So Deeply Shallow
We all are stare as those rosy lips
Announce the daily news
With perfect blandness painted on
The direst of views
We tell ourselves this artifice
of unaffected calm
Is to protect the sensitive
With palliative balm
But really we are moved to this
Affect-less lack of heft
Because we know no other way:
We have no feelings left.
It is good to be home. It’s especially good whenever one has spent a portion of the preceding time sucked into the malevolent maelstrom that is everyday traffic. There is rarely any simple way to drive or be driven from Point A to Point B without going through what amounts to an epic chase movie, but one whose projectionist speeds up and slows down the film at random intervals, spills a handful of hard candy into the projector where it is shredded into flying bits of sharp debris, and occasionally gives in to the urge to make shadow puppets, in front of the projector’s beam, depicting a snake swallowing a live rabbit. Really now, who thought mere traffic signals and seatbelts sufficient for dealing with this?
There is no safe place to drive . . .
Here I am, minding my own business but driving sensibly as I always try to do, obeying the rules of the road and what I remember from long-ago drivers’ education training as best I can, and the rest of the wheeled world out there refuses to cooperate. The driver in front of me goes three-quarters of a mile down a straight road with her left turn signal winking ironically at me the whole time, apparently letting me know that she is fully aware that she is two feet into the center turn lane the whole way but has no intention of actually turning. Finally she turns off her left blinker so that she can concentrate better on getting in the left turn lane fifty feet ahead without that distracting noise. Once around the corner, I pass her at last and see her over there in the other lane, driving along while leaning so far toward her passenger that I guess she must be trying to adjust Grandma’s girdle with her teeth.
Meanwhile, I have stopped three times to let the person now in front of me pause in various uncontrolled intersections to decide whether or not to turn to the right out of them. At some point it seems there is inspiration, and the turn is accomplished. This, in the stately local style: slow to an almost complete stop; stare in the direction you are going to go so that your vehicle will understand where you intend it to take you; crawl around the corner at the lowest speed you can manage, lest you hit a pothole or a pony; at the last second, drive up over the curb at the corner because you cut it too close; overcorrect, step on the gas suddenly to free yourself from this unexpected obstacle, and lurch around the rest of the corner almost fully in the oncoming lane. The other favorite place for people here to do the stop-crawl-stop thing is over speed bumps, where I’m slightly perplexed to see so many of those He-Man monster trucks, jacked up so high for off-road adventure that a small elephant could pass underneath, tiptoeing timidly over speed bumps in this fashion. I can only surmise that such studmuffin drivers fear their exceedingly large manly parts hang too low and may be hit by the protruding speed bump if they’re not careful.
Pay no attention to the color of the lights!
I gather as well that the driver’s handbook in this state fails to offer a definition of the word Merge. Conceptually, I had always thought it to mean something like, ‘before you enter the roadway, observe the traffic already in your intended lane and then adjust your speed higher or lower to accommodate smooth entry as you join the stream of vehicles’. Evidently “merge” sounded too much like “barge” to someone along the way and they thought it far too impolite, so drivers here instead creep up the on-ramp and hover sheepishly on the shoulder, hoping that the four lanes of behemoths whizzing by at full speed will miraculously part like the Red Sea and they can wade on in. If the desired space doesn’t show up quickly, why then the obvious solution is to build up to appropriate freeway speed while still kicking up sideline debris along the shoulder until a good spot clears on the road. Conversely, the warning to “yield” is interpreted as an invitation to stomp on the gas pedal and scream on in lest the optimal moment pass forever. Why this would be more disconcerting when the screamer whizzes by me and I can see only the top of his head over the dashboard is of course a mystery.
Accidents are a given, even at relatively low speeds. I understand that even the most attentive and careful driver can have a dog dash in front of him or have a passing bus throw up a sheet of rainwater onto her windshield. In a land where potholes of epic proportions might swallow a Smart Car, sudden hail turn a Humvee into a convertible, or a meandering red Angus shamble over and divert the oncoming pickup suddenly into my lane, things are bound to happen. But sometimes I do dream of a trip to the grocery store that doesn’t involve riding alongside a texting torpedo <LOL-swerve-OMG-swing-WTF-swissssh> or in front of somebody clearly needing to get to the bathroom NOW or behind the person whose peculiar brand of legal blindness means that all street signs, lights and obstacles look identical to her so she chooses a happy medium for all things and toddles along at the same cheerfully modest speed no matter where she goes or what piles of junk she drives through to send flying at me, and no matter what that light she just potted through might be trying to hint to her she ought to consider doing instead.
Sending signals right and left . . .
Like selling her car.
I wish.
Such wondrous things are all around if only I remember to keep my eyes open . . .
It’s Time
It’s time
to hitch up my skirts
pick up my feet and
run like a madwoman
howling gleefully
shrieking with wildness
through the weedy grass
through the prickly woods
across the stinging rush
of that icy brook
and leap headlong
back into full-fledged life
Brilliant things await me!
An Understanding
Jacob Johnson Underhill,
Our long-gone friend, we miss him still,
For there’s none left to pester now
That he is dead; the old hay mow
Has no more mousetraps set to catch
Him with an unexpected snatch;
His cows remain un-tipped; the well
Where his hat “accidentally” fell
Is boarded up; the outhouse stays
Untroubled now for days and days
Where it was once (we’re sorry, Mom)
Deposit for a cherry bomb
And too, quite often (sorry, Dad)
Pushover to a farmer’s lad
And lass who hunted for a thrill,
Thanks to old farmer Underhill.
Now his old tractor has not seen
Us sugar up his gasoline
Or stuff a tater in its pipe
For ages, things that used to gripe
Old Jacob some, but he plowed on
With chuckling brown-toothed grin; he’s gone
And how we miss him now, old coot,
Who never bent to our pursuit
But took it all in patient stride,
The way we liked to chap his hide.
The fact is, he loved us until
He was no more, old Underhill.
It’s dull down on the farm these days,
Except when a peculiar haze
Will sometimes gather in the field
And there his shade may be revealed
To grin, complicit with us still,
Old Jacob Johnson Underhill.
I love sauce. Saucing a great dish properly is a little bit like creating the right music to shape a fine piece of text: suddenly this new dimension brings out a whole range of new and beautiful textures and nuances that were lying there in wait all along but are awakened by the new partnership into something even deeper and lovelier. Words and music. Food and sauce.
Sing along with me, if you will. Bésame Mucho! Glorious things happen in the kitchen, love is brought to light, when the sauce is a-simmer. It’s enough to make a clodhopper like me sing and dance. (Sensitive readers, please avert your eyes, or you’ll end up wanting to evert them.)
One of the best things about saucing is that it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult to have a great impact on a dish. The prime example of this, natürlich, is a simple deglaze–one additional ingredient that brings a lot of happiness to the dinner party. It’s nothing more than a way to rinse the pan with any fitting liquid that will loosen all of the good fond, or browned goodies and drippings, left in the pan in which the dish’s main ingredients were cooked. It can be kept nice and thin and loose or further reduced to thicken, either easy without adding a single other ingredient, or it can form the friendly base for yet more monkeying around. All good!
Sometimes all it takes is a nice loose juice to deglaze the pan . . .
Which brings me to another great and lovable thing about sauces. There are such an enormous number of possible combinations of ingredients, proportions, and techniques that I’d bet any cook worth her salt (never mind all of the other ingredients) could cook her way through a long and delicious life without ever repeating a single sauce precisely. Almost frightening, that, but really quite exciting and encouraging in its way. A restaurant chef’s career depends on just the opposite, that she be able to reproduce to a virtually molecular level the same sauce over and over, meal by meal, dish by dish, once it’s on the menu. Patrons will rebel if given any surprises or disappointments. But the home cook, if his family is the least bit adventuresome or just plain ravenous, has the possibility of playing with his food and, if he’s lucky, discovering in the process the next world’s favorite. Or at least his wife’s.
Even the classic sauces offer incredible opportunity for invention, if you can master the basic form. Bechamel, salsa verde, Bolognese, hoisin, barbecue sauce, mole, tartar sauce. Me, I’m not such a master of basics. But I eventually figure my way around things, with enough expert guidance from my various kitchen muses in person or through recipes and other forms of fabulous foodie folklore. I try a whole bunch of different versions and variations and mess around, I read up, I lick the spoon, I experiment on all of my friends and loved ones (and I sincerely apologize for whatever culinary atrocities I may have perpetrated over the years against any undeserving parties), and I work my way around to sauces that I’m willing to try repeating, or that I even get asked for again. Sometimes it’s a long, puzzling path of kitchen adventure that leads to a complex and subtle sauce. Sometimes it’s just the joyful re-creation of a straightforward childhood favorite, and no less welcome on the plate or on the tongue.
So in closing today, I commend to you my very favorite variation on perhaps my very favorite sauce. I am mad for Hollandaise. In particular, my lifelong love is the Hollandaise version I learned from my mother, who learned it long ago from Queen Betty Crocker. It’s not an old-school French version with vinegar or white wine, it’s purely eggs, lemon juice and butter. I’m such a down-home bumpkin that I like it best made with [really top quality] butter that is <horrors!> salted. I’ve even learned that I like it quite well if I just hot up a cup of butter with two tablespoons of lemon juice until nice and sizzly, pour it into a blender, and spin it while I drop a couple of pretty whole farm fresh eggs right in, and watch it whiz while it quickly cooks the eggs just enough to thicken into a ridiculously delicious “instant” whole-egg Hollandaise that I will happily eat on fish, on pasta, on pork, on sautéed greens, on (sure!) Eggs Benedict, on sweet fresh fruit, on a shortbread, on a spoon. What can I say, I have a lemony Hollandaise <ahem!> problem. Thankfully, there’s not yet a twelve-step program to cure me, so I can keep on indulging my addiction as long as I like.
That, my friends, is sweet music to my ears.
Sing along with me again . . . shall we have a little Monteverdi this time?
Extra Ordinary
Although I arrived in my mile-long limousine
amid a storm of camera flash lightning and wailing
pleas, ‘Look here! Over here!’, and with
my customary flutter all around, confetti-like, of fans
awash in sycophantic swirls of yearning whirlwind flight,
you needn’t be intimidated by my entourage and air
of mystical perfection, for I am quite ordinary too
and put on my pants one three-thousand-dollar leg
at a time, just the same way that you do
I'm in the full bloom of my life . . .
A Real Hottie
O radiant beauty, dost thou know
What microwaves thine innards so–
Pray, can it be that bane of men
And women both, yea, estrogen?
Go ahead, my man, and throw me bouquets!
Once upon a time, I wrote and posted a poem. It was yesterday, in fact, that I posted it, right here, along with some photos of mine, and got a number of comments from you kindly people when you read it. Ironically, perhaps, it was titled:
I Don’t Think I’m Crazy, but I’m Not Crazy about Clowns, Either
–now I’m a little unsure about the Not Craziness on my part, because the post has disappeared from my blog and only appears as an unillustrated draft in my archives at the moment. Naturally, this is precisely when my otherwise quite nice tech homies of WordPress have deemed it a fine time to take a weekend off from Support to spend fine tuning all of the neat things they can do for me. Of course, people, I already knew about my own craziness. I’m quite happy in it, for the most part, as it’s just a friendly sort of nuttiness and of being, erm, offbeat or eccentric that I’m pleased to hone to a fine art. But when it allows cracks in my little tiny universe where something I’m pretty sure I did actually do can leak out and disappear on me like this it’s just a little disconcerting. I shall have to have a little heart-to-heart with the WP techno-mavens when they–and I–both get back in our respective grooves and see if we can’t find the alternate dimension wherein my wandering words may be, perhaps parked in the wordsmiths’ Naughty Corner to think over how they dared to disrespect the dignity of the Clown race.
I can only hope my earlier words have had a good think . . .
We’ll see if the ether-gods and I allow yesterday’s post back to the party when found. Words, as we all know, have a tendency to be incredibly unruly. In the wrong hands, nothing but trouble. Left to their own devices, heaven only knows. So we shall just see.
In the interim, I’ve got loads of other words stacking up and raring to go. You are so deeply not surprised. So I’ll keep plugging away and we’ll see what transpires right back here where there’s room for more. So I gather.
We'll see how everything stacks up as we go along . . .
I am slightly tempted to take a brief commercial break because, since I brought up the whole subject of craziness and now have the best sort of it running through my pretty little head. Three words: Crazy. Patsy. Cline. I have a feeling even a clown could be saved from the purgatory of the social outcast just by listening to the inimitable Patsy’s rendition of that immortal song. Words, you know, being powerful–and when linked to music, another incredibly powerful force, possibly that much the better. I might just have to take a moment for the same therapy.
There are certain ubiquitous characteristics of my life in travel . . .
I’m hitting the road, or rather, taking to the air, on Monday. It brings to mind so many aspects of my own experiences in traveling over the years.
The first, in this instance, is that my feet develop a distinctly leaden quality and my heart begins to follow them, when it comes to taking off sans Sweetie. But no one gets to travel with his or her favorite road-tripping partner every time. At the moment, this is an opportunity to join with my parents and the part of the family currently in western Washington in the adventure of getting Mom and Dad relocated from their home of many years to a new apartment in Seattle. A dramatic change in their lives–in the whole family’s lives–to be sure, and one that promises to be both physically and emotionally challenging but I expect will be at least equally exciting and fulfilling as it plays out. I wish my spouse could share in all of that, not to mention that I simply don’t like being apart. Having connected with each other a tad later in life than many, and just plain enjoying each other’s company hugely, we begrudge any time not shared. But that has to be beside the point at times, when the road calls for whatever reasons. So off I go.
Another constant in my life of travels is that the unexpected is inevitable. I hope more than I can possibly express that it doesn’t ever again include my suddenly throwing up in the middle of the metal detector arch at airport security (SORRY, O’Hare TSA workers! Really I am, I grovel at your feet! It was the flu talking!). I’m quite glad too if the unforeseen doesn’t include missed or canceled flights or lost luggage, but seeing as how I’ve survived all of the foregoing, I will grit my teeth and go along through to get to the good stuff on the other side. There are unexpected gifts and heaps of happiness that come with being out of my usual groove, too. Shared laughter with strangers that turns into a mile-spanning, long-lived friendship. Directions to the wrong place, but one that turns out to be far more interesting and memorable than the intended one. A grim-looking last-chance eatery where the food is miraculously fabulous and the proprietors simply underfunded gastronomic gods. The out-of-the-way garden, happened upon in a blasting rainstorm, that offers a tree so massive and dense in its canopy that everyone escapes the blast under it in warm and dry conviviality.
The monotype illustration above is from a series I made on returning from my very first trip abroad, where my older sister and I spent over three months exploring from England to Norway and back, visiting nearly a dozen countries in between, and there I learned for the first time that there are certain rhythms and patterns to this travel thing. We developed a set of Rules to explain our experience, including the one illustrated here, that All winter trains run on time except the one you are about to board, which arrives just shortly after you have become one with the permafrost (or something to that effect). There were definitions of what to expect from technology (The handrail of an escalator is always set to move at a rate just enough higher than the rate of the steps that if you keep your hand on the rail, by the time you reach the top of the escalator you will be lying face down in a pile of chewed gum), from museums (All museums shall be free of charge and open seven days a week, except the one you most want to visit, which costs the equivalent of six college credits and is open only during a full lunar eclipse), and from bag stowing systems (The overhead racks on trains are designed to fit bags no larger than four bars of soap placed side by side, and may be constructed of silly putty and yarn).
But we also saw that grand benevolent side of what happens when you venture outside of your personal castle. There were relatives and family friends who knew us only through our parents and perhaps a contact or two along the years but willingly took us in and gave us the full visiting-royalty treatment when we’d hoped at most for a chance to meet over coffee. A pâtissier whose exquisite goods suddenly went on sale when he learned that we had come into the country overnight, arriving on the weekend when we had no access to a bank for currency exchange, and were a couple of pitiful looking famished students. The driver of the night’s last bus to town from a ferry crossing, who delivered the handful of after-hours stragglers on board each to our individual destination instead of wherever his route should land us.
I have seen so much more of this side of travel in the years since than that grubbier and less inviting one, that I can’t help having a little buzz of anticipation at any trip, even the seemingly predictable one of heading toward family and to my own old stomping grounds. I know that unexpected pleasures await. That undeserved happiness is always in store. I am going to see people and places I’ve known since birth, but every time I see them with new eyes because the earth has turned just so much, the calendar pages pulling me, us, them all forward into some new configuration. If I’m looking for the exotic, a fresh new hour means that everyone and everything in it have been in some way made different and what I find when we meet up is bound to be in that way a wonderful revelation of joy and surprise.
Another rule of travel: if I look for it, every journey offers something wonderful and new . . .
Holy Tree Trunks, Batman! It's public housing for critters!
We got the good news yesterday: we’re expecting! No, come down off the ceiling you guys, this is not a midlife-crisis pregnancy I’m talking about. I’m not having any obstetrics and ultrasounds–will gladly leave that to much better suited (and -aged) women, thankyouverymuch–and I haven’t got a pretty heifer on hand and headed for calving either, like Celi’s beautiful bossy Daisy (she is rather independent-minded, that cow).
We’re having a baby tree.
Our city has a pretty nifty organization dedicated to ecological soundness and progress, and they sponsor an annual tree giveaway, a free young sapling to any homeowner in the city. They give away hundreds a year to first-come-first-served applicants who can choose between a handful of varieties each time and hope they asked early enough to get their first choice. Last year we had just moved into our house and were delighted to be granted a five-foot redbud “stick” in a three gallon pot, a baby that as I’m looking out the window now has about three slender branches starting to give it a little less strictly vertical look, and big heart-shaped leaves fluttering in the midday breeze.
This year I’m happy to learn we get our first choice again and will become proud parents of a Mexican Plum sapling. I’m going to add it to our front yard along with the redbud, where I hope that the two modest flowering trees will grow in to eventually be mature enough to together fill the gap that will inevitably be left when the big, beautiful flowering pear out there gives up the ghost, as I’m told they tend to do in a rather moderate lifespan of 25 or 30 years (this one, given its size and the age of the house, may well have about 20 years under its bark already). Then I’ll still have blooming trees to complement the fabulous old Post Oaks in the front garden.
Can you tell we’re big fans of trees here? When you know that both my husband and I grew up in the Evergreen State, surrounded by Douglas firs and a kazillion other varieties of trees, and that we moved to a state we knew full well would have hot summers (though we couldn’t have guessed quite how relentlessly and blisteringly hot this year), you can’t be surprised to hear that we house-hunted by tree. That is, houses without sufficient trees around them were instantly crossed off our list, while even a so-so prospect as a building might get a go at least temporarily if it ‘gave great tree’. So we were over the moon at finding a nice place set among three old oaks (the one in the back is a Red Oak) and two mature flowering Bradford pears, and fronting a small ravine that is packed with a mix of wonderful trees. Not only do we get the heat-and-light filtering of these beauties, but we get a constant stream of birds and all of the other creatures to which the trees offer shelter and food and comfort.
This summer was extraordinarily stressful for the trees around here, and many, even in our mostly automated watering neighborhood, died. It’s inevitable but a heartrending sight, a rusty brown pine amid the hardier green oaks, letting its long silky needles stiffen and hang lower and lower as if in mourning for its own loss. A big magnolia and oak, standing side by side with their branches now utterly winter-bare and their bark peeling back and pulling away from the trunks that can no longer feed themselves. It’s a bitter thing, dying, for an ancient tree as well as for all of the birds and beasts and bugs that suffer for its loss. And for the people who lose just that much more fresh, filtered air, that spot of shade, that green-roofed place of peace.
So I am doubly happy when I hear we’re getting this new tree. A different kind than those I’ve known, a little adventure in seeing and growing something out of my ordinary ken. One that will show us that it’s spring with a splash of bloom as it grows up, even if the Texas weather trends forbid that we should figure out it’s spring in other ways. One that will someday set fruit fit for jam or juice, or maybe just bejeweled gifts for the birds and beasts and bugs that celebrate the finding of another tree.
I love that despite the sometimes arid and definitely less plant-diverse region here than what I used to know, my home’s embraced by such a wealth of trees. Oaks of many kinds, ornamental pears, a soapberry sapling that I hope will also rise up into a great feeding station for the birds, magnolias and mulberries and pines around the block; trees that make me think for just a moment that even a place of drought remembers its fecundity and grace give me a kind of nourishment that all the birds and beasts and bugs can take for granted but I hope that I do not. An infant human is a lovely thing, to be sure, as is a newborn calf. But for me, for now, nothing is better news than that I’ll soon have another tree to plant and someday sit beneath.
Art-Colored Glasses 