Starring Roles
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Category Archives: Education
Wishful Gardening
If you haven’t already guessed it, gardening in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest is a mixed blessing. Yes, you can battle long, murky, cool, overly rainy winters that seem to last seven months of the year, so the easiest things to grow are mold and mildew, possibly between your fingers and toes. You want a green roof? Get yourself a rooftop Japanese moss garden without even trying just by positioning your house close to any healthy shade tree. I can’t promise you’ll feel very Zen about it, because like the fiendish imported English ivy, such moss is mighty hard to stop let alone kill, and eats buildings faster than you can spell ‘plague’. Mud is perhaps a given, but so, in the territory of a once quite active volcano is the euphoniously named glacial till that means Rock Picking becomes a competitive sport among gardeners and anything larger than a teacup had better be excavated for with vigorous pickaxe action and the tenacity of a Welsh miner. Slugs grow to mythic size and are believed by small children to be capable of swallowing their pint-sized innocent selves without chewing.
But the mildness of temperature and plentiful rains also mean that one can practically put a piece of two-by-four in the ground and grow a tree, or at the very least, can make greenery and flora proliferate in an almost jungle-like exuberance. Heck, though outsiders might doubt it, you can grow big healthy palm trees and citrus and big fat figs right there next to the cold waters of the Puget Sound, mere crawl strokes away from the chilly dark not-really-Pacific Ocean. So the P-Patch allotments of Seattle are rich; why, even a parking strip along a city street can support a dandy raised-bed vegetable garden full of tempting green and vitamin-packed leafy goods.
One of the things I’ve missed greatly since leaving the west coast is an incongruously tough plant, one evolved to withstand the vagaries of coastal wind and salt and coastal dwellers’ neglect with remarkable stamina and glamor. The Ceanothus, sometimes known as Farmer’s Lilac, is one of my very favorite plants for this combination of ruggedly handsome looks and ease of care. I am fairly certain that an experiment with one or two of these heady-scented, blazingly blue delights is in my Texan future. They come in such a variety of heights and breadths, leaf sizes, shades of blue and purplish, and even both deciduous and evergreen types that there’s sure to be a sort that will withstand even north Texas trials. Now that I’ve been back amid them in full-blast bloom, I know I can’t keep going sans Ceanothus without giving them a good old Texas try.
The other thing I miss most, perhaps, about Northwest gardening will likely be much harder to replicate in my newer, ahem, digs: cottage gardens. Besides that native-born northwesterners are not much inclined toward formality, their access to easy growing conditions make them quite fond of that crowded, colorful and slightly overblown style of gardening, not least of all because it leaves less room for weeds, which of course also love the mild and friendly weather. But in hot and dry climes it can be a little too stressful on the water meter and long for greater shade than is easily procured by the average gardener. Clearly, it’ll take some tricky thinking to overcome those obstacles. Our recent negotiations with the fellow who will likely supervise our landscape overhaul when we can manage to do it have been a solid reminder not only of the limits of NTX nurseries and their resources but how much it’s going to cost us to do any adventuring in the fuller development of our patch of ground. Our recent house plumbing near-disaster and a couple of automotive ones, not to mention the trip we are making just now, all send pretty clear signals to our budgetary brains that it’s yet a while before we can tackle much renovation or revivification in our happy little greenbelt-hugging home zone. So for now it seems all the wiser to me to store up all of the brawny, brainy yet beautiful garden ideas I can and savor my short stay back in cottage-garden country to help me suss out just what I can do to bring a semblance of it back home with me when the bank account has been fattened up a bit more again.
A Whisper in Your Ear, My Dear
Friendly Advice to a Feckless Youth
The true Reckless Endangerment
is seldom what you’d guess:
not often quite so obvious
as acting under stress,
thus putting others in harm’s way
for physical duress;
more likely, it’s just saying things
much better left unsaid
about your girlfriend’s hairstyle, or
about great-uncle Fred,
who is your mother’s richest
relative and, shortly, dead.
It’s bad enough your note on Fred
will cut Mom from his will,
and likely keep you from her own
good graces longer still,
but there’s your girlfriend left to calm.
Let’s hope the bitter pill
of your ill-thought hairstyle remark
won’t make her wish you ill.
When Ladies are Dancing
Patterns of elegance, synchronized moves,
Footsteps as fluid as flowing in grooves
Down sides of a fountain afloat with champagne,
They leap and they glide and they dance the refrain
As though they were ageless and weightless as light,
Each gesture, each pattern, each detail so right,
So proper and grace-filled, expressive of joy—
Intimidate wholly the poor sidelined boy!
When a Boy Grows Up and Becomes a . . . a Much Older Boy
Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I know there was a time when you might’ve wished you’d had actual children and got us instead, but since you never left childhood entirely behind yourself, I think we can call it even. And just think, your offspring are following blithely in your footsteps to keep our own youthful high spirits intact via non-emergence into full adult behavior, so between us we’re all waving the old family flag pretty handily indeed. We’re only so good at it, of course, because we’ve had such an outstanding and irrepressible example in front of us all along.
I’m grateful for the training in reckless enthusiasm, Teflon ego-building, rampant silliness, and all of the other life skills you have generously shared with us by guidance and example all along the way. I like to think I’m getting fairly good at all of that myself, but will never tire of knowing that it’s shared and that I perform my junior jollities in the shadow of a true master. A good father gives his offspring a happy childhood; a great father carries it on with his children so they never have to give up its joys completely. Thanks to your showing me the way, I can’t imagine ever losing my delight in the mystery and adventure and simple goofiness that life can bring, and that is a fantastic gift anyone less happy would have to envy. I hope you know how deeply–and yes, seriously–it’s appreciated, not just on Father’s Day but every day I can celebrate an untainted sense of the grandest laughing love of life. Thanks for that.
And as with mothers, I am doubly blessed, as I realized pretty much the instant I met the man who would become my other Dad, my husband’s father. It took no time to see that there was a kindheartedness and a very merry twinkle in the eye with which I felt utterly at home, familiar and safe, and these last sixteen-plus years have continued to prove my first assessment correct. To have two fathers who keep the days filled with generosity and warmth and love and my face always turned toward the smiling sun is truly a treasure that will never, ever grow old.
Foodie Tuesday: I Travel on My Stomach
Yes, I travel tummy-forward. But then, you knew that, didn’t you. Of course food is the center of my travel adventures. It’s pretty much the center of my daily life, as you have seen. So one of the central joys of going on any expedition is guaranteed to be eating related. I am somewhat inclined to plan any trip around the potential dining and snacking involved in the destination of choice. The choice of destination, if I have any, is certainly influenced as well by the quantity and quality of delicious items available in said locale.
As it happens, the point of this journey was determined in advance by the lovely necessity of the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Collegium‘s participation there. It was mere marvelous luck that sent us off to Berkeley, and San Francisco was of course a truly logical pit stop on the way to see our family up north, then, no? As it happens, there’s no end to the glorious eating and drinking you can do in the magnificent Golden Gate city. There are the icons of foodie worship all around that range from the Buena Vista, where Irish Coffee is purported to have been born (and is aging very gracefully indeed, I can tell you) and the venerable eateries of Fisherman’s Wharf (yes, we did pop in to Alioto’s last night and the Dungeness crab Louie was loaded with sweet crustacean dreaminess) to a nearly endless parade of newer delicacies and delicatessens.
One thing that could hardly steer you wrong on any expedition, from road trip to round-the-world, is keeping a sharp lookout for good food and drink at every turn. The most logical place to start is any farmer’s market, food hall, CSA, allotment or other magnificent foodie emporium. Say, perhaps, the Ferry Terminal, where just by crossing the cable car line at the Embarcadero you enter into a haven of artisanal glories that will transport you to another plane. There are charcuteries boasting all sorts of exquisite hand-crafted organic meat treats, a creamery or two filled with cheeses ranging from creamy goat cheese or a fromage triple-crème smoothness to the wildest of the contemporary cultured creations and back again to the most scintillating classics like the weirdly beautiful Mimolette (not, as it appears, an alien cantaloupe but a deep orange hearted beauty of a nutty salty cheese) and of course the most glamorous hunks of lovingly aged Parmigiano-Reggiano looking ever so much like a cheesy lunar landscape inviting exploration by hungry adventurers.
There are the vegetable stands full of produce and forage unspeakably pristine and desirable in its purity and freshness. Sea beans, anyone? Mushrooms picked from their carefully hidden home turf this morning? Artichokes still small and tender and almost as delicate as to be able to self-destruct in a puff of fairy sparkles? Oh, my darlings, you can see that I’m bound to instantaneous loss of–well, okay, I would lose my composure and maturity if I had any to start. When I get around this stuff it just happens. And I think you do know what I mean. Be nice.
Meanwhile, I shall be dashing hither and yon to hunt along those pretty, pretty piers of San Francisco, where the fishermen bring in their catch of the moment, just to see what tempts my hungry soul. I love fish. I love shrimp, prawns, scallops, calamari, all sorts of goodies. But what I’m most often and most likely to want any time I can possibly get hold of it is fresh, sweet, insanely delicious Dungeness crab. I will certainly eat it as many times as I get the chance on this visit to the coast. I had it at both lunch and dinner yesterday and it was barely enough to whet my appetite further. Don’t get me wrong: the crab Louis was excellent and the macaroni and cheese with D-crab in it was a dish of smooth, melting yumminess. But life is short and Dungeness far, far away from Texan turf, so I’ve a great need to fill up my innards with as much of this joy-inducing treat as I possibly can. So much work to do. I’ll get back to you later on this.
What are you waiting for? You should be rushing out in search of, at the very least, a good grocery store or picnic ice chest. Get yourself moving. There’s very little time until the next meal, and who knows when it’ll be the last one, really? Hungry, I tell you, hungry and sure that time is seldom better spent in pursuit of grand food and drink than in nearly any other work known to humankind. Be reasonable. It would be quite a pity to let any such fine things go unappreciated, now wouldn’t it.
‘Twixt Heaven and Hell
Much of the repertoire categorized as Early Music by us modern folk was, whether religious or secular in nature, directly connected with the ideas of Heaven and Hell. Not surprisingly, a great many of these songs used love–doomed or newly married, joyful or unrequited, chaste or wildly earthy, or whatever brand was of interest in the moment–as the vehicle for exploring the concepts of Heaven and Hell. We are only able to conceive of and interpret any grand philosophy or construct through the lens of the familiar, and best so, through what excites our attention and preoccupies our waking hours. Love, in all of its myriad aspects, is a logical choice indeed for such explorations.
The programs sung and played thus far this week at Berkeley have been unsurprisingly full of love, lust, longing and loneliness and all of their cousinly affections, then. I had to laugh when a humorous piece contrasting Heaven and Hell included text and visual references in the performance that made Hell seem remarkably likely to be just another name for Texas, but that’s merely a reflection of this same recognition factor that makes songs of love such a universal language, so globally appealing.The whole festival this week is in itself a fine microcosm and affirmation of this communal language, created by not only the sharing of these great and even the not-so-great pieces of music, but also richly by the sharing of our common interest in music and the arts and the newly fledged acquaintances and enriched relationships that come from our all crossing paths in this event, by coming together as it were to sing the same song and revisit our sense of love and its wonders.
Now, let the players and singers strike up another chord!
Here in Music-land
While our neighbors, housesitters, et al., languish in the rain and heat back home in north Texas, we are enjoying the gentle zephyrs of coastal breezes, California-fresh seafood, and the retro-rrific air of counterculture that still wafts about in the refined west coast air of Berkeley. More than that, we are reveling in the good company of my spouse’s musical compatriots: his Collegium Singers from the university, many longtime instrumentalist and singer and arts administrative friends from all over, and fellow enthusiasts attending the Berkeley Early Music Festival. The Collegium crew sang, appropriately, like angels in their concert this morning, performing the Victoria Requiem they’ve been refining with such jewel-like precision and sweetness that I wouldn’t be surprised if the dead had resurrected just to listen in, had it been a true funeral service. Instead it was exquisitely meditative and left me–and clearly, the rest of the audience–feeling newly alive.
It’s lovely enough to be back on the Left Coast and greeted with such stellar weather, to have my first glimpses of Berkeley’s laid back, live-and-let-live pleasures as a city, and to be in yet another university town where the average walk down a street takes me past representatives of countless countries and cultures, avidly breaking down the latest puzzle of physics or chattily discoursing on the political influences on the contemporary literature emerging from central Africa. It’s a delight to see (yes, and eat) classic dishes from France, Thailand, India, and almost any other culinary heaven imaginable, all within a quarter mile’s stroll of each other in the heart of town. And it’s unspeakably fine to smell the familiar resinous breath of the redwoods, firs, pines and cedars, to see olive trees and palms and Strelitzia reginae and succulents cheek-by-jowl with purple rhododendrons and lawns full of tiny English daisies. California. It’s been a while.
The musical immersion is as marvelous as always at festivals and conferences devoted to the art: the rehearsals, the post-concert critiques and deconstructions among friends and colleagues, and hearing fabulous pieces old and new is so invigorating. Heard in concert this afternoon was a vocal-instrumental ensemble that included in its quintet a dear former student of my husband’s, as marvelous a person and musician as ever, and among the works the group performed that were new to me were a pair of certainly not new (ca. 13th century), stunning anonymous compositions from the Montpellier Codex that simply took my breath away. Everything old is new again. Not least of all my amazement at the beauty and variety of music out there in the depths of the melodic pool whose surface I’ve barely begun to skim.
The other charms of Berkeley are many, including some of the most outstanding examples of nineteenth century American architecture anywhere. We took a short side trip on our first day in town to stop in and see the superlative work of Julia Morgan, perhaps best known as the designer of Hearst Castle, that monument to extravagant American ego, but to my mind better represented by the Berkeley City Club, a more refined and slightly more restrained palace of culture originally meant to house and host the many women’s clubs of the city. Every inch of the place speaks of thoughtful attention to detail and the cultivation of gentility. Signs of Berkeley’s longtime perch on the front edge of tech development and IT culture are everywhere, too, from storefront displays of vintage technological hardware that seem remarkably antiquated and quaint for being relatively recent iterations of what we now consider so commonplace. The constancy of the city’s citizens in bucking any idea that feels imposed or compulsory is still seen in the posters plastering every flat surface to promote individual choice, dedication to intellectual pursuits and challenges to anything that smacks of dull pedantry or legalism.
There was much more marvelous music this evening and will be tomorrow. Today alone, there were concerts at 11 am, 2:30, 4 and 8 pm–with a Heinrich Schütz reading session led by my husband sandwiched in between. Oh, and lunch with another wonderful former student. I can certainly guarantee there will be plenty more enthusiastic eating, drinking, visiting, strolling and happy wool-gathering in the sun as we idle (or dash) along on the way to the next event. For now, a brief pictorial and a wish that everyone who loves music may have an opportunity to attend some such grand events in their own places and times.
Amazing but True
Some years ago on this very date there was a shift in the universe. It wasn’t exactly an unexpected one, in the sense that it had been foreseen for about nine months, but surely its full grandeur could not have been predicted. And not everyone on earth knew right away what a wonder had occurred, because the wild and wonderful event in question was the birth of my third sister.
While she was, like the others–I can’t speak for Big Sister‘s first two years except upon having studied pictures of her effortlessly spectacular adorableness before my own appearance in this plane of existence–charming, pretty and charismatic from the start, there was no way of knowing in advance just how fabulous she would prove to be. That’s the thing about siblings: they are inherently outliers to our frame of reference until their influence on our lives appears in real time. And like our two other sisters, the youngest was her own brand of greatness from the start.
What we quickly learned was that she had a uniquely clever and witty point of view and was rather fearless about besting her trio of big sisters in many a moment simply by sitting back and watching our various adventures, figuring out where we might have gone a bit astray with them, and powering on ahead when her turn came. This was perhaps most evident to the rest of us when she would check in with our parents on whether a particular action of any of ours that seemed just a little outrageous was in fact worthy of our getting in trouble over, and if not, then couldn’t she do it, too? [I am not entirely certain that she wasn’t occasionally disappointed when we weren’t in trouble for the activity in question, but that’s a topic for another day.]
And Little Sister wasn’t very old at all when some wise guy quizzed all of us girls on our life’s plans. What did we intend to be or do when we grew up? Undoubtedly he was looking for some nice, pat conventional answer like Teacher or Nurse or some superlative man’s nice little wife, but my littlest sister’s response was unhesitatingly ‘Amazing but true!’ We did not quite grasp at the time that this was indeed both a plan and a vocation, but by cracky, she turned out to have gotten it exactly right. In all of the years since, she has been and done many things, accomplished a tremendous amount, continued to be charming and beautiful and charismatic, and absolutely has embodied a life’s saga that despite being utterly Amazing is still entirely True. We can all vouch for both aspects.
She has been, in various turns, an outstanding student, a fine violinist, and an intrepid traveler; all three of my sisters studied and/or worked overseas at college age, and this youngest met and married our superlative brother-in-law while doing so and has now lived longer in Norway than she did in the US. She speaks Norwegian not just like a good student of the language or even like a person whose lineage encouraged her to hone it to refinement but like a native-born speaker, which prompted one of her nephews in his youth to proclaim her the Smartest Sister in our family. Since I happen to think each of my sisters the Smartest One as well as the Most Fabulous (and if you can’t do that kind of math, refer back to my post on Auntie Ingeborg’s science of favorites) I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. My sister has been an administrator, translator, friend, daughter, wife and mother, and much more. She has navigated the waters of an adventure-filled life with both nerve and verve and I still marvel at her excellence every day.
So, on this anniversary of that auspicious occasion whereon she first graced us with her presence, I can say as I always have and always will that her arrival completed the set of our family in ways that we could never have expected or would have dared to wish, and filled any empty spaces, even where we didn’t know they’d existed, with a rare form of love and happiness. I thank her for this gift of herself. And I wish for her many, many more years of being as Amazing as ever!
The Departure Gate is Always Closer to Arrivals than You Think
The end of one thing is almost invariably the beginning of another. Nothing reminds me of this more pointedly than time spent at the airport. People are jammed into this microcosm of hurry-up-and-wait, playing out every aspect of plodding patience and spiky urgency, of rabid determination and aimless uncertainty, on the spectrum ranging from action to stasis.
It’s easy to forget, when one is in the Infinite Queue that always precedes ticket purchase, baggage checking or security examinations, never mind plane boarding, that even the most extreme globe-spanning flights comprise in reality a very small portion of one’s entire life span (one hopes). Even easier to become so focused on the specific trip being taken at the moment that one will be leaving many places yet to journey to others, long after the current sojourn is a distant memory. Every one of the departures and arrivals may have its own significance, indeed, but each is only a passing event in a longer timeline.
Perspective is difficult to achieve and even harder to maintain. To go toward one loved person or place demands that we leave another behind. This is how we will always be, one foot planted and reluctant to move from where we have been and the other striving to move us toward the new, our hearts and minds leaning forward or back but seldom willing to hold still right where we are. And it isn’t such a bad thing, at that. It’s how we grow and change and find new loves, none of which can happen without taking the occasional flying leap, whether it’s on an aircraft or strictly metaphorical. Time flies, but so can we.
Art-Colored Glasses 