Category Archives: Happiness

Foodie Tuesday: My Salad Days are Not Behind Me

Posted on by
54
photo

Is it salad or crudites when it's deconstructed? Do I care, or am I just *really* hungry? Is salad so hard to eat unabashedly that it must be disguised as something else to pass muster? Is Vilma secretly seeing Ernesto at his nightclub El Gallo Llorón while she thinks Juan Maria is away on vineyard business?

Sometimes I think that Salad has a little bit of a stigma in the popular mind, even though ‘some of my best friends eat salads’. There’s just a hint that if one is too obviously fond of salads one must be (a) stuck in the 1970s–don’t get me started on alfalfa sprouts–(2) trying to lose weight and hopelessly clueless about all of the better miracle diets out there, or (lastly) some sort of chlorophyll-blooded alien. Despite the widespread knowledge that there are endless kinds and combinations of foods that can be classified as salads and that the vast majority of them are both rather tasty and potentially nutritious, there’s always some naysayer out there who thinks that there’s something just a tiny bit off about people who embrace frequent salad-eating.

I would find it seriously boring to eat salad often, too, if all salads were born alike, but that is far from the case. There are all sorts of recipes and inspirations available from every quarter, and definitions galore of what constitutes a salad. The origin of the salad construct is arguably that of a simple collation of a dish or meal, in antique times, consisting simply of raw, fresh vegetal matter seasoned with salt (the ‘sal‘ of salad), and occasionally, with vinegar and oil. The idea has expanded over the centuries gradually to include cheeses, meats, fish, eggs and nuts, and at some point probably around the latter nineteenth to regularly include mixtures of warm ingredients and often grains, legumes, and their offspring of breads and pastas as well. If you can’t figure out how to keep a salad interesting then you are as sadly unimaginative as the average politician and probably deserve to go hungry for a while to contemplate your sins.

All the same, I have no objection to a rather staid and standard sort of salad, a plain bit of greens or greens with a few ‘classic’ add-ins–juicy sweet tomato; a bit of diced avocado, perhaps–and maybe a splash of good dressing, either as a light meal or a side dish. The much-maligned ordinariness of even a wedge of supposedly flavorless iceberg lettuce can sometimes add an exceedingly welcome and refreshing bit of mild crunch and hydration to offset an otherwise heavy or over-the-top sort of meal. There’s a perfectly good reason the ‘Wedge Salad’ has remained wedged onto the menu of virtually every standard American steakhouse for so very long, in between the slabs of highly seasoned beef and the creamed This and butter-slathered That and deep-fried Other, all quite delicious indeed but occasionally in want of one coy kiss of contrast or brightness in some fashion.

photo

In our hearts, we're all kind of plain, but is being ordinary a *bad* thing? Or is it mostly just comforting? Is a salad comprising only common uncooked vegetables and dressed abstemiously with a squeeze of lemon juice and a slurp of olive oil anathema, or can it be loved for its pure, taste-able simplicity? Honey, do deer eat salad in the woods? (Or just salal?)

I suppose I could be said to be more fond of or partial to salads that take the trouble to stand out from the crowd just a little bit, or at least less likely to become jaded by them since they vary the input on the palate. Why not jazz up the greens with a bit of roasted vegetable or bright fruit, with some shredded or crumbled cheese, some toasted nuts? Give the dressing a little boost of unexpected flavor. Make it a meal by putting some handsome protein in that invitingly verdant nest. But let’s not get crazy here! At some point, a concoction too complicated ceases to be a salad and becomes either a circus sideshow not very enticing as actual sustenance or more about ideas than about taste, and I find that tiresome in any part of a meal. If food is entertaining, great, but if entertainment is inedible, don’t try to tell me it’s dinner.

For that’s what it all means to me, finally: does what I’m serving genuinely satisfy hunger? Does it actually taste good? Does it express hospitality by being sensitive to the tastes and health of guests at the table? If it doesn’t meet those criteria, all of the artful towers of constructivist salad art and all of the impressive molecular gastronomist foams and gels and powders, the foodie-swooning truffles and caviar and smoked duck ravioli and balsamic-martini dressings in the world won’t save it from death-by-silliness. Let’s hear it instead for a thoughtful, pleasurable combination of flavor, texture, color, scent and sensibility that balances the needs of the diners and plays nicely with whatever else is brought to the feast.

Lately, my salads have been fairly basic again, combining the wonderfully homely base of romaine lettuce leaves or shredded cabbage with whatever array of old-fashioned but still tasty partners I happen to have on hand and be hungry to devour and topped with a lick of some complementary dressing for the big, if unsurprising, finish. I’ll be hungry soon enough for a hit of pizzazz in some part of the salad equation, whether it’s a whole new salad or just a garnish I’ve not enjoyed in a while. Because I’d hate for the old-familiar to become dull and unappealing. That is the very definition of being too far gone to recapture one’s salad days.

photo

A salad certainly needn't be fussy, only friendly, to enhance the dining experience; it's more important to balance the other characteristics of the meal than to show off what wild and weird tricks a salad can be made to perform. Unless you happen to know how to, say, make yellow tomatoes turn into red tomatoes when you put the dressing on the salad or how to make origami swans out of butter lettuce leaves.

Being beautiful, after all, is more about attitude than pedigree, so I’m more concerned that my salads be composed of flavorful fresh ingredients, play a proper supporting role to the stars of the meal (the people, first, and then the entrée), and in true Coco Chanel style, always be appropriately dressed. Even Coco, I feel certain, would admit that certain occasions require tasteful nudity, but she would know better than anyone that most events are best served by a well-designed and appropriate ensemble and careful accessorizing. With that, I scratch out here a couple of my thoughts about salad dressings, which like salads themselves seldom require an actual recipe–if they need one, they may have gotten too complicated for their own good.

I think of salad dressing as a marvelous way to distinguish the beauties of a particular salad. Something astringent works better with salad than with nearly any other course of the typical meal, so if the meal needs a little flash, that’s a great place to create it. For milder needs, despite my love affair with heavy cream, I know that creaminess in salad dressings is rarely best accomplished by incorporating actual dairy cream. A better partner with salads is an emulsion, generally two liquids that want to hate each other being brought into détente by mechanical means. Typical examples would be an acid ingredient like vinegar or citrus juice and a fat-centric goodie like oil or egg yolk, the two ingredients being beaten into submission by gradually incorporating the fat into the acid with a vigorous, airy, steady whisking. Sort of like a cranky teacher putting the harsh reality of thoughts into my fat head by forceful means. Not that any of my own teachers was ever like that. (Cough! Mrs. Finley!) Once I have (or a persnickety teacher-like person has) made the dressing’s basic parts behave properly together, there are endless sorts of herbal, spicy or other flavors that can be invited to play along with them for individuation and to better suit all of the dinner’s other ingredients.

Here’s a little combination to try: 1 part ginger juice (freshly grated ginger root will do, if you don’t have bottled juice), 1 part soy sauce, 2 parts maple syrup or raw honey, 2-3 parts lime juice, 2-4 parts macadamia or coconut oil (or any mild flavored oil you like). Put them all together in a tightly lidded jar or bottle and shake vigorously. Adjust to taste. Dress the salad just before serving or let guests dress their own salads. Fitting add-ins or add-ons for this sort of dressing are toasted or black sesame seeds, ground black pepper, toasted sliced almonds or pine nuts. Well suited to mixed green salads with sweet orange segments, diced dried apricot, ripe avocado, grated myzithra cheese, kale, thinly sliced jicama or daikon or sweet radish, or . . .

What? You can’t hear me over the crunching? Well, then, grab your salad fork and join me. I won’t tell anyone you’re one of those, you know, salad eaters.

I Left My Car in San Francisco

Posted on by
53
photo

Edmonton

Many cities are best appreciated on foot. No matter how plush or sexy a car you have, sitting in it immobile in ugly traffic is just as unattractive as ever–maybe more so, if you’re thinking that somewhere in the next six blocks, if you can ever traverse them, is the bling-swinging pedestrian, high-speed messenger’s bicycle or runaway shopping cart with your pretty car’s number on it, and nowhere in the next eighteen blocks is there such a thing as a parking space for under $40, should you negotiate the next six unscathed. Life in a car is rough enough.

But there’s so much you can see and do on foot anyway that is unattainable or at least seldom noticed from inside a car. Window shopping while driving is no safer or more successfully accomplished than texting at the steering wheel. People watching, one of the best entertainments and learning tools known to observant persons, is at best a fleeting glimpse while driving past, not like the pedestrian’s opportunity to slow down and say hello or, more covertly, sit on the nearest bench and watch the whole human show parade along its way. Some cities, like San Francisco and Prague, Seattle and Stockholm, have enough narrow hilly streets that you can’t see halfway along the block, let alone what’s up over the hill’s crest or down around the next curve.

But if you were trying to operate automotively anyway, how would you be close enough to smell the smoke of a wood-fired oven drifting out a cafe window, to peer in and notice a gilt coffered ceiling behind the revolving door of an old bank building, to catch the eye of the shop proprietor who winks at you out of the dim interior so slyly that you can’t resist going in to see the hand-woven silks so ravishingly gleaming under the curved glass of that ancient mahogany display cabinet? What chance would you have of getting ever so slightly jostled off your straight walking path so that you notice that in the almost invisible gap next to you, between the bent copper drainpipe on the left and the broken rusty post-box on the right, a narrow cobbled alley appears, with sunlight spilling into it in ragged patterns created by its tiny balconies swathed in brilliant yellow and red and purple flowers?

photo

Denton

I’ve always preferred in-town meanders of the bipedal variety over wheeled ones, especially those exploratory ones in a new town or just a new part of a familiar town. If there’s not too much ground to cover, I covet the freedom I have to stop and gape, to slow down, take sudden unplanned tours and detours, to take pictures of the quirky oddity that almostescaped my eye. The fitness that comes from walking certainly beats that of planting my posterior in a car seat, no matter how tensely city traffic might make me perch there, and if I do get weary there are not only refurbished old trams, pedicabs, monorails and water taxis to deliver me from my exhausted state to my actual destination if necessary, or better yet, a nice leisurely cafe break at a sidewalk table with a sparkling mineral water in hand and dark sunglasses on so I can see all of the action nearby without appearing to stare too disconcertingly while I catch my breath and give my aging parts a little welcome recovery time. I’m just grateful to have two functional legs, no matter how modest my fitness level happens to be.

photo

Casco Viejo

Since my dyslexic gifts (yes, I just spelled it dsylexic before editing) include complete lack of an inner compass, one of the particularities of strolling wanders for me is that I must always allow plenty of time, and assume a fair likelihood that I will be well and truly lost at least once per outing. Including in my home town. Possibly in my own yard. But so far I’ve always found my way back again, like the proverbial Bad Penny, and remained alive and unharmed. I’m reasonably canny about not going into dicey areas alone or after dusk, taking off without an emergency cell phone (now that I finally have one, though it really is strictly for emergencies thankfully), or going for a genuine who-knows-where expedition without telling someone. But beyond that, plus some welcome good luck and guardian angel accompaniments, I can say with a certain amount of pleasure, surprise and/or pride that many of my best adventures have happened as a direct result of just staying close to the ground and taking advantage of the fortuitous events that occurred along the way, embracing the goodness of the fun and fascinating people who cross paths with me in those fine and serendipitous ways that happen when you let them. They can’t put that stuff in tourist guidebooks.

So I’m glad that I got out and left behind any car in so many grand places, or I’d never have loved them so well. Munich, New York, Verona, Chicago, London .. . would any of them have been a tenth as lovely from a car as on foot? It’s possible, I suppose, but I wouldn’t take back a single pair of my worn-out soles to find out for certain. I suspect more truly that it’s because I get up and leave my car in all those wonderful, fantastic places that I end up leaving my heart in all of them too.

photo

Boston

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing

Posted on by
39

There was a boy . . .photoHe was remarkable, special and fabulous in every way . . . by his own admission. That sounds like a pretty smart-alecky remark from his bratty second daughter, doesn’t it, but you know, he’d be the first to tell you that it simply never occurred to him to doubt himself. Teflon ego? Naive puppy? No, he’s just a pretty cool guy and didn’t see any need to worry about it along the way.

People liked him; he liked them back. One thing leading to another, as they always do, he grew up and became, in various turns, a college graduate, a husband, a father, a seminary graduate, university board chairman, bishop, hospital board chairman, and oh yeah, all those other things. You know: the keynote speaker and community activist constantly playing both conscience and jester to the complacent. The nutty uncle who accidentally fades his snappy burgundy deck shoes to a flashy candy-colored light purple that becomes his infamously funny family trademark and then makes them the coveted trophy passed down from one to the next of all his nieces and nephews as they graduate from high school. The pastor who tells wacky tales from the pulpit that actually explicate complex biblical concepts and help to untangle earthly Issues for everyday humans. The bishop who travels with a phalanx of fellow bishops to act as bodyguard for their danger-exiled brother Bishop of El Salvador in Guatemala and escort him safely for a visit to his people at home. The respected administrator who sees a busy hospital through the building of a whole new hospital campus. The husband who woos his ever-tolerant wife with anniversary gifts of snow tires and garden manure but always remembers a card with an actual romantic note to accompany it. The dad who sends excuse notes involving kidnap by Green Gremlins to the principal’s office after his daughter’s flu absence from school.

My father’s stated policy, from a rather early time in his life, was that Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing, and if it was spoken with a jovial wink, it was and yes, still is pretty much his modus operandi, whatever the endeavor. Underachieving was never an option and half-hearted efforts the same as not trying at all. This insight of his came long before the appearance of the modern day’s sloganeering cheerleaders insistence that one Go Big or Go Home.

photoDad brought along with him from his earliest years that sense of ease with himself and his place in the world and built it into an expansive view of what he could and should do and what the world could be with a little effort. As much as he indulged his playful and witty side (surely one of his most endearing qualities in his every field of action in life) he has always harbored a tender heart as well. Any practical tendencies of his that might be seen as hardheaded or stoic, serving him excellently in his many leadership roles as they did, were at their root driven by a deeper need to look out for others’ best interests and work to keep his own in check. All of this shapes a man who manages to maintain the unusual duality of a highly accomplished Type A leader and the Class Clown, a rare and gem-like formation indeed.

And today is that remarkable, special and fabulous man’s birthday.

photoAs it happens, he’s right, you know: anything worth doing really is worth doing to the nth degree and then just a little bit more. He didn’t get to be this advanced in age and yet still a ridiculously charming kid just barely beneath the gloss of grown-up-ness without having practiced that art well and truly. Happy birthday, Dad!

Order & Disorder

Posted on by
29

P&IMost of us seek order in our lives, or at least a sense of order. We want to believe that there are things we can assume and expect and even, if we’re really fortunate, control. Yes, those whose lives full of action and unpredictability and chaos would seem to exclude the possibility–extreme sports aficionados, high-powered businesspeople, rodeo clowns, astronauts, oil-rig roughnecks and those raising toddlers–look for order in their own ways so as make sense of their place in the universe. It might be in simple things like organizing the spice cabinet or sock drawer with obsessive neatness; it might be in the form of how they interact with people outside of the job, or it may be entirely internalized because inside is the only place they can see where they can exert their own opinions and desires and beliefs to the fullest extent.

In art, it’s often what differentiates in its subtle ways between the immature and the mature artist or designer or craftsman. It’s expressed as the creation of thoughtful balances or deliberate imbalances that succeed in creating the visual unity or tension in a composition, between colors, textures, distinct subjects and objects, or other elements of the work. While it’s undeniably true when disgruntled viewers look at abstract and non-objective artworks or some kinds of highly quirky contemporary designs and say “My five-year-old could’ve done that”, it’s equally true that the most sophisticated five-year-old will likely only do so by chance, and then only once, whereas the mature artist usually had a purpose, a process by which he was tweaking the tools and techniques to achieve something that might have as little chance of connecting with any individual viewer as that smarty-pants kid’s work but has a thousand times better the chance to succeed in what the artist intended and is, to boot, repeatable. To live on the less visibly ordered side of the equation is to risk losing communication with a potential audience, but for some artists, that is a worthy risk, most especially because the audience they do reach will be the more attuned to their visual language and will respond in kind.

In truth, the most conventional and marketable of artists and designers may have broader appeal, but can be just as off-putting to some viewers and would-be customers as any avant-garde members of the species. Order, as it happens, is in the eye of the beholder at least as much as is attractiveness in art.P&IConsider the Desk. Nearly everybody who owns or works at one creates his own environment there, because it’s somewhat controlled, controllable space. For some, the orderly desk is a perfect puzzle, each single item in a particular position on a particular bit of real estate thereon or therein. Some are always en route to that Ideal but never entirely there. And some have desks that look remarkably like bomb sights. Yet never assume that this is truly disorder. I have known people with desks whose archaeological depths of debris and deconstructivist demolition could easily hide the crown jewels, a body, or a small automobile and yet who, when they wanted a particular piece of paper or the mini-stapler, instantly knew the precise spot from whence it could be excavated. That’s order of a higher order.

What all of this means in the grand scheme of things is that it’s merely a set of constructs or ideals that varies so greatly from person to person and time to time that we’re all probably best served by finding whatever forms work for us individually and then allowing ourselves the flexibility to understand and tolerate others’ sense of order or disorder, whether we approve of it or not. Mostly, it won’t lead to apocalypse–and if it does, who among us will remain to worry about it? Maybe the ones with the monstrous, mountainous desks, if they can duck and cover under them fast enough. More likely, we will all muddle along as we’ve always done, some of us fascinated with baskets and boxes and cubbyholes and patterns and polish and others delighting in their weirdly convoluted and inscrutable tangles of Stuff.

And nobody Wins or Loses–except if you count losing that one danged Thing that you’ve been hunting for in the pile forever and ever (usually until realizing it is in your left hand pocket).

Cracking Open the Cracked Mind

Posted on by
24

oil pastel on paperJoyriding

I’m thinking of driving

Up on the sidewalks

On the way to

Work today

And up

The sides of buildings,

In the

Tops of trees;

I’ll probably drive

Across the bay—

It calls for

Some extravagance

On peculiar

Days like these.oil pastel on paper

Convulsions, Convolutions

I’m thinking baroque

Thoughts today,

Internecine and wild—

As weirdly Machiavellian as

The daydreams of a child—

As Byzantine as psychotropic

Drugs could make them be—

But you need not be worried for

My safety: that’s just me.digital photo

Remember the Living

Posted on by
33

I had meant to post this later, but given my earlier note to you this morning I think it’s the right one for today after all. Food posting can wait.

A little while ago I posted a pair of poems memorializing our beloved friend Jim, one of them (Keyboard Position) honoring a fine teacher of his, whose graceful playing as accompanist to a vocal colleague, when I heard them, was so evocative of Jim’s that I was instantly flooded with remembrance–and a few fond tears–on recognizing the source of so much of his comportment at the piano: his posture on the bench, the curve of his hands, the distinctive action in his wrists and arms. The second poem (Nocturne) was more specifically about Jim’s playing and, especially, the powerful sense that his music lingers around us, as evidenced of course, in that earlier performance of his professor’s.

P&I

The Organ at Trinity Chapel, one of the many we heard Jim play so magnificently.

Some folk were understandably curious about the backstory of those poems. I’ll start with the “front-story”, if you will. It was a decidedly more recent performance of keyboard magic that brought all of these simmering memories bubbling so actively to the surface. I chronicled it in another poem, posted here slightly earlier. While my husband, as Interim Choirmaster of an Episcopal church, was preparing a pair of Lessons and Carols services in December with choir and strings and organ, the guest organist who had already been engaged for the occasion by my spouse’s predecessor arrived and began both rehearsing and endearing his charming, avuncular self to us. We had some foreknowledge of this guest, and were prepared to hear his spectacular playing, not least of all the amazing improvisational skills for which he gained much of his fame, so it wasn’t terribly shocking that hearing him play was so powerfully evocative of our late friend Jim, also a gifted organist and improvisational artist. What we weren’t prepared for was this dear guest organist Gerre Hancock’s death a few days ago. Needless to say, we are saddened by his loss but immensely grateful we had the chance to spend a little precious time with him and hear him play.

P&I

Jim commissioned some Bach portraits from me for a program we did together, music and readings and projected artworks, chronicling the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach.

There are so many unfathomable mysteries in life and death. How is it that our paths in life cross with those of just these particular people at just these particular moments and have such unimaginable depth in just these particular ways?

I can’t begin to believe that it’s all coincidental or purposeless, most of all because I know how much I myself have gained from knowing all three of these magnificent keyboard artists. I am deeply glad that Jim’s beloved mentor and professor, subject of Keyboard Position, is still among us. He is a kind, gentle and wise spirit whose mere presence in the community still infuses us with the warmth of his long service as a fine educator and the depth of his skills at the keyboard. Gerre, though not so very old at his death, had a long and celebrated career and rich life.

Jim didn’t get so many years to accomplish any of this. He was murdered at 40 by a suicidal gunman. There can be no sense made of it at all. Like so many horrors in this world, it ought never to have happened. That it happened to a man my husband and I both considered an intimate friend as well as colleague, one who indeed played a part in bringing us together and then stood up as a member of our wedding party while also acting as organist and hymn-writer for it; who with his wife joined us on our honeymoon; who collaborated on projects with each of us at the university and elsewhere professionally and who celebrated together with my spouse when they both finished their doctorates–needless to say, his cruel death was earth-shaking.

But that is precisely how terrible things unfold in the real world, time and again. For some of us there are mercifully few such monstrous events, and for others they seem a constant deluge. One or a thousand, there is no pretty way to decorate such grief and darkness and make them logical and palatable, or even tolerable. So how to do we go on living?

Jim taught me the answer as much as anyone ever did. He had had his share of sorrows and trials in his own brief life, but he also managed to live one of the fullest and richest lives, in his 40 years, of any person I’ve ever known because his constant focus was on seeking, embodying, and passing around every form of goodness he could encompass. His almost limitless capacity for loving and sharing those gifts with others was clearly reflected in an enormous host of dearly loved friends, people whom he claimed as family and who took to heart his lessons of generosity, hospitality, inclusiveness, and determined hope. He created an army of sorts, and one more powerful in its quiet, almost stealthy, way than most, of people like me who, while we remember him every day with both love and loss, move forward through it more determined to embody some little part of the wisdom and patience he had at his best, the passion, persistence, and relentless efforts to better not only himself and his own considerable skills but the lives of the people around him.

charcoal on paper

Among the artworks Jim commissioned from me over the years were a series of lighthouse images because he was captivated by the idea of lighting the way for those in need.

So when I think of him, I don’t constantly revisit the hideous memory of his death and grief at the gaping wound left in this world by his loss–no good comes of lying deep in those fixed, implacable sorrows. I am moved to remember, to be immersed in, the deathless love of a friend and companion; his admiration for lighthouses, which for him symbolized the shedding of more important kinds of light than the mere incandescent; in the many graces he worked so hard to polish to excellence* and what they ought to do for the wider world; in his shouts of laughter at whatever deserved a good laugh; and most deeply, in those still fresh melodies that his magnificent musical gifts keep alive in the one simple medium that will outlive all of our astounding technologies for music-playing and listening: the heart.

Only in remembering to treasure the wealth of living that Jim wedged into his brief sojourn among us, and in living out the best of his legacy that I’m able to do, can I keep the joy that he was alive. By continuing to hear and be moved by–and move to–the music that Gerre and Jim both (and now, Anders) left eddying around us, whether from their instruments or from those lives lived with arms open wide and laughter ringing among the stars, I remember best how to keep living my own life.

P&I

Jim's memorial sculpture on the university campus where we'd all worked together was my final commission for our dear friend. This image, with commemorative text, is etched in glass and set in a steel frame, and the piece is called, simply, 'Excellence'*.

Don’t Blame Monday

Posted on by
39

It’s true, I’m among the horde of cruel people who put the onus for all our Monday growling and grumpiness and grunge on the day itself. Many of us see Monday as the End of All Things Fun, coming as it does on the heels of any sort of weekend respite or recreation we might have enjoyed. I’ve long had that nasty habit of looking in the mirror on a Monday and seeing monstrous presence there, only thinly veiled by the black cloud of my ill-humor.P&II think perhaps it’s time to take a little responsibility for the ogrish attitudes myself and reclaim Monday as the Beginning of something fresh and new–by making it that, if need be, by force. The end of one thing is almost inevitably the beginning of another, and if the follower isn’t to my liking, then who’s to change that but me? Isn’t it just possible that in the open spaces between my crotchety complaints and snarky remarks, there could be room for the tiny wedge of reinvention to be driven in for a start? I think I should see what I can accomplish in this. No need to keep glowering at a meanie in the mirror morosely.P&IOne of the first things, I suppose, is to make sure that my Mondays hold something that I look forward to eagerly, something to start my week with a measure of pleasure. So I am taking that step in a small way already: Monday is my day for planning and for clearing the decks. As an inveterate list-maker and lister-of-lists, it’s my day to ‘walk the fences’–and since my Spread (no, dears, my Texas ranch, not my posterior measurements) consists of a house on a typical city-sized lot, it’s not too hard to accomplish that part, at least in temporal terms. But I must do so with eyes wide open for details that need attention so that I know of all the things that require mending, tending or improving. Those light switches that are going to be replaced. (The replacements have already been bought–check!–so it remains only to install them: Note!) The wood handles on the washtub need a preservative oiling. The seed starters are lined up as kits in the garage work area but need to be assembled now. And with the Must Do list is the ever-mutant list of how-abouts: would the window coverings in the reading/TV room be better insulation and easier to open and close if I redo them? Can I put a more comfortable seating angle on that chair by shimming the front legs? Do I have all of the supplies from my shopping list for finishing that little art project? Is the grocery list for Tuesday complete?

There is a surprising amount of satisfaction in not just being able to cross little things off those perpetual lists as Finished but being able, as well, to refine the remaining items so that they are more clear and purposeful and prioritized, and give shape to the rest of a busy week for me. It’s just the way I operate. It also makes me feel a little freer and lighter about what pleasurable things I can do while accomplishing my list-work, how I can distribute things in the short and long term, and when I can break up the flow of Projects with Fun–this latter being an essential thing and not, then, needing to feel like a disruption of the flow but rather a welcome island in the stream. Me, I like a wildly numerous and exotic archipelago of what others might admittedly think purposeless delights in my life’s flow.

So I am on a campaign of making Mondays a favorite day for me by turning my old attitude on its ear. I always had a fondness for forcing a change in point of view by whatever literalistic or foolish means necessary, after all: if I can’t see my artwork with enough objectivity to make intelligent editorial decisions about it, I need to shift how I look at it in order to adjust how I see it. Stand on my head. Come into a dark room and turn on the light on it suddenly. Imagine I’m a six- or ninety-six-year-old looking at it and how I’d describe it.

In the case of Mondays, I’m guessing many a 96-year-old with healthy feelings toward life would simply be delighted at being alive for another one. And six is an age when everything is still new every day, and electric with possibility. Why shouldn’t I adopt both of those attitudes?

P&IFor now, I intend to arrange at least one additional Fun Thing to be included in my Mondays on a regular basis, but perhaps a different kind of fun each time, so that I can’t get jaded and lackadaisical about it. Certainly it should have elements of silliness included, because that’s something that never does grow old with me, and perhaps is part of the reason I expect I shan’t grow old myself any too soon. Looking out my window, I see that the bare-branched trees of winter are suddenly covered with black lace, that the intermittent wind gusts have kicked up a ballet of curlicued oak leaves in the corner of the patio, and that the cardinals stopping by for a nibble of grain have somehow taken on a much deeper and brighter hue of red. Is it a change of seasons coming on? Perhaps it’s just that I’m letting the seasons change within me.

It Finally Dawned on Me

Posted on by
35

Another completely open secret: I am one of the world’s chief exponents of that special breed known as Not A Morning Person. Everyone who knows me even a little is well aware that it’s my firm belief that I am thoroughly Anti-ante-meridian. And that if the world should happen to come perilously close to its end before noonish wherever I happen to be, I will not be prepared to put on my cape and tights, grab my magic wand and zip off to the rescue. So sorry, y’all.

Yippee Skippy for me, I married a man who, despite being unable himself to hibernate for the long periods I require on a constant basis, is sympathetic to my pathetic plight and leaves me untormented, bedding yanked up around my ears, in my mummified position of contentedly deep sleep when he arises.

Except for emergencies and Sundays.

On Sundays, one of the six days a week that he works long hours, if I sleep my Required Daily Allowance, I’d either better’ve gone to bed by about 8 pm on Saturday–not often convenient for those married to guys who conduct, and whose many colleagues and students conduct, concerts at, say, 8 pm on Saturdays and such–or if I sleep in Sunday morning the next time I’ll see him is, well, Monday. That’s how it works for a church choirmaster, at least one with a can’t-dash-home-between length of commute and Evensong on the docket.

The remaining Sunday option for me is to get over myself. So I haul my carcass off of the oh-so-magnetic mattress in the pre-dawn dark and crawl around until I can find my way to join him in the car for the trek SSE toward the Big City. And guess what: I found out there’s pretty stuff all over the sky at sunrise.photoSometimes it’s just the coloration of the dawn that’s so painterly. Marked at the horizon with the lace edging of silhouetted trees and hedges and power transformers, it stretches violet and rose and salmon and gold as far as the bleary eye can see. Almost always, there are thousands of birds taking to the skies en route to their own day jobs, the egrets flapping like clean sheets on the laundry line as they head out fishing and the grackles peppering the air as they look for actual clean laundry to besmirch, the pigeons heading for delicious night shift dinner garbage for their breakfast and the hawks remaining puffed up in their patrician dignity on lampposts while watching for the first ambulatory happy-meal to scurry by below. Even the traffic, being sparser and lit up with twinkly head- and taillights, looks far less plebeian and grubby.photoI like the scenery next to me, too.

I can look around at all the glories of an awakening sky and be amazed and awed (yes, odd) and impressed and moved by this stuff I’d never see if I stayed abed. But really, I could get all that gushy admiration going by looking at a great sunset, right? Or if it has to be dawn, by ogling some nice Impressionist paintings or a super-duper set of postcards or some dandy cinematographer’s artwork on the big screen, and I’d never have to pry myself out of that come-hither blanket and pillow nest I so admire. Then I look at the scenery next to me again. I really like that scenery.

And it dawns on me. Seeing the sun rise may be all it’s cracked up to be, but so are NASCAR driving and alligator tagging and ice fishing, to those born to love those activities, and who am I to deprive them of their fill? No reason for me to compete for what I do not desire. I’m happy to report that I do, it turns out, appreciate a beautiful sunrise, but I have no particular need to reaffirm my appreciation except when it’s built into my limited opportunities to spend time with the man who, kinder chronographical conditions permitting, doesn’t harass me when I’m sleeping, even if the sun is getting a bit distant over the yardarm. Now, he is a sight for sorely sleepless eyes.photo

No Worries, Everything’s Okay Here! I’m doing Just Great! (Twitch, Twitch, Giggle)

Posted on by
38

 

sketchbook

But my noodle is full of doodles!

Being and Nuttiness

Origami boats and hats

And frogs and swans

And paper cats

And chicken frills

And snowflake cuts:

These little pieces

Drive me nuts—

It’s not the cut-

And-paste, you see,

That makes me

Shake the acorn tree;

It’s just that

They should

Have the guts,

Barefaced, to call it

Therapy.

sketchbook

I mean, oodles of doodles!

 

Going Buggy

I wouldn’t say it bugs me

All that much to be indoors,

For after all my place is not

Much awfuller than yours,

Both having small enclosures and

These windows that won’t open,

And both beset with folks who have

Rude ways of interlopin’

Whenever you might think you’ve got

A chance to set things right

By putting forward fine ideas

Or going home at night,

But if it comes right down to choose,

I guess I’ll stick right here—

My rubber room; your office—

‘Least I’ll get reprieved next year.

Lighting Candles in the Vastness of the Dark

Posted on by
41

photoIt’s easy in this big, busy world to feel sometimes that one is alone in the magnitude of space, a tiny voice calling out and not knowing if there’s anyone who will answer. When times are grim, that is quite simply the pervasive sense. When my youngest nephew was very small and spending his first overnight at his grandparents’, my mother tiptoed down the darkened hall before turning in for sleep and heard his little voice coming out of the doorway with the plaintive little inquiry: “Is there anybody here who knows me?”

Like him, I have always eventually been answered in my timid forays into the fearful or unknown with rescuers coming to my aid, whether in a literal sense or in the sometimes equally powerful act of offering emotional and companionable solidarity. I’m here for you; I hear you. It doesn’t always have to be more than that, though I can’t imagine there are many who would find themselves able to be surfeited when it comes to genuine kindness and support; sometimes just knowing that there is somebody else somewhere in this overwhelming life who cares what happens to us is grace enough.

Entering the seemingly surreal world of the blogosphere is certainly sufficient intimidation and unfamiliarity for most of us, and a place where we well might feel we’re talking into empty nothingness. The discovery that there are not only fellow wanderers in the place, indeed, but kindred spirits–well, that is more than just a comfort. It’s a relief and a joy and the sighting of rescue breaking through the impenetrable dark with, however tiny, a candle flame. Amazing how that infinitesimal light pierces the gloom and begins to widen. How it begins to be passed from one to the other until a seeming infinity of tiny flames has suddenly coalesced into blazing daylight!

That is the kind of friendship that shifts from virtual to virtuous in a rather quick succession of conversations and shared thoughts and dreams, where we go swiftly from meeting-in-passing to knowing that it matters that each little flame be tended thoughtfully. True community, it turns out, can be cultivated in dimensions that know no boundaries of physical space. It grows in sharing commonalities and respecting and treasuring the uniqueness and differences of opinion and belief and history that give so much deeper meaning to what we do hold in common.

So I pay grateful tribute to those who have answered my voice in the darkness, who have shone light upon my blogging life and more importantly, shed light in every direction by the mere warmth and passion of their spirits through their own voices in blogging. There should be a much more beautiful and euphonious name for this dimension of community than Blog, Blogger, Blogged, Blogging–all of them sound, if not rude, then at the least terribly plebeian. But then, perhaps the true beauty of the construct is its very ability to carry our unvarnished, unembellished humanity if not on golden wings then on plainly mortal feet, all of us walking along, however trepidatiously, speaking softly to others we only trust are there, carrying our little candles ahead of us with quavering hope.

Lately I have been reminded of this sharing of light and warmth yet again by the gifts of three further Versatile Blogger Award recognitions by that Beautiful Spirit, Alpha, at Aspire.Motivate.Succeed., the warm and wonderful master of his well-tended garden, Bishop, at Bishop 9396’s Blog, and the Bardess, DM Denton, who shows magnificent visual and verbal ambidexterity. From three people who demonstrate great versatility indeed I take it as a high compliment.

And I have now been granted the Candle Lighter Award by dear ‘Nessa at Stronghold. She is a bright light indeed for such a young torch-bearer, bringing her insights and opening discussions on many a topic that could fall into the dark but for the repeated loving applications of the light of inquiry and passion that she offers in her forum. All are free to ponder there the complexities of life, love and the human psyche that cross all boundaries of age and experience. Precisely the kind of place that welcomes shared illumination just as I’ve been describing here.

Candle Lighter Award logoThe Candle Lighter Award has been variously described in terms of its requirements, so I thought I’d see if I could trace it back, and behold, this award’s creator actually maintains an open link so that we can bask in her generous and thoughtful gift. So raise your lamps high with me, won’t you, and we’ll thank her for this kind and inspiring offering. Thank you, then, both to Kate, the nurturing mother of this Award, at Believe Anyway, and to ‘Nessa, who believes strongly enough to shine her own light in the darkness.

Kate is especially generous and ingenious, I think, in opting to simply let the award she conceived stand on its own, requiring no response or action other than that one should, appropriately, shine light upon its meaning as a representation of positivity and hope and illumination in and of itself and the thoughtful sharing of it ought to recognize those whom the giver sees as showing those qualities in blog work. To further those beliefs and ideals, I will of course share the names of a small few bloggers who represent the vigor of meaningful optimism, teaching and leading and sharing the light through their munificent and loving work. And as ‘Nessa has reminded me, many of the brightest lights are those that persist to shine in the darkest places.photo

Thus I gladly pass the torch to my friends at PsycheVida, The Invisible Shadow, Aspire.Motivate.Succeed., The Human Picture, G (of G Caffe), and Year-Struck, who all know the light well, if partially by virtue of having known or passed through various dark places, and choose to shine their better selves abroad like rays of sunlight.

I have handed the Versatile Blogger Award along (as well as a few others with similar requirements) enough times that I fear I shall put your lights out, all of you, if I should share another laundry-list of factoids about my shining self, and know that you’ll find more than enough of my self-revelatory chatter just by wandering around my blog any day of the week. But I hope that you will also attend to the following fellow off-road-thinkers who certainly deserve a badge of Versatility for their wide-ranging skills and interests, again without requiring anything of them in return other than that they should rejoice in being in company that deeply appreciates the surprising and wonderful collection of wits that each of them represents.VBA logo

To Marie, tending home, garden, and a next-gen toddler in her Little Corner of Rhode Island; to Ellen, who writes and paints and draws and sets the cultural coordinates of her region at Nine Lives Studio; to Bella of winsomebella, a magical land where passionate soul-searching merges with poetry and photography, travel and storytelling; to John, cooking up history and food and familial love in the Bartolini Kitchens; and to Nia, who intertwines photography with food, the tails of cats with tales of travel, and wonderful daily expressions of local culture to charm and amaze us.

Some of you, I know, have been laureates of these specific and many other blogging awards, and deservedly so, so I neither demand of you that you accept (though it’s pretty much an impossibility to make me un-like you once I’ve decided I like you, as far as that goes!) nor that you ‘keep passing the dessert around the table’. Your blogs and excellence speak for themselves, and if you wish to share the joy further then I am delighted to have put it in your hands for the sharing. Because that is the whole beauty of this place we call the blogging community. There’s dessert and light and warmth enough here for everyone.photo