“It’s Complicated” with Orange

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blurred taxi photo

Any color is fraught with meaning, and all relationships are fraught, yet . . .

Maybe it’s a little odd, my having an eccentrically complex relationship with that simple secondary color. Not that I dislike it; the fabulousness of a flaming sunset at the end of the day is hard to argue, and a spectacular orange koi is a worthy showstopper. Lots of things I really admire, even crave, are orange in fact. After all, the orange fruit and all of its showy tangerine and kumquat cousins are pretty, cheery, and refreshingly delish.

But orange still has some slightly off-putting associations for me that keep it as a color generally restrained from entering my go-to list of favorites. The aforementioned fruit might even share in the blame. I’m sure I’m not the first kid in history that thought oranges and mandarins exceedingly tasty except for those pesky un-chewable and indigestible segment membranes. But I may have been in the minority when my solution to that problem was to bypass them, not by spitting empty membranes out indecorously or rudely refusing to eat the food proffered by my kindly parents, but by squirreling them away in my cheek and not swallowing them. Clearly it can’t have been a particularly delicious solution, since the least desirable part of the treat was what remained the longest, but apparently I was too prim and simplistic to have thought the whole procedure through. Further, how I intended to cope with the skeletal remains in the long term if I wasn’t gutsy enough to just spit and throw them away I cannot quite imagine, but clearly the extended timeline was an abstraction beyond the scope of a person of my then so limited life-experience. All I can say is that the experiment was short-lived. When I arrived home after a whole morning’s outing and, on being parentally interrogated about my assumedly pleasant adventures, remained mum, a quick investigation revealed the impacted concretion of orange-leavings jammed up like snus by my gums. I was given a quick course on the proper technique for eating a whole orange section, which to my dismay involved actual swallowing and digestion of the part I didn’t much like. Ah, well, I managed to overcome my disappointment and learn to love the fruit in a slightly more grown-up fashion after that.

Though we are taught at a reasonably young age to watch out for those mercilessly careening yellow and orange cars that make up the majority of the (somewhat heedlessly) speedy American taxi fleet, I’ve certainly never been directly menaced by one–and there are times when there’s no more welcome sight that one hustling to my rescue when it’s wanted. Still, l have moments when the color, seen just peripherally on the move, gives me an instinctive urge to throw myself headlong into a safe ditch or behind a brick building. It might at least prove highly entertaining to those nearby, but it makes me just a bit more paranoid than it ought to when I’m on a city sidewalk.

Another youthful experience that may have colored my feelings about the color orange involved my initial foray into fashion. The first time my parents let me choose my very own garment, the object of my affection was an orange coat. Not just any orange coat, mind you, but a pint-sized, short-length, fake fur trenchcoat-styled warmer in brilliant Safety Orange. You know the color: they make road cones that color to keep you from driving your pickup truck into the sinkhole that just swallowed Highway 2. The warning tape quarantining an anthrax zone is that color. Deadly toadstools warn off marauding fauna with that color. And I chose a coat that was not only that color, but loudly and proudly so in plush fake fur. I must assume that it is the clearest possible confirmation of my parents’ unswerving and unconditional love of their offspring that they not only allowed me to have the coat but to wear it and be seen with them in public. Though children can reasonably be said to look cute in pretty much any old thing they do or do not wear, I think it’s also fair to say that no color has yet been invented that was less likely to flatter my skin tones, let alone give me the air of sophistication I imagine I was expecting from the thing.

That, however, is just what is so odd about my orangey-astic feelings. I felt myself a modern and cosmopolitan woman of distinction in that coat. My adult recoil at picturing the silliness of it in no way matches the love that I remember having for that ridiculously orange fur blob of a coat. No sight is more pleasing than that of a friendly orange taxicab pulling up to the curb at my command. My irritation at eating something with the flavor and consistency of strapping tape in no way diminishes my craving at certain times for a luscious juicy segment of a perfectly simple ripe Navel orange.

I’m complicated that way.

“Siete tutti testimoni!” (You’re All Witnesses!)

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[Ed: including to my bad pretend Italian]

monotype 1982

. . . the question is: what did we just witness?

Once upon a time in an Italian bar/cafe, there was a bit of a dust-up. A woman spray-painted into clothes that could conceivably be construed as the work uniform of a Professional sort of woman was becoming very vocal in her criticism of the bartender who would not fill her order for a drink refill. As it was still quite early in the forenoon and it was perfectly evident to even the least astute detective in the place that she had already quaffed quite a number of drinks, the knowing grins around the room were clearly in support of the barman’s side of the difference, but that interested la dama not at all, if she was capable of noticing. This was highly unlikely, given how much energy she was devoting to berating and abusing the barman and impugning his humanity, his virility, his lineage, his bartending skills, and anything else she could think up to fling at him in epithetic form, all the while storming back and forth as though onstage in her own melodrama. I, for one, didn’t need to know any real Italian to know either what the situation was or how graphic her language. Finally she did decide to appeal to the cafe patrons for support in her cause, and spun around, all wild hair and spandex, screaming “Siete tutti testimoni!”

And indeed we all were witnesses. It’s just that she failed to realize we were witnesses not to any crime or indignity being perpetrated against her but quite the opposite, had witnessed her being a noisy louse, a jerk, e una idiota estrema.

Keeping a low profile with our badness and stupidity is never easy, no sir. Keeping a secret, always on the verge of impossible; otherwise there would never be any big deal made of it. But we all have plenty of times when we’d far prefer no one were paying us any attention. Don’t tell me you’ve never said or done something dopey or rotten and then fervently wished the earth would open up and swallow you. If that were so, your halo would be blinding the rest of us and eventually you’d be shunned and banished from the general company, because tolerably ordinary mortals make mistakes and have faults.

What wouldn’t any of us give to have our own permanent magician’s assistant devoted to diverting the universal attention from our every slip and slight! Lacking that sleight-of-hand, though, we continue to make our every faux pas and fumble right out in front of everybody, and even those failures seemingly accomplished in private tend more often than not to be exposed with astonishing speed. If we were to be visibly dirtied by our every inward flaw, we would look like nothing so much as a whole race of ambulatory mud pies.

graphite drawing

So many ways to get into trouble . . .

The Age of Communication, despite sounding like the cheery promise of more perfect interaction and dialogue between us, has instead mostly created a false sense of remove and anonymity within which many people shed their garments of civility and openly abuse the supposed cover by being ever bolder and more crude in exercising their own imperfections with great abandon, all the while excoriating others whose flaws don’t match their own. Trolls, flamers and lurkers abound.

This isn’t, of course, new. Criminals and miscreants of every flavor have existed since the beginning of recorded time. We merely update our approach to use these newer electronic tools in order to make our awfulness easier to enact or to use new methods that seem to offer better cover for our creeping nastiness.

A fellow blogger recently ‘went public’ with the exposure of one such despicable attack, made via a “comment” on her blog that was nothing less than a vile spewing of personal hatred in the form of threats against her and her child. One can, I imagine, debate endlessly about cause and culpability if one wishes to wade through the possibility of such an attacker’s being non compos mentis or under duress from such-and-such mitigation–while we’re all demonstrably fallible we like to think no real, healthy, normal human would do such a thing to another let alone do so before the eyes of the world. Why and how, however, seem to me to be less helpful questions to ask first than “now what?”

No matter how much we’d like to sweep ugliness under any available rug and forget it, it doesn’t cease to exist–nor do we, however unwittingly or inadvertently or driven by whatever illness or desperation, cease to create more ugliness. The question remains, where do we go from here? Lady Macbeth and all the rest of us know that What is done cannot be undone, so how do we move forward?

Recent events have nagged me into puzzling more than usual in this vein lately. The hideous mass murder in Norway a mere few weeks ago was a terrifying reminder of the ever-present ugly underside of human nature. Americans have been publicly obsessing over how to acknowledge and commemorate the decade-past monstrosity of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Crime waves go up and down but as seasick as they make us we never seem to stop them.

The blogger who published her attacker’s wrong, it seems to me, was wise. She knows that there is a much larger community of people that choose kindness, thoughtful discourse, mutual support and what we believe to be a fundamental good among us that can’t be destroyed by the bad. That we will rise up and, each in our own way, say so when we see someone saying or doing horrid things or being terrible is the only reasonable recourse–silence is complicity or at the very least, acquiescence. And so I must stand with my fellow blogger, and with all my fellow believers in a certain kind of peace, and say to all enemies of that peace that hatred and violence of any kind are not welcome here. In the ether, or on the earth. Not anywhere

Weird and simplistic and naive as it sounds, I think the only way to stop people from doing really evil things is to make them want to stop doing them. [Huh??]

I am making no miraculous proposals here. I own no magic potion, know no transformative incantation, have no universal antidote to hatred and cruelty and incivility. But what I am beginning to learn at this ripe old age is that only by making the first incremental move toward a solution do we have any hope of finding or creating a solution. The only such move I can see that’s feasible for non-magicians is to confront and oppose meanness and wickedness when we see them. Merely standing in open defiance of what we believe is wrong is all that some of us can do, but we surely must do it.

So even though I abhor wallowing in public maundering over unchangeable griefs and agonies past and will not likely take a lot of visible action in response to the 9/11 anniversary or the Norwegian rampage, I will resist the witness-intimidation tactics of both my own passive don’t-get-involved nature and that of the would-be wrongdoers out there and say, Choose better. Being a jerk or worse yet, an openly abusive or cruel or vicious person, has no place among real people. Deliberate kindness and goodness are actually meant to be the norm and should be practiced. Sounds childlike, maybe, but I just have to stand as witness to this.

We’re all witnesses.

The Ol’ Travel Bug is Such a Wonderful Disease

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Panama farm shots

That itchy foot might mean it's time to go away somewhere new . . . or time to go back somewhere . . .

but it’s astounding how often the foot grows itchy, one way or another.

It isn’t even that I absolutely need to go anywhere physically when this would-be rash attacks, for I have spent some time honing my skills at inner travel as well.  But don’t get me wrong, my passport is always kept in my shoulder holster if the opportunity for actual travel should arise serendipitously or otherwise. Itchy feet should not long be ignored.

Between those blessed moments of existing in another world, meanwhile, I tend to my whispering wanderlust by quietly reliving past journeys in my heart and plotting out how the next ten or twenty jaunts might best go–and where.

Some of the time the yearning is stronger than just a wish for a little visit to someplace that’s not where I live and spend my time on a regular basis. It’s homesickness. There are places I’ve been lucky to visit that ever after I will pine for as though they were my birthplace, my bloodline, my true north. You’ll be hearing about those along the way. The heart-rending gorgeousness of many deeply differing places and their people and culture and food and terrain and building styles–those can inspire, too, a pure, down to earth ache to go back just because.

Above is such a little green reverie that I revisit many a time that brings me back to a lyrical time my husband and I spent in Panama a few years back. Part of the beauty of it was being introduced to the fantastic diversity and poetic complexity of a country I knew nothing of prior to visiting there. No surprise I’d find innumerable romantic notions arising from those velvety verdant hillside farms draped along the slopes of a sleeping volcano. Nor from the casual elegance of a coffee plantation-turned-B & B where we could order a privately catered supper at our cottage and sit dining off of old Limoges while looking out at the misty parade of constant rainbows over the valley below our windows. A seemingly out-of-the-way farm whose greenhouses shelter over 2400 varieties of orchids alone: can this really be a place on old Earth? The capital city had its own tremendous and colorful pull on us, with its fantastic blend of ruined ancient, restored colonial and glossy contemporary architecture, its cosmopolitan blend of business and culture and exquisite parks and marvelous food. The soundtrack of birds that seemed delightfully exotic to me and the array of abundant tropical flora filled every space between the people and events that kept us happy and eager to dance through the next day of pleasures in the sweet concoction that is Panama.

Lest you be misled by any of the foregoing paeans to the Panamanian countryside, Ciudad de Panama is far from alone in being a citified locale I can love. “Some of my best friends are cities.” So after a good wallow in the vanilla-scented sugary flora of the remoter portions of the land, I’m quite happy to head to the big city to luxuriate in another sort of wonderfulness altogether. Hear that, townies? Hide behind the transit station! Run for the barricades! My foot is just beginning to twitch again . . .

city photos

Shall it be a coastal city this time, or . . . ?

Miss Kitty’s Beauty Hive and Be-of-Good-Cheer Embalming Emporium

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bug photocollage

I am abuzz with curiosity about this title you have given yourself . . .

There was once a place near where my parents lived, a privately owned beauty parlor housed in a quaintly kitschy pink pseudo-Mediterranean house wildly out of place in its north coast lumber mill town, named The Beauty Hive. Everything was so potentially wrong, anachronistic, tacky and off-kilter about the place that I had to assume that, rather than producing a continuous line of beehive-sporting, overdressed, elderly women clad in shabby 1962 Dior knockoffs, it was a knowingly winking hip place. I never saw anyone actually emerge re-coiffed from its portal, but hoped in my heart that its name and oddball character were conscious tweaks of the nose of snobbery from a smart marketer.

All of this, perhaps, because I am a horrible snob and hung up on old-fashioned ideas I probably should have long ago given up myself.

One of the many things about which I have rather peculiar and specific ideas (tastes, to be sure, but I tend to treat them almost as law) is the subject of names. I have very strong likes and dislikes among names–fewer, thankfully, of the latter than the former–a great curiosity about the whys and wherefores of someone or something having a particular name, and a fairly rigid belief that one should call a person by the name he or she wishes you to use, whether it “feels” right or not.

By that I mean that there are people who, the instant you meet them, introduce themselves and then say, “but call me [such and such]–everybody does”. Then ‘such and such’ it is. Some are very dependent upon their honorifics for a clear sense of identity (or to shore up an insecure ego), and if one introduces or signs himself as The Very High Reverend Mister Doctor Esophagus, Esquire, then I will jolly well address him by that extravagant title when calling him “by name” (if not just Sir or Your Holiness) until he explicitly permits me to do otherwise–even if I can’t help chortling in private over such pretentious foolishness from a guy greeting me in a grocery queue. I notice that there are plenty of people using their titles in places where their titles have no real meaning, like the academics parading around as Professor Phlegmatic or Doctor Stricture while at their own doctor’s office for a mole removal or the local natatorium for a brisk dip; what has their research and lecturing work to do with their current activity?

I’m equally prickly, though, about people giving titles–spontaneously or otherwise–where they are not requested or even not welcome. When I was a university lecturer, I never applied for the status of tenure-track, and having worked my way through from a starting point of one-class-at-a-time adjunct to full-time teacher over my first couple of years, my official status as a pedagogue remained Lecturer throughout my decades of teaching. I found it a mildly annoying misnomer, then, to be addressed as Professor, not being even an Assistant or Associate Professor let alone “full” (and it seemed extra-ridiculous to be called Lecturer Sparks), so with my classes I made it clear at the outset that I preferred to be on a first-name basis with all of the other serious-minded scholars in the room. If an individual student, personally or culturally, was uncomfortable with first-name familiarity, they were welcome to have me call them Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. and could certainly call me Mrs. or Ms. Sparks, something I actually was whether in the classroom or not. My other official title during my academic years (Curator of Visual Resources, my nom-de-guerre as gallery director at the university) would have been even more asinine used in that setting, because to me it represented the slippery but obvious granting of a mock-shiny and slightly suspect tiara in lieu of a raise. I did have one student that insisted very pointedly on calling me Professor Sparks long after repeated polite requests that he do otherwise, and it came as no surprise that when he was later called to task for clearly choosing to omit a specific stated requirement in an assignment, his response was to threaten me with physical violence in front of the whole class. Really, just how maladjusted does one have to be to need so desperately to mess with another person’s name?

The most truly over-sensitive point with me is that of nicknames. I think I can understand the desire to fit in that drives most nickname use: it implies casual and relaxed attitudes (great in a sports setting or a club, for instance) and an intimacy between people that many find less distancing and formal and fussy than their whole or given names. In some cases, it’s clearly a welcome rescue from being saddled with a name they’re not too fond of in the first place. Sometimes it’s from having a family name that’s too hard to separate. My husband shares his first name with his father, a good name indeed, and yet is not a Junior because their middle names differ. But despite his parents’ initial assumption that they would differentiate between the two by simply calling their son by his middle name, other family members and friends immediately gave him a nickname, diminutive of the first name, and it stuck instead. The result was mainly that if anyone did call my spouse by his full first name, it was assumed the reference was to his dad (or that the son was in Big Trouble). Pity, really, because both men are wonderful, quite distinct from each other, and both in my view well fitted with that great first name they share.

My spouse and I reached a point in life and in his career where he just wanted to enjoy using his real, full first name and be done with the imposed nickname. He had long been known by his full name in Europe and Canada and only gone by the old ‘shorthand’ version back at home for some time now. So he politely let people know, and over time the general response, even among those who have known him since he was a little squirt, has been a gradual re-habituation and our getting to have my partner be known to others by the name we know as his.

I underwent the same process but made the switch a bit longer ago. Growing up, I was a Kathy. I don’t know who first called me that. But by the time I joined six other Kathys and Cathys and Cathies and so forth in one classroom I was beginning to reassess the beauty of my given name of Kathryn. I’ve always liked it, but found like most kids (including the aforementioned boy) that if someone else pastes a nickname on you and you don’t rebel against it for any reason, you’re stuck. I had nothing against being a Kathy–but didn’t enjoy disappearing among a multitude of them. And since I was really fond of the name my parents gave me, why not use it? It’s remarkable how firmly we get it fixed in our heads what a person should be called. My husband found it tricky to ease longtime friends and relatives into calling him what they thought of as his father’s name. I have a similar circle so ingrained with the habit of calling me by my diminutive that there are still random moments of “Kathy” popping up in my presence.

Thing is, I haven’t thought of myself as Kathy since I first decided to revert to what I think of as my real name. When people address me by the nickname in print, it’s a safe bet they’re complete strangers assuming unwanted familiarity with me. When they do so in person, I often fail to respond, simply because I don’t “hear” that name as mine at all anymore–you must be talking to someone else!

There have been a rare few that christened me successfully with other nicknames (some of them even repeatable in public!). I can think of maybe two people who have ever called me Kate, both of whom knew me well enough that I considered it an honorific title specific to them. One aunt affectionately named her über-pasty niece Caspar after the friendly cartoon ghost character. My immediate family and some good friends call me Kat or Kath, which is comfortably casual without being the potentially demeaning diminutive of my (officially) immature years. A few who share or are pleased by my Norwegian ancestry even call me by my middle name of Ingrid. Also pleasing, not least of all because I got that name in honor of my dear aunt.

Then there are the ones, not quite like that borderline-torturer former student but still wanting to be pesky, that choose names for me or anyone else without permission and based on their desire to irritate and irk. Siblings are, of course, very fond of pulling that stunt. Mine chose the nickname for Kathryn that I openly disdained, if not hated, most. Kitty. Any time they really wanted to get under my skin, especially in public, they might slip in that name. Don’t get me wrong, while it’s more of a diminutive than I would ever call a favorite tag per se, it’s not a name I hate in general, just the one that I thought most ill-suited for me.

Finally I got smarter than to react with the sort of crabbiness that so pleased my sisters when they called me Kitty. I usurped the name. I was graduating from college and taking out a business license to sell my artworks on commission, and it occurred to me that if I stole the name Kitty it wouldn’t have half the cachet for my sisters to torment me with anymore. It just needed to be a really obvious bit of silliness that could take the edge off any serious-seeming warfare. That was when I remembered the similarly obvious bit of silliness at that weird beauty parlor near Mom and Dad’s. So I took out a license under the business name of Miss Kitty’s Beauty Hive, a title that remained (though eventually discreetly and more conveniently shortened to MKBH) for a good twenty years. Can’t make fun of me by calling me something I call myself!

So maybe I have to relent and let people call me Kathy again. Even though I so deeply don’t feel like a Kathy anymore–that’s someone I was thirty years ago and no longer know. More likely, I’ll try to keep gently introducing myself as Kathryn, the name my parents loved enough to lay on me at birth, and just smile sweetly when any other title comes my way. It’s all about the tone, the intent.

As for the Embalming Emporium of today’s post title, that just goes with my general sense that if I want to stand out from the crowd–whether of multitudinous iterations of Kathy and Catherine or of bloggers or of artists or of ordinary human beings–I may as well crown myself with the laurels of some seriously distinctive and humorously provocative title. Plus, if I get enough response to it, I can always look into taking up business under yet another name that has little to do with my actual business and everything to do with deciding myself what I want to be called.

Beware the One-th of the Month

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skull drawing and Hitchcock portrait

Even when you expect the worst, something worser may lie ahead . . .

Alfred Hitchcock was known to tell a certain little story that subsequently stuck (ouch!) in my mind. This is my recollected version of it:

Wilfred’s wife Muriel had been missing for some time and the incessant rain had abated when the search party finally found what might be a sign of her in a ditch beside the winding and desolate country road. At first, it did look like Muriel’s shoe, and Wilfred was distraught. He clutched at the shoe–which, it turned out, had a foot still in it.

“Oh, I hope nothing terrible has happened!” he cried, “Muriel never takes her favorite shoes off when she’s out of the house!”

A little farther along the lane there was a torn macintosh sleeve that, when he rushed to pick it up, had an arm in it showing Wilfred a hand with familiar jewelry. He was beside himself with worry.

“Gracious! Muriel hates to be late for anything, but she would at least pause to take off her mac when the rain stopped–it’s much too warm to wear in this fusty weather. Surely she would take a moment to get more comfortable.”

The search party progressed slowly, finding bits and pieces of what had surely once comprised most of Wilfred’s missing wife. Wilfred grew more and more frightened at what might have happened to his dear Muriel, but he dared not let himself think the worst. Finally they came to a weir where, caught in its grate, there was a familiar looking head. Wilfred leaned forward to address it:

“MU-riel! Are you all right?”

*********************************

Funny, isn’t it, how we tend to assume the worst and still somehow be so surprised that things turn out to be as bleak as they are. The first of the month (any month) looms large as the archetype of a Bad Day for many people. It’s the day when most of the bills are due, accounting must be made at work for one’s actions–or inaction–during the previous thirty days, filters must be replaced in the machinery, timers reset, and all manner of drudgery and doom are assumed to lie in wait. “I can’t believe it’s already September! Where did August go?” The month begins with a day of dread.

But I’ve found too that there’s a palpable truth to the old idea that while pessimism feeds on its own energy and dark expectations tend to be fulfilled with dark results, optimism and positive expectations can be equally self-fulfilling. Of course it makes sense to be prepared for and know how to survive and rise above disaster. But doesn’t it make great sense to get beyond that and, if necessary, work and will good things into existence instead? If I’m going to spend energy on thinking about the future, I hope it will be with the belief and intent that the future should be filled with good stuff of every kind.

Alfred Hitchcock, it seems, may have been a slightly shady character himself; perhaps it fed his genius for black humor and suspenseful psychodrama, but the tension between his deep-dyed wit and the truly grim storyline with which he would present us was necessary both to leaven the tale and to remind audiences of a better possible outcome. Without the contrast of an occasional flash of light, darkness becomes meaningless and incomprehensible.

Never mind the Fear of the First. Begone, nagging soothsayers of the End Times. I’m not afraid of the cursed Ides of March. Superstition and despondency, get thee behind me.

I prefer to keep my moments of fright to those contained in good scary fiction, and dwell, myself, in a much sunnier place where I expect pleasure and prettiness and plush pillows and poached pears and perfection. At least when I curl up with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King in that place I can be assured that they’re only tall tales I’m reading and the bogeys will all go away again when I turn on the lights and tell them to go. Then the terror is finite and fictional and even fun, but finally, it’s also conquered.

  • Edgar Allan Poe portraitRepeat after me: It’s only a story, it’s only a story . . .

Raised by Dogs

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graphite drawing

Who’s looking after whom?

Some people might say I was Raised by Wolves. Insiders say, in a cheerier tone, that I was Raised by Wolds. The strange truth is that, though I have lived my entire life thus far without having “owned” a pet since my late lamented goldfish, I have been nurtured throughout my years by various cats and dogs.

There was that one goldfish, true: Patrick Richard. What, you don’t think that’s the most obvious and logical name for a goldfish evah?? Suffice it to say that the fish was simply named after the school friend who bestowed it on me. I’m pretty sure I must have had a crush on him, the boy I mean, to have named a fish such a thing, but then I was never the most conventional of children. Perhaps the whole goldfish episode was simply precursor to my much later fish-and-pencils phase of artworks. In any event, Patrick Richard had a rather short career as my pet and might be presumed to have expired of overindulgence, since if I recall correctly he grew quite large quite quickly until the day when I came home from school and his ample orange belly was topside-up. I gave him a simple and dignified burial out behind the house that evening, the funeral if any somewhat truncated by my bare foot landing on a slug out there in the dusk, prompting a quick dash back into the house. I don’t think I went back out and erected a monument or anything.

The companion animals that played larger (and generally longer) roles in my life belonged, then, to others. It mayn’t have prevented me from forming attachments, but I suppose I don’t have the same deeply familial link with them that I would have had I taken full responsibility for the animals’ well being.

When I was still in the midst of grade school, it was the semi-rural setting where we lived that provided the most constant access to “pets” of this sort. There were always pastures within a quick walk from home, where I could linger at the fence and feed grass or fallen apples to the horses and cows that would come over for a friendly trade of nuzzling and scratching. Some pastures were particularly close: when we moved back to western Washington from Illinois and I was about twelve, we lived for a while in an old parsonage that sat between the older chapel and a modest and uneven pasture where a shaggy little pony kept company with a handful of grazing cattle. One morning when Dad was getting ready to head over to work, he came into the kitchen and there on the back stoop, gazing in the window curiously, was the enormous bull, who had escaped from next door. Apparently he thought a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal would be preferable to puddle water and a salad of pasture greens.

All of this was good company, and very pastoral indeed.

Cats around there were primarily those accustomed to keeping down the rodent population and reminding the dogs of their place in the hierarchy of the universe. Dogs, those were decidedly the most individualistic and interactive of the beasts around my neighborhood(s) as I grew.

The first dog of importance in my little life was undoubtedly my cousin’s funny little cockapoo Raskal. He was among the first in what would become a designer-dog race, very possibly because his sire and dam had no clue about pedigrees and just did what comes naturally to any self-respecting dog. But since Raskal arrived before anyone had ever heard of the phrase “puppy mill” or worried much about the genetic time-bombs in designer breeds, I think he was designed by Mother Nature strictly to be a truly fun play companion and to think of life as one big exciting adventure after another. When he wasn’t too busy being passed around from one admirer to another for his extreme cuteness and friendliness, he was very willing to work hard at attempting to “dig out” any kid that happened to be trapped in the impenetrable prison of a closed sleeping bag, or to romp off on all sorts of mini-adventures, his body trembling with happiness and his curly blond coat rippling like he was on fire. His was a short tenure on earth: driven by his (aptly named) rambunctious energy, one day he dashed up over a blind hill and right under a car when we kids were once again all on an outing being led with aimless and artless abandon by his lightning-bolt zipping. But in that too-short life he still managed to imprint himself and his boundless good cheer and infinite thirst for play on all of us. He was surely a better teacher and good influence than a whole lot of sober grownups can be!

Another in my pantheon of Great Dogs was the next-door neighbors’ Dutchess (their spelling, not mine–is there a theme of distinctive spellings among my dog friends?). She did indeed have a certain regal aloofness. As a half-coyote mix (again with the pioneering hybrids), she expressed her royalty with either disdainful avoidance or, more likely, with a couple of sharp barks and a good growl or two, when anyone approached the property. I was traditionally rather over-cautious around dogs myself, having been knocked over and winded when small by a not-so-small farm dog that seemed to be considering whether I would be tasty or not when my parents retrieved me. So when I met Dutchess, and for some time thereafter, I took my time about getting very close. But I think she appreciated my deference, because after I babysat at her house (for her young human charges) a time or two she seemed to decide that I was acceptable and even became rather kindly toward me and a little bit protective of me if I happened to come by with anybody else in sight. It wouldn’t by any measure be considered a close and cuddly and playful relationship, but the fact that this rather fierce and solitary little creature treated me as accepted and respected company and even let me stroke her thick coyote fur collar meant a great deal to the person I was at that age, another somewhat solitary soul.

On the other side of our house were the neighbors whose dog Tar was the polar opposite of Dutchess, the local extrovert, the neighborhood captain of entertainment. He was still clearly not a pampered and sheltered purebred, either in looks or personality. I would guess at this great remove of years that he probably had a bit of long-haired German Shepherd in his multifarious lineage. He was really a very beautiful dog, a bit smaller than a typical shepherd and slightly more compact, less lanky. But just the right size for hugging, and covered with a long, thick, gorgeous tar-black coat.

Tar was easy to anthropomorphize. He seemed to have just as much the mischievous and play-hungry attitudes as all of the neighborhood kids had, and an egalitarian willingness to embark on any expedition with any of us, whether with him in the lead or being allowed to trail alongside. He couldn’t resist hunting, and was mostly welcome to do so around there, where at the time the street was only half built-up, still checkered with weedy, tall-grassy empty lots, and dead-ended by a beautiful little woodland of Douglas firs and salal and ferns. Tar didn’t know the difference, of course, between a mole and a small kitten, but he could hardly be faulted for that; so as long as the folk around kept the kitties indoors, we were at the same time kept mercifully molehill-free. Being as inquisitive as any dog, Tar did have a few run-ins, not least of all with the toad he caught that left him running around foaming like a punctured beer can for a short while.

His worst run-in, though, could be said to be with his otherwise kind owners and the annual summer haircut to which they subjected him (known to us as the “lawnmower” haircut) that left him looking like a black sheep clipped by a woefully inebriated shearer. We felt deeply sorry for him; he was painfully aware of being stripped of his accustomed handsomeness and would immediately set to work to deliberately do some forbidden thing right in front of anyone so that they would scold and banish him and he could go hide and nurse his shame in private for a little while. After a short period of growing out the offending haircut, however, he would return to his sanguine equanimity and rejoin the forces of the street’s youthful denizens at play.

Tar was an able guard dog when we were fort-building in the woods, keeping unwanted squirrels and crows at bay. He was a great exercise coach, leading us on loping, leaping bounces through the waist-high grasses in the vacant lots–and also our watcher lest any of us come unexpectedly upon one of those Timmy’s-in-the-well-sized holes dug in them to test water table levels before a build. Pity any of the kids that came along too late in the neighborhood development process to watch Tar pronking his way across a vacant lot with exuberant abandon. He was truly the very picture of living fully in the moment.

I still enjoy the company of a well-behaved and friendly dog so much that if my life weren’t so overfilled with other enjoyable company and activity I would undoubtedly succumb to canine charm and adopt such a companion after all. I am grateful to have a number of friends with sufficiently delightful beastly members of the household–dog, cat and otherwise–to keep me from mourning the vacuum (or more likely, the need to vacuum much more frequently) occasioned by lack of a dog or cat or small wildebeest keeping us company in our house. After all, it’s through others that I’ve always had the pleasure of meeting and being befriended by great animal companions.

Makes me wag my tail with happiness.

graphite drawing

One should have as many Best Friends as possible in life . . .

Foodie Tuesday: She’s Completely Nutbar, but isn’t She Sweet?

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photo closeup

Won't You be My Baby, Oh, Honeycomb . . .

There’s little that can’t be improved by the addition of a sticky slick of raw local honey. I’ll concede that there might be something, but it doesn’t come to mind immediately. I could contentedly eat spoonfuls until comatose if it weren’t for the smidgen of good manners and even smaller atom of good sense preventing it.

Today’s supper was one of the times I restrained my sugar-rush inclinations, since I was making R’s favorite coleslaw and, with him persevering toward complete blood sugar control without the aid of medications, who am I to stand in the way of such valor? So I made the slaw with a natural non-sugar sweetener. But I still slipped just a hint of sugar into the mix, because the salad wouldn’t be entirely his favorite without his favorite add-in. It’s about the easiest ‘dish’ to throw together, if you can actually call something so ridiculously simple a dish. I’m no purist, so if you have strong Feelings about everything being homemade, organic, locally sourced, and so forth, you’ll probably want to squint a little during the next section to avoid unnecessary annoyance and then revise as needed to meet your needs.

Stupid-Easy Sweet Cole Slaw

Throw together everything ‘to taste’: Shredded cabbage (yeah, I’m often wonderfully lazy and use the pre-shredded slaw mix with red and green cabbage and carrots); lime juice, sweetener (honey is, of course, wonderful–or dark agave syrup, or sugar of any kind, whatever floats your cabbage-eating boat); a spoonful of mayonnaise (I’m still fond of good ol’ Hellman’s classic artery-hardener); add-ins.

So: cabbage, lime juice, sweetness, mayo and Fun Stuff.

The add-in of choice in this house is minced pickled sushi ginger.

Other goodies sometimes join the party: sesame seeds, toasted sliced almonds, chopped apple . . . whatever fun yummy junk is on hand, pretty much. It’s the ginger that I think of as the personality of the House Slaw, and anything that complements that is welcome along for the ride. But most of the time, it’s just the basic ingredients chez nous.

It was the other day that I got my honey fix. The day I went Nutbar. When the man of the house is away at any of his various work-related salt mines, I indulge in both foods that Mr Supertaster can’t or won’t eat and also in a bit of sugary madness. I made some chewy granola-style bars that work pretty nicely as a breakfast or brunch munch, especially with a nice spoonful of thick Greek yogurt drizzled with the aforementioned lovely honey and a toss of crispy carrot chips.

You’re going to sense a trend here: I’m all about the lazy approach. I love to eat what tastes delicious to me, but I have to really be in a certain rare mood to get into the groove of fixing super elaborate and labor intensive foods. More often I’m pleased to spend a day or two of heavy lifting in the kitchen in order to ‘put up’ a big, divisible, freeze-able batch of something that we can dig into at will over the next however-long. A slow cooker loaded with broth fixings is a common enough happening, mainly because I can use the resulting broth so many different ways, and also because it takes so little effort in total to throw a batch of prepared bones, roughly chopped mirepoix, herbs and spices and the like into the cooker and let it go for a long, slow simmer. I’ve got the straining thing down to a science, having learned to line a big pasta-strainer pot with a clean flour sack dish towel, spoon the skeletal remains out of the broth with a big sturdy spider, and dump the rest of the crock into the lined pot. Then all I have to do is hoist the pasta strainer high enough to lift out the dish towel by its corners, give that a quick squeeze to get the rest of the soupy goodness to flow through, empty the grisly remains in the trash, and pour up my broth for cooling. Lots of mileage off of a very humble process and the unfussiest of ingredients.

About those Nutbars. Again, easy-peasy. Simple contents, very simply prepared, not difficult to store, and quick-as-a-bunny to grab and nibble.

nutbars, yogurt & honey, carrot chips

. . . and you thought I was referring to my sanity when I said "Nutbar".

Going Nutbar

Ingredients: nuts, seeds, dried fruits, butter, spices, whey protein powder and gelatin, sweetening and salt.

I filled my trusty Tupperware 8-cup measuring pitcher with about 6 cups of mixed almonds (whole, raw), roasted/lightly salted macadamia nuts, dried dates and figs and apricots, and a handful of candied ginger, and filled in the gaps between all of them with about 3 good scoops of vanilla whey protein powder, a handful of raw sesame seeds, and a healthy dose of cinnamon with hints of cardamom, mace and cloves. I pulsed all of that mix in the blender in batches until it was all pretty well reduced to a chunky flour. Then I just mixed in as though for a very dense dough: 3 big tablespoons of gelatin melted in water (you can just leave this out or use agar agar if you’re vegetarian, but I like the chew and the added nutrients available in either of the add-ins), a little sweetener (I used a splash of sugar-free hazelnut syrup that I have around, just for the flavor), about 3 tablespoons of melted butter, and a bit of Maldon sea salt. All almost quicker to do than to record here.

The rest is finishing: line a cake pan (I used my ca. 10×14 Pyrex baking dish) with wax paper or plastic wrap, press the “dough” into it evenly, cover with more of the wrap, and (if you’re a little shaggy on the pat-in like I am) give a quick flattening treatment with a jar or can as your pan-sized rolling pin. Stick the pan in the refrigerator overnight and slice the bars up for storage next day. I cut them in granola bar configuration since that’s what they resemble a little. The bit of butter means they don’t stick together very badly, so I laid the bars on edge right next to each other with wax paper between layers. Some are lying in wait in the freezer, and the rest are being gradually eaten out of the fridge, with or without yogurt, honey, carrots . . . .

Did I mention honey? Guess I’m just a sucker for sweet things. Must be why I love you so.

Happiness may be Ephemeral, but It’s Sure Worth the Effort

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Jack Benny portrait

We-e-e-ll! I'll just have to think about that for a bit . . .

People from all over the world have been sending Happy Birthday messages to our house today, not randomly mind you, but because my life-partner-in-crime is–I’m not making this up–commemorating his birthday on this very date. Hard to believe he isn’t simply frozen in time, if you have seen the guy or met him, he not only looks younger than he is but thinks and acts with a decidedly youthful joie de vivre.

Unlike the late, great Jack Benny, my spouse has no desire or need to perpetually revisit his thirty-ninth birthday. With Mr. Benny, granted, it was an amusing ongoing joke from a man playing a parody of himself as a vain, self-centered cheapskate and a wildly deluded hipster-wannabe. And the joke only worked so well with him because he was widely known not to be any of those things in real life. Biographical tales of the real person Benjamin Kubelsky grew up to be make it clear he was genuinely charming and talented and worked with remarkable dedication to achieve the appearance of a lazy, egotistical and rather hapless fool constantly stymied and bettered by others and the world in general and utterly mystified by it all. Central to his concept of being a performer was that it was his responsibility to offer top-flight entertainment for his audience, and if that meant giving all of the laughs to the other actors at his expense, or featuring musical guests with a high profile on his programs while lampooning his own quite skilled violin playing, he was more than content to do so, and always the first to applaud them with genuine admiration.

Not surprising that such a man would be remembered by so many with such deep and enduring affection, nor that despite any dated references and lack of stylistic currency, his comedy when heard and seen nowadays still has such resonance.

There is a small truth that I must own for the sake of full disclosure: my grandfather looked and acted a lot like Jack Benny. While Mr. Benny died when I was still relatively young, and even more so for that matter did Grandpa, the television program was still being regularly broadcast far enough into my youth to be imprinted on my memory distinctly, and seemed quite often an echo of my own Grandpa’s sly and selfless sense of hilarity; coupled with a slight physical resemblance between the two, this means that watching the Jack Benny program can be a little like watching (unusually well-produced) home movies of my grandfather. Most distinctly, the many times I saw each of those long-gone delightful men falling to pieces with laughter, usually at someone else’s witticisms or clever moves, made me conflate them somewhat in memory. And I knew that for both, it was an innate sense of urgency in pursuing the joy that was floating right around them that drove the amazing commitment to seeing, feeling and creating happiness.

An utterly different approach from that of my grandma. Granny honed her joy-craft willfully and out of necessity, with not much more in the way of a starter kit of ingredients and tools handed to her than a bit of protective sisterly love and her own power and imagination. Her childhood and youth were colored by parenting that evidently ranged from neglectful to grotesquely abusive at times, and she certainly had neither wealth nor fairy godmother nor any other great advantage to bail her out of that, but as her adoring grandchild I never saw the remotest hint of any of that. What I saw was a woman with a rich capacity for laughter and love and endless patience for showering her grandchildren with massive doses of both. She not only pulled herself through her early years on her own strength but became a lifelong expert at choosing happiness and knowing how to conjure it into existence, seeking the right people to populate her life, situations in which to immerse herself, and the wisdom and determination to see the good in all. The result, as I lived in it, was an extended family touched at every point by Granny’s warmth and playfulness and delight in laughter and happiness. How can anyone not fall in love with that?

No mystery, then, that I would not settle for anything less in a lifelong love partnership than another expert in seeking and making happiness everywhere he goes. It’s a distinct part of how he manages to come across as younger than not only his chronological years but the experiences he’s lived and, sometimes, weathered along the way. This man was gifted from birth with great parenting and a happy childhood and youth alongside a terrific brother, so he could be said to have gotten a better natural foundation than my grandmother’s ever was–but like most people, he’s seen his share of hard work and emotional trials and certainly, some wrenching losses. Those may be par for the course: everyone is affected at various points in life by unwelcome troubles and certainly by the disasters around him and the deaths of people close to him. What’s not so common is the ability and will to deal as graciously and sensibly as one can with life’s inevitable blows. It’s this skill and art–born, bred and cultivated–that make him a distinctively wonderful person who manages to build an atmosphere of contentment and positive outlook around him.

It’s what makes him see the world with a rather forgiving skew yet one that knows only a sense of humor will pull him through and out of any undesired mire. Better laugh than cry, any time! Needless to say, he makes me smile; he makes me laugh. He’s not going to be switching to a career as a stand-up comedian anytime soon (and neither of us can remember a joke from one end to the other) but he sees the funny side of so much, and just the sight of that unaffected smile, those blue eyes scrunched up with a mischievous twinkle, the sound of that musical laugh–can brighten the dullest or darkest moment instantly. I can think of a whole lot of other things to like and love about my husband, but on his birthday I can say with great conviction that his ability to bring happiness to me and many other people around him is one of the things I appreciate the most.

There was no fancy party to celebrate the occasion of this birthday. Scrambled eggs for dinner, a little dish of homemade vanilla ice cream later in lieu of any glamorous festive dessert. Quiet time doing some work to prepare for tomorrow’s various jobs and tasks. Sitting together later in the TV room watching some pre-recorded stuff and just reaching over occasionally to hold hands and smirk at each other like teenagers, because it still amazes and amuses us to have found each other and be having such a truly happy life. Only takes a very little bit of effort along the way, and what a marvelous byproduct real happiness is. So, fancy or no, without any cake and candles or fussy doings of any sort, kind of an ordinary day of work and busyness, but in the end, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, a really Happy Birthday.

May there be many more!

Seen through Stained Glass

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skyscape painting + glory hole digital art

From the glorious inferno, a supercooled liquid . . .

Glass Passages

Strange enough that someone saw at hand,

amid a million million grains of sand,

the only water truly born of fire–

that clarity, deep brilliant light and flow,

refractory and sharp and sweet, desire

that stops in time complete and whole, as though

to freeze all thought and memory and time–

and then took flame to capture its sublime

pure rectitude and stillness; who could know

the alchemy that could and would be wrought

by taming elements to strengthen, stain

and shape anew the crystal, blazing hot

sand silicates and yet somehow retain

such potency, such power that a strand

of history would through it then be drawn

to tell the stories, made so much more grand

in glass by tying evening back to dawn,

and in the light transmitted through that glass,

commemorate the ages as they pass.

saints' portraits

Sources of inspiration can appear even in places where simple and ordinary beings are able to find them. Sometimes it just takes a particular window--or even a mirror--to make it possible . . .

 

Who Needs Persistence when You can have Lucky Breaks?

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Eleanor Roosevelt portrait

Who persists, endures; who endures can astound . . .

Me, that’s who.

I have already admitted to having had more than my fair share of lucky breaks in my lifetime. And I have no intention of turning in my life-lottery tickets, either; I’ll gladly keep collecting such loot any and every time it’s tossed my way.

But it’s random. It’s unreliable. And if I’ve used up my fun-karma and crazy mountains of bliss already, I’d like to think that my skill and hard work and cleverness and dedication will fill in any resulting gaps. (Well okay, would that my good luck would grant me a quick smack on the pate first with that glittery wand imparting the necessary will and skill to make this possible.)

Lacking any guarantees of some handy grant-wishing genie, indefatigability fairy or goodness-gnome just flitting into my neighborhood on a whim, what I get to thinking is that there are all kinds of motivation and inspiration out there if I just get my own effort the slightest bit underway. When I think of family and friends, and certainly of some of the great famous icons of fortitude and endurance, those who have risen above the general tide of humanity through sheer force of personality, the strength of their own determination, their patience in times of trial and intense belief in something special well worth their doing. To be unwavering in the pursuit of what is important takes passion and faith.

I’ll have to work on that still. I’m pretty sure it’ll only happen in very little increments and at a glacial pace. That’s how it works, I guess.

So here I am, starting a blog and plodding on, day by day, trying to keep my mind hopping just enough to move forward, ever forward . . . dainty little molecule by molecule. Here I go, planning the next minor move toward putting my more of my artwork out there in the world. Here it comes, the next foray into a new phase of constant art-making practice, stumbling along and hoping that my totems and talismans of dedication and determination will push me yet further toward–what? Being a better artist, that would be terrific. Being a better person, that would be outstanding. Being committed enough to work toward getting there any way I can: that’s the real goal, and I hope with all my heart I find the fortitude to go that route.

Jackie Robinson portrait

Teach me how to do this, my friends . . .