The Bones of the Beach

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I grew up pretty near the Pacific Ocean. It was a matter of a couple of hours to get to its shores from home, and mere minutes’ drive to Puget Sound, and I have always loved any chance to spend time along the water. At home in Texas, it’s not so easy: there are a few man-made lakes within a short drive, with a few public beach spots along the edges of each, most of the time too hot for strolling, and that’s about it. So that recent trip to Puerto Rico was a brief but lovely reminder of what pleasure I find in wandering the beach when I can, absorbing not only a bit of salt water through my happy bare feet and the tangy air through my expanding lungs but also the great sense of history and adventure inherent in all of the findings strewn along the tidal brink.Digital collage: Beachcomber's Trove

Despite being so much a water-baby at heart, I’ve never so much loved open water swimming—after all, my people are the pale, easily fried folk of Norway who transplanted to the familiarly brisk spank of the coastal waters to fish and farm and forest-hunt as they’d done back in the old country. But I’m drawn all the same to explore the tide-pools and comb through the heaps of hidden-and-revealed treasure that line the beach, sucking deep breaths of sea breeze happily right down to my soul. I love to see all of the bits of shell and bone and stone piled up and intermingled with molted feathers, ship detritus and the petrified lace of corals and seaweed. Every tiny piece seems to hold such a storied past that I can stare and sift and dream endlessly.Photos: Beach Bones

What caused that lone shoe to wash up here from unknown shores? Why are those pieces of sea-soaked driftwood burnt but not in the fire pit, rather appearing like a dragon-singed skeleton in a distant heap down the shore? How did so many colors of ghostly and sandblasted beach glass come to bejewel the line of the tide together? Who were the creatures that fished the shore and left bleached fish bones here, a crab shell there? When did the storms kick up such a foment of foam that the inland side of mean high tide has a gloss of it lacquered firmly across the surface of its sand? Where are the children whose sandcastle ruins are still tucked behind the biggest boulders on the beach, waving flags of leaf and kelp from their stunted battlements? And most importantly, when can I return to the beach to stroll and dream of such things again?

My Opinion, and Welcome to It

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Digital illustration: Tweeting in the Twentieth Century

Here’s a little something I’d Tweet if I had an actual Twitter account, because I’m quite sure the whole rest of the world *really* needs to know it.

Just My Opinion

While I pontificate and muse

On any topic I should choose,

You can’t be blamed for heading east

When I head west or, in the least,

For covering your weary ears—

Like any sentient who hears

Such foolishness as what I spout—

But don’t talk, too; I’ll just tune out.

Litanies

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I have a gift for complaining. I’m known to bemoan the unsatisfactory in any element of life that irks me at the moment, and seldom run out of topics. Why, I’ve been heard to complain about other people who complain too much.

One might almost assume I didn’t have a really excellent life. One would be wrong in that. I’m just curmudgeonly sometimes.

Digital illustration from a photo: The Fabric of My Life

You might think I’d carry my umbrella every single day, the way I can gripe about how imperfect life is, but when I leave my bumbershoot half-folded like this to dry after a real rain, I’m reminded that things are often better than they seem…

I like to think I’m not framing my dissatisfaction as criticism and fault-finding, believing myself too pious and generous for such finger-pointing when I know I’m imperfect myself, but of course, any notion of imperfection implies fault or blame at some level. Therein lies evidence of my fault in this insidious pastime.

So I’m working on letting my Pollyanna side dominate better. I can play my own version of her Glad Game and attempt to divine the positives in the situation and keep my attentions there instead of on the downside. I don’t think it healthy, overall, to put too Panglossian a gloss on things and lose touch with reality, but whatever their relative literary merits I suspect young Pollyanna is the more practical of my fictional companions. Instead of pretending that rotten stuff is good, she exhorts us to see what is good and use that to enlighten and change the rest.

Being grateful for what is fine and admirable and sweet is an invitation to imitate it and to use the power of such goodness to defeat the rest. Time spent in recitation and recognition of joys and strengths is never wasted.

Photo: A Tip of the Hat

…It’s much better to give a tip of the hat to what is actually fine and dandy in life, and be glad of it!

The Baby of the Family

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When my older sister has birthdays, I’m not overwhelmed by thinking about her age. I’m close enough behind her that I kind of feel her age already, myself. No big problem. Sister number three is a little further behind me, and being the first of my younger sisters to hit each milestone after me, is the one who always makes me feel that little twinge: ‘I have a younger sister who’s that old!’

Baby sister eases into place after the rest of us without creating much ripple. The fact that the youngest sibling is approaching any notable mark is mitigated by three predecessors having beat her to it. Today, her birthday, she’ll do her little bit toward ‘catching up’ again, and yet, naturally, she will continue to remain younger than the rest of us. Once the youngest, always the youngest.

Part of me can’t help but subscribe to the cute and cuddly image held by youngest siblings. For one thing, she is beautiful. All three of my sisters are beautiful. Only one can be the youngest, of course, so I can’t help it entirely if the picture in my mind of my baby sister keeps looking quite a bit like she did as a small child. That adorable infant thing, once seen, is hard to undo. Both little sisters, as a result, are at times in my mind the human equivalent of kittens or puppies or fawns, despite having grown up into fantastic women with real lives and real families of their own.

I have nothing against aging, either mine or my sisters’. As long as we get to do it for a good, long time, and my sisters are doing it wonderfully well so far. I might think of them, the youngest especially, with the soft-filter glow of nostalgic youth painting them into charming little toddlers all over again, but only in light of knowing that they continue to grow more wonderful and marvelous with their actual progress through the years.

Digital illustration: Little Woodland Creatures

Happy Birthday to my—ahem!—foxy baby sister!

I can say as a dandy postscript to this bit of nostalgia that my baby sister is getting some suitable attentions during her birthday celebrations, which began just a little bit early this year. Her youngest, our nephew Christoffer, is in the previously mentioned punk rock band Honningbarna, and they opened for Aerosmith and Alice Cooper last night. My sister and niece got to watch from very near the stage (yay, earplugs!), and when our nephew came off the stage to give his mom a birthday kiss, the crowd responded with all appropriate enthusiasm. Not bad birthday entertainment for a lady who is doing her best to catch up with my advancing age!

Tough as Nails

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Photo: A Little Rusty, Maybe

I may be getting a little rusty and weathered, but I’m just happy to be aging.

I’m managing to age. I’m glad. Though I’ve never had such a deep fall into my depressive and anxious episodes as to become suicidal, I’ve had times when I feared it might be hard to keep living, instead retreating into agoraphobic hiding in perpetuity. Those times, I am so very thankful, have been rare. They’re long past, too.

A couple of months ago, though, I had the first of some subtle indications that my longtime sense of shining wellness might have some tiny cracks forming in its foundations. A creeping unease entered into my confident good cheer. When I was first diagnosed and treated back then for my anxiety and depression, I had the strange sensation of learning what it felt like for my symptoms to recede, one by one, and as they did, I realized that the way I’d felt and the whole way I’d understood myself for all of my life before then, was in large part a collection of symptoms. Underneath it all was a different, happier and healthier self I have relished getting to know as I was unmasked by this progress.

I won’t lose that self again readily. I made tracks for the doctor’s office to talk about my options, because I don’t ever want to be held prisoner in that not-me state again. We’re checking my general health, the doctor and I, and plotting a course for reinforcement of the new-and-improved me while combating those things that threaten in any small way.

My greatest reassurance comes from living with the life partner who never ceases to love and support me for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. Backing him up in the task are the many relatives and friends upon whom I also depend. But I’ve come to realize that I have another resource on which I’ll be depending in this adventure. Surprisingly, that defender is me.

See, I understand now what I didn’t and couldn’t back in the day: I could never have made it to my first depressive crash and subsequent healing if I weren’t pretty tough inside. I have always thought of myself as shy, timid and easily cowed, but the truth is that if everything that seems ordinary and normal to other people in the everyday scheme of things—meeting a new person, answering the phone, taking a class—seems infinitely harder to a person with anxiety disorder or the chemical imbalance that causes chronic depression, then I must be stronger than I thought.

I’m planning to win. I don’t expect it’ll happen overnight, let alone permanently, but with my personal army at my back and the right attitude and resources of my own, I think I have a good shot at it.

Photo: Tough as Nails

For a marshmallow, I’m actually tough as nails.

Let’s Just Hug It Out

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The Cuddlesome Kraken

You think that I’m all hands, my love,

Controlling, holding tightly so?

Don’t wriggle, struggle, push and shove;

This is the only way I know!Digital illustration: Cool Kraken

I love you, darling, s’truth I do,

So let’s just cut right to the chase—

Let me wrap all my arms ’round you—

Embrace, embrace, embrace, embrace!Digital illustration: Kraken is Warm for Your Form

Chocolate is Half-inch Caulking for Cracked Moods

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When I worked for my uncle’s construction company, the lead painter and I would look at something shabbily built and laugh that we’d been sent in to fix what the carpenters evidently couldn’t, with a mythical substance and/or application process we sometimes referred to as “half-inch caulking.” While a good job of caulking the edges and cracks around trim and other carpentry is an important step in preparing a built object or room for its paint, any gap as large as a half-inch would in reality need more serious care than mere caulking—perhaps even rebuilding—before it was worthy of being painted, and there’s no such thing as caulking truly made for such massive applications. Curing, caulk would soon enough shrink and pull away from the trim and leave a gap nearly as visible as the one it was intended to fill, and no amount of daintily applied paint would make it as pretty as if it had been assembled and prepared properly. Still, on our best days, we amused ourselves with the notion that whatever the previous workers had failed to build or fix nicely, we painters with our magic powers could doll up sufficiently to save.

I think that I am even less fooled, nowadays, by the idea that a vigorous application of fine chocolate to my innards by means of cheerful ingestion can cure anything that might ail me. But I am no less pleased to entertain that myth than the aforementioned one, and don’t mind that any proof in the positive results of chocolate-eating on my attitude is likely a placebo effect, psychosomatic or flat-out delusion. Whatever the truth, I continue to fill in the gaps of my frayed moods with chocolate, and it nearly always helps to smooth over the flaws better than nearly any other restorative out there.

Casa Cortés ChocoBar, our fantastical find of an eatery in San Juan, not only offered a plethora of chocolate treats for the repair and maintenance of body and soul but had a wonderful wall tiled with antique chocolate molds that may well have been used to cover a multitude of sins in the building construction itself. That makes the place, in my estimation, extra potent and all the more inspiring. I may be on the hunt now for chocolate molds with which to tile my next kitchen wall, but I won’t want decommissioned molds, preferring to fuel myself with the contents as I install. It seems the respectful thing to do.Photo: I can Fix It with Chocolate

Foodie Tuesday: Everybody’s Version is Different

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As often as I post about loving comfort food, I seldom say clearly enough that I’m well aware everybody’s version of that idea is unique. Yes, we have familiar favorites that we’ve learned from our national, cultural, regional and communal environments, and those might well be generalized across towns or families. To a point. But the specifics vary with our own body chemistry, when it comes to allergies and the biology of taste buds, never mind the variety that comes from making choices.

That’s when it’s possible to slide from one leaning to another, even in what food sounds most comforting to me at the moment. Did I grow up surrounded by essentially middle class, white, middle-of-the-road, twentieth century American foods and preparations? Yes. Do I still think most of the stuff I grew up eating and drinking is delicious and comforting? Yes, I do. But it’s long since been joined on my hit list by a lot of other edible goodness that derives from cultures and kitchens far from those of my youth.

Learning to eat and prepare some of the deliciousness found in, say, Thai and Russian and Moroccan cuisines not only stretches my repertoire but trains my hungry brain to hanker for new goodness in addition to the comforts of my hungry childhood. Every unfamiliar regional or national cuisine, every dish, that I get to taste offers the possibility of further comfort foods. What’s it all mean? Most importantly, that I will never lack for something delicious that will bring solace and pleasure along with its nutrients, and may well continue to find new and enticing foods to add to my go-to list as life goes forward.

Photo: Tandoori Tastiness

Take a plateful of Tandoori chicken with Basmati rice, raita, coconut, dried fruit and cashews (and avocado, snap peas and carrots on the side), for example. Once you’ve had the marvelous and heartwarming masala that seasons a Tandoori meal, it’s easy to see what’s made that region’s cuisine so popular for so very long, and to think it’s a great idea to join the crowd.

Ha-ha-ha! I just realized I hit the Publish button on the wrong post. It’s Tuesday early this week! If it’s any consolation to anyone out there, it is already Tuesday in India, and I promise I’ll put up the other post tomorrow. Ta-ta for now, my friends. I have all night to dream about Tandoori chicken and anything else that makes me hungry for its comforts.

Roaring through the Twenties

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I didn’t plan it, but in an abstracted moment, something happened to me. I was noodling around with some bold geometric abstractions with a sweeping organic curve, and hey-presto, there arose another kind of imagery, organically if you will, from the illustrations I was making. Their loose, zingy energy immediately made me think of the Jazz Age, all youthful impatience and catchy rhythms—of skinny collegians with megaphones, top hats piled up in the cloakroom at a speakeasy, and slick-haired tenors piping from scratchy gramophones to lure heedless girls with pin-curled bobs out onto the dance floor. Pay no mind, as you read, to the nonsensical text and the slippery grammar—after all, the sort of brash youth I’m picturing would’ve been exhorting their mates with that madcap urgency that preceded the crash of ’29, probably with a cigarette holder wedged in the teeth, and possibly fueled by a G&T or two. If you can let go of your suspenders just long enough, jump on in and do the Charleston along with the rest of ’em.

Digital illustration: Jazz Age 1

Just A Little Jazz-ma-Tazz

When you feel yer feet a-tappin’ and your hands just get a-clappin’

Somethin’ grand’s about to happen:

Just a little jazz-ma-tazz—

If the week was long an’ weary and your eyes are gettin’ bleary,

Time to let it go, ma dearie,

With a little jazz-ma-tazz—

Take a sip o’ somethin’ chilly, knock yer elbows willy-nilly

And don’t worry if it’s silly,

‘Cause it’s only jazz-ma-tazz—

There’ll be time enough tomorrow for ol’ tiredness an’ sorrow;

If you’re empty you can borrow

Joy from jumpin’ jazz-ma-tazz—

So get up an’ quit yer waitin’ and yer heavy hesitatin’

And begin the celebratin’

With a little jazz-ma-tazz—

Get yer sleepy feet a-tappin’ and your hands awake an’ clappin’—

Somethin’ grand’s about to happen:

Spark a little jazz-ma-tazz!Digital illustration: Jazz Age 2Don’t forget to pick up your boater or cloche as you leave, and don’t blame me if your heels are howling in the mornin’.

 

Reptiles, Amphibians & Humans, Oh My! (Part 2)

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I won’t cheat you. Just because I posted those highly fictionalized cartoony versions of a reptile and an amphibian yesterday when I was singing the praises of singing frogs, iguanas, turtles and their fellow creatures doesn’t mean I wouldn’t share the joys of the real things with you as well. So consider yourself forearmed with this brief alert: cuteness and beauty ahead! Real, live. Starring some fantastic iguanas and our own, homegrown Tiny Tim/Tina Turtle. Photo: Dynamic Iguana Duo

Photo: Iguana Photo-Bomb

Photo: Magnificent Reptile

Photo: Our Tiny Turtle

Photo: Tiny Tim (or Tina) Turtle