Thursday in Helotes

Yesterday, crack of dawn, ice on the windshield, steroid-peppy, I drove to Scenic Loop in Helotes to spend the day--the town on the outskirts of San Antonio where Will and his family live in a small rock house at the top of a long hill.

Ironically, it's about two miles from the house where my own children grew up (in a rock house, then later a stucco one, both at the end of long bumpy driveways, both also off Scenic Loop)--so the drive always takes me back in time to the years we lived there, years that add up to more years than I've lived anywhere else.  I go there about once a week to keep Elena (and Nathan sometimes after school) and stay for supper.  It's a trip, a journey.

First, there's the seeing off of two fishermen for the day--Will and his father, my ex.  

Then, there's a morning of reading to and playing with Elena, and soaking up her pure exuberance of living.  She's a bilingual baby, and if I ask her, "How do you say milk, or monkey, or bread or just about anything in Spanish?" she can tell me the word. "How do you say Daddy in Spanish?" I asked.  She thought a bit and said, "Will!"

Whatever I make for her, she says, "Yummy!  I taste it!"  Everything is still present-tense with Elena.

After lunch, we gave two pork chop bones to the dogs, one to the large Golden Lab, Abby, one to the tiny feisty rat terrier, Skippy--as in SkippyJonJones.  With some fierce growling and fast moves, little Skippy wound up with both bones!  Abby stood back looking piteous, Abby who could, as Will said later, eat Skippy in one bite if she had a mind to, which she doesn't. 

Deja Vu really kicked in after nap when we drove to Helotes Elementary School to pick up Nathan from first grade.  Both car seats, a diaper and drink bag, it takes a lot more work to get children from here to there than it used to, but we managed to get there in plenty of time to watch the first graders file out.

How many times have I waited in that exact spot to pick up Day and Will when they were little?  The school is larger, the playground fancier, but the friendly mood of the school is the same. When Nathan came up to us, he was beaming.  He'd had a blue day for four days in a row--meaning he'd been good all day long.

So we went to Orange Leaf and the bookstore to celebrate.  Bought him a Lego set for one of his early birthday presents.  Watched him dance in the yogurt shop to entertain some little girls at the next table.  Cleaned up chocolate faces.  Had a power struggle with Elena who insisted she was going to sit in the front seat, not the car seat--until Nathan bribed her with a Cheeto and I put on my serious face.  Listened to her assert her authority as Nathan was trying to tell me a story in the car: "I talking to Yenna, Nathan!  Stop talking!" 

He had walked up to the school counselor on the way to the car.  "Hey, Mr. Vasquez, when are you going to have one of those groups again?"

"Would you like to have another group, Buddy?" asked Mr. V.

On the way to the car, he told me, Mr. V. was the teacher who was like having your mommy and daddy at school.  If mean kids tried to bully you, Mr. V would take care of it and teach the bullies how to be nice. "It's like sometimes I might want to take care of my little sister and I'm not strong enough and I have to ask Will to help me," he said. 

We ended the day with delicious chicken tacos around the table: Will and Veronica, Nathan and Elena, and my Ex and me.  

Wednesday Morning, the wind blowing hard

On the advice of a good friend, I finally went to the doctor yesterday and got diagnosed with bronchitis.  Having had a few bouts of pneumonia as a child, I decided to go the regular medical route to healing before it settled deeper in my chest.

And so here I am in the middle of the night, revived and running on the high-octane of drugs, making a note to go to Whole Foods and get some probiotics when they open.

Driving back from my morning coke run, listening as always to NPR, I noticed that our cold front had arrived, 48 degrees, heading toward 38.  The Honda was blowing a bit in the wind.  The window people at McDonalds who often give me my cokes for free threw in a sausage biscuit this morning.

On Morning Edition there was an interesting story: People regard creativity more highly if it comes from far away.  If you want to pitch an idea, we were advised, don't pitch it where you live.

Why? Apparently, when we're close up to something (or someone) we see the details; when we're far away, we see it in a more abstract way.  We tend to be more critical of those right in front of us, in awe of people and ideas that are geographically distant.

I often think--as I'm sitting across the table at Adalantes talking and reading with a writer friend, or as I'm sitting in my wonderful writing groups: This piece is better than much of published writing I've read lately.  This piece is vibrant, provocative, unusual--something the world should get to read!

But here we are, all close up to each other and far from Publication Central in New York.  Few of us attempt to publish in that far away world we know little about, perhaps intimidated by the roads we'd have to learn to navigate to take our writing out there into the world.

Our hesitancy to publish may mean a loss to the larger world out there, but the writing is a boon to those of us in the close-up audience who meet to savor and appreciate what our writer friends can do. I carry their poems and stories around with me everywhere I go, my treasured companions.

Marcus' art:Home Depot

Marcus made this using the Panorama function of his mama's iPhone.  Yesterday when Day called to check on me, he got on the phone and told me:

"My mom says most people go to Home Depot to get their supplies to make art; you make art right there at Home Depot."

"I have the awesomest mom," he said.  "I like to make art and she likes to make art.  I like to dance and she likes to dance."

What You, Too, Can Do on Dateless Friday and Saturday Nights

For the low cost of $25, you, too, can spend six hours taking an online defensive driving course.   By one in the morning, following two nights of listening to lame jokes and looking at cartoons, you can--as I just did--take a multiple choice test that it would be virtually impossible to fail.

However, to be fair, I'm not sure I would have passed the test without taking the course.  I now know that a seatbelt must be worn over the shoulder, not under the arm as I have always done.  I grew up before seat belts.  I was a mother when mothers thought we could reach our arms out to protect our unbelted children in the front passenger seat. I still throw my arm across the empty passenger seat as a reflex if it looks like someone ahead of me is stopping suddenly. When seat belts were first required by law, I balked.

I learned about the consequences of driving with a .08 BAC--that is blood alcohol content. (Since I don't drink still or moving, I'm not too worried about losing my license, but watching the videos in this class made me more aware of how many other drivers out there are drinking.)  Texas has more alcohol-related fatalities each year than any other state.

I learned some stuff about hydroplaning on wet roads.

I learned that it takes a train a mile to stop--so I will stop trying to race across the tracks.  (just kidding, Carlene, I don't do that.)

So, with a 95% score on my multiple choice test, and my eyes bleary from watching six hours of training, I am going to bed.  And I am never, ever, going to go 51 in a 35 speed zone again.

My Mama And Me

Are alike in many ways.
We both like to have at least one pretty part all the time.  She goes to the beauty shop every Thursday morning without fail and sleeps with toilet paper on her hair so she won't mess it up between Thursdays.  My daddy used to call her beauty shop appointments "Mission Impossible."

I get my hair cut and colored about twice a year, period--but I have to have a monthly pedicure since I wear nothing but sandals.  I did that this morning after getting my car washed, and now I have perfectly lovely purple toes and smooth soles.

While sitting in the chair, I got an email from my friend Diana:

 I have decided that the mirror and the bathroom scale both lie.  They are defective. That's not me.

I know that  my younger body (which while certainly not swim suit edition material) was firm and smaller is still there, it just doesn't show.

I used to be able to feel and see bones....hip bones, rib bones.  Then without warning, they disappeared under  layers of soft flesh and saggy skin.  

Not long ago, I noticed my sister, my junior by three years, had a saggy neck!  That area right below the chin that I had never given a moment's thought before, and I thought, "Bless her heart!   I wonder if she is aware of that??"

Then, I looked in my defective mirror and I had it too!!!

Now, if I happen to catch a glimpse of my face, I just look away and smile.   I'm still myself behind that false image.

And you know what?  I no longer see my sister's saggy neck.  I see her beautiful self and hug her.
Keep smiling, dear friend.  

And know that your defective mirror and scale will be recalled by the manufacturers, just as mine will be.

Bless all our hearts!

Let's all ride on the front row!

                  Thanks to Nellie for this! 

"Happy is how I look...."

I still can't believe it when I hear myself saying to a doctor's receptionist, "Yes, Medicare."  Really--I feel like I'm delivering my grandmother to the doctor's office, just doing the paperwork for her.

It doesn't surprise me to give my birth year, 1948--I'm used to that.  But doing the math and saying 65?  Well, that shocks me every time.  I feel like saying 45, maybe 50--but this?

Then there are those unfortunate reversals of the iPhone camera--when I mean to take a photo of someone else (usually Elena these days) and I see myself from the neck up instead.  Who is that person?  Being oldish is new to me.

I notice it every day, little things, just the way we noticed when we were adolescents, so proud of  every little budding sign that we were women, finally! We wanted desperately to start our periods, wear bras, and shave our legs.

Most days I don't feel old, but some days I do, just a little. The legs I used to like showing off I now choose to cover up.  Shorts and high heels, no way. Bones and joints, I've recently discovered, can talk. Bending down to get the mail off the floor is sometimes an ordeal; opening jars is always an ordeal.  I try to get in lines with men checkers so I can ask them to loosen my jars.

Remember when we made decisions knowing that whatever we chose to buy we'd probably enjoy for many years?  Now who (at my age, give or take a decade or two) doesn't at least consider: this could be my last car, my last job, my last whatever? Even if it's not, the possibility hovers.  We notice the ages of people in obituary columns.  So young! we protest--when we see our ages there.

On the other hand, being a little bit old has its advantages.  I love the freedom most of all.  Freedom, usually, from worry.  Freedom to not care so much about the approval of other people.  This is a glorious age in so many ways, a happy time, as Fleur Adcock proclaims in her poem, "Weathering." (I've put the best three lines in bold print.)

Weathering

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn't care how I look, or if I'm happy,

happy is how I look, and that's all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that's little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.

Jan's Amazing Dream

This polenta dish--delivered to the shut-in from my friend Jan--is fantastic!  She actually dreamed the recipe.  I have never in my life dreamed a recipe--but after eating this, I'm going to hope for a kitchen dream.  I could eat this every day.

Here, in her own words, in response to my request for the recipe:

I actually DREAMED that dish on Monday night.  Tuesday I bought the ingredients and made it for my dinner.  I steamed the spinach, then layered the spinach in a small casserole, topped with thinly sliced garlic and sliced fresh tomatoes, topped with feta, then broiled til the feta browned.  I put the whole thing on top of the fried polenta and yes the polenta was homemade.  It’s easy and tastes better than the kind in a tube.  Yum.  Really one of the best things I’ve ever made, and so simple.  I dreamed all but the polenta.

For the polenta:

Buy Bob’s Red Mill Polenta and follow the directions.  Instead of water, I use Central Market Organic Chicken Broth.  It’s easy — just boil, then simmer, like cooking grits, only it takes a little longer.  Then spread the blob of thick polenta in a buttered casserole dish and let it cool.  Then you can cut it, slice it, fry it and find simple happiness.  Jan Schubert Norris

Here's To Pete, Philip, and Shirley

All gone, all within the last month: Pete Seeger, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Shirley Temple Black.

I like to imagine that there's a boundary that the living among us can't see, a dividing line between Here and There; when people leave Here, they walk across the line with the others and keep on living.  I like to think that they are still singing and acting across the line--recognizing each other, their contemporaries in death, maybe forming a brand new band or writing some new songs for the people who've crossed over the line ahead of them.

When I heard about Shirley Temple Black's death, I didn't think of the child star she was (that was before my time); I thought about the Shirley Temple doll I got one Christmas, still in Carlene's doll cabinet.  We all got Shirley Temple dolls; she was a star when our mothers were little girls.

Here is Shirley herself, holding a Shirley Temple doll.

The second thing I thought about was Daisy, my baby girl, born in 1971.  A precocious talker at two, she would sit on the floor in bookstores, carefully turning the pages of books.  "Is this book appropriate for my age?" she asked.

"Did that baby say what I think she said?" asked a clerk.

Everywhere we went, her hair a mass of bright curls, people would bend down and ask her, "Do you know who you look just like?"

"Shirley Temple," she'd say (sounding very bored). She had no idea who Shirley Temple was, but she'd heard it  so many times she knew the answer.










This is one of my favorite photos of Day--in the arms of Granddaddy Lloyd.  As you can tell, he adored her--and she him.

When Day's baby brother was in the hospital during his second and third week of life, Day (then almost seven) and I would walk across the park to Mi Tierra's for lunch.

Her favorite drink was a Shirley Temple: ginger ale in an icy glass with grenadine syrup and one maraschino cherry.

A cold on a hot day

If you're like me, when you're sick, you don't know what you want.  To be left alone, to be pampered, or to just sleep until it passes.  We're not talking about serious illness here, just a garden variety cold. I had planned to devote these three days to writing but now that my head is full of whatever a head is full of when a cold descends, I can't keep my words from sinking into quicksand and disconnecting from what it was I meant to say.

I'm reading a library book Freda loaned me, She Matters by Susanna Sonnenberg. It is moving, evocative, worth the read for sure.  It reminds me of the chapters of my own life and the friends who've been there with me and for me--and vice versa--through what my friend Mary Locke calls "Life's Rich Pageant."

I got phone calls and e-mails from friends checking up on me, advising sleep and water and Alka Seltzer for colds.  I had a visit from a friend who isn't afraid of germs, she said.  And then Jan--my dear  friend and great cook who lives next door--delivered dinner: sweet potatoes, steamed peas, polenta with spinach and feta, delicious!

Sometimes when we're sick, we need people to tell us what we need. I needed a visit, phone calls, a good book, and polenta covered with spinach and feta cheese.

The Pleasures of the Just-Right Book

Before I read the last few pages of Rebecca Mead's book,  I want to share with you what just lifted me up off the bed where I was reading and took me back to the red-dirt, piney-woods, sweet-tea land of my childhood.

"Our earlier experiences provide the ground upon which our characters are built...and some part of our character grows from the brilliant, scintillating, intense capacity for emotion that a child experiences.  There is nothing particularly special about the landscape of our youth...except for the important fact that it is where we learned to be human." 

Reading a hard-bound book with deckle-edged pages and a beautiful cover, the pages thick for underlining, written by a writer who blends scholarly and personal reflections, reminds me of the pleasure I felt when I first began to own hard-bound books and learned that I could scribble and underline in them with impunity.

The real pleasure, though, comes when what the writer is saying feels so true and rightly said that I want to linger in her paragraph for a long time, like lingering in an actual place.  My scribbles and lines are little flags I post there so I can return later.  On pages 251-253, Mead writes about the power of childhood landscapes to shape who we are. What we consider beautiful, what we try to replicate, what we like and dislike--the roots of our preferences and aversions spring from places outsiders would consider most ordinary.

After the following passage, I just wrote a great big green "Wow!"

Eliot's books show me that "the remembrance of a childhood landscape is not mere nostalgia for what is lost and beyond my reach. It does not consist of a longing to be back there in the present; or a longing to be a child once more; or of wishing the world would not change. Rather, it is an opportunity to be in touch again with the intensity and imaginations of beginnings. It is a discovery, later in life, of what remains with me. "

At least one other writer has said that the material of most writers comes from their first decade and a half of life.  Maybe it's in returning to the "intensity and imaginations" of our beginnings that our unique and individual Muses are most vibrant and alive. Maybe we travel and make art and write to see the world again as a child, everything new.

When "foot" means almost everything

Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day in San Antonio.
When Janet P, my passenger and willing companion, and I drove up to the storefront "Foot Spa," neon lights flashing "Foot massage $35 an hour," she was a tiny bit dubious, I think.

Signs on the glass had diagrams of reflexology--which had attracted me to the place and I felt a need for some footsie rejuvenation.

We sat in the car for a while; I assured Janet it would be fine.  I'd walked in one day last week to check it out and had a brief conversation with a Chinese woman named Linda, mostly in a kind of sign language since she obviously didn't understand much English and I obviously didn't speak her language.

Inside it was very dark.  Seven comfy white-sheeted tables were lined up in a room that was probably very clean--though it was too dark to tell much more about it.  A tree with multi-colored lights, a Buddha, some Asian music: I liked it.  I liked it better doing it for the first time with my friend.

We lay on the tables fully clothed, side by side, and they put our feet into a tub of hot water.  Then they began massaging our heads.

"I thought this was a foot massage only," Janet said.

"Yes," they said.

"But you're massaging my head," Janet said.

"Yes," they said.

"But I just washed my hair," Janet said, "I don't think I want any oil in my hair."

"Yes,' they said, continuing to massage both our heads.  They called in a young woman to to translate, but she didn't actually know much more English than the two who were about to give us these wonderful massages.

We both gave up trying to communicate, and fell into the Nirvana of two massage recipients.  It was one of those amazing hours you want to share with all your good friends!  Foot massage in Chinese must mean head, shoulders, arms, legs, back and feet.

Janet and I visit the Toilet Seat Museum in Alamo Heights

Here's Janet holding the Illinois license plate.

Barney Smith is a 92-year-old neighbor of mine--two and a half blocks away.

But I had never met him or seen his toilet seat museum until today--when Janet Penley and I decided to stop in.

He has been collecting and decorating toilet seats for many years,

often painting beside the hospice bed of his wife of 74 years.

His toilet seats fill a garage: maps and jewels and memorabilia are attached to the toilet seats; 

license plates, birthday and anniversary cards, photographs, and movie stars.....

After going to the McNay to see the Robert Indiana show, and after having Thai lunch and getting 

ourselves side by side foot massages at a seedy-looking but wonderful place on San Pedro,

Janet gave Barney a call (that's the way you do it; you call; he opens up)

and we got ourselves a tour, Janet's third, my first.

What an interesting man, personable and quirky and fun to meet.

His wife had been in home hospice for four years, and she just died last week.

Each of their anniversaries and trips, and each of his birthdays starting at 70 is remembered in a toilet seat.

People come from all over the country and beyond to see this little museum,

and it's been featured on several TV shows--including The View.

Yenna and Elena at Kiddie Park, Valentines Day 2014

My grandchildren call me Yenna--a name that came from Elena's daddy (at two) trying to say my name, Linda, before he could pronounce Ls.

Elena is particularly proficient at Ls--in English and Spanish.

When Will, at two, was  asked, "What's your mommy's name?" he said "Mommy."  When prompted him that my real name was Linda, he said, "Oh yeah, Yenna."I decided right then and there that Yenna would one day be my grandmother name.

And so it is: to Jackson, 12; Marcus 8; Nathan, 7 in March; and Elena, 2.

Janet O surprised me by stopping by after her gym class--and she rode with me to Helotes to pick up Elena.  Janet Oglethorpe is a baby whisperer best I can tell.  As we were dressing Elena for the trip to Yenna's house, Janet told her that she had puffy sleeves.  Puffy was a new word to Elena. She thought Janet meant puppy and she looked in the creases for Skippy.

"Puffy," Janet said, taking her to the mirror in the bathroom to show her the way the tops of her sleeves were puffy.

Later in the day, after her long bath, while I was dressing her for our trip to Kiddie Park and the train ride, she said, "Janet tell me puffy," and wanted to go to the mirror to check out her wardrobe all over again!

We were playing a car game to keep her from falling asleep on the way back.  I asked her "Do you like hamburgers?" "Do you like noodles?" "Do you like tacos?" and so on.  She answered "No" to every one--so I thought I'd sneak in a trick question and hear another "NO."

"Do you like me?" I asked.

"Yes!" she said.  "I love you, Yenna."

Well, if that won't make a Yenna's day, I don't know what will!

Janet and Elena

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, EVERYBODY!

I love The Diane Rhem Show on NPR.
On today's show, she interviewed Dan Jones, the author of the "Modern Love" column in the New York Times, who has written a book called Love Illuminated.

Here's the link: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-02-13/daniel-jones-love-illuminated-exploring-lifes-most-mystifying-subject-help-50000-st

When Diane met her husband of 50-somthing years, she thought he had a voice that was too loud.  "Didn't his mother ever teach him to modulate his voice?" she (a secretary) wondered about him (an attorney).

Now he is living in an assisted living facility with Parkinson's Disease, and his voice is no longer loud, but very quiet and gentle.  When asked by a caller to talk about her long and happy marriage, she talks about the "wonderful" voice of the man she loves.

Come Sail With Me On The Ocean of Love

What in the world is this blog about?

I have no idea.

It started as a travelogue and has since wandered all over the map--from recipes to reports on my days to movie reviews to pictures of my grandchildren.  One day I'm writing about the banal Bachelor, the next day I'm writing about Middlemarch--which has been called by some "the greatest English novel ever written."

Whatever it is, I'm having fun! For myself and for those who are still following my random, disorganized "things," this is something of a diary/extended e-mail. It's possible that a theme will emerge, though I have no idea what it might be.

I wrote in my last post about My Life in Middlemarch and the relationships between the British authors of Eliot's age.  A book that similarly illuminates what was going on in America at the same time is Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Louisa Mae Alcott, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson: these writers were producing great American literature on our side of the pond--while Eliot was writing in England.

Philip Lopate, in To Show and To Tell/ The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, writes, --"We tend to value renegades like Thoreau, doomed alcoholics like Poe, reclusives like Dickinson, misunderstood visionaries like Melville, expansive gay bards like Whitman...."  

When I was a student teacher in 1970, my first teaching assignment was a six-week unit on   transcendentalism. I  loved studying Emerson and Thoreau way more than teaching grammar--which I did the second six weeks. In graduate school, I got  better acquainted with  Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.

Later, studying 20th century fiction, I was startled to discover that Flannery O'Connor was on the syllabus.  I had heard of her all my life.  She and Carlene (my mother)  were classmates at Georgia State College for Women, mid-1940s.

I had seen Flannery in Carlene's college yearbooks and I knew that Flannery was the assistant editor of the literary magazine, The Corinthian, and my mother was the editor!  But I had no idea that she'd made it into the canon and that I'd be reading her fiction and letters thirty years after their shared college days.

What does Carlene have to say about this?

"Flannery went on to fame," she says with a grin.  "I just went on...."

My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead

George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, chose a male pseudonym when she began writing fiction, including  Middlemarch.  I've not read the novel, but I've watched it on Netflix, along with Daniel Deronda.   I've been too engrossed in Rebecca Mead's book (an excellent book for English major types like me) to read the actual novel, but I'm about to start.

Some of the George Eliot's English contemporaries (and near contemporaries) were the Bronte sisters,  Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale,  Henry James, and William Wordsworth, grandson of the poet by the same name.

I like knowing stuff like that.  In my school days, we read authors without any sense of how they fit together in time and place.

It's fascinating to read in Mead's book about the social and intellectual connections among those who were living and writing at exactly the same time, or close to the same time, in Victorian England.   Here's a tidbit:

According to Henry James, who called on her in 1869, when he was a handsome twenty-six-year old, "She is magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous....She has a low-forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth...."

Later, he writes: "Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."

Herbert Spencer, whom she loved and hoped to marry, who enjoyed her company as a friend, ate alone in a dining room so as not to "face someone so ugly over the dining table." 

In his old age, however, Spencer took credit for having encouraged her to write fiction.  Rebecca Mead writes:  "She did not find her fictional voice until she was loved by someone who saw beyond her capacity for brittle cleverness--in whose company she did not feel the need to be on her emotional guard." She did have a long-standing happy love life with George Lewes after being rejected by Herbert.

She has been described as personable, brilliant, unconventional, ferocious, and physically unattractive.  Before she began writing fiction, she often used her pen (as James did) writing snarky essays about other writers and public figures.

Rebecca Mead, however, traces Eliot's changes as a writer: she came to her full maturity and compassion as a writer when she began writing fiction.   Middlemarch is considered one of the greatest novels of English literature.

I'll close with Mead's words:

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book.  But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.  There are books that seem to comprehend us jus as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree."

Wardrobe Willies

At salon tonight, our leader, Janet P.,  divided us into two groups, two separate rooms.  We were to write down what the people in the other room were wearing.

Had she asked us to write about Charlotte's colorful house, I could have done much better--but I was only able to identify the color of blouses and jewelry, not much about shoes and socks and pants.

This was our introduction to this month's topic: what stories do our clothes tell about us?

I have never been interested in fashion magazines and keeping up with current styles; I am--as Janet O. said, more of a Bohemian: I pick up something here, something there, and throw it together, rarely if ever shopping at an actual mall.  My closet is fairly sparse.

It turned out to be a lively discussion--as our salons always are--though I haven't given enough thought to clothing of late to add much to the conversation.  But I did have one twenty-year-old memory:

At the time, I worked for a short time as a consultant for a government agency, traveling to different cities to teach workshops in communication.  During National Secretary's Week, I was asked to give the same keynote address to five different assemblies of secretaries.  The topic was Dressing for Success!

I was then--as I would be now--the last person you'd want to advise you on anything wardrobe-related.  My real job was teaching college students, and I usually did that in blue jeans, long flowey blouses, and Birkenstocks.

Linda Kot was visiting from Cape Cod, and we went to JC Penney's to begin our crash course.  Long story short, I got myself a red suit and some beige naturalizer "high-heeled" shoes and wrote up a speech.  For an entire week, I traipsed through airports carrying my new shoes in my hands, my feet in agony.

When I walked into each hotel ballroom, filled with secretaries who were elegantly dressed and coiffed and accessorized, I felt like the impostor I was!  What could I tell these women about dressing for success, beyond what I'd just read the previous week and what the JC Penney's clerk had told me in my five-minute crash course?

Apparently, I had the chutzpah to carry it off--or at least say my few words quickly and segue into the  chocolate mousse.

At the end of that week, I had the good sense to resign and return to the blue jeans and chalk dusty classrooms where I felt more at home. The Probably-Polyester red suit and the Naturalizer heels were vigorously tossed into a big green plastic bag and delivered to Goodwill.  I hope that whoever wound up with those clothes has met with uncommon success.

Santa Claus may be alive and well after all

One of the fun things about keeping a blog is getting emails in response to them that make me smile.  This morning I got this one from my friend Diana Storrs, and I asked her if could post it:

Linda,
I just read your blog on the Bachelor.  What a HOOT!  I'm embarrassed to say I have never watched longer than the few seconds it takes to scroll past it while channel surfing, but sounds like you have nailed it, perfectly describing the vacuousness, inanity and just plain sadness of it all.  Because I haven't watched an entire episode, I'm not qualified to comment, but I just love any chance to use words like "vacuousness and inanity"!

This "girl" is hooked on Hoarders, which makes me feel very neat and tidy; and those shows where a complete dump of a house is turned into a wonderful, tasteful, tidy home, on a miniscule budget that would make Martha Stewart weep.

When they are finished with the makeover, tiny, dark rooms are transformed into pleasing, airy spaces, the kitchen becomes a glossy, efficient space with artfully placed bowls of impossibly perfect fruit.
You get the idea.

I'm sure these programs speak to some dark corner of my psyche, assuring me that, yes, Diana, there IS a Santa Claus!

Love you, girl!
Keep it coming.
Di

Lollygagging

Usually when I call Carlene, she's picking up twigs (she filled three wheelbarrows yesterday) or raking leaves or doing her taxes or making squash and onions--while talking to friends who show up to talk.  Or she's just gotten back from her three-mile walk with Judy, her friend and the mayor of Lawrenceville.  Or she's caulking around the base of her toilets. Or she just got back from Cracker Barrel with Margaret and Marlene, or a baby or bridal shower.

But today, she said she was lollygagging--which is Georgia-speak for doing nothing.  She was reading a book of letters written during World War II.  The Georgia forecast is predicting ice storms.

Last week she gave a program at church for young married women--wherein she asked them to tell their love stories and she told her own, of a fifty-seven year marriage.  One of the things she showed them was a note he had left on the table, as he often did, this one signed Lloyd.com.  When she was checking e-mails, he used to sit in a chair beside her and watch, but he never used the computer himself.  "I'm afraid if I mash one of those buttons, I'll break it," he said.

She told me that a window man came to her house to inquire as to whether or not she'd like her windows weatherized.  She declined.  "But somewhere down the road...." he  started.

"I'm already pretty far down the road," she said, "I'll be 89 this summer, and I can tell you I'm not going to need my windows done down the road...."

I believe that she'll be one centenarian who decides one spring day to have her windows winterized!  Her road is bound to be a long one, with all her walking and eating well and friendships.

We talked about how we often measure our days by how much we get done, how liberating it is sometimes to do nothing.  I told her I was thinking of painting my walls, but that I'm enjoying reading so much I can't summon the energy to paint.  "Well, the paint's not dry from the last time  yet," she said. So I came home and lollygagged, reading an excellent book: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead.

Then the carpet man brought my newly cleaned carpet back--the one that was a gift from my friend.   He put it in front of the sofa and it looks like brand new.

"You look so happy," the rug man said.  "You must exercise every day."

I hedged.  "I'm going to yoga tonight," I said.

"That's why you are so happy," he said. "You go to yoga and then come teach me."

I think he was flirting--though I'm not entirely sure.  It's been long enough since I've been flirted with that I'm not sure I can read the signs, but I'm going to play like he was.  But mostly, I'm going to lollygag.

One Bachelor and Nine Girls on Prime Time

I would nod my head vigorously if I were among a group of friends and anyone said disparaging things about the Monday night show, The Bachelor.  I would nod so that no one would find me out for having watched it.  But for just a minute, I'm going to take off my clothes, so to speak, and reveal to you the cellulite of my brain.

I am, along with one of my very smart friends (who shall remain nameless to protect her reputation) a closet watcher of this beyond-ridiculous show wherein a  bunch of "girls" (they are all called girls even though they are in their twenties and thirties) swoon over the bachelor of the season, hoping in the end to be the winner, the recipient of an impressive diamond and a proposal for marriage.

My name is Linda and I am a narrative addict.  And this cheesy show has some notable narrative elements:

First, we have our handsome leading man, made even more attractive to "the girls' because he is a single father. ("I'd given up on ever finding such a genuine good man like you," one says).  His single-fatherdom also gives him an out: If he doesn't want to kiss a girl, he takes the high road and says it's because he doesn't want his daughter to see him kissing on TV. (We do not believe him)

He also has a Latin accent--which, as we all know, makes a man all the more sexy.  And he knows his moves, both on the soccer field and as a lover of girls.  We know this because he doesn't resist full-on kissing and making out with the three or four girls he really likes, never mind the prospect of his daughter catching the scenes on TV.

Juan Pablo is not, by the way, ever referred to as a "boy."
Juan Pablo is a "man," a full-fledged grown up. (Turns out he was a reject on a recent season of The Bachelorette--where he was one of the house-full of "men" vying for the favor of the one pretty "girl.")

Second, we have our seekers: of fame? of marriage? of notoriety?

Two of Juan's  favorites, both blonde beauties, come across very differently when JP is around (they are "hot" according to the bachelor) than when they are back in the mansion with "the girls."  Among  their rivals, the words of these two are often bleeped out.  The other females in the pack do not think those two are hot at all: one is flagrantly aggressive, the other less so, but these two girls despise each other, adding the narrative element of conflict.

Another favorite of our bachelor is an opera singer, the only one half-hearted about being there--even though she keeps receiving stay-roses. (Let's call her our only Possibly-Dimensional character) According to the teaser last night she may decide to go home next week, never mind all the roses she's already gotten.

Among the rivals for JP's favor, we have our all-American single mom, a nurse, a perky attorney, a hair stylist, the majority of the original cast already banished from the kingdom and "sent home."  At the end of the night, the Star gives roses to the keepers--and the unfortunate rejects ride away in tears, cameras rolling.  They are, understandably, deflated.  After all, each banished girl has finally found someone "to spend the rest of my life with."  They all say that, almost verbatim, as they ride away in the black limousine, their humiliation making them all the more attractive.

So why do I watch this ridiculous, politically incorrect, flat-charactered show?  Why do I keep hoping that one of these people will broach a subject besides themselves, anything--politics, literature, religion, their work, music!--which never happens?

The opera singer tried a time or two to open up the conversation--but Don Juan silenced her by stroking her beautiful face and looking longingly into her eyes.  (He has just, moments before, done the exact same moves with a few other girls, but only the singer is visibly bristling and looking into the distance.)  You can see the writing on the wall.  She's either going to take her roses and go home next week, or she's going to stretch it out all the way to the proposal and refuse the bachelor's offer, take that, Don Juan! 

Maybe I like watching it so I can write a critical blog post, revealing that I really do get how stupid the show is while I'm spending two hours watching, so you won't think me superficial.

Maybe it appeals to my fascination with romance, period, however flat. And maybe, after all, that's the way certain twenty- and thirty-somethings do talk and fall in love?

Or, maybe, I just like a weekly taste of cotton candy....

Nellie's Baba Yaga

Many years ago, we were all reading Women Who Run With The Wolves--a book that left a strong impression.

Nellie is now taking a class in fairy tales--and sent me this wonderful rendition of Baba Yaga.  I think it's a terrific illustration!  I'd buy a book with that cover, wouldn't you?

Two Trips: Best American Travel Writing 2013

I'm enjoying vicarious travel this morning, first to Cuba:

"We landed under searingly vivid skies, something like what the blue tablet from a packet of Easter dye lets off.  The land right around the airport is farmed; we saw a man plowing with oxen.  The fertility of Cuba is the thing you can't put into words.  I've never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative.  Throw a used battery into a divot, and it will put out shoots--that's how it feels.  You could smell it, in the smoky, slightly putrid smell of turned fields.  More and more, as we drove, that odor mingled with the smell of the sea."

from the essay, A Prison, a Paradise, by John Jeremiah Sullivan--in The Best American Travel Writing 2013. 

Now I'm hiking through the jungles of New Guinea with Judy Copeland: The Way I've Come.

The small people she encounters on her dangerous hike consider her "very fat" and predict that she won't make it to her destination:

"By American standards," she writes, "I'm not that fat.  I think of my body as sturdy, a legacy of tall big-boned Appalachian forebears.  I wonder, though, if something in the way I carry myself gives that Jell-O-like vacant look of a body whose extremities aren't inhabited, whose occupant has long ago abandoned the front parlors to closet herself somewhere deep inside."

These are wonderfully well-written tales, the kind Liz Gilbert predicted in the introduction would make the reader feel she's "been there" with the writer.

A haunting tale from the Valero station....

Harvey is big man who works at the 7-11 turned Shamrock turned Valero--where I go when the weather and my mood call for a hot dog.  It's a rare treat and never quite as good as I hope it will be, but ok, it's done, I'm fixed for the next six months.

He gave me his recipe for beef stew as I was paying, then as I was walking out, he said, "You have time for a story?  This one will haunt you."

"I've been working 46 days in a row, see, and my girlfriend takes me out last night for a beer.  We go to this bar and she and all her girlfriends are speaking Russian together and I'm watching TV, drinking my beer." He makes the sign for drinking a beer.

"So in comes this girl wearing a bikini top and I'm like wow."

I wonder where this story is going.

"But when she comes up closer, you see that she has tattoos covering every inch of her body."

He gestures up his arms, on his Valero-shirted chest, down his jeans, to show me he means every inch. My hot dog is getting cold.

"But here's the kicker.  She has no eyebrows, just tattooed ones that go all the way up her forehead.  And her face is all-over tattooed.  And her tongue--it's cut in half like a snake's tongue!"

I must look disgusted or bewildered because he says, "See how your face looks?  That's how I was looking when I seen her!"

I try to think what to say and Gary's words come to mind: "It's a big world."

"Do What You Like; Like What You Do"

In New Mexico, Carlene bought me a license plate holder from the Life Is Good store.  I've enjoyed having that reminder in both the Big Minnie and the Honda--which I see every time I open the hatchback  to get groceries or a yoga mat.

I'm thinking of it now because I'm just so grateful to have found a career I love--leading writing groups.  Fact is, I've always loved my work--teaching all grades from sixth grade to college--but this is the best ever.

When I do work I love, I don't feel tired afterwards, I feel energized, refreshed, and alive.  Writers--after all--all in one room: what could be better?  Every meeting is different, every written page a gift, every writer a friend.

As Valentines Day approaches, I'm not thinking: Poor Me, I don't have a man in my life; I'm thinking Lucky Me, I  have amazing friends!  My life feels so full; where would I fit a man-person? But I did tell Sharon today (when she brought me a Valentines bouquet) that if I do ever get married again, I want her to be my flower girl.

How Big Is The World?

For over twenty years, I had a brilliant friend named Gary who liked to say (especially in response to my whining about some inscrutable drama): "It's a big world...."  And then he'd smile that wise Buddha smile of his, leaving me to ponder what that had to do with anything.

Apparently, he said that to his family and friends a lot--because it was mentioned in his eulogy with nods all around. Sometimes, the simplest words stay with us, reverberating with new meanings as we try to build bridges with people we think are oddballs:  It's a big world; there's room for all kinds of people.  It's a big world, don't waste your energy puzzling over little things you can't change.  It's a vast planet we live on for an infinite amount of time; make the best of it.

I think of those words as I'm watching Olympic athletes march onto the field proudly carrying flags of their countries. I think of those words when I'm obsessing over something that--from the perspective of outer space, for example--is smaller than a gnat. 

I was watching Island at War last week--an interesting series about a German invasion of a fictional British Channel Island.  What struck me were the ways that some of the English inhabitants and some of the German soldiers befriended each other and came to understand each other as individuals.  One German airman confided in an English woman that he didn't believe in the war either, that he was conscripted and "following orders"--just as the young men on the other side were doing.  

If we paint a people with a broad stroke, we don't see them as individuals; we see them as extensions of the powers that be.  When we studied history in school, countries and their people were painted with broad strokes.  I often believed the propaganda that some countries were "good guys" and other countries were "bad guys."  If the only history one learns is the dates of wars or the names of leaders and dictators, it's easy to conclude that national identities matter more than individual stories.

I hate to admit it, but the "history" and "geography" I learned in school was about as flat as a video game.  I wish we had had more teachers (like the one good history teacher I had at S.A.C) who taught with newspaper clippings and photographs of individuals, each with a unique story. I wish that we'd danced to the music of other cultures, tasted their bread, read the letters lovers sent to each other during times of war and times of peace.

Painting With Words

Karen Norris is an absent member of my Monday Night writing group, an attorney, a yoga-doer, and--as you will see if you go to her blog (written while she is working in Doha, Qatar)
an excellent writer:

Karmasdharma.blogspot.com.

Karen opens her latest post with this description of Bangkok:

"Bangkok. Big, bustling, crowded and dirty.  Beggars.  Children extending skinny arms clutching cups. Cynical me thinking, knowing, that there’s a pimp around the corner, using this sad child as bait to lure paper into the cup. Cripples, dragging their bodies across the pavement, or rolling prone on skateboards, through the crowds. Mass-transit trains hurtling by, above and below.  Taxis, tuk-tuks, buses, motorcycles, cars, pedestrians, clamoring and vying for an opening on the crowded streets.  Jumbo jets roaring and rising overhead. The rumble of combustion engines.  The racket of 2-cycle motors.  The chatter.  The clatter.  The smell.  Of food cooking, food rotting, digested food, discarded food.  Of gardenias, and cigarette smoke and petrol fumes. Of perfume and sweat and incense. The sights, songs, tattoos and breath of a human macrocosm.  A living city."

And she ends this post with a statement about writing a blog:

"I am trying to take bigger risks with my writing. Like using the word, urbanity, in a completely incorrect way, but a way that appealed to me. I sometimes imagine that I am a painter, playing with different brushes and paints and strokes and methods. So each blog is a practice painting in which I try some new or weird application. Then when it's done, I stack it on top of the others in the closet and wait until next time. When I will play with my paints and brushes again.  I also realized that if I was going to write, then I had to write about what interests me, and not try to write about what I think might interest someone else. Which reminds me of one of the things you quoted in your blog about no story so mundane that it can't be made interesting, and no story so interesting that it can't be made mundane. Very wise, and very true."

I hope you'll visit Karen's blog.  I think you'll feel like you're there with her on these pages!

Today is Marcus Day

Last night Barbel called and asked specifically about my 8-year-old grandson, the one with the long eyelashes and the blue eyes.  "Does he still look like an angel?" she asked.

He does.

Day had written an e-mail earlier in the day saying that Marcus is having a hard time in third grade--not because he's struggling academically, but because some of the kids in his class don't "get him."  For one thing, he loves to dance.  He's creative and sensitive;  he feels sad when his friends tease him about dancing.  He loves to play video games, and he loves stuffed animals. Day wanted me to encourage him to take dance classes, so I called him today to do that.  "Can we talk every Friday?" he wanted to know.

When anyone I love is in trouble--even if it's brought about by a bunch of mean third graders who laugh at differences--I think about that person all through the day.  I try to figure out what kind of gift would deliver a tangible substitute for a hug.

Since he was very small, Marcus has loved jewelry and cool hats.  When we go to crafts shows and flea markets, you can always find Marcus looking at rings and hats.  And so today, I went to Kathleen Sommers and bought Marcus a "worry ring" made by an artist whose work they were showcasing.  Since he's worrying, I suggested that turning the outer rings might help him relax--but I preferred to call it a love ring, so that when he turns the rings, he'll remember all the people who love him exactly as he is.

I told him on the phone I was sending him a little present and that I hoped he'd like it. He said, "I know I will; you always pick the awesomest stuff."

I decided to proclaim today Marcus Day--even though his birthday is months away--and I found it was much more fun than the rushing-around last minute shopping that precedes birthdays and Christmas. Since I was the only customer at Kathleen's on this cold, cold day, I told the three women helping me choose a boy ring about Marcus' hard time in third grade.  Every one of them had a story about herself or her child being made fun of by classmates at that same age, one (also eight this year) for wearing clothes that were too "artsy."

"I might not see you for two years," Marcus said.  "Cause we're going to Cape Cod this summer and  to the Grand Canyon next.  But when you see me, you're going to notice how much I've advanced with my dancing."

"How about I come see you when you're in Cape Cod, or before?" I asked.  "Because you know I'm not going to wait two years to see you!"

"That would be totally awesome!" he said.

At this moment, I can't think of anything that would be more totally awesome than sitting on a  Cape Cod beach watching Marcus dancing in the sand.

A Pillow Book

I'm reading a book by Philip Lopate called To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction.

He begins his chapter on the importance of keeping writing notebooks:

"The tenth-century Japanese court lady Sei Shonagon kept a writer's notebook in which she recorded a miscellaneous catchall of things, charming and annoying, rhapsodic descriptions of nature, odd facts, and malicious observations of her countrymen.  She claimed to be chagrined when it was discovered and read, though a part of her must at least subconsciously have had readers in mind all along.  Now considered an indispensable classic, Shonagon's Pillow Book was also, in a sense, the ancestor of the modern blog."

Imagine--these writings are now over ten thousand years old and college students and others still enjoy reading her musings about her life.

What was she reading?  What was it like being a court lady?  What were her private "malicious" observations about her countrymen?  I've just ordered a copy--I'll let you know more when it arrives.

Luminaries in the Night

After being up an hour or so in the middle of the night, I went back to sleep around six to have the most fun dream I ever remember having!

It was a huge party, huge--and it all started when Gerlinde and her husband (unbeknownst to me being musicians) set it all up and thousands of people came to listen to them singing.  All of you were there; everyone I know was there.  Everyone was dressed up and happy, and we were all about twenty years younger than we actually are.

Lloyd and Carlene were there, dancing!  That was definitely the highlight of the dream, and I didn't want to wake up from it.

My Ex was there, too--young and animated and sweet, not exactly like I remember him in real life.  We were sitting at the table with Bill Clinton, who apparently was our good friend.  We called him "Bill."

Gary was there--his wonderful alive self--and we laughed that his cancer diagnosis had been a mistake.  He was swinging in a hammock, happy as always.

At some point, I lost my camera.  I got on a bus to look for it, and the bus started rolling, taking me to a place where everyone was speaking Russian.  They were dressed in the kinds of traditional clothes that "Russian dolls" wore--which was probably linked to my just having ordered a book for Elena about Russian nesting dolls.

I had to ask some blonde English-speaking Russian manicurist if she could loan me money to get back to the party--and promised I'd return her two dollars the next day.  She willingly loaned me the money.

I may have to book a flight to Sochi now, in real life, to pay her back and get back home!

Pillow Book

This blog has turned so random it's a wonder anybody reads it!

A book is more of an artifact, subject to success and failure, praise and rejection. A book to those of us who are literary types, a book printed on paper that sits beside our bed and can be returned to again and again, is the best thing of all.  To write a book seems the highest of goals for a writer.

A blog, on the other hand (which I never thought I'd like writing so much as I do!) is something like a pillow book.  More on that later.

This one has recipes and poems and rants--along with some book and movie opinions from an amateur reviewer, me.  But if you look at the origin of the word, amateur, you'll see that it means "to love to do." I'm happily an amateur book reviewer and photographer and traveler.

The joy of doing this thing is that it keeps me looking at things and recording my observations--and at the end of the year, it's my diary of the year, the ups and downs, the friendships, the surprises, and the connections with people in my orbit.  To love to look at things: I heard someone once describe herself as a "scopophile"--a lover of looking. That's us, those of us who read and take pictures and write.

And it's a connection with the people who read it and write emails in response--that are often more interesting than the posts to which they are responding!

I love books on paper.  I love underlining and writing in them, the feel of a pen settling in to someone else's pages and conversing with the author.  I love returning to books-on-paper after a long absence like friends. But this blog is its own quirky thing.  I love all of you who are reading along and sometimes sending emails saying so.

My dear friend Joy--a much-published children's book illustrator and creator of the ornament posted on an earlier post, "Traveling Solo," sent me some pictures of her wonderful, fanciful clay people yesterday.  What she said about the "satisfaction of finishing something in one day" applies to blogging.  A book takes many drafts to complete, a cover design and title to decide on, and the awareness that reviewers on Amazon will blast it or praise it.   On a blog, like the pillow book I'll write about later, you get wander all over the map and have the satisfaction of arriving someplace in a single day.

A Poem By Ellen Bass for Valentine's month

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching–
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after–if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Traveling all over the world from my red bed

I am about to take a journey all over the world--through the essays in a book Linda Kot recently sent to me: The Best Travel Writing 2013, edited and selected by Liz Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame.

So far, I've only read the introduction, and already it's good.

She makes an interesting point: we don't read travel writing so we'll think, "I wish I could go there;" we read travel writing to feel that we have been there.

Her opening lines:

Here are two facts I learned long ago about travel writing:

1.  There is no story in the world so marvelous that it cannot be told boringly.
2.  There is no story in the world so boring that it cannot be told marvelously. 

As in all writing, the work of the writer is what makes an essay great--not the subject matter itself. 

The travel stories I have selected for this anthology are the ones I believe were told the most marvelously...told with the greatest sense of marvel by writers who took the most personal responsibility for infusing a wonderment into their tales. Some of these stories find their authors flinging themselves into mad acts of danger and some do not, but every piece contains awe in strong enough doses to render the reader enchanted, delighted, compelled, or forever unsettled.

"Enchanted, delighted, compelled, or forever unsettled"--what a challenge for writers of all genres, right?

A cold Wednesday night in San Antonio

Okay, I'm done whining!

The day turned out to be a good day, in spite of the traffic ticket.  Kate and Sandy perked me right up, then Jan brought pizza for dinner!

Pity Party is officially over, and Elena is coming over tomorrow.  She called to remind me she wants to ride in my car--and I know she hopes to ride the train, but it's supposed to get down to 29 tonight.  We may do the children's museum instead.

What would we do without friends, friends who bring food and rescue us from ourselves, even when we don't send out a smoke signal that we need them?

A tap on the window

Have you ever woken up in the morning feeling like your head is going to explode, for no reason?

This morning, I woke up feeling like if anybody spoke to me I'd bite their head off. I'd had a great day yesterday and there was nothing wrong, just a minor twinge in my driving leg.  I went to the chiropractor; I went to Honda to talk about returning the seven-year warranty I shouldn't have bought; nobody in the realm of business was returning my calls.  The man at the Honda shop tried talking me into keeping the warranty, the way they do, speculating that if the AC went out, the cost of repair would be $2100!

"Is it going to go out?" I asked, foolishly.
"Well, you never know," he said, wisely.  But he knew what he was doing: planting that seed of fear.  I left not knowing whether to keep the warranty or sell it back.

So driving home, I stopped at Target to get a $7 toaster so I could make toast with my gluten-free bread, and then Kate and Sandy called and said, "Let's meet at Beto's" and I said "Okay, but first I have to run back to my house for a minute."

Run must have been the operative word.  Next thing I knew lights were flashing behind me on McCollough and I got a speeding ticket.  Bummer!  Rushing around trying to save money,  I got a ticket for going 50 in a 35 zone.

"Never mind," I texted Sandy and Kate.  "I'm not leaving my house again."  My intention was to sleep off my bad mood, not inflict it on my friends.

So I turned off the phone to take a nap and was snoozing when Sandy tapped on my bedroom window.  "Get up! You've slept long enough!" they said--and came and piled in the bed with me.

We made tea and ate Think Thin bars and now I'm feeling that whatever it was in my buzzing head has gone away.  Sometimes it takes good friends in what Kate calls "the shit-free zone"--friends who ignore your napping sign--to tap on your window and wake you up!

A Different Word Every Day

After reading my post about each person having "a word," I got this response from Betty, my Seed Pea:

"What's my word?  I'm giving that thought.  One I associate with you is truth.  That seems to be a deeply held value.  Like a greedy child, I don't want to be limited to one.  Maybe I could assign a word to each day.  It's a fascinating thought to ponder.  At this specific moment, it would be sleepy.  I'm ready for a nap."

I think Betty is remembering the Truth Sessions we used to have when we were girls.  We'd sit around in a circle and tell each other the "truth" and promise we wouldn't cry or have our feelings hurt.  After all, our friends were telling us all our faults "for our own good."  Funny, I can't remember the injurious truths I told, only the ones I received: I was flat-chested and I wore my socks wrong side out.

Now, no longer flat-chested and having learned to wear my socks properly, those comments don't apply--nor do they sting anymore, but at the time, they were awful things to hear, back when we were  all trying to be perfect, or live up to some standard of perfection that we made up as we went along.

The Truth is we do get to have a different word every day if we want to!  At this particular moment on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, my word is now what Betty's was yesterday: sleepy!  What a gorgeous day in South Texas.  Bonnie and I just returned from a very nice lunch at the Bear Moon and a walkabout in Boerne.

Recipe for Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients
4 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for currants
4 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 3/4 cups cold buttermilk, shaken
1 extra-large egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
1 cup dried currants
Directions
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add the butter and mix on low speed until the butter is mixed into the flour.

With a fork, lightly beat the buttermilk, egg, and orange zest together in a measuring cup. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture. Combine the currants with 1 tablespoon of flour and mix into the dough. It will be very wet.

Dump the dough onto a well-floured board and knead it a few times into a round loaf. Place the loaf on the prepared sheet pan and lightly cut an X into the top of the bread with a serrated knife. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. When you tap the loaf, it will have a hollow sound.

Cool on a baking rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Irish Soda Bread

My Monday night writing group meets tonight.  I'm going to read this excerpt from Alice McDermott's novel and talk about the way the narrator goes in for close-ups of her characters.  She could have said, "I was never interested in cooking, though my mother tried to teach me."  But no.  She takes you into the kitchen where her mother wears an apron with rickrack, and you know it had to be the forties or fifties.  She lets you eavesdrop on the conversation.  Maybe she makes you remember when you learned to cook something.

I'm off now to buy buttermilk and caraway seeds.  I'm going to try my hand at making some Irish soda bread for tonight's group. 

From Someone:  

My mother called me into the kitchen….

“It’s time,” my mother said, “that you learned a few things.”

On the narrow corrugated tin of the drain board beside the sink, there was the flour bin and a bottle of buttermilk, the pale box of baking soda, a box of raisins, a box of salt, and a tin of caraway seeds. On the small table beneath the window, a bowl and a spoon and a measuring cup. There was as well a narrow card on which she had written in her careful hand the recipe for soda bread.

It was time, my mother said, that I learned a few things about cooking. 

I stood in the kitchen doorway, all reluctance. Why? I wanted to ask.

My mother tied an apron around my waist. “All right,” she said. She nodded toward the table, the bowl and the spoon and the recipe card.  I looked at her. The morning sunlight from the single window lit the down on her cheeks. It showed her brown eyes had some green in them, too. And that on either side of her tall forehead her dark hair was turning gray.

“Go ahead,” my  mother said.  “Get started. And when she saw me hesitate, she impatiently put her hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the table and the bowl and the spoon. “Read the recipe over and then gather your ingredients,” she said slowly.  “They’re all right here.  I’ll supervise.”

I looked at my mother in her housedress  and her apron trimmed with green rickrack, her wide soft breasts and her pillowed belly and her strong, firm hands. A body, a physical presence, more familiar to me in those days than my own, since my own was something I had only begun to consider.

“Don’t be dense, Marie,” my mother said. “Don’t stand there gawking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. Go.”  And another touch on the shoulder. “Read the recipe over once and gather your ingredients.  It isn’t hard.  It’s high time you learned.”

Why? was what I wanted to say, but I was certain without conscious thought that the question would get me into trouble. I turned reluctantly to the table, my feet feeling heavy in my shoes. I picked up the card.  It was my mother’s routine to make her soda bread on a Saturday morning while I went out to join my friends.  It had always been so. 

“Read it over,” my mother said. And I nodded, pretending to. The sun through the single window was bright in my eyes. “Now gather what you need.”

I picked up the flour bin and brought it to the table. I picked up the buttermilk and the raisins. I went back for the salt and the tin of caraway seeds and then stood before the bowl and the spoon and the measuring cup. Beyond the window, beyond the gray bars of the fire escape, the wash my mother had done this morning was waving on the line: sheets and pillow slips, my school blouses and my father’s shirts, which were hung upside down by their hems, their arms waving in a way that made me grow dizzy in sympathy.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” my mother said behind me.  I looked at the ingredients I had lined up on the small table. The sun had turned the buttermilk a kind of blue. “No,” I said.

My mother took me by the shoulders and turned me around. “Are you sleepwalking?” she said. “There’s the baking soda.   You’ll have nothing at all if you don’t have that.”

I fetched the box of baking soda and then once more stood before the table. “Now what?” my mother asked.

I shrugged.  Beyond the waving clothesline were the windows and fire escapes of our neighbors, the dancing laundry of a dozen more families, the tall brown poles that held the lines, electric lines and clotheslines.

“Glory be to God,” my mother said. “Now you read the recipe, Marie.”

I looked down at the little card. The ink my mother had used was brown. Her handwriting was lovely and neat, the capital S and the capital B at the top of the card were striking,  My mother had learned from Irish nuns. “Marie?” my mother said.

The sound of her voice was more familiar to me than my own; I knew the end of my mother’s patience when I heard it. 

“You tell me,” I said softly.  “You tell me what to do.”

Behind me I heard my mother cross her arms over her rickrack apron….