God, how I love hanging laundry outside in the Adirondacks, with the mountains framing the view of golden meadows, green trees, blue sky and rolling river. Tonight it may freeze and maple sap may run, but right now is balmy, sunny bliss. After hanging laundry the chuckling frogs out back seem to beckon me. I summon the dog and we set out along the thorny edge of the field toward the wetland at the back of our property.
Spring at our place means the AuSable River roaring out front, the low parts of the meadow flooded out back. The reeds and grasses are still dead and dry from winter and they shush against my denim legs as I stride eastward. When I reach the water’s edge I sit on a hummock and listen to the frogs croak and cluck, thriving in their rich ecosystem. I can’t see any froggies, just the placid swollen water and its world of grasses submerged in sapphire light. Just a few weeks ago this was all frozen, flat and white. We walked along, admiring the stillness and the hardy shrubs. Now it is a maze of tussocks, spiky plants and ripples as invisible things touch the surface of the water. I glance upstream, into the sun, as my dog huffs and chuffs in the grasses behind me. There is a small thing floating in the water, a shape like this: So small and yet it gives the glassy surface movement. It drifts ever so slowly toward me, and I realize that it is a frog. Then I see others in the distance, aligned toward me, it seems, but of course they are facing the precious sun.
I think of my family: my beloved, taking a nap in the house. My sister and her husband and children, enjoying their own southern, earlier springtime in the country. My brother and wife and their soon-to-be firstborn, cozy in a suburban townhouse even farther south. My mother, whose lifetime of springs is now ended. In heaven are there flooded creeks and chirruping frogs?
I yearn to see a frog up close in the water and so steel myself for an icy cold immersion. I am clumsy and squeamish in the way that city-bred folks can be, but I have a stout heart and a yen for adventure. In I wade, and find the water velvety cool. My skin is protected from mud and ticklish mysteries by thick socks, jeans and sneakers. I laugh for joy: spring! Some day soon my beloved’s and my children will wade in this very swamp, will know it far more intimately that I in this still, sweet afternoon.
The floating frogs vanish when I approached. I am aware of not only my body but also my cold shadow, the ripples my steps cause as I walk deeper, and the cluttered sounds of my playing dog. Across the meadow floats the sound of chickens calling to each other and my neighbors’ children playing tag.
My beloved and I hope to adopt a baby soon. Most everyone asks if we’re going overseas. No, we say, there are enough kids in this country needing families—and there are, but few newborns, and that’s what I want: an infant to start with. I want to wander my land with my own child and discover life again.
I grieve that I will never be able to share this and so many other joys with my Mom. She had been so brutally ill for years that I yearned for her passing even while I knew that it would cause a sadness unrivalled in me since my Dad died. That was when I was 20, Mom 45 and Dad 54. Dad was out for a mid-summer bike ride and a drunk driver ran him down. With Dad there was no time for last words. I think I progressed very far in granting Mom the forgiveness any child owes its parent. I hope she forgave me as much as she could.
When my Dad died I experienced the typical stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, with shock being the pungent soup in which everything swam. The flavor of my mother’s death is relief. During the last 17 years, she was suffering and dying. Last year when she gave up living independently I helped my sister and brother pack up her house, where we had grown up. I chose to pack up her bedroom. She was nearly bed-ridden and as the range of her physical body shrank she drew close to her all her most precious totems: journals she wrote after Dad died, Bibles of various translations embroidered with her hand-written annotations, animal bones, seed pods, art and needlework of a size and heft she could hold in her frail, curled hand. Now I, who lived farthest away, decided what intimate things she would keep with her in her new room at my sister’s house.
I wanted to retrieve a pink jade necklace that I had given Mom right after I graduated from college. She had long since ceased wearing jewelry. She had rarely if ever worn this necklace and instead had draped it upon a small Henry-Mooreish-ish sculpture on her bureau, like a lei on a Buddha. As time passed and I moved farther into my adulthood, Mom acquired other necklaces and layered them on top of the pink one, decorated the treasures with doodads and trinkets, until the thing was a mound of glistening snaky intrigue. Now I took that assemblage apart and reclaimed my old necklace, then examined the handsfuls of strung beads and gewgaws that my mother had gathered together. I took what I wanted and left the rest for others to discover.
In her top dresser drawer I found an envelope addressed in her hand to me. Business-sized, white, plain, with printed info and my Mom’s handwriting when it was vigorous. I looked inside and recoiled from it. I never chose to discuss that envelope with Mom in the year that remained to her. I guess the subject remained in the taboo area like so many things we couldn’t talk about: Race, specifically African American. Anyone of whom she had a bad opinion and no respect. She forgot things. She said one thing and did another.
I understand it is important to forgive and say all that needs saying, so nothing is left undone or unsaid when the person finally passes away. I tried very hard to forgive her and said the words out loud to her many times. She many times replied that she forgave me, too. There was a time years ago when I churlishly thought, “What has she to forgive me for?” But that was before I began to understand how strongly she felt about the abortion I chose to have when I was twenty.
Safe in the north woods I see a frog, one who has seemingly decided to let me approach. Maybe it is a sentry or sacrifice. Or maybe it is a female wanting fertilization, as our chickens will squat submissively before us thinking we’re her rooster. I stop and rest my hand on my damp thighs. Delicate little grey thing, with golden eyes above the waterline. The frog could easily sit in a teaspoon. I coo to it, praise its little beauty. I am awed by its sturdiness and delicacy there in the water, this creature of season. No matter the snow and ice of the last month or the parched whistle of summer to come—this frog floats in a perfect hour.
Out in the swollen wetland I lean closer ever-so-slowly until I can reach out a trembling pale finger and touch its tiny webbed foot. The frog lets me stroke it, and I gently tug the underwater grass it clutches so its body angles to me. With one outstretched fingertip I stroke the tiny frog’s silky green-mottled skin. The frog darts away, legs scissoring into complete concealment inside the submerged grass thicket.
Farther downstream more frogs are making a racket, clucking and splashing. I don’t hear the frogs we call spring peepers; perhaps they are for nighttime only. I wade easily through the slow stream toward dozens of frogs on the surface, bobbing and skimming. The dog canters alongside on the dry field edge. Ahead at a wide bend in the placid water one small clutch of frogs is thrashing and splashing. I near them cautiously, as bodies, shadow and ripples send little beasts into camouflage. The knot of struggling frogs stays flopping in the same spot on the pond surface. They must be mating and I must see! But the tangle of rubbery legs and jaws sinks and flits away before I can get close enough to decipher their activity.
Much of my mom’s last year was spent at various medical facilities. The rest of the time she lived at my sister and brother-in-law’s home in a rural mid-Atlantic town. My sister and her large young family were well intentioned but had no idea what a demand that caring for such an ill person would be on their time. The new situation was an appalling culture shock to my mother, who was used to being Queen Bee of her dim, brocaded urban bungalow and its dusty silences. They did the best they could, but it was not easy for anyone. Mom even spent a few days in a municipal nursing home. I tracked her down there by phone maybe six weeks ago. She was hard to reach—it takes persistence in those places, and politeness and a respect for the busy routine of nursing home staff. After three or so calls a staffer said, “Here she is,” and put the phone to Mom’s ear.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Martha,” I said in a cheery, warm voice as usual.
“Uh-huh!” she said faintly.
Mom was usually so articulate and keenly verbal.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Martha. Are you ok?”
“Uh-huh, unh-unh.”
“Are you ok, Mom?”
“Unh-unh.”
“Can you ask for help, Mom? Do you need my help?”
“Uh-uh, uh-uh!”
“Do you need me to help you get help?”
“Uh-huh! Uh-huh!”
I promised to stay on the phone with her and took my cell phone in hand, hoping for service in the remote Adirondack hamlet where I live. Glory be, yes.
“Mom, I’m going to call the nurse’s station now and I’ll stay on the phone with you until you get help. I love you.”
“Uh-huh.” I could sense relief from her, and relaxation as she rested from her exhausting effort to communicate. She had been out of it before but never this badly. At least she was in a wheelchair right at the station, rather than in her room, where her condition might have gone unobserved. On the cell phone I told the receptionist and then nursing station staff, “my mother is having a stroke or something right there in front of you and she can’t get your attention. I’m on the phone with her on the other line. Please help.” Finally someone spoke to me and her voice changed from my left to my right ear. The nurse hung up and I called back to confirm, and knew all was well. Later my sister asked if I thought our mother might have been faking it. In fact, I believed Mom but I wouldn’t have put it past her to induce feeling that badly so she could go back to the familiar and safe hospital and its 24-hour a day care and not so many people of a certain lesser class.
Complicated person, my mother. Her death has not brought any clarity to my spouse’s and my adoption process, the certification perhaps here-ever-after stalled pending a fire safety inspection of our 170-year-old farmhouse and its twenty-first century woodstove. Another procrastination, that envelope from Mom’s bureau with its official seal, my mother’s curly handwriting and a scribbled splotch of yellow highlighter.
Later in the days of packing Mom’s personal things I found a card in her Rolodex with the same odd yellow highlighter splotch, although this time the neon and ballpoint drawing of a smiling face were clearly the work of a small child. The address was to a memorial plot in the heartland where she bought a remembrance for my unborn child. Maybe if I could have children now she would have let this slide, or if we had adopted before she died.
It was my decision and I regret it only minimally. My life would have been so much different. I chose a life I could foresee happily, without a child at twenty. Now I am approaching 40, want a child so badly and cannot now have one of my own because my body won’t allow it. I cannot say what would have been had I chosen differently.
Thigh deep in meltwater I feel no sadness at the painful past and unknown future, only wonder and joy in the present. The chattering frogs have given me all the forgiveness I need at this moment. In the net of sunken reeds are cloudy blue blooms—frogs’ eggs in giant clusters like dotted thunderheads in the stream, hanging of the edges of submerged reeds like underwater hydrangeas. I gaze in delight at this final show, which I never would have seen if I hadn’t risked venturing out into the flooded channel. Each egg cluster is the size of a grapefruit, pale grey-blue, made up of thousands of black seeds embedded in flowerheads of clear shining protective globules, the black nuclei of which become visible when I gently lift their stalks to the surface. Here are the frogs’ progeny, unguarded and incubating in the sun-warmed water.
My own children are somewhere now, too, eggs and sperm in two people, and we live our lives until the moment we join and become a family. Living up here on our wee farm in the wilderness soothes a torn soul like mine. I have prayed and sworn to forgive my mother, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough to earn her forgiveness. I have hidden her envelope from myself, but I can see it—pale rectangular wing on the tablecloth near a basket of brown eggs.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Thursday, December 22, 2005
plumbing
Last night after John washed Cruiser in the bathtub upstairs, our kitchen ceiling started dripping (under the bathtub, naturally.) We’ve had that tub worked on before, so we figured maybe the plumber would guarantee his work and it won’t cost so much this time. John drilled a few holes in the ceiling to let the water out and eventually it stopped. “Don’t use the tub,” he commanded. Duh. Then this morning—AFTER John went to work—I was using the upstairs sink and heard a growling noise, and then when I went down to the kitchen for coffee, lo and behold there is a full on shower happening in the kitchen. I called the plumber who was out of course, I called our excellent neighbors who came right over and spent an hour helping me arrange garbage cans and towels and figuring out where to shut off which water. Jeez Louise. Now the ceiling is sagging, the drywall is like pudding and who knows what John will find when he gets home from work. I left for work when the water finally slowed to a drip. #&@*%! At least Cruiser is clean. Merry Christmas! Last year you may remember that the day before Christmas Eve our septic system backed up. Strange sort of karmic gift this house gives us. I am starting to have a regular feeling that I wish we had a newly-built house. I don’t want to move because I love our neighbors and community, but the house, as gorgeous as it is...we don’t earn enough money to keep that house in the style to which it is accustomed!
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Death Lessons
Two years ago my beloved and I and our cats moved to the North Country from a big city so we could live simply and learn how to raise some of our own food. We bought an ancient farm and have been slowly reviving it, with a lusty garden in our first year and “chigs and pickens” in this, our second year of country life. We plan to fence in our modest acreage and raise beef cattle next year.
I work at a farm-school and so receive lots of thoughtful guidance about what to do as we start our small farm. Plus we get helpful commentary from neighbors: the lady selling fire department raffle tickets at the hardware store, the man on a bicycle who stops at our flat section of Route 9N to fix a tire. The books our town librarian checks out for us give her plenty of knowledge about this couple of newcomers: “Raising Poultry for Food” and “Everything You Need To Know About Pigs” and “Build It Yourself”.
Today we slaughtered our first chickens. They were genetically selected for meat production, with enormous breasts and chunky wings and thighs, and soft white feathers easily plucked, supported on sturdy ungraceful yellow legs. They waddled like heavy toddlers. The birds spent their days outdoors in spring and summer weather, slept in a hand-made coop, enjoyed limitless corn and bug-snatching and playing in the grass during their brief lives. We wanted them to live well, be happy and have painless deaths before we ate them.
My husband laid each uncomplaining chicken’s slender white neck on the smooth cut surface of a log and beheaded it in one clean stroke of a sharp axe. Immediately pressing the neckstump against the grass to absorb the briefly pumping blood, he held the heavy jerking body as the last electrical impulses of life churned through it—no undignified running around with heads cut off. When each warm feathered body was motionless, my husband took the animal by its legs and dunked it in a vat of steaming water to loosen the feathers. The work of plucking, gutting, cleaning and packing the meat went quickly. I wrinkled my nose at the stink of hot wet feathers, murmured thanks to the birds who were next to die, snoozing inside cat carriers under a blanket in the back of our truck.
The heritage breed egg-laying birds who remain in our hen yard are maturing into soft, multicolored, clucking creatures. When they are “spent”, as my farming friend calls it, we will kill them, too, and take meat from their bodies. Soon we will butcher our pigs, playful buddies full of life who come running when I approach, who sink to their knees in grunting ecstasy when I scratch their flanks and who gleefully recycle all our food waste.
This afternoon my dear cat died and I miss her very much. She lived by the sword, a vigorous killer of birds, mice and moles, full of zest for climbing trees and love for her human companions. We knew that by letting her run free outside we were exposing her to risks like cars and coyotes, but we chose to accept those risks in order to give her the fierce pleasures of country life. She was happy until the instant she ceased to exist. My husband dug a deep hole in the center of our garden and, sobbing, I laid my cat to rest next to her favorite toy, a coyote foot discarded from the taxidermist. Why today was her day to die I cannot say. I think of the white chickens to whom I murmured thanks for their lives this morning, and the purring cat into whose warm black fur I murmured sweet nothings every day I knew her, and I feel grief and ambivalence and a sense of mystery.
Here in the North Country I am learning about death, life and love.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Mother's Day
Fifteen minutes ago, thigh deep in meltwater, I felt a kinship with frogs. I’d spent a couple hours at my friend Lauren’s house with her family celebrating Owen’s third birthday. Sunshine, mountain vistas, early spring earth unbound. As always the topic of my spouse and our adoption process came up, and I felt wonder at the sunlit children in Lauren’s kitchen, the small sugary hands and faces absorbing candy after the piñata broke in the field. When I talk about adoption with folks, most everyone asks if we’re going overseas. No, we say, there are enough kids in this country needing families—and there are, but few newborns, and that’s what I want: an infant. I can’t have a baby of my own and I want to have that experience. Then in the future maybe we could adopt a sibling group, older kid with their baggage; but for now, an infant. We’ve been going through the home study process for about nine months now, and hope to be certified by this summer. Then, we’ll see how it goes. I have faith that all will work out somehow.
I left Lauren’s before the birthday cupcakes were served because I wanted a little time in the warm sun on my small front porch. This is the first afternoon warm enough for sitting outside. Each time I sit and read or write I know my days doing this are numbered. As a new mom I won’t be able to relax and read a novel for hours, or obsess over a poem while consuming a cocktail. I know this all will change and so I appreciate it consciously. Lauren’s husband brought out the cupcakes so I could bring a couple home for my spouse and me. The children had selected five colors of icing for the chocolate cupcakes: red, orange, yellow, green, purple. The cupcakes were arranged on a tray with their colors forming diagonal stripes.
I came home and hung up some laundry outside, another first-time-this-year seasonal pleasure. Tonight it may freeze and the maple sap may run, but right now is balmy, sunny bliss. After hanging laundry I intended to come sit on the porch to write this essay about Mothers’ Day, but the chuckling frogs out back seemed to beckon me. I summoned the dog and we set out along the thorny edge of the field toward the wetland at the back of our property.
My beloved and I bought this large old farmstead two years ago knowing that I would never be able to get pregnant and knowing that we planned to fill the place with our children and family. My sister—who is also my best friend—has four kids and lives in a happy mayhem in rural PA with her husband and our mother, who is too sick to live alone any more. Our family will be different than theirs in some ways—we love books and don’t watch TV, while they hunt and have three TVs. If only Pennsylvania and the Adirondacks were connected by a short street. We would create our own town of love.
Spring at our place means the AuSable River roaring out front, the low parts of the meadow flooded out back. The grass is still dead and dry from winter and it shushed as I strode eastward toward the wet area. I sat on a hummock at the water’s edge and listened to the frogs croaking, clucking, thriving. I couldn’t see any. Just the placid water and its world of grasses submerged. Just a few weeks ago this was all frozen, flat and white. We walked along, admiring the stillness and the hardy shrubs. Now it is a maze of tussocks, spiky plants and ripples as invisible things touch the surface of the water. I glanced upstream, into the sun, as my dog huffed and chuffed in the grasses behind me. There was a small thing floating in the water, a shape like this: So small and yet it gave the glassy surface movement. It drifted ever so slowly toward me, and I realized that it was a frog. Then I could see others in the distance, aligned toward me, it seemed, but of course they were facing the precious sun.
I yearned to see a frog up close in the water and so steeled myself for icy cold. I am clumsy and squeamish in the way that city-bred folks can be, but I have a stout heart and a yen for adventure. In I waded, and found the water velvety cool. My skin was protected from mud and ticklish mysteries by thick socks, jeans and sneakers. I laughed for joy: spring! My new home in the country! Some day soon my children will wade in this very swamp, will know it far more intimately that I in this still, sweet afternoon.
The floating frogs vanished when I approached. I was aware of not only my body but also my cold shadow, the ripples my steps caused as I walked deeper, and the cluttered sounds of my playing dog. He is a yellow lab and one would think he’d leap into water, but he’s fussy and not brave. He is also devoted to me, and as the psychic apron string that binds us stretched further he finally plunged in after me.
Soon I saw a frog, one who had seemingly decided to let me approach. Maybe it was a sentry or sacrifice. I stopped and rested my hand on my damp thighs so I could see it better. Delicate little grey thing, with golden eyes above the waterline. The frog could easily have sat in a teaspoon. I cooed to it, praised its little beauty. I was awed by its sturdiness and delicacy there in the water, this creature of season. No matter the snow and ice of the last month or the parched whistle of summer to come—this frog floated in a perfect hour.
I leaned closer ever-so-slowly until I could reach out a trembling pale finger and touch its tiny webbed foot. The frog let me stroke it, and I gently tugged the underwater grass it clutched so its body angled toward me. It was relaxed and aware of me. I stroked its silky skin. But then the frog darted away, legs scissoring into the submerged grass blades. It was gone.
Farther downstream more frogs were making a racket, clucking and splashing. I didn’t hear the frogs we call peepers; perhaps they are for nighttime only. Dozens of frogs on the surface, bobbing and skimming, and one small clutch of them thrashing and splashing. I approached cautiously—body, shadow and ripples sending little frogs into hiding. The knot of struggling frogs remained. I thought they must be mating and wanted to see. Perhaps they were, but the tangle of legs and jaws sank and flitted away before I could get close enough to decipher their activity.
The dog paddled in a long snuffly arc from the grassy bank to my soaked legs, touched his nose to my hand, and swam back to shore. He clambered out and floofed face-first into the dry grass, pushing his snout through the reeds and propelling himself by his hind legs. Drying himself off or scratching, I guess. I made for the bank, knowing that soon I would be too cold to enjoy myself. Behind me the cagey frogs began to cackle.
Then in the net of sunken reeds I saw cloudy blue blooms—frogs’ eggs in giant clusters like dotted thunderheads in the stream. I gazed in delight at this final show, which I never would have seen if I hadn’t ventured out into the flooded channel. Each egg cluster was the size of an orange, pale grey-blue, made up of thousands of black seeds embedded in clear shining protective globules that became visible when I gently lifted them to the surface. I had seen perhaps a hundred celebrating frogs, and here were their progeny, unguarded and incubating in the sun-warmed water.
My own children are somewhere now, too, eggs and sperm in two people, and I play gleefully while they live their lives until the moment we join and become a family.
I left Lauren’s before the birthday cupcakes were served because I wanted a little time in the warm sun on my small front porch. This is the first afternoon warm enough for sitting outside. Each time I sit and read or write I know my days doing this are numbered. As a new mom I won’t be able to relax and read a novel for hours, or obsess over a poem while consuming a cocktail. I know this all will change and so I appreciate it consciously. Lauren’s husband brought out the cupcakes so I could bring a couple home for my spouse and me. The children had selected five colors of icing for the chocolate cupcakes: red, orange, yellow, green, purple. The cupcakes were arranged on a tray with their colors forming diagonal stripes.
I came home and hung up some laundry outside, another first-time-this-year seasonal pleasure. Tonight it may freeze and the maple sap may run, but right now is balmy, sunny bliss. After hanging laundry I intended to come sit on the porch to write this essay about Mothers’ Day, but the chuckling frogs out back seemed to beckon me. I summoned the dog and we set out along the thorny edge of the field toward the wetland at the back of our property.
My beloved and I bought this large old farmstead two years ago knowing that I would never be able to get pregnant and knowing that we planned to fill the place with our children and family. My sister—who is also my best friend—has four kids and lives in a happy mayhem in rural PA with her husband and our mother, who is too sick to live alone any more. Our family will be different than theirs in some ways—we love books and don’t watch TV, while they hunt and have three TVs. If only Pennsylvania and the Adirondacks were connected by a short street. We would create our own town of love.
Spring at our place means the AuSable River roaring out front, the low parts of the meadow flooded out back. The grass is still dead and dry from winter and it shushed as I strode eastward toward the wet area. I sat on a hummock at the water’s edge and listened to the frogs croaking, clucking, thriving. I couldn’t see any. Just the placid water and its world of grasses submerged. Just a few weeks ago this was all frozen, flat and white. We walked along, admiring the stillness and the hardy shrubs. Now it is a maze of tussocks, spiky plants and ripples as invisible things touch the surface of the water. I glanced upstream, into the sun, as my dog huffed and chuffed in the grasses behind me. There was a small thing floating in the water, a shape like this: So small and yet it gave the glassy surface movement. It drifted ever so slowly toward me, and I realized that it was a frog. Then I could see others in the distance, aligned toward me, it seemed, but of course they were facing the precious sun.
I yearned to see a frog up close in the water and so steeled myself for icy cold. I am clumsy and squeamish in the way that city-bred folks can be, but I have a stout heart and a yen for adventure. In I waded, and found the water velvety cool. My skin was protected from mud and ticklish mysteries by thick socks, jeans and sneakers. I laughed for joy: spring! My new home in the country! Some day soon my children will wade in this very swamp, will know it far more intimately that I in this still, sweet afternoon.
The floating frogs vanished when I approached. I was aware of not only my body but also my cold shadow, the ripples my steps caused as I walked deeper, and the cluttered sounds of my playing dog. He is a yellow lab and one would think he’d leap into water, but he’s fussy and not brave. He is also devoted to me, and as the psychic apron string that binds us stretched further he finally plunged in after me.
Soon I saw a frog, one who had seemingly decided to let me approach. Maybe it was a sentry or sacrifice. I stopped and rested my hand on my damp thighs so I could see it better. Delicate little grey thing, with golden eyes above the waterline. The frog could easily have sat in a teaspoon. I cooed to it, praised its little beauty. I was awed by its sturdiness and delicacy there in the water, this creature of season. No matter the snow and ice of the last month or the parched whistle of summer to come—this frog floated in a perfect hour.
I leaned closer ever-so-slowly until I could reach out a trembling pale finger and touch its tiny webbed foot. The frog let me stroke it, and I gently tugged the underwater grass it clutched so its body angled toward me. It was relaxed and aware of me. I stroked its silky skin. But then the frog darted away, legs scissoring into the submerged grass blades. It was gone.
Farther downstream more frogs were making a racket, clucking and splashing. I didn’t hear the frogs we call peepers; perhaps they are for nighttime only. Dozens of frogs on the surface, bobbing and skimming, and one small clutch of them thrashing and splashing. I approached cautiously—body, shadow and ripples sending little frogs into hiding. The knot of struggling frogs remained. I thought they must be mating and wanted to see. Perhaps they were, but the tangle of legs and jaws sank and flitted away before I could get close enough to decipher their activity.
The dog paddled in a long snuffly arc from the grassy bank to my soaked legs, touched his nose to my hand, and swam back to shore. He clambered out and floofed face-first into the dry grass, pushing his snout through the reeds and propelling himself by his hind legs. Drying himself off or scratching, I guess. I made for the bank, knowing that soon I would be too cold to enjoy myself. Behind me the cagey frogs began to cackle.
Then in the net of sunken reeds I saw cloudy blue blooms—frogs’ eggs in giant clusters like dotted thunderheads in the stream. I gazed in delight at this final show, which I never would have seen if I hadn’t ventured out into the flooded channel. Each egg cluster was the size of an orange, pale grey-blue, made up of thousands of black seeds embedded in clear shining protective globules that became visible when I gently lifted them to the surface. I had seen perhaps a hundred celebrating frogs, and here were their progeny, unguarded and incubating in the sun-warmed water.
My own children are somewhere now, too, eggs and sperm in two people, and I play gleefully while they live their lives until the moment we join and become a family.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Iranian funk music
Google Search: "Iranian funk music"
Lately I have been finding new music to listen to by going to Google and typing in "countryname funk band." In this way I've found Ten Mile Tide, an Irish funk band, and Amp Fiddler, admired by a Japanese funk band. This morning I felt like listening to Iranian music, but Google gets no results from either that or "Iranian funk music," nor "Iranian funk."
Community Radio Licence Application Form
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Page 1. Community Radio Licence Application Form Page 2. Public Version 1.0 30th July 2004. - 2 - A. Please read the Notes of Guidance ...
The above is Google's one result from the search term, "Iranian funk." There used to be a pretty hip, Westernizing youth culture there, around the time of the last Shah and shortly thereafter. I was friends with a brother and sister who emigrated from post-Ayatollah Khomeini Iran to the U.S. They lived with us for a short time. The girl and I exchanged small gifts, and I still have hers today, a tiny cherished heirloom. With her brother we played endless games of volleyball. This we all knew, and through it came American English for them and a little Persian sensibility for me.
We lost touch as young adults. I gravely offended them the day of my father's funeral. The Iranian family assumed they were going to stay with us and help and have a joint grieving session, but instead I told them coldly to leave. I always feel pained that our relationship ended on such a note. My mother didn't want to see them, wasn't even in the same room. I was twenty. In my family's grief we briefly considered that the CIA might have had something to do with my father's death, punishment for helping Iranians or maybe he knew too much.
Living in today's world is so changed in many ways toward the visions of 1984 and Brave New World. We are getting increasingly Bladerunner-ish. So I will go back to the computer and type into Goggle "Persian funk." Since I use Mozilla Firefox for most of my web-related stuff, it has these handy tabs so I can open in succession webpages with the search term. In this way I find an album called "Invisible Borders," which I call up on my Dell Musicmatch Jukebox and listen to while I search for and find nearly no Iraqi funk music. And then I try Arabic funk. Bonanza! Try it yourself by searching for "COUNTRYNAME music." See what you find.
Lately I have been finding new music to listen to by going to Google and typing in "countryname funk band." In this way I've found Ten Mile Tide, an Irish funk band, and Amp Fiddler, admired by a Japanese funk band. This morning I felt like listening to Iranian music, but Google gets no results from either that or "Iranian funk music," nor "Iranian funk."
Community Radio Licence Application Form
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Page 1. Community Radio Licence Application Form Page 2. Public Version 1.0 30th July 2004. - 2 - A. Please read the Notes of Guidance ...
The above is Google's one result from the search term, "Iranian funk." There used to be a pretty hip, Westernizing youth culture there, around the time of the last Shah and shortly thereafter. I was friends with a brother and sister who emigrated from post-Ayatollah Khomeini Iran to the U.S. They lived with us for a short time. The girl and I exchanged small gifts, and I still have hers today, a tiny cherished heirloom. With her brother we played endless games of volleyball. This we all knew, and through it came American English for them and a little Persian sensibility for me.
We lost touch as young adults. I gravely offended them the day of my father's funeral. The Iranian family assumed they were going to stay with us and help and have a joint grieving session, but instead I told them coldly to leave. I always feel pained that our relationship ended on such a note. My mother didn't want to see them, wasn't even in the same room. I was twenty. In my family's grief we briefly considered that the CIA might have had something to do with my father's death, punishment for helping Iranians or maybe he knew too much.
Living in today's world is so changed in many ways toward the visions of 1984 and Brave New World. We are getting increasingly Bladerunner-ish. So I will go back to the computer and type into Goggle "Persian funk." Since I use Mozilla Firefox for most of my web-related stuff, it has these handy tabs so I can open in succession webpages with the search term. In this way I find an album called "Invisible Borders," which I call up on my Dell Musicmatch Jukebox and listen to while I search for and find nearly no Iraqi funk music. And then I try Arabic funk. Bonanza! Try it yourself by searching for "COUNTRYNAME music." See what you find.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Black Paper Silver Ink
Discovering that completing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days meant writing 1,666 words per day only added to the hair-tearing. It's not that I've never written 1,666 words in a day before, but it's a question of whether I can keep it up everyday for a whole month. However, since I'm in this already, I'll wing it. I believe I can write that much if I don't stop to consider how bad the dialogue sounds or how the story just plain doesn't make sense.
I am in writing mode.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
what did I tell you?
After a month of increasingly bad pain in my left wrist, I went to the doctor today. It is possible that I have a fractured wrist. The only things I can think of that would have caused this are my various hilarious bumps and crashes while enjoying a few hours of cross-country skiing during the past two months.
I kept telling folks that I couldn't try skiing because I was bound to break a bone.
I kept telling folks that I couldn't try skiing because I was bound to break a bone.
Monday, February 14, 2005
pizza on Valentine's Night
What kind of place is this where a drunken wife cannot get pizza on Valentine's Night? Deep sigh.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Baltimore Skies
The New York Times > National > Baltimore Streets Meaner, but Message Is Mixed
Yes, it is sad that Baltimore's crime rate is rising again. What really caught my eye about this article is the photo showing the orange night. I remember in the early 70s when the sodium lamps were installed, and the end of the old incandescent street lights on their small-scale decorative iron poles. The colored night skies of cities has always bothered me. I feel grateful and appreciative of the black and spangled skies here. The first starry sky I remember noting was my first week at Hampshire College in 1983. Long time ago.
My friend Susie has just pulled in. We're going to have a cocktail. Very young Johnny Cash on the stereo.
Yes, it is sad that Baltimore's crime rate is rising again. What really caught my eye about this article is the photo showing the orange night. I remember in the early 70s when the sodium lamps were installed, and the end of the old incandescent street lights on their small-scale decorative iron poles. The colored night skies of cities has always bothered me. I feel grateful and appreciative of the black and spangled skies here. The first starry sky I remember noting was my first week at Hampshire College in 1983. Long time ago.
My friend Susie has just pulled in. We're going to have a cocktail. Very young Johnny Cash on the stereo.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Saturday, February 05, 2005
John's first fire
Saturday, February 5, 2005
John’s firefighter uniform hangs dripping in the basement near the cat boxes. This morning was his first fire, a “fully-engaged structure fire.” The call came at about 6:45—we were awake instantly because it is unusual for the Upper Jay tones to sound. At first I thought the dispatcher said “awful fire,” but pragmatic John said it was “possible fire” and was probably a false alarm, being near Ward Lumber. But no, in moments a second call came through, the dispatcher seeming excited, saying, “Second call, structure fire confirmed, Upper Jay and Jay firefighters report immediately…” John got dressed and left, taking my cell phone with him because he needed to be in Lake Placid for his under-the-table refereeing job in a few hours, and would need me to come pick him up. I clattered around the house, waking up for real, groggy and excited, talking to myself and the dog, the cats. I wanted to go see the fire, wanted to be there when John needed to be picked up, wanted to go back to sleep, wanted him to be home all at once. I started the car to warm it up and got dressed, brewed coffee. During these twenty minutes the dispatcher called Wilmington, Au Sable Forks and Keene fire departments and the ambulance from Au Sable Forks. Big fire, serious danger. I told Cruiser I would be back, put boots and coat in the now-warm car and took off toward Jay. Cold morning, everything glittery and salt-soaked. Little snow depth but much snow coverage, the river still frozen and white. Clear sky. As I rounded the river bend near the Stones’ house, that halfway point where I have ridden my bike and then soaked my sweating head in the cold river, the sky over Jay began to come into view, with a slow pink-stained handkerchief of cloud or smoke over the hills.
I pressed on, cruising at 80. The fields and houses and river dwindled by and off to the right, far across the river I saw a plume of pale smoke above the trees. It rose in cloudy, tight billows until a certain layer of atmosphere, when it flattened out and streamed northward with the air currents. I knew that pale smoke meant steam—water applied; black smoke would be worse. I felt a pang for the family, hoped no one was hurt, wondered what John was doing. I drove into Jay, braking down to a reasonable 40 as the car rose up the gentle hill, passed familiar summertime landmarks—the Jay Green, the rapids of the Au Sable River underneath the one-lane bridge. I noted that the new covered bridge was completely clad in golden fresh wood. Once they have built their large truck-suitable bridge, nothing will replace the innocence of that covered crossing over the swimming holes. But I digress.
After Ward Lumber on the Glen Road I saw flashing lights, ominous and iconic. I wanted John. A tall, androgynous older woman flagged me to a stop at the corner and I explained I was a firefighter’s wife, he needed to be picked up for work. She told me to park between this and that red truck and not to exit my vehicle, ma’am. So, eager to please and cowed, I pulled in and sat, anxious, sipping my hazelnut decaf. Three men were conferring on the road ahead of me. One of them separated and came toward the car; amiably I rolled down the passenger side window. He leaned his forearms on the edge and we chatted. I assumed he was an official and explained my presence. He didn’t know John. Finally he said he wasn’t a fire department person, was just a neighbor watching. He recommended I go talk to that man in the gray jacket. So I did, once again explaining—wife, pick up, confused, where should I go? The man in gray said I should just walk on up to the fire. So I did, heart pounding, conscious of my posture, not wanting to be ejected nor to get in the way, nor to embarrass my husband.
The day was clear and cold, everything sort of faintly hazed by salt in the air or a thin tinge of smoke. There were no sirens, no noise. I turned off the paved road onto someone’s two-track driveway, longer than I had expected. Fat beige hoses wavered along the ruts, as thick as my thigh. A rivulet of water trickled away from the fire. I avoided both water and hoses, concentrated on keeping my balance on the frozen hump in the middle of the drive, my black Sorel boots a warm cushion.
There were fire trucks, utility vans, the enormous pick-up trucks that men here drive as a badge of membership in the North Country. Dozens of firefighters in their dirty yellowish uniforms, their classic hats and black stripes, somber faces. The smoke climbed like a fierce thing, huge and silent. I heard the crackling of the fire before I saw it. No voices, but the humming of motors left running, the spew of exhaust fumes a distraction in my peripheral vision. The crispy snow was flecked with black ash and tiny holes.
I moved forward cautiously, and was glad to be ignored. The firefighters were moving in teams, some with hoses, some with tools, some taking a rest near trucks, some standing in a distant, alert group like athletes in the box waiting for their turn on the field. My age-old fear of large machines lurched out and then sank again as I walked between rumbling fire trucks. Then voices and shouts and the fire, orange and reaching out from a broken window, reminding me oddly of an air conditioner. I stood for a while, my back against the grill of a fire engine, heart thumping, droplets of liquid tapping my face. Two girls whose faces I know from summertime wandered past me, looking at me as if I were an authority or an interloper, I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t smile—not a smiling occasion.
All I could see of the volunteers was their backs, uniformly drab and strong. I stepped forward to get a closer view and saw the sadness of the house, not a large house, just a home, enormous with flames and leaking wisps of smoke from shingles and siding. Striding from around the side came a set of firemen, with one in a distinctive black top—and the square-jawed face beneath the helmet was my own beloved, grim and serious and heroic.
John and the Upper Jay fire leader (Captain? Chief?) passed me unseeing, intent in discussion, planning their next move, I imagined. I feared I might lose sight of John again, and realized that probably he was too engrossed and this fire too big for him to leave to ref a hockey game. I wondered how I could be helpful. When he and his colleagues stopped walking and stood to watch the action, I crept up behind John and touched his sooty hot palm with my hand. He turned and looked down and was happy to see me. We loped off together toward the utility truck, and he gave me back my cell phone, asking me to find a way to contact his ref boss. I love John in a crisis, always cool-headed and looking ahead a few steps. He wears the black with reflective stripes because he is one of the “inside men,” those who are smaller (John says—in better shape, I say,) and have been trained to go inside the burning building to search for victims and survivors. He said that the family was fine, no one was in the building, but it was a terrible tragedy because they had just lost a child. I later learned that it was an adult child, but still.
This area is so sparsely populated that there is a network closer than six degrees between all of us. I made ten or so unsuccessful calls to directory assistance asking for the phone number for the Olympic Arena, then to Lake Placid friends to ask them to look—no one answered. Then I had the bright idea to call the LP fire house, because John had mentioned that his ref supervisor is also a fire fighter. The friendly man who answered knew what I was talking about and knew the person John needed to reach. He said he would find Butch, the ref boss, and offered to call me back and let me know. I felt infinitely soothed by this fatherliness, neighborliness, masculinity.
(I have learned so much since moving up here about accepting the archetypal masculine and feminine roles that my mother has talked about forever that I have objected to forever. Well, now I am here in a wild and rough place, where there isn’t much wiggle room for liberal ideas in a place where you could die any day from cold or bears or logs crushing you.)
After getting the message to John’s ref boss I knew I had no business at the scene, so I left as slinkily as I came, hoping no one would notice me. I drove home much more slowly, and stopped at the Upper Jay firehouse expecting the Ladies Auxiliary to be there making coffee and sandwiches, but there was no one there at all. I was conscious again of overcoming my objection to the idea of “Ladies Auxiliary,” because in that moment I knew exactly what the term meant and how important the function is for both hard-working fire-fighters and their anxious spouses, and for the traumatized, displaced families. John came home about four hours later, reeking of smoke, arm muscles pumped up, veins bulging. He took a quick shower and I cooked him a hero’s breakfast of five eggs and two diced hot dogs with pepper jack cheese, and then he was off to ref hockey for eight hours. He is a dynamo.
John’s firefighter uniform hangs dripping in the basement near the cat boxes. This morning was his first fire, a “fully-engaged structure fire.” The call came at about 6:45—we were awake instantly because it is unusual for the Upper Jay tones to sound. At first I thought the dispatcher said “awful fire,” but pragmatic John said it was “possible fire” and was probably a false alarm, being near Ward Lumber. But no, in moments a second call came through, the dispatcher seeming excited, saying, “Second call, structure fire confirmed, Upper Jay and Jay firefighters report immediately…” John got dressed and left, taking my cell phone with him because he needed to be in Lake Placid for his under-the-table refereeing job in a few hours, and would need me to come pick him up. I clattered around the house, waking up for real, groggy and excited, talking to myself and the dog, the cats. I wanted to go see the fire, wanted to be there when John needed to be picked up, wanted to go back to sleep, wanted him to be home all at once. I started the car to warm it up and got dressed, brewed coffee. During these twenty minutes the dispatcher called Wilmington, Au Sable Forks and Keene fire departments and the ambulance from Au Sable Forks. Big fire, serious danger. I told Cruiser I would be back, put boots and coat in the now-warm car and took off toward Jay. Cold morning, everything glittery and salt-soaked. Little snow depth but much snow coverage, the river still frozen and white. Clear sky. As I rounded the river bend near the Stones’ house, that halfway point where I have ridden my bike and then soaked my sweating head in the cold river, the sky over Jay began to come into view, with a slow pink-stained handkerchief of cloud or smoke over the hills.
I pressed on, cruising at 80. The fields and houses and river dwindled by and off to the right, far across the river I saw a plume of pale smoke above the trees. It rose in cloudy, tight billows until a certain layer of atmosphere, when it flattened out and streamed northward with the air currents. I knew that pale smoke meant steam—water applied; black smoke would be worse. I felt a pang for the family, hoped no one was hurt, wondered what John was doing. I drove into Jay, braking down to a reasonable 40 as the car rose up the gentle hill, passed familiar summertime landmarks—the Jay Green, the rapids of the Au Sable River underneath the one-lane bridge. I noted that the new covered bridge was completely clad in golden fresh wood. Once they have built their large truck-suitable bridge, nothing will replace the innocence of that covered crossing over the swimming holes. But I digress.
After Ward Lumber on the Glen Road I saw flashing lights, ominous and iconic. I wanted John. A tall, androgynous older woman flagged me to a stop at the corner and I explained I was a firefighter’s wife, he needed to be picked up for work. She told me to park between this and that red truck and not to exit my vehicle, ma’am. So, eager to please and cowed, I pulled in and sat, anxious, sipping my hazelnut decaf. Three men were conferring on the road ahead of me. One of them separated and came toward the car; amiably I rolled down the passenger side window. He leaned his forearms on the edge and we chatted. I assumed he was an official and explained my presence. He didn’t know John. Finally he said he wasn’t a fire department person, was just a neighbor watching. He recommended I go talk to that man in the gray jacket. So I did, once again explaining—wife, pick up, confused, where should I go? The man in gray said I should just walk on up to the fire. So I did, heart pounding, conscious of my posture, not wanting to be ejected nor to get in the way, nor to embarrass my husband.
The day was clear and cold, everything sort of faintly hazed by salt in the air or a thin tinge of smoke. There were no sirens, no noise. I turned off the paved road onto someone’s two-track driveway, longer than I had expected. Fat beige hoses wavered along the ruts, as thick as my thigh. A rivulet of water trickled away from the fire. I avoided both water and hoses, concentrated on keeping my balance on the frozen hump in the middle of the drive, my black Sorel boots a warm cushion.
There were fire trucks, utility vans, the enormous pick-up trucks that men here drive as a badge of membership in the North Country. Dozens of firefighters in their dirty yellowish uniforms, their classic hats and black stripes, somber faces. The smoke climbed like a fierce thing, huge and silent. I heard the crackling of the fire before I saw it. No voices, but the humming of motors left running, the spew of exhaust fumes a distraction in my peripheral vision. The crispy snow was flecked with black ash and tiny holes.
I moved forward cautiously, and was glad to be ignored. The firefighters were moving in teams, some with hoses, some with tools, some taking a rest near trucks, some standing in a distant, alert group like athletes in the box waiting for their turn on the field. My age-old fear of large machines lurched out and then sank again as I walked between rumbling fire trucks. Then voices and shouts and the fire, orange and reaching out from a broken window, reminding me oddly of an air conditioner. I stood for a while, my back against the grill of a fire engine, heart thumping, droplets of liquid tapping my face. Two girls whose faces I know from summertime wandered past me, looking at me as if I were an authority or an interloper, I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t smile—not a smiling occasion.
All I could see of the volunteers was their backs, uniformly drab and strong. I stepped forward to get a closer view and saw the sadness of the house, not a large house, just a home, enormous with flames and leaking wisps of smoke from shingles and siding. Striding from around the side came a set of firemen, with one in a distinctive black top—and the square-jawed face beneath the helmet was my own beloved, grim and serious and heroic.
John and the Upper Jay fire leader (Captain? Chief?) passed me unseeing, intent in discussion, planning their next move, I imagined. I feared I might lose sight of John again, and realized that probably he was too engrossed and this fire too big for him to leave to ref a hockey game. I wondered how I could be helpful. When he and his colleagues stopped walking and stood to watch the action, I crept up behind John and touched his sooty hot palm with my hand. He turned and looked down and was happy to see me. We loped off together toward the utility truck, and he gave me back my cell phone, asking me to find a way to contact his ref boss. I love John in a crisis, always cool-headed and looking ahead a few steps. He wears the black with reflective stripes because he is one of the “inside men,” those who are smaller (John says—in better shape, I say,) and have been trained to go inside the burning building to search for victims and survivors. He said that the family was fine, no one was in the building, but it was a terrible tragedy because they had just lost a child. I later learned that it was an adult child, but still.
This area is so sparsely populated that there is a network closer than six degrees between all of us. I made ten or so unsuccessful calls to directory assistance asking for the phone number for the Olympic Arena, then to Lake Placid friends to ask them to look—no one answered. Then I had the bright idea to call the LP fire house, because John had mentioned that his ref supervisor is also a fire fighter. The friendly man who answered knew what I was talking about and knew the person John needed to reach. He said he would find Butch, the ref boss, and offered to call me back and let me know. I felt infinitely soothed by this fatherliness, neighborliness, masculinity.
(I have learned so much since moving up here about accepting the archetypal masculine and feminine roles that my mother has talked about forever that I have objected to forever. Well, now I am here in a wild and rough place, where there isn’t much wiggle room for liberal ideas in a place where you could die any day from cold or bears or logs crushing you.)
After getting the message to John’s ref boss I knew I had no business at the scene, so I left as slinkily as I came, hoping no one would notice me. I drove home much more slowly, and stopped at the Upper Jay firehouse expecting the Ladies Auxiliary to be there making coffee and sandwiches, but there was no one there at all. I was conscious again of overcoming my objection to the idea of “Ladies Auxiliary,” because in that moment I knew exactly what the term meant and how important the function is for both hard-working fire-fighters and their anxious spouses, and for the traumatized, displaced families. John came home about four hours later, reeking of smoke, arm muscles pumped up, veins bulging. He took a quick shower and I cooked him a hero’s breakfast of five eggs and two diced hot dogs with pepper jack cheese, and then he was off to ref hockey for eight hours. He is a dynamo.
Monday, January 31, 2005
a reason for owning cross country skis
The elder generation of my family can't quite understand why John and I own skis. Mom and Sally are tolerant, but I can detect that they think I have taken up a luxury sport. I have tried to explain how it is living in such a cold climate, where if you don't get outside you will die of depression. If you want to walk, you have to manage walking in snow, which has many characters: snow can be crunchy and deep, squeaky and rigid, light and slippery, melty and weak. It can support you, trip you, drag at you, numb you. The salty roads are fine to walk on but not so beautiful as the woods, and of course not so safe as trails. And why restrict yourself to roads when the land is so gorgeous? You need something other than shoes to get around. Hence skis and snowshoes are common.
Today gives me the perfect reason for owning cross-country skis. I took the day off from work, having spent a long weekend in NYC for meetings (which was splendidly fun and successful.) It was a gorgeous, sunny day. The river is solidly frozen and covered with a sheet of snow. There are pawprints and skis tracks everywhere. I needed to get to the library for a volunteer task, and John has our only working car today, so I skied down the river to the library.
Today gives me the perfect reason for owning cross-country skis. I took the day off from work, having spent a long weekend in NYC for meetings (which was splendidly fun and successful.) It was a gorgeous, sunny day. The river is solidly frozen and covered with a sheet of snow. There are pawprints and skis tracks everywhere. I needed to get to the library for a volunteer task, and John has our only working car today, so I skied down the river to the library.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Holiday Classic
BKHoliday
This might be the most clever holiday email thingie I've ever received. A classic. I hope I offend no one.
This might be the most clever holiday email thingie I've ever received. A classic. I hope I offend no one.
The New York Times > Opinion > Puzzles: Beat the Clock
The New York Times > Opinion > Puzzles: Beat the Clock
Every New Year the NYT puts out the best super-puzzle I have ever seen. This one is no exception. Enjoy!
Every New Year the NYT puts out the best super-puzzle I have ever seen. This one is no exception. Enjoy!
Monday, November 22, 2004
not a luddite
I've bought a Treo 600 and boy, do I like it. Palm, phone and camera all in one. I am just beginning to learn how useful it is. Techie, not I, but fond of handy gadgets, yes.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Arafat & Othello
The New York Times > AP > International > Arafat's Health Worsens; Doctors Sent to Compound
A not unflattering picture of Yasir Arafat on the front page of the NYT electronic edition. He seems to be contemplating global leadership when in fact he's just been poisoned by an operative in an international conspiracy.
The U.S.A. certainly seems to be fracturing into bits. Even the coasts are no longer dependably Democratic. An explosion of registered Republicans is leaking out on all sides. Who knows where Alaska, Hawaii and the others will land. We have forfeited our post-WWII good position.
So, vote.com. Play the game Othello. Watch as Republican strongholds do the Bush Push from Ohio eastward to the Atlantic, through West Virginia and Virginia.
A not unflattering picture of Yasir Arafat on the front page of the NYT electronic edition. He seems to be contemplating global leadership when in fact he's just been poisoned by an operative in an international conspiracy.
The U.S.A. certainly seems to be fracturing into bits. Even the coasts are no longer dependably Democratic. An explosion of registered Republicans is leaking out on all sides. Who knows where Alaska, Hawaii and the others will land. We have forfeited our post-WWII good position.
So, vote.com. Play the game Othello. Watch as Republican strongholds do the Bush Push from Ohio eastward to the Atlantic, through West Virginia and Virginia.
Friday, October 22, 2004
Declare Yourself - Register to Vote
Declare Yourself - Register to Vote
Lots going on here. I think every day of writing in the ol' blog, but I don't write. This morning, for example as I was driving to work, there was fog all along the valley. The road follows the river west and upstream. Fog in pale pastel colors: lavender, blue, pink, orange--the dog in the back of the car, listening to Talking Heads or some such...
Stay tuned.
Lots going on here. I think every day of writing in the ol' blog, but I don't write. This morning, for example as I was driving to work, there was fog all along the valley. The road follows the river west and upstream. Fog in pale pastel colors: lavender, blue, pink, orange--the dog in the back of the car, listening to Talking Heads or some such...
Stay tuned.
Saturday, September 18, 2004
tomatoes and maples
Picking tomatoes in my garden. Bending, kneeling, reaching between the tangled vines and leaves, plucking, persuading the fruits to pop clear of their hats. Cruiser snuffling along between the rows, gobbling tomatoes that have fallen to the dirt. Toppled tomato cages, overheavy and dragged down by squash vines, yet offering clusters of tomatoes that promise to become red. A balance between autumn temperatures and sun summer warmth. The maples in the distance, reddening in bursts--here is one, there is one. A burgundy-colored maple leaf slips along the grass to my foot.
Monday, September 13, 2004
pleasures
Balmy, bright, breezy Sunday afternoon, standing barefoot outside in the grass, hanging damp laundry on the line, gazing across the field at my neighbors. My favorite red wine to follow.
Overcast brisk Monday morning, barefoot in the grass, quickly unclipping cold, dry laundry from the line, folding crisp t-shirts and pants down the front of my body, the wind flicking my nightgown around my calves, trying to avoid being seen by drivers on the road. Coffee waiting inside.
Overcast brisk Monday morning, barefoot in the grass, quickly unclipping cold, dry laundry from the line, folding crisp t-shirts and pants down the front of my body, the wind flicking my nightgown around my calves, trying to avoid being seen by drivers on the road. Coffee waiting inside.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Today is the third anniversary of September 11, and the first where I feel mostly normal. I ate granola and drank coffee with John this morning, pureed tomatoes and mulched perennials, read a novel and napped. As I ran errands in the car I composed the first lines of sonnets in my head: "The late summer crickets' high-pitched keening," "Rugged field laid flat for winter, coming," "Sweet belly of a mountain, maple red," ...
I have not been wallowing in memories as I did the past two years. I have had no flashbacks. It has receded. I've reread my journal from that time, a scattered and not-quite immediate remembering. I post some of it here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
September 11, 2001
Tuesday morning was a gorgeous a late-summer day in New York City. I got up, drank coffee, showered, dressed like the minor executive I am, and went outside to wait for the bus to my new job. The bus stop is in front of our apartment house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We live on Broadway, leading down to the East River.
Very often when I go outside I glance down to my right where the East River separates us in Brooklyn from the island of Manhattan, which is the place most non-New Yorkers think of when they say "New York." Ever since John and I moved here I have enjoyed the site of the twin Towers, so secure and strong, a symbol of being in New York. I have sketched them and remarked upon them in letters to friends and family. Those two Towers and other landmarks like our Williamsburg Bridge and the Empire State Building, and Brooklyn Bridge, even the Statue of Liberty visible ½ block away convince me every time I see them that yes, I do live in New York.
Tuesday morning I didn't take note of the Towers because I was interested in reading something in my New Yorker magazine, and the bus was rounding the corner. Soon I was on the bus and riding the few miles to my office. I missed my last chance to see the twin Towers as they were.
The neighborhood where I work is called Fort Greene. It is a residential neighborhood, brownstones and playgrounds and stores and restaurants. When I got to the office, early as usual, another early arriver said that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. I thought he was joking, and went outside to look. High in the sky there was a noticeable and strange plume of smoke floating past. There was a fast-rising urgency of people and sirens. I went back inside and called my husband John. He works in Manhattan at 6th Avenue and 27th Street, in a midtown neighborhood called Chelsea. He had not heard yet. We spoke briefly and hung up so he could go outside to see.
We had a radio in the our little Fort Greene office and everyone gathered around it to listen. The announcers didn't really know what was going on! A plane had hit the trade center—-unbelievable. I read later in the NYT that a local announcer joked about it being kamikaze pilot. Another plane has hit, oh God, and something has happened at the Pentagon in Washington, too—-it must be terrorists.
Usually outside at this time of day are young African-American youths playing basketball in the two City Park courts across the street. It's a big park, and I don't even know the name of it. Dekalb at Adelphi and Carlton. At my Venetian blind-shaded, sunlit desk I swallowed herb tea and tried to get some news online from CNN or the New York Times, sources I thought I could trust more than a nervous talk radio host. The websites were slow to come up from all the zillions of other people trying to access them, and when they did they showed photos of those two dear Towers smoking and blazing like in a disaster movie. I could hardly believe it. Then I tried to start my workday, but I really couldn't concentrate. A young woman arrived late to work, crying.
I called John again, and he told me what he saw standing at the corner of 6th, the flaming smoking Towers. I kept trying to believe that I could go about my regular day, but when I heard my husband's shocked voice I finally gave up. I told the Executive Director's young assistant I was leaving, left the office and walked down the block to Fort Greene Park, which has a big hill overlooking the city. And there were the enormous top thirds of the Towers, the wrecked and whole upper floors like the tines of a grey comb only three miles away, hazy with smoke on the otherwise gorgeous pristine sunny day, black smoke and orange-red fire, so large and close. Glittering things fell away from the burning, pieces of building or I don't like to think what else. Helicopters circled, a fighter jet zipped by far overhead. At first there were only a few people there on the hillside, but more and more came, and we all watched and crowded around those of us who had radios. Sirens were everywhere, ambulances, fire trucks and police on their way to the scene. I clasped my hands and prayed, but I felt little comfort in that—-how could my weak prayers save those people the pain of fire?
And then the left-hand tower Tower simply collapsed, slowly at first, collapsed, compressed straight downward, as if a giant hand was pressing it down, recycling a can or bottle. The rumbling roar came to us up on that leafy green hill, and everyone moaned and or screamed or was silent.
I can think now about who was there: our Executive Director's Assistant, whom I had told I was stepping out; the receptionist, who would end up getting fired for coming to watch; the girl who had been crying since she got to work; others from another department; the mostly African-American strangers on the hillside. Although there is a large hospital nearby there was no one in scrubs.
The right-hand Tower stayed up, the one with the broadcasting antenna on top, still blazing and smoking. A huge mushroom of dark ash and smoke billowed, sinister black and gray like you see on TV when a volcano erupts. All those people, I thought. It all happened so fast. How could can they be getting out, how many people were on the fire stairs of that building evacuating when their building it collapsed? I felt almost nothing, just stood there praying because there wasn't anything else I wanted to do. Some other people from my office arrived. We stood and watched the remaining Tower burn, listened to the various radios, talked quietly, tried to reach loved ones on cell phones. The minutes dragged by as slowly as minutes sometimes do, when you are in misery.
I left before the second Tower collapsed, not wanting to know any more and feeling an obligation to my job. As I walked back through the park I saw things of normal life, a group of people in matching t-shirts under a tree, getting ready to perhaps play softball,. A woman and a child in the playground. The woman watched me eagerly as I approached down the hill, and I thought she might want me to tell her what I saw.
I said, "Don't you want your daughter to see?"
"We were up there watching," said the woman, gesturing at her little daughter, "but she just wanted to come swing on the swings."
I nodded, and then the woman said, "I am from Israel. We have this all the time. And now I feel for you Americans." She and I stared at each other, a long moment of deep communion, and I put my hands over my heart, and she nodded, and I left.
The vision of the collapsing Tower, and the billowing explosions of smoke replays silently in my mind. Too much to believe, too much to accept. I was willing to think I had hallucinated it, it was only a dream. I wanted it not to be real. Somehow a giant movie screen had been placed across the vision of all of us up on that hill; it was Hollywood, some strange brutal experiment in mass entertainment, not a real thing. New York is larger than life that way; I see things in daily life here that I’ve only ever seen on TV or in movies. I wanted to believe almost anything but that it was real.
When I got back into the office only a few people were still there. Almost everyone else, but only I among the senior staff had gone to the hill to see for themselves. The radio was still on, describing what I had just seen. I didn't want to hear and went up to my desk outside the executive director’s office. She was on the phone behind her closed, glass door. I tapped on the door to let her know I was back, and then sat down at my desk and put my head in my hands. I would have begun to cry then, except she came out shouting. "This is unbelievable of everybody, how unprofessional, how could you just leave and not tell anyone where you were going, what are you all, some kind of voyeurs? This is none of your business!" She went on and on, spewing at me. I nodded and nodded, said, "Yes, I understand. I understand. I did tell so-and-so that I was going, but then she came herself." I told myself that my boss's her behavior wasn't about me nor really directed at me, it was just her way of coping with the unimaginable. Maybe her sister is in that Tower, I told myself. Maybe she is in shock. Everyone has their own ways of dealing with trauma. Then the executive director went downstairs, still shouting, and had it out with the receptionist, who had also gone up to the hill. To the receptionist's credit, when I saw her on the hill I asked who was covering the front desk and she said So-and-So was. But that wasn't enough for our executive director. I guess the receptionist had been on probation for a while, and this was a last straw.
"Pack your bags!" shouted the executive director.
"Are you firing me?" screamed the receptionist.
"Yes, I guess I am," said the E.D. I just shut my ears and made like a worker bee. I guess our former receptionist will never forget this day for several reasons. The receptionist continued shouting at my boss the E.D., who came quietly back upstairs and went back into her office.
Things all around became very quiet except for the radio and the endless sirens outside. I tried again to work and found myself reading the same sentence over and over again. The other women trickled back in, the crying woman, too. They said they had watched the second Tower collapse. I knew that I and all of us were in shock and dealing with it in our various ways. I felt myself flickering from sensibility to irrationality. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to go back to the hill and watch. I wanted to blink and have it be a dream. I wanted to go home and cuddle my cat Naomi. I wanted to hold my husband.
John and I talked briefly--some of his staff was missing, perhaps stuck on the subway, perhaps caught in traffic, perhaps just outside watching. He was responsible for about 30 people, and his coping method was to keep everyone close in the office and let them watch TV. The news was saying you couldn't get out of or into Manhattan, and I was afraid that John couldn't come home that night and I would have to be alone. At the same time I felt so selfish because so many others would never see their dear ones again.
Very quickly I got a bunch of emails from people worried about us in NY, including one from my mom through one of her tenants. Mom was terrified that we were hurt. I replied that we were fine, if shocked and frightened. I got an email from my friend Trish in Maryland near Washington, DC saying what she'd heard about the Pentagon and possibly other places there being bombed. I called my downstairs neighbor who worked at a bookstore in the bottom of the World Trade Center, and he answered the phone, said it was his day off and he was fine, told me that tons of people were standing outside our building our apartment on Broadway watching the scene. I checked my voicemail at home and found a hysterical message from Mom, and I realized belatedly that it wasn't just me who was possibly affected from our family: my brother Tom lives in Virginia and works for the federal government in Washington. I called Mom and we spoke briefly—she was fine by then. I asked for Tom's office number, but I couldn't get through. I began to be afraid for him.
And then, like the Tower collapsing, I lost my ability to remain professional and dispassionate. I felt a black cloud of depression sinking over me, as if my vision was narrowing down to a tunnel and my entire being was drying up and shrinking. I just sat there at my desk, listened as the young women talked about what they had seen, nodded and smiled and tried to be professional, set a good example, but inside I was just dust. All I could think about was my brother Tom and those people in the World Trade Center. I forced myself to be calm and kept telling myself Tom was fine, of course he's fine; he didn't work at the Pentagon. But in those moments we didn't know anything for sure because it was all happening so fast. And Tom can be such a hothead--I wondered if he had perhaps seen the plane crash into the Pentagon as he was driving to work, and had jumped out of his car to go help, or worse.
The hours passed quickly, and soon it was after lunchtime. My boss, the executive director who had screamed reprimanded me and fired the receptionist as her first reaction to the tragedy, calmed down and began to tell people they could go home if they knew someone who might be in the World Trade Center. "I can't go home," said her assistant, "I live in lower Manhattan." Another woman whose cousin worked in the buildings said she didn't want to leave, she just wanted to work, but then she did leave. I tried to stay, but couldn't stop thinking of Tom, and at about one p.m. I told the E.D. I was going to depart leave. "I hope your brother's ok," she said gently.
I went out and waited for the bus under the BQE. Hundreds of people were walking up the normally pedestrian-free roadway. I later learned that people from Manhattan were evacuated and walked away from the disaster across the three bridges right there: the famous Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge, which is right outside John's and my apartment. All those solemn, exhausted-looking people pouring by as I stood waiting for my bus were survivors of the attack. Some of them had breathing masks on, but none were dusty. I thought about biological warfare, and my mind went blank again. The bus didn't come, and someone told me that all buses were being commandeered to take cops and emergency workers into Manhattan. So I walked home, not such a long walk. Everyone I saw was solemn and quiet. We looked in each other's faces, which is something New Yorkers do not usually do. It was surreal, the terrible pouring black smoke across the river and in the sky, and the stubbornly beautiful day so much bigger than even this calamity. Cops were directing traffic; people were scrambling, cars and trucks honking, people saying they had to get here or there. "I have to make a delivery," roared one truck driver to a policeman who wasn't letting him through to downtown Brooklyn. "This is an emergency, you're blocking traffic," replied the cop.
About an hour of fast, sweaty, crowded walking later I was almost home, from African-American Fort Greene to Hassidic/hipster Williamsburg. There were men with guns guarding the Navy yard, a huge complex on the water a few blocks from our house. When I finally got home to our beautiful, sunny loft, a fifth floor walk-up, I threw down my bag and went out onto to the fire escape. "Our bridge," as John and I think of it, was packed with people all walking in the same direction: out of Manhattan. If they were shouting on the bridge I couldn't hear. A very few vehicles roared in, a random-seeming assortment of fire trucks, ambulances, sedans, buses. Normally that bridge is a river of transportation.
I came inside, changed out of my work clothes, opened up a beer and watched TV for hours and hours. John called frequently to tell me he was ok, and I told him people were walking across the bridge so I knew he could get home. He arrived later and we hugged and kissed, grateful beyond belief for our lives. We stared together out the front windows at the great smoking mess of lower Manhattan where those beautiful gleaming Towers had stood until that morning.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
The week has gone by with us trying to adhere to our routines of work and errands and regular life. We watch TV obsessively, read every paper, and chat with friends and family on the phone. Friday President Bush declared a day of mourning, although it was not organized at least in my neighborhood. I went with two other women to the Presbyterian Church at Lafayette and something, which was silently open for prayer. We sat in the ear-ringing intensity among two dozen scattered strangers, all races, lots of whites and blacks together. I looked for a kneeler and braved dusty pants to kneel on the hardwood floor at our pew to pray.
My faith in God that has been rock steady through every tragedy of my life, even Dad's death, has been tested: that moment of the tower collapsing, my whole soul rising slower than the speed of light to will it not to be, through the power God is supposed to have. I have trouble believing that my prayers make any difference, yet some moist-eyed time passed while I kneeled in thought to God. When I was walking from the Presbyterian Church I went for Italian food, pasta puttanesca. For the rest of the day I felt so much lightened and refreshed. The good feeling lasted into the next day.
John and I and everyone we know are depressed. The city is not the same, although as I write this on Sunday, September 16, 2001, the third monthiversary of our marriage, there are children playing and shrieking outside, the train whooshes by on the bridge, and there are normal signs of life: traffic, the regular amount of sirens. Certain things have been notably different, like the stench of burning that wafted over us several times this week as the wind changed. I knew I was breathing people's dust and ashes. Today is the first clear day since it happened, the smoke finally under control. The skyline is different.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
I am consumed with thoughts of death. I partly think I am or we are dying. We're both abusing and indulging ourselves. Anyone could have been in the WTC at those moments. Everybody knows of someone who is affected, who was there. There are layers of people's experience: mine is having seen in person from a distance both towers burning and one collapse. John saw both burning but neither collapse. Another person maybe first saw it in person after it fell down, a different trauma yet. Layers of witness to Armageddon. We're all depressed and sad.
Joe calls, drops off xtine & Don's long-promised hand-me-down microwave. I whine and ask him to carry it up, he snarks back, "What, can't you even walk down the stairs?" I quickly do, braless, distracted, but at least clean.
Today I closed a cookbook I opened on Monday, collected the candles I burned in the windows Tuesday night. Women shout outside. Could be more than 5,000 lives lost, more than 5,000 injured, tens of thousands of direct family & loved ones. I am living in a geography of grief. African-American funerals dot the mornings of my walk down Dekalb to work. Breathing my chain-smoking and the breath of death, ashes and chemicals and rotting human flesh, some burned. What is that shouting outside? I don't want to know. Every siren is heightened; every bang and screech makes my heart flutter and brings quick sweats. Every traffic-induced ripple of the floor and building has an added ominous-ness. I twitch with nervous energy.
This weekend is the first day of autumn. Next Tuesday is supposed to be Election Day in New York State. The mayoral race--who will back out between now and then? All campaigning has stopped. Margarita Lopez sent JLS a dear friend letter saying "...in light of recent tragic events..." The shouting people outside cheer and clap, must be playful noise, nothing to be anxious about.
I yearn for more great change. I've destroyed our two big comfy black cotton sheets in the process [and shrouded our fire escape in black]. Next could be packing up all the tchotchkes, letting the plants die. Seems like my beloved old cat Naomi's eating less; even she is reacting to the tragedy. A hysterical siren flails by, up Bedford toward the north side. Is it going onto the bridge? Several blocks of the neighborhood will know soon enough. I ache from smoking and not eating. There's incense to soothe and please my aural passages, fresh cool water. Another cigarette.
I have not been wallowing in memories as I did the past two years. I have had no flashbacks. It has receded. I've reread my journal from that time, a scattered and not-quite immediate remembering. I post some of it here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
September 11, 2001
Tuesday morning was a gorgeous a late-summer day in New York City. I got up, drank coffee, showered, dressed like the minor executive I am, and went outside to wait for the bus to my new job. The bus stop is in front of our apartment house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We live on Broadway, leading down to the East River.
Very often when I go outside I glance down to my right where the East River separates us in Brooklyn from the island of Manhattan, which is the place most non-New Yorkers think of when they say "New York." Ever since John and I moved here I have enjoyed the site of the twin Towers, so secure and strong, a symbol of being in New York. I have sketched them and remarked upon them in letters to friends and family. Those two Towers and other landmarks like our Williamsburg Bridge and the Empire State Building, and Brooklyn Bridge, even the Statue of Liberty visible ½ block away convince me every time I see them that yes, I do live in New York.
Tuesday morning I didn't take note of the Towers because I was interested in reading something in my New Yorker magazine, and the bus was rounding the corner. Soon I was on the bus and riding the few miles to my office. I missed my last chance to see the twin Towers as they were.
The neighborhood where I work is called Fort Greene. It is a residential neighborhood, brownstones and playgrounds and stores and restaurants. When I got to the office, early as usual, another early arriver said that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. I thought he was joking, and went outside to look. High in the sky there was a noticeable and strange plume of smoke floating past. There was a fast-rising urgency of people and sirens. I went back inside and called my husband John. He works in Manhattan at 6th Avenue and 27th Street, in a midtown neighborhood called Chelsea. He had not heard yet. We spoke briefly and hung up so he could go outside to see.
We had a radio in the our little Fort Greene office and everyone gathered around it to listen. The announcers didn't really know what was going on! A plane had hit the trade center—-unbelievable. I read later in the NYT that a local announcer joked about it being kamikaze pilot. Another plane has hit, oh God, and something has happened at the Pentagon in Washington, too—-it must be terrorists.
Usually outside at this time of day are young African-American youths playing basketball in the two City Park courts across the street. It's a big park, and I don't even know the name of it. Dekalb at Adelphi and Carlton. At my Venetian blind-shaded, sunlit desk I swallowed herb tea and tried to get some news online from CNN or the New York Times, sources I thought I could trust more than a nervous talk radio host. The websites were slow to come up from all the zillions of other people trying to access them, and when they did they showed photos of those two dear Towers smoking and blazing like in a disaster movie. I could hardly believe it. Then I tried to start my workday, but I really couldn't concentrate. A young woman arrived late to work, crying.
I called John again, and he told me what he saw standing at the corner of 6th, the flaming smoking Towers. I kept trying to believe that I could go about my regular day, but when I heard my husband's shocked voice I finally gave up. I told the Executive Director's young assistant I was leaving, left the office and walked down the block to Fort Greene Park, which has a big hill overlooking the city. And there were the enormous top thirds of the Towers, the wrecked and whole upper floors like the tines of a grey comb only three miles away, hazy with smoke on the otherwise gorgeous pristine sunny day, black smoke and orange-red fire, so large and close. Glittering things fell away from the burning, pieces of building or I don't like to think what else. Helicopters circled, a fighter jet zipped by far overhead. At first there were only a few people there on the hillside, but more and more came, and we all watched and crowded around those of us who had radios. Sirens were everywhere, ambulances, fire trucks and police on their way to the scene. I clasped my hands and prayed, but I felt little comfort in that—-how could my weak prayers save those people the pain of fire?
And then the left-hand tower Tower simply collapsed, slowly at first, collapsed, compressed straight downward, as if a giant hand was pressing it down, recycling a can or bottle. The rumbling roar came to us up on that leafy green hill, and everyone moaned and or screamed or was silent.
I can think now about who was there: our Executive Director's Assistant, whom I had told I was stepping out; the receptionist, who would end up getting fired for coming to watch; the girl who had been crying since she got to work; others from another department; the mostly African-American strangers on the hillside. Although there is a large hospital nearby there was no one in scrubs.
The right-hand Tower stayed up, the one with the broadcasting antenna on top, still blazing and smoking. A huge mushroom of dark ash and smoke billowed, sinister black and gray like you see on TV when a volcano erupts. All those people, I thought. It all happened so fast. How could can they be getting out, how many people were on the fire stairs of that building evacuating when their building it collapsed? I felt almost nothing, just stood there praying because there wasn't anything else I wanted to do. Some other people from my office arrived. We stood and watched the remaining Tower burn, listened to the various radios, talked quietly, tried to reach loved ones on cell phones. The minutes dragged by as slowly as minutes sometimes do, when you are in misery.
I left before the second Tower collapsed, not wanting to know any more and feeling an obligation to my job. As I walked back through the park I saw things of normal life, a group of people in matching t-shirts under a tree, getting ready to perhaps play softball,. A woman and a child in the playground. The woman watched me eagerly as I approached down the hill, and I thought she might want me to tell her what I saw.
I said, "Don't you want your daughter to see?"
"We were up there watching," said the woman, gesturing at her little daughter, "but she just wanted to come swing on the swings."
I nodded, and then the woman said, "I am from Israel. We have this all the time. And now I feel for you Americans." She and I stared at each other, a long moment of deep communion, and I put my hands over my heart, and she nodded, and I left.
The vision of the collapsing Tower, and the billowing explosions of smoke replays silently in my mind. Too much to believe, too much to accept. I was willing to think I had hallucinated it, it was only a dream. I wanted it not to be real. Somehow a giant movie screen had been placed across the vision of all of us up on that hill; it was Hollywood, some strange brutal experiment in mass entertainment, not a real thing. New York is larger than life that way; I see things in daily life here that I’ve only ever seen on TV or in movies. I wanted to believe almost anything but that it was real.
When I got back into the office only a few people were still there. Almost everyone else, but only I among the senior staff had gone to the hill to see for themselves. The radio was still on, describing what I had just seen. I didn't want to hear and went up to my desk outside the executive director’s office. She was on the phone behind her closed, glass door. I tapped on the door to let her know I was back, and then sat down at my desk and put my head in my hands. I would have begun to cry then, except she came out shouting. "This is unbelievable of everybody, how unprofessional, how could you just leave and not tell anyone where you were going, what are you all, some kind of voyeurs? This is none of your business!" She went on and on, spewing at me. I nodded and nodded, said, "Yes, I understand. I understand. I did tell so-and-so that I was going, but then she came herself." I told myself that my boss's her behavior wasn't about me nor really directed at me, it was just her way of coping with the unimaginable. Maybe her sister is in that Tower, I told myself. Maybe she is in shock. Everyone has their own ways of dealing with trauma. Then the executive director went downstairs, still shouting, and had it out with the receptionist, who had also gone up to the hill. To the receptionist's credit, when I saw her on the hill I asked who was covering the front desk and she said So-and-So was. But that wasn't enough for our executive director. I guess the receptionist had been on probation for a while, and this was a last straw.
"Pack your bags!" shouted the executive director.
"Are you firing me?" screamed the receptionist.
"Yes, I guess I am," said the E.D. I just shut my ears and made like a worker bee. I guess our former receptionist will never forget this day for several reasons. The receptionist continued shouting at my boss the E.D., who came quietly back upstairs and went back into her office.
Things all around became very quiet except for the radio and the endless sirens outside. I tried again to work and found myself reading the same sentence over and over again. The other women trickled back in, the crying woman, too. They said they had watched the second Tower collapse. I knew that I and all of us were in shock and dealing with it in our various ways. I felt myself flickering from sensibility to irrationality. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to go back to the hill and watch. I wanted to blink and have it be a dream. I wanted to go home and cuddle my cat Naomi. I wanted to hold my husband.
John and I talked briefly--some of his staff was missing, perhaps stuck on the subway, perhaps caught in traffic, perhaps just outside watching. He was responsible for about 30 people, and his coping method was to keep everyone close in the office and let them watch TV. The news was saying you couldn't get out of or into Manhattan, and I was afraid that John couldn't come home that night and I would have to be alone. At the same time I felt so selfish because so many others would never see their dear ones again.
Very quickly I got a bunch of emails from people worried about us in NY, including one from my mom through one of her tenants. Mom was terrified that we were hurt. I replied that we were fine, if shocked and frightened. I got an email from my friend Trish in Maryland near Washington, DC saying what she'd heard about the Pentagon and possibly other places there being bombed. I called my downstairs neighbor who worked at a bookstore in the bottom of the World Trade Center, and he answered the phone, said it was his day off and he was fine, told me that tons of people were standing outside our building our apartment on Broadway watching the scene. I checked my voicemail at home and found a hysterical message from Mom, and I realized belatedly that it wasn't just me who was possibly affected from our family: my brother Tom lives in Virginia and works for the federal government in Washington. I called Mom and we spoke briefly—she was fine by then. I asked for Tom's office number, but I couldn't get through. I began to be afraid for him.
And then, like the Tower collapsing, I lost my ability to remain professional and dispassionate. I felt a black cloud of depression sinking over me, as if my vision was narrowing down to a tunnel and my entire being was drying up and shrinking. I just sat there at my desk, listened as the young women talked about what they had seen, nodded and smiled and tried to be professional, set a good example, but inside I was just dust. All I could think about was my brother Tom and those people in the World Trade Center. I forced myself to be calm and kept telling myself Tom was fine, of course he's fine; he didn't work at the Pentagon. But in those moments we didn't know anything for sure because it was all happening so fast. And Tom can be such a hothead--I wondered if he had perhaps seen the plane crash into the Pentagon as he was driving to work, and had jumped out of his car to go help, or worse.
The hours passed quickly, and soon it was after lunchtime. My boss, the executive director who had screamed reprimanded me and fired the receptionist as her first reaction to the tragedy, calmed down and began to tell people they could go home if they knew someone who might be in the World Trade Center. "I can't go home," said her assistant, "I live in lower Manhattan." Another woman whose cousin worked in the buildings said she didn't want to leave, she just wanted to work, but then she did leave. I tried to stay, but couldn't stop thinking of Tom, and at about one p.m. I told the E.D. I was going to depart leave. "I hope your brother's ok," she said gently.
I went out and waited for the bus under the BQE. Hundreds of people were walking up the normally pedestrian-free roadway. I later learned that people from Manhattan were evacuated and walked away from the disaster across the three bridges right there: the famous Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge, which is right outside John's and my apartment. All those solemn, exhausted-looking people pouring by as I stood waiting for my bus were survivors of the attack. Some of them had breathing masks on, but none were dusty. I thought about biological warfare, and my mind went blank again. The bus didn't come, and someone told me that all buses were being commandeered to take cops and emergency workers into Manhattan. So I walked home, not such a long walk. Everyone I saw was solemn and quiet. We looked in each other's faces, which is something New Yorkers do not usually do. It was surreal, the terrible pouring black smoke across the river and in the sky, and the stubbornly beautiful day so much bigger than even this calamity. Cops were directing traffic; people were scrambling, cars and trucks honking, people saying they had to get here or there. "I have to make a delivery," roared one truck driver to a policeman who wasn't letting him through to downtown Brooklyn. "This is an emergency, you're blocking traffic," replied the cop.
About an hour of fast, sweaty, crowded walking later I was almost home, from African-American Fort Greene to Hassidic/hipster Williamsburg. There were men with guns guarding the Navy yard, a huge complex on the water a few blocks from our house. When I finally got home to our beautiful, sunny loft, a fifth floor walk-up, I threw down my bag and went out onto to the fire escape. "Our bridge," as John and I think of it, was packed with people all walking in the same direction: out of Manhattan. If they were shouting on the bridge I couldn't hear. A very few vehicles roared in, a random-seeming assortment of fire trucks, ambulances, sedans, buses. Normally that bridge is a river of transportation.
I came inside, changed out of my work clothes, opened up a beer and watched TV for hours and hours. John called frequently to tell me he was ok, and I told him people were walking across the bridge so I knew he could get home. He arrived later and we hugged and kissed, grateful beyond belief for our lives. We stared together out the front windows at the great smoking mess of lower Manhattan where those beautiful gleaming Towers had stood until that morning.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
The week has gone by with us trying to adhere to our routines of work and errands and regular life. We watch TV obsessively, read every paper, and chat with friends and family on the phone. Friday President Bush declared a day of mourning, although it was not organized at least in my neighborhood. I went with two other women to the Presbyterian Church at Lafayette and something, which was silently open for prayer. We sat in the ear-ringing intensity among two dozen scattered strangers, all races, lots of whites and blacks together. I looked for a kneeler and braved dusty pants to kneel on the hardwood floor at our pew to pray.
My faith in God that has been rock steady through every tragedy of my life, even Dad's death, has been tested: that moment of the tower collapsing, my whole soul rising slower than the speed of light to will it not to be, through the power God is supposed to have. I have trouble believing that my prayers make any difference, yet some moist-eyed time passed while I kneeled in thought to God. When I was walking from the Presbyterian Church I went for Italian food, pasta puttanesca. For the rest of the day I felt so much lightened and refreshed. The good feeling lasted into the next day.
John and I and everyone we know are depressed. The city is not the same, although as I write this on Sunday, September 16, 2001, the third monthiversary of our marriage, there are children playing and shrieking outside, the train whooshes by on the bridge, and there are normal signs of life: traffic, the regular amount of sirens. Certain things have been notably different, like the stench of burning that wafted over us several times this week as the wind changed. I knew I was breathing people's dust and ashes. Today is the first clear day since it happened, the smoke finally under control. The skyline is different.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
I am consumed with thoughts of death. I partly think I am or we are dying. We're both abusing and indulging ourselves. Anyone could have been in the WTC at those moments. Everybody knows of someone who is affected, who was there. There are layers of people's experience: mine is having seen in person from a distance both towers burning and one collapse. John saw both burning but neither collapse. Another person maybe first saw it in person after it fell down, a different trauma yet. Layers of witness to Armageddon. We're all depressed and sad.
Joe calls, drops off xtine & Don's long-promised hand-me-down microwave. I whine and ask him to carry it up, he snarks back, "What, can't you even walk down the stairs?" I quickly do, braless, distracted, but at least clean.
Today I closed a cookbook I opened on Monday, collected the candles I burned in the windows Tuesday night. Women shout outside. Could be more than 5,000 lives lost, more than 5,000 injured, tens of thousands of direct family & loved ones. I am living in a geography of grief. African-American funerals dot the mornings of my walk down Dekalb to work. Breathing my chain-smoking and the breath of death, ashes and chemicals and rotting human flesh, some burned. What is that shouting outside? I don't want to know. Every siren is heightened; every bang and screech makes my heart flutter and brings quick sweats. Every traffic-induced ripple of the floor and building has an added ominous-ness. I twitch with nervous energy.
This weekend is the first day of autumn. Next Tuesday is supposed to be Election Day in New York State. The mayoral race--who will back out between now and then? All campaigning has stopped. Margarita Lopez sent JLS a dear friend letter saying "...in light of recent tragic events..." The shouting people outside cheer and clap, must be playful noise, nothing to be anxious about.
I yearn for more great change. I've destroyed our two big comfy black cotton sheets in the process [and shrouded our fire escape in black]. Next could be packing up all the tchotchkes, letting the plants die. Seems like my beloved old cat Naomi's eating less; even she is reacting to the tragedy. A hysterical siren flails by, up Bedford toward the north side. Is it going onto the bridge? Several blocks of the neighborhood will know soon enough. I ache from smoking and not eating. There's incense to soothe and please my aural passages, fresh cool water. Another cigarette.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
This week I thoroughly groomed a horse, including hoof-picking, for the first time in my life. It was intimate and sensual. The horse, Dandi, munched at her grain and let me stroke her all over with the two brushes. Her belly was particularly delightful, a warm furry gray globe I could have curled up in.
I've also set up my studio. THIS is a huge excitement for me. My own room just for "pwah-jex". Dozens of little cubicles labeled intriguingly: "things to fix," "papier-mâché," "wood," "decoupage," "IJ." IJ stands for Interesting Junque. Sally brought that word into my life when I was a wee girl and Sally would show up with grocery bags full of mathems--gifts of items that are new to you--and IJ.
It is good to settle in. My dreams have been about finding just the right light for the vast collection of houseplants I don't have. Winter approaches, and I have a nest, a den.
I've also set up my studio. THIS is a huge excitement for me. My own room just for "pwah-jex". Dozens of little cubicles labeled intriguingly: "things to fix," "papier-mâché," "wood," "decoupage," "IJ." IJ stands for Interesting Junque. Sally brought that word into my life when I was a wee girl and Sally would show up with grocery bags full of mathems--gifts of items that are new to you--and IJ.
It is good to settle in. My dreams have been about finding just the right light for the vast collection of houseplants I don't have. Winter approaches, and I have a nest, a den.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Burke's Backyard Archives 2002 - Dairy GoatsFirst Barn Chores All Summer
Wearing last year's gloves, and the stench of last year's rutting billy goat is now soaked into my hands. Heady stuff, dizzying odor. I mucked the donkeys' stall this morning. I'm out of shape in regard to mucking. By the first two shovelsful of poo and wet hay I was dripping sweat. It doesn't help that it's humid and warm. Donkey poo has less of a pleasant odor than some other barnyard poo, or maybe it's just that I'm out of practice. I did enjoy our first minutes together when Rachel and I were the only ones there and I was dispensing carrot bits. The goats liked me but not the carrots, except one doe who ate them happily. Maybe it is fresh billy goat kid musk I have on my hands. The babies have horns like the first joints of little thumbs, and I scratched behind those wee horns.
Wearing last year's gloves, and the stench of last year's rutting billy goat is now soaked into my hands. Heady stuff, dizzying odor. I mucked the donkeys' stall this morning. I'm out of shape in regard to mucking. By the first two shovelsful of poo and wet hay I was dripping sweat. It doesn't help that it's humid and warm. Donkey poo has less of a pleasant odor than some other barnyard poo, or maybe it's just that I'm out of practice. I did enjoy our first minutes together when Rachel and I were the only ones there and I was dispensing carrot bits. The goats liked me but not the carrots, except one doe who ate them happily. Maybe it is fresh billy goat kid musk I have on my hands. The babies have horns like the first joints of little thumbs, and I scratched behind those wee horns.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
I love yard sales, garage sales, tag sales, thrift shops, clearance sales and boxes marked "free." I love a bargain and love things with provenance. Recently I bought a big box at a barn sale. The box contains all the horse tack that the barn owner's great-grandpa used to run this farm: bridle, harness for a plow, various straps and buckles, all of it ancient and ugly. I was so enchanted by the romance of this, a decrepit farm down the road from me, and here in the trunk of my car went part of its economic engine. My husband groaned and said, "That will stay in that box forever, now." Stubbornly I insisted that I would clean it up with Murphy's Oil Soap and maybe make an art piece out of it. I did spread it all out on the floor of our garage and take photographs. Nevertheless, back in the box it went and still remains.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Confessions of a Recovering Child Fundamentalist
...actually, I always questioned things to the point that I got in trouble with my Sunday School and Vacation Bible School teachers...
Note to my beloved and only brother, ex-Marine, owner of indeterminate politics, one from whose mouth terms like "baby-killer" and "queer pervert" have issued (admittedly, half a lifetime ago.):
Dear T:
I am struggling with something that I think you can help me understand. John's Uncle and Aunt (hosts of our wedding) are coming to visit soon. We are pretty close and I love, trust and respect them. Uncle F sent me an email recently that said simply, "Vote for Bush." Now, he knows what kind of person I am and what my values are. "Why?" I responded. "Because he is the best candidate," wrote Uncle F. I fussed and fumed and eventually wrote back, "I must respectfully disagree." We haven't discussed it further.
So I have become worried about their visit. I am concerned that I will want to haggle with Uncle F--why on earth do you think Bush is the best candidate, yadda yadda yadda. I totally can't understand why anyone would want to vote for President Bush, and I also recognize that 1/2 or more of the country will vote for him. I do not understand it and would like to. People with Bush stickers on their cars seem like alien pod people to me.
What good is there about President Bush? How to address all the well-known bad--false representation leading to ill-planned war in Iraq, bigotry, cronyism, undermining basic constitutional principles--like separation of church and state--that have been part of what caused this country to be as strong and powerful as it has been, etc.
~~~~~~~~~full moon, hormones in nuclear fission mode~~~~~~~~~~~
Email to the membership services department of the GOP upon reading a NYT article about their convention staging:
Dear Folks,
As a former NYC resident and survivor of September 11, 2001, I find it disgusting that you all would use the site as a visual and emotional backdrop for the Republican convention. I am forever changed by that day, have flashbacks, nearly faint at certain smells, weep when discussing it, have nightmares and I know that I am among thousands if not tens of thousands of people who feel the same way. That day, and all that occurred thereafter in our neighborhoods, is not yet a political tool! Maybe December 7th is ok to use, or D-Day, but not 9/11, at least not for me.
It seems heartless, tasteless and not savvy, as did President Bush when he stood in flight uniform on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a banner that said "Mission Accomplished."
...actually, I always questioned things to the point that I got in trouble with my Sunday School and Vacation Bible School teachers...
Note to my beloved and only brother, ex-Marine, owner of indeterminate politics, one from whose mouth terms like "baby-killer" and "queer pervert" have issued (admittedly, half a lifetime ago.):
Dear T:
I am struggling with something that I think you can help me understand. John's Uncle and Aunt (hosts of our wedding) are coming to visit soon. We are pretty close and I love, trust and respect them. Uncle F sent me an email recently that said simply, "Vote for Bush." Now, he knows what kind of person I am and what my values are. "Why?" I responded. "Because he is the best candidate," wrote Uncle F. I fussed and fumed and eventually wrote back, "I must respectfully disagree." We haven't discussed it further.
So I have become worried about their visit. I am concerned that I will want to haggle with Uncle F--why on earth do you think Bush is the best candidate, yadda yadda yadda. I totally can't understand why anyone would want to vote for President Bush, and I also recognize that 1/2 or more of the country will vote for him. I do not understand it and would like to. People with Bush stickers on their cars seem like alien pod people to me.
What good is there about President Bush? How to address all the well-known bad--false representation leading to ill-planned war in Iraq, bigotry, cronyism, undermining basic constitutional principles--like separation of church and state--that have been part of what caused this country to be as strong and powerful as it has been, etc.
~~~~~~~~~full moon, hormones in nuclear fission mode~~~~~~~~~~~
Email to the membership services department of the GOP upon reading a NYT article about their convention staging:
Dear Folks,
As a former NYC resident and survivor of September 11, 2001, I find it disgusting that you all would use the site as a visual and emotional backdrop for the Republican convention. I am forever changed by that day, have flashbacks, nearly faint at certain smells, weep when discussing it, have nightmares and I know that I am among thousands if not tens of thousands of people who feel the same way. That day, and all that occurred thereafter in our neighborhoods, is not yet a political tool! Maybe December 7th is ok to use, or D-Day, but not 9/11, at least not for me.
It seems heartless, tasteless and not savvy, as did President Bush when he stood in flight uniform on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a banner that said "Mission Accomplished."
Friday, August 27, 2004
The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Art Review: Caution: Angry Artists at Work
John got up early and I slept in this morning, bolstered on one side by Cruiser and on the other by two cats. Heaven.
A blue heron has taken up a stance on rocks in the Au Sable river near our house. I never see it on the same rock, but it always looks the same, like a sculpture. Maybe it is a joke.
John got up early and I slept in this morning, bolstered on one side by Cruiser and on the other by two cats. Heaven.
A blue heron has taken up a stance on rocks in the Au Sable river near our house. I never see it on the same rock, but it always looks the same, like a sculpture. Maybe it is a joke.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Late August and the leaves are turning. Nights have been in the forties. This summer we never once went swimming in the famous Jay swimming hole, although we did once go swimming in a spot near us. We haven't had a bonfire or slept outside in a tent. So much rain and so much chill, and so much to do all summer. We have been very busy.
John has learned a new word for me: mouse potato. Courtesy of the NYT magazine this past Sunday.
John has learned a new word for me: mouse potato. Courtesy of the NYT magazine this past Sunday.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Proust Questionnaire
Your most marked characteristic? duality, as in graceful and clumsy
The quality you most like in a man? gentleness
The quality you most like in a woman? strength
What do you most value in your friends? love, compassion, loyalty, discretion
What is your principle defect? being judgmental
What is your favorite occupation? puttering, reading, napping
What is your idea of earthly happiness? having endless creative and physical energy in an environment of peace and contentment
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? losing freedoms
What would you like to be? someone who leaves many legacies of good work
In what country would you like to live? USA
What is your favorite color? red
What is your favorite flower? lily of the valley
What is your favorite bird? bluebird
Who are your favorite prose writers? Edith Wharton, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gene Stratton Porter
Who are your favorite poets? Ogden Nash, Emily Dickinson, various sonneteers
Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Aslan
Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Girl of the Limberlost
Who are your favorite composers? Aaron Copland, Meshell Ndegeocello and many in between
Who are your favorite painters? My mother and father, Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel, Botero
Who are your heroes in real life? Rosa Parks, Kevin Jennings, Ruth Lilly, all reasonably competent waitresses, my husband
Who are your favorite heroines of history? Harriet Tubman, suffragettes, women in the Bible
What are your favorite names? Elizabeth, Thomas, John, Meagan, Maggie, Samantha, Cameron, David, Grace
What is it you most dislike? fear and pain
What historical figures do you most despise? Idi Amin, Chinese Cultural Revolution functionaries and others like them
What event in military history do you most admire? the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords brokered by US President Jimmy Carter between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
What reform do you most admire? repeal of prohibition
What natural gift would you most like to possess? athleticism
How would you like to die? with all my affairs in order, peacefully, if not on my own terms then instantaneously via gunshot, beheading or other means
Who would you have liked to be? a pioneer in the American West in the 1700s, partnered lesbian woman passing as a man
Your favorite virtue?* generosity
What is your present state of mind? calm and focused
To what faults do you feel most indulgent? sweet tooth, sloth, gossip
What is your motto? bless yer heart
*Virtue, Faith, Honesty, Gratitude, Perseverance, Forgiveness, Patience, Courage, Respect, Generosity, Discipline, Compassion, Humility
Your most marked characteristic? duality, as in graceful and clumsy
The quality you most like in a man? gentleness
The quality you most like in a woman? strength
What do you most value in your friends? love, compassion, loyalty, discretion
What is your principle defect? being judgmental
What is your favorite occupation? puttering, reading, napping
What is your idea of earthly happiness? having endless creative and physical energy in an environment of peace and contentment
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? losing freedoms
What would you like to be? someone who leaves many legacies of good work
In what country would you like to live? USA
What is your favorite color? red
What is your favorite flower? lily of the valley
What is your favorite bird? bluebird
Who are your favorite prose writers? Edith Wharton, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gene Stratton Porter
Who are your favorite poets? Ogden Nash, Emily Dickinson, various sonneteers
Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Aslan
Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Girl of the Limberlost
Who are your favorite composers? Aaron Copland, Meshell Ndegeocello and many in between
Who are your favorite painters? My mother and father, Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel, Botero
Who are your heroes in real life? Rosa Parks, Kevin Jennings, Ruth Lilly, all reasonably competent waitresses, my husband
Who are your favorite heroines of history? Harriet Tubman, suffragettes, women in the Bible
What are your favorite names? Elizabeth, Thomas, John, Meagan, Maggie, Samantha, Cameron, David, Grace
What is it you most dislike? fear and pain
What historical figures do you most despise? Idi Amin, Chinese Cultural Revolution functionaries and others like them
What event in military history do you most admire? the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords brokered by US President Jimmy Carter between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
What reform do you most admire? repeal of prohibition
What natural gift would you most like to possess? athleticism
How would you like to die? with all my affairs in order, peacefully, if not on my own terms then instantaneously via gunshot, beheading or other means
Who would you have liked to be? a pioneer in the American West in the 1700s, partnered lesbian woman passing as a man
Your favorite virtue?* generosity
What is your present state of mind? calm and focused
To what faults do you feel most indulgent? sweet tooth, sloth, gossip
What is your motto? bless yer heart
*Virtue, Faith, Honesty, Gratitude, Perseverance, Forgiveness, Patience, Courage, Respect, Generosity, Discipline, Compassion, Humility
Chilly August morning. That's an impossibility in Baltimore, where I come from. Winter is right around the corner. I feel like Persephone, above ground and in the light now but thinking ahead to my nuptial duties in Hades.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Ah, the end of two weeks of vacation. I did a whole lot of nothing. Actually, that's not quite true. Main accomplishments: weeding garden, putting up pounds and pounds of zucchini (shredded, breaded, cubed,) harvesting herbs and hanging them up to dry in kitchen and dining room windows, weeding and mulching the perennial bed. I wrote cards and letters to a bunch of people, read books and novels.
The most interesting and evocative book I read during this vacation was Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. This book brought me right back to the late 70s when my father was a missionary and he was helping folks, notably an Iranian family of four, to achieve political asylum or otherwise immigrate to the U.S. under the auspices of the Christian church. I remember some of my girlfriend Mahnaz's stories of the revolution and her escape--stories which by now are certainly edited through my own political filter and the length of time it has been since I heard those stories--but what stays with me is Mahnaz, then 15 (and I twelve), saying she had been in class at school, masked gunmen came in and machine-gunned the classroom. Mahnaz's teacher was killed and her classmates fell all around her. She fell too, underneath the body of her girl cousin. The cousin was killed but Mahnaz lived, without physical injury.
Mahnaz and her brother R and their mother P came to the U.S. a year or so after their father Mahmoud, who was blind. Mahmoud's blindness was the result of a motorcycle accident in Tehran in the early 70s. He had become an outcast and for whatever reasons he came to the U.S. and lived with us. Who knows what twisty paths led a wounded Iranian to a Christian household in Baltimore. When Mahmoud's wife and children arrived, a year or so later, I remember hearing that P, his wife would have divorced him if they had stayed in Iran.
They had a loud, bickering relationship, which couldn't have been made an easier by culture shock. Neither Mahnaz nor her mother wore the chador, but when we went to their mosque in Washington, DC we all put it on. That day--I was 13--a Moroccan sheik, a member of a Moroccan Air Force group that my father was escorting somewhere, asked me to be his first wife. Mahnaz was sitting next to me on the schoolbus which my father was driving. She ducked her head. I was too young to feel embarrassed, and felt I should be polite. I told the man I would have to ask my father. The man said he would let me have stereos, TV's, and help him pick his other wives. Later Mahnaz said this offer was a great honor. Now I don't know. We were young girls and these men were knowledgeable about war and terrorism. Soon the Ayatollah Khomeini took U.S. people hostage and all that stuff happened, and Jimmy Carter, the President we could feel comfortable with, was trashed in his re-election bid by Ronald Reagan.
I turned 15 just after that election, and the 30-ish man I adored came to my high school production of "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" with my parents, and asked them if, when I turned 16, he could date me. And that's another story which I may never tell.
The Washington I see on the news is now vastly different from the airy, green and marble place I knew when I was a child. It is much different from the place I lived as an adult in the 90s. Bollards, Jersey barriers, Constitution Avenue blocked off, the White House surrounded by armaments... I wish my father were alive today to give me his opinion on all this. He would have understood the Muslim fundamentalist movement in a way I never will.
Once, riding in the front seat of my parents' car (1965 Dodge Dart Swinger, reddish-orange body and black vinyl top,) I sat between Mehdi and my father. Mehdi was 16 and wearing shorts. His legs were very hairy and his knees were square. We were friendly, or at least, Mehdi was friendly for an angry Iranian boy who was stranded in the U.S. I don't know his circumstances. We were talking about what was happening in Iran. "Would you fight?" I asked. Certainly. Would you kill? Yes. Would you kill me? Yes. He was controlled, calm and serious. I don't remember if my father said anything.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now it is almost four p.m. and raining. Beef stew is simmering in the oven. I am sipping red wine, John is downstairs in the living room listening to the soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou. Soon I must prepare several coolers full of lemonade, ice tea, water for the Saturday evening JEMS concert, and defrost the collection of homemade cookies that has accrued from previous weeks' concerts. Because of the rain it will be inside the Au Sable Forks community center, which is a drag. The Jay green is much more fun.
The most interesting and evocative book I read during this vacation was Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. This book brought me right back to the late 70s when my father was a missionary and he was helping folks, notably an Iranian family of four, to achieve political asylum or otherwise immigrate to the U.S. under the auspices of the Christian church. I remember some of my girlfriend Mahnaz's stories of the revolution and her escape--stories which by now are certainly edited through my own political filter and the length of time it has been since I heard those stories--but what stays with me is Mahnaz, then 15 (and I twelve), saying she had been in class at school, masked gunmen came in and machine-gunned the classroom. Mahnaz's teacher was killed and her classmates fell all around her. She fell too, underneath the body of her girl cousin. The cousin was killed but Mahnaz lived, without physical injury.
Mahnaz and her brother R and their mother P came to the U.S. a year or so after their father Mahmoud, who was blind. Mahmoud's blindness was the result of a motorcycle accident in Tehran in the early 70s. He had become an outcast and for whatever reasons he came to the U.S. and lived with us. Who knows what twisty paths led a wounded Iranian to a Christian household in Baltimore. When Mahmoud's wife and children arrived, a year or so later, I remember hearing that P, his wife would have divorced him if they had stayed in Iran.
They had a loud, bickering relationship, which couldn't have been made an easier by culture shock. Neither Mahnaz nor her mother wore the chador, but when we went to their mosque in Washington, DC we all put it on. That day--I was 13--a Moroccan sheik, a member of a Moroccan Air Force group that my father was escorting somewhere, asked me to be his first wife. Mahnaz was sitting next to me on the schoolbus which my father was driving. She ducked her head. I was too young to feel embarrassed, and felt I should be polite. I told the man I would have to ask my father. The man said he would let me have stereos, TV's, and help him pick his other wives. Later Mahnaz said this offer was a great honor. Now I don't know. We were young girls and these men were knowledgeable about war and terrorism. Soon the Ayatollah Khomeini took U.S. people hostage and all that stuff happened, and Jimmy Carter, the President we could feel comfortable with, was trashed in his re-election bid by Ronald Reagan.
I turned 15 just after that election, and the 30-ish man I adored came to my high school production of "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" with my parents, and asked them if, when I turned 16, he could date me. And that's another story which I may never tell.
The Washington I see on the news is now vastly different from the airy, green and marble place I knew when I was a child. It is much different from the place I lived as an adult in the 90s. Bollards, Jersey barriers, Constitution Avenue blocked off, the White House surrounded by armaments... I wish my father were alive today to give me his opinion on all this. He would have understood the Muslim fundamentalist movement in a way I never will.
Once, riding in the front seat of my parents' car (1965 Dodge Dart Swinger, reddish-orange body and black vinyl top,) I sat between Mehdi and my father. Mehdi was 16 and wearing shorts. His legs were very hairy and his knees were square. We were friendly, or at least, Mehdi was friendly for an angry Iranian boy who was stranded in the U.S. I don't know his circumstances. We were talking about what was happening in Iran. "Would you fight?" I asked. Certainly. Would you kill? Yes. Would you kill me? Yes. He was controlled, calm and serious. I don't remember if my father said anything.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now it is almost four p.m. and raining. Beef stew is simmering in the oven. I am sipping red wine, John is downstairs in the living room listening to the soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou. Soon I must prepare several coolers full of lemonade, ice tea, water for the Saturday evening JEMS concert, and defrost the collection of homemade cookies that has accrued from previous weeks' concerts. Because of the rain it will be inside the Au Sable Forks community center, which is a drag. The Jay green is much more fun.
Hours-old alpaca with her wobbly legs. Her herdmates are looking on with as much curiosity as an alpaca can muster. Courtesy of Jay Ward, Au Sable Valley Alpacas.
Monday, July 26, 2004
We watched the bicycle portion of the Ironman race on Sunday, July 27th, 2004. The riders passed our front yard. There's Cruiser watching john take the picture. We yelled, "Good job! Looking strong! You're a rock star! Bravo!"
I notice looking at this photo that I grew quite noticeably fat when we first moved here.
There's my old rocking chair, a gift from xtine Demaio & Don Rice upon their moving West from Brooklyn, and the busted Adirondack chair that John patched back together and painted in purple, pink and rose.
Dear All,
The 2004 Ironman Lake Placid was yesterday, and we participated all day long (with a long nap in the middle.) You can find official race coverage at http://vnews.ironmanlive.com/. Click "post race coverage" and then the most interesting options are "photos" and "video and audio."
The bike portion of the race goes in front of our house, so we were out there are 8:30 a.m. to cheer on the first rider, and went inside at about 2:30 for a nap. Cheering is tiring! We shook a gallon maple syrup bottle with pennies in it for the greatest noise effect, shouted, clapped and called out to them. Lots of the riders smiled, waved, gave the thumbs up, said things we couldn't understand because they were going so fast (the Doppler effect?) Cruiser snoozed the whole time. On the riders' second lap around many were really delighted that we were still there. "See you next year!" some of them shouted. In the minutes where there were no riders we were quiet and realized what a soft, pretty day it was, the only noise being the gently rushing river. When riders came by we heard our neighbors making noise all up and down the valley: drum beats and shouts carried for miles, and I'm sure folks heard us, too.
John had gone into Lake Placid at 6 a.m. to see the swimming start of the race, and we returned there at about 8:00 p.m. to see the end of the running marathon. What endurance these folks have. I was most moved by the families who waited near the finish line for their loved one, who slowed to grab a baby, or the hands of their children, or their dog's leash, or their partner and ran as a joyful group through the cheering stands and across the line, where they were met by volunteers, medical staff and often more of their families and friends. The official pics show that one Ironman dropped to his knees and proposed to his girlfriend, who accepted. Wow, he carried the ring all those miles?
The 2004 Ironman Lake Placid was yesterday, and we participated all day long (with a long nap in the middle.) You can find official race coverage at http://vnews.ironmanlive.com/. Click "post race coverage" and then the most interesting options are "photos" and "video and audio."
The bike portion of the race goes in front of our house, so we were out there are 8:30 a.m. to cheer on the first rider, and went inside at about 2:30 for a nap. Cheering is tiring! We shook a gallon maple syrup bottle with pennies in it for the greatest noise effect, shouted, clapped and called out to them. Lots of the riders smiled, waved, gave the thumbs up, said things we couldn't understand because they were going so fast (the Doppler effect?) Cruiser snoozed the whole time. On the riders' second lap around many were really delighted that we were still there. "See you next year!" some of them shouted. In the minutes where there were no riders we were quiet and realized what a soft, pretty day it was, the only noise being the gently rushing river. When riders came by we heard our neighbors making noise all up and down the valley: drum beats and shouts carried for miles, and I'm sure folks heard us, too.
John had gone into Lake Placid at 6 a.m. to see the swimming start of the race, and we returned there at about 8:00 p.m. to see the end of the running marathon. What endurance these folks have. I was most moved by the families who waited near the finish line for their loved one, who slowed to grab a baby, or the hands of their children, or their dog's leash, or their partner and ran as a joyful group through the cheering stands and across the line, where they were met by volunteers, medical staff and often more of their families and friends. The official pics show that one Ironman dropped to his knees and proposed to his girlfriend, who accepted. Wow, he carried the ring all those miles?
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Starlight Births A Cria
At noon today John and I arrived at Jay Ward's alpaca barn to get our instructions for care and feeding of the animals while he and his family are on vacation next week. We have been part of the alpaca-sitting team before, but this time there are new animals and new routines. Jay wasn't there yet, so we browsed around his airy, new, pleasant barn, greeting the skittish alpacas and talking to the chickens. I picked up one golden hen and petted her.Home
Jay's two little daughters, Mollie and Lucy, are responsible for the alpacas' care, which is a good advertisement for how gentle and easy the alpacas are. Jay keeps them in pairs or trios, and the little groups share a stall which lets out into the meadow that rolls down to a wide bend of the Au Sable River. In the right-hand corner stall were two lady alpacas. One of them, a brown-and-white named Starlight who Jay had described as one of the most desirable because of the color of her fur, was lying in the straw and dust in front of a fan, accompanied by a standing alpaca, her friend, and a handful of clucking murmuring hens. I flickeringly remembered Jay mentioning a pregnant female in his "help care for alpacas while we're on vacation" email. Sure enough, her sides were swollen in that rounded diamond shape I have gotten to know through a year of peripheral contact with pregnant goats and sheep. She was breathing hard, and quickly I realized it probably wasn't from the heat of the day.
The animals had recently been shorn, and their bodies were willowy, especially their long, giraffe-like necks. The pregnant female's neck was creamy and her head and face were a mixture of brown and cream--Jay later referred to this coloration as "pinto." Her topknot was as fluffy and soft as all the others' were, and her eyes large and calm and cool. I watched her waist contracting and glanced at her butt, where her unshaven brown mop of a tail was raised, rather than relaxed as the others' were. Then I saw her vulva, pink-rose-red vertical lips opening like petals from her distended bum.
"I think she's getting ready to give birth," I remarked to John. He seemed skeptical until I picked up her tail and showed him her vulva. He quickly left the barn to find Julie, Jay's wife, and let her know. Things happened very quickly then. In a blink the baby's snout had emerged an inch from the alpaca's bum, and its nostrils were quivering and snorting. Instant life! Clear liquid dripped steadily from the alpaca's bottom--her water had broken.
In two minutes Jay arrived with their two girls (Lucy the youngest in a white bike helmet, flowered top and yellow rubber muck boots, brown-haired Mollie in a purple jumper and blue rubber muck boots.) I can only imagine how Jay felt, knowing how valuable these animals are and two virtual strangers in his barn watching Starlight go into labor. He was animated and the girls were full of questions.
"What's happening? Is she alright? What should we do? What's that?" They were not grossed out but curious and caring. I suggested saying Thank you God for this miracle, and immediately felt sanctimonious, but that's how moved I was.
Soon Jay shooed us out and we talked in the sun. He knew a lot about how this was supposed to happen--two front feet should emerge very soon, he said. But when we adults returned to the barn there was still the snout, and Starlight had plainly stopped having contractions. Jay put on short blue latex gloves and I asked if he needed lube.
"I shouldn't need it," he said, "but I don't know. This is actually the first time I've been here for a birth. It's always happened in the middle of the night."
Right then I felt that it was ok for us to stay and observe, because I knew we could help. John joined Jay in the stall and hugged Starlight while Jay gently felt around the baby's emerging head. The mother squeaked and whined, and the two men stood back from her. Jay said she should be lying down. The baby's head was fully out now, and it began hooting. The mother bent her graceful neck to peer at this noisy thing projecting from her butt, and turned in circles like a cat slowly chasing its tail. Jay began to become concerned and pulled out his cell phone to call the vet who gave him phone advice, then called one of his fellow alpaca breeders, Cal Coolidge, who quickly arrived to lend a hand. Lucy and Mollie slipped in and out, not sure if they wanted to watch. The baby, called a "cria," shook its head and one long ear flopped free, and one leg emerged. Jay changed into shoulder gloves and knelt in the dust to help the mother. Her contractions were weak and infrequent, but she did not seem too distressed. Jay realized that the cria's other front leg was folded back, and he spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to ease this leg forward. Other kids joined the quiet observers--two tow-headed brothers. All four children were as much interested in Cruiser, who I had tied to a tree outside, as they were in the birth. One of the hens was making a racket and Mollie said, "She knows something's happening."
Just as Jay's concern was edging toward fear, he asked Cal to speak again with the vet. And as Cal greeted the vet, Jay got the cria's second front leg out. In a couple of minutes he had pulled while the mother pushed and the baby was out on the stall floor, and we were all glowing with relief and pride.
The cria was whole and healthy, strong enough to begin flopping around trying to stand immediately. Its wet body quickly became matted with straw and dust, and as quickly the filth dried and fell off. Cal Coolidge pulled off some of the membrane. The mother watched and nosed her baby. Neighbors began to arrive, and Jay's wife and mother-in-law. We were quietly celebratory.
From our arrival to everyone's joyful congratulations was 45 minutes. We will go back later today to get our instructions for alpaca-sitting.
At noon today John and I arrived at Jay Ward's alpaca barn to get our instructions for care and feeding of the animals while he and his family are on vacation next week. We have been part of the alpaca-sitting team before, but this time there are new animals and new routines. Jay wasn't there yet, so we browsed around his airy, new, pleasant barn, greeting the skittish alpacas and talking to the chickens. I picked up one golden hen and petted her.Home
Jay's two little daughters, Mollie and Lucy, are responsible for the alpacas' care, which is a good advertisement for how gentle and easy the alpacas are. Jay keeps them in pairs or trios, and the little groups share a stall which lets out into the meadow that rolls down to a wide bend of the Au Sable River. In the right-hand corner stall were two lady alpacas. One of them, a brown-and-white named Starlight who Jay had described as one of the most desirable because of the color of her fur, was lying in the straw and dust in front of a fan, accompanied by a standing alpaca, her friend, and a handful of clucking murmuring hens. I flickeringly remembered Jay mentioning a pregnant female in his "help care for alpacas while we're on vacation" email. Sure enough, her sides were swollen in that rounded diamond shape I have gotten to know through a year of peripheral contact with pregnant goats and sheep. She was breathing hard, and quickly I realized it probably wasn't from the heat of the day.
The animals had recently been shorn, and their bodies were willowy, especially their long, giraffe-like necks. The pregnant female's neck was creamy and her head and face were a mixture of brown and cream--Jay later referred to this coloration as "pinto." Her topknot was as fluffy and soft as all the others' were, and her eyes large and calm and cool. I watched her waist contracting and glanced at her butt, where her unshaven brown mop of a tail was raised, rather than relaxed as the others' were. Then I saw her vulva, pink-rose-red vertical lips opening like petals from her distended bum.
"I think she's getting ready to give birth," I remarked to John. He seemed skeptical until I picked up her tail and showed him her vulva. He quickly left the barn to find Julie, Jay's wife, and let her know. Things happened very quickly then. In a blink the baby's snout had emerged an inch from the alpaca's bum, and its nostrils were quivering and snorting. Instant life! Clear liquid dripped steadily from the alpaca's bottom--her water had broken.
In two minutes Jay arrived with their two girls (Lucy the youngest in a white bike helmet, flowered top and yellow rubber muck boots, brown-haired Mollie in a purple jumper and blue rubber muck boots.) I can only imagine how Jay felt, knowing how valuable these animals are and two virtual strangers in his barn watching Starlight go into labor. He was animated and the girls were full of questions.
"What's happening? Is she alright? What should we do? What's that?" They were not grossed out but curious and caring. I suggested saying Thank you God for this miracle, and immediately felt sanctimonious, but that's how moved I was.
Soon Jay shooed us out and we talked in the sun. He knew a lot about how this was supposed to happen--two front feet should emerge very soon, he said. But when we adults returned to the barn there was still the snout, and Starlight had plainly stopped having contractions. Jay put on short blue latex gloves and I asked if he needed lube.
"I shouldn't need it," he said, "but I don't know. This is actually the first time I've been here for a birth. It's always happened in the middle of the night."
Right then I felt that it was ok for us to stay and observe, because I knew we could help. John joined Jay in the stall and hugged Starlight while Jay gently felt around the baby's emerging head. The mother squeaked and whined, and the two men stood back from her. Jay said she should be lying down. The baby's head was fully out now, and it began hooting. The mother bent her graceful neck to peer at this noisy thing projecting from her butt, and turned in circles like a cat slowly chasing its tail. Jay began to become concerned and pulled out his cell phone to call the vet who gave him phone advice, then called one of his fellow alpaca breeders, Cal Coolidge, who quickly arrived to lend a hand. Lucy and Mollie slipped in and out, not sure if they wanted to watch. The baby, called a "cria," shook its head and one long ear flopped free, and one leg emerged. Jay changed into shoulder gloves and knelt in the dust to help the mother. Her contractions were weak and infrequent, but she did not seem too distressed. Jay realized that the cria's other front leg was folded back, and he spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to ease this leg forward. Other kids joined the quiet observers--two tow-headed brothers. All four children were as much interested in Cruiser, who I had tied to a tree outside, as they were in the birth. One of the hens was making a racket and Mollie said, "She knows something's happening."
Just as Jay's concern was edging toward fear, he asked Cal to speak again with the vet. And as Cal greeted the vet, Jay got the cria's second front leg out. In a couple of minutes he had pulled while the mother pushed and the baby was out on the stall floor, and we were all glowing with relief and pride.
The cria was whole and healthy, strong enough to begin flopping around trying to stand immediately. Its wet body quickly became matted with straw and dust, and as quickly the filth dried and fell off. Cal Coolidge pulled off some of the membrane. The mother watched and nosed her baby. Neighbors began to arrive, and Jay's wife and mother-in-law. We were quietly celebratory.
From our arrival to everyone's joyful congratulations was 45 minutes. We will go back later today to get our instructions for alpaca-sitting.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
The day before yesterday I saw a red salamander on a rock behind my office building. I was walking the dog, Cruiser, in a shady spot that is verdant with vinca vine and other pleasant ground covers, and glanced at the boulders that mark the corner of our building. There was an orangey-red smear, which I thought might be bubble gum dropped from the balcony above, or a broken balloon, or a toy. I peered closer, and saw the salamander shape, so my mind zoomed in on toy. I like toys. I peered closer, and saw layers of fine detail that continued to emerge as I got closer. Delicate spots, points of yellow outlined in green. Tiny transparent toes, wrinkles of an armpit where the arm was set forward and the toes on the rearward-facing arm curled under. Such detail--it couldn't be a toy. It was completely motionless, its tail curved gently, a beautifully rendered salamander in a caricature of a salamander pose. I gently touched its nearly transparent tail and the salamander jerked. Alive, definitely. As quickly the creature froze again, hoping to fool me. But I have opposable thumbs and cannot be so easily fooled. Ever so lightly I stroked its little tail, no thicker than a piece of cooked spaghetti. It edged away from me, but didn't flee. I didn't want to disturb it more so I moved back away from it and went on with the dog.
This made me want to spend time writing like Annie Dillard in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."
This made me want to spend time writing like Annie Dillard in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
One year ago today we woke up in a cabin at Cobble Mountain Lodge in Lake PLacid, bundled ourselves, three cats and one small Nuyorican dog into the Pathfinder and drove to our lawyer's office to sign papers and hand over one big check to buy this house. Then we drove back here and in an hour the hired guys from Brooklyn turned into the driveway with their huge rented truck and unloaded all our belongings into this big beautiful house. Most of what we owned was in cardboard boxes that they placed in the garage, several rows of stacks of boxes higher than my head. How did we arrive here with all that stuff when we had lived in a cramped apartment? My mother and Sally loaded us up with mathems, and in the coming weeks it was like opening presents to unpack some of the boxes and see what we had been given.
A week later Liza, Dave and the kids visited for a week, helping us settle in.
A week later Liza, Dave and the kids visited for a week, helping us settle in.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Email to friends and family...
Hi, Ladies,
We had a great weekend and I know you each would have enjoyed sharing it with us. The weather has been gorgeous, even when it rains.
Yesterday morning we arrived at the Whiteface United Methodist Church annual auction and bbq. It was so much fun we stayed til the bitter end--we were there about five hours. Things were going for such reasonable prices--it was a deal for the bidders and not so much of a fund-raiser for the church, but we all had fun and that's what matters most, I guess. Plus they probably earned a couple new members (us.) I was the chief bidder in our family and also a proud driver-up of bids that I subsequently lost--as a professional fund-raiser and dedicated community volunteer I felt it was my duty to raise the prices. I won several bottles of wine, eight passes for a raft ride at Au Sable Chasm (which we'll save for when you all visit,) dinner for two at a new restaurant, a cat mirror that looks exactly like something my mother would give me, a free night at a nice b&b, a one-person tent that a local character took with him on the Appalachian Trail, a delicate old cut glass sugar & creamer and some assorted junk. John sat there, unmoved by any of the goods, until a set of three simple wooden chairs that had been reupholstered by our neighbor came up for auction, plus two pillows to match. Then John sprang into action, and the chairs were his. We don't know where they'll go but they sure look nice. He also won a $25 certificate from our oil company, for which he paid $20. Hey, it's $5 off. We bid on but lost a rustic curio cabinet, an heirloom cedar chest, and a few other things. All in all it was a great bargain and the church thinks they made $2,000 or $3,000, most of which was NOT from us.
Then we came home, unwound and went off to the Jay Town Green for the Saturday night concert series for which we are the refreshments volunteers. As soon as we pulled up it started to pour rain, but as the band was set up inside the gazebo they decided to stick it out. So we and a dozen other die-hards stood around in the pouring rain chatting for 45 minutes until, as forecast by one farmer-artist fellow, the sky cleared from the north. The concert began and people came out of the trees, it seemed. There were probably 50 folks, including a bunch of children. Speaking of children, I am enduring fierce desires to have a child. John says if I go through one more cycle without changing my mind then he'll know it's for real and not just hormonal. (It's been months now.) And then, as he says, "We'll get one."
Last night it rained again, and we were awakened by the Essex County fire-ambulance pager that John now carries glued to his person. It goes off in the middle of the night when it rains. I suppose I will get used to it quickly, but for now it is a disturbing, surreal interruption: first a series of tones which have meaning--last night's tones included a tune in a minor key--and then the calm deep voice of the dispatcher. "Essex County Emergency system activated for Wilmington, two car incident reported on Route 86 in the Notch, one rollover, one entrapment. All Wilmington units respond." John didn't wake up. I petted his hair and listened for the second call, which usually follows the first. Sure enough, in a minute or two the tones rang again, and the dispatcher repeated his announcement and added, "One person reported unconscious, but breathing. Repeat: one person reported unconscious, but breathing." So stark, so professional. John doesn't have to respond to anything that is not a fire in Upper Jay unless they call for backup. The backup system is why we hear all fire and ambulance calls for the county. If there's a huge wreck on the Northway, for example, then John might have to back up the VFD in a town 50 miles away across six mountains. I am fast gaining respect for our local community that does all this stuff as volunteers.
This morning we woke up lazily but soon John was out on the road running. He ran for two hours, arriving home just as I came back from the farmer's market with blueberries, maple sugar and a bunch of cool stuff from a garage sale including the most fetching pair of gold sparkly pointy harem slippers with a yellow pompom on the tips (25 cents.) It's good to be a grown woman with odd sartorial taste and absurdly small feet. I noticed a Jeep Grand Cherokee for sale at a neighbor's house, which we later test drove, and a second yard sale at which I got a treadmill for John when the winter sets in and he can't run up mountains any more. The treadmill is now in our basement. I tried it. If I wear three bras I might be able to use it comfortably.
Now John's on the front porch drinking a Bud and reading the paper. I am not typing up a fund-raising plan for the SPCA, nor entering town library archives acquisitions into a database, but writing to you. In a half hour I will freshen up and take off for Lake Placid where I am meeting a friend for supper. She's a member of a group into which I've been scooped up, called Adirondack Women For a Good Time (AWFGT.) There are six of us, all (except me) lesbians in their 40s-60s who like to eat meat, drink cocktails, talk loudly about all sorts of things and get preferential treatment at restaurants because we are characters. I guess I fit in somehow.
Our kitchen garden is a luxurious profusion of edibles plus an equal amount of sturdy weeds. Flowers are everywhere, from the acres of daisies and purple/pink wildflowers in our field to the bright bursts of pink and white cleomes around the garden border. Our river cairns have withstood several rainstorms and get added to every time one or the other of us goes wading. The Nissan is parked by the road with a FOR SALE sign in it, and the Taurus is doing just fine as an only car. The cats are stoned on catnip, Cruiser the dog is gently covering the entire house with golden hairs, and blackfly season is over. I am sublimely content.
I think of you often with love, and hope to see you soon.
Hi, Ladies,
We had a great weekend and I know you each would have enjoyed sharing it with us. The weather has been gorgeous, even when it rains.
Yesterday morning we arrived at the Whiteface United Methodist Church annual auction and bbq. It was so much fun we stayed til the bitter end--we were there about five hours. Things were going for such reasonable prices--it was a deal for the bidders and not so much of a fund-raiser for the church, but we all had fun and that's what matters most, I guess. Plus they probably earned a couple new members (us.) I was the chief bidder in our family and also a proud driver-up of bids that I subsequently lost--as a professional fund-raiser and dedicated community volunteer I felt it was my duty to raise the prices. I won several bottles of wine, eight passes for a raft ride at Au Sable Chasm (which we'll save for when you all visit,) dinner for two at a new restaurant, a cat mirror that looks exactly like something my mother would give me, a free night at a nice b&b, a one-person tent that a local character took with him on the Appalachian Trail, a delicate old cut glass sugar & creamer and some assorted junk. John sat there, unmoved by any of the goods, until a set of three simple wooden chairs that had been reupholstered by our neighbor came up for auction, plus two pillows to match. Then John sprang into action, and the chairs were his. We don't know where they'll go but they sure look nice. He also won a $25 certificate from our oil company, for which he paid $20. Hey, it's $5 off. We bid on but lost a rustic curio cabinet, an heirloom cedar chest, and a few other things. All in all it was a great bargain and the church thinks they made $2,000 or $3,000, most of which was NOT from us.
Then we came home, unwound and went off to the Jay Town Green for the Saturday night concert series for which we are the refreshments volunteers. As soon as we pulled up it started to pour rain, but as the band was set up inside the gazebo they decided to stick it out. So we and a dozen other die-hards stood around in the pouring rain chatting for 45 minutes until, as forecast by one farmer-artist fellow, the sky cleared from the north. The concert began and people came out of the trees, it seemed. There were probably 50 folks, including a bunch of children. Speaking of children, I am enduring fierce desires to have a child. John says if I go through one more cycle without changing my mind then he'll know it's for real and not just hormonal. (It's been months now.) And then, as he says, "We'll get one."
Last night it rained again, and we were awakened by the Essex County fire-ambulance pager that John now carries glued to his person. It goes off in the middle of the night when it rains. I suppose I will get used to it quickly, but for now it is a disturbing, surreal interruption: first a series of tones which have meaning--last night's tones included a tune in a minor key--and then the calm deep voice of the dispatcher. "Essex County Emergency system activated for Wilmington, two car incident reported on Route 86 in the Notch, one rollover, one entrapment. All Wilmington units respond." John didn't wake up. I petted his hair and listened for the second call, which usually follows the first. Sure enough, in a minute or two the tones rang again, and the dispatcher repeated his announcement and added, "One person reported unconscious, but breathing. Repeat: one person reported unconscious, but breathing." So stark, so professional. John doesn't have to respond to anything that is not a fire in Upper Jay unless they call for backup. The backup system is why we hear all fire and ambulance calls for the county. If there's a huge wreck on the Northway, for example, then John might have to back up the VFD in a town 50 miles away across six mountains. I am fast gaining respect for our local community that does all this stuff as volunteers.
This morning we woke up lazily but soon John was out on the road running. He ran for two hours, arriving home just as I came back from the farmer's market with blueberries, maple sugar and a bunch of cool stuff from a garage sale including the most fetching pair of gold sparkly pointy harem slippers with a yellow pompom on the tips (25 cents.) It's good to be a grown woman with odd sartorial taste and absurdly small feet. I noticed a Jeep Grand Cherokee for sale at a neighbor's house, which we later test drove, and a second yard sale at which I got a treadmill for John when the winter sets in and he can't run up mountains any more. The treadmill is now in our basement. I tried it. If I wear three bras I might be able to use it comfortably.
Now John's on the front porch drinking a Bud and reading the paper. I am not typing up a fund-raising plan for the SPCA, nor entering town library archives acquisitions into a database, but writing to you. In a half hour I will freshen up and take off for Lake Placid where I am meeting a friend for supper. She's a member of a group into which I've been scooped up, called Adirondack Women For a Good Time (AWFGT.) There are six of us, all (except me) lesbians in their 40s-60s who like to eat meat, drink cocktails, talk loudly about all sorts of things and get preferential treatment at restaurants because we are characters. I guess I fit in somehow.
Our kitchen garden is a luxurious profusion of edibles plus an equal amount of sturdy weeds. Flowers are everywhere, from the acres of daisies and purple/pink wildflowers in our field to the bright bursts of pink and white cleomes around the garden border. Our river cairns have withstood several rainstorms and get added to every time one or the other of us goes wading. The Nissan is parked by the road with a FOR SALE sign in it, and the Taurus is doing just fine as an only car. The cats are stoned on catnip, Cruiser the dog is gently covering the entire house with golden hairs, and blackfly season is over. I am sublimely content.
I think of you often with love, and hope to see you soon.
Friday, July 09, 2004
John has just been inducted into the Upper Jay volunteer Fire Department and is undergoing several months of training. He's received his beeper. Last night it rained, and the first call came through at suppertime. He didn't have to go, as he is fire department, not ambulance, and it wasn't in Upper Jay. In the middle of the night, two o'clock-ish, three calls came through in quick succession. First the almost pleasant alert tones, then a slight crackle before the dispatcher's deep, calm voice. "We have received word of a car and motorcycle collision on Route 73 between Keene and Keene Valley." "...a rollover on Route 73..." and a third call saying they needed a driver and attendant. The first two calls were repeated. It was very intense and disturbing and exciting. We'll get used to this soon, I hope, and it won't blast us out of sleep. Perhaps there is a certain tone for the Upper Jay fire department and John and I will learn to recognize that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)