October 4, 2013 · 5:24 pm

The Power of Art

starry-night-by-van-gogh1We left Seattle in torrents of rain and darkness and stepped into sunny Laguna Beach for a few days this week. Our good friends opened their arms and opened their door, and throughout our stay I saw their home as an art gallery—for they live with it every day, all this local, live, and original art.

In a word, the impression it made was life-changing, a feast for the eyes.

Walk into town in Laguna and everything is about the arts, from what you hang on your walls to what you drape on your body. Walk Heisler Park overlooking the ocean and the smell of oil paints is intoxicating. From sun up to sun down for three glorious days in Laguna Beach, I submerged myself in the visual arts. I saw paintings in the landscape, the sky, and the water.

My understanding is that the town of Laguna Beach was practically founded by artists who selected it as the perfect spot along the Southern California coastline in which to set up their easels. Where the hills meet the sea and the sea circles in with southern facing coves, and a Mediterranean climate blankets all.

I am trying to carry that mind set home with me. I am talking about Art. What others find a luxury or frivolous, I find essential. I think it may be for us all, though many don’t know it. And that, in fact, may be what is wrong with this country.

For I know this: if everyone were involved in the arts, either in a creating or enjoying capacity, the world would be a better place.

We can do this. Think of the miles of corridors and acres of waiting rooms in all our institutions and offices, and what is on the walls but framed printed reproductions. Over and over again, the same prints. I think we’ve gone numb to art in this country.

Have we forgotten that there are artists out there? Think of the number of art students alone. All the original art being made with hardly any hope of selling. Have we forgotten the power of art and how it can save us? American abstract painter Darby Bannard said it well, “The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.”

Just as a writer sees and hears with words, one who takes up photography starts to see photographically. Sculpt, and become extraordinarily sensitive to texture and form. Spend an afternoon in art galleries, and walk back out into a world that is suddenly as rich an oil painting. On and on, art saves us from our worst selves by putting life on a higher plain.

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September 25, 2013 · 5:12 pm

Groundhog Nation

joel-vollmer-02-03-09With a weariness from having presided at five memorial services for mass killings during his five years in office, President Obama noted this week at the Washington Navy Yard, “Part of what wears on us as well is the sense that this has happened before. Part of what wears on us, what troubles us so deeply…. is how this senseless violence that took place here in the Navy Yard echoes other recent tragedies.”

“…. sometimes I fear there’s a creeping resignation,” he shared, “that these tragedies are just somehow the way it is. That this is now the new normal.”

Have we become stuck in time, living the same occurrence over and over? In the effort to enact gun control in this country, it would seem so.

“That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks…. and move on,” writes The Guardian in a September 21 article entitled “American Gun Use is Out of Control: Shouldn’t the World Intervene?”

“No other advanced nation endures this kind of violence,” continued President Obama at the Washington Navy Yard memorial service. “In the United Kingdom, in Australia, when just a single mass shooting occurred in those countries, they understood there was nothing ordinary about this kind of carnage. They endured great heartbreak, but they also mobilized and they changed. And mass shootings became a great rarity.”

What does it take to change public policy?

It took years and years but we ended the war in Vietnam.

We went from mindless littering to respecting the environment. We learned to recycle, compost, and plant trees.

We learned to respect gay rights. For gay rights to be recognized it took enough people coming out for everyone to discover a gay person in their lives. Someone they cared about, perchance.

Are we waiting now for someone in everyone’s life to get shot before we enact gun control in this country? Must it become a crisis of that magnitude? In many of our communities, it already is.

“It may not happen tomorrow and it may not happen next week. It may not happen next month. But it will happen,” assures Obama, “because it’s the change that we need.”

“…. no nation sees itself as outsiders do,” observes The Guardian. “Half the country is sane and rational, while the other half simply doesn’t grasp the inconsistencies and historic lunatic of its position, which springs from the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, and is derived from English common law and our 1689 Bill of Rights. We dispensed with these rights long ago, but American gun owners cleave to them with the tenacity that previous generations fought to continue slavery.”

Oh, and we abolished slavery too. Let’s not underestimate our ability to fly like an eagle.

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September 18, 2013 · 4:00 pm

Finding Time (or Growing Mornings)

If I want to get anything done now, I have to squeeze it into the morning. That is where I am in life. Morning is my best time for doing anything. If only I could tell myself it’s always five o’clock in the morning somewhere!

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It wasn’t always this way. Like the sun & the moon & the tides and & seasons, the best time of day changes with well, time.

In adolescence, it was clearly the night. I wasn’t alone in having enormous  energy all night long, and difficulty rising anytime before noon. High schools should be rescheduled into night schools to accommodate for this phenomena. The hard part would be finding teachers. Students might have to police themselves and run their own curriculum. Older adults and high school students would totally miss each other, and perhaps that would be a good thing.

We are either Morning People, Afternoon People, or Night People, and as we age, we change tribes. I haven’t figured out who the Afternoon People are.

“I know this much,” writes Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending, “…. there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.”

Which reminds me to get busy and redesign my clock. I would have it that the clock read a.m. all day long, and only go into p.m. at night, when I want to wind down. Mornings simply aren’t long enough anymore, and if I am going to accomplish anything in life I must try to absorb the Afternoons too—until someone comes around to claim them.

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September 11, 2013 · 8:52 pm

Just Doing It

How to be your own personal trainer. I should be able to do this. Look at how I have taken to writing. First thing in the morning, before getting dressed, before going online or going anywhere, I write my Morning Pages. And while I hope to make more of a dent in the writing world than just being a disciple of Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” I find a certain comfort in that. What else would explain why I have practiced it for more than a dozen years?

Sitting each day for Morning Pages is my zazen.

Now I am hoping to bring about another practice in the form of physical exercise. The longer I live, the more connections I see between things. Walking, writing, they are the same. In writing and in walking I am making the same expression in different mediums.

“We live as we move,” writes Julia Cameron, “a step at a time, and there is something in gentle walking that reminds me of how I must live if I am to savor this life I have been given.”

I have started with walking the 4.3 miles of The Loop daily, no ifs, ands, or buts. https://alittleelbowroom.com/2013/04/03/the-loop/

At one time I had a personal trainer. Well, I hired a friend to walk with me. Not that I don’t love to walk, I do. But this was different. She was younger, thinner, more fit than I, and faster. Whereas I am basically a browser and overly interested in homes and gardens.

One of the first things she insisted on was that I leave my little dog at home. I felt bad about that, but there would be no sniffing around in the bushes or wandering off in the grass for us. We had to hightail it every step of the way.

There is nothing like the power of the knock on the door. A personal trainer comes to your place and there is nowhere to hide and no way out. Throw in the friendship factor, and I didn’t want to inconvenience her by canceling. So I never did. Whereas left to my own devices I can come up with a million reasons why I haven’t the time: the house needs cleaning, the garden needs weeding, the manuscript needs editing, or I can convince myself that what I really need is a nap.

Now my friend has moved and I am on my own again, trying to make it happen every day. My technique is to pretend that I am her, not me. I know all my tricks too well: the penchant for short-cuts, the stop-in-my-tracks gazing at view. In other words, I have to be her to push me. It’s still a joint effort.

Then, with The Loop under my belt, I find I go out of my way to add as many more miles as I can in the course of the day. As in, one good turn deserves another. Here I think like a NYC woman, or think environmentally, and walk everywhere I can. It helps to live in a city or live in a town, but that market may be closer than you realize.

Hoping I will become as addicted to my mileage stats as I am to my blog stats on the WordPress website, my tech savvy daughters have given me a fitbit to track myself each day. Again: walking, writing, it’s the same thing. I’m getting it, really I am.

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September 4, 2013 · 4:41 pm

O Canada!

Slip away for two weeks and what happens? My dear, dear, President Obama loses his mind and threatens air strikes over Syria.

We keep returning to Canadian waters in our boat. The goal this time was to go beyond The Puget Sound, through The Gulf Islands, up the Straight of Georgia, and into Desolation Sound. In speaking to my father, I called it our “destiny” when what I meant was destination. But I don’t know; maybe it is our destiny?

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Located between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island, Salt Spring Island, in particular, has a distinctive history. In the mid 1800’s ex-slaves from Missouri who had made it to California came up from San Francisco at the invitation of Sir James Douglas, the first provincial governor of British Columbia. Here the British granted all the rights denied them by the United States: the right to vote, to become part of the local militia, to homestead and own property. Some of their descendants are established there today.

Then in the 1960’s and 70’s, American draft dodgers began arriving on Salt Spring and once again the island opened its arms. Again, many stayed and are among the artists, musicians, farmers, and small business owners contributing to the quality of life there today.

Are they ready for another wave of American ex-pats?

I don’t want to come home if we have to go to war. With all the work there is to do, we have to protest this now too?

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August 29, 2013 · 12:24 am

Away, Away

“…. And as a nap slowly steals her away, she feels herself engulfed in a wave of absolute calm. She shuts her eyes. Drifts off, untroubled, everything clear, and radiant, and all at once.” Khaled Hoseini, And the Mountains Echoed

I am on my back on the deck and my eyes are closed. The boat is Desolation Sound bound, inching through the Puget Sound, Gulf Islands, and up the Straight of Georgia. I feel like I’m living in an Annie Dillard novel, illustrated every few miles on shore by Edward Hopper lighthouses, the only structures around. My husband tells me dolphin are leaping in our wake when I nap. That, he thinks, will keep me from sleeping. What he doesn’t know is I may be dreaming of whales. 

As we make our way a sailboat motors by named “Breeze.” Moon jellyfish are pulsing beneath us, mountain peaks rise rounded, pointed, and tilting like witches’ hats, and Crayola white clouds as drawn by children. Otherwise it’s trees, trees, trees forevermore—a landscape that’s all-preserved, all-good, except when you think about bears. Whenever I step ashore, I think about bears a lot.

When I was young and growing up Catholic, I thought the ideal way to die would be in my sleep, in church. This required some practice in falling asleep during sermons. Remember when nearly every elderly person used to “pass away,” as they said, “in their sleep”? Lately everyone seems to die of specific causes, and so I was almost pleased to hear of someone dying in her sleep. Since that strikes me as a simple, peaceful and painless way to go, it’s good to know it can still happen.

I don’t need the church now, but I do need my sleep, day and night, more than ever. I am a napper. There, I’ve admitted it.

I had to help persuade my dad at eighty-something, still steeped in Protestant Work Ethic, into napping. “It’s alright, dad. Think of naps as prayers.” Does he know what a running start I had on him?

Napping and life go hand in hand for me. Just as in boating when we shove away from the shore–and leave it all behind, I love flying above the cloud cover, when it’s hard to imagine a country down there with all it’s configurations of land and water, all its human strives and heartbreaks. Away, away–apparently I am drawn to that.

Stretched out on my back on the deck, I could be anyone, anywhere, any age.

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July 25, 2013 · 3:52 pm

Social Media Off-Roading

What-are-the-Factors-of-Cheating-in-a-Relationship1You can never accuse me of being too familiar with popular culture. Mention a television show, and the chances are I’ve never heard of it, never mind seen it. And as games go into The World Series, Superbowl, or NBA Finals, I often have to ask who’s playing. And so I recently stumbled upon a couple social networks for adulterers, a good ten or twelve years after their inception.

It came across my desk in a curious manner: by way of poll results among their cheating members. Illicit Encounters, which operates out of the UK, found the Audi to be the most owned car, followed by BMW and Mecedes. “Cars can reveal a lot about their owners,” suggests Mike Taylor, spokesman for Illicit Encounters. “All the cars in the top 5 represent our members; they are typically successful, motivated, high achievers who are less likely to settle for something they find unsatisfying, be it a car or a relationship.” Not surprisingly, the website’s poll also found that “72% of Illicit Encounters members were likely to change cars within three years to refresh to a newer brand or model.”

Ashley Madison, the online dating site out of Canada for married cheaters, discovered that most of its female members shop at Banana Republic. Furthermore, a third of the women surveyed stated that they had doubled their spending on appearance since they started cheating, according to a report in The Huffington Post.

Top dining preferences were Morton’s and Ruth Chris. “Chain restaurants are larger and less conspicuous,” explains Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman. “Steak houses are always a popular affair destination since they’re not only dimly lit but also commonly found in business districts, close to hotels where these types of dates typically end.”

According to Ashley Madison, a new member signs up every nine seconds. “Next to Facebook, we’re probably going to be the fastest growing social network on the planet,” boasts Noel Biderman. With 19 million anonymous users in 27 countries, Ashley Madison has a translation engine for those interested in hooking up internationally. “America is the largest market for adultery,” says Biderman, but he fully anticipates that the next largest market will be Japan.

“I did not invent adultery. Along with marriage there is infidelity. I am merely trying to create a near perfect affair,” explains Noel Biderman.

As a former sports agent and sports attorney, Biderman estimated that “90% of my work dealt with adultery. So I thought starting a site in which married people could communicate would be profitable.” And when he read that nearly a third of the users of internet dating services were married people pretending to be single, he knew he had found a niche.

But even in the course of researching for this blog post, my hands felt a little dirty. And I wondered, why are we listening to him? The man who states “Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment,” is married and claims to be monogamous himself. “It is interesting,” writes Ilana Angel on Jewish Journal.com, that Biderman “is ‘allowing people to be honest,’ when the honesty is with strangers, not the person they exchanged vows with.”

Amanda Biderman, the person he exchanged vows with ten years ago, has her own issues with it. “I would be devastated if Noel cheated on me,” Amanda Biderman said on The View, “but I would not blame it on a website. It’s servicing a need out there, and unfortunately it exists. It’s sad.”

And she adds, “Cheating is destructive.”

Nevertheless the slogan for Ashley Madison reads, “Life is short. Have an affair.” Amanda’s face is the corporate model. Seems like an awfully nice woman to find herself in the middle of a cyber pimping business.

Audis, Banana Republic, and Morton’s. What is it I resent in the results of these polls? Why, it’s what it implies: that the rest of us, the monogamous, are driving around in Fords and Chevys, wearing L.L. Bean apparel, and eating at Olive Garden.

I hope not.

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July 17, 2013 · 4:18 pm

Wish You Were Here (or 911)

dogs-playing-pokerTruth be known, there are currently more dogs than children in Seattle. At last count, 45 pet- friendly hotels, 38 pet-friendly attractions, and 150 pet-friendly restaurants. You say you want to go out to the San Juan Islands this summer? No problem. Dogs are seated like passengers on Kenmore Air Seaplanes. All of this puts Seattle in one of the top twenty destinations for travel with a dog.

I am not at all surprised. I live here. In our neighborhood in Queen Anne the local pet store, All the Best, is nestled between two popular watering holes for humans, The Parragon and Hilltop Ale House. The first time I walked in I was taken back by all the dog furniture and dog clothing (rain gear and fleece jackets) on display.

Oh, I get it, I thought. Dogs are the new American Girl Doll!

Some of us spoiled our daughters in that sense, and now we can spoil our dogs. And we do, even as they sleep in our beds and wear their own fur coats.

Dog people meet dog people, and often learn the dogs’ names long before we learn each other’s. Thus I knew Max and Millie (Teacup Yorkies) before befriending Sandra and George, and Callie (a Yorkie-Shitzu mix) before becoming Teri and Dan’s friend. However, six years later I am still “Coco’s mom” to many on the hill.

So at a time when some dogs have their own facebook accounts, why was I surprised to hear from Callie, the Yorkie-Shitzu, while visiting Whistler in B.C. Canada? She was staying at the Westin and posted a photograph of the hotel’s monogrammed doggy bed, bowls and snacks. (Teri and Dan presumably had their own).

And there you have it, the blog post I was going to write. Oh the places we were going to go, and the fun we were going to have! Doggy lattes and biscotti at dog bakeries. Dog cake mixes, dog birthday cakes, dog party hats and treat boxes. Homemade ice cream for dogs. Dog cards. Dog houses: cottage style, log cabin, Mediterranean or modern. Four poster beds with a Simmons Beauty Rest mattress for dogs (coil spring, covered in fleece). Waterproof fleece dog jackets, raincoats, cooling coats, goose-down filled coats, and faux fur lined “dreamcoats.” Dog shoes, dog boots, boot liners. And doggie doorbells that hang low enough from door knobs for pets to reach…. you can see where this was going.

Then my daughter in San Francisco phoned, waking me from my reverie. Suddenly the blog post title changed from Wish You Here Here to 911. Dogs, it seems, are under siege in San Francisco. Have you heard? Tainted meatballs poisoned with strychnine have been discarded on city streets in various neighborhoods including Twin Peaks, Lower Haight, Cole Valley, Hayes Valley, Bernal Heights, and Diamond Heights—dog frequented neighborhoods all. Community members have found and picked up hundreds of these tainted meatballs. Pet owners such as my daughter, need be vigilant on walks.

Last week a Park Police Station Inspector told a community meeting that the tainted meatballs may have been planted by someone afraid of dogs. Others suggest that the perpetrator detests dogs. That this individual has mental health issues is as clear as gun laws in Florida are flawed. Oskar, a much loved dachshund, was killed. No one wants to lose any more.  For we are now the dogs’ best friend, and it’s our job to protect them–if only from the worst of us.

Anyone with information is encouraged to call (415) 554 9400.

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June 27, 2013 · 4:07 pm

Meditation for the Greatest Generation

“It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.” Lewis Grizzard

One day my mother phoned a number of her old, long-distance friends and every one of them was in some point of transition to a retirement home. One was already settled, a block from the water’s edge in Juno Beach, Florida.

“But how can this be?” she cried, “When just a few years ago I was only sixteen!”

My parents are presently caught up in their own such move. My mother is subject to purging moods where she would get rid of everything and run like her house was on fire. Whereas Dad would have it that they just not go, and fights it every step of the way.

I arrived on the scene and found a sofa missing and the living room rug rolled up but rug pad down, in a house that was still on the market. I was at a crossroads: assist them in packing or restage their house for showing? Or both.

It is important that family help. Mom and Dad had hired a lady, “a down-sizing expert” she called herself, who came and helped herself to things. She combed through their drawers and closets and went off with—well, they are not quite sure what she went off with or where it all went. A Cardinal Cushing Consignment Shop was mentioned, and I have every intention to go there to look for a silver salad utensil that I had expressed interest in. It was perfect for serving a dish we adore in my home, Insalata Caprese (sliced fresh buffalo mozzeralla, sliced fresh tomatoes, fresh basil, seasoned with salt, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil or balsalmic vinegar or both).

My mother and I have done this dance before–she wanted a debutante and what she got was a hippie. There were visits home from college where my blue jeans would magically disappear in the laundry, after all the time invested to soften them, before manufacturers ever dreamed of stone-washing. So I became accustomed then to walking down to The Child and Family Services Thrift Shop in town, combing the racks for my blue jeans and buying them back. I would do this again for that silver utensil.

Which brings me to the tomato. I have a friend who just this week packed up all her belongings and moved from Seattle to San Diego for the tomatoes. Well, there were other factors on her list, but tomatoes, she tells me, were in the top three. I can understand that. I had an aunt who once said of the caprese salad, “I could live on this!” She was the one who introduced me to caprese, and I must say there has never been a more delicious, or more simple, salad since.

I would like to tell my parents it’s not all about the big things in life, like the move, but rather, the little things, such as vine-ripened tomatoes.

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June 12, 2013 · 6:46 pm

Reign of Water

What is the phenomena when something you love in life, rises up and knocks you down? I recently had that experience returning from a writing workshop in Tuscany where we were forever outdoors, well fed, enjoying wine, morning, noon, and night, basking in and absorbing all the natural and artistic beauty, and giving back by way of writing. If I were to design a heaven for myself, this might be it.

My intention in coming home, was good. Something along the lines of I will just try to bring it all back with me. I saw no reason for it to end. I still had my Tuscan magazine piece to finish, and if possible, I would like to feel as inspired here as I did there.

And so upon landing, as soon as I had unpacked all my notes and books and recipes, I flung open the doors of our house and made every effort to turn our little English Tudor in Seattle into an Italian Villa. By slow-cooking our meals, braising beef, veal, pork or lamb, my husband and I would embrace eating and drinking with the same daily seriousness as the Tuscans. And the wine would continue to pour….

That first night I made Balsamic-Glazed Short Ribs, which smelled divine all day but in the end was too rich a dish for us, too late at night. And the wine, whatever happened to the wine, so pure in Italy? I am not the first to suggest that one can drink quite well in Europe with no adverse effect, but come home and…. Well, I suspect additives and preservatives to meet the requirements of the US Food and Drug Administration. I know everyone is currently bent out of shape over privacy issues with NSA, but personally I am much more concerned about this.

In other words, I tried to bring the Tuscan lifestyle home and it didn’t translate. Instead, a perfect storm ensued: the wine hit, food poisoning, and dehydration…. And for what I would describe as a week, though my husband says it was just days, I lay about trying to get some water into me, drop by drop.

I had all that time to think about water.

Where my mind was not allowed to go, however, was to food and drink.

So I thought of a handful of friends who have stopped drinking over the years. You know who you are, I love you, and thank you. You pulled me through and showed me where to go if I ever got out of the trouble I was in.

I may change my mind oneday, but right now I’m pretty passionate. I want to let this gentle “Reign of Water” run its course—and see where it goes. Perhaps it will be my most productive and prolific period yet.

I’ll toast my water goblet to that.

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