June 27, 2012 · 4:27 pm

Little Talks and Ethernets

Every week at this time I have a little talk with myself. “That blog isn’t going to write itself, you know?” I ask. Blogs don’t write themselves any more than novels, memoirs, or short stories do. As a mom raising girls I was famous for having “little talks.” In an effort not to embarrass them or myself, I’d pull them aside or wait for an opportune time to “have our little talk.” We seemed to settle everything this way. Now I have no one to pull over but myself, and apparently this has to happen repeatedly. Especially with one of the activities I most enjoy, which is writing.

Blogging holds my feet to the fire in a way I haven’t known since grad school. My daughter set up my blog for me. She was twenty-six at the time and while I was still hemming and hawing about whether or not I even wanted a blog, she set it all up on WordPress. Seeing it, I could title it. But she got me rolling. Her recommendation was that blogging be weekly, at a minimum. “You will lose all your readers, mom, if you do not post consistently.” It must have been pounded into me. That was last Thanksgiving, twenty-nine posts ago, and I haven’t missed a beat. Still, what she can’t see is that I go through this insane ritual every week like a high-wire act, trying to dodge out of it. In the meantime, it’s good practice….

One foot in this world, one foot in the old, that’s the precarious balance of our time—unless one is young enough, or nerdy enough, to be at home in the ethernets. I am reminded of a story of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation to the throne in 1952, following the death of her father, King George VI. Elizabeth too was twenty-six years old. This would be the first coronation ceremony since the advent of television and BBC would be broadcasting it live. Millions of British citizens were expected to huddle around television sets, many for the first time, and one of the overriding national concerns was: How are we going to know if the ladies aren’t wearing their hats?

That’s kind of where we are today, between worlds. Oh, the things that work for my daughters that weren’t in place for us. They have no idea. We were moving about and marrying and changing our names at their age, and all too easily losing track of one another. But with today’s technology and social networks, the twenty-somethings are part of an ever-growing community they carry with them from school to school, job to job, city to city, one name to the next. They and their friends and acquaintances are like satellites positioned and moving around the world at all times, and I am in awe, really.

Now, if I could just pry my heel out of this net….

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June 20, 2012 · 5:59 pm

My Prayer to the World

For decades now my Sunday morning ritual has typically been walking or gardening. I believe that by staying off the religious road I have found a more spiritual path. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking that I might go to church if I could find there what I find so readily on walks, in the garden, or in the arts: and that is something new, something realized, or unexpected.

For example: at this month’s graduation speech at the UW’s Foster School of Business, the student speaker quoted the poet Mary Oliver with the line, “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” And last month at “Resonance,” a Seattle Pro Musica concert in St. James Cathedral, we witnessed the world premiere of “I Sing Love,” a choral hymn by Bernard Hughes embracing Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Remarkable moments like these are not only what I most love in life, they are what I live for!

Through love bitter things seem sweet,

Through love copper becomes gold.

Through love dregs taste like pure wine.

Through love pain is as a balm.

Through love thorns become the roses,

Through love vinegar becomes sweet wine.

(Excerpt from “Two Wings to Fly,” written by Jalal ad-Din Muhammud Rumi)

Just as love is spoken in many languages, I see the world’s religions as different expressions of the same thing. So I believe in it all. Walk into my writing room with me for a moment. A collection of antique Santos and a stone Buddha sit upon the writing table, silent and nonjudgmental.  I could never write with anyone but Buddha and saints looking on. Crosses hang around the neck of the tallest Santo. Milagros and crucifixes adorn the walls, a reproduction of a Hindu temple carving that was given to me, a handmade candle from the Holy Land, a Wiccan wreath from Salem, Massachusetts, a Native American dream catcher hangs in a window, and a Tibetan prayer flag drapes in a corner. Initially I strung the prayer flags across the room but it looked too much like a gas station.

Despite all the icons, it makes perfect sense that I would wind up in The Pacific Northwest—a region so secular, it’s almost European. One Sunday morning a Seattle friend and I were walking and the subject of religious intolerance came up. She is agnostic, and you know me, I don’t declare myself anything. The insufferable Republican primaries were raging at the time and about to swing through the South, where many of the Evangelicals were having a “problem” with Romney’s Mormon faith. As outsiders, I can’t tell you how provincial and tribal this looks! Ironic, isn’t it, that it falls on people like us to be the most religiously tolerant in all the land? I mean, we don’t care if you are Muslim or Mormon or what-have-you. And I’m proud of that.

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June 13, 2012 · 5:45 pm

Sufferin’ Succotash

“There are many ways to love a vegetable. The most sensible way is to love it well- treated.”  M.F.K. Fisher

Remember when the old refrain “eat your vegetables” could be heard ‘round and  ‘round the dinner table? How did we go from that to making salad an entrée, to going for the grilled vegetables even before the steak? Well, they’re all good now. Even Brussels sprouts. Especially Brussels sprouts! Turns out, it was all in the preparation.

Foodies have fun bashing the 1950’s, for good reason. With the exception of door-to- door milk delivery (even in the cities!), nearly everything was mass- produced, processed, and packaged. We’re talking Velveeta cheese, Jell-O mold salads, bottled salad dressings, and frozen t.v. dinners. Cakes came from a box, gravy from packets, whipped cream from an aerosol container, and unless you lived on a farm, vegetables from cans. One has to wonder where we would be in the U.S.A. today had it not been for Francophiles Julia Childs and James Beard. In an country infatuated with “instants,” their message was to take the time to cook good food, and to cook it right. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that I even like lima beans now.

The old way was to over-cook (canned) vegetables. The new way is to eat it raw, or under-cook everything fresh. The old way was to peel vegetables. The new way is to leave them in their skins. The old way was to submerge the vegetables in water, over-boil, and then pour all the water down the drain. The new way is to sauté, roast, or grill the vegetables. Or if boiling, in as little water as possible, as quickly as possible, and know that whatever juices remain are beneficial and should be used—as stock, if not in that particular dish. The new way brought extraordinary color, flavor, crispness, and nutrition back to the vegetables. It got us growing our own again, shopping farmers markets, or organically. Washing, cutting and chopping, and creating a still life each evening in the kitchen as beautiful as any painting.

My husband and I are very fond of the artichoke, which can be grown in most any climate and harvested summer through fall. For this he has perfected an aioli sauce, and we like to dip the leaves in it while sitting on the sofa viewing Anderson Cooper’s news program at night. Eaten in this manner an artichoke alone can be filling, or maybe it’s the news. Artichokes remind me of my parents, when they were younger, and I was younger, and I’d come into their bedroom at night to find them sitting up in bed with pillows propped against the headboard, mom in her nightgown, dad in his pajamas, eating artichokes in bed. A dish of mayonnaise between them for dipping the leaves, and a small glass of wine on each nightstand. They too were watching television, a small black & white portable set well across the room. This was a ritual they must have engaged in frequently when artichokes were in season. Consequently, the artichoke is the only vegetable I associate with the bedroom, so much so that when we enjoy ours, I keep thinking we are doing something that belongs in bed.

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June 6, 2012 · 6:30 pm

The Speed of Life 101

So it goes.  The wheel turns, generation after generation,

around and around.  We ride for a little while, get off and

somebody else gets on.  Over and over, again and again.

(excerpt from “Seventy-Two is Not Thirty Five,” by David Budbill)

 

My friend and I are at the University of Washington for the undergraduate graduation celebration at the Foster School of Business. Students file in donning caps and gowns, filling twenty-one straight rows of chairs. The graduates look loose and excited, cheering each other on. We spot my friend’s son at last. He is tall, good looking, and beaming. Much as I remember him at his Indiana Jones birthday party when he turned five years old, just yesterday.  It’s been quite a ride. Anyway, the important thing is that he looks as extraordinarily happy today as on that day when he was dressed in little khakis shorts and shirt, fedora, and boots.

Here he is in the auditorium hooting and calling much like he did on that day leading the charge at the piñata. It’s easy to see that he’s on good terms with everyone around him now, just as he was then. Back when we knew all our children’s friends. His mother, my friend, had decorated the yard with Tiki torches, dried palm fronds, and painted masks posted on the fence and gate. Today his black gown drapes, and as he adjusts his cap I remember the fedora flying off his head as he swung his way through on a jungle-gym-turned-obstacle-course. That hat, purchased one day at Disneyland, was what started the whole “Indiana Jones” themed birthday party. Children in costume become their part, and on that day he was indeed a miniaturized Harrison Ford. Today he’s “The Graduate.”

The student speaker catches my attention with the delightful line from the poet, Mary Oliver, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” For his fifth birthday party his mom had made a Volcano cake with dark chocolate “lava” embedded with rock candy and gummy worms, sprinkled with cocoa, and adorned with plastic flies. This week he turns twenty-two with a double-major in Entrepreneurship and Marketing and his tastes are Epicurean.

Guests at his birthday party dug for buried treasure, arrowheads and glittery “gems.” The Foster School of Business grads intend to find success. The student speaker suggests that “when we do the things we love, we do them well.” They are the strategic thinkers. All I can do is hope. Everyone assembled here believes in bright futures. “Optimism in the face of adversity” is the theme of the keynote address. “At some point pessimism about the future becomes self-fulfilling,” he warns. Don’t be afraid to fail.

As little Indiana Jones he practiced cracking his make-shift bullwhip on the patio floor, again and again.  Today he is flicking his tassel. The graduates throw their hats in the air and it is over. Or just begun. Just like that.

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May 30, 2012 · 7:20 pm

The Power of Story

We gather at The Richard Hugo House in Seattle, chairs scattered around small tables, a simple podium up front on a platform. New City Theatre inhabited the space before it became a venue for the literary arts. What was once a stage for cabaret performances now hosts readings. There is a lot of energy between these walls and we tap into it.

Writers trickle in from as far as Portland. Students and alum of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Goddard, we try to do this sort of thing often because, as far as we are concerned, we have found our tribe. Except that it is smokeless, the room resembles a café scene in Greenwich Village back in the Beat Generation. A man and his poems, a woman and a piece from her memoir. Someone refers to “all the love in the room….” And I feel a nostalgia for that era of acoustical guitars and ballads, before everything in the arts became so heavily produced.

The long lost art of readings, where writings are offered as gifts. I come away from each one knowing I am holding and have been entrusted with an enormous bouquet. Readings reintroduce each one of us to the primal importance of story. At a reading we are in that heaven again and wonder why it ever stopped? Why that gap between childhood and graduate school without having been read to regularly? Parents get busy or children run off or everyone tells themselves, “oh well, she can read now on her own.” But it’s not the same.

I run a weekly writing workshop for seniors and start each session by reading a story aloud. The story suggests a prompt, and the participants bow their heads and write on that for an hour. And in that time I see so much joy on their faces. How often writing out an experience enhances it. While mining for memories, present aches and pains fall away. We bring ourselves home with stories, and give value to our lives. At the end of each session we all read what we have written. In listening to each other’s stories, we experience common human values. Lives link with the storyteller. The personal becomes universal, and another “tribe” is formed.

My father tells me he is fond of reading a book to my mother in bed. His voice is soothing, and she often falls asleep. At which point he keeps going, I think, reading aloud into the darkened room, giving the gift of story.

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May 23, 2012 · 7:02 pm

Irrational Fears in an Irrational Time

Two presidential candidates, attractive, bright, Harvard scholars both, stand before us in a crowd. Spring is warm, much like summer, and the candidates have removed their jackets. Obama rolls up his sleeves as well. Mitt leaves his sleeves long, pressed, and buttoned at the cuff. Obama reaches out to people with both arms. Mitt methodically shakes hands with his right hand, trying to give a formal hand shake, over and over, despite the fact that folks are all around him. I see a world of choice in this election. One man is real. His ears stick out as do ours. While the other man looks computer rendered. “Mannequin man,” I call him.

Beware of mannequin men, women, and children. As a child I believed that mannequins were simply posing by day, but came alive at night. The grandest department store in Hartford, Connecticut at that time was G. Fox & Co., where legend had it, female mannequins were modeled after Katherine Hepburn, also Hartford born and bred. Her father, Thomas Hepburn, a prominent physician, and her mother, Katherine Houghton Hepburn, head of the Connecticut Suffrage Association. Now as fond as I am of Kate, I know her to have been formidable. Twenty years later in La Jolla, California, the seamstress on my wedding dress, a close friend of one of Kate’s nieces, confided that Kate had nothing to do with her niece because she had failed to complete her college education. Aunt Kate held her standards as high as she held her neck, and, like a mannequin, she did not bend.

Anyway, back in Connecticut, back in time, my best friend shared this fear of mannequins with me and together we fed each other’s fantasy. On sleepovers, in that moment just before sleep, one of us would mechanically move an arm, raise a leg, or turn her head, and with all the woodenness and soullessness of an android, come alive at night as a mannequin. Apparently the only way to deal with a mannequin was to become one yourself, and so we terrified both ourselves and each other by never wanting to be the first one to snap out of it.

Whether it’s your best friend acting, plaster, or plastic, now I know what this phenomena is called: The Uncanny Valley Effect. Coined by robotics professor, Masahiro Mori, in 1970, “The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The ‘valley’ in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.” (Wikipedia).

These are strange times and we stand at a precipice. While “mannequin man” tips us into an uncanny valley, the president, on the other hand, is one of us. I’m just saying….

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May 16, 2012 · 7:01 pm

Roche Harbor, Roche Harbor

It had to have been a dark day in January when a “Save the Date” card arrived for the Grand Banks Rendezvous, May 10-13, at Roche Harbor Marina on San Juan Island in the Puget Sound. I’m sure I looked at the photograph like I was looking at another life, long ago and far away. Nevertheless I posted the card on the kitchen wall, and last week we packed up, grabbed a good friend and our dog and headed out.

First I should explain that my husband has had two expressions of mid-life crisis that I know of, one is a silver Boxster Porsche, and the other, a 36’ Grand Banks trawler. One is speedy and the other, slow. Boating has so capsized our world, we are beginning to dream of living on the boat in all the summer months of our retirement. Cares are left on land and water becomes an elixir. But that’s another story. The one I want to tell now is of the annual Grand Banks Rendezvous, which is fast becoming more fun than college reunions. More fun than anything.

People from all over–Aspen, Philadelphia, and somewhere in Texas, as well as some of our own neighbors in Seattle— keep their boats in the Puget Sound. Grand Banks owners tend to be former sailors who have moved onto something that is a little less work. This sets everyone apart from other stinkpot owners, or so we like to think. Grand Banks slip in and out as quietly as kayaks. And while many other boats are designed to be condos at sea, there is something so outdoorsy and friendly about the Grand Banks. Like a row of front porches tied up to the dock.

That’s the nostalgic quality of both the boat and Roche Harbor, which has to be one of my favorite spots on planet earth. For me Roche Harbor is reminiscent of The Bandbox, a big music hall on a small lake in my childhood in Connecticut. For my husband, it’s the Catalina Casino building, where he summered. Everyone has someplace. It’s sunny, people look healthy, and I think it’s the light. Have I mentioned the whole subculture of children and dogs? Papa may be in an engine class, mama busy mastering navigation, but children are endlessly entertained with a simple fishing pole or just a bucket and a net. In all my times out there, I have yet to hear a baby cry, a child whine, or an adult have a cross word. Everyone is away from cell phones, ipads and computers, and our dogs get a taste of life off-leash.

All my bright colored clothes come out here, I stow them on the boat, all the reds, whites and blues–saving the khakis, blacks, browns, and grays for Seattle. But that down pouring of light, nostalgia, and particular patriotism—with a call to colors at every sunset, saluting the British, Canadian, and American flags and proudly playing all anthems. Here it feels almost like international waters, and it’s rather fun for an old counter-culture girl like me.

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May 6, 2012 · 3:28 am

The Color Orange

I am sitting here at A T & T Stadium in San Francisco on a bright sunny afternoon with the Giants well ahead of the Brewers, looking out to a sold out crowd–half of whom are dressed in orange–and wondering how it was that I once had a problem with that color? But I did. While all other colors on the spectrum were natural to me, I saw orange as the color of plastic, and I abhorred it. I had to work on that. And that I did, out in the garden, making myself plant not with my customary whites or pastels, but with oranges. I found oranges and blues, oranges and purples, particularly exciting, and I grew to love the color orange that summer. How liberating! I was cured.

Maybe I’ve been a sleepy blue Mariner fan too long but now that I can embrace it, the color orange really is brighter, more wide awake. Fans are happier here. And looking out to them I have the same thought I had at the last Giants game I attended: hoping that they all know how extraordinarily fortunate they are to live here, and knowing too, that they do. It’s all over their faces.

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April 28, 2012 · 9:15 pm

Aboard the S.S. Retirement

Whatever I was going to blog about went the way of the dial phone when I found myself flying to Boston to visit my folks in their retirement village this week. Now I can’t even remember what my topic was going to be. I’m here to help out in any way I can. The last visit was to help with the house, this time the theme seems to be gardening. They see me as strong and quick and capable, exclaiming “why, you can do in two hours what would take us days….” But when my husband calls me from his office in Seattle and I mention that I’m ready for bed (9pm EST), he remarks, “I see you’ve fallen right into the culture….”

You’ve got to. This is their time. We do a lot of sitting around and it’s my time to listen. Oh sure, they want some stories of what’s going on out there, however they’ve got their own world here too. It’s a bit like seeing children off to boarding school, but the difference is that parents never have the opportunity to stay in the dormitory and see it all through their eyes. Here, you do. I’m living in their home among all their retired friends and neighbors, and for dinners we all have the option of going up to the dining hall together. The event is communal, the room is formal. Ladies dress and look lovely. Men wear jackets. And this, I’m afraid, is the end of an era. When Mom and Dad first moved here the dress code specified ties as well. Ties are gone, and you just know that jackets will be next. But for now the dining hall still has all the ambience of an elegant old cruise ship.

At sixty I feel young here. I also find remarkable role models for how to navigate gracefully through the seventies, eighties and nineties. There are always a handful of centenarians among them. Residents keep as busy, healthy, well-read, and well-traveled as possible. On campus, as on a ship, dinners are the main event. Cocktails and appetizers through specialty coffees and cordials. Starting at 5:45pm, such a meal can take hours and eat up the whole evening. Clubs schedule themselves to dine together, singles and couples make dates with each other, essentially everyone arrives knowing with whom they are dining each evening. At Mom and Dad’s table last night, a most interesting couple. He designed systems for air traffic control for major airports in his day, while she designed crossword puzzles for the New York Times, both Sunday and weekday, working with Will Shortz. Oh my. I don’t know why but I challenged her to a game of Scrabble. And the reason I’ve got to get to bed at 9pm: big match in the morning and she will be formidable.

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April 20, 2012 · 7:36 pm

Being Here (Where I Am)

“Do you think the wren ever dreams of a better house?” Mary Oliver

The desire to live here, there, and over there, in this, I may be the craziest person I know. On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon I went looking at high rise condominiums in downtown Seattle. I wanted to see what it would be like to reinvent my life from that vantage point, overlooking the port, The Sound, and into sunsets every night. Then hours later, setting up my city lot terrace on Queen Anne Hill, I thought, how could I ever leave all this….

This is the terrace we imagined from the deck that had been out back. A stone paved and planted formal outdoor room, evocative of many places: France, New Orleans, Boston’s Nob Hill…. This is the rock wall we envisioned and the climbing hydrangea we planted that now completely covers the high wooden fence surrounding us. Assorted wrought iron pieces collected in consignment stores up and down The Main Line in Philadelphia, painted black, and cushioned in a black & white awning stripe. The pair of magnolia trees that grew from saplings to their two-story height in a few short years—such is the growing power of the Pacific Northwest. The trees are shaped like topiary, low box hedges beneath kept trim, and potted herbs lined up like sunbathers on a étagère. Into this black & white outdoor room I specified all white flowers: rhododendron, climbing hydrangea, the stand of lilies beyond the fountain, and the dinner-plate sized blossoms the pair of magnolia trees serves up. Of course, the lavender plants will bloom in a lavender color, the rosemary, a blue, chives, mauve/pink, roses will climb over the fence, and other assorted plants, such as columbine and forget-me-not, have a way of hopping or dropping in. And like friends, they are all welcome.

As a child I frequently rearranged my parents’ furniture in the night. People would wake up and bump into things. As a single person and later, married, I was all too game for every move. I even remember the moves that we didn’t make, because I had, in a sense, inhabited them. With the position that would have relocated our young family to Iowa, I pictured a house with a wrap-around porch on a prairie where one could see anyone coming over the horizon in any direction. The house, the landscape and its serenity, grew on me such that I was almost disappointed when my husband did not take that position. Iowa.

I could fill volumes with all the houses I have loved that I did not live in. “The ones that got away,” I call them. Some people have affairs; I look at houses. Perusing MLS listings, attending open houses, drawing up floor plans if I’m interested, sketching, coming up with color schemes, and re-imagining life with each one. It’s like a chemical dependency, this willingness to make a complete overhaul of one’s life. In an effort to get more than one life in, I have to wonder, might it be at the expense of one life fully realized?

Yet there is hope. While I continue to look and sketch and imagine, I do notice a waning in the energy to pull off any of these desired moves. This has come with age. For the first time in my life, the thought of moving is exhausting—something others have known all along. And while I may still harbor harbor views, all I have to do is sit still on this terrace, plant, or clean up in this garden, and I can be where I am. And this I must do more often. And keep the drama on the page.

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