Still Amazed

Short September Walk

Sometimes you really notice things as you walk along the dusty road of this canyon. Yesterday it was clusters of tiny green acorns on the low branches of the oak trees, the surprisingly wide berth of a pregnant cow, and in the blank blue sky a white airplane, its propeller buzzing in the distance. If it is three o’clock and sunny, the glare of the world may not be to your liking, and you will pause to wipe away the smudge on your sunglasses and lower the brim of your hat, remembering rain and yearning for green. The chronic wind of afternoon will start to pick up, and you know it won't be pleasant when you turn and walk against it. At the junction to the main road, you will reflexively open the mailbox and peer inside, but of course it will be empty and you’ll smile at how hope always trumps experience. 

If there is a snakeskin snagged in the brush by the side of the road, you will stoop down for a closer look: you will see that it is dry and light, a translucent hybrid of plastic and parchment, a custom encasement abandoned by its inhabitant. You will ponder the meticulous design of its ridges and scales and may even perceive it as beautiful, for you are learning to appreciate such things, their inviolable integrity and otherness. And then, reverting to the dysfunctional home base that is your own ego, you will wistfully think about shedding and change, the many shells that have contained you, the selves that you have been, what you may yet become, and what remains.  

Shifting Light

It was a bright night washed in moonbeams to an almost daytime shine, and I was tumbled into wakefulness when the rumble of a distant train unleashed the agitated voices of a caucus of coyotes. I closed my eyes and an image came to me of the earth spinning in space, but more than spinning, I could feel it breathing. And more than breathing, I could feel it pulsating, pulsating with a billion prayers, and many were of thanks, but there were mostly supplications, and they merged into a kind of music that was the yearning of humanity throughout all time, reverberating through the universe. 

But I had no desire to be awake and unmoored in the night, even listening to the music of the spheres. These were dangerous waters, I knew. I tried to navigate away from the undertows of fear and avoid the straits that always lead to sadness. I thought about light: The moon spilling itself into this room. Sunlight in a garden. The blank open brightness of the Southwest. The muffled gray light of Chicago in November. Headlight beams on a lonely road. The warm lamplight seen through the windows of houses I have not entered. Shooting stars. Fireflies. 

“All I ever wanted was to paint light on the walls of life,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Me too.

 Summer has ended. Yesterday I waited at the exit from Gaviota to the 101 for a break in the traffic as a stream of Labor Day travelers drove past, many in recreational vehicles or carrying kayaks or bicycles or ATVs, an endless procession of vacationers returning to their everyday lives. Now, lying in my bed, hoping for a return to sleep, I remembered a summer from my childhood on Coney Island Avenue, when my sister and I set a towel and a pot of water on the sidewalk and propped up a rain umbrella and sat there pretending we were at the beach. People looked at us and chuckled: such charming little pauper girls, a beach so near but so unreachable to them. Those hurried pedestrians missed a lot; there were small treasures even in the gutters here. Once I found a green lens from a broken pair of sunglasses, the perfect window for a tiny house of scraps, though I never built what I imagined in my mind, and there were bottles to gather and redeem for coins, and one lucky day a perfectly fixable red bicycle sitting out with someone’s trash. Brooklyn summers. I wonder: do people still sit out in the night talking on stoops, roofs, and fire escapes? Were those streets as innocent in the 1950s as they seem now, looking back? I used to wish I lived in a house with a big front porch on one of the shady side streets. I never imagined I would live in the country, within sight and sound of the sea, my sleep interrupted by coyotes.

What was I dreaming about before I awoke? Maps and train fares. Trying to find my way home. The kindness of strangers, and some sort of museum. New York City again. Suddenly I remember riding the subway in 1967, looking at a poster of a long-haired girl running through a meadow filled with daisies. It’s an ad for shampoo, I think, and I am a long-haired girl myself who smells of shampoo and probably spearmint chewing gum, and I am wearing white fishnet hose and a swirling pastel watercolor dress -- lilac, pale green, aqua, an Age of Aquarius kind of dress. Later, my friend Rosemary is standing on a corner in the Village biting into a large green apple, and a man walking by says that apple is bigger than she is, and she smiles (the way she used to smile) and the same old moon is rising above the city, and we will all grow up and forget about each other.

Much later we might learn of early deaths and inexplicable outcomes, or perhaps we will receive a mundane update surprising only in the number of years that it encompasses, because we honestly forget we are this old. And it’s big, this growing sense of being temporary, really quite a lot to process, especially in the middle of the night. So many things remain in need of understanding. So many things remain in need of being done. "The great courage," wrote Camus, is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death." But the light in the heart of the night is hard to look into. 

Thank God for that sky grown faintly mauve with morning now and the shape of things returning and resolving themselves. The leaves of the lilac on the deck are suddenly illuminated, and there is the comfort of cows grazing on the soft brown hillside, and the caw of a loud-mouthed crow. A bowl on the kitchen table is filled with tomatoes from the garden, heavy as grapefruit, and the light in its early autumnal slant is a sigh holding hints of prayer and promise. I think of these words by Pico Iyer, one of my favorite writers: "...everything falls away from us - the light, the dark, the warm afternoons-- and all we can do is cry out in affirmation of our joy."

Breathing hill, I will walk to you.

By the Sea

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and 

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it's always ourselves we find in the sea

E.E. Cummings

The day was a kiln, and the ground a parched clay platter, and everyone moved slowly if they moved at all, but we had a plan in place. We would pack a makeshift picnic and go down to the beach with friends in the late afternoon, and we could walk by the shore or go for a swim or just find a spot to sit and talk, and we would stay there until dusk, or as long as we wanted.

It was a simple plan and it came to pass. Marc, tall and bearded, grabbed his camera and tripod and immediately went off for a solitary walk, looking at the estuary that washes out from the canyon, watching the waves, squinting at sea life with an intentness and curiosity I remembered fondly from the days when we were teachers together. Others went blissfully swimming or splashed around in the surf. A breeze came up, and distinct currents of coolness rushed through the air, as refreshing as rivers. Sometimes you could take two steps over and suddenly find yourself in a little patch of cool air and pause there for a moment, almost sipping it. On the bluff above the beach, a black steer stood unsettlingly close to the edge. To the west, towards Pt. Conception, the sky began its long slow sequence of dusky pink and orange, intensified by the haze of distant fires.

I put a fine blue cloth down on a weathered redwood table and we began to unpack our repast.  There were bottles of Gewürztraminer, spicy and chilled, and cold cans of Bud, and for juvenile palates like mine, some sort of sweet fruit soda.  There were deviled eggs and garlic-studded pork loin, chips and dips from Trader Joe’s, mushroom turnovers, slices of honeydew. “Does anyone have any interest in locks?” asked Julie. Locks? I thought. Doors, yes, windows, yes, but locks? And of course she pulled out a chunk of salted salmon, lox that she had prepared herself, and we proceeded to eat, appetites unbolted, doors ajar, conversation humming, a sense of well-being. 

There was talk of brown bears eating nectarines and berries, of an oak forest reclaiming a certain apple orchard, of an Indian cave in the mountains. Kit and Beverly came by, fleeing the heat of the backcountry, with their laptop and a movie in their car. We talked of school days and paradigm shifts, retirement and disability, the places we’d like to travel to and the pleasure of being right here.

Then came a shout from another Julie, who had heard some sort of rattling noise coming from the front of her truck and thought there was a snake inside. Everyone approached the vehicle, some armed with sticks and ready to gingerly poke around, and we saw the origin of the sound: a dragonfly caught inside the headlight. Monte reached in and helped the creature to extricate itself, and it shot suddenly into the air, bursting forth, erupting into freedom, and we all looked up with a-h-h-s and awe, and there was a second dragonfly in the air that seemed to have been hovering and waiting, and the two of them sailed off together. 

It was a beautiful moment. Fellini-esque, perhaps, but beautiful. Then we settled down again to watch the sunset and the water’s shine and the beginning of the night. We were a ragtag group, graying and balding, broken and repaired but not quite good as new. We were people past our prime, retired or tired, still trying to figure things out, still capable of being surprised. 

Jupiter rose brightly and the broken bowl moon shattered into luminous pieces that floated on the shimmering sea. 

This Week

Last night a coyote stood directly below the window, so near that I heard the catch in his throat, the little grab for air, in the pauses between yelps. He lingered for a long time, and I hoped he was flushing out rabbits. Sometimes he barked like an ordinary dog, and other times he summoned up a more traditional howl, and it went like this for quite some time. I grabbed a flashlight and tried for a glimpse, but by that point he had scampered up a hill and into the orchard, and all I could see were the shadowy silhouettes of trees and everyday objects rendered strange and supernatural by the night. I stepped outside onto the deck and was startled by stars. Was Mars the one with the orange hue? It was a warm night, and it was very still. It was nice to be standing out there, and although it was becoming less and less likely that I would ever get back to sleep, that doesn’t matter much when you can sleep in the next day.

This is the time of summer when I used to be braced for back-to-school. Maybe the frantic flurry of meetings and preparation would have already begun by now, and I certainly don’t miss it. It feels very indulgent to be able to watch the edge of summer and have a sense that it belongs to me, or that I belong to it. The days are a seamless space, not the background for a dance already choreographed. And this week I got to stay at home and pay attention to my own life.

I’m paying attention, of course, to the larger world as well, although in a manner not unlike the way I sought a glimpse of that coyote. I am standing behind a screened window, watching, scanning the horizon, seeing mostly shadows and occasionally looking up to discover there is miracle still happening.

I suppose I seem like a liberal stereotype sometimes, but I was saddened by the death of Senator Kennedy this week. My favorite stories, you see, have as their themes redemption, transformation, and transcendence, and Ted Kennedy epitomized all of those. I actually met him at some kind of Democratic fundraiser back in the 1980s. He was not exactly a hero in those days, still known mostly for his appetites and mistakes, but he did have a certain charisma and an amazing ability to make you feel significant and noticed, even in the course of a momentary handshake and three-word exchange. As the years went by I began to observe that he was always there: the Senator that we could count on, old reliable, consistently fighting the good fight, earning respect and efficacy along with his white hair.

And I know I personalize things too much, but I have lost a brother and a sister, good people unknown to most, who died quietly and left a hole in my heart, and it occurred to me that somewhere beyond the epic tragedy of Ted Kennedy’s losses, there was also the peculiar private sadness of siblings dearly loved who died young. I can also relate all too well to the sense of having disappointed people or of having had a mantle of expectations thrust upon me that did not necessarily fit, and I certainly understand what it feels like to have made a terrible mistake, or to have neglected to do something that you will spend the rest of your life wishing you had. Ted Kennedy endured these things and moved on and in time forged his own kind of greatness. 

So for personal reasons as well as his remarkable contributions as a legislator, I had a special fondness for him. I almost wrote a letter to him once, and then I thought that if it ever even got to him, he would probably think it weird or presumptuous.  Maybe not. I think we should all get in the habit of writing letters when we have something human to say.

Anyway, I guess my blog is my letter, and my writing is my way of looking more closely at the bumpy experience of being human, and I know I’m silly and sentimental, but here we are, a part of this great saga, and we need to pay attention and talk to each other and get up in the night and look up. 

When In Doubt, Make Ice Cream

         I just watched a documentary about Garrison Keillor, and one of the things he said was this: “I was afraid of living an ordinary life and I realized that’s what we all get. We get an ordinary life and its good enough. It’s good enough.”

         Ordinary, in fact, seems miraculous sometimes. Case in point: On Saturday, we had some rain. A small statement, but oh, the sweetness of it. It was lazy rain. Summer rain. The quiet kind. Big slow raindrops, but enough to revive fragrance and refresh spirit. All day it softened the light like a veil of prisms.

         I'm not proud of this, but just a few days ago, I got so discouraged and depleted that I felt as if there was probably just a blank space left where I used to be. The details don't matter. It was just one of those last straw kinds of things that momentarily put me out of the game. Thankfully, it didn’t last. And I think sometimes you have to go there just to remember how resilient you are.

        Truth is, as much as the ordinary is miraculous, it can also get downright unpleasant, and there’s nothing unique or unusual about that. I suppose you just have to ride it out. Or let it wash over you. Fight back. Give up. Whatever works.

        But I learned something important: Ice cream helps. I am so serious. Here’s the recipe: First, put on some music. (I chose Django Reinhardt. There are plenty of other contenders.)  Then make a custard base of fresh egg yolks and milk. Cool and keep stirring as you fold in heavy cream and real vanilla or whatever ingredients you desire. (Be creative. Mistakes are impossible.) Pour the mixture into one of those ice cream makers with the canister insert that gets intensely cold. Crank it slowly. Taste it often.  Invite your neighbors to share.

         The neighbors will arrive at 4:30, one of them wearing hiking boots and a long blue dress with a tropical print. Her husband, having spent the day surfing, will have the sleepy and satisfied demeanor of an old lion with his needs met and no fight left in him. If you are lucky enough to live near a Jeanne, she will come, too, and with flavors of her own to complement the strawberry and the sesame-honey-almond-vanilla that you made. Maybe you’ll also happen to have a friend from out of town visiting for the weekend, and maybe he’ll be a little too concerned about fat and sugar content and mention it more than once, but he’ll find his comfort zone, and you will not let his personal caveats diminish your experience because if you have learned anything this week it is that you should enjoy your ice cream while you can.

         Line up little dessert dishes. The green Depression glass is especially pretty, but the clear ones have a certain elegance too.  Be patient. Let the ice cream soften on its own. Use an old-fashioned scoop to serve it up. Savor each flavor separately. Choose a favorite if you can. Wash it down with champagne, but only if that suits your fancy.

         This small pleasure, this ordinary day, it is good enough. Good enough.

         Observe how the light is blushing, how everything almost glows. Hug your friends before they head back home.

 

Weathering It

Frankly, I don’t know what I am about to say here, but I’m tired of the previous post that’s been hanging there all week, especially when I am finding it so difficult to maintain the sense of humor and compassion that I was advocating in it. (I suppose that was just the sound of me whistling in the dark.) In any case, the Sisyphus model still holds. The rabbits have continued their assault on my flowers – even including geraniums, that choice of desperadoes -- and as my gentle attempts to discourage them have failed, I have begun to develop a surprisingly hard-edged kind of anger. As for the situation with my mother, it has taken on a whole new dimension of difficulty, but I won’t get into the details now because I am still immersed in dealing with all that, and I don’t want it to be the theme of another depressing blog post tied together with a frayed ribbon of unconvincing optimism.  Two of my girlfriends happened to be visiting when some of this ordeal began to spill over, and they were unexpectedly treated to the spectacle of Cynthia Quite Frazzled. But here’s the way it is with those kinds of friends: Jan wrote to thank me for loving her enough to share my troubles, and Vickie said, “It feels good to be more than a fair-weather friend. I’m here for the tsunami, baby!”

In fact, I was so buoyed by friendship that I thought socializing might be a good antidote, and I overcame my reclusive mood and stepped out on Saturday night to a gathering at Dave and Karen Jensen’s house. There was even a sushi chef on hand, Byron from Burma, whose presentations were so artful and beautiful I succumbed to his invitation to sample a morsel. (Despite my Neapolitan adventures, I have not yet developed a comfortable relationship with raw fish.) The morsel tasted like the sea, but more personal, with a whisper of wasabi, and I could honestly see how someone might grow to like it, given time. “What is it?” I asked Byron.

 “Tuna,” he said, which was not the exotic response I expected.

 In the spirit of Naples, I also ate a chewy bit of octopus, but mostly I just admired the aesthetics of it all. I asked Byron where he learned the art.

 “Las Vegas,” he said, which again was not the exotic response I expected.

But the unlikelihood of our various convergences is always part of what intrigues and amazes me. The core component of this particular assemblage was Dave Jensen’s hiking group, which decided two years ago to sponsor a young Tibetan girl through nursing school in India. They simply wanted to adopt a philanthropic cause, something small and direct, as opposed to bureaucratic and anonymous. Of course it’s hard to zero in on one cause when there is so much need everywhere, but being good hikers they decided to follow a few existing footprints that suggested a path.

It turns out that Dave’s wife Karen, while teaching at Dunn School, had conducted an art exchange between her students in the Santa Ynez Valley and Tibetan refugee students at an art school in India; she in turn had developed a correspondence with the art teacher there, Mr. Sonam Choephel, and through Sonam, she had become aware of the struggles of a Tibetan girl named Tenzin Lhazey. The first and only of ten siblings to graduate from high school and be accepted into college, Lhazey was heartbroken at having to forgo her dream of becoming a nurse due to inability to pay the fees. Here's where our intrepid hikers stepped in, each contributing what they could, even literally emptying their pockets of loose change each week, and recruiting an ever-expanding group of friends.

 Saturday’s get-together was a celebration of Lhazey’s successful completion of her second year of nursing school, and included a slide show of our host’s visit to India to meet her in person, the unveiling of a painting by Sonam, and even a long-distance phone call to India. A remarkable and idealistic young woman in her own right, Lhazey says that her blessings and gratitude have grown “like rolling snow” and she is eager to make the world a better place.

There’s more to the story of course, but mostly I am touched by how this circle of friends has changed a single life, and in so doing, the world. It reminds me how each of us can make a difference: start anywhere, start small, but simply start.

And sometimes my own life seems very small, but when I consider it in terms of the network of friends up close and in radiating circles, I don’t feel quite so isolated and insignificant.

Here, the world smells a little like campfire smoke. There is an eerie haze that gilds and ambers the light by afternoon, and when I awoke last night and looked at the sky, the moon was a wedge of orange. La Brea Fire is now up to 84,000 acres and 25% contained. It changes the weather. 

And it's true that I’m heading into a challenging week, but I guess so is everyone else. Maybe if we lean into each other we can weather those tsunamis.

 

Undone

Every morning I am reminded of the general irrelevance of my personal desires when I go downstairs, coffee in hand, and survey the night’s devastation of my flowers by a couple of furry little bunnies. Rows of beheaded stems greet me, and scattered half-chewed foliage, and tattered petals on the ground. Rather than resort to harsher measures, I have been systematically replacing the devoured flowers with different types of plants in an effort to zero in on the ones the rabbits deem inedible. Marigolds are consistently recommended, and I could see they were not preferred, but even they eventually fell victim to the voracious little beasts. I thought I had a fighting chance with geraniums, and this morning these too had been destroyed. Now I am down to trusty salvia and lavender, but I half expect to find them in a broken heap tomorrow.

All I wanted was a border of colorful flowers along the stones by the entrance to our house. What I have gotten instead are unwanted lessons about nature, survival, persistence and loss. I find myself thinking of Sysiphus, condemned to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, from which it would roll back down of its own weight. “Happiness and the absurd,” wrote Camus, “are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.” Remember that.

Meanwhile I have been spending time in Orange County lately to help my elderly mother through accumulating difficulties. A quick distillation of the latest story is this: Following surgery to mend her broken arm, she was discharged with a metal insert in place to connect the separate pieces, the arm carefully cradled in a wrapped plaster splint and sling to heal. At some point, however, she removed that gosh-darn splint all on her own, and when she went back to the orthopedic surgeon for a follow-up look yesterday, he discovered that the repair had not held through all her motions, and the arm was broken again. He did not recommend subjecting her to the ordeal of surgery a second time. Her arm will heal in its own way, but she will not be able to extend it fully. At nearly 90, she can probably handle this limitation more easily than another operation. Besides, outcomes are questionable when, as the doctor put it, “The patient is noncompliant.”

Given benefit of hindsight, I suppose there are dozens of things that might have been done differently to avoid being at this disappointing junction. If I were inclined to feel combative, I could find blame, point fingers and direct anger at inattentive caregivers or doctors without foresight or the exasperating behavior of a befuddled old woman. And if I were feeling analytical, I might even springboard into a discussion of our irrational health care system, and the ethics of choices, and the whole inescapable business of growing old.

But I am not inclined to rail at the universe. Things come undone. People become as fragile as flowers. And even as the rock rolls right back down the hill, we have those purposeful periods, as Sysyphus did, when we think we know what we need to do and even imagine it might work. Diligence and good intentions count. We make meaning, and we keep at it, and that’s wonderful, as long as we can also accept absurdity.  

So I gather up the fragments in the garden and tend to the survivors. I figure that life’s bumps and bangs can yield few gifts more valuable than patience and compassion. A sense of humor comes in handy too. 

Embrace fragility. (But not too hard.) Loss and breakage are inevitable. 

Snow Cones Squared: The Joys of Granita

It is time to write of something sweet and cold. Bowls of colored jewels -- pale watermelon surprised by a squeeze of kaffir lime, coffee paired with almond, or the ultimate classic: clean white lemon with bits of yellow peel.  Slushy and refreshing, true granita may bear some vague resemblance to a snow cone, but oh, it is so much more than those cloying crushed ice concoctions. 

I first tasted the genuine article in a town outside of Naples and have since learned it is a Southern Italian passion.  My cousin Luisa had taken me on the back of her motorcycle to an early morning market; the day grew miserably hot and muggy as we wandered around, and the granita street vendor was a welcome sight. He served us limone, his only flavor, in little white cups, and it was dolce, but also intensely lemon and icy cold, seriously icy. It was blended, but not to the point of processed ices or sorbet; its texture was coarse and uneven. Grainy, you might say.

Later, in the house of another of my Italian relatives, I was offered a fragola version of this delight, icy chunks of strawberry essence in a little glass dish. Somehow the flavor of the fruit in granita is concentrated within the crystals of ice and released onto the tongue in a rush of cool. The effect was sublime in strawberry. Sensing that I was becoming an avid granita fan, Luisa created her own interpretation of the lemon that night, lighter and thinner, served in a wine glass and eaten with a spoon, and I fell in love with the classic over again. There is something about the tartness and hint of bitter that makes the limone the most refreshing and sophisticated of all granita flavors, although I am willing to be convinced otherwise.  

In a rather charming coincidence, it turns out that our good friend Jeanne has been experimenting with granita this summer, and now and then Monte and I walk up the canyon to her house on a Sunday evening to sample her creative variations. (It’s a tough duty, but we try to be neighborly.) I already told you about her mango chipotle, where rich sweet mango is given a snappy pepper bite. It’s hot. It’s cold. It’s even picturesque. And there are the berry best that begin in Jeanne’s garden, scoops of magenta, rich as garnet.  Monte likes the coffee, which is barely sweet. We have been speculating lately about peach and ginger, and I’ve even heard talk of grape. And fig. Excuse me for a moment while I contemplate fig. 

In an essay called Mint Snowball, Naomi Shihab Nye writes about a specialty her great-grandfather created in his Illinois drugstore long ago. He stirred fresh mint leaves with sugar and secret ingredients in a small pot on the stove, then shaved ice into tiny particles that were permeated with the mint mixture, and served it mounded in a glass dish alongside a scoop of vanilla ice cream. “The Mint Snowball,” says Naomi, “tasted like winter…snow frosting roofs…little chips of ice on the tongue, their cool slide down.” Her great-grandfather's recipe has long been lost, and no one has ever been able to reconstruct it precisely, but I am certain of one thing: it was granita.

As far as I can tell, most granita recipes begin by simmering sugar and water to make a syrup, but true granita requires the addition of fresh fruit and authentic flavors. It also requires a commitment of time and the leisurely rhythm of summer because it needs to be revisited frequently during the coarse of its freezing. After the basic sugar syrup has cooled slightly, you add a puree of fruit to it, along with other ingredients of your choosing, transfer the mixture to a pan, and place it in the freezer. When ice crystals begin to form around the edges, you crash into it with a fork and stir it up. Don’t go too far from the kitchen; you’ll need to do this every thirty minutes or so for three to five hours to get the texture right. It is a ritual. A lingering. The bestowal of attention to a promise of pleasure and a pleasure in itself.

Naomi reflects: “Perhaps the clue to my entire personality connects to the lost Mint Snowball. Although I know how to do everything one needs to know – change airplanes, find my exit off the interstate, charge gas, send a fax- there is something missing. Perhaps the stoop of my great-grandfather over the pan, the slow patient swish of his spoon. The spin of my mother on the high stool with her whole life in front of her, something fine and fragrant still to happen…”

That’s it. Something fine and fragrant and still to happen. 

Better yet, something happening right now. 

And what could be more satisfying than to sit with a friend on a balmy night enjoying a dish of crystallized, concentrated summer? 

 

 

 

Enter The Tiger

I woke up tired. It was the tiger’s fault. He had abruptly presented himself to me in my dream, a huge responsibility that I was not prepared to deal with. He had somehow entered my kitchen, not my real-life, current kitchen but a small city space of long ago with a single window that opened onto a fire escape. He stared at me and his breath and body filled the room, and he made it known that the emptiness in his belly was becoming painful enough to affect his temperament, and this would soon become my problem. 

I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a package of stew meat. I thought I would throw the beef chunks outside the open window and thus entice him onto the fire escape so I could shut the window and be free of him, but he growled and pushed against me even before I could unwrap the meat from its paper. Wishing to avoid his claws, I threw the meat down at his feet, and he ate it, paper and all, but it seemed only to excite his appetite further, and he leaned forward, muscles twitching, far from sated. Do tigers like cheese? I frantically wondered, remembering a wedge of Jarlsburg in the fridge. The only flesh in the immediate vicinity was what I wear on my bones, and I was loath to part with it. Now we were suspended in an uneasy standoff, and its likely outcome did not bode well for me. I disembarked from the dream.

"Cats again?" said Monte when I told him about it. He was referring to other feline dreams I used to have, the ones where kittens grab onto my legs with their scratchy claws and pull at my hair and leap onto my back and I can’t shake them off. Yes, I know it’s weird to have had nightmares about cuddly little kittens, but I figured out what anxieties they symbolized and managed eventually to banish them. This was different. We’re talking tiger here: a huge and powerful beast invading my space and holding its ground and showing no sign of backing off.

Awake and in the sanctuary of daylight, I gave myself time to ponder the dream, and it didn’t take long for its meaning to crystallize. Big, dark, insoluble problems have shoved their way into my life, and they are squatting there, demanding something of me. 

Some of these are the fall-out of other people’s bad luck and mistakes, and although I try to help, I must avoid being consumed by them. Lately they have been permeating my borders with a new degree of forcefulness and are not so easily dispensed with. Other problems, meanwhile, have always been there, patiently lurking in the shadows, confident that they would assume dominion in their time. These are the ones inherent to being alive and getting older, and they are no longer mere abstractions. All in all, it's a pretty daunting tiger that crouches in my kitchen.

In the morning garden, I discovered that a rabbit has been eating my flowers and left a row of beheaded stems.  Perhaps this is an animal I can deal with. 

And maybe not.

 

 

The Raspberry Jacket Incident

Some people squander discretionary money on gambling and alcohol, others indulge in pedicures and facials or their daily frozen coffee drinks. My downfalls are nurseries (the gardening kind), Trader Joe’s, and thrift shops. In another post, perhaps, I will delve into my issues with the first two.  Today, however, we are going to consider thrift shops and how they beckon and what happens to me there.  This exploration seems in order today in the aftermath of the Raspberry Jacket Incident. Allow me to explain.

         Monte and I were heading home from Orange County, but he had a meeting in Ventura and dropped me off to wander around downtown for an hour or two. I looked at paintings in the Channel Island art gallery, paused at the Earle Stanley Gardner building and imagined Perry Mason there, and ventured into a series of shops that seemed to fall into three basic categories: patchouli-scented hippie-esque, floral and frilly feminine, and the beach-surf variety. It got boring very fast.

         I had recently cleaned out my closet and drawers and purged them of all the peculiar and ill-fitting garments that I never wear, and I'd been enjoying this new sense of order and space in my life. The last thing I needed was to get back on the road to accumulation. But a simple fact must be faced: the main shopping attractions in this part of town are the supermarket-sized thrift stores.

         And did I mention I was bored? Against my better judgment, I began to make the rounds. One of them was crowded, and the second smelled musty, but as with Goldilocks, the third one felt right. It had potential, somehow. Potential does not necessarily mean that you will find something in particular that you need (although I am sort of looking for an old-fashioned ice-cream maker) but rather that there is a chance here of discovering something you sort of maybe want, and because it is a thrift shop, this vague wanting is enough to provoke the purchase. Even if you come to your senses afterwards and realize that you have just bought something strange and creepy that someone else purged from their closet, it didn’t cost you much and you can soothe yourself with the knowledge that the money has gone to help poor people, abused women, or whatever worthy cause the shop funds.  You can then hang the item in your own closet for a suitable amount of time before donating it to another thrift shop, thereby doubling its philanthropic mileage.

         But that’s enough pretense to virtue. The real lure here is the amusement of the hunt and the momentary thrill of discovering something unique and special and worth much more than its price tag. Granted, some folks are immune.  “It’s depressing,” is one friend’s take on it, “smelly old stuff. Other people’s rejects.” And sometimes I can see her point, but as any connoisseur can tell you, there are different grades of thrift stores, ranging from the sad, unappealing ones that smell like dust and mildew, to well-stocked collection points for the gently used discards of the affluent, with most falling somewhere in between.

         Maybe one reason I am not offended by the idea of other people’s used items is because I grew up on hand-me-downs. In the olden days, families with children routinely passed along outgrown clothing to families with younger children. I remember my sister and I going through bags of clothes from the big Irish family down the street, happily choosing what we liked and what might fit, all of it new to us. (It was nice the way people simply gave things away back then rather than trying to sell them, and I wonder if that’s something healthy that we’ve lost in this day of garage sales, consignment shops, Craig’s list, and e-bay…but I digress.)

         Anyway, that hand-me-down view of myself in my formative years not only explains my ease with second-hand stuff but may well have affected my sense of style for all time, or more accurately, it may account for my lack of style. Like the little girl going through the giveaway bag, I simply choose from whatever is randomly available, and you never know what will catch my eye, although I do seem drawn to colors and embroidered flowers and nostalgic detail. I am not guided by a sense of an overall look and I do not have any clear view of what I “should” be wearing.

          Which brings me to the garment in question. I thought it was one of my better thrift store finds, a brand new linen jacket (still bearing its original tags from Nordstrom’s) in a color called raspberry that reminded me of bougainvilleas. There it is, in the picture. Are you wincing? The name on the label, Cynthia Steffe, is the same one on the label of my favorite blouse, and although I am (obviously) not much of a fashion follower, I’d begun to think that she might be a designer that I liked. I was a little ambivalent about the ivory crochet detailing, but I decided that it was cute and boho-chic. At $17.98, the jacket seemed pricey by thrift store standards, but a steal for what it was. 

Now I pulled it out of the bag and held it up for Monte's appraisal. “What do you think?” I asked, hopefully.

         He didn’t hesitate for an instant. “Sarah Palin,” he said.

         In my world this is not a compliment.

         And he went on to elaborate, digging the hole deeper. “Seriously,” he said, “it’s tacky and ridiculous. Trailer trash chic. Everything about it is wrong for you: the color, the style, the cut, everything. And what’s with the doilies?"

It was a harsh critique, and it brings up the question of whether it is possible to be honest without deflating someone quite so thoroughly. My standard is, if it’s too late to undo it, you lie a little. This definitely applies to haircuts. And I think it should apply to an item already purchased and not returnable. Then again, if one is going to look ridiculous in said item, I suppose the bluntness is a kindness. 

        In any case, my small sweet moment felt besmirched. I know I shouldn’t give so much credence to his opinions, but my pleasure in the purchase had evaporated entirely and I could no longer imagine myself feeling jaunty and pretty in the raspberry jacket, whose fate is yet to be determined. One possible outcome is that I will wear it defiantly, imagine I look good, and grow to love it. More likely, I will donate to a thrift store.

         And maybe, just maybe, it will end up saving me a fortune over time because whenever I am tempted to be impulsive in the future, there will be the indelible image of a raspberry jacket with doilies. So it was a great deal either way.