5 January 05
On How Not To Prepare Tea
This study demonstrates why it is not a good idea to use a chocolate teapot to prepare a cup of Earl Grey. Happily, the principal investigators were able to make use of the remains.
2 January 05
Gourds and a One-eyed Santa
We drove to Berkeley today. Numenius has been trying to wean his father off Windows and onto Linux and for the week I was in Maine he had set him well on his way, but in geekery there’s always more to be done and so off we went to do it, well I did the driving part not the geekery.
But first we needed lunch, so we headed off to a fast-food Indian on Oxford and then decided we needed to go to Cody’s because that’s what you do when you go to Berkeley, you look at books. N’s Dad received a call on his cellphone in Cody’s from his wife, S, calling from Cape Cod, where she’s gone to give a recital, reminding him to make sure we took the GOURD home, a gourd she had presented to Numenius on Christmas Day (they’re Jewish, mind you) and which he couldn’t fit in his backpack on the train and his bike on account of its girth, so it was sitting on the dining room table waiting to be retrieved.
Sigh.
Some presents are useful, like socks and knickers. Some are fun, like the Herd Your Horses game my niece received last week, which featured mustangs named Dusty and Blaze and ranch horses of all breeds (did you know, for instance, that percherons only come in black and gray?). Others are gimmicks, silly and cheap and just for the sake of making sure someone’s got something in their stocking (these feature prominently in office holiday gift exchanges and their sales before Christmas in the United States amount to many times the GDP of most countries).
And then there’s the present that my friend T calls the crappy gift. Like the one-eyed Santa she received from someone at her office a couple of weeks ago no kidding cross my heart and hope to die, the office that used to be MY office, and if anyone ever gives me one I’ll hand it right back to them and smile and look blank and in fact closely resemble the one-eyed Santa. They called him Cyclops in Greece. I’m working on the LOOK, just in case. But crappy gifts can also be incredibly expensive: they’re just always OFF, by a little or a lot.
The gourd… let’s just say it’s a large spherical decorated object sorry objet originating in I believe Morocco to go with the other large arty-but-not-to-our-taste objects given by Numenius’ stepmother that don’t fit in our house either stylistically or physically owing to the fact that this is a 600-square-foot abode we share with two cats, a 7-inch dobsonian telescope, and a tandem bicycle. S has seen it. She’s been here. She knows what we have in the way of room.
We stopped off on the way home and deposited the giant gourd at N’s sister’s house, swapping it for yet another former large gift to us from S to give to T, with the solid assurance that if she considers this to be a crappy gift she can feel perfectly free to drop it in the back of someone’s pickup truck on the way to lunch sometime.
But we ain’t taking the cyclops Santa.
25 December 04
Pyjama Day
We DID venture out into the northern woods, still with icy snow in them. We DID walk across the lake onto Fibbers’ Island, where we made up fibs (like there’s a hot tub on here and pineapple trees). I did hear black-capped chickadees and tufted titmice. I didn’t fall on the ice except once. We did sort of stay in our pyjamas all day despite the walk in the woods. I did sing songs I haven’t thought about for over thirty years.
It’s REALLY cold here. It’s wonderful. The hairs in my nose froze.
13 December 04
Apple Hazelnut Mix
A recent addition to our traditional breakfast of nine-grain cereal, cooked with some sort of fruit and nut gorp, dried apricots, figs, and prunes. The hazelnuts make it very yummy.
12 December 04
Tajine
It’s been foggy here, the kind that sets in for days. Although we got out a little it’s the kind of weather that hunkering down was invented for. My outing last night to Rite Aid produced my first pair of reading glasses, probably two years after I should really have bought some—in preparation for lots of reading. About time: I have a stack of books by the bed.
Today I made my first tajine, a North African stew with dried fruit (ours featured apricots, prunes, and mangoes, which we had to hand). Although we don’t own the beautiful earthenware pot which gives the dish its name, it turned out quite well. Served over couscous with harissa. The house is full of tangerines, a splash of color in our now monochrome world…
30 November 04
Loss
A friend has just lost her guide dog, Bruno. He had cancer for a while and it finally caught up with him.
Losing a dog is awful. Losing a dog who helps you get around, is your eyes, your legs, who picks things up you can’t find, who gets you past those awkwardnesses when people don’t know how to respond because you’re in a wheelchair, so that even strangers come up to you and start conversations, who kisses you when you cry because let’s face it the world’s a pretty bleak place right now, who allows your partner to go to work without worrying—losing this, I can’t really imagine.
Bruno attended Code Pink rallies in a pink bandana, wagging his tail and smiling at everyone. He sat at the ACLU table at the Farmers’ Market, encouraging people to take literature, warning them about Ashcroft, grinning through his graying Labrador jowls. He was a true activist, a true friend. He was a Good Dog with a fondness for cookies.
He’ll be missed…
25 November 04
Mughlia Saag Thali
Pica’s Mum came up to see us today from Bodega Bay. After a walk in the Arboretum, we set out to find a lunch place, thinking at the very least the restaurant Great Wall of China would be open despite the holiday.
We did better than that, ending up at Kathmandu Kitchen, a Nepali place on G Street here in town. I had the thali plate mentioned in the title, Pica had beighan bharta, and Mum had palak tikka paneer. We all drank mango lassis too.
That meal was so much more tasty and wonderful than the traditional Thanksgiving turkey I can hardly believe it. No sticking one’s head in the oven staring at the fat-spitting giant fowl either. I think we’ve started a new tradition here.
24 November 04
Thanksgiving
We do not do Thanksgiving Dinner. People around me ask, jokingly yet accusingly, whether I’m not thankful. Yes, I say, every day, but I’m a vegetarian, and it’s all about turkey, and I just don’t understand what connection there is between being thankful and stuffing my face over the course of hours at the expense of my mother’s back and tranquility and overall mental health, which is how I recall this from the time when we DID do Thanksgiving Dinner, in Spain, when nobody else was, a little island of American tradition where most of the people at the table were more English than American, a tradition we then repeated a month later, only this time with presents.
Once we were invited by some friends—he was in the US Air Force—to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Base southeast of Madrid. (This was the Torrejn Air Force Base, but it was just called “The Base” by all non-base English speakers, a place which, during the height of the Cold War which this was, would be the launching point for an airborne nuclear attack in the European theatre, which we never thought about at all being only nine or ten. To us the Base was a place where you could get American candy and American comics and where there were lots and lots of people who never emerged at all, never saw Spain, never learned even a word of Spanish, carried on their own little version of military life that would have been identical in Germany, or Japan, or the Philippines but which always included lots of liquor. There were exceptions, such as the friends who had invited us. They seemed very, very rare.
What struck me about this dinner at the Base was how formulaic it was. Our Thanksgiving dinners at home were similar—similar ingredients—but were special, probably because we were the only family within three miles to have the oven on at 5:00 am; I enjoyed making the crosses on the stems of the brussels sprouts like some minor benediction, waiting for the inevitable o’clock when my mother would cut herself badly with one knife or another. (Blood everywhere. Every time.) At the Base, by contrast, there were literally hundreds of people getting the same mashed potatoes, the same turkey, the same gravy—the uniformity, the sheer number of slices of turkey, made it so much less and at the same time so much more. It was excess, my first real inkling of it on this scale. The food was good. It was just that there was so MUCH of it.
The past few days I’ve been pondering on the emptiness of this culture. The paradoxes abound: there’s way too much of everything, of food, of STUFF. Obesity is an epidemic linked to poverty, of all things; antidepressants are now the number one class of drug prescribed in the U.S. When will we say, as a culture, enough? Enough stuff? Enough of this emptiness? We have so much now, can’t we just be thankful for THIS? Can’t we share? Can’t we just be?
So I will get up tomorrow morning and be grateful for the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows that sing and scratch at our back door, for the rock wren hiding in the bee boxes, for the color of the dawn, for the mist that glides over the levee, for my health, for my friends, for my family, for my love. Then I will go and BE in this instead of eating for hours followed by slouching comatose in a chair watching a game of American football.
And on Friday, I will not shop till I drop. It’s Buy Nothing Day. You’re invited.
15 November 04
Perplexed
I pay almost no attention to football, but have to wonder what on earth is my alma mater the Cal Bears doing with a football team that is currently ranked number 4 in the country? I mean, finishing the season with a winning record, preferably after beating Stanford across the Bay, is all we’ve historically ever had hopes of. This is a team that hasn’t been to the Rose Bowl since I’ve been alive, last won said game in 1938, and whose most noteworthy moment was one year recruiting the Stanford band. Cal, a football power? Naaah—this year must be an aberration.
14 November 04
Endurance
Another one-sentence post…
So I’m on the phone with my good buddy DocRock this morning saying I’m going to Mass for the first time in God I dunno months probably Ash Wednesday and she’s just listened to Gomes from Memorial Church on the Harvard radio station over the web and he (deep bass brilliant black gay Baptist) says Memorial Church is all about peace not war then she tells me about this amazing Shackleton thing she’s been reading and how they only had wool socks (no Polartec in those days) that got soaked and cold and they stayed cold for what five years but every last one of them survived and how we should be grateful and I get to Mass across the causeway hoping for what I’m not sure peace or nurturing or something but the young Franciscan guy gets to the sermon and what does it turn out to be about but Shackleton and endurance and how we are not to despair but go for the long haul and I blink and wonder what this means as in whether it’s a sign I should get ready to go to Antarctica or at least somewhere bloody cold or be grateful for central heating or maybe just consider coming to Mass more often.