Old School blast from the past

I received an actual letter in the mail today. Honestly, I can't remember the last time that happened.  Yes, I've received the odd Thank You card (generally from the delightful Heather J, such excellent manners!) and birthday cards and such, but a letter?  Really, that is a rare occurrence, indeed.

Of course the letter was from Margot, Margot my best friend made at San Francisco State University in 1981-82.  We met in a general elective Speech class.  I'd already noticed her earlier that day in the bookstore.  I liked her shoes -- black Capezios -- and her hair.  She was a weirdo like me, back in the days when there were weirdos.  [PS I know that I just said on Facebook that I was making a new vow not to say I was too old for stuff.  But I never said I was vowing not to look back on my youth as The Coolest Time Ever, which honestly, it was.]

Funny that just this weekend I was looking at a box of stuff from Margot, not just letters we wrote each other when she moved back to LA, then to Copenhagen, back to LA, then back to SF, then Missouri and Oklahoma, etc.  Also poems she wrote and gave me, poems we collaborated on, drawings she did, notes we passed in class.  I was just looking at the box and wondering whether I would keep its contents much longer, whether they are one of those things I need to let go of, burn ceremonially in a bucket in the yard.  [I can no longer burn things in our fireplace, since we removed the grate and stuck an aquarium in its place.  The gecko would not appreciate the flames.]

I think of Margot quite a bit.  We were best friends at a time in our lives when those bonds go deep.  Two of her paintings hang in my house in the two rooms in which I spend most of my time -- the living room and our bedroom.

She and I were pregnant at the same time.  During our last trimester, we even shared a zip code, 94132, way out in the foglands near State.  Her son was born two weeks after The Kid, and we got to be young mothers together for the short period of time that she remained close-by.  Watching her eat while pregnant, I remember being stunned at the quantity of food she could put away -- two burritos in one sitting, I sh*t you not -- this same person who used to survive on popcorn and an apple, even during the brief time she was a bike messenger.

I always loved her sense of style, her confidence, her sense of humor and outlook.  But as happens, we drifted apart.  I think the last time I saw her, she came to our house for a visit.  I remember feeling so self-conscious about our place -- wishing we had somewhere nicer to receive guests -- and feeling a little awkward.  It's so funny to try and layer the present presence of a person over the memory of a person.  After so long of only having an idea of this friend, then boom, there she was in the flesh.  Such a funny adjustment, to make room for the real thing.

It isn't unusual to receive something in the mail from Margot.  Literally, that box of Margot in my closet has probably hundreds of letters in it.  It's just been a while.

Her letter was inside a card that looked oddly familiar, a painting by Paul Klee.  And lo and behold, it's a card that I gave her years ago.  Enclosed was an article about Arthur Rimbaud that ran in the New Yorker. I have the magazine but hadn't gotten to the article yet.  She sent it, since it reminded her of me, me at 19 always lugging around a poet in my bookbag, Rimbaud one of my favorites.  

Paul Klee, Glass Facade, 1940

Margot and I had so many funny experiences together.  It was she and I who stuffed Charles Bukowski down the garbage chute, laughing the whole way.  She and I who "survived" living in a one-bedroom apartment in Paris with my entire family for a few weeks, then escaped back to San Francisco, where we felt we could be free.  She and I who crashed on Roddy's floor for weeks following arrival as we found work and our own place to live (a tiny studio in which we shared a mattress we got for free).  She and I who went separately and yet together from teen to parenthood.  It's so good to hear her voice.

She included her email address in the card she sent, but I don't think I'll be using it.  So much more fun and so much more appropriate, given our history and who we still are, to mail her something back, using our old names of A-skin and M-skin, one being walking in two different skins, the one called Ariane, the one called Margot.

As different as our lives may be now and the paths that got us here, I won't let go of that pretty little box of Margot.  Instead, how delightful that I can keep adding to it, almost thirty years later.

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the bag thing: i didn't forget

I know it's been a while since I introduced The Bag Thing, and that I owe you all the photos and delightful narratives that accompany them. But I've been a little lame lately, and so not up to my usual snuff.

In the meantime, to hold you over, I just wish we could see what's INSIDE this enormous $2,165 purse of Anne Hathaway's.  My great fear is it would be virtually impossible to find anything in this bottomless Mary-Poppins bag.  How could it possible have enough pockets to organize one's things?  You'd have to resort to a purse within a purse -- and that is just silly.  Note that she covets her own clutch.  I should think so!


More soon on The Bag Thing, promise!

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/hold-everything/?scp=1&sq=hold&st=cse

books about orphans

A few weeks ago, the day that Joe and I went out on that early-early morning hike to Tennessee Valley, we came across a garage sale close to our house, featuring my most favorite thing: kids selling off their books.  Now, this is only my favorite thing because it means I can benefit, but there's a part of me (a big part) that truly doesn't understand the selling of books, the kicking them out of your house.  Unless they're rotten.  I still always feels bad about it, like how I still feel a little guilty about stuffing Charles Bukowski down the garbage chute in my parents' kitchen in Paris.  Or freecycling last year's Booker Prize winner.  Rubbish: get out of here.  Only if I can't read you, do I want you out of here...

I'd been thinking about re-reading Heidi by Johanna Spyri for a long time, in this year that I seem to be going backwards and forwards in my reading, revisiting old favorites and making new ones.  But every edition I saw in bookstores was just so ugly, I couldn't manage to trade the coins for the pages.

And here, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but this sweet Junior Deluxe Edition of Heidi and a companion volume of Black Beauty, published in 1954. Sweeeet.  I'm crazy about those goats with the little hearts above them on the cover -- so cute.

Heidi is a book I adored as a child, along with The Little Princess, both stories that were made, no surprise, into films starring Shirley Temple, both stories about orphans.  I read these books over and over again.  Heidi held particular appeal, since it takes place in the Alps and I could easily transpose her glee at standing in an Alpine meadow onto my own joy at being in the Pyrenees, in our ancestral place, breathing the mountain air, eating well. 

Never had the child been so happy in all her life.  She drank in the golden sunlight, the fresh air, the sweet perfume of the flowers and longed for nothing but to stay where she was for ever.  

There was something so appealing to me about orphan status.  It's not that I wanted my parents dead, but I longed for the freedom to make my own way, which is, I suppose, the great appeal of the orphan motif in children's stories.  No one to protect you (or boss you), so you get to be you, figure stuff out, be the hero or heroine of your own tale.  I know I wasn't alone, since most of our childhood neighborhood games originated in the orphanage, all of us escaping from Ms. Minchin (probably the influence of watching A Little Princess every time it aired on Channel 44), surviving by our own wits, organizing ourselves into a little, fair utopia.

Heidi is a remarkably religious book, which is something I didn't remember from my childhood readings.  But the big deal is Heidi herself, who's so remarkably sweet and loving, absolutely free of artifice, scampering like a goat and smelling the flowers.  It made me long, again, for a simple life, a bed in a hay loft with a view of the stars, days spent roaming the meadows, naming the flowers and rambling with the herd.  

underwater

I'm in the midst of a horrible spate of insomnia.  Either I only sleep a couple of hours at a time, generally with awful dreams, with an hour or so of wakefulness in between.  Every couple of nights I'll take one of the remaining Ambien from the chemo left-overs and be knocked out for 8-9 hours.  That lets me catch up a bit.  But today I am falling on my face a bit, unable not to work since our audit starts in less than a week and we're not ready, unable to work at full strength since I'm feeling so wobbly.  Reconcile Balance Sheet accounts?  Ok, I'll try, but really, I think I'll have to re-do most everything tomorrow.

One of the nightmares I had last night -- and let me be the first to say that reading Hunger Games at bedtime is probably not a good idea for me right now (thank goodness I'm only maybe 10 pages from the end of volume 3) -- was about me drowning.  Repeatedly.  I would watch myself wake up gasping for air, then I'd fall back asleep into the sharp realization that it was still happening.  I've never had that dream before.  And boy, I hope I don't have it again tonight.  I don't know if it was really physically happening -- sleep apnea all of a sudden? -- or if it was just dreamed.

Drowning is one of my biggest fears.

And really, the dream-drowning is just a mirror of how I've been feeling lately, like I can't keep my head above water, paddle as I might.  Just too much happening all at once, and I'm not in full possession of whatever faculties I might have possessed in the near-past, skills that helped me keep breathing no matter how deep things got.

That dream completely freaked me out.

And today I'm just exhausted.  I felt fine yesterday (probably because of my Ambien-enforced eight hours).  Today, just so wobbly, unable to concentrate, dreaming of one thing and one thing only: my pillow.  OK, maybe two things, really: my pillow and my former wherewithal.

Here's hoping this passes soon.  In the meantime, enjoying all this abundant oxygen, filling my lungs, savoring each breath.

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i'm a teeny tiny little ant

"Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud?"
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.
— "Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise."
— "Vous chantiez ? J’en suis fort aise. 
Eh bien! Dansez maintenant."
- Jean de la Fontaine, La Cigale et la fourmi

When we were children at the French American Bilingual School, like all French children in French schools everywhere, we memorized and recited poems and stories.  One of these is La Cigale et la fourmi, The Cicada and the Ant, which you can read in passable translation here.  This story, I just realized, is lodged in me deep.

The point of the story is that the little ant works all summer, working and preparing for winter, while the cicada sings. When winter comes, the cicada has nothing set by and goes begging to the ant.  Who asks the cicada, Well, what did you do all summer long?  And when the cicada says, so pleased with herself, why, that she had sung, the ant says, You sang?  How delightful.  Now dance.

And that's the end of that.  The moral not lost on generations of kids: make hay while the sun still shines.  But so much prettier than that.  

The fable itself just trips off the tongue.  The words themselves are music, and I can remember myself in a line-up of charming children in navy blue jumpers or pants and white shirts, red ribbons in my own hair, reciting this, sing-song, the story itself imprinting itself all the way inside me.

I realized, moments ago, the hold La Fourmi has on me, as I was considering my own hesitation to go anywhere at all in the summer.  We've been having a fantastic weekend, but I am plagued by a little ant-y voice whispering that I am letting the sun get away from me, the time to harvest and prepare.  I think about how satisfied I was two weekends ago when I made a load of pesto from basil in the garden, how I felt last weekend crushing comb for jars and jars of honey.  There's something so deeply comforting about stocking the larder before winter, and conversely something so disturbing to me about not spending the time required to maximize the return on the spring investment.  But I've been choosing to sing instead of work.  I know the singing is good for me, but the work still pulls. 

All the way to a fantastic morning and afternoon in Point Reyes yesterday, I hesitated. If I stayed home, I could tackle those white flowers in [garden] Box 4 that I've been meaning to clear for ages.  If I stayed home, I could compost, start harvesting apples, make a pear tart, write, roast that butternut squash that we harvested, dig potatoes.  The list goes on and on.  I wish there were a different word than "work" to describe it really, since work carries with it the baggage of not-joy.  The work I'm talking about it is nothing but joy.

As we stood in line at the Point Reyes Station Farmers Market yesterday morning, waiting for our delicious grilled cheese sandwiches with a fried egg inside (dreamy!), a friend of a friend was surprised when Joe said there were a lot of Bay Area things we had never done.  Which is weird, for two natives.  He meant things like going wine tasting, or eating at famous restaurants like Chez Panisse or French Laundry, or any number of other things that this person, not-native, was talking about which I can't even remember now.  We only went to Alcatraz two years ago, for example, almost to the day, a cold weird day with Blue Angels flying overhead and Joe stumbling around in a chemo-induced fog.

Anyway, yesterday, standing in line, we had just emerged from a great yoga class at Yoga Toes with the charming Nicholas Giacomini, aka MC Yogi.  He was great and funny and awesome, and he played James Brown which RULES.  It was so sweet for me to have Joe in yoga with me, just like old times.  To be there, we had opted not to do our usual Saturday morning thing -- Joe hours on the bike with his teammates, me hours in Sausalito with the kula, then reuniting at home for lunch and garden.  We chose to skip that and spend the day with Peggy and Jim in West Marin, stay away from our Country Mouse chores and just hang out.  It's kind of a new thing we're doing, trying to take a weekend-day a month and step outside our pattern.  

So much fun but really so hard for us.

Anyway, this friend of Peggy's with whom we were waiting for sandwiches,  just couldn't imagine what we were doing with our time that we weren't partaking of all of these wonders of the area, all of these resources.  I felt funny trying to explain the pull that Home has for us.  It was hard for me to imagine being someone without this need to be INSIDE the very ground I walk on, that maybe she doesn't know what it feels like to know that that eggplant you're eating is something you yourself put in the ground, coaxed from seed, protected against the incursion of birds and voles, until it came to glorious fruition, a celebration of soil and summer on your palate.  I wasn't always like this, raised on concrete and noise, but here I am, in full revel of my country side, hardly able to tear myself away from our small plot of earth.

Years and years later, I see how all that early life indoctrination turned out, how much I am La Fourmi, industriously gathering and planning for the future.  Even while I'm out singing and eating and window-shopping with my friends, still the teeny tiny little ant inside is keeping track of where the sun is and how much time remains.  A little Cigale but mostly, mostly Fourmi.


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and just because i love this song and it makes me laugh and it has some tiny bit to do with today's theme, here's Flea singing "Little Pea."  Just listen, nothing to see here.  :)

bring it: the drug of the nation...

For a very, very long time, from the time The Kid was 5 until he turned 18, we did not have television.  Wait, I lie: we had a physical television set, but we did not have cable, meaning that the physical television set was only capable of showing us videos, then DVDs.  We watched a lot of movies together, but missed a huge chunk of television-time.  We missed, for example, the entire Seinfeld era.

It was easy since for most of the time, The Kid was in Waldorf school, which actively promotes this kind of disconnection from bullshit children's programming and the horror of incessant ads pushing plastic toys and so-called "food." When we left the French school, dumped the tv and went to Waldorf, we were suddenly liberated from the acquisitive arms race of who at school claimed to have more Mighty Max playsets.  

aforementioned Mighty Max

We didn't miss tv, although of course, if/when we traveled and had access to it, we were like pigs in shit, rolling and reveling in the popular "culture" that we were otherwise missing.  [I feel I have to apologize for the use of that pig idiom.  It's revolting, but somehow really does seem fitting in this instance.]  

I credit the absence of tv for much that was good in The Kid's upbringing, one of the excellent and most important decisions we made.  He definitely had long stretches of being bored, an essential state for children, in which he learned to come up with activities on his own.  He also developed a strong reading habit, beginning from Where the Red Fern Grows (although he was a late adopter, something that kept me awake at night), and was a prolific artist and model maker.  Not having a tv puts a lot of pressure on parents, naturally, since the frequency of the question, "Mom, what can I do?" markedly increases.  But damn it, it was so worth it.

Once we were out of the woods, so to speak, developmentally, once we knew that The Kid had good habits, and once  -- probably most important -- we'd run out of surprises for his birthday, we decided to make him the gift on his 18th birthday of turning on the cable.  Don't get me wrong: we were never utter luddites.  We'd had internet for as long as it was possible to have internet, and we watched a lot of movies.  But cable tv?  That was a whole new thing.

His first response, besides glee, was, "Nice one, guys: way to get cable right before I go to college." In fairness, his birthday is in November and so college wasn't for almost a year. Plus, I don't think we were ever the kind of family that imagined that at 18, he would break up with us and be completely on his own.  

But glee it was, a feeling we all shared.  

I readily and happily admit to LOVING television.  There is so much good stuff, so much funny, so much great nature footage, so much Masterpiece Theater and so much cycling coverage.  I feel grateful that we re-entered the tv world around the time of TiVo -- thank heavens for that device -- and have only once or twice regretted letting it back into the house, probably because Somebody was watching something annoying like The Family Guy at 7 in the morning.   That is not my favorite.

Mostly I'm thinking about my love for tv a lot right now since it's September, and I'm so happy that a lot of My Shows will be coming back on the air.  In particular, I'm excited about the return of my favorite show OF ALL TIME, Sons of Anarchy, and Parks and Recreation and Always Sunny in Philadelphia and  30 Rock and House (because I love Hugh Laurie, even though the show really is, as Joe says, just medical ScoobyDoo, every episode pretty much identical to the last, every show featuring at least one mention of amyloidosis).  I am so looking forward to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey making me laugh even more than I am now thanks to Louis CK and the madness of Wilfred. 

It's not an either/or for me: I don't subscribe to the "I don't watch tv, I read books," Kill Your Television school of thought.  I'm going to do both, dang it, because it's not an either/or.  OK, yes, I do have to make a choice of how I spend the time available to me, but watching something really funny can be followed by reading something really great or vice versa.  It's not as if one negates the other.  It's a both/and.

The season hasn't started back up yet and the tv's off right now, so in the quiet of this morning, I'm savoring the anticipation of what's to come.  And for old times' sake, sharing this appropriate Disposable Heroes video from back when I really loved Michael Franti, so young and bringing it re the drug of the nation, in such a sweet, old-school Target-Video-reminescent style. 

No either/or here.  I can buy what he's selling and *still* settle down happily on the couch, closed book on my lap, rocking to the methadone metronome.

30-Day Whatever

Last month I signed up for Amy Ippoliti's 30 Day Yoga Challenge via Facebook.  I'm a huge fan of Amy's -- she's funny and she kicks ass -- and I particularly love how entrepreneurial she is, always coming up with some new deal.  Did you know she invented the Anusara immersion?  So, since I fell in love with Amy at Wanderlust, it was only natural that I follow her on FB and basically do everything possible to emulate her, be just like her. Like sign up for the Challenge.  

Except I only lasted about a week.

Amy's 30 Day Challenge for August was to spend 15 minutes a day reading something yoga-related.  Could be anything: magazine, books.  I got on the bandwagon late, so began the Challenge about 1 1/4 hours behind.  And my fuzzy anemic brain + a perhaps poor choice of reading material didn't work in my favor, either.     

David Frawley's Yoga & Ayurveda has been hanging out in my Pending pile for at least 18 months, since I set aside in favor of something juicier.  The thing about the Pending pile is that often a book winds up there because it didn't hook me.  "Pending" basically means I'll give it another try, but if I'm being realistic, it probably means Will Read When All Other Good Books Vanish.  And -- another one of my rules -- a  book never gets shelved UNLESS it's been read, which means if I don't like you, you could linger in a pile on the floor forevs.  Nevertheless, on Day 14, I feel like the book gave me a huge gift, maybe its only gift, when I read this:

Yoga and Ayurveda are sister sciences that developed together and repeatedly influenced each other throughout history... Yoga is first and foremost a science of Self-realization. Its concern is spiritual practice... Yoga provides the key to all spiritual development, which in the Vedic sense is gaining knowledge of our true nature beyond time, space, death and suffering.  Ayurveda is primarily a science of Self-healing aimed at relieving the diseases of body and mind... Traditionally, in India, yoga dealt with the spiritual side of life...  Ayurveda, on the other hand, dealt with the physical.

Allow me to reiterate: Yoga is the spiritual practice.  Ayurveda is the physical. This is something I know about yoga after 8 1/2 years of practice, but something that snuck up on me, really.  I went into it, like a lot of people do, for a physical practice, resistant to the notion that it was a spiritual practice.  And it got me anyway!  Reading it in Frawley, though, made a lightbulb go on, that's still on.  I've been thinking about it ever since.  

Even though I got that lightbulb out of it, I was disappointed that I couldn't manage to complete a reading Challenge.  But here's the deal: it's hard for me to take on a Challenge that involves reading, since I already have so much reading on my list.  As I sit here writing this, you should know that around me are the latest New Yorker (thanks, Martine) in which I'm reading an article about Timothy Ferris, the second volume of The Hunger Games (thanks, Eunice) which if I'm not careful I will finish before leaving for work today, and at least three open webpages that I am reading as part of my morning routine.  

Truth is, though, that it's apparently extremely hard for me to do *anything* for 30 days straight, if we leave aside the purely biological.  

The 30 Day Yoga Challenge for September hasn't been posted yet, so I don't know what Amy proposes for the month.  But I'm thinking I need my own 30 Day Challenge, something that I commit to doing every single day, starting today.  Consistency is something I really wanted to work on this year -- it's in my resolutions, and on a yellow 3 x 5 index card on my desk to remind me.  Question is: what?  What should I do for 30 days?

There are some simple health-related practices I could take on, like ensuring that I take my thyroid, iron and Vitamin D every single day.  It's remarkably easy for me to forget things like that and then suffer as a consequence.  Or I could vow to sleep 7 hours a night for 30 days, but that seems well-nigh impossible, unless my supply of Ambien expands.  But those are boring, and not really challenging in a way that, uh, challenges me.

I think for 30 days I might try something truly radical.  I think for 30 days, starting this second, I am not going to criticize or correct.  When Joe reads this, he is going to laugh his ass off!  This is probably the single-hardest challenge I can come up with, since that red pencil is so much a part of my nature, calling out the it's/its errors, bitching about incivility, constantly schooling everybody about the rules.  I do it to myself, too, if that's any consolation at all, listening intently at all times to the very loud voice within that likes to point out and dwell on my own flaws and errors.

Done, for a month.  

With one caveat: at work, my job really is quality control, so I am responsible for catching and correcting errors.  I hereby solemnly swear that I will do so nicely.

Help me with this, will you?  This is going to be super-hard, way harder than reading about yoga for 15 minutes a day, but I think the end-result is going to  be really great. I may come out of this more positive than before, more able to see the good, less intent on fixing what I think is wrong.  Or I could bail after 2 days.  Which, if I'm being consistent, I won't criticize.  

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