Resolutions from the Mastiff side

Hey, if "distaff" can refer to the female half of a couple, then "mastiff" should be the male half, right?  And it would make the distaff happy if, along with our 65 nations, we had a blog viewer who was a mastiff...

So I've read Nora's resolutions, and I'm deeply humbled.  (That happens often for me; I learn things from her—about forbearance and resolve and compassion and curiosity and a hundred other ideals—and I think about the rest of my day a little differently.  I'm a better person because I know her, and the more I know her, the better I am.)

I'm still very aware, six months in, of all the things that are happening for the first time.  Our first married Thanksgiving, our first married martini, our first married joint holiday cards.  And tomorrow will be another, our first married New Year's Eve.  In many ways, we've been here before.  But because it's our first, because we've had our share of elsewhere, we are going to stay home, have some friends drop in. We'll sit in the living room and talk and laugh and have a toast at 12:00. This one feels different.

More importantly, 2012 feels different.

I once wrote to her that she was magic in a bottle.  I repeated those words on our wedding day half a year ago.  And I'm thinking about them again tonight.

In fact, this is the letter that I wrote to her on June 25th, and that she read to the community that afternoon.

My Nora,

I’m sure that you never imagined all of this when I asked you last August if you would marry me.  I’m sure that you never imagined all of this when I woke you up on New Year’s Eve with a date in mind.

I’m sure you never imagined the blog.  Or the spreadsheets.  Or the rings. 

It’s been a whirlwind of the unimaginable, but now we’re here.  And I just wanted to take a minute to remind you of a couple of things.

I want to remind you that you are a generous and gracious friend.

I want to remind you that you have changed my life. 

I want to remind you that you are magic in a bottle.  Still, and always.

I want to remind you to stop, right now, and look at our friends.  Go ahead, stop.  Right now, for twenty seconds or so, just stop and look.

These are the people who have held us.  These are the people who make us more than we might otherwise be.

Just as you make me more than I otherwise am.

We are better together than apart.  We are better here than anywhere else.  I was contented on that evening last summer when you said yes, and put on that carrot bracelet.  Not happy, exactly.  Not excited.  But fulfilled, completed, at home.

And today is the same.  Happy, certainly, and a little excited. 

But also fulfilled.

And completed.

And at home.

With my full love,
Herb

So what does that mean for 2012?  It means that no matter how many demands I receive from work or from professional colleagues, I will remember that she, and we, deserve consideration as well.  It means that I need to do my writing, to and help her do hers.  It means remembering every day what "home" is, and ensuring that I help to make it.  It means focusing on what we have and what we can do rather than what we don't and can't.  It means fitting our jobs to our passions rather than the inevitable diminshment of working in the other direction.  It means being creative about the kinds of work that might lead to the values we hold.  It means remembering that everything we choose to do means that we are not doing other things, and that we should weigh the balance consciously rather than default to habit.

It's too easy to fall into labels and categories.  I'm "a college administrator," or "a teacher," or whatever it is.  But really, underneath those job titles, I'm trying to accomplish some things in the world, and I might have those effects more fully or more broadly through some other medium.  2012 needs to be a year in which we keep those values and goals more visible than the roles we use to achieve them.

And I resolve to hold all of you close in this coming year as well.  As the cliche goes, you never wish on your deathbed that you'd answered just a few more e-mails or read one more issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education... no, you wish you'd spent more time with your friends and your family, more time making the world better for yourself and others.  That's the work of 2012.

Nora closed her resolutions by wishing you all a "bounteous" 2012.  And I concur, but I'd also add the wish that we all think this year about the "bounty" we most desire.

Resolutions - of course...

It's the day before the night before. Tomorrow is New Year's eve and the next day, somehow the clocks are presumed to start over because of some arbitrary calendar thing. If I were Herb, I would probably look up the origins of calendaring, but I am not Herb. But I am not immune from the desire to start over at many of the things that are part of the daily patterning. And I am as unlikely to succeed in those resolutions as most, though I am determined to try. Of course I expect to lose weight and become more fit. Of course I vow to balance my life better and spend more time doing the things that nourish, instead of focusing on the toxic tasks and those that are do-able and can be checked off the list rather than the ones that are more consuming. But as I sit beside the wood stove, I am thinking of all this year has brought - a marriage at the top of that list. It is not something I would have predicted a year earlier. And I wonder, like most of us, where I will be on the day before the night before 2013. And this year, the stakes seem different. 

I know this much.

We are blessed in our broad circle of friends and I am only sorry that I haven't spent more time with each of those we love. I am sad at how much of the casual dropping-in friendships that were part of our earlier lives have disappeared under  the mounds of to-do's. I resolve to be better at that, and at keping in touch.

Because of our commuting lifestyles, I have been unable to make the contributions I wanted, to the communities in which we live. I have allowed passive acts like reading the news on-line, to substitute for action. I resolve to try to act in some small way each week, to make the change I want to see. Because of the logistics of life in early 2012, most likely, that will mean writing, rather than running for office or funding campaigns for change. While Vermont is blessed with terrific state officials, I agree with Paul Krugman that "too often political journalists mistake the theater of policy for reality (or don’t care about the difference)" and therefore the politicians spend their time grandstanding to those who are most likely to get them a media moment or who will support them financially. Certainly there is too much distance between a constituent's pleas and the passage of policy. But I have been speaking to "the converted" and I need to act on what I have been saying, and act where it might, maybe, just possibly, make a difference in the way one person votes or acts, or in one place.

I resolve to work on work. I have spent less time than I should, on the things that can make a difference in the lives H and I lead. We are apart too often, and I am responsible for not thinking hard enough about how to build the change we want to see in our personal lives. It is easier to do what is familiar than to imagine something new. A colleague sent a Christmas card quoting Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it's done." I commit to that - to making the work we want rather than fitting the niches that others provide for us. That entails believing that I can make what I want, and right now, that may be the hardest task I set for myself, but  I commit to tilling that ground, though right now, that looks about as unclear as where we will be on Dec. 30, 2012.

There are other resolutions... to front-burner the book I have been working on for decades now, to get out of the desk chair for something other than eating and sleeping, to listen more carefully and not multi-task while I should be paying attention. But most of all, I resolve to push the demons aside, for part of each day, and be grateful for what entered my life with great joy in 2011. And that includes you ...and my dear H.

A bounteous 2012 and peace to all, and much much love....

Six Months and One Day

And the six months were pretty good, but the one day has caused us to rethink the whole thing.

We both got a terrible night's sleep last night, for far too many reasons.  We got up around 8:30 and packed and said goodbyes, and loaded the luggage cart.  But the big suitcase was too big to fit through the elevator doors, so we had to take everything off the cart and do it over.  The same was true again at the bottom, where the suitcase was too wide to fit on the cart through the door to the street.

But we got everything into the car, got the cart back into the lobby.  I went around the corner to Oren's for a coffee and a tea... closed.  So we drove over to Greenwich to RouRou, another nice little coffee shop.  The young proprietor was rolling out his awnings as we arrived, and he welcomed me in.  "Nothing like the smell of fresh croissants in the morning," he crowed.  I got an iced coffee for Nora...but he had no ice.  Oh, well, it had been refrigerated, so good enough.  I ordered an iced tea for me... but he doesn't do iced tea, so I had hot tea instead.

We got underway, not very much traffic.  The cats were whining.  We've discovered this stuff called Comfort Zone which is an attempt to replicate happy-cat pheromones–it really does seem to calm them down when you spray it around on the seats and floor.  But the can was back at home in my car.  So we stopped at a PetSmart, where I stayed in the car and Nora went in.  She returned many minutes later with Comfort Zone, a scratching post and a scratch board made with emery crystals so that it supposedly does a better job keeping their claws trimmed back.  But she realized that she hadn't gotten any paw-safe snowmelt, so she went back in while I sprayed a little happy mist around the car.  Two spritzes on Nora's seat, two on the center console, two on the floor of the back seat.  And then I wanted to shoot the little rug that's behind my seat, so I put the can into my left hand to reach around... and hosed myself directly in the right eye with a full stream of it.  90% ethanol right in the eyeball.

Ow.

Read the label.  "Eye Irritant," it says. Duh.

So my melted eyeball was dripping down the front of my jacket, but the stuff really does keep you pretty calm.  So I got out of the car and let the alcohol evaporate, and after about a minute, I could open my eye again, upon which I discovered that I still had vision and depth perception and really good tear-duct productivity.

Nora returned again, by which point I could pretty much see again.  So we drove off, bought gas, and proceeded on to the Woodbury Commons outlet center near Central Valley NY.  I need some new shirts for work, and Mom has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Philips Van Heusen, which gives her a card good for 40% of on any purchase of Van Heusen, Bass, Izod or other PVH brands from one of their stores.  We had that card today.

Can you even begin to imagine how busy it is at one of America's largest outlet malls on December 26th?  No.  Trust me, no, you cannot even begin to imagine how busy it is at one of America's largest outlet malls on December 26th.  We got there at about 11:45 am, and even the extended, overflow, distant, cowpasture parking lots were full.  (Honest, we saw one family who'd parked across the eight-lane access road at the nearby high school and walked across all that traffic rather than try to fight their way through Woodbury Commons parking.)  So we parked way out by the tour buses and snow plows, and walked into utter consumer hell.  There were rope-lines outside some of the stores, forty or fifty people waiting just to get IN to the Fendi store, for instance.  We found a map kiosk, located the Van Heusen store, and walked over.  Elbow to shoulder in there.  Long lines for the dressing rooms, lines for the registers.

I had an interesting conversation with the store manager while waiting to try on a shirt; he said that the rope lines we'd seen outdoors were more due to preventing shoplifting than managing crowds.  If the really high end stores let in only ten or fifteen people at a time, the staff can watch them all.

Nine shirts and a nice jacket later, we were done, and the price was admittedly crazy low, like about 80% lower than retail price. And the Comfort Zone left on my face probably kept me calmer than I otherwise would have been.

Walking back out at 1:30, the parking was even MORE full than it had been.  We walked past one little altercation, where one group of young people in a Scion and another group of young people in some anonymous ZipCar were both inserted at opposing angles about 30% of the way into a single parking space.  The two groups were standing around arguing about whose spot it was and who was wrong and all that, and the security guard on her Segway scooter said, "If there's an argument about a parking spot, neither car gets it.  That's the rule."  What a great sort of Dad-wisdom that is.  "If the twoaya's don't shut up, neither one'a ya's is gonna get any!" 

Nora hadn't had enough outlet therapy yet, so we went to another nearby shopping center and the Eileen Fisher Factory Store, where she got a nice mid-length coat.  And then we got back in the car and drove, and drove, and drove.  The cats were champs: eight hours, no food, no peeing, no puking, and after I melted my face off with the Comfort Zone, they were pretty placid about it all.

Finally, at 6:30, we were in the house.  Cats fed and watered, all luggage inside, and we were eating a mediocre takeout pizza that had the HUGE advantage of having required no time or labor to produce, so it tasted heavenly.  But we've used up just about all of our emotional reserves.  Fortunately, tomorrow, I'll be driving away for another two hours in each direction to go use my new pool cue for the very first time.  (If you want to see it, go to this link above, click on "cue collections," then "standard collection," then find the Grand Slam in natural finish.  Absolutely stunning, and the photos really reveal little about just how beautiful this thing is.)

I should probably shoot a little Comfort Zone around my car before I leave, just as a back-up...

2.5 Down, One to Go

Well, we promised three Christmases, but had a surprise visit this afternoon from our friends Sjoerd and Michael from next door.  We discussed politics, talked about having Frisian horse butts outside your kitchen window, and had a glass of prosecco in the middle of the afternoon.

Last night, we had a lovely dinner with Grazyna and Howard, consisting of:

• Prosecco (seems to be a theme...)
• Cocoa truffles
• Grilled salmon
• Cabbage and mushroom perogies
• Borscht with dumplings
• Steamed asparagus
• Steamed fresh potatoes
• Couscous with cranberries and pecans
• Chardonnay
• Brussels sprouts
• Apple strudel
• Kutia - Polish / Ukranian/ Slavic charoset
• Kenyan coffee liqueur
• Israeli honey liqueur
• Tea

I don't know if all of that was authentically Polish, but it was authentically pretty terrific.  And then we stayed up until just past midnight solving the world's problems; although, since we didn't fully agree on everything, we have some work left to do.

Back home, crashing into bed.  Then up this morning at about 9:00 to finish wrapping the last of packages, and then Christmas morning with Mom.  A fun fabulous time; as Mom said, every gift was clearly intended to be exactly for whom it was for.  There were no generic "oh, gee, that's really nice..." moments.  (It's unseemly to talk about one's Christmas loot, but Nora and Mom conspired to have a brand new Theirry Layani pool cue delivered from Montreal...  My gosh, it's gorgeous!)

We made scrambled eggs and bagels and cheese for lunch, then cleaned up enough (both the apartment and Nora & I...) to be presentable for Sjoerd and Michael's arrival.  Now we're cleaning up once again, and will leave for Ellis and Joanna's in about half an hour.

A lovely weekend thus far, with more to come.  We hope that yours has been terrific as well.

Three Christmases

We're about 20 minutes from loading the cats into the car as the final step before leaving for NYC.  Tonight, we'll have dinner and Christmas with Grazyna and Howard -- Grazyna still holds to many of her Polish holiday traditions, so that's always a lot of fun.   (Clear borscht is really good, too!)  Then in the morning, we'll have breakfast and Christmas with Mom.  And then in the evening, we'll have dinner and Christmas with Mom and Ellis and Joanna.

We hope that all of you have wonderful Christmases as well, regardless of how many you indulge in.

Herb & Nora

Cookies and Movies and Adventure

Yesterday was a very fine day.

Once we got up, I prepped the kitchen, laying out all of the flours and spices and sugars and bowls and spoons to make cookies.  We put together two different kinds of sugar cookie dough to chill in the fridge, along with a double batch of rugelach dough.  Then we made brownies, blondies, and oatmeal cookies.  (The blondies didn't set well, but I figured that letting them cool overnight would turn them into blondie brittle.  Turns out they just became very dense, and very good, blondies.)

Highly Recommended

Then we cleaned ourselves and the kitchen, and drove into Glens Falls NY to our favorite haunt, Aimie's Dinner and a Movie.  The drive through the countryside was great, as was the conversation.  We'd planned on stopping at a grocery store to restock a couple of things, but we didn't really need them right away, so we went to Aimie's sister business, Wallaby's Jazz Bar.  We sat.  After brief conversation, the bartender took up our challenges. Nora wanted a martini, something like a Cosmo but not too sweet.  I wanted a beer, bitter.  "Say no more.  I've got just the thing."  And soon, Nora had a martini made with grapefruit and lemon vodkas, and I had a pint of Old Man Winter, by Southern Tier Brewing of Lakewood NY.

Speaks with Doorknobs asked the bartender about the barback, a stunning display of woodworking with a bust of a horse looking over the bar from the top center.  Well, there are some folks who, once you crack the tap, can't stop.  There were scarcely any other patrons, so with a little urging, we learned about the history of the bar, the politics of working with bar owners, the residential and commercial real estate conditions of Glens Falls and Saratoga... and then we learned that our bartender was back in school to train in radiology.  We got a MARVELOUSLY graphic depiction of a hip replacement surgery, complete with stainless steel mallets and pulling the old hip out of the socket with the puller having one foot braced against the operating table for leverage, blood and bone chips flying around the room.  He said at one point, "I have a moderately weak stomach, and this was my first full surgery.  I thought I'd have not look until after the incision was done, so that I wouldn't pass out. I was sure I was going to become a secondary patient.  But I finally told myself, 'Just get outside yourself and go do this.'  And I was okay."  The orthopedic surgeon was someone our bartender had played high school football against 21 years earlier.

Then we went in to the theater, got a very nice seat back-row center (back row at Aimie's being the equivalent of about the eighth row in a normal theater), and had a remarkably low-quality dinner.  We keep TRYING to have a good meal at Aimie's, but they can't pull it off.  The concept is so wonderful that we want to support it, but their kitchen staff or procedures are just not up to the task.  (Same ownership as the bar, which is nearly empty four nights a week and only has real business on Friday and Saturday nights once the bands start up.)

But the movie itself, Hugo, was remarkable.  It wasn't a very credible story, and the acting ranged from bland to awful.  Ben Kingsley would not have gotten his Oscar for this, and Sacha Baron Cohen was channeling John Cleese from the Fawlty Towers era.

What was remarkable was the way in which 1920s Paris had become a larger-scale analogue for the clockworks that Hugo tended.  This was a movie with ten million moving parts, all of which were visible so that you could see the gears turn and the cam-wheel pivot and the pawl catching on the ratchet.  It was a movie about the craft of movies, made by a director, Martin Scorcese, who clearly loves the craft of movies.

In every movie, there are a few lines that I take away as ideas worth testing.  From Hugo, the passage was when Hugo was breaking into a theater with his compatriot Isabelle.  Since young Hugo was a mechanical wizard, it was a simple matter for him to pick the lock on a side door.  Isabelle said, "We could get in trouble!"  And Hugo looked at her and said, "I know.  That's how you know it's an adventure!"

Nora and I have talked a lot about risk and certainty.  Hugo may have some wisdom for us both.

Good news and bad news from the Twilight Zone

Cancer care is another planet. No news there. We have been wandering without a guidebook - neither Fodor's nor the Lonely Planet. And we have been stuck in a bad hotel in a decent neighborhood with Anthony Perkins for a hotellier (click on the link!) - OK so I exaggerate a bit. A bit.

Mom was diagnosed with non-small-cell carcinoma sometime in early August. She found her oncologist through a beloved primary care physician who recommended someone on his hospital's staff. We made an appointment and went through the testing associated with pinning down the what's and where's. That included X-rays, blood work and PET and CT scans in a lead-lined room below the street, with the sounds of banging from the other rooms. Creepy. A little like listening to the torture of other prisoners, though I liked our "jailers".

Then began the readings of the readings of the tests. I began to understand slowly, that cancer is not linear. We heard that she had stage 4 cancer from her primary care doc. Not good news. But that it was confined to the lung and the pleural cavity. Good news that it wasn't in other places like the kidneys or liver or brain. We heard that lung cancer likes bone. It wasn't in the bone. Cause for near celebration.

She began to have difficulty breathing. She met a pulmonologist who we liked. A lot. He stuck some kind of drain in her side to withdraw the fluid in the space between the lung and the chest wall, so the lung could fully expand. I guess that is what qualifies as bad news and good news. Three times. A liter and a half of fluid each time. Over the course of less than three weeks.  Bad news. She had a "pleurodesis" in which they spray some kind of talc in the cavity and the body is so annoyed that it forms a scar which closes the cavity so the fluid can't accumulate. I never quite got it straight where the fluid goes. Her beloved doc said something like "if you remove the tear ducts, you won't cry even though there is something still stuck in your eye." Good news. Really! Well, sort of. The oncologist was supposed to release her with medication in hand. He never showed up despite calls from the hospital staff, a friend-doctor employed at the same hospital, the residents, the social worker, and yes, her pulmonologist. The oncologist never showed up. Hours after we were supposed to be able to leave. Later he said he had come in 15 minutes after we gave up and went home.

So you may have noticed that there isn't much in this account about the oncologist. Yup. Mom met with him alright. With my brother. With friends in tow. He prescribed a new age cancer drug that costs something on the order of $3000 plus a month. If you can get it. If you can get insurance coverage. Did you know that the supplies of cancer drugs are in short supply? (you can click on this link as well) They are. Bad news.  He gave her the first month's supply.  Good news. We tried to reach him about the second month's supply and got it with one day's supply left on month 1. Did I say that that required multiple phone calls? It did. Not once did I get through to the secretary when I called, though I did leave messages with the answering service, who left messages  for the secretary...We got the  Fed Exed meds from Florida with rubber gloves to take it with. And with a bill for "only" $2000 which dropped to $240 the next month, when she went on the "catastrophic" level of insurance coverage. Forget about the osteoporosis pill that cost over $100 for one month - that's right, one pill. Ah well, that's not about the cancer, and she got the meds she needed. Let's have a party. And then we tried to reach the oncologist about the prognosis. How many calls? How many emails? He didn't answer any of them, but at the next appointment, he told us "one of my patients has lived for TWO years on this drug and is still alive." Good news. "And probably 100% of men over the age of 80 have prostate cancer. And that's not what kills them." SO since she is 92, and 92 is even older than 80-something, she could well live forever with lung cancer. Goodie. There were phone calls about alternative drugs that had just been approved. Emails about prognosis and test results and appointments and ...yes... fear... and itching.... and diarrhea.... Not one call or email was ever returned. Not one.....

SCENE TWO.....
Mom went for a second opinion today. Here's the shameless plug for Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.  We had to get "20 unstained slides" and "1 diagnostic slide" and a CD of her PET and CT scans. OK, that was a PIA. We essentially had to apply to get into see the doc and we were rejected by one who couldn't see her soon enough. We were accepted by another colleague. Oh Happy Day.

Mom went for a second opinion today. The cabbie actually got out to help her into the cab. What are the odds?

Mom went for a second opinion today. The doc spent close to an hour with us. His staff was clear and respectful. He was clear and respectful. There is good news and bad news. But when I called to say that the pharmacy was saying that they couldn't fill the prescription as written, his staff answered the phone on the second ring, asked what pharmacy we were going to use, and said, "don't worry, we'll take care of it." And they resolved it and called back in 20 minutes.

Anthony Perkins was last seen in the rear view mirror.

All in a Day's Work

It's a late night, and I arrived just over an hour ago, in NYC. It is 30 degrees in New York and 80 degrees in Mom's apartment. So much for sustainability. I teach a class in sustainable design and use more than a tank of gas to drive to and from VT, and the landlord of the building pumps out heat with no monitors on the radiator unless someone opts to turn off the valve. He uses the worst quality, most ozone-damaging fuel oil and clearly is unconcerned about his role in planetary health. So the radiator is pumping and the window is open.

Yesterday, H and I went Christmas shopping in Manchester and Bennington. We went to the outlets and I got new orthotics from a podiatrist who owns the local hiking store. He explained metatarsal arches and looked at my feet analyzing bumps I never noticed and the curve of my instep, and my gait...and I only went in to buy some gifts. I left with gifts in hand,, and a new stride which he says will cause me pain before it gets better. He encouraged me to work into the insoles and  come back in two to three weeks and he will analyze my feet again. He didn't charge me for the metatarsal support or the podiatric consult. Yet another example of the Vermont ethic... giving people more than they knew they wanted. (Oh yes, and both employees asked me how I felt and cautioned me not to overdo it, after a test drive across the street to the Northshire Bookstore. One had consulted on my gift purchase earlier, and the other was a mere bystander.)

We stopped in a craft store that we like in Manchester, chatted with two of the artists and then drove on to Bennington, to a craft store that H likes, on our way to one that I like, but as in earlier posts, everything was locked up tight at 6 p.m. on a Saturday, 2 weeks before Christmas. It is enough to make you believe that a lot of Cinderellas with pumpkin coaches live in Vermont. We had planned to have dinner at the well known Blue Benn Diner which has a remarkable menu - most of it posted on 8 x 11 sheets of paper all over the inside walls-quesadillas to cream of mushroom soup, and cider doughnuts to brisket, but alas they were also closed. We wound up at a Brew pup on the main street where we snagged two bar stools rather than wait 20 minutes for a table. There were two Christmas parties in the rooms upstairs with a band playing sing-along favorites that are part of bar culture. We watched while the bartender mixed 8 or more pints of various beers, Long Island Iced Tea, White Russians and a broad range of other mixed drinks and arranged them on  trays for the waiters and waitresses to carry upstairs. A lime meant the drink was alcoholic, an orange wedge signified something that was alcohol-free, and each glass was identified as the tray was picked up. We watched tray after tray disappear up the stairs on the arms of Mel the owner's son who "incorporated" in 1994 fulfilling his post-college dream, and Deb, who has been working for more than 20 years. "Dad" filled his glass three times in an hour, but the main event was Desiree the bartender who was a whirl, mixing drinks, filling glasses, restocking her garnishes and bottles, replenishing glassware, busing tables, taking payment, and keeping up the banter with her customers at the bar. Each trip was useful for some task, and there was absolutely no down time, though in the two hours that we were there, we did see her take a sip from her own water bottle once.

There's probably a joke somewhere in "two ethnographers walk into a bar," but H and I watched dumbstruck at her finesse. We got her talking about her husband who works as a cook at the hospital and her 18  month old son. We got her talking about the time she was laid off from another job at the same time that her husband was laid off, and the EIGHT jobs they took to make ends meet. And we got her talking about her marriage and her child and the difficulties of being a new parent. And we watched someone who loved the work she is doing. "No stress" she said, as she filled yet another tray. "She's awesome" the waitress and waiter said, admiring yet another one-leg-two-armed-kick-stretch-and-reach across the kid who was replacing glasses as fast as she could fill them. "I never get my drink orders filled as fast as when she's here," Mel said.

What does any of this matter on a hot-cold late New York night after another long drive? I am thinking about what it is to do the work you love. I am thinking about what it is to have the chance to be good at what you do because it is what you do all day.  I am thinking about what it is to try to do that work when you have a husband and a child who need your attention. The writer Arlie Hochschild wrote an article called "No Place Like Work" in which she described people who find work less stressful than their lives at home; described people who would rather stay at work than come home to demands that aren't so clearly defined. And I am thinking about the many people we know who never get the chance to do the jobs that reward them for the work they can do.

Oh yes, and one more thing... I am thinking about people who do what they do because it makes the people around them feel good, and it makes the people around them, able to do what they do better...OK so that's an awkward phrase, but Desiree not only was happy doing her job, but she made us happy, and she made the waiters and waitresses better at their jobs, and they made their customers happy. Not bad for a day's work.

A Dog on Thin Ice

Nora has come to the decision that my totem dog is a border collie.  That's a complimentary image, and she's described my professional life in terms that make the border collie seem like a reasonable choice.

But I'm expected to do the same now and choose a dog to represent her, and I suddenly feel as though my happiness for the next few days is on the line.  You know the old joke about the wife who asks the husband, "Does this haircut make me look too much like my mother?"  There's no good answer to something like that, right?  And that's just a yes/no question.  I now have a question ("What kind of a dog am I?") for which Wikipedia says that there are 492 possible answers, ranging from Affenpinscher to Yorkshire Terrier.  How does a guy get THAT one right?

And because she's had many dogs over the years, walking them through New York City where there are more dog breeds than people's nationalities, she's come to know something about all 492 of them.  So if I were to try to be safe and say "I think you remind me of a Cão Fila de São Miguel," she'd be, like, "Oh, that's just terrible!  How could you say such a thing?!?" And then I'd get twenty minutes of discourse on the traits of the Cao Fila and why it's nothing like her and why she was surprised and disappointed at my judgment and...

There's probably like eighteen of these dogs on the whole planet, and she'll have met five of them.

Me, on the other hand, I grew up in the working-class suburbs.  We didn't have dog parks.  We didn't even have dogs, come to think of it.  Another mouth to feed...  I remember that Chuck, two doors down, had some kind of a spaniel whose fur was always matted.  That's about it.  I think my family had the only dogs around.

My first dog, which we got when I was about eight or nine, was Dolly, a black-and-tan smooth-haired Dachshund who we got as an adult dog from somebody.  When Dolly died when I was about twelve or so, we went out and got a puppy around my birthday, a black-and-tan wire-haired Dachshund who I named Schultz, after Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes.

Sweet dogs, both, but I think if I were to tell Nora that she reminded me of a wire-haired Dachshund, there'd be hell to pay.

The other thing (and this is a terrible thing to say about the love of one's life, but the truth cannot be denied) is that Nora is a dog stereotyper.  Someone will mention a dog breed, and she'll say "Oh, those dogs are all crazy.  You can't train them."  She wouldn't say such a thing about Italians or bowlers or people from Poultney – well, she might say something like that about people from Poultney – but with dogs, she's more than willing to attribute standard characteristics to the many from the knowledge of the few.

So here we are.  I know next to nothing about dogs except for two Dachshunds and a chocolate Labrador Retriever.  I like dogs, in general, but I don't take it much farther than that.  And I have to develop an analogue dog for Nora, who knows every breed in existence and has firm opinions about each of them.

Nothing good can come from this.

The sonnet writers didn't often go for dogs as their source of comparison.

My love is like a red, red setter...

ehhh...

Let me not to the marriage of two breeds 
Admit impediments, love is not love 
Which neuters when its owner needs,
Or withholds treats, or from bed shoves.

It's the simplest, most harmless questions that hold the greatest peril.

A dog's life....

SO I don't quite remember what started it, but I know it had something to do with my last post when I said I wanted to find a Great Dane under the metaphorical tree for Christmas.  H and I started talking about what kind of dogs we were and he said I was a Jack Russell Terrier. 

 
OK so I don't get that one at all, though he says I am always doing something, and that's probably true, though too often it involves the keyboard of the computer. Anyway, it is far more flattering than what I thought he might say about Bassett Hounds and Clumber Spaniels. 

Or the other pet we have talked about acquiring when we can fnd a place with a year round pool

But then I started thinking about what he was. He called himself a Corgi cause of the short legs... Not.

And then we got off the phone and I nailed it. He's a Border Collie! They are the smartest of all dogs and they spend their days herding sheep into tight little packets by lying in a crouch and staring at them until they figure they are better off in a clump than on their own. And then if they didn't get the message, the sheepdog nips at the hocks until they move where they are supposed to. 

And sometimes the dog has to separate one from the others by running at them til they decide that they the dog's ideas are really smart, and they go hover in a corner of the pasture.

So what does H have to do with sheep? Well some of you know some of his colleagues... I am not naming any names, ok? But some of them are sort of in need of being corralled into one place, with one idea. Some of them have been known to go off on their own, thinking they can find a different path, and he has to spend his days, convincing them that the consensual path is the best for all concerned.

So I was really happy with that analysis until H said he'd gotten a message from one of the people at the professional organization he works with. Not everyone is falling so easily into line on a conference he is going to be running. And sometimes a sheepdog's work can be a bit more than he expected...

Pandering

OK so H is the numbers guy in our relationship, and I am responsible for the garden. That isn't to say that he has never dug a shovel-full of ... fertilizer... or that I can't count, but there are areas in which we leave the other one to be responsible for making decisions. His is the kingdom of numbers hands-down. But I can't help looking at the stats on our blog.

It is always interesting to see where people come from and as you can see in the right hand column, we have had some really interesting visitors - well, their countries are pretty interesting even if we don't know that they / you are interesting. But there is something humbling in the other field that is available to us, which is to see what the search terms are.  For this month, 2 people have come to the site by looking for Maine coon cats, 2 people have been looking for mokume gane rings like our wedding rings, 4 people have searched on 53 (Herbie the love bug's number in the movie by that name), and fully 70 people have found us by searching for some variety of big dog, great dane, mastiff or other dog-related combo. Now it isn't that I am jealous exactly, though all the comments seem to come in response to Herb's posts (ok, so I AM jealous), or that I feel that my gardening is taking a back seat to his posts on Herbie the love bug (ok so as I already said...!) , or that I think there is something interesting in the chronicle of married life (at least Kathleen and Susan and my mother agree), but to have a full 89% of our visitors come to us  by looking for dogs?  And there have been 244 page views on that post alone, when all we get on the others are between 2 and 10. Harrumph! Even the cats are a little miffed. SO this post is in an effort to get some real attention... Here goes:

Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, Rebecca Black
Herman Cain sexual harrasment
Apocalypse, the end of the world as a movie, video game, rapture or other likely search term
Scientology
Sex
The Meaning of Life
Tea Party
Occupy
Maserati, Koenigsegg, Ferrari, McLaren 
Khalil Gibran

Ok... there... I am done pandering to the masses. I'll post something else in a day or two...once I start breathing a little more slowly.

Then again, I take it back. I am not sure I want to be that public! Strike that!

Welcome to those of you who have found us... We are glad you are here... Now I just need to get a Great Dane for Christmas....Maybe I will go back to sleep and see what I dream of THIS time.

One Book at a Time, Please

I know many friends who have four or five books open at a time.  The book on the nightstand, the book in the office, the book on the coffee table, the audiobook in the car.  They dip into and out of these worlds, able to pick up comfortably where they left off, never confusing the characters. The Victorian detective doesn't wander onto the bridge of the starship, the beautiful Cambodian farm daughter doesn't fall in love with the Russian mathematician.  (Though any one of those would make an interesting story...)

Nora does that.  She has a couple of books or more going at once, each of them always dense with quilted, patterned language; she reads the way Annie Hall dresses.  I cannot.  I spent the weekend reading Chad Harbach's 500-page novel The Art of Fielding in two enormous gulps, 200 pages the first day and 300 more the second.  I did that last summer, too, reading Joe Coomer's A Pocketful of Names in a single run from nine in the morning until dinner.

So, given that habit, explain this.  In the course of the last two days, I've started writing a second book.  This new second book fits inside the first one, acts as a sort of reference volume to be used by the characters in the main book.  For the readers in the real world, I'm hoping that this second, internal book acts as an emotional guide to the larger husk surrounding it, is the secret encryption device that allows you to see through the code in the ways that the characters themselves cannot fully know.

It's an odd sort of confidence that rarely comes, when you can't begin to imagine where a project will go next, where you give up control and yet feel fully sure that the end will be joyful.  My life with Nora has been like that.  We rarely know what the next couple of days will bring, and yet I know that joy is assured.

"No way tired"

Why is it that I always seem to post from the center of silence? There is some music in the background - of course it is music H has chosen. He is sitting on the couch and I am on one of the twinned black chairs in the living room. I am grateful for this time together. We have had far too little of what I imagine constitutes a "normal" marriage.

I came back to MA after returning mom to NYC after the Thanksgiving festivities. I had plans to see a friend or two here, and head to a conference on Sustainable and Smart Growth held by a Cambridge think tank, Lincoln Institute. I managed to sneak some Christmas shopping in, and a trip to a few exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts- the Degas nudes, the jewelry room, and an oddly fascinating exhibit of wood sculpture by New York artist Ellsworth Kelly. I walked far too much, and was in considerable pain at the end of the day, but H and I met for dinner at the museum - something we do far too infrequently, and we wandered through the musical instruments exhibit after that. All in all, a nice day.

The conference was held  behind  substantial security at the Federal Reserve Bank Building in Boston, in rooms with glass panels and windows that faced in. There were internal courtyards and gardens with sculpted trees and shrubs, and clerestories facing the sky. Across the street, in the real cold of a winter day, was the encampment of  Occupy protesters in tents arrayed along the street facing the one doorway I could find in the mamoth structure, except that is, for the one where the Brinks truck was parked at a loading bay.

Inside, there were sessions that ranged from the self-congratulatory to the inspiring. Tim Beatley reported on European cities that are racing to be the first declared as officially carbon neutral, by providing high-speed rail and walkable streets and communities built at what architects like to call "human scale." Others reported on partnerships across state lines  building "place-based" solutions to the problems of urban sprawl. Communities in northern Maine and in New Hampshire and cities from New York to Seattle were models of what could be done to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel and improve the quality of life in communities across the globe.

In the meantime, the Tea Partyers have defunded  Obama's Sustainable Communities initiative which triangulated Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) in a too rare linkage of common concerns. Paul McMorrow's article in the Boston Globe is a powerful indictment yet again of politics that gets in the way of rational discourse and self-preservation.

I returned to the apartment and promptly got sick, crawled into bed with a cold and sniffles that had me asleep for the next 12 hours. I suppose it was the virus that is around. It could have been a result of spending a day in a space that did nothing but look in, while everything healthy happened outside.

One thing sticks with me.

The plenary speaker was Ron Sims, the ex-county executive of Kings County, Washington and an ex- Deputy Secretary of HUD. He rambled for an hour with neither a lectern nor a note, and like many schooled in a Baptist tradition, he blended exhortatory rhetoric with personal anecdotes. He talked about growing up in a poor neighborhood where Quincy Jones and his brother grew up. He talked about their successes. He talked about his  "perfect" granddaughter, and he talked about watching as the son whose umbilical cord he had cut, cut the cord of his perfect  granddaughter. He talked about his twin brother whose "work was done." And he talked about two women who were part of the church community where he grew up, and their pies.  And he talked about their singing of a Baptist hymn."I don't feel no ways tired," he said, declining to sing. "I've come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy." 

"Your work is not done," he said.

There was lukewarm applause after all the other sessions. There was  a standing ovation after he spoke. I went up to thank him, and he gave me what the Regional Administrator of HUD described as a trademark bear hug.

We have a lot to be grateful for in this country. He talked about his wife's observation that in her native Philipines, development would come right to the lakeside, but in his beloved Washington landscape, the lakeshore was still natural habitat. Here in urban Massachusetts, there is a sinuous park along the Mystic River a half block from where I write this. As I lumbered along to the Whole Foods for chicken soup this morning, there were couples walking dogs and carrying frisbees, children in and out of strollers on their way to play, and joggers running along the ersatz path that follows the river's course--a most "walkable landscape".  I wish the train ran between Massachusetts and Vermont without a needed detour in New York. I wish that there were more places that had some understanding of the need for people to encounter strangers on common ground and that there were more places that understood that there were appropriate human scale proportions between architectural height and the width of the street. But if the Tea Party has its way, the benefits that accrue to all of us in having communities that concentrate on smart growth and sustainability will be felt in other countries, and we will be left with empty shopping malls in suburban communities, the  foreclosures of  houses and their neighborhoods, and tent cities on public land in places from Washington State to Boston.

There are some days when I am in many ways tired, but I am not yet ready to give up.

Quiet

H just left to head for Boston with the cats, and when I walked him out, Mom said, "Why so quiet in the house"?

It has been quiet today. H and I were each working  on our writing - mostly in different rooms. Mom has been reading the NY Times. beside the wood stove. It is all in sharp contrast to the days that preceded this one.

I drove down to NY to teach on Monday night, and Mom and I packed the car to drive back to VT on Tuesday, where Herb was ensconced with the cats and making a bump  in the income of the local supermarket, the local organic farm (for the turkey) and a dent in the food budget. On Wednesday we started preparing for the holiday meal and of course, Thanksgiving was consumed (pun intended) with vacuuming, cooking, dish washing and a modicum of furniture moving.  Our friends Linda and Ursula came over to add stuffed squash and pecan pie and wine to the banquet, and we talked and laughed and compared notes on the Penn State debacle, books we had read, travels around the country, relatives, and friends in common, and ate until I could barely move.

Friday we digested large quantities of left-over risotto, stuffing and turkey, and visited with our farmer friend, Amanda, who was stuck in her town for three weeks because of the Hurricane in August. Her husband had used a clothesline attached at one end to a tree and to the house at the other, to shimmy through ice cold storm water with floating propane tanks to rescue an 80 year old neighbor who had stopped into his neighbors' house to check their sump pump and was then caught on the second floor in suddenly rising waters. The owners were at Dartmouth Hospital where he was in kidney or liver failure and she was by his side. Everyone survived and the home owners are now back in the house thanks to a month's volunteer work by a relative who gutted and restored the house from the damage of water soaked walls and utilities.

We got caught up with Amanda's life, finding routes around severed roads and bridges to milk their goat, building new 50 foot greenhouses on leased land, and we heard about her sister who had a baby one month ago, breaking or straining her tail bone in the process. She is still unable to drive. We got caught up on Amanda's part time job as an LNA and her plans to eventually take on training as an LPN. We heard about her grandfather's stroke that has him in rehab in Rutland, and her grandmother's dementia that has necessitated moving her into Amanda's parents' home. She left so she could drive the hour back to Stockbridge to wake up her husband for his 12 hour night shift making snow at the local resort. We hugged and promised to get together again soon.

Yesterday, we took Mom to the Weston craft fair which was profoundly disappointing other than the work of our friends the Morgans and the Munyaks, and then we went over to the classic Vermont Country Store for a dose of tourist excess. We drove to the Northshire bookstore after that and then home, having had our fill of people and churn.

So today is indeed quiet. We haven't gone anywhere. Emmett called to say that he got his plow on his truck so he can plow us out if needed. Jeanette called to say she has a stomach virus and can't stop down to see Mom before I take her back to NYC. The cats slept in their boxes after making a perimeter tour of the house. We spoke to Coreen, our across-the-street neighbor, for a few minutes while we were walking the cats. All in all, a low key day.

And now the cats and Herb are on their way to Boston.

Yes, it's quiet. We hope it's quiet where you are too.

Writing Phillipe

The week has been filled with visiting and cooking and preparation for meals, but I've had a couple of opportunities to write.  On Sunday and Monday, I finalized the story I'd been working on for the North Coast Journal, the interviews with people who had left Humboldt County and now looked back upon it.  And yesterday, I spent several hours working on the fiction project I've had going for the past two months.

When I haven't written on a particular project for a couple of weeks, getting started again is like plowing the driveway.  You shove the snow three feet ahead, then you back up, cover that same ground again and go another two feet further, and then you back up, cover all that ground again and go two more feet.  That's what I did yesterday.  I read the whole 50 pages I had so far, sometimes more than once, tweaking and tuning and cleaning; and once I got to the end of what I'd had, I moved another five pages further down the road.

I told Nora, during a break, that my characters were engaging in a lot of unearned exposition.  "We don't know them well enough for them to be talking this much," I said.  "But it's helping me to get to know them, so that's okay for now."  So far, most of my characters have been pleasant, articulate, good natured... they've been me dressed up in various costumes.  But I had written one guy, Joel, who was funny and abrasive, and Mellisa the over-educated UPS driver, and two or three others who might be able to grow into their skins and become interesting.  But yesterday, I wrote the side character of Phillipe, the smug and condescending Belgian.  Phillipe may become an enjoyable foil to all of the other serious business going on around him.

I know I'll eventually have sixteen or seventeen people inhabiting this place I'm creating, and that not all of them will be as distinctly drawn as the others.  I'd created about seven of them through my previous work, and each one of them had an interesting bio if you wrote it in one sentence.  For instance:  Carson, 77, is a retired civil engineer (Bechtel) whose husband recently died.  That's an interesting type, a frame to ultimately hang compelling behavior from.  But Carson and the others are far from being characters yet.

In a way, it's kind of like casting a reality show like Survivor.  You have to have the retired professional athlete, the CEO, the drama queen, the single mom... but they aren't very interesting until they start working together or screaming at each other.

So Phillipe occurred because I needed another character at a point where my hero was about to embark on a new challenge.  I brought his frame into being in about thirty seconds, and then he just started to act up on me.  He's a jerk, and there's no other way around it.  He's very talented... and boy, does he know it.

Today, Nora and Mom and I have the dump and the post office and a shower and then the Weston Craft Fair... but a rendezvous with Phillipe awaits me this evening. 

Thanksgiving – Part 3

It's a little before 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning.  I've started a fire in the kitchen stove, Nora has started a fire in the living room stove.  Mom is still asleep upstairs.

I see that someone has found our blog through doing a Google search on the phrase "bride nora from wear the bride dress."  Clearly I haven't been using Google correctly...

Our friends Ursula and Linda will be with us for dinner at about 5:30, bringing stuffed acorn squash and a pecan pie.  Leading to that moment, the agenda for the day is to roast the turkey that's brining in the garage (who needs a refrigerator when you've got Vermont in November?); to bake cranberries and oranges; to make mashed potatoes with leeks, and risotto with sun-dried tomatoes and cherry peppers; to bake cornbread stuffing; to set wine and prosecco to chill; to vacuum and sweep and move the table out; and to put the chocolate lava cakes into the oven right as we're clearing the turkey bones off the table. 

And to say good morning to you all, and happy Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving - Part 2

H and I just watched a documentary on bowling. Yes, bowling. He once bowled seriously, as he now plays pool. The documentary, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, followed four men through a season of what felt something like the circus coming to town. In 1997 the PBA broadcast on ABC for the last time and in 2003, three Microsoft execs (retired) bought the franchise for $5 million and brought in some ex-Nike guys to revive it. It was all reminiscent of another documentary on the Big Apple Circus ("Circus") that played out many of the same themes. A caravan of recreational vehicles traveled the roads from tournament to tournament (or show to show). Careers were built and lost.  Families were built and lost.  Lives were fit around the needs of the tour. Personalities were built for the benefit of the media.

Of course one man won. Three lost. Their stories of success and failure would be familiar to most. Each one represented some archetype; the hero, the bad boy, the kid on the rise, and the old-timer whose luck had run out.

When we were finished, I took out a book that I have been reading, by Lisa Knopp: "The Nature of Home."  I read about her decision to leave a full time teaching position with benefits, in what she calls "the estranging place," so that she could settle with her children in southeastern Nebraska. She gave up what was safe, for something that would take her to her "belonging place."

It is a struggle that H and I have taken on for some time now... and we have opted for the familiar over the risky in times that are economically extreme. Academic and writer Richard Wolff recently claimed that the government's statistics on those who are unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work is now at 18%. So familiar has trumped our decision to start over, for the weeks to come. And I am struck by how many people live and work in their "estranging places" because it is what they know and the risks seem too great... or as Wayne Webb (the old timer) said, while driving through the rain from one show to another, bowling is all he knows. He has bowled professionally since he was 18; at the time of this documentary, he was 45.  "I never did college.  I don't have another way of making a living.  I thought bowling would always be there."  Replace "bowling" with "the factory" or "the department" and you have the stories of millions of hardworking and successful people who suddenly find themselves with no next steps.  If he is to give up the tour, what is there for him to do? If we give up the work we know and that we do well, who are we in its absence? Lisa Knopp writes "Faith I told myself. Faith will make this work. I thought often about Jesus' disciple Peter. The moment Peter thought about the impossibility of walking on water, he began to sink. I could sustain myself in my belonging--place as long as my faith exceeded my doubts".

We are exhorted to take the risk, jump off the cliff..."at least you will be in a place different from where you were stuck." I have heard this much of my life and from many people. But most of those people have health insurance and a steady income and a clear knowledge of what they are jumping toward. We hear the stories of the successes... these are the stories ginned up to give us faith. But there are legions of people who are sinking in this country, whose faith in themselves and the system were not enough to keep them walking on water.

Knopp patched together jobs as church secretary and interim school administrator, and writing book reviews for a local paper. I have worked as a consultant and adjunct teacher for much of my life and have patched together a business and a life. But tonight, I am aware of how many people are patching lives together, and how few of those lives are shaped as we had imagined, in our belonging places. The MVP of the Professional Bowlers Tour is last seen chipping the ice off the roof of his motor home, late on the night of winning the national championship, on his way to the next tournament, the next round, the next circus.

Thanksgiving - Part 1

Thanksgiving is coming, and while I agree with all the politically correct conversation about how we stole the land from the Native Americans only to send them off on the Trail of Tears, and the rhetoric about this being the starting gate to the race to Christmas, I am still thankful this year.

It will be my first married Thanksgiving. I am grateful for that.
It will be a chance for Mom to reclaim her spot in the leather chair in the corner of the living room beside the wood stove, covered in fleece and blankets. I am grateful for that.
It will be a time of cooking and chaos in this tiny ill-prepared kitchen, with bowls and ingredients on every surface, and the resulting turkey and tofu dishes, cranberries and oranges a la mama, sweet potatoes, applesauce from the tree in the backyard, sparkling cider and prosecco. I am grateful for that.
It will be a time to compare notes on recent stories in The New Yorker and the new book on Steve Jobs, and maybe we will read aloud from the Phantom Tollbooth - a children's story celebrating its 50th anniversary. I am grateful for that.
It will be a time to watch the cats play, walk in the dry leaves, wait for snow fall, and see friends who have made this place our home. I am grateful for that.

And maybe, just maybe, we will make some phone calls to those too far away--to Jerry and Bill and Vearla, Kathleen and Julio, Grazyna and Howard, Elie and Deborah and Neoma and Ben and Susan and Jonno and a few more of the hundred or so people who held us close this year. I am grateful for that.

May all of you have much to be thankful for this year. May all of you have peace in both heart and head. May all of our international visitors find that whether or not they share in this most American tradition, they have much to celebrate.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Nora and I have been in New York since late Friday afternoon.  Since then, we've:

• had hummus and wine and tabouleh and pita and cheese with Sjoerd & Michael & Joseph & Josseline;
• walked the new section of the High Line after brunch at The Park with Grazyna & Howard; and
• are about to have another brunch with Susan and David at the Marketplace Cafe. 

At which point I'll get on a bus to Boston, and Nora will continue the revelry with an early New Jersey dinner with Deborah.

But the real event, of course, was dinner last night for Estelle's birthday.  Estelle, her two children, their two spouses, and friends Peter and Marti from San Francisco took over the center of Blue Hill for three hours.  A lovely evening and a lovely dinner for a lovely person.

Happy birthday, Mom.  Arms around you.  We wouldn't have been any place else.

A word to the wise

Nora and I are driving to NYC tomorrow, for Mom's 92nd birthday on Saturday.  We'll be driving Georgia, and taking cats.  Nora and Ed and Simon have been on the road so much recently that she doesn't want to drive back to Boston on Sunday and then home to Vermont on Monday or Tuesday, so I'm getting back to Boston on my own and she'll head straight to Vermont.

It turns out that Sunday is a pretty tough day to travel.  The cheap buses get used by people with weekend friends and parties and boyfriends/girlfriends to visit, and although they may have different departures, they all have to go home on Sunday.  So Bolt Bus is sold out.  LimoLiner is sold out.  Amtrak isn't sold out, but it's $168 one way.  Peter Pan has seats; though it's a little downscale compared to Bolt, it'll have to do.

While looking for seats on Peter Pan...

Okay, I have to stop here for a minute.  Peter Pan?  Who the hell names a bus line Peter Pan?  Bolt I get – quick, straight line.  LimoLiner I get – purported luxury.  MegaBus I get – cheap mass transit.  Greyhound, the old dog... fast.  Fung Wah?  It means something in one of the Chinese languages, but I don't know which language, and Google Translate says that "fung wah" translates from Chinese to English as "fung wah."  So let's say it means "the passengers are decoys for drug trafficking," which is the folklore about that company.  Whatever, I still get it.

Peter Pan?  The bus that won't grow up?  It's even got the boy in green tights on the side of the bus.  It's a mystery to me.  Of course, I wouldn't have named a computer company after a fruit, either, so maybe it's just my lack of marketing acumen.

Anyway, I digress.  While looking for seats on Peter Pan, I see on their website that they have three drivers who have accumulated over three million accident-free driving miles with the company.  Three million miles!  And it's taken each of them about 35 years to do it, so we're looking at 80-90,000 miles a year.  But my favorite thing is that two of the drivers in the three million club are brothers, Joseph and Everett Anderson of Springfield, who both started driving with PP in the early '70s.  I hope I get to meet Joseph or Everett on this trip.  (Rather than Captain Hook...)

Long Time Coming

For the first three-and-a-half years I lived in Medford, August 2006 through February 2010, I spent all my free time hanging around a bowling alley like a 14-year-old.  And yes, I DID do that when I was 14, so I know whereof I speak.

When I first got my job at the BAC, Nora and I came down to Boston a couple of times to look at apartments and neighborhoods.  And one of the things I did was look in the phone book under "billiards halls" and "pool rooms."  (There seems to be a local variation in how these places are listed, just as a bar can be a bar in one city and a tavern in the next.)  I found a lot of places that I knew immediately would be all wrong.

Felt, Boston Theater District.  First off, pool table cloth is not felt.  It's worsted wool.  Maybe they use the name as a warning of what will happen to young women if they go there.  Here's their web opener.  "Welcome to Felt!  Felt restaurant, billiards, lounge and night club, features four levels of entertainment.  Ideally situated right next door to the Opera House, and just around the corner from the Ritz Carlton, Boston Common.  FELT is the perfect place for a night out on the town, dining and corporate functions."  Not so much about the pool, is it?

Flat Top Johnny's, Kendall Square, Cambridge.  The tables all have red cloth, but good pool rooms are not about decorator colors.  It's a hipster paradise, full of early-30s with awkward sideburns and big cans of PBR.  "We feature 12 tournament sized pool tables, a rotating line up of old school pinball, dart boards, and Golden Tee golf.  Couples, singles, and parties of up to 150 people will find Flat Tops a comfortable place for nighttime fun.  It's the perfect place for pool-hall junkies to get their fix or a group of friends to unwind and have a few drinks."  Pool-hall junkies is the giveaway phrase there; that was the name of a particularly horrid 2002 movie about pool gamblers that features hipster icon Christopher Walken.  

Kings, Boston Back Bay.  You'd think it was nothing short of a miracle that there's a pool room two blocks from my office.  But no, I can scarcely stand to go there.  It's a post-work hangout for the Prudential, full of crowds of young people looking to hang out and find temporary heterosexual partnerings.  When there are eight or ten people using one pool table, pool is not really on their agenda.  Kings is a 24,000-square-foot entertainment facility featuring 16 ten-pin bowling lanes, three premium bars and a full-service restaurant, and the private Royal Room featuring 6 Brunswick Gold Crown Tables, 4 retro oak SKEE BALL tables, and a regulation shuffleboard table. Our bars offer classic, yet innovative cocktails, while our restaurant serves an impressive array of American favorites and delicious comfort food. The venue accommodates 500 guests and features 30+ big-screen, high-definition televisions and projector screens with audio system, making it the perfect place to catch all the local and national sports action. With its retro-inspired vibe and state-of-the-art equipment, Kings offers a modern option for those seeking a hotspot that hearkens back to an era when good times ruled. That era is back at Kings!  Yeah, just like the 1950s, plus $14 an hour to play pool...

But I found this little place in Somerville called Sacco's Bowl Haven.  Nora and I stopped in around noon one weekday and had a long chat with Barbara, who's done the day shift there since... well, for a long time.  Fifteen candlepins lanes, and eight Gold Crown tables in an adjacent room.  I knew I had to find an apartment somewhat nearby.

So for the next three years and a bit, I was at Sacco's probably three or four times a week.  They had no liquor license nor food license, so you could get a candy bar from the vending machine and use the drinking fountain to refill your Dunkin Donuts cup, and play pool for $7.50 an hour (that's per table, not per person, so playing a partner cost each person $3.75 an hour).  That's where I met Mike K and Mike D and Dan and Corey and Fred and Dave and Matty and Roger.  And Frank Bates.

Frank's a retired pipeline engineer who, because of his skill with GIS and spatial analysis, became a crime analyst for the Somerville Police Department after he left the energy business.  He's a Vietnam vet (Marine Corps), a Somerville lifer, a proud parent and grandparent, and an all around good guy.  Frank worked Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Sacco's, and he and I had a standing match of straight pool every Tuesday for three years.  So when Sacco's closed in early 2010 to become a pizza restaurant, I knew I had to keep in contact with Frank.

My weekends have been unpredictable at best in the past few months, so I hadn't actually seen Frank since he and Rosie came to our wedding (135 days ago).  But Nora was scheduled for an early bus yesterday to NYC, so I called Frank on Saturday and asked if he wanted to go up to World Class Billiards in Peabody on Sunday afternoon.

What a perfectly wonderful afternoon.  We caught up on each others' families and work, talked about both of us being in the data analysis business and shared insider hints, and played a glorious set of straight pool.  We played from 1:00 to about 4:30, and left feeling more energized and more at home than we'd been in months.

We change jobs or communities or hangouts, and find that most of our friendships there were temporary and conditional.  "Keep in touch," we say, and then don't.  It's a special relationship that transcends the circumstances of its origin.  But its only those circumstances that allow the origins to occur at all.  If a place can bring dozens or hundreds of people together, some of them will find some others whom they never would have otherwise encountered, and some of THOSE relationships will endure.  It's because of my lifelong reliance on places like Sacco's that I want to build a place like that myself.  It's an opportunity to give others the same chance I had to find themselves and their tribes.

Harvest Home: Chapter 3: Wild Nuts and Raw Fiber

I started writing this essay a few days ago and it has been simmering as I contemplated gathering and making something with the black walnuts that abound here--a wild and liberal bounty available for the gathering. One of the community members here is offering 60 gallons, free for the taking.  But having come here with few skills for gleaning, I had to google the process of using the unexpected harvest that lie beside the cemetery wall and near the apple tree that was so generous this year. When I read that you had to start by driving over them to hull them by cracking the outer shells, and then needed to let them cure, and then go at them with a hammer (wearing goggles for protection from flying shells), and then a nut pick, even I decided that was more than I wanted to take on.

It reminds me of the days when I learned to spin. A free sheep fleece was an unimagined bounty. I acquired them ‘til they filled more Rubbermaid containers than I dare to count.  Then I realized that each would need to be "skirted" (the desirable sections separated from those that had been sheared from around the sheep's armpits, belly and "naughty bits"), washed (initially I did this by hand in roughly one pound lots, and a fleece can be up to 10 to 12 pounds or more before it is skirted), dried (in the sun or near an apartment radiator), picked (the burrs and chaff removed), carded (combed, sometimes one lock at a time with a dog brush), "pre-drafted" into "rolags" (pulled into aligned rolls of fiber), and then spun and plied.  Oh yes, and then knitted into garments that, at my pace, could take a year for a pair of socks. Eventually I cut the time commitment by buying prepared fiber, ready for the spinning.  It still takes an inordinate time to make anything, but at least I don't feel like a character in a fairy tale. (Much.)

So when Herb and I began talking about "home," in connection with the story he was writing for the local paper in Arcata, CA, where he feels as though he is at "home", I should have linked the spinning and the walnuts to the conversation. 

Herb says that he and several of those he wrote about in his article for the North Coast Journal (see earlier posts on “Domestic Ex-pats”), knew they were “home” when they fell in love with the landscape and town square at first sight.  Others warmed to it, but none have let that sense of home fade even though they no longer run the marsh or wander through the redwoods in the center of town. There is something in the way we carry home within us, that has shaped decades of my professional life and still more, of my personal longings.

I am a city girl who has found what academics call "a sense of place" here in a town of 800 people in rural Vermont. It feels right when I am here, but I am still cautious about using that sacred word: “home.” My mother asks me when I call after the long drive back from New York or Boston, “So you’re home”? I usually respond “yes, I’m back in Vermont” or “I’m back in the house.” Only rarely, “yes, I am home.” I struggle to understand the reluctance. There are other sacred words that I hesitate to use: “writer” and yes, “wife”. Is it the fear that these will evaporate like the morning dew if looked at too closely?

Someone once said to me, “you are a writer if you write.” By inference, I am “home” if I am at home. But there is something missing in these simple definitions… something of feeling time pass. A home is a place where we stay or that stays within us in the rituals and seasons. A writer is one who knows that words are our intimates awake and asleep and awake again. H and I wake with words on our breath—not connected to story or purpose, but because they are the liberal bounty before the work of picking them from their shell. Wife? It is still new. We celebrate the days we are together, count them as though each one were precious. We have had a decade to skirt the fleece, wash and dry it, but we are still drawing the fibers into alignment. We have yet to draw them into a rolag, spin them, ply them, knit them into the fulled fabric that we will pull over us on a cold night- husband and wife.

Just so, I have had a decade here in this town, and still find it difficult to say that I am home. Is it that I need to marry this place as writer Lisa Knopp has said when she writes, "the specific place I have chosen is of less importance than the fact that I have entered into a committed faithful relationship with it."  Is it that I need to feel that there are generations in the cemetery behind that black walnut tree? Or is it that I need to know that I can afford to live here, in the modest way I choose, with the man I married, and that we will “belong” to this place? Is it that I need someone from here to say that I belong? Is it merely time, waking up together, with husband and wife on our breath?

Trying to understand and explain that is tantamount to making socks from raw fleece.

Would you like some whine with that?

OK So, I am feeling a tad peaked. Simon (the cat) woke me 4 times last night by bumping his head against mine and I know most of that was because he is a heat seeker and wanted to get under the quilt. I think he loves me, but he is a CAT after all and he doesn't do it when the weather is warm! By the way, if you haven't already seen the "Simon's cat" animations on Youtube, you should look for them here. But besides, I am peaked because when I look at the stats for our blog, while we indeed have hits from 52 countries--lovely, exotic, other-language-speaking, only-imagined, oh!-how-I'd-like-to-visit countries--in the past month, 34 of the hits have been for "Herbie the love bug" and 28 have been for "huge dog". 

You post because as Herb has said, it is like sending a note in a bottle out onto the ether, and then you find that people (4 ) only want to know about the mokume gane rings. You hope they will find the pearls of wisdom valuable, but the comment field stays blank except for mom who sends an email to tell us that we are brilliant writers. You hope to start a dialogue and find that, according to my friend David, it isn't even people who are finding us, but "bots".

It's enough to make me take to the bed...but then there's the cat....

End of whine.

Our friend Elizabeth who played at our wedding has been campaigning for a pet. She has posted notes around the house with information on the statistics on how many households have cats. So in an effort to stoke the fires...ONE HUGE CAT:

And then there's this HUGE CAT:

And last but not least THIS HUGE CAT:

OK so it's a cat fish....You never know what some bots will like!

It's Still October!!

We spent much of yesterday afternoon stacking firewood to dry, putting summer items like patio umbrellas and garden tools into storage, and retrieving snow shovels and containers of dried bark for kindling.  I wanted to get the garage clear enough to put Habañero inside, because there was a lot of snow predicted, and I wanted to be able to leave this afternoon without a lot of cleaning and dampness.

And it's probably good that I did that, because this is what morning looked like.

 
This image has not been Photoshopped.  It was not a hold-over from some prior winter.  We are not sending it back in time from January 2012 as part of our top-secret time-travel project.  This is what our yard looks like at 9:45 a.m. on Sunday, October 30th, 2011.

I mean, really... this is just unreasonable.

The cats do NOT want to go out this morning.  Their buddy the chipmunk is sleeping in, and they see no reason to go stand in four inches of slush.  Nor do I.

So I'll be driving back to Boston a little early today, so that I'm on the road during daylight and warmer temperatures; whatever melts this afternoon is going to re-freeze overnight.

October, the iconic month of autumn.  Guess I'll go shovel some autumn off the porch. 

Seasonal Chores

Last week, it was in the 60s in Boston, but the weather was starting to make the shift from sunnycool early fall to rainywindy late fall.   I didn't expect that on Thursday night, it would snow. 

On surfaces without much thermal mass – on the grass, on windshields, on the raised porch – we probably got a little less than an inch of accumulation.  Wet, sticky snow; white slush, really.

We drove back to Vermont yesterday, in separate cars.  That trip takes us immediately northward, and the accumulations were more significant the further northeast we went.  The trees were laden, and there were several inches of snow on the ground in the woods.  Cresting over the Killington ski area, the temperature dropped below freezing, and the weather accountants reported that they'd received a good six to seven inches.

The rule of thumb in my Michigan childhood was that we would have had at least one visible snow by Halloween, but that snow wouldn't persist for the season until Thanksgiving.  I don't remember an October snow in Boston, and according to Weather.Com, it's only ever happened four times.

Our mechanic Mike was kind enough to fit me in yesterday afternoon, to swap out my summer tires for snow tires in the midst of an afternoon of late-month state inspections.  The snow tires are harder than my gummy summer performance tires, and they're mounted on black steel wheels with no hubcaps rather than the good alloys.  Habañero always looks a little disappointed while wearing utilitarian black wheels and those high-sidewall tires, like James Bond dressed in Carhart overalls.

Now on Saturday morning, it's 30º and the wood stove is lit.  The cars have a good layer of frost on the windshields.  Nora is outside with the cats, as they re-acquaint themselves with walking in snow; they shake their paws every few steps and attempt to pick their way from grass to grass, like stepping stones across a river.  It's time for me to get a haircut (the first since the wedding!) and work on the article I've promised by Tuesday.  My editor is 3200 miles away, where there is no snow and hasn't been since 1972.

I kind of like scraping the windshield in the morning.  It's one of those jobs, like painting or mowing the lawn, where you can see a sharp difference between where you've worked and where work has yet to occur.  There's also a cord of wood dumped on the garage floor that needs to be stacked, a different kind of job where the pile stays the same size for a couple of hours and then seemingly without notice you're down to the last 40 splits and it's time to sweep the bark and sawdust.

WELCOME to our fiftieth nation: Greece. We promised champagne and here it is!