ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Sunday, November 27, 2011

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.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

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. 

Thursday, November 24, 2011

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.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

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.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

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.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

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.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

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...)

Monday, November 7, 2011

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.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

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.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

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!