Well, this is about life, which begins at conception, but I don't think I want to go back quite that far. Two weeks? Three weeks? How long has it been?
Anyway.
1. The big girly, as you may remember, went off to the University of Dallas for their two-week Arete program, aimed at high-school students. By Day 4 she was homesick; by Day 13 she didn't want to leave, ever ever ever. Since her return, a t-shirt bearing the message iThink. You should try it sometime has been getting a lot of airtime, because the next best thing to being there is wearing it, apparently.
2. Helier turned 8. He turned 8 two weeks ago, so the next thing I'm doing when I finish this is to update the ol' sidebar. On his actual birthday, we convinced some friends to go with us to the mountains, where we were rained on torrentially, yea, even more than torrentially, which mattered a lot more to the mothers huddled under umbrellas than it did to the kids in bathing suits in the creek.
Finally the rain stopped, and over on the pile of rocks where Crispina and her friend were setting out a tea party, a fat copperhead decided to step out, so to speak, for a breath of air. Only later did I learn just how closely this tea party and this deadly snake had coincided, but by then everyone had already been safely out of the way for ages, so my nervous breakdown was a very quiet and interior one and didn't last all that long.
Actually, once everyone was safely out of the way, what we all did was watch as the copperhead maneuvered itself this way and that trying to get its mouth around a catfish it had caught, which was wedged between two rocks. For nearly half an hour it paid out thick curves of body in an attempt, I think, to get nose-to-nose with the fish, which might or might not have been still struggling; I never saw the fish until the very end, when the snake stopped trying to eat it right there, opting instead to writhe away to some more private place, carrying the fish sideways in its mouth like a dog with a bone.
"Aw," said Helier. "He looks so cute like that."
3. The Monday after Helier's birthday, we left for eight days in Memphis, during which time we also drove to Little Rock to retrieve the big girly from Southwest Airlines. She got off the plane wearing the aforementioned iThink t-shirt, and she's been tired ever since. All that thinking . . .
In Memphis, Helier had two more birthday parties: one at which he shared the birthday honors with Aunt T., and another one which wasn't really much of a birthday party, because I just can't make myself call people the day before and say, "By the way, would you and your numerous children mind running out in all your voluminous spare time to buy my kid some kind of additional toy?" So this was more of a playdate, which was perfect. Helier got to put his new tent up in Grammy's back yard and play in it with his buddy Joseph, whom he had not seen in a year, plus several other friends we don't get to see nearly often enough, so he was a perfectly happy boy.
4. We returned to Fiat on Tuesday in a state of exhaustion. The dog, who had spent this time undergoing the gentle ministrations of Carrie the Dogsitter, was hysterically, vocally glad to see us, but altogether fine -- before we left he had been refusing to go for walks, but Carrie the Dogsitter ministrated him gently somehow, and he seems to be over that.
The air conditioner, on the other hand, is not fine. Nobody gently ministrated it in our absence, and now I guess we're good and sorry. Some of us are sorrier than others; the kids' rooms upstairs have window units, nice brand spanking new EnergyStar-rated window units which cause frost to form on the insides of the windows, while downstairs, particularly in the kitchen long about four-thirty in the afternoon, frost is not forming on the insides of the windows, let's just put it that way. Rumor has it that a repair consultant might visit us on Monday, but since we rang up and complained that Monday was too long to wait, we've been contemplating the possibility that whoever answers the phones might have slid our work request over to the "Rot in Hell" box. Meanwhile, you might think that come Friday, Monday might not seem so far away, but I assure you that it does. At least, to those of us who live downstairs it does.
5. I got a haircut, which I am now greatly regretting. I like to get my hair cut, and I don't mind it short-ish, which it certainly is right now. It's just that I've had very good cheap haircuts in the past, and this wasn't one of them. In fact, I'd probably still be sitting in the chair, trying to convince the person cutting my hair that I really did want the bottom part layered the way it had been previously, except that I started to think that anything else she did would only make things worse, and that I had better escape with what I had. She kept telling me that if she cut my hair in the way I was describing, it would "look like steps," by which I understood her to say that if she cut it that way, it would "look like steps," and I really didn't want to find out what that might mean. So I paid my money and ran away, and have been grateful ever since to whoever invented the modern barrette.
This is all kind of angst-y. Of course it's all vanity, too, and the experience leads me to consider that, the whole feminist narrative aside, nobody but nobody oppresses women the way we oppress ourselves. Aelred never wants me to get my hair cut. He'd be happy for it to grow out to my feet. When he says, I love you the way you are, he means, Please please please do not go out and try to improve yourself, because you know you'll be sorry, but you'll probably do it anyway, because what do I know about the way women want themselves to look, and then I'll have to tell you whatever you've done is cute, to make you feel better, which I am happy to do, because I love you the way you are, but it would be nice if we didn't have to go through this song and dance all the time.
Which does make me wonder why, exactly, it is that in every commercial you see these days, it's the man who's the idiot. I mean, not that I wonder all that much. I know the answer. These commercials are made by people who think that if you allow a man six inches of intellectual rope, he's going to force some woman to go out and get a bad haircut, because men just naturally like to oppress women, and if they were smarter, that's how they would do it.
Or something like that.
6. The dog ate a bee and came to breakfast yesterday with a strange bulbous nose in place of his normal long sleek one. One hundred eighty-three dollars later, I now know that dogs can take Benadryl.
7. While I was away, I did a good bit of writing. My mother has a guesthouse -- really an apartment above her garage -- which is an excellent writer's retreat, being quiet and away from all the normal question-askers and fight-pickers. I'll have a new chapter of the story blog up soon; I also had a little epiphany about the other story which I've been posting here in bits and pieces. I know where Michael goes when he goes out, which might not sound like much, but it was like getting a key to a long-locked door and made me very happy.
PS: I always forget about blog-carnival things -- I'm doing well generally just to get something written, you understand -- but after I'd written this, I realized that what I had were, um, like seven "quick takes," and this was Friday, and . . . anyway, thanks to Jen at Conversion Diary for hosting Seven Quick Takes, and hopefully this won't be the last time the planets line up right.
PPS: Re the air conditioner: The person who answers the phones did indeed put our work request in the box marked "Rot in Hell -- Until Tuesday." Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and sometimes it just gets greased. On the bright side, the home-warranty company called today to offer us a $100 rebate on some kind of additional cooling appliance for the downstairs, where currently we have none. I'm thinking that if we could affix a window unit to the vent-a-hood above the stove, I could just about bear the thought of cooking dinner for three more days.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Praying for Beth
My high-school friend, who in the spring underwent a transplant of her own stem cells as a last stand in her long battle with cancer, reports via her CaringBridge journal that Monday's definitive scans and blood tests, the anticipation of which had been hanging over her for months, have revealed "no active disease." She will go back for another check in October, but for now the "all-clear" is marvelous news.
Meanwhile, the question of what, and whether, to pray for a high-profile cancer sufferer has been raising some interesting and sometimes heated conversation.
And on another note, there's a new chapter up at the story blog. I'm now at the end of what I had already written, so the pace of the serialization will be slowing down some; my aim is a new chapter every ten days, but we'll see. Since I have no idea what's going to happen, not the least glimmer of a vision, I'm resorting to good old blows on the head and long blackouts to give myself time to think . . . that is, I'm knocking characters out, but then again maybe a blow to the head would help me, too.
Meanwhile, the question of what, and whether, to pray for a high-profile cancer sufferer has been raising some interesting and sometimes heated conversation.
And on another note, there's a new chapter up at the story blog. I'm now at the end of what I had already written, so the pace of the serialization will be slowing down some; my aim is a new chapter every ten days, but we'll see. Since I have no idea what's going to happen, not the least glimmer of a vision, I'm resorting to good old blows on the head and long blackouts to give myself time to think . . . that is, I'm knocking characters out, but then again maybe a blow to the head would help me, too.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Why I'm Not Making Dinner Right Now
I woke up at 3:45 this morning, in a motel room with Epiphany and Crispina. Epiphany had a plane to catch at 6:30, which meant presenting herself at the airport no later than 5:30. By 4:20, all three of us were up, showered, dress, packed and ready, but as the airport was only a mile away, this seemed like overkill in the department of promptitude, so we sat back down, got out our prayer books, and read Morning Prayer aloud together.
By the time we finished, it was 4:35. We hauled our little bags and Epiphany's enormous one, packed for two weeks in a dorm room, downstairs. I checked us out, and we drove to the airport, where we joined a growing crowd of travelers waiting for five o'clock to strike and the Southwest Airlines staff to appear and check them in.
We'd spent the night in the motel because although there is a major airport a forty-five minutes' drive from Fiat, Southwest Airlines does not land there, nor does it depart therefrom; for the cheap flights you have to drive three hours to Raleigh. So I'd booked this motel room for Epiphany and me and then made plans to spend the day before her departure with a friend from high school who lives in a town at the edge of the Research Triangle -- an area, I observe, whose economy seems to thrive in a way that the lumber-and-textile-based economy in our part of the state does not, quite, these days. There, the shopping centers along the highway aren't nearly the ghost towns that they are between, say, Fiat and Rutherfordton, where we went the other night to visit Amicus at Boy Scout Camp.
But I digress. As I say, I'd made these plans, and at the last minute I decided to bring Crispina along, too. Aelred and Helier were leaving early Saturday morning to fetch Amicus and assorted other boys from Scout Camp, a Y-Chromosome-stamped endeavor if ever there were one, and while they'd willingly have taken Crispina with them, I thought everyone might be happier if she came with me.
She was happier, I can tell you that. At my friend's house, she was loaded up with outgrown ballet costumes belonging to the teenaged daughter, and the twelve-year-old son, manfully swallowing his disappointment that I hadn't brought any guys for him to play with, not only entertained Crispina all afternoon, but sent her away with a large plastic talking robot, which is the new darling of her heart. All the way home in the car it was, "Would you like some tea?" Emergency on the waterfront! "A strawberry fruit snack?" Rescue winch deployed! The first few thousand times I heard the robot utter this phrase, I thought it was saying, Rescue wish deployed, which was sort of charming, I thought -- a robot version of prayer, almost.
Meanwhile -- or, well, between yesterday afternoon's visit, which already seems to have happened a century ago, and the drive home, which also feels now like an event of the dim and distant past -- we deployed Epiphany to her college program. Her bag checked, we wandered up and down the airport in an unsuccessful bid to find an open coffee stand; of course it was really a bid to make time stand still, which also proved fruitless.
After a few minutes' stroll, during which the fruitlessness of the coffee search became all too apparent, I turned to Epiphany and remarked with great casualness, "Well, you might as well go on through security. Maybe there'll be coffee on the other side."
"Yep," she said.
Thereupon Crispina burst into tears. "Dooooooon't gooooooooo."
"I'll be home soon," said Epiphany. We hugged each other in a brief, businesslike fashion -- don't want to get all emotional, here, unlike some people -- and off she went. With Crispina, who was still swallowing down great sobs, I watched her show the security personnel her boarding pass and i.d. I watched her take off her belt -- metal buckle -- and her shoes and put her little baggie of toiletries in the tray alongside them. I saw her head and shoulders proceed along the line and through the metal detector, on the far side of which she paused to reconstitute her clothing.
"Goodbye! Have fun!" we called to her as she ascended the stairs on the far side. She turned and waved to us, then passed from our sight. Crispina started to cry again, until I suggested we go find something sticky and sweet for breakfast and comfort the robot, all alone in the back seat of the car under the urinous lights of the parking deck.
So we came home. In our absence, which felt a lot longer than it actually was, the boys had acquired a turtle. His name was Norman -- I guess it still is Norman -- and Aelred had rescued him from the middle of the highway en route either to or from the Boy Scout camp. Possibly Norman was fleeing one of the deserted shopping malls along that road, where I'm sure the earthworms are scarce. At any rate, Aelred had brought him home for Crispina to see before releasing him by the creek behind the old high-school gym, and when we got home, there he was, in a box on the back porch, glaring balefully up at us from his temporary lettuce-carpeted environment.
After getting up at 3:45, putting a child on the plane, and then driving three hours home, I felt like an afternoon nap. In fact, I felt so much like an afternoon nap that I started to look like one, too. In the course of this nap I had one of those strange half-waking dreams in which you're consciously thinking something, or at least you dream you're consciously thinking something. In this one, I was inspired to draw a cartoon; it was a dream, I suppose, because in real life I don't draw all that well. The cartoon I drew featured a gigantic plastic robot with light-up eyes and extendable torso striding across a burning landscape. Sometimes when I looked at the drawing, however, the figure I'd drawn looked more like an enormous turtle. At any rate, it was a figure of massive destruction. The cartoon bore this caption: "Nevertheless, it was what he did."
When I woke up for the second time today, that's what I was thinking about. I am thinking on it still.
By the time we finished, it was 4:35. We hauled our little bags and Epiphany's enormous one, packed for two weeks in a dorm room, downstairs. I checked us out, and we drove to the airport, where we joined a growing crowd of travelers waiting for five o'clock to strike and the Southwest Airlines staff to appear and check them in.
We'd spent the night in the motel because although there is a major airport a forty-five minutes' drive from Fiat, Southwest Airlines does not land there, nor does it depart therefrom; for the cheap flights you have to drive three hours to Raleigh. So I'd booked this motel room for Epiphany and me and then made plans to spend the day before her departure with a friend from high school who lives in a town at the edge of the Research Triangle -- an area, I observe, whose economy seems to thrive in a way that the lumber-and-textile-based economy in our part of the state does not, quite, these days. There, the shopping centers along the highway aren't nearly the ghost towns that they are between, say, Fiat and Rutherfordton, where we went the other night to visit Amicus at Boy Scout Camp.
But I digress. As I say, I'd made these plans, and at the last minute I decided to bring Crispina along, too. Aelred and Helier were leaving early Saturday morning to fetch Amicus and assorted other boys from Scout Camp, a Y-Chromosome-stamped endeavor if ever there were one, and while they'd willingly have taken Crispina with them, I thought everyone might be happier if she came with me.
She was happier, I can tell you that. At my friend's house, she was loaded up with outgrown ballet costumes belonging to the teenaged daughter, and the twelve-year-old son, manfully swallowing his disappointment that I hadn't brought any guys for him to play with, not only entertained Crispina all afternoon, but sent her away with a large plastic talking robot, which is the new darling of her heart. All the way home in the car it was, "Would you like some tea?" Emergency on the waterfront! "A strawberry fruit snack?" Rescue winch deployed! The first few thousand times I heard the robot utter this phrase, I thought it was saying, Rescue wish deployed, which was sort of charming, I thought -- a robot version of prayer, almost.
Meanwhile -- or, well, between yesterday afternoon's visit, which already seems to have happened a century ago, and the drive home, which also feels now like an event of the dim and distant past -- we deployed Epiphany to her college program. Her bag checked, we wandered up and down the airport in an unsuccessful bid to find an open coffee stand; of course it was really a bid to make time stand still, which also proved fruitless.
After a few minutes' stroll, during which the fruitlessness of the coffee search became all too apparent, I turned to Epiphany and remarked with great casualness, "Well, you might as well go on through security. Maybe there'll be coffee on the other side."
"Yep," she said.
Thereupon Crispina burst into tears. "Dooooooon't gooooooooo."
"I'll be home soon," said Epiphany. We hugged each other in a brief, businesslike fashion -- don't want to get all emotional, here, unlike some people -- and off she went. With Crispina, who was still swallowing down great sobs, I watched her show the security personnel her boarding pass and i.d. I watched her take off her belt -- metal buckle -- and her shoes and put her little baggie of toiletries in the tray alongside them. I saw her head and shoulders proceed along the line and through the metal detector, on the far side of which she paused to reconstitute her clothing.
"Goodbye! Have fun!" we called to her as she ascended the stairs on the far side. She turned and waved to us, then passed from our sight. Crispina started to cry again, until I suggested we go find something sticky and sweet for breakfast and comfort the robot, all alone in the back seat of the car under the urinous lights of the parking deck.
So we came home. In our absence, which felt a lot longer than it actually was, the boys had acquired a turtle. His name was Norman -- I guess it still is Norman -- and Aelred had rescued him from the middle of the highway en route either to or from the Boy Scout camp. Possibly Norman was fleeing one of the deserted shopping malls along that road, where I'm sure the earthworms are scarce. At any rate, Aelred had brought him home for Crispina to see before releasing him by the creek behind the old high-school gym, and when we got home, there he was, in a box on the back porch, glaring balefully up at us from his temporary lettuce-carpeted environment.
After getting up at 3:45, putting a child on the plane, and then driving three hours home, I felt like an afternoon nap. In fact, I felt so much like an afternoon nap that I started to look like one, too. In the course of this nap I had one of those strange half-waking dreams in which you're consciously thinking something, or at least you dream you're consciously thinking something. In this one, I was inspired to draw a cartoon; it was a dream, I suppose, because in real life I don't draw all that well. The cartoon I drew featured a gigantic plastic robot with light-up eyes and extendable torso striding across a burning landscape. Sometimes when I looked at the drawing, however, the figure I'd drawn looked more like an enormous turtle. At any rate, it was a figure of massive destruction. The cartoon bore this caption: "Nevertheless, it was what he did."
When I woke up for the second time today, that's what I was thinking about. I am thinking on it still.
Friday, July 9, 2010
That Book I Was Talking About to Pentimento and Anne-Marie
Okay, so I couldn't remember either the title or the author's name exactly. But this is it: Margaret Kim Peterson's Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life.
In the comments to a previous post, several of us have been meditating on themes of domesticity and utopianism, and what happens when the two collide. The post itself is really nothing more than a collection of tossed-off responses, but the ensuing conversation has been good and thoughtful, and has covered some important philosophical ground. This, I suppose, is inevitable, since any question about why we do what we do also raises the necessary questions of why we are what we are, what our existence means, and whether there's a larger framework of existence beyond our own which informs all these things. At any rate, I'm enjoying the conversation, and of course, anyone is welcome to join in.
Why have I been neglecting the housework this week? Two words: Muriel Spark. It's all her fault. Or, well, I lay the blame at the feet of the friend who so kindly invited us to dinner Tuesday night, plied us with gin-and-tonics, and then handed me a collection of three Muriel Spark novels: Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry From Kensington. From the moment the book fell into my hands, I was officially checked out of the conversation. Aelred and our friend talked about Leo Strauss, and I sat on the couch and read. And read. And read. Until I fell asleep, around 1:30 a.m., so soundly that at last the other two couldn't help noticing, and Aelred woke me up and we went home. It was a satisfactory evening altogether, giving me cause to contemplate the fact that your true friends are the people who really don't care that you're ignoring them; they'd do the same to you, with no hard feelings.
I'd love to have some conversation about Muriel Spark, and while there are all kinds of things I could toss out to start it, the one which swims randomly to the surface of my mind right now is the motif of the anonymous caller, and of guilt and blackmail. In Memento Mori, elderly people are plagued by phone calls by an unknown person -- an amorphous unknown person, whose voice variously sounds upper- or lower-class, male or female, cheerful or threatening -- who delivers, always, the same message: Remember that you will die. These occurrences accompany the intrusion into a circle of acquaintances of a sinister housekeeper bent on bleeding cash from people's kept secrets.
Meanwhile, in A Far Cry from Kensington, a character is driven to suicide by notes and phone calls from a person calling himself "An Organiser," who preys on this character's vulnerability and gullibility in order to effect an utterly illusory revenge on the novel's narrator.
I don't quite know why I love these novels by mid-twentieth-century English women writers as much as I do. They're grim in their outlook, which is not that surprising, given the grimness of the postwar English lives their characters lead. And yet they crackle not only with life, but with truth, and I'll take them over a heartwarming read any old day. Heartwarming makes me suspicious; give me instead an unexploded bomb in the garden, even though (and perhaps because) the old maxim about a gun in the first act always holds true, and although I like peace and comfort, I think truth is better for me.
It's probably not out of keeping with all this that I'm reading Treasure Island in its unabridged form to Helier and Crispina right now. We left off yesterday just as Jim has met up with Long John Silver for the first time, in his guise as kindly, formerly-and-soon-to-be-again-seafaring tavernkeeper.
"Is Long John Silver good?" Crispina asked.
"Wait and see," I said.
"Is he bad?"
"Wait and see."
Of course, the answer is that he's both: thoroughly corrupted, yet capable of flashes of human kindness, if not actual charity. He is a liar from the first, and a liar to the end, yet he compels our sympathy, even as he compels Jim's. If he can't be good or merciful, he does move others to goodness and mercy -- which is something, at least in a fictional character. Treasure Island is the achievement that it is because of him; he's the Gollum of that story, and as necessary to it, as he is, as Gollum is to The Lord of the Rings. In fact, I think that the greatness of both those stories (and it's a very similar greatness, and they are very similar stories, as it now occurs to me) lies in the existence of a character like this, a twisted soul in which goodness is perverted to evil, and evil, equally often, is perverted to something approaching goodness, or the memory of it.
As always, the disclaimer stands that these are sponsored links; if you buy a book (any book) through them, the change goes clinkety-clink in our tip jar. You don't have to buy anything, of course. I just want you to read and comment and be my friend. But I am constrained by the FTC, if not by the standards of my own crystalline integrity, to remind you that I don't include these things out of sheer personal disinterest.
In the comments to a previous post, several of us have been meditating on themes of domesticity and utopianism, and what happens when the two collide. The post itself is really nothing more than a collection of tossed-off responses, but the ensuing conversation has been good and thoughtful, and has covered some important philosophical ground. This, I suppose, is inevitable, since any question about why we do what we do also raises the necessary questions of why we are what we are, what our existence means, and whether there's a larger framework of existence beyond our own which informs all these things. At any rate, I'm enjoying the conversation, and of course, anyone is welcome to join in.
Why have I been neglecting the housework this week? Two words: Muriel Spark. It's all her fault. Or, well, I lay the blame at the feet of the friend who so kindly invited us to dinner Tuesday night, plied us with gin-and-tonics, and then handed me a collection of three Muriel Spark novels: Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry From Kensington. From the moment the book fell into my hands, I was officially checked out of the conversation. Aelred and our friend talked about Leo Strauss, and I sat on the couch and read. And read. And read. Until I fell asleep, around 1:30 a.m., so soundly that at last the other two couldn't help noticing, and Aelred woke me up and we went home. It was a satisfactory evening altogether, giving me cause to contemplate the fact that your true friends are the people who really don't care that you're ignoring them; they'd do the same to you, with no hard feelings.
I'd love to have some conversation about Muriel Spark, and while there are all kinds of things I could toss out to start it, the one which swims randomly to the surface of my mind right now is the motif of the anonymous caller, and of guilt and blackmail. In Memento Mori, elderly people are plagued by phone calls by an unknown person -- an amorphous unknown person, whose voice variously sounds upper- or lower-class, male or female, cheerful or threatening -- who delivers, always, the same message: Remember that you will die. These occurrences accompany the intrusion into a circle of acquaintances of a sinister housekeeper bent on bleeding cash from people's kept secrets.
Meanwhile, in A Far Cry from Kensington, a character is driven to suicide by notes and phone calls from a person calling himself "An Organiser," who preys on this character's vulnerability and gullibility in order to effect an utterly illusory revenge on the novel's narrator.
I don't quite know why I love these novels by mid-twentieth-century English women writers as much as I do. They're grim in their outlook, which is not that surprising, given the grimness of the postwar English lives their characters lead. And yet they crackle not only with life, but with truth, and I'll take them over a heartwarming read any old day. Heartwarming makes me suspicious; give me instead an unexploded bomb in the garden, even though (and perhaps because) the old maxim about a gun in the first act always holds true, and although I like peace and comfort, I think truth is better for me.
It's probably not out of keeping with all this that I'm reading Treasure Island in its unabridged form to Helier and Crispina right now. We left off yesterday just as Jim has met up with Long John Silver for the first time, in his guise as kindly, formerly-and-soon-to-be-again-seafaring tavernkeeper.
"Is Long John Silver good?" Crispina asked.
"Wait and see," I said.
"Is he bad?"
"Wait and see."
Of course, the answer is that he's both: thoroughly corrupted, yet capable of flashes of human kindness, if not actual charity. He is a liar from the first, and a liar to the end, yet he compels our sympathy, even as he compels Jim's. If he can't be good or merciful, he does move others to goodness and mercy -- which is something, at least in a fictional character. Treasure Island is the achievement that it is because of him; he's the Gollum of that story, and as necessary to it, as he is, as Gollum is to The Lord of the Rings. In fact, I think that the greatness of both those stories (and it's a very similar greatness, and they are very similar stories, as it now occurs to me) lies in the existence of a character like this, a twisted soul in which goodness is perverted to evil, and evil, equally often, is perverted to something approaching goodness, or the memory of it.
As always, the disclaimer stands that these are sponsored links; if you buy a book (any book) through them, the change goes clinkety-clink in our tip jar. You don't have to buy anything, of course. I just want you to read and comment and be my friend. But I am constrained by the FTC, if not by the standards of my own crystalline integrity, to remind you that I don't include these things out of sheer personal disinterest.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Fireworks in the Country
Our agrarian friends invited us out to their place for an evening of illicit fun. Now, now, not that kind of illicit fun. We all kept our clothes on, and the strongest substance we ingested was fudge pudding pie, which was far more addictive than anything anyone might have drunk. But fireworks -- privately owned and operated -- are illegal in the state of North Carolina, and we had those, lots and lots of them, once darkness fell.
The kids, of course, had the requisite sparklers and pop-its. When they tired of merely throwing the pop-its on the front walk to hear them snap, they laid them out in patterns and rode bikes over them. They held two and three sparklers in each hand and wrote with them on the twilit air. Our friends' toddler granddaughter watched them with enormous eyes. "Wanna watch the fireworks, Abby?" the big kids would ask her, to which she would reply, with gravitas, "Boom."
Our friends live half an hour from town, in fairly deep country. The land out their way rolls and crests in loose green waves, and from every rise you can see mountains in the blue distance. Creeks thread through pastureland and stands of heavy forest. People grow a lot of corn. That is, I know that it's living people who grow the corn; there are the cornfields, the houses, the cars in the yards. Driving that way, however, I almost never see any human movement. The cluster of businesses -- gas station, cafe -- at the crossroads has the look of a ghost town on an ordinary mid-afternoon. The school, in full session, is sealed tight as a box ready for mailing, and under the onslaught of sunshine the windows are dark. No one sits on the porches of the houses. The garden benches surrounded by petunias are there for the amusement of the plaster deer who stand in perpetual hesitation on the lawns.
I sometimes wonder whether the people who live along country highways put things in their front yards, not necessarily because they think wagon wheels and wishing wells and sleeping Mexicans and donkeys and fake deer are pretty, but as decoys: watch the gnomes, not me. These are people, after all, who want to be surrounded by land, not neighbors. That's not to say that they wouldn't be neighborly; it's just that they want to go about their lives, day to day, unscrutinized and un-commented-on. If they want to put cars in the front yard, or install a little Japanese bridge over the grass, that's their business and nobody else's, which is why they live where they do, exposed only to the car roaring past at sixty miles an hour, whose occupants can remark on the decor but know nothing about them.
Our friends, as it happens, live down a gravel road several roads removed from anything like a main highway. They have goats and chickens in tidy barns and coops built by the husband; last night he showed us the new rail fence he's put up to contain the animals in one large barnyard which encompasses all the separate houses and pens and delineates the boundary between the world of the house and the world of the farm.
There are four houses on their road. The first, at the bottom of the road, is occupied by people who keep a camper trailer in front of their house for -- according to our friends -- the exclusive use of their cat. At the top of the road are two houses: one for sale and mostly vacant, its owner maintaining a home and art studio in Asheville, and the other newly sold, despite the fact that a surveyor's error meant that it stood on land that didn't actually belong to it. "We're just not asking how that worked out," said my friend as she turned chicken on the grill. It's a nice house, large and yellow with a wrap-around porch, regal and homey at once on its sweep of hill. I had often eyed it with something like envy. Still, I received the news of its passing calmly. I've heard enough septic-tank stories lately -- from people in town, even -- to be just as glad to live on the sewer line. Never mind the surveyor's error.
When we got there, the late sun was angling across the top of the woods and laying down, on their neat front lawn, the spindling shadows of trees planted in the spring. Our friends' kids had been riding bikes in the driveway, and when they came running and yelling to greet our kids, the blond hair around their flushed faces was dark with sweat. Their father, who had been mowing with the tractor, had just been stung or bitten on the neck by some unidentified insect -- he said it was two inches long and green -- and was in the house, where another friend of a homeopathic bent was swabbing the knot it had raised with cider vinegar on a cotton ball.
"Does it still sting?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Cut it open and suck the poison out," that friend's husband suggested.
"No thanks," said the victim.
The sun went down. The children ran amok with their sparklers and pop-its. The air cooled. In the blushing sky over the woods to the west, the first star appeared. We gathered on the front steps, and the sting victim, miraculously recovered, put his lighter to the first fuse.
"Boom," said the toddler.
They were good fireworks. Watching them was a bit like sitting under a beach umbrella of fire, which opens enormously above you and then closes on you, without ever quite touching you, though you steel yourself for the possibility that it might. In between the big numbers, the kids took turns setting off Roman candles, which was a thrill: you stand there like the Statue of Liberty, and fire comes out of this thing in your hand. It's like being in Star Wars.
Meanwhile, at intervals, above the woods to the south, the municipal fireworks fifteen miles away would breach and sound. Rather, they were like the splash made by some invisible creature surfacing from the trees' stirring liquid darkness into the clear and open darkness of the sky. I thought of the years we lived in Utah, when our approach to the Fourth of July was to drive up into the foothills above Salt Lake City to watch not only the Salt Lake fireworks, but the displays of communities all the way down the valley: the Draper fireworks, the Murray fireworks, the Sandy fireworks, little silent explosions rising first here, then there, from an enormous gridwork of light ringed by black mountains.
That's the thing I miss most about the West, that you can get up on something and see, as if you were looking down from the sky. Once we were flying back to Salt Lake on a night of fireworks -- either the Fourth of July or New Year's Eve -- and the view, as we descended, of fireworks erupting all over the valley, was hardly more spectacular than the view from the hillside above the Avenues. Here in the South your line of vision is blurrier, even when there are hills to stand on. So we could see only the bigger splashes from the town fireworks and, presumably, if anyone there thought to turn around, that was all they could see of ours.
And I suppose that if they had, or if any neighbors had been disturbed, they could have sent the cops out. But they didn't. You could draw all kinds of conclusions about that, I suppose: that really, as long as nobody loses sleep, nobody much cares; that the inclination of country people is not to meddle; that there are things to be said about independence, freedom, and privacy and the way those values might transcend regulation, though I don't especially feel like saying them now. The sun is shining, and it's my own inclination to think that a day spent trying to construct a cogent argument about freedom around an evening of illegal fireworks is probably a day wasted.
At any rate, nobody did call the cops, and nobody got burned up, either. We all staggered safely home to bed, and here we are.
The kids, of course, had the requisite sparklers and pop-its. When they tired of merely throwing the pop-its on the front walk to hear them snap, they laid them out in patterns and rode bikes over them. They held two and three sparklers in each hand and wrote with them on the twilit air. Our friends' toddler granddaughter watched them with enormous eyes. "Wanna watch the fireworks, Abby?" the big kids would ask her, to which she would reply, with gravitas, "Boom."
Our friends live half an hour from town, in fairly deep country. The land out their way rolls and crests in loose green waves, and from every rise you can see mountains in the blue distance. Creeks thread through pastureland and stands of heavy forest. People grow a lot of corn. That is, I know that it's living people who grow the corn; there are the cornfields, the houses, the cars in the yards. Driving that way, however, I almost never see any human movement. The cluster of businesses -- gas station, cafe -- at the crossroads has the look of a ghost town on an ordinary mid-afternoon. The school, in full session, is sealed tight as a box ready for mailing, and under the onslaught of sunshine the windows are dark. No one sits on the porches of the houses. The garden benches surrounded by petunias are there for the amusement of the plaster deer who stand in perpetual hesitation on the lawns.
I sometimes wonder whether the people who live along country highways put things in their front yards, not necessarily because they think wagon wheels and wishing wells and sleeping Mexicans and donkeys and fake deer are pretty, but as decoys: watch the gnomes, not me. These are people, after all, who want to be surrounded by land, not neighbors. That's not to say that they wouldn't be neighborly; it's just that they want to go about their lives, day to day, unscrutinized and un-commented-on. If they want to put cars in the front yard, or install a little Japanese bridge over the grass, that's their business and nobody else's, which is why they live where they do, exposed only to the car roaring past at sixty miles an hour, whose occupants can remark on the decor but know nothing about them.
Our friends, as it happens, live down a gravel road several roads removed from anything like a main highway. They have goats and chickens in tidy barns and coops built by the husband; last night he showed us the new rail fence he's put up to contain the animals in one large barnyard which encompasses all the separate houses and pens and delineates the boundary between the world of the house and the world of the farm.
There are four houses on their road. The first, at the bottom of the road, is occupied by people who keep a camper trailer in front of their house for -- according to our friends -- the exclusive use of their cat. At the top of the road are two houses: one for sale and mostly vacant, its owner maintaining a home and art studio in Asheville, and the other newly sold, despite the fact that a surveyor's error meant that it stood on land that didn't actually belong to it. "We're just not asking how that worked out," said my friend as she turned chicken on the grill. It's a nice house, large and yellow with a wrap-around porch, regal and homey at once on its sweep of hill. I had often eyed it with something like envy. Still, I received the news of its passing calmly. I've heard enough septic-tank stories lately -- from people in town, even -- to be just as glad to live on the sewer line. Never mind the surveyor's error.
When we got there, the late sun was angling across the top of the woods and laying down, on their neat front lawn, the spindling shadows of trees planted in the spring. Our friends' kids had been riding bikes in the driveway, and when they came running and yelling to greet our kids, the blond hair around their flushed faces was dark with sweat. Their father, who had been mowing with the tractor, had just been stung or bitten on the neck by some unidentified insect -- he said it was two inches long and green -- and was in the house, where another friend of a homeopathic bent was swabbing the knot it had raised with cider vinegar on a cotton ball.
"Does it still sting?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Cut it open and suck the poison out," that friend's husband suggested.
"No thanks," said the victim.
The sun went down. The children ran amok with their sparklers and pop-its. The air cooled. In the blushing sky over the woods to the west, the first star appeared. We gathered on the front steps, and the sting victim, miraculously recovered, put his lighter to the first fuse.
"Boom," said the toddler.
They were good fireworks. Watching them was a bit like sitting under a beach umbrella of fire, which opens enormously above you and then closes on you, without ever quite touching you, though you steel yourself for the possibility that it might. In between the big numbers, the kids took turns setting off Roman candles, which was a thrill: you stand there like the Statue of Liberty, and fire comes out of this thing in your hand. It's like being in Star Wars.
Meanwhile, at intervals, above the woods to the south, the municipal fireworks fifteen miles away would breach and sound. Rather, they were like the splash made by some invisible creature surfacing from the trees' stirring liquid darkness into the clear and open darkness of the sky. I thought of the years we lived in Utah, when our approach to the Fourth of July was to drive up into the foothills above Salt Lake City to watch not only the Salt Lake fireworks, but the displays of communities all the way down the valley: the Draper fireworks, the Murray fireworks, the Sandy fireworks, little silent explosions rising first here, then there, from an enormous gridwork of light ringed by black mountains.
That's the thing I miss most about the West, that you can get up on something and see, as if you were looking down from the sky. Once we were flying back to Salt Lake on a night of fireworks -- either the Fourth of July or New Year's Eve -- and the view, as we descended, of fireworks erupting all over the valley, was hardly more spectacular than the view from the hillside above the Avenues. Here in the South your line of vision is blurrier, even when there are hills to stand on. So we could see only the bigger splashes from the town fireworks and, presumably, if anyone there thought to turn around, that was all they could see of ours.
And I suppose that if they had, or if any neighbors had been disturbed, they could have sent the cops out. But they didn't. You could draw all kinds of conclusions about that, I suppose: that really, as long as nobody loses sleep, nobody much cares; that the inclination of country people is not to meddle; that there are things to be said about independence, freedom, and privacy and the way those values might transcend regulation, though I don't especially feel like saying them now. The sun is shining, and it's my own inclination to think that a day spent trying to construct a cogent argument about freedom around an evening of illegal fireworks is probably a day wasted.
At any rate, nobody did call the cops, and nobody got burned up, either. We all staggered safely home to bed, and here we are.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Lime-Ginger Slushies
1. Intend to make lime-ginger sorbet. Combine 1/3 cup fresh lime juice, 1 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar, and a pinch of grated fresh ginger root in the canister of your favorite hand-me-down electric no-crank ice-cream maker.
2. Place canister in plastic ice-cream-maker tub and fill with ice and rock salt, per directions which you now can't find but vaguely remember from last summer.
3. Plug in ice-cream maker. This is where things go wrong. Instead of the usual grinding racket which means that the dasher is agitating inside the canister, all you get is a sort of constipated hum.
4. Spend the next twenty minutes plugging and unplugging the ice-cream maker, locking and unlocking the motorized lid, detaching and reattaching the dasher, all to no avail. Meanwhile, your sorbet mixture is starting to form a promising frozen crust.
5. Try manually agitating the dasher via the half-inch metal end protruding through the lid of the ice-cream canister. Repeat until your thumb and forefinger develop the cramp.
6. Remember that somewhere you read that if you put a container of ice-cream mixture inside a container of ice and rock salt, and shook the whole thing around for, I don't know, forty-eight hours or so, you could make a perfectly successful ice cream.
7. Don't even go there.
8. On the other hand, it would be a shame to throw out that lime-sorbet mixture. You were really, really looking forward to lime sorbet.
9. Place sealed Tupperware container inside large plastic cheap-ice-cream tub (throw out six-month-old homemade granola first), and fill with ice and rock salt from ice-cream maker, which from now on will double as not-so-decorative planter.
10. Replace lid on ice-cream tub and very gingerly give the entire contraption a little shake. Repeat thirty thousand times, or as often as you remember while preparing the rest of dinner.
11. When you tire of this charade, remove Tupperware container from its bed of briny ice inside the ice-cream tub, give it one or two final, guilty shakes, and stick it in the freezer.
12. Forty-five minutes later, say to yourself, "You know, this isn't so bad. And there's not nearly as much rock salt in it as I thought there'd be."
Serves whoever will eat it.
(actually, it was really good and gave me a killer headache, and everybody else with their fudge hoo-hoo bars on the sticks can go swan dive in the lake)
2. Place canister in plastic ice-cream-maker tub and fill with ice and rock salt, per directions which you now can't find but vaguely remember from last summer.
3. Plug in ice-cream maker. This is where things go wrong. Instead of the usual grinding racket which means that the dasher is agitating inside the canister, all you get is a sort of constipated hum.
4. Spend the next twenty minutes plugging and unplugging the ice-cream maker, locking and unlocking the motorized lid, detaching and reattaching the dasher, all to no avail. Meanwhile, your sorbet mixture is starting to form a promising frozen crust.
5. Try manually agitating the dasher via the half-inch metal end protruding through the lid of the ice-cream canister. Repeat until your thumb and forefinger develop the cramp.
6. Remember that somewhere you read that if you put a container of ice-cream mixture inside a container of ice and rock salt, and shook the whole thing around for, I don't know, forty-eight hours or so, you could make a perfectly successful ice cream.
7. Don't even go there.
8. On the other hand, it would be a shame to throw out that lime-sorbet mixture. You were really, really looking forward to lime sorbet.
9. Place sealed Tupperware container inside large plastic cheap-ice-cream tub (throw out six-month-old homemade granola first), and fill with ice and rock salt from ice-cream maker, which from now on will double as not-so-decorative planter.
10. Replace lid on ice-cream tub and very gingerly give the entire contraption a little shake. Repeat thirty thousand times, or as often as you remember while preparing the rest of dinner.
11. When you tire of this charade, remove Tupperware container from its bed of briny ice inside the ice-cream tub, give it one or two final, guilty shakes, and stick it in the freezer.
12. Forty-five minutes later, say to yourself, "You know, this isn't so bad. And there's not nearly as much rock salt in it as I thought there'd be."
Serves whoever will eat it.
(actually, it was really good and gave me a killer headache, and everybody else with their fudge hoo-hoo bars on the sticks can go swan dive in the lake)
Friday, July 2, 2010
Are You a Radical Homemaker?
More to the point, am I a radical homemaker?
I mean, okay.
Family well-being. Home with kids. Check.
Environmental sustainability. I use a clothesline. Check.
Community engagement and social justice. Well, I try to be nice to people, and my children say "please" and "thank you." Check?
Actually, I did quit the last steady job I had about thirteen years ago. At the time, I thought it was because I was going insane trying to grade papers with a toddler in the room, and because the teaching was crowding out the writing. Something had to give, and it wasn't the toddler or the poetry. I did not quit my job for the express purposes of growing tomatoes, canning green beans, or saving the planet; currently I have the tomatoes and the green beans, though I'm giving myself permission not to can anything if I don't want to, which is a prerogative you have when you don't especially think of yourself as part of a movement, with a prescribed paradigm, but as a person trying to live a decent life with other people to whom she has become attached. This, I suppose, is what is meant by "money losing power to relationships," though I'd never quite thought to put it that way before.
I was bemused, I have to say, by this confession of "Radical Homemaker Failure." I mean, on the one hand, yeah. However you happen to dress it up, ideologically speaking, domestic work is still work, and it's not always that much fun. Well, let me rephrase that: self-deprivation is not fun, which is why the first thing serious frugality experts will tell you is that you cannot set yourself up to feel deprived.
Which is what seems to be at the heart of this case of homemaker failure. It's not just that finding a coffee table is a drag; it's that the coffee table you really want is right there at Crate and Barrel, for $400, and whatever you find on Craigslist is a paltry substitute for that. It's not just that you drive a cheap little car, but that everyone else you know drives an SUV. It's not that you have a cruddy rental kitchen, but that your friends have Viking ranges. In other words, it's not (entirely) that your life is objectively inferior in quality, but that comparisons, as they say, are odious.
So I don't know that "failure" is the right word. I can call myself a "failure" at sewing, for example, but the truth is that I just don't want to sew -- except when I do. Crispina and I, together, made a lovely little dolly a few weeks back for a friend's birthday, all hand-sewn out of scraps we had lying around. Crispina drew on a smiling face, and I embroidered it, and Aelred remarked that we ought to go into business making dolls. So, obviously I can not fail at sewing when it really matters to me to sew something. I just don't happen to want to do it very often, which is far more true than saying, as I sometimes do, that I'm one of those bad mothers who can't sew.
As a general rule I'm suspicious of the whole "choice" trope -- my choices, your choices, we all respect each other's choices -- but the fact of the matter is that we do have to choose our way forward, and one kind of choice, at any turning, trumps another. I didn't take on homemaking to make some kind of statement, but because having the time to spend with my children while they're young and having the freedom to write meant more to me than cars and appliances and coffee tables. That choice, for those reasons, makes the cooking and the laundry easier to bear. They're the dues I pay -- the domestic equivalent of filing and meetings -- for the privileges I have, all of which seems a lot less radical than simply real.
It's late, and I'd like to think more about this, but not now.
H/T
I mean, okay.
Family well-being. Home with kids. Check.
Environmental sustainability. I use a clothesline. Check.
Community engagement and social justice. Well, I try to be nice to people, and my children say "please" and "thank you." Check?
Actually, I did quit the last steady job I had about thirteen years ago. At the time, I thought it was because I was going insane trying to grade papers with a toddler in the room, and because the teaching was crowding out the writing. Something had to give, and it wasn't the toddler or the poetry. I did not quit my job for the express purposes of growing tomatoes, canning green beans, or saving the planet; currently I have the tomatoes and the green beans, though I'm giving myself permission not to can anything if I don't want to, which is a prerogative you have when you don't especially think of yourself as part of a movement, with a prescribed paradigm, but as a person trying to live a decent life with other people to whom she has become attached. This, I suppose, is what is meant by "money losing power to relationships," though I'd never quite thought to put it that way before.
I was bemused, I have to say, by this confession of "Radical Homemaker Failure." I mean, on the one hand, yeah. However you happen to dress it up, ideologically speaking, domestic work is still work, and it's not always that much fun. Well, let me rephrase that: self-deprivation is not fun, which is why the first thing serious frugality experts will tell you is that you cannot set yourself up to feel deprived.
Which is what seems to be at the heart of this case of homemaker failure. It's not just that finding a coffee table is a drag; it's that the coffee table you really want is right there at Crate and Barrel, for $400, and whatever you find on Craigslist is a paltry substitute for that. It's not just that you drive a cheap little car, but that everyone else you know drives an SUV. It's not that you have a cruddy rental kitchen, but that your friends have Viking ranges. In other words, it's not (entirely) that your life is objectively inferior in quality, but that comparisons, as they say, are odious.
So I don't know that "failure" is the right word. I can call myself a "failure" at sewing, for example, but the truth is that I just don't want to sew -- except when I do. Crispina and I, together, made a lovely little dolly a few weeks back for a friend's birthday, all hand-sewn out of scraps we had lying around. Crispina drew on a smiling face, and I embroidered it, and Aelred remarked that we ought to go into business making dolls. So, obviously I can not fail at sewing when it really matters to me to sew something. I just don't happen to want to do it very often, which is far more true than saying, as I sometimes do, that I'm one of those bad mothers who can't sew.
As a general rule I'm suspicious of the whole "choice" trope -- my choices, your choices, we all respect each other's choices -- but the fact of the matter is that we do have to choose our way forward, and one kind of choice, at any turning, trumps another. I didn't take on homemaking to make some kind of statement, but because having the time to spend with my children while they're young and having the freedom to write meant more to me than cars and appliances and coffee tables. That choice, for those reasons, makes the cooking and the laundry easier to bear. They're the dues I pay -- the domestic equivalent of filing and meetings -- for the privileges I have, all of which seems a lot less radical than simply real.
It's late, and I'd like to think more about this, but not now.
H/T
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Meanwhile . . .
Over at the story blog, chapter iii is up. We are rapidly approaching the point beyond which I have no idea what's going to happen. Don't you want to join us for what I hope will be an interesting ride?
And now people are cheating at mancala. Gotta run.
And now people are cheating at mancala. Gotta run.
In Case You Were Wondering
We're still here. That is, we left, but we came back again, and here we are. Still.
Early in the week we spent two days in Asheville, a town which makes me feel rather like the large, fat, Italian in a room full of chattering French -- not that I'm large, or fat, or Italian, mind you, but neither am I tattooed, pierced (that much), dreadlocked or vegan, all of which you pretty much have to be to disappear into the wallpaper there.
I like Asheville, even if it does make me feel conspicuously boring: it's the kind of town where, against a blue-gray backdrop of mountains, you can poke through stores with Soviet Army caps and Depression glass in the windows and then go try on athletic sandals which require a degree in quantum physics to put on correctly.
In fact, Epiphany essayed a pair of these shoes in the Mast General Store. She put one on; the nylon webbing around her big toe stuck out in a big, awkward bubble.
"Oh," said the perky, outdoorsy salesgirl -- I forgot to notice what she was wearing on her feet -- "these are so fabulous once you get them adjusted." She yanked on the strap. The toe bubble disappeared, only to reappear over Epiphany's instep. "You just --" said the salesgirl, "-- pull on this --" Again with the disappearance and re-emergence of the strap bubble. "These are really so great --"
"Um," said Epiphany. "Could I maybe please just try some of those plain velcro ones?"
In the end she decided against the $95 Quantum Physics Sandal and strode happily out of the store in a pair of $40 Tevas For Dummies, identical to the ones I bought last summer, which I now finally have back for my own personal use, if you catch my meta-narrative here.
We had dinner in a sort of pan-Middle-Eastern restaurant -- it was sort of Moroccan, and sort of Turkish, and sort of . . . well, "Jerusalem" was part of the name -- with tapestries draped in heavy swags across the ceiling and a room so completely swathed in red Bedouin-tent-looking material that it was a challenge to find the restrooms, which the waitress assured me were back there. Turns out that they had the door camoflaged to look like the rest of the tent interior. We reclined on silken cushions and ate lamb shanks and drank Lebanese red wine and little cups of dark, sweet Turkish coffee, and it was all very fine indeed, being the sort of thing one does not get to do in Fiat. Here the Middle-Eastern restauranteur, who is the biggest show in town, cooks calzones and makes wrap sandwiches, which is why he's the biggest show in town, not counting the City Lunch diner, where you can get a plate of fried livermush for a dollar, all day long.
So now we're back, and the dog is starting to relax and take us for granted again. The day we were set to come home, the friend whom we'd roped into feeding the dog while we were away rang us up to say that the dog had gone outside and refused to come back in, and was it all right to leave him there?
"Yeah," our friend said, "he went out and flopped down by the fence next to Aelred's car, and he's just lying there whining. So I was wondering when you were planning to be home."
Now! I wanted to say. Go out and tell him we'll be home five minutes ago!
Of course we weren't, but now we are.
Early in the week we spent two days in Asheville, a town which makes me feel rather like the large, fat, Italian in a room full of chattering French -- not that I'm large, or fat, or Italian, mind you, but neither am I tattooed, pierced (that much), dreadlocked or vegan, all of which you pretty much have to be to disappear into the wallpaper there.
I like Asheville, even if it does make me feel conspicuously boring: it's the kind of town where, against a blue-gray backdrop of mountains, you can poke through stores with Soviet Army caps and Depression glass in the windows and then go try on athletic sandals which require a degree in quantum physics to put on correctly.
In fact, Epiphany essayed a pair of these shoes in the Mast General Store. She put one on; the nylon webbing around her big toe stuck out in a big, awkward bubble.
"Oh," said the perky, outdoorsy salesgirl -- I forgot to notice what she was wearing on her feet -- "these are so fabulous once you get them adjusted." She yanked on the strap. The toe bubble disappeared, only to reappear over Epiphany's instep. "You just --" said the salesgirl, "-- pull on this --" Again with the disappearance and re-emergence of the strap bubble. "These are really so great --"
"Um," said Epiphany. "Could I maybe please just try some of those plain velcro ones?"
In the end she decided against the $95 Quantum Physics Sandal and strode happily out of the store in a pair of $40 Tevas For Dummies, identical to the ones I bought last summer, which I now finally have back for my own personal use, if you catch my meta-narrative here.
We had dinner in a sort of pan-Middle-Eastern restaurant -- it was sort of Moroccan, and sort of Turkish, and sort of . . . well, "Jerusalem" was part of the name -- with tapestries draped in heavy swags across the ceiling and a room so completely swathed in red Bedouin-tent-looking material that it was a challenge to find the restrooms, which the waitress assured me were back there. Turns out that they had the door camoflaged to look like the rest of the tent interior. We reclined on silken cushions and ate lamb shanks and drank Lebanese red wine and little cups of dark, sweet Turkish coffee, and it was all very fine indeed, being the sort of thing one does not get to do in Fiat. Here the Middle-Eastern restauranteur, who is the biggest show in town, cooks calzones and makes wrap sandwiches, which is why he's the biggest show in town, not counting the City Lunch diner, where you can get a plate of fried livermush for a dollar, all day long.
So now we're back, and the dog is starting to relax and take us for granted again. The day we were set to come home, the friend whom we'd roped into feeding the dog while we were away rang us up to say that the dog had gone outside and refused to come back in, and was it all right to leave him there?
"Yeah," our friend said, "he went out and flopped down by the fence next to Aelred's car, and he's just lying there whining. So I was wondering when you were planning to be home."
Now! I wanted to say. Go out and tell him we'll be home five minutes ago!
Of course we weren't, but now we are.
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