Pondside Thoughts...

The Nest is Quiet. Too Quiet.

Sweet A has moved to New York City. It's a good thing. A good idea. She has a great new job and a great new apartment in a wonderful neighborhood, close to friends and her sweetheart. It's all good.

So why do I feel so sad?

Lovely L hasn't lived at home for years and Sweet A spent four years in Colorado before coming home for just a couple years.

I think it's all about permanence. This is the real deal. My last fledgling has fledged, and the nest is feeling terribly, terribly quiet in a that'sthewayitisfromnowon kind of way. So no amount of rational thinking or mantras pronouncing that she is under four hours away by car, no happy thoughts about achieving her goals or the pride I feel in her accomplishments, none of this has anything at all to do with my emotional journey. I have to ride this one out and wait until it *feels* right, which it certainly does not yet. But it will. I know it will. Waiting is not my strength.

Smudgy Tattered Recipes

I read Linda Matchen's article "Recipes Infused with Time" in the Globe today. Lovely article about using recipes that live on tattered pieces of paper and are barely legible, passed down by family and friends. Ms Matchen discusses her resistance to typing them into electronic documents because they would lose their special quality and the connections she feels when she handles them.  As is often the case, the now-ubiquitous "Comments()" that follow an article capture my attention either because they enrich the message of the writer, but more often because they serve as a portal though which the confused, bizarre, sometimes hateful, but always entertaining words of the masses flow. 

 

For this article I expected comments on similar experiences, connections to loved ones, maybe a recipe or twelve, but I was quite surprised (silly Pollyanna) at a highly critical comment that pointed out that these recipes were unhealthy (recipes were not included), didn't include precise amounts, and (oh no!) sometimes contained ingredients that are hard to find. He/she went on to vilify the coddling of pieces of oil stained paper, recommended scanning, and wondered how we have survived as a people. Et cetera.

 

Now, I agree that preserving these precious memories via technology is a wonderful idea, and adding our own recipes is what it is all about - building and enriching family traditions.

But there is nothing in the realm of family cooking - absolutely nothing - that comes close to holding in my hand the original recipe, the one with the smudge from mama's fingers and the splatter of a batter gone wild 60 years ago. For the sentimental among us, these tattered and stained treasures taken out and handled so rarely, carry with them the love and labors of those who loved us into existence.

I'm grateful that I can scan the words into somewhat permanent form and share these techno-docs with others, but when I handle my grandmother's recipe scraps I feel her hand in mine. As will my daughters when the time comes.

So one question: would you find a photo of the Declaration of Independence a satisfactory substitute for seeing the document itself, and the handwritten signatures and ink blotches on the very paper used by those who wrote it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not comparing Nana's mandelbrot with the Declaration of Independence, but I'm just saying...

Baby Sarah. She's some baby.

Oh, the sweetness of babies, wiggly and new and googly-eyed. Baby Sarah is a wonder at four weeks. She snaps to attention when I catch her eye, she lifts her head and looks around at her incomprehensible world, she is beginning to offer lopsided smiles, and she sort kinda yesI'msureIsawthat plays the stick-out-your-tongue-when-I-do game. She yowls like a banshee when she is hungry and rolls her eyes in delight when sustenance arrives. Yes, Sarah is a keeper. She's some baby.

The Power of Music

Apparently this little fellow agrees with Kanye West concerning the best video ever made. Enjoy.

Zimmans. Mecca. Same diff.

Zimmans is a fabric store in Lynn, MA. But to say Zimmans is a fabric store is to say that the sun is warm. Or my grandpuppy Puma is cute. Absurdly vast understatements all.  Zimmans is a Metropolitan Museum and Merchant of Cloth through which one wanders, dazed and confused by the variety, beauty, number, color, complexity, shimmer, humor, pathos, hideousness, and aching loveliness of its inventory. Bolt after bolt of treasures ranging in price from three to well over one hundred dollars per yard.

I rarely go to Zimmans on a mission. I don't hunt at Zimmans. I go to bathe my eyes in its wonders until suddenly something grabs my attention and I realize that I, well, I NEED it. Yes, really need it for a project I hadn't realized existed until just that moment. A project that is critically important, critically essential to some basic component of my life. Thank heavens, I think, I am here in Zimmans and can purchase this lovely cloth for this life or death project. Thank the fabric gods.

 

Billy Collins to the rescue. Again.

The neighbor's dogs were out at about 5:45 this morning, greeting the first hints of daylight with hearty barks of joy. Joy for them; disorientation, disbelief and dismay for me as I had fallen asleep only about four hours earlier.  Once I am awake I'm generally not able to fall back to sleep. Too many thoughts of what needs to get done before heading out for the fabric store (yippee!) in the late morning. So as I lay in bed fighting off an unwelcome bout of crankiness I thought of another Billy Collins poem. That Billy Collins, he's got my number.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

 - Billy Colllins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

 - Billy Colllins

Libraries without books, oh my

This morning I read an aritcle on boston.com about the headmaster of the Cushing Academy, a New Englad prep school, who has decided to rid the school of the 20,000 or so books in the school library and replace them with about a half million dollars worth of electronic workstations and devices and, oh, yes, a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

Headmaster James Tracy has decided that books are an outdated technology, like scrolls were before books. There has been a lot of dark science fiction written about a future in which books are banned, and this guy is taking it upon himself to eliminate those pesky, dusty old volumes the school has taken 144 years to amass.

So far as I can tell, this man should not be permitted to be within 100 yards of children, should be physically removed from the Cushing campus, and should be forced to deal with his soulless future vision in solitary confinement.

Clearly, he has never read Billy Collins' poem, Marginalia. And not much of anything else, I would guess.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

- Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

- Billy Collins

Yesterday's Rainbow

Driving home from work yesterday at my usual speed, two wheels on the road at all times, I glanced to my left and was struck dumb by a full rainbow, bright, intense, and lovely. I did what any thinking person would and moved from the left to the middle lane while I dug for the iPhone in my purse. Not wanting to create a traffic problem I took a series of seven photos out my window without slowing down. Don't  you just hate it when people using their electronics drive at half speed, oblivious to the backup they are causing? Me too. Here's half the rainbow.

Back to reality.... or did I just leave it?

Back to work today... hard to believe my week off is gone. It flew by so fast.

While I was glad to get home yesterday, back to my own bed, my own porch, my beautiful Spy Pond, it was imposslbe to sleep last night as I thought about all that lay waiting for me at the office. I finally fell into a troubled sleep which was invaded by the sun and NPR only moments later, it seemed. And today was at least fifty hours long. My days at work generally are very busy and active and I rarely look at my watch until about 5, when I realize the work day is gone and I still have hours of work to do.  But today I plopped into my chair at 3, completely exhausted, glanced at my watch and couldn't believe I still had hours of meetings to attend. Oh my.

Re-entry is not for wimps.

It's finally past 5 and I have done my basic work for the day. I just don't have it in me to work the additional three hours that would normally complete my day and make a dent in my work...

As for the last few days of vacation, they were as delightful as the first. I spent them with C and P and daughter and son-in-law A and E on Yokum Pond in Becket.  We saw "Gallim" at Jacob's Pillow, had yummy beer can chicken for dinner, and played endless silly games with baby Julia, who is a beauty and a delight. But beyond all that, here's my favorite part. 

On Saturday morning P's neighbor, the amazing C, asked us to drive her boat as she took her first water skiing spin around the lake  C is an experienced water skier who just loves to get out there and zoom around beautiful Yokum Pond on a single ski.  P was to drive and I would be the spotter. C took us around the lake once to test the new motor on her powerful little boat and give directions. Then P took over the wheel and C jumped into the water, put on her ski and held the rope as we slowly moved ahead until it was taut. P hit the gas and the boat powered forward. The amazing C slowly came out of the water on her ski, beautiful, grinning ear to ear, and gracefully skiing back and forth across the wake, coming up next to the boat, drifting back, seemingly effortlessly carving the water for a full turn around the entire large lake.  When we again reached our starting point C dropped the rope and we circled round to pick her up.  We were screaming in delight and joy for the amazing C, not only in the boat, but on the shore friends celebrated this incredible woman's journey around the lake on a single water ski.  The amazing C is 72 years old, has a very nasty and aggressive case of pancreatic cancer, and severe arthritis that takes particular pleasure in locking up her shoulders. By all rights and standards, she should be sitting in a rocking chair receiving guests and sipping tea.

But not the amazing C.  Let us all be blessed with her will, her optimism, and her indominable spirit.

Vacation Life is Good. Very Good.

It has been a very good vacation week here in the Berkshires.  Work has been beckoning, but I've managed to keep it largely at bay, with only a few hours taken from the week... not bad, given all that is happening. Monday will be an adventure, I'm sure, but I'm trying not to think about it until at least Sunday afternoon. With limited success.

We went to the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA, to see the Arthur Dove/Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit, which was wonderful.  I'd never seen their work displayed side by side. Remarkable how strongly Dove influenced O'Keeffe, who credits him with her introduction to modernism. And it is clear that O'Keeffe influenced Dove's later work when he moved to watercolor.

Arthur Dove's "Sea Gull Motive" and Georgia O'Keeffe's "Dark Iris":

 

Remarkable, no? 

Last night we saw "Away We Go" with Maya Rudolph. What a funny, interesting, touching movie. Just wonderful - a hearty laugh and a few tears if you are a true cinematic weeper like me.

We continue to sample the great restaurants of the Berkshires including a light supper at Napa in Great Barrington last night.  I had a yummy red lentil soup with chorizo and smoked paprika and a roasted beet salad with arugala, Berkshire blue cheese and toasted almonds, with a glass of Fabre Montmayou Classico Malbec from Argentina.  Is there a better way to end the day?  Not likely, especially since young Fisherman A joined us and added good conversation and several very amusing tales of his day to day toils as a server at a posh Berkshire retreat.

On to Becket this evening, and dear friends C & P, their daughter and her husband, the wonderful A & E, and grandaughter, the amazing and lovely baby J.  All on the shore of beautiful and huge Yokum Pond. This will be a nice way to end my Berkshire retreat.