Tasting Summer

What is the taste of summer? Is it toast with crabapple jelly, put down by the folks at Smoland Prairie Inn during a year when there were crabapples, when the buds hadn’t been destroyed by hail? Or cheese-curds, squeaky-fresh from the Burnett County Creamery, eaten in a bottomed-out canoe on the shallow St. Croix River? Or peaches, picked yourself, one by careful, is it ripe? one, on a breezy slope in the hill country south of Fredericksburg, as Chinese tourists among the next row of trees look in vain for phone bars? Is it ribs from Arthur Bryant’s place in Kansas City, a place alive with hospitality amid the bleak urban wreck of a neighborhood? Or sweet corn at a brother-in law’s birthday party, while grandma suffers a worrying nosebleed?

It has been all those, for me, tasted in time snatched from two months of frantic “hiring and firing,” of planning for the best but fearing the worst, of going on faith and still going on faith, and still going, and going, and going. Two months of sometimes falling off the steep learning curve of learning to run a school, or rather of applying skills from thirty years of teaching, being on committees, facing down thieves and flat tires on the dark byways of Italy, applying for university monies, accepting the kindness of strangers, working at a newspaper, acting as a stage manager, dreaming up and carrying out trips to far away places, teaching Sunday School, singing in choir, raising children, sitting at the bedsides of ill or dying parents and trying – sometimes in vain – to keep the peace among friends, colleagues, myself and my in-laws… to running a school. And here I am, washed up from that sea of worry on a beach of self-indulgence, and of a different, a family sort of worry.

Just now I tasted summer as it is lived here in the San Francisco Bay area: in the chilly summer fog of the Bay’s industrial rim. While my daughter did her hourlong run around the back streets of El Cerrito, I walked briskly along the trail which leads from the Dog Run to Marina Bay, replicating somewhat my power-walks at Thomas Park, back home in College Station: a bittersweet walk. Yes, it tasted of memories of walking there with my mother, and wishing I had been here to walk with her there more, that perhaps she would be walking there still, had I been able to live near her, to take her out walking as she needed to, after her friend moved away, my father being lame and unwilling to put himself through the painful effort of walking with her, or get a power wheelchair to bring it about. That’s the bitter taste, along with viewing the grim, gritty underpinning to the marshlands along the walkway, lined up in rigidly-straight heaps and laved by straight canals: the silty topsoil covers concrete bones of extinct giants, waste from the liberty-shipyards of the ‘40’s, themselves spawning the urban blight of labor lured here from the South and left to rot after the War, as rot they did.

But over the bones of the waste is growing a comely cover of native grasses and reeds, succulents, wildflowers , all running with muddy rivulets shaped however they like and walked over by marsh-birds and creeping furry critters, a landscape nearing the pristine, in which only the occasional abandoned tire or blown-off bustina mars the nearly human-free scene. The chilly, freshening breeze blows sweet across the wild fennel growing on the margins of the waste, on the edge of the asphalt path; the dilly leaves of the fennel crush sweetly between the fingers, the yellow umbels suddenly shout that they would taste lovely, lightly fried in batter like Roman artichokes, and I laugh at the other, the healing, rich, inward taste of summer: the making of a wholesome dish from the bitter jetsam of memory.

Leaving Sendai

How can you tell if a place has become home? Is it when you know how to sort your trash and when to put it out at the kerb? Is it when you know which shop sells rice, and which has the best oranges, and where to find your favorite brand of sake? When you look forward to the next episode of Nani Kore? (“What is that?” a show which goes all over Japan finding obscure monuments like a tree growing from a roof or the longest, steepest temple stairs anywhere or boats with sad faces) on TV or, on that crazy food show, start betting which dish at CoCoCurry is the number one favorite before the hapless guys (who have to eat whichever choice they make) guess what it is? Or is it when you check every day on the progress of leaves and flowers, opening out along the river, and keep forgetting to take crumbs for the birds? Is it when you are headed for the subway station but stop to cheer for the wheelchair marathon, and someone hands you a flag to wave, like everyone else? Or when you go out with the local ladies to see the seasonal blooming of misu-basho and share a lunch of okonomiyaki the way they make it back home in Kansai before hanging out at a temple (all equally clueless as to what to do) and sharing family stories on the way home, stories that could happen anywhere?

Maybe it has something to do with going local. With the help of our brave secretary, we have gone to local concerts, talked with a local history expert, and even joined local folks when they went off to Hirosaki, a 6-hour drive round-trip (ten, if you count the traffic jam downtown), to see the 5000 sakura (cherry trees) in bloom there along with pilgrims from all over Japan and the local American air force base, and to buy the local apples. Two weekends back, we went to the big city-wide Flea Market in Dainohara Park, where zillions of small family groups spread out a blanket on the grass with their old clothes, old toys and some real old treasures, and found souvenirs to something we did four years back (the chaggu-chaggu-umakko horse festival in Morioka) as well as a useful teapot (ours had a crack) and a happi-coat. We also provided a handy opportunity for grandsons to practice their shy "Hello," impressing their beaming grandmothers.

Maybe it has to do with making pilgrimages to places we loved before, not because they are famous or anything, but just because we went there so often, or something particularly touching happened there. It was near the Seiyu grocery store in our old neighborhood that we watched the Seiyu checker in his clean green apron gently take the elderly gentleman by the arm and escort him across the street and off home. One beautiful Saturday, we stopped by there and bought sandwiches, tea, and a couple of fresh cream-pan and picnicked in the cemetery on the ridge near Kitayama Station, admiring the roofline of the nearby temple, the dramatic clouds, the just-opening sakura and the song of the uguisu in the branch above our heads, then walking the tiny neighborhood back-trails down to the train station at Kita-Sendai. We went to Shiogama a weekend back not to see the amazing shrine or eat the incredible sushi, as we did last time, but to eat lunch at the boat terminal, admire improvements to downtown, revisit the little stationery shop and the grocery, recalling the long cold day’s evening we spent four years ago, wandering the downtown, waiting for a procession to return to the shrine. On another gorgeous day, we went to Matsushima not to see the famous temple, but certainly for the stunning views and also for lunch and to do some sketching, and to revisit our favorite shop that not only sells most of the many fabulous tops to be found in Tohoku but also spins them for you, to demonstrate how they work. That we got to hear a street calliope and see a reallyfat Corgi was just icing on the cake!

Last night, before going home to pack, we stopped by the busy corner where the 7-11 is, and the Kent Cookie shop, and while I waited for Robin to get cash and sake and crackers to take home, I watched the flu-masked housewives race by on their bicycles, aprons flying, the uniformed teenagers out after manga and snacks, the bus wheel by on its way to the bridge, and thought this is home; I’m really going to miss this! We had just walked down the street from the university, where I had said good-bye to a new friend who shares a love for fantasy, Dr. Doolittle, and things that are “mysterious.” She and I plan to work together on a book about Masamune Date, this great city’s great founder, and that way maybe I can give a little something back to the city I have come to love.

Waking Up in Sendai

The day starts very early, here in Sendai, because there is something distinctly off-kilter about our time-zone, here. The sky begins to get light at about 4:45 AM and the local temple on the bluff above our apartment rings its big bell at 5:00 AM. Having become used to the good, hard tatami-style mattress of our bed (and being wise to the good, hard pillows, I brought my own squishy old feather pillow from home), and the comforters that don’t tuck in and are a bit short for large gaijin like us, so that we wear good, warm socks, I am sleeping better, but still, when the temple bell goes, it is pretty much time to get up. Or one can at least start pondering life in general, doze a bit, and then get up at 6:00ish. The other thing that keeps one from sleeping well here is all the interesting new things one learns – this was a much worse problem, the last time we were here…

After maybe going for a run along the river, after first saluting Jizu in his little shrine at the trail head (patron Buddhist saint of children; the shrine is well-lit, locally famous, and visited night and day), having some cereal or toast (of the large, square, white variety) and beautiful local eggs (very orange yolks!) or maybe a fishcake or two (or cream cheese from Walmart, which owns the local Seiyu Grocery chain) and some good Maxim coffee, and juice from the 7-11 (combini – convenience stores – are a real necessity to life here, serving as latterie to buy milk and food and underwear and manga and also where you pay your power bills, get cash…), we carefully manage not to take showers while the other person is either shaving or doing dishes (no dishwashing machine), so that the water is super-hot.

Once all ablutions, beautifications, and dressings are completed, we pack up our computers in our packs/shoulder bags, try to decide which coat to wear and whether or not we should be wearing long-johns today or take our clear-plastic umbrellas or what, shoehorn ourselves into our shoes by the front door (leaving behind our slippers, facing inward for our return later), lock up and descend the 4 floors to the ground. There, we can turn either right or left, and will wend our way along the narrow, tidy, sober, well-paved streets of Kome-ga-fukuro (our neighborhood) to get east and north to the main road, across which extends the university, a matter of 15 minute walk or so away. We might pass the little mom-and-pop store which mostly sells sake and gardening supplies, or the gorgeous traditional house with its generous garden, or the amazingly attractive corner café with its tiny garden of trees and flowers, or the gardens with the various camellias, always in bloom: huge and pink, with long yellow centers, small and red, with bright yellow centers, pink and many-petalled, like roses, white and poetically fading to brown, all with their perfect, glossy, dark leaves. The star magnolias are ready to burst into incredible bloom, like huge white roses, and without any leaves, as yet: Robin has coined the word magnolificent to describe them, the plums are fading, and the pink sakura are about to amaze the world, along the river, in gardens, everywhere.

Enough for now! Tomorrow: the rest of the day!

Back to Japan

Where to start? The last month’s writing energies have been siphoned off to other efforts: trying to say something inspirational to a school-full of folks looking for good news, as I get ready to take over the Headship at Saint Michael’s; trying to revise novel number one so that someone will take a second look at it, a third look and then, God willing, launch the thing; trying to write little notes to accompany the photographs, coming from Sendai, where I’ve been since the 29th of March.

Sendai, Japan, that is, Miyagi Prefecture, in the region known as Tohoku, “East-North” in the cool latitudes of upper-middle Honshu. Robin and I lived here for six months, back in the the spring of 2006, and so the place feels like home, but it is mighty exotic, if we sit back and consider, and if this had been our first visit, culture shock would likely be extreme, although back in the States sushi and sashimi are not the unusual things they were in the ‘70s. He and I met through the Berkeley-Sakai Sister-City Student Exchange program: I was in the 1973 batch going to Japan and he went in 1975; we met at a party for the incoming Japanese students in 1974. He was seventeen, I was eighteen, and thereby hangs a tale. How long have we been married, now? Thirty-one years? The good news is that being in the same office all day and a small apartment all night doesn’t seem to be a bad thing…

When we were here in 2006, it had been 33 years since I had last been in Japan, and picturesque Godai-do shrine in Matsushima Bay (go online and admire it: it is adorable!) was open that spring, as it is, once every 33 years… some kind of significance there, I expect. But I was first in Japan as a little girl of 8, on our way to India, where we would be for nearly four years, with trips home every year, after the first summer, and those taken slowly through intervening opportunities of the Levant, Europe, and Asia. I recall staying at the Ginza Tokyu Hotel, and learning from a tall, slender waiter to ask properly for water: o-mizu, kudasai! and also remember standing on the cold shinkansen platform, waiting and waiting for a bullet train that would never come: the only time the bullet train was stopped on account of snow in its entire history, and that was its first year of operation. Instead, we had to take a plane to Kyoto, a low-flying commuter plane, probably a DC-3, and when Fuji-san was announced as being outside the right side of the plane, you can bet that it was justoutside the right side of the plane, gleaming gorgeous with a mantle of snow. And much else… that’s another book lying written and unread, which needs sprucing up and sending out again!

But what of Sendai, city on the beautiful Hirose-gawa, winding like three rivers through the heart of town, past the wooded hill where its founder, Date Masamune, lies entombed in a splendid reproduction of the Momoyama style tomb that burned to the ground in the blitz? Sendai, with its backdrop of mountains, looking out to the sea like a small San Francisco? It is called “the city of trees,” since after the war it was rebuilt in the image of a new, more beautiful, culturally-rich, forward-looking place, a place with broad boulevards lined with zelkova and cherry trees, with a symphony orchestra, a chamber music group, several choirs (including the wonderful Sendai Baroque Ensemble, which we heard sing Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Christi at the local Baptist church, the night before Easter), and a classical music competition (everybody you talk to seems to have a daughter who studies clarinet or piano). It is a place where if you drop a glove or a necklace or a set of keys, it is put on the nearest high surface, awaiting your return, a place where, as you take your morning run beside the river, you see eagles, swooping to clear the high school campus of mice or try to snag your sandwich, pheasants peering bashfully at you through the willows, ducks both plain and extremely fancy, poking along the shore, brilliant, black-and-white wagtails skimming the surface of the water, and loons, fishing in mid-stream. The tips of the tree branches are blushing pale green or pale pink, and the sakura are daily expected: the venerable weeping cherry in the courtyard of the Institute has dark-red buds ready to open on the next sunny day.

And the people! The people greet you as you run with a courtly nod and an ohio-gozaimasu! as you pass them with their beagles, or as they pass you with their far-superior running skills. And when you compliment the hearty old ladies, doing their exercises with a cheerful genki desu! (roughly “you are very healthy!” or “you’re terrific!”), they smile delightedly back. People at a concert of baroque music will sit on folding chairs or will stand, rapt, for two hours of serious, heart-felt attention. When you eat at that Italian restaurant in the basement of the mall, and you forgetfully leave una buona mancia (“a good little something for the hand” – in Italy or France, about $1.00), the waiter chases you with it, up the stairs. Children gape at you – not that many like you, hereabouts – and when you look in the mirror, you think gosh, you really are pretty odd-looking! Oh, there’s just too much. It is a great place to write, that’s for sure.

If you’d like to read what I wrote about visiting Shiogama, just to the north of Sendai, after our last visit here, go to the 2009 edition of youarehere, the journal of creative geography, at www.u.arizona.edu/~urhere/, and look for “On the Shores of Sendai-Wan.”

ja, mata!

How important is culture, anyway?

Weeks pass, no blog. Some blog energies are taken with writing things that might save what had been a good school, as I am chosen to be its Head; much blog energy is taken with watching my mother go through the mysterious process of what seemed very much like giving birth to her soul. The breathing and the tunnel vision looked like labor to me, and the pain… was there pain? God, I hope not. Then there was the cremation agency with their amazing inability to corral paperwork, and the arranging for nurses to visit my father, who between shock and dehydration was in a sorry state. Then there were the death notices to send out to friends far and wide, and the memorial service not to organize because of the far distance of those friends, the drive not to make – yet – to the redwoods, since there were not yet any ashes forthcoming from the cremation agency. But then there was, waiting at the end of the week, the tickets ready in my purse: the symphony.

When Mom was first striken, and Dad could still walk up the steep slope to the first nursing home, to visit her, he read her The Lord of the Rings, which he himself had never before read, not thinking much of fantasy. But she had read it to my brother and me, many and many a time, beginning with The Hobbit. Reading to her was something he could do for her that did not tax her broken memory, did not require her to answer questions like “Do you remember when we…?” some of which sparked a response, and some of which just brought more grief and frustration. But the written word, if we love it, can be held just out of the edge of sight of the mind, each familiar phrase welcomed with a spurt of recognition, bringing the delight of split-seconds of anticipation. He grew to love the story, reading it to her, and having fallen in love with the visual beauty of the films, and it gave long, sure hours of enjoyment to them both in his visits, long stretches of calm joy that she would not have when he himself was striken, not with a stroke, but with the joint-destroying infection of MRSA that left him in a wheelchair after more than a year of periodic hospitalization. Without his visits, and with me far away out of state, she was rolled in front of a television and left to enjoy herself.

Was the presence of that book, any book that she loved, not a Godsend, even though it was not the Bible? Is not any profound work of human genius, that strives to capture the best of the human experience, even if cloaked in elven-grey and walking on hairy feet, worthy of preservation and perusal? The arts of literature, of visual arts like film, of music, are they not as important to life as the getting of money and the wielding of power? Read Everyman to discover some of the great mysteries of the giving birth to the soul: power, beauty, wealth, genius, all are left at the door of death. No-one goes through the door of death with your soul but your Maker, and whatever can guide you to the peace of knowing that, whether it be a New Zealand film-maker or an Oxford don, is a blessing. A hand on an arm, a familiar phrase of Kipling or Frost on the lips, these are the sorts of things that soothe the soul in its time of agony.

The Bible, of course, is rather good at this, as well: I discovered the true purpose of the Song of Songs in reading it to my dying mother, a whole-hearted love-letter to the soul from its Maker. The Psalms are all written for passengers to the grave, and to those on the point of death; how often did David think this night in this cave would be his last? But what if we no longer taught our children the importance of reading literature better than the usual run of the printing mill? or of ever reading the Bible, or thinking of it as some sort of scary object only for use in warding off vampires? Of drawing the sorts of sketches that brought Middle Earth to life in film? or were used to design the glazing of cathedrals? Of composing the sort of stirring music that sent the Rohirrim into battle, or the sort that inspired Howard Shore to compose in the first place, in other words, classical music… Mahler, for example.

At the end of that terrible time in California – and it was terrible, over all, there is no denying it, though the presence of family, their meals and their sympathy, made it bearable – stood the shining event that would be my mother’s memorial service for me, sermon, hymns, processional, requiem, words of comfort, the one thing I really looked forward to and knew wouldn’t disappoint: the Resurrection Symphony of Mahler, performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton (and sometimes just fingers) of Michael Tilson Thomas. I know this piece; I’ve sung it; like a familiar storybook, it had phrases I could anticipate with sweet glee; I knew what it does to the soul, and I needed that very badly. I pulled out two kleenxes, warned my neighbors this could get emotional and why, spotted daughter Tia in the uppermost row, and got ready to be moved from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, and let ‘er rip. It did not disappoint.

So if you need serious comfort, go high, and go deep, reach into the most accomplished creations of the greatest geniuses of the age, creations performed by people at the peak of their powers, endowed with hearts of tremendous generosity and passion, working within difficult bounds of long training and hard discipline but working with a fierce, capable joy, and you will find it. Oh, you will surely find it, if you have a mind trained to it. So we must train our minds to match the height and depth of living, and prepare for the agony of offering up our souls.

Paradise

The scene changes. We see our blogger in a nursing home room in California, holding the hand of a very gaunt woman, her mother, who has decided that enough is enough, and is uninterested in the things of this world like food and drink, but still lights up when she knows she is in the presence of those she loves, and when we tell her just how terrific she is and exactly why we love her and just how many people feel the way we do.

Yesterday, this scene would have included a very loud television showing advertisements for tacky jewelry, a window beyond swathed in curtains, and frequent, loud telephone calls, not to mention the roar of an oxygen machine: hell for the dying. Today, we tell the front desk that our mother has less than a week to live, the supervisor listens carefully before going off to her morning meeting, and within two hours, the neighbor is moved from the room where she has been for two years, the TV goes with her, the curtains are pulled back, a very quiet lady who likes to be out in the hallway moves in, the oxygen machine is turned off, and hummingbirds can be heard in the budding rosebush, outside the window. Mom can hear me reading stories of faraway places to her, or people chatting quietly at the foot of her bed. It’s paradise.

The spiral booklet from Hospice explains very neatly and sympathetically what changes the dying go through, and how we must respect their time of transition. Eating in the room with Mom seems strange: she is beyond the mundanities of sustenance. She is living off herself, and still manages to keep rosy with it, but for how much longer? Day by day the eyes grow duller, the temples and cheeks sink, the hands and arms thinner and thinner still. We keep vigil, we gather around the bed. There is time to say goodbye, to stroke the forehead, to hold the hand, the arm.

I try not to read sentimental books and I don’t allow myself to think about Mom as she was and all she was to us. I made the mistake of doing that a week ago tonight, and my eyes were so puffy the next day I didn’t look so great for my big interview with the Search Committee next night, a week ago tomorrow. The moon was high, the clouds racing over the sky, and the first formations of snow geese were crying to one another as they passed over Thomas Park; I was in the backyard at the chiminea, feeding scrap paper, pine-cones, twigs and frankincense into it steadily, and as steadily weeping away for all that. But not this week, can’t – got to last it out and then go find a hole where the rain gets in…

There is the small matter that, since this time last week, I seem to have been chosen to be Head of a school, and that one’s blogging energies may well be siphoned off to the service of the Greater Good; already I have written several necessary Documents to address the many constituents of this institution, and many more will necessarily follow. And yet, the time in Japan still awaits, though the spouse is already on his way there now and I will not follow until the end of the month, a time to finish revising the first of the two novels, so that they may be presented to some merciful publisher (one or two agents remain untried, but one is unsure about trying them) and spread their well-beloved wings.

There are more paradises to make; one begins to make them simply by asking, and hoping for mercy.

Snowflakes, and the Arms of God

“You are a light on a hill, o people, light for the City of God, shine so holy and bright o people, shine for the City of God…” got the hymn fragment stuck in my head, but really what is running through my mind is the image, not of cities on hills, but of cities on hills with – yes, you’ve heard this before – rivers running through them. All started when I saw the word Brazos recently, printed on the buttons of Robin’s flannel shirt. How did they know, I wondered, that we live in Brazos County, in the Brazos Valley, on the Brazos de Dios River? Then I got to wondering what it would be like to have a city on the Brazos River, I mean right astride it, and I realized it just couldn’t happen, at least not this far downstream or, contrariwise, not this far upstream. Closer to the coast, and the thing would be deeper and more navigable, closer to its source, and it would be shallower and more manageable. But here, it runs between high, wild, clay banks, in a bed full of snags. Just now, it is nearly bank-full with all the rains (at last!) and looking to flood, and when it floods, the Brazos Bottoms fill up with silt again.

“Wide as the arms of God” was how it was described by the Spanish, somewhere at its mouth, but when the Brazos is in flood, hereabouts, the whole Bottom floods, and that looks wide enough for God’s arms to us folks. Out on the Bottom land, the cotton fields, corn fields, sorghum and watermelon patches stretch out flat and wide, nearly as far as the eye can see, and they say that the first crop of cotton that was taken off the Brazos Bottoms was six feet high. Cotton is a great depleter of soils, however, so we are down to the usual two feet, nowadays. Cotton was king in Texas, until the Civil War, and practically all the slaves raised out in Virginia, were sent out here to work it in the killing Texas heat. It is still a yearly question of whether the rains will come at the right time for the cotton, and whether the gins will be full of bales in the fall, and there are still slave quarters to be seen, taken off the plantation lands and perched on small land-holdings, all over the county: little wooden double-cabins with steep-pitched roofs and a porch, fading away in the sun and harsh winter weather.

We had snow, yesterday, and it is colder here than all the other places Robin keeps on his desktop: Berkeley, Paris, and Sendai. When the jet stream loops south, there is no mountain range to keep Canada out of Texas: it just invades as it likes, only meeting resistence from the onshore breezes of the Gulf. When the wind starts to blow from the north, the Blue Northers come in and kill our pot-plants before we can hustle them indoors, but then when it comes again (as usual) from the south, then we are freed from frost, and the frost mostly doesn’t get to Brazos County; generally stalls out in Waco. Things happen fast, and big here, weather-wise, and we have learned to snatch our opportunities when they blow through, however briefly they come: our young folk run out into the parks and golf courses and dance in the rain, when it comes down in buckets as it surely can, and when we get the rare snow, all classes must stop and the people rush out into it.

Like yesterday: the super-big, Texas-sized snowflakes were falling thick and fast, all over the place, like a slow-motion summer downpour. We were on campus for early voting and by the time we got back to the car, my wool coat wast spangled all over with big white flakes, and the students were going nutty. Two giggling anthropology coeds were making a snowman on the hood of a car parked outside the Wooden Ships Lab, and other wild-eyed women were lying in wait with snowballs for the Corps cadets, who were stumping along in their camos as if they were practicing up for Afghanistan – as they well may be, bless their hearts! – but the girls didn’t have the heart to actually throw the things at the guys; rather they threw them up into the air. (Men, take note: rare snows drive women wild; one suspects the mood is on them for any sort of madness!) Snowmen were up in a jiffy, however, and “WHOOP!” quickly spelled out with footprints on the “grassy knoll” in front of the Architecture building, from the roof of which snowballs were being lobbed randomly on passers-by. A woman asked us, at the voting: “Is this snow or ice or something? I’ve never seen snow falling, before!” Now, folks, snow does fall here, every seven years or so, so she must never have run outside before, to catch it, but to fall so thickly and for so long is a very rare thing here in the Brazos Valley.

Cities on rivers are common enough, where we’ve been and where we’re going: Paris started on an island in the Seine, Sendai has the beautiful Hirose-gawa winding like three rivers through its heart, Berkeley has its creeks, running off the hills into the Bay… Rome has its island in the Tiber… but it also has its seven hills: there also needs to be rock under there, somewhere, hills to put the houses on when the river is minded to flood. The Brazos stays out of College Station: we have several ridges between us and the Bottomlands to keep us dry, unless Wolf Pen Creek or Carter Creek run through our backyards. But here, there is no rock to climb up to, along the Brazos, not around here: all clay, clay, clay, and either slippery or hard as rock, and no way down to the water, save by slipping. So here you will find no City on a River. Just a city charmed by snow, for one brief moment, and always ready, for the briefest of moments, to find joy.

Warmed by Foreign Wool

Enough of bitter blogging: let us celebrate the baggage we collect in life, that keeps us warm. This is a night-time blog, which may make it just a hair dark, don't you know. The rest have all been things of the morning. I am just in from walking the dog, under the starry sky: Orion is heading west, standing upright on the treetops, and the moon is a Cheshire cat in the upper branches. This morning, out walking at about the hour the schoolbusses come around, the birds were shouting happily from those same trees, even though the hawk was up and looking for his breakfast, and even though the day before a great owl had been silhouetted against the sky on that tree there, just as clear as clear. Valentine's is past, they've chosen their mates, and they're busy at the business of life.

It was cold out – it does get pretty cold, here in Texas; all depends on which direction the wind is from, and now it is in the north – and so I bundled up with the works, because the dog walks veeeery slowly, these days: wool socks, long-johns under the jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt under the sweater, then the satin-lined wool coat, the blue-silk scarf, the blue-wool-felt beret, and the blue-knit-wool gloves. And I think to myself: these gloves I bought, one desperate night on the Rue Daguerre (or actually Robin bought them for me), to replace the brown ones, completely worn through at the finger tips, which Robin bought me, one desperate night on Ichiban-cho in Sendai, four years back, to replace ones lost, stolen or strayed, all the way back to the butter-soft leather gloves stolen from my pocket on a bus in Rome, just a couple of weeks after I got them for my 37th birthday, January 29, 1993, from the guanti shop on Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, just between Largo Argentina and Piazza del Gesu – the little one that used to be run by the little couple… At the same shop on the same day, Robin bought me my foulard, literally “all wool and a yard wide,” and now I see why the lads from the Great War used that expression to commend a mate who was trusty to the end: it is absolute proof against cold, especially when it is clean and cleverly knotted so that the triangle is in the front. I liked the black-and-white arabesque pattern as being writer-like in its inkiness. The beret that covered my ears tonight is a new addition, from a stationery shop in Aigues-Mortes, bought on another occasion when I had left home ill-equipped. My blue-silk scarf was a gift from Thailand, the purple scarf, tie-dyed with geckos was a gift from my brother, the spiderweb-of-rainbow-threads scarf is from the Tibetan shop on Solano Avenue, Berkeley (the one closer to the hill, not the one closer to the Safeway), meant for my mother but then I realized that in the nursing home, she will not be needing scarves any more, or shoes, or jackets, or jewelry, or much else. She is in her own Wood Between the Worlds, and she is beginning not to want to stay there much longer. She doesn’t eat much; she doesn’t drink much.

Do we care where that wool comes from? Certainly, as consumers, we might like to know that the people who made what we wear were happy to do so, that they were paid well, that they could chat with friends while they worked, that the wool came from sheep who roamed hillsides we might like to roam, that the dying works and spinning mills were clean, bright places that didn’t foul the streams around them. We like to think that the people who sold those things to us or to the people we love to give to us like to work in that little shop, or at that counter in the big department store, and that it pleased them to think that someone would be warmer because of them. The fact that we can often believe none of what I have just said in this paragraph to be true goes a long way to explain why we are such a sad race of humans, these days. But most of all, we like to remember how we came to be wearing the things at all: again, from whom they came, from which street, at which moment of our lives.

So how does all this fit together? In this wise: I am warmed by woolens that were gifts from those I love or who love me, gifts that came when they were needed, and came from all over creation, and half the warmth in them is in the knowing where they came from, from whom, and how, or at least the smile that comes along with the warmth comes from there. And other things warm us, likewise. The smile in the branches of the tree is a gift from knowing Alice in Wonderland, thanks to my mother, and the gift of knowing Orion from someone’s pointing it out, long years ago: my mother again. And my mother: my mother no longer remembers who gave her what, from minute to minute and from day to day; she had a great epiphany at Christmas, when we stood in her room and she beamed at us, but life from day to day is a sad mystery: how did I come to this room with that TV in it and who are these people and what are they to me? Why don’t they let me get at this dratted scab on my forehead? I’ll scratch it if it’s the last thing I do! Sometimes I think my son comes to see me, but then he goes away again, and that old man who says he’s my husband Howard, but how can that be? When we don’t know where the wool we are wearing comes from any more, it may be time to stop eating much or drinking much. Stands to reason.

Lock Up Your Valuables, Sort Of

If you like this blog, are you paying a red cent for it? Ah, the beauty of modern life, when the artists starve. But, but, but, you say, go get yourself an advertiser! Go get one yourself, say I, what I do is write. Get an agent! you say. Already written to and been turned down by 30 agents, say I, what I do is write. Oh, you have to schmooze, go to writer’s conferences to get an agent! I don’t schmooze, say I, what I do is write. It takes me all day to write; I have to concentrate on it to do it properly. I do a blog because what I write is good, but no-one will publish it because it’s not Dan Brown or J.K. Rawlings, which will surely bring in the big bucks, and they were never turned down by anyone, you know. Right.

Am I implying that people nowadays have no vision or judgement? Bingo! But does anyone play Bingo any more? After all, it requires everyone to be on the honor system, and what is that, anyway? Can’t we all just say that we hate big CEO salaries one month and then knuckle under and get one from a lobbyist, a few months later?

And independent films are never any good, and even if they were, distributors would always make sure the finest of those films would get wide distribution, wouldn’t they? In a pig’s eye! And I sold more than 93 copies of a book for children about saints last year, in a world that could sure use them, but who reads or buys books or cares about saints any more? Or children, for that matter. Oooh, am I being bitter and cynical? Bitter, yes, cynical, no. I speak the God’s truth, no more, no less. But then so did the original cynic, so, yes, I am a cynic, living like a dog in the marketplace, saying (as I’m sure Diogenes would have, if he’d had the chance) “The Emperor has no clothes on!”

But in order for you to believe it is the truth, I will have to lock it up from you and charge you for it. Honestly, I wish I could charge you for it, because until Utopia arrives and we don’t need money to buy groceries, pay is a good thing. And until it doesn’t take all day to write something worth reading, so that one can’t do it in the spare time carved from around another job, writers worth their salt (that’s pay, by the way) will need to find a way to make a living off their craft. Yet I maintain that we can’t get by without beauty; I see in the paper where a person can die of boredom. But we pay good money for our boredom!

Antoine-Auguste Parmentier understood that if you want people to value a thing, you don’t give it away free. He was the great French promoter of the potato, and has as a result many potato dishes named for him, a nice tomb in Pere Lachaise, a Boulevard and a Metro stop named after him. What Frederick the Great did in Prussia by force, Parmentier did through cleverness, and with a little help from two or three stiff sieges and famines. According to that well-supported-by-advertising free online information service known as Wikipedia, Parmentier was up against a scientific community that firmly believed the New World import known as the potato would give you leprosy (meanwhile, the Prussians were happily eating theirs without apparent ill effects), and he literally couldn’t give them away, so…

He locked up a whole warehouse of seed-potatoes and I suppose plants, and put an armed guard on it by day, with strict orders to allow people to help themselves once they had bribed the guards and strict orders not to guard the warehouse by night. And don't you know that those clever farmers got all sorts of potatoes and felt very pleased with themselves? What a genius the man was! He deserves two Metro stops, as far as I’m concerned…

Speaking of which, yesterday’s sunrise here in Bryan/College Station should have been locked up in a very exclusive room at the Louvre, or perhaps had a best-seller written about it, and then tickets sold to the first 1000 lucky winners of something or other, because anyone not looking at the sky between the hour of 7:00 and about 7:15 missed out on a unique moment in meteorlogical history – oh, wait, most days are unique… (ouch!). Seriously, many cloudy-blah mornings may come and go, each unique in some obscure way, but this was overwhelmingly and absolutely unique.

It began with the fact that the sunrise was clearly going to be a purply-pink color, with rays of gold-tipped magenta, and moved on quickly to the fact that the clouds seemed to be observing a strict adherence to patterns of parallel bands, at all scales of existence, so that tiny shimmers like the patterns of owl-feathers could be seen in the finest edges of things, as well as great waves precisely like the patterns on the sand of a placid beach, and frankly Marcelled clouds of in-between size were to be seen, all over the sky, from the wispiest edges of things to the thickness of a good blanket of stratus, with a taste and complexity that makes me think Someone read my blog about Lombardy Poplars, and how they seem like man-made down-beats in the landscape.

You can forget the “man-made,” because I have been reminded that repeating patterns are part of the toolbox of God, and that music began, after all, in the throat of some nightingale and the chatter of some brook, and we are just imitators of the great Original.

Now, I will lock that up so that someone thinks it’s important, but I will tell the guards to take bribes, and give it all away.

The Wood Between the Worlds

Yes, yes, no blog in more than a week, but here we are, back in Texas, reflecting. Much doing of the writing sort has happened in the past week, siphoning off blog juices I suppose, and much of just living, which takes up time and thought. Also, one was in Cambridge for a couple of days, without computer access. But here in the Wood Between the Worlds, there is time to reflect on all that.

You are all familiar with The Magician’s Nephew, are you not – the Narnia book I like to read to students first, before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? And with the place neither here nor there, the place rich with possibility and change, but changeless itself, full of portals to other worlds: the Wood Between the Worlds? We are now home, in the Wood, for a full month before putting on our “away” rings again, and stepping into a different pond from last time, the pond that will take us to Japan. There is plenty of time to wander about the Wood in a dreamy sort of way, and try to understand where we’ve been.

Our first night back in Texas, I woke up to the scent of old wood. Our whole house is made of wood, of course, and it was built in 1940, so it is I suppose old. Houses in Paris, as in Rome and most other places with more stone than standing lumber, are made of stone, brick, plaster and concrete, not wood, so home always smells woody, by comparison. Like C.S. Lewis’ Wood, it is a bit of an in-between place, College Station, as the name implies: a train station between Hither and Yon, a place on Highway Six, which, as one is frequently reminded “runs both ways” (in other words: you came here by it, and by golly, you can leave by it again too, if you don't like it here!). It is a place full of potential, a gateway to other places, but not much of a place in itself. Young faculty come here, raise their small children, make their mark, and move on to more famous pastures: it is a seedbed, if you like, full of rich promise, but never seeing it come to full flower. Things grown here are generally transplanted to deeper soil. We’re still here, of course, so we much go out to see grown-up things, elsewhere.

There is a ring of graceful little oaks, around the park across the street, but the soil here is not very good for tall trees: before it had houses put on it, this was Prairie, with a bit of Post Oak Savannah, thrown in: clay soil, heavy and dense. Around here, the tall trees only thrive in the river-bottoms; I long to live in a river-bottom like that, and have tall trees arching high overhead but river-bottoms are always flooding, hereabouts. Dangerous.

Perhaps that is what makes places like France so exciting: they are all one big floodplain, full of tall trees, very dangerous, very exciting: things really happen, there. Oh, yes, they certainly do happen: the last survivors of the 1871 Paris Commune are put up against a cemetery wall (having already shot their own hostages and having spent the night in a shootout among the graves of Pere Lachaise Cemetery), all 150-ish of them, shot, and buried where they fall. Convenient, having a shootout in a cemetery! And so the story goes, all over Paris: what a blood-spattered city! 2000 guillotined in the Place di la Concorde, alone! Yessir, things really happen, in France. No wonder the cathedrals there are as tall as a grove of sequoias!

Speaking of floodplains, I have to report officially that France’s countryside is more beautiful than England’s: I have seen them side by side in one day and can certify it as a fact. On the train from Cambridge to London, and London to Dover-ish (wherever it is that the Chunnel goes under) – admittedly not the best landscape the UK has to offer – we see similar plains and low hills, similar lines of bare trees punctuated by small hamlets, but the hamlets of that part of England are entirely Semi-Detatched Villas of extreme mundanitude… whereas, after your 20 minutes under the English Channel (or La Manche, as they call it in France, “the Sleeve,” as they are loath to let the English have it) – twenty minutes!!! do you have any idea how long it takes by ferry, and how much more seasickness is involved?? – you are among the equally hilly areas alternating with equally flat landscapes, but the French villages cluster like – oh, dear, I’ve been in France too long, I was going to say like aureoles around a nipple, but with the little, single, squat-towered churches and the beauty of them and all, standing among the swelling fields, it’s an embarrassingly apt comparison – and then, the alleés of typical Lombardy poplars or plane-trees, along the roads, man-made though they are, add an irresistable touch of grace, wherever they’re put, like downbeats in a dance. The houses of the villages stand “detatched” and homey-looking, each with its shutters and its yard and its tree. And the persistent overcast of England has risen and is blowing away: real, fleecy high clouds appear, and there is a glimpse of blue lit by sunset. France is beautiful: she is la belle France. Bloody, but beautiful; like civilization itself, I suppose.

Here, we live in a dream of that sort of beauty, and of that sort of danger, of a place where Catholics can rise up and kill 3000 Protestants in a day, where even the smallest town in southern France can even today have its government taken over by a coup d’ètat. But also a place where one of the stations available on cable is the Couture channel, with models marching down runways every day, where couples kiss as they part to take different subway lines, where accordionists make a good living busking on the subway trains themselves, and where small, unescorted dogs sit politely in the doorway of the charcuterie, hoping for mercy.

Here in College Station, last week, a man was held up in broad daylight by another man with a gun: I’m sorry, but we aren’t allowed to have the danger without the beauty! That’s not civilization, that’s just caveman stuff. Wait: those caves were pretty gorgeous, too. Alas!

Our own brand of Frenchness

I know I’ve already blathered about public transit, but bear with me: here I go again. And be patient; I will get back to this point eventually.

We were watching the France 24 (English) TV Station (France vingt-quatre – say it the way they do and it’s waaaay cooler!) over breakfast this morning as usual, and on Saturdays they have a thing they call Reporter, an in-depth show on a particular subject. This week they were talking about a big national debate over “French identity” which everyone realizes is about being a Muslim in France. They went to Marseille, which has a really high percentage of Muslims, and there was much intelligent, reasonable talk, a chat with a young woman who wants to teach French in the public schools but also wants to wear hijab (the head-scarf) banned by public schools here (what is with that??).

But my favorite interview took me back to my old days at Berkeley High, and especially at the Berkeley High Concert Chorale. If you’ve heard this story before, just plug your ears and hum, because here goes: At Berkeley High, what with white flight to private schools, every ethnic group was a minority. That is to say, there were just as many (or as few) whites as Asians as Blacks. If you couldn’t tell which flavor of Asian a person was (Filipino or Chinese or Japanese…now it would be S. Asian or Fijian, too) you were so uncool. Yes, there were occasional tensions, certain bathrooms you didn’t use (pretty much only the bathrooms in the gym were okay to use, and they didn’t have doors, but since you were in the Girl’s Gym and you were a girl and nobody looked anyway, that was kind of okay, too) but that would be true of any big high school. It was in the School of the Arts branch of Berkeley High that things got utopian, especially in the Concert Chorale.

Drama tended to be full of white kids (though I did like the production of “Fiddler on the Roof” with one black daughter), as did Chamber Choir, but Chorale – maybe because of our Filipino-American director, Vince Gomez – was utterly integrated. We also sang everything from Gospel to Palestrina, and we did them all so well and in such racial as well as musical harmony that we were invited to sing at a Choral Music Teachers’ confererence in Anaheim (can you say “with a performance at the Main Street Pavilion at Disneyland with free, behind-the-scenes access to the Magic Kingdom?”) to show that it could be done. We found it hilarious that people thought it couldn’tbe done, but in visiting all the hosting high school choirs on the way there and back, we began to understand that there are schools with big problems…

In the same way, there are three tall high-rise apartment buildings in Marseille that could be a disaster, but in which – an they are large, airy, inexpensive and nicely-maintained apartments – young French families with all sorts of ethnic backgrounds live in peace. The maintenance manager of one building – a former soldier in the French Foreign Legion and native of French Comoros – said he never had any trouble with his tenants not getting along, and they all got along with him fine. A very white-French professional-looking young dad talked excitedly about living there and what nonsense it was that people were talking about Frenchness, since everyone experiences “their own brand of Frenchness.” That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

The trick seems to be living shoulder to shoulder and just sharing everyday life experiences having nothing to do with race or religion, but simple, human experiences like babies, school, paychecks, groceries – well, groceries might point up differences, but could make interesting discussion – life, death, parents, love… One of my other favorite quotations from the show was from a vegetable vendor in the so-called “Arab Market” of Marseille (which, as the reporter pointed out, may be shunned by racist people, but it is festive and colorful and has “good, inexpensive produce”) who said “mixing” is fine, and “mixed children are more beautiful.” Japanese women, they say here, like to marry French men because they are good husbands (the same is said of American men, incidentally), and on the TGV on the way back from Montpellier was such a couple with an adorable girl; I also recall folk on the bus in Berkeley with golden skin and golden eyes… got to agree with the vegetable man on that!

Living together as much as possible, not off in our own enclaves: that is the ideal. Which brings me at last to public transportation. As all of you know who have ever ridden a crowded bus or subway or suburban line train, it is perfectly possible, when a desired stop is reached, for the person in a seat on the far side of a jam-packed car to get to and out of the door of that car in time. How? you may ask (if you’ve never tried it). Here’s how: 1) just after the doors close of the previous stop, you begin to signal that you must get off at the next stop by, say, gathering up your bags, or simply by getting to your feet, which triggers 2) all the people between you and the door (or most of them, there are always a few with earbuds in or who are deep in thought, or deaf, or socially inept) whose peripheral vision is ever alert for the slightest tremors in the Force begin to glance about on the floor for places to put their feet and on the bars for places to move their hands, ways to tuck in their shoulder bags, and so forth, then 3) the stop is announced, or the doors open, and we begin our move – always good to announce our impending arrival with an audible Pardon! Pardon! (in Italy, it would be Permesso! Permesso!), and 4) everyone miraculously effaces themselves, and you get out.

Self-effacing is one of the great miracles of public transit: we discover that, by holding our breath and making ourselves somehow flat, we can take up very little space at all. People without this skill, or people who crash into your shoulder with their backpack or cannot seem to dodge you on the sidewalks (and I have to say that the French are much more random, wandering, illogical sidewalk-walkers than Italians, stopping to talk, or kiss, or whatever just anywhere and zig-zagging wildly; honestly, these people must just be a hair too northern-European or something; they probably can’t dance, either, or shoot a hoop; they sure can’t cook spaghetti al dente), are just boorish and unwelcome on the subway. The whole dance, on the RER suburban line with its pairs of facing seats, as to sitting next or sitting opposite your best buddy (opposite is the correct choice, incidentally, being really more intimate), and then the question of whether you should take that empty seat in a crowded subway or train care (you should is the correct answer, unless you are absolutely getting off at the next stop; if you are bashful and don’t take it, you are just adding to the surplus standing population and taking up space some poor slob standoing on the other side of the car could use) is somewhat more advanced, but well worth learning.

The point being that we are sensitive at all times as to the needs of our fellow-travelers, and anticipate where we can help; otherwise no-one would ever get off or on (oh, I forgot to mention the how to get off even if it isn’t your stop but you were forced to stand in the doorway and get right back in again protocol: basically, you hang on to the bar by the door, if possible, even while you step out, indicating to the hordes about to enter that you are still “on base” and are still allowed to “move your piece” as we all recall from Hide and Seek and Checkers, those two great life-modelling games) a train without murder and mayhem, ever again. Like Civil Inattention (the great city-thing where you don’t meet the eyes of those approaching you, difficult for the Howdy-trained Aggie or indeed for country-folk of France), this sort of Civil Sensitivity (I just made that up) is the great emollient of public transit. Not as good as Poetry*, but a good second best! (*see “Pirates of Penzance,” the show-stopping chorus known a “Hail, Poetry!” Google the words or listen to it on YouTube; you won’t be disappointed. The key phrase is: “Hail, flowing fount of sentiment! All hail, all hail, divine emollient!”) A demain!

A good death

That was the subject for yesterday’s walk from the Orsay train station to the university, through the misty fog of a vanishing winter. The night before, I had been chatting with daughter Tia and had learned that the principal at her little El Cerrito elementary school had succumbed over the long weekend to her cancer (I think it was pancreatic; that seems to be all the rage, lately). Last month, Tia was astounded that the woman would struggle on in her job, knowing almost certainly that she would be dead before the end of the school year. “Is that really how I would spend the last months and days of my life?” she wondered. And would she? Would I?

In many senses, we all have been notified of our imminent deaths; it is just a matter of how imminent and how much we are aware of that imminence. If our reaction to a diagnosis of “only a few months to live” is to withdraw from society, from work, and contemplate the state of our souls, revisit the places and people we love best, one might ask why work at all? Knowing that we are to die in the end, should we not give ourselves over to contemplation from the start? Perhaps we should!

But what if our work is what we love, and not merely the thing that keeps us alive and doing the things (in our spare time) that we really do love? What if being a principal, or being a researcher, is what gives us joy? Why, then we would want to work until we drop dead at our desks!

How do we spend this allotment of years on earth? We discussed this in terms also of what we had seen last weekend, in Languedoc, namely the town of Aigues-Mortes (Ag-e-mort -- "Dead Waters" from the marshes thereabouts; marshes always get bad press... must be the mosquitoes), built from scratch by St. Louis-de-France, the king who lead the 7th & 8th crusades, and died of the plague in Tunis, whose life has been written up by several contemporary biographers and many hagiographers, to boot. Louis was, as I have written elsewhere, “the ideal king, so if you ever plan to be a monarch, listen up! He really had faith: he sincerely believed in God and that God was the boss, not Louis. In Paris, King Louis built one of the most beautiful churches anywhere, called La Sainte Chapelle: the walls are almost entirely made out of dark red and blue glass, and the ceiling is spangled with gold stars. He also knew it was an awesome responsibility to be in charge of all the people of France, and he did his best for them. As a judge, he was fair, whether you were rich or poor, and he was merciful, too, even when punishing people who did wrong. Louis insisted on preserving everyone’s rights, no matter who they might be or what they looked like. In dealing with other countries, he was astute (meaning no one could fool him) and respectful, working for peace whenever possible, but he was a good soldier when he needed to lead his troops into battle. You could always trust him to do what he promised. And, like Joan of Arc and most saints, he hated dirty and blasphemous language (swearing by God and that sort of thing) and he wouldn’t allow it around him.” (Folk Like Me, p. 14)

When Louis decided to go on crusade, he wanted to do it right, leaving from his own port on the Mediterranean; since his lands didn’t quite reach that far, he bought a chunk of unwanted marshland from the local landowners, displaced the fishermen, drained and deepened the ship channel that connected to the sea and built himself a neat little city, and encouraged settlers to come and fill it. Its four-square walls and multiple gates still stand, and in near-mint condition. There he was able to host the captains of the 1500 ships that accompanied him, be blessed in a proper church (also built from scratch) and house all the needed craftsman and vittlers to launch such an effort: he really did it right, and the place was built as neatly and snugly as you might like, with window-seats for the archers, all the way around the lower reaches of the walls, plenty of enclosed guard-houses. Someone really thought that place out – Louis himself or someone he trusted to do it properly, and whose work he approved, as the final arbiter.

Yet Louis himself enjoyed that city only a few months, if that long. He left it behind when he went on each crusade, and died far away. Was his effort a waste? Is anything we leave behind us when we go a waste? Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art is long, life is short”) as the Romans have it, and I think they’ve got it. Make something, solve something, improve something, teach something, and none of it will have been a waste.