Book of Marvels

2008-03-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

Another White Woman for Obama

Confession: I used the Picassa "glow" effect not to make myself look whiter, but to blend in the shine on the end of my nose.

I meant to write a post like this weeks ago, but never got around to it. Now, it's almost too late since the Ohio primary is in just a few days.

I began to consider Obama as a serious contender about a year ago, when I flew out to California to visit my family. My oldest brother picked me up at the airport and asked right away which candidate attracted me. I just shrugged.

"I'll tell you who I'm going to vote for," he said. "Barack Obama."

Why is this significant? Because he's a Reagan Republican who has voted the party ticket as long as he's been voting, who voted for George Bush not once, but, I fear, twice. He's certainly not a liberal, but he's been an increasingly uneasy Republican. More than that, though, he's repulsed by the endless battling and posturing and sniping in Washington, where differences along party lines mean that nothing ever gets done and when it does, it's rarely the right thing. My brother felt that Obama's natural inclination is to reach beyond party affiliation, beyond the liberal/conservative labels, beyond race and religion and all the other categories that divide us to build consensus and work on this country's problems.

I was amazed that Obama had the power to pull my big brother from the Republican orbit, and I agreed with his reasoning. I've not had any reason to rethink that part of my support for Obama.

Big Bro is still plugging away for Obama, along with (I think) all the other 30+ members of my extended family. For those who slice and dice by categories, we're mostly white with a growing Asian minority.

But I'm frankly sick to death of the slicing and dicing, although I'd plaster a bumper sticker with "Another White Woman for Obama" all over my car if there was one. I have friends who'd be happy to put "Another White Jewish Woman for Obama" on their cars-- that would really bust the categories.

Many people pose this as a historic election where we can choose to put either a black man or a woman in the White House. Many people say that sexism trumps racism in this country, that gender distorts our vision of someone's competence and character more than race does. I agree, and I think the discussion about these issues has been hugely valuable. I know I'm a lot more thoughtful about race and gender than I was just a year ago, and I was fairly thoughtful about them back then. I hope this discussion continues and sharpens, especially around sexism-- the most hidden and pernicious of the isms.

But this isn't just an election about categories; it's about individuals of merit. I think Obama is an extraordinary individual who brings not only civility and idealism but fresh, smart thinking to politics. Remember how the old Washington hacks guffawed when Obama said he would meet with dictators (at least, the ones we don't usually meet with) without preconditions? But why should they laugh? Perhaps this kind of new thinking can begin to salvage our relationship with the rest of the world.

I don't think Clinton is extraordinary. Brilliant, hard-working, adaptable, yes. Perhaps even visionary under that carapice of political machinery. But not extraordinary in her thinking or in her ability to inspire people the way Obama does, from my Republican brother to my formerly apathetic teenaged stepson.

The Bush administration has made a mess of so many things, but the thing that I worry about the most is our relationship with the rest of the world. Obama brings not only his brilliance and fresh thinking and civility to this, but also his category-shattering self: he is black and white, Christian and Muslim (on his father's side), American and Kenyan. He can put a face on America that looks something like the whole world stirred together.

Human rights lawyer Lisa Gans wrote something for The Huffington Post called, "Why I Think Obama is the Best Candidate on Foreign Policy." It's a great piece and expresses my thoughts exactly.

2007-12-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

Jumbled Socks

I can finally wear shoes again, but only loose ones, with the thinnest of socks. So I was rooting around in my sock drawer a few minutes ago, fuming and fretting that none of the socks I wanted to wear have mates. Mateless socks are the damnedest of petty annoyances. How is it that I bought three pairs of the same socks-- hoping to eventually have at least two matching pairs-- but still have only one left?

Then something crunched at the back of the drawer. It was one of my mother's old nylons stuffed with dried bay leaves. I held it to my nose-- and it was still redolent of my last hike with my father, maybe fifteen years ago.

It may have been my first hike with my father, too-- while he exercised vigorously for his health in his later years, I don't recall any exercise for pleasure other than golf in his earlier years, when I would have been around to join him. This hike was in the aftermath of all that--after he had given up his twelve-mile morning bike rides but before he couldn't walk the three steps down to their garage without falling. I was visiting my parents in Santa Rosa and was restless and told them I was going for a walk in the state park behind their house. I asked my father if he wanted to come and was surprised when he lumbered to his feet-- his "big fat feet," as he called them. At that point, I just think he wanted to do anything to spend time with his children.

There was a steep, rocky baked-dirt path down a gully, then an equally steep path going up the other side. I remember turning back a few times in a panic because I'd hear scuffling. I was afraid he had fallen-- he'd had two knee replacements and had those big fat feet and was around 80-- but even though he was doing a little slipping, he didn't fall. He grinned and hummed, as he always did, and kept going. I could hear the wild turkeys that set up such a racket every time my parents opened their garage door making noise somewhere, and I worried that one of the boars that lived in the park might charge us. It was an anxious hike, and I turned us around before we got to the top of the hill. The highlight was coming upon a few bay trees. "We used to put the leaves in our drawers to keep away the moths," he told me. So we stuffed our pockets and made them into two sachets when we got back to their house, not because of the moths but because they smelled so good. After he died, my sister and I cleaned out his closet. I found his bay-leaf sachet hanging on a hook, under his bathrobe, and took it back to Ohio with me. I'm not sure if the one in my sock drawer was his or mine.

It reminds me of a good day, one of the last good days, before so much started to change with my parents.

My son called a few minutes ago to ask me what I was doing. It was one of those conversations we have where he pretends to be interested in what I'm doing, but I know he's angling for a ride home from work. "Did you go to church today?" he asked. I told him no. "Why didn't you go to church? I thought you went to church every Sunday." I try, I told him, but usually don't make it. And I asked why he even cares when he fulminates so often and earnestly about church, religion, and all related topics?

He doesn't have an answer for this, but I do. He looks like my father, walks like my father, laughs like my father, hums like my father, and tells a joke like my father. My father never missed church. I think that buried in some part of my son's inheritance from my father is the wish that I'd go to church, too.

(The photo is from 1953, when my parents and my siblings went on vacation to Hawaii)

2007-10-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

Bad Shoes

I didn't like these shoes. They were pretty comfortable but not so comfortable that they negated the basic cloddish and ugly factor. I'd slip into them by default because I hadn't found a shoe in this category that I liked better, then wonder why I felt so homely. Years ago, I used to wear my husband's torn leather jacket and a pair of hideous birkenstocks with socks all the time. One day, my daughter looked at me and said, "Mom, you look like you sleep on the streets." I was afraid I was slipping backwards, sartorially speaking, and kept meaning to dump these shoes in the Goodwill bin.

Wish I had! Three weeks ago, I put them in the hallway when a group of friends were here to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As they were getting ready to leave, I got up to thrust the rest of a bag of potato chips upon my stepson so that I wouldn't finish it myself and tripped over the shoes. As I hit the floor, I heard a snap. I thought I had landed on the potato chips. But my foot hurt so much that I pretty much knew, within seconds, that I had broken it.

As a friend pointed out, "The lesson here is that you should have eaten the chips."

So I had to have surgery to screw my fifth metatarsal back together and can't put any weight on that foot for six weeks. Six weeks! I'm kind of like Miss Havisham these days, clunking around my second floor on crutches, from bed to office, with scary hair and long toenails.

So many revelations! Who would think that this tiny little bone could cause so much trouble? When I read the paper now about skirmishes in Iraq and Afghanistan, I certainly have a new appreciation for injuries. A broken foot is possibly the least of what can happen to someone there, but now I know that it can give people pain and impede their walking for life if not treated. The first thing my doctor did was strap an amazing plastic boot on me, with velco straps and padding and a hand pump that inflates parts of it so that my foot doesn't feel as if it slipped into a crack between rocks. It's a brilliant piece of medical engineering and I didn't even have to pay for it; my insurance does. My first thought was what a wonder this boot would be in Afghanistan, where so many people have either historic injuries or new ones from bombs, land mines, whatever. The boot --presented so quickly to unlucky but lucky me--seemed to highlight yet again that terrible gap between the haves and have-nots of the world. I told the people at PARSA that if I come back in the spring, I'm bringing this boot.

I have to wear it for another month. Marvelous as it is, I'll be glad to get rid of it.

2007-08-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

Pleasure

See the lake? See the mountains? Or only the moon, which rose like the fin of a golden fish behind the great black wave of mountains on the other side of the lake?

But the sun is out now. The mountains are illuminated, dark where the trees are thick, lighter at the top where the trees taper away and the wildflowers take over, white where the surface is gouged by roads or rockfall. As the sun moves across the sky, the contours of the mountain will change, dimensions will be revealed-- the seemingly flat mass of land rising out of the water will reveal itself as a collection of coves and points, valleys and ridges. The lake is intensely blue, rippled by wind and the wakes of a few speedboats. A sailing school is making its way past my house--nine red, white and blue sails tipped at various unhelpful angles--and someone in a little power boat zips between them, bleating orders through a megaphone.

I just got an email from my friend Linda who was here, at this same lake, until a few days ago. She told me that on her last day, she went hiking and kayaking. That's more physical activity than I've had here in two weeks.

I'm sure that I'll get to that hike or bike ride that I plan every night when I look at the stars (those meteors keep flickering around up there like fireflies on my lawn in Cleveland, no matter what the newspaper says about peak viewing times). Now that all the activities are over--the wedding, the funeral, the family reunion--I'm sure I'll start getting up early and riding my dad's old bike along his old twelve-mile route down the lake and back.

Or maybe not. I might just spend the rest of my time here doing what I did today. I took my coffee down to a chair by the lake-- in nightgown and bathrobe--and finished reading my book. Then put on the clothes I've been wearing for days and went back down to read the latest Oprah magazine. My only concern was the balance of sun and shadow. Enough sun to brighten the page, enough shadow to keep me cool. When I finish this post, I'll go back down and start reading "Jim the Boy," by Tony Earley-- a book I liked so much that I wound up giving it to my mother for a birthday two or maybe even three times.

I always feel a little guilty taking my pleasure this way when I'm on vacation. When the Lake Tahoe marketing people make their ads, they don't show pictures of people wearing their mother's bathrobe, sitting in frayed, faded, treacherous lawn chairs reading the Oprah magazine, rising only occasionally to clatter the lawnchair away from the shadow cast by the pines. They show them skiing or hiking or parasailing or rafting--the iconic vacation activities. I've done all those things (still dream about the parasailing) and I like doing them. An annoying, nagging part of me thinks I should be doing these things, since I can't do most of them in Cleveland. Isn't that what a vacation is supposed to be all about? Pushing yourself into the new?

But a few years ago, I realized that it was just fine to lie around reading, even if I'm in Paris or Kabul or Lake Tahoe. It's one of my greatest pleasures and one that I never allow myself during the day when I''m at home, when I could be working. At home, I could always be working. This is the downside of self-employment.

It's one of my perennial goals to read during the day at home--even on a weekday-- as if I were on vacation.

One last thought before I head back to my lawn chair, pehaps with a beer in hand: in addition to the ideas about daily hiking and biking and swimming that I brought to the lake, I also brought a new yoga dvd. I planned to dedicate part of every day to flexibility. My husband just dropped the dvd in my lap, still in its plastic covering. "When we get back home," he said, "you should store this next to your 'Conversational Dari' dvd-- it's in the same perfect condition."

Maybe tomorrow I'll break out the yoga before my bike ride. Maybe not.

2007-07-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Out of Nowhere

I was sitting here finishing up the day's work when I realized I was singing a favorite song from my youth-- probably of that particular youthfulness at the right, when I was showing off my skirt to my cousin Steven. It was "Winter Wonderland," done now in my dotage with fancy jazz stylings.

I sang the part where the song goes:

In the meadow we can build a snowman
and pretend that he is Parson Brown...

But when I was a kid, I had no idea what a parson was-- never encountered the word, I think, until I started reading about the adventures of British children. So I always sang it this way:

In the meadow we can build a snowman
and pretend that he is parched and brown...

It didn't make any sense to me then, either-- how could a snowman be parched and brown? He'd melt first. But, still, I have to admire my little-girl brain trying to work some kind of logic into the lyrics, inserting the only words that seemed to fit the sounds. I'm probably--we're all probably--still doing this now, encountering things that we don't understand and finding that our subconscious brains scramble to find a solution, even if it doesn't work.

I don't know if anyone still reads this blog since I've gotten so lazy about posting, but I thought it would be fun to hear other people's examples of this kind of stuff from their childhood.

So spill.

2007-06-26T17:25:00.001-07:00

A Young Afghan Man Speaks

“What is your work here?” asked M, as I was waiting for a ride that never came.

I told him that I'm a writer and that I was in Kabul to work on three magazine articles.

“Are you writing about the women here?” he asked. “Because when writers come, it seems they’re always writing about the women.”

I told him that only one of my articles was about women. And that if he was interested, I’d plug in my laptop and write about him for my blog.

“My story is very long,” he said, but agreed to try to keep it within an hour. An hour wasn't long enough, though-- I planned to sit down with him again and ask more questions, but never got around to it.

These are some of the things he said.

"I was born in Kabul, in Khair Khana. We left the country when I was two—I’m 19 now—and my family went to India. They left to get away from the war. We stayed there for one year, then we came back to Afghanistan for my uncle’s wedding. We stayed here six months, then went to Pakistan. Everyone was still fighting in Kabul. Even if boys were only fifteen, they were taking them away to fight. I stayed in Pakistan for fifteen years...

Afghan men face many problems, but the women can cry and show that they are hurt. The men don’t cry and don’t want to show anyone they’re hurt. A lot of men have lost their wives, their parents, and their children, but they don’t want to show anyone they are hurt by this. My father was hurt by having to leave this country. He loves this country. Now he’s very happy to be back and to find his county is out of war, out of danger. But he is still searching for work. He used to be in the Afghan army before we went to India, but he can’t find work now. So I’m supporting the whole family...

First, I found a job working in the parliament doing shorthand for their meetings. But after three months, they didn’t pay me any salary...then I found a job as a waiter and worked there for one year. I met X in the restaurant and we became friends. She told me my English is very good and asked me what else I had studied. I told her that I had studied MCSE—Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer—but that I hadn’t been able to find a job doing that. I tried finding a job at the NGOs but they said I didn’t have enough experience. Then she called me and told me she needs me at her NGO. Now I am happy with both jobs...

When I was living in Islamabad, we boys would be able to play outside until 1:00 or 2:00 at night, and no one would tell us this is bad. But in Afghanistan, people will tell you it’s too dangerous. If I finish my work at the restaurant at midnight, then I just stay in a room at the restaurant. I can’t go home because it’s too dangerous. The Taliban are still here. You can find them everywhere. I’ve never seen them, and I hope God never shows me to them. There are different types of Taliban. Talib means the one who has memorized all the Koran—so people who are just like that, they won't hurt people. The Taliban who are fighting, they are not human...

I like the people of Pakistan, but not the government. The people are really good. Whenever I go back to Pakistan, I see them and they’re happy to see me. And it’s not so expensieve in Pakistan. Clothes, shoes, everything is very expensive here. Lots of people don’t have enough food for their families—they can eat in the morning, but not at night. It’s difficult to live in Afghanistan right now...

In Kabul, there are now people who have moved here from all the provinces. They are uneducated and they don’t know how to be with other people. Because of these uneducated people, the war will not be over in Afghanistan. Always these people want to fight -- they fight with each other, with Pakistan, with India, wherever. But we can’t find anything from fighting. We have to be like brothers and sisters to each other. Everyone has mothers and sisters. We should not look at each others’ mothers and sisters with bad eyes. "

2007-06-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

A Letter From Kandahar

Ever since I started this tenuous connection with Afghanistan at the end of 2005, I've been getting an average of 10 emails a day about what's going on here, either from people with fat distribution lists or from organizations that compile articles from newspapers and magazines around the world. I've found it hard to keep up with all these reports while I'm here because the news is often so disturbing. It's one thing to read about a gunfight among rival politicians near the airport when I'm home in Cleveland, quite another when I"m HERE.

Today, someone forwarded me this letter, below. It's so filled with hope that I wanted to post it. I wrote an article about this woman last year for Entrepreneur magazine. She's an Afghan- American associate of Business Council for Peace who has settled herself in Kandahar, the area often called the "home of the Taliban," where the fighting is most intense. She started and runs a business called Kandahar Treasures that employs 300 local women.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Friends of Afghanistan -

Greetings from HOT Kandahar! I have not written in ages it seems, but I was very touched and inspired and so I write. Today, for the first time in Kandahar's history the women of Kandahar organized to hold a special peace prayer at the sacred Shrine of the Prophet (Kherqa Sharif) in Kandahar.

This program was organized by ordinary mothers, sisters and daughters of men who have lost their lives in these unjust times - they have realized that politics, international policies and the current leaders of the country have not been able to calm the situation in their country. They have learned to turn to God to help!

Kherqa Sharif is relatively a small shrine and Afghans believe that the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad is kept here. Every Thursday thousands of women come to pay their respect to the sacred shrine. The women wanted to hold their event at the Shrine because many women would be there anyway - no need to advertise to gather women. Initially the women did not ask the Shrine keepers to allow them in the mosque next to the Shrine so that they could use the loud speaker - but this morning when the women showed up the Mullah's of the Shrine/Mosque said to the women "you are our sisters and we want you to have a nice prayer - please go to the mosque and hold your prayer there." WHAT MORE DID WE WANT??? The only condition was "no children allowed" - which we planned on not having at any rate for the sake of spoiling the prayer rugs (no diapers in Kandahar!) -

So, the women eagerly went to the mosque and for the first time in Kandahar's history women made a presence at a very historic and public mosque and for the first time in history raised their voices through the loudspeaker that reached the open streets around the Shrine for the sake of peace. Many women were in shock and disbelief that they were allowed inside the Mosque!

I am proud of all the women here because inspite of the situation on the ground the women still gathered to show their solidarity and sisterhood in peace. After the event, my staff and I returned back to our office and I asked them what touched them the most about the event and the following are their answers:

"I have never been this happy in my life - today I read the Holy Quran for my brothers in Islam inside a sacred mosque!"
"For the first time in history we have raised our own voices!"
"After the event, I feel like my depression of life has been lifted!"
"Sitting at the mosque and praying with the women gave me courage to become more active. I know now that I too am capable of serving my people and my country!""This was the best Mother's Day gift that I have ever received!" (Today was Mother's Day in Afghanistan!)

Oh, this was an incredible event! It is indeed amazing what a group of women can do when given the chance. I hope and pray for peace for Kandahar and the rest of the world and hope that our policy makers and decision makers can listen to the cries of so many mothers who so passionately prayed from the bottom of their hearts for peace today in Kandahar. One mother said this while crying out loud " please hold these prayers often so that other mothers would not have to live through what i live through everyday after loosing my beautiful young son so innocently!"

In Peace,
Rangina

2007-06-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

Jingle Trucks!

During my last two weeks in Afghanistan, I've had a slight, very personal recurring despair.... I hadn't seen any jingle trucks.

Seems that I had seen plenty during my first two trips here.

I wondered if they were disappearing along with the blocks of traditional mud-brick buildings and other signs of old Afghanistan.

But yesterday, I went with some friends to a lovely lake with paddle boats and to Afghanistan's one and only golf course. While we were on our way there, we turned a corner and...there was a cluster of jingle trucks, washed and ready for the next day's work! I love the whole jingle truck ethos of embellishing the ordinary, of elevating the workaday to art, of driving beauty all over the country.

There should be a word appropriate for the many-ness of jingle trucks. A tintinnabulation of jingle trucks? A prism of jingle trucks? They are a delight to the ears (if one could hear them over the traffic) and the eyes.

PS--after I posted this, I saw the most magnificent jingle truck ever in downtown Kabul. It had a sort of huge rounded marquis over the cab. Like a headdress for a dancer-- painted, spangled, mirrored, ribboned, tasseled. Utterly magnificent. Who knows what ordinary cargo it carried-- toilet paper? computers? bricks?

2007-06-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

Rejects

The fabulous PARSA staff invited me to their compound for dinner and a sleepover last night. I had to share my room with these guys to the right. They were the first round of dolls made by local women for the PARSA gift shop, but didn't quite cut it-- eyes askew, over- or under-sized heads, overall not as artful as further iterations. But still, too delightful to throw away, so they sit on the executive director's windowsill.

When I was getting ready to bed down last night, one of the compound cats shot in the door. I'm allergic and tried to chase it back out again, but it whirled around the room, always out of reach. I thought it was just trying to hang out with me--cats love to make me sneeze-- but no! It jumped on the bed and lunged for one of the dolls, dragged it behind a cupboard and tried to claw off its beard. One of the Afghan members of the PARSA family rushed in and shouted, "He is trying to kill Osama!"

With the cat out of my air, I spent a lovely night in Marnie's office. I was surrounded by the beautiful art work of Afghanistan-- the rugs, the embroidered panels, the painted cupboard. I could hear the water sloshing around in the well outside, the wind passing through the wheat, the dogs' occasional bark, the goats' occasional bleat. I imagined I could hear the mountain, just over the wall at the end of the compound.

2007-06-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

The Ice Cream Man

One of the things the Taliban did was to ban music. Clearly, the Kabul neighborhood in which I'm staying would have chafed under this restriction. Last night as I lay on the couch reading for a few hours, I could hear music coming from every direction-- from the neighbors to the left, from the neighbors to the right, from across the street. Wonderful, soulful, dance-worthy, croon-along-with music. Not, I'm happy to say, the theme song to Titanic, which I heard several times at an Afghan restaurant last week. For reasons I don't understand, Titanic is still a big hit in these parts.

During the day, the noise of traffic and construction and planes drowns out most of the music. But the other day, I heard a familiar sound coming from the street and ran up to the rooftop patio to see what it was. An ice cream man! I didn't recognize the melody, but that doesn't seem to matter. There is something universal about the ice cream man's song, whatever the tune-- something about summer and sweetness and small pleasures in the middle of the day.

See the child in the upper right corner, running off to beg her mother for this treat?

2007-05-31T03:30:00.000-07:00

Waving Hello/Goodbye

I love all the store signs in Kabul-- all so colorful against the buff-colored streets and walls and clothes--but this one is my favorite. Most of the signs have their business stated in English as well as Farsi, but this palmreader-- I guess he only expects a local clientele.

I had hoped to use this post to say goodbye for ten days-- I was scheduled to go with a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society out to the Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan's beautiful, ancient, historic route to China. Marco Polo went this way, and I don't think it's changed much since then. The Wildlife Conservation Society is doing some great work out there with village conservation committees. Alas, the part about my joining them (which had to do with passing through an area where there have been dozens of landslides) fell through. So, I'm cooling my heels in Kabul, looking for some other things to write about.

One idea-- hire a driver and just go around the city photographing signs.

2007-05-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

Powerless (the electric kind) in Kabul

In a dark shop, two men stand behind their counters and turn out dainty little dresses and finely detailed jackets. No city power, no stinking gas generator outside; their work is powered by their own muscle and ingenuity. With a flick of this man's fingers, the wheels at the side of the sewing machines whir and the needle jabs down the seam for a pair of pants. He reaches for the iron heating on top of the gas (?) burner, which looks like something rusting in the corner of an old museum. I see it and wince at the thought of triangles scorched across the fabric. But when he slides it over a hem, all is silky smooth.

Oh, how I love humble machines lavished with so much gold leaf and red lacquer!

I finally figured out a way to appease the capricious Blogger gods, so I think this will go up easily.

2007-05-27T00:45:00.000-07:00

Consorting with Camels in Dubai

I don't usually post pictures of myself here, but I couldn't resist this one. During my two-day stop in Dubai, I went out for a three-hour tour on Friday Most things were closed and quiet. At one point my guide pulled over, led me down a path to the one open gate in a tourist complex and pointed to this clump of camels tied with the slimmest of tethers.

"Go pet the camels!" he said. "I'll take your picture."

I told him that there are many animals that I've longed to pet, but that camels weren't among them. And that I've always heard that camels spit, bite and kick.

"No," he said. "These are very tame camels. They won't hurt you."

So I stood at the edge of their square of dust and shit and leaned gingerly in their direction, giving myself enough room to bolt if one of them looked as if it was going to bite.

"No," he said. "Go inside and stand by them."

He was so insistent! I didn't know whether to walk around this one camel's front end and risk spit or bite, or around its back end and risk a kick. The camel didn't look pleased, one way or the other. But finally, I braved its wrath and stood there long enough for the guide to get his pictures. I did not pet the camel, which glared but didn't attempt violence.

Dubai was...hot. If I had kept track, I probably could have counted 100 building cranes or more. Everywhere, there are more buildings going up, more faux islands being created for more buildings. I don't know who's moving into these buildings, but the guide told me that the space is all pre-sold. He also told me that when he moved to Dubai from India 23 years ago, the area was largely empty. This is before the massive wave of construction that's brought in all the skyscrapers (including the world's tallest building, as yet unfinished, the ultimate height of which is a state secret), the seven-star hotel, the indoor ski hill. You hear so much about glamorous Dubai, but I found it a boring vista. All the buildings look the same--hospitals, embassies, hotels, malls, banks, schools, even churches--all the same, because they were all built in the same period of time and are made of the same materials. I stayed in the old part of the city--busy, crowded, gritty, redolent of lamb being grilled right around the corner--and far preferred that to the glitz. I don't think I'm a Dubai kind of girl.

Now I'm back in Kabul, sitting at the Cabul Coffee House (free wireless!), enjoying a deliciously balmy noon. Pink roses and red geraniums are blooming outside. The fringe on the umbrella tables is fluttering like crayola-colored flags. Some women have just arrived with children who are trying to lure a skinny orange cat down from her perch on a stone wall. It's a lovely day.

2007-05-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

Kathleen
October 31, 1914-May 1, 2007

When my brothers and sisters moved my mother out of the Santa Rosa house where she and my father had lived for ten years to an apartment, shortly after he died, they found a large box of slides unopened since the move from our old house in Oroville. My mother probably would have favored dumping them; she was trying to shed possessions. But she was thrilled when my brother Dan found a slide projector and started dragging the show to family get-togethers.

It was often a difficult performance. The slide projector would stick, leaving us straining towards the screen, willing the next scratchy image to appear. Or sometimes we'd hit a tray or two of slides in which no one--not even my mother--recognized who was in them. People and places so far at the periphery of family memory that they had dropped off. Who were they to us once, that we slotted them in plastic trays and tucked them in a frayed cardboard box and moved them from house to house? No one knows.

Dan decided finally to pick through the thousands of slides and convert the best to digital images. After our mother died last week--no, it's already two weeks, exactly-- we sat for about an hour and looked at them.

There are many wonderful old photos--generally, from the late 1930s through the mid 1960s--and they give the flavor not only of our family's eras but of the country's. Slides from the fifties of a sweetly garish Las Vegas; of a Waikiki Beach that was mostly sand and waves, not hotels; of the Fun House (is that what it was called?) in San Francisco, many years gone, where my mother actually made my brothers wear little gray suits to have their fun.

I was stunned by this particular picture. I had never seen my mother in a bathing suit-- not once, even though our family spent many hours in and around the Feather River, Bucks Lake, and finally Lake Tahoe. I think she was too self-conscious of her skinniness, her freckles, and--by the time I was born, when she was nearly 38--her varicose veins. I can't help thinking that I would have known her differently had I seen this picture before. She looked so pretty, so soft and dreamy. I never thought of her this way.

I keep reaching for the phone to call her. "Who was taking that picture? Who were you looking at in that way?" I would ask. I keep feeling guilty that I didn't call her on Mother's Day, or after I got back to Cleveland last night.

She was fine up until a few days before she died-- fine, that is, for a 92-year-old with a weak heart and failing liver and kidneys. She enjoyed a dinner of fresh crab on the night before she fell and was found to be feverish and was taken to the hospital. At some point, she closed her eyes. My brothers and sister and their spouses and children gathered around her, in various combinations, and petted her head and talked to her and put flecks of ice on her tongue when she opened her mouth.

I called when they were all there and almost asked them to put the phone to her ear, even though she wasn't responding and seemed not to know anyone. I wanted to try out a call and response that we both enjoyed from my pre-verbal past. When I was a toddler, I repeatedly posed an obscure question to the gown-ups, then provided an equally obscure answer when no one knew what to say. They finally caught on, and my mother liked to open our phone calls with the first part of the routine. "Fa sa, sista witcha?" she'd ask as I'd pick up the phone. "Ah sonni winnow!" I'd reply.

I had an idea that she'd repond to this, even at her great dying distance, but didn't want to seem melodramatic and didn't press it. It was my brother Dave who managed to spark her last words the next day. He told her he had brought some tomato plants for her garden. "Black cherry tomatoes?" she asked with some of her old eagerness, and then lapsed back into silence. She had been planning to grow some this year, after I raved about the ones I had tasted at the Tahoe Farmers Market. So sweet, with dusky skins that looked more like chocolate than black cherry.

I'm always unnerved by the photographs on the newspaper obituary pages. People in housedresses or business suits or ballgowns or military uniforms, people who don't realize they're tilting their head and composing their features for a picture that will eventually attend the announcement of their death. I almost don't want to put this wonderful photo of my mother alongside this slight vocalizaton about her death. But there she is, sitting between the river and the trees, holding a red balloon, her face still and soft and so lovely--and I can't resist.

2007-04-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

A Letter to the New York Times Style Section,

in response to

Shades of Truth: An Account of a Kabul beauty school is challenged

Dear Style Editor,

When reporter Abby Ellin interviewed me for her article about Kabul Beauty School, she said that this was going to be a she said/she said, look-behind-the-book piece. However, she goes on to raise the much larger issue in her article about how truthful memoirs should be. I believe she does this inappropriately, as conflicts in perspective—not truthfulness—are at the heart of this disagreement.

First, the article did not fully identify Mary MacMakin, who is only described as an American who lived in Afghanistan for more than 25 years and who initially proposed the idea of a beauty school. Mary MacMakin not only lived and worked in Afghanistan for more than 25 years but also founded PARSA in 1996, a highly regarded nonprofit that works with Afghan widows, orphans and others. The Kabul Beauty School was one of PARSA's projects through the second class. MacMakin—PARSA's director until recently-- supports Debbie's Rodriguez's account of what happened with the beauty school's second class and, in fact, replaced Patricia O'Connor with Rodriguez as director of the school in March 2004. MacMakin's description of the contested events is online, in the June 2004 PARSA newsletter, for anyone to see. Style readers should know that MacMakin is not merely another American who supports Rodriguez's account but is a highly credible woman with arguably more experience and connections in Afghanistan than just about any other westerner.

It's unfortunate that the group who started the beauty school—and I believe they were all well-intentioned—have wound up fighting about it, but I can understand how this might come to pass. People who have spent more time in Afghanistan than I tell me that it's hard to know what's going on there, even when you're right there. So I find it plausible that the other women who organized and taught at that first class didn't understand what Rodriguez faced when she went back to start up the second class and that rumors and worst-scenario suppositions started to fly.

However, I cannot understand why Ms. Ellin aired these suppositions without question. Seriously, now: Is it reasonable to believe Rodriguez wanted to re-open the beauty school outside the women's ministry because she wanted to run it as a for-profit enterprise? This seems ludicrous, as the one point on which everyone agrees is that there wasn't any money for the school at that point. The students don't pay to attend the beauty school. Where would the profit be?

Finally, I believe Ellin—and the angry women she quoted in her article—don't fully understand what the repercussions can be for Afghan women who violate the country's rigid sexual mores. The story of Roshanna is true—horribly so—but the only moral way to include her story in the book was to change enough details so that no one would recognize her. Perhaps Ellin and the others don't understand that women still get sent to prison in Afghanistan for having boyfriends, for being rape victims, for disobeying their husbands, for fleeing them—this is why self-immolation is the choice of many miserable wives. The real Roshanna would face a hell that we can't even imagine here in the States if her plight were known. After we finished the manuscript, Rodriguez asked another Kabul friend who knew Roshanna to go through it and make sure there weren't any identifying details. That no one interviewed for Ellin's article recognized Roshanna is a triumph, in my opinion—not a scandal.

In her article, Ms. Ellin says that the six angry hairdressers question whether the "disturbing, heartbreaking tales of abuse" about the Afghan women Rodriguez has come to know are true. I told Ellin and she failed to report that I had interviewed the group of women who are still around the Kabul Beauty School and Oasis Salon myself, so I know their stories are true. What surprises me is that Ellin—and the other hairdressers quoted in her article—don't realize how tragically unremarkable these women's stories are in Afghanistan.

KO

[photo is of a Kabul Beauty School graduation I attended in 2005)

2007-04-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

A Champion of Small Farmers

This is one of the things a freelance writer can do with a blog: post articles that have been assigned and then killed and that you can't seem to place elsewhere. I wrote the following article about chef Parker Bosley (left) two years ago. He closed his restaurant at the end of last year (right after it made the Gourmet 50 Best Restaurants list for the second time) to work full time with the North Union Farmers Market and with small farmers all over Ohio.

~~~~~

The roads wind and narrow, dip and turn, on the drive from Parker Bosley’s restaurant, Parker’s, in Cleveland, to Michael Miller’s farm. Bosley and I pass through one small Ohio town after another—Navarre, Tarrymore, Winesburg—then onto an even narrower road just short of Berlin. Finally, we crest a green hill studded with headstones, zip past a few small Amish farms, and continue along a lush valley. Miller’s organic farm is up on the right, 86 acres of pasture and woods.

Miller and two of his young children come outside and there’s some small talk and introductions, though the children only nod and whisper to their father in the Amish tongue. Then Bosley gets down to business. “Any sign of the pigs?” he asks, his red- and white-checked shirt a bright contrast to the Millers’ muted hues.

Miller gazes up into the woods on the hillside. His new Berkshire hogs roam the upper five acres, fattening on the acorns, nuts, and wild apples that will add flavor to their meat. Bosley is already imagining a dynasty of them slaughtered and packaged and labeled: “Ohio Berkshire Pork,” available at fine restaurants and farmers markets and maybe even a few specialty grocers. Perhaps nestled near some of the other local produce he’s coaxed into commerce: organic mushrooms and heritage turkeys, as well as his most ambitious project, Ohio’s own version of France’s exactingly nurtured Label Rouge chickens.

Though this role as local-produce impresario is a new twist for Bosley, it’s not a radically new one. Born on a dairy farm in nearby Trumbull County, he grew up eating fresh and local by necessity—he and his parents, his three brothers, and his sister ate what they grew. He was reminded of the rich flavors of his youth years later when he was a schoolteacher in central France and did a lot of driving and tasting in the countryside.

“I was struck by the way that the food in each town was a reflection of its own agriculture and season,” he says. “If you drove three hours to the next town, there’d be a difference in the menu because the people there were cooking from their region and climate. By the time I started my own restaurant, I knew I wanted to do that.”

He alternated teaching with summers working in restaurants and taking occasional cooking classes at La Varenne, ultimately apprenticing with Michel Pasquet in Paris. Once back in Cleveland, Bosley served as executive chef at Sammy’s for three years before he opened Parker’s in 1986.It was there that he realized that finding local farmers to fill his larder was going to be much more difficult than he had anticipated.

“People think it’s a choice, that you can just pick up a phone and say you want local produce,” he says. “It takes a chef twice as much time to buy local produce as it does to buy commercial. With commercial, you just call one supplier and you get it all—lamb, dish soap, paper towels, salmon, carrots, everything.”

Since he didn’t know anyone he could call to order local carrots, he had to hunt down sources. At first, he’d cruise the outskirts of the city looking for farm stands, and then tell the farm family that he was a restaurateur looking for sources and that he’d be back the following week to get more of those carrots or beets or peaches—and could they please reserve a pile for him? Those farmers would tell him about others who were raising poultry or grass-fed beef, so he ventured even farther into the countryside and eventually built up a network of local sources. By the time Bosley left the kitchen to chef de cuisine Andy Strizak, Parker’s was a shrine to local produce.

“We’re almost a hundred percent local,” Bosley says. “Not seafood or olive oil, but just about everything else. We simply don’t serve strawberries or broccoli in the winter. We might serve a cobbler with blueberries that we got from a local farmer and froze back in July, but we’re not going to bring them in from Guatemala in January.”

Now semiretired, the 66-year-old devotes much of his time to expanding the pipeline of local produce to restaurants and farmers markets. He’s out in the countryside two or three days a week, investigating rumors of excellent garlic or farmstead cheese. He subscribes to more publications about farming than about cooking, and studies farming literature so thoroughly that when he urges a farmer to try a new breed or crop—like Michael Miller with his Berkshires or Ed Snavely from Curly Tail Organic Farm, in Fredericktown, now raising another heritage hog called Large Black—he knows what it’s going to take to procure, raise, and process it. He attends regional meetings of groups like the Ohio Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association and the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association. When he raises his hand to offer an idea and identifies himself as a restaurateur, farmers turn and look at him in amazement. Same when he calls rural politicians to talk about legislation that will affect small farms.

“They ask why someone like me would care about House Bill 27,” he says. “I tell them that good farming and good soil make good food.”

Bosley also acts as a consultant to Donita Anderson, founder of Cleveland’s North Union Farmers Market, at historic Shaker Square. The two of them think up products that restaurants and picky consumers want (or would want, if they knew local farmers could put them on the table),then Bosley helps the farmers get started. For instance, he met with a group to the west of Cleveland to talk about growing organic asparagus in raised beds with retractable covers, thus lengthening the season by a month. Bosley also holds workshops to train farmers on developing relationships with restaurants-—in the wake of his work, many area chefs are interested in local produce.

“He’s been a big influence,” Anderson says. “Chefs call him, they ask him for advice—if they want to go local and seasonal, they go to him.”

But Bosley’s vision is bigger than just pleasing those at the knife-and-fork end of the food chain. He wants to restore the link between producer and consumer that’s been snapped by corporate agriculture and its many middlemen. And he wants farmers to get a bigger chunk of the consumer’s dollar so that they’ll stay on the land instead of having to sell to developers. All this gets back to the old-fashioned capitalism that Bosley says he loves: Make a better product, aim it at the right market, and you will prosper.

Out in Miller’s fields, some of these products regard us amiably from the little hollows they’ve made in the thick pasture grass. These are five-week-old chicks that have been bred to mature more slowly, with firmer and more flavorful meat, than their commercial counterparts; Bosley urged Miller to order them from a hatchery in Alabama. They live in a capacious wire pen that Miller moves once or twice a day, so they can peck up greens and bugs to supplement their organic feed. He will raise about 400 of them this season, enough to freeze and offer to customers desperate for local organic chicken in the winter.

Bosley, as dapper and cordial in the field as he is when greeting customers at Parker’s, bends down to peer at the chicks. “Would you start giving them a little milk in the next few weeks?” he asks, adjusting the bill of his red cap against the sun. “Even if it sours, they like to pick out the curds. It will sweeten the meat.”

Then he and Miller load his biweekly supply of organic eggs—40 dozen from Miller’s Golden Buff layers—into the back of his Subaru. Some of these will go to the restaurant, some will go to a Cleveland pastry chef who follows the high road of local and organic. And then we’re off along more winding roads, through more small towns, because there are many more farm projects ahead to which Parker Bosley intends to apply his judicious and ever-curious eye.

2007-04-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

The Pungent and The Sweet

My friend had taken her seder plate down from the wall, where it usually hangs under the Mexican folk art sconce I gave her and her almost spouse a few years ago. Now, it was on the table, its scroll-like calligraphy nearly hidden by the egg, the parsley, the chicken bone (they didn't have lamb), and the horseradish. Off in the kitchen, a ham was waiting for the next day's Easter gathering. They are that kind of couple, it was that kind of weekend.

The horseradish had been prepared by another friend, ground from her own roots with some fresh beets thrown in. It was a gorgeous zinfandel color, unlike the horseradish in my picture, which came from a jar and looks more like applesauce. I was greedy for it, ate it on my matzo and my brisket and even licked it from my stained fingertips.

I almost named this post, "Back when I was Jewish." I wasn't really, but I was married to a Jewish man for nearly twenty years who had grown up in a tiny town in the Catskills. I had been madly in love with him--at least, for a long time--and adored his family, as well as the friends and relatives who filled their lives. I wasn't Jewish, but I had a Jewish last name and knew a bracing handful of Yiddish epithets and looked more like my in-laws than my husband did. People would walk into my mother-in-law's office, see the portrait of my husband and me on her desk, and say, "Your daughter married such a nice-looking boy!" During my brief stint in corporate communications at American Greetings, someone once came to ask me if I was interested in managing the Jewish card and gift-wrap lines. She was surprised when I said that I wasn't, you know, really Jewish.

My in-laws weren't religious, and I never went to a seder in their home. In fact, they were adamantly anti-religious; his father had equal opportunity contempt for both rabbis and priests. But all the ingredients at the seder the other night-- the matzo, the gefilte fish, the brisket, the horseradish--were regulars on their table.

The horseradish often came from friends who lived on a chicken farm in an even tinier town than theirs; I don't think it had more than a outhouse-sized post office and a one-pump gas station. I always wanted to write about these friends, and now I'm sorry I didn't. Two brothers and their wives shared an old house across the road from a pond where they all fished summer and winter, through the ice. My husband and his sister had been regular visitors there when they were growing up, and then we--with our children--went calling every time we visited his parents.

It was a magical place. The two brothers and their wives were small and the rooms of the house were small and so crowded with wonders-- thousands of books and little sculptures and bowls of candy and platters of bowtie cookies and a baby grand piano and large chairs in which the small people looked like slightly wizened children, burnished with kindness and humor. One of the wives was such a lovely person. She was my mother-in-law's best friend; when she died, years after my divorce, I think my mother-in-law started to die, too. This woman was the smallest of the four. Her high-heeled shoes fit the children perfectly and she didn't mind if they clomped around in them. She always made egg salad before we came, and it was always perfect, the Platonic ideal of egg salad realized.

Outside, one of the brothers had a large garden, untended and unfenced. He planted enough, he said, to share with the rabbits and the deer. There was always a circle of chairs near the garden but under the reach of the trees where we sat in the summers and talked. These were long meandering hours with no urgency, no agenda. The other brother had fought in the Spanish Civil War and had stories, but you had to beg them from him; mostly, he liked to talk about the fish across the road and the funny things that people were doing around the county. He was my father-in-law's best friend (serendipitously, he was married to the woman with the tiny shoes). When my father-in-law died, the grief of it dimmed something forever in this brother.

The four of them made their own horseradish once a year in a big building attached to the back of their house. I think they used this room to inspect and package eggs the rest of the time, but when they ground the horseradish it was as if someone had lobbed tear gas into the room. When we'd pull up their long, weedy driveway during horseradish season, our eyes would start to water before we got out of the car. We'd have to run through this room with our arms across our eyes to get into the house, to reach for the perfect egg salad and the platter of bowtie cookies and the tiny shoes.

Those days now seem so perfect-- like scenes from a old movie or exquisite little paintings or even charms hanging from a bracelet. I don't know why someone older and wiser didn't pull me aside and tell me that these days wouldn't last, that these people wouldn't last, that the angers and disappoinments and anxieties that took up too much of my time should be pushed aside, as much as possible, so that I could partake more fully in the life that bloomed in this particular way for only a while. Maybe they didn't know this themselves. Maybe it seemed too obvious to mention.

That's the way it was; that's the way I thought it would always be.

Am I the only one who looks back in surprise?

2007-03-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

What's on my nightstand...

Well, not really on my nightstand. It's on my dining room table so that every time someone stops by, I can pick it up and shriek, "Look! look!"

I didn't expect to be this excited about the book's release. After all, I'm only the co-author and you have to turn a few pages before you even see my name. You might even have to put on your reading glasses to see it. Maybe my subconscious was being hypervigilant, guarding my ego against the slings and arrows of non-attention. But what the heck, my ego seems to be saying. It's still really exciting.

The book is so pretty! Of course, I saw the cover image months ago and have been observing it daily at Amazon. Then the editor at Random House sent me a copy last week, well in advance of the book's arrival in bookstores April 10. There's something very different about holding it in my hand. It's pleasing in a satiny, tactile way. And that color that the designer used around the border and in the Kabul Beauty School font--fresh and vivid, like the new leaves about to unfurl in the next couple of weeks. I like it very much.

The Kabul Beauty School is more than a book for me, too. When I was asked to help write it, my second or third question was, "Will I have to go to Afghanistan?" I was so pleased that the answer was yes. It didn't occur to me to be nervous until the night before I left, when I actually went to the globe and saw how far away Kabul was-- really, on the other side of the earth. I had to remind myself to breathe deeply for about an hour on the plane. After that, I was fine.

I've always wondered about people who wind up living atypical lives far from home, either people who live by travel and only touch down now and then or who actually sink into another culture entirely. I've wondered how they wound up living in Saumur or Rome or Kabul and I've wound up living in Cleveland-- not a bad choice, I hasten to add, but it's not Saumur or Rome or Kabul. I've wondered if this was a conscious decision that they made at some point in their lives or if they were sort of blown there by the winds of serendipity. In either case, I've wondered if that meant that they were deeply, truly not at all like me. I generally embrace the fallacy that everyone is basically just like me.

So I spent six weeks in Kabul and met all sorts of expats there-- Debbie and many others. I don't really have an answer as to what snaps that thread that ties you to the familiar, but it fascinates me. I'm going back in May for a month to write some articles. Snapping my own thread briefly, then knotting it back to my ordinary life again at the end of June.

Page 123

2007-03-15T05:24:00.000-07:00

Page 123

I confess to reading too many blogs these days. It’s a pleasant, mind-drifting counterbalance to the pile of work that keeps getting bigger. Anyway, here is a meme—which I’ll define as a combination bloggy echo and relay race—a theme that gets passed from blog to blog—in which you go to page 123 of your novel-in-progress, drop down four lines, and then copy the rest of the paragraph. I actually have two novels-in-progress, so this is a chunk of the more recent one. (I picked up the meme from Writing Under a Pseudonym)

*People have to look a little harder these days for the random find. I’m not the only one wandering along the banks of the river after heavy rains, looking to see if the high water has dislodged the sediment of years to reveal an arrowhead, or an adz, or a spear point, or even a t-drill. It’s always thrilling when I find one. I might only catch a glimpse of a jagged edge poking out of the sand, and I’ll stop and stare until I’m sure that I’m not imagining the succession of half-moon chips where the maker pushed away the blunt stone. I used to imagine those marks on every bit of rock when I was a kid. When I walked the paths from my mother’s house to the mountain or the river, I was sure there were thousands of stone points below my feet– the work of centuries buried, gleaming in the dark earth, swimming like ancient stone fish back to the earth’s surface for someone to catch them. When I was a kid, I could hardly walk barefoot, so sure was I that the stone points would break through the thin crust of earth and bite at my feet. I yelped on the garden path as if I were walking on a bed of nails.*

The photo is from the Feather River near Oroville, which is the setting--although fictionally reengineered--of this novel. I have a better photo of it in Picassa, but can't seem to drag it here. Oh, I struggle with Blogger!

2007-03-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

Portland Art Cars

We drove up one rainy street and down another looking for a parking place. Then, out of the fog and mist and late-winter wistfulness, this magnificent vehicle appeared!

"Look," I shouted to my daughter, who was driving.

"It's an art car," she said, as if this were entirely commonplace. Which I guess it is, in Portland.

Now, I'm thinking of gathering an assortment of geegaws to glue onto my Subaru. I had wanted my neighbor Steve to tart up my car with some flames or wings or something-- he does that for a living, although mostly of the business logo variety. But now, my longing for car tattoos seems terribly tame.

I love both public art and folk art, and I love the way they converge in the art car. I think it's a form of public service to lavish this much attention--this much loving, idiosyncratic detail-- on something that everyone gets to enjoy. How rude, how shocking that one of Portland's finest seems to have given this art car a parking ticket (see yellow envelope at bottom left of front window). It should have been a citation for creative valor!

I confess a fondness for over-the-top Christmas displays--front yards that feature wooden nativity scenes and old plastic Santas and and wicker raindeer and lights hanging everywhere (I draw the line at those giant inflated snow-globes that are hooked up to generators and churn away night and day. Was happy to watch, from my office window, as one on the next block gradually deflated and collapsed a few months ago. People should either make or inherit their kitch.) I love outlandish Easter displays, too. Somewhere on the east side of Cleveland, there's a guy who turns his whole front yard into a picture mosaic every year using plastic eggs. I can't believe I've lived here as long as I have and not yet seen it.

Front-yard gardening is also public art-- a gift from one person to everyone who walks, bikes or drives by. I don't have the yard of my dreams yet, but people still stop on my sidewalk and tell me how much they enjoy my garden. "Just wait," I always mutter under my breath. "Wait until next year."

Now I'm imagining an art car parked in my driveway. I probably have about five square feet of clutter in this house, stuff that I can't sell or give away but can't bring myself to dump. Broken masks from Mexico, single earrings, chipped china, old political buttons, gum-machine toys, cyclops glasses...maybe all this can be fashioned into an arty swirl on my car. A modest one, though, because I don't know that I have the patience or the talent to attempt something like the bear-head car.

I could probably replicate the faux birdshit on my bumpers, though.

2007-02-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

Prisoners of the Storm!

Here's the problem with having a blog: sometimes you're just hunkered down inside with nothing to say.

It's not that our excess of weather--Cleveland's snowiest winter since the late 70s, someone said--has completely immobilized me. I saw these fine racks of icicles on someone else's house when I was driving around yesterday-- for some reason, every house on this one block had icicles so thick they reminded me of prison bars. Or of teeth poised to snap off your head if you stick it outside.

And I was out today-- to the farmers market and the library, then out tromping when my dog-walking buddy stopped by. We let the dogs run loose in areas that are usually off limits to them-- in the playground behind the school and in the city park--and the dogs struggled to chase each other through snow that came up to their chests. They looked like big awkward bunnies, leaping from one dent in the snow's crust to another. Back on the street, they sniffed along the snowdrifts for evidence of other dogs and, for once, we could see it: the script of the other dogs' urine, visible in the snow. Like a message board, we said, or like a listserve.

But it's been a hunkering time overall, not a doing time, and I've been reading more than I've been writing. This might be a lingering indulgence from my daughter's visit two weeks ago. We had much serious preliminary conversation before she arrived about what we'd do together. An exhibit at Heights Arts? A musical at Kalliope? A handfull of gallery openings? Finally, we decided that what we'd most like to do is what we hardly ever do: eat take-out from Annie's Sun Luck Garden, lie on the couch, and watch DVDs. So that's what we did Friday night, all day Saturday, Saturday night, and part of Sunday. She introduced me to the wonderful Freaks and Geeks, a TV show that was cancelled after a season.

I have an unconscious and unreasonable code about watching television or even reading for pleasure during the day. I just don't do it, not ever, not even on weekends. I don't know if this is a holdover from being a kid who was frumphed at for reading too much (watching more than a tiny bit of TV wasn't even an option), especially if it was during the day--there were those in my family who teased me by calling me "lily white" because I was lying on the couch reading while they were outside water skiing or learning to golf. Or maybe it's just because I work at home and while I'm at home, I always think I should be working-- or at least be at my desk, doing something that looks like working. If I start watching a DVD or reading a book in the middle of the day, who knows what kind of calamity might be unleashed? The work will dry up, the checks will stop coming, and I'll have to auction off all my lustreware from occupied Japan.

But even after Jamie left, I had to keep watching Freaks and Geeks; I had to see how that one brilliant season played itself out. So I watched the remaining shows at odd times during the next week, and this sort of seemed to establish a gap of pleasure, right in the middle of the day.

It hasn't ruined me yet.

2007-01-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

Two Days with Ohio's Dairy Graziers

I slipped into the dark auditorium a few minutes late, surprised that there weren't many aisle seats open. So I groped my way along the back wall, ventured down the left side and finally slipped into an empty seat. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that the rows tiering down in front of me were filled with broad shoulders in gray shirts with black suspenders. Among the gray, there were many bobbing white dots-- the bonnets of the Amish women who were there along with their husbands. For some reason, I had assumed that the two-day North Central Ohio Dairy Grazing Conference down in Wooster would be populated by aging hippies--about sixty of them. Instead, there were maybe six-hundred people there, and three-quarters were Amish.

See what the coat racks were like?

It was a really extraordinary conference-- I think that even the people who go to these things regularly would agree. Even though it was held on the grounds of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, there weren't any experts from government or academia addressing the crowd. Instead, farmers spoke to each other. These were farmers who have bucked dairy orthodoxy--locking hundreds of cows in barns and loading them up with corn--and now let their animals find their own food by roaming grasslands. They were addressing other farmers who are thinking of or just getting started doing this, often in the face of family or community doubt.

They talked about a lot of things that went way over my head--counting mounts? udder singeing? Just what kind of cow is it that "knows what she's doing"-- and what is it that cows are supposed to know? How do they manage to forget it?

But a lot of what they were talking about was quite clear. They talked about the pleasure of seeing cows live like cows, not machines. They talked about how much healthier their animals have been since they made the switch to grass farming-- one guy said his vet bills fell from $5000 to $300 one year. Several talked about how much easier grass farming is once they figure out how to do it right, how they now have more time to spend with their families and actually enjoy more of their rural life. One Mennonite farmer explained some of this to me later, during a break, "Someone's always got to haul manure on a farm," he said. "With a confinement operation, the farmer has to do it all. But when you graze your cows, they haul their own manure."

And as the cows distribute the manure throughout the fields, it fertilizes the grass instead of becoming a huge toxic heap that requires specialized disposal. It makes so much sense!

I met so many interesting people at this conference and am itching to write about them:

--a French veterinarian who travels around the country selling bull semen and embryos from Normandy cattle--they make the milk that produces the best Brie and Camembert--to US farmers wanting to enrich their herds;
--an Amish elder who believes organic is a spiritual path and urges the farmers in his community to take it;
--a woman who has a small herd of Nubian goats and plans to start making a kosher artisan goat cheese in the next 18 months;
--a couple who bought a dilapidated farm near Findlay, Ohio, and are trying to start both a grass-based dairy and a farmers market there.

A funny observation: one of the panel discussions featured two Amish farmers and two non-Amish (or in the Amish parlance, English) farmers. So guess which of the two had the power-point presentations loaded on laptops and laser pointers? Yes, the two Amish guys.

2007-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

Other Lives

This woman was applying glass beads to a linen runner that will ultimately grace a table unlike any she's ever dined at herself. She said, "Thank you" after I photographed her. So did the other women squatting around the stretched fabric, also applying beads; so did the women operating battered sewing machines against the far wall, so did the stern men who were sorting through fabric swatches on a table. This was one of the pleasures of being in Kabul last spring: everytime I took someone's picture, they thanked me. They seemed to feel I was doing them an honor.

Years ago, I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and was haunted by ideas that sprang from this passage, "We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come...We live everything as if comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold."

Well, haunted may not be the right word. If anything, this passage made my own tendency to fret about whether I've chosen the right life a little more tolerable-- at least, this fretting seems to be part of the human condition. So maybe I kicked myself a little less when I caught myself thinking things like, "I could have been an archeologist! I could have returned to Austria and taken up with my junior-summer-abroad boyfriend! I could have been an expert on alpine geology!" I guess we all struggle with the fact that--sigh--we only have one life to live. Only one that we know about, anyway.

But being a freelance writer-- I suppose any sort of writer who doesn't have a regular beat--exacerbates this tendency all over again. I spend so much time getting to know people who do amazing things and often feel this terrible dismay that they are doing while I am writing about it. I often wonder what it would be like if I were the person doing the doing, not just doing the writing.

That woman in the photo above? She was working in a factory that an Afghan-American woman opened in Kabul a few years ago. The factory employs dozens of people and sources its supplies from other companies in Afghanistan; it is a small and heroic--and important-- effort to build up the economy and give people hope that they can have jobs, not just elected leaders. I wrote about it here. What the article doesn't say is that the woman who started the factory went back to Afghanistan many times when the Taliban were in power and started schools for girls that operated in private homes. When I interviewed her, she was ecstatic because several of her girls were acing their entrance exams at the university.

One of the things that was so fascinating about Kabul was that I met a number of women who were doing extraordinary things-- even outside their own version of ordinary. Made me think more about that whole one-life-to-live thing. We might not be able to live different lives concurrently, but consecutively? Why not?

____

One of these days, I'll figure out how to make the switch to that other, more-superior form of Blogger. If anyone has any words of encouragement-- please!

2007-01-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

Two-Thousand Miles in Two Days

Two seventeen-hour drives! They were separated by three days of lounging around and overeating, but still.

Here are a few thoughts about driving from Cleveland to Pensacola, Florida for the holidays. I'm too weary from wrestling with Blogger to write much else.

If I ruled the world, I'd get rid of most of the billboards on this trip (and everywhere else), although I'd probably keep the one advertising the Corvette Museum and the one for the Booby Boutique--somewhere in Alabama, I think. One of these days, I'm going to march right into the Booby Boutique and see what all the fuss is about.

And I'd do something about the exit signs that advertise places to eat. Much as I try to avoid chain-food restaurants, I acquiesced four times to Cracker Barrel, which is the least of the worst--although just barely, as you have to walk through that gagging miasma of scented stuff to get to your table. I gave in because it's too hard to drive all over the sides of the highway looking for a good local restaurant-- you can drive forever and fail to find anything, or you might even find something worse than a Burger King (Molly's Diner, somewhere in New York). But where are the local-food advocates at Exit 94? Why don't they put up some signs alerting travelers to places run by local folks? Why isn't there something like a AAA guide to good local food along America's highways?

We had a lovely three days visiting my husband's family in Pensacola. As all those southerners swarmed around his step-mother's house to swap stories, his accent became so pronounced that I could hardly understand him by the third day.

You know how you have assumptions and stereotypes about people in other parts of the country? I have them about Ohioans, because I grew up in California; I certainly have them about southerners-- everyone does, and they seem to revel in them themselves. And I always assume they have assumptions about me. I sometimes dangle my life in front of what I imagine to be my southern in-laws' perspective and wince at its frivolity, because many of them are, as they themselves say, country people-- not from a cushy suburb up north, which even locals call "The People's Republic of Cleveland Heights."

But on day two of our visit, we walked into JD's step-mother's house to find that it was pretty quiet. We asked about the whereabouts of Uncle Jimmy, a strapping beef farmer from a tiny town in Georgia.

He was off getting a pedicure and a massage. So much for my assumptions.

2006-12-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

Four Hundred Tubas

My husband pointed his camera at a plaster mermaid on the proscenium over stage right, poised above thirty tons of red velvet curtain and gold tassels. "You want me to take a picture?" he asked. "For your blog?"

"I'm not going to write about this for my blog," I said, with a bit more arch than necessary. "I'm going to write about how the FBI is turning cell phones into remote listening devices."

Then, a huge sepia-tinted Wurlitzer rose from the floor in front of the stage and a man, already seated there, began to play Christmas carols. All the people sitting in the theater rose to applaud-- the couples in matching sweat suits, the families in felt reindeer horns and those in Santa hats, the young parents with babies and grandparents and great-grandparents in tow, the students whose friends were cradling their tubas on the crowded stage, the people in holiday glitter and the glitterless, who might have come in just to get out of the cold. It was the 27th free Tuba Christmas in Akron, Ohio, at the amazing Akron Civic Theater.

I'm sorry for all of you who missed it. Sorry, especially, for those of you who will always miss it, who live in fabulous coastal cities and have to pay a fortune for a night out. A night out that will never be like one in Akron, after all. Soon, the mighty Wurlitzer sank into the floor again. Four hundred musicians lifted their tubas--some decorated with silver garlands, some with holly, some with twinkle lights hooked up to battery packs--and the conductor explained that they would play each song all the way through, then again for the audience to sing along. They began with "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful," which sounded at first like the murmuring of melodious bullfrogs. The people sitting in back of us pulled bells out of their pockets and shook them at the word "joyful." It was hard to match my singing voice to the tuba register, but I reached into the depths of my chest and managed.

A few nights before, my husband and I had watched "It's A Wonderful Life" on television. I was passing through the living room and he told me it was coming on, so I sat down--thinking to stay just a second--and said, "I don't think I can watch this yet again." But I did, of course. And became immediately weepy, even before the story started. I guess this movie is one of those cultural artifacts that crank up the rusty parts of my emotional machinery, just as Christmas itself does. Because they're wired to the memories about the people and configurations of my past, to the possibilities and certainties I've left behind? It seems too reductive to say even that, vague as it is. The movie was intended to be a happy tearjerker, with its themes of loyalty and hard work and kindness and self-sacrifice. It was also a paean to ordinary, flawed people doing their best in small places. It wins my tears for that alone.

I got a little weepy at Tuba Christmas, too, for most of the same reasons-- after all, it was Bedford Falls all over again. And maybe for one reason more. I've wanted to drive down to Akron for this annual event for the last fifteen years, and it turned out that four hundred tubas playing together was even more wonderful than I'd imagined.

2006-12-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

Five Things No One Knows About Me

I took this photo at the wonderful Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota last summer. Selected it today because it reflects my skittishness with the topic. I started this blog to write about things that I want to write about, in some bigger format. I don't actually like to write about myself.

But I was reading Wendy Hoke's Creative Ink blog to catch up on what the priest is saying at her weekly RCIA classes (always very interesting) and found that she had tagged me for a meme on this topic. I haven't quite figured out what all this blog language means or what to do with it, but here goes:

1. I am suffering today from a mirth injury. Instead of doing whatever I usually do after dinner, I sat down in the living room and watched Jon Stewart and then Steven Colbert a few nights ago. They're always funny, but they were either exceptionally funny that night or I was really primed to laugh. I laughed so much that my throat is still sore. I suspect my mirth muscles need a more regular workout.

2. About fifteen years ago, I was going to a movie with some friends and there was one of those huge cardboard cutouts of Christian Slater inside the theater lobby-- and he looked just like me! Really, it was like standing in front of a fun-house mirror, only one that changes your gender and age instead of giving you a huge butt. My friends agreed that Christian Slater and I looked as if we had been separated at birth. I still feel a sort of odd kinship with him. He probably does, too.

3. Even though I like the kind of long hot showers that elicit shock from my family in droughty California, I am fine going for days without bath or shower. I bathe quite regularly here in Cleveland--although my son asks if he sees me early in the day, since he's disturbed that I sometimes go without--but when I was in Kabul, it was often too much trouble to take a shower. There either wasn't enough hot water, or, if there was, the bathroom was too smokey from the woodstove. Or maybe I just didn't feel like walking all the way over to the building with the shower. It seemed like too much trouble to bathe in Afghanistan. I often feel that way about camping, too.

4. I seem to have an unconcious belief in reincarnation. When I drive down my street in the summer and see the women and their strollers congregate at the corner, on their way to the park, I catch myself thinking, "Next time I'm a young mother..." When I see the kids walking home from high school, I catch myself thinking, "When I'm fifteen again..." And sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror--disparagingly--I'll catch myself thinking, "Okay, I'm going to stop being middle aged"-- much as I often think, "Okay, I'm never going to eat ice cream again." As if getting older were a poorly thought-out decision I had made or the result of a decision I had failed to make-- something that I could now plot out on a goal sheet and change. [I guess this last thing doesn't reflect a belief in reincarnation--more a belief in some advanced power to manipulate time which I've failed to employ]

5. One of the things other freelancer writers often say is that they love their job because they don't have to get dressed up. But this is one of the things I hate about freelancing-- no impetus to wear anything other than pajamas. I worked in an office ten years ago, and I loved dressing up for it. Loved the shoes with the little heels and the suits and even the pantyhose. I often came into work with wet hair--and I never managed the art of makeup-- but I did have cool clothes. Shortly after I left that job, I spent one morning interviewing a congressman by phone, in my nightgown. I enjoyed the mismatch between the way I looked and the image he probably had of me, but still--I think wistfully of my downtown clothes.

2006-12-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

The Last of My Little Jonathons

One of the farmers at our farmers market had the most gorgeous Jonathons this year--small burgandy-skinned apples, so hard you could probably dump a pile of them on a pool table and shoot them into the pockets without doing much damage. I like my apples firm! In addition to the outer beauty, many had gorgeous red marbling inside-- something to admire as I enjoyed each tart-sweet bite. The ones in this picture are sad remnants of this year's crop-- shriveled skin, not much marbling, but they made a good breakfast. And I'm looking forward to next year's crop.

Soon, our farmers market will move indoors. Just in time, too-- the temperature has dropped into the twenties and the wind is fierce. Last week, I went to the farmers market--it's the one thing I do regularly each week, more faithfully than church, so strongly do I value this community built around respect for food and the land--and it was brutally cold. It was hard to remove my gloves and hand over my money, and hard for the farmers to make change. I had the feeling that our hands would freeze and shatter, in an instant. Despite the cold, the farmers had still set up their amazing displays of bounty-- the cauliflowers in green, orange and purple, the bristling mounds of radishes, the crinkled piles of kale, the buckets of apples (but no little Jonathons), the mushrooms, honey, organic lamb, grass-fed beef, wonderful eggs, cheese, and so much more. There are the Amish families with their bags of rolled oats and flaxseed and wheat berries; they have pies, too, which I'm programmed not to buy-- what pies could compare to my mother's? I'm more attracted to all the hearty winter vegetables, anyway--the sweet potatoes and squashes and parsnips--that fill the house with their rich, caramel fragrance. I'm sure there is a necessary symbollism regarding the root crops, something about burrowing and feeding upon the richness below the surface, something about the things winter forces us to do. At least, in Ohio.

I received an email from the people at Support Your Local Farmer, LLC. They had read an old entry here about a bumper sticker I saw at the Lake Tahoe farmers market: Support Your Local Farmer Or Watch the Houses Grow. Turns out that they are the source of this slogan, and you can buy the sticker--as well as pro-farmer t-shirts--there.

I worry sometimes about the independent grocery store at the end of my block. I don't buy nearly as much stuff there anymore, and I appreciate the Zagara family's substantial investment in Cleveland Heights. Does anyone have any idea how the farmers market movement and independent grocers can somehow help each other?

2006-11-23T06:33:00.000-08:00

Art in the Middle of Nowhere

There is much of eerie interest in Nevada's high desert country.

As I was shooting along I-80 a few years ago, my head kept swivelingg to look at the roadside oddities. At the steam belching from the hot springs near Nightingale and the signs warning people not to stray into the scalding landscape. At the prisons and the signs warning people not to pick up hitchhikers. At the University of Reno Fire Science Academy, which was torching a building on the side of the road. Finally, I pulled over to inspect a remarkable folk-art edifice near Imlay. Remarkable, in part, because it looks as if the contents of a landfill popped to the surface and then fell into a pattern that is part sculpture garden, part backyard fort, part Death Valley Theme Park. There was no one there; even distant buildings seemed deserted. I was tempted to swipe something, but there was a sign declaring it a State of Nevada Historic Site and another sign pleading that visitors refrain from vandalism. All I took was pictures.

Thunder Mountain Monument was constructed by Chief Rolling Thunder --originally, Frank Van Zant, a Â¼ Creek Indian from Oklahoma, former deputy sheriff in Yuba City, California, and a vet who returned from the World War II with a fractured psyche-- and the hippies who gathered around him in the 1960s and 70s. Together, they created five acres of phantasmagorical structures made from cement, chunks of stone, bottles, old typewriters, cars and their parts, driftwood, road signs and over 200 sculptures. The central structure is a three-story monument that started out as a one-room trailer which Van Zant covered with cement and stones, then added corridors and stairways leading to upstairs bedrooms. The outside of the building --as well as many of the other structures that twist across the property--is covered with friezes, sculptures, bas-relief tableaux and written messages about America's mistreatment of the Indians. At the top of the monument are sinuous loops of cement, making it look as if the structure is crowned with bleached bones.

Chief Rolling Thunder committed suicide in 1989 and left the site to his estranged son, who tried to give it to the state. However, the amount of restoration needed was so vast that the state declined to do anything more than slap a historic sticker on the place....

~~~~

When I first started this blog, I envisioned it as a place where I could talk about the things I wanted to write about, both in my fiction and in my articles. I seem to have strayed from that, so I thought I'd pull up this old query (for you non-freelancers, a query is a proposal for an article that you send to editors) about Thunder Mountain Monument, which I've been dying to write about ever since I passed it on a road trip to California.

Why is this place so appealing to me? It's so forlorn, so abandoned, so mysterious, so redolent of a fevered artistic activity and vision now gone--the desert is steadily whittling it away. Lowbrow that I am, I adore this kind of art. I talked to one art historian who told me there have probably been hundreds of places like this over the centuries, where crank art flourishes and then disappears.

I also like this place because I want my own back yard to look kind of like this (although the inside of that wrecked car was really disgusting). Look at the Thunder Mountain website for more pictures; mine weren't adequate.

And I'm drawn to the human stories floating around the site. My Reno cousins heard wild stories about Van Zant and his guests over the years; I'd love to track them down. And then there is the story of his son, who has this odd legacy from his father but mixed feelings about growing up in the middle of his obsession.

I must have sent this query out to a dozen editors. No takers. I always assume that if something interests me, it's got to interest someone else, too. So I guess I'm just throwing the story out into the cosmos with this post. I don't want it to die in a Word file.

Any takers?

2006-11-11T08:26:00.000-08:00

The Perfectionist's Daughter

Eviscerated scallions! What to do with them?

Up until my mother moved into her apartment, she would have known precisely what to do with them. They would have gone into the big white porcelain jar she kept under her sink, along with the coffee grounds, apple cores and other shreds of vegetation. Also along with the egg shells, which had been carefully stripped of their inner membrane and washed. When the jar was full, she would have walked out on their deck and dumped the contents into the number one compost bin ten feet below, where they would mix with the garden waste and begin their transformation--via the next two bins--into compost. Before the penultimate house in Santa Rosa, at the house back in Oroville, the trip to the compost bins was farther--down a steep path through bleached weeds and live oaks--but it was also firmly established routine. This may be the first time my mother has not had a compost pile, at least in her adult life.

It is not an overstatement to say that my mother believes there is a correct way to treat everything-- this is just one of the ways in which she is a perfectionist. There are well-defined ways in which things are cleaned, saved, reused, stored, or recycled. Amost nothing is discarded. One time, a guest in her house made himself a cup of tea. After wringing the last drops from the bag, he opened the door under the sink and started to throw his tea bag in the garbage. "No!" my mother said from her seat across the room, then hoisted herself up with her cane and hobbled across the room. "We do it like this." She took out scissors, snipped the staple holding the string off the tea bag, put the tea bag itself in the compost jar, put the string and staples in the garbage, and put the little paper tag at the top into the paper recycling. He was stunned that there was ritual applied to such a humble object. But I knew she was holding herself back from chiding him that he had missed the first step of the ritual entirely. She always gets two cups out of each tea bag. If she had gotten to the sink in time, she would have added his to the other wizened tea bags waiting for their second-chance brew, behind the stove.

But I have no compost pile here in Cleveland Heights. They attract skunks, which in turn attract my big white dog. My neighbor has a compost pile not far from my fence. When I go outside at night, I can sometimes see the skunks feasting there-- they look up at me and their eyes shine, even through the mesh and the vines.

Given my strict upbringing regarding compost, I feel terribly conflicted every time I have a handful of scallion tops or brocolli bottoms. Terrible when I've let a whole head of romaine turn to slime! I can either put it down the garbage disposal or throw it into the trash-- two terrible, wasteful solutions. Really, this stuff can sit in the sink for hours while I avoid making a decision.

But, I was just going through a pile of article ideas and came upon a clipping about vericomposting-- letting worms eat the kitchen waste and turn it into fabulous fertilizer. A company in Ohio sells kits that include a nice dark ventilated box, bedding, other stuff that makes worms happy, and 2,000 worms. I'm ordering one! I think the temperature of my basement is just right (between 55-77 degrees) for worm bliss. Then all I'll have to do is trot downstairs with my scallions and feed them to the worms. My garden is a wreck right now-- it's been hideously neglected for months--but I'll be ready to pamper it in the spring with worm nectar.

I'm quite sure I told my husband last year that all I wanted for Christmas was a worm kit. He didn't believe me.

2006-11-01T06:19:00.000-08:00

Charlie Is Alive

My mother had a list of things that she wanted me to do--pull the tomato plants out of her garden, refill her salt shaker, move the decaffeinated green tea to the front of the cupboard where she can reach it. The one thing I really didn't want to do was to dispose of Charlie's remains and clean out his sepulchral vase. But when I walked into my mother's apartment, I saw a flutter of fins.

"He's alive!" I told her. His vase--with a plant in the top and roots in the water that he nibbles at and hides in--was slicked over with green and clotted with floating poop. My sister had been gone for three weeks, so it hadn't been cleaned in at least that long. My mother couldn't see Charlie for all the scum and floaters, so she had stopped feeding him-- she figured it didn't make sense to feed a dead fish. He had survived a week or so of light rations and, after I took care of matters, was feeling pretty swimmy with his clean vase and pollen-sized pellets of food. He's always been a shy fish, but he was suddenly showy.

The sad thing was that my 92-year 0ld mother could still hardly see him.

I visit her every three or so months in California. At each of those three-month increments, I find that more and more has been taken from her--meaning, she gets smaller, she hears less, she struggles to see. I should point out that there have been gains, too, and that some things haven't changed. She has lots of lovely new friends at the apartment building she moved to after my father's death; I tell her it's like the college dorm or sorority life she never had. She even has two new friends who climbed part of Mt. Everest when they were in their sixties. And she still loves clothes. Even though she can't read much else, she manages to peruse the catalogs and order clothes over the phone. I'm sure she enjoys chatting with the people at the call center. I'm sure they have to set aside their time-studied efficiencies and allow themselves a conversation.

But my mother can't read books anymore. This is a huge loss for someone whose life was always partly defined by what she was reading. I have a large family--four siblings, plus their spouses and their eleven grown children and their spouses--and there is a constant book swap at work. My mother always used to have a pile by her bed-- this one from Betty, this one from Dan and Sue, this one from Cindy, and so on. Whenever it was her birthday, she'd get a pile of books. It was the one thing we always knew she wanted.

But her eyes have failed her. Her wrists, too: even when she finds a book that she likes in big print (and she has issues with the quality of the books that go into large print!), the book is usually too heavy for her to hold. She still talks about books and touches them lovingly in stores. When I took her through Costco in a wheelchair the other day, she found a book that someone in the family had been talking about and held it in her lap for a while. Then she sighed and lifted it with two trembling hands. "It's too heavy," she said.

One of the last books she read was High Albania, a wonderful book about a turn-of-the-last-century woman who was ordered to travel for her health and wound up spending years in Albania, visiting remote mountain clans on horseback. My mother loved the book so much that she talked it up to her friends at lunch. One elderly couple wound up borrowing the book. They returned it while I was visiting. As the man handed it to me, he widened his eyes and said, "She's pretty smart, isn't she?"

"Quite smart," I said, and refrained from kicking his walker. Maybe the comment stung because I remembered boys saying something like this to me, about me, when I was a teenager. They seemed startled that a girl could be smart, just as this man was startled that my mother could be smart-- at least, in this bookish way.

Now she can't be smart and engaged in that way anymore. It breaks my heart.

2006-10-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

October Snow

Not just snow, but all sorts of extreme precipitation-- snow and then hail and then pounding rain and then snow again and then hail again. I was making my way to my car with an armload of drycleaning when the latter hail hit. It was like thousands of people shooting at me with little white BBs.

Snow in October makes me anxious (as it does the guys holding up my bird bath-- look at them scowl). The last time it snowed significantly in October was about eight years ago. It was a disaster.

It started much more decorously than today's snow. My husband and I were having lunch in a restaurant, bending into our hamburgers or whatever. And someone said, "Look!" Outside, the most astounding snow was falling-- huge things that couldn't really be called flakes. More like a battalion of flying saucers. Or large, slow-moving magnolia blossoms from a cosmic tree. Or billions of little white umbrellas turned upside down. The snow looked like all sorts of things other than snow, and it was already weird enough to get snow in October. Even in Cleveland.

The magnolia-blossom snow turned into heavier, faster snow and it kept falling, falling, falling for hours. And since it was only October and all the leaves were still on the trees, the snow stuck to the branches-- until they all started snapping and crashing to the ground. We lost a bridal veil shrub and a couple of lilacs; the weight of the snow just ripped them apart. But whole trees split and fell elsewhere, yanking down power lines all over town. We didn't have it so badly at my house, where the power was off for about a day. We made a big fire in the fireplace and put mattresses on the floor and read by candlelight-- it reminded us of a fun camping trip a few years earlier. The people whose power was off for four or five days didn't have as much fun.

So when it snows early like this, I go outside with an old hockey stick and bat the snow off the Japanese maple by the front door. And I get a little more nervous about the weather, the world, even the war-- you know how all those concerns can play off each other.

2006-10-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

Turning a Corner

That's what we were doing, turning a corner, trying to avoid yet another Kabul traffic jam, when we came upon a street filled with all these lovely girls in white scarves. "What are they doing?" I asked Debbie.

"Going to school," she said, as if this were an ordinary thing.

But of course, it's still not ordinary in Afghanistan. Girls are allowed to go to school again, but only some of them, only in some areas of the country. I just read a report saying that 1.2 million primary-school-age girls are not going to school. And I've read plenty of reports of girls schools out in rural areas being bombed, and of principals of girls schools being executed.

I had to deepen my statistical knowledge of women in Afghanistan recently because a local private girls school asked me to speak at at their symposium on education. They wanted me to talk about the Kabul Beauty School and about what I learned when I stayed there to help Debbie Rodriguez work on her book. I had plenty of stories about the women who have come through the school--heartwrenching stories of their lives in wartime, under the Taliban, as refugees, and now-- in these still difficult days. But I didn't know a lot of the numbers, not by heart, so I spent a day going through articles and reports that I get in a daily email.

It's such a tough country for women.

Between 60-80 percent of marriages are forced on the women, often to settle feuds or repay debts.

About 57% of the girls are married before the age of 16, even though 16 is the legal age.

Hundreds of women set themselves on fire every year in despair over terrible marriages. Many are sent to prison because they try to escape their husbands some other way.

85% of Afghan women are illiterate. The number of girls going to school is half that of boys.

And then there was this article that said, "By the end of the year at least 30 percent of seats on all public buses in Afghanistan will be reserved for women under a United Nations-backed programme launched in a country where drivers now speed past stops if only women are waiting while men refuse to give up seats for women..."

They had to legislate women's right to a seat on the bus. It's so awful that it's almost funny, but of course, it's not funny.

I've come to know several Afghan-American women-- mostly online, a few in person--who are back in Afghanistan working on various programs to try to salvage their country. They're tough, tenacious, amazing women. I guess they have to be.

2006-10-08T12:14:00.000-07:00

White Farms

You have to work a little to see the photograph I intended here. First, imagine long rope lines hung with sheets and clothes in two palettes--fluttery pastels of pink, green and blue bracketed by somber navies, browns and blacks. Imagine next an amazing bounty of birdhouses on tall poles, maybe ten of them, white like the house and the other farm buildings, big as breadboxes for giants, each with about twenty neat round openings for the birds. Finally, imagine a much more lavish garden planted near the road-- imagine it topped with brilliant red cockscombs, nearly iridescent in the bright October light.

We passed the perfect picture dozens of times on our weekend into unglaciated Ohio, as we drove along the narrow county roads through Ohio''s Amish country. There was always a reason I couldn't photograph the perfect farm. I didn't want to pull my camera out because there were people there, Amish people, in their buggies or behind their plows or on their bicycles. I didn't want them to think I was trying to photograph them--you know, as if they're kittens, so cute in their straw hats and white bonnets that people like me can't resist leaning out their car windows and cooing; as if they're so quaint with their big-shouldered draft horses and aversion to zippers that they're not even going to know what a camera is. Anyone who thinks the Amish are childishly quaint should stop at the Amish Flea Market in Walnut Creek, Ohio. This is a county fair-sized spread of buildings containing miles of the worst kitch I've ever seen. I think those Amish merchants must be keeping half of China working.

But away from the monster flea market and some of the other monster Amish-themed tourist attractions in Holmes County--according to a brochure, the largest continuous Amish community in the country--there are still the Amish farmlands. And what farms they are! There's almost nothing I love more than a beautiful, well-tended farm, and I don't think we passed one that didn't send me into rapture. There is something almost sacred about applying that much care to the ordinary--each gleaming white fence as if it had just been scrubbed, each dry leaf and spent blossom patiently plucked away.

We hadn't really intended this driving-around-aimlessly kind of weekend. Years ago, I wrote an article about one-day trips from Cleveland to places that offer some sort of educational experience. One of the places I wrote about was The White Oak Inn near Mount Vernon, a B&B where they had special weekends with naturalists who taught you to hunt wild mushrooms and archeologists who let guests help out with a dig on the White Oak grounds. I never got to go there myself, but always wanted to. So we finally went for my husband's birthday. It is much lovelier than its online pictures suggest and is perched just above one of the valleys now filled with corn, not the ancient waters that created it. This gives the impression of a golden river passing by, just beyond the trees. The archeological dig is finished, all covered up, but Ian the innkeeper told me that the researchers think the grounds were the site of an ancient flint knapping workshop. Farmers below still turn up the occasional blade when they plow. So, yeah, I spent a few hours pacing through the mud at the edge of the cornfield looking--aside from anything else, I have this magical thinking that my novel will sell if I find an arrowhead, as my main character does. And I'm always looking for that stuff anyway. I did find three pieces of flint, but none of them appear to be worked. And they're not the gorgeous rainbow flint from Flint Ridge, even though Ian's neighbors have found some.

I thought we'd spend most of our weekend riding bikes. Since my knee is still cranky, we rode around on tiny back roads and looked at farms instead. Every time we passed a buggy, the driver waved. We waved back. My husband loved this. I felt as if his beard was getting longer with every mile.

At one point, we stopped at an Amish general store to find something for lunch. There wasn't much food, although JD did find a bag of excessively sweet, generic M&Ms. Then we wandered around looking at the rest of the merchandise. There was a whole room devoted to fabrics, straw hats, bonnets and sturdy shoes. There were shelves of tools and cooking supplies and lots of what looked like spiritual novels featuring pretty Amish girls. Nothing we wanted. As I waited for JD to pay for the faux M's, I noticed a display selling cigarette lighters in the shape of small handguns.

Coming so soon after the recent shootings in that Amish schoolhouse, it gave me a chill.

2006-10-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

The Beauty of Limited Vision

Most of my garden looks wretched these days. The hydrangea blossoms have turned beige--who wants that? Who even wants to say it? The monarda are covered with powdery mildew and the Alma Ploshke (or whatever) asters are disappointing for the twelfth year in a row. I never manage to cut them back severely enough earlier in the season at the required two times. Now, they're too tall and flop to the ground--as they always do. There are some small consolations. I will no longer disparage dahlias--I mean my own, not the astounding beauties at the farmers market. I grumbled about mine all year and pulled a few up, because they didn't seem to be doing anything but making big leaves. Now I see that one which escaped my fury by growing sideways behind a rose bush is emerging with some lovely big shiraz-colored blooms.

But for the most part, if I want to enjoy my garden, I have to look at the small spots where all is well. Here by the path to the front door, the false dragonhead have opened and intermingled with what I thought was an annual (now I'm hoping it's not) called Mona Lavender Plectranthus. As its tag claims, it has beautiful purple stems and leaf undersides--almost black in some lights--with deep lavender flowers. And it just looks great with the false dragonhead (how I love that name!) and has for over a week.

The news from outside my little world is so bad this week-- from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from the schools where wackos have been kiling kids. From the prisons on any ordinary day. The Plain Dealer ran an article this morning that made me weep about the tiny and intimate details that are recorded in logs of death row prisoners' final days. I suppose it's fine and natural and necessary to find consolation the small lovely details of my life--and on the whole, it's a good life--but I sometimes feel a little guilty taking pleasure anywhere when there are so many awful things going on.

Don't tell me that this comes from a Catholic upbringing! Guilt is catholic, not Catholic.

2006-09-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

Pondering Dog Anxiety

People in my neighborhood are already beginning their Halloween displays. On our morning walk, we saw a window covered in faux spiderwebs, a cluster of small pumpkins, and --most impressive of all--a stoutly stuffed scarecrow with a stake where the head should be. Lulu felt that this thing was not to be trusted. She paced back and forth at the end of her leash, sniffing the air. She cringed. Her tail--an extravagant plumed affair--slumped between her hind legs. She demanded a quick skulk-away.

We go through this every year during the holiday spectacle season. She cares not for the scarecrows or the ghosts that people dangle from trees and front porches; she shudders at those huge, bobbling, inflated snowmen of recent vintage; she cringes again in spring when the holiday exhibitionists drag their hot-air machines back outside and inflate giant Easter bunnies.

She is also so fearful during thunderstorms and in the weeks around Fourth of July that I'm thinking of getting her some doggie valium. I know these fears are common among dogs, but I don't really understand why SHE has them. I've had her since she was a puppy, and I know she wasn't fearful in her first couple of years. She's led an exceptionally pampered life--no children in the neighborhood have tormented her for sport, she hasn't been menaced by guns, she's had no near misses with cars. She never even experienced the rolled-newspaper discipline that was common for the dogs of my youth. I did once smack her on the nose when she drew blood with those puppy teeth, but her mother would have done the same.

Since these fears haven't been caused by experience, I wonder if they're part of her genetic package-- if the instinct to fear certain things is hardwired. Further, I wonder if she's programmed to fear them at a certain time in her life. I've wondered this kind of thing before, when I was writing an article for New Scientist about twin studies. These studies revealed that all sorts of things are present in our genes-- not only a propensity for colon cancer or obesity, but for religiosity and political conservatism. I asked one of the scientists if our genes are programmed to turn on at various times in our lives. Maybe in your twenties, your dissolute grandfather's genes lead you to max out your credit cards; in your thirties, your mother's frugal genes turn on and you finally manage to stick to a budget; then in your forties, you have enough leisure time (the influence of environment!) to take clarinet lessons (the genetic impulse passed on by your father's mother).

I'm sure that this scenario is simple-minded enough to make anyone who really knows much about science flinch, but still-- I like the idea of all these genetic possibilities coming into play at various times in my life, nudged by whatever's going on in my real world. Just as long as I don't start quivering under the dining room table during thunderstorms.

2006-09-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

Sunset over the apricots

Or maybe they were young almond trees, or plums. I'm just guessing. My father would have known. The white wrappings at the bottom of the trees--which look like grave markings in this picture, or it could be my mood--are something that the growers do to prevent disease, I think.

I took this picture just as I was leaving my hometown--Oroville, CA--on a trip to gather information for an article about olive oil.

I love going back to Oroville, but it's always weird. I haven't lived there in decades, and it's amazing how dramatically small towns can change. Throw up a WalMart and a Home Depot, and acres of quotidian landmarks--tacky motels from the 50s, the restaurant where you used to eat fried chicken, the place where your mother took the dry cleaning, the nursery where you could hardly walk down the graveled path because so many tiny frogs were leaping from the plants, the other places you don't quite recall but know something else was there--are gone. As I drove around, I found myself trying to fit the map of before onto the map of now. In some areas, it was really quite impossible.

Those are the Buttes looming in the background of the picture, scruffy little peaks that rise sharply out of the Sacramento Valley. I always watched them dreamily as we drove away from Oroville when I was a kid. There still don't seem to be any major roads in or out of town, at least not for more than a couple of hundred feet; I like this, although maybe I wouldn't if I still lived there. My father (and now my sister, carrying his navigational genes intact) always chose the tiniest roads, anyway--barely paved roads that wound through the rice fields, past the avenues of elder olives, past the new orchards of almonds and plum and apricot. He always knew what they were, although they all looked the same to me. I'd look over the lushness at the Buttes, so enticingly harsh and uncultivated, and vow that I'd climb up there someday. I told my sister that and she told me that everyone says they're full of rattlesnakes. But it seemed that all of Oroville was full of rattlesnakes when I was a kid. Everyone had a rattlesnake encounter story.

I'm suffering a fictional malaise. The main character in my novel has a bad knee, and I seem to have caught it from her. I went to see a doctor the other day and he said inflamed hamstring, funky tendon (not quite his words), and possibly torn cartilage. But I'm quite sure it's a metaphysical ailment. My character is accusing me of creative abuse-- I've brought her to life but left her unfinished. She's put this twinge in my knee to remind me to finish the damn book already.

I'm trying.

2006-09-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

Geraniums and Guns

It was my one day out of Kabul during my first trip there; my hosts wanted me to see a little of the countryside. So we piled a bunch of people in a van and headed out. The traffic and dust and commercial activity dwindled little by little-- after twenty minutes or so, there were just a few melon stands on the side of the road and a gas station (erroneously labeled, in English, Pimp Station). There was some dispute at the front of the van about which road to take, then we finally turned up one that was crowded, at the end, with small signs announcing various NGO-type programs at work in the area.

At the top of the mountain, we turned off the main road and headed down a tree-lined avenue to an old wrecked building. I was either never clear to begin with--or have forgotten-- if the place was one of the king's minor palaces or a warlord estate; whatever, it had been thoroughly bombed at some stage of the wars. It was now a park of sorts-- there were some gardens (although ragged and bare, because it was December) and a few intact rooms to creep through and a huge veranda for viewing the wide vista of fields and mud-brick houses below.

Some men were standing on top of the wrecked building when we pulled up. They grinned and waved their machine guns at us, much as someone would welcome you to a party with upheld wine glasses, the gesture meant to imply, "Come, come! We've been looking out for you!" So we waved at the guys and parked the van and headed toward the house, then saw this greenhouse made of poplar sticks and plastic sheeting in the rubble. The gardener--he in the brown robes--was eager for us to admire his work. I don't think there was anything edible growing there. It was all pink flowers of one kind or another, a love garden for Ahmed Shah Massoud. He is the man in the portrait, the Tajik fighter credited (by some, depending on their own ethnic identity) as being the Taliban's fiercest scourge, the one who was murdered shortly before 9/11. His portrait hangs all over Kabul, but I never saw it so tenderly displayed as in this setting with the pink flowers and the heart painted on the wall.

I remembered this photo when I was having dinner with friends a few days ago and we were talking about the TV special about the buildup to 9/11. One of the friends said, "That Massoud -- what a hottie!"

Well, yes.

2006-09-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

The Morning Death Count

I have a dual-alarm clock set to go off every morning at 5:30 (husband) and 6:00 (me). It's set to our local NPR station because music might not wake us up, the alarm itself is too shrill, and I like the NPR host voices-- they're among my favorite and most familiar voices anywhere. Sometimes I'm tempted to change the station when I wake to news of yet another suicide bomber in Iraq or more signs of global-warming --one wonders if it's worth getting out of bed. Still, the company of those calm, intelligent voices gives me some hope, even when the news doesn't.

This morning, my husband lay there listening when his alarm went off. Then he said, "They're talking about Afghanistan." So I had to lift my head and pay attention: a car bomb outside the US embassy in Kabul, killing (I think) eighteen Afghans and two American soldiers.

I know exactly where it happened. I was dropped off in front of the long blockaded street to the American Embassy there back in April, walked past the soldiers and their machine guns behind piles of sandbags, past the high battered walls that hid the embassy from the streets, past the soldiers from India and Africa who had been recruited to help guard the embassy, past the beefy security guys at the entrance to the building, into the old part of the compound which looks like a really really tidy trailer park. I have notes on all this somewhere, because it felt so thrilling to be there--me, old radical and vehement Bushaphobe, inside the heart of the American engagement. It was only a social call with Debbie Rodriguez, an American hairdresser who lives in Kabul and who was showing me around while I was there to help her write her book, Kabul Beauty School. It was thrilling to be there because it made me feel as if I were in the middle of a different kind of drama than the one outside the compound. I kept wondering if the guy playing basketball or the woman reading in the sun were CIA, if they were involved in some kind of superpower subterfuge that was subtly shifting future events. I'm a hick from Cleveland, not used to consorting with the mighty.

Outside, on the streets of Kabul, there was no need for imagination. There was no time for imagination-- all was hustle, move quickly or get hit by that guy on the bicycle, don't step in the sewer or in that pile of camel dung, cover your head! People have asked me over and over again what it was like to be in Afghanistan, and over and over I am speechless. So many people and their beasts and vehicles and wares clogging the streets, amid buildings that are going up and buildings that are falling down. I was always speechless as Debbie and I drove around, too--so much to see and no time to reflect.

There's a reason that I chose the picture at the top of this post and not any of the 200 others I have from my trips to Kabul (aside from the fact that I don't know how to post more than one picture at a time). I love this picture because it shows how Afghans have hurled themselves back into business after three decades of war. That building in the background had been bombed at some point-- by the Russians? the mujahadeen? the Taliban? the US? Don't know, but the fact that it's unreconstructed didn't deter the Afghans. You can see that at the very top, there are only a few teetering piles of brick left. Someone draped a flag or maybe a makeshift business sign on the floor below it. The next floor has been conscripted for storage. Bottom floor: open for business, despite all those creeky ruins above! Crowded with people and products and conversation and argument and life.

This is what's so depressing about the latest news from Afghanistan. There is not only heightened fighting in the south, but also--violence is starting to become ordinary in Kabul. When I was there, I saw people working hard to get things started again-- little businesses opening everywhere, new buildings going up, fresh coats of paint. All sorts of people who didn't have to live through the misery of the wars are there, too--foreigners or Afghans who fled--coming to open businesses or start nonprofits. People in Kabul tell me by email that they think the violence is caused by militants from Pakistan who are sneaking in with the bombs and rockets. Afghans aren't doing it, they say-- Afghans just want to get a life again. When I listened to the report about the car bomb, I wondered if they'll get that chance.

I still want to go back to Kabul in November--there, I've said it. We only get the headlines here in the states about the bombs and the rockets and the riots, but there are other stories of ordinary people carrying on in their own remarkable ways there. I already wrote one article about them for Entrepreneur Magazine, another for Gourmet. There are plenty of other stories, and I want to write at least some of them.

2006-09-03T17:28:00.000-07:00

Honoring the Ordinary

I remember the first time I read about blogging in the New Yorker and wondered why anyone would want to write or read one. I even felt that way a few months ago, before friends talked me into trying it myself. By that time, I liked reading their blogs but the idea of writing one myself seemed so onerous...all that extra work to send words flying into space, with no one out there to catch them.

Every paper or magazine I pick up these days seems to carry some beef about blogs. They're mostly concerned with blogs that report or hold forth about the news. They would probably dimiss a blog like mine as tedious navel-gazing.

But I'm not navel gazing (after two children?perish the thought!). I'm observing the world around me little bits at a time and musing out loud about it, and this is what I like about the vast blog jungle. It's full of other ordinary observers and musers and people who don't want to let life slip by without charting it. When you stumble upon a blogger whose voice you like, that person will lead you to others and so on. I feel like a monkey swinging from one marvelous tree to another.

Or switching metaphors, as if I'm moving among galaxies. I flit from lit blogs to gardening blogs to farming blogs to cooking blogs to blogs about Afghanistan, each time leaving one cluster of voices for another. Constellations that wax and wane around a shared passion.

I was going to try for another metaphor about synapses in the brain, but three is too many for one post. Isn't that a great picture of the drive up Cedar Hill at 7:55 on a Sunday night, after spending the day on the shores of the great, raucus lake and eating too much cake?

2006-08-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

Office Geography

"Of course I remember that map!" my mother said. "I put it up on the kitchen wall and everyone laughed at me, but we must have looked at it ten times a day."

I'm sure it must have been our mean old neighbor--who accused me of twisting the head off a baby bird!-- who laughed at her, not everyone.

Last time I was home, I was looking at the top of the closet of my old room, wondering what might be left of me there. Not much. The map was on a shelf at the back of the closet, covered with dust and torn nearly in half. I'm not sure what year it was published, but it was hanging in our kitchen in either the late 50s or the early 60s.

I'd been wanting to change things in my office. I wrote an article a while ago about a designer who uses feng sui to make corporate offices more congenial. I was tempted to have her feng sui my office at home, but figured she'd tell me some things to do and I'd never do them and it would be yet another thing I'd wasted money on. But inspired by her, I went home and threw away my weight in magazines and papers and reorganized my shelves so that I could actually find things. I didn't want to disrupt my life enough to paint--even though she told me, "No one should have white walls!"--but I imagined painting them a sort of watery green. Then I realized that the map would fit quite perfectly over the window behind my desk. My husband taped it together, and we hung it with bread ties (or something like bread ties ).

Isn't it lovely? This picture was taken in late afternoon with the sun slanting in from the west, making the map look like stained glass. Behind it, you can see the window of many mullions that has made so many painters groan, also the vine that is slowly covering that side of the house and making the issue of painters moot. Now I know that the color I wanted for my office walls is the green of Afghanistan, Turkey, and Romania-- not the somewhat more garish green of India, Finland, and all of the United States.

When I'm groping for words, I stare at the world gone by-- that big yellow Soviet Union, the smaller fatalities of Zaire and Yugoslavia, also yellow, and pink extinct Rhodesia. It's quite possible that I'm learning all the wrong geography. I find myself saying, "Oh, that's where XXX is"-- then wondering if it too hasn't changed into something else.

On the right is the real Book of Marvels, still with me after all these years. On the left is my daily to-do list, not quite done.

2006-08-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Bee is Back?

I swore to friends earlier this summer that I had seen honeybees in my garden. Excitement all around!

When someone told me several years ago that both wild and commercial bees were dying out because of pesticide overuse and a mite infestation, I was distraught. That's the kind of news that puts me in an apolcalyptic state of mind, where I'm afraid that all the things I love about the world are disappearing. Every time I'd see something buzzing around my flowers, I'd crouch nearby and try to see if it was a real, true honeybee. Most of the time, it seemed not quite right-- too small or too large, too dark, too swift, missing that pleasant, unhurried, highly heedful dithering that I associate with honeybees.

I'm not completely sure this is a honeybee, either-- I emailed a picture to a bee expert but have not heard back. The body seems to lack the golden fuzziness that I recall from the honeybees of my youth. He could be one of the 4,000 species of wild bees in this country. You can't see it in this picture, but he is carrying plump saddlebags of pollen-- that seems to be a hopeful sign of a creature that intends to make an overabundance of honey.

I have to be careful of the bees--honey, bumble and otherwise--because there is so much work after an absence of six weeks. So much weeding! Nature abhors a vacuum and nowhere so much as in my garden, where I diligently tore out all the stupid violets before I left. I returned to find that annoyingly robust self-seeders had taken over the territory. But weeding and dead-heading is hazardous when the bees are still so very busy among my phlox, buddleia, joe-pye, monarda, gloriosa daisies, lythrum and asters. I always assume that the bees see me as a partner, out there to ensure yet more flowering of all that they seek. But, there are some bumblebees out there nearly as big as my fist. I feel they are looking at me balefully.

Some people feel like God in their gardens, making all those important decisions about what lives and what must depart, keeping bloom and foliage and variety in balance. But I'm a very bad god. I oafishly step on one plant when I'm reaching for another, tear things out in the spring because I can't remember that I planted them in the fall, and get tired in the middle of the summer and let the Japanese anemones take over. And I feel slightly guilty when I'm deadheading, especially at this time of year. My poor plants have already worked hard, putting out one burst of bloom after another. The evidence of their fecundity is drying at the end of a stem, but that's what I must snip away to encourage yet more bloom. Isn't this like a greedy audience at the end of a performer's fourth encore, demanding more? More!

2006-08-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

Horse Heaven

I'm working on an article for Wildlife Conservation about the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary, rummaging through the 250 pictures my husband and I shot to remind me of how wonderful it was to be there. We spent three days in South Dakota in late June-- really, I could have spent three weeks wandering that state. You can drive down what seems like an ordinary road there and wind up falling over in awe.

Half our time was spent at the horse sanctuary, where 500 wild horses that have been removed from public lands are living the good life on open range near Hell Canyon. And I was living the good life along with them! As we were driving around with the sanctuary's director, I was thinking how wonderful it is to be a freelance writer-- to come up with a great idea for an article (okay, I think all my ideas are great), to get an editor to agree, then to walk though the door into that other world that each article represents. Plenty of tourists visit the sanctuary, but when you're there to write about it you have this incredibly dense, rich experience with the place and the people that no one else gets. I've been carrying that experience around with me for the past month, as if it's a hard little seed. Now to see what I can grow from it.

The sanctuary sells foals--here's one from this year's fecundity. Look at the heart on his face! As if his genes held a little conference before he was born: "How do we make this guy extra cute?"

2006-08-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

My thoughts turn to eggplant

My friend Lucette has been asking me for my mother's eggplant recipe, which I served her two weeks ago and will serve her yet again in a few days.

Who wouldn't think of eggplant these days? The farmers market is full of them: long graceful lavender ones, round ones that look like they're wrapped in purple ribbons, and of course the ebony beauties on the right. I love everything to do with eggplant. I love picking out the shiniest best of pile at the market. Washing them, watching the water bead on their skin, admiring the way they mirror the room as they dry. Slicing into the white flesh. I have one recipe that calls for salting the slices, laying them out on towels, and sweating out the water. I always feel as if I'm ministering to delicate creatures--sponging away their beads of sweat, turning them over to watch the dew rise on their other sides, sponging again. Well--then cooking and eating them.

My mother always grew all her own eggplants. When we lived in Oroville--very small town California--she had a huge garden where she grew just about every vegetable I'd ever heard of. I'm not sure if she was all-organic then--I think she would have scoffed at this as an ill-conceived notion, since she had gardened through the depression and figured that anything that increased yield had to be good. But because of that same depression experience, she couldn't stand to waste anything. Thus every scrap of leftover went to her compost bins, which she tended as diligently as she tended her children. She lives in an apartment now and has no compost bin. Still, she gasps when someone throws away so much as a teabag! We were trained to snip off the string and tag and the staple that held them, and put the rest of the teabag into the container under the sink that held the compost materials.

I've been looking for the cookbook where my mother's recipe first appeared. It was in an old Omega Nu cookbook from Oroville--maybe from the 60s or 70s?--where the women were all Mrs. John Smith or Mrs. Harold Jones. No-name women! I think the cookbook is buried under some of the piles upstairs and will only emerge when I leave Cleveland. She dictated this version to me a few years ago.

Kathleen Ohlson's Eggplant Parmisan

Three medium eggplants, sliced, brushed with olive oil and broiled on each side until lightly browned
Grated parmesan cheese
About four medium-sized tomatoes
One chopped green pepper
One large chopped onion
One and a half pound thickly sliced Monterey Jack Cheese

Put a layer of eggplant on the bottom of the pan, sprinkle with chopped onion and pepper, and then add salt & pepper. Add a layer of tomatoes, sprinkle with parmesan cheese, then lay slices of jack cheese on top. Make a second layer of everything except the jack cheese (except I think that the last time I made it, I included a second layer of jack cheese and it was fine). Bake at 325 for one and a half hours; turn down to 250 if it cooks too fast. Let it sit for about 15 minutes before eating so that some of the juice reabsorbs. (I also think that the last time I made it, I cooked it at 350 for one hour. Oh well-- you get the idea)

It's very very good.

2006-08-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

Retard

It's hard figuring out what to do with my son for his birthday, because he always expects a Very Big Deal. Which is fine, as long as I can think of something he's not already bored with. Baseball games are so when-he-was-a-teenager, movies are so what-he-can-do-by-himself. If I don't come up with an idea, he'll propose bowling or shopping at Best Buy or something else I really hate. So when a friend proposed a comedy club, I thought, "Sure! Big laughs!"

My son said fine.

But when I went to the comedy club's website and saw the picture and bio of the comedian, I panicked. He was head-shaved and angular and crouched in a karate move; he looked like an attack humorist. His bio said that his mentor had been Sam Kineson, he of the mean-spirited tirades. I imagined the guy bellowing "RE-tard" at some point in his act. Worse yet, I imagined him asking if anyone had any special occasions that night. I imagined that Matt would call out, "Here, sir!" and jump to his big awkward feet and that the comedian--already poised to make a fool of anyone who exposed himself, as comics like Letterman do with their hapless guests--would make painful use of this even greater opportunity for hilarity. As we drove to the comedy club, I was braced for combat. I whispered to my husband that I was going to have to rush the stage if the guy started to screw with Matt. My husband told me to warn him in time, so that he could move to the other side of the room.

I've written about my son-- my mildly/moderately retarded, kind of autistic son--at Salon and Brain-Child. If I'm describing him to other people, I think retarded is a tolerable word. It tells people something of who he is without a lot of polysyllabic subterfuge. I'd rather have them think the worst--and prepare themselves for compassion-- and then be astounded by all the things he is in addition to the label. But "retarded" is not really an accurate word. Matt doesn't seem slower than anyone else, only different. Sometimes I think that part of him is off in one of those 85 other dimensions that particle physicists keep talking about, and that things are both lost and gained in translation. Matt refers to himself as having "learning differences," which also doesn't seem right, in addition to having too many syllables. It might give someone the idea that he can only work out logarithms if they're projected sideways onto giant pieces of rye toast.

I don't use the word "retarded" in front of him.

Shortly after the show started, I knew the night was going to bomb. When Matt isn't enjoying himself, he acts like a beached whale-- he thrashes around in his seat and makes long whale-song sighs. He can clear out a row of movie seats when he's bored. Even though the first of the three comedians to take the stage was funny, Matt didn't even smile. He was as implacably grim as one of those Easter Island heads, even when the comedian referred to Cleveland's Public Square as the Homeless Octogon. I thought it was funny.

The second comedian was a baby-faced guy who was probably younger than Matt. He was my favorite kind of comedian, a Dennis Miller type who was so quick with his words and his wit that I could hardly keep up. His comedic specialty was identifying the things we're sensitive about--race, sexual politics, fatal illnesses--and taking a poke at them. Lots of comedians do this, but he was both appalling and very clever. I'd repeat the thing he said to the Pro-Life woman who asked him what if the Virgin Mary had opted to have an abortion, but it's his joke and too awful--if hilarious--for me to repeat in mixed company. I laughed and laughed--at the same time, wondering how I could laugh, since in any other circumstance what he was saying would only be cruel. I guess it's this: we erect a delicate ediface of words around the things that are painful and hard. When someone reaches out and crumples that edifice bit by bit--and not with a blunt instrument, but with smart, gleeful observations that reflect the futility of our efforts--it's funny. I guess we laugh at our own wincing. And we laugh at the audacity of someone who crashes through the edifice instead of carefully skirting it.

Toward the end of his act, when the laughter from the Virgin Mary joke hadn't yet died down, as people in the audience--still laughing-- were nonetheless loudly moaning that he could say such things--the comedian sequed into new territory. "I hate all the attention our society pays to famous athletes," he said, so earnestly. "Why, there's an international competition that we ignore all the time-- Special Olympics!"

Matt's attention--which had been on the noisy bachelorette party behind us--drifted back to the stage. He gave a gracious little wave to the comedian, as if he were a celebrity in the audience whose presence had been revealed--he has, after all, several Special Olympics gold medals languishing on his dresser. As the comedian went on to deliver a blisteringly graphic riff on the attributes of Special Olympics athletes--I recall something about big heads and drool cups--my husband and I froze. I couldn't bear to look at Matt. I didn't want to see comprehension replace boredom. The audience laughed and moaned, laughed and moaned, and then the comedian left the stage. I could breathe again. I finally looked at Matt, who was studying the dessert menu with a scowl. Just as he didn't find any of the other jokes interesting, he hadn't paid much attention to this material--only to the part that sounded like a salute to activities he has been a part of. Maybe I've trained him to expect the salutes and not the jibes? I don't know.

As we left, I said, "I'm sorry, sweetie-- I don't think you had much fun."

He gave me that Easter Island stare. "Sometimes, I don't laugh all night."

2006-08-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

Menudo for Breakfast

I had to post this picture, even though it's not very good and has nothing to do with menudo. As I was driving along US-80, I had a lot of time to think about corn. Something magical about it-- think of Steven King's The Stand, that baseball movie (can't think of its name--if Kevin Costner built built it, they would come), Children of the Corn...I thought of more examples, but have forgotten. Anyway, corn is somehow mezmerizing, mysterious, mythical. Has this to do with our country's history-- the first gift to Europeans was supposed to have been maize, right? Or is it just that the fields of corn go on and on, covering the land, muffling the earth, hiding...what? We plant all that corn, then seem to be a little uneasy at what we hath wrought.

A few years ago, in another trip cross country, my daughter and I drove from Cleveland to Portland on probably the least direct route: we drove down to Nashville and then took Rte. 40 all the way to Arizona (I think that's where we left 40). The part of our trip that passed through Texas was miserable. A truck had flipped over, spilled fuel, and exploded. Fire spread along the sides of the road and median strip, but we were stuck there, held in place by traffic, not sure if we too were going to catch fire, not sure what had happened to the driver. We were finally able to move on and determined to get out of Texas, but we were too tired and had to spend the night in a horrible town that smelled of oil fire. So we got up early the next morning, got back on 40 and sped towards New Mexico.

Everything seemed to change after we crossed the state line. The landscape turned beautiful, and the sun rising behind us cast a shadow of our car on nearby mesas-- we looked so swift and airy! We were hungry, so we stopped at the first town. Tucumcari, I think. We wanted Mexican food and weren't sure we were going to find any at 7:00 in the morning, but a place called Raul's was open and we became the only customers. On the breakfast menu, there was a listing of the usual assortment--eggs and sausage and potatoes--but also this: "Menudo, Breakfast of Champions!" And even though menudo is a spicy tripe stew and not eggs, it was sort of something we had to do. The waiter came out and asked where we were from, then walked away shaking his head, muttering, "Two girls from Cleveland who want menudo for breakfast!"

Why mention this now? Well, I like thinking about it-- a great memory as well as great menudo--and I hoped something like this would happen on my recent trip. Not so. The food was uniformly bad along the road. I decided that towns should put out a sign listing all the local eateries as well as the big Mac type places for those of us who want to patronize local businesses. I also thought there should be travel books-- like the AAA guides-- that highlight local motels and restaurants, not just the chains.

I wouldn't mind that assignment!

2006-08-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

Lulu the Beloved

This was what I saw in my rearview mirror for 38 hours-- sometimes sleeping with her head on the back seat, sometimes just watching me with big woeful eyes.

Damn that Mapquest-- got lost in foggy Iowa for a while. All the while, I was listening to Gilead, which was read by a man with an annoyingly hearty voice. Despite the voice, I was weeping because the prose and the book overall are so beautiful. Gilead is set in Iowa; I listened as the characters were crossing the West Nishna-something river and suddenly remembered that I had crossed it the day before, wondering if the TMers had somehow won naming rights to it.

Back in Cleveland now. So much to do. These are the other great things about driving cross country: you can wear the same clothes for four days in a row and all you have to do is move forward.

Every time I stopped at a rest area or gas station, I did as Bird (the character in my under-revision novel) would do: I looked for arrowheads. Unlike her, I did not find any.

2006-08-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Hogs Are On The High Side Today

What I love about driving across country is that you find out how the rest of the country isn't like you. Nowhere more than on the radio. The stations play a lot of the same music heard in Cleveland or San Francisco or whatever, but it's interspersed with earnest discussions of hog prices and bean futures. There was a report delivered so quickly that I couldn't quite follow, which sounded much like a stock report only not. "September lean hogs at 4 3/4, down two" and so on. Which made the landscape I was shooting through seem even more fascinating. In Iowa, one's thoughts are on corn-- that's what you see for miles and miles, spreading away from the road in evenly spaced rows that play that little pop-art game with your eye. Fabric metaphors come to mind. It's beautiful. I know from Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma that I'm zenning out on what is actually a problem-- the mono-crop that's destroyed American farming--but still, beautiful.

I made a detour to look at Fairfield, Iowa, home of the Maharishi University of Management and Vedic City, the "world's first city to be designed and built according to the ancient Vedic science of architecture and city planning according to Natural Law." Hmmm-- I got a press release from the Trancendental Meditation (imagine the registered trademark sign here--it always follows) folks that hundreds of yogic flyers had come to town to initiate world peace. Disappointingly, they seem to have settled down.

2006-08-01T20:15:00.000-07:00

Little Oil Wells Everywhere

That title doesn't have anything to do with the picture. This was the sign at the first rest area in Nebraska ( small yellow sign says, alarmingly, "Caution, rattlesnakes are native to this area") But as I left the rest area, the only things moving in the surrounding fields were little oil derricks (sp?), dipping and bobbing like mechanical birds.

I don't know why Montana gets the Big Sky moniker. Wyoming has an awful lot of sky and Nebraska has even more-- there's hardly anything higher than a stalk of corn, nothing to interfere with all that sky. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, ordinarily. But as I was driving to my destination (York, Nebraska-- over 800 miles away from last night's lodging), there were all these ominous warnings on the radio about thunder storms with lightening close to the ground and ten-pound hail stones and such. As it got dark, the light show started. It was like being in Cleveland for the fourth of July-- you can see the big fireworks downtown plus all the little fireworks in the suburbs and in the scofflaws' front yards. So there was a huge display of lightening to my right and about four smaller displays, and they all seemed to repeat about every 20 seconds. As if the sky was pulsing. Sometimes the classic lightening bolt, sometimes one that branched upward like a giant candelabra, sometimes one that groped sideways, like a spectral hand. I couldn't hear the storm, so I assumed it was pretty far away ( just in case the lightening might hit closer, though, I didn't drive near any fuel trucks). But since the sky was so bare of mountains and trees-- so damn big-- it was pretty scary. Isn't there some sort of exhibit at science museums, a glass globe lights up with electrical currents when you put your hand on it? It was like being inside that globe.

2006-08-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

All Livestock Must Be Restrained

So said the sign headed into this Nevada rest area, somewhere between Lovelock ("lock up your love" said the billboard) and Winnemucca. In the middle of day one of the four-day drive from California back to Ohio; landscape bliss. Nevada is a breathtaking state-- route 80 is like a long long corridor between mountains so beautiful and forboding they make you cry. Okay, they almost make me cry. There were several books that I read over and over when I was a kid, and a book of Best American Short stories was one of them. John Steinbeck's story, The Red Pony, was an absolute favorite. The red pony disappears (I recall) into the nearby mysterious landscape. Where I lived in Oroville, there was a road that turned away from our houses and dwindled away into the woods; I always thought that was the kind of place the red pony might have gone. Nevada is almost all like that, a place where red ponies disappear. There are those distant mountains, always, then up closer, miles of sagebrush that look like gray, scratchy chenille and suddenly lush areas with rivers or burned areas from the fire, like spilled black milk. Wish I could cut down one of the dirt roads and explore.

When in California, I went with some friends to the Donner Party museum and Alder Creek site. Thus the landscape had new meaning. At Elko, I stopped to get gas and saw some harsh/gorgeous mountains looming behind the town. They were the Ruby Mountains-- the Donner Party's first great misstep.

Listened all the way (uhhh ten hours) to Mark Salzman's True Notebooks, about his experience teaching creative writing to juvenile detention boys. Great book. It made me think a lot about the work I've done with women in prison. When I was listening to some of the first essays the boys wrote, my reaction was, "Hey, most of my women were never able to write anything like that!" One thought was that my women were much older-- had many more years to drink and take crack and get hit in the head by their boyfriends; they had more ill effects from the lifestyle. I was a little relieved when Salzman said later that there were some weeks when the boys only wrote about pussy and beer.

What I'd like to write about: maybe a nice little travel essay about how our reading influences what we see when we travel.

2006-07-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

Today was my last day at the Tahoe City farmers market. Peaches the size of melons, arugula you can smell from 100 feet away, plus all those varieties of plums I've never heard of. I tried to take a picture with everything showing--near the handle, there's a huge heirloom tomato with a bunch of little Black Cherry tomatoes (they look like they're dipped in milk chocolate)--but sadly, you can't see them. You also can't see the picture I took of Lulu sniffing the arugula, lured by a piece of grass-fed beef jerkey tucked inside the leaves. I forgot to put the memory stick in the camera.

What I'd like to write an article about: how farmers markets are helping farmers stay in business. One of them had a bumper sticker that said, "Support your local farmer or watch the houses grow." Exactly.

Gack, this thing has no spell check?

2006-07-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels. It had a section for Wonders of the New World (which included the Golden Gate bridge, something I'd been driven over many times) and Wonders of the Old World, which included (I think) The Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Queen Zenobia's desert city. The old wonders made me mad with desire and probably changed forever what I thought I'd be and see in the world.

So it just made sense to pick this as the title for my blog. In my writing life--which is a big part of my life, since I pick away at writing so slowly and allow for so many maddening diversions--I often feel I'm compiling my own Book of Marvels, both fiction and nonfiction. I thought I'd write here about the things that fascinate me-- and these are almost always the things I might want to write about or am writing about.

So there. The first post.