Rantsandmusings

Dollmaker Chpt 11

2010-11-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

Chapter 11
We were quiet in the car going home. The days at the Faire were always long and tiring. It was hard to be in character all day. And dealing with the public was no fun either. When customers came into my shop, they usually came in ones and twos and they were usually sober. I fell asleep in the backseat, or drifted into one of those muzzy states where you are half awake and half asleep. I saw Jack again, as he’d looked in high school. He was walking away from me, the same slightly turned in left leg, the same carriage.
“Damn.” I woke up suddenly. Terrified. Gil and Charlie both looked around. “I saw Jack at the Faire.”
Charlie was driving. He looked back at the road, but Gil waited for me to explain.
“Are you sure it was him? It has been a long time.”
“I am pretty sure. I mean I am sure, but I don’t want to be.”
“Man,”Charlie breathed. “What do you think that means?’
“Trouble,” Gil said. Not what I wanted to hear, but he was right. The Feds were clearly onto Jack. Had he been blowing things up? Would he come near me? Fear for Zen and the baby gripped me.
When we got to my house, Charlie parked the car. “Invite us in for a night cap,” he said.
I looked at Gil who had fallen asleep in the front seat and shrugged.
The house was unlocked. No one out where we lived locked anything. What if you needed to get into the kitchen or the barn for some emergency?
“You get us a drink,” Charlie was in soldier mode. “I’m going to do a perimeter.” He poked Gil who woke up and followed us into the house. Charlie left us in the kitchen and was back in a few minutes. Before he took his drink, he went through the house and the basement.
“Aren’t we overreacting?” I said, trying to be light.
Charlie downed about two fingers of single malt and looked me straight in the eye. He held up a finger.
“Some one is blowing up houses around here.”
Another finger. “And you think you saw Jack at the Faire.”
Another finger. “And the FBI came straight here.”
“And Grey is an Elf,” I added, but it wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be.
“That probably gives you some protection.” Did it? I hadn’t thought about that.
“Anyhow,” Charlie said. “Lock up. I think we will too, for awhile. Where is everyone, by the way.”
“Probably at Dad’s. I can’t imagine where else Zen would be.”
Charlie held out his glass for another shot. I really wished Grey were there, he had gone with the Grey Friars; they had instruments to transport. We got the rest of my stuff from Charlie’s car and by that time Mom and Zen were back. The guys left. Zen plopped into the kitchen rocker to nurse Hana before going to bed. Mom handed around glasses of water and wilted into a chair at the table. It had been a hot day and the evening was warm.
“How was the Faire?” She asked. An innocent question, but I felt a blush creep up my next. What did I feel guilty about?
“I sold a couple of dolls and got orders for a few more,” I said quickly. “Grey and his group were there, too. And Gil’s Rat Man costume was a little too good.” I told them about his encounter with the pickle man. They told me about Dad’s renovation of the kitchen.
“Sounds really nice,” I said. “You’ll like cooking there.” I hoped I didn’t sound too eager for her to go and do that.
Zen stood up to leave.
“Hey, listen,” I said as casually as I could. “ Call me paranoid, but I’ve been thinking about the bombings. We were talking about it coming home,” I added. “And maybe we should lock up at night and when we leave the house.”
“Okay,” Zen said.
“Good idea,” my mother added. But she’d been living near Miami for the past couple of years.
“I’m sure there is no danger, but,” I shrugged. But they were all ready on my side. So we went to bed. I locked the doors and shut and locked the downstairs windows for the first time in summer since I’d lived there.
House noises I never heard before kept me awake. Worrying kept me awake. I would have to tell my mother and Zen. What could I say to Zen? Should I email Zane to come home? It wasn’t the sort of news to send in an email. I should call him, or try to. Zen should move into the house. My mother had to move out. Grey. It all swam around in my head for what was left of the night.
When I went out to the morning class, Maxim was there, warm and reassuring. I stopped to pet her and lean against her sturdy shoulder. “Why are people so complicated, girl?’
She turned at my voice and nuzzled my outstretched hand. But she was a horse and had no answers for my human dilemmas. After class I went to Zen’s apartment. Hana was sitting in her little chair while Zen stretched and jazzerciszed to some exercise tape. I noticed she had kept the sound down so that we didn’t hear it in the dojo. I tickled Hana’s several chins and she grinned. She’d been smiling, seemingly, since birth. She waved her fists and kicked. We played until Zen’s tape ran out and she collapsed red-faced and panting into a chair.
“You could just come train with us,” I said.
“I could. But here, if Hana cries, I can stop without disturbing anyone else.”
That was true. I didn’t object to a baby in the dojo once and awhile, if it meant the mother or father could train. I wouldn’t want Hana there. She’d be too distracting. I got up and found some cold water in the fridge for both of us.
“So are we seriously going to lock up all the time?” Zen asked. “I can’t imagine.”
“Me either. But probably until the cops catch the bomber/arsonist.” The words chilled me. Those were terrible crimes, although no one had been hurt so far. i stared at the floor, trying to figure out to start.
“It is pretty creepy,” Zen said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” fell out of my mouth before I could stop it.
She stopped drinking her water and scrutinized me over the rim of the glass.
Oh boy. “Before you got here, the Feds came by, asking about your dad.”
Zen set the glass down and picked up Hana, cuddling her close to her chest.
“They seemed to think he was involved with something called Earth Liberation Front and that they were responsible for the bombings.” I paused, not sure where to go next.
“But Dad’s dead.”
Silence. That was clearly the hard part to tell.
“Mom?”
“They didn’t think so. And I think I saw him at the Faire yesterday,” I said slowly.
She sat down too quickly and Hana looked surprised, but she didn’t cry. “But the Army declared him dead.”
I nodded. “I have a piece paper declaring him so. But. . . “
“But there was never a body.”
I shook my head. We were silent for what felt like a long time.
“What made you think it was him you saw?” She asked suddenly, a little aggressively. Did she want him back or not? “Did you speak to him?”
“No. He was walking away from me. But it was his walk. He hurt his knee playing ball in our senior year and his gait was just slightly off after that. It was his walk.”
“Oh,’ Zen said. “It could have been anyone, then. I mean the Feds upset you and you thought you saw Dad.”
I blinked, as if she’s slapped me. Sometimes Zen’s arrogance hits me that way. And then I bit my tongue. She clearly didn’t want to hear this, or couldn’t hear it. Or maybe she was right. Maybe I only imagined Jack because of the stupid FBI guys. I played the scene again in my mind: tall, broad shouldered, a football player’s build; ordinary hair and clothes, a guy no one would look twice at; the slightly lopsided gait. I’d never have noticed the guy at all if the way he walked hadn’t caught my eye. I’ve watched people move and learn to do aikido for years. Everyone’s carriage and movement are distinct. Even the identical twins who’d trained with us years ago had moved differently, not radically so, but enough that I could tell them apart that way.
No. I hadn’t imagined it. Jack was in the area.
“I have no idea how, Zen, but your dad is here. I saw him.” I stood up. “And I’d really like you to move into the house. Grandma is in Zane’s room. We can put you in your old room.”
“No,” she said, her mouth a stubborn line. Damn. I knew that look.
“Please, I’d feel much better if you and the baby were in the house.”
“Daddy wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Zen, your dad, the one you knew when you were little wouldn’t hurt you. But we don’t know where Jack has been or what he has done or what he is like now.”
She glared at me and shook her head.
“Zen, please.” I hated begging her. “What about Hana?”
“So you think Dad’s gone all PTSD and is crazy enough to hurt us?” Tears slicked her eyes.
“I don’t think anything,” I growled at her. “I don’t know anything except that the FBI came here, looking for Jack. And I saw him yesterday. And I am scared.”
*
By the evening Zen had moved herself and the baby into her old room. After the evening class Grey and I sat on the back porch, watching fireflies in the long evening.
“Tell me, “ he said, taking my hand.
“You tell me,” I snapped feeling overwhelmed from all sides and just on one side of panic, but not sure which side it was.
“I tried,” he said. “I showed you. We sang to you. We have been calling you for years.”
I waited, really having no idea what he was talking about.
“Long ago, in my world, The Perilous Realm it is sometimes called by humans who have visited there, long ago there was a war. Like you we are good and evil, light and dark and like you we go to war. Only we use power, magic you might call it. And in that war our queens, the Queens of Light and Dark were thrown out of time by a great mage. Merlin you call him. And they were lost to us.”
I stared at him. I’d known him for two years and never once had he evinced one iota of craziness. Gil and Charlie liked him. He was well respected at the dojo and taught at the college. Josie and Doug liked him. I stood up.
“You have to go,” I said.
“You asked. Please hear me out.” It wasn’t a request, the tone was one of command. I moved away from him and leaned on the porch railing.
“For a long time there was an uneasy peace. And then the Dragon Kings of the East began raiding our borders. We needed our queen.”
The doll.
“Yes,” he said as if he’d read my thoughts. “Mrs. Fotheringill saw your work and suggested you.”
“She’s an elf?” I was curious.
“A cousin, a half-elf. There are many among you.”
“All those old songs about elves and mortals?”
He ignored that and went on. “We needed and image, a mannikin to call her back.”
“But I know nothing about that, elves and such. Why me?”
He rubbed the side of his face. “Something in your work speaks to us. You see things clearly.”
“There are a lot of fantasy doll makers.”
“There are. Most of them more fantastical than fantasy, all fairy wings and glitter. You had the right balance of vision and fantasy.”
If I spoke, I would be acknowledging his delusions. But there was his sister who really looked like the doll I had made. And there was the Queen in the forest. Oh no.
I ran into the dojo. There was the little pouch on my desk. I had forgotten or ignored it. Leather, soft, dark red. I poked it, expecting it to dissolve into ashes and dead leaves. Wasn’t that what happened to faerie gifts?
“Open it,”Grey said from the doorway.
Inside was a necklace, a rampant lion done in red gold, on a chain of twisted link. The eyes looked like rubies and there were small diamonds in the mane. Grey took it from my hand and slipped it over my head. Nothing happened. No sparks flew, no magical music rang in my head. The diamonds winked in the overhead light. It was gorgeous piece, way too precious to wear regularly.
“Keep it on,” Grey said.
‘Magical protection?” I said.
He shrugged. “It looks nice.”

Dollmaker Chapter 10

2010-08-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Chapter 10
The Rat Man was having a bad day. His string of rats-large, ugly, rubber rats-had got tangled around one leg of the pickle vendor’s cart. The Rat Man didn’t notice and went on walking, pulling the cart over, spilling pickles and brine. The pickle vendor, never breaking character followed him, spewing invective, G-Rated invective--it is a family amusement. Fair goers and children who would ordinarily have found this amusing, scattered before the pickle man’s angry tone and the large, stuffed rat climbing up the Rat Man’s back. Children cried and clung to their parents. Their parents glared at Gil for scaring the children. He wore rags and makeup to make him look filthy. Several of his teeth were blacked out. In all he looked disgusting, a nice contrast to his usual elegant self.
Regarding it from the booth I shared with Charlie, I thought I might have overdone it. The rat was terribly realistic and huge. The body stretched from Gil’s shoulder to his hip. Gil walked a little faster and finally the pickle guy, went back to pick up his cart and try to salvage the few pickles left. Charlie threw me a glance. I got up and followed Gil. I’d get the rat back and stuff it under the counter. We could use it as a Halloween decoration. Gil was at the Rose and Swan Pub, having a glass of stout. The rat sat on the counter beside him.
I held out my hand. ‘I’ll just put that under the counter,” I said.
“Hell no,” Gil said. “It is terrific.”
“But the kids don’t like it.”
He finished his pint. “LIfe is scary,” he threw over his shoulder as he walked away.
Charlie was manning the booth, so I decided to walk around a bit. I thought Grey and his group from the college, the Grey Friars, were playing somewhere. They were on the program, but I hadn’t seen Grey since the night Hana was born. He’d been away, but I thought he’d have come by when he returned. Was he embarrassed? Had he made all that elf stuff up and somehow induced a hallucination in me. I’d been so wrapped up in the baby that I hadn’t really thought much about it, but he owed me some answers.
I was hot and thirsty so I headed for the lemon ice seller up the lane, past the Wife of Bath’s Woolens booth. Sheep were pastured down the hill, five of them, used for sheep herding trials. The Wife of Bath also did a shears-to-loom demo on one weekend of the Faire. Dan the leather worker was next to the Wife’s booth. He was really a saddler. I don’t know if he sold much at the Faire; his usual clientele, the English horsey set were probably not Faire goers. The bridles and saddles were gorgeous things, softly gleaming leather in various colors. The king and queen used them on the thoroughbreds they rode in the daily parade through the grounds. I think the horses actually belonged to Dan. A tall man dressed all in dark green was examining a bridle. I paused a moment to admire his costume: green leggings, tunic and thigh high soft boots. It fit him as if it had been tailored to his lean frame. His red hair was clipped short, bowl cut like a Norman warrior’s. He turned and looked directly at me, as if he’d felt me staring. He sketched a small bow. I curtsied back and turned away from his haughty, cold face.
I bought a lemon ice feeling his eyes still on me and wandered a bit further down the hill wondering how Maxime and Fabienne would look in tiny English saddles or any saddle. Gil and Charlie should train the girls as warhorses. Fabienne, whose disposition was near to vicious would have done well. Booths were scattered across acres of hilly land. Two flat fields anchored the whole place. One was used for the sheep and the falconry shows, the other was the jousting field. Costumed players wandered the pathways, interacting with Faire goers. Besides the Rat Man, the Kissing Bandit, the Saucy Wenches-a set of girl pirates who fenced, there were various nobles, clergy and peasants.
The sound caught my attention. Grey’s clear voice drifted over the crowd murmur. The Grey Friars were on a small stage halfway up the next hill. At the moment the audience was convulsed with laughter over the lyrics to “Spotted Cow,” a mildly bawdy song that could be sung to an audience with children. The lead singer was a girl from the college, short, stocky with flaming red hair and freckles and a lovely but pale soprano. Grey, as he had done at the party, was playing backup and in this case singing the part of the country lad who helps the dairymaid. The group clearly looked to him as their leader. They stood in a semi-circle, Grey at the center in the back. At the moment he was fiddling. The men in the group wore dark leggings and grey tunics. The women wore grey skirts, white low-cut blouses, and black, lace-up bodices. I listened for a while, captivated by the music. The Grey Friars were excellent, but Grey was magic. He voice ranged from high baritone to very high tenor. It was rich and true.
As if on cue, he looked up and saw me. Color rose in his cheeks. That was interesting. I’d never seen him blush. I leaned against a tree, waiting for the set to end. When it did, most of the audience drifted away. A few went up to the stage to talk to the musicians. Grey stepped off the back of the stage and came straight toward me. He caught me off guard, wrapped his arms around me and kissed me. The crowd standing around applauded, thinking it was part of the show. His arm still around me, he walked us away, uphill. We stopped under a copse of birch.
“I missed you,” he breathed into my ear.
“I missed you, too,” I said. I had.
“But you had the baby to keep you busy. What is it?”
“A girl, very pretty, half-Japanese Zen says.”
He grinned. “Good. We got in yesterday. I sent the sibs off late last night and just got here in time this morning.” He took my hand and we walked on.
Was he going to bring up the scene in the woods? The Fey Folk? It was the perfect place to discuss it, in this woods, both of us in costume, pretending. “That night,” I started.
He stepped back and waited, his face unreadable.
“The queen. Your sister. The doll.” He still didn’t speak. Jousters were assembling on the field, just beyond the trees. The sound of chanting floated over the Faire as the strolling monks sang the midday office. It was real and it wasn’t real. The people playing worked both in this world and in their own imagined medieval world, at least the best players did. Otherwise their performance didn’t work. What if Grey and his siblings, the Queen, the Fey Folk in the woods were actually some other reality; what if he wasn’t playing?
“We are real, Dana. Your heart knows that else the Queen wouldn’t have worked so well for you.” He kissed my forehead. “My lady, until we meet at Evensong, carry my heart with you. Without you, I have no need of it.” He bowed and walked away. Faire goers grinned and nodded, enjoying his performance. I walked past the jousting field, needing to think before I went back to the booth. Something had happened with the Queen. She was the best work I had ever done. And then there were the SIlkies. They, too, were creatures from the Fey world. And better than the baby dolls which were cute and fun to make, but ordinary. People liked them, but didn’t react to them, didn’t catch their breath when they saw them.
Just past the jousting field, the Ahmed the Swordsmith was set up. He ran a small furnace with a foot bellows and gave demonstrations of sword making. He had some nice knives, some cheap blades and a lot of trashy stuff to sell to wannabe warriors. In the interests of authenticity he never brought any Japanese style blades, but his steel blades and swords were good. I had a Japanese sword, a real one, worth more than the house and dojo and property to the right buyer. I kept it in a grubby old saiya with very plain fittings. No one knew its worth except my father. He’d had it appraised after my grandmother died. When I opened the dojo he gave it to me, showed me the paper work and said not to tell anyone. I always hoped no one who knew anything about swords ever came to the dojo.
i was looking at the knives, half listening to Ahmed’s spiel about meteorite iron and its magic properties, when a movement caught my eye. I would never have noticed if it hadn’t been for the bombings and the FBI. Or I would have seen an ordinary guy, trim grey hair, short beard in a Yankees T-shirt and jean shorts and then looked away, not registering his walk. We know a person’s movement, we recognize them from far away before we can see details. He had that jock walk, left over from his high school days. He had walked that way all the while I had known him. Lots of guys have it, but Jack crabbed his left foot slightly, so slightly almost no one noticed. I stared at the man’s retreating form. He was walking away and I was glad. I didn’t want to recognize him, didn’t want it to be Jack. It could be some other guy who’d played football and favored his left foot, ever so slightly. And I didn’t want him to recognize me. Although, I remembered, it wouldn’t be hard for him to figure out where I was if he wanted to know.
“Hey,” Ahmed said. “Let go.”
I had crumpled up the tablecloth, scattering his knives. Leaning hard on the table, I struggled to rearrange them.
“Just leave it,” he growled. Then, “Are you all right?”
I drew a long breath, reaching for my center. “I think so,” I said.
At Evensong, I caught up with Charlie and Gil. This last gathering of the day a was a mix of secular and liturgical music. The Jesuits who ran the college also had a terrific choir who came out to perform authentic medieval chant. The master of revels of Arthur’s Court led everyone in a carefully rehearsed dialog between the players who sang pagan love songs and the ‘monks’ who tried to call everyone to a stricter musical tradition of plainsong. Grey and his group were there. A group of troubadours who sang Spanish and Provencal canticles also sang. And they all cribbed the standard folk favorites from groups like Steeleye Span and the Clancy Brothers. In all the crowd loved it. Most of the Faire goers knew the popular folk songs and were polite to the real medieval music. The whole group ended singing “The Parting Glass” as we walked up through the woods to the main gates.
I searched the crowd but did not see the man who walked like Jack again. Charlie noticed my distraction.
“Grey’s over there,” he pointed to where King Arthur and his knights stood. Guinevere and her ladies lined the other side of the path, waving and smiling.
I nodded, pretending that I had been looking for Grey. At that moment, I wanted to anywhere else. Elves. Jack. Faerie. Going home to Zen and a baby suddenly seemed terrifically easy. I passed the man in green at the gate and again he bowed.

Peaches

2010-08-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Peaches and our Mothers

Peeling fresh peaches. They’ve been exceptional this summer. I say this as one who lived thirty years in Georgia and never had a good peach there, except one basketful I bought in the mountains. But here, in New York, the peaches come from Pennsylvania, ripe from the tree, not picked green. They arrive in stores in August or late July, glorious in their fuzzy skins, colored from deep dried blood red to pale yellow. In the past I have made jam, but, unlike strawberry jam, peach doesn’t hold its flavor. I think I should freeze some, though, for winter. My mother would have canned them.
At least until reliable canned peaches appeared on the market, women canned their own.< http://www.google.com/search?q=canned+peaches+history&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=i1n&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=AlxtTPSNIcT_lgeSxLHhDg&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CFAQ5wIwCg> And even after. Early cans were made of tin and people worried about the food. We had jars of canned peaches and green beans lined up in the fruit cellar(later a catch-all place) when I was small. My mother didn’t do tomatoes. Butulism, she said Obviously she was confused in some way. When I was older commercially canned peaches were what we got in winter. Freestone peaches in thick, gooey syrup. They were sweet. Not peachy. Sweet. Okay, sugar is a good preservative. The peaches it preserved were only passable and the syrup didn’t help. Drained and set on a lettuce leaf with a blob of cottage cheese, they passed for salad. I think I liked it, actually, being one of two children in the history of the world who liked cottage cheese. But more often it was a pear half on the lettuce. A canned pear half. And by mid-winter in upstate New York, almost anything that looks or tastes like summer is good enough. Still the wonder and convenience of commercially canned food was more than my mother’s generation could resist. They didn’t entirely trust it, but they did consume it, grateful to be freed from the work. I think of that at the end of the summer, when I never want to see another tomato, but the freezer is stocked with little cubes of paste and sauce full of summer. And I swear not to plant tomatoes ever again. Of course I do, because by the end of winter the sauces is gone and the seed catalogs have filled the mailbox.
But this morning, peeling ripe peaches, their fragrance all over the kitchen, juice running down my hands, I thought about commercially canned peaches. We never have them. We try to eat seasonally. We aren’t real foodies, more like chow hounds--a little less fussy perhaps, but we eat fast food. But seriously, canned peaches? Nope I’d rather go all winter with out them, pig out in summer when they are fresh and ripe, eat them until I can’t face another one and move on to apples, next fruit to ripen here. I might freeze some, for peach upside down cake (Moosewood Desserts has a killer recipe), but I am content to anticipate, to think in winter of the peach as a color or a fragrance, to dream of fuzzy, warm deliciousness. Virtue. Eating locally. All that is good, but hedonism drives my virtue here. No peach from a can or a freezer EVER tastes like those of late summer.

Dollmaker Chapter 9

2010-08-18T07:34:00.001-07:00

Dollmaker 9
When Zane was born he was so fair his baby skin was translucent. He had pale blue eyes and very blonde fuzz on his head. He cried once and then just looked around. Zen followed a few minutes later, howling at the insult of gravity and cool air. Her richer complexion was deepened by crying. She had darker eyes and a lot of black hair that later fell out and then grew back, fine and pale. The nurse swaddled her and gave her to me to nurse, which finally stopped her crying. Zane lay across my stomach, peacefully dozing. Not much changed in their temperaments over the years.
Zen’s baby came quietly, crying a bit in a funny gravelly little voice.
“A girl,” the midwife announced. She held the baby up briefly and then gave her to Zen. The baby had lots of black hair and an Asian spot.
“Well,” said Zen, cuddling her. “I guess Taka is the father.
We huddled around the bed where Zen was now curled up. She had delivered squatting. I wasn’t much help, despite being her coach. I gave her ice chips and reminded her when to breathe, but in her usual, businesslike manner she settled down ‘to labor” and got the job done mostly on her own. My parents waited in the house and then rushed over as soon as I called.
“Here,” Zen said, holding the baby out to me. Still in my party dress, I took the clean, swaddled baby. My eyes filled and my throat felt all clogged. The baby was sleeping, her eyes moving beneath the fine skin of her lids, her little mouth working a bit. The midwife had weighed, measured, and APGARed her. Seven pounds, twenty inches, nine and ten. A perfect baby. I looked at my parents and realized there were four generations of us in the room. My Mom was sniffly and even Dad looked as if he might tear up. I passed the baby to my mother.
“I guess this makes me an ancestor,” she said, smiling weakly.
“Me, too. I guess,” I said, not at all sure I liked that designation. My father was holding the baby now, crooning softly and walking around. Zen gazed sleepily at him, adoring him as she always had.
“I wish Dad had been here,” she whispered and then fell asleep.
I didn’t know whether to cry or scream. We weren’t enough? After all this time she still wanted Jack? I blew out air, softly. She was right, her father should have been there. My parents looked at the sleeping Zen and then at me. They didn’t know about the FBI guys or the suspicions they had roused. They had no idea of the fear that had wakened in me. I didn’t want Jack back in my life or in Zen’s. I wanted him to stay gone.
Dad was trying to pat me and hold the baby.
“I’m okay,” I lied. “Just kind of emotional.”
The midwife was packing up. She would stay a little while longer and then Zen would be alone with us. Actually, Carrie would be back in the evening and someone from the practice would be on call at all times. “Call if there are any questions or concerns. Anything at all.”
In three weeks we were to take the baby in to the pediatrician for a checkup. And Zen was to go to see Carrie again in six weeks. If all went well. No reason for it not too, Carrie had assured us.
*
I went up to my room , exhausted. Mom was going to stay with Zen for a while. We planned to be there round the clock for the first few days. There was never aikido on the morning after one of the Solstice parties, so I collapsed into my bed and woke up in the early afternoon. Pounce was pawing at me.
“Oh go away and let me sleep,” I growled at him. He growled back. I needed to get up. Zen was probably sleeping, but I felt the need to check in and to relieve my parents. When I got to her room, Josie was in the rocking chair, calmly shelling peas.
“Carrie called to tell me it was a girl, so I thought I’d come over and let everyone sleep for awhile.” She grinned. “Beautiful baby.”
I touched the baby’s silky hair. “She is gorgeous.”
“Was it a hard labor?”
“Not by my standards.”
Josie gathered the peas and the husks into two bags.
“Ok, I’ll go now. Gil and Charlie are sending dinner for tonight and probably a couple of more nights, so you can just enjoy.” We hugged.
“You guys are the best,” I said.
“We all do a good job of being family,” Josie said. I had my parents, but hers were gone. Gil’s family still lived in Michigan. Charlie had family in Texas who had pretty much disowned him when he came out. He rarely talked about them.

Babies are a distraction. Hana woke early and nursed and then was wakeful, looking around, happy being talked to. Zen, never an early riser, was content to leave her with Mom and me. We hovered over her, looking for signs of genius. She regarded us solemnly and waved her fists and kicked. Brilliant, we thought. Since I usually work in the morning, getting my orders from the Medieval Faire out was proving challenging. But playing with the baby distracted me from thinking about Jack. I had not seen him again and there had been no more bombings. Nor had the FBI guys shown up again. I settled into a routine of working and playing with the baby, or as much of a routine as a baby allows. To my surprise, Zen respected my work hours and usually stayed in her room or went with Mom to Dad’s place. Dad lived catty-corner across the lake from me. He rented a cottage just off the lake shore.
The area had once been all farm land and was still mostly farms. But the village perched there at the end of the lake, a hamlet really, made up of the college folk and summer incomers. It mostly served the surrounding farmers, or it had until the Sforza brothers decided to build MacMansions out beyond the college. Farming was hard work and didn’t earn much. Small farms went under everyday. I knew that, and if I forgot and started ranting, Gil and Charlie reminded me that they would not be able to survive without Gil’s law practice. Guido the garlic guy, to be honest, mostly subsisted, shutting up his house in winter and living in two rooms. The worst part of the ‘development’ was that it wouldn’t bring anything good to the hamlet. Some work during the building, some custom for the tradespeople, but the people who lived there would work elsewhere, up in Syracuse. They’d live out for the cachet of it, but not be part of the community. Or worse they’d want a Wal-Mart, which would kill the small businesses in the area.
Still, I thought, blowing up the houses wouldn’t solve anything. I sympathized, though. The houses were ugly, shoddily built, designed to sell but not to last. I was on the upstairs porch, hand sewing faux fur onto the Father Christmas I needed for the Medieval Faire. My own costume hung in the doorway, a long skirt, which could be ruched up on hot days to reveal the petticoats beneath, and a linen blouse, not too low cut. I was, after all, a tradeswoman not a tavern wench. In a nod to sauciness though, I wore bright red leather sandals. Charlie and I shared booth space which we divided. He sold hand-sized pies and sweet buns. The Faire ran four weekends from mid-July to mid-August, so it took a lot of the summer for both of us. But it also generated a lot of business for me and some for Charlie who had added tiny fruitcakes to his wares. He offered them as samples of what could be ordered for the holidays.

Missing Henry

2010-07-26T07:26:00.001-07:00

So it is morning and everyone is at last in their new homes and spaces. Even Gidget, the new dog on the block. Sad to think of Henry 3,000 miles away. I miss him or miss the idea of the dailiness of him. We want him next door to watch him grow. Pictures and updates are good, but lack immediacy: every new word, every edge toward walking, each turn of the growing mind. We won’t see it. We will be strangers to him and he will be a beloved child, far away to us.

Dollmaker 8

2010-07-18T06:03:00.000-07:00

Chapter 8

Grey and his siblings stood by the front windows. The bags and cases were open at their feet. A lute, a violin, an oud? tin whistles, a small harp, and an uliean pipe sat on the floor and tables. They tuned for a moment and launched into a set of jigs and reels. Grey played the bodran. He taught something called ethnomusicology at the college. It was the sort of college that allowed majors like folklore and film studies. I am not musical in the sense of playing an instrument or singing. But over the years I had listened to a lot of Celtic music. It was great background for doing the fantasy dolls and central New York had a lot of Irish music festivals. Grey and his siblings were excellent musicians.
They changed instruments and Aislin stepped forward to sing. I expected a serviceable voice clear and high, a little thin. A sound I associated with a lot of Celtic groups. Instead, she had a clean, rich voice that harmonized closely with her brothers’ They did a set of songs, some of which I recognized from old Steeleye Span albums. Dougal and Laughlin did a few Irish drinking songs, got folk to sing along and clap in time. They switched again and went back to instrumentals. After about a half an hour of Appalachian fiddle tunes and folk songs, Aislin stepped up again and gestured to Grey.
He looked a little shy, but Dougal gave him a playful, brotherly shove. Aislin held out her hand. Grey took it and stood quietly beside her. Laughlin took up his fiddle, and Aislin began “The Courtship of Captain Widderburn.” Grey took the Captain’s part and she sang the woman’s lines. It is a riddle song, the woman getting the best of a man who wants to marry her and ‘lay her in his bed.” She demands answers to questions and gifts which are puzzles. They sang with the arch, bawdy innuendo the song demanded, but Grey focused his attention on me the whole time.
“Wow,” Charlie said in my ear. I was bright scarlet, I could tell by the heat in my face and neck. “You need to take that man home.”
“With Zen in the dojo and my mother in Zane’s room?”
Charlie grinned as my snappishness. “He has an apartment near the school, I believe.”
They finished and bowed into a moment of silence. Then the applause erupted. They all bowed again. Aislin stepped forward and held up her hands.
“One more?” She glanced at Grey. “Your choice.”
Grey looked at me again and a wicked grin spread across his face. He said something to the others that I couldn’t hear. Dougal picked up the bodran and started a complex rhythm. Laughlin joined in with the fiddle. Grey turned and bowed to me. As one he and his sister began the “Two Magicians,” a risqué song about one magician trying to seduce another. She changes shape and he becomes another shape that pursues her. Grey sang with his sister, but he sang to me again. They went quietly into another piece, a sad song in a language I didn’t recognize. But I knew the music. I had dreamed it for years. Grey was still looking at me, his expression now unreadable.
Grey clad elves, in a long line, snaking down a stone stairway to white ships waiting in a harbor below. It was a dream, one I had had for years. And in the dream the elves were singing the music Grey and his siblings had just sung.
While everyone else applauded, I slipped into the kitchen.
“Who are they, Charlie?” I asked. He was peering into the oven, but he shrugged. He emerged from the oven, red and sweating.
“Why?”
“Their music.”
“They are good,” he agreed.
“Too good,” I said. “That song they just sang was from my dream.”
“You probably heard it somewhere and it got into your head. Or they are Fey.” He smiled reasonably. Then he turned back to the oven, I had a most Gretel-like urge. Restraining myself, I grabbed a couple of the asparagus-filled tarts and stepped out into the back yard for a breath of air. The night was cool and clear. The Milky Way spread itself across the sky. The Bridge of Birds, the Chinese call it. So Jack had told me. A weaver maid, a fairy from Heaven, fell in love with a cowherd and came down to earth to marry him. They had two children but the Queen Mother of the Western Heaven forces the weaver maid to return to heaven. He pursues her, but the Queen, drawing her gold hairpin slashed the sky and a river floods up between them. The magpies, moved by their love, make a bridge of themselves so the lovers could cross over. Eventually the Queen Mother of the Western Heaven relents and allows them to cross the bridge and be together once a year.
Jack. Why was I thinking of him again? The FBI. And, I admitted to myself, Zen’s baby. We should all have been here for that. I wondered what Zen felt about her father. I had no idea really. She and Zane just didn’t talk about him, except sometimes, at holidays, to mention good things they remembered.
“Seductive isn’t it?” Grey murmured in my ear, startling me. His arms slid around me and I leaned against him. He was warm. He smelled like clear water or the air after a rain, sweet and spicy all at once. He was nibbling at my neck and I had about decided that I didn’t care who was at the house when Charlie stuck his head out the door.
“Your Mom, Dana. Zen’s in labor.”
I spun out of Grey’s arms and grabbed the phone Charlie was holding out.
“Dana, where are you?” My mother sounded a little panicky. “Zen’s in labor and you are her coach.”
I ignored that. “How close are the contractions? Is the midwife there?”
“The midwife is on her way,” Mom said.
“Ok. So am I.” I hung up.
“Oh boy.” Charlie said. “A solstice baby.”
Grey held out a hand. He was leading Maxime, who looked puzzled at being out so late. He lifted me up and jumped lightly up behind me. Maxime grumbled but started off down the path. I sat sideways, leaning back against him. I let myself drift into a light sleep. Maxime, sturdy and warm beneath me, Grey warm against my back, humming in my ear.
“What was that song you sang?” I asked suddenly awake again. “I’ve heard it in a dream for years.”
“An old song of my people. You heard it because we have been calling you.”
The warmth vanished in a chill that flowed over me. “We?”
Maxime halted. We were in the middle of the woods, between our houses. Silver bells rang coolly in the still night. Pale moonlight washed the woods and clearing. Singing came from the copse of oak across the path. Maxime nickered as horses will do when they recognize others of their kind. Horses and riders materialized from the copse, solidifying into reality, beautiful and fey. A tall woman on a palomino mare. Despite her long russet dress, she rode astride. A mass of red-gold hair flowed down her back. A score of others, dressed all in silk and leather, followed on horses of all colors. Tang horses, I thought looking at them. Jeez. Tang horses. My mind was grabbing for things I could understand, because I certainly didn’t believe the rest of what I was seeing.
They paused and Grey bowed slightly. “My Lady.”
“Lord Glas. Is this the Maker?”
Grey poked me delicately in my right kidney. “Yes My Lady, this is Lady Dana.”
Without willing myself to, I bowed. I couldn’t very well curtsy from horseback could I?
“Come to Us, and we will properly reward you,” the Queen said. For she was the Queen I had made. Some how I knew that, though I was not accepting it on any rational level. Maxime pricked her ears and stretched toward the palomino. She stepped nearer and the Queen held out a small leather bag. Grey poked me again. I shot him a quick sharp glance but held out my hand. The Queen placed the bag in my palm. She nodded to Grey, and they rode past us, shimmering into the woods and vanishing.
At the house, Grey slid off and lifted me down. Chivalry. He kissed my forehead.
“Aren’t you staying?” We had not spoken on the remainder of the ride. Again it was the wrong thing to focus on, to say, but nothing else would come out of my mouth. No questions about Elves or Faerie or even people in excellent costumes hiding in the woods.
“Oh no. This women’s business. You go be with your daughter.” He kissed me slowly, his hands warm on my back. “Besides, we’re off tomorrow.”
“Off?”
“The sibs have never been here and want to see a bit of the country. I have to go to North Carolina to interview a folk singer there. So we’re all going.” He kissed me one more time and swung up onto Maxime’s broad back.
“When will you be back?”
He shrugged. “Three weeks or so.”
A car turned down the drive. I remembered Zen. Damn the man. But he had ridden off, Maxime trotting eagerly toward her stall and her interrupted sleep.

Dollmaker Chapter 7

2010-07-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Chapter 7
The Solstice party. I was late, as usual. Gil had showed up a few hours earlier, riding Fabienne and leading Maxime.
“Here,” he said, handing me the reins. “We thought with all the creepy things going on.” He waved vaguely. “Well. We didn’t want you walking through the woods.”
“The moon is full. It will be a beautiful walk,” I said. “Besides, you don’t want to leave Maxime standing around here all afternoon.”
“She’d be doing that at home,” he smiled. “I washed her and put a clean blanket on her. You can mount from the stairs.”
“And fall right off again.”
Gil laughed. “She won’t let you.” He rubbed her nose. “Really Dana, we’d feel happier about your coming through the woods with her. No one will bother Maxime.”
“I could drive.”
“Isn’t your car in the shop?”
It was. I hadn’t even thought about it when I dropped it off for a tune up and Pete, the mechanic said it would take a couple of days.
“Besides,” Gil said, “You wouldn’t drive a mile?” I took the reins before he got off on cars and their evil. There was no way to win that discussion.
I folded the Selkie bodies I’d been assembling and stretched. Pounce jumped up on the table and said something in Burmese. He followed me to the shower and got between the liner and the curtain, talking constantly. I told him to hush but all he did was start to lick my legs when I turned off the water. He muttered at me, as if to say, “I know you didn’t mean to get wet.” My dress hung on the bedroom door, a long dark blue empire-waist dress of silk and linen, a sinfully gorgeous blend. The drape looked like Michelangelo had done the lines. Should I wear it or carry it and dress there? Maxime was clean and Gil had put a thick clean blanket on her. No matter what, I was going to smell like horse when I got there. Maybe I’d just lead her.
Zen and my mother were off shopping for baby things and would join us later. I glanced out the window and watched Ziggy slinking across the yard. I wondered briefly what he was after, and then the parrots started shrieking. Ziggy paused and vanished up one of the oaks.
“Pounce,” I said. “Why don’t the two of you eliminate those birds?” He was on the window sill, his head cocked listening to the birds.
I dusted most of myself with powder and let my dress slither down my body. My hair had gone into dread lock type curls in the humidity. I pulled it severely off my face, tied it with a ribbon that matched the dress, and let the locks bounce around as they would. Given the 19th century look of the dress, my grandmother’s cameo on a ribbon seemed appropriate. Pearl earrings finished the outfit. A generous spray of Ralph Lauren, which smells like wet honeysuckle, and I was off.
*
Maxime was an easy ride. I settled sideways on her broad back and told her to go home. She obediently headed off down the path that ran through the woods and ended in the pasture below their barn. The moon was peeking over the eastern horizon, huge and red in the twilight. We went under the trees where it was darker, and I felt a little shiver of unease. Drat Gil and Charlie. I’d have happily walked here and not thought a thing about it. Instead, I was on an 1500 pound horse, wishing I’d brought a jo, the short staff we use in aikido. Maybe it was Ziggy that made me uneasy. He had vanished up that oak, the shimmery one, way too quickly. There was something odd there. Josie believes in other worlds that exist alongside ours. I am pretty sure I don’t believe that, but she keeps pointing to all the tales and stories of elves and Faerie that seem to exist in all cultures, which makes me think. And then she points to my dolls. She believes I am inspired by the fey world, without me knowing it.
Maxime paced steadily along, unaware of my fears. She wore a halter, but I wasn’t holding the lead rope, just a clump of mane, more for my balance than for any sense of directing her. We came to the clearing in the middle of the woods where we had the Samhain bonfire. Gil and Charlie did solstices and equinoxes, Samhain/Halloween, and Yule parties. Samhain we kept in the woods. Not pagan in any formal way, but deeply spiritual, they felt that no mainstream religion fitted them. Friends, food, and good work was their creed. Kindness and respect. They were really good guys, next to Josie my best friends in the world.
At the edge of the clearing Maxime stopped dead and would not go forward. It was now darker and the moon still low enough on the horizon that its light didn’t penetrate the thick pines and cedars of the woods. I petted Maxime’s neck and murmured to her about her stall and oats and Fabienne, whom she liked a lot. She stood there, her ears pricked, wuffling little horse noises. Peering into the gloaming, I couldn’t see anything except shadows. It was a spooky, magic place in the fall when we came to do the bonfire. In summer it had always seemed inviting. Shimmery, I thought and wished almost any other word had come to mind. The wind rustled the trees and the shadows shifted, looking for all the world like dancing bodies.
“Maxime, please,” I pleaded. “Home girl, let’s go home.” I shifted forward and lightly slapped her neck. She shook her head and started forward. The moon slid over the crowns of the trees, lighting the clearing. No dancers, everything looked normal. But an echo of silver bells sounded in the clearing and Maxime nickered eagerly, the way she did to Fabienne, as if in recognition. A shiver slid down my neck.
*
We emerged from the woods just below the barn. Lights were strung in the trees around the house, the path up to the porch was lined with solar powered lamps that glowed a faint blue. Gil and Charlie stood on the steps welcoming guests. Maxime headed straight for them hoping for carrots. I spotted Grey among a small group on the path. He had made it back. But he was laughing and holding hands with a blonde woman nearly as tall as him. He had said he’d be back, he hadn’t said alone. Jealousy leapt up and bit me hard.
I tugged on Maxime’s mane thinking I could direct her down to the barn. She was not the least impressed. Carrots. I should have brought carrots, the only reliable temptation for her. She stopped at the foot of the stairs. Gil handed her a carrot, while Charlie lifted me down from her back, literally handing me into Grey’s arms. He kissed me, murmuring something about missing me.
“Meet my sister, Aislin. “ He extended a hand to the blonde. “This is Dana,” She smiled and extended her hand. Grey’s arm was still around me, and I needed it. The woman in front of me was a twin to the Queen of Faerie. No. her eyes were a pale jade green, but she could have been the model for that doll. My hand went out to hers of its own volition and my mouth said polite things, but I knew I was staring at her.
“Uncanny, isn’t it?” Grey said. Before I could answer, he went on, pointing at two men standing behind Aislin. “Dougal and Laughlin. My brothers.”
They were burdened with bags and cases but they nodded and said “Delighted.” They had dark curly hair and dark blue eyes but they had the same slender face, high nose and sensuous mouth as Grey. As we moved into the light, I noticed they were dressed in slim fitting pants and tunics and high boots. Grey wore a black shirt embroidered with sky blue, a color matched by Aislin’s dress. The brothers were in dark green and silver.
“What’s with the costumes?” I asked.
He whispered in my ear, “You’ll see.”
The food was laid out on two long tables on the porch. They were decorated with yellow candles in sun shaped holders. Suns cut from gold foil hung from the ceiling. Old fashioned, perfume laden peonies filled vases and scented the air. The paper plates were brightly colored Mexican sun faces with matching napkins. Grey reached across the table and stuck an elegant, slender finger in the crab dip. I stared at him.
“I like eating with my fingers,” he said. “ Open.” And he put the dip in my mouth. I handed him a plate and got one for myself. We went down the table, picking up bits of food. For dessert Charlie had made tiny cupcakes, iced with white seven-minute frosting and lightly dusted with edible silver and gold dust.
“Chocolate.” I bit one and held out the other half to Grey. He took it with his teeth, letting his lips caress the tips of my fingers. I took a slow breath. In the dining room, we found an empty window seat that opened onto the backyard.
“I missed you,” Grey murmured against my ear. He sat up and added, “Mrs. Fotheringam was quite impressed by the doll.”
“Good. She paid a lot for it, so I am glad she liked it.”
“She thought it looked just like the Queen of Faerie, as she imagines her.”
“She certainly looks like your sister.”
“Remarkable, no?”
“Unsettling,” I growled. Making dolls is like making totems or conjure things. A good doll has magic to it, a power to enchant. The Queen had had that. While I was making her, she was all I thought about. Normally, I think a lot about details, but this bordered on obsession. I went to Syracuse and Rochester looking for the right fabrics. I spent hours online looking for the right hair and hands. The perfect shade of eyes. Finished, she invaded my workshop space so that there was no part of the room she did not dominate. She seemed to watch me from her pedestal. And everyone who came in stopped dead in front of her, captured, held for a few seconds by something I couldn’t name. My dolls were mostly imaginary, fun, fantasy creations that people liked. They gave pleasure, they delighted. The Queen enchanted.
Now, having someone appear who looked like one of my dolls gave me the creeps.
“You do magic with your dolls, Dana,” Grey said suddenly serious. “You make things that delight people. That is a true gift.” He studied me so intently that I was blushed.
In a fit of confusion and embarrassment, I went for more food. In the kitchen. Charlie was stuffing tiny pastries with asparagus.
“Love your dress,” he said.
“Charlie, did you see Grey’s sister?”
“She is gorgeous.”
“She looks like the Queen of Faerie.” I snagged a hot tartlet and juggled it while I waited for him to say something.
“She sure does”
“And,” I went on, “Something spooked Maxime.” I paused. “Not exactly spooked.”
Charlie stopped stuffing and waited.
“She just stopped in the clearing, but she acted like Fabienne was there, or something.” I didn’t mention the bells because I didn’t want to believe I had heard them.
But before Charlie could say something comforting, Josie, Doug, Ella, Ben and Stefan, three of their kids, arrived. In the other room, flutey music started. This party often went all night and ended with breakfast. It was an oddly harmonious mix. People from the village, students and teachers from the college and a few others, friends of Gil and Charlie from Syracuse or Rochester or New York City. Around midnight, Gil turned off all the electric lights and called us into the front room.

Dollmaker Chp 6

2010-05-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

Chapter 6

I’d had two scotches with Josie. I could walk, but even if I’d had a lot less, I would not have got on the mat. So I hunkered down in the office and told Gil to teach. I rarely watch class from the sidelines. It is enlightening to see from a distance how people’s posture and execution match or fall short of what is shown. It is usually a case of “You think you did what you thought you saw.” I made some notes about posture, hanmi, and mat awareness. Beginners often forget that there are others on the mat with them. Elbows, arms, bodies stuck out everywhere and into other folks’ space. I resisted leaving the office to correct a couple of beginners who were a serious danger to themselves and their partners. Someone near them explained that just lying on the mat after you’ve fallen is less than wise.
Gil was a good teacher, quiet and firm. He taught basic techniques, nothing flashy. A few of the students would test soon, so the review was essential. I made another note to start reviewing in class. Everyone needed to practice moving from the center of the body, a spot about two inches below the navel. I saw that I hadn’t been emphasizing it enough. A couple of the guys, using all their shoulder strength were locked in what looked like Roman wrestling. And Lin, the smallest girl in the class, was absolutely unable to move her partner. The fact that he weighed twice what she did complicated things, but had she been moving correctly, pushing from her center, she’d have had a better chance.
At the end of the class, I thanked Gil and escaped to the house before he could ask why I had been drinking in the daytime. I am not much of a drinker at any time. I slipped into the kitchen for water and ran smack into my mother and father.
O lord!
He kissed me and told me I looked good. He sniffed at me, but said nothing. Mom didn’t notice.
“Hi,” I said, and sat carefully on a kitchen chair, hoping they’d go away. But then I wondered what they were doing there together. Mom had left my father for Florida two years before. They hadn’t divorced, but they hadn’t seen each other. In fact, I hadn’t seen much of Dad, though we chatted weekly on the phone until he discovered email. Then he wrote every day, little stuff about his dog, about the yard. Nice notes. Mom had hurt him a lot, but I tried to stay neutral on the theory that one never knows about someone else’s marriage.
“I’ve found a place to stay,” Mom announced. She beamed at me, waiting for me to ask where. Suddenly, I was so tired, I didn’t care if she stayed in Zane’s room forever. I just wanted to go to sleep.
But my mother is remorseless. “Aren’t you going to ask me where?”
“Where?” I drank the whole glass of water my father had put in front of me to keep from saying anything else.
“We are getting back together,” Dad said. He stood behind my mother, his hands lovingly on her shoulders.
“Yes,” Mom added. We ran into each other in the village and have been talking over coffee for the past few days.
“Fabulous. Just like a romance novel.” She gave me one of those looks, as if she thought I was being ‘satirical,” as she called it.
So that what she had been doing when she was out looking for a place to stay. Well she’d found one. And it would be good for them to be back together. Good for them, good for me. It was hard enough being between them when Mom was in Florida and Dad lived across the lake. It would have been hellish if Mom had lived in the village. “The kids will be thrilled. They hated you being separated.”
“And now we will be here for Zen’s baby.”
That part was the same. While they had been mad at me and Jack, they’d never taken it out on the kids. My father adored babies and children. They never annoyed him. The twins followed him like imprinted goslings from the time they could walk.
Tootsie and Lolly chose that moment to start a ruckus. I wondered what Dad would think about the birds. I mean who in his right mind would agree to live with them. This time it was Zen who set them off. She waddled into the kitchen. Ok that isn’t nice, but as someone who carried twins to term, I knew a lot about waddling.
“I just finished talking to Carrie, the midwife,” Zen announced. “She said I seem set for a normal birth and it should be ok to deliver at home.”
My head hurt, and it wasn’t all the scotch. I didn’t want to discuss homebirth at that moment. The midwife had degrees in nursing and midwifery, which only sort of made me feel better. Zen was healthy. There was only one baby. The county hospital was only five miles away.
“Would you be my coach, Mom?” Zen asked.
Prissy’s line bubbled out of my mouth before I could catch it. Zen glared at me. My mother leaned in, poised to volunteer.
“Sorry, Zen,” I said sincerely. “I’d be honored and delighted to be your coach.” I wasn’t sure that was true and was really annoyed that there was no father involved. Even Jack had managed that much.
*
Jack, I thought, after I had escaped upstairs. Did it matter if Jack was still alive? Obviously it did, but how would it matter? I was done with him, aside from a fair amount of residual rage. But the kids might want him back in their lives. How would I tell them? Hey your dad is still alive? Guess what, it was all a mistake? What did one say? I’d ask Smiley Fed next time he showed up.
I perched on the window seat in my room, staring out at the oaks in the yard. Two of them grew together and sometimes seemed to shimmer. They didn’t of course, but I liked to watch for it, to try to see what trick of the light made the space between them look all slivery and shivery. Pounce landed lightly in my lap and rubbed his head against my chin. Damn Jack. I was sleepy and headachy. I carried Pounce to my bed and lay down cuddling him. For tonight, I agreed with the Feds; he could stay dead.
*
I was sewing hair on a Father Christmas, a few days later, when the birds started up again. Mom was still with me. Dad wanted to fix up the house a bit before she rejoined him. Sure, I thought, Mom and the adjectival birds can just stay with Dana. This time they were doing their vacuum cleaner imitation. Other times it was Mom’s Cuban neighbor in Florida, singing Cuban songs. And since they had arrived they had learned to imitate Pounce. I hoped Mom appreciated that when she moved.
It was warm. Lolly and Tootsie were on the veranda. “Shut up,” I yelled out the window.
“Shut up,” they yelled back.
Oh for Pete’s sake! I stood to go start a fight with my mother and remembered she was off with Dad, shopping for curtains or something.
Zen came into the workroom and lowered herself onto the loveseat. “Those things are just annoying,” she pronounced. “Poppy must be really lonely to agree to her bringing them.” She poked at a swollen ankle and frowned.
“How are you feeling?” We’d gone to our first childbirth class the night before. Six pregnant women and their coaches on the floor in the back room of the spa across the lake. The lights were dim. New Age music played softly as we settled on to our pillows. Carrie, the midwife, handed out bottled water. She talked about relaxation techniques and urged each mother to find the one that worked best for her. She went on for a long time about listening to your body and going with your feelings.
I’d had natural childbirth too. Jack had even been there, feeding me ice chips and holding my hand. The doctor let him cut the cord for each twin. He held each baby for a moment before the nurse took it to do the APGAR. Do fathers imprint, I wondered. Jack loved his kids. He got up at night with them, changed them, gave them bottles, rocked them. But then he’d gone off on dangerous jobs and got himself lost.
A small dumpling of a woman with grey hair, Carrie wore sensible shoes and managed to be supportive and crisply efficient all at the same time. First we’d seen the childbirth movie, then asked questions. Most of the fathers looked a bit uneasy. There was one other mother there, with a 16 year old daughter. She was a cheeky thing. Asked Zen where the father of her baby was. Zen smiled and said California and nothing else. The mother looked at me as if we were somehow fellow travelers. I was pretty sure we weren’t. Zen was a lot older, and I wasn’t sure if this baby was an accident.
“Have you thought of names?” I asked to keep from talking about swollen ankles and frequent trips to the toilet.
“Yep,” she nodded. “Zoe or Zak.”
“Why not Zinnia and Zebra,” I snapped.
Her eyes widened a bit. “ Zinnia would be all right.”
“Zen, where is the father?” I tried to keep my voice as light as possible.
She dropped her eyes and regarded her belly for a long time.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, sounding very young. “I was seeing a guy and we broke up. And then,” she turned her hands palm up. “Anyhow, I’m not sure which one is the father.”
I bit off the thread I had been using with extra ferocity. Father Christmas’ blue eyes stared back at me. Only the work I had put into him kept me from hurling his placid self out the window.
“But,” Zen went on. “We’ll know after the baby comes. One of them was Japanese.”
“What about child support?”
“Not interested,” Zen said. “I don’t like either of them enough to want them involved.”
“Zen,” I said sharply, losing my self-control at last. “The man has a right to know about his child. And to decide what to do for it.”
“Like Dad?”
Here was my chance. I could mention the FBI guys and their suspicion that Jack might still be alive. I could hint that perhaps Jack was not dead. I could talk about Jack and tell her how much he had adored her and Zane. Instead I said,
“You need to keep your legs up more.” I pointed to her swollen ankle.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “What is the fun part of this pregnancy thing? And why would anyone do it more than once?”
I shrugged. “Since I had a boy and a girl at one go, I never had the urge to have more kids.”
“Did you ever want to get married again?” she asked out of the blue.
I put the coat on the Father Christmas, a blue velvet coat trimmed in faux ermine. Underneath he wore a white linen shirt and a waistcoat of dark green satin. He had long white hair and a beard to match. A bit of a cliche, but he would sell.
“By the time the Army declared your dad dead, I’d got used to being alone. And then there were you guys. Most guys wouldn’t even ask me out once they found out I had twins.”
“Were you lonely?”
I set the doll down on its stand. It needed a bit of red somewhere, perhaps holly on its hat.
“That is a hard question. I was awfully busy, working and raising you.” I found a sprig of mistletoe but no holly. “And by the time you went off to school. . . well I was too old to think much about dating.”
“Oh, Mom,” Zen snorted. “You aren’t too old now.” She paused, still poking at her ankle and then glanced up at me. “Grey is a really nice guy.”
“You just met him,” I said a little sharply. Had she and Josie and Gil and Charlie all conspired to hook me up with Grey?
“Doesn’t take me long to get a read on someone’s character,” she said. “He is always polite to me, in a sincere way, not a smarmy way. He takes responsibilty at the dojo. He likes you.”
I finally found the holly and jabbed it into the band of Father Christmas’ hat. Zen laughed and went off to take a nap.

I finished that Father Christmas and four others. I photographed them and added the photos to my order book. Several new silkies needed to be photographed too. Since I only took a few dolls to the Medieval Faire, the order book was essential and it needed to reflect the work I was currently doing, not older work.

Dollmaker Chp 5

2010-05-27T08:35:00.001-07:00

Chapter 5

Josie kept looking out the window, but she must have felt my astonishment. I waited for her to explain, but she was going to make me ask.
I gave in. “Why Grey? Is he a Fed in disguise?”
She gave me a look. “He is a Fey. I think he could put protection around your place, to keep Jack away.”
I sighed. Josie believed in a lot of things I didn’t believe in. She wasn’t one of those new-agey, left over hippies who show up in Rhydursville in summer. Josie believed in magic, deep magic that called on forces of nature. She believed in the Faerie Realm. I loved Tolkien and wished for Elves, but never expected to meet any. I told myself that. Josie argued that my Faerie dolls wouldn’t be so powerful if I weren’t somehow connected to that realm. Even if I didn’t believe in its actuality.
“Josie,” I began, but she talked over me.
“The Feds show up, Zen comes home pregnant, your mother comes back. This is not all coincidence, Dana.”
“Of course it is,” I insisted. “Things just happen.”
“Really. And the bombings and ELF and the Feds and Jack are all coincidence?”
“I don’t know. He can’t be here. He has been gone for all these years.” I rubbed my arms. “And it isn’t any of Grey’s concern, even if Jack were around.”
Josie raised an eyebrow. She got up and started setting out greens for salad. It was nearly supper time. “You won’t know how much it is his concern until you talk to him,” she said in that infuriating tone she used when she just knew she was right. We had been friends so long, that we usually knew what boundaries not to cross. She was assuming something about my relationship with Grey that I didn’t admit to.
“You know, it’s late. I need to go.”
“Hey Ben,” Josie yelled up the back stairs. Ben clattered down the stairs, iPod attached to his left ear, the right ear bud swinging. “Can you drive Dana home?”
“Can I take the bug?” He grinned at her, looking just like a younger, more masculine version of herself, dark curly hair, olive skin, light brown eyes. Josie tossed him the keys. He drove carefully, and talked about his summer plans, working at the inn and a couple of weeks at lacrosse camp. He was looking to go to vet school, wasn’t sure about his grades, wanted to do exotic animals.
“Dana,” he said, as I got out. The Feds were gone. “Mom’s right, you know. Take a good look at Grey. He glows. And then there is your doll. She did, too.” He grinned. “Later.”
I thanked him for the ride and watched him drive away, going carefully down the road, at least until he was out of my sight.
“Later,” I said back, wondering if Josie had set me up somehow. And how did Ben know what we had been talking about anyhow? Josie was raising an eavesdropper.
*
Zen waddled out of the dojo and waved. She was huge. Not as big as I had been, but she was only carrying one baby. I thought about how big I had been and wondered how I had done it. And then, with a lot of help from Jack, I had nursed them. He alternated feeding them bottles with my nursing. He got up at night. I had to give him credit for doing his part when they were babies. And they adored him, crawling and then toddling around behind him wherever he went. I hadn’t been able to fill that role for them when he disappeared. My dad stepped in as much as he could. Jack’s father was more distant and not much interested in the kids until they reached college age. But nothing replaces a father. That was part of the reason I had never remarried. That and the fact that it took so long to have him declared dead. By the time that happened, I was used to coping alone. And who in their right mind was going to marry me with pre-teen twins?
I went in the kitchen for iced tea and Advil. Mom was off somewhere, apartment hunting, I fervently hoped. Zen had headed toward the lake. I really didn’t like her swimming alone, so I got another glass of tea for her and joined her dangling my feet in the cold water. Zen paddled and floated. We talked about the weather, nothing serious. But it was summer and who needed serious?

Dollmaker 4

2010-05-26T09:36:00.001-07:00

Chapter 4

The fires brought the press, more cops, the FBI, and anyone else connected to homeland security. They interviewed the firemen and then worked their way out to the rest of us. Josie put up some of the reporters and fed a lot more of the incomers. Despite their nuisance value, they were good for the local economy.
The same FBI agents came to talk to me again.
“So you still don’t know anything about eco-terrorism?” said the taller one.
“I now know they blow things up,” I told them.
‘We’d like to look around the property,” said the shorter one, trying to smile again and still failing.
“What would you be looking for?”
“Just looking.”
“I think you still need a warrant for that.”
“We could get one.”
I almost backed down at that. They were scary. They would get a warrant and take my house and the dojo apart and find who knew what. How could I know what might be incriminating when I didn’t know what they were looking for?
“Look,” I said, trying to sound reasonable and cooperative. “I have nothing to hide. I don’t know any eco-terrorists. At least if I do, I don’t know that I know them.” They frowned at me.
“I abhor what was done,” I went on. “But I know nothing.” I shut up. They stood on the porch for a few seconds and then went away.
*
Later Grey showed up for dinner which turned out to be salad. The feds had rattled me so much I couldn’t figure out what to cook. I mean there was Charlie the chef, and Grey, himself, was a good cook, so cooking intimidated me. I do a few things well. Salad is one. I bought a loaf of bread from Charlie and dessert, too. We ate in the kitchen, with the windows open. The lilacs had started to bloom and the scent drifted in.
“The bombings,” I started. “The FBI was here again.”
“Someone who knew about bombs set them.” He had been out on the fire line.
I fiddled with the vinegar cruet, a dragon shaped piece of glass that probably was meant for something else. But it was part of the stuff sent home by Grandmother Ada.
“I hate it. Ever since 9/11 everything even slightly out of the ordinary feels a hundred times more ominous.”
Grey put his hand over mine. I stopped fiddling with the dragon. He stood up and led me onto the back porch. The sun was just going down. We sat on the glider, rocking easily, cuddled together.
“You are pretty safe here,” he said at last. “No reason for anyone to blow up your house.”
“Unless someone decided the dojo was some kind of devil worshipping sanctuary,” I said. Grey laughed.
“Not likely.”
“What about Gil and Charlie? Some kind of nut could go for them.”
“They’re part of the community. Everyone knows them. Besides, these bombers aren’t home grown. I looked up ELF on the Internet. They move around. They are probably gone by now.”
Probably. What about Jack? Still it didn’t feel quite right to worry at that with Grey, who was the first guy in a long time that I had been attracted to. We sat a while longer as the dusk turned to night and the stars came out. Orion was gone for the summer and Venus was bright on the horizon. Then Grey stood up, holding my hand so I would follow him.
“I’ll be back for the solstice party,” Grey assured me at the door. The Queen of Fairie, carefully packed for travel, was tucked under his arm. He leaned down to kiss me. It was late, but we didn’t want to part. He ran his fingers down my back, and I shivered slightly against him. He kissed my ear, blowing softly. I was just about to take him upstairs, forgetting in the moment that my mother was in the house, when the kitchen lights came on.
“Oops!” said Zen. The lights went out.
Grey turned but she was gone. Good thing, since she was buck naked. The moment was gone, too, but he was laughing. He kissed me again.
“Goodnight, dear heart,” he said going out the door.
Zen reappeared, this time mostly covered by her robe that didn’t quite close over her belly. “Just wanted some water from the fridge,” she grinned. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”
I growled at her and went up to bed.
*
Damn the FBI for setting me to thinking about Jack again. Standing in the workroom, sorting brocades for my Father Christmas dolls, all his rants about Christmas came back to me. “A capitalist holiday, geared to making people spend money on junk they don’t need,” he said. Fun? Magic? Joy? They went right by him. Jack disdained any gifts but things found or made. Since we were pretty impoverished at the time, I didn’t argue that, thinking that in the future, we’d change it. So no presents. No Christmas tree in the house. We decorated the ones in the yard with stuff for the birds long before it was fashionable. After he disappeared, I had even less money to do fancy holidays. And by that time, thanks to Jack, the kids didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Poor Zane spent most of his frustrated childhood explaining to his friends that Santa was not real. Zen suffered silently. I wondered what she would do with her own baby.
When they were around twelve, I went to a doll show and discovered Father Christmas, that figure from Europe. Gorgeous, elegantly clothed in brocades furs, they represented the spirit of Christmas, not just gift-giving. From what I later read, I realized he harkened back a long way into the ancient traditions and religions of northern Europe. I sketched and tried to memorize them, since no photos where allowed in the show. It took years to learn to make them well, partly because I felt they needed bisque faces, not the soft doll faces I usually made. Brocade I could get, but fur was beyond my conscience and budget. My mother, determined garage sale goer, found old bits of fur for me, which I used albeit reluctantly.
“It’s all ready dead,” she said when I wrinkled my nose at the idea.
“Not the point, Mom. People who like my dolls generally won’t like the real fur.” But some upscale collectors hadn’t minded it at all. Now I use faux furs, that are very good to touch and look authentic.
Right now I needed three or four dolls to take to the Medieval Faire in August. The bodies were cut out, but I had costumes and faces to plan. In their silks and velvets and fake furs, they were pricey items, but they always sold. At first I had made them white, in the European tradition. After a couple of years, though, I added African and Asian faces and hair. That opened up the costumes, too. The challenge then was to alter the costumes to reflect other cultures and still keep them looking like Father Christmas.
The Feds arrived just as I had chased Pounce out of the workroom, which set the parrots off. I went downstairs before anyone else could get the door.
“Ms. Bales?” They came up on the porch, avoiding the birdcages and the fuming cat. The windows were wide open.
“I still don’t know anything,” I said. But I went out onto the porch.
“You know they blow things up. They are dangerous people, Ms. Bales. They have killed innocent people in Oregon,” the one who could almost smile said.
“You still know nothing about your husband?” Agent Frowny, the expressionelss one asked.
I moved a couple of steps closer to him. I am nearly six feet tall and after all the years of aikido don’t mind using space to my advantage. “Here it is again,” I spoke very slowly. “He. Is. Dead.”
“Ma’am,” he said and backed up a step. “We think he may not be dead.”
If the other guy hadn’t taken my elbow, I might have fallen off the steps. Cold washed over me and I sat down, slowly, on the top step. They had the decency to walk down into the yard, so they weren’t standing over me.
*
My vision narrowed and everything seemed small and far away. I inhaled slowly and repeated to myself, “I am not going to faint. I am not going to faint.” And Josie saved me. Her lime green VW bug turned into the driveway.
“Josie,” I yelled. “I forgot about our shopping trip!”
Josie was quick. She looked puzzled but picked right up on my lie. Frowny and Smiley followed me at a distance.
“Mrs,” Smiley began. “Ms. Bonesteel.”
I stopped.
“Look. We don’t want you. We don’t really want Bales either. We would rather he just stayed gone or dead. But we think whoever is behind these bombings is dangerous. So if you know anything.” He stopped.
I got in Josie’s car. “Go. Somewhere. Anywhere,” I said.
*
“What is going on?” Josie yelled over the VW engine’s noise. It was about 40 years old and she had the windows down.
I leaned on the door, trying to think. As she drove I kept going over what they’d said.
Jack may not be dead
We’d rather he was dead or stayed gone.
Stayed gone? What did that mean?
“Dana?”
“The Feds seem to think Jack is connected to the bombings.”
“Right.” Josie was watching the road. “From the other side?”
“They hinted he might still be alive.”
Josie glanced over and then pulled onto the shoulder of the road. She turned her full attention to me.
“That is what they said. “ I shrugged. “And then they said they’d really rather he stayed dead or gone.”
We stared at each other for a moment. She put the car in gear and we rode back to the B&B in silence. What was there to say? How was I supposed to make any sense out of the FBI’s hints?
“Well,” said Josie said after cutting fudge and pouring black tea. “If you’d let them talk to you, you’d know more. But start from the beginning.”
“I don’t know where the beginning is. They seem to think Jack has something to do with the eco-terrorists. But Jack is dead. I have a death certificate.”
“You do have a piece of paper,” Josie said very slowly. “But no body.”
I stared at her.
“I mean,” she went on. “There was no body recovered.”
“He went missing in Asia.”
She nodded. “Right. Missing. We all just assumed he was dead.”
I shook my head. “He has to be dead. I have papers and they army sent money until the kids were twenty-one.”
The kids. What would I tell them.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Do you think he is around here? That he might be involved in the bombings?’
I shrugged.
“I mean do you think he could do something like that?”
“Josie,” I said, “It’s been twenty-five years. How would I know? I’m not sure I’d even recognize him.”
She nodded. “It has been a long time.”
I fiddled with the cup and saucer and spoon. “You think I should talk to the Feds?”
She glanced out the window. One of her boys was cutting the grass. Doug was further down the lawn, working in the garden. Peas were in. Rows of strawberry jam sat on the counter.
“I think,” she said, still looking out the window, “That you should talk to Grey.”

Dollmaker Chp 3

2010-05-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

Dollmaker Chapter 3

When I finally got home, showered and changed, it was mid morning. I went to the kitchen for a large glass of water before I began work for the day. My mother and Zen were sitting at the table happily eating the blueberries I had been saving for dinner. They looked quite amicable. My mother had had a perfect hissy fit, complete with fainting, when I came home pregnant. Maybe I had missed the drama?
“Hi, Mom.” Zen said. She looked tired, puffy, her face swollen and pale. What kind of prenatal care had she had so far? She pushed the blueberries toward me. “Have some.”
“I was trying to convince, Zen to go to a real doctor,” my mother said. “Not some midwife.”
“Have you had any prenatal care?” I sounded more peevish than I wanted to.
She shrugged. “I went to the clinic a few times. I take vitamins and walk a lot. I don’t drink or smoke.”
My mother glanced at me, as if somehow I was to blame for Zen’s lack of care. Zen looked from her to me. “I’m going for a walk right now.”
Running from what was going to be a no-win battle was more like it. After she walked across the yard and disappeared down the path to the lake, my mother opened her mouth.
I held up a hand. “Don’t. I found out about this when she arrived the other day.” I poured myself a large glass of water from the pitcher in the fridge.
Mom had quit smoking several years before and replaced that chemical addiction with more caffeine. She poured herself more coffee and held out the pot to me in offering. I shook my head. I wanted coffee but the only thing I take into the workshop is water.
“So what now?” my mother went on. “I mean you married Jack, but is the father in the picture anywhere?”
I bit my lip. “She hasn’t mentioned one.”
“Oh,” Mom said. “Still that seems to be the fashion now.”
Fashion? Like hemlines? Or shoes? A baby out of wedlock wasn’t fashion. When I got pregnant, it was moral degeneracy, sin and worse, social humiliation. How did things change so much? Maybe that was the fashion part. We no longer cared what the neighbors thought. Even in a small town like Rhydursville. My own resentments, harbored all those years, rose up and escaped from my mouth. “You weren’t this calm when it was me,” I said sharply.
My mother smiled beatifically, apparently forgetting that she had screamed at me for days when I got pregnant. And when she wasn’t yelling and crying about how I’d disgraced the family and ruined my life, she’d treated me to stony silence. My father had hovered in the background. He hated yelling and crying, but he couldn’t stop my mother. He never did blame me, but he wanted to kill Jack. I mean that literally. He never had liked him and he rarely spoke to him, even after we were married.
“At least she isn’t going to get married just because she is going to have a baby,” my mother said.
I stared at her. “Oh like that was my choice. You and Dad and Jack’s parents made it perfectly clear what the options were. Get married or give up the babies?” I slammed my glass down and it shattered. “Damn it.” I picked up pieces, fighting tears. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of my mother. “No wonder Jack disappeared.”
Where in the world had that come from? And what did it mean? I never thought Jack had gone walk-about. I assumed he was dead. He’d gone off to Southeast Asia and never come back. He hadn’t willfully deserted us. Had he?
My mother, who seemed to have developed an aversion to conflict that was new to me, stood up. “I’m off to the village to look for a place,” she announced, as if I hadn’t just blurted out some dark secret of my soul. I stared at her. But she was rinsing her coffee cup.
“I’ll eat in the village,” she announced. A few minutes later, I heard the car pull out. I toyed with letting the parrots loose. But work called and I went.
*
My seasonal sense was always a bit confused. In summer started my Father Christmas dolls. This year I planned a medieval Father Christmas. Santa Claus is a joke, but Father Christmas in brocades and furs is an elegant idea. I laid out the pattern and cut the basic bodies out of muslin. These would be foundations over which I would put more elegant fabrics. Those done, with some help from Pounce who liked to walk through any work I had at hand, I turned to a set of Silkies I was working on. The fun thing about them was their elaborate costumes. I could use silks and piles of lace, or I could dress them as simple peasant women. I made men too, fabulous princes of the Perilous Realm. Though they were mostly special orders, I was working up a stock of less elaborate ones to take to the Medieval Faire in late August.
Charlie and I shared booth space. He sold organic lavender, peppermint, thyme, and savory plus baked goodies. I brought Silkies, a couple of Father Christmases, and a portfolio of my other dolls. Over the four weekends of the Faire, I usually sold all the Silkies and took orders for other dolls, mostly baby dolls dressed for Christmas or whatever Father Christmas I was doing that year. Not to be left out, Gil was the Faire’s Rat Man.
*
When I arrived at the Inn the next morning, to talk to Josie about Zen, my mother and the parrots, I found her reading the paper. Breakfast was over and the student maids were busy cleaning up. When her own four kids were younger, she’d ‘hired’ them. Now that they were grown, she hired a couple of kids from the college who could work around their class schedules. Josie believed that her job was to decorate and cook for the B&B. Cleaning wasn’t part of her work. To her credit, she also fed the workers, which engendered a lot of loyalty. I admired the way she managed that. I poured myself the last of the juice that was sitting on the counter and sat down on the back porch beside her. Before I could begin to tell her about Zen, my reason for coming, she tossed the paper at me.
“Just look at that.” She jabbed at the headlines with a purple nail that almost matched her purple jewelry. Josie loved color and wore lots of it. Today she had on yellow capris and a yellow top. She looked like an Easter egg, but since I was dressed in my usual jeans and an aikido tee shirt who was I to disparage someone else’s style choices?
The headline read ECO TERRORISTS BLOW UP MACMANSION. There was a new subdivision going up on the other side of the lake, big houses, cheaply built on small lots. Fifteen acres of forest had come down to make the subdivision. Some of them were to be summer homes for folk coming up from the city, or rentals which was worse. We hated them, hated what they stood for, but had been unable to stand against the builders.
No one was hurt, according to the story.
“They should have blown them all up.”
“There are people living there,” I reminded her.
“Ok all the empty ones. The cops think it is a group called ELF. This must be why the Feds are around.”
I shivered suddenly.
“They wanted a room here,” she went on. “I told them I was full up for the summer.”
“Are you?”
“No, not yet. Your mother came by. She’s looking for an apartment.”
I pulled on my hair and ears. “She’s moved back.”
Josie looked a question.
“Yes, she has the parrots. I mean what’s with that? She has three nice children and five grandchildren and a great grand on the way and her emotional life revolves around two idiotic parrots.”
Josie waited a beat and then said, “No one will rent to those birds.”
“Maybe I’ll just move in here, and let her and Zen have the house.”
I told her about Zen.
“Zen will be all right,” Josie said. “And yes, I can suggest a good midwife.”
I sighed.
“Don’t sigh,Dana. People have babies all the time. I am more concerned about your mom. And your dad.”
“Yeah, I haven’t spoken with him, but I wonder how he’ll take it.”
“And will he take her back?” Somehow it didn’t seem like my problem, but since they were my parents, it was going to be. It had been when Mom went to Florida. Dad was devastated, but would not move with her.
“I don’t know. They are my parents, so I wish he would. But she hurt him really badly.”
“It is never just one person’s fault.”
I laughed. “Yes it is. It was all Jack’s fault.” I was kidding. Mostly. Josie and Doug had been together without ever marrying for nearly 25 years. My sisters were both happily married. So what had happened to me? I’d married the wrong man? Was it that simple? Jack had disappeared, that’s what happened.
*
The selectmen called a town meeting a few days later to discuss the bombing. We met in the library, a three-story house left over from the Revolutionary War times. It was still cool enough that we could meet upstairs with the windows open, not needing the air conditioner which was so loud that we couldn’t talk anyhow. Charlie, Gil, Josie and I squashed onto one of the old pews used as benches. The Sforza brothers sauntered in and took seats near the front. They looked like the hoods they were in their black shirts and suits. But the work they did didn’t dirty their hands. The rest of us came in work clothes, straight from the day, from shops and farms. The meetings were always at six, so we could get home early. Meetings were limited to one hour, by general agreement, and the old pews. In a town that had no traffic light, a tiny post office, a volunteer fire department and two full time cops there was rarely a lot to discuss.
Tim Fazio, the town selectman, came in and called the meeting to order. Anthony Sforza stood up.
“I want to know what is being done to find the bombers and to protect our property,” he began before Tim could open the discussion.
Nick Connor, the police chief, said quietly, “We are investigating. And the FBI are here.’
That silenced Sforza for a moment. I nudged Josie,”I’ll bet they aren’t keen on that.” Everyone knew that the Sforza brothers were mobbed up. But there was no evidence or not enough to bring an indictment, though they had been investigated a couple of times. Their cousin, Gino, ran the mozzarella distribution in the area and had tried to lean on Art McGuin who ran the only pizza place in two townships and who only used organic cheese. He’d basically told them to go to hell. Since they didn’t distribute organic and Art was a small buyer, they’d left him alone.
“The FBI will be in town and interviewing residents,” Nick was explaining when a deep rumble startled us. We felt the noise as well as heard it. Earthquakes are not unknown in our region, though they are usually small.
“Thunder?” Josie suggested.
“That’s not thunder.” Charlie got up and stepped out the door onto the balcony. He stood a movement, looking south.
“That was an explosion,” he said. Everyone jumped up and rushed to the windows. A faint redness colored the sky out beyond the spires of St. Brigid’s campus. The village is at the head of the lake, the college just to the west, and a little south of that the MACMANSIONS spread along the west side of the lake.
The meeting ended as everyone scrambled for the door. Nearly all the men and most of the women at the meeting were part of the fire department. Josie and I headed for the station, where we did dispatch. Gil, Charlie, and the rest, even the Sforzas pulled out the hose truck and headed for the new subdivision. Three more explosions went off while they were doing that.
“Four,” I said.
“And one the other night.” Josie added. “That is all of the empty ones.”
“I really don’t like this,” I said just to say something into the silence.
Josie nodded and answered the phone. Everyone who wasn’t out fighting the fire would call or show up to find out what was going on. I thought about the FBI again. Why had they wanted so desperately to connect me to Jack and him to ELF? It made no sense to me. I’d never even heard of ecoterrorists until they showed up.
*
While I was contemplating that and Josie was making coffee, my father arrived. Tall and rail thin, in his seventies, he no longer went out on the fire line, but he always came to the station. He checked supplies and monitored the radio.
“Dana. Josie,” he kissed both of us on the head. “How is it going?”
“Three houses apparently just blew up,” Josie told him.
“The guys are wetting the trees,” I added. “And the couple of inhabited houses in the subdivision.” There were other houses along the west side of the lake, small cottages nestled in woods. But the subdivision was stripped land. If the woods or houses didn’t burn, the fires would go out. There was no fuel for it.
Dad nodded. “You girls got any coffee?”
We laughed. Josie handed him a big mug of coffee, black. “Really, Ed, we haven’t been girls in a long time.”
“To me, you’re girls.” He grinned at us. It was good to see him smile. I was never sure what happened between him and Mom, but he’d been really sad since she moved off to Florida. I thought about telling him about Zen and then changed my mind. Not right there, not at that moment when he was joking with us and looking happy.
The men were out most of the night guarding the bit of woods that bordered the college. The blasts destroyed the houses, but a dry spring had left the woods vulnerable.
*
Because of the fire, I didn’t have class the next morning, but Grey came by anyhow. Zen was at the lake, and my mother was down there so she wasn’t alone in the water.
“Oh.” He paused in front of the Queen, one hand outstretched to touch her, but he stopped himself. “I hadn’t seen her finished. She’s perfect.”
Something in his tone made me look up. He walked around the table she sat on, his fingers still stretched toward her, but never actually touching.
“Perfect?”
“Just as I always imagined such a being would look,” he said. “In fact, she is partly why I came by.” He perched on my work chair. “I’m off to Scotland in a couple of days and I can deliver the doll if you like.”
“Scotland’s pretty big.”
“You said she was going to a woman in Kirkwall. My mum’s on the same island in the Orkneys.”
“Your mum is on the same island as Mrs. Fotheringham?” I sounded like the parrots.
“She’s from Kirkwall.” He held up the mailing label. “Mum’s in Holm.” He grinned as if I knew where that was and all was settled.
I was reluctant to let the Queen go. I’d put off mailing her as long as I could.
“She’d be safer with me than the post. I can hand carry her.”
In the end, I decided he was right. He was probably more trustworthy than the mail service, at least in terms of not damaging her.

Dollmaker Chp. 2

2010-05-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

Chapter 2

The evening class had just begun. I was standing in the door, watching students practice falling when my mother’s champagne Buick LeSabre attached to a U-Haul trailer nosed down the driveway. We were practicing break falls and making a lot of noise, so I didn’t hear the car immediately. But the moment she took the birds out of the car they began screeching and carrying on. Pounce, who often observed practice from the rafters streaked off to check out the new sounds.
“Dana,” Mom waved. She was setting the bird cages on top of the car. She struggled across the lawn, the tiny little heels of her shoes sinking in the grass. She wore those cropped pants we used to call pedal pushers and a billowy pink top. What was in the trailer?
I motioned to Grey, my highest ranked student, to take the class and dashed out to intercept my mother. She had never understood my love of aikido and would have walked right into practice. She blamed my long involvement with aikido on the missionary Bonesteel grandmother and her Japanese art collection. Really it was the time spent in Okinawa and a need to find some space for myself, away from the twins. Not something to tell my mother.
“Mom,” I said. I was glad to see her. I love my mother, and I had missed her since she ran away to Florida. Now it looked as if she were back to stay. “You look great. Love the new hair color.” Blonde this time, but not a pale blonde, not her natural color. We hugged briefly and headed for my house. I steered her off the lawn and onto my raked gravel drive. I didn’t need her to break an ankle.
“What a drive,” she said. “I’ve never driven with a trailer. And the trucks on I81.” She kind of flapped her hands and let the monologue drift off. I was distracted by the cat.
Pounce had slunk across the lawn and was poised beside the back of the car. He turned at my whistle but didn’t come to me. Not that he ever did. Mom noticed him and charged off to save her birds.
“Shoo. Get away,” she yelled waving her arms. Cats were another interest we didn’t share. Tootsie and Lollie started yelling “Cat” and “Mommy.” A cage in each hand Mom followed me up the front steps and across the porch.
“Let’s leave the birds out here for now, Mom.”
She glared at me. Pounce watched curiously from the railing. He wasn’t much of a hunter and wasn’t too brave, but he was, like all his kind, fatally curious. I picked up the cat and carried him into the house. The bird in Mom’s right, Tootsie or Lollie, who could tell? hand screeched at me and yelled, “Keep away!” She set them down on the floor and followed me. I wondered where Ziggy was but thought I wouldn’t bring him up.
Over the years, I had converted the the front parlor and a back parlor into my shop and office. The kitchen and the dining room remained pretty much what they had been though I had updated the kitchen a bit. A refrigerator, a new stove, not that I cooked much, and a microwave, and a dishwasher. I kept my grandmother’s large oak table and Shaker style chairs. I stripped and painted the woodwork a pale yellow to go with the country French blue on the walls. Cheery in summer and warm in winter, the kitchen was a place to eat or sit and watch the backyard. The sun tea jar was on the table. I poured us each a class and carried them into the shop area.
My head ached. Mom didn’t know about Zen. I didn’t know about Zen. She’d mostly slept since arriving, though I had seen her going down to the lake in her bathing suit earlier in the day. But we hadn’t talked. Who was the father? Was he in the picture? Drat the child. She of all people should have known better.
“So, where shall I put my things?” Mom said.
“Which things?” I gestured at the car and U-haul in front of the house.
“Oh that,” Mom said. “I’ll just be here until I find a place in town.”
She was moving back. But apparently not back in with my father. Did he even know she was here?
Mom walked around the shop, touching things. She paused in front the Queen. I bit my tongue to keep from yelling at her.
“This is wonderful,” she said, her hand straying and then returning to her side.
“Thanks. She is for a woman in Scotland.”
“Very nice. Branching out from the usual soft dolls. I hope she paid well.” Mom was always interested in the money aspect of my life. Who could blame her? I’d ended up back in her house with the twins for a long time. She always found my eccentric life-style, that is what she called it, unnerving. She still expected me to go bankrupt and have to come home again where we would live on her Social Security and cat food. And now, here was Zen moved back in with me.
“She did.” I was a bit embarrassed by how well and pleased at the same time.
*
I put my mother in Zane’s room on the assumption that he wouldn’t be home anytime soon. It faced west and would be warm. The birds would like that, and it was the furthest from mine. I didn’t mention Zane and Borneo. I left her to unpack and went back downstairs. Grey knocked at the open door.
“The dojo is closed up and locked.” He was from Scotland but spoke with an Oxbridge accent spiked with a Scots burr.
“Thanks.” He and I were sort of flirting. Grey’s aikido style was soft and powerful. His body flowed against his partner’s in an almost obscene way. Or maybe it was just the long queue of dark hair that reached his waist.
“Mum moving in?”
“No, just staying until she finds a place.”
He gave me a look.
“No, really, she isn’t moving in.”
He kissed me, a warm affection kiss. “See you tomorrow morning.”
*
Mom was up with the dawn because the parrots were. She had the coffee made when I came down on my way to the 6:30 class. I snagged some bread and drank a cup of weak coffee. She couldn’t make drinkable coffee to save her life.
“You should have some yogurt. At your age you can’t get too much calcium.”
“Gotta run to class.” I did run out the door feeling like a teen again. Tomorrow, I’d skip the coffee and go through the workshop on the second floor and down the outside steps. Maxime stood patiently beside the open dojo door. She had a feedbag on and was contentedly eating her breakfast. Gil had put iris and tulips on the shelf in the tokonoma, the flowers of late spring and early summer. I unfolded and stepped into my hakama. I was tying the strings and thinking about what to teach as the others drifted in. A car pulled down the drive, a grey town car with two men in the front seat.
Drugs? Was someone in the dojo dealing? Meth was a problem in the outlying areas of central New York. A couple of the college kids came to mind, but I hadn’t seen any signs. The men sat in the car, waiting for me to come to them. Too bad. If they wanted to talk to me, they could get out. Behind me, Gil clapped twice, to signal the students to line up. I knelt on the mat and bowed toward the tokonoma, the spiritual center of the dojo. A picture of the founder of aikido hung there and a copy of his calligraphy of the characters that made up the word aikido. I’d left as much of the original stone and wood as possible. The walls were grey slate, a rock in such abundance in New York that we couldn’t use it fast enough. The framing wood was oak, but inside, the stalls had been done in walnut. Noren in spring greens hung over the dressing room doors. The sheet rock was painted a soft creamy color for warmth and light in winter when we need those things.
But on this morning, early June sun poured through the skylight.
*
The morning class is my favorite. I love the easy, slow warm up. In summer the sun is up and birds sing all around the dojo. In winter it is dark and cold and still. Sometimes the moon is still up and the dojo is flooded with silver light. Only about six or seven people come, so training is intense. We always end up sweating and laughing. I closed my mind to the men in the car and began a series of yoga stretches. After we’d stretched and rolled, I called Grey up for the first technique. What I do bears no resemblance to what Steve Segal does, to movie aikido. I had learned a hard style in Okinawa and over the years, as my body got older, softened it. Aikido depends on circles for its power. It works well for women who are centered in their hips. Men, whose strength is in their upper body often take years to understand how to move from the center of their body, a mythical spot located about two inches below the navel. Watch any dancer, runner, baseball player. Their balance and strength originate in that center of the body, all movement flows from that still place.
Grey grabbed my gi lapel. I turned as he touched me so that I was beside him for a moment, then slid forward at an angle, so that my hips moved across his line. He stepped forward, fell smoothly into a front roll, and came back to his feet.
We progressed from there to actually sliding the hips under the partner’s body and forcing a hip throw. By the end of the hour we were sweaty and laughing and full of endorphins for the day. I bowed to the class, turned and bowed to the tokonoma, and stepped off the mat to remove my hakama. The guys from the car were standing outside, at a distance from Maxime, but clearly wanting to come in. City guys afraid of horses. I smiled to myself and stepped back onto the mat area to fold my hakama, the wide-legged pants the samurai wore. They are traditional in most martial arts: kendo, archery, naginata.
“Mrs. Bales.” One of the guys had edged closer to the door. Since I had never called myself that, I didn’t turn or answer them. Gil crossed to the door and asked if he could help. Maxime moved toward him. She often stood just at the doorsill with her head inside. She didn’t drool, so it was all right with me.
“Dana?” Grey knelt beside me to fold his own hakama.
I shrugged. “Feds of some kind. But it’s beyond me what they want.”
“Who is Mrs. Bales?”
“My ex’s mother,” I growled. “This is creepy.” I got up and turned toward the door just as Gil was coming toward me.
“They want you, it seems.”
*
I took a breath, centered myself. “Can I help you?” Best to start out polite. They flashed badges and ID. FBI. Double drat. I’d be swearing soon.
“You are Mrs. Jack Bales?”
“No. I am Dana Bonesteel.”
The guy sighed. But I had no reason to make anything easy for them. Besides Jack had been declared dead years before.
“But you were married to Jack Bales in 1972?”
“Yes.”
“He went missing in 1977 and was declared dead in 1984?”
I nodded. Whatever they were going to tell me, I didn’t want to hear it. Jack was out of my life, had been for an age. Sometimes the children reminded me of him, especially Zen, who was the one like him. Mostly, though, I could go for long periods of time without even thinking of him.
“What do you know about the Earth Liberation Front in this area?
“Never heard of them?”
He looked skeptical. “We think they may be operating in the Central New York area.”
“Are they farmers?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Farmers?” The two of them glanced at each other. Clearly I had said the wrong thing.
“They are terrorists, Ma’am,” said the shorter one.
“Well, I am not,” I said, turning away.
“Ma’am, we are very interested in this group of terrorists.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“We are checking in with the rural folk in the area,” said the tall one.
“Just to let you know we think they might be in this area,” said the shorter one. He tried to smile, but his face didn’t work that way. “We’d like you to let us know if you hear or see anything suspicious.” He stuffed a card into my hand.
I turned away and walked into my office. I dropped the card in the wastebasket. I am not a rude person, but when Jack went missing, I had FBI, CIA and every other letter combination at the Feds’ disposal following me around, tapping my phone, harassing my friends and family.
The grey car eased out of the driveway.
Grey and Gil regarded me from the office doorway.
“What is the Earth Liberation Front?” Grey asked.
“Eco-terrorists,” Gil said.
“What’s it to do with you?”
“No idea,” I said snappishly.
“Come on.” Gil held out a hand. “This needs breakfast.” He nodded to Grey to include him in the invitation. Still in our gi, we all mounted Maxime. While Gil and Charlie’s land abutted mine, their house was on the far side of the property, about a mile away. No one spoke, but my mind reeled. Jack? Why had they brought up Jack? I had never taken his name. Now some eco-terrorists may or may not be in the area and the FBI comes straight to me calling me Mrs. Bales.
*
Over waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, I laid it all out again. Gil and Charlie knew the story, but Grey didn’t. And this was not how I had planned to fill him in on my life.
“I got pregnant at the senior ball. We got married. Jack enlisted in the army. They sent him to language school for Chinese; the twins were born in California. We lived in Okinawa. When the kids were about five, the Army sent Jack on yet another ‘mission,’ and we came back home. He never returned.” I drank coffee and scraped whipped cream off my plate.
“There is more.” Charlie held out the bowl. Bald, tattooed, he was about 6’5” and weighed a good two-hundred and fifty pounds. He had the sweetest smile I have ever seen on an adult and seven diamond earrings in his left ear. “Anyhow,” Gil put in, “After seven years, the government declared him dead.”
Thinking about it now, for the first time in a new way, I realized how stupid I had been. Why had they continued to give me money for the kids? What had Jack been doing for the Army that they would pay after his death? Some sort of death benefit, they’d said, and I’d been so desperate for money, I hadn’t looked at it closely. Who knows what the government does anyhow? My mother helped with the kids, and I worked as a maid at the Lakeside Inn before Josie owned it. I waited tables and made dolls at night, trying to get myself established.
“But kept sending money.” I said. “Jeez, I should have known that wasn’t right.”
“What do you mean not right?” Grey asked.
I stared at him. “Something’s fishy. They wanted to connect to Jack, not just talk about eco-terrorists. What purpose would they have for doing that?”
“That,” said Charlie, “Is way creepy. I mean if they were worried about eco-terrorists, they haven’t talked to us.” He’d been a marine in Vietnam and had a slightly paranoid streak.
I helped myself to more whipped cream. ‘How about Bruno?” Bruno Orsini lived beyond their farm, an ancient Sicilian who grew the best garlic this side of California.
“Speaking of creepy,” Gil said slowly. We turned to him. “I found a small campfire down by the lake. Kids probably, but it was right on the edge of our properties.”
I swallowed a mouthful of whipped cream. “Stop. I am not going to get all crazy about this. I did it once, when Jack vanished. Never again. Besides,” I took a big breath. “Zen is here, pregnant.”
And then I started to cry. I buried my face in my hands, trying to get a breath and unable to stop the waves of sobbing that came over me. Finally I looked up. Grey was holding out a napkin, saying “Go on luv, have a good cry. You’ll feel better.” Charlie extended the bowl of whipped cream, his face a wrinkle of anxiety. And Gil was patting my hand, not in a soothing way, but agitatedly, in a way that made me want to slap his hand away. And suddenly, I felt a tsunami of giggles coming up from my chest. I jumped up and ran into the bathroom where I turned on the fan and flushed the toilet while I sat on the seat, laughing helplessly.
When I could finally breathe without giggling or crying, I splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror it was red and blotchy. My family on both sides is ash blonde, and the pale hair, red nose and cheeks and blue eyes made me look like Miss America of the Demented. I didn’t even have a lipstick.
The guys were artificially busy when I came out of the bathroom. Grey was washing dishes. Charlie had started to mix up something in a giant earthenware bowl. Gil was looking at loose ends, but as soon as he saw me, he announced he had clients to call and disappeared into his office. Men.
“I am going home,” I said to the room.
Grey wiped his hands. “I’ll walk with you.”
‘You don’t have to.”
“Yes I do. My car is there.”
“Ah so chivalry is dead.”
“Been so for a long time,” Grey agreed.
We walked in silence. I was thinking again about Jack and eco-terrorists, whatever they were. Grey sang softly to himself. He has a glorious voice, so the singing was all right.

The Dollmaker

2010-05-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1

When the fifth storm of a very early hurricane season threatened Florida, my mother left a message on my answering machine.
“Hi Dana, this is mom! There is another hurricane forecast, but you probably have seen that on the news. So I am getting out of here. I should arrive there on Friday. Can’t wait to see you!”
Getting out of there? She didn’t mention plane schedules. She was driving. She owns two yellow-fronted amazon parrots, loud, rude parrots. Surely she wouldn’t drive all that way with those birds? They were part of the reason my mother lives in Florida instead of with my father, near me, in Rhydursville. And what did she mean by ‘there’? Was she coming to my house or coming back to Dad.
“Dang,” I said aloud. Pounce, my Burmese cat, muttered something back in Burmese. A lot of what he says sounds like swearing, and it sure sounded like what I felt. I’m not one of those women who lives with her cats and ascribes human feeling to them, much less talks to them. All right, I do talk to them. But they don’t talk back. Pounce is just mouthy and yeowly. My other cat never makes a sound. He lives like a ghost in the dojo and rarely comes in the house.
There were other messages, business mostly. But there was one from Zen, my daughter. “Mama, I need to come home for awhile. Delta 789, Wednesday five p.m.” Alarms went off in my head. “Need” wasn’t a Zen word. And there was one last message from her twin, Zach, who announced he was leaving for Borneo to study orangutangs. He’d mentioned something about a field trip in his emails of late, but not anything definite.
I sat down at the work table. What in the world was going on? My mother was escaping hurricanes. I could understand that. But what was up with the kids? Zach was environmental science post doc at Stanford. He specialized in large primates. A chance to study orangutangs was terrific. But it hurt a bit that he hadn’t even consulted with me. We were closer than his sister and I and usually talked about everything. Though I suspected that he thought I wouldn’t understand what it is that he does. I went to high school, got pregnant and married their father but never got to college. Zach didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, he just assumed something about education levels that wasn’t true. No, not exactly. Truth to tell, both kids had more than a bit of their father’s intellectual arrogance.
His sister? Well, I’d find out about that when she was ready to tell me. It was
Monday, my day to pack dolls and go to the village to mail them. While I was there, I
would stop by The Inn to see if my mother could stay there. Josie, the innkeeper, and I were lifelong friends, but that would not count when it came to the parrots. Josie would let my mother stay but not the birds. As I contemplated what to do about my mother’s birds, besides feeding them to the cats, I noticed Gil coming up the drive on his blue Percheron. He and his partner Charlie lived and farmed on the next place to mine. They owned a pair of Blue Percheron mares that they farmed with and, at least for a good part of the year, rode them back and forth to the village and to my place. Charlie had a panel truck he used in his catering business, and they had a small Suburu. Riding the horses was almost an affectation. But they were firmly against cars and the environmental damage they do, so they used the horses for transport as much as possible.
“Hey, I’ll be right down.” I called from the second floor porch where I had been packing dolls. Gil slid off the mare’s back and threw the reins over the porch railing.
“Hey,” he called back. “Charlie sent some lunch.”
“Oh good. Lunch. What is it?” I rubbed Maxime’s velvety nose. Pounce jumped up on the railing and regarded the horse. She liked every living thing in the world, but Pounce was a little more discriminating.
“A new tuna sandwich. Olive oil, capers, and jalapenos.” He held out a small basket. Pounce beat me to it. I pushed him aside.
“Sun tea?” I pointed at the gallon jar I had brought down from the upstairs porch. He nodded.
“You going to the meeting next week?” He meant the planning meeting for the Pumpkin Festival. The Pumpkin Festival was a major event for a town that mostly survived on tourism and the small liberal arts college nearby. The festival coincided with peak leaf season, a major tourist season. As local business owners we were pretty much obligated to attend.
“I guess I will. Zen arrives on Wednesday.”
“Zen? What’s up?’
“I don’t know. She was pretty mysterious. And Zach is off to Borneo to study orangs.”
“Cool.”
“And my mother is driving up to escape the hurricanes.”
He looked at the sky, and I studied the paint on the wall. It needed changing.
“The birds?” he asked after a long pause.
“Them, too.” I was sure she would bring them, though she had not mentioned them.
He finished his tea. “Where are you going to put everyone?”
I looked my best beseeching look.
“No.”
I followed him to the porch. Gil rarely stayed long during the day. They grew organic veggies and some hay and they had five nanny goats whose milk they made into small amounts of Chevre which sold at extravagant prices. In addition to Charlie’s catering business, Gil ran a small law practice out of the house. They worked all the time. Of course, so did I.
“Zen can come stay with us if you need her too.”
“Thanks. I think I’ll put Mom in the dojo guest suite.”
“That will enhance practice. All those bird screams.”
“Oh go home,” I laughed and patted Maxime’s rump as she turned toward their place. She was so docile and well-trained, Charlie could have sent her by herself with the lunch.
*
I went back to packing baby dolls. Heavy-bodied, soft dolls that weighed about seven pounds each, they were good sellers. I made them in all skin tones, with squnched up newborn faces, sometimes with hair, sometimes bald. For each doll, I added a blanket and a matching gown, avoiding pink and blue completely. Around Christmas, they went out in red or green. There were also a few Silkies to go to a collector in San Francisco.
The Silkies were my trademark dolls. They were inspired by the Scottish folk song, “The Great Selkie,”about the shape-changers who are seals at sea and humans on land. I stole the idea for them from a grandma and Red Riding Hood doll my niece had. It was Red Riding Hood, with basket and red dress and hood, very German looking. When you flipped it over, there was a two sided Grandma, one was herself, the other was the wolf in Grandma’s clothing.
The silkies were seals on one side, seal heads and furred bodies that turned into humans when they were flipped. At first I made them all brown haired and dark skinned. But my sister wanted one for her daughter. Our whole family is Scandinavian blonde. So I started to make the humans in all shades with all known hair colors. Gil suggested that I start advertising them in bookstores and at the Medieval Faire. I got a few orders from the bookstore flyers. But when I took them to the Medieval Faire, so many people ordered them that I spent a month making nothing else. They have become a bread and butter item, like the baby dolls. They bring in a fairly steady income and are varied enough to keep me interested.
A writer for Fantasy Doll magazine saw one and did a brief story on them. Since then I have had requests for all kinds of fantasy dolls. The Queen of Faerie being the most recent and best paying so far. I’d made her on commission and even used a china head and hands, a real stretch for me. A woman in Scotland had requested a Queen of Faerie. She liked my soft dolls, her letter said, a lovely letter in real ink on creamy paper: could I perhaps do something a bit more formal? I dressed the Queen in pale green silk, a high-waisted dress, trimmed in matching ribbon. I had painted her china face, not something I usually did. The face had turned out beautifully, the eyes exactly the right shade of pale grey, her skin the perfect bisque, a faint blush highlighted her cheeks. She had pale strawberry blonde hair highlighted with ash blond.
Everyone who saw her--Gil and Charlie, Josie and visitors to the shop all stopped in a small pool of stillness before her. Josie said she was magic, powerful magic. Josie believed in powers that existed along side us. She didn’t claim any of them, but she thought there existed along side our world other realities and that there were powers most of us couldn’t use. It all seemed a bit vague to me, but there was something about that doll that was different from any other I had made.
*
On Wednesday, I drove up to Syracuse to meet Zen’s plane. Zen is short for Xenobia. Don’t ask. I don’t know where the name came from. I was overwhelmed at the idea of having twins, and I was living in Monterey where their father was stationed. I think I was crazy at the time. And for the next five years. We lived in Monterey for almost two years while Jack took Chinese courtesy of the Navy. The twins were born there, which I think accounts for their love of California. Of course, if I’d been left a house there instead of in New York, I’d have stayed in that wealth of sunshine. After Jack graduated from the Defense Language Institute, we lived in Okinawa for three years. Until Jack vanished on a mission somewhere in Asia.
I parked and went into the airport, late, as usual. Zen’s flight had all ready landed, so I went to baggage claim. Zen never traveled light. She hadn’t said how long she was coming for, but even a week or two would necessitate several bags. A quick scan. I didn’t see her. And then a woman with hair so short it was nearly shaved, wearing a calf-length dress of brilliant orange turned toward me dragging a small mountain of bags on a trolley. She was very pregnant. Zen.
She started to cry, something she never did. Even as a child she hadn’t cried much. If she hurt herself, she would take a deep breath, clench her fists and hold out the wounded part for a kiss. The tears completely disarmed me, and I swallowed all the words that had sprung into my mouth. I hugged her and did not mention lost fellowships or her own basically fatherless life or disappointment. And that was good because I didn’t want to repeat the things that my mother and Jack’s mother had said. Still hugging , we staggered out of the airport. She wept into her sleeve. Who carries a hankie these days? And I loaded all of her bags into the trunk and back seat of my Suburu. She got into the passenger’s seat, fastened her seat belt and pulled a bottle of water out of her bag.
Water. I had been so thirsty during the last month of my pregnancy. And I had forgotten until that moment, the unquenchable need for water, even as my feet and hands and face swelled like ripe squash. Zen was swollen, but she had her father’s olive complexion and was tanned from the California sun, so she looked less squashlike than I had. She drank and cried quietly. I turned the air conditioner on and drove. Syracuse ends abruptly and farm land takes over. Dairy farms, small farms, horse farms. It is farmland all the way to Rhydursville. Except where it isn’t. Here and there perfectly good farmland had been converted into subdivisions of McMansions. There was one, a small one, but nevertheless a blight, on the other side of the lake, where the summer people mostly stayed. We all hated it.
“Mom,” Zen said after she stopped crying.
“Not yet, Xenobia,” I said. “Can we please talk later?”
“Sure,” Zen said. “But I need to pee.”
That snapped me out of history and self-pity. I pulled off the road and stopped at a gas station. While Zen went to the ladies, I bought two bottles of water. I was thirsty now. I waited in line behind two guys in dark suits, white shirts and narrow ties. FBI. Where in the world did that thought come from? They were asking directions to Rhydursville. As the clerk rang up my water, I watched them get into a dark Crown Victoria and drive off toward my town. The old paranoia from my life with Jack crept up my neck.
*
I put Zen in the dojo guest room. Stairs were clearly going to be an issue for her. She was due in a month. But that meant my mother and the awful birds were going to be in the house with me. Gil had said Zen could stay there, but she was expecting a baby. They were great with goat kids, but I didn’t know how they did with human ones. And I needed her close. I’d have to kill the birds.
“We can call doctor Patel in the morning,” I told Zen as we dragged luggage across my neatly swept path to dojo. It was the other business I owned. I had started taking aikido in Okinawa and continued after we got back to the states. Now after twenty-five years and several degrees of black belt, I had my own place.
“No,” Zen panted.
I took the bag she was carrying and waved her to a chair.
“No? I’ve only been on one end of the birthing process, honey. I don’t know how to catch.” I bit back the Prissy line.
“I want a midwife.”
I sighed. Of course. All those years in California, in Berkley. Zen rolled her eyes. “Don’t sigh, Mother. I don’t need a doctor or a hospital. Birth isn’t a medical condition. It is natural. Women do it every day, all over the world.”
Infant and mother mortality rates slid through my mind. I heaved a few suitcases onto the bed. “Josie might know.” She had had her babies with a midwife, at home. She had five, she could probably deliver Zen herself.  

Old photos

2010-04-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

My parents owned a Kodak brownie camera. They took terrible pictures by today's standards, my parents that is, not the cameras. The camera shot black and white. I have some of those photos because my mother saved every one, unless she was in it. When my Aunt Mattie died and I moved into her house, I found boxes of old photos, some going back to the daguerreotype. The boxes were full of old faces and people in fancy clothes, fat babies in bonnets and hard shoes and a few mysteries. There was a photo clearly set in the Pacific, but the people were unknown. There was one of an elegant man in a white wicker porch chair, signed "Thanks Winnie. It was wonderful.'
Winnie? My uncle's sister was named Winnie. Had she had a secret life? A lover? What was wonderful? I'll never know and if I had some ambition, I'd write a novel about it and solve the mystery my own way. I keep those pictures. I've lugged them to Florida, to Georgia, and now I've brought them back to Syracuse where they started out. Some day soon I will scan the ones I want and keep the photos. The rest I'll give to the historical society. I want to keep the physical photos because they are things Mattie owned and touched, a connection. Most of my photos now exist as pixels.
I like digital. I like being able to shoot lots of pictures and only keep the best one. Part of me enjoys discarding bad pictures. But I worry that some thing is lost here. Don't the bad pictures tell stories too? The shooter couldn't focus, was an amateur. The baby moved. The grandmother in her best black dress couldn't even smile, pictures were too serious. All those get thrown away or if the photographer can't do that, they are stored but never printed. Printing is expensive. My parents often shot one roll of film over a year or more. The printed pictures made an odd album--Christmas and summer all in one go.
I take lots of pictures. I use my phone sometimes--imagining my old rotary phone stuck in the broom closet, trying to explain to my dad who died in 1960 that I can now take pictures with a telephone. Mostly I shoot with a Canon SLR. I got tired of trying to hold up one of those little cameras and guess what I was seeing. My pictures with the Canon probably aren't any better than those with the other digitals. I am not what I would call a photographer, and I am too lazy to learn.
Every once and awhile I get a good shot. That pleases me, though I honestly don't know what I did to accomplish "good shot." It doesn't matter though. When I die the kids will clean off my hard drive and discard the pictures. They may save a few, not many. The good ones I will have all ready given them. No one keeps pictures. I have realized that.They get thrown away with the dead person's clothes. And I think now that we have them digitally the discarding will be easier.
So many pictures. Everyone takes them. Cameras are on the table at weddings. Kids have them. What for?
Why do we take pictures? To remember? To compete in some unspoken art show--my photos are better than yours?
Photos are like miracles: they mean for the person who took them or who owns them, for the duration of that life. Ephemeral, they live for a lifetime. I'm not talking Matthew Brady here or art photos. I am talking about the ones we compulsively take to hold onto the passage of our lives, hoping, not that they will take our souls as some tribal peoples believed, but that they will save our lives.

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you
Bookends, Simon and Garfunckle

Photos. I can no longer imagine what I will do with them.I give some away hoping friends like them. What happens to them after that matters not. Gifts no longer belong to the giver. But I wonder, now that everyone has a camera, what pictures mean. They meant a lot to my parents and grandparents. They were a kind of magic, valued for their rarity and their cost. Now? Do they matter or are they as impermanent as the newspaper? Worse really, since looking at photos on line lacks the tactile reality of looking at albums, pasted and labelled by hand. Touching creates reality. Looking at pixels adds a layer to the experience, forces us back a step, undoes the experience. The photos on Picassa could be anyone's. In some way they are anyone's to look at, losing the magic of intimacy and meaning.

This ends nowhere, really. I think I need to print pictures and make albums and not think of them as anything beyond a moment of history, going wherever it is going to go.

Midwinter

2009-12-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

Darkness comes at 4:30 in this latitude at this time of the year. Everything slows down. It is hard to want to go out in the evening and do anything. Hibernation beckons. Carbs whisper in the kitchen. There is only about a month of this. By mid-January the days will be noticeably longer. But for the next month we closed around with darkness. The sun retreats, leaving us a little uneasy. It is too dark for too long. In summer, euphoria rules, afterglow lasts until around 10 pm. And the opposite happens. We all want to be outside. We work into the deepening twilight, just a bit more weeding, watering, mowing. We'll go in in a minute. Mosquitoes usually drive me in at last, but the twilight lingers and beckons. I no longer have screened porch, but when I grew up here, we sat out at night until midnight or later. The neighbors came over. The grownups drank beer. We talked or watched the lightening bugs comfortable in the warm evening. Sometimes when it was really hot, we stayed out there to avoid the heat inside the house. Once and awhile, I slept out on the porch.
In winter, the porch was glassed in, but it is always too cold to sit out there. I think the glass acted as a big heat absorber. And we could keep food out there, or the Christmas tree until the house was ready for it. Wasted space in winter, essential in summer. So we ritually lugged the heavy storm windows up from the basement and installed them. In spring, in April maybe, we took them down, and put the screens up. I miss having a porch, a place to wait out the long summer evenings, to drink iced tea and chat with the neighbors, a place to read in the shade without bugs biting, a place to nap on hot days. A cliche, I know, but neighborhoods diminished when new houses with air conditioning came into fashion. The richness of life lessened and we all became poorer. I still want a porch, though I don't think it will reverse anything or change much. But it would be nice to sit there of an evening, even a dark evening in deep midwinter. A space heater, a blanket, a good book, and the old dog.

Sad

2009-12-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

The turkey broth got left out and now there will be no soup.
And it was golden and glorious broth from the best turkey we
have ever had.
Sigh

Eclampsia

2009-11-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

Here is what the medical people say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclampsia

http://www.umm.edu/ency/article/000899prv.htm

Here is what the mother-in-law witness has to say.
First of all, and rather calmly, let me say that convulsions are terrifying to witness.
The person convulsing has no memory of the 'incident,' which is merciful. No one would want to remember the utter helplessness of that. Elana started to convulsive and was instantly 'outside' herself in the sense that whatever makes her herself was overcome by the electrical storm in her brain and the resultant physical spasms.
She had gotten up with a headache and blurred vision. She had had an odd headache a couple of weeks before and not been herself for the past week. I knew immediately (see my earlier post)
what was happening, so I did what we all do these days; I went to the computer. Seth started yelling "Mom." When I ran up the stairs, Seth was holding her up, barely, trying to lower her onto the floor of the shoebox-sized bathroom they were in. This was hampered by the fact that both of them are tall and there is a giant stuffed bear in the corner because that room is usually only used by his younger sister.
Ron drove up, at that moment. I yelled out the kitchen window for him to come. He was walking, tired from a night shift, but instinct and training will override most anything. In an instant, he broke into a run, dashed up stairs in time to help Seth get her to the floor.
By this time, I was on the line with 911, a maddening experience for the caller. The operator asks all these questions without telling you she had all ready hit a panic button somewhere on her end and the EMTs are rolling out of their station, while she wants to know the color of the patients toenails or some such other stupid thing. I was yelling that we needed an ambulance, Ron is yelling from up stairs, Seth was silent. After she said the EMTs were on their way, I calmed down a bit and was able to give them information in a polite, businesslike way, which I had NOT been doing up to that point.
The EMTs rolled in, looked at Elana and said we don't have the drugs for this. They called another ambulance service and opened their cheat sheet for what to do with mothers in full blown eclampsia. By this time Ron and I were in their bedroom, trying to stay out of the way.
J was in her room, where I had also stuffed the dog. I think J just cowered under the covers. Elana breathing was so loud, J said later, that she could hear it through the closed door. It was awful: load, laboured, grating, as if it came past the coarsest sandpaper you can imagine. They started an IV and gave her Mg to control the seizures and start to reduce her blood pressure which was somewhere over 280(top number, I kid you not).
The EMTs are pros, but clearly they were freaked out too, consulting a guide book of some kind for dosages. The other service arrived fairly soon. By that time, time was, to use a bad metaphor, dilating and contracting. The EMTs stabliized Elana as best they could and then tried to move her down the stairs. Elana is tall and the bathroom is quite small. They couldn't turn her. They couldn't get the stretcher in the bathroom. They dragged her out, almost literally, turned her in the hall, while I waited for one of them and her to fall down the stairs. Finally they got her on the stretcher, and then couldn't get it down the stairs. They couldn't grip it or they were afraid she would fall. So they back up into the bathroom. A stair chair seemed to be what was wanted next. They get one and bring it upstairs and manoeuvre it into the very small bathroom behind her. This then requires them to lift her again, this time into a sitting postion, and this time they can carry her down the stairs. Outside they transfer her to the stretcher again. She lolls, her head and arm off the side for a moment. She looks dead.
At that point, I think we've lost her.
The ambulance takes off, Seth follows in another. While all this has gone on, I have called work to tell them I won't be in, called a neighbor to take J to work and to watch the dog. Ron and I dress and get in the car. I've talked to Amy, pediatrician daughter, who says they will deliver the baby and everything will be all right. Not so sure, we head for the hospital.
What I can't reproduce here is the terrible gurgling, rasping breathing, the seizing, and then the deathly stillness after. She was totally unresponsive, limp, just like a body, not a person. My response to terror is to go cold. I don't cry and I don't go hysterical. I drove. Ron and I talked, but we didn't know much to talk about. I had heard of eclampsia, Aunt Mattie had nearly died from it and her baby had. Among older women it was whispered about. Now it is so rare that pregnant women hear about it, out there in the distance. "Oh yeah, eclampsia" seeps in from the remote reaches of the pregnancy universe. But I know nothing. And Ron, though he has been an ICU nurse for 35 years, knows nothing.

Post Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T05:26:00.000-08:00

More about Thanksgiving later. Right now there is snow on the ground and my neighbor's 140 pound mastiff is sequestered in J's room. She loves us, is less certain about my son. She is here because J locked herself out the dog's house. She was dog sitting, opened the door to take the dog out this morning. And the door closed behind her. The key, of course, was inside. We suspect the cats actually shut the door all the way. We don't know when the neighbors will be back, sometime today. In the meantime, there is this large dog in my house who is hostile to one of the house members.
On the up side, there is turkey left over. Lots of turkey for sandwiches and pot pie or some such.
And much cranberry salad. So much to be thankful for.

Comfort Food

2009-11-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

Comfort food

The food you eat when you are sad, sick, lonely, in short, in need of comfort. It may be food your mother made when you were a kid. It may be some food you have come upon as an adult that you eat to feel better: cereal, toast and butter, mac’n’cheese, pasta. For me it can be oatmeal, poached eggs on toast, toasted cheese and tomato soup. That last most clearly demonstrates the distance I have come as an eater since growing up in my Central New York, working class family.
What is to change about toasted cheese and tomato soup? The name for one thing. It is most often called grilled cheese now, implying the sandwhich is made on a grill. Toasted cheese is actually another dish in which cheese is put under the broiler and toasted. My mother made toasted cheese sandwiches with American cheese on white bread, which may have been home made when Iwas a kid. And she made Campbell’s tomato soup with milk. The sandwich was cooked in butter. The basic ingredients.
Later, in the pressure of the food industry in America she switched to Roman meal whole grain bread. I can’t remember if I protested. If I did it wasn’t as vociferously as my children complained about whole grain breads. Sometime the cheese was Velveeta. Sometimes chedder.
We never cooked with margarine, a holdover from my mother’s Depression experiences. I switched to making the soup with water as a teen ager worried about my weight. I my twenties, with small kids of my own, the combination began to evolve from its middle class beginnings into a lunch or snack of a much different character.
With very little money to live on, I made a lot of my own bread. For awhile, when we got surplus food, we went back to Velveeta type cheese. Once we got on our feet, we could buy the real stuff: Munster, Swiss, Aged Chedder, Provolone. And those are just the sandwich cheeses. I continued to make and buy whole grain bread in a brazen disregard for my children’s preferences and in the firm belief that it was better not to eat any bread than to eat the Styrofoam stuff that came from the store. I still cooked in butter. I mean olio is some kind of goo that is derived from non-food material, right? So the sandwich changed, but not so much as the soup.
I still use Campbell’s tomato, still don’t use milk. But over the years I have added various things: garlic, a bit of olive oil, a dab of butter, dill. Mostly dill, because it tastes so good with the tomatoes. And there is always basil, another real tomato compliment. Basil, fresh from the garden, spicy-sweet, filling the kitchen with its sharp scent. Basil, dried. Basil and garlic with perhaps a bit of parmesan. The soup grows richer, “mouthier’ acquiring what flavorists call umame: Umami, popularly referred to as savoriness, has been proposed as one of the basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human and animal tongue. Umami (旨味?) is a loanword from Japanese meaning roughly "tasty", although "brothy", "meaty", or "savory" have been proposed as alternative translations.[1][2] In as much as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar to Brillat-Savarin's concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami).
Thus what started out as simple comfort food has become a marker of education. My palate has changed and developed as I have eaten around the world and among friends with more food sophistication than I have. My vocabulary has changed; I know words like umami, that my parents would have though pretensious. My class has changed. I am not a blue collar person now, though I began there. Toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, then and now, mark my progress through life.

A yard full of EMTs

2009-11-18T06:18:00.000-08:00

I was brought up (mostly) and deeply loved by my Aunt Mattie who nearly died from eclampsia and who lost her only child in that process. The family told the story as families do, in whispers and allusions. I don't know the details. I do know the Protestant Irish side of the family blamed the Catholic hospital for her near death: "You know," they murmured, "they save the baby first, and then worry about the mother." I might try to find the death records later. I am just reporting now.
So eclampsia niggles around in the back of my mind every time someone I know is pregnant. And then Elana has headaches. I am mentally running in circles and shrieking. When she gets the blurred vision, I know what has happened. I am on the computer searching for eclampsia when Seth yells from upstairs in a tone that brooks no hesitation. I sprint for the stairs to see him struggling to hold her as she goes into grand mal seizures.
grand mal seizures.
The following are the immediate notes, from that day:
Eclampsia. An angel delivered Ron into the house from work
at exactly that moment.
EMT's arrived. They raced off to the hospital, had to
trach her, her airway and tongue were so swollen. C-section.

Immediate delivery is the only solution to eclampsia, the only way to save the mother.
When they put her in the rig, I was pretty sure we had lost her. Had no idea about the baby.
They got to the hospital and most of the ER, OB and Neonate workers were waiting in the ambulance bay. We learned later that student nurses were called down to watch. This is not voyeurism.
No one sees eclampsia any more. Better prenatal care catches the pre-eclampsia. They put the woman to bed and give her stuff to lower her blood pressure. Full blown eclampsia is such a rarity that the OB who delivered the baby had not seen it.

All this sounds calm. We are educated. We are a medical family. We handle panic through information.
NO WE DO NOT.
Information is good. But it does not control the terror, not horror movie, fun terror, the real terror in the face of the death of a young woman and her baby. A daughter-in-law, a grandchild.
Terror possesses the body, inhabits your stomach, your head, you shoulders and toes which curl under. Really. And then it crawls off and lurks in the form of anxiety. It keeps you up or puts you to sleep. It makes you weepy or surly, snappish and stupid. Deep breathing helps, maybe. It did keep me from screaming and running around. Various things helped at various times: prayer, a friend showing up, mostly Amy's calm transmission of any information we needed and Ron's interpretations of all the ICU speak.
I never liked horror movies. I don't like being scared. I like it a lot less now. I need a Doris Day movie, I think. Or maybe just another long walk with the dog.

Illness as illness, not metaphor

2009-10-23T09:11:00.001-07:00

So somewhere along the line we all got duped. The baby boomers that is. We were supposed to be invincible, eternally young, powerful.
At the moment five friends of mine have cancer, my husband has prostate cancer, another friend has Alzheimers'. How did that happen? We got suddenly old and we didn't expect it. My parents did, expect it. They knew from caring for their old parents, that after 50 or so, it was over. People got old, they dwindled, they died. They got eccentric or demented. Men had heart attacks. Women got "female trouble" and lingered for years, suffering. There was not much to do for them. Medicine up to about 60 years ago was palliative. Hence people's attitude was more realistic, grimmer. I have the sort of temperament that thinks grimmer is ok.
I exercise. I try to eat well but don't deny myself much, except perhaps in portion size. My friends do the same. My husband smoked for 40 years and finally quit. He eats whatever and how much of it he wants. My health conscious friends have cancer. My husband has cancer. My friend has Alzheimer's. Except for morbid obesity, which does clearly limit life, not much else seems to matter. Genes and dumb luck. But our grandparents knew that.
My point here that I am exhausted by health news. My well, so far, friends who go on about diet and water and vitamins and exercise have worn out my patience for such discussions. We are all going to get something. We are all going to die. Can we go back to talking about books now?

Fall

2009-09-13T06:15:00.000-07:00

Fall seems like such a season of changes, perhaps because we are moving into the dark of the year and we resist the changes. We have pulled all the vegetables and added compost and manure to the gardens. We will mulch and leave them over the winter. The tomato late blight really dampened the fun of gardening this summer, though the purple beans and peas did very well. The cucumbers didn't, but they never do. I need to test the soil for ph.
Days are visibly shorter. School has started. Changes. In my climate, where there is real winter, there is never enough summer. In the south, by September I was frantic for it to cool down, to be able to open windows again, for fall flowers. Here, there is a desperate last blooming. Asters, Queen Anne's lace, golden rod cover the roadsides. This year there has been so much rain that the flowers embody the word 'profuse." In the garden, golden and red mums begin to look like a reflection of the turning trees, a last glory before the snow comes. Here, where we could have snow in the a month or so.
Seth and Elana are coming in a month, snow would not be the welcome we'd hope to give them. Better the soft golden glow of a long warm autumn, the richness of Keat's sonnet laid out in welcome, apples, pumpkins, cornstalks and the mellow hazy air that marks a good October. The year disappearing softly into winter, a season most of us dislike. That is all right. We should dislike winter. It is hard and deadly. There will be a winter baby here this year, a new life coming around the solstice, to mark the turn of the light, the lengthening days, like the buds that lie furled on branches through the winter, promising.

Yoga Class

2009-08-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

I hurt my back a couple of years ago and was out of aikido, my usual exercise. So I took a yoga class, as soon as I could sort of walk again. Believe me, there may be malingerers out there, but back pain is massively incapacitating. I got tired of crawling around my house and wanted more (or less) than a surgical solution. Steroids got me on my feet again. But clearly, my back was now damaged. Permanently. So I found a yoga class. And an instructor who is kindness itself. Or so I thought until we got to the end of the first class.
There we are, lying on our backs on the floor. Those of us with bad backs have our knees bent, others are flat down. Let me first explain that although I think of myself as non-competitive, I am. So all class I have been struggling to keep up and worried about not doing whatever as well as the woman next to me. So now I am reduced to competitively relaxing.
“Relax your toes,” David intones. I flex and then relax my toes. By the time I’ve finished, he’s up to the knees. Trying to stay relaxed, I race to catch up. This isn’t competition, I remind myself. It is, indeed, the very opposite. It is supposed to be the very opposite. By now he is telling us “walk your attention up our spine.” My mat is sticky. The room is hot. I don’t like the smell. I am not relaxing. The person next to me breathes elaborately slowly, noisily. My attention is not walking up my spine.

“Now let go your personality muscles,” the instructor goes on. I’ve missed the neck and shoulders, so I struggle to relax my face: mouth slackens. Years of smiling fall away. Words dribble out of the softened lips. My crow’s feet fly away, laugh crinkles melt back into the flesh of my face. Personality, character drain into the floor, leaving me plain. Mother lines, wife lines, grief, fear, intelligence all go. I sigh out a deep breath, imagining my face null, my life gone from it. Terror grips me, but I no longer have a face to register it. I lay there, blissfully outside myself. For a moment

David’s intrudes softly over the breathing of my neighbor as he tells us to wiggle our toes and feet. To imagine energy coming back into our bodies. “Listen to the sounds in the room.” My neighbor’s stenotic breathing. “And the sounds outside.” A dog barks somewhere. It is raining. “When you are ready, open your eyes.” Open them? That would mean using those muscles I’ve let go. It would bring back my crow’s feet. Deep breath. Open my eyes. Return from the oblivion of deep relaxation. I roll over, tuck my legs up under me and stand, relaxed. Not sure I want my personality back. Maybe I could get another one? What happens to them as we relax? For a moment I imagine David shuffling them among the people lying on their mats, oblivious. But he calls my name and says goodnight, so I am fairly sure I am still myself. I look in the mirror. Yep, my crow’s feet, my worry lines. But more relaxed. I walk out into the rain.

Dog

2009-06-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

The neighbor's mastiff lies behind me, snoring. She spends part of almost everyday with us. My daughter adores her, and Sam loves her back. The daughter is working, but I have the dog because I am a sucker for big sad faces. And mastiffs have those. The snoring starts softly.
It has been raining here since mid-June. Really. I think we missed a couple of days but not more than one or two. Usually I take the Mastiff, aka Sam, and our dog to the park down the street. They can get off lease there and run around. We've been today. And now both dogs are asleep. I assume the rumbling is thunder. The floor vibrates softly. Not thunder. Sam is deep asleep and snoring. I am not making this up. The floor does vibrate slightly. One hundred and sixty pounds of dog rumbling vibrates through the floor.

My dog glares at her. Sam takes up most of the free floor space. My dog, Padme (don't ask) feels excluded. She an aloof beast and Sam craves affection. So Sam will move right in and demand petting, while Padme looks resentfully on. They have had two spats and seem to have worked out their relationship. Like two-year olds, they vie for attention, take each other's toys and food and then complain to their humans. No wonder people think of them as their 'children'. I could rant on that, but I just wanted to write about Sam snoring and me thinking it was far off thunder. Dogs are dogs, not babies, not kids, just companions whose breathing comforts us in our loneliness.

Life Failures in all seriousness

2009-06-18T09:41:00.001-07:00

The trim on my house needs to be painted. I can’t do it and get it done in one summer.
Which is why the trim on half the windows is yellow and half blue. And some of the white parts aren’t any more. They are flaky. Those parts are too hard for someone without lots of experience in high places. So I have to get bids and pick a painter. This is anxiety producing. Mainly because of money. The last time I checked this out the painters wanted $3000. That is THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Hence the half-finished look which reproaches me every time I drive up to the house.

It looks slovenly. The yellow windows imply laziness, poor financial planning, and a general unworthiness. IF I had only WORKED HARDER at my career, I’d have money. (Or I would have finished the damn painting.) OR I could have married money but I didn’t. So I don’t have pots of money to throw at painters. If I had done those things, one or the other of them, I’d be able to afford a painter without stressing about it. I could call, get bids, pick the one I think most suitable and they would arrive with brushes and ladders and my chosen color of paint. They would scrape and scaffold and paint, and in a few days, I’d have have new looking trim. Some, I”m sure, would need replacing. Go ahead, I’d say. Fix it. And not sneak in the house to fret over the cost.

Painters will arrive. The work will get done. I will fret over the cost, over where the money will come from, while the primary breadwinner in our family goes off to even more over-time shifts and I feel feckless. This is the deal we have made in our marriage, but I am no longer comfortable with it. At my age a serious career is not looming over me. So I am stuck feeling that I should paint. I should do the work I can’t pay for. In future this could and probably will get worse, as lawn mowing and snow shovellng become more challenging.

Solutions? I have none. Who knows when or if we will ever be able to retire. The economy has twice fallen out from under our retirement funds, leaving the future precarious and anxiety producing. Panic inducing actually. Anxiety doesn’t describe it.
A house is a money sink. I have lived in a condominium and hated it. What to do? An apartment makes having a dog and even a cat, a challenge. A condo has no resale. A tent perhaps, though in my climate that would certainly put the challenge of pets and apartments into perspective.

Today, it is raining. You can’t paint in the rain. I suppose I could make a few calls. The painter won’t get cheaper. And if we get it done now, we won’t have to think about it for years. Perhaps never again. And it will be one less thing to obsess about.

More on wedding pie.

2009-06-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

Pie

Wedding pie to be specific. Not cake. They decided to serve pie. Fruit pies, apple, strawberry/rhubarb, cherry, peach/blackberry, apricot. With gold dust and pastry cutouts on the top. Egg wash made them golden. Nine pies on a table, glorious in their
goldeness and sparkles.

Inside. No corn starch and not much sugar. Mostly fruit, so they were not the cloying, pasty things one finds in stores. The fruit was in big chunks so when it baked and shrank a bit, it remained recognizably fruit and IN NO WAY resembled the typical apple pie filling, for example, that is always waaaay too close to the Ritz Cracker fake apple version. Mush in the mouth.

For my taste the apricot and the strawberry/rhubarb were the best. Maybe a teaspoon short of sugar but a nice change in their tartness from the baked beans and mac and cheese of the wedding food. Salade Shirazi and the bean salad were sharp and crisp and offered palate cleansing. The pies, after a suitable procession from the house, offered rich flavor, sweetness and tartness at the end of the wedding feast.

The Tyranny of Green

2009-06-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

The tyranny of green

This isn’t an environmental rant. Or maybe it is. After a week in Los Angeles, surrounded by flowers of eye-popping color, I am home again in upstate New York enveloped by trees, grass, bushes, weeds, all in brilliant green. Green everywhere. The tulips and daffodils are gone. The roses and peonies not yet out. Spirea drapes its whiteness across green lawns, an echo of winter when snow drapes itself across evergreens. Is white a color? I learned in school that it wasn’t. It is an accent, perhaps, to other colors, a background but not much in itself.

In California, color engages or assaults the eye. Blue sky, pale brilliant blue in day, darker and richer in the evening. The browns and grey-greens in the xeriscaped yards and surrounding hills provide an understated background to the flowers. Along the roads, in right-of-ways, wildflowers add yellow and orange. The jacaranda trees were in bloom, pale purple glory arching over the streets and giving canopy to the other flowers: roses in the usual reds, pinks, and white. Other roses in yellow, yellow and orange, corals in various intensities. Jasmine flows everywhere. It was blooming, its scent almost too much to bear on some streets. Lavender and speedwell spike up, giving texture to gardens. And then there are the hibiscus, again the usual colors but also a deep creamy yellow so lovely you could taste its yellowness.

Flowers enchant any landscape. And I love the colors, but the real beauty of the hills and landscape are the colors I have no name for. Greys and greens that are neither. Browns, tans, ochers both more and less than those words imply. They force the eye to work; it can see millions of colors. The brain registers them. Language unfortunately has not kept pace. The colors tease at the eye; the brain searches for the right words. Greynish doesn’t do it. Is that more grey than green? What about the greens that are also grey? I think there are numbers for them, but how romantic is that? They need dry names, in keeping with their desert home. Something spare and whispering. It’s the desert landscape, the mix of beauty and danger. The desert is beautiful, and much more lethal than where I live, despite the hard winters. Yet its beauty moves me almost to tears. Or beyond them. My soul wants clarity, spareness that untangles the messes of life and gives pure answers. Both arctic and desert landscapes call to that longing. Both are deadly as life. Softer climates, where there is water and perhaps easily available food, crowd the eye and soul, deceive perhaps, that there is no danger. There is, of course, but the landscape cheats the eye and heart. One thinks, I can live here, I can relax, perhaps Eden was like this. IF Adam and Eve had been created in the desert, or even in drylands, that serpent would never have got so far. We who live in green persuade ourselves that beauty is safe, is meant for us, is believable.

All those flowers in California are cultivated to defend against the desert. As with so much else in Los Angeles, they provide a set, a scene to inhabit. But here, where I live in the east, I am enfolded by green. My half-joking fear of being strangled by vines that creep in my windows is only that. Half a joke. Grass, vines, shrubs, trees will take me back in the end, quickly, never leaving a bone exposed.

Reactions to the wedding

2009-05-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

Wedding Pies

Go for and be fruitful,
the Lord commanded

The garden provided rhubarb
southern California yielded
cherries, white and deep red,
strawberries, bulbous blackberries,
and sweet apricots
orangey-gold velvet.

Sliced strawberries fall heart-shaped
among cubes of baked rhubarb.
I dig stones from cherries,
quarter apricots. Lemon
juice goes in,
not too much sugar,
perhaps not enough,
but these are wedding pies
and should not be too sweet.

We sand them with gold and silver sugar,
from the pastry, we cut hearts, lay them
on the tops.

Juice bubbles up and runs out,
tart and spicy. Eat it warm or cold.

Spring

2009-04-12T10:33:00.001-07:00

A thing I need to speak to God about when I get to the place where one can do such things, spring. I love spring, especially in the abstract. Flowers come up. Snow goes away, a great boon where I live. First it smells muddy and new, then green and sweet. It is sunny. Sunny, after the grey of winter, of which we have a lot. The red-wing blackbirds arrive, right after the robins. Boy robins have black heads, their breeding plummage. They stake out territory and squabble, just like human boys. They are cute.
The daffodils are up and blooming, giving a serious lesson in microclimates. The daffys in the village, a mile away, bloom about a week before mine do. For the past few months, seed catalogs have weighed down the postman and my sagging mailbox. I have ordered the tomatoes. And joined a CSA. We plan other veggies, but this summer my heart has turned to flowers. Tulips, zinnias, dahlias, peonies. Things to scent the outside. Things to cut and bring in. I am hoping for wild pumpkins from the ones left out last fall. The snow came so early we never finished cleaning up the garden. My co-gardener looks askance at wild pumpkins, but I plan to move them up back next to the blackberry canes and what is left of the old lilac. I killed half of it and spared the rest.

So spring. Why do I want to talk to God about it?
Sex. Tree sex that is. Thousand of trees spewing pollen all over. The wind fills with it and carries to my nose, eyes and bronchial tubes. It makes my head ache. I cough and sneeze. This year I sneezed so much and so hard I burst a blood vessel in my right eye. People then had to go around saying "ewwww, what happened to your eye?" And I had to say, "No my husband doesn't beat me." Then there is the asthmatic phase, where I don't breathe well and have coughing fits. I lose my voice (not an altogether bad thing). Worse I get whiney and kvetch. In the south I hid in air conditioned buildings. But here? I've been in all winter. Who could stay in now? I can't. I take pills and use inhalers. I go outside. I garden. But I wish the Unmade had come up with some other means of tree reproduction. And I plan to complain when I get wherever.

Movies

2009-03-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

Movie notes

First Milk. Excellent film and a terrific performance by Penn. He does passion and nuance well and never chews the scenery. The film documents that period in the 70s, when the gay movement appeared in the national news like a slowly swelling wave. It asked the question “Do you know someone gay?” And Milk was correct. Gays need to come out so that the rest of us could see them as people Obviously, it took a while. But when the AIDS epidemic hit, despite all the ridiculous reaction to that as a gay disease, the idea that we all knew someone who was gay was easier to take in, to absorb as a culture. The cinematography is good, the set dressing spot on. Especially the geek glasses from the 70s.
A good score, lots of opera. So I turn to my husband and ask “What’s a straight guy to do?” I mean all that opera in this film and in Philadelphia. And the stereotype of gays and opera. How does a straight guy ‘come out’ and admit he likes opera?
This has been keeping me up.

Second Twilight. Egad what a dog of a movie. It stinks from the beginning to the end. The acting is dead. Maybe it is supposed to be that way? A joke I missed? “Vegetarian” vampires who only drink animal blood. Oh please. Bella is so unreactive to anyone or anything, despite her protests that she adores Edward, that she could be a stick with hair. Edward is funny looking and the Indian boy who would be a good match for her and is hot, is simply disregarded. Her mother is about as emotive as a teddy bear. And her father, who is supposed to be taciturn succeeds marvelously.
Oh did I mention the feud between the vampire people and the vampires? Some hint at myth there, but it goes nowhere, beyond glaring, that is. Lots of glaring between the Indians and the vamps. And why is the Indian dad in a wheelchair?
There are scenes of Edward carrying Bella on his back while he climbs trees and leaps about in treetops. After Crouching Tiger, no one should try that. They just look silly. The scenery is good, though it would be hard for it not to be out there in Washington along the coast.
I know, I know. It is aimed at 13 year old girls. That is the real evil of this film which is otherwise just stupid. It replays, albeit chastely, which I do applaud, the old love at first sight, girl in need of rescue, story, that no young woman needs to fixate on. I am not against love. Or crushes. Really they are fun. Vampires as the ultimate high school outsiders are a great metaphor. But how many 13 year old girls get metaphor? Bad boys, even good bad boys, don’t get better just because a girl loves them. The Vampire as good guy is fascinating metaphor in our time. Didn’t they used to be soulless and un-redeemable? Apparently this is changing, e.g. Spike and Angel. There appears to be a scholarly reaction:

Margaret L Carter , a scholar of vampire literature, has defined good guy vampires as vampires who act morally when dealing with mortals, and, as a whole, conform their moral perspective to a human ethical perspective. They obtain blood without killing or "raping" their victims, and generally acquire their blood from animals, blood banks, or willing human donors. A few use synthetic blood substitutes. Carter also maintains that the good guy vampires retain personality and freedom of choice, and are not so consumed with blood lust that ethical decisions become impossible. Good guy vampires tend to emerge in one of two situations: First, they are basically good people who discover themselves trapped in the evil condition-vampirism-and are forced to continually fight against it; second, vampirism is pictured as an ethically neutral state, in which vampires could make ethical decisions on how to find their needed sustenance ... blood.

The moral dimension is hinted at, but not really explored. Bella just accepts that her dream boy/man, love for all time, belongs to a mythical group of mostly nasty folk. And wants him to make her part of the group. Again I believe some 13 year old girls could be so love struck. Bella, however, is not 13. She is smart and independent. Until Edward spurns her in chem lab and she turns into a dishrag, overcome with love, and wants to become the undead? And what I seriously don’t like is that the movie emphasizes this transition, even if Edward doesn’t. Movies have few enough smart girl characters (don’t ask about Hermione, I am cranky about the way she is treated by Rowling throughout). Still this series was written by a Mormon woman, so perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps this old feminist should just stick to gardening and not watch movies made more recently than 1945. :-}

Grinding my teeth flat.

2009-03-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Rage in the Classroom 4 March 2009

To quote Jane Austen, I am all astonishment.
Yesterday, fully half of my Global LIterature class, a 300 level class, confessed that they had yet to hand in one paper. Three of which were due by 5 March. Without them, one could not take the midterm.

Silly me for putting such draconian threats in the syllabus. What to do? I have two dilemmas. The midterm, obviously. And then there is the revision class I scheduled for the day we return from spring break.Students think revision means fixing the commas and handing the paper back in. And for this they should get an A. I will be gone to the south to visit family for the first time in three years. But, being a responsible person, I arranged to get the class covered. And in doing that to give students a chance to revise one of the papers they have already handed in.

Somehow, when I started out, it all seemed benign. Now. It is a nightmare. I asked who hadn’t handed in a paper and clearly there were so many I would have to shift somehow. Or not. And my rage is about that. More later. Add to the mix of slackers, two women who are in the midst of personal tragedy. Three actually but she wasn’t in class and I got that news later in an email. One’s partner was having some breast cancer complication. She starts off, loudly proclaiming that giving any accommodation to the slackers is unjust to those who did their work(despite enormous personal cost, in parens to me). I mean she is loud and says she is going on a rant, looking defiantly at me. And she is very red in the face. Did mention loud?

After years of aikido training, I finally manage to use it. I sidestep the attack.I look her straight in the eye. I hold up a hand “Five minutes,” I say. “You can have five minutes.” She stops completely and says very softly, “I’m done.” I breathe and say “That still leaves us without a solution.”

Says the woman next to her, who unbeknownst to me was crying throughout class, “Well how about if people get what they can to you tomorrow by 3. And those who don’t, don’t get to rewrite.” Everyone agrees that might work. Notice no one has mentioned the midterm. Nor have I. Hence the rage at my own cowardice. I should have brought it up. I should have said no last minute papers that I have to print and rush to grade while I am fasting, running my own kid around and trying to get ready to leave on my trip tomorrow. I should have just left every last one of them swinging in the wind.

So why didn’t I? Fear. Cowardice. Not wanting to face the hassle of a pack of angry students who think the world revolves around them or are so scattered about the work they are at that they can’t read the syllabus. At the moment I hate them. I hate myself.

Oh and then there is the student who wasn't in class but emailed me a paper. She was a wreck because her partner had recently become disabled and suddenly the burden of that, school, work all fell on her. She’ll be ok.

Me. The last term I ever teach, I swear I am going to say whatever pops into my head.
For now I have to go file points back on the teeth I ground down.

Food and Eating in Hinduism and the Baha'i Faith

2009-02-15T19:30:00.000-08:00

A Brief Comparison

Eating customs are among the most deeply entrenched behaviors of any culture. At its most basic level eating keeps us alive. Beyond that level however, food and eating co-mingle with other emotional needs. As M.F. K. Fisher says, “There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk.” Combined with the sanction of religious taboo and long custom, dietary laws and traditions become among the strongest bonds put upon us. Indeed Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik in the introduction to their collection Food and Culture: A Reader, remind us that Eating is an endlessly evolving enactment of . . . community relationships” (1). And while it is open to dispute, Claude Levi-Strauss posits that cooking, like language, is a universal human activity. To this end, he suggested that people everywhere consume food that is raw, cooked or rotted: In any cuisine, nothing is simply cooked, but must be cooked in one fashion or another. Nor is there any condition of pure rawness: only certain foods can really be eaten raw, and then only if they have been selected, washed, pared or cut, or even seasoned. Rotting, too, is only allowed to take place in specific ways, either spontaneous or controlled” (Quoted in Food and Culture).
Levi-Strauss suggested universality of these categories, all people at all times have structured their food consumption around them, which leads to a consideration of how food preparation and consumption embed themselves into a culture. Most dietary laws come from religious or scientific sources. In America, today, we have perhaps replaced religion with science, but we still control, condemn or approve, and enjoy eating according to strict ‘rules,” albeit ones that seem to change with dizzying speed. For many people both in the U.S. or around the world, however, diet is also regulated by religious teaching. Not to go too far afield, but the dietary laws most of us in the west are familiar with are those of Judaism or Islam. The Bible hints at three dietary ages: the Edenic which is vegetarian; the Noaic in which everything is available to man for food including meat, but not blood: the Mosaic which sorts out the clean and the unclean beasts from which man may eat(Soler, in Food and Culture,56, 57). Hinduism also constrains its followers with strict laws regarding diet and commensality. In the Baha’i Faith, however, we have been released from dietary constraints with two exceptions: alcohol and animals found already dead, carrion.
These prohibitions make excellent sense. They reinforce the dignity of man by protecting him from drunkenness with its accompanying social and physical evils. Eating meat found dead, rather than humanely slaughtered, properly drained of blood and gutted leaves man open to disease. It also implies an innate cruelty that would underly a culture that sustained itself in such ways. Additionally, these dietary laws allow Baha’is to travel the world and eat among any people. And it leaves peoples who join the Faith free to continue cultural ways that are among the deepest and most meaningful to any group. We have only to consider the role of food at ethnic identifier for Italian Americans or African Americans. Thus the Baha’i traveler or teacher can truly be a world citizen, at home in any culture.
Dietary laws from ancient revelations, have of course on a very physical level been designed to protect adherents from illness. They reinforce larger concepts such as the agreement of science and religion. Dietary restrictions also allow identity within a group and without, providing clear boundaries between those who belong at the commensal table and those who cannot enter the community. Hindu dietary laws, I confess, present a bewildering array of rules about food and its preparation, the manner of eating, and those with whom one may consume food. Abdu’l-Baha helps to explain the variations in the laws that we find when we compare religious teachings:

Secondly: Laws and ordinances which are temporary and non-essential. These concern human transactions and relations. They are accidental and subject to change according to the exigencies of time and place. These ordinances are neither permanent nor fundamental. For instance during the time of Noah it was expedient that sea foods be considered as lawful; therefore God commanded Noah to partake of all marine animal life. During the time of Moses this was not in accordance with the exigencies of Israel's existence, therefore a second command was revealed partly abrogating the law concerning marine foods. During the time of Abraham -- Upon him be peace! -- camel's milk was considered a lawful and acceptable food; likewise the flesh of the camel; but during Jacob's time because of a certain vow he made, this became unlawful
(Abdu'l-Baha, Foundations of World Unity, p. 93)

On one hand, we can consider these riches of guidance as an example of how religion and science reinforce each other. Ancient people were not ignorant. They understood spoilage and such. They also knew without having a scientific vocabulary for it that certain animals had very primitive digestive systems which might produce ‘unclean’ meat. Beyond that, they clearly understood the role of spices in preserving food and in making plain foods (lentils) palatable. Today we count five tastes that allow us to enjoy food, along with the sense of smell. And indeed, those tastes are described in Ayurvedic medicine.

The Six Tastes
How much of each Dosha your body produces depends primarily on which Tastes you consume. The tastes influence the balance of the Doshas in the body. Like the Doshas they are derived from the Five Great Elements. They have profound effect on all parts of the organism and not merely the tongue.

Sweet. Composed mainly of Earth and Water. Sweet increases Kapha, decreases Pitta and Vata, and is cooling, heavy and unctuous. It nourishes and exhilarates the body and mind, and relieves hunger and thirst. It increases all tissues.Sweet produces satisfaction or satiation. Overindulgence in Sweet Taste leads to its negative aspects, complacency and greed. Intense complacent effect increases the naturally inert, complacent Kapha, cools the anger of Pitta and comforts the fear of Vata.

Sour. Composed mainly of Earth and Fire. Sour increases Kapha and Pitta, decreases Vata, and is heating, heavy, and unctuous. Sour refreshes the being, encourage elimination of wastes, lessens spasms and tremors, and improves appetite and digestion. Produces the searching outside oneself for things to possess. Sour causes evaluation of a thing in order to determine its desirability which selectively enhances certain appetites. Overindulgence in evaluation leads to envy and jealousy, which may manifest as deprecation of the thing desired, as in the "sour grapes" syndrome. Envious effect increases Kapha if envy of another's success incites you to obtain further success for yourself. Otherwise Pitta will increase as jealousy mutates into anger over the raw deal you feel you are getting from life. Envy does help reduce Vata, by focusing and heating up your consciousness.

Salty. Composed mainly of Water and Fire. Salty increases Kapha and Pitta, decreases Vata, and is heavy, heating and unctuous. Salty eliminates wastes and cleanses the body , and increases the digestive capacity and appetite. It softens and loosens the tissues. Salty Taste increases zest for life, which enhances all appetites. Overindulgence in zest leads to hedonism, the craving for indulgence in all sensory pleasures physically available to the body.

Pungent. Composed mainly of Fire and Air. pungent (which is hot and spicy like chilli peppers) increases Pitta and Vata, decreases Kapha, and is heating, light and dry. Pungent flushes all types of secretion from the body, and reduces all Kapha-like tissues such as semen, milk and fat. It improves the appetite. Pungent Taste is productive of extroversion, the tendency to excitement and stimulation, and particularly the craving for intensity. Overexcitement and over-stimulation leads to irritability, impatience and anger (pungent language or a sharp retort). Pungent Taste increases Pitta by actively increasing the flow of hormones and digestive juices, making it easier both to digest and to manifest anger. It relieves Kapha by decreasing self-satisfaction, and temporarily relieves Vata by permitting expression of bottled-up resentment. In the long run, however, Pungent increases Vata by exhausting the organs and glands, which, "dries you out", limiting your ability to project aggression or unhappiness outwards.

Bitter. Composed mainly of Air and Space. Bitter increases Vata, decreases Pitta and Kapha, and is cooling, light and dry. Bitter purifies and dries all secretions, is anti-aphrodisiac, and tones the organism by returning all Tastes to normal balance. It increases appetite, and controls skin diseases and fevers.Bitter Taste produces dissatisfaction , which produces a desire to change. When you have to swallow a "bitter pill"' its bitterness dispels your self-delusion and forces you to face reality. Too much disappointment leads to frustration, which confirms your system in bitterness. Grief is also bitter.Bitter is best of all Six Tastes. As Dr. Vasant Lad says, "Bitter is better." in small amounts Bitter helps balance all other tastes in the body. Just as mild dissatisfaction with yourself or your situation impels you to change, Bitter dilates channels which are too constricted, thus reducing Kapha and its complacency , and constricts those which are overdilated, thus reducing Pitta and its anger. Overuse of Bitter increases Vata as dissatisfaction and continuous change induces insecurity and fear.

Astringent. Composed mainly of Air and Earth. Astringent (which makes your mouth pucker) increases Vata, decreases Pitta and Kapha, and is cooling, light and dry. Astringent heals, purifies and constricts all parts of the body. It reduces all secretions, and is anti-aphrodisiac. Astringent Taste produces introversion, the tendency away from excitement and stimulation. Excessive introversion leads to insecurity, anxiety and fear. Astringency causes contraction, which makes you "shrivel like a prune." and clamps the "cold, bony hand of fear" around your throat. Astringent taste constricts, drawing one away from the self-satisfaction of Kapha, and the self-aggrandisement of Pitta. Its constriction increases fear of insufficient sensory "nutrition" and leads to increased Vata.

All these tastes are essential for proper functioning of the organism, and reach us primarily through our food.

Modern science tells us that we can detect the four tastes we all learned in school: sweet, salt, sour, and bitter. Additionally, Umami (旨味?) is one of the five basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human tongue. Umami is a loanword from Japanese meaning roughly "delicious flavor", although "brothy", "meaty", or "savory" have been proposed as alternate translations.[1][2] The same taste is also known as xiānwèi (traditional Chinese: 鮮味; simplified Chinese: 鲜味 literally "Fresh Flavor") in Chinese cooking. In as much as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar to Brillat-Savarin's concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock (Wikipedia)

When humans eat, they use all of their senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) to form general judgments about their food, but it is taste that is the most influential in determining how delicious a food is. Conventionally, it has been thought that our sense of taste is comprised of four basic, or ‘primary’, tastes, which cannot be replicated by mixing together any of the other primaries: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. However, it is now known that there is actually a fifth primary taste: umami.
The Hindu list adds astringent and pungent to our familiar list of four. The include spicy and astringent under the list of ‘tastes’ that we can detect in the mouth.
While man was not ready for the concept of ribonucleotides (in umami) when the Vedas were revealed, the Hindu pantheon of flavors seems to echo our modern understanding of taste and its function in food. The dictionary lists pungent as an adjective with the following synonyms. 1. strong, hot, spicy, seasoned, sharp, acid, bitter, stinging, sour, tart, aromatic, tangy, acrid, peppery, piquant, highly flavoured, acerb << OPPOSITE mild.

On a larger scale, Hindu dietary law serves to support the caste structure of HIndu culture.To give just two examples: Food must be prepared according to defined practice and the preparer’s status or state of mind can affect the ‘quality’ of the food, making it unfit for consumption.

From The Mahabharata Anusasana Parva, Section CXLII
Translated by Sri Kisari Mohan Ganguli

Mahadeva said: Those that are righteous and desirous of acquiring merit always pursue with firmness the culture of the soul. The food that comes from cruel or fierce persons is censurable. So also the food that has been cooked for serving a large number of persons. The same is said of the food that is cooked in view of the first Sraddha of a deceased person. So also is the food that is stained in consequence of the usual faults and the food that is supplied by a Sudra. These should never be taken by a Brahmana (priest)at any time. The food of a Sudra is always disapproved of by the high-souled deities.

If a Brahmana, who has set up the sacred fire and who performs sacrifices, were to die with any portion of a Sudra's food remaining undigested in his stomach, he is sure to take birth in his next life as a Sudra. In consequence of those remains of a Sudra's food in his stomach, he falls away from the status of a Brahmana. Such a Brahmana becomes invested with the status of a Sudra. There is no doubt in this. This Brahmana in his next life becomes invested with the status of that order upon whose food he subsists through life or with the undigested portion of whose food in his stomach he breathes his last. That man who, having attained to the auspicious status of a Brahmana which is so difficult to acquire, disregards it and eats interdicted food, falls away from his high status.
___________________
Additionally many foods are forbidden for reasons that now seems arbitrary and obscure.

“Forbidden foods
From The Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva Section CIV
One should eat only such food as is not forbidden in the scriptures, abstaining from food of every kind on days of the new moon and the full moon. One should never eat the flesh of animals not slain in sacrifice. One should never eat the flesh of the back of an animal. The flesh of goats, of kine (cows), and the peacock, should never be eaten. One should also abstain from dried flesh and all flesh that is stale. One should not slay a bird (for eating it), especially after having fed it.
All food that is forbidden in ritual acts should never be taken even on other occasions. The fruits of the Ficus Religiosa (sacred fig or Peepul tree) and the Ficus Bengalensis (in English:Banyan tree; as also the leaves of the Crotolaria Juncea (Sunn Hemp), and the fruits of Ficus Glomerata(cluster fig or Gular fig or country fig tree), should never be eaten by one who is desirous of his own good. The remnants of food and drink, as also the flowers with which one has worshipped the deities, should never be used.
The man of intelligence should never eat any salt, taking it up with his hand.
Nor should he eat curds and flour of fried barley at night. One desirous of food should never drink curds at the conclusion of a meal.
One should never eat off the same plate with another even if that other happens to be of one's own or equal rank. One should never even touch the remnants of other people's dishes and plates. Nor should one ever eat any food that has been prepared by a woman in her functional period.
One should never eat any food or drink any liquid whose essence has been taken off. Nor should one eat anything without giving a portion thereof to persons that wishfully gaze at the food that one happens to take.
One should, with concentrated attention, eat once in the morning and once in the evening, abstaining entirely from all food during the interval. One should never eat any food in which one may detect a hair. Nor should one eat at the Sraddha of an enemy. One should eat silently; one should never eat without covering one's person with an upper garment. One should never eat any food placing it on the bare ground. One should never eat except in a sitting posture. One should never eat while walking. One should never make any noise while eating. One who sits to one's meals after having washed one's feet, lives for a hundred years. One should first wash one's mouth thrice with water before any food. Having finished one's meals, one should wash one's mouth thrice with water and twice again.
One should eat one's food with face turned eastwards, restraining speech the while and without censuring the food that is eaten. If one eats with face turned eastwards, one becomes endued with longevity. By eating with face turned southwards, one acquires great fame. By eating with face turned westwards, one acquires great wealth. By eating with face turned northwards, one becomes truthful in speech. One should always leave a remnant of the food that is placed before one for eating. One should never take a meal without eating some sesame.
Inviting a guest at night, one should never, with excessive courtesy , force him to eat to the point of gratification. Nor should one eat oneself to the point of gratification. After the meal is finished, one should wash one's mouth and face with the right hand only. After washing, one should touch the crown of one's head with the right hand. Having finished one's meals, one should mentally touch fire.”

After hundreds if not thousands of years, much of the advice seems unclear and without practical basis. Compare this with Baha’u’llah’s advice on eating, “ A little food in the morning is like a light to the body. Leave all harmful habits, they cause unhappiness in the world. Search for the cause of disease. This saying is the end of this speech” (Law-i-Tibb). Here we see the wisdom of updating the social teachings, as new manifestation does. In this day, with refrigeration and better animal husbandry and farming, such elaborate laws are not necessary to protect our health. In addition, the new teachings of the Baha’i Faith eliminate the striations and stigma of caste thus opening the way for believers of all backgrounds to eat together of whatever food they wish. This sense of commensality will allow Baha’i communities of the future to embody the oneness of mankind that is the central tenet of our faith.

Inauguration notes

2009-02-05T16:34:00.001-08:00

Inauguration notes.

The Weekend and The Week have come.
I find myself feeling very odd, feeling like I belong. For so long I have felt outside the mainstream of my country. Now with Obama and Biden rolling across the country,
headed toward Washington, I am holding my breath elatedly, happily, scared.
So much could go wrong.

Cool, sophisticated, detached would be the safe way to be. Raised on political cynicism, I want to say with the pundits, those who supposedly know--It can’t last. Nothing changes. He’ll turn out to be like all the rest.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist. I believe things will get better, in many ways. Maybe not the economy right away. That seems to be a problem outside any one man's control.
Instead I look forward to a slow change in attitudes: maybe being one
of the good guys will become all right, maybe being a really smart, attractive
woman who gets along with her mum will be all right, maybe consensus works.
I hope, I don’t have hope, I actively hope that my country will find itself. A disillusioned liberal from the 60s has suddenly decided to take another chance with her heart. I love these guys. Along with millions, I hope and think they will do as well as anyone can in our clumsy system. They might even do better than all right.

A story that lives in our family resonates today especially. Ron's great grandmother was
taken to see Lincoln's funeral cortege as it rolled through Indiana.

http://www.lincoln-highway-museum.org/20Days/355-Index.html

A story that probably connects millions of us, sets itself a little deeper in my heart. Part of my family stood beside the tracks and waited through days and nights, to pay respect to the man who held the Union together for us. All these years later, a man who benefitted from Lincoln's courage, and his children, the descendants of slaves, roll across the country, through the night toward Washington,toward the future.

I am cynical. It is hard not to be in this time and place. After the nadir of Watergate, and all that resulted from that, the despair and loss of focus for my generation, the sense that my fellow Americans were more than willing to sell the Constitution for a mess
of pot(tage), after the sleeping years of Reagan, after the malfeasance of the past eight years, today is a time to breathe, to step back a moment, to allow ourselves a little national political happiness. I am happy just to be with the in-group for a few minutes. It is a new place for me. I like it. I fear a lot, loss of political will, failure of the economy, assassination(the punctuation of my adult life), but for a few days I am going to revel in good rhetoric, in a handsome young couple with some beautiful kids and
a dream for tomorrow. I am going to face forward.

Inauguration notes

2009-02-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

Inauguration notes.

The Weekend and The Week have come.
I find myself feeling very odd, feeling like I belong. For so long I have felt outside the mainstream of my country. Now with Obama and Biden rolling across the country,
headed toward Washington, I am holding my breath elatedly, happily, scared.
So much could go wrong.

Cool, sophisticated, detached would be the safe way to be. Raised on political cynicism, I want to say with the pundits, those who supposedly know--It can’t last. Nothing changes. He’ll turn out to be like all the rest.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist. I believe things will get better, in many ways. Maybe not the economy right away. That seems to be a problem outside any one man's control.
Instead I look forward to a slow change in attitudes: maybe being one
of the good guys will become all right, maybe being a really smart, attractive
woman who gets along with her mum will be all right, maybe consensus works.

I hope, I don’t have hope, I actively hope that my country will find itself. A disillusioned liberal from the 60s has suddenly decided to take another chance with her heart. I love these guys. Along with millions, I hope and think they will do as well as anyone can in our clumsy system. They might even do better than all right.

A story that lives in our family resonates today especially. Ron's great grandmother was taken to see Lincoln's funeral cortege as it rolled through Indiana.A story that probably connects millions of us, sets itself a little deeper in my heart. Part of my family stood beside the tracks and waited through days and nights, to pay respect to the man who held the Union together for us. All these years later, a man who benefitted from Lincoln's courage, and his children, the descendants of slaves, roll across the country, through the night toward Washington,toward the future.

I am cynical. It is hard not to be in this time and place. After the nadir of Watergate, and all that resulted from that, the despair and loss of focus for my generation, the sense that my fellow Americans were more than willing to sell the Constitution for a mess of pot(tage), after the sleeping years of Reagan, after the malfeasance of the past eight years, today is a time to breathe, to step back a moment, to allow ourselves a little national political happiness. I am happy just to be with the in-group for a few minutes. It is a new place for me. I like it. I fear a lot, loss of political will, failure of the economy, assassination(the punctuation of my adult life), but for a few days I am going to revel in good rhetoric, in a handsome young couple with some beautiful kids and a dream for tomorrow. I am going to face forward.

Blue Star

2009-01-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

7 August 2008

I took the blue star out of the front window. It had been there since April 2007. It was faded; the red gone to a faint red, not pink, the blue dimmed to blue-grey. The star is the same pattern that Betsy Ross used. I was going to join the Blue Star Mothers online and get a flag from them, thinking this would be a good thing. Thinking I might need to talk to them sometime during Seth’s deployment. But then there was the issue of the loyalty oath they wanted me to sign. A loyalty oath, to get into a group I had not desire to belong to anyhow? No. So I looked for a five-pointed star pattern online and found the one Betsy Ross used in first flag. I liked that, liked the continuity of it because while I didn’t believe for a moment my son was defending his country, I love my country and connecting back to our better selves felt good.
When I hung it, I didn’t think of the sun and the way it damages fabric. I thought a lot of the damage the sun in a place like Iraq can do and sent sunblock. Even though the Base Exchange carried it, he probably wouldn’t buy it. He said he didn’t need armor despite all the news stories. ‘We don’t wear most of it anyhow,” he said. So I sent sunblock, the only armor I could provide, unless you count love and prayers, a constant shield around him from roughly 6,000 miles. His friends and ours were praying, too. I fantasized that a mother’s prayers were special. But that was a fantasy. That was clear from the daily news.
He called from Ft. Lewis, back at last. He was safe. At last I turned off the cell phone, which had been on in class, in doctor’s offices, in places with clear signs ordering me to turn it off. The only place I lost that battle was in the Federal building in Syracuse. The security guards cared not a whit for my pleas. They took the phone and gave me a chit for it. The whole time we were in the Social Security office, I fidgeted, wanting to run downstairs and check. What if he had got hurt? No that would go to the home phone, but he might have just called. If I missed the call I couldn’t call back. For the entire deployment, I saved all the phone messages we had from before he left, in case I never heard his voice again. I especially loved the one about the free llama. He was driving back from a retreat in Canada and saw a sign. It was a typical message, laughing and light hearted, the way we would have wanted to remember him.
When his sister deployed to Qatar, I didn’t have a recording of her voice to save. But she sounds like me. In phrasing and vocabulary, in wry humor we all sound alike. And her daughter sounds so much like her I can no longer tell them apart on the phone. Amy and I couldn’t be more different in nature and temperament, but she is the self I might have been, a better me, who calls rarely, loves me from afar, and goes her own way. When she was two she walked off and left me in a mall and was non-plussed when I found her. Not even scared. A thing I envied, even as I scolded her for terrifying me.
We sent snack packages to both. I included lotion for her. The desert is dry. She laughs at me, in email; “As if we don’t have everything here.” True. The US works hard to make deployment like playing: AC, movies, a complete Base Exchange, phones, email. Over and over I wonder how those other women did it, during other wars when a letter might come occasionally or not at all. When a letter was an act of faith so great my heart quails to think of it. You wrote, “My dearest son,” walked to the post office, purchased the stamps, yielded the content of your heart, the prayers encoded in the minutiae of daily life that he wanted to hear, believing it would get to him, mostly to him, since women came late to the field of war. And then you waited, went on with life, ran the farm or business, tended the other children. During their deployments I often pictured myself perched on the mailbox, waiting. I had to wait there, to keep the mailman from pulling his black car into the driveway.
They come in a black car. Two soldiers. To bring the news of a loved one’s death. No impersonal telegrams with black borders, the ones my mother’s generation so feared. And further back there were lists from the newspaper or no news at all. One waited. We planned, as if it would help. I told his little sister what to do if they came and his father and I weren’t home. Let them in. Call us. make coffee for them. Wait. I planned in my head what I might do: lock the door, faint, wail and howl, serve them coffee in silence, run upstairs and hide in the room he sleeps in when he is here. But you never know and you can’t plan. His father never talked about it. He didn’t read the will his son left, a graceful, thoughtful document. We never even joked about the money we’d get, though I planned what to do with that: pay off the debts, set up funds (tiny ones-the ‘death benefit’ isn’t that much) for his sister’s kids or invest for our old age, maybe take one trip, mostly give it all to the Baha’i Faith in his name. When I explained to the mailman, he was more than happy to park on the street and lug things up the hundred-foot drive.
No letters came. He used email. But I wrote to him, long letters full of babblings about the garden, my classes, Da and the other sister still at home, what I was watching on TV. It was a grand gesture really, a way to feel kinship with women of other wars. And it was for the feel of writing, the fountain pen on paper. I wished for elegant stationery, but mostly wrote in the graph paper notebooks I favor. I tore out the pages and sent them with Star Wars stamps. Star Wars was a childhood obsession. He said he liked the stamps and the letters. Who knows? I imagine him reading them, grinning at my voice, so like his own, and perhaps keeping them. I hope he kept them.
Amy sent effusive emails of thanks for the snacks or as we call them snackies. Apparently we made quite a hit with the fighter pilots with whom she shared. Seth put his out in the day room or invited friends over for parties. Now that they are back, I cruise past the snack aisle in stores. I am not possessed by the urge to make cookies, nor do I search the King Arthur Cookie cookbook for recipes that will withstand the long journey to Iraq or Qatar,that will endure the heat. No chocolate they said between April and November. Savories were always welcome. For the Baha’i holidays in February we sent books and toys and goodies. Amy sent embroideries from Qatar and saffron. Seth sent things via the Internet, flowers for the little sister, books and music for us.
The rear battalion called to invite us to the welcome home celebration at Ft. Lewis. Nice. Also the first contact I had had from them in the entire fifteen months. Still, no news is good news. Seth had already called from the airport and then emailed. His sister emailed, but never called. So they were back. At first I walked around in an elated daze, grinning to myself and laughing and crying at odd moments. I prayed and thanked God repeatedly. No bargaining, no promising to be good forever because my children had returned safely, just praise and thanksgiving. And a remembrance of those who did not return safely and a prayer for their mothers who waited in vain. And then I took down the blue star and turned off the cell phone. And exhaled.

2009-01-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

It's cold out. Near zero F cold, which even for central New York is cold. I haven't ventured out, having been house bound for a month with my new hip, I am not innured to winter this year. So I hang inside, vaugly resentful of the confinement, but not so much that I am willing to rouse myself, put on longjohns, heavy pants, socks, high boots. And that is just the nether half of me. The top gets a long-sleeved Cuddle-Duds undershirt, a turtle neck, a sweater, down jacket, scarf, hat, mittens. Fortunately I am old enough to go to the bathroom before I start this dressing ritual.
On slightly less cold days, in other winters, I get dressed, get the dog and her lead. J gets dressed. We get in the car, go to the neighbors to get their English Mastiff out for a romp. If the sun is out, as it is today, it is comfortable in the sunshine. We drive to the park, leave the car at the closed gate and head toward the lake.
As a kid, I'd have been sledding on the hill behind my house, spending hours careening down the hill, dragging the sled back up and doing it over. The goal was to go fast enough to slide past the flat space at the bottom of the hill and start up the next hill. I always wanted to get in among the small cedars that were retaking my family's garden area. We cut them occasionally for Christmas trees, but mostly we ignored them, letting that part of the property go back to forest. It is houses now, sold when my mother moved to Florida. Only the oldest, Mattie, who left it to her and one other sister had any feel for the land. The others viewed it as something to get away from. They grew up on the farm and wanted nothing to do with farming, farms, or farmers.
The place lives only in memory, mine. And perhaps in the one set of neighbors, still living there who would remember the place as it was.
Does it really make us unhappy, I was going to say crazy, to be disconnected from the land? Wendell Barry argues that it does, or rather he argues that the industrialization of our lives makes us crazy:"What is utterly alien to both is corporate industrialism-a dislocated economic life that is without affection for the places where it is lived and without respect for the materials it uses." (http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200205/land.asp). We could live in cities with gardens, pets and the city wildlife and not feel so alienated if the valuation of those things were equal to the worth of machines and a life constrained by them. I am not arguing that we give up machines and go back to some non-existant Neolithic paradise. But the love of gadgets and machines, the eroticism of that physical and mental landscape distorts our understanding of our place in the world. We do belong to nature, even if only in part. We need nature. How many of us have plants on our desk or pets in a small apartment? What does that indicate about our psyches? If you don't grow rare violets, why do you have a plant? Is it only decoration? What are you decorating? Is it a statement? My boss likes plants so I will have one? Or is that violet or airplant a response to an unacknowledged need to touch wildness, to connect to the living world denied by the air-conditioned office, the artificial light, the computer and phone on your desk?
In winter, when nothing blooms where I live, the seed catalogues arrive in January. Nice timing, since by that time the outside whiteness makes flowers and vegetables REALLY attractive. Read the catalog, resist the urge to sniff the pictures, hoping for scent, admire the colors. The vendor hopes you will be overwhelmed by sense-longing and order a lot of seeds and plants. It is easy to do. I have lots of seeds left from other years!
But it IS winter. So I bundle up, get the dog, go to the lake to look at the geese, to find tight-furled buds on the trees, to look for the first returning ducks or later in the season, the bluebirds.
Winter is part of the life-cycle too. Go out and walk, even if it is cold and snowy.

Marxist Rant

2009-01-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

It’s funny how limitations become malleable. In order to get out of the house yesterday, I went to Wegman’s with Ron while he shopped for groceries. It is like hunting for him. He makes a list divided by categories, checks the sales, organizes his coupons, girds up his loins and plunges into the store. He loves it. I am indifferent to hostile about it, a result of reaching a space in my life where eating and cooking are a matter of necessity for me, not fun, unless there are friends coming over, but as a daily routine--snore. So while he was slipping up and down the aisles hunting the best deal on cannelloni or some such, I was walking the perimeter, as fast as I could go in a crowed store, with my big boots, cane, and winter jacket. I can’t walk outside. Too icy, and a fall would not be good. The carbon steel hip won’t break, but it can come out of the socket until all the muscles and such heal. So I am exercising in this huge, fancy grocery store, glancing at stuff as I go by.
Stuff. Four thousand kinds of cereal, all but three not fit for human consumption. What is wrong with us? How is it even legal to sell that shit? And who would eat it,much less put it in their children? These are not rhetorical questions? The few kinds of cereal I ate as a kid were not so bad, my family having an abiding passion for oatmeal. I confess to an abiding fondness for Mapo and regret its loss, but never as a grown up have I eaten Frosted Flakes, despite a passion for tigers. Now, if I eat cereal, I just eat steal cut oats with maple syrup. Food, as Michael Pollen would say. Things my grandmother would recognize. But what is in Cocoa Puffs, or Lucky Charms? Here is General Mills’ description:
Lucky Charms

Magically delicious Lucky Charms cereal features frosted oats and colored marshmallows.

The kids’ brand with adult appeal for more than four decades. Made with whole grain, Lucky Charms is fortified with 12 vitamins and minerals, and is a good source of calcium
And here are the ingredients for, God help us, the chocolate version:

Whole Grain Oats, Sugar, Marshmallows (Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Gelatin, Calcium Carbonate, Yellow 5 & 6, Blue 1, Red 40, Artificial Flavor), Corn Meal, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Caramel and Beet Juice Concentrate Color, Corn Starch, Salt, Canola Oil, Calcium Carbonate, Artificial Flavor, Trisodium Phosphate, Zinc and Iron (Mineral Nutrients), Vitamin C (Sodium Ascorbate), A B Vitamin (Niacinamide), Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine Hydrochloride), Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin), Vitamin B1 (Thiamin Mononitrate), Vitamin A (Palmitate), A B Vitamin (Folic Acid), Vitamin B12, Vitamin D, Wheat Starch, Vitamin E (Mixed Tocopherols) Added to Preserve Freshness

Magically delicious frosted oats? And colored marshmallows? Without getting into the obesity debate, the awful thing is that this stuff tastes bad and degrades the budding taste buds of the children who eat it. Aside from that, which is evil enough, we are bombarded with several score kinds of this junk. All probably roughly the same shining examples of capitalism gone amok. Sell stuff at all costs. Caveat Emptor. No matter if the product is worth the money or worthy of consumption by any one.
The bread section, which i never go in , but was on my route, since we get our bread at the bakery section(bread snobs), is the same. It is a bit smaller than the hangar size cereal section.. In this part of New York, a place of massive Italian immigration, good bread is appreciated and sold even in regular grocery stores, which Wegman’s is not, and in various bakeries. Still there is a sizable section of enriched styrofoam, sliced. And I am stuck, food snob that I am , asking myself, who buys this stuff. It isn’t slicing that makes it attractive. You can get any loaf sliced. Maybe, I tell myself, it is the soft crusts. I know of adults who won’t eat crusts if they can avoid it. What baffles me is what are those consumers looking for? Certainly not an assertive bread. Something that gives one an excuse to eat bolonga or flutternutter sandwiches? Just eat the stuff out of the jar, for Pete's sake. . Isn’t bread part of the sandwich experience? White? Sure. We have a friend who makes a white bread to die for (Julia Child’s recipe), a white bread that is redolent of wheat and a hint of yeast, a bread that complements anything put on it, that turns into toast to make you swoon. White bread, plain, sustaining, tasteful. So how in the world did we get from there to Wonder bread in what, three generations? Ease. Feminism. Laziness? Did our mothers and grandmothers really find ready made bread superior or were they so exhausted that taste no longer mattered?
 I wander back to Ron who is standing in the soup aisle. We buy Campbell’s tomato soup, cream of chicken, and cream of mushroom. We use the latter two for sauces and cooking. We eat the tomato but doctor it with garlic and dill weed. It is the only canned soup that doesn’t taste of the can. I don’t know why. I tell him I am converting to 1905 Marxism. He nods, preoccupied with his ‘hunting.’ I rave softly about a waste of resources, over choice, abuse of the people by massive corporations. He puts the soup in the cart and laughs at me. He agrees, mostly, but he is caught up in the hunt for bargains and the good stuff amid the dreck. There is nothing I can do to prevent the corporate breach of the walls. I limp off to the produce aisle, looking for food.

2009-01-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

Down some snowy candlelit lane, snaking like ribbon candy, lies Christmas. Not one I ever had, nor anyone I know. We have not celebrated Christmas in our home for over thirty years. We are Baha’is and I guess that makes other people nervous. They rarely invite us to anything Christmasy. In essence, we have been Christmas free all this time. No shopping, no pressure to get gifts for people about whom one feels at best ambivalent. And most of them are relatives. The last gift I gave my mother was a miniature orange tree. She said, “This is the only thing you’ve ever given me that I’ve liked.” That was how gift-giving went in our family. There were years and years of wrong gifts: a pink and green sweater with a clown ruff, the wrong books, dolls I never wanted. Gifts so bad they had to have been intentionally picked for their badness. I guessed at that meanness as a young child. Though there were things I liked: Lincoln Logs, plastic horses, coloring books and paper dolls.
With my children, gift giving was simpler. I knew them in a way my adoptive mother never knew me. I could assume that what I liked would please them too. And mostly it did. They liked books and toys, music. Easy things to buy. Especially in February when the Baha’i holidays are and there are no sales, no Santa, no Must-Have Toy of the season. I wander empty malls, looking, spending time thinking, unhasselled by bored sales people. Valentine’s Day is out there, but it is still a lover’s holiday. And candy covers all contingencies. In February, I have time to shop and plan, to hunt for just the right thing. Without hype. Without pressure to conform to that icon of Christmas lying at the end of that lane. An icon against which it is almost impossible to stand. Have a natural tree? Make your own gifts? Don’t get family together. My god, you might as well advocate cannibalism. Everyone wants you to do what they are doing, to conform to the hive mind of the holiday. Dickens is to blame of course, but he’s dead a long while now, and we are grown up. No one in Florida has to have artificial snow or Santa in a heavy red suit trimmed in frackin’ fur. The hegemony of the Northern Christmas so pervades the holiday that despite regional differences, there is only one Christmas in America.
A hideous. bloated Christmas which proffers redemption, but rarely delivers and certainly not in the Scroogian mannner. I’ve seen fights over the turkey, sisters insulting and hurting each other, parents and children, spouses, all go at it. And despite Hollywood, I know of no one redeemed by trying to live up to “God bless us everyone.” Why? Well who goes to church for Christmas now? If I did Christmas, here’s what we’d do.
Chrstmas Eve, put up the tree.
LIght the luminiere
Go to midnight Mass.
Come home and open a small gift.
Sleep relatively late the next morning.
Open gifts, most of which would be handmade or donations of time.
Go serve somewhere.
Come home and eat with friends.
Listen to a lot of music. Over the next 12 days try to visit friends and do things together. On 12th night get together with friends and welcome the lengthening days of the coming new year
I like to think that is what I would do, that I would resist the Santa lie. Ok I am an old poop. But what is Santa but blackmail? Be good you little beast or you will get no toys! And really, who connects Santa to the gift of the Christ Child except in the most superficial way? What is the connection? God gives us a child,whom he will cause to be crucified later, so Santa is God, the gifts are what? No wonder people bail and just go with the shopping and Santa. Theology is too hard, and screwy theology is really hard.
Who needs theology when the aunts arrive in two hours and the turkey is all ready done?
Is there a way to sort out the holy day and the holiday? A holy day is a church day, services day, an observation of some kind. A holiday--public fun, general celebrations. Examples Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. There are others, mainly shopping days. But as a culture we do celebrate Thanksgiving (ok maybe the Indians don’t) and the Fourth. Everyone can do them, all the multiple diversity of this country can eat turkey and wave a flag. Even the vegetarians can celebrate with tou-furky and tofu hot dogs. And while the Fourth lends itself to drunkenness, it doesn’t carry the emotional baggage of Christmas. Thanksgiving can, if you don’t go home, but the burden of presents is missing from both holidays.
So there we are as a culture, saddled with a holiday that originates in Europe-yeah yeah, we do too-that was almost created by Dickens, whose other realities, I submit, we would not so eagerly adopt. And that is because of redemption. No story about the Fourth or Thanksgiving suggests that observing these holidays will make us better. Perhaps we do ask of the Fourth that it reaffirm who we think we are as a people, but it will never redeem us because it is too laden with death and violence. Thanksgiving should be a day of Atonement; it is a day of gluttony connected to football, not even Lacrosse for pete’s sake. Thanks to Dickens, we burden Christmas (shouldn’t it be Easter) with the weight of saving us. Whatever bad thing we have done can be expunged if we only promise to love Christmas and keep it all the year. Presents as bribes? The turkey makes up for the years of penury that Scrooge has foisted off on the Cratchitts. Playing games with one’s family? Oh what a metaphor. Scrooge and his nephew doing charades, as if they hadn’t been for years. And there we are every year charading our way back to the family, laden with turkeys, hoping for blessing, wondering why it doesn’t work.
So bah humbug on the Dickens Christmas. Bah humbug on all of it. Let’s go back to keeping the solstice. Let’s renew ourselves by reconnecting to the natural world every year. Go decorate an outdoor tree for the birds if you live some place where it snows. Go pickup the beach, then have a cookout. Screw presents. We all have too much stuff anyhow. Rejoice, if you live in the norther=n hemisphere, in the lengthening days. If you live in the Southern hemisphere, welcome the cool season.
Just leave Claus out of it.