|
Last meeting of the school year today. An informal thing. A small celebration. A planning session. An AI conversation. A gabfest. It was an afternoon of chatting and fun, not work. But it’s the last thing on the calendar for a bit.
So we celebrate. Inspired by the collective encore of Sunday night’s show, I give you, the summer of singing in no particular key.
Now, let us summer!
I thought, If I’d known this ride was going to be so good I would have fueled better and gone out earlier.
Swamps, river, open fields, vineyards, I felt smooth, fast, and fluid over all of them today.
Great feeling.
I had so much fun ironing pocket squares last night that I didn’t want it to end. So I stopped, and I can do more of them tonight, or another night. It’s a party in the ironing room.
The ironing room? You know, the one with the squeaky board and overheated iron and spray bottle (because our German-engineered iron has a leak and doesn’t hold water anymore). There’s also the bloating towel, and a lot of luggage, and an extra bed.
Alright, you found me out. The ironing room is the guest bedroom. Though I think I iron in it more than we have guests there. So we’re renaming it.
Anyway, a lot of squares were ironed, still a bunch to go.
And, this afternoon, I made some more cufflinks.
I’ll soon have a set for any type of playfully colorful situation. I have so many cufflinks. I need more french cuffs.
If you think that’s all I’ve got today, you, dear reader, are wrong! W-R-O-N-G.
There’s a rabbit living in our backyard. It’s a regular old zoo out there. And this critter is not bothered by people at all. I got within about five feet before it took two tentative hops away, to see if I would give chase.
I did not.
And, yes, look at how green that grass is. The last few days of rain have been what we needed to finally get us out of a drought. It started last September. And we might have emerged from it a little more quickly than meteorologists had expected last fall.
Which is great. This was my first drought on well water. I don’t have a good sense of the size of our watersource below us, and some people around here are a bit thirsty.
I do know the aquifer is glauconitic sand overlying micaceous sand. Obviously. It is porous and permeable, of course. I know this because I just found a state aquifer map. The challenge is that we’re on the geological border of everything, here where the heavy land and the green sands meet. There are seven different types of aquifers running on the diagonal, and the map is just vague enough that we could be in one of three or so. So I do what anyone does when they want to know about the glauconitic sand, I overlaid the aquifer map with a working map … and found that, even when you adjust for size, the scale of one of them is off.
Who to believe? The state’s map? Or Google Maps?
And while you wrestle with that …
Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am presently nine discs behind. The Re-Listening project, you’ll recall, is where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in their order of acquisition. Roughly so, anyway. I’m right now working through a book out of order. So the book is from 2007, but these CDs are older. None of that matters. The point of the Re-Listening project is listening to the music, and here I’m just filling space with videos of good music and the occasional recollection. So that matters a little bit.
Which brings us to Melissa Etheridge. I had her four earliest records on cassette, maybe five, and maybe didn’t upgrade all of those to CDs. But this, her seventh album, is the last one I bought. Etheridge turned 40. She’d had her first two kids. She was entering a new phase of life. (All of this is great, of course, but … ) The older material, where she was younger, more intense, raw, dramatic, as she now says, all of that was the best part of her catalog.
And since this was released in 2001 she’s had about two lifetimes worth of experiences. Maybe I should dip back in.
Anyway, the first track is a good one.
And much of the rest is this comfortable kind of at-peace-with-itself pop, when I’m just looking for her to put to words some core feeling and belt it out over a 12-string.
But that didn’t happen a lot here — some artists you just don’t want to change, I guess, even though you know change and growth are good things — and so I never listened to this all that much. I don’t even know all of the lyrics.
She’s still touring. Playing solo dates and with The Indigo Girls. We saw them together last fall. Melissa Etheridge will absolutely tear a building in two from the stage. She’s still got that sort of power and intensity. Its impressive.
And I was blown away by her cover of Joan Armatrading.
The next CD is from Michael Penn, 1997’s Resigned. I’m not sure why that shows up in this book. I’ve had this disc since soon after it came out. (It’s terrific.) I probably bought this off the strength of radio or MTV airplay. Here’s the first track.
Probably it was right about here that I entered into my “I wanna be a songwriter” phase. But, as I told a friend, I’d have to work with someone who sounded like this. My friend laughed at that, and every so often she would ask me if I’d found that person yet. I had not. Also, I never wrote any songs. It was a short phase.
My appreciation for Penn has lasted throughout the years, though. And you’ll just have to believe me that I listened to this record three times this time around.
This whole record was long spring days with apartment windows pushed up and doors opened and the stereo, tied into those big, waist-high speakers, turned up loud. I think there was even multimedia on this disc. But who puts discs in computers anymore? Opportunities lost, there.
Michael Penn has been composing for TV and movies for quite sometime. Probably better than life on a bus. Though, sadly, I never got to see him play live, but I would go to a show.
It’d be “an evening with” event. Black jeans, crisply ironed pocket square.
Cold and rainy throughout the day. And yet somehow it was, at times, bright. A bright gray, perhaps. And it wasn’t the coldest day you’ve ever experienced, no. It is May after all. On the other hand, it is May, and it was cold. The kind of cold that you know, right away, if you let it sink into your bones, you’ll have a difficult time shaking it.
So I stayed inside. And shivered.
Tomorrow, we might have some sun and a high of 64. This would be appropriate for the last full week of May.
We’ve not done it, so we must do it. And that thing which we must do is the contractually obligated weekly check-in with the cats. They remain the most popular feature of the site, they know it, and they remind me of it. They are especially adamant when they know they haven’t been featured in a while.
It has been nine days since they’ve graced this spot. So, believe me when I say this, I’m hearing about it.
Now that’s one sleepy kitty!
While Phoebe is trying to hold her head up, Poseidon is holding down his part of the arrangement, guarding the backyard. You can see we’ve upgraded their duty station somewhat, and they’ve started to figure it out.
From there, they can battle the birds, fight off fallen leaves and alert us to any larger critters that come by.
We don’t have a lot of larger critters coming up close to the house. Except in the winter time. Everyone comes around when it snows. I can see the tracks.
Here soon, though, Poe will be watching the deer munching the grass out by the treeline. I wonder if he’ll do that, comfortably from his box, or if he’ll climb on top of it for a more commanding view.
I started a new book last night, which means I should mention the one I just finished. Kate Harris’ debut is a travelogue, an adventure memoir. Published in 2018 to wide acclaim, it was a best seller in Canada, won the prestigious RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and a host of other awards. And if you like the genre, or just get into this, you can see why.
Harris was a Rhodes Scholar, an MIT grad student, but didn’t find that she was suited for the lab. She wanted to go to Mars. Or, really, to be an explorer. Or, more precisely, perhaps, to find herself alone, very much alone, at the top of things. Oh, she’s also a talented writer. She and a childhood friend set out for the old Silk Road and this book is about this 14-month adventure, crossing borders, fighting off thirst, meeting people from drastically different cultures, the sort of thing you’d expect from a travelogue. The kind many people think they would write. But it earns its keep in the little asides she takes throughout.
Besides, the historian William Cronon argues that there is nothing “natural” about wilderness, that it is a deeply human construct, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” Though I might be appalled by Marco Polo’s failure to swoon at mountains and deserts along the Silk Road, wilderness in his day implied all that was dark and devilish beyond the garden walls. The fact that I’m charmed by the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the breathtaking expanse of the Tibetan Plateau doesn’t mean I’m more enlightened than Polo, more capable of wonder. It means I hail from a day and age—and a country and culture—so privileged, so assiduously comfortable, that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal. It probably also means I read too much Thoreau as a teenager. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote, priming me to pine after places as far away from Ballinafad as possible, like Tibet and Mars. Provoking such distant wanderlust was hardly Thoreau’s fault or intention—he himself never travelled beyond North America—but I enthusiastically misread him, conflating wildness with wilderness, substituting a type of place for a state of mind. Cronon finds the whole concept of wilderness troubling for how, among other things, it applies almost exclusively to remote, unpopulated landscapes, fetishizing the exotic at the expense of the everyday, as though nature exists only where humans are not. This language sets up a potentially insidious dualism, for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel it. In that sense, biking the Silk Road is an exercise in calibration. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.
Or, after easing their way into Tibet …
It was only late August, but the poplars were already flaring gold. Fallen leaves crunched beneath our wheels, and the paper prayer flags scattered on mountain passes made a similar noise when we biked over them. Tibetans threw the colourful squares into the sky in a bid for good fortune, and if nothing else, this had the immediate effect of collaging a dark road into something brighter. On one pass a bus drove past me just as its passengers threw the papers out the window, so that prayers stormed down all around me. One of them caught on the brim of my helmet without ever hitting the ground. I tucked the gritty, sage-coloured square into my journal for good luck. Depicted on it was a wind horse, or lung ta, a pre-Buddhist symbol for inner wind or positive energy shown as a horse lugging a jewel on its back. When someone’s lung ta decreases, the Tibetans say, they are grounded by negativity, and when lung ta increases they see things more positively and soar. “The very same thought can lead to a state of freedom or to a state of confusion,” wrote a Tibetan monk, “and the direction it takes depends upon lung ta.”
Or this, near the end of the journey …
The edge of winter, the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Mel and I stood shivering in the spot we would’ve landed if we’d kept swimming east that first summer on the Silk Road, a faint slick of sunscreen in our wake. Then again, shortcuts never take you to the same place. Wearing down jackets and pants with the legs rolled up, we shuffled into water so calm and clear it was like wading through air. Ten seconds later we shuffled out again, numb from the shins down. That night we warmed up in the village of Spangmik over a dinner of dal-and-rice with two Indian tourists. All I remember from our conversation was that the men hailed from some massive city, Mumbai or Calcutta, and Pangong Lake was the first place they’d seen stars.
Or this bit, in the epilogue, which is a long way off from where she began, in literary, personal and geographical senses.
With that the woman disappeared into a back room, leaving me stunned at her refusal to take sides. She returned a minute later with some photographs of her own: A family snapshot featuring rows of solemn people wearing dark robes with sleeves so long they hid everyone’s hands. A monastery pearled among gritty mountains. Some kind of Buddhist painting, intricate curves and symbols and patterns rendered in yellow, green, red, white, and blue. “Sand,” the woman clarified. “This is sand.” I’d read about how Buddhist monks painstakingly arrange bits of coloured quartz into a geometric representation of the universe, or mandala, then scatter the art in a gesture of non-attachment. The photograph I held was the sole proof that the sand mandala had ever existed, only the real mandala wasn’t the completed work of art, but its attempt. That act of pure attention, the motion there and away.
And then, every so often, she drops in lines like this, stuff you know that just came to mind somewhere on a dusty mountain pass.
“Every heartbeat is a history of decisions, of certain roads taken and others forsaken until you end up exactly where you are.
It’s hopeful, it’s humble, it’s kind and, in parts, quite funny. For thoughtful wanderlust, pick up Kate Harris‘ Land of Lost Borders.
We have a large honeysuckle in the backyard. It grows over a little metal trellis, which we had to replace because it was rusting through. Also, the bush had overtaken it, grown top heavy and had become unmanageable. So, a few weeks ago, we cut the thing back. We had to abuse it pretty well to extract the old trellis which was buried deep into the soil and supported by some rebar and other fantastic off-the-cuff solutions the previous owners had installed.
That was the better part of an afternoon.
Anyway, this evening while I was strolling around outside taking a break, I wandered over to see how it was doing. You’ll be pleased to know that it seems our honeysuckle is as hardy as most any of its kind.
It looks weird right now, and it will require a bit of training and some actual pruning — which hadn’t happened in a long, long while, apparently — but it is still green and shows signs of new leaf growth.
There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Feel free to fill in the blanks.
This honeysuckle has a crimson flower. And, like all honeysuckle in my adulthood, it doesn’t seem to have the amount of sweet nectar of the first ones I ever discovered as a child. Those all yielded yellow and white flowers back home, and they could be unruly masses, growing and thriving most anywhere. At our house growing up, the previous owners had strung honeysuckle along a set of clotheslines they didn’t use. It took years to get all of that out. But, in the process, you could enjoy the flowers. I still clearly remember learning about the treat inside those flowers. It’s a fond memory.
Honeysuckle always seemed its most fragrant right about the time that school wound down. Maybe that’s why I wandered over there tonight to check on it.
Anyway, the grading is now done. I have, in the last 10 days, read and evaluated some 650-plus pages of undergraduate work. A lot of it quite good, and some spectacularly so! Now I’m going to give my eyes a rest. Tomorrow I have to turn in the grades.
