In The Quarter Of The SunThe word 'lee' has been popping up in life a bit lately. Not only is this a fairly common hindsight in crossword puzzles (or 'alee' a cousin which doesn't sit too right for an unknown reason), but I'm fairly certain that the resonance stems also from some deeply latent connection with childhood readings of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, first on the carpet at the small school and then later on my own.
It is an old word, a short word, a word for shelter from wind and weather. It connotes a passive cover, a solid thing, but not overhead. Bound up in the word as well is the thing from which one is spared: to be protected from elements raging past handspans away, carried overhead by its own power, impotent from its own strength to invade the shadow of the rock.
We get good weather for that sort of thing here. We get snowstorms, driven by wind that clouds the air and makes the near distance indistinct. We get thunderstorms, fill of wind and lightning. Sometimes, we get both at once.
Supine, ProneWe are sitting in Juliet's room. Juliet is spinning the globe on the desk, quickly enough to blur the land into the blue, the world spinning at terrible speed and in the wrong direction. With her eyes closed, she reaches out with a fingertip and brings it slowly to a stop under pressure. She does not open her eyes.
"We could go here," she says.
Her finger is leveled at the gentle blue of the Pacific, touching down in the middle of that wilderness. I imagine a small isle there, the simple foods of fish and fruit, the quiet when the winds are low, the lashing rains when they are not.
"I do not know if I can swim," I tell her.
Her eyes open, and she frowns at her finger. She sits down quickly into the chair, angry at the globe. "Too much water," she says. "We could head into the mountains."
"I could take a horse, perhaps," I tell her. "We don't know how to drive."
"Marco has been teaching me a little," she says. It is new to me. "I can't do so well enough to know when I am wrong."
We look at the globe for some time. All the world is there, so small upon her desk. On that little ball, everything is so close to us. So much is in reach.
Jacobo has gone.
KnockDinner is over, and we are in the front room. We are spread out some, Juliet on her end of the long couch, I on mine, with Marco rumpled into the easy chair. Mr. Shen is making noises in the kitchen, cleaning dishes. In the room it is cool and dim.
There is a knocking at the door, and Marco rises.
The man at the door is sharply dressed, a dark suit, close hair. He nods to Marco in greeting.
"Thank you," Marco says, "for not breaking my door."
The man smiles at that. "They wanted to," he says. "I told them it would be unnecessary. Thank you for letting me tell them the truth." A woman in a technician's coat is wrestling a large machine through the door, trailing cables that snake out into the night. The man waves his hand at the walls. "They have this house surrounded."
Marco shrugs. "Do they think that will help?"
"They do not know," the man says. "It worries them." He looks at Marco. "You do not know, either, and that worries me." He looks around the room. He nods to us, Juliet and I, but says nothing.
"We need to end your experiment," he says. "We are not losing the war so badly anymore. We are winning it, in fact. We are doing well. We no longer need to take risks." Marco says nothing. "This information is of little use to you, I know, but I thought it best to come tell you." He pauses, and looks around the room again: Juliet, I, the rose tree in the pot in the corner. "I am sorry about the lawn. It is very lovely."
Marco sits down heavily in the chair. "I will let it grow, I suppose."
"Yes," the man says, and "well," and he turns to the technician, who has been waiting. "Please," he says.
Juliet is close to me, on the couch, but we are not touching. My eyes are in hers, and her eyes mine. There is a crash of tableware in the kitchen.
QuiteIt is a testament to our fair city that there is drunken singing outside my window.
It is another, subtler testament that the singing in question is in four parts, with harmony.
Very much so!
CodaA programming note: there ends (more or less) the odd tale of Marco, and one of the strange seasons in which he lived. His story now has a place on the project page.
The only other thing I really want to say about it is to apologize for the unrelenting italics; I did that for the purposes of setting the material apart from the rest, and also in an effort of breaking myself of the habit of using typographical emphasis to set off words that I could better make stand out through grammar tortured use of. It was a worthy exercise.
I had fun with it. I hope you liked it. (Thanks.)
Here We Are!
Jingle When WalkingA friend of mine has a book of calligraphy. It is a lovely little book, well bound and comfortable in a slipcase with protective papers. The leaves are of good vellum, and feel good under fingers. The book itself is a replica of a request made by a King, some time ago: "bring me calligraphy," he said. And they did. And it is, none of it, bad calligraphy. There are perks to being King.
There are others. It has been a happy accident to be introduced to the work of Marin Marais, who composed, among other things, incidental music for a King no less than Louis XIV. The recording is by Spectre De La Rose, and buried in the baroque noodlings of court music is a lovely duet for viol that aches, and aches well. It must have been something to hear, that first time.
There is a hole in the pocket of my coat, up where it joins. I sometimes lose coins to it, and they fall between the wool and the lining to make small noise down around my feet.
Things I Keep Forgetting To Do With Vanilla Ice CreamRoot beer floats: I know people that make decidedly excellent root beer floats. I don't know how they do it, but they find miraculous balance in the ingredients, somehow, something I've not yet been able to master. Instead, I try to follow the wisdom my my family's approach: use quality ingredients, and it won't go too far wrong. There's a company named Virgil's that makes a terribly expensive root beer that they sell in single bottles, complete with a wired cap. It's almost too excellent to dilute, but mingle the stuff with a good vanilla ice cream and the result is just about as far from wrong as one can get.
Ginger snaps. Break up a few ginger snaps into the bottom of a bowl with fingers (or go after them in a plastic bag with a rolling pin). Fold them into a good vanilla ice cream with the back of a spoon; the ice cream will soften some, so eat it up quick, while the snaps are still bone dry. This trick also works well with grapenuts.
The trick to good vanilla ice cream is an ice cream maker, some salt, some ice, some cream, some sugar, a vanilla bean, and a healthy supply of hyper-active and gently gullible children.
God Does Not Play Dice With My iPodSometimes, shuffle play is a transcendent thing.
Those That Make Me Make Them UpI will admit: I am bad at talking about process. I come from a people and place with a strong line of "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do - hey, this looks interesting," so one of the reasons I have difficulty with talking about process is that I have some amount of trouble with the thing itself. At the moment I am afforded the luxury of messing around with words as play. I very much need to play more.
I will admit, too, that in my experience where the words end up coming from is a total mystery more half the time. There are times, true, when there is work to be done, and plots to advance, and characters desperately in need of something to do, and the only thing to do is press ahead, give them halting steps, and leave weaponry scattered around the drawing room. It is much more fun when they take matters into their own hands and teach me what happens next.
They do not need to be even shadows to do this. Just this evening a gentleman walked briskly into my text editor: I know he is a man, neither elderly nor a boy. I do not know what he looks like, smells like, or (largely) what he does with his time. As way of introduction, he said this:
"I do enjoy these buttered toasts."
...and from that there was an afternoon of warm sun in a garden slightly shabby, words uttered at a cast metal table and chairs coated too many times with white enamel, perhaps under some tree. Those at the table recline from the day, which has not been too long or unkind: they lean back a bit in their chairs to take leisure as a luxury, more so because it is not deserved. Someone there has, of course, done something unspeakable. They will likely pay.
Eventually, I may know his name. It usually takes a dozen tries. I am bad at that.
This Day of HeartsIt has been a good evening, an evening clean and clear. The air is winter, but gentle, and the stars leap from their field.
There is a way home from work on a road that drapes over a low hill with few houses, no street lights. In the summer, the road is crowned with leaves, a green tunnel. Every once in a long while a car goes by, setting out ahead of it a moving arc of white from the head lamps, bright against the dark background.
In the winter, on nights like these, a car can do similar. The illumination passes, bringing up for brief moments the bones of dogwood and birch, the scruff of the silver maples, the dark arms of the oaks and mulberries. When the car has passed and the shadows snap back into places, the view from the hill between empty trees is the lights of the valley, the soft lamps of our evenings.
In coffee shops, in markets: in homes.
Good Valentines.
One Wonders If These Titles Concatenate Into Anything MeaningfulA long time ago, I had reason (of which I am still not sure) to go on something of a test-run picnic with a friend. We were both in the habit of finding strange places to spend time. And so: we found ourselves walking railroad tracks in the early part of a summer evening. It was just as the air began to cool, and insects began in earnest, shaking the trees.
There was a signal pole there by the tracks, where they wound through a green valley. We climbed it, stepping with care past the high-tension lines strung on poles a long arm's length away. Above those on the signal pole was a small platform behind the lamps. We put a blanket down, and unpacked a small meal. Conversation was difficult: it was a surprisingly peaceful place, high above the valley floor. We sat and sipped and chewed and looked out.
Then a train came.
The BloomThere are, for some reason I do not know, a great deal of crows about. I do not know exactly how many, but I would put it up near a thousand of them. They have been congregating on the crowns of leafless trees, dots against the sky. So many of them are so perfectly still that it seems they are ornaments, but a few wheel and turn in the air, seeking new position on the branches. This does not dispel the illusion - this somehow makes it worse.
They would be like fruit but they do not hang. Rather: they are dark blossoms, bobbing in the wind.
Different FloursIt is cold here, quote cold; the forecast earlier said only a single thing about this evening's low, but now says nothing at all (and all of this is before the wind). The air outside tightens faces, and the chimney pot look meek. Everything is slow.
So I stayed inside and messed around with paratha. This is simple stuff: a measure of flour, half as much water, a scatter of salt. Mix that up, knead it a bit, and let it rest. Roll a circle, brush with butter and fold, roll, brush and fold again. One last roll and then onto a griddle, and very quickly there is fresh bread. Done right, the bread is tender, nearly pastry and puffy from the layers of butter.
As usual, things this simple do better with good ingredients. Salt is salt, but water makes a difference. I used to use various kinds of American wheat flours for this sort of thing, but I was only able to get odd results. The breads were quite good, but not quite right. Lights went on when I picked up a sack of atta flour from the excellent local Indian grocery. This is truly the flour to use for these things. I've no idea why. The breads are amazing.
All that stuff was set up, so I went and made roti to go with the rice and the light curry of turnip greens and black eyed peas that ended up becoming dinner. It is a happy truth of life for me that fresh bread utterly elevates a meal. If I had had a mango...
Instead, I have blankets and a mug of hot water with a touch of honey in. It is very cold.
Parting OutI had occasion to mess about with one of the shiny new iMacs recently (a friend was gracious enough to leave one lying around). Heavens, it's pleasant. It's quiet! If the optical drive isn't churning away at speed, it only makes a blissful hush. It's terribly shiny.
I got the chance to play with the new-fangled media applications that came with the thing; it would work admirably as a TV/PVR/DVD Player/MM Server/PBX/whatnot. One particularly interesting one was the photobooth app, which, as part of its work, cranks the brightness of the screen right before the shot. The thing also flips the images it takes, so that the visage one gets of one's self is the familiar one from the mirror, not the other one that everyone else sees.
I read a (probably suspect) paper sometime ago on the psychology of this. It turns out that there are perceptual trends associated with haircuts: the sloppy, non-scientific summary of it all was something along the lines of "parting your hair on the left makes you look like a dork." The problem is that a good looking part in the mirror will translate badly for those whom one might meet. The advice follows: make sure you look like a dork in the mirror!
But really, is it better to project a more pleasing image to strangers, or one's self? Should we all carry mirrors with us for those momentary chats on the way to the bakery in the mornings? And what are the social niceties of that? Whose mirror to use? And forfend if your mirror isn't clean...
My solution to this is to give ever less of a damn about my hair. And mirrors were probably a bad idea in general.
These Oak Benches Need More StainI ought stop listening to Cat Power; it is making my heart hurt. Or soothing it.
Like much in life, who can say which?
The Bees Have ItThere was the possibility that I was coming down with something (this is, sadly, still something of a possibility). It is the season for it; I am not looking forward to the idea at all, especially now that I will, in the main, have to fend for myself should such befall me. When getting home, I felt quite poorly, but it may have simply been the cold: some blankets and one useful cold weather trick have improved things.
That trick is this: hot water in a mug with a bit of honey in. I've found that caffeine doesn't help, and more often than not I want to avoid the astringency of tea. Water itself does it: the mug is warm, the liquid is hot, the stream rises. The honey lends some body and sweetness and notes to the steam (don't use too much!). This stunt works extra nicely with thyme honey, but most any honey will do.
I should make some soup.
A Thousand Points of LockIt is somewhat unfortunate that a friend of mine both took up and put down a small hobby in astronomy within a single season. It is cloudy here a lot, and when it isn't, there is often a smudge of haze above. The evenings of clear skies are rare, and even then there is the light from all the lamps in this place, pouring up into the sky and battling the stars. Amateur astronomy around here takes a professional's patience, and for that coin one is better served moving to the good end of a professional telescope in a professional place.
The lights have other uses, though. Back before the lights, night snow must not have been nearly so impressive, if seen at all. With the coming of the gaslights, townspeople were treated to soft globes of lit flakes suspended, dancing patterns to stroll through on the way upon the avenue. It must have been quite something, the first winter after they lit those streets.
The lights we have now do similar, but they are at remove from the level of the pavement, and cast broad cones instead of the close pools. They track the swirl of snow just as well, though, particularly the fat wet stuff that sometimes falls this time of year.
I would recommend a large, brightly lit parking lot, empty and late in the evening. It is the only thing I can think of that they are good for.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Commentary accepted at pen@goob.com, although the traps are agressive and the pointy bits simply drip with dark liquour. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.