More Food Musing

The grandboys are journeying home from Small Town Upstate NY today. Soon I will know whether anyone panicked, when the door to the runway gaped open. I will know whether a person can breathe in Charlotte on the last day of June, descending an achingly hot runway into an icily air conditioned holding pen. Why does an airline make you fly 1000 miles east in order to go west? Why are there no direct flights from Syracuse to SF? Tell me why and why, as Woody Guthrie sings.

I think they had a good time. No one indicated any different. They caught fireflys and swam in the pond and probably got to drive the rider mower. They were fed according to their limitations, which probably meant lots of delicious desserts and a sprinkling of salad.

Well, when the Man's kid was spending half his time with us, before he decided that drugs played him a more compelling tune than food and shelter and we were foolish old people who couldn't possibly imagine what his stressful life was like, thus we needed to be neutralized, food was An Issue. His meal of choice featured either pesto spaghetti or a steak burrito. Now, age 28, he is a gourmet cook, capable of producing all sorts of subtle and surprising food combinations to delight and amaze his friends and family. He also likes us. Blink and things change. In principle, I support that.

So, even though the grands do not, at this time, venture far from pasta and cheese or cheese and pasta with a little bread on the side, it is just possible that they might get to feeling a hankering to branch out. Try a little sauteed spinach. Munch a portabella. Barbecue some corn. They have been actively discouraged from taking risks of any kind but now they're a few steps out into the world. OMG! Hope I'm there.

Hot. Damn

Yesterday gave us a morning like many another Essay Effay mornings: cold, grey and foggy. I wore my fake fur vest, windbreaker, socks and a ski cap to the park. I'm not sure my dogs would recognize me outside the house without a ski cap on.

Puppy-O dashed and frolicked. Old Girl Queenie rolled from leg to leg, burling her way up hill and down dale, staying the course. Unbeknownst to them, we were treacherously planning to leave them alone for an entire day while we went in search of sunshine.

Somehow, we missed the flood of pilgrims to the Gay Pride Parade. We sailed across the Bay Bridge and serenely voyaged past herons in rice paddies and controlled burns beside irrigation ditches, until we came to Party City, 3 hours into the journey. Barely a car in sight, the last 40 miles, except for a bunch of big sedans and pick-ups parked outside the Mennonite church.

Oh, it was Hot. I fell asleep in cool sun and woke up in an oven. The wind blowing snarls into my bangs felt like a hair dryer. I slugged warm water into my mouth from a bottle that had still been half-frozen a half-hour earlier.

Party City has a big park and big trees, lots of trailer communities and a state U. The Man spent (or wasted, depending on whom you ask) a good (?) ten years of his life there and has many fond memories. Now that we are Old, he thinks maybe we should live there, at least part time. So we are there to look at a house. Not just look, you know: walk through, open closet doors of, exclaim over. Eat a few blackberries off the bushes on the fence. Sit on the front porch and wonder how sun gets past the trees in the winter, if they don't drop their leaves. Serious contemplation of a house.

House has a lot of charm and seven foot ceilings. The master bath is big enough to turn around in, just. The kitchen cabinets are made of quarter inch plywood and painted LightBrightWhite. But, there are two fireplaces and big old comfy soft sofas that the owners might even leave behind. And herbs and fruit trees in abundance. I could see me in a calico bandana (am I mixing too many images?) and granny shades, hawking tiny, ribbon tied bundles of purple sage and lavender at some farmers market.

After that, we went swimming. It was necessary to walk over pizza stones, masquerading as a poolside terrace, to get to the water, but then someone brought out Real lemonade, made from just-picked lemons and we sat in water and sipped cold bevvies and it was lovely.

If you're wondering, the car didn't cool off until we got to Berkeley. The dogs expressed their anxieties with a number of wiggling body motions and snorts.

How They Spent Their Summer Vacation

Here we are, in the summer of what do we do with two teenage boys whose life has been a lot like Jacy Dugard: they've been cut out of the world and encouraged to eat crap and play video games. True, they have not been impregnated twice and forced to live in tents in the back yard. But still. . .

The boys remembered with pleasure visiting their grandfather and step-grandmother in upstate New York, at their little farmette. They have turkeys and a pond and a garden and lots of space and fresh air. So, arrangements having been made, off the boys fly from San Jose to Chicago, where they will change to a smaller plane and fly to Syracuse. They have never flown without an adult before.

In Chicago, their flight is delayed. And delayed. And then canceled. They are given hotel and food vouchers. They hit the cell phones, everybody at every end of this looming fiasco is mobilized. Some blessed human, related to a co-worker of my son, who is huddled in her storm cellar, waiting for the end of the tornado warnings, volunteers to pick the boys up at the airport, feed and house them overnight and return them the following early morning, all of which she does. They then spend another 12 hours at O'Hare. The younger boy is fried and wants to go home. The older boy seems to be enjoying the challenge. Neither one of them, I just want to say, is wearing baggy pants or women's underwear. They do - finally - get to Syracuse. The next morning, there are strawberries and sunshine and swimming and laughter in recalling the airplane adventure.

Meanwhile, back in the home state, their mother is trying to convince the judge who issued the orders that it's time to revert. She wants a joint custodial schedule, no evaluation, no supervised visitation. This is appropriate, her attorney argues, because a psychiatrist has written a letter attesting to Mom having organic brain syndrome (which is?), known by this shrink because she's been treating Mom off and on for ten years. But nobody in the family has ever heard of her before, and Mom is not the type to keep secrets when she can get so much more mileage by flopping it all out there. Mom also has a letter showing she has been discharged from rehab. There's a reason, and it's not that she has completed a program. It's that she doesn't admit she has an addiction problem, so they can't help her. All there, in the letter.

What Mom hasn't done is go into an in-patient program or arrange - in timely manner - for an evaluation, as she was ordered to do. She had told the boys, while trying to talk them out of traveling east, that they would be back with her after this court appearance. Ain't happening. Next?

Definitely Half Empty

Really, what can you think when you descend the stairs in the dark at almost 5 a.m. to find the front hall full of dog poop? Which you notice, before opening the front door and smearing it far and wide. You decide to pick it up before retrieving the paper from the front steps and, on your way to the kitchen for paper towels and floor cleaner, step in a small pile you haven't noticed and track it all the way down the hall.

It's Saturday, so the crosswords are at maximum difficulty. The creator of the blighted puzzle this morning has a frame of reference I have no access to. Rock performers I've never even heard of - not that I'm fluent in rock, these days, just that folks like that are all over the media, so everyone knows their names. Or not. So I fill in the lame two or three short definitions I can hope are correct ("transpose digits" is "err"?) and decide that it will all be better by and by, after I take a shower.

It's a foggy morning, though the wind hasn't kicked up yet. Maybe 55 degrees. The infrared bulb in the bathroom that heats the cramped space enough to make it possible to take off clothing before getting into the shower is unplugged. Plugged in again, it doesn't function. Plugged into another outlet, it still doesn't function.

Inside the shower is an enormous black spider, glaring from the nether reaches of the tub. Not so long ago, when I tried to spare a spider - or at least give it a chance to survive - it leapt upon me from the shampoo shelf, causing me to jump and shriek and embarrass myself, even though I was the only person awake and present. . . I took a glass jar and put it down over the spider. It would not climb the sides, just sprawled there, with all of its legs splayed out.

A rational person would certainly have given up for the day, no? But then I'd have missed standing in line at the pop-up deli and coming away with corned beef! Kosher dill spears! Whitefish salad! Potato salad. Saved by sheer dumb resolve to power through!

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

Last night I had a Law Nightmare. It was probably also a Death Nightmare. A former client, someone I never should have met but I did, and became his rock and his salvation, given that he had not the least idea how to live in this particular world. If whatever it was couldn't be accomplished by shouting or pouting or desperate acts of self-mutilation, he was lost. Dutifully, and despite his inability to ever come up with any money, I kept trying to represent what he told me his interests were. Such as taking his tiny daughters away from their drug-addled Mom and keeping them safe in his stinky little dog-filled house in a neighborhood where no female could venture outside without a male protector. And then, of course, he'd add a woman to the mix: someone from the neighborhood who lived on SSI and had a weakness for kinky sex and marijuana or someone who came to the door selling candy bars for a high school charity and was perfectly happy to settle in with takeout from McDonalds and a lot of hashish.

The tiny girls got bigger, started school, had learning problems, acted out. What else could be expected? The trick was to keep the matter out of the hands of CPS, to keep the family in Family Court, thus out of the juvenile justice/dependency system. When one of the no-longer-tinys told some school person she was being sexually victimized by her dear old Dad, it was no longer possible to keep the social workers at bay. Nor, I must say, did I want to. So I passed the caveman on to my office mate, a fighter, and advocate and much more familiar than I with the perils of the juvenile courts.

In my dream, Caveman had decided I had mishandled his matter and was determined to have justice, no matter how long it took to get there. He needed all his files and I found him looting my denuded office, searching for files I had long since shredded. And suddenly my old office mate, my dear dead friend, stalks in sporting a chic blonde bob and a sneer for me. She's going to represent him in whatever action will bring me to my knees! She won't look at me or talk to me, just stomps around looking stylish and forbidding. And I wake up, with my heart going hundreds of miles an hour and no idea why these two want to team up for anything, let alone inhabit my dream life.

I'm not sure I want to know what it means.

I Think I'm In Love

Pranced off to the DeYoung today, to follow the lines in the sand to the Picasso Exhibit. It opened last Saturday, to enormous hype, including some companion exhibits featuring G. Stein et famille, their art collections and personal foibles. I always like a good foible exhibit, me.

Well, it is a lovely and wondrous exhibit and especially nice if you spring for the audio tour, even though the volunteer who connected us must moonlight as a dominatrix ("You Must have this audio if you're going to the exhibit!!!!")The Man insisted that he didn't need it and wouldn't have it. I caved, and was glad I had, being an afficionada of odd factoids, of which there are a multiplicity.

A long, long, long time ago, when I still raising small children, I read a book by Francoise Gilot called something like My Life With Picasso, which made me yearn for small, white-washed, tile-roofed mud houses, close to a beach and brooding, sunken-eyed men in espadrilles, painting on everything, painting breasts and guitars and roosters and eyes with starry lashes. A life lived with wine and bread. A life different from the one I was experiencing in New England, in drafty old summer houses, ripe with mildew and fade. Gilot was all but missing from the exhibit today but there was a picture of Picasso wife # 1 or maybe 2: Olga, a beauty, painted from a photograph (interesting factoid) and looking remarkably like a Matisse.

There were none of the sexy paintings, really. No satyrs, no nymphs. Only one minotaur, not engaged in randy malfeasance. Fairly tame and dimly lit, this exhibit, but I didn't get to see any of it in Paris, two years ago, because the museum closed two days before we got there and won't reopen until it's renovated. Art without a home. Anyway, a gracious and welcome traveler/guest. See it if you can.

But Seriously, Folks. . .

How are we going to deal with this weather? Today, in Essay Effay, the temperature never topped 60 degrees and the wind howled icily down the east/west streets. I had on the Man's windbreaker, which I wear all winter for park walks, but I forgot my hat (wool) when we walked dogs this morning and, as a result, I have an earache.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast they are frying. "Dogs are sticking to the sidewalks" as my Dad used to say, quoting (perhaps) Thornton Wilder. "Could fry an egg on that sidewalk" as somebody or some bunch of bodies used to say, to express overheated urban conditions. And in Texas, everything is drying up and blowing away (can you say "Dust Bowl"? How about "Great Depression"?) And, as goes Texas, so goes a lot of agriculture and up up up go food prices. And then there's China, desperately needing water. And Vermont, drowning as the rivers swell and tear away the land.

Not so long ago, it seemed possible to exist comfortably and eat just fine on a modest monthly income. Fish and chicken were cheap, vegetables even cheaper, beans a good protein source. . . Last time I checked, salmon was $18/lb. Chicken could be had for under $3/lb., if you were going for something that wasn't raised on hormones and pesticides, but that would be a special. So, you're an old person (yes) trying to make a small amount of social security go a long, long way and you better hope you are good friends with your neighborhood butcher, who can save you a couple of soup bones to add to your parsely broth. That's while he/she is still in business for the next few months. But then?

My compadres are old enough to remember the back-to-the-land surge of the late 60's. All of a sudden, we coddled little suburban brats were asked to learn how to chop wood and haul water and garden and keep chickens for eggs and meat (I don't have to detail what it took to get to meat with chickens, do I?) And this was all in order to be self-sufficient, because Vietnam and corporate America made us think the shit was hitting the fan and we needed to get off the grid. Some of us are still out there, more comfortable now, no doubt - maybe growing a little for a medical marijuana collective, maybe specializing in quail eggs or heirloom tomatoes, maybe just growing enough to can and freeze and trade a little with neighbors, if it's a good year and the late rains don't steal the pollen.

It would be wise not to be helpless during these dark days.

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart

Do you live in a world of rue and remorse? Probably not, if you're youngish and vigorous and still feel like you're on top of your game. Just be aware, that walking among you - maybe even in line behind you at Whole Foods, with impeccable products in the hand basket and a cloth bag to pack purchases in - are people like me. I may have a big bouquet of organic flowers and a clutch of organic shampoo and body wash, with no discernible, irritating odors, I may be wearing jeans and a Santa Cruz hoodie and flip flops that show my silver blue toenails. I won't be wearing makeup but my hair will be clean and brushed and I'll have my diamond stud earrings on. You probably wouldn't swing a wide path around me or avoid eye contact because you don't know how much I rue and regret, how paralyzing it can be.

This morning, I woke up remembering when Daughter-In-Law (DIL) quit her quite good job with the County, five or six years ago. She quit, allegedly, because she didn't want her boys to have to go to after school care. They rarely did, since she was working 3/4 time, but even if they had, all their friends did, so what was the big deal? Could it have been that her drug habit had advanced, even then, to the point that people were noticing?

For quite awhile I wondered about that. After she and my son split up, I assumed she had stopped working on the advice of an attorney, to boost the amount of support she would be paid and to make it more complicated for her to get back into the job market, so support would be extended. Now, I wonder and stare at walls. And I regret not - at least - asking.

The thing is, you go on learning how to look at things. You learn what a jerk you have been at points along the way, for not looking closely, more insightfully. You hope that this learning can inform the yet-to-be.

Where It Hurts

I really like my dentist. He's been more than patient with me for at least 25 years, as my gums recede and my teeth abcess and take leave of my mouth. He sees me when I'm in pain and almost doesn't lecture me, even though we both know I wouldn't be in such pain if I saw him more regularly instead of on an emergency basis. Because, even though I like him, I don't like the whole business of dentistry and ignore it as much as possible.

It's just like car insurance. I dislike the concept of insurance a lot. Seems like betting against yourself. If you're willing to do that, what other depths might you sink to? Plus, insurance is expensive. None of that matters, if you live below the radar. You just never register your car and abandon it when the plates go out of date. I mean donate it to a charity. By abandoning it. I don't like insurance but I have insurance because I'm not such a great driver anymore and I don't like having roadside chats with cops about expired registrations. Sometimes it seems like the choices in life are worse and worser.

Today, after he alleviated gum and sinus pain in the left side of my mouth by adding some padding to the right side of the device that provides me with the illusion of having upper teeth, my dentist told me that he wants to get a divorce. He says it's amicable, even though his wife doesn't want it. What can I say? She's a retired nurse and has been assisting him ever since she retired. She is smart and competent and even got him to travel to Europe. I thought they enjoyed each other's company. Apparently, they were good actors until they got their kids raised and now they have nothing to talk about.

What next? Will she move to LA, where her family lives? Will she get surly and refuse to play the amicable divorce game? He's planning on a trip to Mumbai (she hates all that spicy food and poverty, he says) His dental assistant says he'll no doubt buy a motorcycle and a Porsche. Today he had an awful haircut. It looked like someone had used garden shears and trimmed around a bowl, balanced unevenly on his head. This is worrying but it will be worse if he's suddenly all gleaming and spiffy because of a new love interest. I told him maybe to try a trial separation rather than the whole epic production, just to keep himself safe from fortune hunters. Hope he listened.