Quite Elegant Circumstances

Sleeping in a bay window overlooking Dolores Street. Even after all these years, San Francisco is The City, the home country. L's flat is in the blue building at the corner, kind of hidden behind a smaller tree. It's going ok. (Though I gotta say, today she is right cranky. Better, I think, but cranky.)

the easiest pumpkin "pudding" imaginable

I used to spend more time cooking... before I had to give up both wheat and dairy (and then soy). Since I mostly cook for one now, and because it's too hard to cook for larger numbers with foods I still love, but can no longer eat, I have had to find ways to streamline. Otherwise, it feels too much like I'm dining on the law of diminishing returns.

I don't remember when, but on one fortuitous shopping trip, I discovered that Quaker sells a very convenient box of individual packets of grits. Now grits have become my main staple. I began using them just by cooking a packet in the microwave (for one minute) to go with some eggs and maybe bacon, but then discovered, gradually, that I could cook a light-- but very satisfying-- meal in a bowl, beginning with one serving of grits. And in practically no time. (Note: I always cover the grits, etc., loosely, with a paper towel or napkin or paper plate, nothing plastic, to keep them from spilling over.)

I began experimenting by adding just one egg, after the initial cooking, and then returning the bowl to the microwave for another spell (times vary, but probably for a minute or two); and then adding two eggs (w/ Omega 3); other times one or two eggs with some frozen shoepeg corn (smaller kernels taste sweeter & better & are easier to digest), and maybe with some bacon or ham, which might also be heated in the microwave on a plate on top of the bowl of grits. At other times, some mushrooms, from a can if that's all I had on hand. For something sweet, a chopped up banana is also good, or a few berries. Or just a small sprinkling of chocolate chips.

More recently, though, I had been wanting something with pumpkin, probably an unsatisfied craving leftover from the holidays. Finally, I opened one of the several cans of organic pumpkin pie filling that had been collecting in the cabinet, and used about 1/3 of it, adding it to the cooked grits, after beating in two eggs. (Remember, this is all happening in one bowl, with a spoon and a fork, and something to cover the bowl while in the microwave.)

I started off with two minutes in the microwave (after the initial minute for the grits), but the "pudding" needed more time, perhaps because the combination of two eggs and the moisture in the pumpkin. I think I gave it another minute and a half. Earlier on, I used to stir in between microwave sessions, but now I usually just put it back in for more time, if it's underdone. Everything puffs up a bit, far less than a souffle, but still pleasingly, and then settled down a bit, like other baked custards. The texture is not as smooth as the usual pudding, but then the base is ground corn, not milled flour. But if you like polenta, you won't mind.

For a little extra flavor and other good things, I'll dust it with a very small amount of Green & Black's ground chocolate, an equally small amount of flax (because I'm still getting used to it), and a packet of raw brown sugar. Why all the individual packets? Partly for convenience in measuring, but also because I've been making it at work in the communal microwave, and having it for breakfast, while other people are eating other goodies that I can't have. I never used to buy pumpkin pie "filling," only the packed pumpkin, but in this case, having it pre-spiced is a definite advantage, and because it's an organic brand I found in the supermarket, it doesn't contain other things (like modified food starch) that I never know for sure are safe for me to eat.

I confess that I may actually like my "pudding" even more than I used to love pumpkin pie. Which was considerable.

Not At All Easy To Read

My boss the head of reference thinks that interest in the Kerouac scroll must be a generational thing, since he doesn't care at all. Me, I have history of a sort with manuscripts typed on rolls of teletype paper, and the museum is free on Friday evenings, so I hurried over after work.

The whole west wing of the museum echoes with the clatter of typing. I thought at first it was a recording, but it was way better than that: at the entry to the exhibit there is a room with old Underwood typewriters, and visitors are encouraged to compose either haiku (a bunch of Kerouac haiku are hung on display) or road narratives, and pin them to the wall. Type type type. Type type type. There is a film on continuous loop, apparently a shortened version of "What Happened to Kerouac". There are enormous blowups of the pictures from Life Magazine of an impossibly handsome Kerouac sitting by his typewriter, holding up the scroll as if reading. There are display units with photos and books of other Beats, and a display panel about Kerouac's associates' New Mexico connections. The sound of typing from the anteroom stops, begins again. Type type type. Type type type.

There is a long long case diagonally down the middle of the room, with the first thirty-six feet of the manuscript unfurled. I don't know if it has been opened to different parts of the story in different cities, but we get the beginning. He composed it with the real names. Neal is Neal. The paper is almost transparent, and the grain of the cloth on the floor of the case shows through behind the typing. Even if one weren't bending over sideways trying to read across the lines at an angle without leaning on the case (which might set off an alarm), it would be hard to read. With or without bifocals. As presented, impossible. I went to the foot of the case where I could at least read straight on instead of sideways. It was the part where he is picking cotton for two dollars per hundred pounds. I read until I was practically standing on my head trying to puzzle out the last visible letters as the paper wrapped around the glass dumbbell holding the rest of the novel. Type type type type type type.

The museum rented a billboard, along I-25 northbound from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. The same text as the bumper sticker above. If you didn't know what it was about, you wouldn't know. Good pix in the San Francisco Chronicle.

On the way to fetch LobsterBrian from airport

ruminations

Our bodies disease when we fail to confront disappointment with loving persistence. The small cleaving occurs the first time, the cleft widening as our spirits are buffeted about over time. Failure to love, failure to joy--these are the seeds of unsought unchosen illness.

Love and joy, then, are key to healing: this is why aligning ourselves, our minds and spirits, becomes critical. Thus we infect ourselves day by day and arm ourselves against disappointment. More importantly, the infection spreads to others.

And helps them to heal.

Thence also we conclude that rage destroys body and mind in loosening our attachment to life and affects others' attachment, as well. We may leave the susceptible in a weakened, disappointed place.

***

When young ones are small their parents help them to redefine their emotions: the child exclaims I don't love you any more or I hate you; the parent says You must be so angry right now, so disappointed. Because being angry doesn't mean you stop loving. I won't believe it does.

I have raged until my mind and body and life went entirely to pieces. Exhausted, I hear the small mental voice: Just because you're angry with someone, it doesn't mean you don't love them. Rage-and-pain magmaspatter resolves to swirl of ash and then to clean settling snowsift, and I stand holding all that love in the bowl of my hands--and I begin to heal.

And because I know there is no spatial separateness, not really, I pray that my anger's cooling-receding cools and transforms the anger of others.

Unblocked, at last

With more than one blogger identity (both old and new versions), I was confused about how to log-in and post here. But tonight I'm unblocked. Hooray!

The dusting of wet snow was a surprise this morning. We knew about the inches of rain, the flooding and rising water in the area around us... but not the snow. Power outages... my train wasn't running, and I had to figure out another way to get to work. Only a little bit late A very minor inconvenience, all things considered. And this Nor'easter is still not over. So many people have had to evacuate their homes, and so many of their homes are now ruined.

I've been reading Joan Didion's book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," and thinking about people I've known who have died recently. In particular, a 44-yr-old woman-- physician, wife, and mother of three-- the wife of a former boss of mine. What an incredible woman she was.

And then today that inexplicable shooting-- a massacre, really-- in Virginia. The coverage has pre-empted some unimportant and ridiculous sitcoms. Too bad it was just the typical network-style coverage.

It's staggering to think of all of that grief and mourning to come... and that's just a fraction of what we are wreaking every week in Iraq.

Done, Done, Done With The Desert

High tide at First Beach, Quileute Reservation, on Saturday.
Turn your volume down before you click. What I wanted to catch was the rattling thunder of the backrush pulling cobbles down the foreshore, but the little camera's audio pickup was overwhelmed.

By August, I will be living out there somewhere within reach of Ocean. For now, back to work here in the high desert.

14 April 2007
Thursday we woke up to half-a-foot of snow on the ground
yesterday was bright and warm, grasses and fruit blossoms
I thought then to wear a bright dress to work today but
damn! it's pouring rain this morning, so back to protective denim.

My aunt in Louisiana phoned the shop yesterday to tell me
of their pygmy goat in labor too long
and the head of the dead kid stuck
part-way out, and the rush to the surgeon.

5:30 a.m.      What month is this? Mar ... no April, oh
I remember, I've been writhing and night-
maring about taxes, till I remembered
"cut-off date" does not equal guillotine.

This feels good, waking early and writing. I would like to say I've missed it, but in the weeks of absent impulse I've missed nothing. March was the shop's worst month since its opening 16 months ago, and I could order no books and the shelves have grown anemic. That mercenary alarm, and the tax bit looming, and all accounts in disarray since December's move, receipts and statements disappeared, and the body swooning and drooping: no poetry there, only sleeping late napping napping and in other hours reading compulsively

convulsions of Shakespeare
I spend my late evenings stalking
the seventeenth earl of Oxford,
dear Edward, threading behind the scent.

I did take off a Wednesday afternoon
to drive employeeRory 'round
the SurpriseValley, where he's never
been, so he finally might under-
stand all the fuss, and see where
half our customers hail from.
I found the place suddenly changed, with
an Internet espresso place, and
a gallery in the saddlery, and a
billboard at the four-corners promoting
"6-acre ranchettes."

I tried some Journeys, those mental
forays into inner dimensions
(infernal dementia) that so fascinate me.
In one I was guided down a
broad thoroughfare to a capitol dome
and briefly I imagined myself supinated limp
across father Lincoln's alabaster knees
like the Pieta.
In another I swan deep and deeper
till I bumped against a living wall of whale-hide
there was no getting past.

In a high moment this week
I told a dream to a shop-customer friend
as though it were prophecy.
She countered (her husband a psychologist) Jungian, with
      a certain more internal perspective.
Yes, I said, yes, you're right,
and I let it go--but doesn't she get it?
I thought later
(later, when I got it)
that all this outer is only projected inner?
That all this "inner" is just the breeder
      for molecular circumstance?
The scales fall away ...

6 a.m. Do I go make a Serious cup of coffee?
or slide down
under the down
and go back (go back!)
to sleep? O let's be strong:
coffee it is, then.

Two earls to tell of today.
I mentioned Edward Oxenford already,
whose labors of love were lost behind Shake-speare's mask.
But I found another earl, as well, recently, and sent for
the little book Near False Creek Mouth
Earl Birney's poems from 1964 Vancouver. He wrote I guess mostly in the '40s and taught at the University of British Columbia and an image I find personally devastating from a poem called "Memory no servant," its last line--
        But what I can be certain not to forget:
            ten feet from the first bridge
            on the highway north from the town
            a turtle coming up from the gulf
            Both wheels ran over its middle
            The sound      a crushed carton
            Looking back:
            the untouched head
            ancient      stretched      and still
            moving

(Strange thing about living in town now. I am not privy to the conversations of wilderness birds but can hear the mews and cries of gulls who populate the vacant lots here. I used to see them before in fields, I remember, just after plowing, but their daily cries at all hours, this is new to me--or renewed, inasmuch as they were ever-present in my Culver City childhood.
These, I suppose, must be the inland,
Mormon gulls
fond of locusts and alkali.)

But I find behind these Birney lines
a pointed kind of racism, dated chauvinism,
and a lot that bugs me.
So I suppose I'll do with the moving head
of the crushed tortoise
where the book falls open anyway.
and re-price it and put it on the shop shelf.

Seeing The Thirteenth Redd

On Thursday M and her friend counted 12 steelhead redds in their assigned stretch of creek. Last night at dusk we walked down into the nearby stretch, and she showed me how to recognize the disturbed gravel patch which means it's a place where a fish dug a hole and buried eggs. I put on her waders and pretended to see what she was pointing out. Maybe I saw. I certainly got to experience the bliss of standing in the middle of the creek...

I Never Met a Tide Table I Didn't Love

Now there are three: in my shirt pocket the one I tore out of the newspaper the day I arrived—and isn't it DIVINE to be someplace where there's a tide table in the newspaper— and the one for April we got at the lodge in Kalaloch; and in the pocket of my pack the elaborate one with conversion tables and suns and moons and whatnot for the whole year for the whole northwest that came from the all-in-one store in Forks.

Yesterday and today drove out to La Push. Beautiful capital-O-Ocean. No whales, though other people were seeing them. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean. No rain yesterday, some rain today. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean.

Um, yeah, I also talked to a storage place about where to put my stuff when I get here, and bought a county street map, and found out what I will need to get a library card when I get here,

and bought my hostess a big Stanley thermos for a bread-and-butter present. Haven't seen her all day, she got a call early this morning from a volunteer biologist who needed help counting redds in Siebert Creek (?? wikipedia says 'a salmon redd is the space at the bottom of a stream that a spawning salmon makes for its eggs'). She crashed around assembling her waders and daypack and rushing-away breakfast and (not very good) thermos and so on, and was gone. By the time I got back from the Ocean, she had gone off to Port Townsend to hear a naturalist talk about newt migrations. Or something equally entrancing.

Did, Might

M loves Beach Four on the Olympic Coast the best, because it has tidepools. We walked, and got rained on. She took a longer walk, to further tidepools. I got my book and myself pervasively damp, mismanaging raingear. Coming home we were chasing a rainbow for almost an hour. Caught it at Crescent Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

M is planning a trip to Bhutan for next month, so she can finish her book. Yesterday's expedition was by way of playing hookey from preparations. Today she is making phone calls about immunizations, and such. I might go out to La Push. The gray whale migration is passing.

Beach Four
Crescent Bay

Closer To The Ocean

The maples have their catkins blooming, and leaves beginning to leaf out. I dreamed last night the tide was full in the bays and inland waters I drove past yesterday. There's a cherry tree out the window in fullest dress.

I'm in my friend M's cabin in the woods behind Port Angeles. An agenda-less spy trip. Look at places to rent, poke around town. Go out to the ocean. The real ocean. I read the apartment ads in the paper yesterday. M tells me I can stay with her as much as I want, and that she might go away next winter and I could sublet. We'll see.

Day rose beautiful. There will be pictures later, but around here you go when the weather says go.