Fés, Summer, 2007 (A Poem in Prose)

Fés, Summer, 2007

From the bruised-sky countenance of an English summer (three hot days and a thunderstorm) we fly south; we are young.

At Bab Boujaloud, the blue-green gate, we look up, eyes hot, sweating diamonds onto a street paved with dust. Hey, Bob Dylan! Ali Baba! Nice girl! (I like being your nice girl, while you, today, are all shaggy brown hair, beard, sunglasses).

I like it when you speak French, when you say shokran, when you sit for hours, beneath a lamp, sketching its lace form, each precise indent, measuring with your eyes. You are intimate with it; I want to ask how these things are done, but the silence is all that keeps us cool.

Kif? We watch the owner of the café, carefully rolling, with stained and heavy hands, a joint. Kif? He says. Then I lose track; we swim home through Fauvist paint (even you look made of blue and green now). We follow sex with a nap, wake with eyes ringed red to dancing music. Listen to that, you say. (Perfect bliss).

In sudden palaces, children play, women scrub the smell of decay, the rot of orange blossoms from the floor. The tiles arranged with surgical symmetry (mathematics by color). We spend our days walking imperfect circles around the riads, the minarets, the medersas. We spend our nights too hot to touch.

Mornings made of honey and a single cube of sugar dissolved in the ocean of your coffee. I prefer mint, hot, sweet, so you teach me to tie a paper napkin round the glass because it was something you learned, once. I read the guidebook to you: It seems to exist suspended in time.

Even the shadows are still.

Here in the House which was the Site of Our Budding Love

1.

I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We're in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it's Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

2.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don't want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we've lived here--how long? nearly two years?--it fits us. It owns us if we don't own it.

I think about this sometimes (I've probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that's too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don't think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?--say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it's early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we're here, they aren't just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o'clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven't actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that's what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

3.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I've been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn't swim in Walden Pond after all.)

4.

I'd like to wear a summer dress, today; or a pair of cutoff denim shorts, like I am seven again, and a fluttery blouse that lifts in the gentle wind. I'd like to see all of our clothes--his shirts, my knickers--our sheets--hanging on the line in the garden. That's the nicest thing, here, in summer. Looking over the fences and seeing that everybody on the street has hung their washing outside.

And the days of the barbecues. Walk outside in the early Sunday afternoon, smell the char and the smoke from next door, or from your own garden. One day we spend hours outside, into the night, lying on a blanket. The boys burn old pieces of wood in the barbecue just for fun. We leave all the plates and bowls outside until the next morning.

5.

So it's funny to think that for all that, it isn't ours (ownership being a thing about money, not memory). Still, here we are on a Saturday, doing our laundry, our dishes, he bringing me tea while I work, Billie Holiday drowned out by the sound of the washing machine shuddering its way through another load, passing through this in-between season and into another.

Oxford, Late Winter, Evening

I like to watch the steeples puncturing the sunset as I cycle home, showering the city with blood-orange colours, setting the tops of buildings alight. Such precise buildings: the filigree, the sculpted domes, the golden windows. The roads seem wider at this hour, and unpaved. I go towards home, towards the pub with the rusty bicycle outside, towards the café where magic (they say) happens. Towards the bare-wood-planked edifice of our love.

Earlier I ran mundane errands. I bought ugly things, useful things. I hate to spend my money on ugly, useful things. Razors, shampoo, tampons, condoms. I went to the self-checkout because I did not want to be seen. Please let them not think that this is what I do, what I do, in my red pencil skirt, my leather heeled brogues, my rust-coloured coat, after work, on a Friday evening. Let them not think that this city and this life has become so prosaic for me, because that would be an unfair representation, and even if I buy razors and tampons on a Friday evening while the air and the light is shimmering all around us, I also...

...have this thought: cycling to work, early morning. The sun coming down the wide, empty (unpaved) High. I had forgotten how much I love to see the city in this light. The closed, sour winter-me, so suddenly self-obsessed, so willing to be saddened or hardened, moved by the temperature, the darkened days, had forgotten this very simple thing; but all it took was a touch of light upon my skin to remember it.

(Still, strolling down Turl Street, I see a stationer is closing its doors for good, and in the Covered Market, past the fresh meat and leather and hot cookies, several shops wear signs: Sale. Last few days. Everything must go. I have thought for so long that the economy does not touch me, because I am poor anyway, I am in the throes of youth, but maybe, I think, I will miss the stationer, where I once bought a set of notecards, and the shop in the covered market where I once bought a blue satin clutch to go with my dress for a friend's wedding.)

Turquoise

I'm wrapped up under the duvet, listening to Chopin. He wants to know if I'm okay.

Me: I'm fine, I'm just feeling...well, not blue, exactly, but...

Him: Turquoise.

Me: Yes.

(He gets me. He really does!)

Love is a Poor Man's Food*

The Man's been telling me about these guys for absolutely ages, but in classic fashion, I've ignored him up until now. I'm sure many of you will recognize this little dance: he finds something absolutely riveting online, and insists that I listen Right This Second while he reads whatever it is aloud, and I go on doing whatever it is I'm doing (trying to decide if my eyebrows are too thick or not, shopping for shoes online, etc). I say, "mm, uh-huh" and offer a few short, diplomatic spurts of laughter where possibly appropriate and then mumble variations on, "hah, wow, that's so cool, who knew?" and he knows full well that I'm not paying attention because I do the same thing to him, and he continues merrily doing whatever the male equivalent of shopping for shoes online is.

But recently, he implored me with more than the usual enthusiasm to sit down and look through these two blogs, and I acquiesced, because I could hear something really, deeply genuine in his voice, and boy am I glad I did. Here's why:

They're really cool! He's English and she's American. They met and fell in love in space of days. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York, where they now live. Yes, I like their story for its parallels to our own, and I like the feeling I got when the Man said to me that it's nice to read about these people with a really amazing history and I got to say back, well, hey, we're not doing so badly either, are we?

But also, maybe more importantly, I like reading the words of two people who are unashamedly in love with each other. It's nice. It makes me feel all hopeful and warm inside. It's like the blogospheric (can I say that?) equivalent of playing with a very small, fluffy puppy, which maybe makes it sound more trite than it is. It's just somewhere between a favorite old book and a small animal, perhaps.

Part of me wants to say to myself: whoa, now, hang on. This is really, super creepy. You're basically peering across an entire ocean into the lives of two complete strangers, watching their every (virtual) move, and making judgments about them, projecting your own hopes and fears onto them. Stop being a stalker and GET A LIFE.

The other part of me says: oh, shut up already. Scruples suck, and bloggers don't write about their lives in the hopes that no one will ever read their words or identify with them as human beings (and if they do, wow did I get this whole blogging thing wrong).

It's the latter part that wins. You know what? It's nice reading something that makes me smile, and makes me feel normal(er), and also reaffirms my belief that human beings are actually really groovy sometimes.

****

It's also made me think, maybe I haven't explained enough about the Man and me. It's always just been that he's a presence in my life (a big one) and, you know, he's English so sometimes we have some really funny interactions. But the thing is that I wake up every morning, and then spend quite a lot of time throughout the day, thinking how lucky I am and how extraordinary it is that I literally found this man that I love at a pub, in Oxford, in a sea of people. I mean, what if it had been a Thursday night instead of a Wednesday night, and he'd been at football instead of the Turf Tavern? I like to think that we'd have met anyway, but life's funny like that--you never know.

It amazes me every day, every moment that I think about it. I don't think about it enough, these days. I used to think about it all the time because it came up all the time, when he was introducing me to his friends or I was telling mine about him. "How did you meet?" they'd want to know, and he used to say, "fortune of chance," and I settled for saying, "at a pub," with the wryest smile you've ever seen. It just seemed too implausible. And implausible, I suppose, it was. I mean (avert your eyes, Mom!), I've kissed other men I've met at bars, too (not a lot, but still), and I didn't fall in love with them.

But I did fall in love with him, and he, extraordinarily enough, fell in love with me. I've forgotten of late not how much we love each other--there's no ignoring that--but about how incredible the circumstances of our loving each other are. We love each other across cultural boundaries and in spite of the distances between our birthplaces. A year ago I wasn't sure how the hell I was going to make a move to England work but now here I am with a boring office job thinking how dull making photocopies is, as if this huge, huge thing hadn't happened in my life to allow me to even have the job in the first place.

It's not that I take things for granted; it's that, in the words of Pico Iyer, who I've been reading a lot of lately, I'm "beginning to domesticate the dream, to know my way around the marvel." Iyer was talking about a place, and I could just as easily say that it's how I feel about Oxford, too, but I think it's just as apt about love. I don't forget that I'm lucky, or that my situation is beautiful; I forget that my coming here to this place (this city, this state of in-love) was so full of chance and happenstance. It just seems so natural. And hearing Ray LaMontagne sing that "love is a poor man's food," when all the newspapers predict a decade of austerity and financial ruin, when my paychecks barely cover the bills and we can't imagine ever having the funds to do something drastic like, hey, buy our own house, only reaffirms how important this is.

*Ray LaMontagne, "Hold You in My Arms"

What We're Like

We've become these people that, like, act almost kind of cool, and adult, and stuff. We lounge around with our Macs, in our slightly hip outfits (him: Croc sneakers--though please don't picture these, because his are actually really, surprisingly groovy plus he bought them from a man on the street for the price of two pints--khakis, and a Banana Republic jumper; me: black skinny jeans (yes, I finally caved), slightly ethnic scarf, long cardigan (according to the Observer magazine, cardigans are "in")--actually, the image almost disgusts me. We cook breakfast, have friends over for casual lunches. I sit under a duvet drinking lots of tea and eating clementines (and I'm not the only one) while he catches the second half of the Spurs v Portsmouth game. When he comes home we watch a few episodes of 30 Rock and order a curry.

"You're not eating the nob of your sausage?" he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
"No," I say. "I got bored with it."
He picks it up, eats it. I'm chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
"You're going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage," he says. I swallow.
"Yes," I say. "Yes, I am."

(Maybe not so adult.)

My 2008 in Quick Review

We started off the year with Fidel Castro's cigars at the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific, near the Western Gate, windy. I got my university diploma; it was very large. Then it was back to England for an austere few months of late winter cold-ness. I hunted for a job. I got a job. I re-discovered how little I like office work. The Man did research for a BBC 4 radio show, and became a temporary commutor to London. I started cycling everywhere; first shakily, winding my way round the neighborhood for practice. I went to my very first hen-night; I had a fairly significant birthday; my parents came to visit us in Oxford; the Man turned another year older. We tried to handle the cruel transition from winter cold to tempting spring almost-warmth with as much grace as possible, but I still underdressed a lot. In a green silk dress and a kilt, we attended the wedding of two friends deep in love. We celebrated our first year together. I decided once and for all to be a writer, and to go back to school. As summer settled over the city we headed back to California, where we lounged our way through a heat wave, tasted lots of wine, did our best impression of surfers, and got a nice tan. I also applied for a student visa, drove to Burbank and back in one day to ensure that it was received in good time, and, thankfully, was granted one.

Back in England, it was midsummer and beautiful. I hung the washing outside and wore sleeveless dresses, and visited the botanical gardens, and the parks and meadows, often. I went for long walks. I was out of work until September, so I became very, very, very poor. I had to admit that I've been foolish with money in the past, and take out a loan for school. We visited Cambridge, and Brighton, and at the end of August, with the barest hint of autumn in the air, we went to Paris, where we watched people unabashedly for several days straight. I started work again. I started school again. The city revealed itself to be beautiful in autumn, too. The days got colder, and shorter. We looked after a veritable menagerie in the countryside, feeding pigs and staying warm by a log fire. We celebrated the election of Barack Obama and I went to my first bonfire night. Several friends moved away, seeking fortune in London. Time began to seem like a blur, like something running towards Christmas full-pelt.

And I didn't go back to California for Christmas. For the first time ever. We went to carol services and ate mince pies and mulled wine; we bought presents for people and tried to hide what we'd got for each other. We went a few miles out of town for a week, and had Christmas with the Man's family, and unwrapped gifts and ate lots and lots of turkey, and slept in, and stayed warm, and read books, and when we came back, though we'd had a very nice time, we were also happy to be home again.

There are things I've misesd, I'm sure. But for now, we're off to the Isis for a drink and then to dinner with friends to celebrate the new year.

Best to all, and hope you enjoy this last evening in 2008...

Lemons, Lemmings, and Love in Winnebago Country

“He has the social skills of a small lemon,” he says—at least, I think he says at the time. Actually I’ve misheard.
“He has the social skills of a small lemming,” is what he’s really said.

“Oh!” I say back. What can you really say, after all, to someone you think has just described another human being as a small oval-shaped yellow fruit? I picture the man whose social skills are akin to something that tastes nice sprinkled over hummus puckering his lips and crinkling his nose. His head his egg-shaped, pointed at the top like a Conehead, and his skin is rough and leathery, and thick.

(Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it, to get through the day unscathed?)

Later, I will wonder: are small lemmings necessarily any less socially capable than their larger colleagues? Don’t they all just march along, without regard for future or past? But it’s the sort of thing you say when you don’t have all the time in the world to think it through, and in your head, you hear the voice of logic saying, “what could be more socially retarded than a runt lemming?”

A small lemon, apparently. And then I wonder: would a small lemon, as opposed perhaps to a large lemon, have some shame in not being as juicy, as fruitful as it could be? (Whereas a small lemming can be just as lemming-y as a large one.) And maybe this inferiority complex is what leads it to be so antisocial: that constant reminder of being less of a lemon is too much to bear. It becomes a hermit lemon: sulky, moody. Misanthropic.

(Only it can’t be misanthropic, can it, because it isn’t, as much as I may try to personify it on paper, human. It becomes the lemon equivalent of a misanthrope, anyway.)

The funny thing is, that a week later, I will remember thinking that he says, “the social skills of a small lemon”, and realizing after that he has actually said “lemming”, but I will not be able, for the life of me, to recall who has the social skills of a poorly sized fruit-or-silly-animal. It’s funny how things like that work; well, how memory works, anyway. Like a sieve: only it forgets to catch the relevant details and gets lemons and lemmings instead.

In the fruit bowl, there may or may not be blood oranges. We are not sure how to tell, without cutting them all open, but there’s something nice about not knowing what kind of orange you will get until you’ve begun to peel it. When I was a child I thought that blood oranges looked like I imagined pomegranates to be (I'd not yet seen one in the flesh): something approximately the color of a faded ruby inside, soggy and full of dark, running juices; and because in my mind pomegranates were always associated with poor Persephone, bound to Hades because of their seeds, so too did blood oranges begin to tie themselves to an ancient Greek myth.

Again, funny how memory, and connections, will play tricks on you. Here’s another one:

At the dinner table in QI a man tells his friend of a dream he has, to drive a Winnebago through the American countryside.

“I have such a fondness for the Winnebago,” he says. They commune over what seems to be a mutual affliction: love of one of the world’s most bizarre inventions. Then the other one sighs wistfully, starring into his cloudy glass of white wine, through the haze of golden liquid looking out over the warm wooden dining room while the towers of a dozen different Oxford colleges hang against the night sky behind him. They are caught up in the drama of another world: of driving an obscenely large vehicle through dusty country roads, past cornfields and IHOPS and Wal-Marts big enough to swallow entire towns whole; past crumbling barns, shiny new skyscrapers, under big skies on big roads in a big, big country.
“Ah. It really is Winnebago country,” one of them breathes happily.

And I think: when I was a little girl, my idea of the perfect possession was a motorhome, a Winnebago. I thought that having one’s home be so portable would just be right somehow; and being a child, I was too young to understand all of the cultural implications of motorhomes and trailerparks or the ennui of a life spent on the road. It had simply occurred to me, in a very basic way, that portability of home can be an asset to one’s own essential self.

So now I take books everywhere, and think that in some strange way that I can explain in words to no one (and how ironic is that!), this is almost the same as having a home on wheels. Words travel better than almost anything else I know.

And because it’s Valentine’s Day soon (or possibly already is), there’s one more thought that seems unconnected to everything else but important to say, and important to say now:

There’s a song I’ve been listening to a lot lately, because I heard it in a film and it caught my attention in that way that certain songs do—you think to yourself, in a theatre crowded full of people: this song was written for me! And part of it goes like this:

“If you were a wink, I’d be a nod; if you were a seed, well I’d be a pod. If you were the floor, I’d wanna be the rug; and if you were a kiss, I know I’d be a hug.”

A Few Brief Food Notes

We have food phobias.

I used to make fun of him for his: conference pears. I only had to speak the words; and as soon as they escaped my lips they seemed to go straight to his head. He would shudder in the same way he does when I put on an English accent and say “water” (the only word I can say truly convincingly, at the moment) and goosebumps would rise on the back of his neck.
“They’re only pears,” I would say, “I’ve seen you eat pears.”
“Not conference pears,” he would say back, cringing.

It had to do with their skin, he confessed one night: their horrible scaly pearskin, slightly fuzzy like a peach, rough and wrong. Like when you see something that’s completely disproportionate, and it makes something in your head go berserk, go all dizzy because things aren’t as they should be. Like the window display I once saw in Boston, with huge denim jackets sized for Sasquatch next to mini jeans clearly meant to fit Malibu Barbie.
“I’ll be your conference-pear handler,” I promised.
“Thank you,” he breathed, relieved, I think.

But the other day, I was pondering the poetry of compost: the way teabags and old brown lettuce leaves arrange themselves in the bowl, nestled amongst green carrot-tops and strips of red and yellow peppers and old potatoes, when it occurred to me that I have my own food phobia, akin to his conference-pear-horror.

Sprouting potatoes. The ones that have been sitting on the counter for too long, a few weeks maybe, the ones that things have started to grow out of. I get the same kind of vertigo looking at sprouting potatoes that I did looking at the denim window display. The worst is when they’ve got little flowerbuds, usually dark purple, at the end of the green sprouts. I’m actually shuddering just thinking about it.

To even the score, I told him about my dread of sprouty potatoes, and he promised not to ever make me deal with them if he could help it. This is how I know we are good for each other (or one way I know): we take care of each other’s food phobias.

And each other’s food loves. We say things like, “it’s ok, we’ve got hummus” without a trace of irony. It really is ok, though not just because we have hummus but also because of all the other things that are hidden in the folds of being able to say “we’ve got hummus”. This weekend we made our own hummus: a smattering of spices and pepper, some garlic, lemon juice, chickpeas in their own water, all blended together with a delightfully phallic aluminum blending stick. Then we sat in the lounge eating our hummus and drinking cider and reflecting on the richness of this kind of evening.

We made winter vegetable soup, too. This was about a week ago. We had a preponderance of root vegetables. No, preponderance doesn't even begin to cover it. We had an invasion of root vegetables. Carrots and potatoes and swedes and Jerusalem artichokes pouring out of boxes and bowls, practically spilling from the kitchen. George the poet came by once and assured us we'd never go hungry like this, but then some of the potatoes started to sprout and I panicked and we decided we should do something about the whole situation, so one evening, a really cold one, when all you want is soup and to be inside, we cooked them up and put them in a wonderful stew. Neither of us was quite sure what to do with the Jerusalem artichokes--which do not look like artichokes, which do not come from Jerusalem--so I looked them up. "Cook them like you would potatoes," said one website, "but beware that they have a tendency to produce very potent gas."

We had fresh tomato-infused bread from Maison Blanc and lots of butter and listened to Radio 4. Sometimes I think we are very old people in very young people's bodies, and I love it.

Are Scotch Eggs the ultimate hangover cure? We wondered this once. Because they are such perfect little balls of everything you crave when your head won't stop pounding: they're warm, breaded, meaty, eggy, and, best of all, you can dip them in hummus. ("It's ok; we've got hummus.")

Last night we went over to an impromptu dinner with some friends. "We have lots of chips," they said. "And steak. And pink bubbly." We stopped by the Co-Op on our way, so that we'd have something to bring them, but the only meat they had was lamb, so we brought lamb chops and red wine and the rest of our homemade hummus. Then we ate steak and lamb and bacon and chips and hummus and champagne and red wine and whiskey with ginger wine and talked, more or less, about the first lines of books. That is what food does to us.

And I was happy, because the night before, I said, all I'd been craving was a big chunk of meat. There is no way to say that, if you're wondering, without making it sound like a thinly guised euphemism--nor is there any way to express the relief of finally getting said meat ("oh, you finally got some, did you?"), but it doesn't matter. The other day when they didn't have any condoms in the shop, he brought me home The Observer's Book of Food--a Saturday special--instead, to tide us over until we could get to a real store.

Taking Care

We decorated the tree last night.  The process was eminently enlightening.  We discovered that certain ornaments are creepy (a wooden cat with a string you pull to make his legs splay open, for example); certain ones are too partisan (an elephant was relegated to the box, whilst a donkey was allowed to swing free on the branches.  my mother has steadfastly refused to display the special edition white house ornaments we get each year from a lobbyist my father knows.  "not while he's in office," she says).  Xander is partial, I've discovered, to old-fashioned looking ornaments: simple, wood, Christmas-y.  I seem to be partial to animals and flamboyantly colored, almost garish representations of things like musical instruments that have very little to do with Christmas, really.  I spent a good deal of the evening worrying that he would find our tree--a rainbow assortment of bicycles and baubles, and creatures and angels, with its colored lights and ramshackle stand--too camp, too California, having strayed too far from the Christmas ideal.  He, I think, spent most of the evening worrying that my family now thinks he's very bizarre (he is, but not a one of us is in any position to judge).

The result of his careful arranging, and our wrestling with the tree to get it into the stand, is actually  very pleasing--the result, I suspect, of our both having been in charge of Christmas in our respective houses for so long.  The tree is just the right balance of tradition and unabashed flamboyance--California meets Charles Dickens, or something.  The ultimate Christmas compromise, and it works very well, as it turns out.

I am now sitting watching how the tree handles the daylight: have you ever seen a fully dressed Christmas tree in California sunlight?  It looks utterly out of place, no matter the season.  But I may as well not be in California at the moment, for I am on the couch, and Xander is talking to relatives in Oxford whose voices I can hear, and the house phone has just rung, and someone from another part of the state is on the line.  We are inundated with communication, and wildly, absurdly global, it seems.  The world shrinks and then expands at our whims: we are in the remotest spot, where cell phones do not work and radio crackles gently, but we have technology at our command, and can close ourselves off to the outside, or open up to it, at the tap of a key.

And then there's our Christmas tree, with its motley array of ornaments, a product of compulsiveness and--perhaps a better word here--care.  Yesterday we had a lovely lunch at Chef's Touch in Solvang (a respite from the faux-danish-ness); panini-pressed sandwiches followed by a persimmon pudding.  We overheard the chef discussing the pudding: his Grandmother's recipe, he said, and, when we inquired after it, also "what sealed the deal with my wife".  We had to have some--not only to see what such a powerful pudding in the flesh, but also because, you have to admit, "persimmon pudding" sounds wonderfully poetic--almost erotic, the sort of food I imagine Greek gods and goddesses licked from each other's fingers whist draped in swathes of golden fabric and ivory robes.  

The pudding was indescribably delicious (the gods would not have been disappointed, I assure you), but what was equally delicious was the care the chef seemed to be putting into his work.  I don't just mean putting into his food, either, though clearly there was that: I mean also the way he interacted with his customers (just the two of us and a middle-aged man with a beer and a sandwich), the way he prided himself on the persimmon pudding, the way he cheerfully gave us our portion "compliments of the chef" and invited us to the open house later ("we've got to dress the tree," we said.  "oh, screw the tree!" he cried.  "no, we're not going to do that," Xander said back.  "it would be very prickly."); the way I felt, after having eaten, sated both in spirit and body, as if I was part of something, a good something, and it was completing me, and I was completing it.

So when we came home and decorated our little tree, each of us bringing the expertise of years and the prejudice of place, and reached a tidy balance (example: we've never had white lights on a tree before, but this year, they hang alongside the colorful ones), you could call us compulsive, or downright weird (and you'd be right, on a superficial level).  Still, I'm inclined to think it's necessary care: what is the point of doing something, especially something symbolic, or something important, or something that earns you a living, or something that holds weight and meaning, if you don't take care?

"Everything falls away from us--the light, the dark, the warm afternoons--and all we can do is cry out in affirmation of our joy." *

I straddle longitudes and latitudes—

What is the point, I wonder, at which you can say you truly know a place?

I was born in turn-of-the-20th-century-California, where kids rode horses and climbed trees, where roosters woke families in darkest dawn, where rains washed the road away each winter and we set up school in a Victorian mansion. Then I crossed the country in one sweeping motion; 21st-century-Boston, all WiFi cafés and gleaming ultramodern skyscrapers. If you looked at the ground, you’d realize that people had been walking on the same bricks for four hundred years; or close to. But I didn’t know what old meant until I crossed the ocean, another sweeping motion, and walked down the High Street in Medieval Oxford.

“If you keep moving east,” my mother jokes, “eventually, you’ll end up right back where you started.” Isn’t that what Eliot says? "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

I start to feel a bit like that about university. Did I not know precisely what I wanted, from the moment I set foot in these hallowed halls (metaphorical hallowed halls, in my case, for the Emerson campus is as un-ceremonial as can be, as unlike a campus as the food court in a shopping mall)? I was going to be a writer, and spend my four years here filling my head with books--until a few weeks in, when I decided to explore, and my exploration led me somewhere entirely new, and exciting, and now here I am, and all I want is what I wanted in the first place, except that, as Eliot says, I have an utterly new sense of it.

There were points in my youth when I hated the ranch--and if you'd seen it, and hadn't lived there, you'd have to wonder why. But I had a thousand reasons: I hated its distance, its ruggedness, the way everything was full of hills; I hated how dark it got at night, how early the morning light came shooting into my bedroom, how coyotes and cows kept me up at night with their incessant howling and mewling, how I had to harbor a vague worry, everywhere I went, of mountain lions; I hated how dry the hills got each summer, how muddy and wet everything was by the light of winter; I hated going out in the dank darkness of a cloudy evening to turn the generator on; crawling up the driveway laden with grocery bags and heavy bookbags; and more, and more. I was a petulant teenager, yes; but when you know someplace, really truly well, do you not also gain a right to rail at it sometimes?

I certainly don't hate it now (though neither to I flatter myself that I could live there again, not yet)--going there is a respite, a holiday from the ugliness of a city, a feast for the senses. Never before did I appreciate a simple walk through the hills so much; never before did I delight so well in donning muddy wellies and tromping through the mud; never before did I lie awake by moonlight and marvel at how rare the sound of a coyote seems, or awake bathed in hot sunlight to think how special it is for one's rhythms of sleep to be marked not by the sounds of college kids yelping their way through a party, but by the rise and fall of the moon.

I find myself spread across many places: and I wonder, am I divided and split, or am I, in fact, more whole because of it? --and I think, because I am in essence the optimist (though some of you may not always believe it) that it is most assuredly the latter.

I have dreams now of Oxford; which seems, in my memory, to be the place I have been happiest, though surely there have been, and will be, minor unhappinesses there. It is not easy to feel this way: am I, I wonder, abandoning my family, my childhood home, the country that birthed me? But I am not doing these things, for to do so would be to renounce where I come from, and though it may be harder to visit the ranch, to spend time with my parents, I embrace wholeheartedly my origins, and know them as such, and know also that distance alone cannot keep me from them.

I straddle longitudes and latitudes—and know that I am more whole for it.

* Pico Iyer, from Sun After Dark (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Iyer, a travel writer (I might like to argue he is much more), was born in Oxford, raised in Santa Barbara, CA; then educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. At the time of writing Sun After Dark he was living in suburban Japan. Straddling...

A Pair of Atlases

(for someone I know…)

Trying to bear the weight of the universe—even your own private universe--on your shoulders is hard. Then again, if everyone in the world was responsible solely and entirely for themselves, well, things would be a lot less messy but—it’d be a very, very lonely place. Somewhere, but I don’t yet know where, there’s a secret, magic balance. It’s the perfect amount of involved; the perfect amount of responsible; the perfect amount of adult. It’s not-too-much-guilt. Every once in awhile, we get it wrong. We, the pair of atlases, generally tend to err on the overly-involved, overly-responsible, overly—well, if not adult (no one would call us that, I don’t think), then overly conscientious, side.

It’s very heavy—the guilt, I mean. Helping people is light and airy. That’s not what’s heavy. That’s not even what it’s all about (though it probably should be). There are lots of strings attached—helping oneself, for instance. Feeling justified, needed, or loved. Oh, it gets very complicated indeed. But being driven by our guilt will only make our shoulders sag, and our faces pale, and our muscles, inside and out, ache.

I haven’t yet figured out how to transform guilt into something good; but when I do (and I will, I will, I will!) I’ll tell you about it. And maybe it has something to do with the light-and-airy-helping-feeling, and maybe soon I’ll discover where that magic balance is hidden.

But until then, I say…well, at least we’re a pair, and so, not alone; and I don’t think there’s any rule anywhere that says one Atlas can’t share another’s burden.

Satellites & Surface Area

Between the two of us, we don’t have enough money for the bus. I find it funny that this could be: two people, smart, funny, good looking young people, each with a university degree (well, almost), neither of whom can manage to cough up one-pound-thirty. The relative poverty of youth, I think, for the millionth time this week. We are living partly on the high of our own happiness, partly on the kindnesses of those older than ourselves, and partly on the empathy of our friends, who suffer similarly at other times. They will always find a way to buy us a drink; and we, when we can, will always find a way to reciprocate. Of course, we are all also doing this partly on sheer luck.

A thrown-together dinner party: it was meant to be risotto, but we had so many potatoes that at the last minute, we figured it would be better to make gnocchi from scratch. We buy half a shoulder of lamb from the butcher, and some quail’s eggs on sale, and are delighted when our entire bag of vegetables costs under five pounds!

The guest list fluctuates—it is only finally settled an hour and a half before we are due to start cooking, and even then it is only because we wrangle a deal with A, who says he will only come to dinner if we have a drink with him first (a stressful day at work, he says). So we carry our groceries to the pub, and A buys us cider, first one pint, then another, but because I drink slower than the boys X worries he should head home and start cooking. He takes the food and goes off to catch a bus while A and I discuss the woes of writing our respective dissertations. And we are growing progressively more and more animated, exchanging ideas like tennis players volleying, and I have scarcely sipped my drink, when X comes toddling back. His tail is between his legs and his cheeks rosy from cold.
“No money for the bus," he remembers.

A hands him a few pounds for another pint: a wordless exchange. Are we drinking to forget? I forget to worry about this. X comes back outside with a cider and a folding map of Oxford pubs.
“Did you know,” he says, “that this style of folding was derived from origami? Now it’s how they fold satellites.”
He takes the two corners and pulls; the map unfolds, and the table is covered by a paper representation of a dozen wizened old drinking establishments. I point at the ones I’ve been to while X says,
“It’s about surface area. And it’s also far simpler for a robot to simply pull two corners, than to futz with folds.”
“All except three,” I say. “I’ve been to all the places here except three!”
X squeezes the accordion-like map shut again; then pulls, and unravels it again.
“How do they get satellites to twist and fold like that?” A wants to know.
“They’ve just got the right materials,” X says. Flexible, foldable, satellite materials.

We are now running very late. We send A to get wine and throw the lamb in the oven, and dance round the yellow-walled kitchen washing dishes and cracking quail’s eggs and dropping vegetable stalks on the floor and sniping at each other until I spill egg all over myself and run upstairs in a huff, and X follows me and folds me in his arms and whispers “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you,” but it is not till twenty minutes and seven outfits later that I am able to come back downstairs and feel at all composed.

We drink the fancy bottle of wine at dinner. For as long as I have known X, it has been there, on the counter, a yellowed French label.
“I’m saving it for a special occasion,” he always told me. “It’s really nice stuff.”
But tonight he leans over to me and says,
“I don’t know why I made it out to be as big as I did. It’s not that nice. It’s not so special. I was thinking, on the way over here, that we should drink it.”
I protest. I do not know what significance—if any—it may hold, but I feel this is a rash decision.

I protest, and he protests to my protests, until we’re tongue-tied and twisted. “Honestly,” he insists. We’ve moved through seven bottles already, so we throw caution to the wind, and open the fancy wine, the wine for a special occasion. I think: well, it is a special occasion, isn’t it? Of sorts?

In the morning every space in the kitchen is covered with the detritus of a lovely meal. There was scarcely room for six of us at the table; I find myself thinking, “we need more surface area”. I picture our lives being unfolded by robots, grasping at the corners, pulling gently, and what they would see this morning, I suppose, would be colored by nice wine and quail’s eggs, and a whole lot of a happiness that has nothing whatsoever to do with money in a bank.

The Importance of a Good Pair of Boots Should not be Underestimated

Perhaps I ought clarify the photograph below: artistic compost. A representation, in very many ways, of my earnest but foible-filled attempts at living ethically.

Have had a day full of sloe-picking, dog-walking, mushroom-examination, village-pub-going, beautiful-autumn-day-watching gloriousness. It’s quite possible that one of the things that would make me happiest in life would be to be out here—where I seem to be both deeply happy and fabulously productive and inspired—with a pair of good solid rubber boots and a huge ratty old jumper, and to go for long aimless walks through the countryside with good company.

Beetroots Revisited: In Which a Bit of Guilt Visits The Author One Lovely Oxford October

How to reconcile the giving up of the vegetable deliveries? I am sitting at the kitchen table cradling a cup of tea, and thinking, we simply can’t afford it. Between going hungry and going unethical, we have, being human, chosen of course the latter: not because we are by nature unethical beings, but because we are by nature a species who competes, who strives for survival, and who, when needs must, compromises.
Here’s what happened. It is happy news: S and A are engaged! We’re excited for them; they glow, they invite us to the wedding, they move in together. And, though I’ve never known the house at a time when S lived there full-time, day-and-night, now her clothing is gone from the bedroom, her books pulled from the shelves, and a faint emptiness steals through the spaces that crave, but at present lack, inhabitance. She continues to rent her old study—“the midden”, it’s called, for the literary chaos on desks and chairs, the smell of old books, the sound of papers fluttering, crumpling, lovingly abandoned to a life of running free through a jungle of very academic words—but X hasn’t seen her in weeks, he says.

Then, on an October afternoon that toys with becoming cold, despite the fiery red and orange colours blazing in the trees, S sends word that she’s transferred the vegetable order we shared with her from her old address to her new one. That’s it: the transition is complete. No more little cardboard boxes on the doorstep every Tuesday.

We will not put in an order of our own. X is covering all the rent until I can move in come January; and though he smiles at me as readily as always, the burden weighs heavily. Sitting cross-legged upon our messy little bed, framed on each side with an old wood chair piled high with books, I say tentatively:
“Well, perhaps we can just wait and then—reinstate the tradition when I’m back for good.”
I can feel his relief: perhaps he expected me to adhere to my morals more fiercely (perhaps even I expected to do so).
“Yeah yeah,” he says. “It’s just—at the moment—too much.”

Too much: I know what he means. Too much food. Too much cost. Too much bother. I don’t think either of us is one to bend easily, but what can you do when it all gets to be too much?
What, indeed. Do you try to make it up in other ways? Do you assuage your gently nagging guilt by assuring yourself that, come springtime, when you’ve saved up enough, you’ll rejoin the ranks of the worthy, you’ll redouble your efforts! Do you content yourself to know that for many long, meaningful months, you were good?

I’m a perpetual, insistent, insolent worrier, it’s true. When X says, “It’s just too much” in that resigned voice, shoulders slightly hunched from trying to scrape up rent, my mind, in its worrying little way, goes immediately to the things I’d written months previous. “I’m such a hypocrite,” I fluster, flush-cheeked, brows furrowed. Have I lost, I fret, my right to write about this?

Good intentions, after all, cannot alone suffice. They are, yes, a crucial baby-step. They are the foundation for everything else: like a writer’s credibility. No self-respecting author could rely solely upon his honest reputation (he must also have message, mastery of prose, an audience, a dream)—but without that foundation of ethos, everything he does subsequently is meaningless.

So, I think again, what can we do? And it stops being about easing the guilt, at a certain point, and starts again being about the problem at hand. I remember presently that not having Abel & Cole drop off our groceries each week is not actually the end of the world. It’s hardly even a hiccup. We can still eat well: in a way that nourishes us, and the planet, and the local producers. It won’t be in a neat package, tied with shoestring, for a few months. True. But so?

So we’ll have to work a bit harder to make it to the covered market before closing time. We’ll have to read labels more closely. We’ll have to do our own research to discover what products are local, what fruits and vegetables are in season, which ones are grown organically and not packaged in a thousand layers of plastic. Perhaps—people have done this for centuries, after all—we shall even start tend to our garden with more seriousness, and more regularity.

Midweek, and our kitchen is bare. We have no bread for toast, and no coffee, because neither of those things was delivered on Tuesday. All that remains of last week’s box is a collection of unwashed potatoes and a bowl full of little lovely apples. I chew my lower lip hungrily. X and I are both developing a slight but annoying cold; fall is in full swing, and though the sun shines brightly this fine morning, our window is shut tight against the autumnal chill. We emerge to a street that smells wonderfully of chimney smoke and changing leaves and pumpkin pie; the light is gentle, and warm, and hazy. We can hear snippets of people’s conversations as we step down the street, and the hum of music from houses. Someone has been sick on the narrow sidewalk; I have to jump to avoid stepping in the remnant of last night’s revelry. X and I wear thick jumpers and hold hands.

The little shop on Magdalen Road reminds me of going into someone’s overstocked pantry: fruits and vegetables, crisps, chocolate bars, a hundred varieties of sodas and juices stacked in no particular order in the refrigerator; milk, cream, cheese, butter; jams and peanut butter and marmite. Everything is slightly dusty; the chaos is warm, and inviting. We gather up our goods: the cheapest, simplest goods we can get. Plain sliced white bread (a half loaf so it doesn’t go off before we have the chance to finish it), milk for our tea, butter for our toast, tawny marmalade, orange juice.

Back at home, we make toast, cup our hands round our tea to keep warm, open the back door to let the smell of fall in. I do my best not to feel guilty about our illicit feast: bread that was baked far from Oxfordshire, juice from Florida, milk that isn’t organic. I spy the all-natural washing up soap by the sink and am briefly cheered; but that gnawing, itching, tingling worry…
Then, in the midst of my third cup of tea (trying to will away my headache and soothe my slightly scratchy throat), I remember something my parents used to tell me: everything in moderation. So today, I think, we woke up, we felt slightly rotten, though happy, and we were very, very hungry, and we went down to the little corner shop and bought some inorganic foodstuffs. Well, so what. We are not to be defined by our missteps. We mean well. We, for the most part, do well. The relative poverty of our youth makes it harder—but there are millions far worse off than us. For now, we’ve put rent before organic vegetable deliveries. But, I’m very happy to say, we’re also keeping our values very much in mind.



(thesis entry?)

A (minor) Correction & (even more minor) Rumination

...three posts later. Just had a look at the "I'm going to Europe! yipeeeeeee!" blog, and three posts later, I fell in love.

ethos, as they say, is paramount, and if we start ignoring facts (even tiny ones), for poeticism's (or anything else's) sake, well, then we start to compromise that all-important credibility...

It's not a gin and tonic, but...

“I should,” I thought.
“I shouldn’t,” I thought.
“Yes, I should.”
“No, I damn well shouldn’t. It’s silly and self-indulgent.”

And so on.
Finally I thought: well, I really should, shouldn’t I? I’ve played and played and played with the idea for so long. I’ve even had several blogs, though they were never kept up with any great conviction. You might even say they were neglected (horrible me). The last time I started one I was about to go off on some big European adventure. Then, two posts later, I fell in love. And you know how that changes everything.

The man I fell in love with sent me a link to a friend’s blog, recently. I discovered that they aren’t actually self-indulgent (or don’t have to be). They’re quite cool, in fact. And, for someone who loves words, they’re the (mostly) youngster-friendly version of porn (they’re right…the internet really is rife with the stuff!). Even my mother keeps a delightfully not-self-indulgent blog. If someone 36 years my senior, who maintains a wonderfully generational ignorance about the world of technology, can do this, well, so can I.

And isn’t there a refrain about how writers should write a little, every day? What was that epiphany I had a few months ago—“I want to be a writer!” Sometimes we’re so stupid about ourselves. Why, I’ve known that since I could think. Yet I let myself talk myself out of it, over the years—and it did take years, to convince myself of that. All it took to remember myself was a few Sundays spent lounging in the garden drinking gin and tonics and doing the crossword. How lovely. So, if that’s really what I want (and it is, oh, it is!), I should write a little, every day. Whatever it takes. I’m behind the game—I spent much too much time, as so many of us do, thinking I wanted to do something else (play the political game, in my case…though how I would have survived, with all my scruples and GUILT, I can’t say).

So here we are. Off we go. Into the fray, I suppose…