Basket Raffle

Going out to a park alone can be tricky and nerve wracking; every twig snap signals sudden death by raccoon or bear or sasquatch.  But going to the woods is one of the most energizing and restorative activities, for who doesn't like picking up acorns, hickory nuts, leaves, or just breathing the oxygen given off by the trees?  Your head clears, filled with dreamscapes of green.

So I don't go, but was looking for an outdoor activity I could do by myself if no one else was around.  Walking was okay, trotting down to the lighthouse at the end of the berm and back was a short half hour; going for a walk around the downtown buildings was spooky on the weekend, for downtown no longer has shoppers for the disappeared stores, and the only place open besides a few restaurants is the central library.

Last time I went there, it was pandemonium; quiet doesn't exist.  C'MERE, YOU GOTTA SEE THE BABY DO BEYONCE, SING LIKE BEYONCE, WAFFLE. Waffle got out of her stroller, held her bottle like a microphone, and yelled "PUH HARRING ONNIT" over 'n over as if the needle was stuck in the groove.  Staff are completely cowed, and if they try to conduct order, are told to go eff themselves.

Two years ago, my son and his wife wanted to give out fossils as wedding favors, which was a memorable idea.  Buckets, shovels and a vague vision accompanied us to the nearby Penn Dixie Fossil Park and Nature Preserve, where we dug in the mounds of shale left from the days that it was a cement quarry, and found scads of brachiopods and horn corals.  I liked digging and banging rocks open a lot, became a member, and now have a go-to place for getting outside.

On weekends, the place is usually crawling with kids, which isn't a problem. Everything is a treasure, and you keep what you find.  They yell amazement and success, or if very small, cry when summer heat becomes a weight.  They don't bother me a bit, I can only hope their enthusiasm lasts into later decades.  This may not happen as easily as expected, for the elephant in the room is a certain brand of adult.

When in a big box store, and a kid is acting up in a tantrum, it takes every professional atom in my body not to go over and correct the miscreant, elementary teacher style.  But it's the same with adults.  If a parent is bullying, or threatening a consequence without enforcement, I am just itching to correct them as well.  

Parent:  "If you don't stop, you will have to sit in the cart."  No stopping.  "If you don't stop, you will have to sit in the cart, I mean it."  Behavior gleefully escalates.  "Please stop, that's not how you behave, you will have to sit in the cart if you don't make a good choice. Do you want a Slurpee?"  People stare at me because my head has turned inside out with the effort of non-involvement.

Or this, what I often hear at the fossil dig from a parent; Come here, let me show you, go in the water and you don't even have to dig anything, the fossils are right there.  See?  In the water.  (Kid goes to dig in loose rock). No no no, Pancake, in the water.  Come in the puddle, it's easy.  I'm telling you.  You have to look in the water.  AREN'T YOU LISTENING TO ME?  Get over here.  You aren't finding anything, stupid; look at what I have already.  You wanted to come here, why aren't you looking in the water??

Probably because the water is stale, smelly, dead, and the mountains of shale look like fun to climb.  Fossils are everywhere, you could fall down and find them.  Let the kid explore, just keep an eye on them.

Today, however, not the mother of the year made the visit a dramatic stage play, for which she should get an award.  "This isn't what I thought it would be."  Boy: "Look!  I found a fossil!  What is it?"  "YOU KNOW YOU AREN'T BRINGING ANY OF THIS INTO MY HOUSE!" Boy, wistful: "I know."  "THIS PLACE IS HIDEOUS. HIDEOUS!  I COULD BE AT A BASKET RAFFLE."

Wicked my brain: You want hideous, take a look at that blouse you're wearing. You should go to the basket raffle, maybe win a new one.  My serenity was being interrupted by this yowling.  The injustice of bringing a child to dig fossils when you could be at the finest basket raffle, getting more crap that you don't need!  What's in those baskets is dollar store hoo-ha, not a collection of china from Bergdorf's.  She wanted a medal for being at this forsaken, grey quarry, when dish sponges from Taiwan were disappearing under her nose because she wasn't there to claim her prize of prizes.

"We're GOING! There's a basket raffle going on, don't you want to be at the basket raffle?  This place is awful."  The term "basket raffle" was blasted ten times in two minutes, and I was ready to crawl into the subterranean muck and hide with the trilobites.  Or, ninja throw my rock hammer right center of her man bun.

The kid said nicely, "But I don't want to go, I want to find the one that looks like a shell.  Can we stay five more minutes?"  I will give her the credit of acquiescing for the five minutes, yet his plaintiveness broke a bit of my heart as it reminded me of myself when a kid, when my father would make me stay in the car as he took my brother out to toss a ball around at the park.  You don't deserve to go.

One last halloo of  "basket raffle" and they loaded up, I think the kiddo did find a few things from the chirps he made.  Then I had peace until the Cub Scout troop showed up, but they were excitedly great, their parents were happily great, and the spot I found to dig was Devonian awesomeness.  Accumulated was quite a pail full of various species of brachiopods, and the largest gastropod of one inch that the volunteer guides had ever seen.

I like finding things, it took me years to realize why I enjoy walking on beaches for shells, why digging for fossils is happiness, or why searching for wild mushroom species is exciting.  Becoming a research librarian would have suited me well, but the career outlook was poor; here I am, better a teacher.  But finding, it's discovery and recovery.

It puts things in place, familiar objects that have a noble stature in my mind.  My godmother gave me my first seashell, simple fossils lay about on the ground where I grew up, and the curiosity of mushrooms has enthralled me since being a child.  Talismans.  What are yours?  What gives you a place that is your own in this world?

Tonight there is a harvest moon hidden behind the remnants of clouds from the last hurricane.  We are due to have much rain.  It will run in rivulets through the loose gravel and stone, freshly dug this afternoon, releasing more fossils from the matrix of clay and shale.  The nights are cooler, deeper in darkness, which now comes sooner in October; tuck in the children, the cats, the dogs, and yourselves. Appropriate to shake out the winter blankets, our sails for bedtime dreams loosed from the anchors of time.  Dreams and wishes.

Good night, sleep well.  Everything will be fine, I promise.


 

Slow Motion Food

The fork, for it performs more of a textured separation and readying as compared to a spoon, is handled gingerly as if held by Leopold Stokowski leading an orchestra.  It stab-scoops up a bite of closely photographed food, pauses on the way up, and exits the frame, all of this happening in a slow motion trick designed to enhance the crumb, color, and composition of the featured recipe.

Social media is having a wonderful time creating these miniature food features which emphasize food ballet, causing salivary glands to explode in applause. But why?  You've seen them if you read Facebook; pork chops dance in air, noodles align in rows, salad fireworks dazzle the eye.  How is it that we are attracted to this new form of advertising like cats following a mouse, with enlarged pupils? Why does falling food enchant and hypnotize?

It is named Slow Motion Food Photography, and is usually combined with Macro Food Photography.  What it gives is a hyper-realism that grabs your sensory circuitry and amps up the idealized pleasures of taste, sensation, ownership, and satiation.  You want that gooey, melty, golden cheese luxuriously oscillating from between two slices of buttered bread, crusted from grilling.  It teases a survival instinct through those dramatic images showing an unctuous filling, and you imagine the glistening bite traversing down your throat after breaking through the resisting crunch of the crust with your teeth, salt on your tongue.  This magnification increases desire; it distracts, and having food makes pain temporarily disappear.

If a fork is used but disappears as it carries a morsel up to the off-screen mouth, we await the flavor and texture in our own, and are a bit miffed at the sleight-of-hand.  It feels empty, deprived, fooled by a dishonest fork.  So go get a bag of whatever is in the cupboard and substitute this for that, I wonder how often it happens.

The craziest ones are the desserts, as if layering Oreos over pudding then blending more Oreos with cream cheese in a food processor for another level won't have the family flying around the ceiling in a chemical stupor.  The fork slides through the crushed cookie layers as if they were diamonds, loads up the tines, and again pauses as if this goodness is too rich, a miracle, a mythology come to life.  It looks good even to me, and I don't care for Oreos; Lorna Doones are more my preference.

The genre has become funny, like watching a dog with it's head out a car window, yet I also miss some good recipes because I don't have patience enough to watch a lemon be juiced at so many frames per second. Just give me the facts, a straight link where I don't have to read how your little dumpling began to walk the week you were making the video so ha ha some parts had to be shot over again scroll down eighty feet for the actual recipe, and keep the redundancy down to none at all.  I don't have to read the title, the same title over again, nor the title announced again in the first sentence.  Do these people get paid by the word, or are we an audience of wombats?

Geez, I'm being nippy.

The city lights are on, the late train just pulled in at Exchange Street, sounding a horn that echoed off the buildings of downtown.  Fall is nearing, the farmer's markets are burgeoning with produce from an ending season.  Peaches are almost over, corn is going, tomatoes will follow; we will have Chippewa potatoes, peppers, pumpkins, cabbages, carrots, and cauliflower to stock our larders. Soup, always a good thing that can be made out of these.  Tuck in the kids, test the latches, pet the dog, call the cat, cover the bird.

Get yourself in and dream of time, for nothing stays the same, all you can do is grow and learn and be kind to each other.  And that is enough.  Good night, good hearts.

Endings and Beginnings

There is love, there is romance, there is flirtation, attraction, warmth, giving, collaboration, communication, desire, and any number of words which describe what happens between two people.  It's a tide of fluid emotion that comes and goes, rises and falls, and is full of little silver fish that flash in sunlight, if you are lucky.  Love can be stoic, recalcitrant, a steadying hand on a tiller that gets you both through the swells and troughs of life with a dogged determination.

There are no guarantees that it lasts, but it is the one thing in this existence that can and will reach beyond time, through all dimensions.  Love.  My Mom once told me that love is the only thing that can last forever.  I believe it.

Yet, have you ever loved someone to the point that it hurts?  Desire overrun with fantasies of being with the other; creating rushes of dopamine, ecstasy, and an attachment that becomes addictive is called limerence, and it can incapacitate your life.  Does it ever develop into a good relationship?  Sure, but more likely than not it becomes a psychological trap in which everyday functioning is focused on the obsession.

Not everyone is susceptible, but male or female, a good portion of us are.  You think about the person constantly, imagine conversations, become desperate in finding ways of pleasing them.  You replay and analyze every word for meaning, experience physical palpitations, trembling, or extreme shyness.  And your good old pal, your brain, is pumping out a chemical cocktail designed to foil rational thinking.

According to David Sack, M.D., "Much to the dismay of diehard romantics, research suggests that limerence is the result of biochemical processes in the brain. Responding to cues from the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland releases norepinephrine, dopamine, phenylethylamine (a natural amphetamine), estrogen and testosterone. This chemical cocktail produces the euphoria of new love and begins to normalize as the attachment hormones (vasopressin and oxytocin) kick in, typically six to 24 months into a relationship. In much the same way that changes in the brain cause drug addicts to feel an intense, all-consuming draw to get and use drugs, limerence can drive people to extremes in the pursuit of the object of their affection."

It will end, it can end, often in one of three ways: elimination of contact, creating a reality of hopelessness that forms an endpoint; surprisingly, consummation at the peak of passion, providing attainment of the goal--there is nothing more to strive for and the limerence either winds down or develops into something more stable; lastly, diverting to another object of interest transfers emotion into a new relationship, whether with another person or situation.  You do what you must.

Ah, the tangles of romance...not all end in despair or with regret.  Each ending is an opportunity for change, sweet memories are held dear, it is all a journey and the best we can do is to be kind to each other.  Sometimes that bolt out of the blue wakes you up, invoking new ways, reviving thoughts that say yes, you are lovable.

Sleep tonight, it is nearing mid-August and dreams hold a year's worth of both happinesses and fears.  You are innocent in your wishes, your arms hold the world for many, and those you protect need your constancy and devotion.  Divine your way with the guidance of angels, may they watch over you always.  Good bye, dear one.  Good night.

Hailstorms

At eleven in the morning, the wind blew in a wall of clouds and it began to hail. Outside, people scuttled, surprised that the expected rain had shifted in nature to stinging pellets, dropped from meters above.  Perhaps if it hailed more often, the fashion of hats would reappear, for the humans clapped their hands over their crowns; perhaps if it hailed more often, the reading of newspapers would become common again, for today's social electronics can take a photo of what was happening, but no one was doing that.  No selfies during immediate hailstones. A newspaper held as a roof over a head would have deflected the pummeling riot.

From my high-up window, exactly where the cloud wall stopped was clearly visible, it presented a dullish grey-green barrier which halted on tip toe at the County Hall building.  Weather like that appears in this area, coming right off one of the Great Lakes as definitive lines of snow, storms, or cold fronts.  The north will be dark, unbeckoning, tumultuously roiling in bulbous tantrums; yet as one looks to the south, brighter skies hold sundipped fluffs of clouds sweet as lambs sliding through the angelic atmosphere, with harmonies murmured by seraphim.  We've been featured on the evening news because of it.

It was a false showing, for the heaving clouds whipped balls of ice at us quite briefly, then lifted their skirts and ran, pushed onward by the spiraling wind.  Rains fell from more stable clouds, all in a hurry to go further east towards open fields, where only railroad tracks run through empty yards or over valleys.  The city trees thankfully raised their branches again, letting the rain wash down leaves and limbs, melting the uninvited ice.  Thin white miasmas rose as the warmer rain hit the melting hail, creating short-lived, seething ghosts of a colder breath.

Hail is formed when ice pellets within a thunderstorm are caught by the updraft, and given another coating of ice when lifted back into the freezing, higher atmosphere.  Once heavy enough, and depending upon the strength of the rising air, they fall.  Same mechanism can make a tornado.  Here, it is rare to get stones of any great size; I have heard from a Texas cowgirl, however, that they may get large enough to break windows, tear up a garden, and put dents in cars.

The weather remained twitchy, the dull green of the hailstorm clouds hastened east, the rains came, a band of darkening cumulonimbus hovered over Lake Erie and in the developing moisture of these new clouds, a waterspout sprang up.  For the most part, they are harmless, weak, and just elongated sprays of water.  Still, anything of tornado shape and just as unpredictable gives me the willies.  I will watch my waterspouts from a restaurant porch with wine, thank you.

Today: the television in the oil change place where I have taken my car is broken, the image is pixilated as if reassembled by macaques and frozen into a nonmoving, nonliving chockablock of pink human.  The sound works, and the sports channel is playing super hip city lingo fast speech interviews, hitting the listener bam bam bam with immense metaphors packed into a space the size of a Chiclet.  The same information is stretched out like a rubber band, repeated over 'n over in these Chiclets as fast as hail, and just as unmerciful.  Oh, for a set of earbuds.  Or a mallet, for my head.

The commentary based on banter pauses to interview a wee child, whose voice has the Minnie Mouse capacity to bore through Vermont granite.  The motherly interviewer pulllls out answers from this mite in encouraging tones by making her own voice go up at the end of each sentence.  The mite squeaks back in longer and longer explanations, causing the windows of three sedans to shatter from the aural detonation.  Phil Spector cried out from his jail cell, for his Wall of Sound was as soul-shaking as a glass of Fizzies in comparison.

Public service announcement: it has been noted by linguists that young women have begun making their voices go up at the end of sentences, even if it isn't a question.  Noted reporters on NPR have been guilty?  That wasn't a question?  My foot is stuck in the grate?  He was shot in the parking lot of the convenience store?  Check yourself, because if you do it within my reach, I will punch you.

Now, if sound could be concentrated like a laser, it would be this ambitious child's voice.  It cannot be shut out, and a new appreciation for the sports banter emerges from the sharp edges of dental drill lunacy.  I wish deeply for the space-filling goofballs to come back.  Please.  The other adults in the waiting room have dropped into the subconscious plane of their phones and laptops.  Some have brought friends and family to pass time with, and the families have a commonality, being that each would like the other members of their party to shut up.  Shup!  SHUP!!

They are large, dressed for an enclosed backyard with high hedges, and banging on the vending machine.  Arguments about whose dollar was put in last for payment blast off the walls, in the same way the television is yammering.  "Only talk to the money," spews the sportscaster; "My dollar, MY DOLLAR," roars Mom.  I am temporarily fascinated by the similarity, and wonder if we have become an undercurrent propelled by media or the weather.  Well, sure.

Ideas turn over as fast as colloquialisms; for example, last week's fidget spinners are already in the past tense.  "I thought the school allowed them," said one parent with a straight, wondering face.  Why on earth wouldn't they, aren't they educational toys?  Remove the term 'educational' and bingo.  You can mimic the academic descriptor "educational" because you heard it advertised as such, and you hope against hope that spinning one will cause Pookie to absorb phonetic skills rather than you actually reading to the Pookster.  Let this enlightenment brighten your family policies: NO, IT DOES NO SUCH THING.  All the spinner does is create theft, dissection, distraction of the rest of the students, high blood pressure in the teacher, argument, and unholy, tearful oaths sworn on a Gideon's that My Grandmother Bought It For Me with angel choir theme music, when in reality, the wet-faced six year old has magically shoved Ignatz Jr's. toy down the front of their pants. I am not shaking children upside down by the ankles in spite of the pleasant imagery, so if your kid brought one to school because you thought increased learning would happen but it was stolen, broken, or given to a friend just to hold for the day, oh well.   Hailstorms, life is full of.  Ask the Beanie Baby collectors.

The air has cooled, the thick humidity dissipated.  A large box was kindly delivered today, and has been given a door to make a new cat house for Snowbelle.  She was so happy to see it, she did a silly, crooked dance and told me thank you.  She will sleep in it tonight, and dream catnip dreams.  Soon the downtown buildings will blush in sunset, subdue to purple before the lamps light, and our own dreams will play at deeper levels we have no waking knowledge of.  Wishes.  I wish.  Sleep well.  Good night, Mama.

Unfather's

This isn't pleasant to read, and may create unease or cause you to dislike me even further than before.  Let it, for discomfort causes reflection, and perhaps invokes greater compassion, or kindness, or if you need to protect yourself, greater indifference.  That dirty little neighbor's kid who's always hanging around your own family may need a sense of normalcy, even if it's just for an hour.  It's okay to send her home, too.  She's still learning.

I don't even think of the day anymore until reading statements that others have scripted in praise of their fathers, then, the memory clenches as if I swallowed a peach pit.  Tell me I'm ungrateful, that after all, he is my faaaather, that I didn't appreciate what I had, that the knot will go away once I forgive him; let me tell you, this is not a story of forgiveness but of survival.  Realize the number of me that there are. Please understand that I am so amazed, almost confused, by those of you who miss your dads.

He killed our pets, threatened to kill us, smashed my mother into floors, walls; broke our dishes, scared neighbors, beat up my grandfather for giving me and my brother quarters, said it was his right to use me don't tell your mother, was mean whether drunk or sober, took his diabetic brother who was in the hospital a two pound box of chocolates resulting in my uncle's death, and when he tried to kill himself and was revived in the ambulance, I asked the invisible air why, why did you bring him back.

I was six and it was Christmas, the kind with lead tinsel and sumptuous lightbulbs on the tree that made it smell like it would burst into a fireball within ten minutes.  My brother and I had to kneel in front of the manger and pray to baby Jesus, a poorly painted plaster bit that spent the rest of the year rolled up in newspaper in the hot, dusty attic.  My mother had wrapped up a toiletry set for me, consisting of four rectangular glass bottles.  Pink body lotion, rosy bubble bath, green shampoo, and a clear cologne that smelled like pale flowers.  I was enchanted, left it under the tree to make Christmas last a bit longer, before the explosion.  Didn't take long.

Mom and Dad in the kitchen, Dad yelling.  YOU'RE MAKING HER A WHORE, SHE'LL BE ON FRANKLIN STREET WITH THE PROSTITUTES.  What the heck is a whore?  My mother tried; she won't be a prostitute, she's a little girl, little girls use bubble bath.  More yelling, I could see my Mom's face crumple, she was collapsing like a dying star.

His sisters never used any of that, she doesn't need it, men will be chasing her just like the red-headed women on the street you don't know nothing, no daughter of mine.  Looking back and considering circumstances, I believe he was more concerned with his own reaction to any prettifying of a vulnerable little girl.  As a result of the bubble bath debacle, the set remained unused under my bed, and I was relegated to using Spic and Span or Oxydol in my once a week bath.  My father would expect us to greet him at the door when he got home from work, happy to see the breadwinner, the king of the house; I was told to wait until he smelled me, to see if I had any forbidden fragrances.

Do you know what it's like to have your neck smelled by your angry father every night when he arrived home?  And still he would come to me at night, to help me say my prayers.  I was allowed boy's things, cap guns, tool sets, a Zorro outfit, catcher's mitts, a chemistry set, no lace, no frills, those things were far away from me, and I regarded the ribboned girls at school as sissies who would squeak if a frog jumped at them.  But deep inside I longed to be washed in bubbles, given embroidered handkerchiefs, allowed lotions and bows.  Best that I wasn't.

Yet I now read the "best dad ever", "I miss you every day", and the "wonderful man who brought me up, stood by me" and wonder what that is like.  The day mine died, I felt a wash of relief, the abuse had become verbal as I grew, married, and I would plot escape routes when visiting.  Don't let him get between you and the door.  He still yelled, hateful, don't bring us no food, shove your pans up your ass.  After my Mom died, I eventually stopped going over altogether, it was better for me even though the guilt wagged it's finger.      

I don't miss standing in front of the card display, searching for one that would satisfy him without sentiment to mock, or encourage the slurping noises when he kissed my neck or cheek.  Something that wouldn't be an out and out lie.  I don't miss worrying about bringing him the right thing, to be told take it back, or have it thrown against the wall.  Come here and give me a kiss instead.

We all have our demons, and I try not to visit mine on anyone; but it happens and I apologize.  It causes me to step back and evaluate how clingy I can be when something seems right, balanced, or well, normal.  Dinner at a table--I wasn't allowed to eat with the family, had to take my plate to the living room on newspapers on the floor.  People having people over without the main course being launched or furniture broken.  I will always be on guard, but that's no one's problem but mine.  

With my class of first graders, I made sure to pull together a Father's Day gift, except I got the date wrong, it's this week, not last week.  We made plaster casts of seashells and half the students opted to wrap theirs in Christmas paper because they love Santa.  There are more fathers in this group, and the cards we made assured me that these children are loved properly, and that they are safe with their dads.  I like to think that there is more good than bad, there has to be.

Night comes, shading the micro scrutiny of day; sleep restores and creates growth.  Growth means hope.  Thundering clouds have washed the men who are building a garden down along the apartment sidewalks.  They are planting impatiens of a delicate lavender, making it look like home, like hanging stars in a night sky.   Paint your stars, illuminate space with nebulae or the flowing curtains of the borealis, planets with swirling rings, moons somber and silver.  You can.  I did.  You are loved.