Hejira Spring

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Hejira ~

a journey . . .

. . . the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 which marked the beginning of the Muslim era; the Muslim calendar begins in that year

. . . a cross country trip from Maine to Los Angeles by Joni Mitchell

. . . her album of that name written on that journey in 1976

. . . the title track of the album

Albert Camus wrote: "What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country... we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being... There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing... Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves."

~ Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1942

I love to travel, but I agree with Camus in this note. When visiting places away from home, it is as if I wake up with new, more expectant skin. Especially in the somewhat familiar strangeness of Paris, more than anywhere I have been, every sense is alert, intense, as if I am a china cup full and ready either to spill, or crack in the quake of each encounter.

Joni Mitchell is a traveler, always in some vehicle. She loves the wind from Africa blowing through a village on Crete under the moon, but soon gets back to missing her familiar white linens and California scenery. To, and fro, she goes. I don't know how many times I've listened to this song in the last couple of weeks on my drive to and from work on straight Meridian Road, farms opening like wings on either side. Countless times. It embodies just at this moment of the world how everything is everything, while everything is also nothing, and I think very importantly, how nothing is also everything, in the cycle of our life . . . between the forceps and the stone. Her melancholy minor melody, the dark tones, the strings touched in variance like the fragrance of parfum et fromage, her love of Paris that is always there even if unspoken, her freedom, her longing for the road — sometimes in strength and vulnerability as a hitchhiker, her concert tours where she is not always comfortable in her astonishing success, that clear voice sparked, like a car's red-eyed tail light at dusk on the Champs Élysées, or the lit end of a cigarette.

In Paris in May, the wind blows up the Seine, tearing horse chestnut blossoms from trees like snow, and our eyes fill with allergic tears, blinding every walker heading toward the setting sun. We weep in our human weakness, unable even to look upon the light, blinking, trying to wipe our eyes clean. Maybe it is necessary to filter that radiance from too much visibility. Maybe that much light would take us too early to the stone.

It's nice to listen to her sing in the YouTube below while reading her witnessing words. Or, just load it and close your eyes.

Hejira

by Joni Mitchell

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
There's comfort in melancholy
When there's no need to explain
It's just as natural as the weather
In this moody sky today
In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed
I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl

You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line
Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They're either going to thaw out or freeze
Listen
Strains of Benny Goodman
Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years
We're only particles of change I know I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
Until love sucks me back that way


© 1976; Crazy Crow Music

Rue St-Louis-en-l’île, Paris, spring 2003

 Musicians on Pont St Louis, Paris, spring 1997

Champs Élysées, Paris, spring 1997

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Paris Hilton style gets upstaged

Paris Hilton's style gets upstaged

One way to make a statement on the red carpet? Wear an attention-grabbing magenta leopard-print frock! Both celebutante Paris Hilton and "Slumdog Millionaire" actress Freida Pinto donned the same stunning Marchesa dress for different events. Question is ... who wore it better?
 

 Paris Hilton in Riverside, California, February 26, 2011. Frederick MA. Brown/Getty Images

Freida Pinto in Toronto, Canada, September 13, 2010. Charley Gallay/Getty Images

Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton rocked the Marchesa Resort 2011 dress in February for the launch of her “Passport” fragrance collection in Riverside, California. The starlet, who will soon headline the reality series “The World According to Paris,” accessorized with simple nude pumps and a wavy, side-swept ‘do.

Way back in September 2010, Pinto wore the same gown for a dinner to celebrate the premiere of her film “Miral” at the Toronto Film Festival in Canada. Freida paired her one-shoulder satin organza dress with purple Ferragamo pumps and a black-and-silver studded clutch.
The dress suits both ladies beautifully, but Freida’s dark tresses and gorgeous skin tone really make the dress pop, and her color-coordinated heels are the perfect accessory. For me, Ms. Pinto wins this battle hands down.

Source: Yahoo

Paris Hilton turns 30

Paris Hilton doesn’t turn 30 until Thursday, but she got the festivities started early in Los Angeles last night.
The birthday girl threw a Moulin Rouge-themed party at the V-Moda fortress, a private house in the Hollywood Hills. Although the party began at 9 p.m., Paris made a fashionably late appearance, arriving around 11 with boyfriend Cy Waits in tow and cameras rolling for her Oxygen reality series.
But instead of making a beeline for the bar, her very first stop was the petting zoo:

 

Read more: eonline.com

So what?

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-Luxembourg Garden's Medici Fountain in May 2006

with face sculpture by Swedish artist Lotta Hannerz;

read my Paris Deconstructed blog post 
about being a woman alone in Paris that day here

Isn't this woman utterly amazing? All she does is breathe. I truly love and admire her. What a meditation she is. "So what?" she seems to whisper-breathe. "I am in Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens Medici Fountain, commissioned by Catherine de Medici . . . but . . . So what?"

The question So what? was a weed of rudeness in the field of my life growing up, a thistle you didn't want to touch, best to leave it alone to grow by itself, prickly and ugly. Mouths got slapped for saying such things. I didn't even think it, because it stood up and declared persistent insolence, superiority, rebellion, put-down. These were not in my floral repertoire.

Fast forward to the year of the door into freedom -- Paris 1997 when I'm 40 (nine years before these photos).

Two things.

One. I found thistle weeds in the luxurious flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens. Was there some mistake? Thistles -- weeds -- in one of the grands jardins of the most elegant city in the world. But there was no mistake, they had been planned and planted. Tall, regal purple Scottish thistles were designed among snapdragons and I don't remember what else. I stood there dumbfounded, trying to comprehend many things at once: How did a garden designer understand how beautiful they are, and worthy of formal beds? How had I scorned them? Why do things in Paris look so frickin' beautiful? They're weeds! for heaven's sake . . . and then from the splashing water of the Medici fountain under the plane trees I seemed to hear someone whisper: Et alors? So what?

Two. I went to a jazz club called Petit Journal with my sister, across Boulevard Saint-Michel from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was my first time sitting for a prolonged mutual welcome of jazz. Our mother was freshly gone two months before, she who left behind New York jazz for a life of church music in the Midwest. Now with my sister in Paris: a door, a spiral stair down to a tiny, wall-lit, cave-like cellar. A female vocalist just on the other side of that table, no stage, who looks like Dianne Wiest with a voice like Etta James'. A quartet packed tight, playing loose -- bass, piano, drums, horn. Hours of So what interpretations of standards, and a little improvisation.

Today, almost fourteen years later, I'm still a baby in jazz, listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane play So What. But all these years since the freedom door, I've been practicing (as in, practicing to get better at it) So what. What does that statement (more than a question) mean to me, now? It means letting go, like thistles that let wind carry away their down. It means being unbounded by clocks, ought-tos, appearances, fears, expectations, shame, regret, jealousy, tidiness, judgment, offense, binary choices (and lists!). It means seeing beauty in the of-course lovely, and also in the untamed, thorny, worn, shabby, discarded, muddy, unknown and mixed-up ordinary-sometimes-even-ugly beautiful. I probably still wouldn't say So What? to anyone out loud, because spoken it just sounds bratty. But I say it to myself, and to Inge, when we get too serious and need to lighten up!

Et alors? So what?

How about by way of reply, a 1959 live recording in New York of a jazz musician who loved Paris and felt more welcome there as a black performer than in his own backyard -- Miles Davis, with John Coltrane in a gorgeous, untamed but highly cultivated field of So What? (Great article about Miles and his long love affair with Paris here.) Listen, view the video (also with members of the Gil Evans orchestra and Jimmy Cobb on drums) at full resolution, and feel the heart in Miles' eyes. Then, at about minute 4:29, when Miles and Trane (don't I sound hip, baby?) start blowing So what behind Wynton Kelly's piano playing, see if your fetters haven't come untied.

The video is followed by more photographs of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, from my solo trip in 2006, not the year of the thistles, for sadly, I have no photos of those. But really, So what?

Newsflash: I need orange has offered her beautiful thistle photo, from the Luxembourg Gardens!

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-Does the chap in glasses not look like he is saying, "Et Alors . . ." ?

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My tongue speaks French and Chinese

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Chinese long beans

I have tried to keep up with my personal farmer and his vegetable garden this summer by gathering and preparing the goods for the table. Just a few footsteps from our door we've picked strawberries, rhubarb, tomatoes -- green for frying and red, yellow and orange fresh or in sauce -- green & red peppers, jalapeños, banana peppers, kohlrabi (oh so crisply satisfying dipped in hummus), beets, peas, carrots, garlic, scallions, sweet corn, cucumbers, zucchini, bush beans and pole beans. From the herb bed: basil, parsley, thyme, chives, sage and rosemary.

While ordering seeds from his piles of catalogs back in January's blue ice days, Don discovered Chinese long beans and ordered some and even built a special trellis. These long beans are also known as long-podded cowpeas, asparagus beans, snake beans, chopstick beans, yardlong beans, dau gok in Cantonese and jiang dou (豇豆) in Standard Mandarin. They are thua fak yao (ถั่วฝักยาว) in Thai, right Dee Dee? (I sort of feel that I shouldn't say that out loud.) When the first beans were ready to pick, I was impressed with their length, but I asked myself, Does size matter? I am a green bean lover. When I go to Paris, a supper of haricots verts, baguette, Roquefort and a glass of red wine suits me very well after a day out on the rues. I like a thin, delicate bean, with a warm, mellow flavor and texture that is tender and smooth.

Chinese long beans next to a handful of bush beans; 

the long beans are about 18"

As we learned more about Chinese long beans, we discovered that they are all the rage in fancy restaurants. Chefs have fun sculpting them into different concoctions, like an entertainer does with balloon animals. I decided to create nests, and Don suggested the little onions that were strangely anchored on the surface of the soil under the scallion leaves, for "eggs".

I am trés heureux to report that Chinese long beans are délicieux! They are tender and warmly savory, the way haricots verts are. And you get to create something clever if you want. These are what I call bird's nest beans, which I believe my tongue tells me is les haricots verts d'un nid de l'oiseau in French and 鳥的巢穴豆子 in Chinese, but I could be wrong.

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What is French country?

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When I was old enough to drive, I wandered out in the Country Squire wagon, into the country some days, others to our local university town for shoes, or to Mapes furniture store. I realize this last destination is odd for a 16-year-old on her own, in frayed blue jeans, gladiator sandals, and Carole King hair. The store was half way to the university town, a stand alone building not downtown anywhere, on the four-lane thoroughfare running east and west through towns across our state's mid-section. It was a large, sprawling place, laid out in comfortably sized rooms with furniture arranged in home-like groupings. I found rest and inspiration wandering through the cool rooms, empty of people (all but one or two sales clerks who smiled and then ignored me). I breathed in color schemes and fine quality craftsmanship, the shine of mahogany, the luxury of damask, moiré and tapestry and the comfort of polished chintz. All the furniture was traditional, appealing to our conservative small rural community.

This was the era, in the early 1970s, when Colonial anything was making a big comeback, leading up to America's bicentennial in 1976. This callback to our own revolution seems to have also conjured another country's. French country provincial furniture was also all the rage, with its maple framed sofas and headboards with graceful curves and peaks. Mapes furniture store offered a couple of groupings of this style. I don't know how, but intuitively I disliked French country furniture, with a passion, and I all but ignored it. I felt it was fake, in a design sense. I knew it did not look anything like authentic country furniture in a French chateau or cottage. Where was the inspiration coming from, and how did it get here? I especially cringed at the artificial flecks of "wear" and wormholes in the wood. I knew that I would never purchase such a piece of furniture if my life depended on it. I was a fake furniture snob. I would rather own a threadbare velvet sofa from Goodwill than something created to look old.

OK, so now, as a true snob, I will talk about Paris. In 1997 my sister Nancy and I ventured out at the crack of whatever dawn a tourist with jet lag can conjure, and hopped on the Metro north to the edge of the Paris periphery, to the Paris flea market. I bought this 200-year-old French clock for Don at Marché aux Puces St-Ouen de Clignancourt, the place some believe to be the original "flea market" -- so named for the beginnings as "rag-and-bone" market stalls whose furniture was infested with bugs. It has come a long way since then, with shops that are priced way out of my league. This clock was priced at about its age: $200. Not bad, I thought.

One of the things that drew me to the clock was its obvious age and experience with critters. While the front and sides of the clock are embedded with brass marquetry, the back side has worm holes. Et voila! The early bird catches the worm.

I spent a couple of days in the French countryside back in 1975. I slept under the stars in the churchyard of the Vézelay Abbey (Basilique Ste-Madeleine) with a handful of fellow students and one rebellious professor. We awoke inside that stone wall with the one-armed cathedral at our backs (like a Sunday School child raising her arm, frozen in time), and a soft valley freckled with poppies spreading out like a calico comforter from the feet of our sleeping bags. This was after dining the night before in a simple dining room in a hostel, with plain wooden tables lined up, showing great wear, windows flung open to the sleepy sun shutting down the valley, we students, lined up in our wooden chairs under bare light bulbs overhead, one large bowl of pottery in front of us, filled first with soup, then salad, then meat and potatoes, carafes of wine centered on the tables like bouquets. Cool and warm, comforting and luxurious.

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Heart Strings: A Tale of Two Concerts

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There is an emotional intimacy that certain performers let us share that expands musical pleasure, into rapture.

Lansing. Monday evening we took our seats in a small venue for a hundred people, the Creole Gallery in Old Town, with bohemian brick and mottled plaster walls, wooden chairs and old porous wood floors. It feels familiar and homey, as the venue for small, casual concerts. The gypsy jazz John Jorgenson Quintet seems to prefer these small, informal spaces, from what I gather touring their YouTube videos, and I can see why. If they were up and out on a remote stage in the Great Hall of the Wharton Center, where they fully deserve to perform with their outrageous skill and polish, we would be an audience, not participants.

Gypsy jazz is energetic at the get go. Many of the numbers are so fast paced that you have no breath left when one is done, and you're sure there are no note-stones left unturned in the musical riverbeds of the world. But John Jorgenson and his rhythm guitarist, bassist, drummer and violinist knew we couldn't take that pace any more than they could keep playing it for two full hour sets. So they mixed in Edvard Grieg (sorry, I don't remember which song), "Melancholy Baby" and "La Mer", among other calmer tunes. But for the most part, the rapid guitar picking, plucking, strumming, fingering, harmonics and violin bow stroking made it hard for me to sit still. So there was this energy in the room, flowing from the stage, and being boomeranged back from us, the listeners, many of whom were aging band members, exploding with appreciative whoops. There was also another force at play, and that was repartee. In the middle of John's frenetic strumming, violinist Jason Anick would reply with a decidedly schmaltzy quip, or a sarcastic violin moan, and the corners of John's mouth would turn up. Or vice versa. Again and again. The musical conversation of joy, love, and fun.

Here is John Jorgenson's Quintet playing Ghost Dance, but the only musician who is the same besides Jorgenson himself is the bassist, Simon Planting. The current members we saw are at John's site. And while you can catch a smile or two in this video, you can't sense the subtle frivolity we experienced at the show.

Paris. There was another concert of strings that had the same effect on me. It was Vivaldi, in an evening concert in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, another small venue for an audience of 100, one of three times I've sat in that stunning, historic space to listen to musical ensembles. (If you are interested, please read more about this jewel, Sainte-Chapelle. Here is one place to read more. You can read more about Sainte-Chapelle, and John Updike's poem after a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, at my post at Paris Deconstructed.) In spite of 6,500 square feet of windows telling biblical stories, rising 60 feet above and around us like a stained glass forest - reds, blues, purples muted in the softly lit chapel - the setting feels intimate, yet as unlike the Creole as a room can be. Old in the Sainte-Chapelle means 13th century. An ensemble of half a dozen musicians on cello, bass, violin and piano played many pieces, and often, there was the same camaraderie - the grins, the nods of understanding, the snickers while raising eyebrows and attacking strings with a bow flourish. I was so magnetized by the tangible connection between the musicians, that I left that concert floating on a cloud of euphoria. When I'm in Paris, all my senses are heightened (something I'd like to bring into the now, everywhere), which made this experience especially ecstatic.

At first, in both concerts, I wondered if the smiles, the quips, the fun, was put on. Was it just part of the performance, something to entertain and hold the audience? An act? At the Creole Gypsy Jazz concert, my eyes bored in on John's and Jason's faces to see if I could find a clue of artifice in their looks. They seemed genuine, though I couldn't be certain. I let it work its magic anyway. I believe that exuberance from us, the listeners in the wooden chairs, also amplified their emotive energy. When I glided out into the darkening warm summer night of Old Town after the Jorgenson concert Monday, with my hand in Don's, and a smile and a beat still lighting me up, it hit me that this fun, joyful exchange is necessary to their level of music. The musicians need it, as they need to practice thousands of hours to hone their skill. The music needs it, for the seeds of the notes to be broken open, and brought into the light of loving attention, to take root in the listener, and come alive, emotionally, and spiritually.
 
Here are 37 seconds of a concert in Sainte-Chapelle, not taken by me.

That night in Paris back in 1997, after listening and watching young violinists and cellists play like children on a playground of delicate but robust equipment, lying in bed, my soul left my body and met with those musical "children" in impassioned, playful conversation, all night. I woke up wondering, Was the conversation words, or did we speak in music? Was it a dream?

No matter how a violinist interprets Bach, Vivaldi or Mozart with bow strokes that are collé, legato, louré, martelé or staccato, or how many notes a gypsy jazz musician like John Jorgenson can strum and pluck out of a guitar in a minute, with joy and the force of love, the notes can't be squandered, or used up. The more you give, the more you get back. The riverbeds will always refill, and refresh - a far, far better immersion than what mere technical skill, melody, arrangement, and orchestration combined can provide.

I found this gypsy wagon at a flea market in Holland, Michigan in 2008

Jean "Django" Reinhardt was a French gypsy who was the first European jazz musician to make it big, and he started Gypsy Jazz - Jazz Manouche in French. 2010 is the 100th anniversary of the year he was born, in a gypsy wagon near Brussels. John Jorgenson was asked to play Django in the 2004 feature film, Head in the Clouds. How's that for synchronicity for this July in Paris? And you know what? I did not know until just now, at the tail end of this post, about that title Head in the Clouds. All that floating euphoria. I think I'd better see this film.

Jean "Django" Reinhardt

This post is part of the Paris in July blog theme, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Go to Paris in July to take your heart to the City of Lights. 

Photo of John Jorgenson found at johnjorgenson.com.

Photo of Sainte-Chapelle courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

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Why some people don't go to Paris

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Me? I'm ill equipped for it. French 101. That's it. Unless you count my mom sitting next to me on the couch, enlightening me on French pronunciation as a young person, starting with that vexatious phrase, qu'est-ce que c'est que ça. Really? KESS-KUH-SAY-KUH-SAH? When it comes to French, I am sandwiched between my mother who studied it through college and read Les Miserables in the original language (no doubt it's there in one of those floor-to-ceiling stacks in George Whitman's Paris bookstore at left), and my daughter who speaks it gracefully after six years of study. I learned Latin in high school, and I know some Turkish from living in Istanbul. On the ILR scale (Interagency Language Roundtable), I got to about a 2.5 out of 5 in Turkish (5 being that of a native speaker).  In French, I'd say I'm at around .2, maybe .3. How profoundly inadequate I was on my seven trips to Paris. Yet shamelessly, well almost shamelessly, I went anyway.

Many people take vacations in a variety of places where the language spoken is not their own. But I venture to guess that Paris is the one place where, first of all, the gap between the written word and its pronunciation is a wobbly bridge to cross, and second of all, it is spoken by people who are perceived [by some] to be mean and rude. So the image of waiting in line at a patisserie for pain aux raisins with French customers and having to fumble with Je voudrais une (or is it un?) pain aux raisins s'il vous plais and the correct francs, well now Euro coins, while also trying to find one's glasses to read said coins is just too frightening to contemplate. What scowls, what high scoffing eyebrows will fill that tiny space like arcs of raisins!

Yet I have found that when I have made the least effort to open a conversation with shop keepers, restaurant workers and taxi drivers with my limited (but I am certain very well pronounced, hawnh-hawnh) French, I have received gracious and helpful responses. When I haven't (I remember one particular taxi driver who I thought would break his transmission, he shifted so hard, and a certain crepes waiter in Montmartre who implied that I should order more than I did - What else was on the menu, s'il vous plais?), I have stood my ground and said in English something to show that I am not intimidated, and immediately there was respectful deference (at least in my presence).

One of the best moments in Paris was the spring Don and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary (2003, photo at right where we lived for a week). We were in a fromagerie the size of the postage stamp below, on Ile Saint Louis, picking up a Roquefort for supper. Don requested the cheese in French, and the seated French woman readied to slice with her big knife, adjusting it wider or narrower according to his hand instructions, cutting a wedge at last. She took his Euros and sweetly chirped with the song of a little sparrow, "Au revoir, Monsieur Foreigneur . . ." When we got outside the shop, in an incredulous tone, Don asked, "How did she know I wasn't French?"

I have a Paris blog called Paris Deconstructed, which is like Jacques Derrida's "literary revenge on philosophy" in that it is my revenge on the myth that Paris is the Eiffel Tower and rude people. I call it synchronicity that this post today happens to be exactly one year since my last post there, July 18, 2009, the second part of a story of meeting Mrs. Schott. And here's a post about that Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, and my encounters with the legendary Mr. George Whitman, which was my very first post at PD. I'll post there again when I get a round tuit. (Today that's pronounced to rhyme with Paris (the French way) and Ile Saint Louis: a round too-eee.)

This post is part of my participation in the Paris in July blog theme sponsored by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea, and told me by my dear friend DS at Third-Story Window. So, if like me, you can't afford a trip to Paris this summer, do start your reading tour de Paris at those and other participating blogs where the lingua franca is just, well, PARIS. Bon voyage!

Paris in July

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haricots verts - be still, my heart

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I nearly fainted when I saw a large package of haricots verts at the store
- French green beans, thinner than our green bean varieties here.
I get more delirious over haricots verts
than I do over clothes, shoes or jewelry.
Their consistency and flavor are more delicate
in a firm, fresh way, than larger, meatier beans,
their stature like the thinnest, highest stiletto heel to a shoe lover.

When I'm in Paris, at the end of a long day out walking
and a big meal at noon,
I cook them up for supper,
with just cheese, baguette and red wine.
It's comforting to know haricots verts, like all green beans,
are a great source of Vitamins A, C,
potassium, magnesium, folate and riboflavin,
because those nutrients are so good for the heart,
which is important when it's beating hard with excitement
from food. It balances itself out.

This time I blanched them two minutes
with some equally swoon-worthy young asparagus
- asperges in French, doesn't that sound beautiful -
makes me want to sing, or better, listen to "Je t'aime".
Then I rinsed them in cold water and dried them,
stir-fried them in olive oil in the wok until just tender,
in the last half minute adding
a couple tablespoons of fresh minced garlic,
a tiny amount of minced ginger, a couple tablespoons of soy sauce,
and a few dashes of balsamic vinegar.
They're topped with broken walnuts.

When you can't get to Paris in the spring,
you can taste Paris in the spring, right on the farm.
Everything is starting to vibrate.
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a birthday

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"She sat there filled with champagne.
She talked about hashish and its effects.
I said, 'I have known such effects without hashish.
I do not need drugs.
I carry all that within myself.'
At this she was a little angry.
She did not realize that I achieved those states
without destroying my mind.
My mind must not die, because I am a writer.
I am the poet who must see."

- Anaïs Nin, talking to June Mansfield,
wife of Henry Miller, in Henry and June

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Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France,
February 21, 1903 (died January 14, 1977).
Her diary was her closest friend.

Power to diaries. Power to blogs.
Power to the word, to the poem,
and to a clear mind.
Observe, feel, tell the details.

See in · · · out · · · through · · · across · · · beyond · ·
· · along · · · around · · · within · · · underneath · ·
· · outside · · · past · · · into · · · behind · · · ahead · ·
· · onto · · · toward · · · until · · · upon · · · among · · · at · ·
· · over · · · on top of · · · inside · ·

No one else sees the way you see.

window on
rue des Barres, Paris
May 2006

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complexity

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It was May 2006, and I was trying to make some sense of my hair in front of the mirror in a tiny Paris bathroom. I wanted to get to the Picasso museum before noon without my coiffure looking like a subject of Cubism.

Thankfully I don't have to contend with my hair frizz routine on a daily basis and only wash it every three or four days. Once I blow dry and flatten it with irons (one round, one flat) it's good until the next wash - smooth and shiny. The infrequency of hair maintenance is handy while traveling, like staying in Paris for a week. Of course hair presentability may not be of much importance on a camping trip to Tahquamenon Falls in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but I am not about to step foot onto the rue de Rivoli under a frizzy mushroom cap.

So, even though I don't have to torture myself often in the hair ritual, when I do, it is no Parisian bonbon to contend with my bird's nest in a foreign country. The voltage difference is fine for hairdryers since you can go from 110 to 220 with a turn of a switch and an outlet adapter. As for the iron, for the longest time I wasn't willing to lay out beaucoups euros for a European flat iron (last time in Ireland the price had come way down, and I bought one - vive la difference!), and so I was stuck blowing my hair out smooth - a skill I have never mastered. I have carpal tunnel syndrome for one thing, and a lot of hair for another. Standing at the mirror, arms up, holding an unwieldy dryer in one hand and a round brush in the other without tangling the frizz into a rat's nest for 30 minutes is enough to make me want to take a trip to the guillotine.

I hear you mutter that I should just let my hair do its natural thing. After all, aren't I Madame Nature Lover here on the farm? How inconsistent! How vain!

How true.

I imagine what you're imagining. A skull covered by luxurious curls and waves. A romantic maiden's locks you want to run your fingers through. Robert Graves' White Goddess bounding through the meadow, birds mimicking her flowing mane with graceful wings.

Wrong. Nada. Nilch. When I was a teenager, yes I confess my hair was to be envied. Long, wavy and lots of it. But toward the mid-centurion mark, as the face began to sag and languish, a desire for a maturely sophisticated do cropped it gradually until it is now chin length. Easy, right? Wrong again.

My hair is . . . complex. It is my supreme desire to homogenize it. To smooth out its complexities. The under, or bottom, third is hair to die for - thick and with body. The middle third is a little wavier, still fine. The top third, at the crown, is something on the order of Hermione Granger post-magic spell gone haywire.

You see, consistent with my hair, I am a complex person. And while I may value diversity of many kinds and in certain arenas, au naturale isn't acceptable to me here. I just wanna be pretty. Some people's frizz is fetching! Mine is wretching.

This spring's Paris fashion shows brought on the frizz! Some fetching, some, well, let's just say that this is the year I should walk Paris avenues au naturele and be the bomb!



Ohh I love looking at Haute Couture. I only got as far as Jean Paul Gaultier's rockin' runway show with soft Asian rhythms in the background. I still need to watch the rest. His models clearly had good Paris hair solutions: braids and hats (even if some of them are a wee bit mogul-ish). He doesn't need hair frizz to dramatize nothin'. Haute Couture is Art, that's it. Gliding, flowing, fluid, human body art. - -









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Picasso's Woman, Collection of Mrs. John Baker
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early bird

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5:30am

It's Monday, and you slept in an hour because you have no student appointments today. The only thing calling you to the university is answering emails. You shower so your hair can start air drying and in your long heavy gray winter robe you pour your first cup of coffee, add vanilla soy and a blip of half and half. Stir with a long thin sturdy plastic spoon from Ireland because plastic is quieter than steel against the ceramic, important when someone else is sleeping.

You add a log to the wood stove and open the vent. It will take a few minutes for the orange embers to burst into flame and be visible through the creosote dimmed door. You hear a tick-tick-ticking just before the log ignites. It won't be light outside for another hour and a half, you see two or three stars shimmering between clouds. There is just one dim table lamp on. You wonder when you first began to like getting up so early, feeling robbed if it is already light when you awake. Your mother who got up early too would by now have already prayed on her knees for every world country's leader by name in her morning routine. With the smell of coffee and wood fire in your nostrils, you plop into your chilly red leather chair, covering your lap with a fleece blanket, and your laptop.

6:30am

You pour your second cup of coffee, and a cup for Don who is now up. Where did that hour go? Oh yes - besides gmail, a little quiet music, Facebook and blog comments, you also read some news stories, especially the one about hating Obama - that if you do you are likely to be white. Thank goodness your mother and father taught you not to hate blacks. The family room is toasty.

7:30am

Don has left for school, and it's light now - though gray and wintry, a light breeze bobbing the yellow tipped bamboo. This makes you think of President Obama again, because he's in China today (or is it tomorrow? he was just in Japan, when does he sleep?), where there is apparently deep cultural prejudice against blacks. After an essay by Ann Claycomb* about feeling like a terrible mother, you open the latest digital New Yorker - more palatable than the hard copy sitting on the kitchen table because you can read it without holding anything but your coffee cup. (You would not be able to read it online if you didn't have that subscribed copy on the table though. Ironic.) You used to think that people who got up early were the ultimate non-lazy people - industrious and worm-catching. You've changed your mind, and you realize your mother has flown up somewhere into the stratosphere of your esteem.

You read the article on the Michelin restaurant rating system from start to finish as hungrily as if you were eating a meal at a 3-star restaurant in Paris, which you've done thrice, unbelievably. The Michelin restaurant inspectors are anonymous and work long days, not paid too well, but wouldn't that be a great job, except for those long forms you have to complete after each meal, taking an hour. You know you are nowhere close to high society, you live on a farm with rustic outbuildings and chickens running in the yard, you and your husband have modest salaries in your thank-goodness jobs, and yet you have been served the food of the gods - once at Taillevent and twice at Le Grand Véfour. You contemplate blogging about those experiences and think better of it. Too much work to fire up the Paris blog again with old photos to process, and so many beggars in Mumbai and mine victims in Kabul with one leg or arm lurking in the vestibule. That would take more energy, better writing and less conscience than you feel capable of today.

9:30 am

You are still on your arse, with a warm machine bringing heat and information from around the globe onto your lap. Half-way through the Michelin article you have seven additional Internet tabs open: one on force feeding ducks for foie gras, the second the Michelin site Famously Anonymous, the third a list of 138 of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's recipes (if you were industrious you could attack those the way Julie did in "Julia & Julie"), the fourth - wikipedia.org open to the word Kairos after Montag mentioned it at his blog (the man must read incessantly) - meaning among other things "the time when God acts," the fifth - Facebook where you had to post the salon.com article you read about Obama hatred from the rightwingnuts (not that anyone will read it), the sixth a Huffington Post piece about the irony of Sarah Palin's new book title Going Rogue, and the seventh is your work email because you just decided you're going to stay home by the fire and answer emails here today. This is after you already spent two perfectly good weekend days at home with nowhere to go.

You convince yourself that because you want to write about what you take in, and this morning's worms were too plump, tasty and plentiful to leave for another morning, you need a whole day just to digest them. And that deserves 3 stars.

* This post was inspired by the form Ann Claycomb used in her piece at brevity titled WQED, Channel 13: Programming Guide. I was so taken with her form, that I imitated it. Thanks to Montag whose comment triggered the conviction that I should rightfully link it here - not that he was guilting me!
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a different light

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Sky lover Violet Sky commented on the special warm glow of the morning and evening sun in October in my last post. I agree with her. Sometimes, though, as she no doubt could attest in Toronto, the glow of October's light is rather cool, if that makes sense, and sends you inside for a warmer radiance in a brick fireplace. As another friend says, it's starting to be "candle time."

Inge and I drove an hour and a half to my family's cottage (home of the Wild Things swing) for a writing retreat. It was dark and chilly - except for some brief moments such as this one when Inge was crowned with cool light on a stage of diamonds backed by milky drapes - and when it wasn't raining, light fingers of wind tipped the oak leaves spilling their rain reserves down onto the ferns, moss and tin roof. It was just the right atmosphere for nesting in the couch cushions behind a stack of books and a slow dancing fire.



Conversations with Inge are about stories. Of authors she reads and the very few I read too, such as Orhan Pamuk (click here for my encounter with him). Oh - his beloved İstanbul is also my beloved İstanbul. Or is it? He steps out one way, and I step in another. It is his story, it is my story. Or we talk about her mother's scattered leaves of stories collected and piled in attic letter boxes before Inge and her sister arrived, a world apart. Or Inge's own story, which she wants to write down for her fourteen year old son, with her places, favorite things, her poetry, sketches and photographs. We talk about truth versus fiction. What is the Truth? How does Memory serve? How can I fill in the vast gaps of knowledge about daughter of Swedish immigrants Grandma Olive? I don't remember her at all though she must have held me before her death when I was four. What can I piece together of her from what I have heard from stories told by Mom: taping wallpaper designs around the walls to match patterns as she drew them; sisters Susan, Bootsie and Nancy: falling into the goldfish pool and being terrified of breaking something valuable in the not-too-child-friendly house; and brother Nelson: Saltine cracker & peanut butter sandwiches she made for his snack - each unique and colored by their own separate memories? And what truth of her can I corral from her china, or the "bastard" cabinet she painted, or her sewing box, and the vases she collected?

Just as there is a different light in October, and there is a different light inside, there is also a different light within each of us. This light is more powerful than we are sometimes willing to acknowledge, and it slants this way and that and glows uniquely from each individual. As Eric Maise wrote in one of the weekend's fireplace books (one Inge gave me on some Christmas or birthday), A Writer's Paris, from the chapter "Hemingway Slept Here":

I don't care where Hemingway slept. . . What writers write interests me. . . . If Hemingway is important, it is because what he had to say still touches us. But is it important that on this exact spot, now smack in the middle of a fancy mall, he had onion soup after a night of debauchery? Hardly. The past is no substitute for the present. Love the 1440s, love the 1680s, love the 1920s--love any epoch that touches your soul. But start each day focused on your writing and not on your literary maps.

Bring along the stories of others that have touched you. You can't help it. But write your story, as only you can.

RESPECT

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Congressman Joe Wilson didn't have it when he shouted "You lie!" to President Obama in the middle of his speech to Congress.

Someone spray painted this word on a step going up to my university office building. I don't know why. Sometimes graffiti is art, but most of the time it's disrespectful.

Meditate on the word.

Respect.

Respect is the balm we hold in our hands every moment.

Some people believe if you treat someone with disrespect you lose the right to be treated with respect yourself.

I have a story that demonstrates what I feel about respect. The story belongs to a man - let's call him Vick - for whom I frankly don't have much respect. But this story, like an iridescent bubble, surrounds and protects him from my memories and wrath.

Vick was my boss for three years. While he treated me with respect, I cringed when he led our staff with a cold, condescending and dictatorial style. Out of a staff of 20, only a couple people liked him. I'll never forget in my first week on the job one secretary said she wished his plane would crash. Out of respect for his position, I found a way to be pleasant and cordial in our daily professional relationship, and at some level I respected his expertise in his field. But I would never want him for a friend, even though he could be charming and even warm at times. Charm on the heels of cold arrogance only increased the chill.

So, this is the story he told me, the bubble around him that embodies my definition of respect.

Vick went to France with his American wife, a professor of French, every summer for several weeks for her academic research. This was one realm where he felt intimidated, convinced the French people he encountered scoffed at his American accented French. How strange it was to picture him, Mr. I-RULE-THE-WORLD, feeling inferior. His robust physique, while perhaps lending itself to his power in the U.S., only increased his feeling of mortification in Paris. And isn't it rather charming that he revealed his vulnerability to me this way?

He explained to me that he learned from the French how to enter a restaurant: Walk in the door quietly. Listen to the room. Let the room receive you. Serenely, calmly, genteelly ask the host for a table. He was so careful about this it became his appeasement, his little sacrifice at the altar of the French gods, hoping he might be accepted in spite of his Americanized French.

One year Vick's parents-in-law visited them in Paris, and they had no clue about the "respect the room" rule he had learned and honored. All those years of showing deference entering a restaurant were blown away in a gust when the door opened and his mother-in-law chattered away full voice while everyone in the room gaped at them. Our tall, broad, bearded professorial Vick in a tweed sport coat held his head as high as he could while his innards melted in humiliation.

This is what I think of, what epitomizes respect for me. Entering quietly. Listening. Then proceeding.

Even the air we move through deserves our respect.

And now I am reminded of a little Mark Strand poem:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand
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double fisted French apple pie

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These are my apple pie tools.

Apple pie may be very American, but this is French apple pie, needing special considerations. The buttery crumb topping makes it French, according to Mme. Betty Crocker. I always thought crumb topped pie was called Dutch apple (remember double Dutch, in jump rope?). Dutch apple pie is actually when you pour cream in through slits in the top crust during the last five minutes of baking. Wow.

I rolled the dough out on the cutting board that I carried home on the Metro from the Paris flea market. People on the train looked at me like I was carrying a weapon. I tried to look nonchalant, as if a) I weren't an American tourist and b) it is perfectly normal to get on the Metro with a big round board with a handle. Travel tip: no matter how you try to blend in, those Parisians pick up your Americanness every time. I is what I is, I guess.

The apples I used were our yellow transparent apples, what was left of them by the deer and the kids playing knock-the-apples-off-the-tree at the wedding. I used Don's ice scraper to pull the high, remaining apples within reach.

I see that the winner of the national pie championship was made with yellow transparent apples. I don't think you can find them in many shops or farmers markets, so we are fortunate to have this very (French)-tart variety right in our little orchard. (I don't think they're really French apples; I just threw that in with the tart.) You can use Granny Smiths, another tart apple, if you can't find transparents. But really, wouldn't you rather have a French tart than a Granny Smith?





This is Don's ice scraper tool co-opted for pulling apple boughs down.



















Here are the yellow transparent apples, so pretty, with Don counting sunflowers in the background. (It's over, Don, the wedding is over, it doesn't matter how many we have now.)













The weapon.









French apple pie before adding ice cream.

The recipes:

Instead of a top crust, I topped it with crumbly yums, making it French apple.
I added chopped, salted pecans to the crumb topping: