cows in cafés

It’s the kind of day where the only cows I see are those suspended in a café on State Street – where I jumped out to get a cup for the long day of teaching.



Buy print 2018


Typically, on days such as this, I’ll post a photo of the lakeshore path and say – here, look at this! Everchanging! Enjoy! Today, you get not only the café cows, but, in addition, a secret peek at what the view is like out the 9th floor Faculty Tower stairwell window at the Law School. Me, I’m on the 6th floor. But a quick visit with a colleague up on 9th lead me to pause and admire. Almost as good as the lakeshore path, don’t you think?



Buy print 2017

for the love of goats

Is it 450 chickens and 32 goats? Or 450 goats and 32 chickens? Oh, I don’t need notes for that. There are way more chickens than goats on the farm.


I’m such a fan of goat cheese and such a steady customer of Dreamfarm farmstead goat cheese (sold at the Westside Community Farmers Market)! I have been meaning to go out and take a peek at all those goats who have so lovingly contributed to my cheese happiness. But, life interferes and so it wasn’t until today that I made the trek out west to mingle with the animals. Dreamfarm – to borrow from their label – “where goats browse on pastures and eat organic grain and hay.”

It happened that it was a rainy day. Still, I don’t have classes this afternoon and Diana Murphy, the head cheesemaker and goat keeper had a few minutes to spare (she runs the show with her husband Jim and a bunch of daughters, but hey, she is there, on the premises, tending to all those goats and chickens, so I will call her the CEO for practical purposes) and so Ed and I headed out to visit. Diana was waiting for us.



Diana Murphy of Dreamfarm


The farm's not too far from Madison. Just beyond Cross Plains. A very pretty drive at this time of the year because the corn and soy fields are starting to look golden. Rain notwithstanding.



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Let me say this: in the past few months, I’ve fallen in love with a handful of dogs that have crossed my path. A Labradoodle on Cape Cod. A Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier in Chicago. A mutt in Madison. But nothing, nothing prepared me for the surge of love I felt for these goats.



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Look at them! They run up to you, check out your backpack (if you have a backpack), they nuzzle you and look imploringly at your face, so that you just want to pick them up and place them in your lap!



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…At which point they throw back their ears and grin, looking for all the word like light aircraft, flying straight at you!



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Diana tolerated my quickly escalating (and very vocal) crush and then reminded me that goats need to be milked. Every day. Whether or not you have relatives in Poland, or yearnings for France, or daughters you absolutely must visit regularly on the east coast.

And the chickens? Remember, there are also happy hens. Gorgeous. Kind of shy though. Definitely not lap material.



Buy print 2011



I’ve written before about my attitude toward chickens. They absolutely depleted the meadow by my grandparents’ village home in Poland. But Diana’s chickens are different. When they eat up the seeds and bugs and who knows what else, she moves them to the next slice of meadow.

So is it easy to raise chickens and sell eggs? You’d think yes. Think again. Moving the hens around – fine, there’s that. Picking up eggs from 450 hens daily, where each hen lays an egg 5 days out of the week, and then, by hand, scrubbing each egg clean and filling the boxes… Oh, it’s our evening activity, Diana tells me. Right. I surf the Net, try to imagine a blog post, munch on Angel Fluffs and worry about the work that I have to do tomorrow. Diana + family ensure that a bunch of families have wonderful eggs for the week ahead. Whose is the nobler task?

On our way out, we stop by the Dreamfarm cheesemaking facility. The cheese is already an organic product, waiting for certification. But more importantly, it is so very very excellent. I’m eating some right now. With dill and garlic. I could have selected one with other herbs. Nettle, for instance. All made by hand. Creamy, so very creamy! Jealous, aren’t you?

Sunday repose

Sunday idleness. It’s never that, here at home. Clean house, look out wistfully, do work. I keep my lazy clothes on. I suppose that’s something.

By early evening, I know I had avoided what should have been today’s call: to think great thoughts and imagine action steps to implement them. I mean, if you’re not going to be leisurely, nor social, shouldn’t you at least plan for a better tomorrow?

I took a walk around the block.

It is a problem when you live near a mall: a walk around the block becomes a walk around the perimeters of brick and concrete.

I watch others on break…










…And linger for a while to talk to a woman who comes to this spot regularly. To feed the quasi-urban animals.

They always come for the bread, she tells me.

Hers is a good use of a Sunday, no?

shopping

Sometimes I pity the farmers. Bad soil, lousy weather, Wisconsin bugs – it’s enough to make you reconsider.

Our images of the whole field to table thing are, of course, sweeter, gentler: young buds pushing their way up, growing and spilling their bounty into the harvesting machine (or hands). The farmer, smiling, piling this bounty into a truck, to bring it to our paved parking lot. Weathered faces and hands – so rewarding to see right up front, as we reach for the good stuff, anticipating the many meals that we'll make henceforth.


At the Westside Community Market, I see these vendor tables in the bright light of a sunny September morning, and I fill my basket, and it is all rather joyous.



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Back at the condo, Ed and I work on improving the storefront on the Ocean Store page of my website. If you have never tried to build your own click-through shopping cart on the Net, I’m telling you now – it is so complicated, so frustrating, that it’s enough to make you reconsider.

Ed has done the brunt of the work on it – days and nights of learning enough html code to make things work. Really, it has been one long nightmare. Much of it is beyond me, but what I have plunged into has been truly beyond hard.

All for your shopping pleasure. So that when you do eventually decide to buy this book, or some future book, or a photo, or cards for the holidays, or whatever, we’ll be all smiles and handshakes and kind thoughts about one another.

If creating merchandise is hard, creating a storefront for it is like working to get that squiggly worm out of an otherwise fine apple.

Uff. Happy shopping.

another perspective

Being born to a very political family (professionally and in their degree of expressiveness) inoculated me against an excessive verbal engagement in the political process. In fact, mostly, I like to stay silent. Arguing is so exhausting! It leaves me feeling depleted.

But, I do like to listen to others occasionally – both those on “my side” of the issues as well as those offering another perspective. And occasionally, when provoked, I will rattle off my latest reasons for feeling incredulous at the way constituents and political leaders shuffle around and arrange themselves prior to a major election.

And we are before a major election.

But mostly, I stay quiet.

Today, I biked to work using a different combination of paths and roads. Up Observatory Drive and down Bascom Hill, approaching the Law School from the Hall, over where Lincoln sits. It offers another perspective on the Mall and the green spaces where students bring their books, their laptops and their feelings of affection for one another.



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rain

It was a good day. Up early, taught energetically, spoke passionately to a colleague on the matter of the RNC.

Watched the rain outside.

Walked to university committee meetings, got wet, walked back, envied the boots of those who wore boots (of the galoshes kind).





Noted the ice cream social at UW (ice cream social… oh well – what’s in a name…), wondered how it is that the servers had THAT much cheer. The rain sloshed down on us all, pouring wet streams down our shirts and into our shoes.






But the ice cream was free and we were there and the servers were so cheerful and so we ate…





More hours of teaching, and finally the bus right home. Except that my bus pass has expired. But, a friendly soul gives me a ride back. I pick up a rosé at Steve’s (I have much to celebrate today) and head home to listen to the news of the day.

Madison, Naturally

September 3rd will always be one of those important launching days for me (oh, the things I have launched!) and so today I’m introducing you to something that took three years to put together – Madison, Naturally: a photo book, with 35 pages, compiling 85 of the best of Ocean photos of outdoor life in and around Madison.

You live here and you want to show off this town to friends, relatives, in-laws, prospective students or employees who have never set foot in Madison? Send them a copy. You once lived here and you miss it? Treat yourself to this, for old times’ sake. Worried about gifts for the holidays? Problem solved!

[Just to show you that I DO have entrepreneurial grit, I am giving you the direct link to the Ocean Store here AND in the sidebar. This week-end, look for a new and improved storefront.]



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(inside)


Madison, Naturally is a lovely little hard cover book (8 x 10 inches in size, priced at $45). I embarked on this particular project in anticipation of the October art show (where I will lead a workshop on creating a photo book), never realizing how big an effort it would be to put together a volume of this sort.

Now that it’s all over and done with, I do want to step back and say a significant thank you to the person who brought me to Madison so many years ago. And a thanks with a grin to Ed (who thinks acknowledgements are silly), for knowing every back road and creek in the region and for waiting so patiently while I do my camera stuff outdoors. Above all – a thanks to daughters, who love this place even more than I do and who taught me to say, in response to the question – where are you from? – not “I now live in Madison, Wisconsin,” but “I am from Madison, Wisconsin.”

huffing

The hottest day. Like a school kid, I load up my brand new back pack (large, very large) with laptop, texts, papers and I hop on the bike.

I am drenched by the time I reach the Law School. No time to fret. Copy the syllabi, proceed to class. And after, I sit in my office for a few minutes, as is my habit after class, recovering.

And I admire the shades of green outside.



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A break between classes. I pedal to the coffee shop off of Lakeside Street. Oh, what’s this? People actually swim in our lakes? No kidding!



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Others prefer to just watch.



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Not me, not today. I dig out my laptop and plunge. Not into the lake, but into work. Another class, then, back on my bike and a hot, sunset ride home. There, I collapse.

sucking candy

Of all seasons, summer is the one most laden with sugar. And at the end, you’re left wondering if you got it all in, sucked up every last bit of it, before the steady diet of winter potatoes and cabbage begins (I think like a Pole).

The confection is not only in the weather, the harvest of fruits, the profusion of warm days – it’s also, for me, in the number of non-office days. And long evening hours, with the sun still up, pushing you to do more, to put in solid chunks of time into your favorite projects.

For an educator, Labor Day is like the gate slamming in your face. The good thing is that you get to lay out your clothes for the next day and they don’t feel tired. And neither do you. The bad thing is that the day has only so many hours and increasingly, the free ones are on the dark side of the day’s spectrum.

And now for the taking stock: if I call myself a writer and a photographer, what has summer contributed to either?

My book moved forward, slowly. But, on the up side, this week you will see on Ocean the unveiling of another tome, one with few words, but with a lot of color and pizzazz. And with these reviews from a number of lucky souls who had a chance to preview the effort:

That’s just like you, to take on the complicated production of something that will bring you no returns. Had you no entrepreneurial lesson in your communist upbringing at all?

It’s beautiful! Gorgeous! Now can we eat dinner?

And while I’m on the subject of writing and photography, let me warn all good people contemplating a showing of their talent in some gallery-type presentation – think twice. So much work! Like planning for a dinner party where you’re not sure you’ll even have a good time, and with great concerns that too many will be there for the free food rather than the heady experience of once again seeing your art. (The show is on the first week-end of October: look for further postings inviting you to attend. Refreshments provided. Of the cheap kind.)

And so, as I am sucking on the last sweetness of the season, I’m thinking that it was a good one. These bridge days to the next season are like the tips of the glads that I keep refreshing and cutting back, not wanting to chuck it all just yet. And anyway, tomorrow promises to be the warmest day of the year. So there.



Buy print 1999

loss

Saturday evening. A warm, beautiful time of day. I had spent time at the farmette and now I am heading home. Ed swings his Honda motor bike over and I get on, throwing my backpack in the yellow crate over the rear wheel.

A beautiful ride. The sky is clear, the air is turning cool.

At the condo, I unpack the back pack and reach into my dress pocket for the cell phone.

Gone.

We retrace our spin, staring down into gutters, patches of grass – nothing. It’s dark now. I dial my cell phone – it goes into a no ring mode. My gut tells me it’s been crushed somewhere between the farmette and the condo and I bear the burden of its demise.

The next day, I spend $200 on a new phone, but even that is, most likely, a mistake. Look, Ed tells me, ebay has these at half the price. I shrug and cling to my purchase.

In the afternoon I attend a memorial service. I hesitate before going. The person who died was a friend, but few would understand why. She was part of what I perceived (mistakenly? who can tell) to be a hostile neighborhood. Except, she was herself anything but hostile. She was kind and caring and so, along with a million others, I mourn her sudden and untimely death. In the end, I get on my bike and pedal over.

It is a beautiful memorial service and the room is packed with family and friends. Family and friends. I think about how easy it is to sequester yourself in pursuit of God knows what, oh, those ever important projects, so that, at the end of the day, you plug in the most important numbers into your new cell phone and you realize that you really never want to talk to anyone anymore with the exception of a precious handful or two.

I have attended funerals of older people – the grandparents and great grandparents out there, and they have been sad occasions exactly because these people have outlived their circle of influence. So that at their memorial service, the rooms are quiet and no video clips of rich and full lives fill the auditorium.

At home, I have much work to do and tomorrow I plan to delve right into it. Tonight, I am watching (of all things) the Sound of Music and thinking about the last time I saw this peculiar movie – it was in Poland, with daughters, eight years ago, under most unusual circumstances. I’m watching and thinking how even as early as five years ago, when I was just fifty, I was very forgiving of myself and how now, I am much less inclined in that direction.

family visits

During my high school years, my grandmother continued to live in the Polish village, an hour or two to the northeast of Warsaw, the same village where I spent my toddler years, the one which, to this day, has no paved road leading to it.

Nearly every week-end, we would visit her there. On Sunday afternoon, when it was time to leave, she would stand in front of the house and wave us on, crying quietly to herself. The house kept shifting for her – from quiet beyond belief, to full of the noises and demands of family. I don’t know if it was that she missed us so much on the empty days (independent types can be a handful). Maybe it was the shift from full to empty that disturbed her. A recurring feeling of loss.

I know that shift from full to empty. But I sort of envy my grandmother. She only had to wait five days for the house to be full again.


Ah well. There is always food to fill your empty spaces. On the way from the airport, we stopped at Sophia’s, where the cakes are like those my grandmother used to bake. An old world kind of place. Except for the ketchup on the tables.



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After? Well, there’s the market. A hot day, but a good one for corn and tomatoes. And shedding clothes, where appropriate.




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once again

I bike to work just as the labor day week-end is about to roll in. For the past nine years, I spent labor day out east, helping daughters move. Not so this year. No one is moving.

And so I spend a day at home, with one daughter still here, though not for long (not even a full day) and I watch the politics unfold before me on television. Oh dear.


Slowly, I let go of it all and return to my focus on teaching. September is a month of concentration. Even as, at the juncture, when it is still really summer, you see students clinging to the comfortable, the easy, the sublime.



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That’s them. I’m in a different orbit.

late afternoon caller

She was intensely engaged with the person on the other end. Sometimes she paced, sometimes she stood still, listening.





I’ve had conversations like that, where everything seemed to hinge on what was said by the other party. But not recently. And anyway, were I to be so invested in the outcome, I would probably not position myself so exquisitely in front of a store with the perfect late summer colors framing a well-dressed countenance. I’d be disheveled, in the gutter maybe, sweating it out.

Ah, poise.

quiet time

A nap. A big snore, an exhale. I need one, you need one. I offer a serene photo from the fields bordering the farmette. I never post photos more than twenty four hours old. This one just barely makes it. Good night, sweet dreams. I’m ready to call it a day.



Buy print 1993

a half a shed (is better than none)

As if to balance the recent urban presence in Ocean posts, this day is rural to the core.

First: I went early to the farmette to check on the state of the crops. Perhaps this word (“crops”) overstates what Ed and I planted back in May. But when you put in more than three dozen tomato plants and you’re basically a city person, you think of yourself as being quite the farmer.

The tomatoes are doing fine, in a lazy sort of way. Ed, ever the minimalist, doesn’t stake. So the tomato field looks like a beach with plump beings who forgot the sunscreen.



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Next, there are the fields of cosmos. The truth is that a packet of seeds will NOT create fields of anything. But, the flowers that finally budded, while limited in number, are magnificent.



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And finally – a progress report on the Writer’s Shed Project. Today, Amos & friend hauled the skeletal structure to Ed’s place.

It took them three hours to plomp the thing into the place and there were casualties along the way.





Inside, there is nothing. We are to fill the interior with walls, floors, lighting fixtures. Water, if Ed thinks of a way to run it in (not likely). Projected date of completion? I do not know. Maybe never?













Buy print 1990

from Chicago, one last time

And the food. What of the food here? Oh, always exquisitely diverse. Yesterday we opted for a new Indian eatery -- Marigold. Yes, sure, there’s Devon Avenue – home to any number of Indian restaurants, but Marigold is off to the side, on Broadway, and it is superb.



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We note on this Chicago trip a number of restaurant closures, or for some old favorites -- significant face changes. When people are tightening their budgets, restaurants suffer, even, and perhaps especially in the middle price range we tend to favor (one assumes rich people will never lose interest in the upper end establishments). Sometimes the face changes are very welcome. And they make me wonder: how is it that Madison’s kitchens don’t change much? I can list a dozen restaurants that people love for no reason that I can think of, except that they have been there for decades, with the same menus, the same décor, same locations. I expect my grandchildren will become familiar with them too. Yawn.

We aren’t especially welcoming of new places in Madison. We are far more critical of them than of the old places, where we demand nothing more than that they remain the same. In Chicago, people flock to the new and interesting and seem to show no loyalty to tired cooks.

I started this mini series with the statement that Chicag is a handful. Sometimes being a handful can be very interesting. And good.

from Chicago

I was going to give you a day’s respite from longer posts. I took this photo of a man on a break and thought – that’s it for today.





But then I go for an early evening walk – up and down Andersonville (once Swedish, now – who can tell; it certainly known for its high concentration of gay couples, but the ethnic dimension is unclear), then west to Lincoln Avenue and south to Lincoln Park. I pause at a park there and watch men – some dozen or more, my age mostly – play a very, very good game of boules.





The men speak another language. I’m not a Higgins, but I’m more than okay at placing languages and this one sounds familiar. But what is it?

One of the players comes over to chat. So it’s Croatian! They’re not recent immigrants. They all came between twenty and thirty years ago. But they get together every week in good weather. Fridays after work and Saturdays. And they play. And talk. It’s a good way to pass time, he tells me.


So are there still communities with demographic labels in Chicago? Do cities segregate in ways that are beneficial rather than simply exclusionary? The current thinking is that it's better to mix it all up, right? Sort of like this Swedish Andersonville Jewish Italian New York deli slash pharmacy that is also especially gay friendly?





I go back to my favorite bakery, Natalina’s – the one where she bakes, inspired by her Sicilian grandmother’s recipes and he helps, with his Lebanese family bakers’ experience. It is a wonderful place, not only for its pasteries…



Purchase photo 1985


…but also for watching what happens in the open kitchen, just behind the counter. The owners, Natalie and Nicolas are both so sensual, so deliciously focused on each other that it’s like watching an elaborate meal preparation in their own home, as she rolls the dough, slowly, with beautiful, strong arms, and he leans on the counter, waiting for another tray to come out of the oven.



Purchase photo 1984


My visits to Chicago would be greatly diminished without a stop at Natalina’s and so I ask them, nervously, because I see the framed, glowing reviews from Food and Wine and other reputable magazines on their melon colored walls – will you be relocating someday? Downtown maybe?

No… he says this slowly, as if he’s just now mulling this over. Because really, it’s not only about the business of it, it’s also the place, their place.
No, he says again, not in Chicago. Maybe in Italy?
Sicily? I prod…
No.. somewhere else…
Rome! I say, and he considers it and smiles.

I drink a shot of espresso, with a scoop of raspberry gelato at the side, I take a pack of cookies and head out, thinking that this is the new Italy, here in Andersonville, in this pasticceria. In an old Swedish neighborhood, in Chicago.