night

It’s been a long time since I biked in the pitch black night.





I really somewhat like it. On a warm night, the darkness is rather inviting. Speeding up one hill and coasting down the next, I’m thinking – this is what running away must feel like. Mmmmm…

But, I haven’t much to run from. The day was so full of good work and good encounters with students (yes, the annual pizza night at Uno’s: one section today, another tomorrow) that really, if I were to run toward anything at the moment it would be toward more work. It can be that intense. Or distracting, depending on what else you want to accomplish during your time on the planet.

I wont post photos of the evening with students – there are too many lovely faces out there and I don’t want to pick and choose. But I’ll put up this – of one waiting for the doors of the Karaoke place to open. If he looks worn and tattered, it’s because it was an even longer, even harder day for him. I at least get to declare recess when I need a break. The students have to wait. Until recess. And for the karaoke doors to open for them.

flight

I can’t say that I am one of those who looks for “signs.” As in -- "if the sun shines in the next minute then I will get mumps"… Strange reasoning. I avoid it.

Still, what would you think if, on the way to your Torts class, you had to slow down your bike in order to avoid hitting the white-clothed men and women?





I'm biking, as usual, past the hospital and I understand that there was an emergency drill today, so, of course, there is an explanation. But I have to wonder. Is it coincidence that I am racing to be on time for my class on medical malpractice?

Whew. Too much seriousness for Ocean.

I'll switch gears:

I have been (cheerfully?) complaining about how housebound I am this fall. I'm certain that I need flight in the same way that you need air conditioning (all Americans appear to need air conditioning). Let me say this: it is easier to turn up air conditioning than it is to put in place flight when your income dwindles (it’s the economy, stupid!), and supplements to it are, well, meager.

Spend your miles! – someone might say to me. (I accumulate miles in the way that people accumulate junk: constantly, without ever throwing anything away.) No! That’s for the ultimate rainy day -- when I can’t moonlight anywhere at all because I am so old that my joints don’t permit me to open the door to anything that doesn’t have a push button attached to it.


Late, on my way home, I bike to the grocery store to pick up veggies for supper. Hi, Ocean, says a fellow shopper who knows me pretty much exclusively through the blog. Going anywhere soon? I've been wondering... Funny you should ask, just on this day!

So, today, my occasional traveling companion and I purchased flights. Indeed! All those hours of post-work work (“Hello, how are you? What brings you to our shop this evening?”) have given me a flight.

Even though the flight isn’t until December.

In the meantime, I take great great pleasure in watching the flight of other winged ones. On that same bike ride to work this afternoon, I notice this guy take off. Happy travels to you. I know how cool it is to push off and head elsewhere.

kormorany, in english

A commenter asked for a translation of the song in the previous post. I was going to do this in the comment section, but then I realized that it's Tuesday, for God's sake, Tuesday, my awfully long day, a day that is so consumed by work that I cannot write anything here at all because everything has to do with work and, well, I don't write about work.

You could have had here a post about rain. Because there was plenty of it. But that's too simple. Let me add a layer of emotion by providing (some of) the lyrics from yesterday's song. Interspersed with photos from today (hello, autumn!). A very very wet day. So wet, that no one's shoes were adequate. Sit back and just look at this (very wet) landscape as if you were Polish. Take off your socks. They're wet. I peeled off mine. And I let myself lean back into my chair, immersing myself in the words before me:

Kormorany. The cormorants.

Dzień gaśnie w szarej mgle
The day disappears into a gray mist

Wiatr strąca krople z drzew
The wind shakes off raindrops from trees

Sznur kormoranów w locie splątał się
A string of cormorants, tangled in flight

Pożegnał ciepły dzień
Said good bye to a warm day

Ostatni dzień w mazurskich stronach
The last day in the Mazury region [the lake region of Poland, where so many set sail during vacation]

Zmierzch z jezior żagle zdjął
Dusk took the sails off the waters

Mgieł porozpinał splot
That's a toughie: it's about dusk taking apart the tangle of misty air

Szmer tataraku jeszcze dobiegł nas
The whisper of sweet flag reaches us

Już wracać czas
It's time to return home...





Even pop music could not shake the poetic impulse. Songs of the sixties in Poland, even the late sixties, were so full of metaphors and poetry that the heart just swelled.

kormorany

Has anyone become tired here of the ending summer theme? Really not? Honestly?

With the official close of summer (tomorrow afternoon), I put a close to brooding. The seasonal malaise, fueled by wistful rides past yellowing fields of soy has to stop. You can’t in one breath say you’re all about the colorful, changing landscape (I love a crisp fall! I love the new school year! I love living in a place with four seasons!) and in the next – tear it apart (I miss summer! I hate the gray of November! Look one last time at the barefoot women and shirtless men on the UW campus!)





Though really, I'll admit it, change is difficult. Only spring manages to gallop in without so much as a shrug of concern for all those who happened to have loved February or March.

So, let me stumble along, as I become, with each day, more and more accustomed, as we all will be, to the shift away from summer, toward the dull, cold, bleak, gray days of late fall. Can’t wait.

In the meantime, I'll be listening to Kormorany, A Polish song that I learned to love in 1966, when I returned to Poland from the States. It speaks of the shift from summer to fall. Kinga, one Polish-American reader who occasionally checks in here, this one’s for you. The rest of Ocean readers, well, you may enjoy seeing what was hot (music-wise) in Poland in 65-66. Not up to the standard of the Beatles? Oh, how little you know about what pulls at the Polish heart!

a cigarette break

I like the idea of stepping outside for a few minutes to take stock of what you’re doing and where you’re heading. A cigarette break sort of, minus the cigarette.





I also like the idea of sitting down at a café, over a beer (or glass of wine) before a sensible hour, because it suggests that nothing else has to be done that day,

I did neither. Though I did jump out of the ordinary for a bit (even as I spent very little time outdoors). Instead of receding into my usual ’09 antisocial demeanor, I drank coffee with friends, first, at brunch, with my very kind manager (from the little shop where I moonlight)…





…then at the place of the cigarette and beer photo.

It’s a bewildering day in a calm sort of way. One can invent drama in one’s head even when nothing’s happening.


Maybe it’s time to step outside again. No cigarette, just a break from an evening of thinking.

It’s truly beautiful outside – summer, masquerading as fall.

A very long goodbye to a sweet and gentle season.

saturday morning

Suddenly, the Saturday ritual – a trip across the road to the Westside Community Market – is under fire. For three weeks in a row, I’ve ignored the market. I haven’t the time to cook – not on the week-end and not on the evenings of early week. I’m home too late to brush dirt from mushrooms or peel squash for soup. By the time my evenings clear (Wednesday), I have a the Hilldale Market down the hill offering even fresher corn, tomatoes, greens.

But this seems just so wrong. During the cold months, I’d give anything for a chance to take out my basket on a Saturday and shop for produce outdoors. If you don’t do what you claim you love doing, shouldn’t you reconfigure life so that you can get back to what once made you smile?

This morning, refreshed by a Friday of no outside obligations, I pull Ed out to the market. Dinner will be late – past 10 – but that’s the way it has to be. And anyway, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms don’t take long to roast (with olive oil and garlic, 400 degrees, ten minutes).






The rest of the morning is a blur. When you have a list of tasks, all disconnected from each other and pulled together only because they’re all just a Honda motorbike ride apart, you go through it all in a hazy state of indifference.

Only the weather continues to be anything but indifferent.

And so we motor downtown to sell some clothing, and deliver a photo of mine to the Overture Center Gallery (which photo? I choose La famiglia Romana because I love all that is contained within it), pick up a replacement laptop for Ed, a backup hard drive for me... I know. After this kind of a list, one has to ask -- why blog? Why write about life if your life has become inconsequential?

But let me finish: we settle in at La Baguette, for a cappuccino (for me) and quiche (for Ed). A dreamy quiet settles over my internal space.






I read an article last night, written by a man who, in his permanent bachelor state, finds himself with too much time on Saturdays, even as his married, familied friends find that their Saturdays are booked for years into the future. There is, of course, mutual envy.

To me, Saturdays with family or even perhaps in a newly minted love affair may appear booked, but they are booked in good ways. What should never happen is what I find to be my lot right now: free days that aren’t free, but nor are they (for the most part) putting anyone closer to anything singularly special. These cluttered times will fade from memory, because no one remembers days spent on crossing off "to do" lists. That's why we make the lists: they are surely forgettable.


On a more cheerful note, late night hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and scrambled eggs are a wonderful supper. Especially with a baguette from a bakery that now forms the backbone of my better moments.

food

Hi Ed. Do you think, maybe, we could soon, you and I, go shopping at Woodman’s?

It has come to this. Woodman’s is Madison’s premier discount grocery store. A place that, to me, is everything that makes for a grocery shopping nightmare. Aisles of bulging containers of godawful stuff that some would call food.

Except, there are two points to remember: 1. It’s cheap (Ed appeal) and, 2. if you look carefully, you'll find something fresh and honest. Maybe not fresh. But honest. I have to believe that Kashi crackers and organic grape juice are honest.

Life has been so brutal (meaning – busy) that we have run low on the basics. It's time for that quarterly Woodman's trip.


But walking up and down the aisles (and we walk up and down all of them), I have to wonder – cheap, yes, maybe, but at what price to the American eating habits?





We stand in line at the check out. Ed tells me – I have never in my life checked out with TWO carts full of food here.

Except that we haven’t bought anything, I tell him. A bunch of bananas and a pint of blueberries – that’s the extent of the produce.

Indeed. What we have are two carts full of everything but dinner.

The experience is so (to me) depressing that I insist on a pause for air at the nearby La Baguette. There, we chat with the owners, we laugh...





...we meet the owner’s parents. We walk away with only one baguette ($2.50), but my sense of well being has surged.


In the late late afternoon, we take Ed’s ancient (is 30 years old ancient?) Honda to his farmette. He wants to feed his cats, I want to take a walk.


Earlier, I was creating space on my laptop (the way to do this is to get rid of hundreds of irrelevant photos) and I came across pictures from March and April in Madison. It is a sadly gray time of the year here.

Today is its exact opposite.





I walk over to the fields where the Hmong farmers have so earnestly planted market vegetables and flowers. They are used to seeing me with my camera. We chat in the way that people do when neither understands the other’s language.





I continue up the road, past fields of market flowers…





And further still. The sun is low, the colors are sublime. My shoulders are bare – it is that warm.





I call Ed. Pick me up on the Rustic Road. I’m ready to head home.

one more time

Oh, indulge me! It was a week of hard work, a week of fighting off viruses that are surreptitiously creeping up Bascom Hill, a week of meetings, appointments, a week of late hours at the little corner shop.

And all I could think of was how enchanting even the hellishly busy weeks can be when the air is warm, the sky is blue and the sun dapples the bike path with crescents and obelisks of harvest gold.

I’m not going to campus tomorrow and next week promises the more typical pattern of rainy days and cool evening rides. So I give you this one last day of brilliance.

…on Bascom Hill, just outside my office…











On State Street, during my afternoon coffee break…





…and on the lakeside ride home.






Look closely at the faces: soon they’ll be hidden by scarves and turned up collars. Not today. Today the caps are decorative, the scarves – absent. Young bodies, stripped as far as decency permits. To take it in, one last time.










…while the sweaty band plays on.

language

Two tail ends to my day: a quick good bye in French and a greeting in Russian.


I have to say that nothing challenges and excites and depresses me more than having the opportunity to use a different language in the course of a very normal day. Let’s focus on the depressing elements of this: I am always worse than I think I ought to be.

But wait, my day started at the market. Nothing complicated about that. I try to decide between garlic.









Ed is with me so we go with the cheapest per bulb (the German).

That is the easy hour. So long as your day’s challenge is in deciding between Georgian and German garlic, you have nothing to complain about.


Then the day gets tricky. Teaching. Yes, of course, Lots of it. After, I pedal madly up hills and across excessively busy intersections for an appointment on the far far west side of town.

And now things become complicated in a pleasant sort of way. At 5:30, my obligations are behind me and the rest of the day is completely open.

I bike to La Baguette (ca va? Oui, ca va bien. – that was easy…) where a loaf of wonderful bread is waiting for me.





And soon after, I bike home. Or almost home. I choose a circuitous route. Past the Sheboygan Community Gardens. I waver. Tired, hungry, I want my home. (There are exactly 45 pounds of tomatoes waiting for me. Ed and I had gone overboard at the market.)

But I throw the bike down and go up the hill, because the sun is setting and I hear a language I hadn’t heard in a long time.

And there is a family, tending to the remains of a summer garden.





I recognize one person instantly: she used to sell bagels at Bagels Forever. I knew then that she was Russian. A very long time ago I had asked about her. They said she had a son, same age as my daughters…

I listen now, watch, inquire with my eyes if I can take photos, they (there are four of them, older, and still older) nod yes.





And then I leave. hesitating, but just for a moment. With (now, switch to Russian please) a comment about how beautiful the colors were.

Are you Russian?
No, but close. Polish. I sort of understand your language.
Yes… Polish. Polska…

And that is it.
Very lovely colors. Good bye.

And I think – I really love languages. And people who speak them well, naturally, from day one.

no you can't

Most everyone from my demographic category (past fifty, raised in Europe) will say that our parents tracked our lives less than we track the lives of our children. But my parents, championing independence from (it seems) the moment of my birth (I can give examples!), were especially hands-off.

So much was there an absence of directives (especially of the “don’t do that” type), that I recall vividly the three times during my teen years when my parents said “no!”

Thinking back, only once were they right (“no! you cannot go to Afghanistan!”). I was 19, but, as a Pole, I could not travel to most countries unless I used my dad’s diplomatic papers, so their “no” was a deal breaker. Good thing. That was one ill-conceived trip.

But remembering another “no!,” the one where I learned I could not move around Manhattan on a bike -- I kind of think, even now, that it was misplaced.

[The third "no!" isn’t something I want to mention, because you, on this side of the ocean, would dislike my parents for it and it is not my intention to create blog hostility toward either my mom or dad.]

I was already 18 and on my own, so their “no!” to the bicycle was a symbolic kind of shout down, but it was loud and rare and so I retreated and used the bus.


This morning, as I manipulated my bike across four lanes of University Avenue during rush hour (to get to the left turning lane), I thought maybe I am latently (very latently) asserting myself, as in: I can bike wherever I damn want to!

Most of my morning bike route is along a tame path by Lake Mendota. It requires no concentration and so I offer it none.





I daydream as I pedal. Someday I wont notice a rut and I’ll end up veering off into the lake. So there is greater danger in the benign.

But my satisfaction comes from that initial urban crossing of the four lanes. A sense of pleasure in mastering a skill that my parents never intended for me.


Let me add a post script to past night's note here. I was commenting then about shirtless men. I'll give equal time now to another category of underclothed student: the one with a bare foot. On warm days, common as pie.

half bare

Is it correct to call men without shirts “topless?” Or “half-naked?” In some stores, you’ll read that “shirtless” patrons are not welcome. So is the proper term “shirtless?”

It would be impossible for me to even imagine a male student coming to a law school class without an upper-body garment. But at the college level, this (shirtless male) must be within the realm of the not absurdly ridiculous, because today I saw a number of young men looking somewhat bare.





That's men for you.

Oh, but wait. On my ride home (or, rather, to the little corner shop...) I saw a college aged maiden arise from the waters.





It could be that she is the example that I need to make this post gender neutral. It could be.

But, if half-bare males on campus are rare, half-bare females are, for all purposes, not to be found. Predictably, this goddess turned out to have all the strings in the right places.



All this to say that it was a warm day. Anyone needing to rely on extraordinary measures to keep cool (for example -- come to campus shirtless) had my total understanding. Inside as well? Yes, sure. Though I would have been just a tad thrown off.

sheepishly

I’ll say this about Sunday: if you wake up and you remember that most every minute of the day ahead is accounted for, you feel cheated. As if you lost a week-end.

But every minute is not accounted for today! I have a handful of hours before the clock strikes the noon hour (at which time I will get ready, dress in black, walk to work). I hand over several precious minutes to reminiscing about how on recent, more flush September week-ends, I would be elsewhere, attending to grape harvests, or listening to the ocean waters pound the shores far far away.

To these musings I think Ed grunted. Or said nothing at all.

We should have house-cleaned, but I already cleaned this week-end and I felt I might well overdose on the stuff I spray on bathroom surfaces. Even though the container calls it eco this and green that.

Ed asks – do you want to go see an art show where the artists make things out of cigar boxes?
What things?
Don’t know. There are eleven artists displaying their cigar box works at a cigar shop.
It’s too perfect outside. I don’t want to breathe cigar smoke.
How about the Jefferson Sheep Fair? You like sheep.







Actually, I think sheep are pretty dumb. You look at them and they look away and they do it in unison. A bunch of sheep avoiding your gaze. It’s weird.

But I miss Scotland. Or, more accurately I miss the June days when I had nothing urgent on my plate except to hike from point A to point B, amidst fields of sheep.

We climb on Ed’s Honda and head east. Less than an hour out of Madison and we’re there.





We don't have much time, but I think we do take it all in: the market lamb contest…





The baby lambs…





The sheering of sheep (he charges about $4 per sheep; ...picked the skill up in New Zealand. It’s a lifestyle, he tells us. You don’t do it for the money but for the lifestyle. He sheers here and in Scotland and God knows where else. I think that I work for the love of teaching and for the money, sure, but I think that lifestyle – all indoors and very confined – is at odds with what I think of as healthy)…





Sheep. Everywhere sheep. And their attendants.





Sometimes back to back…





Or, really, just back to back sheep. Or the backsides of sheep (unlike the backsides of people, these are quite exposed).





I enjoy most watching the sheep herders participate in the herding event. I like how hell bent the dogs are – as if they could not run fast enough. Except when the master orders a stay. They crouch then, waiting to be released again.





There were other displays – of wool, spun by nimble hands…





Really, lots and lots of wool, for sale wool, for prizes wool, oily, beautiful, fragrant wool.





But in the end it was a joyful morning, full of those dumb, hairy sheep, uplifting to me, just because they made this Sunday morning less predictable than I thought it would be.

old dogs

On the one hand, old dogs have a hard time with new tricks, on the other, if they’re of a playful disposition, then sometimes they can surprise you.

Here's a photo of Ed, prior to dinner last night. Ironing. It would not shock me to learn that this was the first time he had ever held an iron.






The dinner itself was, of course, terrific fun – both to cook and to share. On the other hand, today was spent in the miserable company of dirty dishes, tired limbs and a great desire to not go to work at the little corner shop.

Ed and I took a walk by the lake just before I was due to join the retail world and truly, our pace was that of two very old dogs. He said it was my fault. I lagged behind.

Still, the summer weather continues energetically, as if it can’t get over its own wonderfulness. Take this one! And this! And another!

We watched others watching ducks. The water was murky, the sun hot, the air still.