After the tempest, a musical evening

It’s hard to explain the Concerts on the Square to a non-Madisonian. The basics are simple enough: a weekly summer outdoor event for which thousands gather; a concert, a bring-your-own-picnic, a spread-blanket-on-the-grass and sit-in-comfy-beach-chair-that’s-no-more-than-six-inches-off-the-ground (that’s a rule) event. There, it’s starting to get complicated. Bullet time!

• You have to know that to get anywhere within viewing distance of the “stage” (really, the SE entrance of the Capitol), you must put your blanket down at 3 p.m. to claim a spot. Not earlier (that’s a rule), not later (others will fill the spaces). The concert starts at 7, but you don’t have to stay with your blanket (and chairs if you’ve brought those as well) because this is Madison and things remain where you leave them.

• If it’s windy, your blanket will flutter away in your absence unless you weigh it down – but you can’t use stones (that’s a rule). Some years ago people (including me; hey, everyone was doing it!) looted stones from around the Capitol to weigh down blankets and after the show they would take their things and leave the stones behind (not guilty on this one) so that it looked like it had hailed boulders that evening.

• You can eat, read books, drink wine or beer, play cards or board games, do pretty much any quiet, low-to-the-ground activity, using the music as an excuse to be there. Listening to the music is an option (about 75% do listen), but not a requirement.

• The rules of concert going go out the door (no pun intended). People applaud after movements, or in fact before movements even finish (ey harriet? The dern thing finished yet? Sounds like it should be done. Clap clap clap).

And so on.

Tonight’s theme was “classical hits.” You would think that this would be boring to the thousands who gather (last week’s polka theme seemed more fitting for the carnival atmosphere), but no: the crowds will swell no matter what and for the most part, people listen.

The sun moves behind the Capitol dome in the course of the first hour and the concert ends in the pallor of early dusk. You stretch your legs, chomp away at your edibles and feel at peace with the evening (or, if you’re like me, you get a tad weepy at the first strains of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto; it’s so beautiful, and it’s been a long day; one can get emotional like that and no one will notice).


looking up from the blanket 


napping is also an option 


intermission 

Craziness of a sort

A feisty reader and blogger who herself has a record of dropping days upon days from her blogging obligations asks why I have had no posts today. Heavens! This day is one big mudslide into cardiac arrest, it has been that busy.

ALL WORK NO SLEEP

First of all, there was the last lecture to deliver -- three hours on the important civil rights Supreme Court decisions of the century (and which ones would you choose to include here?). Did anyone else notice that Charter crashed access to the Internet between 3:30 and 6:30 a.m.? Was anyone else frantically clicking away waiting for it to come back on so that they could finish last-minute scavenging for updates and information?

WHEN SOMEONE IS WILLING TO WALK WITH ME, I AM THERE!

Second of all, I once again misestimated distances and so what was to be a one hour walk turned into one hour and forty minutes (and the friend I walked with is a speed demon!).

I WAS LURED INTO THE FRANCE-BASTILLE-DAY THING ONCE AGAIN

Thirdly, yes I did blog about not celebrating any holiday of a country where I am not currently residing, but when a friend told me he was making Vichyssoise for dinner today in honor of Bastille Day I got jealous. Of course, not having time to do anything in the kitchen, I limited my celebratory measures to picking up a bottle of the French aperitif, Dubonnet. (Does it matter, do you suppose, that it was really bottled in the US? And why is it that I imagine every clebration of things French should include a wine-based beverage?)

MY MOM'S AT IT AGAIN

Fourthly, I came home and found a thick packet in the mail from my California out-of-the-ordinary mother. Among the items:


one book is autographed -- to compensate for not getting Clinton's signature in his text when he was in Berkeley 


an article about a very tall bridge; don't ask -- I don't know why 

For the first time in a long time, I wont even read blogs until late tonight. The day's not over yet. I'm keeping the car engine running as I write this. Thank God I haven't time to be tired.

Q/A

Q: If you’ve lived in Madison for 25 years and have a pretty reliable sense of direction, is it possible to get lost while walking within a mile or two of where you live?
A: Yes.

Q: Is it possible to ask 6 separate people directions to Old Middleton Road when you're stuck on some godforsaken street called Brody Drive and get 6 separate wrong answers?
A: Yes.

Q: When you finally decide to go back to University Ave and you miraculously see the Perkins American flag just a few feet away, can you still face great obstacles like wire fences and prickly thistle before you can reach it?
A: Yes.

Q: Are there bloggers out there who cannot transfer Mapquest pictures onto their blog without taking a photo of the computer screen?
A: Yes.

Q: Does the red star on the map below indicate the place where the author of this post first got lost?
A: Yes.


the scene of a foul mood resulting from overheating, dehydration and being lost 

If you can figure out how to get from the red star to Old Middleton Road, please email me. One woman swore there was a secret tunnel that took you underground right from University Ave to Old Middleton by Knoche's grocery store. If you know of it, I will PAY you if you tell me where it is.

Understanding Ariel

Ariel and I don’t speak the same language. Oh, we both use English words, but our meanings don’t coincide. She works behind the counter at Borders café and I am a frequent customer. I do tip her for the small latte I get, but perhaps she has figured out that once in a while I withhold the quarter and only throw in a dime (I like to keep a quarter around for parking reasons). Or something. She appears sanguine, yet she is completely areal in her approach to her job.

Ariel, I’ll say, the tables really need a wipe. Ariel gives a concerned look and hands over a wet rag. Ariel, a small skinny latte please. She takes the cash, forgets to punch my card, makes the coffee and carries it over to the opposite end of the counter and shouts out to the public “small skinny latte!” I sigh, go over, take my drink, come back to the cash register, give her my card, she punches it.

I have many such Ariel stories, all trivial and all part of my routine now. Someday I’ll have to work out good responses to her, as soon as I figure out why she always does that which, while not wrong, is not right either.

A prof’s crisis (it was not my fault!)

I am, I admit, rather a last minute person. I want to work ahead, but more often than not I prepare classes in the amount of time it takes, right before the class itself. If I need 10 hours to write up lecture notes, I will do it 10 waking hours prior to class. Risky? Not really. I give myself generous amounts of time so in case a tooth falls out and I have to detour to the dentist – I can accommodate that.

But I cannot accommodate what happened today.

I was to give lectures for three hours this morning, tomorrow morning, and Wednesday morning to the 30 foreign attorneys attending the Summer Program at the Law School. It is the first time that I’ve been asked to teach in the Program and so brand new lectures needed to be produced. By 6 am this morning, the first one was ready (yes, yes, a significant portion was written just yesterday).

I walk into the Law Building at a leisurely pace (I have an hour to spare! I am cool!), pick up my mail, leaf through it, think about reading blogs when suddenly, RED ALERT!! What’s this? A schedule of the Program that has me in addition slated to teach this afternoon?? Several more hours of lectures to give TODAY??

Naturally, I assumed that it was my fault, my oversight. But mostly I assumed that I would die of a heart attack and that would be that. Because I don’t HAVE my next set of lecture notes. Those were supposed to be generated this afternoon and evening.

In control, in control! Where is that Polish grit? I can do this!

I used every spare second, every bathroom break (for them – no such luxury for me – the caffeine and water had to stay in me until the ordeal was done with), the lunch hour, to produce the next batch of notes.

I never taught with such passion before. Passion replaced fear. Have you ever heard anyone pace and rave about the beautiful complexities of the Common Law tradition? Give spectacular examples of statutory interpretation? That was me! Brilliant it was not, but I doubt they noticed – they were too shocked that anyone would CARE that much about the law. (In fact, today I only cared about surviving.)

Two postscripts:
1. When I got home I retrieved the original schedule and noted that I WAS RIGHT! I hadn’t been in the original program for the afternoon. Small consolation.
2. I also noticed that I had neglected to remove the laundry tag from the back of my skirt and so the attorneys must now think that American profs wear red tags pinned to their clothes for decoration.

What a day.

The ultimate complement or the ultimate insult?

I was speaking to an attorney last night who works at the law firm where I once worked. He was with two other people (“I came to the reception with my family” he tells me) and I quickly realized that the young man was his son who was currently an undergrad and aspiring to be a lawyer someday. The other, a woman, said “I’m Y and I am the non-lawyer here, I teach dance.” I was about to say “and I assume the two of you aren't the parents here?” [Because there were some little tikes running around, belonging to some young couple, but typically, a college guy was not going to be the dad, even if he did marry early.] My Q was preempted by her next comment. She said “…and my kids, of course keep me busy, though X here (pointing to the college guy) is pretty much on his own by now.”

Whom would I have embarrassed more – the son, in an Oedipal sort of way, for my suggesting that his mother was his wife? The mother, for linking her romantically with her own son? Or myself for being so clueless as to the approximate age of a person?

Alone

I’ve just come back from a reception for the 30 participants in the Summer Program at the Law School – a program that teaches the basics of the American legal system to foreign attorneys and those seeking to further their legal education in the States. Thirty people, many from Asia, some from South America, a handful from Europe, including one from Poland, all here to take part in this intense course of study. Most are in the States for the first time. One lawyer from Korea is here with his entire family – wife and two adorable children; another lives in Berlin and works in a town that borders with Poland. And the Polish participant – she’s here after just barely finishing her legal studies in Poland. She lives in a small town outside Wroclaw. Most Americans have never even heard of Wroclaw. (She was shocked when I came up to her and started speaking Polish.)

I am impressed with the lot of them. To travel to a different academic setting, halfway around the world is difficult. [Been there, done that, and I never had the language issues to worry about.] To leave people behind in the close communities that you grew up in, be it Berlin or Tokyo is nearly impossible. I can guarantee that this evening will stand out for them for a long time, perhaps forever. The first 24 hours you spend in a completely alien setting is like that. You are alone, completely, utterly alone where no one understands anything about your life, your culture, your home. You are here for a purpose, but in the initial moments you can’t quite get a grasp on what the purpose is. You feel like you are totally out of your element.

Sometimes those impressions come back to haunt you even when you are no longer a new transplant. In later years, even when you know how to pretend otherwise, you understand that you are not part of this world, you are an outsider.

Sunday rain

A summer rain on a Sunday afternoon... What to do?

1. Work on my lecture notes.

2. Listen to Ann on WHA radio talk about blogging (check her blog here -- she said on the radio she took pictures of the studio and so I expect a post any minute now) and give very good responses to caller comments!

3. Make use of yesterday's Market berries (see below). Chocolate is such a good companion to fruit.

strawberries put to good use 

Low tolerance for good things?

For some time now I’ve been worried that people are liking “nice” less and less and “rotten” (at least in small doses) more and more. [I am not worried that I am too nice. I am worried that the rest of the world will get off the niceness kick and turn more and more icky.]

I have two examples just from this past week. I was discussing the weather yesterday with a friend and he said “it’s too sunny and nice.” I responded with something not so nice, like “you are out of your mind!” But he countered with: “I’m not the only one. I was at a store where the clerks were commenting that they didn’t want to go downtown to the Art Fair because being out in this nice weather was no fun at all.”

In another instance of something that I think is quite related, I heard an NPR interview with an expert on classical guitar. He was talking about Andres Segovia’s charismatic playing and how much it had transformed that instrument into something that could be used in the classical context. I was listening to this with a good deal of interest since I am a fan of Segovia and have a scratchy, much overplayed record of his music.

The person commenting on classical guitar said, however, that in many ways, Segovia has been surpassed; that this generation of classical guitarists plays with a precision that Segovia lacked (if you listen to Segovia, you’ll inevitably pick out the “woosh” oh his shifting hand or the tweak of a string vibration that shouldn’t be there). The NPR person responded – “but that’s no good; isn’t it better if there is a demonstration of human imperfection, so that the piece doesn’t, in fact, come out flawless? There is such a thing as being ‘too good’ at something.”

Of course, my scratchy record hid Segovia’s flaws from me. But I would actually like the scratches not to be there, and listening to snippets from the young guitarists, I liked their ‘overkill on the perfection thing’ just fine. And I like bright weather, nice words and good designs, or at least attempts at getting as close to them as possible.

So uncomplicated and so beautiful

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the late Pablo Neruda, perhaps the most beloved and widely read poet in the world. I am certainly a fan. From his simple odes to his love sonnets and everything in between – I like it all. I wanted to pick a favorite for the blog, but I have no favorite. It is the entirety that is, to me, so appealing.

“No theme would be beyond my orbit,” Neruda once said. And indeed, his collections are a testimonial to his remarkable versatility. In his “Odes About Everything” he describes what inspires him and what he puts down on paper:

…Odes
of all
hues and sizes,
seraphic, blue
or violent,
to eat,
to dance,
to follow footprints in the sand.

I might mentions that there is a Slavic connection to Neruda – for one, he adopted his name in honor of the Czechoslovak poet, Jan Neruda; for another, he was intimately associated with Poland’s Czeslaw Milosz – at least until their falling out over Neruda’s persistent support of communism.

Today, the Washington Post has an article by Edward Hirsch on the life and work of Neruda. It is well worth reading (here).

Ahh, Neruda would have been a fantastic blogger!

Saturday: point by point

Trivial points are exactly what a Saturday needs. Interspersed with Market color.

1. A visitor who had not been to Madison for a number of months flew in last night. As I pulled into the driveway (having picked her up at the airport) she looked out and said: “wow, what happened here?” I looked surprised and then concerned. She answered “the flowers! They’re a jungle! You can’t see the house, they’re so tall!” I explained about the spring rains, I pointed out that in daylight she would see a proliferation of color and texture and it would amaze her. “Can people make their way up the path to the front door though?” She asked, seemingly bewildered. Yes. I provide a hatchet and clippers. Jeez!

And, speaking of flowers, take a look at today’s, at the Market (yes, less wild than mine… hey, there’s room on this planet for all kinds):


orderly, kempt, colorful 


summer gold 

2. I have an internal alarm that I do not understand at all, it makes no sense, it is irrational. But I trust it: I always wake up just a few minutes before I have to get up (meaning before the alarm would sound if I were to set the alarm). I know many people recount similar experiences, but I think mine is an extreme situation because indeed, even if my waking time varies greatly (as it does depending on whether I’m teaching, or working at L’Etoile, or traveling in other time zones) I will always wake up about 5 minutes earlier. I’ve had this internal alarm for as long as I remember.

But today, I woke up 5 minutes AFTER I was to get up. This is so unnerving that I’m wondering if I should have a talk with a medical person. [But what do I say: I need an appointment to check why my internal alarm was 10 minutes off today?] I truly do not know what to make of it.

I made it in time to pick up (for myself!)the first blueberries of the season and the first Wisconsin corn. And these huge, flavorful strawberries – perfect for dipping in chocolate:


everyone should get a sixpack 


how many ears per person? 


SO impresssive. eat with chocolate! 

3. Tory is the Chef de Cuisine at L’Etoile. Within the restaurant hierarchy, that puts him just below Odessa. If you eat something absolutely delicious on your night there, chances are it had Tory’s mark in some way. He is a fantastic, conscientious cook. He turned 29 today and it is remarkable that he has developed such skills at his young age. He told me that he first started cooking in his grandparents’ diner in Racine. He did his training at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan, then, for seven years, he apprenticed at a wonderful assortment of New York restaurants. But he didn’t care for the people who came to the eating establishments in NYC and so he moved back to Wisconsin, just to catch his breath.

I just have to say this about him: Tory is a supremely kind person. I suppose it doesn’t matter if you’re eating there – you could very well love the food prepared by a mean lowlife. Still, I’ve seen staff come and go at L’Etoile and Tory is right up there, at the top of a select handful. Working with him, as a result, is total pleasure. And no, he does not read my blog, so I am not sucking up in any way. But if you do go to L’Etoile to eat, look for him (he’s there every night)and tell him that you heard he is super nice. Here’s a picture from today, just so you know who your man behind the stove is:


happy birthday, Tory 

4. No, L’Etoile is not the only place to grab a nice bakery item on the week-end. Since I am not paid to stay loyal and advertise its unique virtues I can say that my eyes do stray often to other baked goods at the Market. These blueberry scones looked wonderful:


with a latte, with hot chocolate, with anything! 

And in the end, I went with my out-of-town guests to Marigold Kitchen. How can you resist blueberry pancakes with orange butter and cinnamon granola? They’re not too sweet (you have pure maple syrup for that) and the taste is heavenly. Highly recommended.

5. I will not blog about Art Fair on the Square. I could say, I suppose, that for me, it made for a trying day because as a result of it, the Market had to downsize and move to Wilson Street. A shame for the framers because these weeks are their absolute peak in terms of produce.

Yes, I walked through the Art Fair briefly and yes, it has beautiful pieces and ugly things and all ranges in between (Ann, c’mon, cave in and blog about it!). Most people go just to look and on a gorgeous day like today, the Square was packed. Am I the only one that finds the prices, for the most part, insane? Much as I’m in favor of supporting struggling artists, I’m not sure these guys are struggling. And yes, I know that lawyers charge more for an hour of dribble than these artists do for an hour at the easel. One insanity, however, doesn’t justify the other.


(from the Art Fair) the glass is greener elsewhere 

On a scale of 1 to 10, how thrilled am I with this?

The NYTimes has an article today (here) about the expansion of high speed internet access. Yes, its availability is expected now in hotels, cafés, airports. But trains? Planes? Automobiles?

The article addresses the difficulties of establishing Internet connections in moving vehicles with metal “skins.” Still, I think the expectation is that soon, the world will be one big hot spot.

Do I welcome these developments? Hard to say. I am thrilled that I can now work on my computer at Borders bookstore. But why is that so? It’s a bookstore, darn it, why do I feel compelled to take my work or my Internet surfing to a bookstore? Shouldn’t the ethicist speak out about this? Am I in any way contributing to the sales of books? And how about cafés: I like taking my computer there as well. But wait: what if my favorite cafés in France had a row of laptop users pounding away. Here, take this photo (below, taken just last year) and use your imagination. Place Parisians with computers at all the sidewalk tables. It’s WRONG!

Yet, just me sitting there blogging about the joys of people watching in Paris – I can make an exception for that…

I’m inconsistent. I want the options for myself but I want the rest of the world to take heed: laptops on long flights? Maybe. But not in French cafés. Please, let there be a few sacred spots in the world.

Paris now, before Wi-Fi 

A seasonal adjustment

Sometimes when I post something here, I cannot wait to post again, just so that the previous post does not stand out with its atrociously glaring title. Now is such a moment. Christmas on the blog is significantly out of place when I am chasing mosquitoes as I walk. So, just to appease my inner sense of balance let me post three pictures from this morning. They were taken in a place that is a five-minute walk from my house (Owen Woods). Whenever I groan too loudly about life in the suburbs, I am reminded that I have Owen Woods while New Yorkers have trees growing out of concrete slabs every thirty blocks and then I become quiet. [Until my next unhappy suburban moment.]

The prairie restoration project at Owen Woods is wonderful enough, though I think I want to set limits on what in the prairie I want restored. For example, the Black-eyed Susan and Echinacea are just fine, but the bugs – oh the bugs! They are obnoxiously intrusive and if I remember correctly from reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books, they caused one of the girls in the “Little House on the PRAIRIE” to go blind. So, yes to prairie restoration, but can we please do it with an eye toward plants that are repugnant to insect life? [Is that even possible?]

prairie flowers and grasses (and bugs) 

only in nature does this pairing of colors work 

happy looking Susans 

Christmas, communism and the return of the kid with the classy shoes

BoringAng is blogging about Christmas imagery and JeremyF is linking to Christian websites that warn against associating with atheists (might that include Communists? Do these websites see them as overlapping sets? Probably). Putting the two posts together reminds me of the FAQ that came my way (though not recently, and not in July): how did we deal with Christmas in Communist Poland? Given the prevalence of Catholicism even (or especially)in postwar Poland, was it celebrated? Repressed? Berated? Condemned?

Though as I have said before, my non-Catholicism kept me out of the churches during the holidays, I certainly did not mind otherwise horning in on Christmas celebrations. And Poland did (still does) Christmas in a big way, centering it mostly on feasting, but with music, tree-trimming and St. Nicholas thrown in as well (though St. Nick does a disappearing act after St. Nicholas Day early in the month, so as not to detract from the birth of Christ theme around the 24th and 25th). The churches appeared to me crowded year-round and so repression of religion has to be viewed as being somewhat at the level of abstraction. And governance, of course. Government offices had no religious iconography or ornamentation and I never saw a Christmas tree anywhere near the Communist Party headquarters. [Contemporary Poland seems to now scorn the “quaint” idea of separation of church and state.]

I do have to say, though, that I was a jaded kid. Did I “believe” in St. Nick and his sack of presents? My mother tells me I stopped when I was 5, immediately following the visit to the Warsaw Department store where my sister and I had this picture (below) taken. You can see the “yeah, sure” look on my face (I’m on the right). I am told I went up to “St. Nick” afterwards and told him loudly “you are SO not real,” much to the dismay of the children in line. I am quite ashamed of this now – what a spoiler. Note, as well, the postwar Poland haute couture. I don’t think I realized that people wore shoes for reasons other than protecting the feet from mud and sharp objects until I traveled to the States at the age of 7.


Warsaw, Poland, December 1958 

A musing

Occasionally, in a moment of musing about your past, you google a memory. Indeed, this is what must have happened, as I got the most remarkable email today from someone who reached this blog by googling the lyrics to the “United Nations” song that I used to love so much back in my elementary school days at the UN International School.

The reader writes: I googled "United Nations on the march" and found the lyric at your site. As a youngster at a bungalow colony day camp in the Catskils in the 1940s we sang the song. Sadly, I haven't heard it since.

This, then, is the power of the blog. It allows you to get close to people over “blogger dinners.” It allows for friendship to grow exponentially. And, it allows you to talk to someone who, 20 years before your own elementary school days, was belting “Take heart all you nations swept under!” at a camp in the Catskills.

Happy bloggerversary to JFW, the blog that gave me a leg up on this blogging business.

This has happened to me!

I opened the New Yorker this afternoon to the following ad from a credit card company:


(nc: poor Glenna -- she takes the plunge and then gets mocked for it by a credit company!) 

Alongside the photo were these words: It didn’t seem right to us, either. We thought it a little odd that Glenna from Duluth would spend $282 at the Screaming Needle in Hollywood. With Fraud Early Warning, XX can recognize unusual spending and stop it.

Now wait a minute! There is a clear insinuation that a 50 + (okay maybe a bunch of pluses) woman living in Duluth is staid and priggish and that she lacks an irreverent side that would cause her to hop on a plane to LA and get herself a tattoo.

Maybe. I don’t know Glenna. But then, does XX Company? And what else do they know about Glenna? Is there a person who goes through her every receipt and says “Yep, that fits, that’s Glenna!” or “No way would she buy something so gauche, so risqué, that Glenna, she’s no spring chicken now is she? And from Duluth, too.”

I’ve had my card rejected in places and so I know the feeling. I have been warned by operators whom I have frantically called to avoid the embarrassment of being arrested for non-payment, that next time I would be well advised to call ahead, to warn the company of impending odd expenses in weird and out-of-the-way places. It’s for my own protection, after all. What, from myself??

Cost – Benefit Analysis

Last night I attended a blogger dinner: five bloggers (representing Boring, Bed, SirEP and Ocean) sat face to face and talked about the trials and tribulations of life in the big league (of work? academia? blogging? all of the above). Why call it a blogger dinner? Why not just dinner with friends? Because this, like my dinners with Mother In Law and with A, B & F, would not have happened were it not for our blogging. Indeed, in this case, I would never have met the people at all. There is unquestionably a sizable social benefit to this blogging thing.

However, there is also a cost. I have noticed that one side effect of blogger dinners is that people feel terribly anxious about posting something about the event afterwards. It’s as if we have to be especially witty and clever and insightful, we have to stretch ourselves beyond our normal boring selves. In other words, we have to put out a spin that exceeds our capacities.

Well NOT ME! I will not let this become a permanent liability, a cost, a burden, I will lead by example, set the pace, storm ahead with a DUMB POST ABOUT THE BLOGGER DINNER!

Keep that in mind as you read my not especially profound observations about last night:

1. It was one of those interesting situations where you’re sitting there waiting and only one other person shows up. Many minutes pass and still it’s just the two of you. You wonder, have I posted something recently that offends? Did they all get pulled over by a police car and are now talking themselves out of a jail sentence for speeding? What? [ans: the latter.]

2. This was a sober bunch. It’s been a while since I’ve been out with a group of people where the dominant and most popular drink was water. I did not cave in to peer pressure. I stayed with my rule that if it’s a dinner where the entrees cost more than $5.99 per plate then there should be wine.

3. Talk fast or be prepared to move when the waiters start putting up chairs on tables, hinting that you’re overstaying your welcome. It’s Madison: the chairs on tables routine begins at 10. What would this town do without the Barnes & Noble café, which stays open until 11…

4. My devious subtle testing revealed that the bloggers have been reading Ocean. They knew, for instance, that I had misspelled “hardy peasant stock.” [it appears as “hearty” in the blog – something that I affectionately preserve only in part because I don’t retro-edit posts that are more than a day old.] Or, they were good at faking it.

5. The bloggers I met are terrific. They are witty and smart and funny and cool. The lesson: if your blog is good, you’re no dork.

6. A photo. There must be a photo. The Ocean rep took it and so she is missing from the pack. The rest-- here they are, the whole boring, beddy, sirepy bunch of them:

closing down Barnes & Noble 

too much text, too little color

In late winter, I would post spring updates here, pulling photos off the web to illustrate where my garden was heading. Then I stopped. There was so much color elsewhere that I did not need to sprinkle the blog with garden photos. But today I noted paragraph after paragraph of blog text and decided it was time to jazz it up some with flowers from my garden. They thrived this year on neglect. I hardly tended them. Reliably, they came back to show off their true spunky grit and spirit.

they climb like mad 

fiesta rose 

lemon-green daylily 

unkempt flower pots 

orchid? no, daylily 

Why I stopped going to yoga

Some of the reasons:

1. working out in 98 degree heat was so…toasty.
2. my “all you can yoga in a week for $14” deal ran out.
3. because I have a suspicious nature and I look dubiously at meditative exercises that you can do with your dog. No, not a mistype. Dog. In a BBC article that I picked up off of someone’s blog (sorry, I can’t come up with the link to the blog, but here’s the link to the article) I read that people are now bringing their dogs to yoga classes. The dogs seem to love the various yoga positions and do them effortlessly, almost, in fact, as well as their owners.

Ridiculous? Yes! Especially the part where they all breathe together and hold paws. Read this:

The dogs did most of the things that the humans did. "At the end we were even encouraged to get them to hold their paws together so that we could recite a specially adapted concluding prayer.”[-- this from one of the owners.]

I am willing to see well-behaved French dogs in restaurants with their owners, but somehow extending the imagination to canine yoga is too much of a stretch. Really.

A long post that spans such topics as Croatian Rockefellers, the Medicis of Florence, Nobel laureates and Polish restaurateurs

Over the years, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists have left their home countries to travel to places where labs are well funded and opportunities to prosper are numerous (mostly in the U.S.). With respect to men and women of science, today’s IHT describes the phenomenon (here) thus:

The world's scientists are like a flock of flamingos that migrates from briny lakes when they dry up and returns only when the lagoons are replenished.

Not surprisingly, many of the home countries, including Poland, are now trying to woo the successful scientists back to their homeland. In Italy and Croatia large-scale research centers are being established to entice those who have left. And the successful expatriates who have made their wealth abroad are being asked to donate large sums of money to keep the centers competitive with their counterparts abroad.

I find the idea of returning in some way to your base, aligning yourself again with your home country, infinitely fascinating. Radman, a Croatian scientists who heads a 25-person lab in Paris, has taken it upon himself to secure donations from fellow expats for the Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences on the Adriatic Coast. In the article, I read:

“I'm trying to tempt them to play the role of Croatian Rockefellers or the Medicis of Florence," he said. The sales pitch isn't flowery: "What will you get in return? Nothing. Just the glory."

I think there are two types of success stories out there – the Martha Stewart types who do much to camouflage their heritage, even changing their names to Americanize their image (I suppose the title “Martha Kostyra Living” lacks a certain pizzazz; and in all fairness, she was not born in Poland and so her associations are a generation removed from her roots), and then there is the very large second group whose members cannot or will not break with their past. In it we have the musicians – the Chopins and Paderewskis who left and died abroad, but went back again and again in their work to their homeland (Poland); or, we have the “fathers” and “mothers” of disciplines who returned to Poland in significant ways in their scholarship: there is Florian Znaniecki, author of the “Polish Peasant,” a work that I think, can fairly be described as creating the foundations for empirical sociology; Oscar Lange, who, after a successful career in economics at Chicago, went back to Poland and lay the groundwork for the emergent field of Econometrics; or Marie Sklodowska Curie, who named a newly-discovered element after her homeland (“polonium”).

The last I counted, there were some two dozen Nobel Laureates who are either Polish or of Polish origin. Of course, everyone knows about Walesa, Milosz, Szymborska, or even Singer (all Nobel laureates), but does anyone know that the following are also Poles by birth? – Begin (Peace, ’78), Peres (Peace, ’94), Rotblat (Peace, ’95), Agnon (Literature, ’66 – maybe the fact that Poland was partitioned during his childhood caused him to not think in terms of having a homeland), Grass (Literature, ’99 – he, too, said nothing about Poland in his Nobel prize acceptance speech; even in speaking of his childhood and early influences he managed to skip any references to things Polish) and a host of scientists that are not household names here or in Poland. None of these are significantly focused on their country of birth.

On a less grand scale (and belonging to the group of returnees), I met this winter a Polish-French woman who married a French chef and convinced him to open (along with her) a restaurant in Krakow (even though he speaks hardly a word of Polish). She relocated her family to Poland (she had left the country when she was a child), excited at the idea of riding a wave of success there. She told me she wants to be part of the newest “Polish renaissance.”

It’s all intriguing to me – the story of the returning Pole, in spirit or otherwise, the one who can’t quite let go of the past.

Update on the V.I.P.P.

The missing very important piece of paper (VIPP, see post about it yesterday) is still missing. One moment it was on the counter, the next moment it’s gone.

A reader writes:

Nina,
you have to stop looking for the VIPP. it's time to give up.
a concerned friend,
Tonya B

p.s. did you look in the car?

My response:

I know I have to stop this! But what if it was important? It looked SO important! I checked all cars. The last (and not altogether impossible) theory is that the dog ate it.

p.s. Just in case, I’m not letting go of the garbage today (it’s garbage pick up day on my block). I’m going to dump it all on the driveway as soon as the weather improves and go through it that way. Next, I'll recruit others to help search. They may see something I missed. I may do a dinner party around this theme…It’s here SOMEWHERE, just give me a little more time before I settle for the dog theory.

NOON UPDATE:
p.p.s. thanks, too, sir ep for your words of concern.

A FAQ

I have been asked this quite a lot: “which language do you think in, Polish or English?” Possibly I have had this query levied at times when it has been painfully obvious that I was not born into an English speaking environment (so that, after listening to me, or reading something I put together in my awkward foreign-person way, a person is tempted to ask “so…do you ever at least THINK in English?”)

When I was a kid I would give this serious consideration. I would go into my head and attempt to pay attention to my thinking process. I wanted to catch myself: “ha! Wasn’t that Polish? No, I distinctly pick out an English phrase there…”

But over time, I came to believe that it can’t be done. If you think about thinking (can one do that?) you come to realize that you are always envisioning yourself in conversation with some entity. The minute someone asks which language I think in, I rivet to the language of the inquirer.

And what of the times when no one is asking? How do I, how do multi-language people in general think? It is still the case that thinking about it forces a language, typically of the environment one is in. I dare anyone to take a moment now and contemplate with some detachment how thoughts spin inside one’s head. Mind-boggling, isn’t it?

There is only one worse question out there and I get this one as well: what language do I dream in? Typically, when asked this, I just make up an answer. I’ve learned that this is far more satisfying than my convoluted diatribe on how it is impossible to recreate thinking about dreaming in the abstract.

A missing V.I.P.P.

Next week, between Monday and Wednesday, I have what amounts to a nine-hour series of lectures to give on a topic that is not within my typical lecture orbit. But neither is it an impossible task, since it is on a topic that is not especially difficult for a law prof of any field to speak on. All I need is time. I am a rather meticulous lecturer. I never go into a class without comprehensive lecture notes. I don’t read them while presenting, but anything and everything that I ever say is in some way contained in the sheaf of papers that I bring with me to class. For the hours of teaching that I have before me next week I calculated that I would need 45 pages of single-spaced lecture notes.

Today is Tuesday. I told myself that I absolutely had to begin putting together my 45 page security blanket. But early in the day, I was arrested by a disconserting realization: it struck me that yesterday I left a piece of paper on the kitchen counter. It was a very important piece of paper, folded into an envelope-like enclosure with perforations on all sides. Why do I believe it to be significant? Because it came in the mail this week-end and it had “very important” written all over it. Not literally, but in the presentation. It looked so important that I pulled it out of the stack of mail and placed it on the counter as Something I Must Not Neglect.

Tonight I was attending to paperwork and I could not find this V.I.P.P (very important piece of paper). I looked through the week’s garbage three times, piece by piece, rotten piece of food by rotten piece of food. Nothing. I went through every room in the house, every stack of papers, every drawer of irrelevant trash. Nothing.

I could not stop myself. When I didn’t find it in the first round, I did a more thorough second round. Then a third. Fourth. I’m pausing before my fifth to blog, but a fifth is around the corner.

It could have been vital to my existence. Or, maybe I was wrong. Maybe it just looked important. Maybe it was an invitation to apply for yet another credit card.

As a result of this paper chase I made no inroads on the 45 page single-spaced packet of notes. I can’t decide which is more disconcerting: the fact of the missing slip of paper, or the time lost searching for it.

Daily life

Normally if I ask someone in an email “how’s it going” they respond that they are exceedingly busy and overworked and behind on their projects, etc etc. But one friend writes the following:
“we moved cows from one pasture to the next… I am going to plant june berries underneath the aspen trees…we lost our vegetables to frost last night…” and so on.

How is it that people develop these skills? Do you read books on herding cows and then just do it? What are june berries anyway? And what place in continental US has frost in June? Does it hurt the june berries?

It struck me how during the majority of my days I move within a five mile radius of my home, my actions are limited to the same ones, day in and day out and they do not include moving cattle from one pasture to another. Just as I start to feel competently self-sufficient, I am reminded that I’ve given up on growing my own vegetables because I know the local farmers do it better and I pick up few new skills from season to season.

Thank goodness we have travel to take us out of the ordinary. Daily life can leave you with a rigid tunnel vision and atrophied observational skills, to say nothing of stagnant coping abilities.