The detail in the venison dish was amazing. Under the slightly cocoa-flavored venison sauce lay a sprinkilng of pear puree. At the side -- a tear-drop of whipped potato. Chard adds a touch of bitterness and nicely folds the meat back into the blend of sauces. 

When doing one of these, always, always start with the best possible chocolate. They did. The beauty of this lay in its utter simplicity and perfect execution. 

a meal in itself: post dinner nibbles 

New York interlude: setting out for a lunch to whip all lunches off the charts in terms of wonderfulness

This afternoon I am to dine at Bouley.

I should be thinking ahead to the tasting menu. I want to learn, get inspired by the great chefs of the city*. But right now all I keep thinking of is my entrance into this renowned Tribeca eatery: one look at my apparel and I know what table they’ll seat me at. I’ll just have to be careful so that I wont get banged by the door as the runners zip dirty dishes past me on the way to the kitchen.

I really do not love the fact that tasting the best of the best requires dining in opulent surroundings but I am willing to make the sacrifice occasionally.

Still, the dressing up part can dampen my humble cotton-leaning enthusiasm. I do not want the hosting person to immediately sniff financial failure (or at least on the failing side of great affluence) when she or he sees me entering the room. And they can tell, just by looking at my shoes.

Today will be a disaster in the shoe department: I am forced to wear something weather appropriate – not quite snow boots, but something that wont make icicles out of my toes. I have avoided purchasing pointed stilettos thinking – dear God, this style has to pass soon so that sanity can again prevail.

But it hasn’t happened yet. And in the meantime I suffer the indignity of knowing that whatever piece of leather or cloth will be strapped to my soles is inferior and plain wrong for the fine carpets at Bouley.

Ah well, if I wanted to tromp in with kick-ass shoes, I’d have to get some kick-ass dress to go with them and now we’re talking four digit prices, just for lunch.

Between my attire, my chickening out on the sophisticated hair-cut and my blogging camera, I am going to be like a duckling bobbing in a sea of plumed swans. But the food – oh! the food will be spectacular!

*Chef David Bouley is the city’s top cooking honcho, being the only one to have ever scored a 29 in Zagat’s food ratings.

these should be on my feet

slick men's counterpart (tell me what guy in Madison has a pair like this?) 

New York interlude: highlights

My man Jason, color specialist, the guy who can tell by just looking at me the shade of hair I had as a five year old (“it is the peak of hair color for everyone; after that it’s downhill all the way”), the guy whom I trust so much with hues and tones that I listen even when he tells me which nail polish to buy for summer sandal weather, was chatty today. He isn’t always, but today we were both in the mood.

One topic was my hair: is it time to go sophisticated (rather than fun)? I mean, I am 52 and I am heading for Paris next week. Is this the day to do the blunt little number that is so tres gentil that gentlemen start buying you un petit verre du vin?

Oh I was tempted. Really tempted. But I said to him: next time. Even though my next Jason moment will be after Paris and the only petit anything that anyone in Madison will buy me will be a spotted cow – how sophisticated is that, damn it: can I buy you a spotted cow? Much less deserving of a special hair trim.

Still, the Jason halo held. It’s as if I were with a golden spoon rather than just a few five-year-old-like golden strands. My evening flight to Chicago left 15 minutes early and I was on it, the Puck’s sandwich at O’Hare was superb, and the bar lady took one look at my hair and asked for an ID before serving me wine (honest! her eyes bypassed the entirety: I am certain that the only thing she even glanced at was my hair). Obviously she was momentarily thrown off. Had she not looked beyond the scalp, I would have been denied my glass of Chardonnay.

I’m in New York now, in a contemplative mood. It’s quiet, no one’s around. I am tempted to spend the rest of the evening sitting in front of the mirror, thinking five year old thoughts. I do not much remember what I did or thought as a five year old, living in Warsaw, looking out at the ridiculously noisy tram station just outside my window. But I sure had the hair color of all colors, if Jason has it right. Life was simple, but oh so golden.

Thanks

I do not often link back to Ocean posts when I make references to them (horribly unnice of me but there you have it) and so it took me a year to notice that my links have not been working. Possibly ever. So that, when, say, an author of another blog found a fetching photo of himself on Ocean and wanted to draw the attention of the world to his stellar good looks, he found that all he got for his efforts was a link to whatever latest Ocean post was on display. It is a problem when you think you’re linking to this, and instead get this.

Thanks, Tom, for fixing the broken link. Now, if you want this, you’ll get this, not, say, this.

Oh the flowers I have planted here: by the hundreds! The hours I have worked here: by the thousands! Now it's time for someone else to step in.

It’s good to move out of ruts and move ruts out of your space. When you need help, why stick with the ordinary sources of support when you can reach into fresh pools of extraordinary people?

That was my reasoning when I handed over my yard to a nine-year old. He will make sure no one sprays poison on my weeds (he is quite the econut). He will every once in a while take a sharp blade to the one or two strands of grass that make it through the dandelion patch. He will be the caretaker, the observer, the hawk.

Why him? Oh, maybe I see myself being nine again, loving the yard in my grandparents’ house. I see myself tending flowers there, next to my grandfather’s, picking cherries and fraises de bois, I see myself buying an American skateboard (remember those?) and taking it for the summer to that Polish village, only to find that it does not work where there is no pavement!

I see myself not weighed down by burdensome decisions that have to be made later in life, like forty-three years later. I see myself smiling with friendship toward people I meet – even older neighbors, age meaning nothing, friendship meaning doing things for someone and then dousing them with a water pistol.

So he gets my vote of confidence. And if he and his pals find cool ways to play here while he’s in charge, how wonderful that would be. Yards and houses should not stand empty, not when there are so many out there who would know how to care for them and how to enjoy them.

inch by inch, row by row: 

If it’s Friday, it must be…???

I realized today that I will be spending each of the next five Fridays in a different place and only one of those will be Madison. Tomorrow I am off to New York again where I will be preparing myself for an important event this Saturday: the consumption of a spectacular lunch.

That I can spend two days thinking about a spectacular lunch says tons about me (that my days are indeed structured around stuffing food into my face). And that I am happy to be roaming this month says even more.

A friend said just this past week that for her, knowledge and insight came from things she read and observed in her immediate environment. I argued the opposite: for me, displacement creates the necessary agitation to shake things up and throw out some new patterns for the brain to interpret.

I’m ready for it. And so is Ocean.

Ladders

Two nights ago, a neighbor took me out to dinner in honor of my promotion. Now, you could say that it was a little premature, since the i’s have not been dotted and being rather pessimistic about linear progression toward happy outcomes, I am certain that the entire thing will derail and I will be left unemployed with one of those cardboard signs saying “I am a lawyer without an income; feed me.” (I do realize that I may get rotten tomatoes in my tin rather than real cash with that sign, but one has to be honest.)

The reason I am writing about this now is that after protesting and saying “you don’t have to do that” about a dozen times, it struck me how momentous this step up really is. Because after it, there are no more promotions left for me: I will have reached the final stage of career advancement and all that’s left is to be booted out (you never know), rather than up.

Some might regard this as tremendous success. I am 52, I interrupted my career climb many times and here I am, now forever stuck at this same level of my professional status until I retire or kick my own tinny little bucket.

But it has not been an effortless ascent. I changed career paths three times in the course of my studies. And once I settled on law, the kiddies came, each choosing her birth date to coincide with the beginning of a new semester of law school. With my law degree, I still hop scotched around the profession, switching from practice, to teaching how to practice, and finally to “just” teaching.

Job security has also been elusive. Until the last decade, much of my work was funded by grants written by me to agencies and foundations that I felt sure would reject my projects, my work, my life, throwing me out with the heap of paper rubbish that routinely accumulates on their desks. I will never forget the day I traveled to DC to meet with a rep from the Department of Education concerning my most recent grant proposal. She clearly did not understand the project. Not any part of it. It was a nightmare in the making. I swear she heaped money on me in the end just to shut me up already.

Or, the interview with the nun from a Chicago foundation that was considering funding my AIDS Legal Services Project. Up to that point they had funded things like the Crane Foundation up in Baraboo. How do you make the leap from long-necked birds to AIDS? Here I was, trying to convince the nun that helping gay men (at the time AIDS was mostly about gay men) straighten out their legal messes was the way to go. We spent the entire time talking about how men got infected with HIV to begin with. I swear, up until that moment, she did not know.

My point: as I wave a fond farewell to yet another cohort of law students, I want to say – I know all about the anxiety of work v. no-work, about liking your work v. dreading each day of it, and change: most of all, I understand change. Gone are the days when you land your first professional job and you stay with it til you die (for women, I doubt that those days were ever in the offering).

And it all moves very very fast. You’re waving your diploma and the next thing someone is taking you out to dinner because you’re now senior and full, though not quite full of yourself, because you know better: were it not for good old mother fortune, it could still be you, there with the “unemployed lawyer” sign, wondering which corner brings in the biggest loot.

Where the author of Ocean and Camille Paglia find themselves to be odd bedfellows, united in the belief that Americans need more angst to write well

Much can be said about Paglia’s appearance at Borders tonight. Much. I took notes, if only to document this point of much-ness. [For cool photos and a more thorough analysis than you’re going to find here, check out Althouse.]

But I knew instantly which statement of hers would compel me to write an Ocean post, the minute she spit out the words (and if you ever heard her talk you would understand the appropriateness of my word choice here), for the woman doesn’t really talk: she throws sentences out in a cascade of fire and ice so that you’re at once entertained, enthralled, repelled – depending on your own personal inclination.

Here’s how it went. We were at the Q/A phase of the evening. Someone asked what she thought of the multitude of creative writing programs out there.
Her words (on this one point), crudely paraphrased by me: Can you make good art in the school context? Shouldn’t it come out of life itself?

And as she was about to say the above, I wanted to raise my hand and ask this of the questioner: Can you make good art in the school context? Shouldn’t it come out of life itself?

Before I could applaud wildly her insistence that one must live the adventurous life to be able to write the next great American novel, she moved on to an elaboration of this theme:

The trouble is that middle-class white America has never had anything happen to them and so really, it has nothing to write about.

And as she was saying this, I was thinking of all the Europeans (Poles especially) who fully believe that the trouble is that middle-class white America has never had anything happen to them and so really, it has nothing to write about.

We then witnessed Paglia stage an expressive portrayal (all gestures and sentences quickly delivered, darting at you from the podium) of where American novels have been forced to tread: forty years of writing about pills and suicide and mental breakdown and stepfathers making passes at stepchildren and divorce and AIDS and cancer and chemotherapy and prozac! Personal dramas detailed in horribly graphic ways until you cannot stand it anymore! [Not that some of these may not deserve the high drama status. Her point: an encounter with personal drama of this nature does not in and of itself spur great text.]

Of course, I can be guilty of this as well: guilty of exploiting (in my writing here, for instance) the internal sagas until I make myself retch. I am so adept at picking up the malaise of the moment, the personal tragedy du jour from my immediate environment!

But it’s short-lived. I am a product of a thousand + years of Polish history, where I am on safe ground again. There, I have enough tragedy and drama to help elevate my own angst to such levels that I need not ever fear drowning in an American white middle-class un-cataclysmic environment ever again.

The tough part

...of being a law prof is the grading of exams and finishing the last class of the Spring Semester, knowing that you will never see some of the faces again – some of them who have followed you from First Year Torts, through Second Year Family Law and now finally to Third Year Comparative Family Law. It’s 5:30, time to pack up and move on. God, I hope they do well and stay happy in their career choices.

A European Identity

It’s emerging quietly, slowly but steadily: a sense among those in Europe of being European rather than remaining tied to any one nation. (The IHT describes this phenomenon here.)

And I agree. It’s not that taking on this identity requires shedding layers of, say, Polishness. Rather, over time, you find yourself incorporating a growing number of habits and inclinations whose source lies outside the borders of your own country.

In recent years I have oftentimes referred to myself as being European and only after saying it would I catch myself and add quickly – I’m actually Polish.

Is the EU at the root of this shift? Some say indeed, it is. With the loosening of trade, travel, work and study between nations, multiculturalism is now a requirement of professional -- and personal -- success. Rather than homogenizing the continent, the EU has created an expectation of feeling at ease with a diverse set of behaviors that are multinational in nature (not the least of which is the expectation of familiarity with at least 3 European languages).

There are two forces at work here, I think: the adherence to values that are thought of as essentially European at the moment. The IHT article lists these as a belief in social democracy, in quality of life issues (as opposed to an unwavering commitment to a strong work ethic), in a rejection of armed conflict as a means toward achieving political objectives.

But separately, there is the shaking up of a cocktail of behaviors that have the markings of the French, the Polish, the Italian, and incorporating them into your own routines. And perhaps in the process, there will be a Darwinian selection of the most servicible, delicious habits, so that the true European will find herself grabbing a café and a croissant on the way to work, reading the novel on the subway, pausing for a 90 minute lunch with a friend (I suppose a brat and beer would be favored by some), ending with a spot of tea at 5 and sitting down to an al fresco dinner at 10 pm. Wait a minute, is my idea of Europeanness mostly centered around food?? Chacune ses gouts.

So I was wrong

I posted yesterday about my new (and very-slow-moving, given time issues) interest in knitting. I wrote "men don't knit" over and over again. Ah well, what do I know. Another instance of a reader straightening out the writer. Check out MenKnit.net and the picture of the guy in his tight-fitting handknit duds. And here's another thought -- do they let women sit in on men's knitting groups? You know, just for balance... (Photo courtesy of the site.)

The thinking behind the reading

I can imagine what an average Ocean reader has to contend with: a blog that isn’t all that enigmatic but isn’t all that clear either. Say a reader clicks on to Ocean this morning. Isn’t it likely that s/he would have this reaction to the post (immediately preceding this one)? [Assuming that s/he would have time to kill. Though remember, it takes longer to read/write something than to think it.]

Oh! She posted early. Or did she adjust the time on the post? No, she’s always posting before dawn on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Hmmm, something about a flower. In her house. Boring, boring, boring! Jesus, can’t she find something interesting in the media to comment on if her life is so prosaic?

Pretty picture though. A little blurry, impressionistic sort of. But the carpet kills the image. Why do people have off-white carpet? So passé.

Wait, maybe she’s not really writing about the flower. Something about it blossoming even though it’s not supposed to. Nature, nurture… Now what's that all about?

I suppose she could be saying that if you don’t nurture something it dies. You know I had a boyfriend once. Loved him to pieces. Separated from him, didn’t see him for twenty years, saw him again – felt nothing. For me, the love died. It was sad, actually.

So is this the opposite? Tending to something makes it vibrant and healthy and alive, even against all odds? What a bunch of clichés!

Naaah, she’s probably just writing about flowers. Who the hell can tell though. Such a pretentious and Polish thing to do: they’re all about allusions, never plain in your face text. Crazy! Tell it like it is next time.

Bougainvillea blooms require sunshine, don’t they?

In the northern corner of the house there is a room that is supposed to be a plant room. I have written here in the past that unfortunately the room has almost no sunlight and therefore few plants ever produce any noticeable blooms. Green leaves? Plenty. But no blooms.

This year, however, my Bougainvillea (which I keep indoors for the winter) went nuts. Defying nature, defying my posts here about this being the dumbest plant room in the world, what with no sunlight, it threw out a profusion of blooms.

It’s amazing how much can be accomplished through perseverance and tender care. Nurture won over nature in this one.

against all odds 

If I am unable to recognize or interact with friends or family members, I still expect gifts.*

Well of course! Gifts, candles, cakes, especially in April.

Okay, please do not tell me I am overdoing the birthday thing. It’s not that I am fiendishly obsessed with April 21st. I did not even post about the day this week-end where I just happen to mention to the Nitty Gritty wait-staff that it indeed was my birth…week (they asked!), which resulted in an additional round of singing, clapping and, most importantly – a gift of a Nitty mug and unlimited free refills on beer until midnight. It is too bad that my dining friend was pressing to leave (embarrassed by this apparent birthday fixation? maybe) – I may have been tempted to raise a toast – one at a time – to all the wonderful people on the planet who also enjoy a birthday on April 21st.

Seriously, what I think I have to note here is that my life is one big disconnected heap of vignettes and disparately positioned people who barely know of each other’s existence. And so the fact that I have so many kind souls taking it upon themselves to wish me a happy day is largely a sign of how pathetic I am – in need of this kind of pat on the back – and also how separated my spheres of orbit are.

Tonight, one sphere is certainly shining through. Tom and his wife, Suzanne, baked me a b’day tart and I have to say this: in all my decades upon decades of life, I have never ever had anyone bake me anything for my birthday. Ever. Not even my mother (who is no cook and has possibly never baked anything in her entire life, which is a good thing). No one in my immediate family has ever cracked an egg and mixed batter, ever. Not even into a cake mix.

And so – a big thank you is in order: it is a first, and knowing their baking skills, worth waiting for.

P.S. It is over now, correct? I mean, no more birthday posts?
Wrong. One more, whereby the two most brilliant and gorgeous (I swear!) women in the world are picking up the tab on a lunch next week in New York at a restaurant of my choice. It can be any place! Will I make a fool of myself and escort my camera into a fine dining establishment in New York just so I can photo-post about it later? Is the Pope German? And please, if you have had a most decadently wild and wonderful meal in the city recently, write and tell me where so that I can call and try to get a reservation. I already know what I will wear – just not where I will wear it to.

* "Living Will," by Paul Rudnick, this week’s New Yorker

A Tom specialty: peanut butter mousse covered with chocolate

Playing tag with the clock

Of all the bizarre quirky things that I do these days, perhaps the very weirdest is my “get up on the five” rule. I will not get out of bed unless the digit 5 is displayed on the clock. Why that particular rule should be in place is so insanely nutty as to not be worthy of mention here. I am sure not a single reader would come back to Ocean if he or she knew how twisted and convoluted my thinking on this is.

Also notable and considerably less crazy is my internal alarm clock which always has me wake up seconds before the anointed get-up time for the day. Sometimes I wake up a good deal earlier, but always, always, all my life, even when I was a young parent and totally sleep deprived, I would wake up at 6:29 if the get up time was set for 6:30 that morning.

Of course, given my “on the five” fancy, these days I would not get up if I opened my eyes and noted the 6:29. I would wait until the digit five appeared and so I would allow myself a doze until 6:35 made its presence known.

But sometimes I miss it by just a few seconds and just as I am about to throw back the quilt, the clock hits 6:36 and then I know I can (have to?) go back for a quick snooze because it will be another nine minutes before I see the saintly 5.

It’s easiest to start this at 5:00 a.m. because then I can cheat and tell myself that there is indeed a five and then I can get up whenever I damn please, at least for the next 59 minutes. It's like the Sunday of wake up times -- I am given the gift of procrastination within that hour.

Am I superstitious? Of course not! Science rules my life and thoughts and I haven’t made bargains with mystical forces ever in my entire life.

So why don’t I wean myself of this fancy for the five? (It has happened that I will have missed so many rise-at-five opportunities in one morning that I make myself dangerously close to being late for life’s important events.) I don’t abandon the silliness because it is a challenge and it is fun. That’s it. Some people turn on the morning news and wallow in all the tragedies that befell the planet in the hours when they slept. Good for them – if it helps push them out the door. I choose the self-amusement track.

(I am very glad though that I only have one more morning class to teach this semester. I pictured myself many times explaining to the dean why I skipped class on a dysfunctional-five-day and I could not find sane-sounding words to explain it. By next semester I am positive I will switch morning games. It's not fun nor is it a challenge if it goes on too long.)

Where the author of Ocean takes up knitting in a desperate attempt to feel connected to the world around her

So everyone knits these days. My neighbors all knit. Students knit. The world knits. [Admittedly, men do not knit. Why don’t men knit?]

I taught myself how to knit some decades back but I have only once completed a knitting project and it was more than two dozen years ago. I was brooding, the skies were dark and full of ill will, it seemed the thing to do in a Madame Lafarge sort of way.

Why knit now? If others are telling me “you should try it” and it’s legal, there aren’t many things that I would say no to, at least for a one shot deal.

So I bought some fancy needles that have a plastic tube connecting them, making it all look like a feeding tube which definitely has weird connotations these days, but still – that’s what I was told to buy.

And I bought yarn – little balls in many shades of purple green and taupe.

And yesterday afternoon two very patient neighbors came over and showed me what to do. I will, hereafter, be knitting a scarf when I am watching a DVD or sitting in a car and not driving. Because I am all about finishing impulsive projects.

[Why don’t men knit?]

The crucial question, I suppose, is how many hours in the course of any day do I devote to watching DVDs or sitting in a car and not driving? Not many. Not to worry! There isn’t a person I know who is in desperate need of a scarf at the moment. And who knows what life-altering events will place me (in a state of physical or mental incapacity) perpetually in front of a TV screen in the months to come. I am prepared. Plus I have the nifty little plastic tube if my other ones ever fail me.

My Sunday evening post

…should run like this: the author has written and then removed two posts from the “saved drafts” section of this blog. One was trivial and silly the other was full of e.e.* angst and distress. That a day should contain elements of both – why so be it. But Ocean readers don’t have to suffer through such indignities. Back tomorrow with a clean slate.

* oh what did you think: Eastern European, of course!

Now that we have the capability of recording and preserving everything (in sight and sound), shouldn’t we think about what's best left forgotten?

The Smithsonian, as reported in the NYT Week in Review, tells of efforts that are underway to preserve some of our aural history: “Since the sounds of ancient Rome are no longer available to us…, what should be recorded today? The answer, says Sheehy [director and curator of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings], is pretty much everything."

Really? Why? Movies and films give a sampling of the range of sounds we are now exposed to. I suppose the argument can be made that one cannot predict what information will benefit future research (within the natural or social sciences). And so we should save everything? So that we may all implode and bury ourselves in some garbage heap of irrelevant fact?

Noises and sounds that I am sure will never benefit anyone and therefore should be obliterated a.s.a.p,:
- the cacophony of sound at a suburban mall, especially in a food court, on a Saturday afternoon;
- anything in and around Langdon Street (frat row) in Madison on a Saturday evening;
- I know it’s too late, what with there being a recording already archived to torture anyone in the future, but could we nonetheless try to erase a number or two from the Sound of Music? Getting consensus on this will be a synch.
- I would seriously like to erase the sound of the Polish word for “whore.” In the alternative, I would vote for legalizing prostitution just so the enchantment with this word will quickly disappear. Right now, its usage seems at an all time high. It’s reason enough to move around with an iPod stuck in your ear to block it out.
- Etc.

I can hardly stop myself – there’s so much that could be added. Noises, all of it noises, tolerable in their transient state, unbearable if preserved forever.

[BTW, has all this preservation technology made the idea of a buried time capsule obsolete? Or are we still stacking our little mementos and doodads into the bowels of the earth with the idea that some future incarnation of a humanoid will unearth these treasures and be pleasantly surprised with the Barbie dolls and Superman comics contained therein?]

What happens when…

...You’re riding along the I-90 with a friend who is a terrific driver, accelerating powerfully after each toll gate? The problem: she’s a woman, driving a sporty Audi TT. She passes people. She passes men in their black-bullet Corvettes. They don’t like it. They then hog the left lane to block her way for hours on end.

road hog 

...You’re at a Chicago mall in the year 2005 and you enter a Sony video store with all sorts of movie making and movie watching technology? You end up being part of the display.

starring Althouse and Camic 

...You are at the same mall, this time in an Apple computer store along with five million shoppers wishing to touch with their own greedy little fingers the shuffle-pods and iPods and who knows what else-pods? And wanting to get rid of their squirmy children, so that they themselves can play with the new technology? You come across all the children, squirreled away in the corner of the store, where they have their own private little Mac attack (and then hit parents for the very computer or computer game they so enjoyed in the mall. Say as a stocking stuffer next Christmas).

absorbed 

I am a stranger in my own town

Peering in on the blogs of others, I came across this little speech test over at SamplesConnection. Of course I am going to be sucked into doing the test. Of course! I want to be rated, ranked and categorized, I want to know why everyone around me thinks I use words singularly, in ways that aren't wrong, but aren't exactly common either. I want to know where in this country, linguistically speaking, I would best fit in.

I wish I hadn't found the answer. My new label: foreign-born linguistic misfit in her own town. Because it is a small wonder people in the Midwest look at me strangely. Here's my speech profile:

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

25% Yankee

10% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Musical chairs

Tonight, my daughter is singing on stage under the direction of Krzysztof Penderecki, the world-renowned composer from Poland. That is unquestionably the closest anyone from my family – extended over all known-to-me-generations – has ever come to performing alongside musical greatness. So it is fitting that it should be a Pole right there, on the same platform as my girl (who is no longer really a girl… sigh…). But she is on the East Coast and I am in the Midwest attending to work and dishes (not even in that order) and so fate has pushed me into the shadows as she sings in probably achingly beautiful tones (okay, she is in the choir, but still, her voice I am quite certain will be the achingly beautiful one).

This event does recall my own brush with Polish musical greatness, though not on stage and with less flattering overtones. I was on a ship, crossing the ocean, returning to Poland. I was thirteen. Really, I think appearance-wise, that was my worst year. I cut my own bangs and my sister said I looked like a pope – all straight across, like a papal beret. More importantly, teens like myself should not have had bangs to begin with because they never looked good, even fresh after a shampoo. Then, too, though I was athletic and fit, I think I really had some gawk gene that reached peak maturity at that age, before I learned to suppress it.

It happened that Leopold Stokowski was also on the ship – along with his juicily attractive two adolescent sons. We hung out. Or, rather, most likely, I chased them. As I recall, they showed less than zero interest in me and my being 13 made me even less of a hot prospect, as they were firmly into their high school years. But I chased them nonetheless. I did not have a crush on either, but I was in love with the idea of a shipboard romance and so I tried.

Moral of the story: don’t chase sons of famous composers while crossing the ocean?. There is no other moral or point to the story, but I did think of it just now as my own daughter prepares to sing. She at least has the good sense not to show the slightest interest in Penderecki’s sons, possibly because she hasn’t met them and they would be well into their fifties should they even exist.

Thoughts about cooking Polish-Russian food

Hey, no one called an ambulance.

Would I do it again? I would!

I like the way the foods on my menu sounded Russian and Polish: blinchiki, pierogi, caviar, borsch, uszka -- in addition to the staples such as herring, trout, nut cake..

Two recurring ingredients: mushrooms (I used the dried “porcini” type that I brought over from Poland) and sour cream. Practically every dish had one or the other.

Advice: always always eat with people who are good sports about it and shower the meal with appreciative (and critical, where it’s warranted!) words. I know we should all rise above compliments and comments, but when you cook all day long, the pleasure comes in seeing people eat and react. One reason why I stopped moonlighting at the restaurant is that I felt disconnected from that last stage of the process: when I let the plate go from the kitchen, I never saw how it was received. You evolve as a cook, I think, by keeping an eye on people’s faces as they eat. Not all dishes work well and you learn what people pick out as the truly exciting and what they appreciate on a smaller scale. Last night, my group was expressive in all ways. Putting out plates of food was, therefore, a joy.

Okay, it’s late and I have a hell of a clean up before me. I promised those far away a few photos from the evening. Here’s a sample:

Festive beginnings: potato rounds with smoked salmon, sour cream and caviar 

It's so good to have last minute help with plating foods... 

you have to have herring to nibble on before dinner. Here, it's tossed with apples, sour cream, onion and dill. 

the rewards of cooking: watching the faces of guests as they sample different foods (in this case, Jeremy reacts to the deep burgundy colors of borsch) 

wild mushroom pierogi, from start ... 

...to finish. With sour cream and crispy onion bits. 

indispensible dinner companion: a camera, of course 

almond-orange cake with bittersweet chocolate: some impatient person dug in too early 

Running scared

All I did was say things like “I am cooking up some Polish-Russian food tonight” and I started getting the emails: “I’m excited, but are you serious about the boar?” When another evening invitee stopped by in the afternoon, most likely to check up on the food prep, he proceeded to make every excuse under the sun to avoid returning in the evening (I was busy cooking, but something about crazy internal aunts was at some point mentioned).

Now really! This is the kind of continental provincialism that drives me crazy! Eels, boars, pigs knuckles – these foods have been staples, I’m sure, for hundreds of years!

Never mind, I am proceeding, if I have to eat all the courses myself, with the rest calling for take-out pizza on some excuse or other.

I’m sure they’ll eat the cake, it’s been pretested.

Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger,

Okay, I have issues with you. Anyone can tell I am not a fan. But you know, California is not my state and so I stay out of the discussion.

But today you irritated the hell out of me and you stepped on MY toes, so I feel I must react.

You said the other day that the way to deal with the immigrant problem in this country is to close the borders. Yep, that’s what you said – I heard you. And so did others. Many thought that perhaps these were not kind words, coming from an immigrant like yourself.

Now, I am sympathetic to your language issues. But when today I hear you say you misspoke because English is not your first language, I bristle. Because you know damn well that “close the borders” sounds nothing like “secure the borders.” Close, secure – nope, no similarity at all.

So please fess up: you misspoke because you speak foolishly oftentimes and you don’t really have all your political wits about you at all times. It is NOT a language thing.

Best wishes for a hasty return to "acting,"

nc

April 21st rules!

You really are shamelessly obsessed with your birthday, aren’t you?
Yes.

Did you have to write on the blackboard in class today “don’t mess with me, it’s my birthday?” Isn’t that unprofessional or something?
Unprofessional, shmeshional. Besides, it was point number three on a list of factors regarded as significant in determining jurisdiction for a modification of a custody order. I thought I’d lighten up their fare a little.

Every post has been about your birthday thus far. Every one. And you’ve put up three and it’s not even noon.
I’m about to do a fourth.

Disclaimer: Ocean posts in and of themselves are insufficient to establish a credible case of author battiness. More is needed.

Kwiaty

In Poland, when I was growing up, it was the birthday/nameday person who brought treats for friends, classmates. People stopped by with wishes, but it was up to the celebrating person to dish out the goodies.

So, for Ocean readers, who suffer through the yellow and blue thing each time they log on, here's the best that I can do: a pretty bouquet, standing in front of a samovar (in line with tonight's theme for dinner: foods from Eastern Europe), with so much thanks!

Ocean colors. Really. 

Make-do?-Can-do!-spirit

Say it suddenly turns April 21st. Say you don’t have a comments function on your blog where, after saying, hey, it’s my birthday, ten million people log on to say “happy birthday!” What then? Oh, come on, there’s always a way!

oh yeah! 

Time

In the early morning hours, I’m drowsy, awake, drowsy, awake – it has been that kind of a night. My last day now of a year that has had its share of bloggable and not so bloggable events.

At night, I once again think of shutting Ocean down because I feel it is losing its entertainment value in the same way that I feel myself to be losing my entertainment value.

The less you ask that I entertain you, the more you accept my need to talk in other tones, the sooner I will return to entertaining you in the future.

Kathy, who is my oldest friend in town, has a sixth sense about Ocean and me. She lives quite far now, but she shows up at dawn with a latte. She has so little time, far less than any other person I know in town, but she shows up with a latte, to help pass this last morning of an eventful year.

She runs her words through the history of my life in Madison. She leaves a bar of chocolate and rejoins her own world of frenzied work demands. I’m here, with my bar of chocolate and Ocean, my email, my disconnected world of people.

The only thing that connects one person to another, one event, one stage of my life to another is time.

JP, a very early reader of Ocean – one of the first ever to comment on it in fact, has just sent a long email describing her life. I haven’t heard from her for months. I read it, fascinated. She has this gift of weaving her text in and out of events and moods that she has sharply, astutely picked out from Ocean. I am stunned at the beauty of her writing.

In the village where I lived my first years, time stood still. I know all about time standing still. It’s standing still right now as well, even as minutes move me closer to April 21st.

A neighbor writes and asks: where were you last night? We were supposed to knit together! I answer: I would not have been good company… Another time…

Ten years ago time was almost taken away from me. I got then one of the many gifts of time, even as I don’t believe in mystical forces and have to count it off as random. I drew a lucky number, someone else did not.

Time: handed to me, but with a warning: it comes with a great big eraser as it rubs away people from my life, some whom I have known forever and ever, all sorts of people -- not asking if I have a pencil to draw in replacements, or whether I even have the inclination let alone ability to do so.

Birthday gifts, gifts of time. The very best, the most demanding on my part, to be sure, the ones that require the greatest personal sacrifice, an ungodly amount of patience and generosity: to give time to a person who needs it. Again and again and again, over and over. And then, to sit back and watch the person take off. That’s it. No other compensation. Just their flight. Made possible by your generous donation. Not even tax deductible, no plaques, no honor. Just a nod, and a silent thank you.

from me, to you 

a spirited walk

A birthday walk today took me to the forest. No, no! Not my birthday! Karen’s birthday. Karen is perhaps my second oldest (by number of years we’ve known each other) friend in town. I should admit that she is also one of those rare people who can easily push me into laughter even if I am riding some wave of gloomish mournfulness. She is a lot younger than me – 367 days actually, and so I feel protective of her (she’s also a wee bit shorter, so I can hover and be a bear-like figure). When I am not laughing.

Now, all this is not unusual. Karen and I walk frequently. But today was extra special, what with her birthday and all. It called for a singularly special topic and we indeed found one: musing about our own funerals – who might show up, who would say what, who would have the greatest amount of remorse (forget about sadness – I am not into funeral sadness). Once you get going on something like this you can spin into all sorts of promising directions, like reviewing the aesthetic merits of the pope's casket, where to go for lunch after you've attended a downtown Chicago funeral, etc etc.

Such a spirited discussion! I'm wondering if she was as fully into it as I was though. Her mood may have been less funerally inclined. Hmmm...

walk in the woods: the birches are green! terribly skinny, but green nonetheless 

don't they look like upside down teeth? 

Moving along...

The day is proceeding.

Rather than wallowing in the millions of things going wrong at the moment, I am clicking through these.

You really have to, have to go ahead and kill some minutes doing this (go to the "animals" tag). It's the kind of activity that will make you smile even as you realize the absurdity of spending any time picking out a snail out of the London Underground map (thanks, FistfulofEuros).

[The fish and the wallaby are perhaps the most clever, though at the moment, I'm partial to the pig.]

Some people wake up, drink their coffee and leap into the day with wild enthusiasm

This has not been my trend lately. In fact, I have to admit that yesterday, leaping anywhere was the farthest thing from my mind and I did not get around to drinking my morning latte (nor to posting, for that matter) until almost noon.

Anyone who knows me can recognize signs of great distress when that happens. My morning latte is a ritual that has such great significance that I am sure if the Titanic were sinking all over again and I were on it, I would pause to fix myself a latte (or at least a café au lait) before disembarking, if indeed it were a morning sinking.

One of the most bothersome aspects of flying overnight to Europe is that the flight does not recognize a latte craving. Air France, always my carrier of choice, does provide good coffee, but with it comes a little container of something called “milk-like” and so as I look out at the vast territory of Brittany below me (breakfast is served as we reach the tip of Brittany) I polish up my rehearsed little speech and with the widest possible smile I look up at the monsieur (it’s more often than not a man these days) and say: please please go back into the galley and search for a small container of the real thing! – all in practiced French to demonstrate the earnestness of my request. The nice monsieur comes back with real milk. On the other hand, the monsieur who has had no mademoiselle lately to sooth his ego, will look at me with scorn and throw a couple more of those “milk-like” containers my way with a “nous n’avons pas du lait” (we do not have milk) which is a plain lie because I know that in business they’ll offer you all the lait you want plus a cow to go with it if you’re in need of one.

Today I will try to charm destiny by posting and sipping a latte. Pots of gold don’t fall in your lap unless you position your lap in such a way as to make it an easy target for flying receptacles holding the loot. Will it work? I doubt it, but Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the heart [and mind and soul and whatever else has been aching] does go on if the day starts well. With a latte, for instance.

The lonely only one

There are so many things in bloom right now! With the Madison temp hitting 80 today, I am hardly surprised.

Determined to capture some of this bounty, I set off for a stroll this evening, camera in hand.

I got no further than the front yard.

For how can I not love this guy*? He grew out of nowhere and he tries to make a life for himself even though he is burdened by the overhang so that no rain quenches his thirst. His surroundings are… insignificant, to say the least. His closest friend is the faucet. He is imperfect, but so is the building behind him (wooden structures always look like they’ve outgrown their pants and their gray socks are showing). And the ugly faucet -- is it obvious that I lacked the strength and the power drill to finish screwing it in? (It is not wrong, therefore, to say that it looks like it's missing a screw or, even more aptly, that it has a screw loose.)

Life is not treating him well and yet he tries to pull out a smile. He calls himself the globe flower. A stunning specimen. A winner in my eyes.

* not all flowers have to be girls

The best 

Update on Frustration (see post below):

I have received a number of emails from readers who felt I was directing my concerns at them.

Naturally, the ones who worried about this were NOT the ones I was frustrated with.

Remember: I have grown incredibly fond of those who correspond with me about my blog. The conversation is rich and there is, indeed, a dialogue.

I am also fond of the silent reader (this is YOU, my most recent emailier!) -- the person who tracks my blog and becomes taken with it so that they come to know me, even as I do not know them at all. I am such a reader myself. There are about five people whose lives I track through their blogs even though I have never commented on them nor written to them. I don't have the time nor inclination to comment every day or even every week on all the blogs I read.

So who is the target of my "Frustration" post? People who are supposedly near and dear to me but who are content to catch my posts occasionally as a substitute for real contact. And when they do catch it, they never engage me about it. They are like maggots, feasting on me, their fallen one. Well, okay, maybe not maggots, maybe not even day-old toast, but certainly they are the ones who make me feel small and insignificant -- worth only a click, nary a private word.

Cooking

I’ve been cooking since I was 13. My mother did a mental calculus in her head when we moved back to Warsaw (after our 6 years in New York): If one daughter cooked one day, the other daughter cooked the next day, the grandmother cooked on Sundays, we ate grandmother’s leftovers on Monday, and we all grabbed something at the Milk Bar on another day, this would leave her with only 2 days of cooking for the family. Or – one, plus leftovers. Good deal. And so the daughters cooked.

The daughters did not take this project seriously. They grabbed whatever was in the fridge, put it in a pot and let it stew for a while. Then everyone helped themselves to whatever was under the lid when they came home. Oftentimes it was so unexciting that various family members felt obliged to continue working or studying and not make it home in time to take advantage of the daughters’ “laboriously” prepared meal.

I did not take cooking seriously until I moved out of the home and traveled back to the States at the age of 19. And I did not prepare a whole meal for a group of friends until I moved into my own apartment as a grad student (I had been au pairing in someone else’s home in college).

I remember cooking that first meal for others. It was a Polish dish – stuffed cabbage. I thought it important that I emphasize my Polishness (I seem to do that a lot…). People ate it. The food stayed down, no one called an ambulance. I remember thinking – hey, this is not bad for stuffed cabbage!

That was also the last time I cooked Polish food for others. I don’t know why. It’s not that I think Polish food is uniformly awful. Yet, my attention has drifted.

Until this week. Something possessed me to check out the Eastern European regions in search of interesting dishes to work with.

Consider these ideas, lifted out of a Polish cookbook:

Beer Soup with Sour Cream and Cottage Cheese
White borsch with kielbasa

Rump of boar
Rump of deer Lithuanian style
Saddle of Mutton in Cream
Carp Polish style in gray sauce

Foamy nut Mazurek
Compote with prunes

I’m excited. Tune in Thursday – my designated Polish-Russian cooking day.

Frustration

Fact: I started writing Ocean with the idea that I would feel more connected to friends through regular posting.
Fiction: I feel more connected to friends through regular posting.

Fact: Putting up a post or photo that I do not completely hate takes time.
Fiction: I am despondent about the time it takes.

Fact: Posting has brought strangers to my email box – strangers who now are no longer strangers.
Fiction: Communicating with these people is an unimportant part of my life.

Fact: I read with greater care the blogs of people whom I know than the blogs of people whom I do not know.
Fiction: People who know me are more likely to read Ocean regularly, comprehensively.

Fact: People who know me well are the least likely to comment on the blog or give me (personally or through email) feedback on posts they may have read. Some have not said a word for months.
Fiction: I am happy as a clam posting away and I view this as a great way to maintain dialogue with those around me. We can all check in to see if each is breathing and move on. Sounds cool to me.

Fact: If the trends continue, and an increasing number of people who know me jump in on the “Let’s check in on Nina, let’s read her blog” bandwagon [update: instead of using the tried and true methods of people checking up on each other], I will shut Ocean down. Or, more likely, I will change the Net address and pass it on to everyone but YOU.