be mine

Yeah, be mine, sweet Valentine’s Day, be mine. Make it special. Got cash? Boil a lobster, pop a cork. Dirt poor? Shoot pool, go home, call a friend. Spend the effort. You are alone? No, wait, there are children out there who love this day full of hearts. Be with them. Or with a lover. Or an ex. Or with a pink cosmo and TV coverage of the Olympics, romanticizing winter and sport. Wake up, wake up, I am talking to you, don’t look the other way!

I asked in class today (50 bright faces, ready to learn even more about dissolving relationships, for that is what I teach): who is doing something fun and Valentiney today? One person raises his hand. Oh come on, you others, you’re lying! Shaking heads. He’s married – someone pipes in. Okay, how many are married here? Seven hands go up. Do six object to the Hallmark celebration of the passage of half of February?

This day, make it bright red and sappy. Remember when the girls were little and we had to help them make cut out hearts for their classmates? God, I hated that project, having no patience for crafts at all, me, who could not ever do scrapbooking because it all looks so painfully tedious and sticky. All those hearts.

And then, in the evening, out of their backpacks would come – endless little hearts, all made by Mothers Who Care (if you’re a father who made Valentine’s day hearts for the class, forgive me, we have not met). I note who made their child sign his or her own. I did. Stiff upbringing my girls had. Solid European manners. Sign the goddamn card already! I am surprised they did not grow up to hate this day. They don’t hate it. If they had been in my class, they would have raised their hands. Both of them, engaged in something fun and Valentiney.

Yesterday, on my way home from a meeting, I walked through our local zoo. I want to photograph polar bears, wrapped in each others’ fuzzy paws, just like I see on blogs and in valentine’s day cards.

But no. I see only one bear. He looks around. Dreamily. Is there a polar bear sweetie out there to eat kegs of fish with? No? Eyes close, he rests, basking in the faint sun that is February this year. Happy-looking. (Though what do I know about Polar bears, especially those in zoos.)

Do well by another and by yourself today. Half of February is over and done with. Happy Valentine’s Day.


anyone want to eat fish heads with me?



no? okay.

have you ever seen a lassie go this way and that [or: how to succeed in getting your name in the paper without really trying]

This is the honest truth: the above was the first song I learned in the English language. My mother taught it to me when we were still in Poland. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe she thought I was the type who needed to get excess energy out of her system by kicking her leg to the lyrics. You’re supposed to kick this way and that. So she said.

I was reminded of it when I read an article in the Wash Post today. There I am – gliding in on the coattails of another blogger, me, Nina, referenced by name in the Wash Post. Waddaya know… (C’mon. scroll down to the last page. Okay, so I am not easy to find. What did you expect??? We’re talkin’ Wash Post!)

The article itself picks up on the recent flurry of activity surrounding Ann’s post of many many months ago – a post where she cited an email discussion she and I had about blogging from the left (that would be me; at the time Ocean actually acknowledge the existence of politics) and from the right (or, from a centrist position, perceived as right-facing).

Now that Ocean is squeaky clean, preferring to write about places and foods and idle conversations, the amount of disgruntled emails in my Inbox has gone down. (Though it hasn’t entirely disappeared. I just had a million-word exchange last week with a person in Poland who was terribly bothered by a generalization I posted about Polish people).

It’s so easy to offend. Sometimes I understand why it might lead to a tightness in someone’s chest, sometimes I do not.

Sometimes I myself am offended when I read blogs. Sometimes I am just damn mad. What the hell, how dare they? Excuse me?

Okay. Those are troublesome times. But you know, the blogs that I read are all over the place. And so I am used to stances and positions and worldviews different from my own. In fact, it is safe to say that no one out there that I know shares everything --- age, worldview, writing style, eastern European angst – that I think are my small burdens. So hey, I can deal with most anything well presented and well argued.

Even if it swings this way….


barbados sheep
Vilas Zoo, Feb.13

And that…


barbados sheep
Vilas Zoo, Feb.13

Regalia culinaria musicale animalia

In other words, a dinner party with hearty, festive eating, rousinging musical shenanigans and animals, eyeing each other, all evening long.

I’m telling it like it was. Last night. At Saul and Mel’s.

blue and yellow, sweet and savory

At Fontana sports:

I’m with a friend who can help me sort through this stuff. I’m looking for a day-pack.

These are good. Note the additional waist band to shift the balance…
I like this one, over here!
Huh? What?
This one! Look, classy! Gray, with blue and yellow accents! It’s perfect!

Nina, come try this one on. It’s all in the fit…
Fit? You’re giving me one with black and red! I don’t want black and red!

You folks doin’ alright here?
I have never in my life seen anyone pick a back pack because of colors. Can you believe it?
Hey, I had a woman come in here and pick skis to match the color of her boots and ski jacket.
And what is wrong with that?
Just do me a favor and put this one on.
I can’t! That brand? My daughters used it in high school! It will make me feel like I am toting their high school packs! Besides, you’re not listening: gray blue and yellow – it does not get better than that.

(Stares from the two men.)

Would you not pick something according to color?
If it was puke-toned, if it fit me well, I would buy it.


(after visits to many other sporting goods stores) at Sacramento’s:

I thought of this panaderia when you posted a photo of the baked goods at Nogales.
These are great! Mexican and Nicaraguan?
Our family took over this place a year ago. We were farmers, we know food.
I see tamales, enchiladas, in addition to the sweet stuff...
You want a nice photo? Let me put together a selection of cakes and cookies.
Too many of those baked goods are going to go home with me, you know that. Good thing my favorite blue-with-yellow-trim backpack has adjustable waist straps.







at Fontana’s:

I’m back! I looked the whole world over and did not find a nicer looking pack! I can’t wait to strap a baguette to its side and stick a bottle of wine inside…

(Only on State Street would a store clerk be patient with weird shopping behaviors of this sort, I’m sure of it.)

prickly

It could be said that I am in a prickly mood. In fact, it has been said of me and so it must be thus.

Maybe I had a jealous spark when I saw Tonya post photos of cacti. My cacti were last week. Hers are now. In general, I prefer pleasant things to be in the now rather than in the last week.

I wanted to throw pictures out to match hers – boulders (she had boulders up on her blog), or little close-ups of puffy headed plants (easy! we have plenty of puffy headed flora up north, especially since it snowed lightly last night), that kind of thing. But my photos were bleak and lacked spark.



frosted



yawn...



prickly and puffy


Then I got myself into a discussion about holidays with a person who doesn’t do holidays. People like that are as sanctimonious about their choices as are vegetarians who ride bikes for fun. Oh! He is in fact also a vegetarian who rides bikes for fun. So he’s got the sanctimonious thing down pat.

You've heard the argument: holidays are just a corporate commercial capitalist bla bla bla.

So I knew my chance of getting a humdinger of a celebration going on March 8th (you know, International Woman’s Day) was going to fall on deaf ears. No lip-smackin’ surprise in store for me on that day. At least not from this friend.

Still, I hardly think I was a bear today. Certainly not a prickly bear. Indeed, in my more mellow moment I decked a table with yellow tulips and actually smiled, on account of the Winter Games starting now. I know how to nip prickles in the bud. I’m fine. Yeah, totally.

Maybe I should have had a cosmo.

Not too late.


mellow yellow

camping

I haven’t done it decades. I wrote an email to someone just yesterday recalling how when I lived in Poland, my parents were, for a number of years, cash poor. Still, they wanted to revisit Italy and so we packed a tent and drove down and pitched it at a campsite on the beaches of the Lido. In the morning my mother said: leave me home the next time.

Independently, I camped. In Poland I kayaked with university friends and we would pitch tents on riverbanks and get cheese from local farmers and cook canned junk and always always boil potatoes – on the days we did not roast them. When I was in charge of supper I made sandwiches with bread and yellow cheese and I’d stick a flower on each sandwich. People thought I was crazy, but hey, Alice Waters did it at Chez Panisse a few years later and she got called the queen of the new American cuisine, how fair is that.

This morning a friend asked me if I would go camping this summer. At once I thought of laptop issues. No blogging? As I listened intently to descriptions of scrubbing the scalp and body with 32 degree water (from the spring) and of canned soup being made over a portable stove because, I was told, it makes little sense to build a fire when you are dead tired from hiking all day, my once rampant now dormant love of camping ...remained dormant.

Still, at lunch another friend described how his whole family gathers with tents and gourmet foods each year in the mountains and how they hike and cook and eat and sit around a campfire and suddenly I envisioned myself grilling things with garlic and olive oil out there in the vast emptiness, under stars and I thought: maybe it’s worth a shot, cold spring bathing notwithstanding.

Do any of the national parks have WiFi?

nie nie nie, to nie ja*

A friend send me a link to a CNN story which gave him pause. Is it her?

Sure, I have complained endlessly about My Busy Tuesday (=yesterday). My Busy Tuesday was made all the busier by a four-hour deposition, where I acted as an interpreter: English to Polish, Polish to English.

And yeah, I spilled the beans and told some of you that I was the interpreter in a case involving a Polish housekeeper.

And I am sure most everyone thought that the case noted on CNN must have been my case.

Sadly, no. I did brag that mine is a high profile case. But I was slightly exaggerating. You know, to make myself look important. Okay, the case is big by Madison standards. But it is not about stealing cameras from Candice Bergen or shoes from Robert DeNiro. Though, just to let you know, CB and RD, I am available, should your current interpreter prove inadequate. I'm good, I tell you!

* no no no, that's not me

from tucson: exits

Doors. So many posters I have seen! Posters of doors. Doors of Madison. Doors of Tuscany. Doors of Yale.

Doors as openings. Doors to historic houses. Adobe buildings of an older Tucson. Doors freeing you to paint them, admire them, photograph them.





Expressing color. Why do doors into homes with a weaker sun over them (in Wisconsin, for example) shun color? Brown doors up north. Colorful doors down south.

Doors to friendship, doors to new interiors, doors to cafés where they serve strawberry lemonade. With a raspberry bar. Eaten outside under a strong sun.



And don't forget about wrought iron gates and fences. Decorative: oh! that is so lovely. Or plain: I plan to paint every last bar of it, the owner tells me.




Doors. Favorite ones:

Doors for visual effect, doors that are functional. Barricades. Gates. Other gates. Boundary gates. So let’s extend a helping hand, across the Rio Grande… Let them out, let them in. Let’s see your card, step this way please.

Gates of entry. Of passage. The flight to St Paul-Minneapolis will be boarding from Gate 10. Weather in Minneapolis? The captain pauses for effect. A balmy 22 degrees.

Closure to the 78 degrees of Arizona. The cabin door is closed, turn off your cell phones. Thank you for flying with us.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you, hosts and friends and hummingbirds and suns setting and warm sunlight the next morning, waking me up even before the dog barks.

from tucson: I mean, from mexico: like all good neighbors

Before this day, I had never been to a Mexican border town. Fly in to Mexico City, move around the central provinces, fly out. That’s it.

Want to go to Mexico?
Yes.

Less than two hours from Tucson. Drive through National Parks with vast stretches of arid land and you’re there. Leave the car at the border and follow the signs:



It’s not unimportant that this is Super Bowl Sunday. Nogales is crowded, but with almost no Americans. How do you spot an American here? We are the buyers. We come here to poke through stuff brought up to this border town by people who want a sale. More so on this day of no Americans than any other.

I take off on my own. I quickly leave the center and head for the hills, camera dangling. Can’t help it, I am these days so often looking at places through a lens. It is a bigger addiction than the Internet. You have to be a person of great patience to walk with me. I stop frequently. My friends are happy to let me go off alone.





Music. Where there are people, there is music. At one corner, five radios on full volume. Not American music. Spanish lyrics, Latin melodies.

When I was in third grade, back at the UN School, we sang this song. I remember every word:

Let’s sing a song of the good neighbor
Til it echoes o’er the sea
Si si amigo, wherever we go
Good good neighbors we will be

So let’s extend a helping hand
Across the Rio Grande
And help each other too
Like all good neighbors do – oo - oo.

So what happened? …here in this poor poor border town of Nogales?

I stand at the base of a hill, taking a photo of a blue house. There are so many colors, most faded but some still bright, up there on that hill.




A Mexican man leaves his girlfriend and comes up to me.
Miss? You want a good picture? Climb up those narrow (crumbling) stairs. All the way to the top. You will see everything.
Thanks, I will do that.





All the time I am here, I pass groups of people hanging out. Perfect words to describe it. Hanging out. Young people and even younger. Babies on the way to childhood, on the way to adulthood. Sometimes I cannot tell which is the child, which is the adult. These girls, I was going to label them “sisters.” But when one gets up I wonder if she isn’t the mother.





In a back alley, halfway up the hill I hear the racket of a machine. I pause at the doorway and look.

You wanna come inside to see?
I step in.
We are making tortillas. Did you ever see them made?
My camera, my curiosity tell it like it is: I have never seen tortillas being made and yes, I want to come inside. I watch, she explains. She smiles at my picture taking. She lets me taste the warm soft pancake. Good. How can it not be?

Neighbors come here to buy fresh ones for supper. Fresh baguettes for the Sunday supper in France, fresh tortillas for the Sunday supper in Mexico. She is happy when I tell her I want some too, even though I have no Mexican family to feed. I will feed myself.

Twenty five for fifty cents. Two pennies per pancake. American pennies welcome. American pennies. We can use American pennies here. All pennies welcome.








I climb down again and rejoin the stream of people, Mexican people, no Americans, no Americans, they’re watching Super Bowl, that’s right.

I stop in front of a bakery, trying to understand the sweet inclinations of this community. Simple cookies and buns, puffed up, showing off their freshness. Someone comes up to me. It’s the camera. It is my question mark. People have figured out that I am asking, even as I say no words.

These, we like these, the person behind me prods my elbow to focus on the side of the shelf. He smiles as I turn my camera toward his choices.



I cannot be like the Polish tourist that I half am. You know the Polish tourist in Venice? He comes with his family by bus. He takes pictures of his family on the main square. He enters the church, prays, goes outside. He sits with his family on the church steps and opens a plastic bag where he has packed (more likely his wife has packed) the breads and sausages (from Poland) for the afternoon meal. They eat. The plastic bag escapes with the wind. Ooops. He leaves, pushing the sinking city deeper into the lagoon with his tread, spends nothing, leaves his garbage and is out before sundown.

But I want nothing. No clutter back at the loft.

Still, as I dump my plastic water bottle in the trash can, the image of the Polish tourist haunts me. So I buy two green thick glass goblets. Simple goblets for simple country wines, the kind you might have with a baguette or a tortilla.



At the exit point, the US official is old, kind-looking. Friendly. The stream of people returning to Mexico, WalMart bags full of toilet paper and who knows what else, move quickly. The stream of people leaving Mexico – less so. Our drivers’ licenses are inspected, but one look and it becomes a formality. What did you buy? I am asked. Two goblets. Two beautiful goblets.

from tucson: in the matter of water

My host and I get out of the car at the foot of the Canyon.

Here’s a bottle of water for you.
Thanks. I’ll leave it in the car for later.

That snippet of conversation says it all. I am a desert hiking imbecile.

My host is not: take the water. It’s the desert.















Later:

What’s a watsu?

I ask this after I agree to subject myself to it.

I walk into a garden in the Catalina mountains. Rosemary bushes are in bloom. Humming birds descend for a swig of the sweet stuff. In front of me – a pool.





She tells me to go in. The sun is piercing there over the water. Outside, it is 75. In the pool it is 96.

Floatation devices are wrapped around my shins. She leads me into the middle and forces me into a reclining position. She holds my head above water and moves me around, this way and that. For an hour she prods, pulls and kneads my limbs, my back, my neck. I go limp in the water as she moves me, snake like, across the pool.

It feels like sea weed, doesn’t it?

I want to be sea weed from now on. Forget law school, forget gray drizzly days. Leave me in this pool so that I can watch the humming birds circle the cacti. Hi birds, I’m here, I am the sea weed.

from tucson: african art, carpets and cacti. and sun.

It’s Friday, noon, the plane lands and people start undressing. The burden of toting an extra jacket or sweater is nothing compared to the burden of dealing with bad weather up north.

The pilot, having had his adrenalin pumped, I’m sure, while coping with the Minneapolis snow now says in a resigned way: the weather in Tucson? Sunny. It’s always sunny in Tucson (I swear, a yawn follows).

It is a dry place. The last rain shower came down in mid October.

Three of us arrive from different parts of the country. Our host picks us up. I am itching to shed the long sleeves. Oh, don’t be shy! We’re not modest here. I am not shy, but ripping off my shirt in the airport parking lot seems extreme. I wait until we get in the car.

It is getting hot. We pull up behind a Motel 8. Dust covers my old shoes. Two guys are grilling meats and corn in the corner of a parking lot. My groups is hungry and so we eat.

And suddenly I am in Africa.









shea butter

People are heavily into rocks here in Tucson. It’s the second time I am in this town at the time of the gem exposition. It’s not enough that these stones are a really big deal, but the event spawns side shows, like the one here, behind the Motel 8, of African Art.



carapets and me



lunch


And lo! There is my guy from two years back, with his truck of Afghani carpets. I bought a runner from you! I’ll sell you an area rug for $1200! I don’t have $1200! Make it $200 then. Times are tough in Afghanistan.

Our friend who is hosting this reunion (four women, friends since the first year of Law School now exactly 25 years ago) lives among cacti and palm trees.






valentine's day hearts?

We stroll in the late afternoon, ready for the dessert chill that comes around when the sun goes down. On the back deck, she feeds us Brazilian drinks with lime juice and some potent something. Life is sweet.



cacti and caiparigna coctails at sunset






hairy cacti at sunset

clichés

I woke up yesterday smothered by a dream that would not loosen its grip. In it, I was leaving an airplane. I could not gather my belongings. I would pack one item and two others would spill out. I was alone on the plane, struggling to keep all these items contained, but it was no use. I finally left, leaving behind God knows what.

It’s too obvious, I know, but there you have it: me trying to contain all that is with me, required of me, presented to me, failing in the end as it all scatters to my feet.

My flight this morning out of Madison was at an awful morning hour. I had had an argument last night (or, rather, someone found me argumentative and I argued the incorrectness of this assessment) and so I did not sleep well (at all?), being sensitive to disturbances of any kind these days.

Recently, I had been noting that our airport has only bars, plus a stinky stand of packaged foods and isn’t that just typical. Not anymore. Since my transit through here two weeks ago, it has acquired a food court. Can you predict what it has to offer? Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Quizno’s subs, the Great Dane Brewery. It’s sort of snapshot of middle-Madison, no?

I only wanted a strong coffee. Finding none, I went to the gate and tried not to sleep. I missed my boarding call, but I swear, they changed announcing agents. I had been listening for a female voice.

In Minneapolis, it is snowing. Hard. That’s fine, I expect that this is a city of snow. Snow in Minnesota, sunshine in Arizona. A stereotype I can live with, especially since my final destination is Tucson.