back then

I could write many paragraphs about how often I am reminded that I am no longer really even middle aged. I am, I think, several generations upwards of that period, no matter how generously you define it.

I’ll tell you one poignant example of such a reminder: my daughter directed me this afternoon to the local paper (is it still a 'paper' if it’s a page on the Internet?) where an author muses about her childhood connection to a strip mall – the Midvale Plaza, for those who know Madison. The nondescript lineup of shops has recently been leveled and replaced by a sweet little condo complex – units on top, library, ice cream shop and café on the bottom. What more could you want (if you’re into condo living)! And yet...

My daughter was nostalgic. We, too, once lived by that strip mall and she, too, remembered days spent walking from our home to the then rather shabby library, past a hobby shop, a Baskin & Robbins (31 flavors!) and the Hoover vacuum repair store.

I thought – this is what it means to be ancient: not old, but ancient – when your daughter remembers an era that is no more.



In other news:  in the hours of the early morning, I am, as ever, getting ready for school, classes, work – you know the routines. Finally, I head downstairs. I pause in mid-step. From where I am, the front room looks so pretty! The light is dappling in, the painting from Jerez, finally set in its frame, is up, the geraniums are blooming.





It is a “life is good” moment.

And there is another  such moment – heading home from Paul’s. The light is just so, the work week is nearly done with.






And now the evening is mine, for the first time in a long time mine -- nothing that needs attention, no student emails to contemplate, no project that needs to be completed before tomorrow. I'm buoyant. To a point. As I put away groceries, dinner ambitions wane.  I ask Ed -- do you mind if we just eat a frittata tonight? We have some fresh spinach and leeks...





In my younger years, I never just made a frittata for dinner. Or reheated yesterday's soup or plunked frozen lasagna into the oven. Ah, but that was then. Right now, ask me to put together a three course meal and I'll respond -- what's the occasion? None? Then forget it.

café

You know your priorities aren’t in order when you start skipping your regular visit to the café – class goes too late, another meeting, too late, too late... How did it come to be so difficult to find the half hour each day – one lousy half hour, stretched maybe to an hour, but with a computer, for God’s sake, in the American way of taking your work to a café, so that it’s not all about the pleasure of being social, it’s also work, café work!

Well now, time to make amends. This day will be different. This day we’ll make it to Paul’s. (I call it Paul’s because without Paul there would not be the convivial atmosphere that I look for, but the place does have an official name – the Oasis. Oh – you wont see that on the outside. It’s EVP there. Confused? So just call it Paul’s, like I do.)





Ed is never on perfect behavior there and most of the time, that’s okay, because Paul can shoot back at him if he needs to, providing the balance that I like to see in these exchanges.

Ed eats soup, I drink coffee. That’s our gig. He reads and dozes, I write. And eventually the sun goes down and we are back at the farmhouse, happy. But there’s a price: it’s frozen lasagna night again. Can’t have it all.

the cool

Late afternoon. I’m hanging with the cool guys.





Well, okay, cool guys plus Ed who under no circumstance can be characterized as such.

We’re looking at the lauded building designed by architect Douglas Kozel. (Kozel is with us, walking us through the stunning structure.)






It’s a mission with a purpose. Not my purpose, but sort of kind of Ed’s. His business is growing and the players need space and someone's got to build it. Might they create a place built along the lines of this? And if not, couldn't one pick bits and pieces and incorporate them into a final vision of what is to be?

So we look at bits and pieces.






I think how being a state employee for nearly all of my professional life has kept me away from decisions about how my workspace should look. My own office is pathetically small, cramped, basic. I purchased the chair in which I sit twenty years ago at a discount store. I believe it was under $50. The best part of the space is the window. (It is a grand window, looking out on Bascom Mall.)

I like great work spaces, great living spaces too. Even as for me, there’s beauty now in the uncomplicated. The farmhouse is one such place.

Still, I am tantalized. At the point where we examine the superbly designed employee snack space, I almost ask – may I please submit my resume to work here?

Then I think how after snack, there’s the desk with a work project before it.

If I can have only one, I prefer loving the work project.

But man oh man, it's beautiful to imagine that one can have it all!

Maybe not. Too much pressure. One has to confront something in the everyday that is imperfect. Otherwise, it's not life. It's fantasy.

Monday Monday

By now, any Ocean reader should know not to mess with me on Mondays (this semester). It’s a killer day, made all the more challenging because immediately after there comes Tuesday and Tuesday has a morning run of classes that requires work, even as on Monday, there is no time for that. The best that I can come up with is to come home Monday night, plunge into dinner prep...





...fall into exhaustion after the final clean up, recover sometime, say, around 2:30 am and use that magic middle of the night moment to prep for the morning class. If you have a better game plan, please advise, but keep in mind that I already am trying to work hard on Sunday to get things in good stead for the week ahead and yes, I know I could do frozen dinners on Monday but on tough days I especially want to eat well. Besides, I’d defrosted the shrimp. They had to be used.



Tomorrow is the “full snow moon.” Funny how that goes. Not much snow out today. That snowman on Bascom Hill? Gone.





Snow moon. No matter how inaccurate your name, you were beautifully bright as I drove home to the farmhouse tonight.


 

pressure

The pressure of the Super Bowl! If the world around you is watching The Game and you’re not, shouldn’t you be doing something that benefits from the sudden quiet as the game begins? The world’s moved indoors, huddled, with bowls of chips and chicken wings and cold six packs of locally brewed beer. And where are you, oh football detractor? Are you skiing the empty trails? No? Not that? (No snow.) Are you at the cinema, enjoying great seats at movies that tonight aren’t packing a crowd? Not that either?

In fact, the day is unusual, even as, by the end of the game, it turns very ordinary.

Brunch. There is a birthday brunch for a friend. Downtown. Can’t think when I last ate brunch downtown. And, since it is just a smidgen above freezing and all the slush has long trickled off, I can bike.

Cold, but good for the soul.







Brunch is with the Younger Set. Meaning – the small pool of friends that I sometimes see even as they’re all half my age (or thereabouts).






They’re hearty eaters – not yet at the wake up age where food becomes the enemy. We met at Samba Grill – Madison’s great place for buffet salads and endless meats carved at your table. It is the perfect place to go without Ed. Beef? You have beef? Layer it on!

Is it appropriate to say that one can pig out on cow?


I bike home.


 


Ed is in a reclining mood and I spend the rest of the day attending to chores and phone calls with various parental figures.

In the evening Ed asks – want to go to Dane Brewery?

We never eat out. Ever. And so I don’t turn down the invitation because I can never tell if there’ll be another.

Are you sure it wont be packed? Because of the Super Bowl?

Ed calls. In fact, it’s a quiet night there.

We sit at the bar, eat, drink, with one eye to the screen (especially when the ads come on) and the other – buried in the newspaper. Comics. Ed’s reading comics.

I feel we should not be reading during our rare dinner out.

What’d you say gorgeous?

I shrug and pick up a section of the paper while burly players topple each other and the clock moves slowly towards halftime.

And then we go home.

Saturday

You know what I love about Saturdays?

No...

...It’s the only day where I don’t have to do anything. No classes the next day. No essential chores. No schedule! No rush!

So there’s another Ice Age Trail maintenance project today...

When?

9.

Ah well... so we rush. But you know, rushing for something that is as delightfully energizing and (therefore) pleasurable as heaving logs and branches on a bright February morning (the kind I dared only dream of yesterday) is an entirely different proposition.

But, despite the hurry, we are late for the meet up. (Taking the wrong road doesn’t help.) Where are they? We listen for the noise of a chainsaw. Silence.







We look for signs of fires burning. Nothing.






We hike the trail, hoping to come to come across the work crew.







And we find them. With a handful of teens who are here to do their community service.

It’s warmer today and within minutes, our jackets are off.











We work steadily, quietly, interrupting each other only to comment on the clumsiness of the other. Careful don’t trip. Don’t you trip. You’re so clumsy! Clumsy? You’re the epitome of clumsiness! And so on.

Toward noon, the Trail people get out the food for the volunteers. It’s our sign to take off. But this time I linger for just a little while. There’s great pleasure in watching these kids let loose over a very hot fire.

One of the Trail builders has brought his usual pots and pans and he teaches one kid to make chocolate cake under burning embers.






You get the feeling that life is good, here, in the clearing. Forget about the issues that push us to do stupid or angry things. Here – it’s all calm. The only noise is of snapping branches in the fire and of the chain saw around the bend.


Eventually I pull myself away and we drive the country roads toward home.






In other news: I thought about family this afternoon. I had reason to. Maybe the most poignant was a call to my father (in Warsaw). He was looking for reassurance on some family matters and I gave it to him, even as I believe none of it. He’s old. He deserves not to worry.

But, additionally, he asked me to call a friend of ours in New York. It is that friend’s birthday and my dad no longer has the ability to work through the complexity of calling someone far away and communicate effectively with the odd person who picks up the phone.

I was reluctant. Dad, I don’t have any contact with those people anymore.
Please, call.
Sigh. Okay.

They’re famous. They are the ones whose daughter I cared for when I came back to this country as a young adult. I don’t like keeping in touch with famous people.

But, it was my dad’s request and so I called. Family. The person whose birthday it is could not talk, but his family was there and they did and we reminisced some – about the years when they were my life, my home, my reason for being in the States.

Families are there for each other – I’ve heard that line so often. Sometimes they are. When I come across instances when that is the case, it makes me smile.

flip flop

In my early years here, in Wisconsin, I often got the question – oh, you’re from Poland... is it as cold there as it is here?

Colder, I’d say.

Really? What’s the winter low?

Oh, not as low as here...

But you said...

It just feels colder. Damp, prickly cold, the kind of cold that makes your bones shiver.

I rarely feel that kind of cold in Madison. But I felt it today.

It seems that we’ve traded places: Madison was like Bialystok (a Polish city worst hit by a vicious cold front passing through Eastern Europe) and Bialystok was like Madison.


Early today, there were the fog alerts. Dense, soupy – words that make you think of towels soaked in cold pea porridge. But by the time I set out for campus, the alerts are over and done with. What remains is the gray.

Lake Mendota never looked less... approachable.





No matter. It’s February. And the weekend. And I have chicken soup on the stove and the idea that we’ll be chopping down some invasives in the back of the farmette once the weather improves and in case all this soupy wetness is the way it’s going to be until April – well, that’s a good excuse to get away. And I will.

But not just yet. February is, this year, a stick it out at home month for me. I like home. Bathed in sunshine home. No, not true. Just home.

at the end of the day

Nearing the end of a full week. Finally. Meet Ed at Paul’s. Paul has a helper in today.
So, she asks, you guys went away somewhere?

Yes, Spai...

New Jersey! Ed pipes in.
New Jersey?

He’s just saying that. It was Sp...

We went to New Jersey.
Where, Newark? I hear it’s up and coming.

No, no, not that...

Huh?

There are times when Ed is so uncontrollably boyish! His age, divided by six.

When you have a long week, you under-appreciate boyishness in another. Especially when (for the third time this week) your Apple computer is malfunctioning and there’s no food at home for dinner and the snow is melting before your eyes.

Snow melting... It was not like that this morning. It rained fog -- a misty white dusting of freezing particles.













By afternoon it is all gray and gone and there we are, at Paul’s, bantering about New Jersey.

once upon a time

I liked poetry. I went through a phase. Not too long ago. Clare Cavanagh, a frequent translator of the Polish writer, Wislawa Szymborska, came once to speak at Borders and I was, at the time, enthralled.

A poem for you today, by Szymborska (this one is translated by Joanna Trzeciak):

Some like poetry

Some--
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting the schools, where one must,
and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.
Like--
but one also likes chicken noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.
Poetry--
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.


As I read today about the death of Szymborska (in Krakow, where she lived virtually her entire long life) I spin back to the time when poems (of others) were scattered across my table and if asked, I would have told you that they would be part of my life forever.

They weren’t. These days, I prefer essays.

In that same period of time (the time of poetry), I was being a mom to two young girls. Each had her own set of fleeting passions, but today I remember the one belonging to my older girl. At the age of twelve, maybe thirteen, she developed a love of musicals and especially as belted by the unstoppable Patti LuPone.

Patti was with us on long car trips – on tapes played on the boring highways between Madison and Pittsburgh (where the paternal grandparents once lived) and she was with us at home, played loudly, or maybe it’s just that Patti always sang so loudly!

Fifteen, or was it seventeen years ago, my older girl learned that, after a bit of a hiatus, Patti LuPone would be again appearing in public, singing through her beloved Broadway repertoire in a theater in New York. It was not our habit to take weekend trips those days. Funds were tight, college was looming. But, I badly wanted this one:  a mother daughter week-end in New York. Since then, I have traveled frequently with my younger girl, but that New York weekend remains the only trip that I ever took alone with my older daughter.

It was a fantastic set of days! At the end of the performance, we stood and watched as the show’s entourage left through the theater back door. Patti was there, real, alive, Patti LuPone – my daughter and I, the oddest demographic in the theater, to be sure, watching as fans like to watch. Satisfied, satiated.


Patti LuPone is in Madison tonight. My older girl and I meet for dinner downtown…





…and then proceed to the theater.







When you are a star, a diva, a performing musician, when you write award winning poetry, or more humbly, an obscure little blog called Ocean, oftentimes you don’t know who your audience is. Or if maybe someone is reading, listening, someone who is living a flight of momentary fancy, only then to disappear, until maybe fifteen years down the road, something happens and a memory comes back and he (or she) is with you again. Hey, I remember when I once read your poems and they made me smile, ever so broadly.


Patti LuPone sang well -- that's a given. But, time reshuffles cards for us, so that what is today is just a shade different than what was once upon a time. After the show, my girl and I went to the backstage door. For old time's sake. A small crowd -- maybe a dozen or two dozen people -- hovered, waiting for the grande dame to step out into her limo.We were told to form a line, to put away cameras. Patti came, scribbled a half formed letter (L? P? something altogether different?)  on people's outstretched programs and left.


Wieslawa Szymborska shied away from big crowds. She once said that any more than a dozen in one room made her uneasy.

I think how when you aim for big audiences and you get them, it changes you.

I hope that I never aim for big audiences. I hope that I remain shy with crowds of more than twelve.

a reversal of fortune

I learned a lesson today. Several, in fact, but one stands out: January 31st is, in the final run, January 31st. You can’t leap out of bed and think: spring! – even if outside it’s 35 degrees (that’s a Wisconsin spring morning reading) and there’s talk of record breaking highs in the afternoon (a sweltering 49).

Still, following a grueling Monday, I’m thinking how exhilarating it would be to bike to work! I haven’t biked since the end of November and hadn’t expected to until April. But 49!

My ever helpful shaggy haired landlord kindly steps outside (in a state of at least partial undress... it makes me smile to see him so oblivious to...the ways of the world) and brings out my bike for air pumping and light battery checking. By 8:30, I am on the road!

The best ride for me makes heavy use of the bike path. But it’s not the fastest route to campus. I’m nervous about the time -- my first class is at 9:30. I opt for a faster (45 minute) route. Combination bike path and road.

What’s this? Patches of snow? A little bit of ice maybe? A surface of frozen mist?






Well now. A challenge.

Okay, getting close to campus. Familiar vistas!







And here’s where I should have understood that where there is snow and where there is warm air, eventually, very eventually, there will be puddles. And sand, and salt, and all of this will make its way up, up and in a sweeping arch, hit me right on the back, my head, too, covering me with all the debris we throw on the roads to keep them ice-free.






Not that I immediately realize what is happening. I’m pedaling madly to get to school on time. Oh, I notice some specks of mud on my pants, but I shrug it off. A bit of mud? Eh --the price of any bike ride.






Minutes before class, I walk into my office, take off my jacket and see the damage. I take off the helmet. Salt in my hair. Indeed, mud, salt and sand everywhere.

So I learned something. And I suffer the indignity of teaching with a wet pants seat and salty pony tail. (The mud-splatterd jacket I can, thankfully, leave behind.)




Work day's done. The ride back is much nicer. Even as I just cannot believe that there are ice fishers on the lake. As if suspended on water.






Onwards. Past Lake Monona, which looks as if it's heading into April.





Done. Finally, splatterdly done. A stop at Paul’s (where are you Ed??? Late? Do you understand what it means to panic at someone’s absence??) and then the last lap home. Just as the sun sets.





Home.

Mmmm, farmhouse home.

Monday

I step outside, consider biking to work, laugh off the idea and walk over to the red hot lover. It’s nice there, in that parking spot.







That’s the last time I can apply the word “nice” to the landscape around me this day. The rest? Well, here’s a reality for you: from morning, til 5:30 I never shut up. Between student meetings and class hours, I was engaged in the art of talk. By the time I dragged in to the farmhouse, I was so disinclined to speak that I had no ability to voice preference for anything, including dinner foods.

Frozen lasagna. Good enough. Now please. Shhh. I have nothing more to say about anything.

we'll take it!

A half an inch of fresh snow – light, fluffy, you know the kind: it doesn’t quite settle in, but instead, hovers loosely, prettily over whatever was there before. In this case, it covers a layer of ice along our dirt driveway and, more importantly, it covers (ever so lightly) ski trails in the area.

But it wont last. Put a handful of skiers on it and it will be back to the new normal this year: bare patches along our forest trails.

We should be out there before all others, I tell Ed. The side of me that wants to seize the moment before it shatters and disappears is especially prodding us out of the house early. The week ahead will have a warm spell. What little snow there is will surely disappear soon.

The sun plays with the few puffy clouds. One minute we're dazzled in light, the next -- we're a somber blue.






By 9 we’re in our local county park. I can’t say that it’s blissfully quiet. A helicopter is running electrical components in the nearby Yahara wetlands and in fact, part of the park is closed for safety reasons.






That’s okay. We have a good loop that takes us away from it all.


 








Back toward Lake Waubesa, where the ice fishermen hang out.






It’s cold and blustery outside and I’m thinking maybe it would have been better to eat the breakfast oatmeal before the ski run. But, the sun is out and the sky has that early morning tint to it and it puts us both in such pleasant moods that I forget about the work and the cleaning and the tedious stuff that’ll frame the rest of the day.

Nice work, Ed. Only, could it be that you’re slowing down? I shout back at him.
I’m having a contemplative moment. I don't rush things, like you.
Good job staying upright on the hills! I retort.
Good job not breaking your camera! He answers.






And so we continue in this way until our loop is done and our gear is thrown in the back of the car again, with the hope that there’ll be another chance to use it this season.


In other news: may I give a piece of market advice for The Great Investors out there? My bet is that Apple is puffed itself out to be way out there, even as it is not altogether way out there. It's merely a company that sells machines and it isn't magic, nor intuitive, nor easy, because machines aren't magic or intuitive or easy and if you want to ride the cloud of hyper-nonsense about Apple's capabilities to do everything perfectly, feel free, but I'm not going to be there with you.

I wont spend much space on explaining how both Ed and I spent the better part of the afternoon working on getting on iCloud and upgrading my OS on my current MacBrookPro. That's boring. But I will complain about how many things in this whole procedure were odd and in fact downright nervewrackingly convoluted. I don't blame Apple for that. Technology IS complicated. I just wish it would fess up and not pretend differently.



Otherwise: yes, there's an otherwise. Otherwise, it was such a beautiful day. Isis was at the farmhouse with us. He decided we're worth the trek up the lightly snow-covered path.

fire

How are my eyebrows? -- I ask Ed. Completely gone?
No, just a little singed.
Casualties of the morning. Also undone – a pair of outdoor gloves. They were old, but still...

But let me say right away – and perhaps this will surprise you – it was an excellent morning.

My idea this winter to ski daily faltered rather quickly: the trails around Madison don’t have enough snow to make it fun. The temperature heaving has given them a brittle, icy coating. With twigs and pebbles poking through. I talked of doing a trip up north, but the older Ed gets, the less he likes spontaneous ling distance  journeys. And so this morning, as I see again a nice strip of bright light at the horizon just before sunrise, I say to Ed merely this – outdoors... we have to get outdoors today.

It’s windy and in the low twenties. Eh, so what. The Ice Age Trail folks (such apt description) are organizing a work day out on one of the segments of the trail just west of Madison.


 


At 9 a.m., we’re there with them at the trailhead, waiting for instructions.

Clear the hill, burn the brush.

It’s great work! Within minutes the cold ceases to be a problem.






And as the stacks of chopped and snipped wood grow, the fires flair and the air takes on a gusty smell of campfires.










Managing the fires when the wind is this strong is a challenge. My brows are the price to pay for it.


 


But it’s terrific work and for three hours, we chop, snip and haul until the leaders call for a lunch break. We leave then. We’re known for that – we come, we work, we leave. Unfriendly types who scorn bonding over dead flesh between slabs of bread. I wont deny it -- it's an apt characterization.

Ed drives the now fixed, but so very rusted Geo home. These hills west of Madison are especially pretty now, in January. Here, you can't tell that the snow cover is actually quite thin.





It is a beautiful landscape.






And now we’re at Paul’s café. Ed’s sleeping, I’m thinking about how to trim eyebrows around the missing parts. The smell of wood is still with us. The chill of the wind is long gone.