September

Warm, but nippy if you go out at the edges of the day.

I biked to work at a leisurely pace (my first class is a late morning thing, my last class is an early evening one) and I looked yet again at September. You can see it – no other month looks like this:



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On the Hill, a student still wanted to call it summer. She looked at her cell messages, put the phone down, looked at her bright pink toenails, and then looked at nothing at all, not even the the Capitol at the other end of State Street.



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Students don’t believe in September. They seem to go from summer to late October. Everything in between is… still summer. Stretch out on the green, throw a Frisbee, take your laptop outside.

Transition months are more for people like me who need time to adjust, so it’s not shorts to snowshoes. Though maybe tomorrow I’ll try that stretch out on the grass thing. When no one's watching.

closure

Biking for pleasure, biking to get to work, biking to make a delivery. Biking up the steep Old Sauk hill, biking past my old home.

The hot sunny day is making me sweat. Crazy biking. Maybe I should have walked.

Maybe I should have walked. Maybe I should have skipped Estonia, skipped the art show, skipped rolling croissants, or cooking for twenty during presidential debates four years back. I made soup and needed twenty soup bowls. In those days, I didn't hesitate much.


The hill (Old Sauk hill) wasn’t really a challenge today. I had so much energy, so much brute force, killing force that it took no effort at all to climb it.

My old house in the old neighborhood had a new flower patch and while I marveled at its orderliness, I wondered what had become of the 10, 40, 140 perennials I had stuck in there over the years.

My friend and once neighbor talked of changes in her life and I compared them to changes in mine. I left thinking she was on a good track. And that’s not because she is heading with her husband to England next week. Maybe I could say that she is on a good track and therefore she is heading with her husband to England next week.

I visited with my doctor who had read the Doug Moe column and she commented that she always imagined that I had wanted to be a lawyer from the time of diapers. [Truth is, my grandmother boiled my diapers in pots of water on top of a coal stove, having neither electricity nor indoor plumbing to help her along.] I filed that into my storehouse of stories of what people found most surprising after reading the Doug Moe piece. One colleague mentioned that she wondered why I could not jump into journalism given my constant movement between Poland and the US. Another colleague said he never knew I was such an interesting person. Hmmm.

On the ride back from the far west side, I stopped at Owen Woods.


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Owen Woods – the place where I went to find something, back in the days when I lived so close to it. Something? What? Imagined balance. An echo of my own thoughts.

It was pretty today, after five, tea time five, just before the news five. I caught glimpses of the capitol – from the top of Old Sauk hill, from inside the Owen park itself.



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And I caught that afternoon-evening light that makes all lasting bits of summer colors seem faded and pale, in spite of the blue sky, the loud screech of the yellow bird, and the balls of rabbit fur, hiding behind golden stalks of prairie grasses.



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food and a blast of good weather

If you want to have your picture taken and you care about how you look in it, you should resist the impulse to have yourself photographed while eating. Most people do not look attractive while chomping and heaving their cheeks and jaws in peculiar and unnatural ways.

Realizing this, I refrained, for example, from eating the lovely tart in the photo at the sidebar. (See it? It's to the left.) I smiled, my daughter took the picture and then I chomped.

Nevertheless, on days like today, even eating looks pretty. It was an absolutely brilliant afternoon -- all blue skies and gusty warm breezes.

In the lunch hours, the Library Mall down the hill was abuzz. On the down side, it was abuzz with construction, as was the lower part of State Street (patience! I know it's probably for the common good!), but still, on the positive side -- it was a beautiful moment of students at one with the day, with each other and with the food they were eating. So many styles of eating! And for once, on this day -- all beautiful to behold.



sticks





taste this





sticks again





chips and dip





big bite





smaller bite


Remind me of this day and this moment four months from now.

red haloed moon

There is a moon tonight that beats all moons out there. It comes with a halo. You can see it in all its full splendidness, as the skies have cleared.

My associations are banal – that’s amore, Moonstruck, Italy.

I thought how juicy it would be to announce here, on Ocean, that this week-end I would be traveling to Italy. And to snap a photo of the brochure that came in the mail – it’s of an Italian hotel on the Amalfi coast. Ahhhh… …coincidence?

The reality is that the extent of overheard Italian this month will be what I heard in front of the Italian Workers’ Club tonight. Do you know the place? On Regent Street.


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Downstairs, at the Greenbush Bar, Ed and I ate pizza. Lights twinkled, sort of like on the Amalfi coast, I suppose… men grouped at the bar and spoke of very important nonsense, the wine flowed and people talked in robust, animated ways. A woman waited for her loved one to come back (he did).







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As I prepared to mount Ed’s motorbike to hitch a ride home, someone from the Italian speaking set asked if we wanted a photo. Ed always rolls his eyes on that one. He has no sentimental leanings and especially none that would recognize a full moon with a red halo over it. But I acquiesced. I cannot imagine standing there in the light of the full moon and saying – naaaaah, bad idea.

It’s weird but good, my fellow photographer said to me, looking at the photo, as she handed back the camera. That’s fitting, I thought.

friends in the Wright places

You’ve come across unusual coincidences before. We all have. Your sister knows the uncle of someone who was married to the teacher of your best friend’s second born and suddenly you meet that person in your yoga class. That sort of thing.

Okay, try this one: my father once worked at the UN and there he met a coworker who would remain his lifelong friend, even as she stayed in New York and he traveled back to Poland. This person (let me call her “Martha”) is friends with someone who went to college with someone else. That someone else eventually inherited a Frank Lloyd Wright House in University Heights, one of only a handful of Wright homes in Madison. It’s rarely (never?) opened to the public, but to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the current owner (the someone else) decided to throw a very private party. She invited, among others, her college friend and also Martha.

And that’s how I found myself, on Saturday afternoon, inside the Gilmore House.

I had never met Martha, but we correspond regularly as we update each other on my father’s health and well being. And now, here she is, in town and inviting me to come with her for a special look inside the Gilmore House before the big party the next day. (Another coincidence: the original homeowner was a UW Law grad.)

What did I think of it? Well, I can’t share much, because I was told to hide my camera. It’s a very private place, so that even the rock in the back yard – which I was itching to photograph, if only because it has a plaque commemorating the fact that this is the highest point in Madison proper – was off limits to my Sony. Something about security. But I will say this: up until now, I hadn’t given much thought to how there is a world out there in University Heights, that totally moves beyond my own orbit.

Did I mention that the Gilmore House is sometimes called the Airplane House? Can you guess why?



Airplane on the summit
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full view
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I did enjoy meeting my father’s friend, Martha (whose last visit to Madison had been in the year before I was born). I took her for a quick spin around campus and I was amused that she recognized much of it from photos she had seen on Ocean.

I assured her that someday my father would once again travel to NY. I’m not certain whether he will, though I can’t help but think that good friends, and even those who are friends of your college friends, are worth traveling for.

loud rooftops and sagging umbrellas

[PREAMBLE: I noted the interview with Doug Moe in yesterday’s post. It’s on line now and you can read it here.]

A fearsome orange wheel, spitting shreds of bright color, turning counterclockwise across the TV screen, moving from the blue of the Gulf to the brown-green of the land. I fall asleep to this image and I wake up with it. Hurricane Ike has replaced hurricane-level political discourse on the news. I suppose everything has its good side.

Madison is far from the Gulf, but the dawn is gray here too, even though we wont get the Ike rains until later in the day. No Ike rains doesn’t mean no rain, and at 7 a.m., when the Westside Community Market is just setting up, the tents are sagging under the force of water. The farmers look up and make mental calculations of how much water a tent cover can take.



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looking up at the big umbrella, toting the little one
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forcing the water off
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We buy veggies and flowers and springs of mint for the water jug in the fridge, and we make passing comments on the rain. Josie Pradella of Terra Source Chocolates, a newcomer to the market (and a most welcome addition) tells me that you can’t fight the elements, you just have to float with what the weather brings and I smile at that, because it is far easier to feel at peace with the elements if you’re munching an aronia-filled (locally sourced!) chocolate at 7:15 on a Saturday morning.



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I'm thinking, too, that it helps to have a good pair of galoshes.



good galoshes, old umbrellas
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I have been in tornado-like storms here, in the Midwest, and I know the throbbing noise of pounding rain and it should scare me, because moving through it ranks high on the list of dangerous things that I have done. But the sound of relentless rain reminds me more of drawing rainbows with colored pencils under the sloped roof that my grandfather built over the village house in Poland. I would listen for the claps of thunder and if there were none, I would keep drawing, endless pictures of setting suns and colorpacked rainbows.

The rain would pick up speed, and then slow down, and when finally, it would settle into a silent drizzle, we would step outside and smell the dampness. Never did it occur to me to call those days gray ones. Green, pungent, minty crisp.


Josie, of chocolate fame, is right to shrug at the clouds, the downpour, the sagging overhead umbrellas. It's raining. Umbrellas do sag. Besides, it doesn't feel all that gray at the market today, here in Madison. Wet, but not gray.



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the interview

Everyone in town knows Doug Moe. A columnist at the Wisconsin State Journal and before that at the Capital Times, he is widely read and much adored.

So of course, when he sent me an email asking if I wanted to chat about my new book, I said sure! Who would say no to a line or two from the pen of Doug Moe?

The key thing I retained from my days of talking to the press (when I worked as an attorney at the Center for Public Representation – a nonprofit advocacy organization) is that you keep your sentences short and you leave the reporter with soundbites. Everything else is irrelevant.

I prepared a two page outline of points about me, the blog, and the book. Keep the man focused on the benign, the lovely, the immaterial.

Doug sat at the Panera booth, waiting. Pad on table, pen ready.




He glanced over my outline, smiled, and went to his own questions.

Before I knew it, an hour had passed and I experienced what one must feel after a very successful visit to a therapist – all truths out on the table, the soul expunged, the stories duly noted.

Wait a minute: did I really just tell him about the fact that I’m scared of lightening and that my occasional travel companion, Ed, lives in a sheep shed? Did I describe to him how I got my job as a nanny in America? Did I admit that I am a terrible entrepreneur? And did I reveal my deep secret that way back when, I imagined myself to someday be a journalist?

Good grief.

Read all about it. In our Sunday paper.

a morning of drizzle

Black umbrellas belong elsewhere. In France, maybe. Yes, of course they do. Remember how deliciously moody they were back in my Normandy posts?

Madison is not – should not be – a black umbrella kind of town. It’s not that we’re a gaudy city. But we are quite preoccupied with our weather issues and it’s bad enough that we have to deal with an unreasonably long winter. We don’t also have to pander to the somber mood of a drizzly kind of day. Weather cannot control that much of our emotional space.

I walked up Bascom Hill and I noted with pleasure that a number of students resisted the black and chose, instead, to walk under patterns of lilac flowers or crimson stripes with badgers gallivanting across the surface. Umbrellas with attitude. The black ones? Do me a favor: toss them aside and start again. (Though I love the "flip flops in any weather" trend. I bet it'll stick through at least Thanksgiving.)



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commercial interests

It’s no secret that Ocean has donned a commercial negligee: it has added tiny notes here and there about how you can click your way to Ocean photo ownership any time you want.

Do I like selling things? Put it this way: I like making my photos available for those who want them, for whatever reason. I recently sold one to a woman who asked to use it as a wedding motif (it was of a place where her wedding would be). I felt warm and fuzzy for days after. And, perhaps more importantly, I am slowly learning that keeping Ocean afloat (can it be done?!?) does sometime require that I find ways to support it, other than by pulling out a credit card and hoping that a more generous economic stimulus package will make its way through Congress before the bill comes.

But, I refuse to engage in non-Ocean commercial activity here. No ads, no banners, nothing that is outside the bailiwick of the blog itself. So, Ocean will, in that sense, continue without commercial interruption.

Photos of the day? The bad news is that much of my time was spent at work, on campus. The good news is that I took a different bike path, since I had morning meetings in the southern corner of the university. So, rather than taking you along on the lakeshore path, I'll give you a different frame from my morning ride:



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And now let me return again to the matter of commerce. Tonight was the night to feast on meats and appetizers at Samba, a place where waiters parade with swords of "sizzling flesh," as Ed would call it.






We were there to host, wine, and dine visitors from China, who make things happen for Ed and his awesome business partner, Greg. For a handful of years (and may it all continue for decades and then some!), the Chinese men (plus one woman, but not at all a Sara Palin type) have been overseeing the production of machines designed by our two men of Madison (actually one is of Waunakee, but let’s not be fussy). It's a story in its own right, but here you see the key players:






It was a splendid evening. I always learn a lot about commercial interests when I hang around Ed and his partner and one thing that I learned today was that you make much more money selling computer controlled machines than you do selling photos.

cows in cafés

It’s the kind of day where the only cows I see are those suspended in a café on State Street – where I jumped out to get a cup for the long day of teaching.



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Typically, on days such as this, I’ll post a photo of the lakeshore path and say – here, look at this! Everchanging! Enjoy! Today, you get not only the café cows, but, in addition, a secret peek at what the view is like out the 9th floor Faculty Tower stairwell window at the Law School. Me, I’m on the 6th floor. But a quick visit with a colleague up on 9th lead me to pause and admire. Almost as good as the lakeshore path, don’t you think?



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for the love of goats

Is it 450 chickens and 32 goats? Or 450 goats and 32 chickens? Oh, I don’t need notes for that. There are way more chickens than goats on the farm.


I’m such a fan of goat cheese and such a steady customer of Dreamfarm farmstead goat cheese (sold at the Westside Community Farmers Market)! I have been meaning to go out and take a peek at all those goats who have so lovingly contributed to my cheese happiness. But, life interferes and so it wasn’t until today that I made the trek out west to mingle with the animals. Dreamfarm – to borrow from their label – “where goats browse on pastures and eat organic grain and hay.”

It happened that it was a rainy day. Still, I don’t have classes this afternoon and Diana Murphy, the head cheesemaker and goat keeper had a few minutes to spare (she runs the show with her husband Jim and a bunch of daughters, but hey, she is there, on the premises, tending to all those goats and chickens, so I will call her the CEO for practical purposes) and so Ed and I headed out to visit. Diana was waiting for us.



Diana Murphy of Dreamfarm


The farm's not too far from Madison. Just beyond Cross Plains. A very pretty drive at this time of the year because the corn and soy fields are starting to look golden. Rain notwithstanding.



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Let me say this: in the past few months, I’ve fallen in love with a handful of dogs that have crossed my path. A Labradoodle on Cape Cod. A Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier in Chicago. A mutt in Madison. But nothing, nothing prepared me for the surge of love I felt for these goats.



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Look at them! They run up to you, check out your backpack (if you have a backpack), they nuzzle you and look imploringly at your face, so that you just want to pick them up and place them in your lap!



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…At which point they throw back their ears and grin, looking for all the word like light aircraft, flying straight at you!



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Diana tolerated my quickly escalating (and very vocal) crush and then reminded me that goats need to be milked. Every day. Whether or not you have relatives in Poland, or yearnings for France, or daughters you absolutely must visit regularly on the east coast.

And the chickens? Remember, there are also happy hens. Gorgeous. Kind of shy though. Definitely not lap material.



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I’ve written before about my attitude toward chickens. They absolutely depleted the meadow by my grandparents’ village home in Poland. But Diana’s chickens are different. When they eat up the seeds and bugs and who knows what else, she moves them to the next slice of meadow.

So is it easy to raise chickens and sell eggs? You’d think yes. Think again. Moving the hens around – fine, there’s that. Picking up eggs from 450 hens daily, where each hen lays an egg 5 days out of the week, and then, by hand, scrubbing each egg clean and filling the boxes… Oh, it’s our evening activity, Diana tells me. Right. I surf the Net, try to imagine a blog post, munch on Angel Fluffs and worry about the work that I have to do tomorrow. Diana + family ensure that a bunch of families have wonderful eggs for the week ahead. Whose is the nobler task?

On our way out, we stop by the Dreamfarm cheesemaking facility. The cheese is already an organic product, waiting for certification. But more importantly, it is so very very excellent. I’m eating some right now. With dill and garlic. I could have selected one with other herbs. Nettle, for instance. All made by hand. Creamy, so very creamy! Jealous, aren’t you?

Sunday repose

Sunday idleness. It’s never that, here at home. Clean house, look out wistfully, do work. I keep my lazy clothes on. I suppose that’s something.

By early evening, I know I had avoided what should have been today’s call: to think great thoughts and imagine action steps to implement them. I mean, if you’re not going to be leisurely, nor social, shouldn’t you at least plan for a better tomorrow?

I took a walk around the block.

It is a problem when you live near a mall: a walk around the block becomes a walk around the perimeters of brick and concrete.

I watch others on break…










…And linger for a while to talk to a woman who comes to this spot regularly. To feed the quasi-urban animals.

They always come for the bread, she tells me.

Hers is a good use of a Sunday, no?

shopping

Sometimes I pity the farmers. Bad soil, lousy weather, Wisconsin bugs – it’s enough to make you reconsider.

Our images of the whole field to table thing are, of course, sweeter, gentler: young buds pushing their way up, growing and spilling their bounty into the harvesting machine (or hands). The farmer, smiling, piling this bounty into a truck, to bring it to our paved parking lot. Weathered faces and hands – so rewarding to see right up front, as we reach for the good stuff, anticipating the many meals that we'll make henceforth.


At the Westside Community Market, I see these vendor tables in the bright light of a sunny September morning, and I fill my basket, and it is all rather joyous.



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Back at the condo, Ed and I work on improving the storefront on the Ocean Store page of my website. If you have never tried to build your own click-through shopping cart on the Net, I’m telling you now – it is so complicated, so frustrating, that it’s enough to make you reconsider.

Ed has done the brunt of the work on it – days and nights of learning enough html code to make things work. Really, it has been one long nightmare. Much of it is beyond me, but what I have plunged into has been truly beyond hard.

All for your shopping pleasure. So that when you do eventually decide to buy this book, or some future book, or a photo, or cards for the holidays, or whatever, we’ll be all smiles and handshakes and kind thoughts about one another.

If creating merchandise is hard, creating a storefront for it is like working to get that squiggly worm out of an otherwise fine apple.

Uff. Happy shopping.

another perspective

Being born to a very political family (professionally and in their degree of expressiveness) inoculated me against an excessive verbal engagement in the political process. In fact, mostly, I like to stay silent. Arguing is so exhausting! It leaves me feeling depleted.

But, I do like to listen to others occasionally – both those on “my side” of the issues as well as those offering another perspective. And occasionally, when provoked, I will rattle off my latest reasons for feeling incredulous at the way constituents and political leaders shuffle around and arrange themselves prior to a major election.

And we are before a major election.

But mostly, I stay quiet.

Today, I biked to work using a different combination of paths and roads. Up Observatory Drive and down Bascom Hill, approaching the Law School from the Hall, over where Lincoln sits. It offers another perspective on the Mall and the green spaces where students bring their books, their laptops and their feelings of affection for one another.



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