fruit

If ever you need a break, head out to a farmette where berries and cherries grow. On a day that starts out chilly, but then turns cheerful. (Even as the cherries are wonderfully sour.)





A place of flowers. Big flowers. With bees working harder than us mortals.











And of course, berries.










(The rest of my time was indeed spent on work. I’m hustling with schoolwork, so that I can take the week-end off. Off and away. To where serious quantities of berries and cherries grow. I think.)

sunday

It has come to this: Sundays are my punishment for a heathen life. Lacking a congregation, a place of meditation, a reason to meditate on this day (over, say, Monday), I have punished myself fully by making it a day of work.

On Sunday mornings, I scrub my home clean.

Tired and needing respite, I put away the two sponges, one dust rag and one scouring pad and I take out my pressed black duds so that I can hike over to the shop and hustle some products to meet corporate goals.

I work for a decent place: corporate goals are reasonable, and indeed, today we do more than well by them, but it is unquestionably, without doubt, work.

By evening, I am spent. My legs have not been in their favorite position (reclining, preferably, on my coffee table) since sunrise.

I have one more errand to run and this is indeed the highlight: Ed zips me over on his motorbike to State Street, where, at Steep & Brew (the café), two artists (she photographs and he frames, or the other way around, or in conjunction with one another) are displaying their photos.





Me, I know one member of the pair from the Westside Community Farmers Market (often she helps her mom sell stuff – see previous post). But I’m here because it is so rare that one can feel great fondness for both the art and the artist(s). Not impossible, mind you (commenters, all of you – from Michigan to Massachusetts to Boat of Garten in Scotland, surely you know I’m thinking of you), but so rare.





Ed sits back and enjoys the free cookies and the break from the recent onslaught of my catapulting anxieties about life, work and all things in between.

I buy three beautiful cards, with photos that only people who understood farming from the core could take, and I go home. It’s a good ending to a not the easiest of days. Such good fortune. Wouldn’t it be terrible if the day began in a grand manner and then, after teetering, plummeted to an unforgiving end?

together (at last)

I don’t make my way to many wedding celebrations any more. People my age don’t change their marital status much. They may disengage, but I rarely get to see the re-engage part.

When my colleague, Ann, announced her plan to marry (and soon at that), I put her (and her partner/fiancé) down to being hopelessly romantic. Our planet is short on that category. Most are hopelessly confused. Bravo Ann for avoiding confusion.


Family. You don’t have to tell me it’s formed in many ways. And when it all comes together in one room, you have a chaotic splendidness that's positively enthralling.

Vignettes of family life. I had it there, right before me, at the Westside Community Farmers Market early this morning. Mother daughter, father daughter.















And I had it at a wedding celebration later in the day. Ed’s friends, after many many years together (she wanted a cake with the words: it’s about time, but the bakery refused), formalized their splendid union and threw a party.





Family poured in from far and wide and all I could do is watch and admire.















I thought – if you leap forward because you are romantically inclined and you have the support of friends or family, chances are you’ll do okay.





















But maybe you’re the loner type? The kind that prefers to read the Portable Curmudgeon alone in a café. The kind that perhaps finds all this family and marriage stuff unnecessary?





Oh, sure, sometimes it’s fun to stand alone.





But as for independence over partnership and family? I can’t agree with you. I’m too enthralled with the joys of togetherness. Young and old.

waiting

…for summer. For dinner. For soup. For bread. For better weather.

(on Ed’s motorbike, as the rain clouds pulled in on what is a record breaking cold July day)





(even though the corn stalks tell us summer’s in full swing)





We did get wet out there on the road. But, a warm haven of a place (La Baguette) was just a short ride away. And their bread was just out of the oven. (As always.) And their coffee was rich and hot.





And the people watching was thoroughly enjoyable.

(watching others wait for warm soup)





(and then watching them eat it, with zest)

around the corner

I wonder which is harder – to work afresh after having already worked earlier in the day, or to work at your second job on week-ends. Perhaps it’s the latter: you feel like you have given up any scrap of being free. You belong to somebody else every single day of the year. Except for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

It was only my second day lighting that moon of extra work (at a shop not too far from where I live). I still dressed with care – in the way that you do the first day of school and maybe the second, but not thereafter.

It struck me how lucky I am to have been interviewed by a gutsy hiring person with a sharp sense of the world out there. When the corporate office questioned picking a law prof for the job, unconvinced that I should want their small dollars, she did a masterful job sticking with my application. Such a good break for me, especially since I have as much experience doing this line of work as I had cooking professionally when I was hired (also by a gutsy woman with a sharp sense of the world out there) a decade ago to moonlight at l’Etoile.

Learning to function in new worlds is probably (after the dollars earned) the most gratifying part of taking a second job. I am reminded of first meeting Ed some years ago. He introduced me (at least tangentially) to the world of machines and engineering tricks and mechanical solutions to common problems I thought how cool it is to explore places where what you say or write matters less than what you think and do. Very quickly, Ed became my traveling companion, even in months that we stayed in Madison.

And I like this, too, about working now beyond Bascom Mall: the clock moves in a different way at hourly jobs. The goal is not to get something done, but to stay focused on continued action, but only for your set of hours – nothing more, nothing less. And after you punch out, no one cares where you head and what you do next. You’re out the door. Good bye until you punch in again.

We’re a small set, over at the place where I do my extra hours. Women, all women (how different than in a professional kitchen!), three, like me, filling in the gaping holes of underemployment, or as in my case perhaps -- overreaching (chasing goals that are just a little beyond the doable). None of us fit the mold of “woman picking up extra cash now that kids are older and she can get away more.” Indeed, I think I’m the only one who even has children.

There are never more than two of us at a time and at some point, I know I will be alone in the shop – opening it and closing, like the mother in the Umbrellas of Cherbourg movie, dusting off shelves in the quieter minutes. I like that image.

It’s cool outside now. An evening chill that warns of an unusually cold set of summer days ahead. I don’t mind. It’s warm in the little shop on the corner. And the smell right now is of fresh lemons.

rules of your game

As I shift between work spaces and I learn the new rules that are my framework at the new place, I think how tricky it is to float from one set of regs to another and make it appear that this and only this is your real way of being.

Many (young) people think that as you get older you gain freedom of being. In the simple refrain of the book, when I am an old woman, I shall wear purple. But I think the opposite is true: as you add new orbits (and you must, because more years almost inevitably puts you into more spaces) you must learn to navigate them differently and attentively or you’ll be seen as one of those loopy people about whom one says – oh, she must have just given up!

So I am one way at my moonlighting job and I am a different way at my primary job. And I am one way with this friend and a different way with another. And I was one way with my now ex-spouse and I am another way with an occasional traveling companion.

Okay. Nothing exceptional about that.

But then it struck me that once you are one way, a revolution must happen for you to become another way. Otherwise there’s no going back. Only a complete contextual flip will cause you to flip as well and even then, it’s not guaranteed.


At midday, Ed and I walk down to the Hilldale market. I am a stranger there and the vendors may as well be from another state – I recognize hardly any. We buy veggies – similar, of course, to the ones I see now at the Saturday Westside Community Farmers Market, but the context is so different that I resist purchasing. Only the thought of a veggie-less dinner makes me break down. Okay. Garlic. Tomatoes. A few potatoes. Okay. That’ll do.





We admire the potted perennials...





… Ed looks over at a table with baked goods. As he reaches for a bag of oatmeal raisin cookies, I’m thinking how he and I very quickly formulated rules of being toward the other. Little has changed since we first met nearly four years ago. From day one, we behaved in a certain way. And it is how we are today.

As we walk up the hill, away from the Hilldale market, feeling like strangers there but certainly not toward each other, I wonder if we will always be operating in the same way, or whether at some point, the context will change, a revolution will happen and one of us or both of us will be different.

celebrate

Bastille day. I adopted this holiday as one to take note of, way back when. Some thirty years ago, I did what I thought was the full French deal: I’d buy an American French baguette and a cheap Brie and a bottle of bubbly (of the alcoholic kind) and I would think – life is good.

Of course I liked Bastille Day. It was, for me, the default holiday. The Polish July 22nd was nothing to be proud of, the American July 4th wasn’t yet part of my identity. The French national day was a wonderful compromise. Smack between the two.

And now? Well, I’m American. July 4th is no longer someone else’s barbeque. Still, I have a weak spot for France’s big day. Does this translate to a celebration? On the one hand, I worried about food. I made a point of stopping by the Fabian’s team on my way home. They were in town to peddle the fish and shellfish they’d hauled up, fresh from the Gulf.





I consider it. Really I do. But I let the fish go. I can’t quite work up French enthusiasm for a fresh and honest dinner for one, and I’m eating alone tonight.

I buy some shellfish and freeze it.

The day pulls toward early evening. I’m to meet a friend for coffee. Except we don’t have coffee.






Things are looking pink now. Allons enfants de la patire…

At home, I put on a French movie. The DVD is warped. I turn to the Tour de France. No baguette, no cheese. But still, I have a little boxed rose left from Paris.

Le jour de gloire est arrive…


It’s not my holiday. I just don’t think I was meant to embrace a July holiday. They’re for people who have a blood commitment to their land. Me, I’m a floater. Commitment to people? Yes. To land? Not so much.

secret places

It’s such a nice idea – to be able to escape for a few minutes to a secret corner. It has to be lush of course. And hidden. A misfit in a brutal environment of urban concrete.





I had such a place in Warsaw: behind the park, a shaded alley with small homes. So unlike the apartment blocks in the city center! I don’t think many people knew about it. And of course, I kept the place to myself. I went there “to escape,” because adolescent girls often think they need to “escape” whatever uncomfortable realty is nipping at them.


And when you're past the angst of growing up? It's still there: the desire for a spot of heaven. Close to home.

It's a challenge to find such a place. I’m surrounded by the essentials: grocery stores, bookstores, movie houses, pubs, sushi bars – great, but that’s a different kind of escape. What’s my secret destination when I want to exhale after a tortured day of reading heavy, heavy cases?

This.





Hidden. Yet, just a few minutes stroll from my front door.





Lush now, in midsummer.





A garden. All it needs is a stone wall and a secret gate.

Eh, let’s not be greedy.

summer clouds

And we know all too well that, no matter how simple we want a day to be, how uncomplicated and straightforward, it’s really not up to us, is it?

I gave it a good effort, I think. Straightforward things: I scrubbed the condo clean. That’s a Sunday ritual. All dust and lime deposits removed. Done.

Then what? Typically, this will be a moonlighting day, but I’m not on a regular schedule yet. And so it turned into a biking day.





We pedaled over to our favorite café to make sure my photos were hanging straight. They were. And then? Well, I lost myself in a series of phone calls, each building on the previous one. And I thought – how much influence do we really have in the life of another? In the course of a lifetime – maybe. In the course of a day – not much.

And so the day dripped on.

At Ed’s farmette, I fought off mosquitoes and surveyed the fate of the various flowers I’d planted in better bug-less days.

I admired the work of the farmers in the plots next to his.





When the light began to fade (ever so slowly), I said – let’s go home.

The clouds were funny tonight. On the bike ride home, it's almost as if they were trying to make a statement. But what?

possible

A commenter wrote that you tend to get more work done when there is more work to do.

Yes, you're right about that.


Saturday: up at 6 for an hour of reading (news, blogs, the usual morning fare). Down to the gym for the next hour. I try to read a book while on the machines, but I’m distracted by the Today show on TV – the story is about moonlighting. Not surprisingly, a growing number of workers are looking for that second job. Suddenly I am immensely grateful that I found one in a place that is so incredibly unobjectionable.

By 8, I shake a groggy Ed and we go to the Westside Community Farmers Market. Quickly. Efficiently.





















Grilled foods tonight. Good. Got them now. And fruits for breakfast. Shopping done.





A shower, with time for the hair to dry. And time for the most important morning ritual – breakfast on my small condo terrace. This part calls for a leisurely mindset. It’s no good otherwise. An espresso on the run just hasn’t the power to coax me into a proper mood.

By 9:30, I’m dressed and ready to head out for work.





We open the place up, the manager and I. And we talk. About her move here when the store opened, about life, families, the sales approach, the product.

Strands of conversation, cut short when the door opens and a customer comes in. It’s a beautiful day outside and so there aren’t many here, shopping, but there are some. The undecided ones. The young girls who have absolutely no intention of buying anything. The ones who know what they want because they once had it and they sure would love to have it again (even if the memory is a little fuzzy about the what and when of the purchase).

The sun moves across the floor and I am so glad that the place has windows where you can see that. None of this sequestered mall stuff so that when you go out you notice with shock that the day has changed and you have not witnessed the moment of transformation.

And then I am done. For now. And I think how mellow this is – this morning at…. my place of additional work. How lucky that it should be this way.

I walk back slowly. On another day I would rush. Maybe. I would still have energy to write. Maybe. There it is – cautious optimism!

I call Ed. I’m done! We walk over to Border’s where I sip a coffee and look at Maile Meloy’s wonderful new book of short stories. Ed buys it for me. As a present.

Back home, I heat up the grill and get the market veggies out. The Tour de France is on. I think about someday hiking the Pyrenees. Maybe. Someday.

the writing on the wall

I’ve only told a handful about the exact nature of my additional (week-end) employment. Their reactions have been, I suppose, in character. My mother, struggling to maintain tact within her usual frank approach to family and life in general, asked – but, didn’t they think you’re too old for this job? Don’t they want to place out front someone who looks, well, you know, better? Not that you don’t look well. For your age. (I assured her that the company maintained nondiscriminatory practices.)

Ed’s reaction has been a continued preoccupation with melting metals, or whatever else he may be reading at the moment:





When I nudge him to take note of this significant change, he remains unfazed -- Oh, pick you up after work then?

I want to say (and I do say it) – no, you will not. I will no longer have time for what you do so well (which is a moment-based existence that adds on bits of life incrementally – sort of like a domino chain: you can’t tell what the next piece will be, except that it will somehow relate to the previous one).

Ed is very adept at blocking the subtle differences between the schedule of a person with two jobs and a person with no job at all (he retired early).

I am mostly surprised, however, at my own reaction to this slight twist to my life henceforth. It seems like a major admission of failure. And this is something so new to me, that I almost cannot continue the conversation with myself about what comes next. It’s too distressing. Upbeat people are not good at acting out distressing turns in the road.

Of course, the failure that I now suddenly recognize, as vividly as I recognize that my right hip is lower than my left (once I was told of this, I see it so plainly, even though for years this had completely escaped my notice) – is the failure of fitting in what I thought for so many decades I was slated to do: the writing of the goddamn book that we all probably think we have within us, except that I thought it especially strongly.

Perhaps more perceptive souls saw this coming. It could be argued that I have had plenty of months to do well by my ambitious leanings. People who want to finish manuscripts don’t cross oceans the minute school’s out. They don’t kayak down the Wisconsin River just because the weatherman notes the absence of thundershowers in the forecast. They don’t wait for the writer's shack to be finished because, really it may not be the next domino piece, or the one after, and even though Virginia Woolf insisted on a better writing environment for herself, she could afford to be fussy: she was already an accomplished person before she said (or rather Nicole Kidman said, but I imagine she got it right) -- I need to return to London.

On the upside, I still wake up each day making up sentences in my head. My groggy senses haven’t caught up with the suddenly distressingly real possibility that I may never get them on paper. In the gray light of the pre-morning sky, I am still working on my unfinished manuscript.

this moment

In a touching NYT essay about her mother who slowly is losing her memory to Alzheimer’s, Elizabeth Kadetsky notes how forgetfulness does allow you to dissociate from history, all history, painful and pleasant, so that you come to appreciate only the moment, nothing that came before it, nothing that would perhaps disturb the pleasure of experiencing whatever touches you now.

I am, as everyone else is, attached to memory. If I do not have a daughter at my side, I at least have the recollection of our most recent conversation, and of our time together, and of her (their) entire childhood.

On the other hand, if I were not burdened by the memory of yesterday’s coldness, I would believe, just based on what I am experiencing at the moment, that we are having a pleasant as pie summer season.


I bike to campus today and urge Ed to bike with me. Being more “in the moment” than perhaps anyone I know, he agrees. Why not…

And it is a lovely little ride.





The lake is pretty, yes, totally pretty (forgetting the ice that covers it for so many winter months... long winter months), sailboats and other floating devices bounce around in playful summer winds (and children bounce with them…)





…(and some bounce too much so that the boat topples over…)





…really, it is quite a perfect little day.


Bascom Hill is empty now. Mostly empty. In any case, there are no Badger red sweatshirts on this warm (enough) day. The only red on the hill is the red of the old brick Science Hall. Oh, and of the young woman, turning ever so slightly pink. In her red bikini.





I take Ed down to the food huts on Library Mall. This is my stomping ground, not his, I know my way around: I know that lattes are on sale on Thursdays at the bookstore, for instance. I know all that. But he, too, has memories here. Distant ones, but memories nonetheless. The juice guy is an old buddy, and the fruit vendor was in his housing coop.





I say to Ed – and I come down here nearly every day, no matter how cold… But he’s not listening. He sees the burrito stand. At the moment, he wants nothing more than a double burrito. With hot sauce.


We bike back the long way – via the Southwest path. And this is the way I bike when I meet a friend on Monroe Street or have dinner on Chapman. Ed’s grinning. Really? It’s pretty here in the summer, he tells me.

skip the robin

A friend of mine wrote that her mother, who winters in Florida and spends the summer in the Michigan family home, is considering cutting out early and returning to Florida in a couple of weeks. The cold Midwestern summer is dragging her down.

I’m with her on that one. There’s something terribly wrong about a July that offers up both a high of only 65, at the same time that it thrusts upon us the usual swarms of mosquitoes and over-air conditioned interiors. Life is brutal this year in the Midwest.

It is not surprising, therefore, that I stayed at my home desk (response to commenter question: the writer’s shed is taking the path of all great cathedrals of Europe: it is turning into a multi-stage project, with each phase taking years and epochs to complete).

Here are some more depressing notes:

I cooked broccoli soup for supper. How “winter” is that!

My movement was of the indoor kind – in the gym.

I skipped the Wednesday market around the corner. Too cold. Never mind that vendors were equally cold, and for a significant number of morning hours.

I watched the Tour de France because the race was along the Mediterranean and I was jealous. Of the Tour de France. That's beyond insane.



I have a photo for you – it is of a robin. I post pics of robins in March to remind myself (and you) that spring is about to happen. Let me not post it. Too sad to resurrect themes from March.

small dog

Oh, such a beautiful moon there, somewhere behind the clouds! Full moon, the one over a river, moon river, river made beautiful by the moon. Time to chase it once again.

And I don’t mean time to leave, time to go anywhere at all. Quite the contrary – time to stay put and puff up the reserves a bit. Time to moonlight.

I applied for week-end and evening work and today I was called back with an offer. In the days of a tough economy, of furloughs and pay cuts, I am grateful that the place I chose to put down my application said – start anytime.

Although I don’t hide here that I am a law prof, neither do I write about my work at the university. So much do I avoid it that I sometimes think Ocean makes me look like I do not have a job (if you write about a glorious moment on the lake and that becomes the post for the day, doesn’t it seem as if that’s all there was to that day?).

With my moonlighting, I decided to take the opposite approach. I will not mention the place of work (at least for now), but I wont be so reluctant to mention my hours there. (Within limits: I mean to keep my bread well buttered.)

I’ll say this: I chose a place that sells something I like.

I’ll be the little dog there – the new hire, the lowest rung on the ladder.





And that’s a good thing. Every once in a while, it’s useful to take some of the loftiness out of your own environment. To scrub a few floors that are not your own.

So, sweet moon, thank you for this offer of work. So long as I have the energy to do it all, I’ll try to do it all.