Jeremy, I am sooooo sorry!

Last night I received an email from the daughter of my closest friends in Warsaw. She is a woman of great poise and intelligence. And tact. She writes this:

i z przerazeniem stwierdzilam, ze Jeremy propaguje mowienie "zzzzCoca", jak rozumiem za Twoja namowa. hi hi, nic dziwnego, ze moga sie wtedy kelnerzy patrzyc dziwnie. ogolnie przyjetym zdrobnieniem od coca-coli jest "cola", "coca" zas oznacza kokaine....

Oh shit! (forgive me for being crude, the situation calls for it)

For those who do not speak Polish, it reads more or less thus:

With great dismay, I concluded (from reading my comment to his post here) that Jeremy is encouraging the use of the term “zzzz Coca,” as I understand it, under your tutelage. [Jeremy, my fellow traveler to Poland, asked how to order “with coca cola” in a restaurant. Being savvy in slang, I said: ask for “z Coca"; “z” means with, and “Coca” is slang for Coca Cola.] He he, it’s not surprising then that waiters looked strangely upon him. The colloquial term for Coca Cola is “cola.” “Coca,” on the other hand, means cocaine.

Damn! I knew there was a slang term. But it’s been years since I had to order Coca Cola for anyone! Jeremy: I’m sorry for getting it wrong and for making you look like a cocaine junkie to all Poles you interacted with on your trip.

How can you laugh When you know I’m down

First of all, if you’re looking for a post detailing my own mental breakdown or decline – forget it. This ain’t it. I’m writing about a movie. A very funny movie.

I would have missed it but for Saul & Mel – the two who are ensuring that this summer I do not fall into a state of cultural nothingness. But they know how I feel about French films and so yesterday afternoon, there we were, sitting at the Hilldale theater along with 6 other people, all of them over the age of 80, all dripping with sweat under a broken air-conditioning system. A situation made to bring out the giggles, no?

Okay, here’s why I adored the film (which, btw, received a scathing review in our own Cap Times but was thrown many plump tomatoes elsewhere). Yes, I’m nuts about the French farce. I’m completely won over by films that have no story line, or an implausible story line and yet still manage to charm you. The acting has to be superb (as it was in this film) and the setting authentic (ditto here). After that – it’s one big pull into the saga that details the peculiarities of human nature.

Apart from my two partners-in-viewing, I was the only one laughing out loud. Maybe the rest could not keep up with the subtitles. Maybe they were napping. Maybe they were in it for the popcorn. But really, how many movies in the last five years have caused me to laugh out loud? Perhaps one other, except I cannot at the moment remember what it was.

What’s it about? Well, suicidal depression for a start. And helping another. This second theme is what causes critics to have a fit because the implausibility here is just outrageous. And yet, I’m thinking that it’s not. I can well imagine a situation where you find yourself spiraling into a giving mode, while someone, the beneficiary, hardly even notices your efforts on their behalf.

I’m not going to ruin the movie for anyone by even hinting at the tragic/comic (maybe none of the above!) ending. But here’s a big plug: most of the story takes place in a Parisian restaurant. I mean, even if you hated the movie, how awful can it be to sit for two hours and watch people eat French food?

The title: après vous

Spying games

I come back home and inspected the premises. Ah! They had spent some time in the master bedroom! A short pause in the living room, a peak at the other rooms. Good sign – they’d ventured down to the rec room.

I remember this kind of detective work twenty years ago when we were selling our little condo. [Oh yes, being city people, we thought nothing of making our first home purchase be a condo, even when there were only maybe two condo projects in all of Madison and everyone was so suspicious of that form of home ownership that we absolutely could not sell it when the time came to move. In the end my close friend from Law School bought it, I swear because I was bursting with babies and she felt sorry for me. It was a very small condo – smaller than the apartment I’m moving into next month.]

It’s the same now as we proceed with the sale of the house: I vacuum all carpeted surfaces and scoot out. Then I come back and study the footprints. Crazy, I know. Sort of on the same level as biking around the block and staring at the people who have come to look – evaluating them as potential buyers. Hmmm… they have a baby. That’s good, a baby should grow in this house – make it her home. A minivan rather than an SUV. Good, good. Why aren’t they saying anything about the beautiful flowers outside? Did they notice all my signs about this being a pesticide-free lawn? Have they kicked the Chemlawn habit?

What am I saying, they just came and looked. There’s no UHaul outside the door yet. They just looked. I’m still safe here. This place is still under my stewardship.

Daughters

I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately (mine are grown, living a thousand miles away).
On my long drive to the farm this morning, I was listening to NPR and they chose to play Edvard Elgar. Wow. My daughters played strings in the symphony orchestra not so long ago. The little one would sing Elgar with me in the car, I remember that.

Daughters. I did many shameful things in my life, but in terms of direct impact, one of the more shameful was that I found a daughter-journal and one day, I read an entry. I wish I had not, but I did. And then it tortured me. And I could not let it go. And finally I told her – right in the midst of her college tour! In the Admissions office of Amherst, I was admitting to her that I had snooped! And she forgave me.

Daughters. My other little one. You have never seen anyone dance like her. No, I mean it. For verification purposes, let me brag: she was Clara in the Civic Center’s annual production of the Nutcracker. Man, that girl danced! And then one day she did not. Because dancing is an all or nothing thing. You dance, or you do other things. She made that decision when she was a wee 13, being arguably Madison’s best of the best dancers then, to let it go. So that she could do other things.

Someone wrote in the most dunce-ish of emails received by me in the last month that children turn on you if you don’t be careful.

I know nothing of this.

My house is full of markers of how they grew up. As I get ready to let it go, I have to remind myself every minute of each day: it’s only a house. It’s only a house.

...Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets to the ocean*

I promise I’ll stop soon with the quotes. It’s just that there is some poetic thorn out there and once it wedges itself into your day, it’s hard not to let it drive your text (and drive the reader crazy, I’m sure).

Today, I was going to go for one last time to the Flower Factory – the place to get any kind of flower you may want to put in to your garden. The afternoon dry heat has done wonders in terms of diminishing Madison’s mosquito population, but it has had a miserable effect on my garden out front. Even though I am abandoning it soon and moving downtown, I can’t stand to see its sad little face. I feel it needs one small little pick me up.

But I lacked the oomph to set out. The afternoon came and went and what do I have to show for it? One Ocean post and a trip with Mr. B to the grocery store. [On the return trip, the additional grocery bag toting foods I could not fit into Mr. B’s pouch banged on the wheel with regular thumps and by the time I reached my house, there were great gashes in the bag. I suppose I should be happy that the cherries and Bunny Luv carrots did not leave a trail on the virtually level road I peddled down on.]

Earlier, I dug out my various ragged books of poems and was reminded that poets are typically even sadder than I am, which is saying a lot. True, my standards – Neruda, Szymborska, the Brits – they have at least as much admiration for Beautiful Things Out There as they have sorrow for when Things Are Not Working Out, but still, their voices swell and soar and you can usually cut out snippets that appear sad even if they are not totally intended that way.

You should see the stuff I did not use, for fear of appearing over the edge! I did store it in a Word document in case the malaise of today is only a small foothill on the mountain slope of misery. Not likely, it being such a beautiful Madison summer season, but you never know.

* Neruda actually writes “sea,” not ocean, but my blog is not nicknamed “sea;” I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded the slight adjustment.

thus we salute thee with our early song*

Oh so early, my song this morning was at the daybreak level of early.


watching the sun crawl up between the branches


I know, Ocean appears to be obsessively geared toward irritating Tonya with coffee posts and photos, but how could I resist this one?

coffee & corn





corn close-up. with wild daisies.


Where am I? I returned to the farm where the old oaks grow on a kind invite to spend the morning there with my camera. The coffee on the deck made it almost impossible to hoist myself out of a blissful state of repose and head out into the fields. But I did, I did. The light beckoned.

birches


yahara r.


The people who live there are working toward restoring some of these overgrown fields and returning them to prairie plants and wildlife. To me, the place is beautiful already, but I see the potential for a better balance. The invasive plants (whose names I always get wrong, so don’t even bother thinking you’re going to learn anything here at Ocean) clutch at the soil so ferociously that it’ll take many seasons to get them to let go. And move elsewhere. Like, to the suburban yard I am fighting to keep in order.

parsnip maybe?


creating a path through canary grass


Under the orange sticks of the sun The heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again**

The morning coaxed me into a better frame of mind, that’s for sure. So I am extremely grateful for the guided trek through fields and forests. Though, in addition to pushing through grass that threatened to swallow you whole, occasionally, you would come across sinister sights such as this:


terrifying oak


I survived. And thrived.

P.S. Being late for the farmers market caused me to reconsider going downtown. Instead, I went to the westside offshoot. Damn it, I liked it! SO disloyal, I know. But the crowds were nonexistant and the prices were better, and even late in the morning, I could still pick up these:



at a dollar a bunch, how cool is that!


* Milton, again.
** Oliver, again.

Why do I love you so?

Because you are so pretty to look at?

at jo's: sip it with the Times and a round of chess

at jo's: sweeten it (no!) or drink it plain

at jo's: outside, on a summer afternoon

I did the bold thing today. I bought my first latte at Jo’s. Jo’s Tazzina is the closest café to the apartment I’ll be moving to (in the Bassett ‘hood) and in a month or so, it will be my place of choice for a latte.

I have been reluctant to try a cup thus far. What if I hated it, what if the barista was without brewing brains? What if it just did not measure up?

But it did. And oh, are the colors good for camerawork!

[Tonya, I am like an unleashed animal around a latte - I cannot help myself with the camera. Ocean is but a vessel for my coffee-posting crazies.]

Left to die

Being a post-war baby in Poland can really cause you to enter the world not kicking and screaming, but coughing and gasping. I was not a healthy little number. By age two (and I mean 2 days), I seem to have been pegged as the one who couldn’t stomach life. By the next two (months this time), I managed to develop the dreaded pneumonia which, without antibiotics, and when added to the fact that I was not eating, was pretty much the kiss of death.

My mother likes to recount this as one hopeless situation. So what did she do? She took me to the village, left me with my grandparents and went back to work in the city (after all, she had one healthy one gurgling in the play pen already).

I have to believe that she shed many a tear, expecting (as she tells it) a little wooden coffin with the limp body of her baby, whom she had barely named some weeks earlier, there - waiting for her upon her next return to the village (they had no phones back then).

I always think that story, which is supposed to be ultimately upbeat (what do you know! On the strength of milk squeezed straight from the cow’s warm udder, you pulled through! -- I am told), is maybe a sign that abandonment works in my favor. True, I was not really abandoned, but I certainly was left to…well, die, actually (if I am to believe my mother’s chipper-ish choice of words).

So if you ditch me for one reason or another – I will surprise you and I will thrive. Fresh warm milk -- organic maybe? -- is all it takes. That is the most obvious conclusion to draw from this. It is, however, not the correct conclusion.

Where there’s a will there’s a way; where there’s no will there’s no way.

Sometime in the last 24 hours I realized that I have too much on my plate right now. Which then caused me to ‘fess up to myself that I am one basket case. And I have run out of steam. Normally, under such circumstances I am one to push the balls to the wall. I cut to the chase, go the extra mile and get things done. No lollygagging for me.

But it’s different now and I am making no bones about it. Each day this month I have been running like a chicken with its head cut off. Until now. Instead of putting the pedal to the metal, I am sitting here stumped and I know I’ll stay here thus til the cows come home. And I don’t even have cows.

Eat ‘n run

Ah, kef! How great it is to watch a person work so damn hard and then succeed!

Did you ever have one of those days where you think: okay, it’s just hours. Eventually three o’clock will turn into four o’clock and four will turn to five and so on and so forth. You write mediocre posts and you feel your day is greatly below mediocre.

Then, as dusk turns to very little light, suddenly you get swept up in a celebration of someone’s success. Kef was all about big time success, and tonight one could walk and eat and drink and walk and so on and so forth, and before you know it, her success rubs off and it begins to feel like it’s YOUR SUCCESS! – even though in this case, I did nothing more than walk and eat and etc.


eat 'n RUN

eat 'n run and DRINK

EAT 'n run

Kef: congrats on your Ph.D.! And on so much more (and you know exactly what I mean, my friend).

Revelation, part 2

(10:00a.m. phone rings, my heart leaps)
Hello??
It’s me.

Oh. Sigh... Don't mind me -- I am only reminding myself of days when I waited for the boyfriend to call. Now again I keep hoping it’s that certain someone…
A boyfriend??
No, a realtor with a house sale offer. Sigh…
Anyway, aren’t you teaching now?

In ten minutes…
You sound desperate! Don’t tell me! You want to meet up for another fix of …coffee* ??
(meekly:) …yes.

And so here we are again, in the late afternoon, only this time the size of the cup has grown. I’d say we have an addiction going here.



*this same person threw out slanderous attacks against the java joes among us here.

Oh come on! Everyone, just quit stealing my thunder!

So I crashed on Mr. B three weeks ago. Immediately after, I learned that Lance crashed exactly the same time, on a practice run in France. Yeah, yeah, coincidence.

Then, yesterday, I get this email from a friend:

The leader of the Tour de France Dave Zabriskie fell today in the final minute of the team time trial as his team was trying to beat Lance Armstrong's team. His injury rivals yours (EXACT location!). He ripped his treasured yellow jersey, too. His team finished without him only 2 seconds behind Armstrong's. Unfortunately for Zabriskie, he has to get up tomorrow and ride day after day some 2000 more miles.

Yeah, yeah – coincidence.

I’m unruffled. These racing giants – they race, they crash, it’s their life.

But this evening I hear that the president, Mr. Geroge W, himself wants in on the limelight. While the G-eighters were most likely schmoozing, he was out biking in Scotland. And then he crashed. He ran over a cop! How stupid is that????And here, what’s wrong with this paragraph (from CNN)?

The president's bicycle was damaged, and he returned to his hotel in an SUV that
had been trailing him as he rode with a Secret Service agent, McClellan said.

Our president took his own bicycle with him on a trip to a G8 summit? No! It cannot be! And someone was driving an SUV in Scotland? I have NEVER seen an SUV in Scotland. True, I have not been to Scotland since they started manufacturing SUVs, but I can just imagine what the Scotts think of SUVs. Pretty much what I think of SUVs (mind you, I have rented one two times on family vacations just to see what the thrill was).

There are also a few words about our president’s embracing attitude toward the person he injured:

Bush "visited" with the police officer for some time after the accident and asked White House physician Dr. Richard Tubb to monitor his situation at the hospital, McClellan said.

Why the quotes around visited? Did he not really visit? Did it not go well? Did the officer resist? Is there a law suit brewing? And what’s with offering Dr. Tubb's services? Who even has a physician called ‘tubb’? And FYI, Mr. president, health care in the UK is readily available. So, your largesse is not needed.

Okay now, people, settle down with your bikes. Next thing you know I’ll be reading about the pope crashing during an afternoon spin for an espresso in Rome.

Revelation

I can’t believe it: there is a combination of roads that allows me to bike from downtown Madison to my house, without an incline steep enough to require even one single shift in gears. Today I finally mapped it out. I feel the joyous realization that I am now embarking on the easy life. Goodbye toned, muscled thighs, hello pleasure! And really, I never ever wanted to look like this.

[photo from smartcycles.com]

More like this:

Another discovery: some people appear in their blogs to have great disdain for something, possibly hoping to elicit sympathy and kind words from like-minded readers, but all along, you know what they are? Closet java junkies!

Today, as I put my own cup down on the table, next to hers, I thought – what the heck am I seeing here? It sure is one frothy cup of tea from the professed lover of the brewed leaf. No leaf there: it’s a kissin’ cousin of my own latte!

I don’t know why she drinks it with a straw. I don’t know.

Zakopane and Paris: shared fate

This spring, I had again returned to the mountain town of Zakopane in Poland. Less than 100 kilometers from Krakow, it nonetheless took over four hours by train to get there (something about the tracks being poorly designed). So I took the bus on my way out, cutting my journey by more than an hour, but adding a load of misery as the bus stopped and snailed its way on the winding narrow road.

This is the town that put in a bid for the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Poles hoped for a stunning upset of the frontrunner, Torino. What they got was a stunning kick in the pants in the first round of voting.

Zakopane: still a favorite way of getting around

Today, as the Committee announced its selection of London as the 2012 Olympic site, I have to think that more than the substance of the package was being judged. It is said that this was all Blair’s doing and that has to be right. Even watching from the sidelines, I am often taken in by his speaking talents. My class would be so much better if it were taught by Tony Blair!

Still, I have to feel sad for the Zakopane that never made it past round one and the Paris that kept hanging in there until the end. My Paris photo is now but a sad reminder of how voting so often produces sucky, disappointing results.

Venting with a venti

When you are dealing with a crazed person, it's best to not get yourself all hot and bothered. A confrontation isn't going to set things right, especially if you are in a tango with a big gun and you are only a wee little fish. I know that. I'm not going to use foul language and spit fire when the gun is pointing at my forehead. I'm going to be docile and wimpy and do a quick retreat.

But when I get to my computer, I can let loose.

Bottom line: I think it was entirely inappropriate for Miss driving-huge-SUV to blare her claxon at little me and Mr. B, just because she did not like the fact that I was leaving the parking lot, holding on to a latte with one hand, and steering Mr. B with the other.

I admit it isn’t optimal to be biking and looking after a steaming latte, extra hot, especially when you have a sprained thumb so that the whole experience causes you great pain, at the same time that the Whole Foods sack is bouncing around your rear tire because somehow it got loose on the ride up Mineral Point hill. But the distance is short and few things bring me as much pleasure these days as the thought that I soon will be home, sitting back and enjoying my long deferred afternoon latte.

And really, what damage am I doing to anyone? I’m careful. The ride from the café home is uphill, so it’s not as if I can speed.

But the irony, the irony: me on my little Mr. B – what’s our horse power? Maybe a quarter of a horse, an old lame horse at that? And the SUV? How many horses does that one have under its hood? So there she is, Miss driving-huge-SUV, talking on her cell phone and driving this monster machine with one hand and honking her horn at me, and screaming that Mr.B, my latte and me – we’re an unsafe combination.

The nerve.

A tale of two sillies

While the country was mesmerized by fireworks, the following conversation migrated from a Madison neighborhood last night:

Can I bring anything tonight?
Shears.
Shears?
For hacking away weeds and plants in my yard.

I have enough in my own.
I have more.

I have more.
(third voice pipes in): I have more.

Mine are out of control.
Mine are out of control.
(third voice pipes in): mine are out of control.

[Let's compare:]


Ocean front & Ocean back




TShow front & TShow back

I wish I lived in an apartment.
(third voice): I wish I lived in an apartment.
I am going to live in an apartment.

Lucky! I’m going to make the change soon.
(third voice) I’m going to make the change soon.
I am making the change. Soon.

I ain’t got no hot water and they shut off the heat Can you loan me some money for something to eat*

Savannah oak interlude

On the way to Milwaukee’s Summerfest, I stopped at a farm where oak trees three times my age grow along the banks of the Yahara River.

The last time I was excited by something that grew in the wild on a Wisconsin farm was … I can’t think when. But yesterday I was shown wild cotton grasses and gnarly oaks, sweet blackberry brambles and black walnut trees, and the stream that eventually becomes the Yahara – all making me think that there's something to the words “take Manhattan just give me that countryside!”

bridge over untroubled waters



sizing up the oak trunk


Oh, the festgrounds were crowded..



From there it was just a … two hour zip to Milwaukee’s lakefront Summerfest.

Do Ocean readers know about Summerfest? Advertised as the biggest music festival in the country (by what measure? number of performers? number of visitors? number of concurrent stages? number of beers consumed by attendees?), it is first and foremost a bargain! One fee ($12) and you’re in: see as many musical numbers as you want, stay as long as the bands are playing.

Okay, so you have to eat and drink and you can’t bring in your own stuff.

Think you’re going to see photos of your typical greasy fair foods? Think again. With jambalaya, corn on the cob, roasted chicken and strawberries dipped in chocolate, along with seemingly bottomless wine coolers, I had a feast. Of course, the feeling of “this is a bargain” quickly wears off, but hey, you're paying for the food, the setting, the noise, the people-watching!

jambalaya over beer

A Shocked Michelle


Almost forgot. The music. It’s all about who is singing, of course, but the show is also in the audience. Summerfest is 100% Milwaukee. Yeah, I know, the audience is from all over, but somehow Milwaukeeans set the tone. You get the feeling that after the show, they’d like to take off on their Harleys and head into the sunrise, muscle shirts wipping their torsos, barely covering the elaborate tattoos. I felt at home (because of the tattoo, not the Harley).


Maybe I exaggerate a small bit. And I don’t even have many photos to back me up here. I had been so taken with the Savannah oaks that I used up most of my battery life on the farm, leaving me wondering when oh when will I get myself a back-up battery. The benefit? The post will be shorter as a result.





Michelle Shocked was one hell of a singer though and would have been great to take many photos of. The audience as well – especially the delicious views of several hundred Wisconsinites wiggling their butts on command (Michelle’s song demanded it).


"turn away from me and shake that butt!"


What would you be like if three of your boyfriends were driven to commit suicide?

Maybe you’d be singing dark songs to a packed, adoring audience. Like Lucinda Williams did this night.

Oh no, I would not succumb to that kind of thing – where you stake out seats hours in advance just so you can be in the third row, literally at the singer's feet. No, I would not do that, would I? Peer pressure! My fellow Lucinda enthusiasts, like me, were willing to sit through an entire performance of the Hacienda Brothers (you’re kidding! never heard of them? where have you been?) just to claim good seats for Lucinda.

I thought young people could take the loud music in stride. Or maybe she was just blocking the Hacienda Brothers and forgot to take the plugs out afterwards. BTW, cowboy hats are in at Summerfest!

Lucinda was awesome. You have to admire a true comeback, where a singer has a dismal beginning, then gets herself a Grammy in her mid-forties and is drawing huge crowds of young people (okay, and me – but that’s fitting) at the age of 51.


Is it the dead boyfriend thing that makes her face look so defiant? So steady? And is it her history of tough living that makes her look to the lyric book to jog her memory with many of the songs?


Lucinda Williams singing songs from "World Without Tears"

Regardless, she had the audience on their feet. You could not stand still – her music went right from the stage to your gut. Probably the best concert I’d been to in years.

[Thanks, Saul & Mel, for insisting that I go, for driving, for the whole day!]

* American Dream by Lucinda Williams

The day Ocean's author was rocked into silence

I went for a run early this morning. I do that occasionally just to challenge myself, because between Mr.B and my walking partners, I have pretty much taken off my running shoes for the year.

How good a runner am I? If I take on a hilly terrain and brisk-walk it in 50 minutes, I can do the same at a jog in 40 minutes. So pretty lousy.

I was greatly discouraged. The rest of the morning was spent at locking myself up with lots of reading material and ignoring my physical self.

As a result, blogging was out of the question.

When I rejoined the world, my favorite phone caller was there jingling away. That caused me to hole myself up all over again.

I'm out again, but in a few minutes some kind folks are sweeping me away to Summerfest in Milwaukee. I was reluctant to go. NO ONE SHOULD REGARD ME AS GOOD COMPANY RIGHT NOW! But they persisted and so I'm off. A real post will follow. Tomorrow.

Eastward ho!

This morning I set out for the east side. You might think I was stalking this guy who lives out there, but no. I had another meeting at Mother Fools coffee house and I thought Mr. B might enjoy the adventure.



Hey, what do Ocean and Mother Fool's have in common?

For non-Madison readers, let me summarize it thus: east side people have this thing where they are in love with their ‘hood. Willie Street to an east-sider is like the Black Madonna is to a Catholic Pole. East side people don’t typically like to admit to any great affection for west side people. Phrases like “stuck up” and “snotty” come up. “Homogeneous” is another. And the dreaded word: “suburban.” West siders are soooo suburban.

Within the west side bunch, you have near-west siders, who think they are more like east siders in their funkiness and then you have far-west siders. Near-west siders don’t like far-west siders. They want to distance themselves from the suburban image. And that funkiness complex, too: it comes up.

At this moment I live on the far west side. I got news for you, near-west siders: you’re not more funky than I am, you’re just more rich! Your house costs twice as much as mine.

Me – I like the east side just fine and today I absolutely loved it and felt a great deal of jealousy, verging on rage: they have one of the best bike paths running through it and it is level! No hills, no ups and downs, none of it: flat as can be. Mr. B and I were in heaven.

So there I am, wiling away the morning hours, when a familiar sight comes right into my field of vision:


Oscar? Note the (empty) glass of iced coffee... It has to be!

If this doesn’t appear familiar to you, take a run through cyberspace here.

No, no, Oscar was not stalking me nor I him. It’s just that east siders, they like to band together in public spaces.

My Mo Fo morning made me very very late for the farmers market. So late that Anne of Fantome Farm no longer had any goat cheese left. How can one eat 6-grain crackers without goat cheese? The good thing about being kind to the farmers is that they give you the shirt off their back and, more importantly, their sample containers if they don’t have anything to sell you. Anne: you saved my crackers for the week to come.



Mr. B was happy enough carrying the whole loot home. Uphill -- it being the tiresome west side.

Where Ocean’s author gets in over her head, in rough waters

I recently met someone who is an extreme sailing enthusiast (in addition to being an in-his-spare-time Hoofer's instructor, for those here in Madison who know a Hoofer when they see one). When he found out that I’d been sailing only once in my life on some little nothing boat in Poland when I was maybe 18, he began coaxing me into coming out for a sailing lesson.

I resisted for a while, but finally and I admit this without shame – I thought: why not? It will at best be the adventure of my life and at worst: a terrific blogging opportunity.

So today I sailed.

I’m sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea...
(song sung by Ocean author at the last karaoke attended by her)

My instructor pal is terrific. Moreover, he may at some point log onto this blog and so I will not convey here the full passion of my (negative) feelings toward sailing.

for the love of sailing

In truth: it was not his fault. He is so good at yelling at the crew to get their shit together. And he caught me when I almost was pulled by the rope and tugged viciously to the raging waters below.


is that the Capitol? So far away...

And maybe my attitude was tinted by the weather: today was so goddamn windy that the choppiness I am sure would make a mermaid seasick.

note his task: it was mine for 90% of the hours spent on the sail boat

I did not mind the heavy work either. The bending, hoisting, pulling, swinging down as the sail swept its way across the boat threatening to bang the hell out of anything or anyone in its way – all this reminded me somewhat of working in a restaurant kitchen (another one of those things that took my fancy a few years back) – except that it was like working on plating appetizers on a rocky, swaying floor, where if you did not grip tightly with your shoes, you would be thrown into the oven with the powerful force of a room that refuses to stay upright.

You know when I hit bottom? When I got off the boat, swaying my way in total stupor up the Union Terrace steps and realized that my Summer Without Car meant that I had to peddle Mr. B all the uphill way home.