detritus

I am near the end of the semester. What more can be said about the lake path, about the regularity of working late and early and many hours in between?

I bike along the lake. I take a minute to watch the boat take in the junk that’s making our lakes so miserably green instead of blue.



Purchase photo 1958


On the way back home, I grab just the very last minutes of the other other market. So that I can collect flowers for my condo.





Nothing pushes me out of the routine. Is that a good thing?

what I learned about myself from hanging around daughters, and no, I would not rather be fishing

I have spatial-sequence (or "number form") synesthesia, my daughter tells me. I look up. Is it serious? She describes it to me (hint: it has to do with the brain). Oh! I guess I gave it to you! I have the same thing. Only I never knew it had a name.

I thought, mistakenly, that everyone’s brain functioned this way: when I think of numbers, I instantly imagine them strutting around in a pictorial sequence. For me, at 10, the sequence bends: the teens stay in darkness, to the right of 10, then majestically climb out at 20, progressing upwards and rightwards thereafter. Until 100, when they start shooting up due north, only to turn left again after 1000. Months are arranged in a circle. December is top right. Autumn drags on the bottom. They spin counterclockwise. Days of the week, on the other hand, are a disc. I bet you could hop across the surface from Tuesday to Saturday if you tried.

It turns out that synesthesia (as described above) is very rare. And so I have to ask, what do people see in their mind’s eye when they think of numbers? I mean, do their minds grow blank?

Weird.

I thought about this biking to work and then to get coffee before an afternoon of meetings. I also noted three different fishing situations and I’m including them here for you. Three. From left to right, springing out from under five: one, two, three.



Purchase photo 1957





Purchase photo 1956





Purchase photo 1955

spinning

I know that this is a term reserved for group stationary bike pedaling done at health clubs. In the alternative, people talk of their thoughts running amuck, pounding an idea to death or working themselves into a tizzy over one thing or another. In the dictionary, the primary entry for spinning is about a method of fishing. Funny, I thought it would be about yarn and wheels.

For me, the association is a pleasant one right now. Spinning through old routines, one following another, in a seamless progression of hours.

As it happens, many of those hours were spent on the seat of a bike on Sunday, as we made our way around our favorite bike loops on the most brilliantly sunny day of the year. The breeze was cool, so that the feeling was almost of being on a lake. Except that the views along the bike path (unlike from the middle of a lake) were ever changing as we flew, spinning down hills of prairie, past fields of gold.



Purchase photo 1954





Purchase photo 1953





Purchase photo 1952





Purchase photo 1951

say it with

…flowers. So hard to fill vases in the winter, so easy now.

We circled (squared?) the downtown market. It takes time, but time is expandable on a day like this. And besides, there are the rewards. So obvious...




Purchase photo 1950






Purchase photo 1949



At the close of the market, the flowers dwindle. But it's not too late. Even at the close of the market, when vendors are ready to call it a day, you can fined armloads of these to take home.

preparation

For my late mother-in-law, everything circled around the annual visit of her son (and by default, me). She painted walls, purchased new furniture, and sought out fun things for us to do in and around Pittsburgh where she and my ex’s dad lived.

Charming, I thought. In a quaint sort of way. I mean, would it matter in the slightest if I found her old couch or a new one on my next visit? Did I even appreciate the annuals carefully planted along the front path, tended so that they would be at their peak during our visit?


My daughters came just before midnight on Friday. I spent the day cleaning madly (as if the place hadn’t been cleaned well just before), rearranging the pots on the balcony, scrubbing down bins in the refrigerator, shopping for favorite snacks, straightening, rearranging again.

Daughters. For you – the world.


In the evening, before their arrival, I paused for dinner. Ed’s friend said those magic words – pick a place, any place and so we ended up at El Dorado, an old favorite in the interesting Willie Street neighborhood, where the scenery can be dramatic in an industrial sort of way and patrons wear black t-shirts with slogans that only my daughters could understand.








Purchase photo 1948


On our way back, we paused at the most glorious summertime Union terrace. The boats barely bobbed in the calm waters and the crowds and lights blurred in a sea of gaiety. Magic.



Purchase photo 1947





Purchase photo 1946


We biked along the lakeshore path in the dark (home) and before long, it was time to head to the airport.

Welcome home, daughters.

neighborhoods

I lived in a west Madison suburb for 18 years. Older people moved out, younger families moved in. Sometimes the newcomers would do minor house renovations. Sometimes someone would put up a fence or uproot an old tree. We would all take note.

Last night, I went to visit a friend in the old neighborhood. I drove up my street. Really, the place looks pretty much the same. Sure, a new privacy fence by the house across the street from ours (or, what used to be ours). Nothing more.

As always when I pass this way, I looked up at the windows of our place and tried to see the inside. Not to see the new family’s way of doing things, but to bring back that feeling of home that came from living there.

It was a boring neighborhood, but a good home, albeit too expensive for us, for me to maintain.

In between the move out of the suburbs and the move to my condo, I spent two years living in downtown Madison. I felt as transient there as the students who moved in and out to my east, and the much maligned transient population that loved to hang out at the small park to my west. Oddly, it felt right for me then. I belonged to their limbo worlds.

But I knew eventually I would look for a home.

I suppose it is my fate to then move into a neighborhood in Madison that is anything but stable, though in ways that are perhaps silly. A year ago, there were office buildings next to us. Six months later, there was a gaping hole and the promise of a new Whole Foods, a small hotel and who knows what else. Now, it's all up for grabs again. A week back, our parking lot felt quiet, and now we’re contemplating the expected changes as a new fitness center has leased space on the ground floor of the condo building, with the potential to transform this building, though it’s unclear in what way. Weird.

I’m close to a mall that is trying to appear more urban and less mallsy. New shops open, but they, too, feel very temporary. How can a silly wine shop and a fancy chocolatier survive here? I like l’Occitane, but it’s a frivolous place and we aren’t a frivolous town.

Each time I bike past this little shopping street, I look for closures. They wont surprise me. The street itself seems unreal – like out of a movie set. I don’t want to like it because I know it wont be there in the way that it is now, tomorrow.



Purchase photo 1945



When I travel back to Warsaw, I go back to my favorite pastry shops (there are two that I love). I sit down and think how it was when I ate cakes and doughnuts there forty years back. I do note new places in the city – products of a new ordering of life since I lived there, but there are enough old places that Warsaw itself feels very much the same.

Nothing about where I live and how I live right now feels stable (beyond my teaching). And so, as I bike to work, I have come to believe that the lake path that I follow each morning is my constant. It is mine every day and it hasn’t changed much since the years I took my daughters down to visit the Lake Mendota area.

The rest? One day at a time.

quiet spaces

For the past several days, I’ve had a houseguest. My routines, therefore, have included more sit-down meals (not that he would have minded the rough and ready type; he is, after all, an Ed friend) and more of a balance between work, home work and pleasant guest work, which, indeed, is only worklike at the margins.

The house guest has not left Madison yet and so I conveyed, through Ed, that he is again welcome to stay here, even though I am mostly gone this day and this evening. Ed, never missing an opportunity to remind me that guys need to decompress in solitude sometimes, said that probably his friend would opt to sequester himself somewhere around the shed tonight.

I thought about how, if I were to guess which gender needs to decompress more in solitude, I would have said female, not male.

But, I biked off to work without offering my thoughts on female decompression. Instead, for the second day in a row, I shouted up to the two men on my balcony, relaxed and enjoying their last bites of breakfast, men of leisure, women of work. It seemed fitting, especially since both are retired, even as one of them (the houseguest) is younger than me.


On my ride to work, I took the usual Shorewood detour (road construction, what else), passing a narrow strip of wooded land separating the road from a strip mall. Someone has used that little bit of land wisely, creating unusual quiet spaces. Close to the road, sure, but quiet nonetheless. I offer you those to look at and contemplate.



Purchase photo 1944





Purchase photo 1943

milking

I know, if you have to look at one more post of sweet morning photos along the water’s edge, you’ll take your business elsewhere.

You may think I am milking this morning journey along the lake.

You may think I am simply without ideas.

Or overworked. (I applaud that last thought.)

But really, it is the case that the play of morning light on the various (predictably, the same) points along Lake Mendota as I bike to class is always enchanting. So that even when my schedule is tight and I stand to be a second late, I pause. You would too.








Purchase photo 1942





Purchase photo 1941





Purchase photo 1940



I do not neglect the ride back. But it’s never the same. I have time, I have loads of time, and yet, the light just isn’t there.

But, I give you this photo taken on the return, just to let you know that I do have a life beyond the morning lake shore path. Here I am, greeting the shrimpers from the Gulf. Tonight’s dinner: shrimp with kernels of fresh corn, slices of green onion and strips of basil. So simple. So fresh and honest.

briefly

It rained today. Looks like snow, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s rain. Not a huge rain, not a significant event. It rained, I worked.

ice cream, music, social

I hear the music. Faint sounds of a band. Rehearsing maybe? In the park nearby? I step outside and I see it right away: a small gathering down the block, by the Independent Living Center.

The neighborhood where I live has a reputation: now greatly yuppified, it once was anything but that. Mention the Hilldale area to oldtimers and people will nod: where the seniors and foreign students live, right? That certainly was my take on it.

Oh, it’s changed alright. New condos east of my building, new stores, new fitness center, new hotel, new this new that. But, all these high end lures haven’t chased the others out (thank God) and so you still run into the seniors and the foreign students, and similarly situated folk.


The gathering is not large: a small parking lot lined with chairs on one end, and space for a band (the Capital City Band) on the other. They’re playing the usual: JP Sousa alternating with American Tale, the soundtrack. People tap and nod and daydream.















And so do I. It is wonderfully peaceful here, in the parking lot, where no one cares if roots are three inches deep because of cancelled Jason appointments. The event is free and the afternoon moves slowly from one song to the next. Interspersed with ice cream, eaten with small plastic spoons.





















There are children here, too. I’d like to believe that they’re visiting grandparents and some may indeed be doing that, but most appear to have stopped by for the ice cream and the music, and that’s okay because it is an old fashioned ice cream social and isn’t that what one does? Eat ice cream, tap one’s foot and shake hands with the person next to you…











I stay longer than I intended. I don’t eat the ice cream, but I listen to the music and watch the faces. It is time well spent.

wings and local things

You’ve heard maybe of the 2000 Watt Society? Where communities (so far, mainly Swiss) attempt to stay within that limit of energy consumption without necessarily lowering their standard of living? Just so you know, Americans on the average use six times that amount (Europeans, at 6000 -- three times the goal).

Almost inadvertently, I’m a successful greenie. The things I like don’t require fuel. I hardly ever drive, I like to bike and use public transportation, I hate air conditioning and I live in a unit that is small and so energy efficient, that I can barely tell a winter gas bill from a summer one. I eat market foods, minimally cooked. I don’t really acquire things. I mean, I astonish myself as to how green I am, given that I don’t really try.

Except in one area: I am an awful user of airplanes. A trip to Europe adds Watts to your tally in such heavy doses that traveling by rail and on foot once there hardly helps. And, since rail service in this country is so poor, I use planes to visit daughters out east all the time.

So on balance, I climb back up to the level of the average European. But I swear, the day they launch that first high speed train between the Midwest and the East coast, I’ll be down there with the Swiss purists, hiking shoes and all.

I thought about all this yesterday, as I spent a good part of the day inside, working on things and wishing that I had a nice solid trip before me. I don’t. Not for a while anyway. I sighed a deeply green sigh and looked for other distractions.

And wouldn’t you know it – the afternoon teased me with a dazzling array of wings. Not of the airplane type, but of the more fragile ones that require flapping rather than fuel.

Here, take a look at this guy. Watching me (or a mouse; I couldn't really tell). Just down the block from my condo.




Inspired, Ed and I set out for the Olbrich Gardens. To see the butterflies.




Purchase photo 1939




Purchase photo 1938




Purchase photo 1937


We stay until the conservatory shuts down for the day. At the tail end, empty of visitors, the place takes on an eerie, steamy quiet. So that you find yourself listening for butterfly wings.


Purchase photo 1936




Purchase photo 1935




Purchase photo 1934

Eventually, we head out for a quick stroll in the outdoor gardens. For the bees.


Purchase photo 1933



Finally, we spin towards Ed’s shed. To feed his cats. I’m on the motorbike now, talking to my daughter on the cell and I look up to see this pair… (I consider it a photographic feat worthy of a circus act: cell held to the ear by helmet, one hand on Ed’s hip, the other – clicking away, trying to catch the herons in flight.)


Purchase photo 1932


…and on the final stretch, we pass the wetlands. Home to mosquitoes, sure. Home to these as well:



Purchase photo 1931


It was a good afternoon.

And this morning, I am again at my local Westside Community Market. I stock up on tomatoes, beets, potatoes, garlic, onions, lettuce, milk, cucumbers, carrots, corn, blueberries and… mint (in a jug with water and slices of lemon – my summer drink of choice). I decide to pass on an invitation to attend the Experimental Aircraft Association hoopla thing in Oshkosh. I don’t know if it adds Watts to your tally to simply watch planes fly, but I may as well have one pure month of green saintliness before my itch to visit places that are way too far away gets to be too strong to ignore.

But for today, I'll leave you with three very local, very seasonal vendors, standing at the market almost side by side: Blue Moon, Primrose and Morningwood:


Purchase photo 1930




Purchase photo 1929




Purchase photo 1928

roses and bubbles

I read with great interest yesterday’s NYT piece on champagne. It is my unfortunate lot in life that I am infinitely drawn to champagne and lobster – neither of which I can afford much, both being wedged in my mind as achieving the peak of perfection in taste and mental association (Brittany shores and Maine coastal waters, the chalky undulating fields of grapes in France).

I came to know champagne late in life (and lobster even later). Growing up in Poland, I knew no one who drank it or had access to it. Of course, in those days, you could call anything that fizzed champagne and occasionally someone would procure cheap Bulgarian fizzy wine with some champagne wording on it – the absolute alcoholic bottom, if you ask me. I had little interest.

As graduate students in the States, we purchased champagne in moments of great decadence, to celebrate the completion of a dissertation (not mine), or the offering of employment (again, not mine). I remember purchasing Taittinger and thinking, gulp, this is astronomically expensive, but hey, so what, we may all die tomorrow! Pop!

In the eighties and nineties, I was relieved that there were such substitutes as Italian Prosecco. It fizzed and had beautiful flavors. What more could you want.

But then I took on night work at the Restaurant l’Etoile and I allowed myself another look at the great varieties of Champagne. Such a small region, so many tastes! And perhaps the best of the best for me was the discovery of rosé champagne. The gods knew what they were after when they proclaimed – throw in some Pinot Noir skin, already! (A piece of wine trivia: did you know that the French drink overall more rosé than white wine?)





Soon I was basking in too much knowledge on champagne and too few opportunities to taste it. I set up Field to Table (it lasted a year) and took a group to France. We visited a champagne producer and my heart soared.

This summer, I returned to the region of Champagne and again visited a small, independent producer. I brought back six bottles and tucked them neatly into my fancy little wine cooler.

I don’t know many people who love champagne as much as I do and so I store my treasures for now. But, I would open them all in a snap if that would help celebrate my firstborn’s birthday, which happens to fall on this day. Ah, if she were only here…

Happy birthday, sweet little one! You’re as lovely as roses, inside and out and I love you more than you can imagine! May your day sparkle!



Purchase photos 1927