in the backseat

The NYTimes describes today the inroads bus travel has made in the Midwest and along the Northeast coast. Well okay. (I am writing this as I sit on a Megabus bound for Minneapolis. Cost: $30.95 one way.) I leave the driving to someone else. There is a spell of heavy rain and it’s good not to worry about sliding off into a ditch.

But please, it’s no bullet train.

Last time I took the northbound Megabus, the electrical outlets weren’t working. This time the AC is failing on the lower deck of the bus. That’s fine, I’m upstairs, in the last row, with a sweet but tired kid (to my right) who I am sure would rather be elsewhere.

And the roof is leaking from the emergency hatch. If you are sitting two rows ahead of me you are going to arrive in Minneapolis wet. An enterprising young man attaches his heavy pack to the handles to keep the roof in place. I watch the pack dangle and I worry about the kid next to me -- he is in the line of fire should it fall.

The bus makes a refreshment detour to a truckstop. A half hour wait in deep nothingness. People buy Wendy’s fries and soda because what else can you do. You might as well eat fries and drink soda. With a five hour ride ahead, I suppose a break is welcome relief for the driver. Still, he seems young and peppy. I’m hoping he’s buzzing to go. Certainly we, the passengers, are buzzing to go.

Especially since the bus is already late. Last time I rode the Megabus to the Twin Cities, it was very late. Today, it came in to Madison (from Chicago) just half an hour late and then proceeded to be late some more as the Great Search for a disembarking person’s suitcase took place. All black suitcases removed. She finds hers. All black suitcases put back in the cargo hold. We all wait for the suitcase mess to resolve itself. It does. Eventually.





I don’t mean to compare, but Van Galdar buses, which I use frequently to get to Chicago, are exceptionally punctual.

I glance across to the resting young body of the kid. His dad is fiddling with music (regrettably, he seems not to have earphones); a third person further down in the back row seat hands over a leftover piece of chicken sandwich to the kid, who wakes up, eats it, goes back to sleep. As does his dad. In a surreal moment, I see them against pastures of deep gold and skies of true blue.





It’s a window screen on a parallel bus.


At the rest stop, another passenger asks me if I know how many hours we have before us.
Two? -- he’s hoping.

Maybe three...

Hell, that’s not so bad. It used to take my mom and me fifteen hours to come up from Chicago to Minneapolis!

Fifteen?

She insisted on stopping at all the Walmarts along the way. Things got cheaper as we got further away from Chicago.

In the seat in front, a young man is telling his life story to a woman who would rather be reading the biography of Nabokov resting on her lap. He either doesn’t notice or pretends not to. I’m surprised how revealing he is. Finally, two hours outside Minneapolis, he asks her -- by the way, what’s your name?

On my left side, another young man is listening to music, but through earphones. I can hear it anyway. I like it. It seems mildly jazzy. A good balance to the story of a life in front and the pop sounds to my right.

Are we still in Wisconsin? – the kid’s dad asks me..

Oh yes. Still a couple of hours in the back seat.




It’s 9, but it’s only just barely dusk.

My mind is spinning back to 1984. I was pregnant with my second child and I was in the middle of my law school years, but the summer of that year I spent with my then husband and our oldest in Cambridge England, where her dad was doing research. My two sweet kind wonderful law school pals traveled across the ocean to visit. They were single moms then, facing the same challenges of parenting and studying, and they brought their daughters to England and you could make a sit com from the days we had there with our most exquisite and willful girls (plus the one in my belly).

So now here I am in Minneapolis, with a different familial configuration for all of us, even as essentially nothing has changed.

I rush to call my friend – the one who has also traveled here for the wedding. The two of us take a walk in the last rays of the setting sun...





... settling in at an outdoor table for a pizza and a carafe of wine.

Sometimes you feel like life is forever throwing punches at you. Not this week-end. Not for me.

men, women...

I’m on the motorbike behind Ed and we are weaving our way to campus (construction makes a snake of the normally easy and straight road). I’m in a hurry so I opt for the fast ride rather than my slower pedal-power cycle.

I think Ed is a stellar motorbike rider (even as I also think that he is a bored and therefore indifferent car driver). On the rather small (by Harley standards) Honda, he dominates his space on the road. He exudes confidence and caution all at once. He’s in control.

We stop near the Law School and I unload. I look up as Ed draws my attention to a Harley man. They’ve grown old – he tells me. I think – ahh, age. Once the bad boys, now they worry about stiff knees and pension plans.

A young man zips by, reminding us of what it was like to zip through life with fire in your eyes and knees.





After class, I walk by a student parked on a bench. He’s thinking it through, he tells me. I’m hoping he’s thinking through what we just discussed in class, but I don’t really know. My thoughts have already cycled forward: I’m back to thinking that men’s minds work sometimes in mysterious ways.





There’s a wedding up north in Minneapolis this weekend. That of a daughter of a supremely close friend of mine. Ed, by virtue of his traveling companionship with me, is invited, but he wont go. He says he could not sit through any wedding and to my knowledge he has never attended a wedding.

So how do you explain the fact that a favorite NYTimes clip for him to watch, along with (typically) a sentimentally sobbing me is the Styles-Vows video, where two people explain to the rest of us how and when he asked her (or he asked him, or she asked her, but almost never did she ask him) for her hand in marriage?

Weddings conjure up for me the great expanse of a lifetime. And they make me think of friends who married and stayed married.

I do tonight something I have done on and off for the past several years, but never with much success: I search on the Internet for my best college friend – a woman who has disappeared from my radar screen, to say nothing of my computer screen. This time I think I have found the vital information that I need.

I reach for the phone and call her, but no one answers. I leave a message, without much hope that I’ll hear back.

Ed is doing a Wednesday Night bicycle ride now. Last week, I had ready a plate of rice and shrimp in a fresh and honest spicy tomato sauce for him for when he returned. He was so dehydrated that he passed on the dinner and ate a half a watermelon instead. This week I have a chicken vegetable soup and a watermelon waiting.

energized

Back in June, when Ed and I came down the mountain in the Pyrenees of Spain amidst thunder and lightening and sheets of rain, I was so relieved that we survived that if you offered to sell me anything at all at that moment, I would have said yes.

As we pull out and head toward the coast, away from the Pyrenees, I suggest we pause for a quick espresso. Magically, we pass through a town with a café bakery right along our route. We park the car and go inside.

What would you like?

An espresso and a pastry – maybe something typical for this region?

Typical? These cookies are typical.

Okay. We’ll take the pack of cookies. How much?

11 Euros.

11 Euros?? (Shockingly expensive.)
They are very difficult to make...

We buy the little sack of cookies and very quickly we realize that they will not keep well. The crepe like coating hardens instantly and as we take out one cookie each day, we gnaw mightily at it so that it will break into manageable pieces.

Today, we finished the last cookie. Was it good? Yes, even as it was very very stale.

And yet I was reminded – of mountains, of peaks to climb, of danger and of the sheer joy of stopping for an espresso and a sweet treat.

It was surely the most expensive sack of cookies I ever bought and it was almost certainly one of the best sacks of cookies I ever bought. Before they went stale.

Things do grow stale. Ideas, projects, cookies.

But if you can keep energized, inspired, hopeful...





...then they don’t.

canvas

As I contemplate my next move (which will happen once the condo sells), I think about how important the commute has always been for me between home and office. I do not much care about the vehicle that gets me there and back and indeed I almost never use a car for this trip. But I care about what I see as I pedal (or walk) along. I want to be able to look up and see something deserving of a paintbrush.

And I’ve been lucky these last few years. For instance, today, I biked past a community garden. For a second, I thought I was before a late nineteenth century canvas.





Or, is it that summer makes me blur the line between what is surely art and what is merely a daily tapestry of lush color?

Biking to work along the lake path I think how this summer has been especially generous with its stream of warm days and pastels skies.





On campus, I run into a former student of mine. He is looking so sharp and professional that I almost don’t recognize him. He tells me his wife has bought some of Ocean’s photos for their home (I still sell them at a Fitchburg café and on line if someone puts in an especially sweet request, though it is so financially unrewarding and so time consuming that I’ve stopped making the effort otherwise). I think again how good it is to take a scene like that of a community garden and put it on canvas in the only way I know how.


An evening at my condo. Is it to be the last summer here? Probably.

I fix yet another summer market salad for supper. Baby potatoes, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, almost hard boiled eggs, scallions, herbs and a Dijon mustard vinaigrette.





Unfussy, uncomplicated. Pleasure in the ordinary. Deliciously ours.

lazy morning

How luxurious! My daughter is in town until early afternoon. We head out to the neighborhood where she will be living starting September. Night storms cleared the sky, but it is still very very warm outside.

We talk about meals that will be eaten in and around her new home. We stop in at a grocery co-op and nod our heads appreciatively over this item, that one – favorite things on the shelves of a store just across the street from where she'll spend so many waking hours.

We eat brunch at Lazy Jane’s. Welcome to the neighborhood – they greet her. Here, enjoy this scone while you wait for your food. 

















It’s a hot day, but not too hot for a walk afterward. Up one street, down the next, admiring gardens where owners have taken care to plant flowers that will inevitably bloom their heads off.





And now she’s off, my girl is – back to her work in Chicago. But she’ll be back. With her sister. In a few weeks. Because when you live that close, it’s just a bus ride away.

Two people separately in the past week say to me – you are at the core such a... well, happy person. It’s true. I could fight it, but it will come back – the conviction that so long as you (and your loved ones) are on your feet and able to toddle along, you've got a reason to grin shamelessly.

the whirligig

From dawn to nightfall – I haven’t the minute that I need for Ocean. You surely understand. This is how it looks: finish the writing of the ad for the condo. Zip out with daughter to downtown farmers market. Except that you can’t zip anywhere downtown when Paddle and Portage is in progress.





Visit Café Soleil for a last time before they move to their new fancy digs. Sentimental. I baked for Satruday markets here not too long ago. But, our cafés change staff so fast that no one (but the chef) is there from the days of my apprenticeship.






Shop at market. The basket fills. Weeks’ worth of produce. Yes, the French beans and baby potatoes continue to dominate, but there is so much more...















Flowers. I need flowers. I cannot even try to sell a condo without flowers on the table and in the kitchen.








daughter with bouquet


There. Shopping done. Market sights and pleasures duly recorded. Time to rest? Like these two?





Not us. Ed scoots over and we set out to hike. And swim. When my daughter wrote about visiting, she asked meekly (this after realizing that there would be a heat wave here at the time) – might there be a place to swim?

Sure. We've got it all.

We pick up the Ice Age Trail near Merrimac and head toward Devil’s Lake. It is a hot and buggy hike, but who would fuss on this glorious Saturday when skies are blue and summer is in full bloom.














And after a few hours, we look for the descent toward the beach. We find it.









...and we swim.

At the shore, a wedding is taking place. Alongside a grilling family and another and another...









I mean, it’s Saturday at Devil’s Lake – you can hardly expect quiet. And it pleases me no end that so many people are enjoying the Great Outdoors.


We swim, yes, forward and back, all three of us, and then we refill our water bottles and head for the car. And we drive home. Not for long though. A quick shower, a walk down to the theaters for a movie, and finally a late late dinner outdoors. Seaweed salad and sushi.









I’m home now. At the condo of your dreams. (Not mine for long. Too big. Too expensive. Sigh...) My daughter is asleep, Ed, too, has disappeared to consider the world and the day from a reclining position.

So, surely you’ll understand – I can’t write much today. Too full, too tired, in a happy sort of way.

sudden moves

My daughter tells me – only you would rewrite your life in the space of twenty-four hours.

I'm thinking – twenty-four hours is a very long time.

I’m putting the condo up for sale tomorrow (sure, I’ll provide the link then; and a $500 off for the buyer who tells me she or he reads Ocean!).

In anticipation of change, I spend on this day many hours packing up books and clothes to pass on to various charities. I intend to keep things small. Really small. Thoughts and memories don't need closets. I shouldn't need closets.

It’s almost dusk, but not quite. Ed and I take the motorbike out to do the countless small errands that I defer because my teaching days (Monday through Thursday) are too full to allow for much else then. We stop by a shoe repair place. Cecil’s. Ed stays there to chat to Ron (Cecil) and to brush Ron’s cats. I pace in the parking lot of the strip mall and talk on my cell to my daughters. My decisions need a context. They want to hear the context.

A young boy comes by and tells me I should buy Mexican candy at his mom's shop next door.

We buy a few packs. Yes, of course, acquiring things I don't need (Mexican candy) runs against my determination to keep things simple on this day. But a little boy's face in the window surely permits for a sidestep. If life were to permit no sidesteps, we'd miss the joy of being surprised and teased out of our convictions.





After Cecil’s, we motor over to one of Ed’s very favorite eating places – Brasserie V. It's been a while since I could ask for a glass of rosé and not get a shrug and a shake of the head from the waiter.





We eat our moulles frites and we discuss my future options. They seem solid and good.


I wait for my other daughter to step off the bus tonight. She’ll be in Madison for the week-end. Yes, there's lots to talk about. Solid and good things, but you have to be prepared to see them that way. Through a glass of rosé perhaps.

[View condo for sale here.]

Condo

The best of the smaller units at Weston Place: 1246 sq ft of living space, southern exposure (sunny in the winter, shaded in the summer), custom designed and loaded with things I should never ever have spent money on, but I did and now they are yours, discounted because I want to downsize yet again and move to an even smaller, lesser place.

A catchy ad, don’t you think?

I better rewrite it: Superbly designed... No, wait, does that mean that it was well designed but poorly executed?  Or is it simply too braggy? -- Hey look, I designed it! Surely that adds...something?


I'm downsizing again.

And maybe eventually I’ll downsize my way out of existence, leavening nothing but a thin trail – sort of like that left by a snail who moves ever so slowly toward nothingness.

If I sell the condo (such a good deal: two bathrooms, a SubZero, a wine cooler too – your very own wine cellar, damn it!), then the question becomes what then?

Not a problem. Ever since I spent ten days in a New York Bleecker Street walk-up (it was so nearly honest, if not altogether fresh) I think I can be happy anywhere. I’ll even forgo a dishwasher, which says a lot, because the person who dirties dishes most frequently in my house does not know how to properly clean them and so it’s either a washer or wreck the skin of my hands. And I’ll forgo the frontload clothes washer that I have come to love. I do need a shower though. Okay? May I have a shower?

This afternoon, in a quiet celebration of a holiday weekend I biked up and down State Street thinking  -- beauty's in the eyes of the holder. That's right, isn't it??

messing with forever

Nothing’s forever, right? Even if forever merely means only throughout your life. You land the job, have the wedding, buy your house, and then the job goes, the marriage goes and the house is just a sad reminder of all that is no more. So it goes too.

Here’s the upside, if you’re predisposed to look for upsides (I am): if nothing’s forever, then even when things are just fine, might you consider shaking things up some? Reconfigure your work, go to someone else’s wedding and maybe buy a house? A little one? Like a shed, only with water and a kitchen stove? Doesn’t that sound sort of cool?



I’ve been working too hard again. I took a walk along State Street after class to clear my head and to look for color. You can always find color here, even if, these days, color is muted by the everpresence of people texting. The entire month of June, I saw not a single "texter." Today, on State Street, it seemed that the entire (colorful) world was locked into punching out odd messages with their thumbs to those elsewhere.





On the upside, I suppose it’s a good workout for the thumbs.

buying big things

Well, the time has come when I’ll have to pony up the cash and buy a car. I haven’t done this since 1993, when we purchased a minivan for family use. It had a not too lengthy but nonetheless profitable existence. Without it, taking kids to camp would have been very very hard.

In the last five years, I have gotten by without a car. I have my daughters' old wreck in case of emergency, and Ed has his old Geo that could be called forth to service in case the old wreck cannot go, but really, I have had no need for much beyond that. I am a fan of walking, biking and public transportation.

Still, one ought to have a car in reserve and the old wreck is being passed on to daughters next month, and truthfully, they have a tad more affection for it than I do. It is their first and only car (passed on to them by their grandmother who moved as far away from Wisconsin as she could, leaving the car behind; she was not a fan of the great Midwest).

I have been glancing at Craigs List for vehicles under $4000. Prefereably under $1000, but I am keeping an open mind. Here’s the dilemma: a car closer to $4000 will likely be more pleasurable than the junk I’m likely to get for under $1000. But at what price would you place a fleeting moment of pleasure? I spend most waking minutes very very far away from any car. Shouldn’t I reject cars that offer so few rewards?

Sigh... Between cheap car buying and camera negotiations, I am feeling rather out of my element (my element could be defined as one that requires no major purchases of any kind).

And speaking of major purchases, I have recently seen houses listed on the Internet that are as cute as a button. Why am I living in a condo?




[Photos from the walk home: Abe is yet again looking on at the odd world of our century, and further down, the great Midwestern sky makes everything else look puny, even as the very small things in life -- for instance, the wonderful blue dragonfly -- see her, down in the corner? -- are the real heroes. They crack down on mosquitoes, don't they?]

paths

As I pack up and leave the farmette (class starts soon), I think – well, at least I cleared the path to the shed. And in years past, I put in the flowers to the left. And I’ve tried to arrest the spread of the berry canes to the right (pointless: they grow back).





But really, I’ve made not a dent. Ed’s farmette is a fine example of the powerful force of nature. Leave her alone and she’ll swallow you whole.

So why do I continue to hack away at the weeds? Why do I cut back and clear away paths? I suppose it’s in my blood. You could say my grandfather made me do it. He at least knew that in order to foster growth, you must cut back.


There’s a larger lesson in this. But so what. Who ever pays attention to life’s larger lessons anyway.

Driving in to campus (farmettes are noxious in this way: they require that you drive... a lot), we stop at the Lake Street café for a breakfast caffeinated beverage. We used to come here a lot, Ed and I. A break between classes, a moment of blissful quiet. I’d watch the squirrels outside and always I would look for the train at the side even as it never, ever rumbled by.





Not anymore. We’re beyond café breaks and such wee pleasures realized in the middle of the day. Don’t know why... Good habits become obsolete. Are they replaced by bigger better things? Sometimes. Not always.

tiger lilies and wind

To create a bug free space outdoors (where I could work while bouncing slightly in a sling back chair), Ed digs out two ancient fans and positions them at both sides of the chair, creating what must be tornado conditions from the perspective of a mosquito. Mosquitoes are not strong flyers. Wind sends them back to where they came from (unfortunately, not too far back, but still, giving a momentary reprieve).

I look at the rattling fans and I have to admire their will to continue. They are old.

But then, so is the little black and white TV in the farmhouse. I ask – can a black and white TV transmit the color of a DVD? Ed shows the dismay of a person who truly thinks his traveling companion entertains absurd hypotheticals. Still, he can't demonstrate the stupidity of my question because the VHS/DVD player, also from some junk heap or other, is pouty and unreliable.

As we take the old Honda motorcycle into town today, I think how curious it is that, for all his dedication to fixing (and using) the old and broken, Ed is not a junk collector. You would not know it by his car or his motorbike, or the ancient John Deer he is now guiding across the wet grass, but this is a guy who keeps a sharp eye out on new technology.

...Even as the project of sending an Internet signal from the sheepshed (the computer hub at the farmette) to the farmhouse has failed him. The only way for me to post is to beat down the bugs and scurry to the shed hub. Or to sit on the porch between two fans spinning madly at my sides, with towering tiger lilies in front, reminding me that summer is not always the easiest of the seasons, even as it is the most delightful.





What do you think, is the wind system working? Can you sit there without bugs? Ed asks.

Yes, even though it’s a little too drafty for me.

We’ll keep the fans on anyway. Did you know it only costs a $1 a month to keep a fan running?
I did not know that. But I’m not surprised Ed knows.

a Saturday

If ever I wondered whether mosquitoes like dawn as much as they like dusk, this morning I had the chance to find out.

Yes, they do. Up before me, ready to attack whomever comes down the road.

Sunrise at the farmette. Quiet fields, picked over for the markets. The sun breaks through and passes behind one wisp of a cloud, then another.




It’s going to be a fine day!

But a day not without chores. Last night as Ed struggled to quickly wash and dry sheets for the inflatable mattress at the farmhouse, he found that the dryer has stopped drying. Sleeping on damp sheets was novel and not altogether unpleasant, given the warm day, but this morning, Ed wants to head out in search of spare dryer parts.

We bike down to Willie Street (a mere 10 mile ride from the farmette). You could not, on the ride over, ask for a more beautiful field of flowers and a bigger midwestern sky..


 


He shops for the machine part, then I suggest breakfast.

We are so mismatched in our eating habits when we’re in Madison, my traveling companion and I, that it is rare that we both want a meal at the same time. Breakfast? No, I’ll just have a lemonade. How is it that in travel we are more synchronized?


It’s the week-end of Art Fair on the Square, en event that should excite me, except that over the years I have grown quite indifferent to it. Too hot, too busy, too depressing, too something. But we’re on the square, and the vendors are on the square, and it seems that we should push through the crowds some, and we do. (Can you tell where art ends and reality steps in?)





Soon, we turn away and walk down to where the farmers have been forced to relocate for this one summer week-end.

Exhale. Ed naps on the grass, I watch the farmers stack the beans and arrange rows of boxes of raspberries.









The ride back to the farmette is long. We finish the loop that runs through the city. Twenty-five miles later we’re done.


It’s late afternoon and I am at the point when I think it’s too late to begin something entirely new, and too early to completely collapse in an armchair with a book or magazine.

I look in the direction of Ed’s sheep shed (his home) and I can, I think, even at a distance, hear the buzz of swarming mosquitoes having their Saturday frolic in the raspberry canes and fruit trees that border the path to the shed. And because Ed has been away for so much of this spring, and also because he is so loath to pull anything with roots out of the ground, I see that the path, once wide and beautiful, is completely overgrown with weeds, canes and who knows what else.





In a moment of frantic fury I attack the path. I tear out weeds, I rip out canes, I heave at long vines and prickly branches, all the while stirring up the mosquito inferno within. I am covered with dirt and bugs, but within an hour I have cleared the path. Ed, who has been trying to till and mow the space I have created, tells me to end there and I do, stumbling with sore arms and caked dirt into the coldest most wonderful shower I have ever had.

Evening. We ride the motorbike into town to see my daughter who is there with a friend. I pick up more work at the condo and we retreat, my occasional traveling companion and I. Back to the farmette, where the bugs are noxious, but the berries are ripe and the fragrance of... everything is intoxicating.

smell of wet earth

The light fades. The mosquitoes are out. It’s not that they’re just out, they are having a convention!

Ed reads on the Internet that the adult population thrives on nectar. From willows (so many lovely willows on his farmette!), plums (yes those too!), cherries, peaches – basically, Ed’s farmette is a safe haven for any mosquito wanting life's sustenance.

My younger daughter is in Madison for the week-end and we have a magnificent pizza dinner down a few paces from where I live.





The waitress spills a smidgen from the bottle of Prosecco, which is unfortunate, because she then refills our glasses overabundantly, to compensate, and for once, no one wants to drink much, even though it’s free wine.

I had been having thoughts about writing projects and how we fail at them (okay, how I fail at them) and when I decide to air these thoughts some, I am shot down by rebuttals to my numerations of this problem or that one, and I come away thinking that if it is not the fault of the externalities, then it must be my fault and really, that’s not a surprise at all because I know that it is, indeed my fault.


I am reading a book written by a famous author who contemplates being a not so great father or husband even as it is not so difficult, in the eyes of the world, to be a good father (I haven’t gotten to the part about his husbandry). And I wonder if the world is at all lenient toward those who mean to do worthy things but somehow do not get to them in at a timely manner. And if women and men have to suffer the indignities of failure even as they half hope that it is not entirely of their making.


I’m spending some days at the farmette now. Not too many. Just a few, this week-end.

It feels more like country than any place I’d stayed at in the States. The lights are not quite bright enough, the bugs look for entryways, the smell inside and out is of the soil.

How often can we say that about the air around the kitchen table --- that it is of the soil?

It’s a good place to think again about life’s projects. The mere act of thinking assuages the guilt that attaches to lethargy.

It’s not my fault, I say to myself. At least I think some of the time, it’s not entirely my fault.

The mosquitoes outside continue to convene in huge numbers. The truck farmers who work the fields the night before Madison’s big market day (Saturday) light fires, creating protective layers of smoke over the low lying fields. They wave as we drive by. I think at first that they are waving toward us, but then I change my mind: it’s the mosquitoes – they’re trying hard to chase them away.





I look over to the side of me, as we are driving to the farmette through clouds of bugs and past fields of flowers and peas, and I think that at this moment, Ed has sad eyes.





I remember the days in Sorede when we bought extra mille feuille because he could not resist the joy of eating one on the spot.

This afternoon, we had gone to our favorite Madison boulangerie (La Baguette) and there, indeed, we see the familiar mille feuille.





Ed says no. Not this time.

That’s right. Not this time. Maybe it was not meant to be.