There Will Be Brisket

Fresh from a glorious weekend in Hudson, New York for Sanaya and Chris' splendid wedding, I am ensconced in the kitchen making Rosh Hashanah dinner for a large crowd of family and friends.  Like a true Jewish mother and cook, I panicked this morning and worried that I hadn't prepared enough brisket for everybody.   (Being a vegetarian, I toyed with the notion of not making brisket at all and serving fish in its place.  But tradition won out and I didn't want to disappoint those who are incapable of imagining a New Year's dinner without brisket.) So I rushed out to the store bright and early and bought another piece of meat to cook.   

Yesterday I went for a long hike along the Wissahickon.  It felt like being somewhere far away but I was just a short drive from the city.  There wasn't a cloud in the sky when we started out.  The air was so clear it felt like it would shatter to the touch.  When I went to bed last night I turned off the air conditioning and opened the windows wide to the night.  It was delightfully cool and I snuggled under my comforter as if I was in Maine.  Is this the beginning of fall for real or just a tease? 

Those Were the Days

Having seen Stevie Nicks in AC this summer, this video seems particularly poignant to me. 

Alternative Reality

Clearly, I live in an alternative reality.  One where this is no such thing as "legitimate rape," a truly horrid phrase that I am still trying to get my mind around.  I mean, what makes a rape legitimate? I  just can't figure it out. Is it legitimate if the rapist doesn't beat you, use a gun or a knife, but just verbally threatens death and disfigurement.  Or is it legitimate if the victim is at wearing a mini skirt and tank top and knocking back a few beers? Or, looking through the other end of the telescope can someone tell me what makes a rape illegitimate?

The women at the Republican convention haven't figured it out yet either.  According to Irin Carmon who paid a visit to the so called Women's Pavilion at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, the women there just think men are "clueless."  They're not angry just a little aggravated. Boys will be boys, even congressmen.

Maybe they've decided to live in an alternative reality.

Night Time

 They say that August is the month of shooting stars but I haven't seen one yet this year.  (Time is running out.  I leave Maine on Sunday.) But instead I've witnessed a succession of incredible, technicolor sunsets no one alike, each one setting the sky ablaze with different colors and patterns. 

The last few nights I've walked down to the dock by myself before going to bed to watch the moon set over the lake.   For some reason I don't know and wouldn't understand anyway, the moon--first a sliver, then a crescent and tonight a half moon--is orange. The lake is dark and deep except for the faint orange glow cast by the setting moon.  When I look up I can see the Milky Way stretching overhead. I like to sit on the bench and breath in the quiet for a little bit.   And then I walk back to the house and go to sleep.

I Live in Dog World Now

Wilbur gets first dibs on the New York Times.

Wilbur and Ackee take over the couch.

Ackee travels first class to the dock.

The Akin Fuckery

As usual, Irin Carmon at Salon.com tells it like it is:

It’s not that I don’t understand why people, including pro-choice organizations, like to talk about rape or life endangerment exceptions. They illustrate how incredibly cruel opponents to abortion are, how divorced they are from the difficult and knotty circumstances of real life. And they help people who can’t understand what kind of woman has an abortion — despite that real 1-in-3 statistic — realize that all kinds of women have abortions, including ones they find sympathetic. Women who have abortions have been so demonized that storytelling helps make that essential empathic leap that so many people are missing. But as Akin shows, once you start haggling over reasons, you’re giving up half the fight — which is that this is about bodily autonomy and respect for women’s ability to determine their own lives.  

You can read the entire column here.

It is a blessed day as they say in Jamaica and a quintessential Maine day as I say in Otisfield--all blue and green and golden.  I spent the morning walking around the lake--some 11 miles--with a friend.  We do that together at least once a summer.  Today when we passed the white clapboard church on the road I could hear the sound of the congregation singing hymns.  When I got back to the house, it was time to eat lunch on the deck, read the paper and contemplate what the next activity should be.  Lots to choose from including doing nothing but taking in this perfect day.  That's hard for me but I'm working on it.

I woke up this morning--way too early as usual--to a smear of grey on my windows.  Looking out over the rooftops, I could almost believe the streets and sidewalks were dusted with a thin layer of  snow but then the air conditioner clicked on to remind me what time of year it really was.  In this summer's relentless heat, it's hard to believe winter will ever come.  But Labor Day--the unofficial end of summer--is almost here.  Now at the tail end of the summer season, I am finally going back to Maine where the air will be fresh and cool in the morning and at night I will go to sleep snuggled  under a comforter, the windows wide open and no air conditioner pumping out a stale and manufactured version of winter.

Seize the Moment!

 

Visions of Arcadia

I am getting ready to head down to Jamaica this weekend which means that I am blasting Bob Marley on my sound system while I pack as little as possible in my suitcase.  I will be staying at Yellow Plum with Liz and Giul. . . .and Rocco, Pella and Biggins, of course.  I can already picture myself sitting on the veranda looking out over rolling green hills to the ocean and the sky far in the distance.

Last night while looking out at a spectacular sunset streaked sky from my favorite window seat, I realized that except for a week in Maine over the Fourth and this quick trip to Jamaica,  I will have spent most of my summer right here in the heart and heat of the city.  This is a first for me.  Even when I was working full time, I used to rush up to Maine every weekend, happy to escape and then always sad to come back.  

I think of the lake a lot.  I see it in my mind's eye covered with acres of diamonds by the afternoon sun.  I imagine sitting on the dock at sunset and watching the sky turn colors as the sun disappears into the lake.  Does the house miss me? Does it wonder why I've stayed away this summer?

Earlier this week, I went to see Visions of Arcadia at the museum, a truly transporting exhibit of paintings full of light and feeling.  At the end of the show, the viewer is asked to sketch his or hers vision of arcadia.  That used to be Maine for me.  I'm not so sure any more.

x + y =z

I loved this article in the Sunday NYTimes.  I am mathematically challenged to say the least--I barely remember my times tables--and algebra in 9th or 8th grade (?) was a huge challenge.  So well I remember trying fruitlessly to solve word problems.  The key to the solution always seemed to escape me, the use of words and not just numbers only adding to my confusion.  Fifty years later, I still recall the humiliation and panic caused by my abysmally low SAT math scores.  Would I ever get into college? 

And yet, one of my pleasantest memories is sitting with my dad at our dining room table doing my algebra homework together.  I'm thinking how handsome he is and how he knows everything.   He is patiently explaining to me how to read a word problem and create an equation that finds the answer.  x + y + z.   I get it! I get it!. . . but only here at the dining table with my dad sitting across from me.

Years and years later, I sat with my son at the table in our kitchen and coaxed him, begged him, entreated him  to do his homework, all of which was a challenge he deemed impossible.   Once in frustration he tore up his assignment into little pieces and scattered them on the floor.  I patiently picked up all those little papers and pasted them together for him to bring into school the next day, so desperate was I that he not fail.  Who knows if he remembers. 

When We Were the Kennedys

I started it one night and finished it in the morning before getting out of in bed--When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood.   It's a memoir by a woman who grew up in Mexico, Maine, a rural town not far from Otisfield where I've spent so many summers.  It opens with the death of her father when she was just nine and ends with the assassination of President Kennedy six months later.  It never strays from the small community of largely Catholic, working class families whose livelihoods are tied directly or indirectly to the paper mill that dominates, pollutes but at the same time feeds the life of the town.  Its main characters are the members of her family, her childhood friends and their families, the nuns at the Catholic school she attends.  There's a large cast of characters--every one of whom is described with love and compassion and telling detail.

Tragedy occurs right at the onset--her Dad dies suddenly on his way to work one day--but the book isn't steeped in depression or ugliness.  When I was finished reading it, I felt that I had been privileged to read a private account of crucial events in this one family's history, a gift by the writer to the people who loved her and whom she loved.

The definition of the word heartfelt is "Sincere; Deeply and strongly felt".  This is a heartfelt book.

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West Philly

I've spent a  portion of the last two days in West Philly.  Yesterday Liz and I rode the #13 trolley out to 40th and Baltimore to have dinner at the Chat House.  I hadn't ridden on the trolley since I was a teenager and living in Yeadon with my parents.  The #13 trolley was our way into center city.  We hiked down the hill to catch the trolley then rode all along Chester Avenue and finally down into the tunnel at 40th Street and into center city.  In those days, the trolley wasn't air conditioned.  On hot days, all the windows were wide open so you could lean out and feel the breeze on your face and look out at the street.  The cold air was pumping in last night's trolley but it was filled with hot and sweaty passengers coming home tired and cranky from a long day at work. I remembered getting off at my stop just past Cobbs Creek and having to trudge up that long hill to my house on the corner of Church Lane and Darnell Avenue.  After dinner, Liz and I walked back to center city past beautiful old homes with big porches and flowering trees along the sides.  I didn't think these houses were the homes that most of the passengers on the #13 trolley were going back to.

This afternoon I walked out to West Philly following Walnut Street across the Schuykill to spend a couple hours at the Institute of Contemporary Art.  It was really hot crossing the bridge from center city and I felt the sweat trickle down my back.  It was a relief to step into the cool and dark of ICA.  The guard laughed and laughed when I told her I had walked all the way from center city.  "I did that when Septa was on strike," she said, "and then I had to stand all day here.  I was tired."

Upstairs was the exhibit I had come to see: Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show,  a mash up of videos, graphic displays of information, interactive installations by an Austrian graphic designer exploring his search for the meaning of happiness--how to define it, how to feel it, what causes it.  The gallery was nearly empty so I took my time, happy to be alone in a cool, dark space.  I laughed, I listened, I watched, I read,  I felt happy, bored, interested, even sad at one point.  It made me think which I guess was the point after all.  Then I walked back home crossing the new South Street Bridge (that's what the banners say) which I really like, with views of the river and the city on either side.   

Feeling the Heat

I haven't posted for over two weeks (I'm feeling ambivalent about continuing this blog (Is it too trivial, a waste of time? Should I be doing something more serious?) and it's kind of pathetic to make my return to blogging a post about the weather.  But I just came back from running a short errand that took me outside for maybe 30 minutes tops.  I hadn't been outside since the early morning when it was hot but within acceptable parameters.  This afternoon it felt literally painful to be moving let alone breathing. 

I hate when commentators like right wing fundamentalists start blaming natural disasters on our supposed sinfulness.  But this heat spell really does feel like a punishment.  And it's so clearly one we've brought on ourselves by willfully ignoring the evidence of climate change and steadfastly refusing to do what is necessary and right to save our planet. . .if that is indeed possible.

My depressing, maybe even despairing, mood has only been intensified by reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I was surprised to learn that it was written in 1951.  The grim and dystopian world it describes--on the brink of nuclear destruction, hostile to ideas and learning, devoid of joy and real emotion--feels way too close to the world we live in now.   

Weather Report

We've been having weird but wonderful weather here--sudden storms that tear across the lake without warning followed by brilliant sunshine and cloud swept skies.  Last night at sunset time, we could view a double rainbow at one end and then a dramatic, smoky end of day sky at the other end.

Then this morning I woke up around 4 am to the full moon pouring a golden path right across the lake and into my bedroom.  I went out on the deck and watched it descend slowly into the water.  There was complete silence except for the weird call of loons who I imagine were appreciating the view as well.  Then the skies began to lighten and it was just an hour to morning.  Somehow I managed to get back in bed and go to sleep for awhile.

Welcome to Philly, Cuz

I now have a roommate for the first time since college over 40 years ago.  (A husband, which I had for 41 years, does not qualify as a roommate.  Living with a spouse is way different from living with a roommate.) My new roommate is my 25 year old nephew, Jonathan, who is starting graduate school at Penn this summer.  He moved in on Thursday and immediately experienced Philadelphia at its best--the Night Market down on Washington Avenue.

 This is going to be fun. 

Dateline: Heaven

I'm in Maine, a refugee from the heat in the city.  It's hot here, too, but there's a lake to cool off in and a breeze coming off the lake that makes the deck the perfect place to sit and read. . .or watch the dogs.  Because, dear reader,  I live in dog world now with Wilbur, the wonder dog, and his brother Ackee who do nothing but run around and play all day inside and out.  Wilbur sleeps like a prince in a huge crate in the living room, his toys litter the floor.  He even lounges on the sofa like it a king on his throne.  How things have changed in Heaven.

Some things never change like the consistent variability of Maine weather.  We've had the full repetoire of weather today--blazing sun and clear blue skies in the morning and early afternoon followed by an epic thunderstorm with roaring winds and lots of lightning after lunch.  Now it's sunny again, the lake is flat and the light is glistening gold and green in the trees.  I can't see a rainbow but I can hear the very distant rumble of thunder as the storm rolls away. 

Personal Space

I am heading up to Maine tomorrow, the beginning of my annual warm weather pilgrimage to Heaven.  Only this year, it will be different.  I know that I will not be spending the whole summer in Maine.  I tried that last year and it didn't work.  It's too hard, too lonely to be in the house all by myself.  I keep waiting for Steve, a towel wrapped around his big belly,  to walk up the steps from the lake and plop down on his favorite seat on the deck. 

I'll have Giuliano and Wilbur, the wonder dog, with me this time and over the Fourth the house will be filled with people.  Right now, it's company I need when I am in Maine.  Empty rooms make me sad.   I certainly don't feel that way in Philly.  I relish my privacy there, rarely feel lost in my apartment despite its size.  Maybe it's because I never felt Maine was truly my space.  It was always a shared space, even a public space.  Who knows. . .just know I am going with the flow this summer.

My Jamaica

This is what I do in Jamaica.  This is why I love being in Jamaica.

I help out in the garden. I have the blisters to prove it.

I take in the beauty of the sunset.

I play with the dogs--all three of them!  This is Rocco who LOVES me.

I snuggle up with a good book in Liz's comfy bed.  Giul, the ideal son-in-law, sleeps up in the loft when I visit.