Backpedaling into summer

Tying up loose ends and clearing our vision

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Catch up

Last week, when I wrote about books about crows, I forgot to include this photo.

Maybe this crow can’t read. Or he can but he also knows he can get away with anything when it comes to humans. Photo © Fran Gardner

Crows are hard for me to photograph, as they have walked or flown away before I can get my phone in place, and they are always just too far away.

More patience on my part would help, too. I should just plant myself in a place where crows congregate and wait for them to come to me.

I remember now

Last week I wrote that I couldn’t remember the name of the reference book I used to find information about publishers. I asked a few reference librarians, but they couldn’t help.

But then I found shelves of reference books at the Central branch of the Multnomah County Library. And there was the book I sought: Literary Market Place. There’s even a 2024 print edition.

The uncanny valley

I wrote briefly about a book of this title a few weeks back but didn’t include what the term “uncanny valley” means. It refers to the vertiginous feeling one gets when encountering an artificial construct that is too close to human.

Again, I saw the book’s title in a panel in the graphic novel The Infinity Particle.

The theme of that book is the attraction between a young women who is doing research on Mars (in the future, obviously) and her mentor’s creation, a fully functioning man-bot who apparently has achieved consciousness. He’s even taller than she.

The term “uncanny valley” has to do with graphing human response to various forms, from non-human to artificially human to human. The baseline is between positive and negative, and as the line creeps from artificial to human, there is a sudden deep dip toward a negative response. In other words, we are creeped out by near-human, non-human entities.

I’m not sure how that term fits with the memoir Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, as pictured in The Infinity Particle, because I didn’t finish the book.

Another garage photo

Some readers wondered about the fenced-in space on the top of the garage in the opening photo of the May 25 posting, Crows and Lavender. That was the one with the three birds on the wall.

Here’s another garage photo. No idea whose feet these are. I just looked up and saw them while wheeling down Southeast 27th Avenue.

Photo © Fran Gardner

Triad

• Passive

• Positive

• Point

Yes, I can tie these words together.

Passive

Summer is here, the most passive of seasons. Time for sloth. Reading at the beach.  Taking it easy. Drifting a quiet river on an inner tube.

Passivity is so often tagged as a negative emotion. We should all be active! Forward-thinking! Ready to face the challenges of life.

But sometimes, you know, it just feels right to turn over in bed and go back to sleep.

Passive time is receptive time. Time when you slow your thoughts, turn off the circuits, untangle feelings.

It is a time to just be. And in being you discover.

Just sit for a time. Do nothing. You will find it’s the entry to everything.

Positive

If you can’t be passive, be positive. This is the quintessential American posture. Positive thinking, positive action, goals and closure.

And of course we overdo it. I get so tangled in this exposition that I trip over my metaphorical feet.

Too much positivism leads to excess. We want to stand like Colossus at the harbor of our life, bellowing for all to hear that we can do anything! We can be anything! All we have to do is have a positive outlook.

Hey! Stop beating your chest and climb down off that ladder. You can always ascend again.

But for now, realign yourself. Take another big breath. Pass from positive to passive. Let the muscles of your neck and shoulders relax. Remember who you are.

Then go out there and get ’em, tiger!

Point

For the purposes of this essay, a point is a like a little laser circle. Concentrated energy. Your big plans, your over-arching world view, distilled into a nano breath.

Passive or positive, when you bring your focus to a single point, the extraneous falls away. Here is clarity, fine-honed purpose, a place to rest.

Now. Rest here, even if only for a second. Then, gradually, widen your vision.

You are ready to start a new project, invent a new outlook, forge a new life.

Food from the past

When I returned home after four and a half years away in assisted living, I found food that had been in the kitchen from the last time I lived here.

I’m working my way through the canned goods. The quality may be degraded, but they are safe. They are also, alas, from my time when I ate carbs, mostly corn and beans.

I can’t donate old food to the food bank, so if I don’t eat them I’ll have to toss them. I’m at the point with keto where I think I can have a carb day once a week or so, so I’ll tackle them a can at a time.

More worrisome is the flour. I used to bake sourdough bread a couple of times a week, using a wide variety of flour and grains, from kamut to spelt to pumpernickel. I came back from assisted living land to find two 5-pound bags of Bob’s Red Mill organic white flour in a kitchen cabinet.

In the meantime, I’ve gone keto, so no carbs, and Robert who has been diagnosed as celiac on the basis of a blood test, has become a cautious consumer of wheat products. But, were I to make some more sourdough bread, he would happily partake.

A digression on buying flour

Never buy flour that’s not organic if you can help it. Farmers have taken to spraying their wheat crop with RoundUp herbicide before harvest. It withers the grain and makes it easier to thresh.

I suspect that glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, may turn out to be responsible for the vast increase in neurologically related disorders, from multiple sclerosis to autism, over the past decades.

The German giant Bayer bought Monsanto, the originator of RoundUp, in 2018 for $66 billion. I’m thinking it may be facing billions in claims down the road. It is already paying big bucks to settle lawsuits that have successfully tied glyphosate to various lymphomas.

Another unneeded supply

My old bread-making ingredients included an unopened jar of barley malt syrup. I used it in making sourdough bread in lieu of sugar or honey to feed the yeast. It has a wonderful syrupy texture and a sweet “malty” flavor.

An unopened jar of really good sweetener. Note the kitchen counter. We haven’t gotten around to swapping out the 1940s-era bluelinoleum countertop. Besides, I like it. Photo © Fran Gardner

Glory Bee Foods of Eugene made the product I have, but now sells light barley malt syrup as only as a commercial product in a 650-pound metal drum or a 58.5-pound  plastic pail.

Eden Foods of Clinton, Mich., still sells small bottles of barley malt syrup. You may find it in natural food stores or online. If you are avoiding Amazon, you can order it at iHerb.com.

I don’t know what I will do with that syrup. I think it’s still good. I’ve seen hungry people mining the trash bins outside the Hawthorne Safeway for leftovers. But I can’t imagine approaching one of them and offering a bottle of unfamiliar sweetener.

I hate wasting anything, but especially food.

This might be one of those times.

Tools

I’ve been straightening drawers as I combine my apartment effects with the ones I left at home. A kitchen drawer yielded this assortment of tools. Which do you recognize?

Two of them are for pitting cherries. The simple clamp-like tool grasps the stem of a strawberry and allows you to pull out the core.

The other two items are bottle openers. The big one is useful for opening home-canned jars. It pries off the metal lid with either the big lever (think quart jars) or the little one (jelly, jam or chutney).

One gadget I wish I had is a shrimp deveiner. We had one in the FoodDay offices at The Oregonian, but it is long lost.

Another gadget, another time. I just use a sharp knife to devein shrimp.

Turkish delight

When my sister Catherine Sanborn and her wife, Anne Birmingham were in Portland a few weeks ago, we ate at the Cricket Cafe. That’s a local eatery on Southeast Belmont that specializes in breakfasts.

On this visit, I had the “Turkish breakfast”: Poached eggs, yogurt, garlic, and oil made rosy with red pepper.

The Turkish breakfast at the Cricket Cafe. Photo © Fran Gardner

Hey, I recognize that dish! It’s Çılbır, pronounced CHIL-bur, poached eggs served over a bed of garlicky yogurt and finished with warm butter and Aleppo pepper (or other ground or flaked red pepper, including paprika.)

Robert’s old friend and philosophy teacher colleague Sevin Koont is from Turkey. Her mother, Feriha, gave Robert a recipe for Çılbır. We serve it in custard cups, but it could be flat on a plate, too. I anglicized the name when I included it in the recipe collection I sent to family, oh, decades ago now.

CILBUR                                                                                    Serves 4

• 1 pint (2 cups) unflavored yogurt, such as Nancy’s

• 2 or 3 cloves garlic

• Salt

• 2 tablespoons butter

• 1/2 teaspoon paprika or Aleppo pepper

• 4 eggs

1. Put the yogurt in a bowl. Chop the garlic coarsely, sprinkle liberally with salt, then smoosh it with a blunt object into a paste. You could mash it in a mortar.

2. Mix as much of  the salty garlic into the yogurt as you think you can handle. Divide the yogurt among 4 small dishes or ramekins. Let it sit at least 10 minutes for flavors to blend.

3. Melt the butter with the paprika or pepper. Keep it ready to drizzle over the eggs.

4. Poach the eggs in simmering water (add a dash of vinegar; it keeps the whites from spreading) until the yolks start to set but are still runny.

5. Slide a poached egg on top of each dish of yogurt. Drizzle the pretty red butter over the top and serve immediately.

Check out

Nag, nag, nag

Here’s another reminder to write, write, write. Every day. It helps center your world. You don’t have to publish or edit or reread it. Just put some words on paper or in a computer file.

Earlier this month, I let my practice of 20 minutes of free writing (separate from the writing I do for Substack or other venues) lapse for several days. I had a lot of other writing to do. I was starting to work on quilts again. I was reading more.

The cumulative effect: What I wrote for other projects, outside of the daily exercise, was less interesting, less immediate, more forced.

Seems I need that little 20 minute session with the keyboard.

What it is

Again, the daily writing exercise is not a diary. Not a gripe session. Not even, as it was for a long time for me, a place to come up with a little plot every day.

No, it’s a time to plumb your heart, ask “what am I feeling now?,” move from one polished rock to the next, pausing to skip some of them over the lake.

I’m back on track now, and better for it. It works for me, and I want it to work for you. I want everyone to raise to their potential—and potential is infinite.

Trying to write a poem

This morning, I was sitting outside Straight from New York Pizza on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard with my back to a bus stop, looking at a sticker that reads “Ted Wheeler is a very bad mayor.”

I was hoping to write some poems for strangers. I’ve done it before, with good results. Today, however, the dynamic wasn’t working.

People on Hawthorne are used to ignoring street importuners:

Buy my Street Roots, the newspaper of the homeless.
Sign my petition . . .
I’m homeless, anything helps.

My sign, “Let me write you a poem—it’s free!” is yet another irritant. I’m just another person to avoid eye contact with.

No takers

The poet sits alone
On a forgotten corner. 
No one notices,
Unsmiling faces pass by.

Maybe I’ll move.
Find another venue.
Poems are free, but no takers.
Don’t they know poems can heal?

What is a poem for,
If not to change lives?
Or at least add a perspective,
Make something fresh.

I could be a baker
Or a mender of tears.
I could absorb tears.
With a vast handkerchief.

But my work writing poems—
Nobody wants it.
Not that child with the pink ice cream
In the brown waffle cone.

Not the women with glasses
Or the dogs on a leash.
They’re all in a hurry.
With nowhere to go.

—30—

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