Catching up
Building on the past, with some fresh thoughts thrown in
Check in
Walking
The weather has been cool and crisp this week. Fine weather for walking.
The walk is not what I expected. No walk ever is. Each walk’s moments are unique and come to us unbidden: An encounter with a stranger. A trick of the light. Dog droppings in unfortunate places. Shiny objects. A strange bird. Dead blackberries, far past the season, still clinging to the bramble.
Walking is good for your legs, your heart, your lungs. But mostly, it is food for your spirit. Be outside.
This sweet nectar of experience: I keep drinking it, even thought it’s available only in tiny sips, like what hummingbirds find in a single blossom.
Addendum
Last week I found boarding passes for two strangers stashed in a library book. This week, I found a luggage claim check for a trip I made to DC. It think it was in 2003. I was visiting my younger daughter, who had recently graduated from college and was working at a nonprofit called Citizens for Global Solutions. She lived in Arlington, Va.
The claim check marked my place in a used book I bought on that trip, Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation, by Jess Stearn.
This book, first published in 1963, was the first introduction many Americans had to what was then a mysterious Indian practice.
Stearn was a newspaperman who became interested in the esoteric when writing a biography of the psychic Edgar Cayce.
Working with a woman who had an ashram in Boston, he learned about relaxing his mind, eating vegetarian food (then an exotic idea), and, eventually, standing on his head.
The ideals and practices of yoga, so commonplace today, were fresh and intriguing in the early ’60s. And because yoga is an ongoing practice, the book has held up well.
I’m working my way through it, but it’s tough. A relic from the days before trade paperbacks, this book is pocket-sized. The cramped type, bounded by slender margins, is perhaps 9-point. It’s hard for my elderly eyes to focus on it.
Writing in books
It’s a particular thrill to find a book, especially a cookbook, with some ghostly person’s handwriting on it.
“To Jill, Christmas 1910.”
The Return of the Native, Modern Library, inscribed “John Mansfield Libby, 1927” and “Frances M. Gardner, 1972.”
Or a recipe, crowded onto a slip of paper and left in an old brochure on how to cook with Crisco.
The manuscript of people who have left us is powerful, potent, a bit of their soul spilled into the ink. I keep discovering those lost soul pieces.
Advent
The Christian season of Advent begins Dec. 3* this year. It is supposed to be a quiet space, a time for reflection and retrospection before the Christmas holiday.
*Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. Dec. 3 to Dec. 25 is just 21 days, the shortest. The longest possible Advent is 28 days.
Advent is analogous to Lent, the quiet time before Easter, and Elul, the Jewish month that precedes the solemn High Holy Days and is also a time to step back and reflect.
Right up until the trumpets of commerce crash the party. As with Christmas and Hanukkah, and Halloween and Valentine’s Day, commerce has taken over Advent.
The Wirecutter, a sort of Consumer Reports affiliated with The New York Times, recently posted a review of “the best Advent calendars.” Man, they are expensive, like one that features a different fancy jam for each day for $45.
Or the “The 2023 advent calendar from Onyx, a hip, high-quality coffee roaster based in Arkansas [that] opens like a dictionary to unfurl a cardboard arc of pockets containing 24 small pouches of whole bean coffee.” It’s only $189.
Before commercialization set in, Advent calendars were pretty simple, cardboard sheets with little flaps you opened each day to reveal a picture or a Bible verse. Some included a little chocolate for each day.
You can find a simple calendar with Lindt chocolate teddy bears for $10 at Target.
Jacquie Lawson, known for sweet animated e-cards, creates a novel Advent calendar each year with plenty of whimsy and activities. The themes derive from Northern European traditions, not too surprising, since Advent calendars were conceived by 19th century German Protestants. This year’s features upper-class life in Edwardian England. It costs $8.
Writing
Now that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is nearly over, and I once again have not participated, here is a poem about getting ready to write.
Bring me the bologna
Lazy mind, Kicking the gravel. Don’t lift that foot, Let it scuff along. Write about eyeballs. No, that’s too messy. What about bologna? Well, what about it? Things that you slice, Bologna, not eyeballs. Occam’s razor? Sometimes your fingers. Keep your knives sharp. And always buy good ones. Dull knives can hurt you Like dull platitudes. Keeping it lazy, Hammocks and bees. Sweetness of summer Relaxing in sun. Now in November Time to look forward. Sharpen those eyeballs, Sharpen the knives. Cut out the ennui, Work hard on plot, Focus on character— Write, child, write. Lift off from laziness Make use of your fingers, Crafting or writing, Cooking or petting. Now to your true self, The lazy, the inspired, Where is the balance? Bring me the bologna.
And here is another about words.
Imperfect words
Move around the words. Hew and polish. Choose, sometimes The one with the gaping flaw. Imperfection Pushes you past Pat answers, Easy images. The sculptor works with the medium. Flaws and fissures Challenge the chisel, Deepen the work. Fissures and flaws In our being. We can work around them, Patch some, But let others bleed. They are proof Of our humanity. Spirit moves me. Pushes me off my pedestal, Catches me As I fall free. Nothing is attached Except the ribbons of memory. Nothing is welcome Except my life. Set back on the earth Upright, I breathe. I push aside the numinous. The clouds keep moving.
Listening to books
Last week, I mentioned The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the massive multi-book biography of the president by Robert Caro. I may have given the impression that I’ve read all four extant volumes (the fifth is still being written), but that is not altogether accurate.
I listened to the books.
Audiobooks are a godsend in the case of these tomes, as the books themselves are big and bulky, hard to hold easily while you read.*
*I didn’t read Caro’s first book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses and the remaking of New York’s infrastructure, as a book, either. I read it in pieces when it was serialized in The New Yorker in 1974 as “The Annals of Power.” I had a long bus commute at the time.
It’s the narrator
But about the audiobooks. The reason why they are such a joy to listen to, aside from Caro’s masterly storytelling, is the narrator. His name is Grover Gardner (no relation).
I sometimes seek out audiobooks just because he is the reader.
I love Gardner’s actor’s voice, so well suited to the wise-guy hero of David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter mystery series. Set in New Jersey, the novels feature a semi-retired criminal defense lawyer who is also a dog lover involved with a pet rescue operation.
Like the fictional Andy, Rosenfelt is owned by a golden retriever, Tara, the best damned dog on the planet.
Gardner’s Wikipedia entry says Gardner, now pushing 70, has recorded a jaw-dropping 1,200 books. Audible lists at least 600.
They include the Caro series, Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano Sicilian mysteries, much of Mark Twain, and Will Durant’s series on the history of Western civilization.
He’s also recorded the sci-fi fantasy novels of Lois McMaster Bujold, beloved of my sister, Catherine Sanborn. But even though they’re read by my favorite narrator, I can’t warm up to them. You can keep your Vorkosigan Saga. I can leave it.
The girl angle
I have a favorite female reader, too. She is Katherine Kellgren, an American with an extraordinary capacity for voicing characters, including Brits. She even sings when lyrics are available.
I’ve listened to her read most of the Bloody Jack YA series by L.A. Meyer, as well as the Her Royal Spyness series by Rhys Bowen.
Sadly, Kellgren (whose birth name was Kjellgren) died in 2018 of cancer. She was 48.
Sleeper
In the movie 10 Items or Less, now streaming on Amazon Prime, an old man finds peace by perfecting a pile of oranges and staring at stacked bananas. A car wash generates a dance number. Then everyone grabs a rag and starts buffing the wet cars, creating community and sparking joy in another dance.
This is a rare movie, a quiet outing, despite the car wash, that visits the heart. I add it to my small collection of heart-felt cinema:
Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart The Last Black Man in San Francisco Resurrection (with Ellen Burstyn) Henry Fool Smoke Cherry Blossoms The Good Heart
These are quiet movies, some of them old, often hard to find, but worth seeking out for their understanding of humanity.
Connection
In 10 Items or Less* an aging actor, years from his last movie role, and a young woman spend a day together, sharing and bonding, knowing they will never see each other again once they part.
*I actually lost track of my writing about this movie because the copy editor inside me originally typed the title as 10 Items or Fewer.
“I see you,” he tells her. It’s more than just a tag line from Avatar. It is about connection, about intimacy, breaking down barriers and sharing.
They do mundane things like ride around in a car and shop at Target, yet their actions are rich and meaningful. The scenery is alive; objects are like actors. An oil refinery, stacks of shipping containers, a grocery store, the car wash. The mundane works magic. You can see some of it in the trailer.
The old man, never named and played by Morgan Freeman, has a gift for connection. Some people remember him from the B movies he used to make.”You were in that movie with Ashley Judd!” passers-by call to him.
The young woman, played by Paz Vega, is wry, coltish, unsure of herself, yet brave and forthright. She knows the 10 items or less checkout line is “where checkers go to die.”
In a recent Substack posting, Paul Vlachos
wrote about passing acquaintances:Many of the people you meet on the road will share a few moments with you and it’s understood you’ll never meet again. This kind of talk can generate supreme banalities or brief flashes of deep connection, to be lost an hour later.
Or, in the case of 10 Items or Less, at the end of a day.
This movie may be leaving Amazon Prime at the end of November, so the time to watch it is now.
Check out
Believe it or not, I really do try to keep these postings short. But there are so many interesting things I want to share!
This week, I wrote at least nine (9!) poems for people, six of them at the Hillsdale farmers market and then for three people at the Washington Square mall. Plus, I wrote one for a resident here at Rose Schnitzer Manor. So that’s 10.
I’d like to share those with you, because I think you would like them. It’s possible the Christmas edition, coming December 23, will be mostly poems. That will give me a bit of a vacation from generating other copy.
How do you feel about poetry? Love it? Or does it set your teeth on edge? Leave a comment or send me an email. I like what I write, but maybe I’m a minority of one.
Urban decay
The other thing I had hoped to share this week was a number of pictures of urban decay, the curiously beautiful images of things that are forgotten or pushed aside. But this post is getting long, so I’ll settle for just one.
These colorful compacted boxes are at the back side of my local Walgreens. Last week, there were two piles. Now there are three. See how they integrate with the texture of the building and the signs on the wall.
And just one more picture of something yellow. This enclosure, which I think has something to do with a sewer project, is on Southeast 27th Avenue, near my house.
Okay, one more one more. After I drafted this posting, I stopped by the Hillsdale Library and caught sight of a pile of boxes used to convey books between libraries. I had to get special permission from the staff to enter the back room for the shot.
December’s theme
We’re leaving November, when the dark is rising, for December, when the theme is “celebrations.” That seems self-evident, so I won’t be belaboring the season.
I do hope, however, to lay a few more recipes on you. How do you feel about that?
This week, I cut up a pie pumpkin, roasted the flesh (I add it to smoothies) and toasted the seeds. You may recall that I shared the toasted seed recipe last week.
Now, you
Take care this week. Eat thoughtfully. Forgive your neighbor. Pet the dog. Don’t forget to write.
And remember the “like” button. Just saying.
—30—
Fran, you never know how your writing will affect someone, and they probably won't tell you. Just release your babies into the world and let them fly or fall. I too am in love with my poems and I have a dear friend who always responds with wild accolades. He was a reported at a newspaper we both worked at; I was the city desk secretary. It was the yeastiest and most life-changing job I ever had. We reunited on FB where I've shared my poems for a few years. And still he's my biggest (and only) fan. I cherish ever review he sends, and they may only be one word.