Leaving

Birds form for migration while our young fly off to college

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The autumn winds, rushing,
Waft the leaves that are serest... 
Sir Walter Scott, “Coronach"

There is roaring in the trees these days as autumn winds rip away leaves and lift migrating birds. This is not the fury of the season, just the rhythm of nature.

October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. . . 
Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

Going home

The theme for October is “home and away.” As I write this, I can see from my window flocks of birds in V-formation, gathering to fly south. They are black dots, too far away for me to see the species, but they change direction too rapidly to be Canada geese. The sight fills me with nostalgia.

Gluten free update

I swung by Gills Point S Tire & Auto Service on a working day to meet store manager Richard Schilk, the genius who thought up “We now offer gluten-free oil changes.” He is a cheerful man with a quick smile, and is already thinking of his next offering. Maybe something along the line of “Winter is Coming,” a reference to the new “Game of Thrones” series.

Thank you, Richard, for lightening our day.

Edges and borders update

One of my loyal followers, Esther Dickstein, points out that when I wrote about the edges in our lives, I didn’t address the borders between countries. And when those borders break, as in Ukraine or Israel, we experience a tectonic shift in the way we see the world.

Esther is right, of course. What were once just lines on a map have become the jagged edges of our new reality. We seem powerless to set them right.

Mourning

Last week I recounted how I lost my purse, with my nearly full journal and a pouch full of pens and memories.

I’m not obsessing over losing that bag, but as I move through my days, I feel flashes of grief. Also of shame, an emotion I always want to deny. But I am ashamed that I broke routine by not reaching for my journal first thing on coming home, that I didn’t take good care of my possession.

Oddly, I don’t miss the contents of the journal as much as I feared. A few lists, some references I won’t get to check out. It contained an abundance of writing ideas, most tagged with the initials WAM—Write About Me. But ideas assail me daily, many more than I can tackle. I will not run out of ideas.

Bullet journal

The journal I lost was a lined blank book converted to a bullet journal. That is, I took the effort to manually number the pages and set aside pages for an index.

The bullet journal idea was developed by a designer from Brooklyn, Ryder Carroll (I want to marry that name!), about a decade ago. Read the history of it at https://bulletjournal.com/pages/about

Using one makes your work easier and more accessible with a few refinements on a simple blank book:

• Pages are numbered.

• You create an index (it’s simple) to keep track of ideas and events by noting the page numbers.

• Each day’s coming activities are marked with a dot, later checked off.

• There’s a more complex set of symbols for differentiating entries, such as tasks, events, notes, priority. I sort of forget these.

• The journal may also include calendars; Carroll initially hand-entered the dates of a month on a few blank pages. I pasted sheets from wall calendars, trimmed and folded to fit. Most people just use the calendar on their smart phone.

Journal site

Many years ago, I had a brilliant idea for a website called Journalese. It would be a place for people to share their adventures with journaling. And I would sell journals and pens and such.

I could have made it work. I could reach the moon, too, if I stretch hard enough. We all have big ideas that don’t prosper for some reason or other. I invite you to share some of yours in the comments.

Another big loss

In December 2008, a month after I left The Oregonian, someone stole my laptop. Ironically, that very day I was going to order an external hard drive to make backups. I had been keeping backups on floppy disks, but it was a chore, and I was behind, so I lost about a month’s worth of work.

Now I’m obsessive about backing up: two external hard drives and Backblaze cloud backup. Apple provides iCloud backup, too, but I don’t trust the file structure.

The message in it all

Both these incidents of loss showed me something. Something to do with slowing down, not taking myself so seriously, understanding that I have enough.

As for the missing purse, it’s time to move on. I have a new journal. Ideas are popping all the time.

To make us all feel better, here’s a pretty fall photo. Autumn light spread the clouds after a rainstorm, and serendipity provided the red curb.

Photo © Fran Gardner

October Light

Summer’s sun is straightforward.
October's bright but oblique.

Long shadows lean from the light,
Foreshadowing evening all day.
Shifting shadows dapple the street;
Sun picks out puddles from recent rain.

Above the shadows,
Light washes the turning trees.
Each leaf, each blade its own sun soldier
In the clearest air of the year.

I sit in a sun break,
As warm as August.
Watch the leaves as they dance
In a cool autumn breeze.

October’s blessing:
The caress of the sun,
A crisp kiss of autumn,
A break in the rain.

The college trek

October’s theme, again, is “home and away.” Many fall partings come when children go away to college.

Me, my spouse and my children all went off to college by ourselves.

Robert to Brandeis

Robert Jaffe, my husband, was the first of us to leave, for Brandeis in 1956 at the age of 16. His parents drove him from Brooklyn to Boston. They stopped in a diner near Hartford for some delicious Connecticut “hoagies.” In the restaurant, they spotted the actress Bette Davis with her then-husband, Gary Merrill. They were probably on tour at the time, doing “summer stock” in early fall.

Much as he loved his parents, Robert couldn’t wait to see them drive off so that he could explore the campus on his own.

Me to Berkeley

I got to UC Berkeley by myself in 1969, driving the five hours from Tulare in a little blue VW bug that had been my father’s and that I bought from my siblings. (It took me years to scrape up what I owed them.)

I drove to campus and found the admin building. My dorm was only a few blocks away, not far from Shakespeare & Co. bookstore and Telegraph Avenue.

Getting there, I just kept doing what needed to be done. Found a place to store the car. Got to class. Dated a few men. Was totally clueless about human interaction. I didn’t really learn to understand people until my 40s.

I am so easy with others now. But I grew up having no idea of how to read people, how to observe them, to see them. I used to remember people by what they wore, not what their faces looked like.

That was then

I have a hard time reconciling the woman I have become with the callow 19-year-old who had to transfer to Cal from junior college because of several clueless missteps. I tried to apply to Cal late, and by then I had missed taking the SAT achievement tests. I didn’t even know what they were. My “guidance counselor” at Tulare Western HS never mentioned them.

So I spent a year at College of the Sequoias in Visalia. Lived at home, saved some money, kept working as a proofreader on Saturdays for the Tulare Advance-Register, and got required courses out of the way at a school where A’s were easy to come by.

Maggie to Harvard

My daughter Maggie flew to Boston by herself in 1998. She was 17. Why didn’t I go with her? Partly the cost, but I had also been recently diagnosed and was having some MS issues.

At Harvard, she asked around and found her house. She was assigned an apartment where T.S. Eliot once lived. The parents of her two roommates, both with Massachusetts connections, helped her get settled.

I did fly there later for Freshmen Parent’s Weekend. So the MS must’ve been better.

Lyza to Birmingham, England

My daughter Lyza’s college trek was complex and compelling. After graduating from Portland State, she decided to take a graduate course in computer science at the University of Birmingham in England. At that time, she did not fly. But she was up for the adventure. This was in 2000.

She gathered everything she thought she would need into an enormous backpack, and boarded Amtrak cross-country. From New York, she sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2. From England, she bopped around Europe before settling in Birmingham. All by herself.

I visited later, spending some time in London and in “Brum.”

Here’s her recollection of her time in Europe:

Not to be too expansive, but I also visited France, Spain, Morocco, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Poland in addition to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was close enough upon the heels of the fall of the Soviet Union that the plaza in front of the Riga train station (I THINK) had a chipped-out hole where a stone mosaic of Lenin had been, and hotels were still run by stern old women who demanded your passport in exchange for very little heat in the rooms. There was a McDonald’s on the same plaza, though, of course.

I bumped into the same British guy called Matt, who had a broken arm, in Tallinn, then Vilnius, then on a train in eastern Germany, so we decided to become friends. My three closest buddies in England were all called Matt.

Lyza, afraid to fly, ended up flying home. A close friend developed cancer and she wanted to be there for him. He survived. And she survived the flight.

She later took her fear in hand and taught herself to fly. She now travels by plane frequently from her base in rural Vermont.

My friend Bill

I asked readers to contribute their experiences. One who was kind enough to share was Bill MacKenzie, a onetime colleague at The Oregonian and Communications Manager for Intel in Hillsboro.

It was 1962. A solid New Englander, I had never been west of Virginia when I boarded a plane at Hartford, Conn.’s Bradley Field for Denver, Colo., and the University of Denver. When we flew into Denver’s now-gone Stapleton Airport and I saw the scenic grandeur of the magnificent Rocky Mountains for the first time, I was thoroughly awed. That sight and the feeling of a new beginning still stick in my memory.

Recipe box

I promised a few recipes in October. Here are two that are easy and quirky in the general Fran fashion.

One is The Condiment. It’s just ginger and lemon peel mixed together, but they make a magical pair.

I add it to everything: salad, stir-fry, soup, smoothies (recipe for the quirky way I make smoothies is TK*).

*TK is journalistic shorthand for “to kum,” meaning later.

You may prefer a Meyer lemon, with its milder, less acidic peel, to make The Condiment. But you could also a common supermarket lemon, especially since the Meyer peel is thin and less fun to chop.

Most supermarket lemons are either Lisbons or Eurekas. Lisbons have smoother skin and a point at one end. Eurekas are a bit bumpy and have a “neck” near the stem. Lisbon: thinner peel. Eureka: thicker peel.

Ingredients for The Condiment. That’s a Eureka lemon. Photo © Fran Gardner

The Condiment

• Fresh ginger

• Lemon

Peel a piece of ginger and mince it. Slice some peel off the lemon and mince that. It could have some flesh attached, just not much.

Mix the two together in equal proportions. It keeps in the fridge for a week or so. I always use it up before the week is out.

Daytime tonic

This is a drink that makes you feel alive. I keep some in a water bottle for afternoon sipping.

I always have homemade kombucha on hand, both tea and coffee. For this tonic, I use tea kombucha.

I’ve never measured the ingredients. Use what feels good to you. You need to add a fair amount of water, say about half the drink, to tone down the kick you get from the kombucha and citrus juice.

Kombucha tonic. Photo © Fran Gardner

Tonic

• Kombucha

• Brewed tea, regular or decaf

• Dash of citrus juice, lime or lemon

• Dash of bottled ginger juice, or grate some fresh ginger and squeeze out the juice

• Sweetener. Not much. I use stevia.

• Water. Mineral water is best, but I’ve used sparkling water and tap water.

• Quirky things I sometimes add

  • A few cranberries, grated (easy if they come from the freezer)

  • A few pinches of EmergenC powder. I don’t use orange juice ’cause of the carbs, so the powder add a tinge of orange flavor.

Meditation

I wrote this as a script for a meditation. It is perfect for October.

Winter and pine needles.
The owl of Minerva flies at dusk
From a snow-covered tree,
Loosing clots of snow from its limbs.

You are the owl
Soft breast
Alert ears

Breathe regularly
Relax your eyes
Relax your face
Relax your hands
Relax again, your eyes, your face, your hands
Relax your shoulders
Breathe regularly
Not deeply, just in and out in a calm rhythm

Feel the energy of the universe
Deepen your truth
Pull in the energy and let it out
With each easy breath

As the snow falls from the tree and the owl takes flight
Dark sky and stars fade

Dawn breaks
You’re at the edge of a lake
It’s winter
Dry sedges rustle
Pine trees drip with snow
In the clear frozen air

You walk the path along the lake
On pine needles that crunch
Into the snow
You see animal tracks
But no human presence
Just your spirit
Walking the path

Breathe
You are warm
Your breath warms your toes
Your knees
Your hips
Your belly
Warm
There are soft stars in your belly
Breathe out the stars
Populate the heavens

You have been at this lake
In this forest all day
Now the sunset is vivid
Now the stars you breathed
Into existence
Are strewn across the sky

Remember your breath
You breathe
You breathe
Steadily, calmly, easily

Breathe

Into the silence

Check out

The season is really turning now. I try to photograph trees with fall color only to find they are missing so many leaves already. They just look sad. Here’s a gingko, however, that’s still resplendent. I love the scatter of leaves on the sidewalk beneath it.

Photo © Fran Gardner

The crisp October light draws me outside every day. Enjoy it while you can.

Synchronicity from Lyza

Lyza Gardner was visiting the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Dartmouth, N.H., when she noticed a print on the wall of the Queen Elizabeth 2. The title was “QE2 at Manhattan,” and it was dated 8-14-2000. “I think I was on the QE2 at that time!” Lyza says.

Her partner, Bryan Fox, tracked down the artist and bought her a copy of the print for her birthday a few years ago. Her birthday is tomorrow, Oct. 22. Happy birthday, Lyza!

Love you,

Mom

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