Archaischer Torso meiner Grossmutter

My grandmothers both died when I was quite young and they were reasonably old. I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the total number of encounters I had with either of these women; my maternal grandmother lived for most of her life in Indiana, and her visits to the various places where my parents and their children lived were few and far between. My father's mother didn't visit often either from her home in Berkeley, and we didn't move to California from Virginia until after she died.

I mention this so you'll understand that these were not particularly beloved grandmothers, such as many of my friends have had. And my parents were not the sort to indulge in any rending of garments or gnashing of teeth at these losses. Whatever grieving they did for their mothers was done out of sight of their offspring.

Nevertheless, when my Aunt Maria, an artist of some talent in various media, rendered a clay bust of her mother and presented it to her brother as a gift, I believe my father was grateful to have it and considered it a faithful likeness. In any case, he created a place for this bust in the house in San Jose, and when he and my mother retired to the foothills, a different place for it in Oakhurst. In that house, in fact, it was positioned over an armchair in which he spent a fair amount of time reading.

Now, though this was not a subject of open discussion in the family, my mother detested her mother-in-law, had hated the bust, and strategically positioned a lamp on her desk to keep the bust out of her view as much as possible. No sooner had my father died than my mother passed the bust along to her sister-in-law, my other aunt, who was delighted to have it. In due course, the possessions of my Aunt Anne, who also spent her last years in Oakhurst, needed to be distributed or disposed of, and my half-sister brought the bust of Bertha Stenzel to Berkeley, and presented it to me.

Still with me thus far? As some of you know, I have one brother who lives in Belgium and a sister who lives in New Zealand. There was no clamor on the part of either of them to take possession of this item, nor did my other brother, who lives nearby, suggest we work out an arrangement in which I could keep the heirloom for half the year and he the other half. So the bust was placed in a very unobtrusive place in the dining room of the house in El Cerrito where I lived for many years and I proceeded to forget about it, more or less.

Which brings us to last year, to my move into a place of my own, a move that necessitated a traumatic confrontation with masses of Stuff [about which more another time, I expect] including the aforementioned bust. Over the period of a couple of weeks and after a certain amount of soul-searching, I thought about making a kind of gift to my late mother: smashing the bust into smithereens in some ceremonial way. And so one day, over the protests of my next-door neighbor, who claimed to find qualities to admire in the item, I dropped the bust of my grandmother from about shoulder height onto the concrete path in the back-yard. Other than a tiny chip from the nose, nothing happened.

Well, that completely extinguished my enthusiasm for destroying the sturdy survivor. I put it down on the ground, next to a half-barrel in which some vines and ivy were growing, and decided I would let Nature have her way with it, even wondering whether rain would return the clay to a muddy state (which did not happen). I will have to liberate my grandmother from the oxallis soon, however, because oxallis will take over the entire yard if I am not careful.

This is a test

With blog-hood (even of the occasional variety, which appears to be my style) come new challenges, so please bear with me as I explore some of the things I want to do with this medium. Tonight, I hope to add an image. To those of you who are tech-y types, this may seem like the work of a moment, and an accomplishment like adding an image something you could have done practically before you were out of diapers. Not so for me. I want to test adding an image because, when I next write a proper post, I want it to be accompanied by a picture -- the very picture that will save me oh, about a 1000 words of explanation. I had first tried to add an image when I wrote about the Leonids, but after considerable frustrated effort, I had to concede defeat.


Meanwhile, If I succeed with this mission, tonight's photo is one chosen completely at random from a disc I happened to have here in the atelier: the disc contains the photographic record of my trip to Ireland last May. This photo was taken on one of the Aran Islands: a number of us from the party of wedding-goers at Corofin in County Clare made a day trip to the Arans on a rare, glorious, sunny day in early June. I have to remind myself again and again that the day was a unusual one, because otherwise I want to drop everything and move there immediately. But according to the lady at the post office, "such a day as this might come along once in a summer ... or never at all."

My companions had holed up in the pub because it was "far too hot to be out." Knowing I was unlikely to have such an opportunity again any time soon, I dared the heat and walked around the town and found any number of lovely places to sit and stare at the ocean, or to study the wonderful grey stone with which many structures were built. It felt truly incongruous to be regularly re-applying sunscreen ... in Ireland.

What you see is the remains of a little church, surrounded by a cemetery, all quite close to the beach. Apparently, the action of the wind and shifting sands nearly buried the church, though now efforts are being made to reclaim the site. Most of the graves in the cemetery were from the 19th Century, though a number of the semi-legible tomb-stones appeared to be from the 18th. On the day I was there, it was deserted of any humans, though there were all sorts of birds (most of them strangers to me) and oodles of butterflies, careening about in the sunshine as though they could not believe their good fortune. I felt the same way.

"we are all made of stars"

Tonight we're supposed to have an especially good crop of Leonids, that lovely celestial light show that takes place each November. The trouble is, they will probably be at their most spectacular while I am sleeping. If I do manage to get up at the appropriate time (1 a.m.-ish) will I take one step out of the relatively-warm house into the definitely-cold back yard and say, to heck with the pesky Leonids ... they're probably not as great in North America as they're supposed to be in Asia, anyway! This could definitely happen. In fact, barring the particular language I am predicting here, something like this is what has happened on many another November night in the years since I first began trying to take advantage of prime opportunities to watch shooting stars.

I am pleased to report that I was more successful this year with the Perseids than I have been on other occasions. On the August night when the Perseids were supposed to be on their best behavior, I had my chaise longue already set up in the back yard, and I had a blanket to put ON the chaise longue so I wouldn't be lying down on its cold, metal-y surface, and I had a light duvet to put on top of ME when I arranged myself on the chaise. Other necessary conditions proved to be cooperative, too: it wasn't beastly cold, damp, or windy, so I was able to remain prone for a goodly while and not get impatient when the first fifteen minutes only netted me a handful of Sightings. (Mostly, what I see is the very last little teensy BIT of a shooting star; rare are the occasions when I can follow an entire arc across the sky.) And most importantly in this part of California, it wasn't total pea-soup foggy, as is far from unusual on an August night in the Bay Area.

But I was out at around 10 or 11 p.m. in August this year: that night, a work night, I knew I wouldn't have the oomph to get out of bed at 3:00 a.m. (which was when the Perseids were supposed to peak) so I decided that whatever shooting stars were going to present themselves for my scrutiny would have to be the early birds of the night. And certainly there weren't hundreds per hour (that's what is predicted for viewers of the Leonids in Asia tonight) but it wasn't bad at all while I was out. I was going to try to describe it so that you could picture the shooting stars and the intervals between the shooting stars, but our poor pitiful language lacks a word for the sight of the passage of a speck of starlight across one's field of vision. Tsk. It really seems there SHOULD be such a word, because when I watch shooting stars I almost feel as though there is a sound associated with the brief experience.

A bunch of years ago, I took part in a kind of Perseids work-party. It was under the auspices of the Golden Gate Recreational Seashore or some such, and a friend and I signed up to be there. We were told to meet at a parking lot on Mount Tam at 11:30 p.m., and to bring sleeping-bags so we wouldn't get too cold. B and I duly arrived at the parking-lot and you could barely see 10 feet in front of you: FOG. But the docent-person turned up, and was in walkie-talkie communication with a ranger elsewhere on Mount Tam, and it turned out that, if we were willing to hike half a mile (in the rather pitch-black darkness) we could try our luck in a little meadow that was, for some reason, NOT blanketed with fog.

Well, we decided we were game, and after the stumbling hike to the meadow (not enough flashlights!), it turned out to be a wonderful few hours. The docent had the 10 or 12 of us lie in a circle, with our heads in the center and our legs pointed outward like the spokes of a wheel. We were each facing a pie-shaped piece of the sky, and it was our job to watch just that space for shooting stars, and to call out as we saw them. That night there were hundreds an hour; it was exhilarating to be out in the dark chill air, staring the universe in the face and calling One! Two-Three-Four-FIVE! Six-seven. Eight-nine-ten! And sometimes there were so many at the same time and we were calling out numbers simultaneously, that I am sure our data were not 100% accurate. My friend and I stayed until around 3:00 a.m., at which point the very VERY cold ground underneath our sleeping bags began to seem like too high a price to pay for even the glories being showered across the sky, so we picked up our sleeping bags and our sleepy selves and went home.

As for tonight, I may try my luck before I go to bed, and I may be inspired to come out in the small hours. Pretty chilly out there though ....

what IS so good about walking in the neighborhood?

I moved to this area a dozen years ago. For 11 years I lived in one house, and now I live about nine or ten blocks from there. Although my new place feels very different in significant respects, I can still shop in the same stores, I still use the same public transit systems to get to work, and it still feels much like the same neighborhood. This is a good thing, because I love it here.

I started walking to the BART station on a regular basis six or seven years ago, after my car was totaled in an accident. At that time I lived on a street that saw a fair amount of vehicular traffic during commute hours, but it was still definitely a street people lived on: mostly single-family homes or duplexes, mostly of about the same vintage (the 50s and 60s, according to one of the old-timers, who lived catty-corner from where I was), mostly with small, well-tended yards. It was about a mile from the house to the BART, a straight shot crossing side streets and cul-de-sacs laid out perpendicular to the street I lived on. In the morning, there were other people out and about on foot: parents walking their kids to the elementary school, older kids heading on their own to middle-school or high-school, a fair few runners, and a scant number of business-clad grown-ups walking to the train. This is a bedroom community in a sprawling urban area, so most folk with a day job opened their doors, got into their cars, and drove off somewhere.

When I started walking to the train in the morning, I found it changed the whole neighborhood for me: everything looked more interesting from my vantage-point as a walker. Am I a bit of a voyeur? Absolutely. I do like the glimpses into people's lives that are visible at the walking pace: I get to see the bearded fellow who comes down the walkway in pajamas and robe to pick up the newspaper, and then stops to pick a peony from his garden to take back inside; I glimpse a family scene at the breakfast table through the opened curtains; I watch the elderly, apron-clad woman sweep the apparently spotless garage floor.

I still walk to the BART quite a lot from the new place, although because I now live on a hill at a different angle from the BART station, it isn't quite as simple as the old walk was. But the same things intrigue me, and when I have spent the 20 minutes or so getting from my home to the BART station, I feel I have surveyed a bit of this domain, and gleaned all manner of information (none of it particularly useful) about the small world I live in.

So it shouldn't surprise people to hear that, when I have leisure time and want a bit of exercise, I don't necessarily feel I have to go to the gym: I just head outdoors for a ramble. That means I get to find out what the people over on Lexington have planted recently, and then, later, how their garden grows. I can take note of whose open garage door reveals chaos (lots of people), and whose garage is in scrupulous order (fewer); how many for sale signs there are on really nice houses, and what's the price tag on those sheets printed by the real estate people (a bundle). Depending on the time of day and day of the week, I get to hear how music trickles (or sometimes pours) out onto the street from people's houses. Sometimes it's live music: the most-practiced instrument is still the piano, though I occasionally hear something from the brass or string families. Every once in a while I catch the distinctive sound of a garage band ... still a long way from a paying audience.

Walking, I hear babies, or shriek-y children playing various games in the twilight. I hear LOTS of different languages, since this is a wonderfully polyglot suburb. And as I cover the blocks, I am amazed by the (often tantalizing) scents of food. Sometimes when I am hungry I can’t help but invite myself, in fantasy, for the lovely Indian meal I caught a whiff of down on Kearney, or was it on Waldo? Or maybe it was Liberty Street.

(r)amble -- Part One

In April of 1985 I changed from a mostly sedentary, pack-a-day smoker to a mostly sedentary EX-smoker, and promptly put on 15 pounds of unwanted weight. Someone (alas, I no longer recall who this very useful person was) suggested that I start walking every day, and see whether that made any difference to the avoirdupois. I lived at the time in North Berkeley, at the corner of Spruce and Rose. So one morning I donned suitable clothes and shoes and started walking up Spruce Street. In rather short order I was breathless and mildly sweaty, and in a little more than half an hour, always following the gentle incline of Spruce Street, I was at the intersection with Grizzly Peak, a winding road that follows the ridge-line of the Berkeley hills. I had covered a distance of roughly two miles. On the return trip I walked down the other side of Spruce Street, and re-entered my apartment feeling like a million dollars. Thus began my story as a neighborhood walker.

To amble is to walk slowly; to stroll. To ramble (according to the two definitions I have just culled from my dictionary) is to walk about casually or for pleasure; or to follow an irregularly winding course of motion or growth [I deliberately leave to one side another definition perhaps serviceable to a person who blogs: "to speak or write at length and with many digressions."]

As a general thing, I did not in those early years, and I still do not, exactly amble. On the contrary, one of my brothers once remarked that, in order to keep up with my walking, he had to break into a little jog from time to time. Certainly in the early years, because my object was to ditch some of the poundage I had accrued when I quit smoking, I walked at the briskest pace I could manage which, as my lungs gradually recovered from 17 years of abuse, turned out to be pretty darned speedy. And since Spruce Street was a steady climb, it was as aerobic a thing as I had ever done: I got plenty sweaty on the uphill, and took to carrying a bandanna so that I could mop my brow as I climbed toward Grizzly Peak.

And the weight did come off, steadily if not quickly. But long before I had begun to reap that benefit, I was already hooked on my morning walk: I liked the pace, I liked being up in the early morning, I liked the places my feet took me, I liked being able to see things right next to me from the sidewalk instead of dashing past them on the road, and I liked the lovely vista that rewarded me when I got to the top of the hill. It was almost immediately my custom after that first successful expedition to take roughly the same walk five mornings a week, and to try to take a similar walk at least one of the days of the weekend (though not quite at the crack of dawn).

Over the decades since this auspicious beginning, I have been a walker in various places I have lived in the Bay Area; during my Paris year I was absolutely a walkin' fool, no matter what the weather. And in the neighborhood where I live now, though the 6:00 a.m. four-miler has fallen by the wayside, I try to get in a couple of leg-stretchers most weekends, even if it just means doing all my errands walking.

Next time: what's so good about walking the 'hood

about the weekend

The sun woke me up this morning, but it took a while: today is Saturday, the first day of that wonderful institution, the weekend (or, as my friends in France refer to it, Le Weekend, with the emphasis on the final syllable), and I don't arise at my weekday hour, which is 7-ish. But because discretionary time is especially precious to someone with a full-time day-job, I choose not to sleep in as I used to, years ago, when the entire morning would slide past before I surfaced from my bed. Normally I set the alarm on weekends for 8, to make sure I get good value from my day, but this morning I wasn't impressed by the alarm, so it was the warm, bright sun flooding through the southeast-facing window that woke me up a while later.

The moment I recognized it was Saturday, I was grateful. Before I had finished my first cup of tea I had already received a couple of phone calls, done a few dishes from last night, started a load of laundry, and re-filled the bird feeder, which for the past few weeks has been doing a booming business with the backyard birds (mostly finches, juncos, and sparrows) who either duke it out for their turn on the feeder, or hop about underneath where the spillage lands from the energetic birds overhead. There is a neighborhood cat that treats my backyard as its turf; I shoo him/her away when I notice it, but I also recognize that it is in the nature of a cat to stalk a bird, just as it is in a wise bird's nature to be wary. The bird-feeder hangs from a hook on one corner of the small structure I call "the atelier," which is about 30 feet from the back porch. The atelier was a prime attraction of this rental when I was looking for a place to live: about 10-feet square, it has a sleeping loft, windows on all four sides, lots of bookshelves, too many boxes that I am going to look through one fine day, and a desk supporting my computer. It smells of cedar. I spend a lot of time out here.

But about the weekend: during this morning's puttering around, I found myself wondering about the history of this blessed benefit, the two days of liberty that bracket the five days of labor many workers put in. Of course I see those bumper-stickers that say, "Unions -- the people who gave you the weekend," but I recognize that not every bumper-sticker tells the whole story. So I looked the weekend up on the aforementioned computer, and was a little surprised to see that in the U.S., it was Henry Ford, in 1926, who had the bright idea to give workers in his automobile plant Saturdays off. It would be the 1940s before unions succeeded in integrating the concept into our larger society, and, naturally, weekends don't work the same way all over the world. And they have evolved regionally at different speeds: when I was living in Berlin as a teenager, we went to school half a day on Saturday, though I suspect that is no longer the case at the Malwida von Meysenbug Schule, assuming that venerable institution still exists. (Note to self: Google probably knows.)

So I plan to find out when Henry Ford's birthday was, and raise a glass of orange-juice (or cup of tea) to him in thanks for Saturday joys. (Next up: a little house-tidying, a little grocery-shopping, maybe some baking later on ....)

a beginning

Well, it's all my friend Tricia's fault: if she hadn't made blogging so attractive, I wouldn't be here on a Friday night writing the very first lines of my very first posting on this brand-new blog. Once upon a time the sort of reflections I propose to put into words here might have been ended up in letters. That was during the era in which I wrote oodles of letters to the far-flung folk I knew in various states of the U.S. and in various other countries on a couple of continents. Now, of course, the ubiquity of e-mail has rendered a nice, long, handwritten (or typewritten!) letter a thing of the remote past, and the fact that many of us are obliged to communicate via e-mail on a superabundance of tedious topics five days a week makes writing a nice, chatty PERSONAL e-mail a bit less attractive.

But what happened this evening made me want to write about it to someone (though not to anyone in particular) and the subject, being a bit flimsy and inconsequential, didn't seem to lend itself to a poem. It's just this: as I got home today, two distant olfactory memories crashed into one another in my mind, prompted by the briefest of fragrances in the air outside my home.

Memory the First: a visit to one of my late mother's friends, who lived in some small East Coast location. I can remember her name but almost nothing else about her other than the drive up to her house, which wound between overhanging bushes and tall trees with dangling branches. I believe we had been a little lost en route; it wasn't someplace we had ever been before. It had been raining cats and dogs, and my siblings and I, jammed into the grey Dodge sedan, had undoubtedly been fighting in a similar fashion. Either it was a long driveway, or we were all so ready to get out of the car that it seemed extra long; I can almost still hear the slow crunch of gravel under the tires. When we were at last freed from the confines of the car, we were probably not outside for more than a minute because it was so damp and we were late. But half a century later, I still recall taking deep, hungry breaths of the air before we went into the cottage. There was something floral -- likely more than one flower's scent -- and a wild mixture of green: leaves, bark, some sort of vine, and underneath it earth so rich it almost seemed I could taste it as gladly as a worm would.

Memory the Second: a visit to another of my mother's friends, this one an Army buddy of hers, who lived in Vancouver, B.C. I hardly knew her, though she had been the stuff of legend in my mother's soliloquies about her time as a WAC in Algiers. I had been spending a few weeks visiting my aunt and uncle in West Van, and was invited to lunch with R-, who lived in a tiny house accessible only by a winding path from the street, encompassing 60 or 70 steep stairs; I'm not sure if I had the presence of mind at the time to wonder how the builders could have managed it. In any case, there were no near neighbors: the house was surrounded on all sides by what seemed like jungle in its rich foliage, its strange variety. It rained while I was there, and lunch had stretched all afternoon into the evening as R- and I talked for hours, so that when my uncle came to pick me up, the lights of the city blinked like distant candles as I descended the plant-strewn slopes, gulping the wild air as I followed the path barely illuminated by R-'s flashlight.

It had rained in San Francisco today, though only gently, and I guess it did so here in the East Bay as well, while I was at work. I parked on the hill in front of this place, and grabbed my bags before ascending the stairs to my door. I don't know which of the random plants in the front yard it could have been to suggest the green memories I have recounted here, but Proust was right: whatever fragrance it was had the power to transport me, instantly and completely, to two places I have scarcely thought about in years.