pomegranate

The New Library

For a long time, I wouldn't go to the library.  Not the books I want, I complained.  It was too expensive.  I couldn't seem to keep track of when things were due.  I had little sense of how much I actually read.  As a child, I read continuously.  As an adult, I only have that luxury during vacations.  In real time, I only read at night before going to sleep or in those early hours when sleep seems an impossibility, and I seek comfort in a book.  So, for a long time, I didn't go to the library.

Then I started going again for DVDs.  I understood DVDs.  I had a grasp of when and if I would watch them, and I knew all about returning them, which was good, because the library had a stricter policy regarding DVDs.  Only two at a time, one week, nonrenewable.  DVDs, it seems to me, are the new books.  They're the hot ticket in the library, the place to go if you want to get up close and personal with humanity.  You may not find a soul in the stacks.  It's a rare day when you can peruse the DVDs alone.

The selection isn't great, which inspires me to try things I ordinarily wouldn't.  For example, yesterday I went to the library and ended up selecting "Final Analysis" with Richard Gere and Kim Basinger.  I decided it would be either really terrible or strangely fascinating, and so far it is the latter.  Now, the Keanu Reeves/Gretchen Moll movie that I also rented could very easily end up being cold turkey, but that's the way it goes with library DVDs.  You just roll the dice.

Eventually I also started renting books again.  My library doesn't get everything, and I'm picky.  I like things to be well written.  I like the words to have a certain rhythm and cadence. I lke the characters to make sense even if that sense is that they're insane.  I'm not interested in Bridget Jones wanna bes and thinly veiled memoiristic forays in the past, which in my opinion, should have been left in the therapist's office.  And I'm out of the book loop, so I don't know often who to pick.  So, it's generally the open book test.  I turn to a random page and read a few lines and see if I like it.  It's not infallible.  In fact, I'm often disappointed.  But you can now renew books online.  And I'm gonig to the library anyway to drop off the DVDs.  So, it kind of works.

Lundry Day

Years ago, I stood with a friend in an elevator of an apartment building, and there was a notice posted concerning the hours of the "lundry room."  After reading the sign, my friend took out a pen, and wrote "A-ok!" underneath, and we laughed for a long time, and since then, lundry has always been lundry.

When looked at objectively, lundry does not seem to be that big of a task, but for me, once I start the process, I feel like I should pump my fist in the air or do the snoopy dance.  It feels like that much of a mountain, a task that's generally postponed for at least three days before I actually will do it.   It's an activity where I long for my own machines.  The best laid lundry plans may need to change if others had the idea first.  I can't start the process at 10 at night or 5 in the morning.  Communal lundry demands regular hours.  (And common sense would think that people would also think of cleaning their own lint screen, but I would say that's something that only happens 50% of the time.)  It's an activity where I would prefer solitude.  It's not only the underwear.  It's regular clothes, too.  I don't know why they seem more private when coming out of a machine rather than being on your body for public display, but maybe that's the choice factor.  That was the look you selected for the day.  These are your clothing items that you're in the process of folding when Stranger B enters the room, and there's that awkward exchange of pleasantries about the weather and which machine is broken, but remains plugged in, and don't worry, I'll be out of here in just a minute.  I hate that scenario, but what is even worse is coming in the lundry room, and the machines are stopped, but full of other people's clothes, and you have to take a stranger's clothes out of the machine.  Worse yet, doing it, and then they come in while you're stacking their clothes on top of a machine.  Sometimes I'll take my wash up the stairs to the other laundry room just so I don't have to do that.

But there's something wonderful about freshly clean clothes.  There's this illusion of a monumental task achieved, which breaks before the end of the day, as new dirty clothes begin the pile for next week's lundry.  But there's the sense of completion, of hanging things up, of the cat hovering, waiting to see if her blanket was part of the week's project, and whether she'll have something warm to nap on that day, another day of lundry.

Card People

One of my favorite things about the holidays is sending cards.  I like cards in general.  In this day of email, it's a special thing when someone sends a card.  I think they are small items of beauty, and I really enjoy them.

The other day I was talking to the mailwoman while she was sorting our mail.  I asked her if this was the busiest time of the yera for her.  She said that actually the mail was heavier right before elections.  She said people weren't sending as many cards.

It seems like it has become more of a lost tradition.  People don't have the time to sit down and compose their seasonal newsletters any more or pose for their holiday photo.  I don't do either of those things, but I do like to write a sentence or two to the people in my circles, to let them how much I appreciated their friendship or service, to give them a sentence or two about the me of 2006, to share with them a beautiful image.  Every year, I imagine more people will drop out of the custom.  It's expensive.  It's time consuming.  But I think it's important, at least for me, to write the best wishes, to stick on the holiday stamp, to think, "Oh, I really need to send that person a card."

The Holiday Phenomenon

Earlier this month, I thought about a conversation I had the past year

It was late November 2005.  I sat in a truck in a parking lot outside of Starbucks, drinking a vanilla  latte, and I looked at my friend and said, "I have 90% of my shopping done for this year."

It was a statement I truly believed when I said it.  In the weeks to come, it proved to be a statement spoken out of contentment, but perhaps also of hubris, at the very least, mild delusion.  While I truly believed then that I was almost done, it turned out that I remembered others who needed gifts or cards or something else.  And I would realize this and think ruefully of the 90% of a few weeks ago.

This year, I don't bother with the percentage.  I just keep trying to clear the list, which keeps filling up again.  What I believe this year is that there's always a percentage to do.  The holiday persists after the season.  There are always gifts to give, cards to send people, things to say, items to bring.  Christmas never truly goes away.

On Gifts

T'is the season where one thinks about gifts, specifically the surprise and the expected.

For years, a good friend and I have exchanged presents for our birthday.  They're premediated, predicated by an email before the event, "What do you want this year?"  And the person says exactly what they want, often even providing the link where the other person could get it.  And the pleasure of this exchange is in the procedural process, the thinking of the gift that you would like and then actually receiving it.

This Christmas, I've extended this tradition to others in my circle.  "Tell me what you want," I say.  "I will get it for you."  We've started doing things this way, which satisfies an innate pragmatic need to have objects with function and purpose, to have things of use.  But I remember a gift I got last year that bowled me over.  It was a big bright red coat, long, with a hood.  I wear it all the time now, indoors and out.  California residences are not known for their insulation.  It happened one cold November night, outdoors, listening to Christmas carols, and I saw a woman in a big coat, and I said, "I need one of those," and then promptly forget about it. But it was heard and it happened.  Those are great gifts.

On Getting Lost

I'm one of those people that would fall into the category of the navigationally challenged.  If there was a list of People Who Should Have GPS Installed in their Car, I would be the first to nominate myself.  I get lost easily.  East and west mean little to me.  My instincts often fail me in the matter of directions.  Mapquest sometimes lets me down.

It doesn't stop me from going anywhere.  In fact, it's so exciting to me when I actually learn how to get somewhere, that I actually mostly enjoy the experience.  I just try to give myself a lot of time.  I have my cellphone with me with the number of the place where I'm trying to go.  I leave with little expectations and illusions.

When I went to my friend's memorial service, I drove myself.  I had offers of accompaniment, but I didn't want my hand held at this event.  I wanted to feel the pure emotions of losing someone so great.  So, one bright sunny Sunday morning, I dressed all in black, remembered the exotic cheese -- my friend loved cheese.  We were all supposed to bring some.  And bought a flower -- there was going to be a community bouquet, and set off.  It was one of those days where I knew I was going to get lost.  Both MapQuest and Google felt vague to me and there was the emotional charge of the event itself. Part of me wanted to get there.  Part of me felt that if I got there, that would mean that my friend had really, truly died, and the new chapter opened for all of us.

So, I set off, and pretty quickly took a wrong turn that I rationalized in my head, although I did wonder about it.  I drove down this windy road into fog and trees and wandered around for 15 minutes until I could justify it no further, and made the proverbial U-turn and spotted a community center, and went in for directions. 

The first thing I saw was a dog who wagged his tail and greeted me.  Then I saw four women in leotards, stretching on mats.  One said, "Are you here for the yoga class?  Welcome!"

I looked into their kind faces and said, "Actually, I'm lost."  I said, "I'm trying to get to a memorial service."  I gave them the address.

"Oh, you're going the wrong way," they said.  And they clearly and quickly gave me two options, which I repeated, and hoped I would remember, before I thanked them and left.

I did got lost again, this time on a road that would have been the long way, but easy, if only it hadn't turned into a dead end.  And that's when some small voice in the back of my head said, "Look at the memorial service information again."  Down at the bottom of the email, there were directions. How could I not have known they were there? I looked up and saw the freeway sign that I needed was right over yonder.  I still got there in time to put my cheese on the platter, to stick my flower in the bouquet, to set up chairs, and place programs on them, to hug loved ones, and say, "Can you believe this is really happening?"

Bird Watching

A few months ago, one of my dearest friends, Miriam Engelberg, died.  She had been diagnosed with breast cancer over five years ago, went through the treatment and into recovery, and then the cancer came back a little over two years ago into her bones and in her brain.  She was a wonderful friend and a great cartoonist. Her book, Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person, came out last spring.

I first met Miiriam back in the late 80's on a Sunday morning in a Berkeley church basement.  We were both at a women's group. Miriam was the speaker that day.   It was a time in my life where I was having what are called cluster headaches -- sharp pain above my right temple and around my eye that made everyting but lying down difficult.  One of these headaches started once the meeting began.  But I didn't leave.  I listened to what Miriam had to say, and there was something about it, that made me go up and talk to her afterwards, and when she asked me if I wanted to walk around the lake and look at the geese, I said yes, despite my reclusive nature, despite the fact that my head really hurt.  It seemed the thing to say.

When Miriam was dying, a friend told me to call her any time.  When I did call her and ask her if she wanted to see the new Scorcese, she said no, she didn't really like to go to movies.  But she did like to watch birds, and if I ever wanted to do that, to give her a call.

That day, I took a walk, which isn't unusual, as I try to do that every day, but that day I changed my route.  I went left instead of right and circled around and ended up at a lagoon.  Just as I was arriving, a bird landed, tall and white, storklike.  I went home and emailed my friend and described what I called my bird.  That, she wrote back, is an egret.

After that, I tried to go and see my egret at least a couple of times a week.  She rarely was there.  If I was lucky, I would see her and sometimes a smaller, younger egret as well.  Most of the time, I saw ducks, one gang of three, a motley crew of an entirely black duck, a white duck with a tan chest, and a female Mallard, who would call out a greeting and swim to me when I arrived.

"But I'm not here to see you," I would try to explain.  "I'm looking for my egret."

When I went to my friend's memorial service, I talked to her son.  He loves animals, and I told him about the birds.  In the end, I mentioned the egret.

He nodded.  "That was my mother's favorite bird," he said.

Audio Issues

Two things happened recently that sounded similar notes.

In the first incident, I was in my dentist's waiting room, happily reading magazines.  I had been late to my appointment -- it seems to me that as the holidays continue, drivers become more erratic, so that an afternoon trip across town takes one and a half times longer than it generally does.  It doesn't seem so much that it's the number of cars, but what the cars are doing, which is often being slow on the up take, so that lights are missed, and you can't count on the routine move being made.  Anyway, so I was late to my appointment, which I hated, because I don't like being late to anything, particularly to my dentist who is one of my favorite people in this world. 

I also hated it because it meant less magazine time.  Now, my dentist used to have more junky magazines like People and Us, which I actually preferred.  Now Vanity Fair is the least classy magazine represented, and in some ways to me, it feels sleazier than People and Us.  People and Us are blatant gossip, fashion rags.  Vanity Fair carries with it a pretension of sophistication that once was actually true, but is no longer.  And although I no longer subscribe to it and I often complain about it, I still like to browse it.  Maybe someday I won't, but that day has not yet arrived.

So, it turned out that my dentist was behind schedule, so I was reading my magazine when a mother and child walked in.  They promptly sat down and the mother found a children's book and began reading it out aloud.  And I am trying to read, but now my space is full of sound.  And in my opinion, the mother is speaking too loudly.  She is doing her storytelling voice, as if she is performing for her daughter and for me.  And I find the story obnoxious and I just want to read.  And I want to say, "Can you turn the volume down?" but you know, I was in Berkeley, and they might have escorted me out of the city.

Then today I was on a bus.  I was on my way to pick up my car, which was at my mechanic's.  I thought the bus would be a good place to read, and sometimes it was, and sometimes it was disturbing, like when the man sitting alone behind me starting complaining about how his brand new MP3 player wasn't working correctly, and I tried to dedicate myself further to the page and pretend that I was oblivious to the rant.  Later on when the population on the bus thinned down, a woman behind me started talking to someone on her cellphone about her spiritual education.  Again, it was a baffling performance to me.  Why do I need to hear your life?  I thought of my blog.  What was the difference?  I decided it was a matter of choice.  A reader would have to come here.  Then they could sample it and decide whether they wanted to read more or not.  Here, I could get off the bus, but that would be a big inconvenience in terms of time and energy and money.

I thought about the one time that I had said something.  I was in a movie theatre by myself waiting to see a 5 PM show of "Shall We Dance," the Japanese film.  There was hardly anyone in the theatre.  A man and a woman chose to sit right next to me.  They started discussing their affair.  And I said, "I'm sitting right next to you.  I can hear every word you're saying."   It had grown so personal so quickly, and I thought a) I don't want to move, b) I don't want to hear, c) they apparently need to be informed that this subject should be kept private.  If they don't think so, they can inflict it on someone else some other time.  If they were clueless, maybe what I said was helpful to them.

This afternoon, I wondered if part of this had to do with my professon.  I'm a transcriptionist.  It's my job to listen to what people say and capture it on paper.  I'm extremely auditory.  I've worked in this field for many years, and I've been well trained.  So, I'm very sensitive to noise and words, and I often imagine it as sentences and paragraphs in my head.  It's what I do.

A New Start

I haven't posted here for many months.  This is the consequence, I believe, of building a business.  It seems there is always something to do, and it seems easy, often neccessary, to put your energy there.

But I heard this story on the radio the other day, whch may be a diversion and may be to point.  There was an anthropologist living in an African village, learning the ways of the community there.  Once they trusted him more, they invited him to participate in a ceremony of singing and dancing, which he declined, saying, "I don't sing."  This baffled them.  In their life, everyone sang.   There wasn't entertainers and people in the audience.  Everyone was part of the creative mix.

Lately, I've missed stepping out of that stew.  When I don't write, I feel like I'm not all here.  So, I'm going to figure out some way to show up.  It may be once a week.  It may be more.

The Ducks This Year

Every year, where I live, the ducks come in late January.  They mate, nest, and raise their young here.  This year, the third year I observed this glorious tradition, I was up early on January morning and I heard the quack of a female duck.  It was unrepentant quacking at 5:30 in the morning, an all out bitch fest, and it was all music to my ears.  The ducks were back.

This year was different from the others.  I spied the ducklings a good two weeks after Memorial Day, when I sighted them last year, which felt way too late then, asI I had seen them on Easter the year before.  In past years, it had mostly been the female duck wth the ducklings.  This year, both a female and a male swam with them.  And it was quickly a diminished crew -- from 8 to 2.  I think one perished in the parking lot.  We have a structure underneath the building, and one evening, when I was about to go out, I heard a duckling peeping.  It was a time when people were coming home from work.  I watched them get out of their cars and head resolutely to the elevator, oblivious to me and the duckling, while we danced around cars.  A duckling can be fast, especially one that's scared.  I tried to catch it for a while and then gave up.  The next night, when I saw them in the water, only two ducklings remained.  I hoped it was somehow a fluke, but that has been the true number ever since.

There's an initiation for the ducklings here.  At a point in the process, they swim in the pool.  They can get in the water,  but aren't big enough yet to get out.  The mother squawks until a human comes and positions a chaise longue in the water so that the duckling can use it as stairs.  I think of this tribe of ducks, the ones that come back every year, and imagine that the chaise longue is a part of their symbology, something that the elders tell them to expect, one of the important tools in their tool box beore they reach the important developmental step of exiting the pool on their own.

The other day, I heard the peeping and the squawking, and I looked out to see the duckling in the pool.  One was already big enough to make it out.  They were growing up fast this year, but the other couldn't quite do it.  I went down to put the chair in the water, but when I reached the pool, I saw that it had been done.  I looked over to the man lying in the sun.

"You know about the ducks," I said.

He told me he watched them every year, that he loved them.  I told him that I looked out for them, too.