At age 40 I could say I was half-way to 80, but turning 45, to say halfway to 90 seems overly optimistic.  So somewhere there I crossed that half-way point.  Still you never know.  The family tree is knotted with tough old Puritans and Scots farmers who lived well into their 90s.


We went out for breakfast at the Whistlestop cafe so Nico could watch the trains go by as he had his pancakes.  The crossing gates were coming down even as we pulled up in the car - so he and I got out to grip the chain link fence and we squinted through the ferocious wind and roar that Amtrak's Northeast Regional threw back at us.


A simple strawberry shortcake, split among the four of us served as my birthday cake.


In the evening we went over to Charles and Patty's and got in their way as they cooked us all a wonderful dinner of Indian food.  Beer was drunk; laughter was laughed; commensality ensued.  It was good.
.

I saw a woman with a Modigliani face in a silver SUV waiting patiently, maybe mournfully, to turn past the little graveyard on Route 1 where the Dennison sea captains and their dead children lay 10 generations buried beneath stones engraved with weathered, winged skulls.

hiatus

Phew, a month has passed as the blog has sat fallow.

I was off in Los Angeles for 10 days at the end of January -- doing ethnography for one of the unions trying to organize grocery workers, and managing a couple of other ethnographers, a videographer, and another anthropologist doing on-going phone interviews for the same project.  That set us hip-deep in data that we're still chewing through.

It was good to see Anna, Esperanza and Alberto, and I used Glendale as my base of operations.  They fed me well.

As that California project slips into the write-up and video-edit stages, I'm running point on the next phase of research, interviewing Walmart employees. (More on that later.)

In Rhode Island and Connecticut, unsettled weather has brought snow days and school delays.  Nothing like the blizzards they've gotten further south and inland, but Monica and the boys have been exploring the local ski slopes.  A few warm days have thinned the snow cover and it's patchy on the sunniest spots.  The rivers are running high.  A bluebird showed up yesterday morning, poking around in Nico's birdhouse.  The juncos hopped around looking at it as though it were an apparition.

I introduced the boys to GURPS, the role-playing game, and it became an immediate obsession.  Their characters bonded in their first tavern brawl - an important rite of passage in gaming.  And now they are starting out on a campaign to free some captive wizards in hopes of getting some magic items in reward.  Porter has a cat-man with powers of stealth and invisibility as well as a woman knife-fighter who teleports.  Nico has a red-headed fencer who shape-shifts to a fox and a female elven archer.  I'm running a pyromaniacal dwarf and a magic user to balance out the group.  It all waits on Porter getting ahead on his burden of homework.

Monica's been emailing back and forth with Clara settling the details of March's trip to Costa Rica.  We're getting antsy for travel.

Haiku from a winter's walk

Chill sun on limn-frost

dormancy of elements

broken by a breath

In snow-crusty wood

My steps crush weathered track of

 mink and deer and fox

We shall not cease from exploring
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

---- T. S. Eliot

Skiing Pancieri's Field

The pursuit of truth is like picking raspberries.  
You miss a lot if you approach it from one direction.

-- Randal Marlin.

This is a poem of Denver's that I forwarded to Monica,
because Neruda alway makes her pause . . . .


this is Pablo Neruda Avenue
she said
and unbuttoned the top button
of her jeans


may I walk along it?
he asked


only if you bring me
a line by Pablo Neruda
she said


he was silent for a moment


and then he said
The memory of you emerges from the night around me


whisper it
she said


and he whispered it
as evening fell
on Pablo Neruda Avenue

Bridget and Aunt Monica go sledding

East Germany, April of 1986

Ruins of the Frauenkirche, Dresden, April 1986

photo A. B. 

Last night I watched the film "Lives of Others", (Das Leben der Anderen) about a East Berlin Stasi operative who gradually loses his way in a surveillance operation over a playwright and his lover.  


The atmosphere of the film brought me back to the couple of weeks that I spent there in 1986.   It makes me wonder what my own Stasi file looks like.  I have to assume that there was one, though I have no idea how interested they were in a handful of undergraduate students on an art history tour.  Did they note my wandering off into the countryside outside of Weimar that one afternoon?  The scruffy man ranting about the state in the cafe?  Is there a description of Margaret's and my tryst in the woods outside of Dresden?  The students who proudly avowed that if they ever got a visa west they'd never come back?  How much had the Stasi unravelled by 1986?


One night I remember in particular.  Georg was our tall, dark and handsome art history professor, and the force behind the whole journey behind the Iron Curtain.  Early in the trip he had seduced the young East German woman who was our keeper, earning himself some extra latitude in the bargain, I think.  In any case itineraries became uncertain and the two of them would disappear at times -- hence my wanderings through the villages by Weimar.  Georg had a friend in Leipzig and he and Frank (the hen-pecked assistant for the study abroad program) and myself conspired to escape (to whatever extent) the gaze of the Staatsicherheit.  I'm not sure how it was arranged, but the three of us strolled away from the hostel, and when a car suddenly pulled up alongside us, the street entirely free of other traffic, we quickly hopped in.


The driver was the wife of a painter and she brought us to their large apartment.  I remember that we drank white Hungarian wine and talked of politics.  The apartment was filled with artwork, because the painter was not in the good graces of the state and could neither exhibit nor sell his work.  A lot of the work I found unlovely, dark and with twisting rats and birds -- but I can recall vividly one bright painting entitled something like Icarus afraid to fly.  It summed up the frustration that idealistic East Germans felt about their rigid and corrupt government and the dreary society it nourished.  I could see why the state censors didn't appreciate it.


In the film, set a year or two earlier than my trip, a rigidly controlled Stasi captain, suggests to his superiors that an apparently loyal playwright ought to be watched.  His request is granted, though not because the man, Dreyman, is a threat to the state, but because a minister covets Dreyman's lover, an actress, and wants him out of the way.  The elegance of the movie is in the way the loyal Stasi interrogator and the unheroic playwright are pushed into sympathy by their common antagonist - the corrupt officials who run the system for their own benefit.  The lusciously detestable officials and the actress they destroy aptly represent the depressing (and intimidating) spectacle of the East Germany state that artists, young people, idealists and patriots had to confront in living through that time.  I remember how it permeated the conversations I had there that spring.


The thing that makes the film bearable ultimately is the fact that the dismal trajectory -- of progress deferred and betrayed -- which in 1984 and still in 1986 was assumed to stretch endlessly into the future -- collapsed suddenly and thoroughly only a few years later.

oracles . . . .

Yea, though the asp and the bonobo shall entwine themselves in the ribbons of dying typewriters, there shall be milk upon the golden collars of the salarymen -- and distillations of childhood shall scald the nostrils of the Great and unyet Fallen.

View out the front door . . . .

In Baltimore we went with Chris to the Walter's Museum, to meander through the marvelous collection that Henry Walters and his father assembled.  What an eye for quality they had!  Nearly every piece in there is worth spending time with.


Afterwards, we stopped at a shop and I bought a Tibetan singing bowl.  It is black and embossed with lettering that I don't understand.

I stacked my father's firewood 7 feet high and when I was done, the whole construction, every last stick of it, fell over with an earth shaking crash.  How embarrassing. 


Chastened, I stacked it again 5 and a half feet high.

Day after Christmas and we were dragging.  I took a nap, which I hadn't done since an eye doctor's appointment back in November had so disarranged my schedule that I'd forgotten to drink coffee.  Monica took a nap at 11 a.m.  Cathie was considering her second nap when Monica figured out that the coffee she had brewed said "DEC" not because it had something to do with December, but because it had no caffeine.  Everyone was appalled.  Proper coffee was brewed.

christmas 2009

A Holiday food journal . . . .

On Christmas eve Monica cooked her roast pork.  Rubbed with olive oil, breadcrumbs, garlic and rosemary, cooked in it's own juices; baked red potatoes with butter or with the juices from the roast; asparagus and sauteed dark mushrooms; unsweetened apple sauce on the side; red wine and cider.

Anna had sent tins of homemade Christmas cookies from California and Cathie and Eric's neighbor had sent chocolate truffles.  Peppermint tea and egg nog.  Chocolate from Lititz.

On Christmas morning, the boys can loot their stockings as soon as they get up (this year at 6:45), but the opening of the presents happens after breakfast.  Fred had brought in bagels and lox cream cheese from Brooklyn with him.  Chris had made banana bread.  Cathie cut open a pannetone she had made with white raisins.  There was black coffee and hot tea.

For Christmas dinner Mom prepared a 21 pound free-range, organic turkey -- and lunch was the platter of turkey meat, mountains of mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, Chris' sweet potatoes and baked apples, Monica's green bean casserole, Cathie's creamed corn, rolls, pickled beets - glasses of red wine or an airy Belgium beer that Eric uncorked; sparkling grape juice for the boys.

For the desultory grazing that served as supper, Cathie baked fresh breads and laid out several wonderful goats' cheeses that she'd made.  Chris produced a rich camembert.  The cookies, breads, pannetone from earlier all re-emerged.  Cathie's gift to me, a bottle of 15-year old Laphroaig, was opened.

I lay on my back in the snow, watching the stars materializing in the blue evening haze.  You can't catch them appearing -- only notice that they are there -- where they weren't a moment ago.  I wondered, as I lay on my back with the cold earth draining life's warmth from my body, whether my core would begin to compensate by burning more hotly.  Maybe it did, but the winter earth could absorb it all.


I gathered with friends around a cauldron of fire to celebrate the solstice and we all spoke of the things that the turning of the year meant to us -- that moment, that shift, when the light begins inevitably to increase rather than decrease.  Icy wind brought a writhing to the flames and the orange coals throbbed.  Cold never depresses me.  I love the snow and the division of nature into the dormant and the determined.  (As one around the fire put it, there is something powerfully revitalizing about winter's dormancies.)  But it's true that the days are grown too short and the nights too long.  That solstice shift not only signals the returning balance of the light, but it also affirms that planetary clockwork that brings spring and summer back.


We all warmed ourselves inside the house with rich, dark hot chocolate.

Monica and Nico took the train into New York City where they went to museums, looked at mummies, ate knishes and bagels, sledded the hills of Central Park, and shopped at Rockefeller Center.  Nico sang made-up songs to himself as he and the commuters made their way home northeastwards.

Riffing on one of Denver's daily poems:

4 out of 5 semioticians, 
when cornered, 
will assert that the opposite of somersault is not winter sugar.  
But some of the less well-moored will wink as they say it, 
just in case.


and stapling a black tailfeather onto one of his drowning ghazals:


My son is the raven of glittering eye
And he thinks that we send too few to the sky.


It is good, I think, to stir hot poetry into the morning's second cup of black coffee.


Denver and Sawako and Joseph have been reminding me . . . .

15 inches of powdery snow on a Sunday morning.

Exclamations of joy from the boys as they woke.

Now, an igloo is rising in the yard,

a hillock of snow,

enfirmed by a thousand hand pats

 a hundred shovel wumps

and two score full-body flops.

All hollowed out and inhabited

by boys.