In my Writing with Lightblog of today I posted this initial list:
Feeling under the weather—
a squally infant
a cloudy adolescent
a rainy ex-lover
an icy old aunt
a thunderous History professor
a wind-swept hiker
a humid trombonist
I've subsequently added:
a muddy adventure writer
a dust-deviled librarian
a foggy divorcée
a drizzly hypochondriac
and Liza further adds:
A wintery colloquium
Two, or perhaps three, stormy lovers
A gusty French horn player
A sun baked sleuth
A tropical transcendentalist
A sodden sonambulist
Having ridden camels, photographed tawny lions with their great clouds of breath frozen in the winter air, kayaked down ancient Hawaiian waterways, followed Napoleon across a high pass of the Alps and then the Barbary Pirates down the coast of Mallorca, I find working on Excel spreadsheets underutilizes my talents.
EXPERIENCE
I've walked to Italy for Calvados after dinner climbed police barriers in Paris, while gendarmes with rifles guarded the roofs danced polkas with an island chieftain on Pantelleria bought wood from Jesus ridden horses with the Mescalero Apaches come second to geysers in my parents’ affections eaten smoked octopus and eel as a small child had to buy my way out of Mexico come under death threats in Miami taken 25 Slavic scholars and a bagful of quarters to Cancun photographed Mont Blanc at night crossed the Alps on a schoolbus stayed in a small Swiss town where an escaped Nazi war criminal was caught smuggled liquor through hotel lobbeys in Washington DC laundered book bags full of cash with a CIA agent vacuumed the study of Willa Cather’s Archbishop held the door for Umberto Eco had my picture taken with Jacques Derrida in his purple silk shirt found myself standing on Charles Darwin been allotted a square foot of land on a Scottish island lived in a monastery gone to a bachelor party with Journey been a groupie for a reggae band popped balloons with a golf cart nearly drowned in a parking lot in New Orleans been invited to a gallery opening with the Mayor of Besançon, France fallen in love with a famous French artist in Palm Springs during a weekend of riotous living left my husband for an Austrian composer climbed volcanoes with molten lava underfoot lived among tribes and sandstone palaces built high into the cliffs evaded an escaped lobster in Sicily's Valley of the Temples eaten at midnight on a harbor with an ancient city underwater in it
Played dress-up in the study where “Lost Horizons” was written Waded in the Bay of Fundy Lived across the street from a Tibetan Rimpoche and his retinue Been the wardrobe mistress for an outdoor production of Dido & Aeneas Relocated a newly released Chilean political prisoner and his family with 48 hours notice Been surprised by a park ranger while skinny dipping in Lake Powell with a bottle of strawberry wine Visited the home of Christopher Isherwood which was definitely NOT like the recent movie Watched the lights of France come on while eating dinner on the white cliffs of Dover Been asked if I wanted a date with Warren Beatty by someone who knew him Staged a spectacularly money losing art auction for charity Rafted through the Grand Canyon without benefit of engines while catering for 20 people, most of them quite mad Walked from Santa Monica to the Malibu Pier and back to be stopped only by the rising tide Drunk vodka from a teapot Successfully edited numerous scientific papers while remaining oblivious to their content Ridden on the back of a motorcycle at night on a high canyon road Fallen unwisely in love on more than one occasion Never ridden a camel
The following just made my day: While walking to the Stanford Bookstore, I saw a very elderly man driving a scooter. He looked quite happy and was definitely speeding. Of course I had to look at his black baseball hat, which I assumed would be for one military service or another. Instead it was lettered CRIME & PUNISHMENT.
And earlier this week I loved that someone set afloat a flotilla of little rubber ducks on the fountain in front of the Old Union.
Your favorite season and time of day? Have you ever thought of keeping backyard chickens? What music should be played at your wake? Your favorite ice cream to eat directly out of the container with a spoon? Whom do you most despise? revere? Have you ever paddled a canoe? Would you like to do it again? —Liza
What is that fuzzy stuff in the bowl in the bottom drawer of your refrigerator? How did you come by that nickname "Scamp"? —Christie
Here's my briefly described list of things that have delighted me in the past week and for which I am thankful:
1. The return of the ancient dancing woman to Farmer's market. Last seen dancing to to Greek music, she reappeared to the sound of marimbas from Zimbabwe via Santa Cruz.
2. A branch laden with persimmons on my desk
3. Birds on the water at Half Moon Bay
4. Black tea
5. Undying love
6. Stories, told and untold
7. Sunset over the Pacific
8. The dignity of very old dogs
9. Antique flavors: ginger, Greek olives, chocolate with chili, cardamom
10. Friends in all weathers
11. Sitting in a pool of sun on a cold November day
12. Laughter
—Liza
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A dozen or two things that I am thankful for:
Some just-cut pine next to a pile of tangerines.
The sagacity of playwrights—Stoppard, Shakespeare, Brian Friel.
The long memory of inland mesas that is in me, and black-hearted blue waters on the Kona Coast.
The dusty contemplative green of Medieval French tapestries.
Geodes—plain on the outside and full of surprises.
To have my name spoken in wondering love.
Little scowling Venetian stone lions that make me smile.
Apple-scented brandy from old trees in Normandy.
Getting above the turbulence.
Espresso.
Sage.
British detective stories.
The sounding of a temple bell.
My teacup from St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, even now with its fatal crack.
The meandering of an oxbow river like an artist’s signature below me on the land.
Tandoori spices; grilled onions and peppers with the mark of the grill on them.
Lime and ice and Perrier.
The impertinent wet noses of Black Labs.
Ferries.
Eyeglasses—the ability to see.
Barack Obama.
The intriguing thought of water on the moon.
Clover honey and orange pekoe tea—both which my Granny Belle gave me.
This song by Juan Diego Florez (J’ai perdu mon Euridice, Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck):
The chance to say how glad all these things make me.
Labradors of any hue The scent of a warm apple tart A small glass of sherry & some Spanish cheese Finches wearing tiny yellow vests Billy Collins on poets & their windows A bowl of glossy chestnuts and their broken shells Chains of golden ginko leaves hanging in a window A Japanese flute, played in the distance
This intriguing wall, below the level of the grass which forms its banks, looks at first like an archaeological excavation—which is what draws me, in the end, back out of my car, away from my next errand, back into the beautiful January sunshine, which I’d left only reluctantly after lunch under market umbrellas at the museum café, an earlier walk up the Quad to buy books for this quarter’s class. What are they digging up? What asked to be let out? It’s called “Stone River”—a trickle then a flood of honey-colored stone, an ooze of honey-slow oxbows. Dry-stone wallers from England made it, it’s said, from the sandstone left as rubble by the earthquakes on the Stanford campus. It’s a liminal place, “somewhere between quarries and buildings.” The ephemera of stone is something the artist of this just-emerging wall, Andy Goldsworthy, is noted for, the choreography in the landscape of process and decay.
On this unseasonable day, two men and a schoolchild, down in the manmade riverbed, are coaxing a cat on a leash to walk along the narrow top edge of the sinuous wall.
—Christie
(April 23, 2003)
The wall is magic. I tried running my hand along parts of its spine. Some pieces of sandstone were beginning to warm and others were cooler. A child had left part of a pbj sandwich tucked between the stones, until a jay discovered it and flew off with a large chunk. I walked back up to the Burghers and then said hello to Hope, the angel with the green cape and no-nonsense expression—she’s definitely my favorite of the four.
Thinking about: Nabokov. A green table in a secret garden. Butterflies. Reading the last page of Running in the Family again, and again.
I put water in the kettle, a tea bag in my mug, toast in the toaster, and yoghurt in a blue green bowl the color of the Mediterranean Sea. Or some sea, not an ocean, not the Atlantic, not the Pacific, but a sea and somehow more contained. The toast pops up too pale and I push it down one more time so it will come up brown on the edges and ready for the smooth knife, ready for marmalade. This morning’s travel page shows the Dalmatian Cost, where I have never been, may never go. In the picture, a couple sits on hotel balcony with a bowl of oranges, not yet marmalade, but just as orange. I plan my own, my solo itinerary and, as I eat my now burned toast, I notice that the marmalade is more sharp than sweet.
On one particularly dark day back in the Bush Era, when it was clear that things were only going to get worse, our writing group was greatly heartened by this story about poet James Merrill and a transformative green scooter.
James Merrill wrote in his memoir, A Different Person (1993), about visiting a doctor about his depression, saying that he didn't know how to live or how to love, he just knew how to write a poem. The doctor, he said, "listened closely, then acted with undreamed-of kindness and dispatch. 'Come with me,' he said, in a flash ushering me out of his downtown office and onto the back seat of a smart little pale-green motorscooter. I put my arms, as instructed, about his stout, gray-suited person, and off we went in sunlight, through traffic, under trees, past architecture, over the muddy river to lunch." (The Writer’s Almanac, 3/3/3)
Our hope is that this collection of writing will give readers the same je ne sais quois that brief but immense lunchtime voyage gave us—encouragement for going on; inspiration to do something simply good for ourselves each ordinary day; a smile; a moment of respite or recognition; time out from global numbing; a pause for weirdness, wonder, and delight. We want to share what gives us pleasure or some keener satisfaction putting down as well as picking up.
So hop on the green scooter with us. Read and be well.
