Monday, September 27, 2010

Rearview Mirror

 We have a weird history with car accidents in this family - they usually mean something  in the same way that fortune cookies mean something- like, oh! your whole life is going to change today; live well because what seems risky may pale next to what seems normal;  today, you will not reach your destination, or do not look back, your future is in front of you. Given that the most recent fortune cookie I opened was empty, I am cautious about this line of thinking. But, the truth remains, car accidents tend to be harbingers of larger life events. So, I do wonder what the universe was trying to say to me at 7:22 when I became party to a 3 car pileup at an exit off of route 16 when a petite doctor and her Saab knocked into the back of me after she was set into motion by the Grand Cherokee behind her.

 As I think about the sensation of surreality, the jumbled moments prior to impact, when, even though I can't see behind me I sense that something is about to happen, I realize how familiar this is. Just before these moments, we tend to anticipate them, even though we can't change them or fully understand them. They are a lot like our lives, even though we are scarcely aware of anything going on around us, part of us still knows when some epic storm approaches, ready to dismantle our current understanding and reassemble it in ways that might take us seconds or might take us years to comprehend.

 When I first brushed with mortality in an automotive setting, I was 18. I was in the backseat of my Saab 900 rounding the corner in front of Killington Mountain when a red Civic crossed the center line and slammed into the front end of the Duster just a car before us. You've gotta love a Duster - I hold the car responsible for the fact that no one was harmed that day. For us, sitting in the next car in line, there was the sobering reality that if we had been 40 seconds more prompt that morning, we could have been creamed - which, was ironic, because we were headed north to Addison County, Vermont to jump out of airplanes - a fact that had kept us up all night on Greeta's porch tossing and prognasticating... willing our finest possessions to one another because we feared the risk we could be taking. Jumping out of an airplane turned out to be folly. The real risk we faced lay embedded in the everyday acts that we thought were so benign: cutting carrots, barefoot, while talking about global economics; walking down stairs in the dark and miscalculating their number; or, most perniciously, driving. My friend Ian handled the moment with grace, and pulled calmly to the side of the road, where, luckily, (and I'm dating myself here) a payphone happened to reside in the dirt lot of the state park. He was so cool that after we did our jumps, he returned time and time again, even joining the military to continue seeking out danger in daily life. Greeta went on to travel feverishly, and to dig in deep to our toughest problems in her work as a social worker in Burlington.  Though I would not go out seeking danger, or adventure the same way, I walked away knowing that the real danger was in being complacent, in not realizing that we are dustmites under the couch of posterity, in taking what we have for granted.

 The next time the dark forces of car wrecks would enter my life, I dreamt about it. In my dream, I backed into the side door of my grandfather's jeep. I was 19. I woke up knowing that something would happen because of this dream; I told everyone at work about the dream, and then, that same day, in the rain, I backed out of my parking spot at work - right into the side door of my boss's car. We know it's coming when it does.

 At 25 I came home after a long day working two jobs.  (This story still spooks me). When I walked through the door of my house I looked down at the table in the foyer to check  messages, where I saw a hospital bracelet with my husband's name on it just as I heard him mumble my name from the next room. As it turns out, his first day after seasonal unemployment began went like this: 6:20 AM  kiss Marjke goodbye. 8:00 AM  awaken to a phone call from an eccentric friend offering an opportunity to purchase, slaughter, and butcher chickens (because they had previously discussed the thought that a person who cannot butcher their own meat should not eat meat to begin with), which Mark readily accepts. 8:30AM travel to said friend's home, and then to a neighboring friend's house to borrow a truck. 8:45AM head to a farm in Dover to purchase 10 roosters from a woman with two eye colors and a man pushing a single log around in a wheelbarrow. 9:15 AM return to the home of our eccentric friend and begin killing roosters with a Burmese sword in the woods, clean up the carnage, butcher, package and divvy the meat. 5:00 PM get into a little Toyota with an intersting history and drive home. 5:15PM try to turn left 500 feet from our driveway only to be pummeled from behind by a 96 year old woman travelling at 55 miles per hour - WHAM! 5:16:42 PM head straight for a garbage truck in the oncoming lane. 5:16:44 PM swerve sharply to the right, narrowly avoiding a calamity, only to head back into the lane where the 96 year old woman, he was briefly acquainted with before, was again barreling down on him. 5:17:00 PM finally bring the carreening blue box that he was inhabiting to a complete stop on the shoulder of the road, check his body for injury, and turn to his friend, make eye contact, and in unison yell "The Chickens!" 5:18:00 PM frantically pull plasic bags of chicken fromt he shattered back window of the Celica. 5:20:43 PM call roommate to retrieve chicken and other personal effects. 5:24:08 PM be seized by paramedics, strapped to backboards and loaded into the back of an ambulance. 5:24:24 PM watch as a police officer opens a garbage bag full of chicken entrails that was left on the side of the highway, grimmace and closes the bag, dropping a pair of chicken feet into a smattering of broken glass. 7:52:09 PM return home from a litany of tests. 8:04:33 PM kiss Marjke hello. 10:31PM conceive a child out of sheer joy in having survived. Life and death swirled over Mark's head that day, dancing with one another, both comforting and menacing, just daring him to proceed.

Most recently, I, under the influence of pregancy, slowly watched a car next to me "rolling", which actually turned out to be me - doing the rolling, that is - at a stop light - into the toe hitch of a Dodge Ram, which folded the hood of my Saturn in half to return the favor. I realized from that point forward my life, my mind, my perception of the world would really never belong to me alone, again.

 I am sitting on the couch, now. Every breath hurts. I am left wondering what comes next for me. Children? Change of career? Death? Tough choices? All I can say is that I am grateful that the fortune cookie I opened was empty, because I know that can't happen more than once in a life, like some other things I can think of. But today, I am here; I have something to think of, lessons to learn, and a lot to be grateful for.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

A Small Yam Festival

I woke up to the kindling of a thunderstorm.
I came home to sunshine. And complicated thoughts about families, parenting, and other things.
I know I am a month late for this, really, but I cooked from traditional Nigerian recipes today. The Yam festival is a time to understnad the change of the season, when the summer turns to fall; when the harvest is taken in, and what we have held onto and saved from the previous year will be left behind to make way for what we will gather this year.  Unfortunately my little grocery wasn't carrying real yams - just sweet potatoes, so I focused on plantains, rice and black eyed peas. The scent of the cinnamon is lingering on my fingers.
These same fingers would keep typing if it weren't for the miles to go before I sleep. Nulla dies sine linea - that's all I require of myself here. There are times when the linea will be brilliant, times when it will not. Maybe I will revise this tommorow - or find a way to make something more exciting happen. I'm still rusty in this writing gig.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Perfect Tomatoes

I've been waiting for a summer like this. Last year was a dissappointment. I nurtured 12 tomoato plants only to find them all slowly pass away, victims of a weird leaf eating blight that spotted and then grayed and then withered every single plant. Every. Single. Plant. I had big plans for those plants: I pine for homemade sauce made with the herbs and garlic from the same small patch of earth. I planned to sundry the funkier looking tomatoes and store them for the winter.

I had heirlooms: brandywines - oh! Have you ever seen a brandywine? It is pinkish instead of red; the outside is bulbous, with odd looking growths. It is huge. When you cut it open, there is no logic to its interior, no symmetry. The flavor of that thing - it's rich and sweet. The tartness and acid of a traditional tomato are downplayed, and you are left with a soft kiss of flavor in your mouth. A tomato is a rare love.

And the miracle of this year is that right in the middle of the garden, a volunteer emerged. The sweetest tomato I've ever eaten decided to come up in among the cucumber vines. That's right, my brandy wine. And instead of shrivelling this year all of my tomatoes have decided to rock the house.  All kinds of tomatoes: sungolds, roma, early girl. I love tomatoes when the come ripe out the garden, their skin still warm from the sun. I had a fabulous burger tonight with slices from a surreal perfectly round, perfectly red tomato under a sheaf of arugula, and I am happy. This is a good year - you can tell by the tomatoes.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Make Something

Today I freecycled a carload of 2X4s so that I could get to work on the chicken coop I plan to put into use next spring. I'm embarrassed that after having serious plans to finish this project over the summerI would only really start construction today, the last day of summer, but alas...

About 1/3 our way through the coop venture, friends came by for dinner, and we shifted gears, and it was about time too. I come back to this idea of making something, because our conversation led back to this idea at the end of the evening, when we started to talk about rock walls - our friend started asking for advice. My husband and I put in a dry stone retaining wall - it took 3 years to complete -it probably didn't need to take so long, but we took our time. We pulled all of the material from our own property; we unearthed stone from the edge of the woods; we took lots of breaks. In the process we built a fire pit too.

We finally finished the wallthis summer - and I have to say that toward the tail end (the last year) Mark took on the lionshare of the work. He works in fine gardening, but doesn't usually work on the construction end, and started taking serious responsibility for the project. I also started to see that, maybe it was best for us if we didn't work right on top of each other. I try not to be a backseat driver. Mark watches me pretty closely, which usually causes me to screw up.  He like to make fiun of me for my inability to do math in my head, while I am working on a calculation. It's his way of knowing me well, I guess. He's right. I'm bad at math.

The Story of an Object

Today I stumbled into an antique shop near my home: the real deal: a barn with creaking floor boards through which you can see the ground. I was wandering through cramped spaces filled with tin toys, embroidered wedding veils, McCoy pottery, and hand knotted rugs. I tend to search for small artifacts from my own childhood in a place like this; I'll ogle a  cut glass tumbler because I remember the western sun travelling through one just like it at the dinner table. I once impulsively spent $60 on a metronome because it resembled one that sat on top of the piano in our kitchen growing up; and I bought a red leather wallet at Value Village in College Park, MD last spring because I remember the same one being clutched in my mother's calloused fingers - even though the real wallet had been used until it's suede was rubbed down to the greasy underlayer and the creases frayed and broke; I still felt like something about me was holed up somewhere in the billfold. I didn't buy much today - just an unfinished quilt - but I started to think, as I talked with the owner, about how powerful objects really are in our lives.

It's funny to consider how an object can connect us to people - maybe not any old object - even if someone gave me a generous gift - like, say, a plasma TV, or a wii - chances are I wouldn't latch onto one of those things as a rememberance, but I would give anything just to look at the blackthorn walking stick my grandfather used until he died. I know that the walking stick serves no real purpose to me, but I yearn for it to be near me. Why?

I guess this whole line of thinking started in my classroom the other day, when on the first day of wold lit I pulled out a bag full of artifacts from around the world, and asked my students to think about their origins; who might have made them, and what they could represent. After the kids checked out a few objects we distributed them on a large world map that was spread out on the floor. You could see the story starting to foment: the kids avoided a few things - a hand crafted felt horse from Kyrgistan, a flour sack from Zaire, a handblown glass utility pole insulator from upstate New York - and gravitated toward objects that were more familiar - a happy meal toy, a baseball mitt. Do we avoid what we don't understand? Or is it just the opposite - are we always seeking our comforts in any form we can? When I asked the kids what they noticed, one girl brought up the question of production - the happymeal toy was made in China, but the kids in China may or may not recognize the reference to How to Train a Dragon. The Kyrgyz child knows horses. And further, one would never be able to find and use the materials that go into the American toy, made in China, by an industrial mechanism. It took a community of people, plants, and animals to come together collectively to make the horse.

I have to say, the horse has soul. I admire the horse. I admire the relationship between this culture of people and the resources they have available to them. The horse is proof that human beings are ingenious. It is proof that we are a tough species that can survive the toughest of conditions, and celebrate while we do so. We are talking about an object that from its earliest conception required so many layers of collaboration. From yaks that are grazed and then shorn, to clutches of women who felted, and foraged for dye, and dyed, and spun, and sewed every particle that went into the object. It must have taken hours to make such a thing. People lived and breathed the process. That's the story.

Maybe I have a fondness for the small things that bring me back to my childhood because I lived and breathed them. Maybe I want to see my grandfather's walking stick again because I want to know that he lived and breathed in such a way that it built up a petina on that object; and when I saw that the small thing was gone from where it had once been, it meant that he had really gone as well. An object can be proof. It is our story written in its nicks and dents.

I wonder, now, what to do with this metronome.