choosing wisely

 

You can choose.

To be happy, to be an optimist. Or not. To see clearly or to leave the oily smudges on your glasses. To be grateful for your good luck and proud of your hard-won successes or to complain only that it was a lot of work and there were boulders in the road. To do whatever your old body is still capable of, to stretch and push it to its diminishing limit or let it dissolve like candle wax, settle and fold into shackles on your wrists and ankles, a tight band around your chest. To live – or to die – in as graceful a way as you can devise, loving fully those who deserve it, savoring each bite, each moment. Or not.

 

The wind has died and the shallow bay is calm, wavelets lapping against the sand. They sound like small kisses. I have left my pareu under the umbrella with my book and walked naked to the wet sand, careless of sunburn, heedless that someone could be watching from a distance, and lain where dry meets wet, ears at the tidal edge, feet under water. I imagine I was washed here from a shipwreck or that I am a female Gulliver or a tired seal, that I lie in the single place on this island where I am safe and struggle is unnecessary, where the salt water washes my wounds and carries the tiny threads of blood away, doesn’t try to drown me.

The tempest is over, the storms blown far to the east, and there will be no more on the western horizon because summer is here, bringing only blue skies and a breeze. The Tempest, remember when we had to read that in school? Furies and storms and passion, Shakespeare’s “little lives,” a phrase that floats to me now. Shakespeare, witches, Hogwart’s, wands. I am still taken by sorcery, wish I could weave a spell, make a potion, command an inanimate thing to life: dishes would spin, dogs would fly. An arcing wand, a quick flash and that man I’ve long wanted would love me like he does in my imagination, his lips warm on mine, his whispered devotion filling my ears. I can’t see him; I can’t see anything; the sun is steady and hot and my eyelids are crimson, scarlet, backlit by the nuclear fire, minute veins mapped and dense.

I am old. No one sees this body in the light but me. I haven’t been naked under the sun in decades. A boy I knew from high school surfaced on my computer screen a few weeks ago – are males in high school boys or men? – anyway, there was his so-familiar face. We were a teacher’s terror then, deviling her, irreverent, brilliant. Now he remembers this diner we all went to; I only remember wishing I were sitting next to that Other Boy (whose name I don’t even remember), his thigh against mine. Tuna sandwiches on white bread, pickle chips, soda fountain Coke on rock-crystal ice. Giggling with a hand cupped over my lips, eyes down. I can smell him, the boy who sat in my row, his maleness, his gym class sweat.

My dying brother’s slope is steepening. I haven’t seen him since our Big Chill weekend in November, and it’s almost May, more months than most of us thought he would see. Since his voice disappeared, there are no phone calls. We email – pages have become paragraphs, now with days between them. I try not to imagine what a struggle it is for him to type or when they will cease to exist except on the planet where unspoken words live. I saved a recording of his voice from my phone; I will always hear him; he was picking up ice at the store.

We have had story spirals, usually Craig and Gary and me. One of us will remember a day or a prank or an injustice or a person who was an asshat or a gem from eons ago and send a message to the others, prompting. The next person riffs from there and then the next, like musicians. Three good storytellers, trying for laughs, admitting failings and humiliations, the innocent buffoonery of kids and cereal jingles. I shake my head at things one of us doesn’t remember – how could you not, I think. We are the keepers of many of each others’ secrets and we love each other despite these truths. You can’t embarrass yourself with someone who loves you this much.

There were snake stories and horse stories and musician-on-the-road stories, old girlfriend and boyfriend stories. We avoided religion and politics as only the best friends can do. Craig told Weird Cancer stories like the one about his cell phone alarm. He had set it to remind himself of a new medication schedule – every eight hours around the clock – but either the morphine or the cancer demon mistakenly changed noon to midnight. When it woke him in the dark, playing the ringtone from The Jetsons (who does that?), he hurried to the living room before it woke anyone else. But, because it’s Craig, he had to take the last few steps to the phone pretending to be some weird combination of Rosie the Robot and Frankenstein and then do a little robot dance, laughing soundlessly the whole time, before he pushed the button. He tells us about all the fabulous (his word) things he can swallow – ice-cold root beer, a strawberry smoothie, orange sherbet – as though he were reading from a four-star menu. Long after solid food had left the lists, he crowed that he had a hot dog for lunch to celebrate the start of baseball season. I tried not to wonder if it had to be pureed. I don’t know how much weight he’s lost, pictures have recently been banned, and, frankly, I try not to think too carefully or too long about any of the details. For months he had been trying hard to spare me this knowledge; I fought and fought but have finally agreed not to know. I acknowledge by these words and my original signature affixed hereto that he was right.

He has steered his canoe out of the Sea of Denial and is taking enough morphine to stay ahead of the pain and to relish the brilliant opium dreams. He finally has his arms around the idea that it’s good to be comfortable when you die. He is trying to lessen our pain, we who love him, by getting us to agree not to come, not to watch. We either have or will. He has made his choices. His grace is enormous, is the sky, the highest mountain.

I am, at last, happy to float in this amniotic ocean, to feel the sand swirl against my neck and settle between my toes and fingers, the sun on my belly, even if it’s only a place I go in my mind. The tide won’t rise or fall in my make-believe bay; I won’t get hungry or pruney and have to go inside; I can stay as long as it I need to, as long as it takes, until there is nothing left but peace.

 

 

a new green blue day

Sea lions are sunning and snorting on a floating pier and gulls wheel in the stiff breeze. The air is salted. I’m in my room on the second floor of a small inn on the water’s edge of Morro Bay. One tiny balcony for a chair that faces the sea, one that faces east for the morning sun. White linens, four bouncy pillows, a dinner reservation for naked fish at 6:30, a post to finish tonight, breakfast at Carla’s Country Kitchen tomorrow. Then a four-hour drive to the city that shines between the bridges and the three people who hold most of my heart.

On the road earlier today:

Refugio Road, north of Santa Barbara

Wild-mustarded hills

 

Just south of Buellton, an organic farm

I could be this woman. I could do this. I’m not kidding.

A native oak

Decorated with Spanish moss

Leaning into the hill

 How now brown-ish black cow?

Highway 1 west from San Luis Obispo, rockpile hills

Morro Rock, a volcanic plug, one of the Nine Sisters off the Central Coast.

The blue/grey building is the lovely Anderson Inn.

Dynegy power plant, just across the harbor from the Rock. I have a photo that shows how close it is, but I decided to leave it out.

 Tonight’s nest

Back there near Buellton, I walked on the gopher-hole-pocked ground after visiting with the cows and drove farther east down the narrow road to another farm where the earth had just been tilled into rows, waiting for seeds or seedlings, things that will grow. New leaves on some oaks that lined a creek were the color of milky jade and there was a rusted metal building and weathered wood house I could see through the trees, low buildings and a red door.

There was plenty of time, no deadline, no one expecting me in Morro Bay an hour away. I had the whole day to wander and look; going farther was easily possible. The car hummed, stopped there on the verge, in the wild grass next to the asphalt, beauty all around me and the smell of black dirt in my nose. It occurred to me if I kept going into the valley, around the next bend and the one after that, I might just stay.

hotel california

someone is tossing petals in a stream

somewhere someone is standing at the foothills of their dreams

antje duvekot – “merry go round”

 

this last luxe night in santa barbara -

raced all day from shower to meeting

from web portal to grandson’s college

to ojai and carne asada, past beaches

and breakers once, twice, four times

if you count yesterday or was it the day before

 

yesterday afternoon was a dank car

and unwilling walkers, misted vistas

then faucets of rain and my hair curling

silver corkscrews, dressed in swingy black

dancing until the sky cleared, blown hard

to reveal showoff-girlfriend stars and

a more than half hung yellow moon

 

near seacliff

the shallow seabed reaches for the

dark blue deep, green and teal mix where

huge ragged waves rear and spill,

spray flying a story tall, drops hanging

together in an egg white haze over the sand

and the road, violent beating belting water

that scares me, says remember phuket

and know how small you are in this

 

i was going to stop

with my iphone camera on the way back

to the hotel, the ocean now glassy,

the waves barreled and perfect, the surfers

bobbing, waiting, black neoprene dots

on the glistening blue beyond the rocks

 

but i couldn’t

stop, couldn’t wait another hour

for solitude and a washed face with

every wrinkle showing, eyeliner gone,

big dog t-shirt and baggy pants,

glacier-ice contact half-moons floating

in a case instead of on my irises, hair

in clips and a big bite of donut in my mouth

peets coffee erasing my headache

finally

 

no body, no bodies, no one

but me and this quiet, this soft light

no warm arms or weight hollow

no splashed sink or soggy towel,

no helpful directions or not-so,

no but why are you stopping in morro bay

 

i dropped mr. forte at the train station -

a man with a homeless tan, his life in

a hefty bag dragging on the platform, aiming for

a conversation or a dollar from

my man in a navy windbreaker with an

airplane logo, a briefcase, waiting

for the amtrak south from camarillo

 

i will miss you

i always think a week isn’t long

enough to empty the bitchiness reservoir

to stop clenching my teeth and rolling

my eyes. i can’t wait to miss you, i think

so i hurry back and skip the beach only

to find that i already wish

you were here

 

//////////////////////

 

i don’t write poetry and this isn’t a poem. i’m not sure what it is exactly, but it just seemed to hit the paper in this form so i left it. when you’re on the road, you can get away with things.

 

 

dogleg to malibu, north by northwest

 

It’s time to fly away.

I don’t know how things lined up so perfectly – Mr. Forte’s office retreat in Santa Barbara and Simone’s school Grandparents’ Day in San Francisco bookending a blank Monday and Tuesday that made it ridiculous to even think about driving back to San Diego in the middle – but I was skipping from bedroom to closet yesterday as I packed, singing la-la-la-life-rolls-on with Little Big Town. Boots for a maybe-rainy day, an insurance pair of jeans. I always say if there’s room in the suitcase, you didn’t pack enough jeans.

 

 

I’ve got a new car that gets 50 miles on a gallon of Diesel 2 and hotel rooms booked in Santa Barbara and Morro Bay. I snitched Mr. Forte’s Macbook and added it to my iPad and iPhone and bag o’ cables. I’m taking the slow roads for once and stopping to snap pics. Does this make me a travel blogger? Probably not, but it’s a label I’ll borrow if it means no errands to run or legal papers to type for ten (shhh, not so loud) whole solitary days.

 

 

Bottles and jars of juices and sauces went in the bathroom bag. Where Mr. Forte’s razor should have been, but I swear he said he had it. His clothes, my clothes, red licorice, car chargers for the talky-singy things. Lug it all to the hatchback and slam the door. Duh-done, down the driveway and up the street, taking the back way to the freeway and on the road. It was 11:30 AM, a perfect time to sneak north through LA with just an easy hour more to the white stucco and red-tile roofs of SB and the blue Pacific …

Five minutes later I was on Interstate 5. Three minutes after that there were stopped cars as far as I could see ahead of me and the nearest offramp a mile away. Oooof.

It was the Friday before spring break for most California schools. It was a California holiday in honor of César Chávez and all the courts and state offices were closed. The evening rush hour had started at noon. Add a couple freeway mysteries and my pal Naren (a native of Los Angeles) on the phone was saying, “Deep breaths. It’s just gonna be this way.” It was.

Did you know it’s faster in the right lanes of the freeway when the traffic is stop-and-go? True. Following the dicta of forty plus years as a road warrior got me as far as Santa Monica in two and a half hours, not great but not awful. A string of red diamonds on my iPad map of the 101 between Thousand Oaks and Camarillo said “Go west, girl.” I did, on Interstate 10 (which runs from the ocean at Santa Monica all the damn way to Jacksonville, Florida, through deserts and Texas and then joyfully within sight of the Gulf at Mobile, in case you wondered) until it slung me onto Pacific Coast Highway, known around here as Highway 1, and pointed me toward Malibu.

Lots of other people in cars were clogging things up through Pacific Palisades, but then it got better. I crossed my fingers that there wouldn’t be hundreds of cars joining me from the last few spots – Sunset Boulevard and the canyon roads at Temescal and Topanga. There were, but I caught green lights and outran the herd, passed the stars’ houses at the Malibu Colony, made it beyond Zuma Beach and then I was among the few diehards driving at the feet of the rocky hills that edge the ocean for 30 miles to Point Mugu and the strawberry fields of Oxnard. I actually like LA and had fun the couple times I lived there (one time was in an apartment two blocks from Nicole Simpson on the night O.J. murdered her, a Kevin Bacon moment), but unless I’m spending the night,  I like it in my rear-view mirror.

Mr. Forte got off the train in Goleta last night, and I picked him up as if he were stepping off a commuter in the ‘burbs after a day in the big city. We schmoozed and saw friends and ate and tumbled into a big, tall bed – Mot might have liked a step – and I’m writing and taking pics of this cool place while he fakes his way through a conference until this afternoon.

The sun just burned through the morning haze, so I’m venturing out. Tomorrow Mr. Forte rides the rails back home in the afternoon to an empty house and the food I left him while I motor into the green hills of Santa Ynez and then swoop west to Morro Rock. The sea birds are calling.

 

 

 

cranky hipsta xmas nana

 

I was watching Ina Garten on TV the other day. She was putting a five-egg/one-pan French country omelet in the oven, happily pointing out that it was a two-person dish. She muttered about making individual omelets, “It’s like having to stand at the stove making pancakes for everyone on the weekend. Ugh.” I smiled knowingly at my kitchen sistah.

It might have been when Mr. Forte and I got married and I made the overnight transition from cooking for two (me and my daughter Amy) to cooking for a battalion – birthday dinners for 25 at least once a month – that I became a big-dish cook. Food in our house is served piled on platters or in big wooden bowls or deep ceramic crocks. “Rustic” shoved “precise” down the garbage disposal ages ago. Desserts are crisps and crostinis, nothing more elegant than a big cake or more individual than a bunch of brownies. Cookies – those time-sucking batches in and out of the oven that I had always made, even when Amy was little, with my teeth clenched – have been stricken from the list. Anyone could tell just by looking at me that I am a pushover for a quick run to Maggie Moo’s for a scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone, but no one calls me Cookie Nana.

Except at Christmas. And now I’ve whittled even that to the truly essential: that crisp, thin cookie that tastes like sugar-sprinkled December, the best rolled sugar cookie in the universe, inspired by Martha Stewart. Her current recipe is called “Ideal Sugar Cookies,” but I’ve been making them from the recipe in her “Martha Stewart’s Christmas” book, published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. in 1989.

 

 

My Christmas cookies have evolved, a good sport might say. As Martha writes, I too once had a drawer full of cutters – Santas and Christmas trees, geese and snowmen – and the cookies were carefully iced, though not as carefully as Martha’s (if I had plipped all those perfect yellow icing dots on a sheep cookie with a Barbie doll’s eyedropper and someone had then picked it up and aimed it at his mouth … ) . But the biggest fans of my long-ago iced cookies would lift through the tins to find the naked ones that had been in the oven a few minutes too long (Martha shuddered) and gotten brown and (Amy’s word) shattery. Hmmm.

Any recipe for a rolled butter-based cookie will tell you the scraps may be rerolled only twice. That seemed like a waste of dough I was already wishing I hadn’t made in the first place. My cookie-eaters loved to eat the cookies, not look at them, so I tossed the cute cutters for a sharp knife and traded traditional for avant-garde. We now have West Edge Nana MOMA Christmas Cookies:  barely decorated, they are the deconstructed essence of the holiday that snap between your teeth and smell of brandy and vanilla sugar. Since life has a way of raining surprises down on your head, last year’s batch inadvertently included a geography lesson. Below is a pictorial rendering of the 2011 Mother of Invention Holiday Bakefest.

 

Ready to rock and roll

 

 

A careful observer will see Delaware, Maryland, Colorado, Wyoming and a miniature Tennessee

 

 

Sierra Nevada Mountains – Lake Tahoe

 

 

The Hawaiian island chain (not to scale) (and no counting)

 

 

California with major population centers in green sugar – San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco

 

 

Puzzle for next season’s Survivor Immunity Challenge

 

 

LZ (landing zone)

 

 

Cinnamon red hots for me, not the cookies

 

*  *  *  *  *  *

 

Once the cookies had arrived (chauffeur-driven) in San Francisco, they were taste-tested by Simone, who reported on the rules and results of the recent dreidel contest while eating California.

 

 

 

picked clean

 

 

 

I was clipping husks of pomegranates off the tree last Saturday, knee deep in rosemary and bees.

The weather is whacked – 35 to 40 degree nights and 80 plus degree days, no rain since Thanksgiving. The rosemary is blooming in its proper January, but the trees are popping buds because they think it’s April; the garden couldn’t look more confused. What do we call this – sprinter? wing?

A dormant pomegranate tree is a rat’s nest of grey sticks, skinny and tough. Ours is in the back garden, standing in last year’s crunchy leaf-fall. I leave the split fruit hanging like red leather Christmas ornaments on the bare branches for the December fliers. The male hummingbird who claims this territory sways silently on a high branch, glaring at his rival in the sycamore near the gate.

The rosemary bushes look like fat babies, arms up, elbows that don’t bend yet. Even this hot, the winter sun is soft on the turgid green fingers, crammed with tiny blue flowers. The bees are hooked, bouncing from arm to arm; blue bee heroin. The scent clings to my baggy khakis like pollen on the bees; we share a dense cloud of piney resin and golden dust.

Minus their hint of violet, the flowers would match the sky, that cold-weather blue, darker than spring’s. Paint box blue, bachelor buttons lightened by a dot of titanium white.

With the skeletons of pomegranates on grey wood, I pretend to set the table for lunch, then separate two that look like matched ruby earrings, imagine the frustrated birds that couldn’t get even one nib out of the teasing slash of that whole fruit, too small to open, petrified by the wind.

Gathering leaves, I see a space between reaching branches of rosemary and think hmmm, I could fold my shirt into a pillow and lie down below the buzz, I could look past the lavender, that sea green, past the Easter grass buds on the grey switches to the line-cloud of contrail from a jet so high its roar was lost to the moon, I could lie here while my skin warms to pink, covered by petals and scent, and no one would know.