Write Rite Wright Right

Bilious

2012-01-23T11:34:00.000-08:00

They want to remove my gall bladder.

The specialists who have made this decision have not actually examined me. They have looked at the reports of an extravagant number of imaging procedures and have given their advice from a distance of four feet in a period of five minutes or less.

Everything else having to do with this advice is delegated to receptionists and physicians’ assistants, paramedical personnel whose duty apparently is to be pleasant.

“I’m a sick man...a mean man,” Dostoyevsky writes in Notes From Underground. “There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there’s something wrong with my liver.”

The gall bladder, as you may know, is where the liver stores bile, something which assists digestion. Apparently my gall bladder is full of stones which cause a great deal of discomfort and, according to literary wisdom, a bad disposition.

I could almost diagnose myself with Webster’s synonyms for the word bilious: Peevish, bearish, ill-tempered, cantankerous, disagreeable, dyspeptic, ill-humored, ill-natured, ornery, surly, petulant, cranky, cross, grumpy, huffy, irascible, peevish, testy and waspy.

Not true, you say? You believe I am cheerful and nice?

It’s an act. Webster has me pegged.

What I wonder is whether this bad nature will change if and when my gall bladder is gone. There are lots of synonyms for the word bilious, but not too many antonyms: amiable, good-humored, good-natured, good-tempered.

Hm.

Vanity

2011-11-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

I am vain; there’s no denying it.

I only post flattering pictures (mostly old ones) on Facebook. My business card photo is probably 15 years old, and it took three rolls of film—yes, film—to get one glamorous shot. I used to wear jeans so tight I had to lie down and use pliers to get them zipped. I wore eyeliner to the operating room when I went for cataract surgery. I dye my hair.

This confessional came up because recently I used the word “slip” to a woman twenty-something years younger than I and she didn’t know what I meant. “Petticoat” was no help either.

Discussing the extinction of petticoats with Nicodemus this morning, I told him about Spanx. Probably I am the last person in the world to learn about Spanx, a kind of super-corset which squashes female flesh. They make Spanx “body-sculpting” underwear in all sorts of forms to fit parts from shoulder to toes. God knows what the things do to your insides.

Before I learned about Spanx, I was curious to notice, looking at pictures of a lovely chubby tango dancer (nobody we know) in a strapless dress, that she had a pleat in the skin between her bare shoulder blades. What could cause such a thing, I wondered. Did she know her skin was pleated?

Now I am wondering if these garments have to be removed with scissors. Can you bend from the waist? Has there ever been a Spanx explosion where the flesh comes tumbling out of the constriction? And is it really worth it to suffer for the sake of looking thinner than you are? (Or younger. With thick eyelashes.)

In the interest of research, I took a look at advertisements for Spanx. No, I am not going to buy any. And, searching for the etymological root of the word Vanity, I looked at the Greek version of Romans 8:20: “For the creation was made subject to vanity...” The word is also translated as frailty or weakness.

You might think vanity would be opting for appearance over reality, or the capitulation to some sort of cultural imperative regarding ideal beauty. But maybe it could also represent an effort to get one’s outsides to look more like one’s inner sense of self. How many people do you know who like photographs of themselves? How many do you know who catch a fleeting glance in a mirror and think “Who the heck is that?”

(Narcissus, from John William Waterhouse painting, Echo and Narcissus, 1903.)

Blackout

2011-11-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

Nonda and Ed: This morning’s New York Times reproduced its front page from Nov. 9, 1965, about the huge blackout which happened when we were living on Riverside Drive in New York City. I thought I’d send you a copy of the front page and remind you about what happened that evening.

I was still at work at the United Nations delegation on the lower east side of the city when the lights went out. It was almost closing time for the office on the seventh floor of the Harcourt Brace building and when the power went out, we were completely in the dark. The elevators were not working, of course, so we decided to walk down the steps by the light of various people’s matches and lighters.

Once we were outside, there was pandemonium in the streets. All the subways were stopped under ground, the traffic lights were not working, and every time a bus would come by, people would rush in a crowd to get on any bus going uptown. The office was on about 54^th Street and our apartment was on 168^th. Caught in the noisy, pushing crowd, I shouted out “What are we all here? Animals?” People were so shocked by this outburst that they actually stepped back and let me on the bus, which was bound for Harlem. I got on the packed bus, terribly worried about you kids, and rode as far as the bus went, to about 145^th Street.

Then I got out and walked some thirty blocks through some of the roughest neighborhoods in New York. The only light we had was a little moonlight and the headlights from cars and buses. Pedestrians and cars were going everywhere in a kind of mad tangle, but though everybody seemed to be out on the street, nobody bothered me, I was not robbed, mugged or maimed, and finally I got to 168^th and Broadway and crossed the street in the dark, heading down to Riverside Drive.

When I reached our building, I saw a little light on in the superintendent’s apartment at street level, but of course the rest of the building was dark. I knocked at the door and was greeted by the mother of Junior Collazo, Nonda’s little friend and the super’s son. When I looked in, I saw Junior and you two about to chow down on some delicious-looking tamales wrapped in corn husks. Your baby-sitter, Kay, had left you two with the Collazo family and had gone home to the Bronx. By then it must have been about 7:30 or 8 P.M.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I just remember how scared and worried I had been, and what a peaceful scene it was, you two sitting happily at the table, about to eat a delicious dinner by lamplight.

Love from Mom

The Yellow Cello: A Mystery

2011-09-19T19:11:00.000-07:00

The yellow cello is a big-bottomed narrow-waisted lady with an elegant hand-carved maple scroll. It was probably made in the mid-nineteenth century, during the lifetime of Johannes Brahms, in Germany. It has a spruce table, a maple back and ribs. Its fingerboard and purfling, the thin strand which outlines the top, are made of ebony. June, the woman settling the estate, did not know what to do with the cello, which had belonged to her friend and neighbor, Norma.

Certainly the instrument wasn’t much to look at, with deep cracks all along the belly, a patch on the front, a deep gouge made by the bow, a badly warped bridge and rusty strings. Through the slightest of contacts—the aunt of a fellow cellist learned about the cello when she struck up a conversation with a perfect stranger in her old neighborhood-- Nicodemus heard about the orphan instrument and went to look at it.

June, herself a lively and alert woman in her nineties, said she had often carried the cello to jobs for her friend, who had died, unmarried and childless, at the age of 94. “I guess that part of my life is over,” she said sadly.

Although the instrument hadn’t been played in ten years, “it was the light of her life,” June said. The yellow lady had been left to Norma by her own cello teacher.

Instrument makers and lovers joke about the Strad in the attic. Such is the mystery of stringed instruments that innocents cannot avoid hoping the violin, viola or cello they have found is worth a fortune. In this case, despite a paper stating the modest replacement value of the cello for insurance purposes, the obvious damage made it seem unlikely that the instrument had any value...

Until Nicodemus played it. And fell in love. And gave June a thousand dollars on the spot and brought the cello home.

Even with the rusty strings and the dreadful cracks (they had been patched from the inside and someone had sprayed lacquer on the face to try to make them blend into the wood) the cello had such a big, warm voice that Nicodemus could hardly bear to stop playing. He played and tweaked, tuned and peered, changed a string and played some more.

He took the cello to Carlos, the fine instrument maker in San Francisco. Carlos took in the condition of the cello at a glance, unscrewed the end pin and looked inside. “Not too bad,” he said, though the accumulation of dust showed how long it had been since the top of the instrument had been removed for what Nicodemus called brutal repairs. Carlos played the cello a little. “Beautiful,” he said.

Sleuthing out the history of a musical instrument is usually difficult if not impossible unless the instrument is famous. In this case, June said her friend had played the cello as principal cellist of the Peninsula Symphony, but even the old-timers at the orchestra had not heard of Norma. The cello teacher who willed the instrument to Norma supposedly was principal of the Oakland orchestra, but the orchestra’s archives do not go back very far. The only other clue to the instrument’s history was the figured maple bridge, stamped with the name Salchow, a New York firm.

June believed the cello had been played in Mexico at one point. She said Norma had sold a different cello to someone in the San Francisco Symphony and that she had given another cello to a student. The yellow lady was the one she kept until the end.

Why was the cello’s label removed? Where has it traveled since 1850? All we really know about it is that at least two cellists loved it and played it all their lives, and that despite its age and trauma, it still sings with a beautiful voice.

Forgetting

2011-09-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

“Try To Remember” is the first song in The Fantasticks, the long-running musical show.

Try to remember when life was so tender

That no one wept except the willow.

Try to remember when life was so tender

That dreams were kept beside your pillow.

Try to remember when life was so tender

That love was an ember about to billow.

Try to remember, and if you remember,

Then follow....

We try to remember all of our lives: words, faces, names, times tables. But there comes a time when remembering becomes harder. We apologize for our Senior Moments and worry about Alzheimer’s. And by now we all know or have heard of someone actually stricken with severe memory loss and have heard of the anguish this causes them and their families.

We work at remembering. Mnemonics, named for the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, help us to name the colors of the rainbow, the order of the planets, the music lines and spaces, the Great Lakes: Roy G. Biv for red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet. Mary’s Violet Eyes Made John Stay Up Nights Pondering for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto (lately demoted, but still part of the mnemonic.) FACE, Every Good Boy Does Fine. HOMES.

But maybe we should take another look at forgetting. A touching moment in the original Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuseleh” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuQCt5xWeDc) has Dr.McCoy saying of Kirk’s grieving “I do wish he could forget.” And Spock, placing a Vulcan hand on the head of the sleeping Kirk, says “Forget.”

Mnemosyne was a Titan, a predecessor of the Greek gods and goddesses, and the mother of the Muses. Her counterpart, Lethe, was only a river god in charge of forgetting. However, the shades of the newly dead were required to drink from Lethe, the stream of oblivion named for the god, in order to forget their earthly lives before passing into the afterlife.

When the subject came up last week, Bruce, a brilliant young violinist who never forgets anything, said that in the Chinese culture, not so much urgency was attached to the memory facility of the old folks, or even to their behavior. We hold them in high regard for who they are to us, great-grandfather, great-aunt, not for anything they do or did, he said.

Maybe we cause our forgetful family members unhappiness by urging them to remember, I thought. I thought of conversations centering on some symptom of forgetting which caused sadness on both sides. “She couldn’t even remember her brother’s name.”

Shared memories are integral to our relationships, and yet we loved little children before we had any common memories.

Sometimes I think of my friend Arlene as the Defender of the Aged. She has worked with old people for most of her adult life and once did a study where she played music to nursing home patients believed to be in a persistent vegetative state, the end-stage of forgetfulness. Measurable brain wave activity arose in some of these patients after they heard the kind of music they had liked when they were younger.

“You remember Ram Dass’s book, Be Here Now?” Arlene asked me. “We thought that staying in the present moment was philosophically and psychically something we should strive for. Remember how we all worked so hard at our yoga so we could stay in the Here and Now? Well, these old folks, the ones who can’t remember, they are there, right in the middle of Here and Now.”

Mosaic from the first century B.C. depicting symbols of Apollo (center) Mnemosyne (top) and the nine muses. Clockwise: Calliope, Urania, Polyhymnia, Erato and Terpsichore, Melpomene, Thalia, Euterpe and Clio.

Images and Religion

2011-08-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

The various religions I have heard about have strong opinions about imagery in places of worship. Sculptural depictions of religious figures are all right in some cases and strictly forbidden in others. The beautiful calligraphy of Islam may stem from the forbidding of actual images. The terrifying images of Tibetan Buddhism are a world away from Michelangelo or a plastic madonna on a taxicab dashboard.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, for ten centuries one and the same with Roman Catholics, does not allow graven images but embraces the flat, stylized style of painting which is ikonography in the Byzantine style. They believe that the first ikon was painted by St. Luke. (I am retaining the “k” in the word to distinguish it from computer pictures.) The images of the saints have been so traditionally depicted down the ages that many are recognizable by certain traits: Paul, for instance, is balding; John has curly hair. Some of the apostles are bearded and others are not. John the Baptist has wild leonine hair and wears an animal pelt.

Ikons are not objects of worship, but rather are foci for meditation. The figures are always painted with their ears exposed, as if they could listen to a prayer. Many ikons have had miracles attributed to them, of course. Fire walkers in northern Greece hold ikons as they walk across live coals, sometimes in socks, and are not singed. Two ikons I saw last year in San Francisco are said to be emerging from what seemed to be bare boards. (Ikons are painted on wood.)

We became acquainted with Eikonurgia, a Greek ikon-painting group headed by the master painter George Kordis, through an Internet bulletin board. Nicodemus posted a question about gilding which was answered by one of the teacher/painters from Athens in the group. We have been to Greece several times to observe the group’s stunning work in churches and monasteries.

Now the group has come to America for the first time and has been painting a new Orthodox church in Columbia, South Carolina. Through YouTube, Facebook and Skype, we have followed the painting all month. The amount of surface covered with raw pigment suspended in liquid glass, their fresco medium, would be staggering even without the images.

But trying to describe the images is almost beyond me. Starting with the dome, 70 feet above the floor of the church, is a Christ image whose halo is probably five feet across. Thie image is circled by scriptural words in Greek. Below the Christ image is a 360-degree frieze of angels and seraphim among the stars, and a circle-framed madonna and child. Below this are the words of Psalm 104 in English, the Western letters painted in the Byzantine style. “When thou openest thy hand all things shall be filled with good.”

The next tier down has 20 windows, and between each window is painted an Old Testament Prophet perhaps eight or nine feet tall, identified by name. The windows themselves are painted and decorated. On the next tier is the story of Creation, replete with the sun and moon, the oceans, plants, birds and animals. A short narrative in English describes each part of the painting, which continues through the eviction of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. On one of the YouTube videos, a photographer asks George why he is putting shoes on Eve after she has left Eden. “Vanity,” George answers.

Now we are almost on the ground floor, and the paintings are of the four evangelists. As of the latest postings, a painting of the Last Supper is being sketched in charcoal, freehand as always, by George, who will complete the sketches, faces, draperies and highlights, followed by the other four members of the team, who know exactly what to do. Every square inch of the church above the ground level has been painted.

The scaffolding alone is an engineering marvel. “This is the best scaffolding we have ever worked on,” my friend Yotta said (even though she stepped on a nail when someone overlooked an upturned board .)

I have seen hundreds of examples of Eikonurgia’s work, but the Columbia project is surely the most beautiful (and vast) project they have created. Every figure is painted with such care and reverence that, even if you don’t really believe in what it represents, you must appreciate the genius, the energy, the discipline and the faith which has produced the image.

I am reminded of the first time I saw Delphi, the site of the ancient oracle and the focus of any number of religions in ancient Greece. It left me breathless. All the reverence which had gone into that rocky piece of mountain was palpable. You could feel it from a mile away.

Ikon painters do not sign their work except for an occasional “through the hand of...”This morning, George posted a photograph of the ikon in the church dome, taken from outside, at night. The few words which accompanied the picture showed so clearly that he does not consider this his work at all, but only something which has come through him. “Is always there,” he wrote. “Taking care of...”

Antonio

2011-07-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

“Es muerta,” Antonio says, shaking his head sadly. We look at the tree, trying to see whether any part of it might be saved, but finally decide that it is only good for a little firewood and that it will take two truckloads to cart the rest to El Dumpay.

Antonio only speaks a little English and I speak no Spanish at all, but we manage to communicate through gesture, good will and a little mind-reading. I know that he is not yet thirty but has two sons, one of them twelve, going on thirteen. I know that he is a strict and devoted father who must be home when school gets out and his wife goes to work. He seems to support his parents in Mexico, and more than once has taken in a relative who had nowhere else to go.

Back before he had papers, Antonio went door to door looking for work. I told him I didn’t really have anything, but if he would leave his telephone number, I would call him when I did. He wrote and erased, wrote and erased, and I thought that anybody who wanted that much to get something right would be good to know.

He and several relatives painted my house by hand, with brushes. Antonio didn’t mind washing windows or cars, did all his estimating and billing in his head and never made a mistake, even when he had taken advances for lunch or materials. I worried about how he would keep doing all this when he grew older. I wished he would take an English class or try to get a contractor’s license, but he was too busy working to do much of anything else.

I made business cards for him so he wouldn’t have to keep writing and erasing.

“Maggie, minuto, come,” he says, and I trudge over to the fence where he is cutting up the dead tree with a handsaw even as the sound of chainsaws and chippers blast away from neighbors’ houses. He shows me a decayed stump some eight feet high, two feet in diameter at the top, five inches at the rotting bottom, upright only because it is leaning on branches. The stump had been hidden by the dead tree Antonio was taking out.

“Oh, my God,” I say, picturing orphaned children, Antonio or me squashed as flat as the coyote in Loony Toons. “Be careful! Don’t do anything! Wait until somebody else comes!” Holding my breath, I nervously pull away some logs as Antonio casually clips a few branches, mentally measuring where the stump might fall.

Then he pushes the stump and it falls to the ground with an enormous earth-shaking thud.

“One truck,” he says “for this at Dumpay. Forty-seven dollaria.”

“Not worth it,” I say, and we wordlessly agree to leave the stump where it fell.

Deus Ex Machina

2011-07-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

I have an uneasy truce with the machines. This may date from an astonishingly low grade on a mechanical aptitude test I took in high school or from the description of a war against the machines in the Sixties Bible, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf: “(They) praised machinery as the last and most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid, men would be equal to the gods.”

I have been nudged and bullied into dealing with machines. I had to learn to drive at age 40 because there was no school activities bus to where we lived in the country, and the kids wanted to play football. I can drive if there aren’t too many left turns, but my present car has so many mysterious computerized functions that even the dealer can’t tell why the alarm goes off at random.

In fact, the whole darned house is computerized: The coffee maker, the kitchen range, the television and its remote, the sewing machine, telephones, stereo, alarm clock, answering machine, calculator and camera. Ed gave me a Global Positioning thing after we kept getting lost, and once I get more confidence about left turns, I have every intention of using it.

The turntable which was going to turn all my vinyl records into compact discs, however, I donated to a choir auction. The box had never been opened. Sometimes you have to flat-out acknowledge defeat. I can make compact discs from audio tapes, however, which is a dubious skill since everyone else deals with iPods now instead of compact discs. I have a machine which is supposed to make JPGs from old slides, but I haven’t yet taken it out of the box.

I got my first computer because I wanted e-mail. It took a week to get up the courage to open the box. When I plugged the thing in, it didn’t work, and I phoned up a friend and cried. The problem proved to be the plug, not the computer, and so I have had the usual computer snags and problems ever since.

The newest machine is an iPhone I actually requested for my birthday. To activate it, one had to have the latest version of iTunes on the computer, and to support that, one had to have a more recent operating system than I have. This is what I mean by being nudged and bullied. Meanwhile, I am just using the iPhone as a telephone, and it works just fine.

The phrase “deus ex machina” or “god from the machine”, by the way, comes from Horace, who deplored the Greek tragedians’ use of cranes (machina) which were used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage, where they would neatly wrap up a rambling drama.

Margins

2011-05-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

Nicodemus and I are taking a Greek class, and while we are struggling with declensions (don't ask) we are learning some interesting things.

About limbo, for instance. Ever since I read Dante in high school, I have thought that limbo was a place, real or imagined, where unbaptized children went after death. In Dante's Divine Comedy, virtuous pagans and great classical philosophers including Plato and Socrates, joined the unbaptized children in this shadowy place. I worried quite a lot about the children in limbo.

Then it turns out that "limbo", which means "margin" in Latin, was a copyist's mistake. The monk copying the scriptural passage was referring the reader to a margin note. The next copyist incorporated the word into the text, and eventually the concept of limbo entered the Catholic catechism, though it was never doctrine. In 1992 the catechism dropped the mention of limbo and in April of 2007, Pope Benedict officially clarified the matter without blaming the medieval copyist.

Now I want to talk about a different kind of margin. Most of my friends who were church musicians have either lost their jobs or have been replaced by amateur volunteers, playing mostly guitars and drums. Not many churches these days play the great liturgical music of the past. There is a question as to whether this is an artistic or an economic decision.

And...the 54-year-old Coastside Chorale which I accompany fell victim to budget cuts in June of 2010 even though a parcel tax initiative benefitting the school district was passed. The local adult school was axed without an apology or any official notice.

Next chapter: The Chorale starts up again in fall of 2010 under the aegis of the understaffed local Parks and Recreation department and operates for a full semester without a class list or any idea what its financial situation might be. Telephone calls are not returned. Four months after chorale members had paid their enrollment fees, Parks and Rec released a portion of the fees back to the chorus, which had salaries and expenses to cover. And then Parks and Rec closed down and their administration was passed to a city a mountain range away from the Coastside.

The San Carlos Parks and Rec intends to increase fees for the fall semester, and the remote administrators want a 40 per cent cut. The Chorale, which just wants to sing, is balking, but they do not have tax-exempt status and need a sponsor for purposes of insurance, director's and accompanist's very modest salaries, music scores and rehearsal space.

"Do you feel marginalized?" I asked the director, who several years back lost her church job.

"Do I..." she stammered. "Do I..." Finally she was able to finish her sentence. "Ever".

If a Tree Falls in the Forest: A Conversation

2011-05-13T10:53:00.000-07:00

“Why aren’t you writing?”

“Because hardly anybody reads any more.”

“I think you’ve got your reward system backward.”

“What do you mean?” (I ask him this very frequently.)

“I mean that instead of doing the crosswords as a reward for doing something you don’t want to do, like the dishes, you should reward yourself for doing something you actually want to do, like writing.”

“It just seems pointless to write when we’re living in a time where so few people have the skill or motivation to read.”

“Well, I practice the cello every day. I practice things nobody will ever hear but me.”

“Oh, that’s not true. Everybody wants to hear you play. You play all the time.”

“But I practice because it is what I do. I think you should write because that’s what you do.”

“O.K.”

Squandering

2011-05-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

An entire olive harvest was strewn across the parking lot at the church where Master Sinfonia performed yesterday. Birds will not eat the bitter olives, and most cars were parked well away from the half-crushed mess.

When I saw the ripe olives beginning to fall from the trees last month, I was tempted to gather them up and take them home. Then I thought that they really belonged to the church, so I resisted the temptation to harvest them.

This time, it was obvious that the olives were being wasted, so I found a bag and picked up maybe a pound of the best of the windfalls.

A gallon of olive oil costs about thirty dollars these days. Black olives are not cheap. And yet here were all these olives, being wasted. All that was necessary to use them was to wash them well and put them in salt water for three weeks.

In ancient Greece, the Athenians voted whether their patron should be Poseidon, who gave them the horse, or Athena, who gave them the olive tree. The olive branch has come to symbolize peace throughout most of the world.

Here amidst our prosperity, we complain that we are poor, but truly I think our poverty is for the most part one of education, culture and spirit.

Rediscovering Wonder

2011-04-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems to me that there are currents in space and time which sweep all of us into places and situations where we review, correct, amend, or remember some scene. Or rediscover wonder.

The population of San Francisco is greater than 809,000. The population of Ouranoupolis, Greece, abut 9,000 miles away, is about 900. More than 50 years ago, I spent some time visiting in Ouranoupolis and my son Nonda had his first taste of solid food, fish, at the hands of a woman called Fani Mitropoulos.

What are the chances of my meeting Fani’s nephew (“I am like a son to her”) at an Easter church picnic yesterday, and what are the chances of our discovering the connection? We had reserved a table at the picnic in San Francisco, a celebration with roast lamb, music, all the good Greek things which follow 40 days of fasting and several late-night church services.

We had empty seats at our table, so the man, Neboisa, and his companion joined us. The conversation began in English: “What part of Greece are you from?” “Actually I am from Serbia,” the man said. “We used to look across the border at Serbia,” I said.

“From where?” he asked. “Near Thessaloniki,” I said. And from Thessaloniki, it was just a hop and a skip to Ouranoupolis, the tiny village in northern Greece where the boats leave for Mount Athos.

Fani Mitropoulos was part of the household of Joice Nankivell Loch, an Australian writer and self-trained medic who wound up with her husband, Sydney, in Ouranoupolis in 1922 as staff of a Quaker refugee camp for people displaced from Asia Minor. The couple rented their house and its tower from the monks of Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos , a religious city-state more than a thousand years old .

They worked with the Quakers in Rumania during World War II, but then returned to Greece to assist victims of the Greek civil war. Even after Sydney died in 1955, Mrs. Loch stayed on in Ouranoupolis. She was the only medical person for miles around. People with serious problems who could stand the trip were sent to the nearest doctor, 70 miles away; Mrs. Loch dealt with everything else.

“It’s do-gooders like me who have contributed to the village poverty,” she once told me. “If a couple had four children and two died, which was usual, then the property only had to be split two ways. Now it is four.”

That autumn of 1958, we slept on rope beds, clever contraptions which could be firmed up or softened with a few tugs. We visited the 14-th century tower but did not see the monk’s ghost so many visitors reported. Fani came up with a wooden laundry tub which made a fine bassinet for baby Nonda. We marveled at Mrs. Loch’s six-toed cats, played with her baby goats, looked out upon the blue Aegean sea and watched the sun sparkle on the waves. Currents in space and time: Only a few years ago, Nicodemos made a retreat to Vatopedi Monastery, and Nonda and his family visited Ouranoupolis and took the boat which goes around the coast of Mount Athos. A friend in San Francisco had an ikon of Saint Marina. When I admired it, she said that it had been painted by Fani Mitropoulos.

“Mrs. Loch’s cook?” I asked. “Yes. Fani.”

No women are allowed on Mount Athos, so often the monks would have to hike down to Mrs. Loch for first aid or dinner. Fani cooked for Mrs. Loch, her Swiss companion Martha and their many visitors. She produced huge meals on an enormous wood-burning stove. The day we were there, she milked the sheep and made yogurt.

From 1922 until the 1970s, carpet-weaving, fishing and farming made a modest living for families who were forcibly removed from their homes and livelihoods by wars and political events over which they had no control. As Quakers and peacemakers, teaching trades was for the Lochs a vital part of re-settling the refugees.

The local women were fine carpet makers, but their chemical dyes were gaudy, Mrs. Loch said, and their patterns were unlovely. The monks brought Byzantine carpet patterns from pictures in the monastery libraries. Mrs. Loch, Martha, and Fani sketched out the patterns and gave them to the village women.. They perfected the art of dyeing wool with natural materials, yielding beautiful subtle colors.

Mrs. Loch knew exactly when to harvest leaves, bark, grass and flowers for just the right color. The resulting carpets, while expensive, were so in demand that there was always a waiting list for them. A Greek friend had one of the Ouranoupolis Tree of Life carpets. Fruits, flowers and animals cascaded over the fine wool in colors straight from the natural world. It was one of the most beautiful pieces I have ever seen. Today many of the carpets are in museums.

Mrs. Loch had started out as a writer, and she collected stories from Ouranoupolis for two children’s books about a fictional boy named Christophilos. Any re-telling of a folk story received her full attention. Her blue eyes would light up and she would nod encouragingly. “You mean the knife would never have been used to cut garlic?”

Some years after our visit, Mrs. Loch had a stroke. The villagers went to church and prayed that God would take a month from each of their lives and add it to that of Mrs. Loch. She recovered, regained the power to speak, and was well until she died in 1982 at the age of 94.

Among the many humanitarian awards received by Mrs. Loch (none of which her Greek friends knew about) were those awarded by the governments of Romania and Poland for saving a thousand Polish and Jewish children through a daring escape with the Rumanian underground. At her funeral, the Greek Orthodox bishop of Oxford called Mrs. Loch “one of the most significant women of the twentieth century.”

There are probably still Greeks named Sydney—Seed-nay-eee in the Greek transliteration--, both men and women, from the days the people of Ouranoupolis wanted to honor the stranger who stayed to help them.

(Photographs: The young writer Joice Nankivell; Mrs. Loch, MLB, Martha and Fani’s sheep at Ouranoupolis in 1958.)

Need, Disguised As Love

2011-04-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

More words have been written about love than any other subject. It is as if love were a cosmic puzzle which we sing about, write and talk about, wonder about, and sometimes obsess upon. I myself am guilty of writing far too much poetry about love. In modern times, people even shop for love. There have always been matchmakers, but now matchmaking is an industry.

As a veteran of the love wars, I have frequently been given advice by my friends: “If you can’t choose between them, you probably don’t love either one all that much.” “There’s a major difference in commitment here.” “I don’t think he’s got what it takes to keep you down on the farm.” Mostly I ignored this advice, sometimes to my peril and embarrassment. Not to mention cost.

The Greeks have two words for love. Erotas is the love which demands union, romantic love. Agape is selfless love, as for God, one’s children, a friend or an old wife or husband. Music and literature are most often concerned with Erotas, which after all leads to the perpetuation of the species. Romeo and Juliet did not live to have to deal with family holidays, bad breath or farts. Cole Porter’s comment on Erotas was that it was too hot not to cool down. The popular American distinction is between being “in love” and “loving”, putting enormous weight on a tiny preposition.

The famous passage about love in First Corinthians uses the word "agape" in the original Greek. Historically, the Greeks have always assumed that Erotas would in fact cool down, and so long-term serious contracts like marriage were based on more stable things.

I am not one to deny the intoxication, power, or mind-bending beauty of Erotas. Look at all that music, art and literature it has produced. On the other hand: Henry the Eighth.

What is it that we need and are so likely to justify in the name of love? We need the basic creature things, food, shelter, safety. We need the psychological things, acceptance, esteem, continuity. We have humanistic requirements: Some indication that our life has meaning, that we have value, or even that we are lovable. We do not want to feel separated. In fact, Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving says that the experience of separateness is the source of all anxiety.

I could be an old poop and respond to “We love each other” with the Logic 101 request, “Define your terms.” But I’d much rather echo the conversation between Tevye and Golde in “Fiddler On the Roof”. “Do you love me?” “Do I what?”

(The painting is Edward Burne-Jones’ Cupid and Psyche, the cover of my latest poetry chapbook, Cupid’s Arrow Gone Awry”.

Believe It Or Not

2011-04-11T17:59:00.000-07:00

Things nobody believes: That I found a piglet frozen in the snow at my grandmother's house when I was ten. That a wolf ran between Susan and me while we were outside talking. That I had déja-vus constantly the whole time I lived in Greece.

Things I don't believe: That Charles saw a UFO in New Mexico. That folk remedies are better than modern medicine, though I am willing to try them. That any religion, non-religion or belief system (including my own) has an exclusive corner on the truth.

The Cypresses

2011-03-20T12:42:00.001-07:00

I have been wanting to write about the Monterey cypresses for some time. Last night's big storm, with its morning aftermath of fire trucks, power company vehicles, neighborly conferences in the road, chainsaws, gave me the nudge I needed.

Only one small branch and a rain of cypress pollen fell in the yard, though there are three enormous broken, hanging branches across the street and a pile of debris, cleared by the firemen, beside the driveway. Most of the trees are a hundred feet tall and getting toward the end of their lives, according to Bill, the tree man.

Whenever there is a storm, I tremble and fret, remembering the many times branches have fallen on the cars or gone through the studio roof. I am almost superstitious about the cypresses, using their cones, which are like golf balls, for decoration, making wreaths from the fallen greenery.

This morning Nicodemus and I dug up a six-foot cypress which was trying to grow in absolutely the wrong spot. We planted it in the southwest corner, where two big stumps show that there were large trees growing there some time in the past.

Each cypress tree has a distinct character and appearance. On the west side of the house there are seven remaining trees: Wendy, Wanda, Willa, Winnie, Wahine, and the twins Wose and Wooth. On the south side, in front of the house, is the biggest tree, Susa, beloved of squirrels. On the other side are the twined cypresses Sara and Sota, where the owls roost and the woodpeckers forage. Beyond these are two dead trees, Sank and Sunk, and one barely alive cypress with one live branch, Surviva.

On the East side of the house are the worst troublemakers, so bad that Bill once screeched to a halt as he was driving down the road, ran in and said "you have a branch up there which is life-threatening." That branch was from Elmer, which has provided many near-misses for us on windy days and nights. His companions, progressing toward the street, are Elsa, Emma, Eleanor, Elsie and Elsalita.

The new little cypress is named Cyprian.

Greek Key

2011-02-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

Keys have power. Think about how some people display their keys. Think about what is involved when someone gives you (or will not give you) the key to their house. I remember how hard it was to turn over my keys when I retired from the college, even though there was no reason I would need to open the practice rooms or the piano lab again.

I think it was this feeling, the feeling of someone handing us the key to something important, that made Nicodemus and me so enjoy our first class in Fourth Century Greek. Most of the people I have mentioned this to have reacted as if we were studying Trilobites in Turkestan. Three friends actually understood our enthusiasm, and one of them was the daughter of a Classics teacher.

Every time a New Testament passage comes up, N and I grumble about the various translations, always preferring the King James. The original Greek, of course, is always the same, but it is considerably different from the modern Demotic which we try to practice at dinner time, when we read the Divry’s calendar, with its historic notes, its bad jokes, and its two dates—one Julian, one Gregorian.

The second session of this class happened to be held on a night when neither of us had a rehearsal to attend or a lesson to give, and on a lark, we drove up to San Francisco, found the place, and took our seats. There were about twenty interesting-looking people in the church library, one of them in priest’s black. The teacher was a comfortable-looking woman wearing a beret who proved, in the course of two hours, to have a mind like a fine-honed steel edge.

Nicodemus took notes. I sat with my mouth open most of the time after we did a jet-speed sweep from the Phoenicians to the possibility of a class party in Greece.

So now N is trying to learn his lower-case Greek letters and I am trying to absorb the fact that what looks like an apostrophe is really an “h”, as in hoi polloi, which is pronounced the way it looks in classical Greek, but which is “ee poh-lee” (the many) in Demotic.

Just think: the next time we go to the British Museum, we’ll be able to read the Rosetta Stone!

No News Is Bad News

2011-01-30T09:00:00.001-08:00

We've been heading in this direction for some time. At 8:00 this morning, the newspaper delivery person tossed a two-pound package in the general direction of the house. I took the parcel out of its two plastic bags and prepared to sort out the readable parts of the San Francisco Chronicle, only to find that there were none. The entire package was advertising sheets and circulars.

As the scene grows darker for print media, the Chronicle has resorted to more and more advertising gimmicks: An advertisement page with the newspaper's logo at the top which obscures a third of the real front page. Various ad pages which protrude from the papers ever-slimmer news sections. Inserts made of stiff paper so that the reader cannot turn the page. And of course column after column of screaming commercial messages, more of them when there is a holiday coming up. (In this case, the Super Bowl--that's football for those of you who do not follow sports-- is next Sunday, and much of the advertising has to do with television sets or what is now being called Home Entertainment Systems.)

There was a time when the Knoxville News-Sentinel had a strict policy that no more than one third of the newspaper could contain advertising. But that was when more people wrote for and read newspapers. It's sad.

A Cat Mystery

2011-01-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

Our beautiful gray tortoiseshell cat Mimi died November 13th, and the only thing mysterious about her demise was how well she hid the fact that she had at least three life-threatening conditions while continuing to eat, listen to music, play with her catnip mouse, all the things she liked to do.

We put her body in a plastic box and buried her up in the corner of the yard I like to watch when I am pondering. We put all her toys in the grave as if she were a pharaoh and might need them. We tossed her comb and food dish and scattered her kibble in the back yard, where the neighbor’s dog promptly scarfed it up, looking about furtively for the huge cat which once chased him away.

I had one dream of her, a silent dream, where Mimi was running up the driveway, south, as fast as she could go.

The mystery is what became of all the cat hair. She had a luxurious coat which shed everywhere, floated in the air, worked its way into the carpet, stuck to the stove, adorned all our clothing, collected in the corners behind the furniture. The day after we buried her, all the cat hair mysteriously disappeared. I thought I would use her brush for my hair as a kind of legacy from her, but when I washed the brush, only lint came out; no cat hair. Our black clothing, once richly enhanced with pale gray fur, no longer had a single trace of cat hair.

Some of this might be explained by the heavy-duty air filter on the furnace, at least the floating and pooling hair bits. But what could get the hair off our fleeces, coats and sweaters when energetic efforts with brushes, vacuums and sticky tape would never quite do it?

Nicodemus says she took it all with her.

(Smiling Mimi card by Christine and Jordan Hosfeldt)

Epiphany 2011

2011-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

In the darkness out there,

the lights are little worlds:

Headlights of the workers driving north,

miners’ lamps up on the mountain,

the blinking of an airplane, eastward bound,

the corona of a yellow street lamp.

Out on the water, there is a moving light

from a crab boat heading out before dawn.

If there are stars about,

they are hidden by fog

and the moon is nowhere to be seen.

Here inside where love has been

severely battered,

one lone candle flickers.

Turning Away Wrath

2010-12-03T17:26:00.000-08:00

I know that I have a sharp tongue, which is why I have to make a special effort to keep it under control. My angry letters to erring commercial institutions are legend in our family. Just last month, I let Volkswagen have it, and as a result, after several visits to the dealer, my car is finally repaired. Last year when an orchestra member criticized Nicodemus for not doing something he had in fact done, I wrote her an e-mail which I think shriveled her right up. She hides when she sees me coming.

So this morning when a driver yelled at me in the parking lot, I was careful to give a soft answer. “Why don’t you park it right?” he screamed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You’re half way into my parking bay,” he said, getting into his ugly truck, which was a full four feet away from my car.

“I’ll back up,” I said meekly, and then tried to do so with my hand brake on, I was that rattled. He gave me a dirty look and drove off. I would like to think that, as Stephen Gaskin once advised, that I had taken a bit of meanness out of the world, but I am not that good, and I stewed over the scene for a while.

I remember the last time I ever hit a child of mine (for hitting his brother). I could see my handprint on his sweet face, and I told myself that I would never, ever lose my temper with the children again.

Nicodemus, who can be bitingly sarcastic, can also be a master of the soft answer which turneth away wrath. When someone remarked, thirteen or fourteen years ago, that he didn’t know why people our age bothered to get married, Nicodemus replied “Well, we’re rather conventional.” Anyone who knows us knows better, but the sarcastic man was left speechless.

Once when he was substitute-teaching at a local elementary school, a little girl tugged at his jacket and complained that so-and-so had pushed her or taken her pencil. “Forgive him,” Nicodemus said. I don’t know if she knew what that meant, but I imagine she still remembers it.

Time Travel: The American Farm School

2010-12-02T11:05:00.000-08:00

I had a Facebook friend request this week which catapulted me some 9,000 miles east and 50 years back in time, to Christmas, 1958 at the American Farm School.

We had just moved from Athens with our five-month-old son to the school outside Thessaloniki, Greece. We had a small upstairs apartment in a staff housing unit. The kitchen had a deep north window for food storage and a hooded charcoal burner for cooking; I had no idea how to use them. The power went off at 10 P.M. unless the poultry department was incubating eggs, in which case we had electricity all night.

I said I had to have a refrigerator, and the Farm School came up with a kerosene refrigerator which worked fine. I said I had to have a stove, and unknowingly I caused a crisis in the life of my downstairs neighbor, Demetra, who took the bus seven miles to Thessaloniki to do her baking in a public oven. Demetra calculated the cost of the public oven and convinced her husband, George, that she should have a stove at home.

Next door in the upstairs apartment lived Margaritis and Hariklea and their daughter Efthimoula, who was a little older than our son Nonda. It was Efthimoula who invited me to be her Facebook friend yesterday.

Life in the small community of the Farm School was pretty communal. Everybody spoke Greeklish except the 200 high-school-age boy students, who had to go to class.

I substituted at the English class once and taught the boys to sing “Camptown Races”. For months, the students would greet me on the path with “Doo-dah, Doo-dah”. We had the best milk in the world from the school’s fine Jersey cows. I would simply shake a quart bottle to make butter. There was always ice cream at the dairy, and because the boys learned animal husbandry, we could get meat, chickens and eggs from the proper department and vegetables from the huge class garden. Home repairs became classes for masonry, carpentry, plumbing and electricity.

We moved from the apartment to a beautiful stone house on campus. We had fig trees and a view of Mount Olympus. Our teenaged nanny was in heaven with 200 boys about, and she seized upon any excuse to take Nonda walking. We had dance classes on Saturdays, a shopping bus, and a beach bus for the mothers and children in the summer. I had little jobs teaching music at Pinewood, a school for foreign dependents at the edge of the Farm School campus and working on public relations and scholarships for the school. Occasionally I helped teach short courses in theater for people from nearby villages.

It was another lifetime. Actually, it was paradise.

Nicodemus and I visited the Farm School a few years ago. We saw the old house and Princeton Hall, which was the main school building. We visited the Orthodox church where Ed was christened and looked at the 20-ton rock the boys rolled from a neighboring town for a memorial to Theo Litsas, a saint who was my dearest friend; was, in fact, everybody’s dearest friend. I scooped up a little red dirt and brought it back home.

On Theo’s grave are these words from Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything is worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.

(Photograph is Nonda in the manger scene, 1958. Unfortunately, there were fleas in the hay and Nonda got bitten.)

A Symphony of Bells

2010-11-16T09:01:00.000-08:00

A Symphony of Bells

Every loss tolls the bell of every other loss

so that what began as a solitary mournful knell

becomes a pealing of farewells:

The kiss on the lips,

the turning away at the dock,

“Must it be? It must be.”

“Can you see me?”

“For all we know, we may never meet again.”

She took her regal pose in a forbidden place,

looking perfectly entitled. We didn’t know

that she was telling us goodbye.

Later, she appeared in a dream,

but she was running away, not staying.

Mourning for a small animal

brings with it the ghosts of friends

dead, too busy, estranged or distant,

the helpless affectionate shrug

from the spirit about to depart,

reluctant, but having no choice in the matter.

The tolling of remembered farewells

becomes a symphony of bells.

Does it sing of love lost

or love endured

or something else entirely?

A Good Edumacation

2010-11-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

Matthew, a former piano student, when asked what he was getting from Home School, said “a good edumacation”. When I heard that it now costs $50,000 a year to attend the University of California at Berkeley, I thought about what I learned at my (much cheaper) college back in the seventies.

*Other people are not necessarily like you (Political Science).

*Teach scales in parallel, not by key signature (Piano Pedagogy).

*Everybody—even you-- has to take the junior English exam.

*Freshman English is fun, even if they make you take it in your senior year.

*Weekend credential courses: Take lots of snacks.

*When you phone somebody with a question, get their name. Write it down.

*If you know some Greek, you can ace beginning Biology.

*When you graduate, take with your left and shake with your right.

I learned left from right, however, in kindergarten. Left was the windows; right was the restroom. I also learned how to pronounce “W”, which unlocked the code of written letters. I learned that it is important to be self-sufficient, like the Little Red Hen. I learned that you have to brush your teeth. I learned that it was OK to sit in the teacher’s lap.

I am sorry to say that at San Francisco State’s graduation, where they herded all of us down to the football field in our disposable caps and gowns, I got confused and took the diploma with my right hand.

No Fond Return of Love

2010-09-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

I am re-reading Barbara Pym's hilarious book, No Fond Return of Love. Parts of it are like looking into a mirror.

I was once agonizingly in love with someone who essentially bore me no ill will. I couldn't do enough for him. I made him a quilt which (since I am not a very good seamstress) took a very long time to make. I made him a shirt which unfortunately opened the wrong way. But the worst folly was when I made him, at his request, a nylon cover for his kayak.

Dealing with tent-weight fabric and thread was enough of a challenge, not to mention trying to deal with something eight or nine feet long on a small sewing machine in a cramped space. The design, made after taking many measurements, was something like a banana peel.

When at long last I had finished the kayak cover, I found that there was no way to get the kayak into it. It was a kind of metaphor for the love affair (which is what he called it) itself. I don't mind writing about this now because my husband, who truly DOES love me, never reads anything I write.

As for the kayak owner, Bob Dylan said it best: "You just wasted my precious time. Don't think twice; it's all right."

P.S.

2010-07-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

Brenda, upon being criticized for talking about trivial matters, said "The way I figure it, we've got all eternity...and if I want to spend a few minutes talking about hair, that's OK."

Live Long and Prosper

2010-07-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

One-fourth of my high school graduating class has died. My sister gave me this sobering piece of information during a recent visit to see my 92-year-old mother. Certainly the 229 members of the Class of ’53 are well beyond the threescore and ten which some scripture says is the term of human life. But that was then. Today, seventy-somethings are doing what forty-somethings did a generation ago.

A fourth of 229 dead seems a high number, and it spurred my curiosity about long lives. According to the Minnesota State Retirement System calculator, the current life expectancy for the class of 1953 should be 85.9 years for men and 87.7 years for women.

The factors contributing to a long life (according to Minnesota, which I want to think is conservative in its perceptions) may surprise you. We all know about exercise and veggies. But did you know that living alone is as perilous as smoking? The Minnesota calculator adds five years for living with a friend or spouse, and subtracts a year for every year you have lived alone since the age of 25.

Did you know that a college degree adds a year to your life, and a graduate degree adds two? That sleeping more than 10 hours a night takes four years off your life expectancy? That if you are aggressive and easily angered, it is worth three years of your life?

Why fifty members of the Class of ’53 have died at least ten years before the national average might bear some investigation. Our high school was Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the home of the Manhattan project and the atomic bomb. We used to have occasional A-bomb drills at school. At one point, my friends and I began drinking lots of hot tea because we had been told that tannin could counteract radiation sickness. One boy built a Geiger counter in a metal lunchbox and brought it to school. It would click when he pointed it toward something radioactive like a watch dial.

One of the plants vented something into the air which combined with rain to make an acid which ate holes in the workers’ cars parked near the workplace. My father thought this was funny, and the plant paid to have the cars repainted. We joked rather fearfully about our fathers being radioactive and glowing in the dark.

Since those days, I know there has been an ongoing cleanup of the town which now sometimes calls itself Historic Oak Ridge. During hunting season, the story goes, quarry deer have been scanned with a Geiger counter, and if they were too radioactive, they would be confiscated and the hunter would get a permit to shoot another deer. Compensation has been paid to the families of some of those daddies who may or may not have glowed in the dark. Since I don’t live in Oak Ridge any more, I do not know what steps have been taken to solve the problems the unsuccessful storage of nuclear waste may have caused, only that it has been a concern which was addressed with lots of skill and money.

My father did not know that he was working on the Manhattan project. He thought he was involved in cancer research, which would have been a good thing since my little brother had died of leukemia. We learned about the atomic bomb when the newspapers announced the story of Hiroshima. A newsboy selling extras stood in Town Square and called “Read all about it: Japan Hit By Automatic Bomb”.

When a few years ago a nearby elementary school set about folding a thousand paper cranes to send to Hiroshima, I joined the project, folding origami cranes while I gave piano lessons.

The city of Hiroshima has sent a peace bell to Oak Ridge. I believe that bell is rung every August in somber remembrance of the bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oak Ridge was a wonderful place to grow up. It was a small town, 30,000 or fewer, with a celebrated school system and a public recreation hall with a grand piano where we gave our piano recitals and watched foreign films. Oak Ridge had a local orchestra, a community theater and children’s theater, a daily newspaper which sponsored me for a college scholarship in journalism. There were lots of churches and a synagogue.

I just hope the surviving members of the Class of ’53 find somebody to love, finish that college degree, mellow out and don’t sleep too much. I would like to think they would live long and prosper.

Miracles

2010-07-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

In 1962 a bearded dark-eyed sixty-six-year-old man came to San Francisco after traveling from the Ukraine to Shanghai, the Philippines, Paris and Belgium. Although in life he had done many remarkable things, after his death in 1966, so many circumstances described as miracles were associated with his influence that he became known as the Wonder Worker.

Nicodemos and I heard about a tour of this man’s various places in San Francisco and decided to take the tour. We saw the man’s work spaces, his office and his books in 15 languages, his paintings, the orphanage where he oversaw the upbringing of some 2000 children.

We sat in the chair where he always slept—only an hour or so a night, the tour guide told us, and never in a comfortable bed. The chair was yellow vinyl, missing several springs. Along with the 24 or 25 others on the tour, we were wrapped in his clerical robe and given a blessing. Singly, in pairs and in small groups, we knelt down and had the robe folded over us like a tent. It had a sweet, clean old grandfatherly smell.

The sensation was not unlike getting a hug, but many of the group were weeping as they returned to their places.

There were two infants and three young children in the group, all well-behaved, cheerful, and not at all intimidated by all this churchy activity. When one family group went up to be covered by the robe, we could see five pairs of shoes in all different sizes peeking out from the faded old vestment.

The man called Wonder Worker, now called Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, was born Mikhail Maximovitch. Our friend Nathalie had known Saint John in China and in the Philippines, and she told of how he would leave his residence fully clothed and return without shoes or coat, having given them to someone who needed them more than he.

Throughout the tour, the guide and others spoke of miracles which they had experienced or heard about. Driving home, I was thinking about miracles. I thought that they involved not so much extraordinary circumstances but rather something like a suspension of disbelief.

The tour guide showed us what he called self-healing ikons, paintings of saints which all by themselves grew cleaner and brighter. Clearly the tour guide was not only wonder-struck by what he described to us, but he was willing to suspend disbelief, whereas, I, harumph, was thinking about chemical reactions of egg tempera under glass. But would a chemical reaction have made a self-healing ikon any less miraculous? Chemistry is a miracle unto itself.

And what about saints, then? John Maximovich is a saint to Orthodox Christians; many others have never heard of him. Grace (Episcopal) Cathedral in San Francisco includes Albert Einstein (Jewish) and J.S. Bach (Lutheran) in its roster of saints. I saw church frescoes in Greece which included Plato and Socrates among the saints.

I once asked a wise old priest about saints. “Well, there are general saints, and then there are local saints,” he said, smiling, without explaining. I would consider this wise old priest a saint not because any miracles have been attributed to him, but because in his seventy years he so inspired so much love in so many people. He was a local saint.

Another saint I knew had no association with religion. He taught at a boys’ school and his aim in life seemed to be to make people happy. He was a walking party. He would bring all the students to your house to wake you up with a serenade for your birthday. He organized parties and receptions, song and dance. He once snatched a bouquet from my hands to give it to an unexpected guest. On his own birthday, he gave presents to other people. He was a saint of light-heartedness.

Nobody would argue about the saintliness of Mother Teresa, even though her writings showed that she had human doubts. She was a saint of service.

What do all these saints have in common? Not necessarily holiness or goodness. I think what they all have is a kind of devotion, to a cause, an art, a science, even a religion, which transcends ego. They spend most of their time in service to this devotion, whatever it may be. At times they are vectors or mirrors for us; they help us to see better and to grow bigger. And often what seems to be a miracle associated with these people arises at least partly from our improved perception.

Tyger Requiem

2010-06-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

After they shot Tatiana

he went back to that halting gait

he had as a widower,

before her sensual energy

bounced off the rocks, twice felt.

That she, not he, went after the boys

who taunted them tells something

about the couple. Ferocity:

that was hers, and he let her have it,

even if it meant she cuffed him

once in a while, her ears laid back,

her lethal claws retracted.

Tatiana never lost her wildness,

viciously attacked the hand that fed her,

then sank into a corner and glared

at the terrified witnesses.

Her old mate went into fits of fear

at a tiger poster the zoo put up

and then took down, from pity.

Tatiana groomed her sunset stripes,

pretended not to notice.

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Sleek, amber-eyed, big, bumbling.

After Tatiana was gone,

it hardly seemed worthwhile,

the great yellow-toothed yawn

which made the children scream.

His joints ached; he was confused

without her direction. He wet himself,

couldn’t get out of the dry moat

where she had forced her freedom

(was he trying to follow her ghost?)

Finally they came crying with his release

and with a mild flick of the black and orange tail

he left his lovely body.

(Tony, March 21, 1991-June 22, 2010)

Outside, Looking In (2)

2010-06-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

Alessandro, the journalist from Rome who was with us this past week, showed us how difficult it is to be under dispassionate scrutiny for hours at a time.

On the other hand, the scrutiny went both ways. Alessandro was unguarded, surely an unusual trait in an investigative reporter.

After only four days, for instance, I knew that he was careful with money, didn’t drink much, that he gave up trying to learn to play the flute. He knew his little daughter’s shoe size. I learned what it takes to get a press card in Rome (roughly like passing the Bar examination in the U.S.), learned how he voted in the last election. All the while adjusting lights and focus, working, plying his trade, Alessandro showed who he really was, simply because he didn’t try to hide.

“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Michael Brackney brought this quotation from Anais Nin to my attention.

This makes me feel fortunate that the eye behind the camera this week was that of Alessandro.

Outside, Looking In

2010-06-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

I have been watching myself all week long.

Instead of wearing the same thing every day, I have mined my frugal wardrobe for something colorful. I have put on makeup, have combed my hair, polished my fingernails, lamented my wrinkles.

The reason for all this extreme self-consciousness is a documentary filmmaker from Rome who was here Monday through yesterday shooting footage for a show about my daughter Anna, who went missing 37 years ago.

The show isn’t even about me, but there seems to be something in us, or at least in me, which wants to put a good face on things. Literally. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

The Italian journalist, a charming and engaging second-generation movie man, must have worked ten hours a day behind his camera. He filmed the house, inside and out. He set up interviews which necessitated moving all the furniture and changing all the lights.

He filmed us talking, practicing, going through trunks and boxes, trying to find what he called “artifacts”. Taking a break to pull a few weeds in the garden, I looked up to see that I was on camera and hoped that I hadn’t shown an unflattering backside.

This may seem like a lot of camera work, he explained, but images go by in just a few seconds, and we have to have images to match the script. All this is expected to form a 15 or 20-minute segment on a show called “Que l’ho visto”, which has been running for some 22 years in Italy.

By yesterday, as we ate spaghetti (was it sufficiently al dente for an Italian? Was the sauce good? Should I have hand-grated the parmesan?) and prepared to say goodbye, I felt completely looked-at. Nicodemos and I went to play some music for our guest before taking him to the airport.

“But I don’t have my camera!” he said.

“Good,” we said. “So you can’t work.”

(Searching for Anna, published by Lulu Press, is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.)

Lost in Translation

2010-05-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

We have been having conversations about translation lately, especially, as it happens, the translation of the word "evil" from the Aramaic to Greek and then to English. When I was still naive and idealistic, I wanted to be a translator. I have had a few opportunities to exercise or exorcise this desire since then, and I now realize that the task involves much more than words.

For starts, one must be truly bilingual, which I am not, with my smattering of French and my kitchen Greek. But one must be truly bicultural or multicultural as well; one must know something of the history of the cultures involved in the languages. I once was so rash as to "translate" a large collection of German poems.

The result would have been called, had it been music, something like Variations on a Theme or Fantasy Upon. What relationship the "translations" had to the originals was probably mostly in my mind. The only positive outcome of this effort was that it got the German poems, whose author had gone to that great Iamb in the sky, out of the grocery bag in the poet's son's basement.

While cleaning out the mountains of paper in my house, I came across a little essay made for a French class. On a whim, I had Yahoo's BabelFish to translate it into English, with this result.

A Life of Trompe-l'oeil My friend the painter liked the art of trompe-l'oeil. He made small tables with the watercolour with the postage stamps, however well realize that one cannot know where was the stamp and where was painting: Mislead the eye. Its small house also was folds up of this merry art. Its room had flowers with oil on the wall. With the kitchen there were false briks. The fence of the garden had a painting of vines. If something in the house were broken, Howard repaired it with ribbon and color. My friend lived eighty-two years. He had many things, neither car, neither money, nor luxury articles. But its life was also rich parce au' it had good mood so much. When it was dying, I visited him to the hospital and spoke to him about a film which I had seen, “Babette' S Feast”. “My dear Howard,” I said to him, “This film had a wise message… that the artist is never poor.”

If you read French, here is the original as corrected by the College of San Mateo French teacher:

Une Vie de Trompe-l’Oeil (9 June 1989)

Mon ami le peintre aimait l’art de trompe-l’oeil. Il faisait de petits tableaux à l’aquarelle avec les timbres-poste, si bien réalises qu’on ne peut pas savoir où était le timbre et où était la peinture: Trompe l’oeil. Sa petite maison aussi était replie de cet art gai. Sa chambre avait des fleurs à l’huile sur le mur. À la cuisine il y avait des briks faux. La clôture du jardin avait une peinture de vignes. Si quelque chose dans la maison était brisé, Howard le réparait avec du ruban et de la couleur.

Mon ami a vécu quatre-vingt-deux années. Il n’avait pas beaucoup de choses, ni voiture, ni argent, ni objets de luxe. Mais sa vie était aussi riche parce au’il avait tellement de bonne humeur. Quand il était en train de mourir, je lui rendais visite a l’hôpital et lui parlais d’un film que j’avais vu, “Babette’s Feast”.

“Mon chèr Howard,” je lui ai dit, “Ce film avait un message sage...que l’artiste n’est jamais pauvre.”

A Respectful Apostrophe

2010-05-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

June Morrall's last book, Moss Beach, published by Arcadia, came out last week. Because June is no longer with us, Deb and Mike Wong and others who helped out with the book were at a sort of signing party in a Half Moon Bay book store.

I have a Facebook group called Apostrophe Control, born of a curmudgeonly proofreading moment. I think people who don't know how to use apostrophes should have to take a remedial English class, so I was stunned to see a photograph of a place called The Reef's (as in belonging to a reef) on the cover of June's book.

Actually, the photograph of this beach place in Moss Beach had two apostrophes (or a close quotation mark). Whoever edited the book--maybe even June herself did a respectful and fascinating bit of apostrophe control in the text. It made me think of William Blake's Tyger, which would not be the same with conventional spelling.

Every mention of the club in the text retains the apostrophe (but not the double apostrophe or quote mark, which would just be silly.) After the club was washed away by the ocean and rebuilt farther away, the apostrophe did not appear in the sign, and so the book calls this place The Reefs II (no apostrophe).

I got a kick out of this quirky little bit of editing. I could imagine someone saying "Well, even if the person doesn't know you don't make a plural with an apostrophe, that's how the sign is written." Or "We could correct that; maybe nobody would notice." Or "Well, we have to be consistent. The second club doesn't have the apostrophe."

You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she punctuates, and not just whether they made As in English class. In this case, June or the editor or both showed themselves to be careful proof-readers and faithful historians. I hope June's spirit celebrates the launching of her book.

Kay Ryan

2010-04-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

The April 12 New Yorker features a story about Kay Ryan, poet laureate of the United States: "In her essay in Poetry, she describes listening to panelists talk about how teaching creative writing fuels their own creativity, and feeling the same kind of guilt a four-star chef might feel at a church picnic.'My sense of this panel...is that these are sincere, helpful, useful people who show their students their own gifts and help them to enjoy the riches of language while also trying to get some writing done themselves. They have to juggle these competing demands upon their souls and it is hard and honorable. I agree and shoot me now.'"

Checking Your Sources

2010-04-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

I was on the copy desk of the Knoxville, Tennessee, News-Sentinel when the teletype machines began to spurt out the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. It was after the final edition deadline, and only two of us were on duty at the copy desk, editing news service stories for the next day, cutting, marking capitalization and paragraphs and writing headlines.

This was a long time ago, but I distinctly remember our quandary as to which news service to trust as we scrambled to get the story of the president’s assassination into print, shorthanded and dazed from the almost unbelievable news.

The first Associated Press transmission and the story from United Press International had very different information concerning the number of shots which had been fired, the grassy knoll, descriptions from witnesses. The phones were going like mad, and under pressure to get out an Extra and remake the newspaper’s front page, we had to choose which story to run. We went with the Associated Press because there was no way to check the sources and the AP story seemed more conservative, more believable.

We live in a time of unparalleled access to news, and yet it seems ever more difficult to find out what is going on. Almost every time I try to research something through the Internet, I run into conflicting information. In order to stay current, I read the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times and the Athens News; I watch the local news and BBC America on television. There is not as much overlap as you might think.

Which is not to say I shouldn’t have checked my sources on the Brautigan Library information. Writing a blog is a little like putting a message in bottle. I don’t really know who will read it. Besides this lack of feedback, I find that I’m a bit glib when using the computer to write. (I always write poetry in longhand.)

Dr. John Barber, who has left a longish comment on my blog of March 30, "The Library Lives", reminded me that even if I am putting a note in a bottle, I need to verify my sources.

A story by Kevin O’Kelly in The Boston Globe on Sept. 27, 2004, said “If Brautigan (Library) founder Todd Lockwood’s plans work out, the (contents of the Brautigan library) will move to the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library next year.”

In 2005, The Fletcher Free Library, where the Brautigan library was housed, wrote in its newsletter that the Brautigan collection was going home to San Francisco. Lockwood had, according to the Fletcher newsletter, “negotiated with the San Francisco Public Library to arrange a permanent home for the Brautigan Library at the Presidio Branch of the SFPL, the exact location where Brautigan placed his fictional 24-hour-a-day library”.

To my credit, I did e-mail the Presidio Library to see if the collection had made it, but when I got no response, I didn’t keep after it. The Brautigan Library, as Dr. Barber says in his comment, never made it from Vermont to San Francisco, and, mea culpa, I never followed up to see if the Fletcher Free Library newsletter or the Boston Globe had noted that fact.

Everyday Author

2010-03-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

Dr. Barber just sent this note updating the reference number on The Dioscuri:

Actually, the Library has been stored in Burlington, Vermont, and is now on its way to Vancouver, Washington, where it will become and permanent, interactive exhibit in the Clark County Historical Museum.

Ahead of the collection's arrival we have received an inventory and your book is listed as part of the collection. The Mayonnaise System Catalog Number is different, however. Here is the listing as it appears in our inventory:

Michaele Benedict

(Montara, CA)

THE DIOSCURI

Love: LOV 1990.004

This is a novel set in Greece which incorporates myth, magic and music into a contemporary story. Madeline and Yanni, daughter and adopted son of an American Quaker doctor, are the “twins" who are inseparable as children, and who, as adults, try in vain to live separate lives.

The Library Lives!

2010-03-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Brautigan Library is alive and well in Vancouver, Washington, after traveling from Vermont to San Francisco, where it reposed in storage for four years. This collection of unpublished manuscripts written by "everyday authors" will becomea permanent collection of the Clark County Historical Museum, the former 1909 Andrew Carnegie library building in downtown Vancouver.

As one of the "everyday authors", I am gratified to learn that this funny bunch of writing, about 400 manuscripts inspired by a fictional library in a 1971 novel by Richard Brautigan, will be preserved.

The Digital Technology and Culture Program at Washington State University, headed by Dr. John F. Barber, is working with students and a team of local and international volunteers to reopen the Brautigan library and to "continue its original mission of connecting writers and readers of personal narratives".

According to the Library's web page (http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/) plans call for the organization to collect and circulate unpublished digital manuscripts and to "provide opportunities for research, conferences, exhibits, and creative activities."

Dr. Barber says "The Brautigan Library is not about publishing, or even about literature. It's about people telling their stories in a democratic way. It is a public home for personal narratives in a digital age."

I'm not sure how I feel about The Dioscuri's being called non-literary or about being called an "everyday author" (whatever that means), but I'm glad the Library is coming out of the basement.

Telling Your Story

2010-03-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

In his novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Richard Brautigan wrote about a library where anyone with a story to tell could write it out and put it on the shelves for others to read. The overseer of the library, which was open 24 hours a day, lived there. The fictional library was based on the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library,

Inspired by Brautigan’s idea, in 1990 the Brautigan Library was founded in Burlington, Vermont, by Todd Lockwood, a Brautigan fan, together with poet Robert Creeley and Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe.. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System used by most libraries, the Brautigan library categorized its books according to the Mayonnaise System, referring to the fact that the library in the novel used mayonnaise jars as bookends.

My unpublished novel, The Dioscuri, registered with the Brautigan Library May 25, 1990, was given the Mayonnaise catalog number LOV1990.05.003. The 325 books of the Brautigan Library archive (which included Brautigan’s typewriter) traveled to Seattle for a book fair, then back to its basement home in Vermont. It changed addresses in Burlington a number of times, finally winding up in the public library. In 2005 the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington decided it would be fitting to ship the collection to the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Whether or not the collection actually made it I have not been able to find out, despite many inquiries. The last posted information about the move was a 2005 story in the Boston Globe.

What I wanted to talk about, however, was not the Brautigan Library itself but rather the idea behind a library where everyone could tell his or her story without the assistance of agents, publishers and editors. True, there is the Internet. But not everyone has access to a computer, and some people still like the idea of something written on paper.

I spend at least four hours a day writing at the computer, mostly for fun these days, though occasionally I will send something off to a magazine, and once in a while something will be published. I am a hundred pages into Murder at the Parthenon, a mystery novel set at a Tennessee newspaper in 1954. Certainly this effort is spurred by the love of the old newspaper technology, with its Linotypes and locked pages. I meet regularly with a writer friend so we can toss ideas back and forth and nag each other about keeping our noses to the grindstones.

I am working on a biography of the pianist and teacher Egon Petri, part of which has appeared in magazines and on a piano pedagogy website originating in Finland, of all places. I am editing a wonderful work in progress by a friend who wants to tell her story about meditation. And I am proof-reading an exquisite collection of songs by a composer friend.

There is a modern facility which somewhat resembles Richard Brautigan’s library. My nonfiction mystery, Searching for Anna, was published in February by this organization, Lulu.com. Lulu is an international print-on-demand publisher, some of whose thousands of titles strongly evoke those of Brautigan’s fictional library, such as “Growing House Plants By Candlelight”. Anybody can tell a story on Lulu. For a small fee, a book book can even get an ISBN number and be entered into Books in Print, which means it is available through outlets such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Everybody has a story. Jung said that in most disassociated “normal” living, one’s story was often interrupted. He said psychology’s primary function was to retrieve that story and reunite the individual with it.

One of the best pieces of writing I ever encountered was by a Skyline College student who had brought his essay to the Tutoring Center, hoping for help with his English. The story, laboriously written in longhand, was about how to wash dishes. The student’s grandmother had taught him the proper way to wash dishes, and in the telling of the story, the student revealed himself: Loving, respectful, obedient, attentive to detail, humble. The language was awkward, but the story was truly touching.

How to tell your story: Hemingway said to place the seat of the pants on the seat of the chair and move the hand from left to right, or something to that effect. I would add a bit about spelling and grammar, but really it seems to be mostly about having something to say, saying it as honestly as you can, and then hoping somebody reads it and understands what you meant.

(Reprinted from June Morrall's Half Moon Bay Memories)

Greek Practice

2010-02-26T13:55:00.001-08:00

Nicodemus and I practice our Greek every day by reading the calendar to each other. He recites the date (Paraskevi, 26 Fevruariou) and the year (Dio hiliades deka), then adds the previous day's date and the date and day which is to come.

My job is to read the information on the particular saint's Day (Photeini, the Woman at the Well) and the historic event (Feb. 26, 1936, Volkswagen named its first model Genesis) and to translate the daily joke:

The policeman said to the thief "Since you claim that this gold brooch is yours, you need to prove it to me." The thief turned the brooch over and said "It says right here, 'Yours forever.'"

Soap

2010-02-04T15:47:00.000-08:00

The labels on the homemade soap I give family and friends say “Sapouny”, which is the Greek word for soap. My Greek relatives used to sing an old song about soap: “Sapouni, two cents a pound, for dirty clothes, for floors, for plates.” And in the South, there was a song about Grandma’s Lye Soap “good for everything in the home. The secret was in the scrubbing; it wouldn’t suds and couldn’t foam.”

Sapouny does actually make suds and foam, but my soap mishaps are the subject of as much teasing as was the soy turkey I tried to construct one Thanksgiving. The worst mistake I ever made with soap was transferring a full pot of just-setting stuff into an aluminum pan because the mixture was threatening to boil over.

Sodium hydroxide or lye, the active ingredient in many soaps, will eat aluminum. In my case, there was an explosion, the kitchen filled with gas, I ran to the bedroom, closed the door and called 9-1-1.

After the firemen had arrived and asked if I was all right, they put the aluminum pot in the sink and ran water into it, simultaneously cleaning the sink really well and diluting the still-caustic soap mixture. When they finished (they were all decked out in fancy yellow HazMat suits), they showed me the pan, which had a big hole in the bottom. They said that sodium hydroxide and aluminum put out aluminum hydroxide gas.

“Why would you make soap?” they asked. “You can buy soap at the store,” they said, laughing. “It’s not that expensive.”

This was the most spectacular soap goof, but there were others: The butter soap which smelled like bad cheese, the grey lavender soap which was supposed to be purple. I once tried to make my own lye, dripping water through wood ash, which would make potassium hydroxide if you knew what you were doing. As it was, the mixture was far too weak to combine with oils and saponify (the official word for the process) and I had to throw the whole batch away after stirring for hours.

I have made a few batches of cold-process soap from scratch since the 9-1-1 episode. It is expensive to make and very labor-intensive. You don’t cook it, but you sometimes have to stir the oil-and-lye solution for a couple of hours. The hardening soap has to cure for about a month before it is safe to use, and if you make the mistake of putting a raw bar on your table, it will eat through the finish. However, it smells really good while it is curing and if you make it with olive oil and coconut oil, it is really good for your skin once it is finished.

You must scrape the ash from the bars, because it is the residue of the lye. I save it in a jar for really difficult cleaning tasks (wear gloves).

Lately I have mostly made recycled soap, which uses the easiest of all hand-milled processes and doesn’t involve physical danger. You pare or wash soap scraps to clean them, grate them and put them in a pan with a cup of water, heat and stir until they are liquid and more or less amalgamated (an electric hand mixer helps here), then add whatever fragrance or additives you like. Let the mixture cool and harden and then put it in molds or shape by hand.

The biggest hit of the hand-milled soaps has been chocolate soap, achieved by adding chocolate fragrance oil and cocoa powder to the soap mixture once it has liquefied. You can, of course, use any mild hand soap for milling if you don’t want to recycle scraps, and soap-makers’ supplies on the Internet include melt-and-mold blocks in several formularies including glycerine.

I don’t know why it is so satisfying to make soap. Maybe it reminds me of making mud pies as a kid. Maybe it is because all the utensils you use to make soap wind up shiny and clean instead of sticky and greasy. Or maybe it is as simple as bathing with a bar made to order.

Transcendental Metaworry

2010-01-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

Last night, worrying about the storm and our old trees, my mother, Haiti, the Senate results in Massachusetts, and a half-dozen other things, I remembered Lewis Thomas’s essay on Transcendental Metaworry in his book The Medusa and the Snail.

His only half-joking premise was that worrying is a form of prayer, and that rather than avoid it, we should make it into a discipline and get really good at it.

After I found the book and blew the dust off it, I was once again drawn in to the mind of Lewis Thomas, who might have written the book yesterday instead of in 1974.

Most of the essays in Thomas’s books originally appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, but their subject matter was wide-ranging. He wrote about the United States health care system, about cloning, hypochondria, extra-terrestrial life, warts (“warts are wonderful structures”), music, meddling, language.

Lives of a Cell (Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974) was the first Thomas book I read. Ann Woodlief’s Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 275, says that in this book Thomas “builds on the analogy between the workings of the cell and the workings of the earth and its lives, including man’s.”

Thomas’s point of view was Mozartean, a synthesis, an overview, expressed in optimistic terms without denying that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

By the time Thomas wrote Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, his point of view had become darker: He spoke about the possibility of nuclear war and called the nationalism which divides humans as “probably the most stupefying example of biological error since the age of the great reptiles, wrong at every turn, but always felicitating itself loudly.”

In The Fragile Species, 1992, Thomas’s final book, he expressed the need for some “powerful steadying cohesive force” to bring about what he called not peace, but rather “the comity of nations.” As in previous books, he spoke of the earth as a living organism whose cells include us, with a “vast wiring diagram that maintains the interconnectedness and interdependence of all its numberless parts, and the ultimate product of the life: more and more information.”

The Orion Nebula

2010-01-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

The Orion Nebula

(in memory of June Morrall)

“It’s as if someone

tore through the paper of the sky,

showing the light beyond.”

He has put away his telescope,

has come in with cold cheeks

and starry eyes.

He is describing the Orion nebula.

But I am thinking of her,

how she would greet you like a sister,

with such familiarity you might turn

and look behind you

to make sure it was you she meant.

What with the fog and the trees,

you can’t always see the stars here

and of course to see the nebula

the night must be quite dark.

Thalassophilia

2009-12-05T11:55:00.000-08:00

“The sea is calm tonight”, Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” begins, with the ocean setting the background for an impassioned plea: “Let us be true to one another.”

The ocean is the background for many Coastsiders besides the fishermen, the surfers and the beachcombers. We are so used to its sound, its constant presence, that sometimes we hardly notice it unless it rushes under the front door at Nick’s Restaurant in Pacifica, throws foam on the highway, or produces monster waves like the ones the Maverick’s people are expecting next week.

I have been a Thalassophile, an ocean lover, since I first saw the sea when I was fifteen. Born in Tennessee, I knew about lakes and rivers, but I was stunned speechless when I first saw the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean from the Carolina coast.

Since then, I have crossed the Atlantic by ship and plane any number of times, have been swimming in the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Ionian seas, but I have settled at last where the first and last sights of daylight are the waves hitting the foot of Montara Mountain. The sound of the surf lulls me to sleep every night.

“Another summer at sea?” my husband remarked mildly last June as I began my fourth trip through Patrick O’Brian’s 21 seafaring Aubrey-Maturin books.

Now I am reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for the first time and wondering why this big novel always seemed so daunting, gathering dust on the bookshelf all these years.

I am editing Susan Bradfield’s book The Reluctant Sailor, using Google Docs, since she is living on the yacht Apple II in Baja after some truly harrowing adventures in the Pacific. (Her first book, Any Time, Any Place: Meditation for Your Earthwalk, is now available on Kindle.)

My neighbor Richard is a true Thalassophile. He can see the Pacific from almost every room in his house. He fishes, walks his dogs on the beach, calls our ocean “Mother Pacific.” When he and Dolores were married at home, I took my portable keyboard and played Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave”. We ate crab and drank champagne, just them and the minister and me.

Everything rusts, silver will discolor overnight; we have fog and mildew and bone-chilling summers, but I don’t think I’d ever want to live out of sight and sound of our Pacific.

Extraordinary Women (Number One)

2009-12-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

She lived in a Sufi commune and in a wilderness house she designed herself and which she surrounded with a fence of roses. She was in the Peace Corps in Turkey. She did a study, playing music to patients believed to be in a persistent vegetative state, and some of the folks, amazingly, responded.

Soft spoken most of the time, she is actually a lion in gazelle’s clothing. She has had various jobs having to do with improving the lives of old people. I have seen her at work. She can be terrifying when it comes to defending the old folks. She will not back down. She once bundled up a crowd of hospital patients and took them to the state capital to protest funding cuts.

She raised her son pretty much by herself and did a good job of it. She lives alone, but she hardly ever complains of feeling lonely.

You might see her as shy, but she is the one who will get out and rally her neighbors to join Friends of the Urban Forest and to plant street trees. You should see her present garden: Fountains, hedges, trees, herbs, a regular English garden in a 50-foot urban lot.

She is ecumenical in her religious leanings, attending Presbyterian, Quaker, Sufi and Jewish services. She can say the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. We were yoga students together at the Himalayan Institute in San Francisco.

She writes regularly for professional publications, has written a novel, and is presently writing a book about medical insurance coverage and health care.

We have been friends for more than 40 years. We got our ears pierced together in the kitchen by a doctor who used a darning needle, a cork and an ice cube, which I guess makes us pierce sisters.

I know her about as well as I know anybody, but she can still surprise me. And of course she has a shadow side, as we all do. She second-guesses herself a lot. She frets about things. Strangely, she is not terribly confident, though you’d never know it from her decisive day-to-day activities. She worries about money. She has driven the same Volvo for twenty years. It is always clean and shiny, whereas my VW always has a layer of cypress needles and road dust. She is tall and willowy and looks great in clothes, but does lots of her shopping in thrift stores.

I wonder if she would recognize herself from this description.

The Primitive Kitchen

2009-11-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

I wonder if they still make Universal food grinders and Foley food mills. Does anybody still make their own butter and chicken stock? The primitive kitchen has always appealed to me: the broth on the back burner, the soap perfuming the room as it cures, the blackberry wine bubbling in a gallon jar.

Some of this atavistic enjoyment certainly is due to my learning to cook as a bride on a farm in northern Greece, where things were pretty basic. I balked at the charcoal burner and the north window which were offered me as a kitchen range and refrigerator in our new apartment at the American Farm School outside Thessaloniki.

When I bought a little Swedish kitchen range, it caused havoc among the community women, who up to that point had been content to have their baking done at a public oven seven miles away. My nearest neighbor calculated to the penny what she had to pay the bakery plus bus fare there and back and presented her husband with proof that a cook stove at home would save him money.

The Farm School handymen found a kerosene refrigerator for me. The north window was fine for keeping things cool during the winter with its Vardar winds, but summers were warm and we didn't have electricity at night unless the school was incubating chicks. I don't know how it worked, but as long as you kept it in kerosene and fresh wicks, that machine would even make ice cream.

I learned to whip egg whites with two forks and to make butter by shaking cream in a mayonnaise jar until it separated. I canned tomato sauce in sterilized wine bottles with corks tied down with string and coated with paraffin. I cracked walnuts with a mortar and pestle, sometimes using the pestle to hammer a nail. I picked wild dandelion greens.

Nowadays, I use an electric mixer and buy butter at the store, but I still like to grind meat in the old Universal and make purees with the Foley food mill. I use my grandmother’s rolling pin. I still pick wild greens, make soap once in a while, make bread, and boil up the chicken skin and bones for stock.

The primitive kitchen is the ultimate in Slow Food.

Trekophilia

2009-11-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

So many ideas which were science fiction in the late 1960s have become reality that I’m surprised Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, isn’t considered a modern-day Nostradamus.

The most obvious in the life-imitating-art department is the cell phone which is almost identical to classic Star Trek hand-held communicators. This morning’s New York Times had a story about an adaptation which can turn a cell phone into a microscope, making it ever closer to Dr. McCoy’s medical scanner.

Full-body scans are a reality. We don't have phasers, but we have tasers (hopefully set on "stun"). "Warp speed" has entered our vocabulary. Chiropractors are using lasers to stimulate cell repair. The Smithsonian has a Star Trek display.

We watched the original Trek series on our old black and white Zenith television, phoning fellow Trekker and bosom buddy Dick to debate antimatter or race or whatever (then) radical idea Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were dealing with. When actual astronauts landed on the moon, the kids, wearing their Trek tees, were unimpressed because the astronauts didn’t even beam down.

We have seen all the Star Trek television series which followed the original, balking only at Deep Space Nine and the kiddie cartoons. We have tried to read the books. We have seen all the movies. At the most recent movie, we had to explain to grandchildren why certain aspects of the story line were so avant-garde and outrageous in their day. The grandchildren were a little bewildered. Trek technology failed to impress them.

Now we even have a president who is somewhat Spock-like. I wouldn’t be surprised if he instituted the Prime Directive or tried a Vulcan mind-meld on certain inscrutable foreign leaders.

Reading in the Closet

2009-10-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

My mother kept books she thought were inappropriate for children in the coat closet, which had a single light bulb and smelled vaguely of mothballs. You might guess that this was my favorite place to read. I think the forbidden books included things like Forever Amber, Tobacco Road, and a book called Green Dolphin Street, which had a hair-raising earthquake sequence.

There was a nun in Green Dolphin Street who had given away all her possessions when she took her vows, all except a small box of things she could not take with her but couldn't bear to part with.

I wonder if all of us don't have a few things which wouldn't mean anything to anybody but us. I have a Girl Scout tree-finder's badge, a class ring from college which I never wear, and even a small vial of earth from Thessaloniki. They aren't worth anything, and I don't think I've ever shown them to even my nearest and dearest, but if I were going away to become a nun, this is the sort of thing which would be hardest to leave behind.

Newspaper Mystery

2009-10-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

I am in the throes of writing a mystery novel set at a large metropolitan newspaper in the 1950s. Being in the throes means that I have about twenty files on the computer as well as a large binder filled with notes, maps, and scribbles on envelopes and napkins.

The work brings up all sorts of memories of my first job, working for what I am calling the Knoxville Times: Sounds, feelings, even the names of people I haven't thought of in years.

And since we are far removed in time and space from those days, I might as well confess: I am the one who misspelled either "Seize" or "Siege" in a banner headline on the front page. It was some years after I started at the paper and I was on the rim of the copy desk, where we edited copy and wrote headlines.

The headline was passed to the copy chief, who sat in the middle of the U-shaped desk. He put the half-sheet of paper in the pneumatic tube which went to the composing room, where it was set in print, locked into a lead page, cast into a cardboard mat, recast as a cylinder in lead, put on the presses and printed.

The news editor swore very loudly when he saw the paper. The presses were stopped. The page was remade, the earlier copies of the newspaper scrapped, and all this was on overtime at regular union wages. And then the hunt began for who was at fault. Meanwhile, the man who sat next to me on the copy desk had found the original paper with the headline and had buried it in his desk drawer.

Heads would have rolled, of course, except that nobody seemed to know anything about who was really responsible for the misspelled headline. There were five or six of us on the copy desk; the news editor and the managing editor had seen the proofs and had not noticed the mistake.

I confess: Not only did I write that headline, but just now I had to look up the spelling of "Seize" because "I before E except after C" is still stuck in my head.

Making a Diamond

2009-10-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

When Nic was about twelve years old, he saw a movie about diamonds and decided he would make a diamond himself.

He took an old water heater, an air compressor, carbon from an old dry cell battery, assorted jars, hoses and funnels, went to the store and bought carbide, which one could do in those days.

He bought a gas mask, heavy gloves and a roll of asbestos stuff which he intended to wrap around his legs.

Before actually beginning to make the diamond, however, he thought he would do a trial run. He started the water dripping on the carbide and ran around to the water heater to strike a match (he was not wearing his protective gear.) Nothing happened. He lit another match and nothing happened. He lit a third match, there was a huge explosion, he screamed and went running home.

His mother immediately called the doctor, who made a house call (they did this in those days) and found that, apart from lots of rust, Nic was not seriously harmed.

I love this story because it tells so much about my husband: His willingness to take a risk, his sometimes caution, and his idea that many difficult things may be accomplished by ingenuity and sheer persistence.

The Zoo

2009-09-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

One of the many reasons I liked Biology classes in college was the fact that almost everything (starting with the word Biology--study of life) had a Greek name. Taxonomy was no problem if you knew a little Greek; Ovid's Metamorphoses and Bulfinch's Mythology were surprisingly useful.

Here a bare 20 minutes from a major city, we have more animal visitors than you'd think, and the zoa and phyta (animals and plants) are a constant reminder of our cultural heritage as well as of the natural state of the land before we humans intruded.

From the bird kingdom, phoebes (for Phoebus Apollo) show up at dawn, competing with the robins (Erithacus) for the earthworms (Oligochaeta or hairless animals). The ravens (Corvus or korax, croaking) rule the roost, all black-feathered since Apollo took umbrage at one of their messages. At night, however, Athene's owl calls from the cypress trees. The trees themselves are named for Kyparissos, who accidentally killed his pet deer and was fated to weep throughout eternity.

Down in the corner, two Daphne trees, named for the maid fleeing some ancient god's advances, recall the oracle of Delphi, who reputedly chewed laurel leaves in order to enter a transcendent state. Many of the plants have descriptive names in Greek: Chrysanthe(mum) is Golden Flower; Pyrocanthus is Fire Thorn.

Though we have a renegade deer or fawn which comes in the night and eats the rosebuds, we haven't seen much of the raccoons and skunks since we stopped putting out the garbage at night. The opossums have stopped coming around, too, and it has been years since I saw a garter snake.

The spiders (Arachnids, for the master weaver who challenged Hera, the wife of Zeus) are still on duty, of course, and gophers, slugs and snails (from the family of Mixozoa, slime animals) make gardening a challenge.

Two wild visitors this week stared at me through the window: A hummingbird hovered on the other side of the glass, a foot from where I was munching my sandwich. And a grey squirrel who had a long, fearless drink from the basin I keep out front, then hopped on a log and looked at me long and hard. I felt exactly as if I were on the other side of the bars at the zoo.

Social Security Tango, Part Two

2009-09-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

I have never really fit in very well, so it is no surprise that I've had trouble thinking of myself as a senior citizen. There's a stereotype of the Golden Ager (one of dozens of euphemisms for old people) which involves hobbies, cookies and gardening. My garden is neglected, I don't knit very well, and I only brag a little about my grandchildren.

So it was a bit of a stretch for me to go to the health screening at the senior center, though I liked the convenience of having several routine tests done at one place. I was dismayed to arrive fasting and with no coffee to find what looked like more than a hundred old people with a ten o'clock appointment at the center.

For a moment I thought I'd just go home and have the tests done the usual way at the hospital lab, but then one woman announced loudly that she had her own doctor and that she was leaving to have her lab work done privately. That was enough to ally me with the shuffling masses because I didn't want to be that woman. Secretly, I felt that I should be on the giving end rather than the receiving end of this service. I felt that I wasn't old enough or poor enough to take the place of someone who maybe couldn't afford to pay.

Unexpectedly, the line moved very efficiently, and within a half hour I had been weighed, measured, tested for cholesterol and glucose, and given a brief health advisory by a very nice nurse (Keep an eye on your blood pressure. Everything else is fine.)

Nobody asked me for proof of age, citizenship or anything else. Nobody asked for money.

I drove home feeling that some things are worth praising in this world.

Social Security Tango, Part One

2009-09-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

When life has turned your cry of pleasure

into a wail

And you try to cut the mustard but you

sometimes fail;

When you can't believe the mirror 'cause you

still feel pretty young,

Here's a charming melody just waiting

to be sung.

It's the Social Security Tango.

Don't you anticipate it breathlessly?

The Social Security Tango

Shows how the government takes care

of you and me.

Just keep on working and salting

those credits away

And you'll be getting a big check one day

And do the Social Security Tango,

A rose between our teeth, a smile on our face.

We'll get senior citizen discounts

And eat at famous franchised fast food places,

And they will say how well preserved we are,

So agile and so spry

And though we'd rather just be sexy,

Ours is not to reason why,

And we will join the double A-R-P

and try to just get by

And do the Social Security Tango.

Cane Guy and Push Guy

2009-09-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

Beating, spanking and whipping in the classroom is frowned upon these days.

The era of "spare the rod and spoil the child" is so far past that tenured teachers who repeatedly strike students may be sent to a district Temporary Reassignment Center or Rubber Room while their cases are being heard. They must clock in and stay from 8:15 to 3:15. They get paid for the time they spend in the Rubber Room, an average of three years, with summers off.

Last week's New Yorker had a long article about one such room in New York. Someone I know had a close-up view of a different Rubber Room, and he told me about Cane Guy and Push Guy. Cane Guy, who came from an educational background where classroom discipline often involved beating, had been removed from school after repeatedly striking students with his cane. He spent his days at the reassignment center watching videos, waiting for his case to be decided.

Push Guy, whose offense was that he repeatedly pushed desks into students, spent his days on the telephone.

Push Guy complained that Cane Guy's videos made it hard to hear his phone conversations. Cane Guy turned up the volume. Push Guy pushed a desk into Cane Guy. Cane Guy hit Push Guy with his cane.

Violence is, of course, no laughing matter, but there was a certain Zen silliness about this story, especially since both Push Guy and Cane Guy had been removed from contact with children. The story shows that teachers' unions have some kind of clout, because teachers cannot be dismissed without due process. The teachers have to show up to get paid, even if they don't do any work, and therefore somebody can keep an eye on them.

And since they are not allowed contact with students, teachers like Push Guy and Cane Guy have only each other to pick on.

How To Write

2009-09-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

“I wish I could write.” I hear this all the time. “I wish I could play the piano.” And I say (or think) “Well, why don’t you?”

Everybody has a story. Telling this story in words, paint, dance, music is a good thing in many ways. It breaks through the isolation so many people feel; it may teach; it may inspire. It doesn’t matter that other people have told the same story, because each person has his or her own point of view.

But how do you do it?

In newswriting, it’s a matter of telling something: Who, what, when, where, how.

But in fiction-writing, journaling, poetry (not to mention painting, sculpture and music) it is much more a matter of showing.

As an exercise, take an object, say a coin dug up while hoeing the garden, and write twenty thoughts about it.

1. It is a metal coin.

2. It seems to come from another country.

3. It is probably silver. It is not gold.

4. It seems to be English or Australian.

5. It is small.

6. There is a picture of Queen Elizabeth on the coin.

7. The date on the coin is 1973.

Now you see the difficulty in coming up with twenty thoughts. Already we are in the area of speculation: Did someone deliberately bury this coin? Who? Why? Was the coin lost? Who by? All sound proceeds from silence, and much good writing proceeds from mystery.

A trilogy by the great Canadian writer Robertson Davies begins with a snowball which has a rock inside.

Looking closely at something, almost anything, primes the pump for creative activity. It is just as simple as can be. It's even simpler if you have something you really want to say. Then it is more a matter of paring away the nonessential.

You notice that I have not mentioned spelling or grammar. This is craft, and I have been talking about art. Bad spelling, bad grammar and punctuation tell things about their user which that user would rather not have known. And if the writer has any hopes of success in a college essay, a job interview, or published work, there simply isn’t any way around writing the best you can in your native language. Many manuscripts have been rejected the first time an editor came across a possessive its with an apostrophe.

I have been writing, either as a job or for simple pleasure, for quite a long time. I love to tell a story, and I love to hear other people tell theirs. What's yours?

Little Girl On a Rope Swing

2009-08-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

The drooping leaves of the eucalyptus

were moss-green, not grey

as in the photograph, and the towering branches

would have been tinged with copper.

Black and white, she clings

to the sharp diagonal of the swing

at the farthest reach of its arc.

Whoever gave the swing a push

and took the picture is not shown,

not even in shadow. The child’s

shirt would have been blue, with stripes;

the jeans, well-worn, the color of

forget-me-nots. The girl on the swing

has her back to the camera.

She is looking up ahead

and you can see the edge of her face

lifting—she may be laughing—

but her shoulders are tensed

against the unknown.

Her feet, tightly together, look big

in their sneakers. She is

slight of hip but pudgy of waist.

Crowning this moment

was her riotous halo of

uncombed golden curls.

Playing for Church

2009-08-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

Playing for church is a more exciting job than you might think.

I first played for church 60 years ago in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the Methodist church which met in an elementary school near our house. My mother made me do it. The church paid for my piano lessons.

On the Coastside, I have probably played for every church which has a piano or organ. I am well acquainted with their instruments, especially those of Community United Methodist Church, where for about 35 years I have played as a substitute, for services, weddings, funerals and choral performances. For years, I played for Coastside Lutheran on a tiny organ at the Odd Fellows’ Hall, facing the wall so that I couldn’t see what was going on.

I have a recurring church dream: I can’t find the church, I’m going to be late, I have forgotten my books (or clothing), and when finally I get there, nobody knows what’s going on. All these things except the clothing have actually happened.

There was a time I forgot my slippery flat organ shoes and my high heel got stuck in the pedal board. Or the time I got mixed up about daylight savings time and arrived to find the pastor’s wife in my place at the organ. It was pretty exciting when the old tube organ at the new Lutheran church began strobing and sounding like a mandolin. My favorite church music adventure was when the musician who was supposed to play for a wedding got stuck in traffic on Highway 92 and the dismayed wedding coordinator found me, in jeans, practicing in the choir room. I put on a choir robe and was trying to remember the chord changes for the processional while playing something else as the relatives and guests walked in. The bride was waiting at the chapel door when the regular pianist ran in, out of breath, and took over.

Or there was the sunrise service at the beach where I played the organ on a truck bed and the generator was louder than the organ. I think I wore gloves, it was so cold.

As an outsider (because I belong to a church in San Francisco which never asks me to play) I often daydream out during the announcements. However, many of the sermons and almost all the pianos and organs are memorable, most of them in better shape than that old tube organ—which has since been replaced with a modern instrument.

Even so, at the Lutheran church (for many years now in its own building on the Cabrillo Highway), you have to take vise grips to hold the music rack up on the otherwise very nice piano. At the Episcopal church, some of the organ’s pedal keys don’t work and you must avoid them. The Episcopal church once had a small piano with the names Princess Elizabeth and Margaret Rose embossed on it.

At the Catholic church, you have to make sure the transposer has not been turned on before you work with a singer. The Kawai at the LDS church has a killer stiff action and a pedal you need muscles to use. The Baptist church has a nice little grand piano which is kept in tune.

I have read and heard that there is a shortage of church musicians. The reasons may be that fewer people have put in the minimum twelve years of music instruction that it would take to play most written-out church music, or that many salaries are low and the time required too high, including evenings, holidays and weekends. Some of my church music friends simply don’t want to play the kind of music many churches prefer these days.

It is an odd kind of discipline, playing for church. You must expect the unexpected: Someone faints or begins to cry. At the last minute, they ask you to play something you’ve never heard, and they don’t have the sheet music. The power goes off and the electric organ dies and the church goes dark. Everyone is looking at you and you don’t know what they expect you to play. Someone doesn’t show up. Too many soloists show up, confusing the date. You play too many verses, or too few, and the people laugh. You and the congregation are widely at variance on the tempo of the hymns.

Although this won’t happen in most cases, you may step out the back door of the church into thin air. Community United Methodist Church in Half Moon Bay, founded in 1867, actually moved its chapel so that the front door faced Johnston Street instead of Miramontes Street, and they moved the church hall out to the south end of town. The back door for a time faced nothing at all (now it has steps.) Nobody told me about this the first time I played at the turned-around building, since all the church members, of course, knew about it.

The requirements for being a church musician are that you are dependable and prompt, that you always have your bookmarks in order, that you know most of the hymns and the popular vocal solos, that you always show up, that you demonstrate flexibility and an ability to lead the singing with your instrument, that you read music really well, that you know how to select voluntaries or solos which are appropriate to the occasion. It is a plus if you can look reasonably pleasant while dealing with all the surprises.

I have hundreds of books and a big binder full of music for church. The title of the binder collection is Winging It.

(Drawing is a wainscoting detail at Community United Methodist Church in Half Moon Bay.)

Pied Beauty

2009-07-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Glory be to God for dappled things--

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pierced--fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Frugal Craft

2009-07-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

"No, she never threw anything away," my mother said, speaking of Nannie, my grandmother, who had pieced the quilt squares. Mother, who herself never threw anything away before she moved into her small apartment at Heritage Pointe, found the squares in a box which had escaped the general clean-out because nobody knew what to do with them.

Nannie herself probably didn't know what to do with them. They didn't match each other, and each one had a flaw. A piece was frayed or too small or, in one case, nibbled. I looked at them for quite a while before I decided to continue the tradition of frugal craft.

In 1915 or so, when I figure my grandmother made the squares, one did not go out and buy fabric to make a quilt. The whole idea was to use what you had, odd pieces, unworn pieces of worn-out garments, tail-ends and odd bits. Tiny pieces were stitched with tiny stitches into elaborate geometric patterns, and something useful was created from leftovers.

The Bear Claw used a pink fabric so sheer that it needed a backing, and the frayed edges of the blue had to be patched. The clever brown butterfly was missing a corner --do you see the mend?--and had to be darned in two places. There was nothing wrong with the Star of Bethlehem except that it was tiny, or so I thought until I washed it and the color bled.

I thought a lot about my grandmother as I made the squares into pillowcases and quilted them, trying to match her small stitches. Her world was the garden, the kitchen, the family. She raised chickens and a cow and columbines and apple trees. She canned and preserved. When times were hard, she sold milk and eggs. Her recipes for boiled custard, heavenly hash and fried pies have been passed on to a fourth generation.

She had five children. Four of them became teachers and another became a noted researcher. These children had 13 children of their own, four of them adopted. There are 13 great-grandchildren and quite a few great-greats.

"Lady Mary", they called my grandmother, from Demarius, her middle name. I have her side-saddle, her Wedgewood milk pitcher, her camel-back trunk and several of the quilts she actually completed. I also have her emerald ring. She came to my mother in a dream and reminded her to give it to me.

I like to can, to quilt, to putter about in the garden. I am probably more like my grandmother than anyone else.

The Boy

2009-07-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

She got pregnant. The father was married. She was living with Somebody Else. Partly because she was nursing, her breast cancer went undiagnosed until it was too late. They removed one breast. When they wanted to remove the other, she balked. “I don’t mind dying,” she said, “but I mind being cut up into little pieces.”

She was beautiful, and men always tried to approach her. One of them said “Oh, you’re in the arts? I almost went into the arts.” Her withering response was “Close call for the arts.”

She wanted the baby to be born at home, but after laboring all afternoon and all night (we played a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations over and over), she finally consented to go to a hospital to have a late-stage vacuum procedure. She came right back and limped up the steps, holding the baby. Somebody Else, who hadn’t slept for 24 hours, was right behind her. “Is he all right?” she asked, showing me the little face.

When the baby was a year old, we got three tee shirts. Mine said “I am the boy’s godmother.” Somebody Else’s said “I am the boy’s godfather”. The baby’s shirt said “I am the boy.”

Shortly after that, in June, 1983, She died, leaving the godfather a baby who wailed night and day. Social Services learned that there was an orphan child living with an unrelated adult. Things could not go on as they were.

Her mother, brothers and sister did not want the baby, but they hoped he would be adopted out near them, on the other coast, so they could see how he did. Trying to buy time, our male friends said they could each claim to be father of the boy (which is what we called him, the boy.) Meanwhile, the baby lived in the house where he was nearly born, with the man who had assisted in his delivery.

She had picked a new mother and a new family and had given the new mother a valuable ringas a token of the promise. The family asked for the ring back. They produced a will which would benefit the baby, but only when he turned forty years of age.

Then the baby’s father came forth, scraping together the money to fly from the east coast. “Why weren’t you here before this?” we asked, hugging the baby closer. “How could you let her go through all this without you?”

The baby held out his hands to the father. The father cried. They looked like each other. The father stated his case to each friend who was helping to tend the baby. “I always told her I would take care of him,” the father said. The baby held out his hands to the father again, and the father cried again.

Finally the father said the magic words. “My wife knows about this. We couldn’t afford to fly her out, but she has always wanted a baby boy. She wants the baby.”

Since the father had been named on the birth certificate, there really was nothing preventing him from taking the baby away, but still he wanted our permission. Finally there was nothing to do but grant it. The youngest and most cheerful of us accompanied the father and the baby to the airport. Somebody Else provided an Owners’ Manual.

From a distance, we followed the boy’s progress. He overcame a minor speech impediment. He went to school. His maternal grandmother actually saw him once in a while and tried to give him piano lessons. He learned to slaughter a hog. He played football.

When he graduated from high school, they gave him a plane ticket to come out and see where he was born.

As a baby, the boy had what I have to call winning ways. He had a disarming smile; he was charming. We were glad, because we knew he would need to be charming in his new life. We all wanted to see what kind of person he had become. He still had winning ways, but he was very different from the person he probably would have become if his mother had lived to raise him. He would have been sophisticated and well-educated and articulate. “I am really a simple person,” his mother used to say. But she wasn’t, not at all.

The boy had grown into a beautiful sweet graceful youth, but he hadn’t gotten very good grades at school, didn’t want to go to college, had no particular career in mind. We took him to the museum, but after a short time, he said “That’s about enough art for me.” All he really wanted to do was to marry his high school sweetheart, and so he did, almost as soon as he got home.

Yesterday we received invitations to a baby shower for the boy and his wife. They waited several years. They were in a hurry to get married, but they didn’t want to start a family right away. I wondered what his mother would think if she could look down and see how the boy turned out. I think she would have said that he was just fine. I wished she could have lived to see her grandchild.

Nora Ephron

2009-07-15T18:01:00.000-07:00

People who are trying to write should not read Nora Ephron, because they will love the way she writes so much that they want to write like that. I'm serious.

Bow Fever

2009-07-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

It may have been a mistake to show Nicodemus the cello bows on eBay. But bows of pernambuco, a rain forest wood, are getting hard to come by, even if you make your own. A blank piece of wood can cost several hundred dollars. Only pernambuco or Brazil wood can endure the necessary bending and then resume its shape. A good wood bow can run more than fifteen hundred dollars, with old bows by famous makers running into the high thousands. Which is why some string players are resorting to carbon fiber bows these days.

Victor Fetique a Paris, the eBay ad said. Starting at one dollar. A strange light came into Nicodemus' eyes, and before it was all over, he had won the Victor Fetique for $76, plus handling, shipping and insurance. "The fittings alone are worth more than that," he said.

When the bow arrived in the mail, we held our breath for a moment. It didn't really look like much, but there were no obvious cracks or flaws. "Here is a repair," N said. "This part is original." He weighed the bow and checked its balance point, still reserving judgment. "I think it might be a useful bow," he said.

We researched it a bit after the fact and found that the archetier or bowmaker Victor Fetique was known during his lifetime more for quantity than quality, that his bows were stamped Vtor, not Victor, that there were German copies around, that the real thing was going for $10,000 or more. (Our bow was stamped "Victor".)

N took the bow apart and looked at its innards. All was well. Better than well, in fact. "This bow was used in a pit orchestra," he said. "They would put the bow behind the strings, and you could see the marks of the strings on the frog (the black part where you hold the bow)."

"When a bow has been used to applaud someone by banging it on the music stand, you can see the little nicks in the wood."

So finally he began playing the cello with the new bow. "This is pretty good," he said. And he played some more, and then some more. After an hour or so, he said "This is fantastic. This bow is too good to be a fake."

Hope

2009-07-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Chilean blueberry tree, Luma apiculata, was a beautiful ten-year-old tree, but it had some kind of slow-moving disease which killed it off a little bit at a time. Despite extra water and fertilizer and quite a bit of regret, it languished, dropped its few remaining leaves, grew moss and fungus, and gave up the ghost. We took it down and used it for compost and firewood.

Then, lo! The dead stump began putting up hopeful little shoots.

Stop the Presses!

2009-07-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

We actually stopped the presses three times when I was working at the News-Sentinel: Once when Pope Pius died, once when President Kennedy was assassinated, and once when a banner headline contained a spelling error. This would have been a firing offense except that the headline written by a young copy editor had been read and passed by both the copy chief and the news editor (the original typed headline mysteriously disappeared.)

It was a matter of "I" before "E". The headline contained the words "Seize" and "Siege" ("I" before "E", and I still look both those words up in the dictionary before I write them.)

Stopping the presses in those days was expensive. The front page (it was usually the front page and the final edition which went for street sales) had to be recomposed, lead type and zinc photoplates changed or adjusted, then made once again into a cardboard mat into which metal curved to fit the presses would be poured to form a plate. Copies of the newspaper which were being replaced were discarded and printing began again, often with all the union printers on overtime.

I actually shouted "Stop the presses" myself at the Spokane Spokesman-Review when I was the only person left in the editorial room one Saturday afternoon and the first copy of the Sunday Women's Section hit my desk...with an engagement announcement for the publisher's daughter in which her name contained a typo.

The pressroom chief and I decided to blur the typo with a red-hot iron rod instead of trying to remake the page. Nothing was ever said about the tiny smear which appeared in the newspaper.

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle is the first edition to be jobbed out for printing instead of being printed at the Chronicle's own presses. The paper is five columns wide, about a half-inch narrower, with puzzles and comics now so small it is difficult to read some of the type. There are no wrinkles in the paper and the color pictures are perfectly registered.

Two hundred pressmen at the Chronicle have lost their jobs. "Well, where are they printing it?" Nicodemus asked. "Fremont?"

He thought he was kidding. The San Francisco Chronicle is now printed in Fremont.

(Engraving, Johannes Gutenberg, 1398-1468, inventor of the mechanical printing press.)

Treacherous Beauty

2009-06-30T09:32:00.001-07:00

When we hear the helicopters and sirens on the weekend, we know that someone has ignored the signs on the cliffs which say NO HIKING OR CLIMBING. We can usually tell whether the sirens are headed for Devil's Slide, where someone has driven too fast, or to Three Bells, where the old folks sometimes pass away, or to the ocean where no local would dare to swim.

Yesterday the helicopters were flying low and the sirens were in the beach area. Since it was a weekday, we thought maybe they were having a rescue practice. But when the evening news came on, we learned that a mother and her five-year-old daughter had been caught in the rip tide at the beach and drowned.

I vividly remembered arguing with my grandson, who wanted to walk too far out into the water a few years ago. He did not believe in rip tides and sleeper waves. I remembered getting caught by a sleeper wave in one of the shallow caves on the south part of the beach. Fortunately, the children with me and I only got wet and were able to scramble out over the rocks as soon as the water receded.

The ocean is beautiful and mysterious, but here on the northern California coast, you cannot trust it to be pacific.

(Watercolor of Montara Beach by CEC)

The Midsummer Fires

2009-06-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

Sir James Frazer's book, The Golden Bough, will tell you more about midsummer fires than you really wanted to know. Lit anywhere from the summer solstice to St. John's Day, today, the fires of midsummer in all parts of Europe were documented for centuries, associated with all sorts of things ranging from successful harvests to painless childbirth.

In Greece, where I saw my first midsummer fires, the old folks would only say that the fires should be made from the dried-out May wreath and that they were good for getting rid of fleas and for bringing good luck.

Last summer in Athens, I asked a friend if people still lit midsummer fires and she said that she never heard of such a thing and was quite sure it wasn't done, probably never had been done. However, the English-language Kathemerini, which comes with the International Herald Tribune, had a little article under "Fifty Years Ago Today" titled "The Fires of Ai-Yannis". And the terrible fires which destroyed acres of orchard and farmland in Greece last year began around the time of midsummer.

The article in the Herald Tribune said:

"Tonight, on the eve of the feast of Aghios Ioannis Prodromos (St. John Forerunner), the custom of lighting fires in front of houses using reeds or old palm leaves will once again be revived and children will be competing as to who can jump over the biggest fire. The shouts accompanying the leaps, exorcising 'bed bugs and fleas', bear witness to the fact that both young and old hope to cast into the flames the enemies of a good night's sleep...

"There is also the belief that on that particular day, the sun 'shakes and is blinding'.

"The fire-leaping customs of June 24 are not restricted to Greece but are found among all the peoples of Europe, from Scandinavia and Ireland to Russia. Similarities lie in the tiniest of details, which can only be explained by the fact that the custom dates from our common Indo-European origins."

The sun was not shaking and blinding here on the Coast, which is wrapped in a deep blanket of fog. However, I did take the dried May wreath and burn it. As usual, I'll put the ashes back into the garden. It's not that I'm superstitious; it's just that I think some rituals from the ancient past are worth preserving.

Hot Lyric Imagination

2009-06-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

Hot Lyric Imagination is what one colorful translator attributed to the modern Greek poet Varnalis. I was looking for an English translation for a friend who wanted to know the subtleties of "The Fated Ones", a Varnalis poem set to music by the composer Mikis Theodorakis.

The poem itself is a kind of "Aman" or "Alas" lyric, as highly favored by Greek musicians as by American bluegrass singers (imagine George Clooney lip-syncing "I am a man of constant sorrow" in the film "Oh Brother Where Art Thou).

One of my favorite Greek songs in the old days went

"I was born to pain and tyranny.

I curse the burden I have suffered": Very satisfying to sing when you're washing dishes. (My mother used to sing something called the Prisoner's Song when she was washing dishes: "If I had the wings of an angel, Over these prison walls I would fly.")

The comment on the Varnalis poem was a poem in itself: "His work is written in the demotic and has well taken care of form and plasticity in the expression. It is characterized by hot lyric imagination and satirical disposal with interest for the modern person. His poetry, particularly, is characterized from intense playful disposal and deep musical feeling that is combined excellently with the satyr."

I didn't find any satyr in Varnalis' lyrics, but I did find a wonderful kind of description which almost transcends language. With a rudimentary grasp of demotic Greek, one can visualize the setting and the intent of "The Fated Ones". It is guys in a bar, but there is a hurdy-gurdy churning out strange tinny music which accompanies a kind of Greek chorus. It might be one of the great dramatic tragedies from centuries ago, or it might be a smoky scene from modern times.

Not many poems manage to evoke a scene this vividly. Robert Bly spoke about "leaping poetry", poetry whose imagery could leap off the page and take the reader on a journey. Bly was particularly good at doing this, especially in his collection "Loving a Woman in Two Worlds".

Or in a tiny poem which I must paraphrase because I heard him speak it but have never found it written down:

Lord, have pity on me,

Thy ocean so immense,

My boat so small.

"The River-Merchant's Wife", a poem by Li Po, must one of the most perfect poems ever written in this regard. There are no opinions or conclusions. The speaker does nothing but describe, but the images are almost beyond time.

"At sixteen you departed...

You dragged your feet when you went out...

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you."

The speaker doesn't have to say how much they love and miss each other. You know it from the paired butterflies which hurt her, from the leaves falling early, from the monkeys which make sorrowful noises.

Solomon's Song has Hot Lyric Imagination. So does Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach". And I have heard hot lyric imagination in words composed by Dolly Parton.

(Lyre, National Museum, Athens)

Three Wishes, No, Four, No, Twelve

2009-06-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

I have a magic lamp experience once in a while, where anything I wish for seems to plop down right in front of me. Usually this happens around the beginning of June, when at least a dozen friends and relatives share a birthday week with me.

This year, the magic wishes didn’t start out well, with a summer cold which caused me to miss the party and to accompany the Chorale concert the next day with bleary eye and stuffy nose. But things began gathering momentum Monday morning when two phoebe birds, long absent, alit on the chicken coop and the telephone began to ring.

The best presents sometimes just appear, like the rose-breasted phoebes.

The mail brought quilt pieces made by my grandmother nearly a hundred years ago, and the gift was seeing her frugal craft, tiny scraps pieced together, the smallest of stitches. In the course of the day, poetry in Greek and English appeared, and flowers, music and tomato plants. The afternoon students all played nicely, Debussy and Bach and Mozart.

At about 4 P.M., Carlos, the instrument maker, called and said he was bringing back the little violin I wrote about last month. The 14-year-old owner of the restored violin was just finishing her piano lesson. Her expression, when Carlos handed her the violin, was indescribable.

There had been no way to know how the violin would sound before the work was done and the fiddle had strings.

Another gift: June Morrall e-mailed me, asking if I would do a story, so I wrote about the violin a few hours after we heard its voice for the first time. The grand finale of the garage sale Curatoli violin appears on June’s site, www.halfmoonbaymemories.com.

The most important wish was granted Tuesday when the doctors declared that Nicodemus was free of the hated disease. That would have been enough for many birthday wishes, but the wonderful intangibles continued.

By Thursday, I was ready to be done with wishes for a while (we hadn’t even found time go out to a birthday dinner), but then Arl appeared with roses from her garden and eclairs and some new writing. And my favorite San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote and said he was going to include an anecdote I sent him in his next Monday’s column.

Two neighbors called and asked if we wanted their tickets to Tosca. We gobbled leftovers, threw on clothes, drove to the city and found a free parking place a half-block from the opera house...only to find adorable Camille Offenbach (decolletage, cowboy boots) and her gentlemanly husband sitting in our row.

“I lived for art and love,” Tosca sang, and we blew our noses and wiped our eyes, though of course you can’t watch the end of Tosca without thinking of when Beverly Sills jumped off the set’s painted cliff onto a too-springy hidden mattress and bounced right back up again in full view of the audience.

Tosca was marvelous. High up in the San Francisco Opera House, the seats are so steeply banked that you get dizzy when you look down, but there are two large screens which unfurl nearby, giving you better closeups of the orchestra and the singers than you could get with front-row seats. Puccini's villain, Scarpia, reminded me of a former United States Vice President.

So that was the birthday week: The week was dizzying, and we still haven’t had time to drink the champagne we bought.

Subtitles and Explanations

2009-05-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

Our most bizarre subtitle experience had to be watching "Rigoletto" at the open-air Herod Atticus theater in Athens. The opera was sung in Italian and had subtitles in Greek, the words running along a rail which separated the orchestra from the audience. Of course, with opera, you can pretty much tell what is happening without the captions.

This is not the case with the BBC mysteries Nicodemus and I watch on television. There will be long monologues which are completely incomprehensible to me. N provides a running commentary, interpreting West Country and Scottish accents and Brit slang. Lately, on some shows, the BBC furnishes its own subtitles for rapid dialogue.

Sometimes we will watch a movie just to be together without conversation, the way some people play cards, and the last two films we saw have required a different kind of commentary.

"No Country for Old Men" and "The Dark Knight" are probably the most violent movies I have almost seen.

During the first of these, N had read the book, so he was able to explain the story to a mystified and somewhat repulsed me. During the second, an endless saga of murder and mayhem, I had to excuse myself many times for urgent errands. N would fill me in on who or what had been destroyed while I was brushing my teeth, feeding the cat, looking at tomorrow's calendar. At the end of the film, I was exhausted.

"I'm sorry," Nicodemus said.

(Photo: Opera-goers at Herod Atticus, with the darkened Parthenon in the background.)

Moana

2009-05-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

At a garden party yesterday, we wore winter coats in fog and 52-degree Coastside springtime weather. Someone asked me what I had been writing lately. "Well, there's my blog," I said, "though I don't think many people read it."

"Oh. What are you complaining about?" he asked.

Gulp.

There was a time at Skyline College where the voice teacher I worked with thought I groused and grumbled entirely too much. He began calling me Moana. The students thought that was my name. For a couple of years after that, students would greet me with "Hi, Moana!"

Going Deaf

2009-05-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

In 1802, Beethoven wrote to his brother Carl: "I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness; when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf."

Although Beethoven's musical genius overcame his disability, certainly he did not have a happy life. J. W. N. Sullivan in his book, Beethoven, says "His deafness and solitariness are almost symbolic of his complete retreat into his inner self."

My friend Tedi dissolved in tears when we were studying Beethoven in Keyboard Literature at San Francisco State. "I would give all 32 sonatas," she said, "if only he could have had one happy day."

I am concerned about noise levels and deafness. Motorcycles, chain saws, vacuum cleaners and leaf-blowers assault our ears every day, and I can no longer watch a movie without earplugs. Twice in the past few weeks, I have had to fish out the earplugs at restaurants because of shrieking and shouting which passed for normal conversation.

In my college piano classes, the students used earphones and I monitored what they were playing and hearing. Routinely, I circled the room and turned the volume down on their keyboards. I am worried that all of us are being deafened by increasing sound levels, some of them perfectly avoidable.

Regular exposure to sounds above 100 decibels for more than one minute can cause permanent hearing loss. Motorcycles, power saws, power mowers, and leaf blowers all produce sound at 100 decibels or more. OSHA's permissible noise level exposure for 100-decibel blasts is two hours per day, but they recommend only a half-hour per day for 110 dB (motorcycles, power saws.)

The sound volume on iPods and other devices with receivers close to the ear or actually in the ear has not been published anywhere that I can find, nor has the usual level of movie sound tracks. One chart said a Walkman on level 5 out of 10 produced 94 decibels. I doubt there are many Walkmen still functioning, but I also doubt that the volume on most iPods is set halfway down.

There is an application for iPhones and iPods simply called dB which measures sound levels and I would be interested in learning where, for instance, most movies and souped-up cars rate on the volume scale.

We know that Beethoven's hearing loss involved nerve damage, but that it came on in his adult life. It is unlikely that environmental noise contributed to Beethoven's deafness in the 18th century, but it is a prime suspect in much hearing loss in the 21st century.

The incidence of hearing loss in classical musicians has been estimated at from four to 43 percent. At the Symphony recently, I noticed plexiglas sound baffles in front of the brass players, and my brother tells me this is common practice now, to protect the hearing of the other players. Hearing loss in rock musicians ranges from 13 to 30 per cent. Symphonic music at its peak can reach 120 to 137 decibels, but only for short periods of time.

Rock music heard from four to six feet can reach 120 decibels for a longer period of time and can even reach 150 dB, which is more than the loudest recommended exposure even with hearing protection.

It's not worth it. Turn down the volume. Get rid of the leaf blower. Wear ear plugs.

The Price of Literacy

2009-05-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

Some 40,000 people attended the University of Southern California graduation ceremonies May 15 in Los Angeles. All available seats near the speaker’s podium and the two large video screens were taken an hour before the beginning of the ceremonies, which featured a speech by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As the USC Triojan Band began the processional music, we sat on some concrete steps around the corner from the action. On the step in front of us, a small man holding a large pile of papers sat down gingerly.

It was easy to imagine that the man was a non-custodial father attending his daughter’s graduation. He wore a creased but dapper striped suit, a white shirt, scuffed brown loafers with tan socks, the outfit of a man used to wearing jeans and flip-flops.

During ceremonial introductions and speeches which included the conferring of a Doctor of Humane Letters degree for the governor, the Dad went through his papers, page by page, writing notes, initialing, bookmarking.

We watched a parade of late-arriving bachelor’s degree candidates, mostly young girls in black robes, mortarboards and four-inch heels, scurry past, clutching tote bags and teddy bears. Flower sellers peddled orchid leis at $20 apiece, $30 for double-strung. A woman in her thirties, dressed as a fifties starlet, blonde, strapless taffeta, ringlets, looked for a missing companion. An African family in full tribal regalia marched together away from the ceremonies.

Our candidate, splendidly arrayed in doctoral robes ($900), velvet tam ($150) and academic hood, sat around the corner, about a city block away, with some 4800 other graduates.

When Governor Schwarzenegger began his speech, the Dad in front of us laid his sheaf of papers on his knees, gazed vaguely in the direction of the loudspeakers, and smiled sweetly. The Governor, whose current budget contains deep cuts to education, said “Maybe now that I’m a doctor, they’ll listen to me in Sacramento.” Schwarzenegger, whose daughter is an undergraduate at the university, gave his advice for success: Come to America. Work your butt off. Marry a Kennedy.

Undergraduate tuition at USC was about $37,693 this year, according to the Daily Trojan, the student newspaper. The average student is said to graduate with a $23,800 debt.

When the recessional music began, the Dad went back to his papers. We couldn’t resist peeking. At the top of each page was written Bankruptcy Court.

Orphan, Ready for Strings

2009-05-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

This violin once belonged to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania School District, but wound up in a garage sale, covered with red paint. The school district, contacted by telephone, said they hadn't had a string program in many years and that they didn't want the violin back. The label inside says "Antonio Curatoli" and "copy of Amati".

No Strings Attached

2009-05-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

The world of violins is a strange obsessive place where costly instruments are borrowed, lent, given away, pondered, played and discussed. The 1742 Guarneri del Gesu violin called the "David" was donated by Jascha Heifetz to the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, but is presently being played by the San Francisco Symphony's concert master, Alexander Barantschik. Many instruments played in orchestras across the world are borrowed instruments.

Our house as well has been full of bows and violins lately, many of them garage sale items, some of them in pieces. It all started with the resurrection of Violin Number 1, which had been painted with polyurethane, soaked in paint thinner, taken apart, and finally given to Nicodemus as a hopeless and possibly bad-luck case.

In the months-long process of stripping, sanding, scraping and revarnishing the violin, N acquired something of a reputation as an amateur luthier or instrument repairer. Two more violins with minor dings came his way with pleas for first aid. Another person gave him a violin she didn't want any more, and another passing violinist liked it, took it, and left his own old Sears fiddle in its place.

Then came the Frankenfiddle, assembled from parts by N for a young violinist who was playing on a half-size instrument and needed something larger. A second garage-sale violin found by the young violinist's father has been freed of its paint (yes, some wicked person painted over ebony and birdseye maple). Beautifully revarnished with amber, it is ready to go to the City to be restrung.

N began making cello bows for himself, since he can barely play the violins he has been repairing. The wood blanks and the fittings are costly. When the bow is finished (and it takes weeks of patient sanding, bending, and drilling), it has to go elsewhere to be haired. I estimate that these handmade bows cost $500 and upward for materials alone.

In String World, players will hand bows and instruments around without a mention of money: "Try this for a while. Tell me if you like it." Although these are not usually million-dollar instruments like the David, a good Brazil wood bow could still cost two thousand dollars or more, and a decent (as opposed to plywood, carbon fiber, or "student") violin would probably be that much and more.

I only know of one lent violin which went astray. It wound up in Mexico, painted yellow, but was retrieved by InterPol. Its maker was very disappointed that the Violin Code of Honor had been broken. He put the violin away in a closet because he didn't want to see it any more.

N was looking at the Sears fiddle the other day. "I think I'll fix that one up for Quinn (a student member of our community orchestra)" he said. It is a strange place, the world of violins: No strings attached.

Some Constellation

2009-05-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

Surprised by a sudden squall,

she stood under the eaves of the barn,

hoisting a basketful of apples,

unsure whether to wait it out

or make a dash for the house...

when she saw him coming

out the back door,

wearing his woodsman's shirt

and baggy pants with suspenders,

holding a pink umbrella,

ready to see her dryly home.

The Sirens: Poems of Irresistible Longing

2009-05-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me."

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I just finished a collection of poems dealing with longing. Here are the notes and the painting by John William Waterhouse, 1891.

What song could the sirens sing which would be irresistible?

The sirens have long since left mythology and permeated every form of artistic expression. Though the sirens in art have been given many names and origins, all the stories agree that the maidens, two, three or five of them, once tempted sailors with their song, usually with fatal results.

In the Odyssey, though the witch Circe attributes dark deeds to the temptresses, Homer insists that the sirens appealed to the spirit rather than the flesh and says that once Odysseus heard their song, he sailed on, a wiser man.

Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Pliny the Elder and Leonardo wrote of the maidens. Jesuit writers of the 17th century asserted the actual existence of the Sirens. Sirens intruigued Kafka, who loved a dark story. He wrote of the temptresses in 1917, saying that the silence of the sirens was more ominous than their song.

Aglaopheme, Thelxiepeia, Thelxiope, Thelxinoe, Molpe, Aglaophonos, Aglaope, Pisinoe, Peisinoe, Parthenope, Ligeia, Leucosia, Raidna and Teles are the various names that have been given the sirens.

They may have lurked on an island called Sirenum scopuli, or on Anthemusa, Cape Pelorum, in the Sirenusian islands near Paestrum, or in Capreae. Their father may have been the river god Achelous or the Roman sea god, Phorcys; their mother is variously the muses Terpsichore or Melpomene, or Sterope or Chthon, the earth.

There is some question about whether mermaids and sirens are the same creature. In Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Portuguese, the words for mermaid are Sirena, Sirene, Sirana, Syrena, Sirena and Sereia. Most artists, however, seem to agree that mermaids and sirens are not the same, mermaids being not sinister but rather appealing enough to merit a ballade by Chopin, an opera by Dvorak, an iconic fairy tale, a statue in the Denmark harbor, and a Disney film which lamely gilds the lily of Hans Christian Andersen.

The idea of temptation incarnate has taken a thousand forms. In Poems of Irresistible Longing, I wanted to suggest some themes which might lure the contemporary traveler.

Kalo Pascha!

2009-04-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter! Here are the red eggs and the Easter bread called tsoureki. My Greek friend Yotta writes from her village near Delphi: I am at my home town with my old parents. We are roasting the lamb on the spit. The whole village is covered with smoke which went up higher and higher and made a cloud this morning.

Happy, Uh, Palm Sunday

2009-04-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

We don't always celebrate Easter the same day as everyone else. This year, while many people are having Easter egg hunts and eating chocolate bunnies, we Orthodox are celebrating Palm Sunday. My sons were born in Greece and I have always tried to keep up the Greek traditions for them. You might say that when in Rome, etc., but I have been Orthodox for more than 50 years and anyway am used to being different and not fitting in.

The main reason that Greek (and Russian, Serbian, etc.) Orthodox Easter sometimes falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter is that it must come after the Jewish Passover,which began last Wednesday and lasts for seven or eight days. The rest of the calculations for Easter, involving lunar calendars and something called a golden number, are really beyond me.

Added to this complicated business is the fact that many Orthodox did not accept the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced in 1582 (there is a reason for the word Orthodox) and still use the Julian or "old" calendar, which is 13 days behind. All Orthodox churches, however, celebrate Easter on the same day.

So on Saturday, Eastern Orthodox people will go to church around midnight and wait silently for the priest to bring out the candle which represents the new light and to announce "Christos Anesti" or whatever the word is in the local language. The Russian is something like "Christos Vaskreshi". The flame passes from candle to candle until every taper is lit, and the people try to keep the flame going until they get home, when they will smoke a cross over the doorsill and light the lamp in front of their own icon stands.

Our church stands on a hill in San Francisco. When the Easter service is over, you can wait at the bottom of the hill and watch a candlelit procession as some 700 smiling, sleepy people guard their little flames on the way to their cars. Driving home, usually at about two in the morning, you can sometimes see another small flame dimly illuminating a nearby car.

(Giotto, Palm Sunday)

Bird By Bird

2009-04-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird, subtitled Instructions on Writing and Life, is one of those books which should be written with a capital B. To summarize the premise would deny a potential reader the great pleasure of reading Anne's words, but it is a thought about which I need reminding from time to time.

The Greeks have a saying (don't they always?) which goes "Fasouli, fasouli, yemis' to sakkouli". Bean by bean, the bag is filled. A friend once told me that her sister, overwhelmed by an out-of-control yard, decided on the salami method of gardening: One slice at a time. She would take care of the weeds directly in front of her and save the rest for the next time.

In my old Skyline piano class, we had a motto for learning a piece of music: Particular by particular, we approach the general.

Nicodemus has completed 38 of 40 radiation treatments for prostate cancer. We have been told that this has a good chance of eliminating the tumor. Since his diagnosis four months ago, it has been difficult and necessary to remember, as he marches off every day for treatment, that Fasouli Fasouli Gemis' To Sakkouli.

To help, every Friday we have a bottle of champagne to celebrate getting through another week. Since we are not big drinkers and there are only the two of us, it takes several days to get through the bottle, so our tasteless low-fiber no salad meals (which minimize the side effects of radiation treatments) still somehow have a festive touch to them.

Whatever works.

The Cold Room Diet

2009-04-09T10:54:00.000-07:00

I have lost 20 pounds this past year. I am healthy as far as I know and have made no changes to my diet, but it has been an unusually cold and windy year on the Coastside. Now it seems that there is a relationship between being cold and losing weight.

The New England Journal of Medicine, quoted in today's New York Times, says the answer is brown fat. Nearly every adult, the paper says, has blobs of brown fat, so called because it is filled with iron-rich mitochondria, our cells' little energy sources. PET-CT scans show that brown fat burns glucose when activated by the cold.

In other words, you can lose weight by sitting in what the paper calls a chilly room, 61 to 66 degrees (the average temperature in my historic but uninsulated redwood house).

We have insulated curtains, vinyl film on the windows, draft-stoppers on the windowsills, sheets of styrofoam glued to the walls, a thick rug on the tile floor. I have caulked everything caulkable, and still we have to wear heavy sweaters indoors. I won't even tell you what we wear to bed, but you might think of eskimos.

I suppose it is some consolation that we can keep on slathering butter on everything and still button our jeans, but it's, well, cold comfort at best.

A Marauder

2009-04-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

Although this is a residential community with the usual dogs and cats, we have a great number of other domestic animals and quite a few wild ones as well. There are a few chickens and goats, horses from the stables down the road, and even miniature donkeys which bray once in a while.

We get occasional forages by deer and rabbits and our gardens are eaten by gophers, snails and banana slugs. Ravens swoop about and call raucously; robins feast on whatever berries are growing, whether ivy, cotoneaster or blackberry. Once in a while a gray squirrel will climb the cypresses and run along the telephone wires. A mole made a neat little road of hillocks in the front yard.

At night, there are the owls, the rare possum, skunks and raccoons, lots of them. I am not a friend of the raccoons because they can open the most tightly-sealed garbage can with their dextrous little paws and will scatter the trash far and wide, looking for tidbits. If they get under the house, they will tear out insulation or styrofoam to make nests. They look cute with their little bandito masks, but they will growl and show their teeth if you cross them.

So after a small earthquake and a power outage which lasted longer than usual, we were not sympathetic to the big raccoon who was banging the crawlspace door, trying to get it open. We leaned out the window, shined the flashlight on her, and told her to get a move on. She backed off a bit and waited to see if we would go away. Her eyes were like headlights. Finally she crept away in the dark.

I try to meet the critters halfway. There is a small A-frame down by the fence, under the ivy, where they can get out of the wind, and I keep water for them in a concrete bowl out front. Beyond that, I am not feeling very hospitable when it comes to the raccoons.

"I hope she wasn't pregnant," Nicodemus said.

Growing Up In Heaven

2009-03-24T11:31:00.000-07:00

When my daughter disappeared 36 years ago, her kindergarten class was traumatized. They refused to accept their teacher's statement that nobody knew what had happened to Anna.

"But where is she?" they asked. "Is she dead?"

"We don't know," the teacher answered. This teacher, fair-haired, dimpled, brilliant, was one of Anna's favorite people in all the world.

"I don't want to disappear," one student said. "I want to grow up."

"Anna will grow up," the teacher said. "If she doesn't grow up on earth, she will grow up in heaven."

For years, I would look at children the age Anna would have been and wonder what she would look like at that time. Once in a while I would see one of her kindergarten classmates and notice that they had lost their baby teeth, that they were getting taller.

Then about 18 years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children began its program of producing age-progressed pictures of missing children. They would write and ask for family pictures. Using kindergarten pictures along with pictures of family members at various ages, they would come up with their idea of what Anna would look like at age 23, 27, 31.

I found it difficult to look at these pictures, though as forensic software became more sophisticated, the pictures began to look more like a real person. Once I gathered up courage and made pencil changes to one of the portraits to see how she might look with glasses or short hair.

Then Steve Loftin, a retired police officer and forensic artist at the National Center, produced a picture of Anna at the age of 38 and sent it to me, asking what I thought. The face thinner, I said; the forehead higher. When the picture was finished, I knew that if she had grown up in this world, that was what she would look like.

Steve also did an age-regressed picture, one which might have appeared in a high school annual, and I thought "Yes, that's what she might have looked like."

We may never know what happened to Anna, even though her case is still open and is officially considered a "probable non-family abduction". But because of an incredibly vigorous search, my idea of my daughter is no longer stuck in kindergarten. A Google search on her name brings up thousands of hits. She has a Facebook page and at least two MySpace pages which play her favorite song. She is a featured case on Websleuths, a community of 17,000 amateur detectives. The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children runs a video about her. She has a website, www.searchingforanna.com, and a book by the same name which is distributed on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

It's not exactly growing up in heaven, but at least thousands of people have become acquainted with this happy child.

Harry Lauder's Walking Stick

2009-03-17T17:19:00.000-07:00

This is the strangest thing in my garden. It's Harry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana contorta), which has just made its male catkins. When the leaves come out, even they are twisted and contorted. It is a variety of hazelnut which occasionally will produce an empty shell. Does it need a mate? I don't know. It came from the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco and had four dates written on its marker, the last one being 7-15-88, perhaps the last time it was transplanted. Harry Lauder was an entertainer in the early 20th century. He often gave shows for soldiers in World War I and in character as a Scotsman leaned on a twisted hazelwood cane from the shrub which later was named for him.

Fire of Eden

2009-03-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

Nursery catalogs can be very romantic, and I have never seen Montbretia called Fire of Eden anywhere except in a catalog. My small town is ablaze with these bright orange flowers, Crocosmia masonorum or Tritonia crocosmiiflora, which originally came from Africa and now have wandered as far as Hawaii. A Scottish collector brought the corms to Europe in the late 1700s. The name comes from the Greek, meaning "saffron-scented", though to my nose the flowers have no aroma. I might try drying some this year and see if that brings up the scent.

I love a plant which isn't finicky and which just grows on its own without too much fuss. The corms create their own mulch, so that even if you dig them up, the soil is improved for whatever follows. Since there are hundreds, maybe thousands, in the yard, I sometimes just pull them up after they have bloomed and fling them in the the general direction of the fence, where they came up this year in neat, lush rows.

Daddy (P.S.)

2009-03-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

From my brother Les: "The insoluble math problem you mentioned involved trisecting an angle, which, as I learned in school, is impossible to do mathematically and prove you've done it. Dad invented a relatively simple device which worked, and the result of which could be proved algebraically. I have the blueprints he made up, and actually sent a copy to a friend who is a copyright attorney and has a doctorate in physics and one in law. Dad said he never tried to patent his device because he thought there was no practical use for it, but my attorney friend said he was pretty sure it was patentable. I think every mathematician in the world would be interested in such a device, if only for classroom demonstrations, but never followed through on pursuing a patent."

(Photograph is Dukie with Daddy, April, 1914, Sturgis, Kentucky)

Daddy

2009-03-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

On the first of April, 1914, my father was born at his grandfather's house in Sturgis, Kentucky. The grandfather, Eddie Jones, had a physician attend the birth of his daughter Dukie's third child, who was named Edward Lindle for the grandfather and the doctor.

Just why Grandfather Jones was not on speaking terms with the baby's father, Charley Benedict, is not clear. The family has various versions of the men's first meetings in April. Either Charley and his sister appeared at the door in a horse-drawn carriage or met Eddie Jones's carriage on the road. At any rate, the birth was announced; the aunt was invited to see the baby, but the father was told he was not welcome.

Great-aunt Eulah replied that "If Charley is not invited, I'll not come either."

Our family's oral history edits out sad things, preserving heroic deeds, evidence of merit, and the overcoming of hardship, so I know that at some point Dukie, on her own, shot sparrows to feed her children, and that she made ice cream for Daddy's birthday by hand-swishing a bucket of cream inside a bucket of ice. How and why she killed herself is not so clear. Grandfather Benedict may have been a soldier by then, in World War I.

The orphan children were parceled out to relatives. Some of them treated Daddy harshly (he was gored by a cow while doing farm chores) and he ran away from home at least once. The last time he ran away from home, he was fifteen, living with his grandfather again. He rode his bicycle from Sturgis, Kentucky, to Evansville, Indiana, and got a job delivering prescriptions. Charley somehow found Daddy sleeping in an alley and took him to his own home, where he was looked after by Charley's new young wife.

I never knew Eva, who died giving birth to her sixth child, known only as "Little Babe". I have only the vaguest memory of Charley, whom we called Poppa. His first family, Mildred, Lillian and Daddy, was grown and he was looking after his and Eva's four girls, Audrey, Elsie Janis, Rosemary and Jo Anne, by himself. He played the violin for the children and paid close attention to their diet. He invented an immersion heater which is still used in household appliances. He built a radio. He sold the patents for a good price. He gave me a Blue Willow tea set.

Daddy was known as Benny at college, Tennessee Polytechnic Institute (now Tennessee Technological University). He studied physics, played tenor guitar in a band, painted in tempera and water color, and solved a supposedly insoluble math problem having to do with divisions of an angle. He dated the two older Ensor girls and married the youngest, my mother, when she was 17 and he was 21. She was his only sweetheart, and they were married util he died in the fiftieth year of their marriage.

Daddy often fell asleep in class, and when the professors would call on him, he would awake with a start and ask "Who? Me?" A French professor once shouted "Benedict! Translate 'Qui? Moi?" Daddy, jolted conscious, said "Who? Me?" and the French teacher said "Correct!" Daddy found French comical for some reason and would inform us that "Le diner est servi" and that we were having choux or chou-fleur or petits choux, if that was the case.

My father had a series of teaching jobs after college, but we moved every June because teachers were not paid in the summer. He would repair radios and do handyman jobs to keep us going until school started again in September. When my brother Lindle was born, the baby slept in a dresser drawer for a while because we had no crib. One summer we had to go live with Aunt Annie, who objected to Daddy's Big Band records. I locked her in the outhouse and informed Daddy that now he could play his records all he wanted to.

When I was in second grade, Daddy and I would have lunch together, since he taught Shop in my school. One day I missed him at lunch, and when I came home, he was lying on the couch with his arm over his eyes. He had cut off the tip of his index finger on a power saw at school. They said he didn't yell or swear but just whistled when he saw the blood. I never heard him swear except when he was singing a song from H.M.S. Pinafore which contained the line "Why, damme, it's too bad."

Our favorite thing, after I got too sophisticated to go fishing, was to sing that Gilbert and Sullivan operetta together. Daddy had played Captain Corcoran, a baritone, in a college production, but at home he would also sing the parts of Ralph Rackstraw, tenor, Sir Joseph Porter, and the evil Dick Deadeye: "They are right. It was the cat." I sang Buttercup, the sisters and cousins and aunts, and I squeaked my way through Josephine's soprano aria, "Sorry Her Lot Who Loves Too Well."

After my little brother died, we moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Daddy worked on what he learned much later was the Manhattan Project. He was on the Town Council, joined the Lions Club and directed the Methodist Choir. One of his last jobs at the plant before he retired involved teaching matrix algebra. He had always loved teaching, and he was so happy at getting to teach again that he gave me copies of his textbooks and three handwritten pages of personalized lesson plans. He thought I could do anything and did not believe that as a grown woman I still counted on my fingers. "The fun part begins after Lesson Five," he wrote.

Daddy was delighted by the elegance of mathematics, by the truth of physics, by a bon mot, by anything his children did, by a low note ("Rocked in the cradle of the deep"), the Poet and Peasant Overture, a big band, an afternoon on the lake, any new technology, a circuit board, angel food cake.

He died October 30, 1984, on the one night the nurses persuaded my mother to go home from the hospital and get some sleep. At the funeral, I played Wagner's "To the Evening Star" from Tannhauser and the minister read Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar".

"Sunset and evening star

And one clear all for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home."

There was a double rainbow over the lake when we went back to the house. My mother said "I guess everything is going to be all right."

Daddy had cast his absentee ballot before he died, probably voting for all non-incumbents, which he always threatened to do. So after the funeral, we all went back to our respective homes, miles away, to follow his example and vote.

Doom, Gloom and the Weather

2009-03-01T10:22:00.001-08:00

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."--Bob Dylan

The hole in the ozone layer is closing. I learned this coincidentally from a BBC report on a recent Antarctic expedition.

I know that climate change is real, that we must act, that the world is at risk and that California is still in a drought, despite nonstop rain which has warped my front door, made the ground too soggy to walk on without boots, and left me with something short of sunny spirits.

A couple of weeks ago, I met a man who looked me right in the eye and said "I always thought 'Pollyanna in Hell' would be a good theme for an opera." (Pollyanna, of course, was the perpetual optimist in the books of Eleanor Hodgman Porter, 1868-1920.)

Be that as it may, I wonder why weather reports can't emphasize the positive (such as letting us know the hole in the ozone layer is closing). Instead of headlining CONTINUING DROUGHT (or whatever fear-mongering weather report pertains in your part of the world), couldn't they point out that the hills are green, that new little trees are coming up in the places raked by wildfires last summer?

The late lamented Christian Science Monitor, now available only on line and no longer as a broadsheet newspaper, had an editorial policy of emphasizing the positive. The word "death", for instance, was not used. Journalism school had a standing joke about a Christian Science Monitor headline, "Passed-On Pigs". But what's wrong with this? Does refusing to buy into a doom-and-gloom perception indicate denial or ignorance?

"A tree crushed three cars when high winds and rain-soaked earth caused the two-ton tree to topple onto Highway 17 today." That's one way to say it, frightening the east-west commuters, making everyone suspicious of trees and presenting one (dark) perception of an event. Another way would be to point out that not a single driver was injured, that other drivers passed the word down the road, that work crews cleared the tree in record time, that the tree was diseased and could easily have caused trouble had it fallen during commute hours, that the firewood would be distributed to state parks.

Nicodemus' father was a weather man, long before the development of satellites and whatever other sophisticated technological devices weather forecasters use. He would hitch up his suspenders, sniff the air, and say "Looks like moderate rainfall today."

So what's the weather like where you live?

Pepper Soup and Parmesan Crackers

2009-02-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

Duarte's Restaurant in Pescadero has the second-best soup I've ever had (artichoke) and also the very best soup I've ever had, pepper soup. I've tried at least a dozen times to reproduce the pepper soup recipe and tonight's dinner was the closest yet. You cook until tender a chopped green pepper with two cups of frozen peas in three cups of chicken stock. Add a clove of garlic, 1/4 cup chopped onion, a dash of tabasco sauce and some celery seed. Put all this through a food mill (because the peas have a skin; if you don't mind this, you can use a blender or food processor), thicken with either a half-cup of bechamel sauce or 1/4 cup cornstarch dissolved in 1/4 cup water. Whisk over low heat until thick and warm and serve with parmesan crackers. Serves two people.

Parmesan crackers: Cover a baking dish with foil. Using a cookie cutter or a tuna can with both ends removed, put about a half-inch of shredded parmesan into the mold, press down, and remove the mold. Put under the broiler about 10 minutes, or until the cracker is brown. Cool slightly and then peel off from the foil while still warm.

Bikers

2009-02-16T14:26:00.000-08:00

Lance Armstrong and the 130-something other bikers on the Tour of California rode through our little town in the rain this morning, cheered on by a few people holding signs and yelling "Go, riders!" We watched from the back window with binoculars. A blur of dark shapes blew down the Coast Highway, accompanied by motorcycles and cars whose headlights made long bright patterns on the wet road.

I have been wanting to write something about another biker we know, Kanellos Kanellopoulos. Kanellos was a 14-time bicycle champion in Greece, an Olympian cyclist, and still holds the world's record for human-powered flight.

In 1988, MIT, the Smithsonian Institution, NASA and the Greek government cooperated in the Daedalus Project, attempting to surpass the 1979 record for cycle-driven flight, the Gossamer Albatross passage of 22 miles over the English Channel. Kanellos piloted his craft from Crete to the island of Santorini, 72.44 miles, taking three hours, 54 minutes and 59 seconds.

The Daedalus broke up yards from its destination when a gust of wind snapped the tail boom. The wings folded and the craft settled into the surf, leaving Kanellos to swim and wade to shore. Asked how he was able to achieve this incredible feat, Kanellos said that Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors, had protected him.

The mythic Daedalus, of course, had no such protection when he and his son Icarus attempted their flight from Crete. According to mythology, Icarus was so exhilarated by flying that he flew too near the sun, which melted the wax on his homemade wings.

Kanellos Kanellopoulos still rides his bike through the congested streets of Athens, but for a living he paints religious ikons, teaches Byzantine art techniques with the Eikonourgia group, and coaches physical education classes in an Athens high school. Schematics and photographs of the cycle-powered Daedalus are in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology archives.

(The photo is Kanellos and me at a fasting-day luncheon prepared by the silent nuns at a convent near Athens where Kanellos was working on a fresco.)

What Happened?

2009-02-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

No recording, photographs or videos were made at my Mozart concerto performance Saturday, whether by oversight or budget restrictions I don't know and don't really much care. We are left with only my perception and the audience's impression of what happened.

Since the audience contained mostly friends and supporters, the perception was positive from their point of view. From mine, it was a relief to get through 52 pages of piano music without major mishap, especially since my left arm was killing me. It was a privilege to perform Mozart with the orchestra and to compose cadenzas (the free passages) which let me say some stuff I wanted to say.

The ancient Greeks usually took a poet with them into battle so that after everything settled down, they could find out what happened. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land had its Fair Witnesses for the same reason. We had neither at the concert, only people who wanted to support the community orchestra or liked Mozart's "Elvira Madigan" concerto or wanted to encourage me.

So we can remember it any way we want to. Here's a picture of me in my thrift-shop dress and eBay jewelry, taken right before we left for the hall. Deer in the Headlights.

Archetypes and Metaphors

2009-02-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly and many others have talked about how myths can frame lessons or dramas. They need not be literally true in order to contain truths. The Hopi oral history contains a tale of a great flood, for instance, and Rapunzel should warn against pilfering greens from your neighbor's garden.

Finding excuses not to practice my Mozart concerto, which has its last rehearsal with the orchestra tonight, I was looking at the painting which hangs above my piano. The title is "L'Oiseau Chant Avec Ses Doigts" (The Bird Sings With His Fingers), and the picture is supposed to be a boy Orpheus--the Greek God of music--making a lyre in the tree branches. The title comes from an old Jean Cocteau movie.

Who knows if there was ever a real Orpheus? Plays, poems, musical works have been written about the god who charmed the beasts with his playing, who even cast a spell over the Underworld so that it would release his beloved Eurydice from the dead. The film "Black Orpheus" sets the story in Rio and has Orpheus making the sun rise with his song.

All this is a long way from my present chore. All I really want to do is what Nicodemus advises: Try to make it nice for the people.

EULOGY

2009-01-30T16:21:00.000-08:00

Though he was tall and gangly,

one shoulder up and the other down,

all angles at the piano or

bowing his battered viola,

he didn't take up much space in the world.

He lived for years in the same small place,

collecting sheet music and jokes

to copy at the library and mail to his friends.

Old Eagle Eye, some of them called him,

because he never seemed to practice

but hardly ever missed a note.

That bright awareness lived in a dim apartment,

frugal, thrifty, never wasting anything,

not even his body, much repaired, which he

left to science. He eschewed all custom of dying

and had neither funeral nor obituary.

We learned about his leaving

when our card to him came back,

unopened, with the news. Toward the end,

he said there was a time when his eyes

nearly burned the notes off the page,

but that now the eyes wanted to look away.

He left hardly a trace, not wife nor lover,

not child nor cat nor potted palm.

Anatomy students sometimes admire

the qualities of cadavers, finding

excellence in the vessels, or evidence

of courage in the body's efforts

to heal itself. Of course, they cannot know--

there is no way for them to know--

the lovely music which flowed

from those living fingertips.

Editing One's Life

2009-01-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

The concert mistress of the local orchestra asked me to submit a bio and photograph for the upcoming concert. I always read musicians' biographical statements with a jaundiced eye because of course they are always written to create a certain perception. Why should you want to hear this person play? Because he or she graduated from an important school, won this or that competition, performed in other instances without incurring too much shame.

What I might have written is: MB is playing the solo in the Mozart Piano Concerto because the orchestra was not able, given its budget, to get a better soloist. She is probably doing the best she can, but during the fast movements, perhaps you would do better to read the program notes or converse quietly with your neighbor. She made her own dress and bought that stunning necklace on e-Bay. If she gets into serious trouble during the concerto (knocks the book off the rack, has to sneeze, loses her place), please try to create a distraction. If she makes it all the way to the end and plays the last two notes correctly, please clap very loudly with relief. She has had a lot of piano lessons, but she is very nervous.

I picked out the only flattering photograph ever made of me (attached), but my husband pointed out that the picture is fly-specked, creased, and fifteen years old. We substituted a candid shot in which I look tired.

Coping

2009-01-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

When I heard that the Ukraine gas line affects Greece, I wrote my friend to make sure she is not freezing. Athens, like San Francisco, can be viciously cold in the winter. She replied: "We can still use wood to warm up. Do not forget we are ascetic. We find ways to resolve such kind of problems. We are Greeks."

Poverty

2009-01-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

I was glad to hear that a few copies of Living Poor With Style, published in the 1970s and long out of print, are still available here and there on line. With all the talk about the terrible economy, etc., etc., I have to believe that most of us do not really know what poverty is, and that even those who are truly poor do not know how to cope with any grace or cheer. On the BBC news, there are videos from various parts of the world where people are really poor. Many of them are beyond caring, but others still find ways to keep clean, to make the most of what they have, to wear scraps of bright color.

Poverty itself has lessons, something monastic orders have known for centuries. Some kinds of privation simply force one to think of higher things. If you do not have a place to live or anything to eat, if you are in danger from war and afraid for your children, then you are truly poor. But most people in this country who think they are poor are not dodging bombs. They have running water, even hot running water, a car, access to meals and social services.

Some of us are really fortunate and have the luxury of family, friends, peace, sound roofs, good plumbing, a small steady income, reasonably good health and a measure of self-sufficiency. Maybe we all need to think of a survival baseline and be extremely grateful for whatever we have above and beyond that point.

Christmas for the Birds

2008-12-22T17:26:00.000-08:00

Every year about this time, big flocks of robins descend on our cotoneaster bushes to eat the orange berries. Somehow the word spreads that the berries are ripe or perhaps even fermented. It is impossible to have a gloomy thought, with all the soaring, diving, jostling, chirping and sheer birdy exuberance going on just outside the window. Four or five birds at a time gorge on the berries while others wait in the nearby trees for their turn.

A Christmas Story

2008-12-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

Lambros, a thin little boy, was our downstairs neighbor when we first went to the Farm School in northern Greece. He lived with his parents and little brother in a two-room apartment like ours. In the winter, his mother closed all the doors and the family lived in the front room, where there was the tiniest imaginable wood stove. She kept the pine floors scoured with caustic soda so that they were smooth and almost white.

There were four pallets in the room during the winter. "My husband and I do not sleep together," the mother explained to me. "We cannot afford more children."

When Lambros brought home a bad grade, his mother spanked him, outside, so all the neighbors could see and hear. In those days, this was not considered child abuse. "I told you to bring me an 'A'," she would shout. She believed his entire future depended on his doing well in school, and she may have been right.

One Christmas Day, I wrapped a small toy, took it downstairs, and knocked at Lambros' door. "There!" his mother shouted as she snatched the gift from my hand. "I told you, Lambros, that Santa Claus would be coming! You see, he took your gift to the neighbor by mistake!" And Lambros' skinny little face lit up as he held out both hands for the present.

Babette's Feast

2008-12-17T07:50:00.000-08:00

It wasn't easy, trying to assemble a mince pie this year. Joy of Cooking had a recipe which made 20 pies and called for four pounds of chopped beef or ox heart and two pounds of beef suet, clearly not what we wanted. A search of several stores finally produced a small jar of Crosse and Blackwell mincemeat, barely enough to fill the pie shell, and when the top crust went over this ungenerous filling, it sank, split and cracked.

Babette's Feast was a movie about a woman whose art was cooking. When she won a large amount of money, she spent all of it buying ingredients for a fabulous meal. When someone said to her "But now you don't have any money", she replied "An artist is never poor."

I told this story to my dear departed painter friend Howard once and it made him cry. I thought of it when I looked at the ruined pie I had hoped would cheer Nicodemus up. Holly patches of red and green pastry seemed a possibility. The power went off and then back on while the pie was baking, and after two hours, I was surprised to see that the oven was still cold, the pie unbaked.

I guess I am some kind of artist, though I don't know what kind. I do know that I hardly ever feel poor, no matter what my finances look like. Nicodemus was ecstatic about the pie.

Icons

2008-12-14T15:54:00.000-08:00

When Nicodemus is gilding one of his icons, there are little flecks of gold everywhere, in his hair and beard, on the table, floating around. Long before the word meant a picture on a computer, since more than 15 centuries ago, icons have been venerated in Eastern Orthodox churches all over the world and in the homes of Orthodox people.

Copying an existing icon is not bad form; in fact, the Christian saints are pictured in certain stylized and typical ways which most hagiographers or icon painters observe. Saint Peter always has white curly hair, for instance, whereas Paul is bald, with a little tuft of hair above his brow line.

I asked Nicodemus to outline the steps in painting an icon in the Byzantine style.

1. Select a piece of poplar, wide and thick and not too hard, making sure it is flat. Miter four separate pieces of lath and glue to the board to form a frame.

2. Sand the wood, starting with coarse sandpaper and progressing to Number 1500 grit.

3. Begin primer coats with a coat of gelatin, marble dust and water, with five or six thick coats and then five or six coats of thinner gesso. Sand to a mirror surface (some painters put a fabric layer down before the last coats.)

4. Trace your picture and scribe all the lines into the gesso so they will be visible during painting and gilding.

5. Use masking fluid around the edge of images.

6. Paint six coats of clay bole onto the area to be gilded and sand to a mirror finish. Glair, the froth of egg white, is added to the bole to strengthen it.

7. For water gilding, paint ethel alcohol over a small area, cut a half piece of gold leaf onto a piece of leather and apply to icon with a gilder's brush, dropping it onto the wet spot.

8. Gild up to the scribed, masked area. Press gold leaf to make sure it is bedded in.

9. Burnish the gold with an agate, rubbing vigorously over the nearly dry gold leaf.

10. Faulting: Re-gild missed places, burnish to a perfect shine and dry.

11. Remove masking fluid for a sharp edge to the painted figure.

12. Paint face, hands, etc., dark, using the petit lac method, and do a dark first coat for clothing.

13. Apply the first level of lights and reinstate features from scribed areas with a fine brush.

The painting then proceeds from dark to light, using natural minerals mixed with egg yolk and distilled water. The edges of the frame are painted with maroon or cadmium red. Letters which tell the subject or the name of the saint are painted with oxgall onto the gold and then finished with egg tempera.

The little madonna was one of Nicodemus' first icons, and it remains my favorite. The pose is called "eleiousa" or "the merciful", and the child is looking out toward the angels who are holding a cross and a spear, the instruments of his martyrdom. The mother is worried, as mothers tend to be, but the child is only interested and curious.

Night of Lights

2008-12-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

Last night: We are blocking all the cars in a full parking lot, emergency blinkers on, flat tire, trying to phone Triple-A on a cell phone we never use, and I am supposed to accompany the community chorus in fifteen minutes, using a toy piano which works on flashlight batteries. Through the door to the little mall courtyard where the music is supposed to happen, we can see belly dancers in somewhat middle-eastern costumes and bangles, and an angel walking on stilts. I believe in parking gods, so I asked for help. Within 13 minutes, not only one, but THREE parking places appeared and the AAA truck had come and changed the tire. We picked up the music stand, the toy piano, and the scores, set up in the mall and started playing as the chorale began to sing with their lovely pure voices. Joy to the world!

Song of Survival

2008-12-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

The community chorus for which I play the piano has a number of very senior citizens as well as young folk who like to sing. I have to sit down to play the piano, of course, but there are singers who have to sit down because they can't really stand, at least not for very long. Some of them walk with canes, and some have to take the very slow chair lift up to the second-story hall where we rehearse.

One of the things they are practicing for a program next week is a medley of Christmas songs from the documentary film, "Song of Survival", whose story was also told in a commercial film called "Paradise Road".

During World War II, in 1942, two women interned in a concentration camp in Sumatra wrote out in pencil, on scraps of paper, whatever music they could remember--orchestra music, piano pieces, hymns-- and taught the women prisoners to sing them in a four-part chorus. Some of the women were so weak from malnutrition that they could not stand; they were barefoot and dressed in rags, plagued with tropical sores. Still they sang until more than half of them had died. The survivors said the music gave them the strength to go on.

In 1980, the original pencilled manuscripts were given to Stanford University; they were transcribed, performed by the Peninsula Women's Chorus, and then published in 2000.

The women in our community chorus, especially the very senior citizens, are singing these pieces with special beauty and fervor. These women are not prisoners. They wear nice clothes and are not malnourished, but many of them suffer from various medical problems and physical limitations. They have their own reasons for feeling the Song of Survival very deeply. One of the women told me that when she sings this music, she usually has to sing it through her tears.

Tofu Turkey

2008-11-26T09:56:00.000-08:00

My tofu turkey has passed into myth; nobody who was there or who heard about it will ever let me forget it. Briefly, it took all day to make and it tasted like oatmeal. A slightly more successful vegetarian turkey was the spaghetti squash with chestnut stuffing and a sweet potato head. One year when I was living alone, I ate plain white rice and drank sage tea, feeling terribly sanctimonious because lots of people in the world would be grateful to have just that on the day we call Thanksgiving. It was not very satisfying, and I'm sure I had a cheese sandwich later in the day. Another Thanksgiving, I got on a train going to Seattle and skipped Thanksgiving altogether, though I felt grateful for a lot of things. This year we are going to a restaurant, just Nicodemus and me. Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday, and gratitude is our compass. Happy Thanksgiving!