Pancakes

Every few weeks, school starts late, and I have the joy of an extra couple of hours with my youngest kid. For a while now, we've been using that time to head downtown to Darby's for breakfast; it's happened enough that we could call it a Tradition if we wanted. It's a luxury, having this extra time, and being able to spend it sharing coffee (she mostly warms her hands with it, but usually also sneaks a sip) and eating pancakes is a treasure I will not trade for anything.

Sometimes on weekends, we pry her older sister out of bed and head downtown to the diner. Or maybe it's not until afternoon, but that's no problem, because like any real diner, you can order breakfast all day. One time, the music was some rap about pancakes, and we could hear the cooks talking about pancakes (sorry to be repetitive about pancakes, but me and the girls tend to be selective with our terms, and cannot abide flapjacks, hotcakes, and especially flannel-cakes). One of them said, "I guess I eat a pancake about every damn day!" We cracked up, and repeat that phrase often, if not every damn day. Beneath the laughter, we all recognize a purity in the boast: the guy really enjoys having a pancake every day. A humble pancake sticking to your ribs gives you strength to face whatever the day throws at you.

Even a short stack can be too much for a kid, and sometimes there are leftovers. She works her way through methodically, cutting enough to eat and saving the rest of the disk, so there will be a substantial something instead of a pile of syrupy pieces. Usually, the dog is the beneficiary. Only recently, DNA analysis showed that a key difference between domesticated dogs and their wolfy cousins is that dogs can digest carbohydrates, and our hound excels. She gets a stale pancake and prances around for a while, showing off to those crows who sometimes taunt her that she has a delicious pancake, before settling down and gobbling it up.

Sometimes, I cook the pancakes. After years of messing with recipes and bisquick versions, I found a local pancake mix that does the trick best. These days, the youngest daughter mixes it, then I come along to knock out a few more lumps, and we let the batter rest while the skillet heats up. Cast iron is the only acceptable surface for me. Some of my earliest memories are of the thin blue smoke that my grand-dad let rise before flipping. Then watching my dad, him teaching me that watching the bubbles pop led to browned perfection without grand-dads carbonized edging. Dad cooked on an 11.25-inch Griswold skillet that family lore (or at least my recollection) says was given to him when he went away to grad school. With this classic American iron, he could cook anything the lone male physics student was apt to eat (all three meals). I have that skillet now, and continue to cook all kinds of stuff in it, sometimes to the chagrin of my kids...except when it's a pancake day.

For some reason, my recollections (not yet lore) of Dad's last few days focus on pancakes missed. He had a terminal illness--refusing to knuckle under to the "terminal" label for a couple years already--and was having such a hard time we'd scheduled a doctor visit. After some listening to lungs and flipping through charts, the doctor sat down with Dad, Mom, and me, and explained that Dad needed to be admitted to the hospital. I knew, and I think Dad did too, that the unspoken end of that sentence was "to die."

It was mid-morning now, and Dad said he was hungry. Stupidly, I sought permission go out to eat before going in to the hospital. I should have just taken him. But the message from the nurse was something like, "Now, you know we can't let you do that." That special gentle condescension that transforms dead men walking into incompetent children had already kicked in. I should have nodded, walked him out, turned the other way, and escaped to a stack of pancakes, but Mom was also worried about what might happen and still believing that after a day or two of hospitalization, we'd go out for breakfast. I didn't want to take that from her, and besides Dad probably wanted to believe in that too.

Instead of dropping dead over pancakes, he died in a bed surrounded by machines, stuck full of tubes. My aunt did smuggle in one of his favorite meals before the end, but we never got that last moment of freedom, that last stack of pancakes.That that's my big regret is a blessing, but I still wish I'd whisked my parents away and met my sister for a Last Breakfast.

So, on those late-start days, I'll be sitting at a table with my kid, looking out at the street-scape shenanigans of making silverware sculptures while was await the pancakes. Falling behind a little on work doesn't matter. Eating carbs I don't need is not as unhealthy as missing time with my kids. Following hospital protocol but subverting a dying man's wish was a shame. Pancakes are life, and even if you cannot have one every damn day, it's worth sharing a stack with someone you love.

Admint Calendar

So crazy it just might work.

Being both a mint junkie and a anti-garbage saver of containers, I have on hand a bag full of little plastic disks that once contained mints. I've used some now and then for seeds, but consumption has out-paced re-use for a while now. This fall, however, inspiration struck my younger daughter and I, and we vowed to invent the Admint Calendar.

Decorating the tree. Painting and layout by the child genius.

After some discussion, we settled on cutting out a Christmas tree shape from a scrap of 1/4-inch plywood, painting it green, and attaching the mint containers. She determined the shape by laying out the containers to fit on the board we had; beginning a single one at the apex, her formula for subsequent rows was "add two, then substract one, then repeat." Making the tree took a few minutes, followed by an hour under a fan to dry it enough to do the next step.

Attaching the containers: over-engineering by the dad. (Not pictured: fat ring o' glue)

We have a genetic predisposition to build things to last, perhaps at odds with the surficial preoccupation of some crafters, and so we attached the containers with a glob-ring of gorilla glue and staples slammed deep into the board. Conveniently, the tops of the containers can be pulled off to allow the staple gun to do its thing.

Stashing the candy. Goodbye 'til Christmas day, Eggnog Chocolate.

All that remained was to snap on the lids and install the treats. Maybe the best thing about making your own Adventskalendar is that you get to put good candy in it. Not stuff that was made years ago. No opening up the door to disappointment. It turns out that Seattle Chocolates fit perfectly, and we happen to love them.

No product endorsement intended, but thanks for the glittery labels, whichever corporation markets this stuff.

So, there you have it. The Admint Calendar. The only one of its kind.

The Rain is Back, and So am I

All of a sudden, I see it's been months since I posted here (if that makes any sense). Today, we've finally returned to prototypical Northwest weather: rain, the horizon blurred by a liquid sky, drizzle-drop-drench. I was just talking to my kids, and they agree, it's a relief.

So we must be fully acclimatized to this place. Last week, even though it was a full 20 degrees cooler than "sweltering" in the land of my birth, I was sweating, unable to keep count of how many sunny days we'd had in a row. The girls agree: too many days of bright blue skies in a row becomes oppressive. We welcome the wet blanket now.

Summer rarely reaches the white-sky, humid hellishness of a mid-Atlantic summer here, and it's true that we all soak it up, enjoy it, and retreat from the indoors. It's no accident that Northwesterners spend so much time hiking and camping and such. (OK, not me, but other people, whose jobs keep them inside most days.) This summer more than most, I took a hiatus from blogging and other trivialindoor pursuits. Instead: gardening, fieldwork, and gazing into the yard that became my own, and moving.

So, a new season, a new (old) house. Through great willpower, I've managed to put off doing yardwork at the new place, but that's about to change. For one thing, the communal/community garden is starting to wind down. For another, who the hell wants to dig up the yard when it is hot(ish) and the ground is hard? For yet another, there were side gigs and wildfire-chasing to do while the sun was out.

Now, as the drizzle softens the glacial outwash that is my yard, it's time to dig in. Now, as the Equinoctal threshhold has been crossed, there will be time to write. (As opposed to just clicking in photos at Anthrowback, my minor-effort summertime diversion.) Now, as Winter wrings the glare of Summer sun into a pool of mild Autumnal reflection, it's time to seek shelter under roofs and with kin.

Freedom Inc.

Phoneto by Zonk'em

Outside of Buck's Spice Shop and Darby's, two businesses I gladly choose to support, there is an interstice of green in the sidewalk. Grey, gray,...grass! There's a little (but still larger than the li'l lawn) brass plaque identifying this space as a park. Now and then, there's the sign you see here, miniscule but effective.

"Keep off the grass*" resinates this week, what with the opening of the first legal pot stores outside of Colorado. As my family waited on Sunday morning for a table at Darby's, we saw the sign and the roach** thoughtfully tucked into the park to stack on another entendre***.

We laughed, and took a few photos, inspiring other people to do the same. My kids didn't start doing drugs, I managed to hold onto my job, and breakfast--although served to Led Zeppelin live--was delicious, and in no way a freakshow. Legal pot in 2014 Washington is,...so what?

It was interesting to hear reports on NPR that actually spoke of today's opening of pot stores here in terms of "civil rights," maybe not on par with gay marriage (local reaction: we're totally used to it,...so what?), but a great day for freedom, in the words of a guy who'd been in line since 4AM (sorry, guy who showed up at 4:20) to be the first to buy legal weed,**** only to say he'd light up to "Dark Side of the Moon,"***** sorta like he has for 33% of the 1,287 bags of reefer****** he's bougth before, illegally.

Equality for people who don't fit in the archaic man-woman identities and roles is a civil rights issue, but what happened today is a consumer issue. In Americo, though, consumer freedom has increasingly stood in for and even pushed aside the more basic freedoms in the Constitution.

Today gets reported by those who worry as the Beginning of the End, gateway drug to utter debauchery and decay. Meanwhile, others spout some crap about Freedom when what they're being offered is a chance to pay premium prices plus 25% tax (that's right, Washington State imposes a 25% tax on this freedom) for something that's actually pretty easy to get outside of the official stores. The saying "Freedom isn't Free" needs to be amended, "And it's Heavily Taxed".

So, light up and celebrate if you must, but don't let the ability to go to a store and light up legally make you think you're more free, don't let THC be the opiate of the masses, and don't develop memory loss about more fundamental freedoms at stake in this changing AmeriCo. For real freedom, don't feed the stores that will compete and merge and take-over and consolidate into the same corporate creature that stalks every revenue flow; go chip a park out of the concrete.


* an archaic term for psychoactive cannabis
** an archaic term for the remains of a partially smocked grass cigarette, or "joint"
*** a French term. I only explain archaic terms, so you're on your own for this one
**** archaic term for grass*
***** archaic stoner music
****** archaic term for a joint** or maybe weed****

One Seventh

Seven Slices Make a Wheel

Geez. The last two up-to-date posts were depressing, so here I am regressing to nostalgia.

Someday, I'll get around to the post about reinventing the wheel, a popular 20th Century pastime, but for now I' happy just to post a pic of a wheel. Behold yon wagon wheel. Rims of steel (maybe iron) round hub and circumferance of wood (I know not which species).

Look close, and you'll see that the 14 spokes radiate to seven sections of wood, each 51.42857 degrees of a circle. Sure, it would have been easier to go with an even half dozen 60-degree arcs, easy to mark, nothing more than a radial length required if you know the trick, calculation rendered superfluous.

But at what cost? The wheel divided by six is a wheel divided in half, prone to buckling, vulnerable to folding when you hit that rock cockeyed. Divide the wheel into sevenths, and opposite each joint is a solid stretch of strong wood grain. There is strength in oddness.

Do you see?

Maybe not. In which case, I draw to your attention the seven-sliced pie (sorry, no photo). I grew up hearing the legendary prowess of my grandmother, who could slice a pie into even sevenths. Any fool can do eigths, and sixths are pretty easy too, but the seven-sliced pie requires a keen eye. No zipping the knife all the way across; she had to know the center, the 51-point-something angle. Each cut depended on confidence in the face of chaos, each slice an expression of asymmetry that would add up to: symmetry.

The seven-slice pie was not a matter of neccesity. It was a luxury. She had a family of six. The extra slice was for the hard worker home after a long day (her, often enough, because not only granddad went to the mill), the kid who excelled, the neighbor whose kindness merited recognition. Or, he-hee, the cook whose hand made it. Number seven was the extra. They were not rich, grandma and grand-daddy, but they could still live large. 

Puppy!

These goggles make my nose look big. Please take them off.

 Long ago, a fluffy puppy joined a daughter in the house. Ten years, another daughter, and a cross-country move later, Daisy dog is still fluffy. People always think she's a puppy, even though she's mellowed out a lot, and does a lot of this:

For some reason nobody can remember, much less make sense of, the plan had been to go to the shelter and adopt a cat. All the felines were tweekers, or on a smoke break, or hazing new arrivals, but then a pack o puppies hit the floor, and soon enough a girl was headed home with a puppy in her arms.

She (the puppy) turned out to be--stop me if you've heard this before--the best dog ever. Smart, nice, pretty easy to train and to live with. Instead of growing up to be the Labrador mutt the shelter staff thought, she looks a lot like what people here call a mid-sized Alaskan Eskimo dog. Curly tail like a sled dog, but with much softer fur. Fur like the softest wool, in fact, fur like the famous (and allegedly extinct) Salish Wool Dog, which was used by Indians in the Pacific NW to make blankets. We've woven (OK, twisted and plaited) some of her fur from the Spring haircut that always makes people say "Ohhhh, cute puppy!," and yeah, it makes good wool.

But planning ahead to wash her at the right time, save a few years' worth of fur, and actually weave anything is more than me or anyone descended from me may be able to achieve. Salish Sea tribes apparently raised flocks of these dogs, placing them on islands all summer, where they would be safe from predators and interbreeding with hunting dogs and village curs. That, and a general description of dogs much like mine, is about all I can find out about the breed, but I have to assume that this wool-dog husbandry was complex, and had it's mavens. Absent real info, I speculate: shepherding may have been a convenient way to send pain-in-the-ass teenage boys away from polite society, wool-dogs may have inhabited prairies where root-foods grew to keep the rodents in check,...my mind wanders.

In any case, it had to be cute in extreme. A bunch of fluffy white canines cavorting in an island meadow, pouncing on voles and each other, playing, and of course, napping in the sun.

My puppy is not part of a flock. She'll tolerate some dogs, ignore a lot more, and occasionally snarl down the law on the ones stupid enough to question her reign. She is part of a small flock of girls, trained by her, who do her bidding (mostly). Her fur is in our furniture and clothes (and more food than we'd like to think), but not woven into a blanket. Being a pound puppy, she's not going to have any pups of her own, so there will be no flock o' Daisies. It's sad to know that despite her eternal youthful looks, she is not immortal, and there will never be a replacement, but we enjoy the time we have with her.

Building a Treehouse

That dog is one hell of a supervisor.

A couple weekends ago, the kids and I built a treehouse. I guess "house" is an exaggeration: no walls, no roof, and not much room. But, it is attached to a tree, and you do have to climb a ladder to get there.

Some people think vice is not a good foundation, but occasionally it works out. (That black thing in back is the bumper-seat, not haging beneath the structure.)

The treehouse begins with the tree. In this case, no dendritic cradle, and not even any useful branches, just a slightly off vertical pillar of conifer. For that reason, and because I rent this place and may be required to tear it down someday,* my idea was to use 2" x 8" boards more or less like a vice. Four threaded steel rods, bolted tightly together clamp the boards to the tree (a couple of nails held them in place during drilling and tightening, but would not be enough to support weight by themselves). The result is that the treehouse is minimally bothersome to the tree; as it grows, the bark below will swell a bit, increasing the support. The bolts could be loosened if it looks like the tree is getting squeezed too much, but I doubt that will happen.

Architecturally, I think treehouses should be vernacular and adaptive, expressions of the tree and the inhabitants, and not a static imposed design. So the basic cantilevered vice idea, which may have supported the kids, but not me, required some changing, and we added posts to the outer end of the beams. The joists, rather than being parallel and evenly spaces, radiate slightly to accomodate the geometry of our platform, and the sheet of plywood for the floor has a cutout that hugs the tree.

Those posts express another aspect that I've always thought crucial to a genuine treehouse:they are salvaged. Each consists of a couple of 2 x 4's that used to be a neighbor's bathroom wall, nailed together and cut to fit the odd lengths between beam and the rocks I dragged into place. Ascent is by means of half a step ladder whose braces and other half were getting rickety, and wwas removed; it is lashed into place with some rope salvaged from a boat headed to a landfill.

Almost done. The skinny post was a temporary support, and the real ladder is not in place, but you get the idea.

The treehouse will continue to evolve, and the kids will accesorize it. Already, we added a seat beneath, consisting of a big floating boat bumper suspended from more of that rope. The space beneath the floor, I should mention, was designed so I can stand up under it, out of the rain. The campfire ring nearby may need to scoot over a few feet for safety's sake, but will remain along with the sod-sofa that has been in place ever since I dug the last garden bed. Together, they are becoming a nice little outdoor living space.

One Kid, Two Kid, Red Kid, Blue Kid

Here's one kid. She is punching a snowbank, which insulted her family, or otherwise earned her wrath. She could care less that it is bigger than she is, and is happy to be the center of the shot.

 

Here is two kid (numero uno, in birth order), walking atop a snowbank that she saw as a walkway to another view. She is happy to disappear into its immenseness, and would be unhappy were her face to be recognizable.

I love both of these kids. They are both osum. They have some samenesses, and they have some differences. It would be sad otherwise.

With both of them, there is magic. The combination of complements, or play of opposites, or whatever they are to each other, creates alchemy. The kind that can turn a Northwest mid-winter day cloudless, that can make their dad's stoiclear eyes tear up with happiness. 

Footstep Echoes

Not Nisqually, or even near Olympia, but you get the idea.

The girls and I have been enjoying Olympia on foot lately. We covered 4 miles on the Nisqually delta board walk, cold and windy, but rewarded with wildlife and a hot meal afterward. We ambled downtown (yes, humans can get places without cars), exploring neighborhoods and urban wildlife along the way to the farmers market, followed by a bus ride back (no, humans don't have to let the feet carry the load all the time). Forays through the neighborhood (sometimes with feet pushing pedals instead of pounding pavement) with no particular goal in mind. Motor-free missions to scope out firework viewing spots, or just to pick up a few things at the grocery. Walking down to the port to greet canoe-loads of tribal paddlers (ready to set foot on land after crossing Salish seas), and then trudging back uphill. Yesterday, we walked out on a beach as far as a very low tide would allow, our feet in water that does not hit new land til Asia.

We're exploring, finding where the cute puppies live and where the sweet fruit grows. We're getting places or going nowhere in particular. We're experiencing city grit and natural beauty. We're finding short cuts and long vistas. We're discovering secret gardens and re-discovering public places that exist only as blurs to the car-bound.

We're spending lots of time together with no screens, with no walls. Feet keep moving, and conversation flows. I was never a hiker, but this is familiar to me; it's in my blood. I remember walking through university woods with my family in search of blueberries and a Greek theater. I recall walking what seemed like a long way through the little town where my grandparents lived, visiting neighbors, the firehouse, and ending up at a soda fountain where we would watch our milkshakes take form. These things happened with lifelong teachers who appreciated the value of leaving classrooms and letting places teach at the pace of foot-falls.

As we walk, the earth is pressing memories into our feet. The kids may not remember any one sight, or a particular conversation that passed between us, but the ground was walked on by us, together, our feet shared places and soaked them up. (I enjoy walking solo, too, but moving as a small pack adds something.) Memories are being implanted in our soles, imprinted on our souls, nevermind whether our brains take note yet.

Picture This

Visual anthropology no longer captivates me to the point that I subscribe to the journal (Visual Anthropology), but then again it's more fun to toss out a few observations than to talk all academic. Oh, and I take a ton of photos, and once in a while I get the urge to get something more than a forgotten jpeg. Most of the time, though, there's just the passing instant of the shutter clicking, capturing something.

This is some of my combat photography near the end of a Sponge War, an extremely popular part of the elementary school's field day. On either end of the field of battle are lines of big buckets filled with water and sponges. In the middle is a line they can approach, but not cross. Being there with my first grader, the sense I got from the kids was more of "I'm gonna get wet! Yay!" than anything about a war. Lots of kids just squeezed sponges on themselves and each other directly.

My visual cortex is not so interested in deconstructing socialization rituals, but it does suggest that I report the following about this photo:

• My daughter's about to whip a sponge at some unsuspecting boy. I think she missed, but scored a hit for grrrldom.
• The kid at the left is just off the field of battle, and has evil Joker make-up. More extensive than most of the face-painting I saw that day, and he seemed to be exhorting people on the field of battle while himself staying clear, slightly elevated. But not enough for anyone to do what he was saying. He must be a member of the priesthood in this culture.
• The field of battle is within sight of, but obtrusively below and outside of, the high school athletic field, Monumental Architecture on the neighborhood scale. These kids will be there, one day; they'll traverse the cultural landscape as they grow. [I know, this sounds like I am delving into socialization, but it's only because I do so revel in cartographic visualization.]
• It being near the end of the action, a lot of kids had lost interest in the battle, or in taking sponges to the buckets to re-load. A few, like mine, took the mission pretty literally, and kept picking up sponges (not always re-loading), firing again and again.

So much more could be wrung from this picture (way more than a thousand words, were I aiming for publication), but those seem like the highlights, and it's late. I'll drift off and maybe dream about what other people see in this photo.
 

And Her Little Doggy, Too

Newcomers to this blog, expecting gardening or backroads or nature, you are about to get a dose of the shiftlessness and dissanctity that crops up from time to time. Continue on only if you are not readily offended by death and sacrilege:

Lord Marmalade

The title here is a twisting of Lady Marmalade, whose gichy gichy yaya is one of the few riffs guaranteed to get me dancing, but which has nothing to do with this entry. That weren't no lady, and marmalade seems so un-funky, more old-fashioned and British. Ergo the "Lord." 

Paddington Bear and old women take their tea with marmalade at the ready, it's medicinal power soothing the harm done to one's palate by the clinkery toast favoured on that side of the pond. My grandparents liked it, and I do too, but few devotees are young. Not sweet enough, too full of the peel that Americans have cast off for generations.

This concoction's etymology trails back to classical times, alluding to the Greek "honey apple," an apple grafted to the quince. For a long time, it has meant a jam or preserve including citrus, the acidity probably important before sanitary canning, preservatives, and pasteurization. 

Now it's a nostalgic taste to some, to me. I made some batches this year, both to practice the science of canning which was nearly lost by my generation, as well as to savor something grandma made. The first time I used blood oranges, which I'm guessing would have been unimaginably exotic in central Ohio during the Depression, when as a young mother she began canning in earnest. I followed her lead, and made a portion into "hot jam" by inserting a cinnamon stick into each jar as it was filled. I also experimented with some, adding some local cranberries to the mix to redden it further and add a bit of bite.

Equally exotic may have been the preternaturally orange navels of the modern supermarket, bred for looks, tasting like water. The blood oranges had the allure of aroma, more flavor packed into a tennis ball sized fruit than in the softballs lobbed out of Florida by the trainload. Even better, they were on sale.

Same goes for the variety in the next batch. The local grocery had a sale on "Cara Cara" oranges, which were dead ripe and redolent of heaven as I walked in. I immediately filled a couple of bags with the fruit, same size as the bloods, similarly ugly on the outside with patches of green, some blemishes, and even a soft spot or two (all of which told me the "organic" label was not fake, and that they'd been picked ripe). This time, I went for straight marmalade, no experimental or family-inspired additives.

I don't have grandma's recipe, and had to go looking on the internet, my approach to which is to triangulate, to look at plenty and attempt to discern a logic. The first task is always to weed out the bullshit: the people repeating some untested recipe because they like to post stuff, the "easy" versions maximizing prepared stuffs and minimizing cooking, and the just plain mistaken. Eventually, I zero in on the essentials, and get an idea of the leeway in ingredients and proportions that won't result in failure. The rest is reconciling units (cups versus pounds of sugar, pounds versus numbers of oranges), and trying to figure out what my palate wants compared to typicality, which in this case was less sugar.

In the end, it was this:

10 pounds of oranges (32 or so of the size  favor) - Peel the zest off of about 1/4 of them, quarter and thinly slice everything else.

6 cups of water - Add this and the oranges to a large steel or enamel pot, and gradually bring to a boil. Keep cooking til the only identifiable pieces are the rinds, which should be quite soft.

Now turn it off and do something else til tomorrow.

Start again by gradually turning your orange slurry to a boil. 

10 cups of sugar (You have pretty wide latitude here, I think. Add less to begin, and keep adding til it seems right to you.) - Add the zest and stir. And stir! If you don't it'll start to stick and burn on the bottom of the pot. 

The mixture is sneaky and vindictive at this point--it will look calm, lulling you into not stirring. Then when you start again you release a sudden violent boiling, a volcanic eruption of orange lava hotter than boiling that will stick to your skin and burn like hell. Sweet hell, but painful nonetheless.

A lot of recipes carry on about how you need to bring the stuff to 220 or 222 degrees, or the jam won't set. I've never managed to get it past about 215, and it has set fine. The key things seem to be: it gets darker, you begin to have trouble keeping it from sticking and burning, and it gets thick enough that after a while you cannot stand to stir any more. It's done, so you can it.

This last batch went into some old squat jars I got at a yard sale. Some proudly proclaimed their modernity with embossed patent dates from over a century ago (the same wide-mouth lids of today work just fine, and it's good to know that some things don't change). 

I dipped into one of these pots of marmalade--talking in a Paddington accent of course--and was rewarded with the colour and flavour of liquid sunshine. Nostalgic in name and appearance, perhaps, but as bright and fresh a taste as I could imagine. 

Yum.

A Failure

Once upon a dream, I started a business. I'd had one before, and it had worked. This one ended unhappily, but not forever after. I'd forgotten about it until Spring gardening season rolled around again.

The idea came to me during the Virginia years, a time frought and fucked as any I've survived. I'd go do a field project in Hawai`i for a few months, then come back and write it up. This made better financial sense than the full-time job I was offered locally; weird world. The work I did was exciting and rewarding, and I was allowed to control how it went for the most part. But it also meant missing out on my family, and each trip made it clearer that we'd never be able to afford a decent life if we moved back to the islands.

So I considered going into contract archaeology on my own in the Old Dominion, quickly dismissing the idea as a doomed foray into a hyper-competitive market already full up, not to mention having start-up costs way beyond my means. Then one Spring another idea lit.

Maybe in restrospect, I'd begun grasping at straws, but at the time it felt like I'd discovered a way to weave threads of my experience and interest into a tapestry. Old things, dirt, plants, history, gardening, ethnobotany, sustainable land use... I would invent and occupy the niche of landscape designer/household archaeolgist/... Living in the first American watershed settled by Anglos, I'd charge their descendants to visit their places, learn what had come before, restore it if they wanted, or design a landscape that would testify to their presence long after their kids and kids' kids had become wastrels.

To be sure, landscape architects with expertise in historic gardens exist, but they operate only in the thinner reaches of the statusphere, where the blood runs blue for lack of oxygen and exogamy. There are archaeologists who know something of historic gardens, but they are occupied with their jobs at presidential and plutocratic estates, and spurn the dirty world of digging for hire. The Heritage crowd can be woefully ignorant of the millenia of plant knowledge that preceded Jamestown settlers, and native plant enthusiasts would sooner dine on Cicuta maculata than plant an English-ish cottage garden. Any number of people could grasp a thread tighter than I, but only I would have the tapestry.

There was no time or money to get a Landscape Architect degree (no prob, I didn't want big commercial jobs anyway), so I set to stacking up what creds I could. I was admitted to the UVA/Monticello Historic Landscape Institute, I took a class on the HIstory of Landscape Architecture, I became certified by the state-wide organization as a Landscape Designer (did an end-run on that one, avoiding the usual class-load by re-packaging my anthropological, planning, and cartographic skills into a portfolio that passed muster).

One reason I'd chosed this garden path was that it could be done without employees, without investment capital. I had my body (still relatively strong) and a shed full of archaeology and landscaping tools. My wife got a gig that she generously transformed into a pick-up truck.

And I was ready.

But Virginia wasn't.

I ran through connections quickly. A couple referred to me by my sister, and better yet her boss and his River Road Mansion. My college room-mate with his new spread, who bought a design and paid me to implement it over a year or two of seasonal visits.

But otherwise, not much. Even the work handed to me amounted to very little money in my pocket. I kept taking Hawai`i work to keep from starving my family, which interfered with being able to focus on the landscape design business. I managed to have one good job that I got on my own, designing and making a Japanese style garden in Church Hill, complete with rustic timber frame tea house.

I did learn a lot in my efforts to get work, meeting prospective clients and walking their properties. For instance, even the most ignorant and inexperienced people think that they can plan a lasting landscape (why did you call me?), because one time they grew a great bed of those, uh, you know, the yellow ones. Of if willing to concede that I had some expertise, obstinately insisting on a landscape that would at once be sublime, maintenance free, instantly mature, drought-proof, deer-proof, and death-proof. Oh, and extremely cheap.

So many faces of cheap. Like the people who call for a consultation, a price estimate, and are obviously just milking you for ideas and knowledge with no intention of ever hiring you. Or the ones who will hire you for a basic conceptual design and then ask if you can just real-quick-like whip up a detailed plan and materials list and specifications for nothing. Or who string you along before dumping you to have your ideas done by one of those "landscape designers" whose qualifications amount to having a diesel truck and a trailer full of lawnmowers and leaf-blowers and illegal aliens. Or the old money in their brick and stone mansions that are taken aback that you won't work for what the colored people did back when they were colored. Or the new money in their opulent McMansions, mortgated to the hilt and wanting the patina of age and class instantly with sale plants from Home Depot that have been withering their driveway for a week.

I was getting to despise people. Even more than I had before.

It didn't help that the big dream--that I could do landscapes that would grow into something that would persist, that might feed generations yet unborn with beauty and fruit, with a tableaus of older worlds--was revealed as an impossibility. Because a yard is so personal, people cannot help tweaking it. They plop down some ugly-ass ornament, or if not ugly, definitely not part of the tapestry I'd woven in my mind. And to say so is to insult the customer, which means business is done. Then they get thrilled at some find at a plant sale, and place an invasive bully in the bed. Or they love some certain plant that is wrong for the place where they just know it would be perfect. Tell them it cannot take the heat, cold, wet, dry, or even that it will get too big and damage their house, and at least half the time, even though they may nod their head, their eyes reveal that they think you are an idiot or just too difficult.

At one point I groveled to my mom. Dad's will left everything to her, and she was sitting on a pile of money larger than she needed while her kids ate beans and rice and never ran the heat. If I could have enough to cover living for a year without having to keep running off to Hawai`i, enough to get my name out there where it would do some good, then I was willing to keep trying. But, no dice. I was disappointed, but not mad. It was her money, and she was already helping us financially. I was asking too much to say, "Support me for a year in case this crazy plan works out."

Maybe someone else will make a go of it. There are plenty of Virginians in the strata between the Monts (Vernon, -icello, -pelier) and the middling types that would be willing to pay enough to learn about the secret history buried in their soil (part of the plan was to do some archaeolopgy that would enrich the history of the owner's place, and maybe provide something cool for the mantlepiece), to have a garden matching the period of the house, or maybe to have a landscape that would feed the body and soul for a long time. If I'd been able to stick with it for years, it may have become a going concern. I still believe that a decade or two into it, I could have become The Name that people would pay real money to attach, that I may have been able to become part of the competitive consumption and display of the statusphere.

But then, it's best that hunger won out, that I looked elsewhere, and found a job doing something very different, very far away. Working for richers made me itchy and cranky. My friend was the only one uninterested in chiseling away at what I made (truth be told, the whole landscape thing with him may have been his way of spreading the wealth). Had I become a fulcrum in the one-upsmanship game, it may have broken something in me. More likely, I'd never make it up that far, some moderately rich bonehead would set me off, I'd refuse to do stupid things, and would limp along, maybe making ends meet, but becoming more and more misanthropic. My kids like beans and rice well enough, but is it fair to ask them to live with a broken dream and it's disgruntled dreamer?

Nah. Better the route taken a few years ago. Not a dream. Not a preconceived notion of what will work, trying to force the warp of my interest onto a weft of commercial success, notting nothing true. Epiphany may not be the right word to describe what has happened since I decided to admit failure as a landscape designer, but it is interesting how doors suddenly opened. Letting go of the dream let me try something else, ride the flow to a new place.

Where a life I never dreamed of is turning out to be better than most of the scenarios I would consciously imagine. I get to learn whole new plant communities, different ways of gardening in a strange climate, a rich ethnobotany, unique archaeology. Having the landscape design business, being my own boss, allegedly, turned out to be the least independence I'd had for a very long time. Paradoxically, working for a state government, keeping things right with laws and regs, has left me free.

One Vinyl Archive

My last post was about nostalgia. I remember writing that... Man, that was a good time. I dunno about you, but it seems to me like the world was a little gentler then, people took the time to stop and say hello, offer you some red hots.

But now is now and my sleep this night consisting of the miniscule peninsulae twixt bays echoing with the snoring rollers breaking next to me, coves of stinging salt brine intruding deep into nasal provinves. You know, a cold. So now, to write.

But first, the photo: Marley on Sony on walnut on camel-hair rug on tablesaw on garage floor. This is shortly after christmas, when I received an analog pre-amp to boost the circa 1979 turntable's signal to the 1980-something Panasonic boombox core.

Last time I heard music rumbling up from vinyl coulees was 1990. For more than a decade after, records and player perfected static techniques to amass a latently lithified mantle of dust in my parents' attick. Yeah, I spelled it attick, because fake as it may be, it looks older.

I wiped off dust a few times during the next decade, but the Virginia years were marred by death and dysfunction, poverty and plain ole bad luck. Breaking into a collection consisting primarily of early hardcore--live-fast die-young, dark and hopeless as a death-head's sinus--wouldn't have made sense anyway.

The tech to connect turntable to computer has been around for a while, but I don't want that. I want analog. Not because I am some high-end tube-warmed audiophile, but because I'm a preservationist, cheapskate, occasional luddite, garagelodite.

Likewise with the music. I have one milk crate of albums (plus a few of dad's classical discs), about a dozen 45s, and a couple of those in-between size ones. 10 years worth of Plan 9 purchases, yard sale finds, ironic parental property, and a few precious black platters liberated from unworthy owners. Like I said, a lot of punk, some rock and reggae, a few classical recordings, the standout of which is Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil in Beethoven's 9th. You know, the Clockwork Orange music.

I'd say I regretted nearly half of the records that I ever spent money on. Several can be blamed on my falling for some critic's stupid opinion, others on getting the only thing remotely interesting in a shop full of crap (and finding that the interest remains remote). A bunch of these remain in the collection simply because the milk crate has enough room. I always felt like I'd wanna listen back when I was older, so why get rid of them, why not keep an archive of the 1980s? I guess there are a million reasons not to, but that milk crate stashes so easily, gets out of the way so well, that the collection remains.

So now I get to fulfil that prophecy, and reminisce over the vibrations of diamond on vinyl.

Kids don't always understand the earnest social commentary and subtle ironies of band names like "Millions of Dead Cops" or songs like "Fucked up Ronnie" (Reagan, of course. One memory that struck from vinyl days was repeatedly opening the dorm door and blasting from my huge homemade speakers the opening line "Ronald Reagan, You're Fucked Up!" Ahhh...good times. I bet everyone else on the floor remembers that fondly as well.)

So I started with Bob Marley. Catch a Fire stayed one of my favorites since the time I first heard it. Besides, it's from 1973, I think, a year that echoed through my collection. That's the year of Ziggy Stardust, Dark Side of the Moon, something by Led Zep (like my sister and I were saying the other day, once you get past your adolescently self-conscious loathing of mainstream stuff, you find out that some of it is great), and several other titles that I randomly spew (maybe correctly) when veering into my rant about how that was maybe the best year for records.

Then I played Surrealistic Pillow to see if the Airplane proved rocking enough for my younger daughter. It came up short at the end of the side, and I may have overshot on the next choice, Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. She tore around on her scooter for a while, but by "Death Trip" her eyes seemed a little glazed.

Not sure what's next. I'll amble through the crate, make some discoveries, maybe cull a thing or three, and eventually delve into the hardcore. The girls will all be gone, the garage empty and reverberating. I'll see whether my improvisation lives up to what dad taught me about the physics of record players: concrete floor under a heavy metal table under a rug (to dampen whatever vibrations sneak through) under a planed and leveled slab of wood with high specific gravity under a solid turntable under a record under a needle. Can I crank it up loud enough to create feedback?

Regardless, my mind will loop back to first listenings. Fresh rebelry, Reagan's spectral shadow, loving life but not knowing it, other blatherings of the insomniac. Why speculate? This was about nostalgia, not what's next.

Good night.

Palindromath

Last post concerned one a middle-school daughter. This one stars her little sister, who likes to add things (like, we will wake up early tomorrow and she'll want to play yahtzee).

Some previous week she was just sitting there making me make up addition problems. And eventually I rolled around to twelve plus twelve, which is more than she wants to count to in her head, so she wrote it down, and figured it out. I was proud.

12  + 12 = 24

Only for some reason she wrote each digit backwards. Which made older daughter and I, who as you may recall had been engaged in discussions of Leonardo (who could write in mirror letters, and numbers too I guess, but I ain't gonna check), look at it backwards

42 = 21 + 21

Cool. 42, of course is also the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. What makes a dad prouder than when his girl is good at math and enjoys doing it? Maybe when she generates cool mirrormath...

Rennaissance Man

7th grade history has, just before everyone gets terminally distracted by Christmas, reached the renaissance, leaving behind the medeival times (about which my kid learned that their art was 'incredibly lame").

So she comes home yesterday and asks who the most important renaissance person is. Although it is obviously Hieronymous Bosch, she's not ready for that news, and so I went with Leonardo. She was thrilled with my apparently correct choice, and we agreed that it was because he did so many things. Some people were great artists or poets or scientists, but Leonardo did all that, invented that crazy cool helicopter thingy (I don't give a damn whether it worked, just to come up with that at all is great), did autopsies, and was no slouch at math. skcawkcab etirw dluoc oeL ytfeL, sulp and.

It was a good talk, and later we were telling her mom about it, and how the teacher read my daughter's paragraph to the class as a good explanation of the changes accompanying the emergence of humanism (is there anything that could make an anthropologist dad prouder?!). And told her that we liked DaVinci's diversety of talents.

So mom looks at daughter as says, "Yeah, but he couldn't knit."

And daughter and dad immediately answer, "Yes he could! He invented macrame!"

So yeah, I guess there is something that could make this dad prouder than humanistic academic triumph: well-timed comedic smartassery.

The Wayning Days of Summer

My dad loved the first breath of Fall. One night snaps cool, and Dad could smell it coming. After months of Virginia heat, his was the harbinge he and everyone else welcomed: the crisp breeze, a cold heavy dew-morning, the sudden blush of a leaf. The promise of Autumn to make up for August.

But in the meantime, adore the warm days all the more. Watch the sun fall down, burrow underground and turn into carrots and taters, dazzle off waters and birds, and weave itself into spiderwebs. Knowing that the heat daze is nearing its end makes it bearable, the mind and soul awaken to search for more evidence of the coming coolness.

Like the nights. On clear evenings, with no cloud blanket to hold hot air next to the earth, the warmth dissipates rapidly. Cold sky seems clearer, the universe bigger. Dad's phrase for the sky on such nights was "tangible clarity," and I love that description, reserving it for nice nights like that and precious little else.

Slow Solo

This time they traveled, not me.

They went for a few weeks of lake and grandparents, cookouts and cousins. I stayed to work, traveling a bit, but it hardly seems to count if when you get home you are just alone as when you were on the road.

So I sink into the spasmodic routine of the unattached man: work, kick back, procure food, do what I want, check internet, snack, attend to some un-ignorable task, kick back,....ummmm.

You get enough of that, and time loses its grip. No enforcing the kids' bedtimes? You just stay up til whenever. No other mouths to feed? You eat what you want when you want it, which for me turns into a meandering series of fractional meals formed of leftovers, maybe something cooked, handfuls harvested, and snacks discovered. Omnivoristic biped loping through an empty abode, satisfying his various hungers as they occur to him. Too many days since and too many until living amongst the women again, and time slips off the horizon. 

This is maybe more true for me than most guys, since I don't have TV, and so there's no cast reeling me in, making me wonder what day and time it is so I can spend time with them. I see trashcans out by the road, so I know it is Tuesday, but by tomorrow evening again I'll be lapsing back into chronobliviousness.

Tonight I feel like maybe staying up late, maybe ridiculously late if I think of something fun to do. Other nights, the alone man can fall asleep before dark and jump awake before light, unleashing himself on an unsuspecting and groggy world. Freedom burgeons without the traditional daily cycle.

Alone means no distractions, too, if you can ignore the copper and fiberglass and radiated tendrils that beckon you to neglect your own helm and follow electric sirens to sweet shores. Phone off and computer dark, though, and you can focus not just on what you want, but as long as you want. You can immerse yourself in a moment for hours, losing time while finding comprehension. Maybe just basking in the warm waters of istigkeit. 

Eventually though, the slow solo must end, or else veer off past where anyone else can make any sense of it or even want to hear it. After too long in those waters, a fair number of the unattached start to think nothing of peeing to keep the warm warm, losing not just societal strictures, but that modicum of self control that separates wise from crazed, honored from outcast. Eventually things need cleaning and the house needs to be ready for the returning ones.

But for now, I drift on random autopilot.

A Recent Letter to Mom

Dear Mom,

When we talked yesterday, you were saying that the time you grew up in was the best, and you sounded pretty down about all the problems and pressures that your kids and grand-kids face. You seemed pretty convinced about it, and maybe more weighed down by the present than comforted by the past. Afterward, I felt a little down myself. Not so much because I think we missed out, but because I hate to see you sad like that.

I just wanted you to know that I also grew up in the best of times, and my girls are doing the same again. You and Dad loved us, gave us a great home, and did what you could to protect us and patch us up when we needed it. I'm trying to repeat that. Every generation does it again, because nothing really changes. I've spent decades now studying humans, cultures, and history, and it is pretty clear that people are people, no matter when, no matter where.

Things may look different on the surface, but if we have drugs, yall had moonshine. We have sex in the media, but women in your time couldn't do much about a grabby boss or cousin. We have Al Qaeda, you all had the Klan (the Good Old Days worked pretty well for Good Old Boys, but if you were black you wouldn't wanna go back). Maybe the past seems better because you were blessed not to be exposed to every problem of your era, which is something to be happy about.

I'm happy about when I was raised: good schools with air conditioning, lots of kids in the neighborhood, a time of plenty. I'm happy about when I am raising kids: good schools (living where AC isn't necessary), still plenty of good people, and more potential than ever for a girl. And in our family, every generation has had the love and support of their parents and grandparents, which is what matters.

So cheer up and keep the faith when you think about the world your kids and grandkids inherit. We'll all be fine.

Love,

Your Son

Fax you, Mo.

Just the other day I was mouthing off again. This time it was in the midst of closing on a house, and being asked to fax something I could've emailed.

"Fax!? Hell no, I don't have a fax! Why don't I just e-mail
it to you?"

Pause. Maybe conversing beyond phoneshot, or maybe just a pause, and then,
"That would be okay...We could accept that."
The fax was unnecessary, but if I hadn't come on like an angry bear, they would've had me driving to some place and paying through the nose, or poaching on employer machines. It only makes sense if you like crappy image quality.
Or if you happen to be a gatekeeper guarding turf much diminished in the computer age, especially in our sick economy.

Of course the people I'm dealing with are nice, so I just hit send and leave it at that. But fax machines just piss me off, so I stewed until later on when I was talking to my wife, and I made some crack about only old people having faxes. And fascists utterly feckless without faxes, tools of evil. She listened a while, let me vent, and I forgot about faxes.

Until circumstances forced me to recall. The next day it turned out that closing could not happen without an immediate fax. Yep. A signed page just not close enough to a scanner had to get there now. Because sometimes a transaction is so complex it demands the kind of unverifiable electronic simulacric signature that only faxes provide.

Sounds like karma, eh? Act rude, and you get payback.

And sometimes it just keeps on paying. Because remember, I was not only irritating real estate people, I was knocking on oldsters. So who do you think had the fax? Yep. Grandpa (Congratulations on the big 7-0!) has one right in his study.
So I ate crow, which is not so bad fried up nice and crispy in great-Grandma's skillet. Heheee!

But remember how I was ungratefully complaining about fascists, after all they've given us? The next day I bought a lawnmower (an old-school motorless one, because I may hate faxes, but really do love a lot of old technology. I mean, I'm an archaeologist, for fax sake.) Like the autobahn and prompt Italian trains, lawnmowers are fruits of corporate fascism. My getting one that runs without petrol was me flipping a tiny bird at the machine while it made money off me.

So I think it had a lot more to do with revenge than cosmic balance, but payback is payback. ) I started assembling the mower, but confound it if there weren't but half the fasteners needed and no handle at all. The instructions offered a toll-free number for the missing parts to be delivered. And after almost no phone tree (strange) I spoke to a real person (more strange) with a flawless mid-west accent (suspicious), who asked what was wrong, the item number, and said he would ship the parts (obviously some kind of hoax), "As soon as you fax the receipt to 1-904..."

Oh. As in "Boy, if you keep complaining about faxes being corporate BS, and fascists with faxes, you gonna find we don't take too kindly to that. Now you got a chance to toe the line, fax your receipt, and the machine will run just fine, understand? And if you don't, just remember we have vacancies in Gitmo, Mo. He-heh. Fax you, boy."

Yep. Karma and then vengeful corporate fascists both faxed me. Serves me right for getting all worked up and mean about something as trivial, and apparently useful, as a fax