Thanksgiving
In the Norman Rockwell version, a huge bronzed turkey lies on its side under carving knife and fork wielded by the family patriarch, while up and down a long table wait the solemn yet rosy faces of three generations. Way too sedate and poised. Let's imagine wild arrivals, shaking off snow or rain, snack table plundered by two boys under five, household pots and pans reassigned as head gear, discussion of whether The Wizard of Oz is too scary for this fledgling generation, the pork roast in milk (Italian-style) refusing to boil off sufficiently, two cooks jockeying for place at the stove, a milk spill, a first 2-year-old attempt at the potty, more arrivals, coats piled on banisters and newel posts, etc. etc. By the time we all sit down--all ten of us (some arranged on a card table nearly in the living room), what with a little spat between oldest and middle generations about whether to light the ceiling fixture--oldest insists on low romantic light-- finally finally the dishes are handed round--and what I taste is indecipherable.
That is, until the pecan pie. Not until that crunchy, silky sweet enters my mouth am I sure I have eaten.
My parents rarely entertained large family groups. We were removed, all the way south in Carolina, while their relatives stayed up north, the closest in Washington, D.C. So, they invited in stray Citadel cadets or friends without their own local ties. Now that I'm edging into their age, when I can appreciate their situation other than a backdrop for my own struggles and triumphs, I see that acquiring a suitable crowd around the Thanksgiving table created anxiety and hope. They were very glad when one of their daughters came home for the holiday.
We're such a huge country. Going west or north, east or southwest sends relatives far away. I remember leafing through an old magazine called Ideals, which had found its way into Papa Max's home in Hankinson, North Dakota. In an autumnal scene of falling leaves, with cornucopia spilling fruits and nuts, corn stalks studding fields like a pliant army, and cattle lowing before a barn, yes a turkey too with its tail feathers spread in colorful fan and its wattles jiggling like loose skin on an old lady's neck--in this image, a wagon carried a family toward the farmstead house. The company, aunt and uncle with cousins, had spent hours on the road, but they arrived just in time for a late afternoon dinner, the patriarch poised over the turkey bronzed and eatable, with shining faces turned toward him.
That's the ideal we strive for. Abundance of kin as much as weight of foodstuffs on the table. Under the hail-fellow-well-met of the American character, under the recent revival of cantankerous political argument, under our celebration of abundance lies the hope of surviving in a foreign land. The first Thanksgiving gave thanks for learning how to plant and harvest corn and possibly other Native American foodstuffs like squash, for a successful hunt of deer and turkey, for friendship among strangers. I raise a glass in recognition of those who were not with us this Thanksgiving, the sister, brother, and cousins on various coasts, the many friends spread over the continent. Those who draw up to the table a solitary companion whose warmth and concern lights candles in their hearts. I hope they know that I, far away in the northland, hold them dear.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Margotlog: Bird Capture
Bird Capture
Yesterday morning, around 9 a.m., a hawk swooped through the backyard and sent the pigeons, sparrows, bluejays, chickadees, four cardinals, and assorted juncos and nuthatch--all making a beeline for trees or sky. This has happened before, usually in winter, when the accipiters, harrier, falcons or buteos are hungry and their more normal hunting grounds are covered with snow. Never before have I stopped to watch the whole hunt unfold. It takes patience unless I come in during the middle of the episode when the hawk's watching and waiting have already taken place.
This time, three jays hounded the hawk into a mess of trees two houses away. With binoculars I could spy the tall, pale-chested, dark- backed hunter almost cameoflaged among the thin branches of the trees. Its yellow legs and feet lifted it fairly tall. Checking the bird book, David Allen Sibley's Guide to Birds published by the National Audubon Society, I decided it was probably a Cooper's Hawk that stands 16.5 inches, with a long tail striped with dark and lighter bands. It swiveled its rather flat head with the hook of beak back and forth, but otherwise, except for shaking off flakes of snow now and then, it didn't move.
The jays, quite brave I thought, kept heralding "Hawk Hawk Hawk" from the very tree where the critter stood. I went upstairs to the bathroom with its huge picture window looking out to the back yard. I could spy the hawk from there as well, even better cameoflaged from this higher angle than from the kitchen window closer to the ground. Time passed. The jays kept at their warning, like tornado sirens gone wild. Oh, the hawk will give up, I thought. The jays make it too conspicuous; no birds will return to our daily feast. But I was wrong. The hawk simply waited and watched. Eventually after I'd been upstairs and down a number of times, a few pigeons and sparrows returned to peck at the ground.
Shaking its shoulders, the hawk dislodged itself and flew a short distance to balance on a wire. None of the birds in our yard seemed to notice. All of a sudden, so fast I couldn't track it, the hawk swooped around to the other side of our yard and in an instant had captured a dark-feathered pigeon, one of the few who'd seemed fearless (or dumb or old or careless). The yard went absolutely quiet. Light snow fell. I steeled myself, binoculars to my eyes.
Huge yellow claws dug into the squirming pigeon's back. The hawk was beautiful, stern, absolutely alert, looking in every direction except directly behind it, its large yellow eyes like small headlamps boring into underbrush, between fences, behind the garage. I was fairly sure nothing threatened it, but the hawk clearly didn't want to spend more time than necessary pinned to the ground, pressing its captive to death. This close--I was now in the kitchen no more than six yards away--I got a good long look at the hawk's features. Its breast was heavily striped with orange; a strip of white went under its chin and almost around the whole of its head. The feet and legs were startlingly yellow.
The poor pigeon took a long time to die. Perhaps it's in shock, I thought. I'd be in shock if something pinned me to the ground and began piercing my innards with sharp pokers. After perhaps four or five minutes (but I really couldn't judge the time. My heart was pounding with amazed horror), the hawk began tearing at the breast/stomach of the pigeon. Feathers flew, one stuck to the hawk's sharp, downward curved beak. Flesh, red and wet, was exposed. Maybe the hawk is trying to get at the heart and put a quicker end to this agony, I thought.
The pigeon opened its beak and was either crying out or trying to breathe. I almost couldn't watch. Flashes of a news article from the morning's paper about turkey raisers in Willmar, Minnesota, who toss newly hatched but damaged turkeys into a grinder reminded me of another kind of cruelty. But of course, I told myself, the hawk has to live. It is in essence a hunter and killer. It eats only if it kills other living things. Gradually, the pigeon went limp. In another minute, the hawk lifted off, carrying the body of the pigeon in its claws. And I was left to pour over the two volumes of David Allen Sibley's bird books, discovering that among accipiters, the female is larger than the male since it must feed its young in cold weather. Surely, there was no nest nearby with newly hatched chicks or fledglings, not in Turkey Weather.
Yesterday morning, around 9 a.m., a hawk swooped through the backyard and sent the pigeons, sparrows, bluejays, chickadees, four cardinals, and assorted juncos and nuthatch--all making a beeline for trees or sky. This has happened before, usually in winter, when the accipiters, harrier, falcons or buteos are hungry and their more normal hunting grounds are covered with snow. Never before have I stopped to watch the whole hunt unfold. It takes patience unless I come in during the middle of the episode when the hawk's watching and waiting have already taken place.
This time, three jays hounded the hawk into a mess of trees two houses away. With binoculars I could spy the tall, pale-chested, dark- backed hunter almost cameoflaged among the thin branches of the trees. Its yellow legs and feet lifted it fairly tall. Checking the bird book, David Allen Sibley's Guide to Birds published by the National Audubon Society, I decided it was probably a Cooper's Hawk that stands 16.5 inches, with a long tail striped with dark and lighter bands. It swiveled its rather flat head with the hook of beak back and forth, but otherwise, except for shaking off flakes of snow now and then, it didn't move.
The jays, quite brave I thought, kept heralding "Hawk Hawk Hawk" from the very tree where the critter stood. I went upstairs to the bathroom with its huge picture window looking out to the back yard. I could spy the hawk from there as well, even better cameoflaged from this higher angle than from the kitchen window closer to the ground. Time passed. The jays kept at their warning, like tornado sirens gone wild. Oh, the hawk will give up, I thought. The jays make it too conspicuous; no birds will return to our daily feast. But I was wrong. The hawk simply waited and watched. Eventually after I'd been upstairs and down a number of times, a few pigeons and sparrows returned to peck at the ground.
Shaking its shoulders, the hawk dislodged itself and flew a short distance to balance on a wire. None of the birds in our yard seemed to notice. All of a sudden, so fast I couldn't track it, the hawk swooped around to the other side of our yard and in an instant had captured a dark-feathered pigeon, one of the few who'd seemed fearless (or dumb or old or careless). The yard went absolutely quiet. Light snow fell. I steeled myself, binoculars to my eyes.
Huge yellow claws dug into the squirming pigeon's back. The hawk was beautiful, stern, absolutely alert, looking in every direction except directly behind it, its large yellow eyes like small headlamps boring into underbrush, between fences, behind the garage. I was fairly sure nothing threatened it, but the hawk clearly didn't want to spend more time than necessary pinned to the ground, pressing its captive to death. This close--I was now in the kitchen no more than six yards away--I got a good long look at the hawk's features. Its breast was heavily striped with orange; a strip of white went under its chin and almost around the whole of its head. The feet and legs were startlingly yellow.
The poor pigeon took a long time to die. Perhaps it's in shock, I thought. I'd be in shock if something pinned me to the ground and began piercing my innards with sharp pokers. After perhaps four or five minutes (but I really couldn't judge the time. My heart was pounding with amazed horror), the hawk began tearing at the breast/stomach of the pigeon. Feathers flew, one stuck to the hawk's sharp, downward curved beak. Flesh, red and wet, was exposed. Maybe the hawk is trying to get at the heart and put a quicker end to this agony, I thought.
The pigeon opened its beak and was either crying out or trying to breathe. I almost couldn't watch. Flashes of a news article from the morning's paper about turkey raisers in Willmar, Minnesota, who toss newly hatched but damaged turkeys into a grinder reminded me of another kind of cruelty. But of course, I told myself, the hawk has to live. It is in essence a hunter and killer. It eats only if it kills other living things. Gradually, the pigeon went limp. In another minute, the hawk lifted off, carrying the body of the pigeon in its claws. And I was left to pour over the two volumes of David Allen Sibley's bird books, discovering that among accipiters, the female is larger than the male since it must feed its young in cold weather. Surely, there was no nest nearby with newly hatched chicks or fledglings, not in Turkey Weather.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Margotlog: Margotlog: The Face of Florence - II
Margotlog: The Face of Florence - II
Borgo Pinti, the street where the Women's B&B is located, runs into the center of Florence in one direction, and in the other, toward the northern edge, toward Fiesole. Heading in that direction, you can look down narrow Borgo Pinto and in clear weather spy the clock tower of Fiesole rising up from the hills. From many sources, some casual, some intentional like the Museo di Firenze Com'Era (the Museum of FLorence As It Used To Be), I've gathered that Borgo Pinti originally designated a zone outside the city walls. Old maps describe Florence like a spiky star, with city walls zig-zagging out toward bastions and in toward streets and houses. Between the bastions stood huge wooden gates which could be closed at night or in case of siege.
Antique Florence was a city dominated by families with wealth and power who built huge palazzi or palaces with enormous portals crowned by their coat of arms. But the Catholic Church also amassed earthly might: many sons of wealthy families became bishops and eventually popes--as was true throughout the upper half of Italy. If the Church said NO to building residences/hospitals for "penitente" or unwed mothers within the city walls--sacred space, after all--then such ospedale were constructed outside the walls. Borgo Pinti, beyond the walls, became such a site, with many homes and hospitals for unwed mothers. Pinti is a contraction of "penitente" or the penitent.
I think about this as I roam the neighborhood, now dotted with antique palazzi turned to modern use: one houses the faculty of architecture for the University of Florence, another a military establishment devoted to the wounded. Some of the more enormous gardens and palazzi have been acquired by hotels. One of the more subdued, called the Mona Lisa, shares the enormous inner garden with the palazzo which houses the Women's B&B.
In the middle 1990s, I was lucky enough to be invited by friends to hold a travel memoir class in their fabulous apartment not far from Borgo Pinti. Were there perhaps eight or ten of us who pulled chairs and a sofa into a circle and wrote about breaking high heels on cobblestones or falling ill after eating Mexican oysters? I can't recall our exact number, but we ranged in age from relatively young to older. One of the youngest flew over with me from the Twin Cities. With incredible luck because there was a railroad strike, we hitched a ride from Rome with Helen, an Iowan who'd acquired, then shed an Italian husband, kept their place in the Tuscan hills, and had business beyond Florence. We stopped midway, thank heavens, because Helen drove like a maniac. Panting, drained of color, Margaret and I were almost sick with fear and speed. We admired Helen's collection of American quilts, sampled olive oil made from "her" olives, and hit the Autostrada for the final zip into Florence.
Margaret stayed at the Mona Lisa. As we gathered for our first morning of writing, she arrived with a sparkle in her eyes. She had met Livio who worked the desk at the Mona Lisa. "What, you are unhappy?" he intuited as she approached the desk after viewing the room she'd been assigned. Fingers raised in an encouraging gesture, "Give me twenty-four hours. I will make it right." In fact it didn't take that long: not only did he direct her to La Pergola theater, just behind the hotel, where James Galway was giving a concert, but after she returned, he signed off from the desk and they walked the mystery of Florence under full moon. Her sparkling eyes suggested just what had happened under that magical luna.
Staring up into the Mona Lisa's coffered ceiling, which must have been the entry courtyard where carriages pulled up, I decipher tiny little frescoes illustrating Latin sayings: each square of the coffer contains such things as "Fideli tuo silentio" with a finger pressing lips together. Or a pair of bellows to fan the fire with the saying Accipit Reddit Que. Silence with Heat was the essence of Peg's message. She told us almost nothing of that moonlit walk but her swagger and sparkle suggested warmth, much warmth. Of course, my rude translations of the sayings may be off kilter. Who knows what precisely they suggest--not unlike the whole history of Borgo Pinti.
Borgo Pinti, the street where the Women's B&B is located, runs into the center of Florence in one direction, and in the other, toward the northern edge, toward Fiesole. Heading in that direction, you can look down narrow Borgo Pinto and in clear weather spy the clock tower of Fiesole rising up from the hills. From many sources, some casual, some intentional like the Museo di Firenze Com'Era (the Museum of FLorence As It Used To Be), I've gathered that Borgo Pinti originally designated a zone outside the city walls. Old maps describe Florence like a spiky star, with city walls zig-zagging out toward bastions and in toward streets and houses. Between the bastions stood huge wooden gates which could be closed at night or in case of siege.
Antique Florence was a city dominated by families with wealth and power who built huge palazzi or palaces with enormous portals crowned by their coat of arms. But the Catholic Church also amassed earthly might: many sons of wealthy families became bishops and eventually popes--as was true throughout the upper half of Italy. If the Church said NO to building residences/hospitals for "penitente" or unwed mothers within the city walls--sacred space, after all--then such ospedale were constructed outside the walls. Borgo Pinti, beyond the walls, became such a site, with many homes and hospitals for unwed mothers. Pinti is a contraction of "penitente" or the penitent.
I think about this as I roam the neighborhood, now dotted with antique palazzi turned to modern use: one houses the faculty of architecture for the University of Florence, another a military establishment devoted to the wounded. Some of the more enormous gardens and palazzi have been acquired by hotels. One of the more subdued, called the Mona Lisa, shares the enormous inner garden with the palazzo which houses the Women's B&B.
In the middle 1990s, I was lucky enough to be invited by friends to hold a travel memoir class in their fabulous apartment not far from Borgo Pinti. Were there perhaps eight or ten of us who pulled chairs and a sofa into a circle and wrote about breaking high heels on cobblestones or falling ill after eating Mexican oysters? I can't recall our exact number, but we ranged in age from relatively young to older. One of the youngest flew over with me from the Twin Cities. With incredible luck because there was a railroad strike, we hitched a ride from Rome with Helen, an Iowan who'd acquired, then shed an Italian husband, kept their place in the Tuscan hills, and had business beyond Florence. We stopped midway, thank heavens, because Helen drove like a maniac. Panting, drained of color, Margaret and I were almost sick with fear and speed. We admired Helen's collection of American quilts, sampled olive oil made from "her" olives, and hit the Autostrada for the final zip into Florence.
Margaret stayed at the Mona Lisa. As we gathered for our first morning of writing, she arrived with a sparkle in her eyes. She had met Livio who worked the desk at the Mona Lisa. "What, you are unhappy?" he intuited as she approached the desk after viewing the room she'd been assigned. Fingers raised in an encouraging gesture, "Give me twenty-four hours. I will make it right." In fact it didn't take that long: not only did he direct her to La Pergola theater, just behind the hotel, where James Galway was giving a concert, but after she returned, he signed off from the desk and they walked the mystery of Florence under full moon. Her sparkling eyes suggested just what had happened under that magical luna.
Staring up into the Mona Lisa's coffered ceiling, which must have been the entry courtyard where carriages pulled up, I decipher tiny little frescoes illustrating Latin sayings: each square of the coffer contains such things as "Fideli tuo silentio" with a finger pressing lips together. Or a pair of bellows to fan the fire with the saying Accipit Reddit Que. Silence with Heat was the essence of Peg's message. She told us almost nothing of that moonlit walk but her swagger and sparkle suggested warmth, much warmth. Of course, my rude translations of the sayings may be off kilter. Who knows what precisely they suggest--not unlike the whole history of Borgo Pinti.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Margotlog: The Face of Florence - I
Margotlog: The Face of Florence - I
In the dark of 5:30 a.m., the city of Florence rises in memory, as if I'm hovering over her, not very high up, and viewing her features and moods, wiles and compensations. Yes, her face. What does it take to become enamored of a city? To know her almost better than if she were human, because, of course, she is human, but also shaped by landscape and weather and the occasional cry of birds.
I return every year, needing to inhabit her like a song. She centers me. I exit the train, walk to the busy concourse with the huge clock and low, shed-like ceiling, and turn left toward the door that leads to the buses. Once I am outside, the umbrella pines lining the bus and taxi lanes are conclusive: I am back. No other city I've ever known has such a beautiful line of green in the midst of traffic. I cross under them, miraculously, vehicles stop for the light, and I board the number 6 bus (though this year that's changed, but let's imagine all is as I've known it), which will wend its way past the Duomo, mobbed this early afternoon with tourists, down the street of rich shops, then a jog to the right and the piazza of San Marco greets me with its ring of elms. This year, the elms like the pines look healthier. There's been enough rain.
The new trees, replacing those that died of Dutch elm disease, are flourishing in the early October sunshine.
To be truly home, I descend the bus by a secondary school beyond Piazza Annunciata. The school is a block long with a beautiful series of sightless ovals along its facade. I orient myself to the narrow street called Borgo Pinti, and begin pulling my suitcase along the irregular, narrow sidewalk, sometimes veering off to avoid other pedestrians. It's two long blocks before I arrive at number 31. Cristina and Liana are expecting me. I ring their bell and the huge door within its Egyptian frame swings open. I take the blessedly new and functional "lift" to the top of the palazzo, and one of them greets me. The long shadowed hallway is exactly as I remember it. They've prepared the little single room in white and pink, across from the bath. I step up, leave the suitcase, and cross to the window. There is the huge walled garden, studded with linden, chestnut, ginko, and, close to the window, another umbrella pine whose soft fluttering needles and rough reddish arms pose against the red and tan dome of the Duomo. Sunday morning and evening, bells will ring through unnatural stillness, but now I'm in the presence of weekday paradise--the walled garden at the heart of this city I love.
Later I will begin the passages to reconnoiter favorite views. I'll learn more about the origin of Borgo Pinti from a new garden recently donated to the city, where a custode and placards inform about this neighborhood's history. But first I will rest, drink some coffee, close my eyes on the comfortable bed, recall the play of light on the walls, and settle into grateful arrival.
In the dark of 5:30 a.m., the city of Florence rises in memory, as if I'm hovering over her, not very high up, and viewing her features and moods, wiles and compensations. Yes, her face. What does it take to become enamored of a city? To know her almost better than if she were human, because, of course, she is human, but also shaped by landscape and weather and the occasional cry of birds.
I return every year, needing to inhabit her like a song. She centers me. I exit the train, walk to the busy concourse with the huge clock and low, shed-like ceiling, and turn left toward the door that leads to the buses. Once I am outside, the umbrella pines lining the bus and taxi lanes are conclusive: I am back. No other city I've ever known has such a beautiful line of green in the midst of traffic. I cross under them, miraculously, vehicles stop for the light, and I board the number 6 bus (though this year that's changed, but let's imagine all is as I've known it), which will wend its way past the Duomo, mobbed this early afternoon with tourists, down the street of rich shops, then a jog to the right and the piazza of San Marco greets me with its ring of elms. This year, the elms like the pines look healthier. There's been enough rain.
The new trees, replacing those that died of Dutch elm disease, are flourishing in the early October sunshine.
To be truly home, I descend the bus by a secondary school beyond Piazza Annunciata. The school is a block long with a beautiful series of sightless ovals along its facade. I orient myself to the narrow street called Borgo Pinti, and begin pulling my suitcase along the irregular, narrow sidewalk, sometimes veering off to avoid other pedestrians. It's two long blocks before I arrive at number 31. Cristina and Liana are expecting me. I ring their bell and the huge door within its Egyptian frame swings open. I take the blessedly new and functional "lift" to the top of the palazzo, and one of them greets me. The long shadowed hallway is exactly as I remember it. They've prepared the little single room in white and pink, across from the bath. I step up, leave the suitcase, and cross to the window. There is the huge walled garden, studded with linden, chestnut, ginko, and, close to the window, another umbrella pine whose soft fluttering needles and rough reddish arms pose against the red and tan dome of the Duomo. Sunday morning and evening, bells will ring through unnatural stillness, but now I'm in the presence of weekday paradise--the walled garden at the heart of this city I love.
Later I will begin the passages to reconnoiter favorite views. I'll learn more about the origin of Borgo Pinti from a new garden recently donated to the city, where a custode and placards inform about this neighborhood's history. But first I will rest, drink some coffee, close my eyes on the comfortable bed, recall the play of light on the walls, and settle into grateful arrival.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Margotlog: Water Quality and Showers
Margotlog: Water Quality and Showers
Over the weekend, after shoveling wet snow in Saint Paul, I drove off into the wilds of Minneapolis for a shower. Funny usage, that "shower" for a women's gathering to shower a new bride with presents. I suspect commercial connivage as far back as the '50s. Speaking of commercial conniving, I discovered in conversation with a younger member of the bride's set that new suburban developments are no longer seeding their lawns with five inches of topsoil, but using only two inches. Hereafter, that pride of the city's outer ring will be greened by implanted shower heads and chemicals.
Heaven forfend, say I, and this young woman, who works for the Minneapolis Park Board, agrees. Despite being surrounded by wet snow, despite our yearly water accumulation being at least an inch above normal here in the Twin Cities, we both understand that, in the future, water use by businesses and households will have to decrease. There will be more of "us," potentially laggard and wasteful humans scarfing up scarce water. Yes, even in the land of 10,000 lakes. The MInnesota DNR has just inaugurated a decade-long study of our water table, including those acquifers way below the surface from which many communities draw water. Not to mention, the rivers and streams, lakes and marshes which provide other water sources.
Oh, help: I can feel a preachy tone sneaking into my voice. Soon I may declaim. At our house in Saint Paul, with five resident mammals, the three cats find water where they can, not particularly given to excessive showers, caring nothing at all for lawns and gardens. One biped limits herself to what in Europe would be a bidet-full of water for washing most days of the week. The other biped only recently stopped showering for five minutes at a time. Told by his doctor that dry itchy skin may, indeed, be the result of too long an application of hot water.
What I don't use on my person, I occasionally lavish on our postage-stamp lawn, though lawn hardly applies here, since all the "turf" put down before we bought this place 25 years ago, I've let revert to whatever would come up on its own. Which means creeping Charlie, Virginia waterleaf, woodland violets, dandelions, bellflowers, and in later summer, with a little nudge from me, goldenrod, tansy. and golden glow. OK, I admit I transplanted these prairie natives from a few blocks away where our swatch of native grassland is oddly preserved because train tracks run alongside it. This declivity was once a stream which fed a mill, thus the name of the road on the other side of the tracks: Ayd Mill Road.
Our prairie swatch runs for several miles, and if various nameless mowers don't do too much damage, blooms with truly wonderful prairie flowers, including plum, prairie rose, campions, and the late-summer golden glows--huge sunflower derivatives which I've also filched for several sunny spots in my garden.
Come to find out that these native plants are much hardier than almost anything I have imported. They need less water; die back and return on cue, and given half a chance, will take over from the imported hostas and peonies--well maybe not from hostas and peonies which, once established, are pretty hard to nudge aside. But from lilies and even dragon's head. But now I'm getting too arcane for most readers. Moral of this tale: we need a mental make-over in the lawn department. We need to shed the ridiculous idea that a swatch of perfectly even, green grass is the ideal, and replace it with a varied panoply of natives. Even creeping Charlie, the bane of grass growers, labeled a hated "broad leaf" and subjected to herbicide application, grows pretty purple flowers, rarely needs to be mowed, and when crushed, gives off a minty smell.
Our lawns are English imports from way back in the 18th century, when Italian ideals about close-cut boxwood, and parterres of paved terraces adorned with limonaia (lemon trees in pots) gave way to huge expanses of lawns, copses of trees in the distance, a water course of some kind--think butterfly lakes, or sparkling waterfalls--and finally woods. These gardens expressed what was called the "sublime." They were supposed to lift the eye and the fancy away from what we'd call the "built environment" into wild nature, but only by degrees. The main impetus being a large sweep of lawn down which the fancy strolled to contemplate the cataract of wild nature.
Phooey! In my conversation with the water quality expert, I learned that geese are one of the Twin Cities' greatest polluters of beaches and lakes. "It's their poop," she whispers. One solution resides with the geese themselves: They don't like high grass. Light-bulb moment: the Minneapolis Park Board's renovation of Lake of the Isles includes tall stands of aquatic plants along the edges of the lake. These filter fertilizer and other pollutants which run off from the fancy lawns across the road. Viola! The lake becomes cleaner and the geese stay away from the lake shore. No one swims in Lake of the Isles, but the short-term and long-term message is clear: get rid of lawns for all kinds of reasons. Native plants and grasses, especially tall grasses and flowering plants like goldenrod and golden glow, need no fertilizer or herbicides and far less water to thrive. Plus they keep the geese away.
Now I hear the flip-side of the preacher in my voice: the barker for a new product whose enthusiasm gets out of hand.
If only we could transplant this idea to the suburbs and beyond, say to those lake shore communities across Minnesota where McCabin owners insist on green grass running down to the lake. Think fertilizer, herbicide running off into the water, feeding algae bloom, killing fish. Let's challenge some fine designers to present us a modern version of the sublime, subsituting creeping charlie for grass.
Over the weekend, after shoveling wet snow in Saint Paul, I drove off into the wilds of Minneapolis for a shower. Funny usage, that "shower" for a women's gathering to shower a new bride with presents. I suspect commercial connivage as far back as the '50s. Speaking of commercial conniving, I discovered in conversation with a younger member of the bride's set that new suburban developments are no longer seeding their lawns with five inches of topsoil, but using only two inches. Hereafter, that pride of the city's outer ring will be greened by implanted shower heads and chemicals.
Heaven forfend, say I, and this young woman, who works for the Minneapolis Park Board, agrees. Despite being surrounded by wet snow, despite our yearly water accumulation being at least an inch above normal here in the Twin Cities, we both understand that, in the future, water use by businesses and households will have to decrease. There will be more of "us," potentially laggard and wasteful humans scarfing up scarce water. Yes, even in the land of 10,000 lakes. The MInnesota DNR has just inaugurated a decade-long study of our water table, including those acquifers way below the surface from which many communities draw water. Not to mention, the rivers and streams, lakes and marshes which provide other water sources.
Oh, help: I can feel a preachy tone sneaking into my voice. Soon I may declaim. At our house in Saint Paul, with five resident mammals, the three cats find water where they can, not particularly given to excessive showers, caring nothing at all for lawns and gardens. One biped limits herself to what in Europe would be a bidet-full of water for washing most days of the week. The other biped only recently stopped showering for five minutes at a time. Told by his doctor that dry itchy skin may, indeed, be the result of too long an application of hot water.
What I don't use on my person, I occasionally lavish on our postage-stamp lawn, though lawn hardly applies here, since all the "turf" put down before we bought this place 25 years ago, I've let revert to whatever would come up on its own. Which means creeping Charlie, Virginia waterleaf, woodland violets, dandelions, bellflowers, and in later summer, with a little nudge from me, goldenrod, tansy. and golden glow. OK, I admit I transplanted these prairie natives from a few blocks away where our swatch of native grassland is oddly preserved because train tracks run alongside it. This declivity was once a stream which fed a mill, thus the name of the road on the other side of the tracks: Ayd Mill Road.
Our prairie swatch runs for several miles, and if various nameless mowers don't do too much damage, blooms with truly wonderful prairie flowers, including plum, prairie rose, campions, and the late-summer golden glows--huge sunflower derivatives which I've also filched for several sunny spots in my garden.
Come to find out that these native plants are much hardier than almost anything I have imported. They need less water; die back and return on cue, and given half a chance, will take over from the imported hostas and peonies--well maybe not from hostas and peonies which, once established, are pretty hard to nudge aside. But from lilies and even dragon's head. But now I'm getting too arcane for most readers. Moral of this tale: we need a mental make-over in the lawn department. We need to shed the ridiculous idea that a swatch of perfectly even, green grass is the ideal, and replace it with a varied panoply of natives. Even creeping Charlie, the bane of grass growers, labeled a hated "broad leaf" and subjected to herbicide application, grows pretty purple flowers, rarely needs to be mowed, and when crushed, gives off a minty smell.
Our lawns are English imports from way back in the 18th century, when Italian ideals about close-cut boxwood, and parterres of paved terraces adorned with limonaia (lemon trees in pots) gave way to huge expanses of lawns, copses of trees in the distance, a water course of some kind--think butterfly lakes, or sparkling waterfalls--and finally woods. These gardens expressed what was called the "sublime." They were supposed to lift the eye and the fancy away from what we'd call the "built environment" into wild nature, but only by degrees. The main impetus being a large sweep of lawn down which the fancy strolled to contemplate the cataract of wild nature.
Phooey! In my conversation with the water quality expert, I learned that geese are one of the Twin Cities' greatest polluters of beaches and lakes. "It's their poop," she whispers. One solution resides with the geese themselves: They don't like high grass. Light-bulb moment: the Minneapolis Park Board's renovation of Lake of the Isles includes tall stands of aquatic plants along the edges of the lake. These filter fertilizer and other pollutants which run off from the fancy lawns across the road. Viola! The lake becomes cleaner and the geese stay away from the lake shore. No one swims in Lake of the Isles, but the short-term and long-term message is clear: get rid of lawns for all kinds of reasons. Native plants and grasses, especially tall grasses and flowering plants like goldenrod and golden glow, need no fertilizer or herbicides and far less water to thrive. Plus they keep the geese away.
Now I hear the flip-side of the preacher in my voice: the barker for a new product whose enthusiasm gets out of hand.
If only we could transplant this idea to the suburbs and beyond, say to those lake shore communities across Minnesota where McCabin owners insist on green grass running down to the lake. Think fertilizer, herbicide running off into the water, feeding algae bloom, killing fish. Let's challenge some fine designers to present us a modern version of the sublime, subsituting creeping charlie for grass.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Margotlog: Study Abroad
Margotlog: Study Abroad
A dear friend, retired from teaching Art History at the University of Minnesota, leads "study abroad" courses to Florence or Rome for undergraduates. Usually his students are native Minnesotans, attending the "land grant" university where their own parents may have gone. "Study abroad" for them means entering another country whose language is largely a mystery. They depend on Michael like bambini (little children).
For my mother, second born twin, the runt of her family who had rickets as a child, "study abroad" meant leaving her small town in eastern North Dakota, Hankinson, and traveling by train to Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. By my calculations she entered as a freshman in 1925 and graduated just after the stock market crash in 1929. That latter date I have firmly in mind because she often emphasized, "But by 1929 we already had had an agricultural depression in North Dakota," which allowed her father, the big fish in Hankinson's small pond, to gobble up smaller fry. That he would emerge wealthier than before, we girls had no reason to doubt, for when we began spending summers there in the mid 1950s, Papa Max's house was one of the grandest in town. Around nearby Lake Elsie he had bought up farms for "back taxes." Did banks foreclose these farms because the owners were so strapped for cash they could not pay the mortgages or even the taxes? Or had farmers owned the land for decades but because of the drought earned nothing; when their taxes mounted, the state sold the debts to banks who then put them in something like foreclosure? I have to do more research.
In any case, my grandfather prospered when those around him did not. Even as a child, I felt a prickle of discomfort and resentment when my mother bragged about this Far away in Charleston, we lived on my father's very modest teaching salary; rats slithered around our apartment garbage cans or died in the Old Citadel's foot-thick walls. My mother made over my father's worn-out trousers into slacks for us girls. We certainly weren't rich. Her brother who worked with their father also did very well. His wife sent my sister and me "hand-me-overs" from his daughters, almost our age. Did we love or squirm uncomfortably in their twin blue coats with the gold buttons, or their flounced gingham dresses with white petticoats? Perhaps I sensed a conflict in my mother's choice to leave Hankinson after college and "go east" to Pittsburgh where her job as a college librarian satisfied her quiet love of books, but never made her rich. Yet it put her directly in line to meet my father, a graduate student at Carnegie, who bent over her library desk with his warm brown Italian eyes. He was smitten from the get-go; it took her a little longer.
Her enthusiasm for what she gleaned at the University of Minnesota remained throughout the years entirely unalloyed. She loved the campus, she told us, so close to downtown Minneapolis with its glamorous department stores like Young Quinlan where her mother used to treat her and her older sisters to party dresses and lunch in the sky-high restaurant. Though she was sick the first quarter, intensely shy and suffering from stomach trouble, she gradually adjusted. She thrilled to history courses taught by Guy Stanton Ford. Attended concerts at Northrup Auditorium where she heard Rachmaninoff perform. Rachmaninoff, my mother? Was he still alive in the late 1920s and would he have visited the Upper Midwest?
Why Mousy decided to become a librarian, she never explained, though her love of books shone through my childhood as she read to us every evening: The "Little House" books, poems and stories from the twelve volumes of The Book House; the orange-bound biographies for youngsters of such luminaries as Mozart, my favorite, or Madame Curie. Every week we took a bus from The Old Citadel to the Charleston Library, then housed in a four-story mansion shaded by towering magnolias. Truly a "book house," this library with its intricate curving staircase, its Palladian windows, and the sense that human eyes had awakened under its ceilings garlanded with rosettes and nymphs captured real life within its pages. If I lost myself there, I would wake up in charmed splendor, listening to my mother telling a story of going home to Hankinson for Christmas. "We were stranded just beyond Glenwood," she related. "Huge drifts of snow blew across the tracks. But we college students didn't care: we stoked the pot-bellied stove with torn-up wooden seats; broke out tins of sardines and crackers, and danced to a fiddle up and down the aisles." I capture her there, sashaying across a line of little windows, her cheeks flushed, a smile on her lips.
A dear friend, retired from teaching Art History at the University of Minnesota, leads "study abroad" courses to Florence or Rome for undergraduates. Usually his students are native Minnesotans, attending the "land grant" university where their own parents may have gone. "Study abroad" for them means entering another country whose language is largely a mystery. They depend on Michael like bambini (little children).
For my mother, second born twin, the runt of her family who had rickets as a child, "study abroad" meant leaving her small town in eastern North Dakota, Hankinson, and traveling by train to Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. By my calculations she entered as a freshman in 1925 and graduated just after the stock market crash in 1929. That latter date I have firmly in mind because she often emphasized, "But by 1929 we already had had an agricultural depression in North Dakota," which allowed her father, the big fish in Hankinson's small pond, to gobble up smaller fry. That he would emerge wealthier than before, we girls had no reason to doubt, for when we began spending summers there in the mid 1950s, Papa Max's house was one of the grandest in town. Around nearby Lake Elsie he had bought up farms for "back taxes." Did banks foreclose these farms because the owners were so strapped for cash they could not pay the mortgages or even the taxes? Or had farmers owned the land for decades but because of the drought earned nothing; when their taxes mounted, the state sold the debts to banks who then put them in something like foreclosure? I have to do more research.
In any case, my grandfather prospered when those around him did not. Even as a child, I felt a prickle of discomfort and resentment when my mother bragged about this Far away in Charleston, we lived on my father's very modest teaching salary; rats slithered around our apartment garbage cans or died in the Old Citadel's foot-thick walls. My mother made over my father's worn-out trousers into slacks for us girls. We certainly weren't rich. Her brother who worked with their father also did very well. His wife sent my sister and me "hand-me-overs" from his daughters, almost our age. Did we love or squirm uncomfortably in their twin blue coats with the gold buttons, or their flounced gingham dresses with white petticoats? Perhaps I sensed a conflict in my mother's choice to leave Hankinson after college and "go east" to Pittsburgh where her job as a college librarian satisfied her quiet love of books, but never made her rich. Yet it put her directly in line to meet my father, a graduate student at Carnegie, who bent over her library desk with his warm brown Italian eyes. He was smitten from the get-go; it took her a little longer.
Her enthusiasm for what she gleaned at the University of Minnesota remained throughout the years entirely unalloyed. She loved the campus, she told us, so close to downtown Minneapolis with its glamorous department stores like Young Quinlan where her mother used to treat her and her older sisters to party dresses and lunch in the sky-high restaurant. Though she was sick the first quarter, intensely shy and suffering from stomach trouble, she gradually adjusted. She thrilled to history courses taught by Guy Stanton Ford. Attended concerts at Northrup Auditorium where she heard Rachmaninoff perform. Rachmaninoff, my mother? Was he still alive in the late 1920s and would he have visited the Upper Midwest?
Why Mousy decided to become a librarian, she never explained, though her love of books shone through my childhood as she read to us every evening: The "Little House" books, poems and stories from the twelve volumes of The Book House; the orange-bound biographies for youngsters of such luminaries as Mozart, my favorite, or Madame Curie. Every week we took a bus from The Old Citadel to the Charleston Library, then housed in a four-story mansion shaded by towering magnolias. Truly a "book house," this library with its intricate curving staircase, its Palladian windows, and the sense that human eyes had awakened under its ceilings garlanded with rosettes and nymphs captured real life within its pages. If I lost myself there, I would wake up in charmed splendor, listening to my mother telling a story of going home to Hankinson for Christmas. "We were stranded just beyond Glenwood," she related. "Huge drifts of snow blew across the tracks. But we college students didn't care: we stoked the pot-bellied stove with torn-up wooden seats; broke out tins of sardines and crackers, and danced to a fiddle up and down the aisles." I capture her there, sashaying across a line of little windows, her cheeks flushed, a smile on her lips.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Margotlog: Moments in Viterbo
Margotlog: Moments in Viterbo
Odd what moments stand out. When I look back on our excursion from Umbria south into Lazio (the Italian province which contains Rome), I find myself outside a church in Viterbo, gazing over the main piazza of the city. Just to my left, high against a stone wall, hangs the stone lion, guardian of the city. As we entered the square, I looked up at the lion (perhaps with a palm tree behind him) and commented, "Mi piace moltissimo il leone." One of the group whom I scarcely knew, a tall man with soft Italian body, someone with a weight of sorrow on his back, spoke to me for the second time that afternoon: "Si, si, e molto gentile." It was the surprise of his response, when I'd been rather diffident in his presence (he was, after all, reported to be a count), plus the charm of the grinning lion that cemented the moment in memory.
As tourists, it's impossible not to be rather vague about where exactly, and how, and what's to come next. We're carried along by those who know--friends, in my case, or tour guides who treat us like friends. Landscape whizzes past. We stop to meander around ruins, examining the fiori di campo (literally field flowers), noting that they're the same malva found among the Roman ruins in Umbria, stooping to pick up a piece of stone, numbered then discarded by archaeologists excavating this site of Roman/medieval baths, theater, etc. Being told by a restorer among us that every piece unearthed must be numbered, but since not all can be fit into a meaningful whole, ,many are left for curious scavengers to lift, finger, and once again discard.
Italy, with its rocky, hilly terrain, its centuries of wealth (often from outside the region) lording it over peasants, far more familiar with the land and seasons, crops and produce than those nominally in charge, is full of opportunities for such charming encounters. Little fragments numbered according to some other system than our own tumble suddenly into view. An American friend, entering Venice with her sister and a tour group, steps into a gondola and is wafted away by a gondolier singing an aria from Italian opera. Suddenly running toward them along the canal comes a woman with a cerise scarf floating behind her. She's in full voice, offering to the world and the throaty gondolier, the female accompaniment to his role. Her husband, their friends, run after her and tug at her clothing. "Stop, stop," they insist, but she breaks free and runs beside the gondola, as together, she and the gondolier complete the love duet. I can't forget this, and it didn't even happen to me.
Following association and memory through the labyrinth of Italian story, I find myself in a rocky field, on the huge island of Sardinia, off the western coast of Italy. Edging her way toward the stone hut of a goatherd is the youngest daughter of a wealthy, landlord family. The daughter, lonesome, cooped up by late 19th-century etiquette, by boredom and isolation, has found a friend. Perhaps she reads to the old man; or he tells her about his goats, his memories of her family years ago, his own children and wife lost to the years.
She grows up. There is a war. She moves to the mainland and sets aside afternoons to write while her own children sleep. This is Grazia Deledda and the novel containing this story is published as Cosima n 1937, the year after she has died. Though DeLedda won the Nobel prize for literature in 1926, very few of her works have been translated into English. We can thank Italica Press for bringing us a fine English translation of Cosima by Martha King.
Odd what moments stand out. When I look back on our excursion from Umbria south into Lazio (the Italian province which contains Rome), I find myself outside a church in Viterbo, gazing over the main piazza of the city. Just to my left, high against a stone wall, hangs the stone lion, guardian of the city. As we entered the square, I looked up at the lion (perhaps with a palm tree behind him) and commented, "Mi piace moltissimo il leone." One of the group whom I scarcely knew, a tall man with soft Italian body, someone with a weight of sorrow on his back, spoke to me for the second time that afternoon: "Si, si, e molto gentile." It was the surprise of his response, when I'd been rather diffident in his presence (he was, after all, reported to be a count), plus the charm of the grinning lion that cemented the moment in memory.
As tourists, it's impossible not to be rather vague about where exactly, and how, and what's to come next. We're carried along by those who know--friends, in my case, or tour guides who treat us like friends. Landscape whizzes past. We stop to meander around ruins, examining the fiori di campo (literally field flowers), noting that they're the same malva found among the Roman ruins in Umbria, stooping to pick up a piece of stone, numbered then discarded by archaeologists excavating this site of Roman/medieval baths, theater, etc. Being told by a restorer among us that every piece unearthed must be numbered, but since not all can be fit into a meaningful whole, ,many are left for curious scavengers to lift, finger, and once again discard.
Italy, with its rocky, hilly terrain, its centuries of wealth (often from outside the region) lording it over peasants, far more familiar with the land and seasons, crops and produce than those nominally in charge, is full of opportunities for such charming encounters. Little fragments numbered according to some other system than our own tumble suddenly into view. An American friend, entering Venice with her sister and a tour group, steps into a gondola and is wafted away by a gondolier singing an aria from Italian opera. Suddenly running toward them along the canal comes a woman with a cerise scarf floating behind her. She's in full voice, offering to the world and the throaty gondolier, the female accompaniment to his role. Her husband, their friends, run after her and tug at her clothing. "Stop, stop," they insist, but she breaks free and runs beside the gondola, as together, she and the gondolier complete the love duet. I can't forget this, and it didn't even happen to me.
Following association and memory through the labyrinth of Italian story, I find myself in a rocky field, on the huge island of Sardinia, off the western coast of Italy. Edging her way toward the stone hut of a goatherd is the youngest daughter of a wealthy, landlord family. The daughter, lonesome, cooped up by late 19th-century etiquette, by boredom and isolation, has found a friend. Perhaps she reads to the old man; or he tells her about his goats, his memories of her family years ago, his own children and wife lost to the years.
She grows up. There is a war. She moves to the mainland and sets aside afternoons to write while her own children sleep. This is Grazia Deledda and the novel containing this story is published as Cosima n 1937, the year after she has died. Though DeLedda won the Nobel prize for literature in 1926, very few of her works have been translated into English. We can thank Italica Press for bringing us a fine English translation of Cosima by Martha King.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Margotlog:The Step-mother of the Bride
The Step-Mother of the Bride
Thanks to the suavity and generosity of the upcoming bride and groom, the parents involved in this soon-to-be wedding have sat down to a meal together. It was a heady affair, at least for the older generation. We discovered paths where our lives crossed: groom's mother and bride's father both attended the March on Washington. Bride's stepmother and stepfather discovered a fine yoga teacher in common who used to babysit the bride. And so on.
The wedding itself will be rather secretive--only one parent of the six involved will stand up with the couple. But not so the wedding dinner. We of the older generation will congregate again. Not that we'll outnumber the kids, far from it. In fact, I expect the cousins and various offspring of the 0-5 generation to people the front of the stage. Lots of hands grabbing toddlers and restraining the wild "5's." We of the older generation may be pushed to the wings.
So why do I keep returning to the question of poetry? Why do I want to make a spectacle of myself by reciting some verse when the call comes to toast the happy couple? Though I don't remember this, rumor has it that my husband, the current bride's father, embarrassed the younger generation at our one other family wedding a few years ago by reciting something the couple considered way too sexy. It was probably e e cummings. (Try "i like my body when it is with your/ body...") I've been warned by my own daughter not to bring "The Owl and the Pussycat"into this upcoming affair. "Oh, Pussy, my love," you understand, has salacious undertones.
Think back, I tell myself. Remember how you felt about your own parents at each of your weddings! The first was very solemn: held at Riverside Church on Morningside Drive in New York City, a gothic gem near the Columbia University campus. I wore constraining white and trembled with the chill. The dinner afterwards passed in a haze. If anyone toasted us, I was either too blinkered or too cold to notice. The second wedding, thankfully, took place in May at the Presbyterian Homes in Roseville, Minnesota, where I taught a writing class for old ladies. They with their remembrance and enjoyment cut heavy peonies to decorate the chapel, sweet heavy swoon. Yes, poetry would have been welcome at that wedding. (e e cummings: "i like my body when it is with your/body") Maybe it's that wedding I want to commemorate with Keats' "Bright Star."
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Which is more objectionable, eh? The "ripening breast" or "swoon to death?" Since Keats died a few years after writing this poem in 1819, the death may be literal, yet we don't believe he meant literal death, but that swoon of satisfaction, the swoon of earthly bliss.
No, I probably won't read "Bright Star," though its lines keep sparkling through these last warm days like the late chrysanthemums blazing along the sidewalk. Or the absolutely clear evening star in the half-dark sky.
If I read anything poetic, it will probably be Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," etc. Yet, yet, it is a cold poem with its argument thoroughly under control and its daring to bring time's sickle into a poem of love and marriage. Or, maybe this sort of marriage is all of the mind, and very little of the body. That's what chills me. Not to mention its ending with "doom." I don't count that tidy regular coda. Keats and Shakespeare both end their supposed love poems with mention of the grave's chill. We are to be reminded to "gather ye rosebuds while we may." I'm afraid we older generation bring too much of that reminder into the hallway of love. Though we may still propel ourselves forward, even skip once in a while, we do not bloom so naturally, nor sing in a clear, sweet voice.
Plus, our children truly abhor the idea of our bodies. Especially in any but the most chaste of love's acts. "Ewww, Mother," I can hear the daughter cry when she was a teen. Too ishy for words. Aversion personified. Hints of incest.
There, I've done it--grossed out myself. Nope, I won't mention a word about love or coupling or, heaven forfend, breasts. I'll just give you Shakespeare as a mental exercise, to admire the balanced lines, the measured rhyme, the various sedate metaphors.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Thanks to the suavity and generosity of the upcoming bride and groom, the parents involved in this soon-to-be wedding have sat down to a meal together. It was a heady affair, at least for the older generation. We discovered paths where our lives crossed: groom's mother and bride's father both attended the March on Washington. Bride's stepmother and stepfather discovered a fine yoga teacher in common who used to babysit the bride. And so on.
The wedding itself will be rather secretive--only one parent of the six involved will stand up with the couple. But not so the wedding dinner. We of the older generation will congregate again. Not that we'll outnumber the kids, far from it. In fact, I expect the cousins and various offspring of the 0-5 generation to people the front of the stage. Lots of hands grabbing toddlers and restraining the wild "5's." We of the older generation may be pushed to the wings.
So why do I keep returning to the question of poetry? Why do I want to make a spectacle of myself by reciting some verse when the call comes to toast the happy couple? Though I don't remember this, rumor has it that my husband, the current bride's father, embarrassed the younger generation at our one other family wedding a few years ago by reciting something the couple considered way too sexy. It was probably e e cummings. (Try "i like my body when it is with your/ body...") I've been warned by my own daughter not to bring "The Owl and the Pussycat"into this upcoming affair. "Oh, Pussy, my love," you understand, has salacious undertones.
Think back, I tell myself. Remember how you felt about your own parents at each of your weddings! The first was very solemn: held at Riverside Church on Morningside Drive in New York City, a gothic gem near the Columbia University campus. I wore constraining white and trembled with the chill. The dinner afterwards passed in a haze. If anyone toasted us, I was either too blinkered or too cold to notice. The second wedding, thankfully, took place in May at the Presbyterian Homes in Roseville, Minnesota, where I taught a writing class for old ladies. They with their remembrance and enjoyment cut heavy peonies to decorate the chapel, sweet heavy swoon. Yes, poetry would have been welcome at that wedding. (e e cummings: "i like my body when it is with your/body") Maybe it's that wedding I want to commemorate with Keats' "Bright Star."
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Which is more objectionable, eh? The "ripening breast" or "swoon to death?" Since Keats died a few years after writing this poem in 1819, the death may be literal, yet we don't believe he meant literal death, but that swoon of satisfaction, the swoon of earthly bliss.
No, I probably won't read "Bright Star," though its lines keep sparkling through these last warm days like the late chrysanthemums blazing along the sidewalk. Or the absolutely clear evening star in the half-dark sky.
If I read anything poetic, it will probably be Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," etc. Yet, yet, it is a cold poem with its argument thoroughly under control and its daring to bring time's sickle into a poem of love and marriage. Or, maybe this sort of marriage is all of the mind, and very little of the body. That's what chills me. Not to mention its ending with "doom." I don't count that tidy regular coda. Keats and Shakespeare both end their supposed love poems with mention of the grave's chill. We are to be reminded to "gather ye rosebuds while we may." I'm afraid we older generation bring too much of that reminder into the hallway of love. Though we may still propel ourselves forward, even skip once in a while, we do not bloom so naturally, nor sing in a clear, sweet voice.
Plus, our children truly abhor the idea of our bodies. Especially in any but the most chaste of love's acts. "Ewww, Mother," I can hear the daughter cry when she was a teen. Too ishy for words. Aversion personified. Hints of incest.
There, I've done it--grossed out myself. Nope, I won't mention a word about love or coupling or, heaven forfend, breasts. I'll just give you Shakespeare as a mental exercise, to admire the balanced lines, the measured rhyme, the various sedate metaphors.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Margotlog: Danish Gymnasts, African Students & American Political Hype
In Minnesota Scandinavia, the Danes figure, along with their more populous cousins the Swedes and the Norwegians, as contributors of delectable (and hard to make) holiday treats; civic accountability; spare, appealing furniture design; and the Danish Gymnasts. Friends took me to view this smiling, blond, thoroughly fit and friendly troupe last night. In between ohhhs and ahhhs at double, triple twists, lovely swirls of girls in turquoise leotards, etc., we talked about Copenhagen as a place to visit--expensive food, I learned. Beautiful porcelain called Royal Copenhagen.
We, in fact, dined off a lovely set before the program: each plate hand-painted with a soft blue flower. And the eatables presented by our Danish friend from Tyler, Minnesota: first course of herring, pickles, and buttered brown (homemade) bread; second course of vegetable-beef soup with tiny dumplings made of the same stuff as cream puffs--no surprise that they melted in the mouth; and finally dessert of the most amazing combination: butter cookies made with Hartshorn, which must be obtained from a pharmacy; blue cheese, more brown bread, and succulent pears.
The Italian in me, who not so secretly believes that the best food in the world comes from Italy, had to sit back and leave the field to the Danes: that dessert could not be beat by any other ethnic combination. Or at least that's what my tongue told me. Lest you think this Tyler-bred cuisine is off-the-beaten path, let me point out that the Danish Gymnasts, who are touring the world in ten months, will stop at Tyler, Minnesota. Where, I have taught several writers-in-the-schools residencies over the years and remember a culture hall, dedicated to Danish culture and conviviality.
One of the best things about being American is savoring our ethnic and racial differences. That's one reason I enjoy teaching at Metro State where an upper-level writing class for nurses is likely to include recent immigrants from Africa. This year my class contains students from Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan, and Uganda. Not to mention other immigrants from Southeast Asia, Greece, and all over Europe (but those with European roots come from families in the U.S. for many generations). The African students working for their nursing degrees are acute observers of the U.S. and their own countries. For the second paper, the class wrote on the huge topic of global warming, based on Lester Brown's important book, Plan B. 4.0. (A friend who works for a Minnesota legislator says that Brown's book informs many environmental debates at the legislative level.)
Two papers from African students caught my attention for their startling revelations about population. One, about AIDS in Uganda, pointed out that when a middle-aged man with HIV is treated with anti-retrovirus drugs (the "cocktail" that keeps many HIV patients alive for years), he may then live long enough to marry three more wives and father perhaps a score of children--all of whom will be infected with AIDS. Another paper began with a surprisingly humorous announcement of a death in Kenya: relatives of the 94-year-old deceased contributed three-quarters of the mourners at his funeral: he had been married 130 times, fathered almost 300 children and untold numbers of grandchildren (V. Duham, Oct. 2010, "Kenya's Akuku....polygamy hall of fame"). My student followed this with a compelling description of Kenya's deforestation, largely caused by clearing land for farming to feed the country's rapidly expanding population.
There is little danger that the U.S. Danish-population will expand so much as to cause an environmental crisis in western Minnesota. In fact, my years of teaching as a writer-in-the-schools in farming Minnesota suggests that, if anything, these communities suffer from the reverse: dwindling population due to the consolidation of smaller family farms. What strikes me as I mull the experiences of the last few days, personal and public, writerly and political, is how complex are the policy decisions facing us, worldwide. Our recent election hoop-di-do raises angry voices, confrontative politics, and an awareness on my part that the U.S. swings wildly between apparently irreconcilable poles. Yes, within a decade we as a nation can experience wrenching contests and demanding alterations. Our excesses of hope, greed, and manipulation can wreck certain kinds of stability. The housing crisis, for instance, seems wrought in part by banks and mortgage companies who enticed families of very modest means and no experience in home-owning into accepting variable-rate mortgages. When the rates rose sky-high, what had been affordable became impossible. Who is most at fault: the ignorant home-buyer or the companies that lured them into this trap?
Maybe a portion of the American dream needs revision: instead of every family housed separately with a green swatch around us, we need to look back to the cities of Europe, with their apartment buildings, lovely green thoroughfares (sometimes), and, best of all possible worlds, no cars in the city center. I'm thinking of Munich, or Ferrara where I recently visited. We've eaten up all the wilderness we should; the forests and grasslands that remain need to stay as they are, protecting us from the damages of global warming, as we draw closer together, not so prickly of our neighbors, careful of our own expenses, and teaching each other about the future.
We, in fact, dined off a lovely set before the program: each plate hand-painted with a soft blue flower. And the eatables presented by our Danish friend from Tyler, Minnesota: first course of herring, pickles, and buttered brown (homemade) bread; second course of vegetable-beef soup with tiny dumplings made of the same stuff as cream puffs--no surprise that they melted in the mouth; and finally dessert of the most amazing combination: butter cookies made with Hartshorn, which must be obtained from a pharmacy; blue cheese, more brown bread, and succulent pears.
The Italian in me, who not so secretly believes that the best food in the world comes from Italy, had to sit back and leave the field to the Danes: that dessert could not be beat by any other ethnic combination. Or at least that's what my tongue told me. Lest you think this Tyler-bred cuisine is off-the-beaten path, let me point out that the Danish Gymnasts, who are touring the world in ten months, will stop at Tyler, Minnesota. Where, I have taught several writers-in-the-schools residencies over the years and remember a culture hall, dedicated to Danish culture and conviviality.
One of the best things about being American is savoring our ethnic and racial differences. That's one reason I enjoy teaching at Metro State where an upper-level writing class for nurses is likely to include recent immigrants from Africa. This year my class contains students from Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan, and Uganda. Not to mention other immigrants from Southeast Asia, Greece, and all over Europe (but those with European roots come from families in the U.S. for many generations). The African students working for their nursing degrees are acute observers of the U.S. and their own countries. For the second paper, the class wrote on the huge topic of global warming, based on Lester Brown's important book, Plan B. 4.0. (A friend who works for a Minnesota legislator says that Brown's book informs many environmental debates at the legislative level.)
Two papers from African students caught my attention for their startling revelations about population. One, about AIDS in Uganda, pointed out that when a middle-aged man with HIV is treated with anti-retrovirus drugs (the "cocktail" that keeps many HIV patients alive for years), he may then live long enough to marry three more wives and father perhaps a score of children--all of whom will be infected with AIDS. Another paper began with a surprisingly humorous announcement of a death in Kenya: relatives of the 94-year-old deceased contributed three-quarters of the mourners at his funeral: he had been married 130 times, fathered almost 300 children and untold numbers of grandchildren (V. Duham, Oct. 2010, "Kenya's Akuku....polygamy hall of fame"). My student followed this with a compelling description of Kenya's deforestation, largely caused by clearing land for farming to feed the country's rapidly expanding population.
There is little danger that the U.S. Danish-population will expand so much as to cause an environmental crisis in western Minnesota. In fact, my years of teaching as a writer-in-the-schools in farming Minnesota suggests that, if anything, these communities suffer from the reverse: dwindling population due to the consolidation of smaller family farms. What strikes me as I mull the experiences of the last few days, personal and public, writerly and political, is how complex are the policy decisions facing us, worldwide. Our recent election hoop-di-do raises angry voices, confrontative politics, and an awareness on my part that the U.S. swings wildly between apparently irreconcilable poles. Yes, within a decade we as a nation can experience wrenching contests and demanding alterations. Our excesses of hope, greed, and manipulation can wreck certain kinds of stability. The housing crisis, for instance, seems wrought in part by banks and mortgage companies who enticed families of very modest means and no experience in home-owning into accepting variable-rate mortgages. When the rates rose sky-high, what had been affordable became impossible. Who is most at fault: the ignorant home-buyer or the companies that lured them into this trap?
Maybe a portion of the American dream needs revision: instead of every family housed separately with a green swatch around us, we need to look back to the cities of Europe, with their apartment buildings, lovely green thoroughfares (sometimes), and, best of all possible worlds, no cars in the city center. I'm thinking of Munich, or Ferrara where I recently visited. We've eaten up all the wilderness we should; the forests and grasslands that remain need to stay as they are, protecting us from the damages of global warming, as we draw closer together, not so prickly of our neighbors, careful of our own expenses, and teaching each other about the future.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Margotlog: The Lemon Tree and a Hunchback Moon
The Lemon Tree and a Hunchback Moon
The Israeli film, "The Lemon Tree," moves sedately and with scarcely any dialogue, but once it ends, the message is unmistakable: a huge concrete wall has slid into place, separating the Israeli Defense Minister's fancy modern house from a West Bank lemon grove which has been cut down to stumps. Fear of terrorism cannot coexist beside a dense, much-loved grove.
What the Defense Minister has perpetrated, of course, is also a form of terrorism on the widow (quite beautiful, stately and determined to save her grove) who with an ancient helper tends the trees and picks the lemons. First the Defense Minister has the grove fenced, padlocked and the widow's care of it prohibited. Then he has a huge tower erected where a stupidly amusing guard tries to learn some sort of logic from a tape-player which drones on while he sleeps. When the minister and his increasingly disturbed wife throw a party and forget the lemons, he sends soldiers into the grove to steal some fruit. The widow, outraged, comes after them with a stick (she's easily climbed the fence). They start mauling her, until the Defense Minister's wife cries out in horror for them to stop.
All this time the widow and a charming young West Bank lawyer have been pursuing the case all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. During this effort, they start a sweet, subdued love-affair, which never really goes anywhere, just as, in the end, the Supreme Court composed of three women judges (so as not to make the gender-divide too stark) rules that, though the grove should not be uprooted, it must be pruned to allow any terrorist to be immediately visible.
If the film contained nothing else, we would be thoroughly outraged against Israel, but the Defense Minister's wife, whom he neglects and rather obviously cheats on, gradually comes to hate this attack on the lone woman and her beautiful grove. Though at first the wife mouths agreement with her husband, toward the end of the film she gives a friend, a newspaper journalist, an interview. There she quietly objects to the treatment of the lemon grower, to the huge fence which both women can now scale, to the ridiculous notion that cutting down a grove will prevent terrorism, which of course rains down from the sky.
When the wife leaves the Defense Minister, we understand that she represents the heart of the film. She is appalled by Israel's bellicose attitude toward its neighbors because it duplicates the way her husband treats her and because she can see that the widow who grows lemons is herself a good neighbor. Conversation, sympathy, accord are far better protection against hatred and attack than building a wall and cutting off a beautiful grove at its knees.
Seeing this film set me to thinking about what damage modernism in all its vices has perpetrated against land, water, trees, animals, sky. Outsiders, who haven't lived for centuries and centuries on a particular stretch of land, find it easier to wreck what we call "natural resources" than do very ancient states. Outsiders, especially if they come to settle from distant areas and must uproot peoples long-suited to working the land and gathering its bounty, are quite vulnerable. They're ignorant, to begin with; they don't know the seasons, climate, soils; they also have to battle the current inhabitants for supremacy.
This warlike, defensive behavior continues even after the battle is won--I'm thinking of the United States. We still extract our "natural resources," as if we lived somewhere else and weren't hurting our very own air and water, etc. The conservation movement, which began with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," has educated us that such behavior harms ultimately ourselves. Not only does pollution and degrading of forests, grasslands, rivers, air kill off wild creatures, but such damage ultimately deprives us of rich soil and timber as well as clean air and water, leading to respiratory illness and cancer, etc.
We reap what we sow, or in the case of fisheries, if we reap and reap and reap, eventually nothing remains. There's an excellent case study of recovery from such excess in the Environment Defense Fund's work with Atlantic fishermen on a "catch share" program. Here "fishermen are given secure shares of a total catch limit, set by science, to which they are held strictly accountable"(Turning the Tide: Fishermen Embrace a New Approach to End Overfishing" special report 2010).
Why am I reminded of the recent construction craze in the United States when I read about the collapse of Atlantic fisheries? Because during the craze, hundreds of thousands of houses were built on unsecured loans, gobbling up farmland, and spreading suburbanism even further from city centers. Columnist Bonnie Blodgett wrote recently in the StarTribune, that so many houses were built, each American family would have to acquire four to make use of them all. Of course this was nuts, and once the unsecured loans collapsed, first homeowners who saw their "adjustable rate" mortgages go up so high they couldn't make the monthly payments, then developers themselves went belly up, leaving in their wake, what is surely a blight: empty boxes dotting acres of farmland, where nothing lives, but wind blows. A scene that deserves to be set beside Dust Bowl fields billowing away.
Let's argue that ancient civilizations guard the land and its amazing plenty with the most passion and knowledge. Italian fields today look like those in the background of Renaissance princely cavalcades. Italians, even those who live in cities, love to get dirt under the fingernails. Two Florentine friends come immediately to mind as examples: Grazia has run a "collectibles" shop in the heart of FLorence for years, yet every Saturday she tends land in the country, with apple and plum trees, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, as well as roses and perennials. She also is a mushroom hound, heading off to collect with her friend Antonio, and returning to cook me five dishes with "funghi" which she names over and over until I can repeat them.
Antonio, though working as a tailor or "sarto" in FLorence all his life, was born in Puglia in the boot. One evening he and Grazia drove me through the Cascine, the huge park on the western edge of FLorence, under a beautiful three-quarter moon. They began reciting a saying they both learned as kids from their parents who were farmers. I listened from the backseat, not quite understanding:
Gobba a levante, luna calante
Gobba a ponente, luna crescente.
Gobba means hunchback. I study the moon: yes, its hunch changes as it waxes and wanes. In English the saying goes
Hunchback to the east, moon is waning,
Hunchback to the west, moon is growing.
Of course, to decipher this, you must be able to know east from west. Finally I learned to do this in Florence. The Arno flows west, toward Pisa and the sea, away from the mountains which you can see through the arch of the Ponte Vecchio.
Telling east from west here in Saint Paul isn't all that difficult either because I can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west from my upstairs windows. Still, I have a much harder time telling the waxing and waning moon here in the US than I do in Florence. It must be that the moon responds to local dialects and we don't have an English saying to help us.
Postscript: lest someone accuse me of excessive fondness, Italians have a horrible environmental history vis-a-vis tuna which Italian fishermen are rapidly depleting. Not to mention the practice of snaring songbirds in huge nets, a practice which continues to decimate songbird populations along the Mediterranean. It makes me very sad.
The Israeli film, "The Lemon Tree," moves sedately and with scarcely any dialogue, but once it ends, the message is unmistakable: a huge concrete wall has slid into place, separating the Israeli Defense Minister's fancy modern house from a West Bank lemon grove which has been cut down to stumps. Fear of terrorism cannot coexist beside a dense, much-loved grove.
What the Defense Minister has perpetrated, of course, is also a form of terrorism on the widow (quite beautiful, stately and determined to save her grove) who with an ancient helper tends the trees and picks the lemons. First the Defense Minister has the grove fenced, padlocked and the widow's care of it prohibited. Then he has a huge tower erected where a stupidly amusing guard tries to learn some sort of logic from a tape-player which drones on while he sleeps. When the minister and his increasingly disturbed wife throw a party and forget the lemons, he sends soldiers into the grove to steal some fruit. The widow, outraged, comes after them with a stick (she's easily climbed the fence). They start mauling her, until the Defense Minister's wife cries out in horror for them to stop.
All this time the widow and a charming young West Bank lawyer have been pursuing the case all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. During this effort, they start a sweet, subdued love-affair, which never really goes anywhere, just as, in the end, the Supreme Court composed of three women judges (so as not to make the gender-divide too stark) rules that, though the grove should not be uprooted, it must be pruned to allow any terrorist to be immediately visible.
If the film contained nothing else, we would be thoroughly outraged against Israel, but the Defense Minister's wife, whom he neglects and rather obviously cheats on, gradually comes to hate this attack on the lone woman and her beautiful grove. Though at first the wife mouths agreement with her husband, toward the end of the film she gives a friend, a newspaper journalist, an interview. There she quietly objects to the treatment of the lemon grower, to the huge fence which both women can now scale, to the ridiculous notion that cutting down a grove will prevent terrorism, which of course rains down from the sky.
When the wife leaves the Defense Minister, we understand that she represents the heart of the film. She is appalled by Israel's bellicose attitude toward its neighbors because it duplicates the way her husband treats her and because she can see that the widow who grows lemons is herself a good neighbor. Conversation, sympathy, accord are far better protection against hatred and attack than building a wall and cutting off a beautiful grove at its knees.
Seeing this film set me to thinking about what damage modernism in all its vices has perpetrated against land, water, trees, animals, sky. Outsiders, who haven't lived for centuries and centuries on a particular stretch of land, find it easier to wreck what we call "natural resources" than do very ancient states. Outsiders, especially if they come to settle from distant areas and must uproot peoples long-suited to working the land and gathering its bounty, are quite vulnerable. They're ignorant, to begin with; they don't know the seasons, climate, soils; they also have to battle the current inhabitants for supremacy.
This warlike, defensive behavior continues even after the battle is won--I'm thinking of the United States. We still extract our "natural resources," as if we lived somewhere else and weren't hurting our very own air and water, etc. The conservation movement, which began with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," has educated us that such behavior harms ultimately ourselves. Not only does pollution and degrading of forests, grasslands, rivers, air kill off wild creatures, but such damage ultimately deprives us of rich soil and timber as well as clean air and water, leading to respiratory illness and cancer, etc.
We reap what we sow, or in the case of fisheries, if we reap and reap and reap, eventually nothing remains. There's an excellent case study of recovery from such excess in the Environment Defense Fund's work with Atlantic fishermen on a "catch share" program. Here "fishermen are given secure shares of a total catch limit, set by science, to which they are held strictly accountable"(Turning the Tide: Fishermen Embrace a New Approach to End Overfishing" special report 2010).
Why am I reminded of the recent construction craze in the United States when I read about the collapse of Atlantic fisheries? Because during the craze, hundreds of thousands of houses were built on unsecured loans, gobbling up farmland, and spreading suburbanism even further from city centers. Columnist Bonnie Blodgett wrote recently in the StarTribune, that so many houses were built, each American family would have to acquire four to make use of them all. Of course this was nuts, and once the unsecured loans collapsed, first homeowners who saw their "adjustable rate" mortgages go up so high they couldn't make the monthly payments, then developers themselves went belly up, leaving in their wake, what is surely a blight: empty boxes dotting acres of farmland, where nothing lives, but wind blows. A scene that deserves to be set beside Dust Bowl fields billowing away.
Let's argue that ancient civilizations guard the land and its amazing plenty with the most passion and knowledge. Italian fields today look like those in the background of Renaissance princely cavalcades. Italians, even those who live in cities, love to get dirt under the fingernails. Two Florentine friends come immediately to mind as examples: Grazia has run a "collectibles" shop in the heart of FLorence for years, yet every Saturday she tends land in the country, with apple and plum trees, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, as well as roses and perennials. She also is a mushroom hound, heading off to collect with her friend Antonio, and returning to cook me five dishes with "funghi" which she names over and over until I can repeat them.
Antonio, though working as a tailor or "sarto" in FLorence all his life, was born in Puglia in the boot. One evening he and Grazia drove me through the Cascine, the huge park on the western edge of FLorence, under a beautiful three-quarter moon. They began reciting a saying they both learned as kids from their parents who were farmers. I listened from the backseat, not quite understanding:
Gobba a levante, luna calante
Gobba a ponente, luna crescente.
Gobba means hunchback. I study the moon: yes, its hunch changes as it waxes and wanes. In English the saying goes
Hunchback to the east, moon is waning,
Hunchback to the west, moon is growing.
Of course, to decipher this, you must be able to know east from west. Finally I learned to do this in Florence. The Arno flows west, toward Pisa and the sea, away from the mountains which you can see through the arch of the Ponte Vecchio.
Telling east from west here in Saint Paul isn't all that difficult either because I can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west from my upstairs windows. Still, I have a much harder time telling the waxing and waning moon here in the US than I do in Florence. It must be that the moon responds to local dialects and we don't have an English saying to help us.
Postscript: lest someone accuse me of excessive fondness, Italians have a horrible environmental history vis-a-vis tuna which Italian fishermen are rapidly depleting. Not to mention the practice of snaring songbirds in huge nets, a practice which continues to decimate songbird populations along the Mediterranean. It makes me very sad.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Margotlog: The Girl with the Snow Queen's Kiss
Margotlog: The Girl with the Snow Queen's Kiss
Yes, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it first came out. We were in the Hawaiian Islands, on Kauai, and I sat in the garage-lanai the first morning and afternoon, mid-December, bathed in easy warmth, a flowering cactus just outside the doorway, and read about depredations on sanity, Swedenesque. Last evening, one of the few Sunday Halloweens I remember, the neighborhood graves opened and out poured a werewolf who peered in my window like a mask out of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Princesettes in pink tulle pirouetted; one face-painted pumpkin bobbed her real pumpkin handle attached to reddish hair, and some plump teens gave shame-faced grins because they hadn't bothered to doll-up.
The last and favorite was a tiny girl wearing the Snow Queen's Kiss--all in white, with spangled slippers, bunny fur wrap, and a wand with sparkly silver star. A premonition of the season to come? Or a character from Crime and Punishment which I've been listening to with my late night exercises? The waifs and discards of society find their makers in mid-to-late 19th-century European fiction--Dickens., Mrs. Gaskell, and Dostoevsky are the best. American writers don't take up the theme of the earth's outcasts until later, and then wrap them in outrage--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, for instance. Our myth of human perfectibility and the New Eden doesn't easily admit extreme human need.
My limited knowledge suggests that Europeans don't do Halloween the way we do in the U.S. For intensely Catholic countries, the day after, All Saints Day, is what's celebrated. Similar to the Mexican practice of visiting family graves with marigolds and skeletons made of sugar. "It's a liminal time," a Catholic friend tells me. Over the years, as my list of dead grows, I've come to understand what she means. Liminal, or of the doorway. In these days of dwindling light, the dead press closer to us, they rap quietly at our awareness; they hover just out of sight. Tears spring into my eyes and I'm mourning my mother, the most recent, profound loss. I picture her sleeping as I last saw her, when I came early into her room in assisted living and sat, watching her in her long afternoon nap. The pallor of her face struck me with the intuition that she would not live much longer.
In the last few months, two Italian-American poets and translators have given us versions of the early 19th-century Italian poet and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi. W.S. Di Piero's translations and selections of Leopardi's notebooks contains these sentences: "The ancients assumed that the dead thought only about the things of this life...that they grieved or felt contented depending on what had hurt or pleased them here in life, and so as they saw it--and as Christians do not--this world is mankind's home, that other world is exile." (In Poetry magazine, Nov. 2010, p. 130)
I like to think that this liminal period reminds us that living is precious; the earth that supports us ultimately demands our respect and nurturing in kind. We are kin/kind with those who have gone before and those who come after.
I remember loving Halloween: my Swedish-German mother, not given to effusive displays of affection, yet knew how to decorate and conduct a party. She made us elaborate costumes--Pucinellas in ruffed motley or Japanese ladies with wallpaper kimonos. Then she and other Old Citadel mothers gathered us in the three-story, echoing courtyard of the "center building" where we bobbed for apples, touched slimy disgusting things, pinned some kind of tail on a pumpkin, and shared our "trick or treat" loot. "One hundred and fifty children in one block," she would marvel. She who grew up in tiny Hankinson, North Dakota, whose population at its highest couldn't have been more than 1000.
In this night of misrule, we can blame our pranks on the dead, laugh and stuff ourselves with easy sweetness, and put aside any notion that life hereafter trounces such pleasures. I'm all for believing in benign heavenly guidance and malign distrust. But, so far, I'm more convinced that the dead remain with us, nurturing and terrifying.
Yes, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it first came out. We were in the Hawaiian Islands, on Kauai, and I sat in the garage-lanai the first morning and afternoon, mid-December, bathed in easy warmth, a flowering cactus just outside the doorway, and read about depredations on sanity, Swedenesque. Last evening, one of the few Sunday Halloweens I remember, the neighborhood graves opened and out poured a werewolf who peered in my window like a mask out of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Princesettes in pink tulle pirouetted; one face-painted pumpkin bobbed her real pumpkin handle attached to reddish hair, and some plump teens gave shame-faced grins because they hadn't bothered to doll-up.
The last and favorite was a tiny girl wearing the Snow Queen's Kiss--all in white, with spangled slippers, bunny fur wrap, and a wand with sparkly silver star. A premonition of the season to come? Or a character from Crime and Punishment which I've been listening to with my late night exercises? The waifs and discards of society find their makers in mid-to-late 19th-century European fiction--Dickens., Mrs. Gaskell, and Dostoevsky are the best. American writers don't take up the theme of the earth's outcasts until later, and then wrap them in outrage--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, for instance. Our myth of human perfectibility and the New Eden doesn't easily admit extreme human need.
My limited knowledge suggests that Europeans don't do Halloween the way we do in the U.S. For intensely Catholic countries, the day after, All Saints Day, is what's celebrated. Similar to the Mexican practice of visiting family graves with marigolds and skeletons made of sugar. "It's a liminal time," a Catholic friend tells me. Over the years, as my list of dead grows, I've come to understand what she means. Liminal, or of the doorway. In these days of dwindling light, the dead press closer to us, they rap quietly at our awareness; they hover just out of sight. Tears spring into my eyes and I'm mourning my mother, the most recent, profound loss. I picture her sleeping as I last saw her, when I came early into her room in assisted living and sat, watching her in her long afternoon nap. The pallor of her face struck me with the intuition that she would not live much longer.
In the last few months, two Italian-American poets and translators have given us versions of the early 19th-century Italian poet and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi. W.S. Di Piero's translations and selections of Leopardi's notebooks contains these sentences: "The ancients assumed that the dead thought only about the things of this life...that they grieved or felt contented depending on what had hurt or pleased them here in life, and so as they saw it--and as Christians do not--this world is mankind's home, that other world is exile." (In Poetry magazine, Nov. 2010, p. 130)
I like to think that this liminal period reminds us that living is precious; the earth that supports us ultimately demands our respect and nurturing in kind. We are kin/kind with those who have gone before and those who come after.
I remember loving Halloween: my Swedish-German mother, not given to effusive displays of affection, yet knew how to decorate and conduct a party. She made us elaborate costumes--Pucinellas in ruffed motley or Japanese ladies with wallpaper kimonos. Then she and other Old Citadel mothers gathered us in the three-story, echoing courtyard of the "center building" where we bobbed for apples, touched slimy disgusting things, pinned some kind of tail on a pumpkin, and shared our "trick or treat" loot. "One hundred and fifty children in one block," she would marvel. She who grew up in tiny Hankinson, North Dakota, whose population at its highest couldn't have been more than 1000.
In this night of misrule, we can blame our pranks on the dead, laugh and stuff ourselves with easy sweetness, and put aside any notion that life hereafter trounces such pleasures. I'm all for believing in benign heavenly guidance and malign distrust. But, so far, I'm more convinced that the dead remain with us, nurturing and terrifying.
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