Sixty and Single in Seattle

"Icon Icky Vent"

2012-02-02T09:05:00.000-08:00

I went last night -- girl date -- to hear Jennifer Egan at Seattle Arts and Lectures, after our traditional happy hour at the Alexis. It's pretty much the only place I eat beef, and I was craving their amazing burger with cheese and fries ($7) after spending the day putting two coats of paint on my dining room walls.

I could say lots about Egan -- she spoke so comfortably for nearly one hour about how her non-fiction journalistic work informs her fiction, which is never about her real life -- but then I'd be late to school. So instead, let me mention the whaddayacallit that posts the words she's speaking on a screen so people with hearing issues can read them.

But who is typing the words? Is it a machine? Is it a super-fast human? I try to ignore the screen as much as possible, just like I ignore the horrible TVs in restaurants and bars, but last night, just caught this phrase: "icon icky vent."

Get it?

School Day

2012-01-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

I wonder if my students might be as excited as I am to get back to school. Is it possible they too got just a bit bored with the limited options at home, when we were snowed and slushed and rained in?

I finally got back on my bike yesterday, for the ride to church. Most places, the bike lanes were free of snow, but it was kind of thrilling to my macha self-image to bike past snow piles!

This morning, the sun is out, but probably not for long. Probably I'll be rained on as I bike home, as I was yesterday.

But that's okay. I love to ride, and I love to tutor my kindergartners.

As I packed my bag for school -- leftover pasta with roasted leeks and mushrooms for lunch, NYT book review for lunch reading, bike pump, rain pants... -- I was having a conversation in my mind with my unruly boys. "Is there anything you'd like to know how to do?" I ask them in my mind. "Read about a soccer star? Learn to play better? Someday find a job on Craigslist? You're going to need these words we're learning!"

In my mind's eye, I see them giggling wildly, as they do, and pulling up their shirts to flash their nipples, as they do, and saying, "Chi-chi's! I want to read about chi-chi's!" (At least, to me it sounds like "chi-chi's.")

Nevertheless, I do think something is getting through. Last time we met, they each got a sticker. Unprecedented.

Ski Day, Sled Day, Single Day

2012-01-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

I woke up briefly at 2:30 yesterday morning, and not a drop of snow had fallen. Another false alarm?

No. By morning, we had the predicted 4+ inches. I made breakfast and started calling friends, to find somebody who wanted to snow-walk with me.

Not to whine, but as usual, I didn't find anybody. I went out walking anyway. On the way home, after passing three cyclists (!), three buses, and countless people on skis and sleds in ninety minutes, I said hello to a woman waiting for a #5 in my neighborhood. She looked like someone I'd like, my age, trim, a bus rider. She said she was headed downtown where she needed to get some publicity shots done for her gallery opening Friday night.

All sounds promising. But I realized I had no words to say, Hey, want to try me out as a friend? It would have been easier, oddly, if she'd been a man, to say, Hey, are you by any chance single? (Not that I've ever actually done that either.)

I realize I need a plan. I read recently on Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project blog about Rachel Bertsche, a woman in her thirties, who had as much trouble as I do locating a new BFF (which I thought meant Best Female Friend, but my friend Ruth said it means Best Friends Forever). And Ruth is one of those, a BFF, whom I've know since I was 30. And there's Amy in Port Townsend. I do have friends. But on a snow day, especially, you want a BFF in the neighborhood. I wanted somebody who'd wake up and think, "I've gotta call Mary. She'll want to snow walk too."

This Rachel wrote a book about it, MWF Seeking BFF. Obviously, I need the book. From what I remember reading about it, though, she actually set up weekly "dates" with women who might turn out to be BFFs.

I can do that! I have a little list of women I have met, women I like, but it's hard to know much about them from the moments we grab between dances or during coffee hour at church or waiting at bus stops after SAL.

I'd like to organize my own BFF search, and I think I'll start by resolving to organize a weekly "date" with one of these women, for a walk, or Scrabble, or soup, or something. And just see if a BFF emerges.

It doesn't snow often in Seattle, but next time, I'd like to be ready.

No-Snow Day

2012-01-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

I'm ready to get back to my students, but school will not begin today until two hours late, due to -- what? It's snow-free and even relatively dry in Fremont. I was planning to ride my bike, and I'm layered up: three layers on top and my fleece tights with bike tights on the bottom.

But I checked with a friend on Capitol Hill, through which I ride, and it's slush central over there, he says. "Don't even try it on your bike."

I checked the snow routes for buses; my usual one isn't going up the hill at all. (Hills are the problem in Seattle; we're not wienies, we just have hills so steep I'm nervous about riding down half of them, even when it's warm and dry.)

So I've got a new plan, which may involve a mile-long walk. Must re-think wardrobe....keeping in mind dire predictions for lots of snow later in the day.

Going to be an exciting Tuesday!

Clean the Fridge, Find Lunch

2012-01-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

I hate to admit it, but chaos had been growing at my place. For one thing, I work. Which I love, but it reduces my time for dealing with the demands of daily life.

Fortunately, my Dinner for Eight group was scheduled for an early supper at my place last night. Social obligations like this are sure-fire starters for my cleaning instinct.

I spent two days getting through the paperwork. As a writer, I have pages everywhere, filled with my thinking. Plus the paper that arrives, for me to deal with or file, from my employers, my financial guy, my mortgagee, my attorney, my tax preparer -- good grief!

Once I got through it, my house looked so good. Plus, I made a bright yellow paper folder and scrawled "calendar" across it in red, to hold my 12 monthly calendar pages I printed up on the Web. In the pockets, I put stuff I need to attend to. Underneath, a red folder holds my recent written pages. Together, they look neat and colorful stacked on the desk in my living room.

But there was more to be done. Today I tackled the fridge, taking everything out, washing the shelves and drawers, putting it all back. Usually I find stuff to discard, but today, hardly anything. A pint of half and half from before Thanksgiving, when friends came to visit.

Those visiting friends had brought gorgonozola, and I found a tiny piece of it, all wrapped up in plastic. Another friend, I don't remember when, had brought me "fig bread," a flat loaf made of mashed up figs; its remains had slipped to the back of the fridge. I scraped the extra mold off the cube of cheese, sliced the fig bread really thin, and ate it for lunch.

A tangible reward for doing my cleaning.

Very Wonderful Day

2012-01-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

I hate seeing that my latest post is called "Very Difficult Day," especially since my latest day was very wonderful -- but too full to leave much time for writing.

A lovely day was Thursday, when I had to take the bus to school instead of my bike, since I was going directly to a friend's for a Bainbridge overnight afterwards. I sat on the bus near a young man who mentioned the cold weather. I asked if he was from here, which he isn't, and learned he was on his way to an interview for a job as a chef.

Being the woman I am, I sort of pre-interviewed him, asking him things about his approach to the kitchen -- and he's a calm and organized guy, unlike the celebrity chefs I have read about -- and what they are looking for in their new hire, and what specialties he might bring to it.

I asked him which was his stop, and just before he got off, I leaned over and whispered, "It's probably just because you're nervous, but if you get a chance, you might want to grab a breath mint."

Because who better to tell him than I? He thanked me, and I wished him luck. I hope he gets the job.

Then my next bus was so late, I ended up running four blocks to school, late nevertheless, racing to Ms Smith's classroom to get two of my students, taking off my coat and hat and gloves while saying, "Learner position, please!"

And we still had a wonderful day. All six of my student groups were at their best, including the two impossible ones. In one, where the two boys often hate each other and do all they can to annoy -- echoing every word the other says, bickering, etc -- on Thursday, when I said, "What does 'and' mean?, they said, with their arms around each other, "'And' means together!"

A very wonderful day. And I didn't even get to the Bainbridge part!

Very Difficult Day

2012-01-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

"Very difficult day," my friend posted on Facebook. Nothing more.

Of course I'm sorry it was a difficult day for her, but oddly, it's one of the first things in a week to make me feel better. Because I had a very difficult week, and I couldn't seem to get over it.

Three days in a row, things happened that seemed unfair. It felt like I kept getting punched for nothing I did.

First, there was a guy who, as I saw it, came on kind of strong to me during the holidays, giving me the impression he was both available and interested. Then at a dance on Wednesday, he was with somebody else -- and that's okay, I realized by then that nothing was going to be happening between us -- but didn't say one word to me. That's cold.

Next day, I accidentally left my REI water bottle at the school where I tutor. As far as I know, I'm their only adult cyclist, but next day when I went looking, first thing, for my water bottle, they told me they'd thrown it away. I sort of thought they liked me.

And then, I met up with a guy to discuss a JD Salinger short story, but it turned out he wanted to keep being mad at me because I don't want more than a friendship.

Believe me, I have tried to mine these incidents for life lessons. Yes, I got too excited too fast about that first guy, but it didn't take long to get real. (When a man waits until the day before New Year's Eve to ask what you're doing, you can be certain he's not interested.)

The water bottle? Some people probably have no genuine concept of a bike water bottle.

The angry friend? Fine, I get that he's mad, and feelings are feelings.

But I couldn't seem to get over feeling beat up. I said to myself, Just duck and let the unpleasantness float right on over your head and away. I said, "There's nothing you can do about the behavior of others." I said, "Pray it away."

Maybe all that is finally helping. Or maybe it's reading my friend's post, and getting confirmation for my sneaking suspicion that there's just some weird planetary alignment thing going on, and everybody's a little crazy.

And that makes me feel better?

Oddly, yes.

Deconstructing Pandora

2011-12-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

It's not the ads. I actually don't mind the ads on Pandora. I like it when Barry Manilow comes on with those few bars of a nice song, to share with us how he has atrial defibrillation -- "a fib," he says, casually -- and how we can find out more about it like he did. Plus, who knew Nyquil doesn't have a decongestant? I share the shock and disappointment of the guy in the commercial, and I'm glad his wife told us Alka Seltzer Plus is what we need for a cold.

So that part's okay. What I mean about the worrisome effects of Pandora is how it makes you feel like you're experiencing the stuff the singers are singing about. But you aren't. And they're hardly ever singing anything like, "Life is so great all on my own, I don't have to share the leftovers, oh no no no, I can listen to this stupid station as long as I want, oh yeah yeah yeah, and nobody knows the stuff I laundered last week was still in the dryer this morning when I went to put in the new batch."

Instead, for example, I've heard twice the Michael Buble (should be an accent acute over the "e", but I don't know how to do that) song "Home." And I'm singing along, and I am feeling it, "I want to go home, I want to go home."

But I am home.

And I'm singing, with feeling, "I'm through with Paris and Rome," even though the truth is, I was checking airfares yesterday. (And now that I've seen it costs $1500 to get to Europe, I probably am through with Paris and Rome.)

But I do wake up at the words, "I'm bringing my letters to you, the single lines I wrote from time to time" or something like that. And I'm thinking, "Jerk. You never even sent her a letter? You'll be lucky if she opens the door. You'll be lucky if she still lives there."

And then I take a bike ride, to add some verisimilitude to the concept, "I want to go home." Of course, once I'm on my bike, why would I want to go home?

Pandora Warning

2011-12-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

Okay, after a day of my James Taylor station on Pandora, I see another danger.

I'm reverting to teenage, and not the good part. No, what's coming up is the angst. The does-he-love-me, will-I-get-a-date, am-I-pretty stuff. Any moment now I'll be losing my appetite.

And it's ridiculous. The prom is months away.

Pandora

2011-12-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

When I first heard about Pandora internet radio, I thought, "What a dumb marketing decision! Don't they know the story of Pandora? All that bad stuff set free in the world?"

Now I consider it fair warning. Not that Pandora is releasing anything bad in my house, but it has quickly made me an addict. I'm already thinking about a recovery strategy, with affirmations like, "Mary, it doesn't go away. You can always come back to it."

Because I need to go to the hardware store. My wonderful vintage-y medicine cabinet that I was so pleased to get for a fourth the price of the ones at Restoration Hardware? The latch tore apart yesterday.

Fortunately, I can hear my Pandora from the bathroom, so I got right on the job of unscrewing the six screws of the latch. Then, darn, one dropped to the floor. It has disappeared, which is pretty strange in a bathroom that's probably less than 5'x7'. Fortunately, as I said, I can hear my Pandora in the bathroom. I think it's worth it to spend several hours looking for the missing screw if necessary, don't you?

What I did was, I tried out James Taylor radio this morning, so I've been hearing him and Jackson Browne and the Eagles and the Hawaiian guy who sings Over the Rainbow from (faulty) memory but it doesn't matter, Jason Mraz (whoever that is), and Sting. I'm loving it.

Oh. Van Morrison now. Maybe I'll blog more in the coming weeks, since it appears that I can do this and listen too.

An Excellent Christmas

2011-12-26T10:40:00.000-08:00

Heavy cat in my lap

Hot orange flaming fireplace

Sunday night blues on radio 88.5

Just enough too much excellent Napa Cellars 2007 Dyer Vineyard Carneros Syrah

Playing Royalty with a pal.

Going home covered in cat hair. Not caring.

Single, but not Alone

2011-12-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning all excited about Christmas! The Christmas Spirit has finally arrived.

Instead of a Christmas tree, I've arranged a tall candle, a budding amaryllis, and a scraggly bloomless geranium atop a wooden stool, with the Christmas gifts my family sent arranged around it. Quite festive, actually.

It's supposed to hit 50 degrees today in Seattle, and the sun is out. Now that I'm working, this week is vacation time, and feels like it. I've treated myself in the last couple of days to singles' favorite DVDs, An Unmarried Woman and Up in the Air.

A friend said yesterday, "Let's bike over to West Seattle." So we did, and we stopped for a light, long lunch at Cactus, a wonderful Mexican restaurant that's beautiful, has delicious food, and when you go there the first time, delivers a complimentary creme caramel to share for dessert.

My friend is another Christmas "orphan," and has decided to go to midnight mass with me tonight. I'll be dancing first, at a CD dance at my local Sonny Newman's Dance Hall.

Christmas morning, I'll sit on the floor by my Christmas stool and open my presents while I listen to my Messiah tapes and eat my festive waffles breakfast, with toasted pecans and nectarines from my freezer stash.

Another friend and I, both lovers of cooking and good food, are collaborating on dinner tomorrow. We're cooking over there, with the wood-burning fireplace and two cats.

Not what I think of as my traditional Christmas, but still, all the essentials are in place: friends, food, presents, and Jesus. I'm smiling.

Single Christmases

2011-12-22T11:03:00.000-08:00

It was Christmas Eve in New York City. Christmas morning, actually, since it was midnight, and she had just started her 12 to 8 am shift as a typist for a law firm, one of those dumb jobs you do when you're young so you can pursue your artistic passion. Her whole family was on the other coast.

As she walked home just after dawn, she saw what appeared to be the top of a Christmas tree somebody must have trimmed off, about two or three feet of trunk and branches sticking out of a garbage can. She carried it home. She made popcorn and strung it to garland the tree. She made other ornaments. She sat by her tree and cried.

He, when he had Christmases alone, he drove. Once, after a marriage meltdown, all the way from Michigan to Florida. Once from Seattle to Kalaloch, where the gray waves rolled in with a freezing wind. He didn't feel any better, but at least he was moving.

Another woman loved her Christmases alone. "But you had the kids, didn't you?" I said.

"Oh, no. They were with their dad."

"But didn't you miss them?" I said. And then I remembered, and she reminded me, how welcome a break is when you're a mom. She loved those Christmases.

What I'm learning from your stories, and I thank you for them, is something I know I'll be learning until the day I die. The worst thing about a bad day is our expectation that it will be different.

Christmas for Singles

2011-12-17T15:55:00.000-08:00

Somehow, in the several years since the 2005 end of my marriage, I've managed to insinuate myself into somebody else's Christmas plans every year. Until now. I have a feeler or two out, but I'm also intrigued with what Christmas would be like all alone. Toute seule, as they call it in Paris when you want a table for one. On my own.

Those all sound blue-ish. What if I call it 'Christmas My Way'? Sounds better, but what does it look like?

So far, no Christmas tree. Too hard to put up the big ones by myself. Maybe I need to start liking small trees on high stools. I could do that. Just my favorite ornaments, a string of lights, a focal point for the presents my family is sending.

So far, no Christmas cookies, but in about five minutes, the fruitcake cookies I love will be out of the oven. I see homemade eggnog in my future.

My dream Christmas day includes games of Scrabble and Christmas books read aloud, and people playing instruments and singing songs. I've never had exactly this dream Christmas day in my life, so I can't feel too self-pitiful if I don't have it again this year. I'm thinking, though, a nice roast chicken with roasted leeks and carrots and brussels sprouts, with the homemade fresh cranberry relish I like and a nice bottle of zinfandel. I can read to me, aloud or not, after I listen to my old cassette tapes of Messiah.

As I look back over my long life, I see different traditions through the years. I never thought Christmas alone would be one of them, but honestly, the idea is growing on me.

Dressing for Getting to Work

2011-12-13T08:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, for the first time, I traveled to work via bus rather than bike. True, the rooftops and cars were thick with frost, but that wasn't what kept me off my bike. I bussed to stop downtown for Christmas shopping after my school day. I'll stop at Elliott Bay Bookstore today on my bike route home and finish up.

I'm looking forward to being back on the bike. It's still frosty out there, but the streets seem dry, so I won't be slipping around. True, it will be cold, but I learned yesterday that the discomforts of cycling -- start out too cold so you won't end up too hot -- are nothing compared to the discomforts of winter bus riding.

You need to dress even more warmly when you're waiting outside for who knows how long to catch a bus. And then when you get on, it's apparently 75 degrees in there, and blasting dry heat, so you sit and sweat, because what a hassle to strip off your scarf and hat and gloves and down jacket, and even then, you'd still be wearing an underlayer and a shirt and a sweater.

Give me biking any day. This morning I'll definitely wear my warm booties over my bike shoes and my wool glove liners under my bike crab-claw gloves. My face will freeze, but I like that smooth-cheeks feeling.

A biker friend of mine says we won't really be a bike city until women feel comfortable biking to work in business attire. He was curious how I felt about dressing for a bike commute and dealing with my hairstyle.

Well, folks, I love it! because it's a perfect excuse! I figure, my hair may not look great, but hey, I just got it out of a helmet! Not bad when you take that into account.

As for clothing, my favorite bike attire involves bike tights and a skirt, with a couple wool layers on top. I'm still looking for exactly the right neutral wool skirt for a sort of school "uniform" -- neutral being gray or black or red. In the meantime, I most often pull on my black jeans or neutral taupe slacks over longies, with sweaters and scarves on top.

Best of all, I don't have to think about shoes! (I've never understood shoe lust.) Bike shoes speak for themselves. They make excuses. Probably people think I have really cute shoes in my closet but had to leave them home because of the bike. Let them think that.

Feeling Good

2011-12-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

Janis Joplin: If it feels good, do it.
Mary Davies: If it feels good tomorrow, do it.

When you're single, staying upbeat is all on you. Thus I'm thankful I ran into Dr David Burns' book, Feeling Good, years ago. Basically, he suggests tracking -- via actual charts -- the things that make you feel good, and doing them.

Simple. But feeling good when?

I had a little piece of cake the other night with fudge sauce and Breyer's vanilla ice cream. Yum. I thought about having another piece. But I resisted because I know from experience that nothing beats how good I'd feel next morning about my prudence.

But you've got to try things out. (Within reason, of course.) Two Sundays ago, what with my new job and squeezing a lot of fun into what's left of my leisure time, it felt like I'd barely been home in a week. And I had a new novel to read.

But I love going to church, and my favorite preacher was in the pulpit. Since I bike to church, I decided to be safe, and go to the 11 am service instead of the 9, giving the ice time to thaw on the roads. I curled up with my book in the meantime.

When it got to be 10:30, I decided to go the 5 pm service. Then I started saying to myself, "Sometimes you just need a day in your PJs, and if you don't take it, sometimes you get sick."

Another Sunday tradition I skipped was a phone call to Mom in Michigan, since we'd spoken on Friday.

So I spent the day in my PJs. Read the whole novel. Should have been perfect. But it wasn't. I felt like when you eat too much chocolate.

The next Sunday I biked to 9 o'clock service and phoned Mom when I got home. It works for me.

I do other stuff, too, to stay happy, including fake smiling and laughing until it turns real. And I'm noticing all the ways my new job makes me happy.

Everybody knows a ride or a walk on the crummiest day is an upper, but what if you can't kick your butt out the door? So far, biking is the only way I know to get to the school where I work, so all other modes, untried, provoke anxiety. Thus I ride, even when I have to wear my hiker rain pants. I meet other cyclists, including a Seattle U engineering student who showed me a better route. Under the campus trees, it's still autumn. And on my bike, I feel young, a feeling that's getting rarer. By the time I get home, I've "worked out," an hour and a quarter of cycling, with hills.

And the kids at school -- I have to be on my toes every moment. "English only, boys," I say. "Claudio, eyes right here, please." "Tell me again, students, what's the Super Special Word of the Day?" I feel useful.

Funny, as an early retiree, I've spent a lot of thought on how to make not-working work. Now I'm thinking work is so much fun, we should all do it. But less. If only we had decent health care in this country, we could share the work in part-time jobs. We'd all be feeling good.

I Won!

2011-11-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

I never win anything. At least, that's what I've always told myself, from the time when we were kids and, if it came to drawing straws to decide whether sister Deb or I had to do dishes, I knew I might as well start filling the sink.

But this week, after an already excellent bike commute and day with my students at school, I arrived home to find that Seattle Arts and Lectures has made me a winner. Before Thanksgiving, they asked on their Facebook page for answers to this question: What book are you thankful for this season?

My answer was Cathy Davidson's Now You See It. It's not as if that was the winning book -- though maybe it should be -- but they ended up drawing the names of people who responded, and I won! I won two tickets to the SAL lecture of my choice.

That got me thinking my losing streak is over. I do occasionally notice that somebody is raining down blessings on my head, in an effort perhaps to get me to believe in abundance.

So it was in that spirit I responded to the sign about the sale on champagne at Fred Meyer. I bought six bottles.

The Visit of the Married People

2011-11-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

Married people, nice ones, stayed at my house last night. Married more than 40 years. Though I didn't know them then, we were all sort of young marrieds together: my first ex and I were, with them, guests at the 1972 wedding of mutual friends. We got to be good friends, family almost, with my Husband Two, nearly 27 years later.

They'd come last night from Port Townsend, where we all once lived, for dinner and an overnight on their way to a morning flight.

We talked about children and how they turn out. Their kids are success stories, hard workers, like mine. We did good, and we're lucky. We have friends whose kids struggle with physical and mental conditions that are nobody's fault.

We talked economics, how their financial security and mine come partly from our inclination to thrift, while we know other thrifty people in trouble simply because they decided a month too late to sell the big house.

Politics, recipes, books. Much the same conversations we had when there were four of us.

But as I sat alone in my armchair last night, with the distance of seven years' singleness, looking across to them together on my sofa, I felt suddenly like an anthropologist. This, I thought, is what it looks like to be married.

See, I thought, how her elbow is touching his arm! How she adds a questioning or clarifying word as he describes the book he read. How he asserts that, without her, the church auction might never have come together at all.

This morning she said, as she poured orange juice for a quick breakfast, "We'll just share a glass."

"I have a dishwasher," I said. "Use all the glasses you like."

She used the one.

"Want a banana, Jim?" she said.

He: "I'll take half of yours."

It was a lovely dance, a pas de deux, equal time in starring roles. Nothing googly-eyed, just the rock-solid foundation of trust and cooperation grown up over four decades. What college kids had made of themselves and each other.

When I dropped them off at the tunnel this morning to catch the Link to Sea-Tac, his big pockets held an apple for each of them, for the journey.

About that Job

2011-11-18T08:29:00.000-08:00

So, I got a job. I was talking with a woman at my church, who turns out to work with tutors at a private school and knew a lot about tutor opportunities in Seattle. She said, "You can get paid."

Hmm. I've been volunteering, but like many seniors, I've had some recent financial setbacks. Money could be good.

I guess I applied at exactly the right instant, because they trained me two days later -- paid training -- before anybody even met me, let alone said I was hired. I work 3.75 hours a day, four days a week. I make $11.25 an hour.

Which doesn't seem like much, in a way. On the other hand, if I were working a 40-hour week, it would be not too bad. I have unemployed relatives who'd be thrilled to earn $11.25 hour. When I think of families trying to get along on a minimum wage salary! how does anybody do it? And it takes a lot out of you, working.

I don't have to get on my bike to leave until 9:15, and I'm home by 2:30. I know this will get better, but at the moment, I'm tired when I finish. I want tea, shower, nap. So far, I haven't done much more than entertain myself after work.

Though I get a lot done before I leave home. I'm writing this on Friday morning. I had breakfast, and I just made a big batch of blue cheese Waldorf salad for my sack lunch. I read the New York Times. My house is tidy.

And best of all? I noticed this morning that I'm not having those awful dialogues with myself about whether my life is doing anybody any good at all.

I'll tell you about the kids next time.

The Bike Commuter

2011-11-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

I always wanted to be a bike commuter, but first I had to get a job.

And that turned out to be surprisingly easy. (I'll tell you more another time.)

Yesterday was Day One, and though it was cold, the sun was out. My commute is 40 minutes or so, each way, and somewhat hilly. I asked a friend who owns no car what to wear to be warm enough and, once I get cranked up, cool enough. He said you've got to plan on being uncomfortably cold to start if you want to avoid being sweaty at the end.

Luckily, my biggest hill is on my way home. I sweated. Yesterday I got home at 2:30. I put on the kettle, and while it heated, I stripped and set up my tea strainer. When the whistle blew, I poured the water over my tea, set the timer for 4 minutes, jumped in the shower, and came out with towel wrapped around my head a moment before the timer beeped. By 2:40, I was clean and relaxing.

I thought a side effect of a job would be better time management, but this is ridiculous: I cleaned my house! including bathroom, vacuuming, washing kitchen and bath floors, and laundry. I stirred up bread. I went out to hear Dennis Lehane -- don't bother, by the way -- and came home and baked cornbread. Slept like a log.

David Grossman at SAL/Town Hall

2011-11-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

I had one of those odd feelings yesterday, like a cosmic prod. I felt I ought to go hear Israeli novelist David Grossman, speaking for Seattle Arts and Lectures at Town Hall. Not that there was any particular reason to resist, but I haven't read him, I don't know his work.

So I went. His latest novel in translation is To the End of the Land, about an Israeli mother who decides, when her son re-ups, she will not stay at home and await the authorities who come to tell a family their soldier son has died. Instead, she persuades a childhood friend to accompany her on a long hike. As they walk, she tells him about her son.

Grossman said he used to discuss this book as he wrote it, with his own soldier son. Before the writing was done, his son died in battle in Lebanon, on the last day of the conflict.

I think we were all riveted on the reading from the novel, then what felt like an extended, wide-ranging (albeit one-sided) conversation with a wonderful human being. So during the question time, a couple of the questioners were apologetically confrontational.

It struck me that Grossman never bristled.

Partly, it's because he has nothing to bristle about. "Have you, or even other Israeli novelists, tried to write about the Palestinian experience?" Actually, yes, Grossman spent time in a refugee camp, listening, and wrote The Yellow Wind.

"I notice you haven't mentioned anything about the big recent demonstrations, not only in Tahrir Square, but in Tel Aviv." Actually, Grossman marched in every one of them, and spoke of the new sense among the people that it is the job of the government to support them, not the other way round.

But I think also, behind the failure to bristle, is what he said about the experience of writing novels, writing characters: getting to be somebody else, to see their world from the inside out. I thought (as I rode home on the #5 bus, surrounded by characters), Grossman doesn't bristle because he looks to see himself through the eyes and issues and pain of others.

Bristling is protective. Grossman is openness.

I thought of what John Gardner said about writing, that only a person of great character can produce a great novel. Grossman makes me want to be a better human. I would like to respond to confrontation, as I think he does, with openness, a willingness to consider whether my confronter might have a good point I need to hear.

The Sweetmeat Squash Post

2011-11-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

I've got roasted winter squash coming out my ears, and that's the way I like it.

Last week I roasted up the gorgeous sweetmeat squash that was sitting on my table as centerpiece for weeks. It's a Martha Stewart pastel blue-green, and enormous. I cut it in half horizontally, and thank heaven I'm strong, because that was some job. I could only fit the two halves on a cookie sheet with parts hanging off the edges. It took two hours to roast, and when I got it out of the oven and put each half on a large plate, you couldn't see the plates at all.

Well, no problem. I made a big batch of my famous (to me) Butternut Squash Lasagne (I didn't want to change the name to Sweetmeat Squash Lasagna) and served it to five people. I made another mini one for my freezer. I've made pureed squash soup with a coconut milk-thai curry theme and I've made squash puree with mole sauce and guacamole.

I still had squash, and I was running out of ideas, until Mom told me her granddaughter Miranda, a senior at college, was homesick and had called to request a loaf of pumpkin bread. Silly child, she likes it plain: no nuts, no raisins. Mom made it and sent it off.

Pumpkin bread. The last time I remember eating Mom's pumpkin bread, I ate a whole loaf.

It was evening in the kitchen at our house in Struthers, OH, where the sunsets were brilliant with chemicals from the steel mills. I was working at the rescue mission by day, going to Youngstown University by night.

I was happy. My best friend, Barry Patrick McNally, picked me up for school every day in his new white Chevy Impala with red upholstery. I'd light a cigarette, then pass it over for him to smoke. That was as much as we touched, unless our hands accidentally met, then recoiled, at the volume dial when we both wanted to turn it up. One day we both said, when I got in the car, "You've got to hear this new song." Same song: If You're Going to San Francisco.

I guess I was tubby. I've struggled at times with an extra 15 pounds. I got diet pills at the drugstore, which means they were cheap -- I was poor -- and over-the-counter. I guess they were amphetamines. A drug habit!

I say habit, but I don't remember trouble stopping. What I do remember is how great I felt every day. Filled with energy, too busy and elated to eat.

Until I got home from school, at nine pm. By then, my pill had worn off and there was nothing inside me. One night, I opened the bread drawer and saw pumpkin bread. I cut a slice, spread it with cream cheese, sat down at the kitchen table, and ate it. Then I did it again.

And again.

The loaf I made this week, with sweetmeat squash for pumpkin, I eat a slice a day. And it's probably not as good as Mom's either, since I cut the sugar in half and substituted whole wheat flour for white and oil for Crisco. But it's still really good, and it reminds me of Barry. In my only photo of him, he's sitting at that kitchen table. We might be eating pumpkin bread.

We lost track of each other after I moved to Minnesota, then California, though he visited me in each of those places. I used to look for his curly red hair and freckle face, thinking one day we'd run into each other. I tried seriously, two decades ago, to track him down. I called information and tried a couple different McNallys in the Youngstown area. At John McNally's, a woman answered. "I'm trying to locate my old friend Barry," I said. "Is this the right number?" The phone went silent, then a man got on. "What's this about?" he asked. It was Barry's brother. He told me Barry had been dead for years. He was on his way to Sears to buy his mom a mother's day present, and his motorcycle hit a pothole. It was his mother who had answered the phone. She'd never got over it.

I cried for three days.

But it's good to remember Barry. One night we skipped class, and he told the prof we had to go to a Cana Conference, I think he called it, something Catholics do before they marry, which of course we never would. I still have poems he used to write during class, and slide over to me to read. One page still has the fold lines from the paper airplane he made of it. I have a letter he sent when I was cooking at Camp Burton that summer. I think I'll cut myself a slice of pumpkin bread and re-read them.

Mom's Pumpkin Bread

Cream together 1/3 c shortening and 1 1/3 c sugar. Add two eggs, 1 c pumpkin, 1/3 c water. Combine separately and add to first mixture: 1 2/3 c flour, 3/4 t salt, 1 t soda, 1/4 t baking powder, 1/2 t each cinnamon and cloves. Stir in 1/2 c each chopped nuts and raisins (except for Miranda). Bake in a loaf pan at 350 degrees for 60 to 75 minutes. Awfully good with cream cheese.

My Health Care Reform

2011-11-01T09:16:00.001-07:00

I'm not on Medicare -- though I regard that happy day like a light at the end of a tunnel -- but I have one of those health plans where I not only pay $300 a month for insurance, but most of my own medical costs too. The catastrophic coverage plan, you know.

I've got this foot thing, as you may recall, and my orthopedic PA wrote me a prescription for custom orthotics. Of course, my plan doesn't pay for any part of them. They cost $350 a pair. I went to the orthoticist, since I'd really love to be able again to walk in my old way, and she said she honestly didn't think orthotics alone would do much.

But, she said, I could get orthotics with an attached ankle brace. They cost a lot more -- $910 -- but would cost me less, since Group Health pays all but $170.

Nevertheless -- and this is my health care reform -- I decided not to get them. Instead, we agreed I could get an over-the-counter ankle brace for $15 at the pharmacy and try it out before we invested any more money.

As I was getting ready to leave, she tucked an arch support in my shoe, atop the over-the-counter orthotic that's in there. It's actually helped a lot.

Which makes me wonder what kind of a scientific deal those custom orthotics must be, after all.

But I digress. My point is this: Wouldn't it be interesting if we could recruit ourselves to reform health care, by being as careful with our insurers' money as with our own? Oh, I know, we feel we're already paying a ton, so why not go ahead and get, say, the unproven, expensive, ankle-braced orthotics? But those costs all land on us in the end. Who are we hurting?

The Bus to Bellevue, Part Two

2011-10-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

So I got off the #44 at 15th and Campus Parkway, in the U District, always an interesting place to wait. Two college-age women who looked kind of gorgeously Middle Eastern were waiting, one of them on the phone all the time, saying, "Mona this," and "Mona that." When the #271 arrived, they got on too. Another chat with Mona ensued.

It was a lovely autumn day, and I was glad not to be driving. I'm always glad not to be driving, but today it meant I could devote my full attention to the fall color. Over there on the Eastside, as we cyclists know, the roads are smooth and the potholes few. I hadn't realized, though, that the freeways are lovely. We traveled along roads where the meridians between streams of traffic are planted like mini-mixed forests, already beautiful in their youth. Years from now, I guess you won't see the other side at all.

At one intersection, I saw a pedestrian Stop signal, the raised, red hand, where somebody had carefully removed the lightbulbs that illuminate the middle finger, producing what I guess is the Trekkies' hand sign. Clever.

I'd like to read on the bus, I guess. On my usual short jaunts, there's too much to see. But 80 minutes! I'd brought along a New Yorker, but only the four minutes at the Bellevue Transit Center were dull enough for me to open it.

Speaking of dull, I guess this post is kind of dull. I probably need to say how Bellevue is like another country when you live on my side of Seattle, so think of it as a report on my recent vacation.

The Bus to Bellevue, Part One

2011-10-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

I spent 80 minutes Tuesday getting to to Bellevue to meet a friend, who took me to Issaquah for lunch. The trip started well, on the #44. I sat down next to an elderly gentleman, and said hello. He was on his way to the dentist, he said ruefully, and I said, on the other hand, how lucky we are to have dentistry. He agreed. Then he pulled out a photo of a man in the cockpit of a single-engine airplane. Handwritten on it were a name, Bruce Stine, and the year, 1942, and "the Pacific." He whipped off his hat and turned so I could get a good look at him full-on. "Recognize that man?" he asked me.

So that was Bruce in 1942. I asked if he'd read Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand's superb bestseller about Olympic athlete and WWII hero Louis Zamperini. He hadn't. And he was there!

He told me his wife had gone to heaven five years ago, and then he pulled out a hand-done flyer on pink, with a few quotes I could relate to about how short life is, and how important, along with some Christian words about eternity. "Read this before you go to bed tonight," he said.

Altogether, the most pleasant proselytizing that's been aimed at me in a long time.

Everything You Need

2011-10-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

"Everything You Need is on hold for you at the Fremont Branch Library." So said the email.

Imagine my delight!

Unfortunately, it's just a book title.

But it's a start!

Now You See It

2011-10-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

When you're feeling blue, there are all kinds of stories you can tell yourself about why. I have the disability story, of course. And here's another: It's a good thing I'm so old, I say to myself, because at least I won't have too many more years of this increasingly impersonal digital world where everybody just stares into phonepads all the time instead of looking at each other and doing stuff.

I've changed my mind on this.

I read in the New York Times, a reference to a book on the science of attention. Once I got hold of Kathy Davidson's Now You See It, my attention was all hers. And I'm way less blue now about the future.

According to Davidson, the problem is not so much that we are distracted today, but that we mistakenly believe the human state is otherwise. But it's not true. Not only are dyslexia and ADHD rampant, but even people without diagnoses have runaway brains. If you're ever tried meditating, you know this. (It may be why you've tried meditating.)

And of course, there's too much to know. So with the combination of attention blindness -- we all see selectively -- and sheer quantity of info, we rarely see the same things and certainly not the same way. Luckily so, because it means more approaches to everything. And since we have this digital world, we have easy opportunities to pool our strengths and mitigate our attention deficits. Think Wikipedia, for example.

Davidson applies these ideas to schools and the way we learn, positing a new 3Rs: rigor, relevance, and relationships.

She talks about work, and how work as I knew it was a product of the shift from an agrarian to an industrial age. Going to a workplace, 8+ hours a day: there's nothing inherently right about it, nor was it inherently less disruptive than working from home with email dinging all the time. The exciting edge of how we work today does not lie in trying to fit computers into an old form, but in using them to open up collaboration beyond the constraints of time and geography.

And she talks about aging. Given that everyone has attention deficits, attitude is more important for collaboration than biological limits. Everybody has "senior moments;" it's just that seniors focus on them. Stop it, she says.

I feel better.

Goodbye to Mom

2011-10-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

It was nearly a week ago I took Mom to the airport for her trip back to Menominee. She wanted to be at Sea-Tac by 10 am, and we were still playing Scrabble at 9:20. In the end, each brushed her teeth while the other played.

As I drove back home, alone, I was thankful for the opportunity, in sharing my little home, to practice kindness. Not just to be kind, but to practice, as in, doing something over and over until you get good at it. Of course, any novice would find Mom easy. As I said on our first morning together, as I was doing my usual whatever and Mom sat down on the couch with her book to read, "I love that you do that, Mom!" That she doesn't hover, but takes care of herself.

The kind of kindness I mean is really just patience, I guess, because I love speed and efficiency, and Mom can no longer move fast or hear well. I gave her my room, and took the sofabed; I decided to treat the twice-a-day bed-to-sofa-to-bed dance in the living room as meditation instead of tedious chore.

When I got home from the airport, I didn't want to put our game away, the board full of the words we'd made. For lunch, I mindfully ate the last of the squash soup with fresh ginger Mom had made. Her cloth napkin is still on the table.

That last morning, Mom said, "You'll be glad to get your house back; I know I always am." And it's true, and I still miss her.

I've had some blues this fall, as Mom knew. She came in my "hour of need." Single as I am, I wonder who will be there when Mom isn't?

Mary and Mom Visit Orcas Island

2011-10-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

I suggested to Mom this morning that we each take a few minutes to write about yesterday's trip, then share what we wrote.

What I Wrote:

The single sight most etched on my mind is the glittery Christmas-tree of an oil refinery on the edge of Anacortes, lit by the late, slanting sunshine into what I imagine a Chamber of Commerce postcard of Qatar must look like.

Yes, this image even more than the views of the San Juan Islands we had on Mt Constitution. Not at the tippy-top, however. There it was all cloud, no island views. And yet, as Mom described it, it seemed like Middle Earth, an amazing green of thick moss on the ground and the fallen tree trunks that opened up the woods to us.

The islands, though. Like the other few tourists, we pulled into mini-pullouts up and down the road that circles the mountain. Below the cloud, we could see what seemed like a vast archipelago between clumps of tall evergreens. And then, over there, another! and another, and another. So many islands. I forget this when I come, even when I take the ferry, unless I get myself up to a high point. Because most of the maps just show the big islands. Are there even names for all the small ones? Or did the namers finally slump over in exhaustion?

As to weather, we had occasional sunbreaks. You'd think Mom was a Northwesterner, the way she enjoyed "the sun" on the terrace at the Orcas Hotel -- that watery light strained through layers of cloud.

Here's something I love: When I travel with Mom, I get everything I want to eat, and not too much of anything. Except for our Orcas cappuccinos and our own cups of soup at Roses for lunch, we split everything: French ham and gruyere sandwich and a pot of tea at lunch, and a cranberry orange muffin with our afternoon coffees.

Ferrying back at 5:10, I proudly pulled out my travel knife and bread and apples and -- where was the white cheddar and Seastack cheese? Whoops. Home in the fridge.

Oh well.

What Mom Wrote:

When I arrived at Mary's, we talked about the weather. Today was the only day with a fairly promising forecast, but she questioned if I would want to immediately take off on a day-long jaunt to the San Juan Islands. I said I really wanted to go. Jean had been so enthusiastic in talking abut my getting to see that area.

I am so glad we went! The sun did come out. Maybe three quarters of the way up Mt Constitution, Mary made a startling turn across the highway at a curve (the road was all curves) into a pulloff and we got out. I got tears in my eyes at the splendid views.

Back up: the ferry ride was good, really good. I especially like when I am close enough to shore to see houses. I asked Mary if she wished she lived in wonderful places where she visited. I always do. I want lots of lives. I want to live in the farmhouse with the big dark brown sheep in the fields. I want to live in the sweet little towns with the good coffee shops, great restaurants (where I am the old lady who knows all the local lore). I want to be a parishioner at the white, shining Episcopal church. (I'm not so sure about all the sightseers trooping through my sanctuary.)

The sun was out, pushing the clouds away and coloring them shades of lavender, as we sailed away. I was sleepy but couldn't sleep on the bench in the ferry lounge. I noticed what looked like a cozy cabin way up top of the ferry. I wanted to be the owner of that cabin and when all the pesky riders got off, I'd pull my beautiful boat into a quiet cove and settle by a window and read my book.

Truly a God Day!*

*This is a reference to a phrase in a book we both read recently, Mr Golightly's Holiday.

Preparing for Mom

2011-10-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

My mom is coming to visit for a week, from Menominee, Michigan. She arrives today at 5:32 pm or so. I'm driving (!) to Sea-Tac to pick her up. Last year I rode the bus and the link to meet her, but I guess it wore her out. Maybe I'm in denial that she's 82. (For one thing, think how old that makes me!)

In my one-bedroom condo, Mom will get my room. I've changed the sheets and emptied a drawer for her. I've put a few changes of socks and underwear and my PJs in the drawers of the side table next to my sofa, where I'll be sleeping. I've brought my yoga mat out too, so I can do my stretching while she snoozes.

I'll be fixing spaghetti squash al pesto for dinner, though we don't know if she'll arrive hungry, or having eaten at the Chicago Airport. In any case, I saved us each a piece of birthday cake.

I'm staying relaxed about planning activities. I want badly to take her up to Anacortes for the San Juan views, but tomorrow may be the only decent day all week, and she just got off a plane.

Or she can come with me to my Antigone class at Lifetime Learning Center. I want to take her to lunch at The Tamarind Tree, since it's like a little trip to Vietnam (not that I would know).

I'll be taking her out for cappuccino, since she loves the coffee and the cafes. And I bought one of those foam-making doodahs at IKEA. I tried it out this morning: strong coffee in the old Braun drip pot, warm half a cup of milk in the microwave, then whip it up and pour in the coffee. Not bad at all.

The Starbucks Thing

2011-10-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

Today at Herkimer, I read the paper. I read that Starbucks has a program where customers can give $5 to a loan fund for USA small business development and local entrepreneurs that create jobs. I wasn't reading this in a Starbucks, though I must say they always play better music. And I have my questions about whether this loan fund will really work. But I love that they're trying it. And $5? Even a cheapskate like me has to think, it's worth a try. I'm going to do it.

Jean Gonick

2011-10-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. I was a little hurt when my friend posted on Facebook that Jean Gonick is her favorite blogger. Even though I too love Jean Gonick, she doesn't write that often, and I'd lost track of her last couple of months' stuff. So I clicked on her site -- which you can do directly from my own blog -- see Failing at Life in "Blogs I Read."

I just spent half an hour catching up and laughing my head off.

She might be my favorite blogger too.

No wait. I'm sorry, but I just have to be my own favorite. I have to.

On 78th Street

2011-10-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

Just to update you, it turns out it's not Achilles tendonitis. It's arthritis. They can't fix it -- or can they? Two weeks ago, they shot cortisone into the heel joint. I'm not pain-free, but yesterday I walked a mile to my car repair place, moseying through neighborhood streets and past residential gardens I'd lost track of in this painful summer. Then I walked back to get my car. And then last night I walked to the bus stop, and from there to Central Library, and then back home from the bus stop after hearing Russell Banks read from his new novel. (Which sounds wonderful.)

By the time I went to bed, I could feel my foot, but it wasn't awful.

And this morning, I decided to walk from the car detail place at 78th and Aurora, up to Greenwood and on home. It's probably around 40 blocks. My foot doesn't hurt yet.

It's funny. In June, when I couldn't walk to Markettime and back -- five blocks -- I was outraged. I had planned to continue my eight-mile city walks until I was 80. Now I'm thankful for any mile.

And especially thankful for 78th Street. It's one of those Phinney neighborhoods, and lots of the folks have planted burgeoning gardens in their front yards and parking strips. You can hardly see the house for the six-foot-high white Japanese anemones in one yard. Some of the homes are big, but I also saw a lot of the small cottages I love. Nice paint jobs. Quiet traffic, with roundabouts at every intersection. A pleasure.

I had decided to treat myself to coffee at Herkimer on Greenwood. I'm fond of this place, partly because they sell Macrina's cinnamon brioche slices, and partly because they don't take credit cards, which seems charmingly anachronistic.

Unfortunately, the music this morning was raucously of our era. I ordered my cafe latte from the nice man, who began to bounce along to the loud beat. I said, "Oh, I see you're enjoying this music which I was about to ask you to change to something more mellow."

"We've had mellow for the last four hours," he said. "I need to wake up."

"Thanks for the information," I said. "It's kind of like how One Bus Away makes you feel better about your bus being fifteen minutes late, just because you know what to expect."

I don't think he realized what faint praise that was.

Eat, Drink, and Be Mary

2011-10-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

"Will there be seconds, or do I need to nurse this along?" asked Sharon, one bite into the Coconut Cream Cheese Cake I'd made for my birthday celebration.

I had invited a few literary women to purchase and read a book of my choosing and come discuss it with me over birthday cake. What better way to celebrate my birthday?

I'm lucky to have such friends. These are busy women with jobs and their own writing to do, one in the throes of moving to Seattle. Sharon said last night she'd told a friend about my invitation, and the friend replied, "Are you going to do it?" Because it was a commitment. I told them if they didn't read the book, they couldn't come.

The book is Salley Vickers' Mr Golightly's Holiday, the story of a man my age who takes a cottage near Dartmoor for a few months to rework his once-great opus, now losing its appeal. And all that happens in his little village.

I won't give more away, but I will say my friends felt as I did, that it's funny, erudite, thought-provoking, full of poetry, and positive. Let me know what you think.

And I'm proud that, as a single woman, I didn't mope -- all alone -- and I didn't hope -- that someone would rescue me. I figured out exactly what would thrill me on my birthday, and I made it happen. Together with my friends who care enough to indulge me.

My Lost Friend

2011-10-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

As usual when I get home from a bike ride, I'm thinking of my lost bike buddy. He's possibly my favorite person to ride with ever. Not only are our paces so compatible that we don't even think about them, but also, as we ride, he's talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey and all the other classics he's embarked upon reading before he'll even open one of my favorite contemporary novels. When you get a flat, he has just the right combination of respect for your know-how and willingness to help. Like me, he doesn't mind a drizzle, and he'll share a cinnamon roll.

So where the heck is he? I don't think we've spoken since April. And I've tried. At first I'd leave a cheery message on his phone. Recently, I got kind of testy. Because if he's alive and well and just dumping me as a friend without a word of explanation, that makes me mad. And sad. Sometimes I miss him and other times I think, Who needs a friend like that anyway?

But what if something has happened to him? It's not like anyone would call me about it. We don't have friends in common, really. I even looked him up on the UW website, where he teaches. He's still listed.

I thought of him as I read a favorite blog recently, Time Goes By. Writer Ronni Bennett suggests bloggers follow her lead and prepare a post titled, "If You're Reading This, I'm Dead," and let your heirs know how to post it.

And just so one day you, dear reader, won't be feeling as I am today about my lost bike buddy, I'm going to write that post.

Back to School

2011-09-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised that the relatively few years of my life spent in school have so established in me the feeling that, as days shorten, it's time to get back to real life, whatever that may be.

For me, I'm off in a few minutes to take two classes at Lifetime Learning Center, one on creative writing and another on Antigone. And last night, I went to another orientation at 826 Seattle, this one for volunteers who want to work in afterschool tutoring.

Two new learning situations. But they're not the only ones. In the course of outfitting my replacement bike, I have to fit it up with the stuff the old one had: seat, pedals, under-seat bag, computer (to keep track of miles and speed and stuff), bottle cage, and so on.

A friend put my new seat on, and my pedals, but when it came time to do the computer, he said, "I'll let you do that, Mary. In the spirit of 'teaching a man to fish'..." It's still not on there, and I've thought of hiring someone to do it. I'm so bad at that stuff. And I don't like it. And usually I end up with scabs on my hands.

And then, at the grocery the other day, the produce man was helping me pick out a late-season melon and, when I thanked him, said, "Teach a man to fish...."

I'm getting the idea I'm supposed to dig in and take on the things I don't like to do. I'm hearing voices.

How My Day Was

2011-09-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

When I went to bed a couple nights ago, I thought, I have to clean my bathroom first thing tomorrow! A friend was coming for tea at nine.

When the alarm rang at 7:15, I leapt from my bed and started immediately to clean the bathroom, still in my PJs. That done, the rest of my morning could be leisurely. (As usual, I was astounded at how quickly this onerous task I'd been putting off was accomplished.)

Despite my plying her with tea, my friend was about to leave at 11 am, never having entered my bathroom! "Need a stop before you hit the road?" I asked hopefully. But no.

Still, better that then spend the whole time worrying she might need a bathroom, pouring only stingy smidges of tea, making up medical stories about the dangers of drinking tea anyway. Trying to rush her out with allusions to nonexistent appointments.

Then, that night, I went to orientation for 826 Seattle volunteers. That's author Dave Eggers' program for young writers. I learned his first location was 826 Valencia in Los Angeles -- no wonder I could never remember the number. (Now I have a mnemonic: 826 is the workaholic version of 925.)

They'd pushed every table in the room into one huge square, maybe 40 volunteers filling the perimeter, most of them a lot younger than I. This was a superbly well-run meeting. It started on time. It was content-rich, as the leader acknowledged apologetically at the end.

Anyway. I had noticed up the table from me a woman who, of course, didn't look as old as I do, but did have that kind of dull finish to her dark hair that I associate with years of coloring. I was looking for somebody to say hi to after, so as we left, I caught up to her and said hello, said, "I just wanted to say hi to somebody else who's on the more mature woman end of the spectrum." She looked at me uncomprehendingly, so I said, "I mean, I just thought a lot of the volunteers look like college kids...." Nothing. I began to wonder if she spoke English. And of course I started thinking, Is she a college kid? Am I offending her? So I tried a new tack. I said, "Have you done any tutoring before?"

"No," she said, and turned away, to her cellphone.

Okay. Embarrassing. I made a mistake there, with the mature woman thing. Shoulda just said hello.

But you know what? I decided to nip my self-excoriation in the bud. My words may have been thoughtlessly ill-chosen, but my intention was only to be friendly. If she didn't want to see or respond to that, it's not a problem I can solve. So, never mind.

Why am I writing all this? Because I noticed, during the month when I didn't blog, that life began to seem less and less meaningful. And one day, blue as I could be, I suddenly thought, Life is meaningless, unless we arrange it into a meaningful shape, unless we look for meaning.

Then I thought, when you live with somebody, meaning emerges daily simply in response to the regular question, How was your day?

Wow, like so many things you take for granted until you're single and don't have them, there's a big one.

But that's okay, because writing my blog is how I answer that question no one is asking me.

It was a good day, with a clean bathroom, a visit from a friend, an exciting tutoring program ahead, and a decision to give me a break. I had a good day.

Zydeco Dance Camp

2011-09-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

I was driving to West Seattle early Friday afternoon to pick up my friend Dana and head to Mount Hood for a weekend at zydeco dance camp. Ten minutes into the trip, I thought, "Darn it! I forgot my cellphone. Oh well."

Five minutes later I thought, "Were we supposed to bring bedding and stuff, like at the old camp they used to go to?" Of course I couldn't call anybody to check, and I hated to turn around. I kept driving.

I got to Dana's. He had a pile of stuff on his porch: tent, sleeping bag, pad, backpack. "Are you camping, Dana," I asked, "or are we supposed to bring bedding?"

Duh.

He lent me a quilt and towel and said there was a St Vincent's on the way to the freeway. We stopped, and I got a nice cotton sheet for $4 and a nice throw pillow for another $4, plus a fetching little swingy skirt for another $4. And onward we went.

As on my two previous camp experiences, we arrived after dark and a few minutes after the band started, which means I leave all my stuff in the car, pull on my cowboy boots, and dance in what I came in. At midnight, a friend picked up half my stuff, and we walked all over camp in the dark to find my room, only to realize in the end it was just a few yards from where I'd parked.

Camp was great. I always get a little afraid, on the way there, that I'll be disappointed, but as usual, the people are warm and the music is hot. I learned two zydeco variations I've wanted for years to know how to do.

And I remembered how much I love men.

When we first arrived among the strangers at camp, I thought, These people are old! And we are old, of course, but once you know the people behind the faces, you don't see age: you see Diane, and Ben, and Ginger, and Larry.

And old as we all are, the men still know how to appreciate us. They tell us we look good, and offer us drinks and porterage and an outing to Timberline Lodge. But most of all, they put their arms around us and dance us single ladies into temporary endorphin heaven.

I just love men.

Frances Moore Lappe at Town Hall Seattle

2011-09-16T11:20:00.001-07:00

The third person I asked to accompany me to hear Frances Moore Lappe speak at Seattle's Town Hall last Tuesday said, "Is she still alive?"

Ouch. She hasn't disappeared; she's actually written about twenty books since Diet for a Small Planet. Of course she is alive, probably just a few years older than we are. I expected somebody short and a little dumpy, in those high-end baggy cotton knits with the batik stencilling, and Birkenstocks.

The program started late -- typical, unfortunately. The introducer said a bunch of impressive stuff and then, out onto the stage came -- Jamie Lee Curtis! At least she looked way more like Jamie Lee than like what I expected.

Okay, I know this is tacky, but let me tell you how she looked. She's hot! Chic short hair, black pumps, black pencil skirt that showed her nice knees and legs, a terrific sort of sweater top with a scoop neck so broad and flattering that throughout her talk my attention kept returning to wonder, Where on earth can her bra straps be? Because some foundation was doing a fine job of upholding her.

Then she proceeded to give a tai chi of a presentation, all bending and large swoopy arm gestures at the edge of the platform. Her new book is EcoMind. She says we're afflicted with scarcity mind (which, if you've been reading my blog lately, you know is precisely so). We're engaged in a competitive struggle over not-enoughness: lack of goods and lack of goodness.

But Lappe says no. We have enough and we humans are good enough. She cites data. The sun makes way more energy than we need. We have 40 percent more food than we need to feed everybody. True, it's late to be responding to global warming, but we know what to do. We just need to pay some attention to the kind of life that really makes us happy -- not the big house big car big energy life the media displays as tops -- but a culture of mutuality. We just need to believe we can do it! Believing is seeing, she says.

I want to believe this. She's talking to people like me, who are afraid. "We need to rethink fear itself," she says. "Fear is an idea." She calls the racing heart of fear "inner applause." I do like that.

I can't remember though, if she said that before or after my friend passed me a note that said, "It was nice seeing you. I can't take anymore of this. Sorry." And left.

That surprised me. I couldn't decide myself if her human-potential-guru delivery was just a result of her wanting so badly to persuade us and change the world, or what? And do I buy her message? If the news was full every day of success stories about a new world, wouldn't we be encouraged and join the movement?

I don't know.

Looking Up

2011-09-14T16:42:00.000-07:00

Yes, things are looking up. When I called Les Schwab Monday morning about getting my car tire fixed, they said I'd probably ruined it completely by driving it home from church. My heart sank. Not only a bike to replace, but a tire as well? And I know sometimes you need to replace more than one tire, so they match up.

I left it at Schwab, and they said they'd call when they got to it and tell me the verdict.

Then I took the bus back to the bike shop, and got myself a replacement Bianchi Imola. They had a 2010 model on sale for only $1099. Before I rode it home, I phoned Schwab to see how they were doing on my car. "It's all done," they said. "No charge, come and get it, we're tired of looking at it." It surprised me that this was the moment, finally, when my eyes welled with tears. But a friend pointed out later that when things are going bad, you can't cry. You have to stiffen the spine and woman up. It was just so soothing to have something go so right.

I finally got around this morning to calling my insurance claims people about the bike. They got back to me this afternoon that I should send them all my receipts, for the bike and the stuff that goes on it -- pedals, bags, computer, light, bottle cage, lock, and so on -- and, except for the $500 deductible, they'd send me a check for the rest. No hassle.

So yeah. Things are looking way up.

Buying a Bike, Again

2011-09-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

Buying a bike. Wow. I wrote about this five years ago when I got the Bianchi. All the arguments I had to win with myself to get permission to buy a good bike.

And now I'm doing it all over again. Yesterday afternoon I thought, Okay, I'll have to get aluminum. Even though all my research five years ago led me to choose steel. (I don't even consider the high-end stuff like carbon fiber and titanium.) And then maybe something less than the Shimano 105 drivetrain will be adequate....

But no. Biking is a big thing with me, for recreation and transportation. Why do I think I don't deserve a decent bike? (Possibly because I want to punish myself for being stupid enough to lose my good old Bianchi?)

But I think I'm back on track. As I decided in my post on -- Friday, was it? -- I'll just be thankful that, even though at age 80 I may not be able to afford a $1200 bike (sale price), today I can.

And I am thankful.

Does my Karma Suck, or What?

2011-09-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

True, nobody is dying, and I myself believe any problem you can solve with mere money is not one of your truly bad problems, but still....

My recent Hugo House course in novel writing gave me a new respect for and attention to the narrative details of life. So you tell me: What am I to make of all this?

First, my left foot goes. Since June, I have been unable to walk more than a few blocks. It has so limited me that I can't even take the bus freely anymore. I might be able to walk the necessary five blocks from the #5 stop to a lecture at Town Hall, but I have to plan carefully to find a happy hour venue that's not out of the way.

Then yesterday, I loaded my bike and my friend's on my Thule rooftop bike carrier for the trip to Edmonds Ferry and a Kitsap County pedal. On I-5N, just before Northgate Mall, my bike flew away. Thank God nobody got hurt, and that it wasn't Lynn's pricey custom bike that went, and no cars crashed -- but still. My blue Bianchi, my only bike, my first road bike, is gone.

I'll find a replacement, but meanwhile, I had to get to Queen Anne this morning for church, where I was scheduled to be "greeter," and for later commitments. I headed out in lots of time with all my gear and found my right rear tire flat.

I drove two blocks to the gas station and put in air. I discovered a nail head in the tire. I drove to church, hoping the leak was slow. I wrote all this in Uptown Espresso after church, hoping my tire was holding.

So, three transportation-related mishaps. What's the meaning of this? Am I supposed to stay home? Am I living at some frantic pace to avoid -- myself? I don't really think so, especially since I already decided to get back on my blogging horse, a significant self-discovery practice for me.

Maybe I'm just supposed to prove I can keep on keepin' on. Not let it get me down. Bounce back.

I don't know. Something else entirely? Got any ideas?

Undriver Licensing

2011-09-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I volunteered at the Undriver Licensing station at Seattle's Bumbershoot festival at Seattle Center. I got my own Undriver License a month or so ago. It doesn't mean you pledge not to drive. The Undriver license says, "Congratulations! You now have the freedom to reconsider your transportation choices every day, make the same trip a different way, and share your discoveries with others. So start getting creative about getting around!"

Plus, it's a way better photo than the one on my driver's license. They let me wear a red feather boa and hold a model bicycle -- though now that I think of it, I suppose I could appear at DMV next time with props like that.

Anyway, to get the Undriver license, you simply make a specific pledge for the next 30 days, something like 'substitute one bus ride a week for a car trip,' or 'bike to school half the time,' or, for undriving overachievers who already do a lot of this, 'show your Undriver license to 10 people.'

One guy last Sunday pledged to show his new license to 1423 people -- all his Facebook friends. A family of four each got a license, and as they discussed their pledges, you could hear the ways they would be challenging and encouraging each other on reducing car use.

Undriving's surveys report that 75% of licensed undrivers report new transportation habits after their pledge month. It's a fun way to think about making changes, and showing my license has been a fun way to bring up the idea of taking the bus or the bike with my friends.

But, guess what! I'm about to load my bike and my friend Lynn's on top of my car(!) and head up to the Edmonds Ferry for a day ride in Kitsap!

Balance in all things....

Saving in Retirement

2011-09-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering lately on how much to spend. I've always been thrifty, but I'm starting to dislike it that when I walk into a cafe on a bike trip with friends, my first thought at the pastry case is not, "What looks good?" but "What's cheap?" I'm on a fixed income and probably won't earn another cent in my lifetime. I want to eke out what I have without being driven by frugality. How can I be sure what I have is enough? As my friend Jim said, "The first thing you need to decide is how long you're going to live."

Absolutely right, but not too helpful.

I talked to a friend about it, and she thinks the more you have, the more difficult it is to remain unattached to your present lifestyle. Her idea, and I know she's right, is to be grateful for what you have, knowing that it could go. And then you'd find gratitude for what is left.

So I kept all this in mind on my recent mini-vacation. I drove my car (!) instead of taking four buses for $6 to get to Anacortes and the ferry to Orcas Island. Turned out it was good I did since I ran into other bikers in the ferry line who had taken up all the bike rack space I would have been competing for on the bus. I figure my round-trip gasoline expense was around $20. I paid $7 to park overnight, and about $11 for ferry passage for my bike and me. My friend Nadine had offered to let me sleep at her place on Orcas Island. She also said I could use her sunscreen, sweatshirts, and flipflops, so I could travel really light. And she fed me.

When I got to Orcas, I went to the wonderful Orcas Hotel with its shimmering view of the water and the islands, and got a double espresso for $2 with tax and tiny tip. I had brought a PB&J from home, plus gorp. I enjoyed my coffee a lot, then set off for Nadine's, 21 of the hardest miles I have biked all year, and the loveliest, with sunshine all day and varying views of coves and beaches and cottages.

Had a fine evening with my friend, who let me beat her at Scrabble too.

Then she took me along in her car on her run to Eastsound for propane, cutting my biking trip back to the ferry to just seven miles. I went to the grocery at the waterfront and spent $10 on a sandwich, yogurt, three plums, and an inferior cup of drip coffee. I tried to find a nice place to await my ferry to Lopez, but ended up back on the porch at Orcas Hotel, with a day-old Morning Glory muffin in hand: $1. Should I dump my bad coffee and get another of those delicious espressos? While I pondered, the barrista came out with a cup in her hand saying, "I made a double latte by mistake; anybody want it?" It was excellent.

Then off to Lopez, where I biked all day -- 33 miles -- gradually eating up my food. Back to Anacortes and home.

Total: $51, and I wasn't holding back, either. By contrast, I had a front-porch chat with a guy from the Bay Area cycling the San Juans with a Backroads tour group. I'll bet two days cost him $200.

So have I boiled this all down to a helpful maxim with which to move ahead into my twilight years?

Not yet.

Disabled

2011-07-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd pretty much plumbed the depths of my sixty-and-single-in-Seattle topic. I was pondering what to say in a final, The End, post.

But then I got too busy being disabled to write.

Which is how I realized disability is an obvious topic for my theme, and never yet addressed.

Nevertheless, I hadn't the heart to write about it until it began to seem like it would end.

It's only Achilles tendonitis. Not that big a deal, I told myself in my gloom. When I have to keep saying no to bike club rides, I tell myself, "Hey, Mary, it could have been so much worse! What if you were laid up from a bike accident, with a broken hip or something?"

And when I can't go dancing, I say, "At least it's not cancer. Sure, you're stuck at home, but you're not throwing up from chemo."

Et cetera.

Still, this kind of inspirational talk only goes so far. Because despite all the worse possibilities I didn't have, the truth was, I couldn't walk, even three blocks to my corner store.

I couldn't even bus. I hadn't realized how much a bus-rider life requires the ability to, say, hike five blocks up the hill to Town Hall from the bus stop on 3rd.

I could ride my bike for errands, 5 miles or so at an easy pace, spinning freely. Thank God.

If you had ever asked me my number one mental health strategy, it probably would have dawned on me that it's walking. But I hadn't quite grasped it until I couldn't do it. Whenever I feel the slightest bit low, my habit is to kick my butt out the door and walk it off.

It's been a couple of weeks now since I've been able to do that. Someday, maybe I won't be able to do it ever again. What then? I guess I'll be glad I've had this practice time. I'll want to remember how I'm coping.

And this is how:

1. Stay in the moment. My worst fear was sinking into a clinical depression. I decided to worry about that when it happens.

2. Call your friends. The truth is, I'm often so busy dancing and cycling, I'm not available for theater and movies and making dinner for people. But now I am. And the kind reactions of my friends have buoyed me up like a life-ring I didn't know I had. And I'm saying yes to new things, happy hour meetups with groups of strangers and stuff.

3. Look for the invitation. It occurred to me that for all the healthiness of my walking strategies, it was possible that I was staying in motion to avoid things that require stillness. Feeling. Thinking. Writing.

Hmmm.

4. Take your book medicine. Poor me! I have to sit around all day and read!

5. Do everything to get better. This foot thing probably started in April, but I could live with it. Finally saw a physical therapist on June 17, and I've more or less done what he said, but it wasn't until this week that he gave a name to my condition. And that alone made me feel so much better. Because how could we know if stretching and icing and balancing on one foot would cure IT, if we didn't know what IT is? A masseuse friend of Mom's in Michigan suggested massage, which worked brilliantly. And the masseuse suggested arnica, and I'm slathering that on. And it's starting to feel better.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm hoping to go to a dance tonight, carefully. No waltzing -- too much push-off. But swing should work. And if it hurts even a tiny bit, I'll quit.

When I get home, I'll stretch and ice and ibu and arnica. And be so thankful for what isn't wrong with me.

Who to Choose?

2011-06-26T08:47:00.000-07:00

I just got home from a week-long bike trip in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Great weather, good people, excellent time. We stayed in motels. I had a roommate I'd never met before, who was good enough to accommodate my anti-TV ways. But one early evening, she had the news on. Some guy was interviewing Michele Obama, traveling in Africa. She had spoken earlier that day with students, who had written questions for her. The interviewer had picked one to be answered on camera.

It was something like, What advice do you give your daughters about choosing a mate? Without even needing to pause and think, our First Lady gave some of the best advice I've ever heard.

"Choose people who lift you up," she said.

I wish somebody had thought to suggest that when I was looking for a husband.

So then we got back on our bikes and I lost track of current events again. I figured by the time I got home, everybody in America would be abuzz with this idea and telling all the young people in their lives. But I haven't seen any evidence of this. So you tell your young people, please. And I'm thinking it's a good standard for choosing our politicians too. Let's go for the folks who want us to be our best, not the ones who tell us everything can be fixed without much effort or attention or sacrifice.

When Mom Comments

2011-06-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of jealous of bloggers who get lots of comments from their readers. Probably my mom is my most faithful commenter, and I love that she comments. But at one point, I was wishing she wouldn't sign herself "Mom," so you'd think maybe it was David Brooks or Elizabeth Gilbert saying those things.

But tonight I was thinking, it's so cool that Mom comments. I wonder, if I started reading Huffington Post carefully, if I'd find Ariana's mom commenting. "You're such a good writer, dear, just like I told you when you were in third grade."

Where would we be without our moms?

Midnight in Paris

2011-06-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I guess it's midnight in Paris for me. Not midnight the way it is for Owen Wilson in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris movie. There, midnight is where the excitement begins. For me, it's maybe more like Cinderella's midnight, where the party's over. But you get to dream it all over again.

I walked to the Guild 45th to see the film two nights ago. I loved it. (Oh, I could quibble. I can always quibble. Like, what would it hurt to have the fiance and family be worthy opponents? Or am I wrong? Do they represent a legitimate demographic that hates walking in the rain in Paris and only wants to shop?)

But I loved Wilson's unselfconscious enthusiasm. I loved the elaboration of the suggestion that time puts a patina on any era. (Even these Twitter-laced days with the globe hotting up?)

I loved the allure of romance. Owen and -- was it Adriana? Owen and the Rodin guide. Owen and the Cole Porter record lady. Possibilities everywhere.

And I loved Paris! all the places I recognize and remember, Notre Dame and the Pont Alexandre III and the Jardin du Luxembourg. (Is that where I sat in the park and sketched the statue?) I love thinking I can visit anytime, just by seeing this movie.

I've been in love in Paris. My ex was so wonderful there I said afterwards we should rent him out to take women to Paris. When he didn't want to go back, I went on my own, and that was differently wonderful. And now I don't need to go again. More of Paris can't be better than the Paris I already own, like Cinderella, in my after-midnight dreams.

Maybe this is the Cinderella story for my age group. No prince shows up later, but you'll always have your glass slipper.

On Not Needing a Man

2011-06-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

I had an epiphany two weeks ago Tuesday. For years -- since my marriage ended in 2005 -- I've been saying to myself what women say to themselves here in 21st Century America: "I don't need a man, but I'd like a man."

What we mean is, we're not needy. Our lives are not perfect, but they are filled with pleasure and satisfaction from our work, our families, and our recreation. A companion would add, but not just any companion. The standard set by our single lives is a high bar, and the right man would have to exceed it.

All true. In fact, I feel I'm rather the poster child for being sixty and single in Seattle. I love my life.

And yet, two weeks ago Tuesday, I sat in the office of a therapist I'd seen once before, and he said to me, "At our age, we don't need a partner. You don't need a man."

And something clicked.

I realized that, in my recent three-day-free-trial foray into Match.com, for example, I was more concerned with how I present myself than with conveying who I actually am. They sent me an exciting "Match Daily Five" pick, and I realized that if they sent my profile to him, he would have no way of knowing that I was possibly the "post-stuff" woman he was looking for.

Because my profile didn't mention that I like a small house, that my closet is less than a square yard, that when I buy a book, I sell one.

Men who prefer bikes and buses and feet to cars, as I do, wouldn't know that about me from my profile. They wouldn't know I'm passionate about helping kids learn, which I do as a tutor. They wouldn't realize that, sure, I love a glass of good wine with dinner -- Ridge zinfandel, anyone? -- but can't ever think of what to order in a bar.

Sure, it's possible a guy who advertises himself as spending weekends driving around in the MG he restored, and stopping at posh restaurants, and planning his trips to Thailand, it's possible we might find ourselves unexpectedly drawn to each other, but I'm sure not looking for this man on Match.

I only like to eat out a little, so it's a special treat. I love walking to the restaurant. A bike trip to Italy sounds great, but it's also expensive and carbon-intensive, and geez, the San Juan islands are right here. But most of all, I want a man to talk to. I want a man with educated opinions, who believes life has plot and purpose, and likes to mull it all over. Because the truth is, all on my own, I tend to spend a lot of time with smart people. When I eat dinner with a book open or listening to Fresh Air, I'm spending time with smart companions.

So why didn't I say that in my Match.com profile?

I guess because I was needy. I guess because I thought if I wrote stuff like that, I probably never would find a man. And maybe I never will, but now I know it will be okay.

Ever since that pivotal Tuesday, I'm more thankful than ever for my wonderful life. I relish the walks and the food and the music I put on. And when I happen to feel a little low, I know now it's not because I'm single. I'm low because I'm human, and nobody is up all the time.

Sunday was a typical day. I woke up and biked to church, where my favorite preacher preached a wonderful sermon that got me thinking about how important it is to say to ourselves and especially our kids, "Let's stop and think about that." I biked home and ate lunch and then over to meet Sue in Green Lake Park for Scrabble outdoors, surrounded by people of various colors and languages, playing pickup basketball and teaching their little kids to ride bikes and walking tightrope. Then I got back on my bike and found my way to Laurelhurst and St Stephen's for choral evensong: Handel! A woman friend happened to be there, sat with me, and then shared the after-service reception -- mmm! a favorite red wine of mine and superb cheeses and wonderful conversation about writing. And men.

And then I biked home, and watched a video of The Ladies #1 Detective Agency. It was a fine day, and is there any way a man could have improved it? Only insofar as he would have been someone I could tell about it.

And I have you, don't I?

Norman Rockwell at Tacoma Art Museum thru Monday

2011-05-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

Friday I took my #5 downtown to meet the 594 to Tacoma. It's the final week of the Rockwell show at Tacoma Art Museum and week one of Chihuly. Besides, I've always wanted to visit Tacoma.

Google transit wanted to send me via Amtrak, which would have been fun, but $13 each way. The bus was $3, all the way from home, and what a bus! I had an armrest, a footrest, and a personal reading light. The seat had a headrest and lumbar support, and it tilted. It was all so posh I checked the back of the bus for a restroom, but that would have been too much.

We shot down the freeway for an uninterrupted 30 minutes or so, then the bus made a couple stops before dropping me off at UW campus and a block from the museum. A block that includes the restored courthouse with its lovely dome and the glass bridge. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was in sight, and yachts at harbor.

I liked the Rockwell show. Possibly I just don't know enough to be bothered by the distinction between illustration and fine art. Wasn't Breughel, say, or Vermeer, a Rockwell of his day? Rockwell's paintings are beautifully done and full of illuminating detail. He started his career at 17 in -- mm, 1922? -- for the Boy Scouts, and then, of course, produced decades of covers for the Saturday Evening Post. So a Rockwell retrospective is a lesson in American social history.

Mostly, it's upbeat and optimistic, a picture of the Americans a lot of us wanted to be, want still to be. I'd love to see a Rockwell of some American family on their way in 2011, to vacation or church, with a pierced and tattooed teenager reading to a toddler in the back seat, Mom driving, Dad reading the map, some mini dog doing whatever they do in cars.

But civil rights issues are featured as well, despite editorial prohibitions that for awhile limited the number of blacks you could show and only if they were in menial jobs. I knew the iconic cover with the little black girl being escorted to school by the National Guard, but not the illustration about the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi.

Then, Chihuly. I tire fast of looking at art glass, so this show was perfect for me. It's one huge room filled with both Chihuly's work and the Native American trade blankets and baskets that inspire him, plus a whole wall of his own (I believe) framed Curtis prints of Native Americans. Seeing it all that way, I better understood the idea of Chihuly's "glass baskets" brightly "painted" with glass threads.

I made this excursion on my own. If I'd been with somebody else, we probably would have explored Tacoma more, while we were at it. I almost ate lunch there, but Indochine, which was recommended, was posh and pricey for lunch. Next time, I'll take a walker's map.

I adjusted my bus seat back to Seattle and settled in. I slept.

Read This: Born to Run

2011-05-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

I borrowed my neighbor's copy of Christopher McDougall's non-fiction book, Born to Run, on ultrarunning -- whatever that is -- and, as the subtitle says, "a hidden tribe, superathletes, and the greatest race the world has never seen."

And then I let the book languish on my coffee table for a couple of months while I read everything else. Because what do I care about this stuff?

Then I started feeling guilty about keeping the book so long, and I picked it up, and I finished it, oh, 24 hours or so later.

Here's the thing about this book, clear from just two epigraphs. An early one, page 57:

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.

Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and the creator of the Leadville Trail 100 (a running race of a hundred miles up and down mountains).

You read this and think, What kind of people are they anyway, who run stuff like this? What can they possibly teach me about life?

But by page 250, we get Herb Elliott, Olympic champ runner of the mile who trained barefoot and wrote poetry and retired undefeated:

Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude -- they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.

The people in this book run for fun. Smiling. I guess they look while they run like I look while I dance (only hopefully, they're sweatier). They run for joy and they take care of each other.

When I finished reading, I wanted more, even though my eyes were full of tears.

Richard Ford at SAL

2011-05-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

I was to see my new pal Margaret last night after hearing Richard Ford at Seattle Arts and Lectures. Margaret and I met at the bus stop across from the lecture hall at Benaroya, twice. We'd get on the same bus and talk books all the way home. Last time, we exchanged contact info, so I knew she'd be there for Ford.

I guess it's a good thing we don't sit together, because having no clue to her reaction as the lecture proceeds, her pronouncements are even more delightful: sometimes surprising, sometimes just so well-put. That Elisabeth Stroud was ditsy. That if you added up the total number of words spoken onstage by Joyce Carol Oates and her celebrity interviewer, far too many came out of the interviewer's mouth.

What would Margaret say about Ford? Because I myself was having a problem with him. I haven't read much of his stuff, and my recollection is that it's hard to read. I might not have come at all, except SAL emailed the title of his talk. Which lead me to believe he would deliver a talk, and we could skip the interviewer annoyance.

Did I dream that? Because it was indeed an interview, thankfully by the SAL introducer lady with the glorious white hair, whoever she is, instead of a celeb. To be followed by Ford reading Chapter One of a work in progress. Then audience questions.

He's tall and bony. When he sat in the armchair, his knees rose and his arms hung straight from the shoulders. Praying mantis, I thought. And then he proceeded to be funny.

I hate that. I want my writers to remind me that literature is what distinguishes humanity from other life forms, that it's a matter of life and death. I actually wrote in my notes last night, "This is demeaning. He doesn't take us seriously."
Margaret, I later learned, loved him. She's southern, too, and she said he was a quintessential southern gentleman, including the humor.

Which was wry. For example, when an audience member asked that old chestnut, "Do your characters ever surprise you?" to which most authors say yes blah blah blah, Ford said, "Well, no. I'm running that show."

Is it true, he was asked, that he shot a hole in a book he was asked to review?

"My wife did that," he said. The book was written by someone who once gave Ford a critical review. So when it arrived, his wife took the book and a .38 outside and shot a hole in it. Mailed it back to the publisher.

"That's the kind of wife you want," he said.

In truth, by then he could have said anything, because when he read the chapter from the book he's calling Canada, he had me. If it had been available to purchase, I'd have done it. So few words, so much meaning. The mismatched, accidental parents -- tall handsome military dad, small immigrant Jewish mom -- the nomadic life where school was the narrator's one constant, the unlikely robbery his parents will commit, and foreshadowing of murder....

Wow.

The End

2011-05-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

I finished my novel: 50,729 words. Well, maybe not a novel, exactly, but definitely a complete sh*tty first draft. Beginning, middle, end.
It's not due until Thursday, 4 pm, and the sun just came out. I'm going outside and water plants, then walk down to PCC for a few groceries, eat dinner, then go hear Richard Ford speak at SAL tonight, then go to Portland tomorrow to dance zydeco to Geno Delafose, then come back and dance more Geno on Thursday night at Highway 99.
And somewhere in there, I'm going to drink champagne.

44, 410 Words!

2011-05-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

Just a few days left to go in novel class. By Thursday, I need to complete my 50,000 word novel, and I'm going to do it.

I hope at our wrap-up class we have a time for "What I Wish I'd Known When I Started This." What I most wish is that I'd known about Scrivener, which is cheap software -- $45 -- for writers. Even a thrift fiend like me is forking over.

Then we could have a time for, "What I Knew I Should Do Before Class Began, but Didn't," and that is where I would put "Make an outline, you idiot."

And finally, "What I Learned." I'm learning that writing a novel can be kind of euphoric. I'm wondering how real writers sleep the night through. Aren't they waking up, like I do, with ideas?

And who knew I'd be so superb at banishing my Inner Critic? Next, maybe I'll work on my Outer Critic, and start giving everybody else a break too.

About that ponytail

2011-05-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

Wait, he's a rock star, Steve Palumbi! Has a band! Sustainable Sole!

Steve Palumbi on Monterey Bay

2011-05-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

Steve Palumbi spoke last night at Town Hall -- boo! you missed it! -- and speaks tonight at Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park -- yay! you can still hear him! His latest book is a collaboration, The Death and Life of Monterey Bay. A book about the environment that's upbeat: astonishing. Despite the increasingly "hot and sour soup" of the oceans, Monterey Bay is thriving. It's a story, Palumbi says, of "passion, stubborn effort, and patience," and he trots out the heroes to show us.

My favorite is Julia Platt, who had to go to Germany in the late 1800s to earn a PhD in oceanography, then came back to the USA, where no one would hire her. So she decided to make trouble in Pacific Grove, next to the town of Monterey on Monterey Bay. For example, there's a photo of her working with an ax to take down a fence that illegally blocked public access to the beach. She'd already tried breaking the locks off the gate, but those were replaced. The fence was not.

In the 1900s, somebody suggested that since she wanted to run things, she needed to be mayor. She ran on the slogan, "It will take a good man to beat me." And won.

And so did Monterey Bay, where she established the marine sanctuary adjacent to Monterey's polluted hell-hole of a Cannery Row, which had committed suicide by 1950. Today, an old cannery is the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The bay is a poster child for diversity, not only of marine life, but of human economic activity. Tourism is number one, but fishing thrives as well.

I so wanted to ask him why he has that little ponytail that could be snipped off with no damage to his hairstyle or appearance, not that I'm suggesting it. Tell me about that, will you please?

But instead I said, Isn't climate change lurking, ready to undo all this good? Palumbi said strong ecosystems better withstand climate change pressures, as in American Samoa where a protected ecosystem allows coral to thrive in a warming ocean.

A thrilling presentation. Do try to hear him, and read the book.

More Fear-Juiced Thrills

2011-05-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

In furtherance of my quest for excitement, I rode my bike yesterday to my Hugo House novel class in Capitol Hill, another first. And then I would ride to a lecture at Town Hall, and then, in the dark, back home to Fremont.

I met a classmate for coffee and literary craft chat (!) at Elliott Bay Books Cafe, then went to class where, a week from the end, we're all working desperately on outlines, and yes, you're right, we have put our carts before our horses. I "shared" this short bit:

The worst part of the day was when we signed up at the start. You put your signature, printed name, phone number, and an emergency number on the clipboard. I left the emergency number blank. Because who you gonna call? Mom? In Michigan?

(“Hello, ma’am, do you know a Julia Thorn? Because I’m afraid there’s been a bike accident.”)

Before we left, the ride leader checked the clipboard. “Who’s Julia?” he said. “There’s no emergency contact here.”

“I don’t have one,” I said.

“Nobody?”

“Well, Mom, in Michigan.”

“Put it down,” he said, and handed me the clipboard. I wrote her number, and, in little letters, “Mom,” so they’d be gentle if they had to call her.

On the bright side, if there were any single men on the ride, they know I’m available.

Class ends at 6, so my plan was to get a bite of supper before I biked over to hear Steve Palumbi speak at Town Hall. I should have done a Google search before I left home to find a happy hour that lasts past six. But I had in mind a spot or two with small plates. I went to Oddfellows Cafe and got cassoulet with a whole duck leg/thigh for $12. That's the good news.

The bad news is that even the house wine was $7 a glass, so I figured I might as well have the $9 stuff. Total with tip: $27! Oh well, I performed some mental shenanigans along the line of, "I won't pay for it; I'll just charge it." So that felt good, plus I'd saved myself $4.50 in bus fares by biking.

Still Chicken after all these Years

2011-05-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

(True, I should be writing my novel instead of this blog post, but I've written 39,467 words, and I have eight days to go to 50,000. Not worried. Besides, it's a novel about a chicken.)

People are always telling me I'm brave (brag, brag). A woman I know from dance said I'm her hero! What prompted that was my excursion from Port Townsend, back when I lived there, to the ferry at Bainbridge where I left my car, then boated over to Seattle to a downtown B&B and a night out dancing via the city buses.

Heroic? No. But adventuresome, if I do say so myself.

I was thinking recently though, as I walked around Green Lake on that lovely spring day we had, cherry trees in bloom and the spread of daffodils under the trees, the rowers on the lake, walkers runners skaters dogs and baby carriages everywhere, I was lost in my mind somewhere and suddenly I returned and remembered how daunted I was when I first moved to Seattle by walking around Green Lake!

Does that sound stupid to you too? It's just that only half the people walk with you; the other half are coming at you, and they don't smile or acknowledge you in any way. By now, I suppose that's because they're off in their own minds, but it made me self-conscious back then.

You couldn't do a regular walk like that in the places I'd lived before, Kah Tai Lagoon in Port Townsend, the Bear Valley Trail at Point Reyes, without getting to know the other walkers. In two years, that's never happened here. Except for the occasional dancer, never a familiar face.

I think of how scary it was for me, even though I had moved here in part to ride with Cascade Bike Club, to make that first fast descent down Fremont Av towards a club ride gathering at Gasworks Park. Essentially, I come out of my place, ride a few flat blocks in the neighborhood, and then: a main traffic artery where you have to brake to keep it below 25.

These days, Fremont Av looks like bike heaven: bike route signs! bike lanes! other riders! But I white-knuckled it early on.

Are you like this? Is everybody so chicken faced with new things? I was a Kelly Girl while my husband was in law school, and I never started a new job without feeling sick. Except "never" isn't right. After a year of assignments, I couldn't help noticing nothing was ever as bad as I'd feared. I usually got the jobs done faster than expected.

Maybe that Kelly job should go down as a turning point in my life, my opportunity to learn that feeling scared is no reason to hold back, my chance to get practice in what happens really at the distant end of Timidity Road.

Fear doesn't constrain me, but I'm surprised it's still hanging around. I still start out at fear.

And you know what? I think it gives me a buzz. When I'm feeling my wussiest, I do something I'm scared of. Trying to write a novel, maybe.

Breaking Up

2011-04-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

So, maybe my loyal readers have been wondering, Why aren't we hearing anything lately about that sweetheart of hers, the excellent outings he plans and the encouraging and endearingly laconic things he says?

As you may have guessed, the sweetheart connection is over. I like to say we've converted it to a friendship, and I think this will happen, but it's too soon. But I'm not angry, and I hope he isn't. We're both sad.

Last year, on April 30, he helped me move here, into my wonderful vintage condo. As I sat writing this morning at my dining table, I looked around and thought, There's the story in a nutshell. My teacups shelf, hung straight and true with his help, and on the other hand, my new chandelier [what a find! $20 at the resale shop!], which took a week to get up at all, and you can see how funky the cord and the chain links look, none of which would be true if my sweetheart was still in the picture.

And that is, of course, just the most trivial example of how much harder it seems to be single again after a taste of togetherness.

The thing is, and we're both experienced enough to have talked this through at the beginning, you can't explore a relationship without exploring it. You can't know where and how it will end.

So the best you can do is to enter it with the intention of conducting yourself in such a way that the journey itself has value and beauty, to feel you've been brave and kind, both of you.

And I do feel that.

Still Writing that Novel

2011-04-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

Quick update: If I were absolutely on schedule with what has turned out to be a commitment to write 1500 words a day, I'd be at 30,000 words today. I've written 29,426. I feel good about it.

Your Second Chance to Hear Her

2011-04-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

I found a video on-line of Joyce Carol Oates addressing an audience in Marin County, CA's Book Passage bookstore. It's lovely. She is so nice, in the very best way. She refers in her talk to "the writer's humanist hope -- an enlargement of sympathy." She treats an audience as she treats her characters: with respect and love.

Here it is.

Joyce Carol Oates

2011-04-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

Author Joyce Carol Oates was to appear at Seattle Arts and Lectures last night. I was interested, having read several of her novels, but it's a dance night I hate to miss: Waltz Etc. Would she be worth it, or possibly an arrogant bore, someone so accomplished -- more than 50 books! and some of them so dark, and she herself looking rather Gothic in the author photos, or maybe "gothic" is the wrong term, with that long, pinched Renaissance face framed by kinky pre-Raphaelite hair flowing to her shoulders and parted just enough to peek through.

Could she be as compelling as a two-hour CD dance?

Then a friend mailed me the two tickets she couldn't use, writing, "Use them or not."

With just two days' notice (I say, optimistically, as if time were the only issue), I didn't find a taker for the second one, but I decided definitely to go myself.

I was a little worried when the director came onstage and introduced the interviewer. Interview formats are tricky. An interviewer who gets the idea, and most of them do, that we care what s/he knows or says can ruin the whole evening. This lady was smart, but as my new bus-stop friend Margaret said afterwards, "If you counted up the total number of words spoken onstage, too many of them were the interviewers'." But how do you break the news, when you've hired yourself an interviewer, that her/his job is to disappear?

Oates' latest book is A Widow's Story, a memoir of her husband's death. A fairly snotty and beside-the-point "review," if that's what it was, in the April 15 Seattle Times, faulted Oates for taking her husband's story as her own, and snidely, I thought, told us she was engaged less than a year after his death.

Reminds me of my own snotty response to Joyce Maynard's my-life-with-JD Salinger memoir, until I read it.

I found Oates fascinating. She has an accent flatter than Chicago's. I recognize it; I have family from New York State, and Oates was raised on a small farm near Buffalo. She's tall and skinny with weakling posture. Her clothes are two sizes too big, trousers a little short. She has a way of lifting her hand, gently but held flat as if for a karate chop, and using the whole flat hand to push her hair out of her eyes but not enough so you see the hair move. A frail-ly feminine gesture.

She's modest, brainy, kind, and witty. (When we gave her a lengthy ovation as she was leaving the stage, she seemed to want not to be rude by leaving too quickly. I can see why men would line up once she was single.) She spoke of using her journals to write the memoir, inhabiting 'a breathless now before it has any name to it,' rather than relying on the generalizations by which we name things after. And you feel she is still struck today, three years later, with the surprise of it. He wasn't expected to die. She went to the hospital to bring him home after his pneumonia bout, and he had died from an infection he got there.

But she said it's not tragedy as we expect tragedy, it's not King Lear, unless it's a slapstick version. For example, the cat got up on the desk and peed on the death certificate. 'I scolded the cat,' she said, 'who pretended to be upset. You need the death certificate, it must be delivered to the probate people. So I sprayed it with Windex, hoping it wouldn't produce a chemical reaction that would eat the paper away.'

A mix of the ennobling and the Marx Brothers, she said. And something, I couldn't get it all, about grief not being the big ennobling, wisdom-generating thing we've gotten used to hearing about. She thinks two hours of it is probably enough.

Meaning, she prefers to, as best she can, just put it behind her and move on?

I don't know. I sure wish they'd let me do these interviews.

FYI, for you who follow my noveling career: Up there, that was 684 words I wrote. Think I can work it into my novel?

No Plot? Big Problem.

2011-04-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

Despite the reassuring title of Chris Baty's NaNoWriMo handbook, No Plot? No Problem!, I'm having a plot problem.

Oh, I'm writing my daily quota, and usually I even kind of like the pieces I produce, but they're not adding up yet. I wish I'd taken a pre-course, if there were one, about constructing a plot.

Clues appear. This from Frederick Buechner:

How do I happen to believe in God? I will give one more answer which can be stated briefly. Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot.

Dear reader, does your life have a plot? I'd love to hear from you.

The Story on Sugar

2011-04-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Is Sugar Toxic? That's the title of one of the most-emailed New York Times stories this week. Which is interesting in itself, because a lot of us are scared to even read it.

I read it, though. And I mentioned it to my sister Sarah when we were talking on the phone. "Is it?" she asked. "Toxic?"

The author says so. It's a long article, but I gather that researchers are beginning to understand that we have a sort of lifetime quota of how much sugar our livers and pancreases can handle, and when we exceed it, the liver gets fat and ineffective, and the pancreas shuts down altogether, resulting not only in diabetes and obesity, but also in heart disease and even cancer. Reading the article, you wonder if one day eating sugar will be like smoking cigarettes -- requiring denial or a death wish.

And don't we already kind of know it? I do. I remember one year when I was maybe 38 and everybody was doing elimination diets to find out how to feel better. I went off sugar for a week or two, then went to Paris. One day, I treated myself to a real splurge of a meal, finishing with some rich dessert or other. I had to go directly to my hotel room afterwards and lie down. The sugar made me sick.

So what did I do about that? I gradually worked back up to it.

For me, sugar is like TV: You don't have to be off it for long to recognize the problems when you try it again.

But sugar has meaning. In our family, we never had much money for presents, but birthdays always meant Mom's homemade cakes. I myself am the Cake Lady for the regular round of birthday celebrations with a group of Bainbridge friends.

And Christmas cookies! Who wants to give that up?

I'm thinking about it though. I had stomach flu last week and I'm still getting my appetite back. I ate a teeny piece of cake last night, after having essentially no sweets for days. Not a good idea.

On the plus side, when you're off sugar awhile, fruit tastes better than ever. My friend Amy brought me an all-fruit smoothie on Sunday, which I've been sipping at all week. Delicious.

Characters Everywhere

2011-04-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Here on Day Six of my Hugo House Roughing It course, with -- fanfare, please -- 11,248 words on the page, I see characters everywhere I go. This morning, when my #5 bus came, a young boy got off, probably ten years old. He wore a backpack, and strode confidently to the corner and on up Phinney Av.

He had that home-schooled look. You know, the kids who look capable, behave sociably, speak well. If he ends up in my novel, he'll be in my neighborhood once a week on his way to a class in some martial art -- maybe aikido, since I can get my granddaughter Audrey to give me some details on that. He won't be afraid of me, because his dad -- "My mom, too, actually," he'll say when we get talking -- he likes to be precise -- has taught him not to be afraid of strangers, but to be aware and smart and know what behavior is a warning sign.

"Besides," he'll joke with me, as I kneel in my front garden, weeding the tulips, "I know where you live."

Maybe his mom will get sick, really sick, for a long time, and he'll ask me if I have any ideas for simple meals he can make so his dad doesn't have to do everything after he gets home from work.

Maybe his mom will die, which would be very bad, I know, but it's just a novel, and maybe our heroine will come to know the whole family, including the grandpa, a widower with a lovely home in Magnolia overlooking Puget Sound and the Olympics.

"Plotting," we call this, we novelists. How your characters just lead you along.

Word Count, 4.12.11

2011-04-12T14:41:00.000-07:00

Wrote today: 1536 words.
Total to date: 8476 words.
All righty then!

Why I Won't Be Riding the Link to Beacon Hill

2011-04-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

I had a Beacon Hill appointment today. I don't know the neighborhood. I went there once, for a New Year's Eve party, but it was dark. Otherwise, all I know is that my beloved Willie Weir and his beloved wife Kat bought a small, ugly house there so they could afford to live in Seattle in perpetuity while travelling the world by bicycle, and those of us who know them (and many of us will be turning out to REI tonight to hear Willie's presentation on cycling India -- see Cascade Bicycle Club) are mighty glad about their foresight.

Anyway, I never had a more confusing time trying to figure out how to get somewhere. Usually I just go to Google maps, bring up my default home address, and type in the destination. Then I press the bus icon. This was weird. First it told me to leave the bus stop for the #5 at 46th and Phinney and walk over to Aurora for a #358 (but why?), then it said to get on a #36 when I got downtown. Why didn't it recommend our sleek new light rail Link?

So I phoned Metro transit, and they said I could certainly take the Link, which ran every 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes? That doesn't sound often enough, I thought.

So, I got the 5 at 46th and Phinney, then went down into the tunnel to get on the Link. I could see my train waiting below and still had to swipe my Orca card on the reader or risk a ticket on the train. I smoothly swiped and turned, in plain view of the driver, who went right ahead and shut the doors on me. Honestly, I was no more than 2 seconds, 5 at the most, from being on that train. That was cold.

The next train was actually due not in 15 minutes, but in 7 and a half. I got on, then off at Beacon Hill Station and made my way to the appointment. When I finished, I thought there was no point in hurrying back to the Link, since I'd boarded my bus at just about 8 am, and my Orca validity lasts only two hours; I'd have to pay another fare. But then I saw the bus stop across the street for the #36, and lo, came the bus! At 9:58, maybe I could make it in under the wire.

But no. Orca cards have no mercy, which is one reason I won't be riding the Link. You have to use your Orca there; it won't take a bus transfer. But if you ride buses and pay cash and get transfers, mercy abounds. For short jaunts, I can usually be out and back home on one fare.

But money aside, I do not want to miss the thrill of the 36! That bus is full of different colored people, some wearing headdresses, some speaking unknown languages. And the views! A new view of the Seattle skyline and the waterfront cranes with Olympic backdrop. The closest I've ever been to that glorious terra cotta Deco building that I've been variously told is a hospital and Amazon headquarters (though the sign said it was medical). And you go right through the wonderful International district, where you can jump off and eat at The Tamarind Tree or buy Vietnamese sandwiches.

The 36 is my bus. One of these days, after I finish my novel, I think I'll just try it from end to end.

Daily Word Count

2011-04-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

I did spend enough time at my Hugo House Roughing It class on Thursday to learn that, though we would be fulfilling our obligation if we wrote just 1000 words a day, it would take closer to 1500 to produce a 50,000 word novel, and even that's a skinny one. So that's my plan.

One of my favorite things now is clicking the drop-down menu for "writer's tools," and clicking "word count."

For Friday, I gave myself credit for 2,277, even though 750 of them I'd written the night before, which I don't think counted. Saturday, 1,995 words. Sunday, stomach flu. Flat on my back all day and I still couldn't keep water down.

Which meant I woke up this morning already behind. I wrote 1,506 words for Sunday, but only 1,162 for today, unless I get inspired later.

But I feel good. I have actually begun to invent! I have a place to live, a house-share in Greenwood, and two roommates! And a cat I haven't met yet.

Writing Lessons: Humiliation

2011-04-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!: "Lowering your unrealistically high standards for your writing can be achieved more easily if you practice it in other life domains as well."

I'd love to say this is why I arrived 90 minutes late last night for my two-hour class. It would have been a grand foray into imperfection.

But the truth about being imperfect is, unless it's on purpose, it doesn't make you feel good. You feel like a dipsh*t, not a term I use lightly, as my artist pal Dan, who calls me Church Lady every time he apologizes for some coarse expletive, will attest.

I am not in fact the apparently devil-may-care bon vivant who breezed in late. I'm the one who stayed home from I-forget-what so I could register for this class on-line at exactly noon the day registration opened. I'm the smarty-pants who informed Hugo House that their catalog was erroneously matching days and dates: when was the class really? On my appointment calendar, The Reading Woman, which Amy got me for Christmas, I have highlighted the entire duration of the class on the month-long pages, April and May, plus inscribed the word "class" on each class Thursday. I had willingly though sorrowfully forgone Dan's art opening as well as an upcoming Town Hall evening on Can Seattle Save the World? because each would conflict with my six to eight pm class.

I even wondered why anybody would schedule a class to interfere with my six o'clock dinner hour. But I never re-checked the time.

The class meets from four to six.

Is it good to start a writing class so humiliatingly?

I'm writing, aren't I?

I Go to Writing Class

2011-04-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

The sun is out, inappropriately. I'm about to get on the #5 bus to Capitol Hill and Hugo House for session one of the six-week Roughing It -- "it" being your novel.

Class meets from six to eight. (When do writers eat dinner? I have packed a cup of roasted brussels sprouts in an empty cottage cheese container, with a peanut-butter-spread slice of my homemade bread, toasted. A real fork. A slice of paper towel for napkin; the cloth napkin I normally use seems rather precious. I don't want to end up as a character in a classmate's novel, do I?)

Here I go.

Getting the Food Ready for Writing

2011-04-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

When I told my sweetheart a couple months ago that I was considering taking the writing course, I said I wasn't sure I could really fulfill the required commitment to write a thousand words a day, with my busy life. I remember he sort of reared back and said, "Of course you can! You found time to do a two-week bike trip last year, didn't you? You just have to treat it like that and make the time."

Whenever I weaken, I think of this.

And maybe that's why I've looked at the whole writing class project as something I'm in training for, reading and writing ahead. Fortunately, I don't have to get my gear ready, like I did for the bike trip, but I'm cooking a lot. Stocking the pantry, I guess.

Right now, I've got half a batch of wine-braised lentils in the fridge, a whole pot of pea soup I haven't even tasted yet, and two bags of brussels sprouts ready to roast. There's still half a loaf of my bread, but I'm thinking maybe I'll bake more today, just to have it. And a batch of oatmeal cookies with dates and walnuts.

It's not solely readying for the writing siege. The other impetus is the cookbook I discovered when I visited my friend Ann on Bainbridge two weeks ago. I thought I'd thumb idly through her copy of Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen. In fact, I could hardly put it down. I can't remember finding another cookbook where I wanted to cook EVERYTHING. Usually cookbooks just remind me of stuff I already know.

This one is so good, I determined to buy one for myself en route from Bainbridge, and I did. So far, I've made the mushroom tart (though next time I'll make my own crust; those Cuisinart crusts never seem to come out right for me with respect to moisture), the masa crepes with chard, chili, and cilantro (an unexpected and delicious combination of greens), and the aforementioned wine-braised lentils. The chief note I made about the lentils is, Double the recipe.

Excuses Not to Write I: Katherine Mansfield

2011-04-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

And to think: She died in 1923 and it wasn't until this very morning in 2011 that I read a single story she wrote.

This is how it happened. I'm reading Katie Roiphe's wonderful Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939.

(And, if I may permit myself a tangent, I believe I'm as cold this morning as anyone ever in any historic literary garrett, here in this vile Seattle spring where the poor cherry blossoms are going to end up like soggy toilet paper on their branches, while we'll all have been too cold to go out and look at them anyway!)

(Though, just at this moment, a silvery spotlight has struck one-half my block, not gold, since it's reflecting off the cloudy sky. Gone now.)

I got onto Katie Roiphe when I read her New York Times review of her mother Anne Roiphe's recent book on her own youthful desire to be muse to a great literary man. When I requested Katie Roiphe's own book from the library, I didn't realize it was biography, only that it was about marriages. As she says in the superb introductory essay, about contemporary relationships and how little they seem to have advanced since the period she writes about, "Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in."

Or not living in. But even when not, marriage is the theme. The one we left. The one we passed up. The one we had until s/he died. The one we hope for.

In the near-century since Roiphe's radically modern couples -- including HG and Jane Wells, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry -- we're still yearning confusedly toward freedom and commitment, still half-longing for commanding men and women who need them.

Anyway, as I read about Katherine Mansfield, dead at 33 of consumption and syphilis and probably the radiation treatments she endured, I realized I'd never read a thing of hers.

Somehow I had missed what Roiphe calls "little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear."

So I leapt up from my breakfast table, where I was supposed to be writing at least my "morning pages," to find my $4 Dover Thrift Edition of The World's Greatest Short Stories, purchased on a recent Seattle outing day. I hadn't actually been thrilled with de Maupassant's "The Necklace" or Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." I'd read no further.

But here was Mansfield's "The Garden Party." Yes. A masterpiece. All the breath-taking, lovely things in life: the lawn, the roses, the cream puffs, one's own beauty in the perfect hat. And the dark: death and poverty. The truth that light and shadow is where we live.

Well. I couldn't stop at just one. Might my Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol II, extend as far as Mansfield? On page 1565 I found "The Daughters of the Late Colonel." Funny, these middle-age daughters, so cowed by the colonel that for a moment at the cemetery, they are taken by fear of how angry he'll be that they've let him be buried. We see their poverty in their outrage at the nurse who eats as much bread and butter as she likes. We see the faded portrait on the piano of their mother, dead 35 years ago in Ceylon. We are moved from amusement to sadness, and then hope: might they break away at last? For a moment, sun streams in the window. And then, a cloud.

So you see what I mean. With my writing class just two days away, how can I even presume to try?

And why would I, when I could instead be reading more of Mansfield's stories, as soon as I get down to Ophelia's Books to buy some?

Not to mention finishing Roiphe.

However, a deal's a deal, and I've made a commitment in my writing class to write a thousand words a day. And presumably my teacher will help make this possible. That's why I'm taking a class.

A Thousand an Hour!

2011-04-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

Roughing It: Write a Draft of Your Book in Just Six Weeks

As Anne Lamott tells us in her writing book “Bird by Bird,” even the most successful authors write crummy first drafts. So why not write it fast and get it over with? In this class, we’ll write complete first drafts of a novel or memoir. While in class, we’ll alternate lessons in story structure, character, premise, and outlining, with in-class writing exercises to jumpstart the imagination. You must commit to writing at least 1000 words a day outside of class. This course is geared towards beginning fiction writers, but memoirists and writers of all levels are welcome. Individual conference with teacher included. Required text: “Writing for Story” by Jon Franklin.
Instructor: Rebecca Agiewich

There it is, folks, the course description for the undertaking I begin this week at Hugo House, Seattle's famed hub for writers, aspiring and accomplished.

I bought the textbook weeks ago at Elliott Bay Books. I have a bunch of writing books already, but I was surprised once again by how much somebody else knows and I don't. And Franklin has almost a recipe for how to begin, which I like. I'm on my second read-through.

However, as you may have noticed, I'm barely even blogging. I had blithely told somebody my goal was to train for this course, like a runner does for a marathon, with daily writing exercises, even a couple of short stories. One a day, maybe.

Well, it hasn't happened. But I do have a concept, which is good.

And I have a bit of inspiration. I heard Alexander McCall Smith, of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame, speak at Seattle Central Library last Friday. He's warm and gracious and funny. He described himself as a "serial novelist," kin to serial killers. He is currently working simultaneously on novels in two of his four series. He wrote on the plane, on his way to Seattle, no doubt wearing the fetching kilt in which he appeared to us.

And he told us he writes a thousand words an hour! and does little rewriting. (Which, sadly, doesn't entirely surprise me, based on my short foray into the 44 Scotland Street series, but chaque a son gout....) Still, if he can do a thousand an hour, I ought to be able to do a thousand a day.

Plugging KBCS

2011-03-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

I really don't want to be a person who's always plugged in to her earbuds. I like hearing real life on the bus and the sidewalks, and I feel safer unplugged on my bike.

But Seattle doesn't make it easy, because we have great radio! I'll never forget when the ex and I moved to Port Townsend in 2001 and discovered that public radio at 88.5 played nothing but blues from six to midnight every Saturday and Sunday. I said to Jon, It's a sign. We're in the right place.

I still listen.

But right now, I'm listening to DJ Marte Bisch on KBCS. I had kind of thought, shall I email a request for a Lyle Lovett song? No, I'll just say, "Keep playing what you're playing."

So I sent that email and, guess what? Right now he's playing Lyle! Who's channeling whom?

However, I have to head out on the bus in a few minutes. I'm head cook for tonight's community dinner at St Paul's Queen Anne. (Come on over; 5:30 we eat.)

Is that John Hiatt now?! I don't know if I can leave this music. I might have to plug in.

All My Sons

2011-03-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Intiman is back!

I was so disappointed by recent plays -- The Scarlet Letter, apparently written by somebody who never read the novel, and The Doctor in Spite of Himself, farced up beyond all meaning -- that I was almost afraid to show up to usher last night at one of the final previews of All My Sons.

I've seen that play, and the memorable line the title comes from echoed in my mind, long after I'd forgotten where I saw the play. I knew the Intiman was making changes: relocating it to Seattle, within an African-American family instead of whites. I was praying they hadn't screwed it up.

And they emphatically have not. I'd have to look at the script to see exactly what lines have been changed, and there must be some, because there's a black swagger onstage that can't be original. But basically, the family is a believably prosperous one in Seattle just after World War II. The questions the play raises about the conflict between commitment to the good of one's family versus the larger human family are perhaps heightened by our awareness that the "common good" for so long has taken little account of African Americans. But what I loved more was seeing conflicts anyone can relate to portrayed in microcosm by a family that just happens to be black.

It's a riveting story about money and what it does to us, from the women who want financially sucessful husbands to the men who make money, honestly and dishonestly, from the material of war.

Somewhere in this play, you'll see yourself.

The acting is uniformly excellent, but Kate, the matriarch, stands out. If ticket sales can do anything to put the Intiman's finances back on a firm footing, this show deserves to make it happen. I may go again myself.

The notes on the Intiman website include this quote from the playwright, Arthur Miller: “I don’t see how you can write anything decent without using the question of right and wrong as the basis.”

To me, that's the acorn from which successful theater grows.

More than a Bakery

2011-03-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

When I was at the back bar at Macrina's last week, a man -- not a fat man, either -- sat down with a latte and two apparently identical scones, and ate them both. I couldn't help but admire the forthrightness of this. No dithering.

Both finishing around the same time, we fell into conversation. [And may I say here, though he wasn't wearing a wedding ring, and I think a married person should do that, he quickly got a reference to his wife into the conversation. Some guys will chat you up for an hour with no indication of a "we." Playtime, I guess.]

Anyway, Paul told me he comes in about once a week, but couldn't help much when it came to recommending treats: all he eats are citrus-oat scones.

I said, They ought to have a tasting event sometime, where you pay a set fee and get to graze on bites. He said he knows the owner, he'll suggest it.

I asked him what he did that he could hang out at Macrina Bakery at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning. Architect, semi-voluntarily enjoying the downturn, with the agreement that while his wife supports the household singlehandedly for a while, he'll do the home maintenance that's been deferred for 20 years.

How's it going? I said.

Motivation is hard, he said, but he knows what to do. He's hiring a helper to show up at 8:30 every morning. So he'll have to be ready with a task list, equipment, and supplies.

Smart plan. Sometimes it's hard to apply your professional skills to your own life. I've had that problem.

We talked about the fun of doing things and going places alone. I told him about the TC Boyle lecture, how singles look with confidence for the buffer seats people leave open. He reminded me that even in sparsely-filled halls, couples have to talk over where to sit. And like at FolkLife or Bumbershoot, he said, you find yourself remaining at a marginal performance for the sake of your companion, only to discover later that she stayed for you.

Right, I said, I felt so light walking up here today, no one to consider but myself. And yet, after awhile, single is easy. It's partnership that looks like an alluring challenge.

Paul said, "My yoga teacher says if you tend to assume a pose from the left, try it from the right, and see what opens up for you."

All that, and a brioche too.

Poetry, the Movie

2011-03-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Usually I like going to things on my own, but yesterday wasn't one of those days. Nevertheless, I kicked my butt out the door at 7:15 and walked over to Seven Gables movie theater to see the Korean film, Poetry.

It's wonderful, surprising and yet believable. The main character is an aging woman who talks her way into an already-full poetry class. As a writer myself, I thought, where did this story come from? Perhaps the screenwriter was in a poetry class, and, curious, began making up the story of a classmate. How she cares for her unappreciative grandson, goes to a doctor for a tingly arm, and is diagnosed with first-stage Alzheimers. The serious problems she faces and deals with on her own, with determination and creativity and dignity.

Poetry is filled with characters so real you feel more like you've been on a vacation in another country than in a movie. A movie you wish you'd seen with somebody, so you could talk about all that. And yet, one you're glad you didn't miss, just because you had to come alone.

I pulled on all my layers for the walk home and turned to leave. And there were two friends of mine! And we all went to Mollie Moon for ice cream.

A happy ending.

Macrina Bakery, Queen Anne: First Impressions

2011-03-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

Inspired by my visit to Elliott Bay Books' cookbook section, I Googled Macrina Bakery, which led me to three Seattle locations, the nearest on West McGraw in Queen Anne.

What? West of Queen Anne Av? I didn't know there was anything down there past Third Av where the #13 bus turns toward Fremont. When the sun came out yesterday morning, I hoofed it over, planning to arrive deserving calories.

Down the Fremont Hill, across the bridge, up and over I weewawed my way to yet another Seattle neighborhood. Beneath what appeared to be a suicidally small and insignificant sign, I found a cafe so full of people there was room for me only at the back bar.

The staff is pleasant, the choices painful: everything looks good, and there are lots of different kinds of everything. Portions and prices are reasonable. Muffins are $2.25 apiece, for example. I paid $3 for a Nutella brioche. My sister Sarah loves Nutella. Maybe I've never had it; I found it sugary.

The paintings of Carolyn Goodenough decorate the walls this week. The writer in me wants to appropriate that name for a character: Ms Goodenough. But for an artist? Overly obvious.

Which is probably why Ms Goodenough's paintings are hanging, and Ms Perfect's are still being fretted over back at the studio.

Dangerous Elliott Bay Books

2011-03-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

If you don't have a shopping budget, there are places you must avoid. I knew not to hang out in Elliott Bay Books, but it hadn't occurred to me that their cafe would be dangerous.

Actually, I was in trouble before I sat down. I've signed up for a writing class at Hugo House that requires a textbook. I found it at Elliott Bay. This put me in the writing section, but I have a bunch of writing books already. I wasn't sure even the required book would be worth reading.

Nearby, however, was a table full of essays about the writing life. I was drawn to a beautiful cover painting featuring chiaroscuro raspberries fading into brownness. The book is Imagination in Place by Wendell Berry ("berry" -- get it?).

I admire Berry, not only his writing, but the ethical, largely local life he chooses to live. I'd like him to earn royalties. I bought that one too.

By then it was time to meet my friend in the cafe. She's a real writer, so after the inspiration of our literary conversation, I stuck around and wrote a little on the lined notebook paper I fold to fit my pocket and carry everywhere.

When I looked up, Oh. Books everywhere. Closest were foodie books: essays about food, and cookbooks, and books about eating your way through Paris and Italy. I folded my paper. I rose.

Hey, here's a Macrina Bakery book! That's the place that makes the bread for the cafe here and the irresistible cinnamon raisin brioche slice I get at Herkimer. But geez, their own published cookbook? If Macrina Bakery is such a big deal, how come I haven't come across it in my two years in Seattle?

This is about to change.

Another unexpected bookstore budget hazard.

Why Men Are the Way They Are

2011-03-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

Why Men Are the Way They Are. It's a book title. I kept seeing it on my friend's stack. But how many books about men and relationships does a woman need to read? Don't I know enough?

Ultimately, I couldn't resist.

If I weren't such a TV snob, I'd have heard 25 years ago of author Warren Farrell and "the provocative book that sparked so much controversy on the Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey shows!"

I wish I had.

Here's the chief point: The feminist movement as I know it, the movement of the '60s and '70s, framed the battles in a way that, like most wars I suppose, simply set the stage for more conflict. Because instead of settling for equality for ourselves, we let our anger and pain into channels where we cut men down. We wanted men to be less than us.

For most of us, it was subtle. We didn't give up men; we still wanted them. But secretly, we felt we were better. Remember "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"? We still feel we're better.

I do love men, but even so, his chapter, "What I love most about men," has been alive in me since I read it.

First, a man wrote those words, "what I love about men"! We haven't really yet made a society where a straight man can say that. And it's not just the men who would find it embarrassing.

And then the things he lists. We women know what we love about us: we're good listeners, nurturing, able to work long hours at jobs and at home, determined to exercise and eat right so we'll look and feel good, and so on.

But when we read Farrell's list, we see mostly things we take for granted. Driving the car, for example.

In couples I've been part of, the assumption is, he'll drive. When it's late and you're both tired. When the weather is scary. When traffic is endless. If the woman drives, it's because he asks her to do what both assume is his job.

Which is exactly the kind of taken-for-granted attitude women in the '60s and '70s were so annoyed and angry about: The assumption that a man in the kitchen is doing a favor.

Farrell points out that when men try to solve our problems and want to fix things for us, it's nurturing behavior. I complain when a man jumps over the listening phase to the problem-solving phase, but I'm not sure I'd ever have gotten my cupboard hung straight if my hero had just sat there nodding sympathetically as I explained my problems with the electric drill. Plus, I've found when I ask a man for some listening, I get it.

Biggest of all, Farrell says women put men in a bind. We gripe if work keeps them too busy, too tired, on the road, competitive, but men know women like guys with nice cars and homes, men who buy good champagne and plane tickets to Paris. And you don't get that kind of financial success and security without making work a priority.

I drive a 1996 Corolla, my sweetheart a slightly younger Subaru. I like this. I think it shows a commonality of values. But last summer when I flew home from Mom's in Michigan, his car had broken down and he picked me up at the airport in his son's flashy new sportscar convertible, top down. I rolled my carry-on out of Arrivals, expecting the Subaru, and there was this handsome guy waving at me beside his splendid car and -- I felt it!

Just for a moment, but I felt it.

I'm thinking about dating. Those poor guys! We women complain about dating, the uncertainty and the disappointments, but the guys have all that plus the expense. Almost every woman I know believes a guy ought to pick up the tab for the first date -- at least!

And even if that's just coffee and a pastry, we're talking $10-20.

We think we're so advanced if we tell a man we want to pay our share or even to treat occasionally. But does a man get credit for enlightenment if he suggests you split the tab?

So, thanks Dr. Farrell. I'm going to be a masculist now. Which isn't even a word.

Exactly my point.

Remember that you are dust...

2011-03-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

It's Ash Wednesday, noon service on my calendar. I thought the rain was letting up, but I see it slanting north against the dark of the blowing evergreens across the street. The thingy that vents my stove hood or dryer or whatever has been irregularly POP POP POPping in time to the gusts all morning long.

But the sky is brightening again, as it did 10 minutes ago, temporarily, in the south, the direction I'm headed on my bike. Yes, down there towards Dexter, where I read this morning a warning from Cascade Bike Club that a new construction project began Monday. Cyclists beware.

Okay, I'm suiting up. But why? I mean, Why not drive? What does it mean to me to brave these elements?

Two hours later:

Really, I decided, there's such a thing as being sensible! You could slip on that wet pavement or get blown right out into traffic.

I took the bus.

In the shelter of the church, rain thundered down on the clerestory windows. It gushed into our courtyard.

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return," our rector repeated as she thumbed onto our foreheads a cross of ash. Ash from the burning of last year's Palm Sunday palms. Ashes, after the parade.

In Bird by Bird, our rector said, Anne Lamott talks about living and writing as if we're dying, which, of course, we are. She says to herself, when words won't come, "Hmm. Dying tomorrow. What shall I say today?"

What popped into my mind: Dying tomorrow? I should have ridden my bike.

Riding the Bus

2011-03-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.theyearsareshort.com

Enough already about Gretchen Rubin and the Happiness Project, maybe you're thinking, but have you seen this?

PS: I get that it's not exactly about buses, but it is too about buses.

Back when I was new...

2011-03-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

"Grrr! It looked so simple on Mapquest! I can see 45th Street from home, so how hard can it be to carry on until it crosses 48th Avenue?"

It was though, two years ago when I moved to Seattle, sixty years old, single, city-shy when it came to finding my way by car.

I drove down the hill on 45th below the university -- oh, look at that huge shopping center! -- and came to a sort of slanted tee. I checked the street sign across it, just to be sure I was still good: "Montlake Avenue"?! Where did 45th go?

The answer, I now know, is "leftish."

I was remembering all this last night with warm nostalgia, from the comfort of knowing exactly how to reach St Stephen's Episcopal for the first-Sundays choral evensong. I was affronted, that first time, that my boldness in search of the peace of evensong was unrewarded. Instead, I was anxious about being lost in the winding streets of Laurelhurst, annoyed that I'd be late, worried that I'd disturb the peace of those who knew enough to get there on time.

Even late, though, I got my peace in that holy space full of Bach and the thoughtful, often ancient poetry of the Book of Common Prayer.

I've been back numerous times, even considered making St Stephen's my church. I took my bike buddy with me once, back when we were still figuring out what kind of friends we were going to be.

G went with me last night, G, the quintessentially spiritual-but-not-religious. He loves good music though.

Two years in, it's a special pleasure to be holding dear and counting over my greenhorn memories. Back when I first moved to Seattle....

Excursion to Madrona

2011-03-06T15:53:00.000-08:00

We wanted to enjoy Saturday's sunny weather on our bikes. My sweetheart's great-niece and her family have just moved into a new home in the Mount Baker neighborhood. Since we often bike to adjacent Seward Park, we thought we'd add in a little side trip to see the new place. (We hear there'll be a ping-pong table downstairs, and I'm into that, so I'm trying to keep track of move-in progress.) We weren't even sure they'd be home, but if they were, we didn't want to accidentally arrive at lunch and make them feel obligated to feed us. (Actually, my sweetheart worries about this kind of thing more than I do. I figure if people don't want to feed you, they won't.) Anyway, we decided to avoid the problem entirely by finding ourselves a cafe stop in Madrona on the way.

I'm amazed that I'm still finding brand-new named neighborhoods in Seattle. They call us a city of neighborhoods, but will they never end? Madrona is a new one on me; I wasn't completely sure where it is, but G did the map work, and off we biked. After some thrilling ups and downs and a few groovy alleyways, we came to 34th and Cherry, I think it was, and a couple blocks with restaurants and cafes all along. We locked our bikes and chose Cafe Soleil, well named as sun poured in the windows on two sides.

It's a simple place, and the ceiling is peeling badly, but it's so high, you might not notice. And we found it charming, wishing one of us had a smartphone so we could snap a photo of the three matching tea canisters lined up side-by-side, each tiltinga little differently from the next on a cattywompus shelf beneath three matching teapots that appeared, each one, to be only half there, maybe because they were painted black and white, part of each pot blending into the white cupboard?

He got eggy food, I got wonderful French toast with sauteed apple and real maple syrup, and we split a cafe au lait.

An Ethiopian woman owns the place, and they serve Ethiopian food at night, injera and the whole production. We'd like to go back, next time we need another vacation in Seattle.

PS: The relatives weren't home, but we enjoyed sitting on their stoop. And oh yeah: I got another flat.

Happiness Project

2011-03-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

I really like Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project. She has so many good ideas! I find if I'm a bit less than my usual upbeat self, like today when I had to change my bike tube again, I check her website.

Here's what converted me the first time I looked, her second "truth of happiness" or something like that:

One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy;
One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

Turn that over in your mind for awhile. It's the infinity bracelet of happiness.

T.C. Boyle

2011-03-02T10:07:00.000-08:00

Once again, it was the good old Seattle Times Northwest Weekend section that alerted me to TC Boyle's appearance last night at our central library branch. I jumped on the bus and went.

You can tell the single folks: we expect to get seats. Single seats are easy. Row Two.

Boyle was professional and polished. He appeared in his signature smooth yellow sports coat and red high-tops, a clasp earring in his left ear, one forelock carefully partitioning our view of his forehead. He told us what he was going to do, and he did it, and did it well: Established the factual background of his new novel, When the Killing's Done, two environmentalists with warring approaches to reestablishing nature's balance on one of the uninhabited -- by humans -- Channel Islands. Then, via a reading from Chapter One, introduced one of the characters, the perpetually angry one. Then read us a story, The Lie, published a couple years ago in The New Yorker. Then answered questions, signed books.

I'd call him a fussy man, utterly clear on his preferences, mature enough to accept himself and the inconveniences posed by others. He was gracious in the Q&A, and that must take kindness and patience. "What inspires you?" he was asked. I cringed.

But what does inspire him? I think it was in response to this that he told us about being alone in a mountain cabin to relax after finishing a major project and -- starting again to write. I guess everything inspires him, everything looks like a story.

My favorite of Boyle's fifteen or so novels, not that I've read them all, is The Tortilla Curtain, about illegal immigration -- the need and ambition and plight of the immigrants, against the American dream in a safe, gated community, in alternate chapters. I found it riveting. My ex dubbed it "pulp fiction."

I read Drop City, about hippie communes, and one that moves to Alaska. I've never been colder than the year my ex and I listened to Boyle's Alaska on tape as Jon drove and I knitted our way from California back to our new, frozen home in Port Townsend. We spent a night in our camper at the mall in Olympia, stopped by so much snow, the movie theater was closed.

Talk, Talk, is a suspense novel where the victim is profoundly deaf and profoundly committed to the meaning of it, in a way I never before understood.

The Inner Circle, about Kinsey and his cohort, about what sex is and isn't.

As I said to my sweetheart when we spoke on the phone afterwards, "Boyle was prepared, he was entertaining -- but, no passion."

He did say, "Don't invest in any sushi places," since he thinks climate change will leave us soon with nothing but tilapia.

Maybe his passion is all on the page. Maybe his high spirits are hard won. He doesn't write us black, but gray, with fondness. Maybe, like Balzac, he's writing his own Comedie Humaine; it's just harder to take when time is running out.

How the Carbon Footprint Reduction Initiative is Going

2011-02-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

I walked two and a half hours yesterday!

My sweetheart walked me to church -- one hour -- then he took the bus home.

After church, I took the #13, then walked the remaining 30 minutes home.

My sweetheart came at 2:15, and we walked 30 minutes to the church at SPU to hear the wonderful Orchestra Seattle concert. Then walked back.

Then went out to Lake Forest Park for the night, sweetheart driving.

He dropped me at Third Place Books this morning at 8:55, as he headed north to work, I south and home. My #372 was due at 9:02, and then again at 9:27. (So which of those is the bus I actually boarded at 9:15?)

I got off 35 minutes later at the last stop, in the U District, and walked 40 minutes home. I could have transferred to a #44, and I'll probably try it next time, but I don't think it will save me much time.

So it's two hours, portal to portal, on the bus from Fremont to Lake Forest Park?

I guess the good news is, it's still an hour by bike.

I'll just have to get used to biking it in the dark and cold.

One thing is certain: I gotta fix that flat.

My Blogaganza: Did You Notice?

2011-02-28T13:41:00.000-08:00

It's February 28, the last day of the month in which I vowed to blog every day. I'd been slacking off bigtime.

January: 1 post.

February: 30 posts, before this one goes up.

True, I chose the shortest month of the year in which to post daily. Not even a leap year. Still, I was proud.

Until I missed yesterday. I didn't even realize it until, oh, probably 4 am when I awoke momentarily.

"Blame it on your boyfriend," he said at breakfast.

You Make People Feel Interesting

2011-02-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

"You make people feel interesting," my sweetheart said to me on Monday, after a big birthday party Sunday night full of people I don't (yet) know.

I've been saying it over to myself all week. Have I ever had a nicer compliment?

What I'm Reading

2011-02-25T12:13:00.000-08:00

I'm on page 322 of this novel that started to get really interesting at about page 200, not that it was dull before that.

See, it's about a turn-of-the-19th-century woman sold to a Japanese monastery where the nuns are babymakers for the monks who use the babies for... and about the men who love her and try to free her, while she, no dummy, is doing her own strategizing.

Wow! Sounds tacky, hey? But no, it's David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It was on a bunch of "best" lists for 2010. Beyond the thrilling plot, sentences like this are no doubt why: "Fishermen's voices travel through the warm and salty night," just a bit of routine description from page 109.

I'm loving it. Sure wish it would snow about 10 inches pronto so I could stay home and read instead of going out and enjoying this sunny, freezing Seattle day with a hike at Discovery Park with my beloved.

The single life. C'est la vie.

Who You're Going to Be

2011-02-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

One of the ideas behind St Paul's free meal program, the Fatted Calf Cafe (last Tuesday of the month, 5 pm, 1st and Roy in Lower Queen Anne) was that we'd share the tables with our down-and-out dinner guests.

That turned out to be one of the best parts. Like Eugene, who wasn't there, most of our guests were articulate, some voluble; one produced a musical flow of dark political free verse.

I sat across the table from Jeff, better known as Flipper, he said, because of his work on saving dolphins during the Alaskan oil spill.

I can't think what I asked to elicit this, but he told me it was making bad choices that had resulted in his present way of life. He's one of six kids from a prosperous Coast Guard family, and the only one who went wrong. He said his sibs fooled around with cocaine too, but he was the only addict.

I said, "Is that the choice you mean, choosing to take drugs?"

"My first bad choice," he said, "was the friends I chose. Everything started right there. Nobody tells you your friends will make all the difference. They ought to teach that in school."

My sister Marty and her husband Bart did teach their kids that, but I agree with Flipper that it's rare.

My brother-in-law, Bart Campolo, has been involved in urban ministry his entire career. He told me that many years ago, he and his friend Bruce Main, director of Urban Promise in Wilmington, DE, got together to discuss how they were going to teach the young people they worked with to stand up to peer pressure.

"But nobody stands up to peer pressure," Bart said to me. "So what you have to do is choose the right peers. Who you're going to be is who you're going to be around.

"So as youth workers, we consciously engineered groups with good values."

I really like this idea. Not to make everything about me, but I'm thinking it's a good idea all your life, even for people who are sixty and single and moving to Seattle, or some other new place for a new adventure.

Never Say Die

2011-02-23T17:34:00.000-08:00

I planned to hear Susan Jacoby, author of Never Say Die, discuss "New Myths about Old Age" at Town Hall last night. I figured she'd be talking about botox and yoga, and how not even measures like those could keep us looking young forever.

In the morning, as I drove home from getting my car smogged, I heard she was going to be on the radio talking about baby-boomer aging denial. "Call in," the announcer said.

"What do you mean we're in denial about old age?" I thought of saying. "Things really have changed. I celebrated my 62nd birthday on a 600 mi bike trip; Mom didn't do that." I didn't call, partly because I couldn't keep the number in my brain long enough to pull over and dial.

Then off I went to cook for the homeless for four hours on a concrete floor. As dinner hour drew near, college student Elissa and I hurried over to Center House, where we'd been told we might find some more customers for our free food.

I haven't walked with a 20-year-old lately. They walk different. They don't think about where their feet will land. I myself take advantage of curb cutouts rather than making that big step to the street. Over in Seattle Center, a circular plaza around the fountain sinks 16 inches into the ground, right through the middle of the field we were crossing. Elissa stepped down into it without a hitch. I gratefully spotted a tallish garbage can to cling to as I lowered myself.

Anyway, by the time our Fatted Calf Cafe dinner wrapped up last night, I was too tired to go hear Ms Jacoby tell me I was in denial about the ravages of aging. But that's okay. I'm not in denial anymore.

"I'm taking an ibuprofen to put by the bed," I say to my sweetheart. We're at his house. We just got home from a couple of hours of dancing.

"Why don't you just go ahead and take one?" he says. He's reading the newspaper.

"I did," I say. "I want another one by the bed in case I wake up in the night."

"Mmm hm," he says.

"I just want you to know I'm taking your ibuprofen. Because I'm old," I sort of spit out the words.

"I'm well aware of your age," he says. Keeps reading.

The Fatted Calf Cafe

2011-02-22T10:14:00.000-08:00

My church, St Paul's in Lower Queen Anne, begins a new venture tonight. Where we're located, it's not unusual to pick empty beer cans out of our landscaping, to step around broken bottles in the blocks I walk from the bus to the church, to encounter some dirty, smelly, bag-laden folks around the pleasant cafes and restaurants and the good used bookstores. We want to help.

The Fatted Calf Cafe -- you know, from the parable of the prodigal son -- is Brad's idea. He wants to invite inside anyone who wants to come, and to serve them a good meal, family style, at tables with tablecloths, and us sitting down together to eat. It's not about anybody shuffling humbly through a line.

I'm going in at 2, as sous-chef. We're serving chicken and rice and green beans, salad, brownies.

When I was a college freshman, after a summer job cooking for as many as a hundred at our church camp, I got a day job as cook at the Youngstown, Ohio, rescue mission. I went to college at night.

I carried a "church key" bottle opener in my hand for safety as I walked through what we then called 'Skid Row.' I cooked chicken cacciatore, for example. Ed, who worked with me in the kitchen, had come from the streets himself some years before. He taught me the foundational skill of cooking: the use of a good chef's knife. He told me not to get married until I could afford one. I complied.

Once my purse was stolen, including the paint-box-style makeup set my sister Deb had got me for Christmas. And I was poor myself.

I'm nervous about tonight. I don't know how it's going to go. Maybe a lot of these folks actually would rather have a handout than a hand. Eugene, even.

I met Eugene a couple of months ago at the bus stop at Aurora and Mercer. You come out of the underpass and around a sharp corner to get to the stop, so you can't see what buses you may have just missed.

I saw a tall, lean black guy in gray sweats sitting on a short concrete wall, the only place to sit on the long waits for Sunday buses. I asked if I'd missed the 5; he said no. I went over to read the published schedule on the pole (for a chuckle).

A bike stood there. I went back to the guy and said, "This your bike?" and asked him about his cycling life, which turned out to be vehicular rather than recreational.

Eventually he said, "My name is Eugene," and I told him mine. "You have no idea what this means," he said, "that you would come and talk to me.

"I don't know if it's the color of my skin," he went on, "but people act like they're afraid of me."

"It might be that beer you're drinking here at a bus stop at just about noon," I thought, but did not say.

Anyway, we talked the whole time, even after we got on the bus. He was articulate. I liked him. I look for his face now in Queen Anne. I don't know if he'd even recognize me, but it would be fun if he did.

Maybe tonight, at dinner.

What He Said

2011-02-21T19:03:00.000-08:00

So we're sitting in Pagliacci's Pizza, Lower Queen Anne, eating a slice apiece and sharing a salad for lunch, my sweetheart and I. I'm chewing every bite 50 times, as usual, and he's still eating. I said, "Have you always been a slow eater, like me?"

"Maybe you've speeded up since you met me," he said.

"I don't think so."

"Well, there once was a time," he said, "when you thought you were never gonna find a man who can shovel compost as fast as you, eat as slow, or dance as sweet -- and make you laugh to boot.

"You were so wrong, babe."

That's what he said.

He's Ignoring Me

2011-02-20T22:32:00.000-08:00

It's late Sunday evening, after a busy weekend of the bike flat and staying in together on Friday evening, a drive to Snoqualmie Pass on Saturday for a gorgeous couple of hours on snowshoes, under sunny blue skies with no wind and temperatures just below freezing keeping the snow frozen and lovely, then dance last night, breakfast this morning with family visiting from Philadelphia, church for me, a Cajun birthday party for a friend, then a big family party to celebrate my sweetheart's sister's 70th birthday.

All good, but I'm so tired, and so ready to -- be alone.

And my sweetheart is here, and completely ignoring me, reading the Atlantic, making himself some herbal tea, and hurray! I must say it again, completely ignoring me in the nicest way.

I'm happy.

Flat

2011-02-19T16:49:00.000-08:00

So, I set out last night at 4:50 on my bike. Fifty blocks on and about a fourth of the way to G's, I felt a ba-bump, ba-bump. Another flat. It was getting too late to deal with it on the street, so I called G, walked a couple blocks up to Greenwood Av, and waited for the #5 bus. G met me at Northgate, and took me home.

So, the good news is, my carbon footprint is still looking good. He's doing a lot of driving though.

Gridlock

2011-02-18T16:32:00.000-08:00

Okay, I just got home from my Group Health appointment (I'm fine, thank you) and tea with a friend after. The #8 bus was about 20 minutes late, an interesting achievement for a bus that runs every 15 minutes. I guess I just missed the #5 I was transferring to. In short, it took me an hour to get home from Capitol Hill. Now it's 4:25 pm, I'm going to my sweetheart's in Lake Forest Park for dinner, then to Third Place Books to hear music and maybe dance, which starts at 7:30. I'd like to bus to G's, but it would take 90 minutes. I can bike, in an hour, but I'm kind of tired. Then, after dinner, it would be great to walk to TPB, since it's 1 3/4 mi from G's, and I am trying hard to do those trips carless, but there's just no way then to fit in dinner.

Unless I find my tire is flat, I'm biking. Because of all the not-quite perfect options, getting into my car sounds least appealing. Maybe I'm not even much of an environmental activist. Maybe I just really hate driving.

But, hey -- whatever works, right?

The Circumference of Home

2011-02-17T16:48:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, I finished reading Kurt Hoelting's wonderful book, The Circumference of Home, about the year he went carless and adventured within 100 km of his Whidbey Island home, in response to climate change . He writes:

I am no longer willing to live at such a bizarre distance from what I know to be true. This much is clear to me. If I can't change my own life in response to the greatest challenge now facing our human family, who can? And if I won't make the effort to try, why should anyone else? So I've decided to start at home, and begin with myself. The question is no longer whether I must respond. The question is whether I can turn my response into an adventure.

The whole time I was reading, over about 10 days, I was committed to my own climate change initiatives. It was in my mind, background to everything.

Now, just two days past the end of the book, I can already feel my urgency slacken. What a pathetic race we humans are.

On the other hand, I'm wearing a long-sleeve tee shirt, a zip-up fleece, and a zip-up fleece vest, and I just finished doing a set of reps with my four-pound dumbbells, to try to warm up in my 64 degree house. I took one of those personal carbon footprint calculator quizzes on line the other day, but I'd already done everything, and so have you: Changed out your incandescent bulbs for CFCs, lowered the thermostat, turned down the water heater, plugged everything into power strips.

Could we add this: Don't drive more than 55 mph? In the Carter administration, during that energy crisis, it was the law, to save gasoline.

And another thing: since a third of automotive emissions are produced by car trips of three miles or less, let's do our best to consolidate our errands and/or walk, bike, and bus to get them done.

Are you with me?

And remind me, will you?

Learning with Seniors

2011-02-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

My sweetheart and I are learning to play bridge. No, wait. He already knows how; played it in middle school. As for me, I'm not so much learning to play it as I am taking a class in it. It's complicated. Today was Class 7, and our teacher began at last to explain scoring.

My take on it? Bridge was obviously invented by one of those pain-in-the-neck kids who always changed the rules as soon as it looked like the opponents might become a threat.

But I like my classmates. We're all part of the Lifetime Learning Center at Greenlake, which means we're all kind of old. G and I get a lot of admiration from the others when we arrive on our bikes. One lady told us today how "cute" we are, which I now know is simply the result of being an affectionate couple at our advanced age. Originally from Holland, she introduced herself this way: "Liesel, rhymes with diesel." She was married for more than 30 years, then divorced her husband, who, like her, has never remarried. They see each other almost every day.

Last week we met a woman with a radiant smile and robust physique; truly, she glows. She was born in Poland and survived five years in labor camps, before coming to the United States with her husband. She told us how poor they had been as they worked their way through university and got a start in life. "And that's why I don't feel sorry for poor people," she said. I said, "You mean, because they have so much fun?" "Yes!"

Was being poor more fun in the old days, or do people today just not have what it takes? Or does it take more than it used to?

About that flat...

2011-02-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

You know that bike tire that flatted on Sunday? I was too busy enjoying Valentine's Day yesterday to tackle it, but I fixed it this morning before I headed out on foot for my day

Actually, I fixed it twice this morning. First one hole, then the next one.

I did a thorough job, too, of using my eyes and my fingers to try to probe my tire for the material that made the holes. If the thorn or the glass is still in the tire, it will puncture the tube again. I found a little slit; must be something had cut through and fallen out.

Pumped up the tube, and actually got the tire back on the rim without too much trouble -- always a physical challenge to pop that baby on. And proudly I set off on my day. But not on my bike. I wouldn't need the bike until bridge class on Wednesday morning. I thought I'd better just check to make sure my tire was still holding air before I fixed dinner.

Nope. Flat. Fixed it again. What I think is, on the second try I found the original puncture, which caused so much air to leak out before I realized I was flatting on Sunday that I got a pinch flat.

Then I made dinner and ate it. Just before my post-prandial stroll to the library, I checked it once more.

Still up.

But you know what? I'm kind of getting into fixing it. The worst thing -- and the best -- about bike flats is that they're mercifully rare, so each time one presents itself, I learn to repair it all over again. I forgot on Sunday everything I learned with my last flat, which is why I didn't even see, for example, the surgical gloves I cleverly decided in August to keep in my pack so I wouldn't get so filthy. At first, I wasn't sure what to do with the new-fangled tool I found in my pack, which turns out to make popping a stiff tire back on the rim an easy job, without risk to the tube.

I hope that tire is inflated tomorrow morning. But if not, I think I'll set a timer, and see how fast I can fix it, now that I've had all this practice.