Condiments of the House

Fay was such a luxurious storm—water and electric the whole time, but enough rain to go canoeing in our front yard. Best depression I’ve ever had!

Everything in the house was clean—AT ALL TIMES! Standard hurricane preparation is you wash ALL your clothes and all the dishes before the storm. You don’t want to be two days into no power wearing dirty undies and have a dishwasher full of yuck. The shopping goes without saying. Weather veterans know to have supplies on-hand before open season on high winds. Of course I cleaned the bathtub too, I mean who wants to jump into a dirty bathtub and die of germs instead of a tornado?

The one thing you absolutely must must have on-hand is condiments. Running water, electric, phone service, and cable will be restored before you can get ketchup. I guarantee, your state, local, or federal government will ship gasoline to your area before they put a priority on mayonnaise. I am not joking. I’ve seen it. After hurricanes you can go to the grocery store, and yes, you can get water, you can get ice, bread, meat and cheese, but the first thing to be wiped out on the food store shelves is condiments. It’s the first thing everybody throws out of a warmed refrigerator. Fast food joints have to lock up their mustard packets because people steal them from behind the counter. One sauce per customer!

Ambient Poise

I’d be a terrific Northerner if I could ever get over being Southern. The quiet forces of snow-covered mornings and brittle-edged woods—those forces appeal to me. So does George Winston.

Winston is an artist you can listen to and forget you’re listening, while your mind wanders off into landscapes he paints with music. He plays piano solos as if to an audience of one. His DECEMBER album is based on snow, but as I’m from Florida, I see rain, dripping rain, running rain on gray days when you don’t have to go anywhere, when you can stay inside, drink coffee, think. The Monks of Santo Domingo may be great for a hangover, but George Winston makes space for contemplation.

I live in a little book-lined cottage in midst of a piney wood with smooth streets through a well-spaced neighborhood. In the springtime, I can open the windows and let birdsong fill up the house until it feels like the roof will lift right off. Sigh. Winston’s pianosong chimes in with the birds and blends the music of the outside with his own, and distracts me from the less aesthetic ambiance of my neighbor harvesting every single last tree in his yard, or the garbage truck growling down the road, or the housing development going up a mile away to provide more human noise and less bird habitat.

I’d love to hear the birds and they’d be fabulous, but I’m too well distracted by the mechanics of human life. I can’t listen to just nothing because there is no just nothing. Noises are like noses, but without the “I” to see what they’re sticking into.

George Winston solves my soul’s quest for free range.

Ironic Column

I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, well, I started watching, then I flipped to a feature length film, and when I came back, the Chinese delegation was just finishing the parade of nations. Ah, perfect timing. I saw the Chinese guy declare that this was going to be a “green” Olympics, then they set off all those fireworks and the carbon credits went up in smoke.

Yeah, I’ve been watching Phelps too. I feel bad for him, though, I mean here’s this guy shattering world speed records, and yet you can see the feet of a monitor WALK beside the pool to the golden finish. I mean those times seem so impressive and certainly faster than anything I could swim in probably one lap. You can see Phelps’ arms sprinting, scooping the water into him and making his body flow over it. It’s beautiful the way he moves in perfect economy, in graceful indulgence with a thirst for speed…and then you see these pant legs in the background, they’re not even jogging, they’re walking. That’s when you realize monkeys weren’t really meant to swim. At least with the bicycle races, there are cars to chase them.

So China has broken with the Grecian architectural traditions of ionic, Doric, and Corinthian. They’ve put their own style into that red, flaming Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Would they call it the “Ice Cube” if they hosted the Winter Olympics as well?

Wild Strawberries

Only in honesty do we have lies. Truth is a lack of memory.

Can fact only happen once? Does memory change fact? Is it necessary to remember? Why?

Author, Milan Kundera, is obsessed with lost lessons of war in forgetting. My theory is that war becomes less about the struggle of opposing ideologies/economies/religions/whatever than it is about the conflict of generations. Memory is the cause of war. What we primarily learn from history is an appetite for what to become, what to beat and be better than. Every war is to end war, and the veterans of one war pound their chests with pride until it becomes the drumbeat of the next army.

Some of us don’t want to grow up into war. Some of us don’t want that.

I remember wild strawberries. From my childhood. Once, when I was lost, not terribly lost, I just couldn’t match up the trail I was on with the map…. I was coming down a mesa in Wyoming. It’s nothing but sagebrush. Unless you’re in a canyon, you can pretty much see where you need to go, only sometimes you can’t figure out how to get there. Like writing essays. Anyway, I was low on water and I came across these strawberries, the tiny plants only conspicuous by their bright red fruit, small but potent. They packed more flavor in dime-sized portions than you could get out of Jolly Rancher candies. They were better than Swedish meatballs anyway.

Wild Strawberries, SMULTRONSTALLET, is a film about conflict of the generations set out in black and white. In the end, it is about a gray old man—his acceptance of death and of the next generation, peaceful acceptance which brings happiness. It is one of Ingmar Bergman’s best known films.

Bergman says in an interview that "Anonymity is unthinkable," then he goes on to say how desirable it would be. The Internet is the answer to that—desirable anonymity. The Internet could be the answer to global warming also.

Bergman died a year ago. I choose to remember him today.