100,000k

I drive a 2004 Honda Civic that my husband and I purchased new, not long after we moved to California.  All this winter and spring, I watched the odometer as it rolled toward 100,000.  I have never lived with a car for so long, and never for its entire “first” 100,000 miles. 

And the past five years have been eventful.  Some highlights of the journey:  ten different residences; toting belongings on a cross-country move to New York and, five months later, toting everything back to California; three employers plus concurrent theater work and graduate school; marital separation and reconciliation, heartbreak and depression, and recovery from it all; impromptu road trips to L.A., Oregon, and many solitary drives on local back roads and along the coast; and, in the midst of everything, the passing of my father. 

Thinking about this particular 100,000 miles, there are so many new friends, accomplishments and reasons to celebrate, as well as some to memorialize and to release.  Marking the beginning of the next 100,000 miles also seemed like a mindful way to be open to all the possibilities “down the road” (sorry, just give me this one).

I began to be excited the week that the car hit 99,800 because I realized that the odometer would change on a Friday on my way home from work (if I took a scenic route). I often drive to the towns of Tomales and Dillon Beach because I love the beauty of the the open land, the ranches, and the coastal views.  I thought it would be amazing if the car hit 100,000 at the beach, which seemed possible and poetic…to land on 100,000 on the edge of the continent. 

I left work and drove through the hills of western Marin County.  I stopped briefly in Tomales at a beautiful little graveyard that I like to visit, and then arrived at Dillon Beach at mile 99,988.  I considered looping back, just to try to make the mileage at the beach, but that seemed dishonest.  I decided to head home and planned to stop wherever the odometer turned and take a picture of the site (if it was safe to pull over, of course). 

As I approached the Bodega Highway and Route 1 intersection, I started to laugh:  I had figured that the site would likely turn out to be of a random piece of land along the highway, but as I turned east toward the town of Bodega the odometer hit 99,999.  I turned right toward the Bodega schoolhouse, inched up the hill and watched as the odometer turned to 100,000, and stopped the car.  There is no way I could have planned it, nor will I ever forget exactly where it occurred.  It was framed perfectly, too…

And if you don’t immediately recognize the site of the beginning of my mile 100,001:

 

living small

Not long ago, as I pondered where I would go or what I would do if I was laid off from my job, and contemplating yet another move (depending on how you count it, I could say that I’ve moved anywhere from 4 to 11 times in the past four years), I began to research RVs. 

I thought perhaps that it could be a solution for my life:  having mobility, paring down my stuff even further (which I’ve written about a few times), yet having a sense of my own home.  If I needed to go to another new place, maybe I could just take an organized, familiar home along with me. 

Six months or so later, I know that I have a job for the coming year and am trying to convince myself to stay put.  But I still think a lot about the nature of housing, my environmental footprint, and how I hope to live in the future. 

After researching RV and trailer living (I now know the difference between A, B, and C Class RVs, travel trailers, fifth wheel trailers, etc), I started looking at all the other alternative types of housing.  Here are some of my favorites.

1.  A modern vardo, or updated gypsy van…some are beautifully crafted.

2.  My favorite wheel-less options are some of the gorgeous pre-fab yurts.  For more than five years now (yes, since moving to CA), I’ve fantasized about building a little compound of yurts.  Don’t laugh.  It could be awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. And finally, check out this ethereal earthsheltered home.   It is environmentally kind, and if anyone has a thing for Hobbit living…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related Gleanings:  Tiny House Blog, which describes a lot of fun designs for living smaller.

 

to be remembered…

Last August, writer and theater critic Terry Teachout wrote a beautiful blog post about life, loss, and literature.  It is a lovely, meandering exploration of remembrance that connects Willa Cather (one of my favorite authors) and Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, via the New Hampshire cemetery where Cather is buried.   I especially appreciated Teachout’s closing sentence: 

For those of us still on earth, straining to make something of ourselves, it seems there is no weaning away from the people we love and lose: they are always there, dissolved into the completeness of eternity, waiting patiently–and, I suspect, indifferently–for the little resurrection that is memory.

Lately I have thought a lot about how to honor the memory of people and places we’ve lost (from family members, to interesting strangers, to arts organizations).  And I have taken to reading Obit Magazine, which isn’t as macabre as most folks would suspect.  It may be the historian in me, or my interest in how we remember and if we remember, but either way I am fascinated by how cultures celebrate life and death.  From Obit’s website: 

Death gives life its immediacy. Because we know it will end, we savor and value life all the more. Whether it’s the loss of a person, a place, an object or an idea, life’s constant change presents an opportunity for examination, discussion and even celebration.  By examining the transformations we face, we can understand how the past influences our time and our future.

And so, I write tonight in memory of two first cousins who’ve passed away in the past eight months.  Josh Aiken was 34, and was so kind, gentle, and brave.  Rob Kimpel was 44, and had an infectious laugh and generous spirit; I cannot imagine how much his wife and children must miss him. 

Peace to you both…our families will never be the same…and I will always remember you.

 

 

 

keeping creative types alive

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designed and sewn

ArtsJournal’s video of the day today is “Soundsuits” by Nick Cave.  He makes wearable sculptures, and is what I would call an extreme costumer!  I am excited that an exhibition of his work, along with collaborative dance performances by choreographer Ronald K. Brown, is coming to San Francisco this spring.

Some of these sculptural costumes remind me of a very vivid dream that I had a few years ago.  After watching the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped, that night I dreamt that Mizrahi and my father collaborated on a theatrical production of a fairy tale.  It was magical – the stage was filled with multiple levels and textures, ethereal lights and music, and an elaborately, elegantly costumed cast.  The costumes were all white and glittering silver, with elaborate headpieces and flowing, floral gowns (it sounds like it could come off looking like Christmas in Vegas, but it was tasteful, really).

In the dream, I was completely humbled by the talent of these two men, and felt envious of their ability to design and create something so beautiful.  It took a few days of mulling over the dream and its residual feelings of inadequacy before I realized that the design was all mine! 

Dreams are great.  (I was working with my father at the Youngstown Playhouse as his costumer at that time; not too difficult to analyze this one!)

 

brain break

A friend of mine, B., has a special talent for punctuating serious comments with pop culture references, which is jarring and often hilarious.  After writing to me that he enjoyed reading about my recent thoughts on how we, in a consumer society, accumulate too much stuff, he wrote:

Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow has a blog about things you can buy to have a beautiful life like hers.  Maybe you could get rid of the thinking and learning parts of your blog and add more pictures of stuff to buy.

His comment actually made me feel a little sheepish about one of my “guilty pleasures,” which is the TV show Lipstick Jungle. Oh, to live the life of Wendy, Nico, or Victory! (No, I actually don’t envy a glamorous or celebrity life, but it was a fun soap opera to escape into with women my age who are dealing with career and love problems just like mine…………although mine doesn’t include a six-figure-salary, press conferences, private jets, designer clothes, Page 6, celebrity friends, etc.)

I blame my sister and Andrew McCarthy (who plays Victory’s love-interest, Joe) for this addiction. I blame my sister for telling me that it wasn’t as silly as it looked and it might be fun for me to watch and then I got hooked, and I blame a lingering nostalgia for my 1986 crush on Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink.

Alas, Lipstick Jungle has been canceled by NBC. I’ll have to find some other show to fluff my brain.

 

want and need

Upon re-reading my post from Christmas day, I considered deleting or editing parts of it, but decided to keep it intact.  The reason:  I am entertained by how my writing was affected by reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the weekend before Christmas.  (I highly recommend the book, but wouldn’t suggest it to many people as a “holiday read” by any means!)

For those who haven’t read the book, it is the story of a man and his young son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world; there is no reliable source of food, permanent shelter, or much comfort to be found.  The only things that sustain them are their survival skills, their love for one another, and an intrinsic belief that there are kernels of good remaining in a world of evil.  The story is simple but profound, and is told through a narrative that consists of stream-of-consciousness and spare and poetic description, often utilizing sentence fragments.  As a result, the book seems more like a prose-poem than a novel, and its haunting, stark beauty stems from that structure.  One of my favorite passages is this one, as the father cradles his son as they sleep, as he does every night in the cold and darkness:

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

Upon viewing Christmas through the filter of The Road, my already heightened awareness of modern over-consumption (food, material goods) was definitely enhanced.  I struggled (successfully) against my impulse to buy my niece more “things to open” when I knew she already had more than enough.  And I definitely looked at gift giving with harsher judgment than usual as “wants” versus “needs.”

I am not rejecting beauty and plenty:  I think that that is too extreme.  However, I was reminded to embrace more gratitude for the love of my family and my friends, for joy where I find it, for a belief in goodness, and for all my needs being met in abundance.

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Related gleanings:  I can’t overlook the obvious tie-in of these thoughts to themes in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.  As a theater person, I’ve worked on that show so many times that I had become oblivious to it.  At the urging of a friend, I re-read the original story last year; it was a gift to re-discover the beauty and intention of the original text.  In a non-holiday-related book, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (also a post-apocalyptic vision of the future), I could see The Road as a precurser to the dark but more humorous future world created by Miller.

 

best gift exchange ever

I love making gifts, and I love finding meaningful gifts.  I have rarely had a lot of money to spend, and have often had little choice but to give “gifts of the heart” – homemade things, handcrafted things, and meaningful or needed things.  Even if I had a lot of money, I wouldn’t want to change this way of giving gifts.

For the past ten to fifteen years, at least, I’ve wandered through stores and been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things to purchase. (I’ll write more about American excess soon, but this quiz is a good introduction to the topic.) During the same period, I moved many, many times, and also helped to clean out both my parents and grandparents long-time homes.  The moral of the story:  It is amazing what we acquire.   The result:  I am really turned off to malls, giant department stores, and buying new things in general, beyond what I need.  And when I can, I prefer to acquire used and re-purposed items (furniture, books, kitchenware, etc.). 

On this Christmas Day in a year fraught with disturbing news of the economy, I find myself thinking about my favorite gift exchange ever.  I worked for an arts council, where, of course, we were all underpaid.  The staff consisted of four women, and we discussed doing a $5 item gift exchange, but someone had the idea to exchange only handcrafted gifts.  Since not all of us were crafty, we began expanding the idea.  We ended up with no dollar limit, but instead had three criteria:  it had to be a found item, a handmade item, or a re-gift.

We had so much fun the first year that we did it the second year.  The range of items was bizarre and often hilarious.  One of my co-workers gave me a gift bag containing crafting projects she had purchased 10 years prior and never begun, along with stationery she’d never used and an ugly candle someone else had given  her – she dared me to pass it on.  Another co-worker gave me a pin that I had admired when she’d worn it; I treasure it to this day.  I also received books that people had read and were passing along, and homemade cookies.  It was so much fun to receive those things because they were all given with much thought and affection, and they were all gleaned from our own possessions. It was a wonderful and fun way to celebrate Christmas.

On this Christmas, I am hoping that everyone has plenty, and if you have abundance, the heart to pass it on.  Blessings to all!

 

Stocking up

The day before Thanksgiving, I stopped at Mike’s Truck Garden (a fruit and vegetable stand in Fulton, CA).  I’d seen low prices advertised on local apples the week before, and wasn’t surprised to see the place mobbed the day before the holiday.  I picked out some apples and a few winter squash, got up to the cashier and he said “the total is $4.44, which means it’s $2.22 for you today.”  And then I understood why the employees were saying “have a good holiday, see you in the spring” to everyone:  it was the last day of the season that they were open, and no matter what you purchased that day, the entire bill was half off.  Score.

I got in my car, drove around the back, and decided to park again.   This time, I brought in my shopping bags and got a cart.  I bought many packages of bulk food (nuts, seeds, trail mix, candy for Christmas stockings, etc), more apples and assorted squash, red peppers, green peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, cilantro, parsley, radishes, cauliflower, kiwi, lemons, limes, oranges, onions, green onions, red cabbage, green cabbage, grapes, spinach, green beans, and swiss chard.  My total was $80.46, so I paid $40.23.

I would have bought more, but I was mindful of what I could use for Thanksgiving and in the immediate future, and what I could preserve.  My  instinct (that I had to suppress) was to “rescue” as much of the food as I could.  (I think I could be an obsessive harvester/gleaner if I ever have a garden.)

When I got home, I called my mother, and asked her the best freezing method for much of the excess.  In my childhood, we had large gardens and numerous fruit trees, and we rarely, if ever, used “store-bought” frozen vegetables or fruit.  Every year, we dried culinary herbs, canned tomato sauce, applesauce, and assorted jams/jellies, and stocked the freezer with large quantities of tomatoes, green beans, peas, peppers, corn, peaches, and blueberries.   My sister and I were always being sent to the basement to retrieve items from the two massive chest freezers.

So I spent all of the afternoon before Thanksgiving (and into Thanksgiving day, as well) washing, cutting, and storing vegetables and herbs.  In the week and a half since then, my roommate and I have used all the fresh things, and I take pleasure in being able to pull a ziploc full of clean, ready-to-use cilantro from the freezer when making guacamole.

It turns out that it was an exceptional way to honor Thanksgiving.  At the most basic level, I am grateful for access to plentiful food and to have the money to purchase it, and for the means to preserve and appreciate it.  It also connected me to my family who I was missing  over the holiday.  My mother sent me the following email late on Thanksgiving eve:

I hope you got all your food “put up”.  I was smiling most of the evening thinking about you doing that and enjoying it.  It always brings back a warm glow of home and gives such pleasure.  Enjoy, enjoy.

Related gleanings:  Last week, a story was circulated about 40,000 people showing up at a farm in Colorado to glean the fields after harvest.  Also, as most of us are aware, a lot of food banks are low this year.  If you have the means, consider donating food, time or money to one near you; a good organization is Feeding America (formerly known as Second Harvest).

 

Hard to top that one…

I don’t attend enough performances of classical choral music.

I’ve been fortunate to witness some amazing concerts; the two most memorable were almost 20 years ago when I was in England as an undergrad.  And probably what made those so memorable was that I was high on the architecture; I am certain that the performance sites deeply influenced my perception of the music.  The first was a boys’ choir festival in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, which is an icon of Gothic architecture.  The other was a performance of The Messiah in London at St. Bartholomew (c. 1100), which is one of the city’s oldest churches.  Being in a 1000-year-old church and hearing that music performed live is basically like flying.

This past Sunday, I saw Gustav Mahler’s 8th Symphony (also known as “Symphony of a Thousand”) performed by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.  I had bought tickets to the concert as a birthday present for my friend M., who is a huge Mahler fan.  I’ve never warmed up to Mahler, but, in this instance, was blown away by the beauty of the work and how skillfully it was performed.  It had little to do with its setting – it was just stunning musicianship. 

This particular symphony is a major production; it involves a massive orchestra, a brass section situated in the balcony, seven vocal soloists, the symphony choir, a girls’ choir, and a boys’ choir.  And even with all that vocal and instrumental power, it was the during some of the “quietest” passages that I found there were tears streaming down my face (which is unsual – I don’t cry easily). 

It was an experience of a lifetime.