America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.


-- Walt Whitman
(via Levis)

This is how my dog likes to spend much of her day...

...just wiggling her bottom against the grass or under a low branch of an olive tree. Been that way since we rescued her, but with old age, the condition is worsening, I fear. Sometimes she makes appreciative little mewling noises.

Egrets & cormorants & black-necked stilt

Yesterday, walking along the LA River between Valleycrest and Victory in Burbank, I spied mallard duck, black-necked stilt, teal, coots, double-crested cormorants, white egrets and blue heron. You can (just) see the egrets in the branches of the willow in the picture. More about LA River here via KCET and a lovely blog here.

black-necked stilt

Bonfire Night!

Remember, remember the fifth of November,

The gunpowder treason and plot,

I know of no reason

Why the gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

This is Guy Fawkes, aka Guido Fawkes.


He looks, not surprisingly, a bit like this chap from V for Vendetta:


On this day in 1605 he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament with rather a lot of gunpowder.

In England, we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night by lighting bonfires topped with an effigy of Guy Fawkes and watching him burn a horrid death. We also have fireworks. Lots of them.

In olden days, maybe now too, British children made Guys (a bit like scarecrows) with their father's old trousers and shirt, stuffed with straw or newspaper. Often they'd prop him up on a street corner with a sign slung around his neck "Penny for the Guy" and the money collected would go to buy fireworks.



We had huge bonfires when I was a child -- all the fallen branches and bits of fence post and cardboard boxes saved up for weeks beforehand. My father was a disciple of pyrotechnics and would bury rockets in the ground in old milk bottles; they'd shoot silver rain and golden showers (tho' my friend Wendy is unsure of the usage of that expression) into the air. There were spitting Catherine wheels nailed to bits of wood, effervescent roman candles, screechers, serpents, sparklers and whizzers. Errant rockets, loose from their bottles, often shot across the ground as people remained miraculously uninjured (why my father never lost a finger, I'll never know). And on damp November nights fireworks sometimes wouldn't light or would light so slowly that a new firework was brought out to replace it, and suddenly with a whizz-pop-bang the old wet firework would explode into the sky making all the children shriek with surprise.



But the best part was the sausages, sausage rolls, baked potatoes stuffed with butter and cheese, huge vats of leek and potato soup, ham sandwiches with Colman's mustard on silky white bread, hot Ribena and flasks full of sloe gin and single malt for the grown ups. We had cold fingers and frozen toes and the English sky was black but for the phosphorescent trails of fireworks and the gleeful hiss as they screeched over our heads.

Andrea Gillies wins Wellcome Trust Book Prize

I have to add my congratulations to the wonderful Andrea Gillies (one of the funniest and most clever of my twitter friends -- @andreagillies) for winning the 2009 Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Her book, Keeper, unflinchingly documents Gillies' full-time care of her mother-in-law, who suffers from Alzheimer's. Read about it in the Times here, the Bookseller here & the Guardian here.

A $47,000 lunch

Oh I can't resist this.

Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea FC, recently took five people out to lunch at Nello's in NYC. This is his bill:



Some rather nice wine there, no?

The Field

I lay my camera on the grass
at the edge of a field, walk
to the middle of the field, smile

then walk to my camera and snap a picture
of the field where I had stood smiling.
When my friends ask

why I took a picture of an empty field
I will tell them that is where
I stood smiling, in the middle of the field.

When they fail to understand
I will ask them why they ask
why I took a picture of a field,

what is empty about a field
one has smiled upon, what is missing
in them that sees only an empty field.

-- by Robert Funge
(Used without permission but with enormous gratitude & h/t to Cathy & Wendy for introducing me to this exquisite poem).

The Maharishi & his Bearded Papa*

It may be a widely known fact, but I met my husband, the Maharishi in college. We were young and fragrant and we picked mushrooms together, drank tea, listened to David Byrne and Brian Eno. He took me to avant garde dance recitals and I took him home for Sunday lunch. He taught me about art; I taught him about country life. I made my own dresses from old linen sheets. He wore Brookes Brothers' pink button downs and too-short green trousers from Army Surplus and tweed coats from second hand shops and fresh white boxers from Neiman Marcus. He was the most fascinating man I'd met in my life. And to him, from Beverly Hills, CA, I'm sure I seemed like an exotic bird, albeit an exotic bird from the Chiltern Hills.

While riding our bikes at the beach with our friends from Delaware, who were staying for the weekend, we stopped at the Maharishi's father's house. He lives on the beach and he's not very well. He has cancer. Although, apart from the hair loss and the trouble he has moving about, you'd never know it. He is smiley and funny and alert. He has only ever been completely lovely to me and I adore him.

On the table in the dining room was a huge pile of old photos. Sandy had been sorting out her boxes and had found pictures from the M's childhood and from his father's childhood. There were pictures of John Sr with a huge beard, just like the Maharishi's, like something out of "Easy Rider" in a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, with his arms round my husband, who has straight blond hair, big green eyes, long brown limbs. They're both looking at the camera intently. In another John Sr. is sitting on the beach in his familiar short shorts, surrounded by leggy blondes in tiny bikinis. He's smiling. Then there's one of him as a little boy with his father, whom he lost when he was 18. And one with his mother, Virginia, whom he lost when he was 6.

I look over towards where the others are sitting, by the big window onto the beach. It's blue and white and sunny outside. John Sr is in his usual chair, smiling, surrounded by Sandy, his beautiful wife (like a little bird, she flits about taking care of him, telling him she loves him every few minutes, delivering plates of cold, cut fruit to the table, asking if everyone's okay), by his bearded son, by our friends. Alden was the Maharishi's roommate in college. He has know John for twenty five, nearly thirty years. They're all laughing at a joke. I didn't hear it. There is so much light in the room.



*Not to be confused with the world's best cream puff.

More flu

I don't even want to think that Minky has swine flu, not because I'm scared of the flu itself, but I'm trying to have faith, as my sister-in-law has taught me. Also h1n1 is an enormous drag -- it has to be said. As it is, she's on the nebulizer, inhaling albuterol while watching Gossip Girl, has managed to down a bowl of pasta thanks to LemSip day flu formula plus ibuprofen for the aches and pains in her legs, and I've put a vaporizer in her room so that she has some moisture. There have been a couple of therapeutic two-minute whole-body hugs (a Reiki thing without doubt), a lying in the bed with a normal cup of tea for me and one with masses of sugar and milk for her, a hello to her friends on video ichat, and a cupped in my arms moment or two to assure her, my nearly fifteen year old pumpkin, that swine flu is not in the cards and no, she certainly will not die from it.

But as Minky has had asthma since birth, the effing (Pediatrician's office) nurse's questions piss me off more than a little:
Office Nurse "So is she wheezing now?"
Me "No, actually all the time."
ON "So, when she plays, Mommy?" (that's what they call you -- MOMMY)
Me "She's 14. She doesn't play."
ON "So during sports, yes, Mommy?"
Me "No, chronically and all the time."

My irritation is so acute I dare not speak. But I do.

"I know the doctor isn't there today but would you mind calling in an inhaler to the pharmacy, please?"
"Has she had this medication before?"
"Um, don't you have her file in front of you?"

I creeped in her room at 5am and she's sleeping soundly. I held my hand above her head, not on it for fear of waking her, to detect fever. I checked that the mister was working, told the dogs to be quieter, closed the door.

Why is it that even when our children are almost old enough to drive cars we still feel compelled to go into their rooms in the middle of the night to make sure they are still breathing?

The perfect roast chicken

People speak a lot of bosh about roast chicken. It's my favorite thing in the world and very easy to cook. Here's my favorite recipe by Laurie Colwin:

Laurie Colwin's roast chicken

1. Peel and cut up 4 potatoes and 4 carrots along with a couple of onions and put them in a skillet. Saute the vegetables in a little butter until onions are golden, season them with salt and pepper and crumble in some thyme or rosemary. Tip the vegetables into a large roasting pan. Add a coffee cupful of water to the skillet and boil it while scraping up the bits. Pour this over the vegetables.
2. Pat the chicken (a 3- to 3 1/2-lb. bird is a good size) with paper towels. Stuff it with a couple of cloves of garlic and half a lemon. Or, if you feel like it, you can dice up enough good whole wheat bread to make about 12 cups, toss it with 1/4 lb. fresh porcini mushrooms that have been chopped and cooked for a few minutes in a little butter and salt and pepper and broth to moisten the bread ...and end up with a stuffing that is both down-home and upscale at the same time.
3. Then dust the chicken with paprika (gives skin a lovely deep color and the merest hint of smokiness), salt and pepper. Next set the chicken in the midst of the vegetables like an ocean liner among tugs.
4. Roast the chicken and vegetables in a 300 degree F. oven. The trick to roasting chicken is to baste every 15 minutes. This is a boring chore but worth the effort. I often like to squeeze half a lemon over my chicken toward the end and I roast the bird at least 2 hours and as long as 3. When the leg bone wiggles and skin is the color of teak, it's time to eat.

You can read Anna Quindlen's appreciation of Laurie Colwin here.

Quercus & Wordsworth

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

-- William Wordsworth

Red Kites in the Chilterns

Dominic, one of my oldest and dearest friends in England, a sartorially splendid, twinkly-eyed excellent man, told me he had never seen red kites (milvus milvus)before our lunch in Bledlow Ridge, in the Chilterns. We walked outside after a truly delicious meal and stared up at the sky where two awe-inspiringly large birds called out to each other.

The next day he called to tell me that the book he is reading, Untold Stories by Alan Bennett mentions red kites. Alan Bennett must've stopped for his lunchtime sandwich in exactly the same place as we were.
I love these coincidences. Jung calls it synchronicity. Arthur Koestler might call it something else.

Michaelmas daisies

Effective and rather lovely use of Michaelmas daisies and yellow rowan berries
in the loo of the Sir Charles Napier, Bledlow Ridge -- 16-x-09

La Estudiante Loco

I've sworn not to embarrass my children on this blog. However, in this case, I make an exception.

Minky, who is 14, and had a disastrous experience with learning French in the 7th grade, is now in the fast-track Spanish program (to catch her up) at her wonderfully crunchy new high school. The teacher utilizes songs, poems & acting to learn the language (with emphasis on kinesthetic, spatial and interpersonal learning).

(**please note supporting role by Bean, the lesser spotted, stage right.)

What you think you become

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”

-- Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.