Album

i

Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life

Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse

Of a sawn-down tree, another time and lapse

That must have taken place around midsummer

Come swimming up, and the place, it dawns on me,

Could have been Grove Hill before the trees were cut,

Where I often stood with them on airy Sundays

Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out

At Magherafelt's four spires in the distance.

Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation

About a love that's proved by steady gazing

Not at each other but in the same direction.

ii

Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, seek ye.

Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic

(Our college crest surmounted by columbtt,

Dove of the church, of Derrys sainted grove)

The footworn motto stayed indelible:

seek ye first the Kingdom. . . Fair and square

I stood on in the Junior House hallway

There is a grey eye which will look back

seeing them as a couple, I now see,

For the first time, all the more together

For having had to turn and walk away, as close

In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.

iii

It's winter at the seaside where they've gone

For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,

Uninvited, ineluctable.

A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.

Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.

Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish

And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.

And to all the anniversaries of this

They aren't ever going …

 -- Seamus Heaney

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas"

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" sang Perry Como in 1951. Written by Meredith Wilson in Nova Scotia, the hollyberries and pinecones were probably easier to spot. Here in Hollywood, there's very little that indicates Christmas is coming.  Today's high was a balmy 77 degrees and the blissed out blue skies are ubiquitous. I felt nothing like the holiday spirit until I made a playlist, which I now blast in my house as I hang decorations and light candles. You can download it too:



One child is home from college in Maine and the other arrives from Brooklyn tomorrow. The tree is up and crammed full of sweet ornaments collected over the years or from the tree trimming party I had two years ago to cheer myself up as a newly single woman who didn't want to bathe in the memories of all the other family Christmases. I have hundreds of ornaments: balls and baubles, woodland creatures, Hawaiian sand dollars, peace signs and feathers encased in glass, trains and planes, and glittery paper stars made by Ned, aged 5. The tree is sweet and magnificent, covered in hundreds of lights, and left on all night by me so I can see the reflection through my bedroom door.

There is no snow, no-one is bundled up in coats and boots and gloves and scarves, no bobble hats, no elk or reindeer or people with red noses and cold fingers falling into pubs which blurt out Wizzard's "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day" or "Do They Know It's Christmas?" No Heston Blumenthal plum puddings in Waitrose or cozy walks in snowy valleys.

However, there is a tub of Robertson's mincemeat ready for the pies, and a pile of Christmas cards from friends with cute children and crazy orange and red sunsets bleeding across the sky.  The pepper tree is full of little red berries and the Christmas cactus is has popped out scarlet fruit on the hillside.

"I've bought a wreath to put on the grave" said my mother on the phone from England this morning. "Oh I'm sure Pappa will love that" I said. "You know, he hated Christmas" she said. Not really a surprise. Every year we were told, without irony, that all he wanted for Christmas were some razor blades. And so, I suppose, this is a strange time of year for me. But here's what you do: get up and shower every day, go for a long walk, do your yoga (or whatever it is you do) and listen to a lot of Frank Sinatra and Darlene Love. They always get you in the mood.

A lovely thought for early on a Saturday morning

Never Trust a Poem That Begins with a Dream

One of the lovely things about having a blog is that friends share poems, recipes, anecdotes with you. This poem by Josephine Yu is from my friend Michelle. It was originally printed in Ploughshares:


Never Trust a Poem That Begins with a Dream
unless it’s a love poem or the dream is the one you keep having
      where you leave a raucous party—the kind of party you’re never
invited to—and sit on the balcony, just starting to tear up but not yet
   crying. Most nights the balcony is the second-story walkway of a motel
and the party is in full swing in the room behind you—The White Stripes
      vibrating the stucco and someone’s cigarette, you imagine, burning
holes in the bedspread. A man always follows you out, and as you’re trying
to remember who said “Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named,
            not good,” he puts his arm around you and whispers
something you never remember when you wake up, like the scene
    in an arty film where you don’t get to hear the mumbled last words.
Some nights he’s the boy you had a crush on in eighth grade
who did, in fact, put his arm across your shoulders in the cafeteria, sparks
  cascading down your back, under the Peter Pan-collared Catholic school girl
              blouse you wore un-ironically, being a Catholic school girl.
    Other nights he’s the biology teacher who told oral sex jokes but
let you take a C minus instead of dissecting the frog and fetal pig, even let
       you leave the room during the dissecting, to escape that sharp odor
and soft, snipping sounds. But in the dream you aren’t thinking
   how amazing it is you even graduated, given how much
        you refused to do and how often you skipped class to get stoned
behind the library, and you’re not realizing gratefully how many concessions
            pity won you. Instead you’re noticing how his breath on your ear
lets you feel those delicate folds of skin you rarely think of,
     the way wind moving through grass lets you see the separate blades.
But then you start to notice, too, the same adult-touching-a-child-
       in-an-overly-intimate-but-not-quite-inappropriate-way ickiness you felt
    when a family friend stroked your silky seven-year-old head and promised,
           “I’ll take you away with me. You’ll be my child bride.” And then
  you remember—in the dream—the joke the biology teacher told that ended
   “sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch.” Other nights he’s the dentist who
tightened your braces or the guy in college who sang you “Purple Rain”
               while he played a keyboard, whom you felt sorry for and kissed.
Or the Pakistani dry cleaner who proposed, pledging robust sons
        and starched slacks. But on the best nights, when you’ve fallen
   asleep with the right mix of herbal tea and Law and Order reruns,
    he’s your husband,
           the one you had or have or will have, your husband’s arm
the right weight and length to drape your shoulders as you brood
              “which God’s eye named, not good… which God’s eye named,
  not good” and his voice is warm in your hair, answering,
                                                      “It was Milton. Ready to go home?”
-- Josephine Yu

That is your person

I love this:

"It’s that thing when you’re with someone and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it, but it’s a party! And you’re both talking to other people and you’re laughing and shining and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes. But…but not because you’re possessive or it’s precisely sexual but because that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad but only because this life will end. And it’s this secret world that exists right there in public unnoticed that no one knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s…that’s what I want out of a relationship or just life, I guess."

-- Frances Handley (Greta Gerwig) in Frances Ha

Frank's Potato Bake with Fennel & Artichoke

I realize that I'm prone to exaggeration, but Frank's potatoes -- which we had at Thanksgiving -- are the best I've ever tasted. 

Potato Bake, with Fennel and Artichoke

Main ingredients:

6 pounds of russet potatoes, peeled and sliced 2 large sweet onions
2 bulbs of fennel
2 12oz bags of frozen artichoke hearts (Trader Joes)
16 oz grated Gruyere
16 oz fresh whipping cream
6 oz Kerrygold butter
2 desert spoons of crushed garlic
1/2 cup of Pernod

Chop the fennel and onion into thin slices. Bring a large frying pan to extreme heat, and coat the bottom with butter and a high-heat vegetable oil. Dump the onion/fennel mix in and caramelize. And set aside

Defrost artichokes in microwave. Drain liquid, and allow to dry and cool. Slice the hearts length ways. Heat a pan (like before) this time with butter only, a shake of celery salt, and a mist of paprika. Brown the artichokes, and set aside.

In a big deep saucepan, heat remaining butter (4 oz) and add the garlic to seal it. Add the 16oz of fresh cream, and heat. Add the caramelized onion/fennel mix, and stir to blend all together (throw in a good desert spoon of horseradish too). Add the sliced potatoes, and stir regularly to a boil. Allow to simmer for 10 minutes. Season to taste. Add Pernod last.

Grease a Pyrex dish (13 X 9 X 2.5 inches) and fill it two thirds the way up with the creamed potato mix. Take one third of the grated cheese and layer evenly on top. Then, layer all of the browned artichokes over the cheese. Then layer another third of the grated cheese over the artichokes. Then, top off the dish with the remaining potato mix, and finish on top with the remaining cheese.

Bake at 375 for about 90 minutes. Hey presto!

Robert Adams

love is a place

-- ee cummings

Didion on living

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

-- Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

patience & glorious accidents

After wading through rain and clay mudslides on my dog walk yesterday, today is brazenly perfect in its brand spanking new blueness; light breeze, shimmering golden leaves and happy crows. It's irritatingly beautiful in Los Angeles this Saturday afternoon.

I'm reminded by my friend Vivien, who lives in London, and has an innate wisdom of which I'm envious, that patience is a virtue, not because our pedantic teachers told us so, but because we're not all the same and we don't think the same way or act the same way or make decisions at the same pace as other people, and that if indeed we did, or they did, the world would be small and dull and predictable and boring. What makes life interesting, however you look at it -- whether with abundance, or through a too-small myopic lens -- is our ability, still to be surprised. Think of baskets of eggs. We line them up -- one over here, one there, one around the corner, just in case, one hidden in the cupboard for a rainy day, an array of possibilities, each one measured and shaped and ready to go, but then the one that smashes in your face is the one you didn't see and hadn't prepared for. This is what we call serendipity. And the best things come from serendipity, or the unexpected.

I am impatient by nature. Waiting makes me anxious. I think the worst. My imagination is filled with deliciously macabre scenarios, each one more bizarre and complicated than the next, and I find myself fretting and worried and miserable and ready to chuck in the towel. What Vivien reminds me, and this is woman who is a fan of Chopin's nocturnes and French poetry, is that rhythm is subjective. We each have an inner tempo and we can but dance to that beat, not anyone else's. The happy accidents occur when tempos collide and for one moment, for one glorious second or minute or day, if we are lucky, two different, subjective rhythms hit each other at the right place, the right time, and with the same intention. If these things were easy to predict would they be as transforming? I doubt it.

And so what can we do but wait, and not plan, and live in faith? That word faith again..."Faith: an abiding conviction in the openness of tomorrow" is a definition that works if you do or do not believe in the divine. I think of faith as staying on track, as not veering away from the road, and knowing, somehow, that the road is the right one.

A film adaptation of a book takes out the boring bits, or leaves them in to be signified by a little photo montage...the passing of time. But life itself has boring bits and we're called upon to be patient and at peace with waiting for things. A highlight reel would get old very, very quickly. (Or so I tell myself.)

A Lecture upon the Shadow

Stand still, and I will read to thee

A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.

         These three hours that we have spent,

         Walking here, two shadows went

Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd.

But, now the sun is just above our head,

         We do those shadows tread,

         And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.

So whilst our infant loves did grow,

Disguises did, and shadows, flow

From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so.

That love has not attain'd the high'st degree,

Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,

We shall new shadows make the other way.

         As the first were made to blind

         Others, these which come behind

Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.

If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,

         To me thou, falsely, thine,

         And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.

The morning shadows wear away,

But these grow longer all the day;

But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.

Love is a growing, or full constant light,

And his first minute, after noon, is night. 

 

-- John Donne (h/t VT)