"Hooded Nightbirds... /They Knock on Their Own Doors," or The Dakotas, Martinis, and Me

Once upon a time when I lived in a warm climate state that does not consider itself to be "the south,", I could not adapt to the climate. As "fall" rolled around and "winter" came upon us, it seemed that there was just something so wrong with putting up your Christmas lights with shorts on and seeing the Salvation Army Santas sweating out the eighty degree weather in their thin cotton Santa suits. Having grown up in a four season climate, I began to dream of snow. I even wrote to International Pen Friends and requested to have penpals in northern countries. Finland, Norway, Russia... no shortage of people who still want to write letters. So I was happy to move to the midwest, the glorious frozen coziness of fall apple pie baking, romping in the winter snows, the true act of sacrifice of having to take off your glove to put money in the little red Salvation Army can.

Alas, I have discovered that a blog I had listed on my blogroll is no more: The Dakota Pundit is gone, not even available in any kind of archived version. If anyone knows what the author is up to, please leave some info. There was some very thoughtful writing there and it is a shame that it has all just evaporated into thin air.

Thinking of good writing, warm cafes and better times, here are the virtual imagos of this nostalgia. Those craving the pinpointing, gps-driven geographical specificity of les blogs regionals (maintenant officiellement " les blocs notes regionals)" will have to bite and bear it:

The best martinis in town and a wonderful menu. The upstairs bar, open before the restaurant, feels like a secret aerie in the late afternoon. Over appetizers and a wonderfully stiff drink, discussion of all genres of byzantine maneuverings feels safe.


The worst martinis in town, but its non-alcohol serving original (a coffeehouse) is the best place to nab a table with your books, laptop, and notebooks on a stolen afternoon: great coffee and teas, WiFi, occasional pottery by the owner, and an interior as inviting as this one, though more snug and less drafty.

Many a happy and cozy winter day were spent in one of these two places. I think of them often. I have a whole post's worth to say on friends who comment that one is "better off" not being where they are still going about their lives. Perhaps it is the fantasy of our peculiar profession; certainly a number of people were quick to envy the fact that I left or to tell me what I was leaving was not fine enough for me. They, still happily (?) there, grousing away. I leave you tonight to ponder the fact that I have had no decent sushi since leaving the midwest.

The title of this post --- the quoted part--- from "Easter," a poem by Jeanine Hathaway. Deeply out of context, there I am: a hooded nightbird.

The One Hundreth Day

Yes, it has been quite the hiatus here. I'm surprised I could still access my blog. Perhaps the ephemera of cyberspace are not so short-lived after all. Will have to catch up as we go. Meanwhile...

"If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity."

--- Verne

Friday was the one hundreth working day of this year's lateral option (what this is ought to be getting clear to some people). And that's really all I can say, because I am foresworn not to write about that in this blog, not to let it invade.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I managed to get back to the ranch, at least part time. No time to blog or think beyond what I was doing. Don't know in retrospect how I survived it. One day each week, I drove a huge triangle: an hour down to the option (7:00 am - 3:00, not including the commute), forty-five minutes out to the university, a three hour seminar, an hour drive back, bringing me home at 9:30 or ten, up again at five.... This day was bounded on both sides by days ending at six at a different place. I made it through, with some new contacts and some fresh optimism. It afterwards that I felt the side effects , aka the exhaustion that I had pushed away and out of consciousness, and the depression that in spite of making some inroads, no immediate chance of escape is on the horizon. One of my readers, Dave, I think it was, wrote in a comment from long ago that all the vagueness here was getting to him. About this stuff it just has to be, though I am freer to write about what I do part time in the evenings.

We have had a big snowstorm overnight. Ploughs (or are snow ploughs "plows" ?) came earlier, but the snow is still falling, beautiful and thick. Ah. A grey sky and cappucino; no wonder I have found my way to my blog again...

Rain & Coffee

Rain. Thunder and lightening. A long wait in traffic, finally brought to an end by driving over a low median and through town, all to get my tire changed. I'd had a flat on Friday, and since they didn't have the tire in stock that I needed, they gave me a "loaner" used tire, free of charge, until mine came in. I had told the guy I had to drive to Long Island this weekend, and he didn't mind, didn't hesitate: "Don't worry," he said, "it'll get you there." He'd known my brother, as it turned out. I had to tell him that he was dead, watch his face recompose itself. They'd been friends. I'm sorry, I say, sorry. Had his problems, he says. Yes. We used to go visit your father. I shake my head. Oh. He's happy, though, to meet my mother, and the unexpected reconnection makes the events leading up to it (riding on the rim for 1/4 mile down a shoulderless country road at 1 am; a repair shop guy so lousy that I told the tow to take the car elsewhere) seem, if not providential ---we're not providential types---, then unwasted. Is there such a word ? Not "well spent," and please don't write to me about synchronicity. Somewhere between "meaningless" and "meaningful," I suppose, is the concept I want, the random very annoying event achieving some kind of found value.

I had meant to carry on a bit about one thing I've noticed of late: other people's blogs are pretty. They have lovely graphics around the frames, pictures aplenty, different colored type. Some may also not be free, either, girl, I tell myself as I tire of typing in the html code for every italicized phrase, every everthing. I have three different browsers, and not one will give me the editing features offered here. I could, though, upload images, hence the espresso machine that graces this post and, in the real, my every morning. I have an earlier version of this machine (a Krups) pumping steadily since 1997. I mean two cappuccinos a day on an average day. What html I've learned, I've cribbed and copied, and the "preview" feature here helps oodles because I can witness my mistakes before committing to them. Some people talk of "moving" their blogs. Hadya do that ? I'm not tempted in any serious way yet, but a look at blogs created with typepad and even salon.com make me yearn to do something more creative with mine. Eye candy is so, so, so... tempting. So is this:

If I win the lottery, I'm ordering the Pavoni before I do anything else. I met someone once whose life was the sort of life where she had acquired one of these as a Christmas gift. She'd never used it. It was like being handed the keys to a Porsche that someone never drove. She wasn't silly enough, alas, not to want it as a kitchen ornament.

There is something magic about that first cappuccino for the chronically underslept. I should now be logged into an online training course I must complete, I should now be in bed since I have a meeting in the morning, but neither of those things is going to happen just yet. I don't even know how I came upon it, but I've been reading a blog called "Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen" that got me started on the eye-candy issue. It's a salon.com blog, and I am suspicious of those blogs--- a good number of them seem to be (very comptetent) writers hawking their books and linked to other blogs of murky commercial intent. "Struggle" will probably get added to my blog list; I'm enjoying it and she's linked to some really excellent blogs. She links to one called Juno whose most recent post, the only post I read, says all I've wanted to say about Rove and his, I admit to hoping, comeuppance. Smug ugly little creature, isn't he ? Vanity Fair had quite a long article on Rove and his ways. The title of Juno's post is "Bead and Feather Him." Yes, do. I'm sure anyone passing by this blog has noticed my blog links to left, right and center. Well, probably to the articulate who live somewhere on one side or another of the radii emanting from common and meaningful human ground . No radical outliers, to change mathematical metaphors here. Well, enough of that. I need to go to bed, dream of Pavonis and make sure my suit is pressed. I loved today, a follow up to a late afternoon spent at the lake yesterday, bobbling in the water and drying out in the early evening sun: a real summer day. Even the rain and the traffic jam couldn't shake it from me today. After the tire was put on, I drove back through town and stopped at the ice cream parlor, brushed water off one of the benches outside and sat, vanilla fudge cone in hand, watching the cars find their way to the Main Street shortcut, the barber shop pole twirling across the street, the utility trucks making their way to a the downed pole, everything sunny and waterlogged all at once.

Dies Natalis

It is 3:46 am. I can hear rain on my roof and the cats are slumbering beside me. It is my birthday. Amen.

A Green Olive Tree in the House of God

Hope may have been lost, but at least the car engine kept running....
and run it did, taking me away from the seashore down country roads, that run, ultimately, to a big city: in the late spring rain, I followed a lumbering Coachman along a two-lane road while thinking there is a _____ job in South Dakota, near the Corn Palace. I was following the Coachman on a road that has often led me out and away on my way back from here to the midwest, so it was easy to maintain a kind of dual consciousness where I knew I was off to an interview for a better lateral option, all the while feeling that a life near the Corn Palace was at stake. The interview for the option du jour went well, and I was offered a contract on the spot. This took care of some mounting worries, and I hope my one known reader, the beautifully articulate Willoboe, did not despair of ever knowing if my request for prayers and/or kind thoughts had brought about any results. Indeed it did: it was actually fairly amazing that the week and the interview went that well, and I was determined to keep the momentum going. I downloaded the SD job description, and then it all hit the fan: illness, overworked, over-scheduled, couldn't stay awake long enough to make the deadline, couldn't blow anything off because I had to catch up on all the previously blown-off matters that I had sidelined to make room for these more urgent lateralities (hmmm.... there's a word that may have uses in this blog) and the secret afternoon trips I had to take to follow up on them. And maybe the last straw was the Omigod of one of my favorite new acquaintances, followed by the question, which is really an assertion, have you ever been to South Dakota ?, which barely required its rhetorical counterpart, you don't want to go there. If you are not from the east, but have spent time in the east, as a recovering easterner, I can tell you that this set of utterances will get you through any number of cocktail parties and backyard barbeques where the grill costs more than your car. It works like this: Person A: We were glad we held onto our Martha Stewart stock. Person B: Martha Stewart ? Have you ever really looked at Omnimedia ? You don't want to be there. You dismiss any follow up questions with a few clichés: "there is July, then winter"/"it's not real growth". For the record, I do not hate the east; I am just anthropologically minded. Back to there, it wasn't my friend's disparaging remark that did it, but it rattled around in my mind as I found myself falling asleep at my computer and wondering if a late in the season stab at regaining my former life was really all that well thought-out.

I needn't have wondered. I person I know who is in the same field and who has been enduring her own exile of sorts phoned to tell me that she was on the verge of a one year contract with a very small, uh, firm, which would mean moving all of her possessions across country with no allowance to do it, taking a pay cut and almost immediately beginning a search for something more permanent. Of course she is going to take it. I would take it at this point. I think of that bulky Coachman camper meandering on a route that has been my entry and departure to and from this part of the world for so long. I would at about this time in an ordinary world be preparing for my jaunt to here, cats riding along, presents from "the middle" tucked into the trunk. I miss those long drives: the Pennsylvania mountains, the stop at Midway for Starbucks...

Yes, I would have taken it, too. It is so hard when I am so weary to contemplate yet another "temporary" life of the kind I thought I had left behind when I found myself last in the midwest. All today, a phrase from a psalm kept making its way into my head: "a green olive tree in the house of God." The poet Louise Glück once wrote in The Wild Iris, "how lush the world is/how full of things that don't belong to me:" ah, the house of God. And we are green, aren't we ? So green: we never know what's coming, we don't expect it, them, what happened. The change, the loss. Saplings, all, so best to hold onto that image of flexibility, trees dancing in the wind, the verdancy that we carry, that is possible for us. A point of rest in this unwieldy post, in the unravelling of my exhaustion during, finally, a time to write, think, and renew.

venturi inscia aevi

Can it really have been so long since my last post ? As mentioned last post, in my car, in the morning, I think of many things to say here. Alas, it is still a really hard time. I am trying to generate some options, job-wise, and pursuing them as well as tending to the one I actually have, is causing all kinds of complications. I am so tense as of late that I haven't done much of anything without all the details of everthing hanging over my head. To make matters worse (?), in spite of years of experience in one practice of this field (here we go with the ambiguity again), I still have to complete training to do what I do now. Not that I don't know how to do it, but I need the proper credentials. This is taking up an enormous amount of money and time, and, I fear, as I fall asleep at night, taking me further and further away from what I'd really like to be doing.

On a happier note, I am raising two new cats, my previous pair lost to old age over the last three years. It is funny and charming to have all that kitten energy (they are 10 months old) in the house again, a welcome bit of life and innocence, affection and play when needed most. They are/were shelter cats, sisters to boot. A good reminder that life can be renewed and remade. The question is whether my middle-aged self can endure the process. I have been so tired and stressed these past three years that it was hard to imagine being more tired. But here I am, all the more fatigued. Just when a moment's respite seems to appear, another complication (= bad thing) snatches it away.

We are all complicit in our own entanglements, our own failures, aren't we ? Are we ? There is a quote from the Letters of Abelard and Heloise pushing its way into consciousness, but it is not there yet. Metaphor will have to do, the res/imago problem ( rerum ignavus imagine gaudet to slightly misquote Vergil): is anyone out there familiar with the paintings of someone named Nancy Witt ? I found a book of her paintings, very strange, very lovely. One is called Hestia, and I would like, I think sometimes, to be in that rocking chair, and I even have a plant like that. Perhaps I fear that that is what will claim me, Hestia, the hearth, the call to slumber, dream, but also security. If you know the painting, yes, I see that there is a mirror where we might expect the hearth to be, and a brazier is foregrounded in the shadow. I want to be, feel I have been: Fire Lilies. The hearth, respite, fire, creativity, change: it's all there.

If you are a praying reader, please ask your god/dess to look kindly upon me this week; I really need it. If you are not, please light a candle and think of me.

The Mail, II

It has been too long since I've posted. Every early morning on the drive to work, my head is filled with so many things I want to say here. It has been a hard few weeks, and in addition, Cordelia has been out there, auditioning for some of those lateral options she spoke of, and trying to engineer her way back up the ladder as well.

So, the mail, the package sent out bearing its symbolic little chocolates. In the mail, in my mail, comes a note, the daffodil stamp matching the beautiful sketch of a yellow bird on the notecard within. Thank you, she says, for thinking of me ---and I wonder, does she mean of him ? She had forgotten about that until the package arrived, she says, and I feel bad for a moment that I reminded her and maybe made her sad. But that's not what she's telling me, is it ? What I realize is how much I had waited for some response, how I waited, in small and subtle ways, the ten days between sending and receiving, holding potential rejection in abeyance, how the return card means so much. It will be too hard, soon, to risk writing at all. She had phoned once, so had I. Too many things we don't or won't risk talking about; could mean the little notes are gone forever.

I dream of it all sometimes, tea and watching his hands, my office and the trees, the way we'd all talk. Then I get up in the dark, make my espresso, and drive to work, so much to say, so much lost, between dawn and the sea.