The Itchy Butt

The heat wave continues unabated. Ed worked from home to avoid the pre-Labor Day traffic (which is supposed to be thrice as bad as ever due to an impending Bay Bridge closure – for the entire weekend. The prediction is that Highway 101 through Marin will be a parking lot for three days.) as did LB. At mid-day LB joined me at the pool, she reading and doing the respite thing in the sun and shade, dabbling her toes in the water from time to time for a cool off while I swam a mile. (Yes, a stellar, fabulous, exhausting mile!) I’m going to have to start putting on sun screen because the freckles on my face are darkening and it reminds me of when I was an awkward kid.

Coming home I made Ed fetch me ice cream while I reposed in the back cottage in the cool breeze of the air conditioner and surfed the internet for nothing whatsoever. And then I went and picked up some leave-in hair conditioner to hopefully combat the effects of chlorine and since I was out, you know, a slice of pizza – which just made me hungry for the left over chicken enchilada in the fridge so of course I popped that in the microwave. Which all was chaser to the ice cream sandwich which started it all off before leaving the pool. And I act all mystified and bewildered when I get heartburn. Ha! (Yeah, hmmm… wherever is all this weight coming from, eh?)

LB’s coming over shortly, we’re taking our evening hike a little later in the evening in hopes of escaping the heat. Ms Honey Bee didn’t get a walk at all yesterday (way too hot) and today we’re leaving far later than normal… she likely presumes I’ve abandoned her needs as she’s looking rather despondent and forgotten at my feet. And little does she know she’s getting a bath when we return this evening… she’s got what we call “the itchy butt.”

I’m quite happy to report that I actually had a fairly decent night’s sleep last night. All is good is Zuzuland.

Barely Legal

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage. - Barbara Kingsolver

We’ve begun keeping a list of every time Zoe kicks me and we’re going to ground her for it later. I think we’re getting a good handle on bondage – we’ll have to work on boundaries no doubt.

We’re in week 21 now and although I promised some reflection on The Good Terrorist…. Well… there you have it – I’m not inspired.

It’s hot today, in the 90’s. I spent the morning doing chores before the heat of the day made it all feel too oppressive and then made the unfortunate decision to take the Honey Bee for a mid-day sojourn to the lake. Even though we relegated our activities to the shady side of the lake, it was still miserably and relentlessly hot. Only one room has a window air conditioning unit, so I lifted my skirt and let the cold air pour over my big sweaty belly before readying my things for a trip to the pool.

Getting to the pool later than I have to date gave me a taste of the family aspect of the club. Early in the day it’s open to adults only and not until afternoon does it open up to family swim activities. There were gazillions of kids and babies and moms – not so many dads. But even with the influx of young’ns most of the lanes were reserved for lap swim and people seemed to respect the lap swimmers.

I’ve been working up slowly (it’s only my 4th day in the pool) and currently I’m swimming 1100 yards – which is about 2/3 of a mile. I haven’t been in the water since the summer of ’01 and I’m way out of shape, but the water is so familiar and comforting to me – it’s like coming home. My body is so different and unfamiliar it’s an interesting contrast – feeling so invited and good in the environment and yet feeling so distant and uncomfortable in my body. The movements in the water are reflexive, however. I know how it’s supposed to feel to swim. I make little adjustments and compensate for my changing body shape, my more buoyant belly, my heavier hips and I try to get that feel. On some level, at least for a few weeks, I know that no matter what I do I’ll feel like I’m dragging my body through the water as I build up the right muscles and endurance to swim on top of (rather than under/in) the water. That’s just the normal road to getting there – nothing I can do about that except swim every day, push myself a little harder and have patience. I do wonder, however, as I’m dragging this bowling ball called Zoe with me, if I’m going to feel like I can swim on top of the water as long as she’s in tow.

After I’d finished my first 600 yards I paused and a man approached my lane and touched my shoulder. He asked if I was a competitive swimmer. Not for many, many, many years, I assured him. He said that he’d been coming to the pool for years and he’s seen no one swim as beautifully as me – how it looked so strong and effortless and like it was supposed to look. It felt nice to hear it, even knowing how weak and formless my stroke is given lack of practice. With each stroke in the water I’m correcting, coaching, reminding, adjusting – and yet to someone it looks beautiful and effortless. “No one else here swims like that,” he tells me.

When I was a little girl I remember watching Mark Spitz in the 1972 Olympics on television. The colors of the pool and the grace with which he moved through the water entranced me. I wanted to do that. Even as a young girl, I was never dissuaded by my lack of abilities or natural talent.. heh. I like it that I’ve never been afraid to square off with failure and keep trying to understand, persevere, anyways. I hope I can give that to Zoe – the willingness to ignore failure, one’s own incompetence and insecurities and do it all anyways in the face of it because what really is there to lose at the end of the day?

Pregnant Pause

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience: the task of surviving prosperity. - Alan Gregg

I’m so out of the practice of posting I don’t even know how to begin or what to say. Greetings. This is my first “new” post on blogspot, all the others have merely been transplanted from Diaryland – a quaint little spot – let it never be forgotten, it had its moment. It was.

Week 20, the half way mark, of this pregnancy, has commenced. It’s rather daunting. The miracle of life and all that rot. The first three months were miserable and now I just feel big and uncomfortable. What do I have to look forward to? Feeling bigger and even more uncomfortable and then being in a lot, lot, lot, lot of pain and then terrified for the next eighteen years. And this was a choice… a planned and deliberate choice. What were we thinking!?!

Despite my whining, Saturday was an awesome day. I pruned my agapanthus in the morning, with the exception of two aging flowers acting as pillar to the web of my Marge Simpson spider (which resembles this, but I’d say mine is bigger.) I conferred with Ed on how to handle Marge and his advice was to just leave her be. So there she perches, though much more exposed than when nestled among the other towering scepters of purple flower.

Ed edged the lawn around the garden, which looks amazing after an eight hour stint last week where I weeded, pruned, raked and primped. Zoe’s dresser arrived a few days back and Ed hauled it in pieces, to be assembles, which now lay strewn across the newcomer’s floor.

I’ve been kavetching about wanting to find and pool and swim for years – since we moved up here – and we visited a swim and tennis club which looks like it fits the bill perfectly. It’s an outdoor pool, heated to 82 degrees F, and open year round. If you’re a Native Son of the Golden West they offer steep discounts. They don’t kick in until one has been a member for a few years but it’s even reasonable until then. We got to try it out for free for the day and it was the first time I lay face down, stretched out, for months! It felt so great – like something really precious and valuable. I was beaming happy well into the evening.

After our afternoon at the swim and tennis club we took the bikes out for a spin, while the Honey Bee ran along side, up to the park for a frollicky game of fetch. After a nice work out I retired to the hot tepid tub for some respite. It was a great day.

Despite the pleasures of the day, however, I had a restless and uncomfortable night. If I wasn’t waking to go to pee (an every few hour occurrence… thank you miracle of frill’n life) I was waking up just plane uncomfortable. Around 4 am Secret decided she wanted up on the bed, to be with the pack, and until she departed around 7 I don’t remember sleeping well – despite cozily rubbing noses with the Monster Grrrl, I felt cramped and uncomfortable and sore. So today really sucked by comparison – I did a modicum of gardening but other than that I’ve been prone on the sofa or lazing on the bed and I feel like a big lump.

And if you can’t tell by this post, I’ve officially become one of those pregnant ladies who seem to have no life or mind or thoughts beyond the simple fact that she’s pregnant. For those of you who have never been pregnant, it’s rather all consuming. For those who have, my sympathies go out to you.

I’ll try to bring up some non-pregnant topics next time… like the Doris Lessing book I’m reading (The Good Terrorist.)

The Origin of Love

I wonder how many people have actually read Plato’s Symposium.

The last time I saw you, we had just split in two. You was looking at me. I was looking at you. You had a look so familiar, I could not recognize. You had blood on your face I had blood in my eyes. - Hedwig (and the Angry Inch)

Lowering myself off the back of the boat into the deep blue waters I had resolve to just face whatever it was I had to face. The cold made me catch my breath, draw her into me with reflexive conviction – as though my body were saying, one last time. And in she came, doing nature’s bidding with pure abandon. Once in, there was little point or thought about going back. Maybe just a moment of hesitation. I looked at Ed, he looked at me, and we laughed then situated our masks and bit down on the mouth pieces and alone, together, one last glance and smile, we laid our body’s prostate and peered into her soul.

It was the most amazing moment. It was like going home. And home is a hard place to describe, as much if not more of a feeling as it is a place. We laid adrift and stunned – something beyond awestruck, looking down at the reef shelf below us, hundreds, no millions, of brilliant coral as backdrop to millions of the most amazing fish of every color and variation that I could possibly imagine. And I felt my heart skip a beat as I saw what we were heading into -the edge of the reef - dropping down perhaps a hundred feet or more – not into darkness, but into depth. Again I hesitated as we moved toward the edge and then suspended over a huge underwater canyon. At varying layers of depth larger fish lumbered about as next to us in this vast expanse beautiful fish of indigo and emerald swam with us, not below us, through the pristine clear waters. Across this great divide was another reef shelf where a sea turtle glided peaceably, like a bird around us. In every direction there was something. As far as the eye could see, this was an endless feast.

They called this place the Super Highway. I have never seen anything like this before in my life, didn’t know such a place could exist. I’d read books about these places, had heard that the most amazing underwater places on earth were off the coast of Niihau and now I’ve seen and nothing has come even close to describing it. I feel somehow forever changed.

Dumbstruck, afterwards, Ed and I looked at each other. That was amazing, he’d say with a complicit understanding of the frailty of words. I’ve never seen anything so spectacular in my life, I’d say like a fact. We grasped at someway to speak it, but could not. It was holy – sacred.

I’ve been to the Caribbean and was rather nonplussed despite the brilliance of random triggerfish around a sad lump of reef off the coast of Saint John’s. I was much more impressed with the amazing caterpillar of a rather drab moth in the rainforest there.

The shores off Miami coastal waters divulged rather dull sea life and a gaggle of piranhas that I could have lived my life without encountering. I’m not ashamed to admit that the restaurant I went to, in the hotel with the infinity pool, curtains of fabric, two stories tall, wafting in gentle breezes embracing the pool area and a life-sized chessboard was more titillating then the subterranean spectacles I saw there.

In cities across Europe while other young twenty-something’s were chasing beer halls and adventures, I was chasing aquariums and flea markets with my backpack in tow. While rather unkempt and not well attended, in all regards, the aquarium in Barcelona was strangely among my favorites (although the Baltimore aquarium is certainly something to behold). But perhaps it was just that it was in Barcelona – among the most beautiful cities in the world with its magical Rambles, Miro mosaics tiled into the very streets where one walks and melting architecture.

In the great halls of the Hermitage in what was Leningrad, the place they now, again call Saint Petersburg, there are divine works by human hand, in the Metropolitan or MOMA in New York, in the museums of Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, Paris, London. I’ve been to all of these places and been witness to their treasures. But nothing, absolutely nothing, even begins to compare with what I saw off the coast of Niihau. It was organic and alive and mutable – a metropolis of color, species – a living art untouched and unspoiled. There was a pain that ripped down to the very heart of me, a deep soulful pain of finally coming into contact with that which makes one whole.

Re-volution

I imagine that looking at the world from outer space it appears to change little from minute to minute. I imagine that you could look at this brilliant blue and green sphere for a good long time and like looking at a marble it wouldn’t appear to change much over the course of say an hour or a day with the exception of the angle of the light (and maybe the patterns of the clouds).

And then we zoom in on this little beach, with its relentless rolling waves and wind. Every time a wave washes in it displaces a little sand, carries something in and something out with it. All and all over the course of a typical hour, while there is a million little changes going on, they’re not tremendously obvious albeit perceptible to anyone paying attention. Sure the beach changes quite dramatically over the seasons. In winters the heavy surf carries the sand out of the tide pools and deepens them. In the spring a river cuts the beach in two and brackish water is home to a bounty of little fish. The longer one looks at this beach, truly the more changes one is apt to see – from the more obvious waxing and waning tides to the more sublime new set of delicate prints left from a crab scuttling across the softer sands. The closer one looks at the details, the more changes are apparently going on.

Put the magnifying glass on a higher resolution and narrow the scope to simply this little tide pool. Nearly every time the water washes in and out the entire ecosystem of the pool appears to change. New life brought in, residents who’d perhaps been there awhile or maybe even just taken hold carried away. Perhaps the only truly permanent fixtures being the lava rocks that bank it and the sea slugs that lay a little more solid for their weight. From the perspective of the tide pool the world is in constant movement from chaos to short-lived order to chaos again. Sometimes, at low tide, there is a protracted period of calm. But even peacetime carries with it it’s own set of threats and upsets. From the perspective of the tide pool, change and movement is incredibly obvious. Turmoil is the natural order of things.

Earth is such a pretty word (I say it in my head and under my breath – air-tha’). I think of all the names men might have given this planet and Earth is a perfectly fine choice, but I don’t think it would have been mine. And while I think about such lofty things as naming the planet, I’m really most thrilled to notice today that my toenails have grown back (a trouble likely due to poor-fitting hiking boots.) Because my toenails, why those are part of the tide pool that is me. My beliefs, those would be something of the lava rock that banks it. Ed, Cassie and a host of others, they would likely be my sea cucumbers. (The funny thing is that when you poke at a sea cucumber they dispel everything from their stomachs. Heh.) Secret Agent Dog, maybe she’s something like a barnacle, sticking to my beliefs.

Footnotes

Still waters, really still waters, aren’t clear, they’re murky. It’s movement that maintains clarity and I’m so conflicted by the desire to just sit back and rest for a spell. And I ask myself what I hope to accomplish by sitting idly in a garden or staring into a tide pool for a fortnight and then some. What I hope to accomplish is peace and perspective, finding a wellspring that satiates and strengthens. And then what? And then to walk boldly toward destiny as it presents itself. (But destiny, my dear, is always looking you in the eye and whether you believe it or not you’ve always the capacity to face it.)

Destiny, you are not my enemy. You are welcome in my home and at my table. Come, let us break bread and commune, set aside our differences and make peace.

Assimilation

Squid change colors to blend into their environment. When the surf kicks up the sand, their body becomes translucent, like the color of dust falling through sunlight. When everything settles, they become shadows and light of underwater rocks.

I Hope The Whales Can Forgive Us

You have to let people be right from time to time, it’s their consolation for not being anything else. – Andre Gide, The Immoralist

There are two beached whales on Ocean Beach. It’s not a common site on this particular stretch of the California coast. It made headlines on the 10 o’clock news, mixed with fairly remarkable footage of whales migrating. The woman newscaster’s voice relays the possible causes of the whale’s deaths while a scene of young boys poking objects into and further mutilating the magnificent beasts runs as backdrop. Cut to real time footage of college co-eds, inebriated and stupid, building bonfires near the dead animals.

“Let the dead be dead,” I think.

A few months ago, Cassie and I took an early morning walk on Muir Beach. Past a rocky point was a dead, beached whale. A few people had discovered the animal as we had and had climbed over the rocks to get closer to the spectacle. I did the same, with camera in hand. I’d never seen a whale’s teeth before, so up close and personal, and frankly I was mesmerized, humbled and in awe. I wished I had some sense of its life so that I could quietly honor it with references that carried some weight and meaning for it. I could not. After all, it could have been a “very bad whale,” doing things which left the other whale’s aghast and it’s possible that the day it took its wrong turn and met its demise the other whales might have knowingly thought, “I told you one day he’d get his comeuppance.” But to me, this whale, lying tangled amidst the boulders and breaking waves, looked peaceful and innocent and I was filled with a mournful pause. It’s as though everything cumulated into a shallow breath and the truth of history didn’t matter – just the right then.

I have a peculiar interest in sea animals. As a kid, through a strange series of events, my family would winter in Mexico – Matzatlan, Zihuatineo and finally and most frequently Manzanillo. Us kids were required to take Spanish in school and each became the favorite of our Spanish teacher, Senor Saucedo. At one point I had some fluency, but lost it overtime through lack of use and exposure. When you neglect things, they abandon you.