Mean Food

“I don’t eat tofu,” I told her. “I think Tofu is Soylent Green.”

“Soil and green?” She asked.

“No. Soylent Green. S-O-Y-L-E-N-T.”

“It’s bean curd,” she says. “It’s a soy product.”

“No. No. Soylent Green. Like Soylent Green is people.”

She looked at me puzzled.

“Anyway,” I went on. “I don’t like tofu. And I don’t like sprouts either.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I don’t understand sprouts.”

“Spider legs,” I replied. “Sprouts are like eating spider legs.”

We both agreed green peppers were terrible. They corrupt everything.

The Reunion

The Reunion

Ed and I rose at the break of day and stumbled around the hotel room, gathering our manies and fumbling about as we bumped into one another and wiped sleep from our eyes. We took a taxi from the hotel to the airport and slumped wearily in uncomfortable vinyl chairs waiting for the boarding call. I slept heavy on the airplane on the way back to San Francisco while he dozed and read a bad airport novel – written for travelers who crave distraction without demand. Occasionally I’d wake up and look over his shoulder to read a paragraph or two, make a comment about the bad prose and resituate the pillow.

We’d been up until near 3 a.m. I’m not exactly sure why. The reunion came and went. I still don’t understand it but it’s a good thing to do once every twenty years or so I suppose. Good to remind. Good to remember. Good to go back and see what’s there.

A pre-reunion event was planned at a dive bar on Excelsior Boulevard – an informal no-host gathering. In truth it was the best part of the reunion because you could hear the person settling weight across from you and have some semblance of conversation. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have marked the time as worthwhile.

Entering Al’s bar I recognized no one and was overcome with a sense of foreboding. As I settled in, however, pearls of remembrance flittered by and it wasn’t long before I was hello-ing and what-have-you-been-doing people. It was empty chatter. I largely found myself bored before I even asked the questions. This was the problem – the context. People were in a mad rush to connect and move on – say their paragraph and drive to the next stop to say their paragraph again. I’ve never been inspired by stop and go schmooze. It doesn’t make it wrong. I’m not judging it. It’s simply not my thing. That’s okay.

Eventually two old high school friends arrived, bringing along a beautiful Texan girl as one of their companions. We sat, we talked, we bought each other rounds of this and that and something started to feel a little familiar – like color was entering the outlines. It was pleasant and far less contrived and the evening moved from a hair shy of unbearable into quite pleasing. This was good.

Reunion day approached and Ed and I collected our things and ambled over to the hotel with a collection of snacks for sustenance. We arrived later than we’d hoped and didn’t have time to avail ourselves of the pool or the hot tub. Instead we lounged in the room and watched a special on the attempt to salvage some wreckage from a Southern California breakwater region. Despite heroic efforts the salvage crew failed and left the fate of the disaster to nature’s devices in the end. We dressed with reluctance and eventually descended.

I was titillated, excited, to see old friends who were old friends, learn about lives and indulge in a feast of discovery and rediscovery. It didn’t really turn out this way. I actually had more substantive conversations with people I hadn’t known at all in the day and some of those who I was most anxious to see had few words and seemed readily distracted. One of the women looked at me rather passively and sighed, you just dropped off the face of the earth.

Yes. I did. Perhaps I thought we all did. But it was true. I did. It was taking more than just the weight of what we all had together to hold me to it. We were strikingly different creatures, moved and motivated by different things that weren’t apparent to us then for all our self-indulgence. But as the evening passed, at least among those women, I realized that my own self-indulgence was perhaps the mirror I was seeing. The weight had kept them together and grounded with one another. They had marriages, children and connected lives – they passed holiday cards among themselves and were genuinely involved with each other’s lives. In witnessing their ease, comfort and joy with one another I found myself looking on this with reverence and respect and a chapter of a book had written out its ending for me. I had to unclench a fist on that reality and admit that something real and enduring persevered out of it. A rather beautiful little epiphany unfolded and those women molded together to be an emblem of it. They closed a cold circle, but it’s the coolness that often lets the caste harden into shape. Not for a moment could I find myself begrudging that. To the contrary, it was a reflection of how we all chose to live out this story and it seemed impudent to resent fate in the face of beauty. I held to awe instead and let the pen fall.

I spent the evening largely with three of the boys turned to men over the years. For some reason men seem more willing to let life happen and remold even in the face of varied journeys without making it a betrayal. Maybe it’s simply more an expected and accepted gender norm. Ed inspired dancing and we waded through music and laughter. The rum and the whiskey loosened our spirits and our lives. We didn’t speak on the past, just the now. So we bounced around the evening with a casual disregard and this was good – an honest form of grace in the evening. Ed maneuvered his usual antics, stirring events to benefit the underdog and rise a little ire. He was a gem for the evening and we danced and we laughed and at some point late in the evening we fell into a short quiet sleep and it was over.

I’m left with a montage of stilted conversations – some of which it would have been interesting to carry through to some conclusion or another. Instead most will be left as things unfinished that were suppose to be in just that state of growth and decay. The evening was a little ribbon on the past – decorating something that’s perhaps more interesting when it’s left unopened as a perpetual surprise waiting to happen.

Bedtime

I wonder what to say at the end of a long and weary day. I love you. I love you, world. Thank you for summer, potato vines, agapanthus, dirt, rose petals, grass, dogs, my dog, pillows, feather comforters, slippers, oleander, manzanita trees, moss and rivers.

It’s time to curl up into my big bed, my prize among prizes, my most holy sanctuary, my solace and comfort. It’s time to curl up into my bed, surrounded by pillows – one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight pillows – too many pillows, soft pillows, hard pillows, pillows with tattered cases and ones with crisp white grandmother’s hands embroidery. It’s time to curl up into my bed, surrounded by pillows, Mr. Finley – my bear among bears, distinguished and cuddly - tucked behind pillows with arms gently flailing but wrapped around Einstein, my stuffed Little Thinker. It’s time to curl up into my bed, surrounded by pillows, Mr. Finley and Einstein readied for dreaming and whistle.

She lopes. She plops off the sofa. I can hear her gravity and a crack as she stretches and a sigh and then a soft rhythm of loping. At the edge of the bed she rests her chin for a moment like a parenthetic embrace, an aside, a pause. Then I say okay, and she lingers, hesitates. She listens, but on her terms and it makes me giggle. She pretends this was her idea and doesn’t notice me – saunters up to the pillow and curls herself up. Her nose accidentally hits mine and she sighs heavy again – her whiskers tickle my chin. I nestle my hand between her front legs amid the soft fur on her chest and scritch her chin. She makes soft noises and we fall asleep.

A Woman Who Grows Roses

Ah… coming home. I’m back among my things, my sweet little town, my dog, my mountain filled with imagination and delectable trees, my work and the day-to-day of life whirring by like a bowling pin threatening to drop. There are no tide pools here and no spectacular fishes, but there’s a feel about home, the familiarity of the dirt and the sounds and the air.

I looked in the mirror this evening and I thought, “I’m a woman who grows roses.” The thought made me giggle just a little inside. The roses were from Elsie, old roses that she likely planted years and years before. I tore out most of the bushes and the neighbor begged to retrieve them out of the yard waste bucket while a woman up the hill towed several more away in a red wagon. I kept one and this one keeps my house in bounty of roses – every room, windowsills, every table. I am a woman who grows roses. Cassie comes to pluck a flower from the garden to woo an object d’arte.

There was a neighbor in Minneapolis who bought Mr. Lang’s house after he died in his car of a heart attack one night. She grew roses. Mr. and Mrs. Lang never grew roses. Mrs. Lang passed away and I would sit on Mr. Lang’s back steps and he would take out an angel that when twisted on its base would slowly turn in circles and play a melody. He drove a white car. He somehow felt like part of our family. But when the new neighbors moved in, the woman, the wife, she planted roses. No longer were we welcomed to run across the lawn or slide down the hillside in the winter. Suddenly it was their yard and visitors weren’t welcome. I would later baby sit for her children and she would later leave her husband and her three children and never come back. By now I’m sure those are considered old roses and I just wonder if a new owner has simply fenced the yard.

I am a woman who grows roses and plants basil in flower boxes. Only one of the basil plants survived Kauai and none of the flowers to speak of. I began again with Gerber daisies, which with some tending are growing strong and blossoming beautifully. I also added more basil and I’ll pinch my first harvest tomorrow and try my hand at pesto once again. I’m assured that there is no way this could be organic basil, but since pesticides are illegal in this town, with the exception of treatment for termites and wasps, I’m not sure what toxic chemicals are making their way into my basil.

I am a woman who grows roses, plants basil in flower boxes, tends Gerber daisies and walks her dog every day on a beautiful mountain full of imagination. I looked in the mirror and I saw her – fine lines around her eyes, sunburned skin, freckles on her nose and dirt on her arms and feet. Her hair is strawberry blond and bleached for the relentless sun. She looks peaceful save for the crease in the center of her forehead – a worry wrinkle that began to show itself in her early twenties, felt comfortable and stayed. Her eyelashes are so blond they are almost white. She lives in a small town now and she waves to the town gardener when she’s throwing the ball for her dog in the morning before she settles into a day of work or not.

I miss the sound of the ocean hollering and the squawking of Gabriel the cockatoo in the morning. We’ve left that little bit of paradise behind for the meantime to cultivate our garden at home. While away the hillsides turned golden like the color of wheat and the wildflowers changed from fields of wild irises and poppies to patches of sticky monkeys and an occasional morning glory. Small snakes slither across the trails and lizards are more bountiful. The jawbone of a small animal with menacing teeth perched in the middle of the trail yesterday, like a harbinger of bad things to come. Sinewy dried muscles clung to the bone as I marched by wondering what thing this was and what had become of it. Some days are like this too.

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.

Avacado Reprieve

Fantasy: I see some gluttonous sunburned white man wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, smoking a cigar with his young secretary, bleached blond in a Hawaiian print dress, neck adorned with lei’s, a broad brimmed hat and stylish sunglasses. An avocado rolls out from under the driver’s seat and rests neatly beneath the brake peddle. When he comes too quickly to a stop, loud Hawaiian music playing on the CD player (a little something he picked up at a gas station outside of Lihue), he feels a smush as he hits the pedal. What’s with the God Damned Avocado’s?!?!? He yells. She tenses up and purses her cherry-red lips.

We picked up a new rental car. For just a few dollars a day extra we got a snappy little convertible – vroom, vroom. We drove through Waimea Canyon all the way to Kalalau Lookout. I took pictures of the canyon and the Valley of the Lost Tribe along the Na Pali coast. There were roosters everywhere, but I don’t think my pictures of them are going to be that stellar. I think I’ll have a lot of blurry amber and blue feather with a chicken foot leaving the scene. I chased one around the parking lot for about a half hour at the Kalalau Lookout. Ed nearly wet himself laughing. I do not run like a rooster.

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.