How About a Suggestion, Ho, Ho, Ho?

Jerry's got the door to his study closed, and I can hear him mumbling into the phone.  I'm pretty sure he's ordering my Christmas presents.  I helped him by tearing pages out of catalogs and supplying 800 numbers. (He doesn't do online ordering, too much frustration re forgotten passwords.)

Years ago, pre-internet ordering, I was in a golf shop buying a putter Jerry wanted,  and I mentioned to the salesman that I supplied Jerry with a list of things I'd like for Christmas and the names of stores where he could find them.  "Oh, boy!" the salesman said.  "If my wife did that, she'd get twice as much."  These days, I'd order the putter online, but I'd still need direction about which putter. 

When I was college,  I worked at a department store during Christmas breaks, and I saw many bewildered husbands buying gifts for their wives.  Once I waited on Willie Brown and two other lawyers.  They commiserated.  "I see you've got some bills there," said WB,  surveying the clothes one man was buying for his wife.  "Yeah," said the man.  "It'll add up to enough so she can return them for something she really wants."

Sigh.  Is this a way to run Christmas?  Probably not.   Catalog-page suggestions are a better fit for us, even if it doesn't leave a lot of room for surprise. I tell myself it's a form of communication, and God knows I would have never known Jerry longed for a tome on native plants (Done!  Courtesy of  the UC Press website).

When You Run Out of Netflix

So here's how it looks:  PBS is on near-permanent pledge, and I can't take another round of Peter, Paul, and Mary, let alone those inspirational speakers.   The ads on network TV drive me crazy.   Last night, at loose ends, Jerry and I tried to figure out if there are any DVDs or videos around the house that we hadn't seen yet.  Yes!  The videotape that came with our Corian countertops in 1999, and a DVD he was supposed to watch when he got a knee brace in 2007.  Still haven't watched them.

Encounter with a Fellow Traveler

One of the things I really like about travel is that I meet strangers on  trains and planes who tell me things about their lives.  Without fail, each person seems remarkable:  The mail carrier's wife from Long Island; the secretary to the former owner of the Warriors; and one of the most interesting--during a 50-block shared taxi ride down Fifth Avenue--an interior designer who'd tired of the Dalai Lama ("everything he says is so obvious").  I love these encounters and sometimes write about them in travel blogs.

The other day, taking a break from helping out at the Pantry,  I was eating lunch when a man sat down across from me with a pot of tea and a banana.  He introduced himself as Stanley, from Kenya.   He's a Quaker and  works as a custodian at the Friends Church four days a week.

Stanley

He began asking friendly questions.  How often did I volunteer?  How did I like it?  Usually I'm the questioner in encounters with strangers, revealing little about myself.  I countered with questions. How long was he in the U.S.?  Three years,  accompanying his wife while she earns an MBA and soon a Ph.D.  What was he doing while he was here?  Helping his wife with research, working at the church, and mentoring young African-American men in East Oakland.

He asked what I'd done when I was employed.  I said I'd been a writer. And what did he do in Kenya?  He's a writer.  Ha!  After that, we got down to what we like to write about (him: young people.  Me: everything, including mortality,  a topic he vigorously protested, waste of time, he said).  I took his picture and told him I might write a blog post about him.   He laughed and said fine.

While he's here, Stanley's writing feature articles in Swahili and sending them back to Kenya.  He seemed to think Jerry's job sounded pretty interesting and hinted that he would be a good subject for an article.

Christmas Cooking

Year after year, my sister and I struggled to cook Christmas dinners.  We've produced overdone pork roast, underdone prime rib, and only passable turkey.  We've cooked blurred by cocktails and stone-cold sober (not as fun).  Things got so desperate that several years ago, I began keeping track of what we did each Christmas so we could do a better job the next year:

1996: "Potato casserole got overcooked.  Dad complained green beans were stringy."

1999: "Dinner not so successful. Green beans would NOT cook; Yorkshire pudding was flat."

2000:  "Beef tenderloin too rare. GET A NEW INSTANT MEAT THERMOMETER."

2002:  "Christmas dinner was  excellent!  M. and I made a detailed schedule that was so helpful because we made it up while we were sober."

2003:  "Read this before doing a damned thing!  Make potato casserole the night before and cook it,  otherwise the onion and garlic are too sharp."

2006:  "Pork roast  that should have taken 75 minutes according to cookbook easily took two hours.  Took it out when thermometer read 135 degrees but was too soon."

2009: "Be sure to plunge thermometer DEEP into meat.  Don't start with  chilled roast."

And 2010?   In late middle age, with no more elderly relatives to cook for, only forgiving pals and younger family members, we threw in the towel and ordered the entire dinner from A.G. Ferrari.

Blocks

My friend Rob is  much on my mind these days.  It's been two months since he died, a  dear friend of 49 years lost to  cancer.   Even though I didn't see Rob often after we graduated from college,  I feel haunted by the loss of  him.   Laura, my good friend who's also a therapist, says that each death stirs up memories of other deaths.  This feels right to me.  I'm preoccupied not only with Rob but with my mother, who died 19 years ago.

I'm a quilter, and I've been working on a quilt that is all about green vines.  Apparently.   It's going nowhere.  The other day, I suddenly had an image in my mind of a new quilt block, completely unrelated to vines. I thought, what the hell, and rummaged around in my fabric collection. Then I sewed what I saw in my mind's eye:

  I felt better.  After I stared at that block for a few days and tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a "real" quilt, a bed quilt, I gave up. My hand reached for other fabrics:

The hand-dyed fabric in the center has the suggestion of a horizon.  I can't tell you what this block means exactly, but I can tell you it's in synch with how I feel about Rob right now, that he's just off-shore, in the amorphous blue. When my mother died, I collected pictures of rowboats, and sewed paper xerox copies of them onto plain gray fabric.  I was comforted by the image of her rowing to heaven.

Melon Ice

The painting project in the minute downstairs bathroom is done:  two weeks and two days.  Bruce-the-painter just about moved in with us.  Of course, there was more to do than a bathroom: a hall, the entryway, and a bunch of doors that had to be hand-painted in oil-based enamel.

It turns out that for a large sum of money, you can have your 1980's  faux-sponged wallpaper  removed, and the mess of a wall it leaves behind completely rehabbed and painted with a very smooth and elegant color called "Melon Ice."  (Jerry calls it "Dilute Salmon.")  My sister and I spent part of Thanksgiving Day poring over Benjamin Moore color chips to come up with this color.  The first color, which I chose on my own, "Golden Apricot,"  felt wrong from the first swath on the wall.

Here are a couple of photos:  The After shot (no art, can't bear to hammer holes in it yet) and the Before.  It's hard to capture the cool sophistication of  the new color: think pink grapefruit sorbet.

After:  Melon Ice

In progress: Tribeca Loft ?

Look Up!

Yesterday we went to Pt. Pinole Regional Park to look for Monarch butterflies.  Each fall, Monarchs migrate from inland areas west of the Rockies to coastal areas with milder climates.  This is called "overwintering."  It's a mystery how they choose the same coastal areas year after year, but they do, and if you're lucky you can see masses of them at Natural Bridges State Park near Santa Cruz or in Pacific Grove near Monterey,  hanging from branches of eucalyptus trees. 

Sign directing us to trail to see Monarch butterflies

We set off.  After an ill-advised trek on a bumpy dirt road led us to  the San Pablo Yacht Club, not a Monarch in sight,  we got back in the car and found our way to Pt. Pinole.  We followed a well-marked trail to the trees where this year's migrants congregated. 

After about a mile, we found fifteen people, heads thrown way back, trying to see a couple of small Monarch clusters in high in a  tree.  A sign with an arrow indicated where to look up, but I could see nothing but two small patches of what looked like dark leaves.

Sign indicating where to look up

 An East Bay Parks naturalist had set up a camera on a tripod, and we got a good look at the clusters that way.  My own digital camera was useless--way inadequate zoom. A steady stream of gazers joined us.

This morning Jerry explained to me that entomologists have never figured out how the butterflies know where to migrate each fall. It's the grandparents of the current migrating generation who came last year, and those butterflies died long ago. The current crop had no guide to Pt. Pinole, they just knew where to show up.

The close-up of Monarch butterflies high in a tree