Pillow Messages

My next door neighbor, Annika, came over today to use my living room sofas as props while she took photos of a recent art project.  There are five pillows, each with a precise cross-stitched description of someone's personal routine.  The pillow above describes one of my own.

She asked numerous people, including Jerry, for descriptions of things they did every day.  Not everyone had a routine interesting enough to warrant a pillow, she said, but he and I did (is this good or just ridiculous?)   Can you guess which one is his?   The entire project is called Just So.

Just So, Annika Bastacky, 2012

Weddings to Read About

Today's New York Times has six pages of wedding announcements, June brides and all that.  Most couples are heterosexual and in their 20's or early 30's.  Their faces look unlined and confident.   I think, "yeah, yeah, and good luck to you.  Let's talk in 30 years and see what's happened." 

What interests me--and the only announcements I actually read--are couples who are a) gay and/or  b) in their fifties or beyond,  people who've had some trials and tribulations and are still willing to step off a cliff and hope for the best.  Getting married is easy when you're 25, straight, and doing the expected thing. (Or 27, in my case.)   When you're over 50 and a little worse for the wear, or when presidential candidates are debating your right to marry--that's the story I want to read.

Today's featured couple,  Nancy Coffey and Timothy Nagler, ages 66 and 65 , would seem fall into my sphere of interest, except that she's clearly had lots of cosmetic surgery, so much so that I thought she was 35, and he's lost 50 pounds to please her.  (She said when she met him "he looked like he was pregnant, literally, and he was wearing a pink linen shirt.  He was a sight to behold."  Oh, Nancy!)  So good luck to them, but I hope they can accept the physical realities of being in their sixties.

No, give me come-back weddings; weddings where the bride and groom have imperfect bodies but big, glowing smiles; weddings where the perfectly toned body of the bride isn't draped in Valentino.  And definitely weddings where the Times has to say which bride or which groom in the photo.  Way to go!

Bedtime Reads

The draped lamp

For three months, I've been following a doctor-prescribed routine to help me get to sleep.  At 10 pm, I drape a lamp, sit in my chair in the living room, and read for an hour or so.  No bright lights, no computer, no TV.  Then I listen to five minutes of a hypnotherapy tape and get into bed.

By trial and error, I've found books that engage me but aren't too upsetting or challenging.  I have other books, such as a riveting Japanese mystery that features cutting up bodies, that I read at lunch.

Here are a few bedtime reads, in no particular order:

In the Garden of the Beasts, by Erik Larson.  The story of  William Dodd, the US ambassador to Germany from 1933-37.  A mild-mannered, well-meaning academic, Dodd took his wife and adult children with him to Berlin, where they witnessed the flowering of the Third Reich and had social encounters with Hitler and other now-infamous Nazis.  I liked learning more about the history of that time and place through the lens of a family, which damped down the horror.




The Submission, Amy Waldman.  A committee of survivors, artists, critics, and politicians unwittingly chooses the design of an Arab-American architect for the 9/11 memorial in a blind competition.  All hell breaks lose when his identity becomes known.  There's not one completely sympathetic character, and some are in dire need of a comeuppance. 

Below Stairs, by Margaret Powell.  If you think the servants on "Downtown Abbey" like their jobs, think again.  Mrs. Powell was a housemaid and then a cook in the early twentieth century, and she tells it like it is.  So much for the romance of "downstairs."  People can be beasts to servants.  She married a plumber and escaped, big relief.

A Widow's Story: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates.  "People" magazine calls it "a chronicle of grief."  I call it a long-winded memoir of the several months after Oates's husband died.  Just the facts, m'am, and a little less rumination and metaphor!  But then that's my problem with Oates's works.  Spoiler alert:  She remarries less than a year after her husband dies, to fellow Princeton professor whom she meets at the very end of the book. To be fair, I think she's remarkably honest about the isolating wilderness of grief she found herself in.

Making Toast, by Roger Rosenblatt.  A sad but compelling memoir about Rosenblatt and his wife going to live with their late daughter's family, including three very young grandchildren, after the daughter's sudden death in her thirties.  They and their son-in-law are now raising the children in Bethesda, a five-hour drive from the Rosenblatts' home on Long Island, which they've kept for occasional visits.  The children's grief and how they express it is especially heart-breaking.

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, by Janny Scott.  We know almost nothing about Obama's mother except that she was an anthropologist who married an African man.   This was a very intelligent, feminist woman who earned a Ph.D., wanted the best for her two kids, who loved men but couldn't seem to make two marriages work for her, and who died way too young, at 52, of ovarian cancer.






And books for newly-struggling insomniacs and readers-on-the-beach-or-planes:  Minding Frankie and Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy and Lady Killer by Lisa Scottoline.   The first two are romantic, everything-falls-into-place books set in Ireland, and the third is a mystery with an Italian-American lawyer heroine in Philadelphia.

Car Care

I'm terrible at it.  I've had the oil changed  twice in the last 5,000 miles (I know,  I know).

I blame this partly on my car's primary care provider,  a garage that specializes in keeping Toyotas and Volvos running as long as possible   All the time they want me to bring it in, every few thousand miles.  I hate driving across town early in the morning to drop it off.  I hate being without a car all day.  And it's expensive.

I've been getting around this by going behind their backs and taking it to Midas occasionally for an  oil change. Heh, heh.

Unfortunately, Jerry got wind of this the other night after I'd had a couple of glasses of wine.  No garage check for 5,000 miles!  He was appalled.  His own car may be a mess, full of bug gear and golf shoes and hats for every occasion, not to mention apples rotting under the seat, but, by God, he meticulously keeps track of mileage and servicing in a little book.  Which he's done since he bought his first car, a 1938 Pontiac jalopy.  It's actually kind of tedious hearing about all his cars.

Due to the dinnertime revelation,  I had to get up early this morning and drive across Berkeley, which is wretched during the rush hour. As I pulled out of my driveway, the woman next door pulled out in her brand new Porsche Panamera, which my sister tells me costs around $100,000.   I followed her car as it made its way sleekly across town so she could drop off her son at the high school.  I managed to escape that mayhem and continued on to the garage.

Gleaming and awaiting inspection

Where they were very nice, to my relief.  They didn't chastise me.  I was so freaked out yesterday about being delinquent that I had the car washed, so at least it would look good on the outside. 


Then Jerry picked me up in his car, which smelled like pizza.  He said he knew nothing about it.  But when we got home, he discovered there was half a pizza back where he keeps his collecting gear.  "Huh," he said.  Didn't faze him for an instant. 

Basil, Part 2

Into the green bin...

A varied response to my recent post about my inability to grow basil:  Most people reported that they, too, have had problems growing it and that even experienced gardeners can fail with that plant. In Spain, apparently, it grows easily for everyone except a friend who is English; she blames it on a bias against Anglo-Saxons.

Another friend sent the following advice. It's so practical and encouraging, I might even give basil another go:

"Basil needs sun and regular watering. The trick to getting a good full plant is to pinch it back when it's about 3" high. This will make the plant branch. You can use the parts you pinch off in your cooking, then wait until those parts grow a few inches and pinch again. Before you know it you'll have enuf for a pesto. From your pic I'd say you need to get a new plant, that one's had it. Several plantz is better so you have enuf pinched parts to actually do something with. (dangling preposition--I know) Also, never let it flower. Once it's making sex it's no longer growing for you."

Thank you, Marion O.!   Especially for that last (paradoxical?) sentence...

Curiosities in the Closet

Unworn for years:  everything on the right

Fully half the clothes in my spare closet (old house, tiny closets) are parked there for no particular reason. I haven't worn them in decades. I get a pass on my wedding dress, a knee-length double-knit number, because that was a memorable day.

But a sundress I wore when I caught a bridal bouquet? A satin coat I made to wear to my high school Senior Ball with a guy I didn't really like?  The very- eighties peplum outfit I wore to my 20th high school reunion, which went so badly I never went to another?

I just discovered all this when I went to clean out the closet. Alas, all are still there.  Sigh.

Relic in 2012

Wearing it in 1976

The matching dress is long gone, but the coat's still in the closet

Wearing the coat in 1968

Worn in 1988 to a reunion  that didn't go well

The Essence of Summer

What am I doing wrong?

I love basil.  I think its fragrance is the essence of summer, but I can't seem to grow it.  Year after year, I try--full sun, water-- but it never flourishes.  

Basil always reminds me of my sister-in-law, Delilah.  She was an avid gardener and grew vegetables and flowers on a cultivated section of the 40 acres Jerry's brother owns in Humboldt County.

In the summer of 2004, we drove up to visit them several times. Delilah was seriously ill, and we wanted to do anything we could to help. They had no refrigeration, so I took all the food, packed into ice chests, including a cherry pie at Delilah's special request.  She was the kind of person you had to force to make a special request. 

On our first visit,  I mentioned that I loved basil and bought a bunch every week for 89 cents at the Monterey Market in Berkeley.  She looked startled and led me out the back door to a flourishing basil plant.

"When I want basil, I just come out here and pick it," she said.  There was no judgment in her voice, just wonder. But  I felt very wanton, spending 89 cents a week on something I could grow myself. 

So I've tried to grow it.  Yesterday I read in Sunset that a gardener's task in June was to "plant basil seedlings every three to four weeks for a steady supply all summer."   Ha! In my dreams!  I'm back to buying bunches at the market, and it gets slimey in plastic bags in the fridge, and then I have to buy more.

Here's a picture taken during our first visit to Delilah and Peter in July 2004,  when she pointed out the basil in her garden.  She died two-and-a-half months later.  In fact, the day we arrived  she'd woken up feeling puffy, she said, the first sign that her remission was over.  I will never forget how brave and graceful she was, or weeding her zinnia beds with her, or massaging her hands on later visits, when she lay in the very hot loft bedroom they shared.

Delilah and Peter, July 2004