Mom's Tickets & Zorba

September 14
I've been working on getting tickets for my mother's Big Trip. She's going to go to Knoxville to visit my Dad's great nieces, then from there to San Luis Obispo to visit my sister, then from San Luis back to New Jersey for Christmas--and now we're working on New Jersey to Cleveland where's she'll visit her nephew and his extended family, then back to Pittsburgh, where family friend and West Virginia artist Charlie Cowger will pick her up! This will cost a bundle, but it's great she's so popular with her family.

September 12, 2005
More gorgeous weather, although it's supposed to get hot today. The usual million and a half things preying on my mind, including "reformatting" of my office. Listen to that language. Oh, yes, I've gone over to the dark side. Every night I spend at least forty five minutes just surfing. On the one hand, I am just having a good time with this stuff. On the other hand, I think it's taking away from writing time (although I can't totally be sure– the nervous-pleasurable-quicktime of digital is now associated through e-mail and websites with a lot of projects I didn't used to do: Coalition, writing, Ethical.) I like to think that this digital stuff is taking the place of some of my old depressions. I think, more definitely, it's a space where I once watched more t.v. (All before Joel was born, so more than twenty years ago). I've been using a computre for more than twenty years now! I began with something Zorba (see below). What a trip that thing was! "Portable" sewing machine size and shape, and weight. I thought it was essentially a glorified selectric typewriter. My first MS-Dos system came after we moved to New Jersey. I insisted on amber letters on black, but I wanted no images. Then, a computer later, you couldn't get them without color and imagery, and I then there was e-mail, and then I began to play with the idea that a website – I've always loved art and design in an amateurish way– and began, thanks as usual to brother-in-law David Weinberger, to dabble in HTML, or rather, programs that use HTML, and once I got Dreamweaver, and saw how that eases certain kinds of communication–well, I was hooked, and I remain hooked, and sometimes that I am indeed addicted-- maybe not to gaming or gambling or raw sex images, but, I think, to the flickering screen, to the quickness of information (example--I thought nostalgically of Zorba, clicked over to the Internet, Googled "Old Computers Zorba" and got an image and information within fifteen seconds)

September 11, 2005
This is four years with two wars, one continuing endlessly, plus Hurricane Katrina. Art by Mahasin Nor-Pomarico

September 5, 2005
Back from the lake, closing all day, always sad to see the last day of the season at the house, and the lake was just splendid, cool sunny, perfect.

September 1
I planted fall lettuce today--indoors in pots because the slugs did in one small patch of lettuce and one of radicchio. On the other hand, I have several surviving radicchios and a couple of patches of lettuce. What is with this nature? Slugs eating my tiny lettuces, hurricanes eating half of Louisiana. I'm trying to be amusing, but one is reminded that we are not alone here on our planet. Judy Moffett has an interesting science fiction novel called Pennterra in which a planet rejects the colonists whose approach is ownership rather than community with the ecosystem.

August 30
We'll be going to the lake this week-end and then plunging into lots of activities with the Coalition and gearing up for teaching. I've been cleaning my office-- that is to say, throwing out endless stacks of paper-- old book projects, records of a magazine I was fiction editor for, putting away records of schools where I worked last year, etc. etc. It's very satisfying, and gives a certain sense of control. I've even taken photos and bits of art work and actually put up nails on the walls and hung 'em up. For eighteen years they've been propped here and there, charmingly disheveled. I guess this means I've decided to stay awhile. Joel, meanwhile, called, and he is in his new room, but not unpacked yet. He had to move himself, two trips, in a borrowed car. I felt bad he didn't ask me to come up and help him move. I seem to have turned exactly into what I didn't want to be-- what he calls "such a mother." I really didn't mean to. I swore I'd never eat food that my kid left on his plate, and of course I did. I swore a lot of things. Motherhood is strewn with broken vows....

August 26
Well, the skunk was released. Andy set the trap to catch raccoon, got a skunk instead. The town Animal Control guy doesn’t take skunks or 'possums away, only raccoons, so he apparently crept down while I was out and used a long stick to open the Hav-a-hart and let the dear little skunk go free.
Meanwhile, the deer are totally brazen-- the mangy looking mother– definitely a teenmother, maybe younger– plus twins Bambi and Bambino. They leave deposits of their shiny black scat and eat the growing points off the cucumber and squash plants, and seem to have retarded the tomatoes too. Worse garden in years, although we did have our own carrots, mini-cukes, kohlrabi, and peppers for dinner last night.

And tonight-- Trader Joe's and the movies in Westfield where we saw....

Yes, March of the Penguins. I liked it a lot. For a funny comment on it, see Miles Klee's blog at http://www.thismilkishot.blogspot.com/ --entry for August 15.

August 21
Mary and Tony Sciaino kindly invited us to their (air-conditioned!) West Orange home for grilled steaks last night. Joel came too, and he and Ryan went out to the movies afterward. I like our new neighbors in South Orange a lot, but there'll never be neighbors like Mary and Tony! They were across the street from us for fifteen years, always ready to let Joel come over to play with Ryan and Ann (Joel is exactly nine months younger than Ryan and nine months older than Ann), always including us in their family events, inviting us over for soup on snowy days when the schools were closed (they're both educators) and generally making life in the suburbs just what I had always been afraid it wouldn't be!
In a couple of hours, Joel heads back to Providence for his last week of work, then training to be a Teaching Assistant, then back to school.
I have the kind of twisted mind that misses him most when he's here...

August 20
This is what summer looks like to me, in spite of deer, slow ripening fruits and vegetables. It's always these lovely things that want to grow for me.

August 19

I had such a lovely visit to the museum yesterday. I was going to go out with Chiaki in the afternoon and take her to an English tea at Tea and Sympathy (expensive but fun), so I went to the Metropolitan Museum first and did one of my go-where-you-will visits.
I grabbed a bun and iced tea first, then looked at some things in the photo and print gallery, pretty random, photos of American slaves and free people, 16th century drawings and etchings of saints being tortured by their enemies, the slaughter of the innocents, a battle, which really set me up for the thing that sucked me in most, which was the Indian sculptures.
I hadn't been in there for a long time–I was desultorily looking for the Chinese brush painting which I never found, but instead walked into one of these galleries where you have to read the scorecard to tell the Buddha from Lord Shiva– well, Buddha usually only has two arms and never has a lady consort. There were a couple of mithunas, the loving couples with the tiny waists and bodies that you just want to hug and hold. There was a wonderful Durga (not this one, but one with some of the same elements) wonderful Durga, many-armed and busty saving the world from the water buffalo demon– I don't know, but the grace and pulsing life (there's a Sanskrit word for this that I can't remember) and the dark rooms like elegant caves, just blew me away.
I took a few steps over and sat in the entrance to the Chinese meditation garden to calm down a little. That's why I love that museum so much– I had just been thinking how different I feel towards it after having been in Rome where the art is in its place-- Caravaggio in every church you wander into, Roman ruins sticking up beside the trolley people grab to go to work– how our art is largely stolen from elsewhere by Robber Baron types–and then I step into the Indian galleries and just want to laugh with delight. Thankful that if they had to go over there and buy the store out, at least it's here in a public place where I can see it.

August 18
Andy and I went to the nearest Cindy vigil-- Maplecrest Park in Maplewood. There were probably 200 people there, and MoveOn.Org directs people to a Flickr site that has a slide show of vigils all over the country. Click here for the slide show.