Frank Bruni: "I'm not the guy for this."

Frank Bruni is on a book tour, now that his book "Born Round" is out and he's no longer the New York Times food critic.

I just returned from hearing him chat with Warren Etheredge at one of the "Words & Wine" events that Kim Ricketts puts on in Seattle.  They talked about all manner of things: "eating widely" as a reasonable credential for being a food critic; mothers as stiff competition for Christian martyrs; good and bad food experiences; the expectation people have that you MUST be a good cook if you're a good eater (FB prefers to consume, he tells us); the reality that food criticism is no longer a "local" phenomenon in the internet age, and that a review is as much about a vicarious experience as it is about gathering data on whether a restaurant is worth (or not) visiting; the difficulty of finding synonyms for "tender" without resorting to "toothsome" and other verbal contortions.

I would have been content with hearing much more about any one of those conversation strands, but it was a different topic altogether that intrigued me the most, not at all food-related.

Bruni said that he often thinks, when first being offered an opportunity like New York Times food critic, "I'm not the guy for this."

And I wondered:

How does he get out of his own way in those moments?  How does he drive down the middle between humility and ego?  How does he take his self-doubts, his admitted issues with body image (which he battles not with fad diets but with exercise, good trainers, and a short attention span--being BORED with self-loathing, turns out, is more effective for him than The Cabbage Soup Diet), and STILL step right up to the opportunity and say "Yes.  I am called to do this" and go out and trump self-doubt with self-confidence?

It's not that I'm fascinated by the "imposter complex" as a psychological phenomenon (we'll save my own Ph.D. completion stories for another blog post). 

No, what I am musing on this evening is that, while there are many models of Ego Made Flesh who combine self-aggrandizement with success, they are far less compelling to me than Frank Bruni's combination of success and humility.  The ability to move between direct and honest critique of a famed restaurant and the statement that sometimes a 1/4-pounder with cheese is what's called for; the graciousness with which he indulges audience questions; the lowered eyes and covering of his face when Warren or an audience member points out his considerable attractiveness: these are endearing.

And while I might not say "no" to tagging along with him to a destination restaurant, the truth is that I left the evening thinking I would much rather share a conversation with him among friends, over scrambled eggs.  Or lingering over some modest fare made transcendent by embracing appetite, hospitality, intellect, and spaciousness of spirit around a big table of fellow travelers.

I'm glad he thinks he's "not the guy for this" as he greets the world every day, because if he did...he wouldn't be.

I like to play dress-up.

I don't have The One Big Passion.  I've always thought I wanted one.  To be a Potter.  To be a Weaver.  To be a Writer.  To be a Photographer.  To be a Painter.  To be a Filmmaker.  To be a Singer.  To be a Chef.  I've done or still do or want to do all those things.  But none exclusively.

I've always thought I had some kind of ADD, some deficiency that made me unable to concentrate on just one thing.  Or that I just hadn't found the one thing that would get me to settle down.  I was the Bachelorette of Callings.  No commitments, baby, no tying me down.

But lately I've been thinking it's altogether something else.  I reckon it's not an accident that I loved to play dress-up as a child.  When my parents would go out, I'd go into their bedroom and turn their closets inside out and upside down as I put on one thing after another.  Mom's stuff, Dad's stuff--sometimes combined--and always accessorized with whatever trinkets and oversized shoes allowed me to inhabit and move freely in the faraway worlds in my head.  There were soundtracks in there and smells and furniture and pets and foods.  I would invite my real friends (of which there were few, truth be told, until I got older) to come over and participate, but they got frustrated by my inability to stick with one narrative.  I was in and out of a story before they ever got past "once upon a time" and, really, what was the point of trying to keep up?

In college, my first roommate used to throw her hands up at my habit of sitting in front of the stereo, changing LPs like a short-order cook flipping pancakes, Al Green to Beethoven's "Pastorale" Symphony to Dave Brubeck to Linda Ronstadt and all the time singing along on not one, but ALL the parts.

And now I'm officially middle-aged and on a trajectory toward dotage, I suppose.  I embrace the irony that my depth is my flightiness and I give deep and solemn thanks that I can clap with joy at so many things, all on the same day, and DO.

There's a term for this in German: "Lebenskünstler"--someone who is an artist and whose medium is life.  It sounds much more impressive in German, but really, it's just a fancy way of saying that I'm someone who (still) likes to play dress-up.

culinary stream of consciousness

It started pretty innocently: ever since I moved to the west coast, 3 summers' worth of time, I've been awed by the fact that I can actually get Real.Cherries and Real.Figs and Real.Huckleberries.  Sure, I'm happy about other things, too, but I got over my Salmon.Euphoria pretty quickly, and the catch in my throat when I round a bend and get a glimpse of Mt. Rainier is no longer accompanied by an audible gasp.

But the fruit?  Still inspires actual hand-clapping.  My latest thing is working up glazes for figs, running them under the broiler and then scraping the fruity, bubbly, steaming goo off onto a scoop of hard-frozen vanilla ice cream and then RUNNING to the couch to enjoy it mid-melt.  If I trip, it's no good--pre-melt and post-melt are not the same experience, and plus, there's the mess on the carpet.

Last night I made some with orange juice and balsamic vinegar, and the flavor took me instantly to a childhood place: 711 E. 17th St. in Little Rock, AR, sitting on a counter stool at a bar with a yellow top and a boomerang pattern, watching my great-grandmother, Nanny, making Lane Cake.

I actually hated it.  My little girl palate wasn't down with vinegar in a cake frosting, and Black Walnuts had some sort of acrid thing going on that alarmed me.  And raisins?  Meh.  Too "lunchbox" to be on a cake.  But somehow the taste memory lingered--like a happy virus lying dormant--and it came alive last night, transformed into something that made sense.

Turns out, though, that Nanny's recipe wasn't at all traditional.  I've been poking around on the internet, and hers didn't have candied cherries or coconut or icing, per se.  It was a vanilla-y, butter-y cake (well, oleo-y), and it had a cooked filling that featured vinegar, Black and English walnuts, pecans, and raisins that oozed out from between the layers and down the sides.

So what to do?  I'm thinking of taking my fig/balsamic/orange thing and some of the other components of Nanny's cake and see if I can't come up with a hybrid.   She was a great experimenter, so I feel certain she would approve.

First challenge: I'm not in the Ozarks.  Where do I get Black Walnuts?

 

Good sitting weather.

Sometimes it's not enough to ruminate alone.
Sometimes it's not enough to e-mail and tweet and blog and call and text.

It's good sitting weather outside tonight.

A porch would be called for.

A porch and two rocking chairs and creak-able boards.
And chuck-will's-widows in the distance.
Two friends sitting in the dark, sipping and sighing.

Saying nothing.
Saying everything.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2745380

And here is a response to this post from my far away friend, Lea, who totally got it:

"If I had a mind to
I think Id like to shuffle on down where
I hear they do hear
Chuck Will's Widow in the air

tinkling icecubes in empty glasses
like soft spoken persuasions of longing
no expectations of flutterings
only constant calling

finally soothing, quieting
knowing the song will always be
for those who need to hear
there, diligent on duty"

Lea

Chris, we hardly knew ye.

My friend Chris is dead. Story is, he took his own life Monday. I wasn't there. Truth is, he was always an enigma. The man could tell a story. He is one of the most intriguing figures I'll ever know. Never at peace. Until now. May he finally have some rest.

burnt toast and cow butter

This morning I made some toast to serve as a vehicle for a slather of thick Greek yogurt and peach preserves. Naturally, I burned the toast. I took it from the toaster and carried it over to the sink to scrape, scrape, scrape the burned edges off and redeem the otherwise perfectly good slab of Macrina goodness from the countertop compost bucket AKA fruit fly hotspot.

I've burned lots of toast in my lifetime, and every.single.time.I.do, I think of my maternal grandmother, Mommo. When I was a kid, I spent lots of time at her house on E. 17th St. in Little Rock, where she lived with my grandfather and both her parents. I adored the rest of them, but had a somewhat conflicted relationship with her.

Here's an example of why: once I returned from a year abroad in Germany, and when I emerged from the jetway at the airport to see all the waiting throng (pre-TSA) after 12 months away, and sporting a super fab and hip German haircut, Mommo frowned, put her hands on her hips, and screamed: "Jenifer, why do you deliberately sabotage your appearance??? I HATE that haircut!!!" But that's a different story...

Mommo also had a tendency to burn toast, and in my stubborn child way, I refused to eat it. It was SULLIED! It was not PERFECT!!! Never mind that the toast had been scraped, that there were no more burned edges--there were no EDGES!!! At all!!! It was aesthetically compromised, and I demanded a do-over.

Now I understand why she was so frustrated with me. It's not even that she had been raised during the Great Depression and to throw away salvageable toast was unthinkable, it's just that I've learned in the meantime that the good bits of Macrina toast trump the uneven edge.

Even more puzzling was my childhood aversion to "cow butter." My paternal grandparents lived on a farm and my grandmother churned her own butter. It was ever present on the table and accompanied the homemade biscuits or cornbread that she made for crowds of Cecil B. DeMille proportions at every single meal. Oh, how everyone fawned over that butter. Problem was, I had seen the cow get milked--an unsavory process, to my teensy child eyes--had seen the churning process, had seen Mamaw's batwing arm undulate and flap as she churned, had seen the clots separate from the buttermilk, had seen the paddling to get the water out...and none of that added up in an appetizing way to "butter" for me.

So while everyone else clawed and scratched to get a bit of that creamy goodness on their bread or their cob of corn or their grits, I demanded Sherwin-Williams colored Mazola. Oleo! I wanted a stick of oleo on the table!

I think now of all the butter I missed. Of all the sweat and love and, yes, duty and fatigue, that Mamaw put into it. Of the biscuits she made every night and put in the icebox to haul out in the morning to come to temperature while she milked the cows or fed the chickens, of the aunts and uncles and cousins and the splendid table and the cedar chest I sat on, and the singing and laughter, and the red, red dirt of the road in front of the house, and the cow that produced that butter, and the ridiculous stick of waxy, y-e-l-l-o-w Mazola.

I want a do-over.

signs of life

Between my apartment door and my plot in the community garden--about a block's worth of walk--is the gazebo of the Cascade People's Center. During the day, the benches are empty, and underneath them are plastic grocery bags of stuff, a sleeping bag here, a piece of cardboard there. As soon as dusk approaches, the people who belong to those things return one by one and prepare to stretch out for the night. This is where they live, but they know to be scarce during the light.

The rats, more plentiful, aren't bound by the fear of being ushered away, and they are brazen even in the bright sunshine.

Across from the gazebo is a small grove of flowering trees, under which is ground cover with small, glossy leaves (cool in the heat of the day) and a few rocks and concrete sculptures with mosaic. During our hot spell a couple of weeks ago, the people who are normally gone by day stayed. They didn't sit in the gazebo, but they sat in the cool ground cover under the trees.

Today I walked past that spot and this is what I saw. A Ben and Jerry's container, filled with dried up roses, blueberries, and other flora. Left behind.

I wonder if it was a shrine. Or a memorial.

Or the kind of sign of civilization that causes people to adorn their dinner tables with vases of flowers.

I hope there was once ice cream in that container, and that the people who ate it had good company and together took some comfort from that cold deliciousness.

I thought about picking it up and throwing it away, but on second thought, I determined that it was not trash.

Oh, to be taller. Or more willing to risk brambles.

Water, water everywhere.

Let the record show: on August 13, 2009, at 5:30 PM, your blogmistress heard thunder. At 5:35 PM, she was sitting in her car with the rain coming down in torrents. At 5:40 PM, she drove past the garden, and could swear she saw the hollyhocks straining upward, the fruit trees smiling from canopy to roots.

And now, at home, the window is open and the rain is still coming down. Not an isolated shower, this. Not a tease of droplets, after a parched summer. No, this is the rain that is rhythmic, that creates puddles, that rolls in waves down Fairview toward Lake Union, that causes cars to rev and scream their way up Denny Hill.

One might curse it, if it were December and the veil of wet darkness had grown heavy and with months of winter yet to come.

But it's not. It's August, after dry, after hot, and with more dry forecast.

So for this evening, it is simply relief and grace. I'm tempted to go to the garden and remember what it feels like to pull a weed out of sodden ground, but instead, I will sit by the open window--TV off--with a cup of tea.

Eyes closed.

Just the sound of the rain.

Blackberries on Mercer

I stopped to wait for the "walk" signal during rush hour traffic on Mercer. I saw these blackberries, growing clean out of the pavement. I ate a few, perfect, sweet, plump, and I wished I had a bucket with me.

For an instant the whizzing traffic was the wind sweeping across the field, and the seagulls were Eastern Meadowlarks, and my t-shirt was an apron, and I would pick the berries and put them in my apron, and I would walk back to the house and the screen door would whine and slap as it shut behind me, and there would be a pie and strands of hair glued with sweat to my brow, and my sturdy prairie husband, after a long day of toil, would eat it with no words but with eyes closed in savoring, in appreciation.

Then the light changed and I picked my way through the jam of cars waiting to enter the I-5 ramp.

I might go back tomorrow.

"You were moving very slowly."

Look. I don't really like light opera. I'm not much of a fan of musicals, either ("Spring Awakening" notwithstanding). But I'm a season ticket holder at a certain local theater, and this month's performance was, well, I don't quite know what it was. Wagner meets a barbecue meets the Porter Wagoner show meets a tractor pull meets...yeah. I don't know.

Still, I'm down with camp, and I figured it would be that. And so I enlisted my friend W, a Texan and a foodie, to go along. We started off with a fabulous cold, roasted chicken with a lovely mayonnaise, a bread-tomato salad, and a little wine at Café Presse. We sat outside. The breeze was cool, the sun was out, perfect! The evening was off to a great start!

Got to the theater and settled in. Check. Heard the announcement to turn off cell phones. Check. I took out my iPhone and dutifully flipped the little side switch to silence the thing and put it back in my purse. The...uhhhh...show? spectacle? hootenanny? started and I found my jaw tightening. Everyone around me was acting like this was the most profound thing they'd ever seen or heard, and I was just starting to analyze how that could be when I heard the tell-tale sign of someone's phone. Sigh.

How TIRESOME. I, and everyone else, started craning necks around in indignant disbelief--I mean, I wasn't so sure I liked this particular show, but it's the principle, people! It was very close to me, and the curious thing was that it wasn't a typical ringtone. It was Pink Martini! Pink Martini singing "Donde estas Yolanda" and that's no shrinking violet of a tune. All of a sudden it hit me. That was my Pandora radio on the iPhone, tuned to the Pink Martini station, and it WAS PLAYING. OUT LOUD. IN SPITE OF THE OFF SWITCH. What the...?!?!

My heart went from a dead stop to pounding out of my chest (oh, great, even MORE noise), and I fumbled with my purse and tried every possible way to turn the phone off without removing it from the muffling effect of its dark home. But, I mean, how do you turn a phone off that you think is already, you know, OFF?

I had to take it out. People are practically surrounding me with torches and pitchforks at this point (in their minds and mine), but I finally managed to turn the thing completely off.

I spent most of the rest of the first act trying to get my core body temperature and heart rate back to "normal" range, and eventually settled back into my low-grade disdain for the Teuto-Texan, Tex-Deutsch, uhhh, hybrid thing unfolding in front of me. OK, it was kind of entertaining, and there were some funny lines and songs, and so all was well.

Intermission came, the lights went up, and people dispersed. I recounted with horror to W what had transpired with the phone, and we had a good laugh.

Until a man and a woman appeared in the row in front of us, standing, looking down at me. "Are you the woman with the phone?" Oh, crap. I'm at Friedrichsstrasse border crossing. It's 1983 and I'm in East Berlin and the border guards know I haven't spent all my 25 East Marks and they're on to me, man. "Yeah, I'm terribly sorry, I didn't think it was mine, since I had turned the switch to "silence" and I..." They stopped me, disapprovingly. "You were moving very slowly." Um, well, yeah, I repeated that I, too was looking around for the perpetrator, since I had turned the switch, and... "We saw you and you were moving slowly. In such a situation you must react immediately and..." OK, now WAIT a minute. I interrupted. "Listen, I understand that. What YOU are not hearing is that I didn't think it was my phone! I had turned OFF the phone feature and somehow the radio app got activated--I don't understand myself--but I.DID.NOT.THINK.IT.WAS.MY.PHONE!" Finally, the woman seemed to get it and said I must have been mortified.

Meanwhile, she and her man friend are still towering over me, still have their arms crossed, are still speaking loudly, are still drawing attention to themselves as The Theater Grenzpolizei and me as the person trying to swim my way through the pan-Berlin sewers.

I think they finally just gave up. There's not much of a narrative arc to "earnest" and so they just shuffled back to their seats and sat down.

Oh, and the musical? The costumes were fun, and I'll never hear the word "hogtied" again without thinking of it.

not a fairytale

My personal trainer at the gym keeps telling me to take a "day off" from time to time, and truth be told, that scares me. I know all the reasons I should: avoid boredom; avoid sense of deprivation; rattle my metabolism; give me tools to learn moderation; blahblahblah.

But the great fear is that I will get off the trail, find some beautiful valley, which will lead me to a mountain, which will reveal this and that and yet another thing I should behold...and, oh, the waterfall! and before you know it...I've lost the trail altogether. I will have eaten all the breadcrumbs I left to find my way back and there I'll be. Hansel and Gretel all rolled into one, reclining on the ground, stuffing her face with breadcrumbs at the foot of a waterfall.

footwashing

The news today is HEAT, HEAT, and MORE HEAT.

And from the middle of this record heat wave, here in the 86 degree INTERIOR of my apartment at 8 AM, I have to say I'm tired of it.

I grew up in Arkansas, so I'm no stranger to heat like this. It's unrelenting there in the summer, and the humidity is always wrapped around you like a shawl of thick soup. And even though almost everyone has air conditioning these days, it was not so when I was a child.

And because I was a child, the standard tricks for cooling off were always linked to being cared for: my mom urging me to drink ice water, my dad placing a bowl of ice on the kitchen table and positioning an oscillating fan behind it and making sure that my brother and I were in its path as we ate our supper. My great-grandmother turning on the attic fan at night to pull the slightly cooler air in from outside and taking me to the bathroom to run cold water over my wrists, just at the pulse points: "it will cool your blood so you can sleep!" My other grandmother making all the children sit on the edges of the beds before retiring, as she moved from room to room in the dark with a basin of cold water and a washcloth, bathing our feet before we put them onto the white sheets.

I couldn't help thinking about these things the last few nights as I walked past the gazebo into the community garden at dusk to water my second crop of mustard greens and my beet seedlings for fall.

There were the men and women who frequent the benches and line the mulched beds beneath trees. Their plastic bags were with them, their pants legs rolled up, their shirts open, their hair plastered with sweat to their faces. They had water...I looked for that. But it was miserable. And though a couple smiled and greeted me and remarked on the misery of such temperatures, there were others who lowered their eyes as I passed.

I got to the shed and retrieved the water key and the watering can and set about my business. I wondered what would happen if I gathered up all those people and sat them down on one of the benches, one-by-one, and poured this cool water over their feet. If I would be refreshing them or just washing away my own sense of conflictedness about the social and cultural realities that structured my life and theirs.

I finished watering and walked back through the lushness (why, oh, why, didn't I plant tomatoes, this of all years? I could have even managed okra, I'm certain, with this weather!), and though I wanted to escape out the front entrance, I retraced my steps.

I walked back through the makeshift encampment, and I met the eyes of everyone who met mine.

There is no message to this musing, no end.

It's still very hot.

I miss my grandmothers.

Green beans for Salade Niçoise at Elizabeth's dinner party. New York, 6/20/09

I harvested some garlic scapes tonight.

I harvested some garlic scapes tonight, in order to allow my garlic bulbs to develop more robustly and juicily. Really? No. I harvested some garlic scapes tonight, in order to bring something back from the garden. To have a need for the little knife Zoe helped me find in the shed. To claim something besides a weed. To walk triumphantly back to my apartment, with dirty fingers and green bounty curling around them. To see something new and just picked in my sink. To make something that promises to be delicious and to put it in my refrigerator and know that when I get home after a stressful day at work tomorrow, there will be sunshine and greenness and dirt and community and sweat and pungent, garlicky hope in there to greet me and adorn a plate of pasta.

Nature, meet culture.

Dull and cool.

One of my favorite weathercasters described the current Seattle weather pattern as "dull and cool"--and so, too, is my mood. Not in the dumps, not in the clouds, not happy, not sad, just...dull and cool.

Since I'm a girl of extremes, this is a hard pattern for me to endure. Give me euphoria, I'm fine. Give me wailing-gnashing-of-teeth despair, I can handle it.

But dull and cool? That sends every instinct I have in the direction of something that excites the senses.

Like, oh, say, artisan chocolates. Or a tasting flight of red wines. Or a sampling of different meats at Salumi's.

If I were made of money and time, I could easily transfer that search for heightened sensory input to a Spa Walk. I just made that up, but it would be like an Art Walk. Except that instead of roaming from gallery to gallery, you would roam from spa to spa and try all the different services. Actually, there would be no roaming, because after the first one, you would be so blissed out that you would need to be pushed about on a massage table with wheels, preferably with some Velcro™ tabs keeping the modesty covers from flying off into the Puget Sound.

But you get the idea.

Creekside: or Elective Affinities

You know a weekend is off to a good start when the stranger picking you up at the BART station has decent priorities: no road trip, however short, should begin without coffee, water, a bathroom (input/output) and a GPS. In other words, Noa and I hit it off in an instant.

Both on the invitation list for Elizabeth's 50th birthday party in Sonoma County, we knew each other only as, well, a fellow FOE: friend of Elizabeth. We sorted basic information out in the first few minutes--our connection and history with our mutual friend; level of A/C needed in the car; and tunes or no tunes, and then quickly moved on to the crucial things. Like, should we barrel ahead to Glen Ellen or will anyone notice if we stop at this free tasting at Cline on the right, right there, oh my God, it's free. Virtue won out, and we rolled past, heads craning wistfully in unison.

Elizabeth greeted us at the Gaige House Inn and was rightly proud of the place she had chosen to host us. It was beautiful, well-appointed, and serene, with jetted tubs in the suites and a constant supply of homemade cookies in the main house. The atmosphere was festive, and we all ran about like children afraid to miss something: there were the inviting suites, but oh, a hot tub and a pool, and a creek, and wineries, but look at all the people arriving and the hugging and squeals of recognition and long, evolved relationships playing out in the moments of embrace in the entryway. Just as we would settle back into the deep couches and leather chairs and our heartbeats would slow, someone else arrived, and we all jumped up again, so many panting puppies, clamoring to be part of the welcome. And in truth, it was our reunion, too. Even the ones never met in person were part of the storied pageant of Elizabeth's life, and we had all heard, had all seen.

At sundown, Noa started up to her room to observe the lighting of Shabbat candles. She was encouraged to stay in the living room and the handful of us there gathered around the table with her. In that moment, the peculiarities of our respective religious traditions didn't matter. We were with Noa as she lit the two candles and prayed, and with each other as we considered the week past and the weekend to come in silent, heartfelt connection. I stood with my eyes closed and my mind's voice uttered the names of all those around me, of Elizabeth, of her parents gone before her, of my own loved ones, and then eyes open and "Shabbat Shalom" and kisses all around. A deep, centering breath. An exhalation of peace. All the meanings of Sabbath knitted together and please don't let me cry so early in the weekend.

Neil had inquired at the Fig Café down the road about dinner for such a large group. While they didn't take reservations, they did think they could accommodate us with an hour's notice, so we gathered flashlights and headed single-file down the road in the dark. We must have been a sight to the other diners, all jammed as we were in the entryway, grown men and women giggling and pawing each other, beams still waving madly from the still-on flashlights stuck in coat pockets.

The restaurant staff moved tables together and finally we were seated and enjoying a lovely meal…except for Chad and Harry, whose plan to split a salad and a pizza was dashed by the acoustics in the venue and the fact that Terry was sitting between them. The dotted line of communication yielded up two salads and no pizza. Still, we all had fun and were not thrown out of the restaurant for laughing too much, even when we caused a scene trying to remember the name of the Magic Slate™ children's toy. "No, no, not the Etch-a-Sketch™"--and we all made the knob-turny motion with our two hands in the air, much to the alarm of patrons at the next table. Was this a sign? When a group, double-digit in size, starts to make the knob-turny motion in unison while cackling loudly, it does tend to cause a suspicious narrowing of eyes among those in proximity.

In keeping with the child theme, dessert for most of us was a glorified and decadent ice cream sandwich. Terry, though, chose the Artisan Cheese Plate, which inspired a round of pondering at my end of the table. Just once, I explained, I longed to see a Pasteurized Cheese Plate on the menu. A foil-wrapped wedge of Laughing Cow™, a squirt of Cheez Whiz™, a Kraft™ American Single in its cellophane wrap…and we were off into a pairing dilemma around the proper cracker for such a feast.

By the time we returned to the inn, most of us were starting to fade. A few toddled off to the hot tub, a few to enjoy their luscious suites, and a few had a glass of wine in the living room. I said goodnight and went to #10, filled the tub, cued up The Dale Warland Singers' "Lux Aurumque" on the iPod-outfitted stereo, and engaged the jets. Sacred choral music is not often thought of as the soundtrack to an evening in the Jacuzzi™, I'll grant it. I never claimed to be conventional.

I awoke Saturday and showered and made it to my 9:30 breakfast seating. Eve served me coffee with hot milk and Chad regaled us with stories of, um, his beautiful, beautiful friend Betty. It was moving. Really. I can't repeat it. But it involved a menorah and a nativity scene and that's all I'll say. *wiping tear* I gave Elizabeth a birthday card with an insert. She blushed.

After breakfast, we retired to the drawing room for a refined game of Jenga™. Both Eve and Noa refused to consult the rules, but it was exciting, if unsportsmanlike. While most of the group went to tour wineries, I and Neil and Terry wandered into town and had sandwiches at a sports bar-ish kind of place with aggressive flies and a man in a Hawaiian shirt. I wore my sunglasses. The sky was blue. Audaciously red Japanese maple leaves lined the gutters, and I grinned from ear to ear in sheer relaxation and brazen inattention to the work e-mails piling up in my inbox.

In the afternoon, I had a back facial in the spa room upstairs. This is like a facial, except on one's back--why it's not called a backcial, I couldn't say. But it involved the customary cleansers, exfoliants, and unguents and no shortage of massage. The highlight was the placing of warm rolled towels down either side of my torso, followed by the torturously slow dribbling of lines of hot oil, in sequence, over the whole of my back. I drifted from weeping to sleeping to drooling and back again. I may have asked the aesthetician to marry me in a particularly blissed out moment--I can't promise I didn't.

Everyone re-convened in the main house in their festive dinner party clothes. We filled cars and headed toward El Dorado Kitchen in Sonoma, where we were treated to riches upon riches: Prosecco toasts, nibblies on trays, a fabulous dinner punctuated by tributes and poems and dedications to Elizabeth from her family of friends, and mostly the flushed faces and sore cheek muscles that come from uninterrupted smiling and laughter, not to mention Pinot Noir. Chad, Harry, Robert, and I returned home in the rolling Gospel-mobile, Robert swaddled in his woolen wrap and leading us all in a rousing chorus of "This Little Light of Mine."

Somehow a water blessing ritual morphed into a spontaneous dance party, sacred and profane, seamless. Candace fetched her iPod player and Sharon, Neil, and I became DJ Triple Threat Old School, no doubt, yo. Why Neil had Chris Williamson on his iPod and I had the Weather Girls on mine is anyone's guess, and yet it seemed strangely appropriate.

Sunday morning ushered in the long goodbye. Lingering over breakfast, lingering over coffee, lingering over the newspaper, lingering over the notion that we should all make a pact to do this every year, to form an intentional retirement community at the end of it all (Neil: "this is my kind of assisted living"), to keep expansive and spacious and smile and grace and generous and gift all pedestrian words in our lives' vocabularies. Trust your instincts, indeed.

And now we're all back in our homes, whatever that means. Elizabeth, this blog's for you. We all showered you with words of gratitude for the gift of time, space, each other, and your enduring friendship, and we meant every word. I, for one, know that your best gift was seeing us all happy and in love with the experience you gave us. And you did. And we were.

Thank you, dear friend.

Don't rain on my parade.

But, of course, since this is Seattle, a little rain never stops anyone.

Up at dark:thirty on Black Friday, eager to get downtown with my friend to claim a spot in a parking garage and have breakfast down by the water. I had made a hair appointment for 10:15 the month before, not realizing that it was the biggest shopping day of the year.

But we were in good shape, time-wise, and would have plenty of time to greet the day over coffee, eggs, and a view beforehand.

The closer we got to downtown, the more crowded it got. Surely this wasn't all from shopping (said the clueless nonstrategic shopper to herself under her breath), I mean, there were whole SCHOOLBUSES pulling into surface lots! I knew I was not the most committed to a bargain, and so perhaps there were truly people who made shopping on this day a varsity activity--I was never one of those people, and always chose Varsity Sleeping Late over shopping when given the chance.

But as we inched along in the car, it soon became clear. Long lines of gangly teenagers wearing ill-fitting band uniforms, Santa hats, and carrying all manner of instruments, check. Families with folding chairs, check. A parade! But it was raining! As a relative newcomer to Seattle, my first response was to be devastated for all the parade planners and participants, and then I realized that this was, of course, exactly what "normal" looked like here on the day after Thanksgiving. No one seemed concerned, so I quickly re-calibrated my expectations and looked for parking.

Once settled, we decided to scrap the sit-down breakfast and grabbed a latte and a breakfast snack from my favorite Italian purveyor.

We have a ritual. I enter with a flamboyant "Buon Giorno!" and he always puts his hands over his heart and flirts and tries to speak Italian with me. He knows I am all show and no go when it comes to Italian, but he loves me for trying. I would marry him in a heartbeat, if he promised to talk to me like that every morning.

Back out into the street, hoods pulled up and beverages steaming, we made our way past the staging area. Various kennel club breed groups play heavily in the Seattle parade scene, evidently, since we had to pick our way through sequential gaggles of Scotties, Dalmations, and English Sheepdogs, all bedecked in holiday attire (bless their patient but humiliated little canine hearts). They were delightful. Their owners frightened me as they held umbrellas over their charges.

The high school bands were all over the map. There was the disciplined and organized school from the affluent suburb, counting under their breath, with mascot-appliqued covers for the tubas and music with triplets. They were followed by the ragtag group with a young band leader, all marching out of sequence and playing Christmas medleys in the manageable key of C and in 4/4 time.

The boys in this group looked, to a one, like they would rather be swallowed up into the bowels of hell than submit themselves to the utter humiliation that was befalling them at this moment. Insensitive mothers ran out and got into their sons' faces with video cameras, beaming with pride as the boys closed their eyes in shame, still counting "1,2,3 and 4" as the rain dripped from their noses onto their music.

My favorite was the inner-city drum corps and their parents. The drummers took this as their debut onto the world stage, by God, and they were going to KICK it. Their parents ran through the crowds, staying even with the band, shouting encouragement and announcing "that's my baby!!!!" There was a dance group preceding them from the same school, and they strutted and turned and snapped and threw their heads back and everyone knew they were fine, fine, fine. Yes, ma'am.

I, for my part, indulged in a rare swelling of "oh, why didn't I have a child?" sentiment, as I watched dads hoist little ones onto their shoulders and moms clear the path for THEIR kids to get the candy being thrown from floats.

But that's not where I went with my life. I came here instead. To a life filled with ups and downs, regret and relief, incredible friends and a loving family, annoyances and blessings.

It's the end of the Thanksgiving weekend. I slept some, ate some, talked to many, collected a few experiences, have a refrigerator full of leftovers and an iPhone camera full of memories of a soggy parade.

It's not what my Aunt Mildred would have wanted for me, but I quite like it, all in all.

Not knowing what...

I met D. at the bookstore at noon.

It was already a good day...a holiday, so I slept in. I had just stumbled down the stairs and started making coffee when he called at nine. We had planned to take advantage of the day off by doing something, but we weren't sure what.

Not knowing what--and committing to it--is a fine way to spend a windfall of time.

I padded around the apartment in my jammies for a while, sipping coffee, checking e-mail, deciding not to clean or organize or pay bills or any of those other things that would get in the way of not knowing what.

A quick shower, a pair of jeans (oh, midweek transgression, JEANS!), and out the door to wait for my cab.

I stood in the drizzle, considering the fallen flower blossoms next to the fallen leaves on the ground, and noted that this would not have been possible in Minnesota. There the seasons were distinct. A caesura after each stanza and before the next one began. Summer. Stop. Fall. Stop. Winter. CONTINUE FOREVER AND THEN STOP. Spring. Stop. But in Seattle, the seasons overlap and recede and progress in ways that are more insidious than jarring.

Once at the bookstore, D. and I poked around and picked books up and put them back down again. Not knowing what means you don't want to be heavy laden with books at the start of the day. We crossed the street and took our chances at getting a table at Carmine's. We were just early enough that it worked, and Maria plied us with sausages and polenta and Montepulciano, while Frank Sinatra crooned and Carmine roamed the room and made sure everyone was happy. We were. We laughed and talked and schemed and ate and toasted and knew that such days were gifts.

Back outside, we wandered around Pioneer Square, peeking in stores, tucking little purchases in my bag, not meeting the eyes of the park bench dwellers, wrapped in sodden blankets amidst their woeful lean-to's of bags and cardboard.

Drizzle and chill sent us onto a bus, and we careened along First Avenue to the Pike Place Market, where we wished we had room for the pierogi and bought rosmarino salami for later and regarded the vistas of vegetables and meats while planning the dinner parties we would throw if we were each made of time and money. We tucked into the Athenian and grabbed a booth by the window to watch the gulls and ferries out on the Sound and to warm up and sit for a bit.

We headed up to the core of downtown and said our goodbyes, D. to head back his way and me to walk home. I stopped in my favorite little Italian café and had a cookie and a coffee, the house wine of Seattle.

By now it was dark and had started drizzling again.

I made it home, head down but without the hood of my raincoat, and find myself sitting at the computer now, confronted once again with my Real Life. It's not a bad one, truth be told, and I almost feel guilty for having departures that are no better than the place I live.