No Spirit Moves Me

It doesn’t feel at all like Christmas. In spite of the fact that I’ve spent the past three days cooking, packaging and preparing to mail to my three siblings and my daughter an abundance of fudge, bourbon balls and pralines, as I do every year. It only dawned on me last night that we haven’t put up a tree yet, and here it is the 17^th already. Well, that’s not so bad, I guess. When I was a child the occasion of my birthday on the 20^th was the day my parents put up the tree. Not what I’d wanted exactly, but we were poor, so since there was never going to be a party, this was a reasonable substitute for a celebration.

I’m trying to figure out why this year feels so un-Christmasy. When I said to my partner last night, “Well, should we put up a tree?” as he sat reading in front of the TV, his response was as non-committal as my suggestion. He told me that when he stopped into Home Depot the other day he’d gone into the garden department just to have a look at their trees and there was not another soul in there looking. Seems almost eerie. Like maybe it’s not really December?

I suppose it’s the economy. We’re just two old retirees, but I would think for those thousands who’ve lost jobs, and for whom the squabbling in Congress holds unmentionable animosity, it’s probably especially difficult to summon up the spirit of giving. I can’t even imagine the Dickensian Christmas a lot of folks are having this year while our rich elected officials and their wealthy cronies dicker over how much of their gazillions they get to keep at our behest.

I read a quote by Jack London recently. Paraphrased, it said something like “Charity is not the bone to the dog. Charity is sharing the bone with the dog when you’re both hungry.” You gotta wonder about the wealthy in this country – they have no earthly idea what being down and out really means. I’m pretty sure they can’t even imagine trying to feed a family of four, or six, or more, with limited funds. I have a semi-wealthy friend whose idea of cutting back is getting one manicure a week instead of two. I recently heard some wealthy person interviewed on TV who’d decided she had too many coats already so she wouldn’t  buy another one, this year. Really?  Too many coats. Must be nice. Some of us in this country feel lucky to have one. I wonder if these wealthy know how that feels. I wonder if they know what shopping for underwear in Wal Mart, instead of Victoria Secret, feels like. I wonder if they’ve ever considered that $28 for a single pair of panties is just a little bit outrageous, especially when there are people who will feed their kids for three days on that amount.  I wonder if they realize that it’s some of our country’s poorest who manage to dig into their threadbare pockets to pull out change for the Salvation Army bell-ringer that the wealthy walk right past. Sharing the bone with the dog when they’re both hungry. Yeah, that will yank the Christmas spirit right out of you, just knowing how wealth works in this great land of ours.

We’re turning into India, you know. We’re developing a real caste system. And soon it will be as ingrained as it is there, so that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of someone from a lower caste moving into a better one. That’s what the wealthy want I think. And soon they’re going to have it. The fight is going out of most of us. Right along with our Christmas spirit.

A Trip to England

Three weeks ago, after years of talking about it, my partner and I finally went to the UK. Flew into Heathrow, rented a car, and headed directly for the countryside, confining our tour to the regions of the Cotswolds, Devon and Cornwall. We drove more than 1400 miles, slept in six different B&Bs, 3 pubs, or Ale Houses – some of them, as we discovered, provide lodging and breakfast – and one motel. Enjoyed the best home cooking I’ve had since I was a child. Met some wonderful people. And saw what has to be some of the most beautiful (and unspoiled by modern man) landscapes on the planet.  Who knew this tiny country was so enormous?

The first part of our adventure, as you might imagine, was overcoming the mental challenge of driving on the opposite side of the road, from the opposite side of the car. Towards the end of our journey we’d nearly mastered it.  With gentle reminders to ourselves – for example, a note taped to the steering wheel to remind us each morning as we set out which side of the road we needed to be on – we managed to avoid even a single incident. Though there were some near death experiences, and quite a bit of frantic shouting, as we negotiated the first several roundabouts.

The second thing we did was decide NOT to see London, tempting as it was. We felt one cannot  do London justice on the fly –  a guidebook I’d picked up advised at least five full days – and since I’ve dreamed about the English countryside since I was a child (The Secret Garden was my all-time favorite childhood book), it seemed we’d only make ourselves crazy trying to fit it all in. So our plan is to return in a couple of years and do London first and foremost. 

Setting out from the Hertz rental stand at Heathrow in our little blue Corsa, we headed northwest in the general direction of the B&B we’d booked for our first two nights – the only B&B we’d pre-booked. All the other nights our rooming was arranged on the fly, which, for the most part, worked quite well for us. It kept us from having to stick to any sort of schedule or route. That first day, though, we were grateful to have a plan. I suffered a lot more than I’d imagined from jet lag – even though it was a night-time flight that got us into London at 8AM local time, I’d not slept as I’d thought I would on the plane. I remember very little about that first day except that, as beautiful and different as everything was, I kept nodding off. We finally pulled into the driveway of the Brookthorpe Lodge near Gloucester at 7PM, and were asleep by 7:30.

But the following morning, refreshed, we began our tour in earnest – starting with a home cooked Full English breakfast, my first ever. Don’t believe anything you’ve ever heard before about English food not being good, or, at best, being boring. I had not one single bad meal the whole time we were there. In fact, it’s difficult for me, a true foodie, to stop talking about all the good things we ate. Here’s a typical full English breakfast: First a selection of cereals and fruit. Then, eggs cooked to order, one or two, either fried, scrambled, coddled or boiled; bacon, which is nothing like American bacon, but more like very thinly sliced ham streaked with just enough fat to make it cook up crispy but tender; sausages, also nothing like our typical breakfast links, but also not delicious by my standards – a bit mushy and seasoned rather blandly – although on two occasions I did have some that were quite good; “baked” beans, which I finally began rejecting after the second or third attempt to like them because it seems all they do is warm the contents of a can of Heinz beans to which they add no additional seasoning – beans for breakfast have never turned me on, these turned  me off; grilled tomatoes – yes, whole fresh tomatoes halved and grilled and quite tasty; grilled or sautéed mushrooms – much more delicious than I would have ever thought with breakfast; fried bread, which is exactly what it sounds like – a slice of white bread fried in oil, not delicious, but interesting; and toast of your choice, “white or dark” – you order it by the color, not the grain. In some places it was homemade, in others not. And of course coffee (French pressed, always) or tea.

Beginning each day with such a feast, we did not need to eat again until supper, for which we did not usually stop until after dark, cramming all the sightseeing we could into the daylight hours. Though we did stop a couple of times for Cream Tea, which like the breakfasts, is always the same: a pot of tea served with either one or two scones, fresh fruit preserves and clotted cream.  Clotted cream is heavy cream that has been allowed to slowly warm until the whey has separated and settled to the bottom. The custardy cream on the top is skimmed off and this is what you pile onto your scone along with the preserves. Oh. My. God. I could not get enough of it. Yummy. Yummy. Yummy. Oh, and the tea was pretty good too. In the village of Winchcombe, we were pleasantly surprised when the proprietress of a tiny tea shop and her husband, who live upstairs, joined us as we gorged ourselves on homemade scones and delightful conversation. For an hour we chatted like old friends beneath the low, exposed-beam ceiling and beside an ancient hearth original to the house, which was, to the best they’d been able to determine, at least 400 years old. Amazing.

Basically our tour took us first into the Cotswolds, from Stroud to Warwick (where we spent a full four hours touring the amazing Warwick Castle – a must see), Gloucester, Bath (where we toured the ancient Roman baths, uncovered in the late 1800s by a crew laying sewers and subsequently excavated, and amazing in their “modern” technology and structure); to Leominster to see the ubiquitous “black and white” houses in charming villages such as Weobly and Pembridge; to Wells, and then Glastonbury, town of modern day mystics and healers who still worship the ancient Druids; then across the Exmoor Forest to Tintagel (home of the legendary King Arthur) and Boscastle and the numerous other unique and charming villages along the coast in Cornwall. My favorite of all was St. Just with its high and narrow, twisted streets and stone walls overlooking a tiny harbor where fishing boats bobbed on the incoming tide. Then we turned back towards London, heading across the Dartmoor, which was shrouded in such a thick gray mist that I half expected to see Sherlock himself materialize from the gloom, or perhaps the legendary hound of the Baskervilles; to Exeter, Shaftsbury, Salisbury; and then across the Salisbury plains to Stonehenge (awesome!), Old Sarum and Avebury, another henge (a henge is circular monument or ritural site) much like Stonehenge though on a wider scale, with the village of Avebury constructed right smack in the middle of the ancient circle of upright stones! We ended our last day there in Avebury with a delightful dinner at the Red Lion pub and then a comfortable night in an ancient tavern, now a B&B, called The New Inn.

We crammed a lot of sightseeing into our two weeks, but, oh, there is still so much more to see. I would advise anyone planning a trip to England to narrow your scope, as we did, and confine your visit to one or two regions so that you can enjoy those unique places on a personal level, so you can meet the people – who were always friendly and eager to offer directions and advice – so that you can get out and take walks and tours, drive the narrow hedge-lined roadways, and really begin to feel as if you know the place. And then, as we have already done, plan future jaunts to see all the rest of that amazing country. I can’t wait!

On Salvaging and Saving a City in Ruins

At dinner with friends in the days just following Katrina, our host disparaged aloud the merit of rebuilding New Orleans. I became enraged at his cheek – that he would dispatch an entire city – a place he admitted to never having even visited – with the same abandon he’d just employed to pick a bit of food from between his teeth. Though my anger finally cooled, even today I regret that I held my tongue that night. But this week, as seemingly every media source covers the slow but remarkable comeback over the past five years of that city and its people, I can, figuratively at least, thumb my nose at our friend’s callous opinions.

My first visit to New Orleans was in May 1970 for my honeymoon. What I remember most is the delicious oysters and the relentless heat. I wasn’t crazy about the place, and remarked at the time that while it was great to visit, I would never want to live there. Two years later however, I did live there. And loved it. My affair with New Orleans lasted thirty-two years – 29 longer than the marriage that first took me there. I’d vowed never to leave. Don’t ask me why. I can’t explain the hold that city can have on a person. No one ever has, though many have tried. It’s a place that gets under your skin, into your blood, into the very marrow that builds your blood. It’s in your conscious, your subconscious. It becomes the way you think. It becomes the decisions you make, the values you cherish, the culture you identify with, the spoon with which you feed your babies. Don’t ask me to explain that. It just is.

In November, 2004, in spite of my reluctance, I did finally, tearfully, bid adieu to that marvelous place to begin a new life in the northeast. Not certain I would be able to endure the transition, I did not sell my house, my cute Victorian whose every inch I had scraped and painted and restored myself, but rented it instead to an understanding couple who promised to take good care of it. Nine months later my partner and I sat with mouths agape to watch the news coverage of the worst natural disaster to hit the continental US in recorded history. Not knowing, in the initial hours and days, if my house – three blocks from the Mississippi River – still stood or anything, really, about what the damages were. All we knew was that our beloved city was on her knees.

Since the storm, whenever it comes up in introductions that we are from New Orleans, I always feel a rush to explain that we moved before the storm. Survivor’s guilt I suppose, an unexpressed but deeply felt shame – don’t feel sorry for us, I want to say, we got out in time, all we lost was a car and a roof. Feeling almost as though I should have been there, that I deserted her in her hour of greatest need. Of course this is silly, but it’s how it feels to have known a place so well (too well, in fact, so that feelings of love at times devolved into waves of ambivalence), only to have it collapse as soon as I turned my back.

With the same perverted appetite and tear-filled eyes as five years ago I watched again, all this past week, those video clips of people on rooftops, waving from attic windows, or crowded along the streets beside the Superdome and on interstate overpasses; the mile after mile of vacant lots where homes once stood, the flyover shots of a city inundated with filthy waters, where bodies floated amid the detritus of dreams torn asunder. Unable to avert my eyes, as one watches those old films of the Hindenburg’s tragic final flight, oh-the-humanity, those scenes, the tragic annihilation of the city I knew, into whose nooks and crannies I had peered with a curious and jaundiced eye over those many years in love with her, the city whose embrace I carried with me like a battered teddy when finally I left her, now on her knees, bedraggled and weeping more than salty tears. Weeping her very life from every pore.

It’s not easy to explain the joy I feel about New Orleans’ extraordinary recovery. It's bittersweet, because I know that even as she rises like a broken-winged Phoenix, she will never be the same. The scars may one day disappear, but always now will be a pervasive vulnerability that was not there before. A weakness barely visible, just beneath the surface.

I sold my house earlier this year. I still ache with the knowledge that I will never again live in New Orleans, not for any reason other than that I have a new life here now. But New Orleans will always be a part of me. And though battered yet again by the BP oil spill, and no doubt to face problems in the future with storms increasing and sea levels rising, still one can’t just turn one’s back on a place like New Orleans, any more than one would turn one’s back on San Francisco, or Chicago, or even Cleveland, for that matter. New Orleans is like a living soul, a unique and spirited individual who deserves our time, attention and respect. She is a part of our country’s history. She is a part of us. US.

Efforts

I'm writing a memoir. Just saying that sounds pretentious. As though I were famous, or infamous, and that people would actually be curious enough to read about my life. Hardly. But, I'm writing it anyway. What I want it to say is that in spite of all the trauma, I was a happy kid. When I told a friend that once, he was incredulous. "How can you say you had a happy childhood when all that other stuff happened?" he asked. So, my memoir is my attempt to answer that. I was a happy child, except on the days when I wasn't. And I have happy memories, except for those that aren't. I want to convey this in the memoir. But, so far, all I can seem to write is the sad stuff. I know I'm a harsh critic of my own work, but I don't think anyone wants to read a book that has them crying from the outset. Do they?

Day One

So now I have a blog. I wonder what I'm doing here. Another diversion from writing I suppose. Keeping my butt in the chair, but finding yet another way to avoid the dreaded blank page.