Big storm a coming

#blog52 #week35

Watching a storm roll in (on Sanibel Island, three summers ago) 

“There’s a big storm a coming, of this I’ve no doubt
That storm’s gonna blow your little world inside out”
– from It Ain’t the Wind, It’s the Rain by Mary Gauthier

I’m thinking of Hurricane Dorian today, of course. We know it’s coming. We have the technology now to identify and name storms days before they make landfall. But still, that’s about all we know for sure: a big storm’s a coming. We’re not sure when it will hit, or where, or how powerful and destructive it will be by then. This morning it was barreling toward Florida; now it’s expected to ravage the Bahamas and then veer north toward the Carolinas, missing Florida entirely. Unless it changes course again. The storm has a mind of its own.

I started the day thinking of and praying for my friends and colleagues in Florida and now it seems they may be spared. Who do I know near the coast in Georgia and the Carolinas? Time to start sending good vibes their way. What else can you do when the storm’s heading for you? Stock up on bottled water, cereal and bread; board up the windows; get a generator if you can. Evacuate, or hunker down. Prepare for the worst; hope for the best.

It’s an odd spot to be in, when the sun is shining and the sky is blue, but you know — because the meteorologist told you, and showed you the satellite images — that it won’t last long. You wouldn’t know, if you didn’t know.

This morning: blue skies, fluffy white clouds, sunrise through the trees above the church across the street. No sign of storms. 

“It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone”
– from Vampires by Jason Isbell

The first thing I saw this morning, when I opened my eyes and reached for my phone, was a Facebook post from a friend who lost her father last night. She was with him, holding his hand as he took his last breath.

Grandparents’ graves

Mortality is becoming inescapable. Most of my friends have lost parents; some have lost spouses or even children. At 55, I’m increasingly aware that having two living, healthy parents (who are still married to each other!) makes me a lucky anomaly.

And it won’t last. Enjoy the calm blue skies of healthy, intact family while I can. A storm is coming, and there’s nothing I can to do stop it. There’s no knowing when it will hit, or exactly where, or how — but grief already has me in its sights.

Traffic in Atlanta, tonight

“Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody going to emergency
Somebody’s going to jail
You find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door”
– from New York Minute by Don Henley

Flashing lights, a siren, three lanes of the interstate closed. For most of us, old folks trying to get home after a long day, or young folks just heading out while the night is young — an inconvenience that slows us down. But for someone — a sudden, tragic, life-changing event. At the least, a totaled car. At the worst, serious injury or death.

Before a storm; last summer, Folly Beach SC

Sometimes, though, with an actual storm, there’s a moment. When the air is too still, too calm, a little eerie. And then the sky darkens and the breeze begins to blow, and as you hear the first distant thunder the wind on your face feels so good; cool and wild, blowing through your hair.

And you close your eyes and turn toward the wind and say, “Bring it on.” A big storm’s a coming. It always is.

 

Interesting times

#blog52 #week34

“May you live in interesting times.” – purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse

“… deliver us from evil.” – Matthew 6:13

That guy, face-palming in the photo above as the stock market plummeted Friday on the basis of an incoherent twitter rant by the president. He spoke for me and for so many of us this week. All week, every day, all day, as one alarming and surreal headline replaced another.

To recap a few highlights from the past seven days:

• The president floated the idea of buying Greenland, then cancelled a planned state visit to Denmark in a fit of anger when the prime minister rightly dismissed this proposal as absurd.
• The president stated that “any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat — I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
• He then reposted a tweet saying Israeli Jews love him like the “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God.”
• He announced “I am the chosen one,” while gazing up at the sky with his hands outstretched. (He was referring to engaging in a trade war with China.)
• His administration announced that they will seek the power to detain migrant children indefinitely.
• Also stated that they will not provide flu shots to families in detention. (Six children in detention have already died, three in part from the flu.)
• The president said he’s “very seriously” looking at trying to change the Constitution by executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship — something guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
• On Wednesday the Congressional Budget Office reported that the U.S. federal deficit will expand by about $800 billion more than previously expected over the next decade, as a result of increased government spending.
• It finally came to our attention that the Amazon rainforest, which produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen, has been on fire for the past three weeks.

There was more. Presidential “jokes” about serving more than two terms, about giving himself the medal of honor, and about crashing the stock market. What a jokester, that one.

Twitter sums it up

The news defies commentary or even parody these days, leaving me speechless and sputtering. What?!? Wait… why?!?

We’ve almost entirely stopped talking about gun violence and mass shootings, because that was so three-weeks-ago. Who can keep up?

I feel like we’ve all become masters at psychological coping mechanisms like compartmentalization and normalization, able to somehow absorb more horrific, outrageous information every morning and then get on with our day: work, laundry, dinner, plans with friends.

We’re finishing up a series on The Lord’s Prayer at church. Last Sunday, the sermon was about Matthew 6:13: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

I don’t remember everything Pastor Susannah said, but I do remember her assurance that no matter how dark or awful things get, God is with us. God is our Deliverer.

Overwhelmed by the awfulness of the news a few mornings ago, all I could think to do was to pray: “Deliver us from evil.” 

I silently repeated the line again and again, a prayer of desperation, mostly, but also of hope.

And while we wait for deliverance, there is life to be lived and enjoyed, yes, but also work to be done. So much work. That’s overwhelming, too — and guilt-inducing. I’m not doing enough. I use too much plastic; I buy things from companies that have abusive labor practices (Amazon) and records of human rights violations (Starbucks); I am part of the problem.

Google’s internal motto used to be “Don’t be evil.”

They couldn’t live up to it, and I can’t all the time, either.

But I can try. This morning, I joined with a dozen or so of my neighbors and picked up trash on our street, filling garbage bags with discarded diapers, plastic soda and water bottles and empty cigarette cartons. A small act of resistance to make our city more beautiful.

This afternoon I went to the Refugee Career Hub and helped an unemployed immigrant from Liberia complete an online job application. A small act of resistance to make our country more welcoming.

Then I visited two small local businesses, buying flowers for a friend at Candler Park Flowers and humanely raised meat to cook for dinner this week at The Spotted Trotter. Small acts of consumer resistance to support my community’s economy.

And all of those places — walking with our neighbors, at the Career Hub, in the stores — no one talked about buying Greenland, or trade war with China, or the federal deficit or the Amazon rainforest. Not once.

We put those things in their compartments. Some of us say our prayers. And then we get on with our day, resisting evil in any small way we can.

We live in interesting times.

At my local neighborhood flower shop: Plants are good for us.

 

Tonight, we celebrate

#blog52 #week33

Banana pudding, with a candle for the birthday guy

“People who love to eat are always the best people.” – Julia Child

I love that we are a (blended, far-flung) family that celebrates every occasion around a table. Birthdays, holidays, and visits from out-of-towners are an excuse to gather whatever offspring and significant others are available and indulge in an over-the-top feast, complete with cocktails and dessert.

Tonight, we had something (i.e., someone) to celebrate.

This little foodie turned 23 this week

We headed to one of our favorite special occasion restaurants tonight to celebrate Logan.

Gunshow! It’s not just a meal: it’s a culinary adventure.

As a child, Logan was a classic chicken-nuggets-and-mac-and-cheese picky eater, often uninterested in eating anything at all. So it’s been an unexpected delight to find that he has turned into an adventurous omnivore. The dish he was most excited about tonight? Grilled octopus with watermelon and aji amarillo sauce.

Gunshow describes its service as dim sum style: 8 chefs prepare creative small plates and bring them out, circulating around the dining room. With each dish presented, you can choose to pass, or to take one or more for your table. Tonight’s menu offered 14 courses plus three desserts. Our party of six shared one or two of 13 of the main dishes and two desserts. (And felt really guilty telling the chef we’d pass on his beautifully presented roasted mushroom tagliatelle, but we were so full, and saving room for those desserts.)

Bur first: cocktails and birthday gifts

Fried green tomato, succotash, basil aioli

Smoked wings, mint, tahini, harissa

Red snapper, Thai basil cream, squid ink pilaf, kimchi puree

Smorrebrod: Guinness brown bread, peaches, pickles, goat cheese

Logan’s favorite: the grilled octopus

Charred cucumbers, pickled blueberries, huitlacoche, corn ice cream

My favorite: Lobster roll, brioche, lobsteraise, potato chip, lobster salt

Szechuan spiced green beans, sea island red peas, chickpeas

And  more — dishes delicious but unphotogenic, or ones we devoured before I snapped a photo. You get the idea.

 The pleasure of the delectable food was compounded by the joy of sharing it. Between bites we laughed and talked, nearly shouting over the energetic din of the restaurant, sharing news about family, work, travels, future plans, and what we’re watching on Netflix.

I’m even more hungry for tidbits of information about Logan and his life than I am for lobster rolls and rice pudding.

I knew him as an energetic, challenging, funny, loving little boy. I knew him as an angry teen. Then, for a while, I didn’t know him at all. And now I study him, soaking in every minute we’re together, getting to know him as a young man full of surprises and contradictions.

He took his girlfriend (the lovely Raven) to a John Mayer concert. If he could visit any place in the world he would choose Tokyo. He liked Kamala Harris in the Democratic debates. He likes to watch UFC fights with his brother.

I mentally file these facts away as pieces of the Logan puzzle.

We made plans to get together again, soon. At Alex’s house next time. For dinner, of course. More time around the table with my beloveds. Nothing could make my heart happier.

The lighting was a little harsh, but the company was sweet

 

Back on the farm

#blog52 #week32

Dinner in the woods

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” – from Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

It’s hard to untangle who I am from where I’m from. Is it that I feel like a different person when I’m back here, or that I feel more truly like myself?

I am still the girl in the yellow swimsuit, climbing trees with my little sister

Tonight I’m in the basement of the house where I lived from ages 7 to 18. I can hear my parents upstairs, making “getting ready for bed” sounds. I am at home in every sense, as if the last 37 years of living elsewhere have melted away.

Yesterday we went on a family outing to visit the house we lived in before that, from the time I was three months old up until we moved into the new house when I was seven.

The house is still there, and in pretty good shape, because it’s been converted into the clubhouse for a local golf course. Mom, Dad, my sister Jennifer and I walked around the house and yard area with old pictures, trying to identify which trees were still there, where the swing set had been, how the rooms had been reconfigured and repurposed. My younger brother wasn’t born yet when we lived in “the golf course house,” but he and my sister-in-law tagged along patiently, listening to us piecing together 50-year-old memories.

The golf course house, 2019

Inside, it still has the same pine paneling as when I lost my first tooth, circa 1969-1970

Today I went with my parents on a meandering drive, and we went by the house in town where they lived when I was born, where I spent just the first few weeks of my life.

The house in town. Isn’t it adorable?

I don’t have any memories there, obviously, but I loved listening to my parents talk about their time as young newlyweds starting out in the old house that had belonged to Dad’s grandparents, with its unique cupola, and the beautiful stained glass at the top of the front window.

The memories attach themselves to the houses, but it’s not really the structures that make this home.

I do love the land: the sturdy hardwood trees, the rolling hills, the fields of hay and corn and beans.

We drove out to the river, to see the aftermath of this spring’s devastating flood.

The mighty Mississippi, finally back within its banks

People here seem more connected to the earth, the weather, the natural ecosystem.

The way Mom tends to her garden; the way Dad cares for his goats. The way my one-year-old great-nephew strained his neck to stare in awe at the tall trees deep in the woods. They notice everything.

Harvesting a mess of okra to fry up for supper

What kind of farmer gives their livestock names? This kind.

My little sister answers to “Grandma” now

When I head for the airport in the morning, I’ll be leaving home and going home. From my Missouri country people to my Atlanta city people. Restored, reminded, and rooted. Taking a piece of this place with me, always and everywhere.

Morning

Evening

Still talking

#blog52 #week31

In Venice (last month), in love (the last 17 years)

“Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you’re together will be devoted to conversation.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was, perhaps, not a great romantic. But he was onto something. Today, Allen and I celebrate 17 years of marriage and conversation. He’s still my favorite person to talk to, so I interviewed him this week. I used a version of the Proust Questionnaire, a 130-year-old personality quiz originally popularized by the French writer Marcel Proust.

The results of this exercise support the hypothesis that you can definitely live, eat, travel and sleep with someone for 17 years, in near-constant conversation, and still not know things about them. I found several of Allen’s responses surprising. Some were sweet, a few were just weird, one was appalling (to me). I also discovered that I still have some work to do in the area of non-judgmental listening.

8 years ago: our 9th anniversary dinner

And now, a long conversation with my best friend:

Linda: What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Allen: (Long pause) (Mouthing, then whispering, these words repeatedly) Perfect… happiness?

L: You could describe a scenario. Like a perfect day or…? What are the conditions under which you could be perfectly happy?

A: (silence)

L: Do you want to come back to that one?

A: Oh yeah. That… that sounds like a trick question.

L: (laughing) They’re not… there’s no right or wrong answer to any of these. Okay. What is your greatest fear?

A: Alzheimer’s.

L: What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

A: Uh, my judgmental nature.

L: Me too. I mean, about me. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

A: Inability to reason and listen.

L: Which living person do you most admire?

A: Tom Waits.

L: (laughter) Why? That’s just me, asking. What is admirable about Tom Waits?

A: Uh, he’s creative, he’s unique, he’s individual. He has survived so many of our pop culture and music changes… he’s survived and thrived and is now an icon.

L: Interesting answer. What is your greatest extravagance?

A: Fine dining.

L: What is your current state of mind?

A: I’m extremely happy. Not perfectly happy… that’s a trick question.

L: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

A: (long pause) Yeah, I gotta pass on that one.

L: On what occasion do you lie?

A: White lies all the time, when I don’t tell the truth when I’m being nice to someone.

L: Like, to spare someone’s feelings.

A: Right.

L: What do you most dislike about your appearance?

A: My balding.

L: Which living person do you most despise?

A: Uhhh. Hillary Clinton.

L: Oh my god! (audible gasp) That… oh my god. I have to recover from that.

A: Okay.

L: (Sigh) I can’t — I, you know — I want to ask you why, but I don’t, because then we’d just…. It doesn’t matter. That’s a terrible answer. Um…. there are no right or wrong answers. That’s a terrible answer. Question 11. What is the quality you most like in a man?

A: Honesty.

L: What is the quality you most like in a woman?

A: Openness.

L: Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

A: Awesome.

L: What or who is the greatest love of your life?

A: Linda Dawn Stone.

L: (laughing) There is a wrong or right answer to that one!

A: I was wondering what’s the trick there.

L: I didn’t write these questions. They’re Proust’s questions. When and where were you happiest?

A: That one little bay that we ended up at on the walk around Dingle [Ireland], that had the boat in that little bitty bay. That was the happiest I’ve ever been.

L: Hmm. Which talent would you most like to have?

A: Musicality.

L: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

A: Get rid of my gut. I can’t change my baldness, so… I can change my gut.

L: What do you consider your greatest achievement?

A: Probably my small part in raising two extremely capable and loving and mature and intelligent daughters.

L: Number 20: If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

A: A rock star.

L: (laughter) Where would you most like to live?

A: (sigh) Inman Park. (laughter)

L: What is your most treasured possession?

A: My album collection.

L: Really? What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

A: In general, or personally?

L: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery. Like, what’s the most miserable thing you can think of.

A: The desire to kill yourself.

L: What is your favorite occupation?

A: Doctors.

L: What is your most marked characteristic?

A: My weird sense of humor.

L: Number 26, What do you most value in your friends?

A: Sense of humor.

L: Who are your favorite writers?

A: (sigh) How many do I get to list?

L: It’s an open-ended question.

A: Vonnegut. Steinbeck, Faulkner. Anne Rice, Stephen King. That’s a good start.

L: Who is your hero of fiction?

A: Joad.

L: Tom Joad from… Grapes of Wrath? Is that what he’s in?

A: Yeah.

L: Which historical figure do you most identify with?

A: Joan of Arc.

L: Who are your heroes in real life?

A: Vince Dooley.

L: (looong pause) Okay. What are your favorite names?

A: Chloe. Zoe.

L: What is it that you most dislike?

A: Shitty drivers.

L: What is your greatest regret? (silence) Only two more questions after this.

A: (long pause)

L: Just answer honestly. Don’t worry about the fact that I said I was going to put it on my blog. I could always leave it out.

A: I don’t regret anything. All my mistakes led me to where I am.

L: How would you like to die?

A: In my sleep.

L: What is your motto?

A: “Whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive.”

L: That’s the end of the Proust quiz. Do you want to go back to the first question, that you skipped, which was, “What is your idea of perfect happiness?”

A: No.

L: Bonus question: What would you say is the secret to a long and happy marriage?

A: Listening.

L: Thank you!

5 years ago: our 12th anniversary