Queen Anne Hill - Seattle, Washington
February, 25, 2012 - cold and windy, with off-and-on rain

About the seeds - (see previous posting):
Nothing . . . not in the cup - and nothing growing out of my ears.
But the roses out in the garden got the go-go message . . .

Around Valentine’s Day or when the yellow forsythia begins blooming, it’s time to prune the roses. Rake up the soil. Fertilize. Drench with systemic insecticide. Spray for bugs. And water. One step a day for a week. Done.
Thus it is announced to the roses that it’s time to go to work.

If you do the job right, when you’ve finished the roses should look like stunted, knobby victims of a chainsaw massacre. I don’t like doing this.
Still, it’s the protocol. But I’m just not at ease with what feels like a deliberate act of sadomasochism. I usually apologize while I’m cutting.
Never-the-less, the roses were properly pruned and provoked.
And in a week’s time they started leafing out, stems swelling with juice.

Maybe I should take my little cup of seeds out to the rose patch.
“Look, this is what’s supposed to be happening. Get it? Do it!”
Maybe my mother-in-law will volunteer crank up her prayer routine again.

ARGENTINA

Argentina is a long, long, long way away.
It seldom makes the U.S. news, unless there is a catastrophe.
Such as the major train wreck last week in Once (on-say) Station in Buenos Aires. A station I often used when I lived there for a while.
The news kept Argentina on my mind for several days.
Memories floated to the surface of my thinking.

I wonder what happened to Nohelia and her brother . . .
What’s it like tonight in the Plaza Dorrego?
What time is it now in Buenos Aires?

It is that hour that is neither night nor morning: three a.m.
It is high Summer, and still steamy warm at this hour.

The Bar Avilar is crowded with homesick Spaniards and other aficionados of flamenco. There for the music, the dance, and the flamenco Way of Life.

The Bar Avilar is a classic setting for a 1930’s black- and-white film.
Dark night, dark and smoky bar, dark and smoky people, in dark and smoky moods, eating dark and smoky food, and drinking dark red wine.
Very dark.

Except for the chef.

Through a service window I can see into the brightly lit kitchen.
From time to time the pale face of the chef appears.
An alert, animated face - topped by a white chef’s hat.

He keeps glancing out of the window toward the stage, where solo flamenco dancers come and go in response to the guitar player’s choice of music.

Onstage a particularly beautiful dancer stands poised to perform.
The guitar player strums introductory chords.
An older man begins clapping in the Flamenco style.

The chef suddenly raises his eyebrows, and disappears from my view.
Moments later he rushes out of the kitchen and up onto the stage.
Still in his food-stained apron - and with hands raised over his head - he picks up the beat and dances flamenco with skill and passion.

The woman who was onstage dancing moves to the edge of the stage.
She is taller than the chef, but he is somehow larger in his presence.
She accepts her role as his partner, responding to his fervor and energy as he roils around her, clapping his hands, stamping his feet.

The energized crowd shouts encouragement - Ole! Ole! Eso es!

After slashing and pounding the stage to the cataclysmic ending of the song, the little man stands poised with hands held high in triumph, like a matador who has just killed a bull with one thrust of the sword.

The crowd goes wild. Standing ovation. Ole! Ole! Ole!
Joy is not a customary dimension of the flamenco scene.
But the chef has brought smiles and laughter into this venue of dark night of the soul. Ole! Ole! Ole!

The chef rushes offstage as quickly as he came.
His face reappears in the kitchen window.
He places plates of tapas up on the serving shelf.
His eyes and mouth are smiling - he is still dancing . . .

“Is he a cook who likes to dance or a dancer who likes to cook?” I ask.
Nobody seems to know for sure, though the answer is apparent: Both.

Is he Spanish - a Gypsy?
So some say, but nobody seems to know for sure.

Every time I returned to the Bar Avilar, the cook/dancer performed.
He had become a star attraction.
People came just to be there when he launched from the kitchen and danced.
People came to be sustained and lifted up by his food and his dancing.

One night I met the owner of the bar and gathered some facts about the chef.
Was he Spanish? No.
Gypsy? No.
He is Norwegian.
He came to Argentina some years ago as a chef on a cruise ship.
He took shore leave in Buenos Aires, fell in love with tango and flamenco.
And stayed to dance.
He needed a job, the Bar Avilar needed a cook.
But nobody knew about the dancing.
Until the magic night he first launched out of the kitchen.

Does he perform every night?
“No, only when he is moved.”
“What does it take to move him?”
“Well, senor, we never know, but when he is moved, he comes out and dances and we are pleased. His passion is infectious.
He may be Norwegian cook, but in his heart he is a Spanish Gypsy.

He has found himself and we have found him. Ole!”

Come with me . . . imagine . . .
Buenos Aires, Argentina . . .
It is that hour that is neither night nor morning: three a.m.
It is high summer, and still steamy warm at this hour.

The Bar Avilar is crowded with homesick Spaniards and other aficionados of flamenco. There for the music, the dance, and the flamenco Way of Life.

From the kitchen, the chef in his apron, explodes onto the stage.
A small man with a large heart and music in the soles of his shoes.
The Norwegian cook become a Spanish Gypsy King. Ole! Ole! Ole!

“!Como rie la vida!” say the Argentineans - How the life laughs!

Queen Anne Hill - Seattle, Washington
Mid-February, 2012 - cold and windy, with heavy rain all afternoon
The same tomorrow . . . and the next day . . . and so on, and so on.

THE COMING OF THE GREEN, AGAIN . . .

Whenever I’m away from Seattle for a long period of time I have a long list of busyness to tend to when I’m back in town. Necessary stuff. Time-eating stuff. Crawl-around-town-in-traffic-and-find-a-place-to-park Stuff.
Stuff with no joy or pleasure in it. Put-my-head-down-and-just-do-it Stuff. This week: Car serviced, emissions inspection, new license tabs, driver’s license renewal, dry-cleaning, move documents in and out of the safe-deposit at the bank, garage triage, and piles of mail to sort through.

But The Coming of the Green, Again over-rode the busyness . . .

(Thursday morning)
A stare-out-the-window-into-the-cold-windy-rainy-day kind of morning.
Unlike a poet or song-writer, I’m not inspired. Annoyed is my state of being. Because what I see is dirt - flower beds and pots of raked-and-ready dirt.
Dirt the way I left it in late Fall after all the dead plants were cleared away.
And while it is still way too early to plant, it is not too early to want to be out there in the yard - digging in the dirt.
And planting.
The urge has emerged.

The oncoming light of a change in season has reached in through my eyes to activate the part of my brain/heart/soul that yearns for Spring.
The Green inside me is banging the bell of LIFE.
And I want to be out there in the yard - not in the car in traffic.

To hell with it.
Still dressed in suit and tie for town, I did a mental u-turn and drove out to Swanson’s Nursery.
Much to my delight, the parking lot was full of cars.
I am not the only fool for Spring who is out and about.
People still wrapped-and-capped for winter, in raincoats, carrying umbrellas, were roaming around fondling bare-limbed fruits trees, gently touching the brave winter pansies, running their fingers through tubs of fecund compost, and filling their carts with pots of anything that looked like it might bloom soon: dwarf iris, narcissus, daffodils and sweet-smelling hyacinth, and loading up with lots of fearless pansies already waving their little banners of blue and orange and purple and white.
My car and I came home full of Spring.

(Friday afternoon.)
On the desk in front of me as I write are what appear to be tiny stones.
Holding one in the palm of my hand and peering at it with a magnifying glass it looks like a small brown pellet of dirt or a dried-up bean.
In fact it is a seed.
From a packet I bought yesterday at Swanson’s Nursery.
Its scientific name is Tropaeolum Majus.
Its common name is “Spitfire,” a variety of climbing nasturtiums.

If all goes well, six months from now this little stone will have been the source of a virile green vine roping around my porch, waving moon-shaped jade-green leaves and holding up shapely orange flowers.

And some warm July afternoon, I will collect the smallest leaves and the brightest flowers and put them on top of a fine summer salad.
All of that - every last bit of it - is inside this little stony pellet - as possibility and promise.

One of the graces of nasturtiums is that all parts of the plant are edible.
They add a crisp watercress taste to the salad mix.
And eating flowers adds an existential taste to the quality of a summer day.

Alas, it is too early to plant the nasturtium seeds outdoors.
One must wait until the likelihood of frost has passed.
In Seattle March 22nd is the average date of the last frost.
April 15 is the date after which no frost has been recorded.
And this is mid-February.
But I am impatient.

I remember . . .
Kindergarten . . .
Little white paper cups with a cotton ball inside.
And some water.
On top of the cotton, a seed.
The cups were placed in a cookie tin.
The tin was placed on the window sill in the winter sun.
Above the steam heat from the radiator.
And we waited . . .
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . .
And waited . . .
Thursday, Friday . . .
And over the weekend, while we were not watching, the miracle happened.
By Monday the seeds had cracked and something white was reaching down while something green was reaching up.
A tiny plant had come to life.
WOW!
I still remember . . .

It’s been a long time since I did the seed-in-the-cup drill.
But I did it again on Friday.
A brown ceramic tea-cup, a cotton ball, water, and two nasturtium seeds.
On a south-facing window sill to catch the sunlight.

Like a gambler throwing dice at a craps table I shouted at the seeds,
Come on, baby, do it for Bobby!
Bobby needs Spring!

(Saturday afternoon.)
Peering at the two still-inert seeds through the magnifying glass, I see nothing. No sign of life.
I know it’s in there.
But so far, nothing’s happening.
I am impatient.
Come on, come on, come on - do it!

(Sunday morning.)
Nothing . . .
Maybe they’re not seeds - just little rocks after all - I’ve been scammed.
Maybe I should try a new batch - raid my wife’s supply saved from last year.
Maybe I should open another packet of seeds.

I did buy nine packets. (Nine is my lucky number.)
I have California orange poppies, a morning glory mix, blue corn flowers, three other kinds of nasturtiums, a mix of flower seeds to attract hummingbirds, and a mix to attract butterflies.
Enough to cover half the yards in the neighborhood.

The mixes never seem to work out and grow and bloom.
But I buy them because of their possibilities.
In my mind it is high summer and they are doing their job.
The yard is full of flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies.
When I open the packets and poke around in the seeds with my fingers, that’s what I imagine.

(Sunday afternoon.)
When I was a child my father often warned me that if I swallowed a seed - orange, watermelon, grapes - a plant would grow out of my nose and ears.
A harmless father joke, I suppose.
Little did he know how seriously I took the proposition.
Or how often I deliberately experimented with seed-swallowing.
And how anxiously I checked my ears and nose for signs of green sprouts.

The results were disappointing, of course.
But I attributed the failure not to my father’s mischief but to my choice of seeds and lack of information about how to fertilize them.
I even ate some dirt.
Yes, I really did.

Recall that every part of the nasturtium plant is edible.
So . . .

In tribute to my father’s sense of humor . . . in memory of my childhood hopes . . . in the firm belief that maybe I’ll get it right someday . . . and knowing that when it comes to matters of LIFE, anything can happen . . .
I ate three nasturtium seeds on Friday afternoon - just after I placed the other two seeds in the cup.
Maybe this time . . .

(It’s easy, actually - like taking a pill. Think of seeds as a diet supplement.
I popped them into my mouth, swallowed, and washed them on down with a glass of warm water. No dirt this time.)

As I was falling asleep that night, I laughed out loud.
“What’s funny, dear,” my wife asked.
“Wait and see,” said I, imagining the moment in a few days time . . .

“What’s that growing out of your ear, dear?”
“Part of a salad.”
“What?”
“Nasturtiums - just wait until they bloom!”

(Sunday evening.)
Hardly a week goes by now without an announcement from the world of Astronomy that several more exo-planets similar in composition to Earth have been discovered orbiting around a star like our sun.
At a distance compatible with the development of Life.

Then the astronomers throw in the numbers.
There are 100 billion planets just in the Milky Way and 10 billion of them are in this category of possibles.
Most are millions of light years away.

As I am writing I have an image up on my computer screen.
Taken by the Kepler telescope.
Showing one tiny speck of light - an exo-planet.
A possibility.

And in the palm of my hand I am holding another tiny speck.
A nasturtium seed.
Another possibility.
I look at first one and then the other . . .
And out the window at the soft morning light of oncoming Spring.

I will never travel way, way out there.
Maybe someday, somebody will, but not me.
Meanwhile, I am here - like the seed - still full of the possibilities of Life.
Still hopeful . . .
I will never understand it all.
And that’s all right with me . . .

(Monday morning.)
Checking the seeds in the cup with the magnifying glass.
Checking my ears in the bathroom mirror.
It’s just possible that something is happening . . .

“You’re imagining things, dear,” says my wife.

Yes.

Spring.

Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
9 February, 2012

Saw a great bumper sticker today: SAVE A HORSE - RIDE A COWBOY.
The driver of the truck bearing the sign on its bumper was a woman.

There will be a short pause in website postings while I’m traveling back to Seattle and then to Palm Desert, California, for a gallery showing of my wife’s paintings.

Meanwhile, this:

WHAT I WANT . . .

My literary agent in New York asked, “What do you want?”
She meant she wanted to know my publishing priorities.
But the question provoked the wiggy side of my mind.
The first things that came to my mind were a bit off the wall.
Before I gave her a sensible answer, I gave her the following list:

I want to play lead trombone in the first row of a Black college band in the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena on New Year’s Day.

I want all candidates at Republican Party debates to be required to appear naked onstage so that at least some objective truth will be on offer.

I want cigars to be acknowledged as a vegetable and included as a dietary supplement in the sustenance of all the old men in assisted living.

I want the “Starr Spangled Banner” replaced with the song, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” including all the motions at all national sporting events.

I want everyone who owns a dog or cat be required to put the same amount they spend for food and care each year for their pets into a fund to support the homeless and unemployed.

I want every teacher’s salary to be doubled and every class size cut in half.

I want my ex-wife to develop a permanent nasal drip.

I want my abs back.

I want all those fundamentalist people of every religion who think they will be better off in the eternal ever-after to leave for there immediately.

I want little children to look at me, point, laugh, draw me, and color me in.

I want Cheetos, Gummi Bears, and jelly beans to replace the tasteless plastic wafers in Communion in every Christian church as a sign of joy and life.

I want marijuana legalized and given out with high school lunches.

I want a woman president.

In addition to chlorine and fluoride, I want Prozac and Viagra added to the public water supply.

I want the entire internet shut off one day a week.

I want the Boise State Broncos to win the BCS championship in 2012.

I want dancing required in schools and required for citizenship.

I want Rush Limbaugh to have incurable laryngitis.

I want Louise to give me back my high school letterman’s jacket.

I want Robin Williams and Christ Rock appointed to the Supreme Court.

I want to play tambourine with the Gypsy King’s band.

I want my books to be banned by the Catholic Church.

I want to walk out of my house some morning and discover my old Ford Expedition has been turned into a Ferrari by the Hot Car Fairy.

I want mice to shun my house out of fear of my deadly wrath.

I want cauliflower to taste like rib-eye steak.

I want a swing in a tall tree that hangs out over a river.

I want to ride a horse in the grand parade at the Pendleton Roundup.

I want to give Texas back to Mexico

I want everything I want.
And I want somebody else to make it happen and pay for it.

________________

Enough.
That’s how I replied to my literary agent before I got down to business.
And from her in return?
No comment . . .
But, she’s a publishing professional, not a Fairy Godmother.
Maybe I want too much . . . 

Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
Clouds, wind, snow flurries, 25 degrees
7 February, 2012

If you don’t relate to the story that follows, it’s alright.
You’re probably a city person.
This is country stuff – about trucks and dogs – in Moab, Utah.
We don’t relate to a lot of city things - like rapid transit, for example.
The most common rapid transit we experience is moving from the car to the bathroom in the house after a long drive home.

SHAGGY DOG STORY

In small towns way out west most families own a pickup truck.
These vehicles are not transportation so much as they are necessary tools. And no matter how thoughtful you may be about environmental concerns, if you don’t have a pickup truck or a friend or uncle who does, you are living a handicapped life.

Here’s a taste of the attitude of which I speak:
Two men in the Ace Hardware store, at the checkout counter.
One guy looks out the window, turns back to his buddy, and says.
“My god, there’s Woody getting out of a brand new Prius.”
The other guy says, “Yeah, he went over to Junction and bought one for his wife because she’s been yammering at him. But he’s still got his pickup.”
“Well, then . . . he’s OK.”

Now a Prius is a fine and righteous car – don’t get me wrong.
But you just can’t put a chainsaw and a full load of firewood in a Prius.
You can’t haul all the junk in your backyard to the dump in a Prius.
You can’t go off-road up-hill cross-country in a Prius.
And if you get your elk or deer, you can’t bring it and your camping gear and your guns and your dogs home in a Prius.
You can’t even tie the elk on the roof or the hood or the fender of a Prius.
And you can’t fit six kids and their sleds into a Prius.
For all of these endeavors you’ve got to have a 4x4 pickup truck.

(If Prius starts making a pickup truck, well, then, maybe . . .)
When you do get a pickup, then your first after-market accessory is a dog.
If you’ve already got a dog, fine.
But if you don’t, you will need at least one big outdoor dog even before you get a front-end winch and a gun rack.
The dog is required equipment for a pickup truck.
And if you don’t understand why, then you are city, not country.
And it won’t do any more good trying to explain that to you than if you tried to explain the meaning of modern jazz to the guys in the Ace Hardware.

I tell you all this as a set-up for a circus act I witnessed today.

I went into town to the Ace Hardware store to get a gallon of black paint.
Most of the vehicles in the parking lot were pickup trucks.
All but one had a dog or two in the back bed.

(As an aside I’ll mention how you can tell a city dog from a country dog.
A city dog will bark at you from its safety behind window glass.
But a country dog will ignore you – unless you touch its truck . . .)

So. An old guy in an old blue Ford pickup backed out of the parking lot and drove ahead of me down Main Street, which is also Highway 191 South.

His old dog took up its position in back – two legs in the bed, two legs up on the narrow shelf at the edge of the bed, and head sticking out around the side of the truck, pointed into the wind.

Big black-and-white, flop-eared, long-haired mongrel animal.
A truly shaggy dog.

With me following behind in my old Ford Expedition (an almost truck), the blue pickup moved along in no particular hurry, headed south out of town.

There’s one stop light before the open road. Out by the McDonald’s.
The light was yellow, so we coasted on through – or started to coast on through . . .

Suddenly a couple of tourists in high-tech Lycra outfits and Martian helmets shot out of the McDonald’s parking lot on a tandem bike, not yet coordinated enough in their co-cycling moves to pay attention to the on-coming traffic.

The old guy in the pickup truck hit his brakes hard to miss the bicycle.
The sudden stop caught his dog by surprise, and it was propelled forward in slow motion over the roof and hood of the truck.

Disaster?
No. No, not at all.

The dog rolled a couple of times, made a re-entry recovery move a high-diver would be proud of, and landed safely on its feet . . . in a run.

The driver of the pickup truck slowed down alongside the running dog, honked his horn, and the dog leaped back into the bed of the truck, and resumed his post.
And the truck rolled on down the highway.

Damn! That was good! Not the first time that’s happened, I bet . . . maybe they’ve even practiced it a few times out on the ranch.

I picked up speed and passed them.

I honked and waved to the old guy in his old pickup as I passed him.
He waved back.

The old shaggy dog looked over at me.

I know dogs can’t smile.

But if he could’ve, he would’ve.

Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
Clouds, wind, snow flurries, 25 degrees
6 February, 2012

Astronomical matters: One goal for my year was to be somewhere special each month at the rising of the full moon. In January I went to Monument Valley, Arizona, for a spectacular experience.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, I planned to travel up to Dead Horse Point on the mesa rim overlooking all of Canyonlands National Park and the La Sal Mountains.
After all the weeks of clear winter nights we have clouds and snow.
So it goes . . .
But if it’s clear where you are on Tuesday night, take a look . . .

DOING THE STROLL . . . Just Looking, part 2

When I was a freshman in college I belonged to the University of Colorado Mountaineering Club. An energetic and virile bunch, status came with the number of miles you had hiked and the number of peaks you had climbed.

Sometimes, on a Saturday evening after a football game, we would gather and march madly off uphill in the dark just to see how many miles we could cover before midnight or in 6 hours. We wore counting gauges on our belts.
We were adrenalin-driven mileage maniacs, peak baggers.

For many years afterward I launched out into the Great Beyond in that spirit. Up mountains, down rivers, cross country.
Have a goal, a destination, an X marked on a map.
Get some friends. Go! Get there. Get back. Cross that off the list.
Onward!

That was then.
And this . . . is now. . . .
It’s not that I’m older and slower, but perhaps wiser . . .

Now I’m mainly a solitary stroller in the world.
A wanderer who stops and starts and doesn’t cover a lot of miles.
My goal is not to get somewhere and back.
It’s just to be outside wherever I am with mindful attention.
Not to go far, but to go well.
Not to go fast, but to go with a graceful slowness.
And to go alone quietly, not with talky friends.
Even the friends I like most.
Talky is for cocktail parties.

I think back on all I must have missed when I was goal-and-miles oriented.
What I never saw, never smelled, never touched, never tasted, never heard.
So very much . . .

As I write now I consider what I experienced this morning –

- the smell of wood smoke drifting up the valley from some far off chimney,

- well-built bird’s nests hanging empty in bare winter trees,

- wild turkey tracks that look lie arrows pointing somewhere,

- patterns of ice crystals that look like secret writing,

- the fighter pilot flight of swift finches across the sky,

- followed by a heavy bomber squadron of ravens,

- the footprints in new snow of someone else . . . also out alone,

- the taste of cold water scooped up in my hands from Pack Creek,

- the tingling shock of icy water splashed on my face,

- the foggy puffs of my breath pumped up and out of my lungs,

- and the sound of my own heart pounding in the silence of the bright day.

Taking an hour to cover a half mile is not speed hiking.
At most I’d qualify for a half-mile patch on my parka this morning.
Does it matter?
No.

As I write I’m reminded of three encounters I had in stores in town this week. Each with the same terse question and answer.

“Can I help you?”
“Thanks, just looking.”

How many times have I had that brief exchange in a store?
One salesman told me it was a typical guy response.
Sales people assume that a woman customer is shopping and is pleased to be asked if she’d like assistance.
A man usually knows exactly what he’s come for and goes right to it.
But if he’s wandering around, he’ll usually say when asked, Just Looking.
(Probably while his wife is shopping.)

There really is a difference between Just Looking and Shopping.

If you shift the venue from a store to the World, Shopping is a search process that suggest purchasing something to take home.

Just Looking is an attitude about being in the World.
Just Looking is a Way.

Its mode is random strolling.
Its timing is measured in slowness.
Its success does not rely on what you paid for something at the store, but what you brought home in your heart and mind and soul and memory.

Just Looking is free.