Green Almonds

"It’s Beth." The caregiver was trying to hand him the telephone. I was trying a second time; J. had just called and his father had sounded like he couldn’t hear him; after a few words he had put the phone down on the bed and apparently given up. When I called back the caregiver said he wouldn’t talk to her at all this afternoon, and asked grumpily why she kept waking him up in the middle of the night. "Do you want to try?" she had asked, and I said sure. "It’s Beth. Your daughter-in-law," she repeated. In the background I heard him say, "I can’t talk to ANYone."

"It’s OK," I told her, when she came back on and apologetically tried to explain. "It’s getting pretty impossible to talk to him on the phone. Don’t worry."

He’ll be 99 on Wednesday. I wonder if he knows, somehow. We’re planning to be there, but there’s not much point having a celebration, though we may make a cake for the care team as a small way of acknowledging all their efforts. As he slips further and further away, into places and times where we cannot follow, we all try to keep him contented and comfortable, with varying degrees of success. He’s confused most of the time now, always turned upside down about what time of day it is, often about where, and sometimes about who. On good days he’s still sweet and amusing, speaking in Arabic or sometimes in French, and apologizing when the caregivers remind him they can’t understand him. On bad days he’s confused, angry, frustrated. But even on good days, lucid comments follow disoriented ones, and there are long spaces between thoughts and utterances; his eyes close as if he’s asleep, but often he’s just resting, as if each thought is a heavy weight to gather and then push out onto his tongue.

Last week I came into the apartment after I got back from visiting my own father, who at 83 had just competed – and done quite well – in table tennis at the New York State senior games; I can barely keep up with him. My father-in-law was dressed and sitting in his wheelchair in the sun on his balcony, and when he saw my head appear behind his son’s, his eyes brightened and he smiled. "Hello!" he said. "Sit down. How was your father?" But the conversation faltered quickly; he just seemed too tired to sustain any train of thought and I didn’t want to contribute to his fatigue. I sat and held his hand, unsure if he was aware of me, and after a while he asked to go inside out of the sun.

After a short rest he opened his eye and seemed more alert and connected. He asked what we were eating these days. I mentioned a few things, and said that the grapes had been good lately.

"Such grapes we had from my uncle’s vineyards in Bludan!" he exclaimed.

"What else?" I asked.

"Figs, apples…"

"Are you hungry now?"

"Not hungry, but I feel like I want to eat."

"You mean, just have something to chew on?"

"Yes," he smiled, as if he was relieved someone understood, but when the three of us suggested several things, he just shook his head no, smiling rather sadly.

"He’s been asking for nuts today but he refuses what I offer," the caregiver said. She was a young woman of twenty-two or so, pretty, with dark hair and eyes, wearing large star-shaped earrings.

"What kind of nuts have you been thinking about?" I asked him.

"Green almonds."

"Ah! I’ve seen them but never eaten any. How do you do it?"

He explained how you crack and remove the outer covering, to reveal another shell that has to be removed in turn.

"Sounds like a lot of work."

"Yes, but that’s the point. You sit and do it all day… We got those in Bludan too, there were lots of different kinds of nuts in my uncle’s orchard."

"I’ll look this week and see if I can find you any, sometimes they have them at the market."

He seemed to sleep again after this burst of conversation, and then opened his eyes. "Tell me," he said, lowering his voice just slightly and giving a small nod toward the caregiver who sat at the desk a mere six feet away. "Is this a Bludani girl?"

"I don’t know," I said, looking over at her; she smiled. "What do you think?"

He gave her another appraising glance and said, "I don’t know where these girls come from. But I think this one looks more like a city girl."

 

Floating

Wishing you all a peaceful weekend.

 

Are We What We Wear?

Warning: rare judgmental rant ahead. Above, shopping and cafe sitting on St. Denis, Montreal

They’ve got to be kidding.

I’ve always shopped in consignment stores – my mother-in-law, smiling slyly, used to call them her "boutiques" – and many of my favorite pieces of clothing have come from them, like the dark blue Italian wool jacket I’ve worn for countless business meetings – $50, ten years ago. I used to make a lot of my clothes (before everything we put on our backs was made cheaply offshore) and still would if I had more time. I grew up sewing and knitting, I read about couture, clothes and their design and construction are still very interesting to me.  But paying more than $100 for an item of clothing, with a few rare exceptions like boots or a coat or something really special, has always struck me as, frankly, obscene; my price range is more like $10-$50, tops. I was shocked to read the article linked to above. People are starving and the way to feel less guilty is to buy your one-use evening gown for $3000 on E-Bay? What kind of a planet are these people living on?

Maybe living in Montreal has made me especially sensitive to excess and ultra-consumerism, here where style tends to be individual and hip, and "cheap" is considered smart rather than déclassé. It certainly makes me ashamed of my fellow Americans limping to parties in their recycled Manolo Blahniks – especially those who whimper about trying to live "green." Give me a break.

What’s your clothes-buying policy? Do you have an upper limit that feels OK to you?

 

Green Morning

1. The Green Mountains near Killington and Sherburne, Vermont

2. A lush stand of Osmunda Claytonia, interrupted fern – at my feet as I took photo #1.

3. Farmland just south of Fort Anne, New York, looking back toward Vermont

The drive west last week, across Vermont and into New York, was one of the most ethereal and beautiful trips I’ve ever made over that route. I traveled in silence, in the early morning, alone. The clouds still hung low over the Green Mountains, and a hazy fog persisted in the flatter pastures on the border between the two states south of Lake George – it would burn off later in the morning and expose the extreme heat we’ve had since. But in those early morning hours, the mountains and farmland were dreamy and quiet and empty as the space in which I was traveling.

Later, I wrote in my head: At Amsterdam I made a snap decision not to take the Thruway but to drop down onto Rt. 20. To do that you cross the Hudson and follow Rt. 30, a winding road up into the hills and little towns beyond the river and the city, past old Dutch farms with windmills and red-and-white arches painted on the doors of ancient slate-roofed barns. At Esperance you turn left, and there it unmistakably is, the reason I wanted to come this way: a chance to spend the next two hours in the pastoral landscape of central New York I think of as home, instead of driving in the flat floodplain north of the Mohawk.

Small settlements still mark the town centers along the old, formerly-important road across the state. Esperance, Sloansville, Sharon Springs; flat-roofed Victorian houses in various states of ill-repair; plowed, rolling land planted to corn and beans; hayfields with the first cutting lying on the ground or in round bales; fields of blooming mustard; barnyards dotted with black-and-white Holsteins or a few brown Swiss, goats and chickens and geese closer to the houses; deer in the gullies and wild geese and turkeys in the fields. The towns all look like a parade took place yesterday: flags hang from the telephone poles and the porches are spruced up with lush new hanging planters of petunias or dark blue lobelia, red geraniums in window boxes, and huge Boston ferns ejected with relief from the indoor parlors to spend their summers outdoors. But signs of poverty are everywhere too, in the boarded-up storefronts and dilapidated dwellings, and I wonder how the owners of the huge pickup trucks parked, typically, haphazardly on front lawns are going to be able to afford gas to run them at the prices advertised on the station marquees. I know the answer: they can’t.

Cherry Valley. Richfield Springs. Studying the details, I try to figure out, yet again, exactly what makes this corner of the world different from, say, the towns above the Mohawk River or down in the Catskills, or east of Duanesburg toward Albany. The clues left by the people who inhabit the towns and farmhouses are a part of it, but the real answer is in the form and spacing of the hills and valleys, the pastures and trees.

I stop thinking and run my eyes over the bones of the land, as familiar as my own face in a mirror.

 

At the Lake

Yesterday I drove down from Vermont to central New York to visit my father for a few days. Hoping to find time to write a bit here and post some pictures, so please check back. It’s gorgeous here, but VERY hot and humid. I am wilting already, at 7:40 in the morning! When I got up I went down and walked by the lake. There were little minnows in the shallows, and a few fat bass and sunfish, but the first greeting was from a little black-and-white warbler overhead in a box elder – I watched it for quite a while, and felt welcomed.

 

Faces in a Window

(click for a larger view – recommended!)

On my bike, I headed up the rue Rachel bikepath, through the Portuguese neighborhood with its afternoon smells of grilling chicken, bread baking, and coffee roasting. On St. Laurent I turned north toward Mile End, stopping a few times to look in windows. A small shop selling Portuguese pottery for baking (terra cotta colored, glazed, with raised white designs); Catholic tiles picturing Mary and the saints; soccer jerseys; all sorts of food from imported cheeses to olive oils and sardines. Up the street a little ways was this shop, which seduced me to the point of locking up the bike and going into the shop. It was packed and hung with thousands of dusty objects just like the window was, from floor to the dark high ceiling, and seemed more like an art installation than an antique shop: coins, jewelry, dishes, paper, roller skates, lamps, furniture, records, toys… The proprietor, in a cluttered square booth behind the window that seemed straight out of the 1930s, was talking to his neighbor about a picture he was trying to fix, and paid no attention to me at all.

The inspiration for this particular jaunt was to visit an Indian furniture importer, but the ride itself became its own reason: a tiny boulangerie selling organic breads; a local pottery shop next to trendy modern furniture; women pushing baby carriages and teenagers decorated with piercings and tattoos; the sun was out for the first time all week and so were we.

On a corner in Mile End, I waited for the light to turn. In the front window of a funky cafe on my right, a slender black man in a pink shirt sat in an antique French armchair, upholstered in yellow satin jacquard. He put on a studious-looking pair of glasses and took out a book. The light changed, and I rode off as he raised his coffee cup to his lips.

 

Conversations between Kingdoms

Loose gravel on mud, an uphill road through woods filled with new ferns, the dripping canopy, a sky trying to clear. Late afternoon light on the mountains, standing stones, the gardens where leaves of all shapes and colors within the general category of green form a sculpture in low relief, ankle- to knee-height above the dark earth.

A thin grey snake slithers under a paving stone.

Golden globes of trollius nod near blue forget-me-nots, violet violets. Under thorny rose canes, earnest purple johnny-jump-up faces; iris of deepest indigo studded with raindrop pearls; pure white starflowers, as crisp as starched linen.

A bullfrog jumps ahead of my foot into the pond.

Leaning over the water I see tadpoles, those macroscopic reminders of our own beginnings, in every size from mere black dots to near-frog giants, tails swishing, heads bigger than my thumb, legs starting to sprout. First we swim, then crawl, then hop…but not this one, the ghostly white carcass of a dead bullfrog lying on the bottom of the pond, starting to decompose, near him a large gelatinous mass of eggs. Healthy frogs peer from quick bright eyes above the surface, hop along the mossy bank and into the reeds.

Lupine, its budded flower stalks beginning to rise toward the sun, carpets the damp semicircle at the end of the pond, and beyond, over the bank, tall choke-cherries, hawthorns with tight clusters of white buds, lush growth of ostrich ferns, and cattails rise like torches in the swampy gully before the land moves up again, covered with mixed forest that gives way in turn to conifers, more conifers, and blue mountains.

Yellow throated warbler. Wren.

I head back to the house where J. sits on the porch talking to our friend K.; the host, G., is in the kitchen from which the smell  of roasting lamb and herbs is wafting. Waiting for the other guests, we all listen for car sounds – the new gravel on the road is deep and slippery after the day’s rain – but soon we hear their voices; they too have made it up the long winding driveway and the ebullient greetings soon change to hushed "ohh!"s as they catch their first glimpses of the garden, the pond, the standing stones covered with lichens, the mountains from which the storm clouds are lifting.

Glasses of wine, the surprise of late-afternoon sun on our faces, black flies cheerfully waved away from pulse-points, ankles and ears. Stories of our childhoods in Vermont, rural New York, Detroit, Pennsylvania,  Los Angeles via Hungary — all of us American originally but one, who grew near here, gathering and preserving enough fiddleheads to eat all year, eating honey and maple syrup rather than any other sugars, spending the winter caning chairs with sea-grass with his father. We never thought it was an unusual life, he said, it was just how you lived here, that was Quebec.

Before dinner, I acquiesce to the quiet urge I’ve had since arriving, ask a quick permission, and slip away to the separate building that is G.’s meditation and yoga space. I open the door and step inside, into the silence and fullness I knew would be here, the vibrating fullness and emptiness of a place that has become sacred. There are folded blankets and cushions on the edge of the large rug with its subdued pattern of olive and rust, and I notice G.’s meditation shawl of plain cotton that he brought back from the ashram in France. From a different pile I take a pink blanket and a white cotton cushion and arrange them in front of the rough wooden slab, on two sawn tree stumps, that holds a white perpetual candle where a flame flickers in a pool of paraffin. There are some books in a corner; some natural objects, a rock or two – which make me smile; my own shrines always contain rocks – objects from several religious traditions; incense burners; more candles, unlit. In back of me, a cold wood stove and a rocking chair. And on the wall above the wooden plank, a photograph I first saw last year, of rows of meditating people wrapped in white cotton shawls or cloaks in a large candlelit room. He’s placed it so that sitting here, you feel like you are in the back of the same room, looking forward.

The minutes pass; going deeper. I know I can’t stay long. Wood thrushes sound their cascade of notes in the woods, and finally I turn my head and look out.

The big window that forms half the wall to my right frames a view of the green forest, punctuated by  wet black tree trunks and two narrow paper birches. In the soft last light of the day it is indescribably beautiful. Suddenly thoughts of my mother and my mentor, Herm, gone for many years now, rush into my head. I reach up instinctively and grasp the old pendant hanging around my neck that was my mother’s; I rarely wear it but put it on especially before coming here; it is gold with a clear green faceted stone crowned by finely wrought, small gold leaves. Tears spring to my eyes, and then a feeling of immense gratitude. I shut my eyes, breathe deeply, open them again.

It’s then that I notice the fern just outside the window. It’s an interrupted fern,* one of Herm’s favorites – he used to jokingly call them Fernus interruptus – and it is perfect in its newness, the fruiting bodies on the stem not yet dried, the fronds above and below them light delicate green. I search the woods nearby but it’s the only one I can see. We look at each other.

So this is life, isn’t it, I say to myself eventually. An interruption, aware of itself, named… with a task to ripen, dry, break open and scatter… while meanwhile roots reach down and fronds unfurl above and below, unconsciously, continually. Beautiful, perfect, complete.

I finish my meditation, fold the blanket again and put it back, open the door and step out into the world.

*(An Ontario site notes that the interrupted fern, Osmunda claytoniana, has the oldest fossil record of any living fern today, going back over 200 million years.)

 

Food

Go read Kat.

 

Contact

I’ve been haunted all day by the aerial pictures taken of an isolated, previously-uncontacted Brazilian tribe: the red-painted men shooting their arrows up at the airplane which returned six times, the black-painted figure, possibly a woman, looking upward. The body paint and bows and arrows appeared after the first fly-over,  when all the people ran away.

How terrifying the airplane must have been – like the recurrent nightmare I’ve had where black planes slowly appear over the lake of my childhood, finally darkening the sky, and bombs begin falling in the distance, or paratroopers start hurtling down into my world.

These are human beings, even if we insist on returning and photographing them, capturing them for the world to gawk at. The Brazilian native Indian foundation insists that the tribal lands are protected so that the people can remain autonomous – but why, then, did they take and publish these pictures?

Get away! I want to shout, along with them, though they seem to be silent as they stare up at the airplane. Let these few last isolated inhabitants of the planet remain in their innocence of what the rest of us are doing and have done.

 

Technique and Finesse

Two nights ago we called, on the spur of the moment, and bought tickets to the final evening of the Montreal international Piano Competition. The second three of six finalists, between 18 and 30 years of age, were playing that evening, each performing a full-length concerto with orchestra. I had heard the other three the previous night on the radio during a live broadcast from Place des Arts, and had gotten pretty intrigued.

Being an amateur pianist – very far out of this league – I’m still familiar with some of the repertoire and can identify with the difficulty and terror of performing, and totally fascinated by it at the same time. I’m in awe of the discipline and sheer hours of practice it takes to rise to this level of international competition, and very curious about the combination of personality, music choice, and performance chemistry that bring a very few to the top, and leave so many other extremely talented individuals out of the international careers they hoped for. A few years ago we rented a documentary film about the Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth, Texas; it’s called Playing on the Edge and was, for me, way more exciting than one of those poor-boy-makes-good-in-boxing-ring movies. That competition has the ability to catapult the winner into the spotlight, with many performance and recording opportunities – but even then, few of the winners become the first-rank pianists whose names we know.

The Montreal concert was terrific. The first competitor, Elizabeth Schumann from the U.S., played the
Chopin concerto #1 very well but she was too restrained, almost ethereal, her sound often falling beneath the orchestra; the young man next to me, a Montreal doctor who plays chamber music, called it "salon music;" pretty critical but close to right, I think. The second performance was the huge Rachmaninoff 3rd
by a 27-year-old* Russian, Alexandre Moutouzkine, with formidable  technique; he won a standing ovation. Finally the Tchaikovsky 1st; was played by Nareh Arghamanyan, a nineteen-year-old prodigy from Armenia; her performance was beautiful, nuanced but intense, and after a half hour of deliberation the jury awarded her first place. Moutouzkine tied for second place with Masataka Takada, from Japan, who had impressed me the night before with his performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto. By the time the winners were announced we had become totally drawn into the drama of the contest, the very different personalities of the musicians, the professionalism of the orchestra conductor, and the intensity of the performances; we were thrilled for the winners, sad for the losers, and so glad we had been able to be present in person.

All the competitors had to play in several elimination rounds, ranging from shorter pieces in a variety of styles to a 45-minute recital, including sonatas, during the semi-finals, and then the concerti with orchestra in the finals. If you’d like to see what it was like, video and audio of the performances are available on the Espace Musique website (Radio Canada). The Montreal competition moves in a three-year cycle, piano one year, then voice, then strings. Next time I’ll be more on top of it and make sure to see more of the events; I can hardly wait!

*thanks to DLEE for the correction about Moutouzkine’s age; I originally had it as 30