I would never have decided to read Ulysses all on my own.  But my friend Nancy invited me to join her in a project of reading one episode a week, and I thought there are worse ways to spend four months.  I knew that Ulysses is considered Difficult.  Whole college courses are devoted to this book.  In a documentary called “Joyce to the World,” someone said that no one had ever really read the book at all.

A lot of writing is Difficult.  The Bible is Difficult.  That doesn’t stop unimaginative, unreflective people from making their living tell others what it says.  OK, that’s not the best introduction to a post about reading Ulysses.  The thing is, it bothers me that we are taught to be afraid of reading something difficult because we assume we need someone to tell us what it means.  I make my living telling people they can have their own experience with music and with art that is valid simply because it is theirs.  It was in that spirit that I joined Nancy in reading Ulysses.

In my teaching I like to find out what students are already thinking.  It’s gives us a place to start.  Here’s what I knew about Ulysses before I started reading it: it takes place in one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, which is known and celebrated all over the world as Bloomsday.  Leopold Bloom is the main character.  The story is a hero’s journey that roughly follows Homer’s Odyssey. Leopold is married to Molly Bloom whose soliloquy at the end of the book is magnificent.   Stephen Dedalus is a character.

Stephen Dedalus and I go way back to a high school English class and Mrs.LaBell, a beloved English teacher.  She infused me with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I was drawn to Stephen and his dreamy reflections, his earnestness, and his struggle to find meaning in the sterile religious atmosphere of Ireland.  Towards the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are words that I memorized and have repeated to myself for forty years:

“I shall not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.  .  . I do not fear to be alone.  .  . I am not afraid to make a mistake.”

Stephen was a great comfort to me as I separated from parents who did not understand what I needed as a young and female Person, and when I left the religion that had been pounded relentlessly into me from an early age.  I have often felt alone in my life and I’ve made a great many mistakes (which Joyce calls “portals of discoveries” in Ulysses) and I have never forgotten that Stephen Dedalus went before me.

So this present day Joycean Odyssey began with Nancy and this article by Edwin Turner.  Nancy had already started reading when I joined her in early January.  A few more people signed up for the project.

I asked my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, and who is a great reader, if she wanted to join us.

“I’ll think about it, “she said

That’s what I say every time she urges me to read Patrick O’Brien.

As things stand now I am about to embark on Episode 9.  We have lost one of the originals who called herself a fallen English major and gave herself an F.  I’m not sure if another of us has stalled out or not.  Chris the unclassifiable joined us even after getting a look at the guide that Edwin Turner called “a dour book that manages to suck all the fun out of Joyce’s work.”   We also have in our midst someone who has already read Ulysses twice and who cheers us on without telling us how much we are missing. I look forward to his comments about our comments.

My routine is to read the episode and make notes on whatever strikes me as interesting or in some cases, whatever I can manage to understand.  Episode Seven was so confusing I ended up just making a list of the characters.  But there is always wondrous poetry, humor, and Joycean words and expressions that make me gaze out the window and muse.  I post my notes to our group, and then I read Nancy’s notes and Blamire’s commentary to find out what really went on in the episode.

A lot of things about grower older have taken me by surprise: 1) once I started reading the plays of Shakespeare, I did not stop until I had read them all (that was last summer and you can read about every play here in my blog plus collect well known phrases to quote at social gatherings.) 2) I have a taste for single-malt Scotch. 3) I am thoroughly enjoying reading Ulysses.

Public Utility bills began coming to Seth Burnside at my address last November.  At first I thought the bills had been mis-delivered as they sometimes are.  But it was my address, and my house that I have owned for 15 years.  I sent the bills back with “No such resident” written on the envelopes.  A week later, and rather obstinately, there they were again.  I opened them.  There was my address and there was the name Seth Burnside.

Seattle Public Utilities told me, “Seth Burnside is listed as the owner of the house.  He bought it in November.”

I swayed a little bit.

“I have owned this house for 15 years.  I didn’t sell it in November.”

“But who is Seth Burnside?”

“I don’t know.”

“He doesn’t live there?”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Well, where does he live?”

“Look,” I said. “I have owned this house and lived here for 15 years. I don’t know anyone named Seth Burnside.”

“Are you sure you don’t live at 2622 29^th Ave?”

Am I what? I sat down.  An address on the other side of town. Oh. my. God.  Twilight Zone, party of one.

It took some doing but the customer service person finally put my name back on my account.  In the next billing cycle another bill came to Seth, as well as some “Welcome to the City” materials which I scanned for freebies before putting them in the recycle.  (There were no freebies.) I checked my online bill pay.  Evidently Seth’s bills were being paid.

I called Seattle Public Utilities and went through another disorienting conversation.  “Are you getting any calls from Seth Burnside?” I asked.

No.  Apparently Seth wasn’t concerned about his recent investment.  The customer service person again corrected the name on my account, and said, unconvincingly, that it should be ok, now.

The third time I had to call the billing office I learned that Seth had been given my old account number when he bought my house. I had been assigned a different number by Customer Service Representative Number One.  It would have been nice to not have to pry this information out of them. On-line bill pay likes you to have the correct account number when they credit your account with your money to pay utility bills for the house you have owned for 15 years.

Can anyone call the city, say they’ve bought a house and get their name put on the account?  In my third conference with customer service I learned that no, it was not that easy.  Evidently someone had sung through a rest or two.  The billing office expects to first receive notice from the vacating owner.  City planning and development must confirm the change of ownership.  Then Billing closes out the old account and begins a new one.

There was a lull in the excitement for a month.  Then I got a letter from the city with several forms to fill out, one for me and one for Seth.  They wanted address, phone and bra size.  And furthermore, each form was headed with an account number, leaving me to guess which one they were currently ascribing to me and which one to Seth.

I filled out one form.  Then I wrote a sarcastic letter, sealed and stamped it and just missed the postal carrier for the day.  And herein lays the reason for writing this story:  I got up the next morning, saw the letter on my desk and thought of my friend Nancy.

In my circle of friends are a great many tactful people.  This is a good thing because I tend not to be, though I do try.  I’m my own boss and I don’t have a lot of people I have to get along with. I don’t pop off at people the way I used to and it has been a while since I wrote a sarcastic letter, but I can be blunt and impatient with everyone except my students and the friends I don’t want to lose.  I learned that much from analysis.

I have often heard Nancy say when describing what sounds like an intractable situation at her work, “I try to treat people like I want to be treated.  I don’t like to be yelled at.”

I looked at the letter scorching a patch on my desk, and thought of how civilized, kind and productive it sounds when Nancy says she tries to treat people the way she wants to be treated.  I took a deep breath, weighed the pleasure of zinging someone with my wit, and tore the letter up, saving the stamp because my parents went through The Great Depression.

I wrote another letter.  I politely explained the chronology of my association with Seth Burnside, episode by episode, ending with a mild joke about the learning curve of a computer.  Then I sealed, stamped, and posted the letter.

If I behaved this reasonably more often I might not have been surprised by the tone of the letter I got in return.  The representative of Seattle Public Utilities expressed appreciation for my taking the time to write to them and for being so patient in awaiting resolution. He went through the chronology of what happened on the bureaucratic end and stated quite convincingly that everything was now resolved.  He gave me his email address and phone number should I have any lingering questions.  Thinking about the letter even now just makes me smile. To have behaved civilly is so satisfying. Congress should consider it.

In a few months I hope to write happily about how the IRS resolved what they consider to be a $77,000 discrepancy in my taxes.  This one has taxed–ha ha–every social and self-care skill I have. Stay tuned.

At last Sunday’s Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale I asked how many of the seven participants considered themselves Terrified Adults.  Six hands went up. And so we began.

Stephanie and I sang “The Flower Duet” from Lakme with me playing the bare bones of the accompaniment.  We had been working on this piece for months and our voices rang together in a balance we hadn’t yet found in rehearsal.  Some students, I’ve noticed, need an audience to sing their best. They rise to the enhanced chemistry of other people listening to them.

Then Stephanie sang Schubert.   I asked her to explain to the audience why a nice Jewish girl was singing “Ave Maria.” As a hospice OT Stephanie wanted to be able to sing it for her Catholic patients.  She now knows it by heart in the Latin.   I can think of no richer sauce than Stephanie’s voice stirring the surroundings of a person lying in hospice, fingering her rosary, and living her last moments on earth.

I asked Nina (rhymes with Dinah) to sing next because I knew she would help promote use of The Privacy Screen in Performance.  All week long my students had been experimenting with a screen in various ways just to see what it felt like.  Nina boxed herself in and sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”  Then we screened her in such a way that she and I could see each other but the audience couldn’t see her.  She sang “I Have Twelve Oxen.” Don’t laugh.  It’s a classical song by John Ireland.  Nina reported that she liked being inside the box.  It didn’t have anything to do with not being seen or not seeing the audience.

“It was,” she said, “a different way to have an audience.  The acoustics are different. You and your voice are in this safe, small space—like the shower.  The screen shuts out other stimuli and reflects your voice to you.”

Exactly. It gives an experience of being with yourself , and your voice reflecting yourself.  Of being alone with yourself and yet also knowing that you aren’t alone.  The most compelling performances take place in the balance of these two states.

Eileen found that balance when she sang “Send in the Clowns.” She teared up every time she rehearsed it with me; and she was determined she would get through it without crying.  Her feelings built up as she sang and the suppressed tears behind her singing contributed to an affecting performance, at the end of which, she did cry and so did some of the audience.  From my point of view as the accompanist, I felt swept into that magical space where I felt privileged to play in the glow of those few minutes of that particular song, gone now, never to be recovered.

Then Eileen cut loose with a rendition of “Somewhere” from West Side Story.  First she sang it straight, and then she sang it using every corner of her voice that she could find: she whined, roared, hooted, sighed; and with a sweep of her hand, invited the audience to join her.

There’s nothing quite like the relaxation of a bunch of tense adults after they’ve been allowed to behave like children for a few minutes.  I calculated that it was the best time for Eva to sing “Regnava nel silenzio” from Lucia de Lammermoor, because as someone said afterwards, “that has got to be about the hardest piece there is in the world.”

Eva and I have only been working for about a year together.  It took one lesson for me to recognize a natural coloratura.  When she gets past her passagio and achieves her high G, her face and body relax noticeably and she flies up almost another octave like—well, there’s a reason the coloratura literature is sometimes referred to as “bird songs.”   In Regnava, we discovered a natural trill that thrums like a bird’s heartbeat.  Trilling is hard to teach, and can be hard to do, but Eva only needed it demonstrated once.  Her trills and her high notes were impressive on Sunday.

Anna sang next.  She, too, loved using the screen.  (It was actually originally her screen.  She donated it to the cause of The Terrified Adults).  We set it up so she and I could see each other but she wasn’t visible to the audience.  This gave her cover to hiss “Not so fast!” two pages into “Carol from an Irish Cabin.”

Anna used the screen in the way I would have: to do anything I wanted to with my body, anything that I thought would help me sing better: stretch my arms, screw up my face, peel off my clothes and throw them over the screen –that’s my fantasy, Anna didn’t do that.  She sang two songs behind the screen and then repeated “The Call” by Ralph Vaughan Williams in full view.  I believe that the screen helped her incorporate in her public performance new advances she’s made in her singing technique.  She did a lovely job.

Susan not only sang two Valentine’s Day songs but she brought a heart-shaped cherry- chocolate cake for Afters.  She sang “Be My Love” in French and English and “My Funny Valentine.”  It was the best performance I have ever heard her give.  She was relaxed.  She didn’t seem to tense up before her self-identified scary notes. Susan is usually critical of her performances but even she was satisfied with the way she sang on Sunday.  She told me later that it was all about getting enough breath.

Yep.  That is what singing is: It’s breathing.  It’s Spirit and Life.

Everyone’s sweetheart, Deborah, sang last.  This is her fourth musicale.  She had sat through all the other singers, waiting for her nerves to subside, which they didn’t, until there was no one left to sing but her.

“I’m not going to wait til the end anymore,” she announced. Then she sang “Dancing Queen” with great heart and cheerfulness.  She ended her rendition of “You Don’t Own Me” with a snide “you little shit.”

And so we wrapped up an enjoyable afternoon.  Can you guess who the Spotlight Whore was?

Who’s behind the screen?

Though I live in a major Seattle neighborhood, the city sidewalks end two blocks south of me.  This is rather a point of pride for some of us.  In my case, it gives my street as it runs north alongside Crown Hill cemetery a country feel.  I can see the street from my studio window (if I dis-lodge a cat) and whenever I take out the garbage.

Cemetery Lane

Cemetery Lane is my favored route when I visit—keep in mind I live in a major Seattle neighborhood—the sheep, the geese and the ducks.  The sheep I found one day as I turned down 92^nd.  There they were, two of them with their little curly horns, munching grass and giving me the once over.  For several years they wintered in the city and summered in east King County, but they’ve been gone for a while and the land was sold and bulldozed.  I still walk by their former pied a terre on my way to the duck pond.

The duck pond at 95^th and 4^th takes me back to the 1980s when three piano students – called The Three by the child whose lesson followed –rode bicycles to their lessons on Friday afternoon.  The Three always came via the duck pond and every spring, they gave me duckling reports so I knew when it was worth a special trip to see the babies.

Currently there are geese in the yard across the street from the duck pond.  Great honking geese, waddling around, practicing their arms sweeps.  I like to stand still at the edge of their pen and let them give me the news of the day.  I try to stay until one of them flap his wings but I am usually the first to blink.

Two blocks south of the geese and ducks and across busy Holman Road is Art’s Food Center.  Art’s was a family-owned, local grocery store, but it’s been a QFC for some time now and some of us still resent it.  There’s a 50 foot pole with a lighted ball that used to illuminate the word Art’s and it was cool.  Now that it reads QFC, it’s just tacky.  I got into a tacky squabble with someone at the QFC a few years back.  I asked a woman to stop bellowing into her cell phone and we exchanged a few choice lines ending with her telling me my pants were stupid.  That wouldn’t have happened when the store was called Art’s, partly, I suppose, because that was before cell phones.

Beyond the QFC is Carkeek Park, one of the loveliest of Seattle’s preserves.  Though the entrance is a paved road, there’s a walking path on the QFC side. Leaving all tackiness temporarily behind, the path takes you immediately into the woods with choice of trails blazed by the boy scouts, the city and neighborhood volunteers.  The main trail takes you through the lovely Piper’s Apple Orchard and –tackiness returns–past a smelly sewage treatment plant, over the railroad tracks and finally to a sandy Puget Sound beach.

Carkeek is a walk for a warm day because it’s cool in the woods and cold at the beach. During the cold weather months of November and December you can’t do better than a brisk walk to 90^th and Dibble to see the giant Nutcracker.  I happened to pass by one January when some guys were dis-assembling it and I got the whole story.  It’s a prop from an old Maurice Sendak production of The Nutcracker.  The set had been dismantled and this particular nutcracker was destined for a landfill.  My Dibble neighbor went down to Seattle Center at three in the morning with a flatbed truck and rescued the fiberglass artifact.  It’s been a holiday fixture in my neighborhood for years.

It’s a damp, cold February day in Seattle.  If I had a dog, I’d have to walk whether I liked it or not.  But my cats are demonstrating that it’s just as nice to be warm and still and to watch the world go by the window. And so here endeth my series of one mile out in the four directions.

When I take a walk to the south of my house, I usually begin with a slight jog east through Crown Hill cemetery because the only reason to go due south is to visit my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything.  Gwen is not a point of interest on a walk: she’s a whole day’s outing.  Oh, and one seasonal reason to walk directly south is to get a load of Italian plums from Sue who, in September, is always trying to get rid of her excess.

Once through the cemetery, I head south to 85^th, following the scent of baking bread, to the tiny commercial bakery on the corner at 11th. More than ever, now that I eat gluten-free and bread is forbidden fruit, I enjoy gazing at the loaves in the window and inhaling the fragrance.  I chatted with the bakers once and found out they baked for a familiar Seattle label.  Just off hand I can’t remember if it is Old Mill or Bread Garden.

Across 85^th and a bit west is the Butterfly Garden, a city pocket park wedged next to a clinic and a behemoth Safeway.  I make a point to walk the S-shaped path of the park every chance I get, and to spend a minute at the fire pit and the totem pole.  I like to read the inscriptions in the bricks of the wall: these are the people who donated money to create the park.  My favorite is the one that’s upside down and reads “Why be normal?”  Why indeed?

One reason I might be walking through the Butterfly Park is to get to Queens Natural Nails on the other side of 15^th.  I discovered this business when I was camped out one week at Kinkos, preparing for a new quarter of The OK Chorale.

I walk in the door and say hello to Huong.

“You pi cula?” she motions towards the rack of nail polish and disappears to get a tub for hot water.

I pick my usual “cula,” midnight blue, and sit in a chair.  Her husband, Minh, brings me tea and a hot pack for my neck.  The pedicure begins.  If the shop is busy, Minh does my foot and leg massage.  He has strong hands and the massage goes on and on and on.  My book falls to the floor.

Huong is an artist.  She loves each toe.  After all the massaging oiling, pushing, clipping and filing, she carefully paints each one, stopping to scrape with her fingernail a stray streak of polish that dares to touch my skin.  If I am exceptionally lucky, she misses a faint smear or two.  I pray for this.  Because then she gets out the polish remover and a little paintbrush and delicately, exquisitely touches the offending bit of polish. The buzzes of pleasure run up and down by spine, chatting excitedly with each other.

“I love it when you do that,” I tell her.

She doesn’t understand.  We don’t talk much because it’s a lot of effort on Huong’s part and it spoils the mood for me.  Minh has even less English than his wife but he gets that I love his massages.

After a pedicure I would more than likely just go home but continuing my virtual tour of attractions south of my house, I have to show you a front yard on Dibble Ave where a garden gnome is continually being harassed by two clams:

The best kept and most spectacular secret of the Greenwood neighborhood is the Tibetan Buddhist Sakya Monastery  http://www.sakya.org/index.php.  It’s ornate enough on the outside but the shrine room is so exotic that the only way I can get through a Friday night meditation is with my eyes closed.  Otherwise I am gazing at the clouds on the domed ceiling and trying to pinpoint exactly what shade of blue the sky is.  I am counting the elephant statues.  I am memorizing the patterns of the wall hangings.  I am wondering why some of the figures in the murals are angry.  I am straining to see what’s in the little dishes by the Big Buddha.  I am musing at the $100,000,000 bill in the donation bowl. I am thinking that the cushions reserved for the monks look a lot more comfortable than where I sit.

Mid-way through the Friday night meditation we get to “circumnavigate the shrine” three times.  Along the way there’s a stone lion with a ball in its mouth.  Once I saw a leader agitate the ball as she walked by so that’s what I do.  Three times around the shrine, three times I put my hand in the lion’s mouth.  I can’t remember the point of it but I’m nothing if not participatory.

Outside the shrine I rotate the prayer wheels that send my thought, wishes, hope and dreams into the universe.  And on the way home, I stop for a coffee at the Four Spoons Café at 85^th and Dibble.

Prayer Wheels

Sakya Monastery

We’ve wrapped up another Pajama Week at Local Dilettante Studio.  Participation was so great it spilled over into other areas of life.  My painting buddy Madelaine was disappointed at the thought of missing it.

“We’re at Susan’s house this week.”

“Oh.  I wanted to come in my pajamas.  .  . I’ll do it anyway.”

“You’re on,” I said.

But I woke up at 3:00 AM worrying that I had planned to get groceries at Ballard Market before I went to Susan’s house.  I could pull pants on over the pajama bottoms and wear a long coat, but that would spoil the effect of walking into Susan’s house in pajamas. I wasn’t going to stand at her front door in the cold, peeling off pants.  It became quite an issue at 3 in the morning.

There are lots of Susans in my life.  I asked the Sue who cleans my house once a month if she thought anyone could tell I was wearing pajamas.  She looked at the Scotty dogs billowing out of my Uggs and smirked.

“Oh, go ahead and go,” she said. “You do things like that all the time.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. You’re sort of Out There.”

“Huh,” I thought as I drove off. “I’m sort of Out There.”

I clomped into Ballard Market trying to make eye contact with everyone I passed, trying not to check the state of affairs near the Uggs.  But really, who cared?  If I saw someone wandering around Ballard Market in their pajamas I wouldn’t even blink.

Then there’s that whole thing about people not noticing middle-aged women.  We’re supposed to be invisible.  Or as my non-Susan friend Christina said, “Oh yes, when I turned forty, I could shop-lift freely.”

OK, maybe that wasn’t the best observation to make juxtaposed a story about Ballard Market. Moving on.  .  .

In case you’re new here, Pajama Week was established mostly to cheer me through the dark days of November.  Then I decided the need for cheer was greater in January. Under consideration is a plan to have a bi-annual Pajama Week.  Students and their entourage come to lessons in their pajamas, drink hot chocolate and roast marshmallows.  It’s a good week to be a younger sibling.

More adult students came in their nightclothes than in years past, and a high school student who has forgotten for three years, remembered.  High school-aged boys endearingly sneaked their bathrobes into the house and changed in the bathroom.  Chris, the unclassifiable, didn’t make her lesson but both she and Starfire, the Chinook, are expected to be in their pajamas at the next lesson.  No one gets out of Pajama Week that easily.

For sheer exuberance, there was nothing like the girls who come on Wednesday.  Talia, aged 6, is currently my youngest piano student. She and her little sister, Lalia, spilled out of the car shrieking, “We’re in our pajamas!!” They tumbled into my house like it was Christmas morning.

I watched Talia choose a marshmallow.  “Be sure to touch them all,” I said as I handed her the roasting stick.

It was the same with the Frangos.  The two girls hovered over the bowl, their fingers delicately crinkling the paper in exquisite deliberation over which of the identical candies would be their choice.  How great to be six years old.  Everything is new, even Frangos, even those peppermint starburst candy things.

Pajama Week is a restorative.  It’s like Days of Misrule when everything is upside down.  When I dress for work, I put on PJs.  The line between work and the rest of life gets blurrier than it already is for a self-employed person as evidenced by the trip to Ballard Market.  I’ll know I am truly Out There when I wear PJs to OK Chorale rehearsals.  Pajama Rehearsal.  That may be an idea whose time has come.

Pajama Week Day 1

Lalia and Talia

A good week to be a younger sibling.

The other day was stunningly beautiful here in Seattle, a day so fresh, it smelled like both snow and spring.  I stayed in all day, feeling puny but longing to be out of doors.  Today when I feel like a walk, it’s overcast and raining. So I will imagine a walk one mile to the west of me.

First stop: Crown Hill Cemetery.  The old (1903) and privately endowed cemetery had openings 15 years ago but I believe they are currently sold out and cemeteries being what they are, will continue to be.  There aren’t any scalpers at the 11^th St entrance.  Over the years I’ve gotten used to the sound of the grave digger being hauled out of its shed, and the sight of burials in progress.  Not too long ago there was a bagpiper at a burial.  I opened a window to listen.  A burial is as good as a meditation session for focusing on the here and now.

When I first moved here, I had a gate put in my fence so I could walk in the cemetery anytime I wanted to.  I used to run a spook house every October in the cabin behind my house.  One year the tour ended with the victims being left, blindfolded, in the cemetery while the gate clicked shut.  When I walk west, I always start through my gate and into the cemetery.  Sometimes I walk straight through to 11^th, sometimes I circle the grounds, past some familiar headstones, and past the repository of dug-up dirt that we’ve sledded down during the six hours of snow we sometimes get here.

West of the cemetery I might meet up with Tamara and Callie, the Border Collie.  Tamara is another work-at-homer.  Her business, Palm Presence, includes massage, process oriented body work and retreat consultation.

Tamara and I met shortly after the book launch of 99 Girdles on the Wall.  The Secret Garden Book Shop had suggested I make a blow-up of the book cover to put in their window prior to the launch.  I had the poster made but as it turned out, it didn’t get much display time.  Because I felt disappointed and because the friggin’ thing cost $75, I put it in the front window of my house for two weeks.  Tamara saw it as she was walking Callie.  She went home and found me on the Internet.  Now I join them for a walk as often as I can.

Callie reminds me of my five-year-old self, bursting with energy and excitement about the world as it changes minute by minute, yet confident in the predictability of where the treats are.  With me, it was the home of Borghild Ringdall and her stack of Tupperware dishes to segregate five different kinds of cookies.  With Callie, it’s me.  She greets me with a leap up, and with wags so energetic they almost turn her whole body around. She sits but continues to pulsate as she nails me with her eyes until she gets her biscuit.

OK, so far I’ve walked six blocks.  I’ve passed the United Indian’s Youth Home for homeless Native American boys with the great campfire area in their backyard.  I’ve passed the two great hopes of the shrinking middle class: Grocery Outlet and Value Village. I’ve crossed 15^th which takes me out of Crown Hill.  In a minute I will go back in time to enter Olympic Manor, but I have to stop and admire the tea house.

 Zen Dog Tea House  is the most flamboyant house in the neighborhood, maybe in the city.  The yard looks like the lobby of an elegant hotel in Hong Kong or Taiwan.  Huge, red Chinese lanterns hang from the trees like Christmas ornaments, and at night they are illuminated.  So the place may look at little “out there” but it oozes humanity.  Larry, the owner of the house and curator of the business within (art, tea) is a great guy.  I’ve toured the house and been served tea. I’ve been to readings there, and taken Tai Chi classes.  We need more people and more places like Larry and Zen Dog.

Finally I turn into Olympic Manor to visit Joan, my friend with the theological chops.    Olympic Manor isn’t the throwback to the 50s that it used to be but it still seems a little retro because there hasn’t been a new house built there in 60 years.  I think homeowners sign a covenant in which they agree to have no color whatsoever in their front yard, no tricycles on the sidewalk and no more than one child per house visible at any one time.  But at Christmas every house rivals the Zen Dog Tea House for flamboyance, and Halloween is a kid’s paradise.

I visited Joan one Halloween and thought I was in hell.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had walked over.  Every parent west of the freeway had driven an SUV full of kids to trick or treat in Olympic Manor.  I had to weave between rows of costumed children and squeeze past double-parked, bloated American vehicles to park a quarter of a mile from Joan.  We got no theology in that night because the doorbell was rung every 30 seconds by tiny children in ill-fitting costumes with eyeholes that didn’t line up with eyes, who didn’t know to say “Trick or Treat” and who apparently didn’t, for the life of them, know why they were being made to do this.  They looked like they were in hell, too.  Or perhaps I project.

Joan shows up in a lot in my blog.  Hey, here’s something you could do: you could read all my blog posts from the past 2 ½ years and leave comments and recommends to people who haven’t discovered Local Dilettante Studio yet.  Or you could read this early post that features Joan: https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/09/associating-with-the-bvm/

In any case, it’s lovely to have two friends, a dog, and affordable food and clothing within walking distance of my house.  I didn’t make my provisions for eternity before the cemetery filled up so in the event of my death, someone is going to have to drive me.

“Homage to Charles Adams” from a Crown Hill Cemetery scene

I was in Portland this weekend.  Oregon.  I was there just long enough to know which way to turn when I stepped out of the elevator without having to squint at the hall sign, trying to determine if 415 came before or after 428. I traveled down on the train. I had a stack of New Yorkers and NYT Book Reviews to page through.  And Ulysses.  A friend and I are reading Ulysses together, one episode a week.

“I’m taking Ulysses on the train,” I said.

“Ulysses is the book to have on that train,” her husband told me, “It’s notoriously two hours late.”

My train was not two hours late though secretly I would have loved to spend six hours on the train to Portland.  Not because of Ulysses which I actually did not get to, but because I love being en route.  I needed a long en route to unwind me from what has been an exceptionally stimulating few months.  En route is being not here, but not there.  There are no decisions to be made, just the opportunity to be.  When I think of it, en route is pretty much the human condition, and life is what we do to avoid knowing that.  We may think we are in control but something we don’t fully understand is carrying us along.  It can be a rough ride but I prefer to think that inexorable something has to do with Love.

It was cold in Portland but the sun was as bright as summer.  I took a taxi to the Mark Spencer on the corner of Stark and 11^th.  Waiting in my room was vase of yellow roses, a box of Moonstruck truffles and a Welcome to Portland card.

Wow, I thought, Very nice hotel.

But as I circled around the display, unpacking my bits and pieces, the welcome card dislodged and push around lumps and bundles in my memory.

Wait, I thought, I know that lettering and the panache of the gesture.

I read the small print on the card.  It said “Love, Anna.”

Anna.  My former singing and piano student, also formerly president of the student body of Western Washington State University.  Now she is living in Portland with her BF and working at Rubicon International.  Bright, beautiful, and funny, her mind is far ranging and I love talking with her.  I always feel better about the future of civilization after I’ve been around Anna.

We had dinner at Fish Grotto, a block from the Mark Spencer.  Anna has sampled every restaurant, bar, and coffee bar in the entire city and has a review for them all. Fish Grotto was excellent. We walked around the Pearl district, I got myself vaguely oriented, and absorbed the correct pronunciation of Couch St. (cooch). I fell into bed and to sleep early while Anna went on to do what people in their twenties do with that extra ten hour a day they have.

We met again first thing in morning and got coffee at Stumptown, a block east from the hotel on Stark.  Stumptown is attached to the Ace Hotel whose lobby looks like a Perry Mason set.  There’s even an old photo booth, but with a sign that says it can’t guarantee it will actually take a picture.  In a room full of 25 people with Smart phones, I had a longing for a strip of photos from that old photo booth.

We walked through The Pearl and crossed into Nob Hill where Anna and BF live in an old apartment building with ice box cupboards, a honeycomb bathroom floor, and claw-footed bathtub.  Taking one to these amenitites is a cage elevator, the kind Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore in Thoroughly Modern Millie had to dance in to get it started.  I say things like this to Anna and she says “Oh.”

We parted ways mid-morning because I had an appointment at the Espresso Book Machine at Powells City of Books.  News Flash: Espresso Book Machines are sharing their files.  Since 99 Girdles on the Wall was originally created for and printed on the book machine at Third Place Press, my book is now available on all of the 500 book machines all over the world.  I made arrangements for a copy of my book to be rotated into the display of EBM books at Powells.  For us self-pubbed writers the self-promotion never ends.

I checked out of the Mark Spencer and took a cab to the Heathman, a secondary port of call on the itinerary. Up the street, past the Saturday Farmer’s Market and down half a block was an Oregon style liquor store i.e. lower prices and no sales tax.  I bought two bottles of Scotch and had a nice natter with the guy behind the counter about how Washington state residents screwed themselves by not reading the small print when we voted to hand liquor sales to Costco.  Back at the Heathman, the concierge cheerfully dug my suitcase out of storage so I could wrap the Scotch in my red flannel Scotty pajamas.

Anna took me to afternoon tea at the Heathman.  Holiday logistics made Anna, her sister Julia, and me miss our annual holiday tea for the first time in eleven years.  This one was brilliant:  The calm, the white cloths, the chandelier, the scones, (handmade) marshmallows and lemon squares.  I added my vase of yellow roses, which I had been babying since I left the Mark Spencer.  I was determined to get them home with me.

After a leisurely tea we opted to walk to the train station.  Anna was my sherpa.  She disdained—perhaps didn’t even notice—the little ramps off the sidewalks.  She just yanked the suitcase up and down as energetically as she dances in the world.   We got to Union Station a little after 4:00, thinking I had a half hour to spare.  But train elves had changed the time.  I vaguely recalled how patiently the ticket guy in Seattle had both told me about the change and had high-lighted it on my ticket, I was mentally already en route and it hadn’t registered.

“You maximized your time here!” Anna said cheerfully as we hugged goodbye, and I made it onto the train with two minutes to spare.

I had a little season of anxiety around the notion of missing the train.  Then I remembered my idea of being carried along by something inexorable that has to do with Love.  What happens is what happens.  If it happens to me in Portland, I have a sherpa.

Anna

Tea at The Heathman

I live in an area of Seattle called Crown Hill. When someone isn’t sure where that is, I say Upper Ballard.  That doesn’t really clear anything up.  So then I say Greenwood.  Greenwood sounds very Henry VIII and olde.  That appealed to me until I watched The Tudors, which was creepy. Crown Hill, which now that I think of it also sounds very Henry VIII, is a “transitional” neighborhood, which my neighbor Gwen, who knows something about just about everything, says means that there’s one place in the city where it’s cheaper to live.  She makes a little joke.  We’re good people here.

After the routine-busting pace of the over-long holidays, I appreciate the quiet pleasures of this neighborhood where I have lived for 18 years.  I do a lot of walking, but I also have A Walk which I do several times a week: I turn left at Crown Hill Cemetery and walk a mile due east into Greenwood.  I walk to my Yoga for Over 50s class at Whole Life Yoga, to my neighborhood Bartells and to the ATM where I deposit the checks that come fluttering into the Local Dilettante Studio during the first weeks of a month.  I think of this walk as purely pedestrian, double entendre intended.  The other day I decided to see if there was enough interest in this modest mile to write a whole post about it.

When I stray out of my Block Watch area and cross 8^th Ave, I am officially out of Crown Hill and into Greenwood. On the right is Jorge’s house.  When I first moved to Crown Hill, Jorge had installed a double door on the edge of his yard.  A regular door.  Like an inside-the-house door.  It stood sentinel there for years while a hedge of various plants caught up to it. I have taken a personal interest in that door over the years.  Now there’s an eight foot hedge, and Jorge and I are on a first name basis in both Spanish and English.

Squeaky lives in the next block, across the street from the Greenwood Community P-Patch garden.   She’s a small, muscular tomboy of a black cat who is remarkably social, though of course on her terms.  I look for her and she comes running, ready to endure being picked up for ten seconds.  I put her down.  Outraged, she runs a yard from me, stops and looks back seductively. She does a figure eight around my ankles and I pick her up again.  This time she wriggles, jumps down and instantly contracts a fascination with a blade of grass.  She’s done with me.  Yes, your majesty.

On 3^rd Ave, the street jogs and I turn left at the house of the guy who plays his music way too loud and continue along the backside of the monstrous Fred Meyer that’s being built.  I will never forgive them for tearing down the Greenwood Market which used to be a regular port of call for me.  I bought my groceries at Greenwood Market and everything else at Bartells.  My feeling in this age of super-stores is if Bartells doesn’t carry it, I manage to do without.

Bartells, a family owned Seattle institution that began as a drugstore in 1890, has become a mercantile of sorts.  When I was a child in Olympia, my parents made regular trips into Seattle where I was cut loose downtown to run my little errands and meet up with my dad at the soda fountain at the Bartells in the triangle building on Pine next to the new 1962 Monorail station.  My loyalties run deep.

So I plod past the construction of this new Fred Meyer silently thumbing my nose, or sometimes I take a detour so they can feel the depth of my contempt for them. In any case I end up a block from Greenwood Ave at the house of the garage sale hustler.  This family runs an on-going garage sale most of the year and I see the husband at other sales all over the city, looking for things to re-sell.  He sometimes comes to my annual yard sales and tells me all my prices are too high.

Across the street is Blind Mike, the piano tuner. I’ve known many blind piano tuners.  When one sense is inoperable, the others are heightened.  Or can be, I suppose.  I think a lot of politicians are both blind and tone-deaf and it hasn’t seemed to heighten anything but their egos.

I’ve gotten to know many of the people who walk past my house: the dog walkers, the lady down the street who is close to 90 and is still out every day, the really skinny woman, the Canadian from Montreal, Tamara and Callie, the border collie, who I walk with once a week –or did before the holidays crashed in on me– the Samoan who walks like a dancer while he listens to his ipod, the woman who cancer aged twenty-five years and who is accompanied by different friends.  They inch by my house, turn at the corner and come past again.  Sometimes former students walk by and wave.  Sometimes they ring the doorbell, shy, but tickled to say hello.

Other than Jorge and Squeaky’s people I wonder if anyone recognizes me as That Woman Who Always Walks By.  I wonder on a scale of one to ten how eccentric I seem.  I know I sing to myself sometimes.  I talk to myself a lot. I expect I gesticulate more than I like to think I do.  I took notes the last time I walked in preparation for writing this post.  But these musing are for another time.   I’m done here.

Gifts are the most fun and the most fraught devices in the American Christmas season which begins the day after Labor Day with the first sighting of the little drummer boy and ends with the breaking of New Year’s resolution at about 12:01 AM New Year’s Day.

Let me digress for a rant here about New Year’s resolutions being almost as stupid as that business of the president pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving.  Seriously, does anyone else think that is about the most moronic thing anyone ever dreamed up?  Think about it: pardoning a turkey.  A turkey.  Pardoning.  What the hell is that about?  I grind my teeth every Thanksgiving over it but I don’t want to spend a whole post on it when it’s beneath my dignity to even mention it.

Ok, so New Year’s resolutions are stupid.  Every day is a new beginning.  Every holiday is a mile marker where we can let go of what’s no longer serving us, and make room for something new.  The whole pagan calendar is based on that.  The Wheel of the Year: It’s about the seasons.  Build an altar and move on.

So I have a little—or a lot of—venom to spew in regards the holidays we have just come through.  But I want to send up a gentle and fragrant spray for gifts.  I love thinking about them, choosing them, making them, wrapping them, getting them, opening them.  It’s the child in me, partly, and the thrill of being surprised.  And it’s partly Machiavellian machinations which I am no further above than I am my obsession about the stupidity of the president pardoning a turkey.

Gifts are about power.  Not necessarily about power over others.  They are about power over and the dance around the recalcitrant characters with uncontrollable motives who populate my mind.  This would be a worthwhile idea to explore in a blog.  Maybe next year. Or at my birthday.  I want to write something lighthearted for this last day of 2012.

My friend Lucy and I have worked out a great little system where we just tell each other what we want.  I give her a little list complete with labels (Laphroaig, Fiber Gallery) and she does the same only she gives me more scope: “I love the things you knit or paint or make with chocolate and liquor.”

Last year I said, “OK, I know exactly what I’ll make for you.”

“I like pink,” she added.

I found some bright pink, variegated wool and knitted a cravat scarf to which I added a polished wooden button with rounds like an old tree trunk, one of them matching one of the pinks in the scarf.  Lucy opened her Christmas present and said, “Oh. . . what a cool button.”

A week went by.  “You didn’t like the scarf, “I said.

“It’s more pink than I was thinking,” she said.  “But I love the button.”

“Ok, look, would you go up to the yarn store and buy the color you like and I’ll make you another one.”

“And could it be a bit longer?”

“I want to give something you actually want,” I said “Not something you put in a drawer.”

“I’ll see if my daughter will wear the pink one,” she offered.

“Go to the yarn store,” I said.

A month went by.

I knew she wasn’t going to go to the yarn store.  So I had several of my paintings made into cards and gave them to Lucy.

“Oh, these are wonderful!  This is my Christmas present!”  she said.

A year went by.

Lucy gave the pink scarf back to me this Christmas with the report that her daughter had looked at it and said “What a cool button.”

I’ve been wearing the scarf.  I love its pinkness.

Then there’s Nina (rhymes with Dinah).  Typically Nina and I don’t exchange Christmas gifts.  It’s one of our many endearing traditions.  Nina likes to buy gifts for people when she sees something that strikes her as a good gift for someone in particular. She buys it and gives it.  This Christmas just happened to coincide with a gift she thought I would like.  Such is her sense of the momentousness of gift giving, she made a special trip to my house with said gift even though we see each other several times a week.  It was a book she just knew I would like. The last book Nina just knew I would like was okay.  I liked it about as much as Lucy liked the pink scarf with the cool button.

Nina came with the gift and a lively story of her day of shopping which turned out to have a salt and pepper theme.  She described in detail a salt and pepper shaker and a salt and pepper grinder she had found.

“I need a salt and pepper grinder,” I commented.  “I keep breaking those self-grinders from Trader Joes.  I have boxes of coarse salt.

“You know you can buy ground salt and pepper.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Doesn’t help me now.”

A week passed.

Nina called. “I am such a Christmas nitwit,” she said.  “I gave you the wrong gift.”

“Does this mean I get the salt and pepper shaker?” I asked.

“Ha ha.  No, I gave you the same book I gave you two years ago—the one you didn’t like all that much.”

“I never said I didn’t like it,” I protested.

“You never said you did.  Anyway I’m coming over.”

The exchange was made.

So here’s where things stand now:  The book Nina gave me is Sherman Alexie’s latest book Face and I love it.  Lucy swooped in and intercepted my credit card for some expensive face serum at a holiday bazaar.  She wrapped it up and gave it to me for Christmas.  Though there’s no particular story I want to tell about them, Joan, my friend with the theological chops, made me the cast of characters from Three Bags Full, a sheep detective story by Leonie Swann.  Here they are trying to solve the mystery of the gorgeous glass ball given to me by Chris, the unclassifiable.

Gifts are also about love.