On my recent stint as a water-colorist on board a cruise ship, Nancy, my traveling companion and occasional container for my mental health, took photographs to preserve her impressions.  I wrote.  Here are some vignettes:

*                            *                             *

Our stateroom steward came in a half dozen times a day to empty the wastebasket, check the bathroom supplies, bring fresh flowers and make towel sculptures.  “Fred,” in his late 60’s, was from the Indian subcontinent.  His English was as difficult to decipher as some of the things he did for us.

Most nights when he turned down our beds, I found my nightshirt in a lump by my pillow.  But Nancy’s nightgown would be arranged to look like a butterfly or a fairy.  The first time this happened, we stared at it together.  Nancy took a photo.

“Do you suppose he’s naked when he does that?” I asked

“I don’t know, Elena,” Nancy said.  “That’s your fantasy.”

*                           *                           *

One morning we were ushered into breakfast near a woman who was finishing her own meal.  Our butts hadn’t even touched our chairs before her words shot at us like BBs.

“The muffins are good and I like the way they do the eggs my coffee wasn’t hot enough it looks like it’s going to be a better day than yesterday I enjoyed the glacier I’m from Ottawa–”

I made an immediate decision to not engage, to be surly if necessary.  Nancy murmured something.  It didn’t matter one way or the other.

“I’ve never been on this coast it’s a long way to come for a week on a ship there are so many nationalities I can’t understand what half of them are saying it’s a problem we have in Canada the multi-culturalists bah they violate my civil rights these Muslims with their robes and head-gear.”

Nancy and I exchanged glances.  I thought about spitting my prune pit at her.  Nancy, in her gracious Libra way, asked, “How do they violate your civil rights?”

The woman slammed down her (cold) coffee cup and raised her voice, unnecessarily because she had already cracked my water glass.  “Well, I don’t want to have to look at them!” she declared.

There was a pause.  “Where are you ladies from?” she asked.

“From Seattle.”

“Oh really, you’re American?   You aren’t as aggressive as most Americans.  That’s a compliment, by the way.  I would never live in America.  Your political parties hate each other.”

Nancy and the woman actually shook hands when we left.  I do admire her ability to be civil.

*                      *                           *

But then I have my gracious moments, too.  When I called in at Guest Relations the day after my first watercolor class, Umar informed me that a student had complained about me.

“She said that she asked you for some paint and you ignored her.”  He looked sympathetic.  “I wasn’t going to say anything to you because this lady, she seems to have so many concerns but maybe there’s something you can do for her.”

I took the name and stateroom number. The only person I could remember offending was the reporter from the major newspaper which will continue to go un-named. I thought about the chaos of that class when 50 people swarmed the table fighting for a few squeezed out tubes of paint.     https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/07/meltdown-in-alaska/

I said to Nancy, “My god, couldn’t she see what was going on in there?”  But of course, so often we can only see what affects us.

I called the student and gushed over the phone that I was sorry I had ignored her.  I asked her to introduce herself to me at the next class and I would make sure she had everything she needed.  I can do this for a student but I don’t care to put myself out for a spiteful woman who launches herself at me before I’ve had my tea.

We never saw the woman from Ottawa again and I never heard back from the offended student.  But for the rest of week, whenever I saw Umar at Guest Relations, he smiled conspiratorially and asked “And have you seen our friend today?”

*                           *                           *

Nancy’s favorite person on the ship was Graham Sunderland, The Naturalist.  He gave lectures about pretty much everything on land and sea that we could see from the decks.

After teaching my first watercolor class, I spent two days in fetal position so I didn’t hear Graham’s early lectures.

“His humor is off-color,” Nancy said.  “I know he would appeal to you.”

After the second lecture, Nancy reported that The Naturalist –she always referred to him as The Naturalist–said, “Whales are like people on a cruise ship. They open their mouths and food swims right in.”

At the first lecture I attended, The Naturalist explained that while most salmon return to the stream where they were born, it is a myth that they all do.

“Salmon are like human beings.  There are always some bozos who get it wrong.”

We ran into The Naturalist one evening on an outdoor deck that was unpopulated because there was no place to sit. The three of us talked about the ship’s caste system.  I told him that our running joke was what we might do that could get us put off the boat in Juneau.

Graham’s degree was in Ornithology.  His first year on a ship, he had rescued the dead bodies of various birds that flew against the boat and knocked themselves out.  He had wrapped them up and put them in kitchen’s freezer intending to use them (somehow) for his lectures.  He was not branded a bozo who got it wrong and he was not put off the boat in Juneau.  He was asked back for a subsequent year.

“I hope we run into The Naturalist again,” Nancy said at least once a day.

Our last day on the ship, Graham, Nancy and I met for tea which stretched into dinner.  He told us more funny stories from his twenty years of experience.  One question that seems to be asked quite often, prompting Graham to an aside that salmon have a higher I.Q. than a lot of folks on cruise ships, is

“Does the crew sleep on board?”

On one run, a sarcastic staff person replied, “No, we are air-lifted off at night to sleep onshore.”

In the evaluation forms at the end of that cruise, someone had commented, “I enjoyed everything about this trip except the noise from the helicopters at night when I was trying to sleep.”

Graham’s comment about the photos that Nancy took that evening was that he looked like a Taxi Cab in his yellow shirt.  I said I looked like the drunken fare he had to take home.  And Nancy looks like someone who got her wish to run into The Naturalist again.

Nancy and The Naturalist

Taxi cab and drunken fare

The Nightie

In our entire week aboard a cruise ship (the S.S. Wish-I-Was-Home), Nancy and I did not use the Fitness Center once.  I wasn’t even sure where it was.  However, except for the day we came on board after a cold, wet 8 hours in Juneau, we did not use the elevator either.  We used the stairs.  This activity combined with the state of rage I was in for the first three days, resulted in my actually losing a pound.(https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/07/meltdown-in-alaska/)

Our stateroom was on the 5^th deck, or Below Stairs, so to speak.  Most of the activities were on the 6^th and 7^th decks and the constant supply of food was on the 11^th.  In addition, I was always getting lost and having to retrace my steps in order to start over.  So it was a lot stair climbing. My glutes, which historically hang off me like empty vacuum cleaner bags, were doing their job quite efficiently by the third day.

Cruise ships are legendary for their continual supply of food.  There were guilt-inducing amounts.  Something was available twenty-four hours a day.  It may not always have been what we wanted, but it was available and we were free to take it anywhere on the ship.  Nancy sometimes asked for smaller portions.

One Romanian waiter was puzzled.  His pen was poised while he tried to figure out what to write.

“Just one egg,” Nancy repeated. “I don’t like to waste.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve come to the wrong place,” he said

When I said in my previous blog that we were bumped from the dining room, I wasn’t entirely accurate.  I was going for pity.  We could eat breakfast and lunch in the dining room, but we were bumped from the 6 PM dinner because I was a Non-Revenue Guest with little social standing in ship society; and Nancy, by her unfortunate association with me, was regarded similarly.  The second seating was at 8:30, far too late for me with my particular digestive situation and sleeping habits.  So here is where the pity comes in: poor me, on a ship with enough food to feed several continents, and available in some form 24 hours a day, but I couldn’t eat in the (hot, noisy) formal dining room when I wanted to.

Nancy could have gone without me at 8:30 had she wanted to, but she didn’t.  So we usually ate dinner on Deck 11 where it was quiet and the grilled fish and the raw sushi were good, at least at the beginning of the week.

At the end of that cold, wet, tiring day in Juneau when we took the elevator for the first time, we also sat in the Jacuzzi, all of which left me with the impression that I had actually used the Fitness Center.  We looked at each other and agreed that we were tired of dinner on Deck 11.  Maybe we could get into the dining room at the early seating because other people who also might be tired could be opting to dine in Juneau.

“Will you do the asking?”  I asked Nancy.  “I’ve bothered them all so many times that I am sure they will pre-emptively refuse when they see me coming down the hall.”

At the dining room I skulked around the corner while Nancy charmed an affirmative out of the assistant maître d’.  It was a formal dinner but Nancy assured him we would change and be back in fifteen minutes.

“Did he actually say we weren’t presentable?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Elena.  I don’t do details, I get general impressions.”

(“What will I say in my blog?” I thought.  “I need a quote.”)

Nancy had a cocktail dress that could double as a skirt and I had a black dress with a jacket that could double as either a bathrobe or a swim suit cover-up.  This is what one calls Travel Chic.  We wet down our cowlicks, pulled the hayseeds out of our teeth, and  hurried back to the dining room.

The head maître d’, a man I had bothered even more than his assistant and the hostess, was standing guard at the entrance to the dining room.  His decisions were final.  I flattened myself against the wall, something that was harder than usual to do given the shape my glutes were now in.  I waited a long time.  Finally Nancy peeked around the corner and beckoned.  I scrunched down and tried to hide behind her as we were ushered into the dining room and handed from waiter to waiter until we ended up on the lower level and across the room from where we started.

A protest went up from the people at the table.  Those seats were taken by others in their party.  I looked away, watching for the maître d’ and pretending I wasn’t part of the drama.  I was prepared to see something so fascinating out the window I would cross the room to look at it.

Nancy is diplomatic and gracious.  She employed just the right tone to cut through the complexities of the interaction.  I could learn so much from her.  It all got sorted out.  The folks at the table suddenly remembered that two of their group had been given a complimentary dinner in the ship’s exclusive restaurant because they had complained about the noisy conditions surrounding their stateroom.  This is what the Revenue Guests get when they complain.

Our status then changed from Interlopers to Persons of Interest.  We were welcomed into the large party of retirees from a community on the Jersey shore.  It was a fun evening of lively conversation, and a good meal: tender lobster followed by baked Alaska.

Later in the evening, on our way through the ship, we ran into the cruise director who assured me he had spent $200 on art supplies in Juneau.  My awful week had begun to turn around.

(written aboard the S.S. Wish I Was Home, June/2011)

A cruise ship operates on a feudal system.  The peasants smile, say good morning, look exhausted and serve the Revenue Guests until their wide feet ache.  The RGs have so many needs that I understand why room service sometimes brings the cream but the water is cold, or the water is hot but they forget the cream.  I am grateful that I am allowed to order room service at all given my position on this ship.

I am in the artisan class.  Our position in society has not changed in a thousand years.  We are paid mostly in the form of appreciative comments like:

“Oh how lovely.”

“I wish I could do that.”

“I haven’t a creative bone in my body.”

Musicians, artists, and writers are arguably who make life bearable for everyone.  We are a bridge that connects the poor with the mighty.  We finance our own maintenance and are walked on regularly.

If you want to be in the artisan class, you have to not only love what you do, you have to find your internal survival in your art.  Painting, singing, and writing is where I go when life gets unbearable.  Here on this ship, I am glad I have my paints, a pen and a notebook because I am not cleared to touch the pianos.

I was tense my first day of teaching watercolor on board.  The watercolor teacher is so low on the list of who matters that I only saw the activity director twice in a week.  I learned I could be bounced from just about anything without notice.

I arrived at my first class half an hour early, terrified by the fascist language that ordered me to be 20 minutes early and dressed in “business attire,” whatever that meant. And I was feeling inferior because I had just been unceremoniously bumped from dinner in the dining room.  I waited for 25 minutes.  I didn’t know where anything was, I had been assured that Housekeeping would set up the tables, and get out the 35 art kits, each of which contained six tubes of paint, three brushes, ten sheets of cold-pressed watercolor paper, and a palette.  They would hand out numbers to the first 35 people who arrived; the rest could try again at the next class.

There were 45 students milling around before Housekeeping set up the demonstration table and got out the box of supplies.  Instead of 35 art kits, there were, in fact, twelve palettes, three trays of mostly used up watercolor paints in odd colors, and nine small pieces of watercolor paper about the size I use to test for paint saturation.

“Where’s the paper?”  I asked.  “Where are the kits?”

“This is what you use,”  Housekeeping said.

“I can’t teach 50 people to paint with these supplies!”

“This was enough for the other teacher.”  Housekeeping looked at me with contempt.  She added in a hiss, “This is not the place to have this conversation.”

Forty-five people waited expectantly.  So I did what any professional teacher with thirty years of experience would do:  I turned away and burst into tears.

I knew instinctively that what was expected of me as a team player (which I have never been and was not going to start now) was to say, “I’m sorry, but due to my incompetence and ill-preparedness, there are inadequate supplies.  Please blame me.”

But I wiped my eyes, turned around and chirped into the microphone, “Hi, My name is Elena.  If you have heard that watercolor is difficult, I want to show you why it doesn’t have to be.”

I hissed right back at Housekeeping to cut down some cups to make “palettes,”  find me some paper and bring me some drinking water.  Someone brought drawing paper from the children’s center.  It was little more than newsprint that was going to disintegrate with my wet-into-wet technique.  I gave the nine pieces of watercolor paper to the first people who had come in.

I lined up the meager supplies and without thinking, invited people to line up and take one of everything.  What was now over 50 people swarmed the table and began squirting gobs of paint into cups, fighting each other for brushes and water from the bucket.  I watched in dismay.

Someone politely asked me if I could find her some blue paint.

“No,” I snapped.

She was a reporter from a major newspaper which I will not name because I don’t want you going into their archives and reading of my shame.

Somehow we all got through it.  Some folks were even delighted with their paintings.  When they all left for their next activity, I sat down amidst the ruins of Art and sobbed.

My traveling companion on this ship, my great friend, Nancy, who can tell me every time I have de-constructed a thought, had watched the whole mess from the back of the room.  She told me she hadn’t been able to tell anything was wrong.

Two fellow artists, who sat in the front row and who had come mostly for the pleasure of not having to be the teachers themselves, told me I had handled things beautifully.  I was glad I had given them pieces of the watercolor paper because they knew the difference.

But Nancy talked to the cruise director for me.  “She is not going to be able to pull this off again,” she told him.  “She is going to need watercolor paper.”

The paper was three days away in Juneau.  It took me that long to recover from my first class.  Things got better.  Stay tuned.  I think I have one more cruise blog in me.

Today is the day I pack for a trip—teaching watercolor on a ship cruising up the Inland Passage into Alaska– but I have reached a point where I would rather stay home than cope with the mounting number of things to do before I leave.  A few weeks ago when I hauled out the suitcase and put a few things in, that was fun.  I started a list, that was fun.  The anticipation was mild and dreamy and nothing was crucial because there was plenty of time. I took a whole hour to plan the paints I would take and to squeeze them into my travel palette.

But as the departure day got closer, the list of things to remember to do got more complicated: re-new prescriptions, hold the mail, pay bills before I go, anticipate bills that expect to be paid while I am gone, instructions for the house/cat-sitter and oh my god, I got rid of cable TV months ago and though I have been quite happy without it, what if the cat sitter requires the ability to watch Animal Planet while she’s here?  Sheets.  She needs clean sheets and I leave at 5 in the morning, must remember to make the bed.  What if I forget my passport?  Did I put it back where I always keep it or did I put it someplace new so as not to forget it? What if that book comes in at the library and I miss picking it up?  Then I am back to number 458 on three copies.

Mid-week, a puddle of water collected outside the water meter hole on my parking strip.  I pried open the lid of the hole to discover eight inches of standing water.

“Oh god,” I thought. “I have to get the entire house re-plumbed.  My house-sitter won’t have any water.  I can’t go.  ”

The city’s emergency techs came at 1:00 in the morning, woke me up and got the cats all excited, but fixed the leak.

Then my friend Nancy who can tell every time I have de-constructed a thought, and who is going with me on this trip, called to say that after reading all the material from the booking agent, she isn’t sure she has any clothes appropriate for the trip.

“What are you talking about?”

“Haven’t you read the material?” Nancy is an English teacher.  I wonder how many times a quarter she asks that question.

“Not yet, why?”

“They are very particular about how you, as an ambassadress for the ship, and your guest, me, present ourselves.

“Nancy,” I said. “I don’t think you have anything in your closet that isn’t appropriate for this trip. I think they are concerned about someone coming to dinner in a thong and a tank top with no bra.”

My painting partner, Susan, told me a great story from when she was running a nursing agency in central California.  A male aide came in one day wearing see-through pants and no underwear.

“You’ll have to go home and change,” Susan told him.

“There’s nothing in the regulations,” he challenged her.

“I realize there is nothing in our regulations that say you are not allowed to come to work naked, nevertheless, you are not.”

“I can report you.”

“Go right ahead. But for today you need to put some underpants on.”

I looked through the massive amount of info from the booking agent and by the time I got done reading it, I seriously wondered if I had anything in my closet appropriate to their dress code.  And there were an inordinate number of references to reasons a staff member might be “put off the boat.”

Nancy and I had a long discussion about what clothes we would take.  The new on-going joke looks to be what we might do that would get us put off the boat.  I am supposed to wear business attire when I teach, specifically slacks and a blouse.  I don’t own any blouses, as such.  Could I get “put off the boat” for teaching in what are essentially leggings and a T-shirt?  I mean they are very nice leggings, new in fact, and very nice T-shirts.  They aren’t even T-shirts, they are “tops.”

As of this writing, Nancy is already on her way to our port so she is theoretically out of my worry range.  I leave tomorrow morning.  I can just get the suitcase closed.  That was another thing: the challenge —and the commitment —was to get everything into a carry-on bag.  And use up all the perishables in the fridge but still have what I need tomorrow morning.  I wonder if they put people off the boat for obsessing.

In any case, you might not hear from me for a week.  If I have the appropriate attire, I will post a blog from the ship.  Or wherever I am when they put me off the boat.

No one was more surprised than I was to discover I had a taste for Scotch whiskey.  The child of an alcoholic, I grew up with a fear of alcohol and a dislike of being in situations where people were likely to be drunk.

I, myself, have only been drunk once: the night before I was graduated from Whitman College.  Too many Singapore Slings followed by some nasty Madeira was an effective inoculation against alcohol of any kind.  Thirty five years later I still don’t care all that much for gin.

Wine offered a safer field in which to wander.  I learned how it’s made, how to savor it and talk about it; how to escape a wine snob etc.  I had one moment at L’Ecole No. 41 in Lowden, Washington on the way to Walla Walla when I tasted their Apogee: an entire Christmas season passed through my mouth: the carols, the food, the lights, the warmth, the angels.

For one sip I understood what all the fuss was about.  And immediately after I understood the meaning of “Sic transit gloria mundi” as well.  It never happened again.  Not in the second sip that day nor two years later when I was again on my way to Walla Walla.

I learned a lot about wine.  I just never learned to like it. And wine, indisputably, doesn’t like me.  I don’t get a warm glow or a nice buzz.  I get stupid and slightly nauseated.  It would be more efficient just to give me Rohypnal.

When Joan, my friend with the theological chops, the one with whom I have long conversations about spirituality, offered me some Lagavulin Scotch, it seemed a long way from throwing up in a toilet in College House on the Whitman campus.   I took a sip.  What a revelation!  The Comforter had come.  I didn’t brush my teeth that night because I wanted to fall sleep with that smoky, peaty finish in my mouth.

Fast forward a year or two.  I was watching TV with Chris and Dee.  Chris, the unclassifiable except she is an excellent cook and a CERT trainer.  Dee who missed church this (and every) morning because she was out practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.  That Chris and Dee.  And their four Chinooks.

“Do you have any hard liquor?” I asked.

Chris’ head swiveled.  She thinks of me as a gluten-free vegan wimp.  No wait, I’m the one who thinks of me as a gluten-free vegan wimp.

“I do,” she said.  (I love it when people answer in the affirmative with “I do” instead of “Yes.”  It gives me a frisson.)

She had some Laphroaig and, as a bonus, she knew how to pronounce it.  Another revelation.  I thought nothing could be smokier or peatier than Lagavulin but  Laphroaig out-smoked and out-peated it.  I wouldn’t want to brush my teeth for days.

I was over at Gwen’s the next day –Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything—trumpeting the delights of Laphroaig and asking her what she knew about cigars.  That seemed the next step.

I have not advanced –yet –to cigars, but my birthday was two days ago and both Gwen and Chris gave me bottles of Laphroaig.  I got out the Lagavulin as well.  We sat outside with the salads and the gluten-free birthday cake and compared  Scotches.  They both have their charms.  I’m not sure we came to any definite conclusions, especially not after I brought out the Absinthe.

My bottle of Absinthe is a novelty that will last me for the rest of my life even if I live to be 100 which I sincerely hope I do not.  I bought it years ago when it was illegal to sell but not to own, go figure.  Absinthe has fascinated me since college because I was an English major.  I don’t think you have to be an English major to be interested in Absinthe.  I think it works if you are an art major or have read a Graham Greene novel.

In any case, there was an article in The New Yorker a few years back called “Green Gold” about some Americans in France who were making Absinthe from 19^th century recipes.  I ordered a bottle from their website.  The shipping cost more than the bottle itself.  It was an extremely expensive proposition.  It seemed the risk was all theirs.  I clicked “submit,” and waited.

A week later at 5:00 in the morning, I heard a thump at my front door and the sound of a car speeding away.  On the front doorstep was a package with a customs label that said “printed material.”  I get things from across the pond now and again from my English cousins but this didn’t look like anything they would send.  This looked like something out of a Graham Greene novel.  It was my Absinthe!  It had gone from France to England, sailed across an ocean, slipped through customs as “printed material” and was couriered across the continent.

Absinthe is (famously) chartreuse and (also famously) hallucinogenic although I believe that has been contested.  I maintain that any alcohol can be hallucinogenic if one drinks enough of it which is not an issue with the Absinthe.  It is so strong, it’s almost undrinkable.  And once you’ve had some, you can’t feel your own tongue.

I pour a little in a bowl, everyone soaks a sugar cube in it, take a few sucks off the sugar cube and that’s it until the next time I entertain.  Except I get to tell the story about how the bottle came into my possession.  About 20 more years of telling the story and it will have been worth what I paid for it.

Now I have enough Scotch to last, well, a few years.  So don’t give me any next Christmas.  But I am running low on Drambuie and I like that, too.

There was an exquisite moment in church this morning.  The service was laboring toward a moment of silence.  The service leader was intoning, “Something, something, something.  .  .  that holy quiet.  .  .”

At the next in-breath, Lu upset her box of crayons all over the floor.  It sounded like a burst of hail beating against the sides of the sanctuary.  Necks rotated unapologetically, and chuckles burbled up.  This is a church where you can laugh out loud.  Everyone got clearance for a better inhalation.

The silence, when we finally settled down, was followed by the Lord’s Prayer during which Lu who had just finished gathering up her crayons, dropped them all over again.  This time they rolled around under the pews forever and forever in their glory until the “Amen.”

When I was a child in church, I prayed for moments like these.  Getting the unstoppable giggles in church was a gift from God.  Today as I sat there at the piano awaiting my cues, I was visited with a flood of associations.

At another church job—the one I was fired from because I didn’t close my eyes for prayer—there were awful “children’s sermons.” The children sat in the front of the sanctuary in a circle and pastor talked down to them, manipulating them into cute responses.  Then they left to play fiery furnace or crucifixion or whatever they did in the bowels of the church.

The children’s sermon was especially sappy one Valentine’s Day.  There was a lot of gush about love and Jesus, ending with the question, “And who wants to be your valentine?”  One straightforward young man stuck his finger down his throat and made a retching noise.  I was the only person in the hall who burst out laughing.

In a similar vein was something that happened at meeting of a “spirituality group” I was part of.   There’s a problem right there: a group that characterizes itself as “spiritual.”  Actually it had a pretentious name, Clas Myrddin, but no one used it except the man who conceived of it.  The group was made up of some people who were hoping to by-pass all the difficult feelings and situations of life by being spiritual.  Others of us (me, for example) thought we knew exactly what it meant to “be spiritual” and how to run a “spirituality” group.  The two of us who knew from spiritual were continually butting heads.  Everyone in the group was pissed off at either one or the other of us.

One night in my home, we all prepared to meditate.  Some of the group wanted to try it, some didn’t, some worried that they didn’t know how, some were suspicious that the rest of the group wouldn’t be doing it right and so on. But there we were, fifteen human beings sitting in a circle, getting quiet, trying to be “spiritual.”

My cat, Edith, came into the room, gave us all the once-over, stalked dead center into the middle of the circle and histrionically vomited.  This was also a group where one could laugh and we did.  But we were not sufficiently spiritual to recognize a numinous visitation when the numen up-chucked in front of us.

In 1971, Albert Cullum wrote, The Geranium on the Windowsill Just Died, but Teacher You Went Right On, a book that I am glad to report would not be so radical today as it was then.  The title says it all, not just for teaching but for our lives. Sometimes we get so intent on what we think needs to happen that we miss just about everything.

The late columnist Molly Ivins, said that being Canadian must feel like living next door to the Simpsons.  A lot of people have made this exact observation.  Case in point: our propensity for turning our front lawns into Hooterville and putting up for sale our private possessions is perhaps out-slummed by the phenomenon of the Free Pile.   (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/05/selling-the-vibrator/)

The Free Pile is where everything goes that hasn’t sold in a yard sale, hasn’t yet been picked up by a donation agency, and which you don’t have the energy to load into your car and take to a repository.  There was such a pile outside my house beginning on Friday afternoon.

It started with the Diamondback elliptical and its power cord.  I used the elliptical for years until I got tendonitis from pumping away for too long with my head angled unnaturally toward the television because I couldn’t stop watching the Gilmore Girls.  By the time I moved the TV to straight in front of me, the damage was done.   I couldn’t find another series I liked well enough to induce me to that amount of exercise.

An entertainment center was next.  Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, gave this to me along with her giant TV when she bought her first flat screen.  Gwen has so much more class than I do: she gives things to her friends.

“Sorry, Gwen,” I said (I wasn’t) when she noticed it on the street.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s traveling.”

I put out three boxes of stuff including a jar missing its lid, 5 new blank cassette tapes, a bath pillow, a plastic desk blotter, a large yellow plastic designer flower, 4 plastic iced tea glasses, one of them dis-colored; an empty Avon “Here’s my Heart” cream sachet jar, a packet of bamboo torch wicks, 2 eye droppers, 2 car jacks, a mouse pad, piles of T-shirts and towels, a cotton bathroom rug, a plastic faux-old wall sconce.

I had plans to take some electronics to a recycling event but these items made a pit stop at the Free Pile outside my house: an old computer monitor, keyboard, printer and speakers; also a portable oven that called itself convection because it had a fan.  It had belonged to my parents; I used it in the summer when I didn’t want to heat up the house.  I’d run it outside with an extension cord and cook fish.  But since we are never again having summer in Seattle, I thought it was time to dispose of this relic.

Besides, Gwen who is both classy and generous has left with me –on permanent loan—a Coleman grill.  She and I have started not a few fires in it when we’ve attempted to barbeque.  It’s also where we roasted the Peeps one April Fool’s Day. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/05/peeps-in-performance/).

Matt, my yard guy, posed a 4-foot high stuffed Santa Claus on the elliptical. During this operation, his cell phone slipped out of his pocket.  He was hunting for it when a bicyclist stopped to inspect the loot.  He called Matt’s number and they located his phone.  The bicyclist rode off with a towel.  I heard all this from where I sat at my computer.  It gave me the idea for this blog.

A young man knocked on the door to ask me if there was a power cord to the elliptical because if there was, he would take them both.  I searched through the stuff, now strewn all over the side yard.  Someone had taken the power cord to the elliptical!  It was still usable but you couldn’t vary the speed or keep track of your progress.  The only speed I was interested in was how fast I got through the Gilmore Girls episodes, but I understand that everyone isn’t like me.

I found the lid to the glass jar so I retrieved the jar. Then I took back the Avon “Here’s My Heart” cream sachet jar.

Some kids stopped to pose with the Santa Claus, taking pictures of each other on their phones.  They left the Santa working out on the elliptical.

A man with a lovely conscience was hesitant to take the T-shirts because he was going to use them for rags and someone else might need them for clothes.

“Take anything you want for any reason at all,” I noblesse obliged him.

Someone took the dis-colored iced tea glass.  The blank cassettes went one by one.  A walker took the plastic flower.  All the electrical and computer bits except the monitor disappeared. Someone took the elliptical!

I began coming home from a different direction so I could observe the progress.  I usually come via 87^th street so my car is pointed north on the parking strip.  Otherwise when it rains, I have a lake to negotiate to get into the driver’s seat.  I started driving home via 88^th because it slowly unveiled what was left of the Free Pile. It was like Christmas in reverse: instead of amassing a pile of junk, I watched it recede.

Further drama was introduced by the threat of rain which was forecasted for Tuesday, then pushed to Wednesday.  Then it doubled-back.  I covered what was left of the pile in plastic just before the first drops came.  At this writing, there is still the computer monitor, the entertainment center and three iced-tea glasses.  I have great faith in the American public that before long my only souvenir of the Free Pile will be the fact that I still have that tendonitis.

I do wish car manufacturers would stop coming up with automobile names from mythology.  It’s disturbing to those of us who are sensitive to other dimensions and Simple Green All-Purpose products.

“Would you buy a car called Saturn?” I asked an astrologer friend of mine.

“Never!” Just the thought of it provoked her to do an energy clearance whoosh.

Saturn is the planet where everything goes wrong.  I believe that when General Motors first launched the Saturn, it was full of quirks and cantankerous parts.  On the other hand, if you work through Saturn energy—and we all have it– over the course of a lifetime, you can look forward to a peaceful old age.  It’s not the most appealing advertising campaign for a car, but it’s useful advice for a human being.

Then there’s the Ford Scorpio.  A Scorpionic car would hover suspiciously in the shadows, taking back streets and side alleys, obsessed with its own inner workings.  Its advertising slogan would be “Afraid of the Open Road!”

The Dodge Aries is an interesting juxtaposition of images because Aries energy doesn’t dodge anything.  It just tanks over whatever is in its way.   Driving is dangerous enough without cars that confuse the archetypal forces.

The Leo.  No, wait.  It’s Geo. Never mind.

Jowett Cars Ltd. made a Jupiter sports car.  I don’t know anything about cars—I am only writing this because since I don’t own an i-pod, I notice parked cars when I walk in the neighborhood—but sports cars are small, no?  Jupiter is a gaseous, bombastic energy.  Whereas Aries charges over whatever is in its way, Jupiter merely expands until it has obliterated what was there before.  That doesn’t sound like a sports car.

Mercury is a good name for a car, but I would expect a car called Mercury to be fast and zippy which I don’t believe the Ford Mercury is.  Mercury is the Roman name of the Greek god Hermes.  Quick, lithe, and tricky, he travelled in and out of the underworld, shape-shifted, and made mischief.  He was a fast talker.  He’d make a good sports car or car salesman.

Taurus suggests something that is well-crafted and reliable.  The Toyota Corolla of many years ago could have been called Taurus and brought verisimilitude to its archetype.  I don’t know if Ford Tauruses are particularly reliable.  Forgive me for repeating the obvious: I don’t know anything about cars.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, knows quite a lot about cars.  Once while dining, my guests and I watched her replace a transmission in her, I don’t know, Porsche, in her side yard.  My guests knew enough to refer to it as a “tranny.”   Gwen tells me that I could not have seen a Jowett Jupiter while walking in the neighborhood.  They haven’t been made for years and if someone actually had one, it would hardly be left out on the street.  She accused me of researching cars on the Internet.  Busted.

I do know that cars carry us and our stuff around.  Words do much the same thing.  Meanings and usage change as our world changes and as more and more students graduate from high school without knowing how to write a sentence.  Then again, what I think is the bastardization of our language could be Mercury at work.

I grew up with a religious education that pretty much killed religion for me so of course, I ended up being a church musician.  I fought against it and actually got fired from a church job once because I didn’t have the outward behavior they expected of staff.  One of the many complaints against me was that I had my eyes open during prayer.

There were years when I never expected to enter a church again.  But it’s difficult making a living as a musician if you don’t teach or if you turn down church jobs.  As it turned out, I loved teaching and much to my surprise, I found a home for myself in a liberal Protestant church, so liberal that I actually miss some of the gruesome hymn texts because at least they scanned.

I don’t believe we can expunge anything from our pasts.  We have to come to terms with all our experiences.  But patterns can be unraveled and knit into something new.  It’s important for me to keep track of the original threads.  At least that’s what I sometimes tell myself in the middle of a church sermon.

I have learned to translate a lot of what I hear in church services into a language that has more meaning for me.  When I hear something particularly fundamentalist, I –and people who know me well can attest to what an achievement this is—am able to smile and nod and think to myself, “Don’t get excited, they are expressing their own experience of the divine.”

The divine.  What a frightening concept this is for us.  Uncontrollable, unruly, roaming, surprising.  It makes sense that there’s been an attempt to funnel it into one person—not even a Being, but a person more or less as small as we all are, and usually male—and make “him” be “out there.”

The Force, The Universe, Great Spirit –these are worthy attempts at expressing the ineffable.   Cultures that have many gods and goddesses understand that to claim only one god is an invitation for shrinkage.   But in Protestant Christianity, there is only one God.  “He”–or as the gender neutral hymnbooks try to cram into one beat “He, She, Father, Mother” is “out there.”

This past Sunday in the church service, I played a hymn while everyone sang “God, my God, why do you feel so far from me?  I then sat down with Marvin the Magnificent and fed him Paul Newman organic dog treats, peanut butter flavor.  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/04/choir-dogs/

The minister said something about what to do when you feel that God is far away: Pray. Meditate. Read the Bible. All the usual. “Don’t get excited,” I thought. “She is speaking from her own experience of the divine.”  I fed Marvin another biscuit.

I never hear it suggested that we consult our own desires.  This is what I believe we do anyway.  Protestant theology distances itself from desire by calling it “the will of God.”  I will say about desire what I said earlier about the divine: What a frightening concept this is for us.  Uncontrollable, unruly, roaming, surprising.

What might happen if we all were able to say, “This is what I want.  This is my passion?”  For one thing, there would be a lot fewer people sneaking around getting what they wanted covertly.  There would be a lot less judgment about what other people were doing and why.  And there would be no moral high ground, that fictional piece of real estate that no one has actually seen, let alone inhabited.

No one knows what it feels like to be me.  I only approximate understanding what it feels like to be you.  All we have to go on are the hints and guesses we give each other, and the assumptions we make.  “The kingdom of God is within you.”  I believe the divine is a huge unknowable energy that we can only apprehend by our desire.  That so many religious people want to call it God makes it no less human. That we feel it intensely inside ourselves makes it no less divine.

I don’t suppose we can agree that our desire is divine, cut out the middlemen, and call it a day.

The annual Greenwood Garage Sale day was this past Saturday.  I didn’t get to see much of it because I participated in a Garden Mart sale –all things for (or from) the garden—at Broadview Church.  I got together some garden-themed gifts (probably purchased at past yard sales), my watercolor cards (some of which are of gardens), and the last of my raspberry liqueur (the bottles that didn’t sell at the Dibble House Christmas Sale).  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/11/bazaar-and-beautiful/

I dug up some hollyhock and Canterbury bells, and potted some of my Peruvian scillas.  My neighbors helped me load the car and I took off, stopping at the rummage sale at Christ the King Church on the way.  I thought about selling my rummage sale purchases at the Garden Mart but I love Pre de Provence soap.

So yes, I am somewhat of a Yard Sale junkie.  When my British cousins were here, I pointed out a few yard sales as we were on our way to Snoqualmie Falls.  I thought they would be interested but I think they actually looked the other way, as though I had suggested they watch someone use the toilet.  The British have their Jumble Sales and their Bring and Buy sales so I don’t know what my cousins found so distasteful.  It could be that displaying one’s private possessions on their front lawn is carrying it a bit too far.  At the Jumble Sales in small parishes or villages, everyone knows who brought what, but they pretend not to.  That can hardly be the case when the lady of the house is haggling over the price of her own underwear.

I, myself, have held annual yards sales since 1986.  I have managed to have enough merchandise by virtue of having a lot of storage space and by having parents who were pack-rats.  They’ve both been gone for years, but I still have some of the residual from the 2008 Shock and Awe estate sale of their house.

My original yard sale took place because of a little girl named Jessie, who was a shooting star that flashed across my sky every summer for five years.  She had been my little companion when I lived in France, a four year old blonde child with big blue eyes, delicate features and the spirit of a little imp.  She was nine the first summer she stayed with me in Seattle.   I was used to kids but I only had them for a half hour at a time.  Having one for 24 hours a day was a new experience for me.

That first visit, I tried to out-fun her.  Big mistake as any parent could have told me.  Yard sales were something we both enjoyed, and since Jessie had worn me out with going to sales on her first visit, when she came the second summer it was with the understanding that we would hold a sale of our own. The beauty of this arrangement was that there was a lot of sitting down time once we had hauled everything out, and that counted for me as time to rest.

Jessie brought an extra suitcase of stuff to sell.  The next year, she bought a box and a suitcase of already priced items for the second annual sale.  The third year, one of my piano students, Maddy, came with her mother, Joanie, to help with the sale.

That was the year I sold the vibrator.

I don’t need to recount how said vibrator came into my possession.  It vibrated fine.  It just wasn’t big enough for the requirements of the person who purchased it.  So there it stood, tall and phallic, amongst the tumblers, the purple feather boa, and the game of Boggle.

When I was eleven, I wouldn’t have known a vibrator from an electric drill but the girls crowded around it, giggling.  They christened it the “Happy Finger.”  Its life trajectory became the great speculation of the morning.  Every time someone picked it up, both girls were stuck dumb.

Around noon and buzzing like a couple of human vibrators themselves, they rushed over to where Joanie and I were chatting.

“Look,” Matty whispered. “That old guy is looking at the happy finger.”

“Do you think he knows what it is?” Jessie asked.

“Oh, I expect he does,” I said.

“Eww,” they said.

They watched in fascinated silence until the man who was perhaps in his 70’s, stood the vibrator back on the table, and moved on.

Thirsty and hungry after this spasm of excitement, the girls went off to the now de-funct Art’s Food Center on Holman Road to buy snacks and sodas.  A few minutes later, the old gentlemen paid me five dollars for the vibrator and walked with slow dignity to his car.

When the girls returned from Arts and reeking of grape soda, the first thing they noticed was the absence of the vibrator.

“Someone bought the happy finger?!!”

“Who was it?  When did it sell?”

“It was that man,” I said. “He bought it after you left.”

“The old guy?” they shrieked.  “What’s he gonna do with it?”

“Maybe he’s got a young wife that he wants to keep happy,” said Joanie.

“Ewww,” they chorused, making gagging gestures in case their point wasn’t clear.

This is only one of the things I enjoy about yard sales:  there is so much more on display than the stuff people want to get rid of.  There is more human drama amongst the crime fiction and cracked china than can be dreamt of in any other philosophy.