Kay and I packed our identical painting kits, ones we had bought together at the Art Spot in Edmonds and 50 times the amount of food we would need or come close to eating and travelled to The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach in a driving rainstorm. It was to be three days of painting and long walks on the beach.

The rain was relentless and I was the one to lug everything from the car because 1) I’m younger and steadier and 2) I chose Cabin 4 because it has good light but it also has a flight of stairs. Still, it must be stated at once that Kay, though an octogenarian while I have a ways to go, is vibrant and healthy; funny and fun. She just lost her partner and has to do many new things for herself. I’m a little protective of her. So I was happy to compromise my back, heaving all that stuff up the slippery stairs in the rain.

The Sandpiper used to be a bustling place, clean and well-tended. Now it’s shabby and slowly being reclaimed by sand and water. Seabrook down the road is turfing it out. I’ve stayed here with Nina, with other friends, with a group for my 60^th birthday and many times alone. I still love it because of its location. Twenty yards from Cabin 4 is the sandy beach, wide and expansive.

There was no bustle. In fact, we were the only ones there for the first three nights. The owner wasn’t even there. She had an intern running the place which seemed to mean mainly sitting in reception waiting for something to happen. The only thing that happened was me. The first afternoon I went up to get a dura-log for the woodstove.

“Also, we need matches,” I said.

“What is matches?”

I stared at her for a second. “To make a fire.”

“Oh.”

Jennie was from Moscow, here to learn to be an American hotelier.

“Are you homesick? I asked

“No, I love this. But I go home in December.”

She would go back to join friends in St. Petersburg who were setting up a hotel.

“We’re all alone here,” I said that evening. No lights came from the two huge lodges and there was no one next door in Cabin A. (I don’t know why Cabin A is next to Cabin 4 so don’t ask.)

I remembered the beds as being comfortable but mine felt like an old pull-out couch with bars pushing into my hip-bones. I got up several times to pee, to open the sliding glass door to hear the waves, to open my window, to shut my window. Every time I got up, there was a light on in Kay’s room. When I finally got up for the day at 6:00, I peeked in at the lump in the bed.

“Oh god, she’s dead,” I thought. Then I made tea and read my book. Kay finally dragged out of bed, looking like death because she had slept like the dead. She raised her eyebrows at my book and my tea when I said I thought she had died.

We painted all morning, I went for a walk on the beach, fixed us some lunch, went for another walk, then curled up with my book. Kay painted the rest of the day. We each had projects of our own. Kay did a skating scene for her Christmas card. I worked on glazing a forest scene, which required a lot of waiting for it to dry, during which time I did a fat robin and some dresses hanging on a line. I was planning to write “change of a dress” on it and give it to a friend who just moved.

We worked together on crows. Crows in flight, crows at rest and with wings of watercolor drips. We had crows all over the cabin. We discussed wing and tail size, we tried different techniques. I scattered popcorn on the deck to attract crows so we could study them. Crows absorbed us for one whole day.

I went to the shop for another dura-log.

“You need matches?” Jennie asked.

The second night Kay had another near-death experience. I got up around 5:00 to, you guessed it, pee. As I passed Kay’s room, I saw her slumped on the floor at the foot of the bed. One end of the mattress stood up like the bow of a sinking ship.

In the dim of the early morning and without my glasses, I couldn’t quite figure out what I was seeing. Then I thought Kay had not made it to the toilet and while trying to pull wet sheets off the bed, she had died. I peered closer.

“Kay?”

“Hi,” she said conversationally.

“What are you doing?”

“I sat on the edge of the bed and the mattress slid off.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, around 2:30.”

“You’ve been like that since 2:30?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I help you get up?”

“No. It’s pretty comfortable.”

“So you’re going to stay down there?”

“What time is it?”

“5:00.”

“Yeah, for a while.”

I went back to bed for another hour. When I got up for the day, Kay was snoring comfortably. I made tea as quietly as I could and read until I heard a voice.

“I’d like to get up now.”

There was a bed frame but no box springs, just two mattresses stacked on top of each other. The bottom mattress was slippery like flag silk. I pushed the top mattress into place and sat on the edge of the bed. It slipped down.

“How very odd.”

“I’m going to sleep for another hour,” Kay said.

“OK,” I said. I went back to my book.

I went for a walk in my boots before I started painting. Still chilly out, I wanted socks on my feet. Within five minutes, I had strayed too close to the surf and there was six inches of water in my boots. I sloshed over to a log, emptied the boots and squeezed out the socks. I left them by the log and continued for a mile barefoot before turning back.

Mine was still the only car in both lots.

“We’re the only ones here,” I said.

“You don’t say.”

We painted, it rained, it cleared up, the sun appeared, it clouded over, the sun reappeared. I went for another walk, barefoot from the get-go and came back my feet bone-chilled. Kay painted on, lost and found in her own world, concentrating for hours.

During that second walk I hashed through things that were on my mind: a work dilemma, a relationship problem and– with a lump in my throat– thoughts of someone I had always loved and who was no longer there.

Ahead of me were three little sandpipers. I hadn’t seen any sandpipers yet but there they were, running back and forth with the surf. Three little birds. I thought of the Bob Marley song:

Three little birds on my doorstep.  .  .
Saying, this is my message to you:
Don’t worry ‘bout a thing
Cause every little thing’s gonna be all right.

I fumbled for my phone. I wanted a picture of these little messengers. But when I was ready to click the picture, they had disappeared. But I didn’t need the picture. I had the message. The sea is like that. It washes everything onto the shore and then carries it away.

Pacific Beach

Cabin 4

I yelled at the cat. That’s when I knew things had gone too far.

It started when I began practicing to sing “Fill the World with Love,” a song from the musical Goodbye Mr. Chips (by Leslie Bricusse). I always get a little choked up when I sing it so I was practicing singing through the tears knowing that the throat lump would no doubt be my companion when I sang it for my Zoom Variety Hour (for folks in the memory loss community and their supporters.) The lump did show up but that is not the point.

The point is why I get so choked up. The song in the musical is sung by an old headmaster when he retires from teaching. It begins:

In the morning of my life, I will look to the sunrise
At a moment in my life when the world is new
And the blessing I shall ask is that God shall grant me
To be brave and strong and true
And to fill the world with love my whole life through.

So far, so good. It reminds me of Girl Scout songs.

Then it is the noontime of the old man’s life when the sky is blue and the blessing that he asks is unchanging: to be brave and strong etc.

I get through that just fine. I was earnest once. And there’s still time.

Finally, in the evening of his life he looks to the sunset at a moment when the night is due

Oh god, the night is due. There’s not that much time left.

The song goes on: the question I shall ask only you can answer, was I brave and strong and true? Did I fill the world with love my whole life through?

My tender conscience (shaped by fire breathing fundamentalist Christians from an early age and fiercely militated against by a swath of sarcasm in my make-up) explodes into maudlin regrets that I could have been kinder. I can always be kinder, especially to people who don’t understand sarcasm and I know who they are. Kindness counts. Kindness adds up.

I sang the song for The Variety Hour, I choked up, I sang through the lump, everyone said it was lovely.

It was a Thursday, the day that the odious Texas senator, Ted Cruz left people in his home state freezing –literally–to death, went to Mexico to be warm, came back after social media indicted him and blamed the trip on his daughters. I spent hours enjoying everyone hating on him. Laura Bassett put up a gif of a bedraggled, matted, wild-eyed, unhappy looking cat with the statement “When you look up from your computer and realize you just wasted three hours of your life tweeting about Ted Cruz on vacation.” That was the only laugh I had in four days.

Then I felt weighed down by all the hate. And the time wasted hating and glorying in the hating (as fun as it was.) “Did I fill the world with love?” ran through my head and I started to cry. I cried all the rest of Thursday, a good part of Friday and spent Saturday in a stupor doing nothing.

Earlier in an overabundance of kindness, two people had sent me microphones (I burst into tears, god, I’m a mess). Big, impressive looking microphones. Cadillac, Veuve Cliquot microphones. I flatter myself that it’s because they want to hear my high notes when I sing for The Variety Hour or Open Mike with Mute Button. Whatever.

But I started messing around with the microphones, seeing where they needed to be relative to me and the piano. Then I got the bright idea of recording the accompaniment of “Fill the World with Love” to sing while forcing myself to make love to the camera. My front room became a tangle of cords to speakers, microphones, computer, camera. The first take was depressing: eyes darting all over the place like I making a drug deal and oh god, is that spit visible in my mouth?

The accompaniment didn’t breathe like a singer. I recorded it again. Actually, I attempted it a dozen times before I got something marginally better than the first one.

It was somewhere in there that I yelled at the cat.

I was at the piano, preparing to start another take when she came over, sat at my feet and stared up at me. Stared. If you’ve ever had a cat stare you down, you’ll know what I am talking about. It’s the stare of a million martyrs over the course of history. The eyes bore into you and cause guilt bombs to detonate in your brain. The cat eyes say, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING SOMETHING FOR ME AND I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU ARE JUST SITTING THERE. All this happens when you aren’t even directly looking at the cat. You just know she’s there and you know what she’s doing. It’s asking too much to be filling the world with love at the same time.

I yelled “WHAT!*#?

The Throat Lump cameth. I started to cry. AGAIN. I hate the cords, I hate the look of electronics. I am being strangled with them. Making music is, to me, a piano with a few music books atop it and me sitting there, singing my heart out. I want to fill the world with love, goddamit.

Instead. Well, it’s ironic.

A few days after I’ve done something stupid, I often think, “I feel a blog post coming on.” If I’ve done something exceptionally stupid, it takes a week before I feel it. Well, at the time of this writing, it’s been two and a half weeks.

It started when I noticed that my arms hurt. Just the upper arms, both of them. Seemed a bit weird but I ignored it. The left arm started to hurt more. Then the pain crept up to the shoulder. That left arm became weak. I couldn’t pick up a full mug of tea with any confidence that I could get it to my mouth before I spilled it. Pain radiated down my arm and when I palpated, I could find tender spots around the shoulder joints.

My first thought was to hope it would go away. It got worse. I started to worry. Wheels turning in the middle of the night accelerated: Rotator cuff? What exactly is a rotator cuff? God, that means surgery. One of the Covid symptoms is muscle pain. Oh god, I have Covid of the arm. Or if it is the rotator cuff, I’ll need surgery and when I’m in the hospital, I’ll get Covid. What is MS ? Could this be how it starts? The m is for muscular, d is for dystrophy. Is that anything like atrophy? Oh god what is happening to me? I need to wash these sheets but I won’t be able to make the bed because I have Covid and/or atrophy of the shoulder. It’s already been two weeks. Can a person not in college go three weeks without washing sheets and live?

The next day I took or dissolved or creamed or drank everything in the house that I thought might help. I binged on a ten-hour TV series and spent a day not moving. By the time I went to bed I was feeling sloshy and sluggish but in less pain. So whatever dreadful thing I had, it seemed treatable.

The next day I traced back what I might have done to myself and the dial stopped on my friend Andrea. Andrea is this tiny little thing who lifts weights. During one of our Zoom cocktail parties, she told me about Joyce L Vedral’s 12 minutes-a day work out. She made it sound easy, even inviting and best of all, short. I ordered the book and fished around for some weights that I knew I had because they were too much trouble to take to Goodwill, being heavy and all.

The book came. It was huge and therefore hard to misplace. I boldly set out to do Day #1. I had to learn what the author meant by isometric and dynamic. By the time I felt I understood that, I had lost interest in doing any exercises. So that was my Day #1 workout.

The next day I tried to isolate some muscles as per the instructions. I texted Andrea “I don’t think I actually have pecs.” Andrea said to start with biceps because they were easier to isolate.

I gave up doing the day’s workout and found a single exercise that worked the biceps. I went through the motions without weights. Then I tried it with what I assumed were 3-lb weights. They weren’t marked; they just weighed less than ones that were marked as 5-lb weights. At this point I had to laugh at the idea of doing repetitions. Do two repetitions of 10. I did two lifts. Not repetitions, just lifts. The truth is I shouldn’t have been using weights at all. Cans of soup. Not even soup, tuna fish. No, pencils.

This was when my arms started hurting. I tried a few more days of isolating and going through the motions of the exercises, culminating in two more lifts a day. Then I nearly dropped hot tea all over me because my arm couldn’t hold up the hand that the mug was in, bringing this narrative back to where I was curled up for ten hours watching a Swedish TV political thriller called “Blue Eyes.” Now I was spilling tea on myself because I tried to hold the warm mug on a shoulder joint. Kind of pitiful, really.

There’s a medieval torture called strappado. The victim’s wrists were tied behind her. She was then strung up by the wrists where she hung until the weight of her body pulled her arms out of the shoulder sockets. I respect how much that must have hurt. Joyce L Vedral ought to mention it in her book.

I ordered a shoulder brace. It was as complicated as trying to isolate a muscle and lift a weight. I thought about taking it to my neighbor Gwen’s house. She can figure out anything. But I would have to put on shoes. I could go across the street to my neighbor Bill’s house. His 20-something son is home right now and I knew they’d help me. But I’d have to put on shoes and a bra.

Eventually I got it on me and it helped to keep the shoulder stabilized. Then there was no excuse to not launder the sheets. I spent The Day of the Coup taking down the Christmas tree. Seemed fitting.

In talking with my friends, I have come to the conclusion that I am the only one in my circle who has never before lifted weights. They all must have mighty pecs. I’m just an artiste.

I’ll begin by saying I am not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I think they are a set-up. Or a greeting card invention. And I find the first of January arbitrary.

Out of curiosity I looked up a history of New Year’s resolutions. They appeared to have begun 4000 years ago with the ancient Egyptians. Their new year began in the spring, round about planting time, which makes more sense as a resolution starting time than the dead of winter when sensible creatures are still hibernating.

The wheel of the year, turning round and round, over and over, is a built-in system for starting new rituals and discarding what no longer serves. The moon’s cycles are good for baby-step resolutions: every 28 or so days is a new moon, notable in that you can’t see it. It’s an auspicious time to start something new, then see how you’re doing with it at the full moon, roughly two weeks later. Evaluate, adjust, repeat.

The year has natural cycles that hang on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. At the vernal equinox, the light and dark are in balance and the juices of the earth are rising. It’s a great time to rise with them. At the summer solstice, life explodes with both an embrace of and a farewell to the light. Whether we like it or not and most of us don’t, we know the dark is coming. In our own ways, we prepare for it. The autumn equinox when light and dark are in balance again, is a chance to choose what you will take with you into the dark. And finally, the winter solstice, the grand finale of the year is the best time to just be still and see what thoughts come. No lists, no plans, just let our minds wander. Depending on how much eggnog we’ve consumed, this is easy enough.

If you happen to miss those four yearly events, there are always the crossquarter days: Feb 1, May 1, Aug 1 and Nov 1, the days that fall midway between the solstices and equinoxes. February 1 (Imbolc in the pagan calendar, purloined by the church as St Bridget’s Day) is the time for lambing and the rising of the milk, a new beginning.

May 1 (Beltane before everyone and his uncle took possession of it) is the real beginning of summer, the solstice being the height of summer or midsummer.  In the Pacific Northwest, May is a busy garden month with the added attraction that so many flowers are bursting into bloom. It’s an orgy of color and fragrance that carries you to the solstice and in its own way is not especially a good time to plan but to enjoy the days. That should be the resolution in the height of summer and the dead of winter: enjoy the days, let them come and go.

Aug 1 (Lughnasadh, Lammas and my friend Anna’s birthday) is the beginning of the harvest, a time of great energy. And finally Oct 31/Nov 1 (Samhain, also known as Halloween or All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day) which marks the end of the harvest and  preparing for the dark.

By my count that gives us eight natural times to make resolutions, change habits, re-think, plant, learn something, try again. Twenty if you count the moons of the year. None of them are Jan 1. The year is forgiving. If you fall short of something you meant to do, there’s another six white horses coming round the calendar and you can ride one of those.

But if you are determined to make new year’s resolutions, make them realizable. Here are a few modest ideas:

On a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, you know how you do all the red pieces and then give up? For 2021, resolve to do the yellow ones, too. Then give up.

You resolve to try to not binge on a bag of Oreos? Pile two slabs of frosting between two cookies.  Fewer calories. It works the same to suck the coating and chocolate off peanut M&Ms and spit the peanuts out. They’re stale anyway.

I haven’t done those things.

Maybe for 2021, I will resolve to.

I used to call “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” the alcoholic’s Christmas carol because of the line about “next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” Pure denial, fantastical thinking. Wasn’t that mean of me? It’s a perfect song for this year and I regret my former attitude.  If you’re not busy on Christmas Eve at 3:00 PM Pacific Time, 6:00 PM East Coast, share a merry little winter holiday with us at Open Mike with Mute Button.

Open Mike with Mute Button is an ongoing Zoom event I created for the same reason I start so many things: to get people making music and not just listening to pre-recorded, slick studio productions. While wonderful to listen to, recordings often miss the point of music. Music is alive, and the melding of your beating heart and your breath with melody, harmony and rhythm is an incomparable event all in itself.

Open Mike with Mute Button began when I asked my college friend John who lives in Boston if he would be interested in joining me. John is a walking compendium of folk music. When I knew him at school, he was a banjo plunker. Now I find out he is somewhat of a virtuoso on banjo and guitar. That’s what 40 years of practice will do. With John’s agreement I secured the east coast and John came up with our name.

My student Susan recently moved from Seattle to Longmont, Colorado and she (the original spotlight whore) brought in two of her college friends, Linda and Beth, who all have sung together. Rocky Mountains were accounted for.

My cousin June in Wisconsin, a piano teacher and church musician, said she would join whenever she could. That pins down middle America.

The world’s seventh largest economy gave us Bruce in central California and Mary-Ellis in Berkeley, also college friends. (that would be Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington.) Bruce sings children’s songs, German songs and songs from his Roman Catholic faith. Mary-Ellis, always wildly entertaining, sings musical comedy and standards.

In the Seattle area, besides me, early joiners were Stewart who plays what seems like every string instrument known to man and is long a song collector. My friend and Swedish teacher Karin brought some of the loveliest songs on earth (and often about the earth) from her native Sweden. Vicki, a beginning piano student and the bravest of us all, once played and sang a song from her first-year piano book. And Melinda with her ukulele and her smile makes you sing your heart out.

I know someone in Holland who stays up late and I keep hoping he will join us one day at  midnight for him. That would make Open Mike with Mute Button international.

We are in all stages of musical development: amateurs, professionals, terrified performers and spotlight whores. We take turns singing and playing for each other. There’s always a lot of laughing and I always come away inspired and with a few new songs to learn.

If you’re a musician who hasn’t been practicing because there’s no place to perform, please join us.

We love having an audience! You can mute yourself and sing along or just listen.

It’s a different kind of holiday for most of us. The original words to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” include this line:

Someday soon we all will be together if the fates allow
But til then we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

We can do this!

I’ve talked about learning to sew for years. I want to be able to make clothes in the colors and styles I like rather than forcing myself into procrustean fashions.

This pandemic and the stay-at-home orders (and my lack of work and ensuing free time) has been a boon to me, a self-learner. I’ve been learning Swedish since February–that would be project number one– and am still loving the great puzzle that is a foreign language. When the cold weather forced me out of project number two, the garden, I began spending more time at the piano and got my singing voice back into shape.

All that was pleasurable and none of it scared me. Sewing does. I actually did learn to sew fifty years ago and still shudder at the experience. Part of it was because my mother was an adept seamstress. Without getting into the psychology of me and my mother (See 99 Girdles on the Wall), I’ll just say every session ended in tears. I took a class at Singer and managed to put together a lovely shirtdress, which actually fit, but which my mother criticized for being too short and showing the tops of my fishnet stockings.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything was, in her working life was a dressmaker for a tony boutique in Seattle called Opus 204. Asking her for help with sewing would be kind of like asking Bill Gates to come over and show me how to turn on a computer. Also Gwen is not a teacher. She’s told me this and I know it. The endless patience I have for students she has for machines. The only times I’ve seen her Wisconsin reserve slip is when she is over here trying to figure out what I did to a machine. (Did you take a picture of the way it’s supposed to look? Did you take note of how you took it apart. You did WHAT with a file?)

The Old Majestic

But Gwen was excited about me learning to sew. She brought over a beautiful old Majestic machine for me to mess around with. It was hard to thread and the bobbin wouldn’t wind because the tire, the little ropey gasket thingy, was broken.

“You can wind the bobbin by hand. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

As horrifying as this sounded to me it did bring with it the reassurance that Gwen was not put off by machines and their quirks. There was always a way to do something. But after many trips over here to see what the hell I needed now, she finally declared the machine more beautiful than workable. She found me a refurbished Singer at a steal of a price and I ordered it.

“Tell me when it comes!!!” she said.

“Yeah, fine.” Someone was excited. I was actually a little excited but the travails with the old Majestic had brought up memories: broken needles, seams wrong sides together, blood, the frustration, the tears.

The machine came, I unpacked it, set it up, fiddled around with it, tried some seams. Gwen came over and did a fancy hem and left the needle placement to the left. I was several projects in when I realized the needle should be in the middle. I had been peering around and under and over, trying both pairs of glasses and then no glasses to set the needle in the right place.

Jag syr. I sew.
Combining one learning experience with another.

When I want to learn something, I dive in head first. When I run into difficulties, I asked questions. As a last resort I read instructions. If I determine I have bitten off more than I can chew, I back up. I get there in the end, enjoying the ride. This is the crucial part: I have to enjoy the ride or I will never get there.

With sewing I went right to what I wanted: clothes. I found some lovely green broadcloth and a pattern for a shirt that said “Very Easy—Beginner.” Uh-huh. Never mind that it had a collar and fitted sleeves and buttonholes.

“Lay it out but don’t cut it until I can see it,” Gwen said.

Gwen came over and rearranged all the pattern pieces, asking me questions about checking the cross grain and measuring and marking all the dots and arrows.

“Don’t you just line the little thingys up with the selvidge?” Selvidge was the only Big Important Sewing Word I knew.

Gwen thinks with her hands. She looked at me wordlessly and re-did everything.

I cut out the pieces for the shirt. I learned how to do fusable interfacing, something that didn’t exist 50 years ago. I sewed the long seams. After a dozen trips across the street to Gwen’s house, I managed the placket up to the point where it had to join with the collar.

Then there was the day I sat for a whole hour (I know this because I had bread rising at home) watching Gwen correct the collar. “You should be taking notes,” she said. “You’ve been asking the same question for three days. Take a picture of this.”

“I could,” I said. “But I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”

To myself, I thought, “This is not fun and oh my god, now I’m afraid of Gwen.”

She and I had a conversation involving the phrase “skill level.” I realized that I didn’t have one. Sewing was not just taking a class and sewing seams. There were basic techniques, apparently starting with the words cross grain,that I didn’t know. There were levels of skill. I wasn’t even in kindergarten here.

It’s like singing. Everyone seems to think they know how to sing because hey, they sang in the church choir, they learned guitar in the 60s and they sing along in the car. A lot of people sing just fine without a single voice lesson. But there are complexities to singing, there are skill levels and there is always more to learn. I’ve been studying singing for 50 years and I still have times when I’ve discovered something new in my voice and I think, “Wow, what did I think I was doing all this time if this is singing!”

I couldn’t sleep that night but I got up with a resolve. I folded up the shirt and the pattern pieces and put them out of my sight. I went to Seattle Recreative and bought a beginner’s sewing book. A Next Door request for scraps of fabric brought me sack loads from women who were clearly cheerful sewers (unfortunate word) who didn’t sob over their machines.

I told Gwen, “You’re off the hook. I am going to start from the beginning and do every Girl Scout project in the book until I achieve a Skill Level.”

Gwen said, “I am so relieved. I hate having to be nice for so long!”

I started with mitered corners on a table runner. I got three out of four corners mitered before I almost cried over the fourth one. I folded up the runner and put it with the green shirt.

Mitered corners

I found a beginners project on the Singer website. It was all straight seams. This was fun.

Project Straight Seams

I moved onto fabric boxes. The first one I made could have belonged to the crooked man who lived in a little crooked house. Still the boxes seemed doable and there were skills to be mined from it. I kept making boxes, getting better with each one. That’s where I am now, still making boxes. Still having fun.

Little boxes

I’ve been trying to get back to writing for six months. Nothing propels me so much as the need to confess a scorching embarrassment or to shapeshift something painful into something funny. So here goes.

My story starts about a month ago when I took my octogenarian friend Kay to what I call the Green Cross store—one of those marijuana/CBD shops about which governors in red states frown at our governor. I took her to the one I go to regularly to get a tincture of CBD for nerve pain. It looks like a candy store in there and all the edibles look like fun. But I only ever get the CBD tincture. On the day I took Kay to the Green Cross store, there was a sale on fudge, which sounded appealing to both of us.

After we picked out a tincture for Kay, she announced, “I want to see the fudge.”

The counter guy plunked down a jar of a dozen pieces. Enough to send unsuspecting innocents to the emergency room. We hesitated over it.  Counter guy said there were singles. I exhaled and we each bought one tiny piece of fudge.

A month went by. “Have you tried your fudge yet?”

“No, I’m afraid to.”

“Me, too. I think I’ll wait for a draggy day and then have a nibble.”

The other night I didn’t get much sleep. When I got up, I declared it a draggy day and I would try the fudge. At 1:00 I was leading “A Zoom Variety Hour” for people with memory loss and their caregivers and later I had a few students to teach. It’d be nice to have a little boost. Green Cross counter guy said when his partner ingests the fudge, she cleans the entire house. My house could use a clean, too.

I bit off a piece the size of a pea. An hour later, I had not started to clean the house. I bit off a piece the size of a cashew.

It was 12:30. I needed to set up for the Zoom. For the Variety Hour, I perch my computer on a music stand next to piano and train the camera on the piano keys. I have my water bottle handy and my piano glasses on. Before any of this, I would have warmed up my voice, laid out my music and played through all my songs.

For this particular Variety Hour I had dug out “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” per a request. It’s not a difficult piece but I only knew the last line and something about Brown’s Hotel. I had gone over the words a few times and had played the accompaniment a few times before the fudge.

So anyway, as I said, it was 12:30. I stood up and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and put on my eyebrows. By the time I got there I was pitching around like a ship in a storm. I grabbed the sink and tried to concentrate on why I was in the bathroom.

“Teeth,” I said aloud. “Make-up.” I looked at the clock. “Time. I think.”

I moved the computer to the piano. Then I sat for the longest time trying to think what I needed to do. I couldn’t remember where I kept the address to the Zoom meeting. I lead the sessions but I don’t host them. When I finally found the address (where it has been for eight months), I stared at it, thinking, “That’s not the right thing. That’s for the other thing. Where is the thing I need for this thing?”

Then the computer told me I had no internet. I banged the wifi icon over and over until it released its opinion that I did have internet.  The modem looked fine. I hate when this happens. I looked at my watch. I had 5 minutes. I was sweating. In my sedation, I reset the modem and restarted the computer and sent a cryptic, apocalyptic text message to someone (the person who hired me and pays me) to say I was having computer trouble, didn’t have the host’s phone number and couldn’t find the zoom address. Only it wasn’t nearly so coherent.

I got my internet access back and finally got clear that the thing that I needed was the thing that I thought I didn’t want and I clicked on the Zoom address. After some connection whirls I was thrust into the Hollywood squares where every last person in every last box was grinning at me. Why were they grinning? Why were their faces so big? I heard the phrase “fearless leader.” They scared me.

I spit out an apology and an explanation that heavily favored blaming the computer. I said hello to everyone, one at a time, trying hard to be normal. Inside I was screaming, “Stop, just stop, the less you do, the better off you’ll be, sit still, SHUT UP.”

For the Variety Hour, I play and sing the welcome song (Zippa dee doo dah) and the goodbye song (Happy Trails) and a handful of standards, folk songs or showtunes that people have requested. Other people lead a couple of songs each so we get a nice variety of voices and songs and instruments.

I was okay on “Zippa dee doo dah” because I don’t need the music. But when I had to play and sing “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” the notes swam on the page, the pages danced around and the keyboard moved back and forth so the keys weren’t where I needed them to be. My voice came from somewhere on the other side of the room.

The fudge had apparently made me thirsty and I regularly gulped water throughout the hour. It crossed my mind that everyone thought I was drinking gin and that I was drunk. Through the entire hour, I waited for my own denouement when I would have to explain that I was stoned.

I shoved all my songs to the end so I didn’t have to do them because we ran out of time. While each performer was singing, I tried to craft a non-crazy response to the song and the singer. This was an arduous task and I was not best qualified to do it.  Every time I opened my mouth to respond, my voice moved around and came from a different part of the house, a neat trick that I didn’t appreciate.

Finally we were saying goodbye and they were grinning at me again with big faces and big teeth. When I finally got out of the Zoom Variety Hour, I crept to the couch and lay in torpor for a few minutes. Then I texted Kay and told her I had eaten a third of the fudge and was stoned and she should stand down until we could talk.

The next day I called two people who had been on the Hollywood Squares Zoom to ask if I had seemed off. Both of them said they hadn’t noticed that I was in any way different than usual. This is not comforting.

Entering our third month of Sheltering-in-Place here in Seattle, I locate myself in the week by when I last showered: I showered today, I showered yesterday, I can’t remember when I showered or that’s really a funky smell. My hair has entered a new length division where it now looks reasonably good.

I love hearing what projects people have embarked upon to stay sane. Puzzles are popular. A friend brought over a bag of eight. I have a box of six to go out. Thousand piece puzzles. We aren’t slouches.

My friend Kay has been sorting her house from top to bottom, something she’s been talking about doing for years. The difficulty with sorting is that you have to be willing to get rid of things. That’s been her problem. I told her I’d take the cookbooks, look through them and then put them in my Little Free Library. She and her daughter turned up, masked, with a hand truck and 12 boxes and bags of books. I hauled them onto the parking strip until it rained.

I thought that by now I would have improved my piano technique and learned to sing whole operas. I’ve instead been spending hours in the garden—that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning—and apropos to nothing in my life–learning Swedish.

It all started with the Kavanaugh hearings last fall, which left me disheartened, depressed and disgusted. I wanted to go somewhere far away from everything that is American. I subscribed to MHZ, the international streaming service that provides foreign language films to Americans who never mastered a second language and need the subtitles.

I watched all the French films and television series first because French is the language I know best after English. I watched a lot of the German ones because I had been trying to up my German in order to sing lieder more easily.

Then I discovered Swedish television. It was the peculiarity of what I watched first that gave me the sense of Sweden being a place where everyone is blond and outdoorsy and it’s always mid-summer. Beyond that I loved the sound of the language. It was musical. It had soft edges unlike German. It had less mouth noise than French. Its vowels were Italianate.

For months, I went through all the Swedish films on MHZ. I’d tell my neighbor Bill I was watching Swedish films and we’d smile. Both of us remember a time when a “Swedish film” putatively meant pornography in the U.S. (Remember the pother around “I am Curious Yellow?”)

Enter Karin. I first knew Karin when she brought an elderly charge to sing with All Present. We began trading my watercolor class for her Rubenfeld synergy work. Then private music for Swedish language lessons.

Karin is a retired physician from Sweden; she wasn’t sure she could teach the language. That didn’t matter to me. I learn best when I can just ask questions. So that’s how we started. How do you say hello, thank you, I am, you are, what’s your sign? That sort of thing.

Karin grew up in a small Swedish town called Nora. I looked it up on Google maps. It looks a charming little place up country from Stockholm. In my research, I learned that a woman named Anna Maria Roos wrote a little poem about Nora in 1909 that became a well-known children’s song: Tre Små Gummor:

Tre små gummor skulle gå en gång
Till marknaden uti Nora.

The song says that three little old ladies once went to market in Nora.“We’re going to have fun, ride the carousel, eat caramel and frolic all day in Nora.”

I thought how fun (roiligt)! I would learn the song and surprise Karin with it. I found the music and was confronted with more Swedish than “hi, how are you.” So I found children singing it on YouTube. For two days I listened to Swedish children, puppets and farmors with guitars singing about the tre små gummor, which are the three little old ladies, but for the longest time existed in my mind as three small goobers. I’d get on the trampoline my friend Eileen gave me and put on the three small goobers. Or out in the garden, I’d say to myself, let’s see how much of three small goobers you’ve got memorized.

Finally I sang it to Karin and she was (appeared) delighted. The song has become my reference point for pronunciation. I know how to pronounce the e in tre, the u in skule and the o in Nora. If I can keep my wits about me I can pronounce other words with those vowels. Any sound from the three small goobers transfers. It’s one of the wonders of music

I do find the language musical. I draw quarter notes and eighth notes above syllables to help me get the emphasis in a word or the melody in a phrase.

Which reminds me of another reason I am attracted to the language. All the Swedish religious songs are about nature and the beauty of the world and the tunes and melodies are beautiful. Swedish people sing about the stars in the winter. At the end of April they sing goodbye to winter and welcome the spring. They don’t appear to be washed in the blood of the lamb as I was growing up. It’s aways mid-summer and they are always eating caramel and frolicking in Nora.

My garden is keeping me sane. I’ve been out there for several hours a day since the middle of March, grubbing in the dirt and blowing my nose on the inside of my t-shirt. Maybe that doesn’t sound quite sane but without the garden I feel certain I would have gained 100 pounds and would have no trouble sheltering in place because I wouldn’t be able to get out the door. As it is, I’m eating Nutella with my fingers straight out of the jar.

“We’re living like animals,” I told my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, which makes it sound like Gwen has inside knowledge about living like an animal, which is not my point. Gwen and I have watched a movie together every week for 15 years. Usually we are cozily ensconced on the sofa in her tiny “plaid room” but since the room itself is barely over six square feet, social distancing has nixed this tradition. Now Gwen and I watch movies via Zoom. The movie is on the full screen and there’s Gwen in a little box up in the corner. If she talks I can mute her. (n.b. to Gwen: I haven’t yet.)

The consensus among women these days seems to be that we are never strapping on a bra ever again. That goes double for heels. Heck, work from home, you don’t even have to get dressed. On one late afternoon Zoom piano lesson I saw pajamas and slippers walking away from the ipad .

“Is your dad still in his pajamas?”

“No, those are his ‘house pants.’ ”

That’s what we’re calling them these days.

Laundry is a cinch because I wear the same clothes all week. And showers? In what decade did we get the idea –from Madison Ave- that we had to shower every day? I scrub my knees and ankles when I come in from the garden and call it good.

Just before the OK Chorale’s weekly Zoom, one of the sopranos (OK, Nina rhymes with Dinah) told me she wouldn’t be joining us because she didn’t want to comb her hair. This was hilarious because we all looked like a collection of stray cats except for Don (bass) who had cut his own hair and he looked like Mia Farrow.

I texted my beloved hairdresser (Ross): “As soon as you can work again, put me down in your first slot. Then just tell me when it is, I’ll be there.”

As it is I’ve cut the sides of my hair twice. I’ve been pin-curling my bangs. I go out in the garden with a scarf over the pin curls and feel like my mother going to the grocery store in the 1950s.

I miss the small routines of connection. I miss my painting friends, Susan and Madelaine, with an ache. We have painted together every Tuesday morning since 2007. Susan isn’t allowed out of her building. Madelaine came over last week to pet the cat. We sat 6 feet apart in the sun room and had coffee while Artemis lolled all over her. It was a pleasure for all three of us.

I miss my neighbor Bill coming over almost every day to chat and bring me another section of the New York Times. He does come over and we do chat but at 6 feet apart. Not the same.

I miss Kay. Oh god, I miss Kay. She’s my token non-wired friend. In some ways, she’s non-wired. Her partner says the two of us together are dangerous. We have drinks and gossip once a month at her house. She provides the scotch for me and the vodka for her, Hershey bars and potato chips. I bring the Muenster cheese. It’s a ritual. Who knows how it evolved to Hershey bars and Muenster, but it did and I love it. Kay is not on the computer and secretly (or not so secretly) resents everyone who is.

In some cases, the connections have been reconfigured: Andrea and I have found a way to have our monthly happy hour on Zoom. Nancy and I still walk around Green Lake every Friday afternoon, sucking our masks into our faces.

The aforementioned Nina and I have been doing weekly laps in the cemetery behind my house on Saturday, also sucking our masks. This in lieu of monthly dinners at Saffron using the monthly coupons from ValuePack. We review the “six things” Nina does every day: take a shower, put on clean clothes, spend (at least) ten minutes tidying up, get some exercise and two others I can’t remember.

“Who says we should do these things?”

“I read it in an article somewhere.”

The shower and clean clothes seem a bit excessive unless we are talking about more filth than one can acquire lying on the couch watching Netflix.

cartoon by Hilaire Squelette aka Madelaine Ramey

There are two Marks and Spencers in all of Cornwall; we stopped at the one in St Ives to get whatever we might need for the last evening of the holiday. We had to choose food for two meals, use the toilets and have tea in the café– one always has tea in the café when travelling with Sue and Wendy—and then use the toilets again.

Wendy had booked us into a caravan park in Pentewan (pronounced Pen-chew-an) because the favored B&B in Megavissey was unavailable. This was to be a contrast to a week in a stone holiday cottage on the west coast of Cornwall. Remembering a caravan park in an episode of Inspector Lynley, I was disappointed that ours wasn’t tackier –for the, you know, full experience. To make up for that, tho, it was charm free.

Caravan Park, Pentewan

A caravan is a mobile home. If it’s planted somewhere, that’s a static caravan. The ones on the go are called touring caravans. They are both basically sardine tins. Our caravan purported to hold as many as six people but only comfortably if they were tiny children or supermodels. The bedroom doors all opened into each other so we could only come and go one at a time. Just moving in for a night was a French farce.

My matchbook room held two bunks, each the size of half a twin bed. I had to walk sideways to get to a bed and once actually in bed, I could have passed for a mummy. When I wanted to turn over I moved in installments, first the top half, then the bottom, then the nightshirt and always bumping a wall or headboad. Around midnight I was awakened by explosions of fireworks down near the Megavissey harbor. Fireworks! Wendy and Sue got up to watch them but I wrapped my head in my pillow, which knocked over the lamp, and groaned.

The next morning we went into the little fishing village of Megavissey. Sue chatted up the proprietors of the favored B&B while Wendy and I walked along the quay. I remember Wendy’s mother, Pamela saying, “Megavissey is a lovely little village.” She and Mervyn would come from Harrowbarrow of a Sunday, have tea, have a wander, have an ice cream and sit together on a bench.

In Hurley books I had a long talk with Emma (“I’m Emma with the scarf. I’ve worked here for 20 years, always wear the scarf”) about tracking down used and out of print books about the French resistance.

at Hurley Books

Wendy found a café called Tea on the Quay. While we waited for Sue to join us, I used a toilet around the corner and had what Wendy later referred to as my “toilet experience.” I was seated and ready to unseat when I couldn’t find the toilet paper. Then someone started to enter the room and I had to reach forward and push the door shut. When I finally located the toilet paper, I couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. Finally I pushed open the door where a man and woman stood waiting.

“I’m so sorry,” I brayed in my crass American accent. “First I couldn’t lock the door, then I couldn’t find the toilet paper and now I don’t know how to flush and I don’t want you to have to come in.”

The woman was very nice. She stood in the doorway and pointed at things that might be the flush until we found it. I slithered past her companion as he looked politely at the boats in the harbor.

Megavissey. photo by Wendy

Sue joined us at Tea on the Quay where I ordered for us at the counter. When I sat back down, I found myself facing the couple from my toilet experience so I shaded my face and made everyone move. We had a splendid view of the harbor and I had the best gluten free scone there ever was.

Tea on the Quay

After Megavissey we drove through Gorran and High Gorran to Gorran Haven, which seemed to be all pretty much the same place. One narrow road winding around cottages until it got to the beach.

Sue, looking at the map: “When we get there the car park is on the left at the top of the hill.”

Wendy: “Is it?”

Elena “Is it?”

Sue: “We parked there the last time.”

Wendy: “Did we?”

Elena: “Did we?”

The quay at Gorran Haven

The tide was in and the brick quay was wet and slick and without “namby-pamby guard rails” as Wendy observed. It would have easy to topple in, that not being a fall my nurse friend Susan would have anticipated when she exhorted me: “Don’t fall!”

I was much more comfortable on the sandy beach where a game of fetch was going on: two terriers chasing a stick into the water and bringing it back together, each with an end in its mouth. They dropped it in the sand and danced and barked until it was thrown in again. Two little mates, Alfy with a deep bark and Ruby with a high yip. Over and over they fetched the stick and pranced back with it. On one trip they dropped it at my feet and shook water all over me.

Wendy drove us home through Harrowbarrow, the village of my great- grandfather. It looks so different from when I was there in 1980 and 1991. It seems like less of a village and more like a bunch of cars parked along a narrow road and obscuring a few cottages.  The cottage I stayed in with Hazel, the first member of my English family that I met, looked unloved. It broke my heart.

We arrived home late Sunday. I was due in London the next morning. I didn’t want to leave and because of this I didn’t want to pack so I stuffed everything in my suitcase figuring I would sort it out in London because god knew there wouldn’t be anything fun to do without Wendy and Sue.