A Vision for My Married Life

Photo by A. Grudin

I’m back from the UVM library with a big stack of new books, some cooler than others. They reflect my major interests right now:

• Fiction by remarkable women writers (not that I really intended to discriminate as such; I just happened to pick up novels by Buck, Cather, and Gardam all at once, including Cather’s On Writing, about which I’m very excited.
• Dachas. Much to my relief, since I’m hoping to write a photo/recipe/oral history book on the dachas in Central Russia, there seem to be, at least as of yet, only academic titles on the topic.
• Indian music. My mom had been taking me to operas since I was a teeny girl in Vienna, but the first time I went berserk for music — felt it lifting me up into another atmosphere, one in which the air was lighter and there were colors radiating that the eye can’t perceive — was during an Indian concert at a Presbyterian church in Kensington, California. I want to learn the instruments’ names, what “raga” means, about rhythm and beat.
• And, yes, self-help. I came across “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families” and I couldn’t resist. The guy has nine kids. His wife wrote the foreword. I’m highly skeptical. But you know what, this marriage thing is tough, and I want to make it work.

Some things I’ve realized already:

• I want to write a marriage vision statement with Anthony. To paraphrase Stephen Covey or whatever, when you embark on building a business or a creating a project with someone, you write a vision statement together. Call it the artist’s statement, the business plan. It’s important: it helps us figure out where we want to be in five, ten, thirty years, and how to get there. To me, this means having a healthy, happy family in which each member feels supported and provided for, is creative and thinks critically about the world and other people. I want my kids to change the world through their talents. I think I may be too old for that by now, but I think that Anthony can change the world by teaching those young students about life, love, and truth through the artists, philosophers, and cultural critics he teaches. And I believe that I can change the world by making our relationship, our home, our family a living example of a wonderful kind of love.
• I need to start thinking about our relationship as “we” rather than “he” and “I.”  I need to be more deeply respectful of our partnership. No more shitty insults, sarcastic comments, ego-fueled lash-outs. No more talking about Anthony to other people when he’s not around, or when he is around. He wouldn’t like it if he could hear it, and when he does, he gets upset. (My parents aren’t great examples of this. They’re actually improving, but when we were growing up they were still living out such deep struggles between themselves, they were often pitted against one another and taught us that that’s how a relationship works.)
• I want to be more disciplined in everything I do: my chores, my waking habits, my dress, even shaving my legs. Come on, make the most of it all, girl.

So what’s my vision for our family, five years from now? Well, we’re living in Kristy’s house on Chase Street, and I’ve built a white picket fence and installed an arbor on which mountains of morning glories grow every summer. In the back are raised beds that grow herbs, greens, and flowers. I’ve planted daffodils and crocuses all around the perimeter of the house, and they burst up out of the frozen soil every March, the first heralds of spring. I’ve also planted pale heirloom lilacs at the back fence, and plum and peach trees along the western edge.

Our two cats have a fenced-in area where they can play and watch birds every summer. We’ve got a feeder on the front porch, and at the back. We plant sunflowers every year on which the birds feast come fall. I’ve hung fuchsia and petunias in big heavy baskets from the front porch. Our mudroom is neat and tidy, with shoes lined up under the bench and coathooks above.

Our basement is neatly organized, with ski equipment lined up on metal shelving and old clothes in big Rubbermaid containers. We have laundry bins and a clothesline, and an ironing board. I work as a freelance writer now, and three days a week at Food for Farmers, so I have time to do the laundry and iron all of Anthony’s shirts, our sheets, and our tablecloths and napkins. We’ve also got a small root cellar where I store our carrots and our apples, which stay crisp right through April. We’ve also got a whole shelf of the preserves — gingered carrots, raspberry jam, blackcurrant jam, strawberry jam, pumpkin butter, canned tomatoes — I’ve made the summer before. I get to write about my jam-making experiments for the Burlington Free Press.

Anthony has tenure at UVM, and his book has been published to great acclaim. It’s on the New Yorker‘s list of top ten books of its publication year; he’s even traveled to the major US cities (and Toronto and Vancouver) on a book tour. The department would like to offer him the position of Chair. He still goes to Bikram yoga five days a week, but on the weekends we take walks or hikes or go cross-country skiing together.

I spend a month every March sugaring in Huntington at Dragonfly Sugarworks. I’ve written a book about sugaring with Jen Smith.

We have a three-year-old and are expecting our next baby. I’ve had two great pregnancies and an easy birth; Anthony adores our daughter. We’re going to have a boy, and he’s really excited about that too. We still drink raw milk, sprout all our nuts, soak our grains, and make our own lacto-fermented foods and kombucha. Our daughter is really healthy, bright, curious, and a little bratty (like her mama). Oh well.

We still live close to Will and Jess, Jeff and Britta, Cori and Brandon, and Jake and Catherine. We all have kids between 1-4, and still have our Sunday night dinners together. Will is going to teach the kids to ski this winter. We’re planning to rent a couple of cabins up in Maine this summer and camp out there for two weeks, all together.

My parents are moving to Burlington within the year. Micha and Robert are still doing well and are living with Nick and Cristina in Los Altos. Ted is getting married!

So there you have it. That’s my dream, circa March 2011. Let’s see how it works out!

Kombucha

Without ever really realizing it, I’ve had a taste for lacto-fermented beverages since I was a kid. As a child in Austria, my favorite supermarket drink was Lattella, a refreshing beverage that’s made with fruit juice (in the 1980s, passionfruit and mango were the available flavors — exotic tastes of faraway tropical lands that were so far away from Central Europe’s drizzly, grey, take-it-or-leave-it grumbles) and whey, a byproduct of the region’s cheesemaking, using high-quality, rich milk from the Tirol. I couldn’t get enough of its slightly sour, slightly salty, minerally taste.

As a child, I was always thirsty. Sometimes we’d drive along the highway on a hot Austrian country side day — outside, fields of grain waving blonde in the sunshine — and we’d pass a billboard advertising a light pilsner, a “Helles,” and I’d get so thirsty I could barely stand it. All I’d want was that effervescent coolness coursing down my throat. Whence this constant thirst? I’m not sure. Maybe it was because back then, we didn’t all have our individual, kid-sized SIGG bottles to carry everywhere we went. You drank a glass of water before getting in the car; you had a juice halfway at the gas station; you had an Apfelschorle upon arriving at your destination. In between, you stared longingly at the billboards whizzing past.

At that time, I had a fierce taste for adult beverages. I dreamed of sipping red wine out of balloon glasses, of holding up to my lips a heavy stein of frothy Helles. I loved Coca-Cola, but not as much as my father, who drank up to eight cans a day and was famous for flying into an irritable rage if the intervals between Cokes were too drawn-out. On long car trips, my mother always kept two or three emergency cans stashed in the passenger-side footwell. To this day, the expectant sigh of a soda can popping open always reminds me of my dad.

Then we moved away, and there wasn’t any other country in which a soft drink might have whey added to it. Well, Germany had its Müllermilch (Fitness Molke, to be precise) and Switzerland had its Rivella, but neither tasted quite the same.

And then I tasted kombucha for the first time, as a high-schooler in Munich. Marketed under the brand name Carpe Diem as “kombucha soda,” it came in amber-colored, medicinal-looking plastic bottles. Fizzy, sweet, sour and salty, it soon became my favorite drink. (This a good step in the right direction for a girl whose after-school snack was a can of Mezzo Mix and two Prinzen Taler cookies.) It made me feel satisfied; it quenched my thirst; it gave me a kick of energy that even our cappuccino machine in the cafeteria couldn’t.

Fast forward to college in Berkeley, California. I’d moved into my beloved Walnut House (with our original crew of roommates: Mariana and Oren — default house mother and father; Chris; Olivia; and Andreas), and Mari took me down to Santa Cruz to stay at their wonderful, dilapidated old house right on West Cliff Street. It would be torn down a year later to put up mini-condos; after all, it was an $8 million property and you couldn’t have a bunch of hippie gardeners living in there with their raspberry bushes and tumbledown shacks and excess of peace & love when there was real money to be made, right?

Anyway, one of Mari’s friends, another Brazilian girl, had a big pot of kombucha brewing at her house. She offered me a taste: and I fell back in time, first to those high school days nursing my $4 bottle of Carpe Diem, and then even further back, to my four-year-old days in Vienna, begging my mother for a couple cartons of Lattella at the Julius Meinl grocery store. I was hooked. I brought back a “baby” that she’d given me — the kombucha culture made of symbiotic yeast and bacterial cultures, all woven into a floppy frisbee-like disc of rubber — and brewed my own kombucha in our Berkeley kitchen.

We had a great pantry in the Walnut House: adjacent to the kitchen, our state-of-the-art thermal heating system gently warmed behind the pantry shelves. Perfect location for brewing two 2-gallon jugs. I was up to my neck in kombucha! Couldn’t drink it quickly enough, even if I had wineglasses of the stuff every night before dinner. If neglected for too long, it became vinegar. None of my roommates liked it, not even Jean-Baptiste (French) or Sebastian (German). When we moved from California, I had a big kombucha giveaway party at Anthony’s parents’ house: gifting the discs to Anthony’s students, our friends, colleagues. I think there’s still a baby hibernating in a Ziploc bag at the back of my mother-in-law’s fridge.

And now I’m brewing kombucha in Burlington. It’s been a while, and my kitchen temps are cooler than they used to be (probably 50-55 at the back of the cabinet), and I haven’t found my perfect brewing spot yet. Above the radiators: too hot and dry. Cabinets: cold, due to our 1940s uninsulated construction. Hmm. I’ve grown impatient and have begun drinking the kombucha not fully-fermented, still a little sweet, a little astringent from the black tea’s tannins. And I think I brewed the tea too strong. Next time, I’m going to use this recipe (I like how she dilutes a quart of strong, sweet black tea with 3 additional cups of water for the perfect strength of brew and a just-right temperature).

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Back in Action

July 10, 2010. Photo by S. Shattuck

I’m back after a yearlong hiatus, and I’m going to try and post weekly to this blog. The blog itself started out with a silly nickname my husband called me at that time, “Smidgens,” which turned into a slight variation on that spelling when it turned out that smidgens.wordpress.com was already taken (wha??). I’m not usually one for gratuitious misspellings, except when texting, so was happy to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary approves this alternative.

Anyway, a lot has happened since I last wrote in Spring 2010. It was truly a glorious spring, and that spring unfurled into an even more glorious summer — with temperatures consistently above 85 degrees and swelteringly delicious. We swam daily in Lake Champlain or at the Huntington Gorge, at the little green lagoon of a swimming hole to which we were introduced by Will and Jess. We woke up to the throb of birdsong and went to bed very late. I drove around with all my windows open, blasting 95.5 until I couldn’t stand to hear “California Girls” one more time. Dinner was a big salad with pecans and maple-syrup dressing and Anthony bought huge watermelons from Costco (Vermont watermelons don’t get very sweet) and we sat on our couch, half-naked, eating slice after slice like mouth-dripping robots staring blankly into the cricket night and moving hand from plate to mouth and back again. Oh yeah, and we got married, too, and went on a wonderful honeymoon trip to Europe: Berlin, Portugal, and Luxembourg.

Fall was nice, too, but busy. Some friends got married, others got engaged. I traveled to Torino, Italy to attend Terra Madre, the biannual Slow Food conference and food-tasting extravaganza. I made myself sick by eating way too many sugary sweets, especially Turin’s lush hazelnut-chocolate blend called gianduia, and because I drank four or five cups of espresso every day. The sugar binge continued through Thanksgiving and up to our winter trip to Hawaii, where I ate, on average, one-half pineapple, one papaya, two lilikoi (passionfruit) and some coconut candy each day. I didn’t write much about our stay on Maui, even though I’d have liked to. I did write a short story about some married weirdness we were experiencing at that time: being totally out of synch, resentful of the other’s less desirable character traits, disappointed in our partnership, at least the way it had been for the past couple of months, and apprehensive at spending another year (much less 30+) together. Maybe I’ll post the story here sometime.

Then winter arrived. Our friends, passionate skiiers, have been bragging about how many days they’ve spent atop some mountain since December. I only made it alpine skiing once so far, but got a pair of cross-country skis last week. This week’s earlier thaw made me anxious that it might be the end of the x-country season, but lo! There are 8 inches of snow predicted to fall on the town of Burlington tonight. I think there’ll be a couple more weeks of decent skiing yet. Anthony’s been really, really busy at work, and he loves it, but it hasn’t made for much wintertime outdoor fun this year. Oh well: we had a good time swimming, snorkeling and hiking Haleakala and the bamboo forest on Maui.

Now we’re back at March. (Jo March. Last night, a friend suggested that I change my name to “Jojo.” That was the name of Charles Muscatine’s Siamese cat, and it seems a good cat name, rather than a human name. I’m more inclined to return to my old nom de plume from when I, at age 11, was an actual writer: “Gus.”) I love March because it’s a painful month. For example, just this morning I was admiring the bulb shoots poking up through the soil that had been exposed along the foundations of our house by a spring thaw. Then the temperature plummeted 20 degrees, and those little shoots are now covered by four inches of snow. All the water that was pooling up against our back porch has frozen. Better for us: the basement leaks when it’s too wet. We get another couple of weeks to think about how to deal with it this time.

Listen to me write: basements, bulbs, weather, variations in temperature. What a boring blog this will be. What can I do to make it up to you? I can give you a list of my goals for spring 2011: Learn to like organ meats (liver and kidneys). Finish 2666. Learn to make Julia Child’s tart crust so that when strawberry season starts, I’ll be ready. Publish my article on Patrick Moser. Take the full Introductory Course to Hindustani Music. Find a great house for us, since we have to move from Adams Street. Get ready for backyard chickens and bees. Stop being so neurotic about my health body processes.

Or I could just give you a menu and a wonderful recipe for sprouted mung bean salad, courtesy of Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking:

Instructions for sprouting beans: Soak 1 cup mung beans in 6 cups water. Cover and leave for 48 hours, making sure to change water every 12 hours. Drain. Line a bowl with wet paper towel. Put the beans inside the towel-lined bowl; cover with overhanging towel section. Now cover the bowl loosely with any lid that will not press down on the beans. Leave in a dark place (I use a cool oven) for 12-16 hours. The beans should just begin to sprout. One cup of mung beans will make about 5 cups of Indian-style sprouts.

If you’re not going to eat the sprouts immediately, rinse them and put them in an uncovered bowl filled with water. Refrigerate for up to 36 hours.

5 cups Indian-style (see above) mung-bean sprouts, washed and drained

2 sticks celery, very finely chopped

1/2 medium daikon (about 1 1/2 cups), very finely chopped

1 medium-sized onion, peeled and very finely chopped (I use shallot sometimes as it’s less intense raw)

1 well-packed cup washed, dried, and finely chopped cilantro

3 cloves garlic, peeled and very finely minced

1 fresh hot green chili, very finely minced

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/4 tsp finely ground black pepper

3 1/2 tbs (or more) lemon juice (I like the juice of 3-4 lemons)

Combine all ingredients. Toss well and check seasonings. Serve at room temperature or cold.

Cruel Spring

A gardenful of crocuses

Spring in Vermont: what glory! (If I had a daughter, I’d name her Gloria.)

More later, but suffice to say that we had an excellent weekend that involved spring skiing in 80-degree weather, and t-shirts, at Sugarbush; clearing out the last of the fall leaves and uncovering even more delicate crocuses in yellow, purple, and white. We celebrated Anthony’s birthday dinner by cooking this. And Ellen took us out on Lake Champlain for a sunset canoe ride on Sunday, and then treated us to takeout afterward.

I’ve been a grouch, though. A grouchy brat, spoiled and selfish. I knocked over a plant today and it shattered into pieces on the floor, and the poor rootbound plant just sat there on its side, nothing doing. I forgot my keys three or four times yesterday. And I fought with Anthony on his birthday.

“April is the cruellest month,” but not this April. I’m the only one who’s been cruel. Cruel spring!

Castle Hill

The playhouse at Park-McCullough House

Right now, Anthony and I are sitting in front of a 110-year-old ceramic-tiled fireplace, a tray of ice water and cocktail nuts set in front of us. Warm light glows on walnut paneling and jugendstil sconces, and illuminates the pages of our books (I’m reading Reading the Mountains of Home by John Elder) and, well, our laptop screens. And we actually have two trays set in front of us; one with the aforementioned water goblets and another laden with a tea-set and the remains of my evening tisane, which tonight happened to appear in a Tazo teabag labeled “Calm.” A doddering old piano player alternates between traditional Irish songs, Coldplay, and Kiss. We have to be very careful not to talk to him too much, lest he launch into a twenty-minute monologue on getting older and hips stiffening and knees aching and … (Anthony is horrified) …

We’re at the Castle Hill Inn, nestled into the hillside between Lawton and Cavendish, VT. The inn is housed in the former mansion of Vermont Governor Allen Fletcher, who built the house in 1905. The house was the first in the state to have electricity, steam heat, and an elevator, and was built out of California redwood–no wonder we feel so at home here. It’s a beautiful turn-of-the-century mansion, all dark wood paneling and elaborately molded ceilings, art nouveau details. The original wallpaper even remains in the staircase leading up to the guest rooms.

Tonight, at 8:30 p.m., there are hushed dinners in the warm dining room across from the lounge where we sit. The piano player has tottered off to take requests, and there’s a rarified quiet that blows across from the snowy March night outside (but warm!) and carries into the corners of the room. At this hour, everyone speaks pleasantly and harmoniously. Even New York and New Jersey accents are softened. You can barely make out the silhouettes of the out-of-towners’ Lexus SUVs in the soft darkness of the parking lot. It’s this combination of high beauty and warm friendliness that, to me, exemplifies Vermont.

The towns at either end of this hotel are nothing fancy, but they aren’t depressed either, like some towns we’ve passed through. The Green Mountains are beautiful, and the way the towns of Lawton and Cavendish are laid out have Anthony and I wondering, what makes a lovely town lovely? What style of buildings (they certainly aren’t congruous here, as they seemed to be in Dorset–all white-shingled and kelly green-shuttered), how large must the village green be, how many roads and what shape are they? Do you have a view of both mountains and water? Is there a river that gently snakes through meadows at either shore? Cavendish has fancy buildings (carefully restored Victorians) and funny buildings (a strange natural wood-shingled conglomeration of turrets and sloping barn roofs and stained glass windows) and buildings that exhibit wonderful craftsmanship (the house sided entirely in slabs of carefully matched slate).  The town seems loved, cared for, attended to. There is a stone wall through whose chinks runs a spring.

We ended up at Castle Hill by chance. We had originally planned to stay at a friend’s house in North Bennington for three days, but once we got there we both developed runny noses and stuffy eyes from the kitty who lives there. (Or was it the other way around, the kitty developed a mean streak after we hissed at her, laughing, the first time we met her? And then Anthony accidentally stepped on her tail, which only made matters worse. To sum it up: Kitty didn’t like us, and we were more than slightly allergic to her. So we ate our morning grapefruits, took one last walk through the gloriously sunny streets of tiny N. Bennington village, and made it to the Park-McCullough House before packing up our things and heading off for the mountains.

The Park-McCullough house was really cool. It’s closed from October to May, but the grounds are worth visiting at any time of year. The manse itself was built in 1864-5 by Trenor Park, a local boy who made his fortune during the Gold Rush under John C. Fremont. His wife was a native Benningtonian who was homesick for the East Coast, so the couple moved back to Vermont and Park set out to build the grandest house in probably the entire county, at that point. Just to put in perspective what building that house meant then: it was constructed right through the Civil War (that’s how wealthy Park was), and it cost $75,000 at a time when war-torn America could barely feed its Southern citizens. Oh, that Trenor Park, he was a Yankee, all right!

Anyway, the really cool part about the Park-McCullough house (the McCullough comes from the name of Trenor’s daughter’s husband) is that there’s a full miniature playhouse built mostly in the grand dame’s image. Peek inside the windows and you’ll find a sitting room and a kitchen, complete with a kid-sized wood-burning stove.

Taking West Street, to the left of the house, leads you to the entrance to the One-Mile Wood–an amusing project that workaholic Park undertook after suffering a nervous breakdown after his 13 years out West–that, according to the strangely worded interpretive sign at the beginning of the trial, he determined to “design a one-mile road that did not alter any of the trees in the woods and looped back on itself. And he succeeded.” What a challenge!

Before heading out of Bennington altogether, we stopped for some nourishment at the infamous Blue Benn diner. I believe I read right (and there are lots of signs to read–signs on the door telling you where to sit and wait for a booth; paper signs plastered over the walls announcing daily and weekly specials;  strange little black-and-white place-mats atop the Formica dining tops) that the entire diner is actually a trailer that was uprooted from its original New Jersey home and has been serving the hungry, the road-weary, the local and the grouchy ever since. We were slightly disappointed by the food; I mean, really? They couldn’t serve real maple syrup? And why did they have a “ratatoulie omelet” on the menu? And more than that, why did I order it?!?!?!!?

But then we arrived at the Castle Hill, and all has been well. Let’s just say we headed straight for the two-person whirlpool tub in our room, drew an extra-hot bath and …

Just looked over at Anthony’s computer screen. He’s reading about Nietzsche’s Extra-Moral Individuality. The piano player seems to be packing up for the night, but he’ll stoke the fire one last time before he leaves. I might have one more cup of tea before we go back upstairs. Good night!

Weaknight

I have to admit it: my Bikram yoga practice has improved since I stopped drinking coffee. Sweaty trembling moments of despair and fear of vomiting or passing out or shitting my pants has been replaced by a serene, automatic repetition of motion. I tune in to the teachers’ voices and zonk out on my own breathing. Not once in the New Year have I had to sit out a posture. And why? I’m pretty sure it’s because there is no more black gold coursing through my veins from the morning on.

I stopped drinking coffee for a variety of health-related (um, anatomical and physiological) reasons that shouldn’t be discussed here. And I’ve been mostly very glad of my decision. I owe lots of thanks to Dr. Lorilee Schoenbeck of Burlington, VT, who also happens to be the only naturopath in this country practicing out of a Planned Parenthood. Holla PP!

The title of this post refers to what Anthony and I usually do when we come home on a weeknight. Unless there is a group of rowdy friends who troop in, stomp their boots on the entry rug, and knock over the useless dried arrangements (every time! I should have learnt by now) before settling on the floor and couch to watch football on our big-screen TV, we usually just hunker down. That’s right. We just pour ourselves some pomegranate & Pellegrinos, cook a little sweet-sour tomato sauce and some spaghetti, and eat the steaming bowlsful in front of, sigh, gasp, ooh, ah, television. Lately it’s been Seinfeld, which is still oddly captivating. And you know who’s the least tired and most captivating of all? Yes, it’s Elaine Bennis! Followed a close second by Jerry, actually. George and Kramer have simply been overdone in days since.

Also good: I Like Killing Flies, the poorly-named documentary about Shopsin’s restaurant in Manhattan. I think they should rename it for some rebranding: Shopsin has so many great lines, why pick that one that manages to stir up associations with The Lord of the Flies and Piggy and American Psycho and Natural Born Killers, not to mention Silence of the Lambs, all in one?  When it’s really just about a lovably disgruntled and eccentric short-order cook out of the Lower East Side.

This is where you’ll find us come a weaknight.

Birdsong?

Three days ago it snowed. Thick, heavy snowflakes the size and weight of silver dollars fell steadily from a grey sky throughout the day. A severe weather warning for Chittenden County urged skiiers to their cars to take advantage of the powder, and offices to close at 2 p.m. so that commuters could head home on the slushy Interstate.

Anthony got a whole bunch of text messages from his students starting at 8 a.m. “Just wondering if you will be holding class today? Weather forecast predicts 18 inches of snow and a temp of 30 degrees.” Hm. Temp of 30 degrees. Guess we’ll all have to stay home from school.

Snow came down heavy and hard and we had to knock thick greasy clumps of it from the yew, the tender crabapple branches, and the box hedge.

And this morning … the cardinal’s mating call came clear and sweet from his perch in our yew shrub! Mating season already? Seems like winter has blown over us this year, choosing instead to settle in milder locales like New York City and Washington, D.C. Those old bones need a warmer place to rest, I guess.

Looking Back: Cross-Country

From now on, I’ll publish some excerpts from the travel journal I kept during our cross-country trip this August. Let’s start off on day one as we leave Berkeley, California and head due East:

Boat docked at Serene Lake

Monday, August 10, 2009

Today we started our cross-country journey from Berkeley, California to Burlington, Vermont.

We met Alice at Café Fanny for a quick breakfast of poached eggs on toast (Angelo’s eggs, sprinkled with vinegar, oregano, and olive oil) and a perfect cappuccino. Then we headed east to Reno, Nevada, passing through the Suisun Valley, Vacaville, and Sacramento along the way.

On the road between Vacaville and Sacramento, we were driving 92 miles an hour just as the car in front of us was pulled over for speeding. In fact, we’ve seen three people pulled over just today.

Just before Lake Tahoe and Sugar Bowl, there is an area called Serene Lake, where we pulled off the freeway to drive down a dirt road to a small, shallow lake in which we stood, knee-deep, for a half an hour, not sure what else we should do. We didn’t feel brave enough to invade the private beach next door. I sat in an abandoned metal boat under a water willow while Anthony fetched the camera from the car. We took a photograph of the boat: 1802 Serene Road was stamped onto its side.

The second victim was on the road from Reno to Elko, Nevada. We ate lunch at a Mexican shack in Reno called Beto’s. The special of the day was an outrageously proportioned chile verde wet burrito.

In the car, I fed Anthony jelly beans while we listened to Sherlock Holmes (as we wound through the mountainous roads headed to Reno), listened to short stories and Bonnie Prince Billy, and then ate a bunch of sweet red grapes while we listened to the first part of a lecture series on Marx’ “Das Kapital.”

We arrived in Elko just before sunset, and cooled off in the Shilo Inn pool and steam room before dinner.  The pool was small and after we’d been in it for about 15 minutes, a French family invaded the waters and raised the temperature about twenty degrees. So we got out and sat in the mildly sweaty steam room, which at any rate was better than either rotting in front of pay-per-view in our air-conditioned hotel room or crunching our knees to our chins in the front seat of hte car.

We ate at the Stray Dog pub in the downtown area, really just two streets that intersect at a crosswalk, illuminated by the flashing neon red signs blinking at all the casinos on the street. We ordered a bad doughy pizza and a Caesar salad, dressing on the side (why?) We saw a third car pulled over by cops here: the law enforcers wear khaki shorts, like British explorers with gold stars on their chests.

Now we’re sound in our room at the Shilo Inn. Tomorrow we head to Pocatello, Idaho, and then on to Chino Hot Springs, Montana, and Yellowstone.

Yep, that's right

Dogville

Frisco in the tub

Burlington’s just about the dog-friendliest place I’ve ever lived. This even beats Germany, where it wasn’t unusual for a little old lady in a beaver coat to lead her beloved Dackel (dachshund) through the cosmetics section of a major department store, leaning over with a little handkerchief to pick up any droppings he might pass along the way. American ex-pats mocked Germans for preferring dogs to children, which may or may not have been true. All I remember from my childhood is that, in most German shops in the 80s, you could get the evil eye way easier as a kid just looking at a row of neatly-stacked sweaters than as a dog taking a huge muddy shit all over that same store’s floor.

Yeah, but those were the 80s in Germany and Austria and things have since changed dramatically. People aren’t so unhappy anymore. I’ve had to realize that the old people I knew in 1985 or 1986 were survivors of World War II, women who’d lost their husbands and their sons and lived for years off Jerusalem artichokes and potato peelings and, in the case of Berliners, re-built their city piece by piece from piles of rubble and brick. These old people were just pissed about everything; they struggled visibly under the weight of their memories and losses. And they hated children.

Our little family, free-wheeling and naive, arrived to Vienna from California in summer of 1985. I was not even a year old; my father was unemployed, a house husband way before Mr. Mom; in fact, we moved there for my mom, who had been hired as a technical writer at IBM’s Vienna office.  They were tanned, young, and making lots of money: the original yuppies. We all shared one large bedroom, and while I remember that we used to sit up in bed at night and watch news footage of Ronald Reagan’s speeches and how my parents said very solemnly, “That is an evil man,” I also remember how my mother used to buy not one Louis Vuitton or Céline handbag but several at a time, in various colors; I can still smell her signature Yves Saint Laurent lipstick, electricity and violets; she taught me how to distinguish a pair of Chanel shoes from a pair of Gucci shoes by the time I was four.

But anyway, this post isn’t about my parents’ materialism, or our life in Vienna in the 80s (and, really, it was the best of the 8os–family skinny-dipping and nude sunbathing on the rocky shores of the Danube, yo!), it’s about dogs. And, basically, just how I want a dog.

I’ll leave you with a picture of this frisky gidget gizmo here. We got to play with him in Central Park all last weekend! And watch him freak out over not getting enough sleep and then pace the living room anxiously for the next twelve hours. Hey, we all have our Gizmo days. Sometimes we just run around with our heads cocked to the side all day, never quite knowing how to react to the world that blazes on around us.

Intervention

I usually like the show “Intervention,” sickly so, but tonight it just made me feel sick. Maybe you shouldn’t eat pasta in front of the TV while watching some kid smoke his fifth crack pipe of the day?

Here’s a poem I wrote a while back. I’ll post it instead and think of Joanna Newsom singing about meteorites.

“Define ‘Meteor’”

And I thought in the night

I could tell you something I dreamt of

Like a hard-boiled egg, or the evening we spent there:

The trail down Canyon, it coiled and it roiled in the night

There hung twilighted lanterns—

And when I breathed, the light broke, and I found myself tied to your wagon.

We drove through the hills, the fog billowed in swills

And we talked of our future together,

Of the sidewalks and streets, of the children we’d meet on our pillows

And I held you so close, in my mind there, although I was seated:

And I promise I’d never lay down at the door there, defeated.

No I’ll never lay down on the floor, and say I’m defeated.

Cause our lives will lead us across the paths

Of childbirth and death and aliveness

And you’ll hold my hand while I whelp all our kids

And from my spread legs comes a quivering mess that we’ll name and we’ll hold

And our children will run ragged wild and bold

And I’ll take you down to the little pond and I’ll make you remember my name

Oh we needn’t play any more games

And we’ll need never be ashamed

To call names, and grow braids, and write books, and smash pots

We’ll grow flowers and apples and bake hot pies

And the steam will unfurl out the window

And you’ll lean in through shutters, through filtered green light, you’ll climb trees

And come back for your kiss.

See I’ve told you before

how my love runs ashore and gets grounded there,

and when the tide swells back in

The wind billows in and my mast heaves and I’m back sheepish, you’re scorned

But my heart is a horn that I’ll put to my lips

And I’ll sing with my hips and call you back to me, that morning.

Yes, I’ll come back that morning and meet you.

The leaves will crunch under our feet.

The fog will hang high.

Clear night.