Friday, September 20, 2019

Coincidence

"Good morning, Doctor," I said to the excellent customer at the Bottom Shelf. He's usually there early in the morning. He knows what he likes and makes decisions quickly.


"What do you like best about shopping here," I asked him recently.

"This is a gold mine for the discerning collector," he said and added quietly,
"You know, I'm a dying man. But this is one of my pleasures."

"What?" I said.

"Right now—I'm all hooked up with leads to a Holter monitor. It's just a matter of time for me." He lowered his head back to the $.10 bookshelf.

"Is this a coincidence or what?" I said, laughing hard. I whipped open my loose jacket to expose the monitor dangling around my neck.

 "I'm wearing the same thing!"

No reaction from the doctor. It was an awkward situation—my jacket gaping and my impulsive words hanging in the air between us. It was a good time to stop talking but instead of shutting up, I talked more and faster.

"But I'm not dying just yet, I hope. Only monitoring my heartbeat to see if I have Afib. I thought it was routine." I laughed some more and waited for him to join me. But he didn't think it was funny as I did. He was somber-looking as he quoted Epicurus —the art of living well and dying well are one.  

I stopped laughing and said goodbye. I never know how to answer somebody who quotes.  

When I got home, I googled the quote to see if I'd missed something in our exchange and I found this statement which put words to my friend's frame of mind. Personally, I can't see the value of viewing all of your unfolding life as a prelude to death. And I don't get the notion of living and dying being of equal value. 

“You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value."--Nimit in "Thailand” 
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

Cruising on the Okhotsk Sea

Earlier this year we cruised from Tokyo to Vancouver with a couple of Russian ports on the itinerary.

The Captain just now announced the temperature of the Okhotsk Sea is 2 degrees centigrade (36F), the same temperature as the air. I saw a lone hardy couple outside waddling along the deck past the window of the library where I’m reading and snoozing. They’re so bundled up with thermo-block padding and zero-proof stuffing, they look like walking bowling pins. 

The Viking Orion’s library, comfortable and warm, is advertised  as having been curated by Heywood Hill, a London bookshop owned by the Duke of Devonshire. Heywood Hill. Unconfinable, like dandelion seeds blown off a stem, the library is scattered all over the ship. Books are stacked by the swimming pools, in the bars, in every public room, in the restaurants. We don’t walk around this ship; we thumb our way around from glossy photography books and art portfolios to best sellers and leather-covered volumes of Chaucer and Walter Scott. Readers slouch against the bookcases, lounge in the leather chairs, curl up in front of the fire. 

Yesterday in our first Russian port, we took back-to-back tours in Korsakov/Sakhalin. After being tendered ashore, we searched for our bus, number fifteen, headed for the Chekhov museum in Yuzhno-Sakhalin. Past rows of shiny public buses, a beat-up greyish-white chariot awaited with our number on the windshield. The several hundred other people who were taking a cultural tour (statue of Lenin, war memorial, statue to commemorate the Korean diaspora) were escorted into public buses commandeered for the occasion. The twenty-nine of us who opted for Chekhov got the “Party Bus” so named by Victor, our guide and host. Inside, it was decorated with an explosion of doilies, an essential element of interior decorating in this part of the world. 

Victor, a tall handsome man, wore a thin Clark Gable style mustache. He had flawless skin, not a mark or wrinkle to be seen on his face or hands despite his fifty-eight years. A former history teacher, oil company worker, amateur wood carver and tour guide he was the best part of the tour. He knew, as he said, how sausages and politics are made and told us about his views on both—great conversation on the longish bus ride through the targa and past the depressing local daschas which have evolved during this recent period of prosperity from “dog houses” (Victor’s word) into cheap boxy kit houses worth half a million each (building cost). In the grey drizzle, the holiday houses looked as inviting as prison camps. 

Our first stop was the municipal sports complex/tourist trap for the toilet and big surprise—to shop a display of locally made trinkets. The toilet was a big hit (few of us were under sixty) but why did they think we’d be interested in nesting dolls and nesting Putins, ball caps with Korsakov/Sakhalin written in tiny letters (so it fits) across the bill and felt christmas ornaments made by the local children? I doubt they made a single sale as few of us have rubles and the ship doesn’t do currency exchange. It’s illegal for private citizens to exchange currency, so we were all at a stand-off. 

Back on the bus we leaned into our crocheted head-rests as we rolled through the plain town (lots of boxy apartment buildings, one fancy condo building for oil executives) onward to the Chekhov museum, a modern structure, and not as billed, the former home of Chekhov and his family. Oh well, we got the usual negative Russian greeting from three middle-aged ladies wearing aprons and half-barricading the way. Volleys of loud Russian ping-ponged back and forth between Victor and the women as we stood in front of a diorama of a ship’s prow splitting a foamy sea. A couple of stairs led to a real ship's wheel. 

Victor explained the loud volley was just the usual Russian thing.

“Whoever gets here/there first makes the rules,” he said, shaking his head. Whatever the argument, Victor with his princely bearing and booming voice won. The ladies retreated to the back of the crowd clucking their tongues and looking distraught. Our weak smiles were met with glares. 

“Climb the stairs (of the diorama) and play Captain,” suggested Victor, lightening the mood. We all shifted nervously from foot to foot dreading that he’d pick one of us to play Piggie. Thankfully, he didn’t and we moved on to view a manuscript, the only real Chekhov item in the museum, Victor told us. Then he launched into a few terrible anecdotes about the conditions in the Sakhalin prison which Chekov is famous for exposing. 

“They called them lamb,” Victor said, referring to the escaped prisoners, caught by the guards and cooked up for dinner. “What else are you going to do with them?” he asked with an uneasy chuckle. “There was no food around for hundreds of miles.” Victor made sure we recognized his sarcasm. Richard, unable to contain himself, baa-aa’ed softly in my ear.

We trudged through more dioramas of bizarre, inhumane prison conditions (the Russians have always excelled at imprisoning their citizens) and walked in the rain to the deluxe hotel next door for blinis and tea. After the cannibalism talk, we were starving and much to our surprise the food was delicious, but The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. A Chekhov expert followed with a forty-minute lecture, earnest but humorless and dull. She failed to paint any kind of picture of one the most interesting authors in Russian literature. We only heard the boring bits of biography—dates and more dates interspersed with the names of musty Chekhov scholars. Victor translated and fortunately editorialized a bit. The speaker would close her book as if the end was in sight and then open it again and continue. Victor said, “A Russian never means goodbye when she say goodbye for the first time.” Richard sat us in the front, right under the speaker’s nose, so my struggle to stay awake was on full display.  

At last it was over and we dashed in the rain from the party bus to number thirty-nine where Sergei, our new guide, was waiting. Educated in Korea by a professor from Tennessee, Serge shared his world view of things and sounded like the millennials do world-wide. He escorted us to a song and dance performance by a local troupe presented in an auditorium with the worst seats ever, well almost—the eleven-inch wide seats at La Scala still hold the record—followed by more opportunities to buy awful handicrafts, poorly displayed. Then came a round of public square and statue visiting. Our guide gave us a lot of interesting information about the Koreans on the island which piqued our interest. All you can ask from a tour. 
The theater seats were designed so that everyone had a head view.


Wet, cold and tired we were happy to get back to the warm ship where they greeted us with hot cider. We need the next two days at sea to recuperate before arrival at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Kamchatka, Russia. The weather forecast isn’t good so we’re happy we cancelled our fishing trip. What fishing trip you ask?...to be continued.






Thursday, September 19, 2019

La Scala

I'm back to blogging again after more frustration with fiction.

Milan, last year:
Boring photo of the ticket space

Looks calm but confusion reigned in six or seven languages
Getting tickets to La Scala was a more interesting experience than the actual opera, Alibaba and the forty Thieves, itself. We guessed, in a fightback against scalpers, the Italian government had installed checks and re-checks on buying tickets at the box office. We had to get on one list with our names and passport numbers. After a long wait, we were escorted to a machine where we were supposed to relist everything which would then allow us to get on the real ticket list. By tuning into other conversations and watching people, we realized we didn't have to check-in at the machine. Somehow we ended up in a group allowed to buy the really cheap tickets, eleven euros each. Italians seem to enjoy everything—even the lines and confusion had a good-natured vibe.

The tickets were terrible but even the best seats at La Scala for 250 euros aren't very good. We were in the nose-bleed section and could barely see the top of the curtains running across the stage. By standing up we got an occasional glimpse. The opera was awful...overture not bad, but everything else, mediocre. Our seatmate (we were almost in each other's laps) was a nineteen-year-old Italian kid, thrilled to be sitting next to two Californians. He'd spent a summer vacation in a house trade with people from San Clemente. At intermission, we said, "Ciao" to the kid and snuck out.

Here's a review by Renata Verga on the Bachtrack website:

 https://bachtrack.com/review-cherubini-ali-baba-academy-scala-milan-september-2018

At the head of the instrumentalists, conductor Paolo Carignani managed to get the sounds and the right tempi of a score that, after the brilliant overture, is often limited to supporting the singers in their melodic lines without turning into a tune to remember. Yes, the wisdom of Cherubini's writing is admirable, but one remains indifferent to the plot and to the two-dimensional characters on stage. Ali Baba is not a grand-opĂ©ra, but has its own dances, here wittily cavorted by young, some very young, ballet students in Emanuela Tagliavia's choreography.
Liliana Cavani, who took care of the staging, has clearly expressed her intent to relate the story in a very linear fashion, without opting either for the comic nor for the fairy-tale tone. The result was a visual rendition without a backbone which, even if it nods to contemporary taste – the library in which the four main characters as students read the folk tale and have their first love skirmishes; the getaway in motor-scooter in the finale – fall back on outdated staging and scenery. It does not put to use some twists of the plot, such as the procession of slaves with the treasures stolen by Nadir, which could have given a more theatrical touch to the staging. Meanwhile, the director trivializes other moments: why the need to show Delia having a footbath during her only true great aria? Also, one could have willingly done without the sight of the burnt corpses of the thieves during the cheerful and hurried conclusion.
xxxxxxx

Afterward, we stopped into the new Starbucks cathedral (no line at 9:45, just before closing), had a pizza and bought croissants for breakfast.

Mixed feelings from the Italians we talked to about Starbucks. They love their own coffee but most agree what Starbucks did to an abandoned post office building in mid-Milan is fantastic. And the Starbucks itself is a marvel, although still shaking out the opening problems.

I noticed the next day, which we spent at the Cathedral, that the garden at the front of the Cathedral square was donated by and being maintained by Starbucks. They are good neighbors. 

and more months.....

The trees are leafing out nicely. Instead of looking like broccoli spears, they're starting to look like trees again. Soon we'll have to start watering unless we get some early rain. 


We had a pleasant afternoon at the Bottom Shelf yesterday. A woman came in and bought books she intends to send to the Solomon Islands, where her brother runs a seafood cannery. If you've donated books recently to the store, they might be on their way here:








One of many interesting facts about the islands: Blond hair occurs in 10% of the population in the islands. This is the highest occurrence of blond hair outside of European influence in the world.  After years of questions, studies have resulted in the better understanding of the blond gene. The findings show that the blond hair trait is due to an amino acid change of protein TYRP1While 10% of Solomon Islanders display the blond phenotype, about 26% of the population carry the recessive trait for it as well.

Here's how the blond gene is expressed: 
School children - Solomon Islands


We had among our customers, a teacher who refused her discount. "You charge so little I couldn't think of it." And a woman moving to Northwest Arkansas who came in to donate a box of books and left with a good-sized bag of purchases. For book lovers, it's difficult to get out of the store empty-handed. 

Despite swearing we'll resist and leave the books in the store, I picked up two small but powerful books:

Has a great index:




A customer brought this book, Merde, to our attention and thought we should take it off the shelf. I rescued it from la poubelle (the trash) and flipping through the pages discovered a bit of historical language antagonism. One of the many French words for condom is une capote anglaise, (note that it's a feminine noun), literally an English cape or coat. Funny, since we (our troops overseas in WWll) called them French letters. Why? Because they were distributed to the troops in France in small envelopes.




















Nice to know about withstanding all climates and that they're British Made.

Donations were flowing in all day. The addition of credit card capability has had an impact on sales. Instead of putting books on hold, we get the sale! When people don't have the cash and say they'll come back, they often don't. Now we're capturing those sales on the spot, a big return for the small fee the credit card companies charge. The store is on track to earn about $88,000.00 this year.








Friday, April 19, 2019

Months pass...

"What the f---? Are they out of their friggin minds? Where did the trees go?" said Pink, disgusted, as he peeked out the door. He stood, half-in and half-out, moving forward and then backing up. He stuck his nose out and sniffed. "Charlie wasn't here last night." Charlie, a big homeless Tom, visited regularly, attempting to claim ownership of the patio, spraying the pillars and sometimes even the door—the very door Pink and Cashew claimed as their own. The one they used to go in and out, and in and out, and in and out and in and out. And that's just the morning. ...

Cashew bobbed around behind, trying to see past Pink. "Thank God, that freeloader's gone," he said. "At least something good's come out of all that chain-saw noise and people shouting. Uh oh--look at that lizard. Let me out!!"

Pink turned around and hissed. "Will you stop crowding me? There's no place to hide out there now. Geez...all I can see are stumps. The grove looks like a scarecrow convention. Why didn't they warn us? My favorite spot by the oak tree is totally exposed now. Where am I going to sit?"

"Don't speak to them anymore!" said Cashew. "I'm not going to. Eat and sleep. That's it from now on!" He backed into the house, indignant. He was frightened but as cats are wont to do, he raised his back leg as high as it would go and licked his arse, glancing around casually to see if anyone was noticing his gymnastic moves. He made another attempt to push past Pink and get out, but Pink wasn't budging—he stood his ground, half-way through the door, muttering to himself.

"Do you mean––are you suggesting—no making biscuits?" said Pink, incredulous at the mean streak in his brother. "You can't mean we're giving up on purring? And curling up in their laps?"

"Yes, that's what I mean. Nada. Nothing. See how they like it." Cashew walked out of the room, tail swishing and continued his venomous diatribe. "Punish 'em. Double up in the annoying department -- bother them in the bathroom and run ahead of them into the closet to hide and walk on their computer keyboards and scratch our claws on the carpet, don't come when called and jump up on the kitchen counter and drink out of the toilet and fight with each other and all that kind of human-annoying stuff."

"...but, but...they have the can opener," said Pink, astonished at the stupidity of his sibling. No wonder they call him the Idiot, he thought. 
                                                               ******

Our avocado trees have been stumped and today the surgeons began painting them white and re-establishing our irrigation system. Although I miss living in a green bubble, it's refreshing to get
light in the house and recover some of the views hidden for years behind the huge trees. The cats, used to sneaking around as cats do, under the leafy cover, are a bit shell-shocked. They stick close to the house and crouch under the deck, muttering to themselves.  




Cookbooks and Conversation at the Bottom Shelf



Someone in our small town has hung up their apron for the last time—probably a well-heeled and enthusiastic cook. I’m sure of this because ten boxes of good cookbooks are piled up in the workroom. Cooks don’t donate their cookbooks to the Bottom Shelf bookstore just because they’ve moved. It takes more than a change of address to separate them from their collections.

The best cookbooks we get, in my opinion, are dog-eared and rich with marginalia. Often a flutter of magazine clippings and cook’s notes will fall out of the pages.They reveal more about the donors than the book choices. On a recipe for sweet potatoes—”Thanksgiving—everyone liked it. Add one tsp. vanilla.” The author/cook cannot leave well enough alone.

“I don’t like shiny food,” says Jean, our shift manager, as she scans a couple of the photos and thumbs through recipes. She has a keen and discriminating eye. She shows me more photos. A slab of unidentifiable meat bathed in maroon sauce glistens under the light. She shudders and marks the book $.10. The book sold for $29.95 when it was new. Now it has the same value as a tissue-thin plastic bag from Walmart.

Jean looks over the five boxes on our work table. “Set aside anything with gelatin in the title,” she says.

“Here’s one—Jello Jigglers,” Miranda says plucking a thin volume from the pile. At twenty-eight, Miranda is the youngest of us. “How did you all survive eating this stuff? It’s so obviously devoid of any nutrition. What’s in it? Chemicals, food coloring and sugar?” Jean at eighty-six is the oldest of our managers. She and Miranda share a love for The New Yorker and James Thurber. Somehow, the conversation has drifted to a discussion of favorite Thurber works. I enjoy listening to the intergenerational discussion which includes details about Thurber’s height (short) and temperament (mean). Both Jean and Miranda like Thurber’s dominant women and spineless men. Although I don’t join in, I think about Walter Mitty, my favorite Thurber creation and his made-up medical jargon like “obsteosis of the ductal tract.” My own father suffered from a number of such illnesses which would strike without fail just before mass on Sunday morning and require immediate bed rest.

“Where’s your father this morning?” the priest, Father McIlhenny, would ask us after mass as my sister and I filled by.

“He’s got hypotocusis in the hoodinacapap,” I would answer. My older sister, by then wise to my father’s jokes, let me tell the priest. The words came easily and fast to me because I said/sang them while I skipped rope.

“Again?” Father McIlhenny would smile. I suspect he was a Thurber fan too.

Back in the workroom, I look through the jiggly book. The jello photography is disastrous—plates crowded with clashing colors and shapes, vegetables frozen in aspic like tortured souls in hell. The color separations are poor and the printing is fuzzy enough to make me think my freshly de-cataracted eyes are failing. Miranda, wicked smart and energetic, eats only organic vegetarian foods—a living testimony to the health benefits of kale. She makes me feel like rushing home to eat a bag of carrots.

I ask her opinion about the political correctness of the word “jiggler” which sounds vaguely offensive to my ear. I think of big round Santa Claus bellies, massive ungirdled asses, the handles of running toilets. There were no recipe sensitivity readers when these were printed. I wonder if there are now?

Years ago, I used “prick” in the instructions on a package of frozen pie dough. My boss reddened with embarrassment from his collar to his hairline, as he read my instructions and told me I could not use the word in print. EVER.

“But that’s what you do,” I said, in disbelief. “You prick a pie crust before you bake it. It’s a culinary term.” My arguments fell on deaf ears. “Pierce with the times of a fork,” was the expression we used instead. Pierce was much more tolerable for my straight-laced Swedish boss but still bothers me forty years later. I wonder what he’d say today now that the word pierce, hijacked by the body-art business, conjures up different thoughts. People pierce body parts I didn’t even know existed like the frenulum and ampallang. My niece talks about her industrial and tragus jewelry. God only knows where they are. If I was still writing instructions, Ole, my boss, might now prefer “prick” over “pierce.”

Jean picks up a non-cookbook volume which reminds her of her small Iowa town’s daily newspaper, The Eagletown Echo and the “What’s happening” column which contained all the local news. “They talk about Facebook disclosing too much now,” she laughs. “That’s crazier than a fart in a skillet. You didn’t have any secrets back then. If you traveled all the way to Des Moines, fifty miles away, the Eagleton Echo would have a reporter on your doorstep asking for details. And before nightfall, everyone in town would have read the story and judged everything you did.”

A customer interrupts. “What’s that?” She points to a handwritten note on the counter.

“Oh, probably something somebody found in a book,” I say. “We keep those. They’re amusing. This looks like a shopping list: one-half pound ground lamb,”…

“Hey,” she says. “That sounds like what I’m off to buy. I need lamb for the meatballs I'm making.” She gropes around in her big floral tote, looks up at me and back at the list. “Hey, that’s my list! I must have dropped it.” We laugh that we were both oblivious, thinking it a coincidence.

“So, what are you making?”  I say.

“An Alton Brown recipe for meatballs you put in paper egg cartons and bake in the oven. The grease is absorbed and the meatballs get crispy.”

I suggest she add a fire extinguisher to the list of ingredients.


4/16/19