Enough Flowers or, A Solo Labor Day Weekend

Usually my friend David comes up from New York for Labor Day Weekend— we cook lobster and scallops and corn and tomatoes and talk nonstop. But this year, because of the Pandemic, he was staying put in Germany. During a bad patch in my life I spent a lot of holidays alone — the secret is to plan something special, something you really want to do, and not compare yourself to other people or imagine the great times they are having. This year, knowing that a lot of other people weren't going to parties either helped. And so did an article in the NY Times about things to do. I chose to pick flowers and pay for them by the pound at The Farmer's Daughter in Rhode Island.

It was a longish drive, but so worth it: fields of dahlias and zinnias and flowers like red clover but bigger. I chose yellows — sun-yellow, primrose yellow, pale yellow, oranges from bright to pale peach, 

creamy white for contrast, some pinks and red — but mainly the sunny happy colors I love.

For once in my life, I was going to have enough flowers.  I filled three buckets full. The girl weighing my flowers seemed as enthusiastic about them as I was. We debated how to get them home safely — it was a hot day and a long drive, and I bought the buckets so I could keep them in water the whole way. Just looking at them made me happy:

“It's like buying joy!”  I said and she smilingly agreed and helped me carry them to the car.

At home I had the fun of arranging them, though really, they looked their best — their most exuberant —  all heaped together in the buckets:

I filled the house with them — it was such a luxurious, happy feeling — to have flowers everywhere I looked. For once, enough flowers,  I thought.

And then, I remembered when I was living in Boston, working three days a week because they thought I had fibromyalgia. WARNING: Stop reading here if you'd rather end on an upbeat note!

Years later I found out I had celiac, but that's another story.  It wasn't a happy time; I hated my job at Fidelity, I was really sick — so sick that I went to bed as soon as I got home from work, I was obsessed with a bad man (this was so painful even to witness that none of my friends would talk to me); but I did do two good things in those years. One was write Blow Out the Moon and get it published. The other was to volunteer in a school for kids who had been kicked out of regular public school. 

Every Friday, I met one on one with each boy in the class (there were no girls). They seemed more like me than anyone I knew in Boston, and I realized for the first time that I, too, had ADD. When I was young I don't think they knew about it; if you didn't do well in school, you were considered lazy or stupid or, my teachers' word for me, “careless.” 

But the boys had been diagnosed. A nurse wheeled a meds cart around twice a day and when one ran out of his meds, I saw someone literally bouncing off the walls: he'd jump up, hit the wall with the soles of both sneakers, land, and do it again. As the teachers said,

“He's a poster child for Ritalin.”

The  teachers were saints. When one of the boys, they knew, wasn't getting any Christmas presents, the teacher filled a sack for him (and asked me to get things too which of course I did). 

But this story is about a  bright  boy whose twin sister was at Boston Latin. He, Jonathan, had trouble reading and concentrating. When one Friday he wasn't in class, the teachers told me that he'd been put into a home by his mother — The Home for Wee Wanderers, it was called then. I promised to visit him there each week, and the teachers gave me schoolwork to bring him.

The place was at the end of the subway line, and a long ride. Some of the children had been born with aids, and weren't expected to live. I remember a small pale boy who talked about this calmly. Some were mentally ill: I remember a girl with crazy grey eyes who got too close to everyone. Jonathan, normally a cocky, swaggering boy — so cool that I was a little intimidated — seemed seemed subdued and more serious than usual.

At the end of the first visit, I asked him if I could hug him good-bye: I asked because at McKinley they told us always to ask (you never knew if a child had been abused) and he said yes and clung to me like a frightened child; well, of course he was a frightened child, but one of the things that poverty does to kids is make them seem adult.  

It was a hard place to visit — it's panful to witness the kinds of situations the children were in: not that they complained. Their bravery was one of the moving things. Jonathan was brave, too, but he did tell me that he worried (not his word) that they thought he was “slow.” I said he wasn't, and reminded him of a brilliant poem he'd written.

He smiled a little at that.

On perhaps my fourth visit, I didn't want to go, but I had promised Jonathan, so I did. That day, one of the adult workers, a young man who'd been a final candidate for a place as a composer at the Berkley School of Music, gave me a ride to the subway station, which I appreciated — it was a long walk. By this time I knew him a little and asked how he managed to stay.

“I've learned that the children are more than their tragedies,” he said. 

By the time I got off the subway in Back Bay, it was late — and someone was selling peonies. They're my favorite flower and I chose some; and then the guy offered me all he had left for $5. That was enough flowers, too — enough to fill every vase in the house. I thought at the time, and still think, that it was a reward from the universe.

Jonathan came back to school. Some said his mother had only put him in there because she was afraid he was going to do drugs — or was doing them. Others said she had broken up with the boyfriend who didn't like him. But he came back.

I don't know what happened to him, or any of the boys I knew there; I've googled them but haven't found any. My life had a few years of the chaos created by bad choices (and a bad diagnosis) left before things got better, but for me, they did. My guess is that the boys haven't been so lucky; as my friend Wendy, who in those days worked with poor children in Vermont said,

“Ten years old, and already a lot of doors are closed to them.”

That was probably true. I made my own bad choices, but my life turned out happily enough anyway; I'm grateful for enough flowers and all the other things I've been given. Those boys were dealt a different hand.

Lighter

It's really hard for me (and most people?) to get rid of things — why, I don't know: to admit that you'll never learn to play those Irish flutes, move to a sheep farm in New Zeland and wear those sweaters — or even the black satin coctail dress for parties around here? There's also the what-if-I-need it syndrome; the best counter to that is a firm:  “Then I'll buy a new one,” and this time, because I was determined to clear some space and wasn't worried about money, I could say that without fear. 

I also used some old strategies:

- start with the no-brainers (old shopping bags and magazines and such: should I not admit that I'd been keeping them?)

- call a local homeless shelter, ask them what they needed, and then walk around the apartment picking things out like presents. This was actually fun: I chose several boxes of shiny new-looking children's books, and when the woman worker saw A WRINKLE IN TIME her face lit up and she said, "That was my favorite book in fifth grade!"

- sell what I could on ebay and Poshmark. That was more tedious, but still easier than donating things that cost money, quite a lot of money, that you never even wore! I did that, too, reminding myself that the money was gone, whatever happened to the clothes — and it was MORE of a waste to keep them around weighing me down. Things you don't use and don't like just make it hard to find the things you do like. They take up space in your house and your brain.

Whatever you tell yourself, though, it's still hard to decide, and sad, often, to touch things you haven't handled in years. I was determined to do it, though. I made a big pile of rubbish in the basement (not just mine, things other people had left here) and paid someone to drive it all to the dump in his truck.  I emptied my closets until I could see the floor and everything that remained in all three — no more moving one thing to get at another. Now they and my storage unit are mostly empty space: they LOOK lighter, they are lighter, and I feel lighter.

With the money from selling the clothes  I had enough (thanks to 2 Marimekko dresses with DR labels — I never wore either!) to buy something I really wanted: a ring with an aquamarine the color of the sea around Coll on a sunny day. It's a hard color to capture — 

I found the perfect shape at a London gallery — you could even imagine that it was a wave, and the gold around it the sun shining on the water, but the stone was the wrong color — too blue. I wrote to the gallery and eventually, they sent me a photo of the stone the jeweler had picked, but it was more like moss than the ocean:

This time, I called them — the girl who helped me had a Scottish accent and  when I described the color as “like the sea in the Hebrides on a sunny day,” she knew just what I meant.

“Leave it with me,” she said, a very Scottish thing to say.

“I love that expression!” I said — it always reminds me of really competent people on Coll who know how to do things and do them, well. You really can leave it to them. 

I said so, and then she said she was from Oban. That's where you get the boat to Coll. And her father had worked on Coll. I knew then that it would be fine, but she said to send a photo of the color I wanted the stone to be, so she could show it to the jeweler. 

                          

I did, and a few weeks later, she wrote that my ring had come and it was “absolutely gorgeous.” It is. When I first put it on, I understood why in so many fairy tales, rings are magic. This feels as though it almost could be (though rings are as hard to photograph as flowers; the actual color is more like the green ring above).

It's like wearing the ocean around Coll on my finger — in a fairy tale, I could probably turn it three times and go there; but the way I got it is magic enough for me.

                                          

Painting copyright ⒸWendy Soliday. See Wendysoliday.com

The Actual Party (or Turning Three Score and Ten, Part 2)

The party was on my 70th birthday, even though that fell on a Friday. It was one of those times when nearly everything cooperated in making it fun, not just the flowers Tom sent (see the Preparing post), but the flowers on my porch and, and, most importantly, the guests. 

Everything was done by the time Barclay and Kate, who were staying in the apartment across the hall for the weekend, arrived and there was time  for THEM to relax on their own between their six hour drive and the party. I still had a few things to do, so that was perfect. 

Bob, who was due to and did arrive two hours later, had asked me what he and Mary Beth should wear, and I had said whatever they liked and that I'd probably wear something festive. I added:

“I bet Barclay will wear either a black T-shirt or a Hawaiian shirt.”

Barclay arrived in a black T-shirt and changed into a Hawaiian shirt before the party: we've known each other a long time. I had planned to change into a new animal-print dress, but ended up just staying in good old Marimekko. I am half-Finnish after all! I also forgot to take off my hairband and arrange my hair. I've often thought that one sign of being middle-aged is that when you're giving a party, you care more about how the house looks than how you look — not that I am middle-aged any more. At 70, you are at the start of old age. Young, old, or middle-aged, I always cared how the food tasted!

Me, Barclay, Kate before the party — sadly, no photos of them in their party clothes

That hasn't changed — and my old friends haven't, either. Guy and Bob were room-mates as second-formers at our boarding school. They were kind, pleasant people at school and they still are: just more at ease with themselves than they were as boys.  

Guy, Bob, and Mary Beth, Bob's wife, all arrived at the same time — Guy told me later that Bob had wanted to go through their songs together before the party, so he'd gone to their airbnb. The men wore khaki shorts and shirts with collars — Hawaiian for Barclay (he used to get his shirts in Hawaii when he travelled there on business!), blue Oxford cloth for Bob, and yellow polo for Guy.

Conversation was lively from the start. We drank champagne — even the beer drinkers, Guy and Barclay — taking our flutes from a round gold tray (maddeningly, I couldn't find the edible flakes of real gold I'd set aside to shake into everyone's glasses). I nipped into the kitchen to look again while another friend, who couldn't come because he was in Berlin, talked to everyone on speaker phone; but I couldn't find them. I made myself stop looking but I did describe them:

“For our 'golden years' — and all of our birthdays! Just pretend they're there.”

Conversation was lively from the start, and everyone exclaimed gratifying about how beautiful things looked, not just the view and the flowers but the tables. And they did: everything on the drinks table was white and gold; even the curried shrimp dip sat in a glass bowl on another round gold tray filled with potato chips. People kept commenting on how beautiful it all was and how good the food tasted. 

Maybe because we had all been socially-isolating, everyone seemed extra-happy and even excited to be together. Kate and Mary Beth, who had never met each other before though they knew the rest of us,  talked just as much as their husbands. In fact, Kate talked more than Barclay and seemed excited, too. We laughed a lot, as we always have, not just when people were witty or told good stories, but at silly things. 

About half the time someone went inside or emerged, he walked into the screen door, knocking it out of its tracks. I did it just as often as everyone but Barclay did. Barclay got colored magnets — a red pepper, a yellow taxi —  from the refrigerator and put one on each side of the screen; but we still kept walking into the door. Each time it clattered down, someone said,

“Don't worry. Barclay will fix it.”

And he did. He was after all the one who built a rocket that actually flew and carried a rat, named for our Headmaster, into the sky.

Barclay (center) at school. His room-mate, on the left, sadly died just before Christmas this year.

We sat down only when it was time to eat dinner — me at the end closest to the kitchen, Bob & Mary Beth beside each other at the other end, Guy alone on one side, Barclay on my left with Kate between him and Bob. I asked if someone would say a blessing: Guy doesn't like to be put on the spot, and he and Barclay are both rather introverted, so I was going to nominate Bob. But Barclay said, firmly,

 “Guy.”

That was right. We all held hands. Guy said something brief and eloquent and heartfelt about how lucky he felt and how grateful he was for our friendship, and for all being together — he gave thanks for all that — but I don't remember how he put it.  Well and gracefully, though! Guy and Barclay both squeezed my hands at the end, and everyone smiled at everyone else and commented on the blessing.

Mary Beth, Kate, and  Bob, all raise funds for non-profits. We laughed and groaned at Bob and Mary Beth's tale of dinner with a big, conservative donor. They'd driven to Vermont and when they sat down:

“He likes to stick it to me, and he said, ‘Let's all raise a glass to Kavanaugh,' ” Bob said.

“What did you do?”

“Gritted my teeth and raised my glass — I had to support my wife.”

I kept an eye on the food and wine, but rarely needed to bring out more of anything. The next day, when I commented to Kate and Barc on how  few bottles of champagne we finished, Kate said that Bob and Mary Beth only had one or two glasses each. 

“I only noticed because I was sitting next to them.”

Serving the dessert, which I hadn't planned, worked out as easily as everything else had. As Bob said,

“How do you want to do this? You can't carry in your own cake!”

So I put in the tall pale yellow tapers (7 of them)  and the yellow nasturtium blossoms (10); then sat down outside and the others lit the candles and the sparklers and carried in the cake, singing “Happy Birthday.”

I made a wish, blew out the candles, and said that at my 18th birthday party (Bob was there!), I'd wished that we'd all stay friends. Most of us have. Some have died. One or two of us no longer like each other. But many of us still see each other once or twice a year, and call, and write; and celebrate. Like Guy, I am grateful for that. 

                Serving the cake — Kate did video Bob carrying it in, but my phone didn't cooperate.

After dinner Guy and Bob played guitar and sang; and we joined in on some, but not all, of the songs. As I said to Guy after “Thirsty Boots” (with which he always concludes when he comes down here for lunch and sings and plays to me afterwards), 

“I've been hearing you play and sing that for over fifty years” —first in college, when he was in a band—

Guy when young. He still has that smile.

 “and I've never heard you sing and play it so well.”

Now that we're old, the lines I imagine that the lines about traveling and staying put — “so take off your thirsty boots and stay for awhile” are for me, though of course they were always in the song and I never thought that when we were young.  I do travel a lot now. Whatever Guy thinks about that, he has a beautiful voice and great phrasing, with just enough but not too much emotion. 

Bob sang  “Blue,” (video link below), which as he said, “is a song about loyalty.” He sang it at the brunch the morning after  his 70th birthday — one of the last parties before the Pandemic (many of us turn three score and ten this year). He was playing and singing with people he's been in bands with over the years, and in the middle of “Blue,” he just stopped.

“Bob? Bob?”

He looked up — and Bob (as his son had said in his toast to his father the night before, “never one to leave a feeling unexpressed”) was crying.

“It's all just too much,” Bob said.

I didn't want to cry at my party, so I had said: no toasts. No one cried — even when Bob sang “Blue,” though it's a sad song (“Vet said Blue, you're huntins' done,”) — and that, too, maybe means something different now that we're 70. 

After “Blue,”  we sang along; most of us remembered the words. They were the songs of our youth, after all — we'd seen the Grateful Dead sing some of them, live at the Cafe au Gogo and in the gymn at MIT and outside someplace in Connecticut. And now here we were, fifty years on, singing. 

Bob and Guy, room-mates when they were 13, playing "Blue" 

My heart felt full. I am not just “privileged” in the ways all of us who grew up with opportunities and  parents who, whatever their faults, believed we were talented and gave us good manners and good educations are. I am blessed in my friends — not just those at the party, people on Coll, other old friends, the Blue Rose Girls, neighbors, and some of my siblings. They all made me feel loved on my birthday, and I remember that feeling on the (inevitable even before the Pandemic) days when I don't see anyone.

Birthday presents from Anna & Grace.

Preparing for a Pandemic Birthday Party (or, Turning Three Score & Ten, Part 1)

I am the old-fashioned kind of hostess who does everything ahead for a party — and the older I get, the earlier the preparations start. For my 70th birthday party, I made a schedule, and started getting the porch, house and food ready the Monday of the party. And because of the Pandemic, I had to do some things farther in advance than that: buy really good paper “hand towels” for the bathroom,  borrow tables to keep us socially-distanced on the porch, figure out safe ways to serve everything. 

The menu, too, I planned ahead — but I am also the kind of cook who changes her mind. This was the planned menu (see Recipes pages for *):

curried shrimp dip*  with potato chips

scallop ceviche* made with passion fruit pulp and limes, served in one Mason jar per family unit

cornbread (normally I make tortillas for ceviche but you can't do them ahead)

big green salad with lots of avocado

cake (of course) & iced decaf coffee or hot tea

“You're not making your own cake, are you?” my boarding school room-mate Wendy once said to a young mother on Coll, sounding horrified. Alison reassured her that she was not. But the Blue Rose Girls, who bake better than their husbands do, have “often” made their own, and, although I considered buying one from a bakery here, I didn't. They looked too professional and tasted too sweet.

I wanted a home-made birthday cake. As I made it, in a yellow outside white inside bowl like the ones my mother had, I remembered licking those bowls (always, with lines down the middle so it would be fair):

It's been a long time since I made a cake and I considered buying one again, but everyone coming loves me and has good manners, too. They'd be polite however the cake turned out. Besides, the main point of birthday cake is the idea of it and blowing out the candles and by that stage of the evening, some people probably wouldn't even notice what the cake tasted like.

However, when the carrot cake layers both came out of the oven completely flat, I was dismayed enough to reconsider — but decided to just make lots and lots of icing. I baked  plenty of cakes as a child, and decided to make my childhood favorite frosting: butter and powdered sugar and plenty of them.  I made about a pound of it and put it and the cake in the refrigerator across the hall.

Sure enough, when I iced the cake a few hours before the party, pecans between the layers and an inch of icing everywhere (between the layers, sides, top) did the trick. I sprinkled the top with real gold baking flakes and then (this is why it's good to do everything you can ahead AND leave lots of extra time the day of the party) spent far longer it should have taken to find candles.  I hadn't thought about them — just assumed I'd have some. I didn't, but 7 tall beeswax tapers were actually prettier than birthday candles. I added them to the piles of plates, cutlery etc. on the dining room table —  the 10 pale yellow nasturtium blossoms  I'd pick and put on the sides just before lighting the candles. 

                        Not the actual cake — but one of the candles and the same kind of flowers

But back to the preparations: the best part of the plan was allotting almost an entire day, two days before the party, to finding everything — plates, serving dishes and utensils, glasses, silver, chairs, the right tablecloths for both tables. Because we would be outside the whole time, I just piled everything on what is normally my dining room table. This included sparklers — I thought it would be fun to light them while we carried in the cake — and, remembering a time when Anna came for my birthday and all the matches were so wet that she wanted to give up on them but the children and I wanted lit candles  — a lighter. 

Because I'd found everything, setting the tables was fun: I put my second favorite dinner plates, silver, and Ikea not crystal wine glasses (I didn't want to be sad if anything broke and glasses often do)  on the Marimekko pink and white oilcoth tablecloth. The smaller table had a gold/yellow/ivory damask table cloth covered with a lace tablecloth; it looked really pretty with 2 round gold trays  — one for champagne glasses and one for the dip and chips.

Then, with the table set and all the food made except a second appetizer (pears, blue cheese, spinach leaves skewered together and sprinkled with walnuts & vinaigrette), I went swimming, even though I hadn't brought the garbage to the dump or bought flowers. 

It is a huge mistake to spend the whole day before a party working and I decided I didn't have time to do either of those tasks. But it was one of those blessed times when things just work out — completely by chance, my downstairs neighbor was going to the dump and asked if I had anything. And an hour before the party, the most beautiful flowers I've ever been given arrived:

It's not chance that they went perfectly with the tablecloth and china. Tom, my friend since he was 15 and I was 17, had asked when I was telling him about the party what my colors were. And his wife helped direct the florist in choosing the flowers. They arrived just after the first guests, who were staying for the weekend.

People Seem Nicer Now (or, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”)

 

Here, the churches toll their bells every night at 8 — it is New England, after all! The tolling is loud, and long (video at end of post), and solemn. I think of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” It begins: 

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...

It ends “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls — it tolls for thee.” 

We are all connected, of course; but now I feel the connection more often, not just when those bells are tolling. Maybe other people do, too; people seem nicer now. Here in this rather chilly town, strangers smile at me on the street. It was not always thus. Once, when I came back from Scotland, I resolved to be as friendly to everyone here as I was there.

In the Hebrides, it's the custom to wave to everyone, “even tourists,” a hotelkeeper told me when I arrived on my first island. On Coll, even if you have just seen someone in the shop, they wave enthusiastically  — not just once, if they really like you they smile and wave excitedly several times — when they drive past you a few minutes later. So one year when I first came back I tried smiling at everyone I saw here, in Stonington.

Most people looked at me blankly or even suspiciously; perhaps they thought I was about to ask them for money (“a free handout,” Nixon called it). One walk smiling at them was enough. After that, I averted my eyes when I walked by someone, as they did. But now, people smile; some nod, too. Some even say hello.

That may sound like a small thing, but it's not, at least if you live alone. And the nicer-than-usual goes beyond saying hello to strangers, as I discovered when I finally got fed up with my old screen door jamming and went to Home Depot.  The new one wouldn't fit in my car.

The couple in the truck parked next to me got out and suggested that I put the back seat down. I didn't know how to, so the guy did it; and then they both pushed, while the young man from Home Depot and I pulled. I can't imagine people before the Pandemic having or making the time to help a stranger do that!  But they not only helped— they offered to put it in their truck and drive it to my house if we couldn't make it fit.

But, we did — almost. The trunk wouldn't close, but the young man said he thought he could tie it down and went inside for a rope. Only when he came back with it did the couple leave.

We chatted for a bit, and he told me he had been living on his own, but came home to take care of his sick father. He said he liked living at home more than on his own: “That was kind of lonely.” 

I thought about him, and my mother, as I drove carefully home — the Westerly, RI police love to ticket anyone from CT and they are no nicer than they were before. But, the door made it home 

and I got it onto its tracks in time for my birthday party, which was to be held on the porch.

There were six of us, all old friends. Two were room-mates at our boarding school in 8th grade. We were all so excited to be together, at a party  (or perhaps we are always this spaced out?) that almost every time someone went inside or emerged, he walked into the screen door, knocking it out of its tracks.

Barclay got colored magnets — a red pepper, a yellow taxi —  from the refrigerator and put one on each side; but  we still kept walking into the door and knocking it out of its track. Each time it clattered down, someone said,

“Don't worry. Barclay will fix it.”

He did — and that was no different from usual. He has always been kind, and clever. At 13 he made a rocket that really worked and blasted it off over the school. 

What was different was that we were all so grateful to be together, fifty-something years after we'd first met, and twenty weeks into the Pandemic. We're not islands! 

The church bells tolling, as they do every night at 8.

Wishing at the Well of the Queen's Daughter

              Photo copyright Ⓒ  Xander M-B

Different islanders call it by different names and tell different stories about it; the fact is that there is a natural well in the rocks by the sea, and at half-tide or lower, people throw coins into it and wish. It's deep enough for the coins to stay at the bottom even when the tide is high, though in the past, when people were poorer, children used to climb in to get the coins when the visitors had gone.

One Saturday morning I ran into Marg— thin, elegant in old trousers perfectly pressed and a green-blue sweater the color of her eyes — spreading butter on an oatcake. She was in the village to do her shopping; Saturday morning is when the boat brings the most fresh food. Iona, in the village to do her shopping and washing (the community center has a washer and dryer) joined us, and we companionably chatted and drank tea while Marg buttered and ate her oatcakes and Iona waited for her washing to finish. This kind of relaxed, completely unplanned companionship — especially common in winter — is one of my favorite things about the island.

Iona, now 50, grew up there, and Iona came in the 1970s, so they've known each other a long time, but they included me in the companionship. All of us once supported ourselves at our crafts: duck decoys (prized by American hunters), ceramics (beautiful sea colored glazes), writing. We're all single. And we all chose, and love, the island. 

They both knew how to get to the well, but it was too far from my hut for walking the whole way in winter to be fun. So one day Iona  picked me up in her little car. We drove as far as the track to the graveyard where after the burial everyone drinks whisky outside and talks about the person (“When I die, don't buy any liquor, there's plenty in the house,” someone said to me at the one burial I attended). Then we followed another track through the grassy dunes to the right part of the rocks,  and clambered over them to the steps  — the Queen's Stairs or the Giant's Steps, depending upon who's telling it.

The version I like is that after a selkie climbed down them, she put on her sealskin which she'd hidden under the rocks and then — before she returned to the sea — slid into the pool to wash the land off her.

    Photo copyright Ⓒ  Xander M-B

Iona and I sat on a straight rock with a back some people call “the Queen's Throne.” I'd brought some coins, chosen for the selkie, with a dolphin on the back. Of course, we didn't tell each other our wishes. We sat for perhaps twenty minutes without saying anything at all; it's a rare person that I can do that with and feel at ease, but I could with Iona.  It was a grey, cold windy day — the wind whipped our hair and turned our cheeks cold and pink, but it felt right to sit there until we threw in our coins and silently wished.

   Photo copyright Ⓒ  Xander M-B

 I'd brought some whisky, too — good whisky. Six years before, on my first night on the island , my host told me that when Boswell and Johnson came, the islanders offered them whisky in cockle shells, telling them it was an island custom. Boswell believed them.  My hosts told some BBC reporters on the island the story, and, after dinner, served them whisky from cockleshells.

A cockleshell of whisky is not much.

“Don't you think the islanders were pulling Bosewell and Johnson's legs?” I said and his whole face fell. He looked so disappointed — it had clearly been a great night — that I wished I'd held my tongue. 

I thought of that and regretted saying it as I poured whisky into the hot milk and honey I'd also brought (this is a delicious combination, if the whisky is smokey enough), and we agreed that it was indeed delicious. There was still quite a lot of whisky left after the hot milk and honey were gone, and we decided to drink it out of cockle shells.

We walked along the shore, right into the salty wind, laughing and pouring whisky into the shells and then tilting it into our mouths. It was great, better than the hot milk and honey — like drinking the sea. Actually,  we probably WERE drinking the sea, since we picked up the shells from the beach and the air was so windy and wet.

That summer, when I was back in Stonington, Iona emailed me that her wish had come true. And the following January, mine did, too. I had wished to buy a place in America, and while I was back on Coll, my lawyer in Connecticut signed the papers.

Tammy and I went back to the Selkie's Throne to give thanks.

Those aren't our feet: a child on the island kindly went to the site and took these photos for our blog. Thank you, Xander!

Here he is climbing the Queen's stairs — or the Giant's Steps or the Selkie's Way, depending upon who's telling it.

Books help (not in the ways you may be thinking)

My plan for today was to wake up, do yoga and meditate, then write about the true friends who came for my birthday.  But my street roared awake at 6.23 — drilling, shouting

“I'm weahin' my wife's undawear — it's really comftable,” one workman yelled, garbage trucks. 

And then the handyman who had said he would put the new hinge on my cabinet arrived before I'd accomplished any of it.

I'd been reading stories on our boarding school email chain. My favorite today was about the time someone and 2 accomplices stole 5 gallons of ice cream from the school kitchen and persuaded one of the boys to smuggle it onto the bus to the Boys School and give it to her boyfriend. Even with the help of friends, he was unable to eat it all so they climbed onto the roof and put it on a gutter, planning to finish it later. Unfortunately, it melted and dripped into a master's apartment and the school said that unless the culprits confessed, Dance Weekend would be cancelled. They confessed (as people always did; no one ever turned anyone else in).

Back to the present: Lacking a hinge, for weeks now the door has only stayed closed when a vase is propped under it. But, knowing how in demand those with carpenter skills are, I had told him I would wait to remove the door and bring it to the hardware store for new hinges once he was here cutting the grass and had told me he did indeed have time to do it.

But today he said he did, so I removed the door (which I knew I would never be able to get on again, that's why I wanted to wait) and drove off, with the door. The boy at the hardware store chose hinges he said would work. I came home — and realized that I had left the door at the hardware store. 

I ran to find Bill and tell him what had happened.

“Will you still be here in half an hour?”

He said he would. I apologized for leaving the door behind, saying my absent-mindedness is getting worse with age, and he said, smiling kindly,

“Don't worry, my wife's the same way.”

I drove back, came home, Bill was still cutting the neighbor's grass and Michel, who helps me clean, arrived unexpectedly early too, so we went to tidy the apartment across the hall a neighbor had kindly lent two of my birthday guests. They had left it spotless — all we had to do was put the sheets I had removed (they brought their own) back on the beds.  Michel is a perfectionist — her daughters tease her by moving chairs an inch while she is out of the room and laughing as she compulsively puts them back — and she remained behind doing who knows what (that's why I like her help, she notices things I don't!) while I went to the basement to get wine to give the neighbors.

When I emerged, Bill's truck was gone. The door was still off the cabinet. I tried to call him; no answer. I fumed for a minute or two, then decided to do it myself.  The articles on the Web made it seem very complicated — levelers, guide holes, measuring, planes (whatever they are) to align and fix horizontally, “another pair of hands to hold the door in place”...... I decided to pile books to hold the door level while I screwed in the hinges and hope for the best.

I did open and close the hinges a few times to make sure I understood how they worked and that I was putting them on the right way. And I put the centers exactly where the old hinge centers had been.

As with many domestic projects, you don't need two people. The books and my knee held the door in place while one hand held a screw and the other the electric drill. There is no doubt that putting screws in with an electric drill is satisfying. And it was even more satisfying that the books (the Little House books on one side, Swallows & Amazons on the other) and I got the job done.

True, our work wasn't perfect — but the door opens and closes now, and if anyone with carpentry skills ever does show up (that'll be the day!), he can do it over. For now, this is good enough. And as a child on Coll said when he and 2 friends had assembled a wheelbarrow for me,

“I'm surprised we had the skill set to do that.” So I am — about me, not those kids.

Door staying up, even without my allies the books. And yes, it all needs repainting but that can wait!

Lost cousins

   © Copyright Tatler
I know my Scottish great-grandmother came from the Highlands or islands, because when her son died at 25, she keened, in Gaelic. By then, only people from the Hebrides and Highlands still spoke Gaelic. So, hoping my ancestors had come from the islands I'd fallen in love with (and seeing those islands was love at first sight — that instant, deep recognition), or the one that became my real home, or even that some of my friends were distant cousins, I started doing ancestor research. 

I took DNA tests and found birth and wedding records on Scotland's People. It's quite a feeling, to see the signatures of people you hope are your ancestors: “hope” because there's no way to know for sure that you have the right person.

Before I found anyone, I learned that one great-great-great-great grandfather's surname came the Isle of Yell, in the Shetlands. Partly because of that, partly because I was getting obsessed with it, I stopped searching: I had island blood — just from the wrong coast. But while I was looking for photographs for this blog in a big box of old family photographs, I found a brochure of Oban, the port from which you get to Coll.  I recognized it even before I saw the 

     Imagine the hills green and the water blue.

name — I've walked those streets and stayed in those hotels and taken the boat through that Sound many times. Getting to Coll means an overnight in Oban — more than one, if the swell is so high the big boat can't tie up on the island, or the clouds are so low that the little plane can't make it over the mountains of Mull. 

The Sound of Mull, on the way to Coll

It was a strange feeling to look at those old photographs of Oban, and think my great-something-grandmother and her children had walked there, too.

And I found a photograph of my great-great grandmother with four of her six children (including one of Libby, who married the Scottish painter David Macgregor) sitting in front of this cottage — 

My great-great-grandmother, Jessie Blair, who married Peter Crichton; her son John (she had another named Blair); and 3 of her daughters. Libby married the painter Douglas MacGregor. My great-grandmother Margaret Crichton was already in America.

Sadly, the place wasn't identified, but I bet it's somewhere else in the West of Scotland. Maybe they stopped in Oban on their way to an island, too.

 I know they lived in Edinburgh, I've been to the house; this cottage isn't it. So, probably, they were on holiday — those look like best clothes, too — maybe where they'd come from originally? Jessie's brother lived in Glasgow.  I can hope they came from an island in the Hebrides.

                                             A little bay on Coll. The water is always clean, and often 

                                         this color.

There were 6 children, and only Margaret went to America, so I have cousins all over Scotland; this isn't just wishful thinking, DNA tests say so. But I'm not going to write and say, “Hi! We're third cousins!” 

Or could I? I got an email yesterday from a cousin in England who'd found me with DNA and Ancestry.com, telling me that my great-great grandmother on that side of the family, the English side, Rachael Saunders, had a child “while working on a farm” and had given him, John Saunders, to an aunt to raise. She asked if I knew any more.

Sadly, as I wrote to her, that side of the family — the Rumble side — specializes in secrets. I told her I was glad to have a new cousin and told what I knew: that Rachel married my great-grandfather, presumably without telling him about her other child. Their son, William E. Rumble (portrait to come, I hope) was taught to read by the village minister in Little Wittenham. 

St.Peter's Church Little Wittenham © Copyright Steve Daniels

He must have gone on to a scholarship somewhere, too, because I have his geography book with his name, 1877, and Stoke Rockford, a town with a good school. He saw an ad in the Times of London for  “free farm land” and set sail for America, from Glasgow (so maybe he met Margaret Crichton in Scotland?). The ship's menu, passenger list and his comments on the other passengers were in the box of family things, too.

That ad turned out to be a hoax, and the letter he wrote to the Times about that was published there.

He stayed poor, but his son,  my grandfather, became a lawyer without going to law school — you could do that in those days if you could pass the bar. And it's thanks to his hard work, success,  and my mother's good investments  that I could buy my land and hut on Coll. And it's thanks to the opportunities he had in America, too — which, like many people's in those days, came at the cost of lost families.

(To be continued if I hear back from the English cousin: third cousin, not that distant.)

Took the MOCA (the test Trump "aced")

Most of the questions were super-easy, but the first one had me stumped. How could you connect those dots into a cube, starting and ending where they wanted you to start and end???

I tried and tried, but I couldn't do it. The closest I got was a sort of rectangle — and even then, I put some of the dots in the middle of lines, not at their end points, and skipped one:

                                   Erasure marks are from earlier attempts -- and I know I can't draw.

Could it be a trick question, designed to see how people thought “outside the box”? I know those exist, but the rest of the questions were so simple that much as I wanted to believe that, it didn't seem likely. It was frustrating to be unable to see the answer.

I know I'm a bad spatial thinker — and I also know I am not senile. Yet I had failed  this part of the test. I began worrying that some day, my mental state WOULD be tested by someone and I would be judged incompetent because I couldn't do it. I began planning what I would say:

“I've always been a bad spatial thinker! Even when I was young I was! Look how many words I could think of that began with F — more than a hundred! Besides, lots of creative people...” Then they would just think I was crazy and difficult as well as senile. So I decided I better practice this skill, starting by looking up the answer to that question.

Plus, I admit, a stronger motive was: I just HAD TO KNOW HOW TO DO IT OR THE ANSWER! 

It turns out that those first two items are two different questions. First, you form the dots into a sequence numerically and alphabetically, then you copy the cube. Easy peasy. No need to even do it, I knew I could.

I was relieved, and also reminded of all the times my imagination over-complicates things or doesn't see the obvious — like the time my friend Grace and I planned to bind the drafts of our novels by punching holes into the paper, then looping ribbon through the holes to make beautiful bound books like our friend Alissa's, whose super-power is making everything perfectly, even her potholders. She makes designs with scraps and pieces each potholder to fold in just the right spot for her hand.

   Copyright Ⓒ Alissa Imre Geis, Alissaimregeis.com

But Grace and I couldn't make books like hers: our holes were never in the same places on all 200+ pages, the ribbon wouldn't go through them — only string would. The finished “books” were messy papers, nothing like Alissa's tidy creations. Punching the holes was really hard, too.

Then one of us emailed the other in the middle of the night with a revelation: “We can just buy three-hole paper!” But we hadn't seen it that way, even in all the time we spent punching those holes.

As artists the way we see things (ridiculous as they sometimes are) and do them (obsessive as it sometimes is) are all we have — there's no choice.  Sometimes doing it brings us joy, sometimes not; but we have to do it our way.

An artist in Stonington makes the wrapping of each package a work of art —

Copyright Ⓒ Pamela Zagarenski, sacredbee.com

I get caught up in my own ideas and expressing them as clearly as I can. But that isn't always a good plan. In a test situation — if my competence ever is tested — it will be better to just answer the questions and keep what interests me to myself.  And I won't over-think the questions, either, as I did when I was a child taking an IQ test.

The question was, “What would be the best size for a living room?” I hesitated between two of the choices: 

b)12 x 14 

or

c) 1200 x 1400. (A & B were ridiculously large or small.) I knew most living rooms were 12x14 — but they didn't ask what was average, they asked what would be  “best,” so I chose c, with a nagging feeling that that was the wrong answer.

So when I got home I asked my father about it.

“For an IQ test, Libby, you probably got the answer wrong. But I like the way you think: why not have a living room the size of a king's?”

If my competence is tested, though, I'll play it safe — and, I hope, pass the test.

One good writer

                           

Awhile ago I became obsessed with THE LAST HUNDRED YEARs, Jane Smiley's trilogy following an Iowa farm family from 1918 to 2018 — well-written, funny & exciting & sad, so many characters you had to keep going back to the family tree — and insights (increasingly dark) into us as a country. All day I looked forward to reading it (I only allow myself to read after dinner unless I am sick) and when I got to the end, I burst into tears, partly because the ending was surprising and sad.

Then I went back and read the whole thing again from start to finish, not hurrying the second time. I think I enjoyed it partly because of the large cast and multiple points of view — I like big, sprawling novels that (like life) aren't all one mood or one thing. 

But then I was stuck in that horrible place of not having anything to read. As usual I reread old favorites until I could find something. Finally the library opened and I got everything by Jane Smiley they had.

I started with One Thousand Acres, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. The flap copy told the whole plot! As if that wasn't bad enough, it's based on King Lear. Not surprisingly, I guess, it seeemed pretty depressing. My interest waned after a few increasingly ominous chapters....and I think she found it depressing, too, because her next book, which I am reading right now, is MOO U and it's hilarious.

The title is an agricultural university's nickname, and the book is a really funny send up of academic life, complete with not just turf wars and insane egos but a hog whose secret pen (he's part of an experiment and grant) lies at the center of the campus. His thoughts are given, too — Jane Smiley is really good with animals, as I know from the first book of hers I read, HORSE HEAVEN.

In every room his wife had laid a Persian carpet of exceptional quality — his wife had an eye for quality in all things — and it seemed like every Persian carpet in every room every morning was adorned with tiny, dark tense turds deposited there by Eileen, the Jack Russell terrier....Rosalind, who sent her underwear to the cleaners  and had the windows washed every two weeks and kept her oven spotless enough to sterilize surgical instruments, tried to take the position that the turds were small and harmless, and that the carpets could handle them, but really she just thought the dog was cute... [not the end of the sentence but you get the idea]

The characters, animal and human, in MOO U aren't as three-dimensional as those in Horse Heaven, which I also read twice, but it's even funnier, at least for anyone who has suffered through working in academia. It's satire: over the top situations and exaggerated characters that sent me to sleep in a good mood from laughing so much. And I woke up in a good mood, too — of how many books can one say that? 

Full disclosure: I didn't start the book at the beginning (unusual for me) — I was just flipping through to see if I'd like it when something caught my eye and I kept reading.

Once in the early 1990s, my friend KC, who lives in New York and recommended HOG HEAVEN, and I were in a bookstore in Calistoga, CA. The store sold only books. A sign by the cash register — a long sign — said in big letters that the store reserved the right to refuse service to anyone and then in smaller letters explained.

KC said, polite but puzzled,

“Do some people take too many?” The cashier looked puzzled. “Do you sometimes have to cut people off?”

The cashier explained that people sometimes tried to pay with credit cards they didn't accept — and we all laughed as KC said, “No more for you, you've had enough!” like a bartender. 

But I love KC's interpretation. I'm probably someone who reads too much— but some books make reading a lot of fun, so much fun that it cheered me up.

Dappled moments (#1 and #2)

Painting copyright © 2020 Tasha Wainwright.

Writing novels always felt forced and contrived to me: I don't see my life, or anyone's, as one grand story with a continuous plot that reaches a satisfying climax. My writing, at its best, is a series of moments, vividly described — and that's what any novel I tried to write always ended up being, with most of the moments not even related to the main plot.

That's how my life has been, too — the image that comes to mind is the sea when sunshine stipples bits of water, making sparkles.  So I've decided to just write about those moments. Maybe they'll add up to something or turn out to be related in ways I don't see now, maybe not.

On a good day, the moments are enough — I don't have grandchildren, but I've known lots of children; a friend told me a few days ago that hers still quote me. Just that day, her daughter had sent her a photograph of her puppy, with the caption “precious loaf.” That's what I said when I first met baby daughter, and the saying passed into their family lore.  

I don't remember saying that, but I hope my life holds more moments like that, things I said or did that meant something to other people. But here are the ones that meant something to me.

My grandparents' house on the visit below, in my young uncle and aunt's living room (my grandmother would never have allowed the beer bottle and messy papers in hers). I am the big sister.

One of my earliest memories is of overhearing my parents talking about whether or not to send me to nursery school: I must have been in bed, listening; there are no actual images at all attached to the memory, just what I imagined as my mother said,

“I think she'd get a kick out of it.”

I was fascinated by the phrase and pictured a child kicking a ball into the air. I didn't know exactly what that meant — “get a kick out of it,” but it sounded fun, and as though she thought nursery school would be.

The other early memory had to have been when my mother, sister, and I flew to visit her parents. I remember a small white dish holding green gum, not wrapped, Chiclet shaped, which, the stewardess said, was to keep your ears from popping. And I remember above the seats opposite, where the luggage racks are now, was a made-up bed: dark blanket, white sheet tightly folded over it, white pillow, and my mother reading aloud to us from an orange book, Now We Are Six. 

I still have the copy that was hers when she was a child, printed in 1927.

My grandmother's living room on that same visit.

This wasn't planned, but those are the chairs I posted about in “Small Town Story,” and the punch bowl is now for sale in the antique store where "Some Actual Magic" happened. That's not much of a pattern, but I already see two others.