Blogorrhea Junior

Taking Care

I've missed about six days of work in the last two weeks with a cold. The first three I was out, it had settled into my head in a constant sinus headache that I thought was just a combination of hangover and smoke sensitivity from the Chicago trip. Then I took that letterpress class over the weekend, where I was on my feet for two solid days and the next week I was out for three more days of work and my usual three days off, too, with a genuine NyQuil-cold. I'm still not feeling so swell today, which is my sixth sick-day (say that fast five times!) in a row this week.

Truthfully, I sort of expected this to happen. Although I was fine while I was in Michigan after Dad died—apart from finding being in that house alone creepy—the day after I got back to New York, I woke up with a vicious flare-up of the costochondritis I haven't had in almost two years. And, weirdly, both my hands started to ache from the wrists down as though I had rheumatoid arthritis (which does run in my family). I'm also having all sorts of weird skin issues: acne, itchy dry patches around my eyes, sensitive scalp. Whatever I'm not feeling emotionally is coming out as physical symptoms which also include fatigue. The fatigue isn't the kind that would suddenly appear when I had to do something emotional (which I'd experienced before during therapy) as an avoidance mechanism, it's just as a bone-deep exhaustion, the kind you get after crying for hours. Even though I've been sleeping pretty solidly and well (lately with some very odd and somewhat disturbing dreams thrown in), I'm just tired, and I seem to need more sleep than I have in a while.

So, foolishly, instead of taking it easy and lying low until I start to feel better, I've been running around with my friends and doing stuff I've put off because I've never had the money to do it. Part of this has been holding off being alone, which seems to make me antsy right now. Part of it has been that my friends are so diligent about paying attention to me and asking me out that I hate to say no—sort of killing me with kindness (one of the drawbacks, if you will, of having lots of friends). Part of it is just wanting to get back to normal.

I think I need to just accept that things aren't normal yet, and that it's going to be a while before they are. And that means I have to take care of myself. It's actually been kind of a relief to just stay home and wallow in bed for a while, even if I have been sick as a dog. As I've said elsewhere, one of the pleasures of being sick is lying in bed and reading and thinking, and I still haven't done much of that during the past week. But I've gotten used to being alone again, and don't seem to mind it as much as I did. So one of the things I think I need to do more of is say "no" to my friends' kind offers of company and activities. I need to just chill out and think and process for a while.

The other thing I haven't been doing much of since Mom died—and the year before, while I was getting settled here—is cook for myself. I haven't been eating takeout instead, at least, but I haven't been eating all that well either, just grabbing easy stuff out of the fridge instead of making a big pot of good stuff on the weekends and eating that during the week when I get home. Again, part of that has been lack of desire to cook in the heat, and up in Michigan, a lack of good ingredients and working in someone else's kitchen. But it's also been just plain apathy, too.

I finally made myself some Chinese cinnamon-barley soup this weekend, when I felt well enough to go get some groceries, and that's a start. It's from a great cookbook, A Spoonful of Ginger, which treats food as medicine. I'd been cooking at lot from it back in Brooklyn, but not so much here. After not having any of these for a long time, it really tasted great last night. I'm looking forward to making Tuscan Pork Chops from my New Basics Cookbook at Jen's next week, too. But I understand why people bring food to people after funerals. It's a caretaking gesture, and one that grieving people sometimes really need. Now I have a whole new raft of cookbooks, and the weather's getting cooler, so I'm going to start cooking for myself again.

And in the spirit of taking care of myself, I'm loading up with vitamin C, drinking a lot of water and juice and tea, firing up the humidifier with my special essential oils respiratory mix (eucalyptus, cedar wood, peppermint, and clary sage), popping three capsules of glucosamine chondroitin a day, and going back to bed!

Simple Solutions

Or, Love Your Enemies

Since the US government started killing Iraqis (more than 26,000 at the latest count) I've been thinking a lot about the simplicity of and difficulties inherent in the Christian injunction to love our enemies. I've never felt like the Iraqi people were my enemies to begin with, or even that Saddam Hussein was, for that matter, so I've really been thinking about how Dubya has failed, once again, to live up to his own Christian principles in this. I'm sure if confronted with this failure, even by his own pastor, he'd splutter something along the lines of "it's not that simple!" But that's the real beauty of the command: it is that simple, and yet it's very, very hard.

Salon's review of a new book by Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism, points up the difficulties very succinctly: In it, reviewer Matt Steinglass describes the knee-jerk reaction such a simple concept provokes.

The thrust of Calming the Fearful Mind is achingly simple, not to say simplistic. Hanh thinks we need to calm down and stop blowing things up:

"Misunderstanding, fear, anger, and hatred are the roots of terrorism. They cannot be located by the military … To uproot terrorism, we need to begin by looking in our hearts."

This kind of statement is guaranteed to cause steam to pour from a lot of ears, and not just pointy Vulcan neocon ones. Anyone who acknowledges the occasional necessity of organized violence in the political sphere will find it exasperatingly reductive. But what's perhaps most exasperating is the suspicion that at some level, Hanh is right. Who could deny that misunderstanding, fear, anger and hatred are the roots of terrorism? Who, in the midst of our woebegone misadventure in Iraq, could deny that the military is a poor tool for winning hearts and minds?

If your immediate reaction to Hahn's thinking is something along the lines of the angry exclamation, "what a load of crap!" ask yourself what you're so angry about, and then think about all the factors that you believe make this a much more complicated issue. The US's stated motives for invading Iraq were to prevent the use of WMDs, to liberate the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime, and introduce democracy. But what were the motives behind those motives? Did W really have the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart? If he had, would the US have become an invading army? Suppose Canada decided it was their neighborly duty to liberate the US from Dubya's oppressive and war-mongering regime? How happy would that make US citizens? The short of it is that invasion and occupation, for whatever reason, are seldom, if ever, seen as loving actions by those being invaded and occupied.

This doesn't even begin to address the ulterior motives for this war that are now coming to light, and which many already believed were the true motives for invasion: cheap access to Iraqi oil, business opportunities for Haliburton, arrogant machismo, and a political agenda of imperial ambition. None of these are altruistic, loving motives. But neither are the publicly stated ones. The use of WMDs, had there been any, could have been prevented by many other tactics (though it would have been good to be sure they were really there to begin with, as a start). Democracy, by its very nature, cannot be imposed from the outside; it has to arise from a percolating desire and underlying cultural philosophy and then perhaps be encouraged and supported by others who practice it. It's not a one-size-fits-all method of governance and it comes in many flavors, not just the US's.

It's this high-handed, arrogant, father-knows-best attitude that angers both US allies and our enemies, and who can blame them. There's nothing at all loving about about it, and if the US is a purportedly Christian nation, that should be its primary motivation, and the primary motivation of its Commander in Chief. But Dubya and his cronies don't really love their fellow human beings, any more than Nixon and Johnson loved the Vietnamese.

That just sounds crazy and childish, phrased that way. Or does it? Here's Hahn again, and the reviewer:

In the war with Vietnam, the Americans had the intention to save Vietnam from Communism. It was a good intention, but this desire to save us destroyed us ... The intention to love is not yet love. We must know how to love. True love doesn't destroy the object of its love.

One wonders: Did we really intend to love Vietnam, or Iraq? And then one thinks: Didn't we? Shouldn't we have? Why are we embarrassed by the word "love"? What violence in our disposition leads us to sneer at the word? What are we so angry at? What are we so afraid of?

We're afraid that it really is that simple. We're afraid that we're wrong, that we've been wrong for all the millennia of human history, that the centuries of war and bloodshed really do boil down to lack of love and compassion. We're afraid that we've failed a very simple but astonishingly difficult test. We have failed to love, as a species. We've failed to love ourselves, our families, our neighbors, people who are like us and people who aren't, people we don't even know, the land we live on and take from, the animals we live with, the whole planet and its inhabitants. Failed. Failed miserably.

The beauty of the injunction to love your enemies is that it is so simple, and the tragedy is that it's one of the hardest things we can attempt. True love doesn't destroy the object of its love. This is just a summation of the Biblical (1 Cor. 13:4-7) list of love's qualities:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Love does not demand its own way . . . It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Well, sometimes the hardest thing about practicing the principle of love is practicing a passive resistance, doing the right thing as an individual. If we cannot demand our own way, and yet cannot be glad about injustice, we need to find ways to spotlight love's results without coercion, shaming them into changing their ways. This the hard way to do things, admittedly. It's hard and slow and sometimes disheartening, and sometimes it's costly in terms of life, but it has the advantage of leaving the practitioner with conscience and principles intact and of making the other side look foolish and cruel. Two of the greatest modern practitioners, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Junior paid with their lives, but look at the legacies they left, without resorting to violence; internal resistance, international disapproval and economic sanctions eventually led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

How different would national policy be if it were based on the simple principle of loving both our neighbors and our enemies? If our national policy was one of respect, aid, negotiation, peaceful protest, of truthful discussion, mindful listening, respectful disagreement, if our leaders lived up to the letter and spirit of their religious convictions, how much more difficult would it be for Osama bin Laden to spin a case against the evils of the West, or of moderate Islam, for that matter?

We cannot save a person or village or a country or a world by harming it, and certainly not by destroying it. We can only destroy ourselves in the process, either literally or metaphorically by murdering our own best impulses, our true selves.

The Beatles were right: All you need is love. Go ahead, argue with that. See how silly you feel in the end.

Miscellany

Okay, today you get to see Sick&Tired!Moi. My nose has cleared up considerably but it's gone into my lungs now, which is not good. At least I had a good sleep last night. I have to toddle out for groceries, but then I'm spending the rest of the day in bed, reading and sleeping. In the meanwhile, just a couple of things to note:

I've been meaning to note this milestone for a while now: the blog has finally gotten up to the 10,000 hits mark. In fact, it's well on the way to 11,000 right now. Oddly, it seems to rack up more hits since arriving at 5 figures. I know I have some regular readers among friends, but a couple of new static IPs have showed up that I can't trace. Hmmmmm.

The other event of note was a little disappointing and anticlimactic: my book press arrived yesterday—broken. How you can break a 65 lb cast iron object that isn't rusted through is beyond me, but one of the arms was snapped right in half when I heaved it out of the box. I suspect UPS rolled the box around and bounced it around too much in the box, which was pretty banged up, rather than picking it up. And really, there's no excuse for that. If I can lift it up from the floor and put it on a table, there's no reason some strapping delivery guy can't heft it around without rolling it.

So it's back to the drawing board for a book press, plus the hassle of ironing out who's responsible for breaking this one and getting my money back. The seller, Ralph Williams, has a good rep on E-bay, and he's been very reasonable so far, so I'm hoping this won't be too big a pain. He was pretty pissed off that it arrived broken. Can't blame him. I was just bummed. But I think the next time around I'm just going to bite the bullet and look for one that's in really good condition and not worry so much about getting a bargain. This one only had some surface rust (the break doesn't show any rust inside; it looks like it was just rough handling that did it), but it'll be less hassle to to find a good one in the long run. In the meanwhile, back to the composite board and bricks.

Creative Processing

Home sick for the third straight (wobbly?) day in a row, so I can't vouch for the coherence of this post. I sort of knew everything would catch up with me eventually, but I think the trip to Chicago (also known as the We Still Smoke in Bars City) and two solid days on my feet in the letterpress class, both of which were totally worth it, finally tipped my immune system into giving up. Go ahead, idiot! Drink like a fish  in smoky bars for four days, do manual labor all weekend. See if I care! Get a cold, then. Just don't say I didn't warn you when it turns into bronchitis, dimwit. So it's been a regimen of Cold-Eeze, vitamin C, OJ, hot tea, and soup, though I did start it off right Monday night, when I felt myself getting sick, by going to Telephone (after delivering Eva from her Lasik surgery) and sucking down a couple of Irish coffees.

So what, you're wondering, is my little geek girl avatar doing up there in the corner? Why isn't it sick&tired!moi, or blogger!moi, for that matter, given the subject? Well, a coupla reasons. One is a call for submissions I got from one of my writers' lists yesterday, which I bring you here in PDF format. It's for an anthology called She's Such a Geek: An Anthology by and for Women Obsessed with Computers, Science, Comic Books, Gaming, Spaceships, and Revolution. How could I resist? The only thing on the list that I'm lukewarm about is gaming.

After passing this on to no fewer than four of my friends who also qualify (Jen, Livy, Em, Marcia) I started the draft of what I'd like to submit, yesterday, not really knowing where it was going, as I seldom do with first drafts (I've gotten to really like freewriting; thank you Natalie Goldberg!). One of the emerging themes was technology as a tool that's changed the processes of writing and publishing, which is one of the reasons I've always been interested in computers, and why I own so much publishing and graphic software. This dovetails with the second reason for my little geek avatar's appearance: a post by A.L. Kennedy on the Huffington Post a while back, that I'm just now catching up on. Like so many authors, she's bemoaning the state of publishing:

Fewer publishing houses concentrated in conglomerate hands trying to produce more books of less quality. No full time readers, no full time copy editors and therefore missed newcomers and pisspoor final presentation of texts on the shelves, silly covers, greedy and simple-minded bookshop chains, lunatic bidding wars designed to crush the spirit of unknown newcomers, celebrity “tighten your buns and nurture your inner pot plant” hard backs and much related insanity.

Which makes me want to run right to Soft Skull Press with my manuscript. It almost makes me glad that my novel is likely to get shoved into the spec-fic pigeonhole, since it's so hard to sell a literary novel. It may still be possible to sneak one in under the radar, as Ursula LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and Marge Piercy have been doing for years. And after taking the letterpress class this weekend, it's made me briefly reconsider self-publishing. I originally got interested in hand presses from reading Virginia Woolf's diaries. She and her husband Leonard had a small publishing house called Hogarth Press through which they published much of Virginia's work in the UK, as well as then-experimental work by writers like Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, C. Day Lewis (father of Daniel), Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Gertrude Stein, and Robinson Jeffers. How lovely, I thought, to have control of the whole process: choosing the work, editing, designing, printing, binding, distribution, producing what ends up being a work of art in more ways than one. Hogarth Press was the major inspiration for my own attempt at publishing, Long Meg Press, which was stillborn. In many ways, Woolf was a bit of a geek herself, using the technology available to subvert and change the shape of fiction.

This leads me to the book I'm reading now, if not another reason for the Geek Girl's presence. The only good part about being sick is that one legitimately gets to lie in bed and catch up on one's reading without guilt (not that I ever have very much guilt about lying around reading, but you know what I mean). The book of choice at the moment is a new one: Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs, which puts Woolf's creative process and product at the center of her life, rather than writing about her life as though the books were incidental. As always, I find her thinking inspiring and fascinating. As I'm reading about how she constructed her books, I'm thinking about how I constructed mine, and how much that has to change now, with the distance of time, and I suddenly saw where I could lost most of the ending without doing any harm at all. And how easy it will be, thanks to the wonders of computers, to change the text, and yet preserve its original form, just in case.

Letterpress Class Day II

There's actually much less to tell about this than I thought there would be. Most of this day was taken up with correcting proofs and type, and fiddling with the alignment, printing, then cleaning up. That's about it. The Vandercooks actually are surprisingly easy to run. It's the setting up part that's a pain: getting the type block exactly where you want it by putting "furniture" (blocks of wood or metal of various lengths built type high) around it, then locking it in place with  these expandable thingies called quoins (pronounced "coins"--how very medieval); making sure none of the type wobbles by slipping brasses and coppers (slivers of metal made to the right type size, e.g., 18 pt for our piece) in between the quads; then tapping it down, and, finally, cleaning it. Once that's done, you ink it up by dabbing this gooey stuff on one of the metal rollers (it takes surprisingly little ink, too), lock your paper in the guides, and roll 'em. Literally. People taller than I am can, I suppose, actually stand in one place and print something, but I have to walk back and forth when I'm rolling the press. We printed about 80 copies in three colors, which were done all at the same time since we had three presses at our disposal. The actual printing took about 2 hours, once everything was set up. My press was making funny noises and I was starting to get all involved with thinking about how to fix it, so I guess the next class I take will probably be the Vandercook troubleshooting class, then probably the polymer plates class.

I'm really loving this and I'm a little afraid I might end up with a table-top press and a couple of cases of type in the not too distant future. In the meanwhile, I'm definitely going to go back and do some more printing at CBA. I'll post a pic of the finished product when we get our signed copies back from the poet.

Letterpress Class Day I

I have a brand new fervent respect for Gutenberg and his fellow printers, Marcia will be happy to know. Having set a whopping five lines of poetry in 18 pt. type one letter, space, and period at a time today, I cannot imagine setting an entire book, signature by signature, in solid 10 or 12 pt. type. It was loads of fun though, and had that quality of figuring out both code and spatial puzzles that I like.

To start, we got a little mini-lecture on the history of type and printing and typography, a crash course in metal type jargon, which surprisingly doesn't jibe all that much with computer typography. For instance, a "font" in metal typography is a quantity of the same typeface—so many actual elements—rather than the typeface itself. Kerning in computer typography is letter spacing in metal type. But the measurements are the same (picas and points) so at least I was ahead of the game there.

Then we did a quick and dirty edit of some submitted manuscripts and picked out a poem to set. Some got disqualified on length alone, but we ended up with a piece by a guy whose work I really like, Gregory Pardlo, from Brooklyn. His whole manuscript was really appealing, and we wound up deciding between three of his.

Then we had to choose type. The Center for Book Arts (CBA) has cases and cases of the stuff, but not all of it is complete, and not all of it has enough pieces to set even a short poem (mostly the display faces, but some of the body text too). We were leaning toward Cheltenham, but there wasn't enough of it in the right sizes or weights (lots of bold, very little regular). We ended up with a Baskerville italic, which was nice and pointy and sharp to play off the poem (which is called "glass").

Once that was all decided, we divvied up the stanzas, set the type, and ran a proof copy. Sounds simple, huh? Well, in theory, it is, but there are so many bits and pieces that it takes a while to build a line. and You build it in a "composing stick," which is a hand-held frame that holds your lines snug. First you have to determine your longest line, and set the composing stick slider to just a bit longer. Then you lay in a slug (a bar of lead alloy that comes in various point sizes). Then a "quad," which is a spacer block somewhat shorter than the type blocks (less than "type high") and an exact square of your typeface size on each side, e.g., 18 pt. x 18 pt. x a hair less than type high in our case (they come in other sizes too, but your line always starts with this). Then you start your sentence, which is, of course, backwards. And you're picking all the little letters out of different bins in a drawer or case, as it's known. That part is a bit like playing three-card monty with the alphabet, several special characters, some ligatures, and numbers from 0-9. We worked off a cheat sheet and I suppose after a while you'd know exactly where everything was, if you did this long enough. We only had a couple of caps, so at least we weren't digging into that side of the case much. Once your text is set, you have to finish out the line with some combination of spacers so you end up with a literal "block" of pieces. This is where a good sense of spatial relationships comes in.

The trickiest thing we did today was "build" a faux m-dash, since the typecase we picked out didn't have any. Our instructor, Katherine Ruffin, found a sans serif cap I and then built it into a type block with quads and brasses, and that was oddly fascinating. It looks fine, I think.

The press itself, a Vandercook #4, seems blessedly easy to set up and run, though messy as hell. Being short and having to lean over places that are bigger than me, I plan on getting pretty filthy tomorrow when we actually do our print run. Can't wait.

Misplaced Nostalgia and the Universal Solvent

Home sick listening to WFUV today. I called in for the third day in a row and then went back to sleep, which is always a mistake. I've lost half the day and now I feel groggy and even stupider than usual in the morning. But I did catch the fun fact (or not so fun fact) that today is the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the ore freighter the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and got to hear them play Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which never fails to make me nostalgic for all the time I spent on the beaches of Lake Huron when I was growing up.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the Gales of November remembered.

Now, to people who grew up outside the Great Lakes Region, this is just a maudlin song in the old ballad mode that they can make fun of. To people who know the Great Lakes at all, it's a memorial to one of many tragedies that occur on them. The word "lake" is really misleading in many ways, since they're five of the six largest freshwater bodies in the world (Lake Baikal in Siberia is the largest by volume) and the storms and weather on them are just as treacherous as they are on the oceans—sometimes worse. A nor'easter on Lake Huron, where I grew up, can rearrange the shoreline like a hurricane can an ocean beach, washing away houses, docks, and, in the winter, crushing them with ice flung in piles up to 20 feet high. Waves of 30 feet high are not unknown, and 10 feet high in a good storm is fairly common. I've stood on piers and bulkheads and watched the whitecaps smash into stone breakwaters and fling up spray at least 30 feet, which would be well up over the loaded bow of even an ocean-going freighter. Anything but possibly the new supertankers, which are already too large to fit through the Great Lakes lock system, is vulnerable. The five Great Lakes are full of hundreds of shipwrecks from five centuries, from pleasure craft to ore freighters, wooden schooners to ocean-going iron monsters.

The Fitzgerald was no toy boat, either: it weighed 13,632 tons and was 729 feet long. It went down in Lake Superior in a squall in already-rough water in less than 10 minutes, 9 miles from shore. The waves were recorded at 12-16 feet high and one theory says that the ship apparently went bow-first into one and took on water through a leaking hatch and sank in minutes, like the Titanic, not even giving the crew a chance to launch lifeboats. Other theories posit that the ship broke in two on the surface, caught between the crests of two waves; that it hit a shoal and sustained extensive damage (such damage was found on a 1994 expedition to the wreck); that it capsized. The lakes are never very warm at the best of times, but in November, just going overboard could kill you with hypothermia within minutes of hitting the water. The Great Lakes are savagely unforgiving of people who underestimate them, and even those who know what they're like.

They're the one thing I miss about Michigan, besides Mel.

In the summers when I was an adolescent and later as an out-of-work teenager, I spent hours on the beach. As long as weather permitted, I would ride my bike the half mile to the nearest easement and walk the beaches, or just sit and watch the waves come in and think—unless it was alewife season, when the beaches were covered with picked-over dead fish and flocks of gulls. The best days to go were after storms, when all kinds of detritus and spindrift had been kicked up onto shore near the high water mark. All of Michigan's beaches are public up to that mark, so I could walk for miles along them, if I wanted to, and I often entertained ambitions of walking to the harbor in Harrisville, about 8 miles away as the crow flies, but never got around to it. Instead, I'd walk up and down the mile or so of beach near my house, picking up sea glass and driftwood and bits of shells and occasionally a heavy iron spike from an old ruined bulkhead or pier. Now and then, a nor'easter would uncover the bones of some old structure long buried by the 20-year cycle of "tides."

Finding sea glass was like finding treasure. The transformation by years of scouring made it somehow more than just broken shards of bottles. The colors were almost uniformly pale, with the exception of what had probably once been beer bottles, which turned a soft dark brown, or what might have been old, dark green, 7-Up bottles. Cobalt blue pieces were especially rare and prized, probably coming from old medicine bottles or the occasional Milk of Magnesia bottle tossed overboard. By the time I left for college, I had pounds of seaglass in translucent pale blue and white and amber, dark green and cobalt and brown, and one odd piece of washed-out lavender.

After a storm, fine curving lines of pulverized black hematite or taconite marked the edges of the waves. If you dug into the wet sand almost anywhere along the shore you'd come to a layer of the stuff, either from the shipwrecks of ore carriers or as part of the natural deposits of iron that riddle the region. The beach was littered with seaweed, battered shells, and cast up stones. Many of these were Petoskey stones, the fossils of coral in the shallow sea that once covered the area. Now and then, we collected these by the bucketful to sell to the local rockhound. Just offshore where the waves broke was a line of stones, polished by the action of the water: bits of quartz and granite, and flat pieces of slate we called skipping stones for obvious reasons, igneous and sedimentary rock shuffled around by the glaciers. Up at Sturgeon Point, where the lighthouse was, a long narrow spit of softball-sized rocks curved out into the lake, making a shallow, slippery path into the water, something like the beginnings of a natural Spiral Jetty. It fell off steeply on both sides into invisible bottom and the undertow was likely to drag the unsuspecting into the middle of the lake, so walking onto its mossy surface was a daring adventure.

From the time I was little, I loved the beach and the waters of Lake Huron, what we called the Big Lake. I grew up across the street from a little lake, Cedar Lake, which emptied into Lake Huron in a little creek of tannin-stained water after meandering through the woods and under the highway just a few hundred yards from the easement I thought of as mine, near the beach house of a family named Brownell. In the spring, I went smelt dipping in it with the Culvers, and stayed up all night on the beach with a bonfire and marshmallows and a dipnet, eating freshly breaded and fried smelt, bones and all. In the summer I slept on the beach with friends in sleeping bags, listening to the rush of waves and scaring each other with stories of glowing ghost ships on the horizon. I learned to body surf and snorkel in those waves, learned to beware of undertows and phantom sandbars, learned to read the color of the water for depth and currents. I stopped swimming in it much as I got older because it was just too cold. My childhood friends would often come out of it with blue lips. But as a teenager, I was always the one who went in to rescue the wine we buried at the water's edge to keep it cool, whenever it washed into the lake. Some of those bottles were just lost, a sacrifice to the lake goddess.

The beach and the waters—those in it and those that fed it—were full of surprises and mystery, things transformed by the universal solvent. Rocks became sand, shells and skeletal bones became artifacts, abandoned junk became history. Mysterious things swam in its depths too. Dad took me out on the end of one of the docks at Harrisville Harbor one day to watch the salmon fishing boats and I looked down to see a huge, spiny, prehistoric monster swim by beneath us: a lake sturgeon. I combed the beaches obsessively, looking for pieces of history, natural and man-made. What I really dreamed of finding was some identifiable piece of LaSalle's Griffon, the ur-shipwreck of the Great Lakes.

I can't remember when I first read about the Griffon, but that was when I got interested in shipwrecks and lighthouses. I collected nautical charts and read everything about Lake Huron wrecks that I could get my hands on for a time. I wanted to learn how to SCUBA so I could dive the wrecks and find the really old ones, the wooden sailing ships that carried furs in the 18th Century when Michigan was a wild land, still largely considered uninhabitable because of the climate.

When the Fitzgerald went down, I was 15, and it both reinforced and shattered my romantic notions of going to sea. Though I was still fascinated by shipwrecks, this one was a little too real, a little too recent. Seeing images of the hulks lying on the bottom of the lake or ocean sent a frisson of horror through me when I thought of what the Fitz was now—just salvage. Salvage and the only grave marker those men would have. It was somehow like discovering a long-abandoned house, like the wonder and horror of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or the flash-frozen mammoths, caught dead in the act of living. And it was a testament to the power of the lakes to take and twist and break such a massive vessel like a bathtub toy.

I came away from those summers on the beach with a pervading love of water, and a lasting interest in marine biology and archaeology. I'm still fascinated by shipwrecks and by the idea of the sea swallowing us whole. Though the legends of Atlantis seem truly absurd to me, the flooding of New Orleans is another reminder of the ease with which water can wipe us off the map. In 2000, Robert Ballard (one of my heroes, along with the Cousteaus) discovered the submerged remains of an early settlement 311 feet (95 meters) below the Black Sea, apparently flooded when water levels in the Mediterranean, raised by climate warming, thundered through the Bosporus and raised the Black Sea's level by six inches a day. It's a sobering reminder of the results of global warming, man-made and natural.

And though I remember those summer days on Lake Huron's beach with a great deal of pleasure and fondness, and I understand how they shaped me, I know you can't go back, and that those days of wonder can't be recreated in the same place. I've walked through the trails I used to hike and snowmobile through in the woods Up North, and I've revisited the beach and the lighthouse. My old swimming hole on Cedar Lake has a fence around it now, and much of the Lake Huron easement is eroded away. People have asked me if I want to keep the house up there for a summer cottage, but it's not the same, and there's nothing there for me now.

Time to move on to new bodies of water.

Getting Away . . . And Coming Back

There's a a trope in fiction of the middle-aged single woman going on a trip somewhere after the death of her parents and "finding" herself or having a sexual or spiritual awakening of some kind. It's based in the idea that when we are removed from our familiar surroundings we can and often do reinvent ourselves, and that life-changing events can serve as a catalyst of that reinvention.

I've never been very fond of this particular plot; it always seemed contrived and stereotypical to me, maybe because I've struggled through my adult life to be as authentically myself as I can be. It also annoys me that it's almost always a woman's story. This is probably so because women are so often caretakers and find themselves sacrificing their lives for others, and that's another fact that I find troublesome. But there's no denying that travel to unfamiliar or even just different places can being freeing, and that this is especially so during times of emotional upheaval.

I went to Chicago last weekend to hang out with my life-long friend Paul, to meet his new boyfriend Myron and revisit the good time I had the last time I was in Chicago almost twenty years ago when Paul had first moved there. He's gone away and come back himself since then, moving out to San Francisco with one boyfriend and company and then coming back here to be with another. The last time Paul and I hung out together for any extended period of time, I was in my first year of grad school and he was finishing up his last year of undergrad studies. He stayed at my apartment for about six weeks before moving into the frat house at start of term and then we saw each other pretty frequently throughout the year. I vividly remember him studying on the floor of my apartment, and throwing up on one of my heirloom quilts with the flu one weekend while I was away.

But that was twenty-four years ago (yipes!) and we've both changed since then, so I was a little nervous about spending a weekend with him. I needn't have worried. When you've been friends for 37 years, there's always a core in there somewhere that holds the reason you've remained friends for so long. In short, I had a great time. I met Myron and a host of Paul's other friends, visited his haunts, saw Chicago through his eyes. He was gracious enough to lend me his apartment for the weekend while he stayed with Myron, so I had exquisitely appointed accommodations, with some fabulous Asian antiques, wacky antique portraits, a Chinese red bathroom, a grand piano, a balcony, lovely furniture to curl up in, a flat-screen TV, a cute pooch named Sydney for company, and a really comfortable bed. All of which almost made up for the lack of a tea kettle. Just kidding.

But I didn't just go to visit Paul, though that was at least half the reason for the trip. I went to cut loose a little. To get out of New York, where I have obligations and ties and, worst of all, a routine. It's been a very long time since I got out of New York to go anywhere but Michigan or DC or Canada or South Carolina, where I also have ties and obligations and routines, and I needed a fresh but somewhat familiar place to explore, to give me a new perspective. Upon arriving, I announced that I intended to not be completely sober more than 50 percent of the time, and when asked what I particularly wanted to do that weekend, announced, "get a tattoo." I was only half joking.

It was something of a relief to slip into someone else's routine instead of my own, to go to Paul's usual Friday night restaurant and bar, to his favorite stores (he knows, I think at least one sales associate in every pricey store in the city), to wander around his neighborhood with him while he ran errands, to meet his friends for drinks. I bought a pair of silver Moroccan bangles and a big ceramic jug from a beautiful store (Guava) run by two of his friends, and we purchased a present for our missing third, Mel, but that was all I actually bought apart from food. And the food was great too: dinner and fabulous martinis (twice!) at Firefly, fantastic tapas at Arco, wonderful Italian food at Scoozi. I found one exhibit I wanted to see at the Garfield Park Conservatory (and if I'd known about the Pompeii exhibit at the Field Museum, I'd have gone to that too), but the rest of the time we basically just hung out: shopped a little, went out to eat, yakked, went for drinks.

In sum, I went to Chicago not to find myself, but to lose myself a little. And I did. Chicago is a beautiful city with great architecture, a vibrant arts scene, and great bars and restaurants. I think I'd be happy living in Chicago, but it has an entirely different kind of energy than New York, and I lost myself enough there that when I came back, New York seemed almost too much. I had a day or so of wondering how I managed to live here. I felt buffeted by the speed at which everything moves here and startled by the noise. Chicago's a city with alleys and vacant lots, which seems to buffer a lot of the noise, and it actually does seem to sleep sometimes. Here, you're right on top of everything that's going on, and it goes on all the time. The first night in Paul's apartment, I had to open the window to let a little street noise in, and there was very little of it—just a hum of white noise from Lake Shore Drive.

Now I'm back again, and have fallen back into the rhythm and routine, but I feel a little changed, a little refreshed, at least, though that hangover hasn't quite gone away yet and I'm still suffering from the effects of smoke in the bars. And it's good to know there's somewhere else out there I can take myself off to, when I feel like it. Actually, I have to go back sometime soon because I didn't get to everything I wanted to—the Pompeii exhibit, which runs until March, and the tattoo parlor Paul goes to.

Life's Little Absurdities

The business surrounding the closing of an estate can quickly go from frustrating to just plain bizarre, and finally, to something downright kafkaesque. The first example of this for me was when I got a notice from Dad's health insurance saying that they were denying his claim for ambulance service on the day he died. I'm not sure how calling an ambulance for a dying man fails to qualify as a medical emergency, but I'm going to have to call Blue Cross to find out and I don't really have the wherewithal to be proactive about that right now. I figure if the ambulance people in Dad's town can't squeeze it out of his insurance, they can fight with them.

But the real ringer is the Saga of the Max Steiner At the Movies CD from one of the little companies that sell through Amazon.com, www.caiman.com. I'm warning you: do not buy anything from these people, if they are people. I'm half convinced at this point that it's a bad computer program, or someone who does not speak English who's been provided with a script from which they are not to vary.  Here's how it goes:

A month or so before Dad died, I bought him a CD he wanted, Max Steiner At the Movies. I paid for it with his credit card; it was shipped and arrived. He hadn't even unwrapped it before he died, so I gave it to the library along with what was left of his and Mom's collection of CDs. Earlier this week, I got the following message from Caiman:

Your order has just been shipped from our distribution center. Shipments are expected to arrive within 4-14 business days. I have added your packing slip below. Again, thank you for your order. We hope you will enjoy it and do business with us again soon. Don't hesitate to contact me by email at Claire@caiman.com .

Sincerely,

Claire
Caiman, Customer Service

Just in case I'd been hallucinating (always possible in situations like these), I checked my order history. Sure enough. The CD had been shipped and arrived in August, the month my Dad died. His credit card had also been paid off and canceled that month. As far as I was concerned, we were square. so I wrote back: "I already received this order in July, and what you're sending now is going to the wrong address."

Maybe this was not clear enough. I can admit that. Claire replied by repeating Dad's order and address back to me. I replied: "Yes. All correct. And received in July. Louis has now passed away and there is no one to receive that package and the credit card it was ordered on is no longer valid."

Still maybe not clear enough, I guess. My bad. Claire replied: "Once the item is received we will issue a refund. We apologize for the inconvenience." Okay, I thought. I'll break it down for her. I'll lay it out step by step, so there's no question about what's going on, with a little added sarcasm, just because that's who I am:

Dear Clair (I wrote)

Are you actually reading anything I've written to you?

As I stated below, there is no one at the house to receive the package, and I am not flying 700 miles from New York to Michigan to rectify your mistake. This is a duplicate of an item already received and I'm not quite sure how you charged a credit card that was canceled in August. I am not responsible for the final fate of this item. I would suggest you call the shipping company and have them return it to you.

Claire was undaunted. "We cannot issue a refund until we receive the item back," she insisted in the reply. The fact that I hadn't paid her any money didn't seem to matter. Regardless, I'm still not flying to Michigan to get a $21.45 refund, sans shipping and handling.

I gave it one more shot, in the simplest and clearest terms I could muster. By now, I was ready to cry or scream, I wasn't sure which. And I was also pretty sure Claire was either a text generator, or a moron.

One more time (I wrote again):

This item was ordered in July 2005 and received in August 2005. The item you are shipping now is an unordered duplicate which I have not been charged for because the card given on the original order was canceled in August upon the death of the primary cardholder and original recipient, Louis Kottner. I did not order the duplicate. You have not charged me because you do not have a valid credit card number. I do not owe you and have not paid you any money for this duplicate item. The original is already paid for and received. The item you are shipping now is going to house 700 miles away from my address. What happens when your package arrives at that house is not my problem and it looks to me like you are going to have to write off the cost and shipping and handling for a CD I did not order from you. Tough luck.

I am forwarding this correspondence to Amazon's customer service.

And I did. What I really wanted was a phone number so I could exercise a little New Yawker attitude on this complete and utter idiot, but all I could do was send the correspondence off to Amazon with the helpless note that I was hoping they could make some sense of what was happening here. Why was I caught in this absurdist, dada correspondence? Why me? Why? Help me Amazon!

I thought that might be the end of it. I hoped. I nearly prayed (but that seemed too trivial a problem to bother God with). In trepidation, I checked my mail a couple of times during the following day (today). Nothing from Claire. I had escaped! There was an end to the matter. Perhaps my sarcasm and careful outlining of the situation had finally gotten through to her. Maybe all those years grading freshman papers had actually paid off in honing my skills in communicating with dimwits. (Sorry, that was harsh. I loved my freshman comp classes. Really.)

Then I got home. Two notes from Claire scuttled into my box like little cockroaches, just when you think you've seen the last of them. My suspicions about Claire's intelligence or lack thereof  were only confirmed.

Dear Customer,

Yes your order was shipped on 11/01/2005 At the Movies [SOUNDTRACK] [Audio CD] Max Steiner STANDARD US Postal Service. It usually takes 4-14 business days.

Regards,

Claire
Customer Service

It was the "yes" that did me in. "Yes" what? That the order was shipped was never in question. Why it was shipped was the problem. What could I do but start to cry, which is what I usually do when I'm frustrated. I opened the second message, eyes blurry with tears.

Dear Customer,

At the Movies [SOUNDTRACK] [Audio CD] Max Steiner

Unfortunately we were unable to cancel your order since it was shipped.  However you may return the item minus the shipping and handling.  Please contact us for further instructions to return the item once it has been received.

Sincerely,

Claire
Customer Service

Could it possibly be that I was back to square one? ARGH! as Charlie Brown would say. Not one to let a mere droid have the last word, I fired this off mere minutes ago:

Let's be clear about this. It was not my order. My order was received and paid for months ago. The current shipment was your mistake. I am not getting on a plane and going to Michigan from New York to retrieve your mistake. I am not paying you for it, and I am not paying the shipping and handling. What part of this are you having so much trouble understanding? Furthermore, I am never buying anything from you ever again, and believe me, I'll be happy to tell everyone I know not to as well, because your customer service is nonexistent. What happens to the mistake you made is not my responsibility. Please do not contact me again.

Perhaps this will be the last word. Perhaps I can lay Max Steiner to rest now with my dad (who would undoubtedly say something like "what the hell's wrong with these people?" and fire off his own pithy, sarcasm- and expletive-laden note if he could hear this story).

Maybe I'll just take it out on the customer service rep at Blue Cross.

Ron Sageser, RIP

My friend Roger Bell's partner died yesterday in Atlanta after a long struggle with cancer and AIDS. Ron and I had never met, but Roger is friends with my friends Cathy & Betsy, who live in South Carolina, and I met Roger when he was still living there and I was visiting C&B, some years ago. I know what kind of person Roger is, so Ron must have been equally lovable to be loved so much by Roger. Rest in Peace, Ron. I'm sorry we've lost the opportunity to be friends.