A Fun Night

Bill and I had a great gig last night playing as a duo saxophone and accordion and keyboards in the Blackstone Valley Visitor's Center in Pawtucket. There were two art openings; one for the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative Ten by Ten holiday show and one for Penelope Manzella's oil paintings of amazing mill scapes! It was a fun night and a lot of people turned out. The acoustics were great and people were happy! I was so high from the fun I didn't fall asleep until very late.

Honey

This morning at five AM my chocolate Labrador Pointer named Honey who is normally healthy and extremely active, couldn't even walk! We just took her to Sakonnet Vet Hospital in Tiverton and she was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. Dr. Rix was great, he gave us medicine for her and said she should seem noticeably better in a day or two. I hope so. We are carrying her up and down the stairs. Luckily she has a good chance of recovery. Seven and eight years ago my dogs Lucy + Ruby each died after 14 years. They both had a great long healthy lives and one bad day. May we all be so lucky, right? At five AM Honey seemed like today was her last day. Luckily there's hope. And luckily Honey can be with me, on her bed at my side. She took her medicine well, she is napping and she seems content. I pray she has a full recovery for us and for all the kids and friends, and dog friends in the neighborhood who love her too!

Quotes Of The Day

Those who are awake live in a state of constant amazement.

-Buddha

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

-Buddha

No one outside ourselves can rule us inwardly. When we know this, we become free.

-Buddha

A Bowl of Green

I love greens! Today I took bean sprouts, peapods, and chopped Chinese broccoli and put them into my Dutch oven with sesame oil, olive oil, and the schmaltz-skimmed gelatin from my chicken stock and I also added water. Then I heated it all up and added hot sauce soy sauce and salt. It was fabulous, fast, and delicious!

When I was 12, in 1973 I had dreams in black and white and green. I told my English teacher maybe it was because I was a vegetarian. I still remember those dreams about my white rabbit and my pet guinea pig named Blanche.

I wish there was more freedom for kids to be creative in school. Now it seems school is geared towards testing and many teachers are extremely miserable punishing their students for their unfulfilled creative dreams. I know it scares most adults but kids need to speak out freely and creatively. For many of them it's a matter of life and death, as it was and still is, for me.

Speak Out

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

-Martin Luther King.

Excitement

The fog rolled in late last night! I love fog almost as much as I love a snow storm. I have been feeling an excitement similar to snow storm excitement so it's no surprise that I woke up with joy bubbles roiling in my middle since two thirty AM. The fog is still here. I'm seasoning my Dutch ovens with schmaltz, leftover chicken fat. I've got the white plastic summer box fan airing out the kitchen and my overnight sourdough whole wheat bread rose up over the top of the bowl. I braided it and it is rising now too. The washing machine is agitating our clothes and the coffee pot is going. And I am dancing!

The other night at supper time I accidentally burned my hand in hot water. It happens every year at this time because I forget how hot the water can get from the boiler. I was so angry about it I had a scream fest. I let it rip! A string of curses. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttttttt. Sounds good when you belt it out. 25 years ago I used to scream a lot while driving in my little blue VW bug assuming nobody could hear me! I tend to scream a lot if I have more than a few cups of coffee! I used to love to go to the glass recycling dumpsters at Brown University and recycle my clear glass apple juice jugs by smashing them from a height, and screaming! There's nothing more satisfying than that when you've got a bit of rage in you. And we all occasionally do. Arthur Janov would be proud. He's the guy who wrote the Primal Scream a 1970's therapy of screaming. The Buddhists think this is ridiculous and we are just making more bad karma by yelling. Perhaps they have a good point. I'm not suggesting we all scream but I think if we had safe and humorous ways to express anger and frustration like punching pillows and chopping wood with an axe (while screaming - I guess I like to yell) we'd be less likely to shoot each other or strangle our children. As a teen I loved beating the air bubbles out of clay imagining the clay was the face of my math teacher. I'd be centering the clay on the potters wheel imagining it was my mothers face spinning around melded by my strong hands. What a wicked child, you say. Bruno Bettleheim wrote an amazing book called Uses Of Enchantment all about the importance of fairy tales and how the gore and violence in them is important for kids so that have a way to process their anger. All the people in childrens publishing who believe childhood is sweet and all children are adorable don't recall having been one! A great book to read is Boy, by Roald Dahl. Now there's a guy who made magic out of his rage and what an amazing storyteller he was. My brother wrote him a fan letter in third grade and he received an nasty letter back saying you think I have time to write to you creepy kids! Perhaps this is why my brother isn't a big fan of writing his heroes.

Anyway I am baking an election cake and we are going to scream with joy today!

Earth Udder

I want a calf so badly! Mr. Wright said "Sure, take one!" I called my reference librarians to find out if I could adopt a cow. They read me the zoning ordinance of Woonsocket: "As there is no agriculturally zoned land within the city, farm animals are not allowed in any district."

Rachel the sweet dairy farmer at Wright's Dairy farm told me I am better off coming to visit the cows than owning one. She was in the maternity barn raking the hay today. I marveled at the enormous pregnant cows. One cow had a black and white udder that looked like a globe hanging between her hind legs. She said we think she's going to have twins! I asked her do they have to call for emergency help when the calves are on their way out? She told me she worked as a manager on a farm that milked 1,000 cows a day and had an average of three cows giving birth daily so she's seen it all and can handle it all. Maybe I can be a Wright's Dairy midwife and help out once in a while.

Hoops!

We're looking for a basketball hoop for the neighborhood parking lot!

Monday Morning

I've set up my sourdough whole wheat bread and made it into a braid. Now it is rising next to the boiler, the only warm place in the house!

I was asleep last night at 8PM I woke at 5AM because it was only a five hour sleep the night before! These early to bed early to rise hours are the ones I love. Milkman's hours!

I woke with Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah song in my head. We've performed it with the Small Town Concert Series and Dave Rave and Lauren Agnelli conducting us!

Now I am witnessing the light show in the sky dawn colors from dark blues to gray to purple to pink with hint of orange so far. The little brick schoolhouse behind us is lit up and their chimney is puffing little white clouds of smoke. I am wearing a black sleeveless leotard, and maroon dancers footless tights, blue jeans, and two gray sweatshirts. It's an exciting week ahead. I'd like to play my accordion at the polling places with Obama written across my face...is that illegal?

Quotes of The Day

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.
-Albert Einstein

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery,
The Little Prince

Quote Of The Day

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Body Shapes

I love looking at bodies. In college when I swam at the Brown University pool I was amazed at the variety of shapes a body can have. The ladie's locker room showers had no doors just stainless steel partitions that jutted out from a center like spokes on a wheel. We were all in plain view stark naked, all ages and shapes. It was a shock to me at first. I would look closely at older women's bodies as they showered to see what may happen to mine as I age. And now I laugh at myself when I complain about a jiggle and a fold here and there because someday if I am lucky I will be as wrinkly faced and jiggly as a Sharpei puppy! I remember being fascinated with aging and I drew an aged self portrait in my sketchbook when I was 12. I remember at Grandma's Brighton Beach apartment after we came off the beach and boardwalk and showered I'd see Grandma changing back into her clothes. I was fascinated by the way the flesh on Grandma's back protruded around her bra. And there were permanent grooves in her shoulders where her bra straps had lived and worked for decades. At the pool there is a skinny old lady her flesh hangs on her droopily like the skin around a bloodhounds eyes. She has no fat but her loose wrinkly skin drapes over her bathing suit. She looks like a skeleton wearing a white wet plastic bag. I tell myself be graceful in your body and in your behavior and be civil and kind. It's an important practice and a skill that may even improve with age!

Last Bite Of Baklava

Last night I found the last bite of baklavah in the freezer from our friends daughter's Bat Mitzvah in 2004. It was delicious with hot clear tea.

Calendars

I have a conundrum about calendars. I love them but the squares of the days can't be too big or I feel that I don't accomplish enough in a day or too small and I feel claustophobic. I need to see the whole month at once. That is comforting to me but but I need to record lots of information. Maybe I should make a six foot by six foot calendar on strips of my roll of butcher wrap paper and hang it on one whole wall in my studio! Now there's an idea. Most years I get my dollar calendar at Job Lot one year they skipped a day May 31. It was probably why it cost a dollar! A dollar for a day.

Early & Late

Last night I made a multigrain muffin cake at midnight and at one AM we turned the clocks back so it was midnight again! I love that! I was enjoying being awake and didn't feel too tired but I do love early morning so I went to bed. I woke up with the pre dawn light, opened my dark green shade and watched the Maxfield Parish sky unfold from navy blue to cobalt blue to cerulean blue. Dawn light is a daily miracle. My abdomen responds to light with joy energy and I have to get up and write. When I let Honey out in the yard to pee, I saw the frost had articulated each blade of grass with a frozen sparkly silvery white outline. Breathing the cool air feels so clean in my lungs.

One of Ten

This summer I realized that when I count all of the marriages my biological parents and step parents have had and the subsequent children adopted or born from these relationships, I am one of ten siblings! One sibling I have not yet met and one child born with Down Syndrome died in infancy.

Quote of The Day

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

Letters

Nearly all of my friendships have developed out of writing letters. I am compulsive e-mailer. I often find inspiration from letters I receive.

I am not a drinker or a partier or an avid phone caller so the only way I build relationships is by writing to people, or by walking around the neighborhood with my dog. It's true! And before there was e-mail I used pen and paper and bought pages of stamps! I wrote to many poets and artists who I admire. It's very rewarding to write letters although I never expect a response. I am just surprised and thrilled when I get one.

There's an interesting book called Letters Home by Terry Vance, Ph.D., published by Pantheon Books. The author encourages people in a Gestalt way to address things that trouble them in a letter even if they don't intend to mail it.

When I lived alone with my first dog a big yellow Labrador + German Sheperd mix named Travis, I would sit down to my supper at my green and beige 1940's enamel-topped kitchen table with pen and paper and write letters while eating my dinner. By writing I was having a conversation with the person I was thinking of and I no longer felt alone.

Magic Day

This morning while I was at my desk window I saw a four year old black boy in Power Rangers outfit in the driveway and I just had to go down and say hi. I met him and his three sisters and cousin and we chatted. They were scootering and skateboarding up and down my driveway which is also the neighborhood driveway because we share a parking lot with the four other tenements. I said wow, wow, wow, watch out, as they raced down the hill turning onto the sidewalk to avoid the busy street. One girl the Latina cousin who had wavy black hair down to her waist, said she was dressed up last night as a girl from American Idol and she burst into her song and dance routine for me. I was spellbound. The other girl said she was a princess. Today she was wearing white sneakers that were printed with the word red many times in different colors. I said your white sneakers say red! She said they are red rhino sneakers named after the red rhinoceros. I love rhinoceroses I told her. She had on a shocking pink shirt and jeans and had a million black extension braids down to her shoulders.

I went back inside and made some lunch; cubed fresh tofu, bean sprouts, spinach, garlic, mixed with leftover whole wheat elbow macaroni, and soy sauce and red chilis sauteed in olive oil.

I came back outside standing in the sun at the back gate, eating with chop sticks. The kids were eating snacks out of their blue bags of Ranch Flavored Doritos and climbing my clothesline poles by stepping up on the fence. I watched worried that they would fall while Honey tried to eat their Doritos! The dimpled tall girl wanted to know how to use chop sticks and I showed her and let her try mine. It's like holding a pencil but with another stick that doesn't move. She tried it a few times.

The kids hands got covered with the old oxidized silver paint from climbing the pole so I brought out orange soap for them to wash their hands at my spigot. They were scared of the little red and black box elder bug they saw on the base of my house. I picked him up and showed them his pretty red and black bug back. I said they are sweet bugs called Box Elder bugs named after the Box Elder tree. They won't hurt you. But they wouldn't hear it! And ran screaming. I am terrified of spiders so I didn't push it.

Then later on my way out for a walk with Honey these same kids asked me to accompany them to the Moonlight Wieners around the corner. So I turned around and we all held hands and marched over to the wiener joint on Rathbun Street. Honey and I waited outside while they ordered their dogs "with everything" from the cheerful buxom brunette wiener girls in red shirts at the counter. The owner usually gives Honey a free wiener on weekdays when we walk by, but she wasn't there. Honey was so disappointed, I had to tug her home.

Then my neighbor from Haiti with huge gorgeous round flat very black face stopped his 15 year old pale blue Toyota in the middle of the road and said "Do you want some yogurt?" clutching a white plastic bag out the window. I said sure! It was a total spontaneous act of kindness on his part. He gave me a the bag filled with banana and strawberry yogurts. I squatted on the sidewalk and doled them out, exactly enough for two flavors for each of the kids. I decided it's easier to carry if they take them in the white plastic bag!

I said do you know what's happening Tuesday? We get a new president. They said I vote for Obama! I said me too! And if he wins I am going to dance in the street. They said me too! I said let's close off the parking lot and dance! So if it's a nice day I will be out in our neighborhood parking lot with sidewalk chalk drawing and dancing with my new neighbors.

Then I saw Doreen our mail woman and she said aren't you afraid to stand here? I said what, this is my neighborhood and that is my house, why should I be afraid? She said there are three pit bulls that live here. I said oh, Michael's dogs? I am probably partly responsible for Michael having three dogs because when I first moved to Woonsocket and we were squatters in the mill he would come by and ask me if he could play with our dogs. He was about nine years old! Now he is 29 and he is my neighbor!

Today out of the blue I got a call from my local bank teller Elaine asking me if I wanted to have a play date with my dog and her daughter Darlene's Weimeraner. I said sure. I have never met her daughter or their dog but I see Eileen at the Sovereign bank two blocks away and had suggested we try this someday. I always bring Honey to the bank when I go in! I walked over to her daughter's house about a mile away on Saint Cecile Street off of Diamond Hill Road and I met Eileen and her husband and their daughter a dental hygienist on maternity leave and her husband; a fireman and their two boys and their Weim named Ruger. The dogs played, the kids played, the neighbors kids played and it was 60 degrees and sunny. I even found four little old fashioned glass ice cream dishes on the way over which I just washed. Someone had put out a forest green plastic mesh laundry basket full of clear glassware. It caught my scavengers eye. Most of the basket was full of stuff I didn't want; shot glasses, champagne glasses with writing on them, and little bowl vases like the kind you find filled with flowers on tables at weddings or goldfish at amusement parks. But I spotted the four little clear glass ice cream dishes in the pile and carried them home. Maybe Tuesday we'll make ice cream if it's a nice day. I have an old fashioned hand crank ice cream machine and we can make it outside in the parking lot. I'd better go make some ice!

Naked and Proud

If Obama wins...I plan to dance naked in the streets or run naked into the ocean screaming with JOY!

I will be proud of our country for the first time in my life!!