"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books." —Albert Camus
I've been into reading "the classics" lately. Even as an English major I've found there are still a lot of books I have yet to read to earn the right to call myself a true English major dork (then all I need are 25 cats and I can become the crazy old bat English major).
I love being able to read these books at my leisure and not feel the pressure of thinking about what essay topic I need to write about as I read them now for fun instead of for school. I do, however, miss the class discussions. I miss learning. I feel like I miss out on a lot of the little nuances (or sometimes miss the book's message entirely) without a professor to fill me in.
It took me a while to get back into reading after graduation, I was so sick of it. Now, a few years later, I'm back in my element...perusing used bookstores, reading during lunch break or before I go to bed. My problem now is space. I dream of built-in bookshelves, separate sections for my poetry books and Tommie's over-sized history/sociology books (that's what he gets for always reading non-fiction). I'm like Belle in Beauty and the Beast...I would be thrilled if a hairy, grizzly man set up a library for me in his rundown mansion.
Tommie and I sometimes spend hours creating virtual color pallets for our dream library (and the whole house) we don't have. It's sick really, but I've always been a fan of fiction...a girl can dream. Someday I'll have the house, the library, the 25 cats, and I wouldn't mind dancing in a ballroom with a charming grizzly man either. 
When I first saw the previews for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button I was miffed because a few years ago I had thought, "I wonder what life would be like if humans were born old and got younger as time went on?" I thought someone stole my idea until I looked it up and found out good 'ole F. Scott Fitzgerald thought of it first. Shoot!
I dragged Tommie to the movie because I absolutely love the concept. My sister says it's creepy and scares her and she refuses to see it. In a way, she's right—it was creepy watching a man (even a man as studly as Brad Pitt) get younger while the love of his life gets older. It was tragic, sad, but it was also completely romantic. The theme of life and death so intricately woven throughout the film emphasizes the idea that each of us has a timeline that stretches from birth to death, and regardless of which way that timeline is moving, it's what goes on in the middle of those two fixed points that counts. Tommie and I really enjoyed the movie even if it did leave us in an overly contemplative mood.
I can relate to Benjamin because my friends and family like to tease me that I'm really 85-years-old (only in reality I am and look like a person in their mid-twenties). I can't help it if I say words like "yikes" and "snazzy" or phrases like "She's a dish," or "What a snoozer," or if whenever I act my (real) age and go out to bars or parties I have to recuperate for several months afterwards because I'm pooped. Being young is exhausting. I don't like getting older but Benjamin didn't have it easy going the other direction either.
Tommie and I have known each other for 100 years (give or take) and when we met we were so young I don’t think we knew how to turn on an oven let alone cook a meal. I always wanted a guy in my life who could cook and I’m happy to report Tommie’s doing his part. He says I don’t give him enough credit though and it’s not because I don’t think his cooking is good…it’s because I just don’t give out compliments willy-nilly…well truthfully, I don’t really give them out at all. My Dad and I are alike in that way. We both say that when we think someone looks nice or when they cook something yummy we think it in our heads, we just don’t say it out loud. This drives my Mom and Tommie crazy. See, as I’m eating the food I’m thinking, “Mmmm, scrumptious,” and I assume that by my eating it the chef knows that I think it’s good. I’m just not that expressive or enthusiastic by nature (remember the MTV cartoon “Daria?”). I think it’s better to be selective with compliments lest people expect them too often. But I’ll throw Tommie a bone today (I must not be feeling well) since he did cook a good recipe from Sam the Cooking Guy: Buffalo Chicken Pizza. Yes, it was scrumptious—and Maya agreed (those are her shiny eyeballs lurking behind the pizza in the photo above).
Don’t worry, Maya got a couple pieces of chicken...after all, she compliments Tommie more than I do.
Whenever I travel inland from San Diego, I look up at the rocks jetting out from the surfaces of the craggy hills and mountains and can't help thinking, “Who in their right mind crossed over these things to start a life out here?”
San Diego sits like the Garden of Eden along the Pacific Ocean but if you are driving in from anywhere east you have to go through desert and rocky cliffs to get here. We have it easy nowadays. We can fly in—it isn’t until the plane is about to land that the city and harbor appear from the dark desert landscape like an oasis. Or we can drive. I remember the home stretch of my road trip out here from Boston—getting lost in the valleys of Temecula, California. I sat in my air-conditioned car, binging on peanut butter crackers and whining about the never-ending bends and turns in the road. The landscape looked like something the Hobbits had to cross over with their precious ring. I thought about the families who came here on foot or in covered wagons. They had no major roads to follow, no mix CDs playing "Love Shack" on repeat, and no Dairy Queens to indulge every quarter mile. I swear that if I were one of them, when my horse pulled up to the bottom of one of those unfriendly looking mountain masses I’d say, “No way, Jose. This is it. I’m planting myself on this dry, flat piece of land and never moving again.” And someone with more optimism would say, “Come on—we don’t even know what’s on the other side.” And I’d say, “You said that about the last 10 mountain tops!” I would probably stay there at the bottom of that cragged mountain and open up the first Dairy Queen…an ambitious goal but not the point—I would have missed everything. Just think how beautiful the vast Pacific Ocean looked when they first saw it: the seaside cliffs, dolphins jumping, seals perched on warm rocks. These things I too would have missed if I didn't, if my family didn't, take a risk and move here.
As terrified as I am of change, I know that a life without change isn't worth living (not to mention it's impossible). As I grow older I know that I’ll come face to face with a lot of ugly looking mountain ranges (figuratively speaking) blocking my way and I’ll be tempted to stop in my tracks and turn briskly back around because it's easier, safer and more practical (all traits a true Libra loves), but my hope is that I will push on—keep exploring, dreaming and taking risks (within reason, of course). Who knows...on the other side of every mountain could be a sparkling ocean...or, at the very least, a Dairy Queen (mmmm).
I remember reading Mary Oliver's poem Sleeping in the Forest during a writing class. We only read the one poem by her but that brief encounter left me wanting to read more. She is a true observer of the natural world and through her words the reader can appreciate a deeper connection to nature.
When I went to the bookstore I couldn't decide which of her poetry books to get so I opted for her "New and Selected Poems: Volume One" figuring it would give me a sampling of her work. My favorite section is from her book "American Primitive" and The Sea is probably my favorite poem from the collection.
Growing up in a New England coastal village (photo below), the Atlantic Ocean was a central part of my surroundings and my life. My memories are filled with salty summer days, unforgiving storms, restless nights listening to the waves break, the moon's reflection against the black water...I loved the ocean so much that I sometimes felt as if I wasn't that far removed from it. The ocean was as much a part of my home as the land. I wrote poems of my own to express this connection—this almost "lack of evolution" that causes people who grow up on the sea to feel as if they haven't fully evolved from their ancient ocean ancestors. Oliver's poem captures that feeling—that pull back to our original home—and reads almost like a tale of human evolution on rewind.
Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself—
fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh—my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
feel like!
paradise! Sprawled
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,
and simply
become again a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea's body,
vanished
like victory inside that
insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.
Yesterday, on the first day of 2009, I took all precautions (with the help of some feathered friends) to ensure that 2009 will be a lucky year.
My grandmother once told my sister and I that it was good luck to say “Rabbit, Rabbit” on the first day of each month. It has to be the very first thing you say when you wake up in the morning or else it doesn’t count. There were many months I forgot to say it and I don’t particularly remember if any of them were any more unlucky than the rest, but yesterday morning I recalled the old saying and thought, well, it couldn't hurt: “Rabbit, Rabbit.”
Later that day, Tommie and I ventured on a walk to my parent’s house with Maya. They live about 1.5 miles away and Dad said he’d walk and meet us halfway. As we neared their neighborhood a flock of homing pigeons circled ahead. We watched them do their dance—swooping and swerving through the sky before perching gracefully on some telephone wires several feet in front of us. My Dad and Tommie were next to me as we walked underneath them and I looked up for a moment before deciding that was probably unwise. I had a funny feeling…“I’m going to get crapped on—” and just as the sentence finished coming out of my mouth, a little brown and white turd plopped down from the heavens. “Oh my god, I did.” I wasn’t so surprised to see it there on my shoulder—only surprised that it seemed as if by my saying it, I had put it there myself. My Dad couldn't believe it. “I consider that very good luck!” he said. It’s not the first time (and probably won’t be the last) I’ve been christened with crap. At an early age my parents were sure to fill me in on the superstitious wisdom that being pooped on by birds was good luck. I think they made it sound extra special so that I wouldn’t start crying. I don’t consider myself a lucky person (although I do have a knack for winning pointless prizes in raffles) but I can’t say that I’ve had an unlucky life either. Maybe there is something to the old superstition after all. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing like starting the new year off with a mound of watery poo smack on the shoulder.
After lunch (and rinsing off my shoulder, of course) my Mom presented us each with a potato. We have been doing this tradition for as long as I can remember…on January 1st we plant a potato in the ground for good luck. Honestly, I don’t know where this ritual came from or if anyone else does it.
It sounds like something a farmer might do to will a good year of crops…a sacrifice to the gods of agriculture. We’re not farmers, but some years the potato has actually grown into a sturdy little plant. When we lived in the Northeast, there were times the ground was too frozen to plant in it so we’d open one of the second floor windows and chuck the thing into the snow. Weeks later my grandfather (who lived in the house behind ours and took pride in his nice yard) would find a potato or two strewn about and mutter, “What the Hell?” This year, we each planted a different colored spud into the clover patch at the top of the canyon. For fun (and because I’m a little sinister) I told Tommie to toss his yellow potato at Mom’s behind as she bent over the dirt muttering something about her black potatoes symbolizing a good year with Michelle and Barack.
I don’t yet know if ’09 will be a good year, but my shoulder’s been blessed and Obama’s been planted…at least we’ve done everything we can to make sure it will be a lucky one.
I've been into reading "the classics" lately. Even as an English major I've found there are still a lot of books I have yet to read to earn the right to call myself a true English major dork (then all I need are 25 cats and I can become the crazy old bat English major). 
