Audiocycles, oral Q’s

•November 2, 2007 • 4 Comments

As the season wheels round, the color of the sky darkens each morning a little more.
Owing to the acoustical nature of the canyon I live in, and the extreme darkness inside the blanket-swaddled treehouse, I’ve come to rely on aural cues for time-telling.

Since at least some of them come from human noise, I don’t have to adjust anything tomorrow night. The neighbors adjust their clocks & schedules and I just hear the usual noise at a slightly different ‘absolute time’. No lost energy turning back clocks the way we have to to conform to the capricious ‘daylight wasting’ time. I will never understand throwing away whole chunks of carefully adjusted-to light cycles for the betterment of business.

They are as follows:
As if you care?
No, blogging permits this self-centeredness.
Ahem

2 a.m.-2:30 a.m. Bars in town are closed, and the (we hope) perfectly sober residents of Dog Bark lane drive noisily home (it’s a mile to the bars, by the way. But maybe these people have a favorite bar in, say, Novato, a good half hour’s drive…so OK, maybe they ‘need’ to drive).

At the terminus of the cul-de-sac, our horsemucking neighbor who lives at the stable
stops car,
scrambles out,
and we get to hear what
that muffled music booming dully
from inside his tin can was:
country western,
which spills out
along with him
as he
unchains gate,
pushes gate open,
hops back in (door slam)
drives through,
gets back out, (more music)
shuts gate (none too quietly),
re-chains…
and we get to sleep two more hours

…unless it’s a Monday night, when ONE hour after the closing of the bars, the garbage truck up on Fawn Drive wakes up everyone that sleeps outdoors. Namely the raccoons. Who leap into action, first fighting for access to the edge of the fish pond (where they touch the electric wire, get zapped, shriek and then remember that shutting up is the only way to escape that vile electric current which we turn on when we hear them gallop across the wooden deck to pool’s edge). Their washing needs taken care of, they jog clumsily down the 25 stairs to the house, round the house to the ‘buffet’ that is forty houses with varied garbage out at the curb…and work their way up the street. Our buffet is all inthe compost heap–which they will dig out– while carefully chewing up any unwashed plastic wrappers that get widely re-distribuited …|

So the wee hours of Tuesday morning are a tiny bit different. The rest of the week, we get a whole extra hour’s silence until…a sedan motor noise grows as it approaches below, punctuated by faint thumps.

Then it’s at Taj Mahovel and PLOP! We have a newspaper on the undriveway. Time: 4:30 or so.

A couple more PLOPS for the turn-around and they continue back down the lane, steering and plopping and I get to sleep until precisely six a.m. when our OTHER next door neighborstarts up his huge diesel truck (which we call the Great White Eco Challenge). Rtiual dictates that the GWEC be warmed up for a half an hour….if the breeze is just right, the diesel fumes reach gently into F-ingham Palace (=treehouse) and let us share in the piquant aromas of progress.

Incidentally, this vehicle takes top DecibHell Honors.

We attempt a few more z’s through the gradually growing drone that becomes the morning commute soundtrack. Thousands of cars, well OK, maybe only hundreds, no wait Fairfax is an official 7500 resident town with an unofficial bonus 2,500 residents who never seem to get counted but they live here all right, tucked into the unofficial second units, contributing rent and driving everywhere 4.9 times per day in their 1.6 cars.

Er, I guess I’m really digressing.

Across the street our neighbor repeatedly starts up his wheezy red SUV (which believe it or not is visible from space via Google Earth) at 7:20…the engine finally comes to life and down the street they go, off to get a bit of breakfast. Back about an hour later. Sir Drivesalot used to log about 20 daily trips, but with age he has had to trim it back to about two round trips.
Am I being mean?

It might not be so awful if he weren’t such a speedster…
once I caught a ride with him somewhere, and I watched with a sick feeling as he nearly rear-endend
an unsuspecting cyclist who was actually slowing to a stop at the stop sign! I guess some motorists count on bikers to glide on through, the way he (SirD) does in Big Red.

A mere ten minutes later, we get the Lucky Litany; our next d’hors nachbar has a dog, well two now, since Lucky’s pushing fifteen years. That is a LOT of high quallity non-stop barking, which according to aforementioned nachbar, ‘is his job’. Now the elder statesman has an understudy, even stupider and more sonorous than he…who goes by “Oggie” or maybe “Augie”, my ears can’t tell.
Nayber keeps dogs in house and yard, mostly. Maybe this will change with Og, but for sure Lucky’s main exercise is
a) marathon barking
b) getting let out each morning at precisely 7:30 a.m. preceded by a squeaking gate mechanism.
He ambles over to whichever sidewalk/weedpatch easement feels right, takes a crap,
(which of course remains there until mummified, it’s not going to be picked up by Nayber)
and then for the next four minutes we get a human recitative:
“Lucky! Lucky!…..C’mere boy! LUCKY! C’mere…..LUCKY!! Come on LUCKY! Lucky…..Come here. Lucky. Lucky. Atta boy, Lucky. ”

Eventually the dog feels like angling (maximum 20 feet) back to its yard, and we can hear the squeak of the iron gate and the clank of the latch, then Naybermobile backs up and he’s off.

By now, Sir Francis Drone is like Niagara Falls in the distance, audible and also sub-sonic, thus palpable in deep body tissue.
No, I’m serious. My G.I. tract resonates at what, 7-9 cycles/sec (cps), the same vibration of the big old engines of many of the trucks people motor to San Francisco in. That is from 6-8 am.

And dear rider, you don’t know it, (well, maybe you do, if you live around here. Say, you’re not a resident of Dogbark Lane, are you???) but we used to have a nice little railway that took everyone who cared to from our satellite town back toward the main north-south line, where they’d change trains, go to Sausalito, alight and hop on a Fairy (magical boat that chugs over to San Francisco in about a half-hour’s time).

Some mornings a blue stellar jay will drop acorns on our roof, and screech us out of slumber.

This year the bay laurel fruit flinging itelf out of those trees is remarkably large, sonorous, and since we have many tin-rooves, one of which is forty feet long, and steeply sloped, we hear the pinball machine effect of a “SMACK!” when it hits, then a l-o-n-g b-u-m-p-y r-o-l-l down the roof between the longitudinal creases…and comes to a halt in the gutter which of course is chock full of the season’s bay laurel nuts.
Which aren’t edible (shame!) and in fact are bloody toxic…

By this time–well, this was in my pre-blog, pre-book life –I’m forced out because more than ten-eleven hours of horizontality can make a gal a pillar of sloth.

And I could never have that.

Posted in Jacquie Phelan, Night

Dying Oaks, Razing Homes

•November 2, 2007 • Leave a Comment

Rode a couple mornings ago, on a fine warm day with the smoke from LA inferno suspended in the sunlight. Lowest visibility I’ve experienced in years…Charlie and I took the new route up into the Pine Mountain zone, using Sir Francis Drone Boulevard to get to ‘Brown Bridge Trail’. This connector has added a new region of bicycle exploration: the ridge between Fairfax and West Marin. And except for the toilsome approach, it’s away from cars.

Ironically the solution lies inside the hill itself. There’s a railway tunnel bored in it that served the fire engines long after the trains stopped scooting under White’s Hill. Alas the ends of the tunnel were sealed forty years ago, overgrown and forgotten.
Except by ambitious teens like Charlie and his friend Scot Bowman, who hoped to move a few rocks aside and walk all the way through. No such luck, but at least they got to be inside a hundred year old tunnel!

We bikers are actively lobbying for the tunnels to be refurb’d and re-frequented, but a part of us knows that the Powers That Be won’t be very open minded about this heretical concept: a road that cars can’t drive on? And how many billion dollars?

White’s Hill is infamous (among bikers and emergency response teams) for all the traffic accidents that occur. There is a cluster of red pins at the police station map showing that if you’re expecting everything to be As It Should on that long southbound descent from farmlands into Fairfax, think again. Those pin say enough.

While: it’s fun to reach fifty mph on this section, there are a couple of right hand turns where you cannot see what’s round the corner. What if a car were stalled in the middle, after spinning out?

But about us: we were climbing that section (heading out of town) when we were passed by a platoon of giant, two-trailer trucks. The kind with the beveled bed that holds big rocks…passing reasonably far from us…while belching foul poison.

The county is experiencing a sort of ‘pre-endgame surge’ of building…and the things (mansions and roads leading to them) are huge, often remote, and on steep hillsides. Engineered walls and much rip-rap are key structural components. Non stop caravans of trucks parade through the narrow roads during the week. My friend Mark Woodrow, biker par excellence, is working overtime to keep up with this building boom– he’s a structural engineer.

Back to two middle aged people out on a ride to get away from it all…

We survived the half mile freeway quality, got on the new trail with its spiffy switchbacks and utterly rideable grades…through bay forest, grassland, ridgetop, God what a COUNTY. When we finally get up top, the reward of a view with NO HOUSES (at least for awhile).
Rode San Geronimo Ridge to the Pine Mtn Truck road, and were saddened to see that the MMWD is doing a huge road building project leading out to the red-legged frog waterfall ponds…

Sob.

When they’re not paving the fire roads, radar-gunning the cyclists and ticketing night riders, they are digging up habitat, laying creosote timbers in the marshes and allowing those chemicals to dribble in to the watershed. The sudden oak die-off makes me think of all the insults we had heaped on the open spaces and her hikers, since the late 1800’s.

HELL I seem not to be up to finishing this darn thing.
Will you forgive a sudden quittage?
No I think not.

OK finishing with this: as I rode home, I chanced to see a for rent sign, and learned that the residents, both artists were looking for a third renter to shoulder the monthly rent, even though the house owner (absent ) plans to emply the house+clubhouse, and put a mini-mansion in…

And then the artists get to hunt for new housing…these guys down the street had been at 46 Cross-to-Bear Avenue, off Woof Lane.
Like the brown trees that now number 15% of the trees in the county, the die-off of artist ‘habitat’ (anything with low rent, in an old house usually) will assure the scattering of all that brain and talent…to Oregon.

I guess I’m not happy with this. Too tired to figure out how to accept these intractable realities…

Posted in Jacquie Phelan, Ride, Trees

Food Writer Finds Story

•October 31, 2007 • 2 Comments


The aftermath of How To Cook Your Life cast a stone in my puddle, and three ripples are radiating as you read this scrap of bloggadocio:

A teaching tour of North Carolina (not set in stone, but likely) thanks to the traction of a certain can-do bikegentleman who will be identified once I set a teaching date.

A lavish lunch in Marin County’s finest restaurant, courtesy of Carol Ness, editor of the S.F. Chronicle food section.

One week after, a thank you lunch, subjecting an impressively unafraid Ms. Ness to my idea of fyne qweezeen sur le cheap. Taj Mahovel boasts impeccably scavenged and prepared foodstuff–emphasis on the ‘stuff’….It’s all seasonal, regional “orphan food”. Fruits and vegetables whose only crime was a bruise, a broken stalk, a weeping wound. Or windfall fruit considered a sticky nuisance on the pavement (=figs!!!!).

You recipe collector types could file my cuisne under: Perfectly Fine For Eating Don’t Know What They Were Thinking When They Threw This Away Wow It’s All Free Eh?

And the aftermath of these is yet unknown. A flight to Charlotte/Raleigh to teach?
A ban on expense account lunches for scrappy scroungers?
Permanent closure of all good dumpsters in Marin?

Might as tell a bit about the Press Luncheon, and share the (wo)menu.

As it happened, the Osmanthus fragrans in the middle of the yard popped into bloom (tiny flowers in my hand in the picture above)the day before I spent a two hours prepping the repast below. Since a meal this elaborate is always taken out in the “Habitat” (outdoor room) the runnings-back-and-forth (don’t trip on the bark chips).

We interupt this blog to announce a real..earth quake!! Feels like about a 4.5. (turned out to be 5.6 at epicenter, I think my estimate’s good for here, 60 miles north) Back to our food…

Press Luncheon with Carol Ness
Oct 29, 2007
Taj Mahovel
Hors D’oeuvre: parfum d’osmanthus fragrans

Found Salad European Mix (carefully rewashed)
w/homegrown volunteer tomatoes
Savory bread pudding
with either:
Volunteer tomatillo sauce
Or hissing fuse (note: “hissing fuse” is a condiment made of roasted tahini plus Szechuan black bean chili garlic oil)
Or both. Or neither.
Tomato salad with planted-on-purpose arugula
Sauteed perennial chard, found zucchini (courgette) with heirloom tomato coulis
Windfall figgy pudding
Found local apple crisp with cadged cream
Brooke Bond Scottish Blend Tea

Chef JP of Salivation Army distinguishes between accidental (‘volunteer’) vegetables, “on purpose” (bought the seeds and left them around a few seasons in their packets before getting off her duff and planting them, at which point they are hardly viable but oh what the hell, throw them in and see..)

– and then the more reliable “stuff” that seems to magically refill all the yellow dumpsters. Not to forget “windfall’ (stuff on sidewalk and hidden in deep lawn grass, on street, etc) which needs extra attention when cleaning. No guarantees of organicity here, because of amount of asbestos brake lining dust that filters all over the urban landscape, esp near roads that cars (mis) use.

Carol arrived, sat decompressing a bit in the cool queen’s chair, while I did the last minute bustle. It is a one of the elements of wombat style to abandon visitors esp first timers in the yard, so they can de-compress from their voyage (usuallly stressful, whether by bicycle or auto) and hear a little birdsong or general nothingness…unless the 18-wheeler is groaning through the neighbborhood en route to the stable delivering hay, scraping the phone lines overhead and leaving hay-bits swirling in the breeze… This way, visitor doesn’t have me barraging them right off the bat (sorry).

The next couple of hours we noshed thru those aforementioned dishes…in a sunny quiet yard(mystery: where are all the dogs and carpet-cleaning trucks we normally have providing the sound track?) ruminating about the politics of waste, and assessing the risk of revelation of the secrets of the scavenger.

We shall see how it all pans oot.

Posted in Film, food, How To Cook Your Life, Jacquie Phelan, Salivation Army

Au Clair De La Lune J’ai Roule dans la Boue

•October 29, 2007 • 1 Comment

It’s the longest running full moon ‘season’ I’ve enjoyed in eons.

By paying attention to the risings and settings via the newspaper, a conscientious lune-addict can time appointments with Her Silvery Highness (or Her Ruddy Lowliness) to salt away almost a week of indelible fun.

This morning, at five, HSH sailed high in a cloudless sky, with loyal Orion a few inches away accompanied by the dog star and a couple of planets.

“Let’s do a trail ride”
(self to self)
Roll out the Columboham, my suspended 1992 machine.
My crosser still has that rear flat.
(Bad dog!)
Helmet?
Hah! We don’t need no stinkin’ helmets.
No drunken animals.
No trees flinging branches upon me.
It’s over the stable gate, and up the little rock mound where the ‘jail shadows’ are.
It’s quiet.
Bike feels like a comfortable shoe that lets me feel the earth’s surface.
Veer up the steeps and before even remembering that stairs are cut in to thwart bikers or facilitate upwardly mobile horses, I’m up and over the first two….serious momentum and utter relaxed hand on the bars.
Whew.
Paia Tension–my muse– comes on duty, five minutes into my ride. It’s always a miracle that she shows up late, but never seems to let me down.

Considering the speed with which I routinely fly down all the stairs into the hut, and then out of the hut and onto the street, ’tis a miracle I haven’t lost some teeth or dinged my chin.
Back on track…

Lunelight is reticulated with a fine webbing, mostly light but some shadow. I break out on the first little clearing, glance around to see the familiar grassy slope angling down to my right at an impressive 20 percent. Ahead, “Boy Scout Junction” where four trails converge. I choose the uphill one, through increasingly inky blue shadows, as the overhead oaks shade the road.
Silver and blue the only colors.

In earlier days, the road surface would have been a fine dusty face-powder. Since the late 80’s though, the MMWD has semi-paved the road with a thick layer of rock, mostly broken graywacke. Or is it chert? The substrate is rocks twice the size of a walnut, not the sort of thing you’d care to genuflect upon, should you become un-biked for any reason.

Shadows flit across the road, that last could have been a fox.

At last, up the steeeeep road at Five Corners, and into the lacy-shadowed backtrail toward Six Points. And then down the Hidden Meadow to see if the Magic Tree is still sliding down its perfect little knoll.

In those same “earlier” days, when I lived in S.F., my idea of a good time was to ride 24 miles ato San Anselmo, hide my road bike in the woods, and jog up an unmarked hillside to get to Six Points. My objective, set eyes on a feat of arboreal engineering: an oak tree that seems to slide a few feet more, down the left side of a bare knoll. Alone, on a hill. The knoll’s inside a huge vat of greenery that is two miles from any trailhead…that you can be sure never to see a soul…even though it’s marked on the (old) Erickson maps.

Every time I check, it seems to have slid a little more.

I am quite certain that in some future year, it will be a pile of tree-bones, so I enjoy it while I can. Gee. Maybe I’ll take a picsa. Noah just lent me his spycamera, smaller than a pack of sniggerettes. Very sneaky. The tree won’t even know she’s being depicted.

By lunelight it is difficult to see if there are no leaves, brown leaves or green leaves. I’ll have to double check.
All around Marin, a scary number of trees, in the range of ten percent of all oaks, and virtually all Tanoaks, are succumbing to Sudden Oak Death, an evil visited upon the trees of California…I believe it began in Marin County. It’s an alliance between a fungus (Phytopthera) and a bug. ___

After peeking at the tree awhile and standing ‘stalk’ still to listen for owls, I return the same backtrail, but choose the narrow rabbit run through the wild oatgrass down the hill to Boy Scout. I half-remember all the rooty drop offs, and happily recall precisely where to dismount when the trail is crossed by thick tree roots and the trail itself is so low that the sides are hip-height (equine erosion).

And down to the stables, and home.

After breakfast I realize that Cynthia Carbone is still up in Marin for her writing workshop. Call her number, and she’s already leaving (a day early!), passing the ‘Novato” roadsign on 101.

Sez I to Cyn: Please pull off the freeway at Central San Rafael…I so want to see you and I know you never drive anywhere, let’s visit now!
“Jacquie, you know, I don’t even know how to drive while talking on the phone…this week was intense, and I got pretty overwhelmed…tell me again how to find you? This is really gonna stretch me…”

I put back my cycling shoes (having been home three hours since my ‘quickie’ moon inspection) and broke a dozen traffic laws wheeling toward the freeway. No witnesses. And this document doesn’t constitute a deposible witness.
Does it?
Hmmm

I waited at the proposed zone, no luck . Ten minutes rolled slowly past. Damn, I’d gotten there in a record 20 minutes, and now I’d told her wrong (probably) how to find downtown San Rafael, and she’s probably crossed the bay by accident, having been funnelled onto the 580 bridge, oh well, there weren’t any guarantees…she might have just changed her mind about stopping.

How often has that happened to me?

Times when I just ‘opt out’, mid-errand….go home, admit defeat to Charlie, and take up banjo practice (it’s usually driving to SF for a session that causes my Chicken Out Chakra to glow and rotate. Half the time I turn around within a mile.
Headed back home, and listlessly called out “CYNTHIA!?”…
and there in a parking lot I never would have found, by Whislestop Wheels, stood an unrecognizably beautiful redhead (Cynthia’s hair was deep chocobrown in 1999 when I last saw her).

Jump up and down, and dump contents of my bag:
Baked figs from breakfast, maybe she’d like?
“They’re perfect, I didn’t eat…they remind me of Italy…”
A story I wrote for the Pacific Sun ‘death issue’ (didn’t know it was the death issue), about the upcoming movie Klunkerz.
And some feijoas for her to try.
And yes, that killer picture that Chris Hill took, of the two insouciant little brats sticking their tongues out at the camera, flagrantly ignoring mum’s entreaty for a ‘nice smile’.

We agreed that there is something incredibly heartwarming about girls that tell the photographer to fuck off, we’re not in the MOOD for a nice, polite smile!!!
And I have evidence!

“You know I came on scholarship, right, so I had to read a piece first thing when we got there…and after reading it…a woman rushed up and said she wanted to be my agent, she loved the writing…Jacquie you wouldn’t believe how intense it was…there were people you paid to critique your work, like this guy from Chronicle books, who demolished my momentary bliss by saying that memoirs are SOO dead…unless you have a ‘platform’….Jacquie you have several platforms, plus something to say, plus that witty way with words like e.e.cummings…”
(whew, reader I fairly blushed. This lady can really write, and she isn’t b.s’ing me, but i still have trouble ‘accepting’ such heartfelt words).

Ahhhhh.

Then we traded more stories, caught up on ten years, and snapped some extremely memorable pictures with her tiny silver camera, which of course I’m going to learn how to do too , as soon as NOAH THE BARRISTER forwards me his camera… and then you guys will be stuck with more photos than you know what to do with.

Rode homeward in a mist of wellbeing, big smile….remember that I need to stop at a garage sale for a whistllng tea-pot.
Just after turning off of Third St, the dangerous one-way route leading from freeway to Fairfax, a man jumps from a car, yelling my name.
“Hello?”
“Hey Jacquie, I knew it was you…those glasses!”
“How are you doing? ” I say convincingly.
I’ve never seen the man in my life.
“Great. Sunday drive with my mom, that’s her…going to the Appetite Seminar this year?”
After fudging for a couple more questions, hoping the fellow’s identity would be bundled with one of his replies…I looked squarely at him and said,
“What is your name?”
“John Borzini” I was one of the orignals, along with Donna Degan, blablabla..”
“Sorry to have not remembered” I said abjectly. I hate not remembering names..
“No worries. I was before your time”.
Well, in that case..do you want my boast card?
“Already got it”.
“!”
And we parted. Just thinking of this makes me laugh. It is obvious that the Rumor-Caliber Fame Enhancement Regimen is paying off. I have strangers stopping me in the street. But it gets better.

I peruse a fine garage sale, find a couple of early Armatrading albums and a cashmere sweater, load them into my messenger bag (road bike for this errand, no panniers , but hellishly light and swift on the tarmac) and barely made it out to 3rd St again, and the fellow pulls in front of me, jumps out and hands me a china tea cup, with the inside painted gold, and the saucer to match. Still with the $2 sticker on it…

“I saw this and had to get it for you,” he explained.
I never even thought to ask, what if I’d taken a different route home with my garage sale booty.
More pleasantries, plus a promise to write the day up…
At Androgeno’s it’s impossible not to peek into the Pavlovian dumpsters…and lo, verily, some stunning organic heirloom tomatoes, including the green-and-red striped one.
MMMMM. And four quarts of strawberries…

I really can’t keep going. The day un-spooled like a poorly constructed morality play where by simply being kind to people (and occasionally for going the Extra Mile) you are consecrated evermore to a tribe of dervishes (whoops now I’m mixing my religious metaphors). I know I’m tired, so I’ll just let you dangle in Purgat-o’read.

Posted in food, Jacquie Phelan, Night, Ride, Trees

A bowl of milk with a large pearl floating in it

•October 26, 2007 • 1 Comment

“Last night I dreamt I had this huge, gaping wound in my stomach.”

(Then I woke up and realized that I’m a blogger now.)

Our woollen shade-blind blackens all but a thin border of white…
meaning moon’s still out….it’s six a.m.

Leap out of bed, push blanket aside to see soft white sky overhead, confined by our narrow canyon’s high sides.
Clatter down the ladder and down the staircase…
Scattering raccoons marauding the pool…
and flip open my silver book to write to you, my faithful reader/riders.
I am wondering just how much of my ‘wound’ I dare shine a light on…. one never knows how things sound in “Flirtual Reality” .

On the CD player: Richard Thompson wailing about a misdirected dart.
Under my fingers: plastic keys that click, but never warm to my touch.
Under me: a hard, old chair relieved by a barely padded needlepoint cushion, each salvaged from different piles somewhere in this blog-forsaken County.
Beyond me:
Tapping hands? virtual vastnesses?
I’m so glad I roll out on that bicycle daily, well, almost daily.

Real time pedalgoggy allows me to note that the hell that is Southern California is real; the hazy air carries the particulates of the fires below. Our own heaven will burn too, but maybe not this year.
Meantime…volatile California is my home, my oily skin is my room, and I’m gazing dry-eyed into a milky screen pondering
the meaning of connection
and the means of connexion.
Will you take me as I am?
Will you take me?

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Jacquie Phelan, Night

Again with the fool moon

•October 26, 2007 • Leave a Comment

Eight o’clock, time to go play music with the Thursday evening Willis Street gang. Check in on CC, he’s bed-headed and I’m curiously awake. Autumn moons do that to a girl. Shoulder up the banjo, roll out at eight-o-five and at eight-eleven I’ve climbed the tiny grade past Martha and Richard Shaw’s light-bedizened cabin and down the tiny little appendix of Willis Lane.

Cars line the left, and tunes faintly sound from the house behind the gate.

Jitters the big yellow dog gives his best warning volley, I have to ignore it and push through pretending it’s fine if I set off alarms in the neighborhood.

Our neighborhood’s the same. All the dogs go off at anything. Bubble gum popping. A car going by. And worst of all: a person that’s NOT in a car.

Inside, it’s obvious it’s a special occasion, there are no seats…holy mackerel, there are a dozen musicians and THREE little rats running around, sorry, children: big Liam, little Sofia and Caden the next Dennis the Menace kinetikid.

They’re playing Beggar Boy, so I can tune up and join in before the usual sit-in-the-kitchen and yak with the kids. Sofia is able to finally play ‘vacuum cleaner’ (I used to call it wheel barrow)…a mere month since she was not quite ‘buff’ enough to walk on her hands…but then, this is her birthday! Big five.

And another birthday, Ned’s 66. Two cakes, two songs, thirty shining eyes reflecting candle light. After about an hour’s intermittent playing (I sit out the waltzes) we’re breaking up. Richard S. tells me he sees me all over town but that we’re always going opposite directions. Martha and he are the most regular of the musicians here…I guess Tom and Jeannie and Liam are, too. It is very cool to think that there are people raising their kid in a musical tradition, safely spared from ‘game boy’ and T.V. I could be wrong here, but it seems like Liam’s not a TV kid.

Half the party has chocolate icing on their faces, and sticky fingers on the fretboards. Our last tune is Kitchen Girl, and we actually sound like we know what we’re doing….

And by ten I’m home again under that magic moon.

All is right with the world. Within five miles of me, I mean. May things improve elsewhere, please?

Posted in food, Jacquie Phelan, Night

Cookies from Heaven

•October 24, 2007 • 2 Comments

It’s midnight here in Fairfax…over in the city there was Yet Another Showing of the upcoming movie, “How To Cook Your Life” by Doris Doerrie, a German film makeress of distinction. A discriminating cinematographer as Ed (Espe Brown) put it at his little speech after the movie.

I came with three new friends into S.F. Oct 23rd, a remarkably warm evening, the kind that there are only one or two of PER YEAR in this fog-bound town…we strolled the streets, crammed with diners (not the usual sight) before assuming our (reserved for S.F. Zen Center) seats.

The movie rolled…and rolled. Realized that it’s 110 minutes, probably a good idea to sip coffee beforehand, but both the times I saw it there was just the most miniscule of doze-moments. THey leave me pretty refreshed, ready for the long haul. There are numerous insights in this doc. I have seen it four times now and am still blown sideways by the idea that..when the blue jay bothers you, you open your heart, the blue jay flies in, you become the blue jay, then you are the blue jay reading (a text that had been interrupted by a blue jay’s screech).

It makes more sense coming out of Suzuki Roshi, who promised Ed Brown that he would always be around…
And coming back as archival footage in this movie certainly counts as a version of re-incarnation, n’est-ce pas?].
After the movie was over, and I was in full Afterglow mode (what else can you be in, when you ‘ve seen yrself on the silver screen for at least 120 seconds, and noticed how incredibly funny you are, and my what a lot of wrinkles there are in your expressive rubber face, girl!).

We zombie-trudged over to the car, which then bore us to Greens Restaurant, where a hundred zenbies gathered, including …a fifteen year old kid with bicycle building stories, Indonesian women charmed by buffoons, poets Michael McClure and his partner Amy Evans McClure, and Jane Hirschfield , who were standing about being…poets and sculptors. I am somewhat M. Barrast to say I had no idea about the great Amy…to me she was a personable blond woman about my age, that seemed altogether ‘plussed’ that I was clueless about her. So nice of her ol’ man to fill me in, so I could apologize about being clueless…How do people know that I’m happiest when concocting apologies? I guess they are Buddhists, god, maybe I should jump in there…is there a more soiid ‘peace’ in those walls?
(Green Gulch is tucked in two walls of green chaparral along the Pacific Coast)

Are there walls when you are suspended by some invisible string OVER everything?
Can you define a wall?
Am I a human?
OK. Get a grip.

When I heard that I was posing with the great McClure, I inclined toward him just as he leaned at me growling, “stay out of those trees”.. well, all I could reply was, “in your dreams!”

Trees are my body and my sustenance. When they die I die.

I am trying hard not to die at this moment there are a few too many things to do yet, before all my acorns fall to earth.
Where are the cookies in this story? I forgot to include ’em…the food at Greens was : wine and a few hors d’oeuvres and at the very end, stupendous hand made cookies (made by “Annie”)…which weren’t eaten up. I took a pound home, when the waiter said I could pocket some…
They’ve fuelled my week.
Photos of this openeing can be seen at Jon Pearl’s flickr site:

Posted in Film, food, Jacquie Phelan, Uncategorized

Mushroom soup–again?!

•October 23, 2007 • Leave a Comment

In which the author remembers that she nabbed four pounds of fine crimini mushrooms from “Back Door Caterers” on Saturday en route to Mother In Love’s.

And ignores them until (gasp) Monday. Plastic bags for mushrooms are a terrible idea, but luckily since I’m un-thorough as well as forgetful, the bag is totally open to the air, and the barely-alive shrooms have kept their bounce.

Chopped ’em all up this evening around five thirty, threw ’em in a pot (a find from garage sale last summer….we lost a lovely old bat whose stunning tulip patch and magnificent fig tree will have to fend alone for awhile. Old houses sit un-bought a long time hereabouts…but about the pot…It’s a forties-era Revereware stock pot. Sent my inferior one back to the thrift shop and now cherish hers, taller, stronger copper bottom, better plastic compound in the handles..Alles gute)

Er, yah the sizzling shrooms in butter/olive oil blend…rosemary salt, grind a few reps of pepper, then go excavating for…some chicken stock. Hack out a chunk from a a battle-scarred Tupperware container that’s squatting illegallly on Charlie’s freezer shelf.

Our Sunfrost freezer (=ecologically sound, shame about the wimpy capacity) is like the two Koreas. We each have our own sovereign territory, and then the middle shelf is where each of us jealously watches what gets put there. Somehow, the way the US does to other countries, I have installed bases of frozen gleanberries (and homegrown blackberries), turkey legs, and soup stock in the Zone of Debate, none of which the citoyen (=husband) asked for.

The “give and take”, rather mostly “occupy and defend” dynamism of a long term relationship.
Um. You want the soup NOW?
Right.

It needed twenty minutes for the mushrooms to saute and release their great essence..ok,
Throw in the chickenstock iceberg. Pour in a pint of super rich milk, thank you very much Delano’s. Sploosh of sherry, adjust the salt…and…oh, those big mushrooms should be blendered. OK, dinner will be two minutes late (loud noise emanates from room where blender is)…there!

Serve with two warm flour tortillas.
And a glass of the decanted wine from the Night At The Bioneers Conference. Oh…I didn’t tell you about that?
Got a minute?

Posted in Charlie Cunningham, food, How To Cook Your Life, Jacquie Phelan

Sleepless in slippers

•October 19, 2007 • 2 Comments

I like insomnia. Freelance riders have flexible hours. Usually in bed by nine, I wake up at two a helluva lot of the time, and ready to …do something.

Last night’s something was type a letter and then, without changing out of my p.j.’s, walk outside into the misty middle of the night. Crickets were chirping softly. Not one dog ruined the quiet that’s a rare treat on Dogbark Lane. No surprise, they’re all indoors now.

Our streetlights are painful-squint bright, and even the trailhead has a bright lamp illuminating a huge old building that’s nothing but a roof held up with beams. Beams which make great shadows : stripes on the steep wall of hillside . Ahead of me I can see my own shadow going through the columns. Jail. Ancient Rome. A Marin County suburb. Wonder if the panther that was seen here in August lives far away or holes up rignt in our dark canyon.

I’m aware that the possibility of a panther (we call em mountain lions, but they don’t have that highly sought-after plosive “p” preferred by persnickety poetasters) provides particular piquancy to my perambulations. Back to ….the certainty of a dampish dark walk.

I could use the flashlight to illuminate the bumpy trail, but it sits cold in my pocket. The trail is very familiar; I’ve walked and ridden it a thousand times in all conditions. Beyond the last vestige of artificial light, a bit long thin strip of sky and treetops make a faint design overhead. I feel the trail’s surface through my soft clogs. The going is slow, and my hearing sharpens. In the creekside canyon, the mist’s soft sibilance adds to the cricket backbeat as, now and then, a solid drop of water dings a puddle. Fairfax is fast asleep.

There is nothing to think about –after changing the “hello kitty!” channel. It is so peaceful I could stand in this spot forever. Several eternities shy of that, I turn around, and grope my way back.

And c-l-i-m-b into bed with a cat-burglar’s subtlety , no one the wiser.

Posted in Jacquie Phelan, Night

St Packrat at Clutter/Hoarder Conference

•October 19, 2007 • 3 Comments

IN which a certain Marin hunter-gatherer heads off (late as usual) in a CAR –a very messy, junk-strewn one at that–to get to San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral on time for…..the SFMHA’s Hoarding and Cluttering Conference 2007 – Progress Not Perfection: Improving Health, Safety and Comfort Through Harm Reduction.
(Gasp for breath)

Before putting the bike in the car –a precaution I nearly always take –I reflect, “do I really need to go? I’ve been to these conferences in other years, I know what to expect.”
“But then you can ‘t write about it” my blo-gacious half reminded me. “Besides, you need to hear stuff about ten times to absorb it anyway.”

In goes the bike, on top of the old fax machine, three sets of shoes to be donated (and one set left in car for easy running in case stuck in impractical shoes with impassable gridlock), the pretty hand made rug from the sixties, with the peace dove on it, a few plastic bottles with water (unopened), the squeegee for dusty windshield disease, warm jacket ‘in case’ and gee, you might have to read for another ten minutes to get the gist of what is in that station wagon. Allow me to spare you.
Within one mile of Taj Mahovel I could tell nobody was going to be on time for anything.

Parked at Fairfax Theatre, yanked out the Breezerbike, blew a kiss to the Bluebaru and raced off past hundreds of idling motorists at 7:50 a.m. prime commute time.

Between our place and the Golden Gate, there are roughly sixteen schools and each of them has hundreds of cars tying up traffic…I decided to hop on a bus partway there, and a bus came along in 20 minutes….thank goodness. Then when the bus got stuck in traffic, I hopt off and pedaled away.

And right on cue, the gutters of Gough street (where the cathedral sits on top of one of SF’s fabled hills) began flashing me with treasure…. : a pearlescent pink ball, the size of a baseball.

Told meself: “ignore! No plastic on board!”

Picture a helmeted 50+woman bent nearly double over her handlebars, on a rather ordinary looking bike with blue canvas panniers wagging behind…pulling hard up a heinously steep hill, which has about ten flat segments where there are cross-streets. Her nose is nearly touching the front tire, tongue nearly wrapped around the front hub. The older I get the more strange this must look. At some point I’ll have to push-bike but so far, so good.

A block after the pink ball winked at me, a nice long dark blue scarf, probably acrylic, but very soft, lay just outside the door-line of a fancy car. A rational person would leave it there (might have just fallen out of THAT car). Just one ‘pollution issue’: a blob of tahini seems to have been stomped into the scarf. My handy shopping sack can contain that disaster…

I succumb to the call of the junk, and the score is is tied one to one.
It’s 9:30 by the time I arrive, about fifteen minutes late. I sneak into a packed auditorium under the church’s main floor. At least 300 attendees are riveted on the overhead screen’s Power Point, which lists Commonly Hoarded Items
Paper (check)
Containers (check–in my case it’s baskets I”m crazy for)
Clothing (check)
Plastic bags (check)
Shoes (check)
Cardboard boxes (yep)
Food (check.. my personal favorite!)
Books (check)
Objects from other people’s trash (shhh! That’s supposed to be a secret!)
Pens, pencils (check)
Handouts, brochures (check mate)

Our speaker, Dr. Michael Tompkins, has a message about patience and understanding, without which you can scare a hoarder back into their lonely dark hole.
Technically, hoarding is aquisition of, and failure to discard a large number of posessions that appear to be useless or of limited values. Hoarding’s pathological, clutter affects millions but it’s not as lethal (real hoarders can set fire to their apartments by just allowing clutter to tumble into the kitchen burner when they’re trying to cook..

I spy Jeff Bell in the program, I didn’t know he was speaking. This year he published a very moving memoir called Replay, Rewind, Repeat, which inspired a fan note, and nascent correspondence.. At the break I told him about my book, he was very kind, then tried to tell his business partner Robin that I’m the greatest biker that ever lived. Hmmm.

The majority of attendees are therapists. Probably wrestling with the condition. When it’s time for questions, a line forms, and I lean over to the young woman near me and say, “Wait’ll you hear the Three Part Questions!”
She grinned. Maybe a veteran of these things.

See, the questioner is perishing for an audience themselves, and sometimes, given the rapt attention of the three hundred folks, it becomes the Chance To Squeak Your Mind. And since there really isn’t a two minute rule (maybe not a bad idea!), the person on stage is engaged, then begins to add words and simul-talk to what the squeaker’s saying, and pretty soon, everyone in the audience is thinkng “when is this person going to actually ask a bona fide question? The preamble snowballs into the person’s narrative, and we’re off and rolling in a collectively experienced Too Much Information moment.

I am fascinated by these, and think, hell, my writing a book is scarcely any different. The reader can put me down if I go on too much, though, and so there’s some volition there….

I have to also tell you, my gentle rider/reader, that my book has been kept under wraps for sixteen years because of the gag order my poor dad issued and silly me honored, despite the relative inocuousness of the contents.
I used to have a comic-strip illustrated T-shirt that said “Oh, no, don’t beat them. They’ll only write a book about it”

Ahem.

THe last item the street yielded up came as I wheeled away at two thirty on a clear sunny SF autumn day. It was a black nylon down jacket, the ideal thing for my ultraskinny mate who uses down jackets in the machine shop, and they become flaccid rags without any loft by the time he’s finally willing to part with them. As in: ten years of heavy wear.

He’ll be so delighted.

Only one problem. It’s black and his color’s green.

Posted in Cycling, food, Jacquie Phelan, The Book

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