Our day

Yesterday was beautiful.
Without jacket, in shortest pants and smallest socks,
we headed to the great lawn.
Read a book
Played
Checked out other babies, strollers
Got grumpy
Went home
And so to nap...

But for 30 minutes or so there, we were really chilling in the park.
How awesome it was.

love
me+him

the hippo sleeps

We'd bought the costume months ago and
hung it in the closet to wait.

My first anticipated Halloween ever.

Halloween dawns and, lo, it's a day of nap-striking
so that by the time we're dressed

for trick-or-treating on 69th street,
the pumpkins set out and candy bowls filled,

our little guy is THE GRUMPIEST hippo on the upper west and,
having fought sleep through the day,

promptly passes out,

hippo-head nodding, as soon as we're out the door.

xo

and baby hippos

c

abroad in the city/world

Marathon Morning (marathon men)

As Wyeth makes headway into his 4th month

(or 12th, depending on your thoughts/politics),

he gets daily curious-er, chattier, more ticklable and somewhat more reasonable nap-wise.

Me and Wyeth in Central Park

He is not getting happier about hats and jackets, negative on mittens.

I fear snow-suit season, the bundling hurdle to departures,

already difficult by the urban logistics of strollers and other trials.

at the DIA Beacon (arty men)

He comes along to every event we can in the hope that,

even in a dream-state of stroller-napping,

Wyeth's absorbing and

tucking away impressions

of cafes, museums, neighborhoods, zoo animals and city bustle...

on the Lower East Side (city-wandering men)

Love from

us 3

unputdownable

Wyeth is...

the bundle you can't put down.

(Don't want to,

wouldn't ever,

couldn't)

love

c

Love him so

From Wyeth, Month 2 and 3-ish

(photo by Marie Helene and Micah)

We'll eat




him up,



we love him so.

c + r, loving our Wyeth, our baby wild thing (who pooped this AM!)

Ananda Balasana (happy baby pose)

Okay, not true Happy Baby pose -
Wyeth's not got grip/coordination/recognition of own extremities to make pose plausible, but close.

Wyeth and I attended our first Mommy + Me Yoga class last Thursday. Had planned to attend for weeks but as the hour would approach, we'd be mid-nap, or meltdown or on cusp of a poop (the elusive...)

But last Thursday dawned and Wyeth and I decided that nothing was stopping us - there being no such beast as a well-rested, bowel-emptied and/but well-fed, appropriately suited Wyeth and mom.

Off we trucked.

We weren't the oldest or youngest (many tiny pink bundles, and an enormous 4 month bruiser beside us),
neither best behaved nor worst (thank god - one small pink bundle took the honor), we sat out a few poses,
had some nips at the boob,
probably spent more time prone on the blanket then asana-ing but,
all tolled,
we participated
and got our practice on.

Yes. Wyeth now has his practice god bless.
Ganesha save him from becoming a pre-potty-trained Lulu-Lemonhead.

ommmmmm
out
us

telling jokes

Here:
me and him,
kicking back on the bed,
telling funny jokes
and cracking each other up.

Love him.

c

man on the streets

of Fort Green Brooklyn last Sunday. Looking for a home...

xo
c+w

pea pod, bumblebee and my baby's smile

No, not earth shattering and certainly not well shot, but when this boy smiles...

A long stretch between postings just means more play, walks, reads and tummy time on this end of things. And, Wyeth's abandoned the sleep-nearly-all-night routine, and we're back to every 3-4 hours.

But all's well and our boy is smiling, even without prompts and rattl-y toys.

Love from
us

fascinating (?)

Riveting footage - hello baby Wyeth.

Note - this taken in Maine, almost a month ago, so Wyeth that much more eloquent these days. Watch this space for evidence.

Love and many, many hiccups.

c+w

all we need's a flat surface

On topic of moving with young one and judgments I will no longer pass:
Pre-Wyeth (PW ) was boggled and disturbed by diaper changes taking place on the floors of airports, restaurants, park benches...

The indignity!
promiscuity!
the bum-in-the-air of it!

etc.

No more. Moms and Dads - have at it.

The world doesn't provide enough nicely screened, ever-so-lightly padded, self-cleaning, non-chilly/well-ventilated waist-height flat surfaces, period.

Wyeth, Rus and I are only beginning this journey but already have christened
the wall-to-wall in Grandpop's nursing home,
backseat of MH + Micah's rental car in Maine
and set up temporary shop on beds in 3 states.

Topic for another day, same that theme:
breastfeeding on the road or, why I wish we lived in France.

Stationery love, to all

c (at rest)

much a-moving

Wyeth's logging flight time.

Monday was his 4th flight in his first 10 weeks with a week in Sea Island to visit Wyeth's great-grandpop.
Air travel post-9/11 + baby-gear proliferation + colic = CHALLENGE.
We managed, wore flip-flops, checked two bags and a loaded bassinet.
Like so much of early baby weeks - I had no idea.

Now, we're sticking for a while and I've had time to climb atop the photo mayhem.

Maine photos are here.
More recent, including Sea Island trip, are here.

And, from home base, much more catching up soon.

Love

us

all Wyeth, because

mother's prerogative

c (the mom who posts)

Even more handsomeness

Two more foundational-fellows in the small man's world:

Grandpops x 2

Grandpop Pyle

and

Grandpop Chilov

The two grandfathers -

awake and minus the sleeping off-spring -

seen here discussing Wyeth's future

over popovers at Jordan Pond House.

Feeling my son's in fine hands...

xo

c

Handsome men

From Maine 2009

Gratuitous handsomeness, sorry.

That's dad Rus and Wyeth, very briefly down for the count, on the couch in Maine.

Feel the love + mutual adoration...

reveling in it all,

c

Little family on vacation

Yes, we did make it -

much more soon.

Love

c+w+r

Mt Desert, or bust

Approaching Mt Desert

We're going north, babe-in-arms.

Packed too much? You bet. Sure to have too many, say, onesies and completely not enough, or wrong altogether, of some other baby necessity. Worried about the milk through security, worried about stroller/car seat logistics, worried about melt-down en route...

next post - many miles north (I hope)

c

we hang, often

Wyeth and I hang out, all the time. 

There's a lot of:

inadequate focus for sustained reading, 

insufficient window for a phone call, 

small baby between me and keyboard so can't do that 

and head too bobbly to not support 

so can't simultaneously eat a yogurt either

time.

Like half-day and a half-night's worth sometimes.

Which is fine by me.

Sometimes I sing (Jerusalem and One Tin Soldier in current rotation).

Sometimes I read aloud (his Hungry Caterpillar, Pat the Bunny and mine, Sum)

Sometimes we listen to NPR, or Big Band, or Donavon, or classical.

More often, we're quiet, rocking, gazing and wondering and days disappear.

Love

c + w

Cousin Hudson

Hudson Brown, circa August 2006 -

Seal Harbor, ME

PW (pre-Wyeth), I knew of newborns:

to swaddle and shush,

to document blow-out bowl movements and waterworks,

the un-holdability of a bathing baby,

the what and why of tummy time,

of colic's ominous threes (at age 3 weeks, 3 hours a day, at least 3 days a week...)

weathered with the night mantra that this too shall pass,

and the heart and soul crushing love for a tiny being -

I learned alongside Wyeth's cousin Hudson 3 years ago

and apprenticing to Hudson's grandmother Lynn Brown.

(Photos here. Hudson's blog continues here.)

Hudson Brown, circa May 2009

Colorado

Hudson's now 3 and the cousins will meet soon in Maine.

Where Wyeth will observe, and Hudson (I hope) will demonstrate,

the why's and wherefore's of blueberry picking,

and nuances of being a fine small boy.

I see glimmers of Hudson, and shadings of Lindsey too, in our little man...

Love

c

(wishing Linds was here)

!kung vs. iCal

simple context: Wyeth 'neath the tree

NB. A "technical", somewhat jargon-y, post. 

Slow through pregnancy, by Wyeth's arrival I'd ingested a stack of baby how-to books and announced to any who'd listen (Dad and Sarah, Wyeth) that we'd be working with a schedule. Yes, 8 days old was young but a schedule's a schedule and Wyeth would benefit from this early rigor, be the better adult for the clarity of his daylight hours. 

I encouraged Rus to read up on variations on the schedule, in case we'd missed some nuance.

When Wyeth had missed his nth morning activity slot because he was napping/pooping/fussing, I switched over to the more touchy-feely, Happiest Baby on the Block.  Harvey Karp cites other cultures, notably the !Kung of the Kalahari, as time-eternal examples of mom & babe grooving into a primordial rhythm of breast and sleep and lovin' that transcended time clocks. !Kung babies don't distinguish a night feed from a whatever. What The Baby Whisperer admonishes as "snacking" is the !Kung babe m.o. in the blissfully small realm of his mom's chest, breath...

bigger + messier context: Wyeth's room

Lo, I realize I am neither. 

I will not, as Baby Whisperer demands, establish a schedule for the next 6 months so iron-clad that the world, and Wyeth with it, must contort to align, but neither will I wear my dear baby night and day, forgoing the personal space of us both.

Neither !Kung nor scheduler we will be. Instead? Some very messy, un-schedulable combo of the two.

With love and the day ahead.

c+w

Happy Wyeth's-a-month

I don't doubt that other people have cute babies...
(but)

love c
and contemplating-jade-plant this morning, Wyeth

Super-Abundance

"But the child? Where did it come from? Why? Who was it?

He was quite unable to grasp this,
unable to accustom himself to the idea.
It seemed to him something excessive,
a super-abundance,
and it took him a long time to get used to it."

from Anna Karenina

c
love c, and r too - both blessed

Newell Convers (NC), Howard et al.

An NC Wyeth illustration

The name:
"WYETH" (not Wyatt and not "with" as by the pediatrician's assistant).

Rus and I culled family history, too many opinions and 5 million plus popular baby names to end up with this one. (More on journey to middle name "NICHOLAS" in a future post).

Why? Reasons including:

• Strong, silent name/type.
• "Would I take a call/accept a date/loan money to/share a ride with ________ Chilov". In the case of "Wyeth" - resounding yes.
• "Wyeth, please choose your team for dodgeball/math camp/nap time" and only our little fellow steps forward, not a herd including Wyeth W, Wyeth R, Wyeth with blond hair etc.
• Howard Pyle, possibly (and, for here, conveniently) a vaguely linked ancestor of mine, taught painting and illustration to NC Wyeth (and Maxfield Parrish, among others) at the turn of the century.
• PIRATES, COWBOYS, CASTAWAYS, DEERSLAYERS, MOHICANS, KING ARTHUR, SCOTTISH CHIEFS and a small deer - all illustrated by NC Wyeth and all about as "boy" as they come.
• Rus + I visited the Brandywine River Valley, then Rockland Maine - two prominent Wyeth family sites, and absorbed, were inspired by, took pictures...

NC Wyeth in studio

Howard Pyle in his studio

And, lastly, because Wyeth looked liked Wyeth (and not Howard) from the very start.

love

c, and the aptly named Wyeth, and father R

Where's Wyeth?

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

The dreaded raised fist -

universal calling card

of the unswaddle-able.

love c + r + w

who loves him?

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

Perhaps...
his grandparents?

(Chilov grandparents en route - they love him too.)

Wyeth at rest

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

Wyeth's mini-repertoire varies only in coloring/consistency, duration, decibel, ferocity and sweetness.
Lovableness, constant.

Post-nap stretches too. Freed of swaddling, Wyeth looses sleep from his system, re-acquaints with limbs and nudges the digestive track into high gear.

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

His pal in this leisurely transition state: sleep sheep. (Sleep Sheep plays whale sounds. My baby finds these familiar?)

love from the supremely lovable
mr wn chilov

Wyeth's-eye view

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

"One day son, all this..."

Belatedly, happy 4th from Wyeth et al.

In angelic perfection

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

Bathed, fresh Carter's kimono top, possibly empty diaper, milky breath...

What's finer?

xo
c+w+r

Wyeth's home team

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

Not stealing the little man's thunder -
impossible -
just to show supporting cast.

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

with love to all from
c + r + w

Wyeth-a-Day

(Calendar to come...)

Voila Wyeth being weighed - moments before beaming parents told he'd gained an ounce on his birth weight.

Our baby's fattening.

7 lbs (baby)

and gaining...

This breast-feeding thing's a topic for a whole 'nother post.

Love and mother's milk.

c+r+w

Behold these limbs

From yesterday's knowledge input:

"Under the age of three months, babies have no control over their arms and legs...when they're overtired, babies become more hyper - their arms and legs jerk or wave in the air when they're exhausted. Babies don't even realize the limbs are attached to him.

As far as he is concerned, those moving objects are part of the environment - they distract and disturb him."

from, The Baby Whisperer, Tracy Hogg

love c

At home in the world

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

Here slumbers Wyeth (N.C.) in the patented "double lock-down swaddle" - our weak defense against the small man's wily, wriggly, ways. When we're pushed to the 5-layer swaddle we'll need another solution.

Our small man had a great first week in the world: beguiled nurses, charmed doctors and slayed his family and new friends with his winning ways and well-held head. All bodes well for Wyeth-week 2, the sequel (except with greater motor control + recognition of own limbs).

Can't imagine what he's got up his too-long sleeves.

Love from the home front.

c + w + r

Wyeth Nicholas Chilov

From Wyeth Nicholas Chilov Arrives

It's official, Wyeth's with us.



At 10:04pm, June 23 2009, a little man of huge character, remarkable looks, vigorous vital signs, long limbs, exceptional extremities and an already-adoring public, arrived.

WYETH NICHOLAS CHILOV
(6lbs, 15 oz)

(photos here)

to Ruslan Vladimirov Chilov + Courtney Pyle Chilov

who could not be more smitten.

Love from us 3
c + r + w

Bulgarian or bust (or babble...)

Rus turned 40 Saturday - with dignity, gravitas and a few drinks.
There wasn't much I could give him (having given hand in marriage, in two months a son...) so wrapped-up "Teach Yourself Bulgarian" and promised unflagging study of his mother tongue.

New favorite phrase:
Корабът ми на въздушна възглавница е пълен със змиорки
(Korabãt mi na v'zdyšna vãzglavnica e pãlen sãs zmiorki)

(My hovercraft is full of eels)

love
linguist
mrs. c

Happy Birthday little man Hudson

Three years ago today, the miracle boy entered our lives.

Hudson continues to be a thriving, all-you-could-hope-for, dyed-in-the-wool boy of a being and I'm (juice) toasting him and his remarkable dad and hoping their birthday cake is sweet and the year(s) ahead all blue sky.

Much love + birthday hug,

(aunt) C

R & I, on April 10, wed

At the City Clerk's, we wait....

Then (wed), exit amidst rose petals (thank you MH!) and so many great friends and family.

Onwards drinks and beautiful food at Matsugen (stealth-organized by Christian with help of John + Daniel), brief stop home for re-group, change out of wedding coat, and, at 6:30, to Barcibo for celebration, cakes + toasts into the (wedded) night.

Such an amazing day, so many people to thank and tip of the bouquet to City Clerk's office for most memorable launch.

Love to all, more photos to follow (HUGE thanks to Micah + Marie-Helene for capturing whole day via still, video, large format negatives - doing work of a camera crew of 15). 

Some photos here.

C (Mrs. C) + R
and the little man who attended it all

HAPPY BIRTHDAY dear Linds

Lindsey would be 36 today.



She'd be mother of an almost 3-year old, maybe there'd have been another one in the meantime or, to join the crowd (we're all doing it), one on the way.
She'd be alive to enjoy life in the new administration, alive to witness lilacs that'll be here soon, alive to make plans with...



I miss her more than ever.
I hope they're pulling out all the stops to celebrate her up where she is.

Love you Linds.
love
c

(So many great photos of Linds so narrowed the field to Linds + a few of our/her/my favorite men : ) Biased, but my blog...)

Packing them (HIM) up, out...

by Jill Freedman (who didn't take a donkey photo)

Buoyed by the massive power force that is a group of unintroduced citizens crowded into a gym-ish room and waiting (ecstatically, chattily, peacefully) in tangle small lines to enter toilet stall-size black tents with the worried expressions as they pull the flap aside that once within they'll forget the instructions for lever-pull-direction and inadvertently not only elect the woman from Alaska but possibly undo everyone else's good work/votes in the process.

Or so I feared.But didn't, I think, do - lever thing makes me as nervous as red light/green light buzzer tests from kindergarten.

I voted in the west village Gay/Lesbian/Transgender Center. A few months back I walked by it as it was hosting a party, celebrating some theme that embraced all costumes including lots of backless leather chaps. All bottoms clothed in booths today.

Hope everyone exercised their inalienable right too - I swear it's an awesome thing. And claim your free Starbucks coffee - just tip the barrista.

Love + so long elephants

And we ran

I came late in life to running, later to organized running and as racer, am days old.


3 weeks ago, after a hideous, hot, hung-over mid-Sunday 7 mile run along a dusty (turtle-dotted) canal during which I hadn't died, I decided to be a bit more serious. And so began a double-time training that culminated just a bit before 11am on Saturday morning with the finish of a half marathon, meters beyond Tavern on the Green in Central Park.

Ruslan, Nadine, John, Anka and I ran Grete's Gallop (Norwegian-themed, either to specifically shout-out multiple marathon-winning Norwegian woman? a Nordic bottler? or so that earlier kids event could be called Trolls Stroll.)


I learned:

Late again, now I grasp: the payoff of the day-in-day-out of just showing up and doing. I began running (c/o R) a few years ago. The first hundred runs weren’t that fun, the afterglow was the thing. Much more recently and without hoopla, the runs just got, well, simpler. All of a sudden it wasn't the labored breathing, the cursing of far lampposts and second-guessing of miles – now strength issued from some un-introduced core being and only my legs' capacity and bouts of tedium were imposing limits.

I no longer feared hills.
I crossed the running-for-an-hour threshold.
I found stillness in the forward motion.
I felt the near (working on it) limitless strength of my own body to just go, and then go on some more.
I joined - first time in forever - a group and was buoyed by it, didn't chafe or become malformed by the contact.
And I wore tiny pink shorts amidst thousands, and would again.

Thank you to friends, Dad (fellow soloist) and Sarah for support + spirit and Nadine for pushing protein drinks and, by example, okaying chocolate too.

love + runs
c

a small sale

Paper pulp, Jaipur INDIA 10.06

Sold a photo via Flickr!

(for use by a British company to illustrate the recycling well, cycle - paper to pulp to paper to the nth.)

Modern age-ahoy...

c

Zoom decorating

From Grandpop's Apt Marsh's Edge

Last week was the speedy culmination of a 3-week soap-dish-to-chandelier decorating project for Grandpop. Having decided to leave the Sea Island house and join friends/community/security of a retirement home, and staying in an assisted living apartment there in the meantime, Grandpop had a few weeks to make his new apartment habitable.

I ordered furniture apartment-unseen (worked from floor plans and a few dark photos) and tried to budget along the wavery line between IKEA and Conrans/Restoration Hardware so Grandpop would be cozy but not suspect a brand new/aspirational lifestyle had been bought on his dime.
My Grandpop is 92 after all and not - probably - immortal. Or hankering for a new look/life c/o coffee table.

Grandpop reports that he's hosted friends
Made morning hot chocolate
and begun his further-feathering.

(some pictures)

C

Single beds and bathtubs

My Maine bedroom - sea below and full-size bed as of just this year.

Slowly, so slowly, the house of almost 100 years stretches, wakens, observes that maybe now's the time for little changes.

My Maine bath - view and bucket hair-rinse.

Next up: non-antique bedcovers and knives that cut.

From the porch

this view

Maine maine MAINE

approaching Bar airport, tiny plane (everyone's an aisle and window)

I love this place and would have written sooner to report that
but the whole point of being here
is to be HERE
and not posting,
though that's the distracting temptation..

Fortunately though, not distracting enough and so have had my
halcyon days of blueberries, hikes, popovers, contemplate the waters and book-drops-to-floor naps.

this my view when I sea glass

running man

Before I left the city there were errands -
some took place in the rain.

At the corner of Houston + Broadway, the rains broke and I took shelter with the fruit vendor (bought a banana).

c - who stayed dry for the price of a banana

Olana, that was

The night before

The Olana Summer Party - was...

(saris and salwars and kurtas and men in pajamas and jodhpurs and get-ups ethnic/eastern)

Some last-minuteness to the set-up but party a success (not just my estimation):
Turning away people (bottom-line good but tough news for those who'd left farmhouses counties away dressed in funny Indian outfits for the party's theme only to be sent right back home, now salwaars drooping, bindis sliding...)
The dance-floor never emptied,
Guests found the food (last year's had been fast-moving tray-targets of too few passed hors-d'ouevres),
Guests liked the food (refills, fast-emptied vats of saag-paneer, curry stains)
Folks appeared happy and mingling, befriending and proud to be on a hill-top over the Hudson on a summer-eve,
It didn't rain though it had rumbled and did big-time Sunday),
Olana itself looked magnificent
and I imagine Mr. Church was pleased?

(Able + Africia, arrive via long/dramatic entrance route)

Anyway - it happened and I'm relieved and I would have reported all of this earlier except now in Sea Island, visiting Grandpop, and computer access has been a shifting thing...

Love to all,

c (cloistered)

Still there

Too caught up in my own small stuff of late and trying to live via Blackberry and, meantime, PACT has continued on with their remarkable and effective work in Burma.

Distributing clean water, safe delivery kits, deploying doctors, collecting and administering grants, helping to locate lost relatives and - this one gets me - we delivered 300 dignity kits containing basic clothing and undergarments for women (including personal female hygiene products).

Read reports of their progress here

A first-person account by Pact's Deputy Country Representative in Myanmar, Erica Tubbs here.

Funds are needed more than ever as PACT moves into recovery and rebuilding work...
so consider donating here.

Love to all

c

shift, shift again

This wasn't planned (decisions-under-fire school) but lo, there it was: the very big apartment, empty and me now bursting out of my (other, soon former) Hudson apartment. 2,500 sq. feet of STUFF, plus some barn contents were temporaruly shoe-horned into 600 sq. feet, low ceilings.

This last week has been scrubbing of many-tenants'-worth of life + cooking (Easy Off as floor cleaner), painting over previous tenant's visions of blue and preparing for second move in 30 days this Friday.



Many fine points to the new place, including a small guest room/study, 2 doors down from Mexican Radio (serving till 11), huge farmhouse kitchen sink for bathing dogs, babies?, high ceilings, back porch/deck over looking jungly garden and a carriage house...

c - still moving, soon at rest

Olana (goes) Indian

Spiked lassis + Hudson Valley views + Moorish fantasy-estate setting + sitar =

Olana Summer Indian Party.
(sign up now, ready the sari/salwaar)

c - anticipating

celtics

Raised on Bird and Mchale - never a sports person but a Boston person so impossible not to care.

c -

the journey

The trip -

leaving this



arriving to this:


c - space of 2 hours

stair

Many small towns have auction houses - Hudson has Stair Galleries. Like a country auction, including cast of regulars (local dealers) and you can fit a preview into afternoon's errands.

Unlike though in most other ways. No fly-bitten chipped Victorian, no cardboard box lots of campaign buttons, no farm equipment. I went by yesterday and had Stair's two floors almost to myself.

To preview for Saturday's auction: ancient persian gold arm cuffs, Doug Hall photos, Khmer buddhas, Rauschenburg collage on silk, Barcelona chairs, Bugatti cabinet (with tassles), Islamic incantation bowls (catalog: "used for casting magic spells"), dogan mali mask, zeppelin memorabilia...

dogan mask/me

c -

peacock-keepers of germantown

Can't make up:

This man-made, hand-hewn labor of love + folly sits on route 9G, south from Hudson, just before Germantown turn-off, shy of the gas station trifecta.

An Indian husband and wife team have given us:

Indian cafe + landscaping + enormous cage of at least 5 peacocks (less on pecked to death by dominant white male), plus some fancy hens.

c - admiring

meantime, wedding

Sam and Laura's wedding yesterday - gorgeous and best damn dj-lp dancing by Scott Anderson.

Photo: pre thunder storm

and we're off

No right way to say goodbye.
Have spent the last 10 days absenting myself, sweeping my footsteps from my house. Till there's no trace - that's how it's meant to hand over afterall, trace-less.

I did a decent job of that but god it's been tough. Or layered. You sweep away one and lo you're still, annoyingly, not gone from the closet, the corner.

(I sold the house, closing this last Wednesday)

More when I'm not box-battered and bat-escaped.

xx
c

Wasp-waisted in headdresses

Mrs. Arthur Henry Paget (1853-1919), 1891 (Costume of Cleopatra originally worn to 1875 Delmonico Ball, NYC)

Two shows at The NY Historical Society running til mid-August.
ALLURE OF THE EAST: ORIENTALISM IN NEW YORK, 1850–1930
to inform and introduce some of the collectors, and the city scene that inspired the main exhibition: WOVEN SPLENDOR FROM TIMBUKTU TO TIBET: EXOTIC RUGS AND TEXTILES FROM NEW YORK COLLECTORS


Tajik Bridal Veil, 18th Cen.
Besides being beyond bling, what's intriguing (to me) is this piece contrasted with our NY lady above. The bridal veil has a small mesh cut-out in the upper part of the veil, for the bride's eyes. Otherwise, she would be - I imagine - a visually vibrant but otherwise silent spectator at her own wedding. Her voice, I guess, the piece itself which she would have helped to design and create - a visual roar of pink peacocks.

And we contrast to Mrs. Paget doing the Eastern Lady thing, NYC late 19th century style. Imagine if the lady had actually gone native? Emerged from her carriage the night of the ball just a visually stunning but shape-indeterminate Tajik lady, for the night...


The show's pieces are stunning - ikats, Bakhtiarian camel bags, Turkmen camel knee-covers, Geija baby carriers, Ottoman silks, Tibetan Tiger Pelt rugs, Persian horse covers, prayer rugs from wherever there's not enough room on the mosque floor, Uzbek felt mats, Ikat chapan robes. Riotous colors from sand-colored lands, magnificent patterns punctuated with intimate little pattern "riffs" of the lady weaver - a section of abstraction amidst the historically-informed larger piece, a woman's signature.

c - not dressed as Tajik bride, not today

Hudson town, weekend with Dad, the lady who watches over

Dad walks Hudson shore (train below)

Dad came to visit and Saturday afternoon, after a magnificent storm, we walked the town.




The lady with the view


Watching over all of us, and Hudson.


c (back in the city)


Union Street, greening through the window

(and this just in: Hudson in the WSJ)

sun's path

Manhattanhenge: the celestial wonder when the sun aligns with Manhattan's grid.
On Friday (and just after sunset Thursday), the sun will center itself on our east/west grid
so that if you stand far east on a main cross-town avenue (14th, 23rd et al)
the sun will fall from view as if cued by a divine, city-loving, God.

And the Burmese junta has agreed to give visas to allow in aid workers, (even while extending Suu Kyi's house arrest). Too slow, too cruel but there are still miracles, even in the confines of our modern world.

(look to the heavens).

c

Listen closely

Burmese boys, Palong Village, Shan State 1997

I can't understand why so many people would be hurt at one time, how the horrendous earthquake in Sichuan Province can happen even as Burma still reels from Nargis and reports of contemptible corruption and inhuman politics roll in.

Our hearts are very big. The responses I've received, the direct support that's gone to PACT, have been deeply empathetic - people desperate to help, eager to be of any service...So much compassion.

One of the cruelest things Burma's ruling junta has done is to shut the Burmese people off from the world's compassion. Reports from China are harrowing, but they are reports. In allowing foreign journalists simply to be there and report individual stories, the Chinese government has done a two fold good for its people: the world knows the extent of the damage and so can help in kind, and the Chinese people are being heard and this very basic human right to a voice is bedrock in this time of unbelievable crisis.

The Burmese people not only do not have a voice, but they have, largely, no sense at all that the world is aware, is caring.

Criminal.

An unnamed (for his safety) BBC journalist in Burma's delta region yesterday reported that the Burmese were resilient, few complaining and those that did warily, they were friendly but went about their business, resigned to surviving. He warned that the more serious trouble still lay ahead for the country - the aftermath so much worse than the storm itself - malaria, dengue, the loss of some enormous percent of Burma's rice paddies and so starvation...But he also said, with a still severity I was surprised by:

"There will be some reckoning."

Please continue to follow the news from Burma and in whatever way you can, find a means of hearing its people.

c

Meanwhile in McCain's camp

There's too much to take in - sleep, switch stations, choose music over news...

I almost missed this, a recent McCain hire to run his convention resigning, so quietly...

Why?

Something about his firm representing Burma's military junta/government...

"Mr. Goodyear is the chief executive and a founding partner of the DCI Group, which has offices in Washington and Phoenix. He offered his resignation after Newsweek reported that his firm had been paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent the junta."

c - trying not to lift too many rocks...

UN halts aid

Very latest c/o the AP

UN halts aid to Myanmar after junta seizes supplies

A U.N. official says the World Food Program is suspending cyclone aid to Myanmar because its government seized supplies flown into the country.

He says the WFP has no choice but to suspend the shipments until the matter is resolved.

WFP spokesman Paul Risley said Friday that all "the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated." The shipment included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits.

Risley said it is not clear why the material was seized.

Day 6

The Burmese government is still banning all foreign aid workers from delivering aid directly to the Burmese people. They have accepted some aid from "trusted" neighbors India and China but all other teams, trained to deal with flooding and its aftermath (contagion, poisoned drinking water, the corpses etc.) are denied visas.

Listen to any report (the BBC is doing an excellent job but depending largely on accounts from Burmese living outside Burma and receiving information from family members still there) and the impossibility of the situation is mounting, unprecedented. For a ruling government to not act in its own populations' best interests to this extent, when hundreds of thousands of lives are being lost, is beyond appalling. That level of paranoid xenophobia is criminal.

World leaders are deciding what our response will be, what our responsibilities are.

In the meantime, PACT remains one of the few aid organizations with teams in Burma, with access and directly able to deliver aid where it's needed.

So please support PACT's efforts.
The Burmese people must know there is concern, the world has not stood by once again.

Thank you and please spread the word.

c

Villages vanished

From: Erica Tubbs
Sent: Thu 5/8/2008 11:32 AM
To: Newhall, Sarah

Our assessment team came back from the hardest hit areas of Bogale and Laputta yesterday and immediately brought home the message that food and clean water were essential.

They cut their mission short to ensure that the response could be ramped up immediately and that supplies could begin to flow. As we sat in the dark office without electricity listening to their report- perhaps we were all half-way still reflecting on our own tragedies. No water, favorite trees and gardens destroyed, houses without roofs or in the case of many in the Yangon office entire trees in the middle of our family rooms.

But then came the quieter stories. The stories mentioned in the hall or to individuals in a whisper. Stories about entire villages vanished. About the boats that couldn't pass the small tributaries because of floating bodies. About the man who threw himself in front of the vehicle as the team was leaving Bogale shouting "please hit me! I don't want to live anymore!"

And then we began to realize... the scope of this tragedy can never be about a single sorrow. It's just too big.

Burma: photos of the impact, the impacted

More of PACT's photos from Burma are here

PACT is on the ground in Burma, please help their relief efforts with your donation.

c

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

ts eliot, from Four Quarters

Burma - help

The news from Burma, what little can get out, is appalling - it is now estimated that over 100,000 have died due to the cyclone. Rangoon is without power, many regions remain - days since the cyclone - still submerged, there isn't adequate drinking water and petrol is in short supply. Despite this, Rangoon's airport sits practically empty - most relief teams have not been issued permits and planes filled with disaster-relief experts and desperately needed supplies remain grounded, the Burmese government will not allow them to land.

Sarah Newhall (my step-mother) runs PACT - a global community building, aid organizing and community-level impacting organization of enormous reach and integrity. PACT also happens to have been working in Burma for over a decade, with a number of development projects already flourishing including HIV/AIDS prevention and micro-lending programs specifically in the delta areas hit hardest by the cyclone. While the access of most organizations remains, for the time being, blocked by the military government, PACT is in place and so uniquely positioned to truly effect change and implement the aid immediately.

Please contribute what you can to PACT's initiative and pass this post along to friends and colleagues so that they may do the same. (For PACT's tracking purposes, please mention this blog.)




(In Burma in 1997, I trekked outside government boundaries into Shan State; I spent time in a Palong village. The Burmese were to a man/woman/child: kind, hopeful, resourceful – they stole my heart. The tragedies they've known, perpetrated by their own people - ignored by the world, have wrought a nation of all-too-human souls. Demanding aid without implementers, the Burmese government has essentially charged us as global citizens to get step in. The Burmese people must know the world cares deeply, and right the wrongs of our historical inaction.)

(the flowers)

Fields of them, hands not big enough to make the hug-span bouquet I would have liked.

Now I wish for wildflower fields adjacent to the west village.
The green market seems thin, their bundles stingy...

c - pollen 'neath my nails

(have begun a site of my photos, that will soon include writing too. It's here: www.courtneypyle.com)

big sky (out there)

Returned last night from this place, though I can't believe it.

I can be here (city, evening coming on, npr rattling away, small of super's smoke as he re-bags the trash in the courtyard),

36 hours ago have been there (uncle tommy's ranch, 1-1/2 hours from Boise where, this time in the evening, me, huffing up the hill, gathering lupine...)

c - grateful for it all

Get your poem

Another slow-to-post one, this one time-sensitive, April-specific:

Just a few days left to sign up for a poem-a-day email from Borzio press.

To tide you till that kicks in, your Friday one:

...

I sink back upon the ground, expecting to die. A voice speaks out of my ear, You are not
going to die, you are being changed into a zebra. You will have black and white stripes
up and down your back and you will love people as you do not now. That is why you
will be changed into a zebra that people will tame and exhibit in a zoo. You will be a
favorite among children and you will love the children in return whom you do not love
now. Zoo keepers will make a pet of you because of your round, sad eyes and musical
bray, and you will love your keeper as you do not now. All is well, then, I tell myself
silently, listening to the voice in my ear speak to me of my future. And what will happen
to you, voice in my ear, I ask silently, and the answer comes at once: I will be your
gentle, musical bray that will help you as a zebra all your days. I will mediate between
the world and you, and I will learn to love you as a zebra whom I did not love as a
human being.

David Ignatow from New & Collected Poems, 1970-1985

(Good prose poem place to start is Great American Prose Poems, Poe to Present, edited by David Lehman)

c - in rhyme

Wedded rocks, and not yet said

Wedded Rocks, Rolfe Horn

There's been so much going on, why not start amidst, the links will come.

This is not my photo, I saw it at a gathering of photo galleries in the city a few weeks back.

There's a story there, there are stories everywhere and their not-telling is making me anxious.

Same anxious of when I was 7 and mom and dad started me and Linds on diaries and all of a sudden it would be Sunday, last record the previous Monday, and the enormity of what needed recording paralyzed (little) me.

Bird by bird.

So - a photo from a show I've seen.

And here we go.
Birds to follow.

c - amidst the flock

Satyagraha

Sadhu, Pashupatinath Khatmandu feb 2005

Mostly I'm a musical ostrich these days, but this found me.

Philip Glass + Ghandi + Tolstoy + Tagore + Bhagavagita + opera (+ puppets in the current performance) = Satyagraha.

I don't think I'll be able to get a ticket to see it, the Met's run is over soon and sold out, but I've got the CD...

c - listening

Lindsey's 35th

March 30th - Linds' birth launched spring.

She left when she was 33, two weeks after that birthday, so it's two years gone. Linds and I were a year and 10 months apart, which means (quick math) I was almost 35 when Linds died.

Which feels then like some strange circle closing.

Which means?

What I gather from the circle described by two sisters turning 35, is simply that she's still here, out there, and as constant as she ever was. Her own birth constellation of Breach Candy Hospital, Ward ___, March 30th 1973 (our constellations are neighboring, in the born-in-Bombay-in-the-early-70's celestial district) remains part of the universal memory, no more or less fixed than mine and eternal. And in a way I hadn’t expected, Lindsey is growing up with me now and we're in step except she keeps pace on a cosmic scale, her perspective vaster and so she's watching over us as she grows in lightness.

In this photo (a visit to Oyster Bay and Mimi) Linds has a sureness and a calmness I like. I imagine what more years would have brought. I think that if I listen maybe I can hear, maybe Hudson hears.

Happy happy birthday Linds. Don't fall asleep in the cake.

Love
ctp

Dad, Liberia, a school and Linds

Dad was in Liberia just now. Among other projects and reasons for being there (dad always has many), he was visiting the school far outside of Monrovia that's due to open this spring, and in the name of my sister - Lindsey.

It takes hours and a solid seat to reach the site - one of the reasons the school is so needed, so necessary there - off the grid puts it precisely where it can best serve the unserved, or under-served, school children. Liberia is building itself and schools are topping its agenda - president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is making them priority.



Much more to say but for now I start with introductions, and leave you with Dad's amazing album of the journey here.

C - with so many men to toast tonight (and an early flight to catch)

Scheduling (could be fine)

I leave tomorrow (so early it's a crime I'm blogging at all) for the Dominican Republic and a week with my aunt Snooze, uncle John, cousin Susanna and cousin Susanna's husband Keith.

Which I mention only because there's a lot here to be caught up and I don't know the extent of internet down there. (Or if I should even care, really, and be that person wandering with laptop aloft seeking signal by the pool bar.)

So posts may be spotty, or partial, or not at all.

C - letting you know before I go

Visiting Grandpop

Last week I visited my Grandpop in Georgia - this 92 year old gentleman with the serious expression but smiles in him. Grandpop lives in a house at the edge of a marsh on 5 mile strip of land, connected to state +country by a causeway (guarded by gatekeepers) and called Sea Island.

Grandpop and Grandma (at his side for more than 65 of his 92 years) were the steady center around which our expanding, contracting and occasionally splintering family moved. But despite Grandpop and my shared 36 years, we'd never had the one-on-one time we did this trip.

Conversationally, we criss-crossed the familiar ground of sacred family stories (thesecond Bombay Christmas when Santa came on the camel) and re-sketched the family's characters. We talked of the present: Hillary, the elections (Grandpop, an independent centrist I suppose, will back McCain - a "Navy man"), his upcoming trip to Portugal, where to dine Monday and what kind of sandwich we'd get at Subway on the way home from the hospital (and had I noted where it was when I drove in?)

Mornings I visited the hospital with The NY Times, Brunswick Paper and mail, then left him to nap around lunch and returned by 6:30 for bedside cocktails and the news. Grandpop had sherry in a sippy cup with straw that Susanna smuggled in, I had red wine and we snacked from a tin of cocktail nuts that sat on the tray table between us. Drinks with Grandpop – I have never, yet, felt more grown up. It was heady and it was profound.

And the reason I'm only now starting to write about the visit is I haven't managed to define that "profound". Amidst my mid-life seeking stage (hearkening back to adolescent existential phase but with more empirical evidence, and in english) I'd hoped Grandpop had the meaning of it all wrapped and ready for me to take home. If I could hear it from this man I respect, have known my life, whose values are mine (but finer) - that would be something.

But we didn't get there, though I did learn a little more about Quakers, what he thinks of hospital-sent chaplains and his favorite city. When I picked up Grandpop Saturday, stopped for our Subway mixed cheese and ham sandwich and brought him home, he was a fragile thing I helped from the car. It was me - inadequate to this, not equipped for this level of responsibility, the minding of our family's don.

Grandpop napped most of the first day. He moved from the couch to the deck and fell asleep by the pool with his hands resting across his chest and his head fallen forward. I worried he'd sunburn and rustled about with my shells to wake him. I made plates of lunch for us - the sandwich split, chips and arnold palmers - then he napped some more.


And we made little patterns around one another as he gained strength, returned to his desk to sort papers, received guests and check-in with friends. Every morning I woke early and worried for as long as I didn't see him and his door remained closed. He resumed preparing his morning hot chocolate and his exercises. I went to the beach to run and collect sand dollars and Grandpop napped.

So there it is. Not a big tale and no moral. I flew out Tuesday, leaving Grandpop with Aunt Snooze and John. He now has a woman coming in a few hours a few days a week to help with errands and housework. No one could sell him on around-the-clock - to abdicate his privacy. He's toured the local nursing home but prefers (adamantly) to stay in his home and keep to his independence and patterns. I see that I would be the same, I would want to hold onto life as I lived it, the spaces familiar and still visited by memories and ghosts. I wouldn't seek group outings or meal plans.


On his wrist Grandpop wears an alert bracelet with a button that, I guess, contacts a medical team. Worrying he'd fall again (which had landed him in the hospital), one of us (delicately) asked the obvious :

"What if you fall and can't hit the button and you're alone, no one to hear?"

"Well," said Grandpop, "then that's that isn't it?"

He had a twinkle and the start of a smile when he said it. And he made us laugh.

C – sending love to my grandfather, and toasting his sippy cup

Mrs. Stephenson's Hot Chocolate Sauce

Because it's lousy bitter and I'm going south to see my grandfather tomorrow:
my grandmother's recipe for Hot Chocolate Sauce. Grandma would have podcasted had this had been her era.

The recipe arrived last week, like a thin blue airmail letter that folded into its own envelope - an unexpected email from an old family friend who thought to copy me.
(worrying I'd one evening sit before a large bowl, vanilla barely visible beneath its cloak of chocolate and, tasting, declare there was something uncannily familiar...)



Mrs. Stephenson's Hot Chocolate Sauce,
Requested by Judy Manley in VT (house in this month's Martha Stewart mag)

Combine in heavy sauce pan & stir till dissolved:
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 T. butter (or oleo--from the '50s)
4 oz Chocolate (Baker's unsweetened dark)
1 cup heavy cream

Boil these without stirring for 7 minutes Add 1 tsp vanilla
Keep hot in double boiler

.....

c - wishing sweet dreams and about-face return to the era of recipe cards

Wild Dogs + Anatolian shepherds

Report from Diyarbarker -

Besides the good news that they're well (and so reporting), this takes you MH + Micah-side:


"The wild dogs are like anatolian shepherds
and try and herd our car."


C - in a land of leashes

Coffee in Diyarbakr

For MH + Micah in Turkey:
Men you might meet
in Diyarbakr.

(buy the first round).

Safe travels.

C

English

“Diamonds decorated jewelry,
which was majestically stirring tremors of sweetness
and pleasantries deep down in the realms
of the future brides seemed to have been transformed
into storms of unabated passions…

Thrust of foreign ladies was showing unbound curiosity
and eagerness with which they were capturing
every glimpse of glittering magic of the
jewelry and imprisoning mesmerizing power
of these sets of ornaments.”

Review of jewelry exhibition in Islamabad in The Nation (India)

This is just lightness for a gray day -
a reminder of the abundance of our tongue...

c - given to stirring tremors of sweetness

Snow Day (if)

Last night it snowed.
But not the 6-12" predicted. Just 2", a tidying blanket, the quick work of a set decorator producing maximum effect with no budget allotted for winter scenes. A little melt and we'll return to the muddiness of the weekend, of driveways tracked across roads and car windows blurred with grime.

It's still snowing but slowly now, with spaces and pauses between each flake. Not far there must be an outer edge where I can straddle a weather front.

The schools must be open. Such sad little faces over cereal this morning.

The test will happen.

The tormented meet her tormentor.

The assistant will have to discuss Macbeth's motives.

The game will be played.

The cook's least favorite menu: lasagna, veg and meat, will have to be layered.

On account of cramps the early-to-develop 5th grader will sit out the pass and dribble drill during basketball practice.

The librarian will not give a grace day.

Mrs. Ascher's class's papers on Africa's plain animals will be due.

Logistics for the Model UN Delegates' Hartford trip will be ironed out.

Mr. Evans will meet Ms. Bailey in the second floor Latin classroom, empty for the 3 weeks that Mr. Schiller's classics class are on the Ephesus dig.

The Janitor will have to face the bathrooms used during Saturday's rally.

The senior will sit before the college adviser (and foreign film coordinator) and devise a back-up list, and consider an extra year. (The senior's grandfather, a Princeton man, will be rolling over, somewhere.)

The trainer will ice the star squash player's knee, and discuss Hillary.

The papers will be graded and Rachel's will convince her to major in art history at Barnard. (Rachel will flounder in the field. Her paper was mediocre and marked blindly late Sunday night when the teacher, depressed by the bleakness of her life, was on the second bottle of red.)

The Biology teacher will stretch his department's budget by having his students work a few more days on the fetal pig's own heart rather than purchasing sheep hearts separately. (Jill will be sick.)

Mrs. Hunt's First Grader's pea sprouts in styrofoam cups will be observed in their 19th day of being in the world (a heavier snow and the day would go unremarked, and no measurements noted under Monday, Jan. 14th on the clipboards that hang below each).

Fourth Grader John will finally get the hang of tracing amphoras and finish cutting the felt design for his toga's edge (the Greek Olympics will be held in April).
(Campbell would have liked to help John, she'd finished her border of lyres in last week, but he hadn't asked and she'd been given all the ironing to do.)

Mary Katherine, mother of Brad will have to skip her Bikram class to pick up Brad from jujitsu. (She'll do the Tuesday 6am Iyengar class.)

Bailey's Dad will have to get the report printed and bound himself because his secretary (Meredith) had counted on the weather channel and embedded herself and her new boyfriend in the Catskills where they were snowed in. Bailey's Dad will Google "Xerox, nyc" and discover a Kinkos in the opposite direction of the meeting but not far from the Apple Store. He will buy a nano while the reports are collating.

And Peggy won't go in at all. She's sick.

c - liking snow

Notebooks

a page from Borges' notebook

Since 12/27 I've maintained a morning routine that's filled 51 standard-ruled spiral-bound pages with, well, writing.

I read a book for unblocking the creative "x" and liked its primary rule:
Write
Every
Morning

Do this for 12 weeks (do this for life).
If you do nothing else (in this book, in your creative pursuits, with your god-given talents), do this.

Okay, I thought,
and bought a Staples 3 pack.
I did this first and quickly (aware that I fetishize the tools, I did not go to Sam Flax). I resign myself to $1.99 ball-points, worker-pens.

(In 2008: sometimes the stamps will be plain, the reply too short, the language awkward, the gift generic. Sometimes, I won’t have anything to say.)

Now rich with a sheaf of marked pages I've begun to wonder about what's next. Wither my minutia.

...

"Don't you write every morning?" asked Able.

(I'd complained about nothing to read at Wednesday's writer's open mike.)

"Yes but it’s ramblings . What’s VALUE, how do I cut this in favor of that??"

"Aren't there people who do that for you?" Able suggests.

....

Can we say: It's not enough to create if the world doesn't see?

(So many notebooks, emails saved and hard-drives filled.)

In this fatted, unsentimental age, who publishes the ancestral love letters?

C (who'd like to leave traces too, and have a chance to stand on deck)

Wishing everyone

En route to Kalimpong (India)

"I can't find a single word for all that significance,
and I don't know what it was significant of,
so there it remains,
a mere boulder of impression..."

- Henry James, in a letter 1898



C - wishing all a new year of impressing signifiers and inscrutable boulders

I want to say

Haylie + Peter's barn, me in the window - this morning as I wandered away from shoveling

happy new year to all.

A few for my 2008:

more mist (and Maine),
More tea in large cups and more red wine.
More morning writing.
More clipping, pasting.
More homemade gifts given.
More stamps.
More talk to plants.
More conversation, yorkshire pudding, loosing of pomegranates, underlining, Emerson-dipping, surprise parties, thank yous, kind faces, piggybacks, bitch and swaps, yurts, touch, balsam, puzzles without dark patches, unknowns, candles, saints, foreign lands, reasons to dress up, taxi rides, chaos, company, footsteps, nice smells, sea shells, trust, wisdom, arias, road trips, individuality, divine penguins, gold leaf, dinner dances, mentors, movie theatres with homemade cookies, farmers market cassis, grueyerre, loving but ferocious scrabble, quiet snow, inscrutable houses, plumes, knee socks, live jazz, alchemy, fancy pins, friends + their friends, fage yogurt, train trips, the unexplainable, blueberries, braeburn apples, big plans, little plans, naps, maps, small cookies that come with coffees, kind people, good pens (pen boxes), stories, moss, calvino, hope, clogs with a higher heel, un-itchy sweaters, silk, hugs, runs, soups...

(should I end on soups?)

C - who will go on

(is this becoming a yearbook page?)

Winter hours

Warren Street, Hudson NY

So much of our time is preparation,
so much is routine,
and so much retrospect,
that the path of each man's genius
contracts itself to a very few hours.

- RW Emerson from Experience


Find the optimism in this pairing, it's there.

C - with cheerier stuff in the wings

A tiny tradition

A tiny tradition:
http://www.groton.org/files/02-AudioTrack%2002.mp3

(I posted this last year too.)

From Groton School's Service of 7 Lessons and Carols...

A clear-to-the-heavens soprano starts,
Once in Royal David's City,
the choir joins
(pews fill).

happy holidays all.

west village

One of the things I've been advised.

Restart.

One of the things I've absorbed recently - for I believe I've probably been given excellent advice throughout my life but it seems I'm hearing it, and it's become precious to me, only recently,

is to end the day with some thanks.

"Even if you can only give thanks for the holding-up support of the bed beneath you, still - it's the act of thanking," Ashley said, "that redirects, re-tallies the universe's energies."

Perhaps (I imagine), in some giant heavenly counting chamber, the gods/angels/bean counters look up for a moment, smile, and say: "well then - there's a little blip of a back-at-you we're getting from a walk-up on Horatio Street - we hadn't heard that voice in ages."

(angel-ages)

It was a year of challenges, after a year before it of loss, but I have a bed (my white sheets), 2 windows that look south and down on a tended courtyard, a small(progressive) school's library of reading left in place by the writer (Tom Donaghy - currently on strike in LA) I rent from, 3 plants that apparently receive sufficient light to stick it out, a fireplace that's "working" insofar as it will accept a duraflame log infrequently, a bathtub, a stove and 4 burners, a desk, bits of my art (carried in in bits) and so a home - maybe 300 sq. ft. bathroom included - in New York's most homey west village.

baby-size kitchen, and still the fridge is mostly empty, mostly fage yoghurts.

In the evenings I've been on little runs - down to Canal Street via labyrinthine lanes (past Magnolia's line, Mark Jacob's expanding Marc Jacobs empire, the smokers huddled outside Spotted Pig, the limos spanning the block of Waverly Inn). When I arrive back to my block, my home, I get to take out my keys and climb my tenement's listing steps and disassemble myself neatly so my space won't be overwhelmed by discarded jackets and socks.

not so tidy, and the rug in the mirror needs to be dragged to the garbage,
but the chair was a cast-off left in the hall

It's not grand but a bed of one's own in New York City is always, will always be for me, something to give thanks for.

C - at home

Circa went to Brooklyn (a while ago)

Not so long ago that it's not worth mentioning, Circa went a-wandering.
Not far in distance but, borough-wise, a bridge-leap to Park Slope Brooklyn.

It was a lot of packing - swaddling santos in suzanis, securing ikats amongst the pickle pots, stacking Tibetan tea cups so they weren't jostled by a rogue spice box - but it was good to set out Circa amidst a new space and it was learning. It's been a whole year of massive lessons and as I struggle along, trying to cram a lifetime or graduate school's worth of retail smarts into an affordable time span, it was valuable in lots of back-breaking ways.

And it was fun to be off-site, nice to have wine with friends amidst it all, and good to play dress-up in all the cool clothes being sold by Circa-host (Courtney friend) AshaVeza/Shanti Crawford.


C - casting back (I'm going to break free of the old news soon, just as soon as I can mash in a few highlights, contextual explanations. I worry about gaps that, re-reading fromacafe years from now, to prod my sorry memory, the pieces won't be there. And so I'll be forced to rock, and worry, about the lost summer of '07.)

the upstate part/people

Peter, Haylie and me, Sunday Rhinebeck Farmers market.
Individually, we attend to our purchases.
Peter and Haylie buy giant kale and pastel flats of mushrooms to cook, sans-recipes, in heavy pots you're not meant to scrub,
I buy apples, cassis in un-labeled bottles from the back of a truck, and a scone/cookie hybrid I anticipate all week.

I'm going to try to be systematic here.

For starters then.
October 19th I gave my house to my renter-for-a-year (Doug). On the dot of 10am, as I coiled the printer cord and chose which plant would make the cut, Doug - his Audi trunk full of his most immediate needs - arrived. I'd filled my subaru with bags of what the year might call for and in a key-hand-over instant, my subaru became home.

We migrated down-state 20 minutes to the Victorian farmhouse of Haylie (shop-mate/friend) and her husband Peter. They live on the edge of Rhinebeck village, with a dog named Sam (not pictured), attended by a neighbor's dog Monti (short for Montoose). Monti's been bred to protect vineyards but is actually a massively gentle oaf of a dog seeking more love than the world can give.

Characters:

haylie

peter

monti

Haylie and Peter (and Sam and Monti), made a room for me in their lives and have given me a corner guest room. I have a vast desk with drawers and pastoral views from bed. From it I saw the snow fall this Saturday - I decide whether or not to run based on in-bed assessments. Every morning, Sam wakes me up with a kiss and each morning Haylie/Peter cook - miso-from-shaved-fish-scratch, pancakes, fancy egg dishes, steel cut oatmeal, stewed apples - downstairs. The house is vented in such a way that smells from the kitchen are amplified upstairs so the morning's meal steps into my room and, like a cartoon odor bubble, wriggles into my nose and leads me kitchen-wards.

The household's trained/shamed me to make (better) coffee with the stove-top espresso Italian contraption. I've not become a foodie, unlikely I'll make my own yogurt, but I've been nudged onto a path of culinary-caring. I buy finer teas now, I'm weighing Splenda vis a vis agave syrup as sweetner, Fage yoghurt seems practically commercial.

Spurred by the boxed-pantry I arrived with, I'm the butt of foodie jokes in the household. I thought I'd assembled an exemplary collection of shelf-stable foodstuffs, such as any kitchen might welcome. Truly though, Haylie was generous when she kept half the lot - she was as likely to find use for my store brand tinned chicken chunks as I was her dry pinto beans.

And so it goes.

I am relieved to not have my house to heat, corners to attend to and, when the snow finally comes, a drive to plow. But I am also loving being a part of the cozy household that's taken me in for a time.

From here, not sure. I've begin looking for an apartment of my own in Hudson town (Haylie and Peter will soon put their house on the market)
and I spend part of every week in my city apartment (another post), but for the now I'm in a good place and have donated my Christmas ornaments to the tree.

C - roommate

Tethering a year

Perhaps you'd given up.
Almost two months after all, and that's a very long time.

What I have to report is simple business, and the distractions of my novel new living situation(s) and energies being pulled elsewhere.

But I miss writing here, and reporting. I'm vowing that 2008 will hear more of me, that I can wrangle some balance between Circa, life and the meditations that meandered through this place. Those meanderings were useful in their aimless way; they allowed me to briefly pin the passing and give some heft to the intrinsically weightless.

So much changed this year and maybe I can use the blog to record (and so order) some of those shifts. If I work hard at it (clench and frown), maybe 2008 will unfold with a prayer of a plan.

C - wishing and planning

burma

Novice monks in front of monastery,
village beyond May Myo, Shan State Burma (1997)

Burma takes your heart.

In the fall of 1997, my Biman Air flight from Bangkok arrived in Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport a half-day delayed and full of backpackers. We were an earnest crew - un-linked but collectively buoyed by the budget traveler's hubris that, moving low to the ground, our presence in Burma wasn't in direct opposition to Aung San Suu Kyi's wishes. Mounting a noisy front against the enforced changing of currency at the airport, we vowed to get our few dollars directly into the hands of the common man.

More than the dollars (we had few, their impact would be spotty and sparse), we hoped our presence - as we fanned out on our Burmese adventures - would communicate a universal acknowledgement that yes, Burma still existed to the outside world and we - badly dressed + largely unemployed idealists, would bring their stories home with us.

At least, that was the hope.

I left Burma 4 weeks later smitten and saddened - with no idea where to begin helping the people I'd met and harboring the naive assumption that a kind people in a naturally blessed region couldn't possibly in our modern and connected era be saddled with the oppressive military regime for too much longer. Thus did I excuse myself from responsibility and look to the world and ASEAN to right the wrongs.


And now, of course, the world is again standing by - its attitude and actions stymied by the oil interests of enormous nations, the weighting of political stakes and an appalling inconsistency of our standards for what, in this world, can be called acceptable.

I have no authority to write about Burma but here some recent pieces (thank you R for forwarding "What Makes a Monk Mad")

From today's NY Times: You are no longer monks.

And, "What makes a monk mad"

Of keys

The bare-bones of it:

As of 10/1 I will be renting a small apartment (tiny-studio-small walk-up) on Horatio Street - cusp of meat packing and west village.

As of 10/19 I will be renting out my house to a really nice man whose name is Doug and who seems as good a care-taker as my house could ask.

As of soon I hope, I'll be staying in Hudson town in a space I haven't yet found but can imagine is bright and within walking distance of places I might get a coffee, or maybe a glass of wine. I hope this space will have a place for a bird feeder, I expect it will have fewer windowsills for bugs to gather and expire at.

As of now, my purse contains keys to 4 new York City apartments - none to the one I'm subletting though, all belonging to hospitable friends with more spare medecos than the average city key-holder.

With that setting-out, I will start the filling-in very soon.

c - in-motion

Where on earth

dye it black, fez

To begin.

How many false re-starts can a blogger make and not eternally alienate her readers.

If she promises pictures and stories and, to be poked at and eluded to over the next few posts, some explanations then perhaps the hardiest will stand-by...

c - all geared-up to blog the heck out of the fall

also - to further confuse matters, I have this morning updated my other almost-all-travel-blog, 40figs.blogspot.com.

Happy 65th Dad

Today, as August 17th dawns on the tarmac of Heathrow Airport, my father will be landing into his 65th year.
If that makes any sense.

The point being that a very great man will be celebrating this big event not surrounded by the loving family/friends/admirers who’d like to be gathered round him (we did some of that in maine, not enough) but rather buffeted by some radar-wielding meanie – an unsung great man amongst the Harrod-bag clutching throngs.

This isn’t right but, for a man who’s traveled voraciously all of his life, and put almost everything ahead of himself, this is perhaps not so wrong either. On his 65th birthday, dad’s in-transit to points east – maybe this is just as it should be.

So I would ask that those still-hanging-in blog readers everywhere take a moment to celebrate my dad (his email is David_Pyle@jsi.com btw), and toast a man/husband, father, grandfather and foundation-founder (I wrote about it here) who is, literally, making a difference in this world every day.

I love you dad, you are my rock.



C - celebrating

Blueberries for Hudson

So that supermarket blueberries will always leave him cold, Hudson was taught young - and by his own expert grandfather - to seek and savor Maine's own, hard-won, fruits.

(we picked, he savored).

More of Hudson's Maine tour here.

With sand in our...

I have a million lame + involved reasons for why I haven't updated.
They're tiresome.
This is better.

A genuinely GOOD reason, accompanied by an excellent illustrative photo.

Was in Maine
Hudson was too
We had a picnic...

Many more to come as we chronicle Hudson's first, post-baptismal, walking+nearly-talking visit to Seal Harbor.

Beetles in a tin

To give back to the house that's hosted my morning runs, and river gazing, I signed on to volunteer at the clermont house. I was enthusiasm and "how ever I'd be useful" but frankly wary of a job that required period costume.

But, I was called.

And so reported to Clermont House's head gardener (Susan) at 7:30 this morning, by the lilac bushes where maintenance's golf carts park.

Today was a run-through, next week I'll have actual assignments.

And access to: the tick spray, the deer spray, gardening gloves and a tin with olive oil to dispatch with the Japanese beetles. Beyond that, I will - until I prove some competency otherwise - have absolutely no jurisdiction.

C - gardener-not

The vine that ate the valley

I should report daily, even when the news is as small as:

Train back down and into the city this afternoon. I'd been away for 2 weeks.
Hudson socked in - ghost bridges and sliding-by apparition of west point.


Trees that should have been sharp cut-outs against the fog muffled by the bittersweet - the kudzu of the northeast, insidious for its speed.
It's strangled the 40mph sign on the way to Clermont house - "0" left.
At whatever madness speed it advances - a foot a day perhaps - its activity signifies a terrifying youth.
Accustomed to nature's snails pace brought up short by a fast driving upstart. Us and the trees in thrall and at mercy.

And for all the moments we don't, it's gone and strangled another one.

C - cursing it and wondering why there's no outcry

And when I'm not there

I'm here. Migrating a little and so underming last post - yes - but then it's summer and 4 screens sometimes stand in for plaster et al.

What Woolfe willed

At the top of the stairs...

At the top of the stairs, I created what Woolfe willed for us all and rendered a closet a study.

It's a decadent redundancy in a house of desks but for 2 years my attentions have wandered. One desk: a long table jammed against a Staples-gray filing cabinet, gave the house's best view but placed me living room center court. View vs. tidying for every gathering and excusing the filing cabinet.

Now 4 walls contain me,
kitchen and dishes cannot tempt me,
laundry does not call me,
weeds no longer taunt me,
and my brain can lock-into a topic and file for longer than 10 minutes.

Study, nascent, light to hang, bookshelves to raise...

Within my new enclosed space - like a hotel business center it inspires me to rule the world by fax - I shall generate enormous thoughts and harness and explain them here. A room of one's own guarantees this.

c - enclosed

my, my (lost in thought)

This is a not-proud record lapse between posts.

I'm juggling these days having pushed Circa Trade, and my writing/pitching, to the front of the to-dos. Mostly because I like these two pursuits very much but also - pragmatically - because they just might one day pay.

Doing posts has kept my language limber and my life and every passing thought observed but it's also taken up quite a lot of time. And the observing/recording would sometimes take precedence over, say, going headlong in some Circa-related direction.

Also though, if I'm being honest (and this is my place to be), I have found it hard to regain my voice here. Things that I'd have noted in the past have seemed more incidental than before, harder to land lightly on. Stupidly, things have gained a gravitas unsuited to a bit of a "ramble" round, a go at scrutiny.

But that is precisely the reason I must keep a-writing and a-noting so that this nasty seriousness (somehow I see it as an Oxford don in robes self-importantly crossing a quad) is held off.

So - lightness, air and shorter posts is my solution - just perhaps fewer and relegated to after-Circa and after-pitching times.

C - done explaining, excusing

The Pike

I am neither a good, nor an instinctive driver - only a few years separate me from a failed driving test.

I don't "sense" other vehicles and at 75mph, as I tried to change lanes from behind a Harley, I did so almost into the side of an SUV. I later realized I had an enormous and self-inflicted blind spot and my side mirror was reflecting little but the sky above - every passing was as likely not to work as to work.

I did not stop at the rest area on my way back so that the experience would be over with quicker. I feared that if I stopped I might not start again and that I'd have to be fetched - possibly a first for the Cinnabun rest stop crowd.

The good part?

The Taconic - hairpin and no-shoulder parkway - arrived like a blessed country lane.

c - in the driver's seat, just

Things that change

I know it's been a while.

(I believe it's been a month).

And I've not been sure where to pick up again with this.

Things have shifted in my life which don't need going-into here but they'll emerge as I move on.

Since I wrote, returned from Morocco, I've:

Silently retreated to a meditation center in western Mass for 3 days with 95 other seekers. The retreat introduced a lot of fiber into my system, and nearly weaned me off meditation. Now though - legs having regained circulation and my body the toxins of modern life - I can glean the good, and respect the rigors of the simple days. I'm back to meditating but without the breath of others all around.

Driven the Mass Turnpike and found that scarier, and more profoundly effecting, than the retreat itself. My limits were gone-beyond, I faced myself and my fears, I was in the very moment of the Wallmart truck passing at 80mph.

Driven in the NYC lower east side and not been smashed to the sidewalk by a bus or cursed by a cab driver.

Up-ended my life from the calm and security of the upper west side to the unknown and the unsettled edginess of the lower east side.

Counted on many people for support and a room in the city.

Renegotiated my relationship with my house and the Hudson Valley - that they now be called on to provide long stretches of sheltering.

Become a morning runner.

I'm renegotiating a lot of things. And I'll maybe tell some of that here.

C - in transition

Some time

I'll think of it as a blog breathing break.
That it got worn out by Morocco and though things continued to happen, reporting on them was more than the blog, and I, could do.

Blogged-out - just for now.

Give me, and it, a few weeks.

C - at rest

Morocco Photos

Photos of the Morocco trip

Trivia

Publishing such a document (Bowles' diary) demonstrates
the way in which the hours of the day
can as satisfactorily be filled with trivia
as with important events.

- Paul Bowles on his Tangiers Diaries


Bus rest stop, Cafe El Atlas, Marrakesh to Essaouira -
- Now there's a troop of piping berbers with a goatskin tambourine.
- My hair feels like a bush - no conditioner and matted from train and bus seats
- Back amongst the backpackers - wondered what Morrocan gone-ethnic looked like. Talked to aussie couple - 6 months west africa, german with 2 french girls. They're sitting on the deserted side of the cafe and obstinately not ordering.
- Sould know better than to think every town on a map is romantic. They're tiny dustbowls.

Hotel Riad El Medina, Essaouira
- Sure once charming, horrible now. Clue from name - dumbly redundant ostentatiously claiming an entire quarter. That it's a riad I don't doubt but with crumbled and frayed nautical/grotto theme rooms, cot mattresses on cement platform, watered down fruit salad. Cafe au lait and baguettes keeping it from the brink.
- Tourists have over-run. The town's for sale. The fish market is full of tourists taking fish pictures.
- Overcaste and my room is a cave. Point of beach visit not clear.

Marrakesh - various places
- My god this fruit salad is good
- I think some women pack their smallest shorts in anticpation of a muslim country. Maybe in fez I'll see them flogged.
- Some of the younger girls in the djellabas (no headcover) look so relaxed it could be a beach cover-up.
- They've set a single place for me at breakfast. That I'm writing about it as I'm sitting at it is sad.

Sefi Fatima (Berber barter market)
- Men kiss 5x here.
- Berbers descend with their wool blankets and rugs to buy rubber shoes, polyester tops, soap and tin teapots. Only vegetables retain the authentic.

Fez - train and arrival
- This tour guy may be legit and I may be mean but he should leave a single woman alone.
- Fez seems depressed - repressed? Packed in and layered - voices from below amplified so run the tap.
- Attar of roses. I don't know what that is but that sounds right. It's cloying.
- Nothing's not carved or crenelated here, or tiled.
- 4 kinds of breadstuffs - rolls and puffy crepes, sweet toast and a croissant. Interchangeable starches.

And so on.

C - all minutia, all the time

Lost

...that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there..

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


I was lost twice in Marrakesh (in Fez I had a guide):
First, lunging alley-deep into the medina with a confidence unmatched by knowledge, skills. I was led home by a child who demanded DH 20.
Second time I was made lost by a fellow who said he'd lead me to the Berber auction. I found my way back amongst the tourists by true directions finally canceling the untrue ones.

I emerged unscathed, of course - but it wasn't the worst feeling. To be spun in circles brings a clenching and all of a sudden the future, just briefly, is rendered unsure.

C – in a land where even the unfamiliar's on a grid

Balance

Dar Vedra (my riad, Marrakesh),
the courtyard 'neath my room

As riads sprout, an assessment:

The Europeans eagerness to buy such wonderful buildings (riads)
is matched only by the local Marrakeshe's willingness to dispose of them.

- Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House

C - fan but wary of french invasion deux

Evening at the Place, Marrakesh

Place Jemmna al Fnna, early eve

Marrakesh is the great market of the south,
not only the feudal chiefs and their wild clansman,
but all that lies beyond of heat and savagery:
the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs, Timbuktoo...
here come the camel caravans...

-Edith Wharton, In Morocco
(Whom I almost wish had traveled to Algeria instead so I wouldn't feel inadequate. Ms. Wharton owns this country, with the slight advantage of being a guest of the Governor General wherever she went.)

The Place Jemmna al Fnna - handy during the day as a center point, assumes its true character at night.

Dusk and out come:
Henna ladies. I got hi-jacked - assaulted with flowers up my arm. I made her rub it off, which seemed harsh till she demanded money.
Snake charmers - ubiquitous.
Witch-doctors/healers with ostrich eggs, herbs, dust of ___ and potions. The popular ones make a big to-do of their powers and draw large crowds with diagrams of intestinal tracks.
The man with a tray of rubber dentures and a mound of teeth
The numbered stalls of the white jacket men who serve kabobs and fish



Orange and date men (pockets of calm)
Dancing West Africans - various colors and hats and rhythms
The Water Men in funny hats - redundant since advent of bottled water and now would like you to take their picture.

High above, third floor of the Cafe France, the flash bulbs go off.

C - amidst and observing, trying to take pictures without paying

Fez: doesn't bite

a minaret, a lamp - fez medina

Now that I've left I can say that
many people (Marrakeshis) warned me against going to Fez.

I would get:
Kidnapped from the train station
Knifed en route to the medina
Dragged across the cobbles of the souk
Thrown across a mule
Made into tea

They dissed Fez big time - the two have been going at it for 1,000+ years.

Assumed defensive: antennae up, important papers(!) tucked in close, covered to ankles and wrists, mean to everyone genuinely trying to be helpful.

What I found was:
Absolutely nothing untoward.
In fact, felt safer (Marrakeshis take that) in the Fez medina for the simple fact that everyone there was going about their business. I was not on their list. They did not give a flying because they needed to buy a pound of lamb and pick up the re-soled slippers.

Not that the tourist trade has skipped over entirely (Marrakeshis would love that), but the medina's so big, so old and so essentially working that tourists - even groups of them - are absorbed in just as traders and berbers and heathen have been for centuries.

So - Fez is a yes.

C - no longer there

Spanish ate French

grand choix en el medina

Moroccans are taught arabic and french in schools. They switch mid-sentence, they switch and you almost don't register it.

Some also speak Berber - of which there are 3 dialects.

A few, I'm going to guess more in the north, also speak Spanish. Morocco is close after all, a few kms.

I speak English, crummy but animated Spanish and gruesome french.

The sad part's been that my French might have had a fighting chance - given me a little go at navigating this country - but my Spanish ate it.

My Spanish eats every last French word that might live in me.

(Blind cannibalizing the blind)

C - je ne peut pas comprende usted.

Seaside medina

Essaouira, Morocco

Brighton-on-the-beach except with a souk.
Or, Fez's darkest alley except it's one that ends in a beach side cafe.

Odd this: that the ladies are taking the promenade in the djellabas and the men hovering by the fish shack are hooded.

Arrive at Essaouira this evening (from Fez -6 hours on a train then 3 this afternoon on a bus) and it's unsettling me.

My heart might still be in that dark alley, and can't reconcile the call to prayer going out over thatched beach umbrellas...

C - seaside

An olive and a loaf

Loaf vendor (off with dustpan vendor), medina Fez

You can make a respectable meal of a dish of spiced olives and a round loaf of bread in Morocco.
No one will look askance.

(Which is not to diminish a culture's justly famed cuisine, just to highlight its flexibility.)

That you can't have a beer in public is get-aroundable.

C - mint tea-toasting hors-d'oeuvre meals

Adding no names

Signs, Fez medina

Traveling's eternal why:
take the road,
up-end routines,
leave friends and lovers to go, briefly, far elsewhere.

Then there are "why-s" of a different scale.

Traveling Arabia in the late 1800's, Gertude Bell writes,

"A compass traverse over country which was more or less known,
a few names added to the map –
names of stony mountains and barren planes,
and a couple of deep wells –
and probably that is all...

It's a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia.”

C - adding only herself, no names, to this map

In city midieval

Buildings, people, customs,
seem all about to crumble
and fall of their own weight:
the present is a perpetually prolonged past.

To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in dreams;
and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelops one in every step.

- Edith Wharton, In Morocco

What Marrakesh is no longer, Fez remains:
inwards turned, spooky feeling...
Or so it's seemed in the few hours I've been here.

Its medina is the oldest always operating medina in the Arab world...
modern when Genghis Khan roamed the earth.

I'd braced for the medina tomorrow -
with a map, the light of day, a city-stamped guide.

Inconveniently, there was dinner in between.

The vendors atop their wares looked through me,
the shrouded forms pushed by me
and only the men at the cafes
(aside: it's creepier to be watched by men drinking tea than beers)
registered me with indifferent disdain...

(This medieval place eats little travelers for breakfast)

I found the gentlest face, attached to a cafe with the highest perch
and had my couscous.
I looked on with my mint tea.

Tomorrow, I tour.

C - in the medieval

The call

Church bells and chanting processions and elephants held aloft.
I haven't traveled in a Muslim country in ages.
What I'd forgotten - but here you can't forget - is the call to prayer.

You (I'll speak for me) are a passer-through.
The faithful are called and the faithful gathered in.

It was a strange relief to hear it begin
allahu akbar...
and the veil drops
allahu akbar
and we turn back to tasks impermanent.



C – humbled

Juxtapose

horse cart shadow falls across the Audi
coke can beside the thali,
burkha-ed beside the over-exposed,

such the modern world and all being dragged along with it.

To these I add another.

With my guide the other day to see this place (Seti Fatma)

What's your favorite music?

(I hold out. It's always loaded, my list never ever overlaps and I'm a loser either way.)

Okay.

And he puts on the Koran, on his iPod.


C - juxtaposed

Mint tea protocol

A shopkeeper (of antique jewelry that probably ought to be in a museum) told me there was a new protocol.

Shopkeepers no longer offer mint tea at the beginning of discussions.
This was too forward, implied a debt.
Now they close a chat or sale with the offer of tea.
You choose to buy, you choose not to - we are hospitable either way.

It's a bright and shiny new souk protocol.

amidst

Varanasi's deepest Papua New Guinea,
Siem Reap's Easter Island.

A few thousand Europeans (French happily following a proper baguette) -
all of whom right now in the medina -
have Marrakesh squarely in their holiday sites.
Americans not yet, not so much - it's still a bit glossy magazine stuff.

Though it's embarrassingly easy to get lost in the medina if various factors are in play (more on that),
the medina is signposted if you follow paddles held aloft by tour shepards,
or stick to alleys densest with leather items and decorative tangines,
or close your eyes and follow the "ooh, that's a lovely lantern..."



A culture/country is a big hit with a world scrambling for the foreign;
that I can't except myself is only tempered by the fact that I take up no space on a tour bus.

Your storieed souk is neatened, chickens hung elsewhere, shopkeepers only mildly wheedling, come-ons mild even as jezebels roam in Ibiza-attire, prices are firmed, nothing suspect's underfoot and ATMs are located in the main Place Jemaa-el-Fna.

Still the burnoosed figures hug the souk walls, the odd donkey cart, dates being bought but little mystery really. (until you get lost as I mentioned).



C - amidst them all (and adding to even as she gripes)

In Marrakesh

In Morocco since Friday but challenged to get online. Now on hybrid french/araabic keyboard. Ny already bad typing to gibber.

While I track down the the "w", a breather:
Voila The Dar Vedra

My riad - Moroccan turned-inwards-to-a-courtyard house - 2 stories, balcony around and a marble fountain in the center, rooms narrow but with high shuttered windows and french doors; all the cooling tricks of the tropics in play.

Riads are like safe houses tucked through the medina (logically, people live somewhere) - indicated by no more than a small sign. In the unlikely chance you've re-found your own, you must be directly in front of it to confirm arrival.

Run like bed and breakfasts but by French people - ever so slightly disdainful proprietors. A teddy bear on the bed cushion about as likely as pancakes at breakfast.

My Dar Vedra is wonderful, all that said. Proprietor Sebastian greeted me with a pot of mint tea and small cookies. I got a kea to the secret door. The courtyard fountain is bright pink with roses and there's a small turtle who wanders the tiles. There's also a plunge pool but it's in the midst of everything so I haven't plunged.

Pictures when I sort out wi-fi and so return to a familiar keyboard.

C in the medina

Closing the book

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail.
The description does not describe them to you,
and tomorrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

- Emerson, The Over-Soul

C - stopping reading

NG bias

Morocco 4x
India uncountable...

I have inherited (grandmother and paper-recycling bin at dump) an incomplete collection of National Geographics. They live, spine-side out, as wall-stacks in my library, just in case.

Just in case I'm going to Morocco and would like to find out what the respected traveler has said.

Imagine.

India this, India that, Hindu Kush here, Rajputana there. Morocco? not so much.

Mysterious land of berbers and medinas? not during the years in my library. 80 years - none during the years in my library.

Imagine the National Geographic editor's office
(lined in maps of the sub-continent).
Assisant Editor Graves: Sir, I was thinking __________ for our May issue.
Editor Grosvenor: Nonsense Graves, we'll do India.
(repeat)


C - looking elsewhere

Packing

“You have no right to go about Africa
in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 1897

(in stayed black silk, black button boots and a hat for her travels)

c - amphibious sandals or the button boots

Maghreb el Aqsa - one African edge

Almost on Morocco time.

Studying before Thursday departure: today, by showy gesture and self-evident observation, the establishing of Islam.

Maghreb el Aqsa:

When General Oqba Ibn Nafi rode fully armed
into the Atlantic in AD680 to proclaim,
with sword raised to Allah,
that he could go no further,
it marked the dramatic arrival of Islam in Morocco.
Henceforth, this newly conquered Islamic frontier would be known as
the Maghreb El Aqsa
'the land furthest west'.

C - a little less in awe of a mansion built, and state established, just 300 years ago. No swords raised or uniforms wetted as our forefathers rode into the Hudson. Young us.

Things that are mad

At 8:30 am,

an empty-but-for-a-Subaru parking lot,

of this magnificent 18th century mansion,

with this view (pair of stone lions look on) ,

was open to a public that chose not to show on a sparkly spring morning.

No one observed my constitutional slow-through-the-tall-trees jog,
no one watched me inspect the status of the lilacs.

Lawns that role to the Hudson river and a house that sits above it:
appealing to...no one?

Visit Clermont (the Livingston Mansion).
My subaru, and I, will make space.

C - holding breath for lilacs

Because it's there

And it has carpets and mint tea -

I'm going to Morocco.

Signing myself up with the school of thought that says if you don't just pen it - schedule the damn thing and let other appointments fall about -
then it just won't happen,
I scheduled 10 days in Morocco.

Last week actually I scheduled it.

But I thought it might be a shock to the blog and so only mention it now.

(I fly in and out of Marrakech)

Now that I've gathered up my sheltering sky and Edith Wharton and booked my riad...

Morocco - more, soon.

But just so you know.

C - of the medina

My trip (photos)

Finally into a lumpy package - photos from my travels...

A Travel Slideshow

None are labeled, but within you'll find (somewhat ordered)

In India
Darjeeling,
Sikkim,
Manali,
Dehli,
Jaipur,
Pondicherry,
Cochin,
Bombay,

In Nepal
Bhaktapur,
Jomsom,
Kagbeni,
Kaligandaki Valley,
Muktinath

In Cambodia
Angkor Wat
In Bulgaria
Koprivshtitsa,
Old Plovdiv,

In South America
Rio
Uruguay
Argentina

and, bruefly to the Carribean for
Antigua and Harbor Island.

What you don't do

You don't explore your (untamed) backwoods, in order to discover where your land meets the road that runs parralel, a mile behind your house.

Not ever, but really not in the late-ish evening.

And no again if you have neither navigational skills or breadcrumbs.

I came back from my run determined to bushwhack.
A half hour later I was running low through brambly tangles, sneaker high in mud-swamp, neither at the land-road meeting place nor knowing the direction I'd come from.

Giving up my road goal I turned back .

But my back was not a strict backtrack. It was a serpentining version.

A pricked and tripped BlairWitch spane later, I saw a swath of lawn through my wretched tunnel tangle of brown/gray. Lighthearted/what-will-I-have-for-dinner approaching, I came to the paddock edge of the horse farm.

I was a half mile south of my house.

Undeservedly, I did finally arrive at the heaven-glimpse of the back of my house. I saw my blessed forsythia and, like a beleaguered traveler, the light of my bedroom window.

I emerged on my lawn, I blessed my soddy grass, and I congratulated myself.

On wrapping up one of the dumber evenings of my city soul uprooted life.

C - chastised by the land

Dandelions

While we await the unfurling of the tulip tree's heart leaves,
the forsythia to complete its frantic madness -
distracted by crocuses and perky daffodils -
the dandelions arrived.

In the shadow of winter,
perhaps beneath our deepest rains,
my dandelions were harnessing their marauding-ness, digging in dense roots and now, as I go to inspect pretty things,
I find they’ve busily spread their unwelcome selves across the wet soil.

Spring, and with it weeding, has begun.

C – damning dandelions

Where's Hudson

Hudson, birthday pictures, news of the weekend - they're all here.

(http://hudsonjournal.blogspot.com)

Celebrating

So, readers can remotely participate in a big party, my first post from the weekend.


On Saturday afternoon, at a little patch of Dallas green, a little boy named Hudson celebrated his 1st birthday and Tietze's Toddler's Park was inaugurated in the name of his mother, Lindsey Stephenson Brown.

Hudson's birthday - hosted by Chad and attended by pretty much a Hudson entourage - was a success. Though freezing, in a way a southern state shouldn’t be, everyone layered, hugged and managed still to celebrated in Texas-scale style.

(I huddled behind the caterer's table, warming by the enchiladas bunson burners.)

Some 100 people sang Happy Birthday 3 times in unicent as Hudson gazed across, then smushed/ate, a magnificent cake depicting the park and his own personal cake...

That Hudson is now spoiled for every birthday from here-on-in is a given.

That this boy’s 2nd birthday – even if hosted in a football stadium - will be a come down is hard not to assume.



The Toddler Park was established by funds gathered in Lindsey's name. Perched on a bed of wood-chips, a sort of pirate-y, slide—centric, enormous jungly-structure with outlying bouncing things, the park is a toddler fantasy.

Thanks to our most organized attenders, there are photos of the party are here and here too.

Thanks, on behalf of Hudson and Chad, for attending.

C - full of cupcakes

Lindsey

Lindsey Stephenson Brown
1973-2006


Today it's been a year.

C - in Dallas

Hudson (happy birthday)

We're celebrating Hudson's first year.

He's been magnificent so far -
hitting all of his baby-marks and,
way beyond that,
his joy and charm and essential calm
have given a whole lot of people a whole lot of joy.

One little boy, a whole lot of joy.

We're lucky to have him.

We wish him the happiest birthday a very small person can have.

Love C - loving H

Which will not leave

Upstate, the Catskills tell the seasons.
I monitor the sweep of them during moments of full panorama on my drive home from Hudson.

They were on their own yesterday, above the valley haunted in dark clouds.
Now, they're snow covered and the valley is cold.

I found one small yellow flower this easter morning - it sank, bloom-deep, into my tiniest vase.

(And now I hear the furnace through the floor.)

C - chilly in april

Trade on high

A long time in coming and remarkably little press to hail its arrival.

India and China will soon begin trading (amidst the snow and clouds) in an area closed to tourists since 1963 and only open a few days of a week to Indian nationals since then. (The post between the two nations is exchanged on Thursdays and Sundays only.)

Writing about the pass in his 1963 National Geographic feature on Sikkim (photo below shows Edmund Hillary's widow, Lady Louise approaching the pass, and Tibet, just before its final sealing-off.), Desmond Doig writes:
"...I unwittingly stepped on Tibetan territory and was thoroughly photographed by a Chinese officer wearing an out-size sun bonnet. He could have arrested me for illegally entering Tibet. Since then I have felt like a marked person, with a dossier in Peking."

Doig quotes then ambassador to the US, BK Nehru describing the road as:
"probably the easiest invasion route" from China to India.




So there you have it - China and India, 3 decades in, at peace over a pass. Letting bygones go in the name of good commerce...

KEY CHINA-INDIA TRADE ROUTE THROUGH SIKKIM TO OPEN FROM JUNE
Date: 07/04/2006
Publication: Asia Pulse

BEIJING, Apr 7 - China yesterday announced that a vital trade market on the strategic Sino-India border along Sikkim would open twice a week from June, setting up the first direct trade link between the two countries since the 1962 war.
"The 6,400-sq-mt market, named Dongqinggang, is located by the mountain road 16 kms from the 4,545-mt high Nathu La Pass, where Yatung County of China's Tibet Autonomous Region and India's Sikkim State meet," the official Xinhua news agency reported, signalling that China has recognised Sikkim as part of India.

According to reports from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the market would open twice a week from June for four hours a day after its construction is completed.

"Construction is going on at a brisk pace and 60 per cent of it has been completed. Everything should be finished before the deadline"... Construction of roads leading to Nathu La Pass is also under way, but the area is often clogged by heavy snows. A total of 1,550 workers are now working on site to try to finish it in time.

Nathu La Pass, which used to be a 'hot spot' for trade between China and India, accounted for over 80 per cent of total border trade at the beginning of the 20th century. But trading over the Pass was suspended in 1962.

(Both photos, National Geohraphic, March 1963 by Desmond Doig and William Hubbell)

a cheerless scam

"Aside from the question of health and personal comfort,
nothing can be more cheerless and depessing
than a room without a fire
on a winter day.
...
Without a fire, the best appointed drawing room
is as comfortless as the shut-up "best-parlor"
of a New England farmhouse (my emphasis)
...
a room is not really lived in
and its appearence of luxury and comfort
is but a costly sham
prepared for the edification of visitors."

Edith Wharton from The Decoration of Houses.


C - admonished

(shout out to Cintra, Wharton scholar)

Without fire

In my house, there is no fireplace, just two small mantels framing two blocked openings in the upstairs bedrooms.

(Cruel.)

The lack has embarrassed me and, I think, a little bit the house too. Guests with assumptions about old farm house in northern climates and it starts to smart.

My father, a winter visitor also, generously spurred me to action. For my 35th I was given a check: a fireplace Court, go forth and chimney build (though not in a god-voice but with that emphasis).

The other weekend, after a year of un-returned calls in which I imagined the recommended chimney guy didn't exist or didn't care for the sound of my voice, Gary arrived. Gary’s Saab was a bit of a worry.

For an hour then, we sought evidence of what we assumed had been.
To the attic,
beneath to the dirt-floored basement,
outside to poke the foundation,
then, with knocking hands (I get "empty" and "solid cement" sounds switched), long drill bit and a skewer, into my poor wall.

Gary had stunningly bad news.

“No chimney,” Gary said.

My house's stoic builders had, through north-eastern winters, no need for heat.

Gary’s soup-to-nuts solution:
”Build a proper brick chimney, inset via a slice through a side of the house, a propping up floors and a bracing of ceiling, (pause) a laying of a new foundation, a snip at floor boards….
(I don’t know if this is actually what he outlined but definitely the gist.)

”3 months,” Gary said, ”$20-25,000,” when I went ahead and asked.

We did then speak of a non-cost-of-my-subaru option - which would entail the fireplace/mantel/hearth protruding a ways into the living room, downwards from the ceiling and involved no chimney.

We never got to the cost of that.

Now Gary owes me this in writing.

And so I wait, and like the owners-of-old, considering potbelly stoves.

C - chilly but solvent

seek peace

FERNAND KHNOPFF

I feel the least enlightened of my fellow meditators.

Trying to make light of my fallibity, I share with the short banged woman.

"My mind wanders," I admit, "and my focus is drifty."

"I don't judge myself," she replies.

And puts on her socks in peace.

C - imperfect

The Imperial Prince's Raincoat

Continuing on a raincoat thread (because it exists)

What the China's Imperial Emperors Wore in the Drizzle

In jaunty red.



Because hoods aren't regal.



- From The Talati Album, by Wang Shu Hui at Sothebys

C - wishing to be so well-outfitted today

Feeder down

(evidence)

From the very big to the very small.

Topic being squirrels.

Unfolding: the squirrels have ruined it for everyone, as since time immemorial.

I have evidence (photos) but for now, my word will stand:

In the course of a long morning,
2 squirrels (working against one another but to the same end)
have downed an entire feeder.

Its contents - scattered - sun-flowering seeding my lawn.


C - also with mice issues but sticking to a rodent-a-post rule

what stays with you the longest

What stays with you latest and deepest? Of curious panics
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

—Walt Whitman
(I've quoted this before)

Memory is a hair-trigger thing. Summon, don't recall, then somewhere entirely not there - willfully, its trigger was a certain light.

...

When Linds and I were younger, our family lived in an apartment on an unremarkable street in Arlington. I now realize, it was a floor-through - the left half of an already narrow second floor.

Mom and Dad were simultaneously PhD candidates, each slogging dissertations on a shared manual typewriter.

Anyway.

Our long apartment was a series of rooms - their study at the front and, 3 rooms back and off the dining room, the bedroom, with the bunk bed, that Linds and I shared.

So the music would have been from the record player in the living room, and have been faint from journying by the time it came through our little-bit open door.

But I remember Smetana's Moldau playing. Though I didn't know that then - that i'd remember that.

A month ago I heard the Moldau again. For the first time since? - not sure.


And I was Smetana back to the bunk bed and the light through the just-cracked door and the fainter rattle of typing at the very front.

If I'd tried to summon what the age of 7 in a family of 4 on such an evening felt like, I couldn't possibly.

Then, this bit of music and now I know, that our lives were stretched ahead and together then: Mom and Dad were at the helm, Linds and I tucked into the stern. All was safe.

And they'd chosen Smetana that evening.

Now, two parts - Mom and Linds - of that Smetana-scored moment are gone and I feel very very far from the then.

C - wondering when Hudson's remembering begins, and what will stay

happy birthday, dear linds..

I have the perfect photo (just not here)

Lindsey's in Turkey - maybe 3? - face down, sound asleep in a slice of chocolate birthday cake.

(It was a family classic.)

She didn't take herself too seriously
She enjoyed to the hilt.
She liked cake.
And she was a porker when she was little.

There's been a feeling of loss all the holidays since last April: loss for us as much as for her, that Linds is missing - the essential element gone.

But this holiday, personal one of course - is harder. This time it's Linds' loss. We don't get to bake a cake for her (though Chad has), or watch her open presents, but the fundamental thing is that Linds is not here to celebrate her own 34th birthday.

Now we have a number and wherever she's counting from, she doesn't get to count this one on earth.

While all of us just keep ticking off our own.

We're celebrating for you here Linds. Happy birthday up there.

Love CTP

when you know

The city tell you the seasons.
(I've mentioned this before.)

Green Market, Union Square today and, first time in a long time, live plants on offer.

Palms yes, but budding branches and the crocuses (croci?) seal it.

Haylie (in New Mexico), trying to get a fix on the weather up here, the exact progress of the northeastern spring, asked after the radishes.

I have never marked the seasons by root vegetables - Haylie's closer to nature that way - but will report on the tulips.

c - in yellows and pinks

From a cafe milestone (not mid-point)

Edge of Mustang, Kagbeni Valley, NEPAL 2.2006

11.8.2004 smokey cafe, Athens: blog born.

3.28. 2007 adamantly not-smokey Starbucks, Union Square: 702nd post goes out.


Not a birthday, just number-of-ramblings milestone I've decided to recognize.

If you're reading this (having come this far), thank you.

And please pass on the blog, link to, mention.

Writing for myself should be fulfillment enough - for the times it isn't, a small group of readers would help.

Love

C

meditation is the navy blue of shanghai

"Pink is the navy blue of India"
Diana Vreeland (VOGUE Editor-in-Chief 1962-1971) proclaimed.
Empirically proven. Sort of.

This weekend in the NY Times :

Meditation is the new yoga
(roughly provable)

Mumbai is the new Shanghai
(outlandish)


C - the new nothing

Juice of a persimmon, a japanese raincoat

The paper jackets were carefully layered and treated
with a mixture of persimmon juice and natural oils.

C - simply because

Inside, out

"If the roads are wet and muddy
We remain at home and study,—
For the Goat is very clever at a sum,—
And the Dog, instead of fighting,
Studies ornamental writing,
While the Cat is taking lessons on the drum."

- Charles E. Carryl,
Robinson Crusoe's Story

c - nose pressed