Horrors transcended

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Happy Halloween! I love how this day gives us a chance to play with fright and pretend we're someone else (and eat Reese's peanut butter cups).

Just before our mid-term elections here in the U.S., while politicians flood the air waves with last ditch efforts to get voters out Tuesday, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a Rally to Restore Sanity on Washington DC's mall, which brought out well over 200,000 people. Was the rally to support a political party or candidate? No. In his comments at the end of the comedic and musically entertaining event, Stewart asks, What exactly was this? What was the point? His point was to pull back from 24-hour media pundit craziness-inducing overreactions of the Left and Right and remind us that we are not made up of those caricature-warped portrayals of us Americans. I take great hope from the success of this rally that called out hate and reminded us not to let ourselves be driven by the media's polarizing takes on reality.

I'd like to use this moment when politics are all we're hearing on the TV and radio, on Halloween's day of pretend horrors, to talk about three of our human species who truly suffered under another kind of horror, the political kind. While I complain about the faulty systems of my country and the inefficacy of politicians to fix the mess, and while I feel myself getting more cynical and disengaged (but I will force myself to stop at City Hall on the way to work Tuesday to exercise my right to vote), there are far worse political nightmares in the history of the world. The three people I'm spotlighting lived through some of the most terrifying realities of the 20th century. Yesterday, October 30, was not only the day of the Rally to Restore Sanity, it was Miguel Hernández's centenary birthday. He is the third person in my spotlight, below. In the poem of his I share, he says something like Jon Stewart said yesterday:

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Besides perspective-taking in today's context of political lunacy, this is also about the power of language and poetry to not only express the inexpressible, but to sustain us, even when life is at its most dire. Whether in the reading of it, or in writing it, these three show that poetry can transcend the worst that mankind offers and lift us on powerful and delicate wings into the shining sun at the core of ourselves.

For further biographical information on each of these three, please click on their names.

Nelson Mandela, Prisoner 466/64, born 1918

After spending more than twenty years working for equal rights for Blacks in apartheid-heavy South Africa, Nelson Mandela was arrested for sabotage and sentenced to life in prison. He served almost 27 years in three prisons – Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison, until his release in 1990. He was elected President of the African National Congress in 1991, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and was elected the first black President of South Africa in 1994. He said, “In my country we go to prison first and then become President.”

Nelson Mandela said the poem Invictus sustained him through his nearly 27 years in prison.

Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Anna Akhmatova, 1889 - 1966
"Before this sorrow mountains bow . . ."

Poet Anna Akhmatova lived during the most turbulent time of Russian history, and though she was not herself imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, her first husband, after their divorce, was executed, and her son imprisoned for seventeen months. Most of those closest to her were exiled, imprisoned or executed for their political leanings. Her poetry was banned, she lived under surveillance. Her masterpiece about the horrors and sorrows of Stalin's death camps, Requiem, was written and dedicated to the women she met standing outside Leningrad's Kresty Prison while her son was imprisoned there. The poem was not published until after her death. Please do read the entire poem in the link above. Here is one stanza from Requiem, followed by a poem called Solitude that speaks to her own lack of freedom and the writing that sustained her.

from Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova

5

Seventeen months I’ve pleaded

for you to come home.

Flung myself at the hangman’s feet,

my terror, oh my son.

And I can’t understand,

now all’s eternal confusion,

who’s beast, and who’s man,

how long till execution.

And only flowers of dust,

ringing of censers, tracks just

running somewhere, nowhere, far.

And deep in my eyes gazing,

swift, fatal, threatening,

one enormous star.

(Translated by Yevgeny Bonver)

Solitude

by Anna Akhmatova

So many stones are thrown at me

that I no longer cower,

the turret’s cage is shapely,

high among high towers.

My thanks, to its builders,

may they escape pain and woe,

here, I see suns rise earlier,

here, their last splendours glow.

And often winds from northern seas

fill the windows of my sanctuary,

and a dove eats corn from my palm…

and divinely light and calm,

the Muse’s sunburnt hand’s at play,

finishing my unfinished page.

(I'm sorry, but I don't know who translated this version of "Solitude") 

Miguel Hernández, 1910 (October 30) - 1942

Yesterday was Miguel Hernández' centenary birthday. I didn't know about Hernández until my dear friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow offered a beautiful look at him in his post called Cicada Dirge. This special birthday was hugely celebrated in Spain and around the Spanish-speaking world this weekend. Coming out of poverty and his father's adamant rejections of his literary and poetic interests, Hernández beat incredible odds to become one of the most admired Spanish poets. As a supporter and soldier of the anti-fascist Republican forces against Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, he was arrested and sentenced first to death, and then life in prison when Franco took power. He didn't survive long in prison, as the terrible conditions led to his death by tuberculosis at the age of 31.

Post script: Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow has posted a new commemorative essay called Milking a goat and a dream, tenderly showing more intimate details of Miguel Hernández's story. He plans to continue his series on Hernández in future posts as well.

The world is as it appears

by Miguel Hernández

The world is as it appears

before my five senses,

and before yours, which are

the borders of my own.

The others' world

is not ours: not the same.

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Images of life—

as soon as we receive them,

they receive us, delivered

jointly, in one rhythm.

But things form themselves

in our own delirium.

The air has the hugeness

of the heart I breathe,

and the sun is like the light

with which I challenge it.

Blind to the others,

dark, always remiss,

we always look inside,

we see from the most intimate places.

It takes work and love

to see these things with you;

to appear, like water

with sand, always one.

No one will see me completely.

Nor is anyone the way I see him.

We are something more than we see,

something less than we look into.

Some parts of the whole

pass unnoticed.

No one has seen us. We have seen

no one, blind as we are from seeing.

(translated by Don Share)

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Who advises whom?

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Honors students can be such a pain. They’re bright, they’re gifted, and they’re all over the place. Never ever expect an advising session to last less than 30 minutes. More like 45. Or an hour. (Honors students constitute around 10% of my advisee case load.)

There’s the questioning of myself: If I answer what this student just asked, will I prove I am less intelligent than she is? And how about she asks twelve questions that go into a diaspora of topics, each of which by itself would take a minimum of an hour to discuss? Annoying.

Somewhere in my nine years of academic advising at the university I’ve learned to flow with these grand minds. Answer only the questions they ask, one at a time. Slow them down. Tell them, Let's talk about that topic another time, stay with this for now. They look at me with sudden gratitude when I say that, as if only I can control their tortuous panoply of interests. This is a weighty responsibility for an adviser: How to rein in, but not deaden enthusiasm?

There is Catherine, for instance. She’s about the size of a small thirteen-year-old girl, with a young face to match and shoulder-length wavy blonde hair. She enters my office wearing her gargantuan backpack like a tiny turtle who inadvertently grabbed her father’s shell and left for the day. She painstakingly unloads it to the floor and sits. But don’t let her size and girlish countenance fool you. She is probably the brightest light I’ve ever advised.

I had a choice the first time we met. Resist, or flow with her. No matter what I advised, she responded with another, more ambitious idea. I had experience on my side, but she had vision on hers. So what if it took 20 credit semesters to accomplish it? She had so many things planned out. The intensive and demanding English teaching program was her main focus. But she wanted to add a minor in theater, study abroad in Malaysia, an extra teaching minor in Spanish, and a slew of other “electives” that would not contribute to her requirements whatsoever. I kept telling her, That will add another year to your time here, you know. “I know,” she’d reply. And we’d stare each other down.

Because I chose not to resist, I became altogether charmed by this young woman. Having 1,000 advisees, it’s not easy for me to connect names with faces in that sea. I hate this, because relating to people on a personal level is important to me. A few students stand out, and I remember their names, either because they have so many problems that I can’t wait for them to walk the stage at Commencement, or because we connect so strongly that they are unforgettable along with their names. (And truthfully, those who have the most problems often fill a big place in my heart.)

Catherine is one quirky girl whose name I remembered from the second or third appointment. She doesn’t smile a lot, but from her words, you know she is smiling inside. Confidence oozes out her nostrils. Quickness and wit are her allies. She could stand on a stage and soliloquize Shakespeare or write a major paper on Joyce's Ulysses and convince you she interpreted both impeccably. She has no tolerance for silly and boring and will tell you so, in no uncertain terms. Over the years she gave me a litany of the professors who were intolerable for their blandness. She had that rare combination in a young person of high intellectual intelligence and common sense. Sort of Zorba meets Boss. (Or rather, Boss meets Zorba, Boss being the bookish, mind-driven one, and Zorba being the common-sense-gut-instinct-heart-driven one. Have you read Zorba the Greek by Kazantzakis? You should, I'm reading it now, it's brilliant. Thanks, George.)

So this week Catherine came in for her final check as a senior. Were all her ducks lined up all right before her student teaching placement next year? I panicked when I couldn’t find her file in my drawer. We had met a dozen times at least, and no file! Did the secretary accidentally purge it with the old files? All our checklists, my notes, her added minors, later dropped, our entire history, gone, poof! I stood at the drawer and frantically searched out of alpha order. How could this be? I ranted out loud, “I’m miserable, I can’t find your file!” while she sat on the other side of my desk and chippered in her droll yet sympathetic commentary. Finally I gave up and sat down, pulled out a new, blank checklist, and started all over again. What had taken three and a half years to produce with its scratches in three different colors of ink and highlighters was reduced to a clean form with entries made in one sitting. It felt wrong, because I was reducing the academic diary of her undergraduate years to mere facts.

And so, as if that reduction required it, since neither of us could bear to leave it there, we reminisced, we laughed, we remembered all those times I had advised her to not do something because it would be too much, and she had done it anyway and proved me wrong. And there were the times she did change her mind and drop a plan. She wondered aloud, "How did I possibly think I could do all that?" Hahaha, we laughed some more. She told me about her five weeks in Malaysia in the summer, how miserably bad the professor was and how unorganized the trip, but how extraordinary the people were, which made it worthwhile and changed her views on teaching forever. We didn’t want to stop, but it was time to go.

She stood up in all her five foot two inches, picked up her fifty-pound bookish carapace and struggled to get her arms through the straps and settle it into place on her wee back. She stood in front of me, just on the other side of my computer. It was all I could do not to take her up in my arms, backpack and all, and carry her into the next stage of her life. But the thing is, she doesn’t need me to carry her. She's gotten the best kind of education: trial and error, trial and success.

Reluctantly, I told her I’d see her at Commencement in May. With a look of youthful, sentimental intelligence, she left.

Honors students can give you such a pang.
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Evening Flight

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Evening flight

If I could look down from above

on croplands bordered by tree fences, bare branched,

a shadow of dust like a flock of finches

behind the farmer’s slicing disc,

my car a small crawler on a thin groundway

of gray, dividing green and brown fields in two

If instead of the whispered mourning moon of

the saxophone from car speakers

I could only hear the muffled, distant nicker

of a horse from her open stall

If my thoughts were these dun birds, flying,

and all the great world below

tree hollows and rummages of berries

If in the coming winter

all became clear – leaves blown gone,

the globe sheeted white, dried grass heads

floating over her like candle flames above paraffin

If the world were seeds

and my thoughts birds upon them,

unlocking them, one by one

with my mind-heart’s strong, cleaving beak

If I could write from here, and break

the world in two like that

so it could germinate through me,

become a whole thing again,

I would.


~ Ruth M. 


Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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To love life

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Inge and me after walking in the Making Strides event

This is my best friend, Inge. She is a breast cancer survivor. Today we walked a 5K from our state capitol for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.

Inge. (Please say it in your mind's voice with a soft g, as in flying.) Inge is faithful, and disciplined; she loves language and reads voraciously when she isn't working too hard; she also loves numbers and being organized. She is fascinated by memory and why we remember some things, and not others. She has artistic, intelligent hand writing. Inge is a poet; she is German, with a steel-trap mind; her English is more proficient than many Americans I know. She has beautiful, dewy skin; she adores her 16-year-old son Piet; she is golden, with a golden heart. When we sit together, it's as if we are one person, with two sets of eyes. At lunch today after the walk Inge shared David Brooks' recent column "The Flock Comedies" describing friendship, saying that this passage quoting C.S. Lewis is how she sees ours. I agree:

Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book, “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: “It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”

Warning: Mixed metaphors follow.

Seven years ago, Inge told me she had a malignant tumor. That "cosmic two-by-four," as she calls it, smacked her into an intense journey of chemo, radiation, and exploration of the soul. Shortly after the diagnosis, over lunch out of Bento boxes, she described her session that morning with an esoteric healer who was helping her go beyond medical treatment, toward inner wholeness. Hearing about it I practically jumped over the table into her lap with excitement. The moment was full, and I was eager, recognizing instantly that we would be doing this work together. I could feel an unseen world of mystery and beauty ready to flood us with its light, if we could just get the curtains open. For a couple of years we devoured every book that leapt off the shelf at us, starting with Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, and on into meticulous inner excavations with Don Miguel Ruiz, Michael Brown, Osho, Krishnamurti, Rumi, Thomas Moore, John Hillman, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, G. I. Gurdjieff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, and others in snippets, poems and synchronicities. Even a mother beech tree in Ireland and a Scotch pine in a back yard were our teachers. We dug, scraped, chipped, whittled and brushed off caked-on layers of bad habits we'd accumulated, such as resentment, fear, judgment, dependence and jealousy. No matter where we looked, everything in every direction was vibrating: . . . Life! . . . Love! All seemed simultaneously more . . . and less important. An apple, a leaf or a bird were the center of the universe. The present moment was the only one, and it was eternal. Our conversations flowed with enthusiasm, discovery, and hunger for more. As frightening as Inge's cancer was (thank God I didn't lose her), I am grateful that it was the wrecking ball that knocked down my shabby, haphazard scaffolding, revealing a spare, quiet sunlit meadow of peace at the center of myself. The ugly scaffolding isn't gone completely, but the work isn't as aggressive now. It seems to happen on its own, like a hummingbird whose wings are moving, but almost imperceptibly, as if on a different plane.

Life keeps happening. We are healthy (I too, survived melanoma), but death hovers all around, through distant stories, and sometimes close to home. A couple of weeks ago, there was a terrible car wreck here. In one car three teenagers, and in the second car two grandparents lost their lives. One of the teenagers was a friend of Inge's son's and a former 4th grade student in my husband's class. There isn't much to say about such unthinkable sorrows. But a few days later, a rare morning when I failed to read my Writer's Almanac poem, Inge emailed it to me and said, Read this. Sometimes poems transcend the inadequacy of words, cutting right to your core. Love and life become a choice. This was the poem that day:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002.

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Acorn season

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Nineteen of us, including babies, headed to the family cottage for the fall clean-up Saturday. We took out screens on the porch and washed the storm windows before putting them up. We cleaned behind the stove and fridge. We raked leaves. We raked and raked and raked. We piled leaves on tarps and dragged them into the woods.

There's a lot to rake, all the way around, down the hill to the lake, and down the driveway.

Our cottage sits on a hill, the highest point on the lake, except for the state-owned woods next door, which we don't have to rake, thankfully. If you know about feng shui, our cottage has a pretty good feng shui position with its hill at the back and side, and facing water.

This is the view of the place from the lake.

It takes a big investment of energy and funds from our individual selves to maintain this place and keep it in the family, now that Mom and Dad are gone. Sometimes Don and I think of the vacations we could take somewhere every year with our share if we didn't have this place to keep up.

And then we gather with our family at one of the spring or fall work days, or the 4th of July, or New Year's, and we realize again that we have something very special. We have a home where our tribe can go, and keep our love alive.

I wasn't even going to post about the cottage clean-up this year, and then when I viewed my pictures I had to show you the acorn harvest and what I learned.

For hours, the kids picked cleaned up acorns. (Their work was important.) There was a bumper crop this year! I asked Audrey if she thought they could pick them ALL up. She said with complete assurance: Yes. Of course it became a competition between the girls and the boys. But when I asked Audrey if they were going to count them all, and she said, No, I said, well how will you know who wins? That stumped her. She and Lydia stored theirs in the playhouse oven. Eli and Johnny stored theirs in the plastic dock owl. I don't know who won. I don't even know if they know who won. I do know that not all the acorns got picked up, but don't tell them.

The icing on the acorn cake was when Casey (in the next to the last photo, below) decided she was going to make acorn cakes. (You can see the ball of acorn dough in her right hand in that photo; that's a lot of acorns.) I asked her if acorns are edible, she just shrugged her shoulders and smiled big with her gorgeous white teeth just released from their cages (braces). I told her I was not about to sample her acorn cake until I knew they were not poisonous (where was my sick-at-home husband when I needed him?). Someone googled it on their iPhone and we decided we were safe. You know what? Acorn cakes are not bad. She just added flour and water. I could survive with Casey if we were stranded near oak trees.

Of course when I got home and asked the sick [smarty-pants] husband about eating acorns, he coughed and sneezed out a fine lecture on the Native Americans, especially those in California, who made breads and mush with nutritious acorns, soaking them first in water to remove the tannins. They used the tannin water to tan animal hides. Read this beautiful history in our National Archives of the California Indian Acorn Culture. You know what I just remembered? I think Casey's mom has Native American heritage. Casey was not taught this by a relative though. It was in her somewhere, waiting for acorn season when the acorns called.

In the photo above, you can see a number of things: The original structure, on the right, built in the 1920s with its tin roof that is wonderful to fall asleep under in our beds at night when there is a rainfall lullaby (but alarming under acornfall!) and badly needs replacing; at the left, the addition my father built in the 1960s (after my grandpa bought the place for my mom) to accommodate the ten of us, and eventually many, many more; and most importantly for this post, notice the little green sandbox lid at the bottom left behind the woodshed where Casey and Sydney stashed their acorn collection, which ended up in the acorn cake, below. (Oh! Casey and Sydney won!) In the first picture, Gary (visiting from Guatemala, next to Rachel from Brazil), is smelling the acorn dough.

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Autumn haiku

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how many times you try
to land right
but you forget the wind

    ~

my mother's mind
a leaf in the air
blowing away

    ~

a leaf stem
held by a wet stair
allowing the leaf to watch below
like a turkey vulture

    ~

a floating petal
caught on a spider's shaft
a crane stutters overhead

    ~

caught in his arms

late in life

she said, I do

Have you tried haiku? Though the strict form is 5-7-5, meaning five syllables on the first line, then 7 on the second and 5 on the third (a syllable is on in Japanese) modern haiku is less structured. Haiku in Japanese means "playful verse". The most important elements in haiku traditionally are the kigo, or season word (such as frog, which indicates spring) and the kireji, which is the cutting word. The cutting word, which comes somewhere in the middle, creates the playfulness between the first part and the second, maybe a tension or a revelation. Also, the poem should invoke images, which is what Robert at The Solitary Walker did in his poem "aeolian"-- very imagistic and haiku-esque, as in this couplet: 

     black crows strut on black earth
     tricking the eye

Thank you, Robert, for the inspiration. I was writing haiku in my mind all the way to work after reading that poem. It's nice that your treks inform your inner journey, something I've enjoyed from George at Transit Notes and Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow as well.

Good haiku is not easy, I think. I like going back to the "old" haiku poets for studying their skill at capturing so much in just a few words and sounds, like Basho:

An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

~ Basho (1644-1694)

. . . or Soseki:

Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.

~ Soseki (1275-1351)

For more inspiration, a nice site for modern haiku is modernhaiku.org.

Reading or writing haiku is an illuminating way to meditate.

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Tofu is not as boring as I thought, in fact . . .

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Tofu Steak

. . . it can be pretty amazing.

But "delicious" and "tofu" are not words I ever dreamed of pairing not too long ago. I had enjoyed fried tofu in Pad Thai and other dishes where it was tossed in for good non-animal protein, but I had never even considered eating it as its own course, big and geometric on the plate. That texture, and the blandness. Bleh. Once again, my ignorance of what has been enjoyed for 2,000 years is mind blowing. When ignorance leads to aloofness, or worse, arrogance, it's not good. And, it can prevent you enjoying tremendous offerings. This is how I was about tofu. Then a few months ago, my boss (who lessened my ignorance of Early American Lit eons ago) took me to lunch at Omi, a terrific Japanese restaurant near the university, and since Don and I were on a path to eat less of the beef steak variety, I saw tofu steak on the menu and the description convinced me to try it. After the first bite, I thought I'd die (from enjoyment, not from choking). My boss, Steve, looked incredulous at my enraptured face, and when I offered him a bite, he declined and started off on something about Nathaniel Hawthorne and witches . . .

With tofu steak, the outside of the tofu is delicately crispy, while the inside is creamy. Those textures coupled with the sweet-savory sauce are a winner (you can leave it savory without any sweetness if you prefer, as in the original recipe, below. Also, If you don't like mushrooms, just leave them out.)

Now, whenever Don and I go for sushi and rolls, we also get tofu steak. In fact we love it so much we decided we ought to learn to make it at home. We dug around for a recipe online, and so I want to share the one we picked and tweaked, because it's so simple and yummy, and I want you happy. Making it together takes about 10 minutes prep (mostly chopping) and 10 minutes cooking; Don sautés the tofu, and I make the sauce. Tofu may be bland alone, but it absorbs flavors beautifully, so I'll keep trying new dishes. Maybe you have favorites you'd like to share.

The online recipe is here. Our tweaks in autumn rust. Here is a podcast of me reading the recipe. . .  Just kidding!

Tofu Steak With Japanese Mushroom Sauce (or without mushrooms, if you prefer)

Yield: 4 Servings - We halve the recipe for the two of us, since this doesn't keep well.


Ingredients


4 firm tofu - we use soft tofu, which gets crispy outside and stays creamy inside
1 c fresh shiitake mushroom
1 c fresh enoki mushroom
1 pk regular white mushrooms - we use whatever mushrooms we have on hand
1/2 green onions
2 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons sake (Japanese rice wine) - we don't have sake and use Sherry

4 tablespoons soy sauce

2/3 c dashi (Japanese fish stock) - I need to find some of this, but we use about 1/3 c fish sauce mixed with 1/3 c veggie broth
2-3 tablespoons brown sugar, to taste (Whenever we've eaten tofu steak at several sushi places, it has been sweet, though this original recipe does not call for sugar.) 

          2 teaspoons cornstarch

         a few teaspoons cornstarch on a plate.

         1 teaspoon salt

        4 tablespoons vegetable oil

Instructions

1. Place a clean cloth towel in a shallow plate (something like brownie
pan would be good) and put Tofu on it for 30 minutes to drain water. Wipe the surface of Tofu with paper towels and sprinkle some salt (to make the surface of the steak crisp and brown when done.)


2. Cut off the stem of mushrooms and slice them. divide Enoki into small
bunch. Cut green onions in 2 inches long. Finely chop garlic.


3. Dredge Tofu in cornstarch on a plate covering all sides 
and ends with cornstarch. Put 2 Tbsp of vegetable oil in a
 frying pan and fry all sides of Tofu in medium-high heat 
(we slow it down a little and sauté on medium heat),
until Tofu turn golden brown. Put them on serving plates.
We buy packaged soft tofu in water and cut it in half for two people,
halving this recipe. After draining per #1, we cover all surfaces
with cornstarch and sauté all six sides of the oblongs
(what are oblong "cubes" called? Oh, Don says they are rectangular prisms.)


4. Wipe the frying pan with paper towel and add another 2 Tbsp of vegetable oil. Saute garlic and the mushrooms in medium heat quickly. Add Sake, soy sauce and Dashi stock and bring it to boil. Add green onions. We wait and add the green onions at the very end, since we like them better barely cooked. Dissolve cornstarch in 2Tbsp of water and add to the sauce. Stir from the bottom of the pan and pour it over the cooked Tofu. Serve while hot! (4 servings) We cook the sauce in a separate pan while sautéing the tofu.

NOTE: Dashi is the basic soup stock used in most Japanese dishes such as
Miso Soup and Udon. You can get the powdered stock called 'Hondashi' in any Oriental stores. Substitute it with chicken stock or veggie stock if you like. Shiitake and Enoki are very expensive in the U.S., but they are very flavorful. Try not to cook them too long.

Allow me to share one more great tip for preparing tofu for adding to stir fries and soups. Rather than frying (I'm trying to use less oil), you can bake it and get that nice fried texture. I found the instructions here.

BAKED TOFU: Buy one pound of extra-firm tofu and bake it in the oven using this easy method: Heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 Celsius); cut the tofu into 1/2-inch slabs; marinate it for a few minutes in a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, a tablespoon of honey, and some minced garlic; then spread the tofu on an oiled baking sheet and bake until crispy on the edges and golden brown (about 25 to 30 minutes).

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, 

to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, 

who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities 

he must go out of himself to appreciate. 

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

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My mother tells me it was good

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My mother tells me it was good

Out of the spine of the piano my mother

is calling, and for the first time her voice to me

is jazz. Through my headphones

and a black man’s touch on the keys and strings

I hear her -- the tingles and flashes, rolls, sparks

and hints that used to fill the white church

under the shadow of the cross, telling me

There is more to piano music than "Jesus Saves"

and more to my mother than what I know.

In crystalline notes of his, I recognize her timed pause,

a drop from an icicle melting in the sun

that falls the moment just after you know you want it.

In duet, a saxophone’s smoke rises to the sun,

helping it warm my mother’s piano confessions to me

drop by drop -- those revelations I envisioned, prayers

she breathed in a jazz club before she found God,

suspended, frozen in the veil of her past, yet whispered

through chinks -- in winks and inklings to me

on the black and white hymned keys for the someday, this day,

when I feel their beating hum in the melting icicle of my spine.

~ Ruth M.

Hear a podcast of this poem here.

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The Bridge

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This is Farwell. I don't know if that's his name there on the motorcycle, but that's the name of the little town whose population doubled when these bikers stopped for breakfast. Three years ago this weekend I was on my way north for a solo weekend away, because it was the 50th anniversary of the construction of one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The Mackinac Bridge spans the Straits of Mackinac between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan. The anniversary was an excuse for my Aveo, my camera and me to run off together and cross that 50-year-old bridge, one year after I'd turned 50 myself. We ladies have to support each other (nyuck nyuck). (Did you know that bridge is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish?) I left home (southeast of the star on the map at the capitol, Lansing) and a couple hours later drove into Farwell (not too far from Midland on the map), a town where you don't have to stop since there are no traffic lights or stop signs going through town. But I did stop, to check out this caravan of motorcycles. I sat down on a bench across the street from the diner where these bikes were parked, and waited with my camera. After reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college, I always wanted to take a cross-country motorcycle trip (I'd love this pre-1916 Cannonball Coast to Coast Vintage Motorcycle race). Maybe this was my chance?

When the bikers came out of the diner, they took their time, chatting about where they'd stop next. The gentleman with the Harley-burly beard in the foreground of the photo at the top of the post sauntered across to his bike parked in front of me on my bench and immediately asked if I'd like to go for a ride? Hmm. Here was my long-awaited opportunity to ride in the open air, hair flying from under a helmet, bugs on my teeth. Route 66, here I come!

I declined, however, with all the courtesy I would give the President of the United States. If I think about it too much, traveling alone as a woman can be a little creepy. So I don't think about it too much. (I admit that once or twice in motels I have gotten pretty weirded out if the Psycho shower scene sneaks past the doorlock in my head.) I have found that if I treat people with respect, they treat me the same way. When I'm in Chicago or NYC, and I'm lost? I'm going to ask a construction worker for directions, even though they sometimes come off as being, well, aggressive, toward women (or has this changed?). Something in me really likes to confront assumptions in myself, and in others about me. I have never experienced anything but the most genteel behavior in these encounters (except a few times from whoever is with me, who thinks I've lost my mind). I have approached the thuggiest looking people (I don't mean construction workers are thuggy-looking), and while they may look surprised at first (aren't we all surprised when a stranger comes up to us?), they are always helpful. Something gets bridged between you. If you've never tried approaching the least likely person on the street for help, try it, it is liberating.

I'm careful and don't put myself in dangerous situations. I get a sense if a person is not the kind I want to approach, maybe it's a sixth sense. I always have a cell phone. I only explore in public places, and always in daylight. But I love to travel, and I love to do it alone sometimes, which Don graciously understands, if for some reason he can't join me. He says he doesn't worry about me, although there is one artistic neighborhood project in Detroit I am eager to explore, and he won't let me go alone, even in the daytime. Being vulnerable, because I'm a woman, can be very frustrating in its limitations.

Perhaps my trust in strangers began on my first day of school in kindergarten, when I lost my way home and was crying on the sidewalk. A strange man in a truck stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. No matter that everyone had told me not to get into vehicles with strangers. I said, Sure. He drove me two blocks home. To this day, I don't know how he recognized me, but I didn't know him.

Have you ever traveled overnight alone, just for fun, not business?

my Aveo parked in front of the motel in St. Ignace, Michigan in October 2007

where I was the only guest for the night;
St. Ignace is the first town over the bridge in the Upper Peninsula

state park beach along Lake Huron

northern Michigan farm

Harbor Springs, Michigan

Five Mile Creek, a one room school

wild turkeys in northern Michigan 

(by "northern Michigan" I mean the northern part of the Lower Peninsula)

Mackinac Bridge, between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan
from the upper peninsula in St. Ignace

Mackinac Bridge, from the Upper Peninsula
in its 50th year, 2007

Mackinac Bridge, on my way to morning coffee and breakfast at a diner

rustic boat on a rustic beach

wild beach yarrow
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The turquoises and blues of the Great Lakes are better in autumn

I am severely disappointed that we did not get up north this summer, and our plans for going this fall have also fallen through. That's why I'm posting three-year-old photos, because of my wanderlust for that magical part of the world just a few hours away.

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