Turkey season

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Don keeping watch over his flock by day

Has it really been almost a year since we saw Sarah Palin talking with a reporter about being Vice President and pardoning a turkey from being killed for someone's Thanksgiving table, while turkeys were visibly being slaughtered behind her? It was a grisly example of someone being out of touch with their surroundings.



In the U.S., if you call someone a "turkey" it's an insult, meaning the person is stupid (out of touch with their surroundings -- yikes). Or if you say some project was a turkey - like a movie - you mean it was a failure. Apparently this arose from the fact that turkeys are thought to be stupid. You know how we call someone a "bird brain" if they don't seem to have terrific mental capacity? Well of all the birds, turkeys have the smallest brains in proportion to their size: 2%. Domestic turkeys have supposedly been known to drown standing out in a rainstorm - looking up, mouth open, "hey, what just hit my little head?" as it pours down their throats.

Some say turkeys get a bad rap, since their mortality is not good, and they die from other things more than from drowning. But there is some truth that domestic turkeys have been bred away from their wild instincts to find shelter from the elements.

After we lived in the country of Turkey we encountered a few individuals out of touch with their surroundings who, after chuckling a bit asked in disbelief, "You lived in Turkey? What do you mean, there's a place called Turkey?" Actually the real name for the country is Türkiye. If you pronounce it correctly by rounding your lips and putting that ü just behind your teeth, no one thinks you're talking about living inside a big bird. (Did you know that Sesame Street's Big Bird was made with 4000 turkey feathers?) I remember going to bed at night after speaking a lot of Turkish and my cheek muscles were sore from all those ü's and ö's. Here's an exercise in something close to stupidity for you: When you go to the turkey farm with the kids this year, try saying "göbble göbble göbble" and make the correct sound for the Turkish ö. Öh, and in Turkey they call a turkey a hindi. Now what's that about? I think it went something like this: Turkeys have to do with American Thanksgiving -> American Thanksgiving has something to do with American Indians -> Indians -> Hindi. Phew. I feel like I just flew around the world.

Two of the big toms in the photo at top - the ones with tail feathers fanned, and big pink and blue drooping gobbledy-goop under their little 2% heads, one bronze and one white - died recently after each breaking a leg. See, I told you they die from other maladies. Don doesn't know if they were in a fight, or just too heavy for their drumsticks. :| They have another two months to grow before Thanksgiving dinner - one for us and the rest to be given away. I'm afraid the one tom that's left won't fit in an oven.

I can't say that I think turkeys are dumb, but they look dumb the way they stand and stare at you inside your personal space. Or maybe they just look curious, because they certainly are that. In fact, they look the opposite of being out of touch with their surroundings if I really think about it. Can you be dumb if you're this curious?



So this is what you can say if you don't want to call someone stupid, or a turkey:







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synchronizing: unexpected duets

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My poetry mentor Diane Wakoski taught me to write poems that bring unlike things together. At all costs, avoid clichés, such as comparing tears with rain, or love with fire. She showed that it is far more affecting when a poem like Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" connects things in surprising ways, like winter and a person's mind, as that poem does. I think good poems make you feel two things: 1) I never thought of that before, and yet 2) I always knew that, maybe I forgot it, but I've known it somewhere, sometime.

That's really the theme behind this blog: bringing things together, not that I always think about that when I post.

Two years ago when I first heard about Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin doing a musical collaboration with country/folk singer Alison Krauss I was intrigued by the pairing and wanted to buy the album, titled Raising Sand. I hadn't been excited about Led Zeppelin when they were on the radio in my teenage years, but when my son Peter learned to play guitar in the '90s, Led Zeppelin was one of his favorites, and I found myself rocking along to "That's the Way" or "Ramble On" through his discovery. So in 2007 I loved the idea of rock star Plant and country singer Krauss (that even my punk daughter listened to) singing together. I never listened to or bought the Plant-Krauss album when it came out, even though you can listen to the whole thing at their web site here - so nice. But finally about a month ago I heard it and was blown away by one of the songs: "Gone, Gone, Gone." So, as I was downloading it and putting together a mixed CD, I had the Genius Sidebar open and it was suggesting other duets, two of which I also downloaded. It would be nice to have a whole album pairing singers from different genres. Ha, I speak out of ignorance - even though rauf, Loring and João try to educate me about music. There are probably dozens of captivatingly unexpected duet albums out there, and I am going to hear about them in comments.

Pour yourself a cuppa coffee, or tea. Plug in the good speakers. Put your feet up. Relax and listen. You need some music. Rockabilly. And Blues.

"Gone, Gone, Gone" by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss is my favorite song at the moment. NOTE: Robert Plant is wonderfully "Zepellin-esque" in the studio album version in the link above, so I like it a bit better than the live version below. It's cute though, if you watch the video below closely you can see Krauss do a little Zepellin-esque thing toward the end, as if she's imitating her co-singer.





The second song Genius recommended was JJ Cale and Eric Clapton singing and playing the blues in "Ride the River." It would be a blast to ride the river in a boat with these two, I could paddle since they'd have their hands full of guitars and mics.





The third song Genius recommended was another duet with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and country singer Emmylou Harris singing as a couple who look at their life through a photo album in "This is Us." Here they are on the Letterman Show, and it's fun to watch them sing to each other, but I like the studio recording that follows a bit better here too. Emmylou sounds a wee bit flat in the live version. But what a cool voice she has.





Here's the studio version of the same song:





Had you heard these songs before? Are there other cool duets to add to an unexpected duets mixed CD?

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RESPECT

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Congressman Joe Wilson didn't have it when he shouted "You lie!" to President Obama in the middle of his speech to Congress.

Someone spray painted this word on a step going up to my university office building. I don't know why. Sometimes graffiti is art, but most of the time it's disrespectful.

Meditate on the word.

Respect.

Respect is the balm we hold in our hands every moment.

Some people believe if you treat someone with disrespect you lose the right to be treated with respect yourself.

I have a story that demonstrates what I feel about respect. The story belongs to a man - let's call him Vick - for whom I frankly don't have much respect. But this story, like an iridescent bubble, surrounds and protects him from my memories and wrath.

Vick was my boss for three years. While he treated me with respect, I cringed when he led our staff with a cold, condescending and dictatorial style. Out of a staff of 20, only a couple people liked him. I'll never forget in my first week on the job one secretary said she wished his plane would crash. Out of respect for his position, I found a way to be pleasant and cordial in our daily professional relationship, and at some level I respected his expertise in his field. But I would never want him for a friend, even though he could be charming and even warm at times. Charm on the heels of cold arrogance only increased the chill.

So, this is the story he told me, the bubble around him that embodies my definition of respect.

Vick went to France with his American wife, a professor of French, every summer for several weeks for her academic research. This was one realm where he felt intimidated, convinced the French people he encountered scoffed at his American accented French. How strange it was to picture him, Mr. I-RULE-THE-WORLD, feeling inferior. His robust physique, while perhaps lending itself to his power in the U.S., only increased his feeling of mortification in Paris. And isn't it rather charming that he revealed his vulnerability to me this way?

He explained to me that he learned from the French how to enter a restaurant: Walk in the door quietly. Listen to the room. Let the room receive you. Serenely, calmly, genteelly ask the host for a table. He was so careful about this it became his appeasement, his little sacrifice at the altar of the French gods, hoping he might be accepted in spite of his Americanized French.

One year Vick's parents-in-law visited them in Paris, and they had no clue about the "respect the room" rule he had learned and honored. All those years of showing deference entering a restaurant were blown away in a gust when the door opened and his mother-in-law chattered away full voice while everyone in the room gaped at them. Our tall, broad, bearded professorial Vick in a tweed sport coat held his head as high as he could while his innards melted in humiliation.

This is what I think of, what epitomizes respect for me. Entering quietly. Listening. Then proceeding.

Even the air we move through deserves our respect.

And now I am reminded of a little Mark Strand poem:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand
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l'atelier: layers and layers

A good thing about having your own room is that you can put out whatever objects you want and no one objects. On these shelves in l'atelier I have stacked boxes collected for decoupage projects that have not yet materialized, stones that were collected from beach walks and coasters sliced from the pine tree that broke my heart when it died last year.



A farmer built this 10' x 22' building as a chicken coop over 100 years ago. You can tell it's a coop because five windows line only the south side of the building, for the warm sun in winter months. On the opposite wall there are shelves where I think the farmer had his egg layers' nest boxes, but there is no sign of the boxes.

There are other items waiting on these shelves, like my oil paints (I tried painting here once), and my bouquet from Lesley and Brian's wedding nestled near the earth woman's arms in a favorite photo cut out of a magazine. When Don powerwashed and painted this room, I asked for a blue ceiling. You can see in the photo below how the tin roof was layered on rough sawn oak boards.

When I am in this room I feel that I am at the hinge of the universe, a point where there is neither time nor space. There is life here. Although everyone calls this "Ruth's atelier" it does not belong to me any more than it belongs to time and space.

It doesn't matter if the decoupage projects get done, or if the painting of Killarney stays forever in its stage of tonal study without the finishing layers of paint. I will keep adding stones to the collection on the shelf. These objects feel at home in a room of piles that are happily unfinished, but whole.

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spiderwebs in the meadow

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The vocabulary of spiderwebs:

Silk. Gossamer. Ballooning. Dragline. Anchor. Spiral. Funnel. Orb. Dome.

And on dewy September mornings: Beadwork. Rainbow. Jewel. Necklace.






























From wiki: "The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity."

Last spring I found a forsythia petal swinging by a gossamer strand in the middle of the orchard far away from its anchor:



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harvest

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It doesn't seem to matter what I give the Earth - discarded knobs and knuckles of bone from our table, cucumber peels, broken eggshells, or used coffee grounds that look and feel like the black sand of Kailua-Kona, even invisible and toxic things, such as fears that swirl through my brain synapses - whatever little deaths I dump into Her lap, She absorbs them.

Some days, understandably, She explodes in a torrent of wind or water, or fire borrowed from the Sun. But reguarly what She returns is purified, through some filigree filter (think mycelium and earthworms) that cleans up what I give thoughtlessly. She gives back another day of Life.

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Postscript: To answer Ann, we have a hard time letting our tomatoes ripen, because we pick them green and Don fries them. Mmm, fried green tomatoes - a little tart, very savory, crisp outside and tender inside.

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Chef Don's Recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes (for Judy and y'all):

Slice green tomatoes about 3/8" thick.
Pour some milk in a shallow dish.
Place flour in a bag (some use cornmeal, or breadcrumbs; we prefer flour).

Cover the bottom of a fry skillet with olive oil and heat over med-high (on the low side of med-high) heat. Add 1 T. butter.

Dip tomato slices in milk, then dredge in flour and place in hot oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. If heat is too high, tomatoes will brown but the center will be raw. Tomatoes should cook 5-7 minutes per side. When you see oil bubbling through holes near the edges of the tomatoes, lift the slice to see if it is brown. Flip when brown on first side and brown the second side. Enjoy, my friends, enjoy.

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homey clean

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Finally, after years of intending to make a home cleaner from natural stuff, I did it. None of the recipes had allured enough to push me past lethargy until Design Sponge shared this one (I've posted my version below). Read here some of the disturbing reasons you should consider it too, such as the fact that 17,000 petrochemicals have been approved for home use, but only 30% of those have been tested for impact on humans, and that the average American home has 10 gallons of harmful chemicals hiding in cabinets and drawers.

There are many things to like about this recipe, but the best for me is adding my favorite scents with essential oils.

Homemade All-Purpose Spray

Ingredients (I bought them all at a health food store, except the empty spray bottle, which I got at Bed, Bath and Beyond):

• 1 empty 32 oz. spray bottle
• 3/4 c. Distilled White Vinegar
• 1 c. Hydrogen Peroxide
• 1 1/2 tsp. Castile Soap*
• 30 drops Tea Tree Oil
• 30-45 drops Essential Oil of choice - I used 15 rosemary drops and 15 spearmint, then I added 15 drops of lavender to rise above the smell of the vinegar (other choices include lemongrass, lemon verbena, clove, cinnamon, anise, sage, grapefruit, lemon, and lime)
  

Mixing:

• Place all ingredients into the spray bottle using a funnel or measuring cup with a spout.
• Add water until contents reach top of bottle.
• Shake vigorously and clean with pleasure!

I can still smell the tea tree oil on my fingers (I had to be sure it was coming out of the dropper). Tea tree oil is also known as melaleuca oil, something that was in Australian soldiers' first aid kids in WWI for its natural antiseptic properties.

With an initial investment of over $30 in the various bottles of stuff, I thought this homemade cleaner might be more costly than a ready bottle of GreenWorks natural all purpose cleaner, but I was willing to pay extra. When Don and I calculated the cost (by the way, apparently there are 600 "drops" in one fluid ounce), we discovered it was only $2.13 total for 32 ounces. (Compare: GreenWorks $3.39/32 oz.)

Squeaky, streakless. I've just increased my chances of becoming a clean freak.




*Castile soap alone is a profound discovery for its simplicity and pure, gentle cleaning qualities.

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