Polka Dots

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When I was an adolescent in my mother’s kitchen, eating ambrosia salad and pork steaks with gravy made from canned mushroom soup, I was surrounded by the latest pop design. We had just moved back to my hometown after living one year in a depressed town up north. I was about to start sixth grade, and my twelfth (or eleventh?) birthday was imminent. When Twiggy cut her hair short, my sister cut mine like hers.

We moved into the house across the street from where I had spent all my years before the move. The house was my dream house: big, old, oak trimmed, and where I’d played with my childhood friend Jimmie. But the kitchen was a disaster of rusted out white cabinets someone had decided were a good idea when they were shiny and new, the same time they slapped white aluminum siding on the outside. So my dad had the kitchen completely gutted and refurbished with wood cabinets and a pretty wood kitchen table for us who were left at home: Mom and Dad, my brother and me, and an array of foreign students mostly from Thailand.

I remember drawing mushrooms between meals at that kitchen table (along with Snoopy flying his bullet-dotted doghouse Sopwith Camel in battle against the evil Red Baron). Some of the mushrooms had polka dots, which I copied from orange, yellow and olive green placemats, napkins, canisters and glasses Mom had bought for the kitchen. I thought they were cute. I thought they were cartoon imaginings. I didn’t know until walking the farm eight years ago where our own magic mushrooms sprouted, that polka dot mushrooms are real. So yeah, you can assume correctly that I wasn’t ingesting anything psychedelic in the 1960s and 70s. I don't plan to grind these into powder any time soon, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like, after reading stuff like this at wiki:

Spiritual and well being

In 2006, the United States government funded a randomized and double-blinded study by Johns Hopkins University, which studied the spiritual effects of psilocybin in particular. That is, they did not use mushrooms specifically (in fact, each individual mushroom piece can vary wildly in psilocybin and psilocin content). The study involved 36 college-educated adults (average age of 46) who had never tried psilocybin nor had a history of drug use, and who had religious or spiritual interests. The participants were closely observed for eight-hour intervals in a laboratory while under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms.

One-third of the participants reported that the experience was the single most spiritually significant moment of their lives and more than two-thirds reported it was among the top five most spiritually significant experiences. Two months after the study, 79% of the participants reported increased well-being or satisfaction; friends, relatives, and associates confirmed this. They also reported anxiety and depression symptoms to be decreased or completely gone.

Despite highly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, 22% of subjects (8 of 36) had notable experiences of fear, some with paranoia. The authors, however, reported that all these instances were "readily managed with reassurance."

There are many psilocybin mushrooms on our walking path, 
more this year than ever. 
Maybe the heat and extra rain are good for them.

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Poem: Wild

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Wild

Wild, the sky says “dance”
and the clouds obey.

My hands are birds, posing
in the trees, accompanying.

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Ode to a Pear

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Ode to a pear

Venus rustic,
buddha seated,
bottomly knob,
overturned
not hardly —

who’s to say
your ripening,
still on the sill,
ponderously
unburdened,

all sweet pale,
by a window glazed,
till just tooth
tender, into
a perfection of age

awe-full-y to
decay approaching,
nearly one day
fluid, fermented —

who is to say that then
just before that end
you are not
the fruit
of all
most choice,
delectably
surrendered?

Poetry should be heard.

Did you know that pears don't ripen on the tree? They should be picked full sized and firm, set in the fridge for a day or two to prolong them, then set out at room temperature to ripen in a few more days. Best eaten the day before starting to rot, still sweet, almost dissolved more than chewed, in a quick minute.

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Of shared taxis and shared language

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These are shared taxis, called "dolmuş" in Istanbul; photo from the late 1980s;
"dolmuş" (pronounced dolmush) is related to the word "dolma" — stuffed pepper, 
grape leaves, etc., because these shared taxis get pretty packed with passengers;
they may not look like much, but even Orhan Pamuk rides in these around Istanbul.

I’m one of those people you can tell who I’m talking to on the phone by how I’m talking. I had a boss who was a boisterous, theatrical woman everyone adored. She laughed a lot and spoke with all the drama of the theater, in which she had leading roles for decades in our community. She entertained every time she opened her mouth. When I was on the phone with her the one time she called me at home, I got off and Don said,

“That was Pam, wasn’t it.”

“How’d you know?”

And then I reviewed myself as Pam for the past five minutes. I had spoken louder and funnier. I even scrunched up my shoulders with enthusiasm and smiled like a performer, as if I were Pam’s mirror self.

I don’t know why I do this. I think I want people to be comfortable, to feel good about themselves. I want them to think I like them so much I’m going to talk like them. I wouldn’t want to talk like me — boring, and heavens I wouldn’t want them to talk like me. I’d rather speak their “language.”

I think this trait is helpful for learning foreign languages actually. When you want to sound just like the person you’re talking to, you have a good chance of at least being intelligible.

When we lived in Istanbul I abhorred standing out as a foreigner. But nothing I could do would disguise the fact. Women in the dolmuş (shared taxi) would look me up and down to see if I had a manicure, how my hair was coiffed, where did I buy my clothes? They knew I was different. And when I opened my mouth and asked the driver in Turkish to stop at the next convenient spot, I was still me, an American in Istanbul, but I could speak their language, at least a bit, and I think they liked that I wanted to be like them. At the end of the day Don would massage the pads between my cheekbones and my nose, which were sore from speaking umlauts. We don’t have those in English. Those muscles screamed, “no pain, no gain.”

The truth is, at the moment I am reading Anne Lamott’s hilarious and helpful book about writing, Bird by Bird, and while she’s talking, I want to write like her. This undoes my theory about wanting the other person to be comfortable. She and I are not having a conversation!

me and my then boss Dr. Pam at my college graduation in 2001*

*Note about Dr. Pam:

There is probably no one who affected me finishing my BA in English more than Dr. Pam, who was my boss for seven years and gave me release time from work to take classes. If I remember right, in this shot she was telling me, "Ruth, YOU made this happen, young lady . . . " after I thanked and thanked her for making it possible. Dr. Pam is dyslexic and was told by her high school counselor that she would never do more than clean toilets. One day Pam saw a black woman walking down the street in PhD robes and decided that was what she wanted, and she did it, having to revise her dissertation 22 times, writing it as a single mom with a toddler bouncing on the bed, all the while battling dyslexia. Now she works with TRIO programs to help at-risk, low income, first generation and academically-middle-of-the-road kids set their sights on college.

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"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"

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Nights start to cool, tomatoes like the world grow heavy. A mid-size calf looks at you and splays to his mother. She lows protectively, and in that moment looking into her eyes, you see that together you are pilgrims under an isinglass sun, though she is wary of a traveler such as you.

Title from John Keats' ode "To Autumn"

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Nouvelle 55: Portrait of Mary Magdalen, or a Poet

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Saint Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre
by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo
Mary has just now seen Christ, and the artist paints
radiance reflected on her cloak from the risen Lord,
while Mary's face is in shadow

Portrait of Mary Magdalen, or a Poet

A response to 'Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre'
by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

A veiled face,
cloves cloaked in a sleeve.

Fragrance,
like late summer gold,

leans into the cold of tombs.
Interior lights

– not the apotheosis of the sun—
are the radiants you seek.

Day is where you are,
everything else, shadow.

Break the clove’s shell.
Rub the dark powder

painting your skin,
and smell your breath.

Nouvelle 55 is a poem or fiction in 55 words, based on a piece of art.

Poetry should be heard.

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Poem: His instrument

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His instrument

In this early morning dark
I am unused to the sound

of the old rasping clock that hangs

on the wall until it is shipped

to our son. It is a banjo twin

of the one our girl already has —

gifts from their grandpa,

my father-in-law, who is still

living, though altered

from when he collected time

pieces, wool-serge-suited for work.

He wound keys of all 74 clocks

before driving off in his ‘77

Lincoln, back when he had both

kidneys and a five-bedroom
colonial. His meticulous fingertips
have plucked pendulums

into motion, rotated arrow-hands,

and shut doors with

miniature country paintings

on glass, housing hollows

of time that keep tapping out

the rhythm of a heart,

strumming the quarter hour,
radiating his timbre now into
our many houses across
the land, long after
he has fallen asleep, flanneled
in his corduroy chair,

snug in the apartment where
he'll drift off until the end of time.

banjo clock image found here

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