Blatherings

Since I can’t sleep, I might as well write. Not that I have anything momentous to say (except that my hit counter just hit 45,000). In fact, I’m not sure I have anything to say at all. Maybe I’ll just blather instead.

I need to back up both my laptop and my desktop, wipe the hard drives and reformat them, then re-install some software from scratch. I don’t hate Vista as much as everyone else seems to, but once it gets buggy, no amount of tweaking seems to make it better. Now all I need is to find a couple of unobstructed days to do it.

As I mentioned on Facebook, the huge pot of stock I made over several days turned out wonderfully. I’m making chicken soup tomorrow (with extra garlic and ginger, so maybe it’s Asian chicken soup), and then cabbage soup over the weekend. The rest of the stock gets frozen for sauces and future soups.

Indigo Bunting, who just wrote a nifty piece about Facebook being an addictive timesuck, asked me to tell the story about the Middletown Springs town dump that I posted on Lali’s blog, so here it is. Lali was writing about living frugally and finding wonderful things in the trash and at rummage sales, so I posted this comment:

I’m going to try to take these lessons to heart this year. Mostly my year will be about Throwing Things Away, stripping down, digging out. There are new things I want, definitely, but I will try not to be hasty, and see if what I have can be reused and repurposed. You know, I wonder if non-Vermonters know the wonders of The Town Dump. It is SO not what I expected when I heard IB talk about it. Ours was essentially a combination community center and recycling station. People sorted their Stuph into the myriad collection bins—newspapers separate from magazines separate from white office paper separate from colored office paper; bins for plastics, for glass, for aluminum cans, for tin cans, for garbage—and then there were the large items that no one could use, pieces of furniture, the pallets that Lali mentioned, mirrors . . . it was fascinating to see what others threw away, and fun to pick through anything that called to us. I spent a lot of time at the magazine bin, picking up fascinating small-circulation journals or catalogs for things I never knew I wanted. After sorting, disposing, and collecting, people would stand around and catch up on the news, chatting happily the way they did in the general store or the post office. I knew those neighbors, spread for miles across the Town, better than I know the ones down here who live just yards from my front door. We ate in each others’ homes, had pleasant evenings of board games, went to community meetings and town dinners at the firehouse, volunteered at the library. I have been in precisely one neighbor’s home down here, and that was only so I could babysit their cat.

However: as much as I’ve been longing for Vermont lately (and dreaming of what I’d do with my Powerball winnings), I don’t mind not having to shovel sidewalks or unearth buried cars in winter.

I’m still not sure how to deal with this house. It needs an interior paint job (exterior too, probably, but not quite yet) and new carpeting; before that, it needs to be purged of all the stuff cluttering up the walkways in some rooms and the closets in others, not to mention the truly frightening garage, which has been reduced to two narrow aisles, one to the outside and one to the washing machine and freezer. Once I strip away, do I have the painting done first? The carpeting? What of all the furniture and really, really heavy stuff that will need to be moved before anything happens? Where does it go when there’s no free space?

More troubling still, I don’t know what to do with this odd nook off the dining room, which is currently occupied by an easy chair and side table that no one ever uses. It’s sort of the elbow between the living room and the dining area in this open floor plan, with some angled walls. The chair looks fine there, and we’ve put the Christmas tree there in years past, but it’s really not useful space. It’s too public for an exercise machine (and who wants to sit next to that when you’re eating dinner?). An altar of some sort? It doesn’t feel like a terribly sacred space.

I missed my acupuncture appointment today. Completely spaced it until it was too late. When I talked with Jennie to apologize, I mentioned that I wasn’t feeling sad or blue or depressed, but I was acting the way a depressed person acts, she reminded me that qi, and particularly liver qi, can get stuck, and when it does, it makes you feel “stuck.” The fastest way to get unstuck, both metaphorically and physically, is to move. Start walking. So tomorrow I hope to buy some decent walking shoes, and just break the habit of not moving.

Sorry. I know this isn’t what you’re used to seeing here. But maybe you’ll be comforted to know that I’m feeling drowsy at last. It’s 2:24 a.m., but it’s not like I have to get up early in the morning to work or anything.

Oh wait, I do.

Crap.

Learning to Swim

Disturbing dreams last night; in fact, they rattled me so much that I remember ordering the dream to stop at one point. Mom and Dad and I were all traveling, but they were going on ahead without me. We were able to keep in touch with each other from our various vehicles—they shifted from cars to motorcycles to planes—and I remember having “a few more things to do” before I could join them.

When they were on their plane, I could see it up in the sky, and its wings were suddenly ripped off, and the long cylinder started flipping and turning and swinging back and forth like some grotesque carnival ride. Then it stopped, clearly ready to plummet to earth, nose straight up in the air, and it started falling, heading right for me. I said, “Stop!” and made the plane freeze; it wasn’t that I was trying to change its (and my) fate, but I didn’t want to have to experience it in the dream. I wanted to go on to other dream-things.

And I did. There were several other sequences that I forget now, but there were also repeated images of me able to swim in what appeared to be puddles on the ground but which were surprisingly deep. They were the color of coffee with cream, and they were pleasantly warm but not at all hot. I swam bravely, boldly, with people looking at me, and I didn’t care, even though I’m pretty sure I was skinny-dipping.

When I got up this morning and looked at my Raven’s Brew coffee, I noticed the name of the variety: Resurrection Blend.

Today I cleaned out the refrigerator and scrubbed it down well. Not only did I get rid of the items that were past their prime, I got rid of anything that I would not be eating, which included some things that I had bought just for Mom. This evening I went to the local health food store, which has a small grocery section, and bought ingredients for miso soup (well, Adam has the miso, but I got everything except the bonito flakes, which I’ll probably find at an Asian grocery), then went to Publix and got ingredients for chicken stock and cabbage soup and more butternut squash soup.

I didn’t get anything just for Mom; I would always get her one or two things that she loved, just to brighten her day. This time I bought just for me. Coming home was especially lonely, and I thought of her and the dogs and, well, all those I’ve lost over the years, and blessed them all and cried a little for them. I know it was time; it’s always perfect timing for everyone involved, all of us joining the dance of the great Dao. But if we love someone, or if we love life, there is attachment, and breaking that attachment is hard. Buddha teaches us that attachment is the cause of suffering. But I think attachment, and thus suffering, tells us we’re alive, that we’re connected to one another, that we love that connection.

If Dao is the way water naturally runs downhill, finding its perfect path until it joins with the vast ocean of being, then I’m learning to swim. I may still be in the shallows, but it’s a pleasant and invigorating swim, and in its ripples I can hear whispers of rebirth.

Squeaking and Squonking on White Rabbit Day

In high school, a math teacher once asked us if we’d said “White Rabbit!” that morning. When we looked at him blankly, he explained that if the first words out of your mouth on the first day of a new month were “White Rabbit,” you’d have good luck for the entire month.

This morning, New Year’s Day, I said “White Rabbit.” Does that mean I’ll have good luck for the entire year? Or will I, like Alice’s rabbit, just be late for everything?

I’m not a big fan of new year’s resolutions, but today I decided that I’m going to make a few changes that are long overdue. One is to take up the recorder. Or rather, take it up again.

My dear friend Tim, who besides being the most amazing watercolorist (his work in oils is pretty fine too, but the watercolors really speak to me) is a lovely lyrical recorder player, had been prodding me for years to get a recorder of my own. In August of 2004 I finally broke down and bought an alto Yamaha. And I got the two beginners’ books he recommended.

A month later, when we evacuated to Tampa as Hurricane Frances was bearing down on us, I took the recorder with me. That week the recorder and I got to know one another, and I made satisfying progress.

But once back in the regular swing of daily life, the recorder was laid aside. I’d pick it up from time to time, but playing it never became a habit, and in the ensuing years, the poor thing languished. And it became a bigger and bigger bugaboo. That rosewood-colored beauty just sat there, mocking me.

This week a friend and I challenged each other to just play. For both of us, it turned out to be musical instruments that we once loved but had been neglecting so long that they were now fearsome, but we realized that just playing is very good advice in many areas of our life. We don’t need to be perfect at everything, don’t need to be professionals all the time. We can just play and enjoy whatever happens as a result.

Today I cleaned and assembled the recorder, and started playing with it. Not playing it, really; playing with it. I can’t begin to express the awful squeaks and squonks that poor recorder is making. A goose being beaten and strangled would make sweeter music.

An unintended side effect is that I now want to find my Sweet Pipes Recorder Books, which are in my office somewhere. I use the word “office” only because that is its official designation. For many months before Mom died, I barely used the office, instead working off my laptop, sitting in the chair next to her bed, and the office became a dumping ground for old papers, books, paraphernalia, and things that should have been thrown away a very long time ago. On top of the clutter and chaos is a thick layer of dust. And somewhere in there are those recorder books.

I need those recorder books. My alto Yamaha is in abject pain, judging from the noises it is emitting, and it desperately needs me to treat it with more educated fingers. So today, after I clean out the refrigerator, the big, BIG garage trashcan is moving into my office, and I will become an archaeologist beginning a new excavation. No telling what other treasures I’ll unearth.

Maybe I’ll even find the white rabbit’s gloves and pocket watch.