This is Not a Food Blog

But this was my lunch today.

There's a lot of beauty in Oaxaca.

The sink  in my hotel room looks like a shrine.

While out and about in Oaxaca today, I think I found the stairway to heaven.

I think that's where these folks are headed.

We Are All on the Same Path

Parade through the streets of Oaxaca Day of the Dead 2017

Well, if you look closely you can see the glint of the tuba, but not much else. There were fabulously made-up marchers, but the crowd was huge so I could barely see them myself, much less photograph them. And I was woozy from lack of sleep and a big meal, so I have to confess I didn't try really hard to stand on a fire hydrant or jump three feet into the air or anything.

pulpo

This was dinner. Plus a fancy cocktail made with mescal, mint, and cucumber.

It's good to be alive. Despite all the treats brought to the cemeteries for the dead, I'm pretty sure the living eat better.

Healthcare, Selfcare, Taking Care of Business, etc.

Last Saturday's Sunset

Here's a pretty picture to distract you from the political madness. I'm sick to death of looking at pictures of men deciding the fate of women. This morning, looking at the news, I thought my head would explode just like Trump claims Obamacare is exploding. Or was that implode? I'm pretty sure he claimed both. I want ALL young women to consider politics as a career. Women have to take charge. If there were a headcount of all the women in this country who have NOT been raped, sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, suffered domestic abuse, or suffered economic inequality, would there be anyone to count?

Meanwhile, I've been taking care of business (taxes) and cooking ratatouille and making a salad from collard greens that a T'ai Chi Chih student gave me this morning.

And the best part? I'll be sharing all this goodness with friends while celebrating the demise of the Republican health care bill.

Merry Christmas

Christmas at my house used to look like this.

Today, for the second year in a row, I spent Christmas Day at a bar with friends, listening to fabulous local musicians.

Booze and boats. What a lovely view.

The party ended at 4:30. Santa can party til he melts, but I'm snug at home.
Wherever you are this Christmas, I hope you are safe. I hope you are loved. I hope you've given and received, and that some delicious and festive concoction has passed your lips. I hope you've uttered kind words and heard that kindness echo back. Merry Christmas.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

If the dead can still get mail, if their things can fall out of the closet onto your toes, if they can visit you in dreams, if you can hear their voices inside your head, you can wish them happy birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom. 

Last year's birthday breakfast cupcake.

Last year's birthday party for my mom and my dear friend Carol

Birthday, 2012 just a few weeks after my mom moved in with me.

I'm not quite sure, but this may have been the last birthday she celebrated with her beloved twin sister Millie.

We very rarely know which birthday will be the last. So let's love the cake, and the guests, and the singing. Let's love the love that comes to us on our own birthdays and those of the people we love, be it in the form of gifts or people traveling from afar to share the day. Taste the sweetness. Feel the warmth from the candles. Soak up the glow. Reflect it back.

In a short while, I'm off to celebrate my friend Carol's birthday. She will be there via Skype while a half dozen of us party in person. We will eat and make merry, and celebrate the living and the dead.

The Weekend Report

It would have been easier to stay home and mix my own drink.

I went out to a local bar last night to hear some music
.
My marriage was happier than this bar, I said to the friend I was with.

Ice, we need ice, the bartender yelled every fifteen minutes or so and it was lugged from somewhere in a yellow bucket that may or may not have been exclusively meant to haul ice.

Every other minute a member of the wait staff slipped behind the bar to fill water glasses for a table.
Get out, the bartender would hiss, you know the rules. You don't belong back here.  It happened over and over again, and the bartender went nuts every time. One waiter was particularly adamant with his rebuttal. Apparently there was no water for the wait staff to access wherever it was that they were supposed to get it, and the bartender could just fuck himself.

Kitchen staff came out of the kitchen, hot and desperate to quench their thirst. Get out, the bartender told them too. They weaseled by him and stuffed the bar water nozzle into a glass.

It took forever to get a drink.
The place ran out of the beer it shared it shared its name with.
The bathroom needed toilet paper.

The bartender laid out his tickets from the tables as the waiters put them in. We're out of ice. I don't have a martini glass. We're out of lemons. We're out of limes. You don't belong back here. Get out. I'm really busy he told any patrons at the bar that dared to usurp his attention to order a drink. He made two guys who wanted only a Bud Light and Corona wait until he'd filled the tickets laid out in front of him.

Waiters begged for their drink orders. I'm busy, the bartender would snarl. If people can wait an hour for a cheese sandwich, they can wait 15 minutes for a pina colada.

A guy I guessed to be the owner appeared. He reprimanded the bartender, sliced lemons and limes, hauled in another keg of the eponymous beer, all while looking slightly suicidal.

I finally got the fries I ordered after asking for them a second time an hour later. They were delicious.

The music was fantastic. Everybody in the bar was grooving there in the Kingdom of the Cranky Bartender. It was all of us against him. We won.

How was your weekend?

Have you read THIS yet? George Saunders writing about Trump. Left Land vs. Right Land. I recommend it.

The Party Isn't Over

My parents, 1950-something

I have not blogged in nearly 2 weeks--a personal low, I'm sure--offset perhaps by the 3 or 4 posts per day back in the era of post-divorce wreckage.  Those posts were medicinal, and the recent absence was too.

It doesn't feel appropriate to  blog about family get-togethers or vacations with our recluse vs extrovert family dynamic. Suffice it to say that I went somewhere, ate delicious things, and saw weird and interesting stuff.

Not Holland. Not Denmark. Not Santorini. Solvang.

Solvang is foodie paradise. I could go on, but it would take forever to describe the delicious things we ate. This is a hollow ball of chocolate filled with poached pear on peanut butter fluff. I forget what the little balls mixed with the pear are. They were fantastic, whatever they were. 

We went to an ostrich farm. Some of us wanted to eat ostrich. Some of us didn't. Some of us fed the ostriches. Some coveted ostrich feathers, one person got an ostrich souvenir t-shirt, and probably at least one person imagined herself to be an ostrich, running through the countryside, plumes bobbing.

. 

Surf Naked

You can buy this t-shirt at LAX,

The sky and the ocean were outdoing one another in the contest for the grayest gray as the airport shuttle zoomed down the coast this morning. Dozens of surfers bobbed in the water, wrapped in their black wetsuits from head to toe. No one was naked.

At a LAX bar, I might have gotten my gin and tonic sooner if I'd been naked. The bartender saw the blond next to me, but I was swathed in my gray-haired cloak of invisibility. This is a randomly employed power I have no control over. Sometimes both men and women make a point of telling me they love my hair. Women frequently go on to tell me they could never go gray. They don't have the right skin tone or their gray is a weird texture. Whatever. Oh! the bartender said, when he finally noticed me, startled as if I'd dropped through the ceiling onto the barstool. At least LAX has stopped carding EVERYONE. There were no silver-haired exemptions. What was that all about? Dear whoever stopped that nonsense: Thank you.

I'm on the way to see my mom at the nursing home in Iowa. I'm leaving this:

Last night's sunset

for sub-zero temperatures. I'm wearing wool leggings under my regular leggings and I have a down jacket the size of a small easy chair. My suitcase contains a wool scarf, gloves, two wool sweaters, a down vest, and wool socks thick enough to use as a pillow. There will be extensive driving on this trip. I'm rather relieved that I will not be making the drive alone. Daughter C and her husband will be my travel companions. I keep picturing this:

My mom now has a doctor that checks on her in the nursing home. She no longer has to go out in sub-zero temperatures. She no longer has to go out at all.

And it's just now occurring to me that she may never leave the premises again. Just like that. She's already gone out for the final time, perhaps, and none of us knew it. Often we don't know these last experiences are happening as they occur. It would be too much for us, I suppose,  if we knew. For the past half-dozen years, I've considered that every encounter with my mom could be the last. And that is how I will approach this visit too. I don't see the point in denying it. It's as real as the brutal cold.

Happy New Year! Tiny Sandwiches, Table Tennis, and the Beach

What did I do last New Year's Eve? I asked. I had no idea. Did I drink champagne? Martini's with my mom? Watch the ball fall in New York on TV and then go to bed at 9? Did I kiss anyone at midnight?

Answering questions like that is easy when you're a blogaholic. I read ALL ABOUT IT  this morning. Things didn't get any better in January. I considered getting back on anti-depressants. I talked to my doctor about it--though I didn't follow through. I suspect things weren't much better in February either.

I have been showered with good luck and blessings and love as 2015 has drawn to a close. (It would have been swell not to have fallen off a ladder the night before Christmas Eve, but even that has gone well. My ribs are healing. After three days of misery, every day is a little easier.)

I hope I remember this New Year's eve forever because it's been fabulous.

Sand castle time.

Sophia tries sushi before high tea.

More beautiful grandchildren and the fancy New Year's Eve day high tea.

Girl filled with light.

Son vs Son-in-law ping pong.

I'll say it again. I hope I remember this New Year's eve forever because it's been fabulous.

And family back in Iowa tells me that my mom is doing well. I'm thrilled. With her fall Thanksgiving night in 2014 and the pain that followed, 2014 didn't end well for her either. Here's to 2015's final hours. I hope you have someone to kiss when the clock strikes midnight and that 2016 is kind to you.

Why We Should Eat Dessert

Pavlova by candlelight, prepared by my friend Sasha for our Friday night dessert after dinner on the patio.

I ask myself these days what I'm doing right, what I've done wrong. What I can re-do. What I don't know how to do. What I don't know how to do, but must do.

I'm hoping to move my mother into a nursing home in Iowa. Put her in reach of more people who love her. Put her in the care of nurses 24/7. Put myself in airplanes regularly again like when she was in the care of my brother and his girlfriend on the east coast.

This past weekend was as mixed as a weekend can be. A lovely Friday evening dinner with friends, daughter M here for the weekend. Then Sunday devolved into the unblog-able. There were two calls to the hospice nurse this weekend, two new meds in the past week. This afternoon the moaning was so loud that I thought for a moment I literally could not stand it. As per usual, the moaning does not really signify pain, it's an unconscious thing that my mom does not know she's doing. How can she stop it if she doesn't know she's doing it? How can I stand it when she can't stop it?

Every day I write in my little red "mom notebook" what I have to do, what I've done. I try to keep the plan moving along, but the plan might be changing. Plan A, Plan B. Maybe there's a Plan C that I don't even know about yet.

One of my favorite bloggers lost her mother Alice last Wednesday. Andrea's adventures with Alice have been sort of a guiding light for me. Now that light is out. I have plenty of support left, but I ask myself if I'm ready to let go of my mom. To really let go. I think I am. But I also think it will be harder than I imagine.

Tonight I'm remembering this dream I had when Dan was dying. How the dream helped me know what to do. How it changed the plan. How everything fell into place. How I had to let go.

Oh, This Feast!

My heart and head were in a whirl--the camera saw that. 

That's Pete ladling Gazpacho into a punch cup while I stand at the ready to re-fill the bowl.

The rest of the menu is below: Mussels, clams, smashed cucumber salad, fruit salad, cubes of feta garnished so prettily they looked like petits fours. There was homemade hummus and little add-ons for the gazpacho. There were brownies and a Greek cake topped with nuts and cinnamon and powdered sugar. There was ice cream and espresso. There were 14 of us feasting and it was perfect.

 There was also my friend Nomi, who knows how to capture a moment.

And the next night there were leftovers for Pete and my mom and me. 

The gazpacho grew even more delicious.

Everything got better and better and better.

Report from Pillville: The neurologist, the hospice nurse, and matters of the heart

Things to do while you're on hospice

The hospice nurse comes on Tuesdays. She wears elaborate blue eyeliner and perky pastel scrubs. Somehow this makes me feel all is right with the world. This past visit she noted that my mom's pulse/ox was quite a bit lower than usual and that her handwriting had degraded to an illegible scrawl. This news did not strike panic in my heart. There have been five hospitalizations during the three years that my mom has lived with me. During two I considered summoning the family. There have been eight trips to the ER, two outpatient surgeries, and a myriad of medication changes. I've been at the end of my rope so many times that there's not enough rope left to hang myself--which is to say that I'm ready for whatever comes next. Or that's what I tell myself.

Right now, I'm sitting at the kitchen island in the dark with a glass of wine, listening to my mom moan and shout in her sleep. I don't feel particularly worried about anything, and when I go to bed I will drop into the deep well of sleep only coming to the surface if it's absolutely needed.

On Wednesday I took my mom to the neurologist. She's on hospice now, I told him. She has a new lung tumor. Off most of her meds. She's not in any pain. He asked her if anything was bothering her. She said she was thirsty. He brought her a paper cup of water. He gave me his usual ultimatum. You must have two full days off every week, he said. You can come back to the house to sleep, but you must not see her during these days. You must do this so I do not get a new patient. This speech, delivered in his thick Chinese accent, sounds grave. No nonsense. You must, you must, he says.  I smile and tell him about going to the gym in the mornings. Two full days, he counters. He tells my mom she should enjoy every day, live each one like it's her last. He says that's what he does. He tells us that he's almost met death three times. I know from past conversations that he lost his house and everything in it during a fire and that he barely escaped. I know that he fell in the shower and split open the back of his skull. The scar is impressive. I don't know the story of his third encounter with death. But I believe him when he says he lives every day like it's his last. His eyes meet my eyes. His eyes meet my mother's eyes. He hold us there, reading us. Being sure we understand him. Waiting for us to speak. You can live for months or even years he tells my mom. She tells him that every day she hopes that she'll die in her sleep. He tells her no, that thought is a waste of her time. Just live. At the end of the visit he shakes our hands. Don't come back, he says. Just call me, and I'll write the prescriptions.

In the beginning of our lives in Pillville, there was a podiatrist, a pulmonologist, a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist, a vascular surgeon, a geriatric specialist, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, a dermatologist, and for a brief while, an orthopedist. We are pretty much done with doctors. I think the only one we may see again is the vascular surgeon. If you are sighing sadly right now, please reconsider. Each trip out of the house is a fall risk. That risk includes me. Steadying a wobbly person, even just to get from to car to wheel chair and back again is harder than it looks.

Today I needed to have my mother sign a form. Her signature was perfect. Maybe she could get a job teaching penmanship if there was such a job anymore. But tonight she's shouting nonsense. Our lives here in Pillville are like a yo-yo. Sometimes tightly elegant loops and tricks. Sometimes a limp and tangled failure. At any moment the string can break.

My mom is talking in her sleep again. This time what she said was perfectly clear. "How in the hell are you going to cook a turkey?" I've got that down, Mom, really I do. Of course I don't know that she was talking to me.

In the bathroom at my favorite coffee shop, there is a wetsuit and a towel. I like to imagine that someone runs across the street to surf on their lunch hour. I'd say that's making the most of today.

La Grande Fête

View from my friend Sasha's sunroof

You might not know that I was once a devoted francophile. Once upon a time I even had a blog about my love of France and things French.  Like other bits and pieces of my life, this particular diversion has fallen into disuse since I began caring for my mother. I have nowhere to speak French. No travels on the horizon, no French neighborhood to frequent where I might eavesdrop on a French conversation.

I was supposed to go to the French fair in Santa Barbara today, but just as a friend picked me up to head north, it began to pour here in the land of drought. We felt certain that the rain was just a momentary cloudburst, but the bad weather continued and when the freeway slowed to a stop, we exited and had lunch HERE.  I had the abalone (for some reason it does not seem to be on the menu a bit farther south) and don't regret missing the fair. My friend and I had a leisurely time and drove back just in time for the clouds to open up again.

View outside the restaurant in Carpenteria

I love this stretch of the California coast.  I need to remind myself that my search for a house near the water where I could take care of my mother is what brought me to this exquisite place. I frequently marvel about the twists and turns life has delivered to me since my divorce. How the end of my marriage seemed to be the worst thing and turned out to be the best thing. How agreeing to take care of my mom required me to move and brought me here. How one thing always leads to another thing and at the moment when all that  change is swirling around, we have no idea what the outcome will be. Those clouds might bring a downpour, but in the land of drought a downpour can mean salvation.

View of my patio. When it rains in So Cal, we take photos of it.

Bears

I am afraid of being eaten by a wild animal. Bears. Sharks. Mountain lions. Alligators. Crocodiles.

This is how the summary of the first hike on a trip I'm about to take to Alaska reads: "View nesting bald eagles, beavers, moose and bears in their natural habitat. The guide, a naturalist, (carries a shotgun) takes you...."

I really think I'll be fine. I don't really think I'll be eaten alive by a bear. I think I'm more likely to keel over with fright if there's an encounter with a bear. And then be eaten. But at least then I won't know I'm being eaten.

I went through a period of dreaming about bears a couple years ago. If you're so inclined, you can read about that HERE,  HERE, AND HERE.

When I first moved my mother in with me, she frequently woke me up with her growling/moaning sounds. Until I got used to it, I was convinced there was a wild animal stalking my house.

I took a hike in the back country of Wyoming once. Across a ravine there was a grizzly bear ravaging some berry bushes. We moved on. Rather quickly, singing the Hey bear, ho bear, go away bear song. Just a short way into our long hike back to our cabin, I noticed that the trail was lined with berry bushes. Then we saw bear prints. We'd already studied our wildlife guide and knew how to identify grizzly prints.  Yep. There were those long claws. I doubt that I ran the 12 miles down that mountain screaming, but the adrenaline my body generated made me feel like I had. We had dinner that night at  Jenny Lake Lodge. Mid-way through dinner, I began running a fever, which somehow contributed to the surreal deliciousness of the meal. I guess if you're going to see a bear on the trail, that's a great way for the story to end.

Tequila the Wonder Drug

My neighborhood looked like this yesterday morning.

I've been dragging myself through life the past couple of weeks. Gray sky inside my head. Mail piling up. Tasks accumulating. The layer of dust over everything in my house growing thicker. A dead plant on top of the armoire in the front hallway. Tired. So fucking tired. 

It occurred to me that I'm drinking too much wine. There was a time when I was making a point of not drinking. After my mom's fall on Thanksgiving and the post-fall rules which dictated she could have a mere 2 ounces of martini every evening, I decided I'd top that by foregoing alcohol all together Monday through Thursday. Things were pretty wobbly in Pillville back then. I needed every bit of focus I could muster. Then things changed. And I needed every ounce of wine I could justify. I'm never sure how these transitions get made here in Pillville. I'm just the boss of everything here in Pillville, and I guess, being the boss of wine, I declared that I should have more.

Yeah, so, yesterday I cooked my weekly dinner for my L.A. friends. (Chicken and cauliflower curry, roasted carrots and cucumber salad.) 

                                                            This is the chicken and cauliflower curry.

We had tequila afterwards. And chess pie. And more tequila. And more pie. And cookies. And more tequila. Honest to god, I thought I'd killed myself. And then this morning I woke up feeling fabulous and felt fabulous all day. I actually did stuff. Rectified all of the above-mentioned problems, plus called doctor's offices for my mom and sat on hold and then explained that no, she doesn't owe them money, that they have to bill her supplementary insurance (I'd had a complete mental block against doing this until today.) I ran errands like a champ, filed all the papers that had been teetering on every surface in my room, did laundry, made up the beds for guests, caulked the crack around my fireplace molding,  texted the Someone (which I'd been dreading) and asked about a check I thought I had coming, and THEN a neighbor brought a mis-delivered piece of mail to my door which turned out to be a check from the Someone. 

I mean. Really. It's got to be the tequila. Right?

Dispatch from Los Angeles--Part 2

The book salon feast and its creator, reflected in the mirror.

"Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it."--from Anthony Marra's novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena."

A story set during the two recent Chechen wars, Marra's novel has a lot to say about loss, love, cultural identity, betrayal, survival, war, and the art and objects we humans use to connect, commemorate, and remember one another.

The meal was sublime. Yes, of course there was vodka. We poured it into white creme de menthe to make a cocktail called a stinger and we poured it into pomegranate lemonade. There was also dovga--yogurt soup with greens and herbs. There was beef manti and stuffed grape leaves and a dish with peppers that I wish I could be spooning into my mouth right now. And you might want to lie down in case you feel faint when I tell you that we had homemade halva ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce and salted peanuts for dessert.

Then I dove into my bed for the night where I looked out over the City of Angels. Really.

I went to LACMA again this morning, as has become my habit, where I visited the Art of the Americas Building. It lives up to that rather broad name. The heyday of American furniture and decorative arts, and all that, and in a sort of reverse chronology, on the top floor there's this:

The photo can't capture the experience at all.

I gasped when I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of this gallery with its draperies of reds and greens floating above and its curving walls fashioned of wooded slats. There are one of a kind chandeliers and  lighting that cannot be captured in a photo, and in about 5 seconds you forget all of this because the ancient art is positively stupendous.

And there's this somewhat more modern piece, which was different from everything else, but quite fitting with the larger theme of this 24 hours.

And downstairs, before I walked up the steps to the long, long ago past, there was this:

It fits right in. There were several conjoined couples in the ancient Mexican/Central American clay pieces.