Buy Nothing Day, fall, November
In chilly, cloudy, dark by five, showers on November 28, 2008 at 6:14 pm
It’s Buy Nothing Day, which this year feels farther away and just plain sadder than ever. The day after Thanksgiving—when all we want to hear is save your health, save your house, save your leftovers—and all we get is a gaggle of Kohls employees, sleepy from opening for a line of three people at 4 a.m., half-assed mouthing spend spend spend.
Oh Christ, pop in and I’ll fix us all a giant fruit salad with berries we picked and apples we plucked.
And you can turn us around, from the mall towards the water in a fleet of white hot air balloons.
fall, November, Thanksgiving
In Uncategorized on November 27, 2008 at 5:21 pm
With a heart full of thanks for family and community, here’s to the best holiday.
fall, November, Thanksgiving
In chilly, sunny on November 27, 2008 at 2:47 am
It takes a little more than an hour to drive from downtown Seattle to Vaughn, Washington, a thumbtack of a town near the Hood Canal. All that quiet must make Vaughn the perfect place for Al Prante, president of the Narrows Strut Busters chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation, to perfect turkey calling, which may very well be as much an art as it is a science.
Supposedly, Prante has learned that the best way to charm a turkey is to sound like a sexy woman. According to the Kitsap Sun, Prante can imitate a turkey dance, too, complete with arms moving like quivering wings.
I’m imagining Stars, the Thanksgiving turkey President Bush pardoned a few years ago, nestled snugly somewhere near Bethesda. He startles awake after hearing the distant call of some pretty young thing. The bird, half-dreaming of a distant lover, glides across the greater 48 states and lands smack dab in the middle of Vaughn, Washington and onto the turkey caller’s flailing arm.
It’s a new American legion of honor—the turkey is really a knight, and the turkey caller a grandiose commander. Man and beast are perched for so long that they become a cedar pillar, some grand totem pole of indigenous kin.
fall, November, Thanksgiving
In chilly, cloudy, dark by five, showers on November 26, 2008 at 1:50 am
Last night, I had a nightmare about this grizzly old duplex that sits on our street in Capitol Hill that the city finally knocked down yesterday. I dreamt that its remains stretched into a track of wood and stone, thickening towards my building and rising into an arc to just under my open window. Suddenly an old landlord crawled up the pile and through the screen, looking venomous.
I was so used to walking past the duplex when it was still in tact, held together with a million band-aids, that it got to the point where I stopped noticing that it existed.
I’m realizing that this is the exact opposite of the kind of people we should like to become—ones who get so used to what’s wrong that we forget how to start over. Like a slap on the wrist or a tiny pinch, we need something to tell us that being healthy is better than being sleepy.
Rooting out old fear kept inside of even older parts of our heads, in spite of the fact that nobody’s buying Baby ballet shoes this year.
fall, November, Thanksgiving
In chilly, dark by five, sunny on November 25, 2008 at 5:46 am
On my best behavior, I read from the Book of Hours. I’ve marked the page where a Benedictine writes:
“Pour into us now, O most loving one, the gift of eternal grace, so that, by the misfortunes of new deception, old error may not destroy us.”
fall, November, slept-in-beds
In chilly, still bright foilage, sunny on November 20, 2008 at 1:05 am
I first posted my list of slept-in-beds last spring on Thirtymoon. But there’s something about autumn, when there’s so much dark that you could sleep on sleep, that’s again got me thinking about beds where I’ve slept.
Friends have started to contribute their own lists. Want to compile one to be included here on Weatherspoon?
Slept-in-Beds (two weeks or more)
Childhood bedroom Indiana
Basement guestroom (with termites!) in aunt’s rowhouse Bridgeport, Chicago
Mint in the backyard, oatmeal in the mornings grandparent’s house Indiana
Sun tea on the porch, watermelon in the creek lakehouse Sturgis, Michigan
Dorm rooms, various Indiana
Haight-Ashbury Victorian, summer internship San Francisco
10th and Waverly walk-up, across from Nine Lives Bookshop Greenwich Village
NYU dorm, by the farmer’s market Union Square
Loft above the Civic Theater with a huge vintage vault, green house with slugs in the garden, blue house by the river Indiana
House by the Arboretum, Craftsman with rats in the basement, co-op by the doughnut shop, Seattle
fall, November, Saint Gertrude
In chilly, cloudy, dark by five, still bright foilage on November 19, 2008 at 2:30 am
It was this time of year when a house I rented with friends really came alive. With rats. It was a big 1920’s Craftsman near Greenlake with a drafty crawl space in the basement. Having always lived in old houses I should have known that there was a real risk of the place having rodents. It sat close to a string of restaurants and a grocery store and was blocks from the water. But before this house I hadn’t dealt with anything larger than mice–cute as they are creepy–and never dreamed of living with their big brothers.
I should have been pleading with Saint Gertrude for help the whole time. She’s the patron saint of suriphobia—the fear of rodents.
By the time I was packing up the kitchen and moving out the next summer, a long list of rat stories had unfolded. The rats had been quiet for some time, likely traipsing across the yard in the warm summer weather. Exterminators and dozens of traps later, it had gotten to the point where I knew I was cohabitating with the rodents instead of getting close to actually beating them. And as a result, the rats were gracious, for the most part keeping out of food and sight. But when I left I knew that really, the rats had won.
I opened a cupboard and grabbed a stack of plates to wrap in newspaper. And there it was, this perfect pellet dropped on the center of the top plate. Sort of like the rat was giving me the finger as a farewell.
fall, Jewish father, November, Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, Susan Stamberg
In still bright foilage, sunny on November 14, 2008 at 3:13 am
They’re selling the new Philip Roth book at the grocery store across the street from my office. It’s nestled on a shelf near Men’s Health and a gossip magazine with the headline “Bump Alert!” Apparently Angelina is pregnant again.
I’ve read the first thirty or so pages of Roth’s infamous Portnoy’s Complaint, mostly because my father told me it’s the only book of fiction he has ever read. Once I got through the chapter on how the protagonist whacks off to anything living or dead, I slipped the thing back on my shelf. Imagining my dad as a tween passing this book to his brothers, reading it late at night in the attic with the pool table in the big house he grew up in made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
He proudly bought me my own copy of Portnoy’s at a lecture put on by Nextbook we went to around Mother’s Day. It was themed around Jewish Mothers, hosted by Susan Stamberg from NPR and featuring klezmer music from local sensations the Kosher Red Hots.
Near the start of the event, Ms. Stamberg asked the crowd, “How many of you have Jewish mothers?” Almost everyone in the auditorium at Benaroya, filled with several hundred people, raised their hand. My dad nudged me in the ribs with his free arm. “LOOK at all of them!” he exclaimed. Which sounds really horrible at first, except that he is so Very Truly Jewish. And it’s out of pure love and satisfaction, so much so that he looses his manners and blurts out something mortifying when he spots his kind. This happens everywhere—at Whole Foods, at the movies.
“I was at my butt doctor today,” my dad said as naturally as I love you, “and she said I seemed high-strung. I shrugged and said, “I’m Jewish.” Then she said she was, too! I should have known with the last name David, but still.”
fall, farm, flood, November, water
In showers, still bright foilage on November 13, 2008 at 4:07 am
The rain is flipping everything on its back in Washington State tonight. The Wallace river is still rising near Gold Bar, a speck of a town in the foothills of the Cascades. Earlier today, authorities closed the Green River Bridge at Black Diamond because the soil was moving underneath it. People feared the worst, that the whole bridge might buckle into the water. And at a dairy farm near Monroe, farmers gathered cattle and led them in alphabetical order up hills away from the rising water. I imagine mine shafts filled to the brim in these just- off-the-Oregon-trail towns, grafitti and candy wrappers washing away with the muddy water.
fall, November, Old Farmer's Almanac
In cloudy, still bright foilage on November 12, 2008 at 5:49 am
Around the Civil War, you could count on finding at least two books on the shelf in most houses–the Bible and the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Back then a lot of people used their almanac as a journal, marking up the white space with daily events and turning that year’s edition into bite-sized family histories.
Since it was first published in 1818, the bones of the Old Farmer’s Almanac have been about predicting weather for the year ahead, a mysterious endeavor done by reading, “sunspot activity, tidal action, and planetary position”. Although science has proven otherwise, the publishers claim that their forecasts are 80-85% accurate.
It’s like secret sauce at a rib joint or a decoder ring. There are some things that cannot be known by the rest of us–formulas concocted inside rooms at Masonic temples with musty rugs behind thick velvet curtains.
Wanting to know how tidal action can sort-of predict twelve months of weather is an intoxicating notion, one that is way better to wonder about than see written down as arithmetic on scrap paper. You can feel the weight of such floaty knowledge as it’s passed down, even if you can’t know any facts. Even if it’s baloney.
Arctic Circle, fall, November
In showers, still bright foilage on November 7, 2008 at 2:50 am
Julio Medem’s Spanish film Lovers of the Arctic Circle is on my short list of favorites. The story follows Otto and Ana from a youthful meeting through their falling in love and eventual separation. After the two are estranged, Otto becomes a pilot who flies between Spain and Scandinavia. Years later, Ana travels to a cabin in Lapland, Finland to search for Otto. It’s during the window of time every year when the sun goes in a circle in northern Scandinavia but never sets. With the sun constantly up, there’s something settling about the way she is isolated, waiting on Otto for days, but never solitary.
Lapland Province is supposed to be where Santa Claus if from, and it makes sense. The place practically knocks up against the North Pole. This time of year, when it’s dark out well before I leave downtown just after 5, I think about cities near the Arctic Circle–Helsinki, Reykjavik, Fairbanks. Could you do it, live for months in the Arctic with slim pockets of day to have a few weeks with the sun acting as a pacifier? Because me, sometimes even now I think I could go through so much winter for a few weeks of sleepless light.
