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Owls

A child asks me what my favorite bird is. It’s one of those wonderfully simple questions that only a child would ask. Though I’ve never considered it, I knew the answer immediately. “Owls are my favorite birds,” I say, “because they’re smart and powerful.” The child nods solemnly because I sound serious. So I add “I would love to be an owl for a night,” winking with my voice.

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“If the Owl Calls Again”

by John Haines

at dusk from the island in the river, and it’s not too cold, I’ll wait for the moon to rise, then take wing and glide to meet him. We will not speak, but hooded against the frost soar above the alder flats, searching with tawny eyes. And then we’ll sit in the shadowy spruce and pick the bones of careless mice, while the long moon drifts toward Asia and the river mutters in its icy bed. And when the morning climbs the limbs we’ll part without a sound, fulfilled, floating homeward as the cold world awakens.

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By Meredith – December 9, 2008

Frigidaire Weather

Even though the weather is an universal ice-breaker as well as the conversation topic of last resort, discussing it with too much portense or passion is viewed as mind-numbingly trite. But days like today are exceptions. When the temperature crests 25 degrees and 50-mile per hour wind blasts Canada in your face, everyone talks about the weather. It’s part therapy, part bragging, and part communal grousing.

The first chilly autumn days are a shock to the body. After 5 months of summer, a 50-degree day feels as painful as inching into a swimming pool. How I dread those first mornings of frost, when the sidewalk is carpeted with wet leaves that have stiffened and cars are left to idle in driveways amid plumes of exhaust. All day I am on the constant cusp of a shiver, as if my skin absorbed the cold and it sits just under the dermis, fighting against the surface warmth of the indoors. (I believe the medical term is “vasoconstriction,” when superficial blood vessels constrict in order to divert heat away from the surface to the center in order to conserve heat).

But gradually I’ll acclimate to the cold to the point where I can enjoy it. This morning I walked the 1.5 miles to the subway in 10-degree sunshine. Cocooned within my thickest winter coat, my longest scarf, my most garish ski hat, and with my stomach full of oatmeal and banana, the cold is as refreshing as a menthol cough drop. I scamper to the subway on the near-empty bikepath, imagining myself ripping and throttling through the snow-covered woods on my XC skis.

So all day I’ve been in love with the cold, and I want to defend against the gripers who act as if the cold has no place in Boston in December. Wusses. If you can’t take the cold, move to San Diego.

Posted in Massachusetts.

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By Meredith – December 8, 2008

Movin’ on up

For the first time in my life, I am a property owner! Well, part-owner. One of six owners. Of a condominium. That I’ve never actually seen. In the French Alps.

It sounds like a line straight out of a rom-com—“our place in the French Alps”—adding an air of European sophistication to any conversation. But reality is less glamorous: I partially own a cozy condo in a mountain resort community that demands a $700 plane ticket and an hour’s drive just to reach. The concept is breathtakingly impractical. We’ve vowed to visit twice a year—skiing in the winter, hiking in the summer—but I already foresee those ambitions getting squashed by the logistics, finances, and the inevitable desire to go somewhere else for a change.

So… why do it? Well, the condo is in the same building as the condo where Mr. P’s family has vacationed since he was a little boy. These are small, cozy European units, and more space was needed to accommodate the burgeoning family when we converged during holidays. My parents-in-law proposed that we all contribute to acquire the additional condo. It’s like marrying into the Trump family.

Today we reviewed the closing agreement sent to us by the realty notary in France. In addition to providing my signature underneath 4 pages of complicated French, I had to manually write “Lu et approuve et Bon pour pouvoir” above my signature. “Care to translate?” I asked Mr. P, who was busy reviewing the details of our jaw-dropping wire transfer to France. I think they warn Americans who marry foreigners against doing stuff like this.

Now, I’m toying with the idea of sending out cheeky invitations for a housewarming party. “Join us for après-ski at our new place in the French Alps this Saturday night. Feel free to drop by.” Would that be absurdly pretentious? Absolutely. But the thought makes me smile.

For now, I’ll settle for the novelty of my new title: part-owner of a tiny slice of Alpine paradise. 

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By Meredith – December 6, 2008

48 Hours

My maniacal devotion as a blogger is such that I feel horrendous guilt for almost allowing 48 hours to pass without a post. So here’s what I’ve been so busy doing instead…. (I believe this accounts for all 48 hours, although I only did the math once so it’s probably wrong.)

18 hours of sleep and bed-dwelling.

8 hours of work-work. Have you ever been in a really long meeting, and your brain suddenly announces to itself “You are the smartest person in this room,” and some other, more humble zone of your brain retorts “That’s impossible, because you’re the lowest paid person in the room” and the bold brain zone says “So? I could run this company in my sleep, but who needs the stress, the responsibility, the ass-kissing?” and the humble brain zone replies “Shut-up and pay attention! Our jaw is slackening.”

4 hours of cooking and eating. This would usually be more except last night’s dinner was a pre-Symphony pizza grab.

3 hours of consulting work. I love consulting. So quick and efficient: Company emails task to consultant, consultant completes task while sitting on couch in sweatpants, consultant sends company bill. Such an uncomplicated relationship.

3 hours of walking in the cool December sunshine.

3 hours of newspaper reading, web surfing, email, journal writing, and writing this.

3 hours of commuting, which involves more walking in the cool December sunshine and more newspaper reading.

2 hours 30 minutes of Boston Symphony Orchestra. A special treat on last night’s program was conductor James Levine and renowned pianist Daniel Barenboim doing a duet on the piano — the same piano — of Schubert’s F Minor Fantasy for piano four-hands. We were sitting to the far left of the stage but in the very first row, so our view was of Levine and Barenboim’s backs, sitting next to each other in front of the obscured keyboard. The Fantasy layers textured melodies that are at times sweet, at times apprehensive, and it was fascinating to see these two old men’s sturdy backs swaying and buckling as they labored over the keyboard. Mr. P called our point of view “erotic,” but I think — nay, hope — he meant “voyeuristic” or some other non-sexual word.

90 minutes of hair salon. After my blondness is renewed, I ask for “just a trim.” My hairdresser grins and says, “Didn’t you say you were going to cut off your hair after the wedding?” I assure her, “I’m letting myself go in other ways.”

1 hour of bookstore browsing, during which I read 20 pages of Proust was a Neuroscientist before I declined to buy it.

1 hour of housework. Yes, damned house still hasn’t learned to clean up after itself.

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By Meredith – December 5, 2008

Auden’t

In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand. – WH Auden

I must protest with WH. For I am sober as a Mormon, and tonight my hand is cold and unmoved to write much of anything. I truly believe that if I pounded a beer, chugged an expresso, sucked a Winston, and swallowed some bennies (a quaint amphetamine that beatniks used to harvest from asthma inhalers)… then I would have something more interesting to say than to riff on a quote by WH Auden, who himself relied on a variety of substances to churn out his prose and his poetry.

What would WH have thought about this prose generator? Granted the gibberish that is output hardly qualifies as literary composition, but is it really all that different from the theory put forth and the example exhibited in Kerouac’s treatise “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”?

I’ve tried to write spontaneous prose before, as a way to unclog the stoppage of words that my hand refuses to issue. Somehow my spontaneous prose becomes a pile up of similes and adverbs, plus it’s impossible for me to write with “no periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas.” Obviously Kerouac was so hopped up on bennies that he had no patience for punctuation. One of many reasons to just say no, kids.

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By Meredith – December 3, 2008

Adventures in Discount Acupuncture, Session 1

Yeah, I know it sounds like a bad idea, but M. is a very esteemed acupuncturist who practices out of an alternative health hub in Cambridge, and she’s only discounted for 3 treatments because I was referred by another patient. “I tend to get whoozy in medical situations,” I admit to M. when we’re discussing my health history prior to the treatment. “And I’ve got a thing about needles.” It seems an absurd thing to say to the person who I’m paying to stick filiform stainless steel needles into my body, so I quip “Can acupuncture fix that?”

M. laughs, which is a good sign, because I really couldn’t cope with a stern acupuncturist. After 30 minutes of talking about my health, M. examined my tongue and took my pulse (two important diagnostics in Chinese medicine) and then eased me towards the table. I laid face-up and stared avidly at the ceiling. “Take a deep breath and I’ll insert when you exhale,” M. said. I didn’t feel the first ones go into my knees. She moved down to my feet, which stung a bit, and then my wrists, which were the most bothersome. After verifying I was okay, M. left me alone in the room.

The temptation to look at the needles that were sticking out of my body was overpowering, but I decided against it, at least for the first treatment. My body was tense, so I took deep breaths and thought about calming things. I thought about kneading bread, hiking mountains, laying in bed on a cold night with a book, the satisfaction of completing a particularly witty blog post. I thought about Mr. P mistakenly referring to his socks as his “sockets,” as in “I slept with my sockets on.”

Towards the end of the 30 minute treatment, I began to feel odd. I had expected to feel relaxed, maybe even sleepy, but instead my body and mind were blurrily buzzing. I felt half hyper, half foggy. I wondered if this was my vital energy, my qi, being brought into balance… or if it was my body producing endormorphins and other hormones to deal with the sudden appearace of these invasive objects. After M. removed the needles, I was overjoyed that I had finished my first acupuncture session without fainting. If acupuncture cures me of nothing else, at least it will assist with my belonephobia (fear of needles).

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By Meredith – December 2, 2008

Dead Sox

My virulent anti-Red Soxism has faded in the past few years, and I’ve become more tolerant of the passionate Red Sox fans who devote their lives to following, worshipping, and spreading the gospel of a baseball team. Maybe it’s them. They’ve twice secured their illusive World Series victory, thus destroying their self-identification as underdogs as well as the notion that they were somehow engaged in a spiritual or moral struggle akin to the Civil Rights movement. Or, maybe it’s me. Long gone are the days when my commute bisects Fenway Park, forcing me to endure the close company of sweaty, drunk Red Sox fans in a slow-moving trolley. Plus, over the years I’ve met a handful of fellow baseball anti-fans who commiserate with my belief that baseball is a boring, prolonged sport and that the Red Sox devotion is a diversion for uncreative sheeple… an opiate for the asses.

So I no longer audibly sigh when a meeting at work is delayed so co-workers can exchange inconsequential Red Sox-related banter. I no longer resent when the top story in the local news involves a baseball player trade. I no longer cluck disapprovingly when I see Red Sox fans indoctrinating their young children into the over-priced, over-rated experience that is a trip to Fenway Park.

I read in today’s Boston Globe about the officially licensed Red Sox casket. That’s right, now the most die-hard Red Sox fans can be buried in a coffin emblazoned with the Red Sox logo.

It’s tacky, it’s bizarre, it’s arguably blasphemous, it’s the first skid on a slippery slope to brand and advertisement-infused caskets, but honestly, I don’t care. If it makes someone feel better about death to know that they’ll be eternally tucked away in a Red Sox coffin, or if a doting family wants the deceased’s devotion to the Red Sox to be the talk of the funeral, then who am I to judge? Freaking crazies.

Posted in In the News, Massachusetts.

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By Meredith – December 1, 2008

Getting nutty for Christmas

O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? — Jesus, Matthew 16:3

Americans are adroit at cloistering their collective conscience from the weighty issues of the day. Over the past few decades, we’ve trained our media to ignore any situation that requires knowledge of another countries’ history or mores, complex or abstract thinking, and a viable attention span. It’s not that we don’t care about wars, massacres, extreme poverty, human rights violations, and environmental catastrophe. Quite simply, it’s that we don’t understand.

Now the media is bandying buzzwords like financial crisis, mortgage meltdown, and credit crunch. Americans want to ignore the grave news about unemployment, stock market volatility, foreclosures, and bankruptcies, but the media is just being incessant with all this downer news about the economic apocalypse. Stark headlines like “Citigroup to cut 50000 jobs” really saps consumeristic desire.

So America vows to cutback on unnecessary spending, to hunker down and bring their epic credit-funded shopping spree to an end. The retail stores are nervous, cagey, desperate. Suddenly the American consumer has coyly refused to open her wallet for the retail stores to plunge into, like they have so many times in the past. And now, of all times, with the Christmas shopping season fast approaching!

But the retail stores are well-versed in the American mindset. Americans may no longer be able to spend money that they don’t have, but they can spend the money that they were planning to… wait, what’s that word? Oh yes, save. You know, for rainy days, for emergencies. Like… Blu-ray disc players for $120, GPS systems for $97, pearl necklaces for $49, George Foreman grilles for $30, and an Xbox 360 for $300. Prices like these are emergencies, because the prices could go back up at any moment.

Only American shoppers can ignore the myriad economic pressures, head en masse to the stores, and spend $10.6 billion, 3% more than last year. Only American shoppers can rationalize that, by spending money on non-essential crap, they’re actually saving money. Only American shoppers can stampede in a Wal-Mart. I underestimated you, America, but maybe it’s not that you don’t care about the financial crisis. It’s that you don’t understand.

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By Meredith – November 30, 2008

Cape Cod in Late November

Cape Cod in late November?!? Well, why not? Sure, all of the ice cream shops, mini-golf courses, and most of the restaurants are closed during the off-season, but one can cruise down Route 28 without getting stuck behind loaded minivans trying to maneuver into the packed parking lot of Captain Parker’s restaurant. Sure, the water temperature averages 45 degrees and the wind gusts without reprieve, but the luminous sand dunes and dramatic salt marshes are still a marvel of natural beauty. Sure, the trees are bare and the landscape is bleak, but hotel rooms are 50% cheaper.

And if there’s ever a time of year for chowing down on clam chowder, it’s November, not July. Speaking on which, how is it that every restaurant, lunch counter, and independent grocery store on Cape Cod claims that their clam chowder is “award-winning”? It must be a pretty sad chowder that has failed to garner such accolades and distinction. One restaurant boasted of its “thrice-award-winning clam chowder,” which sounds like a very distinguished chowder, but the wording piqued my inner grammarian so I opted to forgo soup altogether, even though my feet were frozen and my mouth was lined with a thin layer of sea salt that would have blended perfectly with oniony, peppery, clam-thick cream.

Some scenes of Cape Cod in late November courtesy of Mr. P…

An iconic Cape Cod image at Gray’s beach in Yarmouthport:

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Roaming the sand dunes of Sandy Neck beach and praying that I don’t get shot by any of the pheasant, fox, and coyote hunters in the area:

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On Sandy Neck beach, with rays of peaking sun and a terrible sky in the distance:

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By Meredith – November 29, 2008

Gobbles

I’m spending this Thanksgiving at my literal home in Boston, and not my sentimental home in Pennsylvania. Normally I would not waste a four-day weekend by staying in the city where I dwell. In fact, it’s the first Thanksgiving that I have remained in Boston rather than visiting family or seeking repose. Without the ardors of travel, Thanksgiving has been a relaxing, domestic experience for my new husband and I, but I cannot help thinking wistfully of all the places we could be rather than sitting on the couch, watching the Titans neuter the Lions and then the Cowboys fillet the Seahawks (boring football!), and debating the merits of recipes for garlic-herb mashed potatoes.

Thanksgiving started early — 7:30am, when we got up to prepare for the Gobble Gobble Gobble 4-mile run in Somerville. I have always wanted to do a Thanksgiving road race because it is the perfect morning activity for a day otherwise devoted to eating and couch-dwelling. The Gooble x3 is a large race with over 2400 registered runners, but people were already walking at mile one and I passed more than I was passed. “Run faster!” a woman dressed like a turkey yelled as we neared the finish line, “and you can eat more pie!” I finished at 35 minutes and 35 seconds, and that includes the 2 minutes that it took me to get to the starting line. I think that means I can eat a pie.

Thanksgiving is all about honoring old traditions, and making new ones. I introduced Mr. P to one of my family’s traditions: Cinnamon-swirl bread, a staple of our Thanksgiving table since before I can remember. My mom would bake multiple loaves, filling the house with the blissful aroma of fresh bread and cinnamon. I found a recipe online that turned out to be more brioche-like than my mothers (see picture below left), but no matter, because what I really craved with the smell. One whiff and I was pleasantly teary with nostalgia.

As for our new tradition… witness our Thanksgiving turkey (see picture below right, with our new and still unused gravy boat). Now that’s a magnificent bird, and it will not induce sleepiness. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can’t wait to gobble it.


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By Meredith – November 27, 2008