A Visit to Baja & the Gray Whales

So it's time again for a trip to Baja California Sur and Magdalena Bay where the gray whales teach their children the ways of the ocean.

I'm heading there in a few days with my daughter Erin, a wonderful photographer, and if we're lucky we'll get some good photos to share on the blog.

For months now my posts here have been meager. I'm hoping to change that in the coming weeks after my return from Cabo.

People think of Cabo as a party town, but there's a sense of wonder and reverence there too. For me it's a chance to look out at the ocean, watch the sunrise, float around in the bahia, scratch the back of a 20-ton mammal floating near my panga (like the boat in the photo), and appreciate life for what it is -- something sacred.

Sounds a little corny, right? Okay then. Let's spend a second being corny. Life is good. I'm looking forward to a trip to a place where I only understand every third or fourth word. Mostly my plan is to smile a lot, point at what I need, and pay for it with a big ol' gracias!

I'm grateful for this time off. Really grateful for time with Erin. She's been travelling a lot so I haven't seen her in months it seems. Plus for the very first time, she missed our family's Christmas celebration, which included a very silly tree made of leftover evergreen branches from the corner tree place, a lot of bright twinkling lights, and a pointy top made of glitter and wings.

Does it sound like I'm having an existential crisis? No, not at all. I've been reading Jane Kenyon's poetry. She died in her 40s, and her wonderful heartfelt and truth-telling words went with her, except of course for the books she had a chance to finish. Life is good, but life is not fair. Nobody ever said it would be. But things are harsh a little too often these days.

The New Yorker has a piece on a new theory of grief as a "process" rather than Elizabeth Kubler Ross's "stages." The article talks about her life and how it ended. The heart of the article is common sense without a pile of research study outcomes. When you lose somebody you love or whose presence in the world makes your stay here on the planet a little more happy, well, it sucks. And grief sucks. And death sucks. Haven't we been scribbling that fact for 100,000 years?

But we live with it . . . and that's where resilience comes in. The article says some people have more of it than others. My theory is we can create more. Have more.

That's the not so secret secret. The resilience comes from our creativity. The words, the photos, the poems, the stories, the plays, the art, the recipes, the gardens whatever is ours to give the world.

No big awards required. No plaques or certificates. We're loved for just trying to get it right: One word, one image, one handprint in the sand, one flower, one cheese souffle. Fragile, tentative, but worth the energy and effort. Right?? Right.

So here's to clean ocean and clean air and remembering how to swim. Yikes a whale! Baja here we come!

Twelfth Night . . . An Epiphany

Well, another year is stewed and sealed and put away high on a shelf in the cupboard of our lives.

It's safe in there in the dark, and it's good we don't have to look at it for a while. Just-lived events are not the same as fuzzy little memories from the past.

Even horrible memories from the past sieve through that labyrinth of soft brain tissue until what comes out is, well, a Stephen King movie, one you can shrug off when it's over without too much residual creepiness.

The cure is never more than buying a hot chocolate and a cupcake at the local CakeLove store run by college kids from the Ukraine or Lapland.

I mean 2009 was intense, wasn't it?? Maybe it was just me. But some people I know who are as sane as a bucket of sand tell me that the world seems "speeded up," organically faster moment by moment than years past.

Remember when there was time after Thanksgiving to shop around for a Christmas tree and not buy the first one the tree guy shows you??

Actually, I didn't buy a tree this year. Long story to save for another post. I did buy a green shiny elf hat with little wings that flutter in the slightest breeze.

After you collect more jars than you can count at a glance, things change in life. And as Charlie Kaufman says through Meryl Streep's character in the movie "Adaptation" -- "I've come to understand that change is not a choice."

Maybe it's encouragement. The positive force that bounces around inside our electrons like a hoochi-coochi dancer with a bee in her pajamas.

Keep those jars safe . . . who knows when you'll be ready to take them out and give them a shake. Happy New Year!

Honoring Veterans -- a Family Story

This is the official poster for Veterans Day 2009 created by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). You can hear TAPS playing . . . almost.

The VA Web site offers a poster gallery year by year back to 1978.

I wish I had a time machine to go back and tape my Uncle Rollo telling one of his WWII stories. Perfect for MP3. I would love to hear them all again. Uncle Rollo could be on YouTube. Imagine him tapping his pipe on his Annapolis ring (Class of '25) emptying the ashes before he filled it again and lit it with a long, wooden match.

His devoted pug, Friar Tuck, would curl up on his lap as he relived the Normandy invasion and his ship full of soldiers readying themselves for the battle on shore. Uncle Rollo's version wasn't quite as bloody as Tom Hanks's movie. All Uncle Rollo needed to do was captain his ship into position in a certain place at a certain time along with the rest of the fleet.

After the War, Uncle Rollo retired as a Rear Admiral. That rank gave him two stars on the bumper of his Thunderbird. When my sisters and I drove with him to the commissary at Quonset Point to pick up the week's groceries, the sentries would snap to attention as we drove through the gate.

I'm still not sure what to make of a life with that kind of order. At home, we lived in emotional chaos, with my mother spending her time organizing our sock drawer to perfection while the rest of the house looked like a hurricane zone. By the time my parents divorced, nothing was "normal" for us.

When Ted & Jan remarried a decade later, we were still a mess. Is it relationships that make us crazy or the particular people we choose for partners? Straight or gay doesn't matter. The hearts rumble just the same. You'd think kindness would be a given, considering the alternative.

At Christmas, Uncle Rollo would unwrap the tin of Grainger's pipe tobacco we gave him as if it were a treasure. The shape of the tin gave away the surprise, but he always managed to look amazed that he received such a wonderful gift.

And every night as we headed up to bed, we'd swing through the living room and kiss him on the head as he sat in his wing chair reading the New Yorker or the New York Times.

I still get the New Yorker in hard copy. The Times I read online. Some things charm the chaos like the skin off a snake.

Houdini's Birthday . . . It's Halloween

All Hallows Eve is not only the spookiest night of the year, it's also a celebration of one of our most enigmatic magicians -- Harry Houdini.

And it's also the birthday of Susan Orlean, one of my favorite writers and the author of The Orchid Thief.

Even more literary magic is happening tomorrow in Washington Grove, Maryland, where I'm joining a poetry group for the first time.

This is big news because in the past 2 years my journaling is pretty much the only writing in my life. Nothing to sneeze at Sneezy. I mean I'm writing 400 pages every 5 months. Hmm I wonder how much that is by the pound of paper?? Silly.

I think this blog needs more visits from me. As does the Shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that blue-domed amazement off North Capitol Street in Washington, DC. I hear they have quite a gift store. Actually, my grandma visited there on a bus filled with Polish ladies in flowered babooshkas from Anthony, RI. This was back in the early 60s. I heard they had a blast. My grandma's laugh alone could have propeled that bus to the moon and back.

I miss her. That's what happens when I eat too much chocolate. That's the thing about Halloween. If you're not supposed to eat candy, this is the wrong day for you to celebrate.

A New Season . . .

For someone like me who didn't really do much vacationing this summer, you'd think that the change of season would be a blip on my radar screen.

On the contrary, this is a chance to get in my car and drive up to New England to see the leaves and pour some maple syrup on blueberry pancakes. OK, there's maple syrup in Maryland. As a matter of fact there are changing leaf colors in Maryland . . . But once a New Englander, always a New Englander.

I'm thinking of buying a little cabin to live in, a cabin in a birch forest, a cabin with indoor plumbing, a cabin near a lake with a canoe with my name on it. My people came from Quebec to live in Rhode Island. Something went wrong. Not a potato famine, not persecution for being Catholic, not a plague of locusts. But something creepy and dark. Take my word for it.

At the New York Public Library many years ago, my Uncle Rollo (actually my great uncle Roland) found some history on our French-Canadian ancestors. Apparently, one of the married "une femme sauvage" or a "wild woman."

Her name was Marie. I guess the Catholics got to her before the foxy Frenchman did. Her full name, according to some geneaology by a long-lost cousin, was Marie Metiomiguok. She was Huron Indian. I guess she was lucky to marry and move away. The Hurons living near Trois Rivieres, not far from Lake Champlain, were decimated in the late 17th century by the Iroquois. What was left of the tribe moved across the water and changed their tribal name.

I'm simplifying things a little. Old habits die hard, as Uncle Rollo used to say. He also said that aging was not for the faint-hearted. So far, true!

But I think about Marie Metiomiguok. I think about leaves falling in Quebec. Maybe Marie feels the autumn chill in the air; maybe she sees brilliant leaves floating free from the birches. Maybe she wonders if anyone will remember her name.

Clam Cakes in Summer

There's a good reason for driving 7 hours without stopping from Maryland to Rhode Island.

Clamcakes.

In the summer there's nothing like them . . . We stand in line at Aunt Carrie's on Ocean Road in Narragansett for more than an hour sometimes on weekends when everybody's blue from being in the waves too long.

The clamcakes in this photo look a little greasy. But you get the idea. My favorite parts are the crunchy little "tails" of dough that get extra fried so the crisp talks to you when you bite down.

My dad met us at Aunt Carrie's one time when we were staying at the Anchor Motel just down the road. He always ordered the New England clam chowder, which is white. New York chowder is red. Every time I pick "red" I can hear that 60s Beach Boys song, "Be True to Your School." And I can see my dad shaking his head and mumbling, "Meredith."

And don't even mention not really liking lobster. What kind of Rhode Islander are you? Um, the kind that left home for college in the mid-60s to go to school in DC because the drinking age was 18? Who would admit to that?

Certainly not me.

If you ask me, I've lived up here all my life. My heart and soul walk that beach every single day without fail, rain or shine, just after sunrise.

A Cormorant Dries Her Wings

Published online at PoetryMagazine.com (Current Poets Summer 2007), this poem is deep in their archives now. Time has passed, new poets are posted. Old poems disappear every day from cyberspace unless someone who loves them reposts! So here's my Cormorant poem revived and reposted, exactly 2 years later:

A Cormorant Dries Her Wings

Next time you're driving up Race Point Road
on the way to the beach in Provincetown
don't be afraid of the solitary, black bird
you might find standing in the road,
as if waiting for a ride, rocking back and forth
from one webbed foot to the other,
as you wind your way around that wide curve
of beech trees and dunes. You'll be thinking
of the morning sun on your skin, the quiet
waves, the time alone. But the cormorant
is there of necessity, drying her wings
with great flaps and whooshes. After fishing,
she can't fly until the warm breezes funneling
over the dunes have time to dry her feathers.
Until then, she stops your car, and the cars
behind you. Her wings are huge. Will she
come to the window? Will she peck a tire
as you wait there like so much dirty laundry
piled on the front seat? Hope is a bird, isn't it?
Yes, hope is a bird. So, stay and wait a while
for the ranger to save you as he drives by
patrolling the road. He will shoo her away
and ask point blank through your rolled up
window: What's stopping you from everything
you want to do right now? This cormorant?
Don't answer right away. Give yourself some time
to think about it, think about every single thing,
what you're doing there and why.

Meredith Pond July 17, 2007