365 True Things: 2/Language

These are the languages I'm conversant with, in descending order of fluency:

English
German : because I attended tenth grade in Bavaria—and 15 is still a good age to acquire a second language
Dutch : because I lived a summer in Holland during graduate school, and English is halfway between German and Dutch—with a lot of Latin thrown in
French : because I've spent quite a bit of time with francophone Belgians
Spanish : because junior high, plus it's all around
Norwegian : because I seem to go to Norway with some frequency
Italian : because I love Italy and the sound of Italian
Russian : because mushrooms and the Soviet Union and a trip in August 1990 that combined the two (and a short-lived Monterey Peninsula College Russian class)
Japanese : because I lived in Japan when I was ten and went back for a three-month honeymoon, not to mention a summer-session fast-track course in Japanese—three quarters in one
Hebrew : because for a semester in college I thought I wanted to become an archeologist and dig up potsherds in the Negev 
Arabic : because if I was going to go to Israel . . .

I can speak German, more or less. The others, through Italian, I can read with varying degrees of ease (or dis-ease). Russian, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic are pretty much lost to me now, though I still have some of my old textbooks and dictionaries. Hard to let them go completely.

I also have tiny pocket dictionaries for Finnish and Turkish, and teach yourself Irish, Greek, and Danish books.

I love languages. I love funny alphabets. I love grammar with all its rules. I love verb tenses, aspects, and modalities. I love word order, and how changing it can change meaning. I love beautiful words. I love the different musics of spoken languages. (Most of them. I do not consider Chinese lovely to listen to.)

At the moment, I have five books in other languages on my stack: Flaggermusmannen by Jo Nesbø, or The Bat (Norwegian); Het Diner by Herman Koch, or The Dinner (Dutch); In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts by Eugen Ruge, or In Times of Fading Light (German);  Sulla sponda del fiume Piedra mi sono seduta e ho pianto by Paulo Coelho, or By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (Italian); and El inocente by Michael Connelly, or The Lincoln Lawyer (Spanish). I wouldn't say I'm actively reading any of them at present. Not so as to follow a story, at any rate. But sometimes I'll pick one up—along with a dictionary, and for when I'm really stuck, the English translation—and read a page or two or three. I figure it's good for my brain. It's like solving a puzzle.

And every Wednesday I sit down and do what I call Norwegian language torture with a friend. It's good to share the suffering! And the fun. And slowly by slowly, we agree that we're getting somewhere.

365 True Things: 1/The Start

I've been wondering all day if I really want to do this 365 nonsense. Well, what the hell—I'll give it a shot. No one but me will know if I follow through.

And who knows, maybe I'll learn something about myself. Or something about the world, generally. And who knows too, maybe after sufficient time has passed, I'll decide to publicize this blog. If I think I'm doing it right. By which I mean . . . something about packaging, concision, organization—insight maybe; wisdom; thoughtfulness at the very least.

By way of preparation—this being a new start—I looked up the day I was born to see if anything happened. Besides me. And I found one thing: The first Burger King was opened in Miami.

I also found an issue of the New Yorker from that momentous day, weighing in at 244 pages: the Christmas issue (lots of ads for Scotch; no table of contents). The two movies given short write-ups were The Last Time I Saw Paris, starring Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor, and An Inspector Calls, starring Alistair Sim, both of which the reviewer, John McCarten, panned. (Pauline Kael did not start writing for the New Yorker until 1968, when she was 49—though she'd been writing film reviews for other magazines since 1953.) The 12/4 issue is delightfully punctuated by those short takes that have since disappeared—making sport of published faux pas or oddities, often categorized and with caustic comments appended. Such as:

THE MYSTERIOUS EAST

[Adv. in the North Japan American News,

Sendai, Japan]

SOUVENIR SHOP

You shall be sear ched for the Japa-

nese splendid presents surely. Then to the

rare commodities are too many.

EBISUYA SHOP!

Tel—5366

*     *     *     *     *

So: something true about me . . . Although I have subscribed to the New Yorker most of my life, I rarely sit down and read the feature articles or short stories. But I always check the movie reviews. I suspect I would have opted not to see The Last Time I Saw Paris or An Inspector Calls.

I recently renewed our lapsed New Yorker subscription. I would like to resolve to sit down and read the short stories and feature articles, at least one per issue. I'm not going to lay any bets, though.

Project 365 in Words?

What if I revived this blog—which I haven't used in almost five years—to write "something true" about myself (or about the world, my choice), every day for a year. "Truth," of course, being a matter of interpretation. An acquaintance of mine is doing that, and her post for today puzzled me so much that I was reminded that I, too, have a blog, and the few times I used it, I'm pretty sure it made sense.

Thus far—in the nine posts I made between Easter Sunday (April 12) 2009 and May 7, 2010—I've always included a photo. Because that year, I was pursuing a Project 365 on Flickr: a photo a day for a year. I eventually completed four Projects, the last one on December 22, 2013. I enjoyed the consistency, the daily focus; the slight anxiety that tingled in my fingers each day until the shutter was pressed and, after usually minimal processing, the photo posted. (Since that time, I've gotten into iPhoneography, and processing can run wild.) I don't take a photo every day, or even every week, anymore. But I do miss the constancy. The discipline. The practice.

So what if I revived this blog and posted something—even if it's just a sentence, or possibly a photo?—each day. Something about me. Or simply something true.

No one need ever see it. This can be my secret face in a public place.

So, okay. Is this day one? No. Let's start tomorrow. But I will share a photo I took today, while out geocaching in Marina. The spike is the cache.

New technology

I’m not a huge fan of technology.

Well, that’s not true. I love technology. I’ve watched, even participated, in awe over my lifetime as it’s changed our very existence on this planet. For the better, I have to believe. No, I do believe.

So okay, technology is fine.

It’s figuring it out I’m not crazy about.

Because all too often, I can’t.

But nonetheless, last week I decided to take the plunge into G3-land. A new cell phone. A “smart” phone. One that may well be smarter than me. Even though I have a Ph.D. But that degree is from the 80s. And it is now a new millennium.

My old cell phone was also of this millennium. It was an LG “Dare”—as in, I dare you to use me to my full potential. It won that bet, hands down. I used it as a phone—easy enough—and eventually I got quite enamored of texting as well. The camera was good, and my friend Ruthanne in Boston and I would occasionally share photos out of the blue. (The best was on my last day in China two years ago, thirty-four floors above Shanghai: the shrill beep-beep-beep of a text message waking me to deep dark night. I fumbled for the phone, and up popped a bucolic scene of emerald green grass framed by a white picket fence, golden dandelions fluttering in the sunny breeze. “In Vermont: thinking of you,” read the text. Later that morning, in the back of the minivan on a clogged gray highway inching toward the airport, I turned and snapped a photo of the bunched cars behind us, and sent that off to Vermont.)

Although with the Dare I had the possibility (I dare you) of the internet, and email, and all that froofraw, all I really wanted was a phone. I got a fancy one for the camera—and because I like having the best. But I didn’t want to pay for the “frills.” So Just a Phone it stayed.

Since then, I’ve watched friends manipulate their iPhones, Palms, Blackberrys to conjure up pertinent information, fun facts, new leads, places to go, things to do—and felt, yes, pangs of envy. “Via Facebook for iPhone”: you’re sitting in a movie theater, waiting for the show to start, and oh—I can let everybody I know know that I’m, yes, sitting in a movie theater, waiting for the show to start!

I rather doubt that I’ll do that, but now . . . I can. It’s a new lease on life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So today, David and I are on our way to do some geocaching—five or six spots in Rip Van Winkle Park, Pacific Grove, plus one or two at Asilomar. We’ve just come from Verizon, where I got my phone activated and all my contacts transferred from “I Dare You” to “Incredible” (so much friendlier), and have decided to stop for a cup of coffee while we download a geocaching app or two, to test these babies out. (David got a new phone too—his first cell phone.) I decide on CacheMate ($8), whereas David goes for GeoBeagle (free). (There’s a theme here, but I’ll save that for another posting.) While I’m struggling to input all the data necessary to make my purchase—my fingers feel so cumbersome—David says, nonchalantly: “Hey, a cache was placed just today. And it’s only 167 feet from here.”

One hundred sixty-seven feet? Placed today?

“Finish that cappuccino,” I say. “We’re gonna get us a first-to-find!”

The last time—the only time—we got a first-to-find was a fluke: it happened to have been planted the day the weekly geoaching.com update arrived on my computer; and it happened to be a quarter mile away from our house. But this—167 feet? And we learn about it thanks to our droid? How much more serendipitous does it get? This was meant to be!

I dash to the car to get the GPS—since we haven’t gotten quite so far as to be able to use our phones as homing devices. We then head a short way up the street—a parking lot away—to a sparse stand of three struggling eucalyptus trees. And there, tied to a branch with fishing line, is our quarry: a seed that is not a seed: Corymbia ficifolia (was Eucalyptus until 1995, I’ve just learned—those taxonomers . . .)

If I’d been on my toes, I would have published our FTF then and there, but I waited until I got home to my computer—when what did I discover, but a posting by another geocacher (from his cell phone, of course) saying that he was second-to-find, which “isn’t too shabby.”

No, not shabby at all. And now I'm a little less shabby myself. If I can grasp the use of this new incredibleness I've harnessed, I might be making a few more FTF's.

At the very least, I'll be showing this new phone that it’s not smarter than me.

A new year, a new list, a new recipe

2010. Maybe because it’s halfway between the turn of the millennium (historically momentous) and 2020 (if not momentous, at least mumerically cool), I am feeling a different energy this year, in the air, in my intentions, in the very few resolutions I actually made. One resolution was: READ MAGAZINES, MAKE NOTES, GET RID OF MAGAZINES—WITHIN ONE WEEK. Another was: DRINK WATER. The intentions, by contrast, were things like BE DECISIVE, BE GRATEFUL, SAY YES, CELEBRATE, CONNECT, PAY ATTENTION. And because intentions without actions are meaningless, I have been “acting” in a sense: by making lists. That, I guess, is the “pay attention” part of my gallery of intentions.

Let me just say, before I get going here: I am not a list maker.

I lead such an unstructured life it’s silly.

And to me, lists mean structure. And so they are scary.

Yet these past two days (I am so on a roll), the structure I feel from my lists has made me feel, not scared, but—dare I say—in control. Not of my life, I won’t go that far. But of something that my life, my happiness, my well-being, depend on.

And today, a day when I crossed almost everything off my list (MEDITATE keeps managing to elude me), I am feeling powerful. Like I can do anything.

Okay, okay, maybe not anything. But at least I know I can straighten up the house (isolated corners of it, but that’s a start); I can, in the process of straightening up, find an important bit of information gone lost, in this case a piece of paper that will allow me to make plans for a frigid weekend in Yellowstone come February (very happy to check that one off the list, because I wasn’t looking forward to reconstructing it); I can get my Search & Rescue gear in order, so that now I am poised for a call-out (and so one will come, right?); and I can go through my closet to cull clothes and shoes that, as much as I once liked them, I know I will never wear again and so are now destined for Goodwill.

Oh, and here’s the big one: I can cook. I can!

The truth is, I enjoy cooking. Once or twice a year. At least, that’s the story I tell myself. Lately, though, I’ve had the hankering—for a stew, a soup, something simmering all day in the crockpot. A mélange of ingredients and spices, tastes and smells. The other day I was going through the magazine Real Simple (remember that resolution I mentioned?) and found a couple of recipes. One was for chicken stew with peppers, olives, and golden raisins. I tore it out. And last Thursday I entered it on my list for the week; and today, for the day.

And with the sweet intention of making dinner tonight, I took some time this afternoon to visit the market and buy chicken thighs (skinned, boneless), chicken broth (low sodium), kalamata olives (pitted), and red and green bell peppers. And then, a few hours later, I put on my reading glasses and got to work.

Although the recipe specified 30 minutes for preparation, 1 hour for cooking, my approach has never been to prepare, then cook. I wrestle with the ingredients as I go along. Which meant there was some down time (while I wrestled with peppers), so all in all the recipe took closer to 2 hours. And so: I’m about to add a new intention to my list: PREPARE, THEN DO. I can use the reminder, in various areas of my life.

As for cooking, since I already have one recipe ticked off, maybe this momentous year will see more than just two under my belt. Well, in fact, it’s a given. Because this year I have a separate little list: 55 things I want to accomplish before my next birthday, December 4, 2010. And on it are #6: BAKE BREAD and #42: MAKE CASSOULET and (how did this get on there?) #32: DINNER PARTY (though David can be in charge of that; I will sous-chef, something I’m very, very good at). Oh and #46: MAKE RECIPES FROM 5 LITTLE-USED COOKBOOKS. Seven or so cooking events for the year? I might manage to do that.

But I will need to put them on a list or two, or seven. Or more.

I’m kinda looking forward to 2010. I am sensing movement.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but . . .

Khadijah, a member of my little on-line writing collective, Red Threads, issued a challenge some weeks back, of posting a piece of writing every day for a month to the group. We settled on October. The piece could be long, short—a single word, if that’s all that came. The point was simply to post something every day.

It’s a bit like the photo-a-day project I’m on round 2 of in Flickr: Project 365. But different. The similarity is in focusing on completing the task each day. And this month, I’ve really been enjoying the double challenge. Though when October is over and the writing-a-day goes away, I probably won’t miss it. But I hope I also don’t lapse into no-writing-ever. It’s funny how I allow myself to be motivated by these “challenges,” where nobody on earth really CARES if I follow through—but I do follow through, punctiliously. (Hm, maybe that means I care. Which usually brings a “so what?” from me—who cares if I care? That, clearly, is something I need to examine. Seriously.)

The difference lies in process. With the writing, I usually just let something spill out. I’m not trying to craft or polish. Whatever comes, is what I post. No editing. Raw material. (And I want to appreciate my Red Threads for letting me do that. And on occasion, responding. You’ve been terrific.)

The photo-a-day typically involves several shots. Today, for example, I started out trying to get a close-up of our cat’s collar (pink with silver crescent moons and stars), against the salt-and-pepper of her fur, because she was handy and it was a nice day to be outside and enjoy the sight of her rolling luxuriantly on the dead pine needles, in the newly greening grass; and for good measure I took a couple of pictures looking down on her with my 100mm lens (which makes for an up-close-and-personal shot). Then I went to the Roost and my neighbor wasn’t home, so I took pictures of her roses, which are glorious at the moment (pink-and-yellow, lavender, deep red, delicate rose, and a yellow bud, just thinking about opening). I also took pictures of Branco, her little white dog (his name means white in Portuguese), who was barking, barking, barking furiously at me. Well, not furious: he just wanted a pat and a scritch. Sometimes he allows me to enter through the high squeaky gate in silence, other times he yips and yips—and I pat him and he's all wagging tail and grateful brown eyes—and then I continue on up the drive, and he launches into yipping again. You’d THINK the pat would calm him down. Maybe he’s a little senile. Though I have no idea how old he is. Might be two, which would rule out senility. Just . . . confused? Doing his job (most of the time)?

Anyway, when I got home, I reviewed the pictures (a pleasant ritual this past year: I’m coming up on day 300, next Tuesday), and the only one—out of twelve—worth posting was one of the kitty as seen from above. I deleted five of the shots outright—erased, gone. The other six . . . okay, five of them are going as well. One of the rose pictures (the delicate-rose rose) I can’t quite bear to part with, since it’s a nice enough shot. Just . . . not worth posting. Or is it? Eh, sure; it’s decent—lovely colors, pretty good composition; I’ll post it, despite its 1600 ISO graininess (oops: forgot to check again). I need to be more hard-nosed about editing my photos, and anything not worth posting should be launched into oblivion. But I guess I have two categories: pictures-I’m-proud-of and pictures-I-like-for-whatever-reason. I try to include the former in my Project 365, but sometimes all I get is the latter. And that’s good enough.

It’s similar with writing—except that a thousand raw-material words contain so much more than a picture does, in their formlessness, in their exploration, in their musings and wonderings (and wanderings) and imaginings. A thousand words might well hold five that lead to a provocative essay; or ten, scattered throughout, that generate a poem; or a full sentence that becomes the start of a short story. So I’m thinking of this month’s challenge as a raw-material generator. It’s not journaling, but it is thinking out loud. I’ve identified a few ideas that I might wish to pursue. And I will keep all the words, stick them in a notebook, continue adding to them. When it comes to ideas, imaginings, dreams, self-expression, words are so powerful. Much more so than a straight photograph (which is what I take) could ever be.

What a wonderful world

I am lying on my back on the cool granite of the Yosemite high country. Olmsted Point. I’m bundled up—long underwear, heavy windproof pants, a couple layers of fleece, my light blue down sweater, a woolly hat—but rather than the 20-degree temperatures I’d feared, it’s balmy, in the 40s. Still, it’s comforting to feel snug as I gaze up at the huge indigo sky pierced by stars and that moon floating high overhead, bathing this land of rock and trees in its light. Occasionally cars rumble down the Tioga Pass Road, or up it, their headlights scraping over me, the boulders, the large pine tree I’m photographing—adding a few photons to the light painting I’ve already done up close, giving more color and definition to the tree’s plated trunk, the feathery needles. My shutter is open for fifteen minutes, so I have nothing to do but this: lie on my back, my arms crooked under my head, and gaze at the firmament.

A satellite zips along—a tiny speck of light traveling deliberately, at a steady pace, girdling the earth, this planet, over and over, around and around, allowing us to communicate, to observe, providing us with data that could change our lives. And then there are the airplanes, which blink-blink-blink, red and white, across the sky, San Francisco bound. I imagine the people in their seats, reading or tapping at their laptops or simply sitting, eyes closed, listening through earbuds to Neko Case or Janacek or the Bird—no more the days of being beholden to “Jazz Favorites” and “Classical Interlude.” The flight attendant will be announcing just about now that the captain has started the descent into San Francisco, to please pass cups and trash, and the passengers will begin to rustle with anticipation. All those people, all those stories: perhaps coming home after brokering a tough business deal in London; arriving for the funeral of a black-sheep uncle, the wedding of a favorite niece; starting a well-deserved vacation, having traveled all the way from Helsinki or Tel Aviv.

Me, I’m lying on my back under the stars and a song is running through my head, the medley of “Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World” sung so sweetly by Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ltAGuuru7Q). I was listening to it this afternoon as I was driving—creeping—along the narrow, winding Tioga Pass Road in a long line of cars, stop and go, the dense clutch of forest obscuring our view of anything but the bumper in front of us. We’d already spent half an hour stopped, engines off, and I’d settled into the wait reading Brad Kessler’s Goat Song and listening to my iPod on low. Two ambulances charged past while we sat there, ten, fifteen minutes apart, no sirens, lights flashing, headed west, out of the park. Or perhaps they were bound for a helipad. Now, as we inched around a bend and the road curved upward, Israel started his song: Somewhere over the rainbow, and the dreams that you dreamed of once in a lullaby . . . I saw more flashing lights and orange vests up ahead, arms waving. Iz now moved beyond the rainbow: I see trees of green and red roses too. I watch them bloom for me and you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world. A white Toyota Corolla had plunged off the road, into a tree, hood smashed; its windshield was a field of stars, jagged bursts of light. We all looked. How could we not. Well, I see skies of blue and I see clouds of white. No blood, thank God. The man with his SLOW sign, the ranger in her cruiser, a few travelers standing by a car, its back hatch open, seemed loose, the emergency past. The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky, I see friends shaking hands saying, How do you do; they’re really saying I, I love you.

Two people, their day gone very wrong. And hundreds of others caught up, tangentially, momentarily, anonymously, hopefully, in that pair's lives. There but for the grace of God . . . I’m bathed in the moon’s radiance, feeling large and small at once: tiny compared to the stars and the planes and the effort it takes to throw a satellite into the sky, but also of a piece with this chunk of rock and the huge batholith that it is merely the surface of, and of this park called Yosemite, and of the lives of the people up there in the sky checking the seat pocket and down here in their campgrounds sitting around a fire. I wonder what happened to the people in the car—how they veered off the road, whether the airbags deployed, where they are now, whether they’ll be okay. How quickly our lives can change. I’m feeling the wild energy of so many destinies, from stars to human beings, seeping into my body from the burning core of the earth and from the icy black of the universe. I’m thinking of the people I love.

And my camera goes click. And briefly illuminated on the LCD screen is a tree of green, and the trails of stars coursing evenly through an indigo sky: time, life, the immensity of it all, this wonderful world, frozen in a glowing instant.