365 True Things: 9/Frivolity

I took up geocaching eight years ago, on February 10, 2007. I was out hiking with a friend, Miranda, from Search & Rescue, which I had joined not long before. We were discussing how to learn the use of a GPS unit. Miranda said, "You know, there are these things called geocaches all over the place—and you need a GPS to find them. They'd be great practice." We happened to be in Garland Ranch Regional Park, a favorite area for cachers, and as we made our way down a steep trail she said, "In fact, I think there's one right around here." Sure enough: it was tucked into the well of an oak tree, covered over with dry leaves. My first cache.

Since that fateful day, I've found 1,652 caches, over the course of eight years. I'm not a particularly avid geocacher, though, not like some people, who have found tens of thousands of caches. One super-caching couple, known as alamogul, has found 112,440 since 2002. Seriously: that's crazy.

Although my two-hundred-a-year average may seem like a lot, it's not really. Some days you can find dozens, if that's how you happen to be spending your time. My best day, so the statistics page on geocaching.com tells me, was June 8, 2011: David and I were on a road trip in the Sierra Nevada, enjoying the sights and stopping for hikes and caches as we drove. We found twenty-one that day, and didn't find three more. My longest stretch without finding—that is, looking for—a cache was October 2007 to April 2008: 167 days.

Early last year I noticed that my calendar ☝︎ (another feature of the stats page) was starting to fill in. There were still lots of gaps— especially in what locally are (or were) the rainy months, November through March—but I figured that all I needed was a little perseverance and dedication. I also noticed that I have not yet found a cache on February 29, and that gave me breathing room: since the next Leap Year Day is in 2016, I had a good two years to work on filling in my calendar, which meant finding maybe forty or fifty caches. And I've been succeeding. I now need only seven more, as the above graphic attests.

The satisfying green color for today's date is thanks to Little Hiawatha's Carmel Cache, which I ventured out with David and the "geodog" (as we call Milo in our cache logs) to find this afternoon. We located it handily, and it was large enough that I could drop a Swiss "travelbug" called Nemo, which I brought home from New Zealand.

It's a silly pastime, I suppose, but it gets me out, it gets me solving puzzles—some of them confoundedly difficult—and it often gets me to some beautiful places that I would not otherwise have discovered. So: it's my guilty little pleasure, and I'm sticking to it.

365 True Things: 8/Shoes

I sometimes wish I had more shoes—of a particular sort. Nice-looking black leather, somewhat elegant, with a low (or no) heel—because I'm not the high-heeled type. Something I can wear with jeans and a nice shirt and look like I have some idea how to dress. Which I don't, and Google seems to know it: when I search for "elegant but casual black shoes," I realize that whatever is in my mind's eye simply doesn't exist. Widen search: "comfortable but elegant" (because of course comfort is paramount). But apparently Google understands neither of those adjectives.

Or, it's telling me that I live in a dream world and I should just stick with my clogs and stop fussing.

My favorite pair of black shoes reminds me of—I'm not sure what decade, but definitely not this one. They are leather, and they have heels, as well as laces. They're actually pretty comfortable—Clarks Indigos, and Clarks, you know, makes "Shoes designed for living." Can't live if you can't walk. And I think they're pretty classy, but I guess that's true only in a throwback kind of way. They're like a cross between schoolmarm and Miss Moneypenny.

One day several years ago, a man getting into his car stopped, got out again, approached me, and said, "Ma'am? I just want to say, those are powerful shoes. My mama taught me to pay attention to shoes. And those... are... powerful."

I guess I'm looking for powerful shoes that have a more modern air.

But mostly? I live in high-top Keens hiking boots, a pair of rapidly deteriorating brown Merrell clogs (one darker than the other because I managed to spill cooking oil on it), Mizumo running shoes (mostly white with a little orange, at once deliberate—part of the decoration—and the remnant of a visit to red-dirt Kauai a few years ago), Chaco flipflops, and when I'm climbing, mint green La Sportiva Mythos rock shoes. I even have some Crocs (two pair: red and sage green, the red a little larger and more comfortable), and I like to wear them. I am not ashamed to say that. And then there are my fluffy brown Acorn slippers.

When I wish I had those elegant but comfortable black leather shoes to make me look "decent," I turn to my Merrell Barefoots: they're flat-soled and have a strap and make me feel like a little girl, plus they're just a tad too small. But they're better than hiking boots.

365 True Things: 7/Food

I'm something of a loner. I like people in small batches. But occasionally I get the wild idea of throwing a party. A few weeks ago, when David was getting ready to leave Maryland, where he'd been on sabbatical for a year, and come home to California, I got in touch with a few of his, and my—our—friends and suggested a welcome-home dinner party. They all responded with enthusiasm. We will be ten, a perfect number for our dining room table with its two leaves.

One couple who will be coming is vegetarian, so the other day I sat down with one of my favorite cookbooks of the moment, Cooking Light's Global Kitchen, and found several suitably meatless but yummy-sounding recipes: vegetarian moussaka, Ethiopian spicy red lentil stew (mesir wat), Indonesian vegetable salad with peanut sauce (shortcut gado gado), and Uruguayan bean salad. An international, multicontinental feast!

And today we've been cooking. David and I work well in the kitchen together. The work somehow divides itself up naturally, and when either of us needs an assist, it's there for the asking. Three dishes are done, and I am just now killing a few moments before I make the bechamel for the moussaka. Last task: the rice for the mesir wat. Everything is under control—always a good feeling.

I enjoy cooking with recipes. David prefers to see what we have in the fridge and pantry and throw together what usually ends up being a delectable concoction (though there have been one or two failures—just saying). But I like to put together ingredients that I wouldn't necessarily have thought to put together. The spicy lentil stew, for example, involves a spice mix called berbere, which I hunted down a recipe for online:

• 8 teaspoons pure chile powder (ground dried red hot peppers) or 2 tablespoons cayenne pepper
• 5 teaspoons sweet paprika
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon ground ginger
• ³⁄₈ teaspoon ground cardamom
• ³⁄₈ teaspoon ground fenugreek
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon ground allspice
• ¹⁄₈ teaspoon ground cloves

The fenugreek was what really won me over: a new spice for my arsenal! And from my sampling of the stew, I'm pleased with the results. I hope our guests like a bit of kick in their food.

365 True Things: 6/Work

I have worked as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader since about 1984 or '85, mostly with the University of California Press. This "career" started because I was living in the East Bay near Berkeley. I was procrastinating mightily on working on my dissertation, having finished my two years of coursework at UCLA and finally moved north to be with my husband, who was studying engineering at UC Berkeley. I must have been perusing the UC Extension catalogue and seen a course listing for copyediting, taught by Marilyn Schwartz, managing editor of the Press. Because I've always been told what a good writer I am, I figured editing would be easy—and it would assuage my guilt over, well, not writing. Or not researching, as the case was at that point (and so remained for several years, but that's another story).

The class was fun. I found that I in fact do have a penchant for stickling little details, plus I'm pretty good at gauging how much interference a particular author needs. Or put another way, I had my own standard that my authors needed to rise to—but that's something I only found out over time, sometimes to my detriment. (Editing can be very time consuming, and that time is not necessarily always a good investment.) In any case, I did well in the class, and Marilyn pulled me aside at the end and suggested I take the Press's proofreading test. In those days, proofreading meant comparison proofreading: you'd get the typeset pages and the marked-up manuscript and make sure all the editing had been correctly transcribed by the typesetter. By working with the edited pages, I would learn more deeply how to approach an editing project.

So I did take the test, passed it, and I started proofreading. Pretty quickly, I was given my first editing job, which was sort of a hybrid beast, halfway between proofreading and actual editing: a revision of Don Gifford's Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses, previously published by Dutton in 1974 (and now to be called Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses.) The manuscript consisted of carefully pasted snippets from the earlier edition, interspersed with new typewritten notes. The job involved teeny-tiny writing (I'm good at that too), and because it was a reference work, the quality of the prose wasn't an issue—though as I recall, Gifford's prose was just fine.

From those humble beginnings, I went on to edit, oh, hundreds of books. I used to receive them in the mail, months after I'd finished them, and for years I kept them. But eventually I realized they were only taking up valuable shelf space, so I jettisoned most of them (a used bookstore in Santa Cruz catering to the university crowd took them). But first I carefully sliced the dust covers (those that had them) and, if I was mentioned in the acknowledgments, the title and acknowledgments pages. Much less bulky. Eventually, I realized that I didn't care about even those clippings very much. And so, a couple of years ago, I used some of them to make a little book arts project: a flag book. (It's nice to know all that hard work was good for something!) The rest I burned in the fireplace. Yes I did.

And just today, a new job has arrived on my computer, editing being all done on-line now. I always feel a little more "honest" when I have a job in. Like I'm part of a well-oiled machine. This one is about a minimalist sculptor named Anne Truitt. I expect I'll learn something. I usually do.

365 True Things: 5/Creepiness

Not much creeps me out. Skittering cockroaches and earwigs do. Sticking my hand into a dark tree crevice and encountering slime or cold wetness does. A dead thing writhing with grubs does. Though death itself does not. Death may be sad, or harsh, but it's not creepy. The grubs on the other hand, ewwww. Tomato worms can be creepy if they're as big as my index finger and I have to pluck them off my tomato plant with my bare hands.

Not long ago I posted a photo that I thought was rather whimsical and sweet. It's the drinking fountain in the park at the end of the street. A little the worse for wear, sure, but just look at that happy blue eye! My sister-in-law Patty, however, objected that it's creepy. Plain creepy.

Not long before, I'd encountered a painting hanging in the forest that I found fascinatingly mysterious (who had painted it? who had left it there? why?), but my walking companion Annie said it creeped her out. She felt like she was being watched, stalked even.

Those experiences got me wondering about creepiness—and then actively looking for it. I soon started finding it in the form of dolls—discarded, out in the world; or not discarded, but carefully placed to (I can only assume) provide spook value. I started collecting the dolls in images. My gallery isn't large, but it's growing. It's surprising how often I come upon a creepy little doll.

The blank eyes, the severed body parts, the distorted positions, the hangings, the sad faces: they remind me of things that humans do to one another. I don't mean to get dark here. After all, I watch my share of police/mystery shows on TV—I'm just finishing up the first season of the BBC series Luther, and recently watched the Danish-Swedish show The Bridge—and at least in those fictional worlds (and I believe in real life also), the monsters are complex, exercising evil but having arrived there by paths I can't begin to imagine.

They also remind me of loneliness, neglect, being lost or estranged. Even the cute little jumping blonde in the lower left corner. Trying too hard and always failing. What brings us to despair?

Perhaps my creepy-doll imagery is an attempt to express my unease with both the darkness and the complexity of the world. All the stories that have gone off-kilter. Our ultimate lack of control. The ghosts that swirl around us. Our untetheredness.

I don't know.

But the next creepy doll I see, I will certainly be taking a photo of it.

[10/14/21: Today I ran across a Smithsonian article from 2015 devoted to this very subject, "The History of Creepy Dolls." It's definitely a thing.]

365 True Things: 4/Beauty

It is exceedingly rare that I wear makeup, but when I do it is simple mascara (brown-black) and lipstick. I have two tubes of lipstick (or "moisture whip," as Maybelline calls it): Toasted Almond and Rare Ruby. When I was young— high school and college (it was the '70s)— I might have added some eye shadow, powdery blue or shimmery gray, and eye liner, also dark brown. But these days, if I use anything, it's just a touch of lipstick. Hardly ever mascara.

I have nothing in particular against makeup. I just never learned how to use it. Never felt I needed it. Not that I'm any great beauty. But being a beauty wasn't in my repertoire. I was smart. Anyone who appreciated my brains would appreciate me for that, "beauty" or no.

My mother had about the same relationship to makeup as I do, though I do recall a shallow cardboard box full of lipstick tubes in the bathroom drawer when I was growing up. I'd sometimes pull the tubes open, twirl them out, inspect their colors. They tended to be nearly or mostly used up, rubbed flat by my mother's lips. Most were some variation of orange—dried apricot, coral, rust. A few pinks. Maybe she always wore lipstick and I never noticed, though I suspect these lipstick tubes were an accumulation from over the years; that she once wore lipstick more generally, and when I knew her, it was more of a special-occasion kind of thing. She never wore eye makeup. That I would have noticed.

I've since become more feminist (political) and/or philosophical, I suppose, about beauty. It's a cultural (commercial) creation, that's for sure. And it's utterly superficial: all about appearance. That said, there have been not a few occasions when I've seen a friend with and without her makeup, and I appreciate what the makeup does: it's like drawing a picture with charcoal, then adding a little contrast here, maybe a little Conte crayon color there, to give more body, more life. It's not to say that a face without makeup isn't beautiful. Of course it is. It's maybe to play up the beauty that's already there.

If you want to.

I never did.

365 True Things: 3/Poetry

I do not consider myself a poet, but I enjoy reading poetry (more and more), and I have dabbled in writing it. Several years ago I took a couple of wonderful online workshops with a poet in Washington State, Sarah Zale. One assignment involved writing a poem from a visual prompt. The prompt I chose was a postcard in my collection, a black-and-white photo by Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000), a self-taught Italian photographer whose work coincided, in time and emotion, with the gritty Neo-Realism of cinema directors Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. He did a wonderful series of landscapes—high contrast, minimalist, almost abstract—which occupied him from 1954 until his death, as well as a series documenting the everyday life of seminary priests, I Prestini (Little Priests, 1961–63). The photo I chose was in the latter series.

I recently reencountered the poem. It has promise. I think I'll continue to work on it. 

Gratia plena

We see them down here in the village from time to time,
in twos and threes,
cassocked ravens in shiny black shoes.
One carries a spiky armload of baguettes,
the second flagons of Chianti, encased in humble straw,
the third—if there is a third—
a scarred brown leather satchel,
out of which kraft-papered parcels peek, tied snug with twine.

They waft in from another world

through ours

dark angels.

My father grunts and hurries us to the opposite curb,
mutters about dogs and babies and hypocrites.
The cloth bag holding onions, tomatoes, and meat for polpette
knocks against my leg; I try to slow my pace,
to walk more evenly across the cobblestones,
so as not to bruise our meal.

I have ridden my bike up the hill, to the edge of their universe,
peered through the fence and seen them walking,
slowly, heads bent into their books.
As they walk, they speak:
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam—
To God, the joy of my youth.
Deus, tu conversus vivificabis nos—
Turn to us, oh God, and bring us life.
Oramus te . . . Kyrie eleison—
We implore you . . . Lord, have mercy on us.

To my ears
the Latin words
are lead prunes
hollow walnuts
falling hard and coursing a path through the dust.

One steel November day as I cycle down the hill,
snow begins to fall—
flowing out of the sky
cloaking the land in sudden white.
When I reach their fence, I hear shouts.
And there, in the swirling flakes:
whirling black dancers, arms flung to the sky,
shiny black feet slipping and sliding,
out of control,
carving joyous patterns.
They embrace one another,
link arms, kick up cassocked legs.
Snowballs fly.
Alleluia! they cheer.
One stops, and a voice lofts upward, jasmine tenor:
Ave Maria, gratia plena . . .
The others stop too, turn their faces to the sky,
pink tongues thrust out of wide-open mouths.

I tilt my face up also, open my mouth.
Snowflakes whirl and spin,
cold
            sweet
                          angels
    
                                                   full of grace.