Year: 2013

Whose Woods These Are

Berkeley artist Deborah Harris created the block print for the covers of The Greening trilogy.

Leaves have already begun to fall in my backyard. The sunflowers are still smiling on their ten-foot-stalks, seemingly unaware of the change in the tilt of the planet, yet the leaning season has begun, when autumn exerts its downward pull on all the growing world.

There’s something strangely invigorating about the autumnal shift. Perhaps the shortening days, the cooler nights, are meant to remind us that the clock is ticking.

Mother Nature’s countdown is stately and subtle, but the message is clear. Our time on Earth is finite. Whether or not Earth itself is finite is another question, one hotly debated in environmental and scientific circles. But for those of us who take a more abstract, romantic view of life, the possibilities for Earth’s future offer a ripe area for speculation.

In my new alt-fantasy series The Greening, I imagine a slightly less dystopian vision than some. I’d like to think that future generations won’t be condemned to live in a dark dank world overrun with mutant cyber-human hybrids whose idea of a good time is drinking themselves to death in some seedy bar. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s your cup of tea. But as for me, I’ll take the road where the jolly innkeeper isn’t a psychopath.

The first volume of The Greening trilogy starts At The Root, where all forests begin. The tale centers on the struggles of a young woman who sets off on a quest to find her missing father and stumbles into a world of magic and mayhem. But really, at its heart, it’s about growing up and finding your way through the forest. And, like a ten-mile hike in the great Northwest, it’s more fun than it sounds.

I floated an earlier version of this story out on the web for free last fall, as an experiment. I learned some things from it. One of which was that the story I wanted to tell was too big for one volume. And that I wasn’t content with an e-book only project. This slowed the process considerably, as it led to more extensive editing and design considerations, but now, here we are, and the paperback is in stock at Amazon. An e-book version will follow in the coming months.

So, if you’re looking for something leafy, green and not too filling for your leisure reading, consider a walk in the Green Wood.

Ripeness is All

Celebrities and Big Boys flourish in hot summer nights.

Okay, it’s mid-August. If you haven’t got any ripe tomatoes by now either you’re not trying or you live in Seattle.

I used to dream of ripe tomatoes when I lived there. Yet it was nigh on to impossible to coax the plants to fruition, not for lack of sunshine, which is abundant to the point of ridiculous in August. But the night temperatures drop so low that tomatoes sulk and seldom achieve the sort of shiny overflowing pulchritude that comes so easily in the Mid-Atlantic region.

This summer marks the first time in seven years that I’ve not only grown my own, but had enough to give away. However, I’ll say this for Seattle: they know how to make the most of the tomatoes they get.

In the past decade of so, with the spread of social networks and the ubiquity of the devices in which they fester, there’s been a rapid proliferation of events engineered to bring together carefree young people, and those grown-ups who refuse to abandon all silliness even after they land a real job. Flash mobs were one of the first successful examples of this sort of phenomenon. Large groups of people would gather, as if spontaneously, to sing and dance, “Glee”-style, in public places. As the popularity of this sort of thing grew, it was perhaps inevitable that professional organizers would come up with a profit angle.

But what does this have to do with tomatoes, you ask? Put on your goggles and swimsuit and I’ll tell you.

It appears that we live in the golden age of the Tomato Battle. Young folks these days, not content to make lemonade out of the lemons which life hands them, have found a way to make merry with leftover tomatoes. In cities all across America and abroad, savvy marketers have put together those two staples of outdoor summer fun, the beer garden and the tomato garden, to make an unholy mess. Coming soon to a city near you.

Actually, the most recent Tomato Battle in D.C. took place indoors, and, judging by the photos, was a kind of sedate affair compared to a full-fledged tomato battle royal. The Tomato Battle organizers understand that you can’t run a good battle without ammo. They anticipate going through 100,000 pounds of tomatoes in the upcoming Seattle Tomato Battle, scheduled for this coming Saturday, August 17th, at the Pyramid Alehouse. They also understand that the key to success in any tomato fight is timing. Thus the beer garden opens three hours before the first tomato flies.

The organizers have thought of everything. They assure participants, and all those who object on principle to the idea of playing with food, that all the tomatoes used in the battle were already damaged (aka “rotten”) and thus could not have been used to feed the hungry. This disclaimer fits with Seattle’s firmly held convictions about keeping priorities straight: save the environment, help the helpless, then party like there’s no tomorrow.

And, since Seattle is not known as a tomato town, there’s also a note in the fine print to acknowledge the contingency: “In the event of a tomato shortage we will hold a giant mud battle. The event will go on as planned but with mud instead of tomatoes.” Good to know.

Rounding the Curve

Got to keep your eyes on the ball, at all times.

I watched Trouble With the Curve over the weekend. The Nats were having a night off, but at this point in the season my mind is so tuned to the rhythm of baseball that I fill in the off-nights with something game-related. Thus the recent Clint Eastwood film came to the plate.

And I enjoyed it. It’s always nice to watch a story where things work out the way you want them. Where players don’t get left on base inning after inning. Where closers close. Where fluke bobbles and bad hops don’t turn what should have been a close game into a rout. But such is real baseball. Sometimes it’s painful to watch.

The love-suffer paradox of baseball is something every fan understands. Everyone loves to watch their team win. Only the true believers can stand to watch when the wheels fall off and the wagon hurtles towards the collision.

Such has been the story for much of the Nats season this year, a year that started out with understandably inflated hopes and perhaps more than the usual illusions of grandeur. After winning a National League East title last season, this year the Natitude was writ in bold print, with all the drama of prize fight hoopla. Yet now, with more than two-thirds of the season behind them, and the humbling list of injuries and missed opportunities still growing, the team is struggling to climb back to .500. A wild card would have to be pretty wild for them to qualify for the kind of thrilling post-season they gave us last year.

Last week, after a drubbing from the Mets, Bryce Harper delivered a public plea to his team to pull themselves together and play with “heart.” At 20 years of age, Harper is still so young. I wonder if he ever saw “Damn Yankees,” the classic musical in which a fan makes a Faustian deal with the devil in order to secure a winning season for his team, which, as it happens, was the Washington Senators. The song “Heart,” sung by the entire team to the young phenom Joe Brody, claims that talent and smarts are fine as far as they go, but without heart, no team can go all the way.

I would have loved to hear Bryce break into song. But that would have been a clown move. Not his style.

But I applaud him for trying to remind his team, including the managers and handlers, that all the talent in the world can only take a team so far. Luck and heart—or call it crazy determination if you like—is essential to get through the grueling 160-game season, the ups and downs, the curves and swerves.

Eastwood’s baseball movie has a simple, satisfying conclusion, but the plot also touches on serious issues such as aging, gender discrimination, ethnic prejudices and bias. It’s an old fashioned movie about values. It doesn’t rely on an overly dramatic sound track or special effects (though Amy Adams’ hair could qualify as a special effect—it has enough curve, curl and movement to confuse any hitter.)

But the point of the movie goes beyond baseball. Like a good pitch, life comes at you pretty fast, and your at-bat can be over in a blink. So it’s important to make the most of every moment. And to watch out for the curves, because soon enough we’re all headed round the bend. Enjoy the game while you can.

I think that’s what Bryce was trying to say.

Don’t Bug Me

Imagine the onshore breeze, the quiet whoosh of waves.

So after a week at the beach during which we set aside our usual trunk load of complaints, anxieties and issues, and concentrated on putting on enough sunscreen and minding our manners, I found myself applying a different definition to daily challenges: First World problem.

I don’t recall the first time I heard it, but I know that even in that first hearing no one had to explain the concept. When confronted by the inevitable minor vexations of ordinary life, more and more the phrase “First World problem” seems a just and clear-eyed assessment. If you run out of mayo for your tuna sandwich, that’s a First World problem. If you have no safe drinking water, that’s a Third World problem. If you have no toilet paper, that’s a First World problem. If you have no toilet…

This led me to wondering about the situation in the Second World, wherever that is. So I searched for it on the internet and found more than one “answer.” However, among the rants and raves I came across the One World Nations Online site, which seems to offer a fairly reasonable breakdown of the terminology. According to the site, the Second World was originally defined as all the countries inside the Soviet Bloc, or controlled by it. Obviously a lot has happened since the 1940s. Times change. Definitions shift with the tide of fortune.

On a beach vacation the problems of the Third World rarely intrude, unless it’s hurricane season. But here in D.C. one particular Third World menace has been gaining ground. When I was a kid in the region in the 50s and 60s, there were some mosquitoes. They mostly came out at night. You might get a bite or two if you lingered outside on a warm summer evening. But during the daytime the mosquitoes weren’t much in evidence. Now there’s a new mosquito in town.

Asian Tiger mosquitoes arrived in this country in the mid-80s in a load of tires. They are tiny but relentless. They bite in the daytime, and, to make matters much worse, they carry a whole bevy of diseases that the old garden variety biters didn’t. If you get bitten by an Asian Tiger mosquito, along with the painful, itching welt comes the threat of West Nile fever, dengue fever, yellow fever, two types of encephalitis, and something called chikungunya virus—it doesn’t kill you but makes you feel dead anyway, according to this article on Live Science .

As global trade and travel accelerates, we must be prepared to share the problems as well as the bounty of all the worlds within our shared world. Since these Asian tiger mosquitoes don’t like to fly at night, bats can’t help us on this one. Unless we can figure out a way to breed sun-loving bats. I’m betting that even now, in a garage laboratory in the hills of North Carolina some enterprising genius is working on it. I’d gladly contribute to his Kickstarter fund.

Escape Route

You can escape into art, even if it's not.

It’s always good to have a way out. Even if you are lucky enough not to live in a war zone or a country where paranoid folks can walk the streets carrying concealed weapons, there comes a time for most of us when we wish we could just get out of Dodge.

For me, that time is now. It’s not just the headlines. There’s really no getting away from those anymore. It’s not even the weather. There’s no place without it.

I yearn for a vacation from the internal critic that mutters constantly inside me, noting with disdain how I could have done better, should have done more, and definitely should have known better.

Be that as it may, I need to recharge my aged batteries if I hope to finish strong in this human race. And while a trip to Paris or Tahiti is out of the question, a dive into my favorite authors’ works is nearly as refreshing, and certainly less expensive and exhausting.

So, Jane Austen it is. Also P.G. Wodehouse, Tom Holt, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Moore. Such a list will not impress the heavy heads in the audience. But escape reading isn’t an ego contest. It’s a prescription to remove gloom, to reduce leaden anxiety.

Millions of people enjoy reading murder mysteries, and who am I to blame them? The accepted fantasy of the murder mystery genre is that murders get solved, that murderers get what’s coming to them. In reality, I suspect this is less often the case. To me here’s nothing “cozy” about murder.

However, that’s why we love fiction, right? Only in fiction can you be relatively certain that the good guys will triumph, even in the most noir pulp fiction. And if, for some annoying post-modern reason, they don’t, you can always throw the book across the room, or out the window “Silver Linings Playbook” style, and go do the crossword puzzle.

My advice is: take your time, enjoy a break when you can. Because reality will still be there, snarling and scratching, whenever you’re ready to return to the fray.

Happy holiday!

A Stranger Here Myself

It was actually William Blake who said this, but it's the perspective that counts at the Top of the Town.

When we first moved to Seattle seven years ago, we were full of enthusiasm and ignorance.

We knew nothing about the neighborhoods, the hip restaurants, the must-see sights, but we had umbrellas and good hiking boots. We spent a lot of our free time simply walking around the city.

The experience changed us. Up until then my husband and I had never taken many walks except when we were on vacation, even though we had lived for many years in the countryside of Virginia, a place where scenic walks and pleasant vistas abound. But back then we were usually either too busy or too tired to walk around just for the sake of walking around. Our activities were agenda-driven.

In Seattle, when we began to walk for the pleasure of it (and the peripheral health benefits) we came to see the world differently.

There’s no better way to really get to know a place than on foot. In Seattle we discovered all kinds of hidden treasure beyond the obvious parks and art and fascinating architecture. We explored the hidden stairways of Fremont, the pocket gardens of Ballard, the old growth forest in Seward Park, the pea patch gardens all over the city.

When we returned to the East Coast we chose to continue living in an urban environment, in part because, even though I still love the rural scene, at this point in my life I want to be in walking distance of more than the nearest meadow.

So here we are, returned to a city that was so familiar to us once upon a time. In the thirty years we were elsewhere a lot has changed, but the essential nature of the D.C. area remains the same. It’s still a city dominated by the presence of the federal government and the international diplomats who live here. Real life is a little unreal here. But on the ground, walking around the neighborhoods, it doesn’t feel any different from other major cities.

The biggest difference between Seattle and D.C. from a pedestrian vantage point is the tree canopy. The Pacific Northwest is famous for its mighty evergreens. And they are amazing. But much of Seattle was cleared of trees in its early pioneer days, which weren’t that long ago. By comparison, the District of Columbia has been planting street trees for several centuries, and some of these babies are enormous. That’s one reason last year’s powerful derecho (a storm with sustained hurricane force winds) was so devastating. When a small tree topples, maybe it wrecks a car or two. When a giant falls, it takes down power poles, destroys buildings.

D.C. is a city of tree tunnels.

Anyway, once the wreckage was cleared up you wouldn’t have known anything had happened, because there are still soooo many trees in this city.

But there are a few places which rise above the canopy. The National Cathedral sits on one of the best known high spots in the city. Another, less well known, high point is near  Tenley Circle, an area once known as “The Top of the Town.” It’s changed a bit since we lived nearby many years ago. They’ve put in tennis courts where the outdoor stage used to be. The high school has taken over a lot of the open fields. And a covered reservoir sits high above the city, offering a panoramic view to the west.

It’s a popular spot for dog walkers, kids skipping out for a break after class, and people like me. I like the wide open sky. It reminds me of the country, but with a city feel—that sense of a lot of people sharing a particular space and time, working, playing, growing, and getting along as best they can together. It’s not always perfect, and it’s not always pretty, but it’s always alive, and ready for what’s next.

From here to infinity. And beyond. It starts with a walk around the block.

New Wave

Born in the U.S.A.

Happy Birthday U.S.A.!

Seems like only yesterday you were a rambunctious toddler, smashing into things and throwing tantrums if you didn’t get your way. But now, look at you! Reasoning calmly, debating respectfully, open-minded and bighearted, a nation any citizen would be proud to call her own.

Most of the time.

It’s true we’ve had our share of rough patches. Our comeuppances and cringe-inducing awkward moments. But here we are on the brink of another Independence Day, and, so far, we haven’t completely trashed the place. Yay us.

I could go on about how much work there is still to do, but nobody wants to hear a lecture at a party, so we’ll table that for now and concentrate on what is great about our scrappy happy country.

For starters, it’s still breathtakingly beautiful. I’ve sampled it from coast-to-coast, and there’s a lot of great scenery to be seen. Also great food to try, music to hear, events to take in, and plenty of folks willing to give you the benefit of the doubt before judging you solely on the basis of your hairstyle, apparel or accent.

I like that about Americans. At our best, we are a nation of independent-minded folks who live and let live. Up to a point.

Where we drop the ball, sometimes, is when we expect people of other nations to follow our lead, as if we and we alone know the right way to travel to wherever it is the good ship Earth is headed.

I’m not convinced this is always the case. I believe wise and caring people can be found in every part of the planet, but they may not care to swallow the don’t-worry-be-happy pills that appear to be all the rage in this country at the moment. There’s stuff to worry about, people. And it’s a small planet. Problems way over there will inevitably cast a pall on the backyard picnic—it’s only a matter of time.

Back when the world seemed more united about the fractured border between right and wrong, George M. Cohan wrote his rousing ditty “Over There,” a patriotic tune that cast Americans as the natural heroes of the war of that time. It captured one of the ways we like to see ourselves—as righters of wrong, champions of the oppressed, liberators.

Lately that image has been smudged a bit by the complexities of the modern world. No one’s writing popular songs about Guantanamo.

But we’re trying to do better. And that, I feel, is worth celebrating. We’re still trying to live up to our own heroic myths.

This week we’ll gather in parks and backyards across the nation to enjoy burnt offerings, intoxicants, brass bands and fireworks. We’ll set aside our petty squabbles and take a moment to be thankful for all the things that bind us together under one flag. We’ll even try to sing our unsingable anthem, even if we have no ramparts o’er which to watch.

Yes, our United States will be blowing out the candles this week, but don’t get any ideas that we’re done growing. We’re still a rock ‘n’ roll nation, and we’re just getting the hang of this harmony thing.

Putting Perspective on the Past

The airy courtyard has been the setting for eighteen Inaugural balls.

Cities have lives of their own.

People come and go, trends change, history rolls on. Cities that last for more than a few centuries acquire a patina of age that can add to their charm or diminish it.

Washington, D.C., has weathered a bit of history since it first took shape as the nation’s capitol in 1790. Compared to many European cities, ours is still an upstart, a mere teenage town. Like most teenagers, D.C. manages to make a lot of noise and generate a lot of controversy.

But visitors who flock to the massive monuments, museums and government buildings which dominate the landscape downtown sometimes miss the softer, sweeter side of the city: the lush canopied neighborhoods, the quirky streets and hidden gardens that sustain District residents when the going gets sticky.

Well-known attractions such as Georgetown, Capitol Hill and the Dupont Circle area get their share of sightseers. But there’s always more to discover.

Last week I finally visited the National Building Museum. Housed in what used to be the Pension Building, this magnificent structure built in 1887 has some breathtaking features, including an exterior frieze of Civil War soldiers, massive columns, and an awesome courtyard. Like many buildings of that era, it was gradually used for other government offices and its future was uncertain until 1969 when it was listed on the National Register of Historical Places, which revived interest in the space. In 1980 it was reborn as the National Building Museum devoted to all aspects of architecture, including the impact of architecture on the quality of human life.

And if that’s not enough to spark your interest, they’ve also got mini-golf.

The seventh hole celebrates imagination.

The two nine-hole indoor courses were designed by architects and design firms to illustrate environmental and architectural problems and solutions. It’s a great way to get out of the heat and chill out with some quality putts.

I like a government building that offers inspiration and renewal all under one roof. At the National Building Museum it’s par for the course.

Armed With Truth and Beauty

The goddess Saraswati encourages all to grow wise in harmony.

For those of us unable to feel the electric buzz of religious faith that motivates some people to acts of kindness or terror, there are nonetheless times when we wish we could find something above and beyond the mundane demands of daily life to inspire us to be the best we can be without having to join a cult, or a militia, or a book club.

Recently the spiritual signature of the Dupont Circle neighborhood went up a notch thanks to a new artwork erected by the Indonesian Embassy. The stunning pure-white statue depicts Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and art.

I had never heard of her before I happened on the statue gleaming above Massachusetts Avenue. I was fascinated by the exotic image, so markedly in contrast to the usual statues of men in suits that dominate the public venues in downtown D.C.

Because of this city’s history and the tendency to honor military and political leaders in general, there aren’t as many public statues celebrating the kinder, gentler side of humanity. True, there’s an eye-catching statue of Gandhi just a few blocks away from this new work. But Gandhi was a political figure too, worldly and powerful in spite of his humble aura.

The goddess Saraswati, by contrast, has the fantastic appearance of a creature of the imagination, far too radiant to be one of us. This probably has something to do with her appeal as a goddess. According to the explanatory plaque beside the statue, the objects which Saraswati carries in her four arms symbolize her areas of concern. There’s a book symbolizing knowledge, a mandolin representing art and culture, and a string of rosary-like beads for “unlimited knowledge.” In addition she rises above a lotus flower, symbol of holiness, and she is accompanied by a swan, another symbol of wisdom, according to the plaque.

Style and substance unite in a hopeful image.

That’s a heap of symbols to carry around, if you ask me. Yet Saraswati appears radiantly serene, as if, even though she knows the job of lifting up folks’ spirits and instilling them with knowledge and wisdom may be a bit of a challenge, she’s undaunted.

I like that in a goddess.

I imagine having four arms helps. I’ve often thought that if there were a goddess of housework a few extra sets of arms would come in handy. I can’t see anyone worshiping a goddess of cleanliness though.

Wisdom, on the other hand, has lofty appeal. So many of the world’s problems seem to stem from a woeful lack of wisdom. The seemingly endless conflicts between various religions hardly appear wise to me. But then, maybe I’m just not wise enough to see the Big Picture.

At any rate, I welcome the fresh new face near Dupont Circle, a neighborhood with a rich past of colorful characters and spirited protests.

Will She be able to lift the tenor of public discourse in this city of rumors and partisan feuding?

Goddess only knows.

Let An Umbrella Be Your Smile

Speak softly and carry a cool umbrella.

Rain brings out the best in some people.

In others it dampens not only the mood, but the entire outlook on life. Their loss.

Perhaps it’s the plant person in me, or the plant that I am, but I’m a big fan of rain. Even the kind they have in Seattle, which doesn’t quite measure up to my definition of rain most of the time, except for the undeniable wetness of it.

People who only visit Seattle in the summer during the annual raincation, when the sun hardly bothers to set for about twelve weeks, sometimes come away with the mistaken notion that Seattle’s reputation for rain is a bum rap. Not true. It is, in fact, a very accurate rap, for nine months of the year.

However, the kind of rain they have is subtle. For one thing, it barely makes a sound. There’s never thunder, far less the kind of drilling, thrashing gouts of monsoonish excess that make strong umbrellas wilt and weak ones blow away into the overflowing gutters.

In Seattle, where the weather forecasters have a hundred ways to describe rain, the typical rain doesn’t so much fall as sort of mist from cloud to ground, wetting everything in its path. Newbies sometimes think this means they can walk about in it without an umbrella, perhaps mislead by the way many Seattle natives eschew umbrellas out of a sense of regional pride. The true mossback needs no umbrella.

In my current Washington the weather makes quick work of such ridiculous attitudes. It’s raining? Grab an umbrella. Grab two. You know you’re going to leave one on the metro sooner or later.

The thing is, for all Seattle’s vaunted reputation for rainyness, D.C. has it beat six ways to Sunday in terms of quantity, dramatic special effects, and steam-heat inducing abandon.

I love it. I love the thunder, the sudden darkening of the skies, the puddles, the hiss of tires on the streets, the mad dash for cover when the clouds open up on a whim. Mother Nature can be such a tease.

One of my most memorable D.C. rain experiences took place many years ago when I was a carefree hippie. I didn’t own an umbrella at the time, in much the same way that I didn’t own a vacuum cleaner or a television. I was a free spirit, riding my bike to work in the rain, sans helmet. I feel lucky to have survived my own lunacy.

But I digress. The day I became the proud owner of an umbrella I had gone downtown with my girlfriends for some reason which escapes me now. We had Chinese food at some point. And I know we went in the now-vanished button store, which actually sold buttons and nothing but buttons, back in the days before mega-chains took over whole blocks. Anyway, as we were leaving the button store, or it could have been the Chinese food place—memory is sketchy on this detail—the weather took a sudden turn to the King Learish and the rain, of which there had been no hint two minutes before, came down like a wet velvet curtain. We darted in the first store we saw, which, as fate would have it, was an umbrella store. No lie. This store sold umbrellas and nothing but.

Well, sensing that destiny was at work, we each selected an umbrella to match our personalities at the time. You can read as much into this process as you like. Just wait until you are faced with the task: describe yourself as an umbrella.

We laughed and joked and tried on umbrellas and eventually left the store slightly poorer but three umbrellas richer.

I still have my umbrella from that happy rainy day, though I really couldn’t tell you why I chose a polka-dot one. I think I was going through a phase. My friends both lost their umbrellas as years went by, but they are still my friends, which are better than any umbrella anyway.

Rain or shine, a smile may not be an umbrella, but if you find someone who laughs at the same things you do, you’ll never mind a few raindrops on your head.