Musings

Musings on Super Bowl Sunday

Twenty six years ago, Superbowl Sunday was on the last Sunday of January and  the Patriots were playing.   Although I am hardly a football fan, I know  because it was the day of our daughter’s naming ceremony.  

We were out on the deck after the ceremony enjoying a sunny Oakland winter afternoon- clear skies and 72 degrees- when I noticed that my darling infant daughter was looking red.  I had her all swaddled in blankets like my mother taught me and my poor baby was roasting.  New England child rearing practices needed a bit of an adjustment for Pacific breezes.

Now a quarter century later - Amelia is on her way to watch the game with friends in downtown Boston and I am in the central highlands of Mexico. In a few minutes I will take my apple cobbler around the corner and watch the game with former Bostonians…

The Twilight Zone

All week David has been telling me I am going to be late to things I have put on the calendar. 
According to his calendar my photo club is at 1:00.
 “Well I made a mistake, I know it is at 2:00.”

“Don’t you have a meeting at noon?”
“No it is at 1:00.”

“Book club is in 45 minutes,” he says. 
“No it isn’t.  It’s at 5:30.””
“Well why did you put 4:30 on the calendar?”

This was getting out of hand. It seemed as though the Gmail calendar that has been the Demilitarized Zone for calendar communications in our marriage was failing, or I was losing my mind. Neither option was a good one. So we started an investigation. 
✔ Both of our computers were set to the same time zone.
 ✔ Both computers started with correct dates in the calendar.

But we when the dates flew through cyber space they consistently arrived with different time settings- David changed his Google settings to Central Mexico time-  I had not

I am happy to report that marital equilibrium has been restored and we are both living in the same house in the same time zone.

August Musings

 

While busy doing other things the weeds and the season marches on.  Two weeks ago I spotted my first red leaf, a high up and lonely harbinger of cooler nights yet to come.  And then there was there gorgeous purple stain in the kitchen sink from peach skins slipped for a spectacular white peach ice cream.  White peaches have a fragrance that is unique and comes only for a few short weeks in August.  This batch of peaches had a pink color only on the shoulders, but it was a powerful hue.  Staining the sink purple and yielding four cups of deep pink puree. Anybody looking at the finished product would be sure it was strawberry, until it melted in their mouth. 

In the mornings it is sometimes cool enough to begin thinking about long pants again.Not cool enough to actually dig them out from the closet floor, but cool enough to think about it.

 

 With other project taking up much of the last month, my camera has only had a few forays.  When the USS Eagle, the Coast Tall Ship, came to New Bedford, I thought I missed my chance to see it.  It was just too hot, but early on the Sunday morning of its visit I went down to the harbor, hoping to see it as it left port. I discovered that I was wrong about both the days and the times.  On this day, it would be open to the public at 10:00 am.  However, it was only 8:30. I was milling around looking for interesting photo ideas, when a group starting walking up the gangplank.  Figuring that the worst that would happen is that I would get sent back, I just joined in.  After about 5 minutes I realized I had tagged along with an admissions tour for high school students who were considering applying to the Coast Guard Academy and their families.  I kept my camera in its bag, so as not to blow my cover, but it was a real treat to be able to ask tons of questions and not have a teenager rolling their eyes with embarrassment as mom fires away.

The Eagle is an impressive ship.  The 3 masts are 147 feet tall.  It has a permanent crew of 50 and most of the time 150 people are living on board.  Why in this day and age does the Coast Guard use a square rigged sailing ship where all the management of sails is done the old fashioned way?- No winches here, no self-furling sails.  The answer is simple.  To become a seaman, a successful cadet has to understand his or her limits and that of her ship.  The Eagle gives them their first taste of the power of the wind and waves on the sea..  Before graduating from the Coast Guard Academy they will learn the name and function of every one of the 200 lines on this ship and what it does- along with a great deal more. 

 

 The admissions tour does not spare the details of daily life – the sardine like bunks, eating with one hand while keeping your food from rolling away or into the barf of the swabbie sitting next to you.  And counterbalancing these nitty gritty shipboard life facts is the spit, polish and pride the cadets reflect in their scrubbed faces.  A full third of the cadets are women and a surprising number come from land locked states – the wide open prarie spaces no match for the lure of the sea.

 

Istanbul Flashback

 

 

All over Turkey, one sees these blue eyes - Anatolian talismans, made of glass to ward off evil influences and bring luck.  

Well I had a momentary flashback yesterday.  I came out of a parking garage into the Cambridge Galleria, smack into a kiosk filled with these.  For a minute I thought I was in Twighlight Zone travel warp.  But, when I looked more closely I realized I was in America, where some enterprising soul combined a good luck horse shoe with blue evil eyes.

 

Summer Weddings

Weddings- they don’t come very often into my life.  I seemed to have traveled six decades and can still count on my fingers the total number of weddings I have ever attended.  So in fit of a cosmic readjustment I attended two weddings last weekend. One groom I have known since he was in diapers and the other groom since he attended Kindergarten with my daughter.

 Happily, the weather gods of New England were kind this wedding weekend, sending cooling breezes, spectacular sunsets, and all the sunshine one could wish for.  In dramatically different settings -  one overlooking Boston Harbor and the other where the marsh and meadow meet on the Slocum’s River, each celebration gave me time to ponder not just bringing together of families and the joy and possibility that weddings are all about, but also the enduring power of the friendships around which we build our “chosen families.”

I hope my children, now in their twenties, will be blessed with a few deep and abiding friendships along the way. When I met the Olebe’s at age 25, I could not have guessed the pleasure in store for me almost 40 years later when I would dance at their son’s wedding, and share a dance with the youngest man of the Olebe clan, Adrian.

Silver Scarved Foxes

With my photographer’s eye, I walked the streets of Istanbul, always looking into people’s faces for their genetic story- the high cheek bones from the steppes of Asia, the Roman noses from the Greeks, Hittite and Assyrians, the startling green and blue eyes contrasting with olive skin tones.  

But for all my great observation skills, it took me several days to realize that I appeared to be the only grey haired woman in all of Istanbul.  There were brunettes, black haired beauties, occasional blonds or red heads, and thousands of scarves of every hue.  For all the contentious debate about women’s head covering in France, Turkey and other countries struggling with the role of religion in public life, never have I seen a word about the benefits of never having to publicly acknowledge this inevitable sign of aging.