zirconium

[The subject line's from an Anne Carson passage about history and elegy that Amanda Gorman uses as the epigraph to Call Us What We Carry, which happened to be in my library's Lucky Day Collection when I picked up AJ Hall's For Real last week.]

As forecast, the snow is pelting down, and the foot traffic downtown is the lightest I've seen since spring 2020. The main library branch and the Frist Art Museum both issued "closed Sunday" emails.

Instead of dismantling the wreath, I harvested parsley and mint, and spread pine straw under one of the rosebushes. I also yanked out a quartet of mottled hollyhocks. Maybe I'll scatter some old seeds around after the current snowdump melts.

One of my morning errands was putting some books in the Little Free Library outside the nearby elementary school. A car with the license plate "HFLPUFF" was parked in front of a car with a homemade white supremacy decal.

Via el_staplador

Last time I traveled abroad: May 2019 - Cancún - wedding celebration for my friends David and Josh

Last time I slept in a hotel: February 2020 - Lexington, Kentucky - wedding celebration for my big brother and his husband

Last time I flew in a plane: July 2019, returning from the Amherst Early Music Festival

Last time I took a train: same

Last time I took public transit: October 2019, Nashville, when I last took my old car to Markee for an oil change. I was able to pin down the month because Music City Transit had just been discontinued, which I learned while stomping across downtown in high heels.

Last time I had a houseguest: January, when big sister Suz and Uncle Harry stayed with us on their way from Detroit to New Orleans.

Last time I got my hair cut: January. I'm hoping to get another one before I have to renew my license, but if not, that's what sponge curlers and heated clamps are for.

Last time I went to the movies: February 29. Agrippina, live in HD. I was definitely one of the younger people there.

Last time I went to the theatre: January. Wendy Whelan and friends - contemporary dance at TPAC.

Last time I went to a concert: January. Reginald Mobley - countertenor recital at Blair.

Last time I went to an art museum: I was last in the office on March 13, the day after we opened Jitish Kallat: Return to Sender and Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange. I sang at the Tennessee State Museum in December but didn't have time to look around. Maybe Cookeville's Doll Museum and History Museum with Rae, earlier in the fall? ... Oh, wait, I think I poked around the Country Music Hall of Fame some afternoon in January. (Life has been hectic. The winter was a blur.)

Last time I sat down in a restaurant: February - Chinatown, after Agrippina

Last time I went to a party: February - brunch hosted by big brother and his sweetie

Last time I played a board game: Um.... I legit do not remember. Maybe with someone's kids a few years ago. The last time I cleaned a board game was in November 2014, my last month of sanitizing toys as a volunteer at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. The last board game I enjoyed reading was a hilarious mailer from Lucia | Marquand titled So ... You Want to Publish an Art Book. It was shaped like an ampersand and started with these spaces:

Repeatedly staying up past 2 a.m. to meet deadlines exacts a price, which made itself known earlier today in my absent-mindedly tossing good pepper morsels into the compost pot instead of the to-be-pickled bowl, and not feeling up to fishing them out. It is okay. It was a 99-cent bag of already-iffy capiscum annuums, some far gone enough that the bag was leaving a liquid trail when I moved it around the kitchen counter, so I have now dealt with it, resulting in two jars (2 1/2 cups) of quick-pickled good bits; a colleague handed me a clementine on her way out the door on Friday, so the peel from that is also in this batch, along with the last of the Russian honey another friend gave to me last December. I boiled more brine than necessary after adding two more honey-jar-fuls of water and vinegar to the pot (having prepared not quite enough for the two mason jars), so I have now also pickled some of the clementines I already had on hand.

The carrot greens have been chopped up, with the bulk put into the freezer. I stir-fried some with this morning's eggs and this afternoon's pork chop:



The copper pan erupted into a chef's-hat-sized crown of flame when I was heating oil for the pork, but two lids tamed it before it woke the alarm.

I have detached the radishes from the sludge of dirt + greenery their tops had become.

I am also working on assorted notes to put into the mail. General announcement: if you haven't received a thank-you note from me by Lunar New Year for something sent this season, either it or my response were probably misdelivered, so let me know that you were thinking of and/or expecting to hear from me and we'll consider it a sacrifice to the transportation gods. I have heard horror stories from other friends about UPS (driver claimed that no one was home to receive an expedited package when they didn't even bother knocking) and FedEx (driver forged signature), and my neighborhood post office failed to scan a package with a two-day Priority Mail label for three days. Not to mention packages and missives intended for at least three different neighbors ending up on my porch, so who knows what the hell hasn't reached me.

On a more cheerful note, one of the cards was to two top-tier musicians who apparently live on my block (which means there's at least three, as there's also a virtuoso regularly practicing an instrument they don't play). No, I'm not going to disturb them, but I'd be lying if I claimed I wasn't delighted about finding out. I saw one of them at the Ryman! I've probably said hi to them without recognizing them while tugging at weeds or picking up stray candy wrappers! (There are almost certainly other semi-famous people I've said hi to in similar circumstances. Considering how scruffy the neighborhood was when we moved in, I am astounded in both happy and horrified ways at the B&B down the street being able to charge $225-600/night. [Molly, it's the same house but different owners/concept as the place for whom we pretended to be wedding guests.])

Speaking of fame, I have learned that the Asian woman for whom I am regularly mistaken is now the chief content officer for Alaska Public Media. I wonder if me being asked if I'm her will ever actually stop.

I have put two cracked plates into the bin. I have used my gardening shears to cut open a mini-bottle of lotion. (Winter itch, y'all.) Aquaphor's spray lotion felt chilly when I tried it this morning, so maybe it goes into the gym bag. I am 0 for 2 on obtaining straight answers on how my gym plans to handle my membership after my current plan expires on the 28th, but I am persistent, and I can always ride my bike, fight old rosebushes (there are dozens to dig out from a friend's hillside, and speaking of stubborn, those m___ers are HARD to remove from where they are currently entrenched), work on getting through Day 1 of the Splits app on my phone (heron pose and I are not on speaking terms yet), and crank up Yandel. Also, temperatures are supposed to climb back to nearly 70 F on Christmas Day, and the BYM has created monogram and name decals for my paddleboard, so Louise and I have a date.

The past week alone had a lot. A significant number of people in my circles are grieving and/or struggling in other ways. A company I've trusted for more than twenty years may have lost my business. The Dr. Pepper I drank this afternoon did not banish my headache. I dreamt last night about dancers I'm unlikely to see before February at the earliest, and quite possibly never again in some cases (because accidents, aging, and other mayhem are all too likely to claim some of them before our paths intersect again). Going through old address books in the course of writing holiday cards has a way of stirring up ghosts. I read an obituary just this morning for a woman I had dinner with twenty-odd years ago. I shot like thirty baskets yesterday before finally making one.

But: I borrowed Death Wins a Goldfish from the library, and the BYM was chuckling at some of the pages and then started analyzing the artist's depiction of a motorcycle ("That looks like part of... but what the hell is that supposed to be from...?"), which I'm still giggling about days later. I get to meet a friend's baby in two days. I reached Amethyst League in Duolingo. I finished my first new longer-than-a-haiku poem since August. I saw both Cats (sneak preview courtesy of Dance FTW!) and It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood last Tuesday, the latter with a late-night beer. I do like being a grown-up, even during the stretches when it takes all my determination to get on with any of the things I actually want to get done. One breath at a time. One half-line at a time. One comforter laundered. One envelope addressed. One spatula washed. One shirt ironed. And on.

Today's subject line is from Sandra Beasley's Vocation.



Sampled at this year's Tomato Art Fest:

* Picker's vodka soda (grapefruit and tangerine)
* A chunk of orange-fleshed watermelon
* Walker's Bloody Mary mix
* Frozen hazelnut coffee beads
* Chocolate balsamic vinegar (at Galena Garlic on Fatherland, which I had driven past many times...)

Freebies accepted:
* A nylon fan-frisbee
* A trio of temp tattoos
* Some bottles of Sweet Baby Ray's sauces

Purchased:
* Three pints of cherry tomatoes

Some of the sights and wares seen:
* A toddler being pulled out of the doggie ice bath she had charged into.
* Paddle fans with a lawyer's face
* "Believe Women" merch with 50% of profits going to the ACLU
* A RBG paint-by-numbers kit. (I was amused by the concept, but found the actual design was unappealing.)
* Lots of doggies. Bulky Crossfit guy with tiny toy dog might have been my favorite sighting.

Today's cooking plans:
* cherry tomato + bean salad
* roast chicken
* chocolate-dipped banana slices

Most rewarding plant in my currently pitiful yard:

I was drawn into Christian Wiman's "He Held Radical Light" excerpt at Poetry Daily earlier today because I became curious about where he was going after calling a good chunk of another writer's body of work "flavorless as old oatmeal." But the part where I sat up straight was when my own dour mutterings about eventual nothingness ("Look, I'm not going to get wound up about not getting anywhere with x when humans are going to be extinct within a few hundred years...") suddenly showed up on my screen like a mirror:

Nothing survives, I suddenly realized. Dante, Virgil, even sweet Shakespeare, whose lines will last as long as there are eyes to read him, will one day find that there are no eyes to read him. As a species, we are a microscopic speck of existence, which, I have full faith, will one day thrive without us.

Still, abstract oblivion is a small shock as shocks go. When over lunch one day my friend and then poet laureate Donald Hall turned his Camel-blasted eighty-year-old Yeti decrepitude to me and said as casually as he bit into his burger, "I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last," I felt a galactic chill, as if my soul had chewed tinfoil. I was thirty-eight. It was the very inverse of a calling, an ex post facto feeling of innocence, death's echo. In a flash I knew it was true, for both of us (this is no doubt part of what he was telling me), and yet the shock was not in that fact but in the nearly fifty years of further writings Don had piled on top of that revelation. "Poetry abandoned me," he writes in his little masterrpiece Essays After Eighty, the compensatory prose of which is so spare and clear it seems inscribed on solitude itself. If there were any justice in the world, this book would be read by my great-great-great-granddaughter as she gets ready to die. But of course there is no justice in the world.

I submitted two new poems today. I filed a rejection for four others, and made notes about a handful more to craft by the end of the month if mind and fingers and electronics cooperate. And, like quite a few other locals, I could not resist whisking out my phone yesterday when I saw this from the parking lot at work:





My being in the parking lot at that point was a compromise -- because of bloody honking deadlines needing to be met, I stayed at the office past the point of getting to the dance lesson on time, but I did go to the lesson, which ended up being a fine time -- the group was practicing "St. Margaret's Hill" when I arrived, and there was enough room in the studio for me to walk through the figures on my own. The rep for the rest of the evening included "Miss De Jersey's Memorial" (the dance of the month), "Kelsterne Gardens" (as a 4-couple dance), "Key to the Cellar" and several others in Scottish sets, "The Introduction" (which I requested after we collectively struggled with right and left diagonals during "The Weevil"), "The Young Widow" (which I requested when given three dances to choose from because it was the one I hadn't done yet), and "Bonny Cuckoo." We talked about regional differences/practices, including "the Philadelphia rule," which is when you're not the caller of the dance, shut up and don't "correct" the person who is leading the dance if no one is about to get hurt. Very sensible people, those Philadelphians.

I am too tired at the moment to be sensible, so while I knew full well that I needed to sit tail in chair and fingers to laptop to get to bed earlier, I went ahead with baking a cake (along with chicken that needed to be roasted sooner than later) and scrubbing this and that. Pacing will out. Anyhow, there are worse fates than snacking on chicken skins and listening to Monteverdi while editing docs on Italian art...

Etch A Sketch of my name and foot by John Taylor


John and me Etch-A-Sketch-ing at the entrance of Nick Cave: Feat. Photo by Marlow Amick.

Nashvillians, the show closes Sunday at 5:30 p.m. Get your tails over there!

And while you're in the museum... there is a sweet spot in the Gordon Contemporary Arts Gallery, to the left of the intro wall for The Presence of Your Absence Is Everywhere, about six feet back, where the light brings out the everywheres in white letters surrounding the title treatment, which happen to be invisible (absent) if you aren't standing in that spot where the light hits them just so. It is So Very Cool. I love this show so much. Come see it if you live here! (And come to An Evening of Chaos and Awe, too, which will feature music inspired by her work, along with a special dish by Maneet Chauhan.)

There is a mental metric ton of paperwork I must plow through tonight, and I don't wanna, plus the US Open women's singles final was this afternoon, which means the garbage bins are significantly cleaner (and I even went at some of the grodier corners with q-tips), some ancient dog shmutz has been scrubbed off a kitchen window, some recent hackberry shmutz has been wiped off the car windows and handles, leftover tiles from our 2009 bathroom renovation delivered to Turnip Green, and assorted leftovers incorporated into tastier hodgepodges (the last of the white wine from the freak bottle that sent glass into my cleavage has been blended with bargain-bin oranges and fruit salad dregs; the asparagus I defrosted and then forgot about has been scrambled into some eggs), and while I shall desist from dealing with the nearly-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-compost-bowl potatoes until tomorrow (possibly putting them into a lazy woman's version of potato nik), there is bread dough rising on the other end of the kitchen counter.

This morning I volunteered for the dragon boat festival, a fundraiser for the Cumberland River Compact. I ended up helping one of the Buddhist temples set up their tent, distributing oars, helping rowers in and out of boats and (un)tying said boats from the docks, and ferrying lifejackets to and fro. It was a good fit for what my brain and body needed after this week (which included one editing push that went past 4 a.m. and another work-thru-lunch-and-dinner haul yesterday), especially since I'm still coughing too much to dance or go to shows. After my shift, I played cornhole with one of the "Best Little Oarhouse in Tennessee" paddlers and a mother-daughter pair, and watched some of the dance-offs. One emcee was beside himself when a temple team busted into a rehearsed version of The Wobble. Next year I'll try to plan the day so that I have time to fly a kite.

It was likewise tempting to continue avoiding the paperwork put in much more time on the yard, but I confined myself to adding water where needed and clearing enough of a bed to plant the "whirlwind" anemone into its new spot (as well as putting the rosemary and thyme into proper pots):



When I checked on planting distance and depth, I had to look up the word "friable." Which was enough to get a new poem going as well.

[The subject line is from Barbara Jordan's "Bruegel's Crows," in Channel.]

Some days, things mushroom like mad:



They might even get decidedly warped:



It's okay. There will be other days full of light...



and sweetness:

[Subject line from Counting Crows' "Einstein on the Beach"]

A reputation I enjoy is that of being left-brained to a fault. I like coaxing bibliographies into consistency, and I've demonstrated a knack for devising and refining chronologies, schedules, and itineraries. I am sometimes inordinately amused when friends and associates find my pragmatism maddening: watching me add commas and conjunctions to her draft, one author muttered, "You have no poetry in your soul, do you," which cracks me up every time I think back to that session.

This trait likely plays into why I am rarely captivated by artist statements, which are often too lofty, wifty, theoretical, and/or all-encompassing for my taste. Today, however, Heidi Ross's Flickr summary got me off the fence about going downtown to see her show at Third Man Records. The description in the Scene had me adding it to my calendar, but then I put in more than ten hours at the office yesterday, subsequently falling dead asleep in the tub with my eyeliner on, and there are SO MANY WEEDS still in the beds, plus stacks of receipts, plus a manuscript, plus lemons to slice, etc., etc., yadda yadda ishkabbible.

But traffic was lighter than I'd feared, and parking was not a problem, and I hadn't really registered on my previous visit to Third Man (a packed-to-the-gills poetry reading that became too overwhelming for my group, which fled to a Jeni's to recover) just how beautiful its spaces are. I wished I'd brought my own camera as I walked toward the Blue Room. Within the show, I was drawn especially to the trio of Eat the Fruit (Mennonite), Good News, Bad News, Good News, and First Service, Second Service; the third image is that of a Kentucky Theater marquee, listing both a church meeting and a screening of Thriller. The pairing reproduced at the top of the Nashville Arts profile (Rip It Up and Start Again with Nine Knives) also beckoned to me.

When I ventured into the store, the two young women inside were on the floor, shrieking with uncontrollable laughter. They were still in its grip when I slipped out a minute or two later. I couldn't make out what had happened, nor did I particularly want to. I'd bet that the trigger was not only a "you had to be there" thing but also a I'd-have-to-be-them. Better to continue on to Woodland Wine Merchant's weekly tasting, which today featured three wines that go well with grilled food. (Lately, I've been enjoying how good the wines smell -- more so than how they taste. A rabbit hole to explore some other time...) And then to the supermarket, and then back to the house, to make up stories about disconcerting mysteries while yanking at half-matted speedwell.

This morning's subject line comes from Glenn McKee's Late Fragment. McKee's life included working as a UU minister and performing at slams (in his 60s), though it is the title that captured my attention, since I have told my own minister and several other potential decision-makers that I want Raymond Carver's Late Fragment printed in the program of my memorial service.

(My church has a "Wishes at Time of Death" form that the senior pastor keeps on file. Should any of you like to see it in the course of getting such things organized, if you have not done so for yourself, message or e-mail me and I will send you a copy. Speaking as someone who needs to update her other directives; one of the most liberating bits of advice I received in my 30s was from a friend who pointed out that such documents ought to be reviewed and updated every five years or so anyway, as circumstances and relationships and preferences evolve. Realizing that the documents should be treated as a snapshots rather than engravings into stone helped me get on with designating executors and beneficiaries and other arrangements. And while I don't expect my nearest and dearest to require those forms anytime soon, Stuff Happens, and I have had what-do-you-want-me-to-do-if discussions with at least two dear-to-mes within the past month because Stuff Doesn't Stop Happening and I happen to be the person the medicos and/or lawyers are likeliest to call should a bad-case-scenario come to pass. Plus, that earthquake in my parents' native province, cancer diagnoses and permutations among friends and acquaintances -- had I any delusions of immortality or other exemptions to begin with, the universe would have blasted them clear out of the water by now. [And I haven't been able to cherish such delusions since I was five, when I vividly dreamt both of being shot to death and of a future self incarcerated in prison without any knowledge of me-in-this-life. Yes, it does skew your world-view when your brain inflicts that on you before you've even gotten out of preschool.])

But, yesterday was in fact terrific -- the kind of day I dreamed about enjoying when I was small. I spent the morning completing my Memphis Open albums and reports for Tennis Buzz, with mashed neeps for breakfast, along with leftover trout from Thursday night's dinner at Prima. I headed across town to vote in a primary, and then stopped at a department store with a gift card, which I used on a new set of steak knives. I also tried on a dress on clearance: the fabric had caught my eye as perfect for an event I'm attending in May, but, alas, the cut did not flatter my body:



Still, considering it as a possibility brightened my day, as did the knowledge that I don't have to score a new dress for the event; there are several tried-and-true standards in my closet that would fit the bill. I had another gift certificate in hand for Sally's, where I picked up lipsticks and a sharpener to supplement my currently-too-purple supply, and yet another rebate for Three Brothers, where the sandwich and "signature drink" were delicious, the conversation near me faintly but not distractingly intriguing, and the newspapers and magazines plentiful:



On my way home, I stopped at the library to pick up a picture book, and at Woodland Wine Merchant for their weekly tasting. I didn't care for the beers in this week's sampler, but picked up cider and sake while chatting with Tyler, one of my favorite associates. At home, there was time with the dog and time with a friend, and glossy magazines, and a poem I finished and submitted a few minutes ago.

It is 63 F right now and the birds are singing oh so sweetly and merrily. I am short on sleep and soon going back to bed. That too is a luxury, and I am grateful.