I got up early my final day in Berkeley, not wanting to miss a minute of it. Suzanne shut the front door after retrieving her paper and I called from the kitchen where I was making tea, “I HEAR you!” She chuckled.

Mary-Ellis picked me up in the morning and we moved my suitcase to her house. She had “computer work” to do so I made myself a pot of tea and sat at the kitchen table studying Swedish while she typed like the wind on her keyboard.

Next to me at the table were stencils for making envelopes and a pile of calendar art with my name on it. All through the pandemic, I got regular missives, cartoons and Barbara Lane columns from Mary-Ellis, always in envelopes folded from calendar pages. I imagined her with a little assembly line on her dining room table, going to town sending cheerful notes to her friends and shut-ins; I was both. At her work station would be the pile of cut-up cartoons and columns, some notepaper, post-its and a selection of pens. Then the calendar pages, the stencils, scissors, address labels and a glue stick. Lastly her address book and pile of stamps. I envisioned her moving industriously down the assembly line. Her notes and envelopes are a good memory from those two weird years.

In the afternoon I would learn to fold an image of the coral reef or the milky way into an envelope. But first we paid a visit to the Town and Gown Clubhouse of which Mary-Ellis is a longstanding member and often the lead in their annual plays. Neither of us wanted to stay for the lecture of the day but I wanted to see the clubhouse. My only directive for the weekend was that I wanted to see her world though her eyes. Town and Gown is part of her world but to me, it could have been the set of a 1940s movie.

Luncheon was being set up. It was a white-tablecloth catered meal with bone-china dishes and silver coffee service. The food looked sensational. Women were dressed up in hats and heels. I was kind of agog, going from Shut-In to Country Cousin.

I wonder if there is something like this is Seattle, I thought. Well, of course there is. If I hadn’t de-activated immediately upon graduating from Whitman I could have been a sorority alum. Then there were the several years I spent in the Seattle Music Teachers Association, even serving as social secretary. I hated it. But we weren’t talking about me. This was Mary-Ellis’ world and I loved seeing her there.

We had our own lunch outdoors at Saul’s Deli on Shattuck Ave.– (Isn’t that just the oddest name for a major street in a classy university town? Anything that ends in “uck” seems a little slummy to me) –then proceeded to Caesar Chavez Park. The park is made on a landfill that sticks out into San Francisco Bay and is full of walking paths. Mary-Ellis said she walked the path several times a week during the pandemic.

It was warm and windy and for the dozenth time, I thought, “Oh this is the best yet.” My favorite part was seeing all the little ground squirrels, the scourge of the park but oh so cute to the tourist.

On the way home, M-E dropped me off at Andronicos on Solano so I could get some train snacks. As awful as I had felt in the weeks prior to my Berkeley trip and as iffy as my system had been over the weekend, I have to say I enjoyed being mothered a little bit by my good friend. It made me feel warm and safe. But when M-E started to explain to me where I would find the yoghurt in Andronicos, I put my hand on her arm.

“I think I can figure it out,” I said.

I wandered all over the store twice before I finally asked someone where the yoghurt was. And I still had to ask yet again when I got into the correct quadrant of the store.

I walked along the beautiful streets back to Mary-Ellis’s House of Whimsey where M-E was in the kitchen in her apron. I sat at the kitchen table making envelopes from calendar pages and feeling like a happy grade school kid doing a craft project. To complete the simile, I glued all the sides wrong.

We reminisced about Whitman College and told Phil of our escapades over supper. Mary-Ellis and I looked at her beautiful quilts—another of her arty abilities. And then it was time to leave for the train station.

It was exciting boarding the train at night. Again I felt like I was in a 1940s movie. My berth was already made up, giving me my square foot of space to get myself ready for bed. I took a slug of CBD tincture and gradually relaxed, dozing off and on all night. I awoke to Mt Shasta. Between the south and north bound Coast Starlight, the only part of the journey I missed through sleep was the stretch from Chico to Dunsmuir.

I tried to read Walden—it’s one of those books I have always meant to read—but 15 pages into it, I thought, “What a gasbag. This is like listening to a 14-year old boy go on and on about how great he is.” I’ve listened to a lot of them over the years. Self-Importance is not that attractive when you’re 27 years old. Having said that, I do like a lot of his ideas but I’ll just put a check mark by the title and move on. What is that line from childhood? “Let’s not but say we did.”

I did a lot of staring out the window on the trip home. As I might say about Thoreau: “If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains.”

It had been 30 years since I visited the Bay Area. This trip marked my first use of an Airbnb and an Uber but not my last visit with Mary-Ellis. I would make the same trip in a heart-beat.

I crept about my routine at the cold Airbnb, bringing my tea up to my room and putting on the space heater. I had finished Empire of Pain and was into The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner.

Later I met Suzanne on my way out the door.

“You’re so quiet,” she commented.

“Well.” I didn’t know how to respond to this.

I walked along the lovely streets: The Alameda, Capistrano, Colusa, San Lorenzo, Tacoma, Solano-“everything here is three blocks away from everything else”– and ended up at Mary-Ellis’ House of Whimsey. I should clarify that it’s not just the house that’s whimsical. So is my friend. I remember her at Whitman as being almost magical to me, coming as I did from a grim and oppressive upbringing.

I said as much to Phil as we gathered at Berkeley Espresso on Shattuck Ave for a morning cappucchino (Phil), green tea (M-E), black tea (me.) We talked about a mutual fondness for Perry Mason, the old television series that inspired so many attorneys of our generation even though the courtroom scenes are comically unrealistic.

“I DID IT!!. I killed him. I killed him because, because.  .  . I LOVED him!!!” Breakdown, sobbing, sober looks all around, dramatic music.

I heard the story of Phil and the giant speakers that Mary–Ellis hates. Phil likes a refined sound for his classical music and the two speakers are trained exactly on his spot in the living room. Mary-Ellis says she stumbles on them and they are ugly. I didn’t help by saying I hadn’t noticed them but then I had been still swaying from the train and lack of sleep.

M-E and I continued our day with a visit to the Berkeley City Club, of which she and Phil are members. I have friends in Seattle who seemingly would not stop talking about the Berkeley City Club from the moment I bought the train ticket three months ago.

“You have to see it! It’s spectacular. Oh, and the pool. And see if you can see what a room look likes. It’s like stepping into the past.”

They were correct. The building was designed by Julia Morgan in 1929 at the same time she was designing Hearst Castle. Originally The Berkeley Women’s City Club, it was a women’s residence. Two elderly residents continue to hang in there. The rest is rented out and used for functions.

Inside we were looking at a blend of Romanesque, Gothic and Moorish designs with exquisite attention to detail, which recollected a slow and gracious past. The pool is indeed beautiful with a rounded ceiling like a London train station.

Lunch at The Musical Offering Café on Bancroft Way where I had a cauliflower soup so good I quizzed the chef about how to make it. And I don’t much care for cauliflower. I think as my appetite was coming back combined with the pleasure of good company, I ate like a half-dead person coming back to life.

We walked to the Berkeley Campus (University of California Berkeley) through the Sather gate past the gnarled and pruned London plane trees just beginning to leaf and to the Campanile tower. Falcons in the tower can be watched 24 hours a day on a web cam but once up in the tower you can only see their poop on the window ledges underneath their abode.

Besides falcon poop, there is a magnificent carillon up there. We were there in time for the noon concert. I watched the young woman go at the keys and the pedals for “Bonnie Doon” with my fingers plugging my ears. I never thought I could have an experience like that outside of Europe.

Carillon, Campanile Tower, Berkeley

M-E dropped me off at the Airbnb and I fell asleep over The Lost Apothecary. Late afternoon I walked back to the House of Whimsey where M-E had an apron tied around her as she prepared what could have been a post-operative supper for me: broiled rockfish, unadorned white rice, steamed carrots and kale and potato. She and Phil ate apple crisp and I got a baked apple sans skin. Again it all tasted like the best thing I had ever eaten in my life.

We watched The Gift Horse, a Frasier episode where Niles and Frasier compete with each other for the best birthday gift for Martin. Frasier ended up buying a big screen TV, which loomed over his apartment. When the four ten-foot speakers were wheeled in, M-E and Phil laughed. Phil’s speakers did not join in the joke; they weren’t quite that big and there were only two.

Sunday morning, I got together my breakfast and settled in the breakfast nook. Suzanne called from somewhere in the house, “I HEAR you!” and made me smile.

I accompanied M-E to U.C.C. First Church where I was welcomed into the choir, directed by Derek Tam, a young man I was eager to meet. Early in the pandemic, Derek made a virtual choir video of his other group, the Vallejo Community Choir singing “We’ll Meet Again.” I have used that video for the goodbye song for my All Present zoom singalongs for two and a half years. I have watched the faces of the people singing and have made up stories about them, have tried to imagine which voice was sticking out on this note or that phrase.

I have admired Derek in one square, accompanying and in another square, singing, knowing that he also put the whole devilish virtual choir video together. I have never stopped being grateful that I did not try to learn how to do the same. If I had attempted to scale that learning curve, I now would be scratching plaster off the walls of my house and eating my hair.

It was fun being in the choir. I didn’t have to accompany or direct. I didn’t have to know every part in the music. I didn’t even have to know the part I was singing, having run through it for the first time the night before. I enjoyed the knowledge that M-E next to me would grab any note I wasn’t sure of. Most of all, I liked watching a director at work, watching what he did and how thought about the song we were singing.

That afternoon, M-E and I saw a performance of Octet at Berkeley Rep. The play centers around an Internet Anonymous group that meets in a church basement. They leave their phones at the door and take turns speaking up except all the speeches were a cappella compositions. I loved it even though I took my habitual twenty-minute doze.

I went to the Airbnb and slept some more. Supper was more of my post-operative diet. I heard the funny story of how M-E’s and Phil’s son and fiancé had tried to get a marriage license, zooming with the justice. When it was all over, they realized they hadn’t just got the license, they had actually got married. They had to hold another ceremony later to satisfy the family’s thirst for a wedding. They have to have a Persian ceremony this summer to satisfy the in-laws.

So that night we watched The Ring Cycle, the Frasier episode where Niles and Daphne get married three times to smooth over all the familial difficulties.

“Your life is a Frasier episode,” I said.

Mary-Ellis walked me back to the Airbnb. Thus ended Day #3

Elena, Berkeley campus

Mary-Ellis, Berkeley campus

A long weekend in Berkeley was more than my first post-pandemic travel. It had been twenty five years since I had been in the Bay Area; that time was also to visit my college roommate and longest friend, Mary-Ellis. In 1997, as a response to breaking up with a boyfriend, I drove from Seattle to Berkeley on Highway 101 and Highway 1 all the way from the Washington/Oregon border.  This time I took the train.

I had a grand time. I had been viciously ill for two weeks prior to my leaving for California so one could argue it could only get better. But it was more than that: At the end of this trip I reflected that the mini-break was as good as electroshock therapy for busting up my frame of mind. Specifically, it was Mary-Ellis who had that effect on me. She always does.

I was not feeling tiptop when I boarded the train in Seattle. I was still “having a bit of A Do with my stomach,” an expression my English cousins reliably inform is not a Briticism so I must have picked it up somewhere else. I was prepared for the train to be cold but my tiny little compartment was well heated. I ended up needing the cool weather clothes for Berkeley, which, while warmer than Seattle, was still a bit chilly. After going through a winter, I forget what 65 degrees feels like.

What was lacking on the train was wi-fi. “I hope you all have a good book,” said the voice on the P.A. system after cheerfully telling us the Coast Starlight was an old train and not equipped for the internet. I had a lot of books and audiobooks on my tablet but I soon found out that just because there’s title in my library doesn’t mean it’s downloaded. So that was rude. In Portland I went into the station to download a few more titles.

I listened to Kenneth Branagh read Heart of Darkness, (Joseph Conrad) a gorgeous listen. The language is as luminous as the tale is dark. And I started Empire of Pain Patrick Radden Keefe, which was chilling.

The dining car had an ambitious menu, almost none of which I could eat due to The Do with my stomach. I picked at a child’s plate of roast chicken, ate the inside of a baked potato and took a complimentary mini-bottle of Maker’s Mark for Gwen in Seattle because she had taken me to the train station. For dinner, I had tea delivered to me in my compartment and ate the yoghurt and crackers I had brought with me.

I figured out how to pull the two facing seats into a bed, giving me an opening of about a square foot to change into sleeping clothes. I love sleeping on the train although it can be difficult to know if you are mostly awake and dozing off now and then or mostly asleep and waking up 487 times. I know I surfaced when the train stopped in Klamath Falls, Oregon and was awakened with the announcement that we were stuck there for an unscheduled hour and a half for some reason. When I awoke next, it was light outside and we were pulling into Chico, California.

The train was then an hour and a half late getting into Berkeley. I waited by the door with other detraining passengers. Our steward had his hands full so I slipped a five-dollar bill into his pocket. It stuck out so I gave it an extra poke.

One of my fellow passengers snickered and said, “You never know who might grab it!”

I said, “It’s not that. No one needs to know how much or how little I’m giving him.” Course now everyone reading this post has an opinion about what kind of a tipper I am.

One thing that I love about train travel is that train stations tend to be accessible and uncrowded the way airports used to be. You can park close and be in the receiving line for your guest. And there she was, Mary-Ellis, a head taller than the group of Amish people waiting to board.

Mary-Ellis and I roomed together for a year at Whitman College. We pledged a sorority in our junior year. I felt my social life was lacking and I wanted easier access to the fraternity houses. Mary-Ellis, however, was born to it. Not specifically to sororities with their hallowed and silly traditions but to the Women’s Club movement that she would discover later in her life and which had to be explained to me on this visit. There are aspects to Mary-Ellis. One is Ms. Junior League. Another is Fifth Grader at Camp. I love the latter—always have. The former is calm, gracious, solid, patient, beautiful. Yet a third would be The Mom which I especially appreciated what with The Do with my stomach. She was solicitous as only a mom could be and she paced the weekend to accommodate my weakened state right down to policing my butter and lemon intake.

We pulled up to the Mary-Ellis House of Whimsey where she lives with her husband Phil, where they raised their two sons and which is across the street from the grade school Kamela Harris attended. A garden with paved paths inlayed with whimsical flowers and creatures wind around a golden-orange house; if you are of a painting bent, think New Gamboge. Two Australian bottlebrush trees sit in front and a Meyer lemon tree in back.

I greeted Phil when he emerged from his office in a suit and red bow tie. “You get all dressed up to sit in front of your computer?” I asked, then realizing that sounded kind of snarky and he wasn’t used to me, I added “Because you’ve always dressed for work.”

“It’s important to look reasonably professional for clients,” he said

Phil was a public defender for years and he is now a judge. “But not in the courtroom.”

“Why is that important?” I asked.

“People think of all judges as being in the courtroom.”

“Do I have to say ‘but not in a courtroom’ when I tell all my friends you’re a judge?”

He smiled, “No, that’s not necessary.”

Phil is a judge.

For lunch, Mary-Ellis thawed a sumptuous creamy asparagus soup she had made. This might have been when I began saying “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.” I got her recipe. She took me around the corner to the Airbnb where I would be staying and we met Suzanne, an elderly woman with a load of energy and a beautiful smile. She’s rail thin but claims to be trying to get rid of the five pounds she gained while in Europe for three weeks.

Succulents on Steroids

I had a large sunny room upstairs and a bathroom to myself. After dispensing with all the pleasantries, Mary-Ellis left and I fell asleep on the comfortable bed until time for dinner. Walking back to the House of Whimsey felt like a stroll through a continuous garden. The neighborhood is old and lovely, full of flowers, birds, Little Free Libraries, a wishing tree, a poem tree and what I dubbed Succulents on Steroids. The little things we call Hens and Chickens in Seattle are sunflower-huge and sitting atop foot- long stems. An aloe bush looked like a colony of octopi. I remember the first time I saw geraniums in the Bay area: I thought, “Oh my, that’s what they are supposed to look like!” Everything there seems to explode with decadent voluptuousness.

We had a lovely meal at a Thai restaurant where I could get fried rice with half a star (to accommodate The Do in my stomach). Mary-Ellis and I walked up to Indian Rock Park, (“an acre of rhyolite outcroppings, deposited by volcanic eruptions some 10 million years ago” says the Cal Alum page). It and several other rock “outcroppings” in the neighborhood are used for beginning rock climbers and for anyone who wants to sit and watch the sun set on San Francisco Bay or just clamber around the rock. You don’t need climbing gear to get up there, there are plenty of ways to climb even in my insubstantial shoes. Truth be told, I was still feeling the train rocking me back and forth or I would have stayed for the sun set.

And the sun set on Day Two.

Season of mist, mellow fruitfulness and everyone’s favorite Keats poem. There’s nip in the air and a crunch underfoot, apples and cider and nuts in their shells. The world is a-wash in the colors I can’t wear because they wash me out but I get to enjoy them all around me in autumn. Autumn is a reminder that death is part of life and it can be beautiful.

By the time you read this we will have passed the fall equinox when the days and nights are in balance and the sun moves from Virgo into Libra. The Greek Eleusinian mysteries took place during the weeks around the equinox. Women participated in an underground ritual to recreate the birth/death cycle and the Persephone/ Demeter myth.

Persephone was abducted by Pluto to Hades and was consigned there for six months. Every year during those six months her mother, Demeter, the fertility and harvest goddess, mourns, refusing to let anything grow on the earth. Plants die but life is contained within their seeds. In the spring when Persephone is released, so is the life of the world when seeds begin to grow.

When that fat luminous moon appears in the fall, we call it the Harvest Moon. It’s the occasion of Moon festival in Asian countries and among Asians all over the world. It’s a woman’s celebration –it’s yin thing.

Fast forward to the end of October when, a month out from the balance of the light and dark, a lot of things happen. It’s Samhain (pronounced soween), the beginning of the Celtic new year. We call it Halloween, which is short for All Hallows’ Eve—the evening of all the holy ones.

The next day, November first is All Saints Day, the day for mourning children. November second is All Souls Day, the day for mourning adults. The Mexican traditions of Dias de los Muertos (the Days of the Dead) continue on for a week. When I see jack o’ lanterns, I like to think they are for the dead to find their way home. Home actually being my heart.

I always set up a little altar on Halloween to be left up for a week. I set out pictures or mementoes of people I have loved and who have left this world. I light a candle every night for them and I sing a few private songs for them. I get a huge lump in my throat. Time slows down and the world seems to stop for a while. What’s important to me comes into clear focus. At least until I can’t remember a password or the recycle isn’t picked up.

The Days of the Dead are a good time to let go of things that aren’t so well loved. Things that maybe should be dead: Old emotional stuff, dregs, debris. Grudges (Bad example. I kind of like my grudges, but you get the idea.) Even household junk. Do a fall cleaning, getting rid of what no longer serves.

Live each season as it passes;
Breath the air,
Drink the drink,
Taste the fruit.

Henry David Thoreau 1853

Kay and I packed our identical painting kits, ones we had bought together at the Art Spot in Edmonds and 50 times the amount of food we would need or come close to eating and travelled to The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach in a driving rainstorm. It was to be three days of painting and long walks on the beach.

The rain was relentless and I was the one to lug everything from the car because 1) I’m younger and steadier and 2) I chose Cabin 4 because it has good light but it also has a flight of stairs. Still, it must be stated at once that Kay, though an octogenarian while I have a ways to go, is vibrant and healthy; funny and fun. She just lost her partner and has to do many new things for herself. I’m a little protective of her. So I was happy to compromise my back, heaving all that stuff up the slippery stairs in the rain.

The Sandpiper used to be a bustling place, clean and well-tended. Now it’s shabby and slowly being reclaimed by sand and water. Seabrook down the road is turfing it out. I’ve stayed here with Nina, with other friends, with a group for my 60^th birthday and many times alone. I still love it because of its location. Twenty yards from Cabin 4 is the sandy beach, wide and expansive.

There was no bustle. In fact, we were the only ones there for the first three nights. The owner wasn’t even there. She had an intern running the place which seemed to mean mainly sitting in reception waiting for something to happen. The only thing that happened was me. The first afternoon I went up to get a dura-log for the woodstove.

“Also, we need matches,” I said.

“What is matches?”

I stared at her for a second. “To make a fire.”

“Oh.”

Jennie was from Moscow, here to learn to be an American hotelier.

“Are you homesick? I asked

“No, I love this. But I go home in December.”

She would go back to join friends in St. Petersburg who were setting up a hotel.

“We’re all alone here,” I said that evening. No lights came from the two huge lodges and there was no one next door in Cabin A. (I don’t know why Cabin A is next to Cabin 4 so don’t ask.)

I remembered the beds as being comfortable but mine felt like an old pull-out couch with bars pushing into my hip-bones. I got up several times to pee, to open the sliding glass door to hear the waves, to open my window, to shut my window. Every time I got up, there was a light on in Kay’s room. When I finally got up for the day at 6:00, I peeked in at the lump in the bed.

“Oh god, she’s dead,” I thought. Then I made tea and read my book. Kay finally dragged out of bed, looking like death because she had slept like the dead. She raised her eyebrows at my book and my tea when I said I thought she had died.

We painted all morning, I went for a walk on the beach, fixed us some lunch, went for another walk, then curled up with my book. Kay painted the rest of the day. We each had projects of our own. Kay did a skating scene for her Christmas card. I worked on glazing a forest scene, which required a lot of waiting for it to dry, during which time I did a fat robin and some dresses hanging on a line. I was planning to write “change of a dress” on it and give it to a friend who just moved.

We worked together on crows. Crows in flight, crows at rest and with wings of watercolor drips. We had crows all over the cabin. We discussed wing and tail size, we tried different techniques. I scattered popcorn on the deck to attract crows so we could study them. Crows absorbed us for one whole day.

I went to the shop for another dura-log.

“You need matches?” Jennie asked.

The second night Kay had another near-death experience. I got up around 5:00 to, you guessed it, pee. As I passed Kay’s room, I saw her slumped on the floor at the foot of the bed. One end of the mattress stood up like the bow of a sinking ship.

In the dim of the early morning and without my glasses, I couldn’t quite figure out what I was seeing. Then I thought Kay had not made it to the toilet and while trying to pull wet sheets off the bed, she had died. I peered closer.

“Kay?”

“Hi,” she said conversationally.

“What are you doing?”

“I sat on the edge of the bed and the mattress slid off.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, around 2:30.”

“You’ve been like that since 2:30?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I help you get up?”

“No. It’s pretty comfortable.”

“So you’re going to stay down there?”

“What time is it?”

“5:00.”

“Yeah, for a while.”

I went back to bed for another hour. When I got up for the day, Kay was snoring comfortably. I made tea as quietly as I could and read until I heard a voice.

“I’d like to get up now.”

There was a bed frame but no box springs, just two mattresses stacked on top of each other. The bottom mattress was slippery like flag silk. I pushed the top mattress into place and sat on the edge of the bed. It slipped down.

“How very odd.”

“I’m going to sleep for another hour,” Kay said.

“OK,” I said. I went back to my book.

I went for a walk in my boots before I started painting. Still chilly out, I wanted socks on my feet. Within five minutes, I had strayed too close to the surf and there was six inches of water in my boots. I sloshed over to a log, emptied the boots and squeezed out the socks. I left them by the log and continued for a mile barefoot before turning back.

Mine was still the only car in both lots.

“We’re the only ones here,” I said.

“You don’t say.”

We painted, it rained, it cleared up, the sun appeared, it clouded over, the sun reappeared. I went for another walk, barefoot from the get-go and came back my feet bone-chilled. Kay painted on, lost and found in her own world, concentrating for hours.

During that second walk I hashed through things that were on my mind: a work dilemma, a relationship problem and– with a lump in my throat– thoughts of someone I had always loved and who was no longer there.

Ahead of me were three little sandpipers. I hadn’t seen any sandpipers yet but there they were, running back and forth with the surf. Three little birds. I thought of the Bob Marley song:

Three little birds on my doorstep.  .  .
Saying, this is my message to you:
Don’t worry ‘bout a thing
Cause every little thing’s gonna be all right.

I fumbled for my phone. I wanted a picture of these little messengers. But when I was ready to click the picture, they had disappeared. But I didn’t need the picture. I had the message. The sea is like that. It washes everything onto the shore and then carries it away.

Pacific Beach

Cabin 4

I yelled at the cat. That’s when I knew things had gone too far.

It started when I began practicing to sing “Fill the World with Love,” a song from the musical Goodbye Mr. Chips (by Leslie Bricusse). I always get a little choked up when I sing it so I was practicing singing through the tears knowing that the throat lump would no doubt be my companion when I sang it for my Zoom Variety Hour (for folks in the memory loss community and their supporters.) The lump did show up but that is not the point.

The point is why I get so choked up. The song in the musical is sung by an old headmaster when he retires from teaching. It begins:

In the morning of my life, I will look to the sunrise
At a moment in my life when the world is new
And the blessing I shall ask is that God shall grant me
To be brave and strong and true
And to fill the world with love my whole life through.

So far, so good. It reminds me of Girl Scout songs.

Then it is the noontime of the old man’s life when the sky is blue and the blessing that he asks is unchanging: to be brave and strong etc.

I get through that just fine. I was earnest once. And there’s still time.

Finally, in the evening of his life he looks to the sunset at a moment when the night is due

Oh god, the night is due. There’s not that much time left.

The song goes on: the question I shall ask only you can answer, was I brave and strong and true? Did I fill the world with love my whole life through?

My tender conscience (shaped by fire breathing fundamentalist Christians from an early age and fiercely militated against by a swath of sarcasm in my make-up) explodes into maudlin regrets that I could have been kinder. I can always be kinder, especially to people who don’t understand sarcasm and I know who they are. Kindness counts. Kindness adds up.

I sang the song for The Variety Hour, I choked up, I sang through the lump, everyone said it was lovely.

It was a Thursday, the day that the odious Texas senator, Ted Cruz left people in his home state freezing –literally–to death, went to Mexico to be warm, came back after social media indicted him and blamed the trip on his daughters. I spent hours enjoying everyone hating on him. Laura Bassett put up a gif of a bedraggled, matted, wild-eyed, unhappy looking cat with the statement “When you look up from your computer and realize you just wasted three hours of your life tweeting about Ted Cruz on vacation.” That was the only laugh I had in four days.

Then I felt weighed down by all the hate. And the time wasted hating and glorying in the hating (as fun as it was.) “Did I fill the world with love?” ran through my head and I started to cry. I cried all the rest of Thursday, a good part of Friday and spent Saturday in a stupor doing nothing.

Earlier in an overabundance of kindness, two people had sent me microphones (I burst into tears, god, I’m a mess). Big, impressive looking microphones. Cadillac, Veuve Cliquot microphones. I flatter myself that it’s because they want to hear my high notes when I sing for The Variety Hour or Open Mike with Mute Button. Whatever.

But I started messing around with the microphones, seeing where they needed to be relative to me and the piano. Then I got the bright idea of recording the accompaniment of “Fill the World with Love” to sing while forcing myself to make love to the camera. My front room became a tangle of cords to speakers, microphones, computer, camera. The first take was depressing: eyes darting all over the place like I making a drug deal and oh god, is that spit visible in my mouth?

The accompaniment didn’t breathe like a singer. I recorded it again. Actually, I attempted it a dozen times before I got something marginally better than the first one.

It was somewhere in there that I yelled at the cat.

I was at the piano, preparing to start another take when she came over, sat at my feet and stared up at me. Stared. If you’ve ever had a cat stare you down, you’ll know what I am talking about. It’s the stare of a million martyrs over the course of history. The eyes bore into you and cause guilt bombs to detonate in your brain. The cat eyes say, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING SOMETHING FOR ME AND I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU ARE JUST SITTING THERE. All this happens when you aren’t even directly looking at the cat. You just know she’s there and you know what she’s doing. It’s asking too much to be filling the world with love at the same time.

I yelled “WHAT!*#?

The Throat Lump cameth. I started to cry. AGAIN. I hate the cords, I hate the look of electronics. I am being strangled with them. Making music is, to me, a piano with a few music books atop it and me sitting there, singing my heart out. I want to fill the world with love, goddamit.

Instead. Well, it’s ironic.

A few days after I’ve done something stupid, I often think, “I feel a blog post coming on.” If I’ve done something exceptionally stupid, it takes a week before I feel it. Well, at the time of this writing, it’s been two and a half weeks.

It started when I noticed that my arms hurt. Just the upper arms, both of them. Seemed a bit weird but I ignored it. The left arm started to hurt more. Then the pain crept up to the shoulder. That left arm became weak. I couldn’t pick up a full mug of tea with any confidence that I could get it to my mouth before I spilled it. Pain radiated down my arm and when I palpated, I could find tender spots around the shoulder joints.

My first thought was to hope it would go away. It got worse. I started to worry. Wheels turning in the middle of the night accelerated: Rotator cuff? What exactly is a rotator cuff? God, that means surgery. One of the Covid symptoms is muscle pain. Oh god, I have Covid of the arm. Or if it is the rotator cuff, I’ll need surgery and when I’m in the hospital, I’ll get Covid. What is MS ? Could this be how it starts? The m is for muscular, d is for dystrophy. Is that anything like atrophy? Oh god what is happening to me? I need to wash these sheets but I won’t be able to make the bed because I have Covid and/or atrophy of the shoulder. It’s already been two weeks. Can a person not in college go three weeks without washing sheets and live?

The next day I took or dissolved or creamed or drank everything in the house that I thought might help. I binged on a ten-hour TV series and spent a day not moving. By the time I went to bed I was feeling sloshy and sluggish but in less pain. So whatever dreadful thing I had, it seemed treatable.

The next day I traced back what I might have done to myself and the dial stopped on my friend Andrea. Andrea is this tiny little thing who lifts weights. During one of our Zoom cocktail parties, she told me about Joyce L Vedral’s 12 minutes-a day work out. She made it sound easy, even inviting and best of all, short. I ordered the book and fished around for some weights that I knew I had because they were too much trouble to take to Goodwill, being heavy and all.

The book came. It was huge and therefore hard to misplace. I boldly set out to do Day #1. I had to learn what the author meant by isometric and dynamic. By the time I felt I understood that, I had lost interest in doing any exercises. So that was my Day #1 workout.

The next day I tried to isolate some muscles as per the instructions. I texted Andrea “I don’t think I actually have pecs.” Andrea said to start with biceps because they were easier to isolate.

I gave up doing the day’s workout and found a single exercise that worked the biceps. I went through the motions without weights. Then I tried it with what I assumed were 3-lb weights. They weren’t marked; they just weighed less than ones that were marked as 5-lb weights. At this point I had to laugh at the idea of doing repetitions. Do two repetitions of 10. I did two lifts. Not repetitions, just lifts. The truth is I shouldn’t have been using weights at all. Cans of soup. Not even soup, tuna fish. No, pencils.

This was when my arms started hurting. I tried a few more days of isolating and going through the motions of the exercises, culminating in two more lifts a day. Then I nearly dropped hot tea all over me because my arm couldn’t hold up the hand that the mug was in, bringing this narrative back to where I was curled up for ten hours watching a Swedish TV political thriller called “Blue Eyes.” Now I was spilling tea on myself because I tried to hold the warm mug on a shoulder joint. Kind of pitiful, really.

There’s a medieval torture called strappado. The victim’s wrists were tied behind her. She was then strung up by the wrists where she hung until the weight of her body pulled her arms out of the shoulder sockets. I respect how much that must have hurt. Joyce L Vedral ought to mention it in her book.

I ordered a shoulder brace. It was as complicated as trying to isolate a muscle and lift a weight. I thought about taking it to my neighbor Gwen’s house. She can figure out anything. But I would have to put on shoes. I could go across the street to my neighbor Bill’s house. His 20-something son is home right now and I knew they’d help me. But I’d have to put on shoes and a bra.

Eventually I got it on me and it helped to keep the shoulder stabilized. Then there was no excuse to not launder the sheets. I spent The Day of the Coup taking down the Christmas tree. Seemed fitting.

In talking with my friends, I have come to the conclusion that I am the only one in my circle who has never before lifted weights. They all must have mighty pecs. I’m just an artiste.

I’ll begin by saying I am not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I think they are a set-up. Or a greeting card invention. And I find the first of January arbitrary.

Out of curiosity I looked up a history of New Year’s resolutions. They appeared to have begun 4000 years ago with the ancient Egyptians. Their new year began in the spring, round about planting time, which makes more sense as a resolution starting time than the dead of winter when sensible creatures are still hibernating.

The wheel of the year, turning round and round, over and over, is a built-in system for starting new rituals and discarding what no longer serves. The moon’s cycles are good for baby-step resolutions: every 28 or so days is a new moon, notable in that you can’t see it. It’s an auspicious time to start something new, then see how you’re doing with it at the full moon, roughly two weeks later. Evaluate, adjust, repeat.

The year has natural cycles that hang on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. At the vernal equinox, the light and dark are in balance and the juices of the earth are rising. It’s a great time to rise with them. At the summer solstice, life explodes with both an embrace of and a farewell to the light. Whether we like it or not and most of us don’t, we know the dark is coming. In our own ways, we prepare for it. The autumn equinox when light and dark are in balance again, is a chance to choose what you will take with you into the dark. And finally, the winter solstice, the grand finale of the year is the best time to just be still and see what thoughts come. No lists, no plans, just let our minds wander. Depending on how much eggnog we’ve consumed, this is easy enough.

If you happen to miss those four yearly events, there are always the crossquarter days: Feb 1, May 1, Aug 1 and Nov 1, the days that fall midway between the solstices and equinoxes. February 1 (Imbolc in the pagan calendar, purloined by the church as St Bridget’s Day) is the time for lambing and the rising of the milk, a new beginning.

May 1 (Beltane before everyone and his uncle took possession of it) is the real beginning of summer, the solstice being the height of summer or midsummer.  In the Pacific Northwest, May is a busy garden month with the added attraction that so many flowers are bursting into bloom. It’s an orgy of color and fragrance that carries you to the solstice and in its own way is not especially a good time to plan but to enjoy the days. That should be the resolution in the height of summer and the dead of winter: enjoy the days, let them come and go.

Aug 1 (Lughnasadh, Lammas and my friend Anna’s birthday) is the beginning of the harvest, a time of great energy. And finally Oct 31/Nov 1 (Samhain, also known as Halloween or All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day) which marks the end of the harvest and  preparing for the dark.

By my count that gives us eight natural times to make resolutions, change habits, re-think, plant, learn something, try again. Twenty if you count the moons of the year. None of them are Jan 1. The year is forgiving. If you fall short of something you meant to do, there’s another six white horses coming round the calendar and you can ride one of those.

But if you are determined to make new year’s resolutions, make them realizable. Here are a few modest ideas:

On a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, you know how you do all the red pieces and then give up? For 2021, resolve to do the yellow ones, too. Then give up.

You resolve to try to not binge on a bag of Oreos? Pile two slabs of frosting between two cookies.  Fewer calories. It works the same to suck the coating and chocolate off peanut M&Ms and spit the peanuts out. They’re stale anyway.

I haven’t done those things.

Maybe for 2021, I will resolve to.

I used to call “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” the alcoholic’s Christmas carol because of the line about “next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” Pure denial, fantastical thinking. Wasn’t that mean of me? It’s a perfect song for this year and I regret my former attitude.  If you’re not busy on Christmas Eve at 3:00 PM Pacific Time, 6:00 PM East Coast, share a merry little winter holiday with us at Open Mike with Mute Button.

Open Mike with Mute Button is an ongoing Zoom event I created for the same reason I start so many things: to get people making music and not just listening to pre-recorded, slick studio productions. While wonderful to listen to, recordings often miss the point of music. Music is alive, and the melding of your beating heart and your breath with melody, harmony and rhythm is an incomparable event all in itself.

Open Mike with Mute Button began when I asked my college friend John who lives in Boston if he would be interested in joining me. John is a walking compendium of folk music. When I knew him at school, he was a banjo plunker. Now I find out he is somewhat of a virtuoso on banjo and guitar. That’s what 40 years of practice will do. With John’s agreement I secured the east coast and John came up with our name.

My student Susan recently moved from Seattle to Longmont, Colorado and she (the original spotlight whore) brought in two of her college friends, Linda and Beth, who all have sung together. Rocky Mountains were accounted for.

My cousin June in Wisconsin, a piano teacher and church musician, said she would join whenever she could. That pins down middle America.

The world’s seventh largest economy gave us Bruce in central California and Mary-Ellis in Berkeley, also college friends. (that would be Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington.) Bruce sings children’s songs, German songs and songs from his Roman Catholic faith. Mary-Ellis, always wildly entertaining, sings musical comedy and standards.

In the Seattle area, besides me, early joiners were Stewart who plays what seems like every string instrument known to man and is long a song collector. My friend and Swedish teacher Karin brought some of the loveliest songs on earth (and often about the earth) from her native Sweden. Vicki, a beginning piano student and the bravest of us all, once played and sang a song from her first-year piano book. And Melinda with her ukulele and her smile makes you sing your heart out.

I know someone in Holland who stays up late and I keep hoping he will join us one day at  midnight for him. That would make Open Mike with Mute Button international.

We are in all stages of musical development: amateurs, professionals, terrified performers and spotlight whores. We take turns singing and playing for each other. There’s always a lot of laughing and I always come away inspired and with a few new songs to learn.

If you’re a musician who hasn’t been practicing because there’s no place to perform, please join us.

We love having an audience! You can mute yourself and sing along or just listen.

It’s a different kind of holiday for most of us. The original words to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” include this line:

Someday soon we all will be together if the fates allow
But til then we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

We can do this!

I’ve talked about learning to sew for years. I want to be able to make clothes in the colors and styles I like rather than forcing myself into procrustean fashions.

This pandemic and the stay-at-home orders (and my lack of work and ensuing free time) has been a boon to me, a self-learner. I’ve been learning Swedish since February–that would be project number one– and am still loving the great puzzle that is a foreign language. When the cold weather forced me out of project number two, the garden, I began spending more time at the piano and got my singing voice back into shape.

All that was pleasurable and none of it scared me. Sewing does. I actually did learn to sew fifty years ago and still shudder at the experience. Part of it was because my mother was an adept seamstress. Without getting into the psychology of me and my mother (See 99 Girdles on the Wall), I’ll just say every session ended in tears. I took a class at Singer and managed to put together a lovely shirtdress, which actually fit, but which my mother criticized for being too short and showing the tops of my fishnet stockings.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything was, in her working life was a dressmaker for a tony boutique in Seattle called Opus 204. Asking her for help with sewing would be kind of like asking Bill Gates to come over and show me how to turn on a computer. Also Gwen is not a teacher. She’s told me this and I know it. The endless patience I have for students she has for machines. The only times I’ve seen her Wisconsin reserve slip is when she is over here trying to figure out what I did to a machine. (Did you take a picture of the way it’s supposed to look? Did you take note of how you took it apart. You did WHAT with a file?)

The Old Majestic

But Gwen was excited about me learning to sew. She brought over a beautiful old Majestic machine for me to mess around with. It was hard to thread and the bobbin wouldn’t wind because the tire, the little ropey gasket thingy, was broken.

“You can wind the bobbin by hand. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

As horrifying as this sounded to me it did bring with it the reassurance that Gwen was not put off by machines and their quirks. There was always a way to do something. But after many trips over here to see what the hell I needed now, she finally declared the machine more beautiful than workable. She found me a refurbished Singer at a steal of a price and I ordered it.

“Tell me when it comes!!!” she said.

“Yeah, fine.” Someone was excited. I was actually a little excited but the travails with the old Majestic had brought up memories: broken needles, seams wrong sides together, blood, the frustration, the tears.

The machine came, I unpacked it, set it up, fiddled around with it, tried some seams. Gwen came over and did a fancy hem and left the needle placement to the left. I was several projects in when I realized the needle should be in the middle. I had been peering around and under and over, trying both pairs of glasses and then no glasses to set the needle in the right place.

Jag syr. I sew.
Combining one learning experience with another.

When I want to learn something, I dive in head first. When I run into difficulties, I asked questions. As a last resort I read instructions. If I determine I have bitten off more than I can chew, I back up. I get there in the end, enjoying the ride. This is the crucial part: I have to enjoy the ride or I will never get there.

With sewing I went right to what I wanted: clothes. I found some lovely green broadcloth and a pattern for a shirt that said “Very Easy—Beginner.” Uh-huh. Never mind that it had a collar and fitted sleeves and buttonholes.

“Lay it out but don’t cut it until I can see it,” Gwen said.

Gwen came over and rearranged all the pattern pieces, asking me questions about checking the cross grain and measuring and marking all the dots and arrows.

“Don’t you just line the little thingys up with the selvidge?” Selvidge was the only Big Important Sewing Word I knew.

Gwen thinks with her hands. She looked at me wordlessly and re-did everything.

I cut out the pieces for the shirt. I learned how to do fusable interfacing, something that didn’t exist 50 years ago. I sewed the long seams. After a dozen trips across the street to Gwen’s house, I managed the placket up to the point where it had to join with the collar.

Then there was the day I sat for a whole hour (I know this because I had bread rising at home) watching Gwen correct the collar. “You should be taking notes,” she said. “You’ve been asking the same question for three days. Take a picture of this.”

“I could,” I said. “But I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”

To myself, I thought, “This is not fun and oh my god, now I’m afraid of Gwen.”

She and I had a conversation involving the phrase “skill level.” I realized that I didn’t have one. Sewing was not just taking a class and sewing seams. There were basic techniques, apparently starting with the words cross grain,that I didn’t know. There were levels of skill. I wasn’t even in kindergarten here.

It’s like singing. Everyone seems to think they know how to sing because hey, they sang in the church choir, they learned guitar in the 60s and they sing along in the car. A lot of people sing just fine without a single voice lesson. But there are complexities to singing, there are skill levels and there is always more to learn. I’ve been studying singing for 50 years and I still have times when I’ve discovered something new in my voice and I think, “Wow, what did I think I was doing all this time if this is singing!”

I couldn’t sleep that night but I got up with a resolve. I folded up the shirt and the pattern pieces and put them out of my sight. I went to Seattle Recreative and bought a beginner’s sewing book. A Next Door request for scraps of fabric brought me sack loads from women who were clearly cheerful sewers (unfortunate word) who didn’t sob over their machines.

I told Gwen, “You’re off the hook. I am going to start from the beginning and do every Girl Scout project in the book until I achieve a Skill Level.”

Gwen said, “I am so relieved. I hate having to be nice for so long!”

I started with mitered corners on a table runner. I got three out of four corners mitered before I almost cried over the fourth one. I folded up the runner and put it with the green shirt.

Mitered corners

I found a beginners project on the Singer website. It was all straight seams. This was fun.

Project Straight Seams

I moved onto fabric boxes. The first one I made could have belonged to the crooked man who lived in a little crooked house. Still the boxes seemed doable and there were skills to be mined from it. I kept making boxes, getting better with each one. That’s where I am now, still making boxes. Still having fun.

Little boxes