Category Archives: Magic

Today the music returned. A cannister with about two dozen yoga class mix CDs that I painstakenly made on my old computer showed up right next to the CD player in the yoga studio. Had it been here all along? No, it had not. It also hadn’t been anywhere else in the studio that I could discern, nor in my car (which I took apart, not an easy thing with only one door that opens properly and three rows of seats to climb over and under) or home (even more challenging given all the stuff every which direction). I had looked for this little cannister for weeks upon months then gave it up for good. I imagined the cannister falling soundlessly out of my car one day and rolling down I-70 toward better adventures that being the soundtrack for my weekly yoga class.

The business of making yoga class mixes takes time and inspiration for me to bring the right balance of bass-infused chanting, Celtic ballads, jazz standards, a good helping of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Eva Cassidy, and a perky showtune thrown in for good measure. Still, I couldn’t help but mourn in miniature the loss of some inspired moments when great songs I couldn’t remember led to other great songs I couldn’t remember. I told myself that eventually I would squirrel myself and this computer beyond the time-space continuum to recreate many more yoga mixes for my classes. Eventually come spring to be more exact.

It’s come spring, and today as I put down the new cannister of yoga music (which somehow is also holding 9 CDs full of Springsteen mixes for long road trips), I saw the old cannister. “Where have you been?” I started to ask, then realized I didn’t actually need to know. The music rolled away, and now it’s returned. As I slipped an old friend CD into the player today, I reveled not only in the deep river voice of Mary Fahl, right before a Krishna Das chant, but in the mystery of lost things returning.

I used to be a regular on the cross-country bus, my main mode of flinging myself the 1000-miles-plus between college in the Midwest and home in the east. Those long 24-hour stints started hopeful as the pattern for the silky 80′s dresses I made myself only to end up with a misshapen pancake in mauve.

Yesterday I revisited that habit of transit, not even four hours and the bus so much more comfortable than I remember with plugs for laptops I couldn’t have imagined when I was in my early 20s. The people around me were mostly the age I was, making easy conversation with strangers about six-credit classes that involved hands-on forestry or bands at a college a friend attends. A Romanian young man and his American girlfriend fell asleep, him leaning against the window, and she against me. A Chinese mother and her middle-aged daughter made constant and polite talk with a young woman who kept asking, “What’s the Chinese word for ‘I love you,’” and then practicing earnestly. “It rhymes with bank,” she’d say of the first syllable and the Chinese mother would nod encouragement only to be asked next, “What’s the Chinese word for ‘father’”?

Three decades ago, my bus trips landed me in intimate conversations with strangers. We would confess our secret loves and fears, laugh about the rolling adventure of the other characters on the bus, and watch each other’s stuff when one of us ran into a gas station for some Doritos. We also slept on and off, trying not to lean on each other. You haven’t truly seen America until you’ve been jolted awake, only to stumble out of the bus at 3 a.m. in Youngstown, Ohio in the middle of winter to make your way through the haze of relieved smokers toward a long line for a very dirty bathroom. Back on the bus, the sweet conversations and interesting characters, after the first 12 hours, turned into a toxic mix of boredom, sudden noises, irritated seatmates, junk-food headaches and constant discomfort. At the end of each bus trip, I would swear off buses forever again.

Back to the present, I had to move my spread out backpack, coat and ginger ale to make room for a young woman also traveling south in the dark. After working on our laptops in the dark, I couldn’t help but notice her line breaks looked at mine: short and variable. She was also spending a lot of time getting each line right. I waved my hand in front of her to get her to take out her earplugs. “You write poetry?” I asked. She did indeed. “I write poetry too,” I told her, and the conversation took wing. Probably around the same age I was when I was riding buses too often, she also writes in various genres and is learning about the universally dysfunctional world of university English departments. We promised to email, share some poems, and then I was at my destination, dragging a suitcase and carrying a backpack to the hotel. She was on toward Boston to work on a play with a friend.

A day later, getting onboard an airplane, I couldn’t help but, just a little, miss the bus. When my flight pointed its nose down toward its landing at LaGuardia, only to lift it up again and go off to Hartford, CT to sit on the tarmac for over two hours before heading back to LaGuardia, I started to actually ponder taking a long, storied and overwhelming bus ride all the way back to Kansas.

Napping gingerly between checking Facebook and staring at the walls seemed the perfect way to spend this late afternoon, especially since I didn’t sleep enough last night, and I’m nursing a sinus infection with a crazy-long shelf life. Eventually, I would get awake enough to go out with Ken for enchiladas, particularly because I haven’t eaten Mexican food in close to 36 hours, so I was long overdue. Then Ken called from his way home, and everything changed.

Usually, we burn the prairie in early April, but because of drought-delayed prairie flower and grass planting, the planting is coming soon, and the ground needs to be prepared. Ken, Daniel and some friends tried to burn our field to the west in December but had to stop when the wind shifted and the fire starting heading toward our house (where I was blissfully frying latkes). This fire needed to be finished, and finally, the wind was right, the ground was dry enough but not too dry, and the time was short.

I didn’t feel like bundling up so I could strip down as I dragged fire through the cold, but it was the right thing to do because I live on this farm. Also, Ken drove me 2.5 hours each way to a reading last night as a favor, and so I kept my whining thoughts to myself.

Burning a prairie entails setting a back fire on one edge, and then another fire, which will run to toward the back fire, on the other. Dragging fire is a lot like winding spaghetti while running a marathon and dancing the fox trot.. You fork up a bunch of dried grass, wrap it around the pitchfork, and move fast enough to leave a steady trail of drops of fire. Only the pitchfork was broken, and some of the ground I was on was still damp, so I had to stoop down and zigzag as I made the back fire. It didn’t help when Ken took my pitchfork to give to Forest, who was dragging on the eastern edge.

Ken told me to do it his way: grab a big bunch of tall grass, light the edges, and then run, kindling grasses as I went. But I wasn’t so good at this, which required that a person move just fast enough to cover ground and just slow enough to set little fires. Plus, sometimes the fire would flare up and head toward me, and I’d have to throw the grass down and scream. I ended up doing a combination of Ken’s technique with shoveling bits of fire down the prairie.

Within an hour, it was time to stop, most of the field burned or on fire, and night falling (when it’s illegal to burn prairies, an unfortunate law). We stopped, watched the circles of flames, took each other’s pictures, and slowly made our way, ashes behind us, toward the house.

And now, as befits any reluctant fire-starter, the enchilada. As some Kenyans I met liked to say, “God is good.”

Then I woke up.

But while I was asleep, I had an adventure of the presidential sort. It turned out that, one day after throwing my hat in the next presidential election, I won. Right afterwards, I ran into Jimmy Carter, looking over organic vegetables at the Merc (our food co-op), and he was so glad to see me. Turns out we’re old friends. He asked if I’d like him to cone over and talk with me about this big change in my life, and of course, I agreed.

In no time, we were in my living room. Jimmy was so warm and loving, joking with me about how sudden it all was, and suggesting we have a little ex-president posse visit with me to help me prepare.

“The Bushes too?” I asked.

“Why not?” he replied.

I had always wanted to meet Obama (perhaps “meet him again” would be more accurate since I met him in a previous dream recently when I saved his life from a conspiring campaign aide), and I knew Clinton would be a blast to hang with, and so Jimmy and I talked over what I might prepare for dinner with everyone. I thought pot roast might be good, but it’s hard to know how small the brisket might turn out to be after putting it into the crockpot. You wouldn’t want to run out of meat when you have a table full of ex-presidents.

“I make a mean meatloaf,” I told Jimmy.

“Meatloaf, it is,” he replied.

I started to plot running to Checkers to get supplies whipped potatoes, and some cases of fizz water too, when it occurred to me that my life was about to change, perhaps more drastically than I wishes. A doom would be placed over me, and I wouldn’t be able to go shopping at the drop of a hat, secret service men would guard me at all hours, and strangely enough, there would be orange roses everywhere.

“Why orange roses?” I asked Jimmy.

“You had them as the symbol of your campaign. Do you like orange roses?”

“I can deal with them,” I answered. “But now I have to come up with policies on everything, and that will be majorly exhausting.”

“That’s why you need the meatloaf,” he answered. And he was right because Jimmy Carter just about always is.

Coming home from the renga reading in Kansas City, we were a wee bit hungry, so we aimed ourselves toward a hole in the wall diner in midtown whose name shall secret. We stepped over the threshold, and that’s when we left reality as we know it.

First, a group ahead of us – three men and a woman – stopped in their tracks to yell out at friends of theirs already at a table. The friends leapt out of their seats, and we were blocked from going further. This should have been a sign, but unfortunately, we didn’t read it, and nosed our way to a booth.

Soup seemed like a safe bet, but I couldn’t find it on the menu, so I asked the waitress, a slim redhead who would probably fit, folded up, in my purse. “Whatever the menu says, we have it.” Upon further investigation, the menu said, “Please ask your server about our soup of the day.” A few back and forth exchanges later, we all puzzled out, the waitress and us, that there was soup indeed, and it was tortilla soup. Fair enough, and so Ken and I decided to split a bowl of tortilla soup and order one chicken enchilada a la carte.

Within a moment, almost too fast from our ordering time to delivery, the waitress placed three beat enchiladas and cup of soup in front of it. A cook came by, asked us how things were, and we explained the order mix-up. The soup stayed, the enchiladas left and then, as if a magical pulled an enchilada from her hat, the singular correct enchilada appeared within seconds of the wrong ones vanishing. The woman delivering it — one we hadn’t seen before — came out of a back room, and disappeared afterwards.

“This is pretty good food,” Ken said, digging into the soup.

“Compared to diner food?” I asked.

“No, it’s terrible compared to diner food.”

“So it’s pretty good food compared to horrible garbage you wouldn’t want to eat?”

“Exactly,” he told me.

Trying to pay, “La Bamba” blasting in the background and a female cop surveying the menu from her perch beside the register, we fell into a swamp of delays. Turns out we were charged too much for things we didn’t order, and soon the cook and waitress were in a corner, poring over the menu for clues. In the end, we were charged too little, but since our time in this alternative reality was up, we needed to skedaddle. We left a big tip, turned around, and found a $20 bill on the ground. We picked it up, gave it to a hostess who appeared out of nowhere. She tucked the money into a secret compartment of a small podium, and we stepped outside. Back to reality, or whatever we call it.

“It was like being trapped in a bad 80′s disco dinner,” Ken said.

“Or a science fiction version of a diner,” I added.

“That’s what made it the perfect place to go. We couldn’t have found a place better than here right now.”

“But we never have to go back, right?” He agreed, and we drove home.