Tag Archives: Magic

Because Daniel needed to visit five (yes, 5!) doctors to fill out various medical forms for his Peace Corps application, and I’m the one with the flexible hours, I’ve been working for two days in various doctors’ waiting rooms. Add to this Forest’s broken arm and lost retainer, and you know where I’ve been. Here’s what is most wrong about these rooms as best I can tell:

1. Television: Why, oh, why, is there a television blasting anorexic blonde woman chatting with over-animation or soap operas playing?
2. Golf Magazines: No surprise who brings these in from home, but seriously, why not something exotic and mind-expanding like Chinese fashion magazines in Mandarin or magazines devoted to the French Alps, how to make the perfect Baked Alaska, woodworking for babies, or Inuit dwellings?
3. Hotel-Like Furniture and Watery Pastel Landscapes That Aren’t Nearly As Good As Looking At the Window: More and more offices are looking at more and more hotels: the same. I sat in the same chair, only slightly different texture in the beige or earth-tone strip cushion and stared at the same kind of art everywhere (why all this dampened down turquoise?). Why not black velvet paintings of great saints in one office, photographs of beetles in another, and sculptures of body parts in yet another? Turn each office over to a local artist — like the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York — and let him/her go to town!
4. The sign that said, “Please no eating and drinking” in the endoscopy/colonoscopy office. The fresh cookies and sugary coffee in the orthodonist office.
5. The wait.

Walking with Kris downtown, we realized how cool it would be to time travel back to great meals of our lives. Here are five meals I would journey through the time-space vortex to experience again:

1. On a small island off Mombassa after a morning of riding out on the boat (and throwing up over the side as Ken distracted everyone by pointing the other way and yelling, “Dolphin!”), Ken, his sister and brother-in-law and I walked down a path to a clearing where there were tables and people sitting there banging something hard. As we got closer, I saw huge platters of fresh (just picked) tropic fruit — mango, banana, oranges, papaya — and other platters piled high with freshly cooked king crab. Ah!!!
2. At the old Paradise (how do I miss thee!) in downtown Lawrence, I was a fool for Champagne chicken with mashed potatoes, salad and chocolate late….or the chicken-fried chicken.
3. Speaking of the gone-but-not-forgotten downtown, I miss St. Thomas enchiladas (all manner of seafood in a delicate and zingy white sauce) from Tin Pan Alley. Oh. My. God!
4. After walking from my dad’s old store in the subway arcade at Nassau and Fulton Street in New York City uptown for three or four hours, Ken and I — long before we started pumping out those babies — found the most exquisite Greek restaurant on the planet where we shared a huge platter of outrageously phenomenal things from Mousaka to gryo to falafel to many things I can’t remember the names for anymore (but still crave in the middle of the night).
5. Somewhere in Brooklyn, sometime in my childhood, the perfect eggcream (made with no eggs and no cream), and later on, the perfect Napoleon.

Now that I’m all beside myself and need a quick distraction, what are the five great meals of your life?

Growing up more than a little quirky and in a home that went through an outrageously dramatic divorce (known to everyone in my extended family as “THE divorce”), I could never have imagined that one day I would nearing my 25th wedding anniversary. How do I even account for it? Of course, there are the standard answers: we “work” at our marriage, lots of long talks, some therapy and many good dinners along the way, and then just dumb luck. Here’s some of what we’ve traveled through:

• 17 or more (I’ve lost count) cars, starting with a Dodge Dart and going through a parade of very used Toyotas.
• One half-mile-wide tornado that lifted and turned north before it hit our house, other little tornados, one microburst, lows in the -20s and highs over 112, and the best lightning storms on the planet.
• Several home renovation projects that propelled us to marriage counseling.
• Thousands of films watched, critiqued, taken apart and put back together, including the very bad (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle) and very good (Wings of Desire).
• Three refrigerators, two dishwashers, four washers and dryers, three stoves, three microwaves, two waffle irons, and multiple toasters.
• A bout with cancer, a bad car accident, and lots of little scares and scars along the way.
• Twelve books, including Wild Douglas County, Animals in the House, Seasons and Cycles of the Kaw Valley Watershed, The Sky Begins at Your Feet.
• Six or seven desktops and four laptops. Many hours freaking out over viruses, trojan horses, and most of all, glitches in various word processing programs.
• The Grand Canyon, the Rift Valley (Kenya), the Rockies, the Appalachians, White Sands, Asbury Park, the Ish Valley (B.C.), the Black Hills and Badlands, the Sonoran Desert, the Hill Country (Texas), the Green Mountains (Vermont), the White Mountains (N.H.), the Ozarks, and mainly, the Flint Hills, Smoky Hills and Tallgrass Prairies.
• Two houses, three or four mortgages, including designing our own house and helping with the finishing work without seriously hurting ourselves or each other.
• Three children, and three natural childbirths during which time I used many curse words and vowed, each delivery, never to have sex again.
• Multiple camping trips that involved at least four of the following: mirgraines, getting lost, violent thunder storms, one or all the kids throwing up, flat tires or blown transmissions, truly bad food at a quaint little restaurant, speeding tickets, creepy motels, all five of us screaming at once in the car.
• The loss of our dads and my step-dad, both our maternal grandfathers and grandmothers and our paternal grandmothers, some beloved cousins, and dear, dear friends,
• Kaw, Oacc, Lou, Saul, Nelly Boy, Pinky Velvet, Judy A. Hunter, Akio, Miyako, Hideki, Sookie (cats), and Shelby Chocolate Pudding and Mariah Lily Karumba Lassman (dogs). Also everything imaginable from the herpotology family, and one bunny. Along with this, dozens of amphibian funerals.
• Bioregional congresses in Missouri, British Columbia, Maine, Texas, Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, plus hundreds of bioregional meetings and pages written for various publications.
• Too-many-to-count fights, including some big ones, and even more long talks to work it out again.
• Hundreds of yard sales, dates through the alleys to see what new delights were placed near dumpsters, and visits to thrift stores, plus a long-tended hatred of big box stores (often called Mordor).
• Family development phases through Harry Potter, Monty Python, Mad Magazine (how Forest learned to read), David Sedaris, Chronicles of Narnia, and all things related to The Onion.
• Countless coyotes and owls calling at night, turkeys meandering nearby in the day, and two sightings of bobcats out the front door.
• About 109,500 interesting conversations (at least one each day).

A few nights ago, I had the distinct honor of giving a poetry reading at Marysville’s Koester House, an oasis of tall trees, many statues (as written about earlier) and even some stunningly handsome black squirrels (they finally revealed their fine selves to us!). Last night, we wandered through the Waterville Opera House, also built in the late 1900s, where this afternoon, Laura will dance, I will read, and Kelley will sing and play the heck out of a baby grand on the narrow, deep stage.

Both places had the feel of not quite being haunted, but surely occupied, and not just by the occasional caregiver or tourist. Sometimes you enter a room, and there’s a kind of glow or buzz or something beyond sight or sound. Doing the sound check at 10-ish last night, which strangely enough, felt more like 2 a.m. about 100 years ago, I had to say something, so I told all who had been there before how glad we were to have this chance to play, dance and sing in this beautiful hall where all manner of life, death, nuance and surprise, wild turn and secret had happened before. The room glowed and buzzed back.

Thanks to author and photographer supreme Tom Parker for these telling photos of the Koester House!

I’m not talking about metaphorically looking up, which I tend to do and have found overrated at times, but literally looking at the sky. This morning, I woke up to a facebook link from my son Daniel about just this thing, and it dazzled me. This video túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! takes us through a time-lapsed day of sunrises (something I usually only see on video), mid-day skies, sunsets, and my favorite part, night skyscapes.

Watching it, I remember what I love most about living in Kansas and being alive in general: the sky, with its floods of stars, clouds, light and varieties of darkness (turquoise, purple-black, dark blue and much more). It’s happening all the time, even right now when we’re in one of the October days with one of those impossibly blue skies. Check it out, and also remember, especially when walking, it’s important to look down too.

Since Danny extracted my bike from behind a refrigerator in Mark’s garage, I’ve thought of jumping on it and going. I love biking, but just haven’t done it in years for no good reason. Granted, we live in the country, so riding a bike first entails loading said bike in the car or having it stationed at a friend’s house where all the roads aren’t gravel and frequented by cement trucks. But it was more than time.

So yesterday, driving into town with the bike in the back of the van (because I put it there the day before, thinking I might as well use the space opened up by removing seats when we moved Natalie and Daniel to college last month), it occurred to me that the time was now. Informing that decision was a long wait I had behind some construction trucks that ruined any chance to get to yoga class on time.

I parked near the movie theater, lifted out the bike, and got on it, aiming toward the lovely bike and walking trail. Of course getting on a bike again is just like getting on a bike again, and my legs, while protesting at times, quickly remembered what to do. In my 50-minute ride, I saw things I haven’t seen or noticed before:

• A small and lively farmhouse on the edge of the housing developing.
• Three boys near the stream bed planning their war strategy while three other boys ran toward them.
• A wall of cicadas still droning, even now that it’s almost October.
• Several entertaining little bridges over various fingers of the creek.
• It’s hot when I stop, cool when I go.
• Best not to think about how long the hill I’m on is and just keep pedaling at a moderate speed.
• The trail I thought just snaked along taupe-painted houses that all look alike actually shoots into long stretches of woods and surprisingly hidden fields of milo.

Most of all, I remembered something: biking is like flying, and I love to fly.

It has been a long time since I threw myself on my knees in front of my bank’s vice-president because  of insufficient funds. While I have found that saying “I throw myself on your mercy” or “I’m such a complete idiot” do wonders to erase bank charges, such exchanges aren’t what I recommend for great fun.

So I track my money like my cat tracks a moth: constantly. This is because I’ve learned something of my flaws. My over-optimism tends to make me imagine five or six things I can do with extra money that comes in, and the lack of quite enough rational thinking leads to believe all is always possible. Luckily, another flaw is the tendency to obsess, which works as a counter-balance in the age of bank balances being available at the touch of a keyboard. I actually balance my checkbook daily, sometimes twice a day when the chute between the present and the paycheck is narrow.

That’s why when the dreaded phone call came this morning — my husband on the other end, three hours away at a gas station, saying that the debit card wouldn’t work — I woke up in triple-super-speed and raced to the computer where I remembered I have another little flaw. Sometimes I forget to check important details, like whether I put the rental car on the one credit card we have or on the debit card, which is how we ended up upsidedown in our checking account.

From there, I rifled through drawers to confirm that yes, I indeed had torn up and recycled all those courtesy checks from the Discover card, and yes, I had also canceled all other credit cards over the last few years. In minutes, I was out the door, aiming the car toward Discover ATMs to use my brilliantly-just-created PIN to exhale cash from one machine and inhale it into another one (at my bank).

So what is there to say about this? That for the first time, when the phrase “insufficient funds” rang in my head, I didn’t feel like I was failing at life or like I just inhaled half a dark chocolate cake and had a dark chocolate migraine igniting. I just felt like I made a little mistake, no biggie, just a human thing to do. Driving to my bank with a pile of cash to clean up any impending mess, I thought about how farces work: they tell the story of one mistake piled on another until it’s obvious everything is about to explode in total disaster, but then, thanks for everyone embracing the folly of being human, the show ends in marriages and kisses, reunions and laughter.

So let’s hear it for the folly of insufficient funds, not insufficient people, where all’s well that ends well.

Hello everyone — just received word that Poets & Writers Magazine has selected our state for a special contest, which will give one Kansas poet and one Kansas fiction writer some amazing opportunities. Please read the letter below for details.

Dear Kansas Writer,

Poets & Writers has selected Kansas as the focus of the 2011 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award and is now welcoming submissions from Kansas writers. Initiated in 1984, the Writers Exchange Award was created to introduce emerging poets and fiction writers to the New York literary communities and provide them with a network for professional advancement. Each year, poets and fiction writers from one state are invited to apply for the award. To date, 80 writers from 32 states have participated.

One poet and one fiction writer from Kansas will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City, where they will meet with agents, editors, and prominent writers, and give a public reading of their work. The winners will be selected by Rigoberto González (poetry) and Joan Silber (fiction).

The contest is open to poets and fiction writers who:

• Have never published a book, or
• Have published no more than one full-length book in the genre in which they are applying, and
• Have resided in Kansas for at least two consecutive years prior to the date they submit their manuscripts.
  
• An application must accompany all manuscripts and be postmarked no later than December 1, 2010. For complete guidelines and an application, please visit this site.

Read the press release here.

Sincerely,

Bonnie Rose Marcus
Director, Writers Exchange