Peg Duthie's Blog, page 4

baruch dayan emet

I learned a few minutes ago that my friend Frank Stern passed away in early September.

On the one hand, he was 92. So intellectually I knew full well that I might not see him again (which, of course, is true of anyone at any age). But he was a very alert and comparatively spry nonagenarian -- I was waltzing with him at New London Assembly during the summer of 2019, and chatting with him via Zoom the past two years -- so I was very much looking forward to seeing him at New London 2022. In one of our later email exchanges, he was talking about still sorting his father's papers, which included jokes in German. We never got around to talking about his career in physics . . .

So, yeah, feeling bereft.

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Whose clustered fruit must else be lost

Today's subject line is from the middle of Robert Frost's "October," which has these lines near the middle:

Oh hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.

The days seem so brief indeed. This poem ends with grapes, which sent me to another Frost poem -- "Wild Grapes" -- that knocked me off my feet, so to speak, when I first read it back in grade school:

I said I had the tree. It wasn't true.
The opposite was true. The tree had me.
The minute it was left with me alone
It caught me up as if I were the fish
And it the fishpole.

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so many weeds

But, my lord, it's such a beautiful world: the hollyhocks and roses and azalea and balloon flowers are still blooming, and there's this to listen to as I slice, tug, and grind:



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from JERUSALEM, SHINING STILL

Karla Kuskin (words) and David Frampton (illo), 1987

==

There is already an inflated pouffy arch bedecked with Halloweeny bats on the next block. My immediate reaction on first seeing it was "For the love of pumpkin spice, Too. Freaking. Soon."

And right on the heels of that, "F__k me, it has been a scary year, y'all do you."

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measures of time

Just ate the last Easter gumdrop on Rosh Hashanah. That's how things are rolling around here at the moment.

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Golden Age escapism

From a contemporary writer, KJ Charles. For some reason I was able to leapfrog over two holds when I looked up Subtle Blood yesterday, and from there it was off to Proper English (Think of England being truly on hold) and then to a good helping of fic at AO3 -- and it feels a bit like old times, when I was active in Elizabeth Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers fandom, what with certain turns of phrase, and some very good stories in the mix (including some fun crossovers, with Wooster/Jeeves and Miss Fisher and their like). From Subtle Blood itself:

( Will Darling spoilers behind the cut )

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zirconium @ 2021-08-07T13:09:00

A few days ago, a colleague called me a rock star, which feels especially good right now both because I've been enjoying Anna Zabo's Twisted Wishes romance trilogy (pansexuality, aromaticism, bondage, trans hero, mouthy performers, snarky PR manager, art, music, pie, very good coffee, and more [*]) and because there are miles of learning curve to scale at the job. Very appealing vistas; trying to pace myself accordingly -- hence romance novels instead of Big Data slides on this day of rest, with some champagne from an event I emceed last month, and artichoke-anchovy carciuga left over from an impromptu dinner I hosted a week ago.

[* The author has some free short stories on their site. I just giggled my way through the one about the rival neurobiologists.]

The friends who came over had suggested going out, but I didn't have a good feeling about that, both because of Delta and because Saturday nights in Nashville tend to bring too many hipsters, bachelorettes, and other species of extroverts into not enough square feet for my preferred level of cope. Turned out to be a brilliant call on my part -- traffic around my neighborhood was hosed for hours, what with 70,000 people attempting to see Garth Brooks at Nissan Stadium and the thunderstorms that forced the organizers to eventually call the night off. More important, I had everything I needed at home to improvise a nice pescatarian meal -- marcona almonds and Indonesian spiced cashews, fish ball soup, tomato salad, mushroom-carrot bao, and eggplant stir-fried with tofu. I didn't have time to make the ginger marshmallow fluff I'd hoped to offer with cinnamon graham crackers and chocolate (aka fancy s'mores), but that was for the best, since our lovely guests brought with them two kinds of ice cream mochi, along with seaweed salad, cocktail fixings, a sheaf of homegrown lavender, and three heads of garlic, also from their garden. I seriously like being an adult.

Of course, being an adult also means calculating which platters to keep spinning and which to let crash amid competing demands and recurring waves of disappointment, rage, and frustration. I think I'm getting a mite better at recognizing (lack of) capacity -- it hasn't stopped me from going, Oooh! The dragon dance team is recruiting! Ooooh! Little Debbie sculpture contest! Oooh! Toaster oven in a freebie pile! but sleep is winning out over FOMO more often these days. As some of you know, I signed a contract in January 2020 to perform in a professional immersive theater production that would have taken place in June 2020. Things got as far as a photo shoot, but when the venue published its 2021-22 schedule earlier this summer, the show was no longer listed, and while that isn't in any way a surprise, nor would I want or expect the artistic or logistical teams to have decided otherwise, it had been a thrill to be chosen, and something with a lot of potential, both creatively and socially, so yeah, I've been in a bit of mourning over that.

And, although I do better on my own more than many, I've lost ground over the past sixteen months from not singing regularly with others and not hitting the Y every day and it's going to take time to rebuild my voice and get back into form. My current Ailey class pass is about to run out, and it's just as well, because I do not have the focus right now for Zoom Zumba or any other online sweat session. Paddleboarding's on hold until later this month, because I pulled a back muscle last week and because traffic will be impossible this weekend and next. (Ironically, I received invites from two newer friends to go paddling within the past two weeks.) It's fine, but I'm massively annoyed about having let things fall out of shape, but also cutting myself slack, because look, we're dealing with coups and viruses and literal crowds of white supremacist fascist knucklehead grifters, and even Energizer-bunny rockstar me is going to have patches of "fuck off, I need ten naps and a pint of stracciatella before I can deal with any more of y'all."

I have been cracking half-baked Oz jokes for the past month, in part because that's the name of the venue I would have been performing at, and also because my zip code is in the Emerald City "LifeMode Group" of a recent study. The description isn't wrong. (h/t NashToday)

Anyhow, it's time to figure out where I put the library books that are due in six days, sort through yesterday's tomatoes, and get going on today's Spanish homework + freelance pages. Many of my friends were at English Country Dance Week up in Pinewoods (Massachusetts) the past seven days, and as with so many other things right now, I'm a muddle of envy and nostalgia and thank-god-I'm-not-there when I think about them allemande-ing and waltzing without me. (Pinewoods changed my life, for the better -- I'll write more about that some other time -- but I wouldn't be there even in a normal year, because I am unapologetically a housecat and there are dance/music vacations that don't involve outhouses and ticks and camper chores. Just sayin.') And I'd like to be better at playing tunes from Barnes by the time I fully rejoin the ECD universe. Speaking of more things to work on. After today's nap.)

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First draft: Crow

Crow

is what I'd like to be doing
about that pose I finally held
for maybe five seconds ten days ago
after seven years of forward rolls and faceplants.
There aren't pics. The wobbling on water
was keeping the rest of the class immersed
in their own business, which indeed
is something I deeply liked about yoga

back when sweating with strangers was merely
weird and gross and healing, rather
than playing roulette with aspirated bullets.
Though even then the mind was always boxing
the shadows of egos and scripts. Even now
I snarl at the teacher who parroted "Push
beyond your limits" every afternoon. She
is a reason I don't go back to that room

for while I don't always own my own mind
my blood and bones and brain all bear
the knowing that there's just this one life
and just this one body. Sometimes it keeps
me tangling and tango-ing with shouldas
all damn night, sometimes into dreams
that are no kind of restful, but often enough
it's saved me from fools and from my own folly:
to ken the stakes is to mind looking feeble
or out of place -- and then to stand firm
on where I am, on where I feel safe

whether it's never putting head to knee
or going back to double-masks inside the store
but also flipping the dog and failing at Warrior 2
again and again and other things too
again but at times with more grace and then
one morning the balance is there,
the world askew and never not too much
and when I tried again last night
who would have believed it had happened at all
watching me almost roll into the furniture

and this is when I thank the stars
for this body that knows what is true
no matter who might be minding it
and for what this body will return to.



(Different pose, different session. Photo by Sara Bradley at Nashville Paddle)

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dogged gradations

We have reached the stretch of summer where I ask myself daily, "Is this really red enough? Is this the right saturation of golden orangey yellow?" because there are tomatoes ripe enough to harvest every morning and evening, and the urge to leave them on the vine to become even sweeter is checked by the insolence and rapaciousness of the local squirrels. In a month or so I will be asking the same question about the Christmas peppers, although the rodents tend to leave those alone.

I planted two knobs of ginger yesterday, and transplanted some sweet cherry pepper seedlings this evening.

At the start of April, a meme floated into my Twitter feed . . .

FIND YOUR WW2 OPERATION NAME!

1) Take your mental or emotional state
2) Add the last food you enjoyed

I'm in charge of Operation Muted Bacon

— John Bull (@garius) April 2, 2021

. . . and the reaction to my result was pretty much, "You don't say":

Operation Tenacious Prosecco is wholly on brand, I daresay. https://t.co/4pJfy7yxTC

— Peg Duthie (she/her/hers) (@Zirconium) April 2, 2021

A recurring Thing this past week has been working through misbehaving connections. On Saturday, it took me a while to realize my board wasn't inflating quickly enough because a tube was loose. I finally got water to come out of a garden hose by shifting the dial at the tip, after flipping other levers and twisting various joins. (It's still leaking more than I would like, but I'll sort that out some other week.) There's been coaxing various devices to working in tandem, including my ancient inkjet printer with my barely-out-of-the box portátil for work. There are acres of bureaucracy on multiple fronts. Fortunately, there being dozens of irons to tend to, one can heave a sigh and bustle on to the next fire.

... and, Flickr is for some reason timing out on the images from JERUSALEM, SHINING STILL I'd planned to share with you. So that will be something for a later time as well.

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whipping through the weekend

I'm winding down from a weekend with a fair amount of socializing and cooking. The socializing was in small groups, via paddleboard yoga (photos on IG and Twitter (x2)), a neighbor's birthday party (involving Ethiopian and Indian food and quite a bit of red wine and unbridled nerdiness), and a brunch I hosted in honor of another friend's birthday. I made brownies spiked with red pepper flakes for the neighbors, tested two recipes for a friend of a friend, and prepared the following for brunch:

horchata experimentation bar:
* pitcher of sesame milk (1 cup sesame seeds soaked and then blended with around 1500 mL water, then strained and chilled)
* brown sugar simple syrup
* an array of other sweeteners and spices, with a pestle and mortar, a beaker, and a row of shot glasses. The resulting blends included saffron, red pepper, lemon peel, turmeric, cardamom, nutmeg sugar, and other mayhem.

deviled eggs

cherry tomatoes (harvested from the garden yesterday)

boiled artichokes with melted butter

roasted cauliflower with capers, salted lemon peel, and king oyster mushrooms sautéed with ginger (the mushroom component adapted from a Cathy Erway Food of Taiwan recipe)

rice sticks stir-fried with king oyster and shiitake mushrooms, cabbage, and carrots

s'mores cake (devil's food with marshmallow fluff and crushed cinnamon graham crackers)



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