Peg Duthie's Blog, page 45

tulips on the baseline

My friend Harry was a renowned political scientist: he co-taught a seminar at Harvard with Henry Kissinger for three years, compiled a reading list for Jacqueline Kennedy, and shows up in a lot of bibliographies about U.S. central intelligence. I didn't know any of this, however, until long after he and his wife and I had become friends.

As he grew more frail and forgetful, Harry would repeat stories, sometimes during the same visit. Because I knew he was a tennis fan, I often answered "What have you been doing with yourself, Peg?" with something like "Stayed up too late -- Kuznetsova and Schiavone went the distance in Melbourne!" This invariably prompted the tale of how, as a young man, he had attempted to install a tennis court in his yard. Killing the grass was an ordeal. So was laying the clay. The results weren't very good, and he conceded defeat when tulips popped up along a baseline the following spring.

Harry Howe Ransom died yesterday afternoon at the age of 91. I am remembering how, at the end of many a visit, Harry would simply put his hand on my sleeve and whisper, "Peg, you are one of my favorites." I will miss him.

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still stubborn

Coldest day of the winter so far, but the tulips are still proud:



The hollyhocks are saggier than they were at the start of yesterday's snowfall ...



... but it's still so green underneath the outer leaves:



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self-portrait of the blogger as a young cat and an old dog

The young cat belongs to my friend Knight. The kitten spent part of the evening perched on my lap, which was covered by an afghan knitted by K's grandmother:



CNN's two CST clocks -- one for New Orleans, one for Nashville -- were about five seconds apart, which resulted in two sets of numbers being shouted around us, which was pretty funny. The BYM and I started kissing at around 11:59:59 New Orleans time and didn't stop until 12:something:something Nashville time -- as fine a start to the year as I'd hoped.

Today sped by far too quickly, but it included getting to my first yoga class of the year (in jeans, since somehow it's not enough to bring the pants downstairs if you don't put them in the bag you take out of the door...), visiting honorary and immediate family, rereading the New Year's Eve scene in Nora Roberts's Black Rose, and not letting sleeping dogs lie (at least, not right when I got home):



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packing up 2013

The Christmas stockings are already back in the basement, and after lunch I might dismantle the wreath for the compost pile, and then prepare kale salad and clove snaps for the next round of shenanigans. It wasn't overly crowded at the dump, but I was amused to see others on similar "let's get this clobber OUT of the house and yard NOW" missions. The grocery stores and wine boutique were hopping as well. The wine shop owner told me that the caramel brownies I'd given to them were "mindblowing." (That recipe has done right by me this past year: I had to bin my first batch because I'd forgotten the gelatin, which left the glaze harder than plexiglas, but I've baked and boiled several pans' worth since then, and it's been pretty sweet to see "OMG THOSE BROWNIES" on my phone. *Cheshire grin*)

My 2013 had a fair amount of grief and fear and aggravation in it. Some of it likely won't be sorted out until 2015, and some of it not ever. I've gotten better at coping with "not soon" and "not ever" scenarios as I get older (Gottseidank), but man, they still bite.

But there was also the love and support of friends and colleagues, both in crisis and in general; happy trips to New Orleans, Keeneland, Atlanta, and Vancouver; seventy-one yoga classes, twenty-one bike rides, and assorted hikes (including a climb up the Grouse Grind); and some publications:

one haiku and two haiga, in Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga (Dos Gatos Press)

"Even an Empty Life Can Hold Water" and "Making Rice Dance," in the "Journeys" issue of Inkscrawl, August 2013

"With Light-Years Come Heaviness," in the "Immigrations" issue of Eye to the Telescope, April 2013

"Newest Amsterdam," in Dreams and Nightmares, May 2013 (issue 95)

"The Bed I Haven't Made," in STAR*LINE, April 2013

"Sweet 16th" and "Novecento," in the "Menupoems 2013" featurette of Alimentum, April 2013

"Proportions," UU World, Summer 2013 (first published in Measured Extravagance [Upper Rubber Boot, 2012])

"creasing the statement," unFold, 10 April 2013

"Clinging," in Escape Into Life's "Dog Days of August" feature

"Remnant," in Escape Into Life's "Fleurs de Mai" feature

"next to the bandshell" and "kittens nesting," in 7x20, September 2013

five poems on offer at The Poetry Storehouse for remixing (an offer so far taken up by Nic Sebastian and Othniel Smith); an interview of me was published in the Moving Poems forum on 2 December.

"Watching Pain(t) Dry," in Overplay/Underdone (Medusa's Laugh Press)

Thank you all for being a part of my life -- be it as an occasional visitor to this blog or the pal pouring me another whisky or some other incarnation of reader/friend/colleague/inspiration. Wishing you all a splendid 2014!

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lunchtime reading...

Henry Parland's My Hat: "My hat / was run over..."

Jones Very's The Hand and the Foot, a sonnet. I don't agree with the thesis but it's been in my clippings pile all this time because of the final couplet.

This item in Dylan Thomas's list of Useless Presents: "once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet."

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"It's a time when easy things turn difficult..."

Dorothee Lang to Smitha Murthy, on her Italian class:

The next lesson will be happening tomorrow, but I haven't opened the books yet. I just can't seem to bring myself to sit and learn consecutively. And thus, the gaps in knowledge show more and more. It's like in school, when there are classes you enjoy, that seem fun, that are easy. And so you don't take them seriously until they turn more and more complicated and the pile of things to learn grows bigger and bigger. And you think, "If I had learned just a bit every day from the start, it would still be easy now." Which is a true thought and it should make you sit and start the learning, but it somehow does the opposite: it frustrates you . . .

Really, I don't know what it is. Why I am not willing to take the time to learn and instead expect to catch the verb forms in flight, by hearsay. Expect Italian to be effortless. Even though I never was good at learning vocabulary and grammar. And taking the Italian book to Majorca and leaving it there in the suitcase to bring it home didn't really solve the problem either. On the other hand, I would have felt silly learning Italian words while sitting under the Spanish sun. But then, both are Mediterranean places. And better to feel a bit silly while learning than ending up without answers.

-- in Wor(l)ds Apart (Folded Word, 2012)

Also on language: Smitha Murthy, My War with Chinese

From my photos of Israel (this one I think near the edge of Eilat), November 2009:



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trim the hearth and set the table

A perk of hosting a birthday dinner two days before Christmas is enjoying leftover chocolate praline cake for breakfast on Christmas Eve:



The sun is bright and high in the sky. There have been some thin drifts of fat snowflakes, but all they're doing is sending Percy the Panic Catfish into a fin-flapping frenzy, and confusing more of my tulips:







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plus ça change...? (and some other clippings)

From this past Sunday's NYT Book Review:

"The genius of you Americans," the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser teasingly told a senior C.I.A. official, Miles A. Copeland Jr., in the late 1950s, "is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves."

From the In-2014-I-Plan-to-Fry-More-Tofu Department, via the NYT's Mark Bittman:

That "good" news you may have read last week about the Food and Drug Administration's curbing antibiotics in animal feed may not be so good after all. In fact, it appears that the F.D.A. has once again refused to do all it could to protect public health.

[On a related note: How to Make Tofu Really Freaking Delicious. I tried this a couple of weeks ago and the salt soak indeed seemed to help things along.]



The survival time of chocolates on hospital wards: covert observational study. The responses are also a treat.

The Goldilocks Guide to Caramels [that sound of hammer meeting sheet glass accidental toffee this morning? Yep, that was me on my front porch...]

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from Len Deighton's ABC OF FRENCH FOOD

Caramel is the delicious toffee-like substance that the cook produces when sugar is heated to a brown color but not burned. The result is what [Marie Antoine] Carême called "monkey's blood."

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in the last two romance novels I've read...

...which were Laura Lee Guhrke's When the Marquess Met His Match (which, incidentally, has some cheeky nods to Pride & Predjudice and Jo Beverley's Seduction in Silk, I've noticed something the plots have in common that pleases me. It is to some degree a spoiler, so I'll put it under a cut:

( Read more... )

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