Comma Dot Comma

No, the hot town I speak of is not Phoenix, but home-to-me-for-four-more-days Baltimore. I picked up Dr. G from the airport outside of town early this morning, and as we drove in, the Baltimore skyline was muted by mist into variable shades of blue-gray. A beautiful harbinger of heat that presses down on you and fills every orofice. Chewy heat. Slow heat. Southern heat. In a contest for felt misery, an 88 degree Baltimore day just might win a 110 degree Phoenix day.

But nothing feels so good as getting all sticky in the late afternoon and then plunging into a quarry-turned-resevoir. That’s only one of the things I’ll miss. A list:

• Oregon Ridge Park, where a runner once lapped us twice on a three-mile loop hike.
• Gunpowder Falls State Park, where you can count thirty varieties of wildflower in the spring.
• Golden West Cafe, where you are not allowed to ask for any sauces “on the side” and you can order delicious lacy pancakes full of fresh fruit.
• The Book Thing, a roomy, well-organized book store where all the books are free.
• Waverly Farmer’s Market, where you can get bunches of flowers for three dollars and two percent milk in sturdy glass bottles.
• The Charles Theater, where you can watch both The Devil Wears Prada and Tsotsi.
• The many street festivals, including the Hon Festival (where you wear beehive hairdos), the Flower Festival (where you stick peppermint sticks in lemons and suck the juice out), the book festival (where authors read their works on every corner), and so on!
• Being called “Hon” by strangers.
• Living in a neighborhood with churches, supermarkets, restaurants, and kitschy shops in walking distance.
• The Brewer’s Art, where you can gulp down a delicious Ressurection Pale Ale
• The Baltimore Museum of Art permanent collection and free first Thursday
• The Visionary Art Museum’s outsider art
• All the writing-type people who hang around long after they graduate from Hopkins.
• Dogwood trees.
• Red-tailed hawks swooping past my office window.
• parquet inlay in the floors of old row-houses. Marble Fireplaces. Clawfoot tubs.
• And so on!

The alarm to wake up and go to work has not yet sounded, yet she is dreaming of trying to leave work.  She exits the building and is blocked from the parking lot by a holiday parade.  There is a brief gap between the sleigh full of bikini-clad girls and the group of toddlers on belled goats.  She darts through, but too late– she’s among the goats and someone with a walkie-talkie puts a “Staff” sticker on her shirt.  She is in charge of the toddlers on goats.   The toddlers keep falling off the goats as they head downhill, and whenever a goat bleats it sets three toddlers wailing.  They are supposed to throw candy to the crowd lining the street but they really don’t have the coordination for it, so the sweets tend to dribble off of the goats’ backs and sides to get crushed underfoot.  Pink and green candy dust melts into the pavement.
The process is as much herding as it is guiding.  The goats keep veering off to nibble the azaelas.  She becomes quite good at fishing toddlers out of bushes, and she uses a thin branch for a goat switch.  By the time the parade reaches the bottom of the hill, she is short two goats and three toddlers.  She looks back and realizes how far she will have to climb to reach the parking lot and her car.

Dr. G’s grandmother Ruth liked to say she had lived three lives, and she’d be hard pressed to pick which one was best.

Her first life began on a farm in Northern California, where as a teenager she’d get up before dark to get breakfast for the ranch hands. She cooked on a wood stove and stirred huge, bubbling vats of oatmeal, plopping it into bowls for the men who stumbled down sleepily from the loft. One of her neighbors installed the first flush toilet she had ever seen, though back then it was separate from the house and was called a water closet. All the neighbors lined up to try it out; Ruth once told me about the excitement she felt, hearing the water run down through those pipes the first time.

Ruth finished high school by the time she was sixteen, and there wasn’t much happening in Fall River Mills that interested her. She wanted to meet new people and see some sights, so she did the obvious thing– got a job playing piano in traveling revival meetings. She liked to play loud and with feeling, and though she didn’t have much money, she kept herself busy for many years. She fetched up in Salem, Oregon, where a passionate preacher took a liking to her. Her family advised her to go for it– she was 26 years old after all, no spring chicken! And what else was likely to come along? She’d only known the man a few weeks, but she sized him up and thought he’d do just fine.

It was the Depression. They had a simple wedding and only one worldly possession– an old car– to get them started in their new life, but they went on to raise five lively children together in Oregon, he working in churches or on the railroad, she at home with the kids. Her oldest son, Stan, used to terrify her by blithely jumping off of high places, such as the spiral staircase in the church sanctuary, when he was a very small boy. Years later Stan’s son (the future Dr. G) terrified his own mother in the exact same way.

Ruth’s husband died in 1984, after 45 years of marriage, and thus she began her third life as an independent single woman and the family matriarch. She visited Paris; she kept her subscription to the National Geographic. She drove a Ford Thunderbird and hugged her great-grandchildren at family gatherings. Once, in her nineties, she fell in the bathroom and broke a rib. She spent the whole morning creeping the length of her house to reach the phone and call for help. Afterwards she said it hadn’t been so bad, and she liked living alone, and she continued to do so for a few years afterward. That’s when her “forgetter would get to working” on her, as she described it, though her lively intelligence still came to her aid. “So you’re Stan’s boy?” she’d ask. “And you, (pointing at me)– you were in Africa?” Then she’d use the bits and pieces of information to reconstruct our relationship. “You must be married, you must have been in Africa together, you’re my grandson and his wife.”

Ruth died on Friday at age 95, surrounded by her children. Her descendants include five children, eleven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Her legacy is one of kindess, spiritual faithfulness, and adventure. May her family continue to carry it on. She will be missed.

Well, I wanted to spend my free time ordering things for $5 off of the J. Crew final sale but their website seems to be down, so I will instead regale you with tales of Phoenix.

I knew that the city was in the desert, but for some reason I was picturing it as something similar to the Sahel of West Africa– lots of dirt, the occasional low bush or scrawny tree. In fact, I was astonished to witness a rocky, dusty landscape dotted with cacti! There were saguaros, prickly pears, agave, century plants(which are actually a type of agave), and more. It was monsoon season and though there was no rain the dust was often swept up into whirling devils by the hot wind. The prickly pears had swollen purple fruits and the saguaros had hats of red flowers– they looked so dressed up! On a road trip through the Superstition wilderness we saw two mountain goats perched on a cliff face, nonchalantly working their jaws. They had long, curved horns and hide that was shiny in places, like polished leather. Imagine having your skin cured while it was still on your body. The wilderness is harsh and at first glance dull; I wanted to turn away to rest my eye on something lush and green. But I didn’t have a choice and the more I looked, the more invigorated I felt– the wildness and variety of the terrain and the flora and fauna multiplies with every glance. Every landscape must interpret its calling and this one does it with beauty and flair.
The Valley itself is less interesting; blocks of houses interspersed with blocks of strip malls, all the buildings in the same color palette and all the streets perfectly straight and spaced out. Masterminded, if you will, as the new West so often is. Convenient for getting around, certainly. It’s also about 30 miles wide and constantly expanding. You know how a lot of times people say they live in D.C., but they really mean Rosslyn or Bethesda? Or Portland when they mean Beaverton? Well, for some reason we keep ending up actually habitating in the cities themselves, and Phoenix is no exception, despite the cluster of suburbs that have grown into the core. Our new place is, Dr. G tells me, exactly 2000.5 miles from our current place in Baltimore proper. I wouldn’t say it qualifies as luxury (no ambient music or servants in evidence), but it’s nice. Here’s the text of the craigslist ad:

2br - Hillside Townhome/Mt. views/City Lights/Wood Floors

——————————————————————————–

Great 2 Bedroom Townhome, 1 1/2 baths with 2 Balconies overlooking the city.

End unit with wood floors in Living Room, Kitchen and Master Bedroom.

Backs to Shaw Butte Mountain with Hiking and Biking trails thru the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.

Community Pool, Jacuzzi, BBQ, Cable TV, All Appliances, Water, Sewer and Trash included

A few pics:

The view driving up to the townhouse:

The view from the balcony:

And here are some links that describe the mountain preserve behind, which includes petroglyphs and the ruins of a fancy restaurant, among other things.

http://phoenix.gov/PARKS/hiknogud.html

http://www.gemland.com/shawbutte.htm

http://www.ahga.org/resources/maps/ShawButte.jpg

We are headed to Phoenix for four days to search for reasonable accomodations. What will it be? Luxury condo? Luxury apartment? Luxury townhouse? Luxury detached house? For some reason the online ads all insist on the luxuriousness of their offerings. I have a vague impression of all the people of Phoenix all going home to ambient music and soft breezes, with girls in filmy skirts bringing them tonics and cold melon.  And I shall one day be among them!

The lead song on our specially formulated house-hunting-trip mix CD, \burned by Dr. G in the wee hours last night, is Hotel Arizona, by Wilco:

Hotel in Arizona made us all wanna feel like stars
Rental cars and tinted windows, leave another number for me
Even if I make it through
That’s just something that I have to get used to
That’s just something I have to get used to
I feel some connection between you and me
Well I guess there’s some direction maybe you can’t see
Even at the interview, that’s not something thatI’m gonna get used to
That’s not something I’m gonna get used to
Hello, can you hear?
Hello, that’s all there is, that’s all there is
I guess all this history is just a mystery to me
One more worried whisper right in my ear

Here is the Christian music I listened to in High School:

• Michael W. Smith Album: Go West Young Man — CCM
• The Prayer Chain Album: Shawl — melancholy rock
• The Swirling Eddies Album: Zoom Daddy — silly but deep
• The Choir Album: Circle Slide — atmospheric pop
• Kim Hill Albums: Talk About Life, Brave Heart — folksy rock
• John Michael Talbott Album: The Hiding Place (?) — Monk Folk
• Painted Orange — Album: Painted Orange –electronica
• Hot Pink Turtle — indie/punk
• P.I.D. Album: Here We Are (?) –rap
• Petra Albums: The Rock Cries Out, Beyond Belief — anthem rock
• Dimestore Prophets Album: Love is Against the Grain — indie rock
• Newsboys Album: Not ashamed — pop-rock supergroup
• Audio Adrenaline Album: Don’t Censor Me — CCM
• 77s Album: didn’t actually own one, but kept seeing them in concert — indie rock

Shortly thereafter I went through a phase of divesting all my stuff, and I’ve only re-acquired half of it in the intervening years. I bet Painted Orange is pretty hard to get these days. They sang with fake British accents. No one I knew listened to off-the-radar Christian music. I’d go to the bookstore, listen to five or six things, then buy something. Trial and error. I loved the Prayer Chain in particular because the cover had naked guys covered in mud on the front, and my mom had to let me keep it because it was Christian.

Last week we were in Santa Barbara, which turns out to be good for a number of things, not the least of which is seeing one’s little sister marry. Santa Barbara reminds me of a cupped hand, the way the knuckles of mountains curve around the bay. The summer fog adds a diffuse softness, burning off into views of stark blue and green by late afternoon. My brother Gavin donated some of his photos for this post. We didn’t take any because the camera was locked in the trunk of someone’s car the whole time. Here’s the wedding site, a hillside overlooking the water:

And the reception site, also overlooking the water:

You would never guess, looking at the Princess and Prince Charming, how little sleep they’d been getting in the days leading up to The Big Day. They and their entourage tied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny bows on things and ran no end of errands. The buzz at the reception was all about how perfectly everything turned out, from the gift bags left in the rooms of every out of town guest (except for the two that accidently reached some party girls, who drank all the wine therein before returning them); to the table decorated with round vases filled with candy in the wedding colors (pale pink and chocolate brown), which you could scoop into ziploc bags adorned with the wedding logo; to the basket of toiletries and emergency supplies in the bathroom. There were peonies and paper lanterns and a giant sandbox for the kids. You found your table by pulling your name off of a ribbon tied around an old oak tree. I tell you! And here are the Mrs. and Mr. themselves:

And the Mrs. dancing (hm, I guess I don’t know how to rotate a photo):

In addition to wedding-ing, Santa Barbara is also good for eating stuff, especially Mexican food, and outdoorsy stuff like hiking with my brother and parents. Okay, hiking was really hot, but a nice contrast to the hairsprayed-and-manicured previous days. I enjoy both extremes. We hiked along a river on the way out, so we would stop and jump in when we passed a good swimming hole. Nice!

Flying out of LAX on the way home, we had a number of surprises: 1. witnessing cops with their guns drawn by the side of the road, 2. Don King entering the airport with a chestfull of medals (??), and everyone ignoring him, 3. The security people ordering everyone to hold still, all up and down the walkway, as far as you could see. They had the cutest girl out speaking to the travelers (”Excuse me, could you just hold off on walking? Thanks.”) while the rest mumbled and pushed a lot of buttons on their phones and walkie-talkies. After a few minutes they gave the all-clear and we were permitted to move again.

So that’s what I’ve been up to!