250 Words On Growth

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve been surprised that my sixties have marked a period of tremendous personal growth, by which I mean organic materials growing out of my body in new and alarming ways and places.

First, from inside my nostrils and ear canals, hairs in a riot of textures and colors intent on tickling and harassing me. Also, more startlingly, right out on the very tip of each ear, a little crabgrass patch of hairs poking up like wiry antennas craning to pull in a distant TV station.

When you’re 11 and a school nurse hands you a pamphlet titled “Your Changing Body,” they never mention that someday you’ll be shaving your lobes.

Seborrheic keratoses are brown scaly waxy lumps that, as one medical website colorfully describes, “look as if they were dripped onto the skin by a candle,” and my epidermis churns them out. They’re benign, if you consider looking like the Fantastic Four’s Ben “The Thing” Grimm benign. 

The ones I can reach, I scrape off with a fingernail. You’re not supposed to do that and it’s not supposed to work, but I do and it does. For those on my back that I can’t reach, I see a dermatologist, who freezes them off with liquid nitrogen.

At my last visit, she looked and said, “Wow, that’s a lot.” After treatment, I asked if she’d gotten them all. She shrugged as if to say, “I’m not a miracle worker. Make peace with the reality that this is how you look now.” 

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After the Lahaina Fire

The newspaper article in this link reports what Karen and I were up to yesterday afternoon. 

Karen's old boss, county Supervisor James Gore, called Tuesday and said he wanted to bring a busload of folks from the international "After the Fire" conference to our neighborhood, and asked if Karen could say a few words and I could provide a couple of signed copies of A Fire Story. One particular point of the visit was to show a contingent from Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, which was wiped out by fire a year ago, what a neighborhood looks like seven years after it burned to the ground. 

Karen spoke, then I spoke, and Gore spoke. We told them our story, and assured them that if they face every day with purpose and work together as a community, they'll get through it. I gave my book to the mayor and a city councilwoman from Lahaina. The mayor, in turn, gave Karen and me little pins from their city. We told them they're not alone. 

We hugged, we cried.

I found myself unexpectedly moved--"unexpectedly" because I've told my story in a lot of places to a lot of people, many of whom had lived their own version of it. I thought I'd gotten used to it. I think this was different because it was on my turf, in a little neighborhood park that was the only plot of grass and oaks that survived the fire, and the Maui folks' trauma is still so fresh and raw. 

I'm not fond of my quote in the linked article. "Punch them in the face" was said as a joke and doesn't necessarily come across like one in print. But I think we were able to provide some real-life insight and advice that we can only hope they find helpful.

It was a good and sad event.

250 Words on Odd Numbers

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

People like oddness.

Magicians know that most folks, asked to pick a number between one and five, will say three. Most asked to pick a number between one and ten will say seven. 

When I was young, my Grandma taught me my first lesson in art composition: objects grouped in threes are more pleasing to the eye than those grouped in twos or fours. I don’t know how she knew that, she wasn’t an artist, but she was right. We are drawn to the balanced asymmetry of odd numbers. 

One odd number is “Belphegor’s Prime,” Belphegor being a high-ranking demon in Hell whose cursed number is 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001. It’s a palindrome—the same forward and back—with 13 zeroes on either side of a 666 in the middle. It’s also a prime number, indivisible by anything but 1 and itself. A similar so-called “beastly palindromic prime” is 700,666,007. Sinister!

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung and physicist Richard Feynman both extolled the prime number 137, which seemed to surface in their work more often than it should, hinting at some inscrutably deep pattern in the universe. Some scientists wouldn’t be surprised if, when the Theory of Everything that unites subatomic quantum mechanics with cosmological relativity is finally discovered, its formula has a “137” in it.

One of my favorite numbers is 51, because it’s 17 x 3 but somehow seems like it shouldn’t be. 

Of course, according to writer Douglas Adams, the Ultimate Answer to Everything is 42. How odd that it’s not odd. 

Sauce Day!

Yesterday was our first big tomato-harvesting and sauce-making jubilee. Our climate is mild enough that we'll produce tomatoes until the first frost, so there will probably be more crops and sauces to come. We freeze it and put away enough to last throughout the year!

We planted four tomatoes this season: Roma, San Marzano, Sweet 100 cherries, and Better Boy, which was new to us this year. In addition, we have a TON of basil that will both go into this sauce and be made into pesto which, again, we'll freeze and use well into next year. 

I know few things as satisfying and gratifying as picking something from your garden in the morning, cooking it, and serving it for dinner that night. 

Karen and Riley harvesting our crop. Riley LOVES cherry tomatoes; any that hit the ground are hers. I made this U-shaped raised bed, which doesn't have a ton of square footage but is efficient and sufficient for us. You can see a bit of our basil patch peeking out behind Karen.

Today's yield, which will be clean, sliced, and tossed into a pot.

Eleven cloves of garlic ready to be diced. In our family, we call that "a good start."

Everybody in the pool! We'll cook it down for a few hours now. We don't bother peeling the tomatoes (hundreds of cherry tomatoes!), but will use an immersion blender to smooth it all out later.

Added at 1 p.m.: Added some basil and hit it with the immersion blender. Then added spices, Parmesan cheese, onion, bay leaves (plucked from trees in a nearby creek). Sometimes we leave it vegetarian, but this batch has ground beef, browned in another pan (with the onion) and added. Now we just give it a few hours to percolate and thicken. Beautiful color!

Added at 6:30 p.m.: Farm to Table in about seven hours! Fresh sauce on a nest of wide fettuccini, with Romano beans from the farmer's market and a nibble of garlic bread. It was good. Very good.

Leftover sauce headed to the freezer. Depending on how many we're feeding, each container is good for one meal or more. We'll probably make another batch as big or bigger in a few weeks.

250 Words on Kids and Other Humans

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I love kids and kids love me. I don’t know why, but if I’m in a room with a hundred adults and one kid, that kid’s eyes will lock onto mine like a magnet. If there’s a kid in a restaurant looking over the back of their chair, they’re looking at me.   

Maybe because I look back.

I like to think kids, like dogs, are good judges of character and their attention reflects well on me, but I don’t know that.

You might say it’s because I approach the world with childlike openness and wonder, but I don’t think I particularly do and, even if I did, they wouldn’t know that.

I do acutely remember what it felt like to be a kid, which is why I never tease or patronize them. I know they can feel deep embarrassment and perceive condescension because when I was their age I could. Of course I adjust my vocabulary, but I know kids can have interesting conversations about sophisticated ideas because I did. 

Kids aren’t stupid, they’re just inexperienced and uninformed. Both conditions will be remedied in time.

I also try to get down to their level. My mother told a story about being a young girl visiting a sheep ranch. The sheep terrified her and the adults laughed, until her grandfather kneeled to her height and said, “Geez, from down here they look like monsters!” She never forgot his empathy and compassion.

Perhaps the trick is treating kids like people. I remember.