Dried Figs and Wooden Spools

What goes around, comes around

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 02:18:00 +0000

The Columbia Earth Day celebration was rained out last week. Seems fitting, in a way.

Rain is the epitome of recycling: Raindrop to stream, stream to ocean, ocean to cloud, cloud back to raindrop. Repeat for a million years or so.

Earth Day is very special to me. I was a freshman in college in 1970 when θ -- the Greek letter theta – began appearing on bumper stickers and posters. Theta on a green field was the new symbol for ecology, which itself was a term that never made it into my textbooks.

By April, I was wearing the symbol myself and part of the organizing team for Earth Day 1 at Shasta College in my hometown, Redding, CA. I have seldom felt so proud as when I carried the giant θ-emblazoned flag as we marched through downtown.

It tell that story to my students now and their eyes roll. Few know what “Earth Day” means – nor do they care. I suppose I should be upset, but I’m strangely pleased. Their ambivalence means that hippie-haired gaggle of protesters in 1970 succeeded. We changed the world.

Earth Day did not arise to promote hemp seed, belly dancing and henna tattoos. It came on the heels of warnings by Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich and others that we might not make it to our dotage unless we started taking care of our world.

In my hometown, the lumber mills burned their waste in huge “teepee burners,” which likely were not as bad noxious clouds from the burning garbage dump. Clear Creek, near my home, was anything but and lined by 20-foot-high rows of gravel left behind by the dredges that plowed the valley for gold nuggets.

The national picture was bleaker. I remember my eyes burned and I hacked up brown gook while visiting Los Angeles. The Potomac in our capital was known as the river you could smell before seeing. Bald eagles were fantasy creatures – on the verge of extinction from the effects of DDT pesticide.

So we marched. Better yet, we voted. And year by year, life not only went on, it got better.

Now my students watch bald eagles glide over the Missouri River, put their cans in city-provided recycling bags and think DDT is a rap group. Blissfully.

And Earth Day? Just a rain delay. The anger was mostly gone, replaced by gardeners, solar panel salesmen and kids with face paint. But you can’t keep a good movement down.

Like a raindrop.

From One State to Another

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 18:36:00 +0000

Oregon to a Missourian

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 17:49:00 +0000

Dear Gillian,

Spring is just starting to peep out here in the Heartland. The trees are budding and the bulbs are blooming. In a week or two it will be honestly green.

But Missouri is not Oregon. I think about the real green every time I glance down at my right hand and see the sparkle of my UO ring. After 14 years as a professor here at the University of Missouri, I’m a loyal Mizzou Tiger. But in my heart, I’ll always be a Duck.

Oregon is a mystery to most Missourians. I asked a few of my students this week what they thought of when I said “Oregon” or “Oregonians.” I was met with puzzled looks and a couple of “I can’t even imagine it.”

From here, Oregon is a lifetime away – almost a dream. It’s always been that way for Missourians. The Oregon Trail started here and wound 2,200 miles to some odd place where the trees stayed green all year. The Midwesterners in those covered wagons were not gamblers like California’s ‘49ers. But the Oregon dream was so strong even sensible folk who lived by the Show Me creed packed up for a land they couldn’t comprehend.

Even today it’s beyond the imagination of many Missourians. Oregon is the land where you watch the football team change uniforms 20 times, pull into the station to let someone else fill up your VW bus so you can drive over to Washington and buy marijuana, then come home and turn your beer bottles in for deposit before getting a doctor to help you kill yourself. All with no sales tax.

Nothing weird about that. Except sandals, of course. Wearing sandals before May 1 is a Class B misdemeanor in Missouri. Wearing sandals with socks can get you exiled to Kansas.

But I know Oregon and delight in both its eccentricities and wonders. It’s Mount Hood popping out of the clouds after a month in seclusion. It’s Multnomah Falls seeming to spill a wisp of water from heaven. It’s the amber waves of grain east of the Cascades that shock outsiders into realizing more of Oregon is high desert than high evergreens.

And it's the people. Oregonians are less eccentric than they are pragmatic – their ideas make so much sense the rest of us think they must be crazy. Low voter turnout? Cast your ballot by mail. Attendant-pumped gas too expensive? Ride bikes (lots and lots of bikes). Drizzly rain never-ending? Just pretend it isn’t there. Gor-Tex is fashionable for any occasion.

But most of all, Oregon has you. If my daughter, my grandkids and my son-in-law are so very happy there, it must be magical.

And for that, Missourians drop their famous demand and quietly turn it into a plea.

Show Me. Please.

Dad

Missouri to an Oregonian

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 18:36:00 +0000

Dear Dad,

Remember in Eugene when you’d get those rare days in spring where, after dreary skies and an eternity of rain, the sun came blazing out in all it’s summer glory and no one came to class, not even professors because, well, the sun was shining! It’s that kid of day here in Portland. Unfortunately I’m no longer an undergraduate who can just skip a class now and then, and while it is my day off from work, I’m stuck inside studying cataloging, which, by the way, is not the kind of thing you want to do on a beautiful sunny day.

The western half of Oregon, as you know, is blessed (cursed?) with an abundance of rain. I actually don’t mind the rain. I’m not sure if it’s a gene passed down from our English roots or just the fact that I’ve spent more of my life in the rain than out of it that has made it, for the most part, a perfectly pleasant kind of environment to live in. It means that you spend a lot of time indoors or in raincoats, sure, but it also means that it’s green an lush almost all the year round.

Missouri, I know, is not like that. I remember when you first moved there, how you would describe the barren beauty of those months after the leaves fell, when you could see houses you didn’t know were there on hills that had been hidden by a swatch of deciduous trees. Coming from the land of evergreen forests, I didn’t really understand the appeal. Forests were dark and mysterious and hushed, any sounds deadened by the heavy curtain of pine and fur boughs. During our time living in Missouri, and then later all our trips to visit, the scenery has grown on me. It took a while for me to see it, because Oregon’s beauty is very in-your face – sumptuous and grand, but now I understand the feast or famine greenness of your state, the wonder of the world outside transforming from lush green to burn orange to stark brown as the seasons roll by.

Will and I once took Briton on a mountain bike ride, somewhere, I can’t remember where, not far from your house. It was fall and the trees were bursting with bright yellow leaves. The wind picked up, just a little, just enough to send a constant and steady fall of lemon colored leaves, drifting to the ground. Like snow. It went on and on, and we stood under it and just watched. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I still think about it. A part of me wishes I’d gotten a picture, but mostly I’m glad I didn’t, because I’m sure a photo wouldn’t have done the moment justice, and I’d rather have that memory in my head than the memory of watching through a viewfinder and a mediocre photo stored on my computer. Last fall, people here marvelled at the autumn colors changing and I kind of though "meh, I've seen better." Oregon does green better than it does red and orange and yellow.

According to my phone, Columbia and Portland will both be in the high 70’s and low 80’s this weekend. So far this year we’ve been consistently warmer than you, but in a few weeks I imagine you’ll outstrip us, heading toward your much hotter summer as Oregon dithers back and forth for a few more months about whether it’s spring or winter or summer, changing it's mind on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But for a brief moment in the year, we’ll both be spring this weekend. I’ll sit outside with my tea and think about you, enjoying your coffee on your deck. You’ll watch your hawk, I’ll fill up the hummingbird feeder, we should both probably do some yard work except, eh, it can wait.

Enjoy spring in Missouri Dad.

-Gillian

Kids, parents and performances

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 03:04:00 +0000

To Watch, To Dream, To Love

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 03:03:00 +0000

On Friday night I sat in a darkened high school auditorium and watched my girl dance under the bright stage lights. I have seen this particular dance at least a hundred times. I sat through the beginning stages of learning it, listened to the ballet teacher stop and start and stop the music again and again to work on this step or that. I helped with costumes and dress rehearsal and yet, it never got old, watching my beginning ballerina, no less serious for her inexperience than a more advanced dancer, sous-sus, plié and relevé her way through the performance.

This is the first chance I've had to be the one watching other than school music class concerts. The first time I was the audience to my own children. It's only in the last few months that both kids have discovered the excitement of preforming, Evelyn with dance, Briton with acting. His play is just a few weeks away (which reminds me, I better get sewing on those saytre costumes he promised my time and sewing machine for). And as much as I loved (and I mean LOVED) being on stage as a teenager and young adult, I have to say I am enjoying this audience thing even more.

It's not just the fun of watching your child do something wonderful, and lets face it, even if things go terribly wrong, I'm still going to think my own children are fabulous. It's seeing them be inspired by their own abilities, seeing that flush of happiness on their face at the end of the dance, when the audience is clapping and they are smiling and bowing, seeing that familiar thrill, the one I remember, sending their limbs jittering with excitement.

As much as I think to myself "That girl is a dancer!" I've never been the parent who pushes their kids into this activity or that one. In fact, I may have under-exposed them to after school activities simply due to my dread of driving all over town for lessons, classes and practices. I don't expect them to find the thing that drives them now, at eight and twelve. I don't really care much if they stick with dance and drama or float away from them and onto other things. I want them to love life. And if that means dancing four hours a day, well ok. But I'm also ok with building foam swords for a hobby. Watching Evelyn dance was heart-clenchingly sweet. One of the joys of being a parent. And I suspect I'll watch many more dances, and several plays as well for the boy, but even if I'm just watching a reenactment of Jason and the Argonauts in my front yard (it happens) just watching has turned out to be so much fun.

-Gillian

I'm more than a fan. I'm the Dad.

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 03:03:00 +0000

It’s hard to imagine two more opposite performers than our children.

Gillian, our oldest, was born with showmanship. Last-minute complication had the nurses excited as they wheeled Cecile into the delivery room. But like the diva she was and is, she simply came out smiling and singing.

Garrett, our son, had less dramatic but arguably more dangerous natal entrance. He was born jaundiced and spent the next several days under bilirubin lights at the hospital while his mother and I worried.

Both of my wonderful children have, through the years, provided endless hours of the joy, laughter and even terror only a parent can experience. I never tired of their very different performing styles.

Our first video of Gillian shows her dressed in a pinafore and belting out “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” from Annie. She and her friend choreographed their act, complete dance steps and hand gestures.

No surprise, then, that she insisted on going to the Oregon Country Faire to have her ninth-month belly painted or that last week she dressed in the 1920s tweeds of Madame Librarian for a festival. She has never stopped delighting her audience – even if that was just good old Dad.

Our first video of Garrett showed a toddler pushing a toy shopping basket through the house with fierce determination. Nothing was going to stop him; nothing was going to break his concentration.

He was destined to become an engineer. He tackles every challenge with focus, energy and forethought.

The easy part of watching your kids perform is liking it. What’s not to like? Children (your own, that is) cannot sing off-key, fumble their lines or trip over props. It’s all part of the Biggest Show on Earth – parenthood.

Not that they can’t give you the cold sweats. When Gillian announced that she planned to become a drama major and that her boyfriend would be an art major, I had nightmares of supporting them for the rest of my life. Thankfully, Gillian changed both major and boyfriend.

Garrett specialized in stomach-gripping physical performance. He took up soccer early, but blossomed when he moved into the goalkeeper’s box. A keeper is the masochist at the end of the field who dives on the ball just as other players are kicking it. That is, when he is not diving into the path of a leather cannonball.

Eventually, Garrett grew out of competitive soccer. So he took up whitewater kayaking. You will never know how long you can hold your breath until you watch your son turn upside-down amid foam-splashed boulders.

But Garrett always rights himself, just as Gillian always gets deserving applause. And both make me so proud that I would gladly give up anything Hollywood can imagine to watch them perform the miracle of life.

Bravo, my children. Bravo.

Clyde

We Exchange Mom for the Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:50:00 +0000

On the occasion of getting Mom for the weekend. Or, why you should move back to the Northwest.

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:49:00 +0000

Dear Dad,

Mom is on her way here to Portland right now, as I type this letter. She’ll be here, in fact, by dinner. Or long before dinner, actually, if I don’t get started on it soon.

I know it’s not your favorite thing when she’s away, that you get lonely bumming around the house with only Greta for company. I feel the same way when Will’s gone. Like you, I stay up far too late and get caught up in work when there’s no one there to remind me to stop and call it a night. Last week I reorganized the linen closet when Will had to pull a late night at work to keep myself busy. There may also have been some studying procrastination going in, my current read being the oh, so exciting Understanding MARC Bibliographic, but there was some keep busyness about it too. So I know.

But oh, I love it when she’s here. When either or both of you are here. It seems very strange but, the older I get, the more I want my parents near me. You know me. I did not really go through a rebellious phase, I never felt the desperate need to be far far away from my parents. Rather, I think I was independent, something you both taught me to be, and it was that which led me to roam further and further from home. I’m still independent. But at the same time, I need my mom (and dad, of course).

Perhaps, now that I really think about it, it’s less about need than about want. I want to be around my family. I want to sit on the couch and talk about things we heard on NPR or saw in the neighborhood or about that latest weird Swedish TV show you’ve got me watching. I want to drink innumerable cups of tea and eat too many cookies and stay up late talking, instead of working or studying. Because, while I’ll always be your little girl, I think we are growing toward each other, and instead of father or mother and child, we are friends. And isn’t that a lovely thought.

I wish you were here to enjoy the weekend (although not the weather since it’s typical Oregon spring rain and gloom outside right now) but since you aren’t, I know you’ll forgive me for being happy that she’s here, instead of there, if only for the weekend.

-Gillian

Have fun with Mom, but I get her back

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 22:55:00 +0000

Dear Gillian,

Oh, to be in Portland right now. Not just to give you a big hug or to tussle with Evie and Briton. But also to be on the receiving end of a knowing glance from your Mom.

I’m not jealous, but I do miss Cecile when she is on the road. The house seems too quiet when the only foot treads are the clicking of Greta’s paws. Watching television alone makes me feel guilty that I’m not doing something worthwhile. I cook for myself, but it is less fun when no one else enjoys the flavors.

Her company is lucky to have such a talented, considerate and loyal executive who is also willing to fly across the country for it. But we are doubly lucky when work takes her close enough to gather those hugs and kisses in Portland.

And I become a horrible slob.

When Cecile is here, I really try to clean up after myself and do my share of housework. But when there is no one around to please, it is all to easy to say “I’ll pick that up later” or “That pan isn’t that dirty.”

Within a few days, our tidy house looks like a guy’s dorm room.

Before it smells like a dorm room, however, the Ghost of All Nagging Mothers Past visits me – almost always late at night. I crash around snatching up piles of plates, discarded T-shirts and the detritus of temporary bachelorhood. I mutter to myself and swear on a stack of two-day-old newspapers that I’ll be neater next time. But that’s more like wishful thinking than a vow.

Thank goodness we have Hannah come on Fridays to do the real cleaning. Your Mom usually gets back late enough that I can take credit for the sparkling countertops.

Hannah’s vacuum may lack its usual magic this week, though. Mom gets to enjoy finding Easter eggs with the kids, so I will have Saturday and Sunday to resist the mess-making temptation. Focus Clyde, focus.

I really should have this down pat by now. Being apart has been a regular part of our married life. Our jobs take us wherever our expertise is needed, so one of us is traveling every few weeks. It was more traumatic at first because communications were so limited. We had to meter out our expensive long-distance phone calls and tuck notes into suitcases for want of text messaging.

Now we keep in touch throughout the day with little notes that pop up on our iPhones even if we are in meetings. Email takes care of the longer messages. And each evening we call each other before going to bed – or even do a Facetime video conference.

But all the technology in the world cannot replace the one you love. I thank my lucky stars that I can be lonely. Only a heart that is shared can feel emptiness; only hearts reunited can fully understand the power of love.

Give Mom a big hug for me tonight. Watch for that special twinkle in her eyes and the dimples that make you as happy as she is. Make cookies and make memories. And please take care of her.

Her next trip is back to me.

Dad

The Winters of My Childhood

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 22:41:00 +0000

On the first day of spring, we're remembering our childhood winters.

The Sledding Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 22:39:00 +0000

So many of my childhood memories blur together in my head. Summer is one long camping trip where we fished in a river in Montana in the morning and got chased by water moccasins in a Texas lake after lunch and visited the Trail of Tears museum before dinner. I have a hard time separating out what happened when or even where. I see it in my children too. It's the reason that Briton will occasionally start a sentence with, "When we lived in Paris...." We didn't live in Paris, we visited Paris when we lived in Dublin. But to Briton, at 3, a week in a tiny apartment in Paris with his beloved Thomas trains covering the carpet was not very different from every day life in a tiny apartment in Ireland where, again, his trains took up all the available floor surface. Paris, Rome, Missouri, Dublin, Portland... it all kind of blurs together for him, the wheres and the whens.

Like summer, my childhood winters blurs together into one, long, Beverly Cleary-eque day. I don't remember feeling cold or wet from the northern Idaho snow. I don't remember my mittens growing soggy with caked ice or the exhahusting task of keeping the sidewalk of our corner lot shoveled, although now that I've lived in snow country as an adult, I can imagine it. I don't even remember feeling stir crazy with too many days indoors, waiting for spring. No. Winter was all about sledding, and did I ever sled.

My friend Molly lived at the top of the best sledding hill in town and since I spent my afternoons at her house until my parents were done with work, I had the advantage over almost every other kid at school. Apart from Molly and her many brothers and sisters and Hannah, who lived across the street and therefore also had a full time sledding wonderland just out her front door, I got the most sledding hours per day of any kid I knew. We would rush home from school, toss our homework onto the table, gulp down a bowl of ramen noodles from the steaming pot that seemed ever present on the stove at Molly's house and be back out the door before the prime spots were taken by the other kids.

We became experts in reading the iciness of the street, too fresh of snow and the runner sleds, though faster and more controllable, were abandoned for the thin plastic sheet sleds or if we could find one, a smooth bottomed toboggan. Both were alright, but the runner sleds were best. With two or three kids packed on, the pilot holding firmly to the rope with her feet wedged onto the steering bar, the rear position rider would give a good push and then jump on, arms wrapped tightly around the waist in front of them if they were lucky, or sprawled out on the snow as the sled careened downhill away from them if they were not. The road dropped sharply downhill for a block, evened out as it crossed another street and then dipped again until it leveled out finally another block down. More often than not, a run would go awry and dump you into the snowbacks somewhere along the first block. A good run would carry you across the first cross street and you'd crash somewhere in the second block. A great run, only achieved if you started dead center in the road, if your runners were sharp, your passengers well balanced and your aim true, ended in an Olympic ski run finish, slowing to a perfect stop in the flat of the second cross street, arms in the air in triumph. Those were rare and wonderful moments, but they could be achieved. And then, no matter where you ended, the long slog up the hill to start again. A lesser run made acceptable by the fact that you only had a short distance to go to be back at the top, a great run made easy by the lingering triumph of making it to the bottom without a crash. Up to the top, and down again, over and over until the afternoon light faded into darkness and the street emptied until the next day. An eternal winter's afternoon.

- Gillian

A boy and his mountains

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 21:11:00 +0000

When I was a boy, white Christmas was distant concept. Yet it was always close at hand.

I grew up in at the very northern peak of California’s Central Valley. My hometown of Redding is known by travellers far and wide as “that unbelievably hot place where we stopped for gas before driving to Oregon.”

Mount Lassen from Redding

That position at the tip of the valley means that hot air (of which California has no shortage) rises up the valley floor on summer days until it is trapped by a ring of Cascade Mountains. And there it stays. Mercury above 100-degrees at midnight is common in August.

That same fluke of geography gives Redding a ringside seat to a winter it doesn’t have to put up with. “Hot” in Redding may be a term from hell, but “cold” in Redding is Missouri shirtsleeve weather. It snows once in a long while, but seldom enough for a kid to make money with a shovel.

But the snow was always there – on those mountains that a hug Redding like a protective mom. Each morning when I slogged out to catch the bus, I looked east to see what Mount Lassen was wearing. She was usually dressed in her winter whites, but I hoped against hope that this morning she would switch into the mantle of fiery lava made her the center of a volcanic national park.

Shasta Bally, to the west, was shorter and less likely to be snowbound, but loomed close as the guardian of the Trinity Alps. If I could see between the hell-I-ain’t-giving-up-no-leaves live oak trees out back, the eerie specter of Mount Shasta stood out all alone on the northern horizon.

I didn’t realize how much this snowy huddle of mountains meant to me until, as an adult, I moved to Dallas. In that part of Texas, people get nose bleeds at the peak of freeway overpasses. It was so flat that we bundled up the kids and drove to Oklahoma just to see some hills that pretend to be mountains.

Oklahoma, for God’s sake. You don’t admit that in Texas even if you are a foreigner.

We don’t have mountains here in mid Missouri, but the crinkle of tall hills in Columbia so disturbs your sight line that it is easy to pretend there are real peaks out there somewhere. And when the snow is measured by the foot, you don’t wish aloud for mountain roads.

Still, the Redding kid in me still wants to look east in morning to greet my craggy protector. I was never a mountain man, but I will forever be the boy under the mountain.

Clyde

On Aging, and Acting Your Age

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 03:30:00 +0000

Wisdom comes with age, right?

Act your age

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 02:23:00 +0000

Each morning, I open my eyes, smile to myself and rejoice at being 18-years-old. Then I move.

My body has no shortage of devices to tell me that 18 was a long, long time ago. “In your dreams” is literally the last vestige of my physical youth. But my mental youth? That’s a more complicated story.

This week I turned 64, which is old enough to make me grateful that I actually made it to 64. I’m a card-carrying old man. Well, maybe not card-carrying, but my plastic SMTWTFS pill box is close enough.

The retort “It’s better than the alternative” takes the fun out of groaning that “I hate getting old” when my bones don’t want to leave an easy chair. Especially when I catch myself saying, “Oh, yea.”

But tucked inside my gray head is a handsome teenager with boundless energy to gambol though my dreams. I like that guy. And whenever I can, I invite him out into the daylight.

Act your age. The person who came up with that stupid phrase had to be a centenarian at birth. Why in the world would I want to act like a 64-year-old. I am a 64-year-old, for God’s sake. I don’t have to act to be one. Any day of the week, I can be a doddering old fool who can’t hear and who doesn’t get half the jokes of TV comics.

I’d prefer not, however. As a college professor, I swim in a fountain of youths every day. I watch gangly freshmen grow into strong men and beautiful women. I hear the current term for “good” (cool, bad, bomb, etc.) change each year. And I delight in using the newest technologies and stumping my students with references to pop culture (gleaned from the Web, of course).

I like being around young people. Sure, sometimes they seem as dumb as a post, but I’ve learned to forgive the lack of life experience as I collect more than I can use. Their smiles are still untainted by mortgages and bosses from hell. They shoot secret glances across the classroom like fishing lines of love. And they blush when they realize I saw them.

Most of all, they keep me young.

If I am young, but I am 64, then I have no appropriate age to act. So I don’t. I tell weird jokes that elicit more groans the guffaws. I listen to music from any era. I dance when there is no music at all.

And if it turn quickly, I catch glimpses of 18-year-old in the mirror. Acting the way he darned well pleases.

Clyde

Now is Good

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 18:18:00 +0000

This summer, Will turns forty, which means, much to my surprise when I stop to think about it, that I'll be 38. I'm not really sure how that happened. I've spent so long being the young mom, hearing "oh, you're just a baby" at gatherings with other parents that I almost didn't realize that I have reached middle age.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset about it. I've never feared the next big birthday. I didn't worry about turnign 30 (gosh, that was a long time ago) and I don't feel like I will in two years when I turn forty. I don't mourn my youth, probably because I never was very good at being the 20-something wild child that some of my friends had perfected. I didn't like bars and parties and bare midriffs. I never went clubbing. Instead I stayed home and painted rooms or installed new faucets or worked on some craft. Or read. So I pretty much did then what I'm doing now. Although I will say that I could fit a whole lot more remodeling in back then. All that youthful energy that most people spent on partying instead went to pulling all-nighters with a grout trowel re-tiling bathrooms.

So I don't wish I was young again, but I'm surprised to find myself older. Some friends had dinner with us last weekend and brought their two toddlers, and I watched them walk around and around the yard after one or try to continue having a conversation while changing the diaper of the other and it seemed like so long ago that I was doing that. It WAS so long ago. My kids were happily entertaining themselves, one at a park four blocks away, playing basketball with his friends, and I could sit and sip a glass of wine and not worry about someone tripping on uneven concrete and dissolving into tears. I mean, that can still happen, but it's a whole different kettle of fish with a 12 year old than a 2 year old. There's no Thomas the Tank Engine band-aids involved, for example. And again, I'm not sure when that happened. When we stopped having little kids and started having big kids. It happened so fast. What is it they say? The days are long but the years are short? I used to hate it when people said things like that. Things like "It goes so fast!" or "Enjoy it while you can!" because it made me feel like there was something I didn't know, some way that I didn't really understand parenting. But now I realize those people were like me now. Slightly stunned at the fact that that part of their life had long since passed and that it was only in those moments, seeing what you're not doing anymore, that you realize how long it's been.

I loved having little kids. But I love having big kids too. In fact, I think I love it more. Some crazy part of my younger self wanted to have all my kids before I was thirty, because I had this idea that being younger with older kids would be better for us. And thank goodness I did because that crazy part of myself was right. Maybe not right for other people. But for us, it was a good choice, even if a slightly insane one at the time. And I suppose having kids whenever would have been great for us too. I guess what I'm saying is, now is good. Right now it's good to be almost 40. It's good to have kids who can empty the dishwasher (with only a little poking and prodding) and go to the bathroom without help and watch movies with that don't involve creepy trains with faces. It's good to be getting older, even if I'm discovering that, like my dad, I can predict the weather by my aches and pains and I can't drink coffee after lunch time without spending a wakeful night staring up at the ceiling and counting the hours before I have to be up for work. Now is good. Flying by too fast, just as it always has and always will, but good. I'll enjoy it while I can and hope that the next "now" will be just a nice.

-Gillian

On Friends From Afar

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Mums and Toddlers

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 00:56:00 +0000

I almost stayed home that day.

I am, as I've explained, a closet introvert. A shy person pretending to be an outgoing one. I enjoying socializing when I'm amongst friends, I can even be the life of the party if the mood strikes me, but jumping into new situation, meeting new people, that's not my thing. And so I almost stayed home that day. Except I didn't. And thank goodness.

We had picked up our lives and a toddling Briton only a few weeks before to move, almost on a whim, to Ireland. I realize that's not something people do every day, or even once in their lives. And it really wasn't on a whim, it had been long in the planning stages, but when it all happened at last, it happened fast. Jobs were interviewed for over Thanksgiving, visas were rushed to us before government offices closed for Christmas, and we had moved within a few days of the New Year. So it felt whim-ish, and exciting, and totally bonkers. And it was all those things.

Except the reality is that once you get past the oddities of being in a new place, life with a toddler is still...life with a toddler. Just because we'd traded our charming-if-a-little-shabby bungalow for a 300 square foot apartment in a 350 year old town house didn't mean we stopped dealing with things like potty training and letter learning and nap tantrums. And as any mother of a toddler can tell you, the key to surviving those years of toddlerhood without going totally insane is finding friends with toddlers to commiserate with, laugh with, cry with, and sometimes beg for a little babysitting so you can go get a haircut from. And so, the fear of meeting new people was pushed aside for the greater need for adult interaction. Which is how I found myself standing outside a very medieval looking door (actually, I think it was medieval, not just medieval looking) with a cheerful sign on it reading "Mums and Toddlers" instead of staying home and sitting on the bright red couch looking at the bright purple cabinets in our furnished flat.

Luckily, the people behind the door weren't shy. In fact, they were the opposite of shy. I'm not sure I've ever seen a toddler as outgoing as the one that rushed toward my (outgoing, but not quite so) son and made him her instant friend while her mother took my coat, got me a cup of tea and some cookies and plopped me down into the group before I could really register where I was. And just like that, I had friends.

For the next 20 months, until the very day we moved back to the states, these ladies were my people. And Englishwoman, three Northern Irish girls and me, the American. It almost sounds like the start of a bad joke, doesn't it? But it was wonderful. We ate cookies and drank tea and walked miles through parks and streets and neighborhoods with our babies. We welcomed a new baby and heard the news about two more one the way (one of them mine) and talked potty training and complained about picky eaters and did all the things you do when you meet the people you survived toddlerhood with.

There were, of course, hilarious moments. Misunderstandings that happen when people from different countries come together. I'll never forget to call "pants" "trousers" in front of a Brit again, for example. Because that joke went on for weeks. (Pants = underwear, you can see how that could go terribly wrong) We had vastly different backgrounds, I grew up, after all, without any experience of boarding schools or London flats, IRA roadblocks or the Irish Education System, and they were not peanut butter addicts and had never seen an America toddler birthday party a la pre-jail Martha. But that mattered very little, if at all.

What always astonishes me when I think about that time, what astonishes me still when we visit a new place and meet new people is that no matter where you are, life is just life, friends are friends, toddlers are most definitely toddlers and a cup of tea is, well actually, all cups of tea are not created equal, that's a bad example, but moms are moms. Wading through life, dealing with diapers or nappies or whatever the word is for them where you currently are. Children's shows are equally mind numbing and at the same time memorizing, no matter if it's Barney or Postman Pat or Dora the Explorer in Gaelic (it's a real thing).

It sounds exotic to say I've got friends in Ireland. "Oh my friends in Ireland" I could say, and you might be impressed. But they are really just my friends. Ladies who I would sit down and shoot the shit with any day, even after all these years apart. All because I didn't stay home that day.

-Gillian

In praise of those unlike me

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 21:23:00 +0000

I had dinner in Slovenia Wednesday. Well, not really in Slovenia, but in the warmth of Slovenian friendship.

Bella and Julija, 2012

Over a big plate of čevapičiči (elongated Slovenian meatballs), I rekindled my friendship with Martin Jelovsek. Martin and his parents were our hosts when Cecile and I took a 40th anniversary trip to their spectacular little country in 2012. He is also the sister of my co-worker and friend Ursa Lenart, who suggested the trip in the first place.

All of the above is a long way of saying my heart is sometimes not at my home. I have a longtime fascination with the world beyond our borders and a deep, deep appreciation of the people I’ve met there.

I should probably have a passport from the United Nations. I was born in Germany, but my mother was English while my father hailed from Idaho – although his mother and step-siblings were Canadian. I married into a family of with roots in California, China, Korea and the Philippines. Our reunions are worthy of a Food Network special.
I’m proud to be an American, but my mind has wandered abroad my whole life.

I learned at a very early age that all people are just people, but that they spice up the world with unique words, thoughts and actions. It’s a spice that I crave. My university job has taken me from Mongolia to Italy and filled the spaces between with students and journalists from Nepal to Norway. And I’m ready to go out there for more.

Martin, American cousin Olive, Bella and me

Which brings me back that dinner at Ursa’s house. Martin brought with him his cute-as-a-kitten daughter, Bella. When we were in Slovenia, Bella and I became friends in the most wonderful way – without words. She couldn’t speak English and I was generally stumped by Slovene. But 5-year-olds don’t need language. Bella could pleasantly pester me just as I could gently tease her with the sound we all recognize – laughter.

Bella has grown up a few years and didn’t really remember me until I pulled up a photo of her and cousin Julija on my phone. And then we were back to teasing each other and sharing wordless laughs.

The Great Truth of Internationalism is that nobody does life right, but we all live life well. The sin against that truth is looking at the world through OK-I-can-check-that-one-off lens of a places-not-people tourist. Better to travel with your heart, even if it means just welcoming a new friend from a foreign land.

One day, perhaps, my international friends will so enlighten my spirit that I’ll achieve my dream of getting a new driver’s license.

Place of residence: Earth.

Clyde

Happiness is....

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Happiness is a shelf full of color coded books

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 00:15:00 +0000

The fact that I didn’t know I wanted to be a Librarian until my mid (ok, late) thirties is a little mystifying. Aside from my lifelong obsession with books and libraries and the fact that I’ve been extraordinarily close to not one, not two, but three librarians in my life (none of whom were related to me), both of which could simply be symptoms of being a bibliophile, there were other clues.

There was the whole, wanting to check my books out to my friends thing in Elementary school so I would know where there were, at all times, because I loved them (the books that it, I mean, I loved my friends obviously, but I didn’t need to know their every movement) – that idea, by the way, didn’t go down very well with my buddies, although I think they humored me for a while. Also, there was that time when I got my first label maker and wanted to label and alphabetize everything in my house (Ah, all nice and organized). There was also the naming of one of my children after a librarian in a movie - no, not the librarian from Ghostbusters, I wouldn’t do something that silly. (It was the one from the Mummy.)

And finally, there is my habit of color coding my books. Oh, I can already hear what you are going to say. “You do what?” And you’re laughing, aren’t you? I know, it’s slightly crazy, but, BUT, it makes sense if you, like me, have the critical combination of owning shelves and shelves and shelves (and shelves) of books and having an odd form of photographic memory that allows me to remember what almost any book I own looks like (too bad that’s the only bit of photographic memory I have). So if, for example, your husband asks where the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is, you can say, "black, with green writing. Small bookshelf upstairs." And you’d be bang on the money.

Yes I know that’s not how libraries are organized, but barring the institution of Dewey in my house – which would combine my love for organizing books and my love of labeling things, but would probably be over the top – it’s be best way to keep all my beloved books in order. Plus, and here’s the kicker, it makes me happy. Stupidly, ridiculously happy. Probably my favorite house we’ve owned was the one in Charlottesville, because it had one long wall of floor to ceiling bookshelves, all color coded. (Almost) All of my books, all in one place, all in order. Stupid happiness. And no matter where we have moved, my weird color coding of book has gone with us, along with the ridiculous sense of happiness it brings me every time I go hunt for a book, or even walk past my shelves.

Trust me, I’ve gotten a lot of crap for it over the years. Our house was once in a magazine and someone commented online on my “asinine” color coding and speculated that it was only done for the spread and that no one would actually organize their books that way. Before I could respond, I was surprised to find multiple commenters claiming they had the same method for shelving their books. So while I might be a little crazy, at least I’m crazy in a group. (a very organized group). Will poked fun of it for years until he fell prey to its usefulness and started remembering books by colors too. People chuckle when they come over for dinner and ask, eyebrow cocked, why I would bother. But, as with many things that are done simply for the pleasure of it, the answer is still just “Because I like it that way. Because it makes me happy.” I mean hey, I don’t understand why people run, but I try not to judge.

Although really? Wouldn’t it be more fun to stay home and read?

Just kidding.

Do what you makes you happy. Even if it’s simple. Even if it’s crazy.

I’m a sap for hobbies

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 21:08:00 +0000

I once read that “collecting” is the most common hobby among Americans. I can buy that, because I collect. Hobbies that is.

I love hobbies. They give me a needed break from the everyday world, allow me to focus both my mind and pocketbook on the trivial and provide for me a unique sense of identity.

But as much as I love hobbies, I have a devil of a time keeping them. My passion for a hobby can be so blinding that it no longer becomes a break from the everyday world, it become my everyday world.

I have, in turns,

· Tended a massive garden

· Captained (and mostly repaired) a wooden boat

· Carved duck decoys

· Tied flies

· Hunted deer, ducks and rabbits

· Trained a dog who hunted as poorly as I did

· Scoured the countryside for letterboxes

· Made fine things (mostly sawdust) in a woodshop

· Photographed wildlife and wildly cute grandkids

· And a couple others I’ve already forgotten

Each of these was MY hobby. While a recreational pursuit is in my focus, I have little doubt that it is the money-sucking avocation to rival my money-generating vocation. I’m at heart a tightwad, but I’ve never had hesitation laying out the bucks for a rototiller, a table saw, a huge camera lens or a 24-foot wooden boat that was probably better suited for fish habitat.

And each was a bargain. I’m quite certain that every dime you spend on a hobby extends your life a day or two. If you work in a stressful job, as I always have, the chance to perform a mindless-but-enjoyable task to please no boss but yourself is respite with a capital “R.”

Which brings me to my latest passion – with a capital “M.” I make sweet and sticky maple syrup.

A few years ago, when Gillian lived in Vermont, she sent to me a small set of “spiles.” A spile is the spigot that you hammer into a maple tree with the expectation that the precursor to pancake heaven will trickle into your bucket. When I visited her that summer, I couldn’t help but buy a whole selection of big, little, plastic and metal spiles from the real Vermonter (plaid shirt, abbreviated vocabulary) at the country hardware store.

Making syrup is not unlike watching comets. Before the big moment, you crave (and buy) every bit of equipment made . You check your calendar again and again. You wait. And wait.

Then you spend the briefest of times scrambling like hell and loving every minute.

For most of the year, maple trees are pretty much like oaks and elms. They stand tall, provide good shade and cover your yard with leaves each fall.

But for a few weeks in February and March, they go a bit crazy. When the nights are below freezing but the days are warmer, they trees start shuttling sap from root to stem and back so frenetically that they overload. The sap tries its best to pop out from under the back, much to the joy of ants, bird and guys with earflaps on their hats.

We usually think of Vermont or Canada as the only sources of maple syrup, but at one time maples were tapped all over the East and the Midwest. There was good Yankee logic in it. Before the Civil War, white sugar was expensive stuff that came from Cuba and other exotic climes. The Native Americans, however, showed us how to get that sap out of maple trees and boil it down to syrup and eventually a honey-brown sugar. We were so thankful that we stole all their land and gave them smallpox.

The pioneers now buy C&H and most regular folk douse their pancakes with thick corn syrup infused with a hint of artificial maple flavor. But there are saps like me all over the “sugarbush” who brave the cold and spend enough money to by an International House of Pancakes lifetime pass to make a few ounces of pure joy.

I started with three trees and now tap seven – with my eye on another down the hill. I tramp down our hill with a five-gallon bucket, empty the various pails and jugs slung from my tries, then hump the sloshing load back up the hill.

When I get five to 10 gallons of sap, I get to use the toy that occupied me through the warmer months. I built and continually tinker with a wood-fired evaporator. It’s really a pile of concrete blocks topped with a turkey roaster, but it’s what makes mapling a perfect guy hobby. I get to sit around all Saturday poking sticks in the fire while watching 5 gallons of sap boil down to 8-12 ounces of syrup.

And I get to wear a red wool hat with earflaps! Maybe this is it – the hobby to end all hobbies.

Not a chance.

Clyde

To The Beach We Go

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Linger and Stay

noreply@blogger.com (Gillian) — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:25:00 +0000

--> There are places in this world that I react to almost violently. A visceral, oozing out of part of my soul which then latches onto that place, never to be retrieved by my body. It goes beyond liking a place, or even loving a place. It’s much deeper, and harsher that that. I’m not sure if I believe in past lives, but if I did, if I do, maybe that explains it. Places I loved so deeply once upon a time, that when I encounter them again, I feel a deep-rooted link almost the moment my feet touch the ground. The first time it happened, I was 11 and we had just walked, bleary eyed after a long flight and then a jostling, bumping train ride, out of Victoria Station and into London. Parts of Vermont were like that for me. Practically all of Ireland has me in its grip. And then there is the Oregon coast.

The beach, here, is unlike what almost anyone imagines when they think of the word “beach”. You don’t go to the Oregon coast to sunbathe or swim, scantily clad, in bathtub temperature waters. It’s not a sit on a stripy chair and order cocktails kind of place. No. The Oregon coast is harsh and wild and breathtaking. And cold. Always. Even when it’s warm, the wind can whip up and bore a chill right down into your bones. But it’s also like a really good book. Comforting and familiar, restful at times and then again, also with a hint of danger. And so beautiful it hurts. It’s for sweaters and hats and letting the soles of your feet sink into the cold wet sand for just a moment before the surf chases you further inland. It’s for climbing great hulking rocks and walking for hours and peering into tidepools to watch green anemones sway gently with the waves, even though they are trapped in small pools, well away from the surf until the tide comes back in.

This summer, we rediscovered the beach of my childhood. Quite literally, the beach where I lived as a toddler. A quiet beach in an out of the way village, it’s more discovered now than it once was, but even on a busy day, almost no one climbs through the tunnel in the cliff and out onto the long, secluded stretch of sand on the other side. It is my favorite place. No beach-front houses. No shops selling taffy and kites. Just the sand and the sea and the pock-marked and fossil studded rocks that spread out toward the cliffs. The waves crash so loudly that voices are lost in the sound. It’s perfect and terrible and wonderful. So beautiful, it’s painful.

It fills me up, going to the beach. It recharges me. And yet, I love it there so much that often, I don’t even want to go, because I know I’ll have to leave. It’s the same with all of the places that have become a part of me, or which I have become a part of. Someday I want to go and just stay. Stay within sight of looming cliffs and squat lighthouses and secluded beaches littered with sun bleached driftwood. Like Miss Rumphius, when I am old, I will go and live by the sea. And never leave again.

For now, we linger too long, at the beach. Even knowing how slow and twisty and black the drive home can be in the dark. We linger until the last bits of sun have gone. When the cold wraps around you and everyone pulls the hoods of their sweatshirts up over their ears. We linger until there is nothing to do but pull ourselves away from the little bits of our souls that will remain there and head home.
-Gillian

A beach, a song and such a 60’s day

noreply@blogger.com (Clyde Bentley) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 18:30:00 +0000

Salt air, bright sun, bronzed bodies – how can anyone not like a trip to the beach?

I’ve had the good fortune to bake my bones on beaches from Southern California to the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. I’ve even shivered on the gravel that passes for a beach on the Oregon coast.

But one beach, too far from home, continues to haunt me.

In 1966, my father was offered the chance to attend an Army engineer school for National Guard sergeants. It would mean, however, spending three months in Arlington, VA, -- the opposite side of the country from our Redding, CA, home. So he and mom packed the family into our old Ford Galaxy, hooked up a 16-foot funky old trailer and headed east.

While I theoretically liked the idea of adventure and it was just an exchange of a “C” for a “V”, I was still a typical freshman boy. Freshman boys don’t do anything without complaining. I think it is the acne.

With much show of disdain I left my friends and I left my familiar haunts. Virginia, as it turned out, wasn’t all that bad. I even made a few new friends in the trailer park who insisted – in that slow accent – that a “Coke” was a “pop.” Funny, but no southern comfort to me.

The redeeming quality to the trip was the proximity to Washington, D.C. and the surrounding landmarks that dappled my textbooks. Dad was a mailman, a soldier, an engineer – and a history buff. We spent every day he was off duty and my brother and I were out of school looking for our American roots. If it was too hot or too rainy, we went to the Smithsonian. I spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian.

It was an education that I now cherish, but eventually a boy has to put his foot down. The sun was out, it was Saturday and there was supposed to be a beach within driving distance. Dad gave in.

I was as excited as a 15-year-old boy could get. It would be wall-to-wall beautiful girls in bikinis who would almost faint with admiration when they watched me body surf onto the glistening white sand.

History I paid attention to. Geography, not so much. “Beach” has an entirely different meaning when it applies to Chesapeake Bay.

No waves, except when my little brother splashed. No surf. More cigarette butts than sand (this was pre-Earth Day). And 10-times the well-covered moms than the bikinied girls. Who were all protected by tough-looking guys making those cigarette butts. And whose 1966 bikinis would qualify as yoga suits today.

Still, it was better than sitting in that little trailer in Arlington. Until the Mamas and the Papas wafted from someone’s towel-side radio.

“All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray...”

No. Don’t do this to me. Not that song.

“I’d be safe and warm, if I was in L.A….”

OK, so Redding is farther from L.A. than Washington is from Quebec. It’s the safe and emotionally warm part that counts.

“California dreaming, on such a winter’s day…”

It wasn’t winter, but I bundled up in a towel (until I started to bake) and hid my eyes from my all-knowing mom. California dreaming… My buddy Rex and I out on our bikes. People who said a Coke is a Coke. Girls I knew who I could at least imagine in bikinis.

I went home with a mild sunburn and a song forever lodged in my head. I truly love the beach, but it only takes a little sand to click “replay” in my head. Every beach is a memory.

But not to worry, they are good memories. Now when I hear that haunting harmony, I remember the hug from Mom. And I remember thinking that Redding wasn’t so bad, after all. And I remember regaling my friends with tales of the almost-South.

And I remember a question that made me a better writer:

How can so few words mean so much?

California dreaming.

Clyde