A Queer Mobile

Jelly without storebought pectin

Here's how to make jelly without adding storebought pectin. I'm making rose hips jelly. It's base is crab apple juice that I make at home.

Home-made apple juice is the key to a good jell. Apple juice contains lots of natural pectin. Juices rich in natural pectin feel almost slippery. My crab apple juice provides all the natural pectin this batch needs.

The proportions are simple: 5 cups of juice to 7 cups of sugar. Watch the video to see how to time the cooking process and how to know when your jelly's ready.

Download no_pectin_jelly.mov

Crab stuffed peppers

Here's my rendition of roasted red peppers filled with garlic-and-basil-scented crab. I serve it over salad greens for an elegant light dinner.

Download crab_stuffed_peppers.mov

Novels and Poetry

I enjoyed Jane Smiley's new book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Ultimately, though, the book revealed my own shortcomings. I've never been wild about novels. I have a small set of novels that have lit up my life in unexpected ways. But novels and short stories - narrative imaginative fiction - often leaves me cold.

Perhaps Mrs. B., my third grade teacher, was right. She monitored what books I checked out of the school library. She put together her case, enlisted the school principal, and together they confronted my parents. "He's reading too much science," they complained. Presented with an edict to become 'more well rounded' I convinced my parents to buy me the books I wanted. But maybe she had a point…

Then again, perhaps not. My favorite genre is poetry (though I did make it through Joyce's Ulysses last year - and with great pleasure), and two recent books delight me. Harold Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language provides not just an anthology that opened my eyes to new writers, but also includes an introductory essay that propelled me to pick up the poetry of Hart Crane.

Now I have my love-hate relationship with poetry. I'm a person born out of time. Modernist poetry largely leaves me flaccid. I took an on-line poetry class where the instructor tried her best to turn me into a modernist. I quit the class and returned to a favorite pastime, writing sonnets. I'm a closet romantic. I never admitted that to my ex. His and my relationship with Puccini's opera Turandot illustrated our differences. He was thrilled when Liu kills herself rather than betray her love. I'm much more interested in the power of a single passionate kiss to transform Turandot. So romantic - yes. Hearts and flowers - sometimes, no.

Here's where Hart Crane and Walt Whitman come in. Both are deeply romantic, reveling in spirit through nature and love, and not afraid to talk about it. I've devoured Whitman gladly for many years. Until I leafed at random through Bloom's anthology, though, I never read Crane's work. As Bloom's introductory essay shows, Crane isn't easy. But his magnificently crafted blank verse propels me upward to follow his lead. From Atlantis:

So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
The bleeds infinity - the orphic strings,
Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:
- One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves…?
Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

I hadn't realized it before reading Camille Paglia's superb new book Break, Blow, Burn that Bloom directed her graduate work at Yale. The transfer of a tradition of deep reading occurred in that relationship. Break, Blow, Burn (the title from a poem by John Donne) demonstrates Paglia's formidable ability to illuminate the depths of forty-three great poems. I took this along on my last trip and wandered through Yeats and Wallace Stevens while I tried avoiding the enthusiastic embroidery of a fully-figured woman in the next seat. I was delighted the whole trip.

Why poetry rather than longer narrative prose works? Bloom's last paragraph in his introductory essay says it:

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. Even Shakespeare cannot make me into Falstaff or Hamlet, but all great poetry asks us to be possessed by it. To possess it by memory is a start, and to augment our consciousness is the goal. The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

The Season's Fire

I spent ten days in California this month. October in Iowa is my favorite time and I wondered if I'd find anything left on the trees when I came home.

John and I did our Sunday morning walk along Indian Creek yesterday. I brought along my recently repaired Nikon D70 and did a little shooting.

The day was extraordinary. Mornings are often close to freezing but the days warm comfortably. We bundled up a bit and headed off. This was the scene about half-way in our four mile walk.

 

 

 

I've shot this maple each year. There was just enough gold stuck to the bare limbs to make this shot.

The Commitment and our commitment

Dan Savage's new book The Commitment arrived in my mailbox last week. John and I are rabid fans of Savage's sex-and-advice column, Savage Love. I've thoroughly enjoyed Dan's other books. I wasn't disappointed with this one, either: The Commitment is a scream to read. I howled when Dan and his partner Terry headed into a wedding expo in Seattle - just to do a little research for Dan's column.

One thing irked me about the book, though. Our two heroes take a driving trip with their son from Seattle to Michigan. They had some strange phobia about The Red States. What did they expect? To be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail? This false dichotomization between The Red States and The Blue States is some scheme that the media has invented to sell copy. Iowa, for instance, voted (barely) for Gore in 2000 and (barely again) for Bush in 2004. We're purple, as Garrison Keillor suggests. Most folks I know in Iowa dislike both parties pretty soundly. Yeah, there are bigots. But there are bigots in just about every place - and most folks are pretty good hearted. Take a company I consulted for in Iowa, for instance. One lesbian who worked there and her partner went to Cambodia - twice - to adopt kids. So what did the company do in our state far from the 'enlightened coasts'? It gave them a camcorder to record their adventures.

And what about John and me and the marriage thing?

We think about marriage every week, actually. The Cedar Rapids Gazette features a picture section each week on Sunday called Milestones. It overflows with pictures of recently betrothed and wedded couples - usually pudgy guys with goatees and their slightly zaftig Hausfraus-to-be - with a few anniversary pictures sprinkled in to show what marriage and a few years does to people. No Sunday morning is complete without our expert handicapping the couples as to whether they'll be adding to or subtracting from the gene pool by their progeny. (Our casual estimate is that we're doomed as a species.)

Now if marriage for queers was legal in Iowa and actually bestowed rights that accrued federally, we'd march down and get our license in a minute. I've not talked with John about this but I'm pretty sure he feels as I do about it. But the idea of getting a marriage license in another country (like Canada, as Savage and his partner did) or another state seems pretty pointless when it has no legal meaning. If you sense that I'm not particularly interested in some external religious authority blessing us, you're right. I want civil benefits, not a party. If I want a spiritual blessing, I'll do that myself.

In 1998 John and I did two weddings in two weeks in two countries - for the same couple - John's best straight friend. At the first wedding one of the bride's friends, a Unitarian pastor, befriended us. As the bridal couple did their thing on the Caribbean sands, the pastor asked me if John and I ever wanted to be married. I recited what we'd done with each other, the emotional things as well as the financial things. "You're already married," she said.

I don't have a story as riveting as Savage's about commitment, but here goes. John came to visit me in California for Valentine's Day in 1997. We'd been dating long-distance for two years. Yeah, I adored him. Two days later we celebrated my birthday - my last in California. Two days after that, 18 Feb 1997, the movers came. John was taking me back to Iowa to live with him. I was scared to death.

We had our dinner that night at The Fish Market in Palo Alto. We'd eaten there the first night we spent together two years before. Then we headed back home. I stood upstairs looking out the window in my bedroom at my rose garden. Why the hell was I leaving?

I turned around. John was standing silently at the top of the stairs, watching me. He said not a word. I have no idea how long he had stood there, just letting me be. I turned to him. We herded my dog Ki into the Explorer; John had made a nest for him in the back seat. I set the timers to turn the lights on and off inside the condo, then I shut the door and locked the deadbolt. The gate behind me clanked shut. I sat down in the driver's seat and backed the Explorer out of my life in California.

As we drove past San Jose and through Gilroy we started talking about us. I asked him if he might want a ring.

"I can't wear a ring," he said. "I can't wear it with power tools. It could get caught on something and I'd wind up losing a finger. And there's all the wood finishing chemicals." He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "But I'd wear your ring." As we drove onto I-5 south we were deep in quiet talk. But I think that was the last time we talked about rings and ceremonies.

We never did anything about a ceremony. We never hosted a party - at least not just one big party for our friends about us. We did something else. We created our own commitment. It wasn't particularly emotional or sexy. We visited our lawyer's office and hammered out legal agreements around the house, for end-of-life decisions, about wills and property deeds. Not sexy. But it put us on a real legal footing.

I still think about it, sometimes. About a year ago I found a queer goldsmith who creates marvelous wedding rings for guys. I might surprise John someday.

The Last Butterflies

With the temperatures plunging to freezing tonight it's amazing that barely a week ago I shot this footage with temperatures hovering near ninety! John planted an Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly milkweed) whose blossoms have a magnetic attraction for butterflies and bees. The late-blooming Echinacea purpurea (purple coneflower) blossoms were covered in insects too.

Download Butterflies.mov