A Queer Mobile

Sunday walk with Mme. M

Memory of place matures as I walk through a neighborhood over a period of years. My ex-lover always wanted to walk someplace new, to see new things. John and I are cut from similar cloth: we'd rather see how a place changes over time by walking through it in every season. He's run the same route in Cedar Rapids for probably twenty years.

I have my walking routes here in Palo Alto, California as well as back home in Cedar Rapids.  Lately I've been taking Saturday and Sunday morning to walk around my old haunts. There are friendly spirits along the way, I've found, and a bit of bittersweet of days unrecoverable and some people who have passed.

When I lived in an apartment on Seale Avenue I walked almost every day with my good friend and neighbor Kathleen Jacoby. That's where I first walked my dog Ki when he was a puppy. Saturday last found me on that walking route. I thought of Margret last month when I walked here. She passed away the following day.

Sunday I walked through Crescent Park, near my old condo in East Palo Alto. At one point I looked up and saw one of my walking friends strolling by with her two dogs. I don't remember her name; I always think of her as Mme. M. She's an older woman of Japanese extraction who married an American just after the war and moved from Japan to California. Her husband passed long ago, but she's still at work in her volunteer roles and with her dogs.

She looked up and gave me a big smile. "Look who's here, Jasper!" Jasper, her old guy, was right by her side. He almost hopped into my arms when he saw me. Jasper and Ki are the same age; I was so happy that both of them are still among us.

Just before we parted company she said to me, "You were very wise to leave here. Look at you. You're happy and content. So many young here work themselves without a rest. When you're old like me it doesn't matter. But the young have it hard here."

She's right.

If I'm not posting I must be out west...

I flew west last Wednesday and I've been hopping with work ever since. I'm almost done with this month's tour of duty and I'll head home on Thursday. I'm missing John's birthday today; that makes me very unhappy. Last year I was able to bring him out with me, but he's too busy with commission work with fixed delivery dates.

I'm missing you, sweetie!

Sometimes cleaning up can be fun

This is the last day of my five day retreat. It was time to be responsible this morning, so I charged up my iPod, strapped it to my arm and I set about cleaning the house. Podcasts have been a godsend for me. Yesterday John and I listened to an NPR Science Friday podcast on our way to the Co-op, then we talked about it for half an hour on the way back. Today I was checking out a new offering from Shift In Action, a unit of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which I wholeheartedly support. Matthew Fox, the esteemed Catholic theologian, offered an hour of his thoughts on the Divine Feminine and the Black Madonna. Pretty wonderful stuff to hear when you're polishing the countertops.

Chinese brush paining and jade sphere

At the left is the jade sphere that John got me. It's about 100mm in diameter and is rich in color and pattern. I've displayed it on a stand he made me years ago.

At the right is the Chinese brush painting in the frame he made me. It's hanging in my office where it adds a wonderful serenity. The painting is of purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea). The artist is local; she and John spoke about her coming this spring to paint and draw in our gardens.

(Click on either image for a larger view.)

Not that I'm thinking of that too much today! It's about 6F here right now: clear and bitterly cold with wind. We intrepid shoppers, however, didn't let that deter us from hitting our outlet mall. John and I go down about three times a year to shop for clothes. Coupons in hand we headed down; it's the first time the bun warmers (heated seats, that is) in the new Escape have come in very handy.

I made it to 50

I've had an unbelievably nice fiftieth birthday today. Yeah, the weather outside turned really crappy: after having been 65 on Monday it's slid to 20 tonight with snow (we had a thunder snowstorm this morning!) with the prospect of subzero weather for the next day or so. But I couldn't imagine a nicer time.

I came downstairs this morning. John had piled the table with cool stuff. I now have a large, polished ball of multicolored Siberian jade, a palette-full of colored fiber optic spheres, a cool new stuffed dragon, some DVDs, a beautiful new book, and a piece of Chinese brush painting done by a local artist that John presented in a frame that he'd made. My sister Jill sent me a bolo that she'd made, and my good friend Diane sent along a new book on Photoshop techniques.

Ki and I went over to St. John's cemetery this morning where he frolicked through the snow. John baked me my favorite pie (apple) and took me out for sushi. I took the day - and the rest of the week - off. I haven't been this carefree in a long time.

Robot composter

The Cedar Rapids Gazette (of all things!) had an article on a new composter that works inside the house. It's from a company called NatureMill. We've been avid composters for years, but the cold winter climate means frozen outdoor compost piles that take a while to get going in the spring. John and I thought we'd be much better off to have  a system that works year-round for us. So I ordered one.

It's a bit bigger than a typical kitchen trash can with a foot-operated top. The real business happens inside the sealed container. It has a compost reactor that operates at higher than room temperature and a compost basin that sits at the bottom of the container. It's tightly sealed to prevent odors from escaping and it has a carbon filter to reduce odor as well.

Its computer control automatically turns the compost, monitors temperature, and releases the finished compost without any intervention. All you do is dump in two cups of soil, a bit of baking soda, and the kitchen scraps you want to compost. There's a single button on the front when the hopper is full and you're ready to have it start working on more stuff. Hit it and walk away. You add soil every once in a while; the soil provides all the compost cultures you need. There's nothing more to buy

I had a bit of trouble getting started but an email to the company received a quick response that answered my questions. We're composting away. The NatureMill folks recommend drying the compost before use. John plans to empty it into one of our compost bins for final curing. We'll then use the compost outside as we always do.

Check it out if  you like gardening!

Quantum entanglement

John and I clearly know far too much about what the other's thinking.

We had a marvelous lunch just down the street last Saturday. On the way back I had the idea to visit a rock and fossil shop that's not more than ten blocks away from us. It's been there about as long as I've lived here, and neither of us had been inside. So we headed in and found the usual rough rocks and bits of flotsam and jetsam. And then we came to the cabinets filled with carved jade and astonishingly beautiful fossils! Our mouths dropped.

After we got back home John headed off to make a site visit for his work. I ran back to the store. John was so excited about several of the pieces. Finally, I thought, I know what to get him for Valentine's Day and for his birthday. (Our birthdays are two weeks apart, by the way.)

I go back into the shop, and tell the proprietors that "I finally got rid of him. Now I want stuff for his birthday!" I picked out two cool pieces and we started wrapping things up. Then the door opened.

"Oh, shit!" I heard over my shoulder. I turned around. There was John. He came back to the store to get me stuff for my birthday. The husband-and-wife proprietors were laughing hysterically. I shook my head. At least he didn't see what I got him - but he knows where it came from!

The V-Day report

I walked in my office yesterday morning and found a huge sack sitting in my chair. As he did last year, John bought me a mountain of chocolate from Bochner Chocolates in Iowa City. Do take a moment to check out their website. Their confections are as divinely perfect as they appear to be in the photos on the site.

As I'll explain in another post, I hit up our local rock shop for V-Day gifts for John. I gave him a red fiber optic glass heart and a really cool crinoid fossil - along with the promise that we'll head to the southwest this year on a driving trip and hit places like Meteor Crater and Dinosaur National Park.

Last night we headed for Blend, a favorite restaurant in downtown Cedar Rapids, for our Valentine's Day dinner. Our good friend Joe Clark is one of their servers and he took excellent care of us through the five course prix fixe dinner. To spur a little jealousy among my readers, here's the menu:

• Sweet potato fried Blue Hawaiian King Prawns with a Napa cabbage spring roll, snow pea and fennel slaw finished with a pineapple-ponzu dipping sauce.
• Root vegetable salad with a turnip and fingerling potato soup, fresh white truffles and crispy flatbread.
• Seared Skate wing with a chorizo sausage and black bean cake, crispy shiitakes with peeky toe crab salad, and a carrot and pink peppercorn sauce.
• Grilled Certified Angus Ribeye with a bleu cheese potato gratin, asparagus tips, crispy cipollini onions and preserved mushrooms, finished with a thyme- and juniper-infused demi-glace.
• Chocolate souffle cake with a port wine syrup and vanilla bean ice cream topped with marinated strawberries and almond-coconut caramel.

It was divine... (And, of course, the company was peerless...)

Cold and blowing snow

We missed the nor'easter that's plaguing the east coast right now. But it was cold and blowing this morning. Bundled up, John and I took our five mile walk along the Cedar River. Flecks of white floated by just about the time we walked past the wind turbine beside the river. Two intrepid souls came running by, and we saw our dog lady friends, with sixteen paws scampering through the woods.

Just a dusting of white; it's melted off by now.

Working class queer fiction

I've loved reading through Everything I Have Is Blue, a collection of short fiction by working class queers. Wendell Ricketts, the collection's editor, closes the book with a strong essay, 'Passing Notes in Class: Some Thoughts on Writing and Culture in the Ga(y)ted Community.' He opens the essay with this:

I have a confession to make. As much as I reject the notion of collective identities, as much as I despise the Stepford Fag mass hallucinations of gay "community" rhetoric, and as much as I long to be the fierce and independent warrior of spirit that the label "queer" conjures, the genesis of this book was a much more fragile concept, We.

I hung on the phrase Stepford Fag. I'm not from a working class background but that phrase reminded me of times I've spoken with queers, mostly in the SF Bay Area, who just can't wrap their minds around the idea that a queer wouldn't want to live in an urban gay ghetto. I don't, and I never have. And Stepford Fag pretty much sums up my feeling about it. I don't have any reason to define myself by the community I live in. I'm weird enough that some parts of me never quite fit into any predefined group. I've long since given up the notion of lopping off parts of my anatomy on someone's Procrustean Bed just so I'd fit in.

There was a strange incident when I was a teenager that this essay brought to mind. I was raised as a professor's kid, but with some unusual things going on. My father would rather have been a farmer, I think, rather than a professor. Not that he wasn't good as professoring; he was a full professor at the University of Illinois in the College of Engineering the year I was born. He wrote god-knows-how-many graduate-level textbooks. But I still rather think he'd prefer to have been on the land. Grandma (Mom's mother) lived with us; she about raised me. She'd tell me stories of growing up poor in southern Indiana. We weren't fancy.

When I was a teen I had the good fortune to be a lab tech during the summers at a local hospital. I was chummy with several of the full-time techs, especially Sally, a do-gooder wife of a graduate student. Off and on I talked with Madeline, one of the medical transcriptionists, a woman in her late forties who usually had dictation headphones plugged in her ears.

I came in one morning and Sally stopped me. She said she'd been talking with Madeline about her son. He was in the same class that I was in at Urbana High School, and Sally asked her to talk to him about whether he knew me. Madeline told Sally that morning that her son told her that he and I weren't in any of the same classes and he didn't think I'd be interested in talking with him. "I'm not the sort of guy he'd be interested in talking to" were his words or pretty close. And now Sally wanted to know why I thought I was too good to hang out with him. I had no idea what to say. I'd never even met the guy.

That was my introduction to class-based behavior. I'd been running around in homogeneously grouped classes with my other professor kid friends; the University was the largest employer in town, and we were everywhere. But we weren't everybody.

I never did meet Madeline's son, and I'm sorry I didn't. Ricketts's essay focuses a lot on class struggles, and that concept still bothers me. I'd like to think that folks can still talk. Maybe that's the purpose of his book: to put out narratives from a very different starting point. What's strange is that a lot of the stories remind me so much of my own family. We weren't fancy then, and I'm still not, and I like being easy to talk to. Talking and knowing are  just a matter of getting past the veneer.