fall buzz

Sheltered from the strong midday autumn sun, I stand under the old wooden pavillion by the bay and look at the large sunflower heads, baskets of homemade lavendar soap, pie pumpkins, spotted pears, and apples arranged on the picnic table before me. The market is humming with activity; nearby a baker trades a loaf of zuccinin bread for a pumpkin, and two figures huddle over the largest turnip I have ever seen, negociating a price.

Fishing around in the heavy bag slung over my left forearm, I come up with a ginger crisp apple. After the satisfying first chomp, the sweet juice runs down my wrist. Almost immediately, a bee is perched on my apple, hungrily lapping up the sugars in the exposed part that I bit. I do a little dance there, spinning and blowing and gently waving the apple about, hoping that this wild ride would make the bee less interested. But no, he was loving it. The more I danced, the more it seemed that he was relishing my apple.

I knew that this bee would not sting me. Even though my epi pen was over a mile away across the bay, I did not take any further measures to rid myself of this unwelcome companion.

Then I went home and thought about the situation and wrote this poem:

On the Contentedness of Bees in Autumn

in spring when there is nothing but the melting snow and the bare brown twigs and life ready to exhale

there is no flower for the bee to buzz in so he comes after me and I puff up

the summer makes them greedy with blooms to fight over and nests to gaurd and I tend to my own business

they sting me anyway for being and i puff up

summer days get shorter and blackberries ripen and i gather heavy friuts and the branches bounce back and there are the bees consumed in their work

this time i am stung only by thorns

finally autumn comes and i bite into that first crispy apple and juice runs down my wrist and my hands are sticky and sweet and bees come wildly swarming around me like a halo

and we are happily drunk with the joy of autumn together

My Crazyass Badass Aunt

"You know what really burns my ass?" This is one of the common curveballs thrown by Aunt Patty that gets us every time. "A flame, this high." and she signals with her hand that the flame would have to be about 2 and a half feet to burn her ass. She is a badass aunt, almost 60 years old still blowing through the country on a Harley, and a crazy-ass aunt who keeps things loud and wild wherever she goes. You never know what is going to be said or done when Aunt Patty is in the room, so you have to be ready for anything. Sometimes ridiculous, sometimes obscene, refreshingly random, and always genuine, Aunt Patty never passes up a chance to take a flame to the volatile.

Like the time David was sick, for example. This sickness of Davids could have passed like all of the others, him watching TV quietly and peacefully until he recovered. But everyone was busy with the preparations for Grandma Mancini's funeral, God rest her soul, and none of us could care for Davie. Aunt Patty had, however, just arrived and gracefully offered to babysit david (a high-school senior at this point). Aunt Laura had just delivered a forty sanwich tray of Mr. Pita to feed the funeral goers. As Aunt Patty was putting it into the fridge, the thin plastic tray carrying the mountain of pita rolls collapsed. The sanwiches went flying, splattering tomatoes and lettuce all over the floor. This did not phase her. "David, get me a mop and bucket" she said. David fetched her the mop and bucket. After mopping it up, she plunges five gallons of water into the sink with a drain of about 2" diameter. SHIT. water is everywhere. David didnt know what to do, he thinks she said dont tell your ma (nothing is a secret in this fambily). He dried up the cleaning job with a few large bath towels. It wasnt all hard for Davie, though. She made him about 7 oranges worth of hand squeezed orange juice, so he got better quite quickly.

Aunt Patty taught us to dance, I remember doing the mashed potato with her in the kitchen on Christmas. And I remember her saying that if someone had a messy room, they were interesting and probably quite intelligent. When she said that, I ran up to my room to scatter things around and ruffle up the bed I had made hours before. When I came back downstairs, I told her my room was pretty messy, would she like to come see. Then she told me that she meant messy as in a clutter of many differnt things that meant you were interested in everything and too busy to clean up before moving to the next thing. This explaination was the seed to the the clutter-philosophy I live by to this day.

Last year she and Uncle Barry came to the small town of Grayling, Michigan where I was living at the time. I had been waiting for them to arrive when I recieved a message on my phone from my aunt, proclaiming that they had arrived in Grayling. I called the number back and to my surprise, found myself talking to the waitstaff at BigBoys. "I am looking for my aunt," I say "I think she just called from your phone." The waitress was a bit confused for a minute and then remembered "Oh, does your aunt drive a motorcycle?" Hell, yeah. "She's in the parking lot."

Facebook has now made it possible to hear from Aunt Patty on a regular basis, and hear what is on her mind, whenever I want to. Her status updates are quite possibly my favorite quotes on the web, for some reason they always sound like poems to me:

"it is kind of strange, after hearing about my moms friend passing, I heard one of my dads best friends passed also... they are all sitting around with coffee cake and coffee, probably bitching about something"-PV

"this morning I found one of those chocolates wrapped in gold foil in my purse, and I have NO idea how it got there!"-PV

The stories are endless. Everyone who knows her has them. I will never tire of hearing them, and I look forward to the stories to come.

Happy birthday Aunt Patty. I know I have been telling you this every year on your birthday, but in the past, dad told me to say this. Now I can say, independently and for certain, that you really are older than most of the trees in our backyard. And we have a lot of shade back there.

Selected Poems

Ma took advantage of my presence this weekend and told me to sort through my junk. Amongst the birthday cards and photographs and school papers, I came across a few old poems, from the year that JD and I slammed almost every day.

Friends
I met a scraggly goose yesterday
it asked to be my friend
I tucked it up under my arm
and we were together until the end.
8-9-08

The old sock
I gave you my old sock
to wipe away the tears
to get over the year

You dabbed your nose
and said "dear friend
is this really the end?"
I brought you tea
I brought you soup
again another verbal loop
dear friend
dear friend
can this really be
the end
8-2-08

Superman
It's time to go
but I wanna move slow
I want to drag this moment on

I'll take a double scoop of superman
To the shore of Lake Michigan
Watch the blue green waves crash wildly
This is where I want to be

But it won't last because
Superman melts so damn fast

Poison Ivy
I'm itchy everywhere
but really I don't care
'cause the airs so sweet
and the cricket's song
won't last long
summer's
almost
gone.

Highway
concrete speed
white dash dash dash dash dash
signs read Jesus John 3:3
160 miles to cincinati
148 miles to cincinatti 150 miles to cincinatti
dash dash dash concrete concrete
I have lost my creativity the highway
has sucked it from me
i see only sterile ruins of what was once great and beautiful
but is now trash on the side of the road
void of spirit or character
Where am I? Who am I? What am I? What have we become? Why have we made life into such an inorganic jungle of cold fear desperation hollowness? Why have we destroyed what we were given and created a jail?
A mental physical jail where we have all become strangers. We are foreigners in our own land
we dont know where we came from we dont know where we are going
but we just keep going and going and going will the highway ever end? it won't because we will continue to build it faster than we can drive
faster than the fast food we eat along the way

Thaw misleadin' freeze

A winters-worth of oil flows down the alley, and I splash through rainbow puddles on my way to the beach. It is March 1st, and the snow is shining. The promise of spring has given me such energy that I ran to the top of the watershed and back, just high enough to see the south edge of Crystal Lake, the ice below looking thin and blue. I ran back down, against the wind, while the beech trees creaked and groaned in the wind and large branches that had fallen in gusts past threaten a splintered fate should I loiter too long, taking in the view of the backside of the Elberta dunes.

The elberta dune is covered in hardwood forest, naked for the winter. The hill is like the balding head of a young man or old woman, sparse hair can’t quite hide the scalp, though it strives to. So do the thin trees reveal the summer-hidden contours of the hill.

The sky glows pink and orange and purple all at once and the cedars lining the alley are finally giving off the green smells of spring.

One week later, IPR warns me of a winter storm before I am even awake, and in less than an hour I am back down to my 35 mph commute along the icy coastal highway, wipers squeaking against the wet snow. Until the next thaw, smells return to their frozen cloister in the cedar boughs.

no knead to need

Following a friends simple directions, I mix my first batch of no-knead bread. The recipe is simple:

1 cup wheat flour,
2 1/2 cups white flour
Some salt (about a teaspoon)
Some starter (about a tablespoon)
1 5/8 (or so) cups warm water.

You mix it up a bit and let it just sit there for a day or two. All of the ingredients are approximations, you dont even really need to measure. Then you cook it for 45 minutes at 350.

The bread is perfect, every time. One day, a baking genious blogs about the no knead method and the next day, hundreds of people drop hundreds of years of tradition for a smart, trendy, and in style of baking. I am thrilled by it, but also uneasy. No kneading felt like cheating.

I knead to sift the fine flour through my fingers, like my great great grandpa used to do so long ago, at the bottom of a dusty chute in Sicily.

I need to pick up where grandma padalino left off, filling the kitchen with energy and warmth and fresh crusty loaves.

I kneed to push a days worth of racing thoughts into the soft dough that absorbs it all.

The no-knead method yields delicious, fluffy loaves that required no sweat, no shortness of breath, no high risk of failure. I will admit that I am among the masses who have adopted the no knead method. It is too easy not too. But every once in a while I will give the dough an extra push, for old time's sake.

If not for the bubbles, then for the therapy: I need to knead.

regulars

Along with the town gamer, walker, grinner, and researcher, I have become one of the Frankfort library regulars.

The gamer wears a denim flame do-rag and a light blue denim coat and sits tensley in front of his large screen laptop on which he plays various video games. Most of the time he guides his alter ego (a winged creature that hovers at the center of his screen,) through a maze of karsty hills and foggy forests. Sometimes I like to take a break from my work and look over his shoulder at the mystical world he is in, and think 'wouldnt it be fun to be him, and fly at the library?'

I consider the walker a regular, even though her visits are very brief. She is primarily known through town as the walker of the streets, but I have never been through a library visit without seeing her. She speedwalks through the library doors, arms still swinging wildly, straight to the magazine section, and then straight to the 'Health' magazine, where she lifts the lid of the magazine display to check for health magazine extras. All of this happens within about five seconds. Whether or not she finds what she is looking for, she turns around and speedwalks out with perfect form; at least one foot on the ground at all times, arms pumping, and all at a breakneck speed that would probably be hard to keep up with if you were running.

The grinner has become my role model. He is an older man with short white hair and a trim beard and a pointy nose and red cheeks. He sits at the window overlooking the bay with the latest copy of the Traverse City Record Eagle and reads it for hours. With a grin that never fades. Despite the news, his smile shines on like the reflections from the bay, and his apparent joy is contagious.

The researcher and I have quite a lot in common. He sits in quiet concentration behind his small laptop with a frown across his brow that makes you think he is really getting to the bottom of something. On the back of his laptop is a bumper sticker that says "Point Betsie," a lighthouse and nature preserve that is actively managed for invasive species. This is why I suppose we have a lot in common, because I have to assume that he is researching Pointe Betsie, and hence invasive species control, which is exactly what I do.

As you can see, I am in good company. Like they say, Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card.

nothing ever changes and it is never the same

At Christmas, nothing ever changes, but it is never the same. This year was no exception.

Heavily rooted in culinary tradition, our family very rarely strays from the ravioli, squid, and octopus dinner that is synonymous with Christmas to our palates. Upon entering Uncle Steves house, we are greeted with that undeniable smell of squid that I so hated as a child. The smell has not changed, but it's not so bad anymore.

Uncle Steve is bent over the stove, lost in a cloud of steam, and when his face appears over a pot of boiling water he smiles and says "Merry Christmas!" and laughs and you know his smile is real because of the wrinkels that form around his eyes.

Grandma Padalino is sitting at the table with her walker, which, as always, is outfitted with helium balloons and stuffed animals and beads and countless crafts that change every time we see her. "Hi Kids" she always says as we enter, and she is referring to both generations of her grandchildren. She pats us with a hand heavily adorned with colorful plastic jewelry and painted nails.

Granny isn't here to greet us, nor has she been for several years. There is no small, skinny, curly haired, large-eyed, shivvering woman to reach up and hook her hand around the back of your neck, and draw your face in close to hers so that she can gaze into your eyes to tell you ever so slowly, ever so shakily, how much she loves you. And then smile. For a long time. And your face is still so close. No one even seems to notice how long David's eyelashes are, now that Granny isn't around to remind us.

For the first time, Grandma Mancini was not here. The nucleus of the gathering, she was always the one to organize the buying of the 'rav's' (slang for ravioli) and canolies, matters of utmost importance on Christmas. She knew all the family gossip and would speak freely on all of the latest topics. Her greeting was similar to Granny's, but rather than hook her hand around your neck she would wrap her arm around your waist and draw you into a warm plump hug. Then she would gaze up at you (in later years she was literally looking straight up, so you were compelled to lean down, though not by force) and say 'now, who do I have here?' This was a sincere question, because she could not see well. "It's me Grandma." is what I would usually answer, and she would know.

For the past 23 years (at least) there has always been a serious, recurring argument after Christmas dinner. When it is time to boil the octopus. This is the most exciting moment of Christmas day, and there is possibly more anticipation for the moment that the octoupus is dunked into boiling water as there is for the opening of gifts Christmas morning.

First, Grandma Padalino ties a cotton string around the floppy grey head of the octopus. Her loose jewelry swings freely with the long tentacled legs as she waves the creature around for the 'kids' (everyone) to see. The brave among us touch it, and it feels just as slimy as it looks. And then, the dunking. Once, twice, three times Grandma dunks the octopus, and with each duncking the creature's tentacles curl up into tighter and tighter spirals, and change color, and what was once a grey slimy mass is now curly and bright.

This is when the argument starts. Grandma Padalino says it must boil for at least 10 minutes, but you don't want to let it get too soft. Grandma Mancini would insist that it needs to boil for at least an hour or it will be too chewy. This chewy/soft argument would go on and on, although it never seemed that Grandma Padalino could hear Grandma Mancinis arguments, and the octopus would come out after about 20 minutes. Always too chewy for grandma Mancini, sometimes too soft for Grandma Padalino.

We are still grappling with how long to boil the octopus, and I do not think that will change for the next 23 years at least. And a Christmas will never pass where everyone is satisfied with its consistency. But never before would Grandma Padalino herself admit that the mollusk was too chewy, until this year. Because Grandma Mancini was not here to say it. It was then that I realized Christmas would never be the same again.