Looking through windows

I brought my birthday zodiacal month (Virgo) to a close last night with a terrific dinner at a local wine bar. My friends L and C treated me to wine tasting, mussels, shrimp, small plates of olives, crunchy chickpeas and smoked salmon and a few spectacular desserts. The fact that we sat right next to a woman with the Loudest Voice and Most Obnoxious Laugh in the Universe did not stop our own wonderful conversation, and I am once again filled with gratitude at the blessings of friendship.

I'm off to the first baseball game of the season. It's Fall Ball for Oliver. I'm sure that the haircut, color and blow-out I had yesterday will stand me well for another season of sitting in the bleachers at baseball fields in the Valley. If only sitting in the bleachers of baseball fields was slenderizing and brought peace to the soul.

What's going on with you today?

Material Girl

I got a bit of birthday money, and when I saw this typewriter marked down from an earlier too-expensive price, I bought it. I adore it.

Now, I'm going to re-arrange the mess that is my office and bedroom so that the Emerald Green Remington will be a centerpiece.

Reader, how's your Friday going?

One Night Dream

Those two girls (because we decided we prefer the term to ladies) came to my house yesterday afternoon, picked me up and drove me down to Manhattan Beach. We checked into a swanky hipster hotel with a rooftop jacuzzi.

We sat there for a few hours, drinking champagne and then beer and nibbling on calamari. When the sun started going down we went back to our room and changed for dinner. Here's our room:

Can you believe?

We walked into town and down charming little beach streets.

Although a tad on the precious side, here's the house I chose to buy for my alternative life:

We walked down to the beach and then along the beach until the sun set:

Then we walked back up to a wonderful restaurant, were seated and champagne was presented, a bottle of Dom Perignon from a friend who couldn't be there. The view of the ocean was spectacular:

We ate mussels and french fries, burrata and heirloom tomatoes, and I had wild sea bass for a main course. We drank champagne and had tiny sugared donut holes dipped in butter and jam for dessert. We then walked -- or rolled -- back to the hotel. The girls got into bed, and I took a bath. I think you need to see a photo of that, right?

Ha!

Seriously, though, that bath was awesome. I sprinkled in some bath salts and waited for the tub to fill up. You can't see it in the photo, but the tub was rigged for what the hipsters called Chromotherapy.  Evidently the pulsating lights -- both in the tub and overhead -- triggered certain feelings. Pink for romance, blue for tranquility, yellow for creativity, green for whatever, red for passion.We got a kick out of it -- at one point I slid the panel open and peered out at my friends who were reading in that bed. I told them that I was feeling POWER (that was the purple light). I settled for blue and relaxed for nearly an hour.

This morning, we woke up, ate a small breakfast and then I went PADDLEBOARDING! The instructor was about as cute as I could have imagined -- a dark-haired, dark-skinned surfer boy -- and he patiently instructed us (mainly me, because I'd never done it) on how to kneel, paddle a bit and then stand up. The first time I stood up, I kind of freaked out a little bit and had to go back to the kneeling position, but when we paddled out to a glassier area, he made me stand up and from then on to the end of the hour, I DID IT! There were sea lions barking and moaning on the buoys, we saw sting rays below us, the sky was hazy and peaceful, and I did it. Despite my feet going numb, I felt good and think I might be hooked to do it again. I wish I had a photo to show you, but then again, maybe I'm glad that I don't. I'd prefer you think of me looking like this:

I'm back home, rested, relaxed and energized. I'm still 49 years old but very much looking forward to being 50.

Next, mermaid tattoo?

Guess Where I'm Going Tomorrow

Hint here.

My Half Century Plan

via apartment therapy

So, in exactly one month, I'll be fifty years old. I love a birthday, mine included. I'm decidedly not the no gifts, please girl. So. This is what I want for my birthday:

1. Two weeks in the above little house on the Isle of Wight.
2. A trip to County Sligo, along the paths that Yeats walked 
3. A paddle board lesson in a slimming wet-suit with a cute surfer guy of any age
4. A tiny, perfect mermaid tattoo on my left inner wrist
5. A car tour through Badlands National Park, perhaps tripping on a tiny amount of an hallucinogenic

Reader, don't you wonder which of these I'll do?

Heart Mysteries and Circus Animals and W.B. Yeats' Birthday

Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary and Yeats' unrequited love and me, Elizabeth Aquino, showing my unrequited love for WB Yeats.

It's William Butler Yeats' birthday today, and even though he was born nearly 150 years ago and wrote of a world vastly different than our own, his poetry still resonates deeply with me. As a young woman, I was completely enamored with nearly everything he wrote and struck, especially,  by his unrequited love for the beautiful revolutionary, Maud Gonne. The title of this blog is a line from one of my favorite poems called Adam's Curse, and the recording of his recitation of a very early poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, still gives me shivers, especially when he says and live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Here's a copy of one of his last poems, one of my favorites. If you're not a poetry lover -- or even liker -- or if you're unfamiliar with Yeats, the first two parts of the poem look back on the poet's writing and life, his labors and the things he felt were important. He references a few of his poems and themes, and if you find that language difficult, you might scan all the way down to the last stanza which has, I think, some of the most powerful, beautiful and humbling lines ever written. 

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 

The Greatest Weekend in a Decade, at least

This is the year we all turn fifty -- and to celebrate we flew and drove to a grand house in South Carolina. We came from Paris, France and Los Angeles, California. We came from Georgia, and North Carolina. We came from Virginia and South Carolina and Maryland and Tennessee. We are married and divorced. We are with children and without children. We have adopted children. We have children in college and children at home and children with disabilities and children without. We are gay and straight. We love our families and we love each other, passionately.

We went for a big hike in DuPont park on Saturday morning. Some of you who saw the movie Hunger Games might recognize the gorgeous, wild beauty of the place.

We enjoyed the scenery and took many group photos,

But we mainly talked. We couldn't stop talking!

In fact, it was nearly impossible to take a photo of anything other than us talking!

After dinner, on Saturday night, we convened at the homestead for caramel birthday cake and champagne.

We ended the evening with wish papers that I brought from Los Angeles. Evidently, this has never been seen on the east coast, and I was roundly mocked for the whole ceremony being "very LA." But we all made wishes and watched them float up and into the ether.

I am home, now, happy to see my family, but I am filled with warmth and love and happiness and gratitude for friendships that have lasted nearly thirty years, for the women who knew me when I was oh, so young, for the beautiful ways that they live, for the beauty of their faces, for the sound of their laughs and their voices filling my heart.

What I wished for

I'm not telling, but it wasn't world peace.

Facebook Snafus, Gun Control, Switzerland and the The Husband

Switzerland, 2007

I've been called bitter, unhappy, unpatriotic and pompous because of some comments I made about gun control and America yesterday on Facebook. I was also defriended by one of my cousins because of it, so I think I'll take Denise's advice and blog about it.

Oy vey.

Bitter? Well, I'll concede that I feel a tad bitter about the difficult times I've had negotiating for care for Sophie, for medications that cost less if I get them illegally from Canada than legally through my insurance company that has jacked up Sophie's premium more than 150% in three years. Bitter actually might be too mild a term for what I feel about the way this country handles healthcare and the insurance industry. As an overall characteristic of my person, though -- well, I'm not there, yet, thanks to daily meditation and the support and love of family and friends.

Unhappy? Hmmm. What the hell does it mean to be truly happy? I'm certainly not happy all the time and am distinctly unhappy about many things, but I try to do something about the things that make me unhappy. I think if someone knows me well, unhappy wouldn't be a term they'd use to describe me. I'm too much of an idealist to be unhappy. It does make me unhappy, though, that I can't have a heated discussion on Facebook with a first cousin without it degenerating into personal attack.

Unpatriotic? I was born an American and didn't work my ass off to be one. I didn't swim shark-infested oceans or dodge tyrants from the left or right. I believe it was sheer chance that I was born here and not some other country, and I'm grateful to be a part of such a vast, crazy, diverse and free place. I like ice in my drinks, movies, popcorn and peanut butter, all things that you're hard put to find in such plenitude elsewhere. I think our national parks, particularly Yosemite, are the greatest places on earth. Do I believe America is God's gift to the world? Absolutely not. Do I believe America is the best country in the world? Absolutely not.  I'm grateful that my parents and their parents worked incredibly hard to give me the life I was born into. I'm grateful that I can speak openly as a woman in this country, that I can be in charge of my body, that I can choose to worship or not worship as I please. I'm grateful that our country is organized in such a fashion that I can go to the poll-booth and vote without getting killed, that I can rely on the country's military to protect me from imminent danger. I'm grateful that I get some financial aid from our government to help me with respite care for Sophie and my boys. But I'm an integral part of this country as well and grateful for the opportunity to give back with my own tax money, not only to pay for this military and many of the services that make our country a great one, but also to help those less fortunate. Do I believe I'm a human being connected to other human beings, regardless of where they were born? Yes, I do. I'm not sure if that makes me patriotic or unpatriotic, though.

Pompous? Well, I'll cry mea culpa on this one as I do have the tendency to condescend and my tongue is as sharp as a scythe. I'm working on it. When my son Oliver acts like a crazy person as a catcher on his baseball team, I wince and think he's a chip off the old maternal block. I even think the word asshole. Other people just say they like his passion. If I could learn to express my passion in more constructive ways, I'd be better off, as would those on the receiving end of my pontifications.

So, where does that leave us?

The Husband has been privy to the snafu on Facebook, and unlike a good Swiss, he's not been neutral. He rolls his eyes at Americans and their passion for guns and violence. He thinks the NRA is a repellent organization, drunk on power and a tired, irrelevant history. He's lectured me on the real reasons the Swiss all have guns when they're twenty and ammunition, too. He is a sharp shooter and participated for many years in the Swiss bicycle calvary. He hated every second of it, as his father did before him. The Husband is extremely knowledgeable about his country and loves his heritage no more or less than his life in this country. That's one of the reasons, I suppose, that I married him. You know -- all that John Lennon imagine stuff, imagine there's no country, no one to kill or die for, I wonder if you can.

Now I'm off to make some Hallelujah Cake, distinctly American for the Swiss Husband's birthday.

Veil Gluck zum Geburi!