Gun for Sale

Today I contacted Bob over at the Old West Gun Room and asked about how to sell my gun. It means the end to my hunting adventure.

I've been thinking about it for a while. At first, I thought I might try to find someone else who shared my perspective on responsible meat-eating and who might also want to go hunting with me. But, meanwhile, I couldn't help thinking about the fractured arguments that my Hunter Education instructors had used to justify hunting. The role of hunting in wildlife conservation, they said, is the "harvest of surplus animals" (my emphasis). In other words, any animal population that is under management can be allowed to increase in order to create a role for hunting.

It made me wonder if the ranchers who rent out their land for pig hunts are encouraging the pigs so that the pig hunters will be attracted to their ranches. They claim to hate the pigs, but have they created a "hunting surplus?" If so, maybe that's the kind of hunt I went on.

People who have heard about my pig hunting ask me whether or when I'm going to go hunting again. As the months have gone by since that November day when I brought down the pig, it's become clearer to me that I don't want to spend any more time with guns or with hunters.

I had a very deep experience with that pig, and actually, it continues to unfold every time we sit down to a meal made with some of the pig's flesh. I don't regret what I did. I know I was mindful and respectful, but I think when this pig is gone, the most respectful thing for me to do is to find an ethical pork farmer and buy a farm-raised pig from her or him.

So, if you know anyone who wants to buy a nice, well-kept rifle, tell them to see Bob.

The hunt approaches

I am in the final days before my first hunt. There is certainly the possibility that this will also be my last hunt, because I am open to the possibility that the whole experience of killing a large animal and then gutting and preparing its carcass to be eaten will be more than I want to repeat. This is something I will be discovering.

These last few days are feeling increasingly intense, as I do more physically and mentally demanding practice. The whole thing feels a bit spiritual to me, actually.

• I have a teacher with new and exotic (to me) beliefs.
• Along the way, I have encountered adherents of these beliefs, as well as various splinter groups.
• I will have a special guide for the hunt who is different from my teacher. That is, I am being passed on to a superior expert for the culminating event.
• I have had to pass arduous tests: physical, mental and moral.
• I have made journeys: to pass tests, to engage in learning, and to experience the culminating event.
• If I am successful, I will be working very closely with blood (and guts).
• I will be taking in the flesh of the vanquished.
• I will be wearing special garments that I have prepared with special washing.
• I will wash myself with special care and special materials before the event.
• Knowledge of my own limits will be revealed to me as a result of the event.

From 100 yards away

Not to put too fine a point on it, I expect this is going to affect me in a big way.

My shooting is good enough now to pull down a pig, and I can get into a kneeling, shooting position from walking around in just seconds. I'm as ready as I can be.

I just have a few things left to do, including baking some cookies for my coach and me. Doesn't that sound funny?

Memory lane

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education tipped me off about some new research on the middle-aged mind.  The article is a review of Barbara Strauch's book The secret life of the grown-up brain: the surprising talents of the middle-aged mind. (As an aside, the Strauch book apparently defines middle age as stretching from 40 to 68. Are we now expected to live to 136??)

The Chron noted that "The mild forgetfulness associated with middle-age...is real, an artifact of distraction, a surfeit of things worth remembering." So that's it: I just have too many things to remember! No wonder some of them are dropping out of my ears onto the floor.

Apparently, learning new things helps. But, I find this a double-edged sword. Here's why: as regular readers of this blog know, I am now working with a marksmanship coach. She's assigned me some homework this week. It's the memorization kind. Um, actually, I'm noticing that I really rusty in this department.

I've gotten so used to referring to things stored in electronic form on one device or another that I really don't make myself remember much of anything anymore. I do remember things, but this is a happenstance rather than a plan.

It turns out that all my "referring to things" is actually more of a problem than I thought. Recent research conducted at UCSF is showing that excessive uptime is having a detrimental effect on memory: "when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience." Further research, this time at the University of Michigan, found that "people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment."

In other words, we're suffering from overwhelm. At least I am. I used to be one of those people with a fairly deep "general fund" of knowledge, the kind of gal you wanted for a teammate if you were playing Trivial Pursuit. I now know a heck of a lot less than I used to know. At least it sure feels like it.

Maybe it's a good thing I'm doing some memorization tasks, stretching my neurons. Then again, maybe I should just go for a walk up in Tilden.

All Natural

Today I pollinated my pumpkin patch. It's something I've never had to do before. I don't know why, but this year the birds and the bees have fallen down on the job.

It could be the new variety of pumpkin I'm growing.
It could be the weird extra-foggy weather we've been having.
It could be a bad year for bird and bee whoopy.

In desperation, I searched for and found instructions for pollinating pumpkins.

Girl pumpkin flower: see her shapely figure?

It turns out there are boy pumpkin flowers and girl pumpkin flowers. I've only ever noticed the girls. (Is that such a surprise?) Other years, there have always been a few early "lost opportunities." That is to say, a number of those small baby pre-pumpkins just die and fall off. But, by July, I get pumpkins taking hold and growing.

Boy pumpkin flower: a manly profile

This year, here we are at mid-August, and I still don't have any pumpkins growing! This makes me alarmed, because these are baking pumpkins, and I count on having a home-grown pumpkin for my Thanksgiving pie. The clock is ticking.

To intervene on behalf of future pie, I took the boy pumpkin flower and exposed the stamen by peeling off the flower. Then, I rubbed this on the stigma of the girl flower. I did this for as many of the girls as were available--about four or five today.

So what's natural about this? My answer is: what's not? I'm part of nature, after all.

I have a particular horse in this race, which I will now disclose. I belong to what has, since August 4, 2010, been described as a suspect class. (This is a beneficial distinction, it turns out.) For the longest time, what and who I am, including how I managed to become the mother of my best beloved son, has been considered by some (including many voters in my adopted home state of California) to be unnatural. Even though Judge Walker's wonderfully deep and detailed ruling is currently on hold for what feels like forever to me, his words are still on record.

For instance:
"The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed."

I remember having a big argument with my father in about 1978 on this same point. My father believed homosexuality is a choice--really, an act of perverse willfulness. That's why, even though he was an ACLU member who defended the civil rights of others, on this issue, he wouldn't bend. He's been gone for more than 20 years now, so his time has passed too.

It's my time now, and I say that doing things differently doesn't make them unnatural. It's all natural, because we are all part of the whole.

On doing something new

One of the most striking things about learning to shoot a gun is the sheer newness of this experience. When I was driving to Chabot Gun Club the first time two weeks ago, I was taken by how I was about to do something completely different from anything I'd ever done before. I'd be meeting people I'd never met before, and it was likely that there would be more than several degrees of separation between me and these folks. I'd be rubbing elbows with members of the NRA, and, in fact, I would be allowing one of these these people to be my teacher for the morning.

These places where I go to shoot guns feel miles away from Berkeley. In some ways, they are.

I can feel myself stretching.

Last weekend, I had an unexpected realization. Iris and I went to the movies on Saturday--we saw Inception--and all of a sudden I realized that scenes with guns have changed for me. Gun scenes used to be entirely fantasy scenes for me. I didn't have any kind of connection to them at all. But now I have shot a pistol, and I have shot a rifle. I know what that feels like. When I saw the characters in the movie shooting, I could imagine what they felt like. It has changed my appreciation, or maybe it's my apprehension, just a little bit.

I don't have a big conclusion to this, just a kind of awe that I can be this open to such a wild new thing.

Pack Animal

Iris and I are the kind of people who boldly live with another species. Most of the time, of course, we don't think of it this way.

But the fact is, we live in close quarters with a non-human. The species we live with is the one that has been camping right along side our crazy mixed up Neanderthal-loving selves for as long as we've been tossing out tidbits beyond the fire circle. That is to say, we have a dog.

Canis lupus familiaris.

The subject in question is pictured to the right. She looks innocent enough, I admit. Hardly big enough to qualify for that wild middle name. But day in and day out, she employs all that cuteness in the service of a hidden agenda.

And that agenda, according to dog experts, is twofold: food and safety. Dogs pursue this agenda by adhering to a military-like code. In their dreams, they run in packs, and in their waking hours, they apparently feel safest when they Live the Dream.

So, they turn any group into a pack. And, they must know who is the pack leader, the Top Dog. They must understand exactly their hierarchical relationship to that dog. And--here's the kicker--if the presumed Top Dog is not behaving Top Doggishly, they will make regime changing moves. They can't help themselves.

Meanwhile, back at our Cave Woman campfire, Iris and I are melting marshmellows and making S'Mores. Our idea of what we want to do with our little lupus is cuddle and play. We are not "into" discipline. That is to say, compared to our dog, Iris and I are pinko commie egalitarians. We think this is all fun and games, but it turns out that, with our every move, we have been confusing and confounding the pack-minded pup in our midst.

This has become abundantly clear to us, because she has been acting out. Making her moves, in other words. I'm going to spare you the details.

So this week, we've been all about asserting our Top Doggitude. We are Up and she is Down. Up and Down. At first, she was bugged. But, now, she's calm and peaceful. Which means we are actually living with a creature that likes being put in her place.

After all, she is a dog. We have to treat her like a dog, indeed, the lowest dog in the pack, in order to make her feel safe. And, of course, we want her to feel safe.

This is just about when I really notice how weird it is to be living with another species. What were we thinking?

A June Wedding

On Friday, Iris and I will be driving up to Oregon for our niece's wedding to a nice young man we met last November when they joined us, with her parents, for Thanksgiving.

Weddings, as I'm sure you know, bring up lots of feelings for many people. Even our 24-year-old son is twitching a bit this summer as he goes to two weddings of people his own age: this cousin now, and, in August, one of his buddies from Berkeley High.

For me, attending a straight wedding always brings up the whole marriage equality batch of thoughts and feelings. I can't help it. Indeed, just getting to this wedding will involve us temporarily losing our legal married status, as we'll be crossing state lines.

This will be, of course, a June wedding. I myself liked the idea of being a June bride, so the first time I married Iris (1992), we too picked a June date. Stonewall Day, actually, the anniversary of the day in 1969 when a bunch of angry New York queens stood up to the cops and said, "We've had enough." As it happens, Iris and I have also been February brides (2004) and September brides (2008).

Our legal right to marry just in our own state is a matter of hot contention right now, and in the fullness of time, it will likely be taken all the way to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, off to a little town outside of Medford, OR, we go. There, no one will question the right of these two young people to marry, and they will stay married when they cross the line into California where they plan to live.

We will go to this wedding, and we will rejoice for them. We will also be holding our own story inside of us.

I suppose all of the other people witnessing along with us will be doing the same thing with their stories. That's just the way that it is.

The power of the personal; notes from Germany

A trip to a new country leaves one with a great many impressions. The strongest from my recent visit to Germany are connected to personal stories I encountered.

Let me mention first the amazing Holocaust Memorial, more formerly known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Memorial has two parts: an external sculptural placement of 2,711 giant concrete blocks of varying sizes. You can walk through these blocks from any direction, and so they formed a kind of labyrinth. These are 3 photographs I took to give you some idea of the effect: a sense of overwhelming number and individuality of view and experience at the same time.


The information center complimenting the stones adds to this effect with an overview history of the Holocaust but then, importantly, offers a portrait of horrifying deprivation, cruelty and violence in photographs and diaries from fifteen families, each from a different country.

For me, the specificity of this approach made the information sink deeply inside me. In all cases, the photographs from the pre-oppression period showed healthy, glowing faces at various family gatherings. And these served to bring the photographs from later times into exacting and sharp relief. It made quite a difference in impact that every photograph of an individual was identified by name. There were no walls of nameless victims here. Everyone belonged to a family, to a story.

The second experience I want to describe comes from the business part of this trip. For the first two days in Germany, we were in Hannover, where I attended a work-related conference. In addition to the meetings, I was able to have many personal conversations over lunches and dinners with my colleagues from German and Swiss libraries and research institutions. In the process, I began to establish relationships with them, ones that will, of course, grow as we continue to work together.

In these circumstances, we learned a little bit about each other. For instance, I discovered that German children are taught the American Pilgrim story. I was surprised by this, I have to admit. I still find it puzzling. When I, in turn, explained that Thanksgiving is a good holiday for Americans because it is not tied to any particular religious tradition, this was a new idea for Wolfgang and Anja, who explained that Germany is a Christian country. (There you have it.)

For their part, Wolfgang and Anja asked about the wall between the United States and Mexico. They wanted to know how long it is, and whether it stretches all the way from Texas to California. I realized, as they were talking, that Germans understand about walls. They also wanted to know if we had a trade agreement with Mexico, and, if so, why there wasn't free movement between the two countries as there is in Europe between members of the European Union.  Now, Germany is not a country without immigration issues of its own, of course, but I didn't bring this up. Instead, I was just interested to hear how the United States is seen from the outside.

I was walking back from an evening reception on the first night of the conference with a colleague from Switzerland, Angela, and another German, Stefan. Angela said something along the lines of "What I want to know is, we just love President Obama. Why don't you?" Stefan agreed that, yes, he had this same question. I made a response I don't think really satisfied either of them, though what can you say to something like that, actually?

As a side note, I observed this pro-Obama feeling elsewhere in Germany: at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, there is a President Kennedy Museum and Shop. In the big picture window right now, there is a huge poster of President Obama.

One last snapshot: every time we opened a map on the streets of Berlin, someone stepped forward and asked if we wanted help. Most notably, on our first afternoon, as we walked down Welserstrasse with a map, a woman stopped to help us. When she found out it was our first visit and first day, she asked us what we were interested in seeing and gave us what ended up being the outline for our full 3 days.

I'll remember her a long time.

Reunions

I'm going to make use of my poetic license (acquired along with my first Master's Degree--in Poetry, SF State, 1983) and give you a collection of thoughts. See what the combination evokes for you.

A phone call

It came a week and a half ago. We have caller ID, so I could read his name on the display. It seemed improbable to me that a cousin I barely knew and hadn't spoken to in 40 years would be calling out of the blue, but who else could it be? I decided to pick up.

A deep voice asked if I was me. And, if I was who I used to be. I asked, "Are you my cousin?" He agreed that he was. We proceeded to talk for the next 10 minutes about ourselves. He had called my brother earlier that day, and that's how he'd gotten my married name and phone number. He said it had been a long time since he had spoken to us, and he didn't want it to go on any longer.

The funny thing is that, when we were kids, we barely knew each other. I have probably seen him less than five times in my life. His mother was my dad's sister, and my dad didn't try to see his family often. It's hard to make any sense of those old complex feelings now, but it's also not easy to feel strong pulls of family bond at this late date. In their place, I feel a simple openness.

A tent at Maker Faire

I noticed, while walking past, an open-air tent where leaders were teaching eager people how to solder. Adults, kids, men, women, boys, girls, all bent themselves over small objects of metal they were joining together with a metal alloy. This was a very popular activity. There were only a few empty seats.

Joans

On Monday, I will be getting together with another Joan, a Joan from my past. When I was in college (before I got my poetic license), I had a roommate named Joan. We Joans had a third roommate, a woman named Shari. Shari now lives 2 blocks down the street from me, here in Berkeley.

The other Joan had been "lost" to us, living all this time, it seems, in Vancouver, Washington. Shari and I just "found" her--or, rather, she found us--thanks to Facebook.

Shari is making a big brunch for us, offering for my opinion, this list of tasty options:

• Fruit Salad
• Lox, bagels, cream cheese, cucumber
• Blintzes
• White Fish Salad (maybe)
• Frittata
• OJ
• Coffee/Tea/Milk

I'll note that blintzes are Shari's specialty, and that I'd been hoping she would make them! I've been imagining our old threesome, which featured funny, articulate, and deep discussions that carried us hither and yon to the tune of old Simon and Garfunkle, Jethro Tull, and Randy Newman albums. Admittedly, we won't be, as we once were, magic-enabled, but still, I figured we have something like 33 years of catching up to do. We could just hit the high points, and it would get pretty high all by itself.

However, in the last few days, as we've been getting closer and Shari has made attempts to nail down dates and times, it's become clear that our long lost Joan has decided to bring her husband and her sister to this brunch, which suggests she has a very different idea about this brunch get-together than I had had. Ah well, time, as they say, has gone by.

Concluding couplet

I can't resist leaving you with this:

We like putting things together
Do we like putting things together?

Fast means slow

As I write this week's post, I am fasting. And I'd like to say for the record that this practice really needs a makeover. The new name: Slowing.

My argument is based on my experience that time seems to have slowed down considerably since I did not have breakfast this morning.

It's a long slog until I go to bed tonight. I know it's just one day, goddammit, but it's one loooooong day!

While I am on this topic, I recently read Eat Your Dreams, in the monthly magazine The Sun. The author, a man named Sparrow, writes about going to sleep hungry and dreaming (repeatedly) about food and eating. He makes this into a new form of dieting, by dream-eating and waking up fulfilled. Sparrow fasts on a weekly basis, and also twice a month, according to the lunar calendar. He says, "When I fast, I am more likely to eat in my subsequent dream."  No kidding.

Now, The Sun is, overall, a particularly worthy publication, ad free, and on point in its mission to "evoke the the splendor and heartache of being human." We can only hope that this particular message stays off the radar of developing girls and boys, vulnerable as they are to the siren call of anorexia.

Just so you know, I am not making a regular habit of this fasting/slowing business. I only do it when my doctor makes me! Here's why I'm doing it today.

Sprung!

Having grown up in a place with "real" winter (Chicago), and having made a recent visit to New York, I've been reminded this year that March and April are a transition months. In the Chicago of my childhood, March especially, was quite unreliable, and featured dirty, salty snow banks. Walking to school was a messy, wet operation.

In early April, you would look almost desperately for signs of bright colors. I wrote last week about a "dark unclear space" and I am thinking this week that the bursts that renewed life makes onto winter's scene are just as mysterious and magical.

On one of my days in New York, I took the wrong subway to met Nathan at Columbia, meaning that I had a longish walk to campus. It was a good thing, because it meant I passed by a churchyard with this lone forsythia in bloom, blazing yellow against the dark stone walls.
 
This is the first year I've heard Nathan, a native Californian, ever express joy at seeing trees bud and bloom. He is seeing them with new eyes, having slogged through his first winter of chill and snow. He is going through his own blooming.
 

Practically as soon as I got back in town, my sister visited me here in Berkeley. She still lives outside Chicago, and to her, it is wildly green here right now. My yard is looking good right now, with the wisteria and California poppies in bloom. What I was most happy for her to see were the blooms on the Western Redbud tree I have in the backyard, shown here on the right. I planted this little native sweetheart after my mother died, and I put a locket of her hair in the earth underneath it. My mother was a big treehugger from way back, and I know that many trees have been planted in her honor, by her children and all her friends.

In my front yard right now, next to my garlic, I have brave new Dragon Carrot sprouts. I ordered the seeds from the Seed Savers catalog. They are supposed to be red when they are all grown up. We'll see!

All this growth is plain wonder and mystery! And to top it all off, across the street, a baby boy was just born! Little Philo. How about that?

Life just takes the cake. Or pie, depending on your point of view.

Human sacrifice

On my recent trip to New York, I had a spiritual experience of a particular sort. It happened on Friday when I was visiting the campus of New York University. April 2, 2010, was the second-to-last day of an art show at the Grey Art Gallery. The show was Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961-1991.

Earlier in the day, I'd had the opportunity to meet the Director of the Fales Library and Special Collection, Marvin J. Taylor, as my colleague and friend Jennifer Vinopal was giving me a tour of NYU's Library. I'd made a mental note to come back to the show after Jennifer and I went our separate ways. Taylor has been collecting the work of artists, playwrights, choreographers, photographers, and activists of New York's downtown scene since 1994. The show "reveal(ed) the vital intersections of experimental theater, performance and installation art, graffiti, punk rock, and sexual liberation." (I'm quoting the show brochure.)

As I walked downstairs to the lower level, I encountered the moving work of Fred McDarrah who covered New York's Gay Pride Parade every year from its inception for the Village Voice.

And then, suddenly, I came upon David Wojnarowicz's photographs and silent films. He worked in the late 1980's and early 1990's at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The installation included a film running in a loop of Wojnarowicz's lover's last moments and then his prone body, draped in a sheet, and carried by four or five men from a table to a dark, unclear space.

I stood still, watching this, aware that the hour approached 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday, and I wondered: what turns a death into a sacrifice? Did Wojnarowicz's lover die for a purpose, as I was taught to believe about the Nazarene carpenter?

And what about all those other young men who died so young? After all this time, I must say I have not discerned any meaning.

I remember the late '80s and early 90's well. We lost Iris's brother Jon and our friend Kevin Lally in 1993. Indeed, everybody we knew lost someone or many someones. Even though there is a great temptation to make some sense of death, it looks to me now very much as Wojnarowicz depicted it: simply a dark unclear space we are left to ponder.

Roominess

Nathan has been home from grad school for spring break this week, and it has reminded me of an offhand comment he made in August after his successful garage sale. I should back up and say that the garage sale was preceded by the most massive room cleaning he had done since (maybe) the 5th grade. Let me describe it this way: the floor in his room became visible!

He got rid of three electronics systems, his Magic the Gathering cards, various speaker systems, a fancy calculator he needed for high school math, stuffed animals, clothing, books... in short: he got rid of substantial parts of his past.

And, at the end, he made this statement: "Every time I come home from now on, I will clean up one more drawer or shelf in my room until it's all clear so you can reuse the room."

We were taken aback, needless to say. Not only by his resolve, but also by his suggestion that we would actually move on, that we would re-use his room. Of course, we had secretly imagined this, but we had never said anything to him!

And now, seven months later, Nathan is on his second visit home since then. And he hasn't done any subsequent cleaning.

This is actually an interesting convention, this "visit home" language. I remember it from when I was his age. I had stopped thinking of my parents' home as my home rather abruptly even before I went off to college, because they had moved away from my childhood home in the middle of my senior year of high school. So, on my trips back to see them during and after college, I was always very clear to make the distinction that I was going to see my parents, and not going home.

Nathan's growing up has been different from mine in any number of ways, as you might imagine. Certainly one of these is that his parents have continued to live in his old house, in his home town, even as he has left to go to college, and now to go on to graduate school. We are his home base.

Nathan still says he is coming "home," and I think he still feels that way. It's also true that he has started onto a road of undetermined length toward creating another home. He is now living, for the first time, with someone he loves, his girlfriend Alisa.

So, one day maybe he'll stop thinking of this as his home. Or maybe he'll be a person who makes room for more than one home in his big heart. I really don't know how it works for someone who gets to take his or her own time with this particular transition. But, somehow, I think it will be relatively easy, because Nathan is so at ease with it all. And he's in the lead.

Being a carnivore

Next weekend, I'm taking a first step toward eating more meat. When I first started this blog, I explained why I eat fish and not other animals. I've stuck with that for a while now, something like a year and a half.

However, I have had in the back of my mind the last chapter of Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma in which he makes a meal from food he has hunted or gathered. The meat he serves comes from a wild boar he has hunted in Sonoma County, CA.

It seems that the wild boar is considered an invasive species pretty much everywhere it now lives, including Sonoma County. That gives hunting wild pigs an environmentally righteous tinge. The hunter can feel he or she is part of an environmental solution, a clean-up task, if you will.

The California Department of Fish and Game actually has a Wild Pig Management Program, including special hunts, hunter education, and "pig take reports." From the pig take reports of past years, you can see the "method of take" for every county in the state. By far, the most common method of "taking" a wild pig is with a rifle.

And that leads to my next step: a field trip to Target Master West, a shooting range in Milpitis. I have to find out if I can shoot a rifle! I am going with a few friends from work, who have been to Target Master several times before. This is just the first step, I know, but it definitely feels like a moment.

Target Master's tagline is "Serving the Shooting Community for Over 25 Years." The thought that I might be joining "the shooting community" has given me pause, I  must say. I find myself imagining wearing some kind of sign on my back saying "only hunting for food not sport."

At the bottom of this is a real curiosity on my part as to whether or not I have it in me to be a pig hunter. I'm going to start finding that out.

Stirred down

I was making dinner a week or two ago for our friends Jan and Jay, when I reached for a certain spoon in the drawer. I choose this particular spoon whenever I am cooking something special or cooking for people for whom I feel a special love.

This spoon once belonged to my grandmother, who used it so much she wore it down. My mother called it "stirred down." I never knew my grandmother, because she died when my mother was a young girl. When I stir things with this spoon, I think about my mother stirring with this spoon, and I know she was thinking about her mother stirring with this spoon. In this way, I can bring them both to me as I cook.

My mother told me stories about spending time around her mother cooking, including one about her singing (repeatedly) to her mother the 1925 hit  "Tie Me to Your Apron Strings Again." Her mother lost patience, eventually, and if you follow the link you may get some hint as to why that might be. She hugged my mother (a little girl) and proceeded to tie my mother to her with her apron strings.

I have my own memories of watching my mother cook, none as dramatic, nor as musical. However, I can call up how to roll out a pie crust, and beat and stir batters, simply by envisioning my mother's hands going through those motions. When I was a new cook, this was especially helpful.

Now, when I hold this one spoon, which has been in my mother's and grandmother's hands, they are with me, even as I am preparing a meal I will eat with living loved ones tonight. It fills me up, and I fill the food with this feeling. Maybe I should rename this post "Stirred up."

Valentines Day, 2004

I woke up on Saturday, February 14, 2004, feeling down on myself. Feeling like I'd missed out on one of the most important political and personal statements available to me to that point in my life. On Thursday of that week, Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco (just across the Bay from us in Berkeley) had started marrying people like me and Iris. It was a shock and a stunner. It sent earthquakes of joy all across the LGBT community, and I had been too stuck in my daily grind to take a day off of work and go get hitched.

And, by Saturday, I was pretty sure the whole thing had been called off. Every hour on Friday, there had been threats of various legal actions, and besides, we all knew these pieces of paper weren't really going to hold up in court.

So, that was the scene as I started my regular Saturday morning on 2/14/04. It was my turn to do the grocery shopping and I had the radio on in the car. To my great surprise, KQED was reporting that, not only was San Francisco still performing weddings, but City Hall itself remained open for business on Saturday, using an all volunteer staff to handle the expected crowd.

I tore home and woke Iris up with a marriage proposal. Lucky for me, she said "yes!" We called our son Nathan, who had spent the night at a friend's, to see if he wanted to go with us. He was a high school senior then, and we hoped he would join us. We did warn him that there would probably be a lot of waiting involved (which turned out to be quite accurate). Happily, he was excited to go.

So we hopped on BART and headed into the City. When we arrived at San Francisco City Hall, at about 10:30 am, it was apparent that the line for the same-sex weddings was being handled in a non-standard way, through an entrance to the rear of the building, and the line of couples already snaked all the way from the back, along one entire side, and then was beginning to turn along the front of the building as well. Heterosexual couples who had booked a Valentines Day wedding date were being allowed into the building from the front entrance.

So, for the next six hours or so, we stood in line, along with many hundreds of other couples, and their friends and family members. The couple in front of us had been together 8 years. The couple behind us had been together 18 years. At the time, we had been together 13 years. We exchanges stories, took pictures of one another, traded back rubs, getting food, and so forth. It was a very festive event, and all of us were acutely aware that we were making history.

At long last, we made the turn into the building, and then truly amazing things began to happen. You became aware of the fact that every single civil servant you encountered was volunteering his or her time that day (remember, it was a Saturday!). From the security guard at the door to the clerk at the desk, these people would look up at you and say, "I am so glad to be here today doing this for you!" Honestly, you could not keep your eyes dry from one bureaucratic step to the next.

After one of these form completion tasks, we went into an anti-room for a moment, and here was a young woman handing out cupcakes. She said that she had been there with friends the day before and felt that there really ought to be cake for the brides and grooms, so she just decided to make it happen!

At last we had our license and we stood in a waiting area just off the balcony over the Rotunda. This is a dark, but dramatic space. We were standing there with at least 10 other couples, all waiting for a Deputy Commissioner to come and get us. We could also see that there were weddings going on all over the balcony just next to us. It was a wedding madhouse. In one regard, I was operating under a sensory overload at this point, but in another, I think I've never felt more alive, more inside of a moment.

I looked up, and there standing in front of me was an old friend I had known 15 years before. She was there to be a witness for another couple who had not shown up. She knew both Iris and I, and we did not have a witness, because Nathan was not yet 18. So, she became our witness. With Nathan standing by, we got married right then.

This photo shows Iris on the left, me on the right, and Nathan above us. We have just come out of City Hall, so we are newly married. The people on the far right are still in the line waiting to get in.

I have in my hand our copy of the license, which, it turned out, never got certified by the State of California. In the end, our 2004 marriage was never valid. In November 2004, We got a letter from the County Clerk offering us our money back, or we had the option of donating it to a fund to fight for marriage equality. We donated the money. Until 2008, when for another brief window of time, it was an option for same-sex couples to wed in California, we hung our 2004 marriage license on the wall in our house.

Now we have the 2008 license hanging on the wall. It has a little more strength behind it, in that it actually got certified by the State, and so we are legally married in California. But now we are a token couple, one of 18,000 (up from the 3200 in 2004!). Right now the rule is that nobody else coming after us can have what we have. They'll have to be satisfied with separate but unequal.


Here's what's true:
Until it is possible for my marriage to Iris to be recognized by the United States government and across all 50 states, my marriage to Iris is not equal to any one of those heterosexual couples' who walked in the front door of City Hall on 2/14/04, even though I have married Iris over and over again.

I am glad we married on 2/14/04, and I thank Gavin Newsom for his courageous step. But this is a far way from being a done deal.

The Tale of Two Friendships

I saw my friend Denah this week. By itself, that sentence, "I saw my friend Denah this week," is not so remarkable. The thing is, my friendship with Denah exists entirely in the context of an annual gathering on the occasion of Groundhog Day, February 2nd.

I met Denah at a Groundhog Day party, one that my dear (best ever) neighbor Barbara holds every year on February 2, about 6 or 7 years ago. From the first, Denah and I hit it off. We dove into the deep end of conversation that first night, discussing spiritual matters of great importance to us both. I left the party with a sense that this woman had been a real gift to me. Since then, as she has reappeared on each February 2nd of my life, I have had the opportunity to report in on my adventures, as she has had with me. It continues to be a friendship of great sweetness and remarkable strength. It is quite extraordinary.

Seeing Denah this year reminded me of my good friend Lynne, who died in 2002. The two of them are unlike each other, but the friendships themselves have a similarity. Here's how I met Lynne: for many years, 10 to be exact, I took a particular BART train in the morning to my job in San Francisco. I am a creature of habit, and I had a particular place where I liked to stand to catch the train, because it positioned me well for the exit I wanted take once I reached my destination. It turned out there was another woman who was like me in this way, and one day one of us broke the unspoken 'no talking in line' rule. I can't remember if it was me or Lynne, but she or I asked the other what book she was reading. That did it! After that, we never stopped talking. And, as it turned out, having 30 to 35 minutes together, 5 days a week was actually quite a lot of time with which to build a friendship. From then on, we sat together from North Berkeley to Embarcadero (where I exited) and talked, or read, for several years, until Lynne got sick with her fatal illness.

Lynne was a highly skilled nurse practitioner, and she knew full well what her prospects were when she broke the news to me. By then, she and I had gotten together only once outside of the context of our BART-ride friendship, but I was moved to ask if I could be a part of her support system, and she agreed. I joined a circle of Lynne's closest friends, and it was surprising to me that they had all heard of "Joan from BART."

What I want to say about both of these friendships, aside from how deeply grateful I am for them, is that they are in large measure the product of a characteristic I've shared with these two women, that of constancy. This is a quality that doesn't get much play in our culture anymore, as fast-paced as it is.

Now, I am not saying I am a paragon of this virtue. I too can abandon myself in the face of stress or depression. I am saying that it is good to be reminded of what I can gain by remaining faithful, being constant to myself and those who matter to me. Thank you Denah and Lynne.

The Flesh Crayon Lives!

You may be aware of a strange thing that happened about a week and a half ago: all over Facebook, women were posting the color of their bras. Apparently, this had something to do with breast cancer awareness, but honestly, it looked like a virtual underwear party of some kind.

But what jumped out at me was one of my Facebook friends posting simply, "Nude." And, by that, she meant a color, the one that approximately matches her skin. Suddenly it hit me: Nude lingerie is the new Flesh Crayon!

All this time, we've white folks have been wearing nude pantyhose, nude bras, and nude panties, all the while eschewing the use of crayons labelled "flesh"!

Friends, the Flesh Crayon was renamed "Peach" nearly 50 years ago "partially as a result of the U.S. Civil Rights movement," according to the Crayola Crayon Color History, available from Crayola. How is it that we've managed so completely to ignore the same principle as applied to our undergarments?

I don't know, but I'm done with it. I'm not going to buy any more of it.

The Pinnacle of Seed Catalogs

Living where I do, I can walk over to a place I fondly call "the Hort" (Berkeley Horticultural Nursery) any time of the year and buy starts of all the vegetables that are seasonally ready for planting here in the San Francisco's East Bay.

But, my heart still skipped a beat when I saw the Seed Savers Exchange 2010 Catalog of Heirloom Seeds, Books and Gifts in my mailbox this week. First: it is stunning. The cover features a crate of many varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

And then, when you open it up, you get 97 pages of full color photographs and detailed, useful descriptions of hundreds of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Just look at a few of the wonderful names:

• Long Red Florence (onion)
• Bloody Butcher (corn)
• Amish Deer Tongue (lettuce)
• Bulgarian Carrot (pepper)
• Ten Commandments (gourd)
• Envy (soybean)
• Long Island Cheese (squash)
• Nebraska Wedding (tomato)
• Small Shining Light (watermelon)

The descriptions for each seed include where it came from (including if it was sourced by a member of the Exchange) and recommended best uses. Last year, I bought the Hutterite Soup Bean seeds, and, now that I have grown them and cooked with them, I can attest to the fact that they have performed as advertised here: "One of the best heirloom varieties for making soup. Beans soak up water well and cook very quickly. Makes a truly excellent creamy white soup."

In the middle of the catalog, you can read about Heritage Farm, in Decorah, Iowa, where the folks who started Seed Savers Exchange make their home, and the Exchange has its operations. By the time I get to this part of the catalog, I am half in love with these people, and I start imagining spending my summer vacation attending the Annual Meeting. This seed catalog is a powerful thing.

Of course, I've been feeling rather well disposed toward Iowa lately, what with the way things have been going down at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in our fair State of California... Maybe a whole lot of us ought to spend our tourist dollars in the Hawkeye State. What do you think?

If you want to get on this wacky bandwagon, buy some seeds, or just look at incredibly lovely pictures, you can download your very own copy of the catalog. You have now had fair warning of its potency.

Bermuda Grass, the Teacher

Yes, you read correctly. This is a reflection on persistence, the long view.

I started down this path of thinking when I read Novella Carpenter's New Year's Resolutions. She aims to deal with both Bermuda grass and perennial buckwheat, having found that her animals won't eat either. She writes, "This spring, I’ll be hosting a big weed pulling party. I might even hire some local workers, but that last stand of weeds has to go!" I wish her the best, I really do.

When I moved into my house in 1986, here's what the front yard looked like:

It's perhaps not as clear as it might be, but behind and under the sad little bushes is a lawn of well established Bermuda grass.

Now, there is at least one positive thing to say about Bermuda grass. It is drought tolerant. It is also poison tolerant. It is probably nuclear fallout tolerant. I guess that's three positive things...

Anyway, despite these advantages, one of the first things I undertook after moving into the house was the removal of that Bermuda grass. Or, let me say, I began my relationship with the Bermuda grass. Here I am, looking fairly pleased with myself, thinking I am establishing dominion over my little section of California real estate.

After this step, I put in a front garden, with raised beds where I am able to take advantage of the best sunlight I have to grow a few vegetables every year.

However, whereas most plants have one way of propagating themselves--and some of the vegetables I want to grow depend on me, the hapless farmer, for help--the many-talented Bermuda grass has not one, not two, but three ways of spreading itself! Seeds, runners, and rhizomes. That's impressive.

The root systems of Bermuda grass can be a couple of yards below ground. For all I know, the ancient "mother root" from my former yard persists under my pretty front garden. Either that or the interlopers I still occasionally find are the result of roots travelling from my neighbors' yards to mine, under driveways and side walks. It's an absolute breeze for this plant.

Vigilance and constancy: these are what are required against a foe of this caliber. When it comes down to it, Bermuda grass is like a really bad habit, a bad penny. You know what I mean, perhaps. In the 12-step programs, there is a saying that gets repeated at every meeting: Keep Coming Back. It speaks to the regularity and fortitude that is required to deal with pernicious issues. Some troubles stay with us, over and over, coming back time and time again. So we must stay with them also, watching for encroachments, of seeds, runners, rhizomes or whatever it may be. And, sometimes practicing things in the garden is not such a bad way to build good new habits, after all.