wideeyedfunk

Category: Life

Always so surprising.

  • Nuns and the Cosmos.

    I saw two nuns standing outside a condominium construction project that used to be a giant Catholic church. Back in about 1920 Buffalo was rich. Gangsta rich. More millionaires than any other city in the United States and that was back when a million was a million because a cup of coffee was about nickel and that included your lunch. The 1920s gangsta rich families built and maintained what seems like a thousand fabulously vast glories to God and themselves. The blasted, sinking shells of these vainglories litter the urban landscape. This one, the one with the nuns today, at least was spared generations of bats, birds, and urine-soaked crack mattresses. It is going straight from sins to kitchen sinks in a year.

    So, the nuns. One nun was holding a latte cup and the other had a green baseball hat on over her wimple. Both of them were wearing kicks. Sneakers. And their body postures weren’t all stiff and nunny. One was leaned back gesticulating (with her latte cup) and the other nun sort of bent forward in a laugh. I was reaching to open my car window to entirely violate their privacy by eavesdropping when the light changed and I had to go. I managed to get a look at them though – and here’s the thing. They were young. Like mid 30s. Maybe mid 30s on the outside.

    The nuns.
    The nuns.

    I parked the Pathfinder and shopped my way through the co op where everyone is slightly hipper than everyone else but I was distracted and couldn’t play the concerned hip citizen game very effectively. How do people know how to become a nun? Are there still places that take new nuns? How do people know where to look for them? Secret signs and sigils? Do you need a personal endowment like back in the Medieval day? Was there a Google search in these nuns’ pasts?

    I was stumped. Thunderstruck. Once again awed by the variety of life and the greatness of the human experience. It was too much. I came home and spent a happy 90 minutes cruising the Orion telescope website. I need a Dobsonian or a refractor scope right now to feel properly small again – to shrink humanness back into its tiny speck of consciousness. Nuns, not nuns, Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog, you, me – we are all just cells floating in the universe’s vastiness.

    Now for a glass of wine.

  • Responsibility avoidance, Or, There are two kinds of spurs my friend.

    The grass in the back yard is long. Mowing has become critical.

    IMG_2093

    The new back stoop remains unfinished. The parts are in the garage, some assembly required. The new house colors, still undecided. Stripping the old paint, urgent.

    Stoop

    But it’s raining. 47 hundredths of an inch today so far in a long slow endless shower. Well now, that’s just too bad. All of the day’s chores were outside chores. Howsoever will I pass the time?

    RainGauge

    I’ll tell you how, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and a lace knitting project. 178 minutes of men of poor moral character. Italian made cotton Tahki yarn in a peaceable spring leaf green, bamboo needles, and a simple leaf lace scarf pattern. A match made in work avoidance heaven.

    knitting

    I knit three, and watched Blondie shoot Tuco down from the gallows for the second time… “I’ll keep the money and you can have the rope”. Slipped one purlwise, knit two and passed slip stitch over while Tuco caught Blondie in his hotel room… “There are two kinds of spurs my friend. Those that come in by the door, and those that come in by the window.” Slip slip knit while Angel Eyes’ thug Wallace beat the name of the cemetery out of Tuco and the prison camp orchestra played.

    40 minutes of the movie to go, Tuco and Blondie are just about the blow the bridge, and I figure I can knit another 20 or 30 rows if I don’t get too caught up in the three way standoff over the grave.

  • Sunday morning in the rain.

    We rented a 2005 Dodge Ram 4×4, grey with a red capper top, from a guy who doesn’t like over taxation and who is concerned that the WideEyedSpouse’s new hologram infused New York state driver’s license will be remarkably difficult to counterfeit. The rental rates were hundreds cheaper than one of the chain operations. The truck is sticky with years of mysterious stains. The side panels are dense with underbrush scrapes. “I buy ‘em prescratched and pass the savings on to you,” the guy told us. For once I feel no fear that I’m going to be fiscally punished for a minor rental car infraction. I didn’t even use a cup holder for my iced latte yesterday. Madness I know.

    We stayed the first night in an airport Marriott. The toilet overflowed for no reason. The light switches had grime encrustations. The floor corners desperately cried out for a solid vacuuming with a crevice tool. Other guests were also given our room so that the door slapped against the security lock five minutes after I crawled my head-colded, jet-lagged, dehydrated self into bed. “Is someone in there?” they called in to us.

    This morning I am lounging in a soft featherbedded mattress looking out over a rain drenched perennial garden to a misty Kachemak Bay.

    IMG_4335

    All night the rain pattered on the metal roof and the birch trees fluttered in a small wind. I’m in a treehouse, I’d think. Then, no, I’m on a boat, an old boat with a wooden railed gangway between me and the open sea.

    IMG_1737

    For the same price as the begrimed city Marriott we slept in someone’s mad dream –  a self-built compound of small outbuildings and gardens with cats and hens scurrying through the blooms.

    IMG_1736

    There are rules here, no shoes inside, no cats inside, park at the end of the compound…I had to sneak over to an earlier breakfast seating to score some coffee. But so clean. So calm. No anxiety pheromones leached into the walls. No thunderous Chinese and Korean air cargo jets landing on the roof. Just windows and flowers and a rooster crowing now and again.

  • The third crane on the Fish Dock.

    My phone binged at me while I was stopped for an unloading school bus on Homer Spit. I watched the cutest collection ever of tiny-wee Xtra Tuff boots splash down into a puddle at the bus exit. I glanced at the console where my phone rested. “Third yellow crane in,” the message said.

    YellowCrane

    The flashing red lights eventually quit blinking and I turned left onto Fish Dock Road. I putt putted the overloaded minivan between forklifts hauling fish bins, hoses, and hairy-faced men in overall Helly Hansens. Their Xtra Tuffs weren’t particularly cute. My minivan rental did not match the lifted pickups parked all over the place.

    There it was, the Puk uk.

    Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.
    Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.

    I walked over to the skipper to introduce myself. “Hi,” I stood next to him looking down into the Puk uk. “I’m C….” I told him. He glanced at me. “I figured,” he said.

    My logistics handlers were already loading the WeatherPorts, fuel, and other gear. The skipper craned the stuff onto his foredeck using the Fish Dock crane – you pay for the cranes in 15 minute increments. We weren’t in a rush, but time was money so no standing around chatting.

    Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.
    Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.

    I unloaded 25 bins of food and science equipment from the beleaguered minivan to plastic lined brailer bags. Hopefully the many layers of plastic between our food and the Bering Sea/North Pacific will keep everything safe and dry. I don’t like to think of the oatmeal and rice swelling into a rancid mass in the coming days.

    TotesAtDock

    I hopped down onto the boat deck to help Paula the Deckhand guide the brailers and then unload loose bins and gear from a fish bin the skipper lowered onto deck over and over again. Paula made a European noise in her throat. “What IS all this?” she gestured to the lumber, propone tanks and dozens of plastic crates. “Life and science for 9 people for a month,” I told her.

    Paula, left. WideEyedFunk, right. Image by C. Haupert 5/7/14.
    Paula, left. WideEyedFunk, right. Image by C. Haupert 5/7/14.

    It was over in two hours. I shook the skipper’s hand, “See you in a week,” I said, “Smooth sailing,” I told him. We’ll meet up again on Adak.

    WideEyedFunkHomerAK

  • Indiana Jones may have been a little smelly.

    Think it through. He packs a gun and a whip in the smallest suitcase I’ve ever seen. There just isn’t room for spare socks and underpants.

    He wears the same pants, shirt, and hat throughout every field expedition. That suitcase is too small for a couple of clean sets of clothes.

    If you add it all up, he must have been really amazingly smelly. So smelly that it defies belief that he could sneak up on even the sleepiest, slow-brained guard.

    I am speaking from a position of deep knowledge and experience here. I just packed up my gear for a field session in the far northern wilderness. Gun, whip, hat – sure they are in the bottom of the crate if you want to think so. Let’s say that the moment I learned the grant support came through I checked the loads on the revolver and tossed the whip into my packing crate, then finished off a couple of fingers of whiskey.

    Or, you can picture me huddled over the computer monitor late into the night filling out over 100 forms for the university and the federal government so that I could legally perform the field research and justify spending the money. Exciting indeed. There may have been a couple of fingers of red wine involved.

    IMG_0208The packing crate, duffel, and day pack are downstairs lurking in the front parlor. Hamish the Corgi doesn’t like them. Miss Tibbit the Useless carefully monitored each item as it went in. Wiggins the Ancient Cat is considering peeing in the duffel. Or the crate. He can’t decide.

    Where ever Wiggins does decide to wee, he’ll be weeing on SEVERAL extra pairs of socks. I cut down on the collection this year and included only 16. So I like clean socks. I’ll be gone for a while.  I won’t provide details but there are also plenty of underpants. And some extras of everything else. Plus, my eucalyptus oil for dabbing on my belt.  I like to sniff eucalyptus all day and it aroma-protects me from colleagues who pack more like Indy. Way back in the 1990s, a colleague told me that they didn’t see the sense in bringing underwear to the remote field work because it just gets dirty anyway.

    We were out in the wilds for two months that year.  Yaaaah.

    Think good weather thoughts in a northerly direction. Think good garden thoughts for the WideEyedSpouse as he is stuck here with my perennial beds and vegetable dreams. Talk to you on the other side – unless I manage dispatches from the far beyond.

    WideEyedFunk, Buffalo NY, May 1.

  • Toilets, and I didn’t know my mom lurked in my head.

    I don’t know what it is about my neighborhood, but people swap out their toilets A Lot. At least once a month there’s a toilet sitting on the curb on our three block dog patrol. We’ve replaced a toilet or two around here, so I’m familiar with the brands and qualities of toilets on the market. I can tell by the empty new toilet box leaning against the old, abandoned toilet whether or not the home is 1) a rental, 2) being prepared for sale, or 3) a cared-for owner inhabited domicile.

    If the toilet is a brand I’ve never heard of, if the flush rating is listed as 4 or 5 rather than 10 – it’s a rental. If it is a good brand but lower end model, probably someone did a quick refurb to put a place on the market – you get the name but you aren’t out of pocket too much. There are a bunch of older folks in our neighborhood and as they sell up after 40 or 50 years, their bathrooms always get a quick shakedown: new toilet, stick on tile floors, paint (as we well know around here having eradicated a perk up with great labor). If the empty box is a Brand Name, Tall, Flush Rate 10, High Efficiency, Dual-Flush, Piston-pump Toilet, we’re talking an investment in comfort and trouble free use. That’s a homeowner friends.

    This all comes to mind because one block down, between our place and the park loop, someone has a toilet out to the curb. They’ve been in the house for about a year. I noticed that the old toilet is cracked on the base and is one of those old, small, low models. One of the ones that feel dangerously low once you are used to the Tall models. When out visiting and making use of the facilities, have you ever felt yourself dropping too far and panicked a little bit? Then you’ve got a tall boy at home and have run into an older low model. It’s uncomfortable and startling. I’m thinking of starting a Coalition to Remove All Potties that are Short (CRAPS) (heh.). Sorry.

    The point of all this is that I thought nothing of the commonplace sight of the neighbor’s toilet sitting on the curb. Until this morning. The sun was shining on Miss Tibbit’s glossy fur and Hamish was prancing along with his tail stump and head held high on our way to the park. The daffodils and earliest tulips seemed extra perky. It’s Easter and I imagined all kinds of little kids and families putting on their Easter finery and posing for pictures (like we used to do when I was little). I figured that almost everyone in the Eastern Time Zone was sick on candy by now.

    I saw the neighbor’s toilet and I heard my mind speaking in my WideEyedMom’s voice “Look at that toilet – and on Easter…” I even turned my head to roll my eyes at Hamish to share the disgrace. Trash the day before Easter, or say, the day after Easter, is just trash – not great but what are you going to do? On Easter? Crass.

    Funny how these things sneak up on you. You think you are your own person, only to discover your parents living inside your mind.

  • My heart is a like a neutron star, dense and heavy.

    My heart is like a magnetar, dense and heavy and a thousand times magnetized.

    Four weeks from this day I will board a flight to the far away field location. I will have no phone, no lights, no motor car – ok, we do have a satellite phone for emergencies but not much else. Our sole luxury is the outhouse we are taking with us. Stacks of long underwear, socks, field pants, and equipment are growing in the front parlor. This is remote field research.

    My heart is heavier every hour. I look at the WideEyedSpouse and I think, I won’t see you for weeks and weeks. I pet the dogs and I worry – will you be ok while I’m gone? Wiggins the Ancient Cat creaks by, I fret, will you be alive when I come home?

    The weight in my chest is a coalescence of the open wide joy of learning that I was going to have a funded research program this summer. As the time for leaving grows closer, the plane tickets purchased, the boat charters paid, my happy heart tripping transforms to a sullen, weighty thunk.

    I know from past summers that this heart weight will increase. That I will be walking and talking and acting normal but this density lump in my chest will work to hold me in place. I’ll feel it sagging in the pericardium, threatening to rip through and plummet past my stomach to my knees, my feet, the floor.

    When the WideEyedSpouse drives me to the airport, the Pathfinder loaded down with crates and duffles and neutron star hearts, I’ll feel breathless. When I turn and walk into the airport, dragging my burdens with me, my magnetar heart will strain toward its lodestone as he drives away. When the plane takes off, I’ll feel it struggling, pulling to the ground, desperately reaching, trying to keep me home.

    Then…snap. The plane will level off and there will be no turning back. Magentar heart changes to neutron star heart, becomes tripping wide open joy heart and the pericardium can’t hold in the radiant glow of a well loved job. This transformation is heart denial, and a simple, true trust that I’ll head back to the lodestone in the coming months.

  • The little table asked to come home with me.

    We meant to get to the estate sale earlier but the lure of sleeping late on Saturday morning proved too much. As it turned out, we got there in time. This estate sale was 4 stories of furniture, rugs, leaded windows, and interesting heaps of stuff. It was in a partially converted industrial warehouse in downtown Buffalo and I can’t figure out what was going on. Maybe some living space, maybe some packrat issues, maybe a business?  Wasn’t clear.

    SoldSignThe stuff was arranged on raw cement floors flea market style on the first and fourth  floors, stacked warehouse shelving on part of the second, and weird decadent lounge on the second and third with little side rooms of warehouse chaos. Everything was tagged twice. Black price was Friday. Red price was Saturday morning.  Everything was at least half off the red price and we were told by another dusty scrounger that it was best to just talk to Andrew (one of our local estate sale moguls) for the best deal.

    HeaderThe WideEyedSpouse and I both have wicked colds but we girded ourselves and tromped through the levels twice, three times. Second floor: antique leaded glass window: $20. Second floor, loft: mahogany mini side table $20. Not veneer. First floor: bureau with bookmatched drawer veneer $30. Fourth floor: two ironstone platters: $10 and one leathertopped side table: $20.

    ChairI was running my hand over the veneer on the bureau when I saw the little maple kitchen table and chairs. My breath caught. It was weird how my breath caught. I saw like it had happened, was happening, would happen again and again – I saw myself sitting at that table in my bathrobe drinking coffee and reading the paper in the morning sun. The table and chairs aren’t anything special. They’re probably c. 1920s, hard used, and one chair is sort of broken. They were dirty. Didn’t matter, they were already mine.  I looked at the price tag. Red price said $100.

    The sharks were circling tighter. I felt a little thrill of fear. I needed the floor person who established prices and marked items sold – ah! There she was about fifty feet away with people walking toward her. I made eye contact and smiled big, bright, like she was family I hadn’t seen in years. She started for me and ignored the other people. The power of positive feelings! The little kitchen table and chairs were mine. Er, ours. The WideEyedSpouse is welcome to sit there with me.

    BureauThe people milling and swirling around the sale were getting increasingly desperate while we loaded our loot. “You want to sell that?”  an older couple asked when we walked by with the bureau. I thought they were joking but maybe not. “How much did you pay for that?” a chic blond asked us moments later, her eyes were running over the intact drawer fronts. “Thirty dollars,” I said. “You done good,” she told me and broke into a stiff jog toward the building entrance.

    The little table is all set up in the kitchen. I scrubbed it and the chairs with a vinegar and water mix. The Spouse tightened some screws. I sat at it to clip coupons and shuffle through the Sunday paper. After three years living here, I felt warm, and safe, and settled.

    InKitchen

  • Why my laundry day just got easier.

    “You ask if you’re my laundry hump like it’s some kind of punishment.”  The WideEyedSpouse watched me fold another one of his t-shirts and sipped his Milk Stout Nitro. “Honestly, I’m a little taken aback,” he added.

  • I think I’m doing adventure wrong. Or at least wearing the wrong clothes.

    A spring Orvis catalog came in the mail yesterday. Usually print catalogs are trash carefully delivered to my door – from the mail carrier’s hand to my recycling bin. This time the economically-advantaged adventure vibe sucked me in. Vests with useful pockets. Ripstop trousers. Manly jewelry that signals rugged adventuresomeness. I’m trying to decide if men buy that for themselves or receive it as gifts.

    Okonijima Game Reserve as pictured in Orvis March 2014 catalog, page 16.
    Okonijima Game Reserve as pictured in Orvis March 2014 catalog, page 16.

    Page 16 stopped me dead. Above the expedition pants and vintage military belt there’s an evocative picture of a luxury lodge at a game preserve in Namibia. I can’t take my eyes off of it. I can see a comfy bed, white pillows, chairs, reading lamps and I think I see a bathroom tucked discretely in the back. I bet there’s staff, too.

    I live in the wilds for weeks to months most summers. My expedition pants are ancient Carhartt’s (because I think they stopped making women’s work pants) and WideEyedSpouse’s old khakis. My belt is the same leather belt I’m wearing right now, but soaked with eucalyptus oil so that pleasant smells waft from my always-on rain gear.

    My lodge is a battered Eureka bombshelter tent. It has a thin insulated air mattress, a cleanish sweatshirt as a pillow, a flashlight, and no toilet. My lodge does have a spider bat – my trusty halibut knocking stick that’s like a tiny baseball bat. I use it to take out the monstrous subarctic spiders. On rat infested islands it is also the rat bat. Unless they chew through my lodge floors I consider the rats to be warm companions, but sometimes the squirming and squeaking gets annoying and I need to administer warning knocks in the vicinity.

    I am sitting here at my kitchen table staring at this lodge picture. Staring at the fancy pants. Thinking.

    Dear Orvis, I am writing to ask if you are interested in sponsoring…