wideeyedfunk

Category: Life

  • Packing Beets (Beats?)

    The WideEyedSpouse and I faced each other across a bin full of iced up, dripping beet bundles. Hundreds of other beet bins were slushing around behind me in the warehouse. Always interesting to see what’s on the docket at the food bank.

    We volunteer on Saturday mornings once a month or so. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m grateful to have food no matter what. Maybe because I think everyone owes society something.

    I’ve repacked macaroni from massive pallet size boxes almost 5 feet tall into small 8 ounce bags. I’ve shifted weird collections of donated dry goods – cereal, cookies, crackers, whatever not-quite-expired off-brand stuff stores donate – into family sized boxes.

    This time, we were repacking beets. I like beets just fine, but let’s be real honest with each other. Beets are not first on anyone’s list.

    While I folded leaves over and shoved bunches of beets into their plastic mesh sacks, I thought about the folks getting the beets. I know they will be healthier for fresh food. Beets are powerhouses.

    Beets can be delicious. Beets also taste kind of like dirt and the root and the leaves require a certain intensity of preparation. With every sack I filled, and I alone filled dozens, maybe a couple of hundred I don’t know, it’s all lost in a red juice, icy water haze, I heard the recipient saying, sort of sadly, “oh boy, beets.”

    Maybe some folks did say that. And I sure put positivity in every sack.

    At the packing table with us, a bunch of kids from a local private high school were packing beets, too. They were quick, and my goodness did they talk. They sounded like a flock of birds, high and quick voices, ceaselessly chattering. It was charming. We learned about their friends, their rooms, their upcoming class trip. So much more and I bet they didn’t think we’d listen.

    They carefully shook all the icy water from the beet leaves – onto each other. The kid who showed up late got the worst of it. Sometimes five bunches of beets got shaken on him. I was collateral damage a lot. Somehow the WideEyedSpouse never got it. He stood clean and tall and inviolate. I was specked with beet sauce.

    Anyway, we packed beets and bounced and nodded along with the radio blaring from across the warehouse. Crunch, crunch – leaves shoved in half. Stuff, stuff – beets pushed into mesh bag. Bounce, bounce – carry empty beet bin over to the trash to dump out remaining ice and leaf waste. Bang! On the dumpster along with the beat to knock it clean.

    The spouse and I sang along, hummed, smiled at each other. The radio was tuned to an oldies station, late 1980s and early 1990s rap. It was wonderful. “I left my wallet in El Segundo. I got to get it. I got, got to get it” we sang together.

    In a lull between the beats (commercial break), I overhead our table mates talking about the music. “This would be waay better if we could pick the music.” I bet you could change the station I thought, but why would you?

     “Man,” the tallish kid with red hair said, “this is such grandpa music.”

    Oh. Sigh.

    Well, maybe I shoved the next bunch of beets into their sack a little harder.

  • Edges of my breathable world.

    Edges of my breathable world.

    Everything is different now. The stars are brighter. The sky is bluer and big, so big. When space junk bounces along the atmosphere during orbital decay, I can see the edges of my breathable world.

    The WideEyedHousehold heaved itself westward a little while ago. WideEyedSpouse, Useless Little Black Dog, Hank the Corgi, and Cat rode in the Mighty Pathfinder, and I cruised in glorious, isolated splendor in the Smooth Ride from New York to New Mexico.

    The domicile is stucco, the roof is flat, the yard is made of rocks and sand. Friends passing through town said our neighborhood looks like sandcastle mold blocks scattered down by an enormous toddler on the beach. I can’t unsee that. I watch for the stocky toddler legs and stomping feet in my nightmares. Nightmare toddler always has on a blue bunchy waterproof diaper cover. The diaper cover is suspiciously heavy looking.

    “Why did you move here?” ask the People we meet.

    “Joy,” I tell them. Because the ineffable heart lifting wonderous glee of going somewhere else, trying something else, being someone else is reason enough and too hard to explain.

    Jemez Pueblo Red Rock Trail.

  • Sticky missions

    A year and a half, more or less, of stress and misery masked by smiling fortitude. Yuck. I’d rather wail and screech. Family deaths, an unjust nation, job hunting, and illness. The horoscope writer in the newspaper hates Sagittarians because every day I’m told to keep my head down, trust no one, stay close to home. I drag on my cheerful stripy socks and live each day like it isn’t preceded by something wretched.

    Miss Tibbit the Useless, Crooked Hankie the Corgi, the WideEyedSpouse, and I walk the three block walkies circuit most evenings. Christmas lights are going up all over the neighborhood and legions of bagged leaves line the strip between the sidewalk and the street. Hank pees on as many as possible, his stout corgi body rushing to the next leaf bag each time. I can tell he loves marking up the captive yard parts. After each leg lift, he gives me a sideways look and a grin and then accelerates to the next, ears aflap.

    Tibbit ignores the leaf bags and gathers sticks. Our yard is the neighborhood stick repository. She is selective, only sticks with decent heft or length make it worthwhile. A stick pile makes sweet Tibbit smile, tongue lolling. “Ok, get a stick,” I tell her. The big sticks take some thinking, and I mean ALL of her thinking because this dog qualifies as Not Smart, and because they have to be balanced in the mouth. Twiggy ends are long but weigh less than branch ends. A dog can’t just grab hold of the middle and call it done. Her sticks fwap our legs as she rushes past us, leading the walk with head and tail high, stick mission in process.

    This is when walkies get really dynamic. Hank can’t leave the stick missions unmonitored and unmanaged. He runs just millimeters in front of the stick, the twiggy ends brushing his fuzzy corgi haunch hair, evidently an annoyance to be endured stoically when one is managing a mission. Passing leaf bag clusters require his attention so of course he falls behind. Then he rushes past us, ducking low and sleek, grabs any part of the stick he can reach to slow the mission, and heaves his body in front again. Tibbit marches on, aloof inside her sticky mission.

    So anyway. A long period of stress and misery alleviated every day by an indefatigable corgi and stick obsessed useless little black dog. Maybe not so miserable after all.

  • Be mighty. And don’t bite Miss Tibbit.

    Maintaining productivity in my humor-joy oeuvre proves difficult lately. Sure, I can see the bees in the lavender, the butterflies on the buddleja, the hostas exploding with late summer flower potential. The aromas of the herbs wander through my tiny demesne, especially when it rains after a hot day. City reek, city stress stop at my front walk. The back garden is a place of peace and joy. Except when Crooked Hank the Corgi Puppy latches on to Miss Tibbit’s tail. Not peaceful then. No how.

    But…ugh. Threats of nuclear war. Opioid epidemics. Political machinations. Hatred for people different from yourself. Nasty comments on the social media. Crazed news media. Preaching, proselytizing, vituperation.

    It wears a body down, trammels the mind, saps me.

    I need a plan to keep a daily balance because under the metamorphic existential stresses of each day, my stupid heart keeps breaking through the soot crust and beating hope hope hope-joy joy joy–wonder wonder wonder.

    Why does it do that? It actually hurts.

    So here is my plan – each step to be repeated as needed. Feel free to adapt for your circumstances:

    1. Mix a late summer cocktail and play with the dogs. I recommend the gin sour.
    1. Practice a craft, one that doesn’t drive me bananas, like Chinese watercolors or knitting but not lace knitting because the point is to feel good not incite rage.
    1. Smile. To myself. And not because of any establishment discriminatory nonsense about women should smile etc etc. Smiling relaxes the stress garbage and breaks the mean. For me it does. I smile for myself not for anyone else.
    1. Practice saying in a relaxed, non-confrontational way, “I’m not comfortable with what you are saying, please excuse me,” and also practice my saunter so I ooze implacable, indefatigable confidence of purpose walking away. Deploy my hard-won new skills. Be mighty.
    1. Keep watch for someone who can use my help. Help them.

    There it is. If you hear a bunch of barking and laughing coming from the WideEyedBackyard, well, I care a lot about the troubles of the world, but I can’t help make a strong healthy society if I go numb or break. None of us can. Peace, friends.

  • Cats and Plants

    Maranta 2017Yep. That’s a Maranta leucomeura. A scraggly specimen, too. The WideEyedSpouse espied it lurking on the back of a table at the Home Depot. “Special Buy” the tag said. I snorted. What a mess.

    The Maranta lives in the WideEyedHousehold now.

    You may be unimpressed by this prosaic moment. So would I be except for one extraordinary and upsetting fact. The Maranta can live here because Ancient Wiggins the Cat no longer does.  Old-struck, life-weary, that creaky, foul-tempered and steadfast pal of mine left the building on Saturday morning. By Sunday afternoon the Maranta had moved in, that opportunist.

    For eighteen years the household could harbor no plants without inevitable hoorka, hoorka, hoorka noises and slimy green piles on the carpets. Always on the carpet, never on the tile. Eighteen years of raptor intensity attacks on even ears of corn from the farmer’s market left unguarded on the counter. (We once hid them in the oven to prevent the hoorkas, forgot them, found them two weeks later moldering, warm, soft.)

    “As soon as that cat goes, I’m getting some plants,” I may have said, staring dark thoughts at his whiskered and smug face. On Sunday I stood among hundreds of lush limbed and tasty looking leaves. My heart ached – I couldn’t do it. Choosing a plant meant admitting that Ancient Wiggins was never coming back. Pathetic and saggy, the Maranta was desperate and sorry enough to be admissible.

    I don’t look directly at the Maranta. I approach it sideways, water it here and there, move it around from table to counter back to table because it keeps getting in the way. The Maranta hasn’t made it more than six feet into the house.

    This morning several shoots appeared under the torn up, mildew speckled leaves. New growth.

    Wiggins for Blog

  • Battle the dark.

    I ride to work in a late fall pocket of peace. The smooth ride shifts in tiny increments, only the push of gravity and receding traffic tells me we’ve accelerated. Through mad, alchemical witchery, phone and car share intelligence and only my favorite songs play on the sound system.

    The dim and grim winter days are flirting with Buffalo. Moody cloud formations flow over church spires and behind the neon bright signs of Main Street tattoo parlors and take-out shops. Pedestrians turn to moving bundles of dark coats, dark pants, dark boots. Campus is funereal: black leggings and dark jeans clad, bruised-eyed, and stressed the students approach finals week with the sick feeling that something has gone wrong. Wretched regret and infrasound wailing pollute the air of Memorial Library.

    I wore my sheep socks today, in defiance of the dim, the grim, the end-of-semester foreboding. Gamboling pink and white sheep ought to keep my feet light and my mind happy. But looking at them now, I think the sock-sheep might be in states of meditative cud chewing. They look pretty calm down there on my feet, ruminating the day away. Ha. Get it? Oh well.

  • The Kraken came to Buffalo.

    The Kraken came to Buffalo.

    Hamish the Corgi and Miss Tibbit-the-Useless forced us, absolutely forced us, to go to the land of whale hunters, pirates, beach plums, and Range Rovers. Hamish felt that his territorial expansion needed more activity in the Northeast. Miss Tibbit thought she sniffed something interesting coming from Boston-ish.

    Pirates

    We rented a house, packed ALL of the bikes and some of the wine, and aimed the Mighty Pathfinder at Cape Cod.  Hamish remembered that he cannot swim at Sheep Pond in Brewster. He remembered that a body can’t drink wave water on the beach flats of Crowe’s Pasture in Dennis. Sweet Tibbit watched ants march across the kitchen floor toward her food bowl.

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    WideEyedUncleB graciously hosted the mass of us for an afternoon in Scituate. “Hack!” Miss Tibbit coughed with purpose above his living room rug. We waited, alert and conversation suspended, for more. Later, the Spouse reported that he was prepared to catch pukies in his hands. “Great,’” I said. Later, I found the Spouse swabbing Tibbit-pukies from WideEyedCousinA’s pantry floor in Norwell. “That dog needs a bandana,” WideEyedCousinM stated, looking at Miss Tibbit. “This dog needs a hot dog,” she thought back at him, staring pointedly at the platter on the table.

    Then, on a food and pirate outing, I saw something interesting resting lonely and dusty in a jeweler’s case. The Kraken. Red eyes gleamed from the base of a giant, swollen freshwater pearl. Angry sterling tentacles curled. My hands shook and I tried to stay cool. “May I see that ring, there in the front…” I asked, shoving aside some lady blocking my view.  No really, I physically pushed her giant purse out of my way and being attached to it, she followed. WideEyedLinda wandered over, fascinated I think that I heard the Kraken’s song. “I’ll get that for you,” she said in my ear. The Kraken heard her and tightened on my finger.

    Here I sit back in the Buffalo domicile. My patchy sunburn peels. The smell of sea air fades in memory. Dogs lay sleeping, twitching with happy memories of sandy low tide flats scattered with dead crabs and Cape Cod stinks all over the place. The Kraken is with me, eyeing my world with its gleaming red gaze.

    Why can’t vacation be always?

    Kraken

  • Independence Day.

    Thanks to the bold minds and brave signers of the Declaration of Independence, and their willingness to see it through we are here now:  equal, free of abuses, repeated injuries,  and usurpations from Government, free of a Government which refuses to pass laws, free from the obstruction of justice, free of taxation without representation…er.

    Ok.

    Well.

    Thanks to the bold minds and etc. etc. were here now: basking in a glorious summer day of picnics and simply joys. The people of the WideEyedHousehold came of age in one of the New Jersey shore towns, working to serve the holidays of one hundred thousand city-folk. Now, we wallow in the quietude and privacy of a day of independence, without obligation.

    Sweet Tibbit the Useless-Little-Black dog waits patiently for more raspberries to ripen on the thicket in back yard. She already harvested all within reach using her front nibble teeth, stretching her neck, balancing her dainty toes on the edges of the raised beds to reach more. Hamish watches, pretty sure this is Not Allowed but not sure enough to administer chastisement.  I rescued enough for yard-raspberry French-toast for breakfast.

    SmokedThe WideEyedSpouse hovers over the bounty of his 16-hour overnight pork shoulder smoke. Ten pounds of darkly barked smoked pork await conversion into pulled pork sandwiches, tacos, omelets, pizzas, stews, Shepherd’s pies, burritos, lettuce wraps, grilled cheeses, soups, stir-frys – who knows what desperate lengths we’ll go to.

    The baby-toe cactus and the Venus-fly-trap feel it too, exploding with vegetation regeneration in mad blooms, and yes, picnicking in the case of the fly-trap. A desiccated gnat carcass is revealed as one trap slowly reopens in the morning sun.

    Plants

    I stand on the freshly scrubbed front porch, watching the flag undulate lazily over the bees tending their lavender in the garden. Main Street is quiet for once. Instead of driving here and there, bustling and hustling, the Good People of Buffalo seem to be taking the day. The park was full this morning of bikes and kids and dogs and golfers. We weaved and bobbed among them all on the park loop until my bike chain broke – creeee-clank – and then we walked with them.

    Flag

    Independence Day.

  • Blink.

    Blink.

    Six months I ran before the storm, eyes-wide, mind-revved, fingertips-atingle. Grim winter in my rust-belt city disappeared during a week hiking high Oahu ridges. Useless hounds, beloved corgis, and ancient cats snoozed on my tense feet during long hours at the desk. Spring came and went: the cherry blossoms, the tiny green perennial shoots, the new gardens. Summer sneaks replaced Joan of Arctic pack boots.

    Amid the lightening and squalls and winds of change in the WideEyedProfessional life, everything life passed as moments in time, each separated from the next by nearly unachievable work-burdens.

    The Spouse, he was there through this long storm. This catastrophic professo-ecological  shift. He’s still there – I’m looking at his head nod, eyelids heavy sitting at his own desk in the WideEyedOffice this evening. HeavyEyedOffice more like.

    Then, not long ago, I blinked.

    I blinked against the shocking glare of desert sunlight at Elder Brother’s house in Arizona. I blinked and my heart thumped hard twice. Like tiny bio-eAZ cactusarthquakes in my soul. The howling in my mind eased and I heard again. I blinked and saw again. Birds sang from the walls of the WideEyedFunk-West compound and strange flowers were erupting like sores on the tips of saguaro cacti. The air itself stank of otherness. I wondered, what it will be like the first time a human smells the raw stink of another planet? What will Mars smell like? The Moon? Airline air now probably but someday?

    The storm is over. I can do more than survive now. I’m so pleased to be WideEyed again.

    AZ WEF

    AZ chicken

  • The meatballs are in the crockpot.

    The outside world was a rude -6°F this morning. The dogs wasted no time out there during morning walkies. They failed utterly to enjoy the hard, crystal blue sky and sparkling snow. Fair enough. I am appreciating it from my office window.

    Death dealing icicles are dangling from every house for blocks. One neighbor has glaciers forming in the deep vee swales of his roofline, the forward ends are ten-foot long broadswords aiming for earth. Or his car. Because he parks under them.

    SnowYard

    The snow squeaks under feet and tires. The ground isn’t the ground anymore. We’ve all given up trying to clear sidewalks and driveways entirely – we’ve taken to forming a smooth surface of the trampled up, super frozen mass. My boots thunk on these elevated walkways. Miss Tibbit-The-Useless-Little-Black-Dog pees on them and it all disappears. She can’t be the only one. Melting day is going to be awesomely gross. Bleach down the neighborhood gross.

    CrystalsIn desperation I applied Swarovski Crystal tattoos this morning. They are tiny, wee crystals on adhesive. Now my cheek bones sparkle like the snow. I figure that if I disguise myself as a Snow Sprite I’ll be warmer. I won’t mind the frigid temperatures, shocking winds, and massive banks of snow. Two years of this nonsense ran the WideEyedHousehold out of Minnesota a few years ago.

    In further desperation I made meatballs in marinara sauce. A warm, meaty, herbal aroma ought to make us feel secure, warm, and content in these horrible depths of winter. They are in the crockpot now. Sure enough, their happy scent is wafting up from the kitchen. Later the Spouse and I will run out for crusty rolls and provolone cheese. Of course, we are also going to pick up snowshoe gaiters because we are going out into the cold for a hike tomorrow. Probably I should apply more Snow Sprite crystals and eat lots of meatballs in preparation.