See Spot

I'm not sure my eyes are working properly anymore. Of course, they never have. All I have to do is take my glasses off for a moment to realize how lucky I am to be alive now because in another era I would have blundered into a tar pit. I would have been stomped into salsa by a mastodon. I would have died young but at least I would never have seen it coming.

I should have my eyes checked again. But it's been less than a year since the last exam and I can wait. It isn't any one thing, anyway. Seems like I'm always trying to navigate around the smudgy bits and exploring my trifocals for areas of clarity in any given situation. Supposedly I have a cataract that no one is in a hurry to do anything about. I also have enough floaters that in certain lights it's like I'm living in an aquarium, which isn't so bad. The only place it's really annoying is at the piano. I wonder if I can get sheet music the size of the old Dick And Jane book we learned from in first grade. We sat in its shadow. Four kids could make a fort out of that sucker without even using blankets.

I like to think of my eyes as having "let themselves go." That's the expression people use to describe old people who have flat-out given up on trying to be something they're not. I guess it's meant to be derogatory. Seems to me if you're an old woman who rolls out of bed and into a muumuu and scuff slippers, you've got a good grip on things. Mostly no one describes me as having let myself go because it implies I was holding it together before, and there's not a lot of evidence for that. Comfort, Sloth, and I are a mighty team, and Vanity doesn't have a shot against us when we stick together.

Some things I can see more clearly now, in this life pause we've been given. Our isolation is not without its blessings, especially with the stripping-away of diversion and trivial pursuit. So much of what we do is designed to distract us from our eventual, unimportant demise. We acquire mindlessly, we manufacture conflict. We're desperate and diligent in filling up our lives, we feed our rage and our fears. We complain about our busyness and yet we feed that too. We don't like to think about our lifetimes contracting. But there's no getting around that. There's something to be said about knowing what's important, and a lot of unimportant stuff needs to be moved out of the way to see it.

What we need to do is let ourselves go. We're the ones in our way. Every best joy is simple. We all need things for simple survival, and we should do our best to see that everyone gets them, because right now the winners and losers are determined by a game of dice. But we don't need much--not nearly as much as we imagine. Rejoice in good food. Rejoice in food at all. Go outside. Stay inside. Play music. Play at all. Make art. Make out. Make up. Everything is bigger than we are, and that is the biggest comfort and joy of all.

I rejoice in weak eyes that can still see, and I rejoice in you, and in everything that still wings and still slithers and still sprouts on a still-green earth. And I'll fight for all of these tomorrow, but today I'll let my thankfulness for it all roll through me. Gratitude is another word for peace.

That much is clear.

The Pilgrims' Beavers

I'm reading a book right now that claims that no one would ever have heard of my Mayflower Pilgrim forebears if it weren't for all the beaver they got. Without all the money they earned from slaughtering most of the beavers and sending their carcasses back to England, their venture would have foundered, and here we'd be with no Thanksgiving. No Thanksgiving, and probably no beaver either, because someone else would have gotten them instead. Beaver pelts were amazingly valuable. They made the very best hats. The English were all about the hats.

I imagined the beaver hat would look a little like the Davy Crockett raccoon hat, only with a flat flap hanging behind like a French Foreign Legion dude, but actually one has to go to a certain amount of trouble to make a good beaver hat.  You don't use the outside guard hairs at all, but the vast interior belly fuzz can be felted into the most durable, softest material ever. If you ever felt beaver, you'll have to agree. Once you've felted your beaver, you can shape it any way you want, and then all that's missing is the satin or silk ribbons and sashes and plumes from, preferably, a fancy bird on the verge of extinction. According to the book I'm reading, England was going through about 23,000 hats a year during the time of the Pilgrims, and each one required two beavers. They'd have used their own beavers, but they'd finished them all off by that time, and they were nearly extinct in Europe, too. All of which made dead American beavers even more valuable.

Naturally, we were scraping the bottom of the beaver barrel in no time, but we still got cash and Thanksgiving out of it, so it wasn't all bad. Unfortunately, beavers have a rather outsized effect on the landscape--not as much as we do, but still. It's a really big deal. They create a series of dams and build lodges that bunches of them share. The dams create a vibrant wetland environment that many other currently dwindling species rely on. And they slow down the water's inevitable rush to the ocean, purify it, deepen the water table, and protect against both drought and flood in ways the Army Corps of Engineers and Concrete can only dream about. Beavers are just about as important a species for keeping everything running smoothly as you can get. We've let them rebound a bit, here and there, where we don't have anything else going on.

Someone with a hankerin' for gold once took ten Canadian beavers to Tierra del Fuego with an eye to a commercial fur venture. It didn't pan out, so he let his beavers go, and they got busy, as is their reputation, and eventually numbered 100,000. Sadly, the tropical forests were destroyed, and no one got any wetlands out of it, either, because tropical forests don't work that way. Oops!

I hear the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine has tanked also. Presumably it was reported to be in trouble 150 years ago when everyone had gotten all the cod they could snag with hooks and lines, and there were calls for some kind of conservation program, but then the fishermen came up with equipment that could haul up the deeper layers of fish, and the panic was off. Eventually they came up with ships that could basically comb the whole ocean, and you could peel all the cod out of the nets and shake out the other living debris and life was good for the fishermen for a while, but now they have to shut everything down, because the cod is gone.

It may not be too early to conclude that we do not, as a group, make the wisest choices when we focus solely on what we can stash in our pockets for a while. It might make more sense to step back and get a wider view. But we're more inclined to chew on the landscape without building a lodge.

Fudging It

Dave likes to tell people I'm a great dessert-maker. Not because it's true, but because he really likes desserts and doesn't want to make them himself, and I will. I make them with love. Also butter, chocolate, cream, sugar, and nuts, which are more important. You could take all those things and put them in a bag and swing them around your head a few times and you'll get something out of it that people like. I actually have no idea what I'm doing when I make dessert. All kinds of shit can go wrong. There's hard ball this, and soft ball that, and you can't make things reliably fluffy unless you know what spells to cast. Or, you know, some chemistry.

Take my annual Thanksgiving dessert. My sister-in-law was in charge of dinner years ago and so I ran it by her. "I was thinking of making something different this year--I cut it out of a magazine," I said. She was skeptical. "Does it have chocolate?" she wanted to know. I consulted my clipped recipe. "It's called "Fudge-Slathered Fudge Cake," I said. "Bring it," she said. A tradition was born.

Fifty shades of turkey

We change traditions in this family like we change our shorts. A couple years ago Elizabeth showed up lugging a forty-pound side dish of Corn Pudd'n. We all had a spoonful. "New tradition!" we sang out in unison. "It's a Paula Deen recipe," she said carefully. "You do not want to know what's in it."

I still don't know everything that's in it, but part of it is made from pureed fat person.

The Fudge-Slathered Fudge Cake was a hit too. It looked weird, but it tasted great. The cake part gets all its lift from egg whites, momentarily, and then when it cools it shrinks and craters into something with all the heft of a communion wafer. I was horrified that first year, but it comes out that way every time. The cake is only there to hold the frosting up, and the frosting is terrific. But the second year the frosting didn't set up. I started slathering it on, and it kept puddling up around the bottom like saggy pants. I was horrified, but the family gathered around it and monitored the lava flow with spoons and fingers, and everyone was happy. Some years later I stumbled onto a way to make it work right and that part has been fine ever since.

But it's a dessert. It's not going to behave just because you want it to. Every year I find a new way to

screw up the fudge cake. The egg whites got particularly exuberant in one corner this year so the whole cake was on a slant. The frosting requires bittersweet chocolate cut up so that it melts into the hot butter/cream mixture. I probably bought fancy chocolate the first few years but then I thought good ol' chocolate chips would save time and work just as well, and they have. This year I had some leftover Mini Morsels. I figured teeny chocolate chips would melt even faster, which would have been true, if it hadn't been completely false. I kept stirring and stirring and those chips weren't going anywhere. What sort of chocolate chip does not melt when plunged into cream and butter that has been boiling for twelve minutes? Why, little plastic chocolate chips, evidently. I mashed them against the sides of the bowl until most of them had succumbed, but not all. It looked like frosting with little fairy doots.

The cake tasted fine. I think everyone was thankful for it. And,  thankful that I'm not in charge of the rest of the dinner. That's another tradition.

An Apatheist's Prayer

A New York man sued his local Catholic church recently after Jesus fell on his leg and mashed it up beyond repair. It wasn't Jesus per se, but a graven image of him, and don't say we hadn't all been warned about that.

The man had been offering prayers at the marble crucifix for some time, hoping to persuade God to intervene on behalf of his cancer-stricken wife (the man's, not God's). And she recovered, and he was grateful, and offered to clean up the crucifix for the church. He tidied around it and then climbed up to wash Jesus' face, and while he was hanging on the cross (the man, not Jesus), the sculpture, which, unlike the man, was inadequately screwed, snapped off at the base and fell  on him. His leg was amputated above the knee, and he got a lawyer.

The story fascinates me because this man and I got the same basic deal--a wafer of time--and have completely different ways of looking at it. Even if I had retained a residual habit of prayer, I would never have presumed my prayers might have that kind of influence (nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt). I probably wouldn't even have sued the church. Not that the man wasn't justified; but I'm the sort of person that won't even send a burger back to the kitchen when I ordered spaghetti.

So the two of us are blundering through our lives with completely different manuals. His life is more orderly and comes with a pilot and operating instructions, and mine is random and chaotic and joyful. He navigates with a map and a destination and a suitcase full of credit and blame, and I bobble around at the mercy of the tides, with marvels at every crest and trough.

Because look. It turns out even space itself is full of crests and troughs, with starlight romping through it. And right here on my home planet, bright feathered dinosaurs nap in the mud and emerge 70 million years later with stories to tell.  Frozen frogs thaw out and hop away in the spring. Summertime bugs flit around with lanterns in their butts. All this is true.

And if that weren't enough, there also lives a toddler made out of--well you wouldn't even believe what he was made out of, it seems so inconsequential; but he started with the most modest materials, and those materials came with instructions to go forth and divide, and in not much time at all, there was an entire boy, and here he stands before me on sturdy legs and crinkles his face at me and calls me Aunt Muh. It's a small face with nothing scribbled on it yet, not judgment or guile, but it's powerful enough to erase my stained past and replace it with a supple, rolling present.

I crinkle back.

Even if I believed the universe had an office in charge of customer satisfaction, which I don't, I would not suppose that my life comes with any kind of warranty. And yet I assume (why not?) that I will live a long time, by human standards, and drift painlessly into oblivion at the end of it. That may not happen, and even if it does, I know I'm on the downward slope and the decades are picking up speed. But what a fortune is mine: I got a ticket on this ride. And so, for the tides of space, and the fireflies, and the little boy, and the astonishment at it all; for all of this, I pray (why not?) that when my last thought drops out of me like a petal into the sea, it will be: thank you.

Thanksgiving

There are many woes in the world. There is war and violence, sickness, starvation, love lost or mislaid. Here is what passes for woe in my world: I lack the discipline to park my fanny on a piano bench long enough to learn the music I love. "I wish I could get into some kind of routine, like I had when I was still taking lessons," I pouted to Dave, who nodded, while he flipped the contents of a saute pan. He is a saute-pan artiste.

Dave gave it some thought. "I have an idea," he said. "Why don't you sit down at the piano every night while I'm making your dinner?" Two things sprang to mind. One, this would totally work. Two, I may be the luckiest person in the whole world.

Over the next week, a kinship began to develop between Schumann and garlic frying in butter. It is the smell and soundtrack of rapture. It's no great thing that I feel gratitude a dozen times a day. It would disgrace me if I didn't. Fortune has billowed over me my whole life, none of it earned. It's not that I don't deserve it. It's that no one ever does.

I should, with good health, be able to devote myself to learning the entire Schumann canon, in the time given to me by a respectable pension from the Postal Service. There are those who would say that I earned that time with my thirty-two years of work, and in a small, unimportant way, I have. But the world is full of people who have worked harder and done greater things who will never have the particular freedom I've been afforded.

Garlic in butter. They say the sense of smell hangs right next to our memories in a closet in the brain. There is someone who was dear to my heart who never caught a decent break in her life. She lived the whole of it with pain and struggled to remain hopeful, and scavenged all her luck from an abundance of both hardship and friendship, never failing to find the flecks of gold in her pan of black sand. She did not deserve her luck any more than I do mine.

When I paint a landscape, sometimes I pull out a thin line of violet behind my backlit tree or glowing rock formation. It grates against the warmth of the subject and vibrates life into it. My violet line is as thin and sharp as grief, and grief is what shines behind something wonderful that was given and is now gone. I feel that edge of violet shimmering behind me sometimes and am thankful for

how much I've had and lost. I have done nothing to earn the abundance in my life, and the only thing I can say in my defense is that I am grateful, all the time.