peterography

The weekend found us in Joisy where we went for two birthday parties - my mother-in-law’s number 80 and my nephew’s number 4.    I returned late Sunday and I’m not even unpacked but things have suddenly hotted up at work with my boss making the totally unreasonable demand that a project I had promised to finish last year actually be delivered sometime this year. Doesn’t he have any sense of literary irony and dramatic tension? Meanwhile a relative of mine is having a personal and financial crisis and we’re trying to figure out how to help in our usual fluttery and dilettante fashion. I wish I was one of those square-jawed testosterone-dripping action heroes who knows how to charge into a situation and confidently bark orders. And on top of that, our little 13-year old Birman has suddenly started to issue op-ed poops about something in doorways and other heavily trafficked areas. He did it again tonight so I scolded him and locked him in his room but we have no idea what he’s trying to tell us.   Albert, our Maine Coon, speaks fluent cat, but he’s no good at translating. 

Still, pears and squash wait for no man.   This is the time of year when everything is coming in from the garden. Tonight I baked the last of our pears into the last of our ginger pear crisp. We’ve made other dishes with pears - chicken and pears, pear chutney , and pears with chocolate sauce, but Jane Brody’s ginger pear crisp is so incredibly good, and it freezes well and is a reliable hit at parties, so we can’t resist devoting most of our crop to it.

I also found myself with two big zucchini bats - the last of that crop this year. Their seeds and skins were too tough, so I cored and peeled them and quartered the fruit. I sauteeded up some big Vidalia onions with extra olive oil and then dumped the zucchini chunks into that sweet mess with some salt and pepper. They finally became soft around midnight so I put the whole thing in the refrigerator. A few hours ago my wife picked about 20 beautiful plump, red, sweet tomatoes, and tomorrow I’ll chunk them up, and make a casserole with them and the sauteed zucchini and some cheese and breadcrumbs. Now it’s time to release the Birman prisoner and join my wife in bed.

We went to dinner for Rosh Hashanah at our friend Naomi’s last night.    We supplied some of the the dessert - an apple crisp made by my wife and our very reliable ginger pear crisp that I make every year - all the apples and pears were from our trees.    Many of the people were from our usual music crowd and it was a great pleasure as always, but I was disappointed that we missed one tradition - usually when we get together on Jewish holidays the musicians play Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, but it needs a clarinet and Peter, our outstanding clarinetist, had to leave early.  

 I was also disappointed that I sat at the wrong end of the table to take part in a lively discussion on the other end about  the Patriots’ scandal. 

I know this isn’t a sports blog, but I’m so incredibly pissed about this.    I’ve been a Patriots fan since the third grade back at the Warren School in Wellesley, when I was a classmate of Patrick Sullivan, whose father owned the team.  We used to hang out at his house on Bay State Road  and play tag football in a small field on Orchard St across from our friend Cynthia’s, house.    It was the Boston Patriots, in the AFL, in those days, and they used to play on some obscure college field, I think.  I attended one game and I remember nothing about it except rain from gray skies and mud and half-empty stands.

Being a Pats fan, lo these many years, has meant enduring a lot, but the new era of Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli and Tom Brady made it all worthwhile.   The Patriots were the cream of the crop, the team to emulate, the team to beat, and if there were murmurs of dissent and intimations of Pat’s classlessness from around the NFL, well, that  was probably just sore losers and sour grapes.

But the murmers have become harder to ignore with an unseemly victory display after the San Diego game last year, Belichick knocking over a cameraman, Rodney Harrison’s HGH admission (but I give him credit for manning up to admitting it), and now “videogate”.

I don’t care whether “everybody does it” or whether the Jets ratted out New England as part of some feud between Belichick and Mangini.   None of that changes the fact that it was still an incredibly stupid thing for the “smartest coach in the league” to do.    Already, all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated and reporter phone conferences with NFL players, and a thousand sports forums and blogs on the web, people are asking one question.  How much of the Patriots’ success in recent years and their three Super Bowl Wins was due to cheating?   Personally I don’t think it was a factor.  But that’s irrelevant.  In many people’s minds, now, the stats, the accomplishments, the Super Bowl rings and everything else achieved by six years of hard working, well-prepared, self-sacrificing Patriots players will appear next to little asterisks.   

And that’s the other damnable thing about this.   The Patriots don’t need to resort to subterfuge.  They have so much talent, and they are so well prepared and coached that for them to cheat is like Bill Gates holding up a liquor store.  There is nothing to be gained and everything to lose.

This morning was cool and damp and gray.   The ground was sprinkled with the fiery leaves of fall.   There was a child’s kickball in my driveway – white and blue and pink.

Yesterday I was returning from a run during halftime of the Patriots’ game and I was eager to get home and treat a blister and to resume watching New England trounce the Jets.   A young black lab I had never seen before jumped out of some bushes across the street and charged right at me.   I like dogs but I used to be a paperboy and a census taker and I’ve been chewed up a few times, too.  I had a split second to decide whether I was about to get hurt or make a new friend and luckily I saw the ball by the side of the road.  I grabbed it and rolled it toward the dog.  He soccered it around a few times and picked it up in his mouth – the ball was slightly soft – and brought it back to me.  The game was on.   We played soccer and catch and  fetch all the way to my house where I abandoned him in my driveway looking sad and disappointed when I went inside.   He must have left the ball there when he departed.

Saturday was humid and in the 90’s – maybe the last really hot day of the summer.  I enjoyed it by working in my garden.  

One of my blueberry bushes has died.  It could be from our recent drought but it also might be BSV – Blueberry Scorch Virus.   Unfortunately here in Massachusetts we have no Agricultural Extension Service to call on.   By “we” I’m referring to home gardeners.   The state, in its finite wisdom, decided to cut back the extension service to only commercial growers.  So even though I’m paying taxes for it I don’t get to use it.    If they had eliminated it entirely then commercial alternatives would have arisen to provide plant testing and parasite and plant pathogen lab services that growers need.    But since the state is skimming the cream of that business they short-circuit those market forces so backyard gardeners are stuck with nothing.

Saturday night we had our friends Connie and Mark over for dinner, which included our pears, tomatoes, basil, rosemary, mint, raspberries, and apples.  They just returned from a bike trip in Switzerland where they were scouting out new routes for a bike touring organization.   When they’re not bike-touring they’re building their new house – with their own hands -  an amazing solar-powered, energy efficiency showcase that they designed.   I even got the recipe for the dessert I made on Saturday from Connie.   They also have day jobs.   Whenever I feel tired and listless I think about them and the inspiration renews me!

In the early hours of Sunday morning a thunder storm kept me awake for a long time.  The lightning flashes were so frequent and the thunder so continuous that I couldn’t count the seconds between flash and boom to estimate the distance.  

We haven’t had any real rain in so long that whatever reserve of moisture the soil once had is gone. Every day I pour water directly from the hose, sans nozzle, onto the soil around my squash and tomatoes for a long time and the ground just drinks it in until it disappears. For awhile my plants perk up, but the next day they’re folded and limp again. I’m probably violating the local watering ordinance but what can I do? All the towns around here have tightened up -here we can water lawns 3 hours a day, every other day. Other towns have banned watering entirely.

The rest of my life has been dry, too - no new poems or paintings, no shoots scheduled - I miss my models - and at work I got a new computer before my Bermuda vacation and it still isn’t entirely configured! I went to work on Sunday of the long, Labor Day weekend to try to get some work done and got messages about missing libraries in our software development environment when I tried to build. I work for a Famous Huge International Corporation that You’ve Heard Of, and I cannot understand why even the simplest things are so long and complicated. At home I use essentially the same software development tools as at work and when I buy a new PC I’m up and running in a few hours.

My one big accomplishment in the last few days was finally launching my new music blog: Music4Peter. Music4Peter will cover all my musical interests - from concert reviews to technology to the music business, and unlike the little personal blog you’re reading now, I’m hoping to generate some real traffic on it.

One of my first entries was a review of the Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert my wife and I attended in Lowell on Friday night. Outstanding. Read about it in my blog.

Today we went to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich and stayed there until the sun set, turning the sand and water into ever deeper shades of gold and orange. Afterwards we ate lobster at Woodman’s, a local establishment that for years has maintained legendary status among fried clam and lobster lovers. People drive in from surrounding states and stand in line for an hour for the privilege of eating there, but I don’t get it: my lobster tonight was good, but no better than what I could make at home by tossing one in a pot. The cole slaw was above average; the clam chowder was below average - milky, not creamy. Everything is served in cardboard and styrofoam containers under conditions I would generously characterize as Spartan.

But the worst thing about Woodman’s is its sheer chaos - you place your order and collect your soup and sides at one counter; the lobster is purchased in a separate transaction in a different spot and if you want a beer you buy that in a third place. And it has to be the right third place because if you want to eat upstairs you can’t buy the beer downstairs.  The stairs are on the outside of the building and you can’t take a beer outside in that town, so they have an upstairs bar and a downstairs one and big signs warning you about this. My wife and I bought our drinks downstairs took them upstairs and somehow managed to avoid arrest.  Assembling a meal at Woodman’s is like a Dungeons and Dragons game where you wander about a maze of twisty little passages collecting bits of treasure and avoiding danger. But the treasure at Woodman’s wasn’t valuable enough to make the quest worthwhile.

The weather was beautiful as we left Bermuda. We had to spend a long time at the airport because the shuttle schedule from our resort was inflexible, so we sat in the airport lounge picking at an overpriced lunch and gazing sadly at the turquoise water and the sparking shoreline that we were abandoning.

US Customs has set up shop in Bermuda so travelers can be processed on their way out instead of on reentry to the US. I had tried to strike up a conversation with Customs Agent Dougherty because he looked sad. I complimented him on his luck at being assigned to such a pleasant duty station. He replied by asking me if I had seen the news about the recent murder on the island. “They told me this was a safe place with no crime” he added bitterly. I suggested he count his blessings - he could have been assigned to our destination, Boston, which lacks Bermuda’s climate but has many times its murder rate.

My biggest regret was that we weren’t on Bermuda for the fireworm mating. 55 minutes after sunset on the third night after the full moon in the summer, the females of the species Odontosyllis enopla rise to the ocean’s surface in the shallow waters of the reefs that fringe the island.   They swim in slow, sensual circles, glowing phosphorescently.  When the males see them they shoot like flaming rockets out of their burrows in the ocean floor and join the females in a passionate frenzy of flashing green sex.

Maybe next year. When I arrived home I found my poor garden dessicated; the squash leaves hung folded and limp; the tomatoes were wilted, but nonetheless held lots of bright plump red fruit. I gave everybody a big drink of hose water and a few hours later my garden had perked back up.

This is our anniversary. 22 years.

Our marriage is a free verse poem scribbled in the fractal geometry of coastlines, as salty and sparkling and stormy and enduring as the ocean. The South China Sea. The Great Barrier Reef. Huahine; the coral reefs of Bora Bora and Moorea. The Isle of Skye. Key West, Key Largo, and Long Boat Key. Miami Beach, Guadeloupe. Saint Martin. Kauai and the Big Island. Sanibel. The North Sea raging by the Ijsselmeer. Acadia. Montauk. The Gulf of Maine. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Block Island. The Cape York Peninsula, Cape Ann, Cape May, and Cape Cod.

Time and again we’re drawn back to the sea. Whether it’s a luxury hotel with a view of the Sydney Opera House or a hot, cramped below-deck cabin in an old 3 masted schooner on Maine’s rocky coast, we require that transfusion of seawater. As weird and mysterious as the cross-currents of our own lives seem to be, we need to witness the greater mystery and deeper depths of the ocean. In church and synagogue they talk, they sing, they theorize; the ocean provides the practicum. All life came from the sea; sooner or later the good and the bad, the waste and the wonders and all of our sins flow back to the sea. Power, majesty, and awe. Reflection, contemplation and peace.

Years ago we were hiking by the Grand Canyon, in northern Arizona. It was a June day and we stopped to rest in the shade of a cliff when we glanced at the rock wall. It was festooned with fossils of sea shells and the skeletons of ancient ocean creatures. It didn’t seem strange to see this in Arizona, 7000 feet above sea level. It felt comfortable and familiar. I could almost hear the sound of surf.

My own mother was a farm girl from upstate New York who never learned to swim, whose parents were from landlocked countries, who had no special love of boats or nautical pleasures. She had lived briefly near Tampa as a young woman and often described to me the waterspouts she saw out to sea. She longed to return and finally did so when she retired after my father died. And when her time came she had her ashes scattered over the Gulf of Mexico. Some members of my family thought this was a bit odd, but it made sense to me. Walking the beach at Sarasota, collecting shells, she felt at peace; she felt at home.

Today, after a morning of snorkeling off our beach, where we saw squid and parrotfish, trunkfish and sergeant-major fish, we went to Horseshoe Bay and hiked to the east of the main beach, discovering smaller inlets and beaches guarded by great volcanic stones. We found a secluded cove all to ourselves. The waves crashed and rolled, thundering around the black rocks and shooting towering plumes of spray high into the air. Inside our cove, fresh waves from the ocean were met by the earlier ones echoing off the tall black stone walls, cascading and crashing into a swirling cauldron of bubbling, roiling seawater. But despite this, and with my wife at my side, I felt at peace there.

Bermuda is a tiny speck of former vulcanism dusted with sand and fringed with coral reefs, isolated in the Atlantic ocean a thousand miles east of the Carolinas. I’m watching the sun set from the Pompano Beach Club, high on a cliff on Bermuda’s west coast as I write this. I’m listening to classical music on KUSC , thanks to the world wide web, and it cuts out from time to time, thanks to the resort’s rather creaky internet connection. I’m sipping a 12-year old Macallan.

Moments ago I tried to connect to one of the “stations” I’m training at Pandora, only to be politely but firmly told that my IP address had spilled the beans about my location on Bermuda and their lawyers regreted to inform me that their service is only available inside the United States.

The sun is disappearing behind some clouds slightly above the horizon.

After I made some inquiries last week at Pandora about why they don’t do classical music I received a remarkably detailed email from Etienne Handman, COO of the Music Genome Project. He described the theory and goals of the Project - the heart (DNA?, brains? foundation?)  of Pandora. I sent him a skeptical response. I send everyone a skeptical response. Why do I do that?

The sun has emerged from beneath the clouds and is racing to the horizon. The rest of the sky, and the ocean below it, is gray.

I should have at least acknowledged what a remarkable thing is it to create personal radio stations, or I should say “radio stations” by proposing a musician and having it -Pandora - the Box, I suppose - play other music with what it guesses are the same “genes”. The listener dismisses some offerings, accepts others and trains it that way. I’ve created a “Moby” station; my wife has created a half dozen stations ranging from Celtic harp to Radiohead.

The sun has set. I toasted the last of the sun with the last of my Macallen.

Today we snorkeled from a boat chartered by the resort - it was excellent. Then, having not got our fill of boats we rented a battery-powered pontoon (I’ve been writing too much poetry - I almost spelled it “pantoum”) boat and tootled around the ocean near here. And then, after a hot sit on the beach, we decided we hadn’t had enough of snorkeling either and snorkeled some more around the rocky breakwaters here.

It’s 4 PM in Los Angeles. There’s a 2 vehicle accident south of Santa Monica. KUSC is about to play something by Bach conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisc. I’m about to have dinner at Ocean Grill, high over someplace in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

After I dispatched the groundhogs some of my zucchinis recovered. We had a few with our dinners and we let others grow into bats while we were on vacation. I love zucchini and have never been tempted to leave a surplus on my neighbor’s porch. There’s actually a holiday set aside for this, Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night, established years ago by a Pennsylvania talk show host, Tom Roy. But I spent Friday night making zuchnini Parmesan (think eggplant) while watching the Patriots play the Buc’s in a preaseason game. Football is the only TV I watch so my set hasn’t been on since February and it’s always a moment of great anticipation to see whether my TV will start again in August.

But I digress (what else is new?) - our raspberries are done; we still have blueberries; the tomatoes are finally turning red - I planted them late this year - and we harvested enough basil recently to make a nice batch of pesto. Our pears and apples should be ready to pick in a couple of weeks.

The big news is the butternut squash. My garden is terraced and the bottom, widest, longest terrace is devoted to the squash. But my squash has dreams of empire. It outgrew its terrace weeks ago, spilling down over the path I use to maintain my deer fence, and poking tendrils through the fence seeking Lebensraum on the other side. To the north it has climbed over the terrace walls and onto adjacent plots, a raging green ocean, a rising tide of solar-powered plantness, high on chlorophyl and looking for a fight. Yesterday I managed to push it out of my blueberries, but not without a struggle and I’m sure it will be back. Meanwhile I’ve conceded the zucchinis’ patch since they’re almost done for the season anyway. But that’s where I draw the line. Really.