River Towns

 While drinking my morning coffee and scrolling through Facebook yesterday, I came across a friend’s photos of Bangkok’s river and tears immediately began to prickle at the bridge of my nose. They blindsided me and I couldn’t stop them for almost an hour, not sobbing but brimming. My throat ached with my longing to be on a boat in the Chao Phraya with no destination in mind, simply succumbing to the pleasure of being a river flaneur,drifting on a current, seeing what I could see.

I grew up near a river, in a place so tiny that this was its only claim to fame. From the days of my first memories I was fascinated by its motion. Its currents and eddies led straight to a branch of the ocean, where stretches of sand held shells and seaweed, the only playground in town. 

Every summer our little “wide spot in the road” filled up with people from all over Alaska and beyond, drawn by the king salmon that made their way down the Anchor River to Cook Inlet. The glassed-in refrigerated display case in the grocery store held fish that were often bigger than I was, some weighing in at fifty pounds. Then the dead fish went off with the people from other places and the summer carnival came to an end.

When I first arrived in Bangkok the Chao Phraya seemed like a carefully guarded secret. It flowed through the entire city but was annoyingly difficult to find, unless you were one of the lucky few having tea at the Oriental Hotel. When I finally found my way to the dilapidated piers and on the deck of one of the many commuter boats that traveled for miles, I felt as though I’d been given the keys to the city.

The Chao Phraya was alive with traffic, all of it utilitarian. Barges, small and colorful cross-river ferries, the longtail boats that were the riverine equivalent to motorcycle taxis and traveled up the canals, and the large, clumsy tubs that went up to another province almost clogged the river in a water parade that I loved.

The last time I was in Bangkok, I stayed at one of the riverside hotels that didn’t exist when I first lived there. The Chao Phraya traffic now included “tourist boats” for sightseers with an abbreviated route that stopped near the Grand Palace, smaller boats made of teak, gracefully taking hotel guests to the upscale shopping areas, the dinner cruise boats that appeared after dark with their flashing lights and blaring karaoke-esque music. The piers were more substantial than before, offering coffee, souvenirs, and touts. The river, always a commercial lifeline, now is a major artery of tourism.

When I first came to Bangkok, there was a story in the Bangkok Post of how an overcrowded floating pier had sunk, carrying a number of commuters to their deaths. Later I was on one of the large commuter boats when a squall blew in from the western bank and every passenger, man, woman, child, and monk rushed to the eastern side of the boat. It listed in a menacing fashion and I got off at the next stop. These events have always made me well aware that once I was on the river, I was at its mercy. I’d lived in Thailand long enough to be positive that there weren’t enough life jackets aboard to go around and the ones that were available probably had holes in them. Since I never learned how to swim, once I got on a boat, I was doomed in any emergency.

But even with that in mind and with the pounding noise of the boat’s engine and the stabbing shriek of the boat boy’s whistle and the smell of the exhaust that filled the air on the rear deck, I would get on one of those boats in a Bangkok second if I were able to right now. And although I flirt with the idea of seeing other countries, I know damned well that my travel mantra will always be Thailand First. See you soon, Chao Phraya–I hope.

Monsoon Satori

 Living in Alaska for the first third of my life has given me an insatiable hunger for hot sunlight. When I moved to Bangkok, I became addicted to its temperatures that typically ranged over the full spectrum between 90 and 100 degrees; only the city’s thick humidity made me stop my walking once the thermometer went past the century mark.

Later when I returned to the States and visited my son in Tucson, the combination of high heat and aridity that greeted me was delightful. In this outpost of the Sonora Desert, 100 degrees felt cooler than Bangkok’s 95. Although it took time for me to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sprawling Southwestern city, its sunlight had me hooked immediately.

Most people head off to Tucson in the winter. Not me. As soon as the weather reports predict temperatures of 100 and above, I start looking at airline tickets. The highest heat I’ve enjoyed there is 108 and I relished every second that my skin was warmed by sunlight. 

People who live there love the monsoon season, with its raging thunderstorms and its gifts of rain. This is mercurial weather that comes without warning and has no predictable duration. Several times I tried to catch it and failed, my attempts filled with dryness and brilliant skies, until the day I walked out of the Tucson airport and found the bright air held weight.

There were no thunderstorms and no torrential rains waiting for me on that visit, although the sky was often sullen and spitting rain teased without delivering any real release. When a friend took me on a little road trip, we stopped the car and stood on the roadside to watch the vicious currents and the deadly rush of a monsoon river,  spilling  over a bed that was usually a dry scar on the earth. But Tucson’s river held only a few mud puddles and the low growls of distant thunder never made it in our direction.

I left with no understanding of why my friends long for the monsoon and with a firm resolve to avoid that time of year. But one of the Tucson people I love best persuaded me to come for this year’s monsoon time. It had recently battered the area with large hailstones and uprooted trees, a dramatic assault that made her invitation irresistible.

Once I arrived, I still didn’t get it. The heat was several degrees lower than what I usually walked through in this city but the humidity made it seem much more intense. The sun darkened my skin after the first day and my phone went black within minutes of exposure to the scalding light on the rooftop terrace. The clouds thickened at the end of the day, allowing only a thin stripe of sunset and obscuring a view of the stars. 

In spite of the moisture held in the humid air, I carried a little water bottle that I drank from every few minutes, like a hobo clutching a jug of Thunderbird. My hair began to straighten and my steps were slow. In a city where it was easy to walk eight miles a day, I couldn’t go beyond five. My favorite cliche came to mind--”What fresh hell is this?”

I found the answer to that on my second afternoon when I set off on a pilgrimage to what may be one of the best photography galleries in the U.S. I took a wrong turn and walked farther than I needed to. As I retraced my steps, the sunlight tightened around me like a vise and the final blocks were an endurance test. When I reached the gallery, I sat in the merciful coolness of air conditioning for at least ten minutes before I began to explore the photographs. This heat was beyond anything I’d ever felt before, a threat and a punishment.

I left the gallery a couple of hours later, bracing myself for more time under a scorching sky. Instead I walked out into the pale grey of heavy clouds and a strong breeze touched my face. As I walked, I was certain I felt a raindrop and I longed for that to be true.

The clouds thickened and the humidity was like an anvil. My friend and I both wilted under its weight, wishing  for the clouds to burst, and retreating to the relief of air conditioning. “Text me if you see lightning,” I begged before I went to bed.

I awoke a couple of hours later to the noise of thunder directly above my room. Kneeling on the bed to look out the window that faced the mountains, I saw thin slivers of lightning cut through the darkness, jagged and almost cartoon-like. Greedily I stared at them until one came so close that I was positive a spark of it touched my windowsill. After that I watched flashes of light on the wall while lying on my bed, wincing happily with each thunderbolt. Suddenly there was a new sound, one I hadn’t heard since Bangkok. A tropical rush of rain torrented in a curtain of noise and when I looked outside all I could see was a cascading veil of water.  

And then I understood what comes with the monsoon. I left Tucson with a reverence for its gift of relief and when I woke up to rain in Seattle after my return, in a city where this is a frequent and often annoying occurrence, I felt grateful. It took a taste of the desert’s monsoon to make me honor rainfall and recognize the sacrament of water with its renewal of life.

Sacred and Profane

 Tall golden spires sprouting from tiered concrete domes jutted above the ramshackle border of New Petchaburi Road, and the thought of a temple’s beauty and tranquility made me yearn to find this one. Google gave me a name, Wat Phasi, and an address which I gave to one of the motorcycle trio on a morning when a thin but determined veil of smog hung over the city and the air was flat and sluggish. He looked puzzled for a minute and then corrected me. Google had given me an address that didn’t exist. Once he’d cleared up that misconception he took me on a short motorcycle ride to a corner of the city that existed out of time.

Temples in Bangkok almost all follow a set pattern of curving rooftops with eaves curling into serpentine shapes, bristling with white pillars and painted in brilliant shades of blue, red, and gold. The buildings in Wat Phasi were butter yellow with dark brown trimming. Their heavy, blocked shapes turned into graduated tiers.  Carved wood rose to the peaks of their roofs which were crowned with the golden spires that had lured me here.  They reminded me of the Iron Temple, Loha Prasart, in Rattanakosin, where the buildings were patterned after ancient temples in India and Sri Lanka. 

The trunks of decapitated trees, massive and tall, surrounded the temple buildings. They held a wild clutter of objects that had been placed against them, small Buddha statues, wooden apsaras, clouds of plastic orchids, tiny lanterns, spirit houses, figures of lovely girls poised in the grace of classical dance, an army of fierce little figurines dressed in clothing from a past century,  a scattering of brightly colored prayer flags. Gold statues of the Buddha and revered monks were scattered about with what looked  like haphazard abandon and a statue of Phra Phi Ganet was prominent among them, sitting on a throne and flanked with life-size statues of white cows flanking him. He was jet black.

A school lay on one end of the grounds, with a sign saying it was bilingual--English and Thai.. Following a driveway on the other side, there was a little barnyard, with chickens, a rooster, and a roofed enclosure that held at least four white cows. A sign told visitors not to feed them rice, bread, or roti because that made them bloated and  sick. 

I left enchanted by this sacred and rural secret in the middle of relentless ugliness. And then I remembered what my best friend had told me about the heart of his city, “It’s not for travelers.” Wat Phasi was a refuge for people who lived and coped and struggled with Bangkok every day. To walk within it, I needed to earn it and that wasn’t going to happen in a few weeks. 

At the end of my stay I went to Silom Road which  been spared the blight of shopping palazzos and high-rise condos. It still had wooden shophouses and shopping centers that rose only a few stories above its sidewalks. There was even a sprinkling of street vendors and a few surviving food carts spread down a block that had once been thick with an exuberant banquet. A clump of tables near an umbrella-shaded cart made me approach with tentative optimism and there I ate one of the two meals that made me happy--gao mun gai, chicken rice with a sauce that had more flavors than I could pinpoint, eaten on the sidewalk in the company of strangers. 

Then at the end of the street where Silom dissolves into a subway station, was a tiny stall festooned with signs handwritten on pieces of cardboard, both in English and in Thai. “Tough time create strong men.” “Be humble. You won’t stay fresh forever.” “The world is full of nice people. If you can’t find one, be one.”

A man wearing a face mask, his eyes smiling, stood behind a little table that was covered with metal Buddha images, amulets, tiny Phra Phi Ganets, and many little animals. Long ago I’d seen those same animals in the window of a Bangkok antique shop--opium weights--and didn’t have the money to buy them. Now, as I picked up a little brass cat, I felt that same heaviness and was instantly overjoyed. Someone had cared enough to find the molds for those weights and replicated the figures, with detail and care. 

I chose one for me and several for my family, each figure carrying what I loved about this city that once was my home, where I was now a stranger.

May the Force Be with Us

 November is usually my favorite month. There are three family birthdays within it, one of them mine, and it holds a holiday that’s devoted to eating good food with people I love. What could be better?

I used to count Election Day as one of the events that made November special. Not anymore--this year, as was the case in 2016 and 2020, anticipating that day has me hyperventilating and close to tears. 

November 5, 2024 is the worst. We’ve seen what Americans were capable of on January 6, 2021, and this year, with fires set in ballot drop boxes in two different states, contains no hope that violent insurrection won’t happen again. Lies have been spewed in campaign speeches and insults have been hurled with abandon. Promises to dismantle the Departments of Education and Health have been brandished and one of the richest men in the world has been buying votes on a scale never seen before.

In 2016, nobody knew what Trump was capable of and there were some who were certain he would rise to the dignity of the Presidency. In 2020, we believed decency would prevail. In 2024 we know better. He’s back, with the strength of a cult behind him.

Until this week, I was hopeful and optimistic. I wrote postcards, I made donations, I listened to debates, interviews, and speeches. Now I’m in a morass of PTSD. I know I don’t have the strength for what will come if we have four more years of Trump. 

I remember him launching an attack on Syria while having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Xi Jinping. I remember him refusing to give my state aid during a horrendous summer of forest fires because our governor had opposed him in the past. I remember him denying intelligence from the CIA in favor of what he was told by Putin.

Now the Supreme Court has given US presidents immunity from acts they commit while in office. There is nothing to stop this man from doing whatever he wishes. 

In these final days before November 5, I no longer see the glass as being half full. What I see is a 50-50 chance that we will go through four years of hell, with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

And the best I can think of is the possibility of becoming a revolutionary at the age of 76. Appropriate, yes? The Spirit of 76 is better than living in fear and depression--make that cocktail Molotov, please.

Never Enough About Eve

I was still in my teens when I met Eve Babitz. I was babysitting for a couple that subscribed to Esquire and Eve had an essay in the issue I picked up. After I read it, I too became an Esquire subscriber. Like so many others who encountered her, on a page, on a bed, or anywhere she damned well pleased, I was thoroughly seduced.

I’d never read a voice like Eve’s. It placed her before me as though she were a hologram, speaking only to me in offhand candor with her clusters of vivid stories. By the time Eve’s Hollywood was published, she had become my friend, the one who made me long to go to Los Angeles, who made me laugh with her story of the girls who peed in the guacamole. She gave me a whole new definition of decadence when she told me how Jim Morrison’s girlfriend shot up with a huge amount of heroin so she could lose weight before going to the Oscars and woke up post-overdose in a hospital bed days after the ceremony was over. Eve’s Los Angeles was a world of street food long before that term was invented, where the taquitos were so good she licked the paper plate to get every last drop of the sauce. Her hometown was a place where a cop would bark “Can’t you read?” to a group having a picnic near a sign saying picnics were forbidden, a party that included Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Igor Stravinsky. She lived in a city that embraced irony and she wrote about it in a 20th Century voice that made everybody else’s seem stodgy. 

Eve owned the last half of that century. She was never meant for any other time. When she set herself on fire, alone in a moving car, the part of her that wrote died. She probably should have too, because after that she became an artifact. 

The girl who moved through the world clad in the armor of perfect teeth, gleaming skin, and indomitable confidence became a heavily scarred woman who welcomed invisibility. Considering how ravenously she pursued and was pursued from the time she hit puberty, this may have been restful. She could eat in the Farmer’s Market undisturbed, swapping stories with the alter kockers, the old Jewish guys who hung out there too. She could roam through her city without feeling the compulsion to reinvent herself in another book. For the first time in her life, she could live without spectacle. She belonged solely to herself.

Although we never stood in the same space at the same time, when I first saw the gold and deep blue radiance of a Los Angeles twilight, I thanked Eve for pointing me in that direction. When I was contacted by one of her friends because he saw my name in an essay about her, a man who introduced me to a writer who had also known her, with whom I had a platonic love affair until he died, I thanked Eve for sending me her men when I needed them.

I never wanted to meet her. She was too close to me for any conversation other than the ones I found in every book she wrote. That her skill diminished as she grew older didn’t matter. Her stories were still there, and she’ll always be there, as she chose to be--eating ice cream in her leopardskin bathing suit on the Sunset Strip at thirteen, dancing tango in a San Fernando Valley dive, blazing her own trail through an endless forest of fast company.

 

Weaving My Life

 The day is emerging in the same damp gloom that characterized yesterday but with rain in the mix. The gulls are happy. Mulrooney is not. Me? I’m working hard at acceptance, a word I’m just beginning to understand.

“Some people think acceptance means giving up,” a friend said yesterday. I used to lean toward that definition with the phrase “Just accept it,” one that I usually accompanied with a shrug. This fell into the category of “Offer it up,” an admonition that told little Catholic children to emulate Job. Bear your misfortunes with equanimity and thank God you’re alive. Since this is a difficult achievement for a seven-year-old, which is when one becomes responsible for one’s sins and faults, it was easier to sink into an imposed form of resignation that reeked of defeat. As a rebellious child, I developed an aptitude for change, rather than acceptance, and this skill was well  sharpened by the time I became an adult.

Change is a word I’ve always welcomed, with its connotations of self-determination and fresh beginnings. And I’m not alone. It’s the American Way. We’re a country built by people who were unhappy and sought to change that fact by crossing an ocean,  pushing into a new continent, and then forcing our way across it. Although history praises the settlers, if it weren’t for the ones who looked for change, we’d all still be living in the original thirteen colonies. It was those who refused to “settle,” to “accept,” who made Manifest Destiny a truth, not a concept. 

Now that there’s little new territory to light out to, we’re still divided into the ones who settle and the ones who are driven by the thought of change. In fact even the settlers embrace that thought which is one that drives our economy. Change propels demand. Don’t like your house, buy a new one. Tired of your automobile, visit a used car lot. Hate your hair color, buy a new shade. It’s a fact that if acceptance was enshrined as a virtue in the same way that change is, our stock market would plummet in a millisecond and the whole world would lose the lifestyle that it yearns for.

Then Covid-19 came to town, an unchangeable truth that forced acceptance as the only form of protection. All over the world, people chose isolation over death. Staying home, avoiding others, wearing masks that concealed smiles and muffled speech, forestalling travel, even on a city bus--these habits became so pervasive that they threatened to turn into behavior  and when they were no longer necessary, they still had made acceptance an ingrained part of human life. 

I’m one of the millions of aging people that populate the world and for our demographic, Covid was a thief. Although it took years of possibility from everybody, it brought me and others of my generation closer to a sense of mortality. Death is no longer abstract. It’s a certainty.

This is a lot like being crammed into a time machine and spat out into the future. While my mind still was adjusting to the fact that I’d turned seventy, my body was well on its way to the next decade. Minor illnesses hit me with greater force, an accident on a city street made me think of buying a cane, flagging eyesight forced me to wear eyeglasses, my sags and wrinkles were impossible to ignore, and my body had gleefully accepted the law of inertia. 

These are changes that I don’t welcome and am unwilling to accept. Although the past years pushed me into unknown territory, I’m trying to find what is a realistic way for me to live and what is simply absurd. I swallow pills that might forestall cardiac problems, limited eyesight, and fragile bones. I’ve bought an airline ticket that will take me across the Pacific and back again, with the promise of more travel to come after. I make plans with friends that will propel back into motion and the world at large. 

But I’m halfway toward eighty. My Covid habits have become comfortable and my physical alteration inexorable. There’s a degree of acceptance that lurks under my need for change and I’m struggling to understand what that means. 

Since I’m a person who turns to reading when I’m puzzled, I’ve begun my search for meaning there. “Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,” May Sarton advised in a sonnet on what she called “this strangest autumn.” The resignation in this wasn’t a welcome signpost and I moved on, floundering until I came upon Abigail Thomas’s Still Life at Eighty.

These short crisp essays were written during the imposed isolation of the Covid years, a period when Abigail worked to put her truncated isolated state into words that made some kind of sense. Her enforced confinement led her to the word “acceptance,” which seems to have been as alien to her as it is to me. Even though her life has been one of sensuality and connection with the external world, she was raised in a household of scientific inquiry and rigorous thought and her mind has been shaped into a habit of research. She turned to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots and delved into the words that gave birth to what we call “acceptance.”

“A thread used in weaving,” was the meaning of one of the words it’s derived from, she discovered, and when I read that, acceptance made sense to me in a way it never had before. With this as part of its root system, acceptance, instead of hope,  becomes the opposite of despair. While hope is a flame that needs to be tended to stay alive, while acceptance is an active task that weaves a thread into the fabric, over and over again.

Handwoven textiles are one of my passions and it made me happy to see my life as a piece of Thai cotton stretched out on a loom as a work in progress, rough and sturdy, with a bright and colorful pattern. I was the one who placed each thread and if I wove one into the fabric sloppily without caring, the piece was marred in that spot. If I stopped altogether, feeling this was  pointless,  the cloth would never grow beyond that point, staying frozen in that one place. Picking up a thread and weaving it into the whole, with care and thought, even at times when I disliked the color---that was essential. Taking what I have and making a full life from it when I have no choice but to use that particular thread is at the heart of acceptance. 

Recently I put on a pair of prescription eyeglasses that showed me vividly what I’d  been missing in clinging to my impressionist point of view. It was like walking through Disney’s Fantasia with colors that popped, even on a grey Seattle afternoon  and shapes so sharp that they made me wonder if my glasses were 3-D. Expressions on the faces of people who walked past me were as fascinating as an entire novel and architectural details on buildings I’d dismissed as bland became artful surprises. Then I came home and looked at myself in the mirror. 

Without the instant facelift that I’d been given by my bad eyesight, every wrinkle was as obvious as the Grand Canyon. Crow’s feet and crevices--there they were, all mine, along with my blurred waistline and my thighs dimpled with cellulite. 

It was too late for Botox, even if I could afford that option. These things were inexorably part of my appearance, and as much as I’ve denied it, they clearly showed who I am, an old woman. As I saw this truth carved into my face, I made my choice. I accepted. I smiled. 

And now with that thread in place, I’ll go on weaving, carefully, in my own pattern, with all the colors that come to hand.

. 

Three-Quarters of a Century? What the hell?

 After weathering the vast shock of turning forty-five, a process made easy by moving to Bangkok where I instantly reverted to the status of a clueless four-year-old, I've been skipping heedlessly through the following years without paying attention to the increasing numbers.  Not even hearing a tactless little brat who passed me on a stairway in Hong Kong and announced in horrified tones, "Mommy! She's so old!" made me stop and ponder where my latest birthday had taken me. Wrinkles? So what. A vanishing waistline? That was part of the American Way of Eating, regardless of age. Lost hair color? Grey was fine with me. 

Not even the inertia of the Covid years made me pay attention to entering a new decade. Seventy felt no different from sixty--until I reached the halfway point of my septuagenarian years. 

This birthday was different. Two months earlier my youngest sister died, swiftly and unexpectedly. Soon after this, I tripped over an errant rolling duffle bag, broke a little bone in one hand, and had cuts and bruises on my face for three weeks afterward. Two days after I turned seventy-five, I went in to have a cataract removed and observed all the strictures involved with that procedure for much too long. Suddenly aging and mortality weren't just staring me in the face, they were in my face, or to be more precise, on it. A healthy crop of freshly developed lines had come to stay and with my newly improved eyesight, I couldn't ignore them. Perhaps they'd been there all along, I realized with a surge of horror, and I simply had been too vision-impaired to notice them.

Today, after brushing my teeth, as I assessed my face's creases and crevices under the unforgiving light of my bathroom, another thought burst into life. The toddlers I once babysat when I was thirteen are now preparing to enjoy the blessings of Social Security and Medicare. We're almost contemporaries at this point, all of us receiving sales pitches from AARP.  There's nothing comforting about this at all. Nor am I soothed in any way by the knowledge that my oldest son will be getting those same missives in two more years and in that same time period his younger brother will hit the half-century mark. If they are approaching the dubious privilege of senior citizen discounts, then I must be perilously close to being ancient.

In years past, any time I felt as though age was catching up with me, I packed a suitcase and grabbed my passport. In the beginning of this coming year, I'm going to do this again. I'm hoping that a transpacific flight will work its usual alchemy and I'll return with a mindset that has no time to dwell on birthdays and their advances. God, I hope so. I really don't want to let the truth that next year I'll be closer to eighty than seventy get in my way of having a good time with the rest of my life.

Feeling Old in a City of Swifties

 Taylor Swift came to town and for two days the streets were full of young women and little girls. They flashed through downtown like butterflies, some still young enough to need a middle-aged mother in attendance, others striding in pairs like half of the leading characters in Sex and the City. Seattle's notorious dowdiness was suddenly perked up with bras and Stetsons and skirts that resembled band-aids,satin and tulle, sequins and cowboy boots. Among this, I felt as though I was wandering through a series of TikTok reels.

Suddenly I was in a city inhabited by avatars, shining and confident and somewhat terrifying, all young enough that they’ve never inhabited their lives without ever-present screens and cameras. They’ve been stars of their own private video worlds ever since they were old enough to hold a phone and they have an eerie physical presence in which every motion contains a pose.

Almost all of them were white. Many were blonde with bodies that looked as if they’d been manufactured by Mattel. Every last one of them had access to the financial comfort that could purchase a Taylor Swift ticket and the chutzpah to put together the sort of outfit that defied any concept of 20th Century style.

These are not the girls and women I usually see on the streets of downtown and that truth comforts me. There are young female people in the world today who are imperfectly human and unaware of their beauty and power, “same as it ever was.” But in their innermost selves, do they yearn to be one of the Swifties? Or have they turned their backs on that form of gender?

Taylor Swift is popular enough that she drew her audience from all over the Pacific Northwest. From Vancouver B.C. to Idaho, her followers descended upon Seattle in outfits they had probably agonized over for months. I need to remind myself that they aren’t a new species, just a transformed version of cheerleader and sorority girl. 

I’ve seen their kind before but they were in Bangkok, impossibly glamorous in full drag or dancing on the stage of a transgender cabaret. 

Was this weekend a watered-down version of a celebrity red carpet or a Pride Parade for straight girls? I’m too old to know the answer to that but I’m quite happy that my grandchild was at the Seattle Center, wearing everyday clothing in full sunlight, dancing and probably sweating to the music of Sir Mix-a-lot, for free.

Death by Tomato Plant

 For the past three weeks my hands have felt as though they’ve been bitten by mosquitos, although I haven’t seen any. The bites are swollen and itch like crazy, emerging every time I come back inside from my porch. 

I began to remember the invisible and voracious gnats that adored me the last time I was in Tucson, but I’d never encountered them in Seattle before. Besides, those little Southwest devils were averse to wind while my recent bites have shown up even when my porch is ruffled by a stiff breeze.

The bites seemed to become more annoying as the summer took on some heat but I could never find an area on my hands that looked like an insect had feasted there. The swelling and itching came within a few minutes after I came indoors and disappeared after an hour of annoyance with no visible scars. This wasn’t like insects I’d known in the past--and believe me, there have been many. Wherever I go in the world, the word is out. “Hey. Janet’s in town. Let’s eat.”

The source of the bites became my little mystery. Were they coming from the drain that lay just outside of my fence? Did my next-door neighbor have an open container of water within his lush garden where gnats had formed a summer home? Why did these creatures never attack me in the morning when the air is cool and my windows are wide open? And why did the bites show up every time I watered the massive tomato plant that my neighbor had given me a few weeks ago? Was there such a thing as tomato mites?

Last night after dowsing what’s become a tomato tree complete with yellow blossoms and miniscule green globes of fruit, I settled in with a magazine and a particularly virulent itching on my right hand, the one in which I hold my watering can. As the swelling fattened, my concentration went straight to hell and I grabbed my ipad.

“Itching” “Swelling” “Tomato plants”-- within a second google obligingly provided the answer. Tomato plants, with their abundance of pollen, are the bane of allergy sufferers. Itching and swelling are the least of their hazards to those with “sensitivity.” Some people go into anaphylactic shock after being in contact with tomato plants.

This apparently is a fact well known to gardeners and is the reason why tomatoes were considered poisonous for centuries. 

Good old Deadly Nightshade came by its name honestly. Some people can’t even eat a fresh tomato without lapsing into an allergic reaction and many gardeners only approach their tomato plants while wearing dishwashing gloves.

Today is the Fourth of July when most stores are closed. In preparation for the holiday, I stocked up on coffee and cat food. Who knew that my most essential need would be latex hand protection? It seems that my best avenue of defense is to wash my hands the second I come back inside and if that doesn’t work, resort to antihistamines. 

I’ve been so proud of the way my tomato plant has flourished--watering it twice a day, propping up its drooping branches with little sticks, pruning unnecessary branches, and taking deep breaths of its distinctive scent. And this is how it repays me?

Next year I’m going to sprinkle my porch with an assortment of artificial plants that provide greenery without danger. Or perhaps a cactus garden--all thorns, no pollen, no gloves necessary. 

Nature, I’m breaking up with you. It’s all over between us.

Getting the Bends

 Since I don’t know how to swim, Caisson’s Disease, or decompression sickness, has never been a problem that preyed on my mind--until yesterday when I got the bends. This usually only happens to scuba divers when they rise too quickly from the aquatic depths to the water’s surface. The rapid change of pressure produces nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream and in addition to physical pain, causes dizziness and confusion. Who would think this could ever strike on dry land?

Like most of us, I sank into the darkness of  isolation and fear in 2020 and have slowly risen above it in the years that followed. My social life remained cautious and my interactions scanty until this week when that all burst into blossom. For the first time in ages, I had four different occasions marked on my calendar, where usually there’s only one a week. First I was dazzled and then I became dazed. 

In the middle of time spent with one of my dearest friends and her husband, I began to pay for a bottle of wine and suddenly realized my debit card wasn’t there. Neither were an assortment of other crucial items, ranging from a credit card to my passport. 

Luckily I was close to home so I could race back to search for these things. Unluckily I live in a heavily touristed neighborhood with narrow streets filled with crowds of pedestrians. When the little clutch purse where my essential items live didn’t appear in my apartment, I became certain that they had either fallen from an unzipped compartment in my handbag or they were stolen by a pickpocket. 

I immediately canceled my bank cards. Two hours later as I struggled to make an online report of a lost passport, I got up to find something in a pile of papers that I’d moved from the table minutes before my friend arrived. Within them was a weight that was definitely not paper--and there were my missing essential items.

As I mentally retraced my steps that led to this act of stupidity, I remembered that in the middle of preparation for a visit that I’d longed for, I bought fruit at a stand in the crowded public market--mangosteen that both my friend and I had loved when we lived in Southeast Asia. I came home and removed the receipt for this purchase and then left the little purse on top of some papers. Then I received a text message about a job I was involved in, answered it, and began to make changes in the task when another text came saying my friend had arrived. I put what I was working on at the top of the pile of papers and moved it all to another spot. As soon as I saw my friend for the first time in over a year, everything else left my mind, consumed by joy. 

Some may unkindly chalk this up to impending senility. I prefer to think of it as a surfeit of happiness crammed into one week after years of not having this happen at all. Bubbles of effervescence in my veins stalled my brain and the result wasn’t pretty. 

The lesson learned? Slow the hell down as I make my way out of the depths.