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.

Death and Life Downtown

 

Beginning a rainy morning with a funeral march isn’t going to brighten the rest of the day. Perhaps the best part of yesterday was meeting a Rottweiler puppy. The worst part was marching in the company of signs made by a man who comes to every protest, Seattle’s Republican co-opter: Support Small Businesses. Although the march was prompted by the murder of a small business owner, this seemed remarkably dissonant. 

The drumming that led us back to my neighborhood was appropriately somber and set a tone of grief for the dead woman, her unborn baby, and the husband and child who live without her. A senseless crime committed by a madman who heard directions coming from an invisible car was punctuated by a statement from a policeman. We knew who he was. 

There’s now a taskforce of fifty police spread over most of this sprawling city: Aurora, the CD, South Seattle, Downtown. That’s twelve police for each area. More lip service from a city that specializes in this.

On the way to the march, I passed a building where a window washer was poised halfway up a glass wall. Below him was a makeshift shelter constructed of motley objects with its inhabitant under an improvised tent made from a blue tarp and blankets. What insanity is brewing within it? Who would be able to stay sane under those conditions?

Later I went to PCC to get a magazine and ice cream that might pierce through the inner and outer darkness. What gave me a little jolt of joy was seeing a long line outside Ludi’s which is open at last. Nobody waiting outside looked like a tech worker and everybody was happy. When I walked back home a few minutes later, a sign on the door announced that they were closed for the day--sold out. By this time today, they will have been open for five minutes and I would bet there’s already a throng behind the waiting line rope.

This is the third business to open downtown in the past six months--Uniqlo, Ben Bridges, and Ludi’s. Because of its history, Ludi’s arrival makes me happiest. Across from the Market for decades as the Turf, a working-class diner and bar, it became Ludi’s when the owner bequeathed it to a Filipino employee. It was displaced for a parking garage and finally found its new home a block away from me, just down the street from the Thompson Hotel, the Moore Coffee Shop, and a building that has become low-income housing. This is what downtown should look like.

So as a vicious tragedy strikes one business, another one opens. This couldn’t have happened at a better time for the residents of downtown who fear that their neighborhood will die from gentrification as much as from crime..

I can’t wait to have a BLT and a beer at Ludi’s.

Starving the Algorithm

 I've deactivated my Facebook account, which I should have done long ago. Every day I woke up to memes and jokes from people I’d never met and probably never would. My recent “restriction--only you can see your page”--with no recourse provided when I clicked the buttons that supposedly would give me a chance to get out of what we’ve come to call Facebook Jail, made me realize how absurd and conditional this medium is. That it grudgingly gave me snippets of my past every day in the form of “memories” no longer seemed acceptable and I felt disgusted that I’d given it intimate access to my life from 2008 until now.

I moved all of my photos from Facebook to Google Docs--and please, don’t point out the shaky logic behind that. There’s no escaping The Cloud, now that cameras have all become digital. Facebook invited me to move all of my posts and notes too, but I don’t have that kind of time. It took almost five hours for the photo extraction to finish its odyssey and during that time I had to be close by to hit refresh when my wifi timed out. Moving my words would have taken days-and none of them are deathless enough to warrant that.

Next I went through my list of friends and trimmed it ruthlessly. What remained when I finished the triage were family and close friends who don’t have another presence on Instagram that posts everything they put on Facebook. This was a surprisingly meager list. Now that Instagram has become Facebook’s less obnoxious twin, there’s a large degree of duplication. 

I decided I’d deactivate for the first week before I pulled the plug for good on my old account so I could still use the Messenger accessory that’s attached to it. Once I delete that account, I can no longer use that particular part of Messenger. So until I had notified people that I had moved, I wanted to keep that option. 

Then came the shocker. I can’t issue friend requests to people who apparently no longer have Facebook in their countries, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand. Luckily some of them are on Instagram and all of them use gmail. 

I feel lighter this morning. Pressing the delete button and removing fifteen years of my life from Facebook, plus pictures and memories from times before that, will happen today after I’ve sent my last message informing people of this change. Once I’ve done that, I will have come a long way toward reclaiming the word “friend.” 

Perhaps this is my first step to truly leaving Facebook. My new account is infinitely different from the one I had for a decade and a half. The algorithm is in free fall with no data yet to feed on and it’s not a pretty sight. I’m getting a flood of posts that tell me how to roast cauliflower to where I can find a good auto mechanic in Arkansas. My option for removing them is “snooze for thirty days.” 

The “story” invitation is prominently displayed and it’s repulsively easy to wander into the realm of video clips by mistake. When I investigated my settings, there were huge numbers that I turned off. “Push?” What the hell is that? I hope I never find out. What I do know is that before I denied Facebook that power, my gmail account and my SMS were flooded with notifications. 

The beast is changing and feeding it may well be something I decide I’m not going to do anymore. Right now I’m enjoying the sight of it floundering, unsure of what to do with “Mulrooney Brown.” Bite me, Facebook.

Move On. Nothing to See Here

 Lunch with my son yesterday was shattered when he said,”In Mexico they have newspapers that show all the blood. What would happen if we did that here? Look, this is what an AK-47 does to a six-year-old?” 

Kids at his school were out at recess when they saw “a suspicious-looking man.” They reported him to a teacher and he turned out to be a parent who had come to pick up his kindergartner. 

Those kids were at recess. They should have been playing. Instead they’re monitoring their school grounds for potential danger. And we think it’s covid that’s affecting their mental health. 

If people formed human shields around schools every day at every school, would that only accentuate the children’s fear? "Why are those people here every day? Is someone coming to hurt us?"

If the Parkland students didn’t sway politicians from the gun lobby, what will? Maybe the pictures of bodies torn to bits? What paper or television station would have the courage to show that? 

But that’s what stopped the war in Vietnam--dead bodies shown on prime-time TV every night. Coverage of the civil rights struggle brought hate and courage into living rooms everywhere. Now we get our news from social media and watered down newspaper coverage. We don’t even have to change the channel. Click the image of a weeping face and move on.

We are a country who has decided murdered children are an acceptable fact of our national landscape. Some of us believe that Sandy Hook was a hoax and some of us have learned not to think about it at all. 

This is what democracy looks like.

Let Them Eat Cake

 Back in the ‘70s, one of the Andrews who wrote for New York magazine (Tobias? Solomon?) wrote a piece advising people of a certain income level that it would be better for them to shove a case of canned tuna under their bed than to put money in a savings account. Now the cost of that case of tuna is beyond the means of quite a few and a savings account is as useful as a piggy bank.

When our current century was still young and not yet covered in battle scars, I bought a case of Mama noodles to put under my bed. I think I could still afford that investment but I know my blood pressure would rebel. The flood of palm oil and all the delicious additives that make Mama the world’s easiest comfort food also make it one of the least healthy staples. 

For a person who is indifferent to grocery shopping, I still spend far too much of my monthly Social Security check on food, a fact that’s belied by the contents of my refrigerator. I blame this on my homestead upbringing and the food that nourished me when I was a child. All of the economical measures that determined what went on my plate every day--50 pounds of potatoes in a burlap bag, cases of canned green beans, corn, and peas, Crisco in cans so large that they often served as seating for guests at the supper table, enough sugar and flour to last through the winter--kill my appetite with the mere memory of them. They turned me into a person who only stocks up on condiments and a bag of rice to accompany whatever I decide to eat that day. Even if I could afford the financial outlay required by a case of tuna fish, the obligatory nature of it lurking under my bed would deter me from eating it--which I suppose is the point. Survival rations rarely inspire a bout of binge eating.

Then there’s the matter of canned tuna fish itself in this era. Cleverly, manufacturers have abolished the need for a can opener, giving most canned tuna a top that resembles what's found on canned cat food. The resemblance doesn’t end there. Is it a health measure or an economic one that has packed that tuna in water instead of olive oil? No matter which, the result is the same--a dismal lack of flavor that makes a can of Fancy Feast seem almost succulent. That case of tuna has become the nightmare that used to prey upon single women, the one in which they were old, alone, and living on cat food.

Occasionally I’m given a magazine from the days of my childhood and as I study the advertisements, my personal nightmare reawakens. 

Remember casseroles? Remember when a can of Campbell’s soup was the only flavoring agent and garlic powder was an exotic ingredient? If your memory flags, go to an old school NYC outer borough diner where salt, pepper, and a dash or two of Tabasco sauce are the only condiments in the kitchen or on the table. No wonder cocktail hour was a staple in many middle class homes in mid-Century America. To face the dinner table, fortification was essential.

The pendulum made its customary swing and suddenly Julia Child replaced Peg Bracken. The housewives who, in Ms. Bracken’s words, “would rather wrap their hands around a dry martini than a wet flounder” began to labor over recipes that had them tottering by the end of the day, perhaps because of frequent sips of the wine that went into those complicated and exhausting meals. No wonder American women were always on a diet. They were simply too tired to pick up a fork.

God knows what's going on in this country’s kitchens now. What I find telling is that Gourmet and Bon Appetit have disappeared from magazine displays--and so have Woman’s Day and Family Circle. When I make my annual purchase of Real Simple, I’m always dazzled by the preponderance of recipes for pasta and the lack of ones for desserts. There’s a clue, I suppose. Unfortunately the food photography is always more tempting than the recipes; although I may tear out a page for future inspiration, it always ends up in the recycling bag.

Instead I spend a generous portion of my food budget on condiments. A case of fish sauce under the bed? Now we’re talking…

Goodbye, Momo

 As the last trace of Momo disappears, my thoughts have the same tinge of sadness as the weather. I’ve finally reached the point where I can walk past the corner it filled for ten years and am able to look at the shop that replaced it without feeling mournful. Today on the second day of its final sale, I think of going down to say goodbye but I’m not sure I have the strength to do that. 

When Momo first opened, its windows bright and colorful with the sort of clothes that had never before been sold in the CID, I felt a bit outraged. When I first walked in and found it carried $200 jeans, I was horrified. Where did this shop think it was, anyway? But as I continued my exploration, I understood; Momo was like a neighborhood candy store that offered Faberge eggs filled with the best Swiss chocolates--and lollipops too. All the things it held were carefully and democratically chosen to make every shopper at every economic level leave with a purchase that made them happy.

It was a revolutionary approach to retail, made even more iconoclastic by the welcome it extended to anyone who walked in. Lei Ann Shiramizu and the people who worked for her quickly made Momo an unofficial neighborhood community center. Whether someone popped in to buy a greeting card or just to say hi, there was always a spot of chat. Tourists were lured in by the enticing windows and left with recommendations for neighborhood restaurants. Momo's customers were often introduced to people they’d passed on the street for ages without ever saying hello, let alone knowing their names. Lei Ann was not only a “connector,” she was the world’s best hostess who made every day at Momo feel like a cocktail party, no alcohol necessary. 

I lived around on the same block as Momo for years and when I needed a small present, the perfect snarky card, a bar of bourbon-vanilla soap, or a bit of cheerful conversation, that was where I went. “Retail therapy” has become as big a lie as “customer service” but at Momo I always found both--and so much more. I found a friend. 

Well actually I found two. Years after it opened I walked in and behind the counter was a woman as prickly as she was beautiful. We clashed until we discovered we read the same kind of books. Now in spite of the cavernous age gap that yawns between us, I love Angela with all my wizened heart. She is a gift from Momo, in the same way that Lei Ann is its greatest treasure.

It’s a grey and gloomy day and all I want to do is go to Momo. I want to be in the place where everything it contains goes beyond “sparking joy,” it lights a goddamned bonfire of delight. 

Not only did I always find the perfect present when occasions warranted it, Lei Ann publicized my book readings on the blackboard that was at eye level just behind the counter. She sold my last book and gave it precious window space. She--and Angela too--trimmed ragged portions of my self-inflicted haircuts when I rushed in for approval. She was there when my mother died, when a sister and I were bitterly estranged, when the man I loved lost his battle against cancer on another continent, and when my apartment was sold, forcing my departure from the neighborhood.

Momo was Lei Ann’s art installation and she made it a destination point for people all over this city. When I think of  everyone it embraced and welcomed, and of everyone who now passes its corner without ever knowing it had once been there, I feel tears at the back of my nose and the beginning of a lump at the back of my throat. At the same time, I feel deep gratitude for all those years when Momo was in place. Thank you, Lei Ann. Goodbye, Momo.

The Slow Traveler--That's Me.

Veggies? No, Thank You.

 I thought about Kitchen & Market briefly as I wondered if a prospective visitor puts milk in his coffee. Suddenly I realized that place is a bougie corner store and then I recoiled. I loathe the word “bougie” as much as I do “veggie,” which is one I’ve never uttered. 

I think it’s the “ie” ending that makes my brain flinch. It makes those words feel like adult baby talk, like cray-cray and jelly. Jelly doesn’t even make sense since it has the same number of syllables as jealous. That has to be a text abbreviation like Imma and gonna. A Hong Kong friend has even shortened don’t to dun.

I can understand the text-spawned words. Phone keyboards are a pain in the neck to use and the fewer characters involved, the better. Blessedly that new language doesn’t seep into spoken words. But veggie has been around for half a century, spoken by people who certainly have the capacity to utter that extra syllable in vegetable. And bougie is just plain idiotic--bring back the old mispronunciation, bushwa, if the original French is too affected to survive in this century. 

Hoi polloi is another annoying term because nobody knows what it means. It’s the rabble, for god’s sake, not the moneyed class. Namesake annoys me too, since it originally referred to a person named after another, not a person whose name was given to someone younger.

We live in the era of Humpty Dumpty. “When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Slang used to revitalize the language, not infantilize it. 

Dr. Oz was pilloried for referring to a selection of raw, bite-sized vegetables as crudités, instead of a veggie plate. It may be the only thing about that fraud that I can understand--if I had to choose between the two names, I’d call it crudités too. But I wouldn’t choose. I’d learned to call it vegetables many years ago.

The one time I ordered crudités from a menu, it was in Fairbanks,Alaska,  back in the day when quiche hadn’t yet become a cliché. The waitress, a sweet woman from the Kenai Peninsula, repeated my order as crudite with a long i in its last syllable. After that I just ordered a plate of raw vegetables and we remained friends. But there was no way in hell that I’d order veggies. I’d rather have crudite, even though the mispronunciation makes it sound like something that could kill Superman.

What all this means is I’m growing old. Nobody says “it used to be” or “back in the day” unless they’re doddering. No matter that I hated “veggie” when I was a mere slip of a girl at thirty. Some people are born old while others are Noam Chomsky. Prescriptive? Descriptive? I’ll take a helping of both, but for god’s sake, don’t offer me baby talk.

Wishing for a DMZ

 When I spent six months in Tucson, I became friends with a couple of dogs who obviously weren’t meant to be friendly. They were a pair of boxers with menacing barks but after a couple of weeks they stopped barking at me. They lived within a fenced yard with a sign that told passersby to beware of them and their personal style indicated that this was a fine idea. However they seemed to like being talked to and after a brief initiation period, they began to come as close to me as they could get, leaning against the substantial chain links of the fence. 

I never touched them because of a chat I had one day with their owner. “I don’t want them to be friendly,” he told me, but he told me their names, Chacha and Chipilone. With this crucial piece of information, my brief encounters with the dogs became more intimate and they seemed to like the increased recognition.

I also picked up a bit of Spanish vocabulary that has no single word equivalent in English. The youngest dog was named Chipilone because he was like a child who demanded every scrap of his mother’s attention for himself--and sure enough, the youngest of the boxers jammed between the older dog and me as thoroughly as the fence would allow. 

I now live in a household with two chipilones.

When I brought Mr. Fritz home to be a companion for Mulrooney. I’d been told that this tiny little cat was deferential to other felines and at first that seemed to be true. But as soon as he gained enough confidence to venture out from under the bed, he gradually began to take over, inserting himself between Mulrooney and me, Mulrooney and the food bowls, Mulrooney and the cat treats. He observed where Mulrooney liked to sleep at night and did his best to take that over too.

In spite of there being two of almost every cat essential in this very small apartment, Mr, Fritz wants it all. Annoyingly, Mulrooney has spent the last three weeks in a state of abdication, with all of his hostilities directed toward me. Any attention paid to Mr. Fritz, even the uttering of his name, depletes the supply of affection that Mulrooney knows is his. 

Mr. Fritz seems more than willing to confirm this theory. He took over the fleece jacket that’s been Mulrooney’s security blanket for the past couple of years. He’s done his level best to monopolize the bed once I’m in it. He likes nothing better than to gobble his portion of Fancy Feast and then turn toward Mulrooney’s. The one thing he hasn’t assumed possession of is Mulrooney’s little cat cave and that’s been the saving grace of this situation, if there can be any at all.

Last night Mulrooney asserted his right to the bed and Mr. Fritz disputed this for a couple of fun-filled hours. It’s like living with the Jets and the Sharks in feline form and it’s eroding my nervous fiber.

I’ve been told to separate them. Put Mr. Fritz in the bathroom and close the door. This would work wonderfully well if I had more than one bathroom or if Mr. Fritz hadn’t rejected that plan from his first minutes in this apartment. Instead he and Mulrooney have chosen their own spaces, one under the bed, one in his cat cave. There are hours in the day when anybody walking into this place would swear that no cats lived here. There are hours when I wish that were true.

The part that bothers me most about this is the look in Mulrooney’s eyes. He’s a very expressive cat with an eloquent scowl when life doesn’t go in the way he wants it to. He’s not scowling now. He has the feline version of the thousand-mile stare, something I’ve never seen before, and I have an impressive number of scratches on both forearms.

Since the afternoon of February 28th, I’ve been hyperventilating, my life consumed by nonstop turf wars. For the first time ever I’ve considered asking my doctor for Xanax and when a friend bought me a couple of cocktails the other day, a life of heavy drinking began to seem like a fine idea indeed.

The truth is there’s a battle for dominance going on here and it’s not pretty. I have the flesh wounds to prove it. 

They’ll work it out, I’ve been told--but will I survive the process?

Slowly I’m beginning to believe this place just isn’t big enough for all of us.