FULL MOON BIRTHDAY REFLECTIONS

The huge moon that hung in the sky this evening, impossibly luminous and lovely, was a tad off full, for it was last night, in scattered dramatic trailing clouds that the moon was fullest. I had a lot of time to marvel at her then, for I was driving late at night, on almost empty roads, the two plus-hours from Grey County back to Toronto.

The dryness of my tired late-night eyes, painful and a little scary, drove me to close them at red lights (after putting the car in Park), and ask my travelling companion to tell me when the light turned green. That short respite, repeated several times, was enough to extend my stamina and get us back into the city safely. But the struggle to stay focussed and able made me think about all the times I have taken chances, and all the times all of us are pushed to take chances or choose to do it for a thrill. We get away with it most of the time. And then sometimes we don’t…and we and others suffer.

Yet still we push the limits. What is it in us that pushes us to take chances? Evolutionarily these tendencies must have been rewarded…but what purpose have they served? Well I guess they help us extend out boundaries and discover new possibilities. That kind of positive result in previous generations could have been advantageous in many ways to our ancestors.

But when we take chances and risks we’re not thinking about our forebears, we’re instead in the moment, either willing ourselves to come through despite discomfort or exhaustion (think of the soccer players, yikes) or choosing to take a risk for the thrill of it. And in the latter situation, is the thrill in the danger/risk itself? or is it also in the idea that we can get away with things we ought not to do?

Probably some of both…

I wrote those earlier paragraphs last night. Now it’s a bright grey Monday morning, getting more and humid, waiting to start into the promised rainshowers of late afternoon. Meantime the birds are tweeting and the garden is glowing green, the arugula sharp-tasting and inviting, the cucumbers twining and setting fruit. The eggplants are NOT flourishing though. It’s been too chilly at night, so they have not set fruit. The cayenne chiles on the other hand are already loaded and I have been picking their green shiny heat-gifts for two weeks now.

But back to Grey County… A lovely guy named Steve, a chef who has now turned to farming found himself entangled in a conversation with me about cardoons. He’s growing them, and globe artichokes too, even in Ontario’s tough climate. He’s promised me some in August, and I’m delighted, for I have a delicious Kurdish recipe to try.

The meal was anchored by a lot of food from our hosts (who were celebrating having lived on their land for thirty years) but it was also a potluck. Steve had brought over a big load of zucchini blossoms. He made a batter of egg and water and all-purpose flour, quite loose and liquid, dipped each blossom (with its handy and delicious stem) through the batter and deep-fried them in batches in peanut oil in a wok set over the wood fire. We’d used that fire earlier to grill loads of local beef (marinated round steaks) and a lovely lot of shiitakes that our hosts grow outside on maple logs. The beef we sliced across the grain and then dressed to transform it into Thai grilled beef salad, always a crowd-pleaser, flavoured mostly with mint rather than basil, and garlic scapes, as well as lime and fish sauce and a little chile heat. The shiitakes are so meaty that after a quick pre-grill dip in a mixture of oil and fish sauce (with some minced sage and garlic green tossed in for good measure), time on the grill, and slicing into strips with a squeeze of lemon juice, they were perfection and vanished very quickly.

There’s nothing like a potluck meal with people who grow their own food. (And this was even more wonderful because we had a fire and we were outdoors in a forest clearing.) The potato salads (ours with just a pounded pesto dressing of pistachios, mint and chervil, garlic scapes etc plus local vinegar; others with garden peas etc), rhubarb cakes, leaf lettuce greens…were all lively and vital on the tongue with freshness and familiarity too. Perhaps all that good food and good company were why I had the energy to drive back into the city (and I had been sesible about alcohol: I drank only water for the five hours before I set out home).

And so here we are already in mid-July, loving the summer and already noticing that the days have started to get shorter. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and that of a close friend today. We chatted yesterday evening, sitting outside sipping a delicious Chablis, about the stock-taking that July means for us because of our birthdays. What a pleasure to have time and ease to catch up with friends.

And today as I am thinking about all this, I sift through my birthday-time images in my mind’s eye, from childhood homemade birthday cakes heaped with blueberries and raspberries, to making the three day parikrama  round Mount Kailash in western Tibet, to swimming in the soft waters of the Gatineau River north of Ottawa, to last Saturday’s delicious swims in the clean waters of Grey County.

It’s a big stack of images… a lovely chance for me to appreciate being alive in this world.

STAYING CONNECTED THROUGH TIME AND SPACE

Here we are at the last weekend in March, with the equinox behind us, and yet it’s still chilly. At least I am now bicycling again. I took it out this morning to ride to Wychwood Market in a cold wind. It’s been four months since my old red Diamond Back bicycle, the one I rode from Kashgar over the Khujerab pass and down the Hunza Valley to Gilgit in 1986, has been out on the road. It could do with a cleaning and a tune-up (scheduled for next week), and this morning the back tire needed air, but everything else is fine. Not bad for a bicycle that’s getting on for thirty years old.

I’m very attached to my bicycle. It’s got scraped-off paint here and there, from being hauled on trucks and busses etc while it traveled with me in Tibet and Xinjiang and Pakistan and Nepal, and also from being locked to bits of railing around town in the years since. So it’s not a thing of beauty. And it’s also very old-style of course: no suspension (no-one was doing that in the early mountain bike era), and the gears are not synchro-mesh. I think braking systems have also improved in the intervening years, so the brakes too are very retro, and probably less effective than they could be.

When I dropped by last week on foot to Urbane Cyclist, not far from where I live, to make an appointment for a post-winter tune-up, the person in the repair shop, hearing that my bike was old, suggested that rather than getting a major tune-up, which can run to $200 plus, I might want to consider buying a new bike. I didn’t have my bike with me; she said I should come by with it and get a sense from them about whether it was worth maintaining.

Of course I was a little shocked. Abandon my bicycle? Just because it’s old and a little out-moded?

It’s true that in Chiang Mai I have a more modern bike, white and black, a Giant brand (made in China) which I bought in the fall of 2012. It’s got suspension and synchro-mesh gearing, it’s comfortable, and a pleasure to ride. When I first ride it after arriving in Chiang Mai, each time I am struck by how sleek and easy it is, how user-friendly compared to my old red Diamond Back. I feel guilty, sort of disloyal, for even thinking this way.

The suggestion that I move to a newer model here in Toronto is a reasonable one, on its face. But I don’t intend to do it. Why leave behind all that history when the bicycle is perfectly functional? I don’t care that it could be more comfortable or easy or whatever. I’m not interesting in optimising my “stuff”. I live in a house that is draughty and imperfect, a house that I keep repaired more or less, but that I don’t abandon for newer more “practical” lodging. It’s the same with clothing: I hang onto certain coats and jackets and other garments that I’ve had for ages. They get worn now and then, but even when they just hang in the closet the sight of them reminds me of places and people and stories, and enriches me.

It’s the same way with friends. I don’t like to lose people, to let them slide away, though it does happen. I like to keep the fabric of things knitted together if possible. The bicycle is part of that effort, a conscious preserving and keeping alive of a now long-past time in my life. And by using the bike and keeping it integrated into my current patterns of travel and connection, I keep a long thread going, a thread that began ages ago.

The interesting thing for me is to see how threads of place and people and idea come and go in importance. For example, when I get on my bike, or just see it sitting in the front hall waiting to be taken for an airing, I flash on central Asia, stacks of flatbreads, dry air, the scent of smoke, and more. It’s a long time since I was last in Xinjiang, but these days, as I immerse in my Persian World project, central Asia is again on my mind a lot. The bicycle gives me a little Proustian kick back to central Asia, so that my time there doesn't feel as remote. That perhaps explains why, when I was in the rolling grasslands near Mashad last October, the landscape was immediately familiar, and so was the feeling of exhilaration at being back in a central Asian environment. 

The memories and ties from the past, be they an old piece of clothing, a longstanding friendship, a scarred bicycle, are precious connections, cross-ties to the warp and weft of our lives. It seems to me that as we race around, in physical ways, or just mentally and imaginatively through the miracle of internet access, we are in extra need of grounding. I want to not lose track of who I am, and that means staying in touch with a sense of who and where I have been as I traveled to this point.

And so when I take my bike in to Urbane Cycle, I don't imagine I'll be looking longingly at shiny new bicycles. The new and perfect is highly over-rated, don’t you think? I'm sure that I don’t want a newborn bike, with no history, no associations, no resonance. I want to go on riding the  memory-laden red bicycle I’ve lived with for so long, with all its imperfections.

DANCING WITH TIME THROUGH LIFE

It’s been a long time since I posted here. In between I’ve had a lovely intense week in Chiang Mai and up in the hills near Fang, with a crew of six fun and congenial people doing cultural immersion through food. Now I’m in Rangoon. The crows are cawing outside and dawn is lighting things up  in a pearly way.

Last night as my flight was coming in to land in Rangoon, there was a thick dark edge of night at the horizon, and above it a limpid pale blue remnant of the day washed with streaks of tender pink. The new moon lay on her back in a pale curve, already fuller that the new-year sliver of two nights ago. It was a minute or two only, that glimpse, and then darkness fell as we landed.

Reality on the ground was a reminder of how much change there’s been in Burma in the last five years. Traffic here gets thicker and more predictably impossible each time I come. Travel times across the city have doubled and tripled. The heavy traffic is a consequence of the government having lifted taxes on cars so they are affordable to many more people. And that in turn is a sign of the improvement in quality of life for many in central Burma since late 2011, as well as a cause of new and greater stress for taxi drivers and other less affluent people: those who must commute in the ancient crowded busses here.

I’ve been thinking about time, its elasticity and its relentless march too, in my/our daily lives.

Cooking sessions with Fern’s mother Khun Mae, who is a brilliant home cook from a village near Fang in northern Thailand, are always a reminder that traditional methods of food preparation do not allow for shortcuts. It takes the time it takes to reduce the ingredients for a curry paste to the necessary even texture using a mortar and pestle, or to chop meat to an even fine texture for laap or meatballs, using a knife in each hand rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. When I was in rural Senegal long ago I had an immersing lesson in just how long it takes to clean rice of its husks in a mortar, or to reduce millet to fine flour in a mortar. There are no shortcuts there. And any attempt to skimp on care results in wastefulness: the food is not good or it is inedible or indigestible. And the cook’s job is to make best use of the food resources she has.

This is why Rachel Laudan, food historian and analytical thinker about food, is so forceful in reminding us that modern equipment and food processing is a blessing, for it has relieved many (mostly women) of the burden of hours of daily labour. (See her terrific recent book Cuisine and Empire.) Her great example, presented at an IACP food history mini-conference in Mississippi some years ago, was the hours that women in Mexico had to spend every day kneeling and grinding with a metate in order to produce enough masa for the household. Now there are simple machines that do that work. And the women thus have some hours available to do other things, like earning money outside the home for example. That in turn enables them to pay for schooling for their children. And so on…

So how much time do we have freed up, in our machine-assisted world? And how do we use it?

That’s the other cluster of questions my thoughts on “time” have been circling round. I’m not happy with what I see myself doing sometimes. The clear spaces of open time that I need in order to daydream, have fresh thoughts, and write are often eroded by my lingering on this laptop of mine, trailing after this story or that, or rechecking the Twitter feed or my email or (less compulsively) my Facebook pages.

It happened again last night, as I was headed for bed, tired from a week of intense immersethrough work. Instead of getting deep into my book (a pleasure I’d had on the plane), I messed around on the computer reading articles I found linked on Twitter, and I also got caught up in the very seductive form of Scrabble called Playing with Words that is now on my Samsung phone. Time slid by and soon it was well after one in the morning.

It was fun, don’t get me wrong. Two of my concurrent Scrabble games were with my kid Dom, who beat me and then started two more matches with me. He’s on the other side of the world in Toronto and it was a fun way of being in touch. Time sped by without my noticing, ran away downhill, leaving me high and dry and overtire. And a part of me felt pretty stupid for having fallen down the rabbit hole once again.

But playing word games, reading interesting articles, and catching up with news elsewhere are all fun and absorbing pleasures, and let’s agree that pleasure is a wonderful part of life. How lucky to have the time for it! Why do I spoil it by whining and regretting after the fact? How silly.

I guess it’s my mother’s voice from long ago echoing in me, critical of my “wasting time”.  She died in her mid-fifties, far too young, so perhaps somewhere in her bones was a deep knowledge that life is short and time is precious. But in fact I’m sure she got the reflex from her judgmental father, and passed it on.

It’s an attitude that casts a sort of calvinistic pall over wanton time-frivolity.

And so I conclude that there’s a balance to look for here on this "spending time," attitudes to time, impatience-with-long-tasks front. I think it comes down to this: I need to try to be present to the moment and in the moment.

On the one hand that means putting in the necessary time, without rushing or trying to shortcut it, to do whatever job I am doing (hideous vacuuming for example, or taxes) properly and thoroughly, however tedious. Of course it’s a good idea to think ahead and see if there are ways of simplifying or shortening or lightening the task. But once embarked on it, I need to just settle in to doing it well and completely.

And on the other hand, when it’s time for fun, it’s time for fun. And to second-guess and spoil that pleasure by after-regret is to waste it. Right?

That leaves me with a motto/note-to-self something like this: Whatever you take on, whatever you spend time on, do it well and whole-heartedly, and without regret.

Easier said than done, as always!

FINDING THE TIME TO READ & TO DREAM

Happy New Year to you all, belated, but no less heartfelt.

Once again I've left a long pause between posts. No excuses, really except for this feeling of impotence and paralysis that comes with extremely chilly weather. 

There’s something aggressive about extreme cold with wind, at least as we’ve experienced it here in Toronto off and on in the past ten days. It’s inhibiting, and a little scary. “Do I really have to go out?” “Is it safe to drive?” “Will my pipes freeze?” “Where is my long underwear?”: the questions and concerns range from the large and general to the detailed-small, but all of them seem to weigh on us. The result has been, for me, a feeling of being pinned and not independent. I don’t like it!

I say this even though I have been out each of the cold days. On January 2, for example, when the wind chill was 35 below, I walked about three kilometres (not far on a nice day) to a friend’s place for coffee. I was warm enough, in sensible boots, two pairs of socks, knitted gaiters to cover the gap between my boots and pants (over tights); merino wool T-shirt under long sleeved merino (both Christmas presents) plus a sweater on top of that; a neck scarf and big hat and wool armlets bridging the wrist gap to my heavy ski gloves; and a not quite knee-length fifties-era sheared beaver fur coat given to me long ago by the mother of an ex-boyfriend. Over all that I wound a long heavy silk shawl to cover my face and help warm the air I breathed a little. That’s a long list of clothing items, that take more time to put on than they do to be written down.

The encumbrances of winter, I sigh these days, as I pull on tights, or layer on another sweater.

But I am lucky and so are all the people who have health and warm clothes. As I hurried along to my friend’s place the streets were pretty empty. January 2 is not a big traffic day, and especially not in frigid weather. I even built up a bit of a sweat in all my garments. But the older man walking carefully across Harbord Street with a cane, wearing only thin gloves, to pick something up at the corner store, looked reduced by the cold and very vulnerable.

Others who have suffered - apart from the homeless, who are in a purgatory that the rest of us cannot imagine - are those who have to work outside in the cold: postal workers, garbage workers, and the people who work the ramp at the airport. And also the police, ambulance, and fire department people, as well as the hydro workers, who have all had to work overtime to rescue many from crises largely caused by the weather.

I am grateful to all who do that work. It takes a lot out of us all to live in the cold; it saps our energy and we want to retreat into hibernation…a natural animal response. At the same time we expect life to go on as usual and are upset when streetcars get jammed, or airplanes don’t fly, or mail isn’t delivered.

There’s a disconnect between what we are prepared to do ourselves and what we expect others to do for us. Hmm

On another subject entirely, I want to talk about reading and books. And that’s because the other day I gave a talk to a book club. I’d been invited by a friend last summer. The books were the first two of the trilogy of books by Patrick Leigh-Fermor about his walk from Holland to Istanbul in 1933-34, when he was 18 and 19. (They are A Time of Gifts; and From the Woods to the Water.)

I had read the books when they were first published (in 1977 and 1986) and had been engaged by the writing, and also aggravated by it. When I reread the books in preparation for the talk, I was for awhile even more aggravated. Some of the flourishes of words and images felt show-offy and unnecessary. They made me impatient.

But gradually I came to think about the writing differently. Yes it’s show-offy. But the cascading words and images are on the page to do the work that photos now do for us much of the time. And reading elaborate descriptions and complex ideas takes work. It’s work we’re no longer accustomed to doing. We are inundated with images, and tend to rush from one to the next, and to be impatient with stories that unfurl too slowly for our now-usual hurried pace.

And so I slowed down and started to try to approach the descriptions in the same way that I like to look at paintings in a gallery, slowly and carefully. Aha!

In the end, like many presenters in many contexts, I ended up talking about me myself and I, about my evolving reaction to the books. I hoped thereby to get people thinking about what we do when we read, and about how much we lose when we hurry along.

If you have stayed with me this far, in this blogpost, then you are a patient reader, and I thank you for it. I enjoy putting these words on the virtual page, working through the process of communicating my ideas and thoughts as clearly and cleanly as possible. But if there are no people out there who take pleasure in the effort of working their way through pages of reading, then books are under threat, and so is the richness of language.

I am confident, from the reaction of many who were at the talk, that a lot of us struggle to make the time to read well. We’re assailed and seduced by our computers and social media. We are enriched by them, yes. But this doesn’t come for free; it exacts a price. And that cost seems to be in a loss of free or dreaming or unmeasured time to get lost in a book.

Life seems to have speeded up rather than easing off as the decades have rolled by. As I walked along the icy chilled sidewalk this afternoon on my way back from Kensington Market (Sanagan’s Ideal Coffee, 4-Life: my basics along with Cheese Magic) I found myself wondering why there seem to be so few pauses in the day, the week, the year. I did have some deep-sleeping calm days over the holidays, but they were rare havens in a sea of rushings-around. And they were helped by my cutting off from social media and from the computer altogether for a few days.

And so now the new year is moving me along again. I am headed to New York tomorrow (if the planes are flying) for a James Beard Cookbook Committee meeting  (such great people on the committee, which oversees the judging of all the cookbooks published in any given year, by a huge number of judges scattered across North America). And then in ten days or so it’s time to prepare for this year’s immersethrough session in Chiang Mai, followed by a food-focussed tour in Burma.

Airplane rides, long ones, become a kind of pause-place, a time to read and daydream. I never mind a long flight. It feels like an oasis between lives. And how amazingly lucky I feel, to be able to have these transitions, these moments to pause and reflect, and to get lost in books.