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.

IMAGININGS AND TRAVELS IN TIME AND SPACE

Just thinking about time and space/distance... points in time and the passage of time because this is the week of Rick Smith's birthday, and also of the birthday of my lovely father-in-law Jack Alford, who died in the fall of 2003 and is so missed.

Jack comes up in conversation with the kids quite often, "Grandpa Jack would have loved to see that"..(or" know about that" or...) and always with a fond and regretful smile. And so as we think of him and talk about him we find ways of knitting together the gaps in time between then and now, between here and not-here. With Rick there's a space/distance issue too, for he now lives in southern Spain. He's far away (dare I say, especially this week with access to Europe cut off by plumes of volcanic ash?), but still present in our thoughts, still a subject of conversation from time to time.

In earlier times we could write letters and wait for a reply brought by mail boat from across the seas, or by train across the continent. There was no immediacy to those communications, and telegrams were only for crises, life-and-death events. Now we can be in immediate touch via the internet. But the physical person is still far away, and we still go through that process of imagining absent people, having them in our heads, their image without their actual physical presence. As we use new media to make and strengthen our large farflung networks of friends, and spend hours each day online writing emails or checking Facebook, we're constantly engaging in that act of imagining.

In earlier times we didn't have these daily internet prompts, but we still did the imagining, the conjuring up of people far away in space. And that ability to imagine the absent friend who is far away gives us the muscle to imagine and live with our feelings for and memories of people who are far away in time. We can sift through mental images, slices of life that lie stacked in our memories (haphazardly in mine; some people I am sure have much more organised mental filing cabinets!). It's a gift, and a huge pleasure.

The markers of time include various anniversaries, personal ones like birthdays, and national ones, like new years days, etc. Thai, Burmese, and Cambodian new year was this last week, on April 13-14. Last night I made a feasting supper with a bunch of people who know each other well and are very good company. It was a slightly late Song Kran (Thai new year) feast in spirit, a lot of fun.

We relied on Sanagan's for bavette (flank steak) that ended up grilled and sliced and dressed with sliced shallots and lightly fried winged beans and cucumber and plenty of mint and basil to make a yam neua, or Thai grilled beef salad; for free range chickens that yielded a chicken broth for later and succulent chicken meat for a Vietnamese chicken salad; and for the pork that was part of a green coconut milk curry, with round Thai eggplants and plenty of Thai basil and lime leaves. Akhawenzie's smoked fish was the star of a Cambodian-style green mango and smoked fish salad that helped sustain us as we prepared the main dishes. The other starter was that fabulous Thai-Lao invention, miang, this time a basic miang kham: a pinch each, to taste, of toasted grated coconut, chopped toasted peanut, lime, shallot, dried shrimp, ginger, and hot chile, go onto a lettuce leaf, get drizzled with a salt-sweet-pungent sauce, then folded up and popped into your mouth. It's a very "what could be bad?" combo. All it takes is a little chopping to make the small bowlsful of the ingredients...

I haven't mentioned yet the nam prik num, banana peppers, shallots, tomatoes, garlic, all grilled whole, processed to a coarse paste, and salted with fish sauce, nor the delish extras in the form of sips and tastes of drinks of various kinds: scotch from India and from Scotland, mescal from Oaxaca, Mekong whiskey from Thailand, Singha beer ditto, wine, coffee with sweetened condensed milk, and delicious Toronto tap water to wash it all down.

It was a little hard to imagine the heat of Thailand in April though, with the chilly cold that has been around for a couple of days here. The buds and flowers have all put themselves on hold; "please tell me when it's safe to come out further" you can imagine them murmuring to each other. But we're promised sunshine and slowly rising temperatures this week.

Which leads me back to places and people farther away, space/distance and time again: Catastrophes can be exciting, but let's all hope for an easing of that Icelandic ash plume, so that the painful disruptions of thousands of people's lives can wind down and get sorted out. It must be driving some people crazy, that they are unable to travel to a dying parent's bedside or to get home for the birth of a child or... let alone all the economic and personal plans that have been shattered.

We'll be hearing stories about this event for years. It will become a marker, like the massive electricity outages in the eastern US and Canada or the ice storm or other natural disasters that caused few deaths but managed to change people's lives in ways sometimes harsh and unpredictable.

Mother Nature reminds us from time to time that we are NOT in charge, just here on suffrance. It's up to us to figure out how well we can adapt and tune in to her vagaries and her power and her vulnerabilities.