CHANGE AND ATTACHMENT: THOUGHTS FROM TUCSON

I am in Tucson, sitting outside in clear dry air and brilliant sunshine, hearing birds singing in the trees.  In a few hours there's a plane to catch back to Toronto (via a stop in Denver's surprisingly dreary airport, alas!) but for now I'm loving the feeling of warmth (even in the early morning it's soft and warm here) and the unfamiliar southwestern scents in the air.

Last night we gave a talk and slide-show at the Center for Creative Photography.  It was fun and very engaging, because the audience and the venue were terrific.  We love being invited to university events; the people who come are generally very curious and interested in wide-ranging discussion.  And so it was last night.  (We also had the deep pleasure of seeing old friends again: John and Tilly Warnock, whom we know from Laramie, now live here and came to the talk.  Fabulous to reconnect with them.)  

Thank-you Tucson, and Arizona U, and in particular, thank-you to Cass Fey, who has taken great care of us throughout the planning and our time here,  and to Britt, whose idea it was to invite us in the first place.  

We had the usual messing around with projectors, of course.  Cass kept her cool, and finally the third projector, not without some last-minute hiccups, did a wonderful job (though needing the occasional manual adjustment to the auto-focus, thanks to a patient student intern!). 

Now that projectors are not being made any more, we know that our days of showing slides are numbered.  And we know, too, that for people in charge of these events, the end of slide- shows will be a relief.  Digital projection is now the standard and feels less tricky to everyone but us! 

BUT:  I love the way light passes through film and arrives on the screen.  I love the idea that the film, that actual piece of film, was exposed to the light in, say, a village in India, and has travelled all the way to, say, an auditorium in Tucson, so that light can pass through it onto a screen and project an image of that woman's face, or hand, or...  It's magical.  And somehow I can't get as entranced by the idea of an electronic image being brought back, tidied up, and re-projected.  It's perhaps a childish attachment, my love of the concrete thing-itself?? Nonetheless real for all that!

I am sitting outside here in Tucson, using my laptop, thanks to a cafe with wi-fi.  Lovely and lucky to have technology, that makes communication portable, and the whole world accessible. I am grateful, truly.  But I can't help mourning the passage of older technologies, like slide projectors...  Life being made easier, in other words, isn't always life being made better, right?  

Perhaps the important thing to remember is that we do have choices.  For example, I can choose to write with pen on paper; I don't have to be typing and looking at a screen.  I don't have to feel enslaved by the computer.  If I do, it's up to me to shift the way I relate to it.  

Similarly, if I am prepared to travel with my own slide projector, I can go on giving slide shows. And on the other hand, if projecting slides places too huge a burden on others, I can scan the slides and show them digitally.  The trade-offs are there, each time, to be weighed.  

The main thing I try to remember about this tech change, (and other changes and challenges too, of course) is the old rule: no complaining!  no self-pity!  Figure it out for yourself, I say to myself (frequently, these days).  Change the way you do things, if you can; roll with it when you can't; and try to do it all with grace...

LIVING & WORKING WITH IMAGES

A grey drizzly day. No seeds or starts in the ground yet (our last frost can be as late as mid-May in downtown Toronto), but the ground is dug up, darkening in the soft rain, and looking expectant! I should get the snow peas in this week ... hmmm

It's perhaps predictable by now that these posts I'm writing weekly (more or less!) almost always seem to start with garden and weather updates. What is that? I wonder. Could be that old English thing of beginning conversations with the weather? I prefer to think that it's a way of anchoring where I am, what environment I'm in as I write. I know I like to picture where friends are when I am talking to them on the phone, or when they send an email. That's perhaps because my imagination is not abstract, but works with images, just like my memory.

How do we store these images? Somehow the brain sifts and sorts, by story and context, I guess. All that mental "muscle" will presumably start deteriorating with age (must have already, let's admit!). But there's still a remarkable amount in storage, and accessible.

I've been reminded of all these questions about memory and image in these last few days as I've been pulling photos for a talk and slide show at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Jeff and I are speaking there this Thursday, April 24. We're delighted to be invited and to have a chance to see the Center. The images we'll show are all from the Indian subcontinent, from India as well as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan. They glow on the light table as I look at them, each a reminder of the art and beauty there is in everyday necessity in the subcontinent.

As I troll through our slides (yes, we are showing slides rather than skanned images), peering at them through the loupe, each one I look at (really it's more like looking "into" the image) transports me to the place and moment when I "made" the photo. And I know which ones are Jeff's without looking at the label because I know I didn't take them. How is that possible, to remember each one so confidently, after all these years of photographing? The brain is a remarkable gift! And it all happens without conscious effort, this storage and recall.

The same cannot be said for the process of organizing digital images (originals or skans). And that is the task that lies ahead in these coming months: Now that my cousin Jennifer Read has set me up with books and patient instruction, it's up to me to develop reflexes and work my way into feeling comfortable and somewhat confident working with Photoshop and Lightbox. Argh! is my reaction right now.

I'm going to work with my laptop (the little Mac that I am writing on right now), but, on Jen's advice, with a large screen when I am doing photo correction, and using a hard drive connected by a firewire (the laptop is a little small so it's better to have the space on the hard drive for working with these layers of image, etc). The raw photos straight from the camera, and also the tidied ones, need to be stored on another hard drive for backup, and also on DVD's. It all feels cumbersome, as anything does when we have no reflexes.  

I've also been very encouraged by what I've heard from Barcelona-based Jeff Koehler, who writes imaginatively and engagedly about food and is a fine photographer too. He's the only person I know of who works in the same way we do. (Check out his website at www.jeff-koehler.com and his first book: La Paella; his second, which should be fabulous and useful, exploring unsung corners of the Mediterranean through couscous, pasta, and rice dishes, is due out this fall.) He has just switched to digital, last August, and already seems to be well launched. He too uses the firewire with external harddrive to sort and work on his images. I'm so grateful to have his advice too, because it gives me some confidence that I will eventually make the transition without too much crazed-ness!

So here goes!

GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY IN SMALL THINGS

Crocusses are bright spots in the dull earth, but otherwise spring feels pretty stalled here.  There are buds on the trees, but they don't dare fatten, with overnight temperatures well below freezing.  Yikes!  Can this possibly be mid-April?

I was reminded this evening as I was cooking about how the normal or everyday can suddenly enchant or delight when we see it with fresh eyes.  It was Dom's turn to cook, but he had asked if I would trade with him (he has several huge papers due and exams next week and wanted a long uninterrupted work time at the library).  So I made beef stew (starting by heating olive oil in the large Le Creuset, then tossing in mustard seeds to pop, and some nigella, before adding onion, and then the beef, cut fairly small).  The meat comes from an organic farmer named Gerald, whose family farm, Twin Creeks, is near Owen Sound, about three hours north of here.  He brings his meat down biweekly in winter, but weekly to the Trinity Bellwoods Market in summer (late May to late October), where he also sells vegetables and delivers CSA baskets to subscribers.  The meat is wonderful; his vegetables too.  Can't wait.

Anyway, not to go on and on about the meat (or local food issues!), once the stew had simmered itself into tender doneness (there were carrots and potatoes in there too, and some red wine, and a touch of soy sauce for extra depth), I put on the rice.  (Yes, I know, with potatoes in the stew, why another starch?  but rice is a wonderful absorber of flavour, and anyway, most of us in this household don't feel we've eaten unless there's rice.)  

A few minutes later I went to check if it was at the boil, and got caught by the lovely quivering look of the surface.  Some foam had collected there (I had rinsed the rice pretty thoroughly, but perhaps it could have done with more?) and at the edge in one or two places, the water was just beginning to bubble.  The movement sent tremblings across the surface.  It became tender and alive, a lovely hesitant being, in those moments.

I can't remember ever seeing just that effect before, though I have looked at rice coming to the boil almost daily.  Perhaps this time I had an eye for detail rather than "fact".  Usually the question in mind is "is it boiling so that I can cover it and lower the heat?" or "not yet?"  This time, rather than answering that question, I luckily somehow just got caught up in looking.

This all leads me to wonder whether there are magical sightings, brief glimpses of loveliness, to be had all over.  And I am sure the answer is yes.  I can already name a few:  There's the way an egg flows over a hot cast-iron pan as it's put on to fry... gorgeous, and not just because of the eventual deliciousness that the cook might be anticipating in his/her mind's eye (or palate).  There's the instant that garlic turns tan in the hot oil in a hot wok, click!, with little bubbles of oil beside it, and a gleaming tightening of the surface as it shifts to beige.  And, and...

But most often I don't notice any of these treasures, because I am intent on the next step, or thinking about the end result, rather than being in the moment.  And also I am usually not looking at the details, but at the whole process, so I miss the small lovelinesses.

Have you had these glimpses?

And out in the world: It's Thai New Year (the festival is called song kran, April 14 and 15), and a terribly troubled time in Bangkok.  At the moment ex-prime minister Thaksin is inciting instability from outside the country, using his tremendous wealth to buy trouble.  Our fingers are crossed that the political situation stabilises without violence and that the country can move forward out of the Thaksin era...  

ODDMENTS AND THOUGHTS ON SPRING AND TRADITION

I'm a little late posting this week.  My apologies.  This business of re-entry is quite distracting, is one excuse I can give.  But the truth is that it is easy to lose track of the days.  The young people in the house, Dom and Tashi and Ian, have papers due and exams coming up, so they are extremely aware of each day and the obligations that face them.  I on the other hand have taxes and paperwork kinds of things, and images to send off to a magazine, but no fixed schedule, so I tend to lose track... And perhaps the changing weather of spring with its cold and warm and sun and rain, makes it tempting to just live day to day?

There's an update on my last post:  Chris our neighbour went and checked the house and pipes: no leaks he says, and the pump room was warm, but the pump seems to have lost its prime.  Now I've called Sandy Hamilton, the guy who knows all about plumbing, and he will get the pump primed and check the pipes, etc.  I can't wait to be up at the farm seeing it emerge with its winter-faded colours,and with the warm hints of fresh life colouring the trees, especially the dark red of the scrub willows in the wet patches.

And on the general subject of neighbourliness, another gift came my way this week: My cousin Jennifer, who takes on technology with intentness and intelligence, and knows all about digital photography (if you've been to immersethrough.com you'll have seen her name mentioned with gratitude), has offered to drive to Toronto to help set up digital photo files and help generally get the digital photo library organised.  I am so grateful!  She arrives tomorrow.  Wish her luck, please, because I tend to get impatient with the technology.  I think the impatience is my way of dealing with feeling intimidated and out of my depth!  I have promised my kids that I will be calm...

Heading into this next week, with its load of significance for western Christians and for Jews, I wonder at that weight of the yearly religious cycle.  Some people are sustained or held together by it - by the certainty? the sense of identity and community? the continuity?  Others are oppressed by the weight of organised religion, and the sense of received thought and the bigotry and entrenched ideas of good and evil, insiders and outsiders, that seem an inevitable part of religion, especially in the west.  

Speaking of ritual and tradition, it's the time of year for Easter music.  And this year Taffelmusik, the wonderful baroque orchestra that my friend Dina enticed me into subscribing to almost ten years ago, performed Bach's St Matthew's Passion. We heard it on Thursday evening, a stunning performance. There was the orchestra and then a small (nine only) group of singers that together call themselves Les Voix Baroques.  Who needs a choir? we felt by the end, when such a wonderful balance is possible, and extraordinary suppleness too.  

On another subject entirely: I finally sent in the last article I owed for the Oxford Companion to Southeast Asian Food: highlanders and forest peoples.  It was difficult to do, for I am not used to working from anything but primary sources and my own experience.  Books are useful to confirm or help explain, but I am not used to relying on other people's writing for basic information.  But here I had to, for though I have spent a fair amount of time paying attention to local food and agriculture in various parts of southeast Asia, I still have huge gaps.  The trick was to find an organisation that felt comfortable and clear, and then to feel confident enough about what I  was saying.  And the other trick was to make the entry readable rather than stiff and didactic.  Roger Owen gave it a deft little edit, and now it's done and I am relieved!  He and Sri Owen have taken on a huge task in editing the Companion.  We are now all eager to see it published... I think in 2010.

Made crackers, and non-shmura (= not kosher for Passover) matzo with Dawnthebaker yesterday afternoon.  They're all crisp now and ready to be delivered to good friends, for their First Night seder on Wednesday.  Rolling out the doughs and cutting them into crackers, bending to the oven, to put them in and take them out - over and over, for crackers are repetitive labour - felt like bending to tradition. 

So here I am (having turned in circles in this post) back at the subjects of tradition and continuity, though with a twist.  These are far from traditional matzo as people think of them. We used whole Red Fife flour for one batch, spelt flour for another, a blend of barley and spelt for another, etc etc.. You get the idea.  We even made a spectacular sweetened-with-maple-syrup version that is aromatic with ginger.  Some will be offended by the novelty; others will enjoy exploring new possibilities for an ancient tradition.  And that's the idea, right?

SUSTAINED BY NETWORKS OF NEIGHBOURLINESS

Soft grey sky and chirping birds this morning, promises of milder weather.  But meanwhile I know that up north of here in Grey County where the farm is, the sap is still running and not all the snow has quite melted yet.

I talked to our neighbour Chris just now.  He lives across the road from the farm, a lovely guy and very skilled wood turner who does precision work in fine woods and ships orders all over North America.  I called him this morning because of course I had a favour to ask: could he please go over and see if there is any leaking water in the house?  We failed to get back up to the farm in late fall to turn off the water, because the snow was deep from mid- November on.  There's a pump in the basement, with an insulated room built around it, and in there is a small electric heater.  If the electricity went off, then the pump may be broken.  If it stayed on, then the pump is probably fine, but if it's fine and there's a frost-induced crack in one of the pipes, then there's water leaking in the house.  hmm  

Chris said, "Sure.  I'll go over this afternoon and have a look.  I'll call back and let you know. But you should have called in November.  I could have gone over then and drained the pipes. " True, I know, but we didn't want to impose on his kindness.  At the time it seemed like way too much to ask, given the terrible weather, and we also assumed that maybe there'd be a melt in late December when we were back from Asia for a few weeks.  There often is.  There wasn't.  So we just closed our eyes, metaphorically, and hoped we'd be lucky.

 

(The house is very small, with simple plumbing; the basement has a dirt floor so leaking water will drain; and we may also get lucky.  These are the things I have been saying  to myself when I slip into worrying about it.) 

That call to Chris just now was a reminder of how we rely on neighbours, even people we don't know really well, and how we must expect them to rely on us.  In the moment, someone relying on you or on me may feel like an impostition, in fact it IS an imposition.  But it is also a lovely thing, for it is  a reminder of our interrelatedness.  The term "self-reliant" is an attractive one, and most of us want to be and to feel self-reliant.  But when the time comes that we can't cope, or when the difficulty we face is out of our reach in some way, then isn't it wonderful when we have friends and neighbours to whom we can say "help!".

I said just that, plus "I need rescuing" two days ago at a photo store here in Toronto called Vistek, a great place.  One day when I was in Myitkyina photographing in the food market, my camera suddenly read "error".  There was a problem with the little memory card.  I had another so was able to keep shooting.  But later when I tried to read or download from the card it wouldn't read.  Had I lost all those shots?  Scary.

I took the card in to Vistek.  A nice guy there in Service put the card in his magic machine, after a bit of a wait told me he was able to read it, then downloaded the images to a CD - a fifteen minute process - and gave it to me along with the card.  The bill?  "Forget about it"  Now I've looked closely and can report that the photos are all fine. I'm walking on air, yes because I didn't lose them, but also because of how just perfectly nice the guy at Vistek was.

As people batten down the hatches in this time of anxiety about the economic meltdown and its consequences for us all, it's great to remember that acts of personal generosity, small acts of kindness, enrich us all.  So when the opportunity comes to move into a situation and be useful, we're better off to do so wholeheartedly, and with gratitude that we're part of a network of give-and-take, rather than feeling resentful about being leaned on.  

Perhaps this makes me Polyanna-ish? but that's how I feel about it.

SOFT GREEN LANDING - SPRING'S FRESH START

The sun was still high-ish in the sky as Dawn drove me out of the airport parking lot and into the city 36 hours ago, amazing because it was already 7 o'clock.   Toronto glowed a little in the late afternoon light, the snow all melted, and people out in the streets with smiles on their faces, welcoming the warmer weather at last.

Spring is such a time of hope.  I feel grateful to be back here safely and easily (courtesy a great Air Canada direct flight from HongKong).  As Tashi wrote in the comment below my last post, the guys had cleaned the house in the days before I got back, and it was welcoming and airy, with Ian's great version of beef stew simmering and a fresh pot of rice made.  What a lovely welcome!  

The other part of getting back is walking into the office to the greetings (silent but nonetheless demanding!) of piles of mail, mostly bank statements and bills.  Dom did a great job of sorting mail and taking care of immediate bills, but I had a hard time making myself even go into the office, let alone open it all, look at it, and deal with it.  The weather was so great yesterday, my first day back, that I could only make myself take on the mail in the evening, when outdoor temptations were over.  Now it's done.  No catastrophes to report.

And good news: Ann Bramson, our beloved editor at Artisan, has sent us a  contract for a food-focussed book about Burma.  Still have to give it a close read, but I'm so happy to have it here waiting.  It's for very little money, and that's hard, but realistically it's also part of this meltdown era we are living in.  And somehow the smaller money takes a kind of pressure off, so that hopefuly we can feel lighter on our feet as we work on it.

Still waiting to hear if Anne Collins at Random House will also give us a contract for it. 

Meantime, of course, apart from the sleeveless T-shirt weather yesterday, the other lovely thing was to see early spring flowers out here and there, and garlic chives poking up in our small back garden.  I confess to having pinched off a few to sprinkle on my morning rice yesterday, a way of celebrating green and spring and the renewal of life generally.  I topped it of course with a fried egg, more new life!

That reminds me, anyone who lives near a Persian/Iranian grocery should make a point of going right away to see if they have any special Nou-Roz (new year festival, celebrated around the spring equinox) treats for sale, fresh wheat grass or its juice, for example, as well as sweets and fresh herbs.  Check the Flatbreads book, or Seductions of Rice, for recipe ideas...

Now I'll stop rambling to you and try to get back to the rest of my return-home chores (figuring out how to organise and tidy up my digital photos, for example - yikes! - it's intimidating, all the new skills and organizational decisions that lie ahead).  And yes, I'll go on spending as much time as possible in the good spring air and lovely sharp light of March in Toronto.

 

MARKET CONTINUITIES

Another Friday the thirteenth to enjoy!

This will probably be my last blogpost from southeast Asia this season. I am due to fly home on March 17th, in good time to enjoy the equinox in a nothern latitude. I know, I know, it doesn't mean the weather will get warm anytime soon, but that deep thrill of the sun returning, of the light being longer than the dark for six months, is a precious touchstone each year, don't you think?

This morning I went off to the weekly Haw market here in Chiang Mai. It sets up in a parking lot across from the mosque, just a block from Thapae Road. It's been there for years, but I only discovered it a few years ago, so tucked away is its location.

The word 'Haw" is used generally here to refer to a variety of people who are from Yunnan, many of them muslim. The market is most like the market in Mae Sai, the town at the northernmost tip of Thailand, in the so-called Golden Triangle at the Burma boder. There are Shan people, and hilltribe people, and Yunnanese of various kinds, and Burmese too. The food on offer feels like jungle food, wild roots and tubers, greens that are more common in Yunnan than here, and also lots of pickles, Beyond The Great Wall-people-style pickles. There's more than a hint of sour in the air, in fact!

To offset that there are unusual sweets, like black sticky rice disks that are then grilled over charcoal and brushed with a blend of melted palm sugar and sesame (what could be bad?), and "doughnuts" made of cooked black sticky rice shaped into rings and then deep-fried... Yum! I bought some grilled banana and sticky rice, wrapped in little banana leaf packets slightly blackened from the grill, then ended up giving several to a woman who was begging in front of the mosque, her injured foot out before her. (Food feels more constructive than money to me, so when I have the choice that's what I give.)

There are at the market several places where you can sit and eat breakfast. One place has Shan noodle combos, and that's where I ate with some of the people who came to our immersethrough session, last time I was at the market, more than a month ago. This time I went to the other corner, for a different kind of noodle dish.

Fresh back from Burma, I had one of those "duh!!" moments, for the soup over fine rice noodles was a version of mohinga, the Burmese rice noodle soup breakfast. This one was different, for there was no banana stem in it, just tender cooked whole shallots, very like one version I tasted a week ago in Myitkyina. The soup came with a crispy deep-fried chickpea-studded sort of round cracker about four inches in diameter, like but not the same as, the equivalent in Rangoon or Myitkyina. It was delicious, the soup, especially with extra lime squeezed into it, and the crispy disk crumbled on top to give extra texture.

As I walked out of the market with my small purchases (a bag of roasted chestnuts and some cheroots to give to a friend for his birthday this evening; and some black rice doughnuts, why not?), past some hilltribe people selling organic brown rice from huge beautiful baskets, I was reminded that I'm leaving town for awhile, and felt a little downcast. But then I bounced back with the thought that this amazing market, this coming-together of so many people whose origins lie across often-difficult borders, will keep on happening every Friday, in all its wonderful and puzzling variety.

And I have to confess that part of me is already impatient to be back for another breakfast at the Haw market, another immersion in the endless intriguing cultural mysteries of this region.