Not Quite MacArthur

/Ace links in and collapses

Well. That was fun! :)

I’m pretty sure there’s something there within those last five days waiting for me to distill it out and say it. (Can’t wait to see what it is…) Got a project or two I need to finish first, though. All in due time.

One thing I absolutely must say, though, before I do anything else: I had the good fortune on Sunday to attend an Episcopal service that featured both a beautful choir and an insightful sermon. The members of the congegration there were friendly and welcoming to me at a time when being among friendly and welcoming people had inestimable value to me, and for that I’m truly grateful. Blessings to them.

Form vs. Function, round 2

Aaaaargh!  The Kool-Aid is killing me!

Okay, maybe it’s not killing me.  But it is poisoning me.  I’m working on bringing the Spilt Wine portion of the site on-line (not terribly difficult, since the starting content of it is near-identical to the content of the recipes section of my previous site.)  And what should I find myself thinking as I look down the index of recipes, but, “Hmmm.  Center justified and listed alphabetically by author.  That doesn’t make much sense anymore, not without the journal entries explaining who all these people are.  It should be indexed by food type!  And searchable, probably.  And-  linkable.  Like it would be if I…  if I…  threw this whole section out, and just integrated it into Word Press with the journal entries.”

And if I can do that with the recipes, of course, I could certainly do it in 10 seconds flat with my paltry handful of site links.  And also probably the artwork.  And with the Archives, too, provided that I wanted to sit around copying and pasting for long enough.  Meaning that there wouldn’t be any need for a separate Main Index.  Nor for that lovely little Flash film I spent so long working on and like so much.

Never! /Ace shakes his fist at the heavens

In the meantime:  if you’re not terribly concerned with whether function wins over form, please feel free to pick out your favorite recipe [pomegranate pie?], and mail it to me via recipes [at] interregnum [dot] amberhorizon [dot] com. I will happily stick your pseudonym on the front of it and put it up with the rest of them.  Wherever that happens to wind up being.

The hoodies and I finally have all our linking books synched up for the con in Alleghera this weekend.  Wish me luck!

Interlude, with Pomegranates

This wonderful piece was forwarded to me from Orchidwile, who placed it (having no other recourse) in the comments for Fruit:

The Mad Pomegranate Tree

In these bright courtyards where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arches, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who leaps in light scattering her fruitful laugh
With wind’s stubbornness and whispering, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who quivers the dawn with foliage newborn
Opening all her colors aloft with a shiver of triumph?

When in awakening fields naked girls
Harvest clover with blond hands
Roaming the ends of their sleep, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who unsuspecting places lights in their verdant baskets
Who overflows their names with birdsong, tell me
Is it the mad pomegranate tree who fights the world’s cloudy skies?

On the day that jealousy adorns herself with seven kinds of feathers
Girding the eternal sun with thousands of blinding
Prisms, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who running seizes a man with a hundred lashes
Never sad and never grumbling, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who shouts the new hope now dawning?

Tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree who greets the expanse
Fluttering a leaf handkerchief of cool fire
A sea about to give birth to a thousand ships
With waves that a thousand times move and go
To unscented shores, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who creaks the rigging aloft in pellucid aether?

Very high with the glaucous skycluster that lights and celebrates
Proud, full of danger, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who mid-world breaks the demon’s storms with light
Who spreads from end to end the saffron bib of day
Richly embroidered with sown songs, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who hastily unhooks the silks of the day?

In petticoats of April first and cicadas of August fifteenth
Tell me, she who plays, she who rages, she who seduces
Casting off from threat its evil black glooms
Pouring intoxicating birds on the sun’s bosom
Tell me, she who opens her wings on the breast of things
On the breast of our deep dreams, is it the mad pomegranate tree?

— Odysseus Elytis, Orientations 1939

Fruit

“I asked Heath the Fruit Question,” says Kate, around a mouthful of hot dog.

We are strewn around the patio table in Longstreet and the Empress’ back yard, at the tail-end of both a barbecue dinner and the searing heat of a merciless summer day. I have dispatched a hot dog and a crab cake and a cheeseburger of my own, all of which were quite tasty, but I am far more grateful that the sun has dipped low enough to place the patio table in the shadow of the house than I am for any of these. I can still feel the fire burning along my arms and shoulders, in defiance of all my ludicrous slathering with sunblock.

“Which one?” asks the Empress, stabbing a forkful of salad. “The ‘Which fruit are you most like, and why’ question?”

“Yup,” says Kate. The rest of the hot dog disappears down her throat.

Kate is the Empress’ oldest daughter. She is in her mid-twenties (I confess I don’t remember exactly where), with everything that implies. Her passion, like her father’s before her, is Theatre, and she’s been making a very credible stab at turning that passion into a career- but like everyone else who’s ever tried to do that with the Arts, she can’t yet do it and pay her bills at the same time, so she’s been living in her mother’s house and working as a teacher while she gains experience and successes. She is a couple of months off a very serious long-standing relationship with a guy slightly her senior. She left him in the end because she didn’t feel like he was treating her well enough, nor that they had much in common anymore, and because she wanted the freedom to be able to Be Herself and to Find Her Own Way. As I am only a couple of months off being dealt a near-mortal wound by a girl of a similar age, who left our very serious long-standing relationship for essentially those same reasons, I am faced with an extremely hard-to-reconcile conflict. On the one hand, Kate is my niece; she has never been anything except happy to see me, never shown me anything except compassion and kindness, and I have tried to show her the same. On the other hand, she is the enemy. If the considerations that I am her uncle and that she has known me all of her life were removed from the picture, I have no illusion that she would be anything less than sympathetic to the choice my ex made, nor have counseled her to do anything differently- and I suspect that to be true even with the considerations still in the picture. It makes me want to clout her upside the head as a retributive strike against the idiocy of everyone under 30, seize her by the ankle and hurl her hammer-like over the horizon, where the only mental effort I will have to afford her will be reflecting on the faint plume of smoke rising from the distant crater where she landed. Not rational. But true.

“Heath” is the latest in the string of attractions she’s gone on to sample. (When you are in your mid-twenties and in Theatre and not utterly repulsive you have considerable options in that regard, a perk I vaguely remember and admit myself jealous of.) The Fruit Question, though- that’s a whole different piece of idiocy.

The Empress catches me slumping in my seat and sneering. (The sneer is rapidly on its way to achieving capitalization status these days: the Sneer.) “What?” she asks.

I glance at her, frowning. My son is around here somewhere, too, but he’s had the good sense to take his cheeseburger and go sit somewhere else, where he doesn’t have to be subject to any inquiries. “That’s one of those… She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named questions,” I spit, looking away.

“No, it isn’t,” says the Empress. “That came from us.”

“Yeah,” says Kate, chiming in, the two of them looking at each other briefly for confirmation. “We were the ones who told it to She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

I sift my memories and discover that all the circumstances surrounding the key image are fuzzy; I have the lurking impression that she and the Empress are probably right. “Are you sure?” I ask, looking sideways at them. “I thought I recalled her being familiar with it from some other source.”

“Oh, yes,” says the Empress, nodding. “Absolutely.”

“That’s the question I was asked when I first started dating your sister,” adds Longstreet, from out by the pool. “Twice.” He wanders over to the table, glass of Jack Daniels in hand. “First by her,” he says, indicating the Empress, “and then by your other sister, Iris.”

“Nnnh,” I mumble, still searching inward. We were here, at this house, sitting around this same table. They were all in a group, facing each other, and I was outside it; Faye was sitting with her back to me, and I came over to stand by her, but it didn’t really matter, because she was focused on the conversation, enjoying herself, no more than vaguely aware I was there anyway. Somebody- Iris?- explained the question to her, how it could be used to get a first impression about someone, and she lit up, clapping her hands. “That’s awesome!” she cried. “I love it! I’m gonna use that.” And she answered it right away for herself: kiwi, or starfruit, or some other stupid thing I can’t remember now, something tropical and exotic.

And then, of course, having asked her, they had to ask me. And all I could do was stand there spinning my wheels, thinking, “How the hell should I know? What kind of moron compares himself to a fruit?” But I couldn’t SAY that without unleashing their derision, without driving all of them away from me again- driving HER away from me, AGAIN. They didn’t want to know what I was really thinking; they just wanted some pop-culture insight into my psychology that wouldn’t be too serious, something that they could use to compare my cleverness to their own. And in the moment I realized that, it was already too late, because I had paused for so long that I had broken the flow, so long that there was no way for anything I said to be funny or elegant or just blend in. I hated them all so much for that, for all the countless times and gatherings at which they’d ever done that to me, time after time after time…

I strangle on my own rage. “It’s a stupid question,” I growl.

“Why?” says the Empress, scooping up her salad bowl and the meat tray. She rises from the table, balancing them in her arms, and heads for the back landing of the house. “What kind of fruit are you like?”

“It’s a STUPID. QUESTION,” I bark, raising my voice noticeably.

She pauses at the top of the landing, the dishes well in hand, turns halfway back with a tiny smirk and an even look that hits me dead in the eye. And just as she does, in that moment when my anger flares hottest, there are suddenly images inside me, bright flashes among the flames- Faye standing in front of the bookcase, telling me after five years how much she hates the Greek myths, creating one more thing we’ll never share; the howling shades and twisted spirits in D’Aulaire’s; the breakfast plate in front of me at Leisyll Vineyards, so long ago, pink seeds in white flesh. And for once, I finally have the answer.

“POMEGRANATE!” I roar at her, all my teeth exposed. “BECAUSE IT’S THE FRUIT OF THE FUCKING DEAD!!“

I clamp them closed, still grimacing widely. The Empress cocks her head to one side, lets the silence swell.

“A globe of bitter, twisted flesh, wormed through with seeds?” she says, raising one eyebrow at me. “Tough, ugly and unpalatable-seeming on the outside? Mushy on the inside?”

“Yeah,” I say, settling back into my chair, with a small smile. “Something like that.”

“Mmmmm,” she says breezily, nodding. She bumps open the doorway of the house with her hip, glances over her shoulder at me grinning, and disappears.

Kate says nothing as I pick my can of Sprite Zero up from off the table and sip at it. It’s nice to be understood, I think, relaxing.

***

Watermelon, I think, closing the document. Because no one wants to deal with me in my entirety. They have to cut small pieces and spit away the parts they aren’t interested in before they can find me palatable.

I re-open the document.

Memory

The wooden sign above the storefront says “Big Kahuna: Hawaiian Coffee and Smoothies”, but other than that, and the unusual length of the storefront itself, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the stores on either side; they’re all contained within the same peach-colored strip mall, and thus, share the same exterior décor. I’ve passed it twice before coming to stand outside it this third time: once in my car on the way to the parking lot in the center of town, and once on foot, as I walked south down Main Street towards the train station to see what there was to see. Now I stand squinting in the early morning sunlight and press my wrinkled nose up against the glass of the front door, shading my hand with my eyes to try to see inside (a pose referred to affectionately in the retail trade as the “Pocahontas”.) It doesn’t look open, but it’s impossible to imagine that any place purveying coffee of any sort would be closed at 7:30 AM on a weekday morning.

The door, by way of confirmation, gives easily to my touch. I shoulder my pack and venture through it.

Inside, the place is wide, but shallow, with sets of coffee-bar tables and high-legged stools running in a line down the length of the front windows. A cold case displaying sandwiches and juices stands directly in front of me. Behind it are all the dark metal boxes and hot glass containers associated with coffee brewing, and behind them, festive tiki-themed menus listing the various items for sale. A stout middle-aged woman in a blue Hawaiian shirt emerges from a set of swinging kitchen doors as I remove my sunglasses, greets me cordially. “Hello.” We two are the only ones in evidence.

“Hello,” I reply. I glance over the menus above her head cursorily and throw myself to the winds. “What do you recommend?” I ask her.

She raises an eyebrow, behind square glasses not unlike my own. “You’re looking for hot coffee? Cold coffee?” she asks.

“Hot coffee,” I say, smiling. Did I specify coffee? Must’ve been the part of the menu I was looking at…

“All our coffees are Hawaiian,” she explains, gesturing behind her. “And they’re all very smooth. They go in order from lightest roast at the top of the menu to darkest at the bottom. Kona’s the lightest.”

Cheeseburger in Paradise meets Starbucks! “Hmmm,” I ponder. As I am neither in the mood for a stomach-blasting infusion of super-darkness, nor generally in the mood for anything light, ever, I play it conservative. “Medium roast it is. Large, please,” I add.

“Room for milk?”

“Yep.” She turns her back to me and makes with the caffienated alchemy. I thought “Kona” was a specific type of bean, not a kind of roast. “You guys been here long?” I ask her.

She skips a beat at the question, as if she wasn’t expecting it, and pauses, holding my large medium-roast coffee and the lid thereof in separate hands. “A year last month,” she declares, with a nod of her head. She places the two items on the counter. “Anything else?”

A small ink-jet printed sign taped on the cold-case catches my eye. “One of the Breakfast Paninis,” I tell her.

“Six seventy-five,” she replies. I give her a twenty, and her eye lights on the pack dangling from my shoulder as she takes it. “You from around here?” she asks me.

“More or less,” I say, taking my change. “Used to live in the area. Haven’t been back in a while.” I scoop the coffee into my hand.

She takes it at face value. “Milk and sugar under the TV over there,” she says pointing. “Panini’ll be out in five minutes.”

Pharoah is a good-sized town that seems like a much smaller town, on account of being spread out over a wider area than is typical for Bluelaw County. My period of greatest familiarity with it spans roughly a decade, but the majority of the experiences were concentrated within a year or two of my time in college, when I had a friend named Darwin whose family lived there, and when I was dating my future wife Weaver, for whom all the towns in that part of Bluelaw were very much part of her family’s stomping grounds. They had a Japanese restaurant, at a time when you couldn’t get sushi on every street corner, and a movie theater that was old-fashioned enough to have a single screen and a mural of Revolutionary War heroes in the lobby instead of film stars. They had the training center for the Police and Fire Academies. They had a hair salon where I used to get my hair cut, because it was the same place that Weaver got her hair cut, and where the stylist gave me a cassette tape of Saturday Morning Cartoon Theme Songs that Jack still likes to listen to in the car. And really, that was about as far as my consideration of it went. It never impressed itself on me as a place that was good to be, or desirable to be. And when the divorce came, when Darwin, who had always been sweet on Weaver anyway, flew away from me and to her side, when I abandoned Ivory Grove and Bluelaw County and all the rest of it and staggered away to Sealand to die, I swept Pharoah into the dustbin along with everything else, without much remorse.

Life has a way of surprising you, though. One of my more recent surprises has been my left eyelid, which has picked up the enchanting habit of sticking to my left cornea as I sleep, causing it to tear pieces off the surface of my eyeball when I open it. On one fine Sunday morning after it had been doing this in particular earnest, and when it was terribly inconvenient for my regular opthamologist to be in her office, the emergency doctor was located, lo!- in distant Pharoah. I decided I liked her better, and so, as on this morning, I have now returned to the town several times to receive her ministrations. I have discovered in the process that, to no-one’s surprise but my own, Pharoah has continued to exist, even in the absence of my attentions. And to evolve. And perhaps even, to thrive.

I sit down on one of the high-legged stools, drop my pack nearby and fish out my softcover copy of Jeff Shaara’s The Rising Tide, taking my first sip of the coffee as I do so. Yeesh! I think, recoiling. ‘Smooth’ might be a bit of an overstatement. I roll my tongue painfully around the inside of my mouth, trying not to wince. And if that’s Medium, I’d hate to taste Dark.

My appointment is scheduled for 9:10 AM. There is no way to arrive in Pharoah from Sealand at 9:10 AM, because the only direct connections between the two are three-lane highways that are choked with rush-hour traffic from 8 AM to 9:30. As this is the case, I chose instead to leave Sealand at 7:00 AM and arrive here at 7:30. I have spent the time between my arrival and now wandering up and down Main Street, looking at the closed storefronts, reading the unfamiliar names, watching the commuters stroll lazily across the streets and out of the parking lots to mass at the open-air train platform nearby. Washed in the bright summer sunshine, devoid of the rush-hour madness scant miles away, it seems peaceful and good and happy. And most surprisingly of all, untainted. I look within my heart, think back to what I was when I was here, those things I did, and the memories are powerless: nothing but echoes, neither good nor bad.

Is this what it would be like if I practiced meditation? I wonder, staring out the window at the movie theatre, right across the street. The pain and the sadness and the shame about what’s been, and the worry about what might be, all fallen away, and the world just- abiding? Neither more nor less than what it is? I place the book in my lap. Or is it just that in all that time I never truly did anything here that really mattered to me?

The woman from the counter swings by the table and slides a green plastic basket across the marble towards me. The sandwich within is enormous; it fills the basket to overflowing, even cut into two pieces and overlapped. I pick up one steaming half of it gingerly, taking care not to burn myself, take a few small bites. We seem to need memories, on some level. People with memory impairment, people with amnesia or other disorders aren’t happy. They-

The panini sandwich is REALLY good. The outside of the bread is cracker-crispy; the inside of the bread and the eggs are light and fluffy and delicate on the tongue. The cheese is molten and tangy, and the ham is fine-shaven like deli proscuitto: just salty enough to accent the cheese and eggs, without being overbearing.

They-

I take another bite.

Aw, screw it, I think, taking another sip of the coffee to wash it all down. Sometimes there’s no moral. You just get a good panini.