Stay of Execution

Doomed

At times in my past I have felt that I am doomed, in some small secret but unarguable way.  Doomed to fail at relationships.  My metaphor is that I'm the four foot kid with a club foot who keeps going out for the basketball team, while his friends wince.  Each year, I think, "this is going to be the year," and although I get my hopes up it never works.  My friends are loyal but I wonder, each time I don't make the team, if they've inwardly been rolling their eyes all along, cringing at my aspirations, trying to divert me to the chess club or the literary magazine or anything but the damn basketball team that I'm just doomed not to succeed at. 

Anyway, most of the time I think I've gotten over that.  It only comes out when I'm being very mean to myself, this suspicion that I have some kind of romantic club foot that will keep me off the team, no matter how earnestly I practice and how many times I show up for tryouts. 

The last time it came back, or maybe the time before, I was really feeling low.  I was trying to explain the certainty that I am doomed to my Housemate, and somewhere in the conversation she asked if I thought I was the only person who was doomed, or were other people doomed like this, too?  I thought about that a while and said, well, I hate to say it, because she's wonderful, but I think our friend Elizabeth might be doomed, too.  And I hope she isn't, but it seems like she might be.  Elizabeth's about ten years older than us, and smart, fun, cool, interesting, spunky, cute, sociable.  And I'd watched her struggle and get hopeful and then lose relationships.  She seemed like a kindred spirit -- blessed in all kinds of ways but sharing my secret doom fate when it came to men. 

But Elizabeth's getting married on August 20th.  A couple of years ago she met a man at a conference and they've been crazy in love almost right from that moment.  I've been waffling about going to the wedding.  It's far away; it'll be expensive and logistically tricky to get there; there's a regatta here that I should be around for; I won't know too many people and those I know will be all paired up.  But today I decided to go.  I know it will be beautiful and thoughtful and full of reverence and celebration.  Maybe there's no such thing as doom.   

Letters I'll Never Send: A Confession

                                               July 28, 2005

Dear [________]

    I'm willing to bet that you've never seen the website www.postsecret.com.  It's an address where people send secrets written on the back of postcards.  The website is a collection of photographs of those postcards.  It's mesmerizing and wonderful and sad and lovely.  I've been looking at it a lot lately.

    And I've been thinking about my secret, what I would write on a postcard, and how it would feel to tell it.  My secret is about you.

    I was in your house one time, years ago.  You weren't there, and I was looking for some paper to write a letter.  I found a spiral bound Mead notebook in a drawer of odds and ends and opened it up toward the middle, looking for a blank page.  I saw right away it was your journal -- I hadn't known you kept one -- and I didn't put it down.  No, I read it.  Not too much, I was too guilty for that, plus you might have been coming back shortly, but I read a few pages, marvelling at your inner world.

    And here's the thing.  What I read in that journal was more complicated and discerning than I had realized you were.  You were writing about something hard, turning it over on the pages, writing about your own struggle to make sense of it and suddenly I saw the subject -- and you -- in a whole new way.  I saw your intellect and your heart and I admired you more, and differently, than I ever had.  I had a glimpse of your mind.  But I stole that glimpse, it was your private world, and I was ashamed of myself for stealing it.  I've pretended for years that I don't know who you really are.  No, this is worse.  I've pretended not to be interested. 

    We know each other, but not well, and I'm ashamed because I think that's my fault.  I have these layers of shame and gratitude that I can't separate.  I want to be ashamed for reading your inner thoughts and part of me desperately is, but part of me is grateful, too, for the little glimpse of you I got.  I'm ashamed that I don't know how to get there through conversation. 

   Yours,

   Scheherazade

Cuts and Bruises

Along with the summer streaks in my hair and my reluctant freckly tan this summer is evidenced by cuts and bruises and blisters.  The skin on my hands thickens from holding the mainsheet line, or the spinnaker sheets, often wet.  The callouses peel from time to time.  My fingernails are short and usually a little bit dirty underneath, from weeding the garden or pulling something out of the back of the garage.  I crewed in a 420 dinghy sailboat on Monday night, which always bruises my legs up pretty reliably.  On my last run as I stretched I saw that my right upper arm had a dried trickle of blood on it -- did I scrape a pricker bush as I ran by?  On Wednesday I scrubbed the bottom of the boat, treading water in my black bikini as I worked the scrub brush along the submerged hull, like brushing the teeth of a giant underwater creature.  I climbed out of the water, up onto the dock, by clambering up some rusty chains, and when I got out I saw I was bleeding, again on my upper arm.  The scrapes go across a big scar I have from an operation when I was twelve.  For some reason I never knew scars could bleed, but they can, it seems, just like the skin around them. 

How To Ride A Launch

It starts on the walk down the dock.  The launch drivers might be sitting there in the dockhouse, one on the bench beside the ice machine, in the sun, and one on the stool in the little dockhouse, reading a book.  Or maybe they're both out on the launches, driving along through the anchorage, delivering people to their boats.  You'll want to pause at the dockhouse at the end of the pier, no matter what. 

From there you can do a couple of things.  First, do you need any ice?  You might need ice.  The ice machine is there, cubes or blocks for $1.75.  You'll want cubes if you're just going out for a few hours, because you can sink your beer or soda cans into the cubes and they'll be nice and cold.  If you're going on a longer trip you'll want a block, of course, because it will melt more slowly.  You'll need an ice pick and an ice bucket then, for your gin and tonics, but if you're only now thinking about this at the end of the pier you can't go back and you're just going to have to make do.  You could use a screwdriver, maybe, in a pinch. 

Memory

So I was banging my hand on my forehead all day, trying to remember Troy's last name, and the name of the family whose house I used to go to after school.  No dice.  I remembered it was a fairly common name.  I remembered there was a brother a year or two older than me who grew up to be a shaggy-haired metalhead.  I just couldn't remember their names.

Sailing this evening, a friend brought her eight year old son.  We were putting the boat away, talking about who knows what, when someone brought up Inspector Gadget.  What was Inspector Gadget's dog's name? she asked.  None of us could think of the dog's name.  "Clue?" No, that didn't sound right to me. I searched for the name of the cartoon dog.   "He had a niece named Penny," someone offered.  Oh yeah, Penny.  A door in my mind flew open, somehow, but instead of Inspector Gadget's dog, I remembered Troy's last name.  "Nielson!" I said.  "The family was the Neilsons!"  My friends on the boat looked at me blankly.  Never mind, I said.  Just something I've been trying to remember all day. 

A Map of the World

I just drew a map of my childhood neighborhood.  So far, it's only my street.  Amazing what came back to me as I started to draw.  I started annotating houses, writing down the details about the people who lived there or what was in their backyard.  Names came back to me, and colors and features -- the berries on the big evergreen bushes next door, for example, that were red and juicy and round and looked like they would taste so good, but that I wasn't allowed to eat. 

What surprised me was the tragedy that was just a matter-of-fact part of the landscape around me.  Scott Chapman, who lived next door and ended up in prison because of something to do with guns. Bryant and David Field, whose mom died of cancer and who never went to the doctor because she was a Christian Scientist, so everyone felt guilty that they hadn't prayed enough to save her.  Eric Day, who was freckled bookish and nice but was bullied by his father and had so little self-confidence that he was more like a ghost than like one of us neighborhood kids.

And Julia Harrison, on the next block over, who had brittle bone disease that meant she didn't grow like other kids and had to walk on braces.  I remember her bedroom, sitting on shaggy carpet together doing something with stickers and listening to a Wierd Al Yankovic record.  I remember she had a mean attendant, a lady who pushed her wheelchair around and carried her up and down the stairs, and Julia told us that sometimes when she was carrying her she would dig her fingernails into Julia's skin, on purpose Julia thought.  These details came back to me unbidden, along with a memory of seeing her dad in the grocery store a couple of years ago, a couple of years after Julia died.  He looked lost and sad.  I know he'd gotten divorced from Julia's mom, some time ago.

I remembered the house on Glenwood Street where I went after school for a while when I was very young, a couple of blocks down from my house.  I can't for the life of me remember the family's last name but I remember the shade of grey-blue paint on the house and the gauzy white curtains that hung inside.  I remember the stairwell and a little inner balcony and certain rooms.  I remember the backyard.  The mother who took care of us had five kids.  The youngest one was a boy named Troy, who was my age, and sometime in my childhood he died.  My memory tells me, matter-of-fact, that he was run over by his mom's station wagon (I remember that car, definitely) but my brain protests.  How can that be?  How would such a thing happen?  I beg my memory for more information -- did it happen when I was still being babysat there?  What I remember makes me ashamed -- I didn't really like Troy, and was unmoved and totally uncurious about his death, so I don't know anything but this certainty that, yep, he died, and yep, it was an accident, his own mother, I think maybe right there on that street.  Remembering it gives me the creeps, although it never did as a kid, it was as much a part of my landscape as Julie Ridlon's house across the street, where I went for my first sleepover and ate too many Good and Plentys and got sick and scared and had to go home in the middle of the night.

The creepy part of my childhood landscape was in the other direction, the big tanbrown house at the end of the street, with the broad porch facing across to the elementary school.  I walked past it on my way to and from school, and also when I was going the two blocks up to the Rexall store to buy candy.  A man named Mr. Ball lived there, and he would sit on the porch smoking a pipe and wearing a suit.  My memory has him in a sort of tan/olive suit, but he probably wore others.  He was largely bald, with a scraggly gray combover.  And he used to talk to me.  He'd wave and I'd wave back, uncomfortable, and he'd ask me where I was going.  He used to call to me, wanting me to come up on the porch to talk with him.  He always asked me if I was going to get a frozen custard at the store.  I'd never heard of frozen custard, and wondered whether he meant ice cream, and if he didn't know what ice cream was, and why anyone would freeze custard if they could just have ice cream.  Of course I never asked him.  I just smiled a nervous frozen smile and walked fast past his house.  I didn't like him.  He smelled like pipe, and he was old and yellow and I remember knowing that he lived with his mother, who I can't recall seeing but who must have been very old indeed.  And in memory I feel guilty and undecided, just like I felt then.  He was probably a harmless, lonely old man, trying to be kind to a neighborhood kid.  Or maybe he was a creepy old man with ill intentions.  Once he called to me insistently and might have even lurched down the porch toward me.  I was going to the store -- had I told him? -- and he wanted to give me money to buy myself a frozen custard.  I was frozen there and took the money, feeling very uncertain.  He smelled like pipe and had blotchy brown old man skin.  I thanked him and walked quickly away, too polite to run, up to the store, where I bought myself two Charleston Chews and walked home a different way. 

Question

Is it correct, in conversation, to say that you have read a book if you have listened to it on tape or CD or mp3?  Should one specify, in a conversational parenthetical, that one didn't actually read it on paper, but actually listened to it?  Assume the intention of the conversation is a discussion of the contents of the book, not the format, but that there is also no intention to mislead.

I'm listening to Great Expectations, unabridged, on my mp3 player, while I run.  (It's great, by the way, even better than I remember it from high school.) 

Set Up

I complain sometimes that my friends never set me up, but the truth is it feels a little bit strange when they try.  Last night a girlfriend got some friends together and took us to see a band playing downtown.  I think you'd like the guitarist, she said.  Or possibly the bassist -- I've always thought he was cute.  But I've been wanting you to meet the guitarist for a long time.  I think you'll have a lot to talk about. 

We got there late into the set, after dinner elsewhere.  The band played a couple of songs and then took a break, and the guitarist came over to join us.  He knew two of the women in our little group, and sat down with us to catch up with them.  The drummer and the mandolin player came by, too, and a slightly drunk fan of the band.  (The bassist was sitting very close to a lanky blonde, laughing together.)  We were at a red-painted picnic table on a patio under a tent, next to the water.  Now and again big bursts of lightning would flicker, moving east, over the water.  A couple of us counted together until the rumble of thunder.  About 16 seconds.  The drummer said, "Sixteen miles away."  I said, "no, no.  It's just under three miles away.  Sound travels at six seconds a mile."  The guitarist looked at me.  "She says that with such an air of certainty," he observed.  I got flustered.  "I think that's right, isn't it?  Isn't what you're measuring the differential between the speed of light, which is basically instantaneous, and the speed of sound?"  We wandered into a conversation about who broke the sound barrier first, and that led us to Tom Wolfe. 

I'm a good yenta.  I have two introductions that resulted in marriage under my belt, and both couples are now pregnant.  Another couple I introduced a couple of years ago are moving in together next month.  A fourth couple I can't take full credit for -- lots of people around town kept suggesting they get together, including me -- but I want some points for their blissful pairing, a year long, with about six months of cohabitation.  My newest pair, the fifth, has had some rocky times of late, after seven months, but I have faith that they'll get through just fine.  I've been trying for a sixth but it hasn't taken.  I have an idea, though, that I'm going to try to bring about.    

I wonder, now, about matchmaking.  Maybe it's not the skill of the matchmaker but something about being set-up that changes the receptivity of people to one another.  I watched the guitarist through a different lens, last night, knowing my friend thought we might like one another.  Is he my type? I wondered, listening and watching. 

I wondered if she'd told him the same thing.  I doubt it, but I can't really be sure.  If she did tell him, it was sometime during the night, because he at first only took me in as background, and focused on conversation with the two women he knew.  Later, I got onto the radar screen, his glances at me lasting a little longer, taking me in.  I noticed when he acknowledged the small quiet joke I made, gave me a nod and a smile and bounced it back to me.  I watched my own behavior, too, knowing that the other girls at the table were eyeing the dynamics, making their own assessments, evaluating him for me and me for him.  It's a strange kind of consciousness to have, although not altogether bad. 

This is what it is, I think.  Being set up simulates the heightened consciousness of a crush.  You watch for signals and weigh casual comments for clues.  Is this someone I might like?   Am I attracted to him?  Is he attracted to me?  That comment, that was pretty funny.  Hmm, do I like the way he sits?  What kind of signals am I sending out?  Sounds like he is smart.   It's a little like being in sixth grade again, with the constant companionship of an inner voice evaluating and attempting to decode signals.  Does having that heightened awareness make it more likely that you'll like someone?  I'm not sure.  But my memories and impressions of the guitarist are much sharper than if my friend hadn't planted a possibility in my head before we went out.  Maybe that's why matchmaking works. 

(Google says that sound travels at five seconds a mile.  I've been certain since I was a child that it was six seconds a mile.  Someone must have told me that, and I never doubted it.  Oops.)

"Looks Like a Lactarius"

We straggled out of the woods in twos and threes and emptied our baskets onto a makeshift table in the dirt parking lot.  The mushrooms were roughly sorted, and my challenge as an abject beginner was to figure out where on the table I should put each of the mushrooms in my basket.  The yellow one was easy -- it went over with the other yellow ones.  Also I'd been taught to recognize the Russula, which come in all different colors, so my red one and my purple one got spread out alongside their brethren.

But I had a whole range of brownish and whitish mushrooms, in various shades and shapes and sizes.  I went vaguely by shape and color and laid them out.  I had a couple of mushrooms that didn't look like anything else on the table.  [A little joke, I discovered, among insiders in the mycological society, was to reply "not known by science," in response to a query about a mushroom.]

Then this magical performance began, unlike anything I've seen anywhere else.  A little, wrinkly, old man, tanned a dark brown, stood at the base of the table and the others all crowded around him.  Too polite to jostle, exactly, but you definitely had to work to get a good view.  The little old man surveyed the mushrooms and let out a joyful whoop and started picking them up, one by one.  He would wave the chosen mushroom around, as if conducting a symphony, and shout out questions, which the assembled group would call out answers to.  "Let's start with an easy one!  Take a look at this -- what am I holding here?"  People called or murmured a latin name.  "And why?  What kind of a spore print would I get with this?"  "Olive green!" responded a woman in her late thirties, wearing a t-shirt with a tree frog on it.  "Right!" called the little old man.  "And tell me about the gills, what about the gills?" 

I would duplicate more of the conversation for you but it was a mishmash of vocabulary words and Latin terms I couldn't catch or spell.  The little old man would whoop or crow delightedly as he led everyone else through a Socratic identification of the table's worth of mushrooms.  He sometimes crumbled a stem in his fingers or pulled apart the underside of a cap to show us the veil or the gill structure.  Once he licked a cap.  I got a glimpse of his tongue and it was huge and strangely textured, like the surface of a washcloth.  Another time he took a bite of a mushroom and spit it out.  "Yep, that's a _____," he said, while the group around him laughed affectionately and shook their heads.  The assembled crowd would jump in and point things out, too.  "There are two different shape cells in this genus, round and elongated,"  one might offer, or "That's a polypore."  There was a Canadian naturalist who seemed to know a lot, and the old man sparred back and forth with him.  "What is this called?" he would say, and when the man responded with the Latin names he would say, "What did it used to be called?" referring, apparently, to some previous taxonomic home.  "And where does it fit in the taxonomy?" 

It turned out that mostly what I found were different varieties of amanitas.  The old man's introduction to that group was, "And which species would make you a mortician's ward?"  Another fellow, a bearded man between 50 and 60 who, I learned, made slides and examined cells and spores under the microscope a lot, picked up one of the mushrooms and asked the group, "how many ounces do you think this is?"  About three or four, someone answered.  "This mushroom is toxic enough that fifty percent of people who consume one ounce of it will die."  Yikes. 

I found a bolete, too, and felt oddly proud when the little old man gave a little whoop and said, admiringly, "This is a great edible." 

From my notes scrawled down to capture a sense of the conversation and the vocabulary:
Q:"What do the kids call these?" A:"Chocolate tubes." 
The number of cells in a button is the same as the number of cells in a big mushroom -- that's why they can grow so fast, they just have each cell expand but there's no cell division.  Not true for polyphores = cell division; can grow around a foreign body b/c cells divide. 
Amaloid spores -- polypheria
the annulus would be gray
colored gills attached gills flattened gills. split/branch gills.  sometimes gills go down stem (chanterelle) involute gills long gills short gills free gills notched gills
ascomycete = cup fungi (ascus = tube).
"It's called that because the Russians who named it thought it sounded like a fart." 
Paxillus -- cousin involutus is poisonous. 
Prize of the day goes to the person who found harmolmyces = red/purple jelly drops, looks like jello but it's not.
"Looks like a lactarius"

Seeing Mushrooms

How do you find a mushroom?  You're there in the woods, walking along under the pines and the oaks, with a small whining entourage of mosquitos in a pack around you.  The floor of the woods is covered in an erratic pattern of dead leaves and pine needles and baby white pines and sometimes a stump or a big rock or a downed branch or tree.  You're walking slowly along with your basket, scanning the ground, telling your brain to look for something different.  But different from what?  There's hardly a pattern to recognize.  Your eyes find everything that's not-leaf, but that doesn't really help you, because most of the not-leaf objects aren't mushrooms.  And a lot of the mushrooms, as it turns out, appear as funny leaves.  They're underneath the leaf, so what you see is a brown leaf that's lumpy and slightly higher than the dead leaves around it, as it gets pushed up by a growing mushroom. 

I accompanied a friend on the Maine Mycological Society's last foray, on Sunday.  She and I wandered along at about the same pace.  "There's one," she'd say, and go over to pull something up.  I scanned the ground harder, but didn't see any.  We kept walking, and I kept looking, and still she would find them when I couldn't see them.  It's not as though they were invisible.  She'd point one out and I'd think, "why on earth didn't I see that?"  But I just didn't. 

But after about fifteen or twenty minutes I started seeing them.  I'd like to describe what changed or what slight pattern of light and shadow I began to recognize, but I don't think I can.  The mushrooms I found were all different sizes and colors, yellow and brown and purple and red and white.  I also found some slime molds and some ghostly and mysterious Indian pipes (invisible at first, but then once I began to see them everywhere in the woods).  I actually got really good at seeing brown mushrooms (a dull grey-brown, soft, although I also found a warmer honey-brown one, the only edible one I found, plus one with a shiny dark-brown top).  I started to find them first, and my companion would say, "Good eye!" or "Oh, I didn't even see that!"