the cold harsh light of day

Okay, the weekend is over, it's Monday, my birthday has passed. It was wonderful. We got together with some friends last night at Sirens, and talked ourselves silly until Lauren, the bartender, surprised everyone, including herself, by advising us that it was last call.

We've never closed that place. Ever.

But here's the deal. Remember that post, two entries down, where I talked about starting my 50th year? Well, that's the truth. But in regular meatspace lingo, I just turned 49. Thank you all for the birthday wishes but let's not rush me too quickly along in this numerical parade, 'mkay?

who was I kidding?

Maybe the time to hang up the old blogger keys is when your blog gets more hits from folks googling "big black cocks" and "chinese water torcher" than from actual readers.

Oh, wait. This is for me. So bugger off if you don't like it.

aging teflon

In about one hour I'm going to begin my 50th year on the planet. Forty-nine doesn't sound so bad, but I know that "turning 49" means I've completed 49 years, which means that fifty years ago tomorrow, I landed here.

Each day of the coming year I will have experienced fifty times.

That awes me. But mostly it cracks me up.

All those times my mother told me to grow the hell up, well, they never took.

no money fun, part II

I recently received a comment for a blog entry I made more than a year ago, regarding no-money fun, asking for more ideas.

I haven't had an idea in decades.

However, hobbitt and I had a day today that might illustrate some of the finer points of no-money fun. But first, let me toss out some of the ways that we already enjoy ourselves without spending money:

• Playing dominoes (or UpWords, or really any game) regularly and keeping a notebook of scores. This last point is crucial for bullying and bragging rights. Hard to scream "In your face, jerk boy!" when you're in the midst of a terrible losing streak.
• People watching is always good for some interesting conversation. One sultry August afternoon we sat at the Chicago waterfront, making up stories about the people on the various yachts that were leaving or entering the marina. "Oh, she's the trophy wife. The kids don't look too happy, do they? She's gonna spend their inheritance..." "Hmmmm, from the looks of that scowl on his face and the size of that cooler on deck, Mabel might not be making a return voyage!" and such. It's fun. Takes a while to get warmed up, though, if you're not in the habit of observing.
• Warm coats, a dark, dark night sky, and patience. Spotting satellites and shooting stars, while actually exciting and even somewhat competitive, is also a wonderful excuse for some good old-fashioned necking.

For my no-money, however, beaches of any kind offer absolutely endless fascination and enjoyment. We took a long walk today with Inti, who didn't complain too much about how long it was taking me to get around.

First we found that we could make clams squirt water up to six feet in the air by stepping sharply near their air holes. So we stomped across the tideline for a few minutes, seeing how many clams we could set off at one time. Neither of us got wet doing it, which is a first. The dog was not amused. We were having a wonderful time.

The tide was so low that we were able to cross the outlet of the lagoon and head towards Chimacum Creek, which we'd never done (on foot) before. We had wonderful views of the lagoon and saw for the first time the 4-foot mounds of washed stones that protect that fragile ecosystem from the blustery storms we are prone to up here.

On our way back, instead of walking near the bluffs we walked along the tideline, and came upon dozens of living sand dollars. Living sand dollars.





















Dendraster excentricus, Eccentric Sand Dollar, to be exact. And not dozens of them. Thousands upon thousands of them. Then we realized that what we thought were leaves in the sands just beneath the water were colonies of sand dollars on their sides, half-buried in the sand. And then we realized we were standing on them. Hundreds of thousands of them. They're purple and fuzzy. They don't move too fast, although we were able to spot a few that had been moving in the wet sands, by their wide trails.















hobbitt said, "What do you know about them?" and I said, "Nothing right now." Well, now I know that they feed on plankton and diatoms that fall on their fuzzy surface (cilia). And I know they are many. We decided to walk far from the water so as not to crush them, and I came upon a chiton. A lined chiton, to be precise.
























Tonicella lineata. I'd never even heard of such a thing before. I spotted it because it, too, was moving in damp sand and left a noticeable trail. I picked it up to show hobbitt, who proceeded to take a lot of photos of it.





























"Feeds on coralline algae. Often is found living under the purple urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus or in urchin burrows in the rock. This species may home. Predators include Pisaster ochraceous and Leptasterias hexactis, at least in some regions. Eggs are released in April in CA and OR, but in June in the San Juan Islands. Lays a stream of green eggs. Trochophore larva development stops after 150-160 hours, and will not resume unless the larva settles on coralline algae. Larvae metamorphose into juvenile chitons within 12 hours of settling."

Now I know. Now you know. It didn't cost either of us anything, except for the price of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest. This book presents topography and geology, habitats, conservation and ecology, weather, night sky, flora, fauna, preserves and parks. You should have one for your area, or get one from the library for a place you're going to visit. No, really, you should. It'll fit in your pocket. You, too, can be fascinated by what's around you. All you have to do is look.

Tonight, after running errands and being floored by the clarity of the ridges and peaks in both the Cascades and the Olympics, we took our last walk of the day, again at the beach. The tide was coming in and yet the water was still draining from the lagoon. On many occasions I'd wondered, aloud, about when the water changes course with the incoming tide. Even in the twilight we could see the ripples of water draining, and stood quietly to wait for that to change. Within about 30 minutes the ripples had disappeared with the increasing depth of bay water, and yet the lagoon still drained. We walked up the inlet for about 50 feet to what was clearly a high spot. We could hear the water trickling from the pools and flats and waited until that, too, was almost calm with the advancing tide.















We laughed that this was the equivalent of watching paint dry, and made the usual jokes about what boring people we are. But we are curious and fascinated with this place we find ourselves, this beautiful planet. We want to know more about it. Don't you? Tonight, in this betwixt and between place, where the advancing tide met the draining lagoon, we witnessed something mysterious and seldom noticed, if seen at all. It satisfied the parts of our souls that never want to stop learning, and it lightened our hearts, and we'll want to go back and see it again, preferably in daylight and warmer weather.

But I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Our walk back through the meadow gave us a glorious view of the stars, led by that mysterious sparkler Sirius, who stopped us in our tracks one night a few weeks ago, as we gazed and wondered what would twinkle gold and blue and red, and argued that it must be a helicopter or plane. Go out and see this if you can, while it's still near the horizon in the early part of the night.

You won't believe it's a star. And if you think about it, you won't believe how lucky you are to be watching the universe work, quietly and steadily. And it's not costing you a thing.

got lingerie?

We have the most interesting guests.

I was looking for something a few days ago and ventured into the guest room. I opened the drawer of the bedside table and found this:

























We're not quite sure who this belongs to. It's either the younger hippie chick relative who visited for Thanksgiving (and who also left the most recently posted panties), or the older hippie chick who stays here when attending the local massage school's orthopedic massage course, once a month.

This has got to stop.

small miracles

So this happened. I got the call from Jeanne that Aunt Grace went to the hospital today with severe chest pains. Aunt Grace will be 93 in May; her heart is functioning at about 10%; she lives in New Joy Sea, while Jeanne is now in Florida for the winter and I am in Pete Townsend.

A year ago this would have sent me into a state of action. I would have been on my way to the hospital. I would have been agonizing over home care for Aunt Grace (she says she won't have anybody "living" with her when perhaps all she needs is some help during the day) or assisted living (she knows she needs to go and even thinks it's a good idea for her social opportunities but is fiercely stubborn and does not want to leave her home of 20 some years). I would have been calling Aunt Marie to let her know, lest she ream me another one like she did several years ago under similar circumstances.

But tonight the only action I could accomplish was to call my New Joy Sea siblings (and Aunt Marie) and let them know. There wasn't anything they could do tonight anyway - there's a major nor'easter and lots of snow. But I made the calls. Neither Jeanne nor I could much stomach the idea of Aunt Grace alone in a hospital, since we both know she suffers from sundowning, really bad. She gets very disoriented in the hospital, and though she's still pretty sharp for a woman her age, and though she knows that she's hallucinating when it happens, it is a really bad scene.

One small miracle: I wasn't freaking out. I wasn't planning an emergency trip out east. I did have one brief moment of wondering whether I would be able to finish the Master Gardener training, and that was selfish, but understandable.

Second small miracle: a half hour after informing my siblings, I got a call from my brother, who was braving the weather and heading out to the hospital. I was moved and grateful. Jeanne's relief was palpable when I told her.

So who knew? My brother is a hero of sorts. And I will say it just this once: it's about time.

the missed lunch

Sunny skies and calm winds? I'm paddling. I persuaded the pandammys to join me.

We headed towards town today, keeping near the shore on the way out to see how the bluffs have fared in the recent storms. I spotted a redtail hawk on the beach, dragging a tasty morsel of some sort. I think the morsel used to be a bird. I stopped paddling to see what would happen next, but my mere presence spooked the hawk to the branches of a nearby washed-up tree. I should have paddled away right then and there, but sat transfixed instead. The few moments of Mexican standoff between me and the hawk cost him his lunch, as a bald eagle came from the north and sat in a nearby cedar, which was all the urging the hawk needed to hightail it out of there.

I immediately regretted having lingered there, and turned my boat to continue on. As soon as I did so, I glanced over my shoulder in time to see the eagle swoop down to the remains of the meal. The eagle didn't linger for long. In a hearbeat, it took wing with the dead bird dangling from its talons, and flew not 15 feet above the pandammys heads.

After that I decided to get away from the shoreline, and ended up almost a quarter-mile out. I had great views of Rainier and Baker and the moon and the beautiful homes at the top of the bluffs here. And pretty much every time I looked over my shoulder, I was being followed by a large, probably male, harbor seal.

I'm still amazed that I can enjoy this kind of action in mid-winter.

a bit of a blow

A huge and dangerous storm swept through last night. Our neighborhood looks a bit worse for wear. One house around the corner had its eaves crushed by a 75-foot conifer. Luckily it only hit the corner of the house. The ground has been saturated for weeks, and some of these big trees had nothing solid for their roots to grasp.

I sleep with the window open, right at the head of the bed, and it got a little noisy. I finally had to just pull the shade all the way up, as I got plenty tired of listening to it banging against the window trim. In the middle of the night, in the midst of the worst of the wind, I could see hundreds of stars. That beautiful view greeted me every time I woke up from hearing a thud or crash.

What woke me this morning was the beeping sound of hobbitt's UPS (uninterruptible power supply) complaining when the power went out. I paid no mind, after figuring out that we could make a decent cup of coffee by using a match to light the stove to boil water. When hobbitt woke up I informed him of the possible caffeine emergency, and my solution. Then I realized we wouldn't be able to grind any beans. No sweat, he said. We can use the UPS for that! Except we couldn't. Its battery had run pretty low by the time we were up.

Some of our neighbors have generators, and I was getting ready to go door-to-door with the grinder, begging for some juice, but we had electricity by 11 a.m. or so.

We might as well have never set foot on our beach, it looks so different. Logs with a diameter of 5 feet and more were pushed 100 feet from where they were yesterday, or turned sideways, or piled atop one another.

We've promised each other to brave it day or night and get down to the beach next time a storm blows through. It would have been priceless to have seen those behemoths bobbing in the violent surf.

exercise

Mrs. Pandammy and I took a long walk with various spaniels and spaniel mixes* today, on the beach. (Where else?) The sky was a piercing blue and the sun was wonderfully warm. There wasn't a breath of air. The water was still. We decided we'd have to go for a paddle. As we were approaching the parking area, she noticed that someone had what looked like her kayak paddle near his car. Sure enough, some new neighbors had come down to the beach on this lovely day to do some kayaking, and the Pandammy's had offered their boats earlier in the week, so our plans together were somewhat dashed.

Generosity was the order of the day, I guess, but I found myself just a wee bit peeved that our paddling time was stolen by such impudent interlopers. Those bastards!

Ahem. Okay, not a big deal. They don't have boats (yet), and we do, and there will be other days. But today was exceptional. I waited a reasonable amount of time after the impudent interlopers said they'd be back and called to see if Mrs. P still wanted to get out there. By this time, of course, the sky was overcast and the warm note of the day was lost. She declined.

Oh well. I pulled on my Muck Hoser boots (so what they're for gardening? They work quite well in the bay so shut up), gathered my gear (seat, paddles, vest) and took off for the beach. When I got there, it was no longer still, though the water was merely rippling in response to a gentle breeze. It was about 1 o'clock.

I got it into my mind to see if I could get to Chimacum Creek, which is just around the spit and across a short stretch of water. I arrived near the creek at 1:27. I did some quick math (I had to take Inti to the vet for a 3:00 appointment) and headed toward the creek itself. The water was the color of weak coffee, and the stream current wasn't so strong as to make for rough going, and the madrones and eagles and ducks and salal were so beautiful, and the creek so sheltered and peaceful, that I just had to keep going for a while.

Eventually I started to worry about the time, and headed back. I paddled across (somewhat) open water, alone, for the first time. I wasn't afraid. I was working my arms pretty hard, trying to move as quickly as possible, all the while keeping an eye out for a power boat that was pulling up at crab pots (gotta mind the wake), checking for more eagles (a juvenile!), and wondering what the hubbub was on the beach at the spit.

This is when the paddle started to turn sour. A man and little girl and two golden retrievers were there. The dogs were jumping around the little girl, who seemed to be holding a float or dummy of some kind. The girl was crying. The man ran toward them, shrieking obscenities, chased the dogs away from the girl, and then I saw him make a single fist with both his hands and bring it down on the back of one of the dogs.

I was sickened and stunned. I turned the boat and looked, to see what would happen next. No more bludgeons, but a few kicks. Lovely. I turned to continue to the other side of the dock, all the while listening to him scream obscenities at the dogs when they did not retrieve the dummy he was throwing. Once back to shore, I quickly got my boat up on the rack, and went to the parking area. There was only one vehicle there besides mine, and it was a large white pickup with two large dog crates in the back. I noted the license plate and other identification stickers on the windshield (a DOD sticker from '95), then copied those numbers again onto a second sheet of paper.

This truck didn't have a residence sticker for our community. He was a trespasser. We get them all the time, since the gates are open during working hours on weekdays. It's not usually a big deal, as most folks are very nice and at the very least pick up after their dogs.

I left the jolly fucker a note letting him know I had some identification on him and that I'd witnessed him abusing his dogs. I didn't write that I'll be calling the county and the ASPCA tomorrow.

I'm just hoping he didn't notice the fat chick in the blue boat.

Tonight I used Google Earth to figure out that I paddled approximately three miles in 90 minutes. Tonight I figured out that maybe I should take more time doing that, judging from the ache across my mid back.

On a lighter note, I'll be walking the same walk that hobbitt walked yesterday, soon enough. Got a call from my doctor today informing me that yes, the polyps I had last year were indeed of an insidious nature. When I have that procedure done, I'm unlikely to be waxing philosophical about love and being in the moment. I'm more likely to be heard saying "ouch" and more appropriately, "crap".


*Mrs. Pandammy's pups are American Cocker Spaniels. Inti is a mix of some ilk of spaniel and a pack of horny and approximate labs, or perhaps vice-versa.

storm tides

The largest of the tree trunks on our side of the lagoon used to lie perpendicular to the water. Today I noticed it was parallel. This particular piece of wood - I hesitate to call it a log - is about the size of my Volvo station wagon. I began to notice, on my mid-day walk, how much the landscape had changed.

Certainly this happens every day. Each tide, regardless of how mild it might be, rearranges some of the spit, or brings new detritus, or uncovers yards upon yards of polished stones, or maybe covers them up again with sand. But this latest storm pushed new logs into the lagoon and even up upon the walking trails, flooded much of the interior meadow, and washed enough clay and silt into the bay that in front of the bluffs, the water looked a bit like pea soup. At low tide mid-day, I noticed that the slope of the beach was much gentler, and didn't bother my knee so much.

Here and there sand had cascaded over the lowest of the dunes and washed over the grasses. If the plants don't recover before summer, there could be further erosion. This isn't anything new, of course. I certainly have no idea what this beach looked like long ago or what it's likely to become in the far future. I am certain that it is always changing.

I like the beach just the way it is. I don't want it to change. I don't want the meadow paths to be re-routed to higher ground. I don't want the dunes to erode, and evict the mice and voles that Inti loves to chase and hunt. But the tide will come, and then the storms, and the the whole scene will be repainted into exactly what it must be. It's not benign or malignant forces that make it so. That's just how it all works.

Yesterday hobbitt took the purge for today's colonoscopy. While it's routine, it's also urgent. His family history of cancer is even stronger than mine, and his younger brother succumbed to colon cancer eight years ago at a very young age. This is something we live with and don't think about too much. It is what it is.

But last night he was violently ill from the substances that were cleaning him out. It was shocking to me, since this is the 4th time he's been through this. When hobbitt feels ill, he reels in his attention and focus, doesn't complain, asks for nothing, and interacts very little. I always have a hard time with this, since this is the man who cannot walk by me without touching me lovingly, on my cheek or hair or shoulder. I get a little nervous, and impatient, and even sometimes peeved, and it always takes a while for me to realize that I'm actually quite afraid.

This morning, to see him so incapacitated after the procedure, provoked even stronger feelings of fear. In the past I wasn't able to be with him until he was further along coming out of anesthesia. "Aren't they wonderful when they're sleeping?" the nurse said to me, right after his gurney had been wheeled back to me in the recovery room. Sleeping, yes. But this isn't sleeping. This is Demerol and Versed and this is my man, helpless and vulnerable. This is my partner, my best friend, my companion, my lover, my love. This is the other half of what I have become: not a single being, but a part of us.

Today, while watching him emerge from the drugs, came a sobering possibility. And this is different. This is change. I don't want this change. What I want is that this vital and masculine irresistible being never change, never age, never fall ill. It's cruel, this living, aging, this passage of time. I want everything to be, forever, just what it is now. I don't want to have to navigate a different landscape for us, or for myself.

Of course that's a ridiculous desire. And of course I don't believe that this life is cruel, really. This is just how it works. One day, maybe soon, maybe a long long time from now, one of us won't be here. I'm not afraid to die and I'm fairly certain that someday hobbitt will die, too. There's no getting around that. But I looked at my fear today, in pondering my irritation, and what I saw more clearly than ever was the wicked illusion of security. I forget that I can have this moment indeed, but I can only have it right now. My next breath delivers me to an altered sphere, even if I am not capable or brave enough to acknowledge the change.

Our life together here is precisely like the beach and the tides. It works as it is designed, it has a rhythm, but its evolving nature gets lost in the routines and comforts of one another until some violent mid-winter storm shatters the illusion of permanence. And I'm kidding myself if I say it hasn't happened to us before, so why it should come as a surprise to me today is hardly excusable. And yet once again I find myself in deep sadness at the ephemeral nature of it all, simply because I'm attached to how sweet and rich our life has become. I like this "us" thing and I don't know what comes after it, nor do I want to know.

I took my last walk of the day at twilight. The bay waters were as still as glass. The tide was well in, and the sandy real estate was much reduced. That made it all the more clear how the beach had been rearranged, with those hulking behemoths of tree trunks moved about like so many dominoes. I had to pick a different route approaching the end of the spit, and dammit, I didn't want to have to think about that. I just wanted to walk the regular walk around those logs as I had on Monday. Of course that wasn't an option, and though I had to weave into and out of the dunes, and wend my way around the flooding in the meadow, I eventually came to my favorite place just outside the copse of trees at the very end of the point. I looked up and saw the waxing crescent moon just above the deep silhouettes of the firs and cedars, and it took my breath away. A while later I was back on the beachfront and the heron, startled, raised it massive wings and lifted its body just above the water, flying past me and delivering its hoarse croaking complaint. Both events were lovely moments, and once again I was able to inhabit those moments, fully.

Putting words to my uncomfortable fear doesn't solve anything, of course, but it is a start. I don't want to get to the end of all this and puzzle, with regret and panic, "What was this life?" I love this man. I have him now. And that has to be enough, because that is all there is.