Willpower

Willpower is not my strong suit. It’s not my weakest weakness, but I could do better. What are the biggest weaknesses in my willpower folder?

Writing and Reading.

Writing should not be an issue for a writer. When I get these ideas in the middle of the night, when I awaken with my teeth clenched in my mouthguard and my eye mask askew, my hands shaking with the visage of the ethereal nightmare that I’m watching grow smaller and smaller as it drifts out the window, lifting up into the naked branches of the cherry tree, and beyond, into the clear clear clear dark sky, I reach for my laptop.

I open a Word doc and type the sentence I want to remember, the sentence that will fuel my message later. Much later. I have too many writing prompts on too many topics.

But Reading. That’s my biggest downfall, my Achilles’ heel.

I am constantly finding one thing after the other to read online! (Exclamation points are another weakness but I have almost conquered that one, and you’ll note that the previous exclamation point is warranted!.)

“The anatomical basis of Achilles’s death is more likely to have been injury to his posterior tibial artery behind the medial malleolus, in between the tendons of the flexor digitorum longus and the posterior tibial vein. This area would have been included in Thetis‘s grip.” See what I mean? I’m pathetic.

The New Yorker tells me that I’ve hit the wall. I’ve read all the free articles they’re going to allow me. “Subscribe for $1 a week and get a tote.” I have too many totes, but I very nearly do it. I fear that if I subscribe to one, the rest will follow like literary dominoes. The Wall St. Journal, The Washington Post. Like the 12 Temptations of Christ, they’re calling out to me from their individual browser windows until I have filled way too many hours of my day with an endless loop of reading.

The New York Times is a deep bottomless pit of content. Yes, I do subscribe to The New York Times, digital edition, so it’s my own fault. I had been a faithful print subscriber to The Wall Street Journal for years, and then, damn it, the he/she faceless, anonymous paper delivery person kept forgetting (even when I left notes) that on Wednesdays, if he/she left my Wall St. Journal in the Beachcomber tube, the weekly Beachcomber would not be delivered. They penalize us like that. (Fair enough.)

I finally had enough of occasionally missing out on Wednesday’s local news, obits and the Calendar. I called The Wall St. Journal and told the man in India about the tube that the he/she, faceless, anonymous paper delivery person was hijacking everyday and, with unfortunate results, on Wednesday’s. “I would like to cancel my subscription.”

I would miss Dan Neil, the automotive columnist, whose blend of wit and mechanical knowledge is quite attractive to me. I wouldn’t miss the $5000 Gucci handbags in the monthly magazine section. I wouldn’t miss the Financial pages because I never read the Financial pages. I wouldn’t miss that humor guy whose pieces appear in the lower right spread “below the fold” on the Opinion page. (Below the fold is where they put the lesser content.) I can’t remember his name, but I sincerely believe that I could write a humor piece as good as he. (And don’t tell me it’s “as good as him”. When did the world switch from “he” to “him” in this context? It’s everywhere. Don’t they read Grammar Girl?)

Here I go again, off an another reading tangent. I googled* “Wall St Journal opinion page humorist” and after Peggy Noonan (!) I find a list of Top Humorists. Stephen King is #1 on this list. Joan Collins is #3. What? Art Buchwald, my childhood idol (You think I’m joking?) is #7. Tsk.

The man in India asked if I would keep my subscription if he directed the he/she, faceless, anonymous paper delivery person to install a proper tube for The Wall St. Journal. Like a good customer service rep, he diffused my annoyance and I agreed to allow 2 weeks for the tube to be installed.

I waited 4 weeks. Still no tube, and yet another lost Beachcomber issue. I called and there was no distracting me this time. I cancelled my subscription and went online to subscribe to The New York Times. I’m sure that Rupert Murdoch is not going to miss my $99 per half year.

Now I’m reading a whole new litany of favorite columns. Modern Love is best. I crave warmth like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Facebook is my love/hate relationship. Why does someone have to ask a question of their readers that I feel responsible to answer?

This morning a fellow writer, a friend, who is writing a novel set in the time of Boccacio, posted “Who can tell me what the paste left after the oil is pressed from olives is called in Italian? In medieval times, it was a treatment for arthritis and joint pain.”

I responded,
“No, I cannot. However, thanks to your question and my lack of self-control with Google, I now know more than I need to about olives— production, harvest and economics!”

I’m incorrigible.

I found a solution to my lack of willpower with respect to Reading online.

I decided that, beginning today, I shall unplug my laptop when I begin to read online. When the power percentage reaches 0% and my MacBook powers down, that’s it. Tough luck. I’ll have to proceed to the items on my “To Do” list.

Did it work? No. As soon as the pop-up warned me that I was at 5%, I ran for the charger. I needed to finish “How Weed Got Me in the Best Shape of My Life”. What? I don’t need weed to exercise. But I was curious. This is Washington state, after all.

I should note that the day after I cancelled my Wall St. Journal subscription, I found that a shiny new Wall St. Journal tube was in place at the end of my driveway with the morning’s issue.

The very next day, it was unceremoniously removed.

*Is the verb “google” upper case or lower case? When I google it, I get everything to do with the search engine and nothing to do with the verb. 😉

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Anticipation. In the garden and in Life.

I’ve been watching the fruit and vegetables in the garden grow and mature. Weeding, watering and wondering. When exactly is the first tomato going to be perfectly ripe for the picking?

Anticipation, I’ve always said, is a big part of any experience whether it be harvest or travel or concert or film or other highly anticipated event. The days creep along, the calendar dates change slowly. Finally, the day arrives.

Last week, a few tomatoes began to ripen in earnest. Pale orange became pale pink became reddish became almost red but not quite true ripe juicy red. I wandered around the plants, lifting a leaf here and there. I wondered which tomato would be first.

The Early Girl plants are massive, the Jet Stars half their size. Pacific Potager, where I bought plants this year, had at least three dozen varieties of tomato plants to choose from. This being only my third summer in the Pacific Northwest, I was uncertain of which to try, so reliable Early Girl was my first choice. I chose Jet Star plants because they were sturdy with a maturity date several days beyond than the Early Girls.

Surprisingly, when it came right down to it on Thursday afternoon, it was a Jet Star that would prevail.

I was harvesting parsley in the shade of our wisteria-covered pergola. Had pulled up the plants, roots and all. Rinsed off the roots with the garden hose and was snipping the parsley off the stems into a tub in preparation for chopping in the food processor before filing away in the freezer.

After a half hour of snipping, I was ready for a snack and remembered that it might be time for First Tomato.

A few steps away, there she was. Bright red, perfectly red and ready. I tenderly removed the tomato and placed it on a plate. “Tenderly”?

Yes. This was no grocery store tomato, not even a farmer’s market tomato, but a tomato to be consumed in the garden, minutes after picking.

Returning to the pergola table, I slowly drew my knife through its center, the fruit yielding perfectly to the bite of the serrated blade. I cut again, and again, until the tomato lay before me in perfect bite-sized unadorned fragments. Twenty of them. I took the time to count.

Is this beginning to sound obsessive-compulsive?

It was pure anticipation and enjoyment and I was delaying consumption as long as I could.

I sprinkled black pepper and then ground a few twists of pink Himalayan salt, watching the salt dissolve as it landed on the wet surfaces.

Then, the fork. The first taste, the flavor.

Jet Star Tomato

First tomato of the season

I spent a good fifteen minutes enjoying that tomato, while thinking about how I need to cherish more moments like this with pure anticipation and enjoyment.

What’s your tomato today?

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The Time is Ripe.

 

August and Oceans

It’s August. Summer vacations are drawing to a close.

Did you ever see the ocean when you were little?

The closest I came was a postcard from Cape Cod. From my godmother. She and her family had rented a cottage not far from the beach.

I stared and stared at that postcard. It was the only postcard I ever received as a child.

I wanted to see and hear and breathe and immerse myself in that ocean. But Daddy didn’t go far from his chair near the fireplace where he chain-smoked into the dark each night.

Maybe that’s why, when given the opportunity, I fled to Cape Cod to live and teach at age 22.

It’s in our DNA. I wanted to feel it up close, to be enveloped in it, to be drowned/not drowned in it.

Unexpected Triggers

Yesterday, Janet brought me a freshly-picked bouquet of August blooms accented with curly-topped white phlox. They were just like the phlox that were as tall as I in the days when I ran barefoot in dewy cool green grass. I was 3 or 4 years old in that memory and my grandmother’s phlox border must have been about thirty feet long. It stretched the length of our tractor garage from the tool shed to the outhouse.

Vivid blue-violet salvia, the spiky perennial kind, sturdy-stalked and long-lived, stood out boldly, almost dominating the three velvety stalks of gladiolus that completed the arrangement. I placed them in the middle of the coffee table and examined the gladiolus more closely.

They were a color that I’m still challenged to describe—somewhere near coral but pinker and not quite red. These sweet gladiolus were the trigger.

How could I have forgotten about my mother’s love of gladiolus?

Gladiolus were always prominent in the displays on the altar at St. Joseph’s when I was growing up. After Mass, my mother would coo over the gladiolus.

“Did you see the red and yellow gladiolus? Ohhh, they’re so beautiful…”

You may know that gladiolus are grown mostly for cutting.

My mother, however, never cut a single stem of hers.

The reason was that my father would not allow fresh flowers in our house (except for lilacs which he had grown up with). He despised the fragrance of fresh flowers and said that they made the house smell like a funeral parlor.

Maybe it was the metamorphosis of soft vulnerable petals to dry and withered remains that offended him. Acceptance of his mortality had never come easily.

My mother would not be discouraged. She planted her beloved gladiolus in a long, straight row, five inches apart like it said on the bulb package, next to the Tenderpod green beans. She would walk in the vegetable garden after supper in August, and given the alternative, she was content to admire her gladiolus next to the green beans.

In the house, she placed a bouquet of plastic flowers in a cheap cut-glass vase on top of the TV. They couldn’t come close to standing in for flowers sprung from the soil, rained on by spring showers, and coaxed open by summer sunshine. These plastic flowers would never die, even though they faded to pale ghostly shadows in the window’s bright light.

Eventually, silk flowers were invented, and my mother tossed the dusty plastic flowers, replacing them with silk roses, red as the ones lovers send on Valentine’s Day, flowers that my mother never received.

The years passed and soon my father was at the end of his days, under hospice care at home, a hospital bed installed in their living room. When my mother found him dead, she refused to unplug his oxygen until the first responders came to take on the task.

The next day, she awakened and went into the living room. She swears that one of the roses red as a lover’s valentine had popped up from the bouquet during the night. She says she found it sticking out five inches above the rest and is convinced to this day that my father was sending her a message from the other side.

And while I do believe in ghosts and I do believe in miracles, and in lovers bringing red roses, I’m not sure that I can believe in this particular ghostly miracle.

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