…when the living is easy.

Summer is one of my favourite times of year, which is why I’m wicked excited that today is the summer solstice. Although summer has been creeping up over the last few weeks, there’s something magical about the longest day of the year which reminds me of a key turning into place, about to open the doors of summer. Summer is awesome because the days are warm and long, and my friends are back in town, and, at least for a few weeks, I can feel 16 again, only way cooler than I actually was when I was 16.

I note that my first river day last year was 28 May, and I have yet to go this year, which is definitely something which needs to be remedied. I assume that when Tristan comes out a little later this summer, there will be some rivertime happiness going on. There’s really nothing better than a day at the river, especially after a long ramble through the woods:

Summertime is also, of course, PARADE TIME.

And fruit o’clock:

Happy Solstice, everyone.

My father brought some strawberries by the other day, freshly picked from his garden. Apparently several days had gone by since the last time he picked strawberries, so he got quite a haul, considering that he doesn’t have that many strawberry plants. They were red and still warm for the sun, and he said “here, eat one,” and handed it to me, and I did, and it was good, red all the way through and juicy but not dripping, and although it was a tad too ripe, it hadn’t quite reached that strange sour stage that strawberries get to when they are allowed to sit too long on the plant. And then we talked about the travesty that is supermarket strawberries, and he suggested that I wash his before eating them, because “they might have been pecked a bit.”

Last year, I wrote, in reference to Father’s Day: “I always think that it’s rather preposterous to set aside a single day of the year for appreciation of fathers.” And I stand by that statement. In my world, every day is father’s day, because not a day goes by that I don’t think of my father, and I tend to call him or see him in person every few days, because I am fortunate enough to live close to him.

I know that different people have different sorts of relationships with their parents, as evidenced by a lively discussion going on right now at the message boards I have been posting on for almost 10 years. We’re a cantankerous family now, and the topic of Father’s Day came up, and the results were explosive, with some people writing very wistful, sad things about their fathers, while others lambasted them, and the wannabe hipsters like me derided the day as a cheap, Hallmark holiday.

Discussing this later in Top Secret Online Scrabble, one of my fellow posters said “and I really love Father’s Day, Hallmark holiday that it is,” and I responded “I unabashedly love my father,” and went on to say that neither of us is very emotionally demonstrative, and it’s true. When my father showed up shyly on the porch with his strawberries, we had a silent wordless exchange in which we said everything that needed to be said without getting all maudlin about it, and that was that, and everything was good, and now I am eating strawberries chilled from the fridge, with sour cream and brown sugar, a favourite summer treat of my childhood.

But maybe my friend is right. Perhaps being emotionally demonstrative is an important part of life, and, as she pointed out, for those of us who aren’t very demonstrative, Father’s Day provides a nice excuse for doing it. Her father, she told me, keeps all of the Father’s Day cards she’s made for him, and that reminded me that my father has all of my baby teeth squirreled away in a drawer somewhere, and that in turn caused me to wonder what I will do with those particular artifacts when the time comes that they are my responsibility.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many books about dead people lately, and getting all morbid, but sometimes I think about these things, and I wonder how I would feel if my father leaves behind no physical proof of my love for him after he is gone. While the power of intangible love is indeed great, and I know that he knows how I think of him, perhaps, this year, I will go ahead and spell it out, just to be sure that we’re all on the same page here, strawberries and all.

I recently came across a concept which I think sums up this website in a nutshell. I’ve often struggled to explain what this ain’t livin’ is, since it sort of defies categorization. It’s a soapbox. It’s a personal journal. It’s a sandbox. It’s a collection of reviews. It’s recipes. It’s adventures. Most of the people I know who maintain websites have sites that fit into neat categories, like collections of poetry, or writing about food, and sometimes I envy them for their clear, even messages, their loyal readers, their sense of purpose and focus.

I crave order and neatness, and am sometimes horrified by the sprawling disorder which is this website. Every now and then I attempt to codify it, to contain it, to control it, and within seconds, it seems, it’s oozing out the edges again.

And then I read about the silva rerum.

For those of you not up on your Polish history, a silva rerum is a sort of family chronicle, a massive diary kept to keep track of family history. But it’s a little more complicated than that. A silva rerum or sylwa has quotes, poetry, keepsakes, copies of important documents, notes about finances. “Chronicle” really is the right word to use, because a silva rerum is like a repository of all of the information which a family thinks is interesting, important, or amusing.

These journals were kept largely by the Polish nobility, and thanks to some very dedicated record keepers, we can get a fascinating slice of life out of various medieval chronicles. We don’t just know how much a peck of grain sold for and how many serfs these people had, we know what their friends thought about them, what the priest said on Sundays, the order they planted their crops in, what their coats of arms looked like.

Many span across multiple generations, including entries from not just the family members, but honored guests and friends. In a silva rerum, you can see shifting fortunes and the changing face of Polish society, and I think that’s pretty amazing. The thought of keeping a multigenerational chronicle, though largely for internal use within the family, is pretty daunting.

Silva rerum is, of course, Latin for “forest of things,” and that, I realize, is what this site is. It’s a forest of things which can be viewed alone, or as a whole. While most entries stand on their own, they also form a collective narrative about the person who writes them, even if I don’t write much about my personal life anymore.

It pleases me immensely to finally have a phrase to describe what this site is.

“What is it, exactly,” someone will ask me, and I will say “a silva rerum,” and that will be the jumping off point for a conversation about Latin, and history, and journals. I doubt this site will endure for hundreds of years to be examined by future generations, but I do like the thought that, in a way, it is me. Myself, and my forest of things.

I don’t really have any words of wisdom or wit for you today, gentle readers. When I struggled to wakefulness this morning, I didn’t really know what I wanted to say, or how I would say it. I thought about talking about the resilience of the human spirit, how we are able to rise about the things that crush us. Or about telling you a story about someone I knew once, in a time which is beginning to feel very far away and long ago.

I think I will leave it at this: I remember. I will always remember.

I will remember the water on stone, and the water on sand.

I will remember that things are often tenuous, if best. That not all buds bloom. That subtle scents should be greedily absorbed in deep breaths while feel like they are gashing your chest open.

I will remember to look up into the eyes of the sun, for the temporary tingling pleasure of firing rods and cones.

I will remember threads of footprints on the sand.

Today I remember Adrian Burkey, for he is no longer alive to remember himself.

To visit an old friend who is dying is to be reminded that life is fragile and fleeting, while you sit awkwardly knowing that every moment is goodbye. Is to see someone reduced to a shadow of their former self, and to feel bitter that this will be your last and most enduring memory, frail bones jutting from irritated, dying skin like someone is dying from the outside in, dark, sunken eyes which follow but do not see. To feel skin which is so fragile that you are afraid of tearing it with your touch, to sense increasing lightness and to strive to speak normally while every cell wants to scream, to beat the walls in frustration, to run rather than to face reality.

To see an old friend who is dying is a sacred obligation, and to be able to visit when he can still realize that you are present is a bitter honor. To know when you turn to go to the door and raise your hand limply to say goodbye that you will probably never see him again, not in this lifetime, and to wonder whether the end will come quickly or whether it will drag on. To see the end coming slowly is to know that death is not noble or purifying, but torturous and cruel.

To meditate on death is to be reminded that we are never finished, never ready, always resistant. Yet, there is a bitter cup which waits for us all.

“To thine own self be true,” Polonius says in Hamlet. It seems to be a quote that gets repeated a lot, especially on tacky inspirational refrigerator magnets that probably would have deeply confused poor Shakespeare, especially since we live in a society where many people seem to believe the exact opposite of this saying.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was arguing with someone about something that I feel passionately about, and I refused to back down, because I felt that it would compromise myself, that by giving in I would be giving away a little part of myself, and the person obviously didn’t understand this. Objections were rationally laid out, valid criticisms were raised, and I still held my line, because it was important to me. Because I believe that when you abandon yourself, you have nothing. I’m willing to be persuaded and to seeing new information which changes my opinion of something, but I’m not going to quietly give in for the sake of social harmony; it’s just not who I am.

I’ve noticed that a lack of a strong core seems to be a problem for much of our society. We have politicians who are unable to articulate their beliefs because they don’t have them, and people who can’t defend their beliefs because they don’t want to upset the applecart. What’s wrong with a little believing? What’s wrong with having a firm opinion on something, a line which you believe shouldn’t be crossed, and sticking to it?

Minds change and beliefs change, and that’s all well and good, part of the process of evolution. But I fail to see why people don’t stand up for themselves, why they remain silent when they want to speak, and why we criticize the people who do dare to speak out, to raise a ruckus.

When I read the news this morning and found out that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated, I shouted the news upstairs to my friend who is visiting, and we both had a moment of silence.

“That sucks,” I said finally.

“Yeah,” she said.

It sucks that people with courage, strength, and self confidence get assassinated, both literally and figuratively.

I want each of you, gentle readers, to resolve to be more true to yourself in the coming year. When you’re in a social situation and something you don’t like is happening, say something. Or leave. Assert yourself. Remind the world that you are a human being, with feelings. When you hear someone else speak up about something, listen to them and support them, instead of telling them to be quiet for the good of the group. Break out of your culture of convenience and complacence and ruffle some feathers. Don’t do it for me. Do it for you.

A friend of mine gave me a Meyer lemon the other day. She came into Headlands on her way to somewhere else, and said:

“I wanted to give this to you,” and she reached into a paper bag, and at first I thought it was some sort of holiday gift, and I felt guilty for not getting something for her. She pulled her hand out with a perfect, sweetly scented lemon, and she handed it to me like a jewel.

“It’s from my parents’ tree,” she said, “in Chico.”

The lemon had an intoxicating aroma, and I immediately placed it beneath my nostrils and inhaled deeply.

“Thank you, it smells delicious,” I said, and she continued on her way through the evening. The lemon is sitting next to my bed now, because I can’t bear to cut it open, and my whole bedroom smells like sweet lemons, like Greece, like sunshine.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

The interesting thing for me about the solstice, beyond the fact that it marks a change of seasons and an interesting point in our orbit around the Sun, is that people have been celebrating it for thousands of years. It’s kind of amazing to me that early human cultures were able to calculate the solstices, and recognize that something important was shifting, even if they couldn’t necessarily explain the science behind the solstice. The fact that earlier human cultures were able to build huge structures like Stonehenge which were calibrated in accordance with solstices is even more amazing.

Seriously. We take all of these things for granted, and it’s kind of amazing to think about how far we have come (or fallen, as the case may be) as a society. I could look up the exact time of the solstice (10:08 last night) in about 30 seconds on the trusty El Goog, so I don’t really think about how astonishing it is to figure out things like that with only rudimentary tools.

Many winter solstice traditions involve keeping lights on through the longest night, as a reminder that times of light are coming, and it’s intriguing that this tradition has sort of been borrowed by Christmas, what with light bedecked trees and all. Granted, the Christians kind of stole a lot of pagan traditions in the hopes of getting more people on board with their new religion, so I guess it’s not really that remarkable that Christmas shares similarities with older traditions. I still superstitiously leave a candle burning overnight, because I would hate to be responsible for the sun’s decision to remain in the Underworld for a year or something.

In various corners of the world, people are celebrating the solstice in their own ways; for my readers in the southern hemisphere, this marks the start of the descent into darkness, while we in the north are looking forward to longer days. I feel like I am anticipating shorter nights even more than usual this year; the dark has felt more oppressive, for some reason, than it has in the past. I hope it makes me appreciate the summer all the more. Although I have to say that I am so much happier now than I was at this time last year, it’s kind of amazing. It may be dark and freezing, but at least I’m home and my confused narcissus is blooming and there’s a frosted cake on the counter. Well, actually, in the fridge, because of the ants, but “on the counter” sounds better, don’t you think?

I used to stay up and try to watch the sunrise on the solstice, usually from the headlands at Caspar. I like watching sunrises. The cold stillness, the dew, the waiting as a thin thread of light fingers across the horizon, slowly getting larger and larger while the sky turns more and more pale and then suddenly the sun appears. It reminds me of the scene in The Phantom Tollbooth when Milo tries to conduct the orchestra and ends up making a giant mess of things. Maybe that’s why I like to watch sunrises; I’m secretly hoping for a repeat of Milo’s performance.

Sunsets aren’t half bad either, honestly.

A great number of people seem to associate snow with winter, which is, I suppose, reasonable, since it does snow during the winter in many regions of the world. But for those of us who have experienced limited snow, all this talk of white Christmases and so forth seems a bit abstract. December here is drizzly, at best; the real storms come in November and January, but not December.

It snowed in Greece when I was growing up, and I remember playing in the snow with friends and making various snow creations with my father, but once we returned to the States, I didn’t see snow for years until I was at [expensive East Coast college]. I still remember that first snowy morning, waking up to peer outside into a world which had gone white overnight.

But winter itself didn’t happen overnight. First came the frost, which I visualized as a layer which slowly seeped into the earth. I could actually feel the ground getting harder, as the grass froze so hard that it would snap under your feet when you walked on it. But that first snowy morning…it felt as though winter had finally come, at last, as though the frost was an extended overture. It was very early when I woke up, and only one thin thready line of footprints stretched out across the snow, so I leapt of of bed and ran outside, barefooted.

I still remember the crunch of snow under my feet, the moment when my feet finally got so cold that they felt like they were on fire and I ran back inside. My friends who had lived in the snow their whole lives laughed at me, but I didn’t care. I was delighted, entranced, filled with wonder. The snow makes me childlike, filling me with so much happiness that I think I might explode; a happiness so great that it is almost painful.

Maybe because I haven’t lived in the snow for years on end, I love it. I am insanely jealous of people who live in places where it snows. I miss falling down on icy patches, I miss plopping into piles of soft powder, I miss chasing snowflakes as they drift through the air, I miss sudden flurries so intense that I can’t see three feet in front of me. I miss the muffled silence that falls with the snow, the stark trees and sharp light. Having had a taste of snow, I will be forever wanting more.

It rarely snows here. If it does, it doesn’t stick. And by rarely, I mean every 10 years or so. More often, it hails, and the ground stays crunchy for an hour or so before it melts away. I really wish it did snow, because the snow is so very excellent. Our winters are long, and dreary, and dull. I already feel myself sinking into lethargy and depression, with dull grey skies and grinding cold weather but nothing that I can definitively point to as winter. We haven’t even reached the turning point of the solstice yet; I just want it to snow, or storm, or something, anything but this dreary, aching cold and greyness.

People who live in the snow always seem to complain about it. They say that they wished they lived somewhere temperate, but really they mean somewhere warm, where winter days are sunny, like Florida, not grey and heartbreaking, like they are here. When I lived in the snow, winter was my favorite season, for the clarity, the crisp cold, the whiteness, the beauty. Here, the winter makes me want to curl up and die. Instead, I just sleep and eat all the time, hoping to stave off the misery.

If you live somewhere snowy, you ought to appreciate it, for me if no one else. Go outside barefoot. Throw a snowball at something. Revel in this amazing gift from the skies. If your neighbors laugh at you, thumb your nose at them, because you are embracing the snow instead of moaning about it. As you look out into your winter wonderland, think that somewhere else in the world, someone is not as lucky as you are.

Here in the States, people call it “Veterans Day” so that we can have Veterans day blowout sales. And so that we can think abstractly about military service. Other countries call it Armistice Day, after the armistice which ended the First World War; by general agreement, the armistice was signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Most people call it Remembrance Day and they buy red poppies to fund veteran’s groups and then they hold marches.

Both of my grandparents served in the Second World War. My grandmother worked in the signals intelligence department for the Navy, while my grandfather worked for the BOB, and later the OSS, which eventually became the CIA. As often happens in military families, many family members also joined; I have a couple of cousins scattered across the services, for example. Apparently the service gene died out in my father, but I inherited a certain liking for members of the military from my grandparents.

I didn’t really know my grandparents. I inherited my grandfather’s watch, and a box from India that belonged to my grandmother, and I know that my father has various mementos of theirs as well. I only interacted with them a handful of times, although I do remember my grandfather’s last words to me: “don’t let the man get you down.” This generation of people is starting to disappear; veterans of the Second World War are going to be in the 80s, at a minimum, at this point. They’ve been called the greatest generation, and maybe they were.

The nice thing about referring to Remembrance Day as “Veterans Day” is that you don’t need to think about the men and women who are currently serving, or the injured service members recovering at places like Walter Reed. You can celebrate the greatest generation and call it good. Everybody likes veterans, right?

The military did all right by my grandparents. They owned their own house, raised three children, and lived fascinating, incredibly diverse lives. After the fact, I can be sad that I never really knew them, because they went to all sorts of interesting places and I’m sure they had stories to tell. I have inherited their stories second-hand, through my father, but it’s not quite the same.

I also think that the military isn’t doing so well by its current members and recent veterans. I think that when you sign up for military service, you’re making an agreement, with the expectation that the government will hold up its end. That you will have access to healthcare, that you will receive payments from pension funds. That you will get to march in Veterans Day parades, rather than being hidden away so that people don’t have to face reality. People don’t like our veterans now because they are injured and they have to fight for every benefit they receive, and I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t agree with the war, but I also don’t agree with letting veterans down.

Eight million people died in the First World War. They died in trenches and on fields, in hospital ships and in airplanes. Many of those injuries are probably survivable, today; who knows that the death toll would have been with the benefit of modern battlefield medicine. This war we are fighting in Iraq has cost comparatively few lives, but it is no less serious. Maybe if we called it “Remembrance Day” instead of “Veterans Day,” people would think about that.

A friend of mine and I have a sort of informal book club, in which we occasionally happen to be reading the same books, and then we talk about them. Lately he’s been on a kick of reading books from around the ’20s, and we both finished reading Tender is the Night at around the same time, so last night we had the following exchange:

meloukhia: I finished Tender is the Night
Friend: was it not really really depressing
meloukhia: I wasn’t as depressed by it as you were, I think.
Friend: ah
meloukhia: Maybe I just have fundamentally less faith in humanity
Friend: well it depressed the shit out of me
meloukhia: I mean, I’m not saying that it was uplifting or anything.
Friend: well that or you have less of an ideal of true love
meloukhia: Oh, yeah, that is actually a really good point.
meloukhia: I’ve been noticing lately that people keep recommending books with love as a central theme and I just don’t enjoy them as much as they think I should.
meloukhia: It was still good, though.

And then we talked some more about other themes in the book, and Fitzgerald’s penchant for corrupting beautiful, innocent young women, but the conversation got me thinking.

I realized last night that I don’t believe in true love. He definitely does, and it’s interesting to talk with him about love and relationships because I tend to view these things in terms of biological imperatives, pheromones, and psychology. Like all animals, we are programmed to want to perpetuate our own species, and while we happen to be biologically organized in a way that makes this fun, fundamentally, for me, this is all about biology and it has nothing to do with “love” except in the sense of love as a chemical imbalance. Maybe you do believe in love, in which case you probably reject the idea of sexual attraction as a chemical thing, and you prefer to imagine that people magically meet their complementary souls and then ride off into the sunset together. Or maybe you think think there’s a bit of brain chemistry and a bit of the ineffable power of love or some such nonsense.

I don’t think I’ve ever really admitted my lack of faith in love before, although I may have made passing jokes about it. But I really don’t believe in it. I don’t think that everyone has a soul mate, and I don’t believe that there’s some sort of indescribable force which governs human relationships. It’s all in the way your neurons fire. I’ve been living a very solitary life lately, and I’ve found that I deeply enjoy it. I sometimes go for several days without interacting with another person, and I have found that I like life this way. It’s clean, well organized, and far less complicated. I don’t want to share my life with anybody at the moment, and sometimes I think that hermitage really is a way of life for me.

I’ve never really wanted to share with anyone, so I suppose the fans of true love will say that I just haven’t found the right person yet. That someday I will be walking down the street and I will see the person of my dreams, the 100% perfect girl (or boy). But I don’t think I will, because the 100% perfect person for me is myself, is solitude and sitting on the porch in the rain in my pajamas. Maybe I like to be alone because I’m wired that way, and other people seek “love” because their brains tell them to, because this state is most likely to result in more little humans crowding our sick and poisoned planet.

As I found from our brief conversation, my cynicism appears to be ruining my ability to enjoy classic literature. So much literature is about love and human relationships that I often find it hard to relate to books that other people really enjoy. And perhaps this explains my dislike of entire generations of authors and novels; it’s not that they’re bad books, it’s just that they deal with concepts which are totally alien to me. I get that other people love, or at least think that they are in love, and that’s dandy for them. But I do wish they would stop writing about it so that I could settle down and enjoy a nice novel more often.

Instead, I read a lot of nonfiction, or very strange fiction. I like books like Some Prefer Nettles which are all about corruption and evil, two human things I do understand. I like eccentric short stories. I don’t even mind a bit of lust now and then, especially when it’s cold and calculated. Mystery novels ain’t half bad either.

We live in a society which is very focused on pairing us off, like the animals on the ark. A solitary state is alien, while a paired state is natural. This certainly makes sense biologically, but it makes people like me feel as though we live in the twilight zone. It reaches into so many strange aspects of our lives, like the security questions my bank wants me to fill out so that I can prove I’m me. In one of their list of choices of questions, none of the questions applied to me. They were all things like “What is your oldest child’s name?” and “What is your husband’s name?” I literally could not answer any of the questions, so I had to make up an answer to one of them which I will hopefully remember when the bank challenges me as to my identity.

How strange to think that my identity should be intertwined with someone else, that other people are apparently ok with being defined by the people around them, rather than themselves.