Fall Fridays

I love 'em. I hate 'em. I hate to love 'em. Mostly it is miserable sitting indoors on a lovely fall friday - especially if most of it is spent thinking about another lovely day this season that was spent doing Yoga on an upward protruding ledge on the Mattawamkeag lake, in Maine. Since when did financial statements replace fragrant, blissful fall breeze...

Secret hideouts, untold pleasures...

The good thing about having very few (read: no) readers for your blog is that I can talk all I want about these little known fun things to do/see/eat (because I need to talk about them to someone, anyone) and still have them be my little secrets. Yay!
So

Secret Fun thing #1 : I have indulged myself in this all summer - my saturday morning jaunt to the small french deli right across from where we live in Greenwich. They are a less expensive sister establishment of a larger french restaurant two streets down. Their menu changes every week. Theirs is, I reckon, a triumph of few but perfect ingredients. Among their many goodies I love the perfectly crunchy baguettes straight out of the oven generously layered with freshly made raspberry/strawberry/blueberry jams - demolished within seconds of being within reach or the omlet with ham, comte cheese and caramelized onions sprinkled with herbs and served with a side of baby arugula, or their decadent, creamy, deliciously flavoured Quiches that ooze with goodness as you crunch into variously colored veggies that top it, or their apple strudels, danishes, rich and dark chocolate mousses - delicacies to be savored with coffee over the weekend edition of New York Times, and to be remembered until next Saturday(when I get to savour them again). That's my corner deli that serves, amongst everything else, as a reminder that all is well with the world.

Secret Fun thing #2 : The Long Islang City bar on Summer/Fall Sundays. Not that I am complaining, but I have no idea why so little is known about this. Few open air bars in the city have drink specials, live bands through the afternoon, an unspoilt 1880's saloon look AND a beautiful, lady like willow tree that stands tall as its several long, lazy branches arch over each and every window of the bar while the rays of the afternoon sun and gentle fall breeze collectively create a dance of leafy shadows on the yellow pages of your book. Peace is this. And a tall glass of chilled beer.

Secret Fun thing #3 : Watching the first rays of the sun at the eastern most point of the United States. It feels like you're at the edge of the earth : The vast forests extending all over the earth give in to steep cliffs before the vast expanse of the Atlantic engulfs you in its overwhleming beauty and enormous power of being the be-all and end-all of life - until, ofcourse, the sun rises over the horizon - assured of its might, permanent in its being. The buck stops here - in this small, quiet, sleepy little town of Lubec, Maine.

The Truth about Racial Stereotyping..

Is that it aint gonna stop. Not anytime soon. Regardless of the number of African Amercian scholar freinds of the President(Henry Louis Gates Jr.) getting treated to beer at the white house in the company of the cops who pissed off the President for putting his learned freind in handcuffs; regardless of a wise latina supreme court justice who successfully defended herself against accusations of being racist in her confirmation hearings.

You see, its all in the numbers. If 8 out of 10 prison inmates and more than half the bums in New York City or most other places in the US are black, and ALL the help in restaurants and homes are latinos/latinas - racial stereotypes will remain. Racism is a reality in this country. News reports say the President will not reveal details of the beer-talk with Mr. Gates and Mr. Crowley. Good. Why bother? I am not interested in the conversation as much as I am in the Mr. President's reasons to have this conversation at all. Is one conversation going make me less jittery about moping around in the Bronx at midnight (yes, this was attempted with consequences that were not fun)? Its nice of Mr. President to get all worked up about his bud being shackled- but what about this kid ? She was supposedly yanked out of undergraduate studies, from Harvard no less, for allegedly abetting a crime. No proof has been provided to support the assertion of the police. Mr Gates is atleast an established professor/scholar (in African American studies- may have been more interesting if his choice of subject was a tad less predictable, just a tad), this kid's future is potentially in the gutter. Beer pong any one ?

The truth is that until a sizable portion of the colored folk are uplifted in America negative/potentially deterimental stereotyping on the basis of race will persist even in ways that cannot be overlooked. Unfortunately until then, all conversations to address racial stereotyping - with or without beer- are rhetorical too.

"Away we went"

When a movie review in a respectable paper such as the New York Times comes off like its a bit on the fence, you end up feeling like the critics are just trying too hard to do their job.

Atleast, in this case, the review that seems to try too hard to dislike Sam Mendes's latest movie "Away we Go", said enough to convince me to go watch it. Besides, I guess I am something of a Mendesophile. Especially after his star-studded play "The Cherry Orchard" (originally by Anton Chekov, edited by Tom Stoppard) earlier this year.

The set up is simple- a pregnant couple sets out to visit freinds in search of the perfect environment in which to raise their child. Why? Because they are socially conditioned to think that there is such a thing as a perfect setting in which to raise a child. They are shown to run into everything from obscenity mouthing parental horror stories to zen loving, organic-food-eating self absorbed New Age drivelers to those that suffer in the quiet dissapointment of not being parents.

The movie is as unassuming and seeking as its lead characters, if a bit deliberately funny and cloying in some of its frames. You have to love the honest modesty of the characters who wonder if its a cause of worry that they have outgrown the get-a-home-and-a-mortgage stage of their life. I dig the unpretentious indie feel of the movie that among other things encourages idyllic fantasies of a free form life where you first choose the city and the freinds and then the job, and not the other way round - no discussion of this movie is complete without cubicle talk such as this. I know that was part of the movie's plan...

The point is- to me, as the one who pays to see the movie at the theater - this movie reaches its audience. When you tell stories for a living, its all about how well you tell them. So regardless of Mr. Mendes's personal opinion about the perils of living the American suburban dream or about being a New Age driveler, this is a very well made movie. That's all I care about. And the fact that it reaffirms my faith in an imperfect world.

Year 2

Married life Year 2 was celebrated camping by the ocean close to Chesapeake Bay - days were spent under the canopies drinking mimosas and relating stories to lovely freinds and to lots of mosquitoes; fragrant moonlit nights were spent sleeping under the stars listening to the sea and to the shrieks of the fishermen celebrating their crabby victories.......

The slippage of a paean shall be excused ....

A fragrant summer night bathed in the silvery moonlight,
Soft, gentle breeze hummed the Song of the Sea.

Toes entwined and fingers locked,
we sank into the sands of a million shared dreams.

New Beginnings - Ones involving Rain

Its cloudy again. I just realized I loved rain a lot more as a child. I loved the smell of the wet earth after the first few drops of rain on a hot day, or actually after several scorching,torturous, mind-numbingly hot days. I loved everything about the rain- the way it poured relentlessly but wetted only the edges of my toes as I sat on that single step in the kitchen that led to our little backyard with several trees but no grass, the way it sounded on the leaves of the trees that seemed to wait for it as much as all of us, the happy shreiks of kids who ran out to play in the first rain of the season (I stayed away from doing anything like that because I had a tendency to get violently sick) while I hugged myself feeling and smelling the soft, fragrant, coolness that the monsoons brought with them gently nudging away a very angry summer. And then, the gentle patter would give way to flicker of gloworms or the chatter of insects.

I loved how everything sprang to life with the monsoons - it seems like a long time ago, in an innocent time, one without the knowledge all the bad things the economy can do to us, and we, to it.