once upon a time

Not sure exactly what's going on here—yard sale?—but I know when it's going on. That baby is 50 now. That's my ex husband, Douglas, with his firstborn. Behind them is baby Adam's mother (and Douglas's first wife), Jamie, whose birthday was the day before yesterday. On the left I believe we have cousin Roberta with her daughter Lizzie. In the lampshade, my and Jamie's mother-in-law, Shirley. 

I didn't yet know any of these people. but I'm sure any gathering I would have been a part of would have shared the vibe, a kind of longhaired, bellbottomed, potsmoking, hangloose groovy scene. How times and we have all changed. If you could get in the wayback machine, would you?
 

christmas dinner

 It was, with two photographers present, along with one amateur and one on the rise, a much photographed event. Had any noteworthy subjects been present, we could have been paparazzi. But no, we were driven to photograph one another. Fanny took pictures of Donna and Ryan and me in the kitchen.

I took a picture of Fanny in the kitchen.

Donna instructed Ryan in some of the finer points of photography.

We ate. And in a nonphotographic event, we did some ear candling while Ryan read Harold and the Purple Crayon.

merry facetime!

 

I asked Chris to take this pic of Isaac with his new ("nonbinary") doll in Camilla's new doll bathtub. But in fact, my Christmas morning looked more like this. That's Chris's mom, FaceTiming from the back yard, on the right.

 

Meanwhile, I am prepped for a somewhat distanced Christmas dinner with Donna and her daughter Fanny and grandson Ryan.

meanwhile on the solstice

"It was just magic," says photographer Keri Pickett of the day the animals came out. In a Standing Rock sequel, an indigenous women-led movement is protesting Enbridge pipeline #3 from the tar sands of Canada into Minnesota. Winona LaDuke and her Water Protectors band have set up a resistance camp at the place where the pipeline is set to go under the headwaters of the Mississippi River, displacing a million gallons of water. The final permits were issued on November 17. Trucks are already rolling. 

 

The First People are building camps and blocking the road. Some 22 people have been arrested so far. Winona (above) has been protesting the pollution of sacred waters for years. You can watch Keri's documentary about it, First Daughter and the Black Snake, here. The campers in the cold got a much needed boost when the Heart of the Beast puppet theater brought animals to the site. Winona was most delighted to assist as the ass end of the bear. She is, after all, a member of Bear Clan. 

Apologies to Keri Pickett for the bad cropping. I took the pix from her Insta here.

signs in the sky

 

Times have been hard, so it's not surprising, if rather primitive, that we have been gripped by natural phenomena. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was one such event. It only happens every four centuries or so, and some people believe that this was the Christmas star leading the way to Jerusalem and the birth of the sun. I mean son. Anyway Paula, who studied astronomy in college before getting her PhD in English literature of the middle ages, and I, who only entered the observatory for Chinese classes, went out yesterday to try and see the conjunction that Frank had captured The Day Of. It was the winter solstice, and he was abidin' in the fields with, I guess, his telescope and camera. In Peace Valley, MO, he got the picture above that even shows the three moons. But we in New York were not so fortunate, and Paula and I watched the conjuction streaming on line from Arizona. It was cloudy again when we gave it a shot yesterday, and may be cloudy again tonight. We'll decide in a half hour.  On the solstice in Alabama, Jan was able to see the conjuction peeking through the trees from her front porch (below).

postscript

 

Unable to find anyone who wanted my books, I began taking them down to the laundry room as I did my wash. There is a bookshelf in there for books people don't want any more. As you can imagine, being an Upper White Side bookshelf, the collection is eclectic leaning intellectual. I took down the first load when I put in my wash, the second when I came down to move it to the dryer. When I came down to fold my clothes, I saw a man loading my books into boxes. 

"What are you doing?" I asked. "I collect books," he said. "How come?" "I have to eat!" We chatted for a while about life in a pandemic, and about old books, which he manages to sell to shops and street vendors. He goes all over the city to pick up books, CDs and DVDs. He said one famous theatrical couple told him that Broadway theaters are being supported by business grants and will be OK. I wish I had asked him more, like about what kind of books sold most easily, but I realized I wanted to take his picture and my phone was upstairs. I asked him, and he said sure. By the time I got back, he and my books were headed for the exit.

Now I know that somebody wants my books. Donald does.

shit show

 Welcome to the I-have-too-much-shit-show. It's the solstice, and time for the off-with-the-old-on-with-the-new thing. Yes, the whole past year (and longer!) has been a shit show, and I'm ready to be done with all that. But I personally have some baggage to unload as well. I'm not a Marie Kondo minimalist, as you know, but with three housesful of possessions, I have too much shit. Especially books. I clear out my houses on a regular basis—every summer—but the New York apartment, my home, is increasingly crowded. 

And nobody wants my books. You can't give them away any more—not to libraries, old book stores or even vendors on the street. I have some wonderful books, but why? Am I going to look up something in Madam Bovary or reread Raymond Chandler? Do I need a picture book with aerial views of the Earth? I can't bear to part with my Robin Hoods or my father's Tarzans or the Vassar Girls Abroad series just yet. Or my tattered first edition of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (Come to think of it, shouldn't that be kool-ADE?) But I don't need the paperback version. And of course I will keep my Chien-Chi Chang and Donna Ferrato collections. And those of other friends. (Maybe not Lynn Johnson's old Geographics.) So shit is going down to the laundry room in the building, where there's a giveaway bookshelf. 

I started in Hannah's old room, where the shelves haven't been cleaned in so long that I found some bud hidden in the back of one row of books. You could tell that it has been there probably since Hannah was in high school 20 years ago, because it was in a film canister. Remember those? So here goes. Clearing space for light and lightness and new growth. Hopefully not of collections.

home sweet home

 A lot of people like to watch the snow fall through the window, while cozy inside. I am among them. Yes watching from fireside would be better, but you can't have everything. I have generous central heat, and for this I am grateful. I remember the drafty old house of my youth all too well—jumping out of bed to put my clothes on the radiator, then jumping back in bed til they warmed up and dressing under the covers. It wasn't Little House on the Prairie (it was Big House in the Burbs), but I still don't like the cold. Unless it's outside with precipitation, and then there's nothing like it.

the difference a day makes

One day you're playing in the yard. Lalalalala. And the next, you're floundering in the yard and coming into the house covered with snow and eating maple syrup snow ice cream and having hot cocoa and baking Christmas cookies. If you are as lucky as these kids.

 

a merry pandemic

There won't be any question, looking at this photograph, which Christmas this was. This was the Christmas everybody decorated early to cheer themselves up. I got a picture of my neighbors, Steven and Dan, getting their Christmas tree a few years ago, and they let me get another. I saw them yesterday coming back after checking several Christmas tree stands and deciding that the trees in New York were too expensive. They were planning to go to the country and pick one up. Bu then it is supposed to snow tonight, and the thought of decorating a tree while snow is falling was too much for them. They caved. The tree was $150, but hey—it's a big, nice one.

 

the hairbrush saga

I am rich in friends—and in hairbrushes. Thank you to all the card-senders, Facebook wellwishers, in-person celebrants and Zoomers for a swell 70th. And thanks to my ex-husband for the hairbrush. 

Some of you may be wondering what the deal with the hairbrush is. Well, I was in Mongolia, on the eighth floor of a hotel, when I smelled fire. The photographer I was traveling with methodically soaked towels in the sink to cover her mouth, knocked on all the doors on our floor to make sure people were out, packed up her cameras and chargers, passport and money and prepared to evacuate.

I grabbed my hairbrush and fled, incontinent, down the stairs.

There were two stairwells, and I picked the one full of smoke. Several fights down, I heard a voice echoing. "Dowling! Where are you going?"

Sigh. Fortunately I now have spares.
 

recital without live audience

 

awesome or what?

It is the season of windows mostly closed, so I put the mirror back up. Now you can see the river again. And I had two successes today. One friend I had scolded pretty fiercely yesterday called to tell me I was right. And Donna told me I had fixed her. When she got here she was raging, as she mostly is, but then we cooked and ate and drank and yakked and she said she felt like she had been to the country.

 

re houseguests

 

Donna and I had a very odd night. We both drank too much (though too much for her is far less than for me) and passed out very early. When I woke up and walked out to the kitchen at around one o'clock, Donna was awake on the sofa. We then caroused until 5 ayem. And went back to sleep (separately). Then woke up again around nine thirty. I then started looking for an old blog entry and ran across this hilarious one about houseguests. Don't neglect to read the comments! This was back in the day when people used to comment on my blog as opposed to Facebook.

the beautiful city

 Is my city beautiful or what? I better like it here indoors, because it looks like a long, lonesome winter coming up. NYC is getting about 2500 new cases a day, a 50 percent increase in the past two weeks. I feel like this virus has chased me all over the countryside. From New York to Hawaii to Massachusetts to Rhode Island to Missouri and back to New York again. Now there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, baby. But if I'm going to be stuck, I'd rather be stuck here, in a nice, warm apartment with friends in the building and every food in the world delivered and a little action on the street, should I dare to emerge from my fastness. I have experience of the ivory tower.

strange days

 I don't really know how to be. Today I should be officially out of quarantine—14 days, though now the CDC is saying a week is enough. But I have been up to my upstairs neighbor's apartment multiple times a day to help her with food and drink and baths. And she does not wear a mask, and nor do I much of the time. I probably couldn't catch anything from her—she has hardly been out in months. But she could have caught something from me, or her daughter. And then there is my downstairs neighbor. She wears a mask when she visits me, but I do not. Is this okay? It's all very tough to figure out.

And with each additional person, the bubble gets bigger. My upstairs neighbor has been going to doctors and having health care workers in. Her daughter's kids will be going back to school. I will be seeing people, and I don't know who they have been seeing. (I have the additional issue that, since I am half deaf, I lip read some and it is hard to understand people with masks on.) How much can you control the situation? How to parse being rude and being safe? Strange days have found us. 

Masked.

 Unmasked. Where is the comfort zone?

stages of denial

 The trim on my house in Block Island—and many of the windows—was shot, rotted by sun and salt and sandblasting. Mind you, these were windows I had personally installed not that many years ago. Maybe that was part of the problem? Anyway, Ana's son Waldyn took Claudia's Surf City on, and has been toiling away.

Just about every window either required meticulous piecework or total replacement. What a thankless job! Required a great deal of patience and detail work. And of course the inside trim of the windows had to be taken apart and repaired as well. But we're coming down the home stretch. Waldyn is out there now, installing five new windows on the east side, facing the ocean. 

  In other homeownership news, the water was just turned off at Claudia's. It will be turned off at the Goose this week—and not a moment too soon, as there was a hard freeze last night and flurries the night before. Hannah's still needs a replacement toilet installed, and Claudia's new shutoff valves and a new line to the outdoor shower. And speaking of showers, the shower head busted in New York. But here, I just told the guy and he came up and switched it out. Not my problem! Ah, rental apartments. . .