Bologna and Its Namesake

 Many years ago, before the turn of this century (and doesn't that sound OLD!) I was traveling with my friend Tom and his friend Dorothy and we took a late night train from Paris to Bologna. Our cabin had three beds that were magically pulled out of the wall after about 10:00 pm and we were supposed to sleep.  My recollections, such as they are, don't involve a lot of sleep until well past midnight because I found the drink cart and stole (!) many small bottles of Cognac, which Tom and I happily consumed.  Dorothy, probably, wisely, had a couple and went to sleep.

Fast forward to morning, when our train pulls into Bologna. I don't remember much about that night except falling asleep at some point, looking out the window and marveling at the amazing moon.  And then passing out again.  We woke hungover and very thirsty and it wasn't even 8:00 am. Clearly we needed coffee, water and food.... and eventually a place to spend the night.

Because of the afore mentioned hangover, I have no idea what we did with our bags, our bodily needs or our need for coffee and water. What I do remember is that around noon we found a very small, very Italian trattoria down a small alley and we went in for lunch, probably at the stroke of noon when they opened. 

It was clear very quickly that this was a restaurant that catered to Italians.  What a surprise!  English was not fluent, to say the least. But since we were there early, we got a table. Within fifteen minutes the place was full, mostly of business suited men and women, a sign that this was not a toss-off place to eat.

Two things stand out: first, my body was rocking internally, like it was still on the train, quietly drifting side to side, my head still slightly spinning and my eyes rolling around like two unconnected marbles in that aching head, not quite ready to focus on the menu.  Or anything else.

Second, this was possibly the best pasta I had ever eaten in my entire life. When in Bologna one orders Pasta Bolognese. At least I did. How different my life would have been had I ordered something else! Perhaps there was a first course, an antipasti of some sort.... I do not recall. But the waiter put a bowl of fresh tagliatelle in front of me that had been tossed with a very conservative amount of what looked like meat sauce. It appeared that the sauce was barely enough to coat the pasta. Then I tasted it. And I swooned. There is nothing to compare with that first taste. Rich, meaty, not a lot of tomatoes, a dusting of fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Simplicity itself, no parsley, no garlic, no oregano, no spice of any kind.  Meat and something else.

It was salvation. It was a revelation. It certainly cured the hangover (with a nice glass of Chianti) and it set me up for disappointment ever since.

Two years later, I took Gabe to Europe and we stopped for a couple of nights in Bologna because it was, at that time, an amazing city of history and beauty and learning and Bolognese pasta! Gabe and I found the small restaurant down the alley and we were there for lunch. Gabe had the Bolognese pasta and he had the same reaction: one bite and he simply put his fork down and closed his eyes and slowly moved his head side to side.  The owner/host saw this and came up behind Gabe and put his hand on Gabe's shoulder, just a physical acknowledgement of how Gabe's taste buds were surprised and overwhelmed and overjoyed by the taste of that pasta.

And I have been chasing that taste for over 25 years. Today I made Bolognese sauce, once again, trying for that ethereal taste, that elevating experience.  My sauce cooked for 7 hours. It is good. But it isn't it. It isn't Bologna. Maybe that's appropriate, and it is okay, but it is a bit disappointing. I want that first bite experience to be repeated.  Probably never going to happen.  Sigh.

 

"Park It, Whore!"

 Years ago on a local SF radio rock station, there was a DJ named Alex Bennett. He was on during the morning commute, was rather irreverent and one of his catch phrases that he used dismissively was "Park It, Whore." I loved it, of course.

In the past week I have witnessed several really terrible parking jobs in parking lots and the phrase came rumbling back to me. Only this time, it should be "You Can't Park It, Whore." 

What is wrong with people, especially old people, that they have no idea how to simply pull into a parking space?  We aren't even going to discuss parallel parking; that would be a death knell to these folks.  This is simple grocery store parking: pull into a spot and try to get between the two white lines painted on the asphalt. 

Five days ago I was in such a parking lot, talking on the phone (instead of talking while driving, a crime in California) and the car who was nose-to-nose with me backed out and another car pulled in. However, this car, a normal sized sedan, must not have seen the white lines on the asphalt. She parked with about 4 feet on one side of the car and about 6 inches on the other. Plus she left about 6 feet between her front bumper and mine so her car was sticking out into the driving lane.  One would think that when she opened her door to exit the vehicle and could barely squeeze out of the car she might have realized something was amiss. "Oh, gosh! Silly me! I must have parked too close to the edge of my parking space! Let me try again!"  But no. That thought was miles away from her clearly addled brain. She managed to get out of the car, shimmy between her car and the one next to her, walk past the 6 feet of empty space that her car should have occupied in the front of the space and wander away. 

Now, granted, she was sort of old.  But definitely not my age....younger. How does this happen?  How do people become so oblivious to the world around them that they don't even see that world around them?  Parking spaces have lines for a reason but if you don't even see those lines then you are lost and should be shuttled quickly back home, slapped with an ankle bracelet and confined to quarters. Forever.

And then today it happens again!  I am in a parking lot near a Very Expensive Grocery Store in downtown Sonoma. (Redundant, yes.) This store makes Whole Foods look like a Grocery Outlet. The only people comfortable shopping here are rich white people. (Sonoma, again redundant.) I will occasionally go into this market for one reason: they have an incredible salad bar that runs 30 feet and has all kinds of salads and tasty bits. Granted, a small cardboard box of such a salad will run about $8.00, but some of it is so good that I treat myself.

But this day I was, once again, on the phone to a friend, and together we watched, via my narration, a terrible parking  job.  A guy pulled into the spot one over from me (in front) but he was next to the railing that defines where you can leave your grocery cart.  He was very, very close to that railing, and I knew there was no way he could open his door and get out. Sure enough, he tried, failed,  slammed the door and said "FUCK" really loudly. Then he tried to back up, almost scraping his car against the railing, then sort of edged forward until he was 2 INCHES from the car next to him!  His back end was 6 inches from the railing but he managed to open the door and exit, and walk in front of his car (and in front of mine) and leave. But the car next to him, the one that was 2 inches away,  was trapped. That person wasn't going to be able to get into her car.

This was actually hysterically funny while it was happening, much more amusing than it seems here. My friend and I were both laughing. But eventually, we hung up and just then the owner of the trapped car appeared. Oh my. She was shocked at this situation. She stood there for a few minutes, and just as she realized that the only way into her car was to climb over the passenger seat and into the driver seat, the stupid parking culprit appeared.  Words were exchanged, hand gestures were flung about, faces became red.  I simply sat and watched. The stupid guy managed to maneuver his car out and drove away.  She did as well. Whew, situation resolved without bloodshed.

Too many people with too little awareness of how their actions will impact others.  Amusing to watch but an indication of the aging of America and the indifference of strangers.  Come on, kids. It's a crazy world out there. Pay fucking attention. I don't care if  you're old, I do care if you're oblivious. 

Blogging: Old School but who cares.

While in the back of my mind this was apparent many months (years?) ago, I didn't acknowledge it until recently.  Blogging is rather passé.  Sure, if you google something like "is blogging dead?" you will find articles saying "NO!" but that is because businesses still occasionally have blog pages that no one wants to dismiss as redundant. But let's be real. Most successful blog pages have been around for 20 years and no one who starts one now is going to make anything of it.  So, that's that.

However, my tiny little blog page never aspired to be anything but ramblings from my mind, an occasional cool photo, sometimes a book recommendation and general whining prose. So that's not going to stop.  Here we go.

There is absolutely nothing to discuss at this moment that bears any weight because EVERYTHING right now is enormously weighty and fraught with angst and anger and fear. Therefore, resorting to talking about junky stuff is the only way to even vaguely consider putting words down on paper.  If I was a real writer, someone like Ann Patchett or a journalist like Sam Anderson, writing about anything would result in a great book or an intriguing column in the NYT. That is so not me. My words are caught up in the mundane, the boring, the everyday drippings of a small, enclosed life. But since I don't care who reads this, those drippings will continue to serve as the basis for random thoughtless musings. 

Somewhere in my strolling through the internet, I have absorbed book recommendations and have added them to my library list of books to read. Many times those books are boring or pedantic or of no interest, something I don't discover until actually getting them out of the library and attempting to read them. For example: historical fiction: how many more books do we need of a plucky young woman in war-torn Europe who ends up saving thousands of  refugees from the gas chamber while carrying on a painful romance with a soldier who will eventually be killed on the battlefield just as  the plucky woman realizes she is pregnant with his child and sneaks aboard a transatlantic ship and arrives in American in 1944 to become a world-renown seamstress for an incredibly famous fashion designer?  Too much, too many words and it's giving "historical fiction" a bad name, like, perhaps, "hysterical friction." 

But I digress. Many times those random recommendations lead me to a book I would have never found on my own. I just finished reading a small novel written in 1965 called "Stoner" by John Williams about a very sad, lonely man named William Stoner.  An oddly compelling story, very well written if somewhat of a downer.  And now I am half-way through another small book written in 1960 called "So Long, See You Tomorrow" by William Maxwell who wrote more than a dozen books, none of which I have ever heard of.  It's another story about a lonesome man, living in the early 20th century, trying to align his past with his current life. Very good, introspective and thoughtful.

All this is to say that sometimes a book report is the only thing worth writing about.  Sometimes reading is the only thing that gets one through the day, especially in these times that are overwhelmingly frightening and awful.  A good book, a good glass of wine or whiskey, a cozy reading spot. 

Read on, my friends. 

Birds, still captivating

 Two years ago I wrote a blog here about the birds in my backyard, how fun they are to watch, how they all have a different style of scratching for birdseed and how much I like spying on them from my kitchen window. Two years later I am still tossing seed out.  Because it is winter and there isn't a lot of field activity happening, the birds are incredibly grateful for any birdseed that gets thrown their way. (Of course, this is simply my anthropomorphizing them; they probably don't even know what gratitude is, being creatures of very small brains and no human emotions. But still...)

There is a small vole who shares the space with the birds, although they swoop in when seed is present and the vole actually lives there, not a swooper. But he creeps out of his (or her) hole in the ground and very quickly grabs a seed or a grain and darts back into his underground condo and no doubt hides it away in its vole pantry. The vole is a delight to watch and it makes me happy that my bags of birdseed are keeping it well-fed.

The time I spend watching the fauna outside my kitchen window is like my own private National Geographic show. The local feed store has a program when you have purchased ten bags of birdseed, you get one for free. Talking to the owner of that store, I mentioned something like "...maybe feeding the birds keeps them from hunting for food on their own, maybe it's not the right thing to do for them."  His reply was perfect: "We should do things that make us happy and if they make other creatures happy at the same time, everyone wins."  So I continue to enjoy the show and I will scatter birdseed until spring brings more plants and bugs and seeds and everyone wins.

Buy some seed. Scatter it.  See what happens.  We are living in a time when happiness is becoming difficult to find. Watch the birds, be happy with that one, small thing. 

Empty

 Nothing seems important enough to write about because everything that is currently happening is too important, too weighty, too catastrophic, too disappointing, too depressing and so, so frightening. How our country and our world got to this tragic moment is incomprehensible. I can read books and watch movies and have dinner with friends but none of those activities are of any importance when I compare them to real life. And by "real life" I mean what is happening minute by minute in the power structure of America.  I am deeply worried about the future. We all should be.

Over and out for now. 

Here We Go

 So far, not even a week in,  2025 doesn't feel any different than 2024 except more ominous. We have a very large monster waiting behind the stage curtain, eagerly anticipating its own power. That's reason enough to approach this year with caution and wariness and fear. Combined with other unresolved evils (wars, famine, poverty) there aren't a lot of positive incentives poking us forward. So we need to create our own.

Resolutions usually fail because (in my opinion) they are too grand or they imply character defects (i.e. need to lose weight, read more books, cook better food, be nicer) that are not going to change just because you tell yourself it's time for that change to happen.  Instead of a resolution, perhaps we need to embrace uncertainty and hesitation. Instead of insisting on getting more exercise, for example, one could simply say "maybe I will go outside now and then and look at the birds." Nothing major there, just a hesitant idea of looking around the yard. Or instead of planning on eating less processed food, one could say "maybe I will start reading the list of ingredients before I buy anything."  Not even deciding NOT to buy the product, just adding an action (reading the ingredients) to the process of shopping.

Maybe I am just blowing smoke here. But sometimes life is difficult, every day, day in and day out, and making a resolution and then failing at it will only make life more difficult. And send you down another spiral, another bout of depression waiting at the end of that tailspin. No one needs that, of course.  What we need is to be lifted up out of that tailspin. We need hope and a tiny bit of happy and some calm waters ahead.

So my resolution this year is the same as always: absolutely no resolutions. Just an idea or two to change the routine a tiny bit, to get out of the rut, to not let the swamp of current events (and the dungeon of events to come) kill us. More smelling the flowers, more stopping for a coffee, more daydreaming.  That's the ticket!

It's been a while......

 So much has happened since I was last on the scene. Halloween, for example, a holiday that I have always hated and thus will ignore, simple to do when you live on a hill and there are no sidewalks and therefore no small, hideous creatures knocking on your door.        

And then, shortly after that potentially frightening evening we had another one:  the election. Not just frightening but mind boggling and maybe apocalyptical. I don't want to talk about that, we will all be participants in its unfolding and unspeakable repercussions. 

That evil evening was quickly followed by what I love: an atmospheric river.  It's not just that I love the rain, but that description always makes me smile.  An Atmospheric River: it sounds like something out of a "Raiders of the Lost Ark"  movie, when clouds and wind and rain and mud and trees and stones all come together in a monstrosity of a downpour, torrential, of course, flooding the local lands with all of the above and yet never getting to the really dire realm of ..... TORNADO!  No huge funnel cloud developed and stones did not fly in the air (neither did cows or trucks) but it was quite dramatic anyway.  Especially for us Californians.

So we had that. And then a freeze in the early morning, and now chilly nights and lovely sunny days with beautiful skies.  (see below.) 

And then Thanksgiving. Turkey Galore!  (Better than Pussy Galore, and if you know James Bond, you know what I mean.)  And now, upcoming Xmas holidays.  Oh gosh, yes.

This leaves out all the other personal stuff, of course. Doctors appointments, pain killers, X-rays.  Apart from that, trying to walk a small dog in four days of downpours, baking at the hotel, sleeping with the cats, fixing the car, and on and on. 

So it hasn't been dull.  Boring, yes.  But not dull.  Read a couple of good books, watched some really good streaming stuff, ate some nice food, and before my back fucked me up, took some nice walks and saw some lovely fall trees. 

More to come.  Thank you for reading.

A cobblestone sky. 

A cozy sleeping dog.

And color!