Last night my cell phone rang at 3:03 am, ripping me out of sleep.  Deep, sweaty, rapid-eye-movement, body immobilized sleep.  In the first second of half-wakeful awareness, I was able to identify the fact that my phone was playing my mom’s ring.  My thoughts ranged through all the possible worst case scenarios that come with middle of the night phone calls.

My cat was dead.

The dog had been eating algae off of the coy pond across the street and was hit by a car on her way home.

My sister’s guitar amp had shorted out, leaving her charged with electricity, blackened and twitching on the stage of Mississippi Pizza.

(Aren’t you impressed with the amount of creative thinking I was able to do in 1.76 seconds?)

I sat straight up in bed, flipped open the phone and said, “Mom, what’s the matter?  Why are you calling me?  Do you really mean to be calling me?  Did something bad happen?”

She gasped and said, “Sweetie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to call you, I was trying to call your sister and I dialed the wrong number!  Go back to sleep.”

I flopped back down onto my pillows and mumbled, “Okay.  Love you.  Night” and hung up the phone.
I lay there for a couple of minutes, hanging half out of bed, waiting for my racing heart to quiet down.  Soon after, I was able to find the strands of sleep in which I had been wrapped before and soon was back where I had left off.

I guess that’s what I get for not calling her to say good night before I went to bed.

This afternoon, I settled down on the living room couch with a book, prepared to spend a peaceful hour by myself, doing nothing but reading.  About ten minutes into this time, my roommate walked into the room.  He wasn’t whistling, or talking on the phone or even walking loudly.  And yet I was instantly irritated, by nothing more than his presence.

Instead of letting my irritation fester and infest the entire apartment, I grabbed it and laid it out on my psychic work space.  Once captive, it wasn’t nearly as intimidating or powerful as I initially thought.  After examination, I decided I didn’t want it and that I was going to choose not to be irritated.  Inside my head, I declared that I was going to replace my feelings of hostile annoyance towards my roommate with love.

In an instant, I no longer felt irritated.  It was surprising and wonderful how readily I was able to give up the negative feeling and instead feel peaceful and welcoming.  In that moment, I understood through practice the principles of manifesting I’ve read so much about.  It was revelatory and delightful and fleeting.  I sat there for a moment, experiencing the shift in perception, before asking a friendly question of him.  It turned into a lovely hour-long conversation that I’m so glad I was able to make space to have.

I spent 45 minutes in Washington, DC today, and four hours on a train, getting there and coming back. I went for work, to deliver a document that absolutely, positively had to be in today. People were working and rushing to get it done all morning, while I sat quietly in my office, waiting to be given the signal to go. Everything was ready 12 minutes before the 12:58 train, and I rushed out the door, to see if I could make it. I missed it by 4 minutes.

The waiting was nice thought. I got to spend nearly an hour sitting in the main hall of 30th Street Station, watching waves of people arrive, scatter and regather again. The board announcing which trains were departing and at which gate, flipped it tiles regularly, always shuffling back into words and numbers, Regional–2:13, Keystone–1:43, Acela 1:09.

One of the first times I went to 30th Street Station I was a freshman in college. My mom and I were in Philly visiting my grandparents over my spring break. My good friend Andrea was home with her parents outside of Washington, DC and we decided that it would be fun if I went down to see her for an overnight. On the morning I was supposed to leave we all woke up to grey skies and a mild drizzle. The weather conditions sent my grandpa Sid into fits of worry, as he reflected his own fear of traveling in incliment weather onto me. My mom and I convinced him that I would be fine, but just to be sure, he made me leave a full hour and a half prior to the train time. I got to the station with so much time to spare that I was able to take a train an entire hour earlier than the one I had intended.

Arriving at the station that day, I felt grown up and metropolitan. I admired the architecture of the hall, and the echos of the eras past that exist in the signs and stairwells. Other people might find my five hour errand this afternoon irritating, but for me, it was a treat.

This is the picture of my grandma Bunny that I pulled out of my aunt’s basement last Sunday. I had never seen this photo before that moment, and at first glance, I had to struggle to match up this face with the one I carry around with me in my mind. The detail that helped me understand that it was Bunny was the engagement ring she is wearing. It is the ring I’ve looked at on my mom’s hand all my life and so it is deeply familiar to me, even when this young girl is not.

I propped the frame up on my living room bookshelf when I came home Sunday. I look at it every time I pass by and I continually think about what this young woman would have been like. In this picture, she is younger than I am now, freshly graduated from Smith and soon to get married. Comfortable and safe in a photography studio on Germantown Ave, she myopically gazes off to the left.

From my position almost 70 years ahead, stocked with a fairly complete knowledge of her personal lifetime, I wonder what her worries and hopes were on this day. I’m sure she didn’t have an inkling of the life she would lead, of her three sons, her divorce and remarriage. Of life in Virginia, Philadelphia, Hawaii, Boston and finally Southern California. Of six grandchildren (3 girls and 3 boys), two of whom she never got to meet. An angry eventual surrender to lung cancer. I’m grateful to see her before any of those experiences show on her face. I have those pictures. Seeing her this way, fresh and bright with life, somehow helps me love her more.

(I have no idea what she was doing wearing a cross. She was a lifelong Unitarian (just like me), and we don’t typically embrace Christian symbology. It’s strange).

I sat down at my desk tonight, intending to write a post about seeing “Little Miss Sunshine” tonight and how it made me laugh. I was then going to write about how I used to be known, during my freshman year of college, as the girl who would laugh hysterically during dinner in the Lyman Hall Dining Hall every night.

Sitting in front of my computer, gathering my thoughts just before I started to type, I reached back to pull my hair into a ponytail. Realizing that I didn’t have a hair band near me, I pulled open the drawer, to see if there were any plan old rubberbands laying about. A fountain pen caught my eye. I pulled it out and dug for a few others. I’ve documented my obsession with writing utensils before but in my personal pen history, the refillable fountain pen requires it’s own chapter.

I got my first fountain pen when I was 10 years old, here in Philly. It was from Rite Aid, and was pink, purple and plastic. I loved it because it made me feel old fashioned and European at the same time. I took it back to Portland with me and wrote with it during the beginning of 5th grade. Mr. Elliott did not take kindly to the smearable liquid ink and banned the pen from the classroom.

My memories of fountain pens get spotty until my junior year in high school. My english teacher that year as well as the year after, Mrs. Blackstone, often had us do writing exercises in class. She would write along with us in an unlined notebook with her broad tipped fountain pen. She carried it to class in a worn red leather case, gracefully tipping it out when it came time to jot down her thoughts. I was fascinated, and made it my business to get my hands on a fountain pen. Or ten.

In my life, my love for pens that write with liquid ink has had a steady ebb and flow. There was a time I took a page out of my dad’s book and found writing love with a Rapid-o-Graph, a very fine-tipped mechanical drawing pen. I used pens that dipped, pens that took cartridges and pens that had rubber valves that you squeezed while the pen was resting in a bottle of ink, until it’s barrel was full.

Tonight I filled five pens, quickly taking them from empty and dried out to usable. In the process, I dyed two and a half fingers on my right hand a Smurf-like blue and have given my entire left hand a deathly pallor. But for the joy of writing a smooth, even, antique-looking line, it is totally worth it.

I spent two hours with my Great-Aunt Anne yesterday afternoon. The drive from Philly to New Town Square seemed shorter than I remembered, and soon I was turning on to her street. I stopped at Wawa on my way to get her a tuna salad sandwich and a bottle of root beer, her favorites. She is always surprised when I bring them, she herself not remembering that she prefers that combination until its in front of her. We sat down to eat lunch at her kitchen table and she talked, stopping occasionally to apologize for being such a jabberer.

She told me stories of her career as a journalist, several times commenting on my future grad school plans by saying, “I don’t see how they can teach you to write. In my day, you learned by starting at a newspaper. You wrote articles and they rewrote them. Then one day, something you wrote stayed as you wrote it.”

When I asked her how she was feeling, she answered by way of saying, “You see honey, I smoked. I smoked 4 or 5 packs a day for years. They were only $.15 a pack and I started on my way to college. So now I have emphysema and I can hardly breath.” I knew all this, but I listened intently anyway, reading the meaning behind her words, the regret at having made this choice that she didn’t know was bad for her and the people around her at the time. Even still, she admitted that she loves the smell of smoke and will occasionally go near someone who is smoking, just to experience the scent again.

After we were finished eating, the second half of her sandwich wrapped and tucked away in the fridge for the following day, she mentioned that the air conditioning in her car (yes, she still drives, and the entire family finds it terrifying) was only blowing on her feet and could I take a look. We headed down to the basement, where the entrance of the garage is located. I walked slowly behind her as she made her painful, stiff-legged way down the stairs. Instead of turning into the garage, she opened a door that I always had assumed was a closet. It was a storage room that ran the length of the house, and was full with old stuff. We wandered around for awhile, opening drawers and looking at pictures. I spotted an old striped mixing bowl and mentioned how much like it. Before I knew it, it was in my hands. There was also a framed picture of my grandmother that must have been from either her college graduation or engagement. She looked younger and more beautiful than I ever knew her to be. I ended up taking it home as well.

When we left the storage room, she didn’t remember why we were in the basement, until I reminded her about her car. She took a moment to blame the cigarettes from her youth for her memory loss before heading into the garage. I fixed the levers so the a/c wouldn’t blow on her feet anymore and tried to explain to her how to do it herself if they get moved. She looked at me, and then back down at the control panel, and then just said, “I’m not going to move them.”

We headed back upstairs. She could hardly draw breath. I sat on the couch and read a magazine while she breathed in the the wisps of vapors coming through her nebulizer. I stayed for a little while longer, but started feeling antsy to get going. She thrust an old power strip into my hands thinking I could find some use for it, gave me a hug and I walked out the door.

She worries me, living alone, driving herself to the grocery store. She confessed during lunch that she recently forgot the pot of prunes she put on the stove and that she only remembered when the acrid smell of burning fruit and pot filled the house. But she wants it that way and there’s nothing I can do to change her mind.

Digging around my refrigerator this afternoon, I turned up five abandoned, wrinkled apples and one bruised peach with a gouge on it’s side. These half dozen pieces of fruit spoke to me, pleading to be turned into apple(peach) sauce instead of taking a trip down the trash shute. Being that I was already in a bit of a nesting mood, I heeded and quickly peeled, cored and chopped them. Into a pot they went with some water, lemon zest/juice, cinnamon and nutmeg. Then I just left them alone.

I first made applesauce at the Neighborhood Unitarian Church in LA when I was 7 years old. I don’t know why they decided to have our Learning Community class make it, but the image of that day is burned into my heart. I remember standing on a stool next to a window a white apron wrapped around me twice. I stirred that sauce with a wooden spoon every couple of minutes as the apples softened and surrendered their individual integrity. We used apple cider instead of water, I was told that it gives the sauce better flavor. That was the day when I first really found myself wanting to know more about food and how you cook it.

When my family moved to Portland in 1988, one of the wonders of the area that we rapidly discovered was Sauvie Island. It is a small agricultural island just outside of Portland. There is a museum there that is housed in an old farm house and barn, the home of one of the island’s original families. There is an antique apple orchard on the property and all who come are welcome to pick up the windfall apples off the ground. Every fall we’d pack a picnic and head out there to enjoy the feeling of being on a 19th century farm. We’d scour the orchard floor for useable apples and go home to make sauce. There were always Ziploc bags of frozen applesauce in the freezer while I was growing up.

After about an hour on the stove, my apples and peach had given up their edges and corners and yielded to the back of my wooden spoon. Had I been thinking, I would have thrown a couple of plums in as well. They wouldn’t have hurt a bit.  Applesauce also has the benefit of making your home smell like much more complicated culinary adventures are being taken.  I enjoyed the lingering scent of cooking apples and cinnamon for hours after I took the pot off the heat.

Last night my sister called me three minutes after I had turned off my light to go to sleep. I had been focusing my energy on relaxing my toes when the phone rang, but happily put off that task when I realized it was her. We chatted aimlessly for about ten minutes, about her four hour gig earlier that day at the Portland Farmers’ Market, the dead logic board in her 4 year old iBook and music. We sang a long distance duet of a song our dad wrote called, “It Will Be Alright in the Morning.” The phone call ended when she pulled up at the bank to make a deposit and we both reminded each other how lucky we feel to have the other for a sister. It was a good way to end a Thursday.

But enough of that! It’s Friday which means it’s time for another set of the Random Ten. You know the rules, but in case you have short term memory loss, I’ll repeat them. Set your pod or other, less aesthetically pleasing, digital music devise a’shufflin’ and report back the first ten (or eleven if you must) songs it spits out. No skipping, omitting, obfuscating or justifying allowed.

1. Few and Far Between, 10,000 Maniacs (Our Time in Eden)
2. What a Good Boy, Barenaked Ladies (Rock Spectacle Live)
3. Tiny Cities Made of Ashes, Modest Mouse (The Moon and Antarctica)
4. Power in Music, Maria Muldaur (Meet Me at Midnight)
5. When it Don’t Come Easy, Patty Griffin (Impossible Dream)
6. La La, The Polyphonic Spree (The Beginning Stages)
7. I Don’t Make Promises [I Can’t Break], Shannon Curfman (Loud Guitars, Big Suspicions)
8. Compound, Mare Wakefield Band (Factory)
9. Salt Water Sound, Zero 7 (Simple Things)
10. Les Choristes, Bruno Coulais (Les Choristes)

Favorite Song: When It Don’t Come Easy by Patty Griffin. This is one of the songs that is infused with the power to transport it’s listeners to another place. I love to travel this way.

Favorite Album: Meet Me at Midnight by Maria Muldaur. When I was a freshman in college, I called my dad one day, begging for new music. In response, he sent me a small box of very old cassettes onto which he had copies albums in the mid-70’s. One of these cassettes was this recording by Maria. I had never heard of her before that moment, but I was hopelessly hooked. Her quirky, clear voice was what I had been looking for all along.

Need more Random Friday that I can give you? Then check out some of the other players:
Andrea
Ashley
Ben
Brian
Dodi
Ellen
Howard
Kate
Luna
Sherri
Sparky

My grandmother Tutu, the one who lived for more than 35 years in my apartment, wore false eyelashes until the day when her aging coordination stopped allowing it. She special-ordered the lashes from a beauty store in Los Angeles that she had discovered in the early 80’s while visiting us in Eagle Rock. For the almost 10 years that we lived down there, my mom would make regular trips there to buy Tutu’s eyelashes and then ship them to her in Philadelphia. After she died, I found a box of more than twenty sets of lashes, dating from before her stroke in 1990.

She had a fake woodgrain formica-topped dressing table that ran the length of her bedroom with a lighted mirror that swiveled, depending on whether you needed a regular view of your face or a magnifed version. Every morning she would sit there and make herself beautiful. Her long, curly, grey hair would go up in a bun with several sprays of Aqua net and a transparent net tucked around it for safe-keeping. She wore Youth Dew or Opium or Must de Cartier and they always smelled wonderful on her. Then came the lashes. She would pour a small amount of black adhesive into a cap, rotate the mirror to the magnification side and carefully place each individual lash with a tweezer. Tweezers never met her specifications and so she was constantly buying new pairs when she was in drug and specialty stores. She often also used the pointy tips of cuticle scissors to delicately separate and flush the lashes, to make them look more authentic.

Monday evening, my mom mentioned to me that she had lost her favorite pair of cuticle scissors. They had been Tutu’s, and still had a couple carefully preserved smudges of her black eyelash glue on their shank. After we got off the phone, I started scavenging the apartment, looking in every drawer and box that still had some of Tutu’s things in them, to see what I could come up with. When all was said and done, I had turned up 11 pairs of small scissors and 17 pairs of tweezers. I picked five of each, making sure to include those that had the telltale signs of eyelash glue and packed them up in a padded envelope.

I felt a reflected sense of satisfaction when I was done, almost as if I was channeling a remnant of my grandmother that was proud to still be able to meet a need for her child. What’s more, her granddaugher (that would be me) is also still set for life in the scissor and tweezer department.

Reading in Rittenhouse Square tonight, I could feel fall.  During the day it is still agresssively summer, but between the hours of 8 and 9 pm, when the sky is lit with angular, streaky rays of light, and a breeze makes the leaves in the trees flounce with attitude, I can sense the presence of fall.

I have mixed feelings about the prospect of summer ending.  I love September and October, with it’s crisper air and nights where you finally need a comforter on your bed again, but I had such plans for this summer, most of which I haven’t gotten to.  I find myself trying to slow down the moments and I hang on to the minutes of warmth and sunshine with fists clenched tight.  I can’t get enough Jersey tomatoes, peaches, summer squashes and ripe melon, as if buy ingesting the bounty of the season, I will be able to hold on to it longer.

When fall finally arrives to stay, I will welcome it, but right now I’m just not ready.  Is that really so wrong?