I jumped Bella, and then Claire and Milo played really well at her second piano recital and his first, and then Heather and Gilbert and their kids came over for dinner. So it was pretty much a perfect day.
SAN FRANCISCO, 9:59PM PST: Aaand I’m home.
T. remained a rock star for the rest of the flight. I think maybe two other passengers figured out I had a cat in there. Rose met us at the arrivals area with a hot chocolate from Emporio Rulli for me. Handover accomplished.
ARE WE THERE YET? 5:30PM PST: America is really big. America exceeds the battery life of this laptop.
SKY, 5:11PM PST: America is big.
MIDWEST, I GUESS? 4:50PM PST: In which the futuriffic Internetz in the sky are harnessed to mundane ends:
Francis: sounds like smooth sailing up there
me: THIS IS A FAKE CAT
Francis: cats are supposed to claw and hate you!
me: so it is written!
LET’S PUT THE LAKE BEHIND US, 4:37PM PST: Upheaval! Tenzing changes chirality. Now she is sleeping counter-clockwise.
THERE IS A LAKE DOWN THERE, 4:11PM PST: I like flying Virgin. We’re on the Chic Mobile. I ate a wrap. Tenzing is mellow. I went into this liveblogging gig expecting more fireworks, frankly.
35,000 FT, 6:08PM EST / 3:08PM PST: Dayumn, this is awesome. I’m going to make kittens a permanent addition to my flight kit.
We’re above the clouds. Tenzing is nestled on my foot, inside her carrier. Every now and then I reach in and give her a scritch. I cannot believe how calm and brave she is. Beebs would have ripped one of my arms off by now. Is this what normal cats are like?
JFK, 3:35PM: I met Francis in the hotel lobby. Tenzing’s carrier is tiny and black and discreet; she can turn around, but only barely. She is being incredibly brave. So is Francis, who strode away after saying goodbye with only the most manly of tears in the eye. Real men love their kittens.
Note for future cat-accompanied travel: the cat does not go through the x-ray. She has to come out of the carrier and face security like any other person. The first time I held Tenzing it was to walk her through the metal detector. She curled in my arms like an apostrophe and watched as I collected all our bags.
This will not be possible with a cat like, say for example, Bebe.
MANHATTAN, 1:04PM: The kitten is on the subway.
MANHATTAN, 9.37AM: Celebrity cat Twyla wishes Tenzing bon voyage.
MANHATTAN, 9.02AM: Later this afternoon I will be escorting celebrity kitten Tenzing on her move from New York to California. Watch this space!
It would be misleading if I were to give the impression that life with the girls is unpleasant. Yesterday I took Miss Four to the Farmer’s Market with me. She was glowing, in a shiny ivory dress and orange cardigan. She was very helpful and cooperative, and then we danced together at Jackie Jones. We picked up Claire and Jeremy and walked over to the Fairmount Fiestaval, where I gave Claire money and told her to buy tickets and take her sister and play while I sat in the sun and recovered from my cold. Later she came up to me quietly and said “I loved it that you gave me money and let me do what I want.”
“I loved it that you were responsible and took great care of Julia,” I said.
We came home and Claire and Jeremy investigated a set of grasshopper robots for the Community Arts and Science day at Claire’s school on Friday. Jeremy will be running the solar-powered robot work table. Julia and I curled up in my bed. She fell asleep first and I held her and listened to Claire and her Dad talking about solar power. There was nowhere else I wanted to be, nothing else that could have made me so happy.
At a week shy of her four-and-a-halfth birthday, right on schedule, Julia became a sudden and zealous Haver Of Opinions. Her sister also experienced this phase, during which we coined the phrase Four Is Hell.
For example: I’ve been experimenting with wearing things other than jeans and tshirts very occasionally. This morning I walked out of the bedroom in the new Frye Melissa boots Jeremy bought me, a thrifted brown wool skirt, a pink tshirt and a black cardigan. Julia looked me over shrewdly.
“You want to change that jacket,” she said. “You want the sparkly jacket.”
Chagrined, I changed the black cardigan for a chocolate-and-gold one I picked up at Thrift Town last week. I have to admit, it looked a lot better.
As if that weren’t scary enough: We’ve started an ongoing series of stories about Blair and Dahlia, the girls’ interdimensional evil twins. They live in a town called Frank Sarcastor and they always misbehave and are cranky. They don’t eat nice food, just things that taste of snot. At swim class they fill the pool with jello so all the children get stuck.
“Maybe you should go and live with them,” said Julia today. “Since you are always cranky.”
I have no idea how we will get through the next six months. Keep us in your thoughts.
I thought I was going to have some unstructured down time for the first time in a week; and lo, Julia peed her pants. Nobody told me parenting would require endless, inhuman efforts of will. Well, okay, everyone did but even so! I didn’t know they were serious!
And what is more: I would never have fixed the stupid car if I’d known I would spend most of a week stuck in traffic.
It is not all grief for the old horse around here, I should make clear. It may be that Bella is so spectacularly nice that she is making me miss Alfie by being so like him. I’m of the school of thought that believes Bella is an appendix QH – lots of Thoroughbred in her, but a big ole Quarter Horse butt, downhill with no neck, and a brave, sane, kind, cuddly QH attitude. Mare is golden. I am reminded of the tales of Alfie at cross-country clinics in St Ives. The younger Thoroughbreds would fuss and wig out, and Alfie would cheerfully and calmly demonstrate exactly how to tackle each question. They called him Alfie the Wonder Horse.
This morning I was riding with Erika, who is maybe the thinkiest of the trainers I work with. Friday morning lessons with her often end up being hilariously technical, in a way that would completely baffle the objective eye: we do an exercise five or seven times, then come into the middle of the ring and talk intently for a while, then go back out to the track and do exactly the same exercise – albeit, hopefully, better.
This morning’s exercise could not have been simpler. There was a pole on the ground along one long side, and two poles on the ground on the other long side. The two poles were five strides apart. Poles on the ground are practice jumps, with no risk. The idea is to meet them as perfectly as you would need to meet a 3-foot Swedish oxer.
It’s all about pace. You need a medium canter – neither long nor short – and you need it coming out of the corner, ten strides before the fence. Then you need to sit still, except that if any problems come up you need to correct them. I started out fucking up this exercise in two distinct ways. First, I thought Bella’s medium canter was too long, so I kept trying to shorten her pace. Second, in my efforts to be quiet over the fences themselves, I would seize up five strides out and be a passenger. Erika called it my “blank stare.”
Remember Bunk telling Kima that a good detective has soft eyes? Yeah, that. My fixes were, first, to stop trying to collect a poor mare who was already in a lovely pace, albeit long and low as dictated by her QH ancestors. My second was to ride actively into the fences – while sitting still. In other words, do less at the corner, and do more in the five strides in. But hardly any more. Do almost nothing. But do enough. Got it?
Oh my God, it felt so lovely when I got it right. I let her go forward and she flowed. I felt her wanting to drop her left shoulder and I put my left heel down a millimeter and corrected the angle of my left wrist a degree, and she straightened and hit the perfect distance. It wasn’t by accident, as it had been all the other times we got it right. I rode it, and it was good.
She has four white stockings and a wide white blaze that roans out on one side of her face. Her orange coat is mirror-bright and almost dappled with good health. She has soft eyes herself, except when you tighten her girth and she pins her ears and does sea-monster fierce faces. I am not at all attached to her, you will be relieved to hear.
Some time before dawn I walked down to his stable. My boots crunched in the sand. The dark pressed my eyes. I ducked between the bars of his fence, careful not to skin my back on the top bar. He came out of his shed merry and glad to see me. I put my arms around his neck and breathed his mane. We fit together, a young woman and her horse; we leaned into each other like parts of a whole. I knew I’d been away for a long time and tried to calculate how long it had been, but the number I came up with – twenty-odd years? – was preposterous. I knew I could always come back. I knew he would always be glad to see me.
When the sun leaked through I saw his ribs, and the dull hide taut over his knife-sharp hips.
I used to think that his death had been some kind of instructive episode, as in My Friend Flicka or The Red Pony; that it had made me a better or at least more compassionate and empathic person. Now I am not so sure. I am not, after all, a particularly compassionate or empathic person. I don’t know that grief teaches you anything much except that grief never ends. I love my dead as fiercely and needily as I ever loved them when they were alive, but without hope.
“Bad dreams,” I told Jeremy when I woke up.
“What about?”
“Alfie.”
“Was he a demon horse, risen from the grave?”
“No. He had cancer and he was going to die.”
It would be really nice if anyone who ever supported the unjust occupation of Iraq would kindly STFU about the deficit. Unless it is to say: “We are very sorry. We were wrong.”
Jeremy’s office and the underneath of our bed are purged of e-waste. The kids’ toys and the underneath of their bed are purged of goo. Good baby toys and clothes have been carefully stored for friends’ future babies. Dust and pollen have been carefully stored IN MY NOSE.
Julia sings:
“I love the world.
I love everybody in the whole world
and I love to do anything!
This is my weekend.
Oh the weekend is so-o-o beautiful.
Everything is so beautiful,
so beautiful,
SO-O-O BEAUTIFUL!”
Between the decluttering, the new garden and the fact that I basically had my car rebuilt this week… I guess it’s spring :/
Scottie has been sold, this time for sure maybe (selling horses is a Byzantine process) so yesterday was (probably) my last ride on him. I was a bit meh about it, because Bella is so easy and fun and rewarding and with Scottie I have to be much more disciplined and correct and it’s much harder work. Sydney got to ride Bella, and I must shamefacedly confess to a moment of pure possessive bitchiness when I saw Sydney putting Bella’s bridle on.
It was an inauspicious day anyway. It had been raining all the way down to the barn and the weather was bitterly cold as well as soaking wet. I don’t like riding in the indoor – although I am grateful to have an indoor, and not have to face the unpleasant choice between riding in the rain or not riding at all for two months out of the year. And then Scottie’s bridle had the curb rein on, and I haven’t ridden with a curb rein since I ill-advisedly put a double bridle on Alfie when I was about eighteen.
Technical notes: Scottie’s bridle isn’t a double, because a double bridle isn’t just two reins, it’s two reins attached to two bits. Scottie is still wearing the rubber jointed pelham he likes so much, but the bit converters that handled the bit and curb chain via a single rein had been taken off, and a thinner rein had been buckled to the lower ring to control the curb chain through a lever action.
I walked carefully up to Erin, explained and offered to take the curb rein off. That’s because you need light, consistent hands to ride with a curb chain if you’re not going to jab the horse in the chin unfairly; I don’t think my hands are good enough yet. Erin told me to get over myself. So off we went with me holding the reins as if Scottie’s jaw were made of rare bone china. I’ve had it drummed into me forever that you don’t hang on the horse’s mouth, and you especially don’t do it with a strong bit, and if there’s a curb chain involved as well you don’t do it cubed, times one hundred, with cherries on top.
Turns out Scottie really really likes it when people are respectful of his mouth. And my new improved lower leg helps a lot with getting him moving forward with impulsion. He rounds himself and gives you these amazing cadenced trots and canters, and it feels spectacularly huge. I glanced over at Bella and looked at her skinny little neck and thought ever so slightly rude thoughts about small mares with no forehand.
Erin set up canter poles, and after we’d ridden through a few times, forward and straight, she raised the middle pole to be a low vertical. This worked really well for me because I had to keep my leg on and concentrate on keeping a light strong position two strides in and two strides out of the fence, all while holding the double handful of reins, and not smashing Scottie’s Waterford-crystal lower jaw. This is how I relax, by the way.
Finally, we did a twisty-tight course with sharp turns. Beth and Austin aced it both times. I completely flubbed it the first time and rode it not-prettily the second. But we jumped everything and my position was half-decent over the jumps and best of all, Scottie at no point got anxious or tried to speed up or roar away. His anxiety issue is almost resolved, and he’s like another horse – like Austin, almost! Cheerful and honest and good at his job. But flashier than dear old Austin :)
The main problem was that Scottie kept cross-cantering during the changes of direction, so we finished with some canter circles on the flat until I could keep him united at the canter. This was difficult, but also revelatory, because a disunited canter was Alfie’s biggest problem and I could never figure out how to ride through it. Not only have I improved dramatically since Alfie’s heyday in the late eighties, I have improved a lot since three months ago, when I was afraid to ride Scottie over fences. It was a patchy ride, bad in parts but good in others, and I finished it flushed with happiness and hard physical effort. Completely worth braving the rain for.
Thanks so much, handsome man. You taught me a ton and had the best cadence I have ever ridden. I hope the clover is hock-deep where you are going, and that your new owner loves you crazy.
I actually slept last night, because Julia didn’t wake at 1am or something and demand to sleep in my armpit as has been her wont. I lay in my warm bed this morning blinking wonderingly and snuggling my cat. Jeremy brought me hot tea.
Then Salome called so I dragged on some clothes and we ran to the farmers’ market for dried apples and apricots, pistachios, pink lady apples, broccolini, tangerines, bread, eggs, dandelion greens and a pot of live basil. Then home to weed the wilderness that our front patch and the jacaranda’s tree well had become over winter; then to Flowercraft for pansies and violets and petunias. I cut back the bougainvillea so that now it is possible to reach the faucet without being eaten by triffids. The Icelandic poppies survived, to my joy. We planted the annuals and the garden looks adorable.
Then to Crissy Field where the girls swam excellently, then home to eat Jeremy’s roast chicken with a caprese salad with the fresh basil on it, and last week’s bok choi revived in peanut and sesame oil and a lashing of soy sauce. Nom. Then greek yogurt and strawberries and blueberries for desert, drizzled with orange blossom honey. Om nom nom.
And then we crept out into the San Francisco twilight and released a tub of ladybirds into the garden to eat the aphids. One caught a ride in on my shoulder and is now buzzing around the back of the sofa while Jeremy exhorts the children to sleep.
Another bright jewel of a day, rounded out with this.
Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.
My heroine this Ada Lovelace Day is Dr Elizabeth Flint of Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr Flint is New Zealand’s leading expert on desmids, which are single-celled freshwater algae of considerable beauty.
Dr Flint took her MSc degree at what was then Canterbury College in 1931. She moved to England where she monitored London’s water supply before working for the RAF’s Operational Research Section in World War Two. She returned to New Zealand in the fifties and wrote the three definitive books on desmid taxonomy.
Betty is also my mother-in-law’s godmother. I met her on a trip to Christchurch in, I think, January 2001. We talked nonstop for two hours at the cafe in the botanic gardens – for all her stature she is generous and curious and pragmatic and fiercely funny – and then she dropped us at the airport in the 1958 Ford Consul that she had bought brand new. She was working then but has since retired, although not particularly early: Betty will be 101 this year. She was, and is, tireless.
To women of her generation – to the Bettys and Rosalind Franklins and Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hoppers and to my Auntie Barb – my geek feminist sisters and I owe more than I can possibly say. These women light my way and let me see what I can be, and what my daughters can be.
James May’s Toy Stories is ridiculously optimal family viewing material. We simply provide the children with the relevant toys. Claire produced a very fine playdough flower during the plasticine-at-Chelsea-flower-show show. It’s still in a vase on the kitchen bench. Last night the children watched Lego and built their own tall, frail towers.
When I met her in Sydney in January my childhood friend Anna asked if I still believed in God, and I said “Oh, no,” which felt at the time and still feels like an evasion (and also unfairly dismissive.) That said, I still don’t have anything well-formed to put in its place, though, so consider these notes towards… um, something? Maybe a provisional explanation of why the Hubble Ultra Deep Field helps me to be happier, more compassionate and more mindful of my own death.
In her fantastic Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill says:
People of faith so often seem to forget that a god who gives their lives meaning too often provides them with justification when they want to wipe out other people who believe in other gods, or in nothing. My own belief – that we on our short-lived planet are part of a universe simultaneously perfectly ordinary in that there it is and incalculably mysterious in that it is beyond our comprehension – does not feel like believing in nothing and would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter. It feels like a state of infinite possibility, stimulating and enjoyable – not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true. And this remains so when I force myself to think about the most alarming aspect of what I can understand, which is that we will eventually become extinct, differing from the dinosaurs only in contributing a good deal more than they did to our own fate. And it also remains so when I contemplate my personal extinction.
Recessional puts it this way:
Innocence looks at the stars and says “look at the lights of the gods in heaven! I am in awe.”
Experience says, “Eh, it’s just burning gas lightyears away. I’m bored.”
Grace says, “look at the burning gas lightyears away! I’m in awe.”
Last night’s turnout included a Rachel, a Rebecca, a Naomi and an Elizabeth. We need to recruit a Mary or an Eve so we can start a Biblical Heroine Fox Force Five.
Me: “I’d like to write a writing group. ‘Have you thought about writing it in the first person?’ ‘I think your story really starts on page 9.'”
Liz: “The poetry group would be ‘Why don’t you make it rhyme?’ or ‘I think you should replace every third word with the word after it in the dictionary. To make it more postmodern.'”
“People really say that?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t they have medication for that?”
Later I read out a line of dialog and Liz says “I have to show you a woman I know who writes really good dialog.”
“Are you saying my dialog is shit?”
“No!”
“I’ve had a quarter of a glass of wine so I’m paranoid. WHAT OF IT?”
Naomi: “They do have medicine for that.”
Liz silently hands me chocolate.
“There’s some dialog I would have liked to have written.”
Such a day I have had! Brunch with Seth and Meryl at Sun Rise, then present shopping for Ada (a sparkly unicorn, of course) then home to paint cat faces on children, and then I went off to ride Bella Bella Bella Bella! Three months of flat work on Scottie and my maniacal determination to fix my lower leg all paid off in a few moments, when I rode her over fences with my ankle against her side and still! I dropped her in a terrible spot in front of a fence and because she is the honestest mare in the world she jumped out of it and because I have a lower leg now it wasn’t even very sticky…
And the rest was balanced and forward and unbelievably freakin FUN! And Erin used me as a GOOD EXAMPLE of how to ride corners with a correct leg! THIS NEVER HAPPENS! Oh! I am still warm and happy at the thought of it!
Then home and up through my lovely neighborhood to Ada’s party where I met all our delightful friends and SLID VERY FAST. Note that I shall no longer attend parties that do not feature slippery slides the length of a city block. Then grocery shopping with a still-cheetah-faced Julia, who greeted her public with great naturalness and charm. Then baths and James May’s Toy Stories and roast chicken and bedtime and Bebe curled up in my arms.
You should try it! It is so great!
ETA: Um. And then something completely amazing happened.
If we could stay married for ever, that would be cool with me.
preoccupations
