Mariachi

I think I was a little bit in love with this singing fellow, but maybe it was the margarita talking:



I guess I just have so much respect for the people who make a living doing their music, whatever sort of music it is. I'm a little bit jealous, and wonder what my life would have been like if I had tried to do it with my fiddle.

Look at the beautiful faces. This is a job--maybe sometimes, I hope, a joy too, but a day job nonetheless:

Boiled Nuts, Alligator Meat, Texas Home Cooking, Visionary Art, and Donkeys: A Summary

We've seen some strange and wondrous sights as we crossed the American South. Sampled some culinary delights. Been educated.

Boiled peanuts are a strange, multi-faceted experience. You purchase a styrofoam container of them, under advice from husband and friend, ladling the roiling contents, burning your face with hot steam. You clamp a lid down on them so the steam can do no further damage. Back in the car, you sample one. It is burning hot, and the shell yields easily. The nut inside is so soft that it practically melts. But the taste? Disgusting. Yet...you have to try one more to ascertain just how disgusting it really was. Yes, disgusting. Then a third. Hm. Wait, maybe it's not so bad. At least the texture is kind of nice...a fourth. The taste isn't so bad. A fifth. Okay, it's good. A sixth. Delicious, even...Sarge says you need an ice cold Coke to go with.

As for the Alligator meat, we didn't. We wouldn't. We couldn't. And "fresh from the swamp," isn't that an oxymoron?

Cleburne Cafeteria was everything it said it was and more.

The Orange Show cannot really be explained, but if you're interested look at the link.


The donkey lives across the road from my mother-in-law; he is free-ranging with four other donkeys and a two goats. They have a shelter and a feed and water station, and their owners come by every few days. I've never met such healthy, lovable creatures. They will lean against you silently if you let them, waiting for a scratch behind the ears and a carrot.

Scenes from Along the Road

A long day on the road.

We began with some bad coffee luck. I am a true coffee addict, and I must must I tell you have a strong cup of coffee. Let's just say that I tolerate a triple espresso quite well. You can imagine my chagrin when I ordered an iced coffee and was handed this atrocity:



(of course, you can also see that in my desperation for some caffeine, any caffeine at all, I actually drank some of it. Feh. If I'd wanted a glass of iced milk, I'd have ordered it).

We drove and drove, through Georgia and Alabama. Not quite as long as yesterday, but still we are all exhausted.

We ended up in a long-haul truckers' rest stop--the sort of place that provides showers for the truckers and sells everything from beef jerky to tube socks to pillows to caffeine pills. (It was quite fun to browse the odd selection, and we even found a color-by-numbers velvet picture for Hedgehog. She completed this baroque masterpiece on the way to Mississippi) In the ladies' rest room, I came face to face with this machine--very convenient indeed, no?--does it say something about the truckers' diversions?





The third slot of said machine boasted "a variety of 6 different sensual items to create your fantasy," and of course I began guessing: a little feather? a duct tape sample? I couldn't resist making the purchase--and here's what they had to offer:



A little disappointing, but still, drive her wild with pleasure--do you think it can cash that check? Would you trust anything you'd procured in a truck stop bathroom?

"Road Tripping Downfalls" (or, Hedgehog's Catharsis)

Hedgehog says:

"This is a list of complaints:

Complaint #1. I objected to this trip. And I was right.

Complaint #2. Why I was right is because getting cramped in a horrible car for about 14 hours. Is that your idea of fun?

Complaint #3. I thought I had picked boring, lousy books to read on the trip. And I was right.

Complaint #4. It takes too long to get through the states.

Complaint #5. I fear that now whenever I enter the car, after this road trip, I will remember the road trip with precise detail.

And, dear readers, those are most of my main complaints."

Mama says: let's hope tomorrow's better than today.

And weren't the waffles at Waffle House tasty?

Road Tripping

We leave tomorrow in the early a.m. for parts unknown--well, parts known but not clearly.

I have abandoned my Easy Rider allusion as it becomes clearer that the upcoming epic will be more burdened than easy...but such is the privilege of traveling with a little one.

There is so much we can't do with Hedgehog--ghost tours, honky tonks, voodoo shops, getting drunk in New Orleans, buying and setting off fireworks in the Carolinas--but we're substituting swimming pools and alligators and this place so in the end it will be satisfactory, one hopes.

Well, we shall see, we shall see...

Shades

Continuity is the main pursuit of my adult life. I live three blocks from my childhood home, I send Hedgehog to the same school I attended for 12 years, and before that to the little preschool that I went to in the 1970s, and my own mother attended in the 1940s. We summer in an old cabin by a lake in which four generations of Weather in the Streets girls have summered over the span of seventy years.

Sameness is a sort of obsession for me. But it is not always easy, inhabiting the places of one’s youth and of the generations before. There is a sometimes awful burden of memory that one must carry in the places of the past. On some nights, putting Hedgehog to sleep in my old bed, I hear my dead father’s mug of hot chocolate gently tapping down on the side table, the soft swish as he turns the page in his novel, an occasional creak as he shifts in the chair, and much later the click of the lamp being turned off. His chair sits in the very same corner of the living room in our lake house. The very books he read still occupy the nearby shelves. I know he’s gone, but at the same time he isn’t really. Just as my grandma Eva still hangs her sheets on a sunny windy day. As Aunt Abby drinks Tab and lime in her striped beach chair by the water. As Grandpa Max walks the Dobermans in the field behind the house—I can hear their collars jingling—and sometimes I know I see his shadow among the lengthening shadows of the trees.

I like that they’re still there, where I live; the animals and the people. But I know also that I’m bound to the old much too tightly; I can’t get away. If I leave, you see, I leave them all behind and it is over.







(I like ghost stories very very much, and if you'd like to read two more from my past, check out Window Ledge and one about dad.

I Miss My Blog

It's so hauntingly beautiful in the North Country, and I'm so happy to be here, but I am having a terrible time with my internet access and my diabolical MacBook track pad, which is betraying me so cruelly, and so am unable to post my musings and ruminations and I feel deprived of one of my most treasured outlets for my particular brand of insanity...

In truth, when I look at the face of it, I don't have much to say. Vacation has set in and taken hold. There is very good soft ice cream around here. We favor a local roadside stand, Martha's Dandee Cream--we refer to it as "Marfa's" in honor of baby Hedgehog's charming elocution--and indulge in rather Lucullan swirly custardy cones with sprinkles. I like coffee flavor, Hedgehog orders orange cream and vanilla swirl. Others among us go for straight up chocolate. Between that and all the sunshine and fresh air and dipping in the lake, the fireworks and long walks down country roads, I am pretty well anaesthetized...

Funky (a guest post by Sarge)

Was Heaven in the Backseat of My Cadillac? Possibly. I feel that I may have some expertise in this matter, as I once owned a 1970 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. In fact, I am not seriously opposed to the notion that Heaven could very well have been in the front seat of my Cadillac. The front seat was a bench-type seat which is not too remarkable since few sedans had what we called bucket seats in those days. What was remarkable (besides the vastness of it) was that it was a 6 way power bench seat. It went back and forth, tilted, reclined, I swear you could turn the damned thing into a bed-- one with "Magic Fingers" at that, if you were given to constantly jiggling the little toggle controls rapidly back and forth. I was not so given. I was more interested in jiggling... well you can see where juxtaposition and innuendo are taking us. And that car was a great place to juxtapose.

With a front seat of those dimensions the back seat was not even necessary. Of course on a double date (God, how gross were we? Did we have no shame? No? Not even a sense of privacy? Strange I could have sworn I had one, apparently not.) Heaven was often in the front and back seats of my Cadillac, with room for a Coleman cooler full of beers to boot. I'm just getting started so Don't Stop Me Now, You Sexy Thing.

We'd Get Up and Get on Down (Like a Sex Machine).

Yes, we would Partyup and Kiss (actually if I remember right, I saw Purple Rain sitting on the hood of that car at one of the last drive-in movie theaters in New Jersey) and we would probably Do It All Night

We experienced Pain, Pleasure, Ecstasy, and Bliss in that car.

But don't get the idea we were just a bunch of Sexoholics. We'd park and turn up the radio and get out and leave the doors open and we'd Shut Up and Dance (okay those were probably unfair references, they were songs by one of the best bands nobody ever heard of, El Grupo Sexo).

Those were great days, when driving a ten or fifteen year old car meant you were driving a piece of serious Detroit Iron, not just that you were driving an old car. We would do stupid, dangerous things and know that they were stupid and dangerous (let's face it, we lived in pretty much a perpetual state of what the Penal Law defines as Reckless Endangerment) and when we got our boo-boos we laughed at each other instead of crying to someone else. But we knew that What Is Hip was doing your own thang unashamedly. The Caddy was not a trendy car, Porsche 924's and Trans Am T-Tops were all the rage, but it was cool and it had a style of its own, what's more it had substance (472 cubic inches under the hood and 2 and a half tons of GVW worth of substance).

Let Me Take You Higher. We'd go out driving, put on the radio (NOT the stereo) and Sing a Simple Song.

We went everywhere in that car. Can You Get to That was a question that was always answered affirmatively.

That car epitomized funk to me (and not just cause the power windows didn't properly seal and there was a slight mildew issue). In fact you could probably fit a moderate sized band, plus roadies and equipment in the beast. The trunk was roughly the size of the car I currently drive.

Sarge signing off from Theme Thursday guest blogging. Thank you faletme be mice elf.


editor's note: that editor being me, Leah--I must add, I have learned a great deal from reading this post. Now I have to live with it. When Sarge and I were first dating, I made him a special sexy mixed tape (remember those?) that included that Hot Chocolate song, "Heaven's in the Back Seat of My Cadillac," never dreaming of the memories it evoked...at the time, he was much too circumspect to tell me...Sarge, you motherf!@#$er. And p.s. "Can You Get to That" is my personal bar none funky song, by Funkadelic, and if you've never heard it, please go do so immediately.

Tenebrous

A rainy, windy, rumbly evening in the Adirondacks, when it is just me and Hedgehog in the little cabin by the lake, could set a girl's imagination on a rather dark path...

It is my very favorite sort of evening, we have no expectation of activity beyond supper, hot chocolate, a book, the knitting project in my lap...but as the sun goes down on the drear, and the last light, though dim, fades, and the windows rattle and the curtains stir, the hundred-year-old pines press closer around the house, the dark forest behind and the darker lake before us seem to swallow up the little house in their insistent primeval wildness, and I...

am, I will admit, just a bit...

spooked.

The feeling is deliciously shivery and cozy all at the same time, until the hour grows later, and longer, and I am the last one awake, and I begin to feel that I am somehow the night watch, and...

I am not sure that I want to be the night watch, after all...

I do not want to watch for anything...

and I do not want to listen for anything...
not for the movement in the trees, the slight hitch of latch...

or even my own quiet intake of breath.

Victorian Dream

Last night I dreamed very vividly that I was visiting a blogging friend's house--let's not say who it was, I'll retain some dignity--and I caught a cold. This friend had a servant (yes, a servant, do any of you have servants?) prepare a posset for me to drink in bed, propped up against some very large white feather pillows in a very grand room. The greater part of the dream consisted of this friend telling me in detail the ingredients of the drink: cream (hm), 1 tablespoon of the very best whiskey in the house, spices, then filled the rest of the way up with the poorer whiskey and heated nearly to boiling. I have no idea whether this is a proper posset, let's just say it is the recipe for a proper dream posset. It was served in a thick white mug, and I could actually feel the steam on my face. The posset was delicious (I could taste it in the dream) and salubrious. So salubrious that I woke this morning feeling physically bolstered. Can I attribute it to the imaginary drink? Perhaps.

Why did I dream this? A number of months ago, readers offered cold remedies for my consideration. That has been hanging about in my subconscious. And it may have had something to do with the fact that I've been reading a combination of Henry James and Mary Burchell, and have been writing a great deal as well, and so am thinking in terms of descriptions of things, and then too I've been thinking romantic, Victorian thoughts during my waking hours. Perhaps in one of these books a servant, on behalf of a solicitous hero, even brought a posset to a girl with a cold, I can't remember.

I ask you, have you ever dreamed of this strange inchoate interwebs shadow-world? Has it ever been made corporeal during your sleeping hours, have the half-faced people ever come, fully realized, to life? It's never happened to me before last night, and I'm not sure whether I like it entirely.