West Indian 'Iced Tea' - a summer recipe

Here are the ingredients for one of my favorite summer beverages - it's called mauby. 

Served cold, its a golden brown, bracing thirst quencher. OK... its an acquired taste, but it is brown. I've been drinking a lot of it lately as a substitute for coca cola: no caffeine, no fizz, but I've got the cold covered.

Clockwise from top: 

mauby bark from the mauby tree

anise/anise seed  

(use either seeds OR flower stalk with seeds)

star anise (seed pod shown with seeds)

clove

cinnamon stick

bay leaf 

and at the center - spice.

To make the concentrate:

*Add 3 cups of water to a medium sized pot over a high fire.
*Add 8 pieces of mauby bark, plus all other ingredients (in about the amounts shown) to the water and bring to a rolling boil. Boil till water reduces to about 2 cups brownish concentrate.
*Pour off the concentrate and save.
*Add a fresh 3 cups of water to the pot of herbs and boil again. This can be done 2 more times, each   successive boil yielding a less bitter concentrate.

To make the beverage:
*Add 2 or more parts water to 1 part concentrate (depending on how much hair you want on your chest).
*Add sugar to taste.
*Chill and serve.

Photo: tonight, kitchen table.

From here

We'd like to think our perspective matters.

We know that the law upholds our right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', but that's just a cease and desist. What of us, really?

Do our thoughts matter?

our feelings?

What about our individual experiences?

'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears...'

and, what does it mean 'to matter'?

Photos: 
1&2 - at the blessing of the fleet, City Island, NY (June 2009)

3 - butterfly on seathrift (my backyard)
4. my neighbor's garden gnomes
5 &6 - Zhongshan Park, Shanghai China (2007)
7. self portrait - Trinidad (2009)

Compensation

I have been plagued most of my life by a propensity for getting lost, and by a poor memory. Both would haunt me in serial nightmares which may have their roots in childhood trauma (what doesn't?) and would eventually mushroom into a lifelong fear of getting lost and forgetting.

Getting lost and forgetting.
One of my mother's sisters spent her last years in a deep fog, a victim of Alzheimer's. Two of her other siblings are in earlier, but nevertheless devastating stages of the illness. My Aunt Yvonne called up the other day from Devon, England where she lives alone. She is sill lucid enough to realize that she is forgetting, which may be more distressing than being in total oblivion. She does not want to live alone anymore and is planning what she says will be her last trip to Australia, a country she very much loves.
My Uncle Henry lives in Texas. He wakes up at night disoriented and wanders through the house looking for the familiar among the mundane. He thinks he's lost, but he's forgetting too. Is there any difference?

Terrifying as this all is, it is not the kind of 'getting lost and forgetting' that has plagued me.
Let's start with numbers. I can't hold them in the order that I got them. Dyslexia? Maybe.
My job is all about numbers - special numbers like prices, quantities and dates. Markdowns and margins.
These are numbers that no one can afford for me to get wrong, so to compensate for my handicap I have become a note-taker extraordinaire. I have notebooks dating back ten years detailing my daily to-do's and important events including a log of the days I was not at work ( absence is a defense), phone numbers, user names and passwords for the secured sites and databases I must navigate in the course of doing my job.
If there is a meeting, however informal, I take the minutes. Minutes are especially important in two-person meetings. If I sense that 'drape thy derriere' (aka C.Y.A) insurance is required, I follow up with an email detailing the exchange. This dysfunction is not limited to numbers, but happily, problems with prose are less in evidence. My worst work-related nightmare is being cornered with a question whose answer I know but can't remember. Try proving that. I'd be the perfect fall-gal if I couldn't  refute or confirm something with conviction, and as you know, conviction is the difference between the blue sky and a self-healing... I mean, a cell ceiling.

Similarly, I have no sense of direction - no internal gyroscope. Or, not one that functions: turn me around a few times and I'm lost. I thought a GPS would make up for my non-existent nose for North, but it did so much more. The directions given by the typical GPS are moronic, containing lots of loops and 'long cuts'. However, following them is not as moronic as getting lost and it is loads better than feeling lost.
I've named my GPS's female voice 'Alice' as in Jefferson Airplane's Go Ask Alice.
I once followed Alice's directions for Brooklyn which took me from the Bronx to lower Manhattan via the FDR Drive and through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Had I Map-Quested it, I might have gotten there faster than you could say 'Jackie Robinson Parkway', but at least I had the luxury of telling Alice where to get off, rather than feeling like an idiot that I got lost. GPS devices are really mis-marketed as navigational aids; they're at least 50% psychological aids, too.

In all seriousness, I would not like to fall victim to 'Big Al'. I'd much rather lose my faculties gradually in a way that my son and future grandchildren would find at least mildly entertaining. The more hokey stereotypes I can fit, the better. Advances in dentistry have probably saved my teeth from a watery resting place and circumvented a slew of old-lady jokes, but hell - I can get bifocals, my hearing could fade gradually.
In the movie 'Mission Impossible III', Tom Cruise's character, breathless from a brush with death, phones a friend for a favor: access to some restricted data files. The friend says, 'I've gotta use my scissors and shit for this.' which to me, was hilarious. I cracked up laughing, repeating it (at least twice) to my son, who informed me dryly with a withering look: Mom, it's 'I'm gonna lose my citizenship for this.'
Which, in 22 states and counting, would be no joke. I like what I heard better.

Corners

This morning, while riding the bus on my way to work, I had a sudden flashback of my childhood school.

It was a bluish-gray building, I'd say I remember it as a 'stern' shade of gray. The principal, Sister Gerome, always wore a black skirt and a white shirt, and on her head - a black cotton veil over a white skullcap.

The school building itself was symmetrical, but the yard was another matter. The building's wide entrance was secured only by a large black accordion gate which gave access to the lobby, and beyond the lobby, a central courtyard around which the classrooms were arranged in two tiers. The central courtyard was our main playground, but around the perimeter of the school was a narrow ribbon of yard, itself shielded by a tall fence from the sidewalk and the street beyond.

One of these peripheral segments was, inexplicably, a triangular shaped space. The apex of this more or less isosceles-shaped triangle was the least frequented spot in the entire school compound. Children would walk there with an air of trepidation, heightened by the fact that the apex was not closed, but open just enough for one child at a time to pass through to another segment of the periphery. Not only that, but the apex opened into a tiny rock garden with some low shrubs. So you'd have to navigate the narrow opening, step onto the gravel and squeeze past the shrubs. Its fair to say that the apex was planted like this to discourage us children from passing there.

The interesting thing about this morning's flashback is that it was built brick by brick from an instantaneous image of this little corner of the schoolyard. Its almost like I've folded and stored the entire memory of the school in the empty space that was the open apex of a triangular shaped piece of yard. First came the corner,
then the fences, the courtyard, then the lobby, Sister Gerome, and finally the facade of the school in that stern bluish gray.

I often wonder about my son's inner life. Just as I wasn't able (and indeed, never seriously wanted) to share my childhood perspective with my parents, I can't know how my son perceives his world, how he throws his net over the things he means to keep, which oddly shaped corners will suggest the whole, and which empty spaces are carrying entire segments of his universe.

An Ode to Weeds

Maybe it's an act of deference. Or defiance. But, yes, I water weeds. North America has so many beautiful flowering weeds (I recently learned that Emily Dickinson cultivated the dandelion) that I think its a shame to obliterate them. Besides, I am a lax gardener - I like a little disorder in the border. My first spring with my own garden was a revelation. We arrived in the month of March and didn't know what was in the yard. By April I learned: Helleboros for one. Peonies for two. Hostos, Lily of the Valley, Dwarf Maple, hyacinth, tulips, azaleas, as well as two very fragrant shrubs with white flowers that smelled like jasmine - but whose identities are still not clear.

Helleboros

There were also the 'weeds': the vigorous white potato vine, a purple flowering weed, a yellow flowering weed, a blue flowering weed, a pink flowering weed, a patch of beautiful moss growing under one tree and some tiny succulents piggybacking on top of that.

These flowers are small, but they do take on a kind of beauty when left to grow in numbers, or when photographed up close. I don't know why I've got such an affection for them. I let the potato vine grow as it pleases and 'speak to it' nicely about leaving the tomatoes and the hydrangeas alone. By and large, it has complied. I let wild grasses come up in my patio boxes, reasoning that their fluffy tufts are like flowers after all...and there is a succulent weed that has come up between the flagstones that I am watching  to see how far it will fan out. 

Maybe I was so starved of vegetation in my first few years here that I am reluctant to pull up anything that brings a little beauty into my world - no matter what the neighbors say. We have 2 full grown pine trees - down from 5, (neighbor on the right complained about the pine cones and needles falling onto her yard). Maybe I am so angry that I bowed to pressure to cut down those 3 evergreens that I am holding onto my weeds with all my might.

Photos: mine - taken in the backyard.

                                                  

                                                  

  

A Brush with Authenticity

Yesterday, I attended the Red Hawk Pow-Wow at Bear Mountain State Park. I've been attending these events ( at least one every summer) since I was given a medicine wheel by my friend David about 7 years ago. I was going to Arizona for training in energy healing and he thought it was an appropriate present. The medicine wheel itself was very simple: a leather-wrapped circle divided into four quadrants,each dividing bar made of the same pale leather twisted on itself. It was garnished at each of the four junctions with a turquoise-colored plastic bead. He told me quite plainly, and almost proudly, that this particular medicine wheel came from an Avon catalog. Now, I've only seen an Avon catalog twice, and neither time were medicine wheels featured, but who would claim that if it wasn't so?

David is a Guyanese-born East Indian with a British accent who looks for all intents and purposes like a Native American. David actually resembles the Native American actor Wes Studi (who played the Huron Indian 'Magua' in the movie 'The Last of the Mohicans'). He told me that he takes full advantage of this fact: growing his hair down past his shoulders, 'infiltrating' Indian Nation gatherings all over the Tri-State area and hanging out with the Indian bretherin. His earnestness is endearing, and I get it.

A good number of the participants at Pow-wows these days don't even look like Native Americans. I've seen African American Native Americans, and likewise many decidedly Anglo-looking Native Americans who must have just a sliver of Native DNA - between them! Even I, having not even a pin-prick's worth of Native blood, find a great deal of resonance with the idea of being Native - having some pristine, primordial aspect that is unevolved in the best possible sense of the word.

The first (and only) dancer to get my attention yesterday was the young boy pictured above. To see his picture is to see nothing. I was mesmerized by his movement - the intensity of his physical presence and the subtlety of his interpretation. He looked all of seven. He balanced his body securely even as he lowered it into a near-stoop while swaying his trunk purposefully left then right to the beat of the drum. His head was majestic as his arms, like levers, cranked the whole of him back upright. What a joy! I doubt this was instilled in pow-wow prep - there were 5 other dancers in his age-group and none of them displayed his exquisite intuition. There is just this thing - and you know it when you see it.

The Winds of Change

Bryant Park daffodils - Spring 2005

 Today I caught a whiff of Autumn. It came floating on a breeze from the east, a degree or so cooler that I was expecting for August. It was 6 pm and I was walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan, just outside Bryant Park. I was heading home from work. It's a summer for which I'd made a simple resolution: to enjoy myself the most I could - maybe even the best ever. Instead it is looking like a 'lost summer'. I am working the hardest I have in a long long time, covering for a co-worker on maternity leave, and at the same time dealing with an onslaught of orders for my own division. We landed a huge order for Wal-Mart: 1.2 million units of mens' shorts to be delivered from December this year through May 2011. We have also been contracted to produce another 200,000 shorts for a well-known private label. None of it is a challenge, the challenge is doing it all. A few days ago, I read a post,  Daily Om - The Life of your Dreams which seemed to address my current 'stuck-ness'. Over the past few months, I have been slowly making peace with my Cosmic Dance Partner (the good old CDP). I have felt the wind at my back, and I swear an invisible hand has moved a chess piece or two. This has all made my life a little smoother, not to mention giving me a sense that things are actually working to my benefit. One needs that from time to time. After the Smackdown  I was angry at the Universe, then I got way too busy to keep stirring that pot. Now, I am just doing the day as it presents itself - which included, this morning - putting someone's broken Snapple bottle into the garbage can next to the bus stop. Some things just have your name written on them, especially the ones you almost break your neck tripping over. So this is the nature of the double D ( Destiny & Duty) as it presents itself to me. It seems to be the formula for my life - my particular equation with which I tinker at my peril. Its a long equation, not light-bulbish by any stretch, but maybe there is still room to salvage some elegance in the solution. Change for me may well be borne on many successive breezes, each off by just a degree or so from the one before. Today, I caught a whiff.

The New York Public Library overlooking Bryant Park, NYC - 2007

Photos: mine