This day begins and ends with fire
I think I'm finally catching something. Everyone at my office has been coming to work sick for weeks, hacking and snuffling and blowing their noses all around me and then wanting to lean over my shoulder to show me something, or borrow my pen during a meeting ... I'd avoided it so long I was starting to think maybe I wasn't going to get it this time, but this morning I woke up groggy, achy and mildly congested. Sleeping on the couch all night didn't help; I sort of fell over sideways around 9 o'clock last night and never quite managed to get up again. Mr. A brought out my blanket and pillow and I spent the rest of the night curled up like a fortune cookie. I just couldn't bring myself to go back to my saggy worn-out mattress in the cold.
So this morning I felt kind of lousy and out of it, but I had to get up anyway because today's the day we were going to rent a truck for a dump run, a load of fire wood, and to pick up some amazing 20-foot-long redwood 6x6's my old friend Beautiful Hands Man had offered to let us take off his hands. A day like that calls for a hearty breakfast, so I cooked up a good one – veggie omelet with sausage, avocado, salsa, and toast. Except the toast was done a little before the omelet, so I put it on a plate and stuck it back in the toaster oven to keep warm. Then, just to make sure it didn't cool down too fast, I turned the oven back on for one minute.
Next thing I knew there was black smoke and that hideous scorching smell, and when I looked in the door of the toaster oven I saw red! It's the first time that's ever happened to me in more than 35 years of cooking.
Luckily the toast was small and so were the flames, so I just grabbed the whole plate with an orange dog-face silicon hand puppet for grabbing hot things, and quickly set it out on a table on the back porch. Only the top piece was burnt, but the others had absorbed that unbearable smell. I tried eating part of one piece that didn't seem too bad, but it was so nasty I had to spit it out.
So that was the first fire.
The second one I just finished dousing with water and it was the nicest fire I've had outdoors in years. Mr. A has put together a nice little outdoor room back between the two apple trees and the redwood and a big eucalyptus, with a long wooden bench along one side and chairs and little tables, and several 6-foot potted redwoods we really need to get into the ground this year. I pulled out the mini-Weber and loaded up a box of firewood and built the first fire of the season and lit it. The sun had just gone down and I sat there watching the stars come out and petting the dogs and tossing little sticks and scrap wood onto the fire until just now – about three hours.
That was the second fire.
I love watching fires burn. I've been lucky to have had a fireplace in almost every place I've ever rented, and to have one in the house I live in now. It's so much more relaxing to watch a big piece of wood burn down to nothing than it is to watch television in the evenings, or even read. In a pinch, even a candle can work, if you can slow down enough to actually watch the wax melt.
With the wood it's especially satisfying because over the course of an evening there are so many different pieces that burn. I like to watch one piece as it turns black and catches fire and then really starts to break down and disintegrate, and then suddenly you notice you're not even looking at that piece anymore because it no longer quite exists – so you watch another piece, and then another, and eventually the shape of that first piece is completely gone, not even the outline of a duck's beak remains, or the curve that looked like somebody's elbow.
Thinking of it right now I can remember two pieces that were lying on top of each other tonight in such a way that they made the shape of an eel's face. The top one had a nail in it, and part of another piece of wood was still attached to the nail so that it looked like an eye, and I watched that eel's face for probably a half hour as it glowed in and out of orange and black and purple and white ... and by the time I doused the fire an hour or two later, the eel was completely gone. Dust.
It's so satisfying to see how completely the form disintegrates. Nothing recognizable remains of it – nothing. It's so reassuring, somehow, to see something so solid vanish into nothing but ash. So light you can just blow it away.
While I watched the wood burn I was thinking of people I've known, men in particular, and noticed that most of the men I've been with over the years have either hated themselves, or been angry. It's a sad pattern but I can't help acknowledging it. Exactly why I have this penchant for upset men is not completely clear to me. Is it because I'm upset too?
There's actually a third category, too – men who are afraid. Those are the ones I think I relate to the most, which is probably why I haven't ever spent much time with many of those.
Someone told me this week (hi, someone) that someone I used to know a long time ago just got married, and I thought at the time that I didn't have any feelings about it, but I have been thinking a lot about that person ever since. And I guess I do have some feelings about it. Not about that person exactly, because I really have no idea who that person is anymore – it's been almost 20 years since we've had any contact. But it did make me think back on what my life was like when I was in my first years of college, and how I thought everything was going to be. And how it really is now. That's the part I have feelings about.
Or maybe I'm just thinking back because that's what people think about as they age. Their youth. I saw a picture in the paper the other day of these octogenarians all dressed up for a USO party at the senior center and I thought, is that what it's going to be like when I'm old? Eighty-year-old guys in wheel chairs dressed as Sid Vicious? Great-grandmothers in dark roots, breast implants and vinyl hot pants? Isn't it kind of pathetic to spend so much effort trying to preserve a time that is gone? Wouldn't it be more interesting and truly more dignified to continue living a life that's always new? I've known a few really old people who have been able to do that, and knowing them makes me feel a lot better about getting old. They like to reminisce as much as anyone else, but they're not stuck in the past. They've stayed interested in the present, too.
I mean, I still like some of the music I listened to when I was 20, but I don't base my entire identity on it. I've found a lot of additional stuff in the world to enjoy since then. Maybe it's different when you're in a veteran.
So this morning I felt kind of lousy and out of it, but I had to get up anyway because today's the day we were going to rent a truck for a dump run, a load of fire wood, and to pick up some amazing 20-foot-long redwood 6x6's my old friend Beautiful Hands Man had offered to let us take off his hands. A day like that calls for a hearty breakfast, so I cooked up a good one – veggie omelet with sausage, avocado, salsa, and toast. Except the toast was done a little before the omelet, so I put it on a plate and stuck it back in the toaster oven to keep warm. Then, just to make sure it didn't cool down too fast, I turned the oven back on for one minute.
Next thing I knew there was black smoke and that hideous scorching smell, and when I looked in the door of the toaster oven I saw red! It's the first time that's ever happened to me in more than 35 years of cooking.
Luckily the toast was small and so were the flames, so I just grabbed the whole plate with an orange dog-face silicon hand puppet for grabbing hot things, and quickly set it out on a table on the back porch. Only the top piece was burnt, but the others had absorbed that unbearable smell. I tried eating part of one piece that didn't seem too bad, but it was so nasty I had to spit it out.
So that was the first fire.
The second one I just finished dousing with water and it was the nicest fire I've had outdoors in years. Mr. A has put together a nice little outdoor room back between the two apple trees and the redwood and a big eucalyptus, with a long wooden bench along one side and chairs and little tables, and several 6-foot potted redwoods we really need to get into the ground this year. I pulled out the mini-Weber and loaded up a box of firewood and built the first fire of the season and lit it. The sun had just gone down and I sat there watching the stars come out and petting the dogs and tossing little sticks and scrap wood onto the fire until just now – about three hours.
That was the second fire.
I love watching fires burn. I've been lucky to have had a fireplace in almost every place I've ever rented, and to have one in the house I live in now. It's so much more relaxing to watch a big piece of wood burn down to nothing than it is to watch television in the evenings, or even read. In a pinch, even a candle can work, if you can slow down enough to actually watch the wax melt.
With the wood it's especially satisfying because over the course of an evening there are so many different pieces that burn. I like to watch one piece as it turns black and catches fire and then really starts to break down and disintegrate, and then suddenly you notice you're not even looking at that piece anymore because it no longer quite exists – so you watch another piece, and then another, and eventually the shape of that first piece is completely gone, not even the outline of a duck's beak remains, or the curve that looked like somebody's elbow.
Thinking of it right now I can remember two pieces that were lying on top of each other tonight in such a way that they made the shape of an eel's face. The top one had a nail in it, and part of another piece of wood was still attached to the nail so that it looked like an eye, and I watched that eel's face for probably a half hour as it glowed in and out of orange and black and purple and white ... and by the time I doused the fire an hour or two later, the eel was completely gone. Dust.
It's so satisfying to see how completely the form disintegrates. Nothing recognizable remains of it – nothing. It's so reassuring, somehow, to see something so solid vanish into nothing but ash. So light you can just blow it away.
While I watched the wood burn I was thinking of people I've known, men in particular, and noticed that most of the men I've been with over the years have either hated themselves, or been angry. It's a sad pattern but I can't help acknowledging it. Exactly why I have this penchant for upset men is not completely clear to me. Is it because I'm upset too?
There's actually a third category, too – men who are afraid. Those are the ones I think I relate to the most, which is probably why I haven't ever spent much time with many of those.
Someone told me this week (hi, someone) that someone I used to know a long time ago just got married, and I thought at the time that I didn't have any feelings about it, but I have been thinking a lot about that person ever since. And I guess I do have some feelings about it. Not about that person exactly, because I really have no idea who that person is anymore – it's been almost 20 years since we've had any contact. But it did make me think back on what my life was like when I was in my first years of college, and how I thought everything was going to be. And how it really is now. That's the part I have feelings about.
Or maybe I'm just thinking back because that's what people think about as they age. Their youth. I saw a picture in the paper the other day of these octogenarians all dressed up for a USO party at the senior center and I thought, is that what it's going to be like when I'm old? Eighty-year-old guys in wheel chairs dressed as Sid Vicious? Great-grandmothers in dark roots, breast implants and vinyl hot pants? Isn't it kind of pathetic to spend so much effort trying to preserve a time that is gone? Wouldn't it be more interesting and truly more dignified to continue living a life that's always new? I've known a few really old people who have been able to do that, and knowing them makes me feel a lot better about getting old. They like to reminisce as much as anyone else, but they're not stuck in the past. They've stayed interested in the present, too.
I mean, I still like some of the music I listened to when I was 20, but I don't base my entire identity on it. I've found a lot of additional stuff in the world to enjoy since then. Maybe it's different when you're in a veteran.
2 Comments:
In a veteran what?
this is stuff I think about ALL THE TIME.
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