Meet Clara

This is Clara, the orchid, rescued from the week’s trash on my Wednesday night walk.

She’s only my second plant rescue, the first being, about 15 years ago, a then-unknown-to-me Sum & Substance hosta tossed out, like Clara, in the week’s trash. Sum & Substance went on to thrive spectacularly, and hugely (seriously, it is a big plant) in my garden. It was a long time before I finally discovered its name.

Back to Clara. This latest trash rescue is named for a former ceramics classmate, Clara, whose last name I can't remember. She lived in my Dormont neighborhood in the early 1990s; I was either working nights or unemployed and we got to know each other during once-a-week pottery wheel classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland.  Those were nice mornings; class was about 3 hours and teacher was a crusty immigrant from Latvia who smoked. She still shows up at Pittsburgh art fairs. Boy, could she throw. The rest of us had varying skill levels, but mostly, it was just a nice girls morning.

I loved the camaraderie (girl-a-raderie?) but after about four years, felt I had hit my wall. I wasn’t getting better – throwing is hard, and before the wheel, you have to  mash your clay into an air-bubble-less pile, also hard (on the shoulders) – and I never got the hang of throwing bigger than you want your finished product to be, because the kiln always makes it smaller.  So I stopped, but not before Clara had gifted me with an orchid in exchange for lifts to class.

She had an amazing collection. Her old Dormont house had a dampish basement with green painted stone walls where she and her husband had set up an orchid greenhouse. There were racks of fluorescent lights hung claustrophobically overhead, shelves and shelves of labeled orchids, supplies, misters and not to mention the washer and dryer.

I lost track of Clara. But I remember how I learned from her that passion looks different to each person. Her dampish basement was nothing to behold, but what grew there most certainly was.

Anyway, here’s to the Claras. The lady and the plant. Best to you both.

The October Country

So, via the New York Times Book Review, I wandered to a place I would have arrived at anyway.

The October Country.

In brief reviews of old books republished, I found a link to the web site of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company which has a very old copy, among many old books, of short story collection by Ray Bradbury entitled "I Sing the Body Electric."

I love Ray Bradbury. His prose is magic and wonderful and earthy and diamond-like. I would love to drink a glass of dandelion wine with him. I would love to walk a carnival midway with him on a deep and dreamy summer night in Illinois, songs of frogs and crickets in full midnight throat.

Not to be.

Therefore, time again for The October Country. Thank you Ray.  For "The Next In Line," for "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse," for "Touched with Fire," for "The Cistern," "The Homecoming" and for many more, most especially, for "The Lake," a story of life and of memory.

And thank you, too, to Joseph Mugnaini, (that's your work shown here) for your illustrations.

See you next October.

Much love,
Katy

My first apartment. Columbus, Ohio.

A very long time ago I lived in a ..... OK, real estate porn coming.

Lovely efficiency apartment in a unit called Neilwood Gables on the Ohio State University campus. Big living room/bedroom. Beautiful bath with subway tiles. Kitchen with glass doored cabinets. In the 1970s this place rented for $115 a month.

Mom & Dad paid most of the rent (thank you, So  so much). I loved living there, especially hearing the mourning doves cooing in the pretty alcoves between units. (The whole building was in the shape of an E, with the spaces between the tops, center and bottoms of the E being garden spots, with beautiful stone floors and benches.)

Did I say mourning doves? What I treasured so much about that apartment was that it was mine. My home, my place. I loved waking in the morning and hearing the doves ... before class, before my job as a secretary in the OSU anthropology department.  I remember their coos to this day.

I was 20-ish then. I write this as a 60-ish woman, who took a late Sunday afternoon walk and heard the cooing of mourning doves.

I wish, I wish.

Just another day

At the end of Friday the 26th of February 2016, I could not remember, at first, how the day started.

Silly me. Nowadays, it's always something like this:

Awake at 1:30 a.m., tea and crossword puzzle. Awake at 5 a.m., bathroom break and water. Awake at 8 a.m., time to wash up and get ready for work.

This morning finished with tea, lunch packing, filling of the cat's water dish and backing the car out of the driveway. On to work.

At my desk, I read the paper, go through email, start my projects for the day.

Today, I had to go Downtown to get blood work done. (Lot of working going on here this day.)

To get Downtown from the North Shore, you take the T one stop Downtown. I get on and hesitate before choosing a seat across from a couple, him and her, each sprawled on a double seat and leaning into each other. Another man occupies the seat in front of Mr. Sprawler. He looks tired. It's a short ride; when I get off Downtown we make brief eye contact, smile and nod. I don't know why, it just seemed to be a polite thing to do.

I climb the steps up to street level and make my way to the Stanwix and Penn intersection and cross with the white walking man sign. A large SUV nearly mows me down in the crosswalk. I make eye contact for a split second with its driver, my almost murderer, then wish for his fiery death. Oblivious, he drives on.

How does that work? Two strangers, two .... reactions? That's not the right word. Weirdly enough, after my lab appointment, I had forgotten the SUV-stranger-whom-I-had-cursed. Took a half an hour, if that.

At the end of Friday, February 26, my best memory is of the smile from the tired man on the T.

A man of much wit and very little wisdom

Photo by Katy Buchanan
A February morning in Pittsburgh. I wonder what kind of sky Thomas Seymour
saw his last morning on earth?

Over last weekend, I finished devouring "The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor" by Elizabeth Norton. It was on the freebie pile at work and I can hardly ever resist a Tudor tale.

It was very good. The author's research is exhaustive research and the book is extensively but not intrusively foot-noted. It's amazing to hear long-ago words from long-ago people come to life in rich, elegant Shakespearean English.

The title refers to Thomas Seymour, first baron of Sudely, Lord Admiral (and chief pirate) of Edward VI's English navy, husband to Henry VIII's last wife, Katherine Parr, and schemer for the hand of Elizabeth I, who was about 14 at the time of this tale. Truthfully, the book should have been titled "The Tragedy of Thomas Seymour." He was rash, stubborn, scheming and a political nobody, despite being Lord Admiral and a member of the House of Lords. What he had was never good enough and he always felt he deserved more (i.e., to have governorship over Edward VI, then king, but in his minority. Thomas' brother, Edward, Earl of Hertford and Duke of Somerset, held the keys to the kingdom as Lord Protector of Edward. Needless to say, the brothers did not get along).

Anyway, a boastful sense of entitlement was Thomas' downfall. Despite being popular among the common people, and even for a time favored by Edward, he knew how to make enemies and that cost him his head. Not to mention scheming to marry Elizabeth.
The princess, upon hearing of his execution, was reported to have said "This day died a man of much wit and very little wisdom."

*

Elizabeth tacked successfully through the storm of Thomas' machinations for control of her person  and of Edward's in 1547-1548. Everyone knows her mother Ann Boleyn failed to sail safely through the raging weather that was Henry's desire for a son.
So I thought it was interesting to read this brief item in the Post-Gazette Wednesday morning, Feb. 9.

This is the full text:

*************

LONDON — Hampton Court Palace, where the Tudor king Henry VIII broke off ties with the papacy in 1530 just to divorce his first wife and marry his mistress — with whom he was besotted and whom he later beheaded — on Tuesday (2/9/16) held its first Roman Catholic service in more than 450 years.

During the service, held in the palace’s Chapel Royal, chants in Latin from an 18-person choir swelled up toward turquoise ceilings, adorned with golden stars and gilded cherubs. Around 350 attendees were packed into tiny wooden pews.

The service symbolized in part a growing reconciliation between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. The schism dates to 1534, when Henry VIII declared himself the head of the Church of England. The split allowed Henry to leapfrog from one marriage to another in search of a male heir: He annulled two marriages and had two of his other wives executed, including Anne Boleyn, the former mistress for whom he had rejected papal authority in the first place. (Another wife died after giving birth.)

************

Wow! "Another wife died giving birth." Has anyone ever heard "Except for that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
The wife was Jane Seymour, Thomas's sister and Edward's mother; the two reasons for his outsized sense of privilege. She also gave Henry his only son (and died two weeks later, not during childbirth). What Henry would never know was that, although the Tudor line would end with Elizabeth, she made sure it went out with a huge bang. Had Edward never been born, Thomas might have lived and who knows, could have schemed successfully to marry Elizabeth.
Not to be.
Thomas was executed at the Tower of London on March 20, 1549.

Flocking gulls

My colleague Susan and I have been watching the gulls these past few days, circling above and settling and roosting, I guess, on the ice frosting the Allegheny and the Ohio.

Susan sits far from me in our workplace, but we watch the gulls together because I get up every hour or half-hour or so to move away from my desk. Just to get the blood flowing and give my brain some think time. So I walk to the west wing of the office, where Susan has a desk. From the window behind her, we can see the birds and share our amazement at their numbers and behavior. They nest on the ice or float on it. Circling, drifting. Always fairly late in the afternoon, although that may just be when we notice them as the busy work of the day winds down.

My brother Tim is a self-taught bird watcher and often visits a power plant on Lake Erie, in Lorain, I think, because the plant's discharges warm the lake water. And the birds are opportunists and take advantage of that.

Not sure if the gulls are enjoying any sort of warmth at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. Perhaps there is just a nice amount of food there. Whatever the reason, it is mesmerizing to gaze at these birds, floating on thermals, flitting over water, a colony of shifting white on deep gray-green water under January skies.