Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Ruth’s play was in the morning. We drove into Aurora to see it, close to the airport. We came back home, took a nap then went out for the No No’s crawfish boil. Well, I went for the crawfish boil and Kate came along as what the reservation referred to as a non-crawfish eater. We got there early so we saw the waiters put together four tops into single long tables, five of them.
These tables got covered with thin plastic from a roll and the plastic got covered with what I’d expected, newspapers. After we were seated, waiters first brought small plastic containers of fried dill pickles. Wonderful. Next came gloved waiters with metal containers of boiled potatoes and slices of andouille sausage. They simply threw potatoes and sausage slices on the table for each person. Andouille is spicy and a real New Orlean’s treat.
Finally, in the same metal containers came the crawfish, red and spicy from their hot water bath. The waiters tipped the containers over in front of us and small mounds heaped up. The room quieted as we all got to work.
Early in our marriage Kate and I went to New Orleans for a continuing medical education event. It was notable for three reasons. The first and least significant was seeing a grumpy Jerry Lewis pushing a stroller off a plane at the airport. His family looked equally happy.
Having been to New Orleans several times in the years prior to our trip, I wanted to see the area around New Orleans rather than stay in the narrow area of the French Quarter, so I drove out to the bayous. It was April. When I found a bayou that was also a state park, I pulled in, found the boardwalks and walked out into the swampy grassland. Much to my delight and surprise the bayou was full of blooming irises. They were everywhere.
The alligators were just waking up, too. I saw several, moving slowly, trying to get their reptilian blood warmed up. They hunt nutria in this area and there were plenty of these large rodents. The alligators, however, were not up to speed and I witnessed many clumsy attempts by sleepy, cold alligators to catch one. The nutria, far faster than their not yet fully present predators, escaped easily.
The last and most memorable moment of the trip came after I decided to drive around in cajun country and find an authentic cajun restaurant. I found one in a small town somewhere not too far from the bayou. I went in, it was in the middle of the afternoon, and I was the only diner in the place. A waitress came over and I told her I wanted to try some authentic cajun food. What would she recommend?
I don’t recall the other things she brought, but she did bring me a plate of boiled crawfish, fresh from the bayou. And proceeded to peel them and feed them to me. It was odd, intimate and unexpected, but seemed perfectly natural.
As I pinched off the tails of No No’s mounded crawfish and leveraged the meat out of them by breaking the small chitinous bands that held it in, I thought of her, that small restaurant, and all those irises.
Often on Facebook I see people taking time off, time away. An article on how to cope with the flood of news now available and clamoring for our attention suggested not reading any news online at all. Read a newspaper and when you finish it, throw it away. Of course, the idea of a vacation is not reserved for hypervigilant news consumers-like me, for instance-but has broad application in the workplace, too.
I’m a bit suspicious of our motivations. We may be solving the wrong problem. I love travel, seeing new places and becoming a stranger in someone else’s world. I love travel not as a distraction from work or home or the current political climate, but for itself, for the fact of being, literally, somewhere else. It seems to diminish travel, at least as I understand it, to use it as escape. Perhaps the differences here are prepositional. In my sense of travel, I travel to places. In the escapist sense we travel away from something.
Addiction is an overused idea, so I’m not going to talk about Facebook addiction or any other, but the issue in all these instances seems the same as a yearning for geographical escape. Something is not working right now, so I need to go. The problem is, there you are.
Sexual aggression and its effects. #PussysGrabBack is a hashtag encouraging women to vote and to vote against the would be pussy grabber in chief. The Access Hollywood video tape with its lewd, rude, casually mentioned and approved sexual assault language has caused an outpouring of actual stories from women in all walks of life and of all ages.
The Greyhound was not then the dismal transportation method it has become today, but an affordable way of moving long distances. And I traveled long distances, going from Alexandria, Indiana, 60 miles east of Indianapolis, to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. All of my father’s side of the family lived in or near Oklahoma, so this was a way for me to get to know them. And never, on any of those trips, did anything untoward ever happen to me.
A Sunday, downtown was empty of workers and there were no tourists on the streets. I had stopped by a doorway to stand in the shade while I took snapshots of buildings. A man came back, noticed me squatting down changing the film in my camera. He said something, I don’t recall what and I replied because I was a courteous boy from the Midwest. He squatted down, pretending to be interested in my camera.
When I reached the intersection of Broadway and Central in Northeast Minneapolis, I noticed a Ford pickup, black with large tires that made it ride high. The driver gunned the engine, came up suddenly on cars in the lane beside me. Jerk, I thought. Then, he did it again. Very aggressive driving.
Kate had Bailey Patchworkers for most of the day and I spent the day up in the loft with the dogs, so the jackhammering didn’t bother us. This will be worth it, but remodeling is never easy since by definition it has to take place where you live.
Black Mountain, which is covered in lodgepole pine and actually green as a result, has small gold flecks this morning. Those few aspen groves on its slopes have begun to turn, as have more and more aspens between here and Evergreen, but not those on our property. Too, Orion appeared in the southern sky a week or so ago, the early morning southern sky. On Shadow Mountain Orion and the changing of the aspens are true harbingers of autumn.