Shoreline of Wonder

Snowy Egrets are elegant shore birds with plumy white feathers and black bills and legs. Bright yellow feet pattern-interrupt the elegant impression only when said feet are visible, and they’re usually below the water. However, I came along behind two Snowy Egrets at the edge of Braes Bayou when they were avidly investigating whatever goodies the recent flood had churned up, and from that perspective the Snowies looked like the business ends of Q-tips balanced on oddly angled black wires!

The last six or eight months have been remarkable for shore birds on Braes Bayou, including White Ibises and a Tricolor Heron.  For a while there was a Roseate Spoonbill in the vicinity of the Kirby Drive bridge.  Roseate Spoonbills are usually Pepto-Bismol pink;  they use their wide-tipped bills to forage in mud flats for little crustaceans, eating which makes their feathers pink.  The one on Braes Bayou looked not very pink and rather misplaced.  I’ve seen them  in tidal marshes and on Clear Creek near Galveston Bay, never this far inland.  The drought may have driven brackish water much further up the waterways than usual.

There’s one sure-fire way to get Episcopalians to pipe down and listen up. I’ve seen it work at potlucks and now at an organ concert Friday night. The concert was by Dr. Philip Kloeckner, who teaches keyboard at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and directs the choir at my church, which is why the Shepherd School organ hall filled up with Episcopalians happily and loudly nattering. When it came time to begin, the emcee said, ‘THE LORD BE WITH YOU!” The audience instantly chorused “AND ALSO WITH YOU!” and awaited the emcee’s next words in perfect silence!

And what a concert it was.  The Shepherd School organ is a magnificent instrument with 5,000 pipes. It can sound like any of several eras of historical organ.  Philip gave us at least three distinctly different organ sounds in music by various composers.  His last piece was an improvisation on two Christmas carols given to him on the spot.  After thinking about it for all of half a minute,  he wove “Joy to the World” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” into an incredible fabric that seemed to involve pulling out every stop on the organ and sounding every pipe from the tiniest tinkling one to the massive pipe that sends a vibration through your chest if you’re in the audience.

Yesterday was the Twelfth Day of Christmas – the last day of the liturgical Christmas season;  today is Epiphany.  The days of Christmas definitely had their delights as far as I am concerned.

• The Blue Christmas service at my  church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Houston, was designed for people who might be grieving, bereft, or just grimly stressed, and was reverent, thoughtful, beautiful and holy.
• Everybody in Houston got what we wanted for Christmas:  RAIN!
• An owl in a university tree:  when my Rice Alum friends Becky and Marc and their son Beto came to town, we walked around the Rice campus and located one of the Screech Owls that roosts in the trees outside the West entrance of the Library.  The treetop was swaying in a stiff breeze.  Becky commented, “For the owl that must be just like sleeping in a hammock.”
• My dear friend and former colleague Ola gave me P. D. James’ Pride and Prejudice murder mystery, Death Comes to Pemberly, for Christmas.  What a joy to have an enjoyable  and distracting book to pick up and read over the holidays!
• My friend Kristin came from Washington DC to stay a few days.    She nested in my guest room a.k.a. the better half of my living room.  She enjoyed turning on the lights in the Christmas tree at night and when she had to get up early a couple of mornings for meetings.  Not many guest rooms come with a full-size Christmas Tree!
• I like my tree too.  According to my friend Bethe, whose family came from Poland, a Polish Christmas tree is one so decorated that you can’t see any tree. After upgrading to a 7 1/2′-footer this year, since I now live in a condo with high ceilings, I have a Texas Christmas Tree: bigger than it has to be, with spots of local color and lots of elbow room.

• Another friend, Lila (and there’s a theme here:  I am wonderfully blessed with friends!) is recuperating from surgery and, being an industrious person, itching for constructive things to do.  She’s proofreading the dark fantasy novel I just finished.  Wow!  Proofreading a book is a long and detailed job, and almost impossible for the writer of said book, who is much too close to the story to see the typos.
• I read the novel too as a prelude to the last editing pass.  I only caught about 20% of the glitches Lila did, but I found a slew of structural fixes to make, and I enjoyed reading it.  It’s a dark fantasy set mainly in the 1880’s Nevada and Utah Territories.  Now, on about the overall fourth (and in places six or seventh) draft, I think it really works.
• New Year’s Eve was a delight with Kristin and Lila and Lila’s husband Jim and my friend Eileen and her husband Gene at their home in Friendswood.   They live in a residential air park and just being there ups the quotient of fun had by all.  Jim made eggrolls, Eileen made Chinese dumplings and hot and sour soup, we greeted the New Year on Bermuda time, and everyone got home before midnight and before the local revelers hit the road.
• I made a pecan pie from a recipe in the November issue of Southern Living Magazine.  The Holidays are a grand time for modern takes on traditional food;  and  Southern Living, when it really connects with a New Southern recipe, hits it out of the ballpark.  I was wondering about some of the recipes in the December issue which tilted toward more avant garde fare.  My eyebrows shot up at the recipe for Sweet Potato Latkes in a section of new Hannukah food. But a good friend and colleague assures me that sweet potatoes make for extremely tasty latkes. Mazel tov!
• For those of us who didn’t have to go out of town, the holidays mean time for home improvements if desired.  I tackled a stack of memorabilia, some of it from Mom’s house when we sold the house, and the rest of it remembrance material from my adult life.  This was all stacked in a corner with some full plastic tubs holding up part of the stack – meaning no way to assess the contents of said tubs without taking down the stack.   That problem is no more.  I integrated a small file cabinet and four plastic storage cubes into the stack and now it works (and looks!) much, much better.
• New Year’s Day came with a morning of crystalline coolness and clarity. I was driving back from Church and saw a hawk thermalling over Greenbriar and Rice Boulevard.  I had my car’s sun roof open.  While parked at a red light I saw the hawk’s  flight feathers shining at the edges of its wings and its red-tinged tail glowing in the sun.  The hawk thermaled higher and higher.  What a great good luck sign for 2012!

Amazing plant matter- between rains it looks as dead as long-fallen leaves;  after a rain it flourishes.  I’d wondered if this year’s drought would kill off the resurrection fern in the Rice University oak trees, but not at all!

Walking to work, I was startled by being smiled at from the branches of a tree.  It was two mylar balloons – one of them bright gold with a smiley face.  The other balloon had little smileys all over it plus the words FEEL BETTER SOON.

OK, it’s not too surprising, that close to Medical Center, to see a couple of get-well balloons on the loose. On the other hand, it was very apt because  Houston has had severe drought for a year.  Even on a prosperous residential street like Greenbriar many trees (especially magnolias) look wilted. Over in Memorial Park there are so many dead trees it looks like Agent Orange fell out of the sky. The land itself has dried out to the breaking point. Greenbriar has buckles and potholes that could wallop a small car.  And on nearby Braes Bayou the asphalt hike and bike trail developed terrible cracks over the past year.  Cracks big enough to break a jogger’s ankle or take out a bicycle.  So the city put up warning signs and outlined the cracks in white, after which they looked like a crime scene where dead bodies had lain.  Maybe the dead bodies of a year’s worth of hopes for rain.  FEEL BETTER SOON is a great wish for the trees and the rest of the natural fabric of our city.

Per today’s New York Times, you can rent live potted Christmas trees in Southern California. It isn’t cheap, but it gets you a quite nice tree that does not proceed to die in your living room. And: “Families can even order the same tree year after year to see how it has grown. “  Somehow this seems as touching as it is silly.

And so is this:  my craftsy colleague Sarah not long ago informed me that earlier this year a call went out to the knitting community for wool sweaters for lots of little penguins rescued after a bad oil spill Down Under. There was a knitting pattern online.  Knitters the world over responded with a flood of tiny sweaters.  With some of these the knitters got really creative – bright colors, colored borders, even tuxedo patterned knit jobs.   The results, as reported in Fashionista (!) online, were adorable. And it worked.  The wool sweaters kept the birds warm until their oil-soaked, cleaned-up feathers regained their natural oils, by which time the sweaters shredded off.

Speaking of adorable, one of the Circulation student assistants here at Fondren Library, unbeknownst to us,  created a YouTube video of herself and several confederates studying in the Library in Finals to a soundtrack adapted from a pop song and with full-bore choreography.  That video has been a big hit around here.

Meanwhile everything else that’s going on in the world is going on.

Penguins strike us as lovably odd species, but it’s Homo Sapiens that’s genuinely peculiar – in ways that are good and bad and indifferent and profound and never more so than at this season.

Drinking Godiva hot chocolate while perusing Southern Living Magazine’s Ultimate Southern Thanksgiving Cookbook in the November issue. The Apple-Bourbon Turkey and Gravy I am not going to attempt. I’ll pass on the Collard Green Pistou. But I have got to give that Chocolate-Pecan Chess Pie a go.

Growing up I thought Columbus had to be the biggest small (-minded) city in the state of Georgia.  Things have changed!  Besides renewing the historic downtown and many other achievements, Columbus is working with Phenix City Alabama to create the world’s longest urban whitewater course.  They’re taking out two old mill dams and giving the Chattahoochee River back its natural undammed flow, plus sculpting the rapids so as to attract paddlers ranging from the church-excursion level up to world class.  Way to go!

Yesterday morning I was packed and ready for my trip to Columbus, Georgia in good time and not wrapped around the axle about it, and much to my surprise, the world did not end.

I’ve had a travel phobia since I was three years old and (a) Mom divorced my father, (b) she brought me from the only home I knew in Pocatello, Idaho, down to her family in Alabama, where (c) we landed in a family ruckus about my grandfather being not only a terrible-tempered old man, which was no secret, but unfaithful, as in, down the road in town there was a nearly grown, hitherto unsuspected half sister to Mom and her siblings, and (d) that secret clawing its way out of the family closet was emotionally damaging to Mom, coming on top of her divorce, and pushed her into depression that lasted for years; (e) she considered her marriage dead and buried, and her ex-husband pretty much the same, and made it clear without so many words that I had best feel that way too so (f) I never saw my father again.  There was some vague plan for me to go see him after I graduated from high school, but he had a fatal heart attack when I was 14.  Mom didn’t send me back for his funeral.  I didn’t see  Pocatello again until as an adult I resolved to go up there and find my father’s second wife.  She was the most gracious and wonderful woman imaginable, and she did the next best thing to giving me my father back.  She gave me photos, heirlooms, her recollections and those of something like twenty people she took me around to talk to about my father.  Thank you, Kate; live forever in the nearer of presence of God.

So I had plenty of good psychological reason for a bad travel phobia.  The prospect of going away to college in Texas nearly flattened me with dread and anxiety – but it turned out in a wonderful way when I loved Rice University and Houston.  For years, though, I stayed afraid of trips in general and especially trips in a southeasterly direction.  I hated pine trees, which reminded me of the South.  But I traveled anyway to various locations in the US from Northern California and Washington State to Washington DC and across the southern latitudes from Miami to Los Angeles.  I’ve traveled cross-country with pilot friends in small airplanes.  My pilot friend Kristin is well acquainted with my travel phobia and maintains that it makes me the most meticulous travel planner she’s ever known.  The phobia loosens its grip as soon as any trip actually starts, so I enjoy travel and I’m a good travel companion.  And every time I get home it’s like a reprieve from death and doom. I’m so happy that my home unexpectedly still exists:  it hasn’t been destroyed by fire or another ill fate after all!!! – that I’m on a post-travel high for the better part of a week.  Above all else life has shown me that a phobia (or depression or general anxiety or chronic fear) is not a thing that tells the truth.  It tells lies.  If you shake off or plow through or pray through the terrible feeling, the actual outcome may be glorious.

Not having the phobia kick in at all is a novel experience of the sort where deep down you think, This is too good not to be corrected by something really unpleasant like the world ending. But at last report, the world did not in point of fact end. Yesterday’s flight from Houston was fine. I’m in Columbus staying with cousins whom I really like, and I’m on my way over to the assisted living facility where Mom lives now.   Things change . . . and not always for the worse. It can just take time and experience and grace to iron out the early imprint of a traumatic change.

My car developed  small round blurs in the middle of the front windshield – visible and annoying only when the sun angle was low.  After being puzzled for a while I remembered that I’d driven up to Dallas and met my friend Kristin at DFW and after we navigated through Dallas and returned to Houston, she borrowed my car to go around town;  and she has a portable GPS.   And it has a little suction cup to attach its antenna to the windshield.  Aha.  This was like when you  park your car and come back to see by the paw prints that a cat has strolled up the windshield, except these were in the inside:  GPS paw prints.