"a little taste / and a little fragrance"
Mood:
wide-eyed
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Today's subject line is from Yehuda Amichai's "What Kind of Person."
I am typing this in a Tel Aviv courtyard, my netbook plugged into a converter in the kitchen wall. In front of me, there is vase containing nine aging stalks of birds of paradise, and a silver mesh bowl in the shape of an apple-half. The bowl contains seven kiwi-sized lemons from a nearby tree. Above me, the navy-black night sky and a tangle of vines and twine. There was traffic still zooming by an hour ago, but now it's just me, the periodic roar of a jumbo jet, and a cat that's been mewling like a broken videogame (i.e., one stuck on "fire laser!") since before midnight. We're sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the guesthouse owners; one of them came out at 1 a.m. with an extension cord and an offer of tea, and we chatted for a bit about animals, travelling, and how we'd spent our evenings. (We were treated to dinner at a restaurant in Neve Tzedek by the couple whose wedding we're attending later this week.)
More happy things:
Twitterzine 7x20 is featuring Very Short Stories from me all this week.
They're in terrific company: I really enjoyed the two pieces preceding it (by Deborah Walker and Celia White).
We spent our layover in Atlanta at One Flew South. The BYM had been there twice before, with great service and food each time; the bartender last night was "Tifanie," and oh, it was a joy hanging out with her. She's a Lafayette (LA)/Houston girl who loves her work - studying the ingredients, playing with them, understanding her tools - and she has the knack of treating every customer right, be they someone who needs a drink to go or businessfolk killing time with the Yankees/Angels and Monday Night Football while waiting for their connections to Santiago, Austin, and elsewhere. The owners are connected with Rolling Bones BBQ, and there are plans for a new bar to be called "Mockingbird" - so, those will be on our list of places to visit when we're next in Atlanta proper.
Anyway: dinner for me was a duck confit sandwich with an incredibly good slaw (shredded and seasoned just right), and I split a dessert cheese plate (which included a quince jelly that was likewise superlative) with the BYM. For cocktails, I started out with a Georgia bellini (champagne, peach puree, and ginger syrup) and followed it with a "Ruby Slipper" (organic vodka, ruby grapefruit juice, soda, and rosemary syrup); the BYM had a gin martini, a Sazerac, and a frothy concoction called "'Treuse or Dare" that Tifanie had devised while experimenting with chartreuse and egg whites.
(In Googling the restaurant while typing this, I came across M. Lane's writeup; also, there was a woman who showed up at 9:05 p.m. who was sad to learn that the kitchen had closed at 9 - she'd hurried from Concourse A to E in hopes of scoring a bowl of what she swears is "the best chicken soup in America.")
Also at the Atlanta airport - as we walked toward our gate, an airline employee going off-shift offered us some toffee-hazelnut chocolates. They were very tasty as well, and as the BYM put it, "Atlanta is in danger of becoming our favorite airport."
That said, I really do loathe flying these days. It doesn't scare me, but it's just a freaking pain - sometimes literally: my back was not happy about the contortions I attempted in order to fall/stay asleep during my twelve hours in rows 31 and 32 (I switched seats halfway through with a guy who was upset that his audio feed wasn't working - there was a cool Cirque du Soleil documentary I'd watched 3/4 of, but I figured he wanted his movies more than I did, and his seat put me back next to the BYM, which helped with the attempts to sleep since it incrementally increased my squirm-radius (i.e., knocking knees with one's dearest is annoying but okay, whereas accidentally elbowing working-on-his-laptop sound engineer on my left and anxious Israeli grandmother on my right, not so much).
...Aw, foot, the Yankees are now five runs ahead. It's time I headed to bed, but there's a part of me that doesn't want to let go of this day just yet - partly out of sheer excitement, and partly because I want to linger over the pleasures recounted here. (I threw out several tubfuls of notes and drafts and old receipts last week - I need the space, I need to move on, etc. - and I suspect I'm clinging extra-hard to present joys as a form of mourning: that is, if I take the pains to document what I'm seeing and tasting and hearing in such detail, then something will be left when time and attrition erode away most of the names and faces and connections mattering so much to me right this minute.
(That, and I happened to read Hannah Hinchman's A Life In Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal over Sunday lunch. I resisted the urge to stash it in my suitcase, but I did bring along more markers and pencils than was strictly necessary...)
Two more notes:
My friend Laurel sells jewelry and jewelry-making supplies; I went "ooh..." when I saw the chandelier findings she recently posted. (They don't happen to be compatible with my personal style, though; like certain shoes and desserts, some things just aren't meant for me to possess or consume...)
Posted a new ramble at Vary the Line a couple hours earlier.
...It doesn't rain much in Tel Aviv, and there were a few momentary flutters of precipitation earlier tonight that I typed through, but someone from the master bedroom just thrust out their hand in sheer disbelief, the better to feel the drops pelting down. ...and now, five minutes later and three crow-squawks later, we are back to before, only I'm still in the kitchen, having retreated here with my laptop half over the stove. Someone outside has revved his or her motorcycle and sped away. The clock above the fridge firmly ticks through each second; it's too dark to read, but the boom box display (one hour fast) says it's 5:24. Part of me doesn't want to stop taking notes, not just yet, but I will regret being too tired to explore the city by day, and tomorrow night's gathering will involve attempts to converse in French as well as English (it's a trilingual group, but my phrasebook Hebrew isn't going to get me far, alas). So, it is at least time to welcome sleep in, whether or not it immediately obliges me with its restorative or visionary joys.
I am typing this in a Tel Aviv courtyard, my netbook plugged into a converter in the kitchen wall. In front of me, there is vase containing nine aging stalks of birds of paradise, and a silver mesh bowl in the shape of an apple-half. The bowl contains seven kiwi-sized lemons from a nearby tree. Above me, the navy-black night sky and a tangle of vines and twine. There was traffic still zooming by an hour ago, but now it's just me, the periodic roar of a jumbo jet, and a cat that's been mewling like a broken videogame (i.e., one stuck on "fire laser!") since before midnight. We're sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the guesthouse owners; one of them came out at 1 a.m. with an extension cord and an offer of tea, and we chatted for a bit about animals, travelling, and how we'd spent our evenings. (We were treated to dinner at a restaurant in Neve Tzedek by the couple whose wedding we're attending later this week.)
More happy things:
Anyway: dinner for me was a duck confit sandwich with an incredibly good slaw (shredded and seasoned just right), and I split a dessert cheese plate (which included a quince jelly that was likewise superlative) with the BYM. For cocktails, I started out with a Georgia bellini (champagne, peach puree, and ginger syrup) and followed it with a "Ruby Slipper" (organic vodka, ruby grapefruit juice, soda, and rosemary syrup); the BYM had a gin martini, a Sazerac, and a frothy concoction called "'Treuse or Dare" that Tifanie had devised while experimenting with chartreuse and egg whites.
(In Googling the restaurant while typing this, I came across M. Lane's writeup; also, there was a woman who showed up at 9:05 p.m. who was sad to learn that the kitchen had closed at 9 - she'd hurried from Concourse A to E in hopes of scoring a bowl of what she swears is "the best chicken soup in America.")
That said, I really do loathe flying these days. It doesn't scare me, but it's just a freaking pain - sometimes literally: my back was not happy about the contortions I attempted in order to fall/stay asleep during my twelve hours in rows 31 and 32 (I switched seats halfway through with a guy who was upset that his audio feed wasn't working - there was a cool Cirque du Soleil documentary I'd watched 3/4 of, but I figured he wanted his movies more than I did, and his seat put me back next to the BYM, which helped with the attempts to sleep since it incrementally increased my squirm-radius (i.e., knocking knees with one's dearest is annoying but okay, whereas accidentally elbowing working-on-his-laptop sound engineer on my left and anxious Israeli grandmother on my right, not so much).
...Aw, foot, the Yankees are now five runs ahead. It's time I headed to bed, but there's a part of me that doesn't want to let go of this day just yet - partly out of sheer excitement, and partly because I want to linger over the pleasures recounted here. (I threw out several tubfuls of notes and drafts and old receipts last week - I need the space, I need to move on, etc. - and I suspect I'm clinging extra-hard to present joys as a form of mourning: that is, if I take the pains to document what I'm seeing and tasting and hearing in such detail, then something will be left when time and attrition erode away most of the names and faces and connections mattering so much to me right this minute.
(That, and I happened to read Hannah Hinchman's A Life In Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal over Sunday lunch. I resisted the urge to stash it in my suitcase, but I did bring along more markers and pencils than was strictly necessary...)
Two more notes:
...It doesn't rain much in Tel Aviv, and there were a few momentary flutters of precipitation earlier tonight that I typed through, but someone from the master bedroom just thrust out their hand in sheer disbelief, the better to feel the drops pelting down. ...and now, five minutes later and three crow-squawks later, we are back to before, only I'm still in the kitchen, having retreated here with my laptop half over the stove. Someone outside has revved his or her motorcycle and sped away. The clock above the fridge firmly ticks through each second; it's too dark to read, but the boom box display (one hour fast) says it's 5:24. Part of me doesn't want to stop taking notes, not just yet, but I will regret being too tired to explore the city by day, and tomorrow night's gathering will involve attempts to converse in French as well as English (it's a trilingual group, but my phrasebook Hebrew isn't going to get me far, alas). So, it is at least time to welcome sleep in, whether or not it immediately obliges me with its restorative or visionary joys.
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