Rains down in Africa

Raining again, the wettest summer I can recall.

Even the Green Goddess arums are still  standing tall. I carry out buckets of water to plants and take baths twice a day because there are no water restrictions or rationing this year. Rain in Africa is always welcome, a miracle that breaks drought and aridity, something to celebrate and  long for. Across the road the catalpa tree is in bloom, sheafs of white waxy orchid-like flowers that glow in the darkness.

I’m listening to Toto’s old song and blessing the rains down in Africa.

The wild dogs cry out in the night

As they grow restless longing for some solitary company

I know that I must do what’s right

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

I seek to cure  what’s deep inside

Frightened of this thing that I’ve become

I bless the rains down in Africa, I bless the rains down in Africa

I bless the rains down in Africa

Breathe in, breathe out

Replanted basil seedlings for the third time, moving pots away from whatever is eagerly devouring my new basil and coriander. A late summer without fresh basil is unthinkable.

The minestra or baby minestrone soup was a great success. The former art teacher called to say it was the best soup she has ever had. Immediately I began planning  more soups (that visceral connection between flattered vanity and greed, the urge to show off). Ribolito, I said to the housemate. A pumpkin soup with black beans. An Asian laksa with prawns and udon noodles. A tomato soup made silky with red peppers.

‘I think she meant that it was good as far as soup goes,’ said the housemate. ‘Not a culinary conversion or white-light experience. Not give-me-soup-once-a-day, soup glorious soup, soup, nothing quite like it.’

How would gritty noir-ish crime writer Raymond Chandler have written a cookery book? Amusing parody found here. Not to be emulated.

I sipped on my whiskey sour, ground out my cigarette on the chopping board and watched a bug trying to crawl out of the basin. I needed a table at Maxim’s, a hundred bucks and a gorgeous blonde; what I had was a leg of lamb and no clues. I took hold of the joint. It felt cold and damp, like a coroner’s handshake. I took out a knife and cut the lamb into pieces. Feeling the blade in my hand I sliced an onion, and before I knew what I was doing a carrot lay in pieces on the slab. None of them moved. I threw the lot into a pan with a bunch of dill stalks, a bay leaf, a handful of peppercorns and a pinch of salt. They had it coming to them, so I covered them with chicken stock and turned up the heat. I wanted them to boil slowly, just about as slowly as anything can boil. An hour and a half and a half-pint of bourbon later they weren’t so tough and neither was I. I separated the meat from the vegetables and covered it. The knife was still in my hand but I couldn’t hear any sirens.

Sadly, I do remember cooking like that and am relieved to still have all my digits, along with too many memories of sloppy over-salted, hyper-spiced dishes swimming in the unvolatilized red wine that hadn’t gone down my gullet. A coroner’s handshake sounds about right. My golden rule for  dishes that may have unsuspected quantities of alcohol lurking in them when you are in restaurants or at boozy family reunions is to sniff first. Most of us  can tell very quickly if there is port marinading the innocent cherries or a slug of brandy in the jus. If in doubt, don’t touch it.

The serious temptations, though, aren’t usually lurking in the cream sauce or jug of doctored orange juice. Family dynamics are booby-trapped with old hurts and resentments and reminders why we are better off at a meeting rather than fighting those old unwinnable battles around the dining table. Again, and I say this from experience, if in doubt, don’t go there.

Nothing is worth losing sobriety over. Sobriety makes everything else possible.

And this too, a poem Jo posted, written by Judyth Hill:

Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

A life laid bare

Yesterday afternoon I walked around my  friend’s garden down the road and fell in love with a rose named Terracotta, dark as chocolate and not brick-red at all, but with a dusty bloom that reminds you of old crumbling walls flaking grains of sand and  dust motes. We also looked at her flowering Mackaya bella, an indigenous bush that grows in the African rainforest, glossy leaves and shining white flowers, the whiteness of candlewax.

 

My overgrown pup could hear my voice in the distance and  howled pathetically for me to return, even though  the housemate was teaching him to catch a new rubber ball.

 

At one point my friend said to me, unexpectedly: ‘You have a life laid bare.’

 

It is so true — the devastation that for years I tried to conceal, the wasted years, the childlessness, the  loss of family, the inert, blasted inner landscape. Now it is all there for anyone to see. That’s who I am, anyone can walk through that ashy smoking minefield because there is nothing left to explode. In one or two places there is new growth, substance taking root. Amazing.

Today I shall be making a minestra or baby minestrone soup for the former art teacher because she  is unwell and the doctor told her to  have  soup. I suppose he meant nourishing but bland  and invalidish soups, but the former art teacher  doesn’t do bland.

 

This minestra involves two kinds of  onion, celery, carrots, courgettes/zucchini, cauliflower, a single potato, tomatoes, green beans,  a small gem squash, savoy cabbage, cannellini beans, some pink new garlic, broken-up pasta, finely chopped parsley as a garnish. I’m not adding bacon, pancetta or sausage so that will keep it minestra. The rule for making a truly Italian and tasty minestrone is to add the  vegetables one at a time and  saute them, let them simmer before adding the next vegetable peeled and diced, and only add the beans and pasta at the end. No stodge. This I learned from Marcelle Hazan’s books on classic Italian food as well as from eating bowls of soup made by  a grumpy Italian cafe owner named Guido.

 

Goodness, one soup at a time.

 

Sweet craziness of love

I’m still dreaming about Mozambique, recalling malaria dreams bright as some hibiscus nightmare.  Who can tell what ignites the imagination?

In one dream I was a child aged seven staring at a rhinoceros in Gorongosa game reserve in Mozambique.The ancient and leathery rhinoceros was paying no attention me, its crevices crawling with flies. The date was 19 June, 1969. I knew this because I took a pocket diary out of my school blazer pocket to remind myself of the date. My hand in the dream was a dried monkey’s paw, withered and wrinkled.

The rhinoceros was eating grass on the edge of the lake. The lake was rising blue and clear through the zebra grass.

Only look, said the dream. Mayibuye Africa, may Africa return.

Three attacks on local farms this last week, elderly farmers, their wives and families gunned down, no idea if this is a gang rampage or organised efforts to get farmers off the land. Should the farmers get off the land? Would indigenous farmers manage even smallholdings without subsidies? Nobody wants to farm these days, farms are going bankrupt all over the countryside. Fields going back to naked dusty veld. How will we live without food, without maize or yams or Sandveld flat beans? All I can see in the pessimistic mind’s eye is field after field of Monsanto’s genetically modified rapeseed destined for export. Or hectares planted up with biofuels to keep cars on international highways.

And it is cholera season out here, rumours of informal settlements with very ill children and the elderly stricken.

Random notes in the craziness:

* Somebody asked me about my blog names the other day. When I started this WordPress blog, it wouldn’t let me call myself Mary. So I called myself louise for my middle name and WordPress said that wasn’t available. I added a ‘y’. Now I have to use both names and this has caused endless confusion. I may get used to the confusion at some point. Mary LA is smart and bright and ageing sensibly, louisey has  pigtails and a puzzled frown. Mary LA is the one who likes to cook, louisey is haunted by poetry that won’t get out  from under her skin. Mary LA may be minimally crazier than louisey, but that is not a given. They’re both one.

* if you are on my blog list I will have read your blog from the beginning, perhaps several times. I do that because I like getting to know voices, especially voices searching slowly and patiently for their own distinctiveness.

* most of what happens in my life cannot be mentioned in this blog.

* deep down underneath all the craziness I’m on the side of love. Always. And love, like germ warfare, is craziness of a kind.

* when I’m around people who are hurting and messed up and lost, I feel as if I just hang about in a helpless and ineffectual way, loving and losing, but  sometimes this makes all the difference.

The summer rain falling is a glittering pandemonium. Sun shining through the  downpour so that the veld turns from tired dusty saffron to beaten gold. I wish I could post some images of this.

While drinking my second cup of tea I have been reading a NYT review of Herbert Leibowitz’s biography of the poet William Carlos Williams:

Many biographies treat artistic creation as a kind of bloodless version of a Caesarian birth, but Leibo­witz is terrific at conveying the confusion, uncertainty and doggedness of the life of the artist intent on discoveries. He can also be elegant in characterizing the cross-over between Williams the doctor and Williams the poet, as when, commenting on the splendid untitled poem from “Spring and All” that begins “By the road to the contagious hospital,” Leibo­witz notes that Williams was, by this point in his workhorse writing life, listening “to the acoustic properties of words with the same care and skill he devoted to the beating of a patient’s heart.”

From A Celebration:

Walk out again into the cold and saunter home
to the fire. This day has blossomed long enough.
I have wiped out the red night and lit a blaze
instead which will at least warm our hands
and stir up the talk.
I think we have kept fair time.
Time is a green orchard.

Images of  colonial Mozambique found in Albuns fotográficos e descrítivos da colónia de Moçambique

Dream like a gift

Another fine and windless day, figs ripening  at the back on the White Genoa fig tree. Neighbours brought their grown son over to admire the baby Great Dane who behaved like a lunatic. I felt quite ashamed of my pup because he ignored all the commands he usually obeys and ran about barking happily and jumping at the visitors. The son did not think the dog a beauty and  a fine handsome beast. He looked as if he thought his parents needed their heads read to associate with a badly behaved dog like this. So embarrassing. After they all left, the dog sat down obediently and waited for his biscuit.

A little less keen to read Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 after finding it has been nominated for a Bad Sex award.

A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, Tengo thought. Both appeared to be turned outward, trying to listen closely to something – something like a distant bell.

If you can’t tell your lover’s ear from her tutti frutti, the sex is not going to have  a certain anatomical frisson, is it? Why freshly made? And her name is Fuka-Eri which sounds, well –

Anyhow.

Woke up from a dream about Mozambique in which I was a small girl again,  on my way to another school term at the convent school in the port of Beira,  travelling through  Manica and Sofala provinces on the night train from Vila de Manica, sitting all alone with a penknife in my cardigan pocket in case I needed to defend myself. Nobody thought it was unsafe for children to travel long distances on trains back then. We were English-speaking and that would keep us safe.

When I woke up I remembered the cities of Portuguese East Africa as  if they were tumbled together, all the broad avenues lined with palm trees, the public gardens filled with exotic trees and hibiscus flowers,  pavements inlaid with mosaics of blue tiled azulejos, the white and blue churches, the troop ships in the bay at anchor next to dhows  sailing in from Dar es Salaam.  A society frozen in a bygone colonial era.

I remember learning to write and speak Portuguese and Latin, a Portuguese dialect nobody  spoke in Europe any longer. When I travelled to Lisbon, I could not make myself understood.

Mozambique then was caught up in civil war, a struggle for independence, but nobody ever talked about this. Everyone worried about malaria and each morning after school assembly and Mass in the chapel, a health official would order us to form a long crocodile line across the playground so he could take our temperatures and send us off to the sick bay if we looked unwell. The nuns who taught us would shake with fever  when they taught and their canes would rattle against the blackboards.  In those days  Mozambique was still Moçambique, a colony in Lusaphone Africa.

The cedilla I saw for the first time in a classroom in Beira, the tall nun pointing to the tadpole in white chalk wriggling on the blackboard that was in reality a faded green board. Above the blackboard, a black-and-white clockface and above that a crucifix.

‘This is how you write the ‘ç’ in Moçambique,’ she said. ‘This is how you write the ‘ç’ in Lourenço Marques. Lourenço Marques is the capital city of Moçambique, da colónia de Moçambique.’

The blackened teak desks with round holes for ink wells. Shielding my eyes from windy glitter of palms across the road from the school. The flies hammering against the windows panes, the windows closed to keep germs out. The steamy heat like a wet cloth held over our mouths and noses.

When I woke up from the dream that was also a detailed memory, it amazed me that I could recall that time so clearly and how  much I had loved the strangeness and tropical heat of Mozambique. A classmate from Tete province told me the devil ran away from Tete because the heat was worse than hell. Even though I had bout after bout of malaria, I did not want to leave Beira and go back to being a Scottish Presbyterian at a respectable government school. Who would?

Maybe a  new fiction will come out of this. The last stretch of Nanowrimo and my Underground Library story is completed at 17 000 words and ready for (a great deal of) revision. Thanks to everyone who was a writing buddy and I hope it went well for you!

The bluest blue, the red of apricots

Woke up early and went for a bracing walk with a few friends — sun rising like a thunderclap, birds all singing at once, cloudless skies. Temperatures soaring by 5am.

Not bracing at all, that adjective is quite wrong; it was a leisurely amble with pauses to yawn.The smell of eucalyptus  on the hilltop was bracing in a medicinal way and there were grey squirrels darting up and down the trunks of oak trees. Last week I read a review of a book entitled Outwitting Squirrels. It can’t be done.

Back home I read American  recipes for Thanksgiving turkey and looked at pics of my friend Annie and her family  enjoying  a dinner together. How lovely.

Said to the housemate and a neighbour, ‘I’m thinking of stuffing and roasting a Thanksgiving sort of turkey for Christmas. With  cranberry relish (à la Ms Moon) and Mary Christine’s pumpkin pie and butternut squash with seven spices from Lebanon (à la Syd) and Pam’s shoe peg corn with cream cheese, lots of butter and chopped green chillies and jalapenos.’

‘You’re completely mad,’ they both said in unison. ‘The temperature here at Christmas reaches 40 degrees Celsius/104 degrees Fahrenheit. Who eats  a stuffed roast turkey in a heatwave? What people want to eat is watermelon and ice cream.’

So that is that.

 

My neighbour B came around and gave me a basket of apricots from her tree, gorgeous and blushing red. Unfortunately they are mouth-puckeringly sour, so I  am going to make apricot crumble with  lots of brown demerara sugar.

Still in mild shock from  the the scary supper the other night, but the former art teacher has decided to turn 80 again this year and wants a party. Her birthday is 27 December, so we shall go around and celebrate her 80th birthday for the third time. One of the best ways to get over a dire social event is to go right out and  have another social celebration, rather like climbing back onto a horse after falling off.

The hydrangeas are producing big blue mopheads, perfect for  a summer Christmas bouquet. The bluest blue you can imagine.

Getting stuffed!

The ultimate masochistic turkey stuffing from food writers talking about Thanksgiving recipes.

Vogue food-critic Jeffrey Steingarten recounts his favorite Thanksgiving in his book The Man Who Ate Everything, which utilizes a recipe for Thompson’s Turkey, by Morton Thompson, a 1930s newspaperman. Aside from the labor-heavy recipe for roasting the turkey, the stuffing recipe is a feat even for accomplished chefs.

“As the stuffing contains 29 ingredients, it took me three hours to get the bird in the oven, and not only because my spice shelf had fallen out of alphabetical order; nearly every spice I possess found its place in Thompson’s stuffing. The completed mixture is reminiscent of no identifiable cuisine; it includes ingredients like crushed pineapple and canned water chestnuts that daring housewives of 50 years ago put into nearly everything they cooked. And it contains garlic, which was even too daring for most housewives 50 years ago when the American kitchen was still in the thrall of Anglo-German flavor phobias. Made with fresh herbs instead of Thompson’s dried, and with several ambiguities in the shopping list properly resolved, this is the most delicious bread stuffing I have ever tasted.”

Underbelly of darkness

So her family gave a birthday supper for the housemate. It was worse than I could have anticipated. We left as soon as we could decently say goodbye and had a very subdued drive home through the  mountains at night, no stars visible.

The hardest thing was that she might as well not have been there. We were greeted and offered drinks and then ignored. They spoke to me a few times, but only to say how much the meal had cost and asked me to guess the price of  the gift they gave her. (A bottle of expensive Scotch.) I sat and smiled,  nodded and  said nothing. Nothing.

They talked to one another, mostly the men — boasting about ‘getting away’ with slightly illegal business scams, about hiring refugees to work on building their holidays homes because refugees will work for a  slice of bread a day, about spray-painting a damaged car and selling it as new to  a ‘stupid’ young black woman who didn’t know better. Big brother’s son has been working over in the United States and has bonded with a  branch of White Aryan Resistance, wants to bring them over to start restoring white pride out here. Numerous comments about how we need another Hitler, the usual derogatory comments about Jewish people, women,  jokes about ‘unnatural’ types — they call lesbians ‘mother truckers’, watching me out of the corner of their eyes to see if I might be getting riled.

Two small children were there — the little girl was put down next to a chair and told to play quietly with her Barbie doll, the boy was encouraged to jump around showing how he would shoot anyone who was the wrong skin colour. I don’t know how my housemate survived that family.

So often I forget that racism, like any other deep-seated madness filled with virulent hated and  fear, gets worse, intensifies, comes to dominate very aspect of life. There is a germ of greed, violence and rage in there that  will spread through generation after generation. These boisterous good-humoured people with their  imported cars, speedboats (they do a little abalone poaching on the side), houses built like fortresses with safes full of guns and ammunition, guard dogs, electrified fencing. The underbelly of this country I sometimes forget about, that I pretend doesn’t exist. Those who feel entitled to take power by force, who admire ruthlessness and unabashed greed. All of them ‘decent family men’ and church-goers belonging to all-white churches that are not soft on human rights, no wishy-washy nonsense about equality.

‘Never mind,’ said the housemate this morning. ‘They won’t give me another party for at least a decade and perhaps next time we can send along hired surrogates in denim overalls with shaved heads. They won’t notice we’re not those particular dykes because all mother-truckers look alike to them.’

Acceptance is not acquiescence

Mid-week already. The fencing contractor has vanished again, leaving  ugly cheap-looking aluminium palings  piled up in the drive, which is now unusable. I have left an urgent  message on his voice mail, but have to face the fact that he may not re-appear before Christmas.

Acceptance is not acquiescence, I learned in my first year sober. It doesn’t mean I must resign myself to accepting  something I do not think is right. It doesn’t mean just giving up, or not using  one’s powers of discrimination. It means accepting the truth of what is, as it is, right now. The serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can.

I might pay him a visit at 6am and  suggest he  finishes the job  if he wants me to not wake him up by ringing his doorbell at 6am each morning for the rest of his life. But if he has gone fishing and is sitting somewhere in the mountains next to a trout  stream with his cell phone switched off and a happy-go-lucky smile on his face, I will just have to get those palings moved and  postpone my  harassment tactics until he gets back.

Tonight is the birthday supper with the housemate’s  [racist, homophobic] family. Her brother has a new Lexus and a sticker on the back window that reads ‘Greed is Good’. He means it.

Things I won’t talk about then: the notorious Protection of State Information Bill, also known as the Secrecy Bill, was passed through parliament yesterday while hundreds of black-clad activists protested outside. The implications for press freedom are of great concern and many see this as the beginning of State dictatorship.

The murder of lesbian women. Across South Africa, and internationally, gender activists are outraged at the postponement of sentencing of four men found guilty in 2006  of murdering a Khayelitsha woman, 19-year-old Zoliswa Nkonyana, accused of being a lesbian.  The case has been postponed 40 times over a five-year period.

What I will talk about: The goodness of the food. The goodness of the housemate. The contrariness of the weather. Human rights. [I'm joking.] The food . The magnificence of the Great Dane puppy. [They don't like animals.] The weather. The food.

There may be space for more sincere connecting, finding out how people really are. I need to stay open to that possibility. And keep my mouth shut when the bigoty rants begin.

Some of you might have noticed that I have revised and extended my blog roll links beyond recovery blogs, so that anyone who likes to follow random blogs one click at a time to the restaurant at the end of the universe can spend  hours doing so. There are some fascinating and  brave blogs out there. I don’t necessarily agree with the views or beliefs of some bloggers, but I like  reading  what they have to say. In January I will have to delete the recovery blogs no longer active, always a sad business because I am never sure if those bloggers just gave up on blogging or on the dream of getting sober.

Now I must go out and plant out  my new basil seedlings and hope some survive. This has been a bad summer for growing basil. And then I must sit and revise the latest chapter of my novella, which  seems to be shrinking into a short story. So be it.

 

Faster than the speed of light

And those damned little neutrinos are still travelling faster than the speed of light!

When I was at school, it was fun to listen to  slightly muddled science teachers, geeky men sporting  the kinds of spectacles  Kevin Costner wore in the film JFK, explain to us how Eintsein’s theory of relativity proved nothing could move faster than the speed of light.

They were wrong. Einstein was wrong. Those little ghostly particles called neutrinos indicate the universe has extra dimensions we haven’t yet glimpsed or dreamed  could exist.

Neutrinos are tiny and weigh so little  there is no way to measure their mass. There are trillions and trillions of them streaming through the universe and through our bodies every second of the day, almost never interacting with any other matter.

But without neutrinos the sun wouldn’t shine. The sun produces energy by burning hydrogen. At the heart of the sun are oscillating solar neutrinos generated by the exploding hydrogen, neutrinos which stream out in vast numbers from the sun’s core and travel to earth. Bringers of light!

And this morning the sun is shining in a cloudless blue sky, the kind of sunlit day I take for granted so much of the time. My neighbour came over to help me measure couch covers so I can look for  tough, durable and  hopefully attractive  material to give my couches a new lease on life. The Great Dane was zealously helpful and had to be put outside to cool his heels.

Had a surprisingly cheerful email from somebody who had a ‘slip’ at the weekend and has set his new sobriety date for January 2nd, 2012. In my  experience, I couldn’t face the  memories of a drunken Christmas just past and  usually decided to postpone  getting sober until Easter.

What is time after all except sunny neutrinos  streaming through us faster than the speed of light?

All around the valley there are farm dams with flowering waterlilies as we move into high summer.  Along the dirt roads  tourists pedal slowly on hired bicycles, riding around vineyards and admiring the beauty of the landscape, hoping they don’t get chased by ostriches or tumble into prickly pear stumps. At roadside stalls, farmers are selling  stripy green and white watermelons and  crystal-white table grapes. I stop and test the watermelons by knocking to hear if there is a hollow sound along with the right sort of heaviness. In late December, the intensely fragrant and sweet spanspek or honeydew cantaloupes will be ready.

How lucky we are, to be alive and uncrazy here and now, just  standing in the sunshine and weighing ripe watermelons. In the countryside life is slow and  I wish it was even slower, time enough to grow young all over again.