When my parents lived in St. Simons Island, GA, residents had a term for the tourists who flooded the island during high season—driving slowly, getting lost, and generally clogging up the place in their oblivion. “Touron,” a portmanteau of “Tourist” and “Moron,” was that term.

My English-speaking tour guide, Veronique, had given very clear directions for when and how to meet her at 10:30 a.m., directions to exit the motorway and meet her in a car park where I could leave my rental car. I planned to use my cell phone just for this day, knowing I had an unlimited plan and could roam for a maximum of $10/day (I’d kept it in airplane mode since we landed to save on charges). My rental car was reserved. My plan was set. I prepared a small day pack with sunscreen, hat, sunglasses, phone cable and battery to recharge, and a small journal to capture meaningful moments. I also had a small bottle of Tito’s vodka and some Austin swag to give Veronique as a gift.

My actual path to meet Veronique in the car park is too long and twisted for narrative. I will switch to bullet points:

• Taxi dropped me at Antibes train station, same street as the Hertz office. Driver said rental cars were inside, but all I found was an Avis/Budget office. I checked my phone and saw “no service.”

• In the station’s lone bodega/shop I smiled at the attendant and used what would become my mantra for the day, “Est-ce que vous comprenez l’anglais?”

• “Non, Madame, je ne parle pas.” But he kindly took me by the arm and pointed to some train station employees.

• I repeated my “mantra,” and one said, “Oui.” With my phone, I showed him the email with the address for the Hertz place. “Don’t you have GPS?” he asked and pointed me down the street.

• I walked down the street and did not find it. I passed a travel agency for seniors and went in. “Est-ce que vous comprenez l’anglais?”

• I followed directions from the travel agency, but no luck. I walked back to the Avis booth at the train station and talked to an English-speaking customer who shared his GPS and pointed me down the street.

• I found address 31 but it was an “enfant” care place, no Hertz sign in sight. I took photos to document that my confirmation email had the incorrect address and walked three blocks back to the train station Avis booth to just rent a car, no matter how much it cost. I had to wait for the same guy who had helped me before. When he was finished, I asked the agent if she had a car I could rent, told her I had a reservation but couldn’t find Hertz. She said, “It’s just past the park. You can see it from here!” She looked at me, well, like I was a Touron.

• I walked down the other side of street and, voila! “Hertz” like a sign from the heavens, was illuminated in front of me!

• After waiting for the Hertz customer in front of me, I got my car. By this time it’s 10 a.m. I have a 1.5 hour drive and was supposed to meet Veronique at 10:30. At my request, the agent called Veronique for me (after I’d written wrong number down and got the wrong person first) she left the message that I was running late.

• I headed to the garage to get the car. But couldn’t find it. I should mention that these are not square grid streets—there are angles and splits and it’s impossible to tell which road you are actually on. Plus, I couldn’t remember the name of street or name of the garage. I walked two blocks back to Hertz where the agent wrote down the street and garage names. I wandered more and finally found the garage but couldn’t find a door, so I walked down the ramp for cars. At level -2, I saw some guys washing cars and after repeating my “vous comprenez l’anglais” mantra, asked how to get to -4. They pointed me to the stairs, down which I FOUND MY CAR!

• Relieved, I got in only to realize that to save money I’d reserved a stick shift. But fine, most of my own cars had been stick shifts.

• At last I am starting my pilgrimage. Still no GPS. Not sure where I’m going, I remember my taxi driver saying I would head toward Cannes. I tried that, but quickly realized I needed more specific directions.

• I stopped at the first petrol station I saw to get map. The attendant didn’t comprenez l’anglais. But a customer did and told me how to avoid traffic in Cannes: “Don’t go through Cannes. Go back this way to second roundabout, then up the hill, up, up, up. Then follow signs to Cannes. You’ll come back this way, but less traffic. Just remember stay on A8.

• Finally on the motorway, (A8!) I pass sortie/exit 39 where I see “Saint Maximin” on the exit sign and think, “Oh, I’m making up time; Veronique is just at sortie 34.”

• After driving more than an hour, past St. Tropez, seeing signs that Aix-en-Provence and Marseille are getting very close, I begin to wonder that I missed the exit. Should I turn around? The Saint Maximin exit was a long way back. Should I stop to call? (my cell service had miraculously returned). I thought I would stop at sortie 35, but then I miss that exit.

• Meanwhile, I had decided that by because I was so late, I would shorten the tour. I just want to walk through the ancient forest and see the grotto. We can skip the Basilica in town. I will suggest this to Veronique.

• Just as the decision was made for me to keep going to sortie 34, my phone rings. It is a friend of Veronique calling, “What happened?! “ she demanded. “Veronique and your friend are very worried that you had an accident.” I look at the clock. It’s 12:15 p.m.

• When I pull into the car park—just off the exit as she had said, I see Veronique waving to me from her car. She points me where to park and comes running to my door. She says I must call Stephanie because she is very worried.

• I call and while Stephanie was concerned that I was safe, the second thing she points out is that I had not reset my phone properly and was not, in fact, roaming on my $10/day plan, but paying premium prices for my cell service.

• Then Veronique explains that while I was driving, she got a message from the forestry service… the winds are very high today and the forest is closed, shutting off our only path to the grotto of Mary Magdalene. The universe had decided which part of the tour I would do.

Thanks to Veronique’s experience with the locals, we were able to visit the entrance to the forest.

We visited the Dominican monastery at the foot of the Sainte Baume mountain and saw beautiful paitings of the life of Mary Magdalene. Driving to the Basilica in Saint Maximin, we stopped at the marker of the site of where St. Maxime allegedly administered last rites to Mary Magdalene as she died. We then spent the rest of the time in the Basilica where Veronique explained more history than I could possibly absorb. We went into the crypt containing Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus and her skull. More on all this in a future post.

Veronique, now Roni to me since we became friends, is a certified tour guide in France and recently earned her certification in aromatherapy. She creates oils from the plants of Provence, a beautify legacy of Mary Magdalene who is known for oils and anointing. I purchased a small bottle from her--she had it leftover from a retreat she had done the week before and was reluctant to sell it to me. She didn’t want to commercialize the tour in that way, but I insisted.

Before parting, I gave her the Tito’s vodka and Austin swag. “You can make a martini,” I said. She was amazed that we make vodka in Austin. “On ice?” she asked. “You mix it with juice?”

“Sure, you can mix it with pretty much anything.

“I will try it,” she said. “But I don’t drink vodka.”

“What do you drink?

“Whiskey.”

We hugged as we parted and said we would stay in touch. I still want to go to that grotto.

The drive back to Antibes was generally without incident—except for pulling into an incorrect toll booth lane then having to put on my flashers and back out onto the oncoming motorway traffic to change lanes. Just that. Returning the rental car was slightly easier than getting it. This included refueling the car:

• Employing my mantra for the petrol station attendant to help me understand that you fill up and then pay

• Figuring out which type of gas to use...by putting each nozzle in until one fit (Goldilocks!).

• Because I couldn’t figure out how to lock the twist-on fuel cap, the kind attendant came out and did it for me, demonstrating, “C’est la.”

I managed to find the garage and drop the car on the correct level, put the key into the Sixt drop box, and walk up three flights to street level—where the glass door to the street was locked. The final joke of the day. I took the stairs back down and walked out using the car ramp out of the garage. I walked the now famliliar five blocks back to the train station where I got a taxi to deliver me to meet Stephanie and the Lisas for dinner. And gin! Phew. They wanted to hear all about it.

All I could say was, “Each of you would have had your own separate heart attack at various points on this journey.”

My intention, my hope, for this pilgrimage was guidance, to understand my purpose more deeply (or at all) and with more of myself than just my head. Fully committed, I plunged into the day open to whatever might happen only to realize I may be the Lucille Ball of pilgrimages, a hapless human doing the best I can and coming home with a story that at least entertained my dinner companions. (I’m still reflecting on the actual Mary Magdalene part.)

Surely traveling is different now, in the time of Covid; we packed tests, masks, more sanitizer than usual. Fingers crossed we stay healthy to enjoy the trip even as numbers are rising again.

Nevertheless, for this trip I want to go beyond tourism and traveling. I want to be a Pilgrim, “to seek a self worthy of the experience,” as they say. In fact I am doing a pilgrimage, a mini-pilgrimage anyway, the day after we land. I hope I can attain and sustain that level of openness throughout the trip. Pondering these differences while we await our first flight, to Newark for our connection to Nice, I’m amused by my own musings--reminded of a meme I saw from Austin: “Be like I-35--never stop working on yourself, no matter how inconvenient it is for others.”

Our vacation is with our best friends and we are traveling to France--a few days at the beach (Antibes), then to Lyon for a river cruise up the Rhone. From there we’ll head to Switzerland--Geneva, Lake Geneva, Montreaux, Gruyere, Wengen, and then Zurich--where my wife was born. I’ve teased her about putting up a historical marker if we can find the hospital!

In preparation for my pilgrimage, I’ve been reading lot about Mary Magdalene, the woman at the heart of Christianity, Apostle to the Apostles, the first witness to the resurrection, (NOT a prostitute as Pope Gregory said). My English-speaking guide, Veronique Flayol, who specializes in Mary Magdalene--and, in fact, runs the Mary Magdalene Festival later in July, will be taking me to the grotto at Sainte Baume Mountain where, allegedly, Mary Magdalene lived out her life in solitude as a contemplative after preaching the gospel in the Provence area. To get to the grotto, according to Veronique’s website, we’ll hike about 50 minutes along the “Chemin des Roys” or Kings footpath, passing through the sacred forest of the Druids. We will also visit the Basilica in Saint Maximin; the crypt contains Mary Magdalene’s skull and relics. They say carbon testing was done and it is the skull of a Middle Eastern woman who would have lived about the time of Mary Magdalene. I can’t wait for this part of our trip, of my personal journey. I look forward to sharing some of the amazing sights experience of my visit.

A dear friend and virtual pilgrimage companion for this journey gave me some wonderful words to carry along, among them this quote from Thomas Merton:

“You do not need to know precisely what is happening or exactly where it is all going.
What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment
And to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.”

It will be a transformational trip, one way or another. And, when we get home, I hope our doggies remember us!

It feels counterintuitive to do this, to commit to the pour. For whatever reason, my mind and body naturally want to be tentative. If I gently lean the glass over, just enough to carefully move the liquid, it’ll be safer, less messy. Instead, with a timid, gentle tilt, the wine clings to the lip of the glass and runs down the outside. It never makes it to the other glass. It dribbles down the stem and all over the counter surface, not just making a mess, making a stain. Making failure visible.

When you do commit to the pour, the liquid is, effectively, flung into the abyss above the new glass. The trajectory and the power of the force carry it out into the air between the two glasses. Gravity, a stronger force, curves it down into the other glass. The danger, of course, is that your aim might be off and the majority of the liquid could end up on the table or floor or your dining companion. And yet, without committing, without flinging the liquid with some force, you also risk the mess of a timid dribble. For some reason, the risk of using your power feels potentially worse than the risk of gentle spillage.

It takes courage to fling liquid out of a container. It takes courage to be bold with red wine, to risk missing the target, to risk staining something--leaving a mark that reminds you of failure. But without taking the risk, “failure” dribbles all over the place, the failure of full effort, failure to commit. That’s what I’ve been doing with my writing, and perhaps other things too. I’ve been so timid--not just for submissions, but for finishing anything, for making space in my life for it, for taking it seriously...for risking full effort. Time to fling the liquid. Commit to the pour. It should be a hash tag: #CommitToThePour

Which sounds very much like jousting at windmills. And, really, isn’t that what we all want to do? To pursue our passions? A few years ago I learned of a book, One Word That Will Change Your Life. A friend of mine had shared how he selected a word for himself each year. I then tried it with my “tribe” - our group of close friends who usually spend New Year’s Eve together at the lake.

We’re doing it again this year. My friend Lisa brought a “What’s Your Word?” kit so that we could each pound the letters of our words into a metal disk to wear or keep with us for the year.

My word for 2019 is “alignment.” I’m eager to see if I can align my day job, my writing life, my love life, my spiritual life, my relational life. Part of getting things done that I want and need to do is to make them fun and low-risk. Like play. Play, “the spontaneous activity of children,” by definition is also “the absence of harmful intent.” Easy enough to approach my “To Do” list with such intent. As for alignment, it seems alignment would be easier to achieve when activities for each of my lives can, per Webster, “be in or come into precise adjustment or correct relative position.” How great would that be? And maybe, with a low-risk approach, just by doing the things alignment will become apparent. Perhaps it’s not so much in the planning but rather--and so much more simply--in the doing.

Our table at the lake is glass, so we had to take the “What’s Your Word?” kit elements down to the basement so we could hammer on the cement floor. I knelt in front of the little tools. I had selected my letters. I was trying to remember that I needed to use the “N” twice. I was worried about misspelling my word. Then I was worried about running out of space on the little disk. My result was, well, a clear indication that “alignment” is a terrific word for me to attempt this year! (Of note, I had titled and begun drafting this post hours before I created my Word Disk...my first attempt at alignment this year.)

Here we go 2019! Let’s play!

The mood definitely shifted when the three wise men arrived—magi, kings, astronomers, what have you. They brought gifts—however impractical—for the baby. The liturgical calendar of the church, according to what I’ve read, is a way to mark feast days and celebrations of saints. The liturgical colors in sanctuaries change with the liturgical seasons and, I’ve heard, this helps to change the mood of prayer and worship—obviously Lent is a different mood than Advent, although both involve waiting and (at least for Mary during Advent) some suffering.

Epiphany is red. Growing up in a household where both parents were seminary graduates, during a busy Christmas season it was not uncommon to hear someone say, “It’s going to be Epiphany before I get all this stuff done!” I was an adult, though (and an Episcopalian, having migrated up the ecclesiastical ladder from United Methodist), before I heard the term “epiphanic” used with any regularity. It’s worked its way into my vocabulary mostly because it’s just fun to say. Where once I would have said I had an “insight,” now I triumphantly announce my “epiphanic moments,” as if I had seen a star and traveled miles through the desert. (Now that I think of it, some of those moments have felt like that). Epiphanic sounds more exciting and, after all, isn’t that the way we feel when elucidation, or epiphany, happens to us? Maybe it’s the bilabial stop of the “p” sound and the falling meter or double trochee of the polysyllabic word that makes it fun to say: ep-i-phan-ic.

About a year ago, I had an epiphanic moment when the weather turned cold. It was happy hour time and I was shivering too much to have a Gin and Tonic or Cape Cod. I wanted scotch or a Manhattan, something to warm me up. My mood was different, the house was decorated differently—for the new season, I was wearing boots with long socks (we wear boots year-round in Texas, but I wear tennis footies with them during the summer). As I considered my cocktail choices that evening, I thought, “There should be a Cocktail Calendar for different seasons, just like the church has the Liturgical Calendar.” My epiphanic moment!

Manhattans with OED

Further, and perhaps aligned with New Year’s resolutions (or to recover from holiday over-indulgence), my friend Tim McClure famously practices “Janopause” where he and anyone he can convince to join him take the month off from alcohol. (Likely paving the way for more clearheaded epiphanic moments through most of the season of Epiphany!). This year, National Public Radio had a story with science to back up Tim’s wisdom, “Going Dry: The Benefits of a Month Without Booze.”

I haven’t fleshed out the entire Cocktail Calendar, but here’s the general outline, beginning with the healthy start of Janopause:

January
Janopause - a month without cocktails or alcohol of any kind.

February
Red wine, to ease back into imbibing. Variations may include the debauchery of Mardi Gras perhaps followed by more moderation or abstinence during Lent, but I digress.

March
Green beer of course, for St. Patrick’s Day, or Guinness, or Irish Whiskey

April/May
With the arrival of Spring weather and (in Austin) bluebonnets and wildflowers galore, multiple festivals and nonprofit galas, it’s time for the cooler drinks to celebrate warmer weather: Mimosa, Bellini, Gin and Tonic, Cape Cod, Mojito, Singapore Sling, whatever mirrors your excitement about taking off coats and scarves, wiggling your toes in the new grass, and standing outside without shivering.

June - September
It’s flip flops, tank tops, and “lake season!” Time to turn to frozen margaritas, Pimm’s Cup, cold beer, anything made with Deep Eddy Ruby Red (grapefruit) Vodka out of the freezer. Rum drinks are great - or a rum-infused watermelon on ice in the cooler. I’ve heard it said that drinking rum in the morning doesn’t mean you’re an alcoholic—it means you’re a pirate! Arrr! (That’s Pirate-speak for “I agree,” among other things).

October
Now (in theory) the weather is cooling off. It’s also the beginning of oyster roast season—which means Shoo-Fly Punch, bourbon, and craft beer

November
Wine connoisseurs know this is Beaujolais Nouveau time, duh!

December
Celebration time, champagne, prosecco, egg nog, and festive cocktail mixology - bring out the Luxardo Maraschino Cherries for the Manhattans or have a vintage Kokomo.

This is the first official documentation of the Cocktail Calendar, we’ll call it v 1.0. I welcome suggestions, corrections, etc. for both the name of the “calendar/seasonal demarcation” as well as the content—and links to great recipes!

Cheers! Here’s to more epiphanic moments!

Popping a cork in Bridgehamption, NY - Brut Seduction from Sparkling Pointe vineyard on Long Island’s North Fork.

Live lobster headed into the pot.

Our dogs are similarly civilized (soft? unskilled?) or so we thought. We have a 75-pound boxer and two miniature dachshunds weighing in at 9 and 12 pounds. We live in a neighborhood full of wildlife. Deer roam the yards, possums are a regular nightly sighting, and coyotes even come out sometimes. It’s not like we’re in the woods—we are effectively two blocks away from Bee Caves Road along one of the busiest stretches. But in the neighborhood there are hills and undeveloped sections, especially when you get back towards Redbud Trail, Westlake Drive, and Lake Austin. Wildlife central.

The boxer loves to play. When a small armadillo or possum or feral kitten makes it into the yard (we have a six-foot cedar fence around the back yard), she chases, catches, and tosses the animal around in the air. She loves it. Unfortunately, the [insert small animal species here] dies halfway through the game. Possums literally “play possum” and, when they get away with it, the dog loses interest. The next morning, the “dead” possum will have walked out of the yard.

A year ago we got the two miniature dachshund puppies in Luckenbach. We drove out Highway 290, through Johnson City, nearly to Fredericksburg before we turned off onto Luckenbach Road—a two-lane curving hill country road if there ever was one. We passed ranch land, a gated place or two, then some homes closer to the road that looked like they’d been there forever. One had multiple buildings, barns maybe? Storage? We saw a man in a football jersey and plaid pajama pants prowling along the side of a white building on his property carrying a shotgun. Clearly something was up and he’d been rousted from his recliner on this Sunday afternoon to take care of it. Then we saw the turn-off to Luckenbach Loop and, ahead on the roadside, an electric sign in the back of an old pickup truck advertising music nightly at the Dance Hall.

The new puppies, in early 2014

The puppies are adorable and, as it turns out, fierce. In an effort to keep them from chewing on shoes and furniture, I have bought dozens of plush dog toys. It doesn’t matter how many toys I bring home, there is always ONE that they both must have. Racing around and squabbling ensues. It takes less than a day for the squeaker to be extracted. One toy, Flat Cat, did not have stuffing, just a squeaker. A neat hole was chewed, right where Flat Cat’s mouth is; the squeaker was removed and destroyed. Flat Cat is still a favorite, carried around and required for sleeping, but Flat Cat now looks like Surprised Cat with a gaping hole of a mouth.

Other toys, the ones that have stuffing, are eviscerated within days. The limp fake fur “skin” becomes the toy dragged around the house and somewhere a section of our home is redecorated to resemble a blizzard—white fluffy stuffing covers a larger area than seems possible given the size of the formerly stuffed toy. Lately, before the stuffing comes out, the fur is chewed off so that the stuffed tiger or leopard looks like it has some sort of fabric mange.

For our part, we thought maybe the dogs were just neurotic and had specific but unknowable methods to their madness. Then, the squirrel thing happened. There are quite a few fat, bold squirrels that run along the top of our fence, up and down our oak and ash trees, and venture down to the grass where they have buried nuts and other treasures. When the dachshunds were puppies the squirrels taunted them, running down the tree to just above where the puppies could leap in failed attempts to get them. The squirrels chattered at the puppies, flicked their squirrel tails in the air, and ran back up the tree. It drove the dogs mad. They had had enough. One day, when I returned from errands, the two dachshunds were sitting in a single kennel. I knew something had happened. Upstairs, I learned the sordid story. The dogs were making a huge racket in the backyard. My partner thought one of them was being attacked and—in her fear that I would leave her if anything happened to the puppies on her watch (her own fear, I have never said I would leave if anything happened to one of the adorable puppies that I love dearly)--she investigated. She found them in the shrubbery, near the corner drain pipe of our gutters, squealing and barking and pulling a fat squirrel out of the drain by its tail. She tried to call them off. She poked into the thick shrubbery with a rake handle. She shot jet streams into the bushes with the hose. The puppies would not come out. They killed the squirrel and still would not come out. Somehow she got one of them, then the other, wrangled into her arms and locked them in the kennel. Hearing the story, the delivery was hilarious: “Indie just plays with wildlife, but those two are cold-blooded killers.” The teller was not amused—she was frustrated and grossed out and still afraid that one of the dogs might have been maimed in the mayhem. Outside, I found the squirrel in the shrubbery near the drain pipe. It was dead. It was huge, maybe bigger than the puppies themselves. And some of it’s fur had been chewed off.

Cold-blooded Killers

This was their first kill. They had just turned a year old. All their stuffed animals had apparently been training exercises; with the live squirrel they thought they were in the Wildlife Olympics and they had gone for the gold. Two weeks later, I couldn’t get the dogs to come in at bedtime. One of them was near the trampoline sniffing what looked to be a large stuffed animal. It was a possum. It looked dead. The boxer had lost interest and come inside. One dachshund was poking its nose near the possum, sniffing. The other was running along the fence line looking for new blood. I put them inside and latched the doggie door; they frantically pawed and cried to get out and kill again. When I went to remove the possum, I realized it just had slobber from the boxer; I didn’t see any actual blood and it wasn’t chewed up like the squirrel. Plus, I was tired; it was dark and cold. I decided to leave it. The next morning it was gone.

The not-dead, slobber-coated possum.

The puppies are fully themselves. They were bred by a good breeder. They are from a hard-scrabble place in the wilds of the hill country and yet they spent the first six weeks of their lives indoors, contained with their litter mates and their mother. It is their instincts that drive them to destroy toys, to hunt and kill wildlife—and roll in it like hound dogs to get the scent on themselves. Apparently, it is also their instinct to burrow under the covers, rearrange everything until they get it just right and, finally, curl up behind my knees in the bed, completely buried in 400 thread-count sheets and a down comforter on a pillow-top mattress.

We are all fully ourselves and we are all fully masked. We call it manners or social skills in people. We call it good training in dogs. We all have a dark, unspoken side. A killer side maybe, but at the very least a side which would allow us to be ruthless and, yes, cold-blooded. We tame it. We keep it inside. Perhaps we keep it ignorant and, as a result, unskilled, which is probably what my cousin who runs a gun range would say. At the same time, maybe it is that dark side, or some thread of it, that allows us to survive. It is what allows us to leave relationships and manage losses of all kinds. Right? Isn’t there some good that comes from being cold-blooded, or having the capacity to be cold-blooded? Or, is it that being cold-blooded must be balanced by all the good elsewhere in us, all the good we do, by the confessions we make. If confession is being honest about what we feel, then does that honesty raise us above animal instinct?

Native Americans killed to eat and used every bit of the animal. They apologized to it after they killed it. They thanked it for all it would provide. They did that for animals, but reading Philipp Meyer’s The Son, it seems the Comanches did nothing like that when they raped and pillaged a homestead in the Texas territory. White people were not animals that would provide anything for them. The distinction between the respectful killing of animals and the killing of people is an important one. Is the animal instinct required for each rooted in the same place, if killing to survive is killing to survive?

A long time ago, I was writing a story and now I can’t remember anything about what was going on—or was supposed to be going on—narratively except that the protagonist went outside her house onto a patio where a dog was chained. She picked up the dog’s metal food bowl and began beating the dog in the head with it. I stopped writing. I got up and never went back to that story. I have always loved and spoiled my dogs. We have had completely co-dependent relationships and have been very happy. I would never raise a hand to a dog and yet I was beating one to death in a story. Did stopping there keep me from developing as a writer? Maybe. Did it keep me from developing as a person? Probably. Is it incumbent upon us as sentient beings to have the courage not just to face our fears but to face what we fear in ourselves? To face the unknown capacities we unwittingly harbor? Is awareness an opportunity to understand, or try to? To attempt to manage? Can we live without letting the terrible parts of ourselves be known, even to ourselves? Is that a fear-based existence? Is it fear- and ignorance-based? And what happens when that part of us is cut off, silenced? When I had cancer, the only way we knew the fairly large tumor was there was that it had become twisted, cut off its own blood supply, and part of it was dying. That’s what caused the pain that brought it to our attention. Even bad tissue, when it is dying, hurts. If the bad parts of us are shut down, does that cause psychic pain? Does it kill part of us? If so, how does that manifest?

A good friend has a job which involves working with a wide swath of the public—she is a nurse. As you might imagine there are a number of difficult people she must deal with, resulting in a correlatively high degree of frustration for her. She is fond of saying that she can handle the aggressive people and she can handle the stupid people. “It’s the aggressively stupid people I can’t deal with,” she said.

For my part, I wrestle with these questions of the good and evil in the world and in myself. I am handicapped by an extraordinary lack of formal education in philosophy, theology, and survival training, among other disciplines that might provide elucidation. My hope is to learn what I can, intellectually and experientially, and, at the very least, try my best not to be aggressively stupid.

Growing up in South Georgia, at family night suppers at our church, there was only a pile of crumbs left on her cake plate. The cakes were always warm. People thought she did that intentionally. I imagine they had visions of the good minister’s wife lovingly putting the cake together and then letting it bake to perfection while she sat in her dress and heels reading the Bible. But she was a first-grade teacher and by the time she got home from school, got us organized, and made the cake, we were rushing out the door with it hot out of the oven. It was common for her to put it in to bake while she then got herself dressed in church clothes. It was important that she, and we—and the cake—look our best at church, the minister’s family.

Once, when I was in junior high, we were racing around the evening before a special church supper. She was “doing her hair” in her bathroom and asked me to go down to the kitchen, look at the cake, and report to her how it looked. I peered into the window of the avocado-green oven. The pound cake had risen perfectly and was beginning to brown on top, as usual.

I stood at her bathroom door and reported, “It’s black around the edges and the middle is sunken in.”

“What?!” She put down the curling iron and ran, in her slip, to the kitchen. When she saw it was fine, in her mix of relief and exasperation, she whacked me on the head with the oven mitt she had grabbed. “You rascal!”

When I was in college, she periodically mailed a pound cake to me. My dorm mates, and, later, apartment mates, helped me gobble it up. It never lasted very long. My freshman year she also mailed an ironing board to me, so that my clothes would always be pressed. It didn’t fit in my car and I had thought I was off the hook. One day I got a package notice in my mailbox. Full of excitement, I went to the window to claim it. Instead of a pound cake, there was a nearly surfboard-sized cardboard box. I then had to walk all the way across campus carrying it which, by itself, was bad enough but my roommate, who had been with me at the Post Office, was running in front yelling, “Her mother mailed her an IRONING BOARD!” I’m sure I used it once.

For a few years, my dad served the First United Methodist Church in Kingsland, Georgia, on the coast, near the Georgia/Florida line. One of the lazy rivers flowing through the pine-tree-and-palmetto-bush landscape is the Satilla River. The church was at the corner of William Street and Satilla Street. My dad’s business cards had the name of the church and, in true small town form, the address was listed simply as “William and Satilla.” No street number because everyone knew where the church was—on the corner of William and Satilla. His name, Willis, was in the corner with his phone number. He was often out in the community visiting with people, stopping into their homes. A new family had moved in and he stopped at their house. No one was home so he left a card in the screen door, with a handwritten note on the back.

After church each Sunday, my dad, who always said the benediction from the rear of the church, then stood at the door to greet everyone as they exited. This particular day, my mom happened to be standing beside him. The new couple came out, and after chatting briefly with my dad, the woman reached out to my mom and said, “And you must be Satilla.” From then on my friend Gina referred to the pound cake as the Satilla pound cake.

Lately, I’ve been making my mom’s pound cake. My bundt pan is a different shape than hers—she still uses the same one with flat sides and flat bottom. Hers is a two-piece pan, mine is single. In Austin, my life is a completely different shape than hers. I only make the pound cake once a year and have to read the recipe at every step. She gave me the recipe during a phone call. I wrote it down, verbatim—especially the part where she said, “beat the fire out of it,” which turns out to be the key to the texture people have loved about her cake. My adult friends like the cake. At our annual Latkefest party, there is only a pile of crumbs on the cake plate at the end of the night. To date, I have never gotten a piece; it’s gone by the time I can get to it.

I put a lemon glaze on the famous Satilla Pound Cake. Is that defiling it? Is that disrespectful? Or is it a tribute, that I can add my own twist--a cake with a twist, like a martini. The glaze, just lemon juice and powdered sugar, hardens on top and pools around the base of the cake. It adds a zingy flavor. Maybe in Texas, where the peppers are hot, we like a little zing in our desserts too.

In the end, the thing that matters most is what’s under the glaze. The story of the cake is in many ways the story of my life. A different shape, a tartness that is sometimes hardened around the edges, and underneath it is everything my mother taught me about how to survive a life in relationship with other people--how to carry on under the watchful gaze and expectations of people who know very little about who you really are, and, most of all, how to beat the fire out of it to achieve the texture you want.

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‘Satilla Pound Cake’ with my lemon glaze

UPDATE: And...here’s the recipe, courtesy of my mom, Paige Moore. (She said she originally got it from the Jesup First Methodist cookbook but she’s tweaked it over the years.)

Ingredients:

3 cups cake flour
3 cups sugar
2 sticks butter (I use butter, my mom uses margarine, the regular kind; she says if you use light margarine the water content is too high)
6 eggs
1/2 pint sour cream
1/4 tsp soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond

Cream butter, gradually add sugar. Beat it until fluffy (”beat the fire out of it,” per Paige). Then turn mixer speed down, she says, and add eggs one at a time; beat after adding each egg. Add sour cream; mix well. Sift cake flour with soda. SLOWLY put in dry ingredients. Add vanilla. Stir slowly until all flour is in.

Spray pan with Baker’s Joy. Bake at 325 for 1 hour and 10 minutes

Melissa Etheridge at the ACL Moody Theater in Austin, Texas. Dec. 4, 2014

We had the opportunity to see Melissa Etheridge in concert last Thursday night at the ACL Moody Theater in Austin. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen her in concert. No, actually I can. I can tell you exactly how many times. Like many of the women I know--and millions of others--I can also tell you vivid details about moments of listening to Melissa Etheridge’s music. I wasn’t a rabid fan, following her every move, attending every appearance. But when I have seen her live, it is consistently and remarkably edifying.

I’ve seen her at Atlanta’s Lakewood Ampitheater, at the Frank Erwin Center at the University of Texas, and once, she was pulled up on stage from the crowd by the Indigo Girls during “Earth Jam 1995” at Stone Mountain Park. They gave her a guitar and they all sang together. Other artists in that show included Eddie Vedder, Foo Fighters, Luscious Jackson, Band de Soleil. Melissa Etheridge was not on the bill.

At Lakewood, I was out in the grass, the cheap “seats” where most people sat on blankets. It was raining. We wore garbage bags. I was there with a new friend from graduate school and her crowd. My recent ex, a corporate manager, was there in the front, the covered section, with a date; they had taken a limo. At the Earth Jam event, it also rained. I had been there with a work colleague and another grad school colleague. At every concert, we danced and sang our hearts out. We wanted to be as bold and brave—and as talented. She marched across stages and belted out anthems. On occasion, she sat at the piano and played ballads. We featured her songs on mix tapes to send to people we were dating, or wanted to date. She spoke for us, both intimately and societally.

My second girlfriend, J, had a great Melissa Etheridge story. She and her mother were driving from Newport News, Virginia, to vacation in Kitty Hawk North Carolina. They were to stay at the Orville and Wilber Wright Motel. It was raining. Her mother was a smoker. J wanted to listen to, as my music-aficionado stepson would say, “the self-titled debut album.” The album includes the now-iconic songs Bring Me Some Water, Similar Features, Chrome Plated Heart, and Like the Way I Do, among lesser-known but equally emotionally raw tunes. J and her mother listened to the whole thing--on cassette tape--driving in the rain, her mom smoking. Finally, her mom drew on her cigarette, blew out a long stream of smoke and said, “That is One. Miserable. Woman.”

My friend Trent Allen’s band, Dreams So Real, opened for Melissa Etheridge at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1990. He said they toured with her some but not much, probably, he said, due to “too many Y chromosomes.” I just learned about this, in late 2014. In 1990 I was, albeit in Atlanta, working at a suburban newspaper and pretty much exiled from everyone I had known before I came out. (I’ve been back in touch with Trent and many others for years and acknowledge that my exile may have been largely self-imposed, but that’s a longer story for another narrative).

Atlanta’s Fox Theater Marquee, 1990. Photo courtesy of Trent Allen.

Why do we emote so much around Melissa Etheridge’s music? Partly because she sang gender-neutral songs with lyrics we all felt were drawn from our private lives. But something in the way she did it tapped the universality of what it is to be human and in relationship with another person. Gender neutral, relationship is relationship. Love is love. Pain is pain. Loss is the same for all of us and, after a loss, as she told us, we will never be the same.

She was her own self, unapologetically lesbian, butch even, with long hair. And we loved her. For once, we saw ourselves reflected in society; I’m reminded of the image in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood of a man with no arms or legs who lay on the sidewalk in a velvet-lined box with a mirror suspended over him…it was the only way to see himself reflected in society, his face in the mirror with all the motion of the city in the background. But Melissa Etheridge did not emerge as a carnivalesque creature of the night; she was an all-American girl, with a guitar, and boots, and a voice that resonated every chamber of our souls.

On stage, under the bright lights, she represented us, whether she initially meant to or not. First, she is an artist and it was her music that catapulted her to fame--and her talent and hard work that have kept her career going longer than Janis Joplin was even alive. What she did for us was to be visible--and vocal. In the early aughts, a website that tracked lesbians in entertainment and media, appropriately named AfterEllen.com, had then as its tag line: “Because visibility matters.”

There’s all this and, the music is good. Or, the music is first and then there’s all that stuff we listeners bring to it. The lyrics are smart, the guitar work is amazing. She writes her own songs. She performs them like she means it.

James Perone, in his book The Words and Music of Melissa Etheridge , says that “Her real significance as a songwriter lies in part in her craft as a composer, but even more so in her work as a lyricist.” (119)

He goes on to say: “Whatever the listener’s preferences with respect to rhetorical style, it probably is safe to say that on a purely musical level, or in considering the intersection of music and lyrics, one of Etheridge’s greatest strengths is in composing easy-to-remember music, with singable melodies and harmonizations that draw largely on the traditional tonic (I), subdominant (IV), and dominant (V) chords but that frequently include motion to the minor chords within the prevailing key.”

Does she electrify and rock you?

Music theory mystifies me. (Also, there is nothing more humbling as an adult student of guitar than coming home all wound up from a Melissa Etheridge concert and picking up your guitar only to plummet back to earth with an ignoble plop. #buzzkill) But as my guitar teacher has patiently explained, composing music with diatonic chords does impact emotion and resonate with listeners. This requires the listener’s participation and imagination in ways that movies and TV, for example, do not. The chord structure moves from I to IV in comfortable ways. Then Melissa Etheridge adds a minor chord taking it to an unexpected place, not to V or back to I. This creates tension which is then resolved when the final V or I chord is played.

One reason we love Melissa Etheridge’s music is that she composes music that engages us with stable, comfortable chords and moves us to chords that build tension, and then brings us back, while matching this movement with lyrics that resonate just enough to let us interpret the songs relative to our individual experiences. More, she is a compelling performer.

This connection of music and emotion to one’s lived experience is profound. Music is what makes religious and sexual and patriotic experiences so powerful and, sometimes, manipulative. It is in our western-culture DNA to be comfortable with tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords, to feel tension with the unexpected movement to minor chords, then feel the rightness of that final diatonic chord.

With her visibility, her talent, her chord movements, gender-neutral lyrics, and powerful performances, Melissa Etheridge brings the hero’s journey to harmonic music. We are edified because she not only sings to us, she sings for us and she did it for me early on, as I was thrashing around in search of my own voice, my own self.

UPDATE:

I am thrilled, and humbled, that Melissa Etheridge (apparently) liked this post. Social media turns out to be a lightning-fast network which made Tuesday, Dec. 9, a fun day; 3.5 hours after this post was published, Melissa Etheridge--and several of her fans--had “Favorited” and “Retweeted” the link. Wow. Just, wow.

There are those who malign the manufactured-ness of the Thanksgiving holiday itself. My social justice activist friends deconstruct the premise and the marketing—the manufactured, sanitized, dominant-culture version of what we are told Thanksgiving should look like layered onto the colonists’ forceful domination of Native Americans. Modern images from advertisers—and, perhaps from our own memory banks—include gatherings of friends and family of all sizes, and more recently, variations in the types of families, who smile and laugh and hug as they greet each other and gather around a table. Norman Rockwell’s 1942 Freedom From Want painting, of course, iconized the dominant culture image of Thanksgiving. In elementary school in the 1970s, we made “Indian” vests out of brown paper grocery bags and “Pilgrim” hats and collars out of black and white construction paper. This year, there were Indian and Pilgrim photos shared on Facebook. Legend persists.

I wanted to write a post about Thanksgiving and families, maybe something humorous about the emotional high stakes of getting together, how expectations are elevated because Thanksgiving should be special. We often haven’t seen members of our family in a long time; it feels important for everything to go well. Inevitably things go wrong. Food is burned or spilled, or thrown. Someone drinks too much and makes a mess of the table or a relationship. Deep-seeded feuds boil to the surface unexpectedly, leaving mothers and daughters at opposite corners of the kitchen screaming at each other. Someone leaves the room crying. (Disclaimer: yes, I grew up in the South).

One Thanksgiving when I was in my late twenties or early thirties, I went to my parents house—as I had always done when I was single. They lived in a parsonage on St. Simons Island, Georgia, where my dad’s office was on the campus of Epworth By The Sea, the United Methodist Center. Living in a parsonage means that most of the furniture is not yours. Most of it, in fact, is donated furniture and that seemed especially so in their house on St. Simons because my dad wasn’t serving a church. This was a “conference parsonage” not owned or seen to by the traditional parsonage committee composed of congregation members. At least with a parsonage committee you had a few committed ladies, often with good taste, who for altruistic and a host of other reasons, cared about what the parsonage looked like—for better or worse. Sometimes this caring extended to telling the minister’s wife what colors to use, or having to vote before any painting or wallpapering could be done. In the end, we always knew we were living in someone else’s house.

Things were in some ways easier with the conference parsonage. When my parents moved there, while I was still in college, that first summer was spent re-wallpapering. We did it all ourselves. It was looking better. The most difficult had been the living room which had one shade of green carpet and a green velvet sofa of a different hue that clashed so much it almost made noise. Like most small ranch-style houses, the formal living room and dining room were on the front of the house.

It was this dining room, with a dated set of furniture (table, with leaves to expand, chairs, china cabinet), that my mother had decided to update—to re-cover the chair seats—in time for Thanksgiving. Living in parsonages all those years, she got very handy with DIY redecorating. She could refinish furniture, change the hardware, hang wallpaper, paint, make curtains—make anything, really with a sewing machine. And, she owned an electric upholstery stapler.

Of course for Thanksgiving dinner that year I was in my standard jeans and boots. This is important because, had I been wearing a dress, the debacle would have been so different. I had come home from Atlanta where I worked for a software company, where my life was not part of any storyline we had known growing up in a small town in South Georgia. I was now at least five years older than my mother had been when she had me, but I had no children. Convenient, for the family narrative, since I had no husband either. Nor did I bring anyone special home with me—regardless of relationship status. I dated women. Wearing jeans and boots at holidays was my attempt to assert my fledgling individuality. I was using edges to define my separateness—which most people did as teenagers. My curve may have been longer for a variety of reasons.

In any case, I had on jeans and was sitting at the table with my napkin over my thighs. Turns out, my legs were not squished together in ladylike fashion. I know this because the cranberry sauce that fell from my fork did not land on my napkin or my jeans. It plopped right through a gap between my legs onto the chair. I tried to wipe it up carefully. My sister, sitting beside me noticed. We immediately regressed to our 10-year-old selves—giggling outwardly, freaking out on the inside, because we both knew I was in big trouble.

Dinner was interrupted, the fabric stripped off the chair and treated. We were all in motion trying to do something, anything, while my mom took charge in a futile attempt to reclaim the pristine appearance of the new fabric. Our two guests (old family friends, thank goodness) were left at the table by themselves. The fabric never came clean and at every subsequent dining-room dinner, I had that as my own special chair—fabric more faded than the others, the stain hardly visible. My parents have been gone from that house for nearly 15 years now. The story has even faded from the rotation of family lore we laugh about during holiday dinner conversations. My partner, with whom I spend every Thanksgiving, knows the story well enough to tell it, but we have our own family now. Different fabric, different debacles.

To “manufacture” means “to make.” Similar to the definition of “create.” But manufacture adds the connotation of mass production and maybe that’s what’s so sinister to the critics of Thanksgiving as an American-manufactured holiday. It’s easy for me to get caught up in the larger injustices of the world and the sorrows of those who have been hurt—and who are hurting for many other reasons. But for now, I’m okay to stake out what may be a selfish place. Both mine and my partner’s immediate families of origin are all still with us, healthy, and as opinionated as ever. This year, I want to just enjoy the time off from work with our families. Manufactured, maybe. Meaningful, in many ways. Pass the turkey and let the cranberry sauce fall where it may.

• The Armenian Genocide (1909-1918)

• World War I (1914-1918)

• Revolution and Repression in the Soviet Union (1917-1991)

• The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

• World War II (1939-1945)

• The Holocaust, The Shoah (1933-1945)

• Repression in Eastern and Central Europe (1945-1991)

• War and Dictatorship in the Mediterranean (1900-1991)

• The Indo-Pakistani Wars (1947-1972)

• War in the Middle East (1948-1991)

• Repression and Revolution in Latin America (1900-1991)

• The Struggle for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the United States (1900-1991)

• War in Korea and Vietnam (1945-1979)

• Repression in Africa and the Struggle Against Apartheid in South Africa (1900-1991)

• Revolutions and the Struggle for Democracy in China (1911-1991)

These are poems from people who were there, the people these things happened to, the people who (mostly) died. Noting that many of the sections are dated to 1991, it is clear that these sections would be widely expanded if poetry of witness were to be collected from the intervening 25 years.

Because we celebrate Shabbat on Fridays as part of our household practice of “Episco-Judaism,” where really I’m the only Episco part of the equation, I had started with the section on the Holocaust/the Shoah. Actually I started with the erudite introduction which itself took me almost a week to read, resulting in a detour back to Bakhtin and my early intellectual attempts to understand literary philosophy—my feeble apprehension of the nature of language and its relation to lived experience versus artistic rendering in poetry and fiction. I still get lost in Sausseurian “signifier and signified” and Bakhtin’s “code switching,” which is now the name of an NPR radio segment. In any case, my philosophical detour was prompted by the following passage from Forche’s introduction:

“It is impossible to translate [Paul] Celan into an accessible English, an English of contemporary fluency. Rather, to encompass Celan, we might have to translate English into him, that is, denature our language just as he denatured German. [Walter] Benjamin argued that a poem brought into a new language had to transform that language: a good translation would enrich its adoptive tongue as it had changed the linguistic world of its original. Perhaps all the poems in this anthology—even those written in English—are attempts at such translation, an attempt to mark, to change, to impress, but never to leave things as they are.

“To talk about a poem as the sole trace of an event, to see it in purely evidentiary terms, is perhaps to believe our own figures of speech too rigorously. If, as Benjamin indicates, a poem is itself an event, a trauma that changes both a common language and an individual psyche, it is a specific kind of event, a specific kind of trauma. It is an experience entered into voluntarily. Unlike an aerial attack, a poem does not come at one unexpectedly. One has to read or listen, one has to be willing to accept the trauma. So, if a poem is an event and the trace of an event, it has, by definition, to belong to a different order of being from the trauma that marked its language in the first place.”

I think that she’s explicating here her earlier categorization of this poetry of witness using a “third” term—neither political nor personal but “the social … the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. … By situating poetry in this social space, we can avoid some of our residual prejudices. A poem that calls on us from the other side of a situation of extremity cannot be judged by simplistic notions of “accuracy” or “truth to life.” It will have to be judged, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said of confessions, by its consequences….”

Cut to Miami Beach two weeks ago. When the conference ended—it had rained the entire week—we decided to walk down to see the Holocaust Memorial. We walked about three miles; it was flat and not unpleasant in a a light drizzle. From the street corner as we approached, I saw the hand reaching to the sky.

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Meridian Ave. in Miami Beach[/caption]

After inquiring at the information room, we began. The memorial is open-air and, like reading Hebrew, you move from right to left as you read the horror that is the history of European Jews. The words and photos are etched on shiny black granite slabs. Even on this rainy, overcast day, there was a glare such that the words were difficult to read because the reflection of my face in each slab obscured the words—I had to keep moving out of the way to read. It was striking to see myself reflected in the history, implicated.

The final words of the history are “…while the world watched and did nothing….” That section ends with The Hymn of the Partisans.

Next, you enter a structure reminiscent of a temple, there is a flame burning, and you pass through a rotunda to a covered ramp. Upon entering, you realize the passage is only partially covered. There are slats of light top and sides—the feeling of being in a boxcar; you can see thin slices of the outside world as you pass. There is a soundtrack playing…children’s singing voices wrap around you as—in our case—you walk down the dark, wet ramp, intermittently dripped on by the rain as you pass under each slash of daylight. The passage narrows near the end to an open doorway through which you see the sculpture of a small child on the ground reaching out to you. Still the voices of the children echo in the stone passageway.

I stopped at the doorway and could not walk through. I was standing just yards from the base of the giant sculpture I had seen from the street—the hand reaching to the sky with hundreds of emaciated, mostly naked figures crawling up the forearm. The large sculpture is in the middle of a circle. Scattered around the circle are sculptures of others: an elderly couple preparing to die together, a mother and her children dying together, individuals in poses of stasis and motion, evidence of fatigue, starvation, physical brutality, and death. Everywhere suffering. But there is also love, victims attempting assistance to each other, to the elderly, the children.

I could not walk through the doorway. I was at once completely nauseated and devastated. In this public place I was struggling to hold back tears and vomit simultaneously. I chose not to walk into the circle, not to see the sculptures up close, not to look through the reflection of my face in the black marble panels where millions of names are etched, names not in alphabetical order I’m told, just listed in the same random way these victims were piled up. These people, the victims and the survivors, had no choice, no matter how nauseated and devastated they were, no matter how afraid. But standing there in Miami Beach, transformed by my experience of the Holocaust Memorial, I had the choice to go no further, to stop, to cry and breathe, to absorb what I could of the experience and then walk out of it at my leisure.

As Forche so clearly explained, “it was a specific kind of trauma” for me, “an experience entered into voluntarily.” This means that I could also leave it voluntarily. I will never be the same—both for the experience the sculptor and curators designed for me and for acknowledging my absolute freedom to stay or not, to pay attention or not, to remember or not.

Image from Texas Tribune

I don’t know why I want to compare ovarian cancer to the oppression of Texas politics, specifically, the oppression of Texas social and environmental policy. Women don’t have access to affordable healthcare, gay marriage is not legal, drilling, fracking, and mining are among the highlights of economic prosperity heralded by state leaders, and we are running out of water. As a result of these policies, low-income women in most of Texas cannot get mammograms, cancer screenings, birth control pills and other healthcare previously provided by clinics that have now been closed. As a result, my partner and I apparently have to pay more than heterosexuals for our family health insurance policy. As a result, Texas has more frequent earthquakes because of the now honeycombed earth. As a result, affluent people are drilling their own wells to be sure they and theirs have enough water.

And I am afraid of possibilities of the future. Thanks to an editorial on Pregnancy and Civil Rights, I am afraid of the future (and the present) where even women who WANT to be pregnant in Iowa can be convicted of attempted fetal homicide for merely falling down the stairs and subsequently seeking treatment at a hospital.

With ovarian cancer, it’s just you and your body which has betrayed you. Your body has grown this malignancy that doesn’t hurt at first, or sometimes ever. It just grows and spreads and, ultimately, will kill you. Early detection is the best chance for cure, but the tumor grows without you knowing. The tumor accumulates strength and leverages your lymph system to spread all over your body; it will go everywhere. Once it spreads, it cannot be stopped. You can poison your entire body with chemotherapy to try to kill the tumor, but it makes you sick and weak. In the end, you try to find palliative care to make your transition more comfortable.

In state and local politics, we volunteer and give our meager individual donations. We send emails to the senators who would amend the constitution to cement the absence of human and civil rights for those of us beyond the embryo stage. And then, Saturdays, we, like our GOP brethren, watch our college football teams play on Fox TV. Our protests weakened such that all we can do is look away when the upbeat Koch Industries commercials air during the game. The GOP and their PACS have spread through our lymph system to every node of of our lives.

The metaphor breaks down because I do not feel as bleak as this little narrative has turned out to be. The metaphor breaks down because oppression does hurt and we are aware of it, unlike an ovarian tumor. The metaphor breaks down because many of us and our work and vision and money are also spreading through our societal lymph system. We still inhabit every node of our lives. And, in the 33 years since my own stage III germ cell ovarian cancer diagnosis, the survival rates for that type have gone from < 20 percent to > 80 percent. Thank God, the metaphor breaks down!

Jim built bee boxes and a vacuum to pull them in for transport.

Yesterday, a backyard mini-safari identified the hive. It was found by following the “bee line.” Once he removed the bees today, they buzzed and buzzed. They were, he said, “busy bees.” Just as when a friend who keeps chickens explained to me that you have to introduce new hens methodically--because of the “pecking order”--I was reminded today of just how distant from the real world I often feel. Living in this first world luxury in Austin, working in an air-conditioned office and home, vicariously experiencing half my life via social media, no wonder I have no idea that the figures of speech I regularly use come directly from nature. Oh, the practicality of the physical world and our ancestors’ descriptions, which our grandparents then turned into metaphors so that we now call language abstract. But I digress. The bees were safely removed and made ready for transport to gardeners and beekeepers on a waiting list for bees. Ours were the best kind of bees, “the ones people want,” Jim said. We are so happy to contribute! And to be rid of them in the yard.

The honey takes on an orange hue from the Home Depot bucket.

Jim rests after removing the bees and preserving the honey.

The honey was preserved in an orange bucket from Home Depot. On the side it has the phrase “Let’s DO This!” After preserving the honey and boxing up the bees for transport. Jim regaled us with stories of the odd places from which he has extracted bees--the framing around a chimney, which gave the honey “a smokey taste.” Or perhaps, it gave the smoke a honey taste; his description indicated that the “finish” was honey and the rest of the taste was smoke. Then there was the hive near a flower garden that bloomed for much of the year with a variety of beautifully colored flowers. The honey in those combs took on the color of the flowers. He said it looked like a rainbow. Since honey contains all the local plant allergens, he says we can put it in our yogurt and rid ourselves of allergies. In Austin, where we wake with headaches and stuffy noses much of the year, we may be willing to give that a shot!

“Reading Roxane Gay at the Mauna Lani in Hawaii,” Austin Travels Magazine, September 2021

Questions for Contributors, The Georgia Review, January 2022

When my parents lived in St. Simons Island, GA, residents had a term for the tourists who flooded the island during high season—driving slowly, getting lost, and generally clogging up the place in their oblivion. “Touron,” a portmanteau of “Tourist” and “Moron,” was that term.

My English-speaking tour guide, Veronique, had given very clear directions for when and how to meet her at 10:30 a.m., directions to exit the motorway and meet her in a car park where I could leave my rental car. I planned to use my cell phone just for this day, knowing I had an unlimited plan and could roam for a maximum of $10/day (I’d kept it in airplane mode since we landed to save on charges). My rental car was reserved. My plan was set. I prepared a small day pack with sunscreen, hat, sunglasses, phone cable and battery to recharge, and a small journal to capture meaningful moments. I also had a small bottle of Tito’s vodka and some Austin swag to give Veronique as a gift.

My actual path to meet Veronique in the car park is too long and twisted for narrative. I will switch to bullet points:

• Taxi dropped me at Antibes train station, same street as the Hertz office. Driver said rental cars were inside, but all I found was an Avis/Budget office. I checked my phone and saw “no service.” 

• In the station’s lone bodega/shop I smiled at the attendant and used what would become my mantra for the day, “Est-ce que vous comprenez l’anglais?” 

• “Non, Madame, je ne parle pas.” But he kindly took me by the arm and pointed to some train station employees. 

• I repeated my “mantra,” and one said, “Oui.” With my phone, I showed him the email with the address  for the Hertz place. “Don’t you have GPS?” he asked and pointed me down the street. 

• I walked down the street and did not find it. I passed a travel agency for seniors and went in. “Est-ce que vous comprenez l’anglais?” 

• I followed directions from the travel agency, but no luck. I walked back to the Avis booth at the train station and talked to an English-speaking customer who shared his GPS and pointed me down the street.

• I found address 31 but it was an “enfant” care place, no Hertz sign in sight. I took photos to document that my confirmation email had the incorrect address and walked three blocks back to the train station Avis booth to just rent a car, no matter how much it cost. I had to wait for the same guy who had helped me before. When he was finished, I asked the agent if she had a car I could rent, told her I had a reservation but couldn’t find Hertz. She said, “It’s just past the park. You can see it from here!” She looked at me, well, like I was a Touron.

• I walked down the other side of street and, voila! “Hertz” like a sign from the heavens, was illuminated in front of me! 

• After waiting for the Hertz customer in front of me, I got my car. By this time it’s 10 a.m. I have a 1.5 hour drive and was supposed to meet Veronique at 10:30. At my request, the agent called Veronique for me (after I’d written wrong number down and got the wrong person first) she left the message that I was running late.

• I headed to the garage to get the car. But couldn’t find it. I should mention that these are not square grid streets—there are angles and splits and it’s impossible to tell which road you are actually on. Plus, I couldn’t remember the name of street or name of the garage. I walked two blocks back to Hertz where the agent wrote down the street and garage names. I wandered more and finally found the garage but couldn’t find a door, so I walked down the ramp for cars. At level -2, I saw some guys washing cars and after repeating my “vous comprenez l’anglais” mantra, asked how to get to -4. They pointed me to the stairs, down which I FOUND MY CAR! 

• Relieved, I got in only to realize that to save money I’d reserved a stick shift. But fine, most of my own cars had been stick shifts. 

• At last I am starting my pilgrimage. Still no GPS. Not sure where I’m going, I remember my taxi driver saying I would head toward Cannes. I tried that, but quickly realized I needed more specific directions.

• I stopped at the first petrol station I saw to get map. The attendant didn’t comprenez l’anglais. But a customer did and told me how to avoid traffic in Cannes: “Don’t go through Cannes. Go back this way to second roundabout, then up the hill, up, up, up. Then follow signs to Cannes. You’ll come back this way, but less traffic. Just remember stay on A8.

• Finally on the motorway, (A8!) I pass sortie/exit 39 where I see “Saint Maximin” on the exit sign and think, “Oh, I’m making up time; Veronique is just at sortie 34.” 

• After driving more than an hour, past St. Tropez, seeing signs that Aix-en-Provence and Marseille are getting very close, I begin to wonder that I missed the exit. Should I turn around? The Saint Maximin exit was a long way back. Should I stop to call? (my cell service had miraculously returned). I thought I would stop at sortie 35, but then I miss that exit. 

• Meanwhile, I had decided that by because I was so late, I would shorten the tour. I just want to walk through the ancient forest and see the grotto. We can skip the Basilica in town. I will suggest this to Veronique.

• Just as the decision was made for me to keep going to sortie 34, my phone rings. It is a friend of Veronique calling, “What happened?! “ she demanded. “Veronique and your friend are very worried that you had an accident.” I look at the clock. It’s 12:15 p.m. 

• When I pull into the car park—just off the exit as she had said, I see Veronique waving to me from her car. She points me where to park and comes running to my door. She says I must call Stephanie because she is very worried. 

• I call and while Stephanie was concerned that I was safe, the second thing she points out is that I had not reset my phone properly and was not, in fact, roaming on my $10/day plan, but paying premium prices for my cell service. 

• Then Veronique explains that while I was driving, she got a message from the forestry service… the winds are very high today and the forest is closed, shutting off our only path to the grotto of Mary Magdalene. The universe had decided which part of the tour I would do.

Thanks to Veronique’s experience with the locals, we were able to visit the entrance to the forest.

We visited the Dominican monastery at the foot of the Sainte Baume mountain and saw beautiful paitings of the life of Mary Magdalene. Driving to the Basilica in Saint Maximin, we stopped at the marker of the site of where St. Maxime allegedly administered last rites to Mary Magdalene as she died. We then spent the rest of the time in the Basilica where Veronique explained more history than I could possibly absorb. We went into the crypt containing Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus and her skull. More on all this in a future post.

Veronique, now Roni to me since we became friends, is a certified tour guide in France and recently earned her certification in aromatherapy. She creates oils from the plants of Provence, a beautify legacy of Mary Magdalene who is known for oils and anointing. I purchased a small bottle from her–she had it leftover from a retreat she had done the week before and was reluctant to sell it to me. She didn’t want to commercialize the tour in that way, but I insisted.

Before parting, I gave her the Tito’s vodka and Austin swag. “You can make a martini,” I said. She was amazed that we make vodka in Austin. “On ice?” she asked. “You mix it with juice?”

“Sure, you can mix it with pretty much anything.

“I will try it,” she said. “But I don’t drink vodka.”

“What do you drink?

“Whiskey.”

We hugged as we parted and said we would stay in touch. I still want to go to that grotto.

The drive back to Antibes was generally without incident—except for pulling into an incorrect toll booth lane then having to put on my flashers and back out onto the oncoming motorway traffic to change lanes. Just that. Returning the rental car was slightly easier than getting it. This included refueling the car:

• Employing my mantra for the petrol station attendant to help me understand that you fill up and then pay

• Figuring out which type of gas to use…by putting each nozzle in until one fit (Goldilocks!). 

• Because I couldn’t figure out how to lock the twist-on fuel cap, the kind attendant came out and did it for me, demonstrating, “C’est la.” 

I managed to find the garage and drop the car on the correct level, put the key into the Sixt drop box, and walk up three flights to street level—where the glass door to the street was locked. The final joke of the day. I took the stairs back down and walked out using the car ramp out of the garage. I walked the now famliliar five blocks back to the train station where I got a taxi to deliver me to meet Stephanie and the Lisas for dinner. And gin! Phew. They wanted to hear all about it. 

All I could say was, “Each of you would have had your own separate heart attack at various points on this journey.”

My intention, my hope, for this pilgrimage was guidance, to understand my purpose more deeply (or at all) and with more of myself than just my head. Fully committed, I plunged into the day open to whatever might happen only to realize I may be the Lucille Ball of pilgrimages, a hapless human doing the best I can and coming home with a story that at least entertained my dinner companions. (I’m still reflecting on the actual Mary Magdalene part.)