Some mornings start better than others.
This one could have been improved on. I should have been sweetly dreaming of the review in this
Sunday’s Times of Absent a Miracle. Am I really a “talented humorist”? I hope so. But I must quibble: I do indeed have literary pretensions. Boatloads.
Instead, I answered the telephone.
“Put my husband on the phone you pornographic piece of trash.”
This was of course the unfortunate x-wife of CSB. A few things need to be pointed out:
The Caller ID on our phone system is not working, and the above is a powerful example of why Caller ID is a good idea.
CSB has not been her husband for over a decade.
And now I will spend the day wondering why she has added “pornographic” to her nasty epithets for me? Could she have read the book? Even my most carefully crafted sex scenes could hardly be called pornographic (my father is now reading the book for the second time, having forgotten the first, and he is not bothered). But reality is not a big factor here. If she did read the book, I certainly hope she paid for it. Royalties are royalties.

Meanwhile CSB – who was already out in the garden at 6 AM when the call came – returns with some good news. He caught a raccoon in the Havaheart™ trap. A large raccoon. A raccoon that was in our garden eating our precious corn and broccoli - but not the cucumbers - vegetables we did not grow for the benefit of the scavenging raccoon population (or the woodchucks). That’s the good news.
Then the hard part: what to do with a pissed-off raccoon?
You don’t want to know.

But many thanks to our dear friend Ned who borrowed said Havaheart™ and returned it last night, having caught himself a couple of raccoons, presumably relatives, and effected a couple of very clever adjustments that facilitate trapping and dispatching.

There needs to be a patron saint of Caller ID.

Today's geography

It’s after 5 pm and only just now, while reading Butler’s re BB. Agathangelo and Cassian and their evangelical trip to Abyssinia (which ended in a bizarre martyrdom) did I realize that today is the 7th and that today, with zero fanfare, my book (Absent a Miracle – have I mentioned this before?) is officially published. Agathangelo was born in Vendôme, France in 1598. About 300 years later the luxurious Vendôme Hotel was built on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and 101 years later it burned down in the “worst firefighting tragedy in Boston history”. My paternal grandmother (she of the inscrutable horoscope and the countless abstract watercolors) lived at the Vendôme Hotel in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She lived in a suite with Mrs. Downey, her companion, who disappeared one day without a trace. Nana wore long dressing gowns and painted all day long in her Grumbacher sketchbooks. (Are they no longer made?) She was pathologically averse to cutting her toenails and she rarely wore shoes, so her long yellowing toenails were a source of wonder to her 10 grandchildren. (Recent research has taught me that toenails grow at a quarter the rate of fingernails, making long toenails a far more remarkable feat than long fingernails. People can reasonably differ on which is more revolting.) Nana was not living in the Vendôme when it burned down in 1972, but she was there in the 1960’s when it caught fire, and she was being evacuated – in her silk dressing gown – onto Commonwealth Avenue late one night when a friend of mine(Jeannie Nicholson, a tall redhead) emerged from a local bar, saw Nana, and took her in.
As a young priest Agathangelo went to Aleppo where he learned to speak Arabic and was friendly with Moslems and Christians alike. When I was a child, my father travelled to Aleppo 3 or 4 times every year to buy cotton waste because there used to be lots of cotton grown in Syria, and where there is cotton, there is cotton waste. When my mother and I went to Aleppo we took a cab out of the city because I insisted we visit the ruins of the shrine of Saint Simeon Stylites, the 5th century ascetic who lived on top of a pillar for 37 years. We saw a lot of rocks and used our imaginations.
From Aleppo, Agathangelo went to Cairo, where my mother attended high school and my other grandmother – Bonne Maman – attended costume parties. They both loved Cairo.
Having become well acquainted with the Coptic bishops, and his companion Cassian having learned Amharic, the friars Agathangelo and Cassian went south to Ethiopia. Amharic is an ancient and beautiful language, but not easy to learn. Once I was in Washington DC in a taxicab on my way to a funeral and the language being spoken on the radio was incomprehensible but strangely familiar. I finally asked the driver what it was he said it was Amharic. He said there were 4 Amharic radio station in DC; that’s how many Ethiopians lived there. When my sister and I were in Ethiopia in the 90’s we spent a lot of time speculating about the location of the Arc of the Covenant. But Agathangelo and Cassian were preceded in Ethiopia by a Lutheran missionary with a special aversion to Catholics, so with his encouragement, King Basilides decided to execute the 2 friars. They were taken out to the tree from which they were to be hanged, but there was no rope. Everyone had to wait around while the executioner sent for rope. “But wait,” said the friars, “we have ropes right here on our habits.” So they did. And they were hung by their own rope belts.
And their feast is today, August 7th. Which just so happens to be the publication day of my novel, Absent a Miracle.

Back at the Farmers Market

After a week of extracting and bottling the early summer honey (golden, champagne, delicious) I took Let it Bee to the Hastings Farmers Market yesterday. Some of you may know that I am not a natural at retail. It involves two of my weakest points: basic math, and friendly chit-chat. Not necessarily in that order. While I love going to the Farmers Market, seeing friends and neighbors I may not have seen for months, I come home afterwards and fall into a deep sleep, my fingers still sticky.
And yet, and yet.
There are always interesting discoveries. Yesterday I met Hastings own Chicken-Sitter. A lovely woman approached Let it Bee's table and asked if we kept chickens. (She is not the first to have asked that lately. I wonder why? Could it have something to do with the chicken on the cover of Absent a Miracle?) I said we did not, but would like to. She explained that she looks after chickens in Hastings when their owners go on vacation. This is a niche I did not realize existed, and yet clearly it is called for. I took down her name and email address, in anticipation of that happy day when we are collecting our own eggs and convincing Daisy and Bruno that they should suppress all their natural hunting instincts and not chase chickens. I do not anticipate success with the latter.
One of my favorite Farmers Market moments is this: inevitably, or at least at every time I've been so far, someone will come up to me and say, I'm allergic to honey. Yesterday it was a beautiful little girl who announced this fact and explained that she would get hives all over her body, and itch uncontrollably, if she ate honey. Sometime friends will feel compelled to tell me that they just don't like honey and never have; then I feel compelled to say, That's fine, not everyone likes honey, some people prefer refined sugar or corn fructose syrup, those environmentally depredatory products of pesticide-riddled monoculture that are the chief causes of the obesity epidemic in our children.
You can see why I am retail-challenged.

From the Sublime to the Remorseful

I was going to write about the ineffable pleasure of vacuuming and cleaning our laundry room. I was going to extol the pleasures of reorganizing the sheets & consigning the ripped, torn and stained ones to the rag pile.
I was going to wax poetic about the satisfaction of gathering decades of discarded, lost & forgotten baseball caps (also dust covered) each one recalling some past event or place - a fish store in Duxbury where I bought scallops when I was married, but have not seen since; a Julie Taymor puppet production; a now bankrupt soybean seed production company in Nicaragua - and putting them all in one place, in one shopping bag from Bruxelles (courtesy of my mother, surely) and labeling it, Random Baseball Caps for Whoever Wants One.
If you ever need a random baseball cap, you can go directly to my laundry room and know that you will find one there.

I was going to spend some quality time examining why we (we, as in, all of us who inhabit older houses, anywhere) have plinths, moldings, edges, cornices and indented panels – all surfaces designed to collect dust, to accumulate dust, to hold dust close to themselves and hoard dust. I have just answered my question.
And then I come along with the crevice tool on my vacuum and drag it along the top of the floor molding, and circumnavigate the indented panels, sucking up dust as I go.
I was going to discuss all the variations on lint: every article of clothing, every sheet, towel and cushion in this house is represented in the lint build-up in this room. Years ago I noticed that in the course of cleaning out the lint tray on my dryer, that is, taking the tray out of its slot and removing the accumulated lint and putting it in the trash, motes and specks of lint flew away. And I knew perfectly well that the lint that flew away was going to settle on some molding or plinth, settle there and stay there until I came along with my vacuum or dustrag.
So I became methodical about removing the lint from the lint tray. No longer did I cavalierly pull it off in a sloppy sheet and carry it the 4 feet to the trash bin. No, I carefully transported the whole lint tray to the top of the trash bin and slowly peeled away the lint directly into the trash bin, hoping in that way to minimize the escaped lint particles.
I was going to express the inexpressible delight of gathering all the clothespins in one place, and then clipping them in a neat row to the retractable clothesline.
A retractable clothesline is such a wonderful thing that I wonder we don’t have one in every room.
But then I came upstairs and saw the carton the UPS man had just left on the front porch containing 25 copies of Absent a Miracle. I sank into terrible gloom and despond. There it is, chicken and all. It is too long & too fat. 482 pages is too much in this world. I cut the original manuscript by more than a third, until I thought I could not pare it down by one more word. I took out whole scenes involving Hubert van Toots and his demented mother, fond as I was of her. I excised crank callers to the Dream Radio Show. I killed off several of Waldo’s relatives.
It still looks too long. I suggested months ago that they make the print smaller, but they did not.
Then there is the use of the word ‘pooch’ on the front flap. The narrator, Alice Fairweather, never once refers to her dogs or any others dogs as pooches. She never would, and neither would I. It’s not that I think there is anything wrong with the word ‘pooch’, it’s just that I don’t use it, but there it is on the front flap, taunting me.
As for the back flap, it says very plainly: This is her first novel. But on the page in the front listing previous works, Expecting, my (ahem) first novel, is at the top of the list. How did this happen? Will anybody besides me notice? Perhaps it was determined that Expecting is not a novel. I thought it was a novel at the time, even though it resembled in many ways my own pregnancy. But my grandmother’s name was not Esmerelda and she never ran off to a tropical island with a lover, so it has to be a novel.
I won’t even get into the author photograph and all the ways it disturbs me.
Why exactly this despair? Before the book became this physical reality I could pretend that many things could happen, specifically, that it would be reviewed in the Times and I would not have to crawl into the woodchuck hole. But now it is a physical reality taking up floor space in the front hall, and I have no idea if the Times or anyone else will review it or if anyone will finish it. Or like it.

And on top of everything, it seems just a little unfair that there is a chicken on the cover of the book but we still have no chickens. We can’t get chickens because we don’t have a chicken house and we can’t built a chicken house until we build a honey house, and the absence of a honey house is getting to be a desperate situation, because this house is full of apicultural stuff. The extractor is in the kitchen. The shelves downstairs are weighed down with 50 cases of hexagonal glass honey jars. On top of C through M of the Encyclopedia Britannica are sheets of wax foundation wrapped in newspaper. There are hive tools atop the bedroom dresser. Supers are stacked in the pantry and the dining room. Four years worth of Bee Culture are under our bed.

If you’ve read this far you really are a brave soul and deserve better than a self-piteous screed. A thought? Go out and buy a copy of Absent a Miracle. Tell your friends it’s not as long as it looks (large print).