Four’s Flights

Day’s End, With Wind

When you burn your dead in this furnace

of seagulls and shore-swept winds,

sew the sky-rent cries into your coat,

furrow every single flowering branch

into your bread,

your feet will widen till they hold you

in perfect balance.

You will close the oven door.

On the backs of your hands, maps will appear,

a trick of the blood,

showing that you are everywhere

true north.

You’ll recognize the ocean.

You will not ask the hollow angel standing guard

in the beachgrass

the direction of currents

or even

the names

of the tide.

and speaking of dumbass, my friend L, who owns a health food store and goes to Curves with me when she can get out from under the register and the hordes, told me about a customer, very Hamptons Chic and all of about 85 pounds, who asked her is she had any “fat free fish oil”, and when L. explained there IS no such thing as fat free oil of any kind, she asked, “Well, do you have any no-calorie fish oil?”. We almost fell off the machines laughing.  We’ve GOT to get our hands on a  snappy comeback book.

😀

went out to our favorite place for pizza last night with a couple who’ve never been there before. I suspect they were underwhelmed — it’s just a local dive, been here forever and seems odd now, nestled in amongst the Eileen Fisher’s, the Ralph Laurens, and the ElieTaharis, whoever that is. The Shiraz there is drinkable, though that’s it for wine. If you want a buzz, it would have to be beer or hard liquor. Their idea of wine choice is “red” or “white”, which is fine with me as I usually stick to cranberry juice, seltzer and lime, especially if I want to dance the next morning. The whole-wheat pizza dough tastes like cardboard after it cools for more than five minutes so you have to eat it right away, just don’t burn the roof of your mouth. Mesclun salad with goat cheese — yum.

    It was good to get out of the house and away from the very nice but horrendously dressed and dumbasdirt couple staying here. The asked if they could use the coffee maker in their room. Huh? I said “yes”, and they laughed, saying what a relief, they weren’t sure they could and didn’t want to do the wrong thing. Oh my. The guy picked up the glass jar labeled “CREAMER” and asked me if it was sugar. HUH? “Um, no, it’s creamer” I said, and again he was relieved. I gave them a bottle of milk anyway. Have concluded that people who wear yellow pants should not be allowed to travel out of their own neighborhoods.

    The guys are out in the garden this morning building a new pergola for the trumpet vine and the wisteria — I can’t believe so much has gotten done this summer. It’s usually months of pleading before I get part of F’s crew to do anything, but it seems he’s really into this expando-garden project. Can’t wait to put up new bird feeders in the vines, the kinds that dribble like crazy so the squirrels can feast too. Whatever’s growing out there is attracting several species of black, long billed birds and a few random gangs of butterflies — nice to see them dancing in the scattered sunlight under the silver maple. The dogs are saturated with heat and only occasionally cast a blear-eyed glace at the wildlife. Except for the ceiling fans, very quiet here today.

   With any luck the couple will take their breakfast in town today so I can take my teeth out of my tongue.

Back to chores.

been so busy with guests and pots here have not had a moment to write, well, not too many moments, though I have begun a new short story. Am in the midst of creating two characters, truly loathsome creatures who are demonstrating I have some issues to work out  haha so here are their beginnings.

From an email to a friend (a real writer):

Can’t wait to read your new detective novels — your settings are always so exotic and your plots so intricate, have no idea how you manage all that!

At your urging, have been making a stab at writing again — have some characters fleshed ( and I mean that seriously) out and some names, but can’t think of any earthly reason for them to exist. They’re mostly based on some strange characters I’ve met here and about but since I don’t know anything plot- like about their lives or why they are alive at all I can’t come up with any plausible reason for writing about them. 

    One of them is a huge toad-like slug of a woman named Delphinia, perhaps a nightmare version of that ill-tempered non-guest who managed not to stay here a while back. She’s a spiteful baggage, nasty and crude, and oddly, spends an inordinate amount of money on designer accessories about which she brags all the time.

   She hangs out at a dingy, grimy place called the Spitmire Cafe. She’s a low-rung factotum in a cleaning crew working for a huge office complex where she occasionally steals things like designer scarves and  handbags and even once, a pair of very expensive designer pumps two sizes to narrow for her feet, the flesh of which hangs over their sides and turns unnerving shades of puce when she wears them for more than a few minutes. Her circulation is poor, due to her excessive weight and sluggishness. She has diabetes, but pays no attention to her diet. She has a small forehead which broadens out into a squishy and bulldoggish jaw. The cluster of hairs that bristle from the deep creases along the sides of her mouth are bold and black, hinting at her nature, not quite a moustache but suggesting the possibility. Her protruding lower teeth sit at uneasy truce with each other, slightly overlapped, and her chins hang pendulous below as if exhausted in the battle against gravity. An unlikely strand of greasy yellow pearls appear in amongst the folds when she turns her head.   

  I could go on, but she’s really disgusting so I wont creep you out just yet, and you get the drift. Her pal, blond, feral, whip-stitch thin with razor lips and skeletal legs, is based on Ann Coulter. I think her name might be Ketra Flatrick. She, naturally, works in the cafeteria in the office complex. Though they secretly despise the other, they maintain an outward show of friendship since they have no actual friends.

HEEELLLLP

How do people come up with plots, anyway????????????? PT says I should expunge them both. He has a hard time with physical distortion though he doesn’t mind their nastiness a bit. F. continues to wonder where these charcaters come from.  Life just keeps tossing them my way, lucky me!!!   😀

More when I can struggle out from under chores.

one of my B&B crew just had babies  :):):) wish they were here! Am having a Puppy Attack.

The Hideous Guest Monster’s Hideous Husband called this morning to AGAIN insist on getting his deposit back, because he had (get this!) driven over here and had seen “someone here”. He’s now spying on us??????????? And he discovered there was “someone here”????? This is a guest house, of course there are people here  —  duuuuuuh. How is Master Spy to know if the room he had so summarily abandoned was being occupied by paying guests, our friends, our non-dead relatives, or even our own selves?  And when I told him no, he went on to whinge about the fact that the room, the whole house in fact, was “misrepresented” as sunny, while it is, according to him, dark.

    Have to admit I lost my temper and told him not only was I not refunding his deposit, I was requesting that he pay his balance in full for all the trouble he’d caused me with all stories about  dying relatives and cancellations and renewals of reservations and then leaving me with an untenanted room on one of the two biggest weekends of our (very short) season.

Whaddya wanna bet that asshole’s a lawyer (sorry R — no offense to others in the legal profession) and is getting read to sue.  Maybe he’ll sue the silver maple outside the window. Sheesh. Glad I belong to the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, am going there now with a freshly baked bag of popovers to thank them for their moral support in all this.

Hope all the rest of you have a GREAT day

🙂

Guest-disaster weekend began a week ago. The woman who had booked the room for her family called, all whiney and VERY pissed off, to tell me her aunt was dying in California (!!!) and she was going to have to cancel, could they have their deposit back. I said I was terribly sorry about her aunt and sure, if I could book the room, and I was certain I could, I’d refund or transfer her deposit to another weekend. Fine she said, but please DON’T tell my husband! I don’t want him to know about the cost of the room or the deposit!! A series of whinges about said husband and the suppposedly dying aunt followed, at length.

    Right away, I began to get the uh oh feeling –dysfunctional family time. I hate those. “No problem, ” I said, “I only discuss arrangements with the guest who makes the booking, so don’t worry.”  Ah, great relief, then more whinges. Life seemed very anoying to this woman. I wondered  briefly where she lived, and if it might be contagious. Two days later she called back to ask if I’d rented the room yet, which to my dismay I had not, this season being very slow for small businesses. “Well,” she said, “you won’t believe this (I already didn’t), the hospital in California made  a mistake. They mixed my aunt up with someone else, who died, but aunt is getting better, so we’d like to come after all”. Silent alarm bells went off all around my head like Christmas lights, but I said fine, happy to hear it, and answered a few hundred more questions about the room, the pool, the garden, the directions, etc. Then followed a long whinge on her, umm, gynecological condition, her antibiotics, the struggle to get everything ready, the Vuitton luggage, and frayed edges on the Chanel scarf,  and how she dreaded having to make all this effort. Hmm. Some vacation she was planning for herself and her loved ones!

    The day they were to arrive (at 12 noon, she told me, because her Husband insisted on an early start — but Don’t Tell Him I Said That). Fine.     Our check-in is usually 2PM if I have departing guests on that day,  which we did (lovely people!!), so we had to rush through the room changes — Natalia and I were in a fine sweat by 12.  

    On the Great Big Happy side-note of the day, I got a call from my dearest, oldest friend Carmen who unaccountably found herself in a position to come from Southampton to spend the afternoon with me. I was delighted beyond measure as I hardly ever see her and treasure every moment we spend together. 

    We’d planned to spend the day here instead of tooling around as I know that when people say they’re going to show up by a certain hour, there’s usually as reality disconnect of anywhere between two and five hours and knew we’d have to stay here till they arrived. Carmen and I had a nice little walk and talk and then went down to my studio. I wanted her to have one of the shell-shaped dishes she had admired to take home (she was delighted with my latest batch of Raku)  so I suggested she sit with me and rest her feet while I glazed and fired a few for her to choose among. As she’d never seen a Raku firing and as she has a natural curiosity and a lively interest in life and art I thought she might find it fun, and given the drama of removing pots from an 1800 degree kiln while they’re glowing red hot and then plunging them into cans of combustible materials making fabulous fire and brimstone, she did.

      Fortunately, the Disaster Guests (after four phone calls complaining about the traffic) didn’t show up until 4:30, just when Carmen and I finished our tea, a walk around and critique of The New Garden Project, and were pulling the cooled pots from the cans.

  As  I suspected they would be, they were absolutely horrible people, sulky, whiny, relentlessly grim — they clearly, truly hated each other. They refused to make eye contact with each other and with me, and I could tell from the minute they drove up they weren’t staying. I was surprised to see that The Mother was the driver. Given the already hinted-at nature of the Husband, I would have thought that an impossibility. The Extremeoluxury car itself was no surprise. What’s a few hundred thousand dollars anyway?

     First of all, she pulled into and parked in the narrowest section of the driveway which meant the car beside her could not move in any direction, When I waved her forward she behaved like a fourth grade student driver. First the lights went on and off a few times, then the engine, on and off a few times, then the windows up and down up and down, and finally the car inched forward two feet and stopped. I waved her forward again, indicating the end of the driveway which is very plain to see — it was only five yards dead ahead of her, but she had to turn the wheels dramatically, back up, inch forward, back up again, and finally crawl to the correct position. I’m muttering DUMBASS JERK into my fixed smile the whole time, praying they’ll turn around and disappear before I have to make nice. No such luck.

    At last, the fateful exit from the car. The Opening Scene, as it unfolded:

   The Mother opens her door but continues to sit lumpish and dour, heaving frustration and annoyance at what, I fear I’m about to discover. The traffic was TERRIBLE  –big surprise, this is the July 4th weekend in The Two Lanes Only Hamptons  (she expected maybe a deserted 8 lane highway ending in  Alaska?) — this delivered with an acid look in my direction as if it the condition of the roads is somehow my shoddy work. They had a TERRIBLY late start ( multiple causes specified and whinged over). The lunch they had in a nearby town was not only TERRIBLE but TERRIBLY expensive (again, Alaska, anyone?). I’m beginning to get the theme here: things are going to be terrible.

Thus, the beginning of the end. Back to past tense, might as well, since I am passed tense.

    She was about 65 and about that many pounds overweight, stubborn thighs thunderous with cellulite, all, and I mean ALL of which was visible due to the ooze from under the obscenely inappropriate black rayon mini-dress, black denim mini-dress complete with sequins and bugle beads, I might add. (Had it been up to me, they would not have been added, or even worn. ) She finally heaved herself out of the car, exposing more than even the most rabid paparazzi would have wanted to see, and the Twice Divorced Daughter (yes, I’d heard all about that too) and Husband followed. The Daughter had a long curly red hair and a lovely Pre Raphaelite profile  marred only by the frozen rage which drained and clenched her face quite shut. Short and round, she had her mother’s enormous thighs and a bumper crop of cellulite as well, all daringly exposed to the world in a pair of short shorts so constructed as to cut off all circulation to her private parts, which I’d sincerely wished had been a bit more private.  They might have cut off her vocal chords as well, as she utterned not one word. She wobbled toward the house on black stiletto heels, and I wondered if she had any idea they had just driven to a …. farm. I thought, ….not. The Father, in his 70s but looking more like an Egyptian mummy than anything actually alive, was small, thin, miserable,and sported a rakish dyed red combover that would have looked right at home in the fifties. I hope he has found his way back there as he was clearly furious with July ’07.

    I offered to help them with their things and show them to their room but they had to spend some time arguing over how to open the trunk, and then what to take out of it: a single jacket, a single pair of shoes. Not the luggage (hint, hint???). I waited patiently, though Carmen was inside where we had been in the process of digging out the recently Rakued pots from the post-firing reduction cans, and as the pieces were coming out so unearthly copperly cobaltly beautiful and spectacular I was eager to get beck to them , and to Carmen, whom I never see often or long enough.

  When I was finally able to shepherd them into the big, cool cathedral-ceilinged room, they shuffled and argued with each other,  and as I could tell nothing good was  going to come of this I told them I’d be in my studio, so when they got themselves settled in and ready to settle up, they could call me and I’d come upstairs. I left.

    Carmen and I spent a few minutes oohing and ahhing over the pots, jumped up and down a few times over the prettiest ones, and then the phone rang.  “We aren’t staying” the Husband began (HOORAY!) — “you have misrepresented the room, there is no real bed for our daughter, this is totally unacceptable”. First of all I neither represented nor misrepresented the room to him. I had talked only with The Mother, and had answered her endless questions during the course of six or seven phone calls during the previous week. I had told her the bed for her daughter was a very comfy couch with a foam mattress the size of a single bed, in the room which we give to couples who come with a third person, all of which she said would be fine. “You told us the room was sunny, this is DARK!” he said. “No, ” I said, “I told your wife we have two rooms, one, which sleeps only two people, has a ten-foot picture window and is bright and sunny. The bigger of the two rooms sleeps three. It has five good sized windows but is shaded by a huge silver maple, so is only sunny  in the morning. Your wife specifically requested the bigger room, which I have given you.”    At this point he grumbled a few more disappointments, ending with “And we want our deposit back” (WHAT? you’ve got to be joking). He went on in his best Little-Twerp- Bully on the Block tone, but as I’d already heard enough, I interrupted his diatribe. Bullies get nowhere with me, fast.

     “I’m sorry you’re disappointed but the rooms are clearly represented on our website with many photographs, and your wife has seen them all. And I’m sorry, but, no, I’m afraid you cannot have your deposit back, You booked, canceled, and then rebooked  already once this week, and 4th of July the weekend has begun. There is no way I can book the room now. ”  “Yes you can”  he went on to inform me (!!!!), “There are lots of  places out here full to capacity”. Oh fine, I wanted to say, you go tell them to book my room for me — let me know how that works out.  I was quiet, calm, cool, and not about to be bullied, which enraged him further. I was fully tired of him, so, to get him to leave: “Sir, I’ll be delighted to refund your deposit if I get the room booked”, I managed to squeeze in between his bullying and whinging, at which point he hung up and they left before I could even get up the stairs to see them off (read: shoo them out).

    I was a little shaken (who likes all that negative energy? Well, I know some people do,  but I’m not one of them), but Carmen was full of good cheer and support, and we laughed about it all and had a great time unearthing the pots (four of which I gave to her, and she now owns the title of Kiln Goddess.), had a very small vodka/seltzer/fruit juice drink together, and went out to the garden again to take pictures.   

     I got some really fabulous shots of her holding a pot she’d bought for a friend/colleague of hers, while she told me about the Bullovoa Watch ad she’d just shot and described the poses, which she reproduced for me, holding a vase instead of the watches — lots of fun. On top of one of the worst, I had one of the best days of the year.

Friends can make miracles, can’t they! I thank the gods every day for Carmen.

     A lovely lesbian couple with three great rescue dogs came to look at the rooms for a future booking, loved the place, couldn’t wait to put down a deposit. People like those make me happy to stay open for business.

    The Ivy Room is blessedly booked for a returning couple with their two Yorkies who adore this place, and it looks as if I might just possibly get one night booked into the currently vacant room, which, combined with the Disaster Guests’ now-non-refundable deposit, will make one sorta full weekend for me after all. Round and round it goes.

       email on this from my friend M (another healing- miracle friend):

 What slobs!  What do they mean, not as represented?  The rooms look terrific, great sitting room, too.   There are a lot of dreadful people about.

It strikes me that most of your stuff is coming out brilliantly recently although a Kiln Goddess sounds like a very good thing.

…know the feeling very well, R., but am not sure it’s all that unhealthy. There are folks in the world who separate people from animals, people from things, hell, even people from our own selves (body, mind, spirit, etc…). But from my perspective we’re not really all that separable.

     I’ve been what most people would consider overly attached to objects (not in the sense of material wealth) all my life (BIG surprise) but have only just recently begun to understand there’s nothing wrong with it, in fact, considering the state of the planet and what we all know now about its resources, there’s everything right with it.

     For example I noticed, a few years ago, that I experienced a surprisingly deep sorrow when our toaster oven died and had to be replaced. At first I thought I was being neurotic and ridiculous until I REALLY thought about it and began to remember all the delicious, fragrant breads I’d made that had been toasted in it, all the leftover meals so lovingly prepared and shared, all the scones and popovers heated for guests, all the simple, barely-noticed ways in which this very humble object had made our lives sweet. I dug a small grave for it in our dog yard and buried it with a haiku.

   Okay, for most people I’m sure that seems insane, but after all, the “things” we use every day contain within them a connectedness with our lives which over time, I believe, creates a bond of sorts. I think most people experience this on some level, and if we  acknowledged it, this planet might not be quite so overrun with the refuse of our careless lives. I know some guys who are fanatically devoted to various cars and/or boats, and one woman who feels that way about her sewing machine. I bet there are lots of us out there, but not so many who’d admit to being members in this particular club — think we’re just one step above (or maybe beneath) the pocket-protector crew.  🙂

     On a side note, this is partly why I switched from “fine” art to “utilitarian” art a long time ago. I believe the things we live with on a daily basis should, when possible, be works of art, should be things made with love and passion, and that their beauty makes our lives richer and happier, and why not, after all? So many cultures have practiced this philosophy, building  art into the construction and surfaces of common household objects, even making the houses themselves expressions of their artistic drive — I wonder why people are so easily persuaded to give it up.

Cold windy weather in Lucca, I hear — my friend Molly is so lucky! I LOVE cool weather in the summer, squooshy socks, sweathshirts, bonfires on the beach (or wherever) with smores!!!!! What could be better? Heat and humidity are really hard on me —  just have to endure and find things to distract myself from the sense of permanent wilt, but thankfully, none so far.

   This weather we’re having is so gorgeous it’s beyond belief: cool, breezy, a  glamorously iridescent sunlight in the leaves, and with the marvelous, alive scents of honeysuckle and fresh compost wafting across the fields this is unmistakably heaven. The smells call back my time in the Greek Islands and in Pavlo, on the farm, which I still miss in the deepest chamber of my heart.  Bittersweet memories, some going back at least a thousand years. Old aches are the most painful, yet the most dear.

   So far, no rain, so no desperately-disorganized-basement cleaning (yay!!!), and still acres and acres of garden work, Steve wants to unload yet more shrubs and trees on us. Can’t wait to see what F. comes home with today! Hope he brings some Rootone with him.

     Broke my favorite mug (this one had lasted about five years though, not bad), so will have to spend some time downstairs today making new mugs. I have about forty old mugs but none of them qualify as “favorite”. I’d tied La Shep to the bed the other night to keep her quiet — she was on a “slightest noise bark bark” pattern, very, VERY rare for her, but since we had guests I needed some uninterrupted sleep. She settled down immediately and slept like a little lamb all night, but in the morning when F got up, she’d forgotten she was tied and jumped off the bed, her rope taking my mug with it to the very hard, hardwood floor. Oh well. That’ll teach me to leave my mugs on the bedside thingie!

  It suddenly occurs to me that most people, when they break a favorite mug, go out and BUY another one. <G> what an odd idea!

since the garden crew left early (new tool shed still not finished but oh well), I grabbed F., whose toes were emerging from his worn out sneakers, and dragged him bodily to The Bass Outlet in Amagansett Square, a pretty, breezy little green with nice stores all around, a family sitting on the lawn, kids playing some sort of badminton,  the mother wearing a long white dress. I wondered briefly if the chamber of commerce had put them there and then decided it was too sunny and lovely to be cynical. So I left my Cynical Hat in the car, where the dogs promptly ate it.

   Got F. 3 pair of new shoes in spite of his protests that they weren’t “plain” enough: grey and tan, heaven help us. Trust me, with what most of them look like these days, his are PLAIN. If he wants them plainer he’ll have to make them himself. He’s now wandering around grumbling “The first guy who laughs at these shoes…” as if anyone would notice a sedate, ordinary pair of sneakers just because they’re not white. We’re so OLLLD!. Har.

     One of the stores in The Square had a gorgeous bamboo wind chime which F. bought  for us. Will take a picture as soon as I figure out… okay okay nm. Have said it too often already.

   Stopped into the Indian restaurant (The Hampton Chutney, cute name, a play on The Hampton Jitney, a wildly successful bus company out here) and got some tomato basil soup to go with the broiled flounder and brown rice am making tonight, and a mango smoothie. How did I manage to escape chores for two hours??? What a lovely afternoon!

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