In the Garden

My first home was under the apple tree. There was a bedroom, a kitchen where I made mud pies, and a bathroom, with a toilet roll hanging from a branch, just in case. I must have been two or three years old.

In the mornings I woke at dawn and walked over next door, through the garden. My grandfather would make me a coddled egg in a porcelain egg coddler with pink roses on it and a silver lid. An egg coddler is a vessel for soft boiling eggs so that they can be served without eggshells.

I played with my dolls in the nursery, or cut up earthworms in the garden to see which half would live. At first both halves squirm around a little, then finally only one crawls away. I kept earthworms in a big glass jar in the nursery.

At dusk I helped my grandmother pick flowers and dead-head the roses. We floated the rose heads in a giant glass bowl filled with water, and arranged the flowers in a vase.

The apples, I ate as soon as they grew large enough to put my teeth into. Grown ups said they were sour or unripe, and would give me a stomach ache, especially the cooking apples, which were my favorites, but I liked them that way.

I liked sour. When I was offered a sugar cube with my polio shot I said I would prefer half a lemon. They dressed me in pink taffeta and curled my hair with rollers, and took me to the marquee at Princess Helena's garden party, where I impressed strangers by eating the lemons.

Sometimes my father would take me to the greengrocer's, past the chemist with the 30 year-old cat that had been around since my mother was a child, and was fed on drugs. The greengrocers' had a mynah bird that could talk, and once when I was a baby in my mother's arms I ate the marigolds she was holding while everyone watched the mynah bird. I could remember all the women staring at me, and reassuring my mother that I would be fine. At the greengrocer's, my father bought me salt and vinegar flavor potato sticks.

My grandfather liked the cox's apples best, and shook them to hear the seeds rattle in the core if they were ripe, but I preferred the cooking apples, because they were always sour. When there were guests for dinner, we ate in the dining room, around the long, shiny mahogany table, sitting on gold velvet chairs with a big oval hole for a back. Gramps cooked lamb, usually, and sometimes baked stuffed cooking apples for the dessert, but I didn't like them as much that way. I hated meat of any kind and, for a long time, the expression 'by mistake' conjoured up for me an image of a piece of stake accidentally rolling off the table or the edge of my high chair.

With my grandmother, I walked to the other grocery store, on late summer nights, to get strawberry ice-lollies with vanilla icecream inside them. We walked home slowly, stopping to feed the ice-lolly stick to the stone lion on a gatepost along the way, a ritual sacrifice that in retrospect strikes me as selfishly anarchic.

Nearby was a college with green, grassy slopes I could roll down, and two giant stone lions to climb. My father showed me how to strike two ornamental flintstones together and make sparks in the gathering darkness. Then we went to the vending machine where I delighted in the ordinary magic of putting coins in and seeing the salt and vinegar crisps or a can of Fanta drop out.

The cafe in Golders' Hill Park served homemade lemon sorbet, but only in the summer. In long-forgotten winters we walked deliriously far, to Kenwood, for snacks whose memory is mixed with that of an ancient wooden carriage, like Cinderella's, out in the woods.

When my friend came over we dressed in fancy clothes, my grandmother's pearls, and feather boas. My great grandfather used to grow ostrich feathers in South Africa, and went broke when they went out of fashion during the Great Depression. My grandmother told stories about him.

My friend was a little older, and not enamored with my apple tree home, especially the toilet arrangements, although we did make mud pies together. She had the idea of washing the dolls and giving them haircuts.

She had numerous brothers, half-brothers, and step-brothers. They were all packed into a Volkswagen van to go out, and before bedtime we played paper and pencil games, and her mother read us a bedtime story from Beatrix Potter. I had never experienced bedtime before, and had difficulty both falling asleep and staying asleep in the morning.

The last time I saw this friend was on 9/11. We were both picking up children from a primary school in Hampstead, me my own children, and she a family she was working for as a nanny. She had a baby in a stroller. I had no idea what had happened until one of the other mothers or nannies in the playground told me. It was about 3 in the afternoon. After that, we all sat there in silence, incredulous, picked up our children and left. Later that afternoon, at the shopping center, a woman was watching the planes crash over and over on all the TV screens, watching and wailing, as I walked by with my children to play in the toys department.

Although we did not keep in touch, my friend and I, our paths intersected a number of times. She used to teach sign language at the nursery school where I sent my oldest son. I felt sorry that she had always loved children so much and worked with them since leaving school at 15, and yet I was the one who had my own. Most of the other parents were my parents' generation.

When I was three or four someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I wanted to be a hippie, and in my mind's eye I pictured myself hiking barefoot to the North Pole, which I imagined as a striped barber pole in the snow. I liked being barefoot, and looked up to the long-haired teenage cousin who had made smiley-faced iced cookies for my birthday party.

My favorite color was transparent. My friend and I played a game in which we snaked a skipping rope along the floor and hopped over it, naming a new color each time. My father tried to persuade me that transparent was not a color, explaining how clear air ended in sky blue. I already knew to paint the blue sky down to the rooftops, instead of a blue line at the top of the page. I spent long moments staring into the thick side of pieces of glass, which invariably looked greenish when turned to the light. But transparent was still my favorite color, even if it didn't really exist.

I liked dancing to music on our new record player, and staring into the red power light. It seemed there was a magical kingdom of fire fairies in there.

My brother was very sick as a baby. At night his little hands were restrained in cardboard tubes so that he couldn't scratch at the red eczema that covered his skin. He and my mother were in and out of the hospital for weeks at a time. My father brought her gemstones from the geological museum, and we hid them around the room, touching their cool, smooth surfaces. When she came back from the hospital she was pleased to find them but not as much as we had hoped. My father tried to explain to me that my brother couldn't breathe because of his asthma. He said if I breathed in and out of a paper bag I would feel the same way, but that didn't seem like a good idea. I had a repeated nightmare about pushing my brother in his pushchair accidentally into the street. He got run over by a car, and then strangers with glowing green masks instead of faces, like sculptors' maquettes, looked on at me disapprovingly. Another dream was driving by an abandoned fairground where my father had lifted me up onto the flying airplanes before the ride started to turn, much to my mother's consternation.

When I turned six we moved to Israel, in the hope that the climate there would be better suited to my brother. I traveled with a bag of beads from my dressing up days, and a pretty straw hat with flowers on it that soon got lost.

My other grandmother had no apple trees in her garden, but there were plenty of other fruit. A lush, fruitful lemon tree, a loquat tree, and a guava tree. I learned Hebrew quickly, so much so that a couple of months after we moved I was terribly offended when my cousin said that I still had an accent, although later I was given to understand she had meant this as a compliment. In the mornings I woke up alone, at dawn, and played with my fingers. Each hand was a different family. Before moving to Israel, I used to worry that my life had been a dream, and I would wake up to find out that I was still only two or three years old. Now I felt confident that it wasn't a dream, because I had learned a new language, and I could not have invented a whole new language on my own.

I played with my kitten, wearing my new straw hat in the hope that the piercing hot sun shining through the holes would give me freckles like my friends in the village. My grandmother yelled not to climb on the fruit trees, so we walked hand in hand to the playground opposite, and sat in the fiberglass structure atop the slide, under the eucalyptus trees, talking about politics and death. My cousins' father had died in a motorcycle crash before my youngest cousin was born. His picture was by my grandparents' bedside, and he looked like his brothers who still lived in the village, and let us taste milk squirted right out of the cow. I wondered what death was like for the fallen nestling we tried to autopsy with sticks, and whether the chick my baby cousin had squeezed too affectionately with her clumsy hands had survived. My grandfather asked me to help him count the chicks in the hatchery, but they were all moving about and I had little confidence in my estimate so I just stopped after I reached one hundred.

The kitten was run over before she grew into a cat, and my grandparents' little dog was poisoned. My cousins told me that the children in the village were saying my friend and I had got naked together under the loquat tree. So I played with the girls instead, teaching them chess, and coming close to winning the swimming race in the new communal pool doggy-paddle, except for not touching the wall at the other end. Or maybe it was my cousin who almost won, she was the better swimmer at that age.

Applecore #70

Remember that river near Reno? It was actually hard to get to from the freeway, so I planted this Colorado gala applecore from wholefoods in Utah in a dry riverbed nearby. The apple had survived burning man, with a thin coating of playa dust.

Applecore #69

Postultimate apple? This red delicious from Washington which was the only fresh thing at a service station in the middle of Nebraska was so delicious that, well, I just couldn't let it go. First I tried to feed it to some cattle in a truck, but they shied away and wouldn't make eye contact, perhaps traumatized by their journey or having a premonition of its destination. So I planted it in Wyoming, attracted by the espresso sign. The youngest member of the family was going
through a why phase, and I taught him the color orange.

Purple Skies Over Iowa

clouds stretch purple across the sky
Gold sunbeams shoot through them
Air filled with the scent of corn
Filling the windmills, that fuel my green hope
This way of life can continue forever
Freeway, a ribbon stretching from coast to coast
Like a destiny. On the radio, Ode to Joy
Blares out, a sonorous reminder of Spinoza.
Finally the sun is reborn
Hatched from the clouds, a copper egg
Too bright to look at until
It momentarily stains them with red
Snuffing itself out behind the hills
Like the last puff of a cigarette
Before the sky turns purple again.

After the Last Apple

Ulysses wanted to go to the theater, so I found the nearest play. It
happened to start with the story of the first apple, the one eaten by
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Ulysses in Washinton Square

with his friend Sticky.

Applecore #68

In Washington Square opposite my son Ulysses' dorm at nyu.

Planting the last applecore

Eating the last apple

Applecore #67

In a rock overlooking Hecksker playground, in Cenral Park. Some
students were playing jazz in a nearby tunnel.

New York Apple

There was an apple of sorts nearby.

Applecore #66

Near the laundromat on Broome where I was doing some washing.

Applecore #65

Urban applecore. In the scrap next to some trees, behind our hotel in
TriBeCa.

Applecore #64

Planted as an offering to Ganesha at his shrine in Kripalu. The insect
was nearby.

Earth is Hard

Earth is hard for me
I am like an autumn leaf
Fiery, red, yellow, rising
Into the blue sky, wide open
Floating up in the air
Full of intellectual passions
Wafting down to the stream
Dancing upon the rivulets
Flowing between the pebbles, rocks
Hard. Earth is hard for me.

Note: earth here refers to one of five elements (with sky, water, air,
fire). Earth has the quality of a steady regular practice in yoga.
Walking through the labyrinth I realized I do have a steady practice
in apple planting. I guess I can do earth, if it's something entirely
self-determined. Even though I can tie myself in knots that would be
painful for most people because I lack the earthy quality of
resistance in my hips, psoas, and another muscle down there that I
hadn't even heard of.

Applecore #63

Behind the Buddha and peace pole. I decided to walk back out barefoot
and backwards. It was interesting. The slight slope of the ground,
barely noticeable while walking forward, felt like a mountain. At
times I stumbled backward, down into bushes. At times I felt strained,
as though I was climbing up a steep hill. At one point, i felt an
irrational fear of stepping on a snake, there to hunt fieldmice like
the one I saw in the labyrinth the other day.

Applecore #62

In the labyrinth on the way in, on the second evening. I decided to
walk barefoot.

Applecore #61

In the center of the labyrinth at Kripalu, opposite the Buddha, as an
offering. It was dark.

Freedom of Thought

Not all rivers run
From the mountain spring
To the ocean, or lake
Stately in their progress

Some rivers are rainfall
Streaming over the green earth
Gathering in ditches
Gaining strength in numbers

Some rivers run dry
Vanishing
In the desert heat

All we can say is
In one place, at one time
One river runs
Mostly one way

And still waters
Evaporate
Wind churns the clouds
Every which way

But we are not
Raindrops

Sent from my iPhone

View, Poem

Anusara Yoga Workshop Aug 24

We are each our own unique being
A node in the web of light
Of the universe
We draw in from those around us
And pulse back out
The same light that we drew
And more
Making a shining, radiant web
To surround all the darkness
Within and without

In my body
I experience wholeness
When I pull into my own inner being
My core
Skeleton
Heart
And reach it back out
To touch others

Applecore #60

On the way back to Kripalu. This was a windfall apple from the orchard
there, and the previous one was from Great Barrington.

Applecore #59

Next to what looked like a redcurrant tree, but I was too chicken to
try the berries.

Applecore #58

By the Monk's Pond, near Kripalu.

Apple orchard at Kripalu

Applecore #57

In front of this rock, at Simon's Rock where I dropped my son off for
college. Why does it feel as though I am leaving a part of my heart
here, as I suddenly realize he will be over 3000 miles away from home?

Hugging the Appletree

Let's hope it lasts through this storm. I'm sure it has seen more than I have. Lightning never strikes twice? Who knows. I'll be watching, but I'm going inside now.

Waiting for the Storm

In front of an appletree, behind Uncommon Grounds, which is more Berkeley than Berkeley.

Applecores #55-56

So I planted two applecores in the roots of a nearby stump, between the appletree whose fruit I'm holding and the crabapple behind. Afterwards, I ate the apple. It tasted a little dry and watery, not as good as my California Gravensteins, but I saved the core and will plant it later as the Great Barrington apple. I wonder if seeds from this appletree resulted in the glorious crabapple? If so, then maybe crabapples are not too bad. They make beautiful trees.

Preexisting appletree

There was already a fruitful appletree in the parking lot of the historic cafe through the fence from Travelodge.

Applecore #54

In the same broad area.

Applecore #53

Further behind Travelodge.

Applecore #52

Beside the pool at Travelodge, Great Barrington

Grandma's Restaurant in Albany

I can see myself spending some time here on Monday, when they receive the warranty strut for the suspension and try to unglue the rusted rear brakes to adjust them. Today I waited a couple of hours before they gave up. I hope there is wireless internet... Perhaps I'll try the apple pie?

Okay, I didn't plant these

Nothing seriously wrong with the car, I hope. Just some strange
creaking I wanted checked out.

Intrepid Voyagers to Caves of the Wind

Applecore #51

In the Niagara Falls parking lot, next to the border crossing.

Applecore #50

On the 90 freeway, North East, Pennsylvania.

At Chicago Art Institute

A splash of gold on

A shiny black screen reflects

Itself, its own world

Colorful nobles

Gather in little brushstrokes

In back, wild geese splash

It is only our

Scientific view that frames

Monet's color schemes

Leonardo's depth

According to perspective

As discovery

While medieval vines

Swirl around the Jesse tree

Ancient prophecy

Of Jackson Pollock's

Splash paintings in miniature

Purely aesthetic

Elegy on an Old Pair of Jeans

They served me well for seven years

Tattooing my ass with navy swirls

That never failed to draw compliments

Until they grew threadbare and in fact grew a hole

So I bought some new ones from Loehman's

Which turned out to be the same brand

But not as nice

Maybe I can mend them...

Applecore #49

At Beach 7, Presque Isle State Park, Erie Pennsylvania.

Seagull Ate One Applecore

Applecore #48

At a service station on mile 77 of the Ohio Turnpike 80/90.

Applecore #47

In the parking lot meadow by Best Western, Chesterton.

Applecore #46

By the lake behind Best Western near Chesterton Indiana. A woman at breakfast pointed out the swans in the distance. She said there used to be three, and now there are only two. She and her husband were traveling from Colorado, taking their daughter to college in Ohio. They were locked out of their room because the dad was in there with both keys typing away on a computer and not hearing them knocking. The woman was afraid the front desk wouldn't cut her daughter another key without id. I wondered for a moment if she was worried about this because she was part African American, although the daughter looked white. I wonder if black people just get asked for id more often. The woman was a judge, and her husband a lawyer. Their daughter also wanted to study law, but the woman thought she was too shy to be a trial lawyer. Dante also wants to study law. I had never thought of shyness as a problem, I think it's just something you grow out of. I did.

Maybe the issue with the keys was because they had prior experience dealing with the front desk when they forgot their room number the night before. Dante also forgot our room number, but fortunately I still had the little keys envelope. I have only recently learned to forget numbers like other people do. I remembered the number from a phoncard in Italy in the summer of 2007 for about a year, and now I am worried about losing track of my applecores count. I wonder if I have sustained some brain damage, or if this is simply a result of getting older, or both.

It seems to be since I had surgery on my knee in December.

Matisse Apples

Cranach the Elder Apples

Cezanne Apples

Psychology of the Healthcare Debate

I think I finally figured out why many Americans are so up in arms against the public healthcare plan. There are two psychological forces at work. The first is loss aversion, and the second is the Little Red Hen. People who have been putting their money into health insurance all their lives are afraid that they will lose something that, in spite of all its faults, they are already invested in. The Little Red Hen planted the wheat, without any help from the other animals although she asked for help, then harvested it, threshed it and ground it into flour, again on her own. She baked it into fresh bread whose odor attracted all the other animals, who suddenly took an interest in what she was doing. She pointed out to them that she had done the work all on her ow, and then she ate the bread all on her own. I think this story expresses a basic human sentiment of right and wrong. These people who have been paying into health insurance all their lives don't want the others, who have not put in that money, to benefit. If I'm right, this will be a transitory sentiment that will go away once the public healthcare plan has been set in motion. I think all this talk about tax worries is fluff, hiding unconscious Little Red Hen motivation. Dante thinks I am being too cynical.

Nomo

We heard this band practicing from behind the hedge in the flower garden, and we were drawn to come closer, in fact all the way across the Pavilion lawn to the edge of the amphitheater, which was closed off. There was a group of groupies hooping. We sat down on the wall and listened to the entire rehearsal, clapping after each piece, as more people gathered around. Even from this distance, I felt drawn to the drummer of the band, whose energy made me look up from my cellphone and somehow feel as though he was noticing me (almost certainly an illusion as he took up maybe 64 pixels of my vision). Someone mentioned there was going to be a free concert in the evening, so we came back and thoroughly enjoyed it, in spite of the rain.

Applecores #44-45

In the meadow next to the Hampton Inn, Madison WI (Middleton).

Applecore #43

Beside the railroad crossing at Devil's Lake State Park, Wisconsin.

Roasted Apples Recipe #2

Homemade apples.

Ingredients:

4 smallish apples

4 tsp currants

4 tsp maple syrup

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup water

Vanilla ice-cream (optional)

Preheat oven to 360F (180C). Core the apples with a small paring knife, and preserve the cores. Fill the cavities with currants and maple syrup. Place in a small baking tray, with water on the bottom. Sprinkle with cinnamon, and bake for 20 min or longer, until golden on the outside, and almost bursting. While the apples are baking, plant the applecores.

Best served with vanilla ice-cream.

Wait for the vanilla ice-cream chapter at the end.

Roasted Apples Recipe #1

Campfire apples.

Ingredients:

4 smallish apples

firewood

matches

Light the firewood, preferably in a safe container with a barbecue grill. Lower the grill and place the apples on top. Turn over occasionally, with caution, until blackened on all sides. Apples are infernally round and tend to roll into the fire. They are slippery as fish, and difficult to spear and unspear.

Eat when good and squishy. You will likely need to peel away some charcoal from the outside, but it's worth it. These apples are delicious.

Ethics and Apple Planting

There is clearly something a little off about planting apple cores in national parks, even though this activity may not be explicitly prohibited, like leaving trash, or taking away wildlife, fossils and minerals. It would not do if everyone planted apple cores, that would disturb the ecosystem. One view of ethics is that one should consider each action as though the whole of humanity might do it. Would it be good if everyone did? This view is expressed in Sartre's essay Existentialism is a Humanism. I told Dante about it and he thought it was a good rule, most of the time. But not to worry about the apples. It seems to me unlikely that everyone would want to plant apple cores, or in fact do many of the things that I do. I think the only sensible universal rule is do not kill, and there are quite possibly exceptions to that. I'm not a pacifist. Levinas said that we are called on by the other not to kill, and that makes sense to me. He also said that first and foremost we are responsible for the freedom of others.

Driving across the country is also not the most environmentally friendly act. On the radio, I heard an interview with two men who decided to make the drive virtually, online, instead, using Google Earth and Youtube. There is something sterile about that, to me. Although perhaps I should look into planting more virtual apples.

I do think about the carbon footprint. If any of the apple trees grow, I reckon we will be ahead of flying.

Feeling Unwell

Why does this always happen while traveling? I was finally able to swim, and after not sleeping much at all last night I wanted some exercise. So I looked online, and found this swimming lake in the middle of Wisconsin called Devil's Lake, which was highly recommended. It was a lot further off the freeway than I had expected, but the water was nice and warm, and we had a good time. I'm so glad we decided not to camp! Driving into Madison, through fields of beautiful corn bathed in golden sunset light, I started feeling congested. Then we arrived at a gorgeous new Hampton Inn, with a whirlpool, and I thought that would make me feel better, except that I couldn't resist turning on the bubbles, umbrella showers and fake palm-tree sprinklers and playing in the kids' pool as well. After a glorious hot bath, I still felt ill. We made it as far as the elevator on our way to get dinner, and then we came back up from the car with ramen noodles and Dante made me some in the hotel coffee jug, followed by hot cranberry juice.

Applecores #41-42

On the bank of the Mississippi in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I didn't mean
to miss Minnesota, it just happened. Maybe I'll stop there on the way
back.

Applecores #39-40

Along the fence, behind the Super 8, Cliff Avenue, Sioux Falls.

Apples are not Money

As my grandmother used to say, money doesn't grow on trees. So apples are not money. Where does money grow? In people's imaginations. Money is one of our most interesting and complex artifacts. But money is not happiness. This is what inspires Jefferson's amendment to John Locke's philosophy that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions" to the famous "inalienable rights... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Note the relevance to the healthcare debate. In England, following Locke, people have a right to health (and wealth). Here in the US, we have a right to follow our dreams (interpreted by capitalists as money). If I dream of apples, this might make me happy but it doesn't add to my wealth. People think they know what money is, which is perhaps one of the causes of the present unrest about the public healthcare plan. People think that public healthcare will cost tax money. They don't realize that the money goes around in circles, with the drug companies funding parties left and right in this plutocracy, making so-called health (in practice the consumption of FDA approved drugs) the most expensive in the world, precisely because there is no negotiation, no setting of limits by the government in favor of the public good, all to fill the coffers of private interests such as drug companies, HMO's, and a few very greedy doctors with money.

There is a story about the Sultan's daughter, who was sick and dying from a mysterious ailment. The only thing that could save her was an apple from the Tree of Life. But how to get that apple? The rabbi's daughter, Leah, fell asleep thinking about this. And because she was so good, she dreamed that she was in the Garden of Eden. Walking through the beautiful garden, she wondered where the tree of life was. She asked one of the animals for directions, and he directed her to the center of the garden, where she found two trees. Coiled around the trunk of one of the trees was a snake, sleeping. Remembering the story of Genesis, Leah recognized that one as the Tree of Knowledge, so she quickly picked an apple from the other tree, deducing that it must be the Tree of Life. To her surprise, when she awoke, the apple was still there on her pillow. She told her father of the dream, and he brought the apple to the Sultan's daughter, who ate it and survived.

Some thread is missing here that links all this to Annie Apple, the street peddler (and possibly former prostitute) who brings luck, wealth and health to a New York gangster in the movies Lady for a Day, a Pocketful of Miracles, and the story Madame La Gimp by Damon Runyon, possibly published together with Guys and Dolls. I suggest we take this thread, and go fishing for trout...

This argument is going around in circles, like a snake biting its own tail, coiled, perhaps, around an apple or an apple tree. Money, apple trees and trout streams can all grow in the fertile soil of our imaginations, providing we are reasonably free. Free from the threat of sudden death, starvation, and falling into illness. Free from other menaces I probably can't even imagine.

Fortunately, my son also likes listening to public radio. As we drove through the Badlands in South Dakota, we heard a reading of an essay from the 1950's by Bernard Baruch, from which I quote: "Paradise is not for this world. All men cannot be masters, but none need to be a slave. We cannot cast out pain from the world, but needless suffering we can. Tragedy will be with us in some degree as long as there is life, but misery we can banish." And also: "Because I place my trust in reason, I place it in the individual. There is a madness in crowds from which even the wisest, caught up in their ranks, are not immune. Stupidity and cruelty are the attributes of the mob, not wisdom and compassion."

There followed a program about the anniversary of Woodstock, and another on the anniversary of Elvis' death, as the freeway stretched out like a ribbon straight in front of us, right across South Dakota and into the heart of a storm, in which we found sushi in Sioux Falls, after driving around in circles for hours searching for a hair salon.

View from the Road, Badlands

Applecore #38

By the visitor center at Badlands National Park.

Mount Rushmore Cricket

Or maybe a grasshopper?

Dante with the Presidents

Washington