Hot Yoga, Hot Coffee, Dickens and Senescence

A trio of updates about the dauntless author:

While on vacation in Virginia, I received inspiration from college roommate Andrew Simpson--who now trains runners--to try yoga. Friday night the boys and I flew back from Virginia. At 2am Saturday morning I went to bed. At 6am I rose, packed, drove to Seattle, and went to my first Bikram Yoga class. The 105 degree teacher and intense pace of the 90 minute class pleased my palate for extreme sports. I went back the next day, felt great all weekend, and felt great all week. I took two more 8am classes the following weekend, felt pretty good, and yet began to wonder if it is possible to become too healthy--I had my first headache in a while. Was I detoxifying too quickly? Was I in need of a cheese ball from Grandmom Nellie to halt the process?

While I ruminated this while meandering through the meadow of my week, another form of heat informed me I must needs take a respite from hot yoga. I have a lovely thermal coffee carafe, stainless steel, dishwasher safe--it keeps coffee piping hot. It also has an elegant lid, easy to flip open for dispensation, not necessarily designed for curvy roads on Whidbey Island. Driving up sinuous Campbell Road, the carafe found the propitious moment to remind me of the inadvisability of having it on the floor next to me feet, and cascaded more than a few cups of very hot coffee onto my left ankle. Not known for my ululations, I did, alas, emit a resounding howl. Over the next two weeks, at which time I had a break from Yoga, I learned the value of the gnarly looking blister that develops on top of the burn--after it popped after a week, like Proust for the Madeleine or early bed times, I pined for the days of the puffy and well padded ankle. I know have an attractive scar, a suave gait, and have returned to yoga. I felt great all weekend. We'll see if next weekend I feel too pure and require deep fried pickles or twinkies.

While you, O Reader!, might rejoin that the latinate words represent a degradation of my mental capacities and indeed imply senescence, I intend to plead to the contrary, that, indeed, I've been listening to so many Dickens novels (Nicholas Nickleby was the last), as well as those from A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan, that, like someone meeting a variety of long lost friends, I've reunited with beautiful words such as susurration and blandishment and relish endeavoring with the zeal of young Nicholas to insert them into my prose. While I do not think my mind is deteriorating, I do notice--as, for example, when I revisit Heart of Darkness after 20 years--that I am a more mature reader, that I don't glide over details or poetry to squeeze the literary juice out of a text. On the contrary, with Dickens and Conrad and Byatt and McEwan as my guides, I am constructing a mental map of London. One might quibble that I live more in London than in America. Perhaps I do.



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Location:Maxwelton Rd,Clinton,United States

sand, tree forts, indoor water parks

Although Whidbey's May can be cooler than summer in San Francisco, we've had glorious skies the past 2 weeks. Crispin and Liam have visited the beach a number of times with their mom and finally, getting the perhaps unconscious contempt that familiarity has bred by living so close, gone to the beach with me. Here they are working on dams and waterfalls as the tide returns.

Our beach visits have been superseded, however, by a project that has granted pleasure and satisfaction beyond bounds to the three of us. We have invaded the empty lot next to our rental--formally choked by a tangle of blackberry briars--and have endeavored to rescue and redeem it, much as the gardeners at Monticello or Versailles might have worked. After clearing blackberries from a clump of alder trees, we have begun to construct a tree fort.





Expect a more finished photo soon (we have the frame and joists up). Liam is pleased with his ability to hammer and saw, Crispin is thrilled to elevate himself six feet off the earth, and I am finding the satisfaction of having proper wood and nails. I have fond memories of constructing--or being present as it was constructed--a tree fort with a few dads (perhaps some moms?) in the woods behind our house on Frick Road. I remember the excitement of constructing it but not too many details--yet, lo, even as I write this, memories begin to bubble toward me.

While brothers will have their conflicts and dashing disappointments, Crispin and Liam have cheered my indoor space with multifarious creative play scenarios in recent days. Using hollow blocks and silks, they have fashioned water parks for their little ones (wee folk that an adult might confuse for a puppet or doll, but in truth the little ones have been invested with life by their kindergarten teachers).

Location:Maxwelton Rd,Clinton,United States