Happy Thanksgiving, continued

I was tempted to reference Christmas in the heading for this post, but resisted - never mind that it's now less than a month away.

Soon the Christmas ships begin four weeks of evening parades, a welcome brightening of our dark season. Many participating boats live in marinas along the lake below this building, so we get extra chances to check out their colorful decorations. Grand finale happens December 23 at Gasworks Park, at the north end of the lake. That night so many boats crowd close to shore that it looks, from here, as if you could walk right across the lake without getting wet.

Listening to NPR on the aftermath of the carnage in Mumbai, I realize that since 9/11 I've grown used to hearing an interesting group of international commentators from the Middle East and elsewhere. A few speak the measured, precise English that most Americans can't manage any more - others are more difficult to follow. It's all good ear training.

In Transylvania, we become de facto English tutors for our interpreters (especially for the ones whose English teachers give them time off because "you'll learn more from working with the Americans.") It's true - we correct past participles, tangled syntax and pronunciation when we can, all the while complimenting these ambitious 17 and 18-year-olds on their proficiency. I think English must be a fiendish language to learn, but our Hungarian/Romanian speakers just laugh and assure us that French and German (which they also study) are MUCH more difficult.

Happy Thanksgiving!

If this were Facebook, the first line would be "Julie wishes everyone a happy Thanksgiving."

What I'm really wondering is if the two friends who are spending the holiday in New York City went to the Macy's parade. Reports on NPR this morning made it sound fun, colorful - and cold!

Here we have a light gray day, with the sun working hard to break through. "Light gray" is a term I borrowed from a long-ago workmate, whose children (raised on the sunny side of the Cascades) informed her that there were three kinds of days in Puget Sound - light gray, medium gray and dark gray. It's an efficient way to sum up the weather, especially in winter, although this year we've had more sunny November weekends than usual.

Later today a neighbor and I are headed for the Edmonds ferry, to join friends in Kingston for dinner. On Saturday, L is cooking dinner for everyone at their new house on Vashon. Today she gets a welcome holiday from major food preparation because the restaurant is closed and they plan to spend the day quietly.

Last night I made two different recipes of Liptauer cheese, as contributions for various Thanksgiving feasts. Radio news was 90% Mumbai disasaters (BBC World Service, thanks to HD radio) with some amazing on-the-spot reports from reporters and survivors.

One businessman who lives in Mumbai said security around the Taj Mahal hotel had been noticeably increased in the past few weeks. When my brother visited India with a group last month, their original plan was to work part of the time in Mumbai. However, after a quick sightseeing visit, local contacts moved them quickly to a smaller city, explaining that Mumbai was not very safe.

Thinking about travel, and holidays

On a travel blog I follow, a recent thread was, "If you could go right now..."

Answers ranged from walking in Italy to a weekend in Las Vegas to Christmas markets in Europe.

I would probably have chosen Paris, since I was there last November. Today I even found this picture (blurry, but evocative) of the 2007 Christmas lights on the Champs Elysees.



This is the view from any bus crossing top of the boulevard, near the Arc de Triomphe. The hanging blue lights were long tubes, that contrasted with thousands of tiny white lights wrapped around tree trunks and branches. At the far end of the grand boulevard a tall Ferris wheel glittered on the Place de la Concorde.

Northern Europe has long dark evenings this time of year, but Christmas lights begin going up as soon as the All Saints/All Souls holidays are over. No Thanksgiving turkey to get in the way.

There are plenty of places a homesick American can find a traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Paris (biggest one is the celebration at the American Church) but I was quite content with roast lamb at the local bistro. Although I like Thanksgiving, I have never been locked into a prescribed celebration.

My Canadian parents never fully accepted a late November celebration of a holiday they had always observed in October. "Turkey is for Christmas," my mother said - so we sometimes had pheasant or ham.

My husband had no desire to replicate his family's traditional Midwestern Thanksgivings, so our celebrations varied widely. Sometimes we went to the movies before dinner, sometimes we were at Vashon, sometimes we gathered with other families.

The Thanksgiving everyone remembers most fondly was the year we took Chinese takeout to Makapu'u Beach on Oahu, sitting on the rocks to eat after a couple of hours of swimming and body-surfing. Hawaii was digging out from the first hurricane in many years, and on the way to the beach we passed more than one family making a barbecue Thanksgiving in the yard of a roofless house. The sun was shining, the water was warm, electricity was on for most of the time - all good reasons to celebrate.

I like Thanksgiving in Transylvania, which falls the last weekend in September. It's a harvest festival, celebrated in church, and one of only four times a year that Transylvanian Unitarian churches include communion in their service. Afterwards everyone gathers for a dinner that, if you're lucky, will consist mostly of food grown locally.

Winter on its way...

But fall isn't quite over. Bright leaves and flowers lasted into November, and before the pumpkins all turned to mush, they made cannon-ball bursts of color everywhere.

In Fremont, there was even a Great Pumpkin, on top of a studio building. Why the Norwegian flag was flying I don't know.



Today I heard from a reader (how nice to know there are three or four of you out there!) that it was time to "get back to the blog." No more excuses - election is over, the world continues to whirl, unsteadily, and readers feel neglected. Music to my ears, of course.

Wednesday night the orchestra presented the winter program as an open rehearsal/concert at a big retirement home. We first had to move tables and chairs, since the concert hall is really the home's dining room, but setup went quickly, and it was nice to have enough space for stands, instruments and cases. We played for a small but friendly audience, the kind that talks cheerfully through quiet passages and applauds between movements of a suite. Most residents were involved in the bingo tournament downstairs.

Afterwards we moved all the tables and chairs back where they belonged, closely supervised by a staff member with a numbered diagram of the dining room. Amateur musicianship is a workout for muscles of many kinds.

Back on track, I hope

In the weeks leading up to the election, my internet life revolved around a couple of political blogs, with quick visits to Facebook for relief. (Not much relief there, as the cohort fretted as much over the campaign as I did.) As a distraction, I could worry about finances - ugh.

And now the election is over - but we still have a scary economy, and a frustrating interregnum, longest in the civilized world (let's not talk about Zimbabwe, where all parties are trying to sort out an election that happened last spring...)

Meanwhile, I turn to books (see previous post) and music. This fall I'm playing in a community orchestra as well as the Sousa Band. Some weeks that means three rehearsals - band, orchestra, and choir. So far this fall Sousa Band has played a couple of gigs (where we are usually squeezed into very small performing spaces, and it is a distinct disadvantage to play an instrument that you hold out to the side!) We have one more performance before going on winter hiatus. Orchestra and choir concerts are coming up.

My brother and I finally caught up this week. Reason we missed each other at the airport is that he took a different way out of customs in order to change planes. I waited at the top of the stairs where arriving passengers usually appear. Since I hadn't brought my cell phone (and he didn't have the number anyway) we never connected.

Their group had many thought-provoking experiences in India, especially in the orphanage where they did some work, and the "rescue house," a shelter for women rescued from prostitution (where some of the "women" were 10 and 11 years old.)

Their next trip is to Peru. I'm thinking of asking to be the token Unitarian among the Nazarenes.

For a couple of days it has NOT RAINED. Tonight I looked east over the lake in time to see the waning (but still fat) moon come up, bright orange behind streaks of black cloud. For a few minutes it resembled the saggy pumpkins decaying on front steps and balconies around the neighborhood. No time to get a picture - moonrise is swift.

Big anti-prop 8 demonstration in Seattle today. Counter-demonstrators were in place, promising fire and brimstone for sinners, but there were a lot of straight families out to support their gay friends.

Classics of all kinds

For the past couple of years I've been trying to focus on classics - books I had ignored or avoided for decades. So far this year I've re-read War and Peace, and tackled Anna Karenina, the Odyssey, and A Sentimental Education, among others. (Sentimental Education is wonderful, but I gave up on Madame Bovary, grieved, exasperated and furious at Emma's heedless, self-destructive behavior.)

As always, there's a big pile of books next to the bed. Some have place markers (wait right there, Moby Dick, I'll be back) and some have yet to be opened (The Anatomy of Melancholy.)

In between, I read mysteries. Thanks to an excellent Everyman's Library edition that contains four of his best works, I've just discovered Raymond Chandler, and his private eye, Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is the archetype - a man with rough edges, a well-hidden heart, a strict private code of honor, a gun under his jacket, an ever-present cigarette, and a taste for trouble. (Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir" is a direct steal - especially his frowsty office in the Acme Building.)

Not that you'd want to go there, but the stories capture Los Angeles of the 40's and early 50's so vividly that you could take a shooting script off almost any page. (Chandler spent several years as a highly-paid screenwriter - and quit when he had made enough to buy an ocean view house in La Jolla.)

Here, for example, is Chandler on "art moderne" decor:

"They had half the second floor of one of these candy-pink four-storied buildings where the elevator doors open all by themselves with an electric eye, where the corridors are cool and quiet, and the parking lot has a name on every stall, and the druggist off the front lobby has a sprained wrist from filling bottles of sleeping pills.

The door was French gray outside with raised metal lettering, as clean and sharp as a new knife...Inside was a small and ugly reception room, but the ugliness was deliberate and expensive. The furniture was scarlet and dark green, the walls were a flat Brunswick green, and the pictures hung on them were framed in a green about three shades darker than that. The pictures were guys in red coats on big horses that were just crazy to jump over high fences. There were two frameless mirrors tinted a slight but disgusting shade of rose pink..."

And so on. The books are period pieces. Women wear clothes to die for, prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed, and cigarette smoke is pervasive as the LA smog. Be prepared for some jarring stereotypes - Chandler is anything but PC.

But how can you not keep reading when a line like this turns up on the first page -

"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."

Oh baby.

On a very important election night...

Polls just closed here, and at 8:02 I heard cheers, boat whistles and even firecrackers. It's New Year's Eve, a few weeks early.

I of course live in a firmly Democratic enclave, something I have thoroughly enjoyed after many years' residence in a Republican suburb (where two or three precincts could have their quadrennial caucuses in one average-size living room!) Now even that suburb is trending Democratic, at least in statewide races - who would have imagined it?

Tonight my only regret is that somehow my brother and I missed connecting at the airport, so I didn't get to hear about his trip to India first-hand. Although there is only one place that arriving international passengers can get to the baggage carousels, we still didn't find each other.

McCain is better than his supporters, who just booed when he said he had called to congratulate Obama. Later, the people at the Biltmore actually applauded. Still, McCain is rising above the level of his campaign. Let's hope the civility continues.

I liked the echoes of MLK in Obama's speech. For those of us who vividly remember 1968, tonight is the kind of leap into the future we never expected to live long enough to see.

Here's a link to a very nice post about voting in person, from my son's blog.