Jambalaya, baby

It's just a confluence, I guess.

Simultaneously thinking:

-- There's a hurricane heading toward New Orleans exactly three years after Katrina; and,

-- What to feed a dozen for dinner?

So, apply to the trinity in both senses. First, the theological, though I'm about over the prayer thing. Second, and with more tangible results, the holy mix of onion, celery and pepper -- after making the roux, of course, and after doubling the garlic.

The mother broth, with the sausage, can sit in the fridge for a day, and Friday night I throw in the rice and shrimp.

I probably won't have a chance to do much to the blog from Friday on, so have a good holiday.

The upside of rain

Busy, busy getting ready for a dozen folks for Labor Day -- Robert loves a packed house for a long weekend, me somewhat less so -- so I've not had much time to play with my new camera.

Twice the resolution, twice the electronics, half the size and weight and about the same cost as my trusty Olympus, now four years old and showing so much wear that the chrome is gone at the corners.

You might click on the plumeria picture above, or any of its blowups, to see how the new Canon is working so far.

Fay again? More like Feh

I spent today navigating (slowly) north through the S-curved remnants of Fay -- one tornado north of Cordele, another north of Macon, both forecast to pass over I-75. Georgia Public Radio apologized for interrupting some calming Ravel and Dvorak with disquieting news, but I was grateful for the heads-ups.

Less grateful for the blinding rains, but I guess a few hours of elevated adrenaline levels can be aerobic.

At any rate, Tennessee seems to be getting about the same net rain from the storm that Key West did. At least it was a new experience: driving into a storm one week, and back into it a week later.

Love thy neighbor (but lock thy door)

A few weeks ago, Father Don, down the street, took his dog out for their daily first-thing walk. When they got back, they met someone bolting out the vicarage door. The man was carrying Don's laptop, as well as some of his priestly jewelry. (Espiscopal priests don't take vows of poverty; still, it was apparently only a few hundred dollars' worth.)

The other morning on the porch I saw Don and dog going by and called out to commiserate about the loss.

"It's OK," he chuckled. "They got [him, in accordance with the old Watergate cleanup rules]. The cops knew who he was, and when they got the chance to pat him down he was dumb enough to still have the chains in his pocket." He laughed, and moved on as the dawn patrol of garbage trucks moved in.

I hate to admit it, but that has changed the way I live: I now keep doors locked when I'm here alone, even those behind the gates.

Like the tides here, petty crime rises and falls, and in this small an island "the usual suspects" really are the usual suspects.

Our town at the literal end of the road has always had its losers, screw-ups and blowouts, and there's no better place to understand that than the daily roster of mug shots from the county sheriff's office. It's required reading for those of us who sometimes wallow in schadenfreude. ("Oh, look! There's. . . .") These souls are all innocent until trial, of course, and most of the pickups are probation violations ("Come on vacation, leave on probation. . . ."), but the occasional gold-painted mime busted on a charge of selling weed at Mallory Square does catch the attention.

And it does seem clear, from these pictures out of the last few months, that almost no one arrested is having a good hair day.

Speaking of carpets

When the guys in 'Nooga were flipping their wares for us, I had a moment in time, considering how long how many vendors had done just this -- beckoning, blandishing, spinning tales about their wares, sizing up their customers, bargaining, closing the sale.

I thought of one of Amanda's pieces that's now in Key West, and was sorry I couldn't share it with them -- though I do now.

Its twin was on the Roadshow a few years ago. It's about 6 inches high, spelter, polychrome, probably from Vienna in the '20s. It speaks: "I have this treasure for you."

And I think of Rilke in the same era:

Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there,

on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed

what here they could never master, their high daring

figures of heart’s flight,

their towers of desire, their ladders,

long since standing where there was no ground, leaning,

trembling, on each other – and mastered them,

in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead:

Would these not fling their last, ever-saved,

ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally

valid coins of happiness in front of the finally

truly smiling pair on the silent

carpet?

The best-laid . . . rugs

A couple weeks ago, Robert and I found a few carpets to take the place of the solid-blue pieces we'd gotten from Steller for the living room and den: The solids were a great color, but they showed every footstep and crumb and had no . . . soul.

So we picked up some knockouts on sale in Chattanooga: a fairly old Tabriz for the living room, a newish Kazakh for the den (at the bottom, probably made by Borat's uncle Yanoush) and a nice old Heriz runner. The reds, the blues, the peachy oranges. . . .

We planned to have them shipped after we got here in late September -- but then I came down for Fay, and the schedule moved up and . . . bang, here they came in a big, heavy bundle that the burly UPS guy actually asked for help with.

I wrestled them into place as best I could (these things are not light) and figured that when Gregory came to clean house on Friday he could help me with all the furniture-moving to get them down.

I called Steller's, and got hooked up with their ace installer out on Riviera Drive (a terrific guy), and went out to get pads cut, and wrestled the pads back home.

And then Gregory's infected finger (a splinter from years ago, gone very bad) kicked in, and instead of coming here he went to the doctor to see if the finger had to come off (thank God, it didn't.)

Well, I thought, at least get the runner down. But, as you see just above, there were problems even with that pad, and no hope of my arthritic fingers working the knife.

So, roll up the big ones (after admiring them almost in place) and wait for Robert's tremendous carpet lore to come into play.

Though I still can't help but think of that classic Jack Warner quote: "I don't want it right, I want it Tuesday."

Can't wait

You're not likely to miss Rick Worth tooling around town in his Pugmobile. (Though he said it caught fire briefly -- purely mechanical -- a few miles up U.S. 1 a little bit ago).

"Pugs in Space" is the theme of his Conch Cruiser -- that's a replica of a pug up in the dogodrome, not a stuffed pooch -- and he's been working on the rolling piece for a few years.

He's a great guy (which I discovered when he was part of the good-karma posse against a couple of pit bulls and their even more frothing owner), a vestryman at the church up the street (he painted the faux stained-glass window on the front, as well as some great stuff inside) and one hell of an all-around artist (you ought to see his triumphal mural "Wilhelmina Crossing the Seven-Mile Bridge," on the wall outside Bobby's around the corner).

And today came the news that he'd been selected as the poster artist for this year's Fantasy Fest, "Pirates, Pundits and Political Party Animals." Haven't seen the design yet, but I'm willing to bet there's a pug somewhere.

Altius et fortius, anyway

Swifter I wasn't too good with, but the other two parts of the Olympic motto -- higher and stronger -- were as good as I get them today.

The temperature got in the way of "citius" again, and I had to do 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of recuperation, over and over. Lots of water, too, considering my quarts of sweat.

But I trimmed the hell out of the deck, with no mercy at all for things hanging over the pool (and dropping their lovely little scarlet or yellow blossoms, and their attendant leaves, therein). Nor for the five dead foxtail palm fronds in the least accessible corner that I had to saw down from inside the pool (try keeping your footing shoulder-deep).

Thus the three giant bags of trimmings next to the big, full city trash receptacle similarly packed, ready for Friday's pickup.

I was sweating to wrestle one of the bags to the front when a guy I've seen around town but don't know stopped by to say how much he liked the place. He looked as cool as I looked sweaty, and I asked him how his day was going, ready to give him a quick boo-hoo about how nasty mine was.

His partner of 22 years has been in the hospital for four weeks with peritonitis, from a burst appendix, and was about to be discharged yesterday when they took him in for a new round of emergency surgery. So he's solely taking care of their two giant Great Danes, between visits to the hospital and running the Xena Fund, which they founded for needy people in the service industry. His air-conditioning went dead during Fay, and he can't get a repairman to come out. And the storm blew off a chunk of his roof, which now leaks.

I decided I wasn't having such a tough day after all, and on my next indoor break contemplated the magnificent blooms on the four-story-tall scheffleras across the street.

One sweep at a time

Thanks to the rake and the broom, which you see against the column with the little creeping fig reaching around the base, we're almost back to normal, at least in front.

Well, thanks, too, to the clippers and lopping saw I got today.

My first t-shirt was soaked through by 8 a.m. I showered, put on a new one, and discovered that 20 minutes or half an hour are quite enough this time of year, no matter how many passers-by pause to say the place looks great. But string six or seven of those sweat-fests together, with lots of water in between, and you can actually get quite a bit done:

Whack the jasmine so the duranta can get some sun, clean the plumbago out of the dwarf plumeria -- and oh, yes, there's rosemary under there, completely covered -- saw out the stump of the stemmadenia with the little dildo-shaped buds that went in where the triple palm was supposed to go, but got blocked by the sewer line, yank out the dead dipladenia, prune the bougainvillea, rake, sweep, sweep, rake . . . siesta.

And by the time it was time for a glass of chianti and some parmesan and olives as the sun got lower, my usual corner of the porch (that's Marvin's chair over there as a foot rest) was ablaze in Full August.

I retreated to the other corner -- view's much better now, considering how the mussaenda has grown -- and sipped and nibbled and got significantly closer to the right place.

Oops, slop, get the mop

I'm not going to post pictures today, because I just don't like the way anything looks yet: No real damage from Fay, but still one helluva mess.

The pool bottom looks as if someone emptied a whole bag of grass clippings into it. Various little branches and blossoms of dozens of plants, already overgrown, are broken everywhere around the place.

Add into that steaming heat one minute and fresh rains the next -- attack, retreat, attack, retreat -- and the cleanup is really a drag. (The four or five tornado warnings we had today as Fay went up the mainland didn't help much either.)

My clippers have given up the ghost --the spring sprung -- so I'll have to get a fresh pair Wednesday. I'm keeping that Latin proverb in mind: Festina lente, "make haste slowly."

Bye, eye

I was about to pull the deck table and chairs inside, and then I noticed that one of the chairs had been blown into the pool.

That was the worst of it, if you don't count the rain on the tin roof.

What the . . .

About noon today, a mom and four teenage kids pulled up at the big gray guest house across the street. They settled in.

About 3 p.m., maybe the height of the storm, they piled back into their truck and left.

Helluva rain

BIG rain, BIG wind, and it's all flowing downhill from here.

We laugh at storms

When our cousin Nicholas was getting engaged to Stephanie, we put together a luau party, and found a guy in middle Florida who hand-carved tikis -- a great centerpiece for the courtyard that evening.

That tiki sits in our Tennessee garden right now, and when he told me he also had a pineapple for sale. . . .

Yo, mon!

Spillover

Sullins called me a few weeks ago from his boat -- I think he was in the Riviera Canal -- and asked what the hell we'd planted next to the porch.

Robert was here a little later and said our mussaenda had gone wild.

And this morning, as the rain started, I saw what they were talking about. It's higher than the porch roofline, wider than anything around it, and at this point invading the railing.

And of all the porch-sitters here, I think it's my favorite.

Get outta town

The first time we had to deal with an evacuation order was with Hurricane Michelle -- 2001? -- when we were renting and our agent told us that if we stayed through the storm all bets were off.

No water? Smashed car? No power? Medical emergency? Tough.

So, with cops blaring through loudspeakers that non-residents had to leave, and with memories of Andrew firmly in mind, we went to the mainland, to a hotel in walking distance of the Miami airport, on the theory that the airport would be among the first things to reopen in the event of a horrible problem.

We had a nice dinner and came back the next day.

I thought about that little trip when I saw the miles-long column of cars, trucks, vans, buses, campers and other things on wheels creeping north this afternoon as I was sailing south.

The skies were boring one minute, joyously startling the next as the storm edges started to pass over the bumper-to-bumper line of fleeing sheet metal from Florida City to Marathon or so. (But meanwhile for me: First time over the new Jewfish Creek bridge! Ye gods, it took an entire committee to settle on that median-barrier color? Bahama Blue? Erm. But the view from the apex! . . .)

At any rate, given one lane out and one lane in, the phased evacuation plan orders tourists out first when a major storm approaches within, say, 72 hours. The next day, trailer-park folk and nursing-home residents have to go. And the final day, if it's really serious, locals are ordered out. (Lotta good that can do. In Andrew, the storm missed the Keys but tore the roof off the mainland shelter where our evacuees were hunkered down.)

All of this was bouncing through my head when I passed Mile Marker 81-some- thing, where the ashes of a hundred, a thousand, WPA men killed in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 are buried. There were too many to count or identify, and the hot weather wasn't helping, so pyres were the only answer.

That immense storm of '35 crossed my mind, too, as I felt the wind rock the car in the middle of one of the 42 bridges on our necklace of islands. In that same horrid storm, the aunt of a guy I know was driving across a bridge with her boyfriend, and their car was blown into the water. He was found submerged in the car. Her body was eventually found hundreds of feet inland on Cape Sable, all the way up on the mainland.

And as I stopped to give the WPA guys my thoughts, as I do almost every time I go through Islamorada, an endless stream of traffic headed north.

Orange state

Just as I crossed the Florida line, around sunset tonight, there was this big, orange billboard off to the left.

Nice touch, I thought, grasping for anything pleasant after all the crap around Atlanta: Five lanes to two, three lanes to one, hours (which felt like months) creeping along at 5 m.p.h.

But that billboard was of course the moon rising, and the timing was exquisite.

Lord knows what's happening with Fay (though we're still in the center of the cone as I write), but what's happening with me is a car-trunk full of things I picked up as I left: raisins, a hand-crank radio, nuts, skillet meals (thank you Suburban Propane; all I need is a match for the cooktop), a mini-case of chips and stuff, and plenty of hurricane cassoulet, a.k.a. beanie-weanie.

When I checked into the motel in Ocala tonight, and showed the desk lady my driver's license, she was surprised that I was going to, not coming from, the storm.

I mentioned the house, she asked a lot of questions about it, I told her a good many things about it, and she understood.

Fay on the way -- and me, too

Yes, the forecast is for it to go from TS to H1 (the water in the path is well into the 80s, which only throws fuel on the fire), and yes, it's about as direct as it gets.

If the cone (that link takes you to Max Mayfield's blog) holds steady through the morning, I'll make sure my "hurricane entry" sticker is handy and be on my way down this afternoon.

- - -

Noon update: Six of eight storm models put it within 50 miles or so of home. So, as the saying goes, I'm charging toward the sound of gunfire. Hasta luego.

Bustin' loose

Lucy, the mother of our redheaded plumerias, is starting to get showy next to the pool.

And she's getting ready to turn up the volume: Each of those little upside-down furled umbrellas is another blossom, and the plant must have a half-dozen flower heads this big or bigger.

Click the image for a closer view -- though, sadly, not the scent.

Gulp

My kinda guy

From Niels Bohr, the physicist:

Tomorrow is going to be wonderful, because tonight I do not understand anything.

Nothin' says lovin'

I looked in the fridge, and "A Fine Romance" started playing. Not exactly yesterday's mashed potatoes, but mashed potatoes of some vintage nonetheless.

The cold had leached off a little water into the bowl. Actually, a good thing: firmer texture.

So, into the bowl, whisk in a cup or so of grated asiago, lots of cracked pepper and about a quarter-cup of mashed garlic cloves that had been roasted golden in olive oil a week ago.

Sprinkle with extra cheese in a baking dish -- that French porcelain beauty I've had as long as the KitchenAid -- and send it along for the ride next to the baking meat loaf.

And out comes something that looks and tastes as if you'd planned it that way all along.

I mean, Dorothy Fields was a great lyricist, but she'd never have dissed those spuds if I'd fed her.

Out of control

Robert had a rough trip -- nothing special beyond the 4,833 insults, degra- dations and invasions that have become commonplace in air travel, but still. . . .

He was tired when he got home, and said that since he hates eating out alone it had been mostly sandwiches in Key West. And to think I'd stocked up on smoked turkey and honey ham to get ready for him.

So I cooked him up something he could have had down the street at La Trattoria: capellini with a nice little sauce of crisped pancetta and sliced garlic (lots of it) in olive oil, finished with a dollop heavy cream and some excellent romano, shredded in the new/old KitchenAid, all sprinkled with fresh peas.

It was a thing of beauty if I do say so myself, one of those carillons of flavor that keeps ringing its deep bells after you've put the fork down.

While I was slicing and sauteeing and perfuming the kitchen, Robert took the Gator for a ride-around, to see how things had fared in his absence. "Looks like the elephant ears don't need much help," he said with uncharacteristic understatement.

Here comes trouble

Robert's on his way north from a few weeks in Key West -- click on the image to see where he was at 9:55.

(You gotta love FlightAware!)

I pick him up in Chattanooga this afternoon -- assuming Delta doesn't cancel the connection, again -- and it will be so good to see him.

Gone last night

Give me a few thousand dollars -- new camera, lenses, lights, an assitant -- and you would have seen these things in all their glory last night.

They're night-blooming cereuses -- I've written about them here -- and they are strictly one-shot wonders, though in this case there were dozens of wonders in one night.

But at any rate, thousands, or milions, couldn't have conveyed the scent. I think they perfume the night air for miles.

Robert, who's been in Key West for a few weeks, says our cereuses there (children of our main plant, which is at least 10 feet high), have been blooming profusely as well.

We spread fragrance where we can.

How grate thou art

Our big KitchenAid mixer became my trusty tool more than two decades ago, when I started cooking in earnest, and we had to drive an hour into the western suburbs to pick up accessories at the Hobart factory office, because nobody else sold the damn things.

In the ensuing years, I've used it to mix, whip, beat, slice, grate, grind or otherwise process things thousands of times. (I hate to think how many loaves of bread our poor dough hook has turned out.) And bought pasta attachments, grinders (at three levels of coarseness), sausage-stuffers, juicers, even a buffer (which I threw out the other night because the bristles finally came loose after a couple decades).

But the accessory I've replaced three or four times has been the grater housing. Plastic, and prone to breakage at the point where it connects to the power take-off. And now you can buy them where you buy . . . oh, light bulbs.

Which was why, when I was at Ben and Ken's for dinner the other night, and they said they'd culled their cabinets for a garage sale, I whooped when I saw Ben's mother's vintage grater.

Most of you wouldn't understand this -- I'm not sure Ben and Ken did -- but to a longtime cook: This, in '50s aluminum, would never crack. A lifetime of grating, shredding and slicing!

They seemed puzzled by my reaction but insisted that I take it home, where I hand-polished it and then buffed it . . . which is when I threw the buffer out, because there were bristles all over the kitchen.

But that grater: Gratest!

Pasture art

When we first got to Tennessee, almost 15 years ago, and one of the neighbor farmers came over to cut our fields, the first thing I noticed was the scent. The second, after days of raking, drying and baling and the burping out of the rolled hay, was the random deposit of these big, beautiful sculptural masses across our pasture.

The baler moves and gathers and binds, and when it's full: blam. It falls where it falls.

Robert laughed when I called it "pasture art," but that's the term he's used since.

When Mom came out week before last, I loaded her into the Gator and we took a turn around the mowed paths bordering the pastures. She wanted to go through, but I've been there and warned her about thrashing out enough seed heads to make you feel like something that's been set aside for birds to peck on in winter.

So when our real-estate agent called Tuesday to tell us that someone wanted to look at the place, the first people I talked to were Ray and Brenda, to get them hopping on the house and gardens; the second was Keith, to get his guys mowing lawns; and third, I looked out to see the newmown hay being baled. . . .

At least the farm smelled like a farm, in the good way, when Charlie brought the guy out today.

Filled with art and all.

Pink

It's only fitting that I restart with something pink -- in this case, the bromeliad I got another shot of a few years back, although by now it's been split into, what?, four plants that have grown to the size of the original.

The blossom is almost a foot across, and this one, the mama plant, has six of 'em.

When pink hits my mind, I always think of alternate realities, odd perceptions, the myriad ways we have of dealing with what the world shows us, and what we see.

Diana Vreeland, remember, wrote with full confidence: "Pink is the navy blue of India."

Almost back

We're back in Tennessee, of course, Mom and I.

Billy's memorial service was a thing of joy and beauty -- I went in a pink linen button-down over a very pink T-shirt (hey, it's Florida) that cousin Diana adeptly ID'd as roja mexicana -- Mexican pink, a shade just short of fuchsia. And when the Dixieland band struck up a New Orleans slow-march version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" I almost lost it.

But there was wonderful time with aunts -- Liz, Annabel and Nadine -- and cousins (Mark brought Annabel, Robert brought Nadine, and Richard flew in to stand up for Irenne), and Lynda and Diane and Rick and their spouses and their children. . . . .

And Fred. Billy's sweet husband Fred. I was their ringbearer at, what, 3 years old?

We all trashed dinner suggestions after the service and scoured up wine and sent out for pizzas, took over a hotel lobby and sat and ate, drank, talked, laughed and embraced, probably as close to a genuine wake as Protestants can get.

I got Mom back north the next day, and funked a bit but wrote it off to just plain grief.

Stuff around the place in Tennessee went on, and me with it, not worrying about posting to the blog or taking pictures. And I worked through lots of stuff.

I was about ready to write again. Then last week Mom's caregiver, B.J., drove her out with five big file boxes of Dad's papers.

Everything. Financials, work-related stuff, letters from me to him and copies of his to me, birthday cards, old clippings. Some things I stopped reading and shredded or set aside. Some about family history I filed to send off to cousins. (Diane has already sent me, as "first cousin," I guess, our grandparents' wedding certificate to hold.)

There were some clippings, in an envelope marked "save" about how to deal with a gay child, and others about church services I'd played organ for, and notes about his search for my birth mother. The bulk is in a burn bag (with thanks to Lou for an appropriate incantation), but not without taking it all in, and processing.

I was about done with last week's document dump when B.J. brought Mom out today with one big box of correspondence between my parents, and some between their lawyers, and I think the rest of the letters each of Dad's siblings had sent him over 70 years, and all their letters and postcards to me when I was little.

One to Mom and Dad took me so far back to Billy:

"Freddy and I have been getting along very well. I'll bring him home for Christmas so you can meet him -- know you will think him as wonderful as I do. It was great to get your letter and hear how Johnny was coming along. Gee, it seems unbelievable that the little rascal has been here two years. . . ."

And then Billy to me: "Dear Johnny: It was such a nice surprise to see this package for Linda. The little dress is just darling. . . . . We think you have such excellent taste for little girls' clothes. [I did laugh; they knew first.] Linda can't say many words, but she remembers your visit and says 'Johnny' a lot."

And so I cried, and made piles: Those to burn now, and Mom and Dad's correspondence to burn later.

I'll write again in a bit.