Switched At Birth

Lemon Meringue Clouds

Meringue. I am flying in a Boeing 767 American Airlines plane, flight number 52 from Chicago to Glasgow, looking out the window while most of my fellow passengers are sleeping off a viewing of Shrek 2 and City Slickers.

The clouds above the sunrise look like meringue. They make me think of lemon meringue pie. Soft golden curlicues. The last time I baked a homemade pie was twenty one years ago.

I cook when I’m happy, which is most of the time, broiling, sauteing, baking, assembling the fresh good stuff.

Sometimes when I have a temporary dose of melancholia, the lengthy peeling and chopping process necessary for making a bodacious big pot of vegetable soup or chili is cathartic, especially when a few tears spill out in the onion chopping.

The evidence suggests I only bake pies when I’m angry. There’s a story in that, but the person who lit that fire in me is still around on the fringes and my anger refreshes itself even after twenty one years when I think about that night. Nope. Like fine smoked chipotle peppers, this one needs a few more years of aging to leave the heat but tame the flame.

We made it to Scotland this afternoon, dined on scrambled eggs and toast,  bathed in a huge ancient claw-footed tub, and are about to crash out.

Don't worry. Maggie will be fine during the hurricane. She has the equivalent of a samurai named Pauline guarding her life and limb in Pensacola, whatever Ivan may attempt. Still, my happiness here would be complete with that fine chocolate head on my knee in front of this coal fire.

Note: This restored lost post was written on September 14, 2004, as Buck and I were flying to Scotland. Hurricane Ivan suddenly strengthened, made a surprise turn, and hit Pensacola two days later while we were on the Isle of Arran.

Ode To Lazy (Creative) Wireless Joy

Lyle Lovett is singing "You Were Always There" in my left ear as I type. Oh, man, it's great to be untethered, disconnected, listening to music piped straight from Lyle's mouth to my ear, propped up in bed with a stack of pillows behind me, Buck running the day's market numbers from his laptop, and Maggie lying on her fluffy shearling bed down on the floor right at the bed's edge.

After Hurricane Ivan last year, we limped along with no landline phone for more than two months, tv service stuck together with string and sealing wax, and occasional dial-up internet service provided by an expensive cell phone connection.

Service was restored eventually and life as we had known it continued. But, somehow in the melee of rebuilding their sytstem, our cable television high speed internet signal  became anemic. It surged and ebbed, in unsatisfactory proportions.

I got a notice in the mail that Bell South in their wisdom had finally decided to extend internet service out to the back of beyond, where the busses don't even run, to our neck of the woods. Glory be.

We had just spent a frustrating week with Road Runner, their various nice fellas stringing line and new transformers, with much head scratching and mixed results. Bell South offered a rebate, discounts, and other blandishments that at the moment seemed purely irresistible.

Well, as the old saying goes, there ain't no free lunch. In my haste to install the latest greatest Bell South software, I screwed up the wireless connection to my own laptop, turned the old desk top into what might as well be a fishing reef, and worsened our position by at least 33%.

Hard headedness being what it is, I have lived with my errors for months, but the shoe finally pinched enough that tonight I dug around and found our ancient wireless router, hooked back up to the old cable system, didn't think about it, analyze it, or look at a manual. Low and behold, it worked smooth as silk and here I am listening to Lyle Lovett, untethered and unattached except for my undying love for the man by my side and the dog at my other side, writing to you.

Yes, writing to you. Here's the nub of this ramble. With my laptop hard wired, I was limited by time, energy and comfort level. The days are so frenetic right now with our building project that by 10 p.m. I am ready to hit the hay. Early in the morning is walking time, crucial to my physical, emotional and mental well-being. The time in between brings stock market trading and home building on-the-spot decisions.

So you guys have been getting on-the-fly pictures with Reader's Digest condensed versions of events, mostly sans reflective thought. I do the better, acutal writing stuff best about midnight-thirty, wirelessly typing, listening to music while Buck and Maggie recharge their batteries for the next day.

And worst of all, I haven't been reading your writing. That changes -- tonight.

Missed you. Nice to be back.

09:27 PM in Day Book | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0

Hurricane Ivan Aftermath

Look at this morning’s Pensacola News Journal for a clear idea of the reality of Ivan’s devastation to Pensacola and surrounding areas. The unthinkable has happened.

Buck and I flew out of Pensacola Airport on Monday morning confident that Ivan would weaken, turn and dissipate, bringing some wind and rain, maybe scattered power outages for a few hours. We were wrong.

I remember standing in the driveway Monday morning as we were about to leave for the airport. Buck was setting the alarm and turning off the water at the valve outside. I thought about the approaching storm and its uncertainties and wondered, just for a moment, if Longleaf would look the same when we returned from Scotland.

It won’t.

The only person we have been able to reach so far is our friend and builder, Ted Parker. He lives a little further out from the city than we do, and while his home was damaged and he – along with everyone else – is without power, his telephone is working. Ted drove out to our place to assess the damage, and we called at midnight last night (Isle of Arran time, 6:00 p.m. in Pensacola) for a report.

Ted had to park his truck at the gate and walk the third of a mile in to reach the house. In addition to being a builder, Ted is a wood hauler. Has been for many years, and he knows how to cruise timber.

Ted says one third of the standing old pine has been either blown down outright, or twisted off and ripped apart.

But there are two miracles:

1) Trees are down all along the corridor from the gate to the house. Power poles and lines run along the left side of the dirt and gravel road to the house. Ted says the trees on both sides fell in such a way that not a single power line was touched, except for one closer to the house where a small branch is resting on one. There’s no power, of course, anywhere in the area, but with the tree devastation, it would be unreasonable to think that the power lines which are so close to the trees could have survived when the trees did not. But they did.

2) Our home has no damage, not even a roof shingle missing. The screened porch door is gone. That’s it. Even the red aluminum storage building we had installed to hold some of our North Carolina things – mainly tools and boxes of irreplaceable old photographs – was untouched, even though a big old oak tree between it and the house is leaning. We had visions of the storage building scattered over one hundred acres. Our pick-up truck and car were also untouched. The van is out in the open in long-term parking at the Pensacola Airport, so it’s fate is so far unknown.

We believe the force of the wind spent itself on the trees sufficiently to blunt its impact on the house and outbuilding. Sounds logical, but given the surrounding destruction, we are filled with wonder, and immensely grateful.

We last spoke with our kids just as the leading bands of the storm were hitting. They are in new-construction, up to code homes, well inland. Same for Maggie’s kennel. In fact, the kennel, Magic Touch, is the most bunker-like of all. Nonetheless, the twisted feeling in my gut won’t subside until we are able to make voice contact with all.

I’ll update as soon as there is any more news to report.

05:28 AM in Day Book | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0