Travel tips from Ayesha Pulaski

 

I moved into a small apartment on the second floor of a converted villa in a city in northern Morocco in the summer of 1984.  My landlords were an Italian/Jewish couple who owned most of the bars in town (Muslims don't drink, and can't own bars as a result).  My landlords also ran most or all of the prostitution in town. I'll tell you all about it some other time.

 

Around midsummer, an interesting gargoyle stuck her head through the hole in my window screen.  “I thought I heard somebody talkin' English in here!” she rasped in a cigarette voice.  “I'm Ayesha Pulaski.  I'm your neighbor.  You want a drink?  Bring ice cubes.”

 

Ayesha (not her real name) was a local girl, and had worked for a long time at one of the bars in town.  She'd married an American serviceman, Stan Pulaski (not his real name).  They lived in Maryland and had two kids.  (“Honey,” she griped, “I don't have to be here right now.  I could be home right now.  I could be crabbin'.”)  Her husband was on assignment in the Mediterranean, and the kids were at camp, and she'd decided to come back to visit her home town. 

 

“Honey,” she said to me one day, “write me a postcard.  I don't write so good.”  It was a girlie postcard.  "Okay. Write this: 'Dear Stan: Here's a pretty girl for you to look at.  Ha ha.  I need some more money.'  Okay?  Now sign it for me.”

 

Her mother came to stay with her.  Momma was a Berber woman, three feet tall, with blue tattoos on her cheeks.  I came out on the terrace one day and found Momma grinning up at me like a garden gnome, clutching a broom.  “GOOD MORNING!” she shrieked at me in Arabic, sweeping like a demon.

 

“Gonna take Momma back to the United States,” Ayesha confided to me that evening.  “I gotta get her a passport first, though.  Honey, can you imagine that little old lady on a plane?  She's gonna be runnin' up and down the aisle, screamin' her head off.  What am I gonna do?”

 

One last Ayesha story.  I'd just come back from Casablanca, she'd just come back from Spain.  She brought the Jack Daniels, I brought the ice cubes.

 

I told her: “My friends in Casablanca want to explore the desert.  They want to take the train into the Sahara.”

 

 

Ayesha looked disgusted.  She said: “Honey, you tell your friends they're crazy.  My boyfriend and I, we went to the desert.  Honey, there ain't nothin' there.  Ain't no grass, ain't no trees.  Ain't nothing but sand.  I seen this old Berber man, and I says, 'Gimme water,' and he says, 'Gimme money.'” 

 

 

She shook her head, grimacing, remembering that horrible trip, and took another sip of her drink.  “Honey,” she said finally, “my camera melted.”

 

 

 

Fiber: a beginner's guide

 

 

Partner and I are both over fifty, and you know what your doctor tells you to do once you're fifty.  It involves fasting for a day beforehand, and not eating red food, and – ahem.

 

 

Our test results have been okay so far.   I had some small abnormalities a few years ago, but they weren't serious enough to merit special attention.  But it's been around five years, and I have my yearly physical in a few weeks, so I have a feeling I know what will be happening again soon. 

 

 

If I have learned anything through all of this, it is to eat more fiber.

 

 

A man of my age and weight needs about 25 grams of fiber a day.  A paperclip, or a raisin, weighs a gram.  So if I eat twenty-five paperclips worth of fiber a day, I will be fine, and the inside of my colon will be as clean and delicate as a baby's skin.

 

 

This is easier said than done.

 

 

Here's the fiber lowdown:

 

 

•                  Foods that you think might be full of fiber are not full of fiber.  Most cereals.  White bread.  A surprising number of vegetables.

•                  On the other hand, beans have a lot of fiber: red beans, black beans, kidney beans, Roman beans, cannellini beans.  Also chickpeas.  Also lentils.  Prepare to be very gassy.

•                  Peas are remarkably high in fiber.  In fact, anything with a skin is rich in fiber.  Each cute little pea has a little skin around it.  See?

•                  Pasta is made from hard wheat, and so is full of fiber.  Marinara sauce is made from whole tomatoes, and is also full of fiber.  No wonder Italians are so vibrant.  It’s the fiber!

•                  You can actually buy Double Fiber bread.  It tastes just like regular bread, and it blasts through you like an Atlas missile.  It's terrifying.

 

 

This is what we do for health.

 

 

It's worth it.

 

 

My parents' house

 

---

Venersborg, Washington, where I grew up, is a loosely-organized rural community on the side of a smallish mountain, about thirty miles southwest of Mount St. Helens. When I was a kid it was just a few farms scattered among the trees, with unpaved dirt and gravel tracks for roads. Venersborg had been settled by Swedish immigrants about sixty years earlier; later some Finns joined the mix, along with a few odds and ends like my parents. There was one church and one store. The store was almost always closed.

 

 

My parents' house was at the end of the road, literally. Just past our driveway, there was a chain across the road. Past that chain, you could see some wheel ruts running up the hillside, and that was it. 

 

 

It was sold soon after my mother's death in 1999. I've gone up there with Partner once or twice since, just to take a look at it from the road.  

 

 

It's different now.

 

 

All of the old trees are gone. There used to be Gravenstein apple trees dating back to the 1940s (to be fair, they were scraggly and old and covered with lichen when I was a kid, they'd probably have died of natural causes by now), and a couple of nice old pear trees, and a huge Royal Ann cherry that attracted birds by the hundreds. And my parents planted all kinds of trees – blue spruce, pine, cedar – around the house when it was new. There were too many, and by the 1980s the house got almost no sunlight at all, but they were beautiful trees.

 

 

And all of my mother's huge rhododendrons are gone, and the camellia she loved so much, and her roses.

 

 

I look at it sometimes on Google Earth. The new owners have built it up enormously; it looks like a functioning farm now, which is what my father really always wanted (he'd grown up on a farm, and spent evenings and weekends fooling around with his five acres of hay and a couple of cattle and a vegetable garden).

 

 

When I look at it online, I feel like a disembodied spirit, looking at it from above. It makes me want to reach down and touch it.

 

 

And then I can drift across the map, a mile or two away, to the Venersborg Cemetery, where Mom and Dad are both buried, and one of my sisters.

 

 

The image is so clear that you can see the gravemarkers on the ground.

 

 

Ah, me, kids.

 

 

It all goes by so quickly, doesn't it?

 

 

---

 

 

 

Yeast is yeast

---

I don't bake bread often enough. It takes time, and I tend to be in a rush and begrudge the process the time it needs. But it's fun, and the result is very pleasant.

 

I was sick the other day, so I stayed home from work. I found myself craving some nice white toast. All we had in the house was brown bread. All right, I thought; I'll put a couple of loaves of white bread down to rise, and they should be ready by early afternoon.

 

My yeast was dead.

 

There is a process, you see, called “proofing the yeast.” You put the yeast in warm water with a little sugar, and you watch it come to life; it foams and bubbles and develops a faint yeasty brewery/bakery smell.

 

Mine just sat there. The water smudged and clouded, but no frothy yeasty bubbles were forthcoming. I finally dumped the whole sorry bowl of slime down the drain, and settled for brown toast.

 

Yeast is a wonderful organism. It's everywhere. We bake with it, and brew with it, and pickle with it. It surely made its debut that day ten thousand years ago when Bap son of Ungaga forgot his bowl of barley water on the windowsill. A few spores of free-range yeast got into it, and it fermented, and: kapow!

 

I stalked the wild yeast monster a few years ago myself. I left a jar of flour and water and sugar open for a day or two, and then I capped it and let it work. The stuff in the jar foamed like a science experiment for days and days. By the time I threw it away, there were at least two inches of evil-looking yellowish alcohol at the bottom of the mixture. Any bread baked with that stuff would have tasted like tennis shoes marinated in Jack Daniels and Pine-Sol.

 

I'm not man enough to tangle with feral yeast.

 

 

Fleischmann's Yeast, tame and docile, in its modest yellow packet, is perfectly okay with me from now on.

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: "I Love My Dog" by Cat Stevens

---

My friend Ardy, bless her heart, lent me Cat Stevens's “Tea for the Tillerman” when we were both in high school. I listened to it probably fifty times before giving it back to her. I was hooked.

 

 

I bought “Tillerman” and “Teaser and the Firecat” right away, and “Catch Bull at Four” when it came out. Then I went back and got “Mona Bone Jakon,” which came out before “Tillerman.”

 

 

Stevens has reinvented himself several times. He was Orthodox, then Buddhist, then Baha'i, and now he's a Muslim. (He's Yusuf Islam nowadays.)

 

He is one of my favorite modern musicians.

 

Let's hear “I Love My Dog” one more time.

 

  
Download now or listen on posterous

Cat_Stevens_-_I_Love_My_Dog.mp3 (4504 KB)

 

 

---

 

 

The he-man sport of rugby

---

I knew nothing of rugby until Partner and I went to Ireland in 2007. We quickly discovered the little betting parlors that crowd every Irish streetcorner. Partner busied himself with dog racing, but I was fascinated by the Rugby World Cup betting sheet, which was the size of a tablecloth and allowed you to bet on everything, including number of teeth knocked out during a game. Without really knowing what I was doing, I put a bet down on the opening game of the series: the Namibian team would beat the Irish team. I also bet that the first goal in the game would be scored by the captain of the Irish team.

 

I lost my first bet and won my second. Net gain: forty euros on a two-euro bet.

 

I began to pay attention to rugby at that point, and I liked what I saw. First of all, rugby players are enormous. Second of all, they do not wear padded Halloween outfits like American football players; they wear thin cotton shorts and tight shirts, and they look terrific. Third, the rules of rugby are entertainingly incomprehensible. It’s like American football played as a mixed martial art; they just keep beating each other up until one team has lost too much blood to continue. In one game in the late 1990s, the Irish team won the game by picking up the guy with the ball and throwing him headfirst like a javelin into the scoring area. The Sunday Irish Times had a whole special section explaining how the game worked; I read it twice and was still baffled.

 

And rugby players are characters. There's Gareth Thomas, the only openly gay man in professional team sports in the entire world. There's Lawrence Dallaglio, the huge beautiful deadly English player who makes my heart quiver whenever I look at him. There's Sebastien Chabal, l'Homme des Cavernes, the Caveman. There's Zinedine Zidane, the French player who headbutted another player so hard that I could feel it three hundred miles away.

 

But, in the end, it's all about watching thirty buffalo-sized men huffing and snorting at each other, with murder in their big angry beautiful bloodshot eyes.

 

And that's entertainment.

 

---

 

 

RuPaul's Drag Race

---

I get a huge kick out of drag. It's not my thing personally; if I did drag I'd look like an alcoholic overage version of Nancy Kulp as Miss Jane Hathaway from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” But I admire the drag artists who do it; it takes courage to do it at all, and it takes skill to do it well.

 

 

Logo TV, bless its gay little heart, is currently bringing us another season of “RuPaul's Drag Race.” On one level it's just another reality-show competition. On another level it's wonderful. Drag has always been about performance and competition. Cattiness and rivalry are endemic to the drag community, so there's no need for the producers to inject drama into the show; the players bring it with them. And there's little or no real malice or bad feeling here. New York Magazine this week noted that this is just about the only reality-show competition with likeable contestants. The judges don’t pull any punches, but they don't mock the contestants; they mostly point out presentation flaws. They do it wittily and pointedly, but – hey – that’s part of the drag scene. If your dress isn't hemmed correctly, if your wig isn't right: hey, girl, watch out!

 

I used to think that drag was bad advertising for the gay community. It implied that we weren't serious. I've come to realize that the drag community is sort of like our Knights of Columbus lodge. Drag queens, and the Knights of Columbus, put on parades and socials; they host charity bingo events; they get to wear bizarrely colorful outfits and gigantic feathered hats.

 

In both cases, it's performance art about being openly and proudly different in a hostile and indifferent world.

 

As Lady Bunny, a guest judge at last year’s “Drag U.”, said so memorably: “Honey, I always envied my older sister when I was a kid. And now here I am, famous, and my sister's in a mental institution. So that just goes to show you.”

 

Amen, sister.

 

 

---

 

 

The Rite

---

Partner and I saw “The Rite” last weekend. Ho hum. It's a melange of every demonic possession / exorcism movie ever made - mostly “The Exorcist,” of course, but bits of many others, up to and including “Paranormal Activity.”

 

 

Partner and I were mostly interested in seeing Anthony Hopkins. The previews implied that he gets possessed, so I assumed he would be doing his glassy-eyed flesh-eating lunatic routine, and I will pay seven and a half dollars to see that any day of the week.

 

We were not disappointed. When the demon takes him, Anthony rolls his eyes and uses his sepulchral Hannibal Lecter voice and slams people around the room.

 

But he doesn't do enough of it. The movie's pretty dull when he's not flouncing around in full possession mode.

 

The plot is unsatisfying. The movie is full of unnecessary scenes, and plot detours that lead nowhere, and bizarrely tilted aerial shots. The main character is a young guy who goes to seminary school, but who lacks faith; he goes through Dramatic and Affecting Scenes and Traumatic Flashbacks, and there is a surprise ending which is frankly not much of a surprise. In fact, it ends in exactly the same way as “The Trouble With Angels” with Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell, except that “The Trouble With Angels” is a lot more fun.

 

And there's a wee problem with the reasoning behind the whole exorcism business. We are told that, if the devil's real, God must be real too. (I’m not sure why this has to be true. Is the opposite also true? Are God and the Devil a boxed set? Can you say “Manicheanism”?) Apparently, if you don't believe in them – both of them – bad things happen. On the other hand, Hopkins explains early in the movie that the Devil prefers that you not believe in him. Later in the movie, however, the Devil (who turns out – aha! - to be real!) does everything but cartwheels and skywriting to establish his own existence.

 

Doesn't that seem screwy to you?

 

Eh, well. This is a movie that will be quickly forgotten.

 

At least the popcorn was okay.

 

 

---

 

 

Malta

---

I spent a week in Malta back in 1987. Malta is a big rock sticking out of the water just south of Sicily.  It supports a few farmers, a few fishermen, and lots and lots of tourism.

 

 

I flew there from Tunis, on a small plane. We were flying low enough that I could see the ripples on the surface of the Mediterranean. Then, suddenly, there was Malta, a huge black cliff looming out of the blue water. There were cows grazing on the edge of the cliff. I could see the cows. I could see the spots on the cows. Oh my god! Too low! Too low!

 

 

Malta is a strange crossroads between Europe and North Africa. The Maltese language is mostly Arabic, with a lot of Italian vocabulary and tons of English borrowings (it was an British colony for a long time). I speak both Italian and Arabic (and some English), so Maltese was surprisingly transparent to me. One evening in a restaurant, a loud tourist woman complained to the waiter that her steak wasn't properly cooked, and she wanted a freshly cooked one. The waiter smiled, told her (in English) that everything would be taken care of, and said to another waiter (in Maltese): “This cow in the red dress would like a new steak.”

 

 

I nearly choked on my mixed greens.

 

 

Malta is littered with prehistoric remains. There is an underground cave full of strange carvings, accessible through a back door in a bakery in Paola, near the capital. The entire island is paved with Neolithic standing stones and circles and monuments. Thousands of years ago Malta was home to a breed of tiny elephants, whose bones are still found in caves and riverbeds. I remember looking at their delicate little skulls in a museum and thinking: Poor things.

 

 

I stayed in a pleasant cheerful place called the Hotel Plevna.  After dinner I'd go down to the lounge and read the Times of Malta. There was always a frail old lady there, no matter when I got there. She napped a lot. Once she farted in her sleep, which I found both amusing and endearing.  And one evening I heard her talking to a British guest about dinner, in a very high-pitched tone: “When I eat cauliflower it must be piping hot! With a nice cheese sauce!”   Someone later told me that the old lady was the widow of the former Greek ambassador, and a part-owner of the hotel.

 

 

It was twenty-four years ago, and she'd be well over a hundred now, if she were still alive.

 

 

I choose to believe that she's still there.

 

 

---

 

Travel is so broadening

---

Partner and I both like to travel, but not in the same way. Partner likes thinking about it, fantasizing about it, planning it. I loathe all of the foregoing. I'm a nervous person, and I'm never completely comfortable until I arrive at my destination. But we work it out somehow.

 

We get away for small trips from time to time: Boston, New York, Cape Cod, the Berkshires. We've gone to Ireland once, and to the Northwest several times (there's a Williams family reunion every summer, and it's kind of a hoot to see all the cousins, and Partner, bless him, puts up with it). The Northwest is very pretty: mountains, forests, ocean. But it's not my home anymore.  I love going, but it's a bittersweet trip for me.

 

Once in a while we go to northern New England. I'm partial to Vermont, especially Burlington: it's hippyish and small and cheerful, and Lake Champlain is beautiful, and none of the buildings are taller than a couple of stories. New Hampshire's okay, but it feels like a northward continuation of Massachusetts. Maine looks just the way it does in the tourist brochures.

 

But now retirement is looming, and (as I said) Partner likes to plan ahead. “Where do you want to go when we retire?” he keeps asking me.

 

 

I know what he wants me to say. He wants me to say Hawaii, Florida, Key West, Palm Springs, Palm Beach. He likes warmth and sun and SPF 1000.

 

I prefer unusual destinations. I also like screwing with people. “Mali,” I say. “Timbuktu. It's nice and sunny there, so you should like that. Besides, I always regretted that I never went to Timbuktu when I was in Africa.”

 

“They kidnap people there,” he says. “And then they eat them. Forget it.”

 

 

“Senegal,” I say.

 

“Malaria. Schistosomiasis.”

 

“Central Asia.”

 

“You've already been there. Also political unrest. Also bubonic plague.”

 

“Laos,” I say evilly. “Bolivia. Chad.”

 

“Never in a million years.”

 

So you see our fix.

 

Naturally I will get my way. But it will take time, and guile.

 

(I hope he doesn't read this.)

 

 

---