On the smell of burning leaves

This is a nostalgia piece, and normally I hate nostalgia because it conjures a false image of the past that never existed, but this topic might be a little different because it has to do the master of memories, a strong evocative smell. When I was a kid, we had huge trees around our house, so we also had a lot of leaves on the ground in October and November. We raked the brown and yellow and red leaves into enormous piles which at some point we would burn. Today, of course, you can’t burn your leaves without the police and fire department showing up to raise hell with you, and to be honest, it is air pollution. Having an open fire on your property or in the street is totally illegal. Back in the day, if my memory serves me right, back in the sixties, we would burn our leaves each fall, and an almost magic smoke would fill the air. Both acrid and sweet, the smoke had an incredibly rich smell which evokes for me other times and other places, people, seasons, short days, crisp nights, bare trees, incipient winter. The fallen leaves, the burning leaves, were announcing the changing season. I was so much younger then, younger than anyone really has a right to be. When I accidentally smell that smell today, the memories just wash over me like a huge unexpected wave. That nostalgia plumbs the depths of innocence as you warm your cold hands over the flames of memory. Sparks fly up and away in the darkness, children smile and watch the flames, chatting about nothing, but the bonds of those times are strong even though all of that–the burning leaves–is gone, up in smoke, a mirage lost in the past of another lifetime, another country. They say the past is a place to which we will never return, but the memories conjured by those potent and pungent smells assail us in ways we cannot ignore. The burning leaves of our pasts are still there, still burning, and the poetry that we wrote then, inspired by those people, places and events, will always return us to the past when we catch just the slightest wisp of smoke.

On the smell of burning leaves

This is a nostalgia piece, and normally I hate nostalgia because it conjures a false image of the past that never existed, but this topic might be a little different because it has to do the master of memories, a strong evocative smell. When I was a kid, we had huge trees around our house, so we also had a lot of leaves on the ground in October and November. We raked the brown and yellow and red leaves into enormous piles which at some point we would burn. Today, of course, you can’t burn your leaves without the police and fire department showing up to raise hell with you, and to be honest, it is air pollution. Having an open fire on your property or in the street is totally illegal. Back in the day, if my memory serves me right, back in the sixties, we would burn our leaves each fall, and an almost magic smoke would fill the air. Both acrid and sweet, the smoke had an incredibly rich smell which evokes for me other times and other places, people, seasons, short days, crisp nights, bare trees, incipient winter. The fallen leaves, the burning leaves, were announcing the changing season. I was so much younger then, younger than anyone really has a right to be. When I accidentally smell that smell today, the memories just wash over me like a huge unexpected wave. That nostalgia plumbs the depths of innocence as you warm your cold hands over the flames of memory. Sparks fly up and away in the darkness, children smile and watch the flames, chatting about nothing, but the bonds of those times are strong even though all of that–the burning leaves–is gone, up in smoke, a mirage lost in the past of another lifetime, another country. They say the past is a place to which we will never return, but the memories conjured by those potent and pungent smells assail us in ways we cannot ignore. The burning leaves of our pasts are still there, still burning, and the poetry that we wrote then, inspired by those people, places and events, will always return us to the past when we catch just the slightest wisp of smoke.

On snow (especially when their is none and the grass is still green)

So if I can’t get any real snow living in central Texas, I can always write about snow whenever I want to. Snow is beautiful to look at, but terrible if you have to travel, go to work, or keep the sidewalk clean. My relationship with snow has been a long one, but lately that relationship has been from afar, jealously watching snow fall across the country, but never here. Even my annual trips to Minnesota for the Christmas holidays have been bereft, generally, of snow. It snowed a little last year, but this year’s snow totals are zero up to now. Snow is strange: aesthetically, it is very pleasing to watch it fall and cover up everything in its path with a clean white blanket that shrouds the countryside in a frozen swirl of fluffy ice. Heavily falling snow is mezmorizing, but it leaves me feeling grounded. Winter needs snow to cover things up for a few months. Snow gives me a cozy feeling that blank, bare, brown ground does not. Driving in the white stuff is certainly a challenge, if not dangerous, especially if the wind is blowing. Yet I love to be inside on a snowy day, watch the white flakes transform the landscape, and let Mother Nature have her wintry way for a couple of days. Getting a snow day off from school was always a joyous gift from heaven. Yet here I sit in Texas. Green grass, warm temperatures, and no snow on Thanksgiving eve. It just doesn’t seem right, now, does it?

On snow (especially when their is none and the grass is still green)

So if I can’t get any real snow living in central Texas, I can always write about snow whenever I want to. Snow is beautiful to look at, but terrible if you have to travel, go to work, or keep the sidewalk clean. My relationship with snow has been a long one, but lately that relationship has been from afar, jealously watching snow fall across the country, but never here. Even my annual trips to Minnesota for the Christmas holidays have been bereft, generally, of snow. It snowed a little last year, but this year’s snow totals are zero up to now. Snow is strange: aesthetically, it is very pleasing to watch it fall and cover up everything in its path with a clean white blanket that shrouds the countryside in a frozen swirl of fluffy ice. Heavily falling snow is mezmorizing, but it leaves me feeling grounded. Winter needs snow to cover things up for a few months. Snow gives me a cozy feeling that blank, bare, brown ground does not. Driving in the white stuff is certainly a challenge, if not dangerous, especially if the wind is blowing. Yet I love to be inside on a snowy day, watch the white flakes transform the landscape, and let Mother Nature have her wintry way for a couple of days. Getting a snow day off from school was always a joyous gift from heaven. Yet here I sit in Texas. Green grass, warm temperatures, and no snow on Thanksgiving eve. It just doesn’t seem right, now, does it?

On a pink suit

When I saw her in her pink suit, it, of course, looked to be a medium shade of gray. She was a grown woman, I was but a child of four. The tragedy unfolding before my eyes was difficult to understand, and it was only much later that I began to understand what the word “assassination” meant. When I finally got to see the films on a color television, perhaps a decade after the events of that day, I realized the bitter irony of that bright pink dress, an elegant pink wool outfit that contrasted violently with the death of her husband. To me she was just another grown up mixed up in the complicated and mysterious world of adults. Four-year-olds have a very limited sense of tragedy or loss or complexity. I knew the president was dead, and I knew that this affected his wife, but my primitive understanding of the world could not comprehend the immensity of what had happened. I remembered that she looked beautiful, neat and trim, dutiful. As I watched television that fateful day, watched the long faces of the newsmen, listened to their terribly stern words, witnessed their disbelief, I knew something important was happening. She wore a pink dress that day.

On a pink suit

When I saw her in her pink suit, it, of course, looked to be a medium shade of gray. She was a grown woman, I was but a child of four. The tragedy unfolding before my eyes was difficult to understand, and it was only much later that I began to understand what the word “assassination” meant. When I finally got to see the films on a color television, perhaps a decade after the events of that day, I realized the bitter irony of that bright pink dress, an elegant pink wool outfit that contrasted violently with the death of her husband. To me she was just another grown up mixed up in the complicated and mysterious world of adults. Four-year-olds have a very limited sense of tragedy or loss or complexity. I knew the president was dead, and I knew that this affected his wife, but my primitive understanding of the world could not comprehend the immensity of what had happened. I remembered that she looked beautiful, neat and trim, dutiful. As I watched television that fateful day, watched the long faces of the newsmen, listened to their terribly stern words, witnessed their disbelief, I knew something important was happening. She wore a pink dress that day.

On groovy

For those of you who did not grow up in the nineteen sixties, this word is nothing but a strange artifact of that lost decade. Groovy was the paradigm for a generation whose youth was lost in the maelstrom of assassinations, war, protests, draft cards, sit-ins, rock’n roll, peace signs, ecology, weed, Charlie Manson, the Beatles, and a whole raft of strange sitcoms on the television. It was the younger generation–the Hippies–who started to use the word to describe either things they liked or what made them happy, which wasn’t much during the sixties. Born in ’59 to the Eisenhower and Formica generation, I was a little boy during the “groovy” years, which were culminated by the election of Nixon in ’68 and the moon-landing in the summer of ’69. Whenever I heard the word used, or whenever I tried to the use the word, I always felt like everything was incredibly phony. I mean, I never lived in a commune, never smoked or took dope, never burned a draft card, or took part in a riot–I was just a kid. If one of the Monkeys or John Denver said, “Groovy,” I always felt like I was left out, like I didn’t get the joke, that I didn’t understand what the word meant. To this day, I’ve always felt like the word contained an edge of irony or violence that was contrary to what people thought the word meant. It’s as if the word was a self-contained parody of a word, that to use it, you were subjecting yourself to self-parody, ending up with egg on your face, foolish, as if you didn’t really know what groovy meant either. You see, the sixties were many things, but they were never “groovy.” Flower power, Mary Jane, the Cold War, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Detroit, Watts, Birmingham, Saigon, Paris, and the list could go on and on. For a child there was very little that was actually groovy in the conflicts that marked a decade that was filled with death, destruction, and random violence that seemed both common and mundane. Groovy did not seem to be the right word to describe the generation gap, psychedelic drugs such as LSD and marijuana, the fight for civil rights, the war in Vietnam, or the generalized pollution that contaminated our lakes, rivers, and air. We started to wear bell-bottoms and tie-dyed t-shirts. Although I still think tie-dyed t-shirts are rather groovy–I hate bell-bottoms. Although long hair is rather groovy, it never looked good on me. The sixties left me feeling empty, as if nothing were ever very groovy for me. I was growing up in middle America, small town, very agrarian, as if it were impossible to really ever escape the 1890’s, which was when the house I grew up in was built. I was about as far from “groovy” as any one person might get. Perhaps the essence of “groovy” resides in the changing paradigm of lost innocence that marked those years as our country slowly burned in the fire of urban violence and jungle warfare. When the sixties were over, and before Watergate started to garner all the newspaper coverage, “groovy” just passed away, a weird leftover relic of a strange and unsettling decade of the Domino Effect, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tonkin Gulf incident, Mi Lai, Robert Kennedy and all the rest of the un-groovy disasters that filled our lives and made headlines every night. Let’s not forget the dead report given by Walter Cronkite each night as he recounted the wounded, dead, and missing–nothing less groovy than that. Does anyone really know what “groovy” means anyway?

On groovy

For those of you who did not grow up in the nineteen sixties, this word is nothing but a strange artifact of that lost decade. Groovy was the paradigm for a generation whose youth was lost in the maelstrom of assassinations, war, protests, draft cards, sit-ins, rock’n roll, peace signs, ecology, weed, Charlie Manson, the Beatles, and a whole raft of strange sitcoms on the television. It was the younger generation–the Hippies–who started to use the word to describe either things they liked or what made them happy, which wasn’t much during the sixties. Born in ’59 to the Eisenhower and Formica generation, I was a little boy during the “groovy” years, which were culminated by the election of Nixon in ’68 and the moon-landing in the summer of ’69. Whenever I heard the word used, or whenever I tried to the use the word, I always felt like everything was incredibly phony. I mean, I never lived in a commune, never smoked or took dope, never burned a draft card, or took part in a riot–I was just a kid. If one of the Monkeys or John Denver said, “Groovy,” I always felt like I was left out, like I didn’t get the joke, that I didn’t understand what the word meant. To this day, I’ve always felt like the word contained an edge of irony or violence that was contrary to what people thought the word meant. It’s as if the word was a self-contained parody of a word, that to use it, you were subjecting yourself to self-parody, ending up with egg on your face, foolish, as if you didn’t really know what groovy meant either. You see, the sixties were many things, but they were never “groovy.” Flower power, Mary Jane, the Cold War, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Detroit, Watts, Birmingham, Saigon, Paris, and the list could go on and on. For a child there was very little that was actually groovy in the conflicts that marked a decade that was filled with death, destruction, and random violence that seemed both common and mundane. Groovy did not seem to be the right word to describe the generation gap, psychedelic drugs such as LSD and marijuana, the fight for civil rights, the war in Vietnam, or the generalized pollution that contaminated our lakes, rivers, and air. We started to wear bell-bottoms and tie-dyed t-shirts. Although I still think tie-dyed t-shirts are rather groovy–I hate bell-bottoms. Although long hair is rather groovy, it never looked good on me. The sixties left me feeling empty, as if nothing were ever very groovy for me. I was growing up in middle America, small town, very agrarian, as if it were impossible to really ever escape the 1890’s, which was when the house I grew up in was built. I was about as far from “groovy” as any one person might get. Perhaps the essence of “groovy” resides in the changing paradigm of lost innocence that marked those years as our country slowly burned in the fire of urban violence and jungle warfare. When the sixties were over, and before Watergate started to garner all the newspaper coverage, “groovy” just passed away, a weird leftover relic of a strange and unsettling decade of the Domino Effect, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tonkin Gulf incident, Mi Lai, Robert Kennedy and all the rest of the un-groovy disasters that filled our lives and made headlines every night. Let’s not forget the dead report given by Walter Cronkite each night as he recounted the wounded, dead, and missing–nothing less groovy than that. Does anyone really know what “groovy” means anyway?

On making bread

I know I can buy a loaf for less than it costs me to make a loaf, but I don’t care. There is something transcendental about mixing water, yeast, salt, and flour and kneading it into a loaf of bread. Bread has always been a synecdoche for all food, for wages, for a living. Bread is a central part of Christian symbolism and a major part of worship. The transformation of wheat into bread is mysterious, complex, and fills me with wonder. As a small child I watched my mother make bread, knowing full well that she was repeating the lessons she learned as her own mother made bread, who was repeating the recipe and actions that her mother had taught her. I came to making bread later in life, but I had learned my lessons. I believe that making bread is a tradition that should be honored, not forgotten. I don’t mind getting messy, or getting out the bread board, or spending time with my hands in the dough. I don’t mind that it takes hours to get a loaf mixed, kneaded, and baked. I don’t measure anything exactly. I love the idea that no two loaves are ever exactly the same and that I don’t have to “wonder” about how many weird and dangerous chemicals have been added to the bread to keep it soft and fresh for weeks. I love to let the bread rise under a dishtowel while I do something else. I don’t kid myself: I am not an expert baker, but I assume that bread has been made this way for many millennia, and I love being a part of that tradition. Bread is such a fundamental part of the human condition–the variations are almost infinite. Sometimes I had cinnamon, other times cardamon adds a different twist to the taste. Whole wheat flour gives the bread a nutty flavor that is best savored slowly. Kneading bread is a nice workout, therapeutic some days because you can really put your whole body and spirit into pounding, folding, and working the dough. The best part of making your own bread, at least for me, is the sense of accomplishing something original, creating a new thing with my own art, my own recipe, my own energy and effort. There are so few things over which any of us have any control, but baking bread, at least for a moment, can give any of us the illusory feeling of power and control. Yet it is not a complete mirage because at the end of the process you have a couple of loaves of bread that you can slice and eat and enjoy. The process of bread-making is an odd interplay of dry ingredients interlocking with water that creates a whole new thing when fire and heat are added. Who would suspect that flour, with a little coaxing from yeast and salt, could be turned into a crunchy, springy, nutty, moist, chewy phenomenon that can light up as a midnight snack or help wake up a sleepy day beside a cup of coffee? I like my own bread toasted with a little real butter on it. My own bread is nothing like the bread you can buy in a store. My loaves are not perfect, a bit crusty, unsliced, doesn’t come in a plastic bag with a twist-tie closing off the open end. Making bread grounds me in a way that my digitally mediated existence doesn’t. Currently, my bread has been divided into two loaves which are rising in the oven just before I bake them. They’ll be ready around midnight.

On making bread

I know I can buy a loaf for less than it costs me to make a loaf, but I don’t care. There is something transcendental about mixing water, yeast, salt, and flour and kneading it into a loaf of bread. Bread has always been a synecdoche for all food, for wages, for a living. Bread is a central part of Christian symbolism and a major part of worship. The transformation of wheat into bread is mysterious, complex, and fills me with wonder. As a small child I watched my mother make bread, knowing full well that she was repeating the lessons she learned as her own mother made bread, who was repeating the recipe and actions that her mother had taught her. I came to making bread later in life, but I had learned my lessons. I believe that making bread is a tradition that should be honored, not forgotten. I don’t mind getting messy, or getting out the bread board, or spending time with my hands in the dough. I don’t mind that it takes hours to get a loaf mixed, kneaded, and baked. I don’t measure anything exactly. I love the idea that no two loaves are ever exactly the same and that I don’t have to “wonder” about how many weird and dangerous chemicals have been added to the bread to keep it soft and fresh for weeks. I love to let the bread rise under a dishtowel while I do something else. I don’t kid myself: I am not an expert baker, but I assume that bread has been made this way for many millennia, and I love being a part of that tradition. Bread is such a fundamental part of the human condition–the variations are almost infinite. Sometimes I had cinnamon, other times cardamon adds a different twist to the taste. Whole wheat flour gives the bread a nutty flavor that is best savored slowly. Kneading bread is a nice workout, therapeutic some days because you can really put your whole body and spirit into pounding, folding, and working the dough. The best part of making your own bread, at least for me, is the sense of accomplishing something original, creating a new thing with my own art, my own recipe, my own energy and effort. There are so few things over which any of us have any control, but baking bread, at least for a moment, can give any of us the illusory feeling of power and control. Yet it is not a complete mirage because at the end of the process you have a couple of loaves of bread that you can slice and eat and enjoy. The process of bread-making is an odd interplay of dry ingredients interlocking with water that creates a whole new thing when fire and heat are added. Who would suspect that flour, with a little coaxing from yeast and salt, could be turned into a crunchy, springy, nutty, moist, chewy phenomenon that can light up as a midnight snack or help wake up a sleepy day beside a cup of coffee? I like my own bread toasted with a little real butter on it. My own bread is nothing like the bread you can buy in a store. My loaves are not perfect, a bit crusty, unsliced, doesn’t come in a plastic bag with a twist-tie closing off the open end. Making bread grounds me in a way that my digitally mediated existence doesn’t. Currently, my bread has been divided into two loaves which are rising in the oven just before I bake them. They’ll be ready around midnight.