WINTER'S BOOKS

Since I can feel the chill in the air that leads to late fall and the beginnings of winter, I think of hearty soups, a cozy blanket, and historical fiction that allows me to imagine experiences that transcend time and place. A novel may show me a different culture, a different lifestyle, or patterns of behavior. Some of them show our slow progress to be better human beings and others remind me that we still have a lot of work to do to leave this world a better place than we found it.

Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See

See has written several books about women in China at different periods of history. In her latest book, she writes about Lady Tan, who lived during the 16th century and practiced medicine, an unusual occupation for an upper-class woman. The book opens up the sheltered world of upper-class women in China, who remained in patriarchal bondage and whose fortunes were determined by their husbands and family. The women were not able to leave the grounds of their family home, were subjected to foot binding to attract a suitable husband, and were never allowed to have a career other than as a mother.

See describes the painful process of foot binding in great detail, which begins when a girl is a toddler. The foot becomes shaped like an arrow with toes pulled under, bones broken, and infection a constant problem. As a reader, you question why this practice of foot binding lasted for over a thousand years. But then, we can look at our own choices of wearing 6-inch high heels with pointed toes, undergoing plastic surgery, and using weight-loss pills to acquire the elusive beauty we imagine we want.

Amy Chui's first novel, The Golden Gate, is set during WWII at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. A suspenseful detective story patterned after noir classics, the narrative revolves around the assassination of a presidential candidate staying at the hotel and the three beautiful sisters who may be involved. As I read the book, I could visualize the fedoras on men's heads, the pearls dripping off the shoulders of the women, and secrets hidden behind heavy hotel doors.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is my favorite this year. The story revolves around families in a small Black and Jewish community and the grocery store that sustains them. The story is full of great characters such as Moshe and his wife Chona, who own the store, and Nate who works for them. The community comes together to defend itself against the stronger White group trying to displace the community to take over their land for development. The book touches on an important part of our history about White flight, the displacement of low-income communities for urban renewal, and our lack of reparations to those communities. In San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, the lively Fillmore District became an example of that saga. (Read On the Rooftop by Marian Wilkerson Sexton, set in the district in that era.)

Two other good books, Alibi by Joseph Kanon and All the Broken Places by John Boyne, are set in the aftermath of WWII. I have often wondered how a defeated nation recovers from war and how the people involved retrieve a place in a healthy society. These two books provide a window into that experience.

Don't miss So Many Ways to Be a Bird

A friend of mine, Constance Anderson, who is a writer and illustrator, has just published a children's book just in time for holiday gifting. It's a delight, filled with painted and collaged illustrations of birds.

 

TODAY AND TOMORROW

 The sun did come up on Wednesday the day I wrote this post. 

 Today.

Today I was going to publish a post about good reads for Winter.

That will have to wait for another day.

Today I continue to feel stunned by the election results.

Today I looked back to what I wrote in November 2016 when I felt shocked by that election news:

"I watched as my watercolor teacher painted a derelict shack. She said, "This is hard." Something she always says when she paints. I said back to her, "Especially today. I couldn't sleep last night." My friend next to me nodded in agreement, and then the rest of the members of the class chimed in with the same news. Some were full of hope, most of us felt shocked. I thought in our tiredness how we all let our vulnerability show. We came together whichever side we put ourselves on, and offered tentative healing words. One man in his 80s, said, "I've seen worse."

Today I realize that as an artist and a writer, I can continue to write and make art of the small things in life. I can write about sailing a boat as a beginner, about animals that have wandered across my path, about being a vagabond for a year, and how moving to a city has changed my life. I can continue to write about people I consider dear friends, family, and colleagues.

Tomorrow I am going to continue to support libraries and reproductive freedom and preserving the natural world.

Today I can make some good soup and pick up a book and a blanket and immerse myself in a story in the shelter of our apartment.

Today I can read the newsletters that give me hope.

Rebecca Solnit: https://x.com/RebeccaSolnit/status/1854179269003637000

KE Garland:  https://kwoted.wordpress.com/2024/11/06/the-day-trump-was-re-elected/

Pics and Posts:  https://iamchandralynn.com/2024/11/06/grieve-survive-resist-love/

Literally Letty:  https://golfoklahoma.org/literally-letty-the-golf-gypsy-will-rogers-and-clint-eastwood/

Americans of Conscience:  https://americansofconscience.com/11-08-2024/#goodnews

Reasons To Be Cheerful:  https://mailchi.mp/reasonstobecheerful.world/the-indian-state-that-went-100-organic-5372315?e=d492e63da7

And I will ask myself the question that Reasons To Be Cheerful asked of its readers:

What will you continue to do to make this a better world?

COMING HOME

Photo by Bill Slavin

San Francisco's fog hung back from the City as we crossed the Bay Bridge at the other end of town. I smiled at the fog bank, looked ahead to the City's skyline, and realized I felt happy to be coming home. We spent the last three days in Livermore in the East Bay sorting through storage containers at the moving company where we stored most of our worldly goods. After each exhausting day, we spent the evenings at a bed and breakfast inn in the heart of the Livermore wine country. We looked over vast acres of grapevines and olive trees, ranch houses, harvesting equipment, and barns, leading to the rolling hills in the distance. We saw a bucolic, peaceful scene in front of us, so much different from our new life in the City.

In the early morning, we sat outside the lodge in rocking chairs and listened to the birds singing in the nearby trees. A mockingbird captured our attention with its variations of other songbirds' songs. The grapevines hung thick with clusters of ripened, purple grapes. We didn't hear the sound of a fire engine, streetcar, or plane overhead. The dampness from the night was slowly drying as the sun rose higher in the sky, leaving behind the dry heat that we were used to in our former home.

We drove to downtown Livermore, a surprisingly large town in the middle of farm country. The town is bustling with small restaurants and local businesses along the main street. We stopped once for coffee at Press at one end of town and for coffee at Coffee On First at the other end. We ate dinner at Uncle Yu's, a well-known East Bay restaurant with Chinese cuisine. Wondering around Livermore felt so much like our previous life, with people looking familiar to us because they wore similar clothes and were doing the same things we used to do, meeting friends for coffee, getting ready to play golf or ride a bike, or celebrating a friend's birthday.

Since we bought a condominium in the City, we continue to bounce back and forth between thinking our purchase was a big mistake and enjoying all the activities we can now do because we are so close to parks, museums, ballparks, and theaters. We like the mix of age groups, languages, and cultures that are part of our new neighborhood. We are glad we have had the time to think our decision through even though our 3-day trip was filled with fluctuating doubts. As we drove across the Bay Bridge, I had a spark of recognition that the City has become our new home, the place we want to be right now.  We can always make a short trip to enjoy country life. Nothing is forever. 

Photo by Bill Slavin

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I hope you have all voted or plan to vote next Tuesday, November 5.

I read this opinion somewhere this week but failed to note its author. The person still made an important, thoughtful point:

" This election is about character. It is not about the character of the candidates, but about our own."

CONNECTED BY MUSIC

Sculpture outside of the San Francisco Transit Center

 Did you listen to music when you were growing up? 

My mom preferred musicals so she could sing along. My grandparents had a stack of old-timey sheet music inside the bench in front of their small organ. I still hum "You Are My Sunshine." Their organ was fun to play because of its stops and pedals that varied the sound of the notes. My dad listened to a violinist named Fritz Kreisler. We also listened to Country music. The song, "Ghost Riders in the Sky," a haunting piece, crept into my music memories and influenced the tunes I listened to as a teenager. I loved "The House of the Rising Sun," and songs by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Judy Henske, who all sang soulful songs that told poignant stories. When the Beatles arrived, their music dominated the airwaves, pushing aside some older styles.

A couple of weeks ago, the Buena Vista Social Club performed in a small theater in San Francisco. They were a sensation in 1996 when their music first came to the U.S. from Cuba. The group formed around solo musicians from the 1940s and 1950s coaxed out of retirement to play together. They recorded an album with their name as the title, which became a worldwide hit. A film about the group followed shortly.

In 1996, their music made people jump up and dance, learn salsa, and discover a Cuba they knew little about since Castro took over the country. Bill and I listened to the album over and over. Eventually, the Buena Vista Social Club slipped from our memories until I saw a notice advertising their San Francisco show. I wondered what they had been doing in the intervening years. We bought tickets and assumed the audience would be fellow followers from back in the 90s, and yes, the audience was full of people our age. Surprisingly, a large number of young people attended too. They were not a crowd curious about the Buena Vista Social Club. Instead, as the musicians, one by one, entered the stage, the crowd rose up cheering and clapping vigorously. I asked myself how we had missed seeing the connection between the young people and the continuing popularity of this group of vibrant Cuban musicians.

This event got me thinking of the music we hear at the nearby food truck park. The playlists include music from our early adult years, including the Beatles, the Doobie Brothers, and Credence Clearwater Revival, mixed in with a few rap songs. Some of the songs are over 50 years old and I am surprised they would appeal to the mostly young crowds who gather at the park. When we listened to that music so long ago, we rarely heard music from our grandparents' era, 50 years before. Old-timey music and ragtime were rarities. Why has the music from our early adulthood sustained people's interest for so long? I wonder too what music we are missing now that will still be popular in 50 years.

The 8th-floor view of people walking on Channel Street by Martha Slavin

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FOLLOW THE TRAILS

Collage of Sidewalk Brass Markers

The admonition to look around you implies that you need to be more aware of your surroundings. That would have been good advice for me to follow one afternoon in Chicago as I walked with a group of friends, with my head focused in their direction, totally involved in our conversation until I turned my head just as I walked into a light pole. Luckily, I guess, I have a hard head and no damage came from the surprise collision. I wondered why a light pole was placed in the middle of a broad sidewalk, but there it was.

If I am more careful as I walk, l can make many interesting discoveries on city streets. Much of what I see is just trash, but the patina created by all kinds of fluids on sidewalks and light poles makes interesting textural patterns and could inspire an abstract painting.

San Francisco city street patterns

In San Francisco, I've also found brass plates embedded in the walkways. Near the UCSF sports center are several discs with phrases such as "Subsequently Allowed to Dissipate" that make me stop and wonder what they mean. Outside Town's End Cafe, I spotted a large historical stone marker next to the sidewalk that describes the history of Rincon Hill and why most of the hill disappeared. On the pavement next to the stone sign, I found a marker that read: "Cholera Expected Here," the words taken from a paper poster from 1850,  made me think of the threat of numerous lethal diseases that were routinely present at that time in San Francisco (and still are in areas around the world without good sanitation).

Brass plates with poetry are scattered on the Embarcadero walkway to the Ferry Building from Oracle Park and line the ramps leading to the streetcar stations. The poems speak of whales, picnics, and driving cars in ways that made me visualize the scene described by the poets. On Fourth Street, I found markers with the remaining known words from the language of indigenous people who inhabited the area before Whites arrived from Spain. I drew a collage of some of the poetry markers I've seen. I haven't completely written each line of poetry in the collage to give you the chance to discover these complete poems on your own when you come to San Francisco.

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View from a window on Tuesday, Oct. 15, in Livermore, CA

A quick travel tip:  If you like to taste wines or enjoy staying at bed and breakfast inns, try the Purple Orchid Wine Country Resort and Spa in Livermore. The photo above came from one of the windows at the inn. They serve a delicious breakfast and offer wine and cheese in the evening. It is quiet and peaceful so you can listen to the birds in the trees around the inn.

We had dinner at Uncle Yu's in downtown Livermore as well as a light lunch at Mornings on First.

Check them out here:

https://www.purpleorchid.com

https://morningsonfirst.com

 

ROOM TO IMPROVE

 In last week's post, I included a sketch page about traditions from Japan that included drawings of a Kabuki actor, sake barrels, and a young woman in a kimono. I placed them around the page and quickly filled the space with other traditional Japanese images including a torii gate, a sculpted tree, and Mt. Fuji. I didn't give myself time to think carefully about the placement of these images, but the sketch was good enough. But during the day after posting my blog, I kept thinking back about the sketch and knew I wasn't satisfied with the result. I decided to start over to see if I could be more mindful of design elements drilled into me in art school to create a better composition, using relationships between elements such as color, size, and shape.

 I have always enjoyed looking at an artist's sketches at museum exhibits more than their finished work. The sketches reveal a lot about how the artist's mind works. Showing the steps I took with this sketch could be helpful to help understand what goes into making a piece of art. 

First version with green

My first sketch needed something so I put a ribbon of green and embedded the words, Japan and Nihon, into the green space. The green helped to tie the various images together, but it still felt jumbled to me. I also didn't like the top part of the kimono. It looked muddy instead of the beautiful fabric that a kimono would often show.

Version posted to my blog last week with green ribbon added

To start over, I went back to tracing paper and traced over the shapes from the original. I made the torii the dominant feature in the center of the page. I knew that its reddish color would bring the eye there first. I moved the shapes around so they weren't as randomly placed as the original. I also made sure that each image touched something else on the page.

Rough draft on tracing paper

 

I used black markers to outline the images as well as the space around them. I painted most of the images with watercolor. I made sure that I limited the number of colors and had each color placed somewhere more than once on the page. Once I had finished that, I looked again and still felt that something was missing. I used a black marker to connect the images together within the rectangle. I think it looks better, don't you?

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This week in San Francisco is Fleet Week, a pageant celebrating our sea and air military. While I am writing this, I am also listening to the roar of jet planes as they practice close maneuvers in the sky. They are amazing to watch. The birds are silent. Usually, the birds scream after loud noises such as fireworks, but maybe Fleet Week, which has occurred for more than 20 years, is already on their calendar and they have found respite elsewhere.

FINDING YOUR WAY

I participated in Sheila Delgado's September challenge.
Here are some of the pieces I did for the daily challenges.

"Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms."  Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang's thoughtful idea graced the back cover of Poetry Magazine recently. Reading the sentence reminded me of our move to Toyko. We joined with numerous expats from all over the world in a city crammed with over 21 million people. Bill's company gave us lots of move-in information, but the best was a booklet titled "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Most of the expats, like us, stayed only for three or four years and moved on to another expat assignment, while a few put down roots that went deep into the Japanese soil. In either case, a move out of our own country changed and challenged us.

In the first few weeks after moving to Tokyo, we spent almost every day walking our neighborhood, trying out the subways, and looking for something familiar. We lived in Minami Azabu, a district near the center of Tokyo where many expats lived. National Azabu, the local grocery store carried some Western products such as muesli, but many Americans shopped through the Foreign Buyers Club, an early delivery service, to acquire flour, American cereals, and Pop-Tarts. On nearby Hiroo Shopping Street, we found La Jolla, a Mexican restaurant that gave our son something familiar. The staff embraced him with joy. We slowly found other places that became our go-to places, a creperie on a back street off of Omotesando, an elegant tree-lined shopping street near Meiji Shrine, an Italian restaurant around the corner from our apartment, a cafe with dense hot chocolate, much better than the kind we made at home, and Itoya, with its bookstore and floors filled with an array of art materials and office supplies. Those simple connections to our previous life allowed us to step into a world we grew to love, and which challenged our beliefs and values.

Traditional Japan

Learning the language became the biggest hurdle in Tokyo. We came from a country with a language based on the Roman alphabet with 26 letters. We faced a language with 2136 characters in daily use and drawn with a brush, read mainly vertically instead of horizontally, and based on Chinese kanji symbols. We lost our literacy when we arrived as we tried to decipher signage and documents written in kanji and the two other Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana). Nothing was familiar. We began to understand how difficult it is for someone to move permanently to another country while trying to learn a different language and culture. An expat has choices: to hide from the overwhelming, to grow bitter, or to embrace the challenge of learning and adapting to a new life and new standards. During our learning curve, we went through all of those phases.

When we returned permanently to the United States after almost six years in two different countries, our son, who was entering high school, said, "I wouldn't be the same person that I am if I had stayed in Danville."

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September Window View

While diving down a Rabbit Hole on the Internet, I found this intriguing challenge, which offers activities close to water in the winter. Bodies of water are appealing to me and I find it calming to be near the ocean. Does water have the same effect on you?

Blue Mind Challenge:

https://www.bluetonic.org.uk/winterchallenge