tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90219938778042545582024-03-13T12:13:34.960-07:00homefiresGwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-36951019981482579412013-07-22T22:36:00.000-07:002013-07-23T00:27:49.258-07:00Summer promise<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlNG1ef3Q06NOFhjlPSjVr8oMZdpzLHiwpXz7iNlb_AP2uHTKV4y0DvRl6G1VypHYLMt8CRD9y5vCtodDUu9QuEy8swb1rMXB-xwz1oa0vW0lNADcnM7top9a_dW0ntwLVF1qebay8hphh/s1600/books+blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlNG1ef3Q06NOFhjlPSjVr8oMZdpzLHiwpXz7iNlb_AP2uHTKV4y0DvRl6G1VypHYLMt8CRD9y5vCtodDUu9QuEy8swb1rMXB-xwz1oa0vW0lNADcnM7top9a_dW0ntwLVF1qebay8hphh/s320/books+blog.jpg" width="240" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Walking through a heavily air-conditioned Walmart last week
with my mom, looking for a plastic 6-dish rack that could be extended to
a <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>12-dish rack, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>stopping at one point to examine the back of a
bottle of Coke Zero and ponder together for about four minutes, why Coke Zero was
different from Diet Coke, was probably the equivalent of someone else’s
ten-hour drive to see the sun setting over the Grand Canyon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It was on aisle six, about five minutes before, looking at the swivel desk chair selection and pausing to inhale the scents of candles with names like
Let Freedom Ring and Cosy Sweater, that I realised where I was, right
there, near my mom, wandering aimlessly around Walmart, picking things up and then putting them back again, with afternoon plans to head to the state
fair to look at goats and share a corn dog, beat out just about any other holiday
spot in the world at that moment.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It's funny what you crave and where your mind finds rest when it leaves its routine - kind of like a dog let off its leash. My dad wanted to know why my bedside light had been on until about 1am the last few nights. I explained the light was on because I could not for the life of me remember if Christie from Wisconsin ended up with Todd the OC surfer or Escondido quarterback Brad (Thad? Chad?) in <em>Summer Promise</em>, which still features in my childhood bookcase. But it turns out turns out the quarterback doesn't even come into the first book in the Christie series - and so it took several late nights of reading with the fan on, eating Trader Joe crackers, and speed-reading through heavy-handed life lessons (note the publisher) to a frustratingly ambiguous ending (‘’Never had one season held so much hope...or so much heartache!’’). The conclusion was that the only way I was going to get to the bottom of the Todd vs Brad/Chad/Thad question was to loiter around the church library on Sunday and check out the whole series, and in doing so, reacquaint myself with the author's footnotes to the extraordinary high school experiences my 12-year-old self had studied rigorously, and was heroically prepared to experience herself, just like Christie had (my high school experience did not resemble in any way, the above cover of <em>Summer Promise</em>).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And that pretty much wraps up the last three weeks. In the final months before I left work - and especially on the really trying weather days; sleet but no snow, rain that came at you sideways, darkness at 5pm; all backdrop outside the window for the polite arguing and mad scribbling inside, followed by phone slamming and expletives, brimming tears, angry typing, and then somewhere in there, a story - I loved performing lengthy monologues for my colleagues on either side of me, about what I was looking forward to when I came back to my hometown, all based on previous holidays in Los Olivos that I have grown to love, as if we were hunkered down in trenches, under fire, clutching helmets and weapons, our backs to a muddy wall: I talked about waking up on July 4th morning and hearing my dad tinkering with his mini cooper, getting it ready for the parade; the sound and smell of the alfalfa being cut and baled across the street, lemon meringue pie after church, and watching old movies with my mom on the couch; sitting in the hot tub in the backyard and looking up at the walnut trees and the stars; eating chips and cowboy caviar, barefoot, in big Adirondack chairs with friends; going to the outdoor theatre with my mom for Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals; the smell of eucaplyptus trees in 90 degree heat as you walked past mansions that you will (likely) never have to pay a mortgage on, and down the steps to Butterfly Beach with a book and a towel.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I have an exceptionally sweet hometown and region that has been kind to me when I have needed to just come home and just be for a little while, just until the fog lifts. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And I am doing that (and it is wonderful).</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-40880599554375274312013-07-11T16:16:00.001-07:002013-07-11T16:56:58.688-07:00This must be the place<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT9pk4q-eBZnaMPLGTcBGVFMOs-KYZ-p0FuOiqBsVtEgTQhcq3rnReX0BhsEmnzChp00QX4GX3kx2M3nQ4CVTcON0IULaX9VEiYmY88mGtS6MQ9naB92W52o-_GmmUCWIx-Bwr1G7pX-NR/s1600/GY+pics.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT9pk4q-eBZnaMPLGTcBGVFMOs-KYZ-p0FuOiqBsVtEgTQhcq3rnReX0BhsEmnzChp00QX4GX3kx2M3nQ4CVTcON0IULaX9VEiYmY88mGtS6MQ9naB92W52o-_GmmUCWIx-Bwr1G7pX-NR/s320/GY+pics.JPG" width="240" /></a>A week and two days ago today I was dressed in gumboots and a blue onesie, flying through snow and mud on the backof a quad bike, squashed between two dogs, with one hand clenching fencing wire and the other holding the jacket of a woman I had been wanting to find for almost 20 years.</div>
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It was my last few days in New Zealand. There was a closet of hoarded paperwork to sort through, furniture to give away, a car to sell, fines to settle with the Ministry of Justice and the Invercargill Public Library. But seeing Andrea again - this woman I hitchhiked with for two days in Ireland in 1996 - was something I would have abandoned pretty much everything else to do ever since the penny dropped, in a tent, in the middle of a field in Glenorchy last November, and I realised <em>this is the hitchhiker</em> and the mountains all around us that night were the same peaks in three photos that she carried around with her in her wallet when I first met her at age 18. Andrea was 35 that year- the age I am now. <br />
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I wrote about how we first hitched together, lost touch, then re-connected <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/news/features/8019920/True-tales-from-the-trail">here</a> for the Southland Times in December - and I've probably told the story a hundred times in person to many of you in the last seven months because it made a really tumultuous season of my 20s make more sense. <br />
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Who knows what drives us to seek out certain places to be at war with ourselves in. Maybe that landscape - an ocean, a mountain range, a desert in New Mexico, a dusty, scrub-covered hill outside Bakersfield - simply resonates with something inside us some years. Meeting Andrea again in Glenorchy - which had only been a nameless mountain town she described to me as the backdrop for the worst kind of betrayal and the end of her marriage, as we stood by the side of the road thousands of miles away in County Cork with our thumbs out in '96 - made my time there seem less of a mistake. Maybe I was just fated to work myself out in that same place too, years later.<br />
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After we met below those peaks again in November, as visitors simultaneously returning to a favourite haunt - a meeting that spooked both of us I think - she invited me out to her farm in Canterbury whenever I had a spare weekend. Just as I was buying my one-way ticket back to the States, she wrote to remind me the offer was still there and said she had a pair of gumboots that would fit me.<br />
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So before flying to California, I made arrangements to get a car and head out to this farm that she had described on that November weekend as the next best thing to Woodbine Station in Glenorchy which she and her ex-husband had managed in the early 90s before everything unravelled.<br />
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The farmhouse, just off a gravel road that led to Mt Hutt helicopters was covered in snow - I couldn't even get the car entirely up the driveway. The doors were flung open and it was late afternoon. The sun was out; the peaks that framed her farm were so white you could hardly look at them without feeling your pupils blister. <br />
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We sat in these white, deep chairs, covered in soft blankets and looked out to the snow and the mountains. Andrea's husband, Wayne - who she met at a Herbert Community Hall birthday party after she came back from our hitching adventure in Ireland, and married the year I would have rolled into Glenorchy - brought us whiskey and ice with mint leaves in these goblets and left us there to sit like snow queens surveying our kingdom until it was nearly dark. Andrea got up and threw me a Russian fur hat and we headed out on her quad bike to check on the cows. Flying through the night, I didn't care that my good office boots that I had worn to work nearly every day for the last 13 months were getting wrecked. I haven't been able to zip them up since that night, which kind of feels like one less decision I have to make right now.<br />
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Wayne had a roaring fire going and a glass of merlot for each of us when we got back. He made venison and potatoes, something I probably wouldn't eat for a long time - it was a perfect last winter meal. He kept refilling our glasses then retreated to watch the news on TV. <br />
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From a big chest in the living room, Andrea pulled out an album of her years at Woodbine. They were all valleys and mountains and rivers that I knew well. The children at picnics and barbecues in her pictures with 80s haircuts would all grow up to be hellraisers riding their horses through the pub and hanging from the rafters in my photos years later.There were some of her on the back of trucks, working in the yards, riding her favourite horse in the Glenorchy Races, hiking up near Glacier Burn with her dog, and my favourite one of Andrea - her laying in the tall grass, hair in braids, chin on hands, looking up to the Humboldt Range. Many of the photos had been torn in half but then at some point she had made peace with them and they had been taped back together and placed in this album.<br />
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After we came in from the farm the next morning she showed me her art/writing studio out back. On the walls were sketches, paintings, and pictures of all the places she had lived and worked in. Africa, islands in the South Pacific, the Snowy Mountains in Australia. Somewhere near one of portraits of Glenorchy, I saw she had this quote from Karen Blixen, who would have been writing about leaving her farm in Kenya after her divorce, then death of her lover, Denys in a plane crash, and then finally the financial collapse of her coffee plantation (I know all of this because I was obsessed with Blixen when I was 12). Blixen went back to Denmark and never returned to Africa. I don't remember the first part of the quote or if it came from her book or her letters, but I remember peering into words Andrea had written the wall - “You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my life has been wasted here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know” - and knowing what Blixen was trying to say and why almost 100 years after Blixen arrived in that spot that would haunt her forever, two women were looking at that quote and thinking ''yup''.<br />
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Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-1661390295661498112013-04-26T06:41:00.001-07:002013-04-26T06:52:37.563-07:00both sides of the clothesline (and a few night moons) at Whaler's Crescent <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-58196218515687463772013-04-16T01:04:00.000-07:002013-04-16T01:28:34.098-07:00Calling MeganThis morning I called a friend I haven’t spoken to since we were both waitresses in a lobster house in Maine 11 years ago, when we were both single and in this healed-up, hopeful place in life, surrounded by a bunch of people (mostly Russian, Czech and Connecticut residents) who were also happily hanging out in dead-end jobs in a national park. <br />
<br />
<br />
I called her an hour after she had left the scene of the explosions at the finish line at the Boston Marathon, and she pulled over to take my call. Her voice, in the car, was shaky but exactly as I remembered it, Southern warmth and all – I suddenly remembered how she used to say ‘’baby girl’’ to me - maybe when she wrapped her apron around her and tied it, or while we were counting tips, or when I was a passenger on trips through Acadia, down to Portland, and around through hills and oceans in between to hike up mountains and then go out for pancakes in Bar Harbour before our shifts. I was phoning because, according to Facebook, she was a block away from the explosions when they happened, and I needed to find someone to interview.<br />
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Like every journalist in every newsroom around the world that would likely have this event as a front page news story the next day, I was called by an editor just after the bombings happened and asked if there was anyone I knew who might be in Boston right now. <br />
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I pulled off on the side of the road and went through my newsfeed. Megan had posted hours before how proud she was of a friend who was competing, and I messaged her and asked if that friend would be comfortable talking to me.<br />
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Megan messaged me back: ‘’I was there.’’ And she sent her number for me to call.<br />
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The last time I saw Megan was when I was 25 and she was 29, and she was dropping me off at the bus station in Portland, Maine, so I could get to Boston, and then eventually get back to California for a job in San Diego. I remembered that week at her place before I left the East Coast, and it was early winter, and we went for walks around her new neighbourhood drinking chai lattes, our boots crunching on fallen leaves and the air smelled like rain. I’m sure we talked about boys and careers, and places we still wanted to live in, just like we had all through that late summer and early autumn. I remember that season in Maine as one of the most beautiful times in my life, and Megan as my older, wiser, cool sister/co-navigator who put an arm around my shoulder and pointed out that everything was probably going to work out just fine. In my mind, waitressing at the lobster house and living in Seal Harbour, and eating popovers slathered with blueberry jam was a whole chapter of my 20s, but it probably lasted less than three months.<br />
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The tragedy of social media is that you can know so much of someone’s life, without speaking to them. It only occurred to me how weird it was to be calling Megan now, more than a decade later, as the phone was ringing.<br />
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A normal conversation would have gone into how she met her husband and how old her daughter is and if she loves motherhood as much as she thought she would, when we talked about it over nachos at Applebees.<br />
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Maybe we’d talk about the guy who would come in for lunch, order a bottle of wine, declare everything was ‘’Fabu’’ and would always tip 100 percent.<br />
<br />
Or that time that waiter Joe, an out-of-work pilot from Canada, spent three hours arranging furniture on the front lawn to say ‘’Happy Birthday’’ to that girl from Alabama (Lauren?) he had a massive crush on, then arranged for her to fly over the lawn in a private plane?<br />
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Would she remember that time we all fought over who was going to serve Stifler’s Mom (actress’s name? Does it matter?) at table 12, or that time the Secretary of the Interior came for dinner and John, the head waiter, wore his CIA shirt? Or the conversations we had sitting in the car, with gas station coffee and the radio on (it was the summer of No Doubt’s ‘’Underneath it All’’ and we all piled in a car to go see ‘’Sweet Home Alabama’’)<br />
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This morning she said everything you would expect someone to say after walking away from an area and then minutes later, feel it explode. <br />
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Her mom had just called to tell her there had been a third explosion. Her voice broke, and mine did too, ‘’hearing her heart’’ as she would have said, in that Carolina lilt, if we had been sitting on a park bench somewhere.<br />
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I felt cheated hanging up and then writing Megan’s words up to be absorbed with 100 more testimonies in a news article. I wonder if journalists have gone through exactly this, today, mining friends they’ve lost touch with, for disaster stories.<br />
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But I thought about this too, with three televisions in the newsroom playing CNN coverage of the bombings continuously, in front of me, behind me, and to the left of me since I arrived at work 10 hours ago: maybe its cliché to say that people come together in these times and so forth. <br />
But, you know, all day I’ve been thinking about blueberry pancakes and orange juice in plastic cups, American Pie quotes, and train trips, and lights glowing from houses in Seal Harbour, and remember sitting on a wooden bench in an outdoor church and singing It is Well with My Soul alongside Megan under the pine trees, and terror and fear of the world, isn't what I feel.<br />
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<br />Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-2531779601435105502013-03-02T17:17:00.001-08:002013-03-02T17:17:29.897-08:00Whalers crescent<br />
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I went to my first wake on Monday
night, and it was not how I thought it would be.</div>
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I had already spent two evenings in a
foldable canvas chair on my deck, looking at David’s house and the
cars outside on the grass, coming and going, telling myself that I
didn’t want to go across the street to pay my respects because I
didn’t want my last memory of David to be David without life. But
this was a lie really, I didn’t want to walk across the street
because I didn’t understand how the ceremony worked – a memorial
service I get, I have experience with, with photos and music, and a
schedule of who is speaking next and what prayers to recite – but
not a wake. I didn’t know who it was for, and why. I didn’t know
what I was supposed to feel, other than the fear that a 4-year-old
has of a dark hallway. So I stayed on my side of the driveway.</div>
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I listened to the radio, and ate a bowl
of ice cream, made myself a gin and tonic, had another bowl of ice
cream, then a wine, and watched the lights go on and off in the top
room of his A-frame house that had been empty for two weeks while he
had been in hospital. I had passed the hearse on the gravel road
coming into Omaui on Sunday at noon as I left for work; I knew he was
being brought home for two days, for viewing, but I didn’t know
what time, and I was ashamed and relieved to have missed this part,
and I pulled over to let the hearse pass. I thought that was sort of
right and fine and appropriate to our dynamic while he was alive,
that we would pass on this piece of road this way, this last stretch
that came down into Whalers Crescent, me going to work, sunburned,
with sand in my ears, and him coming back here for the last time so
that the town could say goodbye.</div>
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I moved to this town because of David.
In November I drove out with a photographer to do a story on him for
his first exhibition opening. We drove down this long gravel road
that turned off the main road to Bluff and headed for cliffs and bush
and then you turn the corner and there is the sea and a handful of
cribs. It was an old whaling community and it felt like, feels like,
the edge of the world, and very, very far away from the third story
of a building in the middle of the city I that I work out of.
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David lived on the end of one of two
streets in Omaui, and he came out to meet us as we pulled off the
gravel and onto the grass. He had just gotten back from a trip
through Belize, Guatemala, Mexico and had done a series of 36
photographs of his trip in August and September. But it was his
diagnosis with an aggressive cancer in January that gave every
photograph its urgency. You walked through chronologically. The first
was taken about two hours after he had been told at the hospital he
probably had less than 12 months to live, which meant that he
wouldn’t see the next summer. He had been given a camera for his
49<sup>th</sup> birthday and it was in the passenger seat when he saw
a storm coming in over the mountains and pulled over and watched it
come towards him and then he got the camera to capture the obvious
metaphor. He got better with the camera as the year went on, as his
health worsened, as he went through chemo, and got up early, because
the sleeplessness then, to get sunrises on the Omaui beach and the
way the light caught the barb wire of a fence, and a bird coming out
of the water during the winter, with snow on the sand dunes – it
had the feel of someone trying frame every nuanced piece of the
world’s beauty before he left it.</div>
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When the photographer and I first came
up to the house, there was tiny place with a carport and a deck
across the street, half hidden by a wild garden growing around it. It
had a For Rent sign in the front, a bathtub in the back, a place to
gut fish, if I ever got into that, a veggie garden, an apple tree,
and the pounding sound of the ocean, and after some deliberation, and
some emailed prodding from David, this is where I am now. The last
time I saw David while he was still well, was when he pounded on my
glass door, while I was scrambling eggs without having opened the curtains to the morning yet, to tell me there was a beached whale down below and the
whole town was down there trying to refloat it. The next time I saw
him was in hospital, for a followup interview for his exhibition. The
last time I saw him was at the exhibition a week ago, in a
wheelchair, and he was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open.
When I kissed his cheek and said I’d see him when he got home, I
knew I probably wouldn’t. He told me he had big exhibition planned with a new project that was going to blow my mind. I asked if he could say a little bit about at least. He said he couldn't. It was going to be a big surprise and it was going to blow everybody's minds. On Friday, I got a text saying that David
had died. I called his sister, and she said they were going to bring
David back to Omaui, that there wasn’t a day in hospital that he
didn’t ask to be brought home.</div>
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When I did go to see David, finally, it
was in the early evening, when I got home from work on Monday. I
parked my car, got out, and marched over, ready to get this over
with, so I could go out for a run on the beach without feeling like I
was being silly and childish. There was only one car in the driveway,
and the door was open to the kitchen and I stepped inside, knocking,
seeing figures on the porch. Two guys came through the house, and I
remembered them as students from around Invercargill and I said who I
was and said I was David’s neighbour and then I just started to
cry. One of the students put an arm around me and wiped his own eyes,
and said they had been neighbours too for awhile, last year and we
talked about how David looked after all of us, bringing us muffins
and making sure we were happy here and how he told us we shouldn’t swim past
the waves or we’d get dragged out to sea, and then pointed to the
small room around the corner from the kitchen counter, where people
had put loaves of bread and cards and baked goods, and I went in.
David was in an open coffin on the bed. The curtains were open and
the sun had just set.</div>
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It wasn’t how I thought it would be.
The sky was red, the sea had pulled back and the lagoon was full of
new sea water. There was even a full moon. I stood there for a few
minutes and it was how they say, that it seems like that person could
just open their eyes, or move a hand. It was more unbelievable that
he wouldn’t do those things. Just outside his room, you could see
that first photograph of the storm coming over the mountains. There
were books, and CDs and music posters still up. I had thought I would
want to walk in and walk out, but it was the opposite. I wanted to
stay. I wanted to talk to him. If there had been a seat in the
bedroom, I would have sat, and stayed for a long time. It was like
standing in a very small cathedral. Afterwards, I went for a run, and
then for my first night swim in Omaui. The moon rippled on the water
of the lagoon as I slid through it, then turned on my back, and
realised then that the aching in my upper body that had frightened me
all week, was less likely to be a tumour lurking somewhere in me, and
more likely that I hadn’t been doing backstrokes properly, and I
should probably take swimming lessons if I wanted to get better and
that I also need to stop being so ready to die all the time.
</div>
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Yesterday, I had the day off, and I
went back to being the socially awkward neighbour who watches people
from her deck in her pajamas, well into the afternoon. I watched
people I didn’t know move the furniture out of David’s house but
I didn’t see his sister, who was the only one in the family who
would recognise me. It was the last official day of summer. In the
early evening I went for a run and a swim again and on the way back
up to the house I picked blackberries and later that night I ate them
with vanilla bean ice cream and crumbled Oreo cookies and read the last chapter of Mrs Dalloway
(advice for readers who haven't gotten around to torturing themselves with Virginia Woolf: don’t read Mrs Dalloway, if you are feeling like your world is already rocking, it
will tip you over ) and I left the window open because
it was warm.</div>
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I woke up to the house shuddering with
wind and rain and it was cold in the room and a huge, wild, bottomless sadness filled me, the
kind of sadness you have in the middle of the night when you’ve
woken up from a dream you can’t remember. David’s death made
me feel alone and un-buffered, and other things made me lousy too, and all of it seemed to
involve the storm. It seemed to be taking something away and I
thought, well, that was it, that was summer.<br />
<br />
Which is just a depressing final sentence.<br />
<br />
So I will tag this on: apples are falling from the tree in the backyard and there are more blackberries to be picked, which make for great pies, and pies need people on decks to eat them. And I have weekly additions to my growing collection of scratched up $5records. The Doobie Brothers just sound better on vinyl, trust me. Or just come over. <br />
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Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-60283841313492533432013-01-22T21:23:00.003-08:002013-01-22T21:41:06.413-08:00Your table is waiting<br />
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I had set out to describe – kind of vavoom destination style - a long weekend I spent in Waiheke Island just before Christmas, but instead I keep coming back to this string in my head linking a honey and vineyard-saturated island off of Auckland to Antarctic-battered Invercargill, a place that couldn’t be less vavoom, and now l can’t pull the two apart. </div>
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I got to Waiheke on a Friday, still wearing my work coat with unreturned second keys, scone crumbs, gum wrappers and work receipts in the pockets; I walked from the boat to the place I had booked, sticking to the grassy verge of a road that went in and out of afternoon light through the bush. I shifted my carry-on bag from one shoulder to the other, looking at the free folded map I’d taken from the ferry terminal and holding it up. The sun hit the sides of my sunglasses, making me squint, and I kept charging down the wrong roads, thinking they connected until some kids on bikes pointed me down the path that cut through the bush and led to the road I was looking for. I was limping a little, and annoyed, by the time I saw the tops of tents on the lawn first, through the trees, then a roof, a porthole window, and steps leading down to bean bags scattered around the deck of the main house where my boots echoed off the wood. Reggae music mix was coming from a stereo in the kitchen. I watched as a guy below with long dark dreads did a cannonball into a rock pool and then backstroked his way to the side. A leap up and out, a tugging up of soggy shorts, and he walked a few feet away to a Jacuzzi, where he slowly lowered himself in, arranging his dreads over the side, just behind him, as the steam rose around his face. On an upper deck covered in drying board shorts and bikini tops, a girl was trading beer space in the outdoor fridge covered in Jaigermeister stickers for a bottle of vodka.</div>
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I assessed this all woodenly –sunglasses still on - at the reception desk. I felt like an alien creature sent to destroy mankind by first blending in, pretending to be a relaxed and fun person.</div>
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That morning at the airport bookstore I had bought Gone Girl, and had read a few chapters on the ferry trip to the island as Auckland’s skyline disappeared and the wind whipped at the jackets and dresses of the passengers standing all around where I was sitting. It was a novel about a woman who suspects her new husband wants to kill her and every so often I would look up and watch the people from the wedding parties travelling over with department store bags of wrapped gifts hooked on their arms – the woman who cut my hair the next day said 20 per cent of New Zealand weddings happened in Waiheke – and I wondered if I should put the book away, to restore equilibrium to the boat, but then I’d pick it up again because the heroine talked like I do and I wanted to know how the me in an alternate life gets into that kind of situation and then how she gets out of it.</div>
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Later, checked into the hippie homestead with folded linen on my lap, I sat on my tiny bed, hungry, but torn. I had food with me, but I didn’t want to make dinner in the communal kitchen, because it would mean I would probably have to speak to people. I thought about this dilemma for awhile, staring at the wall, hands settled politely. Then I took off my work jacket and my boots and took out my sandals and a sundress. I put the linen on the bed and my book in a satchel, put my earphones on, pulled my iphone out and turned on music, and walked into town, down through Little Oneroa reserve and Pohutukawa trees in full Christmas bloom, a bright, punk red. People were still in the waves, even though the sun had gone down.</div>
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I hated that I had every opportunity for rest all around me, but I couldn’t flip that switch to let it in. I used to dive right into beautiful, free places and absorb them and not fear long, blank spaces of time, but now there open sesame process with an access code that mysteriously alters, leading me away from feeling pressured to frantically produce something, anything, and just hide out and be still for a little while.</div>
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There’s breathing exercises to do this, or the visualising of a still pool of water, or a sunset. Or, for natural-born loners who have to fake extrovertism during the work week, there are nice dinners, alone, with wine, wearing a favourite lip gloss and nail polish and a new bracelet, in a town on an island where no one knows you.</div>
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There’s an art to this. You have to choose the right kind of table in the right kind of eating establishment to do the fork-winding and drinking and staring at nothing and reading, especially when it’s a Friday night at the beginning of summer. Outside that night it was warm and people were on decks and laughing, touching each other’s elbows as they made their points and running fingers through their hair and looking over their shoulder at the boats in the water and the stars coming out.</div>
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I did find an Italian restaurant for this, one with spaghetti to be wound around a fork, and four hours, nine chapters and about a hundred horrified facial expressions later, I left the place with a deep, deep hatred of the heroine, but with an unshakable love of the Marsala-drenched Tiramisu I had just finished, remembering just in time that I was not at home, watching back episodes of Offspring on my laptop in bed, and it was not cool to delicately run a finger along the bottom of the bowl and lick it. At some point between the tomato and basil bruschetta and the scallops the waitress had come by and had switched on the lamp above my table for me as I read. All night she had felt like a guardian of this zone I was happily building dream sandcastles in; I almost expected her to check my temperature and smooth away the hair from my forehead as she left with the wine bottle. I had had two glasses and I’m a lightweight so even the stars looked delicious as I walked carefully down the steps, hand on railing. I had marked my place in the book with a serviette, and couldn’t wait to keep reading. There was a trail above the ocean that went back to Little Oneroa and as I walked it, thinking about how the story had changed on me so fast and then thinking how I wanted to be able to do that, to hold someone captive in a restaurant for four hours with a strong storyline; and then I just thought how very fine it felt to be on an island, at night, just looking up at the stars, and down at the sea, and how I had three more days of this place all before me – I had already planned to read all night, then soak in the spa in the morning and nap until my facial and maybe book a pedicure for the afternoon. I heard myself say out loud <i>Your table is waiting</i>. And I had to think about why I said that at that moment. Then I remembered and it made me grin a bit, at how I’d pulled that one out of my head.</div>
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On a Saturday in Invercargill, during March, which was a difficult month for me, I woke up and decided I needed to put on a dress, and get my hair cut then go out to breakfast. I needed a plan. I needed lists, fresh goals. I had bills to pay, all the stupid mundane bills that you put off doing all month but bills like parking tickets can be that one thing you can take control of, when another part of you feels like everything is just a downward spiralling mess and you just wants to stay in bed until it all solves itself.</div>
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I ordered eggs and a coffee and went to bar table by the window which had chairs tucked underneath. I like the deep-seated booths, but of course those are for two people or more on busy Saturday mornings. I didn’t really mind the barstools. My coffee came. I stared off and drank it. A few chairs away, there was a guy on his laptop, and he started talking. I thought he was on his phone, but realised he was talking to me. I turned to him and answered back because I’m a nice person and it’s Invercargill, not New York City, and even if he was a psycho killer I probably work with his cousin, and he moved down to the seat next time mine, to show me what he was working on on his laptop, and I resigned myself to eating my eggs, when they came, while he talked. If he was interested, really, in anything I had to say, this would have been bearable. But it was evident pretty quickly that it didn’t matter what I thought about anything, he just wanted to talk and have someone, anyone, respond. I understand that this usually comes from loneliness, and I hate people being lonely. But it made me really sad that the spiritual revival bill writing morning I had planned, would now be spent trying to arrange my face into appropriate facial expressions.</div>
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The waitress came over with my breakfast. She swooped in really. She looked at me and at him. Then in this slightly affected five-star dining establishment voice and said to me pointedly, ‘your table is waiting.’</div>
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She stood there awkwardly with the eggs and a giant pepper grinder like I was an idiot. I didn’t understand.</div>
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‘Your table,’ she said again, in the voice, with new urgency. ‘It’s waiting for you.’</div>
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Then she left with my eggs and started walking towards one of the booths. I picked up my coffee and my papers, apologised to the guy with the laptop, and followed the waitress to the table I hadn’t asked for.</div>
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‘You didn’t need that this morning,’ she said, putting down my plate and serviette and silverware and then showering the eggs with the cracked pepper. I realised then how haggard I probably looked, which was depressing. I sat down obediently, thinking <i>okay so you and I are terrible terrible people. We’re going to get in big trouble for not being nice girls; that poor guy... </i>Then:<i> So I can I just do that?</i>The whole morning began to gain this whole new sense of liberation. I was giving off the vibe of someone wounded, weakened, vulnerable to predators who had moved in to pounce on the last of my energy at the watering hole. But that morning I had this protectoress who had just given me permission to be a mess. And now I had the booth.</div>
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I sat there for hours, triumphant. I spread Home and Garden magazines and bills all over the place and ordered more coffee, called my brother, texted friends, made plans to run a marathon and go to surf camp in Bali. I took a magazine quiz and didn’t like the result so I took it again, lying a little bit, and got the answer I wanted. I increased the amount going into my long term savings account by $25. I paid all my parking tickets. I ordered the lemon cake for lunch.</div>
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It didn’t solve anything massive in my life that Saturday morning; but I got traction, and I got a little bit of myself back. I go back to that cafe most Saturdays now, even for a takeaway coffee, out of loyalty.</div>
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In Waiheke, after that walk home from the restaurant, I came back and met the grandson of a Mayan revolutionary on the deck above the rock pool and Jacuzzi eating olives and pita bread with humus under Christmas lights. When I am exhausted the first thing to disappear is my curiosity of other people, but I came back from dinner full wonder for everything, and when I rounded the corner and everyone was there – the guy with dark dreads, the girl loading the beer fridge, plus ten other people around a big, long wooden table covered in wine bottles – and it seemed rude and silly to go to bed, so I grabbed a wine glass from the kitchen and came back out. Some of my best friends in life I have found at backpackers on nights like this, and I love that this underworld of jobless, wandering adventurers has always existed, around long tables illuminated by Christmas lights, with stories to tell, and all night to tell them, which is a whole other kind of table that was waiting for me. </div>
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The grandson of the Mayan revolutionary didn’t introduce himself that way, but as a painter on his way back from Nepal to Mexico for Christmas. He was a Buddhist, but his family was Catholic. He had been named after a patron saint. Christmas would be spent on his ranch on the coast. It was a ranch he had inherited from his father who had died a few years ago. Everything he told me about the family land, surrounded by the cartel, on the ocean and his father were responses to questions I asked, and I know, I know, I know it makes complete sense that everything would be fabricated. That his grandfather had been given the coastal land, as part of a grant from the Mexican government to the Mayans, and the Mexican president, in turn had been given the son of the Mayan leader to be raised in Mexico City. How that son though, was handed over to the president’s Italian bodyguard to be raised by the bodyguard’s family, a man the painter still thought of as a second, maybe even truer grandfather. Then how is own father had grown up strong, brilliant and had taken his education in Mexico City and had become a doctor, had fallen in love with the daughter of the patriarch of the hacienda he was a doctor in and married her, and then became a politician; the painter had been pressured to also go into medicine or politics but he went to art school in Ashland, Oregon instead and now has a studio there, as well as in Nepal and Mexico. He only paints five portraits a year and they are always commissioned, usually by wealthy fiancées who believe they are marrying the most beautiful woman in the world. But the painter is the one to decide that. Part of the arrangement is that the couple is flown to one of the studios and her beauty is assessed by him. He only paints the most beautiful, because he only does five portraits and he is in demand. But he is a Buddhist and of course, true beauty is elusive.</div>
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It was better than a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. It was like Arabian Nights.The whole table has been invited to the painter’s ranch, to ride horses and hunt for jaguars in the jungle next Christmas. I googled the painter and his family and the Mayans later and it adds up; but even if it didn’t, it was better than Gone Girl, which I finished the next morning and then abandoned to the shelf in the backpacker’s lounge, before walking barefoot across the hot, hot deck, togs already on, even before coffee, pulling my sundress over my head and taking a big leap into the rock pool. </div>
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My point, maybe, is that sometimes you need the quiet corner tables, just for one night or Saturday morning, before you can really come back to the big long tables on decks, and ask people how they are, and really have capacity to let them tell you all about it.</div>
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And tip your waitress. They are guardians.</div>
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Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-20611982997763230482012-11-06T02:56:00.000-08:002012-11-06T04:03:19.784-08:00Into the grooveSo I know I should be really really excited to be flown back up to Wellington tomorrow for the Royal New Zealand Ballet production of Giselle. And I am excited, don't get me wrong here. What's not to adore about ditching a hospital advisory committee meeting and weather that's driving me nuts for an overnight in one of my favourite cities in the world (that's a big status for a city to get, but for beauty, people-coolness, memories and general magic it slides in just after Madrid). And I'm really really grateful (little wave there to the RNZB PR person if you come across this blog) to do this twice in one year. I had an amazing two days in August for the opening of Cinderella, which was gorgeous, and fascinating to watch unfold from master class, to costume studio, to stage that night. I used to work at the bar across the street from the St James Theatre and serve people who had come from the evenings at the ballet. They were always buzzing and chatty - its kind of lovely to be on the other side of that now. <br />
One of the perks is that the ''official'' company hotel where the journalists covering the opening get chucked for the night is the Museum Hotel, a place I always loved wandering past when I was a poor scriptwriting student, with cloth bags and exactly six dollars in change to buy fruit and veges at the farmer's market on the waterfront on Sundays. After the August opening - also, you may have noticed, my tweeting debut, a painful birth - I made sure I had a cocktail in the lounge upstairs that looked over that waterfront and and after finishing my story, sat back in the plush, velvety cushions, sipped my drink and said a little prayer of graditude for the years when little adventures can come with a steady income trickling in (emphasis on trickle).<br />
So the reason I'm not really really excited this time around:<br />
I have to tie these trips to some kind of local angle to Southland. Last time - after a shake down of the company - it turned out there was a class pianist who had lived in Invercargill as a kid. This time there was no such luck.<br />
It was then suggested by the chief reporter (with a wolfish grin) that I could be the local angle.<br />
I could request to take part in the master class and do it as a first person piece.<br />
I laughed, cringed at the thought, protested a little, then sent off the request to the company, thankful in advance for tight policy restrictions that would kill this idea fast. But last week, they got back to me in an email. <br />
Everything was cleared. The director would be expecting me at the warmup class at 6.<br />
Great. Awesome. <br />
In the car in front of the gym the other night - a place I've been spending a lot of time since I got that email - I talked to my dad about the new story angle and he reminded me of the ballet, jazz and modern dance classes I used to take with Madame Christine in Santa Ynez until I was about 11.<br />
Did I remember those classes? <br />
Seriously? Every time I hear Get Into the Groove, I am mentally crossing a mirrored room, in a horizontal-striped turquoise leotard doing that skip, skip, arms out ''grapevine'' move. And unfortunately that song gets a lot of airplay on Southland radio (farmers love Madonna).<br />
On Saturday, I bought new yoga pants at the Warehouse, and I've gone through every workout top I have that I wouldn't think twice running on an empty beach in. But alongside 32 bodies that are born to transcend normal limitations in front of floor to ceiling mirrors on all sides...there's no hope in hell of this being anything but Josie Grosie going back to high school.<br />
I've had to abandon the idea of having any dignity in this situation. So while I'm dignity-less, in tribute to my inner 7-year-old dancing queen, I found a horizontal top, kind of a turquoisy green, that I think I look kind of nifty in.<br />
I'm gonna rock this class.<br />
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<a href="http://youtu.be/YjaQRRPmX2I">http://youtu.be/YjaQRRPmX2I</a>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-80851762021914550382012-09-18T02:46:00.002-07:002012-09-18T02:46:15.282-07:00oh! you pretty things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuc5owTi2e-jrJbqc4xGdvyWJovuKA4tSx9DIUOUe89qLvmjCY4lRjJybGPe6hAyknV1wJwcpitSzHyMZ_wKXJiaLzpfHMv91KAEWMblwcHrIOmu0jzHqHHKZoZwPGXdH-u8EVTlIeK9KG/s1600/curio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br /></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuc5owTi2e-jrJbqc4xGdvyWJovuKA4tSx9DIUOUe89qLvmjCY4lRjJybGPe6hAyknV1wJwcpitSzHyMZ_wKXJiaLzpfHMv91KAEWMblwcHrIOmu0jzHqHHKZoZwPGXdH-u8EVTlIeK9KG/s1600/curio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuc5owTi2e-jrJbqc4xGdvyWJovuKA4tSx9DIUOUe89qLvmjCY4lRjJybGPe6hAyknV1wJwcpitSzHyMZ_wKXJiaLzpfHMv91KAEWMblwcHrIOmu0jzHqHHKZoZwPGXdH-u8EVTlIeK9KG/s320/curio.jpg" width="240" /></a>I organised my own retreat this weekend to this place, my bed du jour, to have a think about life. <br />
In the past the mattress and the view here have been a pretty scenic perch to work through big decisions. Which I seem to have a lot of right now.This is a studio in Curio Bay - about an hour from Invercargill - and besides having a bed made of driftwood, separated from the beach only by a sliding glass door, it has the best power shower in the world, a jar of coffee beans next to a grinder in the top cupboard, and a really great stereo system, with a stack of scratched-up CDs, the best of which - in my extensive research throughout Saturday evening, with a leftover birthday bottle of Pinot gris - was a '96 David Bowie greatest hits album.<br />
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I actually don't know Bowie that well. But the more I gazed out to the horizon and gave deep and reflective thought to the big questions in my life that seem to require an immediate decision from me, the more compelled I was to swan back over to the stereo and press repeat on track 4.</div>
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During my retreat, no cell phone, no internet, I listened to the ocean, watched half of Midnight in Paris, slept for ten hours, became a big Bowie fan, and I don't know at exactly what point the switch finally flipped, but driving back home on Sunday I felt a lot of hope about whatever is on that big fat beautiful horizon. </div>
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So no epiphanies for me this weekend. Just rest. Which was maybe what I really needed.<br />
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Anyway, track 4, going out to all you overthinkers... <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bnXZ3R3OWpg" width="560"></iframe><br />Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-83834952638084292972012-06-21T06:50:00.003-07:002012-07-05T12:01:35.324-07:00I just want to see some palm trees<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My evening routine for the last five weeks has gone a bit like this (except tonight; still at work at 1am, trying write about neuromodulation and phantom pain at a fifth grade reading level. The below is waiting for me out there): </div>
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Lean into the rain, wind, sleet coming at me head on, all the way to my car; drive home in the dark, which has been dark since about 5 pm, put on merino wool socks in the dark. Crank up the heat in the dark. Maybe punch on a light, finally. Turn on the evening news, drag my duvet to the lounge, heat up chicken soup in the kitchen, put the kettle on, stir soup, then organise myself on the couch - soup, socks, duvets, polka-dot covered hot water bottle, and open my laptop and cruise expedia.co. nz for the kind of hotel room in Los Angeles that I can wake up in on Monday morning in sunlit sheets, eyelids fluttering then opening to see palm trees and a pool, maybe hear a fountain somewhere, and I will think ah shoot its light outside, I'm late for work.<br />
And then it will wash over me and everything in me will just exhale, unravel.<br />
<em>Hello holiday</em>.<br />
And I will roll over, curl up, and go back to sleep, sun in hair, on shoulders, music from about a million different radio stations on the streets.<br />
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I'm loving the idea of spending just one night in the city I'm always only just passing through, even though I know I'm supposed to be sleeping off jet lag before getting on a flight overseas the next afternoon.<br />
Cristi Silva, my best friend from high school, is driving down from Santa Barbara for the night. I'm so excited.<br />
She said we can go anywhere I want in LA Sunday night. The town is ours.<br />
You know where I want to go? About five metres away to the hotel pool. I want to eat baked Doritos, drink diet root beer, flip through a stack of really bad, pointless magazines, maybe even bridal magazines and hold up the pictures and do the Psycho theme and then you know where I want to go to dinner?<br />
International House of Pancakes. <br />
Maybe Carrows. Is there a Baker's Square in L.A.? I want waffles and streaky bacon for dinner. I want to be my 15-year-old self again. Eat cool whip on toast with strawberry jam.<br />
And then crawl back to bed.<br />
I've been planning on waking up in L.A. for about six weeks now. I don't know why it represents everything I feel I need right now. There is a lovely, very mature, international itinerary that unfolds in the days after.<br />
This is also one of my first holidays as an adult that isn't an actual life move.<br />
Its just a holiday and I love that I do want to come back to where I am now in a month.<br />
I want to come back to post offices with 'please remove muddy boots' signs, and quiz nights at the pub, mulled wine, dessert nights, mid-winter dinners, snow on the mountains, Jamie Oliver cooking shows, freezing cold winds at Oreti beach, long baths on winter mornings listening to Beth Orton, opening up the bathroom window to see the frost covering everything outside. Persimmons and pears and grated nutmeg in porridge.<br />
I love that this holiday is supposed to be just that, a month to just relax a little bit and think about what's next. And be thankful. <br />
(And eat baked doritos and wear big sunglasses by a pool and sleep till noon like a rock star).</div>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-37382946961000889382012-05-29T16:30:00.001-07:002012-05-29T16:30:34.492-07:00memorials in small towns<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last March I went running on a back road near Kurow, a farming town in the middle of the South Island, where I was spending a lot of time then. It was autumn, like now, and the light on the hills in the early evening was changing. There aren't many trees in the area; it was dusk on this road and so I made it my aim to run to the one big oak tree in the distance, before turning back. It was planted by an old farmhouse on a long straight road. <br />
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When I got there the lights had been turned on in the front of the house. I didn't want to hang around too long; I worry about dogs. But then I saw that under tree, near the roots, there was a plaque that had been placed in the ground. Weeds were growing up around it. I stopped and crouched down to look and pushed the weeds back, and on the plaque, mossy and faded so you could hardly read it were the names of two boys who died, one killed in Italy and one in Africa, in WWI. The surname of the brothers was still the same one the mailbox almost ninety years later. You look at that one mailbox, one farm, in the middle of the mountains and two losses for a mailbox out here seems pretty unbearable.<br />
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Memorials - sometimes trees with plaques, but more often in stone or concrete - are usually in the centre of towns, I've found, but not always down here. When I started writing this, I remembered this photo I took two years ago. You have to look hard, but there is a war memorial for WWI in the paddock below the house. That was what I first saw when I stopped the car, this structure in the middle of nowhere. When I hopped over the fence and climbed up towards it, I saw this house, with open windows, curtains blowing, vacant for years.<br />
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Down the road, in a nursing home on the coast, this woman I interviewed about Anzac Day, Lorraine, who is 92, said there were always dances going on in those years, for men coming home and the farmboys leaving during WWII at the town halls. They were boys you had known from birth, who were like brothers, and boys you had crushes on, and maybe that one boy who drove you crazy, that you couldn't get off your mind. She said they would dance all night until that last slow song Wish Me Luck, a song that she still hated, because it was always the song that ended the night. You wouldn't want to let them go. But you could never let that show in your eyes.<br />
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I don't know if Memorial Days are more haunting to me now because I am older, or because I live in a rural area with an ageing demographic who weren't raised to give grief a lot of room, and you see how many names are engraved on these plaques and memorials, how many trees are planted for a soldier who didn't come home, and you wonder who was left in these towns to love.<br />
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Yesterday was Memorial Day in the U.S. It just made me think about this...<br />
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<br />Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-41341451359139140872012-03-25T00:41:00.020-07:002012-03-31T14:52:08.622-07:00milford<div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCan83uaTBV4fKSBfK8o6PhSfkF0lkhjChhkdxF_i9DEVuR8rZXfzGlZU3l0JksWGMgHK0aZPzWjqkQ9QNOdm-3HQ1AhuMSE7cxsghldRUFGC_KQMgOUWuVbv5_b3vVH2ItzBzG8pwMaA9/s1600/IMG_0260.JPG"></a><br /><div><div><div><div><div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYcGQqMXXehGsFzQ_1fgLch4-ThPXWujL1x9n6zGafcQ3ESqzvlhYDLSu8Tqkl5Oa25lmTGiWEFBbl0OBpQzfY7lCoBZsDGFIzMTvBYb8kiMcAjVZ1PYwiED-iBPY-6X5DuTjWVFUBaC6D/s1600/family+tree.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 320px; height: 240px; float: left; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5724120946286522690" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYcGQqMXXehGsFzQ_1fgLch4-ThPXWujL1x9n6zGafcQ3ESqzvlhYDLSu8Tqkl5Oa25lmTGiWEFBbl0OBpQzfY7lCoBZsDGFIzMTvBYb8kiMcAjVZ1PYwiED-iBPY-6X5DuTjWVFUBaC6D/s320/family+tree.jpg" /></a>This last Saturday, walking through rain, hood up and rapidly blinking water off my eyelashes, I listened to a man walking a few feet in front of me talk over his shoulder about a play that ran at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin called <em>Belong</em>.<div><div><div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>We weren't talking about theatre in general, but he began talking - or shouting; it was raining and we could barely hear each other - about it after I joked that I still get my feelings hurt a little bit if someone mimics the way I speak.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>It was just an aside comment and I didn't give it much thought when I said that. It's not a big deal when someone does it, but it gets tiring that there is still a place in my head that recoils to hear how different I sound to people and suddenly the way I pronounce <em>herbal</em> and <em>scone</em> becomes yet another quiet, cold assurance - face to the wind - that no matter where I go in the world, I will always be an interloper.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>He told me the play was about people coming to New Zealand and trying to make a home here and be accepted by the communities they had moved into. He described a whole story line that I don't remember. But I understood why he mentioned the play. That what he heard in my voice was a desire to belong, and that it was not unusual for here, and some playwright recently had been able to capture that in a three-act play.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>Milford was as stunning as it has been for a thousand years; I have pictures. </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>But the part I loved the most about walking for four days through glacial valleys, under icy peaks, passing waterfalls you can't even see the top of and pools of water that reflect all this, after years of just hanging out around Milford's boundaries, was having a woman named Judith come find me in the lobby of Pompolona Lodge after I had taken off my pack, sit down next to me and ask if I was Gwyneth Hyndman - and tell me her mother was a Hyndman, and she always looked for my byline in the newspaper, which always came a few days late with the supplies, because apparently I am a lost, but now returning member of the Southland Hyndmans. They know I am here, she told me. And I thought, <em>weird</em>, but I was kind of thrilled by this.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>I have this picture I took of it as my screensaver. Every time I see it I am reminded that someone saw my name down on the dinner list and she came out and found me in a group of strangers and drew three generations of Hyndmans from memory (then the rain got into my pack and soaked the paper, but I put it together a bit and took a picture of it).<br />But there was something about walking out of the mountains with a piece of paper like this, that I can draw a line to and say - if I am mimic-ed - this me, right here, and these are my people. </div><div> </div><div div=""><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-39654448419918471342011-12-27T17:06:00.000-08:002012-02-12T02:26:10.647-08:00Summer so far..<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS-P59nPLwVb5jXDVohg_qB444ifjBXn5BMIyKMH4b74mzxQO-dsiRLOizFAXVplbIUSQ2yq1ytvxuXh_0lUwCStUs-GsOxHzOgD8yz94vMYMTp9V6BnRu9vBCUufHRiK4w7g-W5P9C9fI/s1600/windscreen.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5696607600902212306" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS-P59nPLwVb5jXDVohg_qB444ifjBXn5BMIyKMH4b74mzxQO-dsiRLOizFAXVplbIUSQ2yq1ytvxuXh_0lUwCStUs-GsOxHzOgD8yz94vMYMTp9V6BnRu9vBCUufHRiK4w7g-W5P9C9fI/s320/windscreen.JPG" /></a> Six weeks ago - which was beginning of summer for me - was Boxing Day. I was up with the sun and a box of birds, keys jangling in my hand, down on Oreti Beach before 7 am.<br /><br /><div><br /><div></div><br /><div>That morning, the beach was magic. The waves ran through my ankles; the sea to my left; sand, warm and firm under my feet, Fiordland just there in a haze, a swinging door of wild weather, closing and opening to a new year, new adventure. I dove into the water for my first swim of the summer. It was like washing off 2011. Christmas: good riddance. </div><br /><br /><div>It didn't even really matter that I had drawn the short straw for work shifts and that an hour later I was straightening my skirt, brushing sand off my shoulders and putting my salty hair up with a bank pen as I ran up the stairs to work to expose the injustices of the world (then settling for writing about Boxing Day sales) .<br /></div><br /><div>And can you hear the freedom in my voice? </div><br /><br /><div>Besides the sudden appearance of summer, it was my second day of being cut loose from a five-day special series that ran in the newspaper, called <em>Home For the Holidays</em>. Under the heading there were a few sentences about Southland Times reporters doing a series on people flying home to Invercargill the week leading up to Christmas, and how we were there to capture all that joy.<br /></div><br /><div>That week, if you came in on any 1.40 pm flight from Christchurch you would have seen me - or at least felt the darkness coming from my corner of the terminal - in a long black jacket, dark sunglasses, black tights and boots, sitting icily in the waiting area, looking like I might be the point person for a assasination. But no, actually, I was there to find happy people reuniting with the ones they love. (To interview them, not to kill them). </div><br /><br /><div>In winter, the holidays are easy and effortless for me. And if it is Christmas in the winter, it means I'm in California, staying with my parents, usually in between jobs and usually comfortably hopeful in my natural state of transience. Its painting by numbers. There are traditions to fall in line with. There are the cards and letters from around the world my mom has out on the table at breakfast every morning after Thanksgiving; there is the standing with my dad and brother at Christmas in Los Olivos, when all the shops stay open late, to serve roasted walnuts like my mom and dad have done, with or without us kids, every second Saturday in December in my hometown for 30 years. </div><br /><br /><div>There is the early twilight across the street over the alfalfa field. The calls on the message machine from old friends back in town who want to walk up to Mattei’s for coffee and mud pie then come back and sit in the jacuzzi under the walnut trees, our toes above the steam, with a glass of wine and talk about life and where we are in it, and are we living up to the expectations we set for ourselves at age 8 (I am not a cowgirl and I am not married to one of the brothers from Bonanza, so F for failure from 8-year-old self).<br /></div><br /><div>In New Zealand, the season is different. It is summer and this is the bottom of the world so there are these long days of light that I will crave in seven months when it's just bed to car to office and back to bed in darkness.<br /><br />But along with all the light there is also this wide open space of time, Christmas eve to December 26, then to New Years, full of absences in my life I maybe don't feel as much in May or September.</div><br /><br /><div>That was six weeks ago.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>The light that was lasting until 11 pm on the beach is gone by 9:30 now. I don't feel so much that resentment when there were hugs and tears and packages in the airport terminal last month that weren't for me. I am back to missing specific people when I need to miss them and when it is right to miss them. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div>On Boxing Day, after I walked around in the heat and interviewed flustered salespeople and sullen shoppers, I got to go back down to Oreti Beach for a story on the lifeguards down there. I had finished, and was walking back to the car, trailing behind the photographer, when I saw an elderly man in the driver's seat of a parked truck on the beach, facing out to sea.</div><br /><br /><div>He had his head down and he was reading. In a frame on the dashboard, on the passenger side, facing the ocean, was a picture of a woman. I only glanced at the picture as I walked past, but in that glance I knew it was that picture that captures everything about her that he loved. And that sitting on a beach in the car, reading, was something they used to do together.</div><br /><br /><div>So I write about absences and missing people I love, and being jealous of people who have all that obviousnes right there with them at the correct times of the year. And then I remember how rare that is, and there are years you have that warmth and years that you just remember it being there. And that I think I know so much about loss but I don't really, yet.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>It is February now. I know the light in the sky is lessening, but it is still a light to do things under. More weekends to new places with new friends that I need to remember to stay open to; we have more roads to discover before the light fades.</div><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div></div>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-18602215793173540292011-11-20T02:52:00.000-08:002011-11-25T02:10:47.883-08:00The Garden PartyToday is my father's birthday; I'm dedicating a song to him.<br /><br />It's a song that was in my head last month, driving, then flying, then driving again, back from a wedding in a vineyard that I went by myself to, knowing only the bride. I had about six hours of travel time the day after to look out windows, forehead on glass, and think about how great it would be to have him turn this song up on the radio and sing it to me right about now.<br /><br />The wedding was beautiful. The bride was beautiful. At the reception, the sun was coming down into the courtyard through the trees, and there was a fountain; it reminded me of being back home, I had these great new shoes that made me feel tall, yet still me, and everyone was wearing groovy frocks and and sunglasses and it felt like winter had been beaten back ; and at some point I was talking with someone, while holding a glass of champagne and a tartlet, when I was told I was <em>strange</em>.<br /><br />The moment was surreal. There was the assessment of who had overheard this conversation and who, exactly, was doing the judging - because what kind of guy says that to a girl, who is clearly very much minus a plus one, at a wedding, because no matter what the context, all you hear is <em>you don't belong here with us. </em>I froze and tried not to let the warmth I could feel rising up in me get to my eyes, where it would show how that adjective killed my spirit a little, as someone who has a long history with public events that begin with feeling quite extraordinary and end with the realisation I'm a cautionary tale for some, or many, depending on the crowd.<br /><br />For these illusions of being destined for greatness, I totally blame my dad.<br /><br />Because for every parade, stage performance, and pony club show that I've arrived at like a conquistador, Dad has been my trusty sidekick, either in the background or taking the photograph as I stride off to be the heroine of whatever story I had created for myself that morning.<br /><br />When I was eight Dad took of me at a Western show class I entered with my pony, Mishka near my hometown. Small, hairy $75 Shetland ponies don't belong next to glistening, sleek, $20,000 Quarter horses, but if I was oblivious to this, Dad chose to be too. So he borrowed a Los Olivos Olive Company van and we coaxed Mishka into the back of it and hauled her off to the show, pulling in beside six-horse trailers in a field next to the showring and unloaded her. I remember looking around and thinking yeah okay, so maybe we wouldn't get the blue ribbon, but I was pretty confident of a second or third place.<br /><br />One thing dad insisted on always, no matter what I was up to: ''safety first''.<br /><br />So the picture I have of Mishka and I is us in a lineup of horses and riders that are clearly bred to win. Shiny saddles, sparkling belt buckles, spurs and cowboy hats. In the middle is me on Mishka, coming up to the shoulder of the horses on either side of me, wearing a polo shirt, regular backyard jeans, a bandana tied around my neck and a big white astronaut crash helmet.<br /><br />I remember at some point looking around and squinting up at the other riders, the astronaut helmet slipping down over my eyes, and then down at myself and Mishka and thinking <em>we look kind of different.</em><br /><em></em><br /><br />There is a photo I have been trying to embed into this post all afternoon. I've scanned it wrong, so you will have to rely on word visuals here. The photo is of me and dad in a Day in the Country parade. This is age 7; about a year before Mishka. To tie me over in my horse craze, Dad had built me one in the back yard, then put wagon wheels and a halter on it. I named it Blaze. I dressed up in cowboy boots and a bonnet and Dad wheeled me down Grand Ave, waving. The great part about the photo which hangs by my bed, to remind me of my roots, is my expression. You can see the defensiveness building in my eyes as its dawning on me that I'm not on a real horse and that I'm not a real cowgirl. I'm starting to get that sullen look of a girl who's fantasy that she is the most beautiful girl in the world is starting to deflate. Dad, the wind beneath my wings, is looking 100 percent supportive as he pushes me along telling me to <em>keep waving</em>.<br /><br />Story of my life, right there.<br /><br />So today on my Dad's birthday I'm playing back a song that was always on when we did our Saturday chore drives together, the drives to get alfalfa bales for Mishka where I'd stare hard at the rearview mirror to decide if I liked my face. This song would come on and I'd snap out of it and look over at Dad and be like <em>hey it's our song</em>.<br /><br />And it still is.<br /><br />Even more so when you're standing in a courtyard with tartlets and Champagne, defending the way you live your life, which I'm still trying hard to be a good heroine of.<br /><br />It's it's is a pretty good legacy to leave to a daughter, Dad.<br /><br />You know why?<br /><br />(Everybody, altogether)<br /><br /><em>Cause it's all right now<br />I learned my lesson well<br />You can't please everyone<br />So you got to please yourself</em><br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uAHR7_VZdRw" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315"></iframe><br /><br />For me, Ricky's lip-synching adds to the overall authenticity of his message.<br /><br />(On an endnote: I sort of threw this guy to the dogs at the beginning of the story with the comment about me being strange. He said he remembered that I had lived, happily, by choice, on my own in Clinton, South Otago, three years ago. Now I live in Invercargill. And he saved himself by saying <em>strange</em> like it was maybe a good survival skill to have handy if i was going to keep moving to wintry, towns at the bottom of the world that are interesting to me. Tonight I chased an astronomer down Oreti beach in 115 km winds - my bank card, pens, office key, two parking tickets flying out of my pockets, to be lost in the waves - for a picture of him watching his 54th solar eclipse. These are the places I like to make my home. Maybe that is odd. But this is me)<br /><br />And the rest of the wedding reception was awesome. I danced all night with total strangers.<br /><br />Us <em>strange</em> girls do that.<br /><br />Happy Birthday Dad. Wish I was going with you guys to the Apple Farm, then Costco, then to the Christmas tree farm...miss you guys so...Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-51784955189678160422011-08-30T05:18:00.000-07:002011-09-04T01:51:16.518-07:00Operation Happiness: 9 things getting me through the winter<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9y55hbNnx81i2e1KobtHlD3TWKtLZ0-f6GJyNqUW0ottSu7A9wp7-_SbgQHaWWdUd_fuiP9VKasJW427Ll8MCO14blE9UwKdQ8A3VIAajSSC3PXdhIGLpm1cBbUuPDjYaZdBHqO_h1jUw/s1600/homefires%252C+beachwalk.jpg"><img style="WIDTH: 240px; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5648409352532116178" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9y55hbNnx81i2e1KobtHlD3TWKtLZ0-f6GJyNqUW0ottSu7A9wp7-_SbgQHaWWdUd_fuiP9VKasJW427Ll8MCO14blE9UwKdQ8A3VIAajSSC3PXdhIGLpm1cBbUuPDjYaZdBHqO_h1jUw/s320/homefires%252C+beachwalk.jpg" /></a>
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<br /><div>Winter.</div>
<br /><div>Not my finest season. </div>
<br /><div>Happiness may only be a dog sunning itself on a rock. But I want it. And usually, and thankfully - very, very thankfully - nothing stands between me and unearned joy, peace, tenderness for the world, etc in spring, summer and autumn. </div>
<br /><div>But winter. Winter, I'm a drooping flower. Anxious about everything. Restless, lonely, sun-starved. Overly navel-gazey, competitive. Sullen...</div>
<br /><div>Augmenting the usual S.A.D. sack blast is a 360 life change for me in the last six weeks. Its a very wanted and positive change, but its a move from sun and wildernesses to a cold, light-less city and a job where I'm writing again, but it also requires me to act smarter then I am, and be a pain in the ass. </div>
<br /><div>This is draining for a people-pleaser. </div>
<br /><div>I spend a lot of time on the phone at a desk that is saturated in yellow post-it notes, on the fourth story of a grey building, which looks out to a clock on another grey building, and a grey sky above all of this, trying to compose hard-hitting questions on subjects I've had about 53 seconds to make myself all-knowing on (it's not always like that but on some days it feels that way).</div>
<br /><div>This time last year, for a reference point, I was coming back from a cycling trip around Prince Edward Island with Angie Kelly, the wind and rain on our faces, sand in toes, blueberries and cheese for dinner, feeling lovely and alive and grateful...</div>
<br /><div>Winter...ai, ai, ai....</div>
<br /><div>My happy list so far: stormy walks on Oreti beach, weekend trips getting OUT of the city, Jo Seagar cooking school's apple cake, baked in the morning, so the whole house smells like cinnamon; late afternoon sunlight on the floor, my french press; waking up buried under duvets to see birthday flowers and sunglasses for when I need them, and I will, there will be light again; and Fleurs Place, my favourite restaurant in the world at Moeraki. Its like an old lighthouse with stained glass windows and fish that's come right off the boats and everything comes on these old plates, like something out of your nana's cupboard. As for the eharmony video: my flatmate downloaded for me after he came home one night to find me on the lawn, headlamp on, trying to coax a stray cat into our gargage with a chicken drumstick. I keep it as a cautionary tale.</div>
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<br /><div>And when all else fails to raise the spirits... </div>
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<br /><div>Bad boys in suits. It's my guilty pleasure winter thing.</div>
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<br /><div>So fun to watch them misbehave (from a distance)
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<br /><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/25361730">Don Draper's best quote</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user7430781">clie</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</p>
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<br />Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-45213776988526643152011-07-20T03:08:00.000-07:002011-08-10T04:12:52.274-07:00This one night? In Malaga?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4R0XImRp7-AGynF72ANbctak0DM9rvqqg6M4R-kk4QFcUeo3ds1pbcjvK1d5X9WDsGfSgeYTAF0NxOOaWocrHgUVq_-AGsV63X5uTEWaufuoI76JmpruiSeCMV1XBfrg4a7R_74e5FAxd/s1600/fan.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639176257704496322" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4R0XImRp7-AGynF72ANbctak0DM9rvqqg6M4R-kk4QFcUeo3ds1pbcjvK1d5X9WDsGfSgeYTAF0NxOOaWocrHgUVq_-AGsV63X5uTEWaufuoI76JmpruiSeCMV1XBfrg4a7R_74e5FAxd/s320/fan.jpg" /></a> Three weeks ago, I was emptying out my hiking pack on a lawn, in front of a hotel room in Manapouri, and I found something I thought I had lost.
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<br /><div>It was dark and my pack smelled of garbage juice that had dripped down to the bottom. I ripped my sleeping bag out and spread it on a patio chair outside the sliding door and gave the pack a shake. Plastic mugs with dried coffee grounds stuck at the bottom, a headlamp, a soggy diary and a few other things I couldn't identify hit the ground then fell away into the dark.</div>
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<br /><div>I've been back in New Zealand a month now. When I shower I'll still look at my belly and see the sunburn I got that last week on the deck in Santa Ynez - the week that was so hot you just wanted to walk around in a t-shirt and flip flops, and sip gin and tonic with limes in a fold-out chair forever - I'd watch it fade a little bit, night after night. </div>
<br /><div>In the morning I zip up a dirty red down jacket with a piece of duck tape over a rip on the right sleeve. It's dark by 5. What I do see in the landscape is as piercing as ever to me - a wintry overlay on the late summer/early autumn I left behind in April. But since I'd been back here, if I see any magazine covers at grocery store markets with any beach or sun or girls in sunglasses, I turn away and look at something else.</div>
<br /><div>That night inManapouri I felt around on the ground, in the grass and my hands wandered around picking up pens and coins and a few gross, damp, garbage juiced wads of something, and then my fingers roamed across it, and I just sat back on my haunches for a second and thought of course I'd find this tonight. And I even wondered if I should just throw it quickly back in my pack.</div>
<br /><div>But I did pick it up, and I wondered how it had gotten so lost, and I flicked it open, just like I did that one night at a cafe, in Malaga, on the beach, wearing my gold sandals, lip gloss and a silvery summer dress with little pieces of copper embedded in the neckline.</div>
<br /><div>I remember taste of the sweet wine my cousin loved, and thinking how beautiful she looked with her fiance beside her. The warm night air, the bread baskets, the bacarones, more sweet wine that led to morning and me in a churreria, chin on hands, watching the slow delicious drip of espresso filling a tiny glass with gold through red blurry eyes. </div>
<br /><div>There were the days leading up to the wedding - the arrival of guests from around the world, sitting in hotel lobbies with the sea just there, and a drink just here, expressing myself with lots of big hand gestures like I was still speaking another language. Washing out the same dress in the sink of the apartment above the streets and the ocean every night with pomegranite and tangerine shampoo and drying it on the balcony so I could wear it the next morning to sit in hotel lobbies again.</div>
<br /><div>Then those go-to-hell black velvety heels that nearly split my feet as I tried to stride over coblestones to the church on that last evening, then gave up and just ran barefoot up the steps, then slipped them back on in the pews to look tall. And how hours later, my cousin's new sister-in-law danced flamenco in heels twice as high as mine and then my cousin pulled her long white dress over one arm and the two of them dragged everyone out onto the floor and the music changed and suddenly we were all doing the electric slide to Friends in Low Places.
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<br /><div>And getting off a bus hours later: my aunt, mother of the bride, still stunning as she took my uncle's arm as the sky over the streetlamps exploded in streaks of pink as he took off his cowboy hat. My other cousin held the bouquet; her boyfriend loosened his bright pink bowtie and I walked in front of all of them down the street, walking backwards, looking at them and thinking this was just like Christmas dinner when we were kids, except better and in Spain, and I was carrying my heels in one hand and a fluttering red fan in the other hand...</div>
<br /><div>I flicked the fan shut.</div>
<br /><div>In Manapouri it was beautiful, starry winter night - you look at the sky here and you just think <em>lonesome</em>. I dropped the fan in the pack and drew it closed; put my gloves back on and pulled my hat down almost to my eyes. I headed towards the pub to check the weather report on the news even though I knew it was going to be gloomy.</div>
<br /><div>But that fan. It was like a love letter you keep finding and stashing away somewhere weird to surprise yourself when you're lonely.
<br />There is no comfort for the cold and endless darkness here now except hot water bottles.</div>
<br /><div>But there was this one time? In Malaga?...
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<br /><div>A traveller's blessing: From a bleak, cold place, I wish everyone a hot-blooded, wild red Spanish fan falling out of your garbage-juiced, half-frozen hiking pack this winter.
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<br />Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-91940643804905046702011-06-17T08:51:00.000-07:002011-06-18T23:10:33.365-07:00Chocolate milk. Buttermilk donuts. R Country Store<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTf695XSAAuprCusb-_dUUYdtwFP_VviJE-D-R0FH7coleT51gJDc-o9W-SL5SkuJg7dg7AfhQPetubAcdbDujkpTcTQ5EMRKXkqC-Td5Wac46Puc7yH9wGdLXEEnRMdhp_bLeZS85fNf4/s1600/me+and+dad%252C+mowing+lawn.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5619702497769853362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 159px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTf695XSAAuprCusb-_dUUYdtwFP_VviJE-D-R0FH7coleT51gJDc-o9W-SL5SkuJg7dg7AfhQPetubAcdbDujkpTcTQ5EMRKXkqC-Td5Wac46Puc7yH9wGdLXEEnRMdhp_bLeZS85fNf4/s320/me+and+dad%252C+mowing+lawn.bmp" border="0" /></a> Every time I come back to my hometown I bring a list.<br /><br /><div>I'm a geek, lists relax me, so when I come back to Los Olivos, California there is a scrap of paper I've written on feverishly while sitting in an airport terminal.</div><br /><br /><div>Next to each bullet points are direct orders to myself about favourite roads to run on at dusk, pieces of outdoor furniture I plan to sit all day in with Lompoc tortilla chips and Cowboy Caviar from El Rancho; there are Midland School fencelines with No Tresspassing signs I need to squirrel through, highways up the coast that Cristi Silva and I will be driving in her husband's pickup truck, and MP3 playlists for jumping on the trampoline at night in my parents' backyard under walnut trees.</div><br /><br /><div>The list is amended and re-prioritized every few years; new strategies are sometimes called for (i.e. Fess Parker's Wine Country Inn & Spa has put a door-sized board across it's gated pool entrance. Lame. But not impossible.) and as Los Olivos has grown wealthier and lost some its grime and soul, there are now winecountry restaurants to spend a whole paycheck at and vineyards to explore and sometimes I'll read or hear about these places and add them in.<br /><br />But there one item on the hometown list that is always at the top, unmoved, and marked in stars.</div><br /><br /><div>Chocolate milk. Buttermilk donuts. R Country Store. </div><br /><br /><div>I used to love running errands with Dad on Saturday mornings. It was my first experience of having 'time to yourself' with someone else and it was where I got my love of jumping into a car and driving away with the radio on. Morning errands were an escape, a reward for completed yardwork (if you rake enough leaves, they fill up the back of a truck, and then that truck has to be taken to the landfill). Easy logic. The quicker you get it done, the quicker you can hit the road, roll down the windows, pass a Capri Sun juice back and forth and tune into the Padres game.</div><br /><br /><div>Some Saturday mornings we'd cross the highway and drive down Foxen Canyon Road, past the dusty corrals and oak trees on the hillsides, the mist rising off them as the heat of the day began to burn through; past the cattle on the bare, brown hills and up the winding road to the landfill entrance.</div><br /><br /><div>Some years it was weekend softball games and I would ride shotgun with the glove in my lap down Refugio Road to Santa Ynez, then be really scared to get out of the car and be a team player. I wanted to stay in the car with Dad and his John Fogerty cassette tapes.</div><br /><br /><div>When I had horses we'd take the blue tarp in the backyard by the walnuts, and cover the floor of the minivan and drive down to the end of Baseline and pick up bales of alfalfa then take the long road back to Los Olivos. I remember rolling down the window and resting my chin on my arms, pushing the flyaway hair from my ponytail out of my nose and eyes and looking hard at the rearview mirror, trying to figure out if I liked my face. </div><br /><br /><div>Then I got older and got a license and inherited a car and pretty soon I had my own errands to run, and places of my own I would drive to listening to my favourite mixed tapes.</div><br /><br /><div>At some point in my early years as an errand sidekick, Dad and I would stop at R Country Store on a corner of Grand Ave. He'd grab a chocolate milk and the weekend paper and I'd get a buttermilk donut.</div><br /><br /><div>Dad would hold open the door and I'd walk under his arm and there was a great feeling of a Saturday morning just beginning, with the Lone Ranger on at noon on channel 32 and then my horse to ride all afternoon and then maybe a sleepover at Jenny Anderson's (Jenny had the best sleepovers) and Xanadu to watch and a lot of interpretive dancing on rollerskates in her driveway until it got dark and her mom called us in.</div><br /><br /><div>Whenever I come back, Dad is always ready to take a car out and get his chocolate milk and the Saturday paper. And in all of my wanderings I have just never found a better place to get a buttermilk donut. We'll drive up in his Austin Mini Cooper and get the mail. You can't really talk because the engine is so loud. So he and I will just shake our head and mouth 'tourists' when we can't get a park in town.</div><br /><br /><div>We'll pull in at R Country and the tri tip will be smoking on the grill outside and all the neighbors will be sitting outside in plastic chairs with coffee in to go cups and Jim with his baseball hat pulled low will always say 'well I always know your daughter's home when I hear the trampoline at night'. And I'll head for the donuts and dad, the chocolate milk and we'll meet at the counter with the weekend paper and fight over who's paying.</div><br /><br /><div>Driving with my father somewhere really normal and familiar is one of my favourite things about coming home. I feel young and taken care of and loved for who I am no matter what I do because I'm his kid. </div><br /><br /><div>And when Dad opens the door of R Country and I duck under his arm with my buttermilk donut I feel like life is one long Saturday morning that's just beginning.</div><br /><br /><div>I will miss these small, simple drives down the road, for nothing in particular, more than anything.</div><br /><br /><div>Love you so much Dad. Happy Father's Day.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-24588266588688607462011-06-10T09:53:00.000-07:002011-06-15T00:02:32.834-07:00After the camino: why I'm on a diet.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2cjakWH_btSxodagBrRhy7jID1bvVV4hX9PN2gNY__g_B2DdBRBzniVbMOWlr1Scjzx59PbzeRZmCaqyEPSYkZk8WOTsUCcmkXJAbYaMsIwHqpC17scrRhNWXlMJ0Ymq6kqRB5476DSJ4/s1600/DSCN6337.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5618336851629141826" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2cjakWH_btSxodagBrRhy7jID1bvVV4hX9PN2gNY__g_B2DdBRBzniVbMOWlr1Scjzx59PbzeRZmCaqyEPSYkZk8WOTsUCcmkXJAbYaMsIwHqpC17scrRhNWXlMJ0Ymq6kqRB5476DSJ4/s320/DSCN6337.JPG" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyEOXi48a8vm2IBdMvYYRw7OBaXSgTtKXQGbT641GQ1INJRt3N2Sl-j_WvL0TPmIfFKbIxWA-FFtuerGLOK5MKudZpaaBQcSidssAaHwRLRsQXss_y7K5wMXtU7Euw56XgpTG2IOqAihMa/s1600/DSCN6287.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; 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MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616643575581887426" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGnYhWKNEVimiEYIGyNy2-yf2fFk6TWUVF8tdX09YnCA6KSSpyrM_jl7yT0LQ4-H2GUA_TDO6ZDo34Klvg1UHY9LIK1DMWRoex52VcJmoySjcrK-Iz8Yk3UXi2hP8pwsdEX-mXfI9S9Tko/s320/DSCN6368.JPG" /></a><br /><br /><div><br /><div><br /><div><br /><div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-DJjO3DlL3BP5t7xTZWDKkXf6xtYbzlUvcASBSQEfsLE1wybkEyyLUOMmF4Z4h60PAuEL7VHkpRN-SRcnVWQ7cDhCGpPFcIcakZOvU078jBkyrXeYkMUOhvvF03uCadXlpn2YRnalqH3A/s1600/DSCN6359.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616643318706729538" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-DJjO3DlL3BP5t7xTZWDKkXf6xtYbzlUvcASBSQEfsLE1wybkEyyLUOMmF4Z4h60PAuEL7VHkpRN-SRcnVWQ7cDhCGpPFcIcakZOvU078jBkyrXeYkMUOhvvF03uCadXlpn2YRnalqH3A/s320/DSCN6359.JPG" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJffouI4xR7QaWrMtcH9MGb3OHt7iPBAVEtrCqD9QstrDw-GY6Rf4eZrixqK5yI8p_oSQxmKhAMZDDYvlkJmrFvek9Hja4Bc3RG0_1IWbhNkiZDnZJMdJ_DOMAqB4TSUhYJHdh6plPvKGa/s1600/DSCN6331.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616643028139807954" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJffouI4xR7QaWrMtcH9MGb3OHt7iPBAVEtrCqD9QstrDw-GY6Rf4eZrixqK5yI8p_oSQxmKhAMZDDYvlkJmrFvek9Hja4Bc3RG0_1IWbhNkiZDnZJMdJ_DOMAqB4TSUhYJHdh6plPvKGa/s320/DSCN6331.JPG" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjdzXdIilWAjkqw4rfxGrv_NhRE0GttiZp3cWYIvyyJ4lZAK0YCno05qfFtQZ_MPFWacHEU7FHXtnm7PjD_36joz0BhRm_tdC0rzb_wyiBmUfeeynpZ5tFv05DGeDo7CFM8UsZKbHACrOF/s1600/DSCN6222.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 240px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616640541676548914" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjdzXdIilWAjkqw4rfxGrv_NhRE0GttiZp3cWYIvyyJ4lZAK0YCno05qfFtQZ_MPFWacHEU7FHXtnm7PjD_36joz0BhRm_tdC0rzb_wyiBmUfeeynpZ5tFv05DGeDo7CFM8UsZKbHACrOF/s320/DSCN6222.JPG" /></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-63810679190441792252011-05-15T10:38:00.000-07:002011-06-14T23:30:09.610-07:00Camino de Santiago: Goodnight for Life<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8sznWbW9tv-KQ2tcZk0j7SEfB2KW9Nx94w-8DBkKE6P8Ia58S0_iZQEFwIhcxaEnXn-Ad3n8CsMhbHfr_oFeB4EC6hHxOMhxbK7XEx9aKwn2cu2Ywu5pa9y4COaU-7jIq-iltFwo67gF0/s1600/DSCN6264.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611957111274515042" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8sznWbW9tv-KQ2tcZk0j7SEfB2KW9Nx94w-8DBkKE6P8Ia58S0_iZQEFwIhcxaEnXn-Ad3n8CsMhbHfr_oFeB4EC6hHxOMhxbK7XEx9aKwn2cu2Ywu5pa9y4COaU-7jIq-iltFwo67gF0/s320/DSCN6264.JPG" /></a> Three Friday nights ago I was rolling out a bedroll by the glow of a Coke vending machine and planning out how I could crawl into my sleeping bag, put on my freshly charged MP3 player and read more of the James Patterson novel I had found that morning in a public restroom, without having to get into some big, profound conversation about life and the universe with the guy who had already claimed the spot under the lights of a Fanta bottle.<br /><br />If sleeping in the vending machine shelter sounds strange, that´s because it was. This wasn't a place I would usually wander around looking for somewhere to stay the night, especially on my own, in this open, square, doorless shack somewhere outside of Sarria, in a cluster of houses and barns, one Alburgue and no bar. As an apology maybe, this had been built to house about ten vending machines - Coke, Fanta, Milka bars, coffee, chips, first aid kits and batteries - and maybe now and then a couple of pilgrims who didn't get to the Alburgue before 23 Spanish cyclists.<br /><br /><div></div><br /><div>Just to set the scene, if I was writing a stage play about big conversations about life and the universe and was trying to come up with a backdrop for two opposing characters where conflict and angst could unfold over one night, a vending machine shelter in Spain wasn't bad. </div><br /><br /><div>And as characters, again, almost too filmic. A 19-year-old art history student from Paris, drinks water out of a crushed plastic container for dinner, while watching a Californian carefully take out gold sandals, a makeup bag and three different dress options for a wedding in the south of Spain the next week, and laying them all folded on a metal table, before yes, finally finding what she was looking for, that leopard-print eye mask she had bought in the Barcelona train station for two Euros.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>His name was Franz and he had this tall, polished wooden staff by his bedroll. Everyone seemed to buying or making one along the route. I refolded my dresses and put them back in a plastic bag in my pack. I know it was how original pilgrims travelled, and they were handy for protection 300 years ago, but now, to me, wooden staffs were stupid.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>So we chose our corners, made it clear in body language that neither of us felt like talking, and went to sleep.</div><br /><br /><div>It was dark when I woke up to a sound. Across the room I heard Franz stir. I pulled up my Audrey Hepburn eye mask. In the reflection of the Coke machine I could see the half moon above the trees. I could hear the cows moving around in the barn next door. And then I heard what had woken me again.</div><br /><br /><div>I turned my head slowly, telling myself it was only a nightmare, just enough to see Franz and he was looking at me, eyes like wall clocks, as the low, velvet growl in the doorway grew in intensity. His hand moved to his side. He brought the staff up to his chest, the sound of it dragging across the cement floor and gripped it with both hands, warrior-style. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div>The dog was stunning, wolf-like. I couldn´t have sketched a more beautiful non-animated dog to battle over my life with; I watched him come fully into the reflection on the Coke machine, joining the moon and the trees. He was turned away from us. Across the courtyard a stray dog slinked away from the barn and the cows. The dog in the doorway watched him leave, his head low, showing teeth, the silver hair along his back still up like razors. Then he circled a spot in one direction, then the other, and then went back to sleep in our doorway where he had probably been for hours. In the morning he was gone.</div><br /><br /><div>I thought about this moment the next Monday, when I saw Franz again in a crowd, his staff leaning against a wall in the cathedral, and how I was all about pilgrim staffs now. In fact, get two; be double fisted on the Camino. We did a funny wave across the room - the kind of awkward movement you make when you've shared a moment in a vending machine recepticle with someone, and this moment will become one of many tales you will tell of this time of walking through Spain in search of something that is unique and real to each person and in need of finding.</div><br /><br /><div>Then Franz nodded and I nodded and we put our hands down and our eyes roamed over the pews of the cathedral in Santiago, searching for more people with whom we've shared something with in the last month.</div><br /><br /><div>I had sworn to myself that I wasn't going to start sobbing, or lie prostrate or do something weird and emotional when I got to the final destination, the noon mass at Santiago. But sitting on the cool tiles, my back against marble, and seeing people across the room, scattered everywhere, people I had had these strange moments with - moments where you take shelter from a hailstorm in a bar and go halves on a pitcher of sangria that leaves you breathless and laughing and declaring you could never be with a guy who was passionate about golf or <em>Braveheart</em>; hours when you walk together in silence along a highway, trucks blowing past you; or late afternoons when you lay stretched out in the sun, each of you with one earphone plugged into one ipod in the grass, eyes closed behind sunglasses, both of you nodding to the beat of a favourite song the other person <em>has</em> to hear because it is <em>all</em> about what you have spent the whole morning talking about - its hard not to feel something gathering up in your chest.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Some of these people have names, and get friended as soon as you get to a computer - like Eva who only knew me for hours before she marched into the bunkroom and dragged me out of my bed and into the bar at Rabonal del Camino (<em>You can't lie here and READ, they are serving BAILEYS in the BIG GLASSES for TWO EUROS)</em> - and others who you tell to go on, you'll catch up with them at the alburgue in the next town, and there end up being six alburgues in the next town, and all you know is their first name and that they had a baby when they were 15 and that they're not talking to their sister. </div><br /><br /><div>At some point I started taking pictures of signs that people had left for someone -<em> Nadine Where are you? Send me your number and I'll call. Oliver. March 26, 2006</em> - and wondered if Nadine saw the sign, if she sent Oliver her number. Did Oliver call Nadine, or did he decide that maybe wasn't such a good idea after all.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>That Monday at noon in the cathedral we all did different gestures of intimacy to each other - hand clasps, bear hugs, the cupping of faces and kisses on both cheeks - saying stupidly, over and over, <em>congratulations</em>. We left the cathedral in small packs of people, our little mishmashed cliches, and stood in the sun of the square. We took pictures of each other and ourselves, our arms outstretched, the cathedral behind us, making jokes about finally securing salvation. I didn't want it to end. We wandered back into the city, climbing the steps, past tourists who snapped pictures of us with our packs and dangling sea shells and worn out boots, past the accordian player with his drum and bass machine who seemed to be everywhere we were, past the woman in the same down vest I had in my closet at home, kneeling, her hands out before her with a bowl of change, head bowed. I felt like I was being dragged past all of this, stumbling, trying to inhale it. In four hours I was taking a night bus to Madrid to get to the wedding in Malaga, to put to use the dresses and scarves and gold sandals that I had unloaded every night for a month to get to my sleeping bag and blister kit at the bottom. </div><br /><br /><div>The will to keep saying goodbye to people - and say it like it was the last time, not like we might bump into each other in Leon or Samos sometime before next Tuesday - was emptying out of me. I saw a beautiful girl in sneakers, massive headphones on her tiny head, writing in a journal on the steps of the church and I stopped to take a picture while she was absorbed. When I looked up, my friends had disappeared into the crowds.<br /></div><br /><div>I realised that's what I had intended to happen, so easily and completely and without any emotional effort. I put my camera in my bag and took a breath. This was the right way. I will send out a group email explain I stopped to take a picture and lost them. But no, there was Eva on the steps, face flushed, a hand on her hip, really annoyed I had made her run back to find me. And suddenly I was really really happy she had. And I realised that I am almost 34 and I need to grow up and stop being such a brat about saying goodbye to people.<br /></div><br /><div>The thing is, I need a line.<br /></div><br /><div>Walking behind Eva, absorbed with my boots, I heard my name. I looked up and there was Antonio and Leah, a couple I met in a backpackers' kitchen the week before. Antonio was learning English and while we had been waiting in line to use the one pot and sieve available, he practiced on me. Everything he had on me was answers to phrasebook questions. I was 33. I was from Los Olivos, California. I had one brother, no children, unmarried. They grasped my hand and kissed my cheek. It was more congratulations and talking about what was waiting for us in our homes then Antonio asked if I wanted to join them for dinner.<br /></div><br /><div>'I wish I could,' I said, placing my hand over my heart, my new gesture I had pulled from some Spanish soap opera maybe, to indicate regret, sympathy or a deep feeling about something. My eyes darted up the street to where everyone was lingering.<br /></div><br /><div>He put is hands up like <em>whataya do</em>? then grasped my hand one more time.<br /></div><br /><div>'Goodnight'... he said, and he lifted his eyes up to the sky, searching for the correct wording in English that he needed... 'for life.'<br /></div><br /><div>I started laughing a little. Harsh.<br /></div><br /><div>But I said it back to him. Then we continued on in different directions, and I was walking and laughing still and thinking, I've got to get a pen to write that down, because I think I've found my line.<br /></div><br /><div>So Camino de Santiago - time of solitude, sangria, long afternoon naps, warm crossiants in the morning, crippling blisters, nights spent in vending machine shelters, and the companions who hang out with you as you sort yourself out... it's been grand.<br /></div><br /><div>Goodnight for life. </div>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-28167212824622096802011-05-07T09:44:00.000-07:002011-05-25T17:03:48.762-07:00Camino de Santiago: Tapas with mom<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS0tW4GZD5-I0L472VHPIMKbBs9BNkQYRSida8MAj59LcWPUGwEDaaBpSPrAi-24wvgr1eUw8p7F0y1pi0bnkL30BOv88AN0d-ZhKsOer5_-qFxjGlNtu_CD5y-3GfFwIBit39F5qjiY_D/s1600/DSCN6032.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 240px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5610808533049711522" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS0tW4GZD5-I0L472VHPIMKbBs9BNkQYRSida8MAj59LcWPUGwEDaaBpSPrAi-24wvgr1eUw8p7F0y1pi0bnkL30BOv88AN0d-ZhKsOer5_-qFxjGlNtu_CD5y-3GfFwIBit39F5qjiY_D/s320/DSCN6032.JPG" /></a> Three weeks ago, a conversation with my mom about the California education system - a conversation that began in the kitchen I grew up in a week before - continued in a tapas bar in Pamplona.<br /><br />Dad was trying to find a parking space; it was a Sunday night, busy in a way that was fresh and kind of wild for all three of us, and while he searched the streets for somewhere to wedge the rental, Mom sat on a barstool next to me, a glass of wine and a plate of jamon and bread, olives, marinated mushrooms between us, and she continued talking like we were still sitting at the kitchen counter in bathrobes, our hands around coffee mugs, the morning news on mute above the refridgerator, and the cat at our feet.<br /><br />In the bar, Mom talked with passion about her work, but for a moment I just watched her face, her hand, beside my hand by the wine glass, crazy noise around us and outside on the streets that was just warming up for the night, and I´m thinking, <em>I´m sitting here with my mom, talking about education, in a bar, in Spain. </em><br /><br />My mom, by the way, came to Spain on just about two week´s notice. When it became unavoidable that she wouldn´t be able to make it to my cousin´s wedding this next week because it clashed with finals and graduation, I mentioned, extremely casually at the end of an email, that she should think about coming over and walking a piece of the Camino with me on her Easter break.<br /><br />My mother is a such a sucker for adventure.<br /><br />When I was young, Mom used to take me to Hendry´s Beach during the summer and on weekends; sometimes in a minivan carload of my friends and our boogy boards, sometimes just her and I. In the morning, or if it was June, it would be completely fogged out. She grew up in a house on the Mesa and Hendry´s was where she grew up swimming with her sisters. The fog didn´t bother either of us. She would get a cup of coffee from the restaurant, wrap herself in jackets and a hat and sit at a picnic table with her journal and write.<br /><br />I would be leaping and diving - my first taste of feeling beautiful and powerful at something - I would yell out to her and wave, and she would wave back and I would feel appreciated and then find someone else to show off for and she would go back to writing and staring at the ocean.<br /><br />Whenever I am back in California, I try to get to Hendry´s. I´ll usually do it on a day when I have something I need clarity on. I bring blankets or a down jacket in case its foggy. I´ll bring my journal and a coffee and I´ll go sit at Mom´s picnic table and write. There have been years when I have stared at the waves from there and remembered myself in them, and then picturing mom, probably younger than I am now, sitting in the same place, writing about her own life.<br /><br />But mostly I don´t think about that. It´s my picnic table now, my beach, my life.<br /><br />One of the most precious things about my mom is the way she has been able to leave beautiful pieces of herself - a picnic table, a beach, a need for adventure - and leave it behind her in a way that I have been able to pick them up and make these things all my own.<br /><br />This morning, on Mother´s Day, I know my mom will be looking up where I am on the map (Melide) from her bed, where Dad will have brought her a cup of tea. Dad will have printed this out for her and placed it on the tea tray. She will have Michener´s Iberria beside her for historical reference, so she´ll know more about the place I am in than I do.<br /><br />Then I bet you anything, she and Dad are going to the beach this afternoon and she´ll get a coffee and bring her journal and write her heart out.<br /><br />Happy Mother´s Day mom...I am a very, very blessed daughter. It was so, so wonderful to see you and Dad in Spain...<br /><br />The next vino is on me.Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-24126308851854402712011-05-05T05:32:00.001-07:002011-05-05T07:27:22.109-07:00Camino de Santiago: Tranquilo´Middle age´ on the Camino ended on Monday.<br /><br />The verdent but monotonous farmland, roads that stretched straight out along a highway for hours; stark suburbia, with nothing rising up to break the boredom, was moving slowly, painfully behind me, giving way to Galacia.<br /><br /><br />In the distance was this landscape reminiscent of my first week, the Camino´s ´youth´- the first sighting of Spain from the French Pyrenees, the first tiny dark coffee at a counter, surrounded by weird, intimidating pastries meant to commemorate a communion; the first sip of real sangria, the first taste of cheese and strawberries together, the mustard seed and lavender blanketing the hillsides, the fear of saying anything in Spanish at all, then the desperate need to say absolutely everything in Spanish.<br /><br />This previous week was as bad as I had heard it could be sometimes. My Spanish was crap. I was falling out of love with my mind, winged in the beginning, free to fly from one pleasant concept of myself to another, inhaling its sweetness; now clawed and vicious, digging up the carpet to get to the source of the stench. My feet, young and true, overnight suddenly went disfigured. My heels looked like small animals had been gnawing at them. I was disheartened. I was slowing down. So this was really it. This was the Camino. Woohoo.<br /><br />I watched a cyclist park his bike outside the cafe. Already I was unbuckling my pack. I had become a follower of ´signs´- signs of wear to stop for the night, which supermercado to buy at, who to sit next to at communal meals in the Albergues. A cyclist in the rain was sort of a sign.<br /><br />A woman was bringing out fresh loaves of a new bread I hadn´t seen. It was round, full of raisins and walnuts, íntegral´, not white, and the smell filled the tiny shop. I don´t know where the Italian went. I bought a loaf, then stood in the alley outside the shop, my pack leaning against the bricks, just barely out of the rain. I tore a chunk off and the steam rose . I bit through the crust to a still doughy centre. It stayed warm in my hands as I tore and chewed. I made that bread last for 20 minutes in the alleyway, thinking that I will remember this bread, on this rainy day in an alley for many, many years.<br /><br />It rained and it rained and it rained. I shouldered my way through a fiesta, the tents, the octopus lifted out of boiling water, snipped up, piled on a bread board and doused with olive oil, sea salt and paprika. I walked in mud through vineyards, with creepy, beautiful old homes that had stood there for centuries on the hills, watching over their bounty. The rain paused. I was soaked. The rest of my bread I was saving for dinner was soaked. I hadn´t seen anyone on the trail for hours.<br /><br />The first sight of a town cathedral appeared as the sun was going down. I was so late, and I was getting terrified that I was going to get stuck without a bed for the night - it had happened in Formista - and I didn´t even know what town I was entering and the clouds were gathering again.<br /><br />I saw the Albergue ´Felix´ as I heard the thunder. My hood was up still, protecting me from wind and cold, as I entered, my big pack barely fitting through the door. I pulled off my hood, then froze. Wasn´t this the reception?<br /><br />I had walked into the kitchen maybe? No, a man, looking a little like Charles Manson, was lifting off my pack and saying a word I have come to love here, repeatedly, as I stared at the huge bowl of Paella, filled with saffroned rice, prawns, fish, capsicum in front of me.<br /><br />Beyond the bowl, which took up the whole entryway, was a table full of people holding up water glasses of red wine and greeting me like I was their prodigal daughter.<br /><br />Having put my pack just inside, out of the rain, Charles Manson began shovelling paella onto a plate and motioning me to sit down, repeating that word and making the up and down motion with his hands in case I didn´t understand.<br /><br />´Tranquilo, mi amiga, tranquilo.´<br /><br />I looked up the word for ´soul´that night. Alma.<br /><br />Mi alma es tranquilo.<br /><br />There is a next part to that quote by Rilke to the young poet, after he tells him to love the questions themselves:<br /><br />¨Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer...¨<br /><br />Buen Camino.Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-78218979791040860202011-04-28T10:51:00.000-07:002011-04-30T11:16:16.778-07:00Camino de Santiago: from a bus station bar in Astorga<p>There is something about walking into a bar in another part of the world and everyone is looking up at a television on the wall. There is a rush of adrenaline and then you brace yourself. I heard someone say they were waiting for Carlos.</p><br /><br /><p>It had just cut to a commercial and all the men, spitting out peanut shells and tossing napkins on the floor, went back to their gambling machines and murmurings and I was left in the dark with my Seseme Street Spanish - what kind of catastrophe now. What more could really happen to the earth right now.</p><br /><br /><p>Another man said that he was only going to wait for Carlos as well and I am thinking, so who is Carlos? And then yes, there was an agreement, that after Carlos arrived they would have seen enough. Enough of what, I am thinking. And por favor, who is Carlos?<br /></p><br /><br /><p>Carlos. You know. Carlos y Camilla. </p><br /><br /><p>I had to laugh. </p><br /><br /><p>So even though I was only in Astorga and not Rabanal del Camino, which meant I had about five hours of walking ahead of me and it was already noon, I put my pack under the bar, ordered a cafe con leche, and wedged myself into the crowd and looked up at the television on the wall and watched representatives from around the world gathering, smiling, and looking ridiculous in hats and pink ties, for an event that required no decision to be made about an invasion, a bomb, a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a dictator gone crazy.</p><br /><br /><p>I stayed for another hour in the bar, until Kate emerged from her car, waving, and I put my bag on my back, tightened the straps, paid for my three coffees and a wine and headed for the highways underpass.</p><br /><br /><p>The morning before I watched two little boys kick the top of tennis ball cannister from one end of the plaza in Leon to the other. I was sitting on a bench, after being ushered gently out of bed by Benedictine nuns at 6:30, and was waiting for Cafe Europa to open. I pulled my raincoat around me and watched the sun heat up the stones of the cathedral. I sat for two hours and watched these boys play.<br /><br />I have a destination. And I have a time I have to be there by. But I´m finding that this journey so far has been more memorable because of its interruptions. I´ve gotten quite brilliant at sitting and staring for long periods of time at something like a plastic bag caught on a fence.<br /><br />The thing is, I´m on a journey where there are a lot of people also staring at plastic bags on fences. We gather at the one cafe in small villages in the morning and order cafe con leche and tostadas and spread maps on the tables. We walk in clusters of the recently divorced, seperated, redundant, widowed and stir-crazy. We spend some time on the trails and under trees, sharing strawberries, strange sharp cheeses and olives, talking about these cross roads we are all at. Do we make the move, wait for our husbands to love us again, try for another child, not be a lawyer like the rest of the men in the family, fall in love, let love go, throw it all in and move to Africa.<br /><br />In all of this, my mind is like a still pool of water in some days, and a class 4 rapid on others, destroying the hours. I´m in love with this time on my hands, I´m in love with limonada in the afternoons, the people, the words I am trying to place in correct order. But my mind, the beast, the wolf, the bandit. So very many hours to wrestle with it.<br /></p><br /><br /><p>There are probably easier ways to explore a landscape. I understand why for hundreds of years, this pilgrimage to Santiago was something criminals were sentenced to.<br /><br />I have a book written by Henri J.M. Nouwen, a Catholic priest who lives and works with people with mental disabilities at the L´Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto. I´m carrying it because I read a quote in the introduction, and it sets the theme for this book. It´s Rainer Maria Rilke responding to a young man who asks if he should pursue poetry: ¨I want to beg you as much as I can...to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try and love the questions themselves...¨<br /><br />So I am learning to love the questions.<br /></p><br /><br /><p>Ahhh....</p><br /><br /><p>Buen Camino for now<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-85572684736172757482011-03-26T19:07:00.000-07:002011-03-26T19:23:40.892-07:00I LIVEDIn October, when the weather was cooling and the trees below Tioga Pass were goldening, and my season of flipping French toast in the Sierra was over, Kelli Ramsay and I packed up her Subaru with duvets, Trader Joe’s cloth grocery bags, Beach Body workout DVDs, her massage table, and a box of her dad’s favourite Louis L’Amour paperbacks and headed to east San Diego county to go apple picking.<br /><br />Knowing we were broke, Wolf and Meryl had set us up with work near their home where they were two of five people who lived in community on an orchard in the mountains outside the town of Julian, in a big house with a library and a record player with a vinyl collection and a wrap-around veranda.<br /><br />Every fall their neighbours and friends from all over California would come to this house for Applepalooza, and sleep in spare rooms, or their campervans, under the stars and the apple trees in the backyard for the 48hours of bonfires, music, firewood chopping, apple pie eating, and cider and homemade wine drinking on the porch steps with the fruit pickers, firemen, weekend nudists, jewellers, cattle ranchers, beer brewers, landscape artists and science teachers; people with both feet planted in this mountain town wedged between the coast and the desert; people who would rather lose their homes for a second or third time rather than pack up and leave.<br /><br />Eight years before, when I was living in an apartment in Ocean Beach, I woke up, well past 9 in the morning, to a dark bedroom. When I went to the windows and pulled back the curtains to the pier and the ocean, the ash was falling like snow, blanketing the cars in the supermarket parking lot across the street; the sun behind the sky of dark was a giant blood blister and houses and barns and entire lives eaten up by the wildfires to the east just kept falling all over the beaches, turning the water to waves of black silt washing up on the sand.<br /><br />Last October, all of that destruction felt buried below young trees and new homes on the hillsides. Kelli and I stayed in a bunk room with a loft on the second floor of the house; I would tiptoe down the staircase at 5:30 and start a pot of coffee and read a hardback book of Steinbeck’s stories from the house library, and try and write a little bit, before my mind woke up and I started censoring myself. At 6:30 I would throw on jeans and a baseball cap and drive out to the orchards as the sun was coming up. If I had time, I’d stop for a last coffee at Julian Coffee Company and wait behind the fire crews, all hovering around the cash register with the <em>Don’t Blame Me, I voted Willie Nelson</em> bumper sticker and passing around the sports section.<br /><br />I had my own quad bike that I would putt-putt around on behind two other orchard workers, Carlos and Ricardo. Our English and Spanish was about on the same level, so we picked more than we talked, but when we did, lying in the shade of trees, baseball caps over our faces, swatting away bees, we were reaching deep into our memories for words and phrasing like <em>missing</em>, and <em>to leave and not come back</em>. Both men were younger than me and supporting families here and in Mexico, and when I explained that I didn’t have any children, Ricardo sat up and looked at me like I had just pulled up my jeans to show him a fake leg and exclaimed, hands out, wide-eyed, with great tenderness, ‘ What ‘HAPPENED?!!’<br /><br />The orchard we worked on was owned by Rodger, who raised Arabian horses there for 20 years, until one fell over on him and broke his back, so now he raised and nurtured things that couldn’t break his body - apples, pears, blackberries, honey bees and apricots – which went to people in the city who paid to have boxes of organic fruit and honey with low food miles delivered to their doorsteps.<br /><br />The week I began, fire crews and engines and helicopters were coming and going for training in the canyon behind Rodger’s orchards where two firemen had been trapped and killed in the fires eight years before. Rodger said this training – and the re-enactment of what had happened - was the first time many of the crew had been back to that canyon. When he mentioned, days later, and in a totally different context, the post-it note one of the fire crew had left on his refrigerator in 2003 (<em>we’ve done all we can, hope this place is still standing</em>), he paused and dropped his sunglasses over his eyes.<br /><br />At night, I’d come home with bags of apples and peel off my shoes and jeans stiff with dirt and a sweatshirt covered in burrs by the door. I’d shower and put on a robe, and Kelli would be finishing up with massage clients and both of us would start dinner and talk about the people we had met during the day, and the stories, and we would pause a lot, pushing food around the plate, trying to articulate everything we were seeing and hearing here, as travellers passing through a town.<br /><br />So when I spotted the I LIVED van cruising around town, looking like something out of the A-Team, I attached it to another survival story from the fires. But Chris – tall, blonde, statuesque; driver of the van, and the queen of Rodger’s apple sorters - long fingers running over the apples, eyes scanning the skins for water marks - took a whole morning to tell me about it, when I got stuck in the sheds on a rainy day.<br /><br />Two years before, at noon, on a Saturday, driving home from a dress rehearsal for a belly dancing performance, Chris was hit by a drunk driver and in one moment’s collision, crushing and distorting her body, belly dancing became - like riding her horses in the hills, running, cycling; picking up her children and getting up and out of a chair without pain – something in her past.<br /><br />How she managed to make this tragedy into a stand-up routine while manning the apple polisher was hard to explain, and in no way could I do it justice when I tried retelling it that night to Kelli – you had to have Chris’s height, the wingspan of her arms, the tan San Diegan babe hands on hips when she described the confusion as the ambulance driver on duty that day – who happened to be her ex-husband – suddenly took off running in the direction of the guy in the car behind Chris’s – who happened to be the guy she left her ex-husband for - screaming <em>I’m going to kill him.</em> He was wrestled to the ground but then let back up when it was clarified he was - more reasonably – only trying to beat his rival to the drunk driver further down the road, who was slouched in his seat telling the cops and rescue crew over and over <em>just tell her I’m really sorry </em>until the ex reached his destination and this time everyone stepped aside to let him knock the driver back into unconsciousness.<br /><br />Chris’s choice of attire on her smoking hot body as she was extracted from the car by the men who loved her had since solidified the reference to that accident in the last two years around Julian – in the bar, crew locker rooms, and in parenthesis on local police reports - as the bellydancing fiasco.<br /><br />The other details that I had to ask to get answers to – how long was the guy sentenced to, what happened to your job, how will the hospital bills get paid, how do you manage chronic pain and then the depression that shadows chronic pain, will it be like this for you forever – wasn’t part of her comedy routine.<br /><br />I LIVED – written in bold, black all caps across the hood of a van that would now surely be the crumpler, not the crumpled, if life were to deal her another highway face-off - were the two words she roped herself to during the day, keeping her from being pulled into the ocean of pissed-off despair that was always beautiful and inviting, lapping at her fingers, waiting for her. And if she forgot, and began to slip out to sea, there was a whole town of people who had also been through hell, to remind her of what was written on her hood.<br /><br />On our last weekend, Kelli and I were taken to the desert. Words were surfacing every hour we hiked through mountains with two friends - both naturalists and lovers of the hardened sand and fossils of the Anza Borrego; words like <em>cruel</em>, <em>breathtaking, ironic</em> – most of the deaths that do happen in the desert are by drowning – and <em>fearful</em>; death in some form here – by flash floods, dehydration, or crazy people - felt very sure and inevitable.<br /><br />Seven hours later I was captivated by the darkness in this place. By the solitude of the back seat of a forerunner, when everyone else was riding in the front; by the sundown on the red canyons around us that were growing monstrous as the night took hold and the stars began appearing; captivated by the heat and one deadly margarita that had left me like this, head back on the seat, the windows down, hair blowing everywhere, the desert wind drying the salt on the skin, thinking that the Black Keys - <em>see the moon; see the stars; from your lonely seat, in your lonely car</em> - were just about the greatest thing to ever come out of a radio.<br /><br />I thought about how coming to Julian was a last minute back up plan. How we just rolled into town three weeks before with the tumbleweeds, and now we were leaving – not just with enough money to get us to the next place, but with jacket pockets full of fossilised seashells, mixed CDs of John Prine, David Gilmour, the Black Keys, Gus Van Sant; of Chris’s answer, when I asked how you just going around forgiving things like that - <em>I just decided early on, how this whole thing needed to be for me</em>; and with this kernel of a thought that someday there would be a house in a town that I would open up to tumbleweed people and be their last-minute back-up plan.<br /><br />And maybe most valuably, I left with a question: what would I would I have written across the hood?Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-28464165091593467822011-02-28T14:30:00.000-08:002011-02-28T14:45:25.618-08:00a fig tree, a porch, a plastic chairI have made my home – sometimes for a night, sometimes for a month - in a lot of spare spaces, probably yours, if you’re reading this.<br /><br /><br />Floors, caravans in the back yard, couches, sometimes hammocks; last winter I got to stay in a huge bed in a master suite overlooking Bass Lake in the winter with snow clinging to the pines, a hot tub three floors down and Christmas music playing and the smell of Brittney’s sugar cookies and the fire being stoked in the morning when I opened my eyes.<br /><br />Whitney Chebegia had the best apartment in the world. She used to pick me up from the airport, me wearing some kind of hippie concoction, her in sunglasses and a suit, and she’d take me and my dirty pack directly to the nearest Mexican restaurant to L.A.X. , then drop me back at her place in Long Beach that had wooden floors and a red two-seater couch. I’d lay under her ceiling fan, eating frozen M&Ms, flipping through 58 channels and read the same ear-marked copy of <em>The Road Less Travelled</em>. Whit was the first of all my friends to have her own one-bedroom apartment with true grown up furniture. At night the neighbours in her complex would hang out in the courtyard around an outdoor fireplace under palm trees, and say hey to couples walking past holding a Peets Coffee in one hand and a golden retriever on a leash in the other and I would feel like I was making a guest appearance on a sitcom.<br /><br />Anna Smith gave me freshly washed floral sheets, folded fluffy towels and ginger crunch slices and let me watch all of season one of <em>Northern Exposure</em> in Invercargill last May. Paula in Spreydon never lets me step off her porch without handing me my mail and making me a full cooked breakfast; Lisa in Kaka Point lets me stare out the window of her kitchen to the sea and the lighthouse and stir my coffee like a zombie and just generally come and go as I like and pull vegetables out of her garden and leave things like wooden salt and pepper shakers, guitar cases, hair dryers and small cars in her garage just to orientate myself.<br /><br />These are just a few of the resting places that have been given to me.<br /><br />For me, resting places are usually places where there is some reworking going on, a few hours, a night, maybe a month of just following the sunlight around a house. It can be one long slow exhalation before moving on to a new place – sometimes physically, sometimes its just a closing down of one season, and an opening up and airing out of a season that is just coming to life again – and it can also be a place where you collapse in exhaustion and have a good cry into a beanbag.<br /><br />In December, when I came back to New Zealand, I spent my first night back here in a house outside of Sumner, a beach suburb of Christchurch. I had been warned beforehand about the steps, which are in the hundreds, and eventually opened up to this stone and wood palace on the cliffs with a garden you could spend a summer living off of and an outdoor tub at the top of the world. Sea and sky everywhere. I was disoriented and weirded out by being back here and went to bed before it was even dark, without changing my clothes.<br /><br />I woke up around 6 and fumbled around the kitchen for a cup, a tea bag and milk. I waited for the jug to boil and stared stonily at the counter, then eventually organised myself and found the door to the patio, with a pillow under my arm, tea in hand, and sat in a plastic chair on the porch and stared stonily at the sea.<br /><br />It’s hard to stare stonily at the sea and stay stony. The waves crashed, the sun rose, and a breeze came and the morning light caught the fig tree and the wind caught the cloth hammock and I watched it sway a little, just lightly, like a dreamy child on a swing, and I probed my disorientation and figured out it was probably just how things were going to be for that week, that coming back here wasn’t a right or wrong move. And the sun rose higher, and the waves kept crashing, and I breathed in and out, and the light crept across the porch, up my arms, and warmed my eyelids and then it was just a full blown morning and I was in a plastic chair on a porch, under a fig tree watching a new day in the world get moving.<br /><br />That morning on the porch, under the fig tree, are the only claims I have on that place. I kept reminding myself to take a picture of it, but it always seemed too far of a walk, to go back down to the car and search for my camera.<br /><br />This guy I work with described being out in the waves at Sumner last Tuesday just before 1, and his board rising and falling and how something about it didn’t feel right. People on the beach had gotten up suddenly – three guys who were coming in on waves, got to the beach and just dropped their boards and ran - and he turned and watched the cliffs over the ocean come down, taking houses, including his own, and also including the stone and wood palace with the porch and the hammock and the plastic chair and the fig tree.<br /><br />No one was in the house when the earthquake hit. My friend and her flatmates are alive. I don’t know anyone on the list of the dead or the missing in Christchurch.<br /><br />My friend and a flatmate that had lived there for nine years went up there to see if anything could be gotten, without killing themselves, and she took pictures of what was left and it looked like a war zone. She took pictures of the living room, a bedroom, the kitchen. What was left of the crumbled porch and the fig tree was rubble. On facebook the porch and kitchen were tagged with a list of names of people who had lived there and sat on that porch and probably sorted out their own minds and made decisions, and took breaths and thought, just like I did, that the world may not be against them after all.<br /><br />Like war zones and places hit by hurricanes and fires and floods, it was a place with a lot of memory and peace that was there and now it isn’t.<br /><br />And I wish I had gone down to my car for my camera that morning and climbed the five billion steps back up again to take a picture. Maybe I’m writing this because I want to capture that place in words, because I missed that moment.<br /><br />It was the palace of resting places and it will be remembered.Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-80665316655338714522011-01-19T01:16:00.000-08:002011-01-23T00:20:37.609-08:00the suitcaseThis morning I am seated at a wooden table. I have a cup of tea and a piece of dry, crumbling leftover Christmas cake on a white plate, next to my laptop. I have just washed all the breakfast dishes and wiped the counters; opened the cotton curtains with little ducks on them so I can watch the rain beat down on the lawns. Last night I left one window in my bedroom open so I could hear the waves on the rocks. But before I did this, I took out all the summer dresses I had, and put them on wooden hangers and hung them on a hook on the bedroom door. I arranged gold nail polish, my sunglasses, a bathing suit and a seafood cookbook on the brown dresser in front of my bed. If I open the other window, ferns and flax plunge through; at night, if there is wind, they run their fingers across the glass. Anything cast off, or dropped on the wooden floors or the bed this morning - I have put it there deliberately. If the ferns really disturbed me, I would go and get a kitchen knife, and hack them back. But their urgency goes with waves and the doors and floorboards (a kitchen knife: maniacal, but there are no hedge clippers or even scissors).<br /><br />This is my room for four days; I am treating it like it is a set for a play that one of us here should be writing (we are on a writing retreat). Last night I watched one of the five of us, from inside as I reclined on the couch with a gin and tonic. In the middle of gales and rain and groaning trees he sat there, writing on a porch that seemed like it might get blown away. He wrote like he was going to die in an hour. He barely lifted his face up. I had just discovered Mad Men that afternoon and was on my fifth episode of Season One. I drove the lemon and ice cubes around in my glass and marvelled at 1952 dialogue and Don Draper - " What you call love is what guys like me invented to sell you nylons" - and slammed the door on the thought of the suitcase I'd brought with me, from New Zealand to California, then back to New Zealand again, full of all the unfinished projects from last year in Wellington and this was going to be the week I would be up at 7, polishing off each one. I would see each project through. This morning I woke up at 10, and dangled my feet above the floorboards, my blanket wrapped around me, watching the problem suitcase. Then, with the heels of both feet I dragged it towards me. It caught on a rug and Idragged that too. I rolled my feet until it was my toes, pulling, then pushing the suitcase under my perch, then finally, under the bed, as far in as my feet could get it.<br /><br />Since March I have written: A 50-minute radio play in my car, looking out to Nugget Point and the lighthouse, my pillow behind me, crushed up against the glass. A five-minute short film while washing dishes at a wedding reception in the Kaka Point town hall (Wash tea cups. Peel off gloves and write. Shove fingers back into wet gloves. Keep washing tea cups while listening for more dialogue from the swinging kitchen door). An essay about a lightning storm on Mount Shasta and how it felt to see a friend in front of me drop to the ground, hands over his head, as I stood there, my hands shaking too much to even rip the crampons (metal) off my boots, unclip the caribiner (metal) at my waist, from an ice axe ( metal) I had just plunged - quite expertly for a baby mountaineer, I thought - into the snow. All of that got written about by headlamp in a bottom bunk.<br /><br />Do I need things to be difficult? Do I need difficult towns, difficult jobs, difficult chairs and bottom bunks to rise to my best self?<br /><br />I went back to Kaka Point last week to sleep and read and eat toast and go for long runs after a month on the road (I'm a cook this summer for a tour company) and I went swimming with a friend on my last afternoon. When I was a kid, I loved waves. I loved them coming at me. I loved the choices you had to get through and over them: you could swim hard at them, leap up to catch them as they crested, lifting you up with them; you could dive under and through them, just missing their punch, rippling over you; but if you fear them, they will crush you.<br /><br />I thought about that while leaping and diving, how leaping and diving to get to the calm, so that you can lay on your back and look at the sky and the cliffs and do frog strokes and feel the sea under you is at times, anti-climatic. There is something to the leaping and diving and getting crushed.<br /><br />I am finishing this in the afternoon, and I have given up. It has stopped raining and the sun is spreading out all over the porch I am on, eating watermelon and spitting the seeds onto the still-wet grass. I am on the Kina Peninsula for 24 more hours and this place - Harry's Place; you can find it on bookabach.co.nz - is too perfect to waste on writer's block. The suitcase is going back into the boot of my car. I will pull it out when I get to some place that frightens me or tries my patience, like Blackball.<br /><br />I am going to make myself another gin and tonic and play lawn tennis now. Thank you, and good afternoon.Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9021993877804254558.post-37942961390859886982011-01-02T10:46:00.000-08:002011-01-10T16:21:46.130-08:00TurangawaewaeI have a friend - I'm calling her K - who I had coffee with before I left New Zealand in June. It was morning; it had been raining hard all night and we were in a cafe in a city down south. People were shaking off their coats and talking about snow down to 300 metres, and which roads were closed; all the windows were fogging up and everyone was reading out weather forecasts. We ordered coffee, then hunched over th table and got straight to it. I had been briefed beforehand in text : There was a man and there was heart turmoil.<br /><br /> I had to lean in closely because K wouldn't talk above a hushed voice so she used a lot of hand movements to describe how and where she met this guy (one long, pointed finger circling the air - code for 'Rotary ball'; a cupped hand hovering over the bicep had to suffice for 'water wing'). It's a good story - and I'm an obsessive, scissors-to-newspaper collector of good stories - and it got retold a lot when I was back in California in the hot, dry summer and flipping French toast and staring out the window over the garden, trying not to panic that my life was not looking how I thought it should be looking. K's email updates from the bottom of the world were read early in the mornings as the coffee brewed and light cut through the pines beyond the kitchen window, before I would start cooking breakfast for hungry wilderness instructors. At night, when the instructors were comatose on hammocks and the couches, and the floors were mopped, and the light sunk behind the baking pines and the kitchen was dark, I would sit cross-legged on the counter and put the fan on my face full-force. While eating frozen Cool Whip from the container, I would try and respond.<br /><br />In July she wrote one exhilerated email, followe by a second not so exhilerated email, followed by three paragraphs of quiet, controlled rage. I sat there, the glow of my laptop before me, trying to think of something to say, especially since I knew, especially then, about heart turmoil and anger dripping onto paper. Then, before I could type three words, a final email floated into my inbox.<br /><br /><em>Forget it</em>, she said, in essence, a verbal flicking off of this guy's power over her. <em>I'm fine. Going to see the fam and spend time in my stomping ground, my Turangawaewae, the place where I stand</em>. She signed off.<br /><br />I thought about this for a moment. Then I googled Turangawaewae and confirmed the Maori definition as she worded it.<br /><br />Turangawaewae. The place where I stand. I Wikipedied it. The place where my ancestors stood. The place that gives me power. I Te Aro onlined it. The place - a tangible place - where my energy comes up through my feet and my heart and my head can come away from this place with clarity, vision, and newness. My footstool.<br /><br />This is K's Turangawaewae: Fiordland, the wildest, maybe most untamed part of New Zealand, cupping some of the world's most mind-scattering panoramas; a place where people die all the time trying to penetrate, breeding chisel-jawed legends (the most legendary chisel jaw famously stitched up his own testicles after being gored by a bull, and at some point after this, rode a horse for 30 hours to report a plane crash). Both K and her sister were named after peaks, which tower over a place, that when you stand there, makes you feel like you're at the bottom of a giant black cauldron with five facets turned on (one time K was introduced to this guy at a party, also from a Fiordland family, who was named after a mountain directly in front of hers, prompting speculation, even though this guy may have been a bit of a schmuck, of their matching possibly being fated).<br /><br />Growing up, there was the Los Padres National Forest behind my parents' home in Los Olivos, California. It has always been beautiful and strange to me, especially when I was very young and obsessed with what was on the other side of anything that I could only see in pieces.<br /><br />I remember my mom stopping the car one morning when I was about six, so I good get a real long look on the way to school. I asked what was on the other side of those mountains. She said if you hiked for hours and hours straight through, you'd eventually hit a place called Bakersfield. I see myself in braids and cowboy boots knocking together, looking at the mountains, whispering te name of this place (<em>Bakersfield</em>!) where all the mystery and wildness unravelled in my mind; obviously the place where She-Rah, and unicorns, Moses, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Black Stallion died and went to.<br /><br />Two months ago, just after Thanksgiving, I took a long walk through the creek canyons filled with the scent of damp sage and walked the paths that my dad once carried me up in a backpack. It had been raining and the mist still clung to the mountains that stretched before me. Behind me was my home, where I had lived until I was 18. It was early winter again and this was a farewell hike through this place that has never lost its wealth and strangeness, the brown, moisture-hungry mountains, the oaks that I have always put a hand on, unconsciously, as I've walked by (I've just heard that it's not good for the trees for me to be doing that) and there was a funny, un-normal desire for me to just keep going, just five more minutes up this mountain, down this next canyon, and then I'd turn back and face up to all the increasingly robotic goodbyes that needed to get said, the digging up of the passports, the confirmation of flights, the checking that I still had a warranted Toyota Starlet and a job waiting for me in New Zealand. I passed a long slab of smooth rock near a stream where my mother, beautiful and sleek and very 1978 in a bikini, the age I would be now, her hair covered with a bandana, was holding me up high above her, in a picture that hung in the hallway when I was a kid. What if, I thought, I did just hike for hours and hours straight through to Bakersfield? It was like I was filling up bottles and bottles of springwater, more strength, more clarity, steadiness; more vision, more remembering of where I have come from, before slinging a pack on, filled with this water, and heading into what could very well be a desert season.<br /><br />It is shrubby and it is humble, but this is my Turangawaewae.Gwyneth Hyndmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03692800710056117722noreply@blogger.com4