ever-fixed mark

Thursday afternoon was beautiful, so my friend C. and I decided to spend the afternoon kayaking. Time was short, so we headed for a nearby lake that had a nice little swimming beach within a short paddle of the public boat launch. It had been years since I’d been there, though, and I misremembered the name of the access road, so we could not find the launch spot. We drove around looking for a place to get directions and eventually came upon a bait shop. C. ran in to ask while I stayed out in the car to try to Google the location on my phone.

After about three minutes, C. came running out. “Did you get directions?” I asked.

“Not only that, but dates for dinner,” she said. “Go, go, go before they follow us!”

She had asked two of the shop patrons directions to the public boat launch, and one responded, “I guess that means you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Then I guess that means you and your friend might be free for dinner tonight?”

She declined politely (a professional heartbreaker, she has lots of experience) and hightailed it out of there.

Bow down to her, ladies! She picked up two men in three minutes in a bait shop. She ought to teach a workshop at the Learning Annex.

In other kayaking news, I managed to coax the boys out on an excursion by tying an inner tube to the stern and trailing them along behind me. I haven’t yet told them that the the tube is usually towed by a much faster boat.

I left my job of three years last week, just packed it in with a vision of taking the summer off and no other back-up plan. I had recognized some time ago that I wanted to be performing a role that was more central to the success of the organization, but was prevented from looking for a new job internally by the realization that the commute was making me clinically depressed. (Forty-five miles from home, which translates to one hour each way under the best of conditions; ninety minutes on a good day; and two hours if raining, meaning that I was in the seat of my crappy little commuter car anywhere between two and four hours a day.) I tried to look externally, but it was hard to do that and perform my current job adequately. So I gave six weeks’ notice, starting my vacation at the same time as the kids. It was counterintuitive, leaving a well-paid job working with brilliant colleagues who treated me well and supported my professional growth almost without limits, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it especially wasn’t where I wanted to do it.

Upon hearing the shorthand version of this tale (”left my job to take the summer off”), each auditor to a man has responded the same way: “Congratulations!” As if quitting sans safety net were a clever strategic ploy, rather than something that any knucklehead could do. (They even wrote a country song about it.) I suppose what they’re really congratulating is not my sagacity but my circumstances, the fact that I can take time off without imperiling my mortgage. Believe me, I’m beyond grateful that I had that choice.

Last week, with all my new free time (!), I read Poser, a memoir by Claire Dederer about motherhood and yoga. Although I generally liked the book, I felt it verging on Eat, Pray, Love territory: Privileged white woman drops out of workaday existence to solve spiritual crisis through magical encounters with another culture! And then I thought, hey, that sounds kind of like me! Privilege, check; drop-out, check; now all I need is immersion in a foreign culture and a few cheesy epiphanies.

Do you think I could get a book deal based on a weekend in Lowell?

7:30 a.m., Starbucks, Route 1. An octogenarian dressed in a style that could only be described as Grey Gardens Disco Hooker (large fur hat, leather bustier, miniskirt, fishnet stockings, sequined clutch) lounges at a table, chatting up everyone who passes. At first I think she must be homeless, having wandered in off the street to cadge handouts, but this Starbucks isn’t reachable on foot or by public transport, and the people she accosts appear more than happy to talk with her.

8:15 a.m., Tobin Bridge. During a long pause before the tolls, I surf my Blackberry. The woman in the car next to me puts on makeup. The man in the sedan in front of us takes a set of drumsticks off his dashboard and knocks out a drum solo, using the steering wheel as a snare, the brake as the bass drum pedal, and the glove box as a high hat. Now I wish I had taken drum lessons just so I could pass the time in this way.

8:35 a.m., Gilmore Bridge. For some reason, this bridge is on the migratory path of some local college students, who scramble up on one side, cross four lanes of traffic, and drop over the guard rail on the other side every morning. This morning a young woman a bit shorter and stouter than most is one of the horde. She lifts her leg to straddle the guard rail but can’t quite make the stretch. After giving it a bit of consideration, she positions herself parallel to the guard rail; pitches face forward at a slight angle so she’s lying atop it; and hurtles over, both legs together.

8:52 a.m., parking garage. Many of the parking garages on the MIT campus have science-related themes to help you remember which floor you’re parked on. This one uses elements of the periodic table. I’m pleased that the floor number corresponds to the number of the element in the table, but dismayed when I realize that because of this the basement is left without an element. This ruins the whole thing for me, but I admire the garage designers for sticking with their organizing principles.

An old Peace Corps friend, Dave, died suddenly this weekend. A bunch of returned volunteers were weaving in and out of a Facebook thread commenting on one person’s announcement that he was coming to the States in a few days to interview for a job with the Peace Corps, when someone broke in with the news that Dave had succumbed to a brain aneurysm the previous day.

I hoped it was a joke, some kind of inside joke between the two of them that I just wouldn’t get. Dave couldn’t die at 40. Dave had saved two lives in one Thanksgiving!

Fucking Facebook. This is what it’s come to. The medium that everyone else uses to post what they had for lunch and how much they are T’ing G that it’s F is now how everyone will know that you’re dead. When all of us first met, the internet barely existed, and no one had a telephone. If you wanted to deliver a message you had to send it through the Tunisian post, or get up off your ass and go tell them in person, unannounced.

That’s how I first met Dave. Another volunteer brought him and another trainee to my house during a “kick-out,” a week-long period during training. It was meant to be the trainees’ first real experience out and about in the country. I suppose A., the other volunteer, thought his charges should see the bright lights of Tunis, so they ended up at my place.

Dave was young, cocky, and good-looking. I thought that pretty much summed him up, with no need to give him any further consideration, but that weekend he surprised me. He was smart and well-read and really, really charming. The kind of attention that you or I might lavish on a seduction target or someone who might leave us a million dollars was the kind of focus that Dave turned on everyone: pretty girls, ugly girls, middle-aged women, old men, straight men, gay men. At one point during that first weekend he paid me the best compliment I’ve ever received:

“You know, you have a really good vocabulary,” he said.

And that’s how you make a friend for life. He had me at “vocabulary.”

Here’s a photo from that weekend. Doesn’t this make the Peace Corps look like fun?

Dave was the Brobdingnag among Liliputs.

Dave gave me gifts of music, literature, laughter. He turned me on to Joni Mitchell; I had only known “Big Yellow Taxi” but he loaned me cassettes of Blue and Court and Spark, and I was converted. When I taught Wuthering Heights and complained about how dull it was, he borrowed one of my photocopies (university policy; we couldn’t afford or perhaps get our hands on actual books) and schooled me in its genius. Every few months, he tried to get me to read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I never could get past the first few pages. He told me that life was too short to read trash, a view against which I used to protest, but which I’ve now come to espouse. Life is too damn short.

He was nicknamed Haj because of a red fez he wore at some party or another. Hajji is an honorific given to men who wear the fez, denoting that they’ve made the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. It’s inconceivable that Dave’s made his last hajj.

Peace, xuyya.

(I’m right in the middle of a post about skiing, but on the spur of the moment I decided to take the boys away for the long weekend, and a new topic presented itself. A detour, if you will.)

I have always considered my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers to be more siblings than friends. You probably love your siblings; you may occasionally hate them; you may talk every day or not see them for years on end. Nonetheless, when one of them shows up at your door, you have to feed them. Right?

On that principle, I decided that I would stop to see a former Peace Corps volunteer who runs a bed and breakfast near the farm/inn where I took the boys this weekend. It’s been over twenty years (OH MY GOD, has it really?!) and, not having been best of friends during our sojourn in Tunisia, we haven’t written, e-mailed, phoned, or communed telepathically in the interim, but I thought, why the hell not?

The episode of “The Office” where Pam and Jim visit Dwight’s beet farm/B&B springs to mind as a potential reason.

Anyway, it was good if a bit awkward. We caught her just as she was returning home, and she was certainly surprised to see me. The two of us exchanged life stories while the boys tore up the house. Before any real damage was done, I hustled them out of there to the more boy-friendly confines of our destination.

The farm was so much fun. Aitch promptly declared himself an expert on the rural arts, and I smiled indulgently at him until he proved his worth, wrangling some rabbits, hunting down eggs in the chicken coop, and milking a cow.

He also saw two pigs rutting, which is how we found ourselves in the indoor pool (”Let’s go.” “No, I want to stay and watch this.” “Hey! Who wants to go SWIMMING?”)

Minor was very popular with the goats.

I have a roll of artsy black-and-white medium-format film of similar scenes all ready to be processed, but I recently got a new Blackberry and have been seduced by the siren song of the instant snap.

I survived my 14-hour round-trip with the boys and had a really nice reunion with my Peace Corps friends this weekend. We drank a lot of wine and told a lot of our stories about each other and absent friends, but we spent an inordinate time reminiscing about the food. For the first time, I realized that we actually ate pretty well during our forced stint as locavores. Sure, we occasionally missed peanut butter, but we had constant access to fresh, abundant meat and produce.

Some things I hadn’t thought about in awhile:

Fresh baguettes, purchased every morning at your local bakery at the government-subsidized price of 100 millimes (about 10 cents). I used to eat it every morning with canned quince jam. It was considered sinful to discard bread, so people would leave their stale ends outside on their curb for animals to pick up.

Kaftegis - disgusting sandwiches with hot greasy french fries IN the sandwich.

Pizza with tuna and olives.

Lablebi, a hot chickpea stew, served as breakfast at construction sites.

Vile pudding decorated with little silver balls served for the Prophet’s birthday. It tasted like the iron pills the nurse used to give us.

Pastries dripping with sweet honey served during Aid Kbir. (The Tunisians were not that great with desserts.)

Raw, unpasteurized, spoiled milk (liban), the national health drink.

Peppers (filfil) that were either haloo (sweet) or haar (hot), depending on how you asked the question. (If the vegetable seller thought you wanted haloo, then he would tell you they were haloo.)

Brik, egg fried in phyllo dough with parsley and mashed potato, served with a squirt of lemon. Yum!

Harissa, or red pepper paste, served with a dash of olive oil and garnished with olives. Yumyumyum.

Cous-cous (kusksi in Arabic), the Tunisian national dish, with djej (chicken) or aloosh (lamb). YUMyumyumyumyum.

We talked ourselves into a serious craving and decided to make cous-cous on Saturday night. While we were shopping, we looked for harissa, which you can often find in the ethnic section of supermarkets, but a search of two stores turned up nothing. My friend K. found a recipe on the Internet and whipped up the most awesome batch of homemade harissa in ten minutes. Go ahead, click on that link and try it out. You won’t be sorry.

When I got home I was motivated to replace my Cuisinart (the bowl on the old one had warped, rending it useless), and I made it myself, as well as another Tunisian dish I’d been craving, slata mechouia (grilled salad). I’m not sure how to describe it — a sauce? a dip? a condiment? You eat it with bread, but you can also spread it on a sandwich.

Here, adapted from the Peace Corps cookbook, is the recipe:

1/4 kilo peppers (I use green and red sweet peppers)
1/8 kilo tomatoes
1 head of garlic
Small onion
1/2 t coriander
1/2 t cumin
Oil
Salt

Grill vegetables on a kanoun (a grill; you can also use your broiler).

When the skins are blackened, put all the vegetables in a plastic bag and tie the top shut. Leave them for 15 minutes. (This allegedly loosens the skins so they are easier to peel.)

Peel the blackened skins from the vegetables.

Puree the vegetables together with salt and seasonings.

Add oil to desired consistency.

Eat with bread.

Shahya taiba!

While Husband is planning his big Renaissance weekend, I have also been planning a reunion of sorts. A Peace Corps friend of mine who lives in Cairo, P., is on the east coast for the summer, and we are planning to take the boys on a road trip to the Finger Lakes region to see two other Peace Corps friends, K. and V., who recently bought a winery. (My friends: winery. Husbands’ friends: Renaissance Faire. Need I say more?)

I’m pretty sure that K. and V. first learned to make wine in the Peace Corps. P.’s roommate, T., used to make batches in their kitchen. He didn’t have access to any special wine-making equipment, so he’d use big water bedouns to ferment the fruit and condoms that came with our medical kits as airlocks. When the condom got flaccid, that was the signal that some crucial biochemical process was completed.

One weekend T. held a winemaking seminar/party at his and P.’s apartment in Jendouba, on the western border of Tunisia. Here we are:

Don’t we look hippie? And sweaty? And drunk? The pink stuff in the water bottle was the finished “wine”; the big bedoun on the floor contained the elixir-in-progress. It was high summer in Jendouba, a town generously described as “the armpit of Tunisia.” Does your armpit harbor mosquitoes the size of single-engine planes? No? Well, then, I’d rather vacation in it than Jendouba.

I’m the one with my eyes closed, which is usually how I’m photographed. I’m holding the wine-making manual (pre-internet, we had to learn things out of books — how quaint). I distinctly remember how happy I was to be wearing shorts outside of my apartment without having anyone call me a kahba (whore).

It was so hot that night that, after consuming a considerable quantity of our moonshine, we decided to sleep on the roof of the apartment building. Even on the edge of town there weren’t many artificial lights, and I spent an hour watching shooting stars before I fell asleep. At least, I think they were shooting stars. They may have been auras from the ocular migraine caused by the drink. I awoke some time later with mosquito bites on the palms of my hands and soles of my feet. Those were some tough mosquitoes.

1. Hair bows. Remember those big bows we used to use to tie back ponytails in the eighties? Like in Heathers? I can’t believe I saw someone sporting one. She was my age, too. I hope she hasn’t been wearing it for the last twenty years.

2. High leather boots. In California. In June. On multiple people. Why?! No time for a pedicure? Are your feet in purdah? There are many closed-toe options that are perfectly appropriate for summer. Please look into them; my feet are sweaty just contemplating this.

3. Three words: Man in skirt. Not a Scott or a tranny, just a dude in a utility kilt. He was rocking it, too.

I can’t get over how empty this hotel is. All day long, I’ve seen no one but my 20-odd colleagues from work, and twice as many bored hotel employees whose actually seem relieved when we pop our heads out the door to ask for something. I’ve sat alone in the pool, the coffeeshop, the lobby. I haven’t seen anyone in my hall, the gift shop, or the elevators.

After work, I went out for a walk along the three-mile route recommended by the concierge. The resort is nestled among a number of gated communities and condo complexes, hundreds of Italianate buildings all jumbled on top of one another, including a hideous reproduction of the Ponte Vecchio over Lake Las Vegas. During a three-mile walk, I saw almost no one. No one playing golf, sitting on a balcony, going for a walk. No boats on the lake, no swimmers on the beach, no one on the volleyball court. No one at the Ponte Vecchio, the restaurant, or Celine Dionne’s house. In 45 minutes, about 15 cars passed me on the street. I actually started to get a little frightened, because if someone had jumped out of the shrubbery, I’m not sure if anyone would have heard me scream.

The only experience I’ve had that’s every come close to that sense of desolation was in Tunisia during Ramadhan. During that month, Muslims are permitted to break their fast at sunset, so at the close of day everyone is at home, sitting at the table, waiting for the cannon to go off to signal that it’s time to eat. If you happen to be out on the street, it feels like the whole city closed down.

But…it’s not Ramadhan or Christmas morning or Super Bowl Sunday. It’s not wartime or a science fiction film or winter at the Overlook Hotel.

I swear for a moment I was convinced that the Rapture must have transpired, but I doubt that event would make much of an impact on the population density in Las Vegas.

In April, I was in Miami. This month, it’s Vegas. We must be working with the CSI-themed meeting planners.

I am actually only nominally in Vegas. The resort where the meeting is held is outside of the city, in a place called Henderson, on a largish body of water called “Lake Las Vegas.” Celine Dionne, I’m told, has a home here.

The resort is nice enough, but it is its own raison d’etre, rather like Disney World. One comes to this resort to visit the resort; there’s no other there there. It’s eerily empty, a victim of the economy and its distance from the Strip. The weather is gorgeous, though, and I’m currently enjoying my 17th uninterrupted hour of sunlight, so I’m not complaining.

Business trips can be disorienting, even a little depressing, so I always try to get out and explore a little bit, just so that every destination doesn’t feel like room-service-and-network-TV. I noticed that the hotel rents out kayaks and paddle boats so guests can “explore Lake Las Vegas,” so I thought it would be fun to do a little kayaking.

Do you know how weird it is to kayak in a man-made lake? In the desert? Past Celine Dionne’s house? The water was so clear and clean; the bare hills in the distance, so incongruous; the sudden appearance of golfers, so intrusive; the wildlife, so scarce. It was like kayaking in the world’s biggest water hazard.