Gratitude: A Letter to the Universe

Dear Universe:
Thank you for the cool water trickling through my veins at last. Thank you for sending me the impulse to buy the Harper's Bazaar Fall Fashion issue so that I could read very nearly the whole four-pound book while waiting for a plane.

Thank you for an old, worn-in and wonderful friendship. For someone who cared enough to track down and drive to the only second-run theater in the St. Louis area still showing Sex & the City so that I could see it on the big screen. Thank you for the release mid-movie where I started to cry - and I so needed to. Thank you for a dream to own the Something Blue Satin Pump.

Thank you for time surrounded by flowers and plants of both the common and exotic variety. For time spent wandering through a woodland garden that transported my spirit to England. For the spontaneity to jump in a fountain and spend the rest of the afternoon slightly damp.

Thank you for chocolate - in martinis and cupcakes and mousse and truffle cake and plain old Hershey's chocolate bars eaten in a dark theater.

Thank you for art. For the burning red intensity of the Rothko. The charred haunting representation of Chernobyl in Burning Rods. For images and lines and color and textures that coalesced into visual emotion.

Thank you for a burst of laughter, for airplaning around a living room singing "That's How You Know" - badly. Thank you for turning laughter into giggles.

Thank you, Universe, for a little break. Thank you for the joy of hugs, the joy of words between friends. The joy of silence between friends. The joy of food shared with friends.

Thank you for friends. And thank you, friend.

Love,
Ashley

If You're Going to San Francisco...

* Be ready to pay with cash (SF is a town without credit)

* Wear comfortable shoes

* Read the map scale carefully ("a few blocks that way" can be deceiving)

* Beware of THE FOG

* Good luck finding Hayes Valley

* Know that "hills" is an understatement (particularly the Russian ones)

* Do not eat at Lori's Diner (to be regretted the next morning by all parties)

* Wear your elastic pants to Ghirardelli Square

* Pack an extra memory card for the 385 photos you will take

* Get scared by The Bushman

* Check out the Get Offs at the Hemlock Tavern (only if you have industrial strength ear plugs)

* Try not to get killed by the rabid cyclists

* Skip Shakespeare's Gardn [sic] at Golden Gate Park. Jenn's description is far more satisfying than the actual garden.

* Contemplate that the Japanese Tea Garden is worth seeing but maybe not $4 worth seeing and how you would've been much less disappointed if you'd only had to pay $2.

* Avoid the cable car with the scary herky-jerky driver

* See the sea lions

* Prepare yourself for smells ranging from garbage to urine to beer to homeless people to dirty bay water to unidentifiable odors that you'd rather not even contemplate what they actually are.

* Buy art from Eduardo Gustav on Fisherman's Wharf

* Meet up with old friends

* Spend too much money

* Flirt with the European boys on the pier

* Get chills in isolation #13 at Alcatraz

* Giggle on the giggle hallway in the Powell Hotel

* Be prepared to be very, very, very sad when you have to leave

Fall, Festivals and Funnel Cake

This past weekend, I traveled to the western North Carolina mountains to take in a couple of festivals synonymous with the onset of autumn. Eva grew up in that part of the state, and we had the pleasure of starting the day with breakfast at her parents' house on Old Spanish Oak Mountain with this spectacular view of Grandfather Mountain from the back porch. (Grandfather is partly obscured by the clouds here, but it truly does look like the profile of an old man, as though he lay down and went to sleep among the ridges.)

We started our festival trek at Valle Crucis, an arts and crafts fair replete with mountain music (bluegrass!), homemade goodies (apple butter!) and a petting zoo (alpacas!). I couldn't get photos that did it justice, but Valle Crucis is a beautiful valley nestled among ranges of gently rolling hills. It's surrounded on all four sides, and this weekend, it was cloaked in the colors of peak fall weekend in the mountains: gilded in yellow, vibrant orange, russet and blood red. Perhaps my film camera captured it better, but I know my digital just couldn't absorb the colors.

The fair itself was charming with all its folksy art - a genre I'm pretty familiar with, as it's very popular in my hometown, but this art was from the mountains and so had a different flavor to it. A lot of interesting metal work, found object art and wood carving. Some of it wonderful and well-crafted - and some of it was a little scary. I chose an unusual biscuit jar from a Boone potter that was glazed in black and white and bore a hand carved mural and poetry on it. I wanted one of these beautiful natural wood bowls, but they are ridiculously expensive. So I took a photo instead.

We couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather - sunny and crisp with just enough chill to make you grateful for your coat and smile that autumn had chased away the oppressive summer heat. And the smell was marvelous - damp dew, grass, woodsmoke and mountain air. It was invigorating.

We drove out of Valle Crucis and through the mountains, past what Eva's dad claims is the most photographed farm in the state of North Carolina perched on a wide expanse of green between two towering peaks. I, unfortunately, was concentrating on not letting the winding mountain road get to me and did not join the legions of photographers who have captured its likeness. We made our way to Banner Elk, closer to Eva's hometown, for the Woolly Worm Festival. What, you ask, is a woolly worm? I don't believe we have them in Georgia, but they look like crawling pipe cleaners. They have 13 segments of brown and black. And at the Woolly Worm Festival, these creatures are raced (yes, raced) up a 3-foot length of string. After 1,400 worms raced, the winning worm, Armstrong, was used to predict the winter weather. His segmented body bore 4 black segments, 4 brown segments and 5 black segments - so look for a severe onset to winter followed by a mild period and then out with an arctic blast. Oh, and by the way, the whole concept of the Woolly Worm Festival was dreamed up by two guys who were high.

The Woolly Worm Festival offered all sorts of culture, from the folk music to the colorful array of people in attendance. I was lucky enough to procure a hot-out-of-the-fryer funnel cake and Mom selected some delicious apple beignets - deelish. Justin and Eva let Dillon have some funnel cake, and, well, folks, he's from the South - he liked it. But not quite as much as he liked the little maracas Eva purchased from the Cherokee Indian pan flutist.

And so we ended our day of festivals - with sunburn, indigestion and a very happy little boy.

Nerd Alert

As if the spate of Harry Potter posting didn't tip you off, I'm going to seal the bargain: I am a nerd.

For the past few weeks, I've been watching Simon Schama's The Power of Art on PBS, which comes on a couple of hours after my mother's weekly dose of Antiques Roadshow. The Power of Art is like Behind the Music: Classical Art. Each one is about the rise to heady success, the onset of arrogance, the downfall, and the death in utter disgrace. It's kind of addictive. And I'm mildly in love with Schama, an affable British historian who possesses something of a Tim Gunn air about him. He strolls through galleries in the same open-collar white button-up and black tailored jacket in each episode and tosses out pithy, almost gossipy information about each of the artists and their masterworks. Like Bernini, a sculptor who committed adultery, only to find his brother was doing the same with the same woman, and therefore sent a servant to slash his mistress's face with a razor blade.

I'm no art critic, and, in fact, have very little real understanding of the meaning of most art. But Schama makes these artists into the rock stars of the day, celebrities mingling among the rich and powerful until they decide to make a scandalous statement with their work. It is his exploration of their work that I find so fascinating. The way he talks about it, wandering through the veriest details, it is so captivating that suddenly I can see why David's The Death of Marat is unholy and beautiful and transcendent and treason. And after he raptured about the exquisitely fine line between reverence and revelry in Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Therese, I hope I get to see it firsthand before I die.

There are only eight episodes, and I'm sorry to say I missed three of them - Van Gogh (featuring Andy Serkis as Van Gogh!), Picasso and Caravaggio. I saw Bernini, Rembrandt and David, and still have Turner and Rothko to go. The show is an absolute culture clash in my mind: art deemed so great that it demanded reverence and an explication of it the brings in all the messy passion and rebellion and irreverence. It is art historian meets Perez Hilton. And I can't get enough.

Leaving: Part Five - A Room of One's Own

One of the things I've missed most about being home is my space. Granted, there's no place like home, and in home, I've been reunited with the room I grew up in. I spent many an hour there feeling like it was the one place in the world that was really mine. It's undergone several incarnations, from the Holly Hobbie wallpaper to the sunflower explosion of the 90s to its more recent makeover to nice neutral tones. But upon my return, I've found it hard to fit back into it - quite literally, between the tiny bed and the tiny dimensions, I can't physically live there comfortably. Currently, my possessions are exploding from overnight bags and boxes and littering every room in the house - and especially the floor of my tiny room, which now has only sparse patches of carpet showing so that you can step carefully through the rubble.

Crammed into my parents' house, I'm like a jack-in-the-box, stuffed without grace into a tight space and ready to spring at any moment if only I get wound up enough. As the days and weeks have rolled past, it's been impossible not to long for my house on Grace Street. Sometimes at night or in a passing moment, I'll recall my favorite details about the old apartment - the wide-board wooden floors and the places where the edges were cracking and splintering; the design on the black tin cover on the fireplace; the eerie circles of light cast upward by the living room chandelier that came from New Orleans; the thick grey plaster walls that held stains from hurricanes and air conditioner leaks; and of course, the giant many-paned windows that stretched up the walls and filtered in the sunlight, the moonlight and the view of my tree.

But there's something beyond the love of the old house itself in my longing for it. There is the point of it being a place that was mine - searched for and discovered totally on my own. And I belonged there. And I had solitude there. Though the solitude may have been too much at times and sometimes I looked forward to breaking away from it, there's a bit of me that wishes for a long stretch of quiet evening with sole possession of the remote control or the stereo or just silence if that is what I wished. Then there is the need for all my things: ready access to all my books (even if just to take them out and open their covers and flip idly through the pages without ever reading them); all of my CDs including Ray LaMontagne, Scarlett's Walk, Under the Iron Sea, and the whole John Mayer catalog which are somewhere in the storage bin; my photographs and teacups and the print of The Pink House that I love so much. Without the trappings of me, I feel a little strung out, unable to feel like much is really mine.

Just having turned 28, I think that I should be expanding out into the world. Instead, I feel like I'm shrinking, back-peddling into a former self that can fit into this house. While on some levels, it's been wonderful to reconnect with my parents and share their roof again, there are moments that I feel absolutely monstrous, like I'm going to Hulk-out and lose my mind. After so many years of relying on and only having to answer to me, myself and I, constant companionship can be stifling. Perhaps that's why I'm up past midnight most nights, relishing the quiet and the stillness. When, if I just close my eyes, I can pretend that when I open them, there will be the soft mellow glow of the downtown streetlights through the window casting shadows along the walls, all the way up to the cavernous ceiling while silence fills a space that is mine. All mine.

Octagonal Oddities

Tagged by Pen to reveal 8 weird things about myself...as if what I write everyday doesn't qualify.

1. I am obsessed with trees. I have in my closet a branch of a weeping cherry tree that used to reside in our backyard and was cruelly cut down because it grew into the septic tank. At Berry, there was a holly tree that grew outside my window, and in Wilmywood, the giant ancient oak outside the Grace Street house was mine all mine. Trees make me feel peaceful and contemplative. Something to do with my name, perhaps? Or maybe I was an Ent in a former life.

2. I feel bad when I am not part of a cultural phenomenon. I feel guilty about the fact that"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was one of the most formative songs of my generation and I simply wasn't that into it. Clerks and Mallrats? Never seen 'em. The Simpsons? Not that funny to me. It makes me feel like a lesser member of the human race, like I'm not being a team player because I'm not participating. It's one of the main reasons I watch American Idol.

3. I like to have the same conversations over and over again, particularly with my mom. If we've talked out a situation once, we've talked it out 100 times. Sometimes we even use the same phrases. There is no answer, no resolution to these conversations. They are just familiar terrain that we like to explore over and over again. Like we need to say, "Remember that rock from yesterday?" Yep, I remember.

4. Embarrassingly weird, but Sister Act Two: Back in the Habit always makes me cry at the end. I'm serious. Those kids singing "Joyful, Joyful" and beating out the giant choir from St. Wherever, and I am in a puddle. Oh, Whoopi.

5. I don't like to listen to music unless I know the words. When I get a new CD, I listen to it at least twice with the liner notes in front of me. I've got to get a hang of the chorus, a thread of each verse in order to build on it until I know all the words. Perhaps this is why I cannot get into jazz. And as a second to this, when I find an artist that I like, I feel compelled to get all of their music even if I only like one song. I want to own them - all of them - and know all the words. This is how I like music.

6. I only like art that looks like something. I know this is incredibly low-brow and unhip of me. But if I'm going to hang it up, I need to see something in it - a cloud, a dog, a barn. It can be abstracted, but there's got to be something there. I'm sure there is great meaning in Pollock. But I don't want it on my wall.

7. I am obsessed with my left-handedness. I like to note what activities I actually perform left-handed...writing, eating, drinking, painting my fingernails, repelling.... I make note of anyone around me who is left-handed - store clerks, waiters, delivery men. I acknowledge it, like we are somehow comrades in arms because of our left-handedness. If I'm watching a movie, I will notice if an actor is left-handed. And I have to say it out loud. "Diane Keaton's left-handed!" (This during watching Baby Boom with my dad last weekend.) It is like being part of a secret society to me - and yeah, Hendrix is in it with me.

8. I see shortening people's names as a sign of affection. And some people hate this and find it a real insult that you would shorten their name. My friend Niki and I have been friends since first grade...back then, we were Nicole and Ashley. But as years went by, it shortened and shortened until we were Nik and Ash. And we used to joke that some day we'd just be letters. I also call STGD by the first letter of his first name which is "T". There are exceptions to the rule - names that simply don't lend themselves to being shortened or people who simply don't fit the acceptable shortening. But really - if I cut off most of your name, it's because I love you.

Tagging the hometown gals - Nik, Andi and Megan.

Road Trip!

It's a phrase that, to some, is full of adventure and excitement. The freedom of the open road, the thrill of the unknow.. To others, it strikes fear. The boredom, the guessing-how-
long-before-
you-can-
pee-again. Whether a road trip inspires fear or excitement, I think we can all agree that it takes on another element all together when it involves your boss. I have to do some unusual business travel tomorrow, involving a road trip with my boss and a coworker. Suffice it to say, I can't decide whether it's going to be strangely fun or completely horrifying. But I can tell you that's it's horrifying that I'm getting picked up at 6:40 tomorrow morning. God help us all.

P.S. If you like this little painting called Road Trip, check out the artist here. Makes me wish I had $400 just laying around.