Magic Thankfulness

It's been a busy few weeks here, and between waitressing and grad school and everyday life it feels as though I've had very little opportunity for reflection lately. There have been a few wonderful, magic days though that I am going to take this opportunity to document my thankfulness for. First, a couple of weekends ago we started out on a hike up the canyon from our house through Temescal Gateway Park in the Santa Monica mountains. We started at our house and headed up the street, through the park, up the canyon trail, past a weak but precious little waterfall, and up and up the side of the mountain to a ridge where we could see studio city, part of downtown and across Santa Monica and Venice to the beach. A passerby stopped to tell us that we could make a loop down, and we crossed the ridge and walked back with amazing view after amazing view of the hills and coast headed up to Malibu on the right and the city stretching to the beach on the left. As we descended we could dissect the town that we live in and begin to recognize landmarks. It was a wonderful serendipitous journey; walking from our house up the canyon, over the mountain and coming home with a whole new perspective on where we live.

I had another magic day last weekend, when one of my dearest cousins and his old buddy came to visit, bringing the fun as they always do. They introduced us to an incredible ramen dive in Little Tokyo that is worth it's weight in gold. A culinary pinnacle of the ramen form. Also, they brought some wetsuits and enticed me out into the waves with them for a couple of hours in which we frolicked in the sun and rolled in the surf on an empty beach in November. It was lovely, and made me so grateful for cousin/friends and to live near the ocean in this beautiful climate.

I'm grateful that my garden is up! Especially thankful now that it is almost December and I will have fresh peas and greens soon.

In the larger picture I am grateful for where I've come in my life. Five years ago I was on my homestead putting on a really work intensive Thanksgiving feast. We had grown the potatoes, squash and pumpkins ourselves, and had also raised, killed, cut the bung from and plucked the turkey ourselves. (Plucking turned out to be another one of those time consuming, largely forgotten and now anachronistic traditional skills that I really took to and am pretty good at. Where was I in the 1800's? Why didn't I get the texting and twitter aptitude?) Anyway, her name was Ferdinand. I cried when we killed her, but she didn't suffer much and she wasn't afraid. We brined her and cooked her the next day for our families. As I washed the free-range turkey from the store this morning and rubbed it with oil and fresh herbs from the garden I said thank you for it's life and I could imagine what it's rib cage was like as a living, silken cage for it's turkey soul. I am glad that I know such things with my hands. I'm glad that I know what I know, and I'm glad that I was brave enough to leave what I knew to expand my life and have the creative path and the loving family that I have now.

And I am very thankful for today. I walked the dog down to the bluffs last night and watched the sun set over the Pacific and felt the whole next day stretching out ahead of me. We are having a very quiet Thanksgiving. Just Tim, Shannon and myself. I have no obligation today other than cooking (a store-bought, pre-plucked turkey), which seems like a good deal to me. A happy and magic day of thankfulness to you.

English Garden Madhouse

Waitressing shoes.

Many, many, many people work in restaurants at various points throughout their lives and if you have or do you will probably relate to this post. I am going to devote some writing here to my newish restaurant job. I love food, and I love eating out, and I don't mind waiting tables and I am often pretty good at it. Although I am qualified to do other perhaps more fulfilling work, (I should note here though that working for a really good restaurant, where excellent ingredients are used and real care and creativity are put into the food and the place is mindfully and compassionately organized is as fulfilling as any other work I've ever had), because I am juggling grad school and family life and occasional health issues waiting tables is pretty much the best way for me to make some money on the side. It's flexible and generally the financial return on the time and effort put in is pretty good. Plus, there's good coffee and free food!

Because restaurants are so team oriented and relatively high paced and high stakes, (reputation, which is all important, can be marred or ruined in an instant), this kind of work creates an immediate little family whose roles and duties and personalities are all intimately enmeshed and interdependent. Like all families, these groupings are often dysfunctional and serve to bring out the best and the worst in it's members. I have worked in quite a few restaurants, and they all have their own interpersonal feel to them. My new place of employment though, Doyle's Cafe,(all names changed here), is perhaps the nuttiest in my experience yet. Granted, I just came from Maine where I worked for a wonderful restaurant with a very sane,(for a restaurant), and nurturing environment,(oxox Mel and In Good Company), so I am a little bit spoiled. But after only two days of searching out here, where there are no jobs at all, I wandered into this little place just a few blocks from my house and was almost immediately offered a serving position. Convenient! So convenient that I can overlook a lot of madness and thus am still working there. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

They call Doyle's an English Garden Cafe. It is an intimate affair of a cozy hallway opening onto a brick patio overflowing with white lattice work covered from top to bottom in ivy and geraniums. Covering the patio are wrought iron chairs and tables with little flower pots on top and flowered cushions and a fountain flowing. It's very beautiful and peaceful and feels very much like you've stepped into an English garden except that the weather is so great and you can see palm trees peeking in overhead from the patio. In the midst of this proper and pretty Englishness is Doyle, the owner. He's English all right, but not exactly proper or pretty. Doyle is a very large, slightly grumpy, unwashed looking fellow in his 60's from Cockney with the accent to prove it. He's actually very generous and a big softy but you might not get that at first. Before owning a restaurant he apparently made quite a bit of money supposedly selling Italian shoes in south London and then doing some real estate deals down in Baja, all of which required him to do business with some famously shady characters in Naples, Italy and in the regional Baja government in Mexico. That put together with the neighborhood he grew up in and the colorful companions of his youth could give you a vague picture of the kind of folks he can hang with, to say the least. He's basically a hard working, regular guy though and at this point it appears that he is retired from any former occupations and lives comfortably in a nice but not ostentatious house in Pacific Palisades with his family and their mercedes and jags. This brings me to his wife of many decades, Imogen. Imogen actually is proper and pretty and also English. I think she was beautiful once, and she has a dry sense of humor and can be quite fun. Her main contribution to the cafe seems to be watering the plants and drinking wine. They have a couple of sons, born in London but raised here in CA. One of them I have yet to meet, but the other, Oliver, I've had plenty of opportunity to get to know. Dude is 38, lives with his folks, and helps them "manage" their cafe. His "managing" seems to consist of not showing up for work on time, or at all, and making lots of free coffees for himself and his girlfriend, Daisy. That brings me to his girlfriend. Someone else at the cafe rather aptly described her as "a piece of work." I'll just leave it at that. Bless her, she does absolutely adore Oliver and sees something in him that convinces her that he is a prince. There was a period where Oliver's old girlfriend and he and this new one were all working at the cafe at the same time, but thankfully that's over. Apparently Imogen was a bit depressed over the new girl at first, but now Daisy's devotion has convinced her to cut her losses and slug back some more wine and encourage the match in hopes that Oliver may actually leave the house someday. Soon.

And that pretty much covers the leadership at the cafe. Oh yeah, and none of them had ever owned or even worked in a restaurant before opening this one a year ago. But, luckily they hired a bunch of nice, young, football loving would be actors from Texas. These are real stand up kids and they have held this place up quite a bit. It works for them because they are all friends, they can all work together, the money is not too bad and they don't have to work nights much so they can go to rehearsals and classes and auditions.

The real backbone of the restaurant though is the kitchen, and like most kitchens in L.A., and everywhere else in the country, world maybe, this English Garden Cafe is going Mexican. Three young guys from Oaxaca are there often more than 12 hours a day. They trade off being cook, prep and porter. Two of them are cousins and the other is a friend. The kitchen is a totally different world from the rest of the cafe. The guys listen to Mexican radio all day long and gossip in Spanish about friends and girls and joke with each other and the waitstaff while they make quiche and sandwiches and salads and wash dishes and mop floors. They themselves eat guacamole and rice and beans standing up at the counter. The cousins were abandoned by their parents at an early age and raised by a traditional grandmother and thus grew up speaking not Spanish but an ancient Mayan dialect that they still use privately between the two of them. The oldest one, aged 21, is living on his own now with his pregnant girlfriend. He supports his family back in Mexico and is putting his younger sisters through school. He beams with pride and joy over his impending fatherhood. You would think that since this 21 year old guy bearing the financial responsibility of his entire family, working 12 hours a day and taking a bus from Hollywood to get there can show up on time at 8:00 am, then Oliver, at age 38 with no financial responsibilities and his own mercedes and living around the corner could get to work by 11, but no. Funny how that works.

Oh, I almost forgot, the last addition to the extended family is the woman's boutique owner next door, Diana. Diana invested in the restaurant to start with and now she is entitled to whatever she would like to eat, whenever she would like it, for free. She really takes advantage of this and appears to eat most of her meals there. She has an amazing, uncanny ability to come in and take a long time to order something complicated and not on the menu just as we are getting really busy. We bring the food and drink to her, and she leaves the dishes on the doorstep for us when she's done. So thoughtful. Oh yeah, and she doesn't tip.

The last addition to the family are the customers. Hard to exactly put a finger on that group. The Palisades are full of very rich people dressed very casually. A few specifics come to mind: soccer moms lunching, older couples getting out, people writing screenplays, people making high end real estate deals. Pretty normal stuff except for the high occurrence of millionaires in leisure suits. And dogs. We allow dogs.

Anyway, this is the Doyle's cafe family. It's like a weird but probably not atypical little cross-section of L.A. The maybe ex- English mafia parents and rich, failure to launch son, the "piece of work" girlfriend, the batty, clueless boutique owner next door, the wholesome future actor kids from Texas, the Oaxacans speaking Mayan in the kitchen, producers and real estate moguls in leisure suits on the patio.... oh yeah, and me! It's a madhouse, but most of the other nutjobs there are growing on me.

Death and Gardens

[The butterfly is one current guide for me. Not only does the monarch have a special pact with death through its ceremonial role of bringing the souls of the dead back for Dia de los Muertos, but it is also a dramatic symbol of metamorphosis. It heads inward to the cocoon to completely transform itself for it's next phase of life.]

Day of the Dead and all of its joyful eerie revelry in the mingling of the living and the dead has passed, and the door to the spirit world is largely shut for another year. This time of year in New England is accompanied by a palpable death of the year. Departing and silencing of wild creatures and faded bones of formerly flowering plants. In my old homestead this time of year was the dark time. We lived on limited solar power and didn't make much in the winter, so during these short days we would light candles and oil lamps at night and save the electricity for the water pump and the cd player. It gets hard to stay up more than an hour or two past dark in a quiet house in the woods lit by candles and woodstove fire. I almost became part of the wildlife in a rhythm of hibernation. Like the squirrels and birds though, the few free daylight hours would be full of busy activity to be ready for winter, like hauling, chopping and stacking wood. Becoming ready for keeping light and warmth in the darkness. Seeing the death of the year and feeling the cold and hearing the silence, accompanied by all those hours of solitude and darkness always turns my mind to thoughts of death and closure.

Even here, where it is almost always warm and sunny, it is cooler than it was a few weeks ago and I can hardly believe it but the leaves are falling from the sycamores and some other trees of northern origin on my street. Although the temperatures aren't much different than summertime, the trees still feel compelled to uphold their inner cycles. A time for outward growth, and a time to turn inward and still. The light slants differently now and the days are dark earlier. It's less dramatic and compelling than the north, but the season has turned here as well. The year is dying.

It is sad, another year going by. But as the festivities of Dia de Los Muertos remind us, death can be a friend, an ally, and a guide to experiencing the present and doing the most that we can with what we’ve got. I recently read an essay by Shaman Maggie Wahls on death and being impeccable. She writes:

"The [shaman] has a personal relationship with death, not one of adversary but one of necessity and even sustenance. Walking with this understanding allows one to see the beauty in every vision, every action, and every moment of one’s life. It is not about becoming perfect. Perfection is striving to be one better than your neighbor, to achieve status, to break a record. Perfection causes striving and since it is never attained, it leaves the striver unfulfilled, unhappy and unsatisfied. But a life lived impeccably is filled with joy, with wonder and with satisfaction that every action, thought and word was the very best effort one could make."

This is a good message for me. I am taking the death of the year as a guide. Life has felt pretty emotionally challenging to me for a long time now. (Who isn’t it emotionally challenging for though? That’s kind of the nature of life if you are paying attention.) I guess I mean that I have been plagued with some unnecessary and troubling emotional baggage. Sometimes lately I feel lonely or depressed, but I've decided to stop with that. These same feelings of loss and depression have been visiting me periodically since my divorce and departure from the homestead. I felt like the life I had in the beautiful woods with my ex-husband was so perfect for me in some ways but not in others, and then my new life with a wonderful husband and family but lots of moving around and chaos is so perfect for me in some ways but not in others. I’m letting that feeling go though. I’m done with it. I’m letting it die. I’m deciding that it is all perfect, I just don’t always understand how. (Kudos here to Rill, up on her mountain in Shrewsbury, for telling me when I was 12 that “everything is perfect we just haven’t figured out how yet.” I thought it was the most confusing and possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard, but it has lived on in my psyche all these years and I finally embrace what she meant!) Perfect in this case doesn’t mean always nice or beautiful or easy, it just means that it is all as it should be and every choice and happening is aligning and evolving in a harmony larger than what we can fathom. I tell myself this a lot, but for some reason now I finally believe it. Changing my idea of perfection is going to allow me to be more impeccable and appreciative of this current time of change and growth. Metamorphosis.

Last bit of news for the week, which brings me incredible joy in the death of this year, is that here in my yard in Los Angeles I borrowed a wheelbarrow from Jose, bought some seeds and compost, and today since I don’t have to work I am planting my garden! This is certainly a first for me, a garden on November 5th! I saved some heirloom tomato seeds from the farmer’s market, and got some peas and greens and carrots and I’m going to do some snap beans, cucumbers and soybeans. I also put in some nasturtiums, chamomile and calendula. The days are short and the nights are cool, but it’s sunny and in the 60’s and 70’s, kind of like midsummer in Maine!, so I’m expecting these babies to get going pretty soon here. I have dirt under my fingernails and my back is kind of sore and I feel just like my old self here in Los Angeles.