New year, clean slate.

I am resolved to submit poems every Saturday of 2008.

After two members of my family told me I couldn't begin a resolution with a four syllable word, I told them my resolution was to step up. At dinner the other three members of my family asked what my resolution was and I said "to step up." The other members mentioned the longer version and my daughter asked for that version. Since the original hearers looked pained, I shortened it to "to act rather than react." Everyone noted that these were two different resolutions. I perused the dinner menu. My husband's resolution is to live more in the moment, my older daughter's is to change her default answer to questions beginning, "would you...?" from YES! ABSOLUTELY! to "let me get back to you on that." My younger daughter's resolution is to be kinder to herself. My son in law claimed not to have a resolution, though he said he has things he wants to do.

Younger daughter = the coach
Older daughter = the reporter

I got up this morning at 4:45, and drove the coach to the airport so she can go back to Miami Beach. She's going back with her Christmas snorkel, fins and mask so she can go out to the beach tomorrow to try them out. The shortie wet suit should get there in another week. Then she's going to sign up for SCUBA diving trips and find jillions of like-minded friends, some of them not tropical fish.

We went to the Palace Ballroom for New Year's Eve. There was a live swing band and dance floor. Since I've had the frozen thigh with nerve jangling I was worried I wouldn't be able to dance, but I did, to the slower songs. Jim wanted I know to swing me around in his mad unschooled style but resisted the impulse as much as he could. It would be fun to take some lessons and learn how swing dancing is done, though I don't know if Jim would find this fun. Maybe we'll find out. The couple next to us went to the Northwest Dance Exchange classes (maybe that's right) at the Swedish Club and said they were helpful and not frou frou or competitive. The classes were helpful not the Swedish Club.

One month from today I fly to India. Time to call that Indian travel agent and find out about flying from Dehli to Kochi, and about getting a car to take me from the Dehli airport to the Radisson Hotel. Yikes!

I've been having a rough time staying here on the planet, tracking my obligations and staying in touch hour by hour with not only what I'm supposed to do but what I might want to do. My mind is a bit of a mush. This reminds me of the woman in primal therapy who yelled at Mike, "How dare you accuse me of working against myself!" which was why every last one of us was in therapy, but sometimes it riles to have someone point it out. I have been working against myself of late, in the quest for "rest" or "a break" or "just a minute of freecell" that turns into vague hour after hour of carpel tunnel syndrome courting bland brain deadening activity that isn't doing anything. I think to myself if there is no god if by corporate and governmental decisions the bees are all going to die and we are all going to have to live in caves again if we live at all then what's the point of functioning? It's pretty hard to argue with that even though it's also danged vague and out there in the future or over in DC and certainly not in my laundry room where the dryer needs to be filled and turned on, in my workroom where the organizational tasks loom - for example I have no book ends so that my new glass shelves drip books at the edges, or at the post office where the stamps live. I will have to get into my biodiesel fueled beetle that is unwashed in the spirit of saving the planet and sloth and drive off in it to do my errands, return to work diligently at getting books together for 7th grade classes, and etc. The and etc. will include my new vice which is the doing of crossword puzzles from the seattle pi, not the seattle times. I do the Merle somebody yes Riegel (or Riegel, or similar) puzzle and thus emboldened embark on the new york times puzzle which I can do now Mondays and Tuesdays without fail, and Wednesdays I dependably can do more than half. Thursdays and Fridays it's Merle alone whose crosswords I can work out, though I still try the NYT. This is a guilty pleasure, a lesser literary accomplishment. I have my tiny delights, as when the answer to a question is "ode" - very frequent - or when it is, only once thus far, Pablo Neruda, written "pabloneruda." One way in which the crossword puzzle is a lower form of art.

New version of a very old sestina by me:

Chagall's Art

The big-eyed goat
rides sky beside a chicken,
brother bows violin
over Vitebsk, a man
aloft with Bella,
torah, Rabbi, angel.

They circle, all but angel
foreign to weightlessness, goat
freed from green, Bella
backfloating lilac, chicken
companionable as man,
varnished as violin,

audible as Russian. Vilin
hourglass, air-worthy as angel,
essential as the body to man.
This is so simple, the brown goat
a child's drawing, the flat chicken,
but for elegant Bella.

His brush caressed Bella,
as bow coaxes violin,
these chickens
vibrant angels.
His hand floats on her hand, man
Marc Chagall or goat

swimming scarlet sky, goat
giddy for Bella
dreaming man
towards this violin
summoning angels,
logical chickens.

In Paris's light he sketched the chicken,
etched the goat,
animals slaughtered next door, angel
rendered, la Tour Eiffel, Bella's
planetary gravity, violin
bird from a far world, this man

whose tears painted the chicken, bella,
who said in colors' threads - violin,
angel, goat -- the essential thing is art.

-Laura Gamache

ciao bella.

"Nobody told me how fun this would be!" - Shelley (AFTER we raced)

Conibear 40+ 8 plus cox (that would be me, which is to say my arm in this photo) rowing the Head of the Charles on Saturday. We more than made our goals, which were:
1. do not dfl
2. do not hit bridges or other boats

The reindeer pulling this sleigh:
Nora, Denise, Marcie, Paula, Beth, Shelley, Becky and Jen.

Cox yells, "On Dancer!" and etc.

Average age: well above 40, except for Jen who is way, way under.

I am in a period of mourning for the anxiety and anticipation of the big event. I have downloaded the course map for the Head of the Lake, which will be November 11. Twice, but the second time it was accidentally. I also have played the Coaches & Coxes Video, both parts one and two, for this race. At the cox clinic Friday I bought a HOC "From the cox's seat" video, which shows Yas Farouk, former #1 cox in US, coxing the 1992 US Olympic Team Reunion 4 through the course last year. We saw a "do not try this at home" section of the video at the clinic, involving almost but not quite cutting off another boat just before the Weeks Bridge, which apparently the cox of boat 26 in our race took to be the way to take that bridge, so that we had a near collision with this boat that failed to announce itself before coming inside and attempting to pass us as I was setting up our turn, so that we clashed oars within the middle arch of the Weeks Bridge while the bow seat yelled at us in an intimidating manner. I had given and did give way for them to progress, but dammit was not going to let her make me go through the right hand arch which would have put us off course and possibly into the rocks. Oh! Did I mention that this boat also didn't seem to be taking this necessary turn? Neither of the boats got a penalty and I got a lesson in learning to be more aggressive. AT THE TIME, IN PROGRESS. SHEESH but sports are an in the moment activity!

THREE HUNDRED LEMONS

Yesterday I went to Cash & Carry in Ballard, which I never before knew existed. I needed to buy 300 lemons, and who doesn't? Cash & Carry is a wholesale grocery outlet, but regular folk can go there. It's smaller than Costco and less glamourous. Their main clientelle seems (after my one visit) to be people who work for/own restaurants. I didn't see Tom Douglas or Tierry from Rover's. I kinda don't think the Cash & Carry is pitched to the high end establishments. But they had boxes and boxes of lemons back in a refrigerated room with those flexible swinging doors with the rubber squeegy bottoms and sides and the plastic windows. Each 40 pound box had 115 lemons in it, so I loaded two of those on the hand truck, then counted out six of the 5 lb bags that didn't seem to have moldy lemons in them, put them in a box, and loaded them on top, tipped the thing back while holding on to the front of the top box to keep it part of the gang just like someone who knows what they're doing, and went back through the cool doors to the warm warehouse, piled my boxes onto my enormous wedge shaped flat cart and returned the hand truck to the refrigerated room, again through those doors whose light weight and flapping noise pleased me. Back in the warm room I wrestled my lemon box laden cart to the checkout line. As it only wanted to be pulled behind me rather than pushed in front of my, I finally gave in to its wishes, and then noted that everybody else was using that method to maneuver their carts. This was not Whole Foods, baby.

I would make you ride with me over the Cascades on two freeways for three hours before revealing the reason for the three hundred lemons, but I am a kinder and gentler (and who knew we would ever feel nostalgia for that man?) sort of a writer and will get right to the point, as is so often my wont.

The Gamache family is making limoncello at Lake Chelan as one of our festive Labor Day Weekend activities. We bought the lemons. We are not Italian. I have never been to Italy. However, we did make a smaller (90 lemons) batch of limoncello two years ago, partially to distract ourselves from Jim's cancer, partly because Shawna and Todd had brought some back from the Cinqua Terre (oh I'm sure that was spelled wrong) and it was fracking delicious. Our limoncello made wonderful holiday gifts for our non-alcoholic friends and family members (it contains, in addition to lemon zest and sugar, vodka and everclear.) Off I go now to zest a few dozen lemons.