Said the famous explorer, de Gama,
To his proud but befuddled old mama,
“I’ve got spices galore,
Precious jewels, silk, and more,
But I wanted to find Grand Bahama.”
Vasco de Gama was the Portuguese sailor who discovered, in 1497, a sailing route from Lisbon to India. The goodies he brought back made him famous and made Portugal’s King Manuel wealthy.
The Bahamas had actually already been discovered by then, by a much more famous sailor, Christopher Columbus.
I’m tired of this snuffling and sneezing,
Bronchitis and head colds with wheezing,
I don’t like to suffer,
I wish I were tougher,
But bring on some spring, ’cause I’m freezing!
In honor of Punxsutawney Phil, who did not see his shadow on February 2nd. That means spring should come early this year, and I, for one, am ready!
I remember the good ol’ days. That was when the drive from Seattle to Eugene, 280 miles on I-5, was only 5 hours.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, such a fast trip is no longer possible. Nor is it possible on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We spent eight hours driving south, seven coming north. There were more backups, slowdowns, and stoppages than I could count. A couple of accidents, crumpled bumpers and tow trucks. One truck bore the telltale sign of someone’s head hitting the windshield. That round pattern of broken glass made us both somber.
To add to the driving challenges, we had rain. First, the mist, which drives me crazy because I don’t have intermittent wipers. Then hard rain, coming down so fast those same wipers were on high and struggling to keep up with the torrents. Then sleet, hail, and finally, a mini-blizzard.
All the weather and traffic did make the driving a challenge. But inside the car, it was a different story.
Inside the car, were warm and toasty and dry. We had great music from the iPod, plugged into an old-fashioned cassette adapter. We jammed to R&B and then switched to Jimmy Buffett, singing along off-key. When we stopped for dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the non-driver went to Margaritaville.
Maybe I was just happy because I love going to see my two sisters. Maybe it was because I was looking forward to three days of eating all the things that are verboten on the South Beach diet — mashed potatoes, and pie, and stuffing, and cranberry sauce.
Or maybe I’m just nuts.
That’s probably what the people in the rest area thought when they saw me. They were battered and wearied by the traffic and the weather. Maybe they weren’t looking forward to the family visits ahead. Or maybe they just forgot to have fun.
Me, I was skipping.
Not rope-skipping, or stone-skipping. Just skipping.
I skipped all the way from one end of the rest area to the other. And when I got back to Barry, we swung each other in circles, and he started skipping, too.
Barry is the one who discovered the magic of skipping in rest areas. He and his sister can skip circles around me. They get lots of height in their skips, and they both have long legs, so they cover a lot of ground. I could hardly keep up, and I’d just end up galloping along behind them, laughing until I fell over.
The problem with skipping is that after a little while, I can’t catch my breath. Not from the exercise, from the laughter. I simply cannot keep from laughing while I skip. The more I skip, the harder I laugh, until I am incapacitated.
But that’s the way road trips ought to be. Skipping around the rest areas until you can’t breathe, and then laughing the rest of the way there.
I wrote this during the Bush administration, to celebrate the annual pardon of two turkeys by the president. Six years later, two turkeys get pardoned, but is the pardoner still a bird with a tiny brain? It all depends on your political persuasion and reaction to the third line:
I just heard that two turkeys’ demise
Was avoided, to their great surprise.
The Big Turkey in power,
In the eleventh hour,
Gave them pardon, along with the pies.
The table under the trees was covered with healthy snacks: Bananas, apples, carrots, bread, and cream cheese. It was free to those of us who’d participated in the Fremont Solstice Parade, so Barry and I stopped for a snack.
Picking up a piece of bread, I turned to the cream cheese. A fellow with the same idea had just discovered that there was no knife to spread it with, and we joked about our predicament. He ended up using his fingers, while I picked up a carrot and used it as an implement.
Our choice of solutions was appropriate: He was naked. I was not.
Seattle’s Fremont parade is famous — some would say infamous — for the cadre of nude bicyclists who paint their bodies and ride the parade route every year. This year, I saw an awful lot of people who forgot both their body paint and their bicycles. The fellow next to me at the snack table was one of them.
I love a parade, and of all the parades I’ve ever seen, this one is my favorite. There are three guidelines and one recommendation. The guidelines: No printed words or logos, no animals, and no motorized vehicles. The recommendation: “Clothing/costumes always encouraged.”
That last one is the kicker. Every year, lots of people come to see the nude cyclists. But the parade is not a nudist event, it’s a celebration of creativity and freedom. Still, the city seems to suspend indecent exposure laws that day.
A bus driver once had me in stitches, describing a gaggle of nudists at his bus stop. They were headed for Fremont, undressed to the nines. “They all carried little towels to sit on,” he said. Since hygiene wasn’t an issue, he let them board the bus. The problem was, they weren’t regular riders, so they all crowded around the front of the bus, asking him questions. Poor guy, he just wanted them to sit down — since he was seated, the view at eye level was distracting, at best. All that wiggling and jiggling, every time the bus hit a bump.
In the weeks before the parade this year, indecision ruled my life. Should we be in the parade, dressed in colorful clothes or costumes? Tina, of the Zydeco Locals, invited us to dance around her float. But I also wanted to watch the parade with friends. I waffled back and forth, finally deciding to watch the parade.
I still wanted to participate in some fashion, so the night before the event, Barry and I showed up to help push the floats a mile down the road into position, a midnight process requiring lots of flashlights, orange vests, and volunteers.
When we arrived at the old Power House, we were lucky to run into Kristin, who we hadn’t seen for over a year. She recruited us for a float decorated with bamboo and hung with dozens of bells and gongs, most of them made from recycled fire extinguishers and alarm bells. There were about eight of us pushing the float, and when we stopped, we had a blast ringing the bells. We were followed by a rolling phone booth (for talking to God) and the Pentagon. They were not associated.
The float move was so much fun, I changed my mind about being in the parade. The following morning, we borrowed some earplugs, as per instructions, and rode our bikes down to Fremont. The float was buzzing with activity. Rodman, whose bell and gong collection adorned the float, handed us a couple of beribboned (I’ve always wanted to use that word) shirts and held a little bell-ringing orientation. “Listen to the space between the bells,” he said. His goal was to create a beautiful sound, not a cacophony of noise.
It wasn’t until later, when we returned home, that we found out who Rodman is. He’s a well-known local glass artist, the great-grandson of Louis Tiffany himself. He holds a Ph.D. in biology, but he turned away from that field when he discovered glass-blowing and has been a full-time artist for many years. Rodman is the artist responsible for the neon Rapunzel on the Fremont bridge.
After donning our beribboned (that wonderful word again) shirts, we began to add ribbons to our entire outfit: Hair, hats, limbs — Barry even tied one around his neck like a tie. Once we were costumed, we were able to take a look at the rest of the parade participants.
Kristin was flitting about in a winged faerie costume. Another fellow was wearing a Utilikilt and a headdress with ram’s horns. Beside us were several women seated at old-fashioned typewriters. On closer inspection, they were sitting on lawnmowers, and instead of paper, there were muffin tins in their typewriters. I think they were the percussion section for a band made up of people with boxes on their heads playing accordions.
Across the street, competing samba bands began to practice. A group of men in drag posed for pictures — how could they walk the entire parade route wearing those 10-inch platform shoes? The Million Belly March went by, hundreds of belly dancers wearing red. I’d never seen so many pierced and tattooed navels. George Bush and his cabinet were there, too, wearing prison stripes and chained together.
There was so much to see, my brain went into overload. There were people shambling about, dressed in grass and moss. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz hung out with something more like a tiger than a lion. One float had about a half dozen naked people. I tried not to stare at their nipple rings.
When the parade finally started, I put my earplugs in to avoid hearing damage from the bells. The only problem was, the earplugs blocked out a lot of other sound. I could see Artis the Spoonman, ahead of us. He was jamming on his spoons, but I couldn’t hear a single “clack.” Behind our float marched an entire band in vibrant blue Alpine costumes with knee socks, but I couldn’t tell what kind of music they were playing.
The Fremont parade caters to the left-leaning political crowd, and the crowd cheered when Dick Cheney, who was right in front of us, fell down and had a heart attack. In contrast to the Pentagon float, there was a giant peace dove. Well, at first, I mistook that one for a seagull. The clowns, who I’d seen in a previous year, dress in hot pink riot gear and carry nerf batons.
The weather was perfect and the sidewalk was thronged with thousands of people. I lost count of how many jumped out to take our picture. I also lost count of the number of naked people. I noticed an intriguing family: Mom, Dad, and their young son. Mom was fully dressed. Son was wearing pants, but no shirt. And Dad had left his clothes (and evidently his bicycle) at home.
Suddenly, I realized that I’m prescient.
A couple of days earlier, a limerick (see “Ding Dong Ditty”) had popped into my head, the first in over a month. At the time, I couldn’t figure out where it came from — a slightly dirty little ditty about a naked man ringing a bell. But when the lines came into my head, I wrote them down, amazed at how easily they rhymed. Now, here I was, and here were the bells, and here were the naked men. Aha!
The realization was what I’d call “a Fremont moment.” The neighborhood has a kind of woo-woo energy, and I guess I’d tapped into it.
The whole day felt like a kaleidoscope, a riot of color and sound. I love the humor and joy, it’s like a shot in the arm of pure creativity.
And all those naked people — mostly men — wiggling and jiggling? Well, I don’t think it’s very creative, but it sure is funny!
[watch this space … photos coming as soon as I can get them downsampled and cropped!]
I try to keep my limericks clean, but this one just came to me, unbidden, on June 13th. Four days later, I found myself surrounded by naked men and accompanying a parade float made up of bells (see “Wiggling and jiggling in the Fremont parade.”). All I can say is, I may be prescient. Watch this space for other clairvoyant limericks.
There once was a guy with a thing
Who just wanted to make a bell ring.
But the sound was all wrong,
The bell, it went “dong,”
And ya know, bells are s’posed to go “ding.”
I picked up my first blender from a yard sale while I was in college. It was an ugly avocado-green 1960’s model with a heavy motor and a heavier glass jar, but it did a great job pureeing soups and whipping up milkshakes.
That year, for Christmas, my brother got me a brand-new in-the-box blender. It was pretty and white and a lot lighter, with a plastic jar. I loved the “new blender” smell.
I immediately wrote an ad to sell my old blender, offering it for the $7 I’d paid for it. Right away, someone at my workplace called to say she wanted it. “I’ll bring it in to work tomorrow,” I told her.
The next morning, I packed the now-unloved green blender in a paper grocery bag and carried it to work, putting it under my desk. Selling the blender represented over two hours of work to me: My hourly wage back then was only $2.95.
Around noon, a coworker told me I had a phone call from my blender-buyer. I eagerly leaped to my feet, and then I heard it: The unmistakable sound of breaking glass. With a sinking feeling, I looked in the paper bag. The glass jar was in two pieces. In the process of getting up, I had kicked the blender and destroyed it. It was a long, sad walk to the telephone to tell my buyer there was now no blender.
I nearly cried at the injustice of it. Especially the loss of the $7.
Back at home, I began using the pretty new blender, and I found it almost useless. The wimpy motor could hardly blend an overripe banana, let alone an ice cube. The plastic jar soon cracked under normal use.
As soon as I got out of college, I bought myself a shiny, new, heavy-duty blender with a glass jar, paying full retail price. I had to pay for it with my shiny, new credit card.
In hindsight, I learned three valuable life’s lessons from my blenders:
One day, a very special man came into my life. He shopped carefully, read Consumer Reports, and for Christmas, he gave me a top-of-the-line Cuisinart food processor. As a result, I learned a fourth valuable lesson:
On the very first Thursday in May,
The government says we should pray.
But for those with no creed,
It’s a conflict, indeed,
So instead, let’s just oompah all day.
This year, May 4th is both the National Day of Prayer and National Tuba Day.
My alarm went off at 5:15 yesterday morning. Rather than my normal pattern of sleeping until 8 and hitting the snooze button a dozen times, I rolled out of bed and grabbed my bicycling clothes. Barry was only a minute behind me. We had a sunrise to catch.
The event was a dawn Mayday celebration at Gasworks Park, with live musicians and Morris dancers. We rode through the park to the edge of Lake Union, where we found dozens of costumed Morris dancers, a handful of musicians, and about forty spectators.
The scene had a deliciously anachronistic feel.
The rusty industrial machinery of Gasworks loomed behind us, and the Space Needle and city skyline rose on the other side of the water. But our jeans and fleece pullovers stood out from the rest of the crowd; everyone seemed to be wearing cloaks instead of jackets. They exchanged flowers and greeted each other with “Happy Mayday.” Waiting for the music to begin, a woman near us looked over her shoulder and spied someone she wasn’t expecting. “Oh my Goddess!” she exclaimed.
The musicians struck up a tune on the accordion, clarinet, and tuba, and the colorful dancers began. They all had fun with their props, mostly handkerchiefs and big noisy sticks. They wore bells on their stockings, and some dances featured a goofy serpent that we at first mistook for a horse.
A pair of joggers in spandex caught my eye. One was fascinated by the strange scene they’d chanced upon. Her mouth was hanging open in surprise, and she started running backwards so she wouldn’t miss anything. Her companion rolled his eyes and dragged her away.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the offstage performers pick up a bowl of chocolates and offer it to some people near me. I thought they were friends of his, until he continued around the circle and offered us some. He was followed by a group of women handing out champagne and strawberries!
The history of the Mayday celebration has its roots in Beltane, the Celtic start of the summer. It’s based on an old fertility rite, one reason why it’s such a fun holiday — a lot of hanky-panky went on in the woods and the furrowed fields the night of April 30th and morning of May 1st. Even the maypole, a favorite of children, is a phallic symbol, surrounded by ribbons that symbolize female energy.
The heavy cloud cover didn’t diminish the event, and finally a few rays of sunshine made their way over Capitol Hill, to scattered applause. It was still so early that crew boats were taking advantage of the still waters to practice on Lake Union.
It was an amazing way to start an amazing day. The first of May is many things, not just Beltane. It’s International Workers’ Day, a holiday celebrated in the U.S. until the anti-communist era of the 1950’s. Our Labor Day was moved to September, but most other countries have a bank holiday on May 1st. Like the Christian church, trying to stamp out earlier religions by superimposing new holidays on top of old, President Bush recently declared May 1st to be “Loyalty Day” in the U.S. In Latvia, May 1st is Constitution Day. It’s also Save the Rhino day. And this year, millions of people used the day to protest U.S. immigration policies.
It’s also my birthday.
As if mine wasn’t enough, the week offers plenty of celebrity birthdays. Judy Collins was born on May 1st, Engelbert Humperdinck on the 2nd, Pete Seeger on the 3rd, and Heloise on the 4th. Karl Marx was born on the 5th. Is it a coincidence that his birthday is so close to International Workers’ Day?
If you want additional celebrations, the first week in May has those, too. The first Thursday is probably not a good day for fertility rites: It’s the National of Prayer. May 2nd is Be Kind to Smelly People Day and the 3rd is Lumpy Rug Day. But the end of the week has the really lively celebrations: National Tuba Day on the 4th and Cinco de Mayo on the 5th.
Finally, there’s my favorite, on Friday, May 5th: No Pants Day! Leave your pants at home and wear boxers or briefs only (no shorts or skirts). Now that’s an observance that goes well with fertility rites.
A bikini-clad Kiwi named Nelly
Decided to wrestle in jelly
“It’s Easter, I know,
But I just have to go,
If I win, I might be on the telly!”
For more on semi-nude jelly wrestling, see Candy is dandy, under Adventures.
