Locomotoring

Devil’s slide is a smidgen longer than a mile, but it is an interesting one. It is on the edge of a cliff and a carve out from what used to be highway 1. Now the highway has a bypass tunnel, leaving this stretch for hikers and bikers to enjoy. During the trip, we noticed nearly 40 species of native wildflowers.

Edgewood and Filoli are only a few miles apart. Edgewood County park is 467 acres and Filoli estate is 654 acres. The Filoli residence and the English Renaissance gardens stand on 16 acres. It was built as a private residence in 1917 and was opened to public in 1975. This was our first visit. The have some wonderful wisterias and weeping forms of trees like weeping cherry. Their millions of daffodils were all spent, but the nearly 80,000 tulips were in bloom. We meandered around in no particular order. It was a weekday and yet quite crowded.

This popular wildflower circuit starts at Clarkia trailhead at trailmarker 23, takes a left at trailmarker 22 to get on Sunset trail, right on trailmarker 9 to get on Serpentine, left at trailmarker 11 to get on Franciscan, right on trailmarker 8 to get on Baywood Glen trail, right on 7 to get to Sylvan, left on 16 to get on Serpentine, left on 19, left on 20 to get on Sunset and then back to the trailhead. Bulk of the action can be viewed near trailmarker 22 at the intersection of Clarkia and Sunset. Friends of Edgewood maintain a wonderful survey and this spring season, we might have identified over 70 distinct wildflower species via the iNaturalist app.

Cantor now has a permanent exhibition titled “Faces of Ruth Asawa”. Unlike her sophisticated, abstract and beautiful wire sculptures, this is her life. Ruth’s story is a fascinating one. These ceramic masks originally hung outside of her home, they represent an archive of people she interacted with and includes her children. She added to them over three decades and moved them around as the collection of faces grew. The presentation at Cantor maintains the presentation at the time of Ruth’s death. Surprisingly, it manages to retain intimacy in the not so personal museum setting. What is it about clay that feels so primal and personal? Or did it feel personal because I recently spent a lot of time with my face.

I have also been wondering about how we celebrate the lives of our loved ones, those who pass away ahead of us. Next to the installation are three clay vessels, named “the life vessels”, made by Ruth’s son, Paul Lanier, on her request. In these vessels are embedded Ruth’s ashes along with ashes of her husband, Albert, and her son, Adam. Through the Modern Art Notes podcast, I learn that vessels are fired in Japanese wood fired anagama kiln. One of the vessels retains the crushed oyster shells on the outside making it texturally rich. Apparently, the family used these vessels as vases on an everyday basis.

Last time, our friend’s little boy played magic tricks to entertain us. That was nearly two summers ago. This time, he showed off his knife skills on chives, and then he played the piano. He had displayed showmanship two summers ago. With time, the showmanship has only become more natural. He wanted to drink his apple bubbly from a cocktail glass. And then he noticed a pomegranate in our fridge, and wanted to eat it. He hadn’t eaten much during dinner. He claimed that he was a picky eater but could eat all the pomegranates in the world. He first wanted a bowl of water and asked for the pomegranate to be cut in half. He then proceeded to de-seed the pomegranate in the water, so the kernels wouldn’t fly off everywhere. Then he asked for five cups and spoons. And finally he proceeded to serve us all, the two of us, his parents and himself. The seeds were nicely picked and no white bits were left on the kernels. His father asked how many pomegranates would it take to keep him busy for 3 hours and he promptly answered 300.

Someone very dear, left us. It was a purposeful and thoughtful departure. She was a child when we met her. Child of a best friend, a friend who is as close as family. She would be a vibrant, beautiful woman if only she were allowed to thrive. We have been angry with the healthcare system in this country for the last many years, a system that refused to help her heal. There is no more anger left, only sadness. We are crying but is crying grieving? I think we were grieving before, for a brilliant mind stuck in a body that couldn’t heal.

I think this is how she saw herself. This is how I saw her. The words on the right represent her thoughts.

We move forward by an hour today. In 2018, Californians overwhelmingly voted to stay permanently with the daylight savings time. Yet, the ritual of biannual moving clocks forward and back continues. Nearly every clock at home is digital these days and they move themselves. A few that are still manual have stayed permanently in daylight savings since 2018. Instead, one lives with the mental math now – call it an iota of personal protest.

This daylight saving we are in the 12th week of heavy rains in California. Footage of Pajaro river levee breaking and flooding Monterey county was scary last night. Today the sound of rain on the rooftop is generating anxiety and we are playing Nina Simone to soothe our souls. Can’t really get out on a hike so here are a few things we are doing to keep ourselves occupied.

One of my strongest holi memory is of my father in my childhood. It has to do with sweets and mischief. My dad was the outgoing, vibrant, extrovert in the family. The rest of us took after our introvert mom. It is hard to not love holi although I used to treat it as spectator sport. The kind where you stay close enough to the periphery of the crowd and keep a lookout for the fastest escape routes dodging the hands and water balloons. My formative years were spent next door to a temple where they celebrated Holika and that was more of my thing. Holika is celebrated the night before holi, at the temple it was a respectable family gathering huddled around a large bonfire. I was that kid that wanted to watch bonfire all night long. Anyways, back to dad. He was short and agile with a wonderful head of curly hair and he would go out in his white Kurta-Pajama (must do for holi so colors show up) and be front and center of the procession that moved from one house to another, bringing colors and loud cheers, and cajoling people to join the crowd.

It is also customary for receiving families to present sweets to the crowd. One of the loved sweets is rasogolla, fluffy round (“golla“) cheese balls in sweet sugar syrup (“ras“). The cheese balls bob around in the sweet syrup, and you simply pick up the balls, squeeze lightly to get rid of excess syrup and pop it in your mouth. The leftover syrup is often used in making other things like chutneys.

In this memory, one of the receiving family brings out a large pot of rasogollas. My dear pater along with the rest of the crowd, partakes in the enthusiastic process of consuming them. As soon as the rasogollas are depleted, he picks up the bowl of syrup and dumps it on the head of the unsuspecting family member who was holding the pot. Don’t get me wrong, by this time, practically everyone is wet with the colored water balloons and there is color everywhere. But that action draws a gasp of horror (“OMG”) from me. The crowd starts cheering, the syrup soaked family member is grinning sheepishly.

This memory is gem in my collection. My other memories of dad are almost all academic in nature, all about education and career and being hardworking, just and honorable. I don’t have another memory where he is causing mischief.

This is a photo of my father and mother I have been working on restoring. My dad has been very sick the last several years, and my parents are often on my mind. Working on their photo has given me a chance to surface some of these cherished memories instead.

This one was taken over 50 years ago, when my parents were first married. The town is Moirang in the Indian state of Manipur. It is situated close to state capital Imphal. Even today it has a population of ~60,000 people spread across 67 villages. Dad started his career in Indian government as a doctor and it was customary to be posted in the remote corners of the country.

This is a posed photo with a professional photographer. My mom is a very accomplished photographer, but I guess this ritual was required for newly weds then. Probably a good thing too because my newly wed photos are self taken and while they are creative they are otherwise a disaster as far as image quality is concerned.

My dad isn’t wearing his glasses even though he is fairly myopic, but if he were, the eyeglass frame would be considered fashionable today. I am glad he isn’t because I see a bit of the mischief in his eyes that goes into explaining the holi story. My mom’s eyes capture the curiosity that I associate with her personality.

I am no longer sure how much of this memory presents truth, but now that the photo-editing course is behind me, I am also no longer worried if this memory is embellished.

The Sanskrit name of the pose is Ardha Chandrasana or Half (“Ardh”) Moon (“Chandra”) pose (“Asana”). One of my teachers, Tara Judelle in her Glo class, Liquid Viscosity, has me imagine a starfish bobbing up and down in calm waters. The class starts with imagining oneself surrounded by the body of water one loves the most. And throughout the class, we imagine shapeshifting as we move from one asana to next, being buoyed up by the water around us. Isn’t that wonderful?

I love water and yes, I am still loving the rain after nearly 12 weeks of what feels like incessant rain in otherwise dry California! But one of my fondest memory is a warm pool in a generic motel in Florida. It was some academic conference or other. At the end of a long day busily overloading the grey cells, I remember getting into the warm pool and floating. And then it started to rain. It was one of those pitter pattern rain drops where you can feel each fat drop as it makes contact. The rain was cooler than the warm water of the pool which created a wonderful sensory contrast and made me tingle head to foot.

Just finished an introductory course on photo-editing. The primary content of the course work was gaining familiarity with Adobe Lightroom. But like all good courses we meandered, we spent time thinking through the ethics of photo editing and dove into generative AI as well. Perhaps my eye opening moment, and an untethering moment, was learning about Ansel Adams’ darkroom magic. I had thought that there was one perfect photo (what the eye saw or wanted to see) but what I learned during the class was that the possibilities of photo-editing are endless. Perfection is sought in the moment. It is quite liberating to not have to bear the load of a single perfection. A good photo edit is what feels good today.

Like me, you probably make jambalaya and gumbo at home and it never tastes anything like it does in Louisiana. These are everyday dishes, and when they don’t turn out right, you gotta ask yourself why. The reason is simple and a bit sad. No one here in Bay Area makes tasso and andouille like they do back there. So, this February, we decide to set aside the anxiety that comes from counting our carbon footprint and order in some. We followed the online ordering recommendations from Serious Eats article “Missing Louisiana: 8 Ways I Bring the Bayou State Home” and ordered in Tasso, andouille, and boudin from Best Stop in Scott.

Not that Pithe needs updating but it continues to get updated even in Bengal. Our experiments whipped up a kaya (coconut jam) smeared rice crepe with maple syrup roasted grated fresh coconut. The rice crepe is made with rice flour, coconut milk, and egg. We had coconut sugar at home and could have used that to sweeten the grated coconut but we chose maple syrup instead. The maple syrup replaced nolen gur, both are saps that can subsequently be hardened into sugar. Neither of the syrups is a replacement for other, but they are sprit sisters. Black seeds of cardamom perfumed the rice crepe batter as well as coconut stuffing. We had learned about kaya watching Ms. Beryl Shereshewsky try a singaporian toast. Our grated coconut filling was sweetened with maple syrup alone and not too much at that, so the kaya helped balance out the sweetness while enhancing the coconut flavor even further.

After two years of being home bound, we started going out this year. Inertia had kicked in, so it took a lot more effort to get out. And we have a big reason to celebrate. We had decided to hike more frequently this year with a goal to hike new trails and explore new parks. Part way through the year, we realized that we could take on the 52 hikes challenge. And we did!

Highlights of our 52 hikes challenge: 

- Median number of hikes in any month: 3

- Maximum number of hikes in any month: 10 (in Dec)

- Total miles: >200 

- Median number of miles per hike: 4

- Median number of stairs per hike: 30

- Park visited most often: Edgewood (8 times!)

- Number of unique parks visited: >30

While much has stayed the same – we started a few new habits, and improved upon some old ones. We adapted locomotoring tagline as it turned 16 this year. We added an audio blog (“Archy and I“) that explores and celebrates sounds. We hope that 2023 allows us to live with greater appreciation for good things in an increasingly complex world.