tuckova

the end of the cotthut

Eleven years ago I bought a cottage here, it's kind of part of the Czech lifestyle and I was married to a Czech so it seemed appropriate. I liked the idea of being outside without running water or electricity on the weekends, just to re-set and to forcibly relax. In about 2010 it stopped being fun to go there, and the marriage fell apart shortly afterwards for the same reasons, and so I hadn't been there in over five years. Friar recently realized that he wasn't having fun there either, and last week he handed me back the keys. I went out and while WOW a lot can break and tumble down in five years, it's still a pretty magical place. I was really excited about starting fresh -- new walks in the forest, barbeque, sitting in the sun reading a book or cozying up in the winter at the stove, reading by candlelight. Very sweet picture.

And then the neighbors pulled up. And they are toxic like ... it's a very specific kind of poison, to which I am particularly vulnerable: the bully. I am immune to iocane powder and most forms of stupid but my life will never be long enough to spend time with a condescending know-it-all bully. And this particular bully feels that since he would like to have the property, he should have it. Like: it just should be his. Why? Because you're stupid.

So there are lots of details, including that there had been a certain amount of vandalism on the property that was probably him, but the bottom line is this: I'm not keeping the cottage. Selling it to the neighbors and getting the hell out of there before he takes it into his head to burn it down or whatever. I'm really sad, because I hate it when my fantasies die before I can even fully breathe life into them. But I know I'm right. And I know that there are so many things in life, horrible things, that you can't walk away from, but when you can, you really really should. 

The earth is my body; my head is in the stars.

There's this old woman who lives in my neighborhood, across the street. She has to be in her eighties, maybe older. I see her almost every day, usually doing the shopping. She is tiny and frail and a sharp dresser, often with heels. Sometimes she doesn't wear make up, and some days she wears more than I do in a year; I get the feeling that she's doing her best but going blind, so to her the giant clown circles of rouge and the smear of bright red in the general area of her mouth probably look just about right. Her hair is a crazy mop of gray, usually styled up quite deliberately in the front and then basically like a windstorm hit it in the back. What you can't see can't hurt you.

We often see her with a man, I assume her husband, even more frail than she is. They hobble around the block together. Lately he's been using a walker. When they get to the door, he opens it for her, but he's so weak it takes a really long time, because he has trouble holding the weight of the door and moving forward at the same time. Sometimes Squire wants to run across the street and help; sometimes we just stare out the window and admire them. The determination, the eventual success. It's hard to not think about aging.

I do not want to be old and frail, though as long as I can still toddle down the hill to the store and back, I won't feel frail. Or even if I am frail, I expect as long as my mind keeps working I won't be too bothered. I don't imagine I'll make it as far as these two, anyway. Into my eighties? It seems unlikely. The thought of thirtyplus more years seems kind of exhausting. I mean, I like my life very much now, but what would I do with thirty more years of it? Would I, in thirty years, finally master the art of applying lipstick? Or would I finally have given up? Would I still suck at the ukulele? Would it make a difference if there were somebody to hold the door open for me? Would the teenage boy across the street come running, if I baked him cookies? Should I learn how to bake, sometime in the next thirty years? 

everything was beautiful at the ballet

I went to the ballet last night. One of my dearest friends here had been gone for a month, and I wanted to celebrate his return, and another of my dearest friends has put up with a disproportionate amount of my chaos lately, and I wanted to celebrate her sweetness, and also I will not miss an excuse for what looks like a good ballet, which it did. So we went.

The first piece was Serenade, by George Balanchine. Bunch of pretty girls fluttering their arms about, with some guys trying to look like the goblin king in the pants department wandering around. One can like it, but it was: meh. I hate to say that. I mean, here I'm looking at a stage full of athletes and all I can think is: let's do math with Balanchine, because it really looked like illustrations of math problems or something. Not word problems, either. So mostly I sat there thinking about WHY I didn't like it, which is not really the feeling you want in the theater.

The second piece was Sofa, by Olivier Wevers, and that was totally different. There was a purple velvet sofa, and everybody danced on and under and around it, and it was awesome. It made me think of high school and how I couldn't have boys in my room but we could be in the living room, and how the sofa was like a way station to where we wanted to go, and the center of slumber parties, and where we watched TV, and it is still all those things, the sofa is so central, and these dancers were fighting and kicking and kissing and teasing all on a sofa, just like us, except of course way more elegantly and their feet probably hurt a lot more. And in this I felt fully engaged and delighted.

The third piece was Lunar Sea, by Moses Pendleton, danced by MOMIX, a sort of black light madness and chaos. Like the first one, it didn't have a story, but it was so busy and stimulating visually that it didn't need one. And so we watched people split open, creatures with four legs dancing across the stage, absolutely a hundred things to look at. 

We ran across the street in the rain, ducked into a clean well-lighted place for tapas and wine, and talked and talked, the beauty of this, three generations of ballet in one evening, and how the first one made sense because we could see now how that non-narrative mathematical beauty made the other two possible, and how the third one called back to it, and how amazing it is to be able to see this when it is presented like that. It was delightful. I was delighted.

Just Sit Right Back and You'll Hear a Tale

Oh, I meant to tell you about May day. On May 1st there was a neo-Nazi ("Young Workers") march downtown. There were 100 or 200 of them, depending on various estimates, so we'll say 150. One hundred and fifty people who hate other people on the basis of things they didn't choose. I am always baffled by this. I hate plenty of people, but entirely on the basis of their choices. If there were a march against the people who stand in the doorways on trams I would be at the front (What do we want? To get off the tram! When do we want it? MOVE!) but disliking foreigners and homosexuals and brown people is just so ... boring. 

They get to march, it's their right to march and they legally requested permission for their little rally in the town's main square with a march around the neighborhood, so that was that. Word went out and a lot of protesters showed up in another square nearby with the intention of blocking the marchers. There were 1000 or 2000 of us, so we'll say 2000 because that's the side that I was on and it sounds nicer. Plus the neo-Nazis were sticking together the whole time, whereas our side sort of wandered in and out, so I'd bet that it was 2000 people in attendance, just not all at once. 

Our side had live music and the city mayor and generally a good atmosphere. Between us and them was a roving wall of six hundred police officers in full riot gear, which was pretty impressive, and I was glad for them that it was a cold day because those outfits look hot. The police were mostly nice, I would say some of them were a bit cranky about having to be there when they traditionally are supposed to be out kissing a girl under a flowering tree, I mean really those pants are ridiculous and any body would rather be kissing than wearing that. 

I guess it was fun. It reminded me of my late teens, when we linked arms around Planned Parenthood and chanted to drown out Operation Rescue. We started out so bold and full of purpose and folk songs but eventually we were singing the theme song from Gilligan's Island, and honestly that makes sense. These people are silly; why take them seriously?

Some people on the blockade side got taken away in police vans (detained but not charged) and some people got tear-gassed; from my point of view it looked like theater; I think they wanted to have drama and the police were bored and that happened. I don't know how it looked to them though. There was some commentary about the amount of money spent on the police being sort of wasteful on the part of the protesters, and some friends suggested that if people hadn't protested it would have been more embarrassing for the marchers, like throwing a party that nobody attends, that they wanted to be challenged so they also got what they wanted. I don't know, I can't attribute a great deal of brains and planning to people who are simultaneously carrying signs that say: NATIONALISM NOT GLOBALISM and confederate flags. Oh yeah you read that right. In that light I wonder if it wouldn't be better to feel sorry for them than to laugh at them. I mean really: it would be the kind of stupid I feel when I have a cold except ALL THE TIME. But there's ignorance and willful ignorance and I don't know, I don't need to feel too sorry for too long. I think we could sing a few rounds of Gilligan for our own amusement and get out in time for some excellent kissing under the cherry trees.

mildly solatic

We were going to go to a Lindy Hop class but we couldn't find the address so then we were going to go to a salsa class but when we went outside it was too beautiful to go back inside so we decided on drinking in a garden instead. The streets full of people as if the whole town had walked out at the same time. Two weeks ago it snowed and now all the restaurants have outdoor seating, though at U Karla they'd spilled out onto the sidewalk even, and we all sat and gazed up and around as the sky turned purple and the stars came out. An Australian, a Brit, an American, and a Czech walked into a bar and they all spoke the same language and the electrician told us the names of the stars except they were airplanes. In the morning I shaved off most of my hair because I wanted the sun on as much skin as possible and I had coffee in the garden and watched a toddler grow a egg out of his skull ("It happens" he said) and then lunch in another place and then more coffee, grinning like an idiot from one place to the next, and then board games which is how I know life continues at a weekly pace. On Friday the clouds were back and my head was so cold it was like an ice cream headache so I chained myself to the desk and hit a deadline and went to Olomouc where all the restaurant tables were reserved in case the atheist patriarch showed up, or I guess more likely his fans, and on the train home I listened to the same two songs over and over because I couldn't imagine another one being better, the small and certain pleasure of already having what you want. I took a taxi from the station because sometimes but only sometimes we must permit ourselves small luxuries and I was cold. I feel grateful and generous and generally good; if I had any idea what you wanted I would probably give it to you, but you don't tell me and I'm tired of guessing so this is me, getting on with it. I have a Monday deadline but I can't focus for beans today so I wrote this instead. 

o lásce o zradě o světě

In 1995, I was in a pub and the song Darmodej (The Malefactor, maybe, although it's translated as The Wastrel), by Jaromir Nohavica, came on the radio. It was... Leonard Cohen. Early Paul Simon. The strong quiet voice that you cannot ignore. I can't explain it, there's a fine chain between poetry and my heart and I felt the tug even though I didn't understand the words. I remember saying: I can stay in a country where this is what comes on the radio. 

 

My Czech friend and I set about trying to translate all his songs, for the meaning, for the meat, and while I never can seem to catch the poetry and put it into English, I slowly came to feel the rightness of it in Czech in a way that I don't begin to comprehend. He is absolutely a poet, because his words work on the page, but he is even more absolutely a musician, because his words turn to spells when he sings them. 

 

He is loved here, although little is known about him personally; in fact a movie was made about people trying to get at him, to understand his songs by getting close to him (and vice versa) and at the end of the movie we know nothing more than the disappointed fans in the film. (This is another reason I wanted to stay here, that the most beloved musician is loved for his art, rather than his tabloid activity.) 

 

I never expected I'd get to see Nohavica. The man is stadium-level popular, and I didn't want to see him being a tiny ant. I like him singing to me sweetly in my personal ear, and though I would swoon if it were in real life, it does pretty well via headphones. 

 

But on Sunday he played in a basketball gymnasium, a strange little unadvertised thing, and a friend of a friend had tickets and I went. I spent most of the time with tears streaming down my face; it's like I've decided to put all my feelings behind a wall but the art still pierces right through, and I have cried for Matisse and Miro and Monet and now Nohavica, and I'm not sorry (not least because at least we're moving along in the alphabet). 

 

It was amazing. It was perfect. I loved when he talked, I loved when he didn't, I loved when the audience sang along and when he moved us to awestruck silence. I didn't even put it on my "dream" list because I never thought it would be possible, and I am so beyond happy it was.