Last call...

This is the last time I update the ether with the progress of my guided tour until my next birthday.  This place I love so much has served it's purpose. You cannot serve two masters or two blogs. Actually,  in my case, it's
three, thanks to these lovely ladies..  I grieve, but I have to confess that I wouldn't even care except that  I just ordered business cards for A Guided Tour so that I could feel more official when I asked if I could take photos.  I'm going to get another set for Cooked Heads. It could be that I'm reading Jane Austen right now, and what is a business card if not a calling card for someone with an official purpose.

Until February...   to deep love, to perpetual bliss, and to "drinking stars"

It's not Paris, but...

...it's still travel.  I booked my flight today.  I'm going to see my family in Houston, a city that has a bad rap. In some respects it's deserved, but Houston is also something other than strip malls, congested sprawl and

the very high pressure system that moves in and squats over the city all summer, every day between mid-March and late-October, which is why I'm going the first part of November.  It also home.

The art of the "doodle"

Almost ten years ago, I bought my husband a leather bound journal because, for a while, he thought he wanted all the grief that being a writer brings.  He never once cracked the back, so eventually, in a moment of deep need, I did.   In the years that followed I'd filled it with menus and notes, drawings and groceries lists, wine labels and the thin strips of linen paper the clerk at Jo Malone's gave to me after she'd sprayed them with Blue Agave and Cacao and 154.  They kept falling out and I kept insisting they stay within the creamy yellow pages to remind me of that day, a particularly nice one.
A few weeks ago, I lost it.  I mourned and moved on to the point that I'm on the lookout for another, but I hope somewhere, someone is enjoying that coffee stained book bound in caramel colored leather.
Maybe it will end up here:

Just lovely

I went to the place that made this:

because I'm reading Emma for the first time and found C.E. Brock's watercolors from the late 19th two volume release of Austen's book.

In case you'd enjoy:
The rest of them

Beautiful things...

...for a certain happy people, and you know who you are.

While ( bargain=true) Shop here;

Take off your shoes..

The place is so surreal sitting as it does in Malibu, California, that I don't mind the broad expanse of blistering marble on my bare feet in the August heat, though I was grateful for the cool water I used to clean my feet before I put them back in my shoes.  I can't imagine it being any cooler in the heat of Mumbai, or Agra, unless it is by moon light.  

Malibu Hindu Temple
1600 Las Virgenes Canyon Rd.
Calabasas, CA

I don't realize it at the time, but my traveling companion and I unknowing crash a ceremony of some sort. We enter a small building in the center of the complex where a young Hindu couple are holding their days old baby in one corner and in a very different corner an Indian grandmother scowls at the interlopers. I didn't see her, because I was so determined to absorb the experience of it all.  My traveling companion told me we'd been given the "stink eye", my words, not hers.  I use the expression because I suspect the grandmother was giving us the Hindi equivalent.  For all my heartfelt intent to show only the respect I felt, I made a mistake of oversight. I lay in bed that night and I feel bad, but only for a moment.  I've been clumsy. I've offended her in the place where she and her family mark birth, life and death, but I also realize I really have traveled and have committed the unintentional offenses one makes when one is out of place.  I forgive myself, hope the grandmother will and think,  "Namaste,"  in her direction, in the direction of her grandchild, and in the direction of all the other people who at least tolerated us for the afternoon we spent trying to see the world through their eyes

I've often quoted E.B. Browning's take on "seeing".  Those who see take off their shoes in reverence for all that is.  The rest sit round the common bush that is afire and pluck blackberries. I should have paid more attention at breakfast because the blackberry syrup I poured on to my pancakes that morning was trying to give me a heads up. 

Lust

I have pined for India since I sat in the The Clay Oven while a man named Pravine talked about his home country. As he talked, I could see the whole of the Western hemisphere, including his own restaurant, retreat from his awareness.  His body was in Irvine, California, but the parts that matter were in Mumbai. It was as inspirational to hear as the yogurt and rose petal jelly was to eat. Pravine’s wife makes it from the flowers that grow in their garden and each tiny spoonful was an orgy of exotic floral sweetness bathing my tongue.  As deserts go, it was a little obscene now that I think about it.

The pining only got worse after a recent dinner during which a man who was both born in Tamil Nadu and has such a deep love for his home country that he has every intention of returning to India with his family next year, told me that there wasn’t much to see in Agra other than the Taj Mahal.  Like you’d need more.  He’s Indian. His expectations are a lot higher than mine, but he did say  I should go anyway. 

     “When you go to Agra, time your trip so that you can see the it during the day, but wait until night fall and go back.  You need to see it by the light of a full moon.”

 I would have kissed him on the mouth for saying that, but I’d just met him, my husband doesn’t like that sort of thing and in fairness it really is bad form. Still, I’ve had enough foreplay.  I’m taking a day trip to India.

          That is much easier to do if you live close to Artesia, California than say, Winnsboro, Texas, but I suspect it’s do-able even then.  The internet, the library and your local grocery store make it so.   Do a google search for images of India to fill your mind with what your feet can't experience. Go to the library and check out every single beautiful book you can find about the place. If you haven’t already, read Kipling’s The Jungle book, or as I’m doing now A Passage to India, though it’s a little dark unless you like cultural misunderstanding as a plot.  For something lighter, read or at the very least go see Eat Pray Love

Go to the store and buy a bottle of curry powder and throw more than you think you should into a pot of browned deboned chicken thighs and onions, cook it until the curry releases its story and your house smells like not your house Add some whipping cream ( you’re on vacation here, just do it ), vegetables of your choice then simmer until it marries. Spoon it all on top of basmati rice, or heck plain rice and lavish it with chopped cashews or peanuts, flaked coconut, raisins and if you can find it, a jar of chutney.  

If that’s too much, boil some cinnamon, ginger and cardamom in some hot tea, strain it and add milk to taste and you get Cheating Chai.  Download Pandora (it’s free and I promise it won’t eat your computer ) and find some Indian music. 

Or, if extraordinary laziness is your forte, you're like me, so just buy the tea, then toss the spices into a pot of simmering water.  You do it for the holidays. Why not for Fridays?

Point is, travel in place.