All right, my dears, take a seat and settle in for a nice long post. I've been running around like a crazy person over the holidays (as, I'm sure, have we all), but the time has come to sit down and record some of my high jinks for the edification of the masses. (Actually, I've also been waiting on some pictures, which finally came, so you can scroll down to see some of the following fully illustrated in Technicolor!)

Hmm, let's work backwards, shall we? I got to spend New Year's at the beach--a fantastical place to spend--well, let's face it--any holiday. My family has established a tradition in the past few years of renting a beach cabin with another family whom we've known since I started going to kindergarten with their oldest son. They live only a mile away from us, so in the olden days, there were many, many nights of Bowen/Van Essen daredevilry--either in the Bowen woods or on the Van Essen farm. These days, however, our exploits have to be planned many months in advance, and even then, attendance is sparse. I made it over for one night and joined the gang for a game of Scrabble and a sunny walk on the bayfront. Oh yes, and High School Musical was also part of the agenda--I think I shall never be the same.

The week between Christmas and New Year's I spent in my beloved Nampa--which I learned has increased 60% in size since I went to college there. This translates to 10% less charm and 50% more traffic. However, the people are as lovable as ever, and I surfeited on peer interaction to make up for the lack of it at home. Highlights include three trips to the Rocky Mountain Pizza place (it was new in town, so everybody wanted to take me there), continuing the Buffy saga with my new converts, coffee with an old former favorite professor, seeing one of my friends in maternity clothes for the first time, playing with Sophie's new globe (going on my list for next Christmas), and finally, the culminating event--our Murder in the Cathedral night.

Now, I expect to make more friends here in Oregon. I expect that there will be various groups and cliques and crowds that I will hang with from year to year. But this is why no one, no one, will ever be able to recreate my English-majory group of friends from college. On December 29, exactly 836 years after this event, six friends and I lit candles, turned on some Gregorian chants, and read aloud the play, Murder in the Cathedral, by T. S. Eliot from beginning to end. I read the parts of "First Tempter" and "First Knight" and imagined how I would direct each of the scenes if I had unlimited resources and supertalented actors. The play was utterly beautiful and our evening was concluded with a fabulous chocolate fondue. We've decided that this experience bears infinite repeating and from here on December 29 shall be sacred to Thomas Beckett and Murder in the Cathedral.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I spent up at my dear aunt's house in Washington, as I posted earlier. Thankfully, this trip was without the 3:30 am shopping excursion. We did manage to fit in some Taboo, however, and a very scrumptious Christmas dinner, and lots of lying around (on my part anyway). Cole and Ashley couldn't make it up to Washington, so they had a little pre-Christmas Christmas with the family a few days earlier, when we exchanged present. Cole made me the lovely contraption you see depicted (note the nameplate!). I was--and am--dazzled.

I also got a new Kitchenaid mixer--woo hoo! Just think of all the delectable treats I'll be able to make now.




And finally, most of the pictures below relate to about two weeks before Christmas, when my friend Keith came to visit for a weekend, and we explored the Willamette Valley like it's never been seen before. I took him down to my favorite place in the whole, wide world--the humble and exquisite McDowell Creek Falls. It being December, the falls were ice-crusted and the trees were wrapped in scarves of green moss. Also, there had been a windstorm the week before, so the woods were in disarray--fallen trees and branches criss-crossing the path. But despite the chaos and our lack of appropriate footwear, we tromped through the mud and debris to the waterfalls--as bright and fast as ever. The wonderful thing about having a place that you return to again and again (as opposed to being a tourist passing through, who sees things once and moves on) is that you get to see it in all its moods and various beauty: the hot summer days of wading up the creek and swimming under the falls; lying on a sunny rock in autumn and watching the leaves fall; the frosty emptiness of winter; and feeling the excitement as the withered leaves fade away and new sprouts appear in spring.

Anyway, when we had gotten our fill of the falls, Keith and I headed for Eugene, planning to see the town, do some shopping, and so on, but we were waylaid by destiny. We pulled over at a place called Living Rock Studios in Brownsville--the place where our lives would change forever. Self-described as the place where "art, science, and religion meet," the Living Rock is the brain-child of an Oregon man who believed that art can be found anywhere--and I do mean anywhere. Want to build a concrete "tree" out of your collection of petrified wood? Do it! Want to inlay your walls with giant agates, crystals, obsidian, thundereggs, and fossils? Why not? Create huge flower-like sculptures out of rusty metal, driftwood, and plastic? Sure! Display your mediocre paintings of every last bird in the Northwest for the world to see? Sew an preprosterously huge and intricate canopy of "leaves" for your petrified wood tree and hang it from the ceiling? Assemble a completely random selection of dubiously historical artifacts from the last hundred years and display them behind glass? Insert odd pieces of rock and incidental items such as spectacles in canning jars and partially submerge them in cement? Start a project of carving something out of every kind of wood in the Northwest and end up with 50 wooden pliers and one mermaid? Assemble all the above in one building, print off your favorite Bible verses on Microsoft Word to fill any blank spots on the wall, hang a sign, and open your doors for business? Yes! You can do it all! There are no limits!

If there's anything I learned from The Living Rock Studios, it's that the world is one heck of a big place, and there is room for anybody to with enough moxie to open their doors and not care who comes walking in. We spent almost two hours there, being escorted around and given the tour by the youngest child of the wizard who founded the place (the flower sculptures were her contribution). She gave us the history of every item--where "daddy" had found it, why he inserted it just there, where it placed on her list of favorites... We were equipped with flashlights at the outset, so that we could shine them on the agate stones and make them glow. The entryway was cluttered with the Coca-Cola lawn furniture of the next door neighbor, which had apparently gotten wet in the storm and had been brought in to dry by her fireplace. Her sister, we were told, had contributed all the textile art: yarn patterns interlaced with shells and driftwood, painted fabrics, as well as the aforementioned leaf canopy. The most arresting thing about the place was not its art, nor its natural artifacts, nor its historical significance. It wasn't its appalling bad taste nor its moments of surprising beauty--it was the accumulation, the ensemble, the entirety. The complete and utter randomness and insanity that would bring together under one roof such miscellany. I truly and sincerely recommend a visit.

Well, it seemed inconceivable at that point that the day could possibly get any better, but we were mistaken. After some much needed refreshment at a Eugene coffee house, we marched downtown to the local Tango parlor. Neither of us having ever danced the Argentinian tango before (and some of us--we Methodist-raised--never having danced at all), we thought it best to take the introductory lesson beforehand. After the first few minutes of cringing awkwardness, we threw our inhibitions to the wind and learned to dance.

And I know that this will come as a huge shock to most of you, but I find it very hard not to lead. Not being in charge of where I go is rather a challenge for me, but I overcame it. Oh yes. After only, oh, two hours or so of getting my feet stepped on, I began to learn. Staying on beat was another problem (which I blame on my aforementioned Methodism, by the way), but that began to improve as well. And after our 1/2 hour lesson, they turned down the lights, turned on the music, and Eugene became Buenos Aires. (The one without Madonna.)

Well, if I were writing a creative essay, I'd end it right there, but since I'm telling you about my life, you will also want to know about the rather anticlimactic next day, where we went to church and played Scrabble with my family. Then I spent the following week recovering from sleep deprivation and too much fun.

Also, I have to mention a recent book I picked up, which I read all through Christmas break and finished just the other day. It's called Letters Home, and it's a collection of letters written by Sylvia Plath home to her mother, dating from her first year of college until a week before she committed suicide when she was 31. Now, I've read your standard American Lit Survey selection of Plath's work, read The Bell Jar, and watched the utterly forgettable film version of her life (Sylvia with Gwenyth Paltrow), but I was only marginally interested in her until I picked up this book--in part because her poetic persona is so unapproachable and in part because I never identified with that crazy, suicidal part of her personality.

But, this collection completely changed all that. Although letters to one's mother are certainly going to portray only part of someone's mind, I was so captivated by the person that appeared in those letters: idealistic, enthusiastic, smart, focused, with huge dreams. This book made me want to be Sylvia Plath's best friend or her sister or roommate. Rarely do I live with a book as closely as I did with this one, which of course made the inevitable end that much more devastating. So, in memorial to Sylvia Plath, I'm going to post quotes from the letters every day this week, starting with this one:

"... I was rather embarassed in English today when my teacher said to let
the rest of the class work at a story analysis once in a while--that I was
explaining too much. It's so annoying to sit and watch people fumble over a
point you see clearly. English is not too challenging, I fear."
--November 8, 1950

--Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1975. p. 57-58.

Labels: Christmas, cooking, Eugene, literature, Nampa

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