Pause for Purpose

Mark K November 4th, 2009

Heidi Krahling’s long-awaited cookbook is now available for purchase. The book is truly a work of art – filled with more than 120 recipes from both Insalata’s and from Heidi’s family along with gorgeous illustrations by Laura Parker and mouth-watering photographs by David Matheson. The book features a foreword by Ann Lamott and Heidi’s personal stories to introduce each recipe.

Insalata’s Mediterranean Table was recently reviewed in the Marin Independent Journal and is available for purchase at Insalata’s – 120 Sir Francis Drake, San Anselmo, CA – or by clicking the following link:

Tags: Anne Lamott, Heidi Krahling, Insalata's, Mediterranean cookbook

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Mark K August 11th, 2009

Our train just sliced a semi truck in half at a crossing near Salinas. The driver appears to be fine – luckily the train missed the front of the truck. We barely felt it on the train, but came to a stop very quickly.

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Mark K August 3rd, 2009

I found a bee in my root beer today. This wouldn’t have been especially troubling, except for two things: the bee was still alive, and the root beer was in my mouth at the time.

My neighbor Mark had given me the root beer, telling me that it was the most delicious root beer that he had ever tasted. He pointed out all of the benefits that were touted on the can: no preservatives, no sodium, no caffeine, and real cane sugar in place of high fructose corn syrup.

Of course I didn’t know that I had a bee in my mouth – I just knew that when I poured the last little bit of the drink into my mouth there was something solid and kind of big that didn’t belong in my root beer. At the time I was sitting at a table on our patio and almost spit into the cactus display in front of me, but didn’t want to spoil the flowers.

Mark has been retired for many years and had been watching me slave over my repairs to my irrigation system. The two workmen who I had hired had just left and I was cleaning up and admiring my work when he slowly crossed the street with the can of ice cold root beer.

I had once had a bee sting me on the lip as it followed part of my roast beef sandwich into my mouth, so the thought crossed my mind that the mysterious object might be a bee that had crawled into the can while it was briefly unattended.

The day before, Mark had watched me swinging a pick in the hot sun, with sweat pouring down my face. After each eight or ten swings I would have to take a rest, mop off my face and get a drink. He motioned for me to come over and explain to him what the project was about and expressed concern about how exhausted I looked. That’s about the time that I decided I would hire someone younger and stronger to do the picking the next day.

I decided to run into the house to spit out the root beer in the kitchen sink. That’s when I saw the bee, looking dazed but still alive, though barely moving. I was grateful to him for not stinging me and thought he should have a chance to survive.

The reason Mark was home watching me was that he had just returned from the hospital and was recovering from a procedure in which the doctors run a scope through his arteries, looking for blockage. He had felt chest pains while doing yard work and the doctors where trying to determine if his arteries could be cleaned out or stretched wider by inserting a stent.

I let the bee crawl onto a spoon and took it outside to the table on the patio. He kept shaking himself, like a boxer who had just been knocked down and was trying to clear his head so he could get up and fight again. He took his tiny front legs and rubbed his head, as if trying to remove the sticky layer of root beer. He tried to move his wings, but they were stuck together.

The doctor had told Mark the same thing that another doctor had recently told my father – that it was too risky to do a surgical procedure – to try to clean the arteries or insert a stent – because a piece of plaque might break loose and cause a heart attack. Open heart surgery was also out of the question for someone in his eighties. Mark was advised to limit his physical activity and take medication to control his blood pressure. He returned home and was taking it easy by sitting and watching me work across the street.

The bee kept working to clean himself and liberate his wings. I put him on the spoon again and moved him to a flower in a sunny spot. He began to move about the flower a bit drunkenly at first, but amazingly, he seemed to be going about his business of collecting pollen.

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect tonic to revive me after two days of hard labor than the ice cold can of root beer – it was every bit as delicious as advertised. As he handed me the root beer, Mark described just how much sweat he had seen pouring down my face as I labored in the sun. Assured that I was finished with my labors, he headed back across the street.

The bee had crawled to the blossom at the very top of a flower. A sudden breeze picked up and swept the bee off the blossom. He took flight, circling three times as he gained altitude and disappeared from my sight.

By the way, the root beer – the liquid part, anyway – was great!

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Mark K July 1st, 2009

Today is my birthday, I think.
You see, Dr. Hennig was the one who chose my birthday. He died this year – he was 100 years old.
He lived in Sedona in the last years of his life and must have been very happy there. Dr. Hennig loved to collect rocks and Sedona has some of the prettiest rocks in the world. Whenever he found an especially colorful rock that he wanted to share with you, he would  lick it, leaving a long, wide wet spot where the colors would break through. “What do you think?” he would ask as he handed it to you.
My dad was the doctor who delivered many of my future classmates in the small town we lived, but when it came time for my birth, he asked his friend, Dr. Hennig to deliver the baby. My parents made the trip to the hospital in the neighboring town – our town had no hospital – on the night of July 1 and my mother soon began labor.
The labor continued throughout the evening in the sweltering Sacramento Valley heat. My dad stood at the bedside throughout, but it was Dr. Hennig who finally brought me into the world.
He looked up at the clock and saw that it was midnight. “I’m not sure if he was born before, or after midnight,” he said as he handed me  to my mom, “but I think July 1st sounds better than July 2nd!”
Lloyd Hennig was always known for his mischievous sense of humor. When he was a teenager growing up in San Francisco, he and his friends would  take a ferry across the Bay and then catch the train to Mill Valley. They would stand at the train depot and wave to the tourists who were departing on the steam train bound for the top of  Mt. Tamalpais. As soon as the train left the station, the boys would hike straight up the mountain to the first switchback curve and wave again to the same passengers. By the third curve, the passengers would be rubbing their eyes, wondering if Marin county teenagers only came in three varieties.
I don’t know if Dr. Hennig applied this same sense of whimsy when he chose my birthday, but I do know that eighteen years later, during the Viet Nam War, the Selective Service Commision instituted a draft lottery, based on a person’s birthday. Each birthday was randomly matched with a number, and if your number was lower than one hundred, there was a good chance you would be sent to Viet Nam. July 1 was assigned the number 284 and I was able to remain a civilian and finish my college education.
Last month, by chance, I visited Sedona and was reminded of Dr. Hennig’s passing. It also made my curious about how things might have been different had he not assigned me my birthday. I did some research and found the answer to a question about which I have long been curious.
The draft lottery number for July 2 was 61.
Thanks, Dr. Hennig. July 1 sounds good to me, too.

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Mark K June 27th, 2009

The business was called “Green Fusion” and used to sell eco-friendly products. Judging by the looks of the plants trapped inside, “Brown Fission” might be a more fitting name.

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Mark K May 21st, 2009

You see grafitti everywhere – well, maybe not the spectacular mural pictured here, but you see the scribbling on a bathroom wall, the spraypainted tags on a bus shelter, or a political slogan on the side of a building. The strange thing, when I think about it, is that I’ve never really seen anyone creating the grafitti.

Maybe that’s not totally true – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen someone write something – a phone number, a joke, or a stick figure. The ones that amaze me are the huge murals that you see in cities. You’re driving down the freeway and there is a huge, multi-colored work of art – something that probably took hours to create with sophisticated equipment and perhaps a team of talented artists. They are often placed somewhere that seems almost impossible to reach – you would need a ladder, scaffolding, or mountain-climbing equipment. Beside that, you would have to remain perched, hanging over a freeway for hours. Surely, even in the middle of the night, someone would see you and the police would be notified. How is it possible for someone to remain in such a precarious position long enough to complete the task?

There are people who believe the lunar landing is a giant hoax, that NASA didn’t really send men to the moon, but rather created the illusion in some Hollywood studio. Do we really know that people create these masterpieces of street art? Is it possible that invisible aliens come in the dead of night and splash them on the wall with air brush light sabers in a instant when no cars are passing?

I wasn’t present on the moon in 1969, so I can’t say definitively whether or not the astronauts landed there. And to this day, I’ve never seen grafitti artists at work, so I don’t really know if there works are created by people.

But I’m still looking.

Tags: grafitti, street art, urban art

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Mark K May 15th, 2009

Is it possible to have too much empathy?

Not long ago I ran into a woman walking down the street of my hometown, who I recognized from a local greeting card shop. She was dressed in black, as always, with layers of clothing from her extra-long sweater down to her peasant skirt and old-fashioned lace-up boots. She looked almost like a person in mourning, but more thoughtful than sad.

I remember once when I bought a sympathy card at the store where she worked. She looked at the card and then at me with an expression of grave concern and then told me that she was sorry about my loss. The card was for a friend of mine who had lost his father. I had never met the father, so even though I appreciated her concern, I felt that I wasn’t really a deserving recipient, being so far removed from the loss.

When I saw the woman in black walking down the street, it reminded me that I hadn’t seen her at the store for a long time. I wondered if perhaps she had such an abundance of empathy that she could no longer tolerate the extremes of emotion that she experienced as people purchased cards to celebrate, grieve or give thanks. Had someone complained that she was too personable, that she was too curious about why customers were buying cards?

I was reminded of the character from “The Secret Lives of Bees” who took on the sorrow of those around her. In order to cope with the pain, she build a miniature wailing wall in her back yard. Whenever she absorbed the sadness of those she loved, she would write about it and then rush outside where she folded the paper and stuffed into a crack between the rocks of her wall.

The card shop closed recently. Perhaps the lady in black has found another way to put her gift of empathy to use. Hopefully she has her own version of a wailing wall to protect her when the feelings get too intense.

Tags: empathy

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Mark K March 7th, 2009

My daughter had her first “solo” driving experience last night, although she got a little help from the control tower.

Talia passed her driving test last month, but still hadn’t driven anywhere alone. She called me while I was at a noisy restaurant and told me that she wanted to meet her friend at the movie theater.  Could she drive there alone?

I told her that that was fine with me and she said that she was a little nervous about finding her way to the theater.  Could she keep her phone on speakerphone and talk to me while she was driving?

Throughout the process of learning to drive, Talia has had an amusing habit of providing “play by play” commentary as she nervously encounters challenges: “Oh no, there’s a car coming, what do I do now?”  She spits out the words rapid-fire, talking to herself as much as she’s asking me a question.

I agreed to be her co-pilot from a distance and quickly paid my bill and left the noisy restaurant.  I started walking home, talking with her as I walked, and even saw her from a distance, taking her first wrong turn.

“Dad, what do I do now?  I’m at that busy intersection and I think I just went the wrong way!”

One thing I’ve noticed as my children have grown up – for some reason kids don’t seem to be paying attention to where they’re going nowadays as their parents ferry them from place to place.  Maybe it’s because they’re paying attention to their Gameboys and i-pods, maybe it’s because they rarely walk or ride their bikes anywhere.  My son recently asked me for driving directions to another theater in our hometown.  When I told him that it was on the corner of 4th and A Streets, he asked me where that was.  When I responded that 4th St. is the main street of the town where he has lived his entire life, he said, “I didn’t know that was the name of that street!”

Talia wasn’t really that far off course – she was just taking an alternate route.  She kept me informed of the landmarks that she was passing – “Redhill Shopping Center is on my right.  Now I’m passing Drake High School.”

We lost our connection when she unsuccessfully attempted to merge and headed down a different road, out of cell phone range. She went around in a circle until she was back on course and then called me back.

“I’m passing the theater now.  Where do I park?”

I guided her from one parking lot to a second one, but they were both full.  The DMV no longer requires that you learn to parallel park in order to pass your driving test.  I think she and I practiced parallel parking once – on a space that was long enough for three cars.

She drove around the streets near the theater – “There’s a space!  No, it’s a loading zone.  There’s another one!  No, I would have to parallel park.”

She became exasperated when pedestrians had the audacity to cross the street in front of her – “Someone’s walking right in front of the car!  I think he’s trying to get run over!”

Meanwhile I was nearing my house – we had traveled almost the same distance. It must have been a strange sight to see me laughing and shouting instructions into my phone as I walked down the sidewalk in the dark.

Finally she found a space large enough to park, but in front of a “dark and creepy park” far from the theater.  She was already late for the movie, so this one would have to do.  She parked the car and I heard the beeping sounds as she locked the door.

Safely on the tarmac, she said goodbye.  I told her to call me if she needed help for the drive home.

She arrived home safely a couple of hours later.  “Why didn’t you call? I asked.

“I know my way home, Dad,” she said.

I guess she was paying attention after all.

Tags: learning to drive, parenting

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Mark K November 10th, 2008

When we traveled to France in October, I arrived a little early so that I could spend some time in Paris and take the opportunity to write about what I experienced.  I spent my days alternating between being a tourist – trying to see as many sights as I could, and being a “flaneur” – someone who wanders without a plan, taking time to notice things along the way.  When I returned to my apartment, I sat at my writer’s table and listened to the foot traffic outside my window while I gathered my thoughts.Paris is such a lively city with such a tradition of creativity – from artists to writers to philosophers – that I found plenty of inspiration for stories.  I would usually go through the photos that I had taken that day and use that as a starting point.

I found that it was sometimes a struggle to listen for my own story – to read and listen to what others had to say about Paris, but to be open to my own interpretation of the experience, which often required me to pay more attention to my feelings and intuition, and less to analytical thought.

I think that’s why I enjoy the Impressionists so much – when you study their art, you might not know exactly what they were viewing, but you get an idea of how they saw it and how they felt about it.  More importantly, it reminds me that there is not just one way to look at the world.

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Mark K October 31st, 2008

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