Rolling On One

We started out Memorial Day weekend by heading south, to Skyview Acres in Pomona, New York (Rockland County — on the west side of the Tappan Zee Bridge). There was a gathering there for the dedication of a plaque in memory of my mom’s cousin Irving Wolfe, who had died last year at the age of 96.

We left Newton in the early afternoon Saturday and went to my aunt Mimi’s house in Mamaroneck. It was the first time I used cruise control on our new car (did I mention (no of course not, I haven’t posted anything in months) that we got a new car, a 2010 Subaru Forester with a sun roof and a radio that tells you what song is playing, if the station chooses to let you know). We had a quiet evening visiting with them and watching the National Geographic channel in their den (their living room is really too big for just four people).

On Sunday, after a big leisurely breakfast, because in a house with two people in their 80s everything goes at a pace that seems leisurely to the likes of us, even though everything in our house goes at a pace that seems leisurely to Matt and Anne, now where was I, around noon we left for Wolfe Field at Skyview Acres. In between breakfast and leaving I was looking through some books, a photo book about Texas cowboys for no good reason, and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast because it was there and I have never read much of anything by Hemingway. Holy smokes, that guy could write. I should know that, of course, but as I said, I have never read much of anything by him and didn’t really know. That book is about when he was living in Paris in the 1920s, hanging around with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and other people who are now big names but were just his friends when he was struggling to sell stories to magazines and Fitzgerald was having trouble finding a publisher for Gatsby.

At any rate, with some help from our GPS we got to Skyview Acres well before the event was supposed to start. Joe Ziner, one of Evelyn’s nephews, and don’t think “nephew” means he’s under 50 because he isn’t, had brought a softball and some mitts, and after several minutes of chatting with everyone we recognized he and I started playing catch. I don’t think I had thrown and caught a softball in the past ten years, but I did remember how. It was more surprising given that it was a mitt for the left hand, that is, for a right-handed person, so I had to throw with my right arm. I didn’t even try to throw overhand, but underhanded I had adequate distance and control. It must come from juggling.

I should tell you, because I did tell Joe, that when I think of Irving and throwing things I have to remember that one day Irv and I were throwing snowballs at my family’s house in Lexington (so this was between 1955 and ’59) Irv hit me in the nuts with a snowball. Of course it was accidental, and no hard feelings, but it’s not something you forget.

Joe had also brought his fiddle and a guitar. He got out his violin and asked me if I happened to play guitar. I haven’t in about 20 years; when I started playing with the klezmer band I concentrated on brass; but I said I used to and would try to strum a few chords with him. I’m not 100% sure I added rather than detracted from the sound, but it was fun anyway.

I didn’t want to be hung up over choosing a title.

I bicycled to work today, for the first time in several weeks and maybe only the second time this year. I stayed in very low gears on all the uphill parts, but didn’t feel particularly tired out by the time I got there or got home.

We had a substitute in yoga class at work today, a young woman (who else would be a yoga instructor?) named Linda who had apparently taught the class there a couple of years ago but whom I hadn’t seen before. She started out the class with some Tai Chi moves (none of which we do in our Tai Chi class there, but which definitely had a Tai Chi feel to them. To me, anyway. I don’t know what the Chinese woman in the class thought of them. Later in the class the instructor mixed in some Pilates moves. I don’t think a yoga purist would have been pleased. It was a less strenuous workout than we usually have, punctuated by the instructor saying something like “phew!” at the end of difficult poses — which gave the impression that it was fine if you had found the poses difficult, too!

We had seventeen people for the second seder, at various times; not seventeen at once, because Patsy had to leave early to get to work, and David had bad traffic coming from Boston and didn’t get here until we were well under way, and Anne had to work late so she and Matt got here after the soup course. We set up in the living room:

Gena and Rachael and all the kids were there the whole time.

Mason and Jared (2nd and 3rd from the left) are reading a mile a minute. I took down my shofar and played one note on it and was soundly criticized by Jacob (in the blue stripes, on his mom’s lap), who knew it was the wrong time of year for that sort of thing. I had no idea where I was going to put the afikomen, and ended up putting it in the middle of the pile of hagaddahs. I didn’t expect it to last a minute before being found, but it kept the boys busy almost until time for dessert — about perfect. Arlene had bought a batch of hot wheels cars with state themes, including a beach buggy for Hawaii and a woody station wagon for California, for afikomen presents. They went over well! Here are Mason and Baylor about ready to go home (or at least to David & Rachael’s to sleep), clutching their cars.

Just for a quick update of what the woods looks like in the early spring, here’s, first, a grackle — back earlier than most of the spring migrants:

Second, a chipmunk, one of many that are running around our corner of Maine the last few weeks:

Some of a broken tree. There have been a lot of windy days lately, and there’s always at least one tree that’s almost ready to fall. This one looked to me like a wooden stalagmite.

… and a good look at Sleeping Rhino, without snow cover and without trees and undergrowth in front of it. This late winter and early spring we’ve had clearer views through the woods than ever before, because of the lack of snow recently.

And while not boiling down sap or walking around the woods, I finished sewing this shirt. Charley took the picture before I did the buttonholes and buttons, but it’s all done by now.

The weekend before last, that is, Feb 27 it must have been, we drove up to Slattery’s Farm and Maple Supply store in West Minot (pronounced like what you do with coal, mine it) to get what we needed to collect maple sap. That was to say, some taps to put in the tree, buckets to hang on them to collect the sap, and covers to keep bugs, stray leaves, and everything else that’s out there in the woods that you don’t want in your maple syrup out of the sap. The woman minding the store, presumably Joni Slattery, was very helpful. “Become a tree hugger,” she said. “If you can get your arms around a tree and touch your hands on the other side, it’s big enough to put a tap in. If you can reach all the way around to your elbows, don’t tap it. If you can’t get your hands anywhere close to each other on the far side, you can put in two taps.” The other customers also were happy to give us some encouragement and pointers. I was thinking that we were spending some money on the deal, and that it was going to be an expensive way to get maple syrup, but I realized that if we got two gallons of syrup with the equipment before it wore out we would have broken even on it. It could happen. After we paid, Mrs. Slattery said, “and with a purchase over $30, you get a free 10 pound bag of potatoes!” So we got more than we bargained for.

Collecting the sap is just the start. You need 40 times as much sap as you’re going to end up with syrup, and the 39 parts that isn’s syrup is water that you have to boil away. So the key is how you’re going to boil down the sap. “A lot of people use propane, something like a propane turkey fryer,” said Mrs. Slattery. We saw a turkey fryer for sale on Craig’s List, but we really wanted just the burner part, not all the turkey wrangling parts. We stopped at Cabela’s, a big outdoor outfitter store, on the way north last Friday, to look for a burner. A very knowledgeable salesman said, “Really, the least expensive thing we have that will work for you is this fish fryer…” and it looked just right, for $40 instead of the $150 Craig’s List price for the turkey outfit. Add the propane tank, and it’s going to take more like six gallons of syrup before we break even; but it’s for the learning experience and, we hope, fun.

First thing Saturday morning, I took the taps, buckets, a hammer, and a drill out to the maple trees we had scouted out. You need to drill the hole slanted slightly upwards —

hammer in the tap (not too hard; you don’t want to split the wood, or the sap will flow out below the tap instead of through it) —

— hang a bucket on the hook that hooks through the tap, and put a cover on it —

and that’s one tree tapped.

Before I drilled the first hole I wondered if it was really going to work. Before I had a chance to hammer in the first tap, it was clear that it was going to. There was sap dripping out of the hole immediately!

Of course I took lots of pictures of the process. I tried hard to catch the drops of sap dripping. This was perhaps the most successful picture:

I put in three taps (because that was all the tappable-size maples we had found close to the house.) We went out to the local hardware store for a tank of propane (which could be a post in itself — but won’t.)

The next morning I collected the sap. None of the buckets was as much as half full, but the three together added up to more than half a bucket — probably five quarts of sap.

I hooked the propane up to the burner, poured a couple of inches worth of sap in the pot, and started boiling it. The burner put out a lot more heat than a stove burner. The sap started bubbling a lot sooner than a teakettle with half as much liquid boils, even though it was a watched pot.

It would have been a better idea to warm up the sap that wasn’t in the pot yet, rather than having it on ice. I kept ladling in more sap as the pot boiled.

As the sap boiled down, it started to have a little of that golden maple syrup color

Syrup is done when the boiling temperature is 7 degrees above boiling (which isn’t 212, unless you’re right at sea level). The books say that you have to be really careful when it gets close to that temperature, or you may boil it over (and lose all that work!) or overdo it and end up with a scorched mess (also lose all that work). I brought the syrup indoors and finished it in a smaller pot on the stove when it had all boiled down to just a cup or two.

Finally, after I had been standing out in the snow for two hours and boiled down those five quarts of sap plus another quart that Arlene brought back before I had finished with the first batch, we had a little more than half a half-pint jelly jar of syrup!

Arlene immediately scooped out two bowls of vanilla ice cream and put some syrup on it!

Wait, is that really me with all those exclamation points?

Not counting the day we got there, because all we did was walk around the hotel grounds (seeing several life birds, that is, birds we’ve never seen before in our lives, in the process) and go to that orientation meeting. Well, the airport was more interesting than most airports. There was someone there making cigars, which was different.

The view from our hotel window was pretty nifty, though, with a rainbow that just stayed there for half the afternoon:

Oh, also at that orientation meeting everyone in the group introduced themselves. There were people from all over the US, two couples from various parts of Canada, and eight Chinese people (two from Beijing) who were three brothers and two sisters and some spouses doing a family reunion.

The first real day of the tour we got on the bus to go to Poas Volcano national park. There’s an overlook over a big crater and a life zone called “cloud forest”, not rain forest, up near the top. The booklet describing the tour said that there was only a 30% chance of seeing anything from the overlook. We were among the 70% who didn’t see the crater, although we were up there at the edge:

However, the cloud forest was there just fine. The idea is, at that altitude on that mountain range you’re in the clouds.

It doesn’t rain all that much, but it’s sort of drizzle, well, that 70% of the time. There are lots of plants (and of course insects, and birds too) that only live in the cloud forest. An indicator plant of cloud forest (that is, this plant only lives in that life zone, so if you see it, you know you’re in cloud forest) is this “poor man’s umbrella” leaf:

The cloud forest has lots of bromeliads, relatives of pineapples, growing in it — I think this is one —

and lots of other colorful flowers, extra welcome when you’ve been looking at the grey New England winter for the last month —

— and of course just lots of vegetation in general.

To get to the top of Poas we had been driving through lots of coffee plantations; that’s a crop that likes the middle elevations of the hills.

There were many signs offering coffee tours. We just got to walk in a tiny coffee grove in the backyard of the restaurant where we stopped for lunch, but we were right there with the coffee bushes,

and had a big view over Costa Rica’s central valley from the restaurant.

(Hey! Why did I turn that sideways? oh well…)

The bus took us back to San Jose, where we went to the gold museum. Besides being a museum of numismatics, with exhibits of coins and currency that had pictures of tropical animals and plants, it had lots of pre-columbian gold artifacts and a very interesting exhibit of how the pre-columbian Central American cultures had done lost-wax casting.

Rather than take the bus back to our hotel, Millie and Joel and Arlene and I opted to stay downtown and find a cab back. Two other women from the tour also decided to stay downtown. Between that and seeing which people on the tour group had chosen to walk on a little trail off the main road from the Poas parking lot to the overlook, and who was really looking closely at the plants up there (and one of the Chinese women was sketching them in a paper journal!), we were starting to get an idea of who might be the more interesting people in the group.

We walked along a pedestrian-only shopping street downtown, and then back a block or two on a parallel street before we decided to get a cab back. The thing I liked best on the mall was a group of sculptures honoring the street dogs of the city:

Oh! I was thinking about all the Spanish we were seeing on store signs. There were lots of shoe stores, zapoterias. I just now realized the similarity between the French ord for wooden shoes, sabots (of course sabotage means throwing wooden shoes in the machinery to stop the mill), and the Spanish for shoes, however much of zapoteria it is.

This is from several weekends ago — probably the weekend of Feb. 3. I’m not sure why Matt was so tired; probably from making two round trips out to Pitchfork Springs (a mile and a half each way? Through a foot of snow?) with Dozer. Both of them zonked out on the living room floor:

Arlene asked me something like “are you going to put markers on the fingerboard?” I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guessed I should; normal guitars have marks every so often so you can find where to play different chords and notes past the first few frets. I had some decorative inlay left from years ago that I figured would be suitable. It came out better than I expected:

I didn’t do the tiny details! I cut a strip of inlay into semi-tiny rectangles and put them in little spaces I cut out. Granted I had to cut two semi-tiny rectangles of inlay strip for each marker, to make diamonds instead of all herringbone, and cut the little spaces to just about the right size. But not the tiny details. All the same, I think it exceeds expectations for a cigar box guitar fingerboard. Here’s the inlay strip on top of the fingerboard so you can see what I mean:

We woke up to exceptionally beautiful snow in Casco yesterday. Here’s the best winter picture of our house I’ve ever taken —

We have a very long driveway, because there is a row of house lots between the road and our lot proper, with a right-of-way a little wider than our driveway between two of those; so I often think I’m out in more winter weather getting the newspaper than a lot of my co-workers are in a whole week. Here’s how it looked on my way back from the mailbox:

Last Thursday I went to a talk and demonstration about a musical instrument called the duduk, at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown. Well, why? you may ask. Mostly because I like music and strange musical instruments, and partly because I’ve been interested in Armenian culture since I lived in Watertown when I was in graduate school.

The link I have above is the museum’s page about the event. If you look along the thumbnails of the YouTube inset, find the one with a picture of a guy in an embroidered white shirt standing in front of a microphone — or go to YouTube and search for “Armenian Duduk Performance“. (or just click on that link!) There’s a 5 minute clip of a trio playing duduks there. If you just listen, and you’ve never heard the instrument before, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re listening to a viola and cello duet, but it’s a double-reed instrument, more like an oboe or bassoon than anything else.

There’s another Armenian double-reed instrument called the zurna. It’s like a snake-charmer oboe and variations of it are found all through western and central Asia. The duduk, however, is strictly Armenian.

I bought both a duduk and a zurna (in fact, two zurnas, one of which I gave to my klezmer teacher) when I was in Yerevan in 1999. I haven’t learned to play either of them. The zurna is incredibly loud, even by my standards as a trumpet player. Maybe not as loud as I can play the trumpet when I try, but I can play trumpet softly when I want to. Zurna, only loud. Only so loud that I wouldn’t want to practice it indoors, nor in fact anywhere within 100 feet of anyone else until I developed some facility with it — so that’s not ever going to happen. ALMA’s exhibit about musical instruments said that the zurna is used for outdoor events, and that sounds good to me.

The talk covered recent trends in duduk playing, mostly what happened during the Soviet era. The soviets were big on encouraging national identity in the different areas of the USSR, and organized folk orchestras which played traditional music of their nationality; but just by virtue of being officially organized they became more codified and polished than the real traditional musicians had been, and duduk music began to be taught more from printed curricula than just handed on from generation to generation. Fewer schools teach duduk now than did twenty years ago, and there is some chance of the traditions being lost. If you listen to the YouTube clip, you’ll agree with me that the duduk tradition is worth preserving!