FUNNYACCENT

Lens Challenge Day: Leaves

 Foliage Festival at Arnold Aboretum last Sunday.

Spring Chicken No More

Sometimes I get overconfident of my physical ability. I think I run 20-25 miles a week, a couple of times a week of free weight exercises at the gym and 6-8 miles walk every Sunday, I think I am all set.

Without thinking twice, perhaps I thought twice, but as usual my mind convinced me on Thursday afternoon right after I had my lunch that it would be a breeze. Breeze my ass. Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN)  offered a free rock climbing workshop on Saturday. So, I called them and signed up for 1:00 pm slot.

I arrived at the site, Nira Rock  on Nira  Avenue right behind Veteran Hospital in Jamaica Plain abound 1:30 pm. I was surprised to see how beautiful and peacefulul the site was.

 Candice greeted me and handed me a couple of papers to sign. She walked me to Nira Rock and introduced me to anotherr lovely girl. I forgot her name, but she was very helpful. She showed me how to put on the harness. I put the climbing shoes and the helmet.

As I watched the first climber eased his way up the wall of the rock I thought about my right knee. Then it dawned to me that my knee wasn't completely healed.  What am I doing here?

I promised myself if my right knee started to bother me, I would stop. Anyway, when it was my turn, Jeremy,the instructor the guy who held the rope told me not to worry. I won't fall he said. I was sure my face expression told him that I was about to chickening out.

To make the boring story short, despite the encouragement from Jeremy and the rest of the people who stood watching the 51 year old woman trying to swing her legs over the ledge, I managed to get only perhaps a quarter of the wall. While trying to find the spot to swing my right leg up, I knew if I forced myself, I would be miserably sitting on my butt nursing my injured knee. I told Jeremy I wanted to stop. Gently he pulled me down.

Perhaps next time I would give a try on an indoor rock climbing, perhaps not because I don't think I am brave enough to get myself swinging next to a big slab of solid rock. One thing I have to say, I salute to all the rock climbers. And yes, my arms are still sore.

Color, Shade and Hue of Fall

Two weeks ago after Mama Z dropped her daughter, Rose at her campus UMass Amherst, we decided to drive up to New Hampshire to watch the foliage. I know Vermont is the best place, but we had a wonderful time watching  blazing colors and shades of yellow, orange and red bursting in one tree. That was enough to stimulate some cells in my brain for a week.

We stopped at  an intersection  of Jaffrey , a  town in New Hamshire and saw scarecrows lined up ahead and a couple of dozens more on the common. We were told they had 308 scarecrows this year scatterred around downtown Jaffrey.

 

One of the scarecrows caught my attention was dressed in half man and half woman. We don't dress up like this scarecrow: half woman and half man, but we are all the balance of woman and man, egg and sperm , mother and father, that makes us as whole.

 

Mama Z bought a couple of gorgeous mums for $2 a pot.

We spotted so many mum stands along the way.

Missed

Was I too busy looking at something else when I was younger that I missed all these beautiful dried up seeds, pods, leaves, twigs, barks, roots and even a dried flowers?

Or perhaps as I am getting older I've started to slow down my pace and I've began to notice everything that I've missed before.

Getting old is not that bad after all, eh?

 

Shots from Zul Mess's garden in Middleborough during Hari Raya gathering last Sunday.

Autumn Falls

Thursday Challenge: Autumn

   I forgot which route we stopped to take this glorious scene, but it was before we got to Jaffrey, NH, a town where the kids put up scarecrows on the common.

Plum

I held a velvety soft plum in my right hand and let the water ran over it. I peeled a tiny sticker off the skin, and gently rubbed off a sticky whitish mark with my thumb. I closed my fingers over the fruit and felt the softness of its skin.

The water dripping from my hand and I bit on the softest part. The moment my teeth sank in its juicy flesh, and the sweetness sipped through my teeth I knew it why I liked a plum when I was a kid. The juice that dribbled from my chin and my failed attempt to stop the juice from dropping on the front of my dress was the fun part.

So, I bent forward from the waist  to let the juice stained the ground instead  on the front of my dress.

Autumn Walk

 Ocotber 5th. Sunday Walk at ICA  Boston

 

Click to enlarge a second photo and take a look at the boat. What do you see?

Miles of Smiles for a Whiner.

It takes a lot of effort, I mean a huge effort to make me angry. The past three years since I joined this facility I have no idea how many times I have clients screamed, yelled or acting impossibly rude because they didn't get what they wanted, or their medications supply was stopped because the health insurance benefit was switched, or thier attempts to reestablish a relationship with thier parents/children were rejected because nobody believed them anymore, or so many other reasons.

And when they raised their voices, they expected the same thing in return. And this was an interesting part: They didn't know what to do when they didn't get what they were expected. They wre ready to spit out their frustrations.

We stood facing each other, sometimes I took a couple of steps back, out of the person's reach. I would be lying if I said I wasn't afraid at the beginning.

It took a few minutes for the person to figure it out.  I didn't respond to him the way he was expecting me to.

I kept my mouth shut, watching closely the person trying to make sense of what he had just said. A lot of times it was nothing to do with me.

He walked away and retraced his steps..

"Aren't you going to say something?"

"Like what?"

"I've just yelled at you like three times. You should yelled back at me."

"Do you think if I yelled back at you, your doctor will give you more dose?"

"Uh? I'm sorry I didn't mean to yell at you."

"Of course you did. You were frustrated, you didn't know what to do. You vented out at me. But I would like you to remember one thing."

"What?"

" I'm not a pin cushion."

"A pin cushion?Ohhhh...... ? I was a jerk, was I?.  But seriously, don't you get mad when I was rude to you a few minutes ago? I was screaming at you like a  manicac."

"No."

"No? I'm serious you know. Don't you want to yell back at me? You are a staff. You can yell back at me, you know."

"What would you do if somebody else screamed and being rude to you the way you were to me?"

"Are you kidding me? I'll screamed back at them. I don't take other people's crap."

"But you threw your crap at me. "

"Boy, this is embarassing."

"What embarassing you?"

"My behaviour. I'm sorry. Will you forgive me?"

"Okay. Can we move on?"

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On the other hand, whiners annoy the shit out of me. It doesn't take long to have an annoying expression all over my face.

Once a senior staff told me I have a lot to learn about masking my annoyance. I never saw you got upset or angry, not even once she told me. But when I let my feeling take over, she said she could tell from the tone of my voice and from my expression. The worst part she said, I didn't even make an effort to hide it.

She was right. I tried to hide it under my weak-ass smile. I made an effort. A few times.

 I felt I betrayed myself. It was so chilling. My face muscles crammed. Froze. I didn't like what I felt.

One day without making an effort to say, No, I am not to a client:

Client: Am I annoying you with my whining?

Me      : So you know you're a whiner?

Client: God!!!! Are you telling me I am a whiner?

Me     : I think you know that all along.

I have full respect for people with grand skills and ability to mask their feelings with miles and miles of smiles. I know I have a lot to learn.

But, let me be myself on this one.

Kapok and Kekabu

I first noticed the plants when I went for a walk after work during a final week of fasting month.

There were a few different wild plants grew side by side with it, but it eventually took over and the rest of other plants wilted away.

They grew on the side of M Street Bath House at the end of Carson Beach bore the green fruits with tiny thorn s. Most of the leaves were long gone.

I carefully ran my index finger over one of the pods. The tiny, short thorns were sharp, but I was careful not to let the thorns pricked into my skin. Like all the animals and plants that have their own devices to protect their existence, the tiny Sharp thorns and very, very short hairs between the thorns must be the protector, the shield.

Each pod had a similar size, between 4 to 5 inches in length and about 5 inches diameter.

Last Tuesday, after my weekly acupuncture session at noon, I didn't return to my office. I took the bus from Copley and went home. I used the hours that accumulated  from the past weeks.

It was 2:50 pm when I got home. It was a lovely afternoon. The kind of day you wanted to be outside, doing something or nothing. But you wanted to be outside.

I changed into a running short, short sleeves t-shirt, off I went out running on the beach.

When I reached at the end of the beach, an amazing and wondrous sight awaited me. I didn't have a camera in my hand. What did I do? I turned around and ran back to my apartment. It took me eight minutes to reach the front door of the building.

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The green thorny pods had matured and the skin turned to brown. The  dried skin cracked opened to expose a fluffy white floss. A tiny brown seed attached to the end of the floss.

The white floss reminded me of kekabu  from kekabu trees (kapok , ceiba petendra) grew tall with green to grayish barks. They looked proud and magnificent  on the right corner of my grandmother's front yard.

The floss from this plant wasn't as fluffy as kekabu and its texture

 was nothing like kekabu, but it was close to enough to bring back the memories.

Kapok tree was original from South American and it was a sacred tree to Mayan people. The soul of dead ascended to heaven through the branch. And kapok tree is Guatemala's national tree.

 

When I was thinking about writing this entry, I remembered the year we lived at grandmother's house when the kapok pods were ready to be harvested.

The green pods turned to brown and trees shed all the leaves. It was a beautiful sight. All the brown pods on the branches hanging up on the trees and there was no single leaf in sight. Some of the pods cracked open and fluffy white floss kapok popped out. It was a beautiful sight.

It was the beginning of 1964, and my mother threw out all the old pillows from all the bedrooms of my grandmother's house. All of us had new freshly made pillow with fresh harvested kekabu. And on top of that my grandmother had a cupboard-full of extra pillows.

Build It From the Scratch

Don't you love her powerful voice? No matter how many times your heart has been cracked or broken to pieces, you listen Joan Osborne asking you What Becomes to Your Broken Hearted?, you straighten up your spine and say: I'm going to build my new heart from the scratch.