A Few Precious Treasures

Marcia Hoehne has kindly given me this nice new award which I am to display along with a description of a few things I love.

Now, I am spoiled for choice when it comes to things I love. I am crazy about music and art and cats and books and plants, and above all, my dear family. I would find it hard to live without onions and garlic and cheese and chocolate and fresh coriander and chili peppers and beans and just about every kind of so-called ethnic food you might care to mention. But I would like to use this opportunity to talk about a few seemingly insignificant things that have become huge since moving here -- things I might not have given a second thought, back home in Scotland.

1) My old black shoes. I bought these frankly ugly shoes about six months before we left. They have a Velcro strap across the front and flat heels, and no fashionable woman in her right mind would be caught dead in them. But my feet have high arches and these shoes have built-in arch supports, and every time I hear one of my colleagues click-clicking along the corridor in her rat-stabber stilettos, I bless these shoes. I don't know how my colleague copes. We're on our feet up to six hours at a stretch, and in her shoes, I am convinced that I would become a homicidal maniac.

2) The two tiny sewing kits I got on Turkish Air. Somewhere in storage, I have a good-sized sewing box filled with different colors of thread, a selection of needles, scissors, a seam-ripper, tape measure, and pin cushion. Here in our little southern outpost, I have two tiny sewing kits and in the past five months, I have used them to 1) sew a torn pocket on a sundress, 2) mend Eldest Daughter's jeans, 3) fix Acquired Daughter's broken shoe strap (courtesy of Eldest's big clumsy feet), 4) sew two buttons back on husband's shirt, 5) hem up Youngest Daughter's shirt and -- well, you get the picture. I do believe in five months I have done more needlework than I did in an entire year back in Scotland, and I even have a good twenty inches of purple and orange thread left over.

3) My tatty old leg warmers. Way back when, after the movies Fame and Flashdance, every girl and her sister had to have a pair of leg warmers. Even non-dancing girls and women in places like Los Angeles and Florida could be seen sporting big, fashionable-looking leg warmers over their skin-tight blue jeans, sometimes spangled with bits of metallic thread or studded with sequins. Please don't imagine that my leg warmers, kindly sent by my friend Dina, are anything like those. They are black and plain and without them I would no doubt have lived through January, but it would not have been much fun.

4) My secondhand clothes shop lined trousers. We came here with a baggage weight limit of just under 20 kilograms per person. That meant that none of us could bring more than a few articles of winter clothing, and though clothes in big cities like Istanbul are well made and cheap, in our town they happen to be expensive. I bought my nearly-new fake moleskin lined trousers at my favorite thrift shop, run by the Cats Protection League, and I daily bless the woman who was crazy (or rich) enough to get rid of them.

5) My travel flashlight.I have a poor sense of direction and bad night vision. We live in a neighborhood sorely lacking in sidewalks but well supplied with potholes and missing chunks of asphalt. Every time I go walking at night, my trusty travel flashlight keeps me out of ditches -- and other people's driveways and entrances.

6) Our internet connection cable. Every time I plug this into my computer, I marvel at its power. It is half the width of my little finger, but it can connect me with people all over the world. It is such a compelling object that it commands the attention and respect of every member of this family, and -- even as I write this -- is an object of hot contention. I am being reminded that my turn with the cable is now over, so I'll pass this along to a few fellow writers who might be game to play along: Merry and Eryl, and Charlie, and Ms A. Paperback Writer, over to you if you're interested!

Born-gracefuls

Have you ever noticed that some people just seem to be born with grace and style? Some people can wear anything and look elegant and refined. Whatever they say sounds astute and perceptive; whatever they do looks competent and natural.

Then you have people like me. I inherited this unfortunate quality from my father. My uncle once commented that my father could wear the most expensive suit and you'd think it had come off the rack at K-Mart. Cruelly, I laughed at the time -- my uncle was right! -- but somewhere deep inside me a tiny voice whispered that I was just the same. And really, I am. Good clothes are wasted on me; in no time at all I've got ketchup on the collar and coffee spilled down the front. Buttons pop off my shirts and get lost, my cuffs become stained and frayed, and my shoes acquire scuff marks no matter how careful I am. But mainly, I just don't wear fine clothes with the natural confidence of the born-graceful. Which is okay, really, as I vastly prefer to buy my clothes at The Salvation Army Thrift Shop, my favorite boutique. But that doesn't mean I don't envy those graceful people just the same. I'd like to walk down the street in my secondhand clothes and enjoy the awe and admiration that the born-graceful inspire whatever they wear, wherever they go.

Natural grace has everything to do with personality and manner, and next to nothing to do with looks. It is inspired by a certain confidence which might be possible to acquire, but I suspect is largely innate. I like to imagine that it is possible to gain this over the years, because I've been trying to achieve it for a couple of decades and I want to think that I am getting somewhere.

The only reason I even decided to try is largely to do with my first yoga teacher, Kakizawa-san, who once commented that she had felt ungainly as a child. Kakizawa-san was in her early fifties, slender and tall. She wore her hair long and it never got messy, and throughout every yoga class, she maintained a calm, gracious manner that was seemingly effortless.

This can't be easy to do in a yoga class, where you are constantly changing position and adopting awkward or embarrassing postures. But Kakizawa-san managed it, all the same. She just had a knack. She herself was convinced that yoga had given her more grace and confidence. This gave me hope.

One day, in class, she was showing us a shoulder stand. "Now please don't be embarrassed if you pass wind when you try this," she said gravely. The entire class -- mainly women in the forties and fifties -- tittered. Kakizawa-san smiled, but assured us that it was perfectly natural to fart, absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about. As it turned out, all of us managed our shoulder stands without even a hint of a fart. But it would have been okay if any of us hadn't: Kakizawa-san had said so.

During cold season, one of my fellow students brought up the subject of jalneti, or saline nasal irrigation. This is the yoga practice of passing warm salt water through the nostrils, which is said to have enormous benefits in cleaning the throat and sinuses. Kakizawa-san assured us that she did this and found it immensely helpful. Everyone expressed interest in precisely how it was done, and she offered to give us a demonstration.

Leading us all into the ladies' room, Kakizawa-san produced a small clay pot filled with warm salt water. She tied her long hair back and gracefully leaned over the sink, collapsing one nostril with a finger and holding the pot up to her nose. "Now you gently breathe in the water" she intoned, doing this, "and release it through your mouth." Again, she demonstrated, allowing the water to flow out of her mouth. It looked so easy the way she did it and -- I swear to God! -- so stylish. I couldn't wait to try it myself.

Now, I won't give you the gory details. Just go try it yourself. You don't need a clay pot, just some boiled water cooled to body temperature with a pinch of salt added. Stand in front of a mirror and see how cool you look doing this. See if you can make it look graceful and stylish. If you can, good for you: you are one of the born-gracefuls of this world and you ought to be proud.

Me, I do it without the mirror.

Personal Goals

I've just been tagged by Katie Alender to come up with 15 personal goals. Being tagged is a huge thrill. When I was a kid, I was seldom ever tagged on the playground, due to an almost complete lack of coordination and an inability to dart about quickly. When I got tagged, I stayed tagged. This blog tagging sounds like a lot more fun -- a sport that even a P.E.-compromised person such as myself can have fun with.

Here, then, are my 15 personal goals:

1) Lose weight -- I don't need to lose a lot, but I still see this as my own personal Mt Everest. Mainly, I want to stop using food as a means of fighting ennui. I have found that when I am bored, I go to the kitchen and forage, even when I'm not really hungry. This is a slippery slope if there ever was one, and I have to dig my heels in somewhere and claw my way back to the top.

2) Get more fit -- This goes hand in hand with losing weight. I work out a lot in the course of tending my garden, but this isn't enough. I used to hike, walk, cycle and swim. I'm going to start with walking and see if I can't work in the other things gradually.

3) Meditate more -- Not too long ago, I'd have rolled my eyes at anyone suggesting that this would become an important part of my life. But meditating is a great way to deal with stress and worry, and the more I do this, the more peaceful I feel. With a couple of teenagers around, I need all the peace I can get. Especially since we bought the drum kit.

4) Keep up my Japanese -- I used to know the Joyo Kanji -- roughly 1,900 Chinese characters (written Japanese is derived from Chinese and called 'Chinese characters' --kanji-- even in Japanese). Gradually I am losing this and learning them was such a pain in the neck that I really ought to be studying Japanese every day to prevent further leakage. Given my inherent laziness, you can bet that isn't happening, and I've got to do something about it before I lose even more of it.

5) Be nicer to my kids -- self explanatory

6) Be nicer to my husband -- as above

7) Be nicer to my friends --hey, this is easy!

8) Not obsess so much about getting a book published. I ought to acknowledge to myself that this may never happen for me, and that if it doesn't, it still is not the end of the world.

9) Learn how to finish things -- I'm great for starting, but awful for winding up and finishing off. It is as though there is some part of me that does not like to see the end of things. Currently, I have started three books and gotten 7/8 way through all three of them; in the garden, I've got four unfinished hanging baskets; in my sewing bag there is a half-embroidered head scarf and a rag rug that I started for the cat in January. And worse still, I have a manuscript that is one-half finished. I think I'll start with the manuscript, then hit the hanging baskets.

10) Try to keep better informed about American/modern popular culture. (I only learned what a blog was last year, who Paris Hilton was one month ago, and that you could use 'friend' as a verb sometime during the past few weeks...Scary.)

11) Remember to shut the £)*$"-ing cat in the kitchen at night so that my sleep isn't disturbed every time she drags in a dead animal.

13) Remember to return the library books (our monthly library fines could feed a family of eight in Bangladesh for at least a month).

14) Learn how to do things on the Internet and in my blog that everybody else seems to be able to do.

15) Not feel too pissed off with myself for not managing to attain all of these fifteen goals...

Now I tag Kim Ayres (Ramblings of the Bearded One), Eryl Shields (The Kitchen Bitch Ponders), and Kanani Fong (Easy Writer)...

Sorry that I couldn't manage to make your blog names light up the way Katie got mine to do, so that you can click on them and flick into your blogs; hopefully I will learn how to do this after reaching goal 14...