Archives for December 2017

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium:

I stood alone on the upper level, facing the kelp forest, watching the silver sardines swim in their schools. They were a murmuration, the swarm of them moving together over the course of split seconds, their scales flashing gold and red sometimes. Turns out you can’t call it a murmuration when it’s fish – it’s called simply shoaling or schooling, but schooling is too simple a word for that gorgeousness of flight I watched. I could have stared at it for hours. They moved like conversation, to and fro, parts splitting off to make new sentences, flying back into each other to complete paragraphs and whole pages. It looked like song, visualized.

Other creatures in the tank were mesmerizing, too, of course. I love the leopard sharks and the kelp bass the size of my car that stays near the front round window as if he knows he’s the star of the show. But the flight-song of those sardines is my favorite aquarium magic. Yes, I love the cuttlefish, with their chromatophore skin (I feel them – with my hot flashes and tendency to blush, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t choose to be so showy and placed in an aquarium for it, but that’s my anthropomorphism showing). The octopuses this time finally seemed kind of amazing instead of gross (Lala is wearing off on me). We watched a day octopus sleeping, and we watched it dream. Scientists struggle to agree on whether they dream or not, but this layperson can tell you with assuredness that they do. He was tucked against his rock, all creamy and pendulous, his one visible eye tightly shut. He puffed out his siphon. He wriggled. He twitched, his arms uncoiling and then coiling back up again. His skin mottled quickly, brown spots, and then flashed back to cream. He twitched again, his eye shutting more tightly closed and then relaxing. His siphon panted. He was obviously chasing cars.

But still, those sardines were more magnificent. I’d always thought they swam together for safety in numbers – some might be picked off but not all. But in fact, they actually look like one big fish making the other actually huge, predatory fish believe they’re tiny and weak in comparison. There’s a lovely metaphor there – stronger together, etc – but what I really love is watching that shared brain in action. Like watching wind, if wind was silver and had intention. And there, in the middle of a Christmas holiday week, surrounded by approximately 400,000,000 children, I was alone with the magnificent, awed and hushed.

(Not the kelp forest exhibit, but from the Open Ocean exhibit.)

Five days from Christmas! How I would have been freaking out as a kid. Christmas was everything. It was the lottery. Anything could happen, and though each year, every year, I felt the small taste of disappointment in my mouth when I didn’t get everything I’d asked for, I still hoped that this would be the year, this would be the one.

I thought of it, quite literally, as wishing season. I could sit around and wish and wish and wish and tell my parents my wishes, and maybe they’d all come true. It was astonishing, really, how many times they were able to come through.

I remember the morning I came down to find that bicycle. I think the reason I go back to this memory over and over again is that I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I’d wished for this perfect bike with the banana seat and plastic streamers at the handle’s ends, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t get it. My folks didn’t have the money. And somehow Mom had convinced me that Santa couldn’t meet all children’s requests, either, that he just didn’t have enough money. This I understood. It made sense that Santa couldn’t afford to give gifts to the whole WORLD without scrimping a little.

So it didn’t bother me in the slightest that it was a used bike under the tree – I completely understood why the rims were scratched and why the banana seat (o blessed banana seat) had a tiny tear along the saddle stitching. Santa had done his best and his best was perfection. It was all my dreams come true in one swoop, and I believed that Christmas was the most magical and selfish of all days, and sometime’s a girl’s dreams really could come true. I flew down the driveway on the bike, still in my nightgown. I pedaled hard up the gravel to ride back into the courtyard. I was a princess; I was a knight; I was a soldier. My bicycle meant freedom, and I wanted to ride that freedom all the way to the village to buy candy. But honestly, that was a long and scary ride, so instead, I did another loop to the bottom of the drive and back up, dodging the Corvair and beat–up VW bug parked next to the falling–down barn. I could still feel that freedom while reading my new books and eating gilt chocolate while glancing outside at my new steed every few seconds.

Magical, selfish lottery. I don’t regret a single wish. I still don’t.

Yesterday I worked at Mills and got my words done quickly, and instead of doing something more productive, I drove to the coast. I felt the need.

I loaded up my phone with writing podcasts and headed for Pescadero via Half–Moon Bay. I found myself at the yarn store, where I bought more Noro for my blanket and some sock yarn. A girl can never have too much sock yarn, ever.

After the yarn, I went to the lighthouse to see about renting out a full building for a retreat next fall, but there was no one around, so I just wandered the property a little bit. I searched for whales but was happy with pelicans.

Then went to Duarte’s, where I sat at an old brown table in the corner. The waitress seems to know me now, though I don’t go in more than once or twice a year. I sat and read Ink in Water, a graphic memoir about anorexia which is just great, and it turns out, is illustrated by Lala’s teacher (all hail the Mills library letting alums check out books!). I read and read. I ate my crab melt sandwich. Oh, god, it’s only tuna fish on steroids, really, that’s all it is, but on the crisp white bread, with the melting cheese, it’s heaven. Then I got a coffee (in the afternoon! Decadence!) and ate olallieberry pie a la mode. All while reading. I devoured dessert, of course, hoovering it up in what felt like seconds, but I made the coffee last. I didn’t check Twitter. I didn’t look at email. I just read. The reading was as delicious as the food. The air smelled like pine from the big Christmas tree in the lobby, and I could hear two waitresses gossiping about overbooking tables for Christmas. There was a couple seated near me when I arrived but they cleared out by the time my food arrived. I had the whole dining room to myself. I hid in my wee corner, listening to the noises of the attached bar, the old building, and the staff, and I was there. My happy place.

Then I drove the wrong direction, just five minutes south, to climb down to the rocks and tide pools. I managed to catch magic hour.

A post shared by Rachael Herron (@rachaelherron) on Dec 18, 2017 at 7:19pm PST

The golden sunlight filled up the holes in the crazy rocks, and the sun melted into the ocean. The water was a blue I can’t remember ever seeing before – a milk–pewter, with sunlight trailing silver sparks.

A post shared by Rachael Herron (@rachaelherron) on Dec 18, 2017 at 7:24pm PST

I breathed. And I took some pictures, of course, because it seems almost impossible to be somewhere amazing without doing that. And I don’t mind – I have thousands of ocean pictures, none of them ever capturing what it was like, but I love the attempt and the memory of the day the photos leave behind. I drove home before the sunset but noticed it happening to my left as I drove up PCH, so I pulled over just as it plunged into the sea. It did that crazy melting–flattening thing as if someone had stuck the whole sun back into the fire and was pounding it out. The glowing, dripping ball of hot yellow metal slid right underneath the ocean’s top blanket. I clapped once, and then started the car and headed for home.

Yesterday I cleaned my office out – getting rids of lots of books that I don’t want to read or keep. I cleaned off the desks and under them a little bit, too, all in prep for ripping out the carpet which I can’t quite seem to make myself do. I don’t know why. It’ll be hard work but mentally easy. I know how it works. I’ve spent time learning how to pull it up – I have special tools to help with things like the left-behind staples in the floor. I’m ready to mask and glove up and get this terrible, disgusting, stinky carpet OUT of here, but I’m stopped somehow. There’s a fear, and I feel it, and it isn’t like me. What on earth am I afraid of? Lala did it in her office, and it’s so much better. If my hardwood floor is too terrible to look at underneath, I can get a huge Ikea rug which would be a million times better than this carpet. But I’m still scared of screwing it up.

There’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to spend my precious free time ripping out carpet. December is my month to READ, and I’m loving it so much – I don’t want to take time away from that. Basically, all I want to do is read. On the week days, I do my work just so I can get back to whatever book I’m reading. I started my “studio journal” yesterday – idea courtesy of Janine. In it, I’m chronicling how the year is going in kind of an art-journal way. I’d love to visit it every Sunday when I plan my week. Yesterday I wrote down some of the books I’ve read this month and made some notes about them and about how I feel in the project so far. But I still don’t know how to rate the creativity I’m feeling/not feeling. The whole idea of the year of play is to be more inspired, but what kind of yardstick do I use? Maybe I should do it every day and take an overview average? What would I rank?

How good did my creative work feel to do today?

Is this perhaps the question that matters? Isn’t it the best way to rate inspiration level? I’m dropping a pebble into the well to see how long it takes for me to hear the splash. I wish I could just clock that, write down the seconds it takes and extrapolate from there. I should probably ask myself that question at the end of the day. How can I set that up so that I remember to do it? Excel spreadsheet? Take an average? Will I really open it at night? Maybe add it to my ToDo list to do when I’m done working?