I don’t drink coffee. I’ve been told I don’t need the caffeine, which is probably true. However, I have a sweet tooth and a penchant for hot chocolate. Some of the best is at Phoenix Coffee because they put cinnamon in it, which may be the greatest spice of all time. (I actually wrote a blog post in praise of cinnamon a few months ago. Seriously, love the stuff.) I stopped by the drive-through on my way to work last week. It was a cold morning, and work is always a chilly environment (temperature-wise, not in the esoteric atmospheric sense), so a medium hot chocolate (no whipped cream, please), sounded like a little cup of heaven. When I pulled up to the window, the person at the counter was helping a customer. I waited, then a second barista came up and took my order. I watched her make the hot chocolate, put a lid on it, walk towards the drive-through window then, denied! She put the cup down near the window and turned to help a customer. At first I thought she was just answering a question, but then she started helping another customer. I waited, watching the minutes tick by and hoping I wouldn’t be late for work. The barista showed no sign of ever coming back to the drive-through window and so I did something I’ve never done before. I left. I’ve never walked out on an order before, but now I have.

This morning, the first of November, there was frost on the ground. I had a really good early swim and on the way to work had a hankering for some cinnamon-y hot chocolate. On a whim, I decided to give the Phoenix drive-through one more chance. This time, there was no one at the counter and a friendly-faced barista greeted me and took my order. She made it in record time and brought it to the window. As she was handing it to me, a second barista popped her head into the drive-through window.

“It’s free,” she said. “The lady before paid for it. It was a random act of kindness.”

This was unexpected. I’ve never been the recipient of a random act of kindness, but instinctively I knew what to do. I smiled. “I’d like to do the same,” I said and handed her the few dollars in my hand.

Glad I gave them another chance.

I went to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings last night at the Beachland Ballroom and my head exploded. I’ve been listening to their CDs for years but hadn’t seen them live until now. They are a funk/soul revival band that have been around for about ten years but only got big a couple of years ago. Sharon Jones is 55, which is way past the age most people are comfortable getting up in front of a crowd of strangers in a short dress and doing the Mashed Potato or the Pony, but that’s exactly what Sharon Jones does every night. She didn’t hit it big until she was in her 50s. For years she worked as a wedding singer, as a corrections officer at Rikers Island (seriously, she’s like five foot nothing but can shrivel you with a glance), and being a back-up singer for other people. She hooked up with members of the Dap-Kings (who weren’t yet called the Dap-Kings) in the late 1990s and they released their first CD in 2002.

Sharon Jones gives me hope. As a writer, you deal with rejection All The Fucking Time. It’s really hard to keep sending things out and to keep writing and polishing new works because sometimes you wonder if anyone will ever read your stuff. So I think about her chugging along through her twenties and thirties and forties, knowing she had something awesome inside her, and not finding the right opportunity to let it out. And I look at myself chugging through my thirties and forties and think perhaps there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps it will be wearing a fringed dress and dancing the Bugaloo.

I don’t have any particular affiliation with the letter “B.” It doesn’t appear in my first, middle, or last names or in the names of anyone in my family (or my dogs). Yet I find that many of my favorite things in life begin with “B.” Herewith, in no particular order except the order in which they occurred to me and not necessarily preference, my favorite things that begin with the letter “B.” Any you’d like to add?

Books
Bicycles
Baseball
Bach
Beethoven
Beer
Burritos (with black beans)
Brie
Baroque (music, that is)
Bagels (if cream cheese were bream beese, I’d add that to the list too)
Beaches (places with sand and water, not the sappy film of the same name)
Baths
Barns
(The) Beatles
Broccoli
Blueberries, oh heck, berries of any kind

I’m half Italian, which means I’m genetically programmed to grow tomatoes. And peppers. Or not (I’m not even that crazy about peppers, yet I am compelled to plant them year after year). And beans. And other stuff. But mostly and always tomatoes. Once or twice a year (three times, if we’re lucky), I bring in a huge haul of tomatoes from the garden, pull out the tomato press, and go to town squishing those little juicy little buggers into puree. The puree goes into the freezer where it will magically become spaghetti sauce or salsa over the winter.
Thus this:

turns these (actual tomatoes from my garden in my actual kitchen sink):

into puree (of which I do not have a photo. Please use your imagination.)

I was driving down a main road today and, at a stop light, glanced at the car next to me that held a woman driving (but deeply engaged in a cellphone conversation) and a dog. The dog looked to be some kind of Labrador mix, and at first I couldn’t figure out what it was doing. The rear window was half-way down and liberally dusted with dried snoot juice (if your dog rides in your car, you know what I mean). As I looked, I realized the dog was licking the back of the headrest of the front passenger seat. This was a relatively new-looking car. A sedan, maybe a Toyota of some sort, and the outside was clean. I couldn’t figure out what could be on the back of the headrest, but this dog was going to town on it. The light turned green, so I went. The other car was going painfully slowly, so I figured I’d eventually lose it. But lo and behold, two stop lights later, it pulls up behind me. I Looked in the rear view mirror and saw the driver still chatting away on the phone, oblivious to the dog in the backseat giving a tongue bath to the headrest.

I just put my kid on the school bus for the first time, so I guess summer is more or less over. It’s cool this morning and kind of damp–feels frighteningly like autumn. However, I’m pleased to say that I didn’t waste my time this and actually made a couple new discoveries that make me feel as though I had been wasting some time prior to this summer.

First, I discovered the novels of Philip K. Dick. Seriously, how come no one told how awesome his writing is? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is darkly marvelous. He created the world of the novel within the first paragraph and then delighted me as I continued to read and learned more about that world. Great dystopian sci-fi with genuine character development. Why I never read his stuff before, I have no idea.

My other joyous discovery (or perhaps rediscovery) this summer was swimming outside. I’m an on-again, off-again swimmer. I never took swimming lessons as a kid and, in fact, was told by the ear, nose, and throat doctor not to put my head under water as a little kid due to recurring ear infections. So I never learned how to swim properly. I’ve kind of figured it out myself over the years. I used the indoor pool at college to do laps and in recent years have done laps at the YMCA pool. I’ll occasionally swim in Lake Erie, and when I lived in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, I would bike out to the beach and swim in the North Sea. Open water swimming brings with it an element of fun fear, because it does make you feel as though you are competing against the elements in a visceral way. In the North Sea, I would deliberately swim out to where my feet could no longer touch the bottom and would just hang out and tread water for a while. It helped me get rid of some of the panic that used to set in when I couldn’t touch bottom.

This summer, the kid and I bought pool passes and being a thrifty family, went often to get our money’s worth. I’ve taught her how to swim and, at five and a half, she’s old enough to make new friends at the pool, leaving me to either sit around like the other pool moms, working on my tan and doling out snacks, or I could swim laps. I’m so glad I chose the latter.

What makes swimming laps outdoors so joyous? I think it’s a combination of the clear, almost crisp quality to the water, feeling the sun on your back or doing a backstroke and feeling that you’re opening yourself to the sun and the sky, gazing at the blue above as your arms chop through the water. I love swimming the length of the pool and looking down as I go over the drop between shallow and the deep, deep end. It looks as though you’re swimming out beyond the edge of the world.

Where have these things been all my life? What other delights have I been missing? It boggles the mind.

The husband, kid, and I just came back from a mini-vacation at a nearby state park. We stayed in the lodge and just spent a few days playing in the pool, hiking in the woods, putzing around Amish country, playing games, and generally having a good time. Families are a funny thing, even small families like ours. Each person wants to do his or her own thing. The kid would have been content to spend the entire time in the water, with occasional jaunts online to forage for food or play a few hands of UNO. The husband just likes poking around podunky little towns. I’m there for the trees. Put me in the middle of the woods and let me hike my way out and I’m the happiest of beings. Finding a balance of all three of these things was challenging. By the end of the day, we were dog tired.

The lodge room had two double beds. One was dubbed the Stinky Boy Bed, which is where the husband slept. The other was the Girls Bed (Girls Rule, Boys Drool), which is where the kid and I slept. My child rotates approximately 720 degrees during the course of one night. It’s always a challenge to share a bed with her because I consistently end up with a hand/arm/knee/foot/head lodge in my back/face/stomach. After an hour or two of lying there and trying to predict which combination will come next, I considered braving the boy cooties and moving over to the husband’s bed. Then he started snoring.

We’ve been together 13 years. I know the guy snores. But before any journey away from home, I seem to get this selective memory that his snoring isn’t so bad or that I’ll be tired enough or (perhaps) drunk enough that I’ll fall right to sleep and not to notice. It never happens. The Scylla kicks, Charybdis snores.

I’m currently reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and brought it along on our trip. At 3:00 a.m., the idea of being a writer-about-town in Paris and leaving the spouse at home to fend for her/himself seemed unfairly attractive. I put the book down and rooted around in the old leather shaving kit that belonged to my grandfather and which I’ve used for traveling for the past twenty years. I managed to find one earplug. It helped a bit with the snoring, except I had to transfer it between ears every time I wanted to roll over. I supposed if you’re able to make the effort to move an earplug from one ear to another as you roll over then you aren’t actually unconscious. As I contorted myself to avoid the kicks from the kid and listened to the buzzsaw across the way, I begged most of the night to be unconscious.

This is what I get for breaking my cardinal rule of travel with my family: Always stay somewhere with two rooms.

The Beekeeper of Monticello Boulevard lives around the corner from us. On the same block, actually. You could walk about half a mile to his house on the other side of the block or walk through our backyard, through our woods, through some other neighbors’ woods, through his woods, into his backyard, past the 20 or so white bee hive boxes, and up to his front door. He has a “Bee Wax for Sale” sign in front of his house year-around. I’ve never bought wax from him–don’t know what I’d use it for. The sign I wait for shows up in late summer and reads “Honey for Sale.”

The first time we bought honey from him was when the kid was maybe a two and a half. I chatted with the Beekeeper for a bit, and he let us wander into the backyard and get as close as we dared to the hives. He was born in Russia and has been keeping bees for more than 30 years. The first year, we bought one jar, which came home in the bottom of the kid’s red wagon. Her job was to hold on to the jar whenever we went over a bump.

I was never big on honey, but I had read that a good way to combat seasonal allergies is to take a teaspoonful of local honey each day. The idea being that since the bees are getting pollen from the very things making you sneeze, you can slowly vaccinate. I figured I couldn’t get any more local than bees who had been hanging around my own backyard. What I learned is that I was never a big honey fan because the only honey I had ever encountered was mass-produced stuff sold in the grocery store. This local honey was a revelation. It wasn’t as thick as the grocery store stuff and had a rich flavor, not just sweetness. (Kind of like the difference between salsa that that has flavor and salsa that just has heat.)

The first jar ran out long before the following summer. But now we were spoiled. Even pricey organic honey from the grocery store didn’t cut it. Oh, I’d put it in my chamomile tea, but it wasn’t the same as the local stuff. Now we wait for the Beekeeper of Monticello Boulevard to put out the “Honey for Sale” sign. Yesterday, when the kid and I were talking a walk, we saw it and cheered. We immediately rang the doorbell even though we had a bicycle, two dogs on a leash, and no money. We asked him to save three jars–two for us and one for my sister, who has also become addicted.

When we got the honey home yesterday, the kid, my husband and I all fell upon the first jar like crazed, ravenous Winnie-the-Poohs. It was exquisite. The kid just kept asking for another spoonful “all by itself.” All night long, my husband toasted sourdough bread and dribbled the honey on it. For breakfast, all my child has asked for is a banana cut up with honey on it. I just enjoyed an endless cup of chamomile tea with more honey than anyone in their right mind would add. Except I’m not in my right mind. I’m in the last throes of summer. The kid starts school in a week. Already, the mornings have the cool, damp feel of fall. I have two jars of summer to get me through the winter.

The puppy is almost eight months. He is still growing and shows no signs of stopping. Unfortunately, his brain is not growing at the same rate as his body. He has figured out that he’s tall enough to eat things off of the kitchen counter. Thus far, he’s gotten half a loaf of banana bread, some cookies, brownies, and an 8-count bag of little Hershey’s Special Dark. So now we realize that we can’t leave any food on the counter, even if it’s pushed all the way to the back. Although he looks like a black Lab mix, a friend noted that he must be part chocolate Lab.

I just got back from taking the dogs for a walk. When I opened the garage, Juno waited for it to get high enough so she could walk under. Mason tried to follow, bumped his head (because he’s several inches taller than she is), and then stood there watching the garage door go up, wondering why he couldn’t get in.

The bag of Puppy Chow reads that it contains DHA for healthy brain development. I sure hope that stuff works fast.

Sometimes it’s difficult to say what we really like. We don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings or don’t want to seem rude or incite an argument, so often we hesitate to say what it is we really want. As an exercise in honesty, below is a short list of likes and dislikes. Feel free to make fun of me in the comments section.

I Prefer:
crunchy to creamy
dogs to cats
bicycles to cars
Wilco to Radiohead
Dandy Warhols to Brian Jonestone Massacre
The Beatles to the Stones
baseball to football
Socialism to unrestrained capitalism
Fiction to non-fiction
Forest to desert
Kurt Vonnegut

I think:
Comedy is more difficult than drama.
Billy Wilder was a genius.
Disco sucks.
Jim Carrey is not funny.
Giving a poodle the show dog haircut embarrasses the dog.
Human beings don’t need to eat animal flesh.
Electronica is frequently unlistenable.
The New York Dolls never got the credit they deserve.