The presence of this blissful pig at Deep Roots Ranch is in no way relevant to the person I am about to describe. If anything, it is more descriptive about my own emotional state today: the weather is perfect, Logan is napping in the Big Pink Bed, and I went to two farmers markets this morning. We got to visit with Betty, Jasmine, Kirsten, and Justin Severino, who was working the booth for TLC Ranch. (Scroll to the end of this post for some great news on Justin and TLC Ranch.)
I had to Google the Butterfly Effect: I didn't know what it meant. Wikipedia says: "The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or, for that matter, prevent a tornado from appearing). The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different."
There is an applet at this site that makes it more understandable. (You need Java in your browser.) So this themed writing is about how one small thing (or person, or event) made a huge difference in your life.
If I look at my life as though through a telescope turned backwards, and see myself now, and see myself far, far away (and very small, as things seen that way are): I am nineteen years old, living in a little cottage in San Diego. Connecting me to the young woman I was then is one thread that is continuous, and that thread is the golden presence of a friend, Maria Nation. She was my next-door neighbor, who lived with her husband, Jacques.
We lived side by side in little cottages in Pacific Beach, on Archer Street.
I had a boyfriend, Gary, who was very handsome but, I admit now, a little on the uncultured side. We had little in common besides great sex and Steely Dan. On many evenings when he worked the swing shift at General Dynamics, Jacques and Maria would invite me to their house for dinner.
A typical day in our shared yard would entail Maria gardening in her bikini—with her perfect figure—and me, with my black thumb, trying to learn the names of the plants she loved. Besides only one farmer I knew as a child in Georgia, Maria was the first person I knew who grew her own food. (I think.)
So dinner at their house might very well include baby lettuces, which she and Jacques would turn into a beautiful salad, served with a vinaigrette of their own making. And there would be wine—I didn't know many people who had wine with dinner. (Gary's people were beer and cocktail people.) Somehow, these little dinners were a revelation to me. They always referred to me as "She" or "Her," as when Jacques would say, "Maria, dear, do you think She would like a glass of wine?" and Maria would answer, "You'll have to ask Her, Jacques."
We moved apart: she to San Francisco after her divorce: I visited her there. Then I left for Los Angeles, and then Nashville after that. She moved to New York and I moved back to California. Sometimes years would go by without contact. A few years ago, she managed to find me online, and wrote to tell me she was living in Massachusetts, and I sent her pictures of the farm dinners I was photographing. (She loved them so much that she created some in her own community, and became one of OitF's most ardent, unmet supporters.)
Two years ago, I found myself in a constellation that seemed to me to be preordained by the heavens. I was working with the Outstanding in the Field people, photographing farm dinners. I'd just discovered the now-defunct Culinary Alliance of Santa Cruz County, and then I got an e-mail from Maria, telling me to visit a website called Edible Ojai. She said her sister, Jane, was involved in the production of the newsletter/magazine: I'd met Jane decades ago when she would visit San Diego.
I e-mailed Tracey Ryder, the publisher at Edible Ojai, and introduced myself. I lauded their work, and told them Maria had sent me. ("Maria sent me" is like having the key to the city.) We quickly discovered all our overlapping interests, and I suggested she come to a farm dinner. She said, "I was at the dinner you photographed last October, at Coleman Family Farm, in Carpinteria." (No way! But yes, she's in the photo to the right.)
I asked, "How did you find out about the dinners?"
"Frish Brandt."
And the final little star moved into orbit. Frish Brandt. That would be the utterly lovely Frish Brandt, whom I had met the previous year at an Outstanding in the Field farm dinner in an apple orchard—whom Jim introduced to me as his art mentor. (She's somewhere at the long table, pictured at left.)
He'd been telling me about her for months. That would be the same Frish Brandt who'd kindly mailed me a catalog of photo galleries in New York City, to aid me when I went there for a farm dinner the next month. And that would be Frish Brandt, Maria's dear friend with the incredible Fraenkel Gallery up in San Francisco. I had no idea Frish knew both Jim and Maria.
And Frish was also friends with Tracey and Carol, who've wanted to use my work in their publications since we met in August of 2004.
All because Maria Nation (who could run circles around Martha Stewart, and laugh the whole while), invited me to dinner when I was nineteen.
I visited her last June with my friend, Betsy, at her home in Massachusetts, pictured here. Anyone who knows Maria will tell you how amazing she is: writer, photographer, gardener, friend, romantic, cook, entertainer, artisan, collector—so much soul, so much heart, and so gorgeous. And with one of the world's greatest laughs. She's got it all and then some. (MWAH!)
• • • • • • • • • • •
Now that I've told about Maria, how I came to live on Archer Street is its own story. Don't feel obligated to read this.
I left my family in Georgia in 1974, when our mother had to be hospitalized. Our family shattered: my older sister, at age 16, got her own apartment. The third sister lived with our grandparents. The two littlest girls went to live with their wealthy father. I went north to Madison, Wisconsin, where one of the families for whom I regularly babysat offered me haven.
It was August of 1974: the Doobie Brother's "Black Water" was everybody's favorite song ("Take me by the hand, pretty mama/Gonna dance with your daddy all night long/I wanna hear some funky Dixieland/Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand") and Nixon had just flown away in a helicopter after resigning the Presidency of the United States. (Wouldn't I love a replay of that right about now?)
I boarded a Greyhound bus and headed north. On the bus was a typical blend of travelers: families, black and white, a couple of nuns, and two hippies. I was sitting next to a nun when one of the hippies asked if anyone on the bus wanted to play chess. Well, rather than sit next to a nun, I traded seats and found myself sitting across the aisle from a very pleasant man named Jerry. Beside him, his friend smiled at me: that was the one I really wanted to talk to. And after a couple of games of chess, Jerry traded seats with Rick....Rick Russell. We talked and talked and talked and talked. We talked all the way to Chicago, when I changed buses and they went on their way north to work on the Alaskan pipeline. Rick was a wanderer, but he gave me an address where he got mail: 727-1/2 Archer Street in San Diego.
We began to correspond voluminously. I was a champion letter writer back then: ten pages or so wasn't unusual for me, and I topped twenty pages more than once. I didn't last long in Madison (great town: too damned cold and foreign), and came home to live with my aunt and uncle. For my sixteenth birthday, Rick sent me a copy of Be Here Now, and probably started my separation from Georgia. In 1977, when financial aid to a college I truly despised (Vanderbilt University in Nashville) fell through, he suggested coming out to California. So I did. (That's the short version.)
After bouncing around a little in Sofabed Land, I got a little apartment in Hillcrest, which I loved except for the city noise. Across the street from me, Frances and Catherine had a great little shop simply called The Store. They sold clothes and all kinds of groovy little stuff, and we became friends. One day, Catherine said, "Our friend, Dick Snyder, has a little cottage for rent in Pacific Beach. You should take it. It's only $125 a month." I called Dick Snyder, who told me about the little studio...and when he gave me the address (727-1/2 Archer Street), I did my famous impression of the theramin from the original "Outer Limits" television program, which most people simply know as "oooooooo-WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-oooooooooooooo!"
So I moved to the cottage in Pacific Beach. (And four days later, on the Fourth of July, an oven blew up in my face and I permanently stopped laying out in the sun, and I don't have skin cancer now, so how great is that?)
Second "oooooooo-WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-oooooooooooooo!" moment: Gary and I moved in together in a house in Hillcrest. Our next-door neighbor? Jerry, from the Greyhound bus.
• • • • • • • • • • •
BIG NEWS about TLC Ranch and Justin Severino. In Becky's words: "We have been invited to attend the Slow Food Terra Madre convention in Italy in late October. We are very excited. As a fundraiser for us to attend, the Slow Food Monterey Bay convivium is helping to put on a pig-centric dinner out at our ranch, the Triple M Ranch, on Sunday, July 30th at 4:30pm-dusk. Our amazing chef friend Justin Severino will be preparing an amazing array of dishes from our pork and organic produce grown on the farm. Cost is $50 per person and will include wine."
For more information, and to register, please visit the Slow Food Monterey Bay website. Justin is the man.
Another of my clients, Heidi Schlect, of River Cafe and Feel Good Foods, has also been invited, as one of the 1000 cooks who will attend Terra Madre. (That's new this year.) Heidi will also be doing some kind of a fundraiser: I'll post about that when I know something.
• • • • • • • • • • •
That's all for today.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.” — Emma Bull
Thanks for visiting.
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