Hotel Retreat, Day 2

Christmas in Culver City.  Here's a reindeer in front of some birds of paradise on the Antioch campus.  I also saw a lovely white rose bush in its final gasp of flowering.  I plucked a velvety petal from the plant and carried it around for a couple of hours.  Walking to campus I passed some trees with pinecones scattered beneath them.  As I picked one up, I thought of my Jaycee Dugard pinecone necklace.  Jaycee was the woman who was kidnapped from her Lake Tahoe neighborhood at the age of 11 by pervert Phillip Garrido and his wife, and kept captive for 18 years, bearing two daughters by Garrido.  When he zapped her with a stun gun, the last thing she touched was a pinecone lying on the ground.  So, as a fundraiser for her foundation, she sells the pinecone necklace as a symbol of hope.  The 4-inch tall real pinecone sitting on my desk, I have no idea what it symbolizes.  I hadn't picked up a pinecone since I was like 10, so maybe it symbolizes my childlikeness.  When I had it at Antioch, a small bug crawled out of it, so maybe it symbolizes my willingness to live with something that may be infested.  It's lopsided, so maybe it symbolizes my ability to love the lopsided.

For the 10 days I'm at the residency I get to camp out in the office of a fulltime professor who's on break.  When I entered this residency's office, there were several issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education and other mail stacked up, the file cabinet was covered with dust, and the computer hard drive was missing. I stacked the mail in a corner and left a voicemail with the department about my lack of computer access.  Then I noticed the guy's plants.  They were all dried up and crotchety.  He's obviously been on leave, and he didn't make provision for the poor plants.  So I filled a pitcher with water and gave them all drinks and picked off the shriveled leaves.  A colleague, who was waiting to go to dinner through all this, said, "He must be a Buddhist," and she pointed to a "Buddha Loves You Too!" sticker on the side of the bookcase and a photo of a Buddha statue.  We made snotty jokes about how his Buddhist compassion must not extend to his houseplants.  Maybe watering the plants, for him, would be an example of the "idiot compassion" the buddhist would talk about.  Maybe he was teaching the plants a lesson about abstinence and attachment.  You only think you need water, you ravenous plants. 

I didn't mention my colleague's name because we were playing hooky from nighttime campus events and I don't want to bring her down with me.  Yes I'm aware that I missed the Friday night lasagna dinner and reading, no I will not reveal the name of my coconspirator.  The first time I was ever called a colleague it grossed me out.  It was when I had a visiting writer gig at Mills; I was at a party at Robert Hass', and this woman from the department introduced me to someone as her colleague, and I thought "Colleague!"  What a pretentious bitch.  I would have been okay with coworker.  I probably would have said, "X and I work together."  I wonder if the word colleague was invented so academics wouldn't have to associate with a proletariat word like "work."  Academics have secretaries who work; academics, on the other hand, have vocations, passion, they do it for the love of it. 

I just looked up the origin of playing hooky:  "Play hooky is probably derived from the Dutch term hoekje (spelen) 'hide-and-seek'. The Dutch word hoek means 'corner'—the boys in 17th-century New Amsterdam played this game around the corners of the street. Hide-and-seek was a different game back then—the players had to search for a hidden object."  

It's late and it's past a reasonable bedtime and I wish I could get up before dawn and watch the lunar eclipse, the huge red moon.  Those of you who do, I adore you.  This is for you—the Christmas reindeer at night, all lit up.  So magical!  I photographed it as my colleague and I were fleeing from campus and heading towards our hooky.