Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Nia on the road

    Trainer Ann Christiansen dancing “Ignite.”

    Two days of driving (sitting motionless for hours) followed by a day of sitting and talking with my mom has brought me to this morning’s feeling of lethargy. What’s going on? No dancing is what’s going on.

    The internal dialogue goes like this:

    Tired me: I’m too tired and fried to dance this morning.

    Wiser me: True, but you can always dance your today body.

    Tired me: My today body doesn’t want to dance.

    Wiser me: Maybe that’s your today brain. Maybe your today body would like just five minutes and then your today brain might come on board.

    Tired me: Five minutes? You promise?

    Wiser me: Yup.

    So the various selves cue up the online routine “Ignite.” And we keep the lights off, letting dawn slowly brighten the room. This routine starts with my favorite song: “The Groove is You,” which tired me starts getting into.

    My today body did 30 minutes, staying with some moves longer because they felt so good, skipping some moves that seemed too fussy for today.

    And tired me is kind of surprised at the fresh energy. It leaves me thinking, when you don’t know what to do, turn on the music and dance.

  • Staying curious

    Me and my beautiful mother Irene

    I never know where a conversation will go with my mother Irene. She can talk music. She can talk politics. She can talk literature. She can talk spirituality. She can talk travel. And, of course, history.

    Today, we hit a little bit on all those topics, but my favorite conversation came when I asked her to name a famous poet that she didn’t know a whole lot about. I figured we could go browsing on the Internet and find some poems to discover together. She thought about this for a few minutes, and then she looked over at me and said, “Christina Rosetti.”

    To me this was one of those Casablanca “Of all the gin joints” moments. What are the chances my 99-year-old mother would name a somewhat obscure 19th-century British poet whose “Goblin Market,” is one of the most rythmically sensual poems ever? I’ve loved this poem since hearing it as a dramatic reading at an experimental theater in Anchorage in the early ’90s. It has a line that I periodically use to describe how I feel at the beginning of something exciting: “Like a vessel at the launch when the last restraint is gone.” So we read it together. I was glad to be reminded that at its core it’s about the redemptive love of sisters.

    We also visited a website that is among my favorites for poetry, The Poetry Foundation,” and found a good bio of Rossetti, including the fact that she wrote the lyrics to a Christmas song we both find haunting and beautiful, “In the Bleak Midwinter.“

    So that’s why I drive two days in January to southern Alberta. Who knows where a conversation with Irene will go? It’s always worth the trip to find out.

  • Romance in it

    A January road trip to Canada! Fifteen hours of driving. I logged the first part of the trip, 480 miles yesterday from Eugene Oregon to Post Falls, Idaho. If you don’t know Post Falls, it’s not surprising. It’s a little town between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. It’s my usual stopping point on the way to Lethbridge Alberta, where my fabulous mother lives.

    I stop here because there’s a nice little Best Western hotel that charges less than $80 for a night’s stay in January. It’s tidy and not far off the freeway.

    I know this route well; last year I made the drive three times. It goes through amazing country, the lush Willamette Valley, the spectacular Columbia Gorge (yesterday, the Columbia River west of the town of Hood River was flat glass, a thing I have never seen before). Today will take me up through Idaho, skirting Lake Pend Oreille and through one of my favorite small towns, Bonners Ferry. Then up into British Columbia, over Crowsnest Past (that takes me over the Rocky Mountains and down onto the rolling southern Alberta plains). I’ve done this trip in brutal weather, but it’s mildly winter at the moment. Rainy in Oregon, scattered snow showers in Washington. Today the forecasters promise chilly partly sunny (16F) on my Canada leg.

    I’m thinking about American novelist John Steinbeck this morning, specifically his book “Travels with Charley,” not a novel but a travel memoir with his dog Charley. He has many fine things to say about a road trip but I like this observation best: “I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”

    I took today’s picture at a rest stop along Interstate 5 just south of Portland. And I like to think that, inspired by Steinbeck, I will be able to spot the romance — stately trees, so beautiful — in unexpected places.