| Posted in » ‘The Song Continues Sweet’
She peers down: small cities, conquered in a glance
and in minutes, passed over, forgotten.
An excitement, a fear. Life in her throat,
refusing to be swallowed. The taste is so sweet.
Minutes become hours, tomorrow the world anew.
Changing trains, and a deep breath inflating sobbing lungs.
The air is cold but it’s free.
Doubtless. Onward. But alone.
She’s a life lived once. And weightless.
ATL
An apology to the city of Atlanta:
Dear Atlanta,
I know we haven’t always been the very best of friends. I was perhaps a little harsh on you when I moved there four years ago. But you’ve grown on me as I’ve gotten to know your people, your neighborhoods.
Standing on the rooftop looking over you I realized that a truth I never expected as come to pass: I will miss you Atlanta. And I’m proud to say I’ve shared some years with you.
I’ll visit someday. Until then,
Your friend, CAT
For those of you living in and passing through Atlanta, please patronize these places and give them a little extra with love from me:
Best of the Best
I literally cannot say enough good about these locations.
These spots are irreplaceable and will be deeply missed.
Brick Store Pub
Octane Coffee
Trinity
Other spots of honorable mention:
Best brunch: Highland Bakery
Best queso: Taqueria del Sol
Best bocodillo and second best queso: La Fonda
Best morning-walk coffee: Belly
Best porch for sitting in the sun: Dancing Goats
Best mahi-mahi sandwich: Eclipse di Sol
Best burger: Vortex
Best sangria: Solstice
Best karaoke: Southern Comfort
i used to paint
man with child on camel, oil on canvas, circa 2003?
a taste of the past
Crazy crazy. Life has been a wonderful crazy ride of late as I’ve said goodbye to Atlanta and as I make my plans to move to Prague. I have every intention of continuing my barely begun series on “Words”, but today a vintage ale has inspired me to look back instead of inward. Take what you can get…
So this week I’m taking a little road trip across the southeast to visit friends and family before my move to Prague in a few weeks. Charlotte is the stop for this evening and I’m treating my friends Laura, Michael and Ryan here to a little beer tasting – Aventinus 2004 Vintage (German), Tripel Karmeliet (Belgian), and Duchesse de Bourgogne (Flemish). While reviewing my notes, I came across this posting that I did a few years ago when I still worked at Octane. Since I’m celebrating the past as I look into my future, I’m going to repost.
These samplers never actually got used (though they are ©Cat Norman), but I had a lot of fun making them. And, who knows? Maybe I’ll readapt them down the road someday?
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When I was a kid, I got great pleasure out of organizing things. (Note: I am not “neat” or “clean”, I just like organization.) I would spend hours pouring through the garden and bush in our compound to find just the right flowers for a flower arrangement to put on the table. Then, when I was a little older, I spent my time arranging my earring collection (amassed over a hundred pairs of large dangly earrings!). With the help of a rack my grandpa built, I could organize by size, color, emotional attachment, or current mood, and reorganize at will! Now my sense of “beautiful” arrangement displays itself in the beer fridge at Octane Coffee.
I’ve been working at Octane for almost a year now. The best part about the group is that everyone who works there is passionate about something – for M’lissa, it’s coffee education; for Aly, it’s community service and aid; for Matt, it’s recycling and the environment; etc. I like organizing and educating about our beer. Passions are encouraged and everyone brings Octane up to their own high standards in each area. Octane tries to be great at whatever it does, and limits the food and drinks to aim at quality over quantity.
I spend a lot of time at Octane stocking the beer fridge, rearranging it by country, alphabetical order, style, etc. It’s my earring rack on a whole new level! I learn more and more about each beer and style as I am ordering new stock, and talking to customers about them. I’ve noticed that a lot of our customers know that we serve great coffee, but don’t know a lot about the quality of our beer. M’lissa does weekly coffee cuppings on Mondays that educate anyone willing to learn about the differences in coffee styles, processing methods, etc. Inspired by that, I’ve been working on a DIY beer sampler pack that will allow anyone interested to sample 3 or 5 beers, as an introduction to Belgian beer.
You’ll see below the Five Beer and Three Beer samplers I designed, wrote text for, and did a little photoshoot or two for. I learned a lot of interesting tidbits of information – like that the proceeds from Trappist ales go to charity or the work of the monastery they were brewed in, no profit kept.
Thanks to Janet for text editing, all the Octaners who posed for the pictures, and Wikipedia, Beer Advocate, and RateBeer for the education.
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A Short Dictionary of (Potentially) Misunderstood Words – Home.
HOME
It was certainly not a place for her. The only physical location that ever came close to taking on that role was the old mud brick house in Ogbomoso she lived in from age 6 to 12. With head propped against the back of her bed, she would watch the lightening dance through the sky as the storm breathed life into the billowing pale green curtain, tickling her face playfully as it flew back and forth, up and down. Yes, it was home that night. When she went back to visit 5 years later, she found it so uncomfortable to see those dusty window screens, naked and exposed, and she was forced to divert her eyes past them in embarrassment. They had cut down the climbing tree in the front yard.
House was never a home after that.
Home for her was exactly what she wasn’t. Cat’s parents were foreign missionaries with the foreign mission board. The home mission board was a different thing all together and it wasn’t their department. So because she was a foreigner at the onset, the answer to the most common question asked of her was as as obvious as it was impossible for her to give. “Where are you from? Where is home for you?”, they’d implore curiously for an answer. And, yes, there was a moment when ‘home’ was a country. “USA! We’re American!”, she’d reply then. With great excitement she took a year furlough to the home that she’d promised so many that she had. The first day of eighth grade the kids gathered around with great curiosity and pressed, “Where are you from?”
After that, she stopped answering the question.
She learned to think of home in much the same way that others think of a dream job. It became for her a romantic idea, but she believed it to be unattainable. The more romanticized her view of home became over time, the more she searched to fulfill the dream. But because of it’s perceived impossibility, she still met no great disappointment when she discovered the a locale, job or social group were still not the home she was hoping to identify with. Then she began to embrace the freedom that came with her conceptual homelessness and idealized her wanderlust to spite the home she didn’t have.
She wasn’t tied down after that.
Now only occasionally is she distracted from her blissful, weightless wandering by the eerie promise, that “…in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home, the end to all flight is unbearable.”
Now the word ‘home’ makes her uncertain about her future.
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She sat across from her friends and they asked her, “When will you return home?” Her loss for words. Her anxiety. They didn’t understand. There was no way they could.
