It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Banish the Should -- Notes from Yale Creek, 2013

Everything I love about the hour around dawn has coalesced.  The chill, silent breeze embraces the deck where I curl into a futon, glad for my sweatshirt and jeans.  A blank notebook, the first after a too-long hiatus, is propped against my knees.  A thump echoes behind my right shoulder.  The tree just missed my head.  I pick up the lumpy green apple, salute the tree and the rising sun peeking from behind the hill, and take a bite.  Clicking my pen, I begin to write.

The tree threw an apple at me, so I thanked it for my snack.  The lambs have awoken the hillside, bawling their cotton ball dreams to their mothers.  The cows respond with the bass line from downslope.  Light is peering between the hills across the valley.  Its bleary eyes chase a jet trail into the periwinkle sky.

We’re an early lot this morning, kids trickling out of tents and beds.  The occasional body is still cocooned in odd places, the couch, the deck, none in the bathtub, though.

Brand new notepad for dreaming, for letting my pen slide across the lines, straying into the unknown spaces.

The apple was tart and crisp-perfect – until I went too far and got a bitter mouthful of the wormy center.  I spat the metaphor into the bushes and chucked my gift from Newton after.

I have a headache born of a hard mattress and too little sleep.  The moon awoke me on its path; it barged into my window, a violent, beautiful intruder stabbing my eyes with a white knife.

Instruments are everywhere, guitars gossiping in the corners and spilling onto the couch, cellos and violins in their black suits by the hearth.  Here and there the oddball – the almost banjo made from a Sierra Nevada case (perhaps that’s what the guitars are criticizing in their living room klatch), a violin case cracked open in an arm chair, a bongo drum standing mute by the coffee table, Caitlin’s cello case, alone in electric blue glory in a sea of black nylon.

The writing meanders through the week at Yale Creek Farm, drifting down the hill to examine the hops climbing their poles, digging its toes into the mud of the pond with the tiny, translucent leeches, sitting at the edge of a mosquito-bitten evening, listening to campfire tunes drift from the odd conglomerate of cellos, violins and guitars who have magically formed an orchestra.

It is a week of fundamentals – the building of shelter (in the form of two straw/clay construction cabins), the preparation of food (for 30+ from produce gleaned and dug from the soil of the farm), and the gathering of community (through games and music and work).  My body is tired on this first morning back at home, arms and shoulders bear testimony to hours of mixing and packing of straw and clay, legs moaning gently about the hills they encountered.  Yet, the work was effortless, a form of love and play.

“Don’t should on yourself,” a friend tells us, in response to some comment about dishes or dinner prep.  Her blue eyes grin beneath black brows as she waits for us to process through the other “Sh--“ word that hits the ears first.  “Only do what brings you joy,” she finishes.

I have trouble with shoulds and with obligation and joy.  Should is a thief, stealing the joy from basic tasks, necessities.  I “should” make dinner.  I “should” put down the phone and chat with the kids.  I “should” do some laundry.  My shoulds have been particularly toxic and self-critical of late.

But, with clay beneath my fingernails, the sun on my shoulders, and the songs of strings drifting up from the pond, the shoulds are beaten back into a corner.  Anxiety, perfectionism, fear, and judgment can’t stand against the elemental nature of the moment.  A blister has formed and burst on the heel of my hand, worn there by the corner of the chunk of wood I use to pack the straw and clay mixture into the crevices of the cabin framework.  My muddy hand-prints mix with others on the shared mason jar of water one of the women has carried up the hill from the kitchen.  The water is still cool and fresh; we’ve left our fears of germs and the odd stray gnat behind in our communal thirst.

I meditate sometimes at home, on a cushion gazing into a candle flame, or eyes closed on the mosaic bench at the front of our house.  Yet, in those cultivated places, thoughts chase like amphetiminized squirrels through my brain.  In the basic acts of building, of chopping vegetables, of feeling my arms cut through the murky water of the pond, the brain centers into a deep stillness.

Thump.  Thump.  The feel of the stick ramming the straw and clay vibrates up my arm and pounds the blood inside my ears.  I swirl a sudsy sponge across the never-ending mountain of dishes in the sink.  With over 30 hungry and thirsty people, the chore is Sisyphean.  Slicing carrots into awkward sticks, joy wells inside me as a worry dashes through my head and is pushed out.  “This too,” I tell myself quietly, echoing the meditation phrase as I keep chopping.  “This too” and the should is gone.

Back home, it’s easy to feel the shoulds and self-judgments piling up.  The lists and worries started lining up at the back of my brain, demanding entry on the drive south.  I’m not quite sure how to keep them in their place.  ‘I should clean the algae from the water pitcher.’ ‘I should go for a run this morning.’

“Only do what brings you joy.”

The green scum on the paper towel, still smelling slightly of vinegar makes me smile as I rinse and fill the now clear filter pitcher.  Once I hit SAVE and upload this post, I’ll put on my running shoes.  Thinking of the feel of my feet lightly slapping the pavement, of the hard-earned strength of my legs gives me joy.  I find myself planning dinner tonight – not as an obligation, but as an act of love.

 

What do my kids say?

I worry about what my kids say in public. 

Most parents reading that sentence are probably having one of two reactions.  The honest ones are thinking, “Oh, God, me too!” while those who prefer not to look too closely behind the curtains of their own lives are saying, “Well, then maybe you should raise them better and stop polluting their minds.”

It might come as a surprise to realize that I’m more closely aligning myself with the second set of parents here, but not in the ways you might think.  I don’t worry about the following things:

• Whether my kids have picked up swear words that they might pass along – They have
• Whether my kids will talk about the R rated movies they’ve seen – They will
• Whether they’ll pass along their knowledge of reproductive anatomy or physiology – Oh, well, at least they know the correct terminology.
• Whether they’ll out us for “always going to fast food restaurants for treats” – In my kids’ collective mind, more than once = “always”

I worry more about the value judgments they absorb from us, and how they convey those judgments to the rest of the world.  If there is one lesson in life that I would really like to give them, it is that every person has his own story.  The problem with this is that I also want them to understand that evil and malice do exist in the world and that it is the responsibility of every person to confront injustice.  Reconciling those two ideals becomes, for me, a giant, tangled, who-gave-the-ferret-the-yarn mess.

Mike and I are not perfect, and yeah, I do worry that our children might pick up something that slipped from our mouths in a moment of anger, irritation, irreverence, or sheer stupidity.  But, overall, I think of those things like viruses – something that may cause a transient infection but will be eradicated if the patient is generally healthy.  I believe that when parents try, most of the time, to live and speak the lives they want for their children, that is largely what the children will learn.  But, I worry about the hidden lessons, about the stories that my kids will take away that are right for our family but may not fit another household.

Here, let me give you three examples: two are moments when my children passed along things from our family – with different results, and one where another family’s values intruded on ours.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, then you probably realize that religion holds a somewhat tentative place in our house.  Mike is pretty opposed to organized religion, and while I was confirmed Catholic, I’ve fallen away from the Church whose teachings differ so drastically from my core values.  As a result, our kids have been raised with a pretty sketchy idea of theology.  My general message to them has been that I believe that all religions – throughout history and cultures – are ways of coming toward the same basic truths.  In this, we’ve tried to teach them to respect everyone’s religious beliefs.  Well, that hasn’t always worked.

Caitlin has considered herself a polytheist for several years.  She tends to favor the ancient Greek pantheon, but will consider the influence of the Egyptians.  She has no patience for the notion of one omnipotent and perfect deity.  She prefers the concept of a number of gods, flawed in human ways, and fulfilling different roles.  Since Caitlin is also typically opposed to sharing information with others except on a need to know basis, her beliefs haven’t generally been a problem.  A couple of years ago, however, she came home from school with one of those stories that made me wince.

Somehow she had wound up in a religious debate with a classmate in which she insisted that the Greek gods are real while the classmate, offended, said that the Greek pantheon were myth and that “there is no God but God.”  This was the point where things fractured a bit.  Caitlin, always ready for a good, speculative argument, demanded, “Well, what if the Greek gods are real and your God is imaginary?”

I’m still grateful not to have received an irate parent phone call on that one…

Incident number 2 took place in our car a year or so ago.  Aidan and two of his friends were riding in the back seat of our van while I was driving and trying not to listen to the 3^rd grade boy dialogue.  No one should have to listen to boys who somehow consider themselves out of earshot.   In my attempt to drown out the fart-jokes with internal white noise, I missed the beginning of the conversation.  My attention focused when I heard one of the boys say,

“That’s so gay!”

Aidan didn’t miss a beat.  “What’s wrong with that?”

“Huh?”  The conversation stopped.

“What’s wrong with being gay,” he asked.

Neither boy had an answer, other than a muttered “nothing,” so the world returned to methane-based humor.

My initial, and current, reaction was pride in my son.  I was proud of him for speaking out against a stereotype, and I was proud of him for breaking from the group to look at his own values.  Usually we worry that if one of his buddies said, “Hey, let’s go jump off that bridge,” Aidan would be the first one over the rail.

But, part of me wonders.  Where do we draw the line in speaking out for our beliefs?  Is it more right for my son to assert his value that no way of being should be used as an insult than it is for my daughter’s classmate to try to impose his belief in a single, omnipotent God on her, or her to impose her polytheism on him?  Part of me says, well, of course.  The one is speaking out against injustice while the other shows a disrespect for someone else’s religion.  But, is it ultimately the same thing?

Now, I happen to know the parents of both my son’s friends well, and I’m reasonably confident that none of them would be okay with their offspring using “gay” as a pejorative.  But what if one of those boys had belonged to a family who truly believed homosexuality to be a sin?  I would argue that Aidan was simply asking, “What is wrong with being gay?” and that his intent was to say that it’s not okay to use someone’s identity as a slur, but might not the hypothetical parent view the conversation as an attempt by my son to impose his beliefs on others?  I don’t know.

The third incident may explain some of this further.  While we generally try to provide a healthy balance of foods for our kids – we receive a weekly “farm box” from a local CSA program, we don’t stock fluorescent orange chips except as a special treat maybe twice a year, the bags of Halloween candy last longer than the twelve months between trick-or-treats, and a fruit or vegetable is mandatory in every lunch – Mike and I aren’t fanatic about every ingredient or product that crosses the kitchen threshold.  Sierra may have a whole-grain flour, nut, and raisin bar from Trader Joe’s with a glass of Kefir for breakfast but a Skippy peanut butter and Smuckers strawberry jam on white bread (with the crusts cut off) sandwich in her lunch.  (This week, these are her menu items of choice.)

Most of the time Sierra, like her siblings, packs her own lunch.  And for a first grader, I think she does a damn good job.  Her typical lunch involves the aforementioned sandwich (sometimes she mixes it up and has leftovers in a thermos jar), a pack of dried seaweed, a container of Pirate’s Booty, and a piece of fruit.  Nutrition-wise, I’d have to say, “not bad.”  She’s got her protein, her carbs, multiple vitamins and minerals, and nothing super-processed or with a lot of ingredients whose chemical structures were the stuff of my undergraduate nightmares.

You may have noticed that first graders are not into nuance.  Shade of grey tend to fall into two camps for the seven-year-old: black or white, good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or bad-for-you.

Knowing this, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Sierra came home a couple of months ago saying, “We need to buy a different kind of seaweed.”

Ok, not a comment I would have expected to hear in my former, non-kelp-purchasing, kid-free life.  But, what really threw me was the next line.

“M says that the kind of seaweed I bring in my lunch is bad for you.”

My first reaction was a series of three-letter acronyms for expletives.  Seriously?  Some kid had decided that our brand of seaweed is unhealthy?  What sort of freaky universe was this?  Could someone please choke that child with a Twinkie?

I’ll admit it – we did double check the sodium content (the only potential unhealthy thing I could think of).  It was fine.  As I type this, I feel like an idiot.  What kind of adult allows a 7 year old to influence her perception of how she feeds her children?

Well, we’re nearing the end of the school year, but M is still at it.  Last week, Sierra was visibly upset (since this child’s default expression is a huge grin, upset isn’t exactly hard to discern.)  Sure enough, “M still says that my lunches aren’t healthy.  Now he’s saying that my sandwich is bad for me.”

Aidan, from the back seat, made the noise beloved of pre-teen boys – that sort of cough, laugh, vocal fart that indicates a level of derision un-expressible by words.  “What the heck is wrong with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”  I have to give Aidan credit; he may rain a torrent of judgment down on Sierra, but other kids are not allowed to make his little sister feel bad.

“He says that the kind of bread we buy is bad.”

Ok, well, white bread criticism makes a bit more sense to me than seaweed-critique, but I was becoming annoyed.  Biting back a number of comments that would not endear me to the 1^st grade parent body, I dredged up, “Well, anything is bad for you in the wrong amount.  Even water can be bad for you if you drink too much of it.  The important thing is eating a reasonable amount of each kind of food.”

This is our default answer to junk food, why pizza is not a vegetable, whether soda=poison, and any other random nutritional question.

So here is my quandary.  M and his family obviously had nutritional right on their side in the white bread question.  Realistically there isn’t anything healthy about the sandwich bread Sierra eats.  (I’ve learned to pick nutritional battles because I fear that if my children decide that cannibalism is the only reasonable antidote to whole grains, I will be the first menu item.)  However, where is the line between M being informed about healthy foods, M educating his friends, and another family’s way of life trampling all over ours?

And where do my kids draw the line?  When does their belief in freedom of religion collide with someone else’s values?  And where does indignation over a slur become telling someone else how to live?

I don’t really know.  I haven’t answered these questions for myself yet.  And so, I do worry about what my kids pass along.

Thanksgiving in the Great Hall

We’re dining at Hogwarts this Thanksgiving weekend. 

Ok, not really, but it’s pretty close.  My parents’ home has a large ‘great room’ with a vaulted ceiling and huge stone fireplace.  It’s normally the least used room in the house; big, and kind of echo-y.  It’s also the only room in which we could hope to seat 17 people around something resembling a single table.

Yep, 17.  We haven’t had this many family members gathered for a holiday in several years, and the logistics took some contemplation.  There’s been a generation shift in our family over the last decade or so, and the transition has been a bit uncertain. My parents are both only children, and so the holidays of my youth were a combined gathering of our core family unit and both sets of my grandparents with the occasional addition of the odd great-uncle, aunt or cousin.  But, since neither set of grandparents had any other children to work into the equation, their presence at holidays was a given.  We rotated major holidays between the three houses or occasionally a rented cabin or condominium.  The biggest logistical quandaries were who brings the turkey and who’s in charge of the Christmas tree.

Fifteen years ago, I married an only child, and the traditions continued essentially unchecked as our family, ameboa-like, absorbed my husband and mother-in-law into the matrix.  Then, roughly a decade ago, my sister met her now-husband, and things got more complicated.  Mike (yes, my sister and I married men with the same name – get over it.) has a brother and sister with spouses and children of their own, and a family with its own tradition of large, boisterous gatherings.  This was unsettling.  Suddenly, my sister’s presence at a family holiday was no longer guaranteed.  Granted, there were any number of childhood Christmases where I would gladly have sent her a few hundred miles in any direction if only I could find a box large enough or a jet pack, but as adults, we’ve reached that intimate, bickering symbiosis known only to two people with shared history of hair-pulling fights and sneaking in the cold dark to open Christmas stockings.  The first Christmas morning where my pre-dawn companion(s) in stocking reconnassaince was(were) not my sister but my children, was the first holiday where I felt the jolt of time.  I wasn’t the kid anymore.  I had moved up a rung on the generation ladder.  And, I didn’t like it.

During this same time period, the other end of the ladder shifted.  The grandparents, around whom our family memories of holiday foods and traditions center, were aging, fading, and dying.  When my maternal grandmother died – fittingly on Christmas Day – two years ago, the shift was complete.  Like it or not, each of us had stepped into the next role.  My children are now the children, not just generational hangers-on.  Santa comes for them, not for Steph and me; they put the olives on their fingers at Thanksgiving.  Mike and I are the parents; my mother-in-law and parents are the grandparents.  And, in this shift, our traditions have been tweaked and our core unit has shrunk. 

This Thanksgiving, however, through some cosmic serendipity, we have expanded again.  My brother-in-law’s siblings both had other Thanksgiving plans, and so, for the first time, his parents join our holiday.  The multi-cellular family organism has collected other matter as well.  My father’s cousin, his wife, and two sons arrived yesterday as we sat down to bowls of clam chowder.  After the required awkwardness of kids forced to join a table of half-strange adults, the bowls were cleared and the house pounded with laughter, shouting, and the clatter of billiard balls.

And Mom, who had called me no fewer than three times while I was in Texas on business wanting help with logistics and cooking (at one point, she was demanding a pecan pie) regardless of my geography or other commitments, said while stirring the gravy, “I’m enjoying this.  This is good.”  Her tone had about the same level of amazement as if the candles in the great room had actually started floating.  Our places have shifted over the years, and we’ve had to rearrange furniture and expectations, but the core magic of Thanksgiving remains unaltered: food, fun, and family.

Keeping Time

We’re haunted by a clock.

It’s impossible to have any literary sensibility and not be fascinated by the narrative potential of a clock.  A clock with a door, and a pendulum, even better.  Even the means by which the clock returned to our family had thriller-mystery overtones.   Let’s face it, there’s something inherently sinister about clocks and clock-makers.  A woman goes alone to pick up the family clock from being repaired and…

Is she kidnapped?  Has the shop been ransacked?  Is the wizened clock-maker dead?  Does he pass her a cryptic message with a bloody hand?

What if there is no shop with a creaking door and timepieces whirring, ticking, and chiming beneath dim eves?  What if the clock-man has retired, he tinkers with his last remaining projects, one at a time in his garage?  What if he asks the woman to meet him in a shopping center parking lot – years after she had nearly forgotten the place of the clock in her life?  Does the plot change?  Will she be stuffed into a van by masked men with machine guns?  Are there Tsarist jewels hidden within the workings?  Drugs?  Code?  Computer chips?

“Oh my God, you’re going to be killed!”  My sister’s response when I told her that I was meeting a man in a white Toyota Tundra in a strip mall parking lot to pick up our grandparents’ clock was a classic blend of horror and amusement.  We like our drama.  The suspense scenarios at least mitigated her irritation that I had told no one that the clock had been gone for years.

This isn’t an heirloom grandfather clock, hand carved by a distant ancestor fleeing an oppressive regime or while whiling away the darkness of winter in a pioneer cabin.  Our clock stands about 20 high, and while the carving is intricate and the Roman numeraled face appropriately yellow with age, as far as I know, my grandparents found it in an antique shop.  Still, at an estimated age of 120-130 years, it is one of the oldest possessions of our modern, wandering family.  We have no ancestral abode; any jewelry dates back a scant couple of generations; I think there may be a family Bible – somewhere.  More importantly, though, for my sister and I, the ticking pendulum and baritone chimes are key notes in the soundtrack of our childhood.

Further back than my memory, the clock sat at the wall end of the peninsula dividing the working kitchen from Grandma and Grandpa’s breakfast nook.  Seeming to grow from the counter and wall, it was less of an ornament than a fixture.  I think some part of my larval brain perceived the clock as an organ of the house, the heart perhaps, though the metaphor may be too obvious.  Still, so long as we heard the tick of the clock, the half-hour bong in the void of night, Steph and I knew, lying on the impossibly hard mattress of the sewing-room pull-out bed, that morning would come, that Grandpa would make pancakes (with beer) and that Grandma would let us make hot chocolate, stirring the powder into the milk with the tiniest of whisks.

The clock would count down the seconds of cold dark, of unfamiliar creaks, of the Akita’s rustling pace as he did sentry duty along the hardwood hallway, of a sister who stole the covers with knees and elbows.  The clock anchored our dreamships as we were cast ashore into the disorientation of a room that was not our own.  It told us that our parents were just down the hall, squashed into one of the twin beds of Dad’s old room.  It told us that our grandparents would welcome us into the soft bed of their oddly shell-pink and silver bedroom for cuddles and stories of Robin Hood, Maid Marian and their ‘beer-busts and barbeques’ after being chased by the Sheriff of Nottingham on his Raleigh bicycle.

Those stories are gone now, lingering ghost-like, only in our heads.  Steph and I never recount them, fearing perhaps that we’ve remembered them differently, and that our opposing memories might counteract each other, vaporizing the past.  Inherited – a dusty word, crumbling with the desiccated lines of loss.  I inherited the clock.

“Do you remember how it works?”  The clock man, benevolent, middle-aged, and not in the least sinister, smiled at me patiently.

Works?  It’s a clock.  It always ran.  Until it stopped.  It was always there, to be visited, to reassure me, to tell me that the world was safe.  Until it wasn’t.  This is the difference between childhood and adulthood, the realization that clocks, families, and lives require maintenance; that the permanent is ephemeral; and that we have to hold the key and know how to hang the pendulum.  “I never knew,” I fumbled with the pieces of the explanation.  “It wasn’t working when I inherited it.”

I didn’t try to tell him – this kind stranger in the daylight of asphalt and white sidewalk – that the ticking of the clock had stopped coincident with the faltering of my grandmother’s own heartbeat.  I didn’t tell him that when she died, claimed finally by the fluids left behind by a faltering heart, I inherited a broken clock, its pendulum wrapped in a paper towel.  I didn’t tell him that every month my clock was in his shop, through the three remaining years of my grandfather’s life, and the nearly six years since, that I have felt my failure as the guardian of the uncounted seconds.

I didn’t tell him as my hand closed around the cool butterfly wings of the brass key, that I wasn’t ready to be the person who made the clock work, that I didn’t know the stories, that I never collected the tall-tales nor the real life memories of our war hero grandfather in his last year.  My sister listened, she sat by and listened in those last weeks before his blood cells completed their conquest, as Grandpa talked of the things he never spoke of in life, of the triumphs and horrors of a war he’d spent 60 years forgetting.  I didn’t go to hear the stories of a dying man, because my grandfather wasn’t dying.  I was just getting the clock repaired so that he could come and visit it.  He could show me how to use it.  He would beat the leukemia like he’d defeated every other enemy.

The clock just chimed eight.  The kids watched as I placed it on our piano yesterday, hung the pendulum, and wound the hands to the correct time, pausing every half-hour for the whirr and bong.  My grandfather’s picture sits next to the clock.  I like to see him on the piano, to imagine him thumping the time into the heads of my less than enthusiastic musicians.  “You’re rushing again,” I hear as my fingers depress the keys of his old flute.  “Here’s the beat.”  4/4 time pounded into my skull.  Time is the place where reality meets imagination.

“If the clock were bigger,” said my son this morning, “and we owned this house, we could attach it to the wall and make a door, and a tunnel down below the house, and my room could be down there.”  His sister had come into the office around 6:30 because she and her “Little One” wanted “to watch the clock.”

Three faces watched yesterday as I closed the etched glass door of the clock’s case.  They filed out of the room as I returned to the computer.  The pendulum ticked away the seconds on my article’s deadline, chiding my clicks over to Facebook.  Before the next 30 minute chime, my oldest daughter knocked on the door.  “I really feel like baking something.  I don’t know why.  I just feel like baking.”

Two girls in terry-cloth jogging shorts jostle at their grandmother’s elbow.  “Always level the flour with the back of the knife.  Like this.”  A white cloud blows into the canister.  “You only need half the sugar.”  The picture shifts and the grandfather hands over the whisk.  “Put your back into it.”  “Fold the whites in gently.  You want the pancakes to be fluffy.”  “The secret is beating the whites separately.  That and the beer.”  The clock ticks away the revolutions of the whisk.  Another scene: the kitchen is hot in the July afternoon.  “Isn’t it ready yet?”  The girl has been stirring for hours.  She thinks that if they just throw in the nuts and shredded coconut that the frosting might be thick enough.  “It will get there,” says her grandmother.  “You won’t think that it will, but it always boils.  Just keep stirring.”   The girl knows, this has been her job, every year since she could see over the stove top, stirring the frosting for her dad’s German Chocolate birthday cake.

My children baked amicably together for four hours on the day the clock returned to our house.  Bowls and pans were put into the dishwasher. Cello practice went off without a hitch; Caitlin conquered Vivaldi and Aidan played the first measures of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with gusto.  I can’t see any lumps, but they have hard heads, my kids.  As far as I can tell, there are no packets of cocaine, no thumb drives stuck to the underside of the clock, no gems hidden in the mechanism.  But, something else came home with that clock.  We are haunted by some combined spirit of time, memory, loss, and love.   I have been given the key, and ready or not, I am the one who knows how the clock works.

My youngest came into the office a few minutes after her sister, past the noise of intent debate from the kitchen.  “Sissy wants to know what kind of cake Grandpa wants for his birthday?” 

I grinned at the clock.  Sorry Grandma, but I know a secret.  “Grandpa doesn’t really like cake.  Why don’t you guys make him a pie?”

Tasting the Fruits

The last bite of the carrot salad lingers on my tongue – tart and crisp with the yogurt, and brightly sweet with a hidden warmth that spreads from the spoonful of chutney I stirred in.   A final sip of lemon water washes away the salad, and with it goes the tensions of the last month. 

Forgive the food references this morning; I’ve been re-reading M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me after reading an intriguing new biography of Fisher, An Extravagant Hunger by Anne Zimmerman.  My first journey through The Gastronomical Me took place nearly three years ago.  I picked it up in a San Francisco bookstore while alone in the City for a conference.  Fisher’s exploration of her growth and her sensual enjoyment of the world through her experiences with food seemed to perfectly mirror my solitary week exploring the culinary delights of that foggy city.  Just as I dressed in a black skirt and pearl necklace for a four-course dinner alone with my book, delighting as much in watching the people around me as in the feel of pate in my mouth, she wrote of crossing the Atlantic on her own, of solitary meals in France, and of discovering herself through her enjoyment of food.  The quote in the book’s preface spoke to me at a time when I felt that I was at last reaching an understanding of my adult self.  “To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.” –Santayana

That was not my first business trip alone, and I had been an adult for two decades, but for whatever reason, that was the week that I first began to ‘take the measure of [my] powers.’  It was one of the first times that I saw myself as directing my own life rather than living for the approval and pleasure of others. 

This most recent encounter with M.F.K. Fisher comes at the end of a couple of months in which my meals have too often consisted of such staples as: two Bao from Costco, microwaved and eaten over the counter with a handful of cashews and a couple of dates; or a grilled cheese sandwich on white sandwich bread, accompanied by a clump of chips.  My energies have been directed goal-ward with little left for inward maintenance.  Even the things which normally center me have this month gone toward other purposes: painting – auction, decorating – auction and Sierra’s party, writing – money or business building, cooking – sustenance only.

What I hadn’t realized, until Fisher’s loving descriptions of meals, friends, and family once more penetrated the fog of my mind, was that I have been living – and eating – therapeutically rather than preventatively.  I know better, of course.  I know the benefits, to myself, and to those around me, of living with intent, of seeking the foods, people, and activities that will make me feel good, rather than seeking out palliatives once I feel bad.  Instead of taking care of myself, eating light, flavorful meals that will sustain me through the chaos, I have waited until monsters were gnawing at my stomach lining and emotions, and then downed too-large portions of the sweet, salty, and doughy foods that make me ‘feel better.’  Even though I no longer have a job that mandates short nails and tears up my hands, my nails remain unpolished and have scarcely seen a file in 60 days.  The extra glass of wine with dinner tastes good and dulls the stress, but it also packs in the calories and leaves me feeling heavy and slow well into the next morning.

It is past time for me to stop, breathe, and focus on eating the foods and doing the things that help keep me from “feeling bad” in the first place.  It is time to run because it clears my head, centers, and energizes me, not because I want to lose weight.  It is time to prepare even meals I will eat alone lovingly, with consideration for myself and for those I feed.  It is time to be aware of, and to take pleasure in, each bite, and to stop when the bites become automatic or the food tastes of sawdust.  It is time to take moments in the day to breathe, to focus on my place in the world, and to give myself enough respite during the day so that I don’t reach the end wrung out, capable only of flopping into a pool of Jello on the couch.  As life presses me with new challenges, it is time to embrace the biggest challenge of all – to live.

We are a family of adventurous cooks.  I ate calamari at home long before the battered rings appeared in bistros and bars.  I also suffered the trauma of squid sandwiches in high school, but that’s another story.  As a group, we will try out almost any recipe, but there are three that you don’t mess with.  All three make an appearance at Christmas.  Christmas morning is heralded by “Cheesy Egg Bake.”  This is the sort of dish that draws screams of anguish from arteries; we don’t tell Dad’s cardiologist.  Slices of crusty French bread line a baking pan, edible standing stones guarding a mess of Swiss cheese sauce into which eggs have been broken.  The pan bakes until the eggs are poached and then the only question is “one, two, or three?”  Even Caitlin, who claims to hate both eggs and cheese, openly rebelled the year Cheesy Egg Bake failed to manifest on Christmas morning.

The Christmas desserts are also non-negotiable.  “Carrot Pudding” (a steamed Christmas pudding, served flambé), and “Pink and White Cake” (Properly called Gateau Noel) come to us from my maternal grandmother, and, I think, from her mother before.  Certainly, the mould for the pudding earned antique status decades ago.  The recipes, carefully copied onto 3x5” cards, show the quirks of their era.

Once upon a time, people knew how to cook.  They possessed the intrinsic knowledge and common language that has been lost in this era of celebrity chefs and televised gourmet smack-downs.  Once upon a time, people knew that life was something you got through by following a general framework, and not fretting the details.  The capriciousness of life was once considered normal.  Meals anchored the day, and were prepared using techniques that were passed from one generation to the next by the osmosis of constant exposure.  There was no need to write instructions for a buttercream icing beyond “add lemon zest.”

This vague instruction with its blithe assumption of a shared knowledge causes my mother and I to grind our teeth annually.  Every year, the same questions arise.  “Is it powdered sugar or granulated for the hard sauce?”  “What’s the butter to sugar ration for the icing?”  “Do I add anything besides the lemon zest?”  “If I’m just using marzipan to decorate, I don’t have to do all this stuff that it says for the almond paste, do I?”  “How long do we steam the pudding?”

Last year was the only year in my memory that we did not have a Christmas pudding.  Grandma Doris passed away on Christmas day, and the collective association between her gnarled hands with their giant ring and impossible, adamantium fingernails and the preparation of the pudding was too strong.  I first began to make the pudding about 15 years ago, as Grandma’s strength waned, sapped, I think, less by the demands of age than by worries over my grandfather.  Grandma was a worrier.  The minutia of daily life could chip away at her nerves like a caffeinated woodpecker.  Yet, under two sets of circumstances, Grandma was a rock.  Given a major life crisis, heart attacks, car accidents, birth, death, Grandma would remain unfazed, keeping her head with British stoicism while those about her were losing theirs.  The second condition that called for calm was the preparation of Christmas dessert.  “Grandma!  The recipe doesn’t say anything about the hard sauce.  I know it’s butter and sugar, but what else?  What kind of sugar?”

Grandma’s response to the panic in my voice was to saunter to the kitchen island.  “Let me see…Oh, I don’t know.  It’s been so long since I’ve made it.  I can’t remember anything anymore.  I think I used to…”  The hands would move among the boxes, spoons and bowls, pausing here, scooping there, mixing, and patting as the diamonds flashed.  Before I knew it, the hard sauce would be in the mould, the pink-and-white cake would be assembled, and I would be left standing with a crumb-speckled spatula dangling from my fingers.

Over the years, we’ve learned lessons from our Christmas desserts.  Neither mom nor I has ever added more specific instructions to the recipe cards.  There is an unspoken, unconscious agreement that this would be heresy.  Once we move beyond the moment of “oh, now what do I do?” our hands remember the task, and the desserts always taste the same, flavored with tradition and trust.

We hear it all the time on the news – calls for “more specific guidelines, and protocols.”  We live lives derived from flow charts, and we lose the ability to improvise.  If we trust our hands, they can remember how to make a buttercream icing.  If we trust our hearts, they can guide us through the complex forests of life and love.  Life can’t be scripted or outlined; there’s no manual, and the recipe is pretty general.  Add some lemon zest, throw in a little brandy, and move on – it’ll taste fine.

Pink and White Cake (Gateau Noel) Christmas 2010

Onions and a Novel

My alarm went off at 4:00 this morning.  Did I pull myself out of my turkey hangover and stumble into my car for a morning of mercantile mayhem?  Nope.  For one thing, last night we had home-made cream of tomato soup and grilled cheddar on baguette sandwiches; our turkey feast will take place tomorrow.  As far as Black Friday goes, I had a different set of numbers in mind.  I donned the navy blue bathrobe that predates three children and even my marriage. (It took some verbal gymnastics to explain to my mother on the morning of the first Christmas Mike and I shared how he knew I needed a robe.)  I brewed my tea (Peets’ Winter Solstice), made my breakfast, read the paper and deliberately repressed the urge to break routine and race to my computer.  But when I sat down to the keyboard, it was with a sense of delicious urgency.  This morning I reached the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words.  In the interests of literary integrity, I’ll refrain from putting the abundance of exclamation points and emoticons in my head onto paper.

Tomorrow is our family Thanksgiving.  This oddball tradition-nouveau of holding our celebration the Saturday following the fourth Thursday of November dates back several years to my first Thanksgiving on call.  Through the years, our family has discovered that moving our dinner to Saturday enables my sister and her husband to join his family on Thursday and to celebrate with us on Saturday.  This system is great for familial harmony, but a bit hard on Steph and Mike and their digestion – particularly since I’m not sure that my sister even likes turkey.

I spent yesterday chopping, slicing, boiling, sautéing, and baking.  Total production: candied yams – 1 pan, cranberry relish – 2 varieties, apple pie – 1, mince tarts – 11, bourbon-laced pumpkin cheesecake –1.  Also bringing olives, cheese, and a loaf of pumpkin bread from my freezer.  With all of this bounty, and with the anticipation of my father’s famous BBQ’d turkey, it may seem strange to note the one dish that calls to me every year.  The dish for which I accept no substitution or omissions.  Stuffing?  No.  Yams?  Nope.  And, no, not the bird.  I can’t comprehend Thanksgiving without creamed onions.

This is not something other people understand.  Even within our family circle, I think there are only four or five of us who like this dish.  Outside of the family, well, let’s just say that claiming that creamed onions are your favorite part of Thanksgiving, does not raise you in the estimation of the general public.  In addition to being pretty much devoid of nutritional value, this is a humble dish – our family’s equivalent of the hoary green-bean-casserole (btw, a favorite of my husband’s family and now the only green vegetable all of my children will eat.)  Here’s the basic recipe.

Pearl onions – frozen, 1 package

Bechemel sauce

Mix together in casserole dish.  Top with dried breadcrumbs, and place under broiler until breadcrumbs are golden and sauce bubbles. 

This is usually cooked and sometimes (depending on how tired Mom and I are) even served in Mom’s most humble casserole dish – a square, blue-flowered, Corning-ware pan that may be older than I.

As a family, ours tends toward culinary and intellectual elitism.  (My husband would say snobbery.)  My sister and I were raised with foods like calamari, fennel, and sorrel decades before they were trendy.  We once spent the better part of a summer scouring the foothills of the gold country in my father’s legendary quest for a sausage-stuffer.  When it comes to pop-culture trivia, we are abysmal failures, but references to politics, history, literature, and classical music wander into our daily conversation.  I am by far the worst offender, and the one crowned “snob” by my husband.  I hate fart jokes, buddy comedies, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart.  Peeps fill me with horror, and I am more likely to bring risotto stuffed baby bell peppers than chips-and-dip to a potluck.  I’ve been known to quote Shakespeare or Donne while sewing up a horse, and I believe that we should never elect politicians unable to properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”  If these things make me a snob, I’m okay with it.

For several years now, I’ve been struggling with the written version of haute cuisine, the literary short story.  As a self-designated over-achieving elitist, I felt it incumbent upon me to strive to produce exquisite works of Literature. (Note the capital ‘L.’)  Here’s the problem. I wasn’t having any fun, and it showed.  I read and review literary fiction, subscribe to several journals, and generally admire and even wallow in the works of great writers.  But, when I want to read for fun, where do I go?  Do I call upon Updike, Oates, or Franzen?  Nah?  I visit my friends: Rowling, L’Engle, Riordan, and Alexander .  I will say it.  Children’s literature, particularly middle-grade fantasy, is my fictional creamed onions.

So, when I decided to embark upon NaNoWriMo (an undertaking often excoriated in the halls of serious literature and publishing), I threw pretense to the winds.  This month, my characters have fallen through cupboards and into swamps, met a gnome, battled a dragon, suffered heat stroke, been kidnapped by a donkey, and followed a spontaneously combusting mountain goat.  There’s also a magic sword, a mysterious cape, and an enchanted necklace.  What a blast!  The novel itself is nowhere near done, but in honor of reaching my word goal, here’s an entire chapter.  Enjoy!  I’m going to go pack, and then it’s off to my creamed onions.

Chapter 17

Follow that Donkey!

Dylan’s first thought was that she was sitting in an oven, being eaten by a furry giant with a long, ugly face.  She jumped to her feet, but the oven door didn’t open, and no one turned down the temperature.  Dylan rubbed her hands across her eyes, pushing the tears back inside, and looked around.  The oven opened before her as a vast ocean of sand and beige rock, reaching almost as far as she could see, revealing itself to be a desert.  The ugly giant turned out to be a shaggy grey donkey.  Dylan scratched at her head.  The donkey must have mistaken her hair for a crop of carrots.  “Gross!  Donkey spit.”

“Is that your idea of some new bad word or something?”  Richard raised himself on one elbow, his free hand checking for his glasses, which had miraculously stayed on his face.  He looked at his sister.  “Oh, I see.  Hi, Donkey.”

“Do you think it’s going to answer?”  Sylvia sat up, pulling her robe, now no longer white, around her ankles and hugging her knees.

“The way things have gone lately?”  Richard squinted at her.  “Doesn’t seem too impossible, now does it?”

“Improbable, maybe,” Sylvia muttered, but she looked closely at the donkey.  So far, however, it showed no signs of turning into anything other than an ordinary if somewhat randomly appearing beast of burden.

“The ass will not speak.”  Abbletrotkin clutched the base of his razron as though fearing that it would separate from his head.  “Magic is not strong in this world.  Not that sort of magic, at any rate.  Here, you will find that the animals are merely animals.  The men, however…”  He shook his head.

“What about the men?”  Sylvia said.  She bent over Dylan, checking her arms and legs.  “I think you scraped your knee again, but that looks like the only damage.”

Dylan shook her head.  “No, that was from falling out of the tree at school yesterday.  Was it yesterday?  I can’t remember; it seems so far away.”

“I know.”  Sylvia wrapped her arms around Dylan’s shoulders.  “It’s going to be okay.  I wish we had a band-aid for that scrape, though.  It wouldn’t be good for it to get infected out here.”

“Maybe there’s something in the pack that George threw at us,” Richard said.  “Do you still have it, Syl, or did it get sucked into the ground in the earthquake?”

Sylvia looked around until she spotted something dark brown behind a pale rock.  “Here it is.  Do you really think there’s going to be a first-aid kit in here or something?  We just came from a world with a dragon infestation, where women die in childbirth, for pity’s sake.”  Shaking her head, she bent nonetheless to untie the leather thong that secured the neck of the bundle.  She cleared a flat spot in the sand and began to lay out the items one by one, inventorying them aloud as she unpacked.  “Looks like some bread, a couple of loaves.  Something squishy, looks like it’s filled with liquid; could it be the medieval version of a water bottle?”  She paused and Abbletrotkin nodded.  “Ok, water then, I hope.  Oh good, four of those.”  She handed around the water bottles.  “Tuck them into your tunics or whatever.  Each of us should carry our own.  But don’t,” she glared at her siblings, “drink it all right away.  Who knows when we’ll find any more.  Ok, what else?  Some…moss?”

“Poultice,” said Abbletrotkin.

“I guess that’ll work.  Here, Dylan, let me have your knee.  I wonder if there’s something I can use to tie it on.  What’s this yellowish thing?”  Like a magician performing a scarf trick, Sylvia pulled an increasing length of glistening fabric from the pack.

“Whoa!”  Richard blinked.  “That’s no band-aid.   What is that?  A cape?  Is it gold?”

Sylvia ran the fabric between her fingers.  “It feels like really heavy silk.  The threads kind of look gold.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “I didn’t see anything like this in the village.  Is this one of those things that you know something about but we don’t?”

He shook his head.  “I am as bemused by this object as you.  I can tell you that it has great value, and is very old.”

“How are we defining old, these days?” Richard asked.  “Old from our time – world, whatever – or old from George’s time, or yours?  What is your time, for that matter?”

“Time is a construct, Richard.  You humans seem to look at time as a straight line, along which one can move only forward.”

“Well, yeahhh.” Dylan shook her head.  “Time is like a story, it goes from start to finish.”

“What if, instead of a line, you look at time as a tree, with many branches, some of which touch and cross each other?  Could you not move along the branches, passing between them at will?”

Sylvia dropped the cloak into her lap and stared at the gnome.  “The garden.  The designs in the garden at the castle.  They have something to do with time, don’t they?”

Abbletrotkin nodded.  “As I told you, the garden tells our story.  Did Dylan not just say that time is like a story?”

Richard shook his head in disgust.  “And that’s all you’re going to tell us, isn’t it?”

“For now, yes.”

“That’s a bad habit, you have, Abbletrotkin, this keeping stuff from us unless we weasel it out of you, or you think you need to know.  Not to mention distracting us.  Back to the cape.  What did you mean it was old?”

“Simply that the knowledge required to turn gold into cloth has been lost for centuries – in any of the worlds, as far as I know.”

“Can’t somebody just climb back to that branch and get it,” Dylan asked. 

Abbletrotkin chuckled.  “Trust you to make a complex problem seem simple.   Well, Dylan, given that the garment is here, it appears that perhaps someone did just that.”

Sylvia found a strip of cotton in the pack and bound the poultice to Dylan’s knee.  She stood up, stretching and took in their surroundings for the first time.  “It’s getting hotter.  It must still have been early when we landed.  We really need to find some shade, and do something about water.  Desert dwellers try to stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, and so should we.”  She looked critically at her brother.  “Richard, you’re going to burn like a lobster, come here.”  She rummaged through the pack again.  “Well, old and valuable or no, this is going to have to do.”  She fashioned the gold cloak into a sort of head covering for her pale-skinned brother, ignoring Abbletrotkin’s shudder.  Precious artifacts were all well and good, but if Richard died from exposure in the desert, what good would the cloak do any of them?

The heavy silk felt like an anchor dragging at Richard’s head and shoulders, but he knew better than to argue with Sylvia when she’d been having a bad day.  Since the day looked like it was turning into the better part of a week, Richard figured he’d just keep his mouth shut.  “I think that the most effective course of action would be to head for those palm trees over there.  There can’t be trees without water, can there?”

“I wouldn’t think so…” Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin who shrugged.

“My people are miners.  Boldarkin is the only one of us so obsessed with trees and plants.  But, I suspect you are right.  At any rate, the trees may provide some relief from the sun.”  He picked up Dylan, setting her on the donkey’s back over Sylvia’s protests.

Dylan grinned from her perch.  “What do you think is going to happen to me up here?  It’s not like the donkey is going to take off or anything.”

That sentence seemed to Sylvia to be tempting fate.  She grabbed for her sister – a moment too late.  Right on cue, the donkey bolted into a rapid, bone jarring trot into the horizon.

“Well, at least he’s heading the right way,” Richard said.  He took the hand of his shaking sister.  “Come on.  He’ll stop eventually.  Let’s go follow.”

Sylvia thought her body would shatter from the shaking.  As she spun to scream at Richard, she caught the eye of the gnome, and realized that her brother was right.  Of the terrifying things that had happened this week, a donkey trotting away with Dylan across a flat, empty desert ranked pretty low.  There were no trucks, no cliffs, and, as far as Sylvia could see, no wildlife or people of any sort.  She sighed; she was getting tired of freaking out constantly, and she didn’t at all care for the fact that, on this adventure, Richard was turning out to be the one who had it together.  “Ok, follow that donkey!”

They soon realized that donkey tracking was easy.  The desert was like a giant sand table; the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  On the downside, the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  There was literally nothing to see beyond each other’s faces and a world divided almost equally in half – completely blue sky, and completely beige ground.  After an hour in the blinding sun, Richard would have given his arm or leg, or at least a couple of toes, to see a tree, or a house, or even a good sized pebble.  The only things that kept him moving forward were the string of hoofprints, Sylvia’s glare between his shoulder blades, and the faint promise of trees at the distant seam between blue and beige.  Even the trees seemed like a cruel joke.  “Do you think it’s just a mirage?” he asked, sipping a bit of water from his container and trying not to think about the fact that it tasted a little like medieval goat.

“Do I think what’s a mirage?”  Sylvia barely looked up from the line of hoofmarks.  Her feet had not broken stride since they had set out after Dylan.  If she was hot, tired, or thirsty, it didn’t show.  Nothing showed except a robotic determination to find the donkey and their sister.

“The trees.  Are we just heading toward something that isn’t real?  I mean what if there’s no point?  What if desert is all there is?”

“The point is to find Dylan.  Even if the trees are just a mirage, the donkey went that way, so we go that way.  Richard,” Sylvia stopped, and cupped her hand under his chin.  “Whatever else is going on here, we stick together.  We need each other, and the only way to figure out how to get home is together.  I know you’re scared and hot and tired and bored.  So am I, but we don’t stop until we find our baby sister, ok?”

“It is not a mirage.”  Abbletrotkin’s voice sounded like glass being ground over gravel, but his step was firm, and he looked like he could walk forever.  “If we are, as I suspect, in the World of the Book, there are oases in this world.  You should know that as well.  You know the stories, do you not?  You knew of my kind, and of St. George, and the archangel Michael.”

“Which Book?”  An idea was slowly unfurling in Sylvia’s mind.

“I do not know its name in your world.  It holds many stories of the balance.  The tale of the cloak of the colors, the story of the one who turned back the sea, the man whose wife turned into mineral for her faithlessness.  There are more, but these I remember.”

“Lot’s wife!”  Richard jumped in place.  “And Moses!”

“And Joseph and the coat of many colors.”  Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin.  “We call it the Old Testament of the Bible, but there are other names for it in our world, too.”  She stared at the line of donkey tracks and back at the gnome.  “So, you’re saying that we are in the world of the Old Testament stories?”

“It would appear so.”

The two children looked at each other. “Gnomes and elves in one world,” said Sylvia.

“St. George and the Dragon.”  Richard nodded.

“And now we’re in the Old Testament.  Do you get the feeling that we’re moving through the grades?  Each of these worlds is like something from Main Lessons.”

“Ok, but why?  Is this some sort of test that no one told us about?  I’ve never heard any of the kids talk about it, and besides if it’s a graduation test for you, what are Dylan and I doing here?”

“I don’t think so.”  Sylvia shook her head slowly.  “I mean it is a test, or a challenge or something, but not a school test.  I think we’re looking at it backwards.  I don’t think the worlds are based on school.  I think school was teaching us about the nine worlds.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “That’s it, isn’t it?  Our school is some sort of training ground or something.  For what?  What are we supposed to do?  And why us?”  She grimaced.  “Yeah, I know, that’s the question the heroes always ask.  But, seriously, why us?  We aren’t heroes.  We’re three kids with a screwed up home, from a screwed up world, who can’t even get stuff from an old classroom without it blowing up.  That’s not heroic, that’s accident-prone.”

Abbletrotkin trudged ahead, leaving Sylvia and Richard staring at his back.  For a moment, it seemed as though he would refuse to answer.  Then, his voice floated back to them.  “You are correct about your school.  The Guardians have always known that the ultimate battle for the Balance would take place in your world, the world in which Ahriman is most likely to manifest, where he has the strongest hold.  Thus, it was determined that those who would provide the final defense of the Balance must also be of your world.  And so, a system of schools was begun with the purpose of training those who would restore the Balance.”

“Okay, but Sylvia’s right, why us?”  Richard stopped walking.  “Don’t tell me this is where you say ominously, ‘There have been others,’ and allude to the terrible fates of other schoolers.  Or, no, wait – you said something before about a Prophecy.  Let me guess, it said ‘Lo and a Bossy girl with black curls, a super-evolved but near-sighted boy, and an annoying brat with carrot-salad hair will restore the Balance, and you all thought of us.”

Sylvia punched her brother on the arm as Abbletrotkin answered seriously.  “No, I know of no others.  Any terrible fate must be your own.”

“Gee, that’s comforting,” Richard muttered.

“And, as for Prophecy.  Yes, the Prophecy exists, but insofar as I am aware, you are not mentioned.”

“Insofar as you are aware?  What does that mean?” Richard asked.

“The actual wording of the Prophecy was lost generations ago.  What little knowledge we Guardians possess of the text has been passed between the Guardians of the words over time.”

“Your time or ours?  Never mind.”  Richard disavowed his own question.  “The time thing still makes my brain hurt.  Ok, so some idiot in one of the time arcs put the Prophecy ‘in a safe place,’ and now it and the Balance are missing.  Nifty.”

“Ok, but if we’re not the heroes of the Prophecy, what are we doing here?  Why did the stupid cupboard eat us?  Why didn’t it suck up the right kids?”  Sylvia twisted her hair up into a knot.  Sweat trickled down the back of her neck, and the donkey footprints seemed to go on forever.  “But really, could the cupboard be in the wrong school or something?  I can’t see any of the kids saving the world, or worlds, or whatever.  I mean most of us are lucky if we remember our homework and lunches.  Some of my class can still barely tie their shoes.”

Richard nodded.  “Yeah, as schools go, we’re not really a heroic bunch.  I mean, Josh can throw a basketball ok, and Amanda in Sylvia’s class plays a mean violin, but as far as world-saving skills, not so much.”

Abbletrotkin turned to face them.  “What makes you think that there are designated heroes?”

They stared.  “There’s always a hero,” Richard said.  “That’s how the stories go.  The guy or girl or whatever with the special destiny has all of fate resting on his hands, or hers.  There’s always a chosen one.”

Sylvia nodded.

Abbletrotkin shook his head.  “No destiny.  No chosen one.  What we know of the Prophecy speaks of the loss of the Balance and the rise of Ahriman in your world.  Our stories allude to a human child, but the allusion is general.  The decision to create your schools was one of prudence rather than a bow to destiny.”

“But then why did we fall through the cupboard?  And why did all of our teachers send us to that room at the same time?  And why has Mom seemed so worried lately?  And why did Mr. Loupe appear in the room if it wasn’t something to do with us?”  Sylvia’s head felt like it was spinning, and the tracks in the sand began to blur.

“I cannot speak for your teachers or your mother.  From what you say, I presume that your Mr. Loupe is one of the Guardians of your world, and I can only guess that he was drawn by the energies surrounding the Balance.  He may have been as surprised to find you in that room as you, yourselves were.  As for your trip through the cupboard, you were simply the ones who were present when the cupboard opened.  Nothing more sinister nor more grand.”

Richard felt like a fish with his jaw flapping.  So, all this craziness had nothing to do with some pre-ordained Fate; they were simply the victims of bad luck?  His head felt a little woozy trying to process.  So, the fate of the universe could have rested in the hands of Larry in seventh grade or corkscrew-curled Emilia in Dylan’s class.  Wow!  He looked over at Sylvia to see how she was taking the news of their insignificance, and bolted to catch her as she turned white and fell.   “Abbletrotkin!  A little help here!”  He lowered his sister on to the sand.  Sylvia didn’t look it, but she was heavy!

The gnome knelt by Sylvia’s head.  “I believe that the heat is affecting your sister.”  He joggled Sylvia’s full waterskin and shook his head.  “We see this in the mines with new workers who wish to prove themselves to their elders.  They neglect their own care in their eagerness.  Your sister has not stopped to drink or to rest, and now her body pays the price.  We must stop here, and provide her shade and water.”

Richard touched Sylvia’s clammy forehead and looked at the endless trail that led Dylan away from them.  “We can’t stop.  Dylan’s just a little kid, and she’s out there all by herself.  What if something happens to her?”  He started to shake, suddenly understanding the pressures Sylvia felt every day.  He was responsible for his sisters, and he had no idea how he could take care of both of them.

“If your sister does not rest and cool her body, she will die.”  Abbletrotkin’s face twisted as though someone had punched him.  “I am concerned about Dylan as well.  The little one should not be alone, but I fear that we have little choice.  If we continue to seek her at this pace, Sylvia will not survive.  I have seen that as well in the mines.  The body can be pushed beyond endurance.  When that happens, the spirit leaves.”

Richard stared at the distant, shadowy trees that seemed no nearer despite the passing hours.  “Okay.  Well, I guess this fancy cape might make a decent tent.”  He dribbled some water into Sylvia’s mouth and soaked a strip of cotton from the pack, placing it on her forehead.

“Wet her wrists as well,” Abbletrotkin said as he fashioned a low canopy from the golden cloak.  “There should be enough room in the shade for the two of us as well, if we remain prone.”

Richard groaned as he crept under the cape.  “Good thing we aren’t foreordained heroes.”

Abbletrotkin looked at him in question.

“When Syl wakes up, she’s gonna kill me.”

 

 

States of Grace

Our grace has a genealogy.  Passed from the Moore family to their great friends, my great-grandparents, the Davises, the verse has wandered through generations, presiding over everything from elaborate holiday feasts to store-bought pizza.

I guess you could say that ours is a secular house.  Raised Presbyterian, but with the imprint of eight years of parochial school, I became confirmed as a Catholic during college.  That was a different era of Catholicism.  Vatican II still rested fresh in most minds; my cradle-Catholic, Polish-American grandmother told stories of masses in Latin, fish every Friday, and entire days of fasting during Lent.  Mine had been a Catholic education with guitar masses and softball playing nuns teaching evolution.  Abortion, birth-control, pre-marital sex, and homosexuality were still big church no-no’s, but the lines seemed less stark, and one sensed that if the church could make the radical shift to female altar-servers, other changes would come in time.

In a big church wedding with a full Mass, I married a Lutheran-baptized, secular, rationalist with the promise that other than for weddings and funerals, I would never again force him into the pews.  My own church attendance – always spotty – began to fade after the birth of our first child, and when the baptism questions began.  At first, “when are you going to get her baptized” seemed reasonable, and there was no conscious procrastination on our part.  Life had simply become complicated, there were diapers, more laundry, and I spent approximately 20 hours of every day with something attached to my breast.  But, gradually, the questions became intrusive, demanding, and resented.  This was our choice, and really, what was the rush?   Other than occasionally testing her newly emerging teeth on inappropriate surfaces, I failed to see what evil Caitlin could be harboring.

Years pass, more children are born, and a new pope is elected.  Somewhere in the decade, either the Church, or my views toward it, has shifted.  Strictures that once seemed eccentrically stodgy reveal themselves to me as cruel bigotry.  I can’t see taking my children to listen to homilies that preach values completely opposite to those we attempt to instill at home.  Catholicism and I have parted ways.  I’m somewhat drawn to the more liberal Episcopal Churches, or perhaps Unitarian Universalism, but haven’t yet mustered the impetus to explore either denomination.  So, our lives exist more or less independently of organized religion.  We teach the children that religion is a human means of understanding the universe, and that all religions are equally valid attempts to reach that understanding.  At this point, I suspect my older kids know more Hebrew songs by heart than they do Christian hymns.  At times, this free-ranging ecumenicism has had its drawbacks.  Caitlin, currently obsessed with all things ancient (and particularly Greek), wound up in an unfortunate confrontation with a classmate last year.  When told by the classmate that the Greek gods were not real, and that God was the only true god, Caitlin retorted that maybe God wasn’t real and that the Greek gods were.  This prompted a discussion at home about respecting the beliefs of others.  Caitlin’s response?  “Doesn’t he have to respect my beliefs?”  In the midst of trying to explain that the Greek pantheon is no longer widely worshiped, I wondered, ‘who am I to tell her that some gods are myths while others are real?’ 

The only daily sign of Christian faith in our house is grace.  Here, I refer to the pre-meal blessing rather than a spiritual or mental state.  The more uplifted meaning of the word fluctuates in our lives by the minute.  Grace is, to me, not only a thank you note to God, but it is a connection to those around me, my family, my companions, and those who have gone.

God is great. God is good.  Let us thank Him for our food.  Amen. The everyday blessing of my childhood evokes memories of muttered arguments of whose “turn” it was, and the surreptitious kicking of shins by the sister who felt that her turn had been usurped.  This was the grace of weekday meals, chanted in a singsong by either my sister or myself with eyes closed and hands tightly clasped in laps – when they weren’t poised to grab the biggest piece of pizza.

Bless us, O Lord for these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive.  FromThybountythroughChristourLordAmen.  In the name of theFatherSonandHolySpiritAmen.  My knees still feel the brush of polyester pleats, and the wood rim of my desk chair pressed into their backs.  With these words I smell chalk, rain-soaked coats, and bologna.  This was the pre-lunch blessing, said in a rush designed to enable each class to get to the cafeteria before the garlic bread was gone on rigatoni day.  My thoughts were usually less occupied with gratitude to God, and more concerned with the fear of explaining to my peers yet another atypical lunch (Calamari sandwiches, anyone?) and wondering if I could convince the yard duty teacher to let me go outside for recess without finishing every last crust of bread.  I held the record for World’s Slowest Eater until Aidan came along to take the title.

Oh, the Lord’s been good to me.  And so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need – the sun, and the rain, and the appleseed.  Oh, the Lord’s been good to meeeee.  GORP, instant oatmeal, hot dogs, and pocket stews – these are the foods that accompany my fingers as they type Johnny Appleseed’s song in rhythm.  This was the blessing of Girl Scout campouts and family camping trips.  Of the graces of my childhood, this is one of two that I have carried into my children’s world.  This is the grace of trees and mountains, of woodsmoke and the cries of bluejays.  This is the grace sung of freedom: the freedom to explore and to get dirty.

For these and all Thy gifts of love, we give Thee thanks and praise.  Look down our Father from above and bless us all our days.  For Jesus’ sake, Amen.  Written down, the verse seems simple, the words easy, yet this is the grace that has challenged many.  I remember, and I suspect this to be true for my sister, a sense of mild triumph when I finally memorized “the family grace.”  I have seen this same triumph in my children, manifesting in the display of superiority by the elder two over Sierra who still mumbles “fordesandallygiftsabove…”  This grace took my genius (I mean that literally, not sarcastically.  He really is a genius; it’s quite discouraging.) husband several years of family holidays to memorize.  Mike and I have been married over 14 years; about a year and a half ago, my mother-in-law announced that she had finally memorized the grace.

I can only attribute the confusion to the complex and rich heritage of our family grace.  Join hands and close your eyes. 

For these – the grace came from Mr. and Mrs. Moore, dear friends of my dad’s maternal grandparents.

 And all Thy gifts – the Moore’s son Eddie had died young, leaving widowed a woman named Gloria. 

Of love – Gloria’s sister Ginny came out to California, to visit her sibling, and to look for a new life. 

We give Thee thanks – Grandma and Grandpa Davis’s daughter Sylvia had died of cancer, leaving a husband and young son, my father. 

And praise – Grandma Ginny always claimed that she fell in love with the towheaded child before she succumbed to the charms of his father Carl, my Grandpa Bligh. 

Look down our Father – Heads bow – around a turkey, a ham, platters of sides, a prime rib, a rack of lamb, enchiladas, pork chops and sauerkraut – the foods were many, varied, and meaningful in their ability to bring a family together.  Generations depart and enter.  Rich, the blond boy, grew up and married Jean – another only child.  They produced me, and then my sister.  Our holidays and birthdays joined in an endless circle of grandparents, great-grandmother, great-aunts and uncles, hands joined in unison. 

From above – Grandpa Davis died when I was a toddler.  Uncle Mac, my Aunt Glo’s second husband, and Grandma Davis passed while I was in high school.  But my grandparents all saw the entry of the next generation.  Grandma Ginny lived hold her first two great-grandchildren, and Mom’s father, my Grandpa Mac got to know not only Caitlin, but Aidan, the great-grandson who resembles him not only in red-hair, but moral certainty.  Grandpa Bligh knew all three, and was able to hear Caitlin and Aidan sing “his cowboy song” and to see the infant Sierra before his death.  Grandma Doris, my maternal grandmother, knew all of her great-grandchildren, and though the pictures they colored must have been only blurs and though time and memory floated in hazy clouds, her face lit whenever they walked into the room.  Fittingly perhaps, the last of my grandparents passed away just before grace on Christmas Day.  While eulogizing his mother-in-law, Dad commented that it was characteristic of Grandma Doris to time her transition to that moment when everyone was busy with other things, to not be a ‘bother’.  I think that it was fitting that she depart just as we prepared to join hands in the blessing that connects our family’s past to its present and future. 

And bless us all our days.  Our days are full.  Sometimes weeks pass before my sister and I can end our games of ‘voicemail tag.’  My children see their grandparents more often than many of their peers, but less frequently than any of us would like.  Some nights gathering five people around a table and enforcing a few seconds of what I envision as joyful reflection and my children see as rote nonsense seems too much bother.  Some nights, we pull out another family staple.  Everyone yells, “Yay, God!” and digs in.  But, when we stop, join hands (or in Sierra’s younger days, ears), and say the words, my family is present – in body and in spirit. 

For Jesus’ sake, Amen.  I still don’t know which window into the universe provides the clearest view.  For all I know, Caitlin’s subversive worship of a pantheon of capricious and flawed deities may be correct; it’s certainly a more fun idea than that of a single, perfect deity.  Maybe my Jewish friends are right, and Jesus was a nice guy, but not the Messiah.  Does it matter?  Religions are human constructs, and whatever one’s faith, humans are very small dots in a very large universe.  So, let’s all join hands, close our eyes, and appreciate our dysfunctional human family.  Pass the bread, please.

20 Minutes (give or take)

The other day, Sunset Magazine posed the following question on Facebook: “What past Sunset article would you most like to make a reality, regardless of cost?”  After reading, and agreeing with, some of the comments: ‘backyard retreat,’ ‘Airstream trailer,’ ‘Maui,’ I realized that my family and I are living a Sunset article, ironically because of cost.

In October, 2009 – about the time we started to struggle with making our house payments – Sunset published an article on “The 20 Minute Life.”  The article envisioned a life in which everything the family needed: work, school, play, food, entertainment was accessible within 20 minutes.  At the time, it felt as though my favorite magazine was taunting me.  The only things accessible within 20 minutes of our home were Granzella’s pizza to the north in Williams, and my mother-in-law’s house to the south in Dunnigan.  The kid’s school was 40 miles from home.  Mike had a 30 mile commute to work.  The only benefit to my 75 mile commute was the NPR time.  We drove a minimum of 30 miles to go to the grocery store, to see friends, or to see a movie.  Our cars devoured gasoline and sheltered fossilized French fries under the seats.  Getting the kids home from school before 5pm became a special treat.  When on call for work, I stayed with friends; some weeks, I spent more time in their living room than my own.  As though the Sunset editors wanted to drive the knife a bit deeper, the town highlighted in the article was Davis, CA – the town I had loved, and left after graduation, the town that housed my kids’ school and many of our friends.

For us, in the fall of 2009, Davis was a dream – the place we drove to see a movie, to wander the fantasy land of the Farmer’s market, the location of my favorite grocery store.  Yet, here was Sunset, featuring a family living my life – biking their kids to school, spending lazy evenings listening to music in the Central Park while eating food from the Farmer’s market stands.  These people didn’t have over 200,000 miles on both of their vehicles.  Their shoulder seams weren’t frayed from the erosion of the seat belt.  They probably even had time to sweep their kitchen floor.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know the rest.  I’ve written about the loss of our home here, and here, and here.  But a year changes many things.  Our living quarters and budget are tight – the financial bogeys that drove us here aren’t ducking back into the closet anytime soon.  Yet, small though our rental house may be, we inhabit it; it doesn’t possess us.  Each child has his or her own – albeit cozy – room.  The oven works, and even though the rental agency isn’t speedy with the maintenance, repairs are no longer our burden.  At least until the rains begin, the kids aren’t complaining about their smaller bedrooms.  Aidan and Sierra spend most of their time outside – in the backyard, on the swing that dangles from the tree in the front yard, at the park, or rampaging with the neighbor kids.  Caitlin has a desk (that she can find!) in her own room, and her bed runs the length of the window providing her perfect reading nook.  We have biked to the Farmer’s Market without whining or automotive encounter.  Caitlin has biked to school twice – losing her way once and scaring the crap out of her mother.  Her response that afternoon, “well, at least now I won’t get lost again…”

And the playdates, my God, the playdates!  In our old home, with the exception of birthday parties, my kids hosted friends perhaps three times in six years.  In the six weeks we have lived in Davis, school friends have visited at least 14 times, and Caitlin and Aidan have both spent afternoons and nights with friends.  This morning, I have a nine o’clock meeting at Sierra’s kindergarten.  I don’t need to leave the house at eight, or even eight thirty.  Eight forty-five will be just fine.  Update:  I did leave at 8:30, but I was able to ride my bike.  Take that, Ham-and-Cheese Croissant!

Ours isn’t a perfect 20 minute life.  I still commute about 35 miles to work, but a 30-40 minute drive beats 60-90 anytime.  Though, I did miss the end of “Marketplace” last night…

Happy Birthday to Me!

Ok, Christy quick pop quiz this morning.  What have you learned in the past four decades?

Nothing!  I don’t know anything.  I’m not good at being a grownup.  Since I wasn’t entirely successful at childhood either, this worries me a bit.  What’s left?  I don’t know how to do things.  I don’t know the protocols.  Someone was talking about a restraining order the other day – where do you go for that?  Apparently there’s a line with a window.  I’m endlessly grateful to be the resident of a county where it seems that no court cases are ever heard.  I hear people talking about jury duty, and they could be speaking in Tongues for all I can tell.  The simple act of clearing traffic violations or parking tickets twists me into a confused boiling knot of stomach acid.  I had to be handheld throughout the entire process of purchasing our house eleven years ago – it was only during that agonizing period that I learned the definition of “escrow.”

I still don’t understand property taxes or how ours get paid.  I never could balance a checkbook.  Compound interest, annuities, trusts, these are all words that grownups toss around.  I don’t have a clue.  And, don’t even get me started on credit default swaps.

Take a breath.  I didn’t ask what don’t you know; I asked what have you learned.  You haven’t just been sitting in front of the TV for 40 years, have you?  Think.

Ummmm…. I know always to turn my face toward the butt when holding a foal so that it doesn’t break my nose.

Not broadly useful information, but it’s a start.  Go on…

I know that you should never go anywhere with kids without baby wipes and some band-aids.

Good, now you’re getting it.

I know never to hit “reply all” without being sure that I really wanted the whole world to read that particular thought.

Pertinent.

I’ve learned not to say “I’ll never.”  I’ve done way too many of the “nevers.”

I’m better at saying “I don’t know.”  But, God!  There’s just so freaking much that I don’t know!

Don’t panic.  I can hear your heart pounding from here.  Dial it back a bit.  Go for the specifics.

I know that rolling clothes packs a suitcase more efficiently than folding.

There, see, this isn’t that hard.

I know that sentiment is bad for children and for animals.

Would you care to expand on that answer?

It doesn’t do any good to get all sympathetic and gushy when something is going wrong.  Animals are looking for a strong pack leader, and kids panic if they think that the grownups are falling apart.

Ok, good.  Keeping your head, I like that.

I’ve learned that my “comfort zone” is just my brain’s fancy term for prison.

We’re getting a little metaphysical here; don’t want to be too pretentious.

Hey!  Who’s taking this test, anyway?

I’m just trying to keep you on track; looking out for your final score.

Ok, fine.  I’ve learned that clicking the mouse incessantly doesn’t make the computer work faster.  Sometimes things just take time.

Did you just try to slide a metaphor in there?

Maybe.

Ok, what else have you got?

I’ve learned that my mom was wrong.  Wearing a low-cut blouse won’t make people call me cheap.  Or, if they do, it’s far enough behind my back not to worry me.  I’ve also learned that the ability to carry off a low-cut blouse is one of the few physical benefits of having borne children.

You’re a wife and mother.  How can you be indulging your vanity and sexuality?

I’m a wife and mother.  I’m not dead or in a convent.  My existence didn’t cease the day I put on a ring or the moment I first became pregnant.  I’m still a person independent of those ties.  Besides, my husband likes my tops!

Ok, I think that’s all we needed to know there.

Fine.  Here, you want parenting?  I’ve learned that I like my children much better when they haven’t been watching TV, any TV, content is irrelevant.  I also like them better when they haven’t been eating food that comes in bright, individually wrapped packages.

No TV or junk food?  Isn’t that a bit harsh?

I didn’t say I was perfect.  We break that rule way too often.  But, we regret it every time.  The hangover really sucks.

Hangover, huh?  What have you learned about drinking?

Fruit drinks are evil.  Water, lots of water.  Don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink.  Port is good – well, good port is good; cheap port is cough syrup.  Pinot noir goes great with salmon.

Sound, practical advice.  Anything else?

Kids won’t die if they go outside without a jacket.  If you let them forget the jacket and refuse to go back home or buy them a new one, they’ll remember it next time.  And, if they say they aren’t cold, they probably aren’t.  I think their molecules move faster than ours do.

Getting old, huh?

Nope!  I have a friend who says “you aren’t allowed to say that you’re old until you’re 108.”  But, Advil is my friend.

See, you’ve learned more than you realize.  Do you have any more, for a bonus point?

Fear is an anchor; cut the rope and see where the current carries you.

Friends and family are forever, but only if you reach out.  Shyness and modesty, not wanting to “bother” are narcissistic traps.

Speak up.  Your thoughts won’t help anyone inside your head.

Always pack a spare pair of nylons.

Put lip balm in every purse.

Never be without a pocket knife.

Life is an open book test; it’s okay to peek over your neighbor’s shoulder, but be aware that they may not be working on the same question.

Ok, I’m done.  I’m forty; my fingers are getting tired.

The Best Tree Ever

Every year, I get out the brooch.  I dig a wool blazer from my closet, ignore the niggling moth-bites,  sweep the detritus of tangled shirts and mismatched shoes aside with my foot, jam the hanger back between its friends, and pin the brooch on the lapel.  About the length of my thumb and twice as wide, it is a roughly triangular frame of gold hung with freshwater pearls from its branches.  I don’t know if the designer intended it as a Christmas tree, but she always wore it at Christmas, and now it is my turn.

My paternal grandmother did Christmas better than anyone else.  As a child, I simply accepted this as fact.  This was what grandmothers were supposed to do.  She arrived with an endless stream of suitcases and grocery bags, and an equally endless stream of instructions for my grandfather as to the disposition of each.  The grocery bags were like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, bottomless caverns of delight.  Fudge, shortbread, dried apricots filled with marzipan and chocolate, fruitcake – not the kind people joke about, but a specific (severely alcoholic) joy that spelled Christmas, stollen – my grandfather baked that, pickled mushrooms in a jar, smoked salmon spread, and, in some years, a Buche de Noel – the Yule log cake.  Grandma wasn’t French, she was Polish, but she had seen the recipe in a magazine, and that was it.  I remember several, pistachio moss, meringue mushrooms and all.  It wasn’t until I attempted that particular pastry feat in college that I realized my grandmother’s dedication to Christmas and to family.

You see, not only was Grandma not French, she was not –technically – my grandmother.  She married my grandfather – a widowed veteran of the war in the Pacific – when my dad was five.  She claimed to have fallen in love with my father first.  That wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.  Men weren’t supposed to be the ones widowed during that war.  But my grandfather survived, often with few others, the brutal amphibious engagements of the South Pacific.  His wife, the grandmother whose name I and my oldest daughter bear as our middle names, was diagnosed with terminal cancer even as their son was born. 

I don’t know how the transition went; my father was very young, and if he remembers, he doesn’t talk about it much, but it can’t have been easy.  Dad’s maternal grandparents had been largely raising him, and my great-grandmother was a formidable force in her own right.  Yet, by the time I came along, no recognizable division between blood and love could be found.  The line had been so blurred, that it wasn’t until Grandma’s funeral that I truly integrated the concept of family that she had forged.  I remember introducing two men of about the same age to each other.  We call them both cousin.  They both called her aunt.  One was the son of her sister, the other the nephew of dad’s biological mother.  Yet, to both, she was Aunt Ginny.

Grandma was the one who remembered things like paper chains, and stringing popcorn and cranberries.  She wore red and green at Christmas.  She sang Christmas carols gloriously off key, and often off-lyric.  She and grandpa tuned the radio Christmas Eve to the Santa Watch, where we would listen for updates on Santa’s location around the world.  And I suspect she orchestrated the Christmas tree.

We don’t have a tree this year.  The reasons are practical; we won’t be home for the week before and much of the week after Christmas.  We cut down and helped decorate the tree at my parents’ house shortly after Thanksgiving.  It took days for the rash on my shoulder from lying in the prickly sand, forcing the dull saw through the sticky pine trunk, to fade.  But, the smell is missing from our living room.  I plugged in the lights around the window; they glowed at me with a lopsided sort of bravery.  They should be glad to be down from the attic at all.

One year, when I was quite young, maybe six or seven, we almost had no tree.  Every year, we collected in a pre-ordained location: my parents with my baby sister and me in tow, my mom’s parents, and my dad’s parents.  Everyone had set assignments:  Grandma Doris made the Christmas pudding, and the pink-and-white cake from recipes handed down from her mother, Grandma Ginny brought the aforementioned endless bags, we brought the cookies that mom and I made as vacation started.  Groceries, ornaments, and tree were divided in advance.  And the tree – when we gathered at a home, that group provided the tree.  But, for several years, we had taken to renting a cabin or condominium along the North Shore of Lake Tahoe.  Generally, someone brought the tree; I remember pine-boughs strapped like hunting trophies to the roofs of the various cars.  I remember the unloading of boxes and bags and the mysterious transformation of the rigid green spikes into a perfect triangle of Christmas.

But, one year, we all arrived at the condominium in the evening snow of Christmas Eve with boxes, bags, and ribbons, but no tree.  Dusk had fallen, frosty flakes fell from the stars, and the strings of lights that outlined the tree lots were dark.  I remember choking on the tears of a little girl weeping into the couch.  I remember my mother trying to console me, to tell me that Christmas without a tree was still Christmas.  I knew she was wrong.  The tree was Christmas: it was the smell of Christmas, it was the place Santa put the presents, the lights were the beautiful dance of the Christmas carols.  The stories of a baby in a barn were cute, but the concept of a Savior was esoteric beyond comprehension to a six year old brain, and the notion that Christmas was somehow in the heart belonged in the fairytale land of television.  Christmas was a tree.

I think Grandma understood.  A cradle Catholic, she had a deeply ingrained sense of the power of symbolism and ritual.  She also had no patience with the notion of hopelessness.  Before I knew it, I was poking a needle carefully through pieces of popcorn, feeling the foamy crunch along the needle, the drag of the thread.  “Where are we going to hang them?” I asked, not daring to stop threading.  Grandma had said we were going to make decorations, so I was making them.

“Your daddy and grandpas will find a tree.”  The snow skittered outside, and I had a vague realization that my father and grandfathers had drawn on jackets and boots and were somewhere in the dark storm.  Mom had said that they couldn’t just cut down one of the many trees around us, which seemed unfair, like being thirsty and surrounded by forbidden water. 

Late, late, after popcorn was threaded, paper chains were made, and Mom was making noises about bed, the door opened, and the tree entered.  Looking back with adult eyes, I see the absurdity of the sight – a scrawny, makeshift tree surrounded by three large men – Ghandi flanked by linebackers.  It was a Charlie Brown tree.  Barely taller than me, with patched on branches – they had made it from the bottom of a too-large tree that a woman in a condo nearby had been throwing out. 

Christmas morning, the little tree had been transformed into a Christmas miracle.  It wore the lights like jewels, had donned my paper chains and popcorn strings with flair.  And Santa had found a place for the presents.

When the time came to go home, Grandma and I paid the tree a memorial visit at the dumpster.  I wept over its popcorn draped branches.  “Grandma, this was the best tree ever.”

And it was. 

Thirty-three years later, metaphorical snows flurry darkly outside.  Santa has been hit hard by the recession.  Grandma Ginny died when my middle child was an infant.  Both of my Grandfathers followed within a few years.  This year, Grandma Doris is on hospice care, and may not see Christmas Day.  Dad is recovering from a heart attack of two months ago.  We’ve come down to Southern California to visit family, but last night we found ourselves visiting Dad’s cousin, not with his family in their home, but in the hospital where he’d had emergency surgery earlier in the day.

I wear the brooch.  I still like to flick the pearls and watch them dance on the bottom branches.  I have inherited something from Grandma besides her jewelry.  Like my Grandmother, I refuse to accept the darkness.  Christmas will happen.  There will be a tree.  Today, we will go to my cousin’s house and make cookies with his children in the conviction that he will be home with them for Christmas.  We will join my parents for Christmas, and I will make the steamed pudding and marzipan covered cake that Grandma Doris can no longer remember, that she may not be here to taste. 

I don’t know what Christmas will bring.  Advent seems particular in its darkness this year.  But, Christmas morning, I will sneak downstairs with my children to collect the lumpy stockings, and, when no one is looking, I will sniff the tree in memory of all those that have gone before.

Runners, Pipers, and Tambourines

Bagpipes as a Zen moment?  What can I say?  I’m Scottish. 

The soft skirl of the pipes drifted around the corner of the hillside.  The first hill had been a pain.  The incline did not challenge my body, but my patience had been sorely tried.  Foolishly, I had begun the race in the group with the posted pace for a 10 minute mile.  I knew I could keep the pace for at least 3 miles, though I was uncertain about the entire 6.  As a road race newbie, I hadn’t realized that this group would also include every person who planned to run at least a little.  A block or so past the start, the crush had thinned a bit, and my feet had found a rhythm.  Just as I began to feel that maybe this crazy endeavor was doable, the mob screeched to a halt.  Like gawkers at an accident scene, the masses ahead had hit the first hill and apparently said to themselves, “Oh, this is too steep.  Maybe I’ll just walk this one.”

Needless to say, by the time I crested the hill, I was ready to bite someone.  Then the moment arrived.  The first notes wafted down just as I heard someone say, “Bagpipes?  Really?”

Yes, really.  Silhouetted on an emerald knoll, a group of kilt-clad pipers played against the mist.  Perfect.  Wrong tartan, but that was forgivable.  My grandfather was a McIntosh.  The clan motto is “Touch not the cat bot a glove.”  Basically, mess with us at your peril.  A stretch of asphalt opened before me and my feet found their cadence.

Back in May as I descended from the endorphin rush of my first 5K race, the 6 mile Wharf  to Wharf (Santa Cruz to Capitola) seemed quite reasonable.  ‘Two and a half months to train.  No problem.’  Therein lays the danger of accomplishment.  The human brain is never satisfied.  I caught myself yesterday afternoon seriously contemplating a brochure for a half-marathon in October.  Endorphins are insidious creatures.  What I had failed to foresee in the balm of May was the effect of summer on my will to exercise, or really on my will to do anything.  My physiology functions best from 65-80 F.  I had also been unable to predict the case of shingles that made the notion of a sports bra unbearable for a full week before the race.  Yet, here I was.  6 miles.  The brochure stated quite sternly that runners must keep to a 15 minute/mile pace and that the course would be closed within 90 minutes.  I envisioned myself dragging at the rear of a pack of thousands, calling my husband for a ride somewhere around mile 3, the pointing and mocking onlookers.  I was dragged to the starting line by two factors.  I had told the children that the weekend camping trip was so that mommy could run a race, and I didn’t want them to see me backing out of a goal.  Also, my mother had told me that I should rest the shingles and scratch the race.  39 years, and my mother still hasn’t learned that the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I shouldn’t.  Sorry mom.

Another hill, another corner.  Passing a folk guitarist, a glimpse of the sea.  A Kiss tribute band played on my left, my feet grinned.  Pulling up a long slope I saw my favorite group of the run.  10-15 tie-dye clad musicians lined up behind a sign that read “Sons of the Beach.”  As I passed, a tambourine and soap bubble infused version of “Rawhide” followed me.  Ah, Santa Cruz.

Balloon arches marked each mile.  The first split time depressed me so badly that my feet almost halted there and then.  ‘19minutes, seriously??’  I told my feet that we had started at least 5minutes back and had been held up in traffic.  ‘Get with it.’  The legs heard and obeyed.  The second mile took just over 10 minutes.  At each rainbow arch, my body responded to the called time as to a challenge.  With each mile my pace increased. 

Onlookers lined the roadway.  Far from the jeering phantoms of my insecure imaginings, these people projected lifesaving goodwill.  Generous with their cheers and encouragement, they gave the impression that each of us had our own personal pep squad.  Some held out hoses or sprinklers for those of us longing for a shower.  One lovely man offered a tray of strawberries and orange segments.  The crisp sweetness of that kind orange carried me a full mile.  One mother and her two children held out their hands to ‘high five’ each of us as we passed.  Just past a percussion group, a lone man stood and banged with a mallet on the back of a skillet which rang sweetly across a slough. 

‘Come on,’ called Capitola.  ‘Come see me again.’ 

‘You can do it,’ Santa Cruz pushed me from behind.  ‘You started here.’

Start there, I did.  Certain places weave in and out of our lives like thin gold threads.  From early trips to the beach and Boardwalk with our grandparents through my college years and into those of my sister, Santa Cruz and Capitola have flickered in and out of my life.  Indirectly, my current adult life has its roots along that bay.  Had I missed a party in Santa Cruz 20 years ago, I would not have met my husband 5 years later.  Strange but true.  After all, it is all Dave’s fault.

Saturday had been spent dragging the kids from one old haunt to the next.  Plugging up the hill to the UC Santa Cruz campus, I demanded of the backseat, “Do you want to see where Aunt Steph went to college?”

As we entered the grounds, their enthusiasm turned to confusion.  “Where’s the college?”  “This is it.”  “This doesn’t look like a school; it looks like a forest.”  I grinned to hear them echo my first impressions.  20 years ago, my roommate and I circled the campus endlessly ‘looking for the college.’  It had seemed impossible that the random collection of buildings that sporadically dotted the forest was indeed a university.

Our next stop was Natural Bridges State Beach.  Flashes of the essence of Santa Cruz drifted past:  surfers floating like black seals on the waves, the requisite amateur-painted VW van, the skateboarder towed by a large, enthusiastic dog, the smells of brine, kelp, fog, and fish.  On the beach, the kids caught a connection to home.  “Come on, Aidan.”  Caitlin dragged her brother to a specific vantage point along the shore.  “Look!  See it?  See the rock; it’s the one from the painting.”  They knew the story, knew that mom had painted the scene in oils from a photograph sent by a college friend.  However, this was the first time they realized that mom painted actual places, and that they were visiting a place that had hung on the living room wall longer than their own lives.  Ghosts of my past walked the sands where my children frolicked.  Past and future joined near a crashing, grey surf beneath the spiraling wings of pelicans.

As we parked near the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a more distant past floated through my memory.  The Boardwalk rang with the excitement of childhood.  Screams and laughter danced above the rumble of surf and roar of rollercoasters.  Grease, salt spray, and tanning lotion ran under the sweetness of cotton candy.  Clutching the hands of my children, I became the child.  My grandparents appeared at every corner.  Glancing at the waves, I heard my grandmother’s mantra as my sister and I ran toward the surf, “Don’t go in past your knees!”  We stopped for lunch and my husband’s jaw dropped as his calorie-conscious wife ordered deep-fried artichoke hearts and a linguica sandwich with grilled onions.  As the crisp grease and metallic artichoke melted onto my tongue, my grandfather’s grin appeared.  My children had a bag of plastic sand toys wedged under the table; the cups of neighboring beer drinkers evoked the memory of hops-scented sand castles.  Grandpa had always saved his beer cup for us to use as a sandcastle mold.  The first tower or two smelled faintly of beer and the paper had a tendency to disintegrate after a couple of trips to the ocean for water, but it was a tradition.  As we draped our bright beach towels over our patch of pillowy sand, I felt the rough edge of brown and white striped terry-cloth.  Grandma line-dried her laundry, and her towels had all of the pliability of coarse-grain sandpaper.  As we emerged from the waves, sunburned, salt-scoured, and sand-crusted, Steph and I stood with meek trepidation as Grandma rubbed us down with the agonizing vigor of love.  We were well into our teens before we managed to convince her that a) we could towel ourselves, and b) that we would really rather not change out of our bathing suits in the middle of the beach with only a towel tented around us.  I resisted the temptation to similarly torture my children.

On the beach, the kids proved themselves as individual as their nicknames – neither clones of each other, nor of my childhood.  Sierra, our “marmot” played happily on the sand, shunning the waves, like a good little land mammal.  Aidan, the “alligator” was happiest in the shallows.  An overly strong wave would cause him to tug at my hand with shouts of “Back!  Back!”  And Caitlin?  Caitlin stood as far into the surf as I would permit.  Two or more weak waves caused her to raise an eyebrow at the sea and ask sardonically, “C’mon, Poseidon.  Is that all you’ve got?”  (She’s re-reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.) “Do you really think it’s a good idea to taunt Poseidon while we’re standing in the ocean?”  “Moommm, I’m an otter.  I’m a creature of the sea.”  And so she is.

Aidan’s hand tucked into mine as we stood in line for the Giant Dipper, reminding me of the mingled excitement and guilt as I held Grandpa’s hand in the same line 30 years ago.  The thrill of riding a “really big, grownup rollercoaster” tangled with the fear that Grandma was right.  Maybe he really was too old for “those rides.”  What if he did hurt his knees or back or heart?  As Aidan’s face went still as the lap bar engaged, the old fears seized me from behind.  What if he was too young?  He was just barely over the height limit; what if it wasn’t safe for him?  What if he was scared?  I screamed with laughter around the dips and turns darting glances at my son’s white face.  The glory of risk-taking fought for supremacy with my need for a guarantee of security.  There are no guarantees; I abandoned myself to the last swooping turns.

Buckled into the car, the first bite of my caramel apple caught my teeth and dripped down my wrist.  In the back seat, the kids shared a bag of cotton candy.  30 years ago, the traditional treat “for the way home” invariably produced the need for at least one stop in response to my sister’s agonized cries of “I’m stickyyyyyy!”  From the back seat, a voice asked, “Mom, do you have any wet wipes?”  “Nope, they’re all in the back.  Do you want a napkin?”  “No, that’s okay.”

Feet flew the 6^th mile past the coast and into Capitola.  A man with a wig like a giant tribble skin ran on my right; I passed a woman with a tank top that read, “Never tutu old.”  She wore a red lace tutu.  I sprinted down the hill with the long galloping strides of my childhood.  My own children and patient husband waited just beyond the finish as I ran from the past into my future.

Respite

A brief break from the ranting today.  Triple digit weather, a case of shingles http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/shingles/dis-faqs.htm, and an on-call weekend punctuated with oddball emergencies have conspired to suck the indignation (not to mention the inspiration) from my soul.  Needless to say, the tick of the clock to 8:00 this morning filled me with joy as it signaled a day off.  Freedom!  Air-conditioning!  The shingles was, alas, still present but was rendered far less annoying by the previously mentioned circumstances.

Summer evokes childhood -- swimming, ice-cream, watermelon, flopping on a couch with a book, mosquito bitten games of hide-and-seek, and movies.  In the pre-video, pre-megaplex days of my childhood, the downtown movie theater played one movie at a time, and lines snaked along the baking sidewalk for blocks.  Around mid-July, doubtless sick of the cries of “I’m bored,” parents would load 5 or 6 of us into a van and drive us downtown.  Admission money carefully safety-pinned into change purses, and illicit brown bags of popcorn smuggled into pockets and backpacks, we were ready.  The oldest member of the group always had a dime for the pay phone, just in case.  The downtown theater in Merced looms grandly in my childhood memory.  The orange top of the white tower stood out for blocks.  I felt very grownup as I handed my money to the teller encased behind the sweeping curve of glass and stepped into the lovely cool of the lobby.  In those days, there was one screen that seemed impossibly huge, a grand staircase that led upstairs to a painted balcony that made me think of Cinderella’s castle.  Smells of popcorn, dust, and an obscure stickiness known only to movie theaters filled the air.  Movies on that screen seemed so real that I would look back to the light from the projector during the scary parts just to reassure myself that it was only make-believe.  The outside world vanished for a couple of hours into the cool, fantasy-laden darkness.  When the doors opened to the blaring heat and light, we would stand, blinking moles, on the sidewalk until a double-parked parent honked and waved us back to reality.

My heart broke when that theater was renovated and split into four smaller screens.  But, by then the VCR was common, and it had become increasingly difficult to convince our parents to shell out the time and money for a downtown movie excursion.  New digital technology and the mandatory blockbuster action scenes have somewhat revived the movie, but my children will never have the same feeling of movie-ness that permeated my childhood and that of previous generations.  Theaters are clean, well ordered, and completely generic.  Bag searches make greasy brown bags of home-popped popcorn impossible.  I may drop them off at a theater, someday – when they’re 15?

Today, however, I reclaimed a bit of my lost past.  I decided to celebrate freedom (and distract myself from the hideous rash on my shoulder) by taking myself to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/harrypotterandthehalf-bloodprince/.  I nibbled on my popcorn through the endless previews, unimpressed.  Then, it happened.  The mist rolled in, carrying the Warner Brother’s logo.  The movie was starting!  In that instant the whole sense of movie-ness, of being a solitary adventurer swept over me. 

Watching the adolescent forays into first love increased my sense of nostalgia.  The chairs grew smaller; I was old again.  That sense of uncertain excitement fled dimly into my past.  As the summer heat burst through the exit door, my feet stumbled mournfully away from youth.

I consoled myself with lunch at Tucos in Davis http://daviswiki.org/Tucos_Wine_Market_and_Cafe.  Between tiny spoonfuls of a dancing cucumber melon gazpacho, I sipped my wine, read The Language of Bees http://www.laurierking.com/, and lounged in the shade of an olive tree and green umbrella.  By the time the beef Carpaccio watercress salad had arrived, my consolation was complete.  Nibbling on the cheese course and sipping a glass of port, I realized that, perhaps, adulthood isn’t so bad after all.

Rant Part 1 -- What's for Lunch?

Part 1 – Food

Food (n.): 1. What is taken into the system to maintain life and growth, and to supply the waste of tissue; aliment, nourishment, provision, victuals.

            b.  What is edible, as opposed to ‘drink.’

            c.  Sustenance, livelihood.

So sayeth the Oxford English Dictionary.  Food – a basic need, a source of controversy, and anguish.  In most of the world, food is truly a basic need.  Food is scarce, and therefore precious.  Many people lack the luxury of agonizing over what they eat; they can’t afford to be that choosy.  In contrast, Americans are increasingly aware of and paradoxically disconnected from our food. 

On an early camping trip with my daughter’s Girl Scout troop, I asked one of the girls to get the Ziploc bag of stew meat out of the cooler.  She couldn’t find it.  At that time, the girls were all 8 or 9 years old, none were vegetarians.  Caitlin walked over to the cooler, and grabbed the bag.  As the bag was emptied into the pot, a chorus arose.  “Eeewww, what’s that?”  “That’s not meat.  Meat’s brown.”  “Meat doesn’t look like that.”  “Ick, is that blood?”  None of the girls knew what raw meat looked like.

A good friend of mine was raised on a ranch.  She and her husband farm hay, garden, and raise a handful of beef cattle.  She came home from work one evening completely perplexed.  “People keep asking me about buying one of our steers.  They want to know all this stuff about how it’s raised.  They seem to get really excited about the fact that we pasture graze them.”

“Yeah, that’s the latest thing, didn’t you know?”

“What?”

“Grass fed beef, locally raised food.  Small farming, local produce, you name it.”

“Uh, why?”

“Better for the environment, less fuel, less methane, etc.”

“So,” she paused and looked at me strangely.  “You mean the way I’ve always eaten is trendy?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“I thought that was just food.”

I think that sums it up nicely.  All of the hype about sustainable farming, local produce, etc. is just food.  This is how our grandparents ate.  If you raised an animal for food, you ate the whole animal, used what you could.  Fruits and vegetables were eaten fresh in season and preserved for out of season.  Children knew where their food came from; they helped feed it until slaughter time, they helped pick and peel it.

Why are we alarmed and confused by an obesity epidemic when so many children think that food grows in cardboard, cans, or McDonald’s bags?  Cereals where sugar and high fructose corn syrup are listed in the top five ingredients get marketed as healthy breakfasts because they are fortified with vitamins and minerals.  We didn’t see this one coming?

Children can be excused ignorance.  It is the job of adults to help children understand the world around them.  There is no excuse for educated adults who have never given a moment’s thought to the source of their dinner.  I find it appalling that someone can complain about the environmental cost of ranching while eating a hamburger, or rant about hunters while eating steak.  Meat eaters have a responsibility to respect their meal enough to be honest about the source.  I am an omnivore.  I eat meat.  My metabolism and physiology support my belief that humans have evolved as omnivores.  And, I prefer to be at the top of the food chain.  (See previous post.)  That said, I respect the position of ethical vegetarians.  If you choose not to eat meat, that is your right.  It may be a more moral stand than mine, I don’t know.  However, I do know exactly where my dinner comes from.  I have stood in a slaughter house.  I have been involved in animal agriculture at each level of production.  I was raised in a family of hunters and fisherman.  I believe that the sin is not in the taking of one life to sustain another, it is in the pretence that lives with greater aesthetic or emotional appeal possess greater value.  Why rank a horse above a cow, a pig over a fish?  For that matter, most vegetables are also living organisms, but that’s just an aside.  Where else in the world do people have the luxury of quibbling over or scorning certain sources of protein?  The fact that Americans are able to eat primarily, in many cases only, the skeletal muscle of an animal, the fact that we legislate which animals may be raised and slaughtered for food, the fact that we have the time and energy to fret over the tossing of dead fish in a public market, these are the things that brand Americans as spoiled and out of touch with the rest of the world. 

When our society demands cheap, mass-produced housing, and raises those houses on fertile crop-land, why are we surprised to find that agriculture becomes a crisis?  My father grew up in Mountain View, CA.  He remembers earning money cutting apricots in the summer.  Go find an apricot orchard in the “Silicon” Valley.  I dare you.  When we take the children to Southern California to see family, my Anaheim-raised husband gets lost.  His most frequent comments:  “That used to be a strawberry field,” or “That was an orange grove.”  I was raised in Merced.  I’ve lived in California’s Central Valley for most of my life.  Farmland dwindles year by year, submerged in a tidal wave of cloned buildings that now sit vacant with “bank owned” signs dotting the landscape.  Several years ago, during the most recent building boom, Caitlin asked about all of the new houses being built.  She wanted to know, “but what will people eat?”

I would love to challenge every urban and suburban dweller to find out more about his or her food.  Talk to a farmer, a rancher, read a Farm Bureau newsletter, visit a farm, a dairy, a cattle ranch.  The farmers and ranchers with whom I interact daily sense the disconnect of the society that they have given their lives to feed, and they are understandably bitter.  They feel besieged by conflicting and impossible demands.  To a large extent, agriculture is at the mercy of uncontrollable forces: weather, fuel costs, soil, plant and animal biology, disease, and legislation at all levels.  Society demands food that is cheap, plentiful, convenient, and yet magically raised without cost to the environment or genetic or chemical manipulation.  Something has to give.  People who rise before dawn, for whom a hard day at work involves dirt, unbearable heat or cold, broken machinery, lifting, bending, sweating and bleeding may be left with a bitter taste in their mouths when they hear well-dressed, well-manicured pundits blathering about the havoc being wrought by agriculture. 

That said, there is another side.  Agriculture has had a tendency to shoot itself in the foot.  Proactively addressing issues of sustainability and animal welfare does not indicate caving in.  In many cases, changing the way “things have always been done” may increase productivity. Locking into a position and refusing to police oneself means that policy will eventually be imposed from the outside.  Living and practicing medicine in California, I have heard multiple complaints about Proposition 2.  However, I want, but have lacked the courage, to ask ranchers and poultry growers why their own industry hadn’t implemented these changes themselves.  Or, alternatively, why they hadn’t done a better job of educating the public on the value of the targeted methods of livestock production.  In the cases where practical agriculture has worked hand in hand with the theoretical, great strides have been made.  It’s time to quit arguing and deal with the crisis.

The real problem that threatens our food supply is the fact that the people who legislate many of the issues affecting agriculture represent voters who have no grasp of these issues.  Farms have become something people drive past on freeways.  Several weeks ago, NPR aired a wonderful series titled Five Farms.  http://cds.aas.duke.edu/fivefarms  This series did an impressive job of highlighting the breadth of agriculture in this country and the issues facing those who have chosen this vocation. 

Food.  Why don’t we just eat food?  What would happen if we quit asking for cheap, homogenized, microwavable, individually packaged, nutritionist approved, exotically flavored, calorie restricted, environmentally and politically correct, sterilized supplementation, and just ate food?  If you eat meat, great; do you understand the costs?  Are you willing to use the entire animal?  Do you really need the out-of –season peaches from God knows what continent that will taste like Styrofoam anyway?  If you want to have a French fry, or a milk shake, enjoy it, savor it.  Rather than wrapping ourselves up in guilt, excess, starvation, and binging, why don’t we just accept food as something we need, and something that brings us pleasure?  Why do we talk about being “bad” or “good” with what we eat?  Be grateful if you have enough.  Bon Appetit.

That reminds me.  It’s time for lunch.

Latte, anyone?

Somewhere, life detoured down the rabbit hole.  I have reached the point of insanity where seeking tranquility in a gallon latte and black bottom cupcake seems reasonable.  The smell of the coffee covers the disturbing odor of sick livestock that clings to my boots.  The caffeine jittering through my veins addles my brain into the delusion that I can write. The chocolate euphoria pushes aside the guilt over the facts that I have no appointments today and therefore no money, and that my writing has thus far only succeeded in depriving my family of my company and my head of several brain cells.  Besides the warm blanket effect, the heat of the mug soothes the ache in my knuckles that is not, can’t possibly be, arthritis. 

I’m pondering moving into Peet’s.  I like the coffee; the chairs are reasonably comfortable; I can plug in my laptop, and no one asks “what are you doing, Mommy?  Why are you writing?”  Plus, it’s clean and has music that makes me feel smarter just by listening. 

On the con side of the list, I risk running into clients.  I hate seeing clients in public.  I have a strange mental disorder that makes it impossible for me to recognize people out of context.  I’m pretty sure I could crash into my husband in an unexpected location and not recognize him.  Most clients don’t understand this, nor do they grasp the fact that their horse is one of hundreds of patients.  Additionally, very few people understand that I don’t really enjoy discussing veterinary medicine in my free time.  (Except in a ranting, anecdotal sort of way.)  Then, there’s the whole middle of the day thing.  It’s not great advertising for a working veterinarian to be seen sitting at a laptop, swilling coffee in the middle of the day.  That scene pretty much answers the question everyone asks these days.  “So…are you guys keeping busy?”  I have learned to interpret this question and the accompanying worried look as, “we’re cutting back on everything, so we haven’t called you in a while, but we’re really hoping you’ll still be in business when we need you.”  Me too.   

In the meantime, I’m going to continue sipping my latte, writing to save my sanity, and hoping that Peet’s doesn’t start charging me rent.