The Middle

I try to fight the urge to be hip and non-conformist merely for the sake of refusing to follow fashion. If I needed a reminder, I found it the other day on Cracked.com, in a piece that elegantly and hilariously laid out for me the inherent ridiculousness of making choices solely on the basis that they are not mainstream. Some things that “everybody likes” are good, and everybody likes them for a reason.

I am, however, bothered by the homogeneity of a world in which The Middle is elevated, celebrated and often the only game in town. I like the soft center of a good oatmeal cookie, but the real sensual delight for me is in the edges with their crisp and concentrated essence. In restaurant offering, perfume, clothing, books and popular music these days, I see a pattern of sameness and safeness that undoubtedly comes from the need to survive in a tough economy, but which seems to leave the world all soft center with no crispy surprises.

I have always loved perfume, and the scents that attract me tend to be strong and not typically “pretty.” I love the sharpness of chypre, the surprise of masculine leather or tobacco note, or a dark and moody incense. I have noticed that all perfumes available in local stores smell the same to me these days; they are all sweet, inoffensive, and virtually indistinguishable from one another in their floral/vanilla/laundry soapiness. Perfumes that I loved in their original incarnation have been re-formulated to hew to the safe middle ground; Chanel’s Coco is now the lighter “Coco Mademoiselle,” and most of the beautiful, interesting Dior fragrances I used to love have been made over into crowd pleasers. Although I am not a drugstore perfume buyer, I did recently engage in a little sniff testing which revealed the not surprising fact that they all smell pretty much the same – like Christmas cookies with flowers in them.

According to an article in “Elle” magazine, mainstream perfumers have figured out the notes that are non-threatening and perceived as pleasant by most people; that’s what sells, and that’s what’s available at Macy’s and Walgreens. If I want to smell like something that arouses my senses and makes me feel powerful, sensual or simply like myself, I have to stalk the online outlets that sell vintage scents and the products of perfumers catering to those who do not wish to smell like Floral FusionGlade or Apple Mango Tango Gain. I do not want to smell like freshly baked cookies, spring flowers or fresh laundry. I want to smell like a Parisian prostitute who has tumbled out of bed and wandered into a cathedral redolent with incense, by way of the opulent leather seats of a vintage Rolls Royce. This is not about nonconformity for its own sake; it is a matter of self-expression and making life juicy.

I could go on about this forever; most movies are either predictable action thrillers or predictable love stories, most bestsellers are chick lit or police procedurals, most Top Forty songs involve idiotic lyrics and a smattering of auto-tuned Bieber or Spears, and most restaurants in this town serve dumbed-down and denatured versions of “Italian,” “Mexican” or “Chinese” food and/or a safe assortment of salad-with-chicken, burgers, and preternaturally huge platters of nachos. There are fringier options, but they are always fraught with difficulty, particularly in my neck of the woods. We had one art film house which went broke and folded, so there is Netflix. There are a few interesting, authentic restaurants in this town, but they struggle, and often close before we’ve had a chance to try them. Books and music are easier, but there are almost no independent booksellers in the college town that I live in. The Middle sells, and unless one lives in a city, The Middle is what’s available.

I am bitchy, arch, elitist, and probably many other things I can’t think of at the moment. I readily admit that. I have mellowed considerably through my years as a mother, an observer of humanity, and an appreciatrix of looking below the surface. I read the “Twilight” books, I have been known to enjoy a family dinner at Olive Garden, and I’ll readily admit that some bestsellers and blockbuster movies are popular precisely because they’re really, really excellent. A lot of the time, though, wading through the pillowy softness of the warm, sweet and safe Middle, I am longing for the disarming, potentially offensive wakeup call of all that is crisp and edgy. I so adore the bite of chypre scent, the crisp surprise of pig ear, and the tumble of thoughts at the end of a movie that raises more questions than it answers. Those are the edges where the sugar is a little burnt, but infinitely more interesting for its complexity.

Why Don’t You Like Me?

I could be wholesome

I could be loathsome

I guess I’m a little bit shy

Why don’t you like me?

Why don’t you like me without making me try?

-Mika, “Grace Kelly”

She is a tall, slender, imperiously elegant member of the Congregation, and she hates me. Well, at the very least she doesn’t like me very much. There is something in the way she looks at me, rather as if she had discovered the leavings of an unhealthy Great Dane on the bottom of her Ferragamo flat, something that summons the keenest pangs of the desire to please. I want a breakthrough, a redemption, some acknowledgement that I am good in some, small way. I would settle for a watery smile, but what I really want is that moment in a romance novel when the Guy She Hates from the Start but Who makes Her Feel All Tingly abandons his icy haughteur and admits that he is crazy about her. The walls come tumbling down, juices flow (so to speak) and there is usually a kiss. I want a breakthrough.

Yesterday was the Advent Tea, an annual event put on by a fleet of  women at the church in which I work. They did all the planning and cooking; I merely provided platters and made enough coffee and tea to fill Lake Michigan.

For a variety of reasons neither germane nor particularly interesting, I found myself needing to empty part of my gigantic 1940s coffee maker into a bucket so that I could make a new batch. As the steam from the coffee fogged my glasses,  I heard Her voice behind me: “What are you doing with that coffee?”

No one has ever asked me what I was doing with the coffee. In general, as long as they have it when they need it, they would prefer not to be in that particular loop. “Well,” I sputtered, “it’s complicated, but I was just-”

“Do you have any more regular?” she pointed a manicured finger at one side of the machine.

“I’m sorry, I don’t. That’s why I’m doing this. I can have some made in about five minutes, and I’d be happy to bring it to you, but I-”

“Never mind,” she waved briefly and dismissively “we’ll get some from another table.” I had clearly failed, failed spectacularly, and was most likely wasting coffee to boot. I was wasting coffee. I was in a bind, I had never assisted with that event, the demands turned out to be rather different than the organizers expected, and I had made a judgment call that it was acceptable to let a gallon of watery decaf die in order that ten better gallons might spring up, Phoenix-like, in its place.

After the Tea, the Cleanup Committee began the process of clearing the tables, wrapping up the centerpieces, distributing leftover cookies, and washing the dishes. As I climbed on a stool to clean out the inside of my antique coffee machine, I was thinking that my feet hurt, that the event had been a great success, and that I really loved the sweet, wise older women in their assorted Christmas sweaters. She slid into my peripheral vision. She was not wearing a Christmas sweater.

“Ann, what’s being done with those pots that are piled up in the kitchen? They need to be cleaned. They’re expensive pieces of equipment.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her, “they’re going to be recycled. The guys just haven’t taken them yet.”

“Those are perfectly good pots – why aren’t they being cleaned and used?” I was six years old, I had broken a vase. My cheeks were hot and I wanted to be rescued. I decided to go with disarming candor, which often works really well for me.

“We tried to clean them – my first week doing a lot of cooking here I wasn’t used to the stove and those pots have really thin bottoms. A couple of people tried to get them clean, but we decided since there were so many of them we could-”

“People could use those pots.” People could. They could use them as planters, or to hold umbrellas near the front door. They could not, under any circumstances use them as vessels in which to cook food in a licensed kitchen. I regret having destroyed them, but they came into the church kitchen around the time I learned to use a cup without handles, they served a long time, and I had, until that moment, felt okay about the fact that they would be recycled and lead another life.

“I, uhm, we-”

If you’re just throwing them away, may I take one to use at my cottage?”

“Yes” I managed, trying a smile. “That would be fine. Take as many as you can use.”

“Well I can’t possibly use more than one” she replied, as if I had suggested that she wear colored nail polish or do something whimsical in her garden. She walked away, leaving me to look at her erect, regal back as I sunk deeply into a thorough understanding of my failings. I had wasted coffee, wasted valuable equipment, and no matter how many people told me I was doing a great job, it was all smoke. I was a loser.

I’ll never know what I did to offend her. It may be my status as The Help, it may be my black nail polish or my lug-soled, lace up Granny in Combat boots. Possibly, it’s the fact that everything about her bespeaks elegant restraint and the refusal of excess, and everything about me says that I enjoy food, and drama, laughing too loud and talking too much. It may be the fact that she smells the need to please, and that I let her push my buttons while I shuck, jive, step and fetch.

Maybe, she’s just not very nice and I need to stop worrying about her. Do you think she’d like that?

 

 

Psych: Tales of Trauma

Just before Thanksgiving, the cooking questions started. Two extremely intelligent, competent women of my acquaintance were traumatized by culinary red alert situations -in one case, cooking a turkey, in the other, making roux. Both friends had, I believe, been placed on high alert by what I like to think of as Tales of Trauma. “I brined, it was too salty, I didn’t brine, I didn’t put the foil on in time, I basted, I didn’t baste, the timer thingie didn’t pop up, I browned my roux, I didn’t brown my roux, my roux was lumpy, my sauce didn’t thicken” etc. ad nauseum. I explained in a calm and level tone that there was no rocket science involved in either operation. I have brined, not brined, basted, not basted, tented and not tented, and the turkey is always pretty good. The only thing that really matters is that you have a meat thermometer to prevent the untimely deaths of family and friends. As for the roux, it always works if you follow the directions and whisk the lumps out. No terror required.

The Thanksgiving-related fear got me thinking about all the times that people have knowingly, and possibly gleefully frightened me about various things with Tales of Trauma. Dental work is a popular arena. I have had many root canals and had my wisdom teeth pulled over the years, and I have noticed that many folks have a story to tell about The Pain, The Vicodin, The Infections, and The Days Off Work. I know that bad things happen, but what is gained from telling someone bound to endure a root canal about the time that you/your spouse/your child/a guy from work had a botched procedure and ended up howling in pain in the middle of the night? Is it a kind of hazing, like law school or a fraternity? Does it give some strange satisfaction, or confer some invisible mantle of status? As it turns out, I have never required anything more than Aleve after a root canal, never had a bad result, and always felt rather better than I did before. I like telling people exactly that.

Women are victimized by Tales of Trauma regarding all manner of “female stuff” from mammograms to childbirth. Speculums too cold, doctors too rough, stirrups too humiliating and questions too embarrassing. It benefits no woman or girl to frighten her about medical examinations that are essential for maintaining health, and can be lifesavers. I do, of course, appreciate a gentle, compassionate physician or mammographer, but if I have a complaint I direct it to someone in a position to make a change rather than repeating my stories endlessly to those about to face the annual music. Because, seriously, why?! Why does anyone feel in any way better because they have bragging rights as Most Abused Pelvic Exam Recipient 2010?

Childbirth is, perhaps, the traditional apex of Tales of Trauma. Birth stories including minutes logged in labor, level of excruciating pain, episiotomies (ick), and epidurals administered too late are legion. Five seconds after my pregnancy was confirmed I found myself recalling, in crystalline detail, every story of morning sickness, pre-eclampsia, spinal taps, and all manner of painful and frightening possibilities that I had ever been told. (And if you grow up female, you have been told those stories, or at least overheard them, hundreds of times). As it turned out, I had a complicated pregnancy that featured pre-term labor, eight weeks of hospital bed rest and a preemie. I have made it my personal mission to tell every pregnant woman who asks that even with the “bad stuff,” I was not often miserable, and I had a beautiful, healthy baby. I can’t stop wondering, though, about the equally common choice to create a Lifetime movie in the presence of other women who may be haunted by the notion that pregnancy and childbirth are horrors that must be endured.

If someone asks a direct question because he knows that you have basted, had a root canal or worried through a battery of genetic tests during pregnancy, an honest and thorough answer is always warranted. It is compassionate, in fact, to share your experiences with a worried sort who is facing something unknown. Sometimes it’s incredibly comforting to know that you are not the only one who had raw turkey close to the bone, or those weird fake contractions.  There is a line, though, between sharing useful information (“dating is harder when you’re older, but I met and married somebody at 35 and I know it can be done”) and recounting Tales of Trauma calculated to cause stress and panic (“It’s awful out there – every guy I meet has something wrong with him and one just stole all my money and my Cartier watch”).

As is so often the case, I have no answers, and no solutions. Instead, I extend an invitation to join me in taking the pledge against telling Tales of Trauma. There’s so much really scary stuff in the world, why manufacture more?

 

Not Writing a Novel

I never write about writing; my aversion to discussing inspiration, mechanics, process, rules and editing is nearly pathological. I have never taken a creative writing course, belonged to a writing group or read much about writing aside from “Bird by Bird,” which terrified me so much that it sat by my bed for nearly three years before I forced myself to pick it up. (And was, I must say, richly rewarded for my courage). I am not afraid of criticism; when I write for money I can re-work a piece until my brain grows numb and I fear that if I have to think of one more way to say “attractive” or “exciting” I will explode, leaving tiny, frustrated shards of myself all over my office. I just don’t like to look at the man behind the curtain; writing has always been a kind of magic best left untamed and unexamined.

As part of this belief in myself as a unique and special snowflake, I have smugly bypassed Writer’s Block for my entire life. I am sympathetic, I smile with kindly condescension at those struggling desperately for a string of words, a paragraph, an idea that sets them in motion, but I’ve always got something in the works. There are so many things that light a spark for me, things read, seen, heard, felt and remembered, that my riches embarrass me. I could blog every day if I had time, writing enough short essays to paper Versailles. What I can’t do, it seems, is write a book.

Less than a year ago an agent approached me. She had read my work and wondered if I had ever thought of writing a book. I was ecstatic, validated, terrified and intimidated. It was The Opportunity of a Lifetime, and a chance to get past the half-a-novel-in-a-drawer stage. Yes, I said, yes I will, I can, and I want to and oh yes! (Apologies to James Joyce). She asked me to send her what I considered my “best stuff.” I was sure that she would be so dazzled by my existing work that she would write back and say, “You are the next Elizabeth Gilbert/Carolyn Knapp/Mary Karr. We’ll just put together a collection of your piercing, vivid, beautifully wrought essays and sell it to Harper Collins. Get your hair cut for the jacket picture.”

As it turns out, there is all this business stuff I didn’t know about. It’s hard to sell anything these days, and a memoir is unlikely to sell unless the writer has a “hook.” I do not have an alcoholic mother, an eating disorder, a tumultuous childhood in a gypsy caravan, or any other distinguishing pathos sufficient to interest readers of memoir. I brightly suggested the “I was snarky and cynical but now am mellow and wise” theme; I was told that it wasn’t very strong. I proposed a book based on the essays about my mother’s illness, which might appeal to (and help) others similarly situated; that was another Fail. She suggested fiction. I wept.

I tried all summer. I had a huge chunk of novel written years ago that I tried to re-work. It proved so difficult to mesh my current style and psyche with my vintage self that I gave up. I started other books and deleted them. I kept a notebook with ideas in it, all of which went into blog posts. I began to see blogging as a kind of literary crack that was giving me cheap highs while taking the resources I needed to do Real Writing. It came easily, I got feedback right away, and it made me feel good. Never mind that every insight, image and observation I had was being sucked into one post or another, never to be seen again. I was failing. I wept.

My writing time was limited, and I told myself stories about all the writers who had day jobs at the customs house or practicing medicine and managed to write novels. I would be disciplined, I told myself, I would get up at 5:00 every day and write for two hours or I would write a chapter a day or I would write 500 words. Four months later, there is no novel. There are folders on my desktop with names like “Old Book,” “Book Abt Hgh Schl Grl” and “Book.” In none of those folders are the contents particularly promising. I am panicked by the idea that I have to sustain something for hundreds of pages, keep it alive past 1000 words, draw fully realized characters, say something meaningful, and think about the same piece of writing for months. I fear the lack of feedback and forsaking the high of completion and praise. I say things like “I don’t really write fiction” but I am a terrible, terrible coward who really has no idea whether I can write fiction or not. I write what’s easy, and what gives me instant gratification.

It is National Novel Writing Month, and I’m not. (Writing a novel). I am thinking about it though, wondering whether I can invent characters and stories informed by my thoughts and experiences. I have a much lighter load at work after today and it will last for at least two months. I could try again to get around this strange kind of writer’s block in which I can produce essays with the greatest of ease but not get past the second page of a novel without wanting to flee. I could stick to it, make myself keep going when it seems pointless, holding my best thoughts close and saving them instead of compulsively squandering them on the quick high of a blog post. We’ll see.

It was a dark, and stormy night.

Call me Ishmael.

All my life, I have pretended that I had an audience waiting breathlessly to see what I would do next.

 

The Empty Cup

Sometimes I wish I wrote under an alias. Sometimes, no, often I have things to say, to spill, to pour out like so much distilled darkness, but I can’t allow myself that indulgence. Those things remain close, fermenting, growing, taking root until they push their way out as tears, impatience and a terrible restlessness. There are words; I say them to myself, chanting them like a mantra. I tell myself everything will be all right, that I’ve been down this road before and returned chastened but wiser. Comfort is what I long for, and I look for it in servings too large, naps too long, television and magazines too mindless. I listen to music so bleak and evocative that it brings tears, thinking that it will be some kind of purge and leave me blank and ready to start again.

It will come, as always, the first tingling of excitement about life poking up from beneath my despair like the bravest green shoots of March. It might be a nail polish color or a novel; I’ve been revived by something so minor as the sight of a copper-green leaf riding the currents past my window. It will come.

For today, my cup is empty. I will do as expected, because I always do, being a good girl of longstanding, but there will be that pressure threatening from behind my eyes, that desire to retreat and lick my wounds in private. It’s part of life, this empty cup, and one best filled not with frantic consumption of food, whiskey or entertainment but with the passage of days and the willingness to be still and present. It seems so painfully deliberate, and deliberately painful, this patient suffering, but I’ve learned something after all these years.

It

Will

Come.

 

 

 

So It Isn’t “Top Chef…”.

As of today, I have had my job cooking at a large, Protestant church for five months. I had imagined it as a kind of “Top Chef: Church.”  In reality it tends to be more like a combination of “Upstairs, Downstairs” and some kind of circus in which animals are replaced with small children and the high-wire is represented by gigantic pots of boiling soup. I still love it, I still look forward to going in, but there is very little preparation of truffle-scented foam.

When I took this job, I was at a point in my life as a home cook that allowed me to watch “Top Chef,” “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Iron Chef” with a certain smug and informed confidence. It was, for me, like watching a sport that I could actually play. “He’s going to go for a sous vide!” I would announce to my spectacularly disinterested family. “Those scallops are overcooked – I can tell from here!” I knew the secrets of  roux that didn’t taste raw and flour-y, how to poach tender and flavorful chicken, and (my equivalent of the Hail Mary Pass) how to make croissant, doughnuts and bagels from scratch. I could party with a spice rack like nobody’s business and present a finished product that spoke of Mumbai, Phuket or Puglia. In the same way that I had lived my childhood years as Dorothy Gale, Jo March and Anne Shirley, I was hitting middle age as Fantasy Chef, in the mold of Anthony Bourdain. Not French and effete, my secret self had tattoos, a pierced nose, Batali-bright cooking shoes, a foul mouth and a favorite late-night watering hole served marrow and tripe soup.

As it turns out, I have not lulled so much as a single snail to eternal rest in a bath of garlic butter. There is no sous vide machine in the church basement, nor is there much call for truffle oil, Hawaiian sea salt, lemongrass or chutney. I cook for families, and not the kind of families that live in Manhattan and take their precocious children out for Dim Sum on Sundays. I am cooking for children who eat nothing “mixed” or otherwise arcane, for elderly folk who can’t tolerate spice like they used to, and everyone in the middle. I have a tight budget. I am, despite my fantasies, completely untrained, and I sometimes make awful mistakes based on a combination of optimism and ignorance. To wit: the scalloped potatoes that failed to “gel” and turned into potato soup, the grilled cheese for 100 people on the griddle that ranged from “torch” to “touchable” in the space of a square inch, and the broccoli cheddar soup that doomed four pots to spend eternity wearing an immobile scrim of vulcanized dairy products.

I am learning, all the time, but it is clear that the work I do is not like that of a restaurant chef working on a line and searing pan after pan of perfect quail breasts; it is far closer to catering or cooking for a school, hospital or all-you-can-eat establishment. Quantities are big, food has to be able to endure the steam table, and the lack of individual choice for diners means hitting the “happy medium” every time. I am not Anthony Bourdain; I am Chris Farley in a hair net. I work with volunteers who are concerned that I will trigger the apocalypse by putting salad dressing on the table in its original containers, and I cook for funerals, cake auctions, parenting classes, and women’s’ club teas. I know who likes Earl Grey, and which kids don’t eat any vegetables.

Last week there was a line dancing class for senior citizens, which required me to hear “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” approximately 62 times, and a tornado warning that brought a parade of sleep-pinked babies from the second floor preschool into my basement to ride out the storm. Yesterday, my kitchen was the hub of a voting precinct and I spent the day dodging volunteers who wandered in to get a snack, or to chat with me despite those white cords hanging out of  my ears, and the fact that I was juggling 350-degree pans the size of Rhode Island. It is a circus of humanity, leaving me with a head full of dancing, white-haired ladies in matching sweat suits and ironically detached poll challengers wiping Frito dust on their tweed jackets.

There is no swearing (well, not much) no tattoo, no piercings and no after-hours drinking in this cooking life. There are spectacular failures, retorts bitten back, and the odd, impotent rage when things don’t go according to plan. I’m thinking that’s all stuff that every working person deals with at one time or another. On the other hand, the time-worn, broad and generous hand of Fate, I get to put on a show at least once a week, create something from nothing, get a round of applause, and come home rich with stories, experiences and satisfaction. If I were really on “Top Chef” I would have been instructed to “pack my knives and go” the first time the scalloped potatoes left the kitchen in soup bowls. In my kitchen, the glass may be full of Church Lady Punch instead of Malbec, but it is always, always half full.

 

Filler

The world is full of filler, for better or worse. There is “good” filler, like the kind of paper one uses to give purpose to a three-ring binder, and “bad” filler like the slimy stuff injected into lunch meat, the exhausted lettuce and weary tomatoes insinuated into innocent sandwiches, and those packing peanut things which I loathe with a vengeance unseemly in a Buddhist. (My mantra: don’t judge the peanuts, do not prefer that the peanuts stop flying out of the box in obedience to some unpleasant law of physics, just be with the vacuum cleaner and stop desiring the use of bubble wrap).

There is also a kind of filler invented, I’m pretty sure, by my friend Kate and me in college. It is a more romantic, fanciful variety of space-occupant and falls into the category of the good stuff. It is similar, conceptually, to a crush, but can be distinguished by its wild, self-conscious improbability. There are “boyfriends” who are real, and can lend you a sweater, “crushes” who are aspirational but usually pursuable, and “fillers” who give one an object of fantasy and plotting without so much as a gossamer strand of possibility. This kind of filler, we reasoned, gives a girl something to think about when there is no reasonable object of affection, someone to spot in the dining hall, and about whom to invent small internal dramas devoid of the real, passionate fire of True Love (or True Lust).

Kate and I both had filler objects, although she needed them less often, being a tall, striking blonde with the kind of illusory hauteur that drives men wild. She immediately snagged the best looking transfer student in our little tribe, and spent much of her remaining time at Oberlin involved with live men, or gently and diplomatically fending off the raft of would-be suitors drawn to her preppy, long-limbed grace I had a series of “boyfriends” who were both gay and living in other states; I might have done better pursuing my filler.

One of my earliest Filler Projects involved Guillaume, a French national who wore the same clothes every day, chain smoked something filterless, and spoke only to French majors although he spoke flawless, if charmingly accented English. He was not nice. Although I never really got close enough, to know, I now imagine that he must have smelled heavily of smoke, unwashed body and quite possibly damp, old books. We never exchanged a word, although I took three years of French in high school and could have carried on a lively conversation about the location of the train station, or lines from “Le Petite Prince.” I was over it after less than a month of stalking, dreaming and imagining a kinder, gentler Guillaume. Plus, I developed a real crush on Josh, who wanted to spend hours in a little room playing jazz for me so that I would learn to love it

Years later, in law school, I continued to “fill,” despite the existence of a live, heterosexual boyfrend. This time, he had the disadvantages of being stupid and dishonest and living in another state, which left lots of space on my dance card. During my third year, when I was a “voluntary defender” and represented minor felons in deepest, darkest Dorchester, I became fixated on a pockmarked public defender who wore cheap suits, stained ties and a wedding ring. If I squinted, he looked a little like Edward James Olmos. I imagined him not as a hack who couldn’t get a job with a firm and resorted to showing up on Court Appointment Day, but as a champion of the downtrodden. His wife undoubtedly failed to understand him. I could hook him up with Brooks Brothers and a good dry cleaner, and in no time we would be whispering hot things to each other in the attorney-prisoner interview room. He got me through a tough couple of months, and then the Real Boyfriend reappeared with apologies, although he never actually got any smarter.

These days, Kate and I are both married-with-children. She continues to be slender, blonde and beautiful; I continue to be less so. I have not discussed the “filler” concept with her again, although I’m quite sure that she remembers our taxonomy of Boyfriends, Crushes, and Filler, and the vital role played by the latter. As for Guillaume and The Unnamed Court-Appointed Defense Attorney from Dorchester MA, I hope they have gone on to live long, happy and fulfilled lives, and that both have discovered the benefits of clean clothes. They will always have a place in my heart. Well, maybe slightly to the left of my heart, in one of those tubes or chambers or whatever I’ve got in there…….

 

The Unimagined Perils of Majoring in English

In the midst of doing the “Times” crossword, I came upon this clue: “A pressing device.” Four letters. I had only an “I,” which was the first letter. My mind, steel trap that it is, flew immediately to devices of the literary sort – “Irony” was too long, “Pathetic Fallacy” was far too long, and didn’t start with an “I,” and so it went, through “Imagery,” “Image,” and “Idiot” which could, maybe, in Medieval Literature,  be a way of referring to a “fool” character brought in to illuminate the foibles of the protagonist. I was sweating faintly, running through every literary device I had ever learned. If you are an English major, you often fail to see the forest for the tree imagery.

Going back and working the rest of the puzzle, I was able to add letters. “I-r-o.” It had to be something about irony, maybe some obscure Greek form of the word. Maybe there was a kind of character called an “iron” who went about High Dunsinane, or hung out near the River Floss dispensing ironies. I did not have a computer handy, and I couldn’t Google it, but I was pretty sure that was what it was. Sure enough, with the realization that “reviving that loving feeling” was “Necromancy,” I got my final “N.”

My mother, also an English major type, was sitting on the couch across from me, reading the “Style” Section.

“Hey mom,” I said, breaking a cardinal family rule of newspaper reading. (That rule, in case you come from a family so lawless as to be without a Print Journalism Rubric, is that one never interrupts another person’s reading unless flames are licking at the edges of the curtains).

“Hmm?” she replied without looking up.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘iron’ as a literary device? It’s in the puzzle, and it seems weird that I never learned it in school.” I had her; she lowered the paper to her lap.

“What’s the clue?”

“‘A pressing device.’  I thought it might have something to do with moving the plot forward, because of the ‘pressing’ thing, but the answer I get is ‘iron,’ and I’m pretty sure that’s right.”  She regarded me balefully over the rims of her glasses.

“It’s an iron, Annie” she informed me, “the kind you use on your clothes. It’s used to press things.”

Where there had been rabbit ears, there was a duck’s bill as the perspective spun and resettled.

“Oh” was my snappy response. “Yeah.” She resumed her reading, and I put down the puzzle in favor of a nap, mentally exhausted, just another casualty of a liberal arts education.

 

Image Stolen from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Duck-Rabbit_illusion.jpg

 

The Gift of a Mix Tape

A young colleague recently asked if I thought he could be as cool as I am when he grows up. The question elicited both hot-cheeked pride and the urge to laugh; I was, for many years, the most resolutely, hopelessly un-cool person in the tri-state area. My clothes were wrong, I tried too hard, and I was never really up on pop culture, let alone ahead of the curve and into the snarky and well-guarded province of “hip.” After collecting myself, I smiled (ironically) and told him that I was sure he could become stunningly, mind-blowingly cool before he hit 35. I offered him the magic talisman that long ago steered me away from Billy Joel and “Top Gun,” and towards the world of art films, Kerouac and Ramones T-shirts: the gift of a mix tape.

For something the size of a panini, mix tapes (and later, CDs) have given me a great education. The first one was a gift from Lisa, a friend in college, who was the coolest person I had ever met. She wore skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors, had a boyfriend named Slash, or Lurch or something like that, and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge not only of the most recent bands on the horizon, but of vintage aural fabulousness. She was not “cool” like the candy-boxy pretty high school girls who had mastered the flawless construction of a Farrah “do;” she was an effortless, un-self conscious magnet for all things outside the box. While I was (unsuccessfully) pursuing a guy named Kermit, she made me a mix tape with all of the song titles and artists written on the paper liner in her striking, back-slanted hand, included “Human Fly” and “Jungle Hop” by The Cramps, “Holiday” by the Bee Gees, “Bowling Green” by The Everly Brothers and “Rockaway Beach” by the Ramones. She included “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” by Herman’s Hermits, but wrote on the liner “Mrs. Graham, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter – Kermit The Frog.” How could I fail to love such a gift?

This music was life changing; I had always felt uneasy with the frantic energy of The Pointer Sisters and their “Neutron Dance,” and the drippy, sentimental ballads about soaring eagles lifting us up where we belonged. Lisa’s carefully curated mix was made solely to speak to my soul, to offer me the tastiest hooks, and to transport me with lyrics that seemed written for my sore heart. By virtue of The Rule of Hipster Transference (look it up) the mix also gave me a first glimpse into the world of music beyond classical and Top Forty. I lost the tape at some point, but I remember every single song, and the sheer pleasure of filling my head with an exquisite, musical poem written just for me.

Years later, I came into possession of another mix tape. It was also a kind of poetic assemblage, with well-chosen and carefully ordered songs replacing the words and images that are the writer’s materials. My closest friend in Boston, who I believed I was dating (although I was not), had a tape that was made for another female friend by a man who was in love with her. She was not in love with him (at least not any more), and in the process of Ritual Ex Obliteration she offered our mutual friend the tape because it was just too good to throw away. We listened to it together, endlessly; it was a strange, voyeuristic glimpse into a message of love that we were never meant to overhear. It had a few not-so-great songs, but it also introduced me to The Dead Kennedys, Bjork, Sinead O’ Connor and Donald Fagen.

That mix, the naked, desperate attempt to use songs to revive the corpse of love, was a powerful lesson in the realities of relationships. It also reinforced the notion that a play list could send a message, and that when one’s own words failed or seemed inadequate; there was another way to say  “Come On Baby, Light My Fire,” “So Happy Together,” or “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Anymore.” I still have that cassette; it lives in a box on my dresser along with a lipstick that belonged to my grandmother and the journalism prize from eighth grade. Since I no longer have a cassette player, it has assumed the status of Holy Relic.

There were other mix tapes, less important to my development as an insightful (and modest) hipster, and I have made many of my own over the years. I have chosen songs to send messages of attraction, confusion, and the rage of a woman scorned. I have made themed mixes from “winter” to “food,” and I have assembled songs simply because I am in love with them and want to share them with everyone I know like some latter day Johnny Appleseed spreading my personal taste throughout the land. Today, long past the pain of turgid hookups and breakups, I will make a mix CD for my young friend. The culling of just the right songs, the re-ordering, replacing and fine-tuning will absorb me completely, and keep me from the laundry, the raking, and other pedestrian concerns. I will be creating, and continuing the music-sharing tradition that has, like a great poem or sculpture, opened my mind and shown me plaints, pleasures and experiences outside of my own small sphere.

Plus, I’m cool like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Dinner

I am keenly aware of the fact that millions of people (and let’s be honest – most of them are women) face down dinner time with a mixture of dread, annoyance and resignation. Something has to be for dinner, and unless one in in possession of household staff, or willing to feed the family an endless stream of Chicken McNuggets and Stuffed Crust pizzas, dinner must be recreated in some form on an almost daily basis. Word: it is not a single, tiny bit easier if you cook for a living. In my case it just means that I have to please two sets of people every week, instead of one.

In the home kitchen, making dinner requires that there be food in the house, and that the available food be susceptible to transformation into something the family will eat. Setting aside legitimate food allergies to gluten, tree nuts, dairy and the leaves of wood-stemmed plants, there are matters of preference. My husband dislikes nothing much besides casseroles, water chestnuts and meat with red fruit. That’s pretty easy. My stepdaughter liked only processed foods and pork chops, which limited my repertoire for close to a decade, and my son currently dislikes pasta with red sauce (!), meatloaf, seafood, and most things that do not appear to have come directly from a paper bag and/or a cardboard sheath adorned by a clown, a king or the repulsively freckled Wendy. They do like spices, curries, and stir fries, but only if there are visible pieces of animal protein and no suspicious leaves or twigs. I like things many things, including lentils, tofu, brown rice, sprouts and yogurt, but t should be clear by now that I cannot serve this particular family a lentil-brown rice-cheddar loaf with a tangy yogurt sauce.

Enter the magazine recipe, with its glossy monthly promise to give me the goods on “Quick Meals Your Family Will Love!” They do not know my family, but I don’t ever seem fully to realize that before I try again. I believe that the editorial staffs of these magazines live in a world in which children crave nothing so much as arugula and salmon, and the men folk subsist on portions the size of a postage stamp and have a preoccupation with maintaining their 32-inch waists. Here in the Midwest, there are pockets of Pollan-following organic gardeners who delight in nothing so much as sitting down to a plate of barley risotto and butternut squash dumplings, but none of those people live in my house. The people in my house like meat and cheese and would subsist joyously on a diet of hot wings, burgers, pizza and the odd Panini. Flipping through a magazine’s week of menus and recipes rife with grilled Mahi Mahi and edamame puree, I frequently experience an acutely painful intermingling of hope and bitter, certain doom.

Last night, eternal sucker that I am, I made a recipe from “Cooking Light” for something called “Tex-Mex Confetti Pizza.” It seemed promising – it was a “pizza” involving pizza dough, and the ingredients were within prescribed limits: cherry tomatoes, corn, black beans and Queso Fresco, with a little hot, smoked paprika and olive oil. I thought it sounded wonderful. It was pretty, with the colorful ingredients scattered artistically over the crust, and I allowed myself a little fantasy: the three of us were sitting around the kitchen table discussing Sam’s recent visit to an art festival in a neighboring town, and as we debated the merits of post-modernism and Sam’s burgeoning preference for figural art, we would all savor our healthy, vegetarian dinner. In this dream, my ill-assorted dishes had transformed themselves into hand-thrown stoneware and the cat wasn’t on the table. It was a dreamy dream, and so real that I could feel the heft of the unique oatmeal-colored plates and hear the Stravinsky wafting from the living room.

What happened was that Sam was having the kind of gigantic sulk that inevitable follows a sleepover, and he was insisting that he needed a crutch because he had injured his foot. As he explained with increasing volume that it wasn’t worse because he had been skateboarding all day, that an Aleve wouldn’t make it better, and that we DIDN’T care what happened to him, I took the pizza out and called everyone to dinner. Sam being crippled, I took a piece to him, which he rejected with a dismissive shake of the head. “Not hungry” he informed me as he chewed on a Tootsie Roll. Rob took a large serving, ate some, and said nothing.

“What do you think?” I asked, as I always do.

“I don’t hate it,” he said pleasantly. I tried some and thought it was pretty good. “Is this mozzarella?” he inquired. I saw an opening.

“No, it’s Queso Fresco, you know, the kind of cheese they use on everything from the Taco truck. It’s really authentic, and I like it because it’s kind of sharp and it makes this taste really good without adding a lot of salt.”

“Oh.” He said. “I thought it needed salt.”

I love them both, I really do. Some day, though, I am going to make some ecstasy-inducing concoction of oysters, beef cheeks, fava beans, truffles, faro, broccoli rabe and dragon fruit, and someone will say “you have created a haunting symphony of flavors. I will never taste its equal.”

In the mean time, I will try to remember that the allure of the recipes on the glossy pages is a false Shangri La, and that the real meat and potatoes of making my family happy at dinner time is mostly…meat and potatoes.