The F Words: Ally Kirkpatrick

We have an exciting treat today in F Words land, folks. One of The Equals Project's newest contributors, the ridiculously overtalented and supercool Ally Kirkpatrick, is here to talk about being a lady and an eater (and an emerging cook). Her blog, The Green Cabin Year, is a chronicle of her life in a teeny little house in rural Virginia. She didn't always live the bucolic life, though---she just recently moved from Brooklyn, where she worked as a barista while writing the nights away. I have to say that I am seriously psyched about her joining our family here at Equals, and I think you will be, too. Tell us a bit about your day job. For the last ten years I’ve pretty much been a professional dishwasher. You could also say I was a barista, too, since I made cappuccinos and espressos part of the time. Dishwashing was half the work, so I got pretty good at that, too. It’s a useful skill, I think, to be able to bang out a huge bus tub of dirty dishes really quickly and effectively. Every coffee shop or cafe I ever worked at (eight different places between Boston, DC and New York), washing dishes was an important part of the job. City cafes get really slammed. Coworkers will like you if you can wash the hell out of some pint glasses, and the customers like seeing you hustle because you get them their iced latte faster.

Sometimes it was good. Sometimes I really hated it. Like when I worked at this one place in the East Village that had terribly steep stairs that would get wet and slippery with each load brought up and down to the sanitizer. I totally busted my ass one time, falling down the steps one at a time like “duh dunk, duh dunk, duh dunk.” I just sat at the bottom for a minute absorbing the reality of what had just happened, thinking “So, this is my life, I guess. This was the most exciting part of me week . . .” then I got up and washed a bunch of lipstick-stained demitasses.

But I’m making it sound worse than it was . . . It was mostly, like 98% of the time, an absolutely wonderful job. Every cafe I worked at had fantastic staff members and regular customers. People I’ve met through washing dishes and pulling shots have become my closest friends. Some of my regulars from the coffee shop came to my wedding a few years ago. Some of my best friends I met over sudsy dishwater.

That said, I’m glad I don’t work full time in a coffee shop anymore. I’m still washing dishes, but now it’s as a kitchen assistant for food writer Cathy Barrow. It’s the best job ever. During the cooking classes Cathy teaches I wash dishes and listen in as she gives instruction. It’s a much more interesting situation than when I was working in coffee shops. Now as I’m washing dishes I get to learn all about cooking, canning, pasta making, etc. I’m learning a lot. Before I would just binge on muffins in the mop closet waiting for the dishes to come out of the sanitizer. I kinda used food to cope with not loving my job. Or maybe it’s that I loved my job, but just wanted more out of life. I wanted to be a writer, and no shameful mop closet muffing inhaling can address that void. I’m still cleaning the hell out some dishes. But I get to learn new things and I have much more time to write. I also get to take home lots of delicious food.

How did you learn to cook? I really don’t know how to cook. I know how to follow a recipe. I know some basic techniques. But as far as actual cooking, as far as being a real home cook, I’m not there yet. I’m trying to learn how to make one big meal instead of all these disconnected spazzy little meals. Does that make sense? “One big meal?" For example, I made scones yesterday. It took me two hours. Then all I ate all day was scones. I felt like crap, obviously, and I never want to make scones again. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I’m trying to learn how to eat. Cooking is the easy part. I know how to season and taste and adjust. What I’m figuring out now is how to do that in my mind, working towards following my wants and hungers and then interpreting those feelings, translating them into plans for a meal.

Do you prefer to cook alone, or with friends or family? I love cooking with my husband Jake. He cooks like he’s dancing, except he doesn’t dance. If he were a dancer his cooking would be like ballet. He’s very graceful in the kitchen, but has a lot of energy and expression. I like working with him because of this. I stay out of the way a bit and just watch, follow his lead, help with one specific thing (chop this, stir that.) It’s always best when one person is in directing the meal, I think, that way you know who’s calling the shots, who’s choreography you’re minding.

With my mom, I love being in the kitchen with her, too. My husband makes things up as he goes, depending on what he has in the fridge that day. My mom, on the other hand, is a big fan of cookbooks and follows recipes more closely. This means that it’s better for us to work on separate tasks if we’re in the kitchen together. She’s knows where she is in her process, I know where I am... with her it’s more like a line dance. We’re in step with each other but on different planes.

Then there’s Cathy. Working in Cathy’s kitchen is just amazing. It’s different than cooking with anyone else I’ve ever cooked with because there’s this childlike wonder that washes over me every time she brings up a favorite dish she makes, or every time she sends me to the pantry for some special jar of something.

I should also really enjoy cooking by myself. I put on Beyoncé or Robin and gyrate around the kitchen like a moron and my dog just looks at me like he’s concerned for my life.

What's your favorite thing to make? Coffee. My favorite thing to make is, and will forever be, coffee. Espressos, cappuccinos, macchiatos, cortados, pour-overs. All of it. I love coffee the way people love wine. I love the story of each coffee: where it came from, how it was processed and roasted, how it tastes in different preparations. Maybe I’ll grow to love making food one day, but for now I suck at it too badly to find peace and enjoyment out of the process. I think because I’ve been making coffee for so long and competing in barista competitions and such that I get a lot of pleasure out of the ritual and the process of brewing coffee.

If you had to choose one cuisine to eat for the rest of your life, which would it be? What cuisine would you say belongs to Deborah Madison? I want to eat Deborah Madison Cuisine.

What recipe, cuisine or technique scares the crap out of you? Anything involving shellfish, because I’m very allergic. Also, recipes that call for hot peppers. Not because I don’t like eating them, but because I always worry I’m going to rub my eyes by accident while prepping them and end up with stinging, watery eyes for the rest of the afternoon.

How do you think your relationships with your family have affected your relationship to food and cooking? Most recently my relationship with my family has made me more interested in foraging. Pawpaws, morel mushrooms, black walnuts, fiddle heads. These are all things my husband and I have been finding on my parents property in Virginia. We just moved here in this past spring and I found myself obsessed with foraged foods. It’s trendy right now, I guess, but I got into it because of my dad, who is possibly the least trendy person in the universe (don’t worry, he won’t read this.) He spends a lot of time in the woods as a hunter and told me about all these hot spots for morel mushrooms up in the hills. I also learned to butcher my first deer this year because of him. That was a relationship to my food I hadn’t experienced before. My husband and I were in the driveway of my parent’s suburban home with this deer my dad had shot that morning laid out on a card table. We had this beautiful deer before us, and we didn’t know what to do with it. So we used my dad’s ipad and learned how to process it step by step from YouTube. It was an exhausting experience, both physically and emotionally, but it was an interesting connection to food – seeing the whole deer-to-venison process – and it made me more mindful about my meat consumption. I still eat meat, but I’m edging further and further away from animal products. You can’t butcher a deer and not feel awe and respect for the animal. I felt a lot of sadness, too, so I think I need to figure out how that needs to impact my eating and cooking habits.

Even today, home cooking is strongly associated with women's traditional place in the family and society. How do you reconcile your own love of the kitchen with your outlook on gender roles? There was an article on Propeller that I read recently by Mary Rechner that addressed this issue in a way that was really meaningful to me. I want to write fiction. If I worry about food all the time then there may not be space for writing fiction in my life. On a personal level I reconcile my love of the kitchen by having a fiercer love for private writing time in my studio. Let me mention that I don’t actually have a writing studio… but you get the idea. My kitchen and my (imaginary) studio are two places I make sure I spend a certain amount of time each day. I want to think about writing and ideas two thirds of the time. One third of the time I want to be canning some jam or stuffing my face with scones.

But on a larger level I’m completely perplexed and can’t reconcile it at all and I feel very worried about it. I’m totally confused on this issue and don’t know what to think. In the meantime I’m reading Propeller polemics and Emily Matchar’s blog New Domesticity [Meg: Me, too!] and thinking “Right on! Fuck canning and baking pretty tarts! It’s pointless domestic posturing!” but then at the same time as I say that I’m canning and baking pretty tarts and not working at all on a short story.

Tell us a bit about the recipe you're sharing. When did you first make it, and why? What do you love about it? The recipe I’m sharing is for fresh Sriracha from Food52. I made it for the first time this summer and I love it because it tastes good on everything. Wear gloves and don’t rub your eyes!

Fresh Sriracha By edamame2003, republished with permission from Food52 1/2 pound red Fresno chiles, coarsely chopped 4 garlic cloves 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 cup distilled white vinegar 2 tbs. palm sugar

Visit Food52 for the full (delicious and surprisingly simple) recipe.

Looking Forward: Hello, Neighbor.

It was a Friday night. My friend Ben was visiting from out of town, and we’d made plans to go out to eat in my neighborhood. As we walked, I listed dinner options---Thai, Korean, Italian, Japanese---but it wasn’t long before I realized I’d lost my audience. Half a block behind me, a wide-eyed Ben stood transfixed in front of the window of a neighborhood barbershop, one I’d passed many times before but to which I’d never paid much attention. “Let’s go here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, incredulous.

“Here,” he said. “Let’s go here. They’re watching the Pacquiao fight. Let’s join them.” Then, in response to my blank stare: “Pacquiao’s a boxer.”

Still several yards down the street, I proceeded to list the thousand-and-one reasons I thought this was a crazy idea. It would be rude, I insisted, to assume that this group wanted guests---judging from the music and the laughter that was coming from the shop, they seemed to be having a wonderful time as it was, without us. We weren’t invited, we’d never met---therefore we’d be intruding. And, I huffed, it was getting late. I was starving.

“We can do whatever you want after the fight, I promise,” Ben said. “Please can we do this? It’ll be fun. These people are your neighbors.” He paused. “Afterward, it’s your call, I swear. Anything you want. We can eat ice cream and watch ‘Father of the Bride’ if that’s what sounds good to you.”

Ten minutes later, I found myself seated on a bench in the front of the barbershop, in the center of a flurry of activity. Men placed bets in Spanish, swiveling in leather barber chairs. Couples salsa-danced to music on an old boombox in the back corner. Beer bottles were opened with cans of hairspray. Ben had joined some sort of raucous conversation with a cluster of Pacquiao fans; meanwhile, an old man pacing the front of the shop graciously attempted to explain to me the complexities of boxing. A girl in the corner about my age offered me a shy smile, a gesture of camaraderie.

“I told you this would be fun,” said Ben.

He was right. It was.

That was almost a year ago. I’ve passed the shop many times since then and have peeked in on occasion, but the barbers’ backs are often turned, or they’re too focused on their work to notice passersby in the street. Last week, however, I ran into the owner on the sidewalk outside a local bodega two blocks from my apartment.

I gave a cautious wave, thinking he might not recognize me; instead, I was met with a giant hug and an ear-to-ear smile. Despite our language barrier, we exchanged pleasantries: we were doing well, enjoying life, working hard as usual. Before saying goodbye, I told him I’d stop by again soon to watch another fight, punching the air awkwardly in a poor attempt to mime boxing. “Yes, yes,” he replied, holding me at arm’s length. Then he did something I’ll never forget.

“Look at you,” he said, beaming, “You’re wonderful.”

All my life, the cities I’ve lived in have felt like temporary homes. Growing up, my family moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu, and I knew that Santa Cruz, where I lived for four years in college, wasn’t a city I’d remain in after graduation. Now, though, for the first time, I’m beginning to get a sense of what it might feel like to be a part of a community. To settle in. To make a place my own.

And I’m realizing I don’t just want to exist as part of my neighborhood---I want to know it. More importantly, I want to know the people I share it with---and not just the ones whose lives look like mine. It makes me so happy to be able to say hello every day to the man across the street who feeds the pigeons every morning, to the bearded bartender next door, to the crew of barbers down the street, and the dreadlocked tattoo artist around the corner.

Two years ago, when I lived deep in a hipster-dominated pocket of Bushwick, someone plastered a sign over a chainlink fence that read, you are not your neighborhood.

Perhaps not. But aren’t neighborhoods largely a reflection of the men and women and children---the barbers, bartenders, artists, hippies, hipsters, and everything in between---who populate them?

We may only know each other well enough to smile and wave and say hello, but this makes us more than strangers.

This makes us neighbors. And together, we are our neighborhood.

Make Down

I'm far from knowledgeable when it comes to other parts of the country, but here in the south makeup seems to be a necessity. Little girls grow up dreaming about the day when they are allowed to imitate their mothers' daily ritual of applying lipstick, blush, and eye shadow. The youngsters turn into teens and start experimenting with heavy eyeliner, brightly colored lips, and many other trendy facial fashions. Beauty pageants, high school proms, and date nights all call for an hour or so nose dive into the make up bag. Before long, the adult version doesn't feel like herself in public without at least a puff of powder. Neither right nor wrong, somehow I skipped right over this entire phase of girlie-hood. Being almost thirty years old means that my skin is far from perfected porcelain. Like most, my face is dotted with freckles, sun spots, the occasional blemish, a couple of scars, and a fair amount of wrinkles that, at times, I wish I could erase. But when I really think about it, those unique characteristics decorating my skin are  just minor details. Details that tell my own personal story: freckles because I have fair skin, sun spots because my family enjoys vacationing at the beach and we forget to reapply sunscreen, blemishes because I get stressed out or eat too much chocolate, scars because I was an active kid, forehead creases caused by being confused or angry at times, and those deep parenthesis wrinkles between my cheeks and mouth because I've laughed a lot during my lifetime.

At this point, I wouldn't exactly know where to start the process of buying cosmetics. Besides modifying my features with a light brushing of mascara and lip gloss, I even bared it all in front of my husband and guests at our wedding. Don't get me wrong, there are many times when I look around at all the flawless faces strolling the streets, and my mind starts to wonder: "That shadow really makes her eyes pop, would it do the same for mine?" or "Her skin looks impeccable with that powder, should I invest?" or "I wonder if I would look younger and fresher with a bit of concealer?"

But in my world, being able to roll out of bed and shamelessly face the world (with under-eye bags and all) within five minutes of placing my feet on the ground trumps everything else.  I could probably just chalk this all up to the fact that, in general, I'm lazy when it comes to presenting myself.  However, I prefer to think I'm sharing and celebrating my life experiences one sun spot and blemish at a time.

Why Do We Live Where We Live?

Growing up, I always felt trapped by my surroundings.  Why had my parents chosen to raise me in the dry, geriatric filled desert of Tucson, Arizona instead of Paris, where I would’ve learned charmingly French traits like bike riding with a baguette or tying a scarf in several hundred different ways?  Why had my dad moved us to the agricultural hub of California, rather than Manhattan, where I would’ve become street-wise and savvy, ready to take on the world with my fast-talking charm and quick wit? As I’ve come to a point in my life where I get to personally choose where I live, I place a high premium on the cities that drew me as a child.  I’ve now lived in Berlin, San Francisco, and New York, with my recent move to London adding to my tour of world cultural hubs.  I spend four times as much on rent than my father does.  I’ve become used to taking over an hour to get from one place to another, walking a block, hopping on two buses and subwaying to meet a friend out.  I have not, since I left my parent’s house, had a backyard to call my own.  I compete constantly:  for jobs, amongst the best and brightest from across the country and world; for seats on public transportation and in restaurants; for space on the sidewalk; for tickets, for roommates, for a drink at a bar.

After we’d been in London for two weeks, my boyfriend Zack seemed agitated.  We were grabbing dinner after spending the day working from home.  “What’s wrong?”  I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.  “It’s just---this is the exact same day we would’ve had in New York.  We woke up, ate the same thing as there, worked in the same way for the same amount of time, are eating dinner at a different version of the same restaurant.”

As he spoke, I realized how much I’d expected my life to feel somehow different in London, as I had when I moved to New York from San Francisco years before.  I tried to put my finger on what, exactly, I expected the change to be:  my lifestyle would be the same (same job, same boyfriend).  The streets I walked would be different but they would lead to the same types of places---the grungy bar I like to spend my Friday nights, the cheery, rickety-tabled brunch spots of my Sunday mornings.  Yet, I needed the change of place to have a palpable, tangible effect on my life.  Otherwise, what was all of the effort and time spent living in the cities of my choosing for?

I asked Zack why he thought New York was, well, New York.  If it simply was the same bars, the same restaurants, the same jobs and (much crappier) apartments, why did people from everywhere want to be there?

“I think,” he said, “it’s because everyone wants to be there. No one accidentally just ends up living in New York. Everyone is there by choice.  Everyone in New York, then, is there for a reason.  There aren’t many other places in the world you can say that about.”

“So the people create the place that creates the people,” I said.

He smiled and took a sip of his beer.  “Something like that.”

Taken that way, I think the childhood me wanted to be the kind of person she saw living in the big cities of the world.  She wanted me to be somewhere by choice, somewhere for a reason.  If I can’t supply any other reason as to why I’m here, the simple fact that I want to be is, for her, enough.

How much do you think place affects your daily lifestyle?  Do you think the New York, big city idea of everyone being there for a reason is true for more rural or suburban areas as well?  Are you choosing to be where you live, or are you there for other reasons?

VII. Provence

My host mother in Aix is a frustratingly loquacious woman named Agnès. She has never left the country and spends most of her time pattering around the apartment in her slippers, fussing over pillows and arranging stacks of magazines. Her social interactions outside of her son seem limited to a few men she used to be in relationships with and now come over every once in a while and sit in the kitchen while she prepares meals for them. She has a heavy torso and thin, spindly legs. At the beginning of my stay, I feel sorry for her.

Though the French dinner is typically a more family-oriented affair, ours consist of Agnès and I sitting at her small dinner table watching the news. She provides a running commentary while I nod and say mm-hmm at intervals. Sometimes I wonder if this is why she offered to host students---so someone is obliged to listen to her.

But one warm evening the television is off, and Agnès tells me a French joke over red, ripe tomatoes and mozzarella.

God, she says, is looking at the earth after its creation. He notices that France is the most beautiful of all the nations---mountains, lakes, beaches, oceans, plains, forests. Every part of the landscape is diverse and breathtaking. And so, to make it a bit more even for the rest of the world, he creates the French people.

I laugh a little too hard.

Having Two

A few years ago, when I was newly pregnant with Charley, my husband and I had our first real married fight. It was at the beach in Chicago. It was July and the water was frigid, but the sun warm. The beach was fairly crowded and in front of us there was a family of four. I don’t remember much about the fight, I knew there were important topics discussed, but I have thought of that family many times since. A funny thing happens when you become pregnant: you become hyper-aware of every mother, father, baby, and family near you. You scrutinize their every movement. Would I be a mother like her? With a baby carrier and no stroller, her hair long and unkempt? Or would I be like the mom over there with the shiny new stroller, and tapping away on her iPhone? You notice which mothers are thin again, which dress well, and become depressed by their small numbers. It must be motherhood, it makes you fat and haggard, you conclude, clutching your belly nervously. That’s what I was doing during our first fight, when I was barely pregnant and still wearing a bikini at the beach. I was silently inspecting the family in front of me. The parents were on their beach chairs; they had dark hair and looked relatively fit. The kids were cute, older, maybe just in elementary school, a boy and a girl, and they played and crawled in the sand quietly. The parents were talking, and occasionally laughing, but I couldn’t hear their words, the wind carried them away. Instead, I noticed their facial expressions and actions. The looked happy, but lurking there underneath the happiness was this tired, bored feeling. They were at the beach, but not really there.

Now, as a parent, I completely understand them.

We spent this past weekend with our five-year-old niece, which was a taste of having two kids. It was exhausting. Her energy was totally different, and the sweet moments between her and Charley were rare. Instead I spent most of the weekend feeding them (on opposite schedules) and mediating conflicts (seriously, I need a law degree for this). It was the constant, ‘she has this turn,’ ‘you have the next turn’ that really wore you out. So I finally understand the couple at the beach with their two kids. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy. Instead, what I didn’t see was all the work it took to get there. But perhaps the journey matters more than the destination?

Four Feet

I signed up for my first race in the spring of 2008---a half-marathon, in Rochester, to be held in early fall. Never having run more than five miles consecutively, I spent my summer training, hydrating, and icing my aching knees. I slept at my parents' house the night before the race. The next morning, my mom was up with me before the sun rose, making coffee and puttering around, while I obsessed over my pre-run meal, my running outfit, and oh my god, why don’t we have enough safety pins to hold my bib in place? As I crossed the finish line hours later, after a grueling 13.1 miles on what turned out to be an unseasonably warm and humid September day, after witnessing more than one runner collapse on the course around me, and after looking for an exit route on the course for 8 miles, I declared that I was done with running. Finished. The End. Two weeks later, I started looking for my next race. And so began my short stint as a distance runner. With several half-marathons under my belt, I decided it was time to try my hand at the real thing, and set my sights on the New York City marathon.  Now, marathon running requires a certain level of commitment, even at the amateur level. Your entire world revolves around running, carb-loading, and hydrating properly. My husband endured months of early nights and pasta dinners;  my friends, I’m sure, grew tired of hearing me ramble on about my upcoming long runs; and my mom, well, she supported me in the only way she knew how: by telling me I was crazy. Unsurprisingly, she had a saying about marathon running. If God wanted you to run that far, he would have given you four feet! Lacking a competitive bone in her body, she also casually asked me, as I agonized over IT band pain for weeks before the race, if I couldn’t run as planned---or if I couldn’t finish---would it really be that big of a deal?

Nonetheless, my mom arrived in New York the day before the marathon, my sisters and brother-in-law in tow, to cheer me on every step of the 26.2 miles. As my sisters and I leisurely strolled around my Brooklyn neighborhood that afternoon, my mom started on a pot of sauce for dinner. We returned home to a feast, my mom doling out pasta and homemade meatballs in my tiny kitchen. My alarm clock went off at five the next morning, and while the rest of my family rolled over for a few more hours of sleep, my mom, once again, was up with me before dawn. We sat and drank coffee, and discussed, one last time, the four points in Brooklyn and Manhattan where they planned to cheer me on.  This would require a bit of hustle out of the group, and my mom, at a strapping 5 feet tall, was not to be outdone by her younger (and taller) counterparts. Not one to wear sneakers even in her backyard, she gamely came prepared with a loaner pair from my sister, ready to take on the streets of New York.

I saw my family first at mile six. With my body and mind already failing me, I found myself choking back tears at the sight of them. They were there for me again and again as planned --- my mom’s head barely visible over the crowd, my sisters and brother-in-law screaming my name, my husband looking on with pride --- as I hobbled forward to finish out the race. I learned later that as I was running, my cheering section ran into their own set of problems. My mom, in a pretty white sweater, was the unlucky target of a low-flying bird, and spent the rest of the day trying to camouflage the obvious stain. My sister, innocently using the bathroom at a McDonalds along the course, with my mom standing guard outside the door, found herself face-to-face with an overly aggressive patron who couldn’t wait his turn. By the time I finished, bruised and battered, we shared more than a few good laughs over a post-run meal.

My mom passed away three years later. We spent the last two weeks of her life in the hospital, sitting vigil by her side, pacing the hallways, hoping for a miracle. When she died, I was left with a hole in heart, and strangely enough, a sharp pain in my right calf. A wrong step left me gasping in pain for months afterward, and running was all but impossible. The hows and whys of this injury were unclear, and quite honestly, probably nothing more than a random coincidence. And yet, maybe it wasn't.

In those weeks leading up to her death, I realized in a panic that I had no idea who I was---or would be---without my mom. People assured me, repeatedly, that she will always be with me: in everything I do, and really, in everything I am. I scoffed at this initially; after all, it requires an astonishing amount of faith to believe such a thought, at a time when my faith has suffered a serious blow. But, as I limped home after each attempted run, I thought of my mom. As I stretched my calf in yoga class, I thought of my mom. And as I laughed at the irony of it all, I thought of my mom. As it turns out, she's with me every step of the way---whether I'm on two feet or four.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Molly Bradley is US-born but France-grown, having lived in Paris from the age of six. Her reintroduction to her native country was through Oberlin College in Ohio. She's fairly certain that aside from having changed homes, schools, or countries every three or four years, juxtapositions like the one between France and Ohio are what have lent her an eye for cultural curiosities and a taste for travel. Over the past four years she has obtained degrees in English literature and creative writing, spent a semester in Senegal, worked as a pastry and line cook at a French restaurant in the Berkshires, learned Russian, handmade a lot of pasta, and become vegan (mostly). She has just moved to Portland to pursue a travel-writing internship, work at a food cart making waffles, and write, write, write.

I read as much for writing itself as for story. Not that that’s unusual, but I’ve come to realize that the writing makes all the difference. I am perfectly willing to read a story that is anywhere from unimpressive to downright unpleasant, in terms of plot---as long as the writing enthralls. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, necessarily, though that can help.

Proof that most readers can be bewitched this way: Lolita. That’s the novel that, for me, triggered this realization. You can describe it briefly as a book about an old geezer with pedophiliac tendencies, and thusly dismiss it---or you can say it’s about a man with yearnings toward his past, unfulfilled sexual desires, an undeniable draw toward the most innocent form of beauty he knows, and a girl too young to know what it means to even pretend to fulfill all that. You might also mention that, while reading---though you are aware of the boundaries and where they should not be crossed – you do not, and cannot, villainize him. And that is entirely the doing of Nabokov’s words.

Lolita is not a particularly recent read for me, but it has guided many of my subsequent choices in reading (and writing). Here are a few things I read this summer that, if not astounded me, at least tickled me: both as a human being with emotions to be strummed, and as a writer with tools to be sharpened.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera If you have ever traveled---especially often or long enough to feel out-of-place in any given place---this is something you should read. I can’t promise it will solve any of your existential crises on the road (play-on-words sort of intended---see third book down this list), but it will be a companion of sorts. That’s largely due to the delight of Kundera’s style: it is always accessible, inviting, and impossibly intimate.

He writes the novel in two ‘modes’: in one, he tells the story of Tomas, Teresa, Sabina, and Franz. In the other, he talks directly to us: about distance, love, desire, responsibility---even about the unique consciousness of animals. In these sections, I found myself stopping after almost every paragraph. Every musing made me want to tell someone in particular, or tell someone anonymous, or at least write it down to tell myself, again and again. Or to write it back to Kundera in a letter.

He also deals delicately (and accurately, it feels) with the subject of unbalanced relationships, or unequal loves. If you’ve ever experienced this, the novel will be at once heart-breaking and -healing.

Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard This one gets a little technical, but as an English and creative writing major, it was right up my alley. Even if you don’t think you’d like a book about the nitty-gritty of technique and form in writing, what fascinates is how Dillard gives fiction a tangible place in the real world. Too often fiction is dismissed as no more than escape or fancy or, at best, a noble yet disconnected and isolated art. It may be somewhat isolated, but Dillard not only places writers beside all other kinds of artists, but places all of those artists in a room with the rest of the world. She answers the questions that most professors, students, and critics alike only have vague answers to: questions about the whether fiction can interpret the world, and how it can allow you to better understand reality. If you write, her answers may make you feel, suddenly, that you have taken far too much responsibility on your shoulders---but shoulder it you should. Someone’s got to.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac There’s nothing like reading Kerouac to make your speech and writing both relax. That is, assuming you aren’t being too hard on yourself for not being able to achieve that casual tone while still spinning out spectacularly singular turns of phrase and cadence.

As  much as I love the classic On the Road, what I love about The Dharma Bums is that it wasn’t On the Road. Kerouac, as Ray Smith, is at once more and less focused on himself, and at once more and less perfectly embodies the way he thinks it best to live. In Dharma Bums, he is very earnestly trying to live a simpler and more spiritual life, largely fired and inspired by his friend Japhy. The greatest part is that while he does a lot better than most of us could, he still screws up sometimes just like anyone would. It’s a hopeful and reassuring thing to see someone mess up and achieve, in equal measure and equal beauty.

At one point, Ray feels he has achieved some kind of enlightenment in the woods near his home. His first thought upon achieving enlightenment is to tell Japhy; he can’t wait to put it into words for someone who is something of a mentor to him. But when he tries, Japhy dismisses him promptly, saying that to appreciate such an experience is not to blab on about it. Ray is subdued, but it remains unclear who’s really closer to enlightenment.

Back to his style: its simplicity is deceptive. One the one hand, it’s reminiscent of those plain, easy pleasures that make you think you could live a far humbler life than you do. It reminds me of my dad talking about the brown bread, mustard, and sardine sandwiches of his youth: those three things were all he required to feel nourished.

Particularly in Dharma Bums, the great thing about Kerouac is that his easy style works to describe his vagabond’s meals of cans of beans just as well as it does to talk about becoming a Buddha, and other more complex matters of the soul.

Souls, sardines, Sabina. They’re all sort of related, and they’re all equally worth reading (and writing) about. It’s all the way you phrase it.

On learning life from life

He aprendido la vida de la vida, “I have learned life from life.” These are the words of Pablo Neruda from the poem, “Ode to the Book,” in which he casts aside words on the page for the immediacy of experience. I’ve loved this poem for the longest time, and these words have never been truer for me than now. From the time I could read, I consumed book after book, in search of compelling stories, complex characters, and literary worlds that helped me reflect on my own. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I often arrive at the first page of a book in search of answers.

I am a lover of questions, and of questions that lead to more questions, but there’s a persistent corner of my consciousness that wishes books were Magic 8-balls. I haven’t shaken up one of those round, little toys in many years, but I sometimes open a book with a similar approach.

Whether it’s fiction, memoir, or poetry, I’ve been drawn to the title by a half-formed question in the back of my mind, and by the last page, a part of me hopes I’ll have uncovered a roadmap, a step-by-step guide to the challenges and questions swirling beneath the surface of daily life. Other times, I secretly hope that by reading about an experience, I’ll be prepared for it in my own life and never be taken by surprise.

But in this time of transition—of graduating and building a career, of moving to a new city, of preparing for a wedding—the voice of Neruda nudges me again and again to simply learn life from life. To learn by doing and making mistakes. To let go and allow myself to be taken by surprise.

This is, of course, easier said than done, but I suppose it is only with such openness that we invite in the possibility for our fears of the unknown to be unexpectedly swept aside by joy.

A Traditional Marriage

This weekend I will be traveling to New England to attend the wedding of two dear friends.  Naturally, I love weddings---the pageantry, the ritual, the attention to detail---and I know this one will be memorable.  Part of the fun with weddings is evaluating each of the selections the couple has made.  One of my favorite activities is getting into bed after an event such as this and breaking it all down piece-by-piece with my husband.  We like to do the full debrief, including, but not limited to: fashion, ceremony elements, weird family dynamics, food and decor.  Clearly, I will be inspecting the floral design with a critical eye---it is a brave soul that invites a wedding professional to the Big Day. This wedding will be much the same in that I know how deliberate and painstaking this whole process has been and I can't wait to see how the couple will be reflected in their choices.  Additionally, I have been made aware that the guest list is rich with characters and we are to be seated at a table with some of the more dynamic friends of the couple.  As usual, my husband and I will immerse ourselves in all the action and take mental notes along the way for fruitful discussion later.  Although we are always delighted to participate in bearing witness to a public commitment to love, something that distinguishes this wedding from the many others we have attended is that the people getting married are two men.

The grooms-to-be in question, are, in actual fact, already married.  They ran right out and got married here in New York on the very first day it was legal.  It was that significant a step in their relationship---they didn't want to wait a single day more than they had to before making it "official."  Anyone who has ever doubted how critically important, how equalizing and normalizing a right it is to be able to get married, should really watch any footage or read any story from the day it became legal for gay people to wed in the few states where that dream has been realized.  New York was no exception when this happened in July 2011.  Appropriately, there was a collective sigh of relief in our community followed by raucous festivities---much like a wedding.

Certainly there is so much to celebrate here.  The idea that we have progressed to the place where there is majority (sometimes overwhelming) support for gay marriage in various corners of the nation is, in itself, staggering.  Although it is easy to wring hands over many social policy and civil rights issues these days, states legalizing gay marriage and our nation's president endorsing gay marriage are heartening signs.

When I think about the relationship that I am traveling to exult and sanction, I am struck by the fact that theirs is a marriage quite similar to and also much more “traditional” than my own.  Both men are working professionals with advanced degrees.  One of them is self-employed and owns a business.  They are both public servants in some capacity.  They value social justice and give to charity.  They share the aspiration of having children and are expecting a baby in the coming months.  They sit down to dinner together each night to a meal they have often actually cooked (!!), candles lit, and discuss the long day behind them.  Their home is warm, comfortable and impeccably decorated.  Most important, they are demonstrably in love and I have only ever seen them speak to one another with kindness.  I already look up to them as parents and their baby has yet to come.

When I consider the controversy around gay marriage, I absolutely cannot understand it from an entirely practical standpoint.  No question, I recoil at the notion that two men or two women couldn’t or shouldn’t love each other as much as a heterosexual couple or that they wouldn’t have the same legal rights and social empowerment.  But this couple bears out my experience that gay people who want to marry thrive in such a way as often puts most straight couples to shame.  They are doing “us” better.  Perhaps it is all the years of being “other” and observing relationships from the outside that has honed their skills within the partnership?  Maybe it is that being with somebody of the same sex has distinct advantages and allows for smoother communication?    The bottom line is that who is anybody to say that they shouldn’t have the right to kick our ass at marriage and/or bomb miserably at it?  I say, WELCOME.  Come on in, the water is fine.

So the next few days will be a whirlwind tour and I am so honored that we made the short list for this one.  These are selective people and not just any person scored an invite.  We are gearing up for a life event that will look a lot like so many that have come before it in terms of the customs.  But, the magnitude of the occasion might just mean slightly more.  I say this both because of what these two men marrying represents and who they inarguably are as individuals and as a couple.

The Crystal Punch Bowl That Wasn't

My grandmother turned 90 last month.  She lived through the depression on a small farm in rural Missouri, married a soldier during World War Two and raised three children.  So when she told me she was interested in recording her ‘life story’ I jumped at the chance to hear anything she wanted to tell me.  I anticipated being enraptured by her tales of living in Alaska and Germany in the sixties, looked forward to hearing stories about my dad growing up, back when everyone called him Butch, and of course stories about the farm, before electricity and indoor plumbing.  I didn’t expect to be sidetracked by a plastic punch bowl. We were looking through the teak buffet table that has sat in the living room as long as I can remember.  My grandmother was telling me about the silver they had engraved and the Rosenthal plates she and my grandfather brought back from Germany.  In the back corner, was something I couldn’t quite make out, so I asked. "Oh that," she said, "that’s a plastic punchbowl I bought for your cousin’s bridal shower."  Not a remarkable piece to be sure, but it’s what she said next that has stayed with me for months.  My grandmother told me that when she was a young military wife, in the forties, she thought she needed to have a crystal punchbowl.  This wasn’t said with any sort of entitlement, if you knew my Granny you’d know she’s not one for thinking she ‘deserved’ this or that.  No, she and my grandfather entertained at times, and he was an officer in the Army; it was something she thought they should have, like wine glasses or nice china.

A crystal punch bowl.  When my grandmother was married, roughly 70 years before my own wedding, she thought a crystal punch bowl was a vital part of her kitchen.  As it turns out, she never did get her crystal punch bowl, and in fact never needed a punch bowl of any sort until a few years ago when we hosted a bridal shower with a dozen guests; and then she went out to her local big box store and bought a plastic one.

The first thought that occurs to me is how different my life is than my grandmother’s.  When I registered for wedding gifts 6 years ago, I didn’t even list any fancy china; I knew I wouldn’t use it.  If someone had even mentioned a punch bowl to me I would have laughed.  But then I got to thinking, maybe I have a punch bowl of my own.

Of the items I registered for years ago, aren’t there some that do little more than collect dust?  Or even today, that purchase I was thinking of making, the current must-have; will it cause a fit of chuckles in a 20-something a few decades from now?  Or will it become a cherished heirloom?  Maybe it’s impossible to predict.  I don’t know.

But I can’t stop thinking about punch bowls . . .

Sojourner Truth: Ex-Slave. Activist. Hardcore Feminist.

A few months ago, sci-fi writer John Scalzi published a blog piece that went viral entitled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. In this article, he attempted to make “privilege” understood to an audience of gamer geeks by translating it into their own language—basically, that SWMs go through life on the “easy” (or “very easy”, depending on your game) button, while various minority identities increase your life’s difficulty setting. “The player who plays on the ‘Gay Minority Female’ setting?” he writes. “Hardcore.”

Our Historical Woman of the day was not, to my knowledge, gay, nor from an era that would necessarily self-identify as such, but I’m pretty sure she was still living life on one of the highest difficulty settings possible. Sojourner Truth was black, she was a woman, and she was born a slave. She lived a life that spanned from a childhood on the plantation to the difficult Reconstruction years following the Civil War. And today, due to her lifelong campaign for both African-American and women’s rights, she has become a symbol for the intersectionality of race and gender—how minority identities can overlap and how struggles can be experienced both separately and in tandem.

She was originally called Isabella “Belle” Baumfree; she changed her name to the (beautiful and rather inspiring) Sojourner Truth decades later. Belle was born into slavery on a Dutch New York plantation around 1797, and spent a childhood being shuffled from owner to owner, separated from family, mistreated by the masters and mistresses of the estates, and marrying a much older slave to whom she would bear five children, though there’s speculation that some were fathered by her white master. All part of the common experience of being a slave woman in America; but that doesn’t diminish its tragedy.

In 1826, an emancipation law was pending in New York—within a year, Isabella would likely be freed. However, she took it upon herself to exit the evil institution a little early. She took one of her children and literally walked off the plantation, finding refuge with a Quaker family and escaping the slave life forever. Later, she fought in court for the recovery of her other children, one of whom was illegally sold to a Southern plantation, and won. This was only the beginning of what was to be a long and fruitful activist career.

What Truth may have been most famous for, not unlike the firebrand anarchist Emma Goldman, was her public speaking. Illiterate throughout her life, she nevertheless had a remarkable gift for language and, from the 1840s onward, went on several speaking tours with both women’s rights groups and abolitionists.

Her most famous speech was apparently entirely improvised. At a women’s rights convention, at which Truth had agreed not to speak in order to avoid making harmful associations between the “Negro” cause and the cause of women, it happened that several men were shouting down the beleaguered women speakers. “Women expect rights? They ask us to help them down from carriages and over puddles!” cried Manly Man #1. “Women can’t even do manual labor!” exclaimed Manly Man #2. (I’m guessing at their names.)

Sojourner Truth couldn’t hold it in anymore. She marched up onto the platform and launched into an impassioned counterattack.

“Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gave me any best place—and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it) and bear the lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen ‘em most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ain’t I a woman?”

Truth then pointed a bony finger (according to her histories, something she was fond of doing) at a nearby preacher, and demanded, “Where did your Christ come from? . . . From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.”

The crowd erupted in cheers. The manly men were publicly shamed. The white feminists who had objected to her speaking felt guilty. (Or so I like to imagine.)

If this all sounds a bit too good to be true—if it sounds like the ending of a '90s family movie—it may be because, it’s not entirely true. Sojourner Truth holds the transcendent rank of symbol in our histories, particularly feminist histories, and symbols often diverge from reality. Much of this speech was recorded by a white working-class woman named Frances Gage, who even wrote it in “plantation dialect” (see above quote, replace every “the” with “de” and “children” with “chillern,” etc). Historians have noted the potential motives of contemporary white feminists for uplifting Truth to the status of symbol: her rootsy plantation background was an ideal metaphor for the need for women’s own emancipation, and her illiteracy meant she could do little to contest the narratives of her white recorders.

Yet I like to think there was at least some truth in this landmark piece of feminist expository, even if it wasn’t quite as movie-scene-y as all that. There are many recorded instances of Truth’s resounding voice echoing through convention halls and touching the hearts and minds of all who attended. She spoke alongside Frederick Douglass—famously asking him “Is God dead?” as he enumerated the injustices being committed daily against the American Negro—and diffused tense situations with unruly, antagonistic crowds—another potentially apocryphal story arises in which she bared her breasts to an Indiana audience who questioned whether she was really a woman. (Probably because she was six feet tall and deep-voiced. And she also had the balls to challenge men.)

She even staged some proto-public transit sit-ins in Washington, DC, storming onto the “white” segregated horse-drawn carriages and challenging the conductor to throw her off. The by-this-time somewhat elderly woman ended up in a scuffle with one driver, whose company she later successfully sued. Hardcore.

Sojourner Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan after the Civil War, where she advocated for a Reconstruction that would address the injustices done to black America by slavery—which, by her estimation, could never be fully forgiven, but at the very least the government could begin to make amends. She died in 1883, roughly eighty-five years old, fighting for this elusive justice to the very end.

Despite the nearly insurmountable challenges set out before her, and whether or not some of the accounts about her are apocryphal or idealized, the former Ms. Baumfree built a life that became an inspiration to every seeker of social justice of the last 150 years. It's hard to imagine the difficulties she faced in her life; her status as both black American and female American, not to mention former slave, informed her experience and drove her impassioned demand for equality and justice in an often ugly American century. And so Sojourner Truth, like her name, embodies a struggle that continues to inspire, that continues to matter, that we are still fighting today.

How about ginger tea?

As the years pass, my culinary taste has changed and I realized I have gained different habits, and fallen in love with new dishes or ingredients I never thought I could stand. When I was a teenager, for instance, I found sushi quite repellent. Raw fish surrounded by rice and rolled up in seaweeds? A dish like that made no sense to my Italian palate. Wasabe? How could anybody find pleasing to burn up their mouth with a green paste? And then, when I turned twenty-five, my boyfriend at the time (and now husband) took me to a sushi restaurant in Washington DC. Could I tell him “I hate sushi please take me in some Churrascaria instead!”?? That was a very cold winter night, but despite I would have rather eating a warm dish and definitely not a raw piece of salmon, I started to realize that sushi wasn’t so bad, at least drowned in soy sauce.

But ginger! No, I really couldn’t stand ginger. A piece of soap would have been better! (That was the taste I compared ginger to…) Sushi AND ginger was too much for my discriminating taste.

So when did I start to enjoy ginger and find its flavor so enjoyable? Just very recently, and I had to go to another continent to learn, once again, that even little things that seems so odd and senseless can be instead very lovable.

“Do you want some ginger tea?”

I can’t actually recall how many times I was asked this question in Myanmar. When I landed in the country, I thought I was just going to live a new adventure, to see new places and take the usual thousand pictures I like to take. I would never have expected I was going to bring home a new culinary habit---using ginger in my daily life and actually falling in love with an ingredient I had thus far kept at distance.

The story is that, while in Myanmar, I got sick for a couple of days. I had very high temperature and there was no western medicine that helped me feel better. But I didn’t want to miss a day. After all, Myanmar is not around the corner, and the chance I’ll visit it again isn’t granted. So I behaved as I was feeling great---while my face was red and burning, my spirit was in fabulous shape. But our guide, a very nice woman called Kin (not sure it is spelled this way!), had the solution (yes, she was much wiser than me and thought there was no way I could enjoy my time like that). She asked for ginger tea in every house, shop and temple, and no kidding I was offered about ten cups in ten hours. And please keep in mind that drinking tea brings other consequences, too! But anyway, by the next morning I was feeling great, filled with energy and strength (and purified!). I am still not sure if I felt so good because of the tea or because of all the attention I got. It is nice when total strangers take care of you so generously.

How weird is the taste of ginger? Hot, fragrant, explosive, peppery, and somehow also sweet. Ginger doesn’t have too much space in Italian cuisine. My mother rarely used ginger in her cooking, and I've never heard of pasta with ginger something in restaurants, haha!, so the taste was pretty much weird to me. Now I find myself searching for new recipes online and trying them out in my kitchen. I discovered ginger doesn’t discriminate.  It crosses cultures and culinary boundaries and makes its way into every cuisine and type of specialty food, from Fiji to India, Jamaica, Nigeria and China. So I learned that Chinese consider ginger a yang, or hot, warming food, which, when blended with a cooler yin food, helps balance and harmony. And surprisingly ginger can even be found in some bars crushed into a Mojito! Also, ginger’s spicy flavor is a big hit in both chocolate and cheese.

But most importantly, if someone will ask me what the best cure for cold and sore throat is, from now on I will give him a piece of fresh ginger to chew.

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life---and travel---leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks---on your body or on your heart---are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” Anthony Bourdain

One more short story about Myanmar and a village with no name at www.alicepluswonderland.blogspot.com

Cookbook Confessions

It was a weeknight at Barnes and Noble. The lights were harsh as usual, the whole place too well lit.  Or maybe it just felt that way---I wanted privacy for the deed I was there to do. I needed an off-the-beaten-carpet spot. Perhaps a corner near an under-trafficked genre . . . what about by that sale table of puppy calendars from 2011? Finding every discreet inch occupied, I gave up prowling and slumped back into the curve of a heavy wooden chair.  It was the worst possible place. In the middle of the store. At the end of an aisle. I carried on my despite the indiscreet location, desperate for my ends. On my lap was a stack of newly released cookbooks. I felt like I was about to do something bad.

And I was.

But let me explain.

I am learning to cook. No one I know is going to teach me how to cook. This isn’t because I know no one who is capable in the kitchen. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I have several friends who are culinary professionals and I have worked beside some very talented chefs. My husband, too, is a natural around food, both in terms of consumption and production. He can improvise a meal in minutes. Yet here I am, still needing inspiration and some serious planning before even boiling a some water. I try to remind myself that becoming a good cook is a process. A journey.

This journey into cooking, as with learning all new things, takes one step at a time. My kitchen’s true north, thus far, is my discovery that there exists no better culinary cartographer than a slick new cookbook. They are my collective compass with their vivid photography, exciting personal narrative, delicious recipes; my ladders for scaling walls of recipe boredom, my ships for crossing the choppy sea of a weekday dinner.  Food is an adventure when presented in a beautiful book, and I hunger to be whisked away to France, Morocco, New York, the Deep South . . . They say you eat a meal first with your eyes.  I would add to that the grumbling imagination we feed far before the food is on the plate. At times my mind is sated in simply reading the lyrical titles printed on a pretty cloth bound spine.

Yet here is where I hit another wall: money. That cookbook compass can be quite expensive. I try to be patient and wait for these books to come at at my local public library, seeing as my tasting menu aspirations are really on a lunch special budget. But that never works. They're always snatched up in a flash. There are, for example, twenty-six holds on Tamar Adler's "An Everlasting Meal." More like an everlasting wait . . .

Which brings me back to the bookstore.

The man sitting behind me is breathing loudly and snarfing a candy bar. (Turns out the word “snarf” is in the dictionary, by the way.) Nearby, children are arguing over a wooden train set. Then I look around, eyes darting, and . . . and . . . I do it.

I take a photo of the cookbook on my iPhone. And then another. And then another.

It’s just like sexting, except that the rump pictures happen to be of roast beef in Around my French Table. 

Here’s my MO: I take a shot of the front cover so I remember the author’s name and the title. I take a shot of the index, then a shot of one recipe for a trial run.  I only allow myself to poach that one recipe, as if that makes my illicit photography any less rude. This photo test shoot is my trial run. I tell myself I'll buy the book if it delivers the goods.

Later that night, when I get home, I sit on the couch with my glowing phone an inch from my nose. I peer into the images, sliding back and froth between the choice shots, zooming in on certain spots.

It feels a little dirty at first, but I’m consoled by the fact that though I won’t be taking any of these cookbooks out to dinner, at least I’ll be making it for myself.

Looking Forward: Great Loves

I saw The Rolling Stones live for the first time at age eleven. Certain details, to this day, remain vivid: the crowd rising as the lights dimmed. The heat of a pyrotechnic explosion at the beginning of “Sympathy for the Devil.” The ground beneath my feet, sticky with beer.

One bit in particular stands out above the rest, however.

Returning home later that night, I was greeted on the front porch by sleepy-eyed parents. Buzzing, high on color and flash bulbs and drumbeats and leather jackets, I hopped back and forth in my tennis shoes and blithely declared, “I’m in love!”

My parents smiled. Music was a part of their history. I imagine it meant a lot for them to know it would be a part of mine, as well.

“I’m in love,” I repeated, “with Keith Richards.”

I referenced this moment once as part of a free-writing exercise in a college creative writing course. The prompt? Tell us about your first love.

The class laughed when I read my response, which was, of course, completely understandable.

But what I’d written was also the truth. I’d fallen in love.

To be clear, the object of my affection was not really Keith Richards (though he does still occupy a special place in my heart). I’d fallen in love with music---more specifically, rock and roll. The music of my parents’ generation. To employ half a cliché, it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship---and over a decade later, we’re still very happy together.

 Not all meaningful relationships occur between people. Family members, friends, and romances aside, some of the greatest loves of my life have been places, experiences, interests, activities. After all, what constitutes a great love? Is it heart-stopping? All-consuming? Is it deep, complicated, emotional, electrifying?

I’ve certainly experienced music in this way. Towns, cities, and neighborhoods, too: Tokyo comes to mind; so does the dusty, cacophonous stretch of street that was my home for a month in India. And writing? Don’t even get me started. It’s been the greatest love/hate relationship of my life.

These are things I’ve loved so intensely that they’ve not only become a part of my life, but a part of me. Along with a hodgepodge of other experiences, memories, destinations, and, of course people, they add depth, shape, color, meaning. They’re building blocks. Puzzle pieces.

They're not just a part of my story. In many ways, they are the story.

Train Travel

I took the commuter train out of the city this weekend for a jaunt with old friends. I was looking forward to taking a familiar route  to meet up with familiar faces, but mostly I was excited about the few quiet hours I’d spend alone on the train. I have a deep and long-standing affection for the Metro North’s New Haven line which barrels along the Connecticut shoreline, into the belly of the beast at Grand Central, and out again. When I was a little girl, my dad worked in publishing on New York’s 5th Avenue. His building at number 666 looked to me like a giant cheese grater and on special occasions I would get to go with him there.  We rode the train together, I wore lace-up sneakers and carried my fancy shoes--mary janes--like the other commuting women. In college, the train was my salvation. I would pack a duffle and squeeze my way onto a crowded rush hour train, thoughts of my mom’s chili and the crackle of the fireplace luring me homeward. When I was lucky, the conductor would never even get to me and I’d have fare for the trip back into the city. For the two hours it took me to get home, I would lean my head against the greasy train window and watch the gray world pass by. I used to prop my weekend reading on my lap. Learning by osmosis.

For people who don’t live there, the route along the Connecticut shore can feel like an interminable middle road between New York and Boston. On summer weekends, traffic on I-95 through Connecticut is so sluggish that even the state’s most stalwart defenders will curse its name. But the train? It just rides along. If you’re lucky enough to live east of New Haven, like my parents do, a connecting train snakes you through marshes and homeward. Depending on the time of day, the light is either all pinks and blues and silvers or golds and greens and blues. Train travel is pure romance.

After college I flung myself across an ocean to live in France. My return stateside found me first in North Carolina and then in Rhode Island and all this life in other places meant years away from this particular train. I didn't have to be on the train to imagine it: the smell of the vinyl seats, the smudgy spots on the windows where other passengers have leaned their weary foreheads, the click, click of the conductor as she'd make her way toward me to punch my ticket, the crumpled brown paper bags with empty cans of cheap beer, the dog-eared copies of the New York Post left on seats, the conductors calling out the town names, their Connecticut accents causing them to eat their t’s.

The catch, of course, is that nothing stays the same for very long. The trains that I took for much of my childhood and young adulthood have recently been replaced. The new trains are glitzy by comparison---all lights and beeps and clean white and red seats. Lucky for me, on Saturday morning the new automated announcements weren’t working. I got to hear the the conductor’s voice just the way I remember it, “New Haven will be the last stop. Please remember your belongings as you exit the train.”

On Deserving

My sleep patterns change according to the season. At this time of year, as summer fades into fall and the days grow shorter and darker, I sleep deeply and long—but once the year has rolled around again, and light peeps into my bedroom late into the night and again early in the morning, I develop seasonal insomnia. Sleep doesn’t come easily to me in the springtime; even when exhausted, I feel the pull of so many things I’d rather be doing than closing my eyes. This year, as sunny days peaked around Midsummer, I found myself once again in the throes of my circadian sleeplessness. My mind seemed to whirl and spin, filled up with the promise of all that sunshine, leaving me spent and ironically too tired to do any of the things on the to-do list that called me out of bed again and again.

As the sun-filled days passed, I tried to unravel the layers of physical, emotional, and spiritual components to my lifetime of insomnia. I came up with many ideas: I didn’t feel safe; I had too much to do; I had a hard time convincing my irrational mind that I’d get more done if I also got more sleep.

And then, one afternoon as I lay on my couch trying and failing to take a much-needed nap, I thought: I don’t deserve to sleep. I don’t deserve to rest.

And that was an attitude I recognized. “Deserving” has played a large role in my life; I fight a constant battle with the insidious little voice inside me that is always fixated on what is fair and what is deserved. Because my energy is limited and must be parceled out in careful allotments, I find myself locked into a continual war with this voice of guilt over how I spend my time.

I don't deserve to rest, because I haven't done anything worthwhile today. I don't deserve to take it easy, because I have been lazy all morning. I don't deserve to have my husband make me dinner, because I ought to get up and do it, whether I feel well enough or not. Sometimes consciously, always unconsciously, I have a running tally always going in my mind. X amount of rest requires X amount of doing. If I have taken it easy today, I need to work extra hard tomorrow. If I have missed this many hours of church this week, I must make sure to go to all of them next week, even if I feel the same or worse. I must not do anything "fun" if I don't have all the "not fun" stuff finished, even if that means I will never have the time or energy for the "fun" stuff.

Since the winter of my junior year of high school, when I began this new life where my energy is so limited and I must live so carefully, I have been afraid. I've been so afraid of becoming that useless person, the one who just never musters up the willpower to get anything done, who always falls back on their physical failings as an excuse for checking out of life. This fear has clawed at me, ruled me, always dictated with precise care the doings of my day-to-day. It has made me feel enormous guilt when I fail to follow through on something I have assigned myself to do. It has made me hard on myself.

It has made me feel undeserving.

That summer afternoon as I lay sleeplessly on my couch, new thoughts came crowding in my mind.

What if it is okay to rest?

What if it is okay to take it easy when I need to?

What if it is okay to care for myself, regardless of what I have or haven’t done today?

What if it’s okay to cherish my body, even if it means letting go of some of the expectations I have for myself?

What if I deserve these things, not because of something I have accomplished or as a result of how clean my house is, but simply because I am a precious soul? What if we are all precious, not because of what we have done, but simply because of who we are?

What if we are all deserving of love? Of rest? Of joy?

.   .   .   .   .

In the months that have passed since that summer afternoon, I have felt my thinking gently shift. That voice—the one that harps so much on deserving, and tries to tell me that I do not deserve to rest—is still there; I suspect it always will be, somewhere deep inside my heart. And, all too often, I find myself listening to that voice, giving it leave to shape my thoughts and feelings about myself.

But I like to think that I’m making progress. I like to think that, in the last three months, there have been a few more times where I gave myself a little grace, a few more times where I reached out for peace and happiness in my life regardless of what I had or had not accomplished. I like to think that I’m a little closer to being able to claim these things for my own, to let go of what I can’t do and live abundantly with what I can.

Because you know what?

I deserve it.

This Time Around

It’s incredible how different a second pregnancy can be. With Charley, my first,  it was months of agony and uncertainty. My stomach ballooned almost immediately and before the end of the first trimester I had already shot up two pant sizes. I was sick everyday and depressed for most of it. Even the small baby clothes couldn’t cheer me up. Hours after buying a striped onesie, I would burst into tears and retreat to bed. It was hard to conceptualize that the little onsie would soon be filled with a screaming little person. This time around, three years later almost exactly, I have a toddler to keep me busy. He points to my belly and says, “Bay-bee!” He starts conversations about everything, wants to know the word for every object and emotion. This is such a fun age and I am worried he will always be my favorite. I was the oldest child and my husband was the baby. I understand the older sibling role. I’ll be more prepared to bond with Charley than this next baby. I'm relieved that having such a fun, active toddler will hopefully distract me from the monotony of staying home with an infant. After he was born I wished for these days when I could take him places and hold a conversation, and they have finally arrived.

Most of the time during this pregnancy I actually forget I am pregnant. Friends ask me, “So, how are you feeling?” and it takes me a second to remember they aren’t talking about a cold. I have started to feel little kicks and movement. Even still my body is in a gradual change. I’m wearing my old jeans with a belly band, something I could never do with Charley. I don’t feel that different. Well, apart from a few things. My hair is fantastic again, thick and growing fast, and the sex is so much better! With my first I didn’t even want to hold my husband’s hand or snuggle. I was uncomfortable and didn’t feel very sexy. This time around the hormones are raging and I take any excuse to rub up against him I can get. It’s certainly helped our relationship after the rocky first six weeks of morning sickness.

I haven’t bought anything new for the next baby, and it still feels surreal. Every few days I look toward my husband and marvel, “We’re going to have another one of these . . .” It’s usually after Charley does something ridiculously cute, or horribly stressful (toddler tantrums, inopportune pooping). I feel like soon I should buy a little stuffed animal, or a blanket or outfit, just to start warming up to the idea of meeting this person inside me. I still remember the very first things I bought Charley. We were visiting Baltimore, checking out the Johns Hopkins campus where I was supposed to go to graduate school (never happened). There was a little gift store down by the harbor and in the children’s section were a bunch of small stuffed animals that rattled. We chose the owl, and Mr. Owl is still his favorite thing to sleep with every night. He looks a little gray and weathered, but the love is still there. I wonder what the next one will attach to like that?

VI. Savoie

In Chambéry, I have rented a room on the upper floor of a house owned by an old couple who sometimes invites me down for crepes and tea. Another girl lives with me, a French student at the local university named Marie. She is a bit younger than me, but, in a stereotypical French way, turns out to be super kinky and progressive when it comes to sexual relationships. She is involved in a love triangle with an older married man and his wife. The situation is never fully explained to me, but becomes painfully obvious when they come over and have weird, loud group sex in Marie’s room. Nowhere to escape to from my room on the other side of the small apartment, I turn up my miniature TV as loud as it goes and scribble away furiously on my vocabulary lists, copying down word after word that I don’t know.

Where the Wild Things Are

By Eliza Deacon We were in Mkomazi, a sprawling 3200 sq kilometers of wild open savannah, dusky mountains and glimpses of Tsavo in the far-off distance. It’s not far from us, up here in the north of Tanzania and bordering Kenya. It’s rugged and wild and probably the most beautiful part of Africa that I have ever seen. Not many tourists come here, it’s rather too ‘off the beaten track’ and gets little mention in the guide books; it doesn’t fare so well with its more famous counterparts, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Tarangire even.

Poachers come here though, as do various tribes and their cattle, they all leave their own footprint. Much of the game has been decimated in the past, by men with guns, and many of the animals that were left soon disappeared over the border. Now Mkomazi can look like a ghost town, with only shadows of what was once there. It’s strange, when one is used to plains teeming with game, to stand in almost total solitude in the space between the mountains.

It’s been a dry year and there is little water, we saw only a few skinny buffalo and a small herd of elephants on this last visit. “They’ve been going into the villages,” a local man told us, “it’s a big problem, they get into the crops and people get scared, they chase them, they shoot them.” I heard a terrible story of a young elephant being chased to its death, run off the edge of a cliff by an angry mob; this from friends who themselves are custodians of two elephants, 4 and 14, rescued when they were separated from their herd and faced certain starvation. They now live together in relative safety on the western slopes of Kilimanjaro. There are always two sides to everything here, both ends of the scale are side by side and you need to look both in the eye.

When the rains come to this area, and if they’re good, it means grazing and water is more readily available without crossing unmarked boundaries, leaving less room for conflict. The rains bring everything back to life---out of the dust and bones---and nowhere is it more apparent than here. I wish I could ‘bed in’ here and never leave. Watch the days, weeks, months change, the animals come and go, and forget anything else in the world as nothing would be as important as this.

Being here takes my breath away. On the one side, you have the Usumbara’s and the Pare Eastern Arc Mountains, deep purple and shadowy at sunset. From the top of a craggy escarpment we looked all the way out across Tsavo, could see the Taita Hills on the horizon. J was in a good mood, it’s a birders paradise and he saw several species he’d never seen before, that made him very happy. Maybe I’ll let him ‘bed in’ and stay with me here too.