Uncertainty: Leaning In

There are always questions. There are no definite answers. Simple and peaceful, yet anxiety-provoking thoughts that Cheri Lucas shares in her blog post on collective memory and joy.

As I look forward at the next few months and the end of my formal education, I imagine joy-filled moments with friends, explorations of a city I have yet to truly give my heart to, and dedication to newly emerging passions and people. And, then, graduation, followed by the extending void of the rest of my life. Various years ago, as college ended, I knew I would live abroad at some point; when I lived abroad I knew I would go to graduate school. And, that is where the plan ended. My ten year old routine of setting goals for the new year, slipped between my fingers in January, as I couldn’t envision the next step. The feeling: true uncertainty.

Uncertainty is one of those mixed emotion words. It inspires youth, risk-taking, adventure-seeking, chance, and jumping in head-first. Its less satisfying other side, provokes anxiety and worry, stalling forward momentum. However, there is no escaping either side, as my thoughtful friends gently remind me, almost everything in life is uncertain. Someone, clearly more comfortable with uncertainty than myself, stated “uncertainty touches the best of what is human in us.” I feel it grabbing at what is most human about me, but perhaps not always the best part.

So, I posed the question to my community, asking how they handle uncertainty?

The response echoes both love and frustration with uncertainty. People both thrive on it and run and hide from it. One friend distilled the moment of power found in uncertainty, drawing from it a sense of self situated in the present. The past is past and the future is not-yet-known. C’s words powerfully bring comfort into the daily experience;

“Life is always like this---every single moment is filled with some sense of uncertainty because we don't know what will happen one second from now. . . but the more you can practice being in the present moment and letting go of both of these things, the more well equipped you are to handle times of "uncertainty" because you are actually accustomed to living your life riding the constant wave of uncertainty. Perhaps more important is to just accept this uncertainty because that is the nature of things. . . Really, the only thing we ever have is this exact moment. Our own minds get in the way of attaching absolute truth to either the past or future . . . to live in the present moment is to acknowledge that the only thing we have in uncertainty. . . the only choice we have is to experience each moment---both joyous and sad---as it unfolds.”

J shared a quote inspiring a sense of inner peace;

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” – Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

And, A, always practical;

“I tend to simply acknowledge that [the uncertainty], more often than not, I don't have answers and don't know what will happen, and attempt to just do what feels right at the moment.”

And, E, who strives for comfort with uncertainty:

“Uncertainty is the world of infinite possibility. Once you are certain, you are much more limited.”

Uncertainty inspires a certain leap-of-faith, of leaning into the unknown and taking a chance. Our faith in being happy, healing, and loved in the future depends on our comfort with taking this step. And, yet, as Cheri concludes in her post, “this shared uncertainty is comforting.” Perhaps, it is what ties us together as humans. Perhaps this why it comforts me to understand how my community loves and equally dislikes uncertainty.

In other places, lives, and selves abroad, constantly in transition, uncertainty colored every moment, experience, and relationship. Nights seemed endless, conversations deeply meaningful, and bonds stronger---in essence a sense of power in youthful flashes of self-discovery. Yet, the moments were at times root-less, and I felt the uncertainty needing a rest. I dreamed of graduate school as a place where I could hang uncertainty up in the closet for a few years and settle into community and a more predictable life. Yet, the fun-inspiring side of uncertainty slowly shifted as the future-focused anxiety seeped out of the closet.

Other friends wrote of the challenging side of uncertainty, the side that we are all aware of;

“. . . this is something I have been working on my whole life. There were and still are times when it makes me physically ill and totally unable to cope. . .I try to control the things I can. . .I always find it very comforting to organize my drawers.”

. . .

“I wrap myself into the fetal position until I find a new way of framing the situation so I can handle it.”

. . .

“I simply try to avoid it.” [end of email]

The emails from friends confirmed my suspicions that there is no right way to handle uncertainty, just the way that works for each individual. It can be scary, dark, and lonely.

Once you begin paying attention to uncertainty, it permeates everything, from over-heard conversations in coffee shops, to secrets friends share, and even to the conclusions of academic articles for class on how people handle uncertainty;

“People’s willingness to act depends on how knowledgeable they are/feel; however in most contexts individuals must act based on predictions.”

It seems obvious, of course that as humans we act based on predictions. What are the other options? The article seeks to explain types of actions people will take based on their knowledge of the outcome. In a world, where knowledge of the outcome is more of a desire than a reality, our decision-making is rooted in our prediction.

We are left with the leap-of-faith and creating positive predictions that allow us to take the risk---apply for the job, ask the girl out, plan that trip, make the move, and whatever uncertain plans you have. Leaning into uncertainty is a sense of freedom that makes us human and calls us to trust ourselves.

XXIII. Normandie

Madeleine is Clémence’s older sister, an outspoken 26-year-old who takes it upon herself to teach me all the dirty words I never learned in my American French classes. C’est très important, ton éducation! she tells me soon after my arrival. I agree wholeheartedly. It becomes a tradition for she, Clémence, Pauline and I to giggle around the table each night as they teach me things like how to tell people to fuck off in three different ways and a variety of tenses. I copy everything down into the little notebook I carry with me everywhere---Roger calls me l’écrivaine, the writer, as I am constantly scribbling away in it, trying to record every detail of Normandie. Apart from a journal, I use it for making lists of the new words I hear. By the end of the visit it is full of my looping sentences, spelling out phrases that, were I to leave my notebook sitting open on the kitchen table, would probably not be what Roger was expecting to find.

After a month under Madeleine’s tutelage, I am speaking grammatically incorrect, slang-ridden French. It makes for easier conversation with Clémence’s friends, but the transition back to Advanced Placement French in Ohio is something of a culture shock. When I incorporate my new vocabulary into an essay on what I did over the summer, the teacher takes away a point for each use of slangy verlan or argot, even though that’s the kind of French that most people in France actually speak.

It’s the worst grade I’ve gotten on a French assignment since I started studying the language years before, but I don’t mind. Each red X reminds me of the stamps in my passport from Charles de Gaulle airport, hard proof that I went somewhere and changed because of it.

Making Mistakes

I spent the last week in Florida, holed up in conference rooms by day and attending boozy events by night. It was my company's annual sales conference, a huge event that brings sales professionals together from across the country. I don't write much---or anything really---about my day job here. I work for a large legal research and technology company, selling both to law firms. When I made the transition from practicing law to sales, my mom was convinced that I would be successful, because in her words, I'm “smart and cute."  What a gift to have had a full-time cheerleader; a gift that I will never take for granted again. I have a boss, one who is at least three pegs up the ladder from me, who speaks to each and every person she meets with familiarity and respect. She's the kind of boss who asks you to do more with less, and is the kind of boss who receives a resounding YES from her troops with no questions asked. We all want to make her proud. She spoke throughout the last few days, providing us with inspirational thoughts for the year ahead and reflecting on the past one. One thing she said stuck with me. She urged us to make mistakes this year---big ones, in fact---because you're bound to make mistakes when you embrace change. I paused at this, immediately thinking about the big ones I made over the last year.

This past year, I spent too many hours thinking about the people who disappointed me, rather than the ones who showed up again and again. I appreciated the latter without question, but still thought about the cards I didn't receive and the times my phone didn't ring. I couldn't help but notice the people who were around at first, but who faded from sight as time passed. This group is small though, so much smaller than the mob that has circled around me tirelessly and endlessly. My mom would tell me to get over it, in that way only she could.

This past year, I focused too much on my own needs in honoring my mom's memory, instead of my family's needs. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, my sister Meg asked me to continue the Black Friday tradition we started with our mom in recent years: in other words, to go shopping with her at an ungodly hour once again. I turned her down, thinking only of how sad it would be without my mom, instead of Meg's wish to keep these traditions alive. Most recently, I balked in response to my sisters' suggestion to serve chicken parm at an upcoming family dinner, to celebrate my mom's birthday. They wanted to honor my mom with her favorite dish; all I could think about was the bother of frying chicken cutlets for 15 people. Thankfully, my sisters took a page out of my mom's book and ignored my nonsense, and thankfully, I came to my senses before too long.

This past year, I lost my temper with my dad on more occasions than I'd like to admit. It's difficult, helping him navigate life without my mom and watching him struggle with everyday tasks that she handled with such ease. The house is messier than it used to be, and all I see under the piles of mail and empty soda cans is my childhood home slipping away. I haven't acknowledged my dad's struggles quite clearly enough, or the strides he has made in becoming independent. My phone doesn't ring every night like it used to, with questions about my day. But then, the first birthday card I opened this year was from my dad. It was signed simply, but he picked out the card and mailed it, with time to spare. A small milestone, but he's learning---and quicker than I give him credit for at times.

We all know that change is the only constant in life. And so this year, I commit to embracing the change that is bound to come my way. I commit to making even more mistakes. And I commit to learning from my past mistakes. A tall order, so I'll start small. . .

I was wrong about the chicken parm. It will be the best I've ever tasted---of this I'm sure.

On learning new things

Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, beginning language courses were my favorites. They were often scheduled first thing in the morning, and with a terrifying list of intimidating lectures and seminars stretching before me throughout the week, I loved starting each day with a heaping dose of humility. When you are struggling through your alphabet at 9am, all bets are off. The first days and weeks of a beginning language course are disorienting, frustrating, overwhelming. It is impossible not to make a mistake. In fact, you have to make mistakes in order to learn to converse. And it is impossible not to embarrass yourself. For the longest time, you sound completely ridiculous as you try to pronounce unfamiliar sounds and string them together, inching toward coherency. You write at a kindergarten level.

But the learning curve is steep, and there are moments of sheer delight as you discover new ways of seeing and describing your world. The results are measurable. You started out knowing three words, and eventually you know ten, then a hundred. Soon enough, you’re making up your own sentences with those words. And one day, perhaps months or years into your study, you realize that you’re finally saying what really you want to say, rather than only what you know how to say.

Last week, my friend Diana gave a Berkman Center talk on Coding as a Liberal Art. She’s been chronicling her experience learning how to code, and in her talk, she offers up reflections on being a beginner and ideas for how coding could be taught in a liberal arts setting.

In a world overflowing with experts and specialists and wannabe experts and specialists, what I love most about Diana’s effort is her open and honest embrace of beginner status. There are so many emotional barriers to learning new things—vulnerability, embarrassment, fear of failing, fear of making mistakes, fear of the unknown—it’s a wonder any of us ever takes on the challenge, especially in adulthood, of being a novice.

Some believe it’s futile to try to learn a new language in adulthood, since it’s nearly impossible to achieve fluency. And I’ll be the first to admit that after years of language study, my conversational ability is generally pathetic. I’ll also be the first to advocate for learning new things, including impossible things, like languages.

Achieving perfection, or expertise, or fluency may be next to impossible, but perfection need not be the goal of a beginner. In fact, if perfection is the goal of a beginner, it’ll probably just get in her way.

One of the most important things I learned from being a beginner is how much I don’t know. A few words offered up in someone else’s native language or professional language doesn’t mean you totally understand a culture or field or perspective that’s different from your own. But it does mean you’re trying. It’s a step in the right direction. It means that perhaps you know enough to realize how much you don’t know.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Elissa Bassist edits the Funny Women column on TheRumpus.net. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, NYMag.com, The Daily Beast, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, The Rumpus, and most recently in the anthology Get Out of My Crotch! Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health.  Follow her on Twitter @elissabassist, and visit elissabassist.com for more literary, feminist, and personal criticism. Have you ever read “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan”? You should read it. It’s an essay about the problems of telling other people what to read. It begins with Epstein’s student who, about to graduate from college, began “asking people whom he thought well-read to make lists of books that he ought to read” because he felt there were “so many enormous gaps in his education.” Epstein writes: “When someone asks you to make a list of books for him to read he is, whether he knows it or not, really asking, ‘How do I become an educated person?’ Now this is a tricky question.”

Who am I to say how you should educate yourself and spend your time? I am someone who saw Magic Mike three times in theaters.

Epstein says many wonderful things, including, “When it comes to reading, though, nearly everyone feels, or ought to feel, inadequate in one way or another. . . How much better just to relax in one’s inadequacy?” (I’d like to swap “When it comes to reading” with “When it comes to being alive. . .”) His advice: skip the old, boring books, if you want; what you used to find boring may not be boring ten years from now; get over the preoccupation to read “what’s hot now”; reread your favorites, or don’t; don’t give book advice; don’t take book advice.

Below is an inadequate list of books eschewing everything above.

Read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. It’s not what you think. I half-wish it were what you thought. It’s a contemporary epistolary novel/memoir/feminist manifesto/art project where the following happens: a husband and wife meet a man named Dick; the wife connects with Dick and refers to their connection as a “conceptual fuck”; the wife writes Dick a letter and the husband proofs it and suggests changes and also writes his own; together, both rewrite their first letters until Chris has a book of unsent letters. Eileen Myles writes in the intro: “In Chris’s case, abjection…is the road out from failure. Into something bright and exalted, like presence…Her living is the subject, not the dick of the title…”

Read Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. If anyone ever has a problem, I tell her or him to read this book because it answers all of them. Steve Almond writes in the introduction: “I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those foundations of inconvenient feelings…within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.”

Almond says we need books like TBT because “in the private kingdom of our hearts, we are desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.”

Read Bossypants by Tina Fey because: Tina Fey.

If you’re like me, you often wonder about The Purpose of Literature. Some people knock memoirs as being a Lesser Art, but (and now I paraphrase David Foster Wallace) literature is not about showing off and performing verbal and storytelling acrobatics—literature ought to be a service to a reader’s interior life. A writer’s personal story and emotional generosity reach me more than any plot labyrinth, and so I say read Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, a book that taught me how to pray. I’m a non-practicing Jew who attends religious gatherings never, and now I say two prayers every night: Thank you for [fill in the blank] and Help me with [fill in the blank]. Mary Karr’s Lit also influenced me in this department.

Please, as a personal favor, will you read everything Lorrie Moore has written? This includes her first collection of short stories, Self-Help, her first novel, Anagrams, and her second, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and her other short story collections Like Life and Birds of America.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is the most fucked-up book I’ve ever read, and I recommend it for this reason.

Read Leaving the Atocaha Station, poet Ben Lerner’s first novel, because every sentence is a perfect sentence.

Every short story George Saunders writes, especially in Pastoralia and Tenth of December, makes me laugh out loud.

You have to read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip D. Dick.

I’ve written before about my feelings for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. When I read D.T. Max’s DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, I felt privy to the inner innerness of a writer who restructured my world and made me feel stuff. Here are two favorite DFW quotations from the book:

1. “I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how ‘hard’ writing was, and how ‘blockage’ was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983 I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I’d not dared hope for from anything.”

2. “We’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.”

It goes without saying (well, I’ve already said it a lot already) that I recommend all of Wallace’s books. They are for those who have ever felt misunderstood or ignored or lonely or bored or broken. They’ll make you feel human in our increasingly digital world.

One last piece of book advice: Never read Fifty Shades of Grey. Every time someone reads Fifty Shades of Grey, a real book dies.

Hungry Hungry Humans

Dear Sibyl, Is it me, or does everyone and their uncle have a food allergy/aversion/snobbish avoidance these days? I've found it increasingly difficult to share meals and prepare food for others without objections from gluten-free, only-eat-local-everything, on-a-cleanse, vegan, paleo-diet friends and family members.  I used to crave the communal intimacy of a shared meal, but now it seems "what I'm not eating" dominates the conversation (and makes my allergy-free, trying-to-stay-sane self question if I really should be eating that dairy/gluten/egg-rich muffin). Am I being insensitive?

Signed,

Eating the Damn Muffin Already

Dear Eating The Damn Muffin Already,

I wish you were my dinner guest.

Recently, we had a couple we were getting to know over for dinner.  I had baked a delicious dessert, since they were bringing the food.  The meal was saucy take out, rich in butter and spices.  When I brought out the salted caramel cake I had made from scratch, I was shocked that neither one of my guests were willing to try it.  They demurred, saying that "Sugar is poison, you know", and that they are cutting it out of their diet completely.

Stunned, I set my cake back on the stove, and, due to the calls of my toddler, who had been promised a special treat in honor of our guests and had even helped to bake it, I cut the members of my family slices and passed them out, leaving our guests to watch us consume a whole bunch of homemade poison.

Their choice to eat greasy take out and then refuse cake baffled me, but everyone deserves to do whatever they want with their body.  Really what bugged me were their terrible manners.

We live in a time of shifting ethics about food.  There used to be a cuisine that was considered "American", that everyone was expected to eat.  In an age of growing education about where our food comes from, who benefits from our consumption of it, and how to best feed our bodies, people are making more informed decisions about food than ever.

This is a really positive thing.  I would like nothing better than to use only local ingredients, from companies that respect the land and pay their workers a living wage.  I want to serve my family healthy food that will help our bodies grow strong.  However, I am not willing to give up the common decencies of community to do so.  My motto is "People are more important than things."  And that includes my current food philosophy.

So, what to do, if you have been invited over for dinner, and you know your hosts do not eat the same way as you?  First of all, ask what's on the menu, and what you can bring.  If you are a strict vegetarian, tell them so ahead of time.  If you have no food allergies, but would like to eat a certain way, offer to bring a salad or special gluten-free bread, and make that the focal point of your meal, eating sparingly what your hosts have provided for you.

Sharing food is such an important part of community building.  Another vital aspect of community is truth telling.  So, if you're on a diet, say you're on a damn diet.  Don't couch it in New Age terms, and definitely don't judge other people's food choices, especially not in their home.

So, to answer your question, are you being insensitive by not loving all the new diets people are trying?  Well, unless you are placing a pig on a spit in front of your vegan friend or inviting your gluten-free buddy over for Bread Fest 2013, nope.

If you find yourself irked by Macrobiotic Mary on your friend list, why not do something with her that is not centered around food?  I'm sure you can agree on an indulgent movie to watch together, to make up for the decadence missing in her diet.  Just make sure you order exactly what you want at the concession stand, and stand by your choice.  But get the small popcorn---she’s not going to share.

Love,

Sibyl

Submit your own quandary to Sibyl here.

Taking a Moment

  When I get run-down or particularly stressed out, the sunset is always a good reminder to breathe deep and let it all go.  I like to stand outside, if its nice enough, or at a window and just be still and soak in the amazing beauty.  It never ceases to soothe my soul.  If you're feeling stretched a little thin, I recommend the same.  And if you can't find a sunset of your own, or need the peace right now, here's one of mine. Breathe deep and be grateful my friends.  Life is a lovely gift.

Lessons from Utah...

Dearest Clara,

Mountains always look better when covered in snow, don’t you think? There is something about those white capped natural structures that takes my breath regardless of whether I’m seeing them from the ground up, or from the sky down.  When I was in Utah just a few weeks ago, I was elated to finally see mountains all around. Last year I made a trip at about the same time and didn’t see a single one—in fact, I could barely see two feet in front of me because of all the fog and snowstorms.  This year, during my week in Utah, I also learned to:

• Drink water, water and more water: The climate in the mountains, especially in the wintertime, is dry as can be.  If you notice you’re thirsty, it’s too late.  Start drinking water in advance of your trip and keep drinking more than you think.  Your body and skin will need it more than you realize.
• Bring a bucket of lotion: Well…not a bucket but you’ll need a lot.  Again, because of the dry climate and the changes in weather, you’re skin will need a little more love and care than it usually might.  Add some strength and add some quantity to what you normally use —and don’t forget those hands! Lots of lotion if they’re out in the cold—remember, your hands will show everything first.
• Consume food as you consume alcohol : Seems like it would be natural right? Because of regulations in the state of Utah, you need to order food at the same time that you order alcohol.  All in all, that’s not a bad general principle to live by—a little something in the stomach when you grow old enough to have a drink is a generally a good idea.  When I think of all the times I enjoyed a glass or two (or perhaps even just a little bit more) and the morning wasn’t as bright, it was always because I had forgotten to eat or didn’t eat very much.  Ordering both at the same time could be a good rule of thumb as you navigate your way through your young adult years.
• “Look out for the praiseworthy, virtuous..or lovely”: I confess I’m not very familiar with the Mormon religion, which is quite present in Utah.  But one of the principles that I’ve learned about through my travels and conversations, is that there is a specific element of faith that addresses praise for the good or the deserving.  Perhaps it is simply a longer way of saying that credit should be given where credit is due, but I can’t help but think that it is a wonderfully generous and selfless principle to be on the lookout for things that deserve praise and then to actually give it.  So many of us go through this world feeling like our actions or efforts of gifts are unnoticed—and so many of us mean to give credit but don’t.  Be the person that looks for genuine opportunities to offer a bit of notice for that which merits it.

All my love,

Mom

An education

Sometimes it is really hard to be a Liberal. Lately, some of my doggedly-held values around social justice and being part of a diverse community have been challenged.  I am learning that when you become responsible for sending a small person out into the world, it can lend a highly specific perspective to what were previously only abstract concepts.  I am not particularly comfortable with some of what I am discovering about myself but I think it is important to ponder. So my husband and I have just hopped on the loopy carnival ride that is securing an education for a child in New York City.  While clearly this process is mystifying in many urban centers, NYC has a famously complex network of public neighborhood schools that are either failing miserably or so successful, such bright spots in a dreary oblivion, that people buy and sell apartments, use the address of a deceased relative, beg, borrow, steal, WHATEVER IT TAKES to gain entry.  And even then, they are not guaranteed a slot in the local school because of overcrowding or their kid may end up in a kindergarten class “annex” in a bodega around the corner.

I would like to state for the record, that our child just turned 1 and so in this moment our focus is on preschool, which doesn’t happen for another full year and yet somehow requires our urgent attention.  I feel whiplash, like I just recovered from having an infant and I haven’t had time to put my purse down before we are off to research schools.  There is pressure where we live to tour preschools, apply and get on the waiting lists NOW, even though because of a late December birthday, our daughter won’t even be eligible for preschool until 2014.  As an aside, our day care of preference (if we had chosen the day care route or would want that to bridge our daughter until preschool) has a 1-1.5 year long waiting list and the people we know whose kids go there now had the good sense to apply when they were newly pregnant.  And they still waited.  And oh by the way, you tour, interview and apply to these places that you then have the privilege of paying for. . . the amount of money varies from modest rent to modest salary. 

Now that we are in this process, we are naturally having to look at our daughter’s future options for school where we live.  Our values dictate that our child will go to public school.  I was educated in an excellent public school system in California and I grew up with this idea that you build community and strengthen local schools by participating in them.  Even if we had the money, private school was not a value of ours.  My husband went to private school because there was no appropriate public option where he lived and he came out of that experience enriched, but feeling like he wanted something different, something more inclusive, for his children.

Diversity is a buzzword, but it also means something to us.  We live in New York and in Brooklyn, specifically, because we want to live among a wide range of cultures, races, ethnicities, walks of life and we want this for our daughter, as well.  But the fact is that we live in a “burgeoning” neighborhood in Brooklyn that has mostly deficient, even sometimes dangerous public schools.

The de facto segregation that the school struggle creates here is widely known and continues unabated and we are likely on our way to contributing to it.  What happens in our community is that the poor children (almost exclusively of color) go to these lacking public schools in the neighborhood and get an inadequate start right out of the gate.  There are also charter schools with limited spaces (also a much-talked-about phenomenon) and these schools are not a panacea.  Charter schools are controversial in a number of ways (Do they really educate kids better?  Are they creating their own form of urban flight?  Are they bad for the neighborhood schools that the children “abandon?”).

We live in a building that is like an island in our neighborhood.  It is full of upper-middle class folks who moved in when this warehouse building was converted to loft condos 7 years ago.  This is the story of so many historic ghettos in Brooklyn.  The affluent people get pushed out of Manhattan and/or choose a different lifestyle and begin changing the face of the neighborhood.  We see the seeds of inequality every day, right outside our door.  Across the street from our island, we have a poorly-rated and, at times, unsafe public school.  In our entire district, there are maybe 1-2 schools that we would consider, none of which are near us and all of which would all require an exceptional process if we were to apply.

What most people on our island do is game the system in some way: they apply to schools using a different address; they happen to know someone somewhere; they apply to a million places outside the district and are willing to wait until August to get a “yes” if the school has space; they have their child tested for “gifted and talented” status and ship them off to a school with a program, etc.  All of this is not only exhausting it has the effect of landing like-people in like-places.  Here we are, priding ourselves on living our diverse experience and we will almost certainly usher our kid toward a school or a classroom where she will be surrounded by kids that are almost exactly like her in most ways.  We will recreate the island and we don’t feel we have any choice about it.

I have begun to call into question what I mean when I say I value diversity.  It is easy to say this academically, and it is quite another to live in a neighborhood where there are shots fired 25 feet behind you when you are 8 months pregnant.  It is easy to say that you want your child to be exposed to every kind of experience until you watch the kids from the local school hang out just steps from the entrance, in broad daylight, smoking weed and let’s just say “talking disrespectfully” about women.  It is easy to say that you love the many threads of our beautiful fabric until you feel so intimidated by the guys on the corner that you walk the long way, and then cross in front of the police station, to get to the subway.  Of course, these experiences are not reflective of the entire character of the neighborhood, but they are an undeniable fact of the culture here.  I want to believe that people of every background can be truly integrated, but sometimes I feel like we all just end up living parallel lives within the same space.

We sat in a classroom with 60+ other parents on Monday to begin the tour of our desired preschool FOR 2014.  I looked around the room and saw lots of hues, heard a few different languages, noticed some non-traditional parents and felt a little better about myself.  Of course if you pay attention for long in a situation like that, you start to realize that everyone is talking to their children in the same way, using the same phrases, asking the same questions, carrying similar gear, coming to and from similar jobs.  It seems like this level of diversity will have to do for now until I can come up with a way to feel more “of” our neighborhood.  And so (if we get in!), we will travel back and forth from one island to another with our daughter and hope that the trip along the way becomes smoother sailing.

Women Who Will Never Die

Yes, literature has a gift: making people and feelings immortal. Over the years, I have stumbled upon many women characters portrayed by writers who were obsessed by their beauty and being. I’ve always felt like I wanted to know everything about these women. What was so special about them? What inspired poets and writers to grab their pens and start writing? Were they worth so much attention? I admire the power of these women, those very peculiar qualities that made them live through the ages in fiction and poetry. Many of them fascinate me, and make me feel a bit envious, too. I think I actually have a number of favorites, and in this list I will only mention three of them (casual order):

 

1. Alice in wonderland. Who was the real Alice in Wonderland immortalized by Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson? I have always felt some kind of attachment to Alice’s story. When I was little, my mother used to feed me with tales. My favorites were the ones that became Walt Disney’s classics, Alice in Wonderland above all. I watched the cartoon so many times I actually still know the words by heart. Alice Liddell Hargreaves was an unrestrained child, naive and innocent at times, but also incredibly aware of the world around her. Alice’s father was the Dean of Westminster School and was soon appointed to the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford. Dodgson/Carroll met the Liddell family in 1855. The relationship between the girl and Dodgson has been the source of much controversy. Dodgson entertained Alice and her sisters by telling them stories, and used them as subjects for his hobby, photography. There is no record of why the relationship between him and the Liddells broke so suddenly, but what remains are some very beautiful pictures of the little Alice (and a WONDERful book!).

“Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.”

2. How not to wonder about Beatrice’s life? We have no pictures, of course! (Yes, paintings!) What we have is Dante’s description of her, which appears in La Vita Nova. When he first saw her, she was dressed in soft crimson and wore a girdle around her waist. Dante fell in love with Beatrice at first sight, and he describes her with divine and angelic qualities. One afternoon, while Beatrice was walking the streets of Florence, she turned and greeted him. On the very same day, Dante had a dream about Beatrice, who became the subject of his first sonnet of La Vita Nova.

To every captive soul and gentle heart

into whose sight this present speech may come,

so that they might write its meaning for me,

greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.

Already a third of the hours were almost past

of the time when all the stars were shining,

when Amor suddenly appeared to me

whose memory fills me with terror.

Joyfully Amor seemed to me to hold

my heart in his hand, and held in his arms

my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.

Then he woke her, and that burning heart

he fed to her reverently, she fearing,

afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.

                            from La Vita Nova - A ciascun´alma presa e gentil core

3. Traveling back in time, there’s another woman who got my full attention. Her name is Lesbia, and Catullus was the poet who fell deeply in love with her (her real name was probably Clodia Metelli). I still remember how much passion my Latin professor put during that class in high school, commenting each and every word from this beautiful poem below. I seriously think this and other ancient poems were what motivated me to classical studies.

To every captive soul and gentle heart

into whose sight this present speech may come,

so that they might write its meaning for me,

greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.

Already a third of the hours were almost past

of the time when all the stars were shining,

when Amor suddenly appeared to me

whose memory fills me with terror.

Joyfully Amor seemed to me to hold

my heart in his hand, and held in his arms

my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.

Then he woke her, and that burning heart

he fed to her reverently, she fearing,

afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.

                                         from How Many Kisses

Who are your favorite women in literature?

Catherine the Great: Prussian. Empress. Enlightened Despot.

Are absolute rule and enlightened republicanism compatible? Can you extol the Declaration of the Rights of Man while also oppressing minority groups? Do progress and violence coexist? Does progress exist?

Sorry to get a little politico-philosophically heavy-handed. (Sorry also for making up the word “politico-philosophically.”) These were just questions drifting through my idle mind as I pondered the legacy of today’s YHWOTD, Catherine the Great. Specifically, her legacy as an “enlightened despot.” Oxymoron much? Not so much, no. Or maybe it is. I leave that for you to decide.

Let’s rewind. Catherine was born with the title Princess Sophia in Prussia, in what is now a part of Poland, in 1729. As was the custom of people in her social class, she was engaged to her cousin when she was about ten. She hated him right away. His name was Peter, and he was Peter the Great’s grandson and heir to the Russian throne.

Following the engagement, young Sophia relocated, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and changed her name to Catherine II. Which, by the way, has always struck me as an incredibly strange convention, getting abruptly, somewhat nonsensically renamed once you plan to take some kind of ruling gig. Like “oh, your name is Albert? Well, we’ve had a lot of kings named George. So why don’t we keep that going. What are we up to now? Six? Okay, George VI. Off you go.”

Catherine was married to sickly alcoholic and Prussia-lover Peter for about seventeen years; despite a troubled relationship and her numerous infidelities, they stuck it out for a time. But power corrupts (or so my high school English teachers told me). When Empress Elizabeth died in 1762, Peter took the throne, really sucked at it, and then was overthrown in a bloodless coup by his not-so-devoted wife. Then he got strangled.

Catherine’s turn.

Fortunately for Catherine, people liked her a lot better than Peter. She immediately set about modernizing and strengthening the Russian state. She continued Peter the Great’s turns towards westernization, though she also reached out diplomatically to Japan and tried to take some of Alaska—indirectly paving the way for Sarah Palin’s political career. She saw Russia through several war victories, against the Ottomans, the Poles, and her own cousin the king of Sweden. (The European ruling classes were pretty incestuous, in both the literal and figurative senses.)

On top of her political acumen, Catherine was also something of a writer. She penned multiple fictions and comedies and was a regular correspondent of European luminaries like Voltaire and Diderot. In fact, she and Voltaire were kind of long-distance besties. They never met in person, but they wrote thousands of letters to each other over the course of their lives.

This was part and parcel to Catherine’s long-standing interest in Enlightenment thought. Along with Joseph II of Austria and Frederick II of Prussia (also fellow members in the “II” club), Catherine was considered an “enlightened despot,” an absolute-style ruler who had Enlightenment ideas. You know, peace, love and happiness life, liberty and natural rights to property.

In some ways this may seem paradoxical, but one has to remember that democracy as we know it didn’t exactly exist yet. At the time, there was a completely viable trajectory that saw progress and individual liberty being best achieved under the iron-fisted rule of a despotic absolutist. No contradiction there! Said a lot of people in the eighteenth century.

Catherine’s legacy is not without blemishes. Most often, she’s criticized for her policies towards the Russian serfs—it’s said her rule saw a high (or low) point for serfdom in the Empire. For example, under her rule serfs (read: one step below "peasants") could be banished to Siberia by their lords the nobles. Or, alternative form of punishment, they could also be mercilessly beaten. So. . . even though you might have bought the compatibility of Catherine’s Enlightenment ideas and her despotism, you might still have some trouble with that whole “oppressing the serfs” part.

Still, Catherine was able to see Russia through what many considered its Golden Age, ruling for thirty-four years (that’s almost thirty-four years longer than her husband) and expanding the imperial frontiers. Call her enlightened, call her despotic, or call her the bane of the serfs—she certainly was powerful.

new life

These are my plants. Or most of them anyway. I crammed them onto a shelf one morning a few weeks ago in an effort to give them all a little extra dose of sunlight. My geranium, which has been steadily hanging on since April, was beginning to look a little droopy and I was worried she might have caught a cold in our ice box of a bathroom. Twenty minutes or so on the radiator would do a world of good, I figured, and so I took her down from her perch above the bathroom mirror and snuggled her against the paperwhite bottles.

These plants are the only living things in this world that depend on me for their daily well-being. Our apartment's too tiny for even the smallest goldfish and I'm fairly certain that my husband's diet would actually improve if tomorrow I suddenly vanished. But these plants, they need me. The paperwhites, I'll admit, only barely. They aren't cut out for long-term relationships. They grow up fast and bloom with fanfare, but they're gone before they've hardly begun. Last week there was a casualty when one collided with the aformentioned radiator. I came down our ladder-stairs in the morning to find the singed remains of a particularly beautiful specimen. Perhaps an extra adjustment the night before would have been more prudent, but I had gone to bed without checking in and in the night the poor bulb was jettisoned from its bottle. I picked at the pieces of leaf that had burned onto the radiator, and completed a quick burial, sans ceremony.

Two weeks ago my big sister became the mother of an actual human being. There were warning signs, of course: the months of pregnancy, the addition of a wooden cradle to her apartment, the ever-expanding belly. But all of that was hardly preparation for the sudden arrival of a pink and squirmy and incredibly alive little person. Poof, a human being with a tiny beating heart and two tiny expanding lungs and all of those many fingers and toes out in the wide world alongside us. I won't pretend to understand what it must be like to be a mother, but I can say that this wilty geranium, feisty paperwhite-owning aunt is awestruck, already.

Looking Forward: Tiny Earthquakes.

There were earthquakes in Tokyo the night before I left for Cambodia. It was the summer after I’d graduated college and I planned to spend a month overseas, teaching English to a small group of children at an orphanage in Phnom Penh. My family accompanied me half of the way there, vacationing at my grandparents’ house in Tokyo for a few days before my departure.

We shopped, ate at our favorite noodle shops, strolled the city streets. At night, I slept in my uncle’s childhood bedroom, on a soft mat laden with blankets. I slept soundly there, in a house I knew well from many visits to Japan. It was quiet—very still, even in the middle of the city. But on that night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I lay awake, palms pressed to the ground.

It was shaking.

Always a bit superstitious, I spent the better part of that night, eyes closed but unable to sleep, counting tiny, nearly imperceptible earthquakes. I was afraid.

The next morning, I boarded the plane.

---

Cambodia was, to put things lightly, an adventure. On my first night, I was offered snake, skinned and coiled in a bucket, for dinner. I lived in a very poor neighborhood where few people spoke English, and I was warned never to walk alone. I found myself stranded in a flood one night. On another, I woke to someone trying to break down my guestroom door. Meanwhile, the organization through which I’d arranged the trip was a non-presence.

I was lucky enough to be assigned a roommate, an Australian girl my age whom I loved, but still, I was terrified to be by myself—and, as a result, I almost never was. I felt vulnerable and in danger. Whether I was being unreasonable or blowing things out of proportion, I wasn’t sure. But the truth was, my time in Phnom Penh rattled me. I loved teaching at the orphanage and met wonderful people wherever I went; still, I experienced fear there on a level I hadn’t known possible.

At one point, in a sort of half-delirious state, it occurred to me that perhaps I'd sensed I was in for a hard time before I'd even arrived; that the earthquakes I'd felt in Tokyo were warnings of the trauma to come.

But I went anyway. Afterward, I felt I understood the meaning of the phrase, “lived to tell the tale.”

---

2012, as I’ve written many times, was, for me, a year of challenges. A part of me assumed that 2013 would be less tumultuous, but after a January full of ups and downs, I’m realizing that I may have been mistaken. Something tells me this year is going to test me.

That’s a scary thought. It’s thrilling, too.

Often, the Earth feels unsteady beneath my feet. In a way, I’m sensing tiny earthquakes every day. The challenge is not allowing them the power to paralyze.

---

I still remember shuffling onto the plane in Narita, the morning after my sleepless night. I felt uneasy, shaken, in a way that I couldn’t quite explain—or justify. To distract myself, I concentrated on the movement of my feet, one step at a time. Everything will be okay, I thought, even if it’s not.

I tell myself similar things as I face the coming year.

Breathe deeply. Focus, or try to. Embrace adventure. Keep walking.

The Other War On Women

Birth control. Binders. Bodies. Babies. As last fall’s presidential election came to a head, the phrase “war on women” became commonplace, part of the traditional vitriolic mud-slinging that both sides used against the other. As a woman, and one who places a high value on the freedoms of women, I of course followed the back-and-forth debates with interest, nausea, or amsuement, depending on what I was hearing.

But during that same period, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about a different “war on women”—the war of woman against woman, the war that we wage on each other, no men required.

At the beginning of my pregnancy last summer, I was talking to a pair of newlywed friends about my quest for the best pregnancy books.

“I don’t want to read anything that is going to make me panic about what could be wrong with my baby, or feel guilty about the pregnancy and parenting choices I make,” I told them.

The husband wrinkled his brow in confusion. “What do you mean, feel guilty?” he asked. “Why would parenting books make you feel guilty?”

I had to laugh at his response. It hadn’t taken me long after seeing that positive pregnancy test to come to understand just how incredibly saturated with guilt the world of pregnancy and parenting really is. Pregnancy books, websites, and forums are filled with dramatic stories about the harm you could potentially do to your unborn baby through seemingly innocuous things including (but not limited to!) nutrition, exercise (or lack thereof), medication, and even hot baths. Champions of epidurals or unmedicated childbirth regularly spar over the various merits of their preferred method, often making it seem like your child’s entire future life could hinge on whether or not you had a medicated labor and delivery.

And things only get more heated when you get into the world of parenting, with all its various methodologies and ideologies and conflicting advice. Breast or bottle? Crib or co-sleeping? Baby swing or babywearing?

Parenting isn’t the only arena in which women seem to spend an awful lot of time attacking each other, of course—it’s just the one I’ve been immersed in the most as I’ve prepared to welcome this new little one into the world. I’ve also seen women go to bat over things as big as career choices and hiring help, and things as insignificant as dyeing their hair or wearing makeup.

And let’s not even get started on the pressure we put on each other when it comes to what a woman should look like.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m as guilty as anyone else. I have on far too many occasions found myself judging another woman’s lifestyle choices, or fashion, or hair, or parenting, or career path. I’ve cringed on seeing wardrobe choices I don’t agree with and raised my eyebrows at life paths that seem less-than-ideal according to my worldview.

But still, I can’t help thinking:

What would the world be like if we women didn’t spend quite so much time and energy waging war on each other?

My resolution for this year is to give myself more grace—to stop holding myself to impossible standards, to have a little compassion for the times when I inevitably fall short (and then do so again, and again, and again). I’m vowing in 2013 to be a little kinder and gentler on myself, accept my own weaknesses and allow myself a little more love.

And all of this, this thinking about new year’s resolutions and about the war among women, has me thinking also: What if we all could do this, just a little, for each other? What if we could allow each other just a little more grace, a little more love, a little more acceptance? What if we could let go of our own lifestyles and convictions just long enough to recognize that, regardless of whether we feed our children by breast or bottle, we are all worthy of love?

It might just be a powerful change, indeed.

Do you ever find yourself at war with other women?

Like Water

By Judith NewtonHer book, Tasting Home, is available for pre-order on Amazon.

“How do you peel a walnut?” my daughter asked as she looked, not too happily, at the mound of nuts on the kitchen table.  We’d spent three days in the kitchen laboring over the twelve dishes we’d planned for a large buffet, and chiles en nogada, or chiles in walnut sauce, were the final stage of our cooking marathon.  That very evening some forty faculty and students from all over campus would be arriving to celebrate our new multicultural graduate program, and if any dish could instill a sense of community it would be chiles en nogada.

Making simple recipes like tacos de crema, macaroni with serrano chiles, and refried beans had been easy and even pleasurable, but the chiles in walnut sauce were posing a challenge. I’d combined Frida Kahlo’s recipe with one I’d taken from the Internet, and the latter called on us to peel the walnuts before pulverizing them for the sauce. “Mom,” said Hannah, rubbing at one of the walnuts, “this brown stuff isn’t coming off.” “This is a window into the lives of generations of women,” I said, ineffectually scrubbing another walnut with my fingers. “Can you imagine how much time they spent working in kitchens?” “I love cooking with you like this,” Hannah had said when we first began. “I love it too,” I’d said. Our years of cooking together and of struggling through difficult recipes had created a strong sense of solidarity.

We decided not to peel the walnuts, since Frida’s recipe didn’t call for it, but we did roast the two dozen poblano chiles and then pulled off their skins. Then we chopped a picadillo out of shredded meat, fruits, nuts and cinnamon, and, cradling the chiles in our hands, began to stuff them with the sweet and savory mix. We were treating those chiles as if they’d just been born, but, despite our labor, they were developing some ugly splits. We decided not to flour them, coat them in egg mix, and then fry them in hot oil as Frida’s recipe required.

“It’s too risky,” I said, entertaining grim visions of the chiles bursting their sides and spilling their colorful innards into a smoky pool of oil. Did Frida fry her own chiles, I wondered. Then came the sauce---easy, sweet, and cool. Four cups of (unpeeled) walnuts pureed with cream cheese, Mexican crema, cinnamon, and a fragrant half cup of sherry. Finally, seeds from six pomegranates and sprigs of parsley to go on top.  Red, white, and green---the colors of the Mexican flag.

I had been thinking about a Mexican novel for the entire three days, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. I’d been imagining Hannah and me as Tita and Chenca, two characters who spend much of their lives in the kitchen. A takeoff on nineteenth-century Mexican romance, Like Water is a novel about love and also a novel about politics, the latter being represented by the Mexican Revolution and the ongoing struggle of Tita and her sister Gertrude against patriarchal culture.

Each chapter of the novel is organized around a recipe, and the process involved in making the chapter’s dish---the grinding, the toasting, the chopping, the boiling, the frying, the cracking of eggs–is so thoroughly woven throughout the pages that cooking, an often invisible form of labor, becomes as central to the story as romance and revolution. Cooking, indeed, becomes an emblem of the domestic work that makes romance and revolution possible. It is the force that keeps women and men alive not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and politically as well.

Cooking is like that, always there, and if it is as it should be, it not only nourishes our bodies but gives us the comfort of feeling loved, cared for, and secure. Eating what is cooked and served in a caring way evokes one of our first experiences of feeling at home in the world, the experience of being fed by another being. That is one reason that cooking and eating with others can heal the adult self, one reason that it can so easily make us feel connected to another person, a family, a culture, a political community.

Like Tita and Chenca, Hannah and I were laboring in the service of politics and love. The new graduate program was meant to be revolutionary---cross racial, multi-cultural, and oriented toward political activism not just inside, but outside the classroom as well. And I had done enough organizing by then to know how cooking for others, not just from duty, but with generosity and lightness of heart, can develop and sustain those ties of feeling that are, at bottom, what make political community possible.

In Like Water for Chocolate, food is given magical force.  Quail in Rose Petal Sauce invites Tita and Pedro to enter each other’s bodies both spiritually and sensuously as they sit at the dining table. It prompts Gertrude to run away with a revolutionary, sitting behind him, naked on his horse. The Chiles in Walnut Sauce provoke the guests at Tita and Pedro’s wedding to make passionate love. Magical realism like this suggests the power of emotion, of the unconscious, and of cooking as emotion work in the day-to-day activities of our lives.

Like life, the novel is full of mothers, those who nourish and those who do not. The bad mother, Elena, controls Tita, insists that Tita serve her until she dies, and forbids Tita to marry Pedro, the man she loves. Cruel, repressing, she is the mother who denies. Even after death, she reappears, forbidding Tita to be happy. Like a force of nature, she returns again and again, suggesting the lasting influence of how we are mothered.

But Tita finds good mothers to take Elena’s place---Chenca, the cook who tends to Tita in the kitchen, and Dr. John and his Indian mother, Morning Light, who feed Tita healing foods after Elena brutally entombs her daughter in the Dove Cot. Tita herself becomes a nurturing mother to Esperanza, her sister’s daughter. Like Tita I, too, had found alternative mothers---in Dick, my gay ex-husband, in my women friends, in colleagues I had come to love. But most of all I had found mothering in being motherly---to Hannah and to my political community. Cooking for, and eating with, others had all but eclipsed those days in my mother’s house---the shame, the lost identity, the spilled water on the floor. Like Chenca, I wanted to pass on, to Hannah and to others, the recipes, the utopian practices, the ways of being and of labor that make history more than a tale of struggle; that make it also a love story, a story of caring for others.

* * *

CHILES EN NOGADA (Adapted with permission of Marilyn Tausend from adaptation by StarChefs.com from Cocina de la Familia: More Than 200 Authentic Recipes from Mexican-American Home Kitchens by Marilyn Tausend with Miguel Ravago. Fireside, Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1999.)

Marilyn Tausend kindly informs me that the secret to peeling the walnuts is to use fresh walnuts, right from the tree if possible. Meat: 2 lb beef brisket or 1 lb beef and 1 lb pork 1 small white onion cut into quarters 2 cloves garlic 1 T sea salt Picadillo: 4 T. safflower or canola oil 1/3 c. chopped white onion ½ tsp cinnamon ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper 1/8 tsp ground cloves 3 heaping T. raisins 2 T chopped walnuts 2 T. candied pineapple 1 fresh pear, peeled and chopped 1 apple, peeled and chopped 3 large, ripe tomatoes, roasted, peeled and chopped Kosher salt to taste Chiles: 6 fresh poblano chiles, roasted, peeled, and seeded with stem intact Walnut Sauce: 1 c. fresh walnuts 6 oz cream cheese (not fat free) at room temperature 1 ½ c Mexican Crema ½ tsp sea salt 1 T sugar 1/8 tsp cinnamon ¼ c. dry sherry Garnish: 1 T. chopped flat-leaf parsley ½ c. pomegranate seeds 1.      Cut meat into large chunks; remove excess fat. Place meat in large Dutch oven with onion, garlic and salt. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil.  Skim off foam if it collects on the surface. Lower heat and simmer for 45 minutes until the meat is just tender. 2.      Remove from heat and allow meat to cool in the broth. Then remove meat and finely shred it. 3.       Warm the oil in a heavy skillet and sauté the onion and garlic over medium heat until pale gold.  Stir in shredded meat and cook for 5 minutes. Add cinnamon, pepper, cloves.  Stir in raisins, 2 T walnuts, and candied pineapple.  Add chopped pear and apple and mix well. Add tomatoes and salt to taste.  Continue cooking over medium high heat until most of the moisture has evaporated.  Stir now and then.  Let cool, cover, and set aside.  The picadillo may be made one day ahead. 4.      Slit the chilies down the side just long enough to remove seeds and veins, keeping the stem end intact. Drain chilies on absorbent paper until completely dry. Set aside. Chiles may be made a day in advance 5.      At least 3 hours in advance, place 1 c walnuts in small pan of boiling water.  Remove from heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Drain the nuts and, when cool, rub off as much of the dark skin as possible.  Chop into small pieces. 6.      Place nuts, cream cheese, crema, and salt in a blender and puree thoroughly.  Stir in the sugar, cinnamon and sherry.  Chill for several hours. 7.      Preheat oven to 350 F.  When ready to serve reheat the meat filling and stuff the chilies. Place chilies, covered in warm oven.  After they are heated, place chilies on serving platter, cover with chilled walnut sauce and sprinkle with parsley and pomegranate seeds.

Republished with permission from Tasting Home

XXII. Rhône

The city of Lyon is known for its guignols, wooden hand puppets that, these days, are used frequently for political satire. I’ve seen a few of the faux-news television shows in my room back in Chambéry. Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected French president at the time, has just married model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, and their guignol doppelgangers make frequent appearances. I am tagging along on this day trip with two girls I met by happenstance in the supermarket. Annabel and Lucy are college juniors and are in Chambéry for their semester abroad. They seem so much older than me, even though the difference in our ages is only three years. They seem so much more fun, so much better at being happy where they are.

As we wander the tiny, packed streets of the Lyon old town, I pass guignol after guignol. Someone would probably like one as a present, I think, but I don’t buy anything. We keep walking for a while, look around a cathedral, eat crêpes, and then take the train to Chambéry. Annabel and Lucy go happily to their student dorm, getting ready to go out for the night, and I go back to my quiet apartment on the hill.

As I sit on the edge of my bed, I compare Annabel and Lucy’s experience of Chambéry to mine. They are so much more in the present than I am, constantly light and focusing only on the moment they’re in. Not only have I been looking forward to going home essentially since my arrival, but I came here in the first place because of the past---I chose this part of the country because my ancestors are from this Alpine region, my great-great-grandparents who made their way across the Atlantic from Switzerland more than a century ago.

And if I expected to find ghosts here, or at least something innately familiar, I was wrong.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

One of the best parts of my job is that each spring trimester, I teach a special topic English course to eleventh and twelfth graders. I have been able to choose my topics and build a course from the ground up. My proudest achievement and favorite course to teach is one called Dystopian Literature. This spring I will be offering it for the fourth time, and in the winter I always revisit my curriculum and the texts I will be using. I am pleased to be able to share these books with you, as they are near and dear to my heart.

First is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It serves as our template for what a dystopian novel is and it exhibits the key characteristics of the genre that my students and I work with all trimester. Huxley’s novel is a sort of dystopian ur-novel; it presents a society that seems to be a utopia to almost everyone except our protagonist. But then Huxley flips the script and introduces a second protagonist midway through the book to advance his themes even further. And, the book has some very funny moments. His vision of the future is remarkably prescient, particularly in the realms of media and entertainment (the “feelies,” movies that you can touch, are starting to feel like something that may exist in my lifetime).

Next, we tackle Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale, which may be my favorite book of all time by one of my favorite, if not my favorite, authors. As we read this book, I have the priceless opportunity of putting the novel in context for the students, including introducing them to personages they do not know at all, like Phyllis Schlafly and, much to their wide-eyed entertainment, Tammy Faye Bakker. Atwood’s novel is so chilling, so unsettling, that it rarely fails to captivate the students.  When Atwood writes “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories,” we are able to discuss the varied levels of autonomy and agency women have had through the years, and the way many women still exist in negative space in certain contexts. I also take great glee in exposing so many young men to Margaret Atwood. I hope some day these young men will grow into men who might one day list the book as a favorite, as Meg dreams of in this piece elsewhere on this site.

Finally, we read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I will not say much about the plot, as if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I want you to approach the novel with as clean a mind as possible. The book is full of the restrained longing Ishiguro is famous for (more often known from The Remains of the Day), and presents a dystopian society that most closely resembles our own (and much of it takes place at a boarding school, not unlike where I teach, adding certain moments of “oh!” for the students). It lacks the overt futurism of Brave New World, and more than makes up for it with gorgeous language and emphasis on character.

Two books I use to supplement our work are Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin. Both present vivid pictures of modern day totalitarian societies with vivid prose. Some of the passages from Nothing to Envy, in particular, parallel eerily with The Handmaid’s Tale, in spite of one being fact and the other fiction and the thirty years that separate the narratives.

All we need to know about dinner and divinity

Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal is one of those favorite books of mine that I haven’t finished yet. I’d like to make it to the end one day, but I’m certainly not in a hurry. I’m savoring it bit by bit, with full confidence that the author herself would approve of my slow read. It’s a book I know I’ll keep returning to even after I’ve finished it, much like the simple, beautiful thought at the heart of the book itself---that the end of every meal is the beginning of another. It’s a book that deserves, in my opinion, a genre of its own. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s not a cookbook or an instruction manual or a food memoir. I’d say it’s a sort of philosophy of food.

A browse through the table of contents is enough to make you cry: “How to Catch Your Tail,” “How to Paint Without Brushes,” “How to Light a Room,” “How to Make Peace,” “How to Build a Ship,” “How to Be Tender,” “How to Weather a Storm,” “How to End.”

You’d think it’s a book about food, and it is, but it is also a book about everything. Adler will start you off with an egg, then catapult you into the heavens, and finally bring you back down decidedly onto the earth. For example: “A gently but sincerely cooked egg tells us all we need to know about divinity. It hinges not on the question of how the egg began, but how the egg will end. A good egg, cooked deliberately, gives us a glimpse of the greater forces at play.”

I have a tendency to favor beginnings over middles and endings, but the opposite is true when it comes to food. I love the eating and drinking and savoring and lingering. I love a kitchen in action, with peels and cores strewn about the counters and several pots simmering on the stove. In the case of food, it is the beginning that catches me off guard. Why is it that dinner so often feels like a challenge to reinvent the wheel?

Some very wise friends sent us off with this book as an engagement gift, as we set out to establish a life---and a kitchen---together. From the very first pages, it has cut right through any anxieties I may have had about how we would feed ourselves. It’s the idea that eating well has nothing to do with extravagance, that cooking well has nothing to do with fancy tools, and that dinner has everything to do with where you left off in the last meal, or in all the meals that have come before.

I’ve never been much of a planner when it comes to meals, and as far as I can tell, thank goodness, An Everlasting Meal lets me off the hook. In practice, this means that the first inkling of dinner begins with the simple practice of getting a pot of water on the stove to boil and an onion in a skillet to soften. Then, and only then, is it time to start rummaging around considering what’s for dinner.

What comforts me most about this approach is that it begins with doing, rather than thinking. It’s one of those rituals buried in the everyday that, once you’ve realized it’s there, offers both a steady anchor and a comfortable stretch of rope for creative drifting.

Are You My Mother?

Dear Sibyl, Recently my grandmother got ill, and my mom went across the country to care for her.  I know this is the right thing for my mom to do, but I'm feeling abandoned and upset.  My mom recently retired and was so excited about all the ways she could spend time with her grandkids (my children) and help us out.  I know this sounds incredibly selfish, but my mom also has 5 siblings that live near my grandmother, and I'm just dumbfounded that she dropped us.  Any words of wisdom?

Distraught Daughter

Dear DD,

We never know when our mothers will leave us.  For some it is early, from a death or an emotional detachment.  For others, it is much later, unfortunately often at the time we feel we need them most.  Either way, it is always painful, and always a reason to mourn and find a way to move on.

So many of the problems in relationships, particularly with family, stem from expectations.  You expected that your mom would be there for you, to help you raise her grandchildren.  This was not an unreasonable expectation, since she has been helping you thus far, but now that you are having to shift your way of thinking about her role, it's leaving you feeling abandoned.

Your mother has her own life.  She's an adult, and she can do anything she wants with her retirement---she's earned it.  So, I'm wondering, how did she tell you that she was leaving town, and letting go of her commitments to you?  If she left without notice, and without you getting a chance to tell her how much you'll miss her, and how sad it is that your kids will lose their close relationship with her, then what you need to do is tell her how you're feeling, and that she could have handled the communication of the change differently.

The other piece that stands out to me from your letter is that you feel that her siblings could be stepping up to the plate and helping your grandmother so your mother could stay with you.  Well, that's an awkward situation to be in.  I'm not sure you want to take on your entire family system, and get involved in their complicated maneuvering of this caregiving issue.  So, you'll have to adjust your expectations for them as well as your mom.

Here's the tricky part.  You need to change what role you are giving your mother in your life (and your kids' lives), without losing the emotional connection to her.  This means you can't just totally detach and say, "Well, I guess she doesn't care about me or her grandchildren!"  You prevent this by being honest about your feelings (stop judging them as selfish and let yourself have them), with yourself and with her, and by accepting what offers she can give at this time.  That way, you're keeping the door open for a closer connection with your mom when she has the space and energy for it again.

You might find this change in roles means you are able to support your mom a bit, too.  I bet it is hard taking care of your grandmother, and perhaps you will get closer to her in this time by offering your ear to her, to listen to her struggles.  In order to do that, you'll have to forgive her for bailing on you.  It won't be easy, but if what you ultimately desire is more closeness with your mother, you'll find it a beautifully strange process.

Love, Sibyl

A Little Lesson

I struggled with what to write this week.  After writing about equality and love for two weeks in a row, I subconsciously set a bar for myself.  I didn't know what I was going to write this week, but I felt it had to be important.  I kept acting like I had big shoes to fill, which is silly since I wear a 7 1/2. I found myself with Writer's Block, or maybe more appropriately, Writer's Intimidation.  I had intimidated myself. How is that even possible? I kept trying to come up with something important, something big and meaningful. And it got closer and closer to the deadline and my pen stayed still, my brain kept running a loop of questions, what to write what to write what to write.

Finally while waiting for my tea to steep, I admitted the truth.  I was being ridiculous.  Screw it, I said to the tea kettle, I'm writing about Tootsie Roll Pops.

This week someone sent me a box of Tootsie Roll Pops.  A really big box of Tootsie Roll Pops.  This happened days ago and I'm still smiling about it.  The thing was, I didn't even really ask for the Tootsie Roll Pops. They were a total surprise, sent for no other reason than I mentioned in passing that I liked them.  Its a little thing, but it made my week.

So I guess the lesson I needed to learn this week is that the little things are sometimes just as important as the big things.