Once there was a girl named Emily Dressel. She was born with a tuft of white hair and a stubborn expression. She hated naps and adored soup. She was shy around the boys, inquisitive in class, and poker-faced on the pitcher’s mound. She blossomed in college with the discovery of $3 Boone’s Strawberry Hill.
My name has served me well over the last thirty years. Dressel. D (like David)-r-e-s-s (like Sam)-e-l. It is a good name. Near the top of the class roster – but not too high up so you had time to mentally prepare yourself if Mrs. Swanson asked everyone to spontaneously recite a haiku or name the Presidents backwards. Strangely, pizza order-takers and restaurant hostesses were universally compelled to lump a “LER” at the end. Apparently, Dressler flowed better in ink. Then, of course, there was that painful instance in 5th grade when some clever chump during recess unleashed utter humiliation in my initials: “E.D. = Explosive Diarrhea”. He wrote it in orange chalk next to the Four Square corner, albeit with several misspellings. His initials were “BC”. The best zinging retort I could spit back at the time, amidst pure playground-peer-pressured-panic, was “Birth Canal”. I can still feel the oppressive heat of jungle-gym stares.
I never personally ran into another E.D. Although one of my pals in high school told me that at her regional swim meet in Michigan, an imposter named Emily Dressel, banged her shoulder on the diving board during a routine back-flip. Apparently, “klutz” runs in the letters.
A few weeks ago, I said “I do”, setting into motion the daunting name-changing process. DMV, Frequent Flier Miles, Credit Cards, ROTH IRAs, Netflix, Work Email, Passport, USPS – the list goes on and on. Using www.knot.com as my “professional” guide to seamless marital transitions, I first bounded over to the Social Security Office. I am quite confident the waiting room chairs had maggots hatching on them or at least head lice, so I opted to stand in the back for fifty minutes while defiantly clutching my purse and attempting to look tough in my Ann Taylor sweater and pearl necklace. There were about a dozen screaming infants and toddlers running amuck with snot crusting on their cheeks, sucking on car keys and cell phones. There was one crazy white-haired lady with a walker who repeatedly shouted “What line?!” to the automated computer check-in screen and a woman in black tights and 5-inch stilettos who strutted past the police officer, dragging her 90 lb. Boxer, insisting that he was a seeing-eye-dog. I overheard two men in knit caps exchanging prison release dates and one androgynous individual, completely horizontal in row 12 appeared to be passed out or possibly dead. When my number was called, I clutched my tidy folder, containing all forms of identification, including my library card and gym membership, and marched up to Counter F. She took one look at me, half-smiled and said, “Let me guess. You just got hitched.”
There is a funny kind of mourning that comes with changing your name. In some ways, it feels like slicing off a pinky finger. True, it’s superfluous. After all, it is just a name, but yet it is subtly sentimental. Who am I if I am not Emily Dressel? My very identity.
It was the name my parents spoke aloud after kissing me on the forehead and some random nurse typed up on a birth certificate. It was the name bathed in incense during my baptism and the one that awaited me in my first grade cubbyhole on masking tape so I knew where to hang my Punky Brewster lunch box. The name appeared on T-ball trophies, in Wednesday Journal articles, and was carved into high school academic plaques. Emily Dressel was what was written on the front of the oversized Stanford University envelope next to a 72-font YES! that plopped through the mail slot one Tuesday in April. This is the name I have signed for decades on homework assignments, permission slips, petitions, and on the back of my first Visa card. The sound of it makes me turn my head, look up, and feel recognized. In fact, I get a bit jealous and competitive when I fumble across another Emily Dressel on google or Facebook. I mean who exactly do they think they are living with MY name all this time? And with that haircut?
This whole pursuit of legal reinvention is my choice and my choice alone though. Many of my female friends have kept their maiden names for various personal or professional reasons and Brad would have been happy with whatever I decided. This is something I wanted to do. A cutting of one cord and a Tarzan vine-leap onto another as Brad and I set off as a family, awaiting whoever or whatever may join our little duo along the way.
And so I am practicing my cursive H’s. It is one of the few capital letters that require an exhaustive pen lift. Several pen lifts, in fact. I can’t seem to get it to look just right. Hampson. It is harmless. Alphabetically acceptable. In the middle of the pack – not too cocky, but not too timid either. And thus far, only one person actually thought I was marrying one of the Hanson brothers with mushroom hair. It is a benign, next-door-neighborly, quaint, all-American kind of name. It will fit easily on the backs of my kids’ Little League jerseys or on the cover of my great American novel. No one will get hurt. It could be so much more controversial. My sister-in-law, for example, willingly adopted the new last name of “Gross”. (No offense, Mike, but that is true love right there.) But, still, it is going to take some getting used to. I don’t know Emily Hampson yet. I’m sure that will evolve after many cross outs, corrections, and voids in my checkbook. I trust she will eventually become broken in and comfortable and start to feel like sweatpants.
Fortunately, I have wracked my brain during quiet moments and commercial breaks and can’t come up with any disgusting gastrointestinal ailments that can be derived from E.H. The worst I can formulate is Excessive Halitosis. But, give me time. We’ve only just met.
Oct 20, 2010
Aug 17, 2010
You say potato – I say pomme de terre.
Hello, my name is Emily and I am a Foodie. That is...major schnoz-in-the-air, fancier-than thou-hierloom-varietal, organically-au poivre snob. You say beans, I say haricot verts. You say mushrooms, I say chanterelles. I won’t be caught dead with American cheese singles or Wonder Bread in my cart. Those are for the birds or toddlers with four teeth. I adore over-priced farmer’s markets and pray to the God of prix fixe. I will spend $200 on one dinner for two without blinking but refuse to buy a pair of shoes for $75 that will last me ten years. Priorities.
I blame my mother and grandmother, Baba. Raised as the daughter of a peasant farmer in the Czech countryside, my Baba mastered simple ingredients grown in the garden or butchered in the barn. There was beef with dill gravy, dumplings and cabbage in the winter - grub that stuck to your ribs and made you sleepy before sundown. In the summer there were tomatoes to strain, cucumbers to pickle, and peaches to peel. In the morning, chicken bones clinked like chimes against the soup pot while Baba braided strudels that bubbled of yeast and apricot jam. Her family used everything - down to the grease that was packed and perfumed into laundry soap.
The thrifty resourcefulness ingrained in that generation’s DNA immigrated with my grandparents to their eventual home in the West suburbs of Chicago. As a child, my mother became accustomed to traditional homemade Czech meals, but she quickly developed an itch to experience the American concept of “dining out”. This was an extravagance not in my grandparent’s vocabulary. When my mom set the table, she often daydreamed of dining downtown in a fancy room with linen tablecloths, crystal chandeliers, and waiters with silver trays who folded your napkin when you got up to use the ladies room. She longed to peruse a menu written in cursive and order something French or Italian that she couldn’t pronounce. She vowed that one day her daughters would know about champagne, caviar, and seafood forks.
My family’s love affair with food was evident decades back on my dad’s side as well. The story goes that his grandmother, Emma, was so fat that they had to saw down the front door upon her death in 1949 to remove her from the house and special order a mega-coffin from California. But, I argue that there is a critical class difference between being a compulsive eater and being a Foodie – besides the cholesterol. Where bingers love to eat, Foodies put equal stock in admiration. We are a discerning, adventurous, and fastidious breed. We are awed by the purple pigments in Dragon tongue beans and the subtle plantain flavor in a Butterstick summer squash. We could chat for hours about the hint of mandarin in a cardamom foam or discuss what herbs to add to a mirepoix to properly flavor chicken stock. We are enamored with gastronomy and fatigued by flourless chocolate cake. We subscribe to Food and Wine Magazine, Gourmet, and watch Top Chef on Wednesdays. We maintain a bucket list of restaurants to spend five hundred dollars at before we die. And we brag. Foodie to Foodie. Under the pretense of recipe collaboration, we truthfully love to pound our own chests.
My brother and I do this - indulge in culinary chatter. He painstaking describes how he basted a honey-dijon glaze over grill-skewered brussel sprouts on Friday and I see his “BS” and raise him a homemade butterscotch semifreddo drizzled with a rocky road brittle. He pauses. Considers. And folds. I win this round. To boost his ego, I casually mention my last encounter dining with savages.
“Last week I overhead this girl at a bistro ask her date what cream bro-leigh was. I turned around, thinking that the guy would be mortified, until I saw he was trying to eat the cedar plank under his salmon.”
We both laugh and snivel, basking in the warm glow of superiority.
But, this type of taste-bud transcendence produces an unfortunate side effect. We are commonly bored. I refuse to support restaurants that aren’t churning out something I can’t parboil, poach, or puree at home. Frequently I scan dessert menus on-line to see if they reek of the ABC’s: Apple tart, Bread pudding, Chocolate cake. It doesn’t even have to be expensive – just give me something original and sexy and deconstructed. Give me a meal of a lifetime.
When we do hit that crescendo - that orgasmic, trifectus climax of peak flavor, texture, and presentation - we cannot help but spew to all of our Foodie friends. Each of us, broadcasting our most elite conquests like decorative patches ironed proudly on a Girl Scout sash.: “Oh yes, we ate at Charlie Trotter’s for George’s birthday last year. The maitre d’ even gave us a private kitchen tour.” or “Bill was so romantic this fall – he surprised me with a garden table at Commander’s Palace for jazz brunch!” Even if you happen to know someone who has visited the Super Elite - like a sister-in-law who once ate sashimi at Nobu in Toyko - you can earn partial credit. At least you are in the game and fellow Foodies know, “Ok, he gets it.”
Which leads me to my latest conquest during our upcoming wedding weekend: Thomas Keller’s impervious 15-table magnum opus in Napa Valley, The French Laundry. The Crème de la Crème. A place where just securing a reservation earns you a patch. It has been on my list ever since my family visited wine country in 2002 and the concierge cackled in my face, “French Laundry!? Honey, the next time they have a table open, you’ll be a grandmother.”
For the past fifteen years, it has been ranked as one of the top restaurants globally. This is the holy grail of the West Coast. Every night, approximately one hundred chosen disciples indulge in a hallucinatory orgy of culinary lovemaking. Foodies will give their left pinky toe for a chance to feast on Keller’s ambrosia: “Oysters and Pearls” or “Foie Gras en Terrine”. If only appendage amputation was so easy…. You actually have to put in the work. It may be about as difficult to snatch a table at The French Laundry as it is to win the Indiana Lottery – twice. And so, I set off to do my research.
First, I sensibly google ‘How to get a reservation at the French Laundry?’ I am bombarded by an obscene quantity of posting boards and chat rooms. Foodies in Portland and Charleston lamenting on Trip Advisor that they have been trying unsuccessfully for five years, perhaps searching for some sort of miracle fertility treatment to increase their chances. There is a message board where you can trade dates and tables with other couples who have reservations on days that they can no longer attend. It all reads suspiciously like a personal ad, Silver-haired San Francisco couple with a secured 4-top, searching for fun-loving pair to join them for Late Seating on Tues, September 14. Must love food, red wine, small talk and be willing to spend a fortune. Gay is a plus! There are numerous references to a mysterious man named Aren Sandersen who will guarantee your party a reservation on your selected day if you give him 70 days notice and hand over your Visa number.
The French Laundry currently takes reservations two months in advance to the day. Their largest table is a six-top and we have eight anxious Foodies in our group. I need two tables of four (13% of the restaurant!). October 4th is our night. We have one shot at this. Like the hunky astronauts in those Hollywood Blockbusters attempting to reroute apocalyptic meteorites and save the human race from total obliteration with one last Hail-Mary computer algorithm.
I call on August 2nd, just to make sure they haven’t changed their policies. I call again on August 3rd to double check and confirm the first person I spoke with wasn’t a vapid idiot. During the night, I have a nightmare about getting stuck in an elevator when the reservation office is about to open and having to tap out a SOS in Morse Code to the emergency responders who don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of my distress. I have my fiance stationed on his overnight shift, stalking Opentable for any possible loopholes per online rumors that the website releases one table per night. On August 4th at 11:30am CST, I arrange my notebook, credit cards, pens, back-up pens in case the first two run out of ink, and stress ball in front of me on the bed.
11:45am - Begin calming breathing exercises.
11:50am – Text my sister to remind her for the fifth time to call on her phone.
11:55am – French Laundry voicemail, “Our reservation office will reopen at 10am PST”.
11:57am – Quick breathing exercise
11:58am – French Laundry voicemail
11:59am - Busy signal
11:59:32am – Busy signal. Shit.
12:00:02am – Busy signal. Double shit.
12:00:13am – Busy signal. Triple shit.
I redial every eight seconds for the next twenty-two terribly tedious minutes. 165 calls. At one point around 12:19pm, I peer down at my index finger, blistering from redials, and think, What the hell am I doing? Dinner at this place is about as much as Baba’s annual social security check. I must be nuts. But then, I come to my senses and realize I have just wasted eleven precious seconds. At 10:22:46am I actually hear a ring. I screech with excitement as the drone announcement comes on, “Thank you for calling The French Laundry. Your call is important to us. All representatives are currently with other clients. Please remain on the line and the next representative will be with you shortly.” I glance at my watch. 10:23:55am. I am probably screwed. More bad elevator music. A voice cuts through the other line - a formal British accent – “Thank you ever so kindly for holding. This is Victoria”. Very proper. I think they must only hire reservationists with proper British accents so all the bitter Americans don’t become irate and vulgar on the phone once all the tables are lapped up. You just can’t take a tone with Victoria.
“Congratulations,” she says breezily. “We have exactly one table left for October 4th. A four-top at 9:15pm.”
“I’ll take it.”
As I rattle off my credit card information and put my name on The Wait List for an additional table, I am already scheming – Who out of my eight family members is expendable? Amy is skinny. Maybe she can sit on my lap.
A week later, I get a call that their private event room has opened up and would we like to secure it for our party of eight? More breathing exercises. Absolutely! I actually do heel clicks and sashay across the living room all afternoon.
Many of you will probably think I am certifiably crazy. For those who don’t – welcome to the club. You are definitely a fellow Foodie. I leave any aspiring Foodies with this small piece of advice. As my mother always instructed my siblings and I, growing up: Fake it until you make it. I recommend investing in an excellent French/American cookbook and dictionary. And remember, everything sounds better and more expensive in French. Meme quand c’est la laverie. Or as we say here....even when it’s the laundry.
I blame my mother and grandmother, Baba. Raised as the daughter of a peasant farmer in the Czech countryside, my Baba mastered simple ingredients grown in the garden or butchered in the barn. There was beef with dill gravy, dumplings and cabbage in the winter - grub that stuck to your ribs and made you sleepy before sundown. In the summer there were tomatoes to strain, cucumbers to pickle, and peaches to peel. In the morning, chicken bones clinked like chimes against the soup pot while Baba braided strudels that bubbled of yeast and apricot jam. Her family used everything - down to the grease that was packed and perfumed into laundry soap.
The thrifty resourcefulness ingrained in that generation’s DNA immigrated with my grandparents to their eventual home in the West suburbs of Chicago. As a child, my mother became accustomed to traditional homemade Czech meals, but she quickly developed an itch to experience the American concept of “dining out”. This was an extravagance not in my grandparent’s vocabulary. When my mom set the table, she often daydreamed of dining downtown in a fancy room with linen tablecloths, crystal chandeliers, and waiters with silver trays who folded your napkin when you got up to use the ladies room. She longed to peruse a menu written in cursive and order something French or Italian that she couldn’t pronounce. She vowed that one day her daughters would know about champagne, caviar, and seafood forks.
My family’s love affair with food was evident decades back on my dad’s side as well. The story goes that his grandmother, Emma, was so fat that they had to saw down the front door upon her death in 1949 to remove her from the house and special order a mega-coffin from California. But, I argue that there is a critical class difference between being a compulsive eater and being a Foodie – besides the cholesterol. Where bingers love to eat, Foodies put equal stock in admiration. We are a discerning, adventurous, and fastidious breed. We are awed by the purple pigments in Dragon tongue beans and the subtle plantain flavor in a Butterstick summer squash. We could chat for hours about the hint of mandarin in a cardamom foam or discuss what herbs to add to a mirepoix to properly flavor chicken stock. We are enamored with gastronomy and fatigued by flourless chocolate cake. We subscribe to Food and Wine Magazine, Gourmet, and watch Top Chef on Wednesdays. We maintain a bucket list of restaurants to spend five hundred dollars at before we die. And we brag. Foodie to Foodie. Under the pretense of recipe collaboration, we truthfully love to pound our own chests.
My brother and I do this - indulge in culinary chatter. He painstaking describes how he basted a honey-dijon glaze over grill-skewered brussel sprouts on Friday and I see his “BS” and raise him a homemade butterscotch semifreddo drizzled with a rocky road brittle. He pauses. Considers. And folds. I win this round. To boost his ego, I casually mention my last encounter dining with savages.
“Last week I overhead this girl at a bistro ask her date what cream bro-leigh was. I turned around, thinking that the guy would be mortified, until I saw he was trying to eat the cedar plank under his salmon.”
We both laugh and snivel, basking in the warm glow of superiority.
But, this type of taste-bud transcendence produces an unfortunate side effect. We are commonly bored. I refuse to support restaurants that aren’t churning out something I can’t parboil, poach, or puree at home. Frequently I scan dessert menus on-line to see if they reek of the ABC’s: Apple tart, Bread pudding, Chocolate cake. It doesn’t even have to be expensive – just give me something original and sexy and deconstructed. Give me a meal of a lifetime.
When we do hit that crescendo - that orgasmic, trifectus climax of peak flavor, texture, and presentation - we cannot help but spew to all of our Foodie friends. Each of us, broadcasting our most elite conquests like decorative patches ironed proudly on a Girl Scout sash.: “Oh yes, we ate at Charlie Trotter’s for George’s birthday last year. The maitre d’ even gave us a private kitchen tour.” or “Bill was so romantic this fall – he surprised me with a garden table at Commander’s Palace for jazz brunch!” Even if you happen to know someone who has visited the Super Elite - like a sister-in-law who once ate sashimi at Nobu in Toyko - you can earn partial credit. At least you are in the game and fellow Foodies know, “Ok, he gets it.”
Which leads me to my latest conquest during our upcoming wedding weekend: Thomas Keller’s impervious 15-table magnum opus in Napa Valley, The French Laundry. The Crème de la Crème. A place where just securing a reservation earns you a patch. It has been on my list ever since my family visited wine country in 2002 and the concierge cackled in my face, “French Laundry!? Honey, the next time they have a table open, you’ll be a grandmother.”
For the past fifteen years, it has been ranked as one of the top restaurants globally. This is the holy grail of the West Coast. Every night, approximately one hundred chosen disciples indulge in a hallucinatory orgy of culinary lovemaking. Foodies will give their left pinky toe for a chance to feast on Keller’s ambrosia: “Oysters and Pearls” or “Foie Gras en Terrine”. If only appendage amputation was so easy…. You actually have to put in the work. It may be about as difficult to snatch a table at The French Laundry as it is to win the Indiana Lottery – twice. And so, I set off to do my research.
First, I sensibly google ‘How to get a reservation at the French Laundry?’ I am bombarded by an obscene quantity of posting boards and chat rooms. Foodies in Portland and Charleston lamenting on Trip Advisor that they have been trying unsuccessfully for five years, perhaps searching for some sort of miracle fertility treatment to increase their chances. There is a message board where you can trade dates and tables with other couples who have reservations on days that they can no longer attend. It all reads suspiciously like a personal ad, Silver-haired San Francisco couple with a secured 4-top, searching for fun-loving pair to join them for Late Seating on Tues, September 14. Must love food, red wine, small talk and be willing to spend a fortune. Gay is a plus! There are numerous references to a mysterious man named Aren Sandersen who will guarantee your party a reservation on your selected day if you give him 70 days notice and hand over your Visa number.
The French Laundry currently takes reservations two months in advance to the day. Their largest table is a six-top and we have eight anxious Foodies in our group. I need two tables of four (13% of the restaurant!). October 4th is our night. We have one shot at this. Like the hunky astronauts in those Hollywood Blockbusters attempting to reroute apocalyptic meteorites and save the human race from total obliteration with one last Hail-Mary computer algorithm.
I call on August 2nd, just to make sure they haven’t changed their policies. I call again on August 3rd to double check and confirm the first person I spoke with wasn’t a vapid idiot. During the night, I have a nightmare about getting stuck in an elevator when the reservation office is about to open and having to tap out a SOS in Morse Code to the emergency responders who don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of my distress. I have my fiance stationed on his overnight shift, stalking Opentable for any possible loopholes per online rumors that the website releases one table per night. On August 4th at 11:30am CST, I arrange my notebook, credit cards, pens, back-up pens in case the first two run out of ink, and stress ball in front of me on the bed.
11:45am - Begin calming breathing exercises.
11:50am – Text my sister to remind her for the fifth time to call on her phone.
11:55am – French Laundry voicemail, “Our reservation office will reopen at 10am PST”.
11:57am – Quick breathing exercise
11:58am – French Laundry voicemail
11:59am - Busy signal
11:59:32am – Busy signal. Shit.
12:00:02am – Busy signal. Double shit.
12:00:13am – Busy signal. Triple shit.
I redial every eight seconds for the next twenty-two terribly tedious minutes. 165 calls. At one point around 12:19pm, I peer down at my index finger, blistering from redials, and think, What the hell am I doing? Dinner at this place is about as much as Baba’s annual social security check. I must be nuts. But then, I come to my senses and realize I have just wasted eleven precious seconds. At 10:22:46am I actually hear a ring. I screech with excitement as the drone announcement comes on, “Thank you for calling The French Laundry. Your call is important to us. All representatives are currently with other clients. Please remain on the line and the next representative will be with you shortly.” I glance at my watch. 10:23:55am. I am probably screwed. More bad elevator music. A voice cuts through the other line - a formal British accent – “Thank you ever so kindly for holding. This is Victoria”. Very proper. I think they must only hire reservationists with proper British accents so all the bitter Americans don’t become irate and vulgar on the phone once all the tables are lapped up. You just can’t take a tone with Victoria.
“Congratulations,” she says breezily. “We have exactly one table left for October 4th. A four-top at 9:15pm.”
“I’ll take it.”
As I rattle off my credit card information and put my name on The Wait List for an additional table, I am already scheming – Who out of my eight family members is expendable? Amy is skinny. Maybe she can sit on my lap.
A week later, I get a call that their private event room has opened up and would we like to secure it for our party of eight? More breathing exercises. Absolutely! I actually do heel clicks and sashay across the living room all afternoon.
Many of you will probably think I am certifiably crazy. For those who don’t – welcome to the club. You are definitely a fellow Foodie. I leave any aspiring Foodies with this small piece of advice. As my mother always instructed my siblings and I, growing up: Fake it until you make it. I recommend investing in an excellent French/American cookbook and dictionary. And remember, everything sounds better and more expensive in French. Meme quand c’est la laverie. Or as we say here....even when it’s the laundry.
Jul 3, 2010
Ode to The Smurf Hearse
Although you never technically transported miniature blue cartoon characters from funeral parlors to crematoriums, you would have been the car they cast had they made the movie: Smurfette and her Erection Collection. You were, however, my leading, although somewhat effeminate, “man”.
I picked you out of a conformist lot of white, grey and black sedans when I was twenty-two. You may have been the runt in the litter, but you were electric blue and somehow, I found you endearing. Practically speaking of course, I knew I would never lose you in parking lot. You were my first new car – a Chrysler PT Cruiser – promising tailgates out the hatchback and parallel parking for dummies. I signed on the dotted line and you were my wheels to adulthood as we chugged along together, hugging life’s curves with your stubby little Firestones.
You and I withstood criticism. People wondered why I was with you. My sister called you hideous and refused to go for a ride - horrified some college guys might assume she was white trash from Melrose Park. Once while stopped at a red light on a beautiful summer day with the windows down, four teenage girls in ponytails taunted and pointed at you, “That’s a really UGLY car!” I know you wanted me to run them over, but I didn’t want to get blood on your blue hood. It would have looked a bit too patriotic.
You were my steady companion through seven years, five moves and three states. You silently tolerated honks, tears, egregious profanity, and twangy country music. You even saved my life once while parked outside a gelato shop in downtown St. Louis. The windows from a twenty-story building blew out, raining down on you like icicles, but you shielded me from debris as I dug around your seat cheeks for meter coins. I don’t dismiss the little things either. Throughout the years, you helped transport dry-cleaning, suitcases, and even that egg custard dessert I brought to a dinner party that sloshed around on your floor mat for twenty minutes until there was nothing left in the casserole dish. Your heated seats more than once tricked my friends into thinking they had wet their pants. And your brakes pads could rival any baby-on-a-plane in a screeching contest, especially after some rain. But, you never judged me. You were my steadfast companion, refusing to gossip even when I had to pee in a McDonald’s cup over your cushions while stuck in a Thanksgiving blizzard on I-55.
Granted, you have to admit to being a bit high maintenance. Always racking up hospital bills with some random hydraulic tube, coolant fluid, and new tires – not once or twice, but three times. You were always falling apart and frankly, your neediness began to reek of desperation. In your later years, you became a heavy breather – wheezing and gasping down the road - insinuating that I should just get out and put you on my back. It almost seemed as though you forgot that you were supposed to be the reliable one in our relationship. So, are you surprised I went and traded you in for a younger, hipper, bronzed model that has less girth? What can I say, you lost that spark plug. You didn’t really think I meant forever?
I will always think of you, my Smurf Hearse, when I see one of your relatives parading down the road. I will recall you fondly, remembering us both in our prime and our youth – wondering if you are somewhere, gallantly delivering Papa Smurf to his final resting place. After all, the dude’s getting old. I write this ode because in the butterflied excitement of my new motor of love, I forgot to even say goodbye. So think of this as a last little pat, one tender farewell. You looked so forlorn, so frightened, so alone - discarded and abandoned - in that brightly lit Hyundai dealership with foreign models sticking their grills up at your chubby handles. But, take comfort, my friend, as much as I cursed you, you were the car for me. And remember this when you are feeling your most blue - they always say you never really get over your first.
Jun 24, 2010
The Camping Clause
So my darling fiancé confides he can’t possibly commit to a lifetime of harmonious matrimony until we have officially camped together. Dirt. Tent. Sleeping bags. Pork & Beans. Spiders with legs like Heidi Klum. Peeing over poison oak in the pitch black with mosquitoes feasting on my ass. Camping. Did I mention I work for Hyatt? We are actually entitled to free room nights. Free. That is usually something he can get behind.
Historically the only aspect of camping I enjoyed in my naïve youth was the cornucopia of jumbo marshmallows. They always seemed to taste better around a bonfire, but that was before I realized how many calories were in an entire bag and before I wore contacts. The way I see it, contacts are my crutch. An evolutionary signal, if you will, that if I were primed for the outdoors – I would’ve inherited perfect version. As it stands, I would have been mauled long ago by some saber-toothed cheetah or fanged wild boar while I stood by, squinting, and wondering what the heck was tearing off my arm. The truth is, it’s just not in my blood.
I confess the notion of zipping up in a cozy nylon tent with my honey in the middle of nowhere with the crickets chirping and the wind howling sounds rustically romantic. But, I am not some savage pioneer woman who chops wood, churns her own butter, and gives birth on the floor of a wagon train. I hate to set a precedent that camping will be alive and well in our future. In my defense, I don’t think Brad would classify me as high-maintenance. I still don’t know how to apply eye shadow, I refuse to buy jeans that cost more than $60, and most of my shoes are flat with rubber soles. (The ones that do have heels more closely resemble toddler’s building blocks than deadly instruments that could be used to impale an intruder). But, I do like hairdryers, arugula on my salad, and the clever names on nail polish bottles.
Weeks later, the invite comes: A 40th birthday / high school reunion celebration with Brad’s hometown friends. Our camping site is four hours north in Little Bear, Wisconsin. (I think I will be the judge of their size – thank you very much) The torturous part being that the rest of the crew will be rationally slumbering in the well-appointed farmhouse while we will be bear bait on the back lawn. But, these are the sacrifices we make for love.
We opt to start our drive from Chicago in Brad’s CRV – incidentally, the car without air conditioning instead of my effeminate Smurf-blue PT Cruiser with air conditioning that reeks of mold.
“It will get us in an outdoorsy mood. We are roughing it this weekend,” Brad declares while playfully punching me in the arm.
I pack the car with toilet paper, pillows, towels, diet coke, and enough Wet Ones to change an entire nursery. The temperature reads 91. About ten minutes into the drive we acknowledge in mutual defeated silence that we have made a colossal mistake. The regret pulsates through the car as exhaust fumes and damp heat plow into our pink cheeks. I focus on a tiny droplet of sweat on Brad’s earlobe. Somehow the idea of retreating and repacking the PT Cruiser seems more barbaric than driving four long hours through Hades. But, we probably had heat stroke.
The Gods smile upon me as we approach a pee stop near Lake Geneva. As the Cubs’ radio announcer alerts us to a nasty storm system brewing due West, the clouds roll in – big boorish cumulonimbus threats that promise to wreak havoc. I have horrific flashes of sinking into a muddy sleeping-bag soup later that evening as buzzing mosquitoes lay their larvae in my belly button. But, as the first droplets smatter onto the windshield and smear the insect guts, it dawns on me... this could be my out. Only a crazy person would pitch a tent in a thunderstorm. Tent poles and lightning - not exactly soup and sandwich. I am fairly confident Brad did not intend to martyr us in effort to fulfill this wedded-bliss camping clause. Sensibility will prevail and I begin to do a nonchalant rain dance with my toes.
The storm is torrential. Hailstones, strobes of lightning, trees snapping like toothpicks. We drive on through the countryside and my mood brightens as the sky darkens. We arrive just before sundown to a house with one convenient extra bedroom and puddles in the back yard.
Before we lie down in a creaky attic bedroom on two twin beds, I inspect the mattresses for bedbugs. After all, it is the country. Satisfied that I won’t be devoured by microscopic Pac-mans, I coo my remorse to Brad with as much sincerity as I can muster.
“I am so sorry the camping didn’t work out tonight. I was really looking forward to a night in the great outdoors with you. If it wasn’t for that darn storm.”
“That’s okay, honey,” he pats my hand softly and rolls over on his side. “We’ll just have to postpone the wedding.”
Historically the only aspect of camping I enjoyed in my naïve youth was the cornucopia of jumbo marshmallows. They always seemed to taste better around a bonfire, but that was before I realized how many calories were in an entire bag and before I wore contacts. The way I see it, contacts are my crutch. An evolutionary signal, if you will, that if I were primed for the outdoors – I would’ve inherited perfect version. As it stands, I would have been mauled long ago by some saber-toothed cheetah or fanged wild boar while I stood by, squinting, and wondering what the heck was tearing off my arm. The truth is, it’s just not in my blood.
I confess the notion of zipping up in a cozy nylon tent with my honey in the middle of nowhere with the crickets chirping and the wind howling sounds rustically romantic. But, I am not some savage pioneer woman who chops wood, churns her own butter, and gives birth on the floor of a wagon train. I hate to set a precedent that camping will be alive and well in our future. In my defense, I don’t think Brad would classify me as high-maintenance. I still don’t know how to apply eye shadow, I refuse to buy jeans that cost more than $60, and most of my shoes are flat with rubber soles. (The ones that do have heels more closely resemble toddler’s building blocks than deadly instruments that could be used to impale an intruder). But, I do like hairdryers, arugula on my salad, and the clever names on nail polish bottles.
Weeks later, the invite comes: A 40th birthday / high school reunion celebration with Brad’s hometown friends. Our camping site is four hours north in Little Bear, Wisconsin. (I think I will be the judge of their size – thank you very much) The torturous part being that the rest of the crew will be rationally slumbering in the well-appointed farmhouse while we will be bear bait on the back lawn. But, these are the sacrifices we make for love.
We opt to start our drive from Chicago in Brad’s CRV – incidentally, the car without air conditioning instead of my effeminate Smurf-blue PT Cruiser with air conditioning that reeks of mold.
“It will get us in an outdoorsy mood. We are roughing it this weekend,” Brad declares while playfully punching me in the arm.
I pack the car with toilet paper, pillows, towels, diet coke, and enough Wet Ones to change an entire nursery. The temperature reads 91. About ten minutes into the drive we acknowledge in mutual defeated silence that we have made a colossal mistake. The regret pulsates through the car as exhaust fumes and damp heat plow into our pink cheeks. I focus on a tiny droplet of sweat on Brad’s earlobe. Somehow the idea of retreating and repacking the PT Cruiser seems more barbaric than driving four long hours through Hades. But, we probably had heat stroke.
The Gods smile upon me as we approach a pee stop near Lake Geneva. As the Cubs’ radio announcer alerts us to a nasty storm system brewing due West, the clouds roll in – big boorish cumulonimbus threats that promise to wreak havoc. I have horrific flashes of sinking into a muddy sleeping-bag soup later that evening as buzzing mosquitoes lay their larvae in my belly button. But, as the first droplets smatter onto the windshield and smear the insect guts, it dawns on me... this could be my out. Only a crazy person would pitch a tent in a thunderstorm. Tent poles and lightning - not exactly soup and sandwich. I am fairly confident Brad did not intend to martyr us in effort to fulfill this wedded-bliss camping clause. Sensibility will prevail and I begin to do a nonchalant rain dance with my toes.
The storm is torrential. Hailstones, strobes of lightning, trees snapping like toothpicks. We drive on through the countryside and my mood brightens as the sky darkens. We arrive just before sundown to a house with one convenient extra bedroom and puddles in the back yard.
Before we lie down in a creaky attic bedroom on two twin beds, I inspect the mattresses for bedbugs. After all, it is the country. Satisfied that I won’t be devoured by microscopic Pac-mans, I coo my remorse to Brad with as much sincerity as I can muster.
“I am so sorry the camping didn’t work out tonight. I was really looking forward to a night in the great outdoors with you. If it wasn’t for that darn storm.”
“That’s okay, honey,” he pats my hand softly and rolls over on his side. “We’ll just have to postpone the wedding.”
Jun 20, 2010
Something Marvelous
On a beach in Korea with seasoning-salt sand and the breeze combing through palm fronds, I pulled out a stiff new paperback, creased the spine a few times and flexed the pages like one might warm a muscle. I flipped it over in my hand, obligated to read the chorus of testimonials before committing to the first page. The pages smelled of ink and bread. By page five, I was engrossed. On page 9, I hovered over a passage with the vigorous persistence of a fly determined to land on a ham sandwich. I wanted to dive in to the words as if they were a summer lake, offering up their coolness and placidness to me. I peered into the water and saw a beautiful reflection.
“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay?…Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this story-teller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”
---Little Bee (Chris Cleave)
I shut my eyes and replayed the words over in adoration. It was of course, our “human story” - where no one is immune to pain or loss or derailment. But, reading that passage smothered me with pride as if I alone were being honored in the front row of a graduation ceremony. As if I alone were being reminded that grace is both earned and dispensed in this life - One just has to hope that whatever omniscient being up there, dosing it all out, will balance out the scales in the end.
I thought back to a vignette I had started writing in the fall of 2008 when my own wounds were not yet scars. I never finished it. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure how it was all supposed to end.
************ ************** *************
October 2008
She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. ‘It’s easier to feel the sunlight without them’, she said.
-Brian Andreas, Artist
I own a print with that phrase etched on canvas. It balances on top of my vanity so I both blink awake to the words and subliminally bid them goodnight. I am not a collector of art or gimmicky quotations. Although I admit to posting the Footprints magnet on my college fridge for two months before overhearing the Lacrosse Boys ridicule it in the hallway. “Never date a Footprints chick. They don’t put out.”
P-I-E-C-E-S. That particular word endears itself to me because that’s what it felt like for a long time. It implies that a WHOLE can disintegrate into PARTS - that loss is tangible. That it has body and blood and flesh. It admits that there is throbbing, bruising, tearing, and scabbing. It is physical. It amputates. And pieces shed, sever, and scatter like shards of glass.
Slowly, I’m morphing. I suppose that is the essence of all healing – the sloughing of the dead and regeneration of the new. But, it’s not pleasant – it’s pink and raw and tender like the blisters on the pads of your palm after playing hours of tennis. It’s wet. It’s messy and soggy in wads of Puff’s tissues and shapeless sleeves of college sweatshirts.
I don’t know why the word “healing” typically elicits such a positive connotation. I don’t think it deserves it. It’s not at all soothing. But, the print’s message is pacifying - coating me like balm and invigorating like eucalyptus.
I bought it down in New Mexico while visiting my friend, Nik, in August. I had just packed up my Tucson condo into generic brown boxes and watched them roll down the black asphalt on a 42 ft. Mayflower moving truck. I handed over the keys to my Chrysler to a chain-smoking trucker with a trailer who vowed to make it to the Midwest in 28 hours flat. I glanced around at the empty 1286 square foot unit - #3212 - and realized I was no longer home. I locked the front door, mailed the key to the rental office and boarded a Southwest 737 with a melting granola bar in my pocket.
When I arrived in Albuquerque, I was damaged and broken and sat contemplating a cheese omelet around Nik’s breakfast table. Her dad, a psychologist with a kind face and wise eyes, was seeding grape tomatoes over the sink and listened to me bemoan my choices in a life mate.
“It all goes back to the mother,” I admitted. “She never could demonstrate love.” I spiraled a piece of mozzarella around my fork and stared at the antique clock on the far wall. I groped for something deliciously insightful – some tidbit that might convince him that I was capable of intense introspection. “I think I over-compensated. I think I wanted to make him whole.”
“It was doomed, Emily.” His voice was quiet and calming – an impressive subtlety when articulating a word such as ‘doomed’. He paused before turning on the faucet. “But, I think it might be too soon to self-analyze.”
I nodded and took my first bite.
It hit 102 that afternoon, but Nik and I decided to hop in the Jeep to peruse the neighboring pueblos and tiny towns surrounding Sante Fe. We scalded our fingertips on the metal seatbelts and blasted the air conditioner to a volume that drowned out Garth Brooks on the radio. She drove. I plopped my feet on the radiator.
The highway sliced through the mountains, curving over boulders and blooming agave. The sun was high and every few miles we passed a patch of spiny cholla cacti that conjured up an image of Bob Marley’s lopsided dreadlocks. Eventually the highway deferred to small country road and isolated artist’s colony about ten minutes outside of Santa Fe. We parked diagonally on a patch of gravel outside of the Wheelbarrow Inn as the smoke from grilled hickory burgers leaked inside the car vents. I hopped out, securing my sunglasses over my ears, and wandered into one of the first galleries.
Instantly, I recognized the sweet scent of hyacinth and the store clerk pointed to a circular table brimming with homemade bath soaps. I inhaled the fragrance. They had been the centerpieces at my wedding. It was then I spotted the prints, polka-dotting the back wall in splashes of red, yellow, purple, and aqua like painted blooms in a tulip garden. "Story People" - the artist dubbed them, a collection of geometric design blended with poetry. I had seen them once before in a boutique in San Diego and adored his elegance with words, but the primary colors didn’t match my motif. My home had been a shrine to coffee-bean brown and African khaki. That day in New Mexico, I spontaneously announced that it was time to embrace some color. Maybe color would bring some healing.
With my new purchase laid out carefully in the backseat, we continued our meanderings through the neighboring reservation. Not a mile up a desolate road, we noticed a caravan of cars bleeding into a vast open terrain, stirring up a haze of dust. We turned into the parade of traffic and filed into a make-shift spot in between two rusted pick-ups.
“What on earth?” I gasped, scanning the bustling crowd of Native Americans with scores of jewelry, pottery, and leather merchandise perched under table tents. A old radio was emitting static mariachi as three mangy strays shuffled by with their tongues hanging out like lizards waiting to vacuum up grasshoppers. A flea market on steroids.
As I stepped out of the Jeep, the clay vibrated beneath my flip-flops and my ears perked to a deep-throated rumble in the East, ricocheting off the San Juan Mountains. Drums. We instinctively followed the noise down a barren stretch until the road ended and a colossal wood fence guarded a crowded entry arch. The winds intensified, plastering the dust across our cheeks into streaks of war print. Clouds churned into thick gray clumps, skirting briskly across the sky like they needed to be somewhere by sundown. The vibration was deafening as we pecked our way to the front.
Suddenly, the narrow passage funneled open to a spectacle that could have been plucked from a scene in Indian Jones. A giant coliseum of aboriginal dancers. There had to be over a 1000 of them, men and women adorned with crowns of feathers in their hair and cloaks around their waists, striking their heels and pelting drum hides. I approached a young bystander with two different colored brown eyes and murmured, "What is all of this? A festival of some sort?”
As if to compensate for his small shoulders, he lifted his chin and looked at me curiously, “An ancestral healing ceremony. It’s been preformed for hundreds of years.”
Nik and I exchanged glances. I knew instantly that we had been led here. The world swelled at that moment, watching this colony of Native Americans perform their ancient healing ritual. I felt the planet spin for me as the dancers moved in hypnotic, choreographed rhythm until their stomping failed to kick up even a smattering of red dust. They had pounded all of the loose soil into the core of the earth.
It was then that we heard the thunder. Claps layered over the drums as if we were being sandwiched between the earth and sky. The rain came down in pellets. The drenching kind that seeps in your underwear and stings your scalp. There was nothing to do but laugh and blink away the water from our eyelashes as we sloshed back to our car with water-logged sandals and soaked pony-tails. It felt like a baptism. It felt like healing.
*********** ************** **************
I glanced down at the book across my knees and focused on the landscape around me. The sun was white and I could feel the tingle of sea-spray from the ocean’s spank against the rocks. From behind the rock wall, a sprout of bamboo shoots swayed in union with the tides like a darting school of herring. Brad and I sat in the shadow of a 150 foot volcanic cliff at the foot of the Pacific with the clouds moving overhead. Two inconsequential humans in the sand. And as the birds darted in and out of the beards of moss billowing down from the cliff in a tangle of Rapunzel’s hair, he proposed to me. This beautiful man. Four tiny words in a lifetime’s crater of sentences – “Will you marry me?”
I had to look up at the sky and smile. We spent the afternoon nestled on our beach, digging our toes into the sand and tracing constellations in each other’s freckles. By mid-day as I nonchalantly nipped the sand with a dried bamboo stalk, I noticed a flickering gleam on the dune to my right. A dainty prism of colored light, hop-scotching about as if Aquatic Tinkerbelle was flicking her crystal wand in careless frivolity. I watched the light in amusement, ever so subtly dart this way and that, until I reached up to sweep a strand of hair from my lips. And in that movement, I understood. My engagement ring. My white sapphire was bathing in the sunshine, casting rainbows on the sand.
She scars. She heals. She sun-bakes. Because indeed, this ending was something fine. I would venture to say, it was something marvelous.
May 23, 2010
Cockroaches
With my family gathered around, my mother turned to my sister two days before she would walk down the aisle and reminded her, “Amy, you and Bryan are incredibly lucky. You will have three grandparents in attendance at your wedding. Think about that. I will never get to be at a grandchild’s wedding. I did the math and it is what it is. It isn’t terrible or tragic. It is just how the timing worked out. I just wanted you to appreciate how special this weekend is… for all of us.”
Recently, my friend’s 95 year-old grandma passed in her sleep. I spent the following night, puddling tears into my glasses, quaking and trembling. My teeth chattered. I burrowed into a nest of crumbled and shredded Kleenex. I wasn’t crying entirely for Grandma G, although she was a wonderful lady and the family gatherings just wouldn’t seem whole without her – poised next to her walker with rouge on her cheeks, cradling a Manhattan on ice. But her passing radiated shockwaves of fear inside me. My own Baba will turn 85 this month. And I kept seeing an image of an hourglass in front of me; sand draining the upper basin in a curtain of sediment.
The idea was – Feel it Now. Maybe if I envisioned the end, soaked up the grief like sponging mussel juice with bread, I could spare myself some portion of the devastation later simply by anticipating. Of course, it was foolish. But, I felt charged to make some changes. The day after the wake, I called in sick and spent the afternoon with Baba, assembling salami sandwiches and sipping black tea, pouring over pictures I had taken of Brad and I a few weeks back.
Looking around her home, I realized it would be the remnants that would singe me. The movies left in the Netflix cue. Clumping flour that wasn’t dumped into a mixing bowl and kneaded into kolachies. The ham bone in the freezer developing an icy fuzz. A half bottle of perfume. Fine white hair in her comb. A calendar left, bleeding open to the month of April…August… or November. Her homemade pickle jars in the cellar, dated with masking tape. The sweet smell of her robe. The mail – Aldi ads, voter fliers, AT&T bills – collecting on the table- her name still bringing printed on envelopes. Marie Novak. Hyacinths, the following spring – little stalks of color poking out of the dirt, having survived another harsh Chicago hibernation.
All the beautiful, simple things would morph into cockroaches.
My friend told me she was washing dishes a few weeks after her grandmother’s passing when she spotted a vase perched on the windowsill that had been passed down through the generations. One of the items she had gotten in the distribution of “stuff”. It had been her great-grandmother’s and it stood boldly, almost tauntingly, in her kitchen as her five year-old practiced writing her name on construction paper with stubby Crayolas. This stubborn, ugly old vase. She felt like grabbing it by the neck and shattering it- taking pleasure in its demise – shards of glass, glistening like wet diamonds in her sink basin. It was only an object and yet…it had survived.
When I asked Sarah how her daughter had taken the news she told me that she had wondered if Grandma G was in heaven. When she nodded, her daughter replied, “But Mom, who will pick up her mail now?”
And that is the crux of it. That it falls on the survivors to trudge through the swampy bog of leftovers – items that may appear harmless to an outsider, but bite, burn and bruise those who have loved. They are our pacifiers and our poisons. We know they are the only tangibles left – a finite number of them - and we cling. We cling to them like driftwood because we are afraid to assess the intangibles, take stock and recognize how we could possibly have enough memories to sustain us. How could there ever be enough?
When my family traveled to Florida last week for Amy’s wedding, we were returning to a place that was warm for us. Warm and woven into our childhood memories of vacations, beach, family and sand. It is where my paternal grandmother’s ashes were tossed from the Grand Marco Bridge to settle in the sun-dipped sea, dance with the coral, and lap with the tides. It was where we had fished for minnows as sun-burnt kids, learned to swim without water wings, and hunted for lizards at sunset. It had been our spring playground.
Throughout the wedding weekend, I did think of that hourglass. It could very well have been Baba’s last plane trip. I noted the pitch of her laugh at dinner while chatting with Bryan’s relatives. I watched her gently pat Brad’s hand and defiantly complain about the wheelchair. I stole a glance at her face when Amy walked down the aisle.
The raw truth is, it will still hurt later. That is for certain. I suppose all I can do is soak up the mussel juice. That is all anyone can do. So that later, we may have the strength to sort through the mail.
Recently, my friend’s 95 year-old grandma passed in her sleep. I spent the following night, puddling tears into my glasses, quaking and trembling. My teeth chattered. I burrowed into a nest of crumbled and shredded Kleenex. I wasn’t crying entirely for Grandma G, although she was a wonderful lady and the family gatherings just wouldn’t seem whole without her – poised next to her walker with rouge on her cheeks, cradling a Manhattan on ice. But her passing radiated shockwaves of fear inside me. My own Baba will turn 85 this month. And I kept seeing an image of an hourglass in front of me; sand draining the upper basin in a curtain of sediment.
The idea was – Feel it Now. Maybe if I envisioned the end, soaked up the grief like sponging mussel juice with bread, I could spare myself some portion of the devastation later simply by anticipating. Of course, it was foolish. But, I felt charged to make some changes. The day after the wake, I called in sick and spent the afternoon with Baba, assembling salami sandwiches and sipping black tea, pouring over pictures I had taken of Brad and I a few weeks back.
Looking around her home, I realized it would be the remnants that would singe me. The movies left in the Netflix cue. Clumping flour that wasn’t dumped into a mixing bowl and kneaded into kolachies. The ham bone in the freezer developing an icy fuzz. A half bottle of perfume. Fine white hair in her comb. A calendar left, bleeding open to the month of April…August… or November. Her homemade pickle jars in the cellar, dated with masking tape. The sweet smell of her robe. The mail – Aldi ads, voter fliers, AT&T bills – collecting on the table- her name still bringing printed on envelopes. Marie Novak. Hyacinths, the following spring – little stalks of color poking out of the dirt, having survived another harsh Chicago hibernation.
All the beautiful, simple things would morph into cockroaches.
My friend told me she was washing dishes a few weeks after her grandmother’s passing when she spotted a vase perched on the windowsill that had been passed down through the generations. One of the items she had gotten in the distribution of “stuff”. It had been her great-grandmother’s and it stood boldly, almost tauntingly, in her kitchen as her five year-old practiced writing her name on construction paper with stubby Crayolas. This stubborn, ugly old vase. She felt like grabbing it by the neck and shattering it- taking pleasure in its demise – shards of glass, glistening like wet diamonds in her sink basin. It was only an object and yet…it had survived.
When I asked Sarah how her daughter had taken the news she told me that she had wondered if Grandma G was in heaven. When she nodded, her daughter replied, “But Mom, who will pick up her mail now?”
And that is the crux of it. That it falls on the survivors to trudge through the swampy bog of leftovers – items that may appear harmless to an outsider, but bite, burn and bruise those who have loved. They are our pacifiers and our poisons. We know they are the only tangibles left – a finite number of them - and we cling. We cling to them like driftwood because we are afraid to assess the intangibles, take stock and recognize how we could possibly have enough memories to sustain us. How could there ever be enough?
When my family traveled to Florida last week for Amy’s wedding, we were returning to a place that was warm for us. Warm and woven into our childhood memories of vacations, beach, family and sand. It is where my paternal grandmother’s ashes were tossed from the Grand Marco Bridge to settle in the sun-dipped sea, dance with the coral, and lap with the tides. It was where we had fished for minnows as sun-burnt kids, learned to swim without water wings, and hunted for lizards at sunset. It had been our spring playground.
Throughout the wedding weekend, I did think of that hourglass. It could very well have been Baba’s last plane trip. I noted the pitch of her laugh at dinner while chatting with Bryan’s relatives. I watched her gently pat Brad’s hand and defiantly complain about the wheelchair. I stole a glance at her face when Amy walked down the aisle.
The raw truth is, it will still hurt later. That is for certain. I suppose all I can do is soak up the mussel juice. That is all anyone can do. So that later, we may have the strength to sort through the mail.
Mar 22, 2010
Circus Peanuts
Admittedly, my blog has been starving lately. Underfed. Malnourished. And neglected like the mangy mutts down the alley licking the underbellies of pizza boxes. It’s not healthy for “it” or for me. So, tonight I write to feed and remind myself to keep throwing out the occasional bone.
When I was around ten or eleven, my mom used to pile Amy, Blake, and I into the minivan and dodge the potholes down Harlem Ave en route to the North Riverside Mall. It became a family routine most Friday nights and our visits incorporated two major objectives – books and candy. The mall wasn’t as seedy back then, although our jackets always stunk faintly of Orange Chicken and sesame oil when we got home since you had to cut through the mega food court to reach Walden’s and Mr. Bulky’s. The two stores lined up at the end of the mall, side by side like the complimentary halves of a ham and cheese sandwich.
We’d hit up Mr. Bulky’s first, our eyes glistening with sugar crystals and artificial food coloring. We’d gaze upon endless rows of teeming plastic bins, revealing sleeping delicacies of gooey Laffy Taffy, fruity Ring Pops, and gelatinous ice cream cones with real wafer tips, coaxing our saliva glands into drool as if we were teething infants.
“Only one kind,” My mom would warn us, reverting us back to the task at hand as she assisted my brother with scooping the bright blue shark gummies into a plastic bag. Four year-old boys were terribly predictable. I prided myself on variation – sometimes going “Swedish” while on other visits surrendering to the puckering tang of the Sour Patch Kids. Alternatively, I adored hearing the satisfying crunch of Ferrara Pan’s mini Jawbreakers against my molars or savoring the oddly addictive banana flavor from the chewy Circus Peanuts. But only if they weren’t stale. It was necessary to sample one to be sure or at least squish a few with the scooper if the store clerk had his eye on me. I don’t think enough kids liked them because it always seemed a tough order to find a fresh batch.
After we bundled, twist-tied, weighed and paid for our loot, we’d file next door to Walden’s Books. Mom would confiscate the candy in her purse after a quick sample so that we wouldn’t get the books all sticky. Walden’s was my haven. I knew the store as intimately as my own bedroom. As Amy and Blake would scamper back to the kid’s section with the red Clifford stools, mom would retreat to the Romance Row where men with long dark hair and bare chests embraced women with billowing blouses on the jacket covers.
The bestsellers prominently framed the front of the store within tall regal white shelves. That is where I would roam, gazing admiringly at the proud hard covers with titles in cursive and names in bold. I’d flip to the backs and stare at the authors’ photographs, perched at their desks or poised in their rose gardens. I’d nod in concurrence, utterly assured that I would be there someday. My very own book. My photograph. My name in bold. It was an absolute certainty that I would be among them in the towering bookshelves with the pretty covers. I just had to wait my turn and become a grown-up. And only then, when I was satisfied I had adequately interacted with my predecessors, did I mosey on back to pick up a new Nancy Drew.
I don’t recall when exactly that absolute assuredness began to waver, when perusing the bestsellers began to feel precarious or elicit that slight twinge of doubt. I know at some point I began to focus on the ages listed in the bios. I was appeased when I saw the author was forty-five or fifty-two or had gone to graduate school or was married or had two sons a daughter and a dog. They were older. That was what it required. Of course, they had arrived. After all, I was only nineteen. Twenty-three. Twenty-five. And over time, the jealousy - the haunting spirals of ineptitude began to cloud like moisture on a mirror.
We stopped going to Mr. Bulky’s and Walden’s when I hit high school. I think they both wound up closing and some awful frilly accessory store where teenage punks pierce ears at card tables likely filled their place. In those years since, my spirit has noticeably waned. When I was twenty-three, I got seriously burned. I was in Borders one Sunday sipping chai, when I picked up copy of The Devil Wears Prada and flipped it over to the back. There she was staring back at me with venom in her eyes - Lauren Weisberger - a young fresh face with blonde hair and high cheekbones. She was twenty-five. I had to put my cup down and read the bio twice. Born March 28, 1977 in Scranton, PA. Cornell graduate, contributor to various prestigious magazines, and now best-selling author. I counted it up. She had me beat. Even if I started that night, working tirelessly on some ethereal and hypothetical manuscript and submitted it to every possible literary publication and chiseled it down to its perfect state, and by some miracle found someone who adored it, I could never compete with her timeline. Lauren Weisberger was living my dream.
After that, I stopped browsing through bookstores as much to avoid the pinpricks and obvious reminders of my perpetuating stalemate. I stopped envisioning my title or jacket cover or clever font. I had always longed to be in this extremely select club and the reality was - the odds were bleak.
Just this past week, I attended the Virginia Festival of the Book, rather by coincidence and consequence of visiting my friend, Nikki in Charlottesville. “I think this was meant to be, Em,” she insisted, always having been a fan of my “voice” as she calls it. “I just know you are supposed to be here with all these writers.”
Throughout the weekend, I wandered through the conference, ate at the local restaurants, and dawdled through the downtown mall, absorbing the others around me – many hopeful paupers in tweed, some local editors, and a sprinkling of literary stars. All of them, struggling with their own doubts, burdens, inadequacies, and failures. All wanting the same dream. I stood in obedient lines with panting fans, anxious to get novels signed by the “Recognizables” – the ones who had made it and thus, sat patiently, scrawling autographs on the title pages of their very own Labor of Loves. I wondered if the repetitiveness of it all had desensitized their fame. I wondered as countless hands reached up, waving gluts of their paperback clones if they remembered a time when they strolled the bookshelves.
The festival did spur a reflection on my summer before the seventh grade and the three months I spent furiously writing cliché poetry. I was relentless in my craft, composing with an insane furor most twelve year olds were channeling toward papering their closet doors with magazine cutouts of the Backstreet Boys. I ventured to the library and checked out every possible book on publishing poetry. After that, I stuffed all my babysitting money in a horrid purple LeSportsac and pedaled over to the local bookstore to pick up some newer editions. I scribbled down list after list, noting genres, editor names and addresses, highlighting the ones I thought looked promising. I spent the summer submitting my poems in giant yellow manila folders, making sure to secure the envelopes with proper postage and duck tape so that nothing could mistakenly tumble out.
I only received one acceptance that summer and it was from the Book of American Poetry that required an upfront payment of $65, but you would receive your very own special copy of the bound Anthology right at your doorstep. All 434 pages. Of course, I leapt at the chance and I still have that thick wad of sucker poems in my bookshelf, not so much as joke, but to remind myself how hard I worked that summer. How much I believed in myself. Sadly, I doubt I have given that much gusto to my writing since.
This fall, I will turn 30. It will be an inconsequential occasion, except for the fact that it will inevitably mark a time in my life when I no longer have anyone or any circumstance to blame for my lack of pursuing fairy tales. As I enter my third decade, I realize I could use a dose of that slight, tow-headed, Nancy Drew sleuth who saw her name in print. I could use some of that zeal because I don’t want to enter my fourth decade, admitting I have yet to even reach up to see if there is a spot on the shelf.
When I returned from my trip out east, I lumbered off the train and toted my luggage behind me back to my new apartment. When I rounded the corner, I remembered with a smile that there happens to be an old-fashioned candy store at the end of my street. Mary Janes, Necco Wafers, bubblegum cigarettes – the whole bit. Books and candy. It might be time to renew the old Friday night ritual. After all, I’m sure I can dig up some stale Circus Peanuts if I need some familiar inspiration. I may even be able to sneak a taste in the store if no one is looking.
When I was around ten or eleven, my mom used to pile Amy, Blake, and I into the minivan and dodge the potholes down Harlem Ave en route to the North Riverside Mall. It became a family routine most Friday nights and our visits incorporated two major objectives – books and candy. The mall wasn’t as seedy back then, although our jackets always stunk faintly of Orange Chicken and sesame oil when we got home since you had to cut through the mega food court to reach Walden’s and Mr. Bulky’s. The two stores lined up at the end of the mall, side by side like the complimentary halves of a ham and cheese sandwich.
We’d hit up Mr. Bulky’s first, our eyes glistening with sugar crystals and artificial food coloring. We’d gaze upon endless rows of teeming plastic bins, revealing sleeping delicacies of gooey Laffy Taffy, fruity Ring Pops, and gelatinous ice cream cones with real wafer tips, coaxing our saliva glands into drool as if we were teething infants.
“Only one kind,” My mom would warn us, reverting us back to the task at hand as she assisted my brother with scooping the bright blue shark gummies into a plastic bag. Four year-old boys were terribly predictable. I prided myself on variation – sometimes going “Swedish” while on other visits surrendering to the puckering tang of the Sour Patch Kids. Alternatively, I adored hearing the satisfying crunch of Ferrara Pan’s mini Jawbreakers against my molars or savoring the oddly addictive banana flavor from the chewy Circus Peanuts. But only if they weren’t stale. It was necessary to sample one to be sure or at least squish a few with the scooper if the store clerk had his eye on me. I don’t think enough kids liked them because it always seemed a tough order to find a fresh batch.
After we bundled, twist-tied, weighed and paid for our loot, we’d file next door to Walden’s Books. Mom would confiscate the candy in her purse after a quick sample so that we wouldn’t get the books all sticky. Walden’s was my haven. I knew the store as intimately as my own bedroom. As Amy and Blake would scamper back to the kid’s section with the red Clifford stools, mom would retreat to the Romance Row where men with long dark hair and bare chests embraced women with billowing blouses on the jacket covers.
The bestsellers prominently framed the front of the store within tall regal white shelves. That is where I would roam, gazing admiringly at the proud hard covers with titles in cursive and names in bold. I’d flip to the backs and stare at the authors’ photographs, perched at their desks or poised in their rose gardens. I’d nod in concurrence, utterly assured that I would be there someday. My very own book. My photograph. My name in bold. It was an absolute certainty that I would be among them in the towering bookshelves with the pretty covers. I just had to wait my turn and become a grown-up. And only then, when I was satisfied I had adequately interacted with my predecessors, did I mosey on back to pick up a new Nancy Drew.
I don’t recall when exactly that absolute assuredness began to waver, when perusing the bestsellers began to feel precarious or elicit that slight twinge of doubt. I know at some point I began to focus on the ages listed in the bios. I was appeased when I saw the author was forty-five or fifty-two or had gone to graduate school or was married or had two sons a daughter and a dog. They were older. That was what it required. Of course, they had arrived. After all, I was only nineteen. Twenty-three. Twenty-five. And over time, the jealousy - the haunting spirals of ineptitude began to cloud like moisture on a mirror.
We stopped going to Mr. Bulky’s and Walden’s when I hit high school. I think they both wound up closing and some awful frilly accessory store where teenage punks pierce ears at card tables likely filled their place. In those years since, my spirit has noticeably waned. When I was twenty-three, I got seriously burned. I was in Borders one Sunday sipping chai, when I picked up copy of The Devil Wears Prada and flipped it over to the back. There she was staring back at me with venom in her eyes - Lauren Weisberger - a young fresh face with blonde hair and high cheekbones. She was twenty-five. I had to put my cup down and read the bio twice. Born March 28, 1977 in Scranton, PA. Cornell graduate, contributor to various prestigious magazines, and now best-selling author. I counted it up. She had me beat. Even if I started that night, working tirelessly on some ethereal and hypothetical manuscript and submitted it to every possible literary publication and chiseled it down to its perfect state, and by some miracle found someone who adored it, I could never compete with her timeline. Lauren Weisberger was living my dream.
After that, I stopped browsing through bookstores as much to avoid the pinpricks and obvious reminders of my perpetuating stalemate. I stopped envisioning my title or jacket cover or clever font. I had always longed to be in this extremely select club and the reality was - the odds were bleak.
Just this past week, I attended the Virginia Festival of the Book, rather by coincidence and consequence of visiting my friend, Nikki in Charlottesville. “I think this was meant to be, Em,” she insisted, always having been a fan of my “voice” as she calls it. “I just know you are supposed to be here with all these writers.”
Throughout the weekend, I wandered through the conference, ate at the local restaurants, and dawdled through the downtown mall, absorbing the others around me – many hopeful paupers in tweed, some local editors, and a sprinkling of literary stars. All of them, struggling with their own doubts, burdens, inadequacies, and failures. All wanting the same dream. I stood in obedient lines with panting fans, anxious to get novels signed by the “Recognizables” – the ones who had made it and thus, sat patiently, scrawling autographs on the title pages of their very own Labor of Loves. I wondered if the repetitiveness of it all had desensitized their fame. I wondered as countless hands reached up, waving gluts of their paperback clones if they remembered a time when they strolled the bookshelves.
The festival did spur a reflection on my summer before the seventh grade and the three months I spent furiously writing cliché poetry. I was relentless in my craft, composing with an insane furor most twelve year olds were channeling toward papering their closet doors with magazine cutouts of the Backstreet Boys. I ventured to the library and checked out every possible book on publishing poetry. After that, I stuffed all my babysitting money in a horrid purple LeSportsac and pedaled over to the local bookstore to pick up some newer editions. I scribbled down list after list, noting genres, editor names and addresses, highlighting the ones I thought looked promising. I spent the summer submitting my poems in giant yellow manila folders, making sure to secure the envelopes with proper postage and duck tape so that nothing could mistakenly tumble out.
I only received one acceptance that summer and it was from the Book of American Poetry that required an upfront payment of $65, but you would receive your very own special copy of the bound Anthology right at your doorstep. All 434 pages. Of course, I leapt at the chance and I still have that thick wad of sucker poems in my bookshelf, not so much as joke, but to remind myself how hard I worked that summer. How much I believed in myself. Sadly, I doubt I have given that much gusto to my writing since.
This fall, I will turn 30. It will be an inconsequential occasion, except for the fact that it will inevitably mark a time in my life when I no longer have anyone or any circumstance to blame for my lack of pursuing fairy tales. As I enter my third decade, I realize I could use a dose of that slight, tow-headed, Nancy Drew sleuth who saw her name in print. I could use some of that zeal because I don’t want to enter my fourth decade, admitting I have yet to even reach up to see if there is a spot on the shelf.
When I returned from my trip out east, I lumbered off the train and toted my luggage behind me back to my new apartment. When I rounded the corner, I remembered with a smile that there happens to be an old-fashioned candy store at the end of my street. Mary Janes, Necco Wafers, bubblegum cigarettes – the whole bit. Books and candy. It might be time to renew the old Friday night ritual. After all, I’m sure I can dig up some stale Circus Peanuts if I need some familiar inspiration. I may even be able to sneak a taste in the store if no one is looking.
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