A Moment In Song, Vol. 5: I Stay Away

It’s October of 2020, and I’m 43 years old. This year has been universally agreed upon as the worst in a century, everyone knows it, everyone has felt it. Millions of people are sick, hundreds of thousands dead, most of us have been essentially sequestered in our homes and communities for months. But tonight, a cloudy and muggy Sunday, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier.

I’ve got a pot of crab boil coming to a simmer on the stove, ready for three pounds of snow crab legs that we will steam, crack and disassemble like scavenging animals, and then roughly chop the sweet meat and fold it together with mayonnaise, minced dill, chives and lemon juice. We will toast buttered potato rolls and pile them high with crab salad and feast fearlessly. I already made a red cabbage slaw with cider vinaigrette and a slender orange slices; it’s chilling while the flavors meld and the crunchiness of the cabbage softens. It’s getting dark so early these days. I’m playing my Spotify time capsule, an algorithm-engineered playlist of mostly 90s tunes, and it’s pretty spot on. Candlebox, Bell Biv Devoe, Bangles, each new song brings a smile with the simple pleasure of recognition and nostalgia.

And then, out of nowhere, the opening guitar notes and shuffling drumbeat of I Stay Away by Alice In Chains seize me in a grip of breathtaking momentary clarity. How corny can I be? I am suddenly so clearly in my teenage angsty mind of the first days I would have heard that song, seventeen and such a fool. For just a moment, I am overtaken with the wish to be able to show that girl this moment, the unthinkable peace and gratitude of domestic middle-age. I want to hold that girl’s face to the glass of 26 years and gift her with the vision of the future and whisper reassurances that it will all turn out better than she could ever hope. 

A corny half-forgotten grunge song drops me in the brain of that girl and I know that she could never have imagined this life. My breath leaves me as I see, through overlapping lenses of naïveté and experience, how easy it would have been for me to never end up here. How close I came, over and over, to settling for something else, how effortless it would have been for me to have accepted a reality that would have led me down a path of discontent or misery or just otherness. How many men I almost attached myself to who would never (never, not for a minute) have brought me a moment of the joy and ease that I have with Austin. I may have been prettier back then, and definitely skinnier, but I wouldn’t trade an hour with seventeen-year-old me. Our house is never very clean, and our cats never let us sleep in, and I haven’t seen my coworkers in person in half a year. Even in the midst of pandemic, even trapped across the country from my family in a red state teeming with conflict and ignorance, even as winter looms with no end to the chaos of America and the planet earth at the dawn of a new decade, I am so grateful.

Dear Delaney of 1994: You won’t recognize a single thing about your future, especially yourself, but I promise, I promise, you’re gonna love it.

A Moment in Song, v. 4

Sure, some songs are going to always take you back to the first time you heard them, or that summer they were ubiquitous (see previous Moment in Song posts...). But sometimes, if you're really lucky, a song you loved for old reasons gets repurposed into a song you love for all time.

Back on the Chain Gang, The Pretenders:

This song originally took me to a sad old place. I first learned The Pretenders with Brandes, we had the Best Of CD so he could learn "Brass in Pocket" as a cover song for his band. There are very few low points in the Pretenders best-of catalog, and certainly the highlight is "Back on the Chain Gang." On the Pretenders episode of Unplugged, she says she cribbed the song from "Working in a Coal Mine," and if you hear her tell it, it makes sense. I mean, is Chryssie Hynde the coolest woman on earth? She might be. Tracy and I saw them at the Ryman a few years back, and Chrissie was in white leather pants. She was like fifty-five. Truly a rock star.

After Brandes and I split, before things were easier between us, I saw Guilty Pleasures play "Back on the Chain Gang" (Kat sang it, of course). Suddenly that line came to life for me: "I found a picture of you, those were the happiest days of my life." At that time, it was a punch to my gut. I'd just packed up our formerly shared home and stored boxes of pictures, what do you do with all the pictures after it all goes to hell? I still come across them, and am shocked by how young we were. And maybe in the fall of 2002, I heard the song and the past would have seemed like the happiest days of my life. Certainly not the present, and the future was not just foggy but blank.

That was eight years ago. Longer than we were together. And as these years scroll onward, I'm glad he is my friend, and glad he is not my husband (he shares these sentiments). It certainly seemed like it at the time, but those weren't the happiest days of my life. The happiest days are everywhere, they aren't crammed into the good times of a seven-year relationship. We certainly were happy, sometimes, just as we were sometimes contentious, and sometimes deceitful, and sometimes selfish, and sometimes just fools.

Fast-forward to May 2010, the month I marry the man I didn't know existed way back then. It's Wedding Week, and it's a blur, although not so much a frantic one as a smiling one. The day before the wedding, we've got a crew of helpers coming to the venue to set up tables and chairs, put out the plates, hang decorations. I spend the morning running errands with my sisters: mani-pedis, a quick lunch and then we head to Sylvan Park to pick up the flowers for our bouquets. There are plenty of people I will be glad to see and spend time with over the weekend, but just for these few hours, I'm so, so happy that it's just me and my sisters, how it's always been. I'm driving us around, and the car is chock full of party paraphernalia. As we're riding down Murphy Road, "Back on the Chain Gang" comes on the radio, and we take a break from the constant flow of conversation that has always existed in our three-sided circle, and we sing along at the top of our lungs, "Those were the happiest days of my life..."

P.S. I've spent this week going back through the history of this blog adding tags. Now, if you want to browse through all the food-related posts (don't worry, there's a lot of them), you can do that here. Or if you're wanting to start at the beginning of the Wedding Story, now that's easy! Was that the best use of my spare time this week? Nope. Am I glad it's done? I am.

lost the plot

I feel like at least once a week, an apology blog comes up on my Reader. You know the drill: "Wow, I can't believe it's been xx days since I've posted last. I've been busy, the weather is cold, I have a social life, blah. I'm definitely going to start writing more." I think we all just have to put some kind of anonymous external pressure on ourselves to write, and then some of us (like me, the kind who did the same thing with schoolwork) use that as a reason NOT to write. I'm writing in my head, all the time. But since the wedding especially, I'm trying to apply a structure to the blog that doesn't exist, and, in the case of my cooking blog that I haven't even started yet, have all my ideas in place ahead of time. That isn't a blog, it's a novel. I'm not writing a novel; I'm never going to write a novel. I just need to keep coming back to this place.

So why haven't I been transcribing the wedding details, the honeymoon tales, the cooking triumphs? I am addicted to word puzzles. I've loved to do them since I was a kid, and it was always especially a treat for vacation travel. I'd pick out a fat paper book of Penny Press Word Games and work through it over the course of a trip, or during school breaks. Over the last few years, though, it's become my default before-bed activity, cutting heavily (okay, almost entirely) into my book reading. I occasionally justify the timewasting on these puzzles as a way to ward off early Alzheimer's. I've heard and read that keeping the brain nimble with word games can help prevent the disease from taking hold, but the truth is, it didn't help my Grandma, who worked crosswords religiously with her morning toast and coffee, and of course she is the reason I am morbidly obsessed with my own failing memory. I really just do these puzzles because I like them. It's quick, gratifying work, suits my diminishing attention span and somehow seems to actually take less brain energy than simply reading. I particularly love the puzzles like Places Please and Fill-Ins, the ones that are the written word equivalent of packing a suitcase (this fits here, this fits there, done!).

So there's my apology blog. I'm not writing on Sundays. I'm doing logic problems. And baking peanut butter cookies. And wrapping Mischa up in blankets with me on the couch. It's wintertime in the Gray household, complete with logs burning merrily in the fireplace, a new 12-quart stock pot purchased specifically for a big batch of chicken and dumplings, and plenty of quiet and peace in the company of my handsome and funny husband. Okay then, I'm not really apologizing. I'll just get there, and I'll keep trying.

small joys

If I were rich, I'm sure I'd be happy. I've always said I'd make a great rich person; I'm generous to a fault and take great joy in gift-giving and sharing. I would spread my wealth around like Dolly Levi and her manure. I'd probably have nicer clothes, but I also probably wouldn't treat them any better than my current Gap Outlet and TJ Maxx-provided wardrobe. I'd travel more, in short bursts, four days to visit Mom, a long weekend to see Jenny, that trip to Chicago that we keep swearing we'll take.

Otherwise, I don't see how different my life could be. Would I rather live in another house? No. Would I rather have a different car? No. Would I want to stop working? No. Would I spend time with different people? Absolutely not. And I don't think I'd ever voluntarily sign up for the weight that comes along with wealth. Right now I feel like I do what I can for the rest of the world; we've certainly earned our wings in the Stray Animal Adoption heaven, and we send small donations to our favorite charities (particularly Alzheimer's research) when we can. If I were rich, I don't know how I could justify the balance between giving and retaining. It would never be enough.

I'm seriously racking my brain to identify parts of my life I would change if money were no object. Because the only thing that's nagging at me right now is laziness about getting in shape, and that not only doesn't have to do with money but is actually WASTING the $17 a month we spend on a shared Y membership that rarely gets used. I make wishes every time I find an eyelash, and lately I just sit there and stare at the eyelash trying to remember what I need to wish for. And the other morning, I wished I would get into shape before the wedding. Wishes are for magic! Not for things that are perfectly well in my command if I just get off my lazy ass three mornings a week. Honestly. That's embarrassing.

My point here, though, isn't about the way I want to look in our wedding pictures. It's about the joy in my daily life that I never look past. If I won the lottery, would I still be filled with peace after dinner-and-a-movie with my future husband? Maybe. Would I get a rush of pleasure from a day's work done well? Who knows. But am I bursting at the seams with blessings? I am. Coming home to a house that smells like spaghetti in the crock pot, and rushing through my nightly cleansing routine in order to climb into freshly washed sheets... there in my life is joy.

never been better

Tonight I'm knocking around the house, solo for a little while. Austin's playing FIFA Soccer with JB. I had planned to spend the alone time working on the filing drawers in the desk in the office I excavated yesterday. Instead I poked around online, played a game, read some educational wedding-related articles. Then I straightened up the house, put away the remnants of our crackers-and-soda snack from this afternoon, and got out the ingredients for tonight's Mexican pineapple salad. And I realized, while I was moving around the house, going through mindless motions, I was smiling the whole time.

I don't talk about religion, on here or anywhere. I'm not a subscriber of any specific doctrine. We don't go to church, and we don't follow any scriptures. I don't have astral convictions, and I don't miss them. But the only word I can find to describe this feeling, this day, this place I'm at in my life, is blessed. I am saturated by blessings. It washes over me, so many times a day, and I wish there was a better way to express my gratitude.

I love our home. We cleaned it yesterday, got the office near to full function, and made some decorating progress. It is safe and warm and comfortable when it's filled with girls, sprawled on the couch with popcorn and ice cream, or when it's just us and our pets, on quiet tv afternoons, or when it's just me and my iTunes. There literally isn't a day that goes by that I don't think how utterly lucky we are that we found *this* house. It felt like an arduous search, and it turned out exactly right.

I love my job. One of the bigger wedding-related dilemmas I've faced (as with every bride in the history of the world, I know) has been the size of the guest list. And this is complicated by the fact that I have 70+ coworkers who are also friends who I can't imagine not celebrating with. It's probably not going to be realistic to invite every Emma staffer plus one, but right now I'm doing my best to find a way to include as many as we can. I think about the very best days at Hatch, when we all felt like a productive family full of friends, and that's how Emma is too. I love it when I make a breakthrough on a collaborative project, I love it when I've finished processing the daily check run, I love it when the power goes out and I wind up laying on the carpet of the second floor lounge doing half-assed pilates with Brooks and Rami and Rachael's puppy. I think I've said this before, but you don't realize how much of your self-esteem is caught up in the work week until you find a job that fulfills you.

I love our pets. We both do, equally, with an unreasonable fervor. We're those crazy pet people and aren't remotely ashamed. Digby is getting closer and closer to being a good dog, and Bridgette is such a sweet girl. We had a brushing session on the back patio last weekend (shedding time is definitely here) and they were both just inhaling the affection and attention. Mackenzie is completely back to her old self, running the house with her larger-than-life attitude and making sure she gets quality time with us before bed every night. Corvinius is, well, an oddball, but a loveable one, and spent a large portion of this afternoon rubbing his face on the corner of my computer screen over. and over. and over again. Oh buddy. And look, we don't like to play favorites with our pets. But every single day, Mischa and Charlie Murphy fill us up with love. Mischa got a new toy today, and she's currently sacked out on her spot at the end of the couch with this new red stuffy wrapped in her arms like a woobie. I just want to hold her so tight. Charlie Murphy loves weekends, particularly couch weekends like today, and the absolute peace and joy he spreads when he's sleeping leaned up against my lap... it's just the best.

I love my friends. Book club friends, work friends, people who don't fall in either category (there aren't many...), I can't get over the support network that surrounds me. I spent a lot of my adolescence thinking of myself as not a "girlfriend" kind of girl, and I'm so happy that I was totally wrong about that. We threw a surprise bachelorette party for Agnes last night, and the house was about to burst from all the girlie love. Lisa and Jenny were missed, but otherwise it couldn't have gone better and I was so glad we could all spend sweet time with Agnes before she takes off for the Great Alaskan Wedding Adventure.

I love my family. The reason I didn't think of myself as a "girlfriend" kind of girl was, obviously, because I have the best built-in girlfriends on the planet, my sisters. We talk every day and nothing feels complete unless it is shared with them. I'm so glad that we live close enough to my dad that we can just have low-key evenings of ceiling fan installation and (really good) chicken wings with him and Lynn. We're so lucky to have them both nearby. I miss my big crazy California family so badly, and one of my absolute favorite things to imagine about our wedding is having them all here together again. And I am just chomping at the bit to get to Seattle (next weekend!) and give my Mom one gigantic hug, followed by a series of smaller ones. It's been almost a year since we've seen her and I can't wait to spend a week on the lake with her and Kam (and Casey and Trent and a deck of cards!).

And of course you knew this was where I was going, but I love Austin. I'm not going to detail all the reasons that he's the man I'm going to marry (I've done that before and certainly will again) but the place where we are in our life together is just especially good right now. I am excited to see him EVERY DAY. How silly is that? I start to feel restless and shifty if it's been more than a couple of hours since I've checked in with him (thanks to IM and texting for completely spoiling me by having my fiance´ available to me at all times). We're on the same page about all these major decisions we've made in the past year and will be making in the next year. We're not exactly wealthy, but it's been a long while since we've had to look at anything and say, from a financial standpoint, "How are we going to make this work?" We carpool almost every day and talk about the stories we hear on NPR. If it sounds idyllic, it is. I can't think of an aspect of my life that isn't made better by just having him with me. We don't have to do everything together (see: FIFA Soccer) but when I'm walking around our house by myself, smiling, it's mostly because of him.

minor rant

I've threatened to address this topic for years. But the magazine industry, in addition to being nearly obsolete, is an enormous racket. Subscription cards are a horrifying waste of paper and trash, for one thing. Even (maybe even especially) magazines that spend a great deal of their pages on eco-wellness and conservation can be tipped upside down to an avalanche of the familiar white rectangular cards. How many subscriptions do those things sell? I would guess less than one for every fifty magazines that are purchased. So what is the logic to putting FIFTEEN of the damn cards per magazine? Wasteful, annoying. If you'd like to hear a gross detail, ask me what I do with them. It's kind of like freecycling, but involves cat litter.

Additionally, the magazine renewal process is the opposite of transparent. The only way to know when your subscription is actually expiring is to figure out the encoded date on your mailing label (and if you already opened your magazine, most of which are encased in plastic now, you already threw away that label). Otherwise, the only gauge you have for the timing of your expiration is the CONSTANT letters you get encouraging you to Act Now! Lock Down This Special Introductory Price! You're Qualified for Professional Industry Pricing! I just received a subscription to a well-living magazine last month as a gift from my Aunt, and TODAY I received a "Renew Now and Save" letter in the mail. The amount of paper this industry wastes in pointless advertising (not to mention the actual printing of the publication, which rarely gets kept or reused) is astonishing.

And even if I was an absolute sucker, and I went ahead and mailed this company a check to renew at the special low price of $10 annual, it is never made clear as to whether that payment would add an additional year to my current (prepaid) subscription, or if I'm just paid up for the upcoming 12 months. I'm going to get those damned renewal notices no matter if I'm paid up for the next decade or not. How would anyone who didn't keep pristine payment records AND maintain a constant conversation with magazine customer service ever know? I'm pretty certain that, over the last fourteen years of subscribing to Martha Stewart Weddings, I have paid for at least eighteen years worth of service. Sure, at $16/year (as long as I can remember), it's not like this is breaking me. I am extremely loyal to this magazine, I have saved every single issue, and I read every single page. $16 is completely reasonable for that amount of value, and I will always pay them as soon as I get an invoice rather than risk missing an issue (and, admittedly, when I *did* miss an issue last fall after we moved, MSW replaced it immediately, no questions asked).

But this leads me to my last topic: I have worked for a magazine, and elsewhere in the journalism industry. I know that the only thing that keeps these publications' doors open is advertising revenue. The operating expenses for any magazine are paid ENTIRELY BY THEIR ADVERTISERS. If you are purchasing a glossy filled with cosmetic, automobile and entertainment ads, you just gave that publisher an extra $3-4 that they didn't earn. They should be paying YOU to read their magazine and support their advertisers! The fact that these publications still attempt to add to their profit margin by assigning (occasionally outlandish) dollar values to the service of placing their magazine on a newsstand or in your mailbox is astonishing.

We have subscribed to a major weekly entertainment rag for most of the years that Austin and I have been dating. One year we got it for free because my subscription to Premiere magazine was transferred to an EW subscription when Premiere met an untimely demise (RIP). After that, we got an obnoxiously high renewal notice and canceled. Then a few months later got a ridiculously low "new subscriber" offer, and signed back up again. This has gone on for years now. Last year, my 2-year subscription was running out, and I got a nondescript card in the mail that told me, in unreadably fine print, that the card I'd used to pay for the original contract was going to be charged $46 unless I contacted them in writing to cancel in the next 14 days. I did so and received confirmation of cancellation. The SAME WEEK, Austin got a "subscribe now and save!" card inviting him to take advantage of the special low price of $19 for two years. A $27 difference in prices for the same plan?! Outrageous.

I love magazines. Especially cooking magazines. I cut most of the garbage mags out of my life (I used to religiously subscribe to Glamour, Cosmopolitan, In Style, Mademoiselle, US, Elle and Allure). I stopped taking Food & Wine when I realized I was only cutting one or two recipes out of every issue. Now I get Entertainment Weekly, MSW, Bon Appetit, Everyday Food (which I'm not planning on renewing) and Real Simple. The only ones that I always read cover to cover are MSW and Bon Appetit. Would I be more likely to read the other magazines if they were free? Probably not. Do I look at all of those magazines' websites regularly? I do. Is it clear that the days of the slick glossy publication are numbered? I think so, although it will make me sad when I'm no longer adding to my neatly ordered shelf of Weddings magazines once a quarter.

Just like in the music business, the magazine industry's total refusal to overhaul their subscription system from the outdated service that made them piles of money several decades ago is, most likely, its death march. Magazines that haven't put all of their content online, in an easily searchable format, will continue disappearing without a trace. I just wonder how many more years I'll find those damned cards under the bed or receive "urgent" notices in the mail before they've all just vanished.

luckies

Today was actually sort of a long day. There aren't many of those at my job, two or three a month. Most days I can't believe how fast the time has flown, and I'm feeling good about all of it. Today I didn't eat lunch until 3:30, and only a bit when I did. Sometimes I revert back to my oldest ways of not being able to organize my thoughts and my projects, and everything takes longer than it should.

It has been a proud accomplishment in my life to have moved almost completely away from my original scatterbrained nature, which I came by honestly, thanks to Dad and Grandma Jansen. It was a conscious decision, an internal effort, to stop being the girl who got an F in Math in fourth grade because she lost her homework every day. Even as recently as college, I got behind on my bills not because I didn't have the money, but because I forgot to mail the payments. I just never really had my stuff together. I had a whole room in our house on the highway that was filled with junk and projects I couldn't manage to make sense of.

At some point during this process of transformation, I also became a control freak. And I'm sensitive about it, enough to the point of making fun of myself but getting my feelings hurt if you make fun for me. I learned that I was good at organizing, particularly events (and spatial dimensions like refrigerators, but that's not my point). I get flustered when I'm in the midst of upheaval, I want to place order to it and take the reins. And, in truth and ego, things mostly turn out better when I do. Things turn out fair and even, or logical and calm. I will ruin a perfectly good chaos by applying systems and sense. Thanks to Mom for this, although she's been comfortably submerged in many a shared maelstrom in these most recent years.

Here's my example that I'm thinking of: cooking at home. This is, of course, a topic that I will happily entertain for hours of every day. I've been a mental and manual collector of recipes almost as long as I remember. I love putting together a menu and making a plan. But I can remember many nights, in my early twenties, of wandering around the grocery store after work, collecting my thoughts and ingredients, and eventually cobbling together a very disorganized meal that wouldn't be ready to eat until 10 pm. And somehow I'd drop $60 on every one of those grocery trips, three or four nights a week, and be mystified by how I was spending so much when I wasn't eating out.

Now I make a meal schedule for the whole week in advance. I spend a few hours on Saturday on the floor of the kitchen with my dozens of cookbooks, making assignments of menus to go along with our weekly social plans. I try to know ahead of time which nights we're eating at home and which nights we're going out, hitting the ballgame, going to a show, or hosting friends. I make a master list of all the ingredients needed for the whole week, and then go through the cupboards and fridge and cross things off the list as I confirm that we already have them. I can't even tell you how much food and money this particular step has saved. How often did I grab a bottle of soy sauce because I couldn't remember for sure if I had any, and then came home to find I already had three half-used bottles? Wasteful.

I do waste one piece of paper every time, rewriting my grocery list from the master with all the items crossed off. I organize the list by aisle at my neighborhood Kroger, so I can start at the top and work my way down without doubling back or losing my focus. I rarely buy anything that isn't on the list, and I'm sure I've saved enough for a year's supply of groceries by doing this. I also hardly ever succumb to the temptation to shop at one of the nicer groceries, and this is a major secret to frugality. If there are fancy cheeses available to me, I will buy them, every time, so I just go to the store that doesn't sell fancy cheeses and I make do.

When I get home from the store and get all the groceries put away, I stack all the week's recipes on the desk and post the master menu on the refrigerator. This item earns more surprised exclamations than anything else in our house, I swear. People see it and laugh, or express their admiration. Everyone acts like it's crazy, to have that list, the whole week, all planned out. But it gives me mental peace of mind, and something to think about during the day, a game plan so that I can walk in the door and start cooking instead of knocking around trying to figure out what I'm doing. I'm really starting to hate feeling rushed in the kitchen, especially in the summer when the heat makes our house feel like a pressure cooker.

Tonight I made poppyseed chicken, the kind your grandma made with canned soup, sour cream, Ritz crackers on top. Served it with rice (perfectly cooked, from my new rice cooker, thank you MCB!) and frozen spinach. The ultimate comfort food for me, and just about my favorite leftover lunches ever. I walked in the door after work and put the pot of water on to boil, and moved efficiently through the meal preparation until the rice, chicken and spinach were all finished at nearly the same time and we sat down to a delicious meal.

I'm not saying that I'm always a well oiled machine. More often I am not, like on Saturday, when I had a ketchup massacre while I was trying to put together the barbecue sauce for the ribs. I pride myself on having a well stocked and supplied kitchen, but I have to admit that too much of my fridge is dedicated to condiments, and I shouldn't have to completely unload my baking cupboard every time I need brown sugar, which I'm sure is the thing I use the most from that shelf. And even though I don't have an entire room for my messy projects like my old house, I do keep a disaster of stacked cooking magazines and ripped out recipes in our living room, and I know it's an eyesore and should be dealt with. Every weekend I plan to tackle that stack and do something about it, but then my thoughts get drawn into baking adventures for Sunday afternoons or perfect side dish pairings for that new salmon recipe I can't wait to try...

for Midgie

Dear Mary,

My earliest memories are of your home. It was a retreat, a playground, replete with treats and marvels. I spent hours of my childhood sifting through boxes of costume jewelry (which I never saw you wear) or scheming to get into the cookie jar (shaped like a cow) where I knew I'd find Milanos or Fudge Stripes. Yours was a home filled with comfort and mystery: apothecary jars, glass figurines, towers of books, bottles of rose-scented lotion, and your father's desk, crammed with secret cubbyholes and coin collections. I was certain that your backyard, with a swing on the cherry tree and a pool we weren't *supposed* to jump into, was my happiest place on the planet.

After we moved to Tennessee, I mythologized you. We were removed by distance from the daily annoyances of generation gaps, necessary discipline, family conflict. I wrote you hyperbolic letters and believed that perhaps you would intervene and force my parents to grant my dearest wish (which was to have my ears pierced). I read you the lyrics to Missing You by John Waite over the telephone. You sent the most fabulous and thoughtful birthday boxes, which were always late but legendary.

It is from you that I am sure I inherited my tendency to lavish affection on animals, having conversations with them, sneaking them treats. I developed a love of word puzzles and classic novels from years of sharing them with you. When I was young my mom told me about many Christmas eves when she would hear you up late, crying, overwhelmed because you had so many presents to wrap and had waited until the last minute. Even as a little girl, I recognized my own tendencies in this story, the likelihood that I would procrastinate and then be angry with myself, the self-pity, the desire to do everything for everyone and make everything the most special, the most perfect.

When I was younger, I was sure I had been granted two of the most opposite grandmothers possible. In comparison to my father's brash mother, who brooked no bullshit and used that word often, yours seemed a mild-mannered, profanity-free life. Hazel had been married often, lost husbands in wars, kept a lot of convenience foods in her vast freezer, and governed her entire family (almost none of whom were related by blood) with guilt and sass. In contrast, you were soft-spoken, a little bit silly, devoted to your church, reserved in dress and a total pushover. Even when you were angry, which wasn't nearly as often as it should have been, there was an optimism to it, a disappointment in the offending party because you expected more of everyone else around you.

I can see it clearly now: you and Hazel were united by a single driving force that provided you with a life's purpose and also something to talk about with each other, despite being on opposite sides of an historical divide. You both loved and protected your family with a fierceness that can't be captured in words, and by which I find myself shaped every day of my life. It moves me the way other people are moved by ambition or desire.

As your memories and realities faded, you kept your sweet demeanor and curious nature. Your face, as it grew more and more blank, was still always smiling. I haven't had a conversation with you that related to our real lives in years. It's like you've been gone the whole time. And now you really are, you were gifted your wish of a peaceful passing, and somehow it's made you more real in my mind than you have been in a long time. My sisters and I are flying to San Jose today for your memorial, and I'm planning the menu for the April birthday party at Bill's house after a service at the church. Wednesday night I dreamed that the food wasn't ready and there were hungry boys everywhere (and a lion) and I was deciding to cook churrasco even though we didn't have a grill or any meat marinating. And then you were there, and you gave me this long, strong hug, and I was filled with a rush of power and gratitude and light that I carried with me long after I woke up, got dressed, moved on with my day.

There is no less trite way to say it: our family was blessed to have you at the start of it. You brought countless discoveries and beauties into our lives, and I don't think any of us are going to ever stop missing you. Thank you for always bringing and keeping us together, and for giving us all the strength and intelligence to also go our own ways, wherever that has been. I'm hoping for another visit with you in my dreams soon. There is still so much I can't wait to tell you.

Portrait of a Childhood, Vol 1: The Woods

The image of a bullet hitting the floor in a ubiquitous movie trailer suddenly reminds me of how much time my sisters and I spent playing with spent shotgun shells that we found in the woods.

We literally spent years of our lives in the woods. We knew every inch for a square mile around our house at least. In the summers, we'd be off in the morning after breakfast and not come home until Dad whistled for dinner. In the fall, we shuffled paths through the fallen leaves. There was an unfinished house on the ridge, only frames and foundation, where we'd assemble dream house fantasies. There was a field on the opposite ridge, past a barbed wire fence (which didn't stop us), where I imagined riding a horse or running in a white gown towards a lover. There were creeks on either side, which met at a pond below the turnaround at the end of our street. We waded and found skipping stones, invented a fairyland (Lynker) on the banks, found tiny shells and occasionally a crawdad or discarded copperhead skin. These were our treasures, squirreled away in boxes under the springs of our mattresses.

It wasn't a desolate area, where we lived. There were dozens of houses on our street. But we were at the end, and felt an exclusive ownership to the surrounding hills. We had names for everything, most of which were probably wrong: mulberry bushes, Indian money, oysters and waterskeeters. I ripped up cattails and used the down to make a (highly unsanitary) pillow for Dolly. We had shredded canvas sneakers just for creekwalking, and further up the creek on the western side of the street, there were pools almost deep enough to swim in.

Directly behind our house, there was a shell of a car at the base of the hill. The glass was all broken out, the roof caved in, most of the upholstery rotted or cracked. We told each other brutal theories about a family dying in whatever accident had left the car there, covered in brambles and rust. We found the broken windshield glass, in perfect cubes, throughout the gravel in our driveway and under the grass, and collected it, pretending to have baggies full of dirty diamonds.

We knew which sticks could be hollowed out and made into whistles or wands. We were terrified and fascinated by cicadas and praying mantis. There was a blue heron that lived in the pond one fall, and a pair of white ducks with red eyes another spring. There were tulip poplars with perfectly aligned branches that we could climb twenty feet in the air.

One summer we were playing in the pool at the base of the waterfall that flowed from the southern end of the pond. The water was clear down there, and deeper, less algae, less reeds and tangles in the shallows. I only remember being there with Casey. Across the surface of the pool, coming towards us in a rapid, twisting whirl, was a cottonmouth. It moved as if I was pulling it towards us on a string, its jaw wide open, fangs bared, white spongy interior exposed. I do not remember even the moment it took to recognize the danger, or the decision to run. All that I remember is literally hauling Casey up the waterfall like a sack of potatoes, before she knew what was happening.

My not-even-a-parent-yet overprotectiveness is aghast when I look back. I can't believe we ran around like that, that close to the water, to the wildlife, to the hunters in the wintertime. I think that I would never let my kids out there. I am not questioning my parents' judgment. They were right, we were perfectly safe, and knew how to get home quickly if we were scared. Our imaginations were enriched by having so much territory at our disposal. But now I wonder if my own current existence is so homogenized that I would never allow such adventures for my family. So much of it seems dangerous or filthy, ticks and nettles and invisible creatures that crashed away in the underbrush as we climbed up a hill.

We went for a walk around Dad's house this spring, and I hung back from the others and sat down next to his creek, examining the ecosystem for the first time in 15 years. As you all know, I'm just not the outdoorsy one anymore. My motto is, "I love not camping." I scoff at people who offer stories of going on a nice hike. I haven't sat on the always-damp ground of a forest and stared at the countless movements in every square inch in a long time.

If I do raise kids, it will probably be in the city. We love Nashville, I love how I see people I know everywhere I go, but still have (pretty) good grocery stores within 10 minutes of my house and the big fireworks show on 4th of July within walking distance. But what will my (hypothetical) kids be missing if they don't grow up with a pond, a field, a mysterious unfinished house and crashed car to explore? On the flipside, what did I miss by not growing up in the city? I think I know the answer to that: very little.

violation

I mentioned the panel discussion I went to at the Country Music Hall of Fame on Saturday. It featured Scott Miller, Chris Knight (both singer-songwriters), William Gay and Silas House (both novelists), and was generally a discussion about music and writing and the places they meet. The writers were talking about how music influences their work, and the musicians were talking about literature and how it inspires them. It was a really great experience. They all played songs or read excerpts, and it was a great pairing of Southern artists who share some history in different ways. William Gay read part of a biographical essay he'd written about Bob Dylan, and it was touching and funny and a beautiful depiction of an era I can only imagine.

They also took questions from the audience. Someone asked, when they write about people they know, do they ask those people for permission first? And Chris Knight answered that none of the people he writes about would recognize themselves. They all talked a little about how much of their real lives they are willing to reveal, and Scott quoted someone else (I should look it up): "Reality don't rhyme." He says you write about what you know, but you take poetic license in transferring it to song (or words).

This weekend I read Which Brings Me to You, by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott. I really enjoyed it, it was a quick and slightly guilty read, a novel written in the format of a man and woman getting to know each other through letters. The letters were "confessions," mostly of the sexual/relationship variety. Pretty intense, a little bit graphic, and very detailed in truth. And I know it is fiction, but I'm also guessing that a lot of this book is based in real life, on real experiences, on real people from these authors' lives.

When I'm reading good fiction, I usually end up mimicking the language and style (unintentionally) in my subsequent writing. Just like when you talk to someone from Minnesota and find yourself saying, "Ya! I knoooo!" So the things I've been thinking about writing this week have been rather confessional in nature. I think about what I would say if I were to write an essay about the first heart that I broke, or the first time I cheated. I wonder if I have the right to write about those things, who I could hurt by going there, the men who I was dating at those times, or my Mom, who probably doesn't want to hear about it. There are a lot of things I think I can't write because I don't want my mom to read them. Truths about our family, or about things I've done that I regret. And those are the things that, I think, I write about the best. Do you know what I mean? That is the creative gray area where I find it easiest to use my own language, my own style.

My mom is a really private person. There are aspects of her past that are locked up in a box, and that has always fascinated me, because I know I'm just not, naturally, that way. I wrote once about that feature that I share with my father, the "artist's death wish to rip open our ribs and show the world our blackened, smoke-spun entrails" (I was in college when I wrote that, I was a little wordy). I very rarely keep secrets, particularly not my own, and I'm not shy about discussing personal details. My father, as we all know, will always say the thing he shouldn't have said. The thing that makes you say, "I really wish I did NOT know that, Dad." And it's mostly humorous, he's a quirky guy, and an amazing writer, and brave in the way only writers are.

I guess my point is this: what should I allow myself to say, out loud, to the world? Should I be more aware of private information, of other peoples' lives? Should I say the bold thing and stand up for it later? Should I start the anthropological self-study that I have always threatened, to start picking apart the web of similarities and differences between my sisters and me, how we ended up the way we are? I think they probably don't want me to do that. It's against my nature to be secretive, but that isn't the same thing, is it? Secrets and discretion, not the same. Privacy and hiding, not the same. That's what I remember about my childhood; we lived in privacy, we were not hiding. There was no avoidance. Just effort withheld? I wonder what I really mean here.

Many members of the blogosphere put a lot of effort into privacy, maintaining their anonymity and that of those around them. They use initials or nicknames, they don't put their own name in their URL (!), they don't post photos. And I understand why they don't, but I've just sort of not felt the need. You people know who I am, right? I'm not keeping any secrets, that's what I tell myself. I use my family's real names, I provide pictures of my home, I use details from my real life that aren't that hard to find. And now, today, I sort of wish I didn't. I'm realizing that there are probably people out there, in the big bad world, who I don't want to know where I live. Who I want to pretend are just not out there. My Myspace profile isn't private, I've put links on blogspot to my online photo albums, I hope I never have to regret this. Today I'm on the fence.

The best writing that I've done in my life, the writing that has made me want to not move away from that aspect of myself, has all been, to a word, biographical. I'm not a fiction writer, and when I tried, I just wrote the truth. But what have I done in my life to justify a biography, a memoir? I'm only 30. I'm not famous, or accomplished, or well-traveled, or particularly interesting in any of my experiences. All that I'm doing is journaling, documenting, observing. We live in an era where everyone keeps diaries again, and anyone can read them. I used to write lies in my diary when I was a little girl, tall tales about boys I had kissed or money I had found, and then be certain to leave the diary where my sisters would find it, and tell myself that they were secretly in awe of my wild, false accomplishments.

Now I'm blogging, and I'm doing this NaBloPoMo thing, and as with writing classes in school, the writing is there for me now, more and more every day, the words and the ideas are more accessible if I keep them towards the surface, need them daily. I'm trying to find the right place for them, the right use, to press the righteous truth to the forefront, and not fall back into the show-off little girl, with her lies and manipulative placements. But I also don't want to betray anyone with a truth that is theirs to hide, and I don't want to later wish that I was in hiding and safe behind a nickname, safe from anyone who would misuse my personal life, or misconstrue my habit of sharing with a desire to be shared.

It's dark outside, and I'm still at work, and I've got to run home and scoop up my dog and take her to puppy class and then rush to Book Club, for the best of Girl Time. I'm not sure that I have even said what I mean here today, but I'm glad that I'll have the chance, tomorrow and the next day, to keep looking for it. Thanks for letting me do that with you.

A Moment in Song, v. 1 & 2

I don't mind being the one hundred billionth person to write about the power of music to transport you to another time or place. Good food can do it, like my previous rant about my grandmother's devil's food cake; how easy it is to conjure the red carpet, apricot trees and apothecary jars of 1552 Jacob Ave. exactly how it was only in my childhood? Or in Ratatouille, when Anton Ego takes a bite of exquisitely sliced eggplant and tomatoes, and is immediately a skinny boy with huge eyes in his mother's kitchen (when we saw this in the theatres, the kid sitting behind us whispered, "I feel like that sometimes"). So it is with music. Here are two examples at the forefront of my mind right now:

Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Smashing Pumpkins:

Backstage in Vanguard Theatre, in the Fine Arts building, in college. I'm on my hands and knees, painting a canvas backdrop that will be the focus image of the stage design for Working, a musical we're putting on, I'm guessing Spring of 1997. Is that right? I can't remember. Doug Cook, my good friend and theatre teacher (and freshman orientation advisor), comes into the backstage area through the door near my boss Tim's office. Doug is wearing his full-length gray Dickie's jumpsuit that he keeps in his office to put over his teacher clothes when there is painting to be done. He is singing, at the top of his lungs, "DESPITE ALL MY RAGE I AM STILL JUST A RAT IN A CAGE!!!" and the sound is echoing through the catwalk and proscenium.

Let's Get It On, Marvin Gaye:

Summer 2002, Dunn School, Los Olivos, California. It's Jansen Family Reunion week, and we're all bunked up on the campus of my Mom's school, having pool parties, making videos, getting on each other's nerves. For the first time since before things like this mattered, I am single. This puts me in the unenviable position of having to sleep on the couch in the living room of the house we have borrowed, while my sisters (and their boyfriends) occupy the guest room and master suite. Four or five of my male cousins sleep on the floor around the couch. This summer, their favorite thing to do is record the sound of their farts into Simon's computer. And also to clog up toilets by not flushing them for several days. My plumber uncles are not amused by this. These boys, however, find pretty much anything brown to be the height of hilarity.

Friday, the night before everyone has to leave, we have an impromptu dance party at Mark and Amy's house. It probably wasn't officially impromptu, Amy and I have the annoying habit of trying to PLAN things like spontaneous dance parties, but this one balmy night in August, it works. The less fleet-footed members of the family are outside, admiring the waning crescent moon through a telescope, while the rest of us are hoofing it in the living room to disco and r & b classics. This is the family that I grew up with, my mother's brothers and their wives and kids. My little grandmother is parked on the couch, clapping along with the music and cooing over particularly athletic feats of footwork. This is the last time I remember recognizing her when I looked at her face. The boys want to participate in the revelry but don't want to be caught doing anything as gay (the opposite of brown) as dance with the grownups, so they are just zooming around the house, sliding on the hardwoods in their socks. Beau ignores my beckoning, but Simon is willing to step up and boogie with me, and Brandon is, instead of dancing, posing in familiar bodybuilder stances. I put on Let's Get It On, the Jack Black version from High Fidelity, and my mom and my Uncle John take this one very seriously. He's flinging her around and dancing in swerving circles and Mom has her arms in the air and is swaying her hips. In one particularly inspired move, she reaches up and unpins her hair, and swings her head with a flourish, and Uncle John steps back as if he's lost his breath. I am envious of their friendship; every year she and I make great strides towards dissolving the structures of traditional mother-daughter confinements, but I don't know if she'll ever be, around me, the way she is so easy with her brothers. Aunt Paula is dancing with Brandon, and Amy and I are in the middle of the room, twirling each other under each arm like ballerinas.

Later that evening, I'm riding my mom's bicycle. It has been years since I've been on a bike, and just like the cliche, I'm suprised by how easily the motions come back to me, the act of balancing, braking, steering. The night is cool, the moon is near and bright, and I'm thinking about how seldom I am alone outside at night. I'm inclined to be a little bit spooked by this thought, and in a small way it makes me very conscious of my single-ness; ordinarily I would be walking home with Brandes. I keep thinking, I'm too old to be single, to start again! And then I consider my mom, and she's single too, and that idea and process was so unthinkable when it started and then it somehow became okay. And then it became the only life any of us could imagine. This is the week I have been told that my ex-boyfriend has died, and many larger thoughts of mortality and maturity and the future are looming. But for tonight, surrounded by the reality of family, I have never felt safer in my life.

Side One, Track One

A girl in my office is getting married. She had a shower thrown for her at her church yesterday. She is a kind and generous soul, and brought in leftover cake. It is a massive sheet cake, with roses. I had a piece for breakfast; it was guiltily delicious. As I was walking past the table with the cake earlier, I noticed the label:

Full Sheet Cake, White
Buttercreme, White

I'm sure you know the kind of cake I'm talking about. My best reference point is that this is the kind of cake we BEGGED for as children, sick of and embarrassed by our mother's homemade ("plain") cakes. My mom calls it Crisco Frosting. I would nod in enthusiastic agreement, "Yes, Crisco frosting, that's the one I want!!" And I will certainly eat said cake to this day, when it's put in front of me. But that makes me a little bit mortified, to think about my mother, who (it turns out!) doesn't like to cook, going through the elaborate processes of my grandmother's Devil's Food Cake recipe, and the next year, Ungrateful Daughter says, "I want the one from Food Lion." It also makes me a little bit weepy, how far would I travel and how many crimes would I commit for a slab of my grandmother's Devil's Food Cake, with Seven Minute Frosting, which hardened to a grainy, crispy crunch, over which she drizzled bitter chocolate.

My point is this: "Buttercreme, White."

Buttercreme, my ass. I'm sorry, is that legal? Are we honestly supposed to believe there is even a THOUGHT of actual butter in that frosting? That a real stick of real butter might have dashed past the cake on its covert journey to be creamed and sugared and labored over for an actual, honest-to-God buttercream? By spelling it "creme," are they circumventing the truth behind the "butter?" "Creme" calls up images of Little Debbies, filled doughnuts, icings on Toaster Strudels. Nobody pretends there is any real butter in any of those things. I'm far from being a political person, but I'm considering becoming a lobbyist. I will petition Congress: do not let KrogerTeeterSamsMart call this "butter-" anything. Officially.

I have so much else to talk about. The last month has been, to be completely generic, crazy. My sisters got married. Austin's brother got married. We got a puppy. A puppy! What are we thinking?! I'm sort of pursuing some sort of interesting pursuits in my sort of attempt at a sort of career/sort of future... which all involve baking. Sort of. And I want to elaborate on all of these things, and also on many others that are just creeping around at the edge of my brain. But I'm only 3/4 of the way through Harry Potter Book 5, which I want to have finished before Movie 5 opens this week, and then gotta cram Book 6 before Book 7 arrives next week (!!), and plus I have to make a fair stab at our Book Club Selection for July (Three Cups of Tea), so I really just need to crawl back under my desk and read, and tell you about the Significant Details later. I leave you with this, as proof that there is Lots to Tell: