Storytelling

"I am so sorry I missed your session yesterday," he said, my tall gorgeous coworker, as we hesitated at the door of the elevator. Was it too crowded? Should we wait? "I had to go home and wait for Verizon."

With a small opening at the front of the box, we decided to risk it and stepped onto the elevator for a local version of the ride to the 10th floor.

"You know how I moved, right?"

I nodded. Actually, I'd forgotten but somewhere in the dusty recesses of my mind I had known that he was moving.

"How was that?"

He told me about a cut pipe and a flooded bedroom. As we stopped at every floor between the lobby and ours, I stepped off the elevator and back on trying to make way for riders who needed to exit, and he told me about the move. Delayed due to flooding. Movers paid by building management. New carpet. Off and on. The apartment. The move. The phone.

"They crossed my line with somebody else's," he held up his hands, trying to visually represent the crossing of lines. "Actually, they crossed three lines and they can't figure it out."

We were the only ones left by the time we reached our floor. He flashed his ID to open the door and we stepped inside, still talking on his part, still listening on mine, as he described conference calls taken at home, on his mobile, so that he could await the repairman. He'd scheduled the session a week earlier. He'd scheduled the workmen a week earlier, too, but things happened. Life happened. He had to go home and wait.

"No worries," I said. "It was just Kate and me. I'll do it again."

I stood in the hall outside his door as he wrapped up the story, as he drew an ellipsis in words since it still wasn't sorted out, the lines, the payment, the new apartment.

Last night, as I walked home from the Metro, I found myself walking behind, then beside, an woman and her son. Both chattered as they walked, seemingly directing their words at each other, but following completely different trains of thought.

"Eastern Market," the boy said. "I'm not going to do that again."

"The sky's just going to open up any minute, isn't it?"

"So many people. I didn't like that."

"I can just feel it in the air."

"It was too crowded."

"It's just going to open up."

"It is, isn't it?" I said as I passed. The boy looked up in surprise, and the woman looked at me gratefully.

"You can just feel it in the air. It must be raining somewhere. It's cooling down, isn't it?"

We talked as we walked. For another block or so, the three of us talked about wind and rain and summer storms. I told them that my apartment kept flooding; they told me that they'd had to dig another drainage ditch. At the corner where we parted ways, the woman kept talking and I stood on the corner and waited as she finished her thought. They crossed the street, and I turned left, waving.

At home, the boy from upstairs, 5-year-old Max, stood on the steps in front of our house and held up a trio of Dum Dums.

"Look what I got!" he said.

"You've got lollipops," I exclaimed.

"I've got three of them," he explained. "Mrs. Young gave them to me. Three of them."

"Aren't you a lucky boy?"

As I stood on the step with the boy from upstairs, as I stood at the corner, as I waited in the hall to hear the rest of the story from my tall gorgeous coworker, I realized that it didn't much matter. Not to me. I'd never called his home number and doubted I ever would. I couldn't remember if I'd even called his mobile and had surely never dialed his office extension. He wasn't telling me because I needed to know; he was telling me because he needed to say it. To tell the story. To share his experience.

All of us have stories inside, the coworker, the stranger on the street, even the 5 year old who lives upstairs. We just need someone to listen.


Tag: Stories Writing

Ten

My nephew turned 10 yesterday. An entire decade with this little person as part of my life. When I called in the morning, he answered the phone.

"Hi, Lodi."

"Hey, punk. Happy birthday." I replied.

"It sure would be nice to see you for my birthday," he told me.

I didn't bother to explain that I'd tried to coming the previous night but nobody answered the phone and I didn't want to drive an hour and half to find myself locked out of the house. I didn't try explaining that I'd already taken a week off work to fly to Minnesota with him, to take him to North Dakota. I didn't get into the meetings or workload, the obligations that kept me at home.

"You're always here for my birthday," he said.

"Let me talk to your mom."

"It sure would be nice..."

"Let me talk to your mom."

She said they'd be home by one. One thirty, at the latest, and that I should call her cell if I needed to reach her. She'd charge it, take it with her, turn it on.

"I'll see what I can do."

I went to work and accomplished what I needed to accomplish from my desk. I packed up the things I could take and review sometime later and I drove an hour and half to a house on a mountain in West Virginia.

Nobody was home.

I waited another hour and a half, reviewing papers in the sticky afternoon, until they got back. Hot, cranky, tired, I hugged them all and tried to forget about the past three hours, to focus on the grimy arms clinging to my neck, to the sweaty little bodies climbing into my lap as we talked. To card games and video games and word games. I pushed my niece on a tire swing and tried to teach the girls how to play a blade of grass. They brought one to my mom, which she honked as one might call a duck, and I wondered if I'd ever seen her do such a thing. When did she learn? When did I?

Pizza and breadsticks, cake and ice cream. An off-key rendition of "Happy Birthday" before the boy blew out his candles and after he'd opened his presents because he just couldn't wait any longer - they'd been sitting on the table all day.

My 8-year-old niece helped bake the cake. Her 6-year-old sister packed up a bag of girly toys, high heels and underwear as a joke gift.

"The panty fairy came!" she shouted, chasing her brother around the house. "The panty fairy came!"

I crawled into bed sometime around midnight, smelling like burnt toast, sweat and gasoline. Exhausted. Happy.

"He was so worried that you wouldn't come," my sister told me. "You're always here for his birthday."

"Am I?" I wondered and realized it didn't matter. He thought I was there and yesterday, I was.


Tag: Family

Winning

Eight years ago, I was in Sydney. A couple of weeks before my birthday. A month or so before the Olympics. We walked by the village and across the Harbour Bridge where the Olympic rings hung; a picture of that hangs in my hall at home.

On the way up to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, on an in-country flight, we watched a security video, some football – Aussie rules – and a commercial or two. Three. Eight years later, one of the commercials sticks with me. I have no idea what it was selling and I don't remember the tagline. All I know is that it featured Olympians who finished last. Olympians who, by all accounts, lost.

The faces, the scenes, were filled with anguish, with heart-wrenching despair as dreams were dashed, and for every winner, for every race, for every competition, somebody did come in last. Nobody remembers the "losers." Many of the winners fade into obscurity, much less those who came in second or third or sixth. But the commercial, the one with those who came in last, claimed them all winners.

It didn't matter where they placed or if they placed. What mattered was that they were there. The best in the world, even at last place. Olympians all. They made it.

Last night, I saw a similar commercial for Visa.



At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Derek Redmond tore his hamstring in the 400 meter semifinal. Derek Redmond didn't finish in first place. He didn't finish in second or third or fourth. Actually, according to the Olympic committee, Derek Redmond didn't finish at all – he was disqualified.

In front of 65,000 fans with the race all but over, he pulled himself to his feet, torn hamstring and all, determined to finish his race. With 175 meters to go and with tears streaming down his face, he moved slowly forward. At 120 meters shy, his father, having burst through security, wrapped his arm around his son's waist and helped him across the finish line. Dead last. But he did cross the line.

The commercial made me cry just a little, brought tears to my eyes that I blinked back furiously. Crying over a Visa commercial. Crying over an athlete who lost his dream. Who crossed the finish line anyway. Who finished dead last. Who finished.

Over the weekend, I went to New York to cheer for a friend in a half marathon. After registration, we went to Niketown and my friend had a shirt personalized in memory of her father – Semper Fi – and for herself with a Nike graphic that said something like "Train like you're in 4th place; race like you're in 1st."

In a few months, we'll be in San Francisco as she runs a full marathon. She won't win first place. She won't win second or fourth or 96th, but she will be there.

Eight years later, I still remember the commercial from Sydney. Eight years from now, I'll probably remember the one with Derek Redmond. I doubt I'll remember or care what either one sold (not very effective as far as commercials go), but I remember the message.


Tag: Olympics Commercials

Night at Nobu

We slid in with a last-minute reservation, calling that morning to try to find a table. Nobu sent us next door, to Nobu Next Door, with a 9 o'clock seating. We arrived early, our rooftop bar closed for a private party. Steve's party. Steve's birthday. Steve ruining our plans to clean up, drink a cocktail and make the reservation at nine. We had to go straight from clean up to reservation. Early.

Fortunately, they managed to seat us. Unfortunately, they managed to seat a rather strange couple next to us. With tables so close one had to be pulled to make way to the banquette, we couldn't help but hear their conversation. A first date, surely, or so we thought as the girl laughed nervously.

"You surprised me," she brayed. "Do you come here often?"

"As much as I can," her date noted. "I swear that I see Martha Stewart every time that I'm here."

"I'd love to see her."

"In her prison orange?"

The girl seemed somewhat flustered, unsure of her response, and I focused on my menu, trying to figure out what to eat. I placed my order, asked for a recommendation from our server and revised my selection to include the warm mushroom salad, half of which I lost to a friend. It was that good.

The couple next to us seemed disinterested in my salad, but the man leaned to his right and plucked a piece of sushi off a neighboring table. Up until that point, I hadn't seen them exchange a single word but suddenly the couple became a foursome, the young first daters next to us, a 30-ish man from Barcelona and his date who might have been anywhere between 30 and 60 with Botox, collagen and saline implants obvious, even in the dim light.

Long distance dating came up, with the cougar and the Spaniard spanning the globe.

"It's hard, isn't it?" the young blond exclaimed. "We've been doing it for a year and a half."

A year and a half? The young couple? The first daters?

"We've been together for five."

I turned back to the salad, deftly plucking mushrooms with my chopstick prowess (read: tried to keep from throwing them at myself, my companion or the floor). I wished that I'd held onto my inane conversation, that I hadn't blown it all on Spike Lee who was really quite quiet, so that I could drown out the couples to the left, the very loud couples to the left.

The couple to the right murmured, leaning into each other and looking into each others' eyes. The blond on my right - the young one - seemed incapable of speaking in anything quieter than a shout. She lives in North Carolina, ordered chicken at Nobu (Nobu! A sushi restaurant) and graduated with a business major, which I heard maybe seven times over the course of the night.

"I was a business major," she shouted while chewing her chicken, open mouthed. "I was a business major."

My friend and I talked, sotto voce, about the day, our plans for the night and the couples beside us.

"You have to write about this," she whispered, as I shook my head.

"I can't do it justice."

She scribbled notes in a pad for me. Botox. Fake boobs. Cougar. I added saké bombs. 1st date? 5 years? And "eating off neighboring table and feeding girlfriend" in hopes that I would remember it all. Chews with mouth open. Only ate chicken.

Sushi and sashimi for us. Yellow tail scallion. Spicy tuna. Japanese red snapper. Jumbo crab. Vegetable roll for the vegetarian. Dessert of chocolate cherry maki and coconut jasmine bombe. Unremarkable wine by the glass and coffee in a vain attempt to stay awake after walking, shopping and too much good food. The night passed quickly, as did the weekend.

"How was it, other than outrageously expensive?" a friend asked, later that night over drinks.

"Outrageously expensive," I replied. "The food was good, wonderful, in fact, but the people... I don't know. Outrageously expensive."

"That's what I thought."


Tag: New York Travel Food

Do the Right Thing

That's what I think when I think of Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing. I saw the movie ages ago in a college class: Ethnicity in America with Dr. Andrade. An honors course. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. Honestly, I remember very little of the class. All I wanted to do was sleep with my first taste of freedom keeping me up until 4 on most nights, but I remember weekly essays, reaction papers and Spike Lee.

Up to that point in my life, ethnicity in America seemed rather moot. I grew up in southeastern Ohio, in a small town, with the fat white majority. 3.91% African American. 0.37% Indian. It was too hilly for farming: no migrant workers. Too poor for much of anything.

Up to that point, my exposure to other cultures consisted of weekly allergy shots with Dr. Rangaswami or his Mennonite nurse, Dorothy. I had a few Indian classmates and some black, but nobody thought of anyone as anything but friends. We grew up together; we were from the same place.

The girl from Iran might have had a little trouble. I don't remember too much about it, but those were the Reagan years. The administration of Bush senior. The "Iran-Contra Affair" seemed like words we'd heard somewhere even if none of us knew what they meant. I think she might have been subject to teasing before her family moved.

It was small-town Ohio, filled with people who were easily categorized as "teacher" or "lawyer" or "insurance salesman" – or so it seemed to my adolescent mind. My own mom was a secretary at one of the 50 or so churches within a four block radius of our giant old house that cost nearly nothing because it was a small town and it was poor.

Until I went to college, I didn't know much about the rest of America. A decade and a half later, I'm still not sure I know much about the rest of America but I try. I started trying first semester, freshman year: Sociology, totalitarianism and thought control, and ethnicity in America with Dr. Andrade.

I don't remember much of the course but it made enough of an impact that I picked the man to advise my senior thesis. I also spent my senior spring break in the Bronx with side trips to protests, needle exchange clinics, shelters, hot meal programs, afterschool sessions, churches and Sing Sing. As in the maximum security prison. Talking to maximum security prisoners. I attribute a lot of that to Dr. Andrade, too.

The one big thing I remember about the class – after a panicked office visit in which I thought I'd get punished for not paying attention – was the movie. Do the Right Thing - produced, written and directed by Spike Lee.

I've seen it a few times since freshman year, and it still makes me cry. Pretty much every single time. The cultural injustices. Violence. Futility. The fact that for a lot of people in America, people who aren't all WASPy like me, the cards are stacked up against them. For the first time, I started to realize what that meant. I grew up in a small town where everyone looked and acted a lot like me, even if I was a little weird; I just didn't get it. Spike Lee made me think. I still don't know what "the right thing" is or how to do it, but I've spent the past decade and a half trying to figure it out.

Yesterday morning, standing at Niketown, a friend leaned over and whispered tersely, "I have something to tell you."

She'd been staring over my shoulder for the better part of 10 minutes; I figured she wanted to tell me that someone had lost their pants or sat down in the middle of the floor or something equally absurd yet basically fine.

"I have something to tell you," she whispered. "But I can't tell you now."

"OK."

I stood for a while and waited. It was a long line and it was slow. Eventually, she could say what she needed to say and she whispered again.

"Spike Lee is standing right behind you."

I looked at her in surprise and willed myself still for a minute or five or 10, filling the air with empty, meaningless conversation, with inane musings until I could turn, glance around the room and see for myself.

Spike Lee.

He's made a lot of movie since 1989's "Do the Right Thing," and at that moment, all of them played on the screen in my head. Spike Lee. Bamboozled. The Original Kings of Comedy. Inside Man. Get on the Bus. 25th Hour. When the Levees Broke. Do the Right Thing. Spike Lee. Two feet behind me.

I let my glance slide over to the computer in the corner, to the desk in front of me, to the customer service representatives, and continued my chatter, talking about travel and shopping, talking about the frizz in my hair, anything and nothing to keep myself from staring. The best way to show my respect seemed to be respecting his privacy, his right to spend Saturday morning with his kids at Niketown.

As for the right thing, I'm still trying to figure that out, but seeing Spike Lee served as a reminder that I need to do more than think. To figure. I need to act.


Tag: Spike Lee Movies New York

Naptime

"All right, everybody. It's naptime."

Somehow the words linger in the far reaches of my memory as something I used to know. Words that had a Pavlovian effect on my meager young mind. Naptime.

"Get your mats."

I can almost hear the voices of my young teachers, the nameless faceless bunch in preschool or Miss Brown in Kindergarten at Washington Elementary in the classroom at the end of the row. I know that I must have gotten a mat and fit into the jigsaw of colored, covered mats on the floor of the room to lie down for a nap but it's all kind of hazy. I have trouble imagining it now.

Did I sleep next one of my friends? Next to Nancy or Debbie? Did I sleep next to Tad? In plaid bell bottoms and a red turtleneck, with beribboned and messy pigtails, did I curl up next to the girl from across the street, the one who would later put paste in my hair?

No pillows. No blankets. Just a roomful of cranky 5 and 6 year olds lying down for naps. It's almost a memory, something that I should know, should remember, but it slips from my grasp as I try to envision a world with preset naps.

Across the aisle from me, the woman in the tight green T, the woman hugging a romance novel, has pulled a huge orange fleece over herself and her fiancé. The man in front of her reclines, mouth agape, under headphones and face mask. Next to me, my friend sleeps quietly with her arms crossed.

There's something to be said for sleeping with other people. Just… sleeping… with people. Mouths open, eyes closed and heads back, we bare our souls, or at least our necks, in vulnerability. We recharge our batteries and dance through worlds all our own, falling asleep in Washington and waking up in Baltimore, near Philly, in New York.

Overhead, the bin isn't closed and the open door chirps with every jolt of the bus. The air conditioning works a little too well and riders hug themselves in their sleep. Half-sleeping, half-awake, I felt my jaw moving but couldn't seem to stop it. I was glad that I managed to avoid drooling into my cleavage or choking awake as so often happens when I nap.

I can almost remember my face pressed against the stiff vinyl covering. The creases of sleep on my cheeks and forehead. A puddle of drool by my chin. A stuffed animal crammed between body and mat. Almost.

I must have felt safe then.

Did we take off our shoes and line them next to the mats or did we sleep with them on? How long did we sleep? How did we wake up and when we crawled from the mats, did we have trouble keeping our eyes open? Did we lie there with our eyes closed and thoughts racing?


Tag: Sleep

Pineapple Express

"Is this seat taken?" he asked with a polite smile.

"No, please…" I motioned to the empty seat beside me.

I regretted my lack of company, the emptiness of the seat that begged to be filled, the awkwardness of sitting in a crowded theater alone with empty seats on either side.

"Please…"

He sat in the seat, a friend beside him, and elbowed me off of the wide armrest, elbowing me to the other side of the seat. He pulled his phone from his pocket and started to talk and surf simultaneously, scrolling through a map to a party that hadn't happened or wouldn't happen or would require a bus because Mr. Phone apparently didn't cab.

"Do you g-chat?" he asked his friend. "I mean, I have it on my phone but I don't IM."

I delved into my book, The New Kings of Nonfiction, compiled by Ira Glass and tried to read about a toxic dump in California, but the man beside me didn't have an inside voice. Or an off button.

"They give you cheap sh*tty food for Restaurant Week," he brayed. "I used to go a lot because I had, like, this girlfriend who was a foodie and she was like 'I want to go because you won't take me there.'"

His voice rose dramatically in an impression of the girlfriend as he flounced his hands.

"And I was like 'No, I'll take you there but not during Restaurant Week because it sucks.'"

He looked at his phone.

"Dude, that's like a really long walk and it's f*cking uphill."

"From Van Ness?"

"Like, yeah."

"Focus," I though. "Read… Good writing."

The book intrigued me, a compilation of essays, of "literary nonfiction" from a variety of interesting writers. Malcolm Gladwell. Michael Lewis. Mark Bowden. Susan Orlean. It was like candy for my brain or more like the fruit rollups that grocery stores sell in the produce section – sweet as candy but organic. Natural. Good for you. I wanted to read, to crawl into the pages and indulge in the sweet wholesomeness until the theater darkened, but the "likes" and the outside voice distracted me.

"It's actually not that long of a walk," the man observed after a bit more scrolling. He held his phone inches from his friend's face. "See?"

The friend nodded and murmured in agreement.

"I'm not paying like 20 bucks for a cab… I hear there's like a $4 minimum for getting in a cab."

"It's like six now," his friend replied and the story moved on to another party.

"Dude, I was so messed up."

Messed up and hooked up, dude and like. The blond chick was apparently like pissed after she sent a Facebook message to the dude beside me, the man in his late 20s, early 30s. A man who wore a suit to work and played with his phone and substituted "like" for other verbs in his life except those to express affinity for something.

"She asked me about her Congressman," he explained. "I was like 'What is he? A freshman on some committee I don't care about?"

I learned that he's not on MySpace or he is on MySpace because his friends asked him to set one up. He started with Friendster and moved onto MySpace, LinkedIn (which is, like, so lame) and Facebook, which is so much easier to get sucked into like he has time for that.

A man at the front of the theater called for attention and explained the rules. No cell phones. No cameras. No piracy. If one of the triumvirate of security guards saw the light of a digital display, the owner would be asked to leave. No questions.

"You know he's talking to you," Mr. Phone said to me and I smiled, closed my book and waited for the lights to dim. I waited for the Pineapple Express.

Lazy stoner Dale Denton has only one reason to visit his equally lazy dealer Saul Silver: to purchase weed, specifically, a rare new strain called Pineapple Express. But when Dale becomes the only witness to a murder by a crooked cop and the city's most dangerous drug lord, he panics and dumps his roach of Pineapple Express at the scene. Dale now has another reason to visit Saul: to find out if the weed is so rare that it can be traced back to him. And it is.

"It's almost a shame to smoke it. It's like killing a unicorn."

As Dale and Saul run for their lives, they quickly discover that they're not suffering from weed-fueled paranoia; incredibly, the bad guys really are hot on their trail and trying to figure out the fastest way to kill them both.

With Seth Rogen and James Franco as the title characters and the guy from The Foot Fist Way, Ed Begley Jr., Gary Cole and Rosie Perez rounding out a strangely-fitting cast, the movie was exactly what one would expect - a mixed up story of drugs and violence with likable stoner stars - and it made me laugh. A lot. Out loud.

Halfway through the film, I realized that Mr. Phone and I laughed at the exact same bits – maybe we had more in common than I thought.


Tag: Movies

Falling on my head

Here comes the rain again. I can see it in the sky, the thick, seamless sky. I can feel it in the air that sticks to my skin, beading on my forehead and upper lip, curling the hair at my temples, at the back of my neck, twisting the hair that escapes my ponytail no matter how I hard I try. The air feels so heavy, so eerily still as the day waits for something more: Whipping wind, crashing thunder, flashes of light.

Yesterday I watched the drops splatter on the ledge outside my window. I watched it streak diagonally across the glass. I watched people in the apartment building across the way watching the construction crew between us dive for shelter.

A week ago, I walked out of Eastern Market station to find a sunshower. Deceived as I always was by the promise of sunshine, I walked home in the rain with music looping through my head.

"If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops, yum what a world it would be… But sticky," I thought as I splashed my way home, sliding around in my flip flops on the old brick sidewalks. I broke one of the straps and walked barefoot through the puddles, the bricks still warm underfoot. Even the acid smell of rain on asphalt didn't bother me as I walked, soaked clear through and humming softly.

A couple of days later, in the Gulf of Mexico, summer squalls sat on the horizon, barely visible in the early morning light. The sun filtered through clouds, orange and pink in a dusky field of deep purple. Over to the right, to the south, clouds met the sea, solid and gray.

"The sky is falling," I thought as I always thought of rain from a distance.

"We're going to want to avoid that," Captain Zutie said and we tried, catching only a few sprinkles on the boat, driving through so many more on our way back to New Orleans. Big, fat raindrops splattered on the windshield and on the ground, blurring the lines, smudging the edges of the road as we drove up Highway One.

They'll have rain again soon, New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico, Grand Isle, as Hurricane Dolly churns toward the coast of Texas, toward Brownsville. A lifetime ago I rode a bus to Brownsville, out of Mexico, away from another hurricane, away from a lot of things. A few days later, I drove to DC. I drove straight through. 18 hours. A couple extra for a traffic jam outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, a thunderstorm, an accident.

I drove to DC and I stayed. I didn't have a job. I didn't have the apartment that floods with every big rain or anything to lose in the flooding. Just me and Mr. Toad, a car that's long since gone. A handful of pictures. A handful of memories. A traffic jam in Tennessee. Rainy afternoons in New Orleans. A fishing village in Mexico. The bus. The hurricane behind us.

Here comes the rain again. A hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Storms in DC and a gray seamless sky. I remembered an umbrella for once, but I should have worn a different shirt.



Tag: Rain

Happy thoughts

"Are you coming or going?" my boss asked, as she passed in the hall.

"Coming," I replied. "I just got back from New Orleans, but I need to take my brother to the airport... He's heading home."

"Is that why you're sad today?"

I looked up in surprise as she continued.

"I mean, you look sad today. Is it because you have to say goodbye to your brother?"

I didn't know that I looked sad, and I didn't know what to say, so I agreed.

In the interest of looking less sad for the rest of the day, I'm going to focus on something happy. Something other than the fact that my brother's leaving or that my stepdad's in the hospital after a horrible accident with the horse or that Grandma Mavis isn't feeling so well or any of the other not-fun stories are part of me but don't belong on the internet.

Today, I'm going to focus on happy thoughts:

• The music in my headphones
• The fact that I finished the really terrible book about a dirty cop with below the belt eczema and a tapeworm and now I can read something girly, something that doesn't make my skin crawl and stomach turn
• The dress I'm wearing because I kind of love it even if my brother thinks it looks like drapery, circa 1973
• Sunshine
• My sister's kids
• My friends' kids
• My friends
  
• Driving my Jeep
• 64 packs of Crayola crayons
• Handwritten letters
  
• Summer storms
• Solving the NY Times crossword puzzle
• Solving a Rubiks Cube
  
• ...
  

I am sad today. My brother's heading back to Buenos Aires. My stepdad's in the hospital. My grandma's not doing so well. Everything's going to be OK, but if anyone wants to share something nice, I'd appreciate it.


Tag: Work

Lazy

Brunch. Pedicures. Breaking into a house to check out a fireplace. It was a lazy Sunday. Late in the afternoon, we ended up at a party down the street.

I didn't really know anyone. My friends. The host. Bambi. It didn't much matter. People crowded around the table with beer and cigarettes, with bubbles, and others floated in the pool. Our host, the chef, stood at the grill with a glass of champagne while Bambi talked of plans to visit Yale in the fall, looking for a doctoral program in American studies.

I didn't know the girl with the long red hair or the one with the braids who'd gone tubing. The man in the Cubs hat with a gold cross. The man with the nipple ring or the one with longish hair and five o'clock shadow. But I met them as the the sun sank in the sky and we moved around the table, looking for a spot less intense. I saw their tattoos, their inner thighs, their bare feet. Into the pool and out again. Into the house and back to the table. We talked about books and jobs, about kids, about baseball, about iPods as the music played. One of the puppies brought bits of Styrofoam and pieces of bark, eager for a game of fetch. Another sat in my lap.

Strips of steak. Pork with pineapple. Sausage and pepper. Grilled corn. Zucchini. Onions. Button mushrooms. We all ate with our hands from bowls in the middle of the table. Poured from common bottles. Opened the beer with a lighter. Laughed. Talked. Ate. I stared at my newly orange-tipped toes.

Nothing serious happened, nothing more than floating in the pool or eating dinner. It was perfect. Lazy. Lovely.


Tag: New Orleans

Speckled trout

Five came early. Too early in the hurricane-shuttered, darkened bedroom in the back where I tried to recover from too little sleep and too much travel. Too much everything.

"I think today was the longest day of my life," I announced from the back of the car. "It was even longer than that birthday when I crossed the international date line, my 35-hour birthday."

I feel instantly, deeply asleep, trying not to think of all that had taken place - the drives, the flights, the meeting, the drinks and dinner. Trying not to think of anything. Five would come early.

Out on the road, in front of the house, a man waited with a truck and a boat. An extended cab pickup. The three of us climbed into the cab and we headed toward the slip, a private slip that some old agreement with an oil company let us use. We had the key, a key to the gate, on a floating key chain.

He already had bait and ice. He already had gas. When we got to the marina, we skipped the lines and made our way to the counter.

"We need fishing licenses. One temporary, out of state. Two for the year."

"The four-day pass will be 60 dollars."

"OK... We're on a charter?"

"Then it will be five but she can only fish on the charter."

No problem.

I didn't exactly plan to take out my own boat or set up on the side of the road with a pole and some minnows. I didn't exactly plan to fish, but as a vegetarian who never seemed quite able to stick to her convictions in New Orleans, I'd pick up a rod and reel. I'd pick up a dozen speckled trout, too, and more than half a dozen catfish that made their way back into the Gulf, swimming in circles after being clubbed and pulled from the line by someone who wasn't me.

"You can bait your own, right? And get your own fish, so I can help the ladies?" Captain Zutie asked my friend. He had to agree or be lumped with the "ladies."

His wife and I didn't mind the help. I didn't mind the help with hooks through minnows, trout and catfish making me squirm. I preferred watching porpoises surfaces off the bow of the boat, a bad sign for fishing but beautiful. The squall in the distance where the sky seemed to fall straight into the horizon. The sunrise with deep orange-tinted clouds, with tinges of pink on a sky of deep purple reflected in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But we were there to fish, and fish we did.

At the second spot, fish seemed to jump on the hooks before one even pulled in the slack. A couple of porpoises crested and left. A couple of boats joined us. And then a couple more. By the time we left, our secluded spot looked like the marina, and by the time we made it back to the marina, some people were just heading out for the day: 9:30 and a wheelbarrow full of fish.

People stopped to look as the captain filled the wheelbarrow. We'd caught our limit in about three hours. Almost 80 speckled trout.

"Shrimp or minnows?" asked one man as he stared, cellphone to his ear.

"Minnows."

"Right."

Captain Zutie cleaned the fish while we waited at a picnic table in the shade, sipping soda and reading the Times-Picayune. Later, after showers and a nap back at the camp, after lunch, we'd pick up the fillets, bagged and packed in ice, for the drive back to New Orleans. My friends, my hosts, would invite friends over for dinner, a fish fry with fresh caught trout.


Tag: Travel New Orleans Grand Isle

We, Al Gore and me

Yesterday afternoon I joined thousands of people at DAR Constitution Hall to hear former vice president Al Gore. The man who would have been president, could have been president and might have changed the world before the Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize, before his coolness factor increased a hundredfold.

Outside, people waited in muggy midday heat, hazy, hot and humid, standing on the stairs and pressing toward the doors. Anxious. Staring and glaring at those of us with "G" tickets. General admission. Guaranteed seats. I heard a rumor that more than 4,000 were waitlisted. I might have started the rumor, but it was based on an email from We campaign saying that more than 4,000 people were waitlisted.

Inside the hall, the seats filled with young and old, professionals, students and retirees. More than a couple of congressmen. The floor seats. The boxes. The risers. Those up and to the left, to the right, with a rear view of the former VP. Those behind the screens. Those behind the platform with all of the video cameras to warrant all of those towers and dishes outside. Filled. To see and hear a man talk about the environment.

Somewhere over to our left, up in the nosebleeds, a baby cried. People chattered excitedly as they waited, and as the man himself took the stage, they erupted into applause and a standing ovation. They erupted a lot throughout the speech, a relatively short number as Gore issued a challenge to produce 100 percent of the energy we need using alternate fuel sources within 10 years.

The former vice president likened the challenge to Kennedy's directive almost 50 years earlier, to put a man on the moon and return him safely within 10 years. Nobody thought it could be done. We did it in eight and a half. Ten years, he said, was about the length of time we needed to affect change without losing sight of the goal.

Gore talked about the challenges we currently face with ever climbing gas prices. Electricity prices. The weakening economy. The strengthening wars. Longer droughts. Increased flooding. More intense fires. With the state of the union, Gore painted a miserable picture that would only worsen as we held onto our reliance, our dependence, on non-renewable carbon-based fuels.

When he issued his challenge, Gore acknowledged the difficulties in attaining success and the infrastructure that would need to be established, as well as the cost. The power grid would need to be nationalized, like roads, and stabilized to eliminate rolling blackouts and frequent failures. Jobs would need to be made for those whose jobs would be made obsolete, such as coal miners.

As Gore talked, I wondered about my offshore oil-drilling friend and what place he'd find in a new, renewable, sustainable world. I thought about converting my Jeep. About converting my home. About changing the world. All of my reading on sustainable living, on container houses and solar panels seemed outside my realm of possibility. Somebody else needed to do it, and I would follow.

"The Stone Age didn't end because of a shortage of stones," Gore said. "It time to move beyond empty rhetoric. It's time to act."

I don't drive very often, choosing to walk or take public transportation more often than not. I shop local, carrying canvas and cotton market bags, and belong to a CSA. I live in a rental and a pretty wretched one at that, and wouldn't know where to start retrofitting it to solar. I don't run the A/C – it doesn't work. I don't run the heat. I use energy efficient bulbs, but as Gore said, we need to change more than light bulbs. We need to change laws, and in order to that, we needed leaders. Us. We. I needed to do something. Get involved. Make a change.

Honestly, I don't know how to do that, but the website seems like a good place to start. As Gore spoke his final words and the crowd erupted once again into standing applause with U2 blaring over the speakers crooning "It's a Beautiful Day," I wanted to do something. I wanted to make a change.

"We have an opportunity to take a giant leap for mankind."


Tag: Washington+DC Al Gore

Salt-kissed and sweet

Blueberry cake. That's what I made on Monday when life got me down. Salt-kissed, buttermilk, blueberry cake. I also made tuna noodle casserole for my brother because I happened to have a can of tuna and he was there.

"Does Mom make hers with peas?" I called from the kitchen.

"I think so," he replied.

"I couldn't remember," I sighed. I didn't have peas and I didn't eat tuna but the casserole seemed to turn out all right. A little bit crunchy in the areas that were supposed to be crunchy, moist everywhere else and golden on top. "Does it taste like home?"

"It does," he replied, stabbing noodles with his fork and smiling.

On Tuesday, it was blueberry tart and curry.

On Wednesday, it was a fresh cherry cake, followed by dried cherry buttermilk scones and baked potatoes. Corn on the cob.

On Thursday… It's still Thursday, but I have plans to bake cookies tonight with leftovers for dinner. And then I'll stop. Then, I'll have to stop because I'm leaving town for the weekend and I've run out of room in my kitchen. I froze the last cake, shared scones with a friend, passed the tart to my brother. Cookies travel well and might find themselves in points south for the weekend.

I bake when I'm stressed and I've had a bit of a run with my apartment, job, family, life with a cold thrown in for good measure. If only I'd thought to bake sooner, I might have managed to avoid the last.

Something about slowing down, taking time to measure and sift, to stir, forces me to measure my own life and sift my thoughts, to blend everything until it all becomes one.

I'd before never made scones. I'd never made a tart. I had to buy a tart pan, try a couple of times with the crust, figure out when to grease my hands and when to flour the counter. Somehow, it all turned out all right. Somehow, it even came out kind of pretty. In my tiny hot kitchen with a couple of bowls and a brand-new pan, I managed to create something to feed the body and soul.

"It's hot in my kitchen," I exclaimed Monday night, fanning myself with an apron and sinking to the couch in front of a fan.

"It's hot out here," my brother said.

The 400-degree oven with a broken hood vent didn't help. Neither did the lack of air conditioning with 90-degree heat outside, but the living room cooled in comparison. It was all about perspective. I handed him a piece of salt-kissed, buttermilk, blueberry cake and smiled.

"Does it taste like home?"


Tag:Baking

Crazy

"Crazy? I was crazy once. They put me in a rubber room. I died there, and then the worms came. Worms? I hate worms. They drive me crazy. Crazy? I was crazy once. They put me in a rubber room..."

I don’t remember how it started or why, but I know whom to blame. The cute little blond cheerleader with the birth control, a friend’s younger sister. A sophomore. Rattling about craziness, over and over again, on a camping trip. It drove us all a little nuts but a decade and a half later, it’s still there, lurking, and I find myself doing it on occasion, muttering under my breath.

"Crazy? I was crazy once..."

We were friends, the little blond cheerleader and I, with common interests in her brother, boys' basketball and High Adventure Explorer Scouts. Camping, caving and hiking. She was a year or two younger than me but we were the girly girls in the coed scouts troop. We bonded.

I still remember walking in the woods with this bouncy little blond thing raving like a lunatic. Seemed like hours. Lasted a lifetime.

"Crazy? I was crazy once..."

It’s hard to stop once in starts. The rant. The craziness. I guess that’s why it works. Crazy? I was crazy once.

My first “real” date in high school, the first non-dance in a school gym or joining a boy and eight of our closest friends for dinner, a game, a party, was a double date with the cheerleader and her boyfriend. One of his friends saw me at her house and staged the elaborately awkward night involving a full-sized conversion van, a movie and hanging out at the boyfriend’s house where the boyfriend proceeded to maul the cheerleader for an hour and a half.

Did I mention that my date didn’t talk?

“Oh, I like your watch.”

Grunt.

“What did you think of the movie?

Mumble, mumble, cough.

“Oh, you should try this!” the cheerleader exclaimed when she came up for air. “Just breath in when he breathes out. Like this.”

I stared at my friend for a second or two as she demonstrated a soul-sucking kiss with her boyfriend, glanced at my date on mute and swiveled back to the TV, counting the minutes until I could go home.

Later, on the porch, our faces collided. I hadn’t quite figured out the swerve yet, the duck, the quick hug and “thanks for a great evening.” I think I might have chipped a tooth.

He called for a week, maybe two, and every message grew more frantic. My friend berated me.

“You kissed him,” she accused.

“Not exactly,” I replied. “And he didn’t even talk. Not once. Not a word.”

I should have taken his calls, though, explained to him that I just wasn’t into him, if only for karma’s sake. I didn’t know. I was too young to realize that you only act that crazy when you really like someone. If he hadn’t been that into me, he might have talked. Opened his mouth. He seemed just fine with my mom on the phone; maybe we could have gotten to know each other before the date.

Several years later, I went on a date with an Albanian. One date. Dinner and drinks, conversation and kissing. By nine the next morning, he’d left five message. Five. By nine. I’d left him less than eight hours earlier and had no idea how many times he’d tried to call. Those were just the messages. He called for weeks, for months, during the weekday, at work, calling, hanging up and redialing when I didn’t answer, and I did actually call him back.

“I don’t think I can see you again,” I explained. “You seem to want more from a relationship than I’m willing to give.”

“Can’t we go to dinner and talk about it?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

One of my friends suggested changing my number. Another offered legal advice about deportation. I just ignored him and his calls. If I were crazy about him, I might have loved the attention. As it was, I was just plain scared.

That’s not to say I couldn't empathize. Crazy? I was crazy once. Longing for a rubber room and self imposing the padded walls.

“Once,” I tell myself. “Only call once. Leave a message. That’s it.”

I’ve had to set up filters to protect myself from messages, from email, from my own too-eager desire to respond. The desire to explain, to make someone understand, to make him like me.

Write me. Call me. Want me.

My phone once complied with my insanity and sent the same message to a guy once. Twice. Seven times. I found out later and apologized with a one-line text: So sorry; won’t write again.

"Crazy? I was crazy once..."


Tag: Dating

Security

“Do you recognize that, Dad?” my sister asked, motioning to the 6 year old with a red-checked blanket. My dad raised an eyebrow. “It was your blanket.”

He held the blanket up for inspection, pulled it close for a cuddle and shrugged.

“It’s in pretty good condition,” he observed of the 50-some-odd-year-old blanket that an aunt had sent to my sister. “I must not have used it much.”

My niece used it plenty. She was breaking in my dad’s old blanket, her new blanket, her didi. A sweet-natured 6 year old, my niece turned into a holy terror when she was tired and hell hath no fury like that child without her didi and teddy at bedtime.

She came by it naturally, her love of the blanket. My sister’s baby blanket was back in our room. A square of yellow satin that her 8 year old needed to sleep. Or so my sister claimed, but I had my suspicions about who really needed the blanket. My brother’s didn’t quite make it to BA with him, but he knew where it was and he’d had it through college. My own could be found in my bedroom at home: Pink gingham with a bit of a flounce and embroidered lambs.

Of course, unlike my sister’s yellow satin square, which required emergency reparations a few years back, mine was almost pristine. I don’t sleep with it. I haven’t slept with it since sometime in the late 70s when I used to beg my dad to bundle me, to wrap me tight in the pink-checked softness. No matter how tight he wrapped me, the cocoon unraveled by morning. It all unraveled anyway, when he left and found a different family and a different life. My baby blanket found its way to the end of my bed, folded neatly, where it still rests decades later.

Red checks. Pink gingham. Yellow satin. My brother’s blanket with the fairy tale rhymes. Linus van Pelt of Peanuts fame carried his fuzzy blue blanket for as long as I can remember, holding it close on long nights while he waited for the Great Pumpkin, putting life into perspective while sucking his thumb and clutching a security blanket.

The pink gingham rests at the end of my bed or across my footboard. My trunk. I probably wouldn’t notice if it were gone, but for some reason, I keep it. My security blanket.

Last night on the evening news, I heard a report about IndyMac, “the second largest federally insured bank to be seized by regulators.” FDIC. I’d seen the stickers on banks forever, it seemed, but I didn’t really think much of it until last night’s news. Individual accounts up to $100,000 were insured. Individual accounts greater than that weren’t, but investors would get 50 cents on the dollar.

$150,000 in savings? You just lost $25,000. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. But thanks for playing!

And that was with insurance.

I once took a trapeze class, climbing a couple of stories on a bare metal ladder to a platform in somebody’s yard in rural Maryland. The instructor, a man from France, held onto the back of my trousers as I reached for the bar and then he let go. With a serious lack of upper body strength, my attempts resulted in swing, swing, swing, drop. Two stories into a net. I bounced a bit, crawled to the edge, and flipped to grass.

Swing, swing, swing, drop. And the net was there. The net was always there.

Cash. Bonds. Stocks. Real estate. Jobs. Car insurance. Health. Life. Education. Degrees. Friends. Lovers. Commitment. Family. Social networks. Baby blankets. We spend our lives trying to make sure the net’s always there, ready to catch us if our own strength fails. When we fail.

Sometimes they work, wrapping us snug, making us feel safe. Sometimes they stay, neatly folded, at the foot of our beds, losing their power, and sometimes we give them to those who need them more.


Tag:Security

Swimming lessons

Most of the time, I feel like I’m swimming upstream. I don’t necessarily mind. I like the water, the current, the way I feel strong as I fight to move forward. Most of the time, I’m not trying to get anywhere. Not in a hurry, at least.

Some days, though, I just want to forget about whatever's upstream and admit to myself, to the world, that it’s too hard to reach. Forget about the extra weight I’m towing. Forget about it all. I just want to ride the current and see where it takes me. Float downstream or even tread water a little and stay in place. Anything but the constant struggle of crawling against nature.

I can barely remember a time sans swimming. Many of my earliest memories come from our summer in Florida. I was three and we had a pool. We also had a beehive in the laundry pole, which my brother and I discovered by banging on it, resulting in more than a dozen stings between his 2-year-old body and mine. Meat tenderizer. Pool. Loads of tears.

Sparklers over the pool. The clear blue silence under the surface. Learning to swim. To dive. To float away the afternoon. My hair turned blond and my skin toasted brown, the color of caramel and lattes. The color of summer.

After the summer, we came home and mom enrolled us in swimming lessons. Apparently, my brother almost drowned. Neither of us remember that (or the spider that exploded into a million baby spiders when whacked with the pool cleaner) but mom was adamant: Lessons. All of us would learn how to swim.

My mom grew up near a lake. In Minnesota, land of 10,000 of them, everything was near a lake, but she lived particularly close. By the time she was in college, her parents had bought a lakeside house with an indoor pool. By the time she was in college, though, my mom had given up swimming. One of her friends had drowned in high school. An avid swimmer. A lakeside girl. She got a cramp.

I’ve hardly ever seen my mom in the water. I can’t remember it actually, not even at the pool in Mexico, the one with a bar where we spent Christmas 1981. (The pool, not the bar, for Christmas.) I did once make her go whitewater rafting, which she loved when she wasn’t scared and screaming. And that was the Class II rapids. I can only imagine what would have happened if she’d gone on any of the Class III and IV trips with me. The Colorado. The Arkansas - the Royal Gorge. The Gauley. More excitement. More danger. A lot less jumping out and riding the rapids.

Maybe not.

I didn’t mind, though. The water. The rapids. I’d been swimming since I was three, that summer in Florida. Years of lessons followed by years of life guarding. Learning to keep my head above water. Learning to find things under the surface. Learning when and how to pull someone who needed help and learning to let go.

The biggest danger to a lifeguard was the victim who panicked and took the savior down with her. Or so they said when they sent me out to the deep end with three other girls. Facing away from the wall, we treaded water and waited, blind to the rest of the class, boys who were sent to attack. Over and over again. Grab. Gasp. Flip. Push. A football player, a boy from my church, reached from behind and grabbed both my breasts. I flipped him over my head and kicked him away. It was the fastest I’d gotten away from anyone but the class wasn’t over. Grab. Gasp. Flip. Push. All while treading water.

I didn’t much mind at the time. In later years, I realized I was probably sexually harassed and subject to the misogyny of the director of the local YMCA, but at 16, I didn’t know any better. I did what I had to do. At 32, I’m still doing what I have to do. Towing the weight that I think I need to save.

I think that somewhere midstream, I forgot that it was easier to stay out of the water altogether, pulling people in with a pole instead of putting myself in danger. I’ve forgotten how much fun it was to float in Class I and II rapids with my feet in front of me and the world passing by. I’ve forgotten a lot of the things I used to love about swimming in my focus on the pull of the water and how slowly I’m crawling.


Tag: Water Life

Adventure spoons

I bought them because they were on sale. Bite-sized Frosted Mini Wheats®. Kind of healthy. Filled with frosted fiber. And cheap. Two for five bucks or four for 10 or something like that. I didn't realize that they came with an Indiana Jones™ Adventure Spoon in green, yellow or red. I didn't even know that such things as Indiana Jones™ Adventure Spoons existed, much less how I'd lived thus far without one.

I found it when I opened the box, sitting in its only little package on top of the cereal package. No fingers sticky with frosting and dotted with bits of bite-sized shredded wheat. No waiting. No desperate race through the box to see who gets the prize inside. Just a neat little package of plastic, wrapped in plastic and taped with plastic.

It looked like a spoon, but I couldn't quite figure out why it came in two pieces or why Kellogg had decided to give spoons with full-sized boxes of bite-sized goodness. The box clued me in on the treasure inside.

I thought about sharing it with my brother for about three seconds. It took much longer to open the packaging, assemble the spoon – I hadn't figured a spoon might require assembly – and figure out the switch/button combination to make it light.

Red.

Apparently, I am now the proud owner of Indiana Jones™ Adventure Spoon in red. I haven't a clue what I'm going to do with it and ripping through all of that plastic kind of broke my heart, but the spoon. It makes me happy.

I forgot to eat for a minute or five, my bite-sized breakfast sogging in soy milk, while I played with the toy and I wondered if I'd ever really gotten a prize inside anything other than Happy Meals and Cracker Jack before they turned to tattoos in every package.

Mom didn't approve of cereals for kids with cartoon figures, sugar, marshmallows or prizes inside. Honey Nut Cheerios was her nod to flavor in a corner cabinet filled with wholesome, whole-grained blandness. No cars. No stickers. No super secret decoder rings. Definitely no adventure spoons.

I considered a world with more prizes inside. Spoons and rings, secret message pens and coin tricks. Doctor's appointments that came with crayons. Socks with stickers. Facials with Frisbees. Boyfriends with yo-yos. What a different world it would be.


Tag: Breakfast

Olive oil and growing up

Olive oil, I wrote in the notebook, which made me think of my best friend from 4th grade. Personally, I think she looks more like Sofia Loren, but in those days, she heard Aut Pot and Ostrich and Olive Oyl. I wondered how she'd look in a black skirt and red shirt with her hair pulled back.

Chewing on the cap, I pondered the list and imagined my cabinets, my week and what I might eat. Did I have lime juice? Quinoa? What did I need for the salad?

Black beans.

Idly, I wondered when I started making lists for the grocery store at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning. When I started being up at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning. Even after a night out.

"Soy milk," I thought and added it to the list. Cereal.

I browsed through recipes and paused at broccoli pesto. Broccoli, I considered and added spinach to the list. I wondered what I'd done with the ragout recipe from that class in Avignon, the one with the zucchini flowers. I wondered when I learned how to pronounce ragout and gathered the courage to take myself to France, to learn to cook ragout with zucchini flowers. To learn to let go and to accept my family, my friends for who they were. I wasn't alone in Provence.

"Chana masala," I thought, knowing I wouldn't have to find the recipe for that.

I wondered when I'd memorized the recipe and thought of sharing it with my friends in England, Helen and Hannah from my trip to India. All three of us had ordered it in that rooftop restaurant in Udaipur with an Octopussy show. All of the bars and all of the restaurants, guesthouses and hotels had an Octopussy show. Every night.

Tomatoes. I needed tomatoes for the curry, and I could use a new packet of cumin. I thought about running to the Indian store by our house just off Old Keene Mill. Was there ever a mill and who lives there now? In the house with the hardwood floors that used to be covered in carpet. The Swiss Coffee walls. Reflecting Pool. The floor that we tiled with my brother-in-law's help.

I wondered when I'd stop sleeping under other people's kitchens, and what else I needed to buy for my own.

Baking soda. Flour. Sugar.

I didn't really need any of those things. Not immediately but I would, sometime, sooner than later. The list started to trail and I started thinking of the things I needed to do, the staid Saturday, errands that I'd looked forward to all week. The grocery store. Laundromat. Bank. I needed more stamps. I needed to clean. I needed to find that recipe for ragout.

I wondered when I grew up.

Then, again, maybe I haven't.


Tag: Home

Smelly salvation

"This smells terrible," I said, holding out the bottle. "Smell it."

My coworker laughed, scrunching up her face as I waved the bottle in her direction.

"It smells bad so you want me to smell it?"

I shrugged. Hesitantly, she leaned toward the bottle and pretended to whiff.

"It smells like vinegar," she said.

With a stuffed nose, I managed to block most of the scent.

"I think it smells like a frat house floor, all stale, old beer and death."

"Then, why are you drinking it?" she asked.

"It doesn't taste like it smells?"

I didn't know about the smell when I bought it. Walking past the Whole Foods between coffee and work, I decided to duck in for juice, for fruit, for something to help stave the cold that I could feel building somewhere in my head, the storm clouds gathering and ready to release a flood of running eyes and running nose, scratchiness, coughingness and sneezing on my unsuspecting Thursday.

In a refrigerator case near the bakery, as I looked at vitamin water, I stumbled across the Kombucha.

"Beneficial probioticsm, live active enzymes, L-Theanine (an amino acid), organic acids and polyphenols," the bottle proclaimed. Granted, I didn't really know what most of them were or, rather, how they would help, but the bottle was pretty.

"Our customers have experienced everything from increased energy levels and decreased appetite, to improved digestion, healthier skin and hair, and even a stronger immune system*," I read, so I bought it. Took it to work. Shook it up and prepared to drink my way to health.

"Do not shake," I read on the lable.

Um, yeah. Right. Good to know.

The bottle bubbled effervescently with live active cultures and a little chunk of something grayish brown clung to the lid: a "macroscopic solid mass of microorganisms." I blanched and kept turning the lid. Slowly. With pink bubbles flying across the desk. That's when the smell hit me: yeast and bacteria, fungus, with a touch of raspberry.

I sneezed, reached for a tissue and resigned myself to my fate. My cold. My healthy but fairly frightening midday drink.

"Alcohol content," I read. Apparently, the fermentation process led to a trace of alcohol (less than 0.5 percent). I took a tentative sip and realized that it tasted nothing like the smell. I tried again, another, bigger sip.

It actually tasted… good, I realized.

I didn't quite manage to get over the smell, but I drank the whole bottle (two servings) before I left work for the day. No miracle cure. No noticeable side effects, but the kombucha, the vitamin water, the fruit and the veggies, a protein-filled dinner and plenty of fluids seemed to help. I felt better when I got up in the morning. Not great, but better. The liquid that smelled of a frat house floor, all stale, old beer and death, just might have helped.



* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Tag: Health

Snuffleupagus

I am sick.

The body aches, fever, chills, sore throat and sniffles seem to be sapping my already waning energy. My head hurts (though, that might be from the night out), my neck and back, arms and legs. My nose is running, which was great when I started sneezing. My throat suffers in silent agony as I grovel in a gravelly whisper. Everyone else seems to be whispering, too, or my head’s wrapped in cotton, and when did the office start spinning?

Normally, I’d deny an affliction until the hallucinations force an “I might be coming down with something” out of me, but I just can’t take any more.

The flooding. The mold. The cricket the size of a tennis ball in my shower. The cranky bartender from Wednesday night. The check engine light on my Jeep that I need fix before my inspection. My inspection. The new project. The old project. The databases that don't seem to have the right data. The laptop that stopped connecting. The old computer with its broken heart. The new computer with a serious lack of programs. The external hard drive that dove into the abyss of nothingness and lost information. The fact that I'm just so sick of it all. And tired. So tired. All the little woes that take my time and energy so I can’t think about the bigger things, the life things, the things I can’t seem to figure out like work and home and life.

And now a cold?

Seriously?

I'm done with it all. My body is waving a white tissue of surrender as I alternate between fever and chills with the room spinning somewhat dangerously around me.

I am sick. As soon as I can, I'm taking myself to bed and there I'll stay until I feel better.

Well, at least until the room stops spinning.


Tag: Health

One of those days

I should have just stayed in bed. I knew it from the minute I rose, awaking before the alarm and padding into the living room to check my work mail. My calendar. I thought about going back to bed for a minute. Ten. Fifteen. And even made it as far as the dehumidifier when I slipped and fell, crashing against the wall and bruising my ankle, shin and arm.

"What the…?" I muttered, realizing the answer before I could finish the question. I was soaked to the thigh.

Apparently, the automatic shutoff valve on the dehumidifier stopped shutting off. Water spilled around the machine, splashing as I slammed into it.

"It's not enough?" I thought. "Flooding from outside and flooding from upstairs? My apartment needs to make water from air and flood the place again?"

Gingerly, I tested my ankle and limped to the bathroom for towels to spread across the floor, hoping it would help, not really caring enough to clean up another sodden mess.

On the metro, an obnoxious business woman started bleating "excuse me" well before the train stopped. She was next to the door. Apparently, she couldn't wait. She needed me to move. Immediately. Before the train stopped.

"Excuse me," she blared.

"Excuse me," she repeated. Over and over again as I tried to move out of the way. She kept repeating her cry until the train stopped and the doors opened.

I got to work early. Earlier than usual. And waited to go to the doctor's office. The results of my physical claimed everything "normal" but they'd failed to do one test. I needed to go back and give blood. Drop by the office on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. After 9.

I waited for the time and I walked to the office, a few blocks from my own. Limped to the office.

"Hi, I don't have an appointment," I said to the receptionist. "But the doctor called and told me to stop by and have blood drawn."

"Sign in," she told me. So I did. "Sit down. The nurse will be with you shortly."

Pulling my book from my bag, I started to read. I finished one essay and read another. Another. Another. Patients came and went. Patience came and went. I fidgeted. I looked at my phone. Forty-five minutes. An hour. An hour and a half. At an hour and three quarters, I stood and went to the window.

"Can you tell me how long it's going to be?"

"The nurse will be with you shortly," the receptionist said.

Shortly. Exactly what she'd said 105 minutes earlier.

They had failed to do the test. The doctor told me that. They were supposed to do it three weeks earlier at the physical they scheduled when I'd called months earlier to say I was tired, so incredibly tired, and aching. The lab neglected the test and I needed to drop by. Give blood. I didn't know I'd lose hours in the middle of the day, a workday.

"The nurse will be with you shortly."

"I... I can't."

I left. Walked back to my office. I'd have to work until 8 to make up for the midday break. I'd stay tired or find a new doctor. I'd get better on my own. Something would happen or nothing at all but I couldn't sit and wait any longer. I couldn't take it any longer. It was too much.

Problems with the developers at work. An increasing workload and the need to help with a project that was no longer my own. Too much.

At home, the dehumidifier kicked out heat and the air conditioner failed. It hadn't worked the four years I'd lived in my apartment, despite my requests for help. For repair. For something from the landlord. Ninety degree days. One hundred. Without conditioned air.

I needed to clean. To unpack. To do my laundry. I needed to move but I just didn't have it in me to look. So I made black beans and rice. I curled up with a book and a movie on Lifetime. A glass of pink lemonade. I'd deal with it all in the morning, and it would all be fine. Nevertheless, I should have just stayed in bed.


Tag: Home Work

Computer daze

Apparently, my computer has a broken heart. That's all I could figure, anyway, as it moped through the day playing slow songs, B sides and waltzes, a couple of monster ballads and the blues. It cycled through songs I didn't even know I had.

Mexican Wrestler? By Emma Roberts? Who is Emma Roberts?

"You will never love me and this I can't forgive" jangled through my headphones.

I was so far from knowing I had it on my hard drive that I had to search for the name of the song. The singer. The album. The track lacked the necessary info, not that it would have filled me in on the young singer slash actress, but I knew that I definitely did not buy it.

The computer did little to enlighten me, though, moving into a little bit of Simon and Garfunkel, It's a Crime by The Magnetic Fields. Belle & Sebastian's The State I Am In.

Actually, I didn't know what the last one had to do with love, but my computer? It had issues. I didn't know how to help it. I didn't pick the playlist. I didn't even know I owned the songs, but the computer kept playing them. Over and over again. Whinging through my headphones. Begging for help before belting out "I Believe in a Thing Called Love."

I think it misses its partner. A couple of weeks ago, I got a new server, so my other tower went away, back to the IT office to be rebuilt and await distribution to somebody new. I'm done to a single tower, the server and a laptop for work and they all live in different locations. The one in my office, the lonely tower, seems to know something's missing. And it doesn't like it.

I've defragged the machine. I've run the disk cleanup. I've shut down and not shut down and cleaned up the bits of installation that never quite completed themselves. I removed the programs that I don't use, but nothing helps. The machine is sluggish. Helpless and hopeless and disinterested in daily activities. It seems fatigued and physically drained.

I can empathize. I've been a bit overwhelmed lately but the music, the slow, sad songs that I didn't even know I owned… I guess it's just in the mood for the Great Lake Swimmers. Moving Pictures Silent Films.

Oh wake me please when this is over
Oh when the ice is melted away
And the hunger returns
I will be the same, but older
And maybe twice the bear
That I thought I was

It's a pretty song. They're all pretty songs, but they're starting to get me down. I had to leave when Miles Davis started. I was scared that one of us - the machine or I - would end up in a ball on the floor.



Tag: Blues Music

Painful pedi

As searing pain shot up my leg, I looked down at my shin covered in a thin paste with large chunks of white.

"Salt scrub," I thought, clenching my teeth as the woman rubbed the scrub into my foot, massaging and exfoliating. Tears welled in my eyes as I tried to focus on anything but the burning in my leg.

"It has to stop," I thought. "It can't go on forever."

I smiled at my mom, my sister and tried to join in their banter as the pain blocked everything from my mind. I stared at my leg, willing the pain to stop.

"I'm sorry," I apologized. "I might be reacting to the scrub."

"Did you just shave?" the woman at my feet asked.

"No, I… We were out today… picking strawberries… I'm allergic to everything, maybe it's just compounding?"

She splashed water on my leg, dulling but not eliminating the pain as my mom asked, "Are you allergic to strawberries, too?"

"No, I don't think so. I don't know what it is."

The woman asked if I wanted any lotion but I just shook my head, blinking back tears and apologizing profusely. It wasn't her fault – she was doing exactly what she'd been paid to do – and it should have been nice: the scrub, the massage, the everything.

After she'd scrubbed my other foot, only the foot, and wrapped them both in steaming towels, the welts started to form. Red, angry lumps of screaming flesh on my leg that I viewed with abject horror.

"Do you want a Benadryl?" my mom asked.

"Does it itch?" my sister inquired.

"Burns," I replied. "It burns. Hurts."

"What happened?"

"I don't know… I really don't know."

My skin must have been raw. Tender. Exposed. Rubbing salt on it didn't help.

Tag: Pain Pedicure

Someplace in between

The bed groaned audibly as I rolled over, reaching blindly toward the table, the alarm, the beeping. I pressed the snooze button and slept for another minute or 10 before it sounded again.

At some point between alarm, sleep and alarm, I realized that the clock was an hour off. Fast. It had been off all week but I hadn't needed it until Sunday morning. 4:30. 3:30, apparently. Far too early but for the flight home.

I reset the alarm and dozed for an hour or so, listening to – listening for – the chimes of the grandfather clock. In my fatigue, I couldn't be sure of the hour or the time of the flight. When it sounded again at 4:30 Central Daylight Time(or 5:30 Kristin Clock Time), I pulled myself from bed for a shower. To dress. To start my day and start my way home.

"Bag for the cookies," I thought, bringing back the sugary goodness that I could only find in Minnesota. "I need a bag for the cookies… I left my Nalgene bottle in the car… Is the flight at 6 or 6:55?"

I'd log into the laptop to double and triple check the flight before heading to the car, as if I could do anything about the time if I had it wrong, as if I could have it wrong after checking the confirmation a dozen times in the past 24 hours.

"You guys are nuts," my aunt exclaimed from her position on the floor, stretching as I pulled up my email and my brother folded his clothes. His laptop sat next to mine. Hers next to that. Her son's on the floor. My brother had cleaned the machines, all of the machines, before bed. She pulled herself upright and opened the garage door.

Bags in the trunk. Airport. Bags on the curb and there we were. Leaving home. Heading home. The lines moved quickly, more quickly than anything else on the trip, and we sat at the gate and waited. It seemed as if a lifetime had passed and no time at all. Didn't we just arrive?

I craved my own bed. My bathroom. Food that I made in my depressing little kitchen. I wondered if the apartment had flooded and if I'd find time to prep for the testing I needed to do at work.

At the gate, my brother read as CNN blared overhead. A woman curled up on the seats opposite me and slept, tried to sleep, as the girl next to her read. Laptops. Pillows. Magazines.

"Please wait until your row is called before trying to board."

Rolling bags pulled toward the counter as people stood. Hovering. Inching closer and closer. Waiting.

"At this point, we'd like to call rows 18 and higher."

Children ran, enjoying a last bit of freedom. Newspapers dropped. Adults watched. CNN droned. Bathrooms . Flushed. Flushed. Flushed.

"We would like to continue the boarding process… We'd like to invite people in rows 12 and higher to board through the gate marked H4. Rows 12 and higher."

I wondered when I'd see my mom again. My grandmother. My sister and the kids. I wondered if I'd ever be back in North Dakota.

"We'd like to continue boarding…" the gate attendant announced, calling more rows, calling our row.

I shut my laptop and walked toward the door. Heading home. Leaving home. Neither here nor there but someplace in between.


Tag: Travel Family

4th of July

"I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy… A Yankee Doodle do or die…"

"Stop it," my nephew ordered between clenched teeth. I wrapped my arms around him and continued to sing in my own, off-tune way.

"Buck up, buddy," I said halfway through. "It's the 4th of July. Deal with it."

"Oh, Lodi."

I laughed and pulled him down the street behind my dad and brother, in front of my sister and the aunt we'd come to visit. My stepmother. My nieces. We passed the school where my aunt had taught for 29 years, barely a block from her house. We walked another block, two, back Hardware Hank toward Main Street where they'd started to set up cones for the parade.

"Throwing candy from cars, at kids, seems intrinsically wrong," my brother observed as Tootsie Rolls skittered across the pavement and our nieces and nephew dove out toward the wheels to collect them. Starburst. Twizzlers. Balloons. A beach ball. The bouncing balls bounced away.

The Shriners passed in tiny little cars. Clowns. The mayor dressed as Uncle Sam and handing out flags. Farm machinery. Fire trucks. The class of '98 revved by in hot wheels and stock cars, one of which broke down in the intersection beside us only to be passed and towed by another member of "Rolling Thunder." The clinic threw water balloons and shot water guns as well as tossing candy.

The kids seemed scared at first, unwilling to dive into traffic, but we soon cured them of that. My dad. My stepmom. My brother, my sister and the aunt we'd come to visit. We hadn't seen her in years. Probably since 1993, give or take a little. My sister hadn't seen her since the late 70s. The early 80s at the latest. Ages. But it was a weekend for family.

Before the parade, we spent the morning at the family farm, a family farm, my grandmother's home – the first house in North Dakota with electricity. The first house that my grandpa hooked up after he'd gone to Washington to lobby for (and win) electricity in the state. The farm in York, the first he electrified - he didn't know that it was the home of his future wife. My grandma.

From what I understand, from questions I asked in 1993 or maybe that last time in 1996, grandpa rode past the house where grandma taught, doing tricks on his motorcycle to impress her. She spoke of his motorcycle, his grin and his red hair. At that time, she might have been teaching in a one-room school house or it might have been the Baker School with four rooms where my dad started school, years later.

Before they met, though, she was one of 10 kids on the family farm, the site we visited yesterday where my first cousin once removed and my second cousins live with a handful of dogs and dozens of horses. It wasn't that big. The house. Not big enough for 10 kids but looking at ages, at years of birth ranging from the 1880s to 1914, they weren't all kids at the same time.

Friday morning, it barely seemed big enough for anyone as we crowded around the table, trying to eat breakfast, trying to stay out of the way. My dad's cousins at the stove, the sink, the door with the guard dog that knew how to turn the knob. My dad and stepmom and distant cousins. My second cousins. My nieces and nephews. Later, we'd decorate the barn – the horses turned out to the pastures. Four of them. Pastures, not horses. There were more like 40 of them.

We didn't have time to see the horses before the parade, not up close, but we did stop at the small country church not far from the house with my grandma and grandpa buried under a stone etched with the farmhouse and electric lines. Peonies in bloom. A view of the farm.

After the parade, we stopped by the pioneer village and museum with old buildings ranging from barbershops and creameries to churches and schoolhouses. Houses. A jail. A cookhouse like the one in which my grandma worked long grueling hours, following the threshing machine from farm to farm. In one of the buildings built more like a hangar, we found the model steam engines my grandpa had built, hand tooling the parts from lumps of metal, hand making the tools to hand tool the parts from lumps of metal.

After that, we stopped at the geographical center of North America, which nobody appreciated as much as me. But I did. We were there. In the middle of our continent. As far from the edges as we could be until we started to approach them again.

No fireworks. We didn't even light the sparklers because we couldn't find a lighter. Just a couple of hours with snacks and wine, a beach ball in the courtyard of the historic fort where we stayed. Conversation. Mosquitoes. Family. Driving my nephew nuts.

"I've a Yankee Doodle sweetheart…"

"Stop it, Lodi."


Tag: Family Travel

Driving the Dakotas

Eight hours.

Eight hours in a car with two other adults and three kids.

Lake after lake rolled past our windows. Fields. Meadows. Farms. Somewhere in North Dakota, we saw our first bison. On a fence post, a bird stood watch.

"Hey, look," my sister pointed out.

"What? What?!" the kids clamored.

"It's a falcon," I replied. "A prairie falcon."

I wasn't exactly sure that it was a falcon, but I couldn't imagine what else it might be. Later, the next morning, an image search proved me right, at the time, though, I didn't know. It looked like a falcon or what I imagined a falcon to be. An hour or so later, we saw another.

"They're bad," my sister said.

"They're not bad."

"They're predators."

"Yeah?"

We were in a different part of the country. Birds of prey of fence posts. Bison in the fields. Fields. Small towns with the distinct presence of grain elevators and an equally distinct lack of stoplights.

At a stop sign, we turned onto a highway, one of the last legs of the trip. Passing traffic zipped by at 70 miles per hour. We turned and merged, from a complete stop to 70.

At that point, we read jokes from a terrible riddle book to one another.

"What do you get when you cross a cactus and a bike?" and "Why does a barber always get places first?" and "How does a duck celebrate the 4th of July?"

A very flat tire. He knows all the short cuts. With fire quackers.

"Knock knock," we prompted.

"Who's there?"

"Boo."

"Boo who?"

"Mason's crying back there!"

The car erupted in laughter far more than it erupted in fights, but there were those, too. Minor spats.

"He's touching me" and "Get your feet off my seat" and "It's my turn to sit by Uncle Scott."

Silly songs and spoken word. I read aloud from my own papers, a gift, from a choose-your-own adventure story, from a book about North Dakota.

Nobody really cared about the state tree (American Elm) or the state bird (Western Meadowlark); though, the falcon earned comment as did the fields of canola, rolling golden outside our windows as we sped to one of the place from which we came. A fort. A family farm. A family we barely knew but called our own.


Tag: Family Travel

Strawberry fields

Forty pounds. We picked 40 pounds of strawberries yesterday morning. Forty pounds and I hate strawberries.

I don't remember picking that much as a child. I remember long, grueling days in the sun with yields in the quarts, not pounds. Definitely not two score of pounds. In 45 minutes.

According to mom, we spent about a half day picking strawberries each summer. According to my muddled memory, we slaved away for hours, days, weeks. Long enough. To pick strawberries that she'd make into to strawberry freezer jam that we'd eat for the next year and she'd sell to ladies at church.

For the record, I longed for Welch's grape jelly. A little bit of purple with my peanut butter but no, we had strawberry. On our toast. On our sandwiches. On our ice cream. Just as soon as we neared the end of the freezer jam, time would come to pick more berries.

That's how I remember it at least. I could be wrong. I kind of hate strawberries.

At the time, though, I didn't so much mind. Not the berryliciousness that filled my lunchbox when we ran out of bologna (and only when we ran out of bologna because peanut butter and strawberry freezer jam never quite made it to lunch before sogging up my sandwich, which would transform into a small, dense ball of strawberry/peanut buttery/Roman Meal mush). It wasn't until the summer after high school when I worked at a summer camp that I got violently, wretchedly ill in a small cabin in the woods.

Nobody brought me food. I survived on strawberry Twizzlers and Oreos. I crawled a half mile to the nearest bathroom or I would have crawled a half mile to the nearest bathroom if anyone had brought me water and I wasn't so dehydrated that I almost started hallucinating. When I started to feel a little better, I ventured into a bite of peach cobbler.

I no longer eat peaches, either. Nothing strawberry-oriented. No Twizzlers. No pink Starburst. No strawberry-flavored Kool-Aid or lip gloss or Jell-O that actually tastes nothing like the fruit. No strawberries.

When my mom asked, "Do you want to go berry picking in the morning?" I responded quickly. Clearly. Concisely.

"Absolutely not."

My sister mouthed "You're bad" behind my mother's back.

"But I HATE strawberries."

I'd already plucked the heads off much of another flat to make strawberry syrup for angel food cake. I'd tried.

"Will you help with the jam?" my mom asked.

"I really hate strawberries," I replied.

Later, though, before bed, I'd ask for the plan.

"When, exactly, are you going berry picking?"

"You don't have to go."

"I know, but I will."

And I did.

I joined my brother and sister, our mom, my nieces and nephews in a strawberry field. The Beatles echoed through my head as we knelt between the plants, snatching ripe red berries from the vine.

My 6-year-old niece and I picked a flat and a half of the four that made it home. 15 pounds? Something outrageous, working quickly and methodically to clear our row of the offending berries.

My sister and I plucked the tops off all, filling bowls and buckets with fresh, clean berries that my mom would make into jam and pie. That she would give away when she'd filled all her containers (and we still had bowls and buckets and strawberries left). That would fill the kitchen with scent and taste and fruit flies for days.





Tag: Family

Gone fishing

I don't know the story about the marlin. My grandparents. Acapulco. My grandpa's youngest brother Art. I'd ask my Grandpa Dean, but he's no longer with us. I'd ask my Grandma Mavis, but it's not the same. Not her fish. She was there, though. Grinning alongside my grandpa's big catch.

I should have asked. Before my grandpa passed. I should have asked the story behind the giant fish that hung on the wall in the family room. It figures prominently in every memory I have of my grandparents' house. It was just... there. Larger than life. I never really realized that my grandpa caught it. I mean, I knew but I never thought of the man on a boat, in the ocean, struggling to reel in a big fish.

Did Grandpa Dean fish?

Sport fishing. He didn't seem like a sporting kind of guy. A businessman. A gardener. A father and grandfather and sometimes a bear, chasing us around the house. But not a sportsman.

I should have asked.

The pictures are all I have. The pictures and a newspaper clipping I found a few years back.



Lands a Beauty

Dean N*, executive manager of F* Canning Co. has this mounted sailfish [my Mom told me it's actually a marlin] on the wall of his den at home. He caught the big beauty, all 144 pounds of it, after nearly an hour's battle out of Acapulco, Mexico.

Using turtle meat for bait, he landed the 9' 1" sailfish [again, not sure, because Mom could have sworn it was a marlin] with an unusually large sail, about 35 miles out, with 1,000 feet of line. It's acclaimed to be one of the "biggest sails" to be landed out there this season.



I should have asked.

Tag: Family

Judging by the sound of things

My sister's coming today. In a few hours. For Mom's birthday and the family reunion. For a last-minute summer vacation and a chance to get away from a little nuttiness with the neighbors and a former tenant.

My sister's coming today, with my two nieces, and I'll turn over my nephew, an almost 10-year-old boy who was meant to be mine for the week.

I think I'm ready to do it.

I don't have any kids of my own. Not yet. Maybe never. I don't know, but that isn't the point. I'm pretty mom-like around my sister's bunch with water bottles and bandages. Pens and paper and tissues. Antibacterial hand gel.

"No, you can't have ice cream – we're just about to eat."

"Please pick up the pieces of the balloon."

"Good job, honey."

"Good job."

"Good job."

"Good job."

One of the phrases I've said most often over the past couple of days, one of the things that didn't come from my own mom but sounds downright motherly, comes in response to my nephew's declaration that things are weird. My brother's an idiot. Certain people are aggressive. Retarded. Stupid.

"Honey, don't say that," I urge. "We're going to work on being less judgmental."

For example, I am a vegetarian. A little contrary to my roots - good, hardy folk. My grandparents grew up on farms in Minnesota and North Dakota. Homesteading, even. Meat wasn't so much a choice but a way of life, but I made it one when I was about my nephew's age, cutting red meat and pork, cutting poultry, even cutting fish from my diet.

I am not one of those strict, "in-your-face" vegetarians. Friends have gone years before realizing I was. I don't necessarily do it for political reasons, not completely, but it's my life. I don't eat meat.

I serve meat. I'll try it on occasion – a bite of Thanksgiving turkey at Grandma's house, a piece of alligator in the swamps of Louisiana, everything that swims and runs and breathes at a wine-pairing dinner with friends without much of a choice. I can remember my last two burgers: one in Australia, circa 2003, and another at the house of a very cute boy my freshman year in college. (He grilled it and I adored him.) Two burgers in more than 15 years.

"That's weird," my nephew said.

I had given him a bit of a hard time about not liking "salads." Any salad. All salad. As a rule.

"You hate meat," he said.

"No, I don't."

"You don't eat it."

"You're right. It's a choice I made. I don't eat meat, but that doesn't mean I hate it."

I explained some of the political reasons behind vegetarianism as a way of life, whether or not they were my own. The economic and environmental impact, the health implications, the humanitarian explanation.

"It is a decision that I made," I said. "I don't judge your right to eat meat; I would appreciate it if you didn't pass judgment on mine."

He didn't quite get it but he cut back on the meat rant, reverting to his own adamant views about salad and China, a war with Iran, people who didn't believe exactly the same as him and maybe some of those who did.

He's 9.

"We're going to work on being less judgmental."

We're all going to work on it.


Tag: Family Kids