Hierarchies of needs

Here's a piece I just wrote for my writing group's February assignment, on "moving."



You say “write about moving” and I try hard to skirt the obvious and think about writing about dancing and discovering more about my physical presence on the earth every day, an aspect of my life I have come to treasure in my middling age.

Yet I can't help circling back to the fact that we moved a lot. Much more than most other people I knew. Even my daughter who was born halfway around the world has only moved twice, once to the orphanage when she was a newborn, and once to the house where we all live now. When I was a child, we moved, and moved again and moved some more, leaving one behind, forever it turned out, just like everyone said. We had so many addresses I couldn't remember them all, but my mother kept track, and wrote them down for me before we could both forget them, bless her soul. The longest we had an address during my childhood was three years. When I started going to kindergarten, I was amazed that most of my friends had lived in their houses for their entire lives. We hadn't even had a house some of the time.

Looking at the list of addresses where I've lived can be painful. I didn't have a special doll or stuffy to tote everywhere I went. I had my sister and my mother, but after a while I didn't even have my sister anymore. We dressed in clothes we found in free boxes, bought secondhand, or even found on the street. I was proud of my ability to sleep anywhere. Was it any wonder that, when my grandfather came to town and dazzled me with visions of debutantes dancing across the ballroom floor at the Brown Palace Hotel, I begged him to buy me a special doll, a brand-new one, even though my parents had explicitly instructed me not to ask for anything for Christmas?

Now I think about moving sometimes, but we chose well when we bought our first house 15 years ago. and I like its modest size; I can clean all the floors at once if I want to. I feel so fortunate to be where we are that I don't want to upset our happy apple cart -- I'm far more risk-averse than my parents were, I notice, as a parent and homeowner and free agent. I'm not as likely as I thought I would be as an adult to want to pull up roots and relocate. My husband and I did it once, for six months in Germany, and it was one of the most difficult periods of my life. Without the ability to translate, I was without my sense of humor and verbal agility, and often felt I didn't have much to offer. The heavy gray weather didn't help matters. The phrase “Out of sight, out of mind” would ricochet around my brain, making me wonder whether my friends were all forgetting about me.

A couple of years ago, I was seized with the idea that I should move with my family to India, we should get tech jobs, and write a book about the experience. I'm fairly certain more than one person or family have since gone and done this, and have written books or are making documentaries about it, which I'm a little surprised to find brings me relief. Ahhh, I don't have to do that!

The fact that my daughter has had some special needs has made me feel very fortunate to be able to get some help sorting through them and working with her. She would be a different person today if we hadn't been able to do that. What gets to me is: We didn't know enough to help my sister the way she needed help when I was a child. And what an opportunity this has been for my daughter; learning about her needs has helped every last one of us in some way. I didn't know enough when my little girl was tiny to know what she needed, although people tried to help me see it. I just did what I could, loving her and sticking close by, and trying (if not always succeeding) to find nonviolent ways to respond, counter to some of my initial instincts, which I knew were wrong but didn't have as much modeling to fill in for them as one might wish when one is suddenly spending many hours a day with one's little baby. When she started getting independent, e.g., walking, I started trying to push her away, too early for her abilities I now know. It turned out she couldn't see well. Now that she can, she is far less fearful about the world at large than she was when she was small. I was worried that she was so clingy; now I see how she couldn't always see faces, probably not enough to recognize whether people were friendly or hostile. Of course she clung to me; I always sorted such things out for her. Now she has more skills and we can support her better, instead of getting mad that she isn't like we were when we were smaller. Being able to provide her not only with love but also with stability and consistency closes some circuit within me and her and allows energy to flow where it hadn't been flowing before.

Will we move again? Hard to say, but living on a block with great neighbors, kids around my daughter's age, and great transportation options to just about anywhere, I have a hard time summoning any motivation to relocate. What a relief, another thing I don't have to do.


Oh, the places I've lived!

1963
S. Columbine St., Denver, CO

1964
S. Federal Blvd., Denver

1967
Berthoud, CO

1967
Gough St., San Francisco, CA

1968
Julian St., The Rectory, San Francisco

1968
Noe St., San Francisco

1968
Pierce St., San Francisco

1968
Cole St., San Francisco

1968
Olompali Ranch, Novato, CA

1969
Nederland, CO

1969
37th St. & Baseline Rd., Boulder, CO

1970
High St., Boulder

1973
Canyon Blvd., Boulder-Mother and father separate, divorce

1974
South St., Boulder-with father and stepmother

1974
Mapleton Ave., Boulder-with father and stepmother

1974
18th & Spruce St., Boulder-Mother

1974
28th St., Boulder-Mother

1974
15th & Spruce St., Boulder-Mother and stepfather

1975
Bluff St., Boulder-Mother and stepfather

1975
Broadway, Boulder-with father and stepmother

1976
S. Boulder Rd., Boulder-with mother and stepfather

1981
Vienna Way, Venice, CA-with mother and stepfather

1982
UC Davis off-campus student housing, Davis, CA

1983
Blake St., Berkeley, CA

1983
Walnut St., Berkeley

1985
Pilkington Ave., Santa Cruz, CA

1989
Fair Oaks Ave., San Francisco, CA

1990
Laidley St., San Francisco

1991
Friends' apartment, Dortmund, Germany

1991
Our apartment, Dortmund

1992
Don & Joyce & Steve's house, Mapleton Ave., Boulder, CO

1992
8th St., Boulder

1996
Catalpa Way, Boulder

Farewell, Lucille Clifton, or Why we don't critique content in my writers' group

My poetry teacher at UC Santa Cruz died recently, which undammed a wash of complicated feelings. I liked her poems, but the best thing about being in her class was the other writers I met there.

Once I was feeling comfortable in the class, I submitted a poem about being a child in my father's car while he drove us home from a party, drunk. Lucille Clifton, instead of critiquing my poem on its literary merits, attacked my content: "A father wouldn't do that to his children. This isn't believable. This couldn't happen."

Really!? This was astonishing news to me.

But you know how it is when someone tells you "This can't be done" or "No, you are dead wrong on this"-- and you just have to set them straight. I was so flummoxed at first by Lucille Clifton's reactions to me and my work that I deliberately didn't pick up my final critique from her, which in a way was just hurting myself because now it means I probably only have a couple of those poems from long ago. Miz Clifton, I now see more clearly, had a chip on her shoulder about discrimination and privilege, understandably given our time and place. I am guessing that to her, most of us at UCSC appeared to be just-weaned, still-sniveling symbols of privilege. She asked aspiring poets who wanted to take her class to write about a time when they were in the minority. She barely believed me when I said that being from a hippie family made me different from my peers, even though I felt those differences acutely every day that I was in school or watched television or had some other opportunity to see how other kids my age lived. I believe she had in her mind a notion about what it meant to be a hippie that didn't quite match my situation. I didn't know enough about the way things were to explain that I wasn't talking about being the kid of privileged parents who had decided to chuck the whole establishment scene, but rather was talking about being a kid of a sociopathic father and a manic-depressive mother. Now I know, and I still feel a need to set the record straight.

I only worry that all this dwelling on what happened is giving me some kind of chip on my own shoulder. I feel compelled to record each new set of revelations, and I keep hoping that process will make it easier to leave behind me. But I haven't fully been able to name what has been whittling away at my shoulder all these years, and I now I can.

Not only can things happen that way but they did, to me. Bless your heart, Lucille Clifton, for not having the capacity to see evil in a father's heart, but I did. And if you are willing to listen, I'll tell you how it was.

Being us

Every now and then I'll say:

"I love Prince!" or some other equally grand declaration.

My sweetheart will challenge me: "I think you just like the idea of Prince."

But here's the thing about the Princes and the Lady Gagas and the Johnny Weirs of the world: They are doing their best by being most true to themselves. I felt that way the other day watching the Oprah episode about the woman who went from being Tim to Kimberly. She documented it in a fascinating documentary film Kimberly made about her experience switching genders that I attended at BIFF last winter. Oh, and by the way, Kimberly is a lesbian now, and has a partner. Oprah, bless her pointy little soul, really tried to wrap her arms around the transgender thing but couldn't quite let herself go there, so offered Kim's story in her "be your best self" format. Oprah celebrated that Kim was able to go back and become friends with her buddies from the football team for which she'd been the star quarterback, back in the day when she was a boy and feeling like she was in the wrong body. Oprah brought Kimberly's mom on the show and told her face to face she wished she'd told her about her feelings earlier. Not much outlet for thoughts like that in Helena, Montana, up to the point where he made the leap to being she.

But today, Kimberly is living proof that being yourself can change things for the better, and offer others a broader view, which is why yes, I really do like Lady Gaga. And I flat-out love Prince.

We're baking with electricity now

Making that delightful no-knead bread has been quite an experience, one that has made me think about what it means to make your own food. I remember lots of baking in my childhood, my mother's and when we lived in communal situations she always helped cook. I thought the kitchen was always one of the most interesting places to be. My mom baked for a living after she and my father split up, making pies for restaurants with a friend, and then as pastry chef at Caribou Ranch. She baked healthy breads, adjusting as needed for the 8,000-foot altitude, and even concocted wholesome meals and wedding cakes for the crews of musicians who came up to make their records.

When my husband and I were young and living in the Bay Area, we were turned onto Greens and ate at Chez Panisse and Jeremiah Tower's restaurants and and it turned out that we were living in one of the epicenters not only of a major earthquake (Santa Cruz, 1989) but also of a revolution in the way huge swaths of the population were starting to see the food they consume and the chefs who prepared it -- chefs have in subsequent years been recognized as more than cooks but as curators of food. Our batch of early health-foodie revolutionary tracts -- one of the Moosewood Cookbooks, Laurel's Kitchen, a copy of Adele Davis' Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit that I never used, intermingled with The Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook and the New York Times Cookbook as the cooking canon of our time and place, one of the very best was the lovingly compiled Tassajara Bread Book. I have enjoyed recipes from other Tassajara cookbooks, but there is an attitude of calm support and peace with the natural proceedings you are about to engage in that is unlike any other cookbook I have ever read or cooked with.

And so we made many loaves of bread and relished the scent and texture and experience, experimented with the balance of white and wheat flour, and loved the results, even when the proceedings seemed to take the better part of a day.

Yet, despite all that calming Zen baking advice, I was always concerned that I'd gone past the smooth-as-a-baby's-bottom phase in kneading my dough and into the tearing-the-gluten-bonds phase that would make my bread tough and chewy. Every loaf of kneaded dough I've made has made me fret about that.

So the no-knead dough was a revelation. I was suddenly more anxious about overhandling the dough when you hardly touched it except to spill it out of its bowl and fold it a couple of times and let it rest, then spill it into a piping hot dutch oven that you cover and bake for about 20 minutes, and uncover and bake another 15. It turned out I needn't have worried -- that dough is about the most forgiving, beautiful stuff on the planet. I have not worried once about torn gluten strands since I started baking this way, and if I feel like making kneaded bread, I know I always can. But I am far more likely to do this instead.

Crusty, Crackling, No-Knead Bread

This is my version of the Speedy No-Knead Bread recipe that the New York Times published recently.

In a deep bowl, measure and stir:
3 cups flour (or 150 grams)*
1-1/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 packet or about 1 tsp. yeast**

Pour in:
1-1/4 cups water (no warmer than 110 degrees F/44 C)
1/4 cup plain lowfat or whole-milk yogurt (or use all water if you wish to make this nondairy)

Stir the ingredients together for a minute or two, until you have a shaggy, sticky dough and all the ingredients are well blended. Scrape the dough down the sides of the bowl and cover the top of the bowl with a damp towel. If your house is chilly, make a place for your dough to rest by heating your oven to 200 F (95 C) for about five minutes and turning the oven off before you put the covered bowl inside the oven to rest from 3-8 hours.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, fold it in half once, and fold it in half again. (Expect a loose dough that barely lets you handle it.) Cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap for 30 minutes. After 10 minutes, start preheating your oven to 450 F (235 C) and put your 6- to 10-quart dutch oven and the lid in the oven to preheat as well (be sure to unscrew and remove the handle on your lid if it is not heatproof -- many of them aren't. If you have to do this, twist a small piece of aluminum foil and insert it into the hole where the lid screw was to seal the hole because the steam from the baking bread is what initially allows the beautiful crust to develop).

After the oven and dutch oven are preheated, use a pizza peel or a flexible cutting board to gather up your dough and put it into the dutch oven. Bake on the middle oven shelf for 20 minutes. Remove the dutch oven lid and bake for another 15-20 minutes, or until the loaf is a rich golden-brown.

Remove dutch oven and set it on the stove. Take the loaf out of the dutch oven and set it on a counter or cutting board to cool for a few minutes, if you can wait that long before slicing and eating it.

*My current favorite blend is about 1/3 white winter wheat flour to 2/3 unbleached organic white flour.
**Fleischmann's or Star rapid-rise both work well -- and you don't have to proof them in warm water first.

A decade

If there's one thing I could take away from this past week, and only one, it would be that the fire burning within is what we have, and it's up to us to stoke it. I am doing my best to devote time and energy to the work I want to do most, to put off the housework before I put off the writing. Everyone has much to juggle; I have less than many, but one of the tricky things to keep aloft is my own ambition, my need to tell these stories.

It's not easy to spend so much of one's time doing something -- striving for some kind of mastery -- that is largely invisible to everyone. In Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hours concept, if you spend eight hours of every day doing one thing you wanted to master, it would take you 1,000 days of practicing to become really good at it. That's eight hours every day, which almost never happens. So double your 1,000 days, or more realistically quadruple them, and maybe you're talking about 10-12 years to achieve mastery, unless you are blessed with lots of time every single day for your practice. Or you set a specific goal: a novel by a certain deadline, a marathon you want to complete, and you structure everything around meeting that goal. That's how I haven't been thinking but how I'd like to switch.

This practice feeds me, too: I feel so grateful for every day and every minute I can write. And dance, love, walk, be here, be with you.

I kissed some foot on twitter today

Ruhlman is the what-if-John McPhee and M.F.K. Fisher-had-a-lovechild of our time in his full absorption in all things cooking related, and I'm such a groupie.

I can't help it. I'm a tad aflutter: Michael Ruhlman thanked me today when I paid him a compliment on twitter. I'm reading his latest book, Ratio, and the book pretty much cemented the rock star analogy for me. (He also wrote a trilogy: The Making of a Chef, Soul of a Chef, & Reach of a Chef, good books all. Oh, and he helped Thomas Keller write his cookbook. Amazing. And his instincts are so true, so good; here he's come up with great formulas, great examples, and some amazingly yummy-looking recipes that I have yet to try out. His preoccupation with food is something I recognize; it drives everyone on one side of my family (every last one a gourmet-food seeker, crazy for the stuff).

I am raving about this book because I find it a rare thing, a fine and flexible reference tool in the spirit of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's more than just a cookbook but rather a liberating way to think about cooking, perhaps even a way to demystify cooking for a whole bunch of people. Once you have learned the basic ratios (and once you've procured a decent kitchen scale with a "tare weight" button), you have a great set of places from which to launch yourself, especially if you are a tinkerer like me who can hardly leave a recipe alone.

In contrast to Ruhlman, who is after some quintessential information about the best ways to prepare food, I keep circling back to what has become something of a new meditation for me: "What if I didn't have the best lunch possible but a good lunch?" What's the difference between best and enough? What does it mean that there is a gap? It doesn't necessarily mean I need to close the gap. I can have a good lunch without making things too fancy.

I heard a great thing -- at least the author of the book where I read it made me feel I heard it: In Beth Lisick's Helping Me Help Myself, Lisick talks about one spiritual guide, one of the people she consults for help in the course of a yearlong life makeover that involves taking the advice of America's most popular self-help gurus, one per month. Irresistible premise, right? I couldn't put it down. It was good, too: She's funny and sharp, if a little mean, which isn't surprising considering her hipster-than-thou life before her grand experiment (even her husband is a super-hipster -- his band opens several shows for Radiohead!) and considering her former disdain for outside expertise of any kind she has a refreshing willingness to submit to the logic of her new 12-pack of teachers. The one that struck me says to a crowd gathered to hear her communicate with people no longer dwelling in the physical world, "A martyr can only nail up one of his hands." I have been chewing on that one ever since I heard it. (And you, dear reader, deserve a prize for most tenacious if you've made it this far without rolling your eyes and clicking to the next big or little thing.)

In other news: The most popular exclamation I hear among the kids at my daughter's school is "What the...?" with equal emphasis on "What" and "the." And today I heard my daughter's schoolmate say "OMG," complete with Valley-Girl emphasis, in conversation. I'm not sure my kid knew what her friend was saying. I wonder whether her friend learned it from older siblings or from TV. I'm guessing the latter. It strikes me as extra ironic because the girl saying it is from a Catholic family. Wouldn't that be taking the Lord's name in vain somehow?

Oh, and there's this little circle thing we do with our knees, where we draw a circle with one knee and then the other. That used to be so hard. I could barely pick my leg up and drag it across my body. It still aches sometimes but today I was thinking, "Where would I be if I weren't doing this?" It's so hard to imagine, I don't even feel like trying.

Current resolutions

Finish at least one novel
Earn money for writing
Be a better friend
Love more
Kvetch less
Use fewer exclamation points
Go hear some more live music
Make another film
Sing more
Write down lyrics
Keep on dancing

A teaser from the new novel I'm writing

She'd bombed. Flamed out. Died. Big time.

“Everyone has to do it once,” they told her after, allowing her to bond with them over shared failures. “It's good to get that out of the way early.”

And: “Now you know how the worst night feels. If you can go back out there after a night like that and not take it too personally, you might have what it takes to make it in this hellish business.”

It made Lydia feel better to hear it. 99 percent of people who dream of this probably never ever try it, she thought, with pride. And it's weird but it's a freaking thrill and a half. She was unable to stop the smile from stretching her lips wide. By the end of the night her face had ached from all the grinning. She was high as a kite, soaring over her old life. Plus, she was funny as hell with all those new brothers. If that five minutes was the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she could even stand doing it again, she felt fine about that. If that were true, who knew, maybe she could be the next Seinfeld.

Lydia's secret excuse for her crash-and-burn of a debut was being in disguise. She cut herself a great deal of slack for it instead of beating herself over the head and concluding she was no good. Her material was pretty good, she thought, but it was trickier finding the way to deliver it, while trying on a whole new persona. She couldn't just drop the persona when her set was over like most performers, she quickly saw; if she wanted to snare the bird she would have to keep it up during the bantering-in-the-bar portion of the evening with the comedians' brotherhood after. She had to be Carmen Flame. She liked the joke of having red hair and being named something smoldering and Latin sounding.

It was like trying to join a fraternity suddenly being around all these guys kind of like her, odd balances of Introversion and Extroversion in the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. She hadn't quite figured out who she wanted to be with them yet. She hadn't yet connected well with her audience, or herself, which was making her feel less worthy of connecting with the accomplished fellows in this group, every last one of them (she thought) with more experience in a month than she'd had in her whole life.

Onstage, Lydia had been worried under her false bravado, which of course the audience sniffed out immediately, nosing her jokes as dispassionately as dogs poking around a pile of leaves while she died in front of everyone, afraid her delivery was rushed and trying not hold back from her inclination to be snarky, which she knew could turn an audience on her in a second. Fear made her sweat, drove her on. She dreaded being booed or hooked off the stage. She'd seen one club owner ring a loud bell or buzzer on the performers – they never knew which to expect – that startled each comedian into submission, abruptly ending their desperate not-quite five-minute sets. You could see the stress of wondering on every comic's face a few minutes into each set: Will my sound be a bell or a buzzer?

No mojo that time. Oh, well, too bad, she thought. But she sure liked the electricity and the instant camaraderie of it, and had felt more alive this night than at any time except riding through the country so busy with thoughts of what she might do when she stopped somewhere and started setting down new roots that she hadn't noticed she'd been singing to herself for miles, alternating between “This Land Is Your Land” and “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” the songs' repeating refrains in the background of her mind like Muzak at the supermarket.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes "Awww!”'- Jack Kerouac

This inspires me and also makes me recoil, all at once. I'm still immersed in judgement about candles that burn bright, the ones who suck all the air out of the room -- you probably know someone, at least one, like that, right? But I also want to be that passionate about my work.

That said, time for dance class!

xoxo

All those channels

A Facebook friend had a question: "Does anyone get this cable channel? We don't and we hear we're on TV."

Sorry, can't help, I replied. No cable. We keep a TV downstairs, mostly for movies. I usually have one show I'm interested in at any given time, sometimes two. Now they are "So You Think You Can Dance" and "Glee," which I made a feeble attempt at watching religiously. They have since fallen off my schedule and I rarely remember they're on at the right times.

The Mister of the house likes to say, "We don't get TV," which isn't strictly true, as he's carefully edited our setup to get the most out of the new digital broadcast signal. But even with the new, improved picture quality and channel selection, there's still hardly anything on broadcast TV.

We haven't had cable in about 20 years -- it was still on for a while after we moved into our little cottage on the hill in San Francisco, but after it finally got turned off, after three months or so, we just never opted in. This fact was remarkable if you consider the sheer number of mailings from the cable company we received over the years (I can't count the number of times I thought, "Oh, this looks like a pretty good deal"). Plus I spent some of my formative teen years with a parent who thought cable was a necessity, and there is always the allure of the premium channels on our friends' TVs and on vacations.

But the deal was never good enough to tip it toward entering into a contract. Because like sex, there was no going back. I knew that much. Once we had cable, we'd deem it a necessity everafter.

I recently read that Bobby and Danette Stuckey of Frasca fame don't have a TV, so couldn't watch Bobby's "Today Show" appearance or Lachlan's "Top Chef" episode at home. Is it a trend? Or three parallel anecdotes?

If I had cable I'd be less likely to update this blog. I'd be less likely to make progress on any of my novels. I would be less likely to read as many books, which might just mean I'd be that much less interested in writing one. But lately I've been reading good ones that make me want to tell stories that are this enriching and enlightening: Lorrie Moore's Gate at the Stairs, Michelle Huneven's Blame and Michael Ruhlman's middle book of his Chef trilogy, The Soul of a Chef, plus the usual Michael Connellys and Anne Perrys and such liberally mixed in.

I always wonder when I see those surveys saying the average amount of time people in the US watch television is more than four hours a day, who has that kind of time for TV-watching? I guess if you watch it for an hour in the morning as you ready for your day, and then you have it on in the background and then watch a little prime-time, a news show, and some of the late show, you're there. But that's a lot of noise in your life!

I've learned a few things from television (a topic for a future blog post), but in the balance the box gives back so little of the time I invest in it, relative to everything else in my life. Now that I've written today (earlier I started Book Two, or Chapter 51, of my novel, Time to read--about Fat? Milk? Kenny Shropsin? Best Friends Forever? Heidi Julavits? Haruki Murakami writing nonfiction? Ahh, choices, choices.

Food and faith

So cozy inside.

There's a storm brewing outside -- it got worse by the minute as I dropped my child at school and returned home after. Nothing falling, yet. And the ground covered with awful ice patches everywhere. Hips will shatter, should snow fall on these lumpy slicks lurking all around.

So: my next writing goal is revising and extending the rest of my current novel. She is poised on the brink of a sting operation, in catching him at his own game. I need to work out the details about her MO (modus operandi is the Latin phrase called out by the acronym).

And then a turning point, where she realizes she doesn't want any part of his game, and mirroring his behavior to trap him at what he will do anyway is not only unfair but also morally wrong and she can't do that another minute or her life might as well just be declared wasted. She has to live her life instead. She can't keep on reacting to his madness; she wastes all her own resources trying to keep up with him. And she never can, because he's miserable with what he's become but can't give up being a bully with all the power it brings him.

That's the emotional plot line. Now to scene-out the mechanics. That's what's next.


___

It is sad to lose a generation. There is always the death of what might have been for those in a branch that chose to live far from their mothers instead of near. So many stories we never heard, never let ourselves hang around long enough to get to know everyone and be a part of.

That happened before I knew it when my maternal grandmother died a few years ago. But that was never offered. She wasn't accessible in any real way -- she'd just blow into town every few years. Or once we went to see her on her turf, in Barcelona, and she led us to the place listed in our Let's Go book as the most rock-bottom cheap but decent food in all of the city, where you could eat a hearty meal for $4 in the midst of all the hoity-toity tapas bars that line the streets and keep the city humming every night. We ate there with her apologizing for the place but the food was good and cheap and we bought hers. I remember meeting her for lunch at the Emporium, across the street from where I worked in San Francisco, near the Powell and Market cable-car turnaround, back when there was still a Woolworth's with a lunch counter and blue-plate specials. I think I harbored a notion that she would take me shopping, but she had the opposite idea and I bought her a scarf in the end. She'd found the least-expensive thing in there and made me buy her one. I had a job, after all, so I was surprised but gracious about it, if a tiny bit resentful. I got one shopping spree out of my grandparents, but have never had parents or grandparents who blew into town to take me shopping. Sigh; some dreams die hard.

I think of people like my grandmother, who seemed afraid to consume much to stay alive, and how my mother does the same thing now, and how others in my sphere are trying to teach me about self-negation, sacrificing for the good of all. My heart reaction to that is no! I know I have entered into phases of food paralysis, when my ideas about what is healthy change and I see food outside that sphere as something less than nourishing. It is a form of anorexia concerned with foreign or polluting foods. I still have it, when we go to someone's house and aren't comfortable with what they eat. My kid abhors McDonald's and I'm with her.

Not long ago I read and started passing around a funny memoir, Jenny Traig's Devil in the Details, about a woman hitting puberty and entering into a life of scrupulosity, obsessiveness over process and correctness. Traig was half Jewish, and at the moment puberty struck, she dove into her religion, especially around food preparation and bodily functions. She had obsessive-compulsive disorder and this was where she expressed her depth of feeling and commitment: to eating correctly and handling food correctly, in observance of Jewish dietary laws about mixing meat and dairy and keeping a truly Kosher kitchen. (And bathroom.)

There was that Aha! when I read about her challenges; I remembered trying a diet when I was 13 that involved a lot of hamburger and pineapple, and thinking everything else was bad and having a hard time starting back up eating other foods again. And then learning about people's challenges with gluten, I wanted to believe it could help our kid with her mood swings, or could cure me of inflexibility and joint pain. And suddenly wheat seemed to be looming everywhere. We caught out a waitress who said no, hoisin sauce doesn't have wheat in it. We Googled it on our little phone.

But for a while I didn't believe in wheat. Now I am just more aware of it as one grain we eat. I tire of it and have to make something with this blend of gluten-free flours I've developed. I like to take occasional breaks from our monoculture wheat culture. So I make banana bread with gluten-free flour. Crepes with buckwheat flour. Those beautiful panisse sticks with garbanzo flour.

Sometimes with food as with nothing else, it's hard to know what to believe in.

No sharks allowed

I was in the car listening to a Led Zeppelin song on the radio, loving the intro and how beautiful it was but simultaneously dreading the bridge, which turns the song into something else entirely -- something else, as a woman, to be dreaded. It's that energy that says, "I'm full of lust and I'm not taking no for an answer. You're in my path and I'm comin' at ya, ready or not."

I just thought for the ten-thousandth time how much more I would have liked those guys if they could have done more than a song or two that was simply beautiful and not full of all that pushy "baby, baby" energy.

Then I opened the New York Times Book Review to discover there's a new biography of them that to hear the reviewer tell it leaves out much about the music and rehashes the gnarly details of their decadent rock stardom. There's some hideous incident involving a woman and a shark that I can only imagine. A bandmember pooh-poohed all that, though, saying they'd only done all that nasty business "for a laugh." "The thing I remember most from that time was the laughter," he said. I wonder if all those women remember the laughter the same way. Ick.

Misloved

Gathering song lyrics for my new novel's chapter epigrams has been fun during this project because it's reinforced the notion that this is a story with universal appeal. Everyone's been misunderstood, underestimated, and misjudged at some point or another. Nearly everyone has loved and those who have loved either know someone or are people who have been loved badly – misused and misloved by someone who has no idea how to treat others with respect. It's been fun to develop a character in this situation for whom I wanted to root for the whole way, cheer on, help dust off and steadfastly pursue her own goals despite all the gravitational pulls of friends, family, and her own Achilles heels: being alone, lacking confidence.

Yet something more than that mean guy needs to be pushing Lydia away from her old life. What is it?

Misloved. That would be a good title, too, wouldn't it? An interesting echo of Beloved.

I just wrote a 50,000-word novel and boy is my neck sore

I did it! At 11:57 pm on Tuesday, November 30, I copied and pasted my novel into the handy-dandy Nanowrimo word-count validation box: 50,016 words! I am a winner!

But in answer to your follow-up question: No, it's not finished. I tried, really I did, but I couldn't wrap it up that fast. One good thing about where I stopped two days ago (more like one-and-a-half days ago, in writing time): I'm in the middle of a suspenseful part of the story, which makes me want to get back and finish it. Only I'm too sore right now to type more than this.

In answer to your next follow-up question, yes, I'm exhausted. Writing the 50,016 words in the space of one month (a 30-day month, mind you) wasn't as difficult as I've found it in years past. It was plenty challenging nonetheless, and it took a huge push at the very end to finish before the deadline. That may be the most brilliant thing about Nanowrimo right there: that it gives you a seemingly impossible deadline to meet. There are enough other people doing it -- and getting it done early, no less -- that it seems like a perfect stretch goal: tough, but doable. O, that crafty Chris Baty (the guy who started it all a few years ago).

And when you win, talk about intrinsic rewards! You sure don't do it for the purple banner on your Nanowrimo profile. You do it so you have done it. You do it because you'll have thousands of words of a story you wouldn't have written otherwise, even if you have given yourself permission to allow them to be terrible and you'll have to rewrite it all. You do it for the writing itself. You do it to get better at writing a novel. You do it to get better at meeting a deadline. You do it to get better at pacing yourself. And you do it because once you have done it, frankly, it's a little addictive and you'd feel like a wuss if you didn't at least try. At least those are the reasons I do it. Oh, and the awesome reactions from friends and family. It is fun being the person in the family most likely to write a novel in a month! Thanks for your support.

Here's another reason you don't do Nanowrimo: to make other people feel bad. I don't want my accomplishments to be things I can use to make others wish they weren't the way they were, e.g. didn't know how to sit down and write a book (or most of one) within a month. A couple of nights ago I did a Sunday NYTimes puzzle on my own, with only two clues supplied by Mr. D, and I put the puzzle down and thought: I'm better at this.

Now, what good does that do anyone to go around thinking that way? The only reason I would ever say that is to make Mr. D. feel worse. But why would I want do that? Why do I ever act like there's one way to do things, and it's mine, the better one?

Some people are excited to cheer you on when you announce that you've been writing a novel, but plenty of us writers (this one included) have also observed that certain people respond by peering at you as if you'd just sprouted a third nipple on your chin. Admitting you have a blog can draw the same kind of response. Some people roll their eyes and say to themselves, "Oh, so you like seeing yourself think. Big whoop." They wonder whether you're just saying you write personal essays and are really hunched over your laptop writing sci-fi, erotica, fan fiction, or some other freaky online genre in which only other freaky online genre freaks would be interested.

It would be nice to hand over the bound book and say, "Here, read it if you like and tell me what you think." Their eyes would pop right out. And lo and behold, yea verily, an organization called CreateSpace is offering to print a copy of your novel if you win Nanowrimo! I'll let you know how that goes.

So it's not about winning so other people lose. First, in Nanowrimo, if you write anything at all of your novel in November, it's likely more than you would have written otherwise, so you win either way. And second, there's almost always someone who writes faster or more than you, and someone who writes slower or fewer words per writing hour. Comparisons don't really help. Instead of being jealous of people who can write 10,000 words in a day, I tell myself they just get more practice in a day than I do. One of the folks at the IHOP (I keep typing "iHOP" and having to correct myself -- ha ha) said he had written nearly half his novel over the past two days. Think of it: almost 25,000 words in two days. I can be proud of not having "shamelessly padded" my story, as they say on the Nano site, to get to the 50K, though. I tried to keep the story moving. There's not enough conflict but I'll catch it on the rewrite.

And how is the writing when you write 1,600 words in a day? 5,000? (Which I did on the last day.) 13,000 (IHOP guy)? You'll never know unless you do it, or unless someone trusts you to read their rough draft. Maybe I or the folks at the IHOP (who all won, incidentally) will rewrite his and publish it; maybe it will have just been good practice and he'll move on to different projects. I'm starting to see how nearly 20 percent of its participants can meet the Nanowrimo 50K deadline but a much smaller percentage become published authors after that. The ones who do seem to be prolific, judging by the small sample I've observed in Nano's forums.

It still seems far easier to write than it is to edit and sell the writing, which are equally consuming and perhaps, despite popular mythology, the more difficult jobs. It seems that writers must be able to turn on the taps regularly but then must spend at least as much time hauling vessels around and hooking up hoses and getting the siphons started to get the writing off their own desks. I want an assistant who would be excited to do all that stuff! My mom pointed out, as usual, right around the time I had the thought: "How nice that you are an editor and a writer." The way I had thought of it was: "I'm Danny and Meg, all in one package!" But they know all about sending their stuff out, which is where I'm ignorant and why I'm as yet unpublished.

So who are the winners here? One thing's certain: there are no losers. I think we're all winners, whether it's at writing a book, or getting dinner on the table, or finishing a work project before a critical deadline, or remaining cheerful despite all odds.

NaNoWriMo day 10, 15,400 words

Again, I come bearing news that this is all going rather well. I'm liking this mettle my main character is showing of late. She's not just parts of me but is more complex, someone I'd like to get to know. I'm still on track wordcount wise, with 15,000 words written that I didn't have two weeks ago. Ten days ago. I had started a version of this story but had gotten sidetracked by a memoir project that now feels like a lot of rehearsal for what I am working on this month. I might have to mine some of what I already wrote someday when I'm struggling to keep up with my recommended daily requirement, as I think of it now. So far, though, I must say the pace is working with my life and habits. Keeps me off the streets, as I often say about writing and used to say about watching films for the BIFF selection committee.

NaNoWriMo, day 6, 10,000 words

Oh, rats. The dreidl song was out of my head for a while....

I just blew past the 10,000-word mark. Yippee skippee! I am enjoying reading what I'm creating. It is good stuff. I'm not holding back. I'm liking my main character's seesawing. She meets this nice lady early on and maybe you think, oh, no, is this going to be all nicey-nice all the way through? A parade of wise crones leading her to her own inner wisdom? But then the next person who says she'll help her is not so nice at all. And there are many more interesting reversals coming up for me to look forward to as the author -- heh, heh. Then a bit of a precipice. Beyond a certain point in my story, I don't have anything plotted. I'm just going to see where she goes from there. I have a feeling she will know exactly where to go.

Sleep well, y'all. I sure will, unlike my poor main character in the scene I just stopped in the midst of so I'll have lots of momentum when I pick it up again tomorrow, which is definitely one of the best writing tips I ever heard.

NaNoWriMo, day 6, 8400 words

I confess, when I think of my current writing group, one voice tends to chime out over the top of the others. When her voice said one day, "It's all good material!" after I had checked in about an impossible situation that I had drawn myself into, I felt a permission to use my own raw material that I hadn't even noticed I hadn't given myself yet. So that little nugget of commentary and advice turned out to be a gift, for which I am grateful especially because it has allowed me to unbarricade a particularly dark and awful corner and allowed me to face up to some facts I'd been avoiding for a while. More material, yippee! [with only the merest hint of sarcasm]

And Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writing Month, bless its pointy little head, is giving me a fun place to put all this. I even have some totems, some people I think of sometimes while writing. There's my mother and oldest sister, and now there are these wonderful constellations and planets shining in my sky: my writing groups, current and past, and Angela Shelton, who is a joyful example of someone standing up for herself and other victims of abuse. She too is taking some long looks at how we make abusers in our culture. There is the author of The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout, Ph.D., who gave me another key to a dark room whose door I can now fling wide open. I am loving working all of this memoir and information into the fabric of this story of a woman getting out from under an ugly, sad situation with an abuser at its core, who must begin the task of making good choices for herself. I confess I feel a little like I'm attempting to climb up there too by telling this story, which I hope can become another bright glow in a constellation that will illuminate more than just my path.



Exercise: Fill in the blanks: "_____s will be _____s!"

What phrase did you pick? One of my novel's themes is the expectations we project onto people because of how we identify them, how we sort each other into categories. Also interesting to me is how often we are right about the character of the person, but wrong about the specific details.

Plus it's a road story.

Beyond reframing: Deframing

In a story from today's New York Times about changes in The Museum of Modern Art's modernist art collections, I just read a great thing. MoMA decided to change the display of some of these paintings by removing their frames. I love this quote: “'Now these strokes explode off the canvas,' she said happily.”

Isn't that great? It's so simple – remove the frame and you've got a whole different painting on your wall. And you get an artwork that is in the state in which the artist first experienced it. I don't imagine most painters think as they're working on their latest artwork, “I'd better make something that matches that really rococo gold frame in the corner.”

And it's such a simple exercise, elegant like that last thought Byron Katie has you do: Can you picture this differently? Can you see this picture differently? In this case the answer seems to be an emphatic yes. (The whole question about pictures and frames makes me wonder about the history of picture frames. How did we come to accept flowery, flourish-filled ornatities around our paintings in the first place?)

I love the exercise, the mental leap you can take away from this. How could you remove a frame from a problem you can't see your way out of? How could you recontextualize your problem and change your view of it?

Review: David Carr's The Night of the Gun

Despite what my blog might have you believe and as much as I love making food for my family, I am more interested these days in memoir, in questioning my past and some of the assumptions I have lived with for many years. So it was with interest that I picked up a memoir that at first glance looked like it could have been written by my father and began to read.

Within a couple of days I had finished reading David Carr's memoir The Night of the Gun. I found it interesting because he was so messed up -- for a guy born with only one kidney, he played fast and loose with his mental and physical health, hoovering up enough drugs (I'd guess) to get an inner-city high school high on crack for days. Yet he was determined as hell to make something of his time every minute he was lucid enough to do something about his work. I found Carr's determination inspiring and fascinating (and so did he, examining it like it had just crept in from outdoors and draped itself over his neck [quotes mine, not Carr's]: "Say, what's this? How does it work? Can I use it for my own advantage? Yes!" I found Carr's backslides at least as interesting as his original transgressions against nature. Then he turns around and like Clark Kent emerging from the phonebooth, instantaneously swinging a great red cape, almost always gets treated as a veritable god in his work life, barely capable of doing any wrong. He gets the stories, interviewing people his peers believe can't be had, and he gets the stories right (almost always). But he eventually succumbs to the conceit that he can just slip under the radar as a garden-variety "suburban drunk," buzzing home on the train after work. Naturally, Carr gets out of control in a hurry once he follows that logical vapor trail. Perhaps this book is best read as Carr's love letter to his frontal lobe, which eventually gains the capacity to last inform his decisionmaking processes in an age- and responsibility-appropriate fashion over time. Time will tell if the reversal is permanent or if the old patterns are too ingrained, the old triggers too easy to trip.

Carr questions his thoroughly researched memoir enterprise all along and he is right to do so. That is an enterprise that can quickly get narcissistic. In fact here, he forces himself to be narcissistic. He says, I never excavated this belly button, and here is every shred of lint and many interviews to establish which piece of lint arrived when. But he is one of the lucky ones for whom his children did give him meaning and inspire him to change his entire way of life. Not too long after I tired of descriptions of the vortex of badness into which his life had devolved, I came to admire his dedication on behalf of his kids, his resoluteness to do right in their presences. Incredibly, according to his painstakingly researched and documented personal history, Carr successfully forswore crack around his "babies" but only backslid on this commitment when he was abusing alcohol (but surprisingly not cocaine or methamphetamines).

Reading his story, I even let myself wallow in a little jealousy of his twin girls, who had each other through it all and who as a result had no idea what their father had a checkered past until he told them about his bad self. I wonder if that came as a bigger shock to them than he expected. But he'd prepared them for it -- they'd hung out with ex-drunks and trying-to-recover junkies throughout their childhoods, as well as a cast of truly supporting characters who helped them get through many a tight spot.

Whatever talent he had, competition and winning was a prime motivator. Hardly a month out of rehab, Carr was already refining his story about having picked himself up and dusted himself off after getting dragged down by "the Life." He was already angling for a Best Comeback award. When a friend said he was applying for a job Carr wanted, back in the days when he was still using drugs, Carr held silent. Everyone later said he should have told his friend he'd been gunning for the same position. But no, he said nothing, and guess who got the job: David Carr did. By the accounts of the people he interviews in his memoir, as an editor he did well; some of the folks who worked with him disagree about how much good he did. But his gift for coming out on top in a competition has clearly served him well: he worked his way up to reporter for the New York Times.

I'm impressed someone that screwed up can truly have that much good in him. He says he always thought of himself as a good man with a bad habit. He gives credit to AA for placing his addiction and the rest of the physical and spiritual world in their proper perspectives in his life. I also noted that Carr returned to his Catholic roots. Catholics always seemed to have the most straightforward program for atoning for sins of anyone ("Take two Hail Marys and you're good to go"). There's a religion that doesn't drag you through the muck but lets you get on with your life, and this guy had some lost time to make up, so that served him well, too.

But Carr doesn't take any of the easy ways out, but rather takes a fearless moral inventory of himself. I think I would have regarded this as just another narcissistic James Frey-type junkie odyssey but for the part when his daughters are about four and he tries to get close to some women, but the women he's choosing are not what he wants for himself or his girls and he does something because he knows something's wrong but can't quite identify what it is. He talks to someone who helps him understand what he wants for himself and his daughters and what he has to change to make that happen. Then he up and changes. It's impressive.

Perhaps Carr is an unusually determined and competitive recovering junkie and drunk. I appreciate the object lesson he offers in his memoir. If someone like that can make that much of himself, and singlehandedly raise twin daughters, what the heck do I have to whine about?

Signs of fall: Canning concord grapes

I made jam twice this week and the second batch was the best ever. Three words: Pomona's Universal Pectin. Happy happy joy joy at that discovery. My jelly had five cups of grape juice, five cups of sugar, and jelled beautifully. I can hardly wait to try another kind of fruit. Pluot jam, anyone?