The Paper Sandwich

Eight Things You Should Never Buy Generic

2012-01-04T11:39:00.001-08:00

1. Ketchup. It's got to be Heinz. Hunt's isn't as sweet, plus it's kind of pulpy, and let's not even talk about generic. Interesting side note: when I was in Peace Corps/Philippines, I learned to eat banana ketchup on almost everything. It was pale orange in color (not sure why) and chunky and sweet and I'd dip jicama strips into it for an afternoon snack or smear it on rice for dinner when all that was being served was fish heads.

2. Tape. It's got to be Scotch. I can say this after spending much of the recent Christmas season wrapping gifts with decidedly inferior store-brand tape. It's impossible to tear off; it doesn't stick adequately to most wrapping paper, and it's too skinny.

3. Mayo. It's got to be Hellman's, though I will also accept Kraft. (Miracle Whip is an entirely different story, and worthy of its own post). When I feel scrimpy and scroogey and occasionally buy the store-brand "salad dressing," I regret it. It's is a strange orangey-yellow color; it's wiggly and gelatinous; it's fatty and too oily on the tongue.

4. Dish soap. I prefer Dawn, but will also occasionally accept Ajax, Ivory or any name brand that doesn't smell like gross-ass lavender perfume or something. Generic will not rise up to proper bubble performance and will peter out in the sink and not cut through grease. It's sad, really.

5. Mac and Cheese. It's got to be Kraft, or, even better, Annie's. My son, Hudson, has recently shaken up the household by introducing Velveeta mac and cheese WITH BACON. Holy shit. I thought it would be terrible but it's pretty good. The biggest problem with generic mac and cheese is how gross it tastes. And also how the powder doesn't mix well.

6. O.J. Anything but generic, which is watery and sour—a dreadful combination.

7. It's got to be Jiff or Skippy. Good luck trying to spread generic on your soft bread. It'll rip it to shreds.

8. Diapers. Pampers or Huggies. This one is not negotiable. If you've ever had a baby, you know that cheap diapers do not contain those little curry-colored explosions newborns are prone to, or, god forbid, the later king-size toddler dumps.

...unless you're broke, of course (which I have been many times throughout my life), in which case, who cares! Anything goes.

Kindle-ing?

2011-11-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

I have a Kindle in my possession. I did not buy it. I borrowed it from the university library where I teach. I got it because I needed to review a library book for a graduate class I'm teaching that was only available as an e-book. As luck would have it, the Kindle was not able to "accept" this e-book because of proprietary amazon issues.

I brought it home anyway, curious.

My children, Hudson (10) and Lily (7), love the Kindle. They think it's great fun to push buttons instead of turn pages. They like zooming around the menu, "bookmarking" their pages, and clandestinely hooking up to wifi. They've been reading fairy tales on it (it came preloaded with these) as well as Treasure Island. Once I came home from work and Hudson was sitting on the couch, reading on the Kindle while it was plugged in, charging. This struck me as strange, unsettling.

Last Saturday afternoon, I found myself finally with some free time to spend with the kids. I said, "Would you like me to read to you both?" and they said yes, then gathered on either side of me on the couch. The first book I read was Fly High, Fly Low by Don Freeman, about two pigeons who live in a big letter "B" atop a New York City building. It was an old discarded library book, hardback with a crunchy cellophane cover. We marveled at the muted oranges, reds, and purples of the sunset the illustrator must have done with charcoals. I ran my finger over one of the pages it was so beautiful.

Next, I read a fairy tale "Little Two Eyes" on the Kindle. I held the plastic rectangle between the two kids, and they argued over for got to push the "Next Page" button each time. There were no pictures. Both kids, I noticed, physically pulled away from me a bit until it was time to push "Next Page." And funny thing—we didn't really know when to stop. Was it a long story? I did notice there were numbers on the bottom of the Kindle, "11%, Locations 424-28, 3790." Were these page numbers? Or was I to assume we were 11% done with the story? Neither, I realized.

I've found myself reacting not against the Kindle, but instead, uninterested in the Kindle. It sits in the living room in its little black case, and though I glance at it, I have not yet been inspired to use it for my own reading. Why is that? I wonder. A. I'm at home. I have books everywhere, all around me. B. There are so many steps to reading on a Kindle. Turn on. Home. Menu. Select text. Press "next page" button. And then, reverse all of these steps when you're done. C. It's plastic and doesn't feel right in my hands. D. It's only the size of half a book. It's like reading a single page over and over. I prefer a two-page spread.

Here are some things you should know:

•I often go whole days without using my cell phone

•I do not have internet access on my cell phone

•I like to be alone a good portion of the time

•I write books of fiction and nonfiction

•I rarely answer our home telephone but stand and listen to who's on the machine

•I feel lonely quite often

•The university loaned me a Kindle 4, not the newest model, and certainly not a Kindle Fire

•I have what I call "The Panning Museum of Antiquated Technology" up in my attic, featuring things like old phones, sewing machines, primitive laptops, curling irons, ancient adding machines, a Rollodex

•"kindle" /verb/ definition: a. To light or set on fire. b. To arouse or inspire (an emotion or feeling)

Purple Slaw, Blogs and Creativity

2011-09-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

I was chopping purple cabbage tonight for an Asian slaw recipe I love that also includes peanuts and cilantro. I like to chop it super fine and serve it in a pale bowl for color contrast. As I was chopping, I kept thinking about my creative nonfiction workshop and the blogs that I had the students create for the class. I'd just checked out how they looked, read what they wrote for their first entries, and couldn't stop thinking about them. It's hard to explain how differently the blogs are making me think about my students. It's like they're more fully present, more three-dimensional, more complex. Their blogs are like portals into their other lives that I don't get to see.

I'm not sure how this will play out, what stumbles and bumps will emerge. I do know setting it up has already proven to be much more work than the "regular" way I used to teach the workshop. Still, something about this approach is lighting a fire in my brain and heart. Their blogs let me stay connected to my students in new ways. Their blogs also allow me to witness their approaches to creativity—visually, socially, and artistically.

So far, so good.

Letter to Myself as a College Freshman

2011-08-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

Dear Anne,

Welcome to college.

Do note that if you leave your gray fedora with the feather pluming off the side of it on your lamp it will definitely burn a hole in it, meaning you won't be able to wear it anymore to house parties, meaning you won't be able to wear it with your Flashdance sweatshirt while fist pumping to Prince's "1999" with a bunch of burly wrestlers and gay theatre majors that you meet at orientation, meaning you won't be found crying in the corner later when "Sister Christian" is playing and you've had enough.

As well, remember you are not the only one from a corn & soybean small town, though it will often seem as such. This is mostly fiction, and aside from the tall, blonde, Scandinavian foreign students who flock to your Lutheran college, realize that most everyone, including the tie-dye wearing Rhonda who lives across the hall from you and is already actively political with her anti-Reagan chants and her Mondale posters, is really just another shy Midwestern kid like you.

Listen to me on this: waitress. Since you're putting yourself through school and must work three jobs to do so, realize sooner than later that waitressing is the most money you can make in the shortest amount of time. Never mind that there will be lots of washed-up thirty-something men who wait tables too, and who will scrape lines of coke along the bar for you after close, and who will act extremely interested in your Shakespeare paper that's due the next day and who will want to give you rides home on their motorcycles—but resist. This will end up, if you let it, being a huge waste of time. Instead, walk home, act confident so no one attacks you, and keep your wrinkled piles of money inside a book for safekeeping. Don't ever keep tips inside the dictionary or thesaurus; it's the first place thieves look. Instead, To Kill a Mockingbird is a safe choice, but if you didn't pack that one, Catcher in the Rye is safe, too.

Relatedly, it's best not to steal textbooks from the campus bookstore if you can help it, even though The Collected Works of Shakespeare costs almost a hundred dollars. But what the hell. Do it anyway. It's the eighties and they don't yet have secret magnetic security strips tucked inside books. Surprisingly, no one will notice the huge 10 pound tome shoved underneath your sweatshirt. Consider it part of your financial aid package.

It's okay to cry.

Also, when your theatre professor with the long gray ponytail pulled up high on her head and her little dog, Zorba, by her side, tells you over and over the difference between "it's" and "its," remember it for the rest of your life. Listen when she says, "Annie, Annie, Annie! This may be one of the most important lessons you ever learn!"

Don't dance on top of the tables at Blondie's Bar during Happy Hour. This may send a message about you that you don't wish to send.

Don't feel bad when spring break finds you at your parents' house in Arlington eating frozen pizza and writing a Sociology paper while the rest of your friends are at South Padre Island. You will be better for it, stronger. Watching snow plop down off the trees outside your old bedroom window will set something off in you that will help you later. Try to be patient for it. Try.

Do not eat the ham salad at the cafeteria.

Do not under any circumstances lie to your professors, even though your old, eternally blinking, tweed-wearing religion professor would believe you if you told him you just found out your parents were getting a divorce last week and that's why you missed the midterm. Know that your very real tears would convince him. But don't do it. Please. It's beneath you.

Finally, keep a little cassette player by your bedside and listen to John Lennon's "Imagine" every night, which will comfort you while lying in your tulip sheets as I-94 and the rest of your future flies by outside the window.

Good luck. I'll be waiting for you.

love,

Anne

Read This Book #4

2011-07-25T06:15:00.000-07:00

I splurged and bought a hardcover of this book. I wanted a good, sprawling, multi-generational family novel to take with me on our trip to northern Michigan. Despite what the cover suggests, this is not a "beach read," but is in fact a complex, richly layered and character-driven novel. I'm so glad I splurged.

First of all, the title: Maine. There's something about the state that holds mystique, allure. What is it exactly? I've only been there once for a week's vacation when my daughter, Lily, was just a toddler and my son, Hudson, was five. We rented a small house on the ocean, and did a lot of chasing after the kids but the real highlight was celebrating my birthday by eating my very own huge lobster on our picnic table, complete with melted butter and bib. Still, Sullivan's Maine is much different here: it's the kind of old-money, family camp style Maine that you want to cozy up in and never leave.

But all is not happy and bucolic, of course. When the three generations of Kelleher women meet at the property one summer, negativity, hushed secrets, sibling rivalry and other tensions abound. Alice, the octogenarian matriarch, drinks far too much and is hatching a plan that will surprise and sadden the whole family. Maggie, Alice's granddaughter, is pregnant and thirty-two with no real prospects on the horizon; Maggie's mother, Kathleen, the black sheep of the family, has moved to California and now operates an organic worm farm. Ann Marie, related to the family through marriage, is the quintessential suburban wife and mother with a crush on her husband's good friend. They all compete, argue, one up, blame, and guilt trip one another as they realize the old and easy days are gone.

What I love about the novel is the way that each character is deeply grounded in particularizing details. Ann Marie is obsessed with dollhouses, and so we get a firsthand look at the culture of miniatures. I was intrigued by the organic composting with worms Kathleen is engaged in, and I was equally taken by the subtle way Alice's Irish Catholic background informs her present decision making.

Idiosyncrasies: Four revolving narrators spanning three generations; the dollhouse convention Ann Marie attends (fascinating look at peoples' obsession with "the small"), the way readers are privy to the novel's "secret," but that three of the four narrators aren't

Favorite line: "Minnie's Minis from Staffordshire made the most gorgeous little cakes, with frosting that looked like real marzipan, and tiny ceramic strawberries on top, each berry no bigger than the head of a pin. A slice of cake could be removed to show the chocolate and raspberry filling inside."

Bottom line: A rich and elegant novel with the beautiful setting of Maine that invokes a longing for the past and questions the durability of family ties

Read This Book #3

2011-07-12T20:19:00.001-07:00

Desperate for a new book to read, I bought this novel by Martha McPhee, thinking: I wonder if she's the daughter of the famous writer, John McPhee, which indeed she is. Clearly, literary talent runs strongly in the family.

Though some reviews call this book a Pygmalion story, a social satire, or even a “morality tale of the early 21^st century greed and fall,” I found it quite simply a captivating read. The basic plot line revolves around India Palmer, a well-published but cash-strapped novelist living in New York City with her artist husband, Theodor, and their two children. When she finds herself living far beyond their means and trying to keep up with the “Joneses,” she meets, at a cocktail party, Win Johns, a Wall Street millionaire who makes a bet with her that if she’s willing to give it a go on Wall Street, he’ll make her a “world-class bond trader” within eighteen months. What follows—her resistance gradually corroded by her desperate desire (and need) for money—is oddly gripping. Will she make it? you ask yourself. And if she does, at what cost?

Favorite Line:

“At Bergdorf’s, I bought a new dress, a rich brown macramé for fall. The price: $775. A tax deduction, I thought. I just had to have it to wear to my book party. I shared my strategy with Lily, and we both laughed about the deduction. ‘An absolute expense,’ she said. 'I’ll serve as witness if the IRS comes after you. Kind sirs, she only wore it that once. She had to look like a million bucks, otherwise who’d buy her book?’”

Idiosyncrasies:

Surprisingly original “good guy- bad guy” characters, such as Lily Starr, her long time writer friend who makes it big and flaunts it in her face, and Snake, a young cut-throat bond trader from Calcutta who befriends her; a hamburger eating contest that will make you nearly vomit; an inside look at what exactly happens on Wall Street and how it works (I found this fascinating).

Bottom Line:

A great story about art versus corporate America right before the banking bubble is about to burst. Gripping, sly, funny, and thought-provoking. Also, I was surprised by how fervently I (a writer) found myself rooting for her to succeed on Wall Street.

Read This Book #2

2011-06-27T05:37:00.001-07:00

I must admit I don't read a lot of British fiction, contemporary or otherwise. I'm small-minded that way. I find it too stuffy, too cold, and yes, those British idiosyncrasies like single quotation marks for dialogue, Old World spellings and idioms (tyre, flat, lift, storeys) and the constant drinking of tea and biscuits with "Mum," are too precious for my taste. But when good crime fiction meets "literary" fiction, I'm helpless against it.

The novel opens with the protagonist Beatrice getting a call that her younger sister Tess is missing, and so she boards the first flight she can get from New York to London. Already I love the idea, since I'm a big fan of missing persons fiction, but as the story unfolds, strange surprises keep cropping up about her sister. One of the things I love is the way the author plays off opposites; Beatrice is the sensible, responsible sister while Tess is a bit of a Bohemian, but instead of treating this dichotomy in a simplistic fashion, Lupton shows the complexity and difficulty of the relationship.

Favorite line: "When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing."

Idiosyncrasies: The entire novel is written in an epistolary fashion, that is, as a letter written from Beatrice to her younger sister, Tess. At first this felt a bit awkward, but then I relaxed into it and saw how perfectly it gave the book shape and structure. There is also intrigue involving medical ethics that gives the novel an even broader social reach.

Bottom Line: One of the most gripping climaxes I've read in a long time. The mystery of what happened to her sister, and the lengths to which Beatrice is willing to go to find out, had me hooked. I sacrificed sleep to finish this one.

Hometown: Revised

2011-06-08T03:48:00.000-07:00

Recently I flew home to Minnesota because I missed my siblings and needed to be among them. I'm also working on a memoir set there, so I needed to see and feel and touch all the things I was writing about. I wanted to tour the trailer court in Arlington where I had spent the majority of my childhood. I wanted to drive down Main Street and check out my dad's old barber shop. I wanted to place flowers and a note on my parents' gravestone. I wanted to check on the status of their old Victorian house.

I did all these things and more, thanks to my sister, Amy, and her husband, Dan, who drove me around in their minivan. They were patient as I popped out of the van to take photographs, jot down notes, and sometimes asked for a second, or even a third, cruise-by of something that caught my eye.

I'd like to report feelings of nostalgia and a deep connection to the place, but the fact is, it was complicated. Without my parents, without a single relative drawing me back there, Arlington had become exactly that: just a place. Sure, there were sweet spots of memory. "Over there," I told Amy and Dan's kids as we drove by the high school, "is where I had my first kiss with Tony O'Brien. Right by that dumpster. Fourth grade."

But as we drove out of town, I wondered: when would I ever be back here again? I'd long since gotten everything I wanted from my parents' house. Most of my old friends had moved away. Without a single family member left in Arlington, there would be very little reason to come back, and the thought filled me with sadness.

* * * *

Back at Amy's house in Montgomery, Minnesota, I had an epiphany: this had become my new "hometown." Each time I visited, new habits had emerged, little traditions that I looked forward to each time:

1. Buying teriyaki turkey jerky at Edel's Meat Market (Monty boasted 3 different meat markets!)
2. Going out for "the best Blood Marys in 17 Counties" at Neaner's White Front Bar
3. Shopping for clothes at Bargain Betty's consignment shop (actually in New Prague, one town over, but still a constant for us)
4. Getting a kolacky (fruit-filled Czech pastry) and coffee at Franke's Bakery
5. Going to see Dan at Fransden Bank and getting a free pen
6. Shopping the dollar aisle of Herman Drug (scored a cool Mood necklace for Lily)
7. Doing a photo shoot with Amy in her studio (she could get me to smile without looking one bit fakey she was so good)
8. Drinking wine on Amy and Dan's deck overlooking undulating hills, a pond, and a horse farm all glowing in the buttery Midwestern light

* * * *

I still dream about Arlington sometimes at night: the long windows of my bedroom curlicued with intricate ice patterns, my mother's kitchen and its apple wallpaper border, the mint green water tower rising up over corn fields, the Christmas lights hung year-round on the feed mill, the diagonal parking on Main Street. These things will never leave me.

As Ray Gonzalez writes: "I do not believe in the loss of home...You can celebrate or mourn the area where you grew up, but you have earned them and can't abandon them completely."

Happy Birthday, Lilypalooza!

2011-05-17T05:58:00.001-07:00

Seven years ago today I had a baby in what was called a "precipitous" birth, i.e. so insanely fast there wasn't even time to get a doctor in my room at the hospital. One minute I was eating an apple on the couch at home, and less than an hour later, I was holding a baby in my arms in the hospital that was a 30 minute drive way. I was still in the red t-shirt I'd been wearing. My hair wasn't messed up; my eyeglasses weren't askew. Aside from looking a little stunned, I look as I normally did on any regular day.

We already had a son and desperately wanted a girl since this would be our last child. When Mark said, "It's a girl!" I said, "Are you sure? Check again because you HAVE to be sure!" He checked again. "It really is a girl," he said. "Annie, we got a girl!"

We had a girl's name all picked out: Lucy. It wasn't even a question, until I held her in my arms and something shifted. "I don't know," I said to Mark. "I'm not sure what we should name her." Then Lily popped into my head. It was deep and fragrant spring; everything was in bloom, and lilies had always struck me as elegant but sturdy flowers. I decided I wanted a daughter who was elegant but sturdy. Mark took no convincing. He wrote her name on the dry erase board in my room: Lily Kahala Rice Panning. And it was decided. For several weeks afterward, I accidentally called her Lucy. She likes to hear this story now. "Can you even imagine me as a Lucy?" she'll say. I cannot.

Below are photos as follows, 1) Lily on a regular old day in our sun room, 2) Lily with her new purple soccer ball from Hudson, 3) Lily in her new GIRLS ROCK t-shirt from Auntie Amy, 4) Lily trying out the bongo drums from Mark, 5) Lily and I after our first run together this past Mother's Day.

How grateful I am for this feisty energetic girl. I know one thing: holding onto her unwavering confidence in herself is going to be my life's mission all the years ahead. We can do it, Lily. GIRLS ROCK.

Read This Book! #1

2011-05-15T04:48:00.000-07:00

Driving With Dead People: A Memoir by Monica Holloway (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007).

I found this book in my local thrift store, hardback, for $1.00. I remember when it had come out, and thinking that it looked good, if a bit gimmicky. But for one dollar, who cared? The gimmick factor was there to some extent: the young narrator had spent time with a childhood friend whose family owned a mortuary. She and her friend would lie in the coffins for fun and pretend they were dead. Later, she would actually witness dead bodies being embalmed and drive around in the family’s hearse.

That’s interesting, I thought, as I began to read, but I wondered how far you could really go with something like that. But that’s exactly it: the mortuary/dead people aspect of the book—though it does serve as a loose through-line—is never the focus of the memoir. Instead, it’s the narrator’s relationship with her family, particularly her father (who drives all over their small Ohio town videotaping car wrecks and gruesome accidents) that cranks up the book’s tension. There’s also a family betrayal that Holloway gradually uncovers that makes the book a true page-turner right up until the last page. As the author's website puts it: "This is ultimately a memoir detailing her bizarre, often funny and ultimately terrifying life growing up in a small Midwestern town." But it's so much more than that.

Favorite Line:

“Dad had pulled some horrendous stunts, but when he fucked with Mom’s love of the Great Smoky Mountains, he’d gone too far.”

Idiosyncrasies:

the narrator’s acting career in L.A., her little blue motorcycle, the many 1970s pop culture references (The Carpenters, Mrs. Beasley, The Beverly Hillbillies, Polaroid Instamatic), her sister's memories presented in italics as her own

Bottom Line:

I fell in love with this narrator. She’s funny and strong and ‘effed up and I want her to be my friend.

Announcement!

2011-05-13T10:25:00.000-07:00

I read voraciously. I read at least a book a week. I steal from sleep to read. I get antsy and desperate and unhappy when I don’t have a good book to read. Therefore, I’ve decided, now that it’s summer and I’m relieved of my teaching duties, that every week (or so) I’m going to recommend a good book on my blog. Mostly the books will be contemporary and American, but not always. Mostly they’ll be fiction and creative nonfiction, but not always. So many times people tell me they really want to read but when they go into a bookstore, they feel lost. They don’t know what’s a good book and what isn’t. I often recommend books to my friends, and have a sort of personal “lending library,” but I thought my blog would be a good place to share with the public lots of good books out there just waiting to be read.

•Each entry will be titled, Read This Book!

•I’m not going to use any sort of star rating system since I'll only recommend books that I think are wonderful and definitely worth reading.

•I’m going to give a quick review plus a non-spoiler summary, as well as three mini features for each book:

1. Favorite Line

2. Idiosyncrasies

3. Bottom Line

Look for the first one very soon!

Four (Healthy) Food Products I Love

2011-05-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

1. Chobani Greek Yogurt, Lemon Flavor. This is easily the best yogurt I've ever had. It's nonfat, only 140 calories and as thick and rich as a custard. What I particularly appreciate about it is the slightly tart taste, as well as the delicate lemon pulp mixed throughout. This has become my new favorite snack, although I must warn you that all their other flavors feature fruit on the bottom, something that creeps me out.

2. Chip'ins Popcorn Chips, Sea Salt Flavor. Made by a company called Popcorn Indiana, these chips have just three simple ingredients: corn, sunflower oil and sea salt. They contain no saturated fat and only 4% regular fat, plus they even have a little bit of fiber. I've tried the white cheddar flavor, but found the sea salt to be more subtle and satisfying. They also come in Hot Buffalo Wing and Jalepeno Ranch, but eww. Really. Did I mention they're only 120 calories for a very generous serving? I love their robust crunch and interesting texture. These make Doritos seem pretty gross actually.

3. Kashi GoLean Crunch cereal. First of all, be careful not to grab the GoLean Crunch Honey Almond Flax. We made that mistake once and it was horrible. Instead, this plain version is made from seven whole grains and sesame with just a tiny bit of honey and cinnamon (I frankly can't taste either). It'll give you a whopping 32% of your daily fiber, but not in a way that feels bulky or cardboardy. It's also low-calorie and low fat, and the clusters stay crunchy. Every morning I put frozen blueberries on it with skim milk, which I love because the blueberries turn the milk ice cold and a beautiful purple color. We go through probably two boxes of this a week.

4. Masa's Miso Sesame Dressing & Sauce. I feel as if I've been on a lifelong search for the perfect utopian salad dressing. This one comes pretty close. It's got the wonderful salty tang of miso and rice vinegar but it's tempered by just a touch of brown sugar and sesame oil. Made by Rikki Rikki in Redmond, Washington, it's not exactly cheap at $4.59 a bottle, but a little goes a long way. I often use it as a dip for baby carrots and celery sticks, as well as a dressing for coleslaw. Real sesame seeds create great texture and body. It's a little higher in fat than I'd like (7% daily value/serving), but in this case it's worth it. Live large!

The Most Tender Holiday

2011-05-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Mom,

Happy Mother's Day. Though it's been almost four years without you, it still feels as fresh and painful sometimes as a new cut. What I find hardest is how the grief ages—not like a fine wine or a good cheese but like our little maple tree in the back yard that grows and grows and keeps getting bigger and more solid with the passing of time. I want to arrest it, stop the way the sound of your voice ever so slightly fades, how when the phone rings now on Sunday afternoon I know it won't be you, how, no matter how badly I wish for it, you will not know your grandchildren, Hudson and Lily, who are playing a loud and very boisterous game of freeze tag downstairs as I write this. Though they have seen my tears and remember tiny bits about you, they will never know what a big heart you had, what a quick and warm smile, what a cozy grandma you would have to been them all these years.

How would you love them.

Here's Lily. She goes to sleep like this every night with her blankie (aka "ear pillow") wrapped tightly around her face. She sleeps under the beautiful appliqued kitty quilt you'd started for her but never got the chance to finish (thanks to your dear friends, Marcia and Gloria, for doing so).

She really likes to run and just told Mark that she'd like to train for a triathlon when she's old enough. Her 7th birthday is in two weeks and she wants me to try and make a monkey birthday cake for her party. I'm sure you can imagine how good I'll be at that.

And here's Hudson. We made homemade butter a few weeks ago and he was totally into it. Like you, he enjoys complicated projects that require attention to detail. In this photo he had just carved his initials into his little tub of homemade butter. I like to imagine all the things you would do with him—teach him to sew, to make homemade caramels, show him your antique Santa collection, which is now god only knows where.

He does remember you, but I can tell he remembers you mostly through me. We got out to Minnesota so seldom when you were still alive. If only we had another chance, just one more day. I like to think of what we'd do together, just the simplest things really: sit on your front porch and drink iced tea and watch all the cars go by, walk up to Dueber's and shop for fabric and coloring books, cook up some hot dogs and baked beans and eat them at the picnic table. The kids could sit in your lap afterwards while you read them books after warm baths in the big claw foot upstairs. I'd hug you as we said good-bye, see you soon.

Little and big things have happened for me since you've been gone. I ran my first half-marathon last week. 13.1 miles, and when I was done, all I wanted to do was call you and say, "Mom, I did it!" But instead I hugged the kids and Mark and went out to breakfast with friends I love like family. But all day I kept wanting to tell you.

I get migraines now; I have to be careful with stress. Mark and I are planning a trip to Italy next summer for our 20th anniversary. This July we're meeting Amy and her family in Michigan for a week because we now have to find new ways without you. Minnesota just isn't the same without you and Dad.

Also, I'm writing a book about you. It's called Dragonfly Notes: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss. I'm digging through your old scrapbooks, letters, photos. Sometimes it's so hard I have to leave the house and not come back until I'm able. But also, it brings me closer to you and it makes me understand you in a whole new way. I found an old light blue diary of yours from when you were 12. I found a scrapbook from when you were newly married filled with dream kitchens and matching living room furniture that you one day wished to own but never did. I found a gratitude journal that you kept, and read one entry over and over: "I'm grateful for my two daughters—they make me so happy."

I miss you.

love,

Annie

Life Off Planet Facebook

2011-04-05T04:10:00.001-07:00

It’s different out here—quieter. I don’t know what my friends are doing, what movies they’re watching, what’s irritating them or delighting them, what their children are doing or saying. Even contact with my only belovéd sister has been reduced by at least 80% now that I’m off the planet. That’s a loss I mourn.

But the quiet out here can be peaceful. And when you suffer from depression, and therefore suffer a lack of perspective or balance, ignorance can be beneficial. It’s a self-protective measure really, this not knowing. It’s not noble. It’s not altruistic. It’s actually a bit lonely, though necessary, too, for a safe heart.

I went on a silent retreat for four days in March: no Internet, no TV, no television, no phone. The first day, after I was shown to my tiny room with bed, desk, window, chair, I sat and looked out at the trees: what now? My fingers fidgeted. My head spun, concocting lists of all that I wanted to “get done.” But to-do lists and silent retreats don’t mix well. I read randomly from the books provided in my room. I read St. Augustine’s Confessions and was surprised by his struggles with lust. I wrote a short essay about grief called “Dr. Blue.” I walked in the woods at night and encountered a silvery deer drinking from a pond. It looked up at me, and I at it, and we stayed that way for a very long time.

The caretaker sounded a gong for mealtimes. The food was served in a dim room with a trickling fountain in the corner. We spoke while eating, but kept the greater world at bay. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami had just hit, and I’d been left wondering how people were faring. But it was not discussed.

Back home, the world had continued on without me. Stresses and triggers arose at every turn, and when migraines came knocking, I knocked them out with medicine that made my tongue thick and my forehead heavy. I removed Facebook from my toolbar, just to see.

I’m floating out here in the dark. I’m waving. Worrying. Wondering.

The Panning Museum of Antiquated Technology

2011-03-04T05:28:00.000-08:00

As I sit here writing this on my sleek new Macbook Pro, my six year old daughter, Lily, is sitting on the living room floor banging away at the Smith-Corona Coronet electric typewriter I purchased yesterday. It was an incredible find: $6.99 at the Brockport Goodwill, in pristine condition, with the original case. The ribbon is fuzzy and faint, but after a quick search on ebay, we discovered that fresh, brand new ribbons are still available. I ordered several.

I wrote many of the stories in my first book, The Price of Eggs, on an electric typewriter. I was living in Minneapolis at the time, newly returned from Peace Corps, had no car and no meaningful employment. I took the bus one day to Montgomery Ward's in St. Paul, and bought the pumpkin-colored machine, riding home with the heavy case warm on my lap like a small child. I loved that typewriter, and spent hours in the attic of my rental house pounding out stories while I looked out into the treetops.

Years later, I joke that I now have a "museum" in my attic here in Brockport, but it's actually true. On an old table up there, I am the keeper of old telephones, landmark newspapers such as 9/11 and Obama's inauguration, Fisher Price toys, metal hair dryers, floppy disks—anything that I feel is either already defunct or soon on its way.

I realize this photo might suggest that I should possibly be tapped for an A & E "Hoarders" intervention, but in my defense let me say that the last time I brought my kids up to the "museum," my nine year old son, Hudson, asked if he could take the 9/11 newspaper to his room and read it. I said yes. His whole world changed that day. For years we'd been telling him how he was just a baby when it happened, and how we remember him lying on a blanket that morning in front of the TV. Now it has become real to him, and has shifted his taste in reading towards historical nonfiction—the power of history you can hold in your hand.

But back to the newly acquired electric typewriter.

Lily said to me this morning, "I like how it dings." I said yeah, me too. She continued: "Doesn't it sound like I'm slapping it? But I'm not. I'm just pressing." I smiled, and remembered how physical writing used to feel to me. There was great thunderous noise associated with writing: the deep rumble and vibration of the engine, the punch of the keys, the ding of the bell, the zip of the carriage, the definitive echo of the final period.

The first story I ever published, "Pigs," was revised 13 times. Each draft had to be re-typed in full every time. There was a fine Braille texture to those pages; sometimes punctuation would even break through the page and create black holes. I remember rocking slightly when I was in a good writing groove. Writing felt more deliberate then. You had to commit or go back and completely redo a page. Not so now, where you can futz around with font, cut & paste, pretend you're revising when really you're just editing and tinkering. Revising, after all, means "re-vision":
to see again newly and clearly.

This is the machine to do it. It beckons me: come back, come back.

Magnetic Color

2011-02-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

This may be one of my favorite purchases ever. I bought these magnetic color strips in Washington D.C. at the National Gallery of Art gift store. I was with my sister, Amy, and both our heads were practically spinning with all the wonderful things to buy—little packets of origami paper, Wayne Thiebaud cake note cards, Andy Warhol posters, Modigliani art cubes—what a gold mine.

But it's the magnetic color strips that got me. And they were on sale: only $10.98 for colors such as Cranberry/Canneberge/Arandano and Leaf/Feuille/Hoja and Petal/Petale/Petalo.

Of course these are highly impractical. Right now they are stuck to the side of a filing cabinet in my study. But quality of life is important, and these magnetic colors make me happy.

My Crafty Affair

2011-02-18T04:32:00.000-08:00

Something is happening to me in this, the dawning of my middle age: I have become "crafty" as my mid-life crisis.

It used to be that a trip to Joann Fabrics or Michael’s would bore the shit out of me. I remember dawdling behind my mother while she took light years searching through bolts of calico and packets of zippers and cards of buttons. Y-a-w-n. But now, I have projects. I come with a list. Just last week I bought three plastic doll heads, Stretch Magic bead and jewelry cord, a #4 X-Acto knife, and Prym Creative upholstery needles.

This is not really me, I think to myself and even say to my husband. I don’t “craft.” In fact, the very verb, “crafting,” sends waves of discomfort over me, sounds too “country charm” and unfashionable and dowdy.

I'm a professional working woman, after all, who has struggled and sacrificed to get where I am today. Prior to my mid-life “crafting” crisis, I thought these things were mutually exclusive: to be a career-driven woman and to be someone who made things such as dolls or bracelets. Where did this idea, this snobbery, come from? My mother never had a professional “career,” so to speak. She worked one odd job after another: drug store clerk, cleaning lady, factory worker, but during all of these stints she was always creating in high gear. She hand-stitched quilts for everyone she knew; she knit hats, socks, tiny doll sweaters, mittens, slippers; she sewed her own—as well as my—wedding dress. Then there was the constant flow of flannel pajamas, curtains, tatting, table runners, teddy bears: all handmade.

It wasn’t until the very end of her life (halted abruptly) that she became a “professional” quilter for profit, buying a high-tech, long-arm quilting machine with a small inheritance from her parents and setting up shop in her very own den. She was finally in business! Doing something she loved while also getting paid for it. I was so incredibly proud of her.

After she died, I sold her quilting machine on Craigslist to a woman who promised me she would treasure it and use it well. Incomplete quilts still hung off hangers in my mother’s den. I admired them, wondered if I might one day learn the skills to finish them, but then thought: no. How could I? I didn’t do well working with my hands. I lived a life of black and white, words on paper, words on screen. As a college professor and a writer, the majority of my time was spent dealing with text—writing it, revising it, analyzing it, grading it, reading it, consuming it, fretting over it.

My mid-life “craft” crisis, I realized, was me reaching out to my mother’s rich talent and trying to absorb any bit of her I could. As I made hand-sewn valentines this year, I liked to think she could see me and smile—and maybe smirk, too. She'd no doubt find it amusing and somewhat ironic to see me laboring over my "crafts" when I'd spent the majority of my life completely uninterested in such things.

It’s true that with papers to grade and classes to teach and a reading series to run, my craft projects often end up by the wayside. But, for comfort, I keep my mother’s antique metal picnic baskets filled with fabric and tins and, let’s face it, junk, right beside the desk where I work. Every now and then when my neck gets sore or I grow overwhelmed by all the text I have consumed, I take a break and open one and dig around. There’s so much beauty and chaos inside.

I remember my mother as I try to create something of beauty in this world.

The Other Side of the Desk: On Being a Student Again

2011-01-22T13:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve taught college for almost twenty years, but it was only recently that I got an itch to actually take a class myself. Perhaps the bleak and monotonous winter had worn me down. Perhaps I was hungry for some new interaction. Perhaps—dare I say it?—I was bored. I had a long winter break, and decided to try out three different classes.

I. Poetry Boot Camp

Just the title was a bit terrifying, especially since I’m primarily a prose writer, but lately I’ve been interested in language and sound and I thought: why not? I was late to the first class, which was held in the instructor’s apartment in Rochester, and when I walked into a group of eight people sipping wine and chatting amiably, no one said much. The instructor’s cats slunk around the living room and made me nervous. I checked everyone out and made some assumptions. We did not introduce ourselves, but were instantly catapulted into a writing exercise. From a handout, we were to choose 3 items and write a 14 line poem using those words. “I’m setting the timer for 13 minutes,” the instructor said. “Go!” She scuttled off to the kitchen.

It’s hard to fully express the panic I felt. Holy shit, I thought. This is insane. I don’t even know these people. WTF? I chose the words, “orange, cloud, and mother” from the handout. My whole life had been consumed recently by grief ever since my mother, and then, shortly thereafter, my father died. I knew I would plow into the grief—I couldn’t help myself—but then I worried about being a “downer.”

This was my first epiphany about what my students go through in my classes. The performance anxiety in a writing class cannot be underestimated. It looms large, beginning with the very content you choose, then what to leave in and what to leave out, and then, of course, having to “share” what you’ve written with the class. In my own courses, I’ll say, “Okay! Write a scene in which a father and son are making a stir fry together and having the ‘sex talk.’” Go!” I expect them to do it, share it, and feel okay about it. What an enormous expectation.

We did eventually introduce ourselves, which settled my heart a bit. We dragged shrimp through cocktail sauce, smeared blue cheese onto crackers, laughed when the cat started batting someone’s head on the couch. Again, it’s hard to explain: I wanted to be liked and to “fit in,” but I also wanted to prove that I was a good writer. There seemed so much at stake, both socially and artistically. And let’s be honest: you compare yourself with your classmates. I was quite taken by the French teacher’s poems, plus, she was so warm and had such an easy smile, I instantly liked her. The psychologist seemed remote, and used cerebral language play. The artist was the hippest dresser, had beautifully arched eyebrows and wrote about her South American mother. I tried to gauge where I fit in, writingwise. Somewhere in the middle, I thought, or a teeny bit above middle? Oh god.

Why did that matter at all? I was ashamed to admit it, but it did. And this helped me to understand my students even more so.

II. Yoga: Private Session

We met on a snowy night in the large yoga studio above the old bookstore. I was as antsy as if it were a blind date, though I knew the instructor from various parent/town events: still. She was so tiny I could easily lift her up in my arms and carry her around. Quiet jazz was playing. I told her about my bad back, how I’d tried everything, how desperate I was for help. She rolled me out a mat, but stood looking me up and down first.

“Hmm,” she said, ‘’you have hips, and curves.” She walked behind me. “Stand how you normally stand,” she said.

I did. She ran a hand up and down my spine.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s showing a lot of vertebrae. You want no vertebrae to show. See,” she said. “Like this.” She stood and lifted the back of her shirt up so I could see. “See how no bumps are showing on my low back?” I did. I even felt it. It was so indented it was like a deep valley.

She said we’d have to start with some basic biology, and dragged a big skeleton out from the corner. She laid it down on the floor very gently between us as if it were alive, then began manipulating the skeleton’s hips. “Your pelvis is like a bowl,” she said, “See?” She shoved her fist into the skeleton’s pelvic cavity. “The muscles below have to hold everything up. When you have babies, especially very quickly like you did, these muscles can get torn and weaken.”

I nodded and made eye contact. We were sitting close to each other and I wanted her to know how attentive and focused I was. But I was also distracted. How would learning about my bowl of a pelvis help my back? I’d tried yoga before but it gave me a headache and caused my mind to race like a hamster wheel. As she continued to explain the importance of lifting the pelvic floor, I started wondering if “Modern Family” would be a new episode tonight, and whether I should make popcorn or have cheese and crackers for a snack and whether or not we were out of red wine. Oh my god, I thought. This is exactly what my students did! I was no better than them! I just wanted to be done and go hang out at home and check Facebook and watch TV.

Eventually we did some planks and bridges. I held the positions precariously and grunted while she scribbled instructions down for me to take home. She drew little stick figures in various positions. She underlined instructions and used exclamation points. Later, I would read these while drinking white wine in front of the TV. “Remember, the pubic bone is the high point,” she wrote. “Imagine a marble rolling from the pubic bone to the belly button.”

I tried to imagine the marble and to perform the pelvic lifts from a sitting position, but it was not very effective as I simultaneously ate chips, texted my sister, watched TV and checked Facebook for all the latest. Perhaps I was more like my students than I thought.

III. Simple Sewn Book Workshop

I took this class with two friends: safety (and fun) in numbers. It was in our town’s new art gallery and sun burst through the big windows onto our work table. The teacher was loud, boisterous, and informal. At first I found her off-putting, but then I warmed to her. Sometimes she was so exuberant about the subject that her instructions were unclear, and I found myself frustrated. I mentally filed this away for my own teaching: remember, students are often just beginners so don’t get so carried away and be very clear about the basics.

As someone with degrees in English and creative writing, I had never had such a tactile class before, and found myself fascinated by all the equipment and materials: waxed linen thread, a “bone folder” for making sharp creases, a Japanese screw punch, binder’s needles. I liked the “thingy-ness” aspect, though the mess and chaos in front of me was a challenge.

One of my friends was very precise about measurements and took her time and care. My other friend was very motivated to learn as much as possible and to gain and practice skills. I found myself somewhere else—wanting to magically channel some of my mother’s creativity, wanting to gloss over, wanting to goof off and rush through. This last piece—the rushing—bothered me. “Do I really have to measure this?” I asked the teacher. “Or can I just eyeball it?”

She said I could eyeball it, but when all was said and done, it didn’t look very good. My two friends’ books looked better. Then, like a toddler, I got hungry and couldn’t concentrate. Luckily, the teacher had brought a bag of oranges and giant chocolate chip cookies. We ate and told stories, and though I didn’t feel the same performance anxiety I felt in the poetry class, I did sense in myself a desire to tell stories, to relay information about my life; I’m not sure why. It wasn’t likely I’d ever see the teacher again. But it did, again, serve as a lesson to me, pedagogically speaking. So much of the learning experience is about learning about yourself, especially in relation to other people. In just a single class, I had learned 1) that I hated clutter, 2) that I had a better time learning if personal information was shared, 3) I cared more about speed than precision (disturbing), 4) I was a chatty student, 5) lack of clarity irritated and frustrated me, and 6) I could only sit still and pay attention for 30 – 40 minutes, tops.

Conclusion #1 : taking these three classes has helped me as a professor more than anything I have ever done, and I will take it all with me as I roll into my 2011 classes and beyond.

Conclusion #2 : I love homework.

The Precipitous Girl

2010-12-21T06:03:00.000-08:00

On Having a Daughter Who Is Not Like Me, or The Precipitous Girl

by Anne Panning

My daughter is high-waisted and low-voiced. Already when she bends down to pull on pajamas, I can see she will not have flared bat wing hips like mine but will stand solid and narrow like a Greek column, and as strong. She will be tall, trim, singularly herself. At six, she wears skinny jeans and tissue tees. She wears her soccer medal to school. For breakfast she likes Nutella on bread, untoasted, with orange juice, no pulp. I cut her bangs very short like my own until recently she told me she wanted to cut her bangs off, which I only realized later meant to grow them out. I will allow it, begrudgingly.

On the day of her birth, I ate an apple on the couch and my water broke. I could feel it ping inside me like a rubber band. It was 1:00 p.m. on a Friday in May. “But no one has a baby during banker’s hours!” I said to my husband, who was in the kitchen fixing a sandwich. But she came very quickly in what would later be called in my medical file, “a precipitous birth.” Mark drove wildly along the thin curved stretch of the Erie Canal; I couldn’t speak. I’d like to say I remember looking out at the water and seeing how sunshine sparkled upon it, but the fact was I had to squeeze my eyes shut against tears of pain.

At the hospital, I crawled out of the elevator on my hands and knees. Because of the unseasonably warm May we’d been having, I was wearing a red t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. In photos taken just minutes later, holding my daughter in my arms, I would still be wearing the red t-shirt, my hair and glasses not even mussed since the birth was so fast there was no time to get into the requisite hospital gown. Later, the red t-shirt would be passed down to other pregnant friends and deemed Lucky. When it came to tortuous pain, we all agreed, speed was the talisman.

My first child had been a boy, so when I was pregnant the second time, I was desperate for a girl and said so, publicly. This made people uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said, “there’s an important distinction here. I won’t be unhappy if I have another son. But I will be unhappy never to have had a daughter.” Still, people thought it inappropriate, including my own mother, who I think worried about how to handle my disappointment if I had another boy. “No, no!” I kept trying to explain. “I won’t mourn what I have. I’ll mourn what I don’t have.”

We chose not to know the gender of the baby beforehand, even though people—sometimes total strangers —would react with unveiled hostility to our decision to wait.

For months before I had my daughter, I knew I would name her Lucy. Like my son, she would have two middle names: one Hawaiian, and the other, my husband’s last name. She would be called Lucy Kahala Rice Panning. We thought it very elegant and lyrical. But when she emerged so frantically fast, our thoughts pinballed to indecision and chaos.

There was a dry erase board on the wall in my hospital room, and Mark wrote “Lucy” on it in his tiny scrawl. I have always been shamelessly proud of my handwriting, and wished very much I’d written the name on the board. It didn’t look right. Plus, this baby girl in my arms was already so intense, I could see, yet so delicate, too. She could not be named Lucy. My grandmother, a tall, willowy redhead who’d been a nurse in the 1940s, had been a Lucille. But not a Lucy. Lucy. Lucy was bawdy, crass, a little pushy maybe and—listen to the word—“loose-y”: loose.

“It isn’t right,” I said to Mark. “Write ‘Lily’ up there.”

He did. Lily Kahala Rice Panning. I’d always loved the Victorian era gem and flower names: Pearl, Rose, Ruby, Violet, Opal. But I also knew lilies to be hearty and resilient flowers, not prone to easy wilting or fragile stems. A lily was a perennial, would grow independently, wildly, regardless of conditions. A lily stood up tall, announced itself loudly like a trumpet. That was the kind of daughter I wanted.

* * * * *

When Lily was just two years old, she hid cans of 7-UP in her dresser drawers. At age two and a half, she potty-trained in Vietnam. Knowing we’d be living there for 6 months, we’d shipped cartons of diapers over beforehand, but they arrived too late. Lily learned to go over pits, holes and squat toilets. Later, we gave the diapers away to our Vietnamese neighbors, who used them for floor mopping.

Lily is now six and has an ipod, and on it there is Jonas Brothers, Katie Perry’s “California Girls,” Queen’s Greatest Hits, “Soul Sister,” and some Jason Mraz. She likes to pretend she’s a pop star and will sometimes break dance on her brother’s bedroom floor while he shines the Halloween strobe light on her. She is always the performer and he is her techie crew. Lately she has been writing her own song lyrics, and here are some I found the other day written in blue magic marker: I want to be a pop star! I want to be a rock star. Yeah. I have a microphone. And I can dance. Yeah. When you are a pop star.

At six, Lily possesses a feistiness I don’t know that I ever had or ever will. When I was a first-grader, I wore calico dresses and tights with tennis shoes and clung to my mother’s leg when we’d go out. I was shy, quiet, had a very difficult time raising my hand in class (something that followed me all the way through college). At a recent parent-teacher conference, the report said of Lily: reads above grade level - exceeds academic expectations - friendly – a bit too talkative at quiet work times – could work neater –- a pleasure to have in class. It was a good report, academically speaking, but as an educator myself, I knew her kind—the chatty pleasant student that you like having in class but who can’t seem to turn it off and sometimes bothers with her exuberance and eagerness to entertain others. She’d be the one I’d have to bust for texting in class.

Lily walks with confidence and conviction. In the mornings, we can always tell if it’s Lily coming downstairs or Hudson because she stomps loudly and announces herself from several rooms away before entering: “Everybody! I’m up!” She expects a lot out of the world, and assumes it will freely give her what she needs and wants. She can be bitchy and irate when her expectations aren’t met. “But why can’t Santa get me the Wonder Jet Flight Simulator from the catalogue?” When I tell her it’s $200 dollars, which is a lot, even for Santa, she resists. “But what about that he has elves who can make it, or who could just go shopping and buy it for him?”

Often, though, it’s an intangible desire, some sought after quality or trait that she dreams of inhabiting. We were watching football the other night when the Dallas Cowboys made an amazing 101-yard interception and touchdown. I never watch football, but found myself cheering aloud at such an amazing feat. “Do you think I could that?” Lily asked. I said, “Oh my god. Of course you could.” But she seemed worried. “But what if I couldn’t catch the ball?” she asked. “You would,” I said. “You’d practice a lot and learn, just like these guys.” She sat back and crossed her arms, confident that the deal was sealed: yes, she could absolutely be a millionaire NFL football player someday. If she so chose.

Her “go-getterness” is not always so heartwarming, though. She can be snarly and surly and borderline mean. I once overheard her berating her older brother for a very slight misdeed—something Nintendo-related involving a SpongeBob game—but the vitriolic tone of her voice made me stop what I was doing and put my hand to my mouth. It was pure venom. She can also be cocky and inflated in her assumptions about herself. Recently her brother had a friend over and they made an elaborate fort. Two nine year old boys, they didn’t want a little sister hanging around. But she wouldn’t relent.

Later we found a letter she’d written to them and shoved under their door.

It read: I want to go in your room and go in your fort so one of you has to choose. I feel sad. So write to me that says what you want to do. Write it on the back.

When they wrote back and said she could come in the room but not in the fort, she was pissed. She wrote them again: But I never get to go in the fort. P.S. I am mad at both of you.

Later, she spent hours with them in the fort.

Still, this is the complicated part: I celebrate all of these traits in Lily because she is a girl, just as I celebrate the way my son loves to cuddle in velvet and fleece blankets, or the way he notices a new pair of earrings I’m wearing, or the way he loves to browse through the dollar store with me, leisurely humming his pleasure and comfort beside me as we look. I want a strong girl and a sensitive boy, and realize that everything we do, everything we don’t do, whether consciously or subconsciously, feeds this. Soccer for Lily. Piano for her brother. No football paraphernalia clothing for her brother. No princess pink froo-froo for Lily. In fact, when Lily was enrolled, at age 4, in a local dance class and was required to clip and spray her bangs back for both uniformity’s sake and to emulate a true “ballerina,” we pulled her from the class and brought her to Garth Fagan where boys and girls both danced in a tough physical way without gender distinction.

My mother, were she alive, would roll her eyes at so many of our battles. “You two overanalyze everything!” she’d say. And it’s true. When we suspected Lily was lying one day about how many Pez candies she’d eaten, we sent her upstairs so we could rally about it and brainstorm a proper response. “It’s just PEZ, for god’s sake!” my mother would say. But it’s so much more than that, I’d argue.

My mother expected so little from the world, and got exactly that much. Instead of a decent kitchen or respect or a solid paycheck, she got a husband who played the lottery and hid scratch-offs in his underwear drawer. She got two sons who could wait for hours in sub-degree cold to kill a deer but not remember to call her on Mother’s Day. She got two daughters, one who would stay close to her and live nearby, and me, who would find ways to get what I wanted, but sometimes at great cost. My daughter must never know this, how hard it was, how hard it is, how much struggle is ahead of her.

But here’s another complicated part: I, female, love to shop. Mark, male, loves to watch football: Okay. But we both love to cook. Mark does all the laundry. I mow the lawn. Together we make all the big financial decisions. These are the good examples. Our children will also, however, experience us in all our contradictions and flaws and hypocrisies. We both probably drink too much wine in front of them, which I was reminded of the other day when Mark came home with a case of pinot noir and both kids argued over whose turn it was to fill the wine rack. One day Mark wants to throw them in the air and wrestle, and the next day he says, “Not now. I have to finish this chapter.” I will go on a spree of ice cream buying and let them have dessert every night until one day I find it too much and say, “No dessert! You don’t need to have dessert every night!” I’ll want to be alone and go hide in my study. Mark will disappear for 10-mile runs and come back only to check his email and ignore them. None of these behaviors are particularly gendered, or so we like to think.

But Lily, as my daughter, looks at me differently than my son. She is watching me closely with her dark brown eyes. She is waiting for a sign, a nod of permission to follow, an admonition to keep up with me, and then, pumping her arms—to race ahead of me with precipitous speed.

On Want Ads and Wanting

2010-09-06T20:16:00.001-07:00

Thanks to my friend, M, my interest in want ads has been reinvigorated. This past summer we were talking at a graduation party under a big maple tree. Nothing major—just catching up on his camping trip to the Adirondacks, my visits home to help my father in Minnesota, and somehow the subject of want ads came up. I like M. He takes an unconventional approach to most everything: dumpster dives to find treasures, works at a wine bar, bikes across the country, understands the need for and appeal of “secondhand.” He is smart and sensitive with warm brown eyes. It takes time, we agreed, a special kind of person—a little old-fashioned optimism and even nostalgia—to place a want ad. We both admitted to reading the want ads voraciously.

After we spoke, I began ripping particularly interesting want ads out of the paper—teeny tiny rectangles of fine print. I taped them onto index cards.

Sometimes they are strangely sad and depressing:

Sometimes they are fueled by anger and injustice:

Seriously! Society has gotten to the point where people
are stealing garden decorations? I had bought a house
that had no curb appeal whatsoever and spent my
money and sweat building a nice garden. My
grandmother gave me her ducks she has had
since the 80’s and my mother bought me a house
present, a cute little dragon. I watered my
flowers one day to discover them gone! I couldn’t
believe someone would steal my ducks and dragon.
I hope they bring you AWFUL LUCK!

Sometimes, a strange sell:

TRY OUR NO SNEEZE Black Pepper! Freshly milled
daily. 10% off with this ad. Stuart’s Spices, 2322 Lyell
Ave., Rochester. 585-436-9329.

Or, the promise of fame and glory:

MOVIE EXTRAS TO STAND IN BACKGROUND.
Experience not required. Earn up to $200/day. 1-877- 247-6183.

Even though we were having people over for dinner, I simply had to call the movie extras number this past weekend. I was put on hold for a long time, but was able to get my German potato salad ready while I held the phone up to my ear. Xylophone music played, twangy and slow. It sounded vaguely like porn music. A recorded voice said, “Hello and welcome to Casting Services. We help lots of people every day. We can do the same for you.”

While I waited, I fried half a pound of bacon and saved the drippings. My potatoes boiled and cooled. Finally, when "Victor" answered my call, I panicked.

Me: Can you tell me more information about the job?
Victor: Are you eighteen years or older?
Me: Yes.
Victor: Can I have your zip code?
Me: (nervous) Yes. 14420.
Victor: What days are you available?
Me: (panicked) It varies.
Victor: (reading from a script) In order to make scenes look more
natural, movie directors hire extras to stand in the background.
Me: Okay.
Victor: TV and motion picture companies are looking for acting,
modeling, dancing…
Me: What kind of companies are these? (PORN! I thought.)
Victor: Companies such as MTV, Discovery, NBC, CBS...
Me: (to myself) Yeah, right.

Victor went on to tell me that for just $1.98, I could place my portfolio on their website and would be contacted by a casting company within 90 days. “Just any photo snapshot of yourself is fine,” he said. He had a very strong Indian accent, and I began to wonder if this phone service was based in India. When I asked if there were any other fees, he said that they keep no secrets from their clients and for just $34.90 a month, I could become a member. I asked for their website and he gave it to me: www.casting360.com. But my Internet went down. Thank god.

Later, I began to wonder what Craigslist might dredge up. Something about want ads online took away the mystique, but still. I had once put an ad on Craigslist for someone to sew kitchen curtains for me after my mom died (she could sew anything). I finally settled on someone I'll call "Mary." My first warning sign should've been that her daughter contacted me, not her. "Yeah, my mom can do your curtains," the girl said. She was maybe 20 and sounded like a smoker and a hardass. There was a lot of yelling in the background, but I thought: I love the idea of someone's mom sewing my curtains! I hired Mary, and she began to stalk me just a little. She also charged by the hour, my second big mistake.

One night I saw her at the local bar, Barber's. Her husband, a renowned (incompetent) lawyer, was ignoring her as he played darts with his friends. As soon as she saw me, she instantly scooted over and put her hand on my shoulder. "I still have the valances for your kitchen," she said. "I'll need to bring them over and double-check the measurements." This was a lie. She'd been lording the final valances over me until I'd allow her into my house again. She was lonely and sad. She was probably 50 years old and kept telling me she'd just run some moose border around her family room and that I should come and see it. Repeatedly, she'd stop by and sometimes I'd have to lock the doors and hide. Finally, I pulled the plug. I told her I didn't want the final valances. I sent her a check in the mail. Sometimes, though, I still see her at Barber's, and from her bar stool she'll wave at me and smile.

Craigslist is complicated, though. There are so many categories it's hard to know which one is suitable. One ad from the “general for sale” section caught my eye:

Female Rat for SALE (CHEAP) - $5 (Mount Morris NY)

Hi, I was holding a rat for a friend but she can no longer
keep her and so I am offering to sell her cheap to a good home.
SHE IS NOT SNAKE FOOD. Her full name is Koko Chanelle
but usually it’s just Koko. Also, the big reason I don’t want her
is that she seems to love biting ME. NOT everyone JUST
me. She’s very beautiful and likes an occasional treat of
Cheesies (small pieces) and maybe a chocolate chip.
She LOVES cheerios. I am willing to give whoever comes
and gets her a bag (like from walmart) of her bedding so
she feels comfy until she transitions to her new bedding,
and (if I have extra) some of my homemade rat food.
I need her gone before i get my other female for my
project for school!

I try not to, but I keep thinking of this girl with the rat. Did she get rid of it? I wonder. And what project at school requires a student to produce her own live rat? And what is her recipe for homemade rat food?

Under craigslist "Lost+Found":

Re chewy Chewy was missing for a week and we
couldn't find her, sad to say she was found in the
canal and someone was nice to take her tags we live in
albion but she was found past brockport

There are a lot of misspellings and grammatical errors on craigslist, which I try not to worry about. But what really nagged me about this ad was: to what end? What did it hope to accomplish or suggest or ask? Was it simply informing the general public that their dog had been found dead? Or was it an indirect thank you to the person who took the dog's tags and presumably returned them to Chewy's owner?

Finally, under "Rants+Raves":

What would Jesus do...?

for a Klondike bar?

Who would go out of their way to post something like this?
Who would go out of their way to read it?

Gazpacho with Shrimp

2010-08-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

I found this recipe lying on an empty seat in the Minneapolis airport. It was clipped from some newspaper—I think the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I snatched it right up. What a find.

2 1/2 pound tomatoes, cored and roughly chopped
2 medium English cucumbers, peeled, chopped
2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
1 green bell pepper
1 1/2 C V-8
1/2 C water
1/2 C olive oil
1/4 C cooking sherry
1/2 C flat leaf parsley, chopped (curly parsley is too strong)
1-2 T sugar
3 T tomato paste
1/2 t paprika
1/4 t cayenne
2-3 t salt
1/2 t pepper
1/2 pound small shrimp

In large bowl, stir together all coarsely chopped ingredients. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours or overnight. Working in batches, transfer chilled mixture into food processor. Pulse until soup is coarsely pureed. Repeat as needed with the rest. Stir to blend batches in a large bowl. Taste, adding more salt and pepper or sugar as you like. Cover with plastic and refrigerate several hours. Serve with cold fresh shrimp on top.

Note: I don't know why you have to chill the coarsely chopped ingredients before blending them. I suppose you could omit that step. All I know is, this is the best gazpacho I've ever had because it's so tasty yet so gentle on the stomach.

Can a Person Read Too Much?

2010-08-05T04:54:00.001-07:00

Recently I bought two soft comfy recliners at the thrift store. They're not very attractive, but I do like the way they smell slightly of baby powder and age, and also the way the cranberry padded velour envelops my body when I sit in it. I'm guessing they belonged to an old couple who has died, or maybe one of them has died and the other had to go into a nursing home; sometimes it makes me sad to think of them. Anyway, they were $25.00 each, a steal really, and though I wouldn't dream of putting them in our real living room, I've placed them side by side in our back sun room—a jumble of secondhand furniture, lacrosse sticks, stray Lite Brite pegs, dog toys and giant picture windows that look out into the backyard. This is where we read, my husband and I. Sometimes we read and then we nap. We jack the recliners way back, spread the books flat upon our stomachs, and doze. We wake, read some more, refill coffee or wine, depending on the time of day. We are very much like retirees, even though our small children mill around us playing Legos or asking if they can have some more Hawaiian Punch or begging to have Van or Kiera for a sleepover. The kids read, too, of course. We keep a large wicker basket of kids' books in the sun room. We have family reading time every night from 7:30 to 8:00. Our kids know that to live in our family is to read. Sometimes, though, when my daughter, Lily, asks me to play Old Maid with her, say, or really, really wants me to log her onto webkinz.com, I'll say, "Just a minute. Mommy has to finish this chapter. See?" I'll show her the book, how many pages I have to go, and she'll sit right beside me, waiting.

We have jobs, of course, my husband and I, but they also involve reading as their primary element. We're both professors, and there are always books to sample, review, read, study, test, assign. We live in books. We live for books. We write books, too, but that's another story altogether.

* * * * *

Recently I figured out that I read approximately 2.5 books a week on average. That's 130 books a year. During a Cape Cod vacation this summer, I read 2 novels and 1 memoir in 7 days. I spend a great deal of time figuring out what to read that involves a complicated tour through amazon.com, Liftbridge bookstore and the Seymour public library. Lately I've been drawn to memoirs about grief and loss (The Mercy Papers, Making Toast), autism (The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes), domestic abuse (Crazy Love), and parenting (Waiting for Daisy, Lift). Thrown in between are always, always, novels.

When I read an excellent book, I type the title into amazon.com, then click through the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section. I then choose roughly 5-10 books, then go to the "Search Inside" feature and read the first pages of each book. Then, I make a short list, see if any are available at my local library; if not, I go to Liftbridge Bookstore to see if they have them. If not, I search bn.com and then do the "Check Store Availability" to see if I can get it at the Greece Ridge Mall Barnes & Noble. I also write down in my journal the title and author of every book I've read, then give it a star ranking, 1-5. Currently I'm reading Ann Hood's novel, The Red Thread about Chinese adoptions (it's going to get five stars for sure), and I already know what's next: People Are Unappealing (Even Me), a memoir by Sara Barron, a woman who started writing porn at age 11, was on the Jerry Springer show, and grew up with a hypochondriac mother and a "homo" father. I have read the first chapter "Lady Daddy" and can't wait.

I detail all of these logistics to highlight how deeply important reading is to me, but also how time-consuming. I have never been one of those people who can find a book lying around the house and read it. I need to plan, hit on exactly the right mood and interest of the moment; it takes time. I also have a fifty-page limit: If a book is not compelling me to get back to it by page 50, it's out. "Life is too short to waste on a half-assed book," I'll say.

* * * * *

Reading is sedentary. To combat this, I'll go to the gym, pound around on the elliptical for awhile, watch the Food Network as I'm doing so (sometimes HGTV if Rachel Ray is the only thing going). I'll put the treadmill on the highest uphill setting and pretend to climb a mountain. I sweat with ear plugs in my ears. Across the street I see people pull up and head into Dr. P's chiropractor office and remember what a bozo he was when trying to fix my lumbar; he was all about sports. "You play anything?" he always asked me, just waiting for a chance to tell me about his glory days as a rugby player. I watch this one red-headed guy I'm pretty sure is a drug dealer wander past in black jeans and black t-shirt on 90 degree days. He's always smoking. He always looks in the gym's plate glass windows with a look that suggests we are all the biggest idiots he's ever seen.

When I'm done, I weigh myself then drive back home. This is how I don't read.

* * * * *

According to tax records, in 2004 I spent $985.48 on books.

In 2005, I spent $1,141.00 on books.

In 2007, I spent $1,150.91 on books.

One year, it reached over $2,000.00.

At this rate, considering I've been reading like this for most of my adult life, this would total, so far, roughly $25,000 spent on books.

Dear god.

What else could that $25,000 have bought, I wonder.

•An old classic Jaguar (my dream car)?
•A trip around the world?
•An in-ground swimming pool?
•A new kitchen for my mother?
•A semester off from teaching?

But, I remind myself, what remains after reading a book is permanent. It can't be lost or stolen or die. I like to think of it as a sort of life insurance against despair and hopelessness. Or like getting another college degree in English over and over and over again.

* * * * *

The problem with too much reading is that it's silent. You don't talk or interact with other people. One time my husband and I had an argument about my reading too much, which was really about the way I sometimes stepped out of our real life and into the world of books. It was true. If you read too many books, too often, there can be negative consequences.

•Lost sleep
•Neglected relationships
•Sadness funk
•Tendency to spout facts at parties and gatherings only to realize they were gleaned from fiction and therefore dubious and unsubstantiated
•Social anxiety disorder
•Fuzzy eyes
•Loss of touch with reality

I could slow down. I could do a book a week, but then what? The only television shows I really adore are "Intervention," "Hoarders" and "Obsessed" on A&E—all documentary shows about people struggling with addictions. I am riveted as I watch these shows, only stepping into the kitchen during commercials to refill my chardonnay. If you can be addicted to buying birds and collecting toothbrushes and cleaning the bathroom, you can also, I'm afraid, be addicted to reading books.

Have Children, Will Travel: Bangkok

2010-07-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Unlike Saigon’s back packer district where grizzled old army vets in tank tops and tattoos could be found drinking beer at any hour of the day, Bangkok’s Khao San Road seemed to be populated by the twenty and under crowd. Everyone was young and cool and international with an earth-grunge-free-love-but-can- afford -to-travel -extensively-and -wear -real -Crocs-and-Ray Bans way. As we dragged our two children, Hudson and Lily, through the crowded sidewalks, a hippie wannabe wearing overalls and Birkenstocks sang “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Beside him hung a rack of t-shirts with rasta-colored marijuana leaves on them. At the next stall, little paper containers of phad thai were for sale for fifty cents and looked like they’d been withering out in the sun all day. The phad thai vendor’s t-shirt read: “I Lost My Virginity in Madagascar.”

Other things for sale on Khao San Road:

•camo cargo shorts
•batik halter top
•fresh mangoes and sticky rice
•fake spongy Crocs
•Camus, Hesse, Dostoyevsky novels
•wraparound peasant skirts
•bootleg Xeroxed Lonely Planet guides
•toe rings and silver ankle bracelets with little bells on them
•tie-dyed sarongs
•a black t-shirt that said “Dave Hits 50!
•brass incense holders
•patouchouli oil
•people who would dreadlock or French braid your hair

The young twenty-something set I could actually deal with; we both taught college, after all, and were used to being more than twice the age of our students. No, our biggest tactical error about traveling to Bangkok was the all-out oppressive heat. It was beginning to make me sick and feeble. As we plowed through the hot crowded streets, Lily kept pulling on my hand, begging to go back to our hotel, to please let her go swimming in the pool. By that point, however, Hudson had become hellbent on buying a small Thailand flag with the bhat he’d earned earlier by massaging our feet and by cleaning up errant puzzle pieces off the floor. Hudson had been collecting flags from all the countries he’d visited . So far, he’d scored Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan and Canada, but we were having a hard time finding aThai flag among the hippie detritus of Khao San Road.

Once we arrived back in our room (alas, no Thailand flag purchased), we were startled to see men dangling right in front of our window outside. Our room was not ideal anyway: it faced a cement wall and was dreary and damp, but now there were four men staring in at us. I called the hotel desk three times, but they blew me off. I whipped the curtains closed, but they were so thin you could see right through. The men soon began pounding against the side of the building with mallets and hammers. Our walls shook. I called again. We were paying good money for the room! I complained. This was unacceptable! But again, the manager, clearly used to bitchy American tourists, put me off. “Nothing else available except the suite I told you about earlier. It is $150 U.S.”

Later, after we’d all taken a stultifying two-hour nap, I woke up to the sound of dripping water. “A leak!” I said, triumphant, and called the front desk to report it. I hated to be one of “those” people, but there really was water coming down right through the ceiling and dripping onto our luggage. This time the manager sighed loudly when I called. He made a familiar clicking sound I’d come to associate with impatience and irritation in Asia. When I told him about the leak, dramatizing it just a bit, there was something in his voice that insinuated I’d actually orchestrated, or caused, the leak just so I could get a different room. “All right. Yes. You may have the suite,” he said. “Yes, for the cost of a regular room.” He clicked his mouth again.

The suite had thin plywood walls with a big white divider running down the center of the room. It was nice but not that nice with a yellow vinyl couch and a whole bank of windows—windows that were frosted so you couldn’t see outside. I had a hard time enjoying it, though; I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d unfairly defeated the manager and so my victory felt tainted.

The next morning’s highlight was the breakfast buffet. The kids gunned immediately for the silver dollar pancakes, the hot dogs, and the red Jell-O, but pushed away the bright orange papaya chunks, which, I had to admit, smelled like butt. They also declined the beautifully fanned circles of fresh pineapple. But who cared? Real life no longer applied.

Around us sat young European women in big linen Houdini pants and tight camis, braless, who seemed tested by the hotel’s 9:30 a.m. buffet cut-off time. They sat with their heads in their hands, smoking, picking at bits of toast. They’d clearly had different evenings than ours, which had entailed trying to bathe the kids in the microscopic shower stall, then watching back-to-back dubbed episodes of “Will & Grace.” The other prominent buffet group was the thuggish American college boys. They were easily identified as American by their Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts, their droopy cargo shorts, and, most importantly, their penchant for wearing ball caps—backwards if they were really cool, regular if they were medium cool. They swore a lot, whacked each other on the arms, and ate huge bowls of cereal. This was a tribe I knew well from teaching at Brockport. Sometimes they looked so much alike that I honestly had a hard time keeping them straight even by semester’s end. Still, I had to give these guys credit for schlepping all the way over to Asia for vacation (even if it was primarily fueled by the infamous live sex shows and preponderance of affordable prostitutes).

Most of my students had grown up within an hour or two of Brockport and didn’t seem to have the travel bug at all. In fact, one year when I’d used a literary magazine focused on travel writing, a strange, antagonistic bitterness came pouring out of my students. “People who travel think they’re so great,” one graduate student said. (I happened to know he still lived at home, in Brockport, with his parents). “It seems like these writers just want to say, ‘Oh, look at me! I’ve been here and here and here and you haven’t, so I’m better than you.’’ A couple students went a step further by wondering why anyone would want to leave upstate New York anyway since it was so great and had everything you needed. “I just like to stay home,” one student said. “It’s less stressful.”

Indeed, but as I watched this posse of big beefy American boys begin a food fight with Cheerios, I thought: at least they’re here; at least they’re allowing themselves to be influenced by something bigger than themselves. “But don’t do what they’re doing,” I whispered to the kids, who looked on with wonder and awe at their food fight. “Very rude.”

We loved the tuk-tuks—tiny open-air motorcars as public transport. We hired a bright green one for a few hours to take us to The Golden Mount Wat, an elaborate gold-encrusted temple far up on a hill. When the tuk-tuk driver dropped us off, Mark said, “Isn’t this peaceful? to which Hudson replied, “My underwear is sticking to my butt,” to which I replied, “Mine, too.” We had to scale hundreds of steps to reach the top. There was no shade. At times, I had to carry Lily on my back to help see her through. When we reached the top, my head was spinning. Luckily, cold bottled water was for sale at the top. Mark and I looked out over the sprawling, smoggy city. It was our 15th anniversary. We'd met as Peace Corps volunteers in The Philippines and had been bonded by international travel ever since.

“We’ve come a long way,” Mark said. He squeezed my hand. The kids were digging through bins of trinkets for sale—beaded bracelets, laminated Buddhist prayer cards, gold coins, tiny Buddha statues, rosewood fans with silk tassels. They were so good about being dragged from place to place in the grueling heat without complaint. We bought them each a fan and some chewing gum and headed down.

Later, back at our hotel, Mark and I opened a bottle of red wine we’d bought on Khao San Road, and started talking about Vietnam, where we’d just lived for six months. It was hard not to make comparisons when traveling from country to country, and we began to note the differences. Vietnam was cheaper. Thailand was cleaner. Vietnamese people seemed suspicious and distrustful. Thai people seemed more cosmopolitan and open. Saigon's traffic was scarier. Bangkok's food was better.

We realized, with some chagrin, we missed little about Vietnam. But we also realized, talking further, that we didn’t regret living there either. How could you simultaneously dislike something and find it very difficult while at the same time enjoy the experience of it and come to embrace it? Which is exactly how we’d come to view our days in Vietnam. There was an odd pleasure to the difficulty of living hard in a strange place.

For our anniversary, Mark and I had both purchased each other silver jewelry—a Bangkok specialty. I bought Mark a braided silver ring for 350 bhat on Khao San Road; he bought me a matching silver necklace and bracelet. Fifteen years, and there we were in Bangkok, Thailand—a family of four.

We stayed up late that night drinking wine on one side of the room, the kids asleep on the other.

Politics Miniature?

2010-06-08T10:19:00.001-07:00

I found these tiny pieces of wood along the Erie Canal foot path this morning in Brockport, New York. Each one is no bigger than a credit card. Each is 1/4 inch thick, and pine, I think. I kept hoping there would be more—a sort of Hansel and Gretel bread crumb trail leading to some final profound epiphany, but there were only these two tiny notes, written on both sides of the pine. The only person I passed on the canal path was a large man on a three-speed bike with sunglasses and a dark moustache who did not return my "hello."

Was this some sort of apocalyptic doomsday warning?

Performance art?

Guerrilla politics?

* * * * *

I want to respond in kind. This person had obviously taken such care by sawing the little pieces of pine into nice even cuts, writing the messages in permanent marker in a passionate scrawl, dropping them randomly along the path over a nearly five-mile stretch.

I think I'll leave a trail of fortune cookies leading to the nice open clearing by the cottonwood tree where you can see the cabbage just beginning to peek up. There, I'll have a small table set with a splendid meal of bread and cheese, strawberries and kiwis, and a pair of binoculars for clear viewing.

Iguanas, Ipods, and Birthdays

2010-05-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

Today when I went running, my ipod was dead so I had to use my son’s. He’s nine. His ipod is newer than mine; it’s lime green and has slick graphics and better games. He also has a fairly eclectic range of music. I saw he had 16 playlists, which surprised me, including Carole King, White Christmas, and Graceland. But he had one playlist with 25 songs called “Party Mix,” so of course I chose that one. Party Mix?

*

“Minnesota Polka” by Karl and the Country Dutchmen

*

I headed out along the Erie canal path, determined to reach Sweden-Walker Road despite the heat. Yesterday I’d gone to Dick’s Sporting Goods and then Target to get myself some new running clothes. I love clothes, and have always been drawn to wintry fabrics like velvet, corduroy, and merino wool; athletic wear has always repelled me with its glossy sheen, meshy fabrics and jelly bean colors. But as I jogged along in my Blue Burst shorts and my Sun Flash top, I swore I ran better, faster, no side ache, no problem. It was the bright new clothes! And also, perhaps, my son’s music.

*

“Fame” by Irene Cara

*

I remember with both of my pregnancies, I’d swum laps at the college pool right up until the day of my deliveries. What I loved about swimming laps was not just that cool blue immersion but the meditative way I would mindlessly count each and every stroke. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…and absolutely nothing else. I would not plan menus or classes. I would not worry and fret and make myself miserable. I would count and breathe and swim. When I run, I plan. My daughter’s sixth birthday party is on Saturday, and although we’re not “theme” kind of people, I run through a checklist in my head to see if all is in order: pink paper plates, purple plastic cutlery and purple napkins, a two-layer vanilla and chocolate cake, goody bags with the right balance of candy and toys (I’d spent probably half an hour in the birthday aisle at Target, debating: monster finger puppets or bundles of fake money? Nerds or Skittles? Glitter pens or hologram notebooks?). Because I want to give my children so many things that I never had, I sometimes find myself overdoing it.

*

“Slash Dot Dash” by Fatboy Slim

*

Lily actually turned six last week in Montserrat, a small island in the Caribbean just south of Antigua. We’d gone there because my husband, Mark, has been transfixed by volcanoes ever since the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption dropped ash on his hometown—miles away from the event. Every morning on Montserrat, roosters woke us up at our villa. Iguanas scootched around the yard, panting. We had packed brightly-wrapped gifts for Lily, but after she opened the pink Zhu Zhu pet named Jilly and its little pink bed, after she’d opened the rainbow sucker and pack of Orbit gum, I couldn’t shake the feeling that her birthday didn’t feel special enough. Sure, I’d stumbled around before I’d even had any coffee and whipped up some pancakes for her. I’d stuck a candle in the middle of the stack and we sang "Happy Birthdady" to her, but then—I don’t know. There we were in the middle of the tropics on a tiny nearly deserted island with a panoramic view of volcano, mountains and ocean, yet it felt “off” somehow for a six year old girl’s birthday. We so often dragged them around to places we thought would be “adventuresome” and they were. They certainly were.

*

“Kids of the Future” by Jonas Brothers

*

Hudson admitted to us after we got back from Montserrat that he wished he could have spent his latest birthday in a foreign country, as well. He’d turned six in Vietnam. We’d thrown a 3-day party for him there including a boat ride down the Mekong River and a stay at My Khanh Resort that offered straw huts right on top of the water. Lily had turned 3 in Taiwan; I’d wandered all around Taipei in the dark, searching for a fancy birthday cake and finally found one in the basement of a department store. It was a little chocolate mound with a flying elephant riding a wafer cookie on top. Once word got out about Lily’s birthday, the hotel also sent a cake up: white and elaborate like a wedding cake. We’d gone out to a smoky Japanese restaurant for dinner that night and what I remember most was looking out the smudged window as it rained and Lily sat, warm and snug, on my lap. That's what mattered.

*

“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen

*

Listening to Hudson’s ipod makes me long for something I can’t name. It’s a mood perhaps, like nostalgia, or missing everything, then realizing it’s all right there in front of you.

Egg Salad: A Meditation

2010-05-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my husband, Mark, boiled six eggs and asked very kindly if I’d be willing to make egg salad for lunch. There’s a fairly complicated way that I make it that he absolutely loves and over the years I have never revealed to him the ingredients. It’s a little secret I hang onto, a pocket of history in our marriage that radiates something tender between us. He has also promised not to read this blog entry to honor my secret.

Egg salad is one of those comfort foods, like tuna noodle casserole or potato salad, that must be made just the way you remember it. I remember when Mark and I went on our honeymoon we encountered our first “his family’s way of making something” versus “my family’s way of making something” argument. Our honeymoon consisted of driving our little Datsun station wagon from Minnesota, where we got married, through Iowa, and into Missouri. We’d made no plans or reservations; we had a tent and a car full of all the wedding presents we’d received, and I lived in fear that someone was going to steal them while we slept. In fact, I was so worried about it that every night we unpacked the whole load, shoved it into whatever tent or cottage or motel room we were staying at, then reversed the process every morning. It was quite impractical, but so were we.

It was the way we did things back then: an open, spontaneous, winging it that carried us along to interesting places. One night near Branson, Missouri, we found a small resort at the end of a twisting gravel road. We took the last available cottage, then decided to make tacos for dinner. But that’s when we hit a snag. Mark was soft-shell tacos; I was Ortega hard shell in a box. Mark was kidney beans mixed in with the hamburger; I was just hamburger. Mark was cumin, chili powder, sautéed garlic and onion; I was 99-cent Ortega flavor pouches that turned the meat a delicious, greasy orange color. He let me win; we made the cheap crunchy version I’d always had in the trailer court with my family. But the victory was short-lived. As I opened the oven door to get the shells out, a big blue flame leapt out onto my face. The cottage instantly reeked with the sour smell of burned human hair; a good portion of my bangs had balled up into hard little nuggets. The flames had also licked underneath my eyeglasses and singed my eyebrows and eyelashes. A hot red patch appeared on my cheeks later that night, and Mark held a dish towel of ice over against my face while I leaned against his shoulder.

As time passed, we learned to forge our own recipes via a hybrid of what we grew up with and what we’d come to concoct on our own. In fact, our tuna noodle casserole now has a decidedly Asian flair with water chestnuts, chow mein noodles and sesame seeds—though it still contains, of course, the crucial cans of cream of mushroom soup.

Here are the ingredients for my egg salad:

6 hard-boiled eggs (bathed in cold water with ice cubes)
Coarse ground black pepper (I hate powdery pepper)
Salt
McCormick garlic powder (not garlic salt)
Clover Valley mayo (from Dollar General—it’s creamy and yellow and cheap)
Miracle Whip Light (our jar is almost always empty)
Kikkoman soy sauce
Lea & Pearins worcestershire sauce
White sugar
Pudliszki mustard (one of those weird German ones from Aldi)

I chop the eggs to bits while Mark sits at the kitchen table and reads either The Economist or The New Yorker that almost invariably comes in the day’s mail. He’s more prone to reading magazines than me, while I, on the other hand, keep a much brisker novel-reading pace. Magazines, for me, are for prettiness and pleasure. I grew up with my mother’s many women’s magazines lying around the house. I loved browsing through them, looking at cute ways to organize your closets with white storage cubes or how to make bird feeders out of 2-liter soda bottles or how you can entirely change the tone of your living room by adding bright red throw pillows. Magazines to me are for looking and dreaming. As a professor, I read serious books and articles for a living, and break them apart and look at them from every angle, so when I’m home I want Martha Stewart to show me the simple secret of how to fold fitted sheets. And I wish mine were such a lovely robin’s egg blue as hers are.

But back to the egg salad. I like to chop my eggs very fine with a serrated steak knife. I chop them right in the Rubbermaid container and then layer all the ingredients on before I stir. Mark likes to toast his bread for an egg salad sandwich but I like to sink my teeth in soft bread. Sometimes we have fancy greens in the fridge and this time there is an arugula, spinach and radicchio mix. I just use the spinach. Egg salad should not have fancy greens associated with it.

My mother used to make not only egg salad sandwiches for dinner, but fried egg sandwiches as well. She fried the whites to a hard brown lace and the yolks to flat chalky disks. She fried them in butter. She made them with cheap white bread, then cut them into triangles, stacked them on a plastic tray, and served them with a bag of Old Dutch potato chips. The grease would soak through the white bread and make it look gray. She also fried onions to a brown caramelized state, but she and my father were the only ones who slathered such horror between the bread and egg. We drank thick white milk with the egg sandwiches and ate off paper plates. “It’s not like the Queen of England is coming over,” my mother would say.

Mark and I polish off the entire egg salad in one sitting. After our sandwiches, we dredge potato chips through it like dip. We can’t get enough, though finally I slide the container over to Mark. He always says the same thing. “Well, there’s not really enough to save,” he’ll say. And then I’ll say, “Yeah, you might as well kill it.” And he’ll say, “I might as well.”

And between us we will have consumed six eggs and countless moments sitting across from one another at the table like this, holding our secrets.

On Facebook and The Fabrication of Lives

2010-04-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

At first I was reluctant. I remember my students telling me a couple years ago about the wonders of Facebook, and me saying, “Yeah, but why can’t you just send your friends email?”

“But no!” they said. “Just try it. It’s all under one roof. You’ll see!”

And oh. Oh-ho, yes. It didn’t take long—old high school friends, college roommates, relatives, acquaintances, current and former students, writers, colleagues—all under my own blue and white roof. I was smitten. Fun! In touch with so many long-lost friends all over the globe. Caught up with people I hardly ever see. It was magical.

It may have been one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.

Let me explain.

1. I have never had a good shut-off mechanism. If I want to buy a coffee table, say, I will search online for days, weeks, late into the night, obsessively, trying to nail down the exact right one. I cannot let it go. I cannot stop the hunt. So, too, with Facebook.

2. Sometimes I’m more concerned with what to write for my status update than I am with my current book-in-progress (and I have heard this from other writers, too).

3. I have seen newborn babies ushered into the world, celebrated a friend's successful surgery, even followed a couple day by day on their honeymoon via Facebook. It is neither good nor bad to witness these things. In fact, I find it quite compelling and can’t get enough (see #1). But by tearing the mask of privacy off these life-marking moments, I am often left oversaturated yet oddly underfed. I don’t know where to go next, what to think, how to respond. More importantly, in the shadow of all these significant moments, I often find my own life to be lacking. In fact, Facebook has made me very dissatisfied, uncertain and confused about my life. In reading so often about other peoples’ lives that make them sound witty and wonderful and adventurous and generous and creative, there is a dark sense of competitive doom, a gnawing anxiety that my own life will never be enough. As much connection, friendship and pleasure I’ve experienced on Facebook, there has been just as much envy, longing, and loneliness. It makes sense to me why so many people, at one point or another, publicly announce, on Facebook, that they’re taking a break from Facebook. It’s simply too much; it can become damaging to our mental health and well being.

Below, some examples of Facebook's negative effects on my life:

1. An old friend of mine, L, seems to spend so much more time with her two little kids than I do with mine. Plus, she’s remodeling their rooms so cutely and they wear really expensive and cool Hanna Andersson clothes. I’M SELFISH AND DON’T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT MY KIDS OR HOUSE.

2. How could T, who just had a baby, be writing again already? I’M LAZY.

3. How does N know so much about wine? I’M A YAHOO.

4. So Ms. P started running suddenly and lost tons of weight and now wears a size 4? MY STOMACH IS DOUGHY.

5. So this family does nothing but travel all over the country and camp in a tent in gorgeous state parks? BROCKPORT SUCKS.

6. My sister hosted a huge Christmas dinner with 25 relatives at her house. WE ARE ALWAYS ALONE.

7. One of my friends, J, thanks another friend, M, for the great time she had at their party. WHY WASN'T I INVITED?

8. Friend G has been out digging in her garden all day. I LIVE IN MY HEAD.

These are admittedly petty, small-minded and short-lived reactions. But here’s the thing: how many of these posts are accurate portrayals of lives lived? Not many, of course. What's hard to remember is they're just excerpts, incomplete moments polished and shined for the public. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying anyone is out-and-out lying in their Facebook posts, but just as when a photographer takes a picture, there is a choice made between what to put in and what to leave out. It reminds me of when me and my husband and two kids lived in Vietnam and kept a blog. Looking back through the postings and pictures later, I was amazed by how fun it all looked, how exciting, how many smiles & swimming pools & gorgeous sunsets there were. What wasn’t included, of course, were the long hours and days spent holed up in the only room with air conditioning, simply getting through the days. What wasn’t included was how, in the absence of friends or a support network, I felt my depression creeping up on me again, threatening to throw a wet blanket over my mood. What wasn’t included were the many long nights Mark and I would sit outside in the ungodly heat drinking warm beer, slapping mosquitoes on our legs, hoping we wouldn’t get malaria.

Facebook, of course, is the same, although I’ve noticed that when someone does write, “I’m sad today,” there is a general supportive rallying, a rushing to aid the person in need that I actually find quite moving. But it isn’t very common. Mostly we show off a little or amplify the actual experience lived. I remember last Christmas standing on a kitchen chair, photographing some beautiful pink frosted cookies I’d made. I took over 10 shots just to get them exactly right. Then, I posted them on Facebook, and waited for numerous responses that eventually came flooding in. What no one knew was how awful the cookies tasted and how I ended up throwing them out. What no one knew was how making the cookies brought back the grief of my mother's death so sharply that I ended up clutching the kitchen counter and sobbing until my head hurt.

If we all posted truly honest status updates, it would be too worrisome, too raw; we would end up scaring each other—thus, the fiction. The fabrication of our Facebook lives is necessary and understandable, but it can also unsettle with its false bravado, its embellished cheer, its manufactured candor.

On Running and Writing

2010-03-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

Every single time I go out running, I think of Joyce Carol Oates. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I met her briefly when she came to Brockport as our visiting writer; she seemed grouchy and reticent to engage in any kind of small talk, but she did mention how many of her novels are composed in her head as she runs, and that she actually envisions scenes and then revises problematic scenes as she runs. "Ideally,” she writes, “the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.”

I head out, crossing first over the Erie Canal bridge, then zigzagging through a neighborhood of modest ranch houses before swinging past the public library and back up Main. I listen to my ipod; without it, I can’t run very far, if at all. The fact is in real life I don’t like listening to music very much and find even classical music grating. I have neither hip nor sophisticated musical taste: Meatloaf, Donna Summer, Ethel Merman, polka, Ricky Martin. I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ll sometimes skip forward to hear Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t’ Start the Fire” when I really need motivation.

Unlike Oates, however, when I run I’m usually trying (desperately) to run away from my writing. I run in order to not think. “Little Machine, Little Machine,” I chant to myself in my head, which is the only way I can keep myself going. The fact is, it’s very difficult for me to run for several reasons: 1) I have a bad lower back, 2) I don’t like to sweat, 3) I hate the look and feel of athletic wear, 4) I hate to exercise in public, 5) I have a hard time shutting off my mind. But because I live so much inside my head, I have to make a concerted effort to remember that I have a body and to use it.

But there’s something that happens when I run: I get ideas. Yes, sometimes it’s an idea for a great new way to cook pork tenderloin. Or sometimes it’s an idea for a cool outfit I might put together the next day for teaching. But more often than not, it’s an idea for a story, an essay, an opening image. Most often it’s induced by the senses, and imbued with memory. I can’t, for example, run along the Erie Canal without thinking of my grandparents’ cabin on Lake Minnewawa and the way the sunlight twinkled off the waves, the way my grandpa would scale and filet sunfish in the backyard, dropping their tiny gray guts into an ice cream pail full of water, the way my sister and I drank root beer on the dock, read Seventeen magazine, slathered ourselves with Coppertone and had to keep moving, plank by plank, to follow the sun.

On weekends, when I run past college rentals with students playing beer pong in the yard, wearing bikini tops and shorts, holding up signs that say, “YOU HONK – WE DRINK,” I can’t help but think of those Friday afternoons in Minneapolis when we all threw money into the beer kitty for a case of Pfeiffer’s, played quarters at the dining room table for hours, then went screaming down the street to Blondie’s Bar where we danced on the table in our tie-dyed t-shirts.

“Little Machine,” I chant, “Little Machine.”

I could've never predicted I’d end up here in this tiny town on the Erie Canal, the great, gray glacial plains of Lake Ontario to the north, the deep black Elba onion fields to the south. Yet it’s been a fertile place for my imagination to grow. My novella, “Freeze,” is the first fictional piece that truly grew out of this region. You can’t drive past the Kodak tower for almost a decade and not have it worm its way in. You can’t run past tall, eerie Victorian houses and not imagine lives lived inside. You can’t walk over huge slate sidewalks, spun out of place by old gnarled tree roots, and not feel the power of history beneath them. My town is called a village—something I used to find very amusing and “quaint” when I first moved here twelve years ago. Now, I understand what that means.

“Little Machine,” I chant. “Little Machine.”

I run past my friends’ houses and wonder what they’re doing, if they’re happy, what they worry about at night before they fall asleep. I run past our babysitter’s house and hope she isn’t still suffering from insomnia. I run past Jill’s Antiques and think I should go buy those Pyrex bowls before someone else does. I run past the house that just burned and wonder what was lost—a pressed corsage? a valentine in a grandmother’s cursive? I run past my friend’s apartment complex and wonder if he’s on the treadmill or cooking salmon on his George Foreman grill.

When I reach home, I’m shot, utterly. But full, too, of freshly oxygenated thoughts.

“Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running,” Oates writes, “the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.”

Short Stories & Telephones

2010-03-04T11:44:00.000-08:00

One thing that’s important to me as a fiction writer is a certain inclusion in terms of character. I much prefer stories told by those not often granted a voice. Growing up in a trailer court, my family didn’t have a telephone. The reason was purely financial: we couldn’t afford one. I remember my bedroom windows faced the graveyard and a dead-end road. There was a loneliness that pervaded my days, and I spent a great deal of time either looking out at the gravestones or reading. Looking back, I can see how this lack of a telephone influenced me as a writer. Without a phone, I wasn’t heard or heard from. We were all, I remember thinking, essentially silenced. Instead, I read and filled my head with other voices, but that need, that pressing need, for all of us to be heard, to be recognized by the larger world, stayed with me.

As the late Frank O'Connor wrote of the short story: “…the modern short story is a genre that deals with members of ‘submerged population groups,’ excluded by one means or another from living in the certainties of civilization-- people of a minority, outsiders, marginalists, for whom society provides no place or means of self-respect.”

Many of my characters in my book, Super America, reflect this:
•a postal carrier injured by a pit bull on her route
•an elementary school lunch lady
•a gay hairdresser
•the ATV driving, gun-toting “hillbillies” who disrupt a quiet suburban subdivision
•a pregnant college student waitress

Having grown up in a family in which both parents floated from one menial job to another, I almost always end up focusing on issues of class in my fiction. Also, I’m intrigued by the way education (especially advanced degrees) can create isolation, alienation, and even resentment. In my book’s title story, “Super America,” Theo, a theatre major, is picked up by his ne’er-do-well father for spring break. On the drive home, the father says, “Don’t talk college. That was my one rule about you going off to the Cities like that. Don’t be an ass. You got to talk normal. You gotta stay who you are.”

Fiction, particularly short fiction, has always been a means for me to work out the tension and alienation of class. I think short fiction works so well for this because, as Frank O’Connor also says: “What makes the short story a distinct literary form is ‘its intense awareness of human loneliness.’” I try to teach this elusive idea every semester in my writing workshops, it seems, but how do you train students to pour human loneliness into a short story? How do you get student writers to even accept and acknowledge human loneliness?

Writing about her own work, Eudora Welty once said, "What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself."

I want to make that jump; I want to amplify silent voices.

There’s a woman in my hometown in Minnesota who shows up at all the grand openings and ribbon cutting ceremonies with her 110 camera. She’s tall and willowy with stringy gray hair. She wears old-fashioned blouses and skirts with white anklets and brown lace-up shoes. She snaps millions of pictures, then takes the film cartridges to Rexall Drug for developing. She lives alone. She wears bandannas tied under her chin. She keeps a folded hankie squeezed into her hand at all times.

There’s a man in Brockport we call “The Security Guard.” He looks a lot like Charles Manson, follows all the postal carriers around town, and pretends to talk into a fake walkie-talkie. He thinks he’s protecting us all. He’s crazy, yes; he salutes every car that passes; he has gold chevrons sewn to the sleeves of his dirty jacket; occasionally, he jumps on his bike and hurries away in a panic as if someone's chasing him. Sometimes I watch him pacing with his walkie-talkie in front of my house and wish so badly I could hear what's going on in his head.

The telephone is ringing.

Teaching Literature vs. Teaching Creative Writing

2010-02-26T06:54:00.000-08:00

When I walk into my Recent American literature class, my shoulders aren’t tense. I don’t have to do deep breathing. I don’t feel the swirling, pulsing tension that I do when I enter my creative writing workshops. I’ve come to realize that in the literature classroom, you can have a great day, an okay day, a dud day, but in the end, no one is going to be personally celebrated, hurt, wounded or knocked out of the ball park. In short, because students are not producers of the literature but are, instead, consumers of it, there’s filter. It’s that simple.

Or is it?

Although I love both, I find teaching literature far easier than teaching creative writing.

Here are the difficult things about teaching creative writing:

1. The intense “homework” due every single night. For every single class, you must read at least two student-written short stories, then craft a personal, instructive critique letter to each student. It’s good honest work, but it is laborious and intense.

2. You must try to create a “filter” (see first paragraph) even though the actual author sits right there in the room. You must simultaneously “protect” the author from jealous bullies and ignorant readers and make sure he or she is not in a defensive crouch or blind posture when receiving criticism.

3. You must make sure students are not using the words, “I liked this,” or “I didn’t like this,” or “I loved this,” or “I hated this.” You must constantly teach students how irrelevant it is to like or not like something. This is much harder than it may seem.

4. You must guide each student writer towards his or her own personal aesthetic vision, be it one you admire or not.

***

My literature classroom zings with a steady hum of energy like a good strong refrigerator. Yes, vehement, opinionated stances are taken and argued. Students want others to agree with them and take their sides. There is posturing, prodding, preening. But at the end of the day, no one is in tears. No one storms out of the room, declaring they will no longer be an English major. Random groups don’t gather outside the classroom, taking sides, soothing egos, promising payback. Nonetheless, teaching literature can be tricky, too.

Here are the difficult things about teaching literature:

1. Sometimes I do not want to tear apart a book I love. “Isn’t this a fantastic book?” I want to say. I want the entire class period to be a love fest for that book.

2. The filter I referred to earlier can also have a soporific effect on students. It’s just a book some old guy from Detroit wrote. They can’t “relate” to it. Their engagement level is compromised by the haze of the authorial filter.

3. To have students write creatively in a literature classroom feels like cheating.

4. Reading is private. For years I have resisted book clubs because I find reading (the scouting out of what I want to read as well as the actual act of reading as well as my own response to what I read) to be a deeply private pleasure. Sometimes I find it difficult, even in a college classroom, to coax out someone’s true reaction to a book because I respect the privacy of reading so much.

Sew Easy

2010-02-18T07:28:00.000-08:00

My mother could sew anything. In fact, she even sewed my sister and me homemade underwear when we were little girls. I can still feel the slippery pink nylon, the soft elastic around the legs, the little strawberry appliqué at the hip. When I told my mother once that it must have been awful to be so poor that she had to make homemade underwear, she said, “Well, we weren’t that poor!”

But they were. I think.

But maybe it’s more complicated than that. Maybe for her sewing was more than just a financial necessity. Maybe it was her own artistic alchemy, a way to spin something beautiful and lovely out of an otherwise difficult and threadbare life. All I know is that the click and hum of her sewing machine used fill the dining room, where she’d set up shop with her little boom box next to her playing Elvis or Jim Croce. A tape measure slung around her neck, pins held between her teeth, she’d occasionally mutter, “Ah, shit!” then begin ripping up the stitches to start from scratch.

She could sew anything.

She made my first prom dress: a peach gauzy floral, off-the-shoulder with satin ribbon trim. She expertly constructed my black box-pleat cheerleading skirts. My wedding dress became a year-long enterprise. She found the Simplicity pattern she’d used to make her own wedding dress in 1963, then revised it into my own knee-length ivory challis with long narrow sleeves, some 1920s beads stitched in loops around the neck, and 100 cloth-covered buttons down the back. When each of my children was born, she knit them tiny hats, made them cross-stitch samplers, sewed them flannel burp cloths, then, later, classic button-up pajamas with teddy bear & candy heart buttons.

To say that I miss receiving these treasures in the mail, to say what a loss it is, well. I can’t even say.

* * *

The other day I found myself in Goodwill, even though I shouldn’t have been. I’d been overwhelmed with teaching preparation, including a three-hour night class that was looming. All day I’d been glued to my desk, reading, planning, organizing. I had to get out, so I drove to UPS to return a sweater, then found myself unable to resist stopping at Goodwill on the way home. Oddly, there was nothing much that caught my eye. I tried on a suede jacket: too cowboy. I found a teal sweater with an asymmetrical neckline: too 80s. Very rarely do I leave the Goodwill empty-handed, but I thought, Well, good for me, and made my way to the door.

But then I saw it. A bright pink box tucked in with the Households. Sew Easy Sewing Machine. It was marked $4.99. “It’s a real working sewing machine!” it said. A red-haired girl smiled on the front. I opened up the box. There was a tiny yellow foot petal that hummed to life when I pressed it. The needle pumped up and down with thin white thread, and I thought, I have to have this! But then I thought: no. I didn’t know how to sew. When I lost a button, I had a hard time sewing it back on properly. I had stacks of fabric I'd inherited from my mother stuffed in my closet, and not a clue as to what I would ever do with them.

I walked out of the store. I sat in my car, looked up at the white winter sky, then leaned my forehead against the steering wheel. I knew myself and I knew thrift stores well enough to know that if you want something, don’t wait or it will be gone later. I went back in. I took the little pink machine out of the box again and studied it. Maybe I could give it to my daughter, Lily, for Christmas. She was five. Maybe by the time Christmas rolled around I could learn how to use it and teach her. Maybe even my son, Hudson, would get a kick out of it. He was detail-oriented and creative. Still. I couldn’t decide.

* * *

When I was a child, I had a toy sewing machine that worked not with thread and needle but with glue. It was pink and white with a little chamber where you loaded the glue cartridges, which smelled exactly like old-fashioned paste. How excited my mother must have been to give it to me. Where had she gotten it? And how did she afford it? She must have thrown her budget out the window and thought: who cares! My daughter is going to learn to sew! Which of course I never did. For years I’d harbored the fantasy that later, once things weren’t so busy, I’d have my mom teach me to sew. It would be a fun project for the two of us some summer, and I’d fly out to Minnesota, ready to learn. We’d laugh at how bad I was at it and drink iced tea on the front porch and talk about everybody in our hometown that drove past on Main Street.

Of course I was too late.

* * *

I grab the pink sewing machine and buy it. It rides home with me buckled into Lily's car seat for safekeeping.

On Buddhist Mindfulness and Ambition

2010-02-13T05:15:00.000-08:00

Recently, I’ve been stuck and frustrated with a book project—a nonfiction account of the months my husband and I lived in Vietnam with our two small children. A full draft of the book, Viet*Mom, is already written, but after getting comments from my agent and another trusted reader, I’ve come to agree that much of the book needs to be rewritten with a lighter tone and a more irreverent spirit. In its present version, it’s too fact-heavy, sequential, and (it hurts to say this) plodding. What I came to realize was that even an “exotic” locale such as Vietnam could become dull when presented in expository prose. As my agent (who is a terrific editor) put it, “The problem with travel memoirs is that they can be a little bit like looking at someone else’s vacation photos: pretty but unessential. In order to make this work, I think you have to show readers that they will be in for a good ride.”

Indeed. She was right and I knew it.

For weeks I sat with the 300-page manuscript hovering nearby, causing me no end of anxiety, self-loathing, panic, and eventually, dread. Since I’ve spent most of my adult life writing something or other, and having never before experienced this kind of artistic black hole, I knew this was unhealthy—for both me and the book—so I decided to take a “vacation” from it. For two weeks I would not think about it, work on it, touch it, tinker with it, read it, or mess with it in any way. Viet*Mom was off the table. I even announced it to my husband and a few friends to make it official.

Here’s where the Buddhism comes in. Around this same time I was talking to a writer friend of mine who’s recently experienced a very painful divorce she didn’t see coming after 30+ years of marriage. She began telling me about a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, she’d been listening to who had helped her tremendously. “She’s a real person,” my friend said. “She’s from New Jersey, and laughs, and is a grandma. She doesn’t take herself too seriously.” At first, I could feel myself disregarding it all. Anything spiritual or religious always got my guard up, but something, thankfully, made me truly listen. “The fact is,” my friend said, “she saved my life.”

Hmm, I thought. That’s pretty dramatic. We paid for our lunches, parted ways, but I found myself later that day searching out Pema Chodron on youtube.com. She used simple words like “stay” and try not to get “hooked” and I went so far out on a limb that I actually ordered one of her CDs from Amazon.

Fast-forward to the present. My decision to take a vacation from my difficult book project has been one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done for myself. Simultaneously, it seems I’ve become calmer, less worried, more centered. I’ve been trying, however slowly, to live my life in the moment and realize that this is it; this is my life. I've found myself taking long walks, listening more attentively to my daughter who comes home from school full of stories and chatter, enjoying a quiet stretch of a random afternoon without the constant pushing, pulsing pressure to be or do something great and worthy and ambitious. I am learning to “stay.”

But something else has happened: nothing.

Workwise, except for my teaching duties, nothing gets done. I am so “in the moment” that I've extended my Viet*Mom vacation—happily—beyond the two weeks. Of course it’s more pleasant not to work hard at something difficult! Of course it’s more pleasant to drink tea and nap and look out the window. Of course it’s more pleasant to ignore the big brooding difficult book project.

And so I'm left with a question: how do the wonderful, peaceful teachings of Buddhism and living in the present moment and practicing mindfulness and learning to “stay” accommodate ambition? Or, as is my fear, do they kill it?

6 Reasons Why I Miss Being Pregnant

2010-02-09T17:49:00.000-08:00

1. Raisins by the fistful, carrots by the pound, slender slices of steak, fanned, bloodrich, across the plate.

2. "To share" personified.

3. Lap swim at the pool where the old ladies with wrinkly arms did not dispense advice but watched alertly, protectively, over me.

4. A free pass—however briefly—to wear giant corduroy overalls.

5. The sleep, a freight train of exhale.

6. That day in Tucson, Arizona where we sat on a bench eating orange muffins and dared to sunbathe the stomach for just a second and the man who nodded and said, "Exactly."

Charlie Chaplin is Eating His Shoes

2010-02-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

Last night after a dinner of shrimp risotto, we settled down on the couch with the kids to watch Charlie Chaplin's "The Gold Rush." I'm sort of surprised that the kids find these silent movies compelling (in fact, I'm delighted), but as the movie progressed, we found that Charlie Chaplin had later added a voice track and dialogue. This completely ruined it for us. "Awww!" we all moaned. My son, Hudson, was the most irritated. "Why do we need words?" he asked. We zoomed the volume down, but then we lost the music that provides such nice tension and pacing. My daughter, Lily, sat tucked under my arm, her feet wiggling in contentment. I kept watching her watch.

At one point, Chaplin picks the nails out of his shoes, chews the leather bits off of them, then sets them aside as if they're bones. Next, he twirls his black shoelace onto his fork like spaghetti and eats it. Lily began narrating. "Look, Charlie Chaplin is eating his shoes," she said. "He thinks his shoelace is spaghetti!" And it struck me that, as a relatively new reader, Lily is learning how to construct her own narrative from Chaplin. She is "reading" and "writing" the story in front of her by providing words to pictures.

I couldn't help think about the new Graphic Novels literature course I'm teaching. The first book we're studying is David Small's Stitches, which has been called "a silent movie masquerading as a book." Panel by panel floats by in grayscale without a word. The presentation of Detroit, Small's family living room, his parents, are delivered to us silently. It's pure synesthesia to portray silence visually. The effect is moody and hellish but ultimately beautiful. Might it work, I wondered, to bring in some Chaplin movies to the class? Might the students learn how to read graphic novels with more complexity by watching silent movies?