On Want Ads and Wanting

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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.