Category Archives: memoir
On Casablanca, Solo Moviegoing, and Time Travel
Last night I made my way to the cinema to see a special TCM screening of CASABLANCA in honor of its 70th anniversary. It was not meant to be a solo adventure, but plans fell through, and going alone was a small price to pay for seeing one of my favorite classic films on the big screen.
Going to movies alone is not something I mind, as there’s no pressure to make sure your moviegoing partner is entertained, no arguments over how to define prime seating inside the theatre (or sacrificing a preferred seat out of respect for a companion’s preferences), no awkward post-movie attempts at polite discussion when opinions don’t line up.
There is also the added benefit of being able to treat oneself to a three-course dinner of espresso, gelato and an entire container of curly fries, with no judgment except perhaps from nearby strangers who glimpse the solo wolfing down of said fries , but who cares about them?
Courses 1 & 2
The other perk of solo moviegoing is there’s no need to dress to impress anyone, to look cute or pretty or anything beyond socially presentable. You can go above and beyond, of course, and that can be fun, too. But last night I opted not to change out of my working-from-home uniform of jeans, sambas and an old, comfortable, combination hoodie/three-quarter-sleeved T. I was not alone in my wardrobe choices that night. The crowd was filled with Ts and sweatshirts, with a sprinkling of having-come-from-the-office button-downs and slacks.
Except for one couple.
I found myself trailing behind them as I walked into the theatre. His white hair matched his crisp suit, which looked like he might have stolen it right off Rick’s back. His shoulders were slightly stooped, but his steps were sure as he led the lady on his arm into the dark. She was wearing a dress, black with tiny white polka dots, the silhouette straight out of the 1940s, complete with back-seam stockings and hair styled into victory rolls. They could have walked right into Rick’s Café Américain and looked just right.
After a momentary wave of guilt for my own attire and casual treatment of the event, I began to wonder about their story. They were old, but not ancient, and they seemed too spry to have seen the film in its original release, but the way they whispered secrets and shared smiles suggested it was a special night.
The magic of the moment in the dark hallway was broken a little when we emerged into the crowded theatre. They found a couple of seats much too close for my tastes, and I hoped that they would have disagreed with me. For no logical reason, I wanted their night to be perfect. I entertained the fantasy of an alternate universe where the theatre had balcony seats, where the two could watch from above the dressed-down masses, focused only on the film that meant so much and each other.
The lights went down, and due to some glitch, they never came back up, even after the film had finished. I didn’t see them as I left, and they’d seemed so unlikely all along that I half began to wonder if I hadn’t imagined them. And since that’s less fun, I I reasoned that perhaps they were just time travelers, having a bit of fun on a day off or enjoying the perks of retirement, and had decided to skip the rush out in favor of other nostalgic adventures.
Before I knew it, I’d reached my car, and the threads of the little fantasy I’d been creating drifted away. But then again, we’d all time-traveled a little that night, hadn’t we? The silent gasps when Ilsa comes through the door and back into Rick’s life. The angst as the rain washes the words from Ilsa’s note. The chills as the Marseillaise overpowers the Deutschlandlied. The heartbreak of a reunion cut much too short for all the noblest reasons.
It’s a wonderful reminder that stories have sometimes-unfathomable power — to move us, to teach us, to break our hearts and mend them, and yes, to transport us to places we’ve been, places we’ll go, and places we’ll never even see.
Like Casablanca in the midst of World War II. Unless, perhaps, you’re a time traveler, enjoying a night out with your girl.
Going Home Again
It’s a strange thing, returning to a place where you spent a significant portion of not only your childhood but also your adolescence, only to find its become a weird amalgam of things that were and things that weren’t. In some ways, we’re all little microcosms of that ourselves. We change, but we carry the past with us, too.
The last time I was in Joplin, Mo., was in 2009, for my last grandparent’s funeral. Technically, he was my step-grandfather, but he was the one I’d always known as Grandpa, even though he’d become estranged in the half-decade since my grandmother’s passing. It is also a strange thing saying goodbye to someone who said goodbye to you long ago. But heartbreak does terrible things to a person. I understand. I felt weirdly distant that day, like I was watching the proceedings from behind a one-way window. Old acquaintances kept asking my mother if she had grandchildren yet, which had the unintentional side effect of making me feel a little guilty for every half-joking response of, “No, just grandpuppies so far.”
So yesterday I returned, two years and a lifetime later, to a town that is half-gone, ravaged by tornadoes. Most of the day I pointed out memories rather than artifacts.
- To a patch of overgrown ground cover: “There used to be an amazing garden here, and every year my grandpa would gather up all the leaves from the trees and put them in this big hole he dug in the ground over there to make compost.”
- “I used to climb that tree,” though the branches I used to climb it are gone.
- A parking lot: “The playground used to be here, and they had this amazing fire truck monkey bars thing.”
Perhaps the strangest incident was trying to track down my grandmother’s house, the one she lived in when I was growing up. I knew it was gone, but there’s some part of my brain that still doesn’t really believe it. We drove past a set of stairs leading up to a lot, and remarked at how weird that was. It wasn’t until we reached some houses down the street and backtracked using the addresses that I realized those stairs had once belonged to the house I was searching for.
We got out and walked around, and I tried to remember where things had been. The porch with the windchimes, the sidewalk leading to the deck, the trees I’d helped my grandmother plant. The evidence that lives had been lived here.
I wasn’t sure what to feel. My boyfriend didn’t say anything, let me ramble on, pointing out little wisps of memories, or half-memories. When I stopped talking, having run out of things to say, he simply hugged me. It was the only and perfect response to the silence.
I think a lot about that old adage, “You can’t go home again.” Recently I read something about how it’s not home that changes, but us. We are the ones who leave and experience and come back with new sight. But the world is not fixed in cement either. Sometimes it changes, too, no matter how much we’d have liked it to remain as pristine and golden-lit as it is in our memories.
It’s that whole Buddhist insistence on impermanence, that true joy and peace can only be found in present moments. But again, there’s more to it than that. The past is our present in some ways, because it provides a fair portion of the building blocks that make us who we are. And when those things disappear in the physical realm, it creates a strange cognitive dissonance. To share who we are, we’re left with ineffective tools to try to rebuild the images dancing about in our minds.
So, can we go home again? Yes and no, I think. We change, and the world changes, and there’s no way of stopping it — nor should we want to. Progress, growth, ashes and rebirth — these are all dependent on change.
But we can define a home within ourselves, too. We can acknowledge and remember our past, and we can honor the past by sharing it, by telling our stories, and by living new ones. Humans are the only species that have the ability and desire to create our own narratives. It’s our burden and our gift. The key, I think, is in remembering that old chapters are not erased by new ones.
On New York
The Statue of Liberty from Battery Park
Over the years, I’ve developed a knack for being able to slip pretty easily into the flow of most places I travel. I think it’s a certain combination of knowing who you are and having an unfailing sense of curiosity. What I’ve found is that each city has its own energy, and I can usually more or less figure out in half a day or so.
I didn’t get to spend much time exploring Austin, but I immediately got the sense that it is a city that takes great and serious pride in its weirdness. It is the sort of place where, if you want to create — be it music, film, art, food, or even new ways to do old business — you will be welcomed with open arms — as long as you embrace and encourage the quirky.
New Orleans, an amalgam of Southern and Montmartre-like charm with a cheeky sense of humor, insisted I relax and enjoy the heaps of serendipity it tossed my way. Anything goes in New Orleans, and it drives home the notion that sometimes you just can’t plan for life, so you’d better just take what it gives you, learn to go with it, and always take the time to laugh.
Paris first stole a piece of my heart more than a decade ago. The innermost aspects of my personality, the ones that only come out in their truest forms in solitude, feel at home there. It’s a place that has always invited introspection, a focus on art and beauty, and an emphasis on slowing down a bit and savoring the life you’re living.
And then London — beautiful & smoggy, grand and quaint London — charmed me with its contradictions. The modern energy mingling with the respect for tradition and history is nothing short of intoxicating, and it took me in and made me feel like I was a part of something at a time when I desperately needed to feel passion again.
But Manhattan? It offered me no such engagement, no such hospitality, no such efforts to gain my affection. No matter how I grasped at its metaphorical wrist, I was never able to get my finger on the pulse of the city.
In hindsight, with all the legend and lore surrounding the city, I probably should have known it would be different. As
Grand Central Station. Oddly, one of the least overwhelming places we visited, despite its grandeur.
I stepped off New York soil and onto the plane home four days after arriving, I still had no clue what to think. To put it succinctly, I was thrown for a loop.
The city offers no comfort when you’re feeling down, and it’s just as happy to chew you up and spit you back out as it is to inspire you. There’s no coddling to be had in Manhattan, and maybe that’s part of its appeal. It’s not that it doesn’t want you to succeed. It’s that it expects you to pull yourself up by your own damn bootstraps and can you get out of the way while you’re figuring out what the hell that means because it took care of its bootstraps a long time ago and its got people to see and things to do.
Manhattan is like that intimidating, stern-faced college professor who gives you the facts but expects you to put them together yourself — the one who gets a twinkle in his eye or the tiniest of smirks on his face when you finally do. (Professor Fred Lamer, I’m looking at you.)
The Chess & Checkers House in Central Park.
I knew it would take writing my thoughts out to wrap my head around Manhattan, and when I left, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever really want to return. But now I know I do. I want to show the city that I finally got it. And goodness knows there’s plenty more to explore, to be baffled by, to experience and observe.
I’m well-versed in travelling solo at this point in my life, but I feel very lucky to have had a travelling companion for this particular trip. As frustrated as I felt with the city, I still spent most of the trip talking, learning, laughing and smiling.
As I recall my four days in Manhattan, what comes to mind is much like those dreamy flashback sequences you see in films sometimes. My memories of the city itself are admittedly fuzzy, due in large part I suspect to the incredible sensory overload from the people and the lights and the noise. But they’re providing that soft glow, faded-edge background that makes the clear human moments in the foreground seem magical.
- Tucking my arm into the crook of my boyfriend’s elbow and laying my head on his shoulder as we waited for the subway, or a show, or the line to move.
- Marveling at how the rain on the streets was snow at the top of the Empire State Building, laughing whilst running around the perimeter as fast as we could to get pictures before escaping the frigid wind & going back inside.
- Sneaking sugar-encrusted nuts from our pockets into our mouths whilst warming up inside a church in Lower Manhattan.
- Watching him tap story ideas into his phone.
- Feeling entirely too human over slices of pizza in the middle of a crowded, chain restaurant, yet with the distinct notion that no one at all was aware.
- Enduring endless teasing about my supposedly high frequency of bathroom visits.
- Three blissful words for the Perpetually Cold like myself: shared body heat.
- Sharing tins of lamb over rice from halal carts.
- Learning and playing chess as the midday light turned into an afternoon haze in Central Park.
- Sitting next to each other in an airport, immersed in separate novel-inspired universes, but still connected by intertwined limbs.
Perhaps this was Manhattan’s plan all along — to teach me that you can still find bliss and comfort and laughter in the midst of life’s frustrations and obfuscations. Those stern professors are funny like that — always handing you lessons behind the lessons.
The 86th Floor Observatory of the Empire State Building
Perspective on a White Hair
There it was. It stared back at her, challenging her to lose her composure, to shed a tear or a waterfall, to succumb to the grief, to give into the fragile parts of her mind.
A single strand gleamed bright amidst the brown waves.
Her fingers combed through, unthreading the tresses until she held the odd one out aloft.
She stared at it curiously.
So I am alive after all, she thought.
She’d spent many years fighting villains of all sorts, and it had all culminated in a terrible battle against monsters that were no less frightening than the worst nightmares of the world’s collective youth. In the end, she’d found herself in the deepest of pits. There had been a span of weeks when there was no light to be found. She nearly succumbed — but then the darkness lifted into a fog. And then an occasional beam of light would break through.
And now this.
She briefly considered the possibility that she might now have superpowers previously unmanifested.
She ran her fingers down the length of the strand and was pleased that it was white and not grey. She thought of Gandalf. And while he had been undoubtedly impressive as Gandalf the Grey, it was after he’d transformed into Gandalf the White that he became truly magnificent.
Yes, this was a good sign. She decided it was completely reasonable to expect any day now to run across someone — elven or rugged it mattered not to her, so long as he had lovely eyes and longish hair and was decent enough in a crisis — and blowing his mind with her badassness. Worship would be entirely unnecessary, she mused, but a little awe every once in awhile would be fine by her.
Only for a split second did she consider plucking it. But if she denied this part of herself, who knew what else she would be forsaking? So she brushed it back behind her ear, where it lay hidden in the dark strands. She would know it was there, and it would remind her of the battles she’d fought, how she’d come out on the other side, and that there were so many triumphs yet to be had.
Reunion
Does anyone really look forward to a 10-year high school reunion these days? Perhaps in a not-long-gone age before the dawn of ubiquitous social media, there was a certain nostalgia about seeing how people had changed in the decade since you’d last wandered the academic halls with them.
But for better or for worse, we now have the opportunity to see exactly what people have been up to. Who’s gotten married? Divorced? Had kids? Moved? Gained weight? Lost weight? We’re already privy to all the little triumphs and defeats of the past decade.
Truth is, in most cases, the people with whom we wanted to keep in touch — beyond the extreme casualness of facebook — we by and large have. There are a few folks with whom I’ve reconnected here and there, but in a class of 400-plus, it’s been rare. You hear about small-town classes of 30 or 40 who stay in touch and hang out, and the first thought is that it seems strange. But is it really? There are probably 25 or 30 people from high school with whom I keep in relatively regular touch; some graduated with me while others were a year or two behind or ahead. But we all create our own small towns, it seems.
And like many small-town folks, we are often loathe to leave our comfort zones. The outside looks weird at best and just plain wrong at worst, and nothing demonstrates this so well as the microcosm of the world via a high school reunion facebook group. In ours, we saw copious advertisements for spray tans, questionable profile pictures, multiple hopes for a night of wild drinking, and more references to babies and kids than a poor singleton like myself can handle without starting to feel like he or she is doing it wrong. By the time the calendar flipped to the reunion weekend, the notion that I’m some sort of Midwestern unicorn, always in the back of my mind, had been at the forefront for weeks.
Still, my childhood and and adolescent best friend was one of the organizers, and so I was obligated to go out of loyalty to her. I went into the night with the perhaps-unfortunate attitude of an outsider, bent on observing the event through an ironic and/or humorous lens. After all, the best comfort a writer has is that everything is material.
Some things I observed:
- It’s an interesting thing to know a fair amount about someone’s life and to yet feel totally awkward trying to make conversation whilst standing in line for the bar.
- I am not the only one who feels like a Midwestern unicorn. One fellow classmate, who was showing off her gorgeous new engagement ring, quickly jumped into an unprovoked defense about how the years of medical school and residency had delayed the start of her life. What sort of strange world do we live in where years spent in a big city in pursuit of the qualification to save lives is not a life?
- The way your brain still defines people after a decade can be incredibly singular and perhaps unfair. The girl who sparked a weeks-long debate on whether or not she had gotten a nose job over the summer break. The guy who really only ever talked to me because he liked the little red car I drove. The girl who did the overhearing in an incident involving a malfunctioning mute button and a conversation that wasn’t meant to be overheard.
- You will encounter secret pain in surprising places, and you will find people who write those secrets off too easily. Let me tell you this: a divorce without kids is not just another boyfriend. I heard this more than once.
- Gluten-free desserts are hard to come by, even when you have been guaranteed a gluten-free meal, and paid a good chunk of money for it. But if you annoy enough people, you might be given a voucher for a free breakfast buffet that you will probably never use.
- An apology costs nothing except perhaps pride, something which we often carry in excess anyway.
- The impact you can make by investing in the lives of youth cannot be measured. I don’t remember how many former teammates asked about my father — who coached soccer for a number of years nearing a quarter-century, taught hundreds of girls about hard work and self-respect and the value of loyalty, and never asked a dime in return — but it was a lot.
- Everyone is disappointed, and everyone is proud, and we are all poor judges of everything most of the time.
In the end, the night was not been full of the drama I’d half-hoped for (I beg defense as a writer on that one). It had not been particularly magical in any way. It felt, in an odd way, like the manifestation of a Tuesday afternoon — still recovering a bit from the Monday, looking forward to and dreading in equal turns the middle of the week, remembering the joy of the past weekend and hoping to feel that way again.
As I walked to the car, my feet having declared they’d had enough of my shoes, and my brain still buzzing from too much loud music for much too long, I found myself feeling relieved and yet a little nostalgic. And being the sort of girl I am, Bilbo Baggins’ famous farewell at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring jumped to mind.
I mused on how he must have felt that night (or, more truthfully, on how I was feeling on this night): the relief at escaping mingled with the regret of all he was leaving — indeed, had left — behind. So many ends, and so many beginnings. Life is both cruel and merciful in that the two can never really be separated.
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve,” he said.
It’s an apology for the knowledge of such a failure without the intention to fix it. And it’s one we live most days, especially thanks to the global village of the internet. In the end, even after all my misgivings, I must say it was nice to have the opportunity to make amends, if only for one night, if only once a decade.
This Recipe Will Change Your Life
This recipe will change your life.
That was the promise. She’d thought nothing of it, to be honest. After all, it had been a rough morning.
In truth, it had been a rough week, a rough month, a rough quarter, a rough year, and, when it all added up, a rough decade — made all the more frustrating by the feeling that she really had no right to feel this way, having suffered nothing beyond life resisting and continuing to resist her efforts to make it fall into line with her expectations and desires.
And today her plans, per usual, had been thwarted by complications. Her morning was meant to be spent simultaneously pursuing her dreams and making ratatouille — a simple peasant dish requiring little more than a bevy of summer vegetables, a few glugs of olive oil, and a pot big enough to hold it all, or so she’d thought.
But some time between making her plans and exacting them, she’d been saddled with several setbacks that at best were reminders that said dreams were in fact a statistical improbability and at worst indicators that she simply wasn’t good enough. Always teeter-tottering between the extremes of not enough and far too much, and always seeming to land on the one most inappropriate for the situation. In her most melodramatic moments, she was coming to believe that was her lot in life.
But she knew this mood would pass (even though she also knew it would come back), and so she gathered herself up and made her way to the farmers’ market.
In the rain.
She couldn’t curse it, as the poor parched brownery that had once been and hoped to be greenery again some day had suffered even more than humans through weeks of 100-degree heat. On a better morning, she might even have danced in it, or at the very least thrown her arms out and laughed at the sky. But this morning she kept her eyes cast downward, in part out of practicality to keep the raindrops off her glasses, and in part because, on mornings like these, she sometimes found it difficult to smile.
After the market (where she’d found plenty of tomatoes and squash, but no shallots or garlic) and the grocery store (where her foot had found a nice, deep puddle) and her necessary (though admittedly indulgent) coffee run, she made it home and set to the task of changing her life, or at least making lunch and dinner for a few days.
As it turned out, there would have been little time for writing that morning anyway, as the recipe directed her toward activities that left her standing barefoot in the kitchen for two hours straight peeling, chopping and/or puréeing batch after batch of everything she’d bought.
First three shallots. Their fumes made her eyes sting — not that it took much. She was embarrassingly sensitive to such things; she had once found herself wearing swim goggles to get through a particularly large batch of onions.
To give her eyes a break, she then tackled an entire head of garlic, whose pungent scent reminded her of her grandfather. He had been a magnificent and creative cook, and somewhere along the family lines, it had become tradition to use amounts of the bulbous herb bordering on ridiculous and maybe even insane to most people. But she had her grandfather’s genes, and, as she found herself both smiling and tearing up again, she wondered if the old saying, “Two heads are better than one,” would have been appropriate to apply in this situation, too.
She moved on to chopping the five small onions, which brought the tears to a blinding level. She let these ones spill down her cheeks. She remembered a past lover, who had once chopped onions for her to spare her the tears. It was an ironic benevolence, considering how pervasive the pain of that relationship had been. Still, she felt an acute longing for someone to chop onions for her again, and she was grateful when it was time to move on to the red peppers.
These evoked no memories or tears for her, and so she was able to focus her efforts on scoring right along the white ribs to avoid having to deal with the seeds that clung perilously to the underside of the stem. Into the food processor the pieces went, and she noted nothing beyond the fact that their obliteration turned them from bright red to a surprising shade of salmon-pink.
Next came the tomatoes.
She’d patiently waited to purchase them behind a couple of fellow market patrons. The man in charge — though the more appropriate term that came to mind was “farm boy,” as he had that slightly cocky but unoffensive confidence of someone who doesn’t yet know any better — was trying to create a rapport with the man considering his produce. “It’s two dollars for the corn?” the man had asked. “Yes, sir, but the worms are free,” he drawled, grinning. The girl had smiled at the joke, but the man was apparently not looking for amusement that morning. “I think I’ll try over there,” he said, gesturing to nowhere in particular. The farm boy just shrugged, unfazed, as he walked away. The farm boy had far less trouble charming the white-haired woman who stepped up next.
The scent of the cut tomatoes brought the girl back to the present. A friend had once stated that good, fresh tomatoes smelled very similar to roses. The girl tried to compare the scent of the open flesh with the one of petals in her mind. She couldn’t grasp the similarity, but one thing was for sure — they both smelled delightful. She cut a tiny piece from the tomato and popped it into her mouth. Somehow, she was not only tasting tomato but garlic and onion and salt and magic. It was quite possibly the best tomato she’d ever tasted. Though she felt a pang of regret, she dutifully dumped the segments into the blender, but not before stealing one more bite. She had a notion to simply pour the purée into a tall glass and call it a day, but she persisted on the promise that the recipe would be even more enlightening.
With the tear-inducing items having allowed the oil and low heat to mellow them, the girl poured the red pepper purée into the mix. The golden-white and the pepper pink would cook down into a rusty orange concoction as she began the long haul of chopping zucchini. By the time she was midway through the squash, it was time to sacrifice the tomato purée into the mix.
She continued to dice. As the ingredients in the pot melded into something more than their individual parts, her mind ran wildly through tunnels of memories, random thoughts, worries, disappointments, and hopes for the future.
The smell of August rain on the streets of Paris.
Her hand run through her hair revealing it was gaining volume and curl in equal proportions, thanks to the humidity.
Arms and legs intertwined in a booth.
Fingers tucked under when chopping, so you only lose skin and not digits — another trick she’d learned from her grandfather.
How the lives that look perfect from the outside are sometimes weighed down with the heaviest burdens.
Laughter at her own silliness that had yet resulted in a hug from a handsome and kind stranger in an alley behind a London theatre.
How the problem with being a manic pixie dream girl is that there’s the manic bit to deal with.
The realization that her heels were beginning to hurt, thanks to their lengthy contact with the hardwood floor.
Fear that she was defined in someone’s mind by her worst moment instead of her best intentions or even potential.
How she’d meant to put on some music when she’d started to help drown out her thoughts.
Amusement that she’d become too distracted by her thoughts to remember to put on said music.
Sadness at the acceptance of a reality in which she might never hear from someone again.
An image of Amélie Poulain, imagining the man she loved returning with the ingredient she needed for the cake she was baking, hearing the rattle of the strung beads in the doorway, turning with hope, and falling into tears at the sight of her cat.
A feeling of being impressed at how her own two dogs continued to hover, as they had since she’d began, waiting to devour anything that fell to the ground, whether it was edible or not. (She tossed them each a cube of zucchini for their troubles and smiled as they snatched them and ran away, lest she change her mind.)
A craving for a really good French baguette, and annoyance that she would be unable to satisfy it in the near future.
A piano player in a jazz bar, eyes closed, so passionately in the moment, standing and pounding the keys.
The need to switch over the laundry.
Her penchant for falling in temporary lust with musicians who lose themselves in the music on stage.
A line from a poem written for her, only a few weeks ago.
A longing for Paris, and then London, and then Paris again.
And finally she set the knife down. This recipe will change your life. The promise echoed in her mind as she slid the largest pan she owned, filled with zucchini and squash and eggplant, into the oven.
And then a new thought occurred to her: What if it could? She considered what she’d poured into the last few hours. Hadn’t she lived a lifetime in her mind, or at least a portion of it, as she’d worked? What if those happinesses, those moments of despair, those inklings of hope had found their way into the synergy of what she’d made? Surely they’d colored the experience itself. And if all the physical ingredients could combine to make something new, something different, something better than before, then who’s to say what else was possible?
And so she decided. This recipe would change her life. Perhaps it had already. All she had to do now was wait, and act, and taste, and savor. A good method for ratatouille, so why not for life?
Hours after she’d begun, she finally sat down with a bowl of her finished concoction. I’ve got a lot riding on you, she thought. Do your best. She tasted it. She had no regrets.
A Farewell to Borders
But that day won’t come now because Borders, within a matter of weeks, will be closing its doors for the last time. As much as society has heralded the coming of the eReader, analyzed the effects of behemoth Amazon, and discussed the role of the physical book in our increasingly electronic world, it still sends a physically unsettling jolt through me to know that, if I’m in dire need of a book, I won’t be able to duck into my favorite bookstore and pick it up.
Sometimes two days really does seem too long to wait. And Amazon, as much as I love them and support them with my business, doesn’t have someone to make small talk as you pay for your purchase. No one comes up to you as you peruse the links and blurbs to ask if you need any help finding what you’re looking for. Amazon can’t look you in the eyes and smile at you. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but in my book that still counts for something.
The thing I loved most about Borders was it gave me a place to go, and then, to be. How many words did I write within the support of its walls? I cannot tell you with any greater specificity than, it was a lot. It was a good place for write-ins, less cramped than local coffee shops, and with the added benefit of inspiration all around you, by way of people as well as the stories that had made it to concrete form via paper and ink and binding.
How many conversations did I have whilst walking the aisles or sitting in the café? It was one of my favorite places to meet to catch up with people, quiet enough to hear both your thoughts and the voice of whomever you were with, but not so quiet that you felt awkward speaking. The spirit of the place always felt warm, which made it perfect for both rekindling and deepening friendships, both old and new.
Now, as this place I’ve loved slowly disappears, I must decide how to remember it. This is what I choose. Borders for me will always be a purveyor of magic. It was the place I could meet a friend I hadn’t seen in months or even years and discover kinship immediate and deep. It was the place I learned I could fall in love again, all because a barista made me tea, stole my heart and carried it for a time; and it was the place where I was learning to survive heartbreak when my heart became too heavy for him to bear. It was the place where I could walk among stories, from the centuries-old to the just-revealed, and steal their strength and wisdom, and where I could trade money for the honor of taking them home with me. And it was the place where I could and did create stories of my own, enveloped by humanity’s greatest tradition even as I took part in it. Magic, all of this.
I can take comfort in knowing that this magic will not cease to exist with Borders, but a part of me grieves knowing it will be harder to find.
Pottery #1
In hindsight, I should have known a skirt was a bad idea.
I didn’t think it through — the mechanics of learning how to use a pottery wheel. Though, in my defense, I didn’t actually know I’d be throwing, as they call it, the first night, and there were no hints about proper attire on the organization’s website. I’d wanted to look cute, perhaps a little chic with a touch of artsy flair. You never know whom you might meet after all, and it’d been several weeks since I’d felt anything close to charming. So, on went the maxi skirt. (Thankfully I’d had the foresight to at least go long.) Sadly, my chosen wardrobe carried more of a “doesn’t-have-the-slightest-clue” vibe than I was going for. At least it was representative of my true self.
“Maybe it’ll be good for you!” was the common refrain from my friends when I told them I was taking a beginner’s pottery class. I knew what they were really saying, of course: “Hey, you’ve been kind of an emo nutcase lately. Maybe this’ll fix you.” And that’s why I hated hearing that particular statement of encouragement. Not to belittle their concern, but no one likes to hear they’re broken, even when you know you are.
But they did have a point, and I was hoping this new adventure in clay would take my mind off things, or even just turn it off for a bit. As I straddled the wheel as closely as I could, per the instructor’s direction, pulling my skirt down beneath the lip of the splash pan between my legs, I was certainly not feeling any more comfortable with myself. My fellow classmates — a married couple on their second set of classes and an art student — paid little attention to the noob across the table.
I’d been handed off to the advanced instructor because the beginner’s adviser was running late. He carried himself with an easy, amused swagger, and his smirk between swigs of a local microbrew made it clear that my situation was worth laughing at. So I did. And he did, too. We quickly developed a comfortable, banter-filled rapport, one that could have verged on flirtation if the circumstances had been different. As it was, I was mostly just happy to have someone smile at me.
As he demonstrated how to center the clay on the wheel, it occurred to me that pottery, GHOST jokes aside, could probably truly be a really sensual, meditative experience if you approached it with the right attitude.
I, however, couldn’t help thinking of Annie on Community as my instructor demonstrated “coning,” which is, to be frank, the art of shaping a ball of clay into a quasi-phallus. I never did figure out how coning helped center the clay. I remain convinced it is to test the maturity level of beginning pottery students. I managed to keep a straight face, but, on the inside, I flunked.
After he’d shown me how to create a cylinder, he set me loose. And by “set me loose,” I mean he left the room. I was on my own. Me and a ball of clay. I pressed down on the foot pedal, setting the wheel spinning. I put some water on the wheel. It flew onto my skirt, taking gray molecules of clay along for the ride. It had begun.
Undeterred, I set to work, bent on replicating the instructor’s technique. Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me remember how I was supposed to position my hands. He’d told me to dig my elbow into my core (which I’d learned by observation meant my groin) in order to stabilize. I tried, but it felt like I was trying to contort myself into an advanced yoga position. My legs weren’t long enough to get the proper leverage. I lamented that I was physically predisposed to suck at pottery.
But I persisted. I managed to get the clay somewhere near the center of the wheel, or at least I guessed I had by the lessening of the flat-tire-sort-of thud-thud-thud I’d felt when I started. I dug my thumbs into the center. It was the first thing that had gone right. The clay eased out into a bowl shape. I smiled. Maybe I wasn’t such a failure after all. I looked up for my instructor’s approval, but he hadn’t returned. This was problematic both because of my Gen-Y need for encouragement and approval and also because I’d forgotten what I was supposed to do next.
I looked at my fellow potters. One was attaching a handle. Another was making clay balls. The third was creating a tiny, intricate vase. They were no help. I set my jaw and went on, an increasingly-clay-covered warrior against the gray lump gaining shape between my hands.
I remembered something about pulling up the walls. Again, I found myself unsure what to do with my hands to make this happen. I took a guess and set my thumb to the wheel and scraped away a ridge at the bottom. Nothing collapsed or exploded. So far, so good. I put my left middle finger inside and placed my thumb and forefinger together on the opposite side of the ridge. I took a deep breath. I moved them up in unison. The clay came with them. I’d created a wall! A tiny wall, mind you, only an inch and a half in height, but a wall nonetheless! I tried again. Another inch.
By the time I’d gotten it up to a respectable three, my instructor returned. I looked up at him with a kindergartner’s eyes.
“Not bad,” he said. “Now cut it in half.”
Isn’t this what always happens? I wanted to say. I work so hard for something, only to have to cut it away, destroy it, try to learn something from the broken pieces, and start all over again! I’m tired of it! I want something to be easy, to last, to just be good without so much strife, so much exhausting effort! This is exactly what I was trying to get my mind off of!
The instructor waited patiently. I decided this wasn’t the proper arena to give voice to my neuroses. I grabbed the wire, slid it under the cylinder, and sliced upward.
“See how it’s a little thick on the sides there? You could have raised the walls more. Not bad for a first try, though.”
I mumbled a thanks as I mushed the imperfect sides of my cylinder together and squished them into an arch. I looked at the table, where seven other balls of clay remained, waiting to be created and destroyed. It was going to be a long night.
[FridayFlash] Fortune #3
“You have boyfriend troubles?”
It is more statement than question, and it is the first thing out of the fuschia-saronged woman’s mouth the moment I lower myself onto her pouf cushion. This is apparently the aura I’m giving out these days, and there’s nothing I can say to defend myself. So, instead, I let out an uncomfortable laugh. She doesn’t elaborate — yet. She just sits down across the little table, smiles knowingly, and takes my hands. “We shall see,” she says.
As she studies my palms, part of me wants to believe that’s how she begins every fortune. After all, I bet an impressive portion of women seeking out fortunetellers do so because they’re having boyfriend issues or husband issues. And the lack of a wedding band on my left ring finger obviously signifies, statistically speaking, that there’s a decent chance that I’m having the former.
And so I ignore the look in her eyes that makes me want to believe that she could see that in me. After all, I am not the sort of girl who lets thoughts of a boy consume her entire being. Not anymore. Never again. I wonder if he’s texted me.
The woman’s thick Persian accent snaps me out of my neuroses and back to reality, and she begins drawing lines with a blank ink pen on my palm, telling me what each signifies. Much of it is what I’ve heard before, which I suppose is a good sign, but a few things are different. She asks if I’ve thought about going back to school. “Not really,” I answer. Her brow furrows, and she shakes her head.
“No, I see something with education here. Think about that.”
She moves on before I can begin to.
“Something with sports in your future perhaps,” she mumbles. “Play sports?”
“When I was younger,” I tell her.
Again, her brow furrows. “Maybe related to education. Something with that.”
If she’d meant to distract me from my “boyfriend troubles,” she’s done a good job. I’m now bent on processing all this, to figure out if there’s any truth, any discernment this woman has about my life that I’ve perhaps not yet touched upon myself. Despite the fact that I’ve come into this with a healthy amount of skepticism — I don’t want to reveal anything to help them concoct a story that I want to hear — something about her words stirs my imagination if not recognition.
She drops my hands and pulls out the tarot cards. She lays a few out.
And then she begins guessing names of people in my life left and right with disturbing accuracy. My father. A good friend. My sister.
Another row of cards. She stares, squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, and then a few searching syllables and consonants escape her lips.
“Who is this person? The boy?”
“His last name,” I admit.
“He is not the one for you,” she says. She looks into my eyes. “But you knew that.”
I nod, but in the moment of silent recognition that follows, I feel my heart sinking straight through my body, through the pouf cushion and into the ground. Even though she is right that I have always known that her statement is true, my mind’s voice is already shouting its rebuttal: We are not yet done with each other, it insists. We have more to learn, to teach! I am not ready to let go. I am not done falling.
And though I say none of this, and not enough true time passes in that frozen moment for all the emotion to show in my eyes, the woman’s lips just barely curl into a tiny smirk.
“But he is OK for now,” she says, laying out another row of cards as if the matter is settled. “In current relationship, just go with the flow. It will be fine.”
My heart returns to my body, settling somewhere in that pit of the stomach where hope and sadness meet. Not quite home, but close enough to carry on.
“I think that’s pretty good advice regardless of the fortune,” I say. In fact, that piece of advice alone might have been worth the price of the entire fortune, I think. Like all good advice, it’s something I already know I should do. But that’s what the best advice really is — the magic is rarely in the delivery itself, but rather its timing.
The cards continue to reveal their secrets as it all sinks in.
She tells me I should move away, travel at least. I am unsurprised. “I’ve considered it,” I tell her.
She tells me to watch out for an ex bent on attacking me somehow. I am again unsurprised. “I can handle it,” I say, surprising myself with the steady determination in my voice, and I can tell she does not doubt me.
She delivers the news that I will have three children: two girls and a boy. Here I am slightly surprised, as she has added one child to the load I was expecting based on a two-minute palm reading I had months ago in London. I am momentarily hit with the notion that I might want to think about getting started in a nearer future if I’ve got to pop out three kids. But then she informs me that two of them might be twins, and I figure that buys me a little more time, which is good since taking care of myself seems like a monumental task some days.
She tells me I will marry a man in a uniform. She does not know what kind — “perhaps a sports uniform” — but definitely a uniform. I am once again surprised, and this is the most skeptical I have been, for I no longer know for certain that I am the marrying type, and while the idea of a man in uniform might do it for some girls, I have never been in that camp.
“You just wait,” she says, grinning. “People come back years later and tell me I am always right! You will see!” She laughs, and I can’t help but chuckle myself.
A Valentine’s Reflection
Last week, I let my journalistic roots run free and did a bit of informal polling/interviewing on twitter and facebook about people’s opinions on Valentine’s Day. A few interesting stories popped up, and for that my writer’s mind is excited and grateful, but not a single person came out in unadulterated support of the holiday. Most responses were apathetic at best, and a few verged on outright vitriol.
- “V-Day is a money drain…and stupid…”
- “Quite frankly I think the holiday is pointless.”
- “It’s not really the same once one has an established family and passing out valentines to others outside my wife would certainly be seen as questionable behavior.”
- “It just feels so corporate. I think it’s for people who have to be reminded that they love each other.”
Some people lamented the potentially depressing effects on singles:
- “I’ve never been fond of the holiday b/c I’ve never had a date during that time period. However, this year is different, so I’m actually looking forward to it!”
- “At uni I was single & heart broken on a V day & thought: This bites. Seeing the sad side of Valentine’s day must have ruined it for me, because I lost interest in it completely.”
- “Let’s just say I’m feeling very Jessica Biel about Valentine’s Day this year.”
Others are just trying to make the best situation they can out of their circumstances.
- “I’m trying to make my Valentine’s week as ‘happy’ and fun as possible; otherwise it has the potential of being a real downer for me!!! Especially this year!! Not gonna let that happen!!”
My favorite comment, though, was this one, from my friend Meg (@ahrdor):
- My humble opinion (with overly-black&white labels): *because* it’s such a big deal to the masses, if you *didn’t* take that day to (also) show off your loved one, you’re arrogant & lame. Ya know? Those who proclaim, “I don’t need a special day to say I love you” are just being silly. You got a Valentine? Be proud of it. Brag on her/him. Do it on every other day, but geez, really? Not on V-Day? <- I think that’s lame. For the record, I also think a mere dozen roses & restaurant visit is lame, but that’s just me. Some couples adore that & DO show their love that way. More power to ‘em. Home-cooked meal, candles & lots’o'snuggle-like time is where it’s at for me! I’ve always had sucky V-Days & look forward to having one, someday, that kicks ass.
As for my own thoughts, I have a somewhat inexplicable love for the holiday. I have no spectacular Valentine’s-related romantic triumphs — quite the opposite in fact. Here’s a sampling from the high/lowlights reel of my life.
- 1993: I get to leave school for several hours and return just in time for the Valentine’s party with shiny new accessories: braces.
- 1997: In junior high, I get my first dozen roses from a boy, and I carry them to all my classes, reveling in being coupled on Valentine’s Day. (We break up two weeks later.)
- 2001: Eight months into my first serious relationship, I spend the day trying not to expect any surprises because my boyfriend is 1) poor, and 2) away at college. No surprises greet me whilst in school, but his mother shows up on my doorstep around 9 p.m. with a cellophane balloon.
- 2008: A relationship on the rocks leads to an awkward but, in my eyes, sweet dinner/movie date to an Irish pub with the most fantastic bread pudding and DEFINITELY, MAYBE, which turns out to be surprisingly good. I end the night feeling hopeful. I hear nothing for three days and later find out much of that time was spent in the company of another woman. It becomes my last coupled Valentine’s Day.
- 2010: A man outside a flower shop tasked with getting people into said flower shop hands me the dozen roses he’s supposed to be advertising. I try to refuse them because I don’t want him to get in trouble, but he insists. I leave with renewed faith in love and random acts of kindness.
Like Meg, I also hope to someday have a coupled Valentine’s Day that takes my breath away. But in the meantime, I can’t bring myself to feel bad or angry or resentful on Feb. 14 of every year. Even when you spin those negative emotions into something potentially fun, like Minneapolis’ Shred the Love Un-Valentine’s Event (H/T to @austinmn), all the negativity seems like a waste of energy. Why not take that energy and put it toward love? And the best part is, you get to define what that means. If I may be so bold, let me present a few ideas:
Volunteer somewhere that needs love. An after-school program, a nursing home, a library, an animal shelter, etc. There are plenty of needs out there; it’s not hard to find one to fill.
Reflect on what you love, and spend the day celebrating it. Love coffee? Take the time to truly savor a cup. Love to cook? Express it with a special hand-prepared meal. Love books? Make a date with a novel. Love films? Get thee to a movie theatre, or settle into your sofa with an old favorite. Love writing? Sit down and plug away at your current project, and revel in the fact that it’s so simple to engage in something you love.
Define “love” broadly, and express the sentiment to people you love. Friends, family, coworkers, your neighborhood baristas — anybody who makes you smile on a regular basis is eligible.
Don’t forget about yourself. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,” as Oscar Wilde so pithily pointed out. So, on Valentine’s Day, be a little kinder to yourself, too, in whatever way that means. Maybe it’s getting in a solid workout or taking a yoga class. Maybe it’s finally forgiving yourself for that One Big Mistake. Maybe it’s a mani/pedi or a facial. Maybe it’s as easy as getting to bed at a decent hour for once. Whatever it is, you deserve a little kindness, too.
So, as the Lone Unadulterated Lover of Valentine’s Day, that’s my two cents on the matter. So much in life is affected by how we frame our thoughts, and Feb. 14 strikes me as a great opportunity to refocus on sharing a little compassion toward ourselves and others while rekindling our passion for whom and what we love. Happy Valentine’s Day, friends!
