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I am a Lost Penny

We had a Special Teacher for a week in 7th Grade Language Arts. Her name was Miss Christy. She appeared on a Monday, all seventies winged hair and a woven Greek shoulder bag full of dittos, very dramatic in a way that made me feel immediately anxious. “I am SO excited,” she said, “to get started with all of you on your creative writing unit.” I was worried. I had been writing forever already, handwritten novels on lined paper with illustrations of bonneted pioneer girls, typed short stories, and, more recently, thrawn and abject love poems. I thought of myself, already, as a writer. It was my special thing, what I did best, the gift I had been given. The idea that everyone could just do my best thing was past threatening and into the realm of viscerally painful. I didn’t care if other students wrote research papers about coal mining, or book reports, but this promised to be a full-on invasion of my most cherished and manicured turf. I sat rigid in my burnt orange plastic chair, overweight, frizzy and pasty, imagining my one unique qualification diluted by a sea of new writers.

Our first assignment was to write about what we had done the previous weekend. I did not find this particularly creative; it seemed more like a newspaper story than anything “creative.” In the middle of writing, dutifully, about my Saturday morning cello lesson, shopping with my mother for new jeans, and how everyone else watched football on Saturday but I didn’t, the Creative Writing teacher caught my eye and motioned for me to come to her desk. She had told us that she “didn’t like desks” because they put a barrier between teachers and students, but there was really nowhere else for her to sit. When I reached the desk, she smiled warmly, and put down the book she had been holding. “You’re Ann, right?” I nodded. I knew I wasn’t in trouble; I was never in trouble. I would, actually, have liked to be someone who might get into trouble, but it was a thrill denied by my anxiety and desire to please adults. “Well I’m happy to meet you, Ann – Mrs. Miller tells me that you’re very interested in writing.”

“I like to write,” I said cautiously, uncertain whether I was supposed to be complicit in this writing thing, or a sponge eager for her drops of wisdom.

“Well, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be very interested to see what you write this week. Mrs. Miller says you have a real talent.”

“Oh, Thanks.” I stood there, thinking maybe a smile was called for, something other girls would know how to do easily, one of those things that was oddly difficult for me. She smiled, displaying big, white, even teeth.

“You may go back to your seat, now.” I did.

The next day as we filed into third hour Language Arts, Miss Christy was finishing a drawing of a penny on the chalkboard. It was pretty good, as chalkboard drawings go; Lincoln looked like Lincoln, and she had done a nice job of making it seem 3-D. “Good MORning,” she said when she turned to face us. “Yesterday we got our tiny toes wet with a little writing practice, but today we’re just going to jump in the lake and get soaked.” My stomach hurt. “We’re going to write an Imagination Story today, and I’m going to give you the whole hour to write it. Don’t worry, there’s not going to be a grade, but you’ll hand them in to me at the end of the hour and tomorrow we’ll talk about them in class.” This sounded okay to me; I wrote “imagination stories” all the time. I was, however, concerned about that penny.

She pointed at the penny. “This is the star of your story. You are going to write from the point of view of a penny, and talk about all the places you go and what happens to you. I want you to use lots of descriptive words, really imagine how it feels to be in a pocket, or a cash register.” She went on to remind the class about how first person worked, and to inform us that she had dittoed lists of adjectives and adverbs to which we could refer if we needed help with writing “colorfully.” We all took out paper from our Trapper Keepers, the usual suspects borrowing from those of us who were chronically prepared, and waited at the starting block. “Okay,” she said, “you may get started.”

I wrote my name and the date in the upper right corner of the page, and desperately regarded the chalk penny. This was really messing me up, having someone tell me what to write about. I liked to write about feelings, and interactions between people. I liked to write dialogue. I could imagine all kinds of things, being an orphan girl in London, living on a ship, being a boy or a dog or a spider like Charlotte, but I had no feel for being an inanimate object. Around me, pencils started to move, and I felt a cold wave of real panic. I was The Writer, my pencil wasn’t moving, and I had nothing to write. Ten minutes passed, and finally, despondent, I started to write. “I am a lost penny. I used to live in a dark, warm pocket but then one day I fell out and onto the street. It was very hard…”.

The next day we came in and sat down as Miss Christy stood in front of the teacher’s desk. “I’d like you to stand up and put your desks in a circle” she instructed. “Today we are going to have a writers’ workshop.” We did as we were told, with a lot of scraping, dragging and jockeying for position. She pulled a bundle of papers from her Greek bag; I knew they were the stories we had handed in the day before. “I’ve read all of these, and I’m very excited about what I see. I’d like to read to you from a couple of stories that I think are really excellent.” I relaxed; when Mrs. Miller picked reports to read out loud, mine was always among them. From across the room, my friend Nicki smiled at me and made her hand into a gun pointing in my direction. Everybody knew this was my thing.

“This one is by Ben,” she began. Ben Fujikawa was a quiet boy who played the violin. He was smart in a math kind of way, but I charitably allowed that he could share my moment in the sun. She read his piece aloud with great expression; the penny in his story went through the washing machine and had a very “colorful” time of it. When she was done, she told us about why it was good, from the use of “describing words,” to the way you could almost hear the door clanging shut on the machine. Twenty minutes of the fifty minute hour were over. Next, she read Stacy’s story. Stacy was my arch-rival, the person who had defeated me in the Sixth Grade All-School Spelling Bee. Her story involved a suspenseful situation on a railroad track, and involved (I imagined) many exclamation points. Ten minutes remained.

“We have time for one more story,” said Miss Christy. The world stopped and I tensed in my chair. It had to be mine, had to be mine, had to be mine. “This one is from Debbie.” I felt eyes on me, my magnitude of failure multiplied by its very public nature. I knew Stacy was ecstatic in her own orange seat, and that Nicki was trying to think of something nice to say after class. I barely heard Debbie’s story; I think it was about the penny belonging to a little boy who was trying to decide how to spend it.

At the end of the hour, as the bell rang and we pushed the desks back into tidy rows and columns, Miss Christy handed back our stories. In the hall outside the classroom, leaning against the faux brick wall, I read what she had written in purple ink. “You have a very good vocabulary for a seventh grade student. This is a good start, but I didn’t really feel like I was right there with the penny. Try to use more colorful language and remember ‘show, don’t tell.’” Keep on writing!” There was a smiley face at the end.

Thursday I pretended to be sick, thus avoiding the second writing exercise. Friday I sat mulishly in my chair as she read aloud, knowing I was safe from further humiliation because I had not actually written or turned in anything the day before. Monday, she was blessedly gone again, replaced by the stolid Mrs. Miller who appreciated the finesse with which I could describe “A Wrinkle in Time.” I did not write another “imagination story” for a very long time. Stacy is an HR manager in Minneapolis, Debbie runs a family business and Ben was never heard from after high school graduation.

I am a writer.

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Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah

I wrote this post in 2009, and it remains a personal favorite:

When I was a kid, I always wondered what the “someone” was doing in that kitchen with Dinah. (Aside, that is, from singing “fee, fi, fiddly-i-o”). When I was really young, I imagined that Dinah was my grandparents’ dog, Dinah, who bit my hand and necessitated a series of rabies shots. When I was older, I assumed it was Dinah’s boyfriend, who I somehow confused with the guy who was “working on the railroad, all the livelong day” and clearly had no business strumming on his old banjo for Dinah in her kitchen as she tried to peel potatoes.

In my present state of evolution, I have an entirely different take on Dinah’s situation: Dinah is trying to cook, she has a relatively modest kitchen, in which “someone” has parked himself with a banjo and professed his desire to help her with dinner preparations. “Someone” is her brother in law, her next door neighbor, or her visiting college friend. He has, he tells her “done a lot of cooking.” He has a great suggestion about a better way to clean the mushrooms, or an idea about cheese that will melt better than the one she chose. He wants to tell her a long, rambling story about office politics or play her the new Keith Urban CD. She wants him to get the hell out of her kitchen so that she can cook in peace, dream a little, listen to her own music, or invent something without any voice other than that of her own inner chef. She wants him, and his damned banjo in the living room with everyone else, eating chips and guacamole.

As you may have gathered, I am a solitary cook by preference (although there are exceptions). I am self-taught, and did not grow up in one of those big families where all of the women-folk slice and dice and shell peas together. My grandmothers both cooked solo in their own kitchens, and while my mother (and father) were willing to teach me in the kitchen, they didn’t cook together or with children most of the time. I never lived in a co-op or worked in a restaurant kitchen where sharing and cooperating are required.

I like my stuff where it is, and I like to be in charge. If I cut up my onions and garlic and put them in little bowls ready to take the dive into hot olive oil, I want them left there. When I’m happy, I like to listen to the music of my choice cranked up to “stun,” and to dance, unobserved, as I improvise. When I’m sad, I prefer to work in silence, using the methodical chopping and stirring as a form of therapy. In the end, I like a certain veil of mysticism between my work in the kitchen and the fait accompli of a well-sauced pork chop in the dining room.

I didn’t know I was a solitary cook until alien interlopers interfered with my culinary mojo. I recall cooking in the highly dysfunctional kitchen of a long-ago ex, with his visiting mother. We made potato salad “together,” a process which started with me boiling potatoes, because I like potato salad with potatoes, scallions, red pepper, mayonnaise and mustard. The next step involved Ma Ex fishing every potato out of the water, cutting it smaller and putting it back into the water. She then added eggs to the boiling water so that they could be included in the salad. She was a fierce little person, and I cowered in submissive terror, eventually completely paralyzed to the point where I allowed her to add not only the eggs, but pickle relish and Miracle Whip.

My friend Healthy Jeff is also banned from my kitchen because, although he is as dear to me as a brother, he is a person who “eats to live” and does not “live to eat,” resulting in an unfortunate predilection for odd 5-grain mushes and mixes of organic juices and whey powder. He likes his pasta whole wheat, his sautees prepared with Pam, and no unnecessary seasonings. Cooking in his presence I feel like Paula Deen laughing vivaciously while building hardened arteries into every serving. When he is in my kitchen, I find myself trying to cook in a way that he will respect and admire (as if I regularly cooked with soy butter and textured vegetable protein), despite the fact that I personally have no desire to eat utilitarian meals that provide essential nutrients but deliver no pleasure in the cooking or the eating.

I also, alas, am unable to cook with my mother. We are very close, but it has become apparent over the years that neither of our kitchens is big enough for the two of us. I make a suggestion and she replies that she “has been cooking since before I was born.” She makes a suggestion and I indicate with some acerbity that I have “read, like 20 recipes for this already, and I am sure this is how I want to make it.” While she is very gracious about allowing me to prepare meals in her kitchen, she does not join me, and we have learned that even a casual remark from the doorway (”you aren’t going to chop those?”) can lead to emotional mayhem.

I do have a friend I can cook with, and this I cherish. Because he is a sensitive person (and accepts my truly astonishing levels of neuroses and need to control everything), when he is in my kitchen it is understood that I am the chef and he is the sous chef. The very fact that he clearly “gets” this lets me relax enough to allow him to take the lead when he is inspired. When he is inspired, its good, and we all eat well. He is orderly, he respects certain culinary orthodoxies that are dear to my heart, and he is vocal in his appreciation of my splendid chef’s knife, well-stocked pantry and functional storage system. He would never put Miracle Whip in the potato salad, judge me if I burnt the garlic, or look askance at a tablespoon of butter.

Maybe Dinah was really down with having someone hanging around in the kitchen with his banjo. Maybe she was lonely and needed company, maybe the banjo guy was the love of her life and she didn’t want him out of her sight, or maybe she was just in a good mood, dancing a little from sink to stove to refrigerator with a glass of wine in her hand and a smile on her lips. Maybe Dinah was a better person than I am, which isn’t actually all that difficult.

But maybe, just maybe, he was driving her nuts.

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Even Russel Crowe Can’t Save You: A Meditation on Change.

Sometimes, the universe sends us a message about the need for change. We may feel it as an ache that can’t be fixed by medicine, vegetables, exercise, relaxing, or even talking to people we love and trust. “Something’s not right,” it says, falling daily into the cosmic receptacle of body and mind. “Something’s not right.”

Sometimes, if one is particularly resistant to that message there can actually be signs. Your dreams change and a theme is repeated, or the same person or situation keeps showing up. Nearly thirty years ago when I was basically flailing around in Boston after graduating from law school, I had a serious of what I can only describe as violent dreams in which my father, mother or brother had died. I finally decided to pack up and come home to where they are were, after which I created satisfying work, and met my husband and got married.

I am resistant to change, which is part of why my Buddhist practice is really “practice,” by which I mean hard freaking work. The basic tenet is that everything changes constantly, and that clinging to things as they are causes suffering. People move on through death or decision, children grow up, jobs end, and fire or natural disaster can take a home and all the memories it contains in a matter of minutes. Not all of these things will happen to us, but some of them surely will.

Finding peace means sitting in the waves and letting them move us, gently, rather than tensing up and fighting to remain in place as the sand shifts beneath us.

But this isn’t a treatise on Buddhism. Well, it is, but it wasn’t meant to be.

A change has been forcing its attentions on me for a long time, and I’ve been fighting it hard. The result, not surprisingly, is that the pain of the situation coupled with the energy spent fighting change has left me pretty tired, sad and hopeless. (#doasisaynotasido.)

Yesterday it came to a head, and that’s never pleasant. As you’ll know from being a human living on earth, if you ignore the difficult relationship/weird lump/toothache/pile of bills long enough, hoping to keep everything stable, you will not just be sitting in the waves, but thrown out of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of a gale. (Ideally, Russel Crowe will be on the ship and will try to save you. Not Russel Crowe now, but Russel Crowe about 20 years ago.)

Post-dumping, I turned to the people I always turn to: my husband, my brother and my best friend. I wanted a life raft. I was hoping for some deeply satisfying “there, there” action, and a healthy serving of “you can handle this.” All three of them were all lovely, as they always are when I need them, but it was my brother who gave me the raft, complete with a warm towel and a hot toddy.

“You are Ed Graham’s daughter,” he said. I allowed as how this was true, and he went on to remind me that our late father, who disliked change and conflict as much as I do (which is to say to a pathological degree) had faced an enormous change late in his working life and accepted and adapted with great equanimity and grace.

He was a college professor, and had been for more than thirty years when his university dissolved the department he had taught in. He was moved to a different department, and then to an administrative position in yet another part of the university. He had done nothing wrong; the entire faculty of the disbanded department was struggling with the disloyalty of their employer, the lack of value placed on their life’s work, and relocation to work far removed from what many of them had done for decades.

My father, as I said, became an administrator, an Associate Dean. At the age of 60-something, older than I am now, he had new colleagues and made friends of most of them. He had a new, much younger and highly temperamental boss for whom he became ally, advisor and eventually mentor. He lost his classroom teaching opportunity (which was what he was born to do) as an administrator, and took on the role of facilitator, elder statesman and problem solver like a champ. He hated the change bitterly, and fought it as soon as it was in the wind, but (as my brother reminded me) he adapted and adapted well, right down to finding silver linings he wouldn’t have allowed himself to imagine.

I am so like him. I have to work every single day to remind my barnacle self  that I can love the people, things and situations in my life like crazy (and I should because that’s where all of life’s juice is found) but I can’t “keep” any of them. Not a person, not a job, not an object. I have to sit in the waves and rock, shifting on the sand and feeling it fall away beneath me, falling over sometimes, laughing and righting myself.

And now I have company, thanks to my brother. My father will from now on be next to me, shifting on the sand, falling over, laughing and righting himself. He’s good company.

P.S. April 29 is the anniversary of my father’s death. Take a minute that day to teach somebody something, whether it’s tying a shoe or planting a row of seeds. He’d love that.

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Militant Self Care Part I

I grew up believing that my first job in life was to please other people, to make people like me, and to serve. Imagine if your parents were Carrie’s mother from Stephen King’s “Carrie,” and your father was Pat Conroy’s “Great Santini.” That’s a glimpse into what goes on in my head.

My actual parents were generally lovely, supportive and insightful about my quirks, although there was great emphasis placed on being of service and putting other people first. That wouldn’t be a bad approach with the kind of kid who needs reminding that they are not the center of the universe, but I was painfully, ridiculously hypersensitive and lacking in self-confidence.

I might actually have needed to be told that I should be the center of my own universe if I really wanted to have anything to give anyone else. Let’s come back to that another time.

I was, by the age of ten, the kid who flew alone from Michigan to Rhode Island needing desperately to go the bathroom but afraid to “bother” the man in the aisle seat. Because some stranger’s (projected) need not to stand up for a total of 45 seconds outweighed my (actual) need to be pee and be comfortable.

This mental state (“pathology,” if you insist) makes me a really good employee, a pretty loyal friend, and an engaged and active daughter, spouse and mother. It has also, traditionally, made me wary of the whole “militant self-care” (MSC) thing.* Mother Theresa has never been on Instagram having a sheet mask party with the other saints.

Right now, I’m dealing with some difficult things. They are not my story to tell (so I won’t in this space) but they do have a significant impact on my daily life. Some time in March they reached a level that made me reconsider MSC. The gateway was telling myself it was REALLY to keep me healthy and resilient for the benefit of others. The hook was that I really dug building little pockets of peace and/or delight into my days.

[And let me say before I go on that I am keenly aware that the whole “self-care” thing is often associated with privilege. My version of MSC is possible only because I have a modest amount of disposable income, and some free time. A single mom working two jobs and raising even one kid would have a much harder time with this than I do.]

So here’s the first part of what I’m doing by way of MSC. Let’s call this part “The Infrastructure” because it’s all about nuts and bolts physical and mental health. A lot of it is so common as to be cliché, and I’m okay with that. I hope some of it is useful.

  1. Meditation. In order to make this a regular thing I had to give up on the idea that it only “counted” if it was breath meditation (e.g. Just focusing on breathing) but not if it was guided meditation (the kind where someone talks you through it.) This judgy difference is courtesy of the Inner Santini, btw. Now I let myself decide what kind of meditation I feel I need, and some days it’s formal breath-watching, cross-legged on a cushion and some days it’s listening to a recorded guide while lying in my bed. It helps.
  2. Hydration. Have I made fun of the people carrying their water bottles everywhere? I have. Does drinking 64 ounces of water a day lead to a statistically noticeable increase in bathroom time? It does. Do I have fewer headaches and more energy? I do. (P.S. I bought a glass water bottle from amazon. This one. It’s pretty, it fits in my bag and cupholder and I am not contributing more plastic bottles to landfills.
  3. Healthy Eating. Sometimes. When you’re having a “Bridge Over Troubled Water” kind of day it’s very difficult to get excited about broccoli. Unless, of course, it’s mashed up with cheddar cheese and deep fried, possible with breading. You are not wrong if you believe that on such a day all bets are off and that it’s nobody’s damned business if you eat Cheetos and Gelato for dinner chased by a bottle of wine. (I’m not much of a drinker, but I hear this is a thing.) Add “Gilmore Girls” reruns and it’s like giving yourself a cozy junk food hug.

If you do that every day, or even every other day during a prolonged period of stress you’ll stop feeling like you’re giving yourself a cozy junk food hug and start feeling like the victim of a junk food mugging.

I have moments of epic indulgence, but most of the time I take care of my body and mind by feeding them tons of veggies, lean proteins and whole grains. Most days I make a mixture of roasted carrots and brussels sprouts, onion, chickpeas, spinach and mushrooms. Topped with a little peanut sauce or tahini sauce it’s filling and pretty delicious. Sometimes I take a bunch of veggies and make soup (vegetable in winter, gazpacho on summer) or I make gigantic salads.

Can’t cook/won’t cook? Get yourself some apples and peanut butter, Pre-cut veggies and yogurt dip (you can buy it pre-made), bags of pre-made salad, cans of low-sodium soup with lots of vegetables. Make a sandwich of purchased guacamole, thin sliced cucumbers, spinach leaves, sprouts and sweet onion on whole grain bread. And when your body tells you that a Snickers Bar would be curative? Eat one.

  • Moving My Body. I may be the least sporty person I know. Despite evidence to the contrary I view every kind of exercise with a mixture of fear and dread. (“I’m going to sweat, I look funny, I’m tired, it’s cold, remember that time I fell on my head going over the horse in gymnastics?!”) I feel better when I move, but I need an incentive plan.

I walk between 5000 and 10000 steps a day. There are days when I really, literally can’t do more than 5k for logistical reasons, but when I can, I do. In the house when it’s snowy and icy out, and outside with the dog when it’s nice out. The incentive? I listen to audiobooks that I am ONLY allowed to listen to while walking. And when I really, really just can’t? I just don’t. So far allowing myself the kindness of a day off has not resulted in some epic backsliding.

I also do yoga around three times a week using YouTube videos from Yoga with Adriene. The yoga is not about burning calories, it is a spiritual practice and helps me to be literally and figuratively more flexible and able to yield to whatever the universe throws at me. The incentive? I let myself stay on the floor afterwards and rest. Sometimes I fall asleep for a bit. Often with a cat on top of me.

Up Next: Militant Self Care II, The Fun Stuff.

*The term “Militant Self Care” comes from the work of Tashmica Torok, founder of The Firecracker Foundation and leader of Militant Self-Care Workshops.

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Disaffected Youth, Adulterous Wasps & An Imprisoned Count: Some Books I Love

My feelings about books (and the reading of them) are as pure and uncomplicated as the love of an infant for its mother. They are, to me, sustenance, inspiration, amusement, and always the best medicine. So serious is this relationship that I have a book tattooed on the inside of my left wrist.

One of my favorite bookish podcasts is “What Should I Read Next,” hosted by Anne Bogel. The schtick is that she has a guest (or occasionally guests) every week, and discusses their lives as readers, their lives in general, and what they’d like to change about their reading lives. She asks them this question: “tell me three books you love, and one book you hate,” and based on the whole informational stew, recommends three books that they might like.

I have listened to every episode, some more than once, and had moments of epic disbelief (the person who “really couldn’t get into fiction”) and moments of deep, universe-healing agreement (people who choose among their three favorites a book or series that I love and keep on my “most-loved” shelf. Well, one of my “most-loved” shelves. There’s the big shelf, and the Jane Austen collection that sits on my desk to remind me that I might at any moment choose to see the sights of Bath or take a long walk through green pastures to visit friends for tea and gossip. Although I look terrible in an empire waist.) Oh, and the books I keep near my bed in case of insomnia or spiritual crisis.

I really want is to be a guest on “What Should I Read Next,” and a frequent pastime is trying to figure out my answers to The Question. But picking only three books I love seems nearly impossible. Could I count a whole series as one? Do I pick things I’ve read recently or use all my picks, as I so easily could, on books I read before I hit high school?

Since Anne Bogel has not yet lifted me from obscurity, I’ve decided to use some of my “bookish” blog posts to give a series of answers to the “three thumbs up, one thumb down” question. (Really, I can do anything I want all up in here.) So, you may get some recommendations that are helpful, you may violently disagree or you might have all the feels of camaraderie and soulmate-ness that come when a kindred spirit loves the same books you love.

Here’s a round of answers based entirely on how I’m feeling right this minute. Also some bonus information about my recent and current reads.

Just finished: “What if it’s Us” by Becky Albertalli & Adam Silvestra. I have read, and loved all of her books starting with “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.” They are all YA, all super LGBTQ-inclusive (“What if it’s Us is a love story about two high school boys) and feature characters of many colors, religions and sizes. Highly recommended for you or a young person in your life.

Now reading: “The Book of Help: A Memoir in Remedies.” by Megan Griswold. I don’t usually read non-fiction unless it’s related to spirituality and/or health. This is the former, a memoir told in a series of vignettes about the many programs and modalities Griswold has tried in her life (TM, EST, Transactional Analysis and more) and all wrapped up in a pretty compelling package starting with a suspenseful hook.

Three Books I Love:

  1. “The Secret History,” by Donna Tartt. This book is everything. If you’re me, anyway. It’s set in a small liberal arts school very much like the one I attended, and at about the same point in history (mid-80s.) It is very long, pretty elitist and full of itself, and has murders, many intense relationships (most of which are quite dark and quite twisted) and many references to studying the classics. It is the book equivalent of spending a few days with a really cool friend who has a well-broken in black leather jacket, smokes unrepentantly, tells stories you aren’t sure you can believe, and will lend you his or her stub of perfect black kohl to ring your eyes before heading out for the night.
  2. “Family Happiness” by Laurie Colwin. Nobody wrote a modern comedy of manners better than Laurie Colwin, who we lost way too young. I’m not sure why this is my favorite of her books, except that the story of Polly Demarest and her (apparently) perfect life is so cozily domestic and well-regulated at times and so disorderly and sad at others. You know, like life. Also, it raises interesting questions about morality in the context of marriage.
  3. “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles. I think Towles is one of the greatest, living American writers. This novel tells the story of the 30 years in the life of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who is placed under house arrest inside the Metropol Hotel in Moscow in 1922 by the Bolsheviks. In those decades he doesn’t leave the Hotel (despite many regime changes), and in his captivity he makes a life that far exceeds anything most of us can imagine. It’s like the Tardis, this book, with abundant life and possibility bubbling under the narrow, placid surface of captivity and restriction.

One Book I Hate: “The Deerslayer,” by James Fenimore Cooper. In high school there were several books I genuinely hated (this isn’t even the one I hate the most.) They were all focused on male characters doing things that didn’t remotely interest me, and if there were women in the story they were only mentioned in passing or caused said men to fall from grace because of their earthy, lustful ways (see “The Scarlet Letter.”) This one does not, I think, involve a woman doing anything. It involves men saving other men from stuff, fighting a lot with tomahawks and various other weapons, and…slaying the odd deer. That kind of says it all.

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In which I begin.

There are so many things I want to tell you. Because I really, really want you to like me.

In my fantasies, there are relatively few fancy cars, spa weeks or mansions. What I want is for at least one person to read something I wrote and cry (dramatically) “eureka!” Or words to that effect.

So I’ll tell you some things that might help you decide to trust me, take this journey with me, and maybe, just maybe, decide that you like me.

Things About Me

I am old. Not old like with a housecoat and a blue-gray perm, but I am gray. I am too old to publish photos of my cute legs in knee socks near a pile of YA books and an artistically arranged mug of cocoa.

I am old enough to be that girl’s mother.

I do, though, like to think I’m pretty hip for a person of my advanced years. I do not listen only to The Eagles and Steely Dan (disclosure: I have hated both since I was in high school), and I know about CBD, AF, and IKR and use all three on the regular.

I have been a lot of things in my life. These include, but are not limited to: professional cellist, attorney, bible salesperson, retail manager, cook, funeral coordinator, stay at home mom, call center employee, temp, Montessori Aide (lasted 2 weeks) and kitchen store manager (lasted one day.)

I am always a writer. I have been a writer since I wrote the epic novel “Lacey Comstock: Pioneer Girl” on notebook paper in third grade. I have written for Salon.com and for Elephant Journal as well as the Edgewood Cooperative Nursery School newsletter (now sadly out of print.) I’ve written some fiction, but only of the short variety. Oh, and some truly maudlin, overwrought poetry of the “I stand here/you are there as across a river/I made from my tears” type. You get it.

These days I work as Managing Editor of a hyperlocal online newspaper, and sometimes I write, but usually I’m editing other reporters’ stuff.

I came from a happy family, and I know that’s right up there with hens’ teeth. My mother died in 2012 and my father in 2014 (after I was lucky enough to provide him with home hospice care), and I miss them every damned day. Sometimes it hits me like a well-aimed punch to the gut, other times it’s softer, and nostalgic. I still have my brother and his family, all of whom I adore flagrantly and immoderately.

I have been married to the same man for 22 years, and I have a son who is 22 (if you raised your eyebrows a little at that, you’re on the right track.) I love them both in ways that are simultaneously life-giving and terrifying (you know, mortality and stuff.) I also live with a big, white dog named Guinevere, a black cat named Luna and a striped cat named Henry. I really can’t sort out whether I love them as much as I love my humans, but I think I do. And I’m okay with that.

I have friends, and they are astonishing to me.

Things I’ll Probably Write About

I miss this kind of writing and that’s why I’m coming back to do it some more. I decided to use this space to talk about all the things I’m passionate about, the things that can drag me out of the worst place and give me hope and anticipation. I’m warning you, though; it’s a pretty mixed bag:

  1. Books. I’m a velocireader, and I have strong opinions. I may talk about a really old book or series I love, something I just read, or something I don’t like that everyone else seems to like. (“Eat, Pray, Love” anybody?)
  2. Spirituality. I’m a Buddhist. But I’m a Buddhist raised by a lapsed Catholic/atheist father and a Jewish mother, and I used to work at a protestant church. Where I was baptized at one point, but it didn’t seem to take. More about this later.
  3. Skincare and Makeup. I’m kind of obsessive about this stuff, and it’s a form of play for me. I’ve tried the 10-step Korean routine, I have a favorite sheet mask, I have tips for getting your lashes to stay curled, how to find the right foundation, and opinions about glitter, contouring, strobe highlights and Eugene Levy brows on 18-year-old women.
  4. Food and cooking. I love to cook, and at this point I use recipes as guides and shoot more for the intuitive. I like to cook BIG flavors, like curries, sambals, homemade red sauce, and, famously, a pasta recipe with so many hot peppers that no one could actually eat it without weeping. I’m interested in cooking healthy food, cooking ridiculously unhealthy food, and baking. I also try to stay on top of food trends and decide whether they’re worth trying. (I see you avocado toast, smoothie bowls and matcha.)
  5. Cool stuff. Podcasts, TV shows, movies, websites, products, music, tips, hacks, etc..

A Thing for Today

It’s time for me to go make my lunch and hang out with my husband and creatures as one does on the best kind of Sunday.

I talked to my BFF this morning (she lives in another state and we have never met, but that’s also for another day) and at the end of the conversation I said “don’t let Monday eat your Sunday.” She and I both thought that was pretty clever. You see why I love her.

Anyway, what I meant was that it’s really easy to let anxiety about whatever you face on Monday (in my case work) ruin your one, golden, silken, Sunday so it is totally consumed by dreading what comes next and a painful awareness that every breath moves you closer to The End of the Weekend.

Please, for the love of all that’s holy, try to stop doing that. I fight it with a combination of meditation (see Buddhist, above), tons of contact with creatures who love me, and immersion in things so engaging that I get immersed and stop fretting. Like writing this blog, reading a good book, or painting my toenails purple while watching old episodes of “Doc Martin.”

Cheers,

Annie