Spring Comes Around Again

Posted on March 30, 2004 by cmf

I made it back to the gym today. I’ve always been a sporadic gym person at best, but last fall I had been back in the gym about six weeks, and was really enjoying it, when Patrick died. Afterwards, I tried a couple of times, but I just couldn’t do it. The treadmill seemed like a terrible analogy for my life, there were too many people, I couldn’t face having to see people. But, now it’s spring again, and my garden is coming back to life, and I’ve found myself the last few days getting cranky in that way that means you’ve got some energy to burn off. Plus, I lost some weight after Patrick died (the only good side-effect of this all, getting rid of that 10 pounds I’ve been unable to shed for three or four years) and I could feel it creeping back on again. So this monring I dug my gym clothes out of the bottom of the closet, pulled out the iPod my fabulous stepmother, in a fit of excessive, yet deeply appreciated generosity gave me for my birthday, and off I went for an hour. It was good. I liked it. One more thing I’m able to do again.

As for the garden– it’s been in the fifties and sixties here for three weeks, which is totally weird. Global warming, I guess — but I’m going for it. The arugula I foolishly planted has sprouted, as has the kale, and the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, brussels sprouts and flowers I’ve started in the basement are also sprouting. I’m thinking of putting in the broccoli raab and maybe some chard. I fell in love with chard last summer, and having a freezer full of chard saw me through a long winter. So more chard. And beets — both for the beets and for the greens. What the hell, I’m planting things early. Forget hedging my bets, life’s too short and seeds are cheap. If everything freezes, I’ll start over. If it doesn’t, I’m ahead of the game.

Goodbye Babylon

Posted on March 29, 2004 by cmf

I splurged and bought Goodbye Babylon from Dust to Digital — an outfit who is, as their website says dedicated to re-issuing music from old 78′s. This five-cd set (six if you count the bonus cd of sermons) is SO fabulous — there’s everything from shape-note singing to holiness string bands to jubliee gospel quartets to just wonderful weird singing about Jesus (or as I like to think of him, Jeeee-sus). I slugged all five cds into the player and have been listening to it nonstop for about a week — I don’t know what the deal is — I haven’t been able to step inside a church since Patrick died, but I’ve been listening to almost nothing but old-time American hymns ever since. As they say, He/She works in mysterious ways.

Jim Houston’s Advice

Posted on March 24, 2004 by cmf

There was a really dumb article over at Salon the other day about the heartbreak of being a midlist writer. The anonymous author is being duly spanked this morning in the letters for her whininess, and for the amounts of money she’s made over the past few years, which hardly seem to qualify her at all as midlist.

Among the many, many things that annoyed me about this article, the one that hit closest to home is the idea that having a day job and being a “real” writer are mutually exclusive. I’ve seen this falsely romantic idea consign so many talented people to such poverty, or to the unending grind of adjunct teaching, or even to the unending grind of the holy grail — the tenure-track job, that they quit writing altogether. Or their writing gets skewed by the need to please a tenure committee, which is a different issue altogether, one akin to the two-book-deal problem (where you owe a book you haven’t written to an editor who has the power to reject it).

Anyhow, the work/writing issue. The summer between my first and second years at UC Davis, I was working the Art of the Wild conference up at Squaw Valley and I had a consultation with Jim Houston. He read my first chapter, and gave me the best advice I’ve ever had: “It’s a real book,” he said in his deep, dad-ly baritone. “Now you just have to figure out how to arrange your life so you can write it.” So for the next five years, that was my goal — it’s the reason I applied for the doctoral program at Utah, it’s the reason I took whole quarters off from my coursework, it was my guiding principle. How could I build a life that would allow me to write that book?

So, when I was finishing what I think of as that infernal PhD, and I was not in a good place, I had to decide how to arrange my life next. I had a finished novel manuscript that my thesis committee hated (neither postmodern nor experimental enough). I didn’t have an agent. I wasn’t published and because I had no mentor on my committee I knew my chances of getting anything other than a crappy adjunct position somewhere were pretty much nil. So I looked around, asked myself where they were paying writers actual money, and went to the Bay Area in search of a job in high tech. At that point, I sort of thought my writing career was over before it had even started, and I just wanted to make some money. I fell into the trap of thinking that writing and having a real job were mutually exclusive. I gave up.

And then Terry Tempest Williams, god bless her soul, fell in love with my book, and on the strength of that, I got an agent, and several months later, after a roller-coaster ride of hope and rumors, my book was picked up by Picador for a very modest advance. The kind of advance that made it clear I should continue to pursue making the transition from an internship at Cisco (yes, 35 years old, PhD candidate — intern. Sad thing was that internship paid more than any job I’d ever had up to that point) to a real, full-time position.

Taking a “real” job at Cisco has been the singular most important, best decision I ever made. Taking a full-time job and keeping my eye on my long-term goal of telecommuting full-time has allowed me the financial freedom and emotional stability to write about half of a novel (that I’m unfortunately pretty sure is now dead), to start this new memoir, to buy this house and build the life that I only romanticize a little bit for you all. It allowed me to help Patrick financially when he needed it, and to survive his death. It took some doing — it took being very clear about what I wanted at Cisco, it took three years of being a very good do-be and working my ass off, a time during which I didn’t get much writing done. It took some effort to resist the pressure to become a manager. It took some creativity in finding technologies and solutions that would allow me to transmit edited manuscripts electronically and making sure that my writers didn’t feel abandoned. Mostly though, it took being very clear all along that this Cisco is my job and that my career is writing and that the one does not cancel out the other.

I know people who make a living without having a day job and they have skills I don’t have. I’m terrible at pitching magazine articles, and I couldn’t write a screenplay or teleplay if my life depended on it. I’m not good at those things. I am good at editing technical documents. I like it. I like the people I work with and I like a stable paycheck every two weeks. A stable paycheck that gives me the freedom to not have to crank out a book every two years (which is good because I’m a very slow writer). It’s Jim’s advice I think of every time I’m at a crossroads. How do I need to organize my life so I can get the next book written? And then, of course, comes the hard part — parking your butt in the chair every day and producing pages — but that’s a different topic altogether.

Jumping the gun

Posted on March 19, 2004 by cmf

Yesterday I planted peas (2 kinds) and radishes, arugula, a raddiccio mix and an endive mix (from Seeds of Italy), an intriguing-looking plant called Saltwort, also from Seeds of Italy which is apparently all the rage in the finer restaurants of that fair land, laccinato kale, and interplanted spinach seeds amongst the transplants (which are looking sad, but that’s what transplants do for a few days). It’s only March and I know, despite our recent spate of 50 and 60 degree weather, that there will be more snow. But I’ve decided I don’t care!

So it snows? So the seedlings die — I’ll just plant more. And if they do make it, I’m ahead of the game. At this point they’re in raised beds in 3 inches of new compost and the soil temperature was 46 degrees — which seems like spring to me. So we’re off …

I did make one big concession to traditional gardening over my methods from last year — I planted things in actual rows. Last year I did a lot of broadcast sowing, which was fine, but I found it difficult to interplant, or to succession plant — so this year I’m going to try being a tiny bit more disciplined, and I planted actual rows. I also figure it’ll be a little easier to remember what was where if it’s planted in some sort of orderly fashion.

Today’s chore is to clean up the front flower bed and put in the last of the compost … but I’ve got a ladies lunch birthday party to go to (me? ladies lunch? these are the things one does in a new town when making friends), so today’s chores might not get done until tomorrow.

Grow lights in the basement!

Posted on March 15, 2004 by cmf

I organized the basement propagation center this weekend — it’s fabulous! I took one of the five-shelf utility units from Patrick’s storage unit, bought some cheap shop lights and grow-light tubes, and I now have four shelves set up with lights. Last year, I bought a couple of heat mats to help with germination, since it’s cool in my basement, and I have them set up on another short utility shelf unit. It’s like a real potting bench down there — space to store flats and cells, space for the bucket of potting mix, space to start seeds. It’s organized and sweet and I’m so thrilled to be planting things again.

So Saturday I started six varieties of tomatoes (plus two yellow cherry tomatoes for my friend Wendy, because her kids liked them so much last summer), and a flat of peppers — three cells each of six kinds of tomatoes. Oh, and Italian eggplant — which needed some help from the wall-o-waters last year, but I got a bunch of nice eggplants late in the summer.

Tomorrow a nice woman is coming with a dumptruck load of compost — twice as much as I ordered last year — so I’ll be able to continue filling the raised beds, and there should be enough for the flower beds as well. I’m going to try planting spinach and some greens right away — there’s actually some spinach that overwintered! I guess next year I’ll try to get serious about fall planting; this fall I wasn’t exactly on the ball, but mostly it just never occurred to me that things would survive being frozen.

I feel very Martha about my little basement shelves with their organized places to put things, and I’m looking forward to walking down there in the morning and seeing flat after flat of hopeful little seedlings.

Lamb and Elk Meatballs a la Greque

Posted on March 9, 2004 by cmf

In the freezer there was both ground lamb and ground elk (thanks Parks!) and after Maryanne and Jimmy’s magnificent dueling sauces for our Soprano’s-spaghetti-and-meatball-dinner on Sunday, I was inspired to make meatballs. I do not come from a meatball people, so meatballs are one of those things I come to late. In fact, I’m not much of a ground meat kind of gal, but when you buy (or are given) meat by the animal, you wind up with ground meat.

So, I decided to do meatballs. Because I had lamb in the freezer, and because I made some really yummy stuffed zucchini last fall with lamb and mint and ricotta cheese, I decided I wanted that kind of a flavor. I looked through a couple of cookbooks and wound up back with my old favorite, the always-reliable and sometimes magnificent cookbook by Dom Deluise, Eat This– It’ll Make You Feel Better: Mama’s Italian Home Cooking and Other Favorites of Family and Friends (while building the link I see he has a sequel out — shucks, now I’ll have to order it). This is one of those cookbooks I acquired somewhere in a sale bin, and it turns out to be totally reliable, and everything I’ve ever cooked out of it is delicious.

So, I looked to page 164 and Don’s Mom’s Meatballs:

Instead of 2 pounds ground chuck and 1/2 pound. ground pork, I used 1 pound ground lamb and one pound ground elk

Instead of 2 cups “Italian-flavored” bread crumbs I used plain bread crumbs, and a generous sprinkling each of thyme, sage, herbs de provence, mint and oregano

4 eggs

1 cup milk (I forgot this one — just noticed it now. Oh well, my meatball mix was quite moist)

1 cup fresh parsley, chopped

1/2 cup grated cheese (I used the end of a piece of Vella Mezzo-Secco, it ground out to a little more than 1/2 cup)

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 garlic cloves (I used four), chopped very fine

1 onion, minced

1/2 cup pignoli nuts (optional. I used walnuts because I like them better and I thought they’d be good with the lamb and mint)

You mix everything together, let rest for half an hour, then form into meatballs. Brown them in olive oil and then finish in a 350 degree oven for 1/2 an hour. I ate them on pasta with leftover dandelion greens/kale from the night before and a dollop of yoghurt. They were delicious, and there were a lot of them so I froze them in baggies … I think they’ll also be good as a sort of falafel-like dish on pita with cukes and yoghurt, but there’s also not so much mint in them that they won’t be good in tomato sauce. And they’re one of those pantry-type things that are good to have around — I can just pop them out of the freezer on a night when I don’t feel like cooking, and know I’ve got nice local dinner that I cooked myself (not that I’m not grateful to the Albertson’s people for the frozen entrees that sustained me these past months).

Martha Martha Martha

Posted on March 5, 2004 by cmf

I have deeply mixed feelings about the Martha Stewart verdict (says the woman who just blogged about ironing for goodness’ sake). On the one hand, it seemed pretty clear from the beginning that she was guilty of insider trading, but on the other hand, insider trading happens every day among folk of her ilk. Why the vigorous prosecution? Why not just a fine and have it done with? I mean, Ken Lay destroyed the retirement savings of thousands of his own employees, (to say nothing of the Neil Bush’s role in the S&L crisis of the late ’80′s — anyone remember that one?), and neither of them have been prosecuted. But Martha, the doyenne of domestic perfection, she of the “good thing” and the reputed temper tantrums? Our Martha, she must go to jail …

I smell sexism. I smell sexism in the sense that Martha, who has a long reputation as a tough broad who isn’t afraid to yell, who has been known to use obscenities and shout at the help, and who has gone out into the tough world of the Ken Lays and Jack Welches and whatever other male icons of corporate America you’d like to toss up in order to make herself into a somewhat paradoxical icon of domestic perfection, is being pillioried for exactly that — for appearing to be miss-blonde-homemaker while actually being a corporate shark like the rest of them. America still has issues with powerful women, and a powerful woman who gains power by commodifying domestic perfection of a particularly upper-class stripe, while simultaneously growing a corporate empire — well, she’s as ripe as any Salem herbalist for the pillory.

Or it could just be karma. Treating people like shit (and there were stories about Martha 20 years ago when I worked in cookbooks in NYC) does come back to bite you in the ass.

Like I said, I have mixed feelings about this verdict. Which is why we shouldn’t be too quick to write off feminism, even the sometimes one-note feminism of the second wave. We’re not on equal footing and we don’t have the power … if there’s anything the Martha Stewart verdict should remind us of, it’s that all-too-salient fact.

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Monthly Archives: March 2004