What Have You Been Doing?

Posted on March 29, 2007 by cmf

People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump going out, or that one of the dogs has wandered off. They’re poets. We love them, but they’re unreliable.)

Work has been crazy since before Thanksgiving. And the last six weeks or so I’ve been trying to work at home while the entire back end of my (not large) house is torn up because the MH has been renovating my bathroom. It will be great when it’s done (and I’m looking forward to seeing it when I get home on Saturday). But it’s been stressful, and I’ve been anxious, and even this little housesitting gig had me a tiny bit worried because the little family on vacation is facing some scary medical scenarios and the last thing I want to do is lose one fo the pets, or have the pump go out on the koi pond, or anything else go wrong. And four days into it, it’s all okay. The dogs are good. Even the chihuahua, who is scary, and hostile, and hates everyone, wanted to come sleep with me last night (kind of scary, when she decides she wants to cuddle — does she really? or is it just a ploy?). So it’s all okay. For the first time in weeks, everything feels like it’s okay. I’ve had a couple of days to sit, and think, and read (which is probably why I got a cold — typical for me, to crash once the pressure is off).

When I was a kid, we’d go to Northern Wisconsin for two weeks every summer. We’d stay in a cabin at a resort, a cabin with electricity but no phone or TV, a cabin with a big screen porch, and an old icebox with a real chunk of ice in it, and we’d all sort of do nothing for a couple of weeks. Sure, we’d water ski, and the parents would play tennis, but as I recall, there was a lot of sitting on the dock in the sun, reading books, making sure the kids didn’t drown, and going up to the lodge three times a day for meals. They didn’t even really get newspapers — they were always a couple of days late — and there were always a few Dads who were made nervous by this because they couldn’t get the latest stock prices. But we all thought they didn’t get it. The point was not to be home. The point was that someone else cooked your meals and made your beds and your job was to read, and swim, and water ski, and play tennis, and have cocktails on the porch at five before going down to the lodge for dinner. Then you’d come back to the cabin, build a fire, and if you were lucky your parents would read you a story and tuck you into bed (it’s the only place I remember my parents married, that resort). That’s my idea of a vacation. A lot of not much.

Aside from the cold, this has been a great vacation. I’ve seen two of my closest friends — and I’ve had a blissful two days hanging out on the porch, reading, writing, walking dogs.

A Good Soup is Hard to Find

Posted on March 28, 2007 by cmf

So, four days into my Arizona sojourn, I’ve come down with a massive chest cold. It might be the flu. It’s not hot here, but it’s not really cold enough to have built a fire during the day or to be wearing a big old fleece jacket I found lying around the house. I’m freezing. And I woke up with a chest that felt like when I used to get croup as a kid — I had to rocket off and stand in a hot shower for ten minutes before I could breathe.
And so, about noon, after not eating anything all day, I decided I need soup. Well, soup, ibuprophen and cough medicine. Food just sounds like ick to me, but soup, or strong tea with lots of lemon and honey — those sound okay. I had to drive out of town to the Safeway, because there’s nothing here but art galleries and pottery shops, and I thought I’d pick up a quart of grocery store soup. But when I got there, they all looked gross. Gummy. Thick. Old. Made from who knows what?

It usually wouldn’t occur to me to buy soup at the grocery store. I have issues with soup made in strange commercial settings. But I was feeling very woofy, and I had hoped that perhaps there might be some kind of tortilla soup that might not be too bad. No luck. Back off home to make soup.
I did a chicken the other night in Jim’s amazing outdoor wood-fired barbecue (big enough to roast a pig, but with a grill that moves up and down on a chain so you can do small stuff too). And I’d bought some endive when I was at the store a couple of days ago — and those gummy soups were so gross that I came home and sauteed off some onions, added some thyme and a few hot pepper flakes, tossed in a handful or two of arborio rice I found in the cupboard and then added chicken broth and a little wine. I cooked it until the rice looked like it was in the vicinity of al dente. Then I stripped the meat off the two chicken breasts from the other night (giving the skin and the really overcooked bits to the dogs, which made them love me), chopped up about half the endive and threw the two of them into the soup pot. It needed to cook for about ten more minutes. La voila. A nice, clean, brothy soup with no weird gummy substances. A pot of soup to see me through the next couple of days of weird Arizona chest cold.

A pot of soup, three lovey dogs, a cheery fireplace, a lot of books … not that one would want to get sick on vacation, but this isn’t a bad place to lie about …

En Vacances

Posted on March 25, 2007 by cmf

I’m in Arizona for a week — just south of Tucson, housesitting for my dear friend Jim who has taken his beloved and her daughter to Italy for two weeks. It’s a perfect writer vacation — I’ve got three little dogs to take care of, two of whom need to go for a walk in the morning and in the evening. This morning we spent an hour meandering through the trails in the riverbottom through which all the birds in North America are migrating — the entire place is alive with the twitter of songbirds.

The MH was teasing me as I left because my suitcase was half-full of books, but this is a writing vacation — one in which I plan to re-acquaint myself with my neglected manuscript, get back in the habit of writing once more, and then sit on the porch amidst the lovely noise of falling water in Jim’s koi pond and read whole books — not just dip in and out of them, but actually finish a book or two. Lovely.

Vernal Light …

Posted on March 20, 2007 by cmf

It’s happened again — the world has come around and has begun to tilt back toward the sun again — and our northern world is turning light again. When I moved up here my California friends were horrified by the prospect of cold, but having survived childhood and college in Wisconsin, the coldest place on earth, I wasn’t worried about the cold. It was the dark that concerned me. Winter is long and dark here — months on end where the sun disappears by five, doesn’t show itself again until after eight.

It’s one of the things that keeping a garden has done for me — it’s put me back in touch with the progression of the seasons. The world is getting light and suddenly it’s time to dig the winter duff off the perennial beds, time to plant spinach and arugula and broccoli rabe. Not time in the clock sense either — time in the older, world-turning-on-its-axis sense. I’m slightly thrummy with anxiety because I haven’t had time to start the tomato seedlings yet, and the middle of March, just about the equinox, is time to start the heat-loving plants: tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, zucchini, so that they can go in the garden the end of May (do not be fooled into planting tomatoes before Memorial Day — it’s the first thing anyone tells you up here, and they’re right).

And so, after a week of unseasonable warmth, I’ve got tidy perennial beds, some seeds in the vegetable gardens, and I’ve had to start watering, which is startling. But the world is greening up. The sun has, indeed, come back again.

Breakfast of Champions

Posted on March 15, 2007 by cmf

Ten thousand years ago, when I was in my 20s, I spent a couple of months in Taiwan. My college roommate had married a Chinese guy and was clearly going to stay there, and I was in between jobs, and I wanted to see what her life was going to be like, so off I went. We were so young that it never occurred to us that having a third person move in with a couple who had just gotten married might not be the greatest idea, although I have to say, for the most part we all got along swimmingly. Emil taught me how to sing the directions home for a taxi driver so I wouldn’t get lost, and Constance helped me get a couple of little English teaching jobs, and all in all, it was a fine adventure.

So, every morning, I’d venture forth from my little room (which was actually a hut built on top of the roof of the building) and out into the market for breakfast. Emil is a musician, so he and Constance were never up in the mornings, but me, I’m a morning gal and breakfast is kind of crucial to my ability to function. So, off I’d take my illiterate, non-Chinese-speaking self into the slightly frightening market in search of the English newspaper and my morning bing.

My morning bing was made by an older lady, cooking on a converted oil barrel. She’d chop up a scallion and throw it on the griddle with a little oil. While the scallion sizzled, she’d beat one egg with a little toasted sesame oil, then spread that out on the griddle too. On top of that went a thin pancake. She’d let it all cook for a second to adhere, then flip it over, and roll it up. The rolled egg pancake would cook for a couple of minutes, then she’d pull it off, cut it into slices, plop it in a plastic bag with a squirt of soy sauce and sesame oil, and off I’d go home with my little breakfast. An egg bing, an orange, some tea and the English paper would keep me occupied for most of the morning on my Taipei rooftop.

I must have made ten thousand bings in the years since my time in Taiwan because the thing about a bing is that you can put anything in it. Some mornings it’s a plain green scallion bing, some mornings I put in whatever leftover greens I have. Sometimes I eat a bing with a little soy/sesame oil sauce, sometimes, like this morning, with a dollop of thick greek yoghurt and a drizzle of olive oil. As spring arrives, I tend to wander out and see what has come up in the garden — young chard, spinach, mustard greens, arugula — all of it is good in a bing. A nice bing, an orange cut into wedges, a cup of tea. Still the breakfast of champions.

Fear Not, Plant a Seed

Posted on March 14, 2007 by cmf

So Meg at megnut is throwing up her hands and isn’t going to worry anymore about what she eats while at Salon, Barry Glassner talks to Tracie McMillan about the religious and sociological roots of America’s strange and inconsistent anxiety about food.

Meanwhile, at the LA Times, Alain Passard comes to America to cook with his fellow chef/gardener David Kinch at Manresa and notes that “If I didn’t have my gardens, I would no longer love to cook.”

Seems to me the only thing to do is to join Meg, and simply start following Michael Pollan’s key points about food, beginning with key point number one: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Grow Your Own

Posted on March 13, 2007 by cmf

This weekend it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and zucchini in the basement under the grow lights. I’ll probably also put in spinach, arugula, and onions — the earliest of early spring crops — the things that can withstand some snow, a few more frosts. There are bulbs coming up, and the iris are poking through the debris of the winter …

Because I’m underwater at work, here’s a link to a great article about building gardens in low-income neighborhoods — teaching people they can grow their own food in areas where there are not only no Farmer’s Markets, but no supermarkets. Check it out.

Patti Smith on the Big Questions

Posted on March 12, 2007 by cmf

On the eve of being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Patti Smith, as always, asks all the really interesting questions:

Should an artist working within the revolutionary landscape of rock accept laurels from an institution? Should laurels be offered? Am I a worthy recipient? I have wrestled with these questions and my conscience leads me back to Fred and those like him — the maverick souls who may never be afforded such honors. Thus in his name I will accept with gratitude. Fred Sonic Smith was of the people, and I am none but him: one who has loved rock ’n’ roll and crawled from the ranks to the stage, to salute history and plant seeds for the erratic magic landscape of the new guard …Rock ’n’ roll drew me from my mother’s hand and led me to experience. In the end it was my neighbors who put everything in perspective. An approving nod from the old Italian woman who sells me pasta. A high five from the postman. An embrace from the notary and his wife. And a shout from the sanitation man driving down my street: “Hey, Patti, Hall of Fame. One for us.”

Art. Revolution. Questioning one’s worthiness. Questioning the validity of accolades to begin with — it’s like a message in a bottle from another time when we were all less cynical, less interested in pure celebrity, less liable to equate success with sales figures.

One of the many things I’ve always admired about Patti Smith is that she never seemed to take her iconic stature seriously. She lives in Detroit. In a neighborhood. She raised her kids and went to the store and never fell into the trappings of celebrity that would have been so easy with someone who appeared in all those iconic Mappelthorpe photos (Mapplethorpe — another message in a bottle. Remember the hysteria over that museum show? Remember those flowers? Remember all those gorgeous men, dead now?).

And when the Rock and Roll hall of fame came knocking, she still had the sense to ask “is this a good thing?” I’m glad she’s accepting. I’m glad she’s accepting in the spirit she is. I’m more than glad she’s still out there reminding us to ask the questions.

Blue Skies, Birdsong, Gin-and-Tonic on the Porch

Posted on March 10, 2007 by cmf

Winter is on the wane — it was in the mid-fifties today, blue skies, sunshine, birds singing and I dug the quackgrass out of an entire bed at the front of the house.

Three years of serious spring composting and my dirt is lovely — even after being trampled hard last summer during construction. Stick a fork in it and it just turns right over, all nice and loose and friable. Hardly any clumps. Big fat earthworms. The youngest dog was quite interested in the whole process, which isn’t surprising since digging holes seems to be his outdoor hobby. Tomorrow the dopey wire fences go in — the two big dogs know to stay out of the garden beds but this newcomer hasn’t learned yet, so another year of tacky edging. He’ll learn. It just takes a while when your a dog to figure out the difference between garden and every other piece of dirt.

So, it happened once more. The sun has come back. The earth is warming up. In on the front porch drinking the first gin-and-tonic of the season. Spring is actually coming round again. Hallelujah.

Hyperreality Creeps In On Little Cat Feet

Posted on March 8, 2007 by cmf

The seductive thing about Theory is that once you get a meme like hyperreality in your head, you can spend days (weeks, years, academic careers) viewing various unrelated bits of news through the filter of that particular theory.

For example, writing the headline … is it because I spent so many years in academia, or because I am submerged in the welter of culture that the phrase “creeps in” is automatically followed in my head by “on little cat feet.” I have to go look up that it’s Carl Sandburg, but it’s stuck there, just like so many other bits of info. Hyperreality, like Sandburg’s fog, is creeping up on me today … creeping up on me as I sign in from Montana to my virtual cubicle in the Big Corporation, as I call in and speak with voices located in Ireland, Seattle, San Jose, and Montana who “meet” in a web-based “meeting room.” Creeps in as I read this review in Slate of Joshua Ferris’ new novel, a novel written in the third person plural about a group of ad workers succumbing to or resisting the undertow of corporate life in the cubicles. The kind of corporate life to which I have this odd, tangenital relationship. I have a “real” job. I log in every morning and put in 8-10 hours just as if I was in my cube in San Jose. And yet, I’m not. I’m in Montana. My “cube” was once a bedroom, and although it’s about the size of most cubes, I’m connected to the “real” world a little more directly than I was when I went in to the actual office. I don’t go to a corporate campus. I don’t have to work in a cube. I don’t eat lunch in the corporate cafeteria. My actual life is less physically controlled by my employer than the lives of my co-workers who go to one of our many corporate campuses, but that’s not to say that my time is any less controlled. It’s a real job, like I said.

It was the search for a world a little lower on the simulation-scale that sent me to Montana in the first place. I didn’t do well in the land of malls and strip malls, the land where everthing looks the same and looks non-indigenous in the same way. So moving to a small town, an old, slightly run-down small town seemed to me like a move toward authenticity, but the insidious thing about memes like hyperreality is that even so, I can see the easy argument to be made that we’re all, especially us newcomers, simply performing a culturally-determined and hyperreal version of small town life. And I’m sure to a degree that’s true. We like our downtown because it’s old, because most of the brick storefronts survived. We like that because once the railroad pulled out there wasn’t any money, the old neon signs all survived, and weren’t modernized. But frankly, the idea that we’re all simply acting out some culturally determined simacula of small town life just makes me tired. While I understand that we’re all unlikely to live truly authentic lives, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try in whatever ways we can to get a little closer to something real. If that means moving to a small town and building a garden, even though it isn’t the first garden ever built, even if the design of the raised beds is influenced by the many photos of European kitchen gardens I saw while planning it that first winter, then so be it.

Because there is something more physically engaged about small town and rural life. Whether it’s my garden, or the number of animals around me, both domestic and wild who wind up on our plates, or the bear that stood up and woofed at us on our afternoon walk two years ago (and upon whose “plate” I was worried I’d wind up) there is something decidedly less hyperreal about living here. Is it simply that when you life in a more rural place you’re more in touch with how the food chain actually works? I found a piece this morning by Jessica McMurray Blaine about how as a kid she witnessed the killing and butchering of her family’s small herd of steers — and how after failing to simulate the horror her parents feared she’d feel about the event, she watched with fascination, concluding that “This had not been about pet names, or pastoral visions of farm life; it was bloody, and difficult, and real. And all right.”

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Monthly Archives: March 2007