Jun 2010
godless wonder
26 June 2010 05:59 PM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral | Best of the blog
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.
I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?
Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.
My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.
Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.
The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.
*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.
Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.
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I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin
The kitchen on Queen Street was out of proportion, with a large linoleumed space that could hold a table for six but contained only an old refrigerator and a telephone jack. The stove, sink, cabinets and counter space were jammed into an adjacent galley. Everything we owned -- pots, pans, dishes, and silverware -- was a parental hand-me-down. In the mornings we would linger over percolated coffee diluted to a muddy brown with half and half, the perfect solution to a mild hangover. Some days I would come home for lunch from my job at the college bookstore to make BLTs on poppy seed buns, the bacon still hot from the pan, tomato juice and mayonnaise dripping down my fingers.
This was the place where we learned to cook, tried recipes from Gourmet Magazine and the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In our year there, we made pizzas from scratch, cleaned and fried squid, and grilled chicken marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, and rosemary. A boyfriend showed us how to make pesto and a cook at the Ironstone brought us a bushel of crawfish that we steamed in a cauldron of boiling water.
I have a file of recipes from that period, most of them copied by hand from my boyfriend D's mother's cookbooks, some of which I still make, like Lebanese Cucumber Soup, and Rice with Garlic and Walnuts. I even have the pizza recipes from Gourmet, which seemed so exotic at the time (Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza with Peppers, Onion, and Garlic Confit, Broccoli and Ricotta Pizza). Going through them reminds me that I never clip recipes anymore, just search around on the internet or Epicurious to see what looks good. Recipes on paper are another thing I miss from the pre-internet days, another reason to toss our modem out the window. I want a paper trail blotched with oil and tomato sauce. I want tangible memories. I want to have my mind and time returned to me (brief interruption while I look at Facebook: see what I mean?).
Still, the memories remain. When my family returned from vacation last Friday, there was a half batch of gazpacho, vinegary and bright, waiting for us, courtesy of our housesitter. Gazpacho was one of D’s favorite foods and I thought of that long-ago summer, which was also the first time Martha and I made the soup. The recipe called for peeled, deseeded tomatoes and we were mystified. How did one peel tomatoes? Like, with a vegetable peeler? Or by hand somehow? And, umm, the seeds? What was the problem with seeds? Finally, Martha called her mother. She gave us instructions: put a big pot of water on to boil, remove the tomato stems and cut Xs in the blossom ends before immersing them in the boiling water for under a minute. Then remove the tomatoes with a strainer and plunge them into an ice bath.The peels would slip off in our hands.
Gazpacho recipe, copied in the summer of 1988.
It worked. Martha and I pureed the still-seedy tomatoes with bread crumbs, garlic, vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice, adding onion and cucumber at the end. The soup chilled while we chopped the garnishes. It was late July on the Eastern Shore. The air was resistant, fluid, like water. Heat flattened the landscape, made the houses across the shimmering street one-dimensional. While I poured the soup, Martha filled two cups with ice and gin and topped them with tonic and thin wedges of lime. We sat in the living room with our drinks, the bowls of gazpacho balanced on our laps. The soup was bracing, the acidity of the tomato and vinegar complemented by the bite of onion and coolness of cucumber.
Sometimes all that remains is sense memory -- the taste, the scent, the aching loss, the joy of conquest -- or a suspicion that something else must have happened. Maybe Martha and I went our for a walk that night after the sun went down, barefoot on sidewalks that radiated a memory of sun. Or maybe we refilled our cups again and again and cried about our crazy mothers, our absent fathers. Or we danced to Prince or sung along to Paradise by the Dashboard Light. D may have spent the night, the two of us still and quiet on checkerboard sheets, feeling the pull of the window fan in my attic bedroom, while downstairs M let the smoke from her cigarette drift out of an open window.
What actually happened that night is lost. But I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin, our kitchen counter splattered with tomato juice, the closeness of friendship at a time when the world was new.
Images:
Top: Me, a blurry goofball in the yard on Queen Street.
Middle: The original gazpacho recipe.
Bottom: The checkerboard sheets, the I Love You This Much statue, the orange crate. The artfully-placed bottle of Corona.
On not escaping
19 June 2010 05:10 PM Categories: The kid | Quotidian existence
The road trip: the long car ride down and then back up the coast, along Highway One and Route 101, those final curves of Big Sur where the kid got carsick (and I was grateful that he'd refused food before then), the rental cottage in Pasadena where I realized that I had forgotten my inhaler and so spent a few hours on our first night there sitting up and trying to take deep breaths. Then there was the graduation ceremony, me and the kid running on the beach in Santa Monica beforehand, the long blah blah blah of the ceremony and the happiness afterwards. We spent some time with the father-in-law and the brother-in-law and the aunt. We ate in lots of restaurants and went through boxes of WWII memorabilia and old family papers and keepsakes.
We went to Disneyland, a day trip where we terrorized the kid by taking him on rides that he wasn't quite ready to experience. He was dying to go into the Haunted Mansion, but as soon as we walked in, he wanted out of there. It was too late. In the days since he's been going over the experience again and again mainly to the birdies in the car (that is, to my index fingers and thumbs, which make convenient bird puppets). He explains what happened and then he has them go through a mini version of it ("Birdies: the room is stretching!"). OK, OK, OK -- I get it. He's working it out. But I still feel guilty for exposing him to that too early. And it wasn't only that. We also got on Star Tours and the Pirates of the Caribbean rides. Star Tours merely scared him. The Pirates of the Caribbean had him burying his head in my chest, asking when it would be over. And I'm not so sure that finishing with the bizarrely psychedelic Winnie the Pooh ride was a good idea for any of us.
Then the trip back home, a greasy dinner, an overnight in Morro Bay, the chill of the wind coming offf the ocean, the seals and cormorants, Morro Rock.
What we brought back with us: a sword, a shield, a retractable dagger, a gumball machine, an old globe, rosaries, a prayer book, the carbide miner's headlamp that belonged to my husband's maternal grandfather. More plastic knights. An extra inhaler. A new pair of shoes. New used clothes.
And now I'm back, wondering where my head is, wanting to escape, really escape. Just me and a book, the swing of a hammock, a cool glass of chamomile tea, a long sleep. This is the state of my fantasy life. Safe, soothing, and solo. I haven't spent a night away from the boy since before he was born. I love him. I need a night away. I'm wishing that I was the type to build him a network, to take a thread here and there and connect him to other people so that we weren't the only ones. I wish all that was effortless for me. But it's not, and here I am, still in the intensity of it all, hoping that it will all turn out ok for him, and desperately wanting a little time to be a grownup away from the toys and the tears. Just a night is all that I ask. Maybe two. The second night for my husband.
Image: The kid at Morro Rock.
Road trip
14 June 2010 07:10 AM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral
Elephant seals near San Simeon.
The boy on the beach in Santa Monica.
Towards the tail end of a graduation ceremony.
More later.
Thresholds of glass
07 June 2010 11:34 AM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral
It’s impossible to hide anything in this house. Even the attic space, something that we can only reach with a ladder that my husband drags into the living room from outside, has two windows, one on the front of the house and one open rectangle directly over the living room. But we still pack stuff into these spaces, boxes of old photographs (so useful for blogging) and books we mean to sell, clothes from my office days. I've sewn single-panel curtains for some of the doors, but in the closets it has been easier to staple burlap roughly to the inside, a way to hide the disorder within, if I do anything at all.
Over the last week we’ve sold some of this stuff on craigslist, carseats and breastfeeding supplies, the artifacts of our son’s infanthood, perhaps showing both an acceptance that he will most likely be an only child and a desire to jettison the things we carried with us across thousands of miles.
What will happen when the earth shakes beneath us, when the house jiggles and pops? I just discovered that we are in a liquefaction zone, which means the ground under the house isn't as solid as it appears, that in an earthquake the earth will take on the qualities of water. Before we moved here, I worried about living in a house where every threshold was marked with glass -- even the stairs and kitchen have glass-paned doors -- where there were 11 skylights and 31 windows. But then I got complacent, because that's what happens when nothing happens: who knows when the next big quake will hit? At least our son’s bed is no longer under skylights. He sleeps safely beneath a solid ceiling, though when he slips into our room he's stuck under glass with the rest of us.
Maybe it’s better to live in a dark space where the secrets can hide behind thick wood, locked against the discovery, where they won’t come spilling out when the world shows its instability. But we’re stuck with the openness for now, with the light, with all the riskiness that openness implies. Here are my secrets, boxed and contained in glass. We live with the danger, with the fact that it could shatter in seconds, that we will be crunching across shards after the tremors.
We have 19 glass-paned doors in this house. The slideshow above shows most of them -- if you can actually see the slideshow. Whether or not looking at slides of glass-paned doors is a worthwhile activity, I'll leave to you. But I do like the soundtrack.
Top image: the closets in our bedroom.
From a prompt, "Inside the closet."
Disappearing act
03 June 2010 11:00 AM Categories: Quotidian existence
Just yesterday, just this morning, even, I was wondering why I bother to be good – what’s the point in it? If I wasn’t good, fair, faithful, wouldn’t my life be more exciting? Would I start to dress in flamboyant reds and yellows, would wrap my body in stretchy, curve-revealing knits and dresses that are almost sheer? What am I afraid of? I imagine a trip to a different city, a clandestine meeting, the dark taste of red wine on our lips, the giving-in. But it’s a fantasy anyway, an impossible one. Not only would giving in cause pain to the people that I love and destroy the good life that I have but it's not who I want to be. I don't want to be untrustworthy, someone who hurts others for the sake of a cheap, temporary thrill.
I’ve thought about it with the Round Robin, too, my writing prompt class, how I faithfully respond to my partner every day, even when there are some that I know won’t do the same, even when what I get back isn’t what I put into it. Still, I treat others how I would wish to be treated and then feel vaguely resentful when they don’t follow through.
I’m good. I pay my bills on time. I remove myself from temptation. I follow the rules unless the rules seem foolish or would hurt someone else. I do my daily work even when it bores me and I understand that my son will only be a child once so I try to appreciate it all (not always possible of course), even when I’ve played the same game too many times to count.
The balance is off, though, and I’m not sure why. I’m hardening into marble, pock-marked and weathered, Mother Mary. Or a nun. This might be solved with a clothes-shopping trip or maybe I just need to take the next opportunity I have to flirt with a man. If I can find one in my travels. The world I live in is scented by estrogen and dirt. It’s skinned knees and snacks at 3:00 and is populated by mothers and babysitters.
I miss men, the tension they provide, the chance to pretend before I return to the safety of my husband's arms. But it could be that what I need is a day off where the only thing to pursue is pleasure and I don't have to keep track of the dirt, the stuff, and the meals, a day when I don't have to be the timekeeper.
From a photo prompt.
The few readers I have left are probably tired of reading this, but I am still distracted: house-buying stuff, stuff-jettisoning stuff (the joys and pains of craigslist), getting-ready-to-go-on-vacation stuff. I know I'll be back and present at some point in the near future. In the meantime, the only writing I've been doing is for the Round Robin class and I'm barely even reading magazines. Perhaps that's why I feel like I'm disappearing.