Room Sound

Are you the kind of person who cooks full meals for yourself when you’re home alone?  

 

My grandmother was. During the time she and I were familiar—the last 31 or so years of her life, she would cook a rotating menu of about four meals. She’d cook them and then eat them, sitting at a 1960s-green barstool across the way from the TV, watching Frasier or Larry King, or her favorite movie—Pretty Woman. When I went to visit her, as I frequently did first as a college student, then in my early Atlanta years, and finally as a grad student, I knew to expect mostly either beef-vegetable stew, or chicken salad and boiled potatoes that were somehow delicately flavored. If she expected the preacher for supper, there would be banana pudding or chocolate pie.

 

I know I’ve written a good deal about my grandmother and the food she cooked. I’ve done so because she’s still a part of me, because I still miss her occasionally, and because this is how I still think of her: standing in what she called her “one-butt kitchen”—it was very small—poised with a wooden spoon or a knife in the air, asking me what I thought of that Katie Couric.

 

(The kitchen was so “one-butt” that my mother had to teach herself to cook because my grandmother wouldn’t let anyone else in there, really, as long as she could manage for herself).

 

I’ve come to idealize the woman some, to wonder how I compare. For years I’ve done this.

 

In some ways, I can’t. At 19, I was trying on various predictable forms of activism, self-loathing and debauchery within the well-appointed terrarium of a college campus designed for just such activities. I was not harvesting several acres of cotton as a widow with a toddler and the help of one field-hand girl. I didn’t elope at 16 in trembling fear of my domineering father’s reaction. I didn’t grow up in charge of peeling and boiling pounds of potatoes on the farm each morning for dinner (that’s the noonday meal, kids) for my army of brothers, sisters, father and mother.

I live with the gentle nostalgia and workaday frailties of someone who grew up suburban and privileged, and I’m mostly not so foolish as to romanticize experiences I didn’t have.*

 

My parents did teach me to cook. An early memory involves my dad holding his hand over mine as I seesawed a rocker knife across a carrot to yield quarter-rounds. Another: Kneading bread dough standing on a chair next to my mom and learning to proof yeast in a sweet, earthy mixture of melting butter and hot water. Later, how to sauté an onion. Cook rice. Bake chicken. Get creative with ingredients. How to drink red wine, white wine. Make a roux. And from a very early age: How to tell and listen to long, drawn-out stories over a long, drawn-out meal involving all of these elements.

 

I grew up loving everything about a real meal, from the preparation (“Do you have your ‘me’s in place?’” my culinary-school sister got us all to say,) to the silly singing party that would develop over dishes late in the night. I married a man who appreciates all these things, too; can’t imagine having partnered up with someone who didn’t get the excitement of a new recipe, the thrill of dressing up to eat out somewhere fancy every now and then, or of making loud, quasi-grunty noises of appreciation over individual bites—the last of which I never even realized I did until once in the company of someone who never made noises over his food, ever. This person laughed at me. I didn’t understand what was so funny. In some ways, my spiritual kin will always be other people who kind of live to eat. I just kind of imagine that people who don’t and I will circle each other always, like wary alien life forms, trying politely not to disdain one another, but never ever really understanding the other and knowing full well we never will, not really.

 

My husband cooks a lot better than I do; it was part of how he wooed me successfully: with homemade Thai dishes dripping with succulently-spiced coconut milk and the best homemade grilled burgers I’d ever had before or since.

But when I’m away and he’s by himself for dinner, Marshall will eat popcorn and chips and salsa and call that supper. Or microwaved burritos and saltines. Or frozen pizza and half a can of Pringles. Or, I swear to you, some unholy combination of all of the above.

 

Tonight he’s out of town, on a camping trip with some friends—and I realized that I almost never eat peanut-butter crackers and cookies for supper. Unless it’s very late at night and I’m nothing but a ball of exhaustion, I can’t bring myself to stand at the counter, grazing on chips and mixed nuts and ice cream and say, “Yep. That’ll do.” Don’t get me wrong: I have a host of other unhealthy habits, and it’s not that I look down on people who don’t look forward to every meal with the freakish childish glee that I do. Sometimes I envy them. These people have more time for other engaging, enlightening interests.

 

Nor do I go bat-shit wild. I don’t think I fetishize food like they do in the magazines and cable shows. I enjoy a hot dog and chips. I will eat half a can of Pringles faster than you can say, “Those don’t even really taste like anything!”

But for my own supper, I’ll throw together a tuna-melt and salad. Or beans and rice. Tonight, I made a ratatouille that was pleasing in all its chopping-of-vegetable preparation and satisfying in the two generous servings I gifted myself with. I talked with my mom, and she told me she makes real meals for herself, too, when she’s alone. Sure, sometimes those real meals are cheese toast, an apple and two Pecan Sandies, but there’s at least some small process of preparation. There’s the sitting down at the table with a plate and a napkin in her lap. Which is what I did. Which is what my grandmother did.

 

Something in this shared predilection makes me feel certain and secure. I wish I could gift this feeling to the insecure self of my 20s.**  Sure, my life savings are kind of crap. Sure, I don’t know and likely will never learn how to kill, gut, and pluck a chicken. Let’s be honest: Even if I did, this skill would never sink deep into my muscle memory to live there, the way it lived in the strong arms and soft hands of my grandmother for ages and decades until the night she died, three years ago. I will never be a one-woman Foxfire, and that’s totally cool. (Unless it’s the aftermath of the post-apocalyptic shit going down, in which case, it won’t be cool, because I will be the first to die. In which case, really, though: Survival of the fittest is how it should be, right?)

 

But even unarmed with Depression-era rural survival skills, I feel rich and I feel strong tonight thinking of this: of the three of us women, each alone in our kitchens, chopping or toasting or steaming up dishes, and then sitting down to eat them, alone and content. There’s some kind of mettle in that. Some kind of strength.

*Mostly. I also live with the certainty that I don’t really have many personal tales worth telling because of the way the lives of elders on both sides of my family have calcified into legend. I mean, compare the following recounted teenage memories:

A. “I’ll never forget my uncle sneaking me out of the house to go see Count Basie in New York.” —my other grandmother before her death
B. “I’ll never forget dancing like a wanna-be hippie maniac while seeing Rusted Root play as a local band in Pittsburgh.” —umm, me.

 

**Now, in my 30s, I’m endowed with a whole new insecure self!

(Or: How Rock-and-Roll Learned Me)

Jessie was my best friend, and we were going to see the band REM play at Starlake Amphitheatre in Pittsburgh. This was a huge deal because Jessie’s parents had actually granted him permission to drive the two of us in their minivan, and they were the sort of parents whose trust in their teenage son was arbitrary at best, subject to mysterious forces beyond anyone’s understanding. One weekend he could come over and watch movies. The next, he had to stay home, just because.


Once, eight of us teenagers went out to Kings restaurant and ordered the behemoth 32-scoop ice cream dish called “Tons of Fun for Everyone.” After ten minutes the dish had vanquished everyone but Jessie. As we lay back in the vinyl booth and watched, he grabbed the big wooden serving spoon and started ladling the soupy chocolate chip and peanutty dregs into his mouth. In the car, he threw up, and when he got home, still sick, his parents grounded him because they would not believe that he hadn’t been out drinking. This, even though we were the type of kids who got off on making chocolate layer cakes and dancing around to “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants. They didn’t see this in him, and it infuriated me.


The summer before, I’d gotten my driver’s license and scraped the side of my dad’s new Camry on a guardrail while driving the two of us downtown to see Jeff Buckley and Juliana Hatfield play. To us, the notion of driving the family car to a rock show outside the green zone of Pittsburgh’s suburbs had amassed a fearful stigma. This night—two best friends off for an evening of rock ‘n roll fun—was huge.


Did I mention that it had been raining all afternoon? The field seating at the amphitheatre was already a muddy mess by the time we got there. The band Luscious Jackson came out to open, and they launched into “Naked Eye,” their bass-heavy hit of that summer. Jessie and I couldn’t stop beaming. We stood there in the squishy field, singing along and stretching our arms out towards the tiny figures on stage half a football field away, as we angled our bodies physically towards the sound we swore was keeping us alive that summer, the same sound we had turned up as loud as possible so many nights, flying far too fast down suburban streets in compact cars and station wagons. This was the experience we’d been seeking; this was the circuit closed, now. The rain poured and we were Real Teenagers Living Life. REM came on and Michael Stipe growled into the microphone, “Is everybody wet out there?” and Jessie and I both swooned some.


Then the frat boys came.


First things first. I know that the term “frat boys” has become sort of a dull catch-all for beer-guzzling beefy young men with no sense of the subtle or artistic, the kind of stereotype that holds little interest for those of us who like to imagine that people are more complex than that. However, if we were to imagine that the above definition evolved from some original, empirical truth, then these young men were the corporeal embodiment of that truth. There were probably about seven of them—or, in the most sparkling version of my recollection, a dozen or more, maybe the original such fellows for whom the term was coined—the Latin fraternitas and the Dutch broeder turned to living, breathing, beings walking this earth. They arrived in a pack. They shoved themselves and their coolers of beer, already very much depleted, into the very last remaining narrow strip of empty space in the entire amphitheatre, behind these two nerdy, awkward kids on the crowded, muddy lawn.


The boys seized the moments between songs to engage in lusty chants. “We are! Penn State! We ARE! Penn STATE!” they cried: clearly, an exercise in camaraderie among handsome corn-fed lads. Such a love as challenges the very descriptor “fraternal.” By the middle of the show, about thirteen of them had linked arms, and in this shoulder-to-shoulder, chorus-line-style, they swayed through the tune “I Don’t Sleep I Dream,” crooning along with the chorus: “I’d settle for a cup of coffee, but YOU! KNOW! WHAT! I really neeed!” The same with “Strange Currencies,” the unrequited heartsong of the album.


It was all quite romantic or something.


Meanwhile, Jessie and I inched forward. Every time we did, though, the Penn State brothers closed the gap on that slippery hill. We gritted our teeth and followed our mothers’ advice: Pretend not to notice them, and they will stop. Granted, we could have really moved. Just a few yards away, our concert experience could have been radically different. Why didn’t we move? We stood there and we got annoyed. We shot each other looks. We sighed heavily. I think the thing is this: At seventeen, Jessie and I were still imbued with that sense of masochistic submission that comes from years of being subjected to the constant threat of ridicule and bullying. We were the clumsy kids, the achievers who never had the right clothes. We had gotten our assignments as low men on the social totem pole years before, and we carried that mark around like something palpable and translatable to anyone else we met. Even if we had moved, we had the sense that things would be no better elsewhere.


And again, I stress: these lads were right behind us. Spitting distance. No. Pissing distance. I know this because when I hear the lush reverberation-chamber of guitar that characterizes the REM album that came out that year, especially when I hear “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” I can still feel big, quarter-sized droplets of rain on my already dripping-wet hair, feel the muddy filth squishing around inside my shoes and then, a drizzle on the back of my ankle, distinctly warmer than the water that had been pouring from the sky for hours. That night, I felt that drizzle and I turned around to see the line of young men, still in Rockette formation, performing their epic number: pissing as one.


“What the hell?” I shouted. Well, sort of. It might have been more like a mutter, not spoken directly to the frat boys, but mumbled, as I turned my head back to Jessie, then hissed, “We need to move up. They’re peeing. They’re peeing!” Again, they: 40 or 50 beefy gents. We: one gangly, closeted kid plus his dorky friend. We inched further forward.


When the show ended, Jessie and I slogged back through the fields to the minivan to find that he’d left the headlights on. The battery was dead. To an over-sheltered teenager who’s already up against his curfew, this fact translated to complete panic.


It was almost midnight and the wet denim from our jean shorts had grown heavy and chafing. Our legs were muddy and sprayed with beery urine, and our ears pealed with the shining, metallic echoes of tones we’d forfeited the ability to hear ever again. Jessie sat dripping all over the beige vinyl driver’s seat, staring into the middle distance, his hand on the useless car key.


“I am so dead. I am just so dead,” he said, again and again. I nodded at him, thinking of how quiet everything in the world was suddenly, compared to the way it had just been filled with loud melody and feedback that had filled every space that felt empty inside of us. It had electrified me; made me feel strong—almost strong enough to turn around and yell at the guys behind us. Almost.


I looked over at Jessie. He stared into a silent, dark place, miles past the plastic peeling dash and the beanie baby charm hanging motionless from the rearview mirror.


Something new was catalyzed in me.


“Stay here,” I told him, and swung the door open. Hopping out, I took an appraising look at the cars around us, sizing them up. A new sense of purpose drove me. I went first to the hippie kids in the station wagon. Then the couple in the green Saab wearing all black. Neither had jumper cables. After these two rejections, I was less sure. I stood up straighter and strode with purpose past a group of attractive kids my age wearing an array of flannel shirts; then I turned around. After all, I had a reason to address them. I turned to a boy with a braided hemp necklace and hair like Jordan Catalano on My So-Called Life. He shook his head and his friends followed suit. “Sorry, man,” they all chorused, and the Jordan-guy tucked his hair behind his ear and offered me a beer.


“Nah,” I said, every muscle in my body electric, careful. “I’d better move on.” I walked away, not tugging at my shorts, which, soaked, were giving me an exasperating wedgie. I was already imagining my new life with the popular kids from this other school, you know, maybe one night I might run into the Jordan Catalano guy at the park, and then—


Well, it was late and I was dizzy with these imaginings—dizzy! Meanwhile, Jessie needed me. In my daze, I had circled back to near where we were parked. A middle-aged couple sat and drank beers on the roof of a brown minivan.


“Do you have jumper cables?” I asked them.


Turns out they did. Valiantly, I pointed out our van just a few yards away, where Jessie sat in the driver’s seat, eyes still glassy and forlorn, staring at nothing. As the man stretched his arms and tossed back the rest of his beer, the lateness of the hour and the direness of our situation hit me again. The man moved slowly—how could he move so slowly?—scratching the back of his head, climbing down the van and inside. His wife stayed on the roof while he swung the vehicle around. I worried about this woman, who was basically risking life and limb to this husband, who was basically drinking and driving. Were we wrong to accept their help?


Well, it was too late now.


I ran in front and around to the side of our minivan, where, sweeping my arm around in an exaggerated fashion, I motioned for Jessie to unroll the window. He did me one better and jumped out.


“I got help!” I said.


“Oh, thank god.”


“Have him pop the hood,” called the alcoholic man.


We wrung our hands as the man walked back and forth between the vans connecting the cables, and whispered to each other about whether we were supposed to give these people money, but before we could say much else to them, our van was rumbling and he and his wife were gone.


Two years later I would go away to college and meet peers with survival skills that trumped my own by a mile. As freshmen, they were already familiar with terms like “management style” and “fundraise” and knew how to implement such terms to become mini-dictators of campus. I was just psyched that no one demanded a hall pass of me. As a teenager, snarling, sugary, barely-in-control-sounding pop albums like REM’s Monster were as close as I got to actually being bold. Our adventures at all-ages shows were our first and only moments to experience the loudest possible version of the larger world, and to prove ourselves against it.


At least that’s how it felt at the time.


On the ride home, elation swept us. I told Jessie about the Jordan Catalano guy and his friends.


“No way!” Jessie said. “He offered you a beer? A beer? Where does he live?”


“I don’t know,” I said.


“Oh, no. Well, maybe we’ll see them at Kings.”


“Yeah, maybe.”


“Maybe.” And Jessie put a tape in the tape deck—Juliana Hatfield or the Lemonheads or the Sugarcubes—and played it low; its longing and hope buoying us up all the way home.

Naomi: My name is Naomi. Do you have a friend?

Dudley Pippin: No, we just moved here. I don’t have a friend.

Naomi: I don’t have a friend, and Irving Gland, who lives across the street, doesn’t have a friend either. We play together.

~”Dudley Pippen and the No-Friends’ Club,” Free to Be, You and Me, children’s record supplied by hippie parents everywhere

“And I would have gone crooked but for you.”
~Diane Cluck, “The Turnaround Road”

I woke up this morning with this song by Diane Cluck lodged in my brain. The past few days have felt like:

[blink] Here’s my dog, playing in the yard with
[blink] this amazing man who is my husband
and
[blink] here are these new friends that I’m tentatively beginning to feel like might be more than barroom acquaintances.

I’m taking this mental breath right now, and there you all are. Here it all is; dare I trust it?: a new, good life. And it’s taken this long.

And it’s been so long since I’ve posted—and I need to be careful in my wording here, because a number of good things have definitely happened in the past couple of years and definitely in the past few months. In large part, however, it’s felt like one of those irritatingly almost-satisfactory phases that characterize eras of transition. You know what I mean? When the realms of work and friendship and general happiness are almost good, but not quite great? Everything kinda felt that way. And I couldn’t bring myself to write about that time’s quotidian workings.
But now that’s changing. Maybe.

Here are a few of the signs.

1.
In a dream two nights ago, I climbed the stairs up to my old floor in my old dorm in Chapel Hill. I was my present age, but going back for a new undergraduate degree. I had left my life in Atlanta a second time—broken away, quit my job and friends and everything—to start over, yet again. This dream was no nostalgic idyll, though I’ve traditionally been susceptible to these. It was a nightmare. There was the usual confusing paper roster of courses I was supposed to be attending but whose first classes I had already missed—that old trope.

Worse: Why had I opted to live in a dorm room with an 18-year-old chosen by lottery? How had this been an idea at all, let alone an idea deemed the best of all possible ideas?

I spotted and grabbed the one other continuing ed student, a woman about ten years my senior. She stood firm and said vague, wise things I don’t recall now as I wept to her: I had made a terrible, terrible mistake, agreeing to live separately from my man, two states away for four more years, quitting my job again and leaving my dog and my incipient life. I had really screwed up royally.

2.
Weirdly, I awoke not to a day of dread, but to one of those exceedingly rare days in which you just crest from high to high. Writing. Enterprising radio stories. A deeply stirring visit to talk with palliative care professionals for an upcoming story. I worked late and drove home feeling tired but not weary. Marshall was out with friends and the house was quiet.

At home, this package leaned up against the usual detritus on the bar by the kitchen. There was no return address, and my name—the name old friends and family call me—was written in green marker in a beautiful hand. My heart leapt; I knew at once, or at least hoped I knew, what this was: no mail bomber or crazy anti-public radio screed, but the opposite of those things.

It was the Ten Dollar Art Mystery. Someone or someone/s calling themselves Narrative Urge has been sending out these mystery letters all over the country, to people involved in literary endeavors. The packages seem to hail from right here in Atlanta, and they contain a ten-dollar bill, a slip of paper with an excerpt from a short story or essay, and a letter, encouraging the recipient to “[u]se the hints. Find Me!” I looked up my literary excerpt; it was from an essay by my friend Gina Webb (who has since written about this phenomenon on her own blog.)
Curious!

Of course I jumped online and spent the next days reading about others’ clues and speculating with friends and acquaintances about the whole thing and who the sender might be.

The letter says in part, “We’re all parts of each others’ stories. Let’s create more!” There’s something especially marvelous about this project in this age in which electronic and incorporeal is the standard. We tend to interpret unfamiliar physical mail as intrusive at best and a potential threat at worse; we trust communication much better when it doesn’t actually touch us.

But this letter waited for me in my kitchen. In the days since, I keep picking up its various components to consider it, both in terms of its mystery and what it happens to mean in my own life: the feeling of finally being a part of something again. It’s a feeling that’s been a long time coming, here in Atlanta.

But maybe it’s back.

3.
A new friend wrote me the next day. He’d ordered a package of cheese curds from the Midwest; did I want some? Well, hell yes, I said, and then promptly forgot about it with the rush of the day. That night, our doorbell rang.
Our doorbell never rings.
Back in my MFA program a few years ago, the doorbell was always ringing—or rather, friends were always knocking on our kitchen door, since my roommates and I lived in a mansion from the 19-teens whose actual doorbell was a noisy old antique thing that clanged ear-splittingly through the house.

People were always dropping by. The introvert in me didn’t really like this in the moment when it happened; it felt something like intrusion, but the lonely soul in me loved it, craved it, in fact. After my far more socially-adept roommates arranged potluck dinners, board game nights and informal hangouts out on the veranda, I’d wander out from my cubbyhole of a writing office and join them for a beer, and though I was never really good at taking the initiative to make such events happen, the actual moments struck me with gratitude again and again.

I was 31 when I came back from grad school, and by then, I’d pulled up my roots and broken my own life apart so many times that, except for Marshall, I lacked the kind of friend who actually lives in your state whom you can just call out of the blue to complain about your day or invite over to cook supper. And Atlanta is a sprawling city instead of a small coastal town, we’re a couple of introvert/extravert mixes, and people don’t drop by. They text. Or they Facebook. And usually, that’s it.

So I started a nonfiction reading series.

True, I did this because I wanted to get involved with Atlanta’s social literary world. But here’s the real truth. I did it to make friends. I can pretty this fact up, and I have. I have used the word “network” as a verb in describing why I started “True Story!”. But really, I wanted to meet people who’d mean more to me than hip gastro-pub small talk about the relative merits of the latest Errol Morris documentary. I wanted to meet people who would drop by the house every now and then, and maybe stay for dinner.

Then the new friend with the cheese curd windfall dropped by. After the doorbell rang, Marshall and I looked at each other. The people who ring our doorbell are: Jehovah’s Witnesses, UPS, and men offering to clean our gutters or cut our grass. And then there was this week’s neighborhood warning: Not to trust any kids who claimed to be selling candy bars for their school: They were really casing your house to burglarize it.

All this flashed between us in that moment. LulaDog began her low growl-bark. (This dog is so un-used to our having people over that she doesn’t trust it at all.) I ordered her to her crate, where she marched, tail between her legs. Then I walked to the door.
And there stood our friend with his cooler of cheese curds.
“You’ve never been here before, have you?” I asked as he came in.
“No,” he said, looking around, taking in, I imagined, the chair opposite the door, piled with junk intended for the basement, and the dining room table covered in mail and magazines and my gear bag from work. “There was talk of a cook-out earlier this summer, no?” he remarked. “But…”
“Yeah, we never got around to that,” I said.
He set his cooler down on a chair and opened it up, bootlegger-style, then brought out small, dripping sandwich bags of cheese curds.
Our conversation was relatively short; soon he was gone. A cheese curd Santa Claus, we joked. A cheese curd dealer! Or, as I said, the moment the door shut, A friend.

And I woke up this morning thinking of how I need to hurry up and do something nice for him, for Mr. Cheese Curds, lest we come across as thoughtless new friends. And that I need to call up my public radio friend to arrange a follow-up to our sushi and crispy duck roll date last week. And that I also need to make a dent already in our book group’s book before we meet next week. And that all these things mean: friends. Maybe. I hope.

Fake opera singing

Interpretation: “You are playing! Let us make merry and jump up on one another!”

Yoga stretches

Interpretation: “You are playing! Let us make merry and jump up on one another!”

Rock and roll dancing

Interpretation: “You are playing hard! Let us make merry and jump up on one another!”

Putting on shoes

“Walk! Walk! Walk! Wait, now I’m so worked up that we’re playing! Let us make merry..etcet.”

Walking in front door

“It’s youuuu! It’s meeee! Wow! We really are playing! Let us…etcet.”

Shooing dog away from kitchen doorway for twelfth time

“We are playing!…”

Picking up a cat

“Me, too! We are playing!”

Casually playing with cat with fabric tape measure

“We are ALL playing! Oh, wow! The three of us shall make merry and jump up on one another!”

Slash across nose by cat, followed by copious hissing…

“????????”

…and running away.

“Oh, boy! We are playing!”

Sometimes things are hard and that’s good. My students and I seem (so far, knock wood) to be gelling pretty well—There’s something in a spring semester that just seems to guarantee a better rapport for me with my classes.

But I’m convinced that this semester’s rapport has nothing to do with ease. Instead, it’s a direct result of challenge.

We are all of us confronting changes in the university’s standards. The students are expected to write something called a rhetorical précis, which is a great analytic tool for evaluating a given piece of writing. Trouble is, about half my students have never even written a paper requiring a thesis statement. Trouble is, some of those students have never even written a paper, period. And further trouble is, some of those students have scarcely touched a word-processing program in their lives until a few weeks ago when the semester began.

None of this is supposed to be the case at the college level, but we work in the real world with which we’re presented. In this case, this means I’ve slowed things down some. I’ve been having them do some remedial exercises and really working in-depth with the nuts and bolts of good writing in a way I’ve done in no semester past. It’s been a real challenge for the students, at least half of whom are returning to school this semester after years or decades in the workforce. But bearing witness to their dedication and even the stress and frustration that sometimes results from it—and responding to this in the classroom, is a freaking joy that always surprises me. I leave campus each night exhilarated from having worked hard myself, and for that work having, maybe, in some small way, paid off.

Honestly, it’s a challenge to me, too. My own background is in journalism and creative writing, and thesis statements and transition phrases are just not matters I habitually think about on a conscious level when I think about writing. I have worked with these concepts for years, but on subtle, more complex levels. Now I have to find the language to explain them and deconstruct them and even to conceive of them myself. It’s an exercise in clearing away everything but the scaffolding of writing, and to my own surprise, I’m enjoying the work.

We all need a little challenge. Marshall, for example, goes off once a week to this masochistic bar trivia night with a few dedicated friends. This is not that Team Trivia business with questions about Beyonce lyrics; this trivia night is run by one neighborhood man whose idiosyncratic questions lean towards minor points of Eastern European history, number-one radio hits of the 1950s and early baseball legends. I’ve accompanied Marshall and his team before, but the trivia man’s questions are mostly so distant from my own areas of expertise (Phil Collins lyrics and public radio personalities,) that I always end up serving as more of a cheerleader than a player and feel guilty sharing in our second-place prize money.

Marshall’s team always wins second place. There’s another team that always wins first. The trivia guy has built this up to a legendary rivalry to keep both teams coming back week after week, and it’s worked. There was a period of time in which it wasn’t even clear any longer whether Marshall’s team was having fun; it had moved beyond a Tuesday evening at the bar and into the realm of gritted teeth and fists slamming the table when they missed yet another tortuously-worded question about some Oscar-winning foreign film of the late ’60s.

But now Marshall’s team has evolved. I don’t know what happened, but they’ve reached the point at which they enjoy their French fries and beer, and they tend to shrug rather than curse when they don’t get a question. Still, they rarely miss a week and they rarely win outright.

When he comes home, he tells me about how they achieved second place that night. He fills me in on the questions asked as we get ready for bed—the answers they got, the answers they missed, and the answers that no one got, the questions that were flat-out unfair or misleading, his voice moving from exasperation to resignation to reflection as we move from flossing to face-washing to dozing off under our mountain of blankets, neglecting to cut out the light as space yawns between our utterances.

I try to guess the answers myself; every now and then, I get one right. “You would have won it for us,” he says kindly. I tell him about my classes that night, about the example I used that worked or the exercise that bombed. The student who made the amazing observation or the student who asked which keys to hit on the keyboard to create a new paragraph. It’s nice to have him to share this with. I mean, at least she asked, I say, half asleep. It’s better than not trying at all.

A play-by-play from two friends on opposite sides who don’t really…seriously…well, totally…care…not really.


My friend S is from Wisconsin.
I am from Pittsburgh.


Neither of us is particularly a sports fan, but both of us harbor a deep pride in our respective hometowns, places where  “hometown pride,” by definition, means football spirit. This resulted in the following exchange of text messages that began Sunday afternoon—messages that skirted the line, exactly, between ironic remove and dead-serious trash talk.


From: S
MY TEAM IS GOING TO BEST YOUR TEAM AT THE IMPORTANT SPORTING EVENT THAT BEGINS IN SEVERAL HOURS!!!
Feb 6, 3:27 pm


From: Kate
THERE YOU ARE MISTAKEN. THE SPORTS TEAM REPRESENTING MY TOWN IS INHERENTLY SUPERIOR AND SHALL BE THE RUIN OF YOUR TEAM AND HENCE, OF YOUR VERY SENSE OF SELF-WORTH!
Feb 6, 3:29 pm


From: S
(1 of 2) YOUR FAMILY NAME, AND INDEED THE NAMES OF ALL PEOPLE BIRTHED IN YOUR HOMETOWN WILL SOON BE BESMIRCHED AND FOREVER SHAMED BY THE GROUP OF ATHLETES
Feb 6, 3:40 pm


From: S
(2 of 2) REPRESENTING MY HOMETOWN, BUT NOT ACTUALLY FROM MY HOMETOWN.
Feb 6, 3:40 pm


From: Kate
AU CONTRAIRE. THE GROUP OF MILLIONAIRES HIRED TO PLAY GAMES IN THE STADIUM LOCATED IN THE TOWN WHERE I WAS BORN SHALL PROVE YOU WRONG.
Feb 6, 3:42 pm


From: S
Nana nanana.
Feb 6, 7:04 pm


From: S
How’s that cheese taste?
Feb 6, 9:31 pm


From: S
Bwahahahahaha! YAY!
Feb 6, 10:11 pm


From: Kate
Congratulations, millionaire franchise of the Midwest. You have ably bested our millionaire franchise of the mid-atlantic.
Feb 6, 10:11 pm


From S
(1 of 2) Those people I don’t even know and will never meet have done something that I have not in any way caused and will not affect my life in any significant
Feb 6, 10:11 pm


From: S
(2 of 2)
way. YAY!
Feb 6, 10:11 pm




Post-Game Analysis:
On both parts, a sense of genuine pride and excitement butts heads with latent insecurity. This combo spurs on defensive displays of ironic faux-sparring, which are followed by a round of only quasi-ironic actual sparring—which vanishes instantly in the face of actual victory and actual failure, and we see genuine  trash-talk (note at this point, the yawning, pathetic silence on my end,) which, after five minutes or so of glorious candor, reverts back to polite I-was-just-joking carefully ironic irony.

1. “Worldtown” -MIA
2. “Mesopotamia” -B-52s
3. “No one Knows My Plan” -They Might Be Giants
4. “Jesus and Tequila” -The Minutemen
5. “50-Foot Queenie” -PJ Harvey
6. “International Dateline” -Ladytron
7. “Only the Young” -Journey

Phew.

Object A: Antibiotics
prescribed to me in Pittsburgh a week and a half after the Evil Cold first began, a few days before Christmas. (Note: Evil Cold has actually gained traction since then and is stronger than ever.)

Object B: Emergen-C
I love Emergen-C for the way its tiny bubbles sizzle in a glass of clear water. As it fizzes down your throat, you can just feel its 867%-or-whatever of your daily Vitamin C needs filling you with beautiful health. This is true even despite an incident that took place last fall. I had taken to bringing a packet to my office hours every day for a week, and one day this jerky man pointed to me from across the room and opined, “That shit doesn’t work.” Thanks, mister. I blame Assy McCurserson-Know-It-All’s rudeness and lack of faith in the placebo effect for the fact that I failed to get well quickly from that bug.

Objects C and D: Lula’s Meds
Must be given on a strict schedule that involves timing her meals (also specially prescribed and not pictured here.) Prescribed after she returned from boarding with rampant diarrhea that necessitated hourly backyard trips for three straight nights. This, of course, could have helped lead to the worsening of Evil Cold.

Not Shown: Anti-Stomach Ick Pills, saltines, and dry toast
that Marshall carefully began munching hours after the inexplicable food poisoning symptoms that struck him in the final hour of our New Years party and ended at 6:00 that morning (in wonderful concordance with the dog’s diarrhea that night).

Object E: Pills Made of Chalk
that supposedly make your coughs more “productive,” my favorite euphemism ever

Object F: Grapefruit Extract
I love grapefruit and so I was excited the bad-assy-iest person I know, my friend Sirkka, gave me this stuff that she says once helped her cure strep throat without the help of doctors. “Just dilute it in some water,” she said. “And honey, too. Then chug it down. Do not stop to let yourself taste it.”
She never lies; she hadn’t started now. The first shot I downed sent a bitter lump of sheer Taste of Bile straight to the back of my throat and triggered my gag reflex so hard I had to re-swallow the mouthful. It was bad. It was very bad. Sirkka was standing right there, and when she asked, “How ya doing?” as I wiped tears from my eyes, I was careful to say, “Okay,” and not “I’m going to throw up now.”

And of course I’ve been taking the stuff several times a day ever since in hopes that Unpleasant Physical Sensation Equals Cure. I’ll let you know.

(Also Not Shown: Bottomless pot of chicken-barley soup we’ve been eating for the past three weeks or so, oranges, oranges, oranges; tangerines, tangerines, tangerines; Nyquil, Thera-Flu, throat-spray stuff, issues of tissues. Hours of our own productivity flushed down the damn tubes.)

or: what the Velveteen Rabbit Taught Me about the Greatness of Crappy Old Sweaters

“THERE was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid.” -Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

No one was baptized at the small Unitarian Universalist church in which I was raised. Instead, the minister gave you The Velveteen Rabbit. The Bestowal of the children’s book would take place during the ceremony welcoming a baby into the church community.

I remember reading the book when I was little and coming away with a very strong sense of “Wha-?” The deal is: A boy has a beloved stuffed rabbit that he takes everywhere and loves so hard that its whiskers and fur rub off. Then the boy gets scarlet fever and after that’s over, all his stuffed animals are loaded up into a garbage bag to be burned. Thee end. Inside the book’s front cover, our minister had written the words, “To Katy—that you might someday become real.” I had no idea what all this was supposed to mean. I wasn’t real? Wait—I would have to be burned alive? Or my Pound Puppy? Maybe it was that my Pound Puppy would one day be taken from me? Why was our church so unremittingly weird?

Like so very many UU lessons lost on the young, I feel like I get it now.

I realized it this morning when I got out my beloved cardigan sweater to wear to the library to do some planning for this semester’s classes. This is the sweater I poached from my mom when I was fourteen and wore just about every day for the five years that followed. At some point, it shrunk. At some point, the hole in the elbow became larger than my elbow. At some point, it lost one, then another, and finally all of its tan leather covered buttons. In my mind, I think of it as the sweater I wore to my first rock show in Chapel Hill in college (Five-Eight and Man or Astro Man?). It’s the sweater I wore while cutting class in high school to wander aimlessly through the hipster neighborhood with friends in Pittsburgh one frigid, icy day. Underpinning these memories are earlier ones, of my mother wearing the sweater while teaching at the nursery school where I went as a child. When I look at the cardigan, I do not see a sweater that no longer even does what sweaters are supposed to do: provide actual warmth. I don’t see a physical sweater; I see only emotional comfort.

And that’s what I do to all the clothes I love.

In no particular order, here are the top three most deteriorated–yet-unreasonably-active items in my wardrobe:

1. cardigan sweater formerly belonging to mom, circa early-1980s

2. US Navy-issue t-shirt belonging to one of my father’s comrades in Vietnam (This is the softest t-shirt known to man. There is also a huge rift between 80% of the neckband and the shirt.)

3. Fall pea-coat (I actually cannot make any sort of judgment on this one. I only know that it’s a bit old in terms of how long people actually keep and wear clothing nowadays. I’ve had it since 1995, which in my mind is not long ago until I say something like “1995 is not all that long ago” to my students and they groan as one at their Old Lady Instructor.)

It was the cardigan however, that sprang to mind, when I was talking with my mother’s friend last week. She and her husband, along with some other family friends were visiting my parents’ house the day after Christmas and she was explaining to me the one reality show she likes—in which they remake you by taking away all your old clothes and giving you $5,000 for a new wardrobe.
“Wait,” I said. “They take—everything?”
“Everything. They take it all to Goodwill,” she said. “But you get a whole new set of everything. And Katy, it’s like they’re re-making you. It’s a new stage in your life that these people really, desperately need. There’s always this moment of catharsis—” She paused, looking into the middle-distance. “The person is changed.” She told me the new-wardrobe/new-you show is the one reality show she’d volunteer for.

But as someone who’s kept a pair of jeans precisely because its hem still bears a puppy bite-mark from my first, now-deceased dog, it sounds like my personal nightmare. On the whole, I don’t keep clothing because of its natural entropy; it’s more like I just don’t notice it and since I’m writing this I guess that maybe, yes, I have a certain pride about not noticing the wear and tear because isn’t life about getting a little more worn as you go?

This is when I realize that maybe the Velveteen Rabbit sunk in more than I first thought.

This tendency to hold onto things has led to its share of unprofessional moments. Wearing my clothes as long as I do leads to a state of wornness I never, ever notice until someone points out to me that every single button on my suit jacket is missing. Or that there’s a bleach stain on my shirt (the same one that’s been there for months, actually, that I’ve ceased to see). These are regular occurrences. When I glance in the mirror before leaving the house, these marks of age don’t exist. I am either still imagining the worn article of clothing as it once was, sans rips, holes and stains, or in my mind, the said imperfections just don’t really matter. The wholeness of the object trumps them. It’s like being in a relationship, which, like everything in this world, has its flaws—and deciding that the good outweighs the bad.

It’s still only now and then that I realize that much of the world doesn’t operate this way. My first job out of college was temping at a corporate bank in DC while interning at a radical feminist newspaper in the evenings. At my day job, I remember one of the account managers tossing a J Crew catalogue into my receptionist station, saying, “They have some really good deals in there. You know, maybe you could just get something—nice.”

This was years ago, and if I had to step back into that role now, I’d be perfectly screwed. I buy almost all my clothes at thrift stores. These items already have histories attached to them, and I love that. They’re well-made, or at least inexpensive. (Whenever I go into a store in the mall, I can hear my mother’s voice in the back of my head, tsk-tsking the cheap fabrics and the crappy hems. “Forty dollars?! Not worth it. That’ll fall apart in two washes.”) And at my favorite all-time thrift store back in North Carolina, I believed there was a sort of magic in effect. I’d walk in thinking, “Cute jeans, cute jeans,” or “pretty sweater,” and I’d almost always walk out with that exact thing. And then wear it into the ground.

The Velveteen Rabbit is told from the rabbit’s point of view. Of course, it doesn’t mind or even notice the loss of its fur or whiskers or the fact that the boy has written his name on its butt; like all stuffed animals in children’s books and movies, it just wants to be loved by the boy. The book is all about the rabbit and his compadres—the skin horse, the wooden lion, becoming real through the process of being loved and worn down. The book’s final, beautiful illustration shows them all at the story’s very end, running off, real animals at last, with stories to tell.

I’ll never think secretly mean thoughts about your wedding, ever, ever again.


I owe some of you an apology. Two, actually.

1. I will never again get secretly reproachful of social friends who don’t invite me to their weddings.
By “social” friends, I mean you, friend I have tea with every few months; you, whom I work with; and you, whom I have met in the past year. The Wedding Planning Virgin Me felt a bit miffed every now and then when mutual pals approached me in grocery stores and asked if I would make it to So-and-So’s wedding on Saturday—the wedding whose existence I was only then learning about. Wedding Virgin Me knew nothing about tent rental fees, chair rental fees, and absolutely nothing about the number of people one Porta-Potty will service. (Ahh. An outdoor wedding. What could be quainter?)

And so, friends? I hereby declare this: I am so sorry. I know you were doing your best. I know now something I only had a faint inkling of before: namely, that a wedding is not a house party. Furthermore, if I’m on your “Maybe” List as a future nuptial invitee, go ahead and move me to “No” if it’ll make things easier for you. This is my wedding gift to you. We’ll get drinks sometime and we’ll toast you and you don’t ever have to worry about whether I prefer chicken or salmon.


2. Not that we’ve planned a “Chicken or salmon?” sort of wedding.
This was one of the first decisions we made when we decided to do this thing: No sit-down meal, no place cards and no chocolate fountains (Sorry, nieces!).

Besides, I’ve observed an inversely proportional relationship between
1. the fanciness of the wedding food and
2. the tastiness of the wedding food.

This brings me to resolution #2: No matter how nasty the food is, no matter how tacky the Greek restaurant is whose social hall gave you a discount to hold the reception in, and no matter how ugly my bridesmaid dress—I will not judge.

I have no right to. I did not have to labor over the decisions you’ve spent these months laboring over, which, shit, are just hard for the majority of us whose taste exceeds our income. Having a perfectly tasteful wedding in which all your friends can have a champagne toast and eat a three-course meal alongside their plus-ones and four kids is expensive and logistically difficult. For some people, having a wedding that grossly offends no relatives is really difficult. And expensive. And expensive.

Wedding Planning Virgin Me did not appreciate the raging costs that cause people to cut corners. At the start of our own planning, for example, having a wedding in a friend’s backyard in a tent seemed an independent move. It was not. It was indeed a move the wedding industry anticipated long, long before Marshall and I ever laid eyes on each other. By the time we were on our second date, the industry had long since jacked tent-rentals to insane prices.

And so, you? Who have your wedding at your parents’ church’s social hall or the cheap hotel conference room, not because it’s your first choice but because it’s your most affordable choice? Please accept this humble apology for any secret snarky thoughts Wedding Planner Virgin Me might’ve harbored. You’ve got your priorities in the right place and I salute you.

More and more, I’m inclined to believe a colleague who recently put it this way: “The wedding industry in its every form is designed to rip women off.” Of course, there’s the fact that Wedding LED votive candles cost twice what regular LED votive candles cost. And then there are these DIY, feminist-ish-y wedding websites touting Theme Weddings for which you will spend ten hours crafting handmade paper garlands. They make me feel bad the same way reading Bust magazine makes me feel bad: mainly, because I haven’t purchased all these things which will make me cool. The amazing irony of the indie DIY wedding websites is their emphasis on handcrafting and buying things designed to designate you and your partner as anything BUT wedding industry victims. Meanwhile, they’re going on and on about the importance of creative wedding centerpieces, advertising a dozen websites where you can buy handcrafted birdhouses or replica 1950s centerpieces or whatever, all lit up with fake LED votive candles.

This planning business is making me resent the hell out of some fake LED votive candles. They are at the heart of every suggested decoration and you know what? They’re expensive.

Okay.
We’ve made tough decisions. We’ve opted not to invite everyone’s Plus One or everyone’s kids. Even though this specificity is common practice today, it still makes Eager-to-Please Me slightly nervous: What would my late grandmother say? Moreover, what might some of my snarkier relations actually say?*

Well, what either might think of our barbecue free-for-all reception and preceding wedding parade through Candler Park is anyone’s guess and beyond my concern. Truth is, we have some pretty damn good reciprocal courtesies planned for our guests. I am so excited about our excellent activities, ample time to spend together and catch up, and, (Oh, yeah, this) our thoughtful, loving ceremony.

See ya there. Or maybe not. It’s cool, right?


(*Just fer the record, we’ve decided to go it this way: For relatives and friends for whom it would be extremely awkward socially or financially not to bring their children and their partners we don’t know, then, fine, bring ‘em. Otherwise, we’re doing a checkbox system on the invitations specifying exactly who’s invited.)