my new year

I observed yesterday my own personal holiday, the one year anniversary of my arrival back in Michigan. One year ago yesterday I arrived in the Detroit Metro Airport at 5:45am, in the old terminal, the dingeiness of which always brought about a sense of nostalgia and a feeling for the beautiful imperfection of home, a feeling I always dismissed, brushing it away for fear that it was the dreaded “Midwestern complacency” in disguise, settling on my shoulders, burdening me with family ties and guilt and responsibility and adulthood.

(Lonesome wanderers, you may as well assume, are not fans of such.)

“I’ll only be here for a little while,” I assured myself. My preparations had assumed as much. I had a few changes of clothes randomly thrown into a suitcase, two pairs of shoes (my favorite boots and my running shoes) and a book for the plane (presciently, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion). I paused in the terminal even though Dad waited for me in the baggage claim, unknowingly savoring this fantasy that my time in Michigan would be short-lived. I ate a muffin from Starbucks. I wandered into the bathroom, rearranged my hair, applied cosmetics, made sure I didn’t appear too bedraggled. Therein lies the magic of airport terminals – forever they provide the rare ability to pause. They create a middle ground betwixt the teary or expectant or rattled departures from and before the grim or hopeful or nerve-wracking reunions with reality.

But eventually it must be met, sometimes in the form of one’s cheerfully affected father, in his orange down coat, hands in pockets, with a “hey, kid, long time no see” look on his tired face. It was 5:45am and he had to go to work in a few hours and I had called him the day before indecipherably sobbing something about “how could he do this to me?” and then later at the San Francisco airport, completely calm, explaining that I would be back that morning before the sun rose. What could he be thinking about me right now? was all I wanted to know, was all I ever, in my previous incarnation, wanted to know about anyone. Is Dad disappointed in me?

“We’ll be fine,” I explained to Dad as we drove home in relative silence save for his relaying to me some rote, chatty neighborhood gossip. ”We just need to work out some issues.”

“You want to get breakfast?”

“Alright.”

After omelettes we came home and the sun was just rising, making the fog only  grayer and denser in its incipient lumination. I wanted a cigarette. I had wanted a cigarette for a month, since I first arrived in San Francisco, even after a whole summer of not smoking at my ex’s behest. I had been fantasizing about that cigarette for days and days. The night that the ex and I enacted the whole breakdown, blowout fight I had been sitting in the back seat of the Land Rover, regarding some poor fool outside the 5am Club smoking, and I wished so hard to not be inside that Armor-all upholstery scented vehicle with its soundtrack of deep-rooted familial bickering in a family that wasn’t even my own and never would be, and instead outside on the sidewalk in the Bay Area mist smoking an American Spirit. With my mother.

Mom was up early now and we joined together in our ritual on the back porch (the ritual we have, in the course of a year, retired for want of need). I can’t remember what I said to her. I’m sure it was stupid. I can’t remember what she said to me. I’m sure it was wise.

A year ago I couldn’t see a thing on that back porch, not through my own and my mother’s curls of smoke and the comfortable fog and the thick wood beyond the marshy back yard and the opaque cloud matter settling in for its winter smothering.

Yesterday we had the strangest weather — inky clouds bashing together and spilling their contents imperiously, followed by intense, winter-clear cold sunlight and spring-like whooshes of wind. I witnessed this from inside the store, remembering for a moment that I had been back for a year, one of those thoughts that comes and goes in the course of a day when most of one’s attention lies focused upon produce codes, cheerful greetings, did you find everything okay, do you need help out with that, old ladies picking through change with wrinkled digits and bright fingernails, babies googling pressing the credit card machine buttons with doughy little fingers, making sure the chicken is wrapped in plastic, the bulk flaxseed is double-bagged, the receipt is signed, change is given and the till is counted down to the last penny.

A year has gone by and I recently stopped thinking of leaving Michigan anytime soon. I thought for all those years that eventually, if I starved myself enough and lived in a beautiful enough place and had the most perfect boyfriend or husband and the best house that I could work my way into the happiness that eluded me.  

A year later, I am curvy and single and I live with my parents. The old me would have died of humiliation, but I wish for her to know : I have never been happier.

It’s been a very good year.

aspiring miss havisham here

Yesterday I took myself to the DSO and loved it. It was an Arabian ‘oud ensemble that sounded like paisley looks. I sat four rows from the stage and fell in love with the stand up bass player. I think we had a thing. Perhaps I will run in to him some day at an oudoor market in Istanbul.

“Detroit…two-thousand-eight…it’s you…”

“I knew you’d never forget me,” I’ll say, and then we will immediately marry and have four adorable and musicially prodigious brilliant children who travel the world with us.

After the concert was over I was thrust back into the real world, without my stand-up bass player. But I did have my leather boots, which make good companions. Leaving Orchestra Hall to step out into nearly deserted Detroit on a gorgeous fall Sunday afternoon is quite an experience in juxtaposition. I drove towards the river, noticing that Starbucks had pulled out of downtown since I was last there and that the Guardian Building is still as indulgently golden as any temple to industry could be, in spite of, or perhaps as a result of, its dire surroundings. On the other side of Hart Plaza the new Canadian casinos loomed in their grotesque vulgarity, looking remarkably like monster packs of Kool cigarettes. Ew.

I got back on the highway, but had to pull off on Middlebelt for gas. Daydreaming in the driver’s seat, I let the pump overflow. I ran into the gas station in full alarm mode, much to the consternation of the attendant. He was nice about it, though, enduring my need to be assured that I would not be engulfed in a giant fireball as soon as I turned the key in the ignition, and he did compliment me on my footwear as I left.

“Nice boots” could have been the last thing I ever heard from any human being on this earth. Thankfully, no combustion occured, and I and my boots still exist.

I woke up today feeling absolutely exhausted by the prospect of ever dating anyone ever again. Conducting fantasy domestic lives with blue-eyed classical bass players is much more rewarding than actually participating in the real thing, if only in light of the absolute truth that make-believe relationships cannot break one’s heart. (“Only love can break your heart,” as Neil Young sang. I could never figure out whether this was lament or rejoicing. Perhaps it is both.)

 I decided that, although I’ve spent a year in abhorrence of an impending spinsterhood, perhaps being like Miss Havisham is not so bad after all.

mock green chile stew

sA while ago in my personal history, I fell in with a rowdy bunch of New Mexicans, who plied me with a Christmas Eve dinner laced with green chile, home made salsa, and my first encounter with (homegrown, no less) purple potatoes. A few months later, I moved to New Mexico. To this day, I do not know the truth about the matter. As much as I love my New Mexican friends (who are some of the most genuine and incredible people I have ever encountered), as much beauty as the ever-changing high desert landscape provides, and as much spiritual and cultural ephemera I soaked into my pale Midwestern skin in that place, I am still convinced that the primary element that kept me there for two years was the food.

First amongst the food is green chile. Oh, there’s also posole, and the multitudes of enchiladas; there’s sopaipillas and chiles rellenos and roasted lamb and root vegetables on the farm and gigantic peaches from the San Luis valley (which is actually souther colorado, but close enough), but who cares? Green chile is more important than anything.

It is a special substance, my friends. It is roasted in parking lots of grocery stores this time of year and so everywhere the air is saturated with the scent, which smells to me like an earthy concentration of dried fallen leaves. It is a heady, permeating incense.

New Mexicans (or those just pretending to be) buy the roasted peppers buy the bushel. A bushel is pretty much a garbage bag full of the deflated, black-flecked red and green skinned, hot as hades vegetable matter. Roasted green chiles don’t come peeled or seeded, and it is according to your particular family tradition whether or not you freeze them with the peels and seeds. Some claim that it makes them bitter to leave the peels on, some claim that it takes away from the heat to remove them. Some are simply too lazy or lacking the masochism required to de-peel and seed and entire bushel of green chiles at once (and after having once volunteered for such duty and as a result suffering from burning cuticles for weeks afterwards, I can sympathize. Oh, there is also the danger of the dreaded GREEN CHILE EYE). From there, the chiles are sorted into freezer bags and stashed away for the winter, to eat and to be used as currency (Seriously. Many a deal is brokered on a quantity of green chile.)

The heat and flavor and provenance of your particular green chile increases or decreases its value, depending on with whom you’re dealing. For instance, my (then) boyfriend and I invested in a bushel of too-hot chile. (When I say that it was too hot, I mean to say that it was too hot for him, a native New Mexican, which means it was really, really hot.) Fortunately, we discovered someone with a tongue of asbestos, and were able to trade amicably.

When the fresh stuff is not available or when you’re found that you’ve greedily consumed your entire stash and no one else is willing to share, there is an alternative. Chopped green chile comes in a little tub (which can be handily reused as storage ware), it is available in any freezer section in most New Mexican or southern Coloradoan grocery store, and it is produced by a company called, fittingly, Bueno (also available through the Albuquerque Tortilla Company). This handy stuff is available in a variety of flavors, but Bueno Autumn Roast is considered the best. It’s good to have on hand, as a welcome addition to ANY RECIPE you may have. Spaghetti sauce, chocolate chip cookies, stir fry? All of the above, you will find, can be enhanced by the addition of green chile.

That’s all well and good, but if you’re in Michigan, you probably can’t get green chile in any variety but a wee little tin can of absolutely bitter, awful stuff that looks like something jettisoned from someone’s nasal cavity, available in the “ethnic aisle” of the grocery store. Don’t bother. (I also once went to Eastern Market in search of chiles and found them, but being that they were grown in Michigan they absolutely lacked heat. Plus, you have to roast them yourself, which isn’t hard, but I haven’t been to Eastern Market lately so that’s not an option.)

Hence, on a crisp fall evening when I found myself lusting for green chile stew and without a hope of finding such, I invented something of which I am very proud: Mock Green Chile Stew.

At my family’s behest, I’m going to attempt to record the recipe, though it was rather free form.

First, it requires that you have on hand a leftover half of a 2-lb roasted pork loin (you might have made this the night before.) I find that green chile accompanies pork the best, but if you don’t have pork, beef is nice, and so is lamb (I think lamb is the most traditional — though keep in mind the greasiness factor). The glory of the leftover roast is that it saves time and, once stewed, it’s only going to get more tender.

Then, you make your regular stew base of sweated vegetables. I had some wee bitty green bell peppers and onions on hand, plus five cloves of garlic, chopped of course (which made me reminiscent of the incredible garlic my friends grow on their farm, so full of oil it’s nearly translucent).

Then, I added some red chile, which is of course available at your local grocery no matter where you are. Mine happened to be from New Mexico (I was in the habit of sending the free packets of dried red chile I got from the bank — yes, the bank gives out red chile — to my mother, and she still has some). I probably put two teaspons in and turned up the heat, let it sweat for another minute or so before I added the pork.

I let the pork hang out in that mixture for awhile to absorb flavor. I wanted a few tomatoes and more heat, however, and went scrounging in the fridge. What did I unearth but half a jar of Green Mountain Gringo salsa? I maintain, afterwards, that only this brand will do. It is my favorite store-bought salsa. I eat it straight out of the jar with a spoon (I find that the high ratio of vinegar to fresh vegetables makes it slightly reminiscent of chow-chow or sweet pepper relish.)

In went the salsa, and about five to seven more minutes of cooking (now at about medium temps, till liquids are cooked down). Then it was nothing more than a few cups of broth and about three yukon gold potatoes cut up, and about twenty minutes of boiling and twenty more of simmering.

That was that. Somewhere a magical alchemy had occured, not unlike that of Ritz Crackers in Mock Apple Pie, that made this stew close enough to the real thing that those eating it doubted my assertion that it in fact contained no green chile at all.

Which is nice, but if I had my way I’d be here.

post-half

“Hey Kristen, 28 new guys are into you!” A fine morning to you as well, chemistry.com! I’m fairly sure that they’ll have no problem making money, purely based on this approach. They could probably just skip the whole matchmaking process and bank on sending similarly ingratiating e-mails to single people.

It is, if absolutely nothing else, wonderful amusement. You see, unlike other dating sites, the database sends you only five new matches every day, and you must make a decision, yes or no, on those matches before they’ll send you more. A bit like Netflix. It makes good practice for anyone who’s a bit lacking in the decision-making department — for if you decide yes, it automatically sends that person an e-mail to inform them that you are indeed interested, and if you select no, they’re thrust into the void from whence their profile will never return. Wu ha ha!

Its’ the second day of post-race recovery and I feel darn near recovered. That could be a result of my having run the slowest race I’ve ever run (not that I’ve ever been a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination), a fact with which I am absolutely content. I felt good for the entirety of the run, which is something I cannot claim about any similar athletic endeavor I have ever undertaken. Remarkably, my stomach also felt good, which has never, ever, ever, happened. I owe this to two factors: 1. No coffee (I had Steaz Diet Energy, which is low-sugar, no artificial ingredients, full of promisingly exotic stuff like yerba mate and acai and insanely addictive) and 2. a breakfast of white rice (yes, white rice!) and egg whites.

white rice! who knew?

” (Which, of course I have a picture of. I mean, who wouldn’t be taking pictures of their — extremely unaesthetically appealing — breakfast at 5am?) The theory there (which I cannot take credit for) being that whole grains, though better at distributing energy, are wayyyy more difficult to digest than their refined counterparts.

Like I said, I didn’t go fast, so I certainly can’t claim any outstanding benefits of such ritual. But I also did not experience the usual horrors brought on by R.G.T. (runner’s gummy tummy) syndrome.

The best part about the whole deal, however, was that I felt humbled. I was surrounded by great athletes, people who commit to training in their free time, running through the capricious weather conditions and the less-than-enticing panorama of Southeastern Michigan. That’s awesome. I didn’t care about how slow I was going or that I probably didn’t look that great or that my boss, who’s my parents’ age, finished ten minutes before me (okay, I cared about that a bit.) I was surrounded by good energy. Furthermore, my ego managed to remain pocket-sized and quiet for the most part and that’s more than I could have accomplished in the past. And that fact is far more inspiring to me than any of the physical factors.

And now, for the real thing, I’m thinking about doing this marathon.
I don’t know why.
It looks weird.

she must be stopped.

Oh! This is the greatest day off ever. First, I woke up. I made myself crepes with home-made applesauce and yogurt. Then, I put on my nice wool coat, being that it’s very crisp outside today, and went to the farmer’s market, where I bought these from the farmer I have a crush on.

zinnias!

[caption id="attachment_56" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="flahrs with vase"][/caption] (That vase, by the way, bears mentioning. It’s english china with a sweet little strawberry print on it — flea market, four dollars! Yes ma’am four dollars.)
Then, I lured into the heart of downtown Northville by garage sale signs, I discovered the most ridiculous antique liquidation garage sale I could possibly imagine. The kind sir operating the deal informed me that I could not leave without something, and I asked whether I had to pay. It was then that he said he’d sell me this table for $5.

my pretty little table

How could I refuse? It was basically stealing. I feel guilty. (Notice those books stacked on top. They are the result of my pillaging the Friends of the Library used book sale last week.) Oh, but then, I spied the most gorgeous leather suitcase, the sort you might imagine yourself hauling off of a train somewhere in the 1940’s, or reproduced in the Sundance Catalog, in perfect condition. How much do you suppose that man wanted for it? The tag said $45. Ten dollars, I tell you — ten dollars!

Do not listen to this woman. These are the words of a madwoman! She may sound completely rational, but, I assure you, she is not. She has a stuff problem. She is like a rabid antiqueing ground squirrel, and the worst of it is, she hasn’t got anywhere to put these things she hauls home. Somewhere in the wine country north of San Francisco there exists a hangar which houses her vintage duvet cover, blue cowboy boots, and an entire set of vintage china (plain white with gold around the rims — simple, everyday china. It was an entire set for only thirty dollars and I couldn’t pass that up!) Somewhere in the desert of Northern New Mexico there exists a garage which houses a vintage typewriter (but I found it in the cabin I once lived where, purportedly, DH Lawrence had also lived. It could have belonged to him! Though, I admit, that’s doubtful) and probably two or three boxes of books — among other things — belonging to this woman. She must be stopped before she collects more and continues in her mission to deposit (aesthetically appealing!) arcana upon yet another unsuspecting recipient.

In other news, I am gearing up for the Brooksie Way half marathon on Saturday. I hope the weather stays…weathery. I hope it doesn’t rain, or snow. I hope neither of my legs develops gangrene and falls off before then. I hope the bump on my knee (my joints are so prone to forming bumps) doesn’t get any bigger. I’m rather anxious about the whole deal. The last (and only!) half marathon I ran was in Salt Lake City two Aprils ago, when I stopped smoking for ten days or so and decided that was a good enough reason to run a half marathon which I had not trained for (other than an entire winter of hiking up hills in my ski boots) at all. I didn’t do too bad, either — I finished in the top half of my age group — but then again recovery was quite rough. I believe I spent ten days in bed eating cereal, and summarily started smoking again. Anywhoo, given that I’m not half that stupid anymore, and I have trained for this, it should go better. I’m not quite as lithe as I used to be, but I don’t smoke, either.

One more thing –
Oh my goodness! Sweaty chefs and Harry Connick, Jr.? And sustainable agriculture? AND Martha Stewart?!? I can’t believe these sort of things happen without me.