I am a jerk.

Isn’t it just awful, isn’t it just the worst feeling imaginable, isn’t it just the sort of poetic irony the substance of which has been woven into so many movies and songs and odes and epic novels over the years — the realization that you’ve taken someone for granted so heinously, the awesome effects of which may be quite unrecoverable (but we hope that they are not. We hope and we pray.)

I’ll say it. I’m a jerk. An awful, awful jerk.

It’s so crappy the devices of time which make it impossible for one to travel back and rearrange, delete words, turn the appreciation quotient up. It’s too bad that you can’t shout warnings to your past self into the wind, to be swept back like an errant hat. It’s too bad life isn’t like Quantum Leap. I could use a little Scott Bakula right now to save me. Not that I deserve it, being that I am a jerk.

An awful, awful jerk.

last hurrah

Afternoon and I am tired, I didn’t sleep last night in this big old creaky place in the woods, when I came home at 11pm all the doors were open and Boogeymen galore hiding in the upstairs, so I barricaded myself in the den, Anthony Bourdain on the TV protecting me while de-boning a leg of lamb in an RV on a desert highway — now there’s a man. All you would-be suitors, pay attention.

As a result of my sleeplessness, I spent all day leaning on the counter at work, well-hidden behind the greeting cards and veneer of Snow White smile with voice to match. You have a wonderful day, I tell them, not insincerely. I don’t mind customers, not even the mean ones. They’re rather insignificant to me, as a whole, insofar as their ability to affect me. I have bigger fish to fry, bigger fish than the spoiled ones they return every so often, wrapped carelessly in crumpled paper. People are careless and selfish — this I know — and every time I get mad at people for being that way I realize — oh, wait. I am one.

But now I am home in the end of this afternoon enveloped in Louis Jordan and crinkly beer-colored light. I think this may be my last hurrah with Grandma and it feels but like a slurry of nostalgia related to more than just her — nostalgia for places, other people, feelings, times. If that’s how I feel at a perfectly healthy twenty-seven, then I can’t imagine how she must feel at (nearly) ninety-seven. After dinner she sits at the tile dining room table and caresse the spot on her chin where the cancer grows, with a look of near-fondness in her serenely clear eyes. I think she knows what it is and she is happy that it is there.

Take me away, she might say. She eats cookies from the package I brought home. “Hm,” she says thoughtfully.

I can’t eat dinner because the smell of mashed potatoes reminds me of retirement homes in Santa Fe and Jackson and turns my stomach, reminding me that this is a retirement home, albeit of one. I feel like I should sit there and keep her company.

“I’m tired,” I tell her.

“Hm.” she replies. “Hm hm hm.”

waiting for the cake

I feed people. This is what I do. Come sorrow, come change, come happiness and tumult, I can be found in the kitchen, whirling around, stirring sauces, gazing calculatingly at the contents of the open refrigerator, chopping, pinching spices and salt into pots of reducing concoctions, burning my tongue and fingers snatching hot tidbits from pans to taste, opening and closing cookbooks, melting and setting fire to objects I’ve absentmindedly set atop burners, and thinking. Thinking about cooking, and nothing else, which is why I’m there in the kitchen in the first place.

I was always confused by a Pearl Jam lyric I heard when I was young, “she feeds him/that’s why she’ll be back again,” but as I grew older and found myself in that very position I understood completely what Mr. Vedder meant. I have a need to feed — boyfriends, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers. It’s why I’m so well-suited to working at a grocery store — though I’m not cooking (I’d be a mess in a commercial kitchen, what with the science and organization and exactitude involved, no thanks), I’m feeding. It’s why I was drawn so easily into my last relationship. My ex, a cyclist in training, had a professional need to eat constantly. “Why don’t you come live with me and do all the cooking?” was all he had to say to charm me enduringly. I spent most of the time we were together immersed in the process of constantly preparing meals. I could be found on any given afternoon (having been graciously relieved of the necessity of having a job) strolling down the street to pick up some needful something-or-other at the confused (oftentimes well-stocked with wine-pickled herring and gigantic wheels of parmigiano-reggiano but mysteriously out of eggs) little market on the corner, and once a week picking through the funky produce at the local farm CSA, trying to figure out what the hell to do with three pounds of kohlrabi and garlic curls (which I am still absolutely convinced are just overgrown garlic). I thrived on epicurious.com and DVD’s of The French Chef I borrowed from the library, happily esconced in the kitchen of his ranch house, my kitchen, reclusive save for playing hostess to our many dinner parties. I kept this up until the very end, the tumultuous last hours of our relationship before I boarded the plane for home, swearing I’d be back (though I knew I likely never would). I cooked him breakfast. Strata.

And so on, throughout my history. Despite various other hints of heritage trickling through my veins, I am an Italian mama (a demographic recently made sexy by our patron saint, Giada DiLaurentis. Thank you, Giada!) to the core.

Lately I haven’t been cooking a whole lot. I’m busy with work and an actual social life (not revolving around me feeding people) and all of the tactical diversions in the name of higher learning and endurance sports I have employed to keep reality (I’m twenty-seven and single! Childless! With no education! Working at a grocery store! Living in southeast Michigan!) at low-tide. I started eating vegan a couple of months ago so that precludes any fun with meat or seafood, not to mention that I just feel guilty imposing my remarkable lust for cruciferous vegetables upon anyone else. Plus, for a good long time this winter, cooking just made me feel sad.

I’ve been staying with my 97-year-old grandma this weekend while my parents are on vacation. Mom left a nice array of frozen grandma-friendly dinners in the freezer drawer, knowing that I’d be running around like a cat-herding stressball, and tonight when I came home from work, tired and hungry myself, I thankfully fished out a Marie Callender’s pot pie and put it in the microwave while I boiled water for my cauliflower (knowing as I do that Grandma don’t tolerate vegetables, of any kind, anymore).

I felt uneasy and guilty about the whole operation as I listened to the Spacesaver’s bored hum. I opened the door halfway through, revealing the pitiful-looking mini-pie. It smelled weird, so I threw it out. May as well boil some noodles instead.

Once the water for the noodles had got to boiling, though, I figured I had better figure out something to put on them. I searched in the pantry for errant packets of powdered sauces, but came up with nothing. Just butter, then. I fished out the tub of Natural Balance and set it on the counter, remembering Grandma’s affinity for real butter and how its golden presence atop and inside nearly every food item on her table elevated her cooking, in my childhood estimation, to a level far beyond any I understood in my world of healthy hippie food. I clamored and pestered her for pancakes and mashed potatoes to be consumed in her kitchen of aqua-painted beadboard.

I figured at that point that, at a loss for the powdered variety, I may as well make a white sauce. I love making white sauce almost as much as I love beating eggs and chopping garlic and as I whisked the flour and Natural Balance in the saucepan I wondered why it had been so long since I engaged in this alchemical kitchen act. The sauce, with the addition of Guernsey milk, called for some cheddar I had seen in the fridge and the noodles and the sauce together called for a little oblong ramekin I saw in the pantry and the whole thing together called for the broiler and so it was that Grandma got homemade macaroni and cheese, with a side of asparagus (simply for decoration since it went untouched) for dinner, which she accepted with the same glee she reserved for my childhood cooking experiments — the expression of joy conveying that, no matter what she may introduce to her tastebuds as a result of my (at times ill-advised) experimentation, she would not simply feign pleasure out of the act of eating it, she would actually convince herself, out of Grandmotherly duty, that it was in fact delicious.

A lot of times I see my Grandma and I can’t see past her failing body. I can’t see past the fact that, for so long, she’s been a ghost of a woman I once knew. While I was away for six years, the part of her that made buttery mashed potatoes and knitted afghans and did the crossword and swore like a miniature truck driver and asked me pertly, “what’s cookin, toots?” when I called withdrew more and more, leaving a feeble stranger in her absence, a stranger at our dinner table whose presence I often resent, sometimes fear, and more often than not, ignore. For all intents and purposes when we are together we are two women, seventy years apart, with nothing to say. She was never the kind to proffer sage advice (beyond “don’t wear white shoes past labor day!”) or ask after my love life (thank God!). Instead, she made me mashed potatoes. She took me out for hot turkey sandwiches when my parents went away on vacation, back when she could still drive. I was too young to ever know her beyond these feeble memories. There are things about my Grandma that I will never know or understand. There are secrets and thoughts and feelings and memories that will die with her, and rightfully so, because they are hers. There is never going to a be a time when we will have much to say to each other, and if there was, it’s gone now. Instead we sat in the living room eating our respective dinners, listening to Chet Baker and the sounds of each other’s chewing.

This is why I do what I do. This is why I feed people. Because I can’t know and understand everyone, or even, really, one person, perfectly. Maybe I have a warped relationship confusing food with love but, damn it, it’s so ingrained in my being and in the beings of the women by whom I was raised that it’s useless to try and exorcise it now. This is how I give and this, essentially, is how I love.

I wish I could say that she finished my homemade culinary masterpiece with relish, declaring it the best meal she’d had in ninety-seven years, but she didn’t, and I was ok with that. I know the difference between feeding people and making them like or eat what you give them. She picked at it politely and I’m sure she would have been just as happy with the microwave pot pie — she didn’t give a shit about dinner, she was waiting for the cake.

balmy friday afternoon stream of consciousness ya-ya

I am grandma-sitting and I’m afraid I’m doing a bad job though grandma wouldn’t let on if it were true, she’s so silent lately and seems so near the end though not sick at all, just quiet and still and contemplative. She hardly says my name anymore, I’m not sure she remembers, I’m not sure she remembers who anyone is or why there are anyway anymore.

It’s the first hot day of summer this june the sixth and I drove home from work in Rosa my convertible thinking about running or riding and wondering how long it would take me to be really good at either or both of those things and probably I will have gray hair before my body finally performs at the athletic level I desire from it, but that’s alright. Better that than a dumpy middle-aged lady. I thought about the race I entered in Idaho and how I raced with the Masters class and how some of the women had legs such as I’ve never seen before, incredible, I wonder if it’ll take me that long to get those kind of legs?

I want to do something tonight involving a patio and some wine (it’s a Cakebread chardonnay kind of evening, I think) and some friends but I’m stranded out here in this island of strips malls and blah and they’re tearing down the last beautiful farmhouse in Novi to build something they call office condos, whatever they are. I hate Northville, I hate that it’s gone completely over to the people with the big beige tacky monstrous houses and Hummers, the strip-mall dwellers, the chain restaurant scarfers, that sort of people. My parents’ neighborhood is one of the last beautiful ones, and down the corridor of seven mile upon which it lies they are already cutting down trees, building houses in what used to be backyards, all to fill the bulging bellies of the greedy people clamoring for more.

Northville used to be so lovely. (sigh).

Alright, I guess I should go run.

I finished writing the above, then went on to see what Kristin Armstrong had to say today —  how lovely.

“Our culture breeds such insecurity, it runs rampant across our femininty, taking hostages in its wake.  Let’s run counter to it, circle ’round the other way, surprise it, take our people back.”

 

of muffins and human behavior

Sometimes, in the midst of existential questioning, I stumble upon the supposition that perhaps my entire reason for being is for the sole purpose of seeking out muffin perfection.

You see, I really love muffins. Ridiculously so. But I should amend that by saying that I don’t love all muffins — in fact, I don’t even like most muffins (I think it bears mentioning at this point that I am not speaking in metaphor at all. I speak quite literally of baked goods.). Those greasy balls of refined hydrogenated corn and petroleum product you find wrapped in plastic in the gas station? No. Those sugary bombs in the Starbucks display case waiting to congeal in a heap in your unfortunate stomach where they may lie for days while your body tries to figure out what to do with them? No. And it’s not just corporate muffins that I eschew — most homebaked ones resemble far too much a dessert rather than a breakfast item for my taste as well (anything with crumbly topping, chocolate chips, or any sort of glaze…no.)  No, friends, I am the product of a childhood catered by my mother’s super-hippie gastronomical bent and so the muffin for me most decidedly is bran.

Dark, lusty, forbidding bran. Bran, the mariah, cast from wheat in the refining process only to be relegated to the dowdy health food category, referred to in hushed tones, looked upon by many as nothing more than a medicinal (OK, I’ll just come out and say laxative) product, viewed in the same light as cod liver oil. But those who know understand that, as a muffin-building material, bran is king. Where white flour is plywood, bran is steel. Strong enough to support the weightiest of interiors (engorged raisins! cavalcades of nuts!), yet light enough to not require an abundance in order to maintain structural integrity (notice how sturdy the bran muffin is, not given to crumbling).

Now, I’ve discovered quite a few muffins that have made me happy across the states in which I’ve lived and traveled, which I could list at length, but won’t, save for mentioning two notables that I miss. In Santa Fe, there’s the Chocolate Maven’s Lowfat Blueberry Bran. Moist interior, large enough to last several meals (when I living there and didn’t have enough money to buy food because…well, because I was living in Santa Fe…this became a matter of utmost importance) and stuffed with fat blueberries, it does the job nicely. It’s best enjoyed en route from Santa Fe to Taos via the twisty low road along the Embudo river. And you may as well stop at one of those fruit stands and get yourself some chile and a peach. Another I discovered at Shades Cafe, a funky little dive hiding in the decidedly non-funky, disgustingly touristy ski town of Jackson Hole. This muffin, studded with sunflower seeds and baked to near-burnt crispness, can be had with a side of steamed eggs (cooked miraculously with a milk frother!) and eaten on the patio amongst the crowd of disaffected ski bum hipster trustafarians who reside in the neighborhood.

You see, in searching for the perfect bran muffin, one must consider so much more than simply the baked good itself.

Which brings me to the case in point. I have been in Michigan for seven months now (and six days) and it took me that long to discover it here (the search was narrowed, I’d like to add, by my conversion to veganism a month ago). This morning I was cruising around Royal Oak (enveloped by the soothing sounds of the Yes album) looking for Wi-Fi, and, tiring of Caribou, discovered a narrow little tin-ceilinged place called the Bean & Leaf Cafe. The hallway I entered through was covered with local photography, the adept and engaging man behind the counter had intricate tattoo sleeves and a way with the milk frother, and the baked goods case contained a muffin not only bran, not only vegan, but from none other than local Avalon Bakery. It was the color of dark, glistening molasses, studded with ruby cranberries, sporting a big, square top (that could easily be detached and enjoyed alone) and offered up warm.

I’m sitting in the sun now with a plate bearing scant crumbs and an empty paper coffee cup.

Last night I had a long talk with an old friend from New Mexico (a person who once showed up at my house bearing homemade lavender ice cream) who’s also recently endured heartbreak and it made me feel so alright, like it’s nothing more than another badge on my Girl Scout sash. I’m in love with the feeling brought on by the realization that I am an indelible part of the human race, a living, breathing testament to the wonder of human behavior (the Bjork song as well as the condition).

Behind the counter they’re discussing dating boys in bands and lunch (I’ve been there and done that and prefer breakfast to both) my signal that I should probably be on my way.

noxious nostalgia and boots

Oh, nostalgia, it hits me like a curtain of paint-thinner fumes sometimes, filling my addled little noggin with visions of times past, entities unrecoverable, friendships faded, loves abandoned, opportunities supposedly wasted. Nostalgia is that soccer field where there now exists a subdivision and the old man in the dingy trucker hat counting his pennies and lamenting “back when they were worth somethin’…”

“Nostalgia is carcinogenic,” a friend of mine used to say.

I’m beginning to believe him. If not entirely toxic, I have found nostalgia of late to at least qualify as an allergen. I’m convinced that it’s not the pollen in the air that makes me sneezy and chest-cleary, it’s the musty green mildew that’s grown on all the damp relics of the past I’ve kept in my attic for so many years, “just in case I need them someday.” I’ve been up there purging junk for a while now, and with all the meaningless files, outgrown clothes, and detritus taken to the dump my mental stash has dwindled down to those items previously designated as heirlooms.

What exactly is of value and what isn’t? If I throw this out, will I live to regret it? Or does it simply hold me back from growing into the woman I want to be? Moreover, if I throw this out, what will go in its place?

I once had this pair of leather boots that I bought at my favorite thrift store in Driggs, Idaho (the See ‘n’ Save). They were knee-high, leather, slouchy tan calf hide and they made me feel like a cowgirl Superwoman. In the scurrying to clean out the ski bum wreck my friends and I resided in, I mistakenly sent them back to the thrift store along with a bunch of crap I never wore and moved to New Mexico a week later only to regret for the two years I lived there those boots I left in Idaho. I inhabited every thrift store from Santa Fe to Taos to Albuquerque looking for a replacement and came up with a lot of also-rans but not quite the real thing.

Well, the oscillating fan of fate found me back in Driggs, Idaho (a place where I never could seem to leave, really. I’m not fully convinced even now that I’ve left) and, one afternoon at the thrift shop, wouldn’t you know it, there were my boots. Unchanged, waiting for me all that time. (I still have them and I wear them as often as is humanly possible, though they are due for a resoling. I even wore them in a wedding recently when I lost my heels).

I’m hoping that life operates rather like the dynamics of old leather boots and thrift stores. I sinverely hope that the objects and people and experiences and loves of real value, if discarded accidentally or needfully, can be recovered at some date in the future at the See ‘n’ Save. That’s the faith I’m operating on right now.

Alright, enough of this metaphorical rambling. The shoe reference, by the way, is a bit of a shout-out. Thanks for the inspiration, you know who you are.

 

dispatches from caribou

I’m in a big black pleather chair at the Caribou Coffee in downtown Royal Oak, a comfy and convivial chain coffee place. I used to hate this place based strictly on aesthetics,  but it has begun to grown on me in light of the fact that, although the coffee is laughably awful (their bread and butter, I gather from the marketing, is those American favorite frozen sugar ice cream coffee concoctions and not actual coffee) they do still offer free Wi-Fi, unlike stingy Starbucks and their pay-per-use bullshit.

Caribou occupies the corner of Main and something street here in Royal Oak, offering one a gracious fishbowl view of the varied population, which consists mainly of cigarette hipsters on one side and moms with baby stollers and tots on the other (ha! so it stands to reason that I should be somewhere in the middle here). Inside, it is all steamed milk and students hunched over homework and businessmen engaged in well-choreographed conversations (one of which I am in close enough proximity to hear, much to  my delight)["do you want me to send him an invitation to the golf outing?"] and sleeping semi-vagrants and androgynous hipsters operating the ever-churning blenders, all amidst the decor which resembles in so many ways (the packed-dirt colored carpet! the musty unoperational fireplace! the mismatched tables and chairs and confused blend of decorating styles!) someone’s family cabin Up North.

Which can be nice, really.

Next door exists this little boutique called Paris, of which I have recently become enamored. Case upon overstuffed, glittering case of vintage jewelry; sweet cocktail dresses; Matt + Nat bags (they’re vegan!) ["they have a love/hate relationship with the product...."] and a back room full of old and lovely dresses, the kind I can spend hours ogling. And the nice ladies who there are lovely and dropped everything to try to dig up something monogrammed for me (I am in love with mongrams lately).

Every so often I think of that song when I feel myself beginning to like Michigan — “It’s a not-so-bad, it’s a nice-a place. Ah, shut uppa yo face.”

 A big gray cat named Slim has adopted me, slinking her way into my house, plopping herself upon my bed and taking up residence.

A distinguished man chats in Italian two tables away from me.

A woman comes in with twins in a stoller and a tot perched precariously on top.

I think I’m going to sign up for the San Francisco marathon.

I’ve been vegan for precisely one month.

I talked to the ex last night, and it felt alright, like an amicable chat with a distant family member.

I think that’s about all the news I can muster.

mama’s day

On Mother’s day we drove through old neighborhoods in Birmingham ogling Tudors and pink dogwoods and bought giant marigolds in a chilling drizzle (I had planned a sunny day) and ate lunch at Papa Joe’s (she had the mushroom bisque, it was marsala-laced, deeply mushroomy and probably not vegan in any way shape or form but I tasted it regardless) and brought home persimmon-colored roses for Grandma, and a cupcake.

For a long time I had forgotten what it was like to be my mother’s daughter and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to remember.

 

It’s funny to read the New York Times’ stumbling to describe what’s “hip” and “indie” in their review of this year’s Coachella and coming up bewildered, though satisfactorily having “discovered” My Morning Jacket. I’m not being snotty when I say that, by the way. I really do think it’s funny in an endearing sort of way, like the older relative at Thanksgiving – “Hey, I really like the Nirvana. Have you heard the Nirvana?”

Yesterday — or no, I think it was the day before, (she said as if she actually has the ability to differentiate between the days of the week) I saw Dawn Wells on television talking about, of all places, Driggs, Idaho. She interviewed me once for a job as an administrative assistant at her strange little film school there. Her office, which occupies what used to be a used car dealership, is vast and occupied by overgrown settees and lifesize cardboard cutouts of herself as Mary Ann (or Ginger. I’ve never actually seen Gilligan’s Island, so I don’t know.) At the end of the interview she patted me on the knee and said,  ”I like you, ” in that raspy old show-biz manner which begged to be followed by, “….kid. You got real chutzpah,“  or, “you’re true blue,” or something.

But she didn’t. And I didn’t get the job, despite the fact that I am true blue and am possessing of real chutzpah.

I like Jim James, by the way, getting back in a roundabout manner to paragraph #1. I never was such a big My Morning Jacket fan (and I think that’s merely because I never owned much of their music until recently) but in that scene in I’m Not There when Jim James is in the band in the little town singing ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’, that just sort of broke my heart and enamored me of him forevermore.

“Rose Marie, she likes to go to big places…” that lyric always strikes me, because I am often overcome by the desire to go to the airport and just sit there, waiting, for nothing and no one.

 

 

That last post was perhaps a little melodramatic, yet immensely cathartic. I hope no one reads it.