Earth to Fomalhaut b

Fruition

2012-01-20T13:18:00.000-08:00

As part of my attempt to change my life in 2012 and use or sell all of the fruit growing on our Fallbrook California farm, I turned this

into this

on Tuesday.

Kitchen alchemy! you're thinking. How can I work this magic in my own home?

Or you're thinking, Here in Fomalhaut-b we'd never eat something that looked like that.

It begins with Martha Stewart, as so many delusions do. Here's part (but not all) of the recipe for candied grapefruit peel printed in the January or February 2012 issue of the magazine (they've stopped printing the date on the pages I tore out, but if you have any citrus growing in your yard, buy the magazine).

And here's a close-up of the results as shown in the centerfold:

If you scroll back up to the photo of my actual candied grapefruit peel, you may notice a slight discrepancy. Instead of pastel sugared pommes-frite-y things, I got hard-crack lizard skins. Naturally, I considered throwing the whole sticky mess away--which, you may have said to yourself already, is what one normally does with grapefruit peel--but then I would have wasted two cups of sugar, thirty minutes of tricky cutting, and 90 minutes of cooking gas, and anyway, to be frank, the entire experience reminded me of nothing so much as writing fiction. During the writing phase, you imagine it all pale orange and sugar-dusted, something you'd serve with love and pride to strangers and friends, but when you stare at your book two months after publication it looks like burnt lizard skins on a tray.

So I tasted one. It was sweet on the outside and bitter on the inside. It was hard and crackly and roasty and dark, and it reminded me of a poem I learned when my mind was still pale orange and sugar-dusted, meaning I was a freshman in college and reading Stephen Crane, William Blake, and Dostoyevsky for the first time. The lines that came to me were from "In the Desert" by Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I let my ruined candy cool on a wire rack, and then I smashed it to pieces and dropped it into a bowl of powdered sugar, which made it look nicely medicinal, and I made my husband try a shard. "Like horehound candy," he said.

Even though I'd made something edible out of something I normally throw in the trash, I couldn't help wondering what went wrong. I found that I still wanted the candied peel as it looked in the picture, as it had been promised to me by that phantasmagoria of kitchen dreams known as Martha Stewart. Why hadn't the recipe warned me to keep an eye on that pot of peels in case things took, as they certainly did, a Dark Turn? And isn't this what one would naturally expect when boiling sugar water for 90--yes, NINETY--minutes? That things might, however low the heat has been turned, round the bend to Hard Crack stage? I've dallied in my life with fudge and fondant. I've loved and lost the odd batch of cooked French buttercream. Most candy recipes suggest a thermometer and demand that you hover as you would hover over a child whose fever has reached 103 degrees, and even then, you never know. You're in the hands of Fate.

So imagine my surprise when I looked on-line for Martha Stewart's candied citrus peel and found not the recipe I used but this one from the January/February 2010 edition of Everyday Food. Instead of the peel of one grapefruit and two cups of sugar, one is supposed to assemble:

2 grapefruits
3 oranges
4 lemons
1 1/2 cups sugar

Instead of cooking the peel for 90 minutes, one is urged to boil it for--is this not a gigantic difference?--ten minutes in water and then 8-10 more minutes in one cup of sugar mixed with one cup of water. So we have the peel of nine fruits, not one, boiling in roughly half the sugar water for 20 minutes instead of 90.

What could I do? I had lots more grapefruit because that's the challenge here--insane quantities of citrus just dangling around like this is the Garden of Eden. I had these lemons plus thirty more, and I had a basket of oranges, and I had a new bag of sugar. So I prepared the Everyday Food quick-boil version, and I got soft, limp, sugary strips you can dunk in chocolate sauce and eat even if you have no teeth:

They're nice. I'm enjoying them. But I'm not going to lie. It's the former version, the one that cooks too long and gets too dark (if my experience is any indication, and it might not be), that I recommend and hope to cook up again. I ate the last shard of Jimmy Crack Grapefruit Peel while I was pecking away on my Untitled Work with the usual mix of hope and despair. I asked myself, "Is it good, friend?" and I told myself it was bitter but I liked it. Because it was bitter, and because it was my heart.

Preservation

2012-01-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

I made a pint of Moroccan preserved lemons today. Or rather, I started a process that takes 30 days, and if I did it right, in a month I can cook something in which preserved lemons are an ingredient. I also prepared, in a frenzy of resolve, a glass of orange-lemonade to drink with my grilled cheese sandwich, a sliced orange salad, and a lime-orange-tangerine frappe for Sam.

This is all the fault of a seven-year-old boy in New England.

The long, funny version can be read at A Raisin and a Porpoise if you scroll down to the post called "Like Lemmings," but the short version is that he visited California with his family over the holidays, and because his mother preserves, conserves, pickles, jellies, dries, and freezes the fruits and vegetables that grow on their farm, he was appalled at the general state of things in California, by which I mean the way lemon, orange, tangerine, pomegranate, persimmon, and--well, if you live here, just look out the window--trees tend to fill up with fruit, stay loaded with that year's crop, flower in the spring, and then produce another crop, which stays on the tree, and so on.

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?

a) We are lazy.
b) California is freakishly fecund.
c) Food is a full-time job if you make it yourself.

I used to think I could fix problem A, and I deluded myself about problem C. When I married and moved to Fallbrook 18 years ago from Utah, I suddenly had at my disposal more than 200 Valencia orange trees and a swath of property on the east side of Tom's mother's house (together, we share three acres) called a "family grove." The family grove and the Valencia trees were planted by the man who built Tom's mother's house more than 35 years ago, and it includes the following trees: Mexican limes, macadamias, loquats, kumquats, Asian pears, plums, three kinds of persimmons, pineapple guavas, strawberry guavas, Valencia oranges, lemons, Washington Navel oranges, and avocados. This is probably not an exhaustive list, though I feel a little exhausted and sort of dazzled just looking at it. Most of these fruits I couldn't even identify for the first decade that we lived there--I didn't know the strawberry guavas were edible, for example, until one of our boys ate one. My focus, in the beginning, was on the seemingly endless supply of oranges and lemons. Someone must want them, right?

The obvious solution was a packing house. Two hundred trees produce a lot of oranges. And they're delicious. So delicious that to drink a glass of juice squeezed from one of those oranges during the long, long season of ripeness (June to December!) is to feel both immortal and painfully sad that you're not immortal. If you don't believe me, come over next summer, and I'll squeeze you a glass.

But 200 trees is a small crop in the current (and recent) agricultural world. Our fruit, though sweet, was small. Most packing houses said it was too much trouble to send a team of pickers to our measly little grove for a bunch of what are known in the trade as "ponies," and although you can hire pickers yourself, you can't pick the fruit and THEN sell it to a packing house. So I tried to give it away. I picked it myself and left boxes of oranges at the senior center, where they were grateful but frankly a little overstocked. Lots and lots and lots of people in Fallbrook have exactly the same problem: too much fruit, too few mouths, and--let's be honest--too much convenient, cheap juice on the grocery store shelves.

One year, I called the center, and a group of elderly men came over to pick the oranges themselves, but my husband took one look at the ladders and the 80-year-old men and foresaw the crippling cost of litigation. So I tried other crazy things. I picked, washed, and transported (with Tom's help) boxes of lemons and oranges to sell to a man named Mahmoud Hassan, the owner of a Lebanese restaurant called Papa Hassan's in Orange, California, situated, of course, in Orange County, not far from where my husband grew up in--where else?--an orange grove. Mahmoud was nice to the 26-year-old me, and he bought our oranges and lemons for a while, but it was semi-illegal to buy from a non-commercial supplier, and I couldn't help noticing, as I sat in a booth and ate roast chicken and tried black Turkish coffee and fell in love with an almond custard called "Heaven" that still haunts me, that our oranges and lemons didn't look good enough for his restaurant's display case. Backyard fruit is usually misshapen and homely. Only a small percentage of lemons grown in any given yard are perfectly lemon-shaped, with a nipple on each side, the way, somehow, the ones in the store always are. Soon the arrangement simply ceased, and I let the lemon tree grow wild.

Meanwhile, I dreamed of making my own marmalade, of the labels I would paint myself and what I would call my glistening jam, of the farm stand where I would sell my hand-packed jars alongside bright pyramids of fresh fruit. This was a long time ago, before you could print labels on your own four-color printer or use the word "artisanal" to describe food. But besides the fact that I couldn't actually produce jam labels, had never cooked any sort of jam, and didn't own a commercial kitchen, there was one problem: I didn't even eat marmalade. I never had. Most Americans don't, actually. They like strawberry jam and raspberry jam and grape jam, but not marmalade. I proved this to myself the year that I finally taught myself to make it, which, not coincidentally was the year I finished writing a novel about a Scottish girl who emigrates to Kansas in the 1930's and can't find a single jar of lemon marmalade--Silver Shred, it's called--in this country. I gave orange marmalade and Silver Shred as Christmas gifts, but not even my own family willingly ate it. It sat in the backs of refrigerators, just another form of waste.

I learned that I could make more money by writing a long non-fiction article about our nearly worthless grove than we could make in four years from selling the entire too-small rapturously sweet orange crop, and although we did sell the crop that year, it was only because I was writing a story about it. Local packing houses and horticulturalists needed the publicity because tract houses were replacing orange groves at quite a clip 18 years ago in San Diego County. A few months after I finished the article, in fact, the packing house in neighboring Riverside County where I'd gone to watch the oranges tumble down conveyor belts into the hands of women who packed them in boxes closed down for good. We became an organic farm for a while because there was a small organic packing house nearby that was willing to work with small acreages, but that didn't last for reasons I can't even recall. It came down to the old problem: we were still too small to be commercial and too big to deal with the fruit on our own unless we gave up our careers and devoted ourselves exclusively to the farm, which would have caused us, without question, to lose the farm.

Here's how it works now: a very old and frail guy named Salvador comes with an even older, frailer guy. They arrive episodically, unannounced. You never know when you'll see them, or when they'll leave the $20 or $40 or $80 in cash. They pick our oranges and tumble them into ragged cardboard boxes, which they stack into the back of an ancient pick-up truck and take to swap meets in Orange County. Once, after Salvador had been absent for nearly a whole season and I felt, frankly, a little put out, it turned out that he'd fallen out of an avocado tree and broken his back. This didn't stop him entirely, just slowed him down for a while.

What Salvador doesn't pick, we try to drink. We pick two baskets of oranges a week, more or less, and cut the oranges in half and juice them on a stainless steel Breville juicer that inspires envy and devotion and also makes, to be truthful, a pretty big mess. We pick the lemons, too, if we make the time for it, and we juice them on the same machine, and then I try to make enough cakes and scones and lemonade and avgolemono to use them all up. On the 4th of July, Sam and Hank walk up and down the parade route with a Bubba Keg full of Fallbrook Lemonade and sell it for a dollar a cup.

I'm telling you this because even so, if you drove by the house, you'd look at our trees and think, "Why don't they pick all that gorgeous fruit? Why don't they eat it? What's wrong with them?"

Mostly, we're lazy and overfed, but the depressing truth is I get worn out by the dazzling fertility of it all. It's like the sunshine and the grass and the beach and the blue sky and the warm weather. You move here and you think you'll never take winter sun for granted, never waste a minute of it, never stop feeling in awe, but you will and you do. Then someone from far away notices, and you have to take stock. You have to try again. You make Calamondin Cake with what you thought were calamondins but are in fact kumquats. (It's delicious, but it takes a loooooong time to squeeze those itty bitty naranjitas.) You make Candied Kumquats. Kumquat-Ade. Strawberry-Guava Jelly. Grapefruit Sorbet. Silver Shred. Unsellable novels. And, this time, Moroccan Preserved Lemons, a thing I've never tasted but am so far enjoying as a sort of snow globe on my kitchen windowsill, a thing I'm supposed to shake once a day for the whole month.

If we like the taste of salted lemon peel, we could be in business. I'm already planning the label, of how the colors will be so bright you can hardly look at the jar without feeling hopeful and inspired and maybe a little deluded, which is just how, on a sunny day in January, I like to feel.

Because the World is Hard

2011-12-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

El Gran Teatro de la Habana (the building with the angels on top), as seen from the sixth floor of the Hotel Parque Central

Going to the opera in Havana is exactly like going to the opera anywhere. You hear an absurd story told in a beautiful way by singers you can't understand unless you know the words already.

I don't know the words to "The Magic Flute," so if I'd been anywhere except Havana, I'd have Googled Papageno on the way to the library to find a book that summarized the story.

But for an American, using the Internet in Cuba is like renting a limo from a Russo-Spanish robot. You have to plan it out in advance, accept that you understand none of the terms, and overspend in a currency that's not friends with your nation. Plus, I'd decided Cuba was my chance to become the nostalgist I claim to be. I'd brought a leather-bound notebook in which to write my penciled thoughts.

Since my chances for finding a well-stocked library with an English section on Mozart appeared slim, we had no choice but to decode the story as it was presented to us in very, very fast Spanish translated from the German and sung in the highest possible registers by Cubans. It tells you a lot about my husband that he was sitting there at all.

First, the opera house. Opera houses make me feel, in the best possible way, like a character in a 19th-century novel who's about to fall in love and die tragically. The Gran Teatro, finished in 1837, is ideal since it's in a state of noble disrepair. The chairs are red and soft, the elaborate wrought iron railings are a little rusty, the curtains are wrinkled and askew, the balconies are perfect for significant looks. We were sitting in the sixth row, not a box, but still. Things had a Tolstoyan mystique.

The production begins in Mozart-land--two girls dressed as boys in white wigs, knee socks, and pale satin sing unintelligible loveliness while pretending to look around them--and then, surprise! the stage fills with 20th-century urbanites imported from New York City via a high school for the arts in Spanish-speaking St. Paul. They sing. I don't mean they sing like sophomores at your neighborhood theater, where you went because the lead is your friend's daughter. They sing like nine-year-old Russians do gymnastics, if you know what I mean. The cute young Cubans dressed like scary stage New Yorkers surround a tenor with a messenger bag who's singing the pants off Spanish Mozart. I conclude that he's an important character.

"El Yuma!" someone cries, pointing to the messenger-bag tenor.

This is the only moment, for the next three hours, of complete comprehension. My husband speaks no Spanish and my Spanish is poor but we've read just enough about Cuba to know their slang for America is "La Yuma," a charmingly weird reference to a short story by Elmore Leonard that was first made into a Western in 1957 (two years before the revolution began) but that we know only from the 2007 film.

Three black women dressed in stiletto heels, trench coats, tight dresses, and high-altitude-Milan-Fashion-Week hair make all the other urbanites back away from the American tenor. They're packing pistols and sexiness, and they want El Yuma for themselves.

But why? Is he a capitalist they want to kill? A tourist they want to protect? Punish? Are the sexy women Cubans or Americans?

The sexy women sing, and naturally, that wakes up El Yuma. They sing and sing and sing, and he sings and sings and sings, and they show him what appears to be a sketch of a girl made by a 17-year-old boy daydreaming in geometry class.

Naturally, because this is opera, El Yuma falls in love. He sings passionately to the pencil sketch. Clearly, he has to have that girl. He wants her. He needs her. We can't tell who she is, but the sexy women approve. I comprehend a few words, translate them mentally while the cell phone of the people behind me goes off (even in Cuba you can't escape this), and experience the thrill of knowing that the only solution, according to Sexy Women, is to visit La Reina de la Noche, which I know--thrilling epiphany!--means the Queen of the Night.

But while the sexy women are off talking to the queen, Papageno appears. (Papageno sings his name a whole bunch of times is how I know.) He's dressed like a peasant and is clearly the country mouse in this production. Innocence in khaki. He sings a bunch of stuff by way of explaining things to El Yuma, and El-Yuma sings back, none of which we understand, and then . . .

The curtains part. The sexy women with guns have brought the American to see the queen of the night, and the queen of the night is . . . the Statue of Liberty?

A soprano on a pedestal wearing a big pointy crown and sashaying about in a giant satin American flag sings a bunch of not encouraging but really authoritative stuff to El Yuma, who cowers. What could this possibly mean? The Queen of the Night = America, and America is singing to an endangered American in Cuba who's fallen in love with a Cuban girl? Who, then, do the Cubans root for? Did Fidel review the production plans for this first?

Suddenly, going to the opera in Havana is nothing at all like going to the opera in San Diego or an Edith Wharton novel. We're not watching a 17th-century comedy in a 19th-century tragedy but political art put on by young people in a national company financed by, and we have to assume (don't we?) approved by Castro's people. So the American, who's clearly the protagonist, would have to be punished, wouldn't he? Could he possibly win his love and live happily ever after?

There's nothing to do now but ask John Updike, who wrote a picture book called The Magic Flute that was published by Knopf in 1962 and is now sadly out of print. We're therefore going to leave the opera house briefly, visit an American library, and whip back into our seats before intermission.

"Long ago to the land of Egypt," Updike explains, "a handsome young prince named Tamino came wandering. This land was strange to him, and he was alone."

Tamino (El Yuma) meets a dragon (played by the mob of Cubans), runs away, and faints. "Here our story would end," says Updike, "if three veiled maidens had not appeared out of nowhere, waving shiny silver swords." (Or pistols.) While Tamino is unconscious, the veiled maidens in trench coats cut the dragon in two. They moon over him, decide they absolutely must tell the queen, fight over who gets to do that and who gets to stay with the cute guy, and decide to take the news to her in unison, which makes for better musical numbers, anyway.

Enter Papageno, who pretends to Tamino that he, not those gun-toting chicks, killed the dragon and saved Tamino. The Three Maidens hear Papageno's lie and put a padlock on his mouth. They inform Tamino that they're the servants of the Queen of the Night (Symbol of American Immigration) and now we're right back where we started, in a Cuban opera theater 53 years into the revolution.

What does it all mean?

I want to say that it means Cuban opera companies are all about free speech, but I can't. During intermission, the man next to us, who was not taking calls on his cell phone, overheard our English conversation and spoke in English to us. He was in his 70's, I think, very thin and soft-spoken, and was one of those people who actually does know all the words to The Magic Flute.

"Have you always lived in Cuba?" I ask.
"Always," he said. He sounded proud and wistful at the same time.

He comes to the Gran Teatro all the time, and he sees every opera they put on. He explained that many of the singers are young because they're still in school. It wasn't normall, he said, for the productions to be in Spanish or in modern dress. He'd been to Italy and to Mexico, and he once tried to get a visa to visit the United States, but it was denied because the agency feared he would simply overstay his visa and never come back. "If I wanted to do that," he said, shrugging mildly, "I would have done it when I went to Mexico." Someday maybe, he hopes. Meanwhile, he recommended that we see a very famous Italian soprano who would be performing in a few days.

I wanted to ask him about the weird Pamina-prison guard scene. When Pamina, the girl in the pencil sketch, is first shown on stage, a man in military dress unzips his pants in a clear prelude to raping her. She faints, and the guard is driven off. The oafish guard later sings of his loneliness and ignominy, but the story never redeems him in any way. He's a brute and a rapist and he's driven off stage every time he appears.

I tried to ask the opera goer if this meant something--if it wasn't strange that the character who most represents a military figure is depicted as evil on stage. But the opera goer didn't understand what I was asking, and we fell quiet. There were too many symbols on the stage for me to ask him about, anyway--Sarastro, a tall, elegant black man dressed in red pajamas like a Chinese emperor, his surroundings and his priests decorated with the symbol of the sun and communism. (The opposite, obviously, of the Queen of the Night, but does that make him Castro?) The three girls dressed like Cuban schoolboys--los pioneros, school children are called--who save Pamina from a suicide attempt.

Real pioneros at a primary school in Havana

If only I spoke perfect Spanish and perfect opera. If only I knew all the words.

The opera resumed, and then it ended after another hour, or, if you ask Tom, after three days, 13 hours and 46 years. We walked out into the Cuban night, which smells of the fumes of old American cars. The opera-goer asked if we liked the show. "Yes!" we said. The opera goer disappeared into Parque Central. Havana lay under the stars like the ruined sister of Paris, a once grand and decadent city that looks as if it's been submerged in the ocean for hundreds of years, brought to the surface again, left to dry, and re-inhabited without repairs. It's a necropolis in which no one is dead, where time stops and yet keeps going.

Only John Updike could explain to me whether America, Queen of the Night, or El Yuma, the lovelorn American tourist, was the hero in a beautiful incomprehensible Cuban opera.

You know the answer, don't you?

Sarastro, symbol of day and light, lives in the Temple of Wisdom. "Sarastro!" says Papageno, shuddering. "He is great, but he is hard."

Fidel meeting Chavez on the wall of the library in a primary school in Havana. "An Embrace Between the Cities of Bolivar and Marti" it says at the bottom.

Papagena, a character I haven't mentioned because she's not politically important, replies, "Sarastro is hard because the world is hard."

Picture of Fidel and Raul at a smaller primary school in Havana

Sarastro's prisoner is Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, an "unhappy woman," as Tamino/El Yuma puts it to Sarastro. To free Pamina from Sarastro, El Yuma must pass three tests: faith, patience, and courage. He passes the tests, and Pamina is saved from her own despair by Cuban school children. He and Pamina "walk through death's enduring night/ with gladness, free of fright."

They don't walk through death's enduring night in America. The Queen of the Night, who loses her daughter forever, becomes "insane with fury." She and her Sexy Veiled Maidens try to destroy the Temple of Wisdom, which is Cuba. Her army melts "before the might of Sarastro as evening dew melts with the coming of the golden sun."

"For there is nothing in the world stronger than goodness and truth," Updike says, not talking about countries, of course, just symbols of day and symbols of night and Mozart's silly, profound story.

I hope Knopf will allow me to print here the final words of the tale as Updike tells it:

"The Queen of the Night was not a wicked woman but she was a woman whose will had not yet been subdued to the will of a man. Therefore she was like a proud ship sailing through a tempest without a captain, at the mercy of every wave and wind, all her sails fluttering. Some say, indeed, that in time Sarastro tamed her fierce spirit with patient advice and harmonious music. Perhaps in time they were married. Perhaps Tamino played the magic flute at the wedding. There are more fantastic things than this that are true."

Because I was there, because I saw it happen, I can't help inserting the words "United States" for "Queen of the Night" and "Cuba" for "Sarastro." I think Castro would have like the opera. But so did I. I suspect there are more fantastic things than this that are true, but I can't think of any.

The Art of Socialism

2011-11-28T11:38:00.001-08:00

If you know we just took a family trip to Cuba, you're probably wondering

a) if I have finally taken Sam's advice and am trying to write a novel with less description and more car chases, and
b) what socialism looks like 53 years into the revolution.

Some day, Sam, some day.

Meanwhile, socialismo.

My father fought in the Cold War (if fighting is the word for flying missions to check on Soviet maneuvers near Iceland), and then he fought in the Vietnam War, which you definitely would call fighting, so I was not one of those American children growing up in the 60's and 70's with liberal parents. We drank Tang. We went to church. We hated communism and socialism even though I didn't and don't know the difference between those two things (although, to be frank, neither do most of the people writing answers on the Internet to that exact question). The main thing that's in play here is that I viewed the prospect of visiting one of the evil empires both thrilling (we're going to a forbidden place!) and pointlessly depressing. For one thing, no one raves about socialist architecture, socialist cuisine, socialist pastry shops, or socialist art. I was afraid most of Havana had been torn down and re-built to resemble the Salk Institute (see exhibit A).

Exhibit A

Why do I need to spend two days on a plane to see something I can see right here at home? And as you know if you've done any traveling to Paris, New York, or Nebraska, it's not just what you think about the country. It's what the country thinks about you.

Consider this dialogue from Ben Corbett's 2002 book This is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives, where Corbett reports a conversation he had with Cuban men who gathered daily to talk about sports in Havana's Central Park. Most of the 40 guys walked away when Corbett asked what Cubans think about tourism, which is clearly off-topic, but a few of them stayed.

"El turismo is a good thing," one said. "Without it, Cuba could not survive."

"But we can't even sleep in our own hotels! We used to be able to sleep in our own hotels, and now even if we have the money, it's for the tourists only."

At this point, even more of the men walked away, and one observed that the police had edged closer to listen in. "They won't even let me through the door of that hotel," said the guy with an eye on the police, "but it's supposedly my hotel according to Castro. Those taxis are mine. The airplanes are mine, but do you see me using them? It's a big lie."

Corbett explains that tourism became Cuba's lifeline after the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. Cuban imports dropped 80 percent (see pages 24-25), the regime started printing money, the Cuban peso lost value, and Castro told the 4th Party Congress, "The growth in income is considerable, and it's very important that everyone should understand how much Cuba needs tourism, even though it implies our making some sacrifices. We'd like to go to all of the hotels, but this is a matter of trying to save our homeland, the Revolution, and Socialism, and we need those resources . . . "

Or as made into a pithy rallying cry on a wall in Habana Vieja:

Hank considers the revolution.

Of course, Castro wasn't really talking about American tourists like us. The American trade embargo is almost as old as the revolution, imposed in a partial way by Eisenhower in 1960 and strengthened and expanded every year for the next three years until John F. Kennedy not only made all commercial and financial transactions with Cuba illegal but also prohibited travel to the country. (See J.A. Sierra's timeline of the embargo for details.) This year, however, the Obama administration eased travel restrictions and expanded a category of legal travel called "people-to-people" visits. That's what we, the McNeals, were doing in Cuba: we traveled there with a company called Cuba Cultural Travel that has a license to arrange what the law calls "purposeful visits."

The purpose, as defined by law, is "cultural exchange," but what are we exchanging? Does the American government hope that visitors, such as my children, will return home more committed to capitalism and democracy? Or is it like the "Big Blue Marble" on a bigger scale? And what do we secretly or publicly hope the Cubans will take away from the exchange, besides money? If certain arts groups have been told to show tourists what they're doing, and money thus flows from the Castro regime to those groups and generates art of all kinds, is there anything bad about that? And are we seeing the truth (parts of Cuba as they really are, whether foreigners are watching or not) or a facade?

We were there for seven days, which was only long enough to formulate these questions, not to answer them. I confess that I watched "Big Blue Marble" often enough as a child to have the song in my head while we were there, and to be truthful and mawkish, that's what I wanted our children to feel. But if what we saw was merely a story certain Cubans were allowed to tell us, I can tell you that it was a rich, complex, and unexpected story. I believed the artists, teachers, doctors, and curators were saying something true that they wanted to say to someone, anyone, everyone, just like the artists, teachers, and doctors I know here. And for a nostalgist like me, there was no end of uncomfortable evidence that socialismo is a better way (I didn't say a painless way) to stop time.

So here I offer just eight things I loved about Cuba, in the form of glimpses that I hope to have time to write about in more detail some day.

1. Fusterlandia

Jose Fuster has spent the last 30 years transforming an ordinary house in the Havana suburb of Jaimanitas into an elaborate mosaic fantasy.

Sewing machine art! Tile trees! It's a crazy place, and I mean that in a good way.

Not sure what the story is behind lady-in-blue and Mr. Cowboy but I think it's a romance.

Not your every day pool area.

Viva Cuba, indeed.

2. Memorializing Hemingway: The Hotel Ambos Mundos and Finca Vigia

Hemingway wrote two minor works in the Ambos Mundos hotel--The Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon--but the shrine is staffed daily by an articulate Cuban Hemingway scholar in heels and a business suit. My favorite part of her presentation was "His wifes were American, and his mistresses were international."

Le Typewriter

In the bookcase beside the holy typewriter, you can view a Finnish copy of A Farewell to Arms, a Norwegian copy of Sneen Pa Kilimanjaro, a German copy of Die grunen Hugel afrikas, and a Ukrainian translation of The Fifth Column, which illustrates the general Cuban effort to make the room more interesting. As cultural exchanges go, I would say that Cubans have much to teach us about memorializing writers. When I went looking for the Key West hotel room where Wallace Stevens stayed for 20 winters, hoping for an enshrined typewriter or ink pot, not a single staff member even knew who Wallace Stevens was.

In February of 1939, Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Havana, and she began looking for a house. She found a newspaper ad for a 15-acre property called La Finca Vigia or The Watch Tower, shown here from the front steps.

The Watch Tower. Hemingway's study is on the top floor.

Interior of the study in the tower.

One of the many perfect things about the museum is the fact that you're not actually allowed into the house. You, the peeping Tom, peer into private rooms through open windows and doors.

These, however, are the only books for sale at museum store. I didn't love this part, obviously, but you can buy Hemingway's books at used bookstores in Havana (shown in the next two photos).

Paris Was a Fiesta sounds like a great book, doesn't it?

3. Tobacco plantation, Valle de Vinales

This is Paco's house. Paco has been growing tobacco in Vinales for decades. He and his wife were born and raised on farms that merged when they married, so he's been here all his life. He still uses oxen to plow, and he still dries tobacco on poles in the barn. When his family served us lunch on the patio, we ate on tables set inside a picket-fence gazebo near the turkeys, pigs, chickens, cats, and dogs. On the menu: local coffee, local green papaya canned by Paco's wife and daughters, local (really, really local) smoked chicken, homemade root chips, buttered manioc, and hand-raised, hand-dried, hand-rolled (right at the table) cigars as discussed at the beginning of this post. In other words, Paco is at the forefront of the farm-to-table movement.

Paco's farm. The limestone hills are called mogotes.

Many of these excellent photos were taken by our friend and guide, Catalina Sykes. Note that Hank (green shirt) and Alexa and Mikey are drinking non-American colas.

Paco himself

The tobacco-drying barn.

Paco's family

Inside the barn. Sam is no doubt thinking about the lessons he heard recently in his science class about the dangers of nicotine.

4. Transportation is a more colorful and difficult affair in Cuba.

If you drive the highway between Vinales and Havana, you'll pass not just one of these buggies but one every three minutes. Horses are still a common means of transportation there, which depending on your point of view, is either exhilarating
(my view) or just plain sad (according to people who probably understand the effect of oxen and horses on GNP.)

I lost count of how many teams of oxen I saw in the region of Vinales.

Havana is filled with home-made bicycle carts. (It's also filled with vintage American cars and old Russian cars, of course.)

Not just two on a bike but three.

5. Restore, recycle, and re-use, as we're fond of saying.

There's no doubt that if we had a contest to see who really cares about recycling, Cuba beats us. Even the street sweepers do it with style.

6. Cuban laundry lines.

7. The Necropolis de San Cristobal Colon

These pictures show only one of the many elaborate memorials in this cemetery: the grave of Amelia Goyri de Hoz, also known as La Milagrosa or the Miraculous One. The legend says that Amelia died in childbirth in 1901 and was buried, according to custom, with her stillborn baby at her feet. When her sarcophagus was later opened (also customary, since skeletons are moved to smaller boxes after two years to make room for the deceased), Amelia was holding the baby in her arms. Amelia's tomb has since become a place of pilgrimage for childless women.

Those whose prayers have been answered return to the grave with engraved marble thank you notes like these.

This gives you a sense of how many prayers are offered here.

This one says, "Amelia, thank you for curing my grand-daughter."

8. Community Center of Puerta de Golpe

In Puerta de Golpe, a town of 7,000 residents about an hour from Havana, we visited a community center where children can learn to make art. It was started by an artist, who initially held the free classes in his houses, but as the project has grown, the house has been remodeled to house a gallery downstairs while he and his wife live upstairs. The classes are taught in structures built of wood and palm fronds. Behind the various studios is a huge organic garden full of vegetables and flowers.

The artist who founded the school


The sign says that classes offered include music, ceramics, dance, theater, painting (in projects such as those shown here), and knitting.

The Poetry Corner

The librarian, his lending library, and samples of children's work. On the shelf I found a book that I was happy to see in a primary school in Havana, too. Mujercitas, a translation of Little Women.

I'll end on the patio of the Puerta de Golpe community center, where Mikey, Alexa, Sam and Hank are sampling fresh guava and papaya, and where the world honestly seemed as simple as the Big Blue Marble song told me it was. I'll loan you my copy of Mujercitas, we'll do a little papier mache, and then we'll eat some fruit.

That this could happen at all seemed a miracle, almost, something I hope my father, looking down on us from a place that seems as far as Fomalhaut b, would appreciate.

My Mother, the Hobo

2011-11-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

They don't call it the Getaway for nothing.

I've been planning for months to execute field research for the book-in-progress. I wanted to sail under the Coronado bridge and spent the night floating there, something that the 12-year-old characters in my story (aka the Untitled Work) are going to do if I ever get past page 74. There were, however, a few obstacles:

a) I can't sail,
b) I don't own a sailboat, and
c) I'm afraid of the ocean, which it seems to me has been extra sharky.

I was planning to get around my inability to sail by asking our 13-year-old son, Sam, to be the skipper on this outing but this seemed like asking to borrow somebody's Mercedes after telling them I can't drive and don't have a license but "my 13-year-old can drive really well."

Enter my friend Maggie. "That sounds fun!" she said. "I could go with you."

Enter her husband Doug, the president of Hobie. "You could borrow one of our boats," he said. "I think the Getaway would work."

Maggie comes from the Pacific Northwest, where she learned to sail at the age most people learn to ride a bike and to read, so she could sail a Getaway with a huge sail at high speed and drop anchor near the bridge and never be even vaguely afraid of sharks.

So on a Saturday night in September, we did it. Doug and Maggie brought the Getaway and a power skiff from north county, which meant driving two cars pulling two trailers, and I brought two picnics, dinner and breakfast, which required no trailers at all. I brought a tarp that was absurdly large (the blue one bunched up on the floor of our tent in the photo), and she brought a tarp that was exactly the right size (the green one that became our tent). I brought a candle, and she brought a battery-operated lantern. Maggie brought her knowledge of sailing and knot-tying, and I brought my appreciation of people who can sail and tie knots. Obviously, the exchange was a little uneven. If you're currently friends with a writer, you may want to look around and see if you can be friends with a yoga-teaching sailor instead. The outings will be better-supplied.

As research, the outing was sublime. I learned that if you drop anchor within two hundred yards of the bridge, you have not moored yourself in Glorietta Bay, as directed in the permit you can (and I did) obtain from the Harbor Police, and the harbor police, who apparently cruise around the bay all night long, will very likely approach your boat with a very powerful headlight at 1:00 a.m. At 1:00 a.m., if you are sleeping on the tarp-covered trampoline of a Hobie under an ersatz tent and you've just barely fallen asleep and it has occurred to you several times that it would be pretty simple to attack two women sleeping in a tent-boat just off-shore and leave them for dead, and likewise it would be a snap for a big boat driven by a drunken person to crash into you and knock your vegetarian picnic and your sleeping self into the sharky ocean, a powerful headlight on a huge boat can be sort of alarming. "Maaaaaggie?" I said as the huge boat and the light approached us with what seemed like breathtaking speed.

Here's what the harbor police will say, and not in a pleasant voice, either. "What are you doing here?"
If you scramble out of your sleeping bag and explain that you have a permit, he'll ask you, "For where?" If you say, "Glorietta Bay," he'll say, in an exasperated voice, that Glorietta Bay is back there. Apparently, there are maps. One is supposed to find these maps, read them, and moor accordingly.

The policeman told us to move, so we pulled up our anchor. The night was windless, and, anyway, we'd lowered the sail. We grabbed our paddle. We dragged it through the water, moving The Getaway ever so slowly, far too slowly for the harbor policeman. "You don't have a motor?" he asked.

"No," we said, paddling in the darkness like the 12-year-olds in my Untitled Work.

The policeman watched us for a few seconds from the darkness of his boat. Paddle, paddle, paddle. "Just go over that way," he said. "And next time, you need to be more prepared."

We paddled dutifully toward the shore, and he motored off. "Here?" Maggie asked.

"I don't know," I said. "He didn't stay to watch, so maybe this general area is fine."

For the next hour or so, I lay in my sleeping bag and waited for him to come back and check. He didn't. The birds or the bats that nest under the bridge screeched on and on. The lights gleamed. The water was smooth and dark and still. It was the best camping trip ever.

View of the bridge from under the tent.

At dawn we ate our breakfast, brushed our teeth, stepped off the boat and onto a paddleboard, and floated over still water that had produced neither murderers nor sharks. To step from a boat onto a paddleboard is the nicest possible way to start a Sunday morning.

Instead of walking down the hall to get coffee, you do this.

Meanwhile, at the baseball field not far from the bridge, the first game of the day was about to start. A friend of mine was asking our 11-year-old where his mom was.

"Oh, she's sleeping under the bridge," Hank said. Not "my mother is not watching my baseball game because she's doing research on a boat near the bridge" but "my mother is not watching my baseball game because she has put all her belongings into a grocery cart and gone to live under the bridge."

Final mooring spot for the Getaway near the Coronado golf course.

Probably I should hire Hank to be my publicist.

Shrines of Key West, Prologue

2011-09-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

In June, Tom and I went to Key West for our anniversary. I like holidays that I can pretend are self-improving, and Tom likes holidays where the weather's really, really hot, so Key West seemed perfect. We could visit Hemingway's house and we could lie around in the sun. In the back of this thought, standing like a ghost behind Hemingway, was Wallace Stevens, who visited Key West every winter for 20 years and wrote "The Idea of Order at Key West" but never built a house there and in any case wrote poetry instead of novels that became movies starring Ingrid Bergman.

I didn't think about this difference between the two writers in my pantheon until the vacation was underway. I thought instead about how inspiring it would be to visit the house of the writer who first made me want to be a writer. For the last ten years or so, I've been telling the same conversion story to teenaged writers about how I was sitting in my high school English class (Paul on the road to Damascus!) when I was asked to write an essay about Hemingway's story, "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." I tell the story even though I've learned that Hemingway is the wrong hero for me to have. Too patriarchal. Too violent. Misogynist! The Nick Adams stories and In Our Time are my substrata just the same. The Old Man and the Sea, too, even though I understood it only as a story about how hard fishing can be. By the time I was a senior in college A Farewell to Arms was the answer I gave when a guy at a party wanted to know what my favorite book was so he could read it before our first date. (He read it. He thought it was ridiculous. We didn't date long.)

The last time I made a literary pilgrimage was a long time ago, when I was 21. I walked on metaphorical knees to the homes of Shakespeare, Austen, Byron, Wordsworth, and the Bronte family, although the truth is that when I reached the Haworth parsonage, I'd reached pilgrimage burnout and didn't go in. I was tired of the strangeness of presentation: the combs, the desks, the letters, the curls of hair, the way each object, labeled and encased and so often tangential, took me both nearer to and impossibly far from the experience I wanted, which was to feel the tremors of revelation. I wanted to see sacred relics, which are proof that the writer existed in human form, and thus proof that the world takes care of sacred things. It wasn't so different from what I did when I was even younger and visited Mormon holy sites: the farm in Vermont where Joseph Smith turned from a boy into a prophet, the city of Nauvoo where the Mormons built a city that was burned down by anti-polygamists, the jail in Carthage where Joseph was shot. You stand in the room, you look at the combs, pens, and dishes (which are either the very objects that were in the room at the time or historical stand-ins), and you try to feel it: time going backward, the dead alive, the divine made flesh.

I'm very susceptible to such places, and I now regret, very much, my refusal to enter the house of Charlotte Bronte. I regret it because I remember, as though it were a spiritual, not literary, experience, hovering near a sunlit room in Hampstead where Keats sat not long before he died, and standing inches away from the tiny desk where Jane Austen wrote and wrote and wrote. Such a small desk. Such a hard chair. The articles of transfiguration.

Hemingway House Exterior

My first glimpse of Hemingway's house in Key West was of the jumbly brick wall that surrounds the property and two teenaged girls posing for pictures beside the bronze sign proclaiming the house as his. The girls leaned as near to the sign as they could get without paying admission, over the gate with their upper bodies, but feet still planted on the public sidewalk. It didn't bother me in the least that they were posing for pictures; I was holding a camera, too. But why take the picture and not go in? They didn't want to go in? Clearly, they were not the faithful.

We paid for our tickets and walked through the front door just as a man who looked rather oddly like Hemingway in his senior years (same beard, same hat) announced that the tour was about to begin. A tour? I didn't expect a tour, but why not? It would be so educational, so self-improving.

Tom said later that he kept thinking, the whole time, of the Disney Jungle Tour, but I was in a more rapturous mood so I was just impressed that our guide was not improvising. He had a script, and he'd memorized it! It was an act, a show in itself, and it was filled with details about when Hemingway arrived and how long he stayed and what he wrote in this very house, so I could look up, as if heavenward, to see the second-story room where book after book after book was completed. We ascended the stairs to gaze at the desk, the books, the stuffed animal heads, the typewriter. The pictures on the wall were not from the period--surely Hemingway didn't put primitive oil paintings of himself on the walls?--but you could believe, standing there, that the rest of it was real, that the man was not a myth but a person, and therefore a person could and did write books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.

Everything in the house, from the dusty Venetian chandeliers to the books on Hemingway's shelves to the bed he shared with his second wife Pauline took on the Aura: This is no ordinary bed. It's the bed of legend. This is no ordinary bathroom. It's the bathroom of legend. Etcetera.

At first, the aura extended to everything the tour guide said. Good little believer that I used to be, I assumed that a preacher in the house of Hemingway would tell God's truth the whole time. I mean, why would people entrusted with the house of a world-famous writer who died just fifty years ago not fact-check the commentary?

Probably you were walking along in Tom's mode the whole time, treating the whole spiel like the Disneyland Jungle Tour, so you know that my original faith was totally misplaced. For me the shift from belief to skepticism occurred in the upstairs hallway, where the guide interpreted A Farewell to Arms as Hemingway's revenge on the Italian nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who turned him down when he asked her to come back with him back to America.

"He killed her off two chapters before the end. Now that's revenge, I tell people," said the tour guide.

Revenge? The young writer lost the woman he loved when he returned to his own country and she couldn't follow, so Frederic Henry lost the woman he loved when she died and he couldn't follow. Why isn't this a narrative of grief?

I shuffled along with the group into the bedroom and looked at the bed Pauline and Ernest tried to share. He suffered from back pain (said the tour guide) and wounds he'd suffered in World War I, and he was a pretty big man, too massive for the beds of the period. On a trip to Spain (said the tour guide), he and Pauline bought a Spanish gate and two gate posts and shipped them home to form a unique, extra-wide headboard. They made a bed together, and they had two boys. It made me think of how I'd married a writer and we'd made a bed together and had two boys, and then the bed was too small so we enlarged the frame to accommodate their middle-of-the-night visits. It made me think about how weird it was for all of us to be standing in front of somebody's bed, thinking our thoughts about their private lives, snapping photos (me), listening to pithy stories that would become true for most people whether they were factual or not, and then would be forgotten, mostly, as part of a disappointing or once-in-a-lifetime trip. I thought, for a moment, not of Hemingway's ghost but of Pauline's. I saw her standing there day after day, listening to a well-rehearsed story that she could never correct or change, joined in death by the wife who followed her, Martha Gellhorn, whose photograph had been hung retroactively on the dining room wall downstairs, and the wife she herself replaced, Hadley Richardson, whose photos are also featured here.

Which is, in the end, what happens to all of us, whether we're writers or not. We become the stories people tell about us when we're dead. The more dramatic the stories are, the more succinct and allegorical they become. Other people put pictures of our successors on the wall. If you're famous, there will be a gift shop. If not, a garage sale.

This post originally ended with this photograph, which was framed on the wall at the Hemingway house.

It's a newspaper picture, so I took a photo of the top so I could remember what date it was published.

I took these photographs because the article said the two women in the picture were Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway. Wife number one, in other words, visiting wife number two in Key West! Unfortunately, I didn't write down when the visit supposedly occurred, so when I came home and wrote this post, I said that Hadley visited on May 19, 1974. As you can see from the comment section, a careful reader wrote in to say that Pauline was no longer alive in 1974. According to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Educational Center and Museum website, Pauline died on October 1, 1951, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Thank you, careful reader. This is why the Internet and self-publishing are no substitute for professional publishing houses and real newspapers.

Fortunately, a friend who's an editor in New York was about to visit Key West, and she agreed to check the date for me. I can now attest that Hadley Richardson visited Pauline in the house with the green shutters in 1950, a year before Pauline died. I like to think of the two women sitting beside the pool that is now a central part of the Hemingway House Tour. Pauline added the pool to the house, the story goes, while Hemingway was in Spain with Martha Gellhorn. He'd nixed the idea of a swimming pool, which was wildly expensive due to the coral bedrock of the island, so she did it against his will. When Hemingway came back, he tossed a penny onto the patio and said she now had his last cent. Then (the story goes) he hauled a urinal back from his favorite bar, which was closing down, and said she had her pool and now the urinal would be his. Soon Hemingway went to live in Havana with Martha Gellhorn. He and Pauline divorced.

The penny of spite is now embedded in the patio beside the pool of rage and the urinal of revenge. It's covered with a layer of heavy plastic. You can look at it and think about the promises you've made to the people you love, and the stories that might be told about you when you're gone. If you go down the street to Casa Antigua, you can see the sign for a $2 garden tour of the place where Hemingway lived before he and Pauline bought the house, where he wrote A Farewell to Arms, my favorite book when I was young and had never been married. I'll warn you, though, that to reach the garden of first romance you have to pass through a room in the Pelican Poop souvenir shop that's packed with penis-shaped pasta and gummy fruit breasts, the tackiest entrance to a literary shrine that can possibly be imagined. Far better, I think, to stand, a little longer beside the pool (the guide has gone away now, and is waiting on the porch for tips) and think of Hadley arriving there. It's 1950. Hemingway isn't married to Martha Gellhorn any more. He's married to his fourth and final wife, Mary Welsh. Maybe Hadley and Pauline will talk about that, but they'll talk of other things, too, memories and opinions that belong only to them. They'll have their own stories and observations, set down and distorted or sold by nobody, and for the space of the afternoon they'll shimmer like the water in the bright blue pool, then disappear.

Somewhat Cheaper by the Dozen

2011-08-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

Happiness found at Hanalei Bay

There are many reasons not to tell the truth about how hard it is to enjoy a family vacation on a tropical island. First of all, you are ipso facto in paradise. If you and every single person in your family is not happy every time you look at the turquoise surf or the five-million-year-old furry green mountains (every minute of the day, in other words), there's something wrong. But what is it?
Let's just say you're on a trip to an island with a lot of vowels in it with four beloved family members, three of whom are on the cusp of adolescence. To visualize this better, tie your leg to the leg of a person who is neither your height nor gender, and then tie that leg to another person of a completely different height, and so on, until there are five of you lashed together. Then pretend that you free and separate, as you are at home, and make a run for ecstatic Appreciation and Delight. Come to the slow realization, as you fall and are trampled by a size 8 Nike, that each person smushing you into the grass has different--unknown, unshared, yet passionate--expectations of what brings delight on a tropical vacation.

The Deeply Held and Unspoken Expectations (hereafter referred to as DHUE) of Family Members #1, 2, and 3 are to jump off cliffs, para-sail, windsurf, snorkel, ride boogie boards, and see the island from a helicopter. Also to eat with abandon. Many times per day.

The DHUE of Family Member #4 are to avoid jumping off cliffs, para-sailing, surfing, or riding in helicopters, to protect all three boys from death and paralysis, to eat shave ice every day, eat local produce three times a day, and to read seven books in ten days. Unfortunately, #4 is pathologically afraid of the ocean and will soon discover that without an exorcism she cannot snorkel.

The DHUE of Family Member #5 are to keep up a brisk daily writing schedule, drink the proper amount of coffee, keep daily expenses down, play tennis with three boys who are displaying good sportsmanship, keep daily expenses down, snorkel, and see pure joy on the faces of the four people whose airplane tickets, accommodations, and shave ices he's paying for.

Let's assume the following, because the following are true:

1) The north shore of Kauai is not known for boogie boarding in the summertime, but is snorkeling heaven.
2) The south shore of Kauai is great for boogie boarding in the summertime, but by the time you get there, a boogie board is not included with your accommodations, and the surf that makes it "great" for boogie-boarding is also great for killing non-native peoples.
3) A dozen eggs cost $8.69 in Kauai. This is before they're cooked or baked into anything.
4) The line for shave ice at any stand that has been praised in a guide book and/or is open for business is at least 17 people long.
5) If you're selling shave ice in Kauai and you say that you're open from 12-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and it's Tuesday at 12:40 AND YOU ARE STILL NOT OPEN, there are going to be at least 17 people in line anyway.
4) Para-sailing is illegal in Kauai (Thank you, Kauai Tourism Board!) but windsurfing and helicoptering cost hundreds of dollars to arrange, per person.
5) If vacationer #4 (otherwise known as the mother) is cooking in a condo to keep expenses down, and there's no way for the boys to go boogie boarding or even to go safely into the ocean (which FYI is the very section of the sea where Soul Surfer Bethany Hamilton lost an arm) on their own, what are the chances, expressed as a percentage, that vacationer #5 (otherwise known as the father) is going to be able to sit in a chair and write while he looks out at the limitless blue sea?
6) Hamburgers cost $13 in Kauai unless you eat at a place where the line cook keeps a package of Pall Malls between her bosoms.

Since we've now hobbled across the finish line of our vacation, I thought I'd share my "how to have a good time with your imperfect self and your cherished family in a perfect location" tips even though it's unlikely you'll be traveling with my sons, my nephew, and my husband. It's the writer's peculiar egocentrism that urges her to Warn Others.
1) Before you leave, ask everyone in your family to write down on a piece of paper the three things they would be very, very sorry not to do on this vacation. Include edibles. Everyone will probably write different, incompatible things, but better to know this now than later, when you're sitting on the most beautiful beach in the world and wondering why Vacationer #2 is brooding instead of frolicking through the surf saying, "I'm so happy! I'm so happy!"
2) Discuss what the parameters for extra expenses will be. If you have already spent X to stay in a fabulous resort with 3,000 swimming pools, for example, are you going to spend X again to rent equipment and hire a coach/pilot/watercraft/exorcist at a location not inside the fabulous resort? The answer to this question will be obvious to the parents, but may not have occurred to the proto-teens in your party.
3) Accept that human beings, especially if related to one another and faced with rising food prices, do not feel happy every waking minute even in paradise. If you brood at home, you'll still brood in between (and sometimes during) the Spectacular Sights and Vistas. And you will still have to do laundry, so you can always blame that for momentary ennui.
4) Ride in the helicopter even if you get motion sickness sitting on a porch swing and are the type to assume that any fun activity will end in catastrophe. The world is pretty from up there. (Do not, however, wear a skirt. Your hands are no match for that prop-generated windstorm, and a whole lot of people from Canada, plus your own children, are going to see your underpants.)
5) Go snorkeling (unless you're me) at two tiny beaches near Princeville called the Hideaways. If you don't snorkel, you can read, climb trees, feed your sandwich crusts to the feral chicken family, knit, play wiffle ball, float, stare at the mountain you first saw in the movie "South Pacific," and look thrilled when one of your kids pops out of the ocean and says, "Mom! I saw a sea snake!"

Fielding a ball in the surf at The Hideaways

6) Drive along the north shore, the south shore, and the west coast while listening to the novel Cheaper by the Dozen.7) Bring your tennis rackets.
8) Buy shave ice from the mobile fruit stand at Tunnels Beach on the north shore. No, it's not in the guide book. No, the ice is not shaved to perfection. But you can eat it on the beach.
9) Eat at Duane's Ono Char. Twice. Maybe three times. Who cares if someone stores cigarettes in her bosoms while cooking? The hamburgers are delicious and inexpensive.
10) Buy fruit and smoothies at the Moloa'a Sunrise Fruit Stand. Papaya cures everything, even the fear that you don't deserve and will never again see paradise.

Run, Run, I'm the Gingerbread Man

2011-05-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

My race-loving, good-looking brother Vince Rhoton (wearing the attractive necklace) and me in 1971.

How to describe the Ragnar Relay, a 200.9-mile race named for a 9^th-century Viking? Let’s say that your brother invites you. The relay is held in lots of different states, including the one where he lives, which is Utah, but the So Cal version of it ends right by your house in San Diego. He says, “It will be fun!” His knees are blown out, and he needs you to help him run his stretch of the race. He’s your older brother and he’s a lot more fun than you are, a scuba-diving, snowmobiling, sky-diving bike racer. You don’t want to point out that you haven’t run any farther than the mailbox since 1994. Anyway, the race is in April, and it’s December. Plenty of time to train! You say, “Okay,” without realizing that a relay-race of this length would need to be run consecutively for more than 24 hours, which means that it continues all day and ALL NIGHT LONG and all the next day, or that many, many of those hours will be spent inching along in a van to the place where runners trade places with riders.

So for four months, you train. April arrives, as April will, and you get on the Amtrak Surfliner the night before the race. You take the train from a spot one mile north of the finish line—the irony!--and ride it for 1 hour and 49 minutes to Huntington Beach, the starting line. Meanwhile, your brother and 13 of his colleagues are flying from Salt Lake City, a spot 700 miles from the race. They are not alone. Six hundred (or so) other teams are flying or driving to California to run in the relay. They are women and men, college students and housewives, high school track teams and middle-aged ultra-marathon-running addicts, teams as small as two or six and normal teams of 12-15, from Colorado, Utah, Northern California, San Diego, and Massachusetts. They will, like my brother, rent 12-passenger white vans. They will buy Igloo coolers. They will buy Gatorade, water, cookies, jerky, chips, tangerines, and trail mix. They will buy the markers you can use to write on the windows of a van. And they will begin or continue the punning process, which is almost as critical to the Ragnar experience as the running process. They've perhaps been working all season, through the long sessions on the treadmill, to decide on:

"Running with Scissors"

"The Mimes: Silent but Deadly"

"Running from Responsibility"

"From Ragnar to Riches"

"We Thought They Said Rum"

The only unmarried racer from our team, Robbie, poses with a team called

All the Single Ladies, who brought a boom box and their own theme song.

These go on the windows, to be emphasized with costumes (black-and-white striped shirts, face paint, berets, and artificial daisies for the mimes; big plastic scissors for the beauticians; aprons for the married mothers running from responsibility), and custom t-shirts. In your case, because you're running on your brother's corporate team, you will be Running for Lifetime, a Utah company that sells tables, chairs, sheds, kayaks, and basketball hoops all over the world, and the logo will be professionally printed and applied to the windows of the van. Possible puns include: "LIFETIME passed you by."

The race begins in Huntington Beach at eight a.m. The first of your team’s Conestoga wagons fills up with men, and the second wagon fills up with men and you. This could sound like a bad idea. The numbers are daunting, aren't they? Fourteen to one? Polygamy jokes, anyone? But remember these are mostly Utah Mormon men, and whatever you've heard about the religion or the Broadway musical, you couldn't ask for a better guarantee that chivalry will reign. No one will swear. No one will drink. No one will flirt or make crude jokes. The music transferred to the radio through iPod cords will be old-fashioned and sweetly romantic and will remind them of their wives, whom they will quietly text from the back seat. Furthermore, these are men who are used to setting goals and pressing on and hanging in there. Have you ever devoted two years of your life--as a college student--to a volunteer job where you have to dress in a white shirt and tie every day, cut your hair unfashionably short, ride a bicycle, tell people about something they mostly don't want to know, live with a series of strangers in close quarters in a country or city not of your choosing and not even get to shoot a machine gun or fly a marine helicopter? It's not a process that attracts arrogant jerks, and training for a 200-mile relay race indoors on a treadmill during the worst winter in 30-odd years is easy compared to serving a mission.

My advice to you is: if your brother is a returned missionary recruiting returned missionaries for your van, sign up. They will have trained harder than you, they will run faster than you, and yet they will, with apparent sincerity, tell you that you are DOING GREAT!!! KEEP GOING!!! Woo-HOO!! the whole time you're running with a pathetic lack of speed through Corona in a severe and unexpected heat wave, and when the race is over, they will not use their beer coupons. Instead, they'll play football in the street with your children, who will say, "That was the best day of my whole life" and "I want to run the Ragnar next year."

To read less impressionistic facts and figures about the So Cal Ragnar, go to the company's own website here.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Devillo Fish

2011-04-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

It began with the impulse to organize. I couldn't find my recipe for puff pastry chicken pot pie in any of the loose piles of recipes that I stuff into the backs of my cookbooks, a system that has the advantage of clearing the counter quickly when guests are coming over and the disadvantage of being a complete mess.

I said to myself, as I often do, that it was time to change my life. I would buy a recipe box! I would copy all of my favorite recipes onto appropriately-sized index cards and file them in categories! I even went so far as to imagine filing them in alphabetical order, though this belongs in the same genre as the fantasy where I'm scanning the nine million photographs currently in my possession into the computer and editing our home movies into a coherent, poignant narrative.

The beginning of this particular attempt at self-transformation happened with deceptive speed. I found a red tin recipe box on eBay within thirty seconds. Its point of origin was Nebraska, which due to the novels of my husband and the reminiscences of his mother, the youngest of nine children who grew up on a farm where bread was baked every day and fudge or donuts were made on Sunday afternoons, has a mythic sweetness. The box not only held the original recipe dividers (including one that mysteriously grouped into one category "CEREALS CHEESE") but was stuffed with the clipped and yellowed recipes of its former owner. What could be more serendipitous? Not only would I organize myself once and for all, but the box would arrive like an unwritten novel about a woman I didn't know.

So what did I learn when the box arrived ten days later?

1) The box was the long work-in-progress of a woman named Mrs. Devillo Fish who lived in Ord, Nebraska, along Route 2. She had a husband named Harold R. Fish and a daughter named Miss Karen who in the summer of 1958 received a thank-you note from her Aunt Gertie and Uncle Ellis that was used as scratch paper to jot down the formula for home-made varnish remover, which was filed, along with four nearly identical articles about preserving poinsettias in a dark basement, under "Miscellaneous."

2) On some long-ago afternoon, a person named Mildred made a $1 telephone call to Wood River, an event of sufficient importance that it was jotted down along with Devillo's to-do list, which included thank you cards to Ina, Florence Portis, and Dessie Vogelar.

3) In August of 1963 it seemed like a good idea--a truly notable idea, in fact, since this recipe is one of few that is typed--to cook an appetizer called "Guess What's." The principal ingredients of this appetizer, should you ever be offered one at a mid-century, mid-Western party, are sauerkraut (squeezed and cut), cornflake crumbs, and Worcestershire sauce. These things are mixed with beaten eggs, rolled in even more cornflake crumbs, patted into balls the size of walnuts, and deep-fat fried. It should be noted that although this recipe is typed, it bears no food stains whatsoever. Perhaps people didn't dare to Guess What, or once they'd tasted and Guessed they ate no more fried sauerkraut blobs, drifting off to sample Chocolate Mint Divinity Squares or salmon loaf.

4) Nothing captured Devillo's imagination more than dessert, recipes for which consume 70 percent of box space (see the very high stack in the photographs above). Heavenly Delight, Tutti Frutti, Peach Tapioca Crisp, Prune Kolache! Apple dumplings, apple dumplings, apple dumplings, apple dumplings. And a whole sliver of the box just for fudge, fudge, fudge. Any time the Omaha World-Herald or the Ord Quiz or The Electric Farmer ran a recipe for fantasy fudge or easy fudge or fail-proof fudge, Devillo clipped and saved it. You simply can't have too many dreams of the perfect fudge you will make when Karen comes home for Christmas.

5) A not inconsiderable amount of Devillo's time was devoted to pickling. I say this not only because there are ten pickle recipes in the box, but because the oldest recipes in the box are those written by Gertie Klingensmith with what looks like bottled ink on a torn-out page of something called the Dundee Cook Book. (I'm assuming this is the same aunt who wrote the kind thank-you note to Devillo's daughter Karen in 1958, and that she is some relation to the Rex Klingensmith whose promotion to the position of service manager at Kinman Chevrolet-Cadillac was clipped and saved in the recipe box.) Gertie's dill pickles were clearly made more than once as the paper is splashed and dyed with vinegar, likewise the 12-day Chunk Pickles and Mrs. Serahen's Dutch Pickles, which call for a 5-cent stick of cinnamon. And the dreams inspired by pickled watermelon rind alone rival the dreams of perfect fudge. No description of preserved rind could be passed up, but was dutifully clipped and filed.

6) The world can change so much in two generations that Devillo's recipe for corncob jelly, which the recipe describes as having an apple-plum flavor, can call for 14 ears of something I have never seen or tasted: red corn. Even my 89-year-old mother-in-law, who grew up in that fudge-scented kitchen in Northwestern Nebraska, has never tasted corncob jelly, though she's seen red corn and says it was grown to feed cattle.

7) If I manage to write out all of my favorite recipes and put them in Devillo's box, there will come a day when no one will cook like that any more, when the ingredients don't exist, when tastes have changed, when the world will have moved on. Of the 243 slips of paper and cardboard in her box, written by hand or clipped from the backs of cereal boxes or torn from flour bags or unspooled from cans of Carnation evaporated milk, there are three I actually want to make: prune kolache, sour milk donuts, and (of course) fudge. Where am I going to put the recipes for macaroni salad and green bean casserole? In the recycling bin? The fire? The back of my cookbooks? I'm tempted to keep them in the red tin box and buy another one for me, or to scan them all and make a conceptual art project, such as a life-size kitchen made of papier mache recipes saved and lost by dead women, or maybe to photocopy the recipes onto cloth and use the cloth to make aprons and potholders and dish towels, which I will give to relatives for Christmas, but as my husband says in as fond a way as possible, while making his way through our craft-crowded house, I'm a start-it-myselfer. The preservationist-art ideas are too grand. Grander, even, than turning watermelon rinds into pickles and red corn into jelly.

8) If I can't organize my own stray clippings and kitchen notes in a way that allows me to find them again, chances are that I will find another recipe for almost exactly the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until I am as old as this recipe box and Gertie Klingensmith's recipe for dill pickles.

9) I should not shop on eBay.

Reader, I Married Him

2011-03-16T09:53:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, while I was wondering if the new Jane Eyre movie was playing anywhere near me (it isn't), I found a folder full of my husband's old school papers, and this drawing was among them. If this isn't an early sign that Tommy McNeal was made for me, I don't know what is. Later in the day, I said, "We're going to see the new Jane Eyre movie, aren't we?" and he said, "I've already seen a Jane Eyre movie that I like, so I wasn't planning to see another one," and then a few seconds later he said, "By which I mean yes, of course, if you want to." Sign number two.

Just for fun, here's a picture of Tommy McNeal in the Thornfield-drawing years:
Sign number three.

I Want to Thank You for Your Purchase

2011-03-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

My friend from college recently had a tumor removed from her skull. She lives in Canada, where it's harder to shop on e-Bay, apparently, and the thing my friend most wanted to do while she was waiting for brain surgery and then recovering from brain surgery (by sitting very, very still) was shop on e-Bay. She had all of her purchases--old skeleton keys, hand-colored postcards, a few pieces of jewelry, scarves, the sorts of things that she and I would shop for in antique shops and thrift stores if she were visiting me in person--mailed to my address in California, and then I sent them to her in Calgary. One of the boxes contained the letter above, and when I read it, I said, "Tony, c'est moi!"

Since it's possible that you can't read everything that Tony is saying in his hand-written letter, I'll quote it verbatim here:

Dear Customer, I want to thank you for your purchase, it means a great deal to me as ebay is the only job I have & can do to earn my living cause of the limitations of my medical illness. The $3.99 profit I made that includes small handling fee, is much needed and much appreciated. Thank you!! I strive to give 5 star service, if I did not please tell me why I did not, so I may improve. I have feedback as soon as a customer leaves it for me, which shows me they were satisfied. I cannot see what star ratings you rate me with, but as soon as I receive feedback, I go to my seller dashboard and check my 30 day, DSR average. If a customer rates me any less than 5 stars across the board, my 30 day DSR average drops immediately. So please tell me if I did not earn 5 stars from you. Thank you for your business and your help!

The reason I feel that Tony and I have a lot to talk about despite my inability to buy or sell jewelry on e-Bay is that if you were to substitute a few words into his plea, you'd have the general plight of the insecure writer (specifically me) in the age of the Amazon-Good-Reads-blogger-star-rating system. The letter would then read:

Dear Reader,
I want to thank you for your purchase. It means a great deal to me as writing is the only job I have & can do to earn my living because of the limitations of my psychic illness, which includes the inability to do higher math. The $2.00 ($1 if you read the book on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad) I might eventually earn in a few years time as a royalty payment on a hardback book if the reviews are good enough AND a few thousand people buy it, is MUCH needed and MUCH appreciated. Thank you!! I strive to give 5-star reading experiences, but if I did not, please tell me why I did not, preferably in the way that you would tell me if you had to face me in person, so I may improve. Thank you and Best Wishes!

Of course, the only real solution is for the writer to stop looking into the Internet-Mirror of star-ratings, to stop asking, "Who's the fairest?" and go back to writing, which I'm going to do right now because I certainly don't have the stomach to do Tony's job and sell vintage rings to people who might tank my 30-day DSR average with a vengeful punch of the star-button.

P.S. My friend in Calgary is doing very well. I think she liked her ring and gave Tony five stars.

To the Fifth Grade Readers of Mrs. Steward's Class, and Their Parents, on the Occasion of the Fall Olympic Reading Ceremony

2010-12-03T13:32:00.000-08:00

What's not to love in this picture? Sam reading. Sam reading IN A TUXEDO. Thank you, Knopf and National Book Foundation.

Three princes: Tom, Sam, and Hank in full regalia.

The black and white dress, plus the book I snagged as a party favor: One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, which you should go read right now.

A Fractured Fairy Tale

Most of you have heard by now that I wrote a book and it was a finalist for something. Essentially what happened was I spent the last 22 years cleaning cinders out of the fireplace and breathing them up my nose and then one morning in October a stranger named Harold Augenbraum sent me an e-mail from the National Book Foundation.

“Call me,” the letter said. After a brief conversation about cell phone coverage in his part of the kingdom, which is called the Bronx, Harold Augenbraum said my book, which I had just the night before considered burning in the fireplace, had been nominated for a National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. Some of my favorite writers in the whole world have won the National Book Award. I didn’t know what to do, so I burst into tears and put chocolate chips in the pancakes. One month later, I was magically zipped into a ball gown in a New York City hotel room and my husband and our two boys were tied and buttoned into tuxedos like James Bond triplets. We stepped into a pumpkin that had been turned into a shiny black car, and we rode through the fictional magical real-life city to the ball.

There is unfortunately only one good way to get human beings to feel drama and excitement, and that is to hold a contest. The National Book Awards are structured like the Academy Awards, except that all of the nominees are people who in high school were too nerdy and brooding to go to the prom, or to enjoy it, so we wrote about that in our journals and cannily chose a profession where it wouldn’t matter for the rest of our lives how we dressed, how we did our hair, and whether or not we looked good on camera. Now that we had gotten used to our poor grooming habits, we were told there would be a red carpet. There was, in fact, a red carpet. And as the flashbulbs were lighting up our corneas, we stopped thinking, “I get to go to the literary ball! I get to go to the literary ball!” and began thinking, “What am I going to tell people back home if I don’t win?”

I continued to think this when I sat down at a table that I had recently learned cost my publisher $10,000. Ten people, ten dinners, $1,000 each. For the McNeals alone, the bill was $4,000. I had two persistent thoughts:

“What if I don’t win?”

“What if Hank doesn’t eat his $500 broccolini?”

Hank ate the broccolini, I’m happy to say. Just before the dessert course, the head of Random House Children’s Books, who was also dressed like James Bond, left his place at the other side of our table and said in a very convincing and compassionate way, “Don’t be nervous. You’ve written a great book.”

I was grateful for his kindness but I wondered, honestly, how the head of Random House Children’s Books would have had time to read my novel. I thought he was probably just being gracious.

You know the end of the story. The emcee read someone else’s name when they opened the envelope, and the clock struck twelve.

My older son, Sam, has read a lot of fairy tales so he knew the script. When we got out to the freezing Wall Street sidewalk, he said, “Wouldn’t it be funny, Mom, if they sent a battered old Suburban to pick us up now?”

The spell was over, see. It was time to lose one of my high-heeled shoes in a subway grate, for the shiny black car to turn into a pumpkin, for the driver in the tie to become a mouse, and for all of us to walk home.

But the black car looked exactly the same. I did not lose a shoe. I went home with all three princes, which is a pretty spectacular prize. The next day, though, I received one more. The four of us dressed in our ordinary clothes and went to a skyscraper on Broadway for a meeting. Our editor handed me a box and said it was from Chip Gibson, the head of Random House Children’s Books, the nice man who’d said, “Don’t be nervous.” When I looked in the box, I saw proof that a stranger, an important man who owed me nothing, actually had read my book. I knew because he had bought something that one character in Dark Water gives to another. In that moment, for that moment, and even now, as I look at it on my desk, my imaginary character became real to me.

All of you in this room who have read a book and loved it, who have felt that you were not reading but living another life, you know the truth. We all love contests and prizes and medals and stickers and awards, but writing is not a contest, and reading is not a contest. It’s the way we save civilization and hand it down to our children. It’s one human being trying to conjure up, and thus to save, a life. It’s Geppetto wanting Pinocchio to be a real boy. It’s the Velveteen Rabbit lying on a pile in the back garden, watching the real rabbits dance. The writer makes the book, but the reader makes it real.

--Laura McNeal

Village Elementary School, Olympic Reading Ceremony, December 2, 2010

Hawaiian Haystacks

2010-08-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

I served Hawaiian Haystacks for dinner tonight. I'm not saying this to impress you. It's more like a confession. Hawaiian Haystacks originated, I think, in the Wasatch Valley of Utah, right at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, where you are more likely to see such a thing as a haystack made of hay, and where food is often practical, whimsically named, and fairly unconcerned with ethnic authenticity. I first ate this dish as a child at a Relief Society homemaking event, where as I recall it caused a stir the size of the Twilight Saga.

In case you've never had the pleasure, here's the ingredient list:

cooked white rice
cooked chicken
gravy

Place each of the following in separate bowls on the table:
pineapple
diced tomatoes
scallions
shredded cheese
sliced almonds
crispy things (such as the fried noodle-y things you find in the Asian section of your grocery store)
coconut (more on this ingredient later)

You may be asking yourself how the Hawaiians feel about this dish. I don't know. If I had a Hawaiian dinner guest, I would never, ever serve Hawaiian Haystacks. But here's the thing. My kids love this dish. When I was asked by Sam tonight, "What's for dinner?" and I told him, he said, "Oh, I LOVE that." Hank asked me the same question a while later, and he said, "Oh, I LOVE that." I don't know about you, but I don't get a 100 percent approval rating more than three times a year. I think it's because A) they finally get to control what goes on their plates--all of the accessories are just out there on the table, and they can add them at will, and B) white rice and gravy are involved. White rice and gravy are magic.

The scary thing is that despite my considerable food snobbery, I, too, like this dish. I serve it most often when my husband is commuting and won't have dinner with us because there are (as you may have noticed) no vegetables on the list and the rice is white, not Healthy Brown. My husband is pretty sure that a vegetable should be served at every dinner, and I don't like to disappoint him. I also don't like to mess with my sky-high approval rating.

Sitting there at the table with Sam and Hank, helping myself to crispy things and slice almonds, I remembered the time that my mother accidentally stored Bounce in the same drawer with the coconut. I'm not sure why she had Bounce in the kitchen at all, but here's a tip: you cannot store these two products together unless you want the coconut to taste like fabric softener, and, as a consequence, for your Hawaiian Haystacks to taste like soap. This is why, to this day, I don't use coconut in savory dishes. Bounce is a powerful flavor, and it should be used, I think, in aversion therapy and chemical weapons.

So if you're fortunate enough to know some actual Hawaiian recipes, I hope you'll ask me over for dinner some time. If, on the other hand, you have two boys, aged ten and twelve, and you have some cooked chicken in the refrigerator, and if you've been working all day and you forgot to plan your menu (as I always do), then it might not be your worst meal ever. Even if you use the coconut.

The White Whale

2010-06-03T10:17:00.001-07:00

It began with Nathaniel Hawthorne and ended with Herman Melville. Specifically, I wanted to remove a dark spot on my cheek the way that Aylmer wants to remove the hand-shaped spot on his wife Georgiana's face in the short story "The Birth-mark," which made a very deep impression on me in middle school. Aylmer is obsessed with the mark, which he feels is his wife's only flaw, and finally Georgiana agrees to drink a spot-remover Aylmer has prepared with the help of his assistant, Aminadab. Naturally, things go awry, and although the birthmark disappears, the potion kills Georgiana.

The dermatologist I sought was going to use something other than a fatal potion. As I understood the process, a concentrated beam of light, similar to a Star Wars light saber, but smaller, would be directed at the spot on my face. It would hurt a lot, but the light would eviscerate the dark skin, allowing the new flesh that replaced the scab to be more or less the same color as the rest of my face, which is freckled, so I did have my doubts. (Would the light saber be tempted into machine-gun mode?) Still, I was chancing it. In my version of the story, I was both Aylmer and Georgiana.

Unfortunately, between the time of my making the appointment and the arrival of spot-expungement day, Tom bought a new truck. It's very similar to his old truck: a white Toyota Tundra with a camper shell to protect whatever dog we're carrying and the plants Tom is transporting to a landscaping project. It's large, though. See-it-from-space large. You can't carry plants, dogs, and four people in a Mini Cooper or a bicycle trailer, which honestly would be my first choice.

Tom was excited about his new truck, and he wanted me to be excited, so I tried to project enthusiasm in the Toyota of El Cajon parking lot, but for me driving a truck is like piloting a cigarette boat armed with nuclear missiles. There's going to be speed, aggression, and danger. I will be armed beyond all capacity. People will mistake me for a person who can drive. Inhaling the new truck smell, my feet on the paper mats, the price tag still in the window, I saw my future: I would drive the new Tundra into a tiny parking garage and the truck wouldn't fit.

Thirty minutes before my appointment with Aylmer and Aminadab, I looked up the suite number of the medical building and realized the Third Avenue address was not, as I believed, two blocks from my house. I had planned to ride and park my bicycle in front of the office and tap the kickstand down with my foot. Riding a bicycle to do errands, even flesh-burning errands, is more or less stress-free. If you happen to graze another bicycle with your bicycle, it doesn't matter. You don't have to tell anyone, and you don't have to leave a note, because no one can see any damage. Likewise, if you hit the garbage cans on your way out of the garage--no harm done. And you never, never have to enter a parking garage on your bicycle and discover that you are the camel and it's the eye of the needle.

But Aylmer's office was in a neighborhood of one-way streets on the other side of the bridge. The one-way streets led to an underground Lilliput where the spaces were--oh, the horror!--not diagonal but right angles. Worse yet, the right-angles were positioned in a small maze, not a large rectangle. I had driven Tom's white whale of a truck into an L-shaped corner of hell. Is that you, Persephone? I wanted to say. We were both stuck there, I felt, until the gods came to let us out. I inched forward and back, forward and back, forward and back, going in all sorts of insane directions in the desperate hope that no one else was descending to hell in the next few minutes for a dermatology appointment because if someone began to watch me--especially an impatient observer--I would get the White Whale into a spot from which I could not remove it, and whom would I call? The fire department? Tom? Captain Ahab?

I'm not proud to tell you that once I sweated the leviathan into and out of a tiny right-angled space marked "Reserved," I ascended the ramp and parked illegally at a tiny strip-mall Petco (diagonal spaces) and walked back down the block to the dermatology office and told the receptionist that I had never been unable to park in a parking lot before but that, unfortunately, was what had just happened and I was going to have to cancel my consultation, which might, after all, be the first in a series of saber-light appointments, all of which would require parking the Tundra in Tiny Town.

"Are you sure?" she asked. She told me there was one outdoor designated space in which normal people in possession of big-boned trucks could park behind the building, and did I want to check that out first? I didn't want to, but she was looking at me like I was slightly insane, and there was a man in the office, too, and he was furtively eyeing me to see what forms hysteria can take, so I did check out the alley behind the building, and I'm not proud to tell you that the big-boned truck space was right-angled, too, and I couldn't see myself getting in and out of it without scraping the sides of at least three vehicles, including Tom's. I parked in front of a fire hydrant and called the receptionist on the phone. I canceled the appointment and drove my spotted face back home.

"We could drive to the parking lot in Hillcrest and you could see if you can park the truck there," I told Tom after he listened sympathetically to my I-can-never-drive-your-truck-again story. "You can see if I'm crazy or not."

"Oh, I don't see what good could come of that," he said.

This seemed true. There was a chance that he'd have trouble parking there, but there was also a chance that he wouldn't.

"We should get the truck a vanity plate," I said.

He found this amusing. "What's it going to say?" he asked.

"I'm going to try to whittle 'leviathan' down to seven letters. Or maybe it should say MOBYDICK, but in seven letters."

Tom said he thought that would be fine, and I had a really therapeutic time playing with the DMV's vanity plate web site. You type in the letters and they appear instantly on a faux license plate. MOBYDCK. ISHMAEL. LVIATHN. WITEWAL. But it turned out, for better or worse, that I wasn't the first person to mine Herman Melville for automotive puns. Most of the variations on Moby Dick were either taken already or deemed obscene. Somewhere in California, a driver is scooting down the freeway in a vehicle called ISHMAEL. I did discover, after lots of attempts, that for $98 the first year and $78 every year thereafter I could call label Tom and his truck CAPAHAB. I could even do so--ha ha--on a special license plate that depicts a whale's tail and funnels money each year to the cause of saving what CAPAHAB maniacally pursued.

But it turned out that, upon reflection, Tom would feel frankly uncomfortable driving around his place of business with the words CAPAHAB on his plate.

Unlike Georgiana, I'm still alive. That's a comfort. I still try to think of how to describe the situation in seven letters while I'm riding nimbly around on my bicycle and trying not to care about my face-mark. I dart in and out of parking spaces. I tap down my kickstand. I walk into the grocery store with the one bag that fits into my basket and hope I don't outlive the man who doesn't care in the least about the spot on my face and furthermore can take me further than ten blocks from home and park a Tundra anywhere, any time, even at right angles, but doesn't like to show off in front of those who can't. GODSEND, I suppose would be apt, but that would make Tom queasy, too.

Scavengers

2010-03-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

Sam collects bottle caps. He's been doing it for years. Friends on other continents help him, and last year he won a blue ribbon--and $20--at the county fair for his massive collection of pretty trash.

For years now, Hank, the younger brother, has been trying to compete. He's searching for his own category of junk, but the right object eludes him, so he just brings home everything he finds. His backpack is filled with broken barrettes, hair bands, shattered pencils, empty plastic sleeves that once held pencil leads, broken ball-point pens, odd-shaped rocks, shards of tile, used straws, and worn-down erasers. If the dryer starts to rattle and clack, it's certain to be a smashed piece of metal or a hunk of gravel from Hank's pockets. If I throw away these things, hoping he won't notice, he notices. He remembers. He asks.

But today, he found the Thing Mom Could Not Throw Away. "I found Barbie boots on the playground today," he said.

"What?" I asked in the same tone of voice I would have used if he said he'd found the lost Hemingway manuscript at the Paris train station. "Let's see them."

He pulled two small black rubber boots out of his pocket. He proudly inserted two fingers and started walking them along the countertop. I didn't even tell him they were too dirty for the kitchen. I was too busy coveting them.

"Quick!" I said. "Let's see if they fit the mice!"

And they do, Fomalhautians. They do.

Appropriation Strategies

2010-03-05T11:33:00.001-08:00

I went to San Francisco a while back to visit my Aunt Clydine and my Uncle Bob, who due to their support of the artistic impulse tend to receive from me hand-made gifts. Last year, it was a knitted cupcake. If your first reaction is incredulity (you go, "What are you making?" and I go, "A cupcake," and you go, "Why?"), you are not Bob and Clydine. This year, they received the knitted person you see waving his arms out of a brown glass bottle: Salvador the Strong Man.

I can post Salvador here because I made him up and I didn't sell him. He is more or less sui generis, from his paper clip legs to his lavender nipples. If you knit, you know that all patterns severely forbid you to sell what you make from them. The line between made-up and copied, though, is a little blurry to me because techniques you learn from one pattern--how to make a neck, how to make a ball--can be applied to many patterns, and how many borrowed, i.e. learned techniques in a single object constitute infringement? Sometimes I think I'm going to stop writing books, which is a lot less fun since Al Gore invented the Internet, and knit folk-art toys, but then I remember that prohibition about selling what you make from books, and I envision a lawyer pointing out to Judge Judy that my mice and people use forehead decreases ripped off from Debbie Bliss.

Which leads me to conceptual art. Bob and Clydine took me to San Francisco MOMA after the knitting convention, and among the many thought-provoking things we saw was the seemingly empty piece of paper I've posted up there next to Salvador. This, Fomalhautians-b, is not an empty piece of paper. It's an erased drawing by de Kooning. If you can read the print in the photographed description of the erased drawing, it tells how Robert Rauschenberg asked de Kooning if he would draw something that Rauschenberg could then erase and display. De Kooning complied. Rauschenberg spent most of a month (or so the description says) erasing the drawing, a process that required no fewer than 40 erasers. What you see is the result: the concept of erasure made literal.

As conceptual art, this is both brilliant and ridiculous. I find myself wanting to write a play in which the main character is in a room off-stage asking for more erasers. "What's Daddy doing?" the kid in the play asks. "Erasing a de Kooning," snaps his mother.

That's the ridiculous part. I mean, how did Rauschenberg keep working in his studio that whole month? Did he never think, "Oh my God. This is the worst idea I've ever had. Who am I kidding?" An artist who doesn't stop halfway through the first rub of the eraser and think, "Wouldn't everyone rather have this de Kooning than my obliteration of it?" is not self-deprecating enough for me.

But there was more, Fomalhautians-b! Around the corner and into another room of the gallery was a framed photo by (or rather "by") Sherrie Levine. The description reports that "Levine has long pushed appropriation strategies to an extreme, often taking the work of other (male) artists as the basis of her own." In this case, "After Walker Evans," is actually a Walker Evans photograph. "Levine paid a commercial photo lab to make negatives and new prints of Evans's photographs and then displayed them under her own name . . . . It is virtually impossible to distinguish the new prints from the originals."

Let's just begin with the term "appropriation strategies." I understand that this is a way to examine ownership, but does it matter what you call it if you're Walker Evans? The part that really takes me back to graduate school, though, is the parenthetical use of "male." Why is the "male" in parentheses? To nudge us in the ribs and say, "Males, naturally," because males deserve it? Because it's significant that Levine didn't pick Julia Margaret Cameron? Stealing a man's work is different, I suppose, because of the imbalance of power, historically speaking.

And yet. After you've asked and answered the questions, who would you rather be? Walker Evans or Sherrie Levine?

Which brings me back to Salvador. The artistic impulse is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Why on earth do I wish to invent lives for fictional characters, and why, when I knit, do I make things with eyes, hands, names, and trousers? And why, in both cases (the writing in terrible earnest, the knitting, thank God, for fun) must the imagined be bestowed and accepted, even loved, before I can feel satisfied? I have to hand it to Levine and Rauschenberg. Instead of saying, I made this, and I want you to believe it's real, they say, What does it mean to be the creator, the copier, and the obliterator? To devote myself in the same style I'd have to erase a page written by William Trevor. Impossible. Hide the erasers, please. All of them, everywhere. And don't let anything go out of print.

2010-03-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

The day they arrested John Albert Gardner III in the disappearance of Chelsea King, the sun was shining. We had let our children ride, as usual, to school on their bicycles. They rode home that same afternoon without our direct supervision. Our 11-year-old was about to ride to tennis practice eight blocks away. I didn't change these plans although I had been looking, every couple of hours, for updates on the search for Chelsea and whoever had attacked a jogger in the same area last December. I thus knew that mothers my age in Rancho Bernardo were planning to pick up their own children from school even though their children normally walked the one-block distance by themselves and even though John Albert Gardner III, the 30-year-old sex-offender who had been staying with his mother in their neighborhood, had been arrested and couldn't possibly be lurking near the school. It reminded me of how, in the weeks and even months after 9/11, I refused to get on a plane. The threat that has passed--the visible threat, the incarnation of our worst fears--is the one we respond to, no matter how illogical that response is.

My neighbor recently purchased a zip-line that he can hang up and take down in the front yard. It stretches from a palm tree right on the corner of his property to a bolt skewered into the concrete of his side door step, so that very small children can ride at safe speeds from a maximum height of ten feet to about two feet, where their feet and bottoms begin to scrape the grass. Both of my children are too tall to get much of a ride, but we had some tiny cousins visiting from L.A. that afternoon, so we stood with all the other neighbor children on the corner so they could take turns climbing the ladder that my neighbor propped against the palm tree and fly briefly, safely, thrillingly down to his lawn.

Two of the taller boys, Micah and Solomon, who couldn't resist flight, however brief, stood near me as I held the ladder for the smaller ones. ("You're such a worrywart!" my neighbor teased, and I said he was right but I couldn't let go of the ladder so finally he went and got a strap with a pair of hooks on each end and lashed the ladder to the palm.)

"Do you really think that Sordar will be revealed?" Micah asked Solomon, who is eight, as they waited for their turn. I could be getting that name--Sordar--completely wrong. They were talking about superheroes of a fictional world.

"Yes," Solomon said. "What if Coronado Island were a world?" he asked suddenly, as if the imminent revelation of Sordar had led to the idea of his own island made fantastically large and complete.

Micah considered this and ripped a piece of grass from the lawn. He held it up. "What if this blade of grass were a world?" he asked Solomon.

"It is a world, in a way," I said. "To a very, very small creature."

Solomon turned to me and said, "What if my tree were a world?" and I thought of the tree that in Norse mythology forms the foundation of the earth, and it was as if the tree in Solomon's yard across the street had suddenly grown larger than everything around us and held us in its branches. I thought of Chelsea again, and of Sam, 11 years old, riding his bicycle to tennis, out of my sight.

Solomon and Micah went on like that, imagining small things made large and the universe contracted into a single known space, and John Albert Gardner kept his terrible secret, refusing to say where Chelsea was, and thirty miles south of the zip-line on which the small, suddenly fragile people in our care reached trustingly for the handles that would carry them to the grass, investigators walked in carefully mapped lines at the edge of an opaque body of water, willing the earth to contract to the one place where Chelsea King was, willing her to be alive, still, willing John Albert Gardner to be the weaker of the two, and she the stronger, willing the Virgil quote she had written on a post-it note in her room, "They can because they think they can," to mean that Chelsea could live because she was so wonderfully alive, and we could save her because we thought we could.

iPay, uPay

2010-02-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to deliver a small, hopeless eulogy on behalf of the cloth and paper book, or, more hopefully, to name the reasons why they shouldn't die and be buried, beginning and ending with their substantiveness. A book is the ephemeral made physical. That is its essence: that everything in a story that happened long ago or never happened to a real person is fixed forever and ever in a book, acquiring mass and weight. Go to the bookshelf, and it's there. Whether you are reading it or not, the words are indelibly printed on a physical object that takes up space and requires no ongoing sustenance--no interacting electronic devices, no functioning electrical system, no current technology, no password or user-name. Open to the middle and Hurstwood is still getting on the train to run away with Carrie. He is always running away with Carrie. His running away, and his ultimate destruction, take up space in many, many different places, on many different shelves, which are unlikely to disappear (through fire, flood, or rot) at the same time. Cloth and paper Hurstwoods inhabit the world. In their independence, in their physicality, they live.

E-books, though, are like cryonically preserved corpses. Sure, you can freeze a body and wait 200 years for science to work out the specifics of resurrection. But what if, as happens so often in my house, the power fails? What if the device itself fails? What if you get on the plane to Australia and you've downloaded three new books, zappity-zap, and, yes, they take up no extra space, but you try to turn on your iThing and you get, as happens from time to time with every electronic device I own, an error message? And what if this is the only form in which the fictional hero inhabits the world, as a pixel summoned through a vast and expensive, technologically dependent process that fails? I have no way of reading the story, and the story in no physical sense exists.

It's not just the way a book never gives you an error message, or the way an individual book takes up its own unit of space, reassuringly present. Books en masse transform a room, a house, a library, a store. They give a sense of habitation that doesn't come from audio visual equipment. Have you ever noticed that rooms in catalogs always have more books in them than most people's rooms do (assuming your friends and neighbors are not writers--writers' rooms actually are packed with books)? Those books have sometimes been mutilated to create a color scheme (the recent Restoration Hardware catalog being a case in point--all the covers had been ripped off so the bindings would be shades of tan and beige) or the books have been turned spine-in (because the pages are all shades of beige and white) but still: the books are there to give gravity and humanity to the room, which they automatically and effortlessly do.

Picture for a moment a room full of old computers and iPads and Kindles and Sony Readers. It's going to look like my basement. It's going be full of cords and blank screens that won't turn on any more. It's going to emanate obsolescence, not permanence. It's going to look like crap, because it's going to have become crap, and you're not even going to be able to throw it away. You'll have to wait for a recycling event at your son's middle school.

But first there's going to be a moment like I had this morning with iTunes. You're going to plug in your iThing and you're going to get a message almost exactly like the one I got regarding my iPod this morning: "This computer is no longer authorized to play items on this iPod. If you do not authorize this computer, 156 items will be removed, such as "Money, Money, Money."

I'm not kidding. The ABBA song featuring the line, "It's a rich man's world" was the example they chose to threaten me with. In case you're thinking maybe I never paid for those 156 songs, I'm going to promise you that I did. That's the kind of once-Mormon listener I am. I paid for "Money, Money, Money" with money.

Anyway, I was given the option to "authorize," so I did. Then I got this message: "We could not complete your iTunes Store request due to error -42408 in the iTunes store. Please try again later."

I did. I tried for an hour. The loop never changed. "Want to authorize? You can't." "Want to authorize? You can't." At first, I couldn't even find a way, without paying for an Apple genius bar appointment, to learn why an iTunes store error was my fault, or why my 156 songs, for which I paid close to $150, should be erased from my $1000 Apple computer. Yes, ABBA. It is a rich man's world! I can tell you exactly which man, even.

This never, ever happens when I go into my library and take down my copy of Sister Carrie. It never happens when I open the new book I bought from the Folio Society, maker of the heaviest, most satisfyingly ornate cloth books: The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Without electricity or a high-speed Internet connection or a functioning iShop I can read the whole thing, and then I can put it on the shelf and remember reading it and later hand it to a friend, and Apple will never tell me it's de-authorized, or that I shared it when I shouldn't have, or that an error at the bookstore has occurred and I should try again later. The ink and paper are not dependent on any corporation any longer. They are Mine.

In literature, the Genius Bar is composed of Dreiser, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Eliot, Bronte, and James, and I don't have to make an appointment to talk to them about why I can't open their books. I just open them, sit down, and read.

Epilogue:

After I wrote this, I figured out a way to e-mail the iTunes store about individually purchased songs. Someone named Jason wrote back appeasingly, "Please know I can
appreciate your concerns and I'm happy to address them for you." With Jason's help, I de-authorized and re-authorized. I transferred three newly purchased songs, and "Money, Money, Money" was NOT erased or obliterated. I regretted my dark-hearted thoughts about Apple. Then it happened again. I am now communicating with Robyn and Michael, highly ranked humans in the iTunes Appeasement Department, about the total lack of respect my computer shows me. I remain, therefore, opposed in every possible way to trusting an iThing with Sister Carrie.

The Literature of Lunch

2010-02-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

It begins with Bread and Jam for Frances. Frances, as I hope you recall, is a picture-book badger who thinks she only wants to eat bread and jam. She wants it for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. Her unflappable mother calls her bluff and serves bread and jam to Frances at every single meal until Frances's little jump rope songs end with the wistful line,
What I am
is tired of jam.

In reality, this is not what happens. You feed a kid the single food he claims to want at every meal, making that special thing for him instead of requiring him to eat what everyone else is having, and in 12 years you'll have a 12-year-old who will only eat pasta with butter on it. Trust me on this.

But when I was little, I read this book so often I memorized parts of it. What I loved about the story was not the lesson that Frances's mother teaches her (what kid wants to learn that her mother is smarter than she is?) but the elaborate lunches that Frances's friend Albert packed for school, and the still-more epicurean lunch that Frances herself, in the end, unpacks on top of her school desk. Those lunches were a symbol to me of What Life Could Be.

This is what Albert brings in his lunchbox: a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread, a pickle, a hard-boiled egg, a little cardboard shaker of salt, a thermos of milk, a bunch of grapes, a tangerine, a cup of custard and a spoon. Albert lays out his napkin like a tablecloth and sets all of these things on it. He takes a bite of each and then a drink of milk, salting his egg before each new bite, and makes "the sandwich, the pickle, the egg, and the milk" come out even. When he's finished, he sighs. "I like a good lunch," he says.

How I loved Albert. Or maybe I loved how I didn't know anyone at all like Albert, and yet he went on eating his lunch like that, impervious to kids who would in real life have mocked him to death. I didn't even know any adults who ate cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwiches. And that custard. Every day I took in my Scooby-Doo lunch box a pop-top Snack Pack chocolate pudding, but Albert's custard appeared to be homemade and baked in ceramic. Oh, how I wanted to be Albert. I wanted to be Albert in the way that, four years later, I began wanting to be French.

Frances wants to be French, too. At the end of the story, she sings her sad little song about jam, which she's so sick of she doesn't even have the heart to jump rope, and then we see her at school. She's setting a doily on her desk. She adds a tiny vase of violets. "I have a thermos bottle with cream of tomato soup," she tells Albert. She shows him the lobster-salad sandwich on thin slices of white bread, her celery, carrot sticks, black olives, and a little cardboard shaker of salt for the celery (who salts celery? I wondered enviously), and two plums and a tiny basket of cherries and vanilla pudding with chocolate sprinkles and "a spoon to eat it with."

Albert admires and approves it all. "I think eating is nice," he says.

Thirty-five years later, every time I pack a lunchbox for Sam and Hank, I want to add a basket of cherries, a ramekin of custard, a hard-boiled egg, and a strange sandwich. I want to pack a vase of violets that will somehow remain uncrushed when wedged between a thermos and a cardboard shaker of salt. I want to pack, for God's sake, a doily. For a time, I sent my kids to the Waldorf School mainly (really, this was 80 percent of the reason) because at the Waldorf School, each child brings his or her lunch in a basket. The rest of the curriculum didn't work out for us, but I really miss that basket rule.

But Sam and Hank don't want a big lunch or a basket. Hank buys a ghastly cafeteria lunch served on Styrofoam trays, and Sam takes his lunch in a Gore-Tex box. He wants peanut butter and jelly, Hershey's chocolate milk, and melba toast. He will eat a small range of fruits, which I have to pack in Tupperware or flimsy plastic bags. They want to cram protein into their mouths and run out to recess. They're Americans, and I alone am Albert. I have to content myself with the fact that they love as much as I do the idea of a lunch that surpasses all expectation, especially those consumed in a lesser known picture book called The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch.

In that book, Mr. Grinling's wife packs his lunch in a basket and sends it out to him via a cable, over the water, where the lighthouse stands. The plot of the story is how she manages to outwit the seagulls who keep devouring the lunch as it glides through the air to hungry Mr. Grinling. But the enchantment of the story is the lunches themselves: for one meal, Mrs. Grinling packs into the basket a Mixed Seafood Salad, a Lighthouse Sandwich (visible ingredients: seven), a layer cake called Peach Surprise, Iced Sea Biscuits (imprinted, presumably by Mrs. Grinling, with nautical designs), Cold Chicken Garni, Sausages and Crisps, Drinks, and six--six!--different fruits, one of which is a whole pineapple.

Someday, I plan to make the Lighthouse Keeper's lunch. I'm going to make a Frances-and-Albert lunch, too. There will be doilies. There will be baskets. I will not be able to send these picnics to an American middle school. Probably, we'll have to eat our lobster sandwiches and nautical biscuits in the park. But afterwards, we'll sigh. I'll think of Albert when I drink out of my thermos cup, and when Sam and Hank run off to play, their sandwiches not quite finished, because who could really eat all that?, I'll lie back and say to Tom, "I like a good lunch" and he'll say, "Yes. You do."

Preserves

2009-12-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

People often ask me, "Laura, what is the meaning of life?"

Not really. People usually ask me why I'm wearing pink rain boots or where their humanities assignment went or what we're doing this afternoon.

But it's still a good question, not least because nobody thought to ask me, which is what a blog is all about: writing even though no one asked you. And it seems to me, as a person who used to enjoy the incomparable relief of faith in a hereafter, that the people who are most likely to make you think life has meaning are the ones who don't ask this question, either because they know the answer (and I don't mean they think they know, because all reality is subjective in this respect, and they don't think they know, they know--that's what makes them so serene), or because they just do things that feel meaningful to them and don't ask what the point is.

Back when I was a Mormon, this sort of question would be answered with a peppy scripture, such as "Man is that he might have joy." (It was also answered, by the more comedic members of the faith, with the slight amendment, "Man is that he might have Joy," with some pictorial illustration of a woman with that given name. Mormon humor is extremely clean.)

Now that I'm left with an unrelievedly scientific view of birth, reproduction, death, and a future in the sort of cemetery where all the headstones have to be flush with the ground (unless my heirs follow the instructions in our will and take my ashes to the River Doon in Scotland), there's not a good one-line answer. There are only answers that take a whole novel to give, and even then, I think, the answer each novel gives is the meaning of one action or a series of actions in one life. You can apply this to your own life imperfectly, I find. I used to think, when I first started reading novels, that if I read enough of them I could prepare myself for an untragic future. I'd know, at least, how not to live, because I'd read what were essentially "How Not To" books.

I came to realize, though, that you couldn't inure yourself against or entirely prevent heartbreak and despair. When it happened to you, it would be unique and completely surprising. It would hurt a lot more when it wasn't vicarious, when it wasn't art, when the house in which you stood wasn't the proud setting you deserved.

Which is why I love scenes or actions or objects in books that give meaning to ordinary things, which echo through my life with a constant ring of unresolved truth. Pomegranates, for example. I never, ever crack open a pomegranate without thinking of Persephone in hell, eating nothing, pining away for her mother and her home above ground, refusing everything that Hades offered until finally she accepted six pomegranate seeds, and for this tiny gesture, this sudden impulse either to taste something sweet or to make the offerings go away, she was sentenced to six months in hell for every year of the rest of her life.

When you're making jelly, you're just cooking, at great length, something that you can easily and cheaply buy. It's like knitting in that way. You do it because you want to feel necessary, not because you really are. Feeling necessary is close enough, most of the time, to being necessary, at least for the purposes of enjoying your day, and keeping the nagging question of your own ultimate death and extinction out of the picture, but pomegranate jelly is superior, I find, in that respect.

For one thing, you can't actually buy pomegranate jelly in the store, at least not any store near me. You can buy the juice, which is a godsend if it's not pomegranate season and you're out of jelly, but the flavor, for some reason, has not caught on at Smucker's. Furthermore, the seeds are supernaturally gorgeous and improbable, each one angled and garnet and frail, so that it's best to uncluster them in a bowl of cold water, working them out like baby teeth one after another with your fingertips, remembering as a few of them burst and the red juice spreads in the water that pomegranate juice is what spinners who dye their own wool call a fugitive dye, meaning it won't remain ruby if applied to anything but itself, but will instead turn your white shirt, your cuticles, or a ball of cashmere to the yellow of old obituaries.

The only way to keep that gorgeous deep dark color alive, to ladle it out instead of watching it fade, is to rub all the seeds gently from the peeled-back skulls of pomegranate skins and then drain out the water and crush the seeds all at once in a three-second pulse of the blender and then strain out the bits of membrane and pith and cook the wine-dark juice with cups and cups of pure white sugar, which dissolve to nothing, and then you have to boil the filled jars in a canning pot and lift them out with tongs like you're a chemist in great peril, boiling secret potions and storing them away.

Why did no one warn Persephone that if she ate so much as one seed, she'd have to keep coming back to hell? Did no one know except Hades? Was it only the pomegranate that could do this to her--not grapes, not berries, not currants? There's no talk of this in the story. But it's something to think about at the kitchen sink, at the stove, as the steam fills the kitchen and fogs the kitchen and the day fills with something that does not, at least, feel fugitive.

Books You Should Read Immediately: a Long, Long List

2009-12-03T08:59:00.000-08:00

Every time I read one of those "Best 100 Books of All Time" or "Best Novels of the Century" lists I feel the usual outrage at the bizarre inclusions and omissions of others. Since I tend to feel, at least six times a day, that the Internet is slowly destroying my way of life, I figure I should at least enjoy the power it gives me to make my own list and amend it constantly.

Rules:

These are not in order. I would never rank my friends in order of importance and affection.
Some books are short stories. I love short stories, so they make the list a lot.
I have left off books that I love if they were written by a friend or my husband. (So you can trust me on that, at least.)
Little by little, I aim to add descriptions of these books and explain why I love them. The list will thus be under construction most of the time.
If you disagree, and you make a good case for your favorite, I'll post that in a separate list, though I can't promise I'll give it my own vote.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott (including The Jewel in the Crown, The Tower of Silence, The Day of the Scorpion, and A Division of the Spoils)
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Ethan Frome by Willa Cather
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
Child of My Heart, After This, and That Night by Alice McDermott
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Chekhov's short stories
Dubliners by James Joyce
Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Death in Summer, Love and Summer, The Old Boys, The Boarding House, The Children of Dynmouth, and The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
Arthur & George and Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
The Tales of Hans Christian Anderson
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
The Sea of Poppies and The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
The Sea by John Banville
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Piano Lessons

2009-12-01T12:09:00.000-08:00

I begged to take piano lessons when I was the age Sam and Hank are now. To emphasize how serious I was about becoming a pianist, I used to pretend to play an invisible keyboard while sitting in a church pew. This may not compare impressively to the Spanish prodigy Alicia de Larrocha, who when denied piano lessons at the age of two banged her head on the floor until she cracked open a wound, but my mild histrionics worked, I suppose, because when I was 11 my parents bought a used spinet and hired a neighbor to teach me once a week.

I took lessons for nine years, the last of which was a piano performance class taken for credit at BYU. It was there that I realized the teacher gave me an A out of pity. She saw that I worked very hard, and she knew I could do no better than I did, and that I wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever master the Bach inventions I banged my head against.

Now Sam and Hank, aged 11 and 9, are in the third year of lessons with their third and most compatible teacher, and as I compare the difficult music I was playing in my third year to the pieces they practice, I'm beginning to see that perhaps I was too hasty all those years ago to master complicated sonatas and sonatinas, to show off with pieces that had seven sharps in them and required me to cross my hands and pound out finger-spreading chords. One day recently, Sam and Hank's piano teacher took one look at my tattered, cover-less book of Bach Inventions, the same one that Maria Batchelder painstakingly annotated with colored pencils the year I gave up on piano, and said, "Who's playing those?"

I said, wearily, that I had been, but to no success.

"Well, that's because they're too hard," she said. "You should play something easier. If you don't have the technique, you can never play those inventions."

I didn't have the technique. I knew this because she was trying to teach Sam and Hank how to hold their arms, just as their first teacher, an uncompromising French woman, had tried to do. Not just their arms, either, but their wrists and their fingers and their whole bodies, postures I could not remember being told to consider when I was blazing through ever-more difficult pieces. Maybe Sam and Hank would thus gain the technique, and they would be able to play the Inventions some day.

But what if they didn't? What if, like me, they were never very good, never more than adequate, always just shy of that feeling that you've mastered the unmasterable thing? I wanted them to play the piano because I believe that music says things you can't say otherwise. I wanted them to have that form of expression just in case. I suppose I also wanted them to have the longings that I have, the ones that drew me to piano in the first place, a longing for something more beautiful than my strip-mall suburban world.

If, however, they never feel that longing, never need that expression, or, what is more likely, are never talented and skilled enough to execute the pieces that would fulfill it, would these hours at the piano have been a waste of time? Would all my weary announcements (after school and homework have drained all their willingness to be controlled and improved) to practice, practice, practice, have been in vain?

I like to think that you learn something from the mere effort of attempting greatness, that in persevering in a great cause you at least learn that you have the power to persevere and to master, to some small degree, the skills of a given discipline. From years upon years at the kitchen table with my father, who helped me with math homework that bewildered me, I learned that if you do your homework every single night you will do well enough on tests to earn degrees that will allow you to study those things (English, in my case) that you might actually understand. I didn't really learn math itself.

Sometimes I think there's something intrinsically meaningful, too, about the little moments of success, the moments when Sam or Hank play a measure perfectly or a song well, no matter how simple the song is. In that moment, all is sublime, and the questions of the future utility of sitting at the piano are answered. Why we do it is for this, and that's all I need to know.

Pointless

2009-12-01T09:54:00.001-08:00

The year that I knitted a ski hat for Samuel and he lost it at the ski resort and felt so awful that he went back the next day to the Lost and Found and was reunited with the hat but in his relief left his new snowboard leaning against the wall and got in the car and was driven joyfully home, my brother, who like my entire nuclear family is a Utilitarian, said, "Wow. And he could have just bought another one at Wal-Mart for five dollars!" should have been the year I gave up knitting. This was, after all, the second straight year that Sam had lost a ski hat on the slopes. His brother had also lost one (hand-knitted). And you don't actually have to be a Utilitarian to notice, as my brother has, that every Target, Wal-Mart, Gap, and Old Navy sells ski hats that are indistinguishable from the homemade type and are cheaper than a single ball of merino wool. You just have to be a Utilitarian to see, accept, and not mind that knitting is thus pointless.

The salient characteristic of the Utilitarian is the instinct to put usefulness and convenience above all other considerations, such as beauty, age, historical value, or rarity. My brother, mother, and father all possessed this instinctive practicality and I didn't. As a consequence, despite our fondness for one another, we complicated each other's lives.

My father, for instance, refused to allow a dog or cat on the premises because, he said, they were dirty. This is true. They are dirty. I know this because I married a dog-loving Nostalgist and we're on dirty, sweet Doberman #3. Most people, including my husband, find that a dog or cat or horse is worth cleaning up after because though not strictly useful, dogs and cats are loving or loyal or gentle or just pleasantly mute in a way that humans aren't.

Before I married the Nostalgist, I moved to the opposite of every house my parents had bought in the course of our wanderings with the U.S. Air Force. It was old. There were no cupboards--only shelves. The floors were hardwood, which is arguably more practical than carpet, but I liked the floors not because they were practical but because they were old and beautiful. In front of the Victorian house rolled a lawn (my father saw a lawn as an expanse of pointless, repetitive labor). To do laundry, you had to go out the back door in the snow, ice, or rain (this was Salt Lake City) and walk down stone steps that might, for several months of the year, be icy, and thrust your clothes into Edgar Allen Poe's Rue Morgue Washing Machine. I was so happy.

Naturally, I got a pet. Cats and dogs were explicitly forbidden, and the never-owned love of my youth, the horse, would not fit on the aforementioned Victorian lawn, so my Nostalgist bought me a rabbit at the Utah State Fair. When I went to visit Tom in California, I had to find a rabbit-sitter, and my father, because he was an essentially generous and loving Utilitarian, said that he would watch my rabbit for me, a burst of fatherly kindness he regretted the instant that he let Tillie the Rabbit out in the backyard and Tillie failed to come when he called her, as rabbits will, so that my father had to run around in the rather exposed backyard (the fence was not opaque) chasing after a bunny, an undignified activity for a retired Air Force major and Mormon clergyman.

Thereafter, I made other arrangements for my rabbits, which I possessed serially, as they aren't long-lived, especially (as it turned out) when the Nostalgist you marry is a serial Doberman adopter.

To explain the sort of Utilitarian my mother is is more difficult, because she's a mixture of such extreme impulses that it's almost as if a Catholic nun were also a practicing Atheist. My mother, in point of fact, is directly to blame for my impulse to knit Samuel a hat that he could have purchased and then replaced at Wal-Mart. My mother, who is so ruthlessly practical that she hasn't bought new china in 45 years--or new dishcloths, for that matter, or a new stand mixer--constantly sews by hand things you can buy for practically nothing at Wal-Mart. When I was growing up, my mother sewed all the ordinary things--dresses, shirts, pants--plus the following: a down-filled mummy sleeping bag. (Yes, you can make one!) A down-filled parka. T-shirts. (This was during the 70's craze called "Stretch-N-Sew.") Quilts. A backpack. We didn't even go camping much. I think she just wanted to prove you could make a backpack. She even stitched a label, using the straight-stitch on her Bernina sewing machine, and attached our last name in threaded cursive.

So I grew up seeing that the best way to give meaning and authenticity to an object was to make it yourself. When I was in my teens, this meant making my own dresses. Now it means knitting, which is more portable than sewing, and best of all for a Nostalgist, requires no machines at all. Unfortunately, when I started to make things, I followed my mother's footsteps, and I bought these adorable labels (featuring a tiny picture of a spinning wheel because nothing says nostalgia like a spinning wheel) that say, "Handmade by Laura Rhoton." After I married and became a McNeal, I added "McNeal" with a red pen to the labels because I'm not completely impractical and I didn't want to throw perfectly good labels away. I sewed one of these labels into Sam's ski hat so that at least no one would make the mistake of throwing it away, thinking it was just one of those Wal-Mart factory products, as had probably happened the first year that Sam lost a hand-knitted ski hat.

This label, though, may have been the hat's literal undoing.

Two weeks ago, Sam went to sixth grade camp in San Diego's Cuyamaca Mountains. The packing list included a ski hat, so I was thrilled--you don't get to wear a ski hat much in San Diego County. When Sam came home from camp, everything in his suitcase was dirty, and since I had cleverly knitted his hat from washable wool yarn, I decided to wash it. When the wash cycle was over, I opened the machine to see heart-stopping yarn carnage. The hat was now a knitted brim and a tangled mass of unraveled yarn that wrapped around and around the center post of the washer. One segment of the ribbed hat, though, was attached to the button of a pair of Sam's jeans. That segment contained my sewn-in vanity label, the one that said the hat was Handmade by Laura Rhoton (handwritten amendment) McNeal. I hung the mess up to dry and told myself it was fixable. I could untangle the strands and knit them again. Everything would be all right.

Why, though? Why in the world should I go to that trouble? Wouldn't it be pointless?

From the Utilitarian point of view, it would, yes. But metaphorically, the hat is proof that I can keep Sam warm with a piece of string and four sticks, and that if what I make for him with those sticks unravels, I can ravel it back together, and I can keep it, and maybe him, together, no matter what machine we get stuck in. Mainly, though, it's just instinct. Against all reason, I have untangled the yarn. I think I'm not going to be able to stop myself. I think I'm about to knit this hat again.

The Cough-tini

2009-11-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

I can't understand why the recent craze for dessert martinis never inspired a drink called the Cough Drop. I'm talking about the seminal flavor of my childhood illnesses--Wild Cherry Luden's.

My father's approach to illness was three-pronged: you were treated and would be cured soonest by 1) Ginger ale, 2) a Hershey bar, and 3) Luden's. In those days, by which I mean the 1970's, the Hershey bar was wrapped in foil, around which the dark brown paper label was glued like a sheath dress. Like a sheath dress, the paper slid off easily. Packaging is important when you're feeling weak and ill.

Likewise, Luden's Great Tasting Throat Drops came in a box, not a crackly bag. The box was lined with waxed paper, and the drops were loose--not individually wrapped in more crackly plastic--so you could eat one Luden's after another in your Dad's Ford Fairlane, and then sit on the sofa watching reruns of Laverne & Shirley while you consumed the rest of the box, exactly as if you were eating Lemonheads, which you may have noticed did get their own corresponding cocktail: The Lemon Drop.

Luden's Great Tasting Throat Drops now come in a crackly plastic bag and every single drop is wrapped in plastic that sticks to the drops if you live in a humid climate, as I do, so everyone knows how many cough drops you've eaten in the last hour, and as you sit on the sofa you slowly build a pile of torn plastic wrappers beside your dispiriting pile of tissues. They've changed the packaging of Hershey bars, too, so that the whole wrapper is one piece--no more foil to make you think you're about to find Charlie's golden ticket.

Maybe this is why, if I were going to drink a cocktail in the midst of a bad cold (and I doubt that I would, because alcohol makes me sleepy and self-conscious, two things I already am), I'd want to sip on a wild cherry drink in which someone had gently dropped a Luden's, and it would slowly dissolve there like a sweet dark source of health and well-being, the beginning of a rosy future, or maybe the vanished past. The waiter would say, "May I get you a drink?" and I'd say, "Yes, thank you. I'll have a Cough Drop, please."

The Injection of Peril

2009-03-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school, we didn't go on field trips. There was nothing to see. Clovis, New Mexico, was not close to any zoos, museums, aviaries, historical farms, amusement parks, botanical gardens, or aquariums. It was not close to anything except Cannon Air Force Base and a bunch of peanut farms, which might now be considered a perfect destination for a field trip, if the peanut farms still exist. In 1976, though, when I was a fourth-grader in Mrs. Gilliland's class, your only ticket out of the classroom was earning lunch.

In Mrs. Gilliland's class, the desks were arranged in squares, four desks to a group. Each group earned points for sitting still and paying attention, and the prize was going out to der Wienerschnitzel in Mrs. Gilliland's car. To get to der Wienerschnitzel, we would drive by the exotic--but never visited--"House of Crepes," which we pronounced, because we didn't know any better, the House of Creeps. The highlight of my fourth grade year was either kissing Brett Merritt in the alley behind Karen Wagner's house or riding in Mrs. Gilliland's car to der Wienerschnitzel in the middle of a school day. It was a sunny day. We didn't wear seat belts. We gave no thought to death.

No teacher in America today could simply take four kids out to lunch in her car. Every time one of my sons goes on a field trip to the science center, a working farm, a production of "Willie Wonka," or the art museum, the paperwork comes home well in advance and resembles a living will. The forms are at least two pages long, single-spaced. The upshot is that "I consent and will be responsible for any medical or dental treatment," and that I "release them from all liability in connection with this trip." Death is invoked every time. Death, and, for no reason that I can ever determine, the possibility of emergency dental work.

This leads to all sorts of anxiety if you're the sort of person who, like me, has been reading tragic novels for 30 years. Maybe I shouldn't let Hank walk three blocks with his third grade class to see Willie Wonka, I thought as I re-read the dental-work clause. Maybe one of the kids will be goofing around at an intersection and he'll get pushed into the street and he'll knock out his two front teeth and no one will know to soak them in milk until they get to the dentist.

In the end, Hank went to see Willie Wonka, which he pronounced the best play he'd ever seen in his entire life. But the field trip, he said, was really boring.

"How could it be boring if it was the best play ever?" I asked.

"We had to walk ALL the way to the stoplight and then walk ALL the way back the other way because that's the only place we could cross the street, and it took HOURS."
Hank's school is 50 yards from an overpass that has a sidewalk on just one side--the opposite side from the school. There is no crosswalk to get to that side of the street except, as Hank was forced to do, at the far end of the street in the wrong direction. This is not a terribly busy street, especially at mid-day, but I could imagine the negotiations. Better to take 25 third-graders on an extra, extra long walk, missing even more of the instructional day, than to risk jay-walking, which would make the school liable in a freak accident.

When Hank was in second grade, his field trip was to a children's museum in Temecula that happened to rest near a creek and a grassy bank. The creek was on the other side of the fence from the grass where we all sat to eat sack lunches, but the trickle of water had produced a thicket of lovely trees. It was spring and the weather couldn't have been finer. Suddenly, Hank shouted, "M. is eating something from the trees!" M. was in my group, and he had just the week before been stung by a bee he was teasing--necessitating a 911 call because he's allergic to bees--so I rushed to see what poison he had ingested and what medical (or dental) care would now be necessary. I looked in M.'s grubby little hand, then back up at the tree swaying gently in the breeze, and I saw that he was picking mulberries.

"Oh!" I said ecstatically. "Those are MULBERRIES, M!" What could be nicer, I thought, than eating wild mulberries on a picnic. This was the kind of field trip Tom Sawyer and Becky could take, or Thoreau, or Rudolf Steiner, but it is rarely, if ever, available to a child who lives on the I-15 corridor of Southern California. "Yum!" I said, and popped one in my mouth.

Mobs of children began picking and eating mulberries, and the chaperones began to distance themselves from me as if I had started stripping. I saw their point. If one of those kids got sick, they weren't going to take the blame. The field-trip legal agreement covered going to the children's museum and riding in a school bus, not mulberry-picking. We had no written contract with parents for mulberry-eating, and as such were legally liable for the consequences.

"But they're just mulberries," I said weakly, and I picked fruit for the children who were too short to reach the branches. What are we trying to provide for children when we take them out of school, if not an encounter of the sort that will educate and inspire them in ways that books cannot? Isn't it all the rage now to show children where food really comes from, to grow it in garden patches at school so they'll know a Ding Dong isn't the purest foodstuff? I just couldn't tell them not to eat wild mulberries. Finally, it was time to get on the bus, and we rode home. I waited for a call from the school district, but thankfully, none came.

Last month, I signed the mother of all field trip liability waivers. Our fifth grader's big field trip is something called The Ocean Institute's Brig Pilgrim Overnight, a sleepover on a 19th-century replica of the ship that Richard Henry Dana sailed in 1835, so the boiler-plate death-and-dentistry clause doesn't cover it. The legal advisor for the ocean institute instead put together the following:

"The Ocean Institute's environment, vessels, facilities, and activities are unique and different from your usual surroundings and activities. There are many inherent risks, dangers, and hazards, and everyone must exercise caution at all times . . . examples of these risks, dangers, and hazards include, without limitation:
a) walking and standing on surfaces that may be wet, slippery, moving, irregular, unstable, and rough;
b) open areas such as hatches into which someone could fall;
c) low or irregular lighting, or no lighting at all;
d) objects and equipment that could fall on someone;
e) low ceilings
f) ropes, chains and items that could strike or entangle someone;
g) extreme and variable physical, weather, and ocean conditions, including darkness, sun glare, storms, and hot and cold temperatures;
h) vessels, docks, buildings, ladders, and stairs from which someone could fall
i) vessels and docks that could pitch, roll, capsize, flood, collide, and sink;
j) gaps between a vessel and a dock that could open or close suddenly and unpredictably;
k) possible encounters with wildlife and plants; and
l) unavailability of medical attention and treatment

Ironically, these itemized dangers are the very gift that the Ocean Institute seeks to give the modern American child, who instead of being indentured at 12 and sent to sea, there to be tested by the elements and men who are not his parents, is constantly protected from experience and harm. The Ocean Institute's express goal is to teach through "the injection of peril."

On the one hand, I welcome the gift of peril. I want my child to experience life at sea, not just read about it. But peril was injected into his life long ago, as it was not injected into mine. I, like most people born in the 1960's or earlier, wandered in blissful ignorance of pedophiles and bicycle helmets. My mother never wondered whether it would be safe for me to walk five doors down to Janet Kopp's house, or to sell girl scout cookies throughout our neighborhood, or to go trick-or-treating alone, and neither did I. She never wondered if Mrs. Gilliland was too old to drive. She never wondered if I, a completely untrained rider, should be galloping on Tiffany Muse's horse without a single adult in attendance, or jumping nightly on unfenced trampolines. Conversely, she never sent me to spend the night on a wooden ship two hours from home with a group of historical re-enactors she'd never met. I am more protective of my children in ordinary circumstances and yet perversely more bent on providing them with educational peril.

I decided I would sign the form, but first I was going to look at the Ocean Institute's web site, which I supposed would have pictures of "the ropes, chains and items that could strike or entangle someone," and the "vessels and docks that could pitch, roll, capsize, flood, collide, and sink." I was right. I could view the boat in 360 degrees from above and below. The bunks looked perfectly clean and airy. Plus, in one of the captions of a photograph of the Brig Pilgrim sailing on a sun-struck, azure sea, I read that the Ocean Institute, like all of us, has been reined in by lawyers. "The Ocean Institute vessels," it stated, "do not leave the dock."

Well, then. How much peril could there be?

When Sam came home unstrangled, undrowned, unstruck, and unbroken, I asked if he had a good time.

"It was better than I thought it would be," he said.

"That's it?"

"We saw a heron."

I sometimes think I'm going to send my children back in time to the utter boredom of my childhood so they can appreciate the places they visit and the sights they see, the French they study so they know "crepes" aren't "creeps," and the precise number of bells rung on a ship to tell sailors it's ten o'clock. I want them to ride their roller skates up and down the segmented sidewalks of Weeden Drive, up and down, up and down, until the earth rolls like the deck of a ship beneath their feet, so that when they go to bed, they still feel themselves striding hard into the future, restlessly in search of something they can't name, but which we now ruefully know was just freedom, a freedom we're unwilling, or unable, to pass on.

Shells

2009-03-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

When Sam was ten, his right leg went into puberty without him. He was wearing a cast at the time, and while his broken tibia was enclosed in gauze and darkness, hair began to grow. Dark, thick hair. The other leg, the one that had to bear all the weight and do all the work, the one that got regular washing and sunshine, stayed slender and boyish, fuzzed like the rest of him in barely visible blond down.
Midway through the healing of his tibia, which had twisted and split, like a stalk of celery, in a snowboarding accident, we went to the orthopedist so that the nurse could remove the long black cast that encased him from toes to pelvis, and re-armor him in a red cast that went only as high as a riding boot. That's when Sam first noticed the premature aging of his leg. He stared down in mute horror.
Then he managed to say, "It's hairy. And dark." It was true that the skin color had changed. His right leg was now attractively Hispanic. The leg, though deprived of all light, had developed a radiant tan.
"Why is it growing hair like that?" he asked Becki, the casting nurse.
"We don't know," she said. "It happens sometimes. But not always."
Worse still. If it always happened, it would be normal. If doctors knew why it happened, it would be explicable. We wanted something like, "A human leg in total darkness undergoes a self-protective transformation from naked to furred." Or, "The hominid limb, deprived of Vitamin D and exercise, redirects all energy to hair spores and melatonin production."
Sam studied his leg with the fear of someone who has just discovered that his bones are not only frail enough to snap on a downhill slope, but whose skin, which everyone looks at practically all the time, can morph in ways not even doctors can explain or alter.
"It's no big deal," I said. "Really, it just looks like your leg is 14. It's the manly leg."
The leg-caster asked if we wanted to take the old cast home or just throw it away.
"Hmm," I said, considering.
If you'd asked me ahead of time, I would have said I'm not the sort of person to take home a plaster cast that my son has worn for six weeks of partial bathing. But the cast had been molded to Sam's leg six weeks earlier. It was rounded, as he was rounded, at the ankle, calf, knee, and thigh. For six weeks, that outer shell had been part of the new, heavy, fragile, armor-plated Sam, a chimera who was part boy, part medieval knight, part crustacean. And when Becki cracked Sam out of it, first using a radial saw that cut it perfectly into a top half and lower half, like a long and slender clam shell, then popping the cut edges apart with a metal tool that looked a lot like steel pliers, what we had was a plaster exo-skeleton, a molted leg that when left behind in the exam room while Sam was x-rayed gave me the same uneasy feeling I'd had when I left the funeral home after my father's viewing. The man in the coffin looked so much like my father that it felt wrong to leave him there alone. The leg looked so much like Sam's leg that it felt wrong to leave it behind.
Also, the cast didn't smell bad. It was surprisingly odorless and clean on the inside.
"We'll keep it," I said. "To show Sam's little brother," I added, in case that would make me seem like less of a weirdo.
Sitting there with the leg-shell, I couldn't help thinking of our visit to the aquarium the week before. We'd all leaned over the simulated tide pool to look at the sea stars, sea slugs, lobsters, and crabs, one of which the teenage docent lifted up to show us. "It's a molting," she said, and she revealed that she wasn't holding a crab, but the molted shell of a crab, which was lifelike in every particular, right down to its tiny, pale pink claws, but hollow inside.
"It's a decorator crab," she said, explaining that all the bits of seaweed and flotsam attached to the shell were applied like makeup and jewelry by the crab itself, the better to disguise itself as just another inedible part of the tide pool. "The crab is very vulnerable during the time that it's molting," the docent said, "and they can get stuck. Then the lobsters come over to eat them." She said the docents try to watch over the crabs and remove them from the pool if they're starting to molt. "Otherwise . . ." she said, and she grimaced.
Sam and Hank walked over to another part of the exhibit, but I was still staring at the hollow shell. "That's what we think happened to this one, actually," the girl confessed in a low voice so that Sam and Hank wouldn't hear.
I considered saying, "Didn't do much of a job looking out for them, did you?" but I eat crab at Christmas, and I was starting to realize the meaning of "soft-shell crab" as a fish-market designation. "Thank you," I said, and we all went into the aquarium to look at the sea dragons floating uneaten in their tanks.
Back in the casting room, the nurse prepared Sam's mummy wrappings and began to cover his treacherous leg in layers of quick-drying tape, red this time. It hardened within seconds and was ready to be decorated afresh by his friends at school. It was a walking cast this time, but Sam was dependent on his crutches by now and too freshly aware of the cracked bone in his leg, so he carried the new cast aloft, clack-bang, clack-bang, clack-bang, as I carried his old leg out to the car and set it in the back. After I took Sam to school, I carried his old leg into the living room, where it gave me a start every time I came into the room to fluff pillows, straighten magazines, feed the fire, or watch television. There was Sam's leg, but no Sam. Just a shell.
The weeks passed, as weeks will, and by the eleventh week, it was time for him to molt again. This time, we were braced for hair. Sam had been dreading the unveiling for days, and he'd gone so far as to ask whether I'd be able to shave off the hair. "Sure," I said. "I've been shaving legs for 27 years."
The night before his appointment, Sam dreamed that they cracked open the red shell and his leg lay there like a pencil covered in hair. Still, it was a beautiful spring day. Wild lilacs, wild poppies, and green grass grew on all the hills we passed as we drove to the doctor's office. Everything, even the trees, looked young and soft and unbreakable.
In the casting room, the saw went noisily down one side of the red cast, around his foot, and back up the other side. Crack, crack, crack went the metal crab-cracker. His leg was down to white bandages.
"Are we keeping this?" the nurse asked, holding up the cast.
I considered the old black cast that was now lying on the floor of Sam's closet like those plaster effigies they made in the ashes of Pompeii. I pictured us lugging the black leg into the attic where it would be discovered 30 years from now when I'm old or dead and Sam's legs are so long and thick that he can scarcely believe he once fit inside that little shell. I pictured his girlfriend or wife finding the cast behind the Christmas ornaments and thinking for a moment that she'd found a petrified boy to go with that Lemon Grove mummy they have in a glass case at the Museum of Man.
The nurse unwrapped the bandages until Sam's leg emerged. It wasn't as thin as the leg in his nightmare, but it had clearly continued its march into puberty. We all studied it thoughtfully.
"It's not so bad," Sam finally said.
"I don't think anyone will notice," I said.
"Oh, they will," Sam said. "Jacob H. did. At school. Because he sits beside me and I had to prop my cast on the desk. He'll notice."
"Okay, but I think most people will see your leg and think, 'Wow. Sam's all grown up. He's not a kid any more.'"
"Yeah," Sam said, neither depressed nor relieved, just resigned to the first of many physical betrayals.
This time, the nurse didn't put Sam's leg into a new cast. But she didn't let it go out into the world unprotected, either. She showed us the x-ray of the long, jagged fissure in his glowing white bone. It was still healing, and it was still broken. The nurse fitted Sam with a black brace that was all straps and buckles and metal and shiny black neoprene foam. She said, "No bicycling, no baseball, no soccer, no rip-stick, no ocean swimming, no skim-boarding, and no basketball."
Sam limped out to the car. A ladybug alighted on the side view mirror and clung there as we gathered speed, heading for four concrete lanes of endless freeway. "Hang on," Sam told the ladybug.
As we drove and kept one eye on the ladybug, Sam said he liked the brace better than the casts because it looked like something Iron Man would wear. I told him about the Six- Million-Dollar Man I used to watch on television when I was his age, and his natural corollary, the Bionic Woman. Sam liked the sound of that. At some point, the ladybug flew off the mirror. We didn't mention it. Her chances were too discouraging to discuss.
When we walked into the house, Sam asked if there really was a six-million-dollar man. "Could that be true?"
"No," I said. "I don't think so."
Tom, who had come into the kitchen to admire Sam's hardware, said it was too bad, really, because if he'd been real, the Six-Million-Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman could have had a Twelve-Million-Dollar Baby. Sam limped off to the bathtub to unstrap his brace and, finally, after all these weeks, immerse his whole body in warm water, which would cover even the hair that was taking him headlong into the future, where he would molt over and over again but leave no trace of those smaller selves, and I would lose forever the little Sam, the one that had once, like the plaster cast in the closet, been light enough for me to carry.

Hail Nada, Full of Nada

2009-02-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

I've wanted to be Hemingway since the day I wrote an in-class essay for my 11th-grade English class on the short story, "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" and realized he had transformed profound existential hopelessness into a beautiful lament: Hail nada, full of nada, nada is with thee.
For the last 24 years, I've been trying to turn profound existential hopelessness (and personal mortification, which is otherwise pretty useless) into something nice, like well-folded laundry or excellent brownies or a spare, oblique short story that ended with people being tight-lipped and brave about death. Naturally, I took classes. I went to graduate school. I attended writing conferences. I sent my stories to magazines. Because it's not just that you turn your existential hopelessness into a lament, but that smart, well-connected people who went to better schools than you did read the lament and decide they want other people to read it, too; they say, in a sense, This is a lament for the ages.
So writing is never a private, modest, personal act, done for itself alone. Why would a magician turn a handkerchief into a dove for nobody? Someone has to see the illusion as truth and then shiver, or no transformation has occurred. You can't write without wanting to publish, and you can't publish without wanting good reviews, and you can't get good reviews without wondering why it didn't sell, or why it didn't sell more, or why the reviews weren't better, or why you don't feel, when you look at what you've written, like you feel when you read Kafka. Plus, if you don't get good reviews and adequate sales, no one will publish your next lament. The room will be empty, and you'll be up on the stage with your handkerchief, looking like the fool that you are.
The more you think about this, the harder it is to keep working. Everyone, it starts to seem, wants to perform, to speak, to be heard, just like you, and now everyone can. Everyone can climb onto the stage and do his act, but the rooms have gotten smaller and smaller, and it's safe to say that most of them are empty most of the time. Or they would be empty, if they weren't so dark. That's the virtue of the Internet. You can't see whether anyone is sitting out there or not, so you don't have to know. This usually translates to lazy writing. If no one is editing you, no one is paying you, and no one at the New York Times Book Review is waiting to say "it was a tour de force" or "a gem-like nugget of lyrical genius," or "utter crap" will you work as hard?
I think of my empty room as a gas giant called Fomalhaut b. I'd never heard of Fomalhaut b before February 13th, when the Wall Street Journal published a story about Jill Tarter's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Tarter recently received a $100,000 prize (and the promise of $1 million in support funding) to pursue her dream of empowering regular people to search for company on other planets (thereby broadening the possibilities for rejection and misunderstanding). The donation will allow Tarter to use the Allen telescope, a $29 million machine that searches the radio spectrum of single stars for transmissions from other civilizations.
"We have been using other people's telescopes for small amounts of time," Tarter told the Journal, an arrangement that was limiting to SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) in the way that publishing houses and magazines used to be limiting to writers. Now Tarter and her band of searchers can listen for alien voices around the clock while other radio astronomers continue their (presumably) more rational work.
What interests me about Tarter isn't the alien voices, but the fact that she has maintained her conviction for so long. This is a person pinning her hopes on hearing from individuals who are so far away that they might be dead by the time we call them back.
There is, for example, the exo-planet Fomalhaut b, a gas giant three times the size of Jupiter that is circling a star called Fomalhaut. Jupiter is never closer to earth than 370 million miles, and exo-planets, 340 of which have been located outside our solar system, are farther yet. "Researchers can only guess," Robert Lee Hotz writes in the Journal, "at how or why a sentient life form on another world might try to signal others in the universe. Gulfs of time and space are so vast that such a species could easily be extinct by the time its signals reached Earth."
I can take a guess. I'm thinking those sentient life forms failed to make a big splash with their debut novels, and they're hoping to try again on a planet where this won't be known. Listen to me, Fomalhautians-b. Things are no better over here. Our publisher plans to launch the book we're now writing in the year 2011, when I expect all book stores, to include Barnes & Noble, to have gone out of business, because all young adult readers--the largest audience booksellers have--will be reading and writing cell phone novels for each other.
Furthermore, Tarter fears that she may have heard an alien signal without recognizing it as such. "We may have already seen it and thrown it out," she says.
Into the alien slush pile.
Hail nada, full of nada, nada is with thee.
And now, before your very eyes, inhabitants of Fomalhaut b, I will turn this handkerchief into a dove.
Fortunately (or is it tragically?), by the time you see it, I'll be gone.