#Microblog Mondays: Migration

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

Migration

At first I thought they were flying north. 
Then west. 

I tried to get my bearings.

They doubled back and over themselves, weaving bird
through bird, without direction, but with
purpose; twenty, fifty, a few hundred:
squawking greetings like so many Asian tourists,
or relatives in friendly arguments
about the best route to take,
circling, finally landing,
a cascade of wings and bodies into the water,
gathering their numbers to divide again into perfect Vs, the arrows
that point towards warmer climes.

I laughed with them, an
outsider who gets not the joke
but the intonation,
wished them a safe journey,
and turned north
towards home.

DJO

A friend of mine who was moving far away gave a group of us each a bracelet before she left.  It was made of beads rolled from recycled paper (if there's such thing as an extreme environmentalist, she qualifies), a kola nut to remind us of how nutty she is, and three letter beads: D, J, O.  They stand for a phrase that came up in conversation one day that made us all laugh, because so many of us suffer from mouths that are quicker than our mental filters: Don't Judge Out loud.

Contrary to what my husband probably believes (hey out there, S.) I try hard not to judge people.  Everyone comes to the table from where they are.  But there are times when people could be sitting a little closer to the table, and the fact that they're not drives me positively batty.  Maybe it's judgment, but it comes from a place of love.  Or dreams of universal self-respect.  Or something.

Last night we attended the birthday party of a friend turning 40.  One of the women there was someone I'd met before, at some of her other parties; though I'd been turned off by what I found to be her overly-bubbly persona, I figured that if she were a good friend to my friend, then I couldn't not like her.  After all, I've had my share of less-than-good friends, and I know how valuable the ones who give a shit really are.

The kids were downstairs with toys, movies, food, and a babysitter, thoughtfully enlisted by my friend's husband, allowing for the adults to mingle upstairs while maintaining on-call status in case of emergencies.  About five minutes into the party, my friend was holding a cocktail, when her friend demanded to know why she was the only one holding a drink.  She proceeded to continue to drink (though probably less than she was actually talking about drinking), and announce periodically how drunk she was.  I found myself getting annoyed, despite my best intentions to behave myself.  Why did this woman feel that she needed to be the center of attention?  And why was she acting like one of my freshman college students?

One of my other friends, who happened to be there with me, reminded me gently that some people still enjoy that kind of life, and that she and I had crossed over the into "grouchy old woman" phase. Still, it was like watching a train wreck for me.  I kept wanting to say "I feel uncomfortable with this situation," but not wanting to judge if that's really how she lets her hair down.

I found myself wishing for better for her.  And then, today, feeling sorry for her (not that pity is much better), wondering if she has a drinking issue (now that I've seen her get shitfaced at three separate events, announcing her decline every time), or an eating issue, or a domestic unrest issue, or a self-esteem issue that somehow manifests itself in all or any of the above. As I was reading this opinion piece in the Times today, I wondering if perhaps "mommy" culture (which is, let's be honest here, a class-specific phenomenon) actually normalizes self-destructive behavior for women in ways that make it even less visible, or worse, culturally acceptable: "oh, she's just getting drunk because that's how those mommies need to let their hair down."  And maybe that prohibition against judging prevents us from stepping in when there's really a problem (even if maybe there wasn't one here).

I'll try my best not to judge out loud, but I reserve the right to care.

Do you have to curb your judgments of others?  Are there times when you've wanted to say something about behavior you've found worrisome, but stopped yourself from doing so in order to respect someone's freedom?

By Heart

I took piano lessons for twelve years, from my fifth birthday through high school, with a short hiatus somewhere in the middle because I finally confessed to my parents that I hated piano because my teacher's constant berating (given my overly sensitive temperament) was making me cry.

I was good at piano; I memorized things quickly, didn't have to practice much in order to make it sound like I'd made some progress.  Over the years, I accumulated quite an impressive repertoire of music that I could play on demand without sheet music, including Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu:


I delighted in sitting down to a keyboard and blowing away unsuspecting audiences.

Over the years, as I've practiced less and less, my finger memory of that music has faded.  I've found the same thing is true of poems I memorized: Invictus, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening (that one in the 7th grade).  I sat down to the piano today to tinker around a bit, and found myself halfway through "New York State of Mind" when I realized I'd lost the chord progression.  I couldn't help but feel like the things I'd learned by heart over the years-the things that are less intellect and more emotion-are slipping away.

The ancient Greeks believed that the heart was the seat of intelligence and memory, as well as emotion (in fact, it was with them that the phrase "learn by heart" originated).  Though neuroscientists have long since proven otherwise, I think about this sometimes when I wonder where the things I've forgotten go, and what is taking up residence in their place.  Is it course numbers?  Day care schedules?  Small projects?  My shopping list?  Whatever it is, it can't be as worthy of a place in the heart as music and poetry.

The root of the word record is Latin, too: before Latin, we had to work on re (meaning "again") and cor (meaning "heart"), committing it to the heart again.  And perhaps there's some truth to it after all: we make the time and space for what we love.

What things do you know by heart, and what things have you lost?

Disguises

Every week on Thursday I invite a faculty member to tea at our college.  It started as a way to get faculty members into the common room for informal, less structured conversations, but along the way, I've enjoyed meeting them, too, and with every passing week, I feel a little more envious of my students.

This week I'd invited a prolific novelist to join us.  She settled back into her chair, crossed her legs demurelty, and began to talk about disguises.  About growing up in South Africa, in a place where the world was turned upside down, but yet everyone pretended it was perfectly normal, and about running away from there to Europe, to the place where writers painted tantalizing portraits of a more civilized life.  She found she didn't fit in there, either.  She wrote, and was rejected.  Her voice was too angry, they told her.  Too raw.  Too close to her subjects.

Finally, one editor advised her to rewrite her book from the perspective of an onlooker.  That was it: the magic door, the way in.  She discovered her voice behind the veil.

I loved listening to her talk, because of the layers of voice and voicelessness, disguise and revelation.  She would put on the literary personae of people she didn't like very much, in order to say the things that she never could have said, were she her own narrator.  And yes, the disguise made the truth more possible, gave her the ability to allow other silenced people to speak.

Wednesday's prompt at BlogHer invited us to "find our authentic voice," listening to our writing to see if we can find ourselves in it, rather than trying to be someone else.  And yet, sometimes, it's also in the disguise that we are more ourselves, isn't it?

Does authenticity need to be the same as identity?  Can we be authentic even if we have adopted a writer's persona to inhabit?

What would your story look like if it was written from someone else's perspective?   Have you ever worn a writer's disguise?

The Breakfast Treats

I don't often find myself lingering in the cookie aisle at the grocery store, except possibly when I'm buying Oreos for S. (this happens almost never) and am trying to make sense of the ten thousand flavors now available (pumpkin Oreos, who knew?).  But there I was, nonetheless, perhaps looking for graham crackers for s'mores, when I saw them: the unmistakable red, white, and green package, the original Stella D'oro Breakfast Treat.

They were my father's cookie: they lived in the kitchen drawer with a perforated metal sliding lid, the one that was meant for bread but that somehow became the "cookie drawer," the one that was always filled with foreign-looking packages and European names.  I hesitated, hand hovering over the package, wondering whether I needed to bring them home home.  I tried hard to remember what they tasted like.  Were they dry and crunchy?  Were they the ones that tasted like anise?

No, I thought.  Best to leave them here.  I'd end up eating the whole bag, just because I wouldn't want to waste them.  Even if I didn't like them.  I didn't need to eat the whole bag.

But they haunted me all week, those breakfast treats.

On my next trip to the store, I gave in.

After I unpacked the rest of the groceries, I sat down and pondered the bag, wondering if I should wait until breakfast.  And then thinking how ridiculous that was, given that my father never ate them for breakfast, either.  Cookies were for lunch.  And every meal in between.

I tore open the plastic, slid out the tray, and picked one up.  I bit in gently, surprised by the give of the brown crust, and the tender almond meal interior.  It melted on my tongue.  They were exactly the sort of thing my father ate: dry, sweet, needing cafe con leche on the side.

With that taste came flooding back others that I haven't thought about in years: Stella D'Oro Swiss Chocolate Fudge (also kept in the cookie drawer), the Pepperidge Farm apple turnovers I made for my father every night for dessert while he watched the evening news.

I still don't know what I was trying to find in that striped plastic container, but I probably don't need to tell you that I ate the whole bag.

***

My daughter, recently, has taken to spooning the foam off of my lattes in the morning.  The other day, she snuck a sip of the drink.  "I LOVE coffee," she squealed. Then, today, like she always does, she demanded a bite of my rice cake with melted cheese, salsa, and spinach.  And informed me that she might need to eat all of it.

I wonder, sometimes, what her taste memories of me will be.

What are your taste memories of childhood?  If you have children, what do you think their taste memories of you will be?

Caesura

The other night, as I was driving home, I spotted a hot air balloon off near the horizon.  Watching it hang there in the air, motionless from where I was, I thought: caesura.

example of a caesura in musical notation

I've loved "caesura" (pronounced si-ZHOO-ruh) ever since I first heard the word: both the word itself, and the idea.  A caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition, a breath between phrases or ideas.  Imagine the conductor's hands, held aloft in the upbeat.

They've been following me, caesuras, these recent weeks.  After the balloon sighting, my husband pointed one out the other day in the hymnal at church, wondering what it was.  It's a reminder, I think.

Living in balloon country, you get used to balloons, and yet, you never really do get used to them, either.  
When you see one, inevitably, you stop whatever you're doing to gawk at it for a bit.  Or you hold your breath for just a moment, with a little gasp.

How often do we do this?  Stop the routine, mindful of the break in regular meter?  In poetry and in music, the caesura gives the work meaning, draws attention to what will come next, sets expectations.  In life, too.

Students returned from a much-needed fall break this week.  Midterms made the atmosphere so tense that any ripple might cause someone to burst into tears; many of them see midterms as a final judgement, not a caesura.  And perhaps it would help if we could reframe them as an equally important "break," a pause before the next phrase begins.

But equally, I think, we need to find multiple moments between phrases, when we're--as one of my students put it--"traveling at warp speed and [still] feeling that you're not moving fast enough."  I used to do this with a weekly yoga class; now, leaving early and getting home late, I've lost that predictable (but also unpredictable) pause.  Even my drive home is filled with chatter.  Clearly, more and more students find themselves ill-equipped to pause, too.

I've been working, with some colleagues, on the framework for a retreat that inspires students to do just this: stop, reflect, set goals, check in.  Maybe the planning will do me some good.

Not that the reminder in the sky isn't welcome.

What do your caesuras look like?

#TBT: Agrarian Pasts, and Apple Cider Doughnut Cake

In one of my old photo albums, there is a picture of me--I must have been around my daughter's age--standing, in the hazy fog from an old flash camera at night, on a wagon at Tice's Farm in northern New Jersey, surrounded by cornstalks and scarecrows with pumpkin heads.  I am grinning ear to ear in my pink jacket with the fluffy wool hood, and my hands are shoved into my pockets.  Most likely, I'm thinking about apples, and apple cider, and cider doughnuts.

I used to think that my obsession for locally-sourced food and farm markets grew out of my time in LA, when I would follow the markets from one neighborhood to the next to escape from life in graduate school, hearkening back to some less-complicated agrarian past that I never lived.  But now I think that those roots are much deeper: that it was about how we spent weekends in the fall, and long days in the summer, and about where half of me comes from.

I'm a child of a parent whose own childhood revolved around the harvest.  My father grew up in a poor farming family in rural Spain until he was old enough to go to a Marist boarding school where he studied to join the religious order. Sometimes, when he was feeling generous, or wanted us to demonstrate more entrepreneurial spirit of our own, he would recount days of doing errands, bringing lunches to workers in the field and earning a few coins here and there that he kept wrapped in a handkerchief.  Maybe it was this childhood that drew him into the garden during the summer, with his bat-sized zucchinis and bowling-ball kohlrabis, and into the orchards in the fall, leading caravans of his urban high school students into the orchard in lowriders that they'd park under the low-hanging fruit.  Maybe it was what drew him to Tice's and Van Riper's farms, with their garish Halloween displays and annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot.

While I liked gardening in our small plot behind the house with my father, I loved apple picking, and going to those farms, getting lost in the cornstalks, dragging my feet through the tufts of hay, picking pumpkins in the field.  Later, as the farm grew more commercial, we'd watch them press cider through the tall windows, and then turning the corner to watch rows of doughnuts float down the lake of oil where they were fried, and across like a small flotilla to the drydock, where workers loaded them into bags, dusting them liberally with sugar.  If I were lucky, I'd get to eat a candy apple, sometimes coated in coconut, everything sticking to my teeth.  When I was six, there was a fire at Van Riper's that destroyed the cider mill and packing room, and I cried, wondering if we'd ever be able to go back.

I was disappointed to learn that Van Riper's became an A&P shortly before I graduated college, and that Tice's turned into an upscale mall six years later, complete with Banana Republic, bluemercury, and J.Crew, bearing no resemblance to the farm of my youth.  I happened across their page online the other day and found them advertising a fall harvest festival that promised to "keep the spirit of the Tice Farm alive."  Somehow, I just don't think it would be the same.

What parts of your past define you in ways that you sometimes forget?

Apple Cider Doughnut Cake

Our new coffee shop started selling a cake like this recently, and I was inspired to find a recipe I could try on my own.  This is a pretty close approximation of those fresh hot doughnuts from my childhood, especially with the sugar cinnamon coating that gives it an extra crunch.

9 T. unsalted butter, divided, at room temperature
1 large Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
1 1/2 c. apple cider
1/2 c. milk, at room temperature
2 1/2 c. flour
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
1/4 t. nutmeg
1/4 t. allspice
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. light brown sugar, packed
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1/4 c. vegetable oil
1 t. vanilla extract

6 T. sugar
1 t. cinnamon
1/8 t. nutmeg
1/8 t. salt

Adjust a rack to the center of your oven and preheat to 350F.

Grease a Bundt pan with 1 T. butter. In medium saucepan, bring chopped apple and cider to boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until most of the cider has been absorbed and apples are easily smashed with a fork, 10 to 12 minutes. Remove pan from heat, cool 5 minutes, then pulse in food processor until pureed. Measure out 1 cup apple mixture and stir in milk; set aside.

In medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and allspice; set aside.

In large bowl, beat remaining 8 T. butter, sugar, and brown sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add oil and beat until incorporated, about 1 minute.

Decrease mixer speed to low and add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with apple mixture, scraping down sides and bottom of bowl with rubber spatula as needed. Increase speed to medium and beat mixture just until combined, about 20 seconds. Add vanilla and beat once more, just to combine, about 10 seconds.

Scrape batter into prepared pan. Bake until cake tester inserted in cake comes out clean, rotating cake halfway through baking, 35 to 45 minutes. Transfer cake to cooling rack set inside baking sheet and cool in pan 10 minutes, then invert directly onto cooling rack.

Combine sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt in small bowl. Sprinkle warm cake with cinnamon sugar, using fingers to rub it onto sides.

Cool cake completely, about 1 hour.