ME: Okay, we’re leaving tomorrow morning, so let’s go over your checklist of things you wanted us to do while you were here.
MY FATHER: Sounds good.
ME: Planted garden, check. Trimmed bushes, check. Took you to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Bought you a Kindle Paperwhite . . . Check. Are you really going to still keep your old Kindle?
MY FATHER: Why in the world would I get rid of a perfectly good Kindle?
ME: Are you going to read the new one and the old one simultaneously?
MY FATHER: No.
ME: You could give it to your sister, or to one of your friends. . . .
MY FATHER: Why would I give away a perfectly good Kindle?
ME: Because you’re going to use the new one more?
MY FATHER: It’s a perfectly good. . . .
ME: Anyway. Bought you a new Kindle. Drove you to where you’re giving a talk next week. Anything else?
MY FATHER: We need to look up my old classmate on the college alumni website.
ME: Okay. That shouldn’t take long. Let me find the website . . . and log in. . . .
MY FATHER: How did you find the website?
ME: I went to Google and I typed in the name of the college and ‘alumni website.’
MY FATHER [making notes}: . . . type in. . . .
ME: Okay, what’s the name of the guy you’re stalking?
MY FATHER: I am not stalking! I am merely curious. . . .
ME: Yes, that’s what stalkers say.
MY FATHER [with dignity]: The last name is Edmunds. The first name is Erik.
ME: Erik Edmunds. Class of 1961. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Is that the one?
MY FATHER: That is indeed the one.
ME: Okay . . . screen grab . . . let me send it . . . all right. Captured and sent to your email. Now I’m going up to bed because tomorrow we. . . .
MY FATHER: Actually, I was hoping you’d show me how to do it so that in the future I could more effectively. . . .
ME: . . . . stalk people yourself.
MY FATHER: I was not. . . .
ME: All right. I will make a profile for you so that you can log in and do it yourself. [I poke at the iPad screen a bit.] Your first name . . . Last name . . . B . . . R . . . I . . .
MY FATHER [helpfully]: C-E. . . .
ME: I know how to spell it . . . address . . . Richmond, Virginia . . . zip code. Class of nineteen . . . sixty-one. Okay. Username and password?
MY FATHER [stares blankly]
ME: You need to create a username and password.
MY FATHER: A ooooser . . . name?
ME: A username. And a password.
MY FATHER: I thought I heard you put in my name.
ME: That was your actual name. You need to come up with a username in order to log into this website.
MY FATHER: A user . . . name?
ME: What would you like to use as a one-word user name?
MY FATHER: Is that like a password?
ME: No, it’s not a password. I said ‘username and password.’ Two different things. Think up a username that you’ll remember.
MY FATHER: Is that like my email?
ME: No. It is not your email.
MY FATHER: What should I choose as a username?
ME: It’s got to be something that you will remember.
MY FATHER: What is the philosophy behind choosing a username?
ME: We are not going to discuss the broad philosophy of choosing usernames. Just pick one.
MY FATHER: What is your username?
ME: It’s . . . no. I’m not playing that game.
MY FATHER: I just wanted to know your username!
ME: It’s a secret.
MY FATHER: If you were to pick a username for me. . . .
ME: Look. This really isn’t supposed to be difficult. Your username can be ‘MrPenguin’ or ‘NPRLover’ or ‘HistoryNut.’ You can use your initials. I don’t care. The database doesn’t care. It is not going to ask your reasons for choosing what you choose. It is not going to question you on your methodology and philosophy of selecting a username. It’s just a username. All you have to do is pick some name so you can user it. Use it, I mean.
MY FATHER: So I don’t need a password?
ME: It’s not the same thing. You will need to pick a password.
MY FATHER [opens his mouth]
ME: Not the same as your email password.
MY FATHER: Oh. How about—
ME: Not the same as your Amazon password.
MY FATHER [dejected]: Oh. Well. What’s your password?
ME [ignoring him]: It says ‘passwords must be at least eight characters in length and contain at least one numeral and one non-numeric character.’
MY FATHER: One numeral—
ME: —and one non-numeric character.
MY FATHER: What’s a non-numeric character
ME: Something that’s not a number.
MY FATHER: Like an asterisk?
ME: Or, you know, a letter.
MY FATHER: Oh! So they want a password with a number and a letter.
ME: Yes.
MY FATHER: B5?
ME: What?
MY FATHER: B5?
ME: Are you calling bingo? Passwords must be at least characters in length. . . .
MY FATHER: What are those on your feet?
ME: What? Sneakers.
MY FATHER: What kind of sneakers?
ME: They’re Converse, why?
MY FATHER: Are you planning on going running?
ME: No.
MY FATHER: Are they fancy Converse?
ME: These are the most beat-up shoes I own. I think I bought them for twenty dollars.
MY FATHER: They look like old-fashioned tennis shoes.
ME: They are. And they have nothing to do with your username and password.
MY FATHER: But what is your. . . .
ME: Never mind.
MY FATHER: What do you mean, never mind?
ME: I mean never mind, I just this second made up a username and password for you.
MY FATHER: Well! We might have discussed it a little, first!
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Monday, April 28, 2014
The Mystery of the Haunted Portrait
There’s a haunted portrait hanging in the church next door.
I hope you appreciate the matter-of-fact, almost blasé manner in which I deliver the news. I’m not exactly a novice when it comes to encountering ghosts, however. In fact—and I say this with a considerable amount of modesty—I’m kind of an old hand when it comes to spirits. A spook wrangler, you might even say.
I grew up, of course, on the same ghost stories as everybody else my age. You know the ones. They end with someone shrieking “GIVE ME BACK MY GOLDEN ARM!” or “. . . and when she stepped out of her car, hanging from the door handle was a bloody hook!” These stories use to send a thrill up my spine, particularly when we’d swap them at church youth group overnighters after midnight, or in the long evenings leading up to Halloween. (This would have been in the days before the web, naturally, when we fifth graders didn’t have online gambling and internet porn to keep us occupied.)
But did I believe them? Not whole-heartedly. I believed there was something compelling about the power of a story told by whisper in the dark. I believed we all enjoy the sensation of giggling at the end of a gruesome tale and pinching ourselves to make sure all of our parts were still there. Even at a young age I believed that the world is full of scary things, and that channeling our fears into storytelling was a way to cope with the darkness. But in actual, ectoplasmic, wafting-around harbingers of another world? Listen, a golden arm would’ve had to have weighed a ton. Nah. I didn’t believe.
Not, that is, until the great misadventure of The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg.
The College of William and Mary had ghost stories. Hoo boy, did they ever. The theater department alone had enough spirits haunting its hallways to have cast all the supernatural scenes in both the original Ghostbusters and its (less original) sequel. The specter of a lonely senior, mowed down by a car before her premiere as Emily in the college production of Our Town, was said to walk the stage of the Phi Beta Kappa Theater, searching for the spotlight she never enjoyed. Upperclassmen in the program passed down to incoming freshmen warnings not to linger alone in the scene shop after dark, where another unidentified spirit would graze the necks of the hapless with an icy-cold kiss. There were dozens more, but they all tended to blend together in a hotpot of spookiness.
I found these stories about as credible as the notion that the pretty male theater majors with perfectly-moussed hair telling them all had ‘girlfriends’ who conveniently went to ‘some other college out of state.’ Nor did I buy the story I heard from others around campus that the cemetery out by the law school had a rapping ghost.
Wait. I can see how easily this story could head down the wrong path and lead only to inevitable disappointment. You’ve now probably got an image in your mind of a hip-hop apparition wearing big ol’ earphones as he hovers over a phantom turntable, scratching rhythmically about how it’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes him wonder how he keeps it six feet under. The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg was not that kind of rapping ghost.
I wish.
This ghost just lay there quietly in his coffin until midnight, when it would rap three times and—well, that’s all. I’m not even sure there was a story behind it—like some kind of demented Avon Lady denied her chance to make commission in life, attempting to sell that one last case of Skin-So-Soft after her untimely demise. Nope. Kind of boring, actually. And I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Oh, but Colonial Williamsburg! The cemetery was probably straight out of Sleepy Hollow with enormous gothic crypts and weeping angels and skulls rolling around on the ground like acorns in autumn, right?” But no. The cemetery by the law school was outside the colonial district. Its grounds were modern and dull and treeless, a grid of marble slabs rendered dull, regimented, and sterile.
One night during my junior year, though, my friends Perry and Melinda and I had been studying for finals in some of our psychology classes out at the law school. Back in the day, smart upperclassmen in the know scorned studying in the Swem Library on the main campus during finals; the law school library a quarter-mile away from the Old Campus was the place to be. The atmosphere was cosmopolitan, the seating was plentiful, and most important of all, I seem to recall they had a snack bar. We missed the bus back, or else stayed after the last return trip to campus. Either way, we decided to return to campus up South Henry Street, past the graveyard.
I don’t know whose bright idea it was to make the detour. We joked about the rapping ghost as we did it, though. Thought it would be ‘fun’ to prove the legend wasn’t real. Had we but known! The cemetery wasn’t lit at night, back then; there weren’t really any streetlights beyond its boundaries to illuminate the paths. The moon’s bright light made the asphalt driveway sparkle as we wended our way along the low, plain tombstones. I remember being in a particularly giddy mood brought on by too much sugar and the prospect of the semester’s end, combined with the silly bravado we all felt.
Then we heard it. Tap-tap-tap. Three rapid, but very distinct knocking sounds. “That was a woodpecker,” Perry said, uncertainly. None of us had really that much experience with woodpeckers, though. We heard it again. Tap-tap-tap. It sounded like someone rapping his knuckles on a wooden door. Which, to our imaginations at that late hour, was close enough to a coffin to make any differences negligible.
Now I can’t say, from a purely empirical standpoint, that it was exactly at midnight that we heard the rapping. (It probably wasn’t.) Nor can I say for certain that the noise wasn’t a woodpecker. Or a tree frog. Or some other fauna of Williamsburg. Or a distant hammer in a house on the other side of the graveyard. All I can really say is that it was late at night, it was very dark, we all heard it, and we all practically crapped our pants trying to clamber over each other and sprint the hell out of that godforsaken place. Then we made a solemn pact never to speak of it again.
Or study at the law school, for that matter.
It wasn’t until we moved to Connecticut that I had my second encounter with ghosts—this time with The Parsonage Kitchen Ghost. I might’ve mentioned that the first-floor flat in which we currently live is in an historic house that used to be the church’s old parsonage. It’s old. Very old. Not so old that staunch old New Englanders probably sat on its front porch drinking Cape Cods while watching the village burn witches on the green across the street, but just about.
Well, very early on in our stay here, I woke up at four-thirty one morning to hear noises in the kitchen. It sounded like a fan, followed by a beeping noise. Craig was snoring beside me, and the cats were both snoozing on the bed. Nobody likes to leave the bed at four-thirty in the morning, particularly to investigate a noise, but I got on my robe and padded down the hallway through the dining room and into the kitchen, where I looked around. Nothing was happening. I went back to bed.
It was maybe two days later that I heard it again. The sound of a fan from across the house. It was very early in the morning, but light enough that I could see. “That,” I said to Craig, waking him up from his sleep, “is the microwave.”
“Okay,” Craig said, then immediately conked out again.
I raced into the kitchen naked, where I saw the microwave oven’s light shining. When I walked through the door, the oven beeped at me and shut down. I opened it up. There was nothing inside. I don’t know why I thought there would be. It’s not as if ghosts need a quick baked potato or a couple of Hot Pockets.
Back in the bedroom, I announced to Craig, “A ghost turned on our microwave.”
“Okay,” Craig mumbled, drool running from the corner of his mouth into the pillow.
“FINE.” I harumphed under the sheets with a flounce. “If you don’t care that a malevolent entity is turning on the microwave and will probably burn down the house, I don’t either.”
The next time it happened, we both heard it. It was still very early in the morning, before dawn, but we were both woken up when we heard the sound of beeping, as if someone were punching a time into the microwave oven’s keypad. Then we heard the oven itself start up with a hum. Both of us ran naked into the kitchen, where the microwave was turning around and lit up. Where normally the time would’ve displayed was a digital mumbo jumbo. I’m not saying it actually read 666 4EVAH upside-down or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“It’s the ghost,” I said, as we both stared at it.
“I think it’s just broken,” said Craig.
“Definitely the ghost,” I agreed.
There’s been some dispute ever since over which of us was correct, but both of us agreed it was probably better to dispose of the microwave oven in the dumpster. Sprinkled with, you know, a little holy water. I try to ignore the fact that from time to time still, water glasses in the cupboard over where the microwave used to sit have a tendency to fall out when the doors have been open for a while, even when the glasses been sitting there undisturbed, flat on their bottoms. It’s as if someone is pulling at them. My reflexes are pretty good, though, and so far the poltergeist hasn’t broken a single one.
But this business with the painting, now. That’s just creepy. At the top of the stairs right inside the church office entrance sat, for the longest time, a portrait of a former minister. I’m told it’s haunted. I don’t know why, or with what, or frankly even how a picture can be haunted. Frankly, if I were a spirit, I’d certainly find a better place to park my keister than some garage-sale quality rubbishy daub without much of a view or, for that matter, access to a room with a flat-screen and cable. All I know is that one of the associate ministers told Craig that he was walking after dark through the church auditorium where the portrait now sits and he felt something grabbing at his legs . . . even though there was nobody there with him.
We walk through the church hall after dark all the time, on the way from the parking lot to the back door of our home. At night it’s already dark, echoing, and creepy in there. Knowing there’s a bored haunted minister waiting to grab at my legs doesn’t make me relish the trip any more, let me tell you. I scurry through as quickly as possible, trying not to cast my eyes up the stairs in case I see those in the painting glowing back at me.
Post-mortem leg-pinching still seems like an unusual kind of hobby in which a minister well past his retirement could engage, but hey. Maybe my parsonage ghost could invite him over for a cup of microwaved coffee and they can compare notes sometime.
I hope you appreciate the matter-of-fact, almost blasé manner in which I deliver the news. I’m not exactly a novice when it comes to encountering ghosts, however. In fact—and I say this with a considerable amount of modesty—I’m kind of an old hand when it comes to spirits. A spook wrangler, you might even say.
I grew up, of course, on the same ghost stories as everybody else my age. You know the ones. They end with someone shrieking “GIVE ME BACK MY GOLDEN ARM!” or “. . . and when she stepped out of her car, hanging from the door handle was a bloody hook!” These stories use to send a thrill up my spine, particularly when we’d swap them at church youth group overnighters after midnight, or in the long evenings leading up to Halloween. (This would have been in the days before the web, naturally, when we fifth graders didn’t have online gambling and internet porn to keep us occupied.)
But did I believe them? Not whole-heartedly. I believed there was something compelling about the power of a story told by whisper in the dark. I believed we all enjoy the sensation of giggling at the end of a gruesome tale and pinching ourselves to make sure all of our parts were still there. Even at a young age I believed that the world is full of scary things, and that channeling our fears into storytelling was a way to cope with the darkness. But in actual, ectoplasmic, wafting-around harbingers of another world? Listen, a golden arm would’ve had to have weighed a ton. Nah. I didn’t believe.
Not, that is, until the great misadventure of The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg.
The College of William and Mary had ghost stories. Hoo boy, did they ever. The theater department alone had enough spirits haunting its hallways to have cast all the supernatural scenes in both the original Ghostbusters and its (less original) sequel. The specter of a lonely senior, mowed down by a car before her premiere as Emily in the college production of Our Town, was said to walk the stage of the Phi Beta Kappa Theater, searching for the spotlight she never enjoyed. Upperclassmen in the program passed down to incoming freshmen warnings not to linger alone in the scene shop after dark, where another unidentified spirit would graze the necks of the hapless with an icy-cold kiss. There were dozens more, but they all tended to blend together in a hotpot of spookiness.
I found these stories about as credible as the notion that the pretty male theater majors with perfectly-moussed hair telling them all had ‘girlfriends’ who conveniently went to ‘some other college out of state.’ Nor did I buy the story I heard from others around campus that the cemetery out by the law school had a rapping ghost.
Wait. I can see how easily this story could head down the wrong path and lead only to inevitable disappointment. You’ve now probably got an image in your mind of a hip-hop apparition wearing big ol’ earphones as he hovers over a phantom turntable, scratching rhythmically about how it’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes him wonder how he keeps it six feet under. The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg was not that kind of rapping ghost.
I wish.
This ghost just lay there quietly in his coffin until midnight, when it would rap three times and—well, that’s all. I’m not even sure there was a story behind it—like some kind of demented Avon Lady denied her chance to make commission in life, attempting to sell that one last case of Skin-So-Soft after her untimely demise. Nope. Kind of boring, actually. And I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Oh, but Colonial Williamsburg! The cemetery was probably straight out of Sleepy Hollow with enormous gothic crypts and weeping angels and skulls rolling around on the ground like acorns in autumn, right?” But no. The cemetery by the law school was outside the colonial district. Its grounds were modern and dull and treeless, a grid of marble slabs rendered dull, regimented, and sterile.
One night during my junior year, though, my friends Perry and Melinda and I had been studying for finals in some of our psychology classes out at the law school. Back in the day, smart upperclassmen in the know scorned studying in the Swem Library on the main campus during finals; the law school library a quarter-mile away from the Old Campus was the place to be. The atmosphere was cosmopolitan, the seating was plentiful, and most important of all, I seem to recall they had a snack bar. We missed the bus back, or else stayed after the last return trip to campus. Either way, we decided to return to campus up South Henry Street, past the graveyard.
I don’t know whose bright idea it was to make the detour. We joked about the rapping ghost as we did it, though. Thought it would be ‘fun’ to prove the legend wasn’t real. Had we but known! The cemetery wasn’t lit at night, back then; there weren’t really any streetlights beyond its boundaries to illuminate the paths. The moon’s bright light made the asphalt driveway sparkle as we wended our way along the low, plain tombstones. I remember being in a particularly giddy mood brought on by too much sugar and the prospect of the semester’s end, combined with the silly bravado we all felt.
Then we heard it. Tap-tap-tap. Three rapid, but very distinct knocking sounds. “That was a woodpecker,” Perry said, uncertainly. None of us had really that much experience with woodpeckers, though. We heard it again. Tap-tap-tap. It sounded like someone rapping his knuckles on a wooden door. Which, to our imaginations at that late hour, was close enough to a coffin to make any differences negligible.
Now I can’t say, from a purely empirical standpoint, that it was exactly at midnight that we heard the rapping. (It probably wasn’t.) Nor can I say for certain that the noise wasn’t a woodpecker. Or a tree frog. Or some other fauna of Williamsburg. Or a distant hammer in a house on the other side of the graveyard. All I can really say is that it was late at night, it was very dark, we all heard it, and we all practically crapped our pants trying to clamber over each other and sprint the hell out of that godforsaken place. Then we made a solemn pact never to speak of it again.
Or study at the law school, for that matter.
It wasn’t until we moved to Connecticut that I had my second encounter with ghosts—this time with The Parsonage Kitchen Ghost. I might’ve mentioned that the first-floor flat in which we currently live is in an historic house that used to be the church’s old parsonage. It’s old. Very old. Not so old that staunch old New Englanders probably sat on its front porch drinking Cape Cods while watching the village burn witches on the green across the street, but just about.
Well, very early on in our stay here, I woke up at four-thirty one morning to hear noises in the kitchen. It sounded like a fan, followed by a beeping noise. Craig was snoring beside me, and the cats were both snoozing on the bed. Nobody likes to leave the bed at four-thirty in the morning, particularly to investigate a noise, but I got on my robe and padded down the hallway through the dining room and into the kitchen, where I looked around. Nothing was happening. I went back to bed.
It was maybe two days later that I heard it again. The sound of a fan from across the house. It was very early in the morning, but light enough that I could see. “That,” I said to Craig, waking him up from his sleep, “is the microwave.”
“Okay,” Craig said, then immediately conked out again.
I raced into the kitchen naked, where I saw the microwave oven’s light shining. When I walked through the door, the oven beeped at me and shut down. I opened it up. There was nothing inside. I don’t know why I thought there would be. It’s not as if ghosts need a quick baked potato or a couple of Hot Pockets.
Back in the bedroom, I announced to Craig, “A ghost turned on our microwave.”
“Okay,” Craig mumbled, drool running from the corner of his mouth into the pillow.
“FINE.” I harumphed under the sheets with a flounce. “If you don’t care that a malevolent entity is turning on the microwave and will probably burn down the house, I don’t either.”
The next time it happened, we both heard it. It was still very early in the morning, before dawn, but we were both woken up when we heard the sound of beeping, as if someone were punching a time into the microwave oven’s keypad. Then we heard the oven itself start up with a hum. Both of us ran naked into the kitchen, where the microwave was turning around and lit up. Where normally the time would’ve displayed was a digital mumbo jumbo. I’m not saying it actually read 666 4EVAH upside-down or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“It’s the ghost,” I said, as we both stared at it.
“I think it’s just broken,” said Craig.
“Definitely the ghost,” I agreed.
There’s been some dispute ever since over which of us was correct, but both of us agreed it was probably better to dispose of the microwave oven in the dumpster. Sprinkled with, you know, a little holy water. I try to ignore the fact that from time to time still, water glasses in the cupboard over where the microwave used to sit have a tendency to fall out when the doors have been open for a while, even when the glasses been sitting there undisturbed, flat on their bottoms. It’s as if someone is pulling at them. My reflexes are pretty good, though, and so far the poltergeist hasn’t broken a single one.
But this business with the painting, now. That’s just creepy. At the top of the stairs right inside the church office entrance sat, for the longest time, a portrait of a former minister. I’m told it’s haunted. I don’t know why, or with what, or frankly even how a picture can be haunted. Frankly, if I were a spirit, I’d certainly find a better place to park my keister than some garage-sale quality rubbishy daub without much of a view or, for that matter, access to a room with a flat-screen and cable. All I know is that one of the associate ministers told Craig that he was walking after dark through the church auditorium where the portrait now sits and he felt something grabbing at his legs . . . even though there was nobody there with him.
We walk through the church hall after dark all the time, on the way from the parking lot to the back door of our home. At night it’s already dark, echoing, and creepy in there. Knowing there’s a bored haunted minister waiting to grab at my legs doesn’t make me relish the trip any more, let me tell you. I scurry through as quickly as possible, trying not to cast my eyes up the stairs in case I see those in the painting glowing back at me.
Post-mortem leg-pinching still seems like an unusual kind of hobby in which a minister well past his retirement could engage, but hey. Maybe my parsonage ghost could invite him over for a cup of microwaved coffee and they can compare notes sometime.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
The Real (Dream) World
After a half-century of falling asleep at night and managing to wake up again in the mornings, I’ve finally become an expert on my dreams. I don’t always comprehend them, mind you—though there are times I understand them with more clarity than I’d like to admit. But I’ve reached a jaded point at which I can rummage through my nighttime musings over breakfast and think to myself, “Oh, it was one of those.”
My sick dreams, for example. No, not the ones involving a pony tail and a whip. I mean the dreams I have when I’m actually ill, perverts. They’re always mathematical in nature, or else involve me having to solve some kind of complicated puzzle. I’ll run imaginary math problems in my head for what seems like hours, or attempt to fit into a finite puzzle box a limited number of complicated shapes. Then I’ll start all over again. And over again. And over some more. I’ve actually gotten to the point at which if I find myself having dreams involving vast quantities of sums or complicated problem-solving that never seems to end, I’ll regard it as a harbinger of an illness to come and I’ll wake myself up, get out of bed, pop a couple of aspirin, and keep an eye out for cold symptoms over the next couple of days.
Then there are my reality show dreams. Although my nighttime fantasies usually have about as much of a life as a soap bubble, the reality show dreams exist in some kind of persistent alternate universe in which I’ve been a television star several times over. It all started in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when I started having recurring dreams about having appeared in the first season of MTV’s The Real World. Oh yes. I was part of the original cast! I lived in New York City with them for several months during filming. Heather was my best friend; we were inseparable during those long-vanished days. Julie and I got into some kind of feud right at the beginning and didn’t really have much to do with each other, even though Heather was trying to get us to reconcile. Eric Nies and I would stay up late at night and play cards.
But here’s the thing about that cruel experience, which has been verified time after time in that weirdly persistent alternate world, while I’ve slumbered: after I packed up my bags and moved back to Detroit to resume my life, I turned on the TV when the final cut of the show started to make its premiere and discovered that I’d been utterly edited out. The Real World wasn’t the true story (troooooue storrrrry!) of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EIGHT. Apparently I was just too BORING to make the final show. Ooo girl, Heather was upset about it too, when we all found out. But it was done, and there was no turning back: I was just an odd little footnote to those in the know, the eighth stranger left on the cutting room floor while everyone else went on to make history.
Like I said, sometimes I can understand my dreams more than I care to admit, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this one.
However, because of my small notoriety, in my alternate universe I managed to get cast on a couple of other dream reality TV shows over the years. The first was Survivor, in which I managed to be the first male contestant to make it through the season without having ever removed his shirt, yo. Because that’s the way I play, y’all. I came in sixth place, having been voted off the island when one of my alliances went sour. However, in a subsequent Survivor All-Stars I managed to place third, which was fairly respectable. The gigs on Survivor directly led to my appearance on The Amazing Race, about five years ago. In the persistent dream universe there’s a very popular clip (over 3 million views on dream YouTube) in which I am in a Tokyo subway and say to Craig, who was racing with me:
Just don’t ask me where we placed, yet. The season’s apparently not over.
Of all my recurring dreams, though, the two most vivid have to do with my school days. The first involves a persistent reality in which it’s discovered that I missed a couple of credits in high school, not only invalidating my high school diploma, but my college and graduate degrees as well—unless, in the inexorable absurdity of dream logic, I go back to my old high school as an adult and matriculate again. You’d think that’d be nightmare enough, but there’s always a point in this dream in which finally the school day is over and I’m anxious to get home, but it dawns on me that I no longer remember the number of my school bus. This dream always ends with me not only trying to race from the back of the school to get to the school busses on time (apparently the lack of a math credit has invalidated my driver’s license as well, I guess), but trying to find the one bus among dozens that will take me home again and not leave me stranded.
Then finally is my most persistent recurring dream. In it, I’m usually an adult. Sometimes I’m younger again. I’m involved in a play. Sometimes it’s a play in which I actually appeared in my waking life, either from college or middle school. Sometimes it’s a play I’ve never seen. The point of the dream is that I’m inadequately prepared, and due to step onto the stage very, very soon. There are times in these dreams in which I’ve never seen the play’s script, and it’s floating around backstage always just out of reach so that I don’t have the ability to review it; in other instances I’ve got a vague memory of the lines I used to have, but I don’t at all remember my cues, or all the details. I’m always in a panic in these dreams. Will the lines come back to me? Will I just have to wing it? Or will I freeze and be exposed as a charlatan to the audience just on the other side of the footlights, staring at me?
I was thinking about this last dream in particular, a week ago. Craig and I accompanied my friend and former college roommate Eric to a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Eric had been involved with the troupe in years past; like the good supporter of the arts he is, he wanted to make an appearance in the audience in order to visit old chums and evaluate just how far they’d fallen since his departure. The production itself was fine. The woman playing Mabel was terrific. The fellow playing Frederic had a weird and awesome tendency, when he wasn’t singing his own parts, of very clearly mouthing the words of everyone else’s songs while onstage. Watching him broadly articulate the consonants of “Poor Wand’ring One” with his lips while Mabel was warbling away made him look like a master ventriloquist.
But there was one woman in the cast who was utterly out of her element. She looked as if she’d been pressed into service mere minutes before the show—like she’d been pulled into the auditorium parking lot to drop off her kids at the soccer field nearby and had been kidnapped, stuffed into leg o’mutton sleeves and a bonnet, and forced onstage in some kind of perform-this-goddamn-operetta-or-we’ll-kill-your-family-and-little-dog-too hostage situation. Her eyes had the wide look of terror of someone who absolutely had no idea what she was doing. When she danced and sang, it wasn’t merely with her eyes glued to her feet as amateurs in community theater sometimes do; she was absolutely and utterly clueless about what she was supposed to be doing at any and every point of the production.
During “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain,” for example, her increasingly-panicky inner thoughts were projected all over her face as plainly as the opening credits of Star Wars on a giant screen. Do I walk forward? She’s walking forward. I’ll walk forward. Not too far forward. Okay. Are we swaying? I guess we’re sway. I’ll sway. Shit! We stopped swaying! Is this one of those things where we join hands and swing our arms? Okay. I’ll grab those hands on either side of . . . SHIT! Hands back down! Hands back down! Did anyone see that? OH MY GOD AM I SUPPOSED TO BE SPINNING MY UMBRELLA?
Craig and I were in tears and hysterics. Eric is too cultured and highbrow to notice these things. He’s basically Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess steadfastly refusing to comment during high tea upon the fact that a footman’s next-to-bottom button has a fleck of tarnish.
For two hours that poor woman looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Even though Craig and I both were helplessly giggling over her discomfort, I felt for her. Every single moment of her distress took me back to those silly dreams of mine in which I’m wearing some foppish Restoration costume or the rags of some old man, and I’m trying to chase down a copy of the script so I can figure out what the heck I’m supposed to be doing before I make a fool of myself in front of an audience.
It’ll be just desserts, next time I enter one of my persistent dream universes, that to atone for my blatant and unrepentant schadenfreude over that poor woman’s stage fright, I’ll be edited right out of that The Real World: New York original cast reunion show.
My sick dreams, for example. No, not the ones involving a pony tail and a whip. I mean the dreams I have when I’m actually ill, perverts. They’re always mathematical in nature, or else involve me having to solve some kind of complicated puzzle. I’ll run imaginary math problems in my head for what seems like hours, or attempt to fit into a finite puzzle box a limited number of complicated shapes. Then I’ll start all over again. And over again. And over some more. I’ve actually gotten to the point at which if I find myself having dreams involving vast quantities of sums or complicated problem-solving that never seems to end, I’ll regard it as a harbinger of an illness to come and I’ll wake myself up, get out of bed, pop a couple of aspirin, and keep an eye out for cold symptoms over the next couple of days.
Then there are my reality show dreams. Although my nighttime fantasies usually have about as much of a life as a soap bubble, the reality show dreams exist in some kind of persistent alternate universe in which I’ve been a television star several times over. It all started in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when I started having recurring dreams about having appeared in the first season of MTV’s The Real World. Oh yes. I was part of the original cast! I lived in New York City with them for several months during filming. Heather was my best friend; we were inseparable during those long-vanished days. Julie and I got into some kind of feud right at the beginning and didn’t really have much to do with each other, even though Heather was trying to get us to reconcile. Eric Nies and I would stay up late at night and play cards.
But here’s the thing about that cruel experience, which has been verified time after time in that weirdly persistent alternate world, while I’ve slumbered: after I packed up my bags and moved back to Detroit to resume my life, I turned on the TV when the final cut of the show started to make its premiere and discovered that I’d been utterly edited out. The Real World wasn’t the true story (troooooue storrrrry!) of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EIGHT. Apparently I was just too BORING to make the final show. Ooo girl, Heather was upset about it too, when we all found out. But it was done, and there was no turning back: I was just an odd little footnote to those in the know, the eighth stranger left on the cutting room floor while everyone else went on to make history.
Like I said, sometimes I can understand my dreams more than I care to admit, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this one.
However, because of my small notoriety, in my alternate universe I managed to get cast on a couple of other dream reality TV shows over the years. The first was Survivor, in which I managed to be the first male contestant to make it through the season without having ever removed his shirt, yo. Because that’s the way I play, y’all. I came in sixth place, having been voted off the island when one of my alliances went sour. However, in a subsequent Survivor All-Stars I managed to place third, which was fairly respectable. The gigs on Survivor directly led to my appearance on The Amazing Race, about five years ago. In the persistent dream universe there’s a very popular clip (over 3 million views on dream YouTube) in which I am in a Tokyo subway and say to Craig, who was racing with me:
ME: Which way are we supposed to go?We finished fifth. It’s because of the popularity of that clip that within the last three months we were cast in the dream version of The Amazing Race All-Stars, and at least once a show the editors include a little flashback to our most popular moment. And believe you me, since we’re savvy about why we were invited back, we play up the comedy.
HIM (pointing south): I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to head this way.
ME: Are you ‘pretty sure’ or ‘one hundred percent sure’?
HIM: I’m one hundred percent sure.
ME (heading north instead): Okay. Then we’re going this way.
Just don’t ask me where we placed, yet. The season’s apparently not over.
Of all my recurring dreams, though, the two most vivid have to do with my school days. The first involves a persistent reality in which it’s discovered that I missed a couple of credits in high school, not only invalidating my high school diploma, but my college and graduate degrees as well—unless, in the inexorable absurdity of dream logic, I go back to my old high school as an adult and matriculate again. You’d think that’d be nightmare enough, but there’s always a point in this dream in which finally the school day is over and I’m anxious to get home, but it dawns on me that I no longer remember the number of my school bus. This dream always ends with me not only trying to race from the back of the school to get to the school busses on time (apparently the lack of a math credit has invalidated my driver’s license as well, I guess), but trying to find the one bus among dozens that will take me home again and not leave me stranded.
Then finally is my most persistent recurring dream. In it, I’m usually an adult. Sometimes I’m younger again. I’m involved in a play. Sometimes it’s a play in which I actually appeared in my waking life, either from college or middle school. Sometimes it’s a play I’ve never seen. The point of the dream is that I’m inadequately prepared, and due to step onto the stage very, very soon. There are times in these dreams in which I’ve never seen the play’s script, and it’s floating around backstage always just out of reach so that I don’t have the ability to review it; in other instances I’ve got a vague memory of the lines I used to have, but I don’t at all remember my cues, or all the details. I’m always in a panic in these dreams. Will the lines come back to me? Will I just have to wing it? Or will I freeze and be exposed as a charlatan to the audience just on the other side of the footlights, staring at me?
I was thinking about this last dream in particular, a week ago. Craig and I accompanied my friend and former college roommate Eric to a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Eric had been involved with the troupe in years past; like the good supporter of the arts he is, he wanted to make an appearance in the audience in order to visit old chums and evaluate just how far they’d fallen since his departure. The production itself was fine. The woman playing Mabel was terrific. The fellow playing Frederic had a weird and awesome tendency, when he wasn’t singing his own parts, of very clearly mouthing the words of everyone else’s songs while onstage. Watching him broadly articulate the consonants of “Poor Wand’ring One” with his lips while Mabel was warbling away made him look like a master ventriloquist.
But there was one woman in the cast who was utterly out of her element. She looked as if she’d been pressed into service mere minutes before the show—like she’d been pulled into the auditorium parking lot to drop off her kids at the soccer field nearby and had been kidnapped, stuffed into leg o’mutton sleeves and a bonnet, and forced onstage in some kind of perform-this-goddamn-operetta-or-we’ll-kill-your-family-and-little-dog-too hostage situation. Her eyes had the wide look of terror of someone who absolutely had no idea what she was doing. When she danced and sang, it wasn’t merely with her eyes glued to her feet as amateurs in community theater sometimes do; she was absolutely and utterly clueless about what she was supposed to be doing at any and every point of the production.
During “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain,” for example, her increasingly-panicky inner thoughts were projected all over her face as plainly as the opening credits of Star Wars on a giant screen. Do I walk forward? She’s walking forward. I’ll walk forward. Not too far forward. Okay. Are we swaying? I guess we’re sway. I’ll sway. Shit! We stopped swaying! Is this one of those things where we join hands and swing our arms? Okay. I’ll grab those hands on either side of . . . SHIT! Hands back down! Hands back down! Did anyone see that? OH MY GOD AM I SUPPOSED TO BE SPINNING MY UMBRELLA?
Craig and I were in tears and hysterics. Eric is too cultured and highbrow to notice these things. He’s basically Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess steadfastly refusing to comment during high tea upon the fact that a footman’s next-to-bottom button has a fleck of tarnish.
For two hours that poor woman looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Even though Craig and I both were helplessly giggling over her discomfort, I felt for her. Every single moment of her distress took me back to those silly dreams of mine in which I’m wearing some foppish Restoration costume or the rags of some old man, and I’m trying to chase down a copy of the script so I can figure out what the heck I’m supposed to be doing before I make a fool of myself in front of an audience.
It’ll be just desserts, next time I enter one of my persistent dream universes, that to atone for my blatant and unrepentant schadenfreude over that poor woman’s stage fright, I’ll be edited right out of that The Real World: New York original cast reunion show.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Conversations with My Father: The Great French Fry Boycott of 2014 Edition
MY FATHER: I’m glad you called. I was going to call you to tell you about my boycott.
ME: Oh dear. What are you boycotting?
MY FATHER: Your favorite restaurant.
ME: What in the world do you think is my favorite restaurant?
MY FATHER: It’s your favorite restaurant. You tell me.
ME: A restaurant that you would visit? Gosh. I don’t know. Is it that Thai restaurant we go to when I visit Richmond?
MY FATHER: No! I like that one.
ME: That barbecue sandwich place we tried that serves Cheerwine?
MY FATHER [with scorn]: No.
ME: My favorite restaurant? I admit, you’ve stumped me. All the restaurants I like are up here.
MY FATHER: Red Robin.
ME: Red Robin?! Red Robin is not my favorite restaurant.
MY FATHER: Don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I could write down the names of a hundred restaurants and I wouldn’t even place Red Robin remotely close to. . . .
MY FATHER: I said, don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I mean, we went there once, but I can’t imagine I said anything that could possibly have given you any indication that it was one of my favorite. . . .
MY FATHER: ANYWAY.
ME [sighing]: Go on.
MY FATHER: I went and had dinner there the other day. And do you know how they served the fries?
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: They had them in a fancy ring that looked like a fancy napkin holder. . . .
ME: Yes, vertically. Craig and I had lunch there a few months ago at a mall and that’s how they served them.
MY FATHER [outraged]: . . . and they were stood up on their ENDS.
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: Vertically! Did you say that?
ME: Several times. So you’re boycotting Red Robin because they served their French fries vertically?
MY FATHER: They used to serve them lying down, like normal fries.
ME: I’m . . . sorry? You know, you are allowed to take off the ring and allow them to lie down flat.
MY FATHER: But then they go in different directions.
ME: In a recent ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously that it was constitutional for Red Robin patrons to align their fries in any direction they want.
MY FATHER: But the real problem. . . .
ME: Oh good, there’s more.
MY FATHER: . . . the real problem is that there aren’t as many as there used to be. The portions are smaller.
ME: But Red Robin is the place where you can have as many servings of fries as you want. Bottomless fries. It’s in all their ads.
MY FATHER: Yes, but.
ME: Yes, but, as in yes, but all you have to do is ask the wait person for more?
MY FATHER: No. Yes, but as in yes, but then I have to hurry and eat them all before I can ask for more, and then I have to wait for them.
ME: Why is that a problem? You don’t have to wait. Grab the waiter when you’re down to the last two or three and they’ll have them out to you by the time you’re done. It’s not a big deal.
MY FATHER: It is a big deal! If you ask for more before you’re finished, the waiter thinks you’re trying to be greedy and take the second portion home.
ME: But . . . but they offer you bottomless fries.
MY FATHER: From an economic standpoint it would be ruinous if everyone ordered extra fries just so they could take the second portion home.
ME: If it were that ruinous, they wouldn’t offer their patrons an extra fifteen cents’ worth of fries.
MY FATHER [loftily]: You know nothing of economics.
ME: So if theoretically the waiter brought you more fries, would you immediately ask him to box them up so you could take them home?
MY FATHER [offended]: No! I’d eat what I wanted.
ME: Okay then!
MY FATHER: And then take the rest home.
ME: I . . . I . . . I honestly don’t know what to say. Why do you care what the waiter thinks, anyway?
MY FATHER: The portions used to be bigger.
ME: Okay. When the portions were bigger, did you ever order more fries?
MY FATHER [even more offended]: I don’t need to eat that many fries!
ME: So you should be happy the portions are smaller! Good god, man!
MY FATHER [with affronted dignity]: This is a very serious boycott and you are deliberately belittling my problem.
ME: You are correct.
MY FATHER: I’m correct? That this is a very serious boycott?
ME: No. That I’m deliberately belittling your problem.
ME: Oh dear. What are you boycotting?
MY FATHER: Your favorite restaurant.
ME: What in the world do you think is my favorite restaurant?
MY FATHER: It’s your favorite restaurant. You tell me.
ME: A restaurant that you would visit? Gosh. I don’t know. Is it that Thai restaurant we go to when I visit Richmond?
MY FATHER: No! I like that one.
ME: That barbecue sandwich place we tried that serves Cheerwine?
MY FATHER [with scorn]: No.
ME: My favorite restaurant? I admit, you’ve stumped me. All the restaurants I like are up here.
MY FATHER: Red Robin.
ME: Red Robin?! Red Robin is not my favorite restaurant.
MY FATHER: Don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I could write down the names of a hundred restaurants and I wouldn’t even place Red Robin remotely close to. . . .
MY FATHER: I said, don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I mean, we went there once, but I can’t imagine I said anything that could possibly have given you any indication that it was one of my favorite. . . .
MY FATHER: ANYWAY.
ME [sighing]: Go on.
MY FATHER: I went and had dinner there the other day. And do you know how they served the fries?
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: They had them in a fancy ring that looked like a fancy napkin holder. . . .
ME: Yes, vertically. Craig and I had lunch there a few months ago at a mall and that’s how they served them.
MY FATHER [outraged]: . . . and they were stood up on their ENDS.
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: Vertically! Did you say that?
ME: Several times. So you’re boycotting Red Robin because they served their French fries vertically?
MY FATHER: They used to serve them lying down, like normal fries.
ME: I’m . . . sorry? You know, you are allowed to take off the ring and allow them to lie down flat.
MY FATHER: But then they go in different directions.
ME: In a recent ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously that it was constitutional for Red Robin patrons to align their fries in any direction they want.
MY FATHER: But the real problem. . . .
ME: Oh good, there’s more.
MY FATHER: . . . the real problem is that there aren’t as many as there used to be. The portions are smaller.
ME: But Red Robin is the place where you can have as many servings of fries as you want. Bottomless fries. It’s in all their ads.
MY FATHER: Yes, but.
ME: Yes, but, as in yes, but all you have to do is ask the wait person for more?
MY FATHER: No. Yes, but as in yes, but then I have to hurry and eat them all before I can ask for more, and then I have to wait for them.
ME: Why is that a problem? You don’t have to wait. Grab the waiter when you’re down to the last two or three and they’ll have them out to you by the time you’re done. It’s not a big deal.
MY FATHER: It is a big deal! If you ask for more before you’re finished, the waiter thinks you’re trying to be greedy and take the second portion home.
ME: But . . . but they offer you bottomless fries.
MY FATHER: From an economic standpoint it would be ruinous if everyone ordered extra fries just so they could take the second portion home.
ME: If it were that ruinous, they wouldn’t offer their patrons an extra fifteen cents’ worth of fries.
MY FATHER [loftily]: You know nothing of economics.
ME: So if theoretically the waiter brought you more fries, would you immediately ask him to box them up so you could take them home?
MY FATHER [offended]: No! I’d eat what I wanted.
ME: Okay then!
MY FATHER: And then take the rest home.
ME: I . . . I . . . I honestly don’t know what to say. Why do you care what the waiter thinks, anyway?
MY FATHER: The portions used to be bigger.
ME: Okay. When the portions were bigger, did you ever order more fries?
MY FATHER [even more offended]: I don’t need to eat that many fries!
ME: So you should be happy the portions are smaller! Good god, man!
MY FATHER [with affronted dignity]: This is a very serious boycott and you are deliberately belittling my problem.
ME: You are correct.
MY FATHER: I’m correct? That this is a very serious boycott?
ME: No. That I’m deliberately belittling your problem.
Monday, March 31, 2014
The Fourth Great Book Purge
I must take a moment and murmur a few words about The Fourth Great Book Purge.
The First Great Book Purge took place sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I winnowed by half thousands of volumes from my home library. Its less ruthless sequel took place in 2010, when we learned that we were moving away from Michigan and our real estate agent firmly suggested that I pack up my books and hide them if I expected anyone even to consider buying our house. Apparently the whole ‘learned former academic gone wild’ decor thing doesn’t play well in the Midwest.
The Third Great Book Purge took place two years ago, when all my books were still in storage and didn’t seem ever to be coming out, and I decided to get rid of all the volumes I’d already replaced with electronic editions. Writing about it afforded all my acquaintances the opportunity to assert I was a heathen and that nothing could replace the smell and feel of a real live book with real live pages made from real dead trees. I also had to withstand all manner of haughty statements about how electronic versions of books made literature as disposable and trivial as Wikipedia articles flickering upon the electron tube—which makes about as much sense as saying books are disposable and trivial because, like The National Enquirer or TV Guide, they’re printed on paper, but whatever. All I know is that I have over fifteen hundred books on my iPad and bitches, it doesn’t weigh any more than it did when I bought the damned thing.
I embarked on The Fourth Great Book Purge this month, when finally I got to unpack everything we’d hidden away in boxes four years ago. Of all the purges, it was probably the most ruthless. In the original book purge I was throwing away a lot of junk that I’d accumulated during grad school. It didn’t mean anything to toss a little-browsed volume on images of courtly love in The Canterbury Tales, simply because I hadn’t cracked the spine since ye olde medieval literature classes and I wasn’t likely to need it ever again. I love Robert Browning, but even a dozen years ago I could find his works online if I really had a hankering for them. What I got rid of back then was dross. The stuff that I still had mostly meant something. Getting rid of it was tougher.
But you know, even a lot of that could go. I didn’t mind letting go of the lesser novels of Fay Weldon, much as I love her style of writing; the really good stuff I already had electronically, and what was left didn’t reach her giddiest heights. I’ve always had a sentimental soft spot for the novels of E. H. Young, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you the plots of any one of her novels, it’s been so long. Practicality won over sentiment, in that case. Ditto for the sunny country novels of Miss Read. When it’s possible to sum up the frantic buzz of activity in one of Miss Read’s slender two-hundred page novels as Gentle spinster schoolteacher bikes to her schoolhouse in a country village, helps a young lad with his sweater, then has tea and cakes with the vicar before going to bed, perhaps it’s just best to concede that the only reason I kept them around is that they were a favorite of my mother’s. And my mother isn’t around to read them.
I used to have a bookcase full of cookery books. I now have a single shelf. I used to have a very large bookcase dedicated solely to paperback novels; I had to lay them in four horizontal stacks across, three stacks deep on all five shelves to accommodate them all. That’d be sixty stacks of paperbacks alone, not counting the ones I crammed along the bookcase’s edges. I now have five little stacks of paperbacks that occupy two-thirds of a single shelf. In fact, every book I own fits in two bookcases, and the shelves are still so sparse that there’s plenty of room for artwork, picture frames, glass work, and baskets.
A casual visitor might inspect my shelves and walk away thinking that the only authors in whom I’m interested are Patrick Dennis and E. F. Benson, with minor flirtations with Ruth McKenney and John Dennis Fitzgerald. Maybe it’s true. The first three of those four are a big influence on my writing style, after all.
I have the books I want, though. If I accumulate a few more, I have space for them—which are words I haven’t always been able to say. If I shed some as they gradually come into public domain or as electronic versions are made . . . well, my iPad still won’t get any heavier.
(I should note that at no point did I get rid of any copies of my books. I probably have more author’s copies of my own novels than I have books by other people, at this point. They occupy their own shelves in the bedroom. I have a paranoid suspicion that they multiply like rabbits when I’m sleeping. I’m probably right, too—but let them breed, baby.)
The First Great Book Purge took place sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I winnowed by half thousands of volumes from my home library. Its less ruthless sequel took place in 2010, when we learned that we were moving away from Michigan and our real estate agent firmly suggested that I pack up my books and hide them if I expected anyone even to consider buying our house. Apparently the whole ‘learned former academic gone wild’ decor thing doesn’t play well in the Midwest.
The Third Great Book Purge took place two years ago, when all my books were still in storage and didn’t seem ever to be coming out, and I decided to get rid of all the volumes I’d already replaced with electronic editions. Writing about it afforded all my acquaintances the opportunity to assert I was a heathen and that nothing could replace the smell and feel of a real live book with real live pages made from real dead trees. I also had to withstand all manner of haughty statements about how electronic versions of books made literature as disposable and trivial as Wikipedia articles flickering upon the electron tube—which makes about as much sense as saying books are disposable and trivial because, like The National Enquirer or TV Guide, they’re printed on paper, but whatever. All I know is that I have over fifteen hundred books on my iPad and bitches, it doesn’t weigh any more than it did when I bought the damned thing.
I embarked on The Fourth Great Book Purge this month, when finally I got to unpack everything we’d hidden away in boxes four years ago. Of all the purges, it was probably the most ruthless. In the original book purge I was throwing away a lot of junk that I’d accumulated during grad school. It didn’t mean anything to toss a little-browsed volume on images of courtly love in The Canterbury Tales, simply because I hadn’t cracked the spine since ye olde medieval literature classes and I wasn’t likely to need it ever again. I love Robert Browning, but even a dozen years ago I could find his works online if I really had a hankering for them. What I got rid of back then was dross. The stuff that I still had mostly meant something. Getting rid of it was tougher.
But you know, even a lot of that could go. I didn’t mind letting go of the lesser novels of Fay Weldon, much as I love her style of writing; the really good stuff I already had electronically, and what was left didn’t reach her giddiest heights. I’ve always had a sentimental soft spot for the novels of E. H. Young, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you the plots of any one of her novels, it’s been so long. Practicality won over sentiment, in that case. Ditto for the sunny country novels of Miss Read. When it’s possible to sum up the frantic buzz of activity in one of Miss Read’s slender two-hundred page novels as Gentle spinster schoolteacher bikes to her schoolhouse in a country village, helps a young lad with his sweater, then has tea and cakes with the vicar before going to bed, perhaps it’s just best to concede that the only reason I kept them around is that they were a favorite of my mother’s. And my mother isn’t around to read them.
I used to have a bookcase full of cookery books. I now have a single shelf. I used to have a very large bookcase dedicated solely to paperback novels; I had to lay them in four horizontal stacks across, three stacks deep on all five shelves to accommodate them all. That’d be sixty stacks of paperbacks alone, not counting the ones I crammed along the bookcase’s edges. I now have five little stacks of paperbacks that occupy two-thirds of a single shelf. In fact, every book I own fits in two bookcases, and the shelves are still so sparse that there’s plenty of room for artwork, picture frames, glass work, and baskets.
A casual visitor might inspect my shelves and walk away thinking that the only authors in whom I’m interested are Patrick Dennis and E. F. Benson, with minor flirtations with Ruth McKenney and John Dennis Fitzgerald. Maybe it’s true. The first three of those four are a big influence on my writing style, after all.
I have the books I want, though. If I accumulate a few more, I have space for them—which are words I haven’t always been able to say. If I shed some as they gradually come into public domain or as electronic versions are made . . . well, my iPad still won’t get any heavier.
(I should note that at no point did I get rid of any copies of my books. I probably have more author’s copies of my own novels than I have books by other people, at this point. They occupy their own shelves in the bedroom. I have a paranoid suspicion that they multiply like rabbits when I’m sleeping. I’m probably right, too—but let them breed, baby.)
Monday, March 17, 2014
Home
We were going to move. We were all ready to move. We’d actually started moving!
Then we decided not to move.
I know, it’s all very confusing. Let’s go back a little bit.
Ever since we sold our house in Detroit and relocated to Connecticut three years ago, we’ve been in transitional digs. We had the movers pack up everything from our two-story colonial and transport it to our temporary quarters, a one-bedroom flat on the first floor of an old church rectory. For the first week of our residence here, we slept on an inflatable mattress and lived out of suitcases while we waited for our furniture to arrive.
We expected only to have to stay in the flat for four or five months, tops. The church that had hired my husband had made promises about housing; it was the deciding reason I’d consented to let him take the position. We didn’t know what they were going to do, exactly, but we knew it was going to be something. So when the movers arrived the next week with our belongings, we decided to do as little unpacking as possible. We filled up the basement of the old rectory with all our boxes—books, CDs, DVDs, decorations, everything the movers had stuffed into cardboard containers, everything I’d packed, everything that had sat in the garage for a year while the house sold. Anything that couldn’t go into the basement, we put into a hired storage unit.
We let the movers move as much into the flat as we could justify stuffing in there. Mostly we let it sit wherever they decided to dump it. A chest ended up next to the front door. One of our sofas—both were beat up and due to be replaced, but we decided not to do anything until we ended up in our permanent quarters—sat by it self in the dining room. From the basement we dug out a couple of lamps so we could see by night, and some dishes and a few pots and pans to cook with, but the happy assumption we made was that within a few months, we’d be somewhere else. Why unpack everything just to pack it up again?
The thing of it was that we lived this way for all three of our years here. We never made any attempt to fill up shelves or organize anything. We rolled our dice that first week and just let them lay. Every month we learned something new about the housing situation. A committee had been formed. The committee was meeting. The committee had decided to do a study. The study resulted in another committee, which was going to renovate one of the church’s properties for us. The committee had to wait for the tenants to move out, then for the bids to come in, and then for the renovations to begin. We grew older and older, the boxes in the basement grew moldier and more rotten, and my sense of restlessness and of being a vagrant grew uneasily greater.
I’ve written about the house finally nearing completion, in recent months. In anticipation of moving, we ordered new furniture to replace the beat-up stuff, and had it delivered to the house. We moved everything from the storage unit into the new place. We started moving boxes from the basement over, too.
Despite our anticipation, we still had one big question unanswered: how much was the new place going to cost us, every month?
It was already a little unsettling that in this area of the country we were paying more to rent a one-bedroom apartment than we had been paying on our mortgage for a three-bedroom home back in Detroit. Admittedly, that was Detroit. This is tony, much sought-after Greenwich. But we wouldn’t be able to figure out exactly how much more we’d have to be allotting for rent in the house until the renovations had been completed, the house assessed, and its official rental value set. Even at the time we started moving, the final number was a total mystery.
A couple of weeks ago we finally found out what the assessed rental had been. Even at the hefty, more-than-half-off discount the church had decided to give us, it was still several hundred dollars more than what we were paying for the apartment. We knew all along we’d have to pay taxes on the difference between the rent we were going to pay and the rent anyone else would have paid; it’s calculated by the government as a taxable benefit. Not until we had those numbers, though, were we able to figure out exactly how much tax that benefit would cost us.
When we toted up the rent, the amount of extra tax we’d have to be paying, and the utilities we don’t pay now but would have to assume there—water, gas, and heat—we came to the sober realization that while we certainly could move to the house and afford it, kind of, we wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Like, ever. And isn’t the big benefit of living in the metropolitan New York City area supposed to be the abundance of things to do?
After a weekend of soul-searching, we decided not to move at all. We’d stay in our flat, at the same percentage discount we’d be getting off the house. Neither one of us wanted to trade experiences for space.
I tell you. I’ve never been so happy about a decision in my life. I didn’t really care one way or the other what we chose. I was just ecstatic that after four long years of waiting, we finally knew where it was going to be.
I guess I’m a nester. I like a comfortable home filled with objects that mean something to me. Home is where I work; it’s where I relax, where I bring my friends when I can. Growing up, I was never able to think or do my homework or play unless my room was in order. I haven’t changed much as an adult. I’ve been the last four years in disarray and I’ve felt every moment of it, personally and professionally. We might have been living here, but I never felt at home.
That’s changed, though. We’ve spent the last two weeks moving into the apartment in a way we should’ve, long back. Instead of storing pots and pans on a metal rack that used to house chemicals and panes of glass from my old studio, that the movers dumped into the kitchen the first day, they’re in new spots in actual reorganized cabinets. The rack has been banished to the basement again and one of our old bookshelves sits in its place, modestly housing the small kitchen appliances. Our old sofas are gone for good, replaced by the new furniture that sat for a month in the house where we might have moved. The dining room now houses bookshelves for the small library I’ve left myself, our piano, a comfortable armchair, a small bar, and the dining room table. It feels more like a space for actual living than it did when it was That Room Where We Kicked Off Our Shoes And Left Our Coats.
Everything’s put away—music, books, DVDs, tablecloths, bed linens, crystal, the good China. Everything has a place, or soon will. The basement is nearly clear. I’ve hung framed photographs and our ceramic art tiles in every room. My glass work has a showcase in the built-in cabinets in our dining room. Even my old board games from my youth found a space in the coat closet—just in case I ever make any acquaintances who want to come over and play Probe or Smess or King Oil or Clue. (But I get to be Miss Scarlet.) I’m very proud of the work we’ve managed to do over the last couple of weeks. The flat has gone from feeling like someplace we slept nights while we sojourned somewhere new—a hotel room in Las Vegas for a week—and more like a real, actual place that I’m proud to call home.
The weeks were not without their casualties, however. The basement is not completely water-tight. While it did weather both Hurricanes Irene and Katrina with only mild puddling, it’s still a hundred-and-fifty-year-old basement that’s barely a step above a glorified fruit cellar. Some stuff did suffer. I lost a large box of shoes to rot and mildew—not really a big loss, since I actually had thought I’d given them away to Goodwill already. One box of Dover clip art books, and collections of Bloom County happened to fall from a stack into a puddle at some point, and the whole thing was so irretrievably ruined that I had to wrap it in plastic so I could pick it up safely to chuck it in the dumpster. I lost a few other paperbacks that had been crushed beyond recognition. I’m afraid to touch my old French horn case, which looks as if it’s been overgrown by a mutant fungus from The X-Files.
Small things, though. They’re sacrifices I gladly make in exchange for feeling like I’m home again.
Then we decided not to move.
I know, it’s all very confusing. Let’s go back a little bit.
Ever since we sold our house in Detroit and relocated to Connecticut three years ago, we’ve been in transitional digs. We had the movers pack up everything from our two-story colonial and transport it to our temporary quarters, a one-bedroom flat on the first floor of an old church rectory. For the first week of our residence here, we slept on an inflatable mattress and lived out of suitcases while we waited for our furniture to arrive.
We expected only to have to stay in the flat for four or five months, tops. The church that had hired my husband had made promises about housing; it was the deciding reason I’d consented to let him take the position. We didn’t know what they were going to do, exactly, but we knew it was going to be something. So when the movers arrived the next week with our belongings, we decided to do as little unpacking as possible. We filled up the basement of the old rectory with all our boxes—books, CDs, DVDs, decorations, everything the movers had stuffed into cardboard containers, everything I’d packed, everything that had sat in the garage for a year while the house sold. Anything that couldn’t go into the basement, we put into a hired storage unit.
We let the movers move as much into the flat as we could justify stuffing in there. Mostly we let it sit wherever they decided to dump it. A chest ended up next to the front door. One of our sofas—both were beat up and due to be replaced, but we decided not to do anything until we ended up in our permanent quarters—sat by it self in the dining room. From the basement we dug out a couple of lamps so we could see by night, and some dishes and a few pots and pans to cook with, but the happy assumption we made was that within a few months, we’d be somewhere else. Why unpack everything just to pack it up again?
The thing of it was that we lived this way for all three of our years here. We never made any attempt to fill up shelves or organize anything. We rolled our dice that first week and just let them lay. Every month we learned something new about the housing situation. A committee had been formed. The committee was meeting. The committee had decided to do a study. The study resulted in another committee, which was going to renovate one of the church’s properties for us. The committee had to wait for the tenants to move out, then for the bids to come in, and then for the renovations to begin. We grew older and older, the boxes in the basement grew moldier and more rotten, and my sense of restlessness and of being a vagrant grew uneasily greater.
I’ve written about the house finally nearing completion, in recent months. In anticipation of moving, we ordered new furniture to replace the beat-up stuff, and had it delivered to the house. We moved everything from the storage unit into the new place. We started moving boxes from the basement over, too.
Despite our anticipation, we still had one big question unanswered: how much was the new place going to cost us, every month?
It was already a little unsettling that in this area of the country we were paying more to rent a one-bedroom apartment than we had been paying on our mortgage for a three-bedroom home back in Detroit. Admittedly, that was Detroit. This is tony, much sought-after Greenwich. But we wouldn’t be able to figure out exactly how much more we’d have to be allotting for rent in the house until the renovations had been completed, the house assessed, and its official rental value set. Even at the time we started moving, the final number was a total mystery.
A couple of weeks ago we finally found out what the assessed rental had been. Even at the hefty, more-than-half-off discount the church had decided to give us, it was still several hundred dollars more than what we were paying for the apartment. We knew all along we’d have to pay taxes on the difference between the rent we were going to pay and the rent anyone else would have paid; it’s calculated by the government as a taxable benefit. Not until we had those numbers, though, were we able to figure out exactly how much tax that benefit would cost us.
When we toted up the rent, the amount of extra tax we’d have to be paying, and the utilities we don’t pay now but would have to assume there—water, gas, and heat—we came to the sober realization that while we certainly could move to the house and afford it, kind of, we wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Like, ever. And isn’t the big benefit of living in the metropolitan New York City area supposed to be the abundance of things to do?
After a weekend of soul-searching, we decided not to move at all. We’d stay in our flat, at the same percentage discount we’d be getting off the house. Neither one of us wanted to trade experiences for space.
I tell you. I’ve never been so happy about a decision in my life. I didn’t really care one way or the other what we chose. I was just ecstatic that after four long years of waiting, we finally knew where it was going to be.
I guess I’m a nester. I like a comfortable home filled with objects that mean something to me. Home is where I work; it’s where I relax, where I bring my friends when I can. Growing up, I was never able to think or do my homework or play unless my room was in order. I haven’t changed much as an adult. I’ve been the last four years in disarray and I’ve felt every moment of it, personally and professionally. We might have been living here, but I never felt at home.
That’s changed, though. We’ve spent the last two weeks moving into the apartment in a way we should’ve, long back. Instead of storing pots and pans on a metal rack that used to house chemicals and panes of glass from my old studio, that the movers dumped into the kitchen the first day, they’re in new spots in actual reorganized cabinets. The rack has been banished to the basement again and one of our old bookshelves sits in its place, modestly housing the small kitchen appliances. Our old sofas are gone for good, replaced by the new furniture that sat for a month in the house where we might have moved. The dining room now houses bookshelves for the small library I’ve left myself, our piano, a comfortable armchair, a small bar, and the dining room table. It feels more like a space for actual living than it did when it was That Room Where We Kicked Off Our Shoes And Left Our Coats.
Everything’s put away—music, books, DVDs, tablecloths, bed linens, crystal, the good China. Everything has a place, or soon will. The basement is nearly clear. I’ve hung framed photographs and our ceramic art tiles in every room. My glass work has a showcase in the built-in cabinets in our dining room. Even my old board games from my youth found a space in the coat closet—just in case I ever make any acquaintances who want to come over and play Probe or Smess or King Oil or Clue. (But I get to be Miss Scarlet.) I’m very proud of the work we’ve managed to do over the last couple of weeks. The flat has gone from feeling like someplace we slept nights while we sojourned somewhere new—a hotel room in Las Vegas for a week—and more like a real, actual place that I’m proud to call home.
The weeks were not without their casualties, however. The basement is not completely water-tight. While it did weather both Hurricanes Irene and Katrina with only mild puddling, it’s still a hundred-and-fifty-year-old basement that’s barely a step above a glorified fruit cellar. Some stuff did suffer. I lost a large box of shoes to rot and mildew—not really a big loss, since I actually had thought I’d given them away to Goodwill already. One box of Dover clip art books, and collections of Bloom County happened to fall from a stack into a puddle at some point, and the whole thing was so irretrievably ruined that I had to wrap it in plastic so I could pick it up safely to chuck it in the dumpster. I lost a few other paperbacks that had been crushed beyond recognition. I’m afraid to touch my old French horn case, which looks as if it’s been overgrown by a mutant fungus from The X-Files.
Small things, though. They’re sacrifices I gladly make in exchange for feeling like I’m home again.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
In the Kitchen with My Mother
My mom had already gotten a fairly good start at being an only child by the time my grandmother decided, as one of her many vague and apologetic afterthoughts, to produce three more boys. Between my mom and the oldest of her siblings lay almost a decade of difference in age; her youngest brother was only in second grade by the time she’d married and given birth to me.
The Second World War forced my grandfather into service; my grandmother picked up a welding gun and worked as a Rosie the Riveter until he returned. In peacetime he kept the family afloat—barely—as a carpenter. He built the family’s home himself in the hills of what was then backwoods Georgia. My grandmother took a number of low-paying jobs to keep the ever-increasing number of mouths fed. Still, it wasn’t until my mom was in high school that the family graduated from an outhouse to indoor plumbing.
My mother had learned how to deal with colicky infants and change diapers before she’d mastered her times-tables; she’d been pressed into baking bread from scratch several times a week before she’d donned her first training bra. Every night, week in and week out of her youth, she prepared family dinners from the rawest and most local of ingredients while simultaneously she raised three children who weren’t her own all before her first adolescent date. She was parent to those boys, too—later in life all three of them professed that she had been more mother to them than the woman who gave them birth. When she managed to win a scholarship and become the first person in any branch of her family tree to go off to college, my youngest uncle for months was inconsolable that he’d lost his mommy.
It’s no wonder that when she had a household of her own, my mom wanted almost nothing to do with cooking. She’d already spent a lifetime in front of her mother’s oven. The automated kitchens of the nineteen-sixties would have seemed like space-age technology compared to the primitive conditions in which she’d toiled. However, the only thing she enjoyed about her electric oven with a timer, her dishwasher, and her vast harvest gold refrigerator/freezer was making herself a big pot of coffee, lacing it with cream, and ignoring them all as she curled up at the kitchen table with a Ngaio Marsh novel or a crossword and a cigarette.
In one of her rare moods, I might come home from school to find the house fragrant and yeasty from loaves of fluffy wheat bread she’d baked from scratch on whim. Once or twice I’d find her humming over a bubbling cog au vin she’d improvised. If she were in a good enough mood to roll out a batch of her favorite angel biscuits, they’d be so light they’d practically float to the ceiling. She was a fine cook, when she cared to be. For her, though, any romance the kitchen might have had was long dead.
Most of the time she’d regard the stove like a death row prisoner might the electric chair. From time to time my father would persuade her to make an ancient family recipe known as Briceland Meat Pie, which he and my sister adored and my mother and I loathed. The dish consisted basically of unseasoned chunks of fatty beef and overcooked potato sealed in homemade pie crust, baked until dry as a desert, then served scooped up in a bowl and drowned in a greasy jus made of the drippings. She’d accomplish each step of the recipe with a set mouth and a face as gray and grim as the end result itself. Every mouthful left the same aftertaste as a long-standing grudge.
She denied any responsibility for breakfasts, reasoning that any child who was old enough to no longer require breast feeding was old enough to open his own package of Pop-Tarts. School lunches she left to my father, who had the minimum agility required to capture some peanut butter and jelly between two slices of Wonder Bread. That left an awful lot of dinners, however. My mom was an early member of NOW and an avid and unabashed feminist and crusader for the Equal Rights Amendment who did not feel that enforced kitchen duties comprised any part of her life goals or career. She was also practical enough to recognize that she was the only member of the household who actually had know-how enough to extract ingredients from the pantry and combine them into something vaguely edible.
Convenience cooking was her only lifebuoy. It took only five minutes to stick three random tins—one of Campbell’s soup, say, one of deviled ham, and one of succotash—under the electric can opener, mix them into a casserole dish, and bake at 350° with a crumbling of canned onion rings on top for texture. That was an entire ninety minutes she didn’t have to spend over the stove. That was half a murder mystery. If forced to provide some god-damned cookies, as my mother would say, for a god-damned church youth group meeting or for school, her preferred approach was to dig around in the breadbox for a only slightly-desiccated package of old Fig Newtons to fling my way, but under the threat of shaming from other parents, she was a fan of the boxed cookie mix that required only a cup of water to reconstitute. When Hamburger Helper came out in the early nineteen-seventies, my mom stocked up on the whole line. Having to brown the beef was too much like real cooking, but she applauded the expediency of merely having to rip open a paper package and pour in water to finish the dish.
I think I made it all the way into my teens before it occurred to me that vegetables don’t naturally arrive in cans. The peas and carrots and corn and lima beans that were the staples of my youth, courtesy of Del Monte, went straight from their aluminum enclosure into a pot, then occupied the soggiest portion of my plate. The only fresh vegetable we ever saw was summer corn on the cob and the occasional chopped heads of bland iceberg lettuce. Even the latter arrived at the table drenched in a candy-sweet French dressing.
It was when I joined the Cub Scouts that my mother found a way to offload even more of her kitchen responsibilities. My mom hated all branches of the scouting organizations; she claimed they were fascist fronts that might as well be sharing office space with the Hitler Youth. My father was slightly inclined to agree with her on most political fronts, but he’d been an Eagle Scout as a lad and still had a secret soft spot for scouting. He lured me into the fold by strategically leaving his old scouting handbooks from the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties lying around where I could read them. The world of those handbooks—which depicted Aryan, unabashedly masculine, clean-cut youths with short hair and pressed uniforms learning Indian chants and exploring the pristine forests of an unindustrialized America—was as foreign to me as Narnia. It was also no less alluring because of that fact.
The day I came home wearing my Tiger Cub uniform and brandishing a copy of my new, updated handbook, which had considerably less talk of Indians and forestry, my mother confiscated it for her afternoon read, fully prepared to scorn the regressive patriarchal values brainwashing the youth of America on every page, I suspect. But when she saw there was an unabashedly masculine Cooking badge to be earned, she set aside all scoffing, looked at me speculatively, and came up with a plan.
At the branch library she found a copy of a book—little checked-out, from what I remember—called Cooking For Boys. The volume was bound in a virile brown and heavily illustrated with photos of hearty little boys wearing manly plaid shirts roasting haunches of meat over roaring bonfires with friendly Indians. It was ancient. I could tell that by the mere fact it dated from the vanished era of my dad’s scouting handbooks, in which one could apparently persuade boys into just about anything by throwing an American native into the mix. I don’t recall any of the recipes between those macho covers actually requiring open flames or freshly-butchred elk, for that matter. Most of them were about as complicated as ‘Cheese on Toast,’ which seemed pretty self-explanatory. But my mother pointed out the colorful cooking badge in the Cub Scout manual, showed me the library book, and announced that I was going to learn to cook! That it would be fun! That my future girlfriends would be so impressed by my culinary skills! Especially if said skills extended beyond the chili made from cans and the peanut butter sandwiches that were my father’s exclusive specialty!
So I learned to make scrambled eggs. At the time I thought transforming raw eggs, a little milk, and some butter into something delicious and edible was something of a minor miracle. It was like real-world alchemy, and I was fascinated. I’d grown up on Pop Tarts and Danish-Go-Rounds. I might not have even had scrambled eggs until that point. I instantly became the first grade’s Scrambled Eggs Champion, permitted—if not encouraged by a pair of parents who wanted to spend Saturday mornings in bed—to make the family’s weekend breakfasts.
From there I swiftly graduated to a Cooking for Boys dinner in the form of individual rustic stews prepared in aluminum foil. I seem to recall they consisted of chunks of beef and potatoes and perhaps carrots mixed with some kind of primitive sauce—ketchup, maybe—in a bundle of foil screwed into a taper at the top. Once they’d thoroughly baked in the oven, I’d carefully transfer them onto a plate and we’d all open them at the table. When the built-up steam had dissipated, we’d dig into the deliciously savory contents.
My mother’s canny plan worked. Not only did I earn my cooking badge within mere weeks, but it wasn’t too long before I’d more or less willingly assumed a share of dinner duties on my own. I could whip up a Hamburger Helper meal with only a minimum of supervision from the executive chef, who was taking a permanent cigarette-and-coffee break at the kitchen table. When eventually I could be trusted at the stove by myself, I followed my mother’s example and made up my own casserole dinners from random boxes and cans in the pantry (Rice-a-roni, say, with ground beef and a can of corn). I could even make my own damned cookies for the god-damned church youth group.
What my mother always found strangest, however, as I took over more and more cooking duties the older I grew, is how little I actually minded it. I never did. I still don’t.
She would have found very curious and repellant the modern nostalgia for homes centered around the kitchen, or for cuisine done the old, hard way without boxes or convenience ingredients. That there exist entire popular cable networks around cooking would have baffled her. If she were still around and knew I hadn’t eaten a canned vegetable or brought home a head of iceberg lettuce since I was in college—that I willingly pluck brussels sprouts from the stalk or snap green beans by hand, despite the time involved—she would’ve shrugged and given me one of those it’s-your-life-I-guess looks, as if I’d declared I wanted to join what she declared an oddball religious cult, like the Unitarian-Universalists.
I would never suggest that growing up on canned vegetables, meals made from boxes, cheese from a can, or frosting from a cardboard container is a fantastic diet. It isn’t. I still make things from boxes, on occasion. I appreciate having a few time-saving recipes in my arsenal. Generally these days, however, I tend to prefer taking the longer and less convenient route to preparing meals.
Yet during those idle moments I find myself clipping recipes from the web, ordering cookbooks even before their publication date, or mentally planning out dinners weeks in advance, it pays to remind myself that what some people dream of, others flee as their worst nightmare.
The Second World War forced my grandfather into service; my grandmother picked up a welding gun and worked as a Rosie the Riveter until he returned. In peacetime he kept the family afloat—barely—as a carpenter. He built the family’s home himself in the hills of what was then backwoods Georgia. My grandmother took a number of low-paying jobs to keep the ever-increasing number of mouths fed. Still, it wasn’t until my mom was in high school that the family graduated from an outhouse to indoor plumbing.
My mother had learned how to deal with colicky infants and change diapers before she’d mastered her times-tables; she’d been pressed into baking bread from scratch several times a week before she’d donned her first training bra. Every night, week in and week out of her youth, she prepared family dinners from the rawest and most local of ingredients while simultaneously she raised three children who weren’t her own all before her first adolescent date. She was parent to those boys, too—later in life all three of them professed that she had been more mother to them than the woman who gave them birth. When she managed to win a scholarship and become the first person in any branch of her family tree to go off to college, my youngest uncle for months was inconsolable that he’d lost his mommy.
It’s no wonder that when she had a household of her own, my mom wanted almost nothing to do with cooking. She’d already spent a lifetime in front of her mother’s oven. The automated kitchens of the nineteen-sixties would have seemed like space-age technology compared to the primitive conditions in which she’d toiled. However, the only thing she enjoyed about her electric oven with a timer, her dishwasher, and her vast harvest gold refrigerator/freezer was making herself a big pot of coffee, lacing it with cream, and ignoring them all as she curled up at the kitchen table with a Ngaio Marsh novel or a crossword and a cigarette.
In one of her rare moods, I might come home from school to find the house fragrant and yeasty from loaves of fluffy wheat bread she’d baked from scratch on whim. Once or twice I’d find her humming over a bubbling cog au vin she’d improvised. If she were in a good enough mood to roll out a batch of her favorite angel biscuits, they’d be so light they’d practically float to the ceiling. She was a fine cook, when she cared to be. For her, though, any romance the kitchen might have had was long dead.
Most of the time she’d regard the stove like a death row prisoner might the electric chair. From time to time my father would persuade her to make an ancient family recipe known as Briceland Meat Pie, which he and my sister adored and my mother and I loathed. The dish consisted basically of unseasoned chunks of fatty beef and overcooked potato sealed in homemade pie crust, baked until dry as a desert, then served scooped up in a bowl and drowned in a greasy jus made of the drippings. She’d accomplish each step of the recipe with a set mouth and a face as gray and grim as the end result itself. Every mouthful left the same aftertaste as a long-standing grudge.
She denied any responsibility for breakfasts, reasoning that any child who was old enough to no longer require breast feeding was old enough to open his own package of Pop-Tarts. School lunches she left to my father, who had the minimum agility required to capture some peanut butter and jelly between two slices of Wonder Bread. That left an awful lot of dinners, however. My mom was an early member of NOW and an avid and unabashed feminist and crusader for the Equal Rights Amendment who did not feel that enforced kitchen duties comprised any part of her life goals or career. She was also practical enough to recognize that she was the only member of the household who actually had know-how enough to extract ingredients from the pantry and combine them into something vaguely edible.
Convenience cooking was her only lifebuoy. It took only five minutes to stick three random tins—one of Campbell’s soup, say, one of deviled ham, and one of succotash—under the electric can opener, mix them into a casserole dish, and bake at 350° with a crumbling of canned onion rings on top for texture. That was an entire ninety minutes she didn’t have to spend over the stove. That was half a murder mystery. If forced to provide some god-damned cookies, as my mother would say, for a god-damned church youth group meeting or for school, her preferred approach was to dig around in the breadbox for a only slightly-desiccated package of old Fig Newtons to fling my way, but under the threat of shaming from other parents, she was a fan of the boxed cookie mix that required only a cup of water to reconstitute. When Hamburger Helper came out in the early nineteen-seventies, my mom stocked up on the whole line. Having to brown the beef was too much like real cooking, but she applauded the expediency of merely having to rip open a paper package and pour in water to finish the dish.
I think I made it all the way into my teens before it occurred to me that vegetables don’t naturally arrive in cans. The peas and carrots and corn and lima beans that were the staples of my youth, courtesy of Del Monte, went straight from their aluminum enclosure into a pot, then occupied the soggiest portion of my plate. The only fresh vegetable we ever saw was summer corn on the cob and the occasional chopped heads of bland iceberg lettuce. Even the latter arrived at the table drenched in a candy-sweet French dressing.
It was when I joined the Cub Scouts that my mother found a way to offload even more of her kitchen responsibilities. My mom hated all branches of the scouting organizations; she claimed they were fascist fronts that might as well be sharing office space with the Hitler Youth. My father was slightly inclined to agree with her on most political fronts, but he’d been an Eagle Scout as a lad and still had a secret soft spot for scouting. He lured me into the fold by strategically leaving his old scouting handbooks from the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties lying around where I could read them. The world of those handbooks—which depicted Aryan, unabashedly masculine, clean-cut youths with short hair and pressed uniforms learning Indian chants and exploring the pristine forests of an unindustrialized America—was as foreign to me as Narnia. It was also no less alluring because of that fact.
The day I came home wearing my Tiger Cub uniform and brandishing a copy of my new, updated handbook, which had considerably less talk of Indians and forestry, my mother confiscated it for her afternoon read, fully prepared to scorn the regressive patriarchal values brainwashing the youth of America on every page, I suspect. But when she saw there was an unabashedly masculine Cooking badge to be earned, she set aside all scoffing, looked at me speculatively, and came up with a plan.
At the branch library she found a copy of a book—little checked-out, from what I remember—called Cooking For Boys. The volume was bound in a virile brown and heavily illustrated with photos of hearty little boys wearing manly plaid shirts roasting haunches of meat over roaring bonfires with friendly Indians. It was ancient. I could tell that by the mere fact it dated from the vanished era of my dad’s scouting handbooks, in which one could apparently persuade boys into just about anything by throwing an American native into the mix. I don’t recall any of the recipes between those macho covers actually requiring open flames or freshly-butchred elk, for that matter. Most of them were about as complicated as ‘Cheese on Toast,’ which seemed pretty self-explanatory. But my mother pointed out the colorful cooking badge in the Cub Scout manual, showed me the library book, and announced that I was going to learn to cook! That it would be fun! That my future girlfriends would be so impressed by my culinary skills! Especially if said skills extended beyond the chili made from cans and the peanut butter sandwiches that were my father’s exclusive specialty!
So I learned to make scrambled eggs. At the time I thought transforming raw eggs, a little milk, and some butter into something delicious and edible was something of a minor miracle. It was like real-world alchemy, and I was fascinated. I’d grown up on Pop Tarts and Danish-Go-Rounds. I might not have even had scrambled eggs until that point. I instantly became the first grade’s Scrambled Eggs Champion, permitted—if not encouraged by a pair of parents who wanted to spend Saturday mornings in bed—to make the family’s weekend breakfasts.
From there I swiftly graduated to a Cooking for Boys dinner in the form of individual rustic stews prepared in aluminum foil. I seem to recall they consisted of chunks of beef and potatoes and perhaps carrots mixed with some kind of primitive sauce—ketchup, maybe—in a bundle of foil screwed into a taper at the top. Once they’d thoroughly baked in the oven, I’d carefully transfer them onto a plate and we’d all open them at the table. When the built-up steam had dissipated, we’d dig into the deliciously savory contents.
My mother’s canny plan worked. Not only did I earn my cooking badge within mere weeks, but it wasn’t too long before I’d more or less willingly assumed a share of dinner duties on my own. I could whip up a Hamburger Helper meal with only a minimum of supervision from the executive chef, who was taking a permanent cigarette-and-coffee break at the kitchen table. When eventually I could be trusted at the stove by myself, I followed my mother’s example and made up my own casserole dinners from random boxes and cans in the pantry (Rice-a-roni, say, with ground beef and a can of corn). I could even make my own damned cookies for the god-damned church youth group.
What my mother always found strangest, however, as I took over more and more cooking duties the older I grew, is how little I actually minded it. I never did. I still don’t.
She would have found very curious and repellant the modern nostalgia for homes centered around the kitchen, or for cuisine done the old, hard way without boxes or convenience ingredients. That there exist entire popular cable networks around cooking would have baffled her. If she were still around and knew I hadn’t eaten a canned vegetable or brought home a head of iceberg lettuce since I was in college—that I willingly pluck brussels sprouts from the stalk or snap green beans by hand, despite the time involved—she would’ve shrugged and given me one of those it’s-your-life-I-guess looks, as if I’d declared I wanted to join what she declared an oddball religious cult, like the Unitarian-Universalists.
I would never suggest that growing up on canned vegetables, meals made from boxes, cheese from a can, or frosting from a cardboard container is a fantastic diet. It isn’t. I still make things from boxes, on occasion. I appreciate having a few time-saving recipes in my arsenal. Generally these days, however, I tend to prefer taking the longer and less convenient route to preparing meals.
Yet during those idle moments I find myself clipping recipes from the web, ordering cookbooks even before their publication date, or mentally planning out dinners weeks in advance, it pays to remind myself that what some people dream of, others flee as their worst nightmare.
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