ramblings

I am trying to regard it as one of the blessings of this summer that I have not yet had a bad peach.

Given war, natural disasters, the collapse of various financial markets, deaths, and anxiety, it doesn’t seem like much of a blessing, but I’m trying to think of it that way.

And these have been just ordinary grocery store peaches, not the wonderful ones that I bought thirty pounds of a few years back that were selling from a roadside stand. These have just been on sale at the grocery store for $1.49 a pound, and I get a few every time I go, and they’ve all been good.

I never used to like summer much — school was out, which many people liked, but as school was something I was good at and summer activities were mostly things I was not good at, I sort of missed it. Fresh fruit was sort of my consolation prize for summer. It was hot and muggy and people were forever telling you to go play outside, where it was even more hot and muggy, but you got fresh peaches, and strawberries and blueberries and cherries and plums and melons and even mulberries, which are not really very good but which I ate in large quantities because we always seemed to have a mulberry tree in our yard.

I was a late-comer to cherries. I’d always thought I didn’t like them, since I never liked anything cherry flavored. Then the summer we were fourteen I stayed for a week in New Jersey with my oldest friend, who was living there with some family friends for the summer. We went into New York City almost every day, and when we got out of the train station, we’d walk along until we found a fruit vendor, and Sara would say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.” Then we walked along the streets of Manhattan, eating cherries out of a brown paper bag and spitting the pits into the gutters. We’d walk and eat until we’d finished the pound, and then, more often than not, we’d happen upon another fruit vendor and say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.”

I don’t eat cherries in quite that kind of quantity anymore, but as soon as I see them in the supermarket, I buy some (and then, because I am old, I take them home and wash them and put the pits I’ve spat out into the garbage can) and think about being fourteen and fifteen and seeing New York for the very first time.

So on days like today when the world seems to be not too great, which is how it generally seemed all the time when I was in high school, I am trying to be thankful for fruit.

Teen: You’re walking?
Me: Yes.
Teen: Where are you going?
Me: Home. It’s four blocks from here.
Teen: Wow, four blocks is a long way to walk in the rain.
Me: [jaw hits ground]

People in my town, upon learning that I walk from place to place, tend to regard me, kindly, as mentally ill. Of course, I am mentally ill, but I the cause, I think, has more to do with genetics than with my chosen form of transportation. If anything, I probably don’t walk enough: most days I walk the four blocks to and from the post office and back, and while I suppose this is more walking than some Americans do — quite a lot more, at least in the rain, to judge by the conversation I had this afternoon — it pales in comparison to the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer. I thought about that as I was walking home, and so when I got home I thought it might be a good time to go for an actual walk, one whose purpose was simply to walk, not to get from place to place. It was drizzling slightly, or trying to, and turning cold, which meant the golf course would likely be empty, and so I changed into boots and layered on my rain gear and off I went.

(Yes, we have a golf course in my town. 351 people, 9 holes of golf. The course is laid out over a ridge and its surrounding lowlands just south of town, and in addition to the nine holes, it has a great many home sites, most of which remain unsold and none of which have been built on yet. I will rue the day someone does build out there, as I tend to regard the place as my own private nature preserve, but I’ve been informed that, due to bureaucratic tangles of which I remain happily ignorant, it will be a long, long time before anyone builds there.)

I walked for over an hour, mostly up on the ridge, keeping away from the roads, which are all named for surrounding mountains and formations: Phelps Way, Irish Rock, Pinnacle Rock, etc. I am reminded of what Billy Collins says about the naming of subdivisions: that Pheasant Run and Deer Creek are not descriptive but elegiac, honoring the creatures that were displaced so that development could occur. The mountains have not yet been displaced, of course, but some of them have been mined and drilled, and others will surely follow.

When I got home, I pulled a tome off the shelf and sat down to reread Thoreau’s “Walking,” which seemed to me to be the thing to do. I thought about copying out a few paragraphs and leaving them in conspicuous places around town, but doing so would undoubtedly be a further indication of my mental illness, so I did not. The funny thing to me is that for as odd as my walking is considered here, I am, according to Thoreau, no kind of walker at all. Happily, Thoreau wasn’t completely convinced that he was much of a walker himself:

It is true, we are but faint hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, neverending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

I have read a number of the currently popular genre of book, the “I went and did this thing for a year” book. There are a great many of these about — years without shopping, without buying anything made in China, living as if it were 1900, living according to the Bible, getting all your food locally, making everything in Mastering the Art of French Cooking — and one is tempted to think of something so trendy as a new idea. But of course Walden was the original “I went and did this thing for a year” book. Thoreau even foreshadowed our current concerns about the accuracy of nonfiction narratives — he actually lived at Walden Pond for two years, but he condensed his experiences into a year for the sake of the narrative. And, as Thoreau detractors are wont to point out, he cheated — he ate half his meals at his mom’s house, or Emerson’s house. Thoreau doesn’t include that, but I doubt he would apologize for it: the point was to live deliberately, and he felt he accomplished that. If you want to get hung up on exactly how he did it, go read the chapters on Economy and bean planting again. Edward Abbey also neglects to include the wife and two children who were living with him during most of the period recounted in Desert Solitaire, which seems egregious in some ways. But including the things they left out would make Thoreau’s narrative, and Abbey’s, more like the current crop of books, which are forever agonizing over the rules and whether they are sticking to them.

It’s hard to imagine anything like Walden getting taken seriously today. Try to imagine a chapter excerpted in Harper’s or The Atlantic Monthly. It’s too sincere, and, as Lionel Trilling pointed out, sincerity got trumped by authenticity a long time ago.

It has always been my desire to live closer to the roots of things, to learn by going where I have to go, to get there by my own means, and while I do not deny the genetic and biological underpinnings of mental illness, I’ve always felt as well that the things I want — to live closely, to take my waking slow, to walk upon the earth and not the pavement — are not an expression of my illness by a desire for health.

I am still in Iowa; everything here is still unbelievably sad and horrifying. This is just an attempt to take my mind off all that for awhile.

My father died when I was five and a half, and thus I was effectively raised by a single mother, with a fair amount of help from my grandmother. My two oldest friends in the world were also the children of single parents.

My mother, and their mothers, got a lot of grief from people. People were generally not allowed to come play at any of our houses after school because there was not a Responsible Adult at home. In fifth grade, a girl had a party for the whole class. I went for a bit, but my asthma started to act up from the crowd and the English sheepdog, and so I went to the organizing mothers, thanked them for the party, and said I would be leaving now. I lived a few blocks away and it was, I think, not even dark out yet. They insisted on calling my mother, who was not home as she had, god forbid, gone grocery shopping. After a lot of hemming and hawing, during which I said they could either take me home to my inhaler or they could take me to the ER, they finally took me home — and the next day they called my mother to excoriate her and to tell her that I was having a “panic attack.”

There was an immense prejudice toward single mothers when I was young. It did not seem to matter how you became single — my father had died; one friend’s parents divorced; another friend’s had never really been together. I had the easiest time, but it was still not easy.

I bring all of this up because I was reading through the comments on Walt’s post, and I was reminded of how deeply judgmental people are about family structures. My father’s death was and remains the saddest thing that has ever happened to me, but I don’t think I am less of a person because of it, or that my family is somehow deficient because of my single mother and single grandmother. A lot of people do seem to think just that, however, and I imagine that many of these people are the same people who view gay marriage as such an abomination because it somehow undermines conventional family structure.

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but the adage that it takes a village to raise a child is far older that she is. It suggests to me that our ancestors knew something that we did not: it takes a village, to me, is a recognition that no one’s family structure is perfect, that even two happily married people of opposite sexes may have deficiencies, and that we as a society should strive to help each other in looking after our children rather than tearing each other down for some real or imagined failing. There are people in this world who make bad parents, but there is, perhaps sadly, no one filter we can use to rule them out of the child-rearing process. Or perhaps the inability to filter isn’t sad — perhaps it is a reminder to us that we must always think; that we cannot and should not rely on any single factor or litmus test to make all our decisions for us — and that, I think, is a good thing.

I’m writing this from a Java House in Iowa City, the one over on the west side of town that’s now part of this mini mall that, when I was in high school, was a field of wildflowers. Come to think of it, the Java House did not exist when I was in high school. I remember going to the one downtown during my first winter break home from college and thinking how pretentious it was. Sometimes I still think that, but given the hours of my life that I have now spent idling away in fancy coffee shops, I should admit to being either pretentious or hypocritical myself. Or both.

When people say, “I just couldn’t keep it to myself,” they usually mean that they have good news (or even the Good News). Mine is not good news. I’ve been pondering a good deal lately about the nature of online communication and whether, when we post something either good or bad, we are doing so in order to be informative or in order to garner accolades or condolences. I haven’t come up with an answer, but I have realized that, for me, the online world and the regular world have bled into each other so much that I can’t always separate out what happens in my real life into distinct parcels that fit neatly into pre-printed grids. I was always fairly good at coloring inside the lines when I was a kid, and I used to hate it when I made mistakes. Some years later, it seems to me as though mistakes are pretty much the currency we trade in, if we’re honest.

Friday afternoon, my godson, Phelim Andrew Thurston, the son of my oldest friend in the world, died suddenly. He was not quite eight months old.

When I was last in Iowa City, my mother, our friend Alice, and I held a baptism for Phelim in my mom’s house. I never got to take a formal picture of us all, and there are more pictures of Phelim’s older brother, Imriel, in that set than of Phelim himself, who was at that time still quite tiny and hooked up to a monitor. He was born prematurely and spent several weeks in the neo-natal intensive care unit, and some months after that connected to a monitor. He was given a clean bill of health after that, though, and seemed to be thriving. You can see him flirting with his mom in this little video.

I got the news Friday afternoon when I got home from work. Before dawn on Saturday I was in my car and headed to Worland, WY, where I got on an eighteen-seat plane with three passengers headed to Denver by way of Laramie. I got into Chicago that afternoon and was practically apoplectic at seeing gas for $4.39 a gallon on the cab ride to my grandmother’s, where I spent the night as I was exhausted beyond measure. It turned out to be just as well, since I wouldn’t have been able to leave that day anyway.

I generally fly to Chicago because it’s almost always cheaper than flying to Iowa, and in this case there was the added bonus that I’d be able to use my mother’s car, which was at my grandmother’s because my mother had left it there when she took the train out to Boston, where she’s spending a month learning about street ministry. The difficulty lay in the location of the keys to my mother’s car, which, after numerous phone calls (including one to Triple A to get the car unlocked, because at one point we thought the key was in it), we finally learned was on my cousin’s dresser in his apartment, which was all very well except that he was in Peoria for the weekend along with the other people who might have had a key to his place, and we had to wait until six o’clock last night for them to return so that we could get the key so that I could drive to Iowa City, which is only about three and half hours away. I got in late last night, after the extreme disappointment of stopping at the Mobil Mart in Rock Falls for a doughnut only to find that not only do they not have Krsipy Kreme doughnuts any more, they also had no doughnuts of any sort at all. (And Firefox, apparently, accepts donut but not doughnut. Gar.)

I’ll be here for a week, at least. I am extremely grateful to my director, Frances, for telling me to go ahead and take off and we’d figure out my timesheet later, and to my coworkers, for covering everything in my absence.

And thank you to all of you. Those on Twitter got this news a few days ago; this is the first time I’ve been able to sit still for long enough to write the rest of it down. If you are a praying sort, please say a prayer for Caitrin, my friend, for baby Phelim, and for Imriel, Ileana, and Delaney, his older brother and half-sisters, and Sam, Phelim and Imriel’s father. And thank you all, again.

Facebook is really making me wonder if I need to reevaluate my entire high school experience.

I did not like high school.  I spent as little time there as possible, but it was still far too much.  If I had to do it over again, I’d drop out the day I turned sixteen, take some college classes, read a lot, and get a GED.

But then, you see, I joined Facebook.  And then I started getting friend requests from people I knew in high school.  A few are people I was at least friendly with, but there are plenty of others I can scarcely remember, and some I remember actively disliking me.

Of course, Facebook is in part about gathering “friends,” and some people are heavily invested in getting their numbers up, and that may account for part of it.  And I have observed that people you know who haven’t seen you in a long time invariably treat you as a long-lost friend, regardless of how little they liked you back when.

A few weeks ago I got a message from a long-lost high school acquaintance in which said acquaintance mentioned that he’d always had a crush on me.  I did not date in high school.  I did not even come close.  I certainly didn’t think anyone came even close to harboring an affection for me.  But apparently I was wrong — and knowing that has made me start to wonder how many other impressions I had that were incorrect.  And that in turn leads me to wonder if I had a whole other possible high school existence, a sort of parallel track that I never found a way to hop on.  It’s almost enough to make me wish I could go back and do it again — but not quite enough.  I think I’d still hate gym class, lockers, bells, the smell of the cafeteria, and my AP English teacher.

I am surely the only person in America right now whose goal is to eat more meat. Yes, you heard that right. More meat.

People tend to assume that I am a vegetarian, although I’m not and never have been.  But it is true that for many years I ate little poultry and almost no red meat.  My reasons were mainly gustatory, as there was little meat that I really liked.  Environmental concerns also figured into the habit: Diet for a Small Planet and the More-with-Less Cookbook were around the house when I was a kid, and I read them.

So why the sudden change?  I have been very, very tired for several months, and the last time I went to give blood I was a little too anemic.  I eat very well and should in theory get plenty of protein from legumes and milk and iron from spinach, but I wondered, since suddenly I started to crave meat more often, if there might not be some crucial animal protein or other nutrient that my body was missing.

The second reason has to do with where I live.  We do not grow a lot of produce in Wyoming, especially at 6000 feet.  What we mostly grow are animals: things that can eat what passes for grass out here, with a side of sagebrush.  I’m not a hunter, so I don’t have a freezer full of elk and venison.  But I do have a store where I can buy local meat.

There are, of course, detrimental environmental consequences to raising cows in the arid west.  But are they any worse than the consequences of Midwestern feedlot beef pumped full of hormones and fed on corn?  And is the carbon footprint of a lamb or cow that came from a ranch within 50 miles of the store really greater than that of the eggplants and peppers and tomatoes that get shipped in from Chile?

I haven’t done the calculations, and so perhaps I’m wrong, but I would guess that it’s about a wash.  So last week I made my great-grandmother’s meatballs.  Tonight I sat down with a lamb chop, some mashed potatoes and parsnips, and some broccoli.  Later this week I’m going to make the dish my mother and I called simply “hamburger-spinach-egg-mushroom.”   And after that, perhaps lasagna.

And oh, did I mention? I’m also planting a garden.

I just upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.5 to the current version, which I believe is 2.3.3.  Yeah, I missed a few in there.  I’m also planning to play around with the theme some, so if you read this from the source rather than via aggregator, you may see some changes.

In other news, on Saturday, for the first time in my life, a candidate I caucused for won.  Wyoming Public Radio feels, for some reason, that telling you about its upcoming pledge drive (which, while very short, is unbearably annoying) is more important than telling you, oh, say, news, but happily NPR and the AP come through with the results, even down to the county.

I got to the caucus site about ten minutes before it started (under normal Wyoming circumstances, that would be early) to find a line to get in.  I didn’t even have to wait in line at the DMV when I got my Wyoming license; I rarely have to wait in lines at the grocery store.  I had a nice time chatting with my fellow registered Democrats, though, and one turned out to be a fellow librarian.  The organizers of this caucus had somehow missed the national press attention that Wyoming was getting in the days prior to the caucus, and they had thus booked a room that holds about 25 people.  There were about 300 people there, and so they had us crowd around the main floor and the balcony of the floor above.

Where I come from, a caucus means getting a bunch of people in a large room and saying, “Okay, if you’re for the woman, go over there; if you’re for the black dude, go over there.”  (And then, because it’s the first caucus in the nation, you get about ten more choices, which as you may imagine is why I have never before caucused for a winner.)  In this caucus, we still heard some speeches and endorsements, but then we filled out ballots sort of like this one and deposited them in a cardboard box with a hole cut in it.   After that, there may well have been more, but I’ve been ill and so I left to come back home and sleep before my week of Missoula Children’s Theatre (brought to you by the Park County Arts Council, of which I am a proud member) and Thinking Ahead (where I’m going to be talking about Radical Reference).

Although it was exciting to have voted for a winner, I am not really all that excited.  There’s enough background about what I think and who I’ve voted for elsewhere on this site.  Suffice it to say that, while the candidates whose positions I really admired have long since dropped out, I am trying to see that having either a woman or a person of color as a major party nominee (and, one hopes, as President) is a major symbolic step for this country and the world.

I was tagged.

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

He didn’t see América. She must be down one of the aisles pushing a basket. He tried to look nonchalant as he passed by the checkers and entered the vast cornucopia of the place.

The book is The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. I read it some years ago for my grandmother’s novel study group, and I’m supposed to be reading it for the library book discussion group on Wednesday. Since the reading I am supposed to do is always the last thing I want to read (even if it’s good), I had the book near my laptop to try to make myself pick it up. The meme has, I suppose, succeeded in making me do that, although I doubt I can get by on only eight sentences when the time for the discussion comes.

I try avoid tagging, as I was never fond of the game, but if you want to be It, go for it.

Update 2/20/08: I forgot to point out that, once again, this post is all the Hermits’ fault.
In 2003 and 2004 I was 27 and 28 years old and living in suburban Chicago. I was mostly unemployed; I was thoroughly directionless; and I was defensive, bitter, and not very happy.

Because I had a lot of time on my hands and high speed wireless internet and a laptop (the same one I’m typing this on now, actually), I read a lot of things online, including just about every article in the Life section of Salon.com. A lot of them bore a strong resemblance to Lori Gottlieb’s argument for settling for Mr. Good Enough instead of holding out for Mr. Perfect. The people who wrote for Salon were not necessarily giving the same advice that Gottlieb does, but they were writing about the same sorts of things, often from the same place–twenty- and thirty-something professional white woman considers the vicissitudes of romance.

Of course, I was also an upper middle class twenty-something white woman, only I didn’t have a profession, and what I thought when reading those pieces was mostly along the lines of “maybe I should just get married and have kids, because then I would have something to do.”

Having something to do is very much a feature of having children, from what I can tell–in fact, quite frequently parents are unable to do much of anything else–but it’s not a particularly good reason to have children, and so I think it’s just as well that I didn’t meet anyone I wanted to marry and I ended up going to library school and getting a job and fulfilling my dream of living in a small town in the West and traveling and hiking and blogging and other things that are more difficult to fit in if you have kids.

That takes care of the kids part, but what about the marriage part?

I’ve always figured that the chances of my marrying are slim to nonexistent. The marriage track record in my family is not very good–so much so that I once burst out laughing when a therapist suggested that in order to make my own relationships work I look to the successful relationships of close family. members and people I knew grewing up. And although, as Laurie Colwin points out in an essay in one of her books about food, you do not have to be beautiful or talented or even thin to fall in love, that entirely sensible argument is hard to uphold against the romantic comedy paradigm that is so heavily promoted by popular culture.

According to Gottlieb, if I tell you I’m not particularly worried about marriage, I’m either in denial or I’m lying. If I’d said that at 27, I would have been. At 32–when, in the world according to your biological clock, I should be more worried–I’m not.

The world according to your biological clock view promoted by the sort of professional white women who write articles like Gottlieb’s–and there are many, many such articles–is only one view of the world, and, however prevalent it may be, it’s not necessarily the best one.

I suspect that Gottlieb is right that your chances of finding Mr. Absolutely Right are pretty slim. The reality she doesn’t acknowledge, however, is that you might not find anybody at all–and that that, too, may be all right.

I did not, as a rule, attend athletic events when I was in high school. I went to the cross-town rivals football game my sophomore year, but since I got into the game by pretending to be a member of the opposing team’s art club, I’m not sure that counts. (The art club was painting faces at the game as a fundraiser, and my best friend went to that school.)

Since I moved to Meeteetse, though, I try to go to a few games. As a result, as I frequently tell people, I have gone to more sporting events since I moved here than in the entire thirty prior years of my life combined.

Basketball is my favorite sport to attend (a good thing, since it’s one of the few offered here), probably because it moves quickly and I even sometimes have some notion of what’s going on. I hadn’t been to a game yet this year, though, and I heard that tonight’s game would be a good one.

Games are well-attended here–I’ve only seen larger crowds at funerals. People quickly drop attending concerts and plays once their kids have graduated, but many of them still show up for games. Never having been to games elsewhere, I can’t offer much by way of comparison, although I imagine they are a lot the same–people yelling advice to the players and cursing the refs from the sidelines, teenagers clambering over one another and rearranging themselves according to complicated and esoteric teenage pecking order rules, little kids trying to see the action, parents trying to keep track of their little kids, and so on.
During half time I chatted with my neighbor from down the street, who asked if I’d made the cheese soup yet and said to come knock on his door if I needed a bottle of beer for it. He’s also trying to organize a moonlight ski for next month, but sadly I’ll be in Salt Lake City at a library conference.

The superintendent, one of the old school board members, and a couple of other guys are always standing and leaning against the wall with their arms crossed at these events. I told them at the school concert back in December that I was going to buy them all white t-shirts and packs of cigarettes to roll in their sleeves. “It’d send the wrong message about smoking, but it’d be such a great photo op,” I said. And I suppose the 50s image is appropriate for these small town moments and small town games.

We started out strong but lost by 11 points. There are a few more games to go, though–perhaps I’ll even make it to another.