Houses I Used to Live in, Baths in the Sink, and New Skills

About six months ago, I was driving my mother around.  (She is 93 and has dementia, and she likes to take drives and look at pretty neighborhoods and trees.)  On a lark, I drove her to the street where I knew she and my father had rented a house when they first moved to the Bay Area.  It was the house in which I was born 56 years ago.

We drove up the street.  My mother looked out the window intently, oohing and aahing at the beautiful trees shading each house.  “Lordy!” she whispered repeatedly, followed by “Vey iz mir!,” which is Yiddish for “Holy crap!”  But she didn’t recognize any of the houses as being the one she and my father had lived in.

We reached the end of the street and turned around.  She oohed and aahed some more, but I could tell that nothing looked familiar.  She often has a blank look these days. It’s common in those with dementia.  “I don’t remember,” she whispered over and over.

Then, at the corner, as we were about to turn onto the main boulevard through town, she gasped.  I looked over at her.  The blankness was gone.  She was pointing.  “That’s it!” she cried.  “That’s the house!”

The house on the corner was a ranch house, updated to resemble the others on the street, but I could see a small area of painted-over brick that looked older.  And the gate to the back of the house had a heart-shaped cut-out in it that also looked to be from another era.  I pulled over to the curb.

“That’s it!” my mother marveled.  “I remember!  I remember that window,” she said, pointing.  “It’s the kitchen.  I used to give you baths in the sink!”

I confess to feeling emotional when she said it.  As regular readers of my blog know, my mother has been angry with me for almost two years, since I took her car away.  She forgets everything these days—what month it is, what day of the week, my kids’ names—but she never forgets that.

So to know that some aspect of my babyhood was important enough, or meaningful enough, or pleasant enough to have escaped the fog of dementia that is eating away at her brain was inordinately gratifying to me.

We have talked about that day often over the last few months.  “Remember when we saw our old house?” she always asks. There is a hint of triumph in her voice.  She wants me to acknowledge this feat for what it is, even as she refuses to admit that there is anything physically wrong with her.

Look what I found last week:

There I am at age 14 1/2 months, about three weeks before my brother was born.  (I know

because the date—September 1, 1958—is carefully inscribed on the back, in my father’s meticulous hand.)   I recognize that little cup on the window sill: my mother still has it. 

  

I also like that I look happy, maybe even gleeful.  Sometimes, in old pictures, I am unsmiling.  I look worried (clearly attempting to perfect what would turn out to be a lifelong condition).  But not here.

I couldn’t wait to show the picture to my mother.  I drove up to see her, as I do most weeks.  When I got her in the car, I showed it to her.  “Look at this!” I said.

My mother took the photograph from me.  “Oh!” she said.  I could tell that it didn’t mean anything to her, that she was hoping by pretending to understand what I was trying to show her, she could fool me into believing that she knew what I was getting at.

“Mom, remember our old house that we drove by?  The one you remembered, the one where you gave me a bath in the sink!  Here I am!  In the sink!  Right here!”

But she had that blank look again.

“I remember that house,” she said.  Then she pointed at the photograph.  “But who is this?”

“It’s me.  When I was a baby!”

She looked confused.  “Is this…your daughter?”

I could feel my happiness draining away, replaced by the sense of now-familiar hopelessness, of time slipping away, of anger at the relentlessness of this horrible, horrible disease.

“No, Mom.  It’s me.”

“Oh.”  She looked at it briefly.  “It’s very nice.”  Then she said, “You don’t want me to keep it, do you?”

“If you want to have it, I’d love to give it to you.”

“No,” she said mildly, handing it back.  “No, I don’t think so.”

We had a lovely day.  I drove her through the town in which I went to high school.  It’s another place she lived, another old address of which she has no memory.  “Lordy,” she breathed, looking up at the stately homes.

One of the things I’m learning about myself as I try to escort my mother through this process is that I’m a big explainer.  I’m always trying to tell people things, and to make things clearer when I don’t feel I’ve been properly understood.

I kind of like this about myself.  I value being forthright, being (relatively) transparent, being able to describe and elucidate the world in such a way that it makes sense to myself and to others. 

It makes me a good writer.

But right now, it doesn’t make me a good daughter.

So I’m trying to adjust, trying to learn new skills.  Last week, as we drove through one of the many towns in which I lived with my mother, I practiced saying things like, “Look at that tree, Mom!” and “Look at that house!”  I smiled a lot.  And I tried not to look worried.

On Old Cookbooks

I am a decent enough cook.  Here’s the peach tart I made for the Fourth of July this year:

I love to follow recipes, but am terrible at making things up as I go, which I think is the hallmark of a great cook.  Also, I’m lazy about buying tools.  But I do have a nice, big kitchen to work in, and since giving up wheat almost three years ago, I’ve had plenty of incentives to improve my skills.

I used to love looking through cookbooks, and I still do, but I’ve discovered a new fascination with quirky, almost-homemade, self-published cookbooks, especially from people (usually women) who live on farms.  I especially love them if they’re older.  I don’t necessarily make things from these cookbooks, but I love the glimpses into other lives and other eras.

Case in point: the recipe entitled “Greco,” from Make It Now—Bake It Later!, by Barbara Goodfellow, written (yes, written!  Like, in pen!) in 1958.  Described as “inexpensive and different!,” Greco is a casserole comprised of chopped onion, green pepper, 2 small cans of mushrooms (oy), shell macaroni, tomato sauce, a can of cream-style corn (oy again), and a pound of ground round.

First of all, I love that in 1958, this was “different.”  Also, I love that “macaroni” is an ingredient.  (Apparently, “pasta” as a catch-all term didn’t exist back then.)  And mushrooms in cans!  Creamed corn!

 

In my head, I’m imagining all the mid-century mothers getting this casserole together early in the day so they could exercise along with Jack LaLanne, pick up their husbands’ dry cleaning, and get to the ironing.  And it all takes place in black and white, and no one is actually poor, and everyone lives in the house that Wally and the Beave lived in, which is to say that I know I’m thinking in outdated stereotypes and I know 1958 wasn’t really like this.  But such is the fantasy occasioned by the cookbook.  Worth the fifty cents it cost me at a used-book store years ago.

Or consider MeMa’s Manna 2: Simply Easy, Budget-Wise Recipes.  (There was an earlier MeMa’s Manna, but the general store in which I found this one was sold out of it.)  Purchased in a small town in Missouri several years ago, it features recipes designed to help “young mothers and working people that are so busy.”  MeMa (aka Mary Boll) writes in the preface, “I grew up in the most wonderful time.  Life was slow, I was allowed to be a child.  We went to town on Saturday night.  No one was scared to walk around the square by themselves.  We never locked a door on the car or in the house.  We never heard of “pot” or drugs.  That was something to cook beans in, or medicine for a cold.”

I confess to finding MeMa’s recollections enchanting, if almost certainly selective.  I did not grow up in “the most wonderful time,” but I share her longing for safety and simplicity.  And I understand what she doesn’t quite say: that our memories of childhood are so often inextricably linked to the food made by someone who loved us.

Recipes in this collection are interspersed with sentimental verse and advice (“Be careful how you live.  You may be the only Bible some people read.”)  Most of these recipes aren’t for me (Jan Lewis’s “Easy Unusual Cake” contains “1 box angel food cake mix” and “1 can lemon pie filling, or any kind”), but I enjoyed reading them and remembering the little town where I bought the book.  There is indeed a town square.  It looked quite safe to my big-city eyes, but I saw it during the light of day.  Perhaps at night, it is crawling with crack heads.

My favorite self-published cookbook to date is Cooking Through the Decades: Authentic Recipes From the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, by Alice Kertesz (available on Kindle).  Part cookbook, part memoir, the book is a charming peek into Ms. Kertesz’s early life, which was spent in rural Wisconsin.  Her mother collected recipes from other farm wives, some of whom collected water from pumps on their back porches, cooked on wood stoves, and kept milk cool in their cellars because they didn’t have refrigerators. 

Many of the recipes in this collection were given to Ms. Kertesz by the farm wives with whom she lived when she was a young teacher.  In the thirties, apparently, teachers didn’t make enough money to live on their own, and apartments were nearly unknown in rural America.  Instead, young teachers stayed with farm families, often helping out in the kitchen after the school day was over. 

I was so charmed by this book’s stories, as I was by many of the recipes: Pineapple Pie, Prune Icebox Cookies, Radio Pudding (so named because radio technology was new and it was thought that the name gave the dish a certain modern cachet), Oatmeal Pie, Mrs. Eng’s Pastel Jelly Frosting, Ketchup Cake.  I tried the Caramel Layer Cake for the Fourth of July and it was a dismal failure (I screwed up the frosting), but I’ve made the Peanut Crunch Fudge Cake, and it was delicious.  (I haven’t gotten up the nerve to try Ketchup Cake, but I’m planning on it.)

As I was throwing the caramel frosting into the sink the other night, I thought about why I have put the effort into trying these recipes, some of which contain very vague instructions more appropriate to a wood stove than to my Kitchenaid.  My mother was an indifferent cook: she didn’t enjoy cooking and didn’t much care what she put on the table each night.  In this (and in much else), she was very different from Alice Kertesz, who loved cooking for her family and went to great lengths to perfect her skills. 

When I bake one of Alice’s cakes, I become the beneficiary of her expertise, her experiences, and, most of all, her memories: of threshing, of plucking duck feathers, of teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, of making the first dessert for her future husband (Chocolate Nautilus Rolls).  I feel connected to her and the way of life she once knew, which no longer exists in this country.  In short, I am trying to claim a family history for myself that is warmer and cozier than the one I have naturally inherited. 

Lest you feel sorry for me, consider this passage from Ms. Kertesz’s book, keeping in mind that she is of sturdy Midwestern stock and would undoubtedly look askance at anyone who might try to suggest she was poorly parented (or at anyone who would use the word “parented,” for that matter):

                I started baking cakes because I wanted a birthday cake so badly.  My mother never made me a cake and I never knew why my birthday was ignored.  I began looking at and collecting cake recipes as a young woman.

        I recall one incident that happened when I was in the third grade (must have been about 1927).  A girl named Lola Nelson came to school in a new dress and stockings, carryng a new lunch box.  She told the other kids, “This is the new dress I got for my birthday and these are my new stockings.  This is my new lunch box…”  She opened it and inside was a huge wedge of cake.  “This,” she said, holding up the cake, “is what’s left of my birthday cake.”  I remember especially envying her the delicious-looking cake.

My mother didn't know how to bake a cake from scratch, but she always made me one for my birthday. It was always chocolate and always lopsided. And I always loved it.

Talking Small

When I began to date after my divorce, I cried every night.  Just the idea of dating made me sick.  I attributed this to the fact that dating involves small talk, and I loathed making small talk

Small talk—the polite social banter in which you engage with people you hardly know—shouldn’t be so hard.  It’s fairly formulaic.  You commiserate about the weather, say you love someone’s shoes, ask what someone does for a living.  It’s not intellectually challenging.  And yet I hate it, for two reasons: 1) I don’t really care about the things that get talked about and find it exhausting to have to pretend as though I do, and 2) I always worry that I’m terrible at it.

After only two or three dates, I came to realize that my worry was unfounded.  It turns out that I am a spectacular small talker.  I am a genius at small talk, a Rhodes Scholar of inane queries, polite laughter, and feigned interest.

 

My dates, on the other hand, were morons in the small-talk department.  From the man who informed me that he didn’t have any male friends because he was so good-looking, to the virulent anti-Semite, to the gentleman who confided via telephone that he was wearing a thong under his Versace suit, they were all sadly inept at the art of graceful, innocuous conversation.

 

Fortunately, a tall, handsome man asked me out, talked about his family in a way that was both fascinating and appropriate, and kissed me in the elevator down to the parking lot.  My dating days were over.

So why am I thinking about small talk?

 

Yesterday I went for a walk through my neighborhood and encountered an unfamiliar woman about my age throwing a ball for her dog.  The dog was darling, and I smiled as I passed them.  The woman smiled back at me wanly.  Then she looked me up and down and said, with equal parts condescension and weariness, “I see you walking a lot.  You’re always so good to yourself.”

Her tone indicated she was taking me to task, as if walking was a self-indulgence that was interfering with all the cancer-curing I was supposed to be doing.   Apparently no one ever schooled her in the finer points of small talk, the most important of which is, Be nice.

As I walked on, I started thinking about middle school.

Middle schoolers are notoriously bad at small talk.  In the first place, they haven’t yet learned the nuanced distinctions between pleasantries (“Who do you have for Algebra?”) and heartfelt confessions (“I, like, hate her.”) 

Also, middle schoolers are assholes.  And I say this as someone who has spent the better part of my adulthood writing books for this segment of the population, mainly because I love them.  But, come on.  We all know it.  (And if you are a middle schooler reading this, you know it better than anyone.)

Middle schoolers are at the mercy of other middle schoolers.  They don’t know from nice.  (Okay, some of them do.  Some of them can make you cry with their sweetness.)  They say unspeakable things to and about each other.  Moreover, when a middle schooler is unspeakably spoken to, she doesn’t have an arsenal of coping tools at her disposal.  (As one gets older, these may include hanging up phones, pretending not to care, and saying mean things about one’s tormenter in one’s blog.)  She may cry, or tell her mother, or swear.  (Older people do these things, too, but not as well.)  But she will feel victimized and wretched, and she will not understand why anyone has cause to be so mean.

So as much as I hate small talk, it does serve a purpose.  It allows us to connect to strangers without saying hateful things about their eye makeup or inadvertently divulging the details of our own battles with bulimia.   And we can go to cocktail parties and high school reunions knowing we are likely safe from everyone’s inner seventh grader, who is just dying to bust out and tell us how, like, fat our ankles are.

As for my neighbor?  I know she meant well.

And a little cosmetic dentistry couldn't hurt.

And the Livin' Is Easy

In general, I am not a summer gal.  By this I mean that I detest heat, am indifferent to ice cream, and long ago gave up my preferred warm-weather activity, which involved slathering Johnson’s Baby Oil on myself and lying in the sun.

To me, summer has always been a time of lassitude and boredom.  I liked school and always noticed that late June was accompanied by a profound sense of missing something.  I felt incomplete, at a loss.  I yearned for routine, which is embarrassing, because most people crave excitement and distraction.  But there it is.

 

Of course, I’ve been out of school for a long time, but even now I am bedeviled by that sense of absence. So I’ve decided, in my plodding, methodical, routinized way, to make a list of all the things that make summer pleasurable for me:

         Fog:  I live near a coastline and, somewhat paradoxically, our summers are replete with foggy days.  Fog enables me to exercise without passing out, wear chunky knits, and make soup.

         Road trips:  Robert and I like to get in the car and drive on unfamiliar roads without knowing where we will end up.  Even though I have lived in California for all but seven years of my life, I still find lots of unexplored terrain, complete with back-road diners, dive bars, and Mexican-restaurants-qua-biker-hangouts.

         Kids: Until about a month ago, at least one of my adult children was in school.  Summer meant seeing them, and occasionally housing them.  The housing part is over, but I still get to see them now and again.  Summer weather makes it easier for me to navigate a perilous highway for a quick lunch or dinner, during which time I harangue them about various life choices and leave them thrilled to be living on the other side of a mountain range from me.

         Lettuce: We have a vegetable garden in summer.   Just reading this last sentence is astounding to me, as I have always loathed all aspects of gardening and preferred to buy whatever I wanted to eat at the store.  Living where we do, though, has compelled in me a change of heart.  I marvel at our small patch of lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, squash, and potatoes, nurtured from seedling-hood, now healthily leafy (except the squash, which I think might be dead).  Vegetables from the garden taste better than anything you can buy.  The smell of a tomato just-plucked from its vine is evidence of divinity.

        Books: I seem to read more in the summer, possibly a vestigial response to the absence of school.  Right now I’m reading Philip Roth’s THE HUMAN STAIN, which I always avoided because the title sounded icky.  What a mistake.  The best kind of writing.  Nothing beats a long summer evening with a good  book, except, perhaps, a long winter evening with a good book, but only because the latter includes a fire in the fireplace and tea.

        Food: In summer, I make lemonade (with Meyer lemons growing outside the kitchen door).  I make fried chicken (which I know is bad for me, but so what, it’s only for a few months, so don’t start).  I make tarts with nectarines and peaches.  I make Italian rice salad a la Marcella Hazan.   Not big on grilling, but I will say that a Polish dog eaten while cheering on the A’s makes me inordinately happy.

        Fourth of July: Our town hosts a hilarious parade.  I make fried chicken and lemonade.  At night, fireworks on the beach.  ‘Nuff said.

        Trips: None currently planned.  Also, we mostly travel in the spring and fall.  But I seem to start thinking about travel during the summer.  Currently on my mind: a trip to Philadelphia and other points east next May.

That’s it for the time being.  Enough to remind me that there is much to be happy about even when it’s stinking hot and the tourists clog up the beach and all the movies suck.

On Good Teachers

Last week, my son and daughter went to a retirement party for their second-grade teacher.

Karen Noel is one of those teachers everyone wishes she’d had, and into whose class every parent angled to get her child.  She is smart and wise, crazy funny, and, maybe most importantly, she knew exactly who every kid in her class was.  She made every day a blast, and yet somehow she managed to brook no nonsense.  And the kids all knew it and loved her anyway.

She had lots of stories to tell us parents.  (To me: “Do you know what your son did today?  He asked me how old I was!  And when I told him, he thought for a second and then said, ‘You’re eleven years older than my mom’!”)  She made us understand that she saw our children as they really were and adored them just that way, as they were meant to be.  (“Your daughter is exactly like you,” she told me once.  “Are you kidding?  She’s nothing like me,” I said.  Karen [eyes closed, exhausted by my silliness]: “She is exactly like you.”)

For years, Karen directed the school musical, in which fourth- and fifth-graders displayed their budding thespian skills.  My son was the Beast in fourth grade (despite Mrs. Noel’s assertion that he sang “in the key of H”) and the Tin Man in fifth.  My daughter was Fagin in fourth grade and Ruth (in The Pirates of Penzance) in fifth.  If you have never seen pre-teens put on Gilbert and Sullivan, you have no idea how spectacular it can be when someone wise and compassionate and insistent on doing one’s best directs it.

Most of us remember our worst teachers.  (Mine were, in order of increasing suckitude, 1) a lovely man who let us watch cartoons and game shows in sixth grade; 2) a very learned professor from a neighboring college who delivered the same lecture two days in a row, probably because he was roaring drunk; and 3) my tenth-grade geometry teacher, who picked his nose all day, every day.)

 

But our favorite teachers commandeer a special place in our memories.  (Mine was Jim Killian, who has become a lifelong friend.) We get weepy when we remember them, and we feel unable to make clear to other people just how marvelous they were.  My theory about this is that school (and possibly life in general) is terrifying and grueling and intimidating and just plain hard.  And when you are young, you can be cowed by that, to the point where you don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning.  But a great teacher changes all that, if only for a year.  And we can’t seem to find enough grand words with which to express our gratitude.

(Mr. Killian, you made every day of high school an adventure and a joy, and you are always in my heart, no matter how often we try to call each other and end up getting sent to voicemail.)

Mrs. Noel was given a proper send-off by the community whose children she nurtured and loved as if they were her own.  Lots of kudos; lots of testimonials; lots of love.  But I’m willing to bet that when my kids talk about her (as they will all their lives), they will say something like, “She was just amazing,” and then be at a loss as to how to convey what she really meant to them.

Elinor Lipman (Almost) Sent Me a Direct Message on Twitter

Elinor Lipman is a writer I’ve loved for a long time.  She writes comedies of manners that are at once gentle, scathing, and hilarious, among them THEN SHE FOUND ME, ISABEL’S BED, THE INN AT LAKE DIVINE, THE WAY MEN ACT, and THE PURSUIT OF ALICE THRIFT. She is a Jewish Jane Austen (the author with whom she is most often compared), an astute observer of modern experience and sensibility.

I’ve read most of her books.  I’ve gone to several of her readings.  And I follow her on Twitter.  She is, in fact, one of the few celebrities I follow, along with several other authors, Lena Dunham, and a couple of reality TV housewives who don’t yell too much.  I’m not sure if Elinor Lipman thinks of herself as a celebrity—I’m willing to bet that she doesn’t—but I have decided that as one of my favorite contemporary writers, she qualifies, whether she likes it or not.

So you can imagine how I felt when I woke up yesterday morning, checked my e-mail, and came across the subject line reading “Elinor Lipman Sent You a Direct Message on Twitter.”  It was comparable to the way my daughter would feel if she were sitting at a bar and Benedict Cumberbatch sidled over and asked if he could buy her a drink.

Delirious.  I was delirious.

My fingers shaking, I opened the e-mail.  In the split second that elapsed before it appeared on-screen, I tried to imagine what Elinor Lipman could possibly want to talk to me about.  I teased myself with various scenarios: she had stumbled on my blog and wanted to let me know that my musings mirrored her own.  Perhaps she was a closet middle-grade fiction reader who had come across PRETTIEST DOLL and THE HARD KIND OF PROMISE and just had to tell me how compelling she found them.  Or maybe she had just laughed at one of my tweets.  Not as exciting as the prospect of being able to discuss literary craft, but then, who was I to complain?  The important thing—the thrilling thing—was that Elinor was reaching out to me.

And then, I read the text of her e-mail: “Someone is starting a rumor about you,” it read, followed by a link.

Technologically naïve, I nonetheless realized it was highly improbable that anyone would be starting rumors about me likely to have commanded Elinor Lipman’s attention.  I reluctantly deleted the e-mail without opening the link.  To be sure, I checked my Twitter feed. Moments before, Elinor had indeed tweeted that she had been hacked, and that she was sorry.

I thought about it all morning: my excitement, followed almost immediately by disappointment and a return to the gloomy state of being entirely unknown to Elinor Lipman.  I cheered myself with the realization that if I was ecstatic at the possibility of direct contact with a writer I love, then surely others feel the same way.   I allowed myself to imagine all the readers on Twitter searching out their favorite authors, scanning their feeds each morning, hoping for the tenuous sense of connection that a tweet provides.  And that struck me as an encouraging, even a glorious state of affairs.

A nice way to start the week.

Shaking Things Up

I tend to like routine.  I find it comforting and also conducive to productivity.  But lately I’ve noticed in myself a discomfiting willingness to try new things.  Here are a few:

·      Spin class: My Achilles tendinitis became so uncomfortable that I was forced to take a break from running.  The Bike Dojo in Santa Cruz (across the street from The Happy High Herb Shop) offers great classes with instructors who manage to be high-energy without being peppy.  I hate peppy.

·      Words with Friends: Robert and I try to keep a running game of online Scrabble going, but my friend Sue recently introduced me to WWF, and now I’m hooked.  Yes, it’s exactly like Scrabble, but the simple fact that it goes by a different name qualifies it as a shake-up in the natural order.

·      Neck cream: I am not a lotion-y kind of gal, but middle-age neck sag is upon me, and Dr. Perricone’s products kept appearing on my Facebook feed.  On the plus side: Robert says I smell clean (which is worrisome only if I allow myself to imagine that he means I didn’t before).  On the negative side: some doctors think the ingredients cause cancer.  I will probably stop using it because of this, but I’m going to give myself credit for having tried.

·      Pushups: I have been working with weights for years, but I have always resisted doing pushups because: 1) they seem manly and 2) they are hard.  However, I am now doing them.  I can actually do a lot of them.  I hate them.  Doing them while “Modern Family” and “Mad Men” are on helps.

·      Sugar: I am giving it up.  Sort of.  By this I mean that I am trying not to eat all the Milky Way bars with which I consoled myself after I gave up eating wheat.  And I’ve stopped putting brown sugar on my oatmeal.  And when I bake a cake, I don’t eat giant spoonfuls of frosting out of the bowl.  Baby steps.

·      Mozart: I’ve always loved classical music, but I stopped listening to it because it reminded me of my father and made me sad.  But recently I remembered that years ago, a psychic told me that my spirit guide (named Anthony, a fact which made me think at the time that the psychic saw the name “Gina” and just pulled something Italian out of her ass) recommended that I work while listening to Mozart.  So I’ve been doing that.  I like it.

The biggest new thing that I’m doing is writing a middle-grade fantasy.  I have never written a fantasy before.  All my books have been about contemporary children dealing with contemporary problems.  A fantasy novel requires different skills, different emphases.  I have to make characters talk less and do more.  It’s a challenge.

(I should add that the psychic was remarkably prescient about a whole host of things.  Knowing only my first name, she told me that I was a writer, that I would live near the sea, and that someone I know casually would eventually have a host of very unusual and specific problems.  So I do believe that Anthony is watching out for me.  Maybe someday he’ll do something about the pushups.)