Crossroads (working title)

The story always starts this way.  Sitting in an airport.  Running away. Running home. It is never clear which it is when it is happening, not even after the fact, I guess.   That prescient clarity can be left to Sam, my best friend.  The one who always knows exactly what mistake I am perilously in the process of making- by default-- and stands by, smirking with a mix of satisfied self-importance and chagrin.  She doesn’t  really like to see me fall flat on my face, yet she is always there to scoop me up off the cement, when I have melted down into nothing but a puddle.  But that’s another story.

This story, like I said, starts at the airport, like so many others.  Infinite impossibility, a blue horizon, heartache that has no name on which to hang itself, as if the curved pegs by the childhood cubbies that contained a universe.  It would be comforting to be able to hang that heartache on something other than my own impulse to run, always run.  Away? Home?

So, I’m fleeing the south and the dark cloud that hangs over its sons of privilege…. Fleeing the pain of dark eyes averted and world-weariness, testimony and scripture, bone-crushing work and rapture.  Fleeing the unabashed indifference to systemic injustice.  Slavery is alive and well.  I do not belong here, I think.  And still my stomach churns and my heart races, and I melt into that warm, strong embrace, contrasting skin, terse and velvet, course burlap.   Incompatible upbringings.  But how can it all end, just like that? That’s the part I want to skip to, flip through the pages with maddening speed, eyes flying over the neatly aligned type, to decipher some sort of order, some sort of meaning in all of this nebulous, idiotic feeling.

No.  The story can’t start here, I think.  The airport is trite, cliché, it is a commonplace too common even for someone contemplating selling their soul for a guitar-playing genius.  I don’t even like the metaphor of an endlessly spinning hub, a wheel whose spokes strike out, one after another until there is nothing but the dull hum, the droning that lulls you to sleep as the motor roars and the metallic body lurches, and your heart stops, for a second and you are totally, completely, one-hundred percent inside yourself, inside the moment… in the radical present.  It is rarely achievable, and so I try to put words to my story, her story.

Any story that will keep my mind off the man whose bones I crushed under my tires, the dead thud of his flesh against my bumper, the sickening crunch of his bones.  It was dark. He came out of nowhere. I tell myself this, but I flee anyway, hoping that in the air the dead cant’ haunt me.  For a moment. 

Giving thanks

Travel is rarely innocent. At least not in my case. I refuse to take simple trips that don't satisfy multiple needs on multiple levels.

My most recent trips include a jaunt across the country, with the girl, for a yearly conference at my Alma mater, which, served also to drive the last nail into the coffin of my dying hopes, and permanently slam the door shut on my wounded heart. Alas.

Not barely did I recover from this whirlwind trip down memory lane, hearty laughter, soul-splitting tears, and a myriad of other emotions that ran the gamut, I jumped in a car, four days later, to do a marathon drive to Pennsylvania to support Paul, in the hour of his father's passing.

Inadvertently, or by cosmic design, the trip also served to wander through the town that was once mine, that I once tramped along in endless teenage boredom, and where my formative memories occurred. I showed my girl the houses where I grew up (so to speak, I believe I am still growing... I hope!) Paul and I used to lie with our backs on the hot summer asphalt, still baking hours after the sun had gone down, and would stare up at the throbbing universe, talking until the early hours of the morning. I was struck by a deep desire to belong to something. To believe in something. Sadly, I can't. But it was both touching, and heart-wrenching to see how much comfort there can be in a shared belief system. Perhaps, I thought, that is why I often feel orphaned.

And still, I managed to make more mistakes in my personal life in only the 8 days before Thanksgiving, and risk utter emotional melt-down. But, I forewent "going fetal" because, well, because there was just too much shit to be done, and places to go.

As luck would have it, my major anxiety living here in Virginia, and wandering far and wide, is that I don't know where I am going. Nothing is familiar. It doesn't matter how many times I drive through Richmond, every damn time, I manage to take a slightly different route, and yet, none of them stick. Even this morning, after the exhausting, albeit mildly amusing scenario, I still managed to get a little lost... but now, thanks to little I.'s loss of her phone on the way back from Santa Barbara, I was able to buy myself, to concede that I needed, a so-called smart phone. Grateful. Yes.

So Tuesday, I taught my class, and came home, managed to remember to bring my plants in so to save them from the impending freezes, and turn off the heating system for our travels, and I left by 6 pm, planning to head to the Trader Joe's in Glen Allen (yes, we haven't convinced ourselves that we are not Californian yet, and there are still some products, primarily child lunch products: cane-sugar lemonade, flax-seed peanut butter, reduced-sugar jam, sparkly water... that we have not been able to substitute out.) I successfully navigated to the store, purchased required goods and had plenty of time to get to the train station, but 10 minutes away, when... disaster strikes. A light drizzle began, moments before I stopped at an intersection and my brakes simply failed to work... my car, moving slow as it was, sliding 10 feet and caroming the car in front another 5 feet. Damage? Minimal. Aggravation, slightly greater. Exhaustion, spiritual and physical. Complete.

There it was, one more time where I was thinking, "why am I doing this to myself? Why am I always in charge of everything?" I felt a great surge of resentment at being an adult. Alone. In a place where there is no one who will even know I'm missing for at least three or four days. I was grateful to the officer for being expedient and grateful for managing to get to the train on time, despite some side-street confusion. Grateful even for the lulling, lurching chug of the train that took us from Virginia to Florida. Grateful more, even, for the fact that the 5 hour delay (making our travel time a whopping 17 hours) was caused by tires on the track that mucked up the engine, rather than a desperate human who had thrown herself into the abyss... and grateful that we had not been derailed or injured.

Thanksgiving itself, was, as always, a treasure. This year, in particular because Kirsten and my parents are all living in the same town and we hosted at Karen and Bill's house, but more so because Steve and Kirsten announced their engagement. Kirsten and I were able to sneak off on day three to wander by the Castillo, enjoy the lights over the harbor, talk in ways that are only possible in person, and with no child-with-large-ears in the next room... I also saw my grandmother and aunt and uncle, who I haven't seen, in person, for several years... I helped, in my small way, to sort through stuff at my parents' new abode, and tried to not break down and cry every night, when I was alone in my room (well, alone, with a sleeping child wrapped around me).

Right now travel just feels like running ahead of the black dogs that are chasing me, and I know that if I stop, for even a moment, they will be biting at my heels, breathing down my neck, tearing me apart. So I keep going. And the return train was only 3 hours late, and I didn't miss work, but I did arrive at 7:30 am to find that my battery had been completely drained.

And there I realize that these are lessons in humility. I can't do it all myself. I don't really think I ever believed I could, but there are these reminders that I have NO choice but to ask for help, and so I did. And the station manager gave me a jump with the cables that I don't travel without, and before he left me, he gave me his card and promised to come get me anywhere if were stuck on my way home. (A very generous gesture indeed, since I was driving over an hour away). So, while it could be said that I had more eventfulness than expected, I certainly can't complain.

I am home, I made it to teach class on time with a whole 15 minutes to stop at my house and shower, and I am in one piece. Healthy, if not entirely happy. And not alone.

El tiempo pasa

Driving out of the dense valley forest, we arrived at the wind-ravaged coast line. California I whisper, under my breath, trying not to be in love, to calm the trembling in my soul and the queasy dizziness in my solar plexus. The oak-dappled golden-grass hills roll out before us, the redwoods, their secret groves, quiet, dark, suspended in fern-green eternity.

We shiver and snap photos. Still images frozen so I cannot, will not forget. I'll be back I promise, as if to a lover, one that will feel my lack in his bones, but I'm not sure. When will I be back? I want to shout out my query to the crashing blue-green waves. Earlier in the morning, naked and wet in the sulfurous springs, "welcome back to the womb" the women had laughed and smiled, we splashed in the early morning sunshine, our breasts floating on the edge of the filmy water, the sun shone down, a smiling mother. It was damn near perfection.

Has it come to this? I hold my breath. Up and down the coast, up and down... I hold my breath and then exhale, feel tensions building, chase them away, grabbing at the joy, as if they were his hands in the throes of a passion that is maybe only uni-directional? I don't know. The darkness comes and chases away my sleep, my sweetness is only a mask, a trick of mirrors and smoke, of light reflected off the water. I feel deformed, bereft. Sleep does not come easily.

The day before, swimming against the current, in a river with no one around. I smile at my dearest friend. Of course it isn't over, I assure myself. But I know I lie, I am always lying to myself, how to disentangle the truth from its exact inverse?

So I let the water wash over my body, my eyes devour the landscape of the hills and valleys, his chest rising and falling, trace the lines of his face, the angles of his collarbone as it meets his shoulder. I shudder. I am alone. I am leaving. California, don't make me go. I beseech the air, no one at all, myself. Don't make me leave the possibility of... I recognize, of course, that this is a tragedy of my own making.

I shake it off and muscle through. Still, though I pretend, I am so afraid. Frightened of the unknown, of the radical loneliness that awaits in the overwhelming greenery. Scared of dying alone. Too young? he tells me, and I smile ruefully. Too young to fear a lonely death? This is death, leaving the golden grass, the ocean, the sharp angles of mountains cutting the sky, my heart, in pieces, pieces that were never mine to begin with.

But life is good, too, I am reminded. Impossible beauty, here whenever I need it. This is here, California will still be here, waiting for me with her open arms. I can't fight for what I can't take with me, I can just offer my body up in sacrificial shudders of pleasure and pain, wracking my body, in rolling waves of grain and salty sea-water, endless rows of entwined grapes that embrace the foothills, wind whipping hair into obstinately intricate tangles. I close my eyes, I don't know what comes next, I let go, floating out into the dark night, the stars pulsing in distant patterns that I cannot decipher. I begin to fall, and hope that the landing will not smash my bones into a thousand tiny shards. Perhaps...

Last day of classes

Today is my last day of teaching. As a graduate student. I'll likely be a teacher the rest of my life, try as I might to swerve from my vocation. Its laughable, really, to think of myself as anything but a teacher, when you consider that as a 12 year old, in homeroom, when most people just desperately wanted to fit in, I refused to let people copy my homework and instead offered to help them do theirs. Can anyone say, nerd? Alright, I'll say it. I was that girl that hung out with my dorky, crazy-haired, nostrils-flairing physics-teaching homeroom teacher, and borrowed a purloined copy of "A Room of One's Own" instead of wearing make-up, or primping, gum-popping, gossiping with my cohort. I guess I've always been a bit out of step with my age-group. Meh.

Then there was the time that my creative writing teacher in Mexico told me that one day I'd be a great writer and docente. I still recall the perplexed look on my face, "not me," I claimed, "I don't want to teach." Nevertheless, there I was, just over a year later, pumping breast milk in a corner of my shared office, and teaching 5 high school classes a day, while finishing my last college class. I fled that first job, claiming to despise the profession, but one year later, I was back for more, sought out by others for jobs I never expected to love.

In any case, over the years I have come to terms with my lot in life. I am an innate teacher, I can't help myself from expounding on matters of interest while waiting in line at the grocery store, or haggling at the farmer's market, or sitting in a movie theater, having attempted to immerse myself in film-going solitude. There is little in this world that is more rewarding than the surprise notes (that are, of course, few and far between) from students whose lives you have touched, and who have reached out to thank you, or to tell you that they still hear your voice in their head telling them not to give up, offering an alternate solution.

So, this seemingly unimportant milestone is of special import to me. The end of an era. The beginning of a new one. How do I mark it? By getting up at 6 and making a tortilla española for my class because I promised them an authentic dish to celebrate and study on our last day together. I guess it wouldn't matter, you know, if I didn't mark the passing of our time together with some gesture of gratitude, or warmth, but, well, these kids, especially, were a particularly wonderful group of human beings. And I got back from them at least as much as I put into the class.

So, because I was on top of things this morning, I even had time to make my small person's lunch before she was up and about (a veritable miracle), and instead of the perennial stresses of us sleep-lovers, we had a lovely exchange.

"Why do I love you so much?" I call up to her, "Do you know?"
"I know," she giggles back down to me, and pauses for effect, "Because I'm me."
"Yep! I love you because you are the kindest person I know," I tell her, and it is the truth, "Because you're smart and talented, but you are always good to the people around you. That isn't easy," I tell her.
"It doesn't seem that hard to be nice to people."
"That's my point, baby," I call back up to her as she readies herself for the day. "I'm so proud of you. I'm glad I'm your mama."
"You know why I'm proud of you?" she replies, "Because even when things are hard you keep going."

That's my girl. She always knows just what to say to buffer the sting of disappointment and make me feel like it hasn't all been a waste. I think back to the last time I was left by a lover, and shocked and hurt and mourning losses that I had never dared mourn, I moped about my house for weeks, barely able to get out of bed in the mornings. She never gave up on me, and the motivational notes that I had left around my house, notes to myself to get some perspective and quit the self-pity, were followed up by sweet messages of love, in her child-scrawl. "Don't worry, mama, you have me. You have..." a long list of all the wonderful things I did have in my life.

So I get ready for my last class, prepared and fortified. I hear her singing "The sun'll come out tomorrow" from downstairs, and I can't help smiling. The next steps in my life are something of an abyss, but, strangely, I feel peaceful and ready to plow on ahead, trusting that the universe will be (relatively) kind to us. There is no statistical data supporting my claim, but I just feel that it is true. And that's enough for today.

Persimmon Bread/ Cake (let’s be honest!)

So it is winter, and the abundant persimmon harvest of the fall may indeed be dwindling. On the other hand, you, like me, may have found yourself with a bombardment of simultaneously ripening persimmons and thought: What can I do with so much persimmon goodness? If you were smart, you froze the persimmons whole before they rotted, or you mushed them luxuriously with your hands, popping them from their skins, and letting the sensuous oozing calm your nerves, and then carefully, promptly stored this puree/ mush in the freezer. You may even have made a persimmon reduction (with limited sugar?) and canned it because you believe in living off the land year round. In any case. There is only so much you can do with a freezer/ cabinet that is full of persimmon.

So, my friends, it is time to get to task.

This bread, which is anything but a staple, has become my new fall-winter favorite. It fills the house with a rich aroma, and fills the head with fantasy. It is perfect for a party, or gift to hosts and hostesses, or even, if you feel the urge, as mini-loaves for holiday gifts for co-workers.

This recipe, I adapted from David Lebovitz’s blog, which in turn adapted it from Beard on Bread by James Beard. I cheat and am unconventional, but, the result is, to date, stupendously fail safe… the same cannot be said for other endeavors in one’s life, so let’s count our blessings when we can.

Two 9-inch Loaves (or one Bundt pan, or 9 in. round layer cake pans)

3½ cups flour (2 dup whole wheat, 1.5 cups unbleached white flour)
1 teaspoons salt (a little more if using unsalted butter)
2 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon ground clove 1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 cups sugar (I always use just under 2 cups) 2/3 cup AGED RUM
1 cup melted butter (the experts say to use unsalted, but I prefer salted) cooled to room temperature (which can be achieved quickly by mixing in the rum…)
4 large eggs, at room temperature, lightly beaten
2ish cups persimmon puree (from about 4 squishy-soft Hachiya persimmons or even Fuyu that are not firm enough to eat crisp, I do believe in food salvaging)
1 cup or so walnuts or pecans, toasted and chopped
1 cup or so dried cranberries (or other dried fruit: cherries, apricots, dates)

Procedure:

1. Butter 2 standard 9-in. loaf pans. Dust with flour and tap out any excess. Hope there are no embarrassing fingerprints that belie your shoddy job at greasing pans!

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Enjoy the sensory inundation of the roaring gas oven. While an accurate thermometer in your oven is a useful tool, I find that as long as you are vigilant, this bread is very forgiving to slight temperature fluctuations.

3. Sift the dry ingredients, save the sugar, in a large mixing bowl. Spices always please me more in the flour mixture, I feel they get better distribution.

4. Mix the rum into the melted butter: it aids in cooling. Add this to the persimmon puree, sugar and egg mixture. Make sure to bask in the glory of the buttered rum mixture. It is quite heady.

5. Stir until you have a wet, sticky batter. Lick your fingers if you must, but be careful not to lick anyone else’s fingers, lest you misunderstand their intentions! Or, conversely, lick whatever fingers offered, with the understanding that it is only the visceral effects of the rum affecting your id. Your superego will surely step in once the effects have abated.

5. Bake 1 hour or until toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. And by clean, I mean not gooey at all. You can also put the entire mixture into a bundt pan and bake for roughly the same amount of time, all the while calling it a cake, instead of bread! You might even consider drizzling it with a chocolate/ Grand Marnier glaze if cake is the ultimate goal.

Storage: Will keep for about a week, if well-wrapped, at room temperature. But in my experience it has never lasted that long! It will take very well to being frozen, unlike the passionate chef who baked it.

Letters to Santa (Update)

"Mama, do you think Santa exists?" she asks knowing the answer as she sits across from me in the Indian restaurant that we decide there is a reason we never come to.
I arch my eyebrows at her. "What do you think?" I smirk.
She grins back, "No?... Yes?... No?... Yes?" there is a hopeful upturn to her voice, as she knows quite clearly that this is about her consumer thrust and not about her deep-rooted belief in some mystical fat man that will plummet through our non-existent chimney.

"So, uh, Borders is closing..."
"We're not going shopping today...."
"I wish..." she later says, and lets her voice trail dramatically, hanging between us and our saffron paneer and chicken tikka masala.
"Not today, kid. I'm tired. And I hate crowds."
"I know..." she feigns dejection.

When we get home she sits down and diligently writes in a notebook, her room is cleaned up and she looks as if she were doing homework, except that she's already on vacation and did all her make-up work before school was out.

She sneaks in and shreds the previous petition to the Santa mama. She has, she claims, an updated letter (replete with an orange Christmas tree on top, with a star at its peak, and an animal of dubious provenance that she asserts, with an arrow, is "Ruddolf") and could I make sure that Santa gets it? This looks much more like a wish list than a sweet, innocent petition of credulity.

Dear Santa,

This year for Christmas I would like these things...

1. Converse (Black)
2. How 2 draw everything book
3. The encyclopedia of immitureity [sic]
4. funny t-shirts
5. Batteries
and possibly if my mom agrees a stuffed animal

Thank you!

I./Little I. [names omitted to protect the innocent, but both her given name and nickname were included, just in case]

P.S. Give your elves my regards.

Letters to Santa

Just in case you were thinking that because we are Jewish, we escape the Santa clause... a not-small, sheepishly-grinning girl delivered this missive to my hands for my "review."

Dear Santa,
I hope you don't mind me asking, but could you possibly come to give me presents? All I really need is to know you exist. The thing I really want is a "how to draw everything" book and a good set of pencils, markers, and possibly good paper. Anything else is optional.

Thank you so much,
Little I.

P.S. Happy Holidays!
P.P.S. I would also like a nice stuffed animal -- Please!