True Adventure – Tomato Basil Risotto

 When you are Very Young, Adventure sounds like a Wonderful Thing. Unknown lands! Exploring new places! Experiencing new foods! But when you become Older, “Adventure” seems more like “Bother.” Fingers get pinched, feet get sore, bowels are unsound, and figuring out where to eat night after night is a chore.

It isn’t easy to travel gluten-free. Sometimes you end up eating plain, crappy food—or none at all. Airports are a carbohydrate wasteland. In public spaces, we want to be sure we are never more than 200 yards from a soda. "Shelf-life" is a problem for food chemists, not chefs.

Of course I pack my own food—what the TSA will allow. But one cannot feel satiated on fruit and nut bars. Salad doesn’t quite cut it, either. Besides, after eight hours in an airport, who wants to eat iceberg lettuce out of a cup? Forget the dressing; “modified food starch” could mean anything. (Note to self: learn to make beef jerky.)

Arriving at a restaurant isn’t always better. The best people: bartenders who know nothing about food allergies, say so, and are willing to go into the kitchen and read the labels on the boxes for you. The worst people: servers who assume they know about food allergies and, as a result ask neither you nor the kitchen staff any further questions. It is very common for servers to confuse “gluten-free” and “low-carb.” If only you knew how many times waiters have refused to serve me French fries...

My vacation was fun, we had a wonderful time, and there is no doubt in my mind that I ate wheat and got sick from it. We were ready to come home for some comfort food.

Risotto fits the bill nicely. It’s hot, creamy, and eaten with a spoon (okay, a fork if you want, but spoons work better in bowls). It can be made in endless varieties of flavors, vegetarian or not, as a main course or a side accompaniment. It knows no season. Risotto rocks. It’s no accident that one of New York City’s premiere gluten-free restaurants is named Rissoteria.

So, ah... Why am I not showing you a picture of this fabulous Tomato Basil Risotto of which I speak? Well, um... It’s MP’s fault. He made it, and it was so fabulous, I thought, “This is absolutely my next post!” but we’d eaten it all so I was going to photograph the leftovers when I had them for my lunch but MP who almost never eats leftovers snuck into the kitchen and ate it for his lunch and there wasn’t any to photograph. The fiend.

Here. This picture is from Last Night’s Dinner, which is where we got the recipe from. Yes, it really looks that fabulous.

Many instructions for risotto are very hyper-vigilante, “You Must Keep Stirring!” but really, risotto isn’t that much of a diva. The texture will still be lovely even if you only stir it every few minutes. If you’ve never done a risotto, this tomato-basil version is a lovely place to start.

When you are Young, Adventure is Grand; when you are Old, it is a Bother. When you can embrace all that Adventure can be, knowing that the best part of Leaving is Returning to your own Home Cooking, then you have reached just the Right Age.

Looking over our photos, MP and I think we’re pretty darn close.

Why yes, I was stranded on a tropical island...

Seriously, I was. I have pics to prove it!

Wow. Even I think it looks Photoshopped. It wasn't but... Wow. Blue water.

Alas, lovely as it was, tropical islands are not known as hotbeds of gluten-free eating. This one sure wasn't. Boy howdy, was I ready to come home to bake and cook.

I'm working on some ideas right now, really wonderful things. Ideas like this:

That's a hot dog bun, folks. A bit craggy, but decidedly gluten-free. But who knew that attempting to create a GF bun would lead to such a philosophical discussion of just what is a hot dog bun and what is its purpose? Trust MP to get straight to the heart of the matter: It's a bun. It holds the hot dog. That's it. It's not complicated.

And this:

You see those? Those are the peaches I had to pick off because there were too many on the tree! And I could still stand to go over the peach tree again! I am very excited.

So sorry for the delay. I'll spare you the GF woecake and get cooking!

Wild Strawberries

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

When I first heard this Zen tale, I was quite young. Nevertheless, I remember thinking, “This is a man with screwed-up priorities. He’s got a tiger on his butt, he’s about to fall off a cliff, and even the mice won’t give him a break. Who CARES about the damn strawberries? Clearly Zen monks have problems with ADD.”

And there the matter rested for twenty years.

There’s a phrase from James Clavell’s novel, Shōgun that has stayed with me: if you want to keep something private you have to “whisper it down a well at noon.” There are many people who blog as if they were whispering down a well, but the Internet is no well, as countless surprised Facebook users can testify. Anonymity is also no guarantee of privacy; the lights always come on.

There are no grand lead-ins, there are no excuses. Life is Life—it is Messy and Ungainly, and when it’s not Boring it’s Exciting in ways that make you yearn for Boring. Things happening in my life of late are deeply personal and bring to mind disturbing situations and questions. I’m hardly the first to face these events or questions, and while it would give me great comfort to write about them, it would give me no comfort at all to imagine anyone even remotely connected with these events finding out my thoughts by reading them in this forum. It is both self-centered and foolish to post certain topics on the Internet and pretend that no one will know it was you. Besides, I have never particularly enjoyed art as an excuse for public psychotherapy. That’s why I gave up listening to the radio in the late 90s (Quit whining, suck it up, move on).

One thing I will say: even as Life is mess and dirty and sometimes makes you angry or sad, it also offers up many other things, some of them quite wonderful—i.e., chocolate-mint macarons.

All around me different people have sung the praises of these confectionary gems. Distinct from the humble American macaroon, these meringue-based treats are decidedly European and undeniably chic. They come in flavors like lavender lemon, raspberry mascarpone, even red bean and green tea.

They are also reputed to be temperamental, fiendishly tricky, and almost impossible for the home baker to master.

They’re also gluten-free.

I made these. They were awesome. I want to tell you all about them. Because although they may not look it from the picture, these macarons tasted of wild strawberries.

We will always face the twin tigers of the Past and the Future. The yin-yang of Good and Evil will always threaten to gnaw away our hold on an intellectualized Reality. The only thing we have, the only thing that is certain, is Right Now. Taste it.

It doesn’t matter is that moment is a hug or a drawn out, tiresome complaint; walking into a hospital room or biting into a macaron—be present to the moment you are in, because it is the only thing that is real.

Inertia: Just Do It

So sometimes the hardest part is the beginning, the just doing it, because inertia is in fact a contagious disease.

The anticipatory thinking of a thing, the "I don't wanna" and the "I'll do it tomorrow" often takes longer than (and is worse than) the doing of the thing you're so studiously avoiding. To wit: this post. It will take me 20 minutes to write it, but I've spent two and a half months avoiding it.

It's been so long that even my pen has succumbed to inertia (yes, I'm old-fashioned. I can edit at the computer, but I can't write), and I had to rinse the dried ink out of the nib. We get like that, too. We think we're dried up, but we're not; it's just that our creative nibs are clogged with day-to-day crap.

Okay, that was a tortured metaphor. Cut me some slack, it's been a while.

August was a lost month. We went out of town and the garden dried up, succumbing to squash vine borers (much to the relief of MP) and the weather. August always makes me think of strange things, and this August was no exception. However, to protect both the guilty and the innocent, I won't go into detail. No, it's no good. Don't ask.

Okay, here's a hint: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is a terrible beach read. Remember that.

The thing about Just Doing is to bear in mind that it is not the result that matters, but the endeavor itself. At long last you're doing something. Doesn't matter what, or how much; it's more than you did before.

Fear can be a compelling reason why we don't do something. I hate calling contractors to do home improvement work. Hate it. What do I know about someone's skills at carpentry? Get cold sweats. But I can not deal with crappy dirt and diseased tomatoes next year, and I will not hump 4 cubic yards of compost one wheelbarrow at a time along one side of the house, out around the back deck, and across the back yard because some cheap nitwit didn't put a gate in the fence on that side of the house. No.

I have learned to divide things into smaller and smaller chunks, distilling tasks down to their essence. When faced with fear, the question is this: what is the smallest step I can take in this project without succumbing to mind-numbing fear? Look up names. Choose three. Call one for an appointment. Call another. Get estimates and compare.

It is excruciatingly slow. But it is moving forward. Sometimes when things are scary, you have to go that slow. Like Zeno's arrow, you have to fool the frightened part of yourself into thinking you are not moving at all, that everything is fine. You have to reward yourself for tiny acts of bravery. In this way you create a body of accomplishment from which to draw confidence.

There are many people in this world who are doing things I would love to be doing. It isn't that they are fundamentally more talented than I am, but they are braver. It is pointless to entertain thoughts of cowardice -- you work with what you get. So what's the smallest thing I can do right now, TODAY, that put's me closer to my goal?

Don't dwell. Don't let it become a Big Thing. Just do it -- and then eat a chocolate afterward. Chocolate makes everything less scary.

Anti-Hero by Villainess

Some women spend their 401K plans on designer handbags. Some want jewelry. Others have a particular weakness for shoes.

I go mad for soap.

But don’t think I’m easy. Clearly one can find soap anywhere; what I seek is much more subtle and difficult to define. Part of it is scent — I like perfume, too — but there is something about a bar of good-smelling soap lathering up like whipped cream that I seek out. Is it the sensuality? A psychological need to cleanse myself? The fact that I grew up in a house with water so hard all our towels were stained rust-red with iron?

One thing is certain — this is not the kind of obsession you can discuss freely. Still, there are those who have known me long enough to know which passions make me tick, and when they see interesting crossovers, they send word. The phrase “I saw this soap named ‘anti-hero’ and it made me think of you” dropped into a friend’s casual e-mail sounded too good to be true.


With my first glimpse of the Villainess home page I knew I was not in some pink girly candy-land of sickly scented personal products. For starters, the look and feel of the web page can only be described as 19th Century smoky boudoir — aged parchment and skulls over a burgundy tooled-leather background. In addition to selling soap, some of their products are Whipped! (body butter) and Smooch! (body scrub), and also perfume oils in ampoules. (“Historically, the ampoule has held the blood of martyrs, anointing oils, and medicinal solutions. We have misappropriated the delicate vials to hold our equally precious Extrait, and carefully accented each stoppered bottle with our hand-stamped monogram and a weathered copper skull.”)

Describing their scent catalog, the founders state “…we aim for that ultimately unique Villainess touch. A bizarre juxtaposition of scent that will create (or trigger) a vivid olfactory memory.” The scents have names like “Asphyxiate,” “Crushed,” and “Silk & Cyanide.”

Sometimes I wonder what my friends think of when they think of me…

The main page listing their soaps states: “Sometimes a girl needs a change of pace. Or maybe she's had a trying day at the office, juggling evil schemes. That's when you pull out the big guns and spoil yourself.” It seems the people at Villainess understood me.
This is how they describe their soap:

Full Name: Antihero
Weight / Height: 3.5oz (99g) / 3 in
Colour: Soft grey suede.
Distinguishing Features: Absolutely smooth, sheer, silken lather swirled with pitch black Australian clay.
Characteristic Scent: Well-worn sweaty leather, the acrid smoke of cigarettes, and a soft side of honey and vanilla.

Cigarette smoke and leather? In a soap? As an M.A. in English Lit with an emphasis on the portrayal of the hero throughout history, how could I say no?

“Anti-hero” is a sledgehammer to my limbic system. It smells like a woman, the kind of woman wears what she wants and smokes where she wants and doesn’t give a damn anymore what people think. And yet… there is also a softer note, something that reminds me of being utterly depressed and enveloped in a really good hug, smelling the smoke in her clothes with another perfume — a yin-yang animal, organically floral sweet scent like… Hope? Every time I smell it I have a vision of the café where I drank coffee and spent endless hours talking about my M.A. thesis while this woman smoked, nodded, and quietly listened to—

Oh my God. I just now realized I’m talking about Em. Somehow they captured how my best friend Em smelled in 1992.

Wow. Crap. Em… Now I’m totally thrown. Well then! “A vivid olfactory memory.” They weren’t lying. Be careful what you wish for.

In addition to the soap I also ordered some Whipped! in Paradise Misplaced (“Sweetly creamed coconut with touches of mango offset by crisp green tea”) and Smooch! in Krakatoa (“Flashes of exotic foliage… amidst slightly more domestic fruits…and an explosive burst of citrus). I’m pleased to say that all three items were really lush-feeling and wonderful, probably owing in large part to their use of high-end ingredients like palm oil, shea butter and cherry kernel oil.

The next scent I’d like to try? “Villainess” — “Sheer pearly grey shot with crimson…. Our signature scent — all ball gowns and combat boots. Raw, smokey [sic] leather and sweet vanilla musk engulfed in a sheer haze of exotic florals — ylang, neroli, jasmine, lilac and tuberose.”

And if you like that, check out the description for "Bathory.”

Star of Bethlehem

According to the USDA I grew up in Zone 5. Not that they track me personally; I’ve just always been fascinated by their brightly banded map, and wherever I go I ultimately want to know if lemon trees are possible (not hardy below Zone 9-10) and daffodils work (doesn’t get cold enough above Zone 8).

In practical terms this means because I didn’t grow up here, there’s stuff out in my yard I’ve never seen before.


A few years back I was mowing and found flowers where I had never planted any. The leaves looked like garlic chives, but longer and fallen over, with small white flowers, a few to each cluster. It was quite pretty, actually, and I wondered who would randomly plant stuff in the middle of a yard out by the curb.

I mowed around it, went back, and dug it up. This was harder than I thought, because the bulbs it grew from (again, like garlic chives or spring onions) were easily 6-8 inches down, and I mangled several before I got enough to transplant into my flower bed. I had no idea what it was. I assumed it was some sort of wild allium (garlic/onion type plant) or bulb. It’s grown up very nicely, and this year I took some pictures.

Gardeners probably seem rather solid and boring (old people with stone figurines growing way too many zucchini), but the truth is, we’re risk-takers. Who do you think invented zucchini bread? Crazy stuff. Seeing only pictures in a catalog, we decode a few bits of information (like zone hardiness, shade tolerance, and mature height), calculate whether or not we have room (and if it’s something we want, we always do), and send away for little bare-rooted sticks or knobby tubers or packets of seeds that look like alien gallstones. We stick these things in the dirt. We wait. A risky business.

Sometimes it pays off. When MP first saw the peach tree, he looked at me and asked, “Which end is up?” Six years and 30 pounds of peaches later, I apparently guessed right. Then sometimes things don’t go well, and one must rectify the mistakes. This happens to both my mother and her mother — a lot.

Currently my mother is ripping up sweet woodruff (“They said it was a groundcover. No lie!”) while my grandmother has spent 20+ years going at the lily of the valley (“It grows up places I never put it!”). Neither one has made much headway. Interestingly enough, my mother cannot get lily of the valley to grow — and she lives in the woods. What both my mother and grandmother agree upon is that STAR OF BETHLEHEM MUST DIE.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it grows everywhere! All the time!” my mother answered.

Grandma was more specific. “Because it gets yecchy.”

Okay… Over time they revealed that star of bethlehem, while pretty, is invasive, crowding out everything growing around it. After blooming, the grassy leaves get rather slimy and can’t be pulled out. It’s pretty for 2 weeks and annoying for 4 months.


I year or so ago I was at a plant sale hosted by a gardener friend of mine, and in her flower bed I saw the unknown little thing I’d rescued from my yard. “How cute!” I exclaimed, “Would you sell me some?”

“Oh God, that. No. You don’t want it.”

“But I already have some and I like it. What–?”

“Kill it.”

“But I like it! What is it?”

“Star of bethlehem.”

I had nursed a viper in my bosom! (Is that not one of the most wacked out sayings imaginable? No wonder it fell out of favor somewhere about 1910…) However, the truth is… I’ve never had a problem with it. It’s at the edge of the flowerbed, and though I occasionally mow over it in the summer, it always comes back in the spring. Look at it — isn’t it cheerful? Don’t the little while flowers look so happy to greet the springtime? Doesn’t its green center look like a Jell-O mold? I still don’t know how it got out in my yard. Maybe some disgusted person flung it there. Maybe a bird carried it off a compost pile. Nature’s mysteries abound.


“You watch it,” my mother warned me, “You’ll be sorry.” But she’s been saying that to me for decades now about this or that, and I’m still here. A lot depends on soil type and micro-climate, so maybe where I have it now it will remain in control. It marks a point in the springtime when the daffodils are gone but the azaleas aren’t quite ready to show. I’d hate to lose it.

Sometimes you have to take risks.

Searching for the Elusive Purple Easter Egg

Have you ever done something that went so terribly wrong you passed beyond dismay into the realm of “My God, I have to keep going to see how truly bad this can get”?

That happened to me this past weekend over a purple Easter egg. Well, I wanted it to be purple. For the better part of my life I have wondered why there were no purple Easter eggs — and yes, I was a strange kid. We would get the PAAS egg-coloring kit (sometimes the fancy ones, sometimes the basic 5-color) and go to town, but Purple never worked. Red worked… Okay, Pink worked, and Blue worked, but Purple was more like Pink strangled Blue and left Evidence of the Crime. Purple was never truly, you know, “purple,” like a grape or an amethyst. It was Pink vs. Blue on a boiled egg.

My sister tells me that PAAS has really branched out since we were tots and that they do in fact have Purple. I’m not so sure, and I submit as evidence a close up of her children dyeing eggs (I’d show you the kids but they’re so revoltingly cute you’d never notice the eggs).


I see many lovely shades of Blue. I do not see Purple.

This bothers me on a deep, philosophical level. Scientifically, it should work; In both additive and subtractive color spaces, Purple is the combination of Red and Blue. Surely a Red dye with a few drops of Blue, or a Blue dye with a few drops of Red, should be somewhere in the ball-park?

All right, look — here are two lovely eggs. Believe it or not, they’re brown eggs. I used your basic grocery store food dye and made a nice coral color and a spring green.


And look at this. I’m being honest here, no Photoshop tricks. Is this not a purple dye? Dare I say, violaceous, even purplescent?


So what is this? Two Easter eggs and an eight ball?


Here’s a lovely shot; you can really see the striping effect. Makes it look like a slightly ominous melon, lurking, while two sweet Easter eggs unsuspectingly frolic about. (Dare I say it also looks like a more colorful re-enactment of the “before” stage in a Zoloft commercial?)


I think the second the egg hit the water I knew it wasn’t going to work, and yet, I couldn’t stop the process. I think I hoped by sheer saturation of color that something might happen. Being a brown egg certainly didn’t help matters, but it doesn’t explain the disaster completely. Why doesn’t mixing red and blue dye work? What causes the inevitable streaking seen even in my PAAS days? The result looked like the black jellybean that nobody wants to eat.


Back in college I had some Greek friends who celebrated Easter according to the Orthodox calendar. In Greece they dye all their eggs red, to represent the drops of blood Christ shed on the Cross (it’s also the color that represents Life and Renewal, I think). When they got hold of the red dye from a PAAS kit, they were horrified, truly upset. “They’re pink!” they wailed, “We can’t use pink eggs!” I’m not sure what they eventually did, but I feel for them now.

I set the Fugly Egg it out on the coffee table to contemplate. The other two were eventually eaten, but this one remained, so maybe there is an up-side to being dyed an awful color. In better light it actually looked navy blue. Sort of. I have since found out that if you want blood-red eggs, you make a dye from yellow onion skins. I am contemplating possibilities for next year, and I am seeing purple onions and cabbages in my future.

I will succeed, or I will take Bad to a whole new level.

Identity

Café Tor almost never got started because of the well-intentioned advice of a friend and my own neurotic tendencies.

Over coffee one afternoon, my friend went on at great length about how I should totally have a blog, and how I could write about our group of college chums and our various made-up adventures and how she would totally read it and tell all her friends about it so they would read it, too.

I sat and thought, “I’ll be damned if I sit here and let you tell me what I should write. Get your own blog. You have no idea who I am.”

Clearly this response was out of line. She was, after all, only being nice and saying that in the past she enjoyed reading email I sent. Thank heavens I kept my big mouth shut. Yet I could not deny that her suggestion made me angry. Where was my stridency coming from?

I decided to think about that with a year of blogging, a meditation in motion, but I would do it quietly, unglamorously, under an unassuming assumed name. No instant readership in the form of family and friends, just a quiet corner to… well, breathe, imagine myself with my favorite libation, and hopefully, write some bits that would make people see things a little differently, perhaps even laugh. If I wanted to write about my friends and family, I would. My choice for anonymity gave them their privacy, too.

My inspiration was “Ms. Schnozz” and her blog, Schnozzfest. Another friend sent a link to her blog with the note, “This reminds me of your writing.” The only reason I didn’t create a script to block this friend’s email from EVER SHOWING UP IN MY INBOX AGAIN (God Bless all my friends who withstand my knee-jerk tendencies to be a… um, “jerk”) was because Schnozzfest cracked me up. Schnozz challenged herself to become a more adventurous person by joining the roller derby, and I loved reading about her experiences. Her triumphs, her frustrations, her dissention into total roller derby geekdom – this girl had some serious moxie and a really great turn of phrase. She could poke fun at others without being snarky and never ever hesitated to poke fun at herself. She blogged about Mr. S., her bunnies, the things that she liked and the things that annoyed her. I write in my underwear as a salute to her and all she believed in. (If you’d read the blog, that wouldn’t sound so odd. Honest.)

Then her voice changed. She wasn’t… having fun? Her scope narrowed. And then she just said, “That’s it; I’m not doing this anymore.”

I wish I had saved that last post, because she talked about some of the very same things I’m dealing with now: privacy, to use or not use your real identity, and the expectation of others. When she stopped using an assumed name and everyone in the audience knew who she was, she had to ask herself, “Is it really appropriate for me to write X, knowing my parents / boss / former best friend from high school / coworkers are reading this?” The need to edit herself lead to flattening her writing into a mono-dimensional, one size fits all online persona. But she understood that’s not how we live our real lives; we have one face we show our family, one for our friends, another for our co-workers… It’s not that we’re lying, we’re just painfully aware that what’s appropriate for one group may not be appropriate for another. Ms. Schnozz decided she wasn’t going to edit herself anymore, and between that and time constraints, she bowed out of blogging.

This made me sad, but I understood. Family and friends assume that they know you – but they what they really know is only the voice they hear in their relationship with you – the one that they’re comfortable with. They’ve never seen that creative voice before. How could they? You’re only just trying to figure it out yourself. Believe me, your deeply Catholic mother may say she would be thrilled to read your first book, but she most emphatically does not want to read that passionate love scene you wrote. She still has your first communion pictures up on the wall and she is very happy with that image, thank you. She does not want to know where you got the idea for the bullwhip / bundt cake / salad shooter scenario. Trust me on this.

I haven’t had much luck trying to discuss my writing with others (salad shooter ideas aside). People who have never looked at the publishing industry are quick to tell me what I should do to get published – find an agent, forget about agents and go straight to a publisher, go to a writer’s conference, join a writer’s group, write for a newspaper, write for a magazine, write children’s books, illustrate children’s books or my personal favorite from my father, “write like Erma Bombeck” – rather than listen to the fact that I’m desperately afraid I’m not as talented as I hope I am. Explaining that I have a file folder full of 30 + rejections from agents who have never read my manuscript, just a cover letter, or that I have no interest whatsoever in illustration makes me feel slightly pathetic. I don’t need to learn how to deal with the publishing industry; I need to learn how to deal with creative fear and frustration. (The once piece of practical advice I think I do need to consider is to accept that the first manuscript isn’t going anywhere right now and move on to the next thing, but strangely enough, no one has suggested that yet.)

Gently refusing their suggestions with a “thanks, but no thanks” makes people wonder why I’m so “touchy.” After all, they’re only “showing interest in my hobby” or “trying to be helpful.” Then their feelings get hurt, which is the last thing I wanted, so I spend the rest of the time trying to make them feel better when I’m the one who’s so frustrated I could bite straight through my damn manuscript.

My decision to blog under a pseudonym and not reveal my online activities to anyone I know in the Real World, as paranoidly private as it sounds, is absolutely the best decision I could have made. Artists need to protect themselves. They need room to experiment with ideas, deciding for themselves what works and what doesn’t work. Nothing kills creativity faster than the expectations of those closest to you and your own fear of somehow “disappointing” them. Depending on your personality type, you may be able to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without ever noticing, or you may find yourself neurotically reading hidden meanings into every comment your friends and family make. Without apology or explanation I honestly say that I am the latter. But once you acknowledge your neurotic tendencies, you can deal with them in a sane fashion.

I can have the freedom to explore ideas and voices, privately, on my own terms, or I can seek the admiration of people I know, but be ultimately aware of and shackled by their opinions. I choose privacy. Privacy does not mean lack of responsibility – I guard the integrity of this name as much as I guard my own – but it does mean that everyone I know can sleep a little easier at night, secure in the knowledge that nothing I blog about will be traced back to them.

Not immediately, anyway…

Dreaming

The peach tree has been stripped by winter down to its essence. It is plain now how it grew last season and where the oriental fruit moths stunted its tips. Those two branches weighed down by fruit are curved now only by memory. Do peach trees dream of Julys? No, only I do that.

I wake up every morning and peer out at it, searching for… what? The way I write you’d think I was living on a 100 acre farm. I’m not. I live in suburbia, bathed in the glow of strip-mall fluorescence. The peach tree is a stick among Bradford pears, holly and water maples – all the cheapest trees planted at volume discount. A garden, however, can happen anywhere, even in January, because beyond these poetically peachy ponderings there are some important things to consider.

January is when all the gardening catalogs come out. Glossy photos of succulent tomatoes, impossibly hued peppers, warped pumpkins cultivated two centuries ago – you know, Seed Porn.

I am here with stacks of magazines, graph paper and ruler in hand, trying to chart out how much I can stuff into 300 square feet of growing space. Packing algorithms are my forte. I figure if I utilize the surface areas of the fences I can train pole beans, zucchini and cucumbers up instead of out, and thereby get in a row of beets or salad greens or something. I’m just worried about the shade factor of the 6 foot fence. Will it be too shady for the beans? On the other hand, they may not mind some shade in the sweltering afternoons. And the kale – where am I going to put the kale in July? The garlic will be out by then, so maybe I can put it around the border… but then where do I put the garlic come November when the kale is still in there? One thing I know for sure – THERE WILL BE ONLY ONE SUNGOLD TOMATO PLANT.

But these are concerns for the beginning of March, when I turn the kitchen floor into a nursery. Believe it or not, the peach tree is the more pressing. Based on last year’s records pruning and an application of dormant oil should happen during the first or second week of February (“green tip stage,” although I may have to prune sooner than that. I need to look it up.) I’ll bring the pruned branches inside and force them for some winter color.

Golly I wish I had a camellia. A nice double pink one that would bloom in February or March. Maybe if I ripped out the holly bushes next to the front porch…

Life is too short for discount shrubbery.

Well Hello There!

I like the pine tree background. It's very Minty Fresh, you know?

Sorry I have not posted in... well, a long time. Things got interesting in the fall -- I did an original post for Matinee at the Bijou (Brother Can you Spare a Dime? Going to the Movies During the Great Depression) and then I launched into learning / re-learning l33t web skillz with some software that would explode after 30 days. Next thing I knew, it was now.

And you may be thinking, "Those two facts are related how?"

We at Café Tor don't particularly like to mention The World Out There because the whole point of Café Tor is to leave The World Out There, you know, Out There. I mention it now only as point of reference, to wit: as I wrote about the experiences of my family during the Depression I noted that the economic clime was quite similar to what we are experiencing now, and I wondered just how far history would repeat itself. Then the stock market tanked in November, and I thought, "Oh isn't this interesting?" Now I'm trying to get a new job in the worst economic climate since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and I can't help but think, "Oh isn't this interesting?"

Actually, I could think a lot of other things at this point, and I have, but they don't really do much good, do they? During the Great Depression very little popular culture and entertainment dwelt on hardship. Roosevelt's campaign song was "Happy Days are Here Again," Little Orphan Annie was a smash hit on the radio, and Ginger Rogers sang "We're in the Money!" in pig-latin (I just had to work that in because that scene cracks me up). Trust me, I am no Pollyanna, but I do understand Depressions, both personal and economic. Dwelling doesn't help.

So put on your glad rags and join us at Café Tor! I promise to try to be a little more balanced in the new year and update more regularly. Who knows? I might even develop Peach Cam for all you fruit tree lovers out there. Hey, don't laugh -- January is when all the gardening catalogs come out.

Be assured that despite the economy, we will not raise our prices at Café Tor! Coffee is only a dime here. Do join us.

Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)

When my father talks about the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), he calls it “Moon River,” after the theme song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Mancini’s score cinched the film for him – “I knew as soon as the titles came up and that song started playing it was a good movie.”

"Breakfast at Tiffany's" Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, 1961, Paramount, **I.V. - Image courtesy MPTV.net

It was one of the movies I particularly remember he let me stay up late to watch, although “let” is not the right word. It was more like, “Sit down, Mar, you’ll like this.” Like a tour guide he made little comments along the way: “I love the way [Audrey Hepburn] wears her hair, almost like a crown.” Watching Cat survey the people at Holly Golightly’s cocktail party he remarked, “Cat’s not really a cat; he’s a person.” Up until seeing that movie my only experience of George Peppard was from The A Team, and I never would have recognized him so young (and with red hair) if my father had not pointed him out. There was no part of the film that my father did not enjoy without a chortle or admire -- until the scene when Holly suggests to Paul that they steal something from the five and dime store. “This is the only part of this movie of which I do not approve,” he said emphatically.

When I watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s now, it surprises me that my father liked the film so much at eighteen (Consider that this is a man who taught his kids to swim by throwing them into the deep end of the pool because that’s how John Wayne did it in Hondo (1953)). Breakfast at Tiffany’s seems like a chick flick, a pre-Sex and the City paean to the single girl in New York City, complete with Givenchy dresses, cocktails and marrying the richest man. When I asked my father recently what he liked so much about the film he told me, “I enjoyed every minute of that movie. I loved the music. I liked the actors, Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard with hair. I liked Patricia Neal in her role, too. The only thing I didn’t like about that movie was that when it was over, I was still failing all my classes.”

Failing? I vaguely remember him telling me once that he almost failed out of college after his first semester. When I think of the film in this light, it makes sense: my father liked the movie because here at last was someone who put a name to that vague feeling of fear and malaise he had. He identified with Holly and what she called the “Mean Reds.” Yet when I asked about this, I did not get the answer I expected.

“Huh? Mean Reds? No… I didn’t go to the movies to think about them, Mar. I went to be entertained.”

My family is used to me asking seemingly random questions. As a writer and a naturally curious person, it’s what I do. Most of the time they answer without much fuss, but I recognize that sometimes I stray into memories undisturbed for a long time. While my father answered my question, that was as far as it would go. I could tell he didn’t want to talk more about it.

My father went to school on an academic scholarship. He definitely wasn’t stupid. Failing classes? How? What happened? I ask other questions, different questions. I piece together things I remember hearing, different conversations from long ago. Here is what I know:

By the time my father went to college he was very definite about what kind of movies he liked, and his tastes have not varied since: “I am not impressed by any overriding theory or philosophy in a movie, which is why more than anything I hate a movie with a message.” He did not care for The Apartment (1960) (“Everybody was a rat.”) or Spartacus (1960) (“The guy died.”) He loved Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (“The scenes in the desert were amazing. At the intermission, everybody wanted a Coke.”) for the music as much as the story. He saw films from the 1930s and 40s on television, watching late night movies at 11 P.M. and weekend movies at 1 P.M. However, he still went out to theaters to see the latest films. He lived at home and walked to classes, but he also had a car – a green and white Olds Rocket ’88 that went 100 mph, and he drove it along the same back roads he worked construction on in the summer to get to the theaters in Rittman or Orrville. He often drove without point or purpose and went to the theater of whatever town he drove into. This was how he saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s, stumbling into the Orr Theater.

The film opens with an orchestral arrangement of Mancini’s song. Audrey Hepburn gets out of a cab on a deserted New York street. She pulls a Danish and a cup of coffee out of a bag and walks north on 5th Avenue, studying the jewelry in the windows at Tiffany’s. Fade to a row of unremarkable-looking brownstone apartments. Holly tries to sneak past a man in a car, but he sees her and follows her, shouting about how giving her fifty-dollars for the powder room gives him certain “rights.” Mr. Yunioshi (an almost pathetic role played by Mickey Rooney) objects to the noise, and the angry man leaves. Cut: Paul Varjak gets out of a cab in front of Holly’s apartment and looks around. Cut: the doorbell rings and Cat jumps onto the sleeping Holly. Holly opens the door to find an apologetic Paul – he just moved in, he doesn’t have keys, blah blah – but Holly can’t hear him through her earplugs. Paul asks to use the phone and Holly invites him in.

And there it is. The scene which occurs fifteen minutes into the film, an almost tossed-off exchange:

Holly Golightly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul Varjak: The mean reds, you mean like the blues?
Holly: No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long – you're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Paul: Sure.
Holly: Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name! (Courtesy IMDB)

Holly’s struggle to “find Tiffany’s” is what drives her. It’s what makes the romance between Holly and Paul sweet and funny and a little bit sad. It’s the whole point of the movie. And my father says he never thought about it?

Random bits of advice and observations from my father fill in more details. He always stressed academic achievement, but he also told us there comes a point when you can study too much. Cramming the night before an exam isn’t going to help and you might be better off playing shooting baskets until one in the morning. He also prescribed contemplative solitude. Years later when I was deep in my own funk, he drove me along the same back roads he drove to various small-town movie houses. We eventually ended up out to the OARDC Experimental station. “I used to come up here at night and watch the lights twinkling,” he told me. Another favorite spot was a large rock on campus. When I went to the same college, I saw the rock of which he spoke.

“That rock isn’t private. It’s right next to the main path.”

“You’d be surprised how private it is at two in the morning.”

If all this does not sound like a man who wrestled with the Mean Reds, then I don’t know what the Mean Reds are.

I cannot believe that he missed the idea of the Mean Reds entirely. At some internal level, he must have felt that here at last was someone who knew what it meant to be scared without knowing why. Perhaps he didn’t recognize it because Holly’s society-girl aspirations were so different from his own. I do not know how he came so close to failing that semester, nor do I know how he pulled his GPA up. Perhaps he views that almost-failure as a weakness he can’t admit to, and recognizing Holly’s Mean Reds means recognizing his own failings from that time. Or perhaps I, being of a more imaginary temperament, insist on seeing a pattern where there is none. Line the facts up however you like; the stories that we tell ourselves about our past selves mean everything.

I see now that, in a sense, he gave that movie to me. He gave it to me in the same way he tried to teach me how to use a volt-ohm meter, change the oil filter on my car, and make bread – because having the same temperament as he does, it was information I might someday need to know. Whatever the reasons he liked it, whatever he did or did not see in the film, he recognized that Breakfast at Tiffany's was a wonderful movie that could banish, if only for a time, those feelings of being afraid and not knowing what you’re afraid of. In a darkened theater, my father found Tiffany’s.

This Little Piggy Hurts Like Crap

MP hates it when I say, "Eww! This smells terrible! Here, sniff it." I'm not sure what irritates him more: that I'm inviting him to sniff something nasty, or that, for a brief half-second, he leans in to sniff before giving me a withering look and stalking away.

Like the telling of a nightmare in the hope it will fade, sharing bad experiences (i.e. -- the scent of cheap candles, the flavor of uni sushi, or that time you ate half the cream cheese bagel before you noticed that, while the cream cheese was fine, the lid to the cream cheese was covered in mold) is necessary to balance the horror of it. Some things are too big for the individual to handle alone.

Which is why I want to tell you about my big toe.

All summer I keep my toenails painted. Where I live, well-groomed feet are a must. I am known for my bright and eccentric choice of colors -- "tidal wave" (turquoise blue) and "parrot" (lime green) are my particular favorites. Unfortunately, even if you remove the toluene and the formaldehyde, nail polish is some wicked nasty chemistry. For that matter, so is nail polish remover.

So here it is mid-September and I've had nearly six solid months of painted toenails. I removed the polish to give my toes a chance to breathe. The nails are not pretty; they are yellowed (dark colors stain) and dry like you would not believe.

Therefore, it was no great surprise that while I was putting on my kung fu pants, my big toenail snagged on a seam and split. The horrifying part, and whole reason why I'm sharing this, is that is wasn't your typical, horizontal split. No, this was a vertical split, 2 mm wide and 4 mm of side nail all the way into the quick.

After the initial swearing, I stared at it and reviewed my options. I couldn't put my foot in my kung fu shoes with this hanging off. I had no clippers, no file. I could have asked Sifu for a knife, but he probably would have handed me some KA-BAR drop point knife and I couldn't do anything but cut off my toe with that. Nope, only one thing for it -- I pulled.

The whole experience left me surprisingly queasy.

I think I read somewhere that you cannot walk without your big toe. I believe it. Just having that bit of nail gone from the side of my big toe has completely messed me up. Stepping down on my foot feels wrong wrong wrong. It doesn't exactly feel painful, but God knows it doesn't feel right, either.

I think I'm done with painted toenails for the season.

(And thanks for letting me share; I feel better. Really.)

Alchemy

Receiving messages from the Universe regarding what you're supposed to do with your life and things you should pay attention to are fraught with confusion. I would much prefer it if large golden rays of light would break through the clouds and the Heavenly Host would sing a chord in a major key. In this way, there would be no confusion, and I could look up and say, "Ah yes. I should be getting a Clue along about now."

For the record: this is not how it happens.

My Sifu said that we should all of us relax, give it up, and focus on wholly being in the Now of things (Daoists are like that). I took this away with me, thought about it for a week, then went back and asked, "What if the Now really sucks?" Meaning, "What if you're, say, being tortured by an emotionally abusive family member and you can't get away?"

"Then be with that pain. You have to be with that pain and understand that pain until you can transform it into something else. That's very much part of the spiritual alchemy the Daoists studied."

Which may be true, but I was still left with the feeling that the Daoists could bite my butt. (For the record, I spend a lot of time wanting to smack my Sifu when he starts talking about Daoists. You could be bleeding and need a band-aid, but a Daoist will just smile and hand you a box of chocolates.)

A few days later I was talking to my acupuncturist, and I mentioned having strange dreams about the past and bizarre emotional reactions to cleaning out my closets. (Acupuncturists want to know this stuff. Seriously. It ties into bocked meridians and elemental excesses.) He replied that yes, out of balance meridians can keep us from performing the kind of alchemy that can transform a difficult past into something that can propel us into our future.

Alchemy is one of those "read only" words -- we all know what it means, but it doesn't come up in conversation a lot (Hey Bob, how you been? Haven't seen you in a while -- done any alchemy lately?). It wasn't the heavens opening up, but for two people to say that to me in the same week regarding difficult emotions... I don't think it's going to get much clearer than that.

So I've thought about this alchemy thing and what it may mean, and it comes down to this: we are so making this up as we go along.

And that's the point: we are making this up, not somebody else. If you want to accept chocolates from a Daoist or work on your stagnant liver chi, that's your business. Both the placebo effect and passive aggression are totally underrated. And if your past sucked and people hurt you, accept it. Assimilate it into your being by recognizing its existence and then use that alchemy to transform it into a better story.

Which, I suspect, is the root of much (though not all) art. "Use it," they tell you in theater, meaning, "Use this emotion and put it into your character when you act." As I writer I can never whine "There's nothing to write about!" (Though I will have to wait until everyone dies, or I'll be sued.) And as a visual artist, well... Open your eyes. Be in the Now.

Alchemy. I'm surprised we don't talk about it more.

Neti Pots

It's Monday. I'm doing a "coffee facial," which is essentially hanging your head over a large mug of coffee and absorbing caffeine through your pores while you try to wake up. It's a specialty here at Café Tor.

I was awakened today by a chuckling robin out in the yard. It's January, friends, and there are robins everywhere. While I admit that I dwell in a place not known for its skiing potential, it is nevertheless too early for any songbird to sit on my porch railing and announce its sexual intentions (the romantic exploits of birds on my porch railing is actually fodder for a whole other post, but nobody has had enough coffee for that yet, so let us move on). Rumor has it that it will actually reach seventy-three degrees in the next few days -- but only to plummet cruelly back into the forties by next week.

Which is to say, this mercurial weather really plays havoc with your sinuses.

I always viewed my neti pot as a sort of personal thing. I don't know why, it just never occurred to me that, standing around at a cocktail party, anyone would want to hear how I pour salt water in one nostril and out the other. But it appears that I'm wrong and everyone wants to talk about neti pots and how fab they are. Oprah has been talking about it. The New York Times had an article last week about the whole concept of the thing as well as all the pretty colors they come in (hey, it was the Fashion & Style section).

I mention this now for two reasons: One, I really thing that with the changing weather and humidity, I'll want to start using the neti pot again so my poor sinuses don't go nuts, and Two, I'm wondering if caffeine can be absorbed through the nasal membranes, because I really need the inspiration.

(No, seriously, don't try that. I mean, it sounds good and probably works, but seriously, don't try that. Just read the Times article and drink the coffee.)

Well. I'm off to run fifty million errands. I'll be back later, so brew a fresh pot -- I'll need it.

[FOLLOW UP: In case you were awake all weekend wondering what happened to him, MP is fine and got to and from his gig. $500 later my car is also fine, with shiny new wires and a distributor cap. I'm not happy about that part, because $500 is a really nice pair of shoes, and I'm not exactly going to open my hood for all my girlfriends and show off shiny new wires.

If it had been my sister's car, it would have cost $1000 dollars and she would have contemplated holding a bake sale to raise the funds, because it would be either have a car or pay the rent, but of course, you can't go to the job that pays the rent if you don't have a car...]

Adaptability

Philosophers, physicists, and intellectual pundits throughout history have long pondered a Unified Theory of Everything. If they would put down the particle accelerator and show up at Café Tor I would tell them what they wanted to know:

The cosmic love-honey that holds everything together is adaptability!

I mention this now because I had this one idea for a post all mapped out, and then Things Happened yesterday, and now I'm not in the mood. So the Muse will have to wait and sip her chai latte, because I will not be a slave to a List of Things to Write About ( I don't think she cares; she's found an old copy of People Magazine and is tapping her foot to Dizzy Gillespie).

This is an example of Adaptability in Action:

MP left for another gig yesterday. He does that all the time; it's nothing new, but this time he wanted to take my car because he had other people and things to take with him. So I clean out my CDs, fluff my car, and he takes off with it (leaving me with his car, a quarter of a tank of gas and a tire pressure of 15 psi. MP is going to have a real swell homecoming, I promise)

Five minutes later, I get a call on my cell. In the seconds it takes to actually answer the call, I have a terrifying vision of MP stranded by the side of the road in the bitter cold. "Tut-tut, Marianne!" I say to myself, "You worry too much."

It's MP. "I'm stranded by the side of the road in the bitter cold. Your car won't start."

Before I answered the phone, I was worried about him. After I answered the phone and it was confirmed that he was in fact stranded by the side of the road in the bitter cold, I was not worried at all. It was more like, "It's been five minutes -- How did you screw up my car in five minutes?"

MP managed to leave the car in a decent spot where it wouldn't cause trouble and got a ride with someone else. I stopped by later and, sure enough, the car wouldn't start. It's being towed somewhere by someone who can hopefully do something to fix it. Meanwhile, I have MP's crappy car, so I'm not stranded. It could have been a lot worse -- no one was greatly inconvenienced, the tow truck only has to go a mile to get to the garage, and no body parts were frozen.

Adaptability.

(If this had been my sister, she would have been stranded in Fairbanks with the baby crying, no cell, and not a dime in her pocket. She would have last eaten four grapes seven hours previously and a pack of tundra wolves would be closing in. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between my sister and me.)

This entire gig of MP's has been one long exercise in adaptability, so I imagine he's rolling with it and is doing fine. As for myself, I can't wait to find out what happened to the car. I'm also mildly interested to know when I'll get back into the mood to complete the post I had originally planned... But the Muse appears to have begun a chess game with her sometimes-lover, Procrastination, so it may be a while.

Super-Powers

That looks so political...

No, I want to talk about good old-fashioned super-powers, like invisibility, x-ray vision, and all that. Because everyone has super-powers. Seriously. They're just not all really cool super-powers.

For example, MP (MP is my guy; you'll hear a lot about him [poor fellow]) swears that his super-power is Cold. Okay, I thought, a sort of Silver Surfer thing going on... No. He means Cold as in being cold -- cold hands, cold feet. While I agree that MP does indeed have unusually cold feet, it makes for a pretty lame super-power. The crime fighting possibilities are narrowed, as it were. What's a little more unusual about MP's super-power of Cold is that he also has... Well, a very cold butt. I've never actually heard of having a cold butt unless you were ice fishing or something. MP tells me that his butt is sort of like cooling fins for his computational brain... And yes, that's right about the part where my mind shuts down, too.

There's an anime, Outlaw Star, in which one of the satellite characters has the special talent of "space fighting with cats." Hello? How do you find out you have that skill? And how do you market that?

I actually have two super-powers, but they're passive; I have no control over either, it's just what happens in my universe. The first is that people tell me everything and anything. The second is space-time bending.

I've had the first super-power for as long as I can remember, and frankly, I'm still working through what it actually is. Am I invisible, so people just talk like I'm not there? Do I have some Bene Gesserit mind-control trick to force people to reveal things that they later regret? Perhaps I just have an understanding face that says, "go ahead -- you can tell me all about that little personal habit of saving your scabs and I'll understand perfectly."

It isn't that I listen without judgment. Oh yes, I have my opinions. Perhaps it's that I reserve that judgment for myself, later, after I've had time to think about it. In the meantime, I'm just gonna keep asking you questions and nodding my head. It's a nice talent for a writer to have, except that if I write what I know, I'm gonna get sued -- not to mention hurt a lot of people's feelings. One must never abuse one's talents. I am sworn only to use my Evil powers in the cause of Good. In the meantime, I guess I wait for everyone I know to die off or something.

The space-time thing happens a lot while people are busy revealing their inner-lives to me (and both happen a lot at Café Tor, now that I think of it). They sort of look up and say, "Wow, it's only seven thirty? Huh. Where was I?" I can expand time really well, but I'm not so hot at compression. We can spend a fascinating hour together, but I can't help your workday fly by.

Useful talents, true, but I'm still working on the space fighting with cats. I want to be well-rounded.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night...

That's it. I'm running away from home.

There aren't any good snacks here. There is nothing more irritating than being home on a Dark and Stormy night and finding out that you crave muffins, only you don't have any eggs, and that somebody used all the coffee creamer but didn't tell you and just left the carton on the counter. How passive-aggressive is that?

Home has also gotten pretty dull lately, which is to say that I have gotten dull. It is time, I think, to change my views, or at least to contemplate what they might be.

Perhaps most importantly, I crave anonymity (I defy anyone to spell that word correctly without first looking it up). There is nothing more of a drag on a writer's creativity than to have the threat of familial obligations lurking about. The people you know most intimately are of course the richest vein of discussion, so let us "open our veins," as it were. I mean, I want to be tasteful here, but if my parents didn't want to see their evil child-rearing practices splashed all over the blogosphere, then they should have fronted up with that pony back in '79. It pays to think ahead.

However, I totally respect my relatives wanting to maintain their own anonymity, to go quietly to their various places of employment without hearing, "Hey - read Marianne's essay in the Sunday paper. Holy crap! Never knew you could use a Salad Shooter to do that!" It's a two-way street, you know.

I've always written in cafés, ever since I discovered that such watering holes existed (And BTW - Starbucks ain't no café. If we are to get along, we have to be perfectly clear about that up front.). I liked to write papers in cafés because it removed me from all my stuff while I was working so I couldn't procrastinate, but it still gave me a responsible means of taking a break (By "responsible" I mean not getting up to go to the bathroom and suddenly deciding that I need to clean out my old makeup by shampooing all the applicator brushes and wiping the containers down with little scraps of damp toilet paper, and then looking up 3 hours later and wondering where all the time has gone). And when I wasn't writing, I was watching people.

When I decided to write the Great American Novel, it was only natural for me to try to find a café to do it in... Only I had moved, and there weren't any.

So I made one up. I became my own barrista, slotted my own jazz CDs, and opened Café Tor. Café Tor is wherever and whenever I need it to be in order to have that comfortable place to write in. It is the café within a café, where the lighting is right and my music is on, and I am at last able to unfurl and muse. But sometimes... I miss the people.

Which is where you come in. So now that we're all wearing our black berets and dark sunglassess... Welcome to Café Tor.