epcohn

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: Bat Beach

The last Saturday night of summer, we drove down the road with the kids and pulled off of Main Street on the dirt road that follows along the river towards the gravel quarry.  We didn’t need to drive, of course - it wasn’t too far to walk, and it was past dinner but the pavement was still baking, the light still bright in the late summer sky.  It was one of those nights when the day goes on forever.  But we drove because we were bringing supplies, and we knew it would be dark and late when we left.  The kids were giddy unbuckled in the car, so close to our destination that they could bounce free, and we pulled over and parked next to the woods and tumbled out and down avoiding poison ivy that almost choked the path to the little beach, the little spit of sand that sat deposited at the place where the little mountain spring whose name we don’t know joins with the West River.  

At that late summer moment, the water ran low, and the children charted a path from rock face to rock face sticking up dryly out of the lazy low river.  They made their way up river, far, too far, and I called them back as you built a fire with the wood we’d brought.  And they came back with an old toy truck rusted from years of river water washing away the paint and the wheels and the windows to leave only the rough skeleton of a plaything.  By then the fire was blazing, just as the sun dipped below the curtain of the mountains and the air began to chill and the light weaken, and we sharpened the ends of foraged sticks to a point and roasted marshmallows.  We made s’mores with dark chocolate, and I congratulated the good taste of our children, who agreed that dark was far superior to the standard milk of the everyday s’more.

And then, as the day finally surrendered, they came.  Black, and fast, and in staggering numbers, the bats filled the sky for their twilight feast.  They dove like fighter pilots through the broad avenue of the river clearing, through the intersection of the streams, alarmingly close to our heads, much to your and the children’s delight.  But in that moment I discovered a previously unknown irrational fear of bats, and I cowered next to you on a log and buried my face in your neck and squealed, to the great amusement of all.  I extracted my phone and searched for “Bats of Vermont” - a characteristic instinct of mine, to try to vanquish fear with knowledge.  And just as quickly as they came, they were gone, winging home with bellies full of insects.

With the confidence of western explorers - the Lewis and Clarks of South Londonderry - we named that place Bat Beach, and it will henceforth and forever be called by that name.  I have half a mind to post a sign.

I walked by Bat Beach today.  It’s barely visible beneath the crust of ice accumulating at the confluence of those two streams like a frozen green clot.  But it was pleasant to think, on my walk home, of that last day of summer that bursted with life and provided us with a chance to cool our feet against the heat and witness the miracle of this place where we live.  When winter becomes too much, I’ll think back to Bat Beach and anticipate our return.

[epcohn]

Love Letter

1. On Thanksgiving, we had a guest, a new teacher at my school whose family is on another coast, and who was orphaned for the holiday.  I never told you how much I loved this, but days before, as we were planning the meal, you said to me, “Do you think Carly would like to have coffee after dinner?”  When I offered that I had no idea about Carly’s after-dinner drinking habits, you said, “I feel like, when I’m a guest at someone’s house, I always love it when there’s coffee after dinner.  You know, you never make it for yourself, but when there are multiple people drinking it?”  I nodded.  “I’m going to make it, I think.”  And you did - when the leftovers were tucked away in the fridge, the giant carcass of the bird removed from danger of dog theft, the plates stacked not so neatly in the sink, you offered coffee.  And she said, yes thanks, in that tone that suggests that would be delightful.  It wasn’t so much that you made coffee, or that Carly accepted it, that lodged in my heart.  It was your planning of this small act of consideration, so far in advance.  You were formulating a game plan to make a guest from my world comfortable, and you carried it out.

2. I said, “Hey let’s make Indian food for dinner on New Years.”  You found a recipe online that requires locating decent lamb meat, toasting 27 whole spices, grinding them in a device we don’t have, marinating the meat, skewering it, roasting it in a tandoor, and serving it with rice.  When I expressed doubt at our capability of executing this recipe, you said, “Where’s your sense of adventure?”  I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

3. You were hell bent on holiday aromatics.  An orange, studded with cloves, simmering in some fluid (water) on the stove for hours.  You talked of it last year, but it never materialized.  This year, on Christmas eve day, you set the kids to the task with the same old bottle of cloves you purchased years ago for this purpose and a plump orange.  They poked until it was ready, and you set it to work.  I teased, but it was a simple pleasure for you, and now it’s a new tradition for us.

4.  Add these to the many, many reasons I love you.

[epcohn]

Salt Bagel

For a special treat, we went to Bruegger’s on Grand Avenue after church.  It was close enough to House of Hope Presbyterian to pressure the parent driving to go just a bit out of his or her way, but too far for us to walk, especially in the colder months when the streets were choked with snow.  There was no consciousness of Bruegger’s as a chain; it, and bagels generally, were new to Saint Paul.  The Jewish deli was not then, and is still not (for the most part) a prominent feature of a Minnesota upbringing.  Perhaps we had extracted a sticky Lenders bagel from a plastic bag and tried to revive that stale-upon-arrival abomination of a baked good in the toaster, but real bagels were an unknown.  And Bruegger’s was an anomaly in the 1980s: a restaurant that specialized in one product, something so ordinary as a piece of bread.  It sat on a corner, red awning, full frontal windows clouded with condensation from the constant baking within.  We’d shuffle in in clunky snow boots and church dresses, slush following us in, tights sagging at the knees, hair no longer obeying its church form.  Nod to the other families in line who’d had the same idea, the backs of whose heads we’d just seen a few pews ahead, or whose hands we’d shaken in the part of the service where you have to greet the strangers or friends around you.

I always ordered a salt bagel with plain cream cheese and a sparkling apple cider, never deviating from that routine.  Perhaps I needed the sodium after a morning of singing in the children’s choir and going through the motions of Sunday school.  Perhaps it was a necessary counterpoint to the sharp sweetness of cinnamon graham crackers that Alicia Hart and I polished off in the corner of musty church classrooms.  Whatever the reason, I craved the grit of the giant salt crystals embedded in the bagel’s outer crust.  My tiny teeth - too big for my face, too small or sparse to do justice to a salt bagel - plunged in past that salty gravel exterior, into the thick layer of cream cheese.  The sharp tang of the salt (in proportions I’d never been allowed to ingest) was followed by the soothing dairy of the cream cheese.  The combination was divine.  The fizz of apple washed it all down, clearing the palate for another gnawing bite.

Now that the bagel has joined the quotidian, the mundane, it sadly no longer occurs to me to be so sensually invested in the eating of a salt bagel.  I never order salt anymore, come to think of it, and perhaps that’s why: the salt bagel belongs in the realm of nostalgia for when Bruegger’s was an exotic locale, and the bagel was an aesthetic experience.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: A Tribute to Mary Hepburn

Dahlia spent the past week at Theater Camp at Main Street Arts in Saxtons River, a program that has been running every summer perhaps since time immemorial through the Herculean efforts of Mary Hepburn.  I saw the play they produced together yesterday afternoon, The Pied Piper, and reveled in one of those rare moments you get as a parent to see your child on stage, under the lights, and notice with a terrified pride how much she’s grown.

But beyond the feelings I felt for my girl yesterday, which is another prompt in itself, I couldn’t help but reflect on the absolute admiration I have for Mary, a sentiment I know I shared with every adult in that room.  Mary Hepburn is a fixture in the Saxtons River community, and a woman more full of life than perhaps anyone else I’ve met.  She has single-handedly fostered a thriving arts community in our little Vermont hamlet; she would argue with “single-handedly,” and I’m sure she’s had lots of help, but it’s Mary who is at the beating heart of it all.  She’s the electric impulse that keeps it pumping.  When she meets you, if she can sniff out even the slightest interest or talent in the arts, she will find a way to conscript you into her world.  You’ll find yourself on top of stilts walking down Main Street wondering how you got there, or do-so-doing in her barn on a mid-summer’s evening.  There is joy in that woman that we all can learn from.

Mary, I don’t know when you started corralling the children of southern Vermont, luring them to the arts like the Pied Piper himself, but I am so grateful that my daughter has the privilege of being among the ranks of kids who have worked with you.  The gift you give them is a sense of discipline and willingness to take themselves seriously as artists, because you take them seriously as artists.  I’ve seen you do it in your pottery classes, as well - your guidance is playful but firm.  And the outcome is breathtaking: I can’t imagine anyone else carrying out the production of a musical with twenty children in a single week, but you do it every time.  Thank you for seeing the light inside Dahlia, and thank you for bringing the arts to her life.

I’ve heard the rumblings of rumors that your retirement is on the horizon, and that we are losing you to Maine.  I’ll be the first to sign the petition against it.  And if it is true, our school - our entire village - must eke out every bit of Mary before you leave.  Saxtons River won’t be the same without you.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: Music from When You Were Six

I have a theory that each one of us has a special attachment to the music that we heard when we were six.  There’s a moment in every life when you start to develop music tastes of your own; your brain begins to sort through the songs you hear on the radio and grab onto the ones that appeal to you.  You start to listen to and remember song lyrics and pay attention to how the songs make you feel.  I don’t know if that developmental moment is year six for everyone, but I’m fairly sure it is six for me.

I was six in 1984, which is fortuitous, because it was one of the greatest pop music moments of all time.  I was in half day kindergarten, and I went to day care in the afternoon at a local woman’s house in my neighborhood.  I remember very little about the woman herself, but I have strong memories of feeling lonely there, and spending time sitting in her living room listening to the radio.  (It just at this moment came back to me that there was a boy at the day care who had a penchant for drawing on the walls of her bathroom with excrement, so perhaps she was frequently busy dealing with that disaster.)  

At any rate, put on virtually any song that was popular in 1984 and I will be immediately transported back to that living room and experience the very feelings that I felt listening to that music.  The music of 1984 tends to be either long on melodrama or completely ridiculous.  Play Phil Collins’s  “Against All Odds” and my heart stops, not because I fully understood, at six, the utter devastation Collins felt at losing the love of his life and recognizing he was never going to get her back, but because for the first time I could at least intuit the sentiments behind his voice, and I could attach my own sadnesses (whatever they were) to those feelings.  When Tina Turner asked through the speakers “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”, I had no experience of protecting my heart from love after having been burned, could not identify with her jaded response to a suitor, but I nevertheless absorbed from the music of that song the sense that love was tricky, and the world was a place where you don’t always get what you want.

In 1984, I learned that Love is a Battlefield, that You Might Be My Lucky Star, that Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and that it was a Cruel, Cruel Summer.  I started to hope that someday, someone would just call to say they love me, or that they would jump for my love. 

But the song that hits me hardest is Wham!’s “Careless Whisper,” although now that I’m going back through the lyrics in my head, I realize that it comes from the perspective of a cheater.  But the agony in his voice is pure heartbreak to me - the sadness he feels at never being able to dance again, the way he danced with her.  Strange that I learned every word, sang along, and have for years without analyzing the story at all.  Strange how song lyrics can just be a string of sounds to make until suddenly the meaning behind them makes sense.

No matter the message of the songs, the music I heard when I was six will forever be the genesis of my relationship with music.  It was the time when I started mapping my own emotions onto what I heard and began to key into how music can encapsulate the human experience.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: The Inner Critic

I need that voice to shut up.  It pumps fear into me and makes me choose other activities instead of writing: I notice the kitchen floor needs to be wiped down, or I think of the shabby peeling paint on the shutters just outside my window.  It nags me to remember there are lots of more productive ways to spend time, that will have immediate rewards.  The voice induces me to read instead: you’re better off reveling in other people’s words, instead, it tells me.  Leave the writing to the experts.  

The voice peppers me with questions and running commentary: Are you sure that’s the right way to phrase that?  Oh that’s a cliche - you know it is.  Don’t even put it on the page.  You’ve heard it said many times before: bad writers use too many adverbs.  Stop using adverbs!  Where is this even going?  What makes you think you have what it takes to write something that goes beyond a few paragraphs?  You have no training in this.  No understanding of how to construct a story.  You’re like an amateur painter hoping with utter futility that you are that rare artist who just “has the eye.”  Such hubris!  When is something going to happen in this story?  

There’s also the self-defeating line of reasoning, and it’s masterful.  It goes like this: You are never going to be able to sustain the energy and self-discipline it would take to carry out the amount of practice necessary to complete a real writing project, so why bother doing it even just a little bit?  What’s the point?

That voice is the enemy.  I have to battle it with my Anne Lamott mantras: shitty first drafts, shitty first drafts, shitty first drafts.  Tiny picture frames.  Bird by bird.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: Love Note (You’re Game)

I’ve been asked: what is it about this person that made you gravitate so fully, so quickly to him?  My response usually rambles, touching on several separate qualities that add to your charm, but right now I realize they all add up to one utterly cherishable trait: you’re game.  I don’t care what it is, you’re always game.  You live by the tenet of why not?  It pervades your every action: unless you can find a compelling reason why it’s not a good idea, and many times even if you can find a reason or two, you throw yourself headlong into whatever idea is proposed and find ways to derive pleasure from it.  Every possibly negative consequence of a decision is an opportunity for alternative joys unanticipated.  And you find them: you dig in and find shiny bits and hold them up to the light as proof that we meant to do this all along.  

The question: Should we try this Germanic restaurant with tired Tyrolean decorations and “schnitzel” misspelled on the lettered sign outside?  Your answer: Why not?

The question: Can we go away somewhere for the night? Your answer: Name the day and don’t necessarily even tell me the place.  I’ll be at your side.

The question (okay statement): Let’s get a dog!  Your answer: When does she arrive?

The question (okay crack-brained suggestion): How about we buy a run down old house and spend a bunch of time fixing it?  Your answer: All I want is to wake up next to you.  I’ll mend whatever I can, live on uneven floors and battle armies of spiders to be able to share your space.

That’s the thing - I keep looking up at you in skepticism, like at some point your limit will be reached and we will find the thing for which you are decidedly NOT game.  I eternally wonder if there’s a well of inflexibility or anxiety ready to bubble to the surface but then I check your face and note the honest relishing of life’s adventure that lies there, unadulterated.  And you lead as much as you follow, and make me game like I’ve never been before.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: That Woman Who Sat Next To Me

That woman who sat next to me moved someone else’s keys from the arm of the chair before sitting down without asking if they belonged to anyone in particular.  She lodged herself in, plump, square buttocks swathed in cotton pants, and nestled her back against the faux leather of the Subaru dealership furniture.  

That woman who sat next to me smelled of cloying, sour perfume - the kind you purchase in the glossy, mirrored aisles of Rite Aid, the bottle tinted pink and missing a good quarter inch of fluid due to customers furtively spritzing the scent from bottles not at all marked “sampler” or “try me.”  She filled the space of the windowless waiting room with her olfactory presence.  

That woman who sat next to me drew a snack bar out of her oversized purse and began to unwrap the packaging with an overdrawn dramatic flair.  It wasn’t a granola bar, or a candy bar, but rather a low-calorie “nutrition bar” manufactured under the guise of diet food but in reality just a stick of waxy preservatives and puffed rice and powdered chemicals.  Peeling back the wrapper, she studied the unclothed end and lodged a corner in the back corner of her mouth, and chewed audibly.  Evidently incapable of breathing through her nose, she drew air in as her teeth smacked through each bite and her tongue cleared the cavity of her mouth of chocolate residue.

That woman who sat next to me felt that the waiting room of the car dealership was an appropriate place to call someone’s daughter - a friend’s?  Her niece? - and sing “Happy birthday” in its entirety.  At full volume.  She was apparently unbothered by the lack of consistent cell service in that interior cave of a room, and asked the call’s recipient several times if she could be heard, in the midst of fervent and repeated assurances that the birthday girl was special, and that her mother was lucky to have a daughter as - can you hear me? - am I clear now? - yes, well happy birthday, sweetheart.

That woman who sat next to me was not the only person in the room but she might as well have been.  She colonized it - the conquistador of Brattleboro Subaru - leaving those of us natives who were minding our own business and reading three-month-old Real Simple magazines held against our will.  And now I remember her, not by choice.  She seared herself into my consciousness without even asking me if I wanted to retain her.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: My Ape

Dear Dahlia,

I learned today that orangutan mothers rear their young until the age of eight.  This is one of the longest childhoods in the non-human animal world.  It might also be worth noting that orangutans are one of our closest relatives, sharing 97% of our DNA.  It had me thinking about the fact that you are just now eight years old, and if we were orangutans, you would be parting from me.  One day I’d be picking bugs out of your crimson back hair and listening for the crash of your limbs behind me as we swing through the trees, and the next you’d be off to find a mate and rear an ape baby of your own.

Recently I’ve been noticing big changes in you, now that you’re eight, and I wonder if this is leftover from some primordial primate moment of independence that lingers in humans even if it still takes us longer to let our babies go.  There’s a piece of you that feels ready to take on the world as your very own being and not as my offspring.  I don’t like it and I do, all at the same time.  I see that I’ve taught you well, and you can use tools to procure your own food and defend yourself when under attack from whatever comes at us.  You have preferences that are yours and yours alone and bellow noises unique to your own personal animal self.  All of this is truly delightful.  But understand that a mother - a human mother - isn’t always ready to release her baby to the forest at eight.  Wrap your fuzzy arms back around me for a little bit longer, and let me carry you on my chest through the canopy to look at the stars.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: The Dodged Bullet

A sharp intake of breath, heart ceasing momentarily: “Just flipped the truck,” your text read.  Followed by “I’m totally fine.”  Exhale.  I was driving myself and almost flipped my own car.  They say don’t read your texts while driving for this very reason, because of the unpredictability of human emotions and the fact that earth shattering news can arrive in just seven words displayed on a small screen.  I worked hard not to let tears loose as I bumped across the minefield of frost heaves and winter pot holes, maintaining calm through the dead zone and willing the car forward to the end point of my drive so I could call you.  I tried to avoid getting too emotional, to avoid calling you a mess and burdening you with the need to gather me back together while you’re waiting for the adrenaline cocktail to seep slowly from your veins and make sense of what happens.  The last thing you needed was that extra car wreck on top of your own personal chaos.  So I called, and was brave, and there was your voice, rattled but solid and true, and you were alive and well.

What I would’ve said if I’d let my own selfish feelings get the better of me is this: you can’t do this to me.  To even imagine you gone in an instant is more than this battered heart can bear.  In such a short time, you’ve become so foundational to me that you are not even allowed to tempt fate to remove you from my life.  You are all things good and steady and right in this world, and to lose you - even hypothetically through imagined what ifs - is too much trauma.

[epcohn]

Today’s Prompt: Searching for Sympathy

She has a fairly constant set of ailments. The sore throat continues for days and requires sticky sweet lozenges, followed by a twisted wrist that is insufferable without a tightly wrapped ace bandage that becomes filthy after several  draggings through sauces on the edges of dinner plates.  She likes to check her temperature with such frequency that it’s become a joke in our house, and she plays along.  “My eye itches,” she says.  “Do you think I should check my temperature?”  Or she notices that her feet stink, and Tully brings her the thermometer.  At the moment, she very legitimately has palms and fingers studded with itchy, wart-like bumps that are inexplicable and probably quite irritating.  Yet it’s the constant verbal reminders that get me - the constant drawing of the conversation back to her wounds and illnesses.

Yesterday, as she took cloth napkins out of a drawer in preparation for setting the table for dinner, her stockinged feet came out from under her and she banged her knee.  I saw it happen, a fairly run-of-the-mill blunder that under normal circumstances would be a humorously klutzy move.  But she reacted beyond her usual flair for the dramatic, all out of proportion to the injury, burying her head in her hand and sobbing as though she was thoroughly wounded.  Tully and Kai, accustomed to the toughness of sibling bullshit-calling, raised an eyebrow and giggled their way out of the room.  She could tell they weren’t taking her seriously, and her response was to amp up the performance, holding the knee in both hands and raising the shrill of her cry even louder.

I watched it play out, throwing a hairy eyeball at the other children in the dining room but not intervening.  It was one of those moments of parenting where so many conflicting feelings surface: the embedded need for a mother to coddle her child; the loud clang of my own bullshit meter ringing like an old school bell; the emergent memory of playing that game myself as a child, liking the feeling of sympathetic attention received when real injuries occurred and hoping my acting job would be good enough to reconjure it.  The fervent wish to quell the ungenerous feelings of the other children mixed, cloudily, with the will to join them in their eye rolling, and the memory of irritation at seeing other kids fake playground injuries or tears in hopes of a fresh dose of sympathy, or to explain why they lost the race.  

And then the mental debate: how do I handle this moment?  As a parent, I want my child to know I hear her woes and am sympathetic to all of the legitimate hurts she feels.  I want her to feel seen, and not dismissed.  But, when the feelings are obviously put on to elicit a response in others, I need to help her grow out of that behavior and learn to be a person whose expressed emotions are genuine.  I want to teach her to assess the injury for what it is, not what it can get others to feel on her behalf.  And with the little bumps and bruises, big responses only bring big responses.

I settled for a quick check in and a hug, followed by some space and the diversion of a fun family dinner.  We never heard about the knee again.

[epcohn]

Today's Prompt: That Beast You Made Me Get

Dear Corey,

I don't know why you made me get this dog.  You found her picture online, when you were wasting time at work, procrastinating by scrolling through myriad sad canine mugshots instead of being effective.  And you decided then and there that it would be such a great idea to bring a dog into our life, as a holiday gift for the children, you said, because think of the joy we'll bring into their poor petless lives.  (So what if they had fish.  Fish are lame pets for people who aren't really pet people.)  And so in a matter of days you had called the shelter in Tennessee, of all places, and talked the guy into sending her up to this godforsaken snow-choked northern land where she would have to limp along on walks because her paw pads get frozen.  But really he was selling you - I saw it as you talked to him on the phone and your face melted at his description of the dog as an "old soul." (He has to say that.  He has three hundred dogs yapping away and crapping in cages behind him and he's got to move them out, come hell or high water.  You're such a sucker!)

Then she arrived. And two days later you promptly left for CHILE.  We're not talking a little short jaunt overnight to a conference or something, this was a WEEK in the farthest reaches of the earth, a continent away.  And I was stuck here with an animal I hardly knew, taking her out at all hours and enduring single-digit temperatures while you texted me pictures of yourself at the beach getting a sunburn.  It was cruel.

Your dog may be an old soul, but it's an old soul wrapped in a pretty young package.  Your dog chooses to pee on the rug from time to time to register her displeasure at not having been out in the past few hours.  Your dog strains at the leash and coughs a choking, manic bark when she even gets a whiff of another canine within a mile's distance.  Your dog sticks her terrier snout everywhere: in the food I'm preparing, under my wrists as I type, into my cheek at the edge of the bed.  She is a beast who sheds wiry hairs in a matted film along the edge of sofas and beds, onto the soles of every single sock, and into every drink I consume.  Her wet beard leaves soaked splotches on my pants, which she licks when I dare not pay attention to her.  Your dog is short on manners, but long on charm.

The next time you come at me with this sort of a whim, I just might think twice about going along with it.  But probably not.

love,

Erin

[epcohn]

Today's Prompt: Diplomacy

As a student of history, I used to believe, naively, that all wars were avoidable.  This must be a failure of diplomacy, I thought; with the right personalities involved, with mature and humane leadership, the differences could've been hammered out, the breaches in the relationship sewn back together.  It wouldn't be easy, I knew, to patch up the anger.  Warring nations have always had cultural discrepancies to wade through and worldviews to reach across.  These discrepancies have bred distrust, and consequently caused conflicting factions to come at their interactions from a place of self-preservation and fear, rather than empathy and collaboration.  Throughout human history, there have been Israels and Palestines with mutual antipathies and hard-headed unwillingness to bend and compromise and coexist.  But, ever faithful in the goodness in the hearts and bellies of all humans, I looked back at historical wars with skepticism and an assumption that diplomacy was possible.  The right negotiators could have reached beyond fear and distrust and found their way into the humanity of their opponent if they had tried hard enough.  They could have waded through the quagmire of one another's worldview and, through respectful collaboration, found peace.  

But now I wonder if war is inevitable, because maybe to ask for that kind of diplomacy is too tall an order.  I've felt the draw of defensiveness myself in personal conflicts - the dark temptation to deny the humanity of the opponent and come out swinging, armed with barbs and hostilities.  It's an ugliness I don't like to see in myself.  We all carry our own personal Israel-Palestines around with us, those people with whom we simply cannot see things the same way.  We try and try to explain ourselves, and yet the world simply looks different from each person's perspective.  If diplomacy fails in these individual interactions, who am I to expect that it's at all possible when what's at stake is the fate of an entire nation?  And yet I still want to believe that it's possible for people to disagree without resorting to violence, emotional or otherwise.  I want to keep that faith, but I'm not sure how long I can.

[epcohn]

Today's Prompt: Dreaming of Green

It happens every year in February: I begin to fantasize about green things.  The bunches of tulips arrive in the market on cue, and I lift them out of their cans of water and inspect their stems as if looking to find the bulb and root there as proof that things grow.  

In the past, the February sickness took the form of weekly flowers on the kitchen table (and I can't say that won't happen again), but this year the symptoms are taking the form of garden planning.  Yesterday I spent hours reading up on the development of a perfect kitchen garden.  Perusing online organic seed catalogs, I carefully planned my beds.  Half an hour: clicking thumbnail photos of luscious summer tomatoes, beefy Brandywines and sungold cherries, zebra heirlooms and plump plums.  Another 30 minutes: greens and herbs, hearty lacinta kale so full of summer nutrients it's almost black, basils sweet and spicy, green and purple, the bushiest of cilantros to line the insides of so many future burritos.  Mesclun blends and oak leaf lettuce, ready to sow and cut and regenerate over and over again, to accompany every warm dinner.  Climbing vegetables and flowers: sugar snap peas with their sharp green flavor, miniature English cucumbers thieving children are certain to pick and eat on breaks from sword play and cartwheel competitions.  Sunflowers to feed the birds and turn their heads to track the progress of the long summer warmth.  Nasturtium to add color to the salad.

I placed their seeds in my online shopping basket and imagined myself pacing between beds, wiping sweat from my brow and leaving smears of dirt from hard-worked fingers, stooping to harvest the ripe fruits of my labor, plucking each one and placing it in a real basket to be consumed that very day.  

[epcohn]

Today's Prompt: The Air We Breathe

            On the heels of Martin Luther King Day, my school developed a voluntary all-school writing prompt related to equality, asking what would it mean for everyone to be treated equally?  I thought I wouldn’t write, with so much to do and the pressing temptation to do nothing and let it pass.  But then I heard a song on the radio and suddenly I had to write.  Suddenly, there was a lot to say.

            The song was an old pop hit from the early 80s that I hadn’t heard since I was a little girl: Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train.”  The song began and my chest filled with nostalgia as the lyrics came forward from the depths of my brain to my tongue unexpectedly, the way song lyrics so often can.  And I remembered so fondly, singing along to the radio:

            My baby takes the morning train,

            He works from nine to five and then,

            He takes another home again,

            To find me waiting for him.

It was a catchy refrain, and as a little girl I learned the words and sang along unthinkingly. 

            And yet hearing it again, I was entirely appalled by the lyrics to that song.  From the perspective of an adult woman listening carefully to the song, it was suddenly obvious that, at a very early age, I’d programed into my little brain the words to a song that describes a woman whose life is absolutely nothing without a man.  Easton croons about how she gets up in the morning and her day seems to last forever, because she has nothing to do but wait for her baby to get home from work.  But then, she tells us, “the moment that he’s with me, everything’s alright.”  Essentially, she lives to be only with him.  And the vision of little early-1980s me singing those words suddenly broke my heart.

            And there I was in the car on a three hour drive, with the time to think about all of the ways those ideas about women’s roles are imbibed – digested – without even thinking about it.  And I recalled the article I read recently about the fact that Landon Donovan is frequently cited as the all-time lead US soccer goal scorer and yet that’s actually not true; in fact it’s Abby Wambach.  And yet she’s listed as the lead women’s goal scorer, as if that category needs the extra qualifier, as if her accomplishment is that much less.  There’s the Women’s World Cup.  The Women’s NBA.  The Lady Wildcats.  Without the qualifier, an athlete is default male.  It’s simply assumed.

            Or there’s the way my friend Amanda and I noticed one day how frequently we comment on little girls’ appearances when we first see them, telling them how cute they look, or noticing that they are growing their hair, or commenting on their clothes.  Never once have I seen a friend’s son and complimented him on his t-shirt or evaluated his coiffure.  And then I started to see it everywhere, in the way every single person interacted with my daughter.  The hotel employees who addressed her as “Princess” at Disney World (vomit).  The old ladies in the grocery store aisles, the friends of the family, my own mother and sister.  Telling her over and over again that she has worth first and foremost because she’s physically beautiful.

            And I go back to thinking about music and realize that little 1980s me unthinkingly singing sexist songs is fully mirrored and repeated in my daughter belting out her own version of “All About That Base,” which is probably the catchiest tune ever invented, and I have to admit it gets stuck in my head, too.  And yet if you listen closely to the lyrics, it becomes obvious that it is a song clothed in the guise of feminism but is actually of a piece with Sheena Easton’s ode to female subservience.  It’s lovely to be told that every inch of me is perfect from the bottom to the top, but I’m hardly going to rest easy in life simply because boys like a little more booty to hold at night.  Aren’t there other criteria by which to judge my worth?  And her dismissal of “skinny bitches” is just another instance of hatred of women by women for reasons of physical appearance.  The song asks us to trade feeling worthless about our bodies for feeling full of worth just because of our curvy bodies’ abilities to attract boys.  Is that a trade worth making?  Does it actually change anything?

            And then there’s the female student I recently overheard declaring that a boy she knew had a “man-gina.”  To the uproarious laughter from peers, as though this was the perfect way to designate him as less than man enough.  Endow him with female genitalia, according to this joke, and he becomes the epitome of weakness and ineffectiveness.  It’s the opposite of declaring a woman has balls, as though testicles are the sole endower of gumption and courage. 

            Or the tired cliché spouted by dads of young daughters that there’s going to be trouble when their girls become teenagers if any boys come sniffing around.              The message, of course, is that boys are driven solely by uncontrollable sexual urges and girls are weak, are the keepers of some innocent treasure called virginity, and need to be protected from male virility.  The construct never considers the fact that girls and women might have healthy sexual urges of their own.  It never focuses on helping daughters develop the confidence to find and cherish their sexuality and own it in a healthy way, or helping their sons respect girls and women enough to give them the space to do so.

            The frequent response to the above comments is: oh, these are just small examples.  You’re making a big deal out of small things.  None of those instances are intentionally sexist.  But here’s the insidious thing about sexism, and racism, and classism, and homophobia: the small examples are invisible, unconscious, and they add up.  It’s not the really overt acts of exclusion and hatred that are the sum of those isms – it’s all that plus the enormous range of hidden and unintentional and assumed ideas and behaviors.  Those hidden parts are like particles in the air we breathe – they come into our lungs without our thinking about it.  They are molecules that become part of us.  Each joke, a particle.  Each song, a particle.  Each qualification and judgment and assumption, a particle.

            And the hardest part about it is that we breathe it in and then we produce it ourselves, exhaling it without knowing it.  I am a feminist, but I’m also a sexist because I’ve inhaled too many jokes and songs and side comments. I may have withstood the siren song of Sheena Easton to stay home as a kept woman waiting for a man; yes, I went on with my life to pursue higher education and a career.  But I still look in the mirror and hate my hips.  I still judge the women around me by their appearance.  I am an ardent supporter of equal treatment of people regardless of race and ethnicity, and yet I’m also a racist because I’ve absorbed television stereotypes of Peter Pan Indians and breathed in the idea that a black man on a dark city street might rob me.  I’m passionate about gay rights and yet I’m a homophobic.  I believe in economic equality and yet I hold assumptions about people who live in trailers.  And I hate myself for having taken those breaths.  And I spend every day trying to clear my lungs.  I spend every day trying to interrogate the poisonous assumptions that surface.  I try to climb above the layer of pollution that still exists, not so thick as when my mother was growing up and was told that her only choice was to be a teacher or a secretary or a mother.  But it’s still there, and it clouds all our judgment. 

Our challenge, I think, is to muster the courage to take a look at what we breathe in, and examine how it tinges what we personally breathe out.  Our challenge is to take a good hard look at ourselves, and then make oxygen and clear the air.

[epcohn]

Today's Prompt: Seaweed

Perched on an outcropping of granite, I peer over the edge as the waves bump against stone, pushing and pressing and slowly eroding.  Below, in the tidal whirlpool, is a giant seaweed clinging to a rock that doesn't quite graze the surface (although there's no surface to speak of really, what with the constant journeying in and out of the waves).  The seaweed is unlike any I've ever seen: so green it's black, so thick in its long, wet leaves it resembles some freak octopus with too many legs, holding on for dear life.  A stubborn squid unwilling to give way to the ocean. The waves ebb, and the tentacles of the seaweed follow, extending themselves fully toward the horizon.  The water returns, and up they float towards the shore, in violent eddies and spirals.  They look like tendrils of salty green hair, giving rise in my imagination to sailors of old spotting erroneous mermaids along the shoreline.  

The seaweed is in constant motion, like all aquatic plants, I suppose, following the whims of the ocean. To be clutching that rock and receiving the daily, nightly, perpetual buffeting of waves is to me the worst imaginable  situation on earth.  The waves do not speak to me; I have no desire to join them and be one with the ocean as some do.  But there is always this moment of surprise, for me, to see a creature so in its element.  For every organism, there is a space in which it thrives, and for every space, there is an organism perfectly adapted to it.  That seaweed wants nothing more than to churn in salt water for all of its days.  What would become of it if the ocean suddenly stopped and it stood still?

[epcohn]

Today's Prompt: Foreign Grocery Stores

I am in Chile helping get VA's new trimester program here up and running.  Yesterday we all found our balance and got rooted here - students with host families, teachers in an apartment about a 30 minute walk from the school.  We unpacked, went for an abundant, late lunch (as they do in countries other than the United States), and then I enjoyed a sweaty, disoriented nap on the sofa.

It was clear this place needed provisions, so we went to the grocery store.  I love foreign grocery stores.  Perhaps it's the food nerd in me, or the cultural historian, but whenever I travel I derive extreme pleasure from perusing the aisles of a grocery store.  It's all so refreshingly different but at the same time familiar, and you can glean a great deal of knowledge about a culture from the way food is sold, how it's organized, and the behavior of the people purchasing it.  

Foreign grocery stores are invariably much smaller than the American supermarket.  This suits me fine, as the array of choices on an American shelf is mind-blowing and nigh on exhausting.  In the Chilean store, I found myself struggling to find places to stand and consider the products on the shelf. Customers with a mission (as all locals in a grocery store are) tried to elbow their way around me as I worked to decipher the language on packaging.  Am I purchasing pasta sauce?  Or is this just undoctored tomato sauce?  Why does this yogurt come in an enormous plastic bag?  How does one store such an item once it's open?  

Best of all, I like to walk through the produce section and read the signs out loud to myself, savoring the taste of the words in my mouth.  Basil: Albahaca.  Peach: Melocoton.  Artichoke: la alcachofa.  In the back of the market, los huevos, sitting out unrefrigerated in stacks.  I try to sear the words into my working memory of the language, learning Spanish by imprinting the food item, the string of letters on the label, to be retrieved when necessary.

This is the way to learn a language and another culture.  In a classroom, it's all theoretical.  It's just practice, and for what?  It's the babble of people who are not you, who speak to one another in a place far away.  But in a foreign grocery store, it's made real.