Julia Child was famous for encouraging us all to have fun in the kitchen—especially when we make mistakes. Most of the time, you're alone in the kitchen anyway, so who's to know if you dropped the eggplant on the floor or if the cake fell a little when it should've stayed puffy?
The important thing is the recovery: Are you able to laugh at yourself, and is the food salvageable? If yes to both, your meal is already three-fourths of the way to success. {The other fourth, I'm sure Julia would counsel, relies on how much butter you use.}
I often channel Julia in the kitchen; I certainly was the other night when I made wiener schnitzel for the first time. Of course that's not a French dish {that "wiener" is from the word Vienna, lest you think it was a hot dog schnitzel or something}, but if you ask me, cooking it—you're essentially deep frying it in peanut oil—takes much courage, something else Julia encouraged in us. As I stood fearfully next to the spattering oil, doing that thing where your body is poised to take flight, I took a deep breath. Flip the meat boldly, I told myself. Be confident. Own the meat.
I flipped with as much careful confidence as I could muster, but some of the oil still splattered on the floor, and I squealed and ran across the kitchen.
Not exactly owning the meat.
Little Pug, ever eager for anything that falls on the floor {manna from heaven, she must be thinking}, sped over to the hot oil—we're talking 350 degrees hot oil—and tried to lick it up. One tiny touch of the tongue, and she squealed and ran across the kitchen.
It's a wonder, isn't it, that dinner ever got made that night?
I thought, as I re-approached the wiener schnitzel: I hope they teach me how to safely fry meat in culinary school. This is clearly a life skill I'm lacking.
Ah, yes, culinary school! I'm going to culinary school, starting today. I'm sure you have questions about that because everyone I've talked to about this has had questions, so I've put together a handy FAQ. After you read this, let me know if you still have questions, and I'll happily answer them over wiener schnitzel.
Kamiah's Culinary Adventures: Frequently Asked Questions
Wait, don't you have a job?
I do! Thanks for noticing that I go somewhere every day and do stuff. I will still be working at my job and will be taking one class at a time. No need to bring too much stress to my life by trying to be some sort of super woman who can work full-time and take lots of classes and train for long-distance races and maintain deep friendships and be someone Little Pug loves. That'd be ridiculous and would make me into a very cranky person.
At this rate, I should finish this degree in...2019.
2019? That sounds like a science fiction year: so far from now.
2019 is a long time from now, but slow and steady wins the race, right? Unless you're running a real race, then that adage doesn't always apply. But in this culinary school thing we're talking about, it does apply: I'll take three classes a year and not be stressed out, something you should never be while cooking.
Let's return to how you're getting a degree. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to quit your job and open up a little cafe that will play French gypsy jazz all the time and be a cliche?
With this degree, I'm going to be a better cook. I don't plan on leaving my job, nor do I ever want to become a cliche. I love cooking, I love cooking for friends, and I love the richness of conversation and connection that opens up around good food. Going to culinary school is an opportunity to get better at what I love and at what excites me.
Are you still going to have me over for dinner? Or will cooking become like homework for you?
Please see the part of the answer above where I talk about how I love gathering people around my table. Yes, I will still have you over for dinner.
But will I have to pay for my dinner, now that you'll be a fancy chef?
Oh my gosh, that would be terrible and I'd lose all my friends. But remind me sometime to tell you about when I opened up a cafe at home. I was maybe 9, and I called it The Kid's Cafe. My cooking skills were limited, so the menu offered peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, and carrot sticks. I charged my family for their dinner, and the kicker was that of course, my parents were paying for the groceries. They paid for their dinner twice over, and it wasn't even that good. I'm sorry, family. I won't charge you ever again.
{I guess you don't have to remind me now to tell you that story because I just did.}
You bring up a good point about your cooking skills: I know you from back in the day {in this case, any time before I was 23}, and in my memory, you were a terrible cook. As in you had trouble with ramen noodles. You must've progressed since I saw you last.
Hi, long lost friend. I have progressed, and I owe it all to a cookbook called Cooking without Mom. No, that's the actual title, sad as it sounds. My mom got it for me when I moved to Wheaton, and it teaches you basics like:
- how to make pancakes
- how to cook vegetables so that they don't look like gray masses of sliminess
- how to make several kinds of hearty casserole {I'm from Iowa, after all}
- basic substitutions when you don't have what you need for a recipe
That cookbook is my foundation of cooking, and two years later, I was using The Art of French Cooking. This is such a ringing endorsement for Cooking without Mom that it should be on the back cover—if it's even still published.
And dear, dear long lost friend, please come over for dinner. I'll make up for those years when I served you poorly cooked ramen.
What sorts of classes will you take?
I'm going to the Culinary and Hospitality Center at the College of DuPage {aka, the community college that is larger than my hometown}, and it's a very hands-on program. That sounds obvious; how else would you learn to cook if you didn't use your hands?
I mean that after one class of cooking and kitchen basics, I will be cooking for the student-run cafe at COD—paying customers! So soon in my culinary career! The program has a stepping stone approach as you build your knowledge and responsibilities in the kitchen until you're doing your capstone class: cooking French food for the fancy-schmancy restaurant at COD.
I get to take classes on things like:
- baking and pastries: I will be able to make my own pain au chocolat. Finally.
- international cuisine: That's everything that's not French, fyi.
- culinary measurements and conversions: Math that applies to my real life! {Sorry, accountant parents who do math in your real lives every day, that I'm just now discovering math that I would consider "practical."}
- how to shop for a restaurant: If I learn any tips for home kitchen shopping, I'll pass them along.
Who are your cooking heroes?
Isn't it obvious?
And yes, I did purposely choose a picture of Meryl Streep playing Julia Child.
Bon appetit!
The moment the doorbell rang, I froze. She wasn't supposed to be here yet, was she? Hadn't we said 6:30? And here it was barely past 6, but my doorbell was ringing. She must be here, of course, and the door must be answered, but I hadn't eaten dinner yet and there was that final pass-through of the house to do still—the one where you sweep everything you don't want someone else to see into a closet or under a bed. Anywhere is fine so long as it's not visible.
I am not hyper obsessed with appearances, although I do realize that by saying that, I have just discredited myself. By saying that, I have made you equate me with Martha Stewart, my hostess smile pasted on as I coo gently about how quickly I threw this party together when really what everyone at the party is thinking is: "Are those centerpieces made out of hand-carved acorns? I didn't know you could get such detailed pictures onto something as small as an acorn."
Let's be clear: I am not Martha Stewart, my smile is real, I can't carve acorns, and I am not hyper obsessed with appearances. It's just that when someone comes over, I like to look like I put some effort into getting ready for their visit.
Move the mail pile.
Fold the blanket on the couch, still laying there from when I fell asleep on the couch the other night (because I have apparently become my mother, who falls asleep many a night in her easy chair).
Wash up the wine glass, also leftover from the other night and perhaps related to the falling asleep on the couch.
Okay, wine glassES, plural, because it's been a couple of nights that I've been working on that bottle of red wine.
I know that if my friends saw that I'm sometimes messy and that I don't always pick up after myself, they'd still love me. They'd still have a lovely time at my house (unless we got in a fight, which is highly unlikely). They wouldn't look at my mail pile and think: This girl disgusts me.
I do that final pass-through for the same reason I plan menus for meals for friends: because in the very act of planning or cleaning, I get to spend time thinking about whoever is coming over. I get to anticipate the conversation and think about the last time we saw each other and what we need to catch up on. I get to think about our friendship and celebrate—in my own little planning way—what that friend brings to my life. By being prepared for the visit, food-wise and clean home-wise, I get to thrive in those hospitality gifts I seem to have.
I know what you're thinking: You get all that from planning out what you'll eat with a friend and moving your mail pile? Yeah, right. You're just trying to justify yourself and make this inability to invite people into messiness sound like a deep and good thing.
Maybe.
Maybe it is more about a control thing and not wanting people to see the unpolished edges or the unwashed wine glasses.
The night that my doorbell rang 30 minutes early, I looked around at the dog toys strewn around the living room. I saw the recycling I needed to take out and the dust rag I had left where it was last used (because throwing it into the laundry basket would be a step too far, I guess). Through my open bedroom door, I saw the laundry that had yet to be put away. And before Katie came over, I had wanted to wipe down the kitchen table and counters.
Never mind that now—no time for it. Katie was at my door, and when I opened it, her eyes didn't sweep over the mess and then flicker with disappointment. Instead, they lit up as she said, arms reaching out for a hug, "Hello, friend. So good to see you!" And she stepped into my home—my not-company-ready-home—and continued, "I always love coming over here. You always make me feel so at home."
What am I trying to get at here? That we shouldn't both cleaning up for guests? That I need to relax and let some mess exist? That I have wonderful friends?
What I'm trying to get at is this: It's okay that I like to do that final pass-through and make sure everything is just so before someone comes over. For me, it really is about welcoming people into my home and wanting them to feel at home there.
But what I need to remember before I get tripped up on expending too much energy "managing appearances" is that people don't come over to see my shining surfaces. They come to see me, and you know what? I can be a little messy at times, and it can be so good to have someone step into the middle of that with me and say, "Hello, friend. So good to see you!"
What is better than getting a new book from the library?
No, really, I'm asking. I have some thoughts about what might be better, but I'm not convinced, particularly because I just picked up a delicious book {The Girl You Left Behind}, and every day, I can't wait to crawl into bed and start reading.
{Given that I recently wrote about how much I just want to hang out in bed, ever since I put on my flannel sheets, you may be concerned that I'm spending too much time in bed and not enough time upright and going about my normal day. Fear not, though: I am upright right now, and I manage to muddle through the days, no matter how much time I spend thinking about how I'd rather be in bed with a book.}
Things That Might Be Better Than a New Library Book
- Maple-bacon biscuits. Any recipe that begins with "Fry the bacon until crisp. Then pour fat into a measuring cup and stick it in the freezer; you will be incorporating the solidified fat into the dough" is a recipe for me. The step where you drench the crispy bacon in maple syrup only intensifies the pleasure.
- Staying inside on a rainy day. But then again, this activity is only made better by having said library book that you want to devour. Imagine it: Fireplace. Wind whipping outside. The smell of a caramelized onion, Gruyere, and ham tarte filling your home. And you on the couch with your book. It is almost too perfect, isn't it?
- A surprise of a card in the mail from an old friend. There is nothing like being reminded of why you're friends with someone: the way she can pull out just the right words, the way she knows what to joke about in a tongue-in-cheek reference to some shared memory, the way she can convey in just a few lines just how deeply she knows you. Add to that the delight of finding something other than a bill in your mailbox, and you have a serious contender for something that is better than a new library book.
But that is where I stop.
I cannot make it any further because I am thinking of my book and my bed. And maybe, one day when I finish this book, I will tell you about why you should rush to your library and get it right now. For the moment, I will say: This book, The Girl You Left Behind, involves France, World War I, impressionism, tempting descriptions of those unforgettable French meals, and a mystery.
Now do you see why I have no time for anything but reading?
And now here we are, a couple of weeks after the time change, and every year, it feels like I will never get used to leaving work in the dark.
The sun was sinking down at 4:15 when I looked up from my computer. Across the way—across the busy road—the sun was highlighting the big brick buildings that make up the county complex. The court's in there, as is the place you can go for early voting. A friend who's since moved away used to work in the county complex, helping low-income people pay for their utilities {and oh, how I wish she were still here and still working there, just across the busy road from my office}.
It's a useful place, the county complex, but it's not a beautiful place. It's where you go to get things done.
But at 4:15 this afternoon when I looked up from my computer, those buildings were blazing softly in the sunset, if things can be said to blaze softly.
When I close my eyes, I can so easily conjure up other "blazing softly" moments:
the Mississippi on a summer's night
sunflower fields out the window of a French bed and breakfast, one that my friend Amie and I stumbled upon as we drove through southern France
the old stone church I used to walk past on my way home from class in Kingston-upon-Thames
In all of those, what I was seeing was already beautiful, but it was made more beautiful by the gently fading light. The light going out in a blaze of glory.
But this afternoon, I was looking at the very dull county buildings, and I was seeing them in a new way.
I think we all, from time to time, need to see the old and the known in a new way. We need to not feel so engrained in our patterns and dug into what we know.
We need, in a way, the time change to show us our world in a different light—and to show us that change and transition comes with perks, too, even if it seems frightening and unknown and depressing at first.
Friends move away.
Relationships ebb and flow.
Your job grows.
You get a dog.
You get married.
You have a baby.
You move.
All these changes can come at us so fast, it feels like, but there will come a time, when you're in the midst of change, that you'll look up from just trying to get through the day—and you'll see the world in a new light.
You will.
So as we learned in part 1, there was this guy who followed me from one store to another in downtown Glen Ellyn—all to tell me I'm pretty. I realize the "following me" part makes it sound slightly stalkerish, but I promise it wasn't as creepy as it potentially sounds.
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Treasure House Man: So...can I have your number?
Me: My number? Really? How about you give me yours?
POWER SHIFT. Bam.
I like to think this was me being a modern day Elizabeth Bennet, not that she had a telephone, let alone a smart phone, but I think, given the opportunity, she would've told Mr. Darcy: "Can you call on me? No. But I'll call on you when and if I desire. POWER SHIFT. Bam."
She probably wouldn't have said bam.
Also, I may not get hit on all the time, but I know enough not to go handing out my number willy nilly. I mean, I once got propositioned in an elevator in Las Vegas; if I can make it out of that situation, I can certainly avoid giving away too much personal information in a shabby chic decorating shop in the suburbs of Chicago.
Treasure House Man: Okay, we can do it that way. Do you have a pen?
Me: Um, no.
I know: I'm a terrible writer. We're supposed to carry pens and Moleskin notebooks at all times, ready for when inspiration strikes, but I forgot, okay? I thought I was going armchair shopping with a friend, not arranging coffee dates.
Speaking of my friend, she spoke up here.
Elizabeth: I can help!
Oh, bless her. For many reasons, including that she laughs at the same things I do and loves France more than I do, but in this instance: bless her for her iPhone.
This was, actually, the first time I'd looked at Elizabeth during this entire conversation with the Treasure House Man. I was sure, as he said things like "pretty" and I said things like "robot," that if I looked at her, my eyes would grow big enough to be frightening as I tried to communicate silently: OMG, can you believe this is happening? Can you give me some sign that this is real? Do you think I should meet him for coffee? Is this bizarre or the beginning of a romantic comedy? Speaking of that, do you think there are hidden cameras around here?
We women might try to convey too much with one glance; despite the fact that we are very, very good friends, I don't think Elizabeth would've picked up on all of that. She probably would've looked back at me like this: Look at him! Not at me! What is wrong with you? Do you have something in your eye?
Treasure House Man: [Tells Elizabeth his phone number and she taps it in as a note. He looks at me the whole time.]
Me: [internal monologue] WHY IS HE STARING? Oh right, because he thinks you're pretty. Smile. Not too big. Yeah, smaller than that. Get it together, Walker.
Treasure House Man: So...it was good to meet you.
Me: Good to meet you, too.
And he walked out of the overpriced store.
Even before the door clicked shut, a woman popped her head around the corner. If Hollywood were trying to represent the perfect suburban mom in 2012—if they really wanted to make sure they got it right so that 50 years from now, people watching the movie would say, "Oh, I see what life was like back then"—they would film this woman.
Ballet flats, cropped pants, a wedding ring the size of Lake Michigan.
Not a hair was messed up, despite the fact that it was raining out and she was carrying a very trendy cloche hat: the woman can wear a hat and still have her hair look like the 2012 version of Donna Reed.
Slightly Unnervingly Perfect Glen Ellyn Mom: Oh, honey, I'm so flattered on your behalf! That was so amazing to overhear.
Me: Oh my word, I know! Can you believe it?
Slightly Unnervingly Perfect Glen Ellyn Mom: No! I mean, look at you! You aren't even dressed to be hit on!
By this, I assume she meant: You aren't even wearing a cloche hat and ballet flats, like me!
And it's true that I wasn't looking my best: I'd spent part of the morning picking up trash along the Prairie Path, the running path that goes through my town. Every year around Earth Day, there's a trash pick up day, and since I use the path so much, I like to help.
I'm so eco-friendly, but I wasn't exactly pretty clothes-friendly that day. I had on a puffy vest, people.
And a hoodie.
And tennis shoes. The tennis shoes are from France, though, I'd like to point out. At least part of me looked trendy.
I hadn't showered, I had on no make-up, and I'm pretty sure I had brushed my teeth.
Me: I know! Look at me!
Slightly Unnervingly Perfect Glen Ellyn Mom: Gosh, I'm married, but I might go next door to see what kind of compliments I can get.
You should probably leave your cloche hat here, I wanted to say. Clearly Treasure House Man is looking for someone with a less put together look.
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Elizabeth and I didn't spend much longer looking at overpriced decorations.
"I need to sit down," I told her. "We need to process this, debrief this, analyze this, and we can't do that here."
That was partially because of the Unnervingly Perfect Glen Ellyn Mom—and partially because everywhere you saw to sit down {paisley armchairs, teal wingbacks, floral loveseats} was covered in tea trays and trinkets, all arranged to look as if you'd just thrown the display together in your shabby chic cottage by the sea.
A bonus lesson from the day: I am not a shabby chic person.
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Elizabeth and I processed, debriefed, and analyzed in a cafe just down the street. That double shot of espresso very much calmed me down, and we came up with an action plan: I would call him the next day.
And that's just what I did—
The next day after a nap {to boost my energy because seriously, it was this gray, rainy weekend that sucked all my normal perkiness} and many pep talks {to channel that energy}, I called him, the man who perhaps was a treasure from the Treasure House.
Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone when your only point of reference for them is "Um, you followed me into a store in downtown Glen Ellyn and um, also, you think I'm pretty"?
It's a challenge, but he turned out to be a not-so-bad conversationalist. An excerpt from our conversation:
Treasure House Man: So, what are you up to tonight?
Me: I'm going to watch this BBC show called River Cottage with some friends. Do you know it?
Treasure House Man: I don't know that one, but I do love British shows, especially Downton Abbey.
OMG, HE LIKES DOWNTON ABBEY.
We probably should've made plans to elope right there on the phone; preferably it would've been an elopement to England, where we could spend our honeymoon at the real Downton Abbey.
Kidding.
Instead, we made plans to have coffee one evening after work.
I scheduled it for just before Bible study {always smart to have a defined timeline when meeting someone for the first time}, and now you can start placing bets on whether:
- I had such a wonderful time that I skipped small group
- I had such a terrible time that I lied and said that small group was at 7:00, or even 6:45. No, I am not above using the Bible to get out of uncomfortable situations.
- I had a magnificent time but still made it to small group, where I wasn't able to focus on the Gospel of Matthew because really, what's the Gospel in comparison to a guy who makes his own custom tools in the shape of robots?
I'll tell you the answer soon enough.
It was a rainy Saturday afternoon in downtown Glen Ellyn, and my friend Elizabeth and I were wandering this resale shop called the Treasure House, picking up ugly pictures and dresses to laugh at but also looking for an armchair for my new office.
"Excuse me, please."
I turned and saw that we had somehow ended up right in the path of these guys who were trying to move a large couch. There was a matching armchair, by the way, but it didn't say "office of a literary person who happens to be a medical writer" so much as it said: "if you buy me, you should also start crocheting afghans and collecting hairless cats."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," I told the worker's back and then sidestepped him, being careful to avoid hitting the display of cut crystal and someone's grandmother's wedding china.
And then I decided to buy the small springform pan I'd seen over in their kitchenware section, and I left the Treasure House thinking more of the quiches and tarts I would make than of the man I'd almost caused to drop a large pink floral couch.
Maybe I should've been thinking more of him because while Elizabeth and I were in the store next door {a laughably overpriced store where their business plan seems to be: find a mirror or whatever on the side of the road, paint it teal or rosy pink, call it shabby chic, and then charge $70 for it}, he—the great lifter of the couch himself—came in and said:
Treasure House Man: Hi, I just came to see if you were just as pretty in here as you were next door.
I will pause here to let you imagine 1) what I said in reply, and 2) what you would've said, had you been in the same situation. I like to think I'm kind of, sort of, maybe witty, but what I said was:
Me: Really!??!
Yes, really, that's what came out. For all my reading of Jane Austen, I still rarely have witty comebacks when approached like that, and let's face it: when you don't have Jane putting words in your mouth—when you are left to your own devices on a Saturday afternoon—it's rare that Elizabeth Bennet-worthy quotes come out.
Treasure House Man: Yes, really. Do you ever have coffee with college professors who volunteer at resale shops on the weekend?
How very specific. I should've said something sparkling and sharp in an attempt to recover my Elizabeth Bennet status—something like, "No, I can't say I've ever encountered this particular situation before, and how uncanny would it be to meet more than one college professor who volunteers at resale shops on the weekends and follows pretty girls from store to store?"
But I didn't say that. I chose to focus instead on the college professor part and said:
Me: Maybe. What kind of college professor would this be?
In retrospect, I think two things:
One, this need to categorize him came out of my mouth so quickly. Is there a kind of college professor I wouldn't go to coffee with—some kind that my subconscious is aware of but the rest of me isn't?
Two, this is probably the most Jane Austen part of the conversation—where I try to discern in an unsubtle way if he's my kind of people. I may as well have asked him, "And do you have an income of 50,000 pounds a year and a house in Derbyshire?"
Treasure House Man: I was a professor in New Mexico; I taught metal working. I make things like this. [Pulls keychain out of his pocket.] It's a bottle opener and [I think something else, but I can't remember/wasn't paying close enough attention because most of my brain was shouting, "HE THINKS YOU'RE PRETTY!" All I do remember clearly is that it was very shiny and shaped like a robot, leading to my next astute comment.]
Me: It looks like a robot!
Treasure House Man: Yes, that's the logo for my company. So...can I have your number?
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Coming soon: Did I give him my number? Did he turn out to be a treasure from the Treasure House? Will I ever not make such obvious, socially awkward statements when someone says I'm pretty?
I have a confession: last week, I ate like an American. The stereotypical American, I should say.
I had just come home from a business trip to St. Louis, and as I do before many trips, I had eaten myself out of house and home, a phrase that always makes me think I should be eating drywall and brick.
Of course it just means that I ate all the perishable things: all the bananas, pears, kale, mushrooms, milk, cream, cheese, bread.
I left myself with many hardy staples: pasta, frozen chicken breasts, canned beans, frozen vegetables, and even frozen servings of this sausage and kale soup I had made when the weather was still chilly and gray.
So there was food, but it was the kind of food you have to think about. What could I eat with the pasta so that it wasn't just bland pasta? Did I want to eat the beans? Maybe rice and beans? Why did sausage and kale sound so good in March but not so good in May? What sounds good now? What do you do when nothing sounds good?
So much thinking, and there was little leftover space in my brain for thinking.
And there was little time for cooking wholesome meals. My office was in the middle of moving, so I was spending my days surrounded by packing crates and making sure I didn't misplace something very, very important, such as the permissions to publish documentation for every article ever written for our websites.
Little time for thinking.
Little time for cooking.
And the real nutrition killer: little time for grocery shopping.
All this littleness leads to my confession: last week, I ate like a stereotypical American. I ate a lot of fast food.
A Short List of Everything I Ate that Maybe I Shouldn't Have
- gas station hot dog
- giant slice of pizza from this little place on my drive home from work. You get a piece of pizza as big as three of my heads and a liter of pop—for $5.
Plus, there's the added bonus of getting to feel slightly like Alice in Wonderland after she shrinks down to very tiny: everything in her world is too big.
- BLT from Jimmy John's, except I'm not a fan of T on sandwiches. Tomatoes make the bread mushy, and I don't mind telling you that it's only a recent discovery that it's not that I dislike tomatoes in general; I really only dislike them on sandwiches. Until not so long ago, I bypassed most tomatoes {even when I lived in southern France}, which is sad, and I plan on making up for it this summer.
So my BLT from Jimmy John's was more of a BLA—I had them put on avocado. And add extra bacon and onions, so I was really eating EBOLA. Nice.
- pizza {yes, MORE pizza} from the Pizza Hut Express in Target. My new office is just around the corner from Target, and it may take a lot of will power to not wander its enticing aisles every day at lunch saying, "$5 movies! How can I pass up Practical Magic when it's only $5? That's just the cost of a giant pizza slice!"
- KFC chicken strips, mashed potatoes, and baked beans. KFC is, to me, a comfort food, so please don't ruin it for me by telling me about how their chicken isn't really chicken. Sometimes, we all need a guilty pleasure, don't we?
With a list like that, it's no wonder that when I finally made it to the grocery store, all I wanted to buy was vegetables.
By last Saturday evening, my brain and schedule had cleared enough to where I was finally able to think about putting food together in a healthy, orderly fashion, not this haphazard eating of things that may or may not be chicken.
We all know not to go to the grocery store when you're hungry. I would like to add a rule:
Do not go to the grocery store when all you've eaten for the past week has come to you in a sandwich wrapper, cardboard box, or served with a spork.
If possible, find a way to get someone to invite you over for a homemade meal, preferably one involving a salad, so that your body can remember that it can, in fact, get nutrients from food.
If you don't do this, then when you're wandering the aisles of the store, some primal instinct in you will force you to put every vegetable and fruit possible in your cart.
It will be an attempt to stockpile freshness, as if your body believes there has been a vegetable apocalypse and you will be forced to eat trans fats forever and ever. Humankind will survive on giant pizza and fried chicken. It will not be pretty, so get the veggies now.
This is what happened to me: when I was at home putting my groceries away, I realized I had enough fruits and vegetables to feed a family of four for two weeks.
I'm telling you, you could make an excellent and large cornucopia display for Thanksgiving using what I bought.
However, it's not Thanksgiving and I'm not a family of four so much as one girl who lives alone with a pug, and she would be little help when it came to the fennel and other things that might rot before I get around to eating them.
So I did the next best thing to forcing my pug to eat fennel: I invited a lovely vegetarian over for dinner and made, among other things that involved many vegetables, this salad below.
As we giggled after dinner while drinking sherry {this is what sherry does to you, by the way: it makes you giggle, even though it used to be the post-dinner drink of refined ladies, which I, apparently, am not}, I was walloped with thankfulness for three things:;
- for weeks when I don't eat well: Giving in to guilty pleasures makes the return to eating well taste that much better.
- for giant pizza: It's so good that I thought of it even while eating asparagus.
- for a good friend who will eat giant pizza with me and help me eat my cornucopia of vegetables: She's the kind of friend who understands that sometimes, there's little time for thinking, cooking, or shopping—and so sometimes, my hospitality looks like inviting her over and then serving her pizza or take-out Thai or grilled cheese. But she's the kind of comfortable friend everyone should have—the kind you can eat pizza with in your sweatpants and not have to worry about trying too hard.
Then later when you have an overflow of vegetables and are overflowing with ideas of what to do with them, she's just the kind of friend who takes her first bite of asparagus and carrot salad, closes her eyes, and sighs in pleasure at the deliciousness of it. She's just the kind of friend you want to cook for and have at your table as often as possible.
Asparagus and Carrot Ribbon Salad
Serves 4
What You Need
- 1 pound fresh asparagus {thick stalks if you can get them}
- 2 large carrots
- lots of kale
- half an onion, diced
- 1 red pepper, diced
- anything else you find in your fridge that you think might taste good in here
- grated Parmesan cheese
- salt and pepper to taste
For the Vinaigrette
- 1/2 tablespoon sugar
- 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 large clove garlic, minced
- 1/4 teaspoon crushed red chile pepper
What You Do
- Lay a stalk of asparagus on a cutting board. Starting at one end, use a vegetable peeler to peel off long ribbons of asparagus. Continue until all the stalks have been “ribboned.” This is actually a rather entertaining way to go about making asparagus.
- Ribbon the carrots, too. If the ribbons are quite long, you can cut them in half to make eating easier, and if you're like me and get nervous about peeling your finger—and therefore assiduously avoid the end of the asparagus/carrot—you can chop that up at the end, too, to make eating easier.
- Add all the vegetables together, make the vinaigrette, and drizzle the dressing over the salad and toss gently. Some freshly grated Parmesan cheese is a good idea at this point.
- Invite over a vegetarian and share.
I seem to be titling a lot of posts like that: a poem, not by me.
But just the other day, I was talking to a very good friend I haven't talked to in a very long time, and she said, "Kamiah, I've been writing so much poetry."
I got a little jealous.
Where are my poems? Why can't I hear the beginnings of poems in my head, as I can at other times when I'm feeling very poetical?
{It's much like hearing the beginning of a song you used to know well. That's how I describe it when a poem starts to form.}
I didn't say that, though; instead, I was mature, or the semblance of maturity, and said, "Oh, how lovely! What do you think is bringing about all this poetry now?"
Because we all know—all us writers know—that writing can come and go, and poetry especially seems to be tied to circumstances of season or what you're reading or how tuned in you are to the small, quiet moments of your day.
If you're in a rushing-rushing-pushing season, it can be harder to see the possibility of poetry in your life, and aha! Maybe that's where my poetry has gone: to the threshing floor of increased productivity and having Too Much to Do.
But that's not where my friend is right now. She told me, "I think all this poetry is coming from how overwhelmed I am with God's unconditional love right now."
This friend of mine has this way of saying things like that that bring me to a halt. Quickly. She says these things not in an overly religious or spiritualized way—not in a way that makes you think she's saying it just because it sounds like a pretty good evangelical thing to say.
She's saying it because she's tuned in to the small, quiet voice of God in her day, and since it'd been so long since I'd talked to her, I'd forgotten how much I love that about her—this way she has of reminding me of the beauty of God's character and his love, all with a few little words.
She's overwhelmed with God's unconditional love right now, and that's coming out in poetry.
To fill my mind and heart with more poetry and more God, I turned to Christina Rossetti right after I hung up the phone. I opened my little book of her poems to a page with this on it:
Lord, Thou Art Fulness
Lord, Thou art fulness, I am emptiness:
Yet hear my heart speak in its speechlessness
Extolling Thine unuttered loveliness.
And it had this on the same page:
I Cannot Plead
O Lord, I cannot plead my love of Thee:
I plead Thy love of me;—
The shallow conduit hails the unfathomed sea.
With those two little poems and that one long conversation, I was overwhelmed by the possibilities the Lord gives us in a day. Maybe eventually that will become a poem, but for right now, all I can say is: O Lord, thank you.
I lay in bed reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, and time and memory twisted together, in and out, tying knots here and there, until I didn't know where to start pulling to unravel it all.
The book was talking about grief—about how Major Pettigrew had lost his wife six years before, but that time has not entirely run straight since then.
"I am sorry I did not have an opportunity to meet your lovely wife," said Mrs. Ali, handing him a cup.
"Yes, she's been gone some six years now," he said. "Funny really, it seems like both an eternity and the blink of an eye all at the same time."
"It is very dislocating," she said. Her crisp enunciation, so lacking among many of his village neighbors, struck him with the purity of a well-tuned bell. "Sometimes my husband feels as close to me as you are now, and sometimes I am quite alone in the universe," she added.
Reading that, I was back in Iowa last Memorial Day weekend for my grandpa's funeral.
And I was talking to him the night before his surgery as he explained what they were going to do to his heart and how it was risky but it was a risk he had to take.
"They keep telling me, Zooey," he said, using the family nickname only he still used, "that there are three major risks." He launched into them like a businessman giving a presentation on investment strategy.
"One, my kidneys could fail. Two, my heart could fail. Three—three, damn it, I always forget this one...oh, that's right, I could die."
I didn't have the heart to ask how he could possibly forget that last one, and instead said something vaguely encouraging like, "Well, it'll all work out for the best."
Even those of us who use words for a living fail to come up with the right words at times.
And I was on a walk with my friend Katie a week after his funeral, talking about how my emotions were 3 millimeters under my skin {"Must be the grief," I told her. "Usually, I can keep them more in check but not in an unhealthy way, I promise."} and about her engagement and wedding planning and oh yes, of course, I'd be a bridesmaid.
And I was standing on my parents' back deck in Iowa, looking out over the Mississippi before the visitation and listening to a voicemail from my friend Amie. "Kamiah, I have the best idea: we should go to France and see the lavender fields in bloom in early July. Now, I know it's practically June now and I know you like planning things, but I think we can pull it off. Call me."
Time around when my grandpa died has become all smashed together—with anything that happened or was planned then.
Katie's engagement.
My trip to France.
Another friend's bridal shower.
The summer writing class I started the day before he died.
I can't think of any of those things without instantaneously feeling like right then, in that moment, the funeral is happening. But also in that moment, I'm talking to him the night before his surgery.
It is very dislocating.
As I stood, for example, at the front of the church in Katie's wedding, I was thinking of him,
and the Mayo Clinic where he'd had his surgery,
and how he couldn't remember the third complication,
and how my sister the Air Force captain stood at attention as the flag that had been draped over his coffin was folded and presented to her,
and how I'd had that talk with Katie a week after his funeral.
All those thoughts came to my mind unbidden, but they came because her engagement is tangled up with his death, and I don't know how to extricate it.
It's all mixed up in my head, all these events, and I don't think I knew how mixed up until I read about Major Pettigrew.
I don't know if it's the snow falling outside The Pines Lodge in Beaver Creek or how I've been reading a book where letters play a vital role, but I've been curled up on the couch in my room here, writing letters to friends at home and feeling slightly nostalgic about a time when letter writing was so much more important than it is now.
There is something to writing on hotel stationery, isn't there? It makes me feel as if I've travelled back in time, back to before I could communicate with everyone instantaneously. This reminds me that I should write more letters—going through boxes of family documents reminded me of that, too.
Before, communication became its own treasure trove, preserving emotion and a way of life in a spidery hand.
Now, we have impersonal fonts and emails that are stored where? In the cloud? How will anyone ever know what life was like for us, if they don't have such physical documents?
Although I suppose that question contains its own answer: by our lack of documentation, people who come after us will know that life, for us, was more about quick, ethereal communication. We could communicate in the moment—anything we wanted from the very mundane to the very important.
It's hard to imagine a scenario like the one I stumbled upon when going through my family history:
My dear Anna,
Thank you so much for writing to Mother. You always were a faithful niece to her.
I'm sorry to tell you, dear Anna, but Mother was taken from us on the Monday after Easter. It comforts me to know she went peacefully, with all of us around her, but how I wish you'd been there, too. She asked after you in the end...
The news of Mother's death wasn't known to dear Anna for days. For days, she went about thinking her aunt was alive and that she hoped to hear back from her soon and oh, she must remember to write her a letter about this little thing that happened.
But her aunt was gone, and it's hard for me to imagine opening a letter like that now, eager in anticipation of news from the family, only to see those words: "I'm so sorry to tell you..."
It's not that Important Communication has gone by the wayside, simply because we've stopped writing so many letters in our own spidery or determined or illegible handwriting.
But when faced with a stack of stationery—when overwhelmed with things to share—it is easy to look back in time and say, "Part of me still wishes it were like that."
The smell of garlic and onions sauteing in olive oil fills a kitchen. As soon as the onions hit the pan with a quiet sizzle, the memory of chili, meatloaf, and cold winter nights starts to saute, too.
No matter where you find yourself, smell is reliably the same. Whether in Iowa or Glen Ellyn or France or anywhere, it's true that when onion starts to sweat and turn translucent, it smells precisely the same. It is a constant to savor, and there is ritual comfort in cooking.
Since I live alone, people often say to me, "But isn't it tiresome to cook for yourself every night?"
I smile and offer up two secrets.
One, I do not cook for myself every night, but thank you for believing me capable of that.
Two—although I'd hope this one wasn't a secret—I'm worth it.
I take great care in planning meals for others. Today is my best friend's birthday, and we're having a small dinner. I spent Sunday afternoon flipping through cookbooks to plan a meal that was just right for her, and then I scheduled in times to do the shopping, prepping, and cleaning.
I took great care for her meal, and I'm worth just as much care, aren't I?
Of course.
I am—we all are—worth the excitement of planning and the ritual comfort of clicking on the gas burner to saute onions.
I have been feeling a dearth of poetry in my life recently.
Please take that literally, not symbolically, as in: There is no beauty in my life, no lyrical moments, no hints of something deeper in an occasion as normal as a morning walk.
It's just that I haven't been reading poetry as much right now—summer hiatus? But what for?—and I didn't realize that I was feeling its absence until my friend Jessie handed me a book of poems last night.
"Thank you so much for letting me borrow this. Good introduction to Mary Oliver."
I stared at the book as if it weren't mine, this copy of American Primitive. I couldn't remember any of the poems in it, nor could I remember loaning it to Jessie, but here it was, in my hands and she said it was mine.
We were at the Chicago History Museum to watch Sixteen Candles, which doesn't sound like a very History Museum-appropriate thing to do until you remember that it was filmed in Chicagoland, and it was made in 1984, making it part of our near history now.
Besides, it was the kind of August evening that makes you thankful for seasons and in particular the one you're experiencing right then.
It was twilight, and the high rises next to Lincoln Park were lit with glowing lives, people going about making dinner or cleaning up from dinner or putting children to bed.
In front of us, the Museum had set up an outdoor movie screen, and just in front of us at our feet was a bottle of white wine, nectarines, chocolate, and cheese. And a Rice Krispy treat from Starbucks because we can't all be swank all the time.
It was, in fact, the kind of night to write poetry, but instead I watched a movie and then got on my train back to the suburbs.
I read poetry on the train before I fell asleep {taking a 10:40 train certainly interferes with my bedtime, which is 10:00}, and American Primitive fell open to this particular poem, "The Plum Trees."
I read it and remembered what it feels like to have poetry in your life. This poem was, in fact, like a small wild plum, which is a comment that will make sense after you read it, and so I will leave you to that now.
The Plum Trees
Mary Oliver
Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into
the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment
rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don't
succumb, there's nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy
is a taste before
it's anything else, and the body
can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,
the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it
into the body first, like small
wild plums.
In the mail yesterday, I got a book I'd ordered from Amazon: Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone.
A friend was over for dinner, so I wasn't dining alone last night, although I do most nights, a fact that doesn't make me sad.
We had a dinner that featured zucchini and red new potatoes, along with hamburgers and ice cream sandwiches {those last two things were not eaten at the same time, of course}, and after dinner, we took baby pug for a long walk.
A late afternoon rainstorm had finally broken the heat, and I was wearing jeans for the first time since the beginning of July when I'd been in France.
As enjoyable as the evening was—and should my friend be reading this, I want to stress that I was so grateful for all the laughing we did—there was a hush of anticipation within me the whole night.
When she leaves, I can read my book about dining alone. I kept thinking this and then shaking my head to shake the thought away.
When one of your best friends is sitting across the table from you with a hamburger on a pretzel roll in her hands, you probably shouldn't be thinking about reading in bed.
But I was, and I just needed to admit that.
That's how excited I was for this book, which combines two of my loves: writing and food.
The title is the same as an essay by one of my favorite writers, Laurie Colwin. In her essay, there's this delicious paragraph:
Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.
For a moment, let's relish that incredibly smart idea of a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. That is yet another example of combining two of my loves.
Moving on, let's think about cooking and eating alone.
I do it out of circumstance: I live alone, so most nights, it is just me. And I love it. Some people have to learn to love eating alone {or living alone}, but I took to it {to both of those things} with gusto and gumption.
As much as I love family dinners—and my family ate dinner together every night when I was growing up—and as much as I love dinner parties and having friends over for dinner, to me, there is such pleasure in spreading out the paper in front of me at dinner time.
Or reading a book of essays at the table.
Or even watching TV while eating. {Don't tell people I do that; it's a little secret of mine.}
There is such pleasure in making precisely what you want to eat and then sitting down in a space that is wholly yours and enjoying it: the quiet, the food, the time.
I realize not everyone feels this way. You, for example, might not relish cooking and eating alone.
Tell me: do you? Do you think dinner alone is one of life's pleasures?
I sporadically keep a Gratitude Journal, and judging from how it brings up my overall attitude, I think I should un-sporadically keep it.
Such a simple thing to do, really. In my planner on those weekly pages that Franklin-Covey tells me I'm supposed to use for prioritizing daily tasks—
Have you ever read the Franklin-Covey instructions for prioritizing tasks? No? It involves letters and numbers and a sorting system that makes even me a little overwhelmed, probably because it's a system I didn't come up with. My little/large independent streak comes out when someone tries to explain to me how to organize my life, so I read the Franklin-Covey explanation and say, "You think you're good, don't you? Well, just you watch what I do with your A1, B2, C-whatever system: I disregard it. Take that, F-C."
—So in the section for prioritizing daily tasks {and when I'm in a Gratitude Journal phase}, I write two kinds of things:
- What I tres really want to accomplish that day: This I do in the morning after I've run {thinking time} and after I've walked baby pug {brain organization time, which includes the time for deciding what I'm going to wear to work that day}. I try to narrow down what would make me feel accomplished that day.
Is it getting done that nagging life admin task, such as getting more stamps at the Post Office? {When it comes to managing your life, don't you find that it's the small tasks that can pester the most? Why is that? And then when you do them, you feel such relief and like you could take on the world. I know I'm not alone in this: read this post over at Pink of Perfection, this blog I stalk/read because I'm convinced the girl and I are kindred spirits.}
Or maybe what I really want to accomplish is finishing a book or that big project at work. Whatever it is, I write it down in the morning to help focus my day.
- Five things I'm grateful for: The next morning, I think back on the day before and write down five things that I'm glad happened.
Could be a long talk with a friend or making a delicious eggplant dinner.
Could be getting done that life admin task.
Could be getting to bed early.
Could be whatever, but it's the moments and interactions that made the day special and right.
The whole process, the thinking ahead to the day in front of me and the thinking back on the day behind me, takes about five minutes.
And what a difference it makes. Even if I had a very bad, no good, horrible, rotten day, I can usually find five bright spots, and that helps keep life in perspective.
Nothing is all bad. Bright spots count no matter how small they are. This five minute exercise brings calm to my day before it even begins.
So I'm going to jump ahead a bit here and list my five things for today here, right now. {Because I'm me, I'll probably copy them into my planner later.}
Today, I'm grateful for:
- a fast morning run
- the little desk fan I bought at Walgreen's: no air circulation, AC that I'm convinced in broken, and a heat wave outside pushing up against the windows makes for an uncomfortable work environment. I'd consider worshiping this little fan, with its white noise and steady stream of cool, if I believed in idol worship.
- an email from a friend who lives far, far away
- listening to my musicals playlist that right now involves selections from White Christmas, just so that I remember that it's not always this hot. {I talk about the heat a lot recently, don't I?}
- cupcakes—frosted with leftover vanilla buttercream from the gateau a l'orange—for dessert after dinner {okay, I haven't had dinner yet, so I'm being pre-emptively grateful for these because I'm sure they'll be good. And I'll be eating them with a friend, so that makes them doubly good.}
That means orange spongecake, by the way, that gateau a l'orange.
I baked up a storm this weekend, and by that I mean: I baked two cakes, and it was 100 degrees outside, not your typical baking weather. It's more the weather for languid afternoons in front of a fan, perhaps with a glass of lemonade. Or with an entire box of popsicles in a little cooler right next to you—easy access so that you can eat popsicle after popsicle without wasting energy trying to part the humid air as you walk to the freezer.
But despite the heat {or to spite the heat}, I wanted to bake, even if it caused a small heat wave in my kitchen. {Air conditioning is no match, it seems, for an oven at 350 degrees.}
A very, very good friend was having her wedding shower this weekend, and I volunteered to make the cake because what is a shower without a little slice of cake? Without a little tranche of sweetness?
And because this very, very good friend shares my Francophile tendencies, choosing the cake was easy: open up Mastering the Art of French Cooking and let Julia Child take over.
I made this gateau a l'orange because it just sounded summer-y. Doesn't it?
Orange spongecake.
It sounds like afternoon tea with white gloves on, something right out of a Katherine Mansfield story.
Like the snack you sneak before dinner.
Like dessert after a meal made only with food bought at the farmers' market.
Or like a Sunday afternoon wedding shower for a very, very good friend whose eyes smiled with contentment when she took a bite of gateau a l'orange.
There are certain images we all know, pictures that are lodged in our communal memory from seeing them so many times on posters or postcards or on TV.
The Taj Mahal with a clear blue sky behind it.
The Eiffel Tower at night.
Tulips in Holland.
The lavender fields in Provence.
Do you know what I'm talking about? You see these pictures everywhere, and you start to think: can it really be that beautiful? Can it really be that color? Can it really be that big?
And sometimes, you're lucky enough to see one of these things in real life. Rising in front of you is a picture that's become so familiar—but it's not on a postcard anymore.
You know a picture is worth a thousand words, but all you can come up with as you stand in front of this iconic beauty is: Wow. Oh, wow.
I saw the lavender fields in Provence two days ago. For the last month, my computer wallpaper at work has been a picture of the Abbaye de Senanque with the lavender stretching in front of it.
Every time I closed an email or an article I was writing, I saw the purple fields and I could almost smell the lavender. {Perhaps that's useful at work, seeing as lavender is supposed to de-stress and relax you.}
But there I was, standing in the field myself.
I had become part of the picture.
I did a cartwheel in front of the abbaye—I have this habit of taking pictures of me doing cartwheels in the prettiest places—but with my skirt on that day, you could see a little more than I intended.
Amie, my friend I was travelling with, was taking the picture. "Um, you can see your underwear in this. Should I just erase it?"
Um, yes, please.
I don't want my picture of the lavender fields—my shot at this image that has become a symbol of beauty—to involve I see London, I see France, I see Kamiah's underpants.
And so I took one with just the lavender, just the fields of rows and rows of lavender, all lined up and headed towards the abbaye.
There is a time for everything, including a time for taking a cartwheel picture and a time for wearing a skirt. However, there's rarely a time for taking a cartwheel picture in a skirt.
Just a note for you, should you ever decide to travel to the lavender fields of Provence: get ready to be speechless, and, if you're prone to cartwheels, wear pants.
In the Chicago Tribune last Sunday, there was an article on the social kiss and how it's gaining popularity here in America, perhaps because we want to be more European or fancy or because we've finally gotten over our American isolationism.
I would argue that the social kiss is gaining popularity on the coasts and that it's slowly making its way to the Midwest, just as many things, including fashion, eventually reach us here in the middle of the country—years after the trend started.
I have anecdotal evidence for my coast-to-the-Midwest kiss theory: my company has an office in New Jersey, and I come out here every few months or so to sit in a conference room and bond with my co-workers, people I usually talk to via conference calls and Outlook.
It never fails that I get kissed when I come to New Jersey, which could, perhaps, be a good slogan for the state. Who wouldn't want to come to New Jersey with a slogan like that? In my view, it'd make more sense than the Garden State, and it would go far in dispelling that view that New Jersey is simply the armpit of New York City.
But back to the kiss: my New Jersey co-workers kiss me when I come through the door, something my Illinois co-workers never do and I don't know how long we'd have to work together before they did that.
Granted, I don't know if these NJ people kiss each other every day—how very French that would be—but clearly these Coast people are more okay with the social kiss than this girl from Iowa.
Unless I'm pretending to be the girl from France—then the social kiss, the double cheek kiss thing, makes me feel at home.
I wrote this thing when I lived in France and taught English at a French high school. In it, I was trying to figure out social conventions but also thinking about how important touch is—how important it is to be touched on a daily basis.
What's that statistic? That to be healthy, you should be touched 12 times a day, or maybe it's 37, although that seems like a lot.
Statistics aside, it's important to be connected to others and when the social kiss makes it way to the Midwest, I will be ready, thanks to France.
-----
Kiss kiss. So light, so quick, so not enough for me.
Here in France, as in so many other European countries, the double cheek kiss is de rigeur.
When you first meet someone, kiss kiss. When you run into a friend in the street, kiss kiss. When you go to someone’s house for a 3 hour dinner, kiss kiss.
Goodbye is a kiss. Hello is a kiss. Thank you is a kiss. With all this kissing practice, no wonder the French have a whole kind of kissing named after them.
Bisous, the double cheek kiss thing, are an expected routine here, but for me, they still feel, paradoxically, both too personal and not personal enough.
They burst my personal space, physically and mentally, because I don’t often kiss people back home, and here, I’m kissing co-workers, people I meet at church, little kids, everybody.
The French kiss like we shake hands, which is what makes bisous not personal enough: it’s just something that has to be done. Most people don’t even really kiss but do that high society princess air kiss. “Oh dahling, how perfectly perfect to see you! Mwah, mwah.”
Bisous are more mashing together cheeks than actually kissing, and for all the noise they make and for how close they make me get to people I barely know, I wish I could feel the care in them.
As I’ve found my life in France, I’ve come to accept and even appreciate bisous, in the same way that I appreciate for his very Frenchness the waiter who won’t bring the bill until I force him to notice my impatience by tripping him.
C’est la vie en France, and France and all its particular Frenchness are now part of me.
I’ve come to realize that there are different levels of bisous: the cheek mashing for slight acquaintances, for example.
The more you know each other, though, the more you’re actually kissing cheeks and not symbolically the air around the ear.
There are such barely noticeable shades of intimacy in if they touch your shoulder while leaning in or if they smile. It can be like trying to explain the difference between brick red and fire engine red – only noticeable if you really want to notice – and I do want to notice.
Noticing will give me reasons for why France won’t let go of me, even when I’ve seen how life here isn’t any easier just because of its otherness.
Bisous were so foreign to me when I first came to live in France, but I found that simply bisous-ing made me feel more French and less foreign here. I often feel just out of place and just misunderstood, and I quickly learned in loneliness what sticking out as Not One of Them does to your self-esteem and self-confidence. It took me longer to learn what defining yourself without a common culture and with pre-conceived notions to fight does for who you are and who you want to be.
Who I am right now is a displaced American aware of the distance of that displacement. That’s neither good nor bad but just a numbered reality: I am thousands of miles from home.
It was my choice to leave that predictable Midwestern home; I know that as well as I know that life and lives didn’t refuse to move on when I moved out of the country.
As I learned to accept France and its Frenchness, I learned to let go of selfish desires – that my absence would hurt and not heal, that I’d wrestle foreign challenges and win easily by living an enviable life, that I’d be so loved that everyone would want to keep me at arm’s length.
“At arm’s length” usually has a negative connotation, like you’re trying to keep someone out. Now I think of it as trying to hold someone in and keeping them within a hug’s reach, and I think like that because I’m so rarely held like that.
Oh, I miss other parts of American culture, like how stores are open on Sundays and how you can charge anything, but it’s missing the hugs of my friends and family that emotionally unravels me at times.
Overdramatic? Maybe. Over-analytical? Of course, but adapting to another me in another culture uproots me enough that I spin around grasping for any normalcy or comparison and end up confused about what’s normal.
It scares me, for example, that when I was back in Iowa over Christmas, I expected people to bisous. Waiting in a café, I watched friends meet and when they hugged or simply smiled, I felt a twinge of missing the bisous which have become routine for me.
But back here, I miss hugs because squeezed so tight is how I feel loved, not in the mostly fleeting formalities of kiss kiss. My arms at times ache to hold something other than that day’s little worries and joys.
When I tried to explain to a French friend what my arms felt – weakly alone – she smiled as if she wanted to understand. Then she bisous-ed me and sent me on my way, bucked up for a French day in the French way. Kiss kiss.
I lied to Mohammed.
He was my cab driver in the early evening on a winter Sunday, and I was going from the North Side to Ogilvie Transportation Center, where a train would take me out of the city and back to the suburbs.
I'd just had one of those particularly charmed city afternoons. Coffee with a good friend: a double espresso at Julius Meinl, the cafe that replicates the European cafe experience so precisely that just seeing the elongated sugar packet and picking up the demi-tasse spoon makes my heart twinge for France.
Jessie and I sat by a big, practically floor-to-ceiling window in these deep, burnt orange arm chairs with a small round table in between us, enjoying the winter sunshine. When the sun shines in the Midwest in the winter, it's that much brighter because you've gotten used to gray days. But then there's a sunny—and usually crystal cold—day, and it's brighter also because the sun is reflecting off all that snow.
As she and I talked about books and people we knew and holiday plans, a homeless man stood outside the window holding up a Christmas tree. Where he got the tree I will never know. Was he trying to sell it? Perhaps, but as I told Jessie about Gone with the Windsors, this book I'd just started that fictionalizes the story of King Edward and Mrs. Simpson, the homeless man lost interest in the tree.
He let it fall against the building and then began imitating me. I'm a somewhat imitable {and yet also inimitable} person, I will admit, when I'm talking. There's lots of swirling of hands and expanding of eyes and raising of eyebrows. And when talking about how the King of England abdicated for an American divorcee, I got especially swirling and expanding and raising.
That is not a rhetorical question, that title up there.
It's a quiz: what TV show's theme song has that line in it?
Another way to phrase that is: what TV show from the 70s am I obsessed with?
I'll give you a minute to think. A clue: It's set in Minneapolis.
Another clue: I used to wake up every morning to the theme song because it put me in that good of a mood. {Note: This clue may not be worth much, unless you've actually woken up with me, and I very highly doubt that you have.}
{Yes, I'm making you scroll down.}
{Doesn't this remind you of those email forwards that inevitably begin with "think of a number between 1 and 100"? Then you go through this whole series of questions,
scrolling
scrolling
scrolling
until you got to the end, and it magically lists the number you first thought of.
And the person you're going to marry.
And the kind of house you'll live in.
And how many kids you'll have.
Wait, that's the game MASH.}
ANSWER
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
I hope you got this right. It's very important to me that you know about Mary.
Today is her birthday—is it just me, or do I seem to be writing a lot about other people's birthdays recently, people I adore but have never met? {Not that I could've met Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott. I'm still holding out hope for Mary.}
Why I Love The Mary Tyler Moore Show
A Bullet Point List by Kamiah A. Walker
- I saw the show for the first time when I was 12 or 13. Then, being 30 seemed the height of being grown-up, an idea later corroborated by that 13 Going on 30 movie, where the little teenager wishes to magically become 30 and it happens. Thank goodness I didn't wish to become a 30-year-old in the 70s. I might've been concerned by the hemlines and the lack of computers. {A semi-related question: Do you ever think about what people did in offices before email?}
- I like that Mary was single and that the point of the show wasn't to marry her off. She went on lots of dates. She even got proposed to once or twice. But the show doesn't end with her wedding. As a 29-year-old single girl, this is especially important. Singleness doesn't define me, but it is fun to watch a show about another single girl.
- Mary was a cheerleader and in student council when she was in high school. So was I. Up for grabs is whether I did those things because I wanted to be like Mary. Actually, I'll grab that one: I had wanted to be a cheerleader since I was 3; Mary had nothing to do with that one.
- I got the first season of Mary Tyler Moore on DVD just before I left for France to teach for a year. Many, many a night—when my brain was empty from speaking French and trying to fit in all day—I would slip under the covers, prop up my laptop, and let Mary distract me and show me life in my beloved Midwest.
- The friendship between Mary and Rhoda is so easy. Popping into each other's apartment. Eating dinner together on random weeknights. Playing tennis on Saturday afternoons. When I first moved to Wheaton five years ago, not knowing too many people, being able to watch their friendship was a comfort—not going to gloss over that fact. Did I live vicariously through TV for a little while? Yes. Mary helped.
And now I have friends to eat dinner with on random nights, cobbling together a quiche or a salad, and stitching together conversation with threads that have been running through our lives {boys, church, work, frustrations, joys}.
- When I have a bad day—a really bad day when I have the mean reds and start to take everything that happens as a personal affront—on days like that, I watch a very specific Mary Tyler Moore episode to help me deal: "Put on a Happy Face." It's about this time that Mary has a series of terrible, awful, no-good, very bad days, and she's tired of always having to be chipper little Mary. That one episode gives me the freedom to accept that I don't always have to be chipper little Mia. Plus, it doesn't hurt to laugh. And I always laugh, no matter how many times I watch it.
Please tell me I'm not alone in this obsession, not that you have to share my Mary fascination. I just hope I'm not the only one who uses a TV show—a leftover from an era I don't belong to—to feel better sometimes.
I have one more way to interpret that original question—what is it about a little bit of light that fills us with such wonder this time of year?
It's the Hallmark Channel interpretation. The Hallmark Channel brings the Currier and Ives print to life and then plays it on repeat from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Lifetime does this, too, and I think ABC Family is also playing Christmas movies non-stop.
The Hallmark Channel symbolically represents the all-Christmas-all-the-time view that has taken over, and it makes us think that Christmas is about more.
For the entire month of December—no, let's admit it, the Christmas "season" starts before Thanksgiving and perhaps even before Halloween in some stores—there's a shouting match for our attention: BUY MORE, SPEND MORE, DO MORE, BE MORE, MAKE MORE PERFECT MEMORIES, EAT MORE, DECORATE MORE.
We start to think we must make room in our hearts for Jesus—and room above the hearth for a 52-inch TV. Because if we don't buy that as a present, then we don't really love whoever thinks they want that.
If we're not careful, Christmas can become nothing but noise as we listen to those shouts for our attention and money and time.
-----
Christmas is a time when we can more distinctly feel the pull in disparate directions.
The spiritual. The familial. The shopping-al. {Not a word, I know, but I liked the parallel I had going there with the -al. I guess I could've used the word financial. Eh, too late to take it back now.}
The last thing you want to feel during Christmas is stretched so thin that people can see through you, and that is why I encourage you to approach Christmas as if it were caramel this year.
Yes, caramel. Because:
- it's malleable: I'm going to sound really trite here, but Christmas takes on whatever shape you give it. You don't have to stick with certain traditions, and you can buck expectations {especially self-expectations}.
You don't have to craft your own Christmas cards and have them mailed by the first week in December—if you don't want to. You don't have to decorate—if you don't want to.
You can watch every Christmas movie ever made—if you want to. You can give up something for Advent—if you want to. The point is to shape Christmas as you want it.
- but it can also be hard: Hard as in difficult or hard as in rigid. The difficult part we don't need to get into: holidays come with baggage, even if you don't travel anywhere {lame joke}. Let's look at the rigid, as in rigid boundaries. It's important to put up a good fence or wall or some other kind of protective barrier around what you want to do to enjoy Christmas. This may mean that you don't say yes to every party you get invited to—but instead say no knowing that you shouldn't socially max yourself out.
It's okay to say no sometimes. Some people have trouble believing that, particularly during the holidays when you're supposed to be happy and friendly and cheery all the time, at all costs to your own little soul.
Because of your little soul, trying hard to truly celebrate Christmas, you do need a bit of a hard edge to your boundaries.
- it's made out of basically one ingredient: Christmas can be simple: friends, Jesus, family. What's the one thing about Christmas you enjoy so much?
- but you can make it more complicated by adding other things to it: Please scroll back up to the part where I talk about how it's okay to say no to stuff during the Christmas season. When you start trying to please everyone, from your boss to Martha Stewart to Good Housekeeping, you start losing track of how Christmas is supposed to be fun.
- it's a challenge to get just right: I don't know anyone who's figured out the best Christmas balance and been able to stick to it every year. Every year, we all need reminders of how to truly celebrate without wanting to slowly pull our own teeth out because that might be less painful than this blessedly exhausting holiday season.
- but when you do, man, that's sweet: Literally sweet, in the case of caramel. And in the case of Christmas, you know what moments I'm talking about. The little or big ones where everyone gave a contented sigh at once. The time when you were little and you woke up at 3am on Christmas morning, peeked through the curtains, and saw a bright shining star that looked like it could be the Star of Bethlehem. Whatever sweetness is to you, look for snatches of it this Christmas.
- and even if you don't get it right, you most likely still have a good story about you leaning too close to the pan, staring at the sugar, waiting for it to turn the right auburn color, talking to it and demanding to know if it's done yet: Not to sound too much like your mom here, but you can always learn from bad experiences, and later, you may even be able to laugh about them. A bad Christmas does not mean you're a bad person with a bad family and bad friends and a bad dog and bad hair. It just means that you get to try again next year to have a good Christmas.
Merry Caramel Christmas!
