l is for lunch

Recently, I've been reading books that either explicitly or implicitly remind me to slow down and appreciate the moment where I find myself.

From MFK Fisher, I've been sampling The Art of Eating, which is a book of essays on the joy of food. If there is anything to make you savor a moment, it is an essay on rich meals shared with a wealth of friends. Reading this book, you can't help but plan a dinner party in your head, one that hopefully comes off like something out of a Katharine Hepburn film.

For me, it doesn't hurt that MFK {should I start referring to myself as KA?} lived in Aix-en-Provence for a while and wrote a book about that little town where I lived, too, for a bit. Map of Another Town: When I read that for the first time, I was very much convinced that I was back in Aix, so when I looked up from the page and saw just the normal street outside my normal suburban apartment, I felt let down. Reading about MFK sitting in a cafe on the Cours Mirabeau felt like reading a much more literary version of my own journal.

In one essay in The Art of Eating (in this series called "An Alphabet for Gourmets"}, MFK writes, "A is for dining alone, and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly."

And that is firmly what I believe. She wrote out my thoughts long before I was alive to have them, and here I am, nodding along with her through the rest of her essay. Is is good to take pleasure in the small moment of eating alone; MFK and I know this.

Take right now for instance. It is lunchtime at work, and I'm surrounded by the din of other people's conversations. They are discussing the Bears game; I don't have much to add beyond an awareness that they are playing tonight.

Or they are talking about how much Halloween candy they still have at home and should they bring it in? {No, by the way, is the answer to that. We have enough here from everyone else who thought of that idea first.}

These people around me are talking about any number of things, and I get to wrap myself up in their dull roar, their hum of connection. It is all to me nothing but so much background noise, and I sit here alone.

Oh, don't feel sorry for me. I'm looking out the window at this November drizzle and thinking of Normandy. This rain is a Normandy rain, a kind of rain I got to know quite well when I lived there. It is gentle and persistent, but here today, it is warmer than a typical rainy day there—at least in my memory. But it's quiet and beautiful, and I walked to the train station this morning sans umbrella—in honor of those Normans who see little need for an umbrella on a day like this, a day when it's barely but constantly raining.

Eating alone, I can let my mind wander, and that is why I don't want you to feel sorry for me: because in these moments at lunch, I don't have to think of anything particular or do anything productive. I can just be here, at a slowed-down pace, taking in where I am.

Just like MFK.

on a new notebook

It's an ironic shame: to write the first words in a new journal. To mar the page with ink and unformed thoughts seems a harsh reality compared to those moments before you put pen to paper.

Then, faced with a white expanse, you anticipate.

Or no, even before that, you anticipate.

Standing in the store before a rack of notebooks, you ponder which one should be yours. Pick one up; weigh the heft; run your fingers over the pages; is it the right size?

Choosing the notebook—black cover, college-ruled, three sections—you can't help yourself: your mind trips down literary paths, through poetic fields {if they were truly poetic, they'd be called "leas"}, across the ocean of discovery and words.

It's in this notebook, you sense as you stand in line to pay, that you'll write Worthy of Notice Things.

With a calling like that, it seems ridiculous that you should be forced to stand in a line to buy this—behind a man buying milk and next to a magazine rack stacked with salacious celebrity gossip.

Handing over bills and coins for this notebook: a business transaction. You scoff at that but hand over the bills and coins anyway, of course.

The clerk smiles at you—forced, required—and you smile back out of habit, but inside, you anticipate what you'll write in this notebook that's now swinging in a plastic bag, just hitting the back of your knee.

try not to try too hard

“I have heard the birds singing, each to each. Every morning, afternoon, and evening, I have heard them singing as I sit, run, lay, swim, kayak, read. I have seen so much of nature here, or more precisely, absorbed it; it's more than seeing it. Nature is around, and my soul is happy to be around it.”

I'll probably never do this again, but that's a direct quote from my journal. I was on vacation in Ontario with four girls. My boss said it sounded like a new reality TV show: 5 Girls in the Canadian Wilderness.

That sounds too close to Girls Gone Wild for my ducks-in-a-row Midwestern sensibilities, and besides, we weren't really off in the wilderness with the moose, bears, and Royal Mounties. We were in cottage country.

Doesn't that have a pleasant, homey ring to it? Cottage country. Sounds so much more upscale than cabin land, and it flows off the tongue better than second home country.

This cottage country is near the Georgian Bay, which is part of Lake Huron. I'm hoping that's enough of a geography lesson for you, because all I want you to take away from this is: I was somewhere beautiful for a few days.

As always—as frequently—I took all of nature in and wanted to send it back out from me, fully inked and lined up. Fully described and explained and appreciated.

That push, that desire, led to journal entries like that one above, where yes, I did paraphrase T.S. Eliot.

And it led to this one particular moment on a hike, one of those moments you hope never fades. Not because it's a rollicking story you want to tell your grandchildren one day—but because it so holds together a particular time or thought or life stage for you.

We hiked at Killbear Provincial Park on the second day of vacation, and when we got to the point of the hike—a view onto Georgian Bay—I sat down on a rock to take in said view.

Clouds grew at the water's edge, just at the line where it drops off the earth, creating a waterfall to Narnia or some other imagined home. Above me, though, there weren't many clouds, as if they sky didn't want its reflection in the bay marred too much.

The water on the rocks did not crash, did not foam, did not draw attention to itself.

It whispered, lapped, rocked. I could look to the bottom; I could see the rock floor pushing up gradually, inclining a little, to meet the rock I sat on.

I could see how if you drained the bay, you'd find underneath a world that looked just like what I was sitting on: rocky but with green life growing in improbable places—as well as in all the places you'd expect to find a patch of grass, a bush, a tree.

I stared and stared and tried to make the words form—the words that would say just what I didn't know I intended.

Instead, a lot of detached openings and segues opened up before me: choppy reflections on what I saw reflected in the water below me.

And it felt like that—trying to write about, wanting to write about, the clouds when all I could see was the inconsistent, moving reflection of the clouds in the water.

Nothing good came, and what did come, I wanted to laugh at because I was trying to be deep. I was trying to hit the theme of the discord of nature and modern life. The discord between the cool calm of the water and my frenzied push to do more and describe more and be more.

What did come to me as I looked at the Georgian Bay was trite. Or maybe it felt trite in the face of an exquisitely-expressed nature.

I kept staring, though. I kept listening, and I heard the birds, friends talking on a rock above me, the water below me.

The friends pulled more sharply on my soul then; I wanted to share the scene, not try to describe it. That's why I was restless, even looking at the ever-moving water and clouds, a combination that usually puts me far beyond the boundary of introspection.

I wanted to be not alone, and so I stood up from the rock and turned my back on nature, on trying too hard, on forcing depth.

I walked up to my friends, sat down between them, and said, “My gosh, it's just so pretty here, isn't it?”

No, seriously, I still don't get a) why you're blogging, and b) why you think the name of your blog is so perfect

{You're probably also wondering why I make everything, even a title, sound like a to-do list.  Let’s just start with Item A on that list.}

Why blog?  For a very selfish reason:  I want to write more, as I mentioned before.

I mean, really, are personal blogs ever started for non-selfish reasons?  These things are basically journals with HTML coding.

Wait, that might not be true:  with a blog, you hope against long-shot hope that people actually read it.  And with journals—

I've kept a journal since I was 15.  I have all of them lined up in chronological order on a bookshelf, right beneath the shelf with non-fiction works alphabetized by author's last name.  {You may now be figuring out why I make everything sound like a to-do list, even if I don't intend that.}

Just because I keep my journals in my living room does not mean I ever want someone to actually read them.

Of course not.

If you're ever perusing for something good to read on my bookshelf, please go for Laurie Colwin or Virginia Woolf or yes, even Jane Austen.

But people reading my blog doesn't bother me at all, most likely because of the HTML coding thing that reminds me that this is on the WORLD WIDE WEB for all the WORLD to see.

Saying things in all caps sometimes makes it scarier.

And sharing my writing with others can serve as an external motivator to write more {my internal motivators need a little bit of help}.  One of those vicious cycle things but in a good way.

This is not a tangent, I promise:  I have this Kids-Thot-a-Day calendar that my Grandma and Grandpa Callahan gave me when I was in fourth grade.  Thot really is spelled like that; the calendar is for daily encouraging words, not for learning how to spell.

I've used it every year since I was 9 {with some time off for while I lived in France and England}, and reading these sayings now, as a 28-year-old—well, they may also help explain why I like to-do lists and order and pushing through hard times.

Yes, some of them speak straight to the little girl in me, and even when you're 28 {and I'm assuming 38, 48, 58...}, the little girl in you sometimes needs to be coddled and reminded how lovely she is.

But some of them...

A random sampling:

• You can't do everything at once, but you can always be doing something.
• Setting a perfect example is the perfect gift you give others.
• If at first you don't succeed, try harder!
• Next time you're alone, try thinking.
• The busy have no time for tears.
• If someone gives you a privilege, you owe them responsibility.
• Love is like money:  it must be earned.

There is one day in there, though, that is especially apropos for today:  Sharing is caring with a friend.

So I'm sharing my writing with you, which must mean I care.  And there you go, I've proven myself wrong:  I just gave a non-selfish reason for doing a blog.

I'm doing this because I care about you.

To show how much I care, I will now share a poem.  You can think it's deep or silly or whatever, but I've been writing a poem a week for the last six weeks, and it's time one of them made it out of my journal and into HTML code.

A Beginning
It starts like this:  a beep beep beep at 5:20
I wake up to find the world is already ahead of me
Out my window, I see the start of the morning:
            orange fireworks on a pink-blushed sky

(Later—in 3 hours—as I drive to work, the morning in full shine, the orange-pink is gone, replaced by a non-color haze and concrete and telephone lines.)

One bird chirps in the tree outside my window
Then takes off, headed to the fireworks show.

I turn off the alarm and take off, too.
Not to the fireworks show but to the Every Day
Which, if you look at it right, can seem explosive.