Essay a Day #4: Gretchen, Magic, Soup

I'm not a day late--it's really more like 12 hours. If I can get in another post this afternoon, we're all caught up. (Let's not investigate the size of that "if.")


The type-perfect words on the page are so few that, upon opening the book you remember again that you shouldn't even bother opening the book.


Gretchen's Potato Soup

4 potatoes, peeled & chunked
1 onion

Just cover the potatoes with water. Add salt and pepper. Mash slightly once cooked. Add milk, cream, or half & half. Add dumplings and bring to boil.
(Dumplings: 2 eggs, 5 T. flour. Mix well, then drizzle slowly into simmering soup.)


Reading it, a stranger would page past. It's too simple, nearly unappetizing. There's no glossy picture to snag the attention. And there are those home-kitchen-recipe mysteries that make my heart rate rise: where do the onions go? Why isn't the half & half listed in the ingredients? What, exactly, is "chunked"?

In my cookbook, though, it's one of the most worn pages, watermarked with oil and spattered like a just-begun Jackson Pollack. But a stranger would page on, because they wouldn't smell the steel pot, full, resting on the back burner, kept warm until we arrived. The wouldn't feel the steam piling off the earthenware bowl onto your face like a hot towel. They wouldn't see the thick, creamy soup clinging to the spoon, too thick to drip. And the taste--I don't have metaphors for that. It was home, and history, and simplicity, and much. As a child, I hated soup, but I would scrape clean bowl after bowl of Gretchen's.

I am not a stranger. I know intimately the soup and its maker. She would make me lemon milk and honey (how did she keep it from curdling?) when I was sick, and gasp with delight when she saw me, and tell me stories and slice an impossibly indulgent wedge of torte onto a gleaming orange plate (I can still smell it, cold and sweet and perfect). As a teenager, I would hover next to her at the stove, taking meticulous notes: the lengths of time, the size of the "chunked," the method for dumplings. But returning home, replicating with precision, my soup was nowhere close to hers. Edible--good, even--but not Gretchen's.

Because hers was more than potatoes. Her heritage was one of barely getting by, of making a meal from old potatoes and water, and she had long-since internalized that stone-soup magic of making such starkness into something generous. I, a child who knew only a pale want, had never known real hunger, could not recognize the spells and potions of a wartime German immigrant raising other people's children, cooking other people's meals.

I still can't make her soup. I follow the recipe religiously, or I add browned onions and rosemary and bacon, and it tastes good, and friends savor and sigh, but it is not hers. I serve cake generously--the orange plate now lives in my cabinet, and that is its primary purpose: to give, to extend, to share. But no written recipes can tell you how to mash the potatoes just so they cream into the soup, or how to lace the layers of torte with just enough brandy to make the flavor linger in the sinuses. How to make someone feel loved and contented before they've finished the first bite.

So why keep the recipe? Why turn the page to the back and white outline when I know the real secret doesn't live there? Maybe to remind myself that this is how things are passed down--food, stories, identity--with some words, yes, but also white space. Good magic. Love.

Essay a Day #3: In Rooms with Women

(posted on EaD 10/3 -- Blogger ate the posting here!)

In about nine hours, I will walk into a house slightly bubbling over with cooing aunts and white tulle. The women will laugh--no, titter--and play games our grandmothers played and squeal and clap gloved hands. Foods will be in miniature, as will the serving pieces. Every other woman there will have been long-married, and they will give the bride half-baked advice laced with unsubtle comments about the general uselessness of men. 

Of course it won't be that bad. I know it won't be that bad. I'm sure no one will be wearing gloves. The tittering will be kept to a dull roar. I'll probably even like the games. But this is what my brain does when a girly thing is in my immediate life path. I know it's silly, absurd even, but it happens nonetheless--for every cell of brain that says, "Relax, it's going to be fine," there are two saying, "but you'd rather stay home and watch Braveheart." . . .

[So this was, originally, a real essay--a more-than-two-paragraphs essay. But Blogger has elected to dissolve it mysteriously (dang logocidal Cloud), sooooo I guess we'll just leave it as it. Maybe I'll flesh it out again when I'm less ticked...]

Essay a Day #2: She & Me

It's strange--funny--fitting--how undifferent I am from her. As though I am a bystander, I can see her, albeit in low definition: the overlarge feet propped on the table, the hips hidden in the box-like chair, Seventeen magazine splayed over angled (but, more than that, rounded) knees. Head down. Defenses up.

Hearing this song now--"She would change everything for happy ever after"--two near-simultaneous sighs hit me: the first is that of a woman who will never be 14 again, who would not turn the pages back to 1998 for a thousand good things; the second is that of the 14-year-old who is still here, the girl who is less changed than she thought she'd be nearly two decades later years later.

In a weird flash of imagination (powered by a few too many Doctor Who episodes) the 14-year-old, ensconced in her comfort zone, evaluates the newly arrived thirtysomething uncomfortably scanning books on the shelf the way adults do when in the lair of adolescents--distracted but not. She has not thinned out the way everyone said she would--everyone said she would, and that is just not fair--but her hair is better and while traces of acne remain, the face is more smooth than scarred. She has learned to dress better, though hints of her never-caught high school trends remain: jeans that brush the ground, shirts that fall to her hips, statement earrings. She wears glasses now. Strange. When did that happen? The teenager squints, swipes at her nose. But there is no denying this is the same woman; her height helps to distinguish, but see too how she pulls her bottom lip up when she smiles to hide the unpretty teeth--dead giveaway. She'd recognize that anywhere.

The thirtysomething, her attention caught, angles her eye over the book to refresh her memory. Is it any wonder this girl would earn an English degree, when her high school hangouts were the theater and here, the second floor of the library, perched between the six and seven hundreds of Dewey. The pictures in the magazine--impossibly long-legged girls with gloss-shined lips and platform-inverted feet--taunt her in secret years before she would learn they taunted everyone, even the glossy, the leggy. She is here because there are other people here--not friends, but a passing glance would make it seem so. She shows a studied relaxation, but it is too stilted to be real. It will buckle at the shift of any number of variables. It's nearly painful to watch.

 Love yourself, the thirtysomething wills across the room, the book settling back on the shelf. Stop being certain that you are an object of amusement. Stop playing a role and free yourself. Walk across campus without a crowd. Be funny for the sake of making yourself laugh. Take ownership of those words that scrape and sting--fat, awkward, poor--or take their sting from them. Find those small powers you have (of words, of compassion) and exercise them.

Because this woman you so ache to become is already sitting there with that magazine. She's wrapped up in those adolescent layers as much as anyone, but she is already peeling back and discarding the pieces that don't work anymore. She will become the girl with the notebook full of quotes, the girl who forgives her father, the girl who falls in love and loses but doesn't die, the artsy girl with confidence built from grace. She will blush less and laugh more and stand instead of leaning. She will not be perfect--and she will in some ways bear no resemblance to this dream-adult you're aiming for, but she'll find those dreams were ones you grow out of the way you used to love Prince Philip but now it's Rider Strong or nothing.

If I could only crouch down, rest my chin on the arm of the chair to whisper to her. But that's part of the deal, isn't it? We wait for our own selves. There's no rushing, no shortcuts. She will find these things to be true, but no sooner, no easier than I did the first time. How do I still remember that first walk alone (insignificant and huge, remembered so perfectly), when the only sound in the world was my hurrying feet in the grass and I was sure every window was filled with eyes. Arriving into class, I regulated my breathing to find that no one had noticed. I remember knowing that he was leaving and in love with someone else--and months later seeing him and feeling only a tinny reverb of old emotion. A teacher looking me in the eyes and saying, "You do this well. Do it more. Never stop." Standing in front of a graduation crowd speaking, laughing, hearing their laughter echo back. Nearly indiscernible steps toward a new (but not as new as I'd imagined) version of me.

The teenager looks up again from the magazine to find that the thirtysomething is gone--sort of. She thought she was talking to her, but it must have been voices from downstairs. A song flits out on the edge of her head, almost heard: "She's just the way she is, but no one's told her that's okay." Weird. She shrugs, and turns the page.

Endnotes:

- the song is Jon McLaughlin's "Beautiful Disaster." It's fantastic, and it's written, I'm quite sure, about every teenage girl ever. Listen to it here.

- seriously, Rider Strong. It's not too late to make this work. Call me.

Essay a Day, #1: Stealing Other People's Stories

Drafter's Note: Hey, friends! I'm embarking on a semi-awesome, semi-terrifying challenge with some new writing cohorts over at Essay a Day: writing one essay (in whatever format/style that takes) each day for the month of October. Let's do this thing... DAY ONE:

All my Oscars have been for screenwriting. 

I’m reasonably sure this is true. 

Maybe way back, back before I traded in my plans of acting for a stage manager’s headset and binder, maybe I accepted a few for acting. But the overwhelming majority of my wins have been for writing stories that were filled in with famous faces and spread thickly across screens in dark rooms full of strangers.

[Sidebar: While it can be awkward, I’ve found the bathroom is the best place for accepting. The steamy mirror creates a glow similar to that of stage lights; your wet hair is easily swept into something classic or cutting edge; the towel can be cinched to sveltify the waist and press the girls into some sort of cleavage. I’ve done a lot of research, and this is where I’m coming down in the discussion: bathrooms are best.]

I’ve only occasionally wavered--while stepping over the thank-yous and nods of honor to the vanquished peers--on which award I held. I’ve typically accepted for Original Screenplay--it seemed purer, more mine. Adapted would do only if it was from my own book. To take someone else’s work, dicing and forcing it into lines of dialogue and scenery, seemed cheating.* But it’s in the tripping over details that you remember it’s just shower steam. The orchestra would have long-since played you off the stage (screenwriters get no extra time, we all know). Your former microphone slices through your perfectly--ehh, uniquely, anyway--swept hair, and it falls into its everydayness. As do your breasts. And waist.

The details had always seemed pretty secure, freeing me up to focus on hair and cleavage. But I went to see a movie last night--just an ordinary movie, but I’d just finished the source-material novel a few weeks ago, and I was so sure I was going to growl at the adaptation (as good English majors always do) but instead... It was adapted. A better word might be perfected. It was like somebody read this mediocre novel and said, “For a rough draft, not bad.” And went in and removed that stupid characterization and fixed the bit with the sister-in-law. And (with the inarguable help of a casting director to be reckoned with) utterly nailed it. 

And for the first time, far from my fogged mirror and hairbrush, I actually, really get the good-artists-steal thing. Because every rewrite is its own creation and every revision is a first breath. We all wear hand-me-down words, phrases found at the second-hand store or buried in Mom’s closet. Nothing is pure, no words are mine. And that’s more than okay--it’s an opportunity: to remake, refashion, redraft, re--- everything.

This silly, unimportant, forgettable movie has me rethinking more than just who I’m wearing. Already I’m fingering through the mental files of stories I wished were better, characters I wanted different endings for. Stealing? Certainly. Bettering? That remains to be seen. I hope so. 

Because--oh man. This is such a shock. I--who are we kidding, I was hoping for this, but I can’t believe I’m really here. Okay, sorry! Focus: so many people to thank...

- - - - -

* Yes, I know some fantastic writing falls into this award category, simmer down. And because I’m a sucker for some facts, a few personal favorite, award-winning (real awards, shower steam nowhere in sight) "stealers" over the years: Philip G. Epstein, Julius J. Epstein, & Howard Koch -- Casablanca (1943). Joseph Mankiewicz -- All About Eve (1950). William Godman -- All the Presidents Men (1978). Eric Roth -- Forrest Gump (1994). Aaron Sorkin -- The Social Network (2010)

Psalmody Psunday: 55

Special bonus points for picking up vague references to Indiana Jones and Shawshank Redemption. Send your answers with a SASE. Many will enter, few will win.

Randomly chosen, but as usual, pretty darn fitting. As a quick opening note, I love this psalm for its tone--I love how David ("a man after God's own heart," Acts 13:22)  didn't mince words when he was psalming. He just lays it all out there: "I am overwhelmed by my troubles" (v. 2), "My heart pounds in my chest" (v. 4), "I can't stop shaking" (v. 5), "everything is falling apart" (v. 11). I love that ours isn't a God we have to doll up for, present ourselves to with our fears and emotions tucked securely away. This year, maybe more than any other, has seen me come to God an absolute mess more than frequently. I love that He doesn't turn me away (or smite me, for the record). I love that He asks the Real Chandra to please stand up--or, more typically, lie prone and mumble into her pillow. He takes what He can get.

Moving along.

God's been showing Himself particularly awesome in the last several days, scraping away some lingering plaque and build-up in our relationship. I seek so hard to complicate, and He cleans out. But this psalm speaks so loudly to where I've been lately: in caves of frustration, of self-pity, of mourning. Some caves I have dug myself, others I've found myself in through circumstances, but all of them I treat as prisons I am helpless to. "Oh, that I had wings... I would fly far away to the quiet of the wilderness" (v. 6-7). Preach it, David. Anyone have some property on the Canary Islands I could get in on?

But God has been driving me--patiently, perfectly--to handle these frustrations in a different way than I would like: instead of anger and fuming, peace and stillness. Instead of retreating from the world, seeking unity and community. Instead of self-righteousness, humility and prayer. These things come unnaturally, and I frequently choose poorly, but He is good enough to keep bringing me to the same choices. Gradually, the right ones come more often. Very, very gradually.

David's summary, both of the situation ("the real danger is wickedness within the city. Everything is falling apart," v. 10-11) and the actual solution ("But I will call on God," v. 16, "Give your burdens to the Lord and he will take care of you," v.22), are still true millennia later. I can fuss and fume and whine and cry--and God accepts all of those forms of communication--but in the end, I am called to be where He has me, love who He has brought me to, and strive (struggle, wrestle, fight) for peace and unity.

Some weeks ago, a friend forwarded me a devotional. She does this frequently and, if I'm being honest, sometimes I read them and sometimes I don't. But that day I did, and this little nugget from Max Lucado has become something of a mantra for me:

This is the time for service, not self-centeredness. Cancel the pity party. Love the people God brings to you. He will work in you what is pleasing to Himself.  And you will get through this.

I find myself imagining David nodding in agreement.

At the end of the day, I choose. I can sit in my cave, growling and imagining conversations where my righteousness and wordiness wins the day. Or I can acknowledge that everything, including victory, belongs to the Lord, step outside, and get busy living.

On Watching Brendan Gleeson Play a Dad

Drafter's Note: If my handwriting were more legible--it can be legible, but when I'm writing for myself it shifts more toward glyphs than characters--I'd just post photos of my marked-up, crossed-out, arrow-studded pages that I worked on yesterday at the picnic table outside Trader Joe's. Writing is indeed a beautiful mess.


There's no such thing an as old revelation, I suppose. As countless as they may be, each wave of realization hits hard, cold, breath-stealing. Like New England ocean water, there is no adjusting to the shock, unless you use "adjustment" as a euphemism for "numbing."

This is a movie about other things--heavy, important, life things--but it is this moment that arrests me, the blow hitting without warning, cutting off breath. A simple enough moment for most--obvious, assumed, almost unnecessary. A grown woman, scarred and bandaged from life's wars, becomes a child as she is folded in against him, his arm crossing and enfolding her. Tears--not of abandon, only of leaking, of honest overflow--and stillness. Quiet, the verb. Father, the noun.

The French make a dissection of the idea of knowing: je sais (I am aware of; surface-level; "I know her name") and je connais (I know fully, deeply; total comprehension and gut-level; "I know her--she's my wife.") I do not know, have never known this movie moment by experience. I recognize this scene as I would a foreign phrase I can parcel into my own--I could give you the gist of it. Je sais, but je ne connais pas. I cannot feel the scratch of stubble or smell the half dozen parts that meld precisely into his scent. There were embraces, but in them I held my breath and was someone else.

This is an old study for me--you would think I'd run dry of words for it. But years aren't balms so much as ice packs--there is a dulling and distancing of pain, but it takes nearly nothing to feel every nerve and capillary. Wounded and healed all at once.

Moments like this used to break me--wails of why, heaving tremors of self-pity. And echoes of that remain, if I dwell, if I linger and wait it out. But even in that stillness, if I am still enough, I can feel it: not the stubble, it's true, but a closeness; no, not a scent, but a shift in pressure--the repercussions of being quieted. If were speaking truth, it's not what I wish I had had, because I ache for the palpable pieces of this world. But it is devastatingly massive, heart-seizingly unreal to contemplate: the sculptor of stars wrapping His Spirit around me, not for any other purpose than to be felt and known. It is insane--no other word comes close. Crazy and true all at once.

I smile now, in these moments. Sometimes through tears. The hurt is still there, down in the deeper canyons, but I rejoice for the way life should be when I see it: when a friend scoops up his crying toddler and murmurs in her ear; when Remus tells Harry he is broken to leave his son, but he dies to give him a better world. The little notes that vibrate, in life and in fiction, validating that a little broken is not all broken, and that gaping wounds are healed one stitch, one day, one prayer at a time.

Owning Places

I am walking home today, the first real day of fall. (Like the first real day of spring in Maine, this has nothing to do with the calendar, everything to do with the switch being flipped--you know it is fall the way you know it's raining. Last's week's humidity has been traded in for a definite chill in the air, and every tree suddenly bearing tiny swaths of gold and red in its sunniest reaches.) The sun splays out across the harbor and shafts through the eight-foot high trunks of reeds to my right, and there, only a few feet past the public sidewalk, is a defined nook, a hidey-hole big enough for maybe three people to sit on snapped trunks and dry leaves. I smile but don't slow down in my walk. This is someone else's place--a place to sit alone, to cry or stare up at the clouds waiting for time to move, and, on very rare occasions, to bring very selected others. It is not my place, and I make no move to claim it.

Because I had a place like this once--a place that wasn't, by any stretched laws of property, mine, though I would have argued the point until I was hoarse. It wasn't used by anyone else--of this I was certain in the way that children are certain of improvable things. The parking lot at my church was far bigger than it needed to be by then, and the whole back half had long gone unpaved and unpainted, delicate flowering weeds smashing concrete to rubble from underneath. And it was there, along the back left side where the woods flanked in close, pressing up the corner of the lot into a near wave of rock. The hill was not a hill, I suppose, but what else did you call it, rolling steeply down into the underbrush? A skittering of stones and dirt, a check to ensure none of same has left permanent, mom-alerting traces on clothing or shoes, and I am there. Removed from every other thing. Invisible. Secured.

I have lost the time I spent there. I have no idea what I did while the sun sank low and my mother attended meetings and studies. But it was good time. Time when nothing mattered but nature's sounds and whether you could see the moon through the cracks in the trees. I didn't have a name for it then, but it was here I learned to sit quietly with God, neither of us saying anything. Clambering out again (with a second check of shoes and shirt) was a dull goodbye, but only a slight one--places like mine did not change or leave or shift their attentions. It would patiently wait.

I don't remember taking any girl friends here--I had friends at church, but I don't remember sharing this with them. Maybe that's the veil of memory, or maybe I was afraid they would take my place and make it theirs. But boys, I remember.

I took Eric there one afternoon. I don't remember any other memory of him but this one. I was whatever age it is when a boy's rat-tail begins, very slightly, to shift from weird to intriguing--disgust giving slow ground away to desire. And his large shoes crunching further into the woods, slowly gazing up trees appreciatively. "This is cool," he breathed, and I appreciated his agreement. Later--that same day? a different one?--he had to pee, and went to the far side of the clearing to do so. I stood immovable, neither turning away nor turning toward, acting with meticulous carelessness, insisting more to myself than him that this was normal.

Some years later, I took Jon there. We stepped easily down the slope--one step, then another--and I waited for the same sigh. I don't remember what he said--only my replies. "The house didn't use to be that close." "Well, ya know, I only came here when I was little." He wasn't mean, I remember, only confused. I'd brought him eagerly out to this place that was barely big enough for us to stand, looking plainly into backyards of neighbors.

The place wasn't the same after that, though it kept its promise and never changed. I tried to go back once, maybe twice, and by then could appreciate that whatever spell had kept me hidden, had kept the walls thick and the world at bay, was broken and gone.

Walking past the reeds today, I missed my place. I have no shortage of places I love to go--restaurants, beaches, parks, wooded trails--but none of them are exclusive to me. I must share custody with a thousand other souls, and the places are less themselves for it. My house is mine, but with no secret, open to all visitors--a different kind of ownership. So I share my spaces, and I commune with God in front of my computer or looking out my bedroom window at the moon. And these new places, and the time spent there, are good--but are a different kind of mine.