July | 2020 | pull up a chair

sometimes i think maybe i should be a brand ambassador for a certain kind of mother: the mother who worries too much. i put in a stellar showing this week as i proved once again there is nary a bump in the road that i can’t imagine, can’t magnify in the picture show that plays in my head, especially in the wee, wee hours.

why, i can picture invisible germs crawling up the underside of a plastic shield. i can picture suitcases left behind, and moving trucks headed the wrong direction (more on that later). i can even picture imaginary apartments, schemes i’ve heard of first-hand where a place is advertised, virtual tours provided, only to find out the whole thing was a hoax, a ruse to snare the gullible into a make-believe lease and a real-time transfer of significant cash.

as if the real world worries aren’t plenty enough, i can embellish a script like nobody’s business.

but mostly this week i was finding my unadorned, un-embellished motherly way once again, tiptoeing in the dark, banging my toes up against doorways and corners, double-timing the wheel on the old-mother-odometer, the one that ages us, wrinkles us, grays us right before our wondering eyes.

yes, i was a mother this week whiling away the hours while her firstborn criss-crossed the country amid a pandemic, en route to a city engulfed in tear gas and federal troops. i realized that, when it comes to that kid, the first one i popped from the womb — my trial run for a lifetime — his adventures will always be unscripted for me, and i will always be finding my way. i will always be reconfiguring the walls of my heart, seeing how far i can stretch, untangling unforeseen puzzles, recalibrating my geo-scope, learning new time zones and cities, and inhaling a world of new wonders as i hitch a virtual ride on his real-life once-upon-a-rower’s extra-strength shoulders.

some parts of the script come more naturally to me. some parts are ones where i bang up, skin, and scrape my old knees. i’ve never before been the mother of a 27-year-old trekking farther from home than he’s ever lived (1,751 miles, says the wee little map on my phone). never before extended my motherly range west of the rockies, west of mounts hood, st. helens and rainier, to be geologically precise.

i know soon enough this’ll all be old news. but, just as in those first days home from the delivery room, when i literally felt my brain rewiring — as if someone was in there with a screwdriver and wrench, hooking up wires and supercharging synapses that i’d never known — my brain is once again in the midst of remodification. once again, a cognitive construction zone.

good thing the old heart stretches on impact. follows by instinct wherever, whenever, however, it’s needed.

this week’s adventure in cross-continental travel proved almost as seamless as an adventuring lad and his overage mama might hope. except for one thing. or, rather, two full-sized moving containers of things. (aka: the kid’s every last worldly possession.)

seems the folks on the loading dock back in connecticut didn’t quite read the shipping labels. or maybe they mistook the OR in oregon as a choice they could make.

they chose wrong, would be the bottom line, and sent the load hither when it should have gone yon. and so, at the moment, the kid is camping out in a bare-naked apartment, starting work monday with the one pair of beloved midcentury khakis he packed in his suitcase, a pair that once belonged to his grandpa, a pair that’ll be plenty proud to enter the chambers of the ninth circuit federal judge considered “a gentleman of the law.”

while we await the return of the rambling load (crossing our fingers and all of our toes), this old mama will undoubtedly startle in the night, tiptoe down the stairs, scribble inventories of all the irreplaceable treasures she sure hopes will resurface.

and because we mamas are the original bounce-back kids, because resilience is our necessary middle name, and we mostly land squarely — if wobbly — on our two sturdy feet, she’ll soon know every last street in downtown portland. figure out the two-hour time lag. and wait for the pandemic to end so she can get out there and soak it all in for herself.

how do you tamp down the worries that keep you from sleep?

infinite thanks to the giant-hearted kindred souls who all but held my hand in the long hours of this week as i reached for the solid ground of a safe landing and adventure-less cross-country migration. you know who you are…

18 Comments

July 24, 2020

of plastic shields and impenetrable helmets: an improbable american summer

*new york times* photo of portland street protest, braced and armed with umbrella shields, this summer’s symbol of resistance

mothers reach for what they need. mothers reach for amulets and gear, paraphernalia and patron saints, to protect their children. it’s an impulse as ancient as time. and will go on till the end of time. of that i am certain.

a mother’s wiring drives me, has driven me now for the better part of 28 years, ever since the doctor told me, incontrovertibly, with the swishing heartsounds of the sonogram echoing wall-to-wall across the darkened tiny room — nine months after the heartache of losing our first — that a life stirred within.

ever since, my first and last impulse, above all, is to keep him safe. to shield life and limb, and cranium too, from incoming assault, be it playground invective, asphalt bike path, high-speed hardball, or any of the fully-pictured atrocities that have played — and replayed — in my too-colorful head.

it is dystopian, at least, that this summer i’ve found myself clicking “buy” on a two-pack of plastic shields, the better to keep the red-ringed virus at bay when a boy i love is flying hither and yon, criss-crossing america at altitudes of 35,000 feet. tuesday night, he dons it for the second time, as he flies from JFK to PDX, that’s new york to portland, oregon, about as long a flight as the american continent offers.

and PDX is where the impenetrable helmet comes in. ever since i started reading reports of unidentified federal forces cruising portland’s downtown streets, driving unmarked vehicles, plucking protestors from sidewalks, stuffing them in vans, without word of miranda rights or where or why on earth they were taking them (leaving some to fear to god they were literally being kidnapped by bands of who knows who), i started thinking about helmets. about what my firstborn might put on his not insignificant head to keep it from getting bashed with the wrong end of a police baton, or any other unidentified thrashing implement.

mind you, it’s not that i worry my firstborn will soon be leaping into the late-night protest. it’s that he’ll be walking to and fro to work. to and from a federal courthouse, as it so happens (though not the one at the epicenter of all the melee; his is the other federal courthouse, two blocks north and west). and in this american summer, in a city besieged by federal forces wielding tear gas canisters and “less-than-lethal” (thank god for modifiers here) weapons, a mother starts considering the selling points and perqs of various impenetrable protective head gear.

which is utterly dystopian, improbable in any other summer than the one that is the america of 2020, a year decidedly not clear-focused. and it makes me think of the litany of mothers who through time have had to send off sons and daughters, who’ve awaited letters, answered the ominous knock at the door, as my own grandmother did, when her son was killed in a midnight ambush on iwo jima. it makes me think of the south side chicago mothers who cannot count on the windows of their minivans to shield the incoming bullets, the ones killing toddlers — even babies; a five-month-old shot just last week in old town — strapped in car seats.

there are mothers weeping across america, across this globe, and the tears seem endless, are endless. will the weeping and the wailing ever, ever end? do we stand a chance to finally stanch the sorrow?

mothers shouldn’t have to plot the surest bullet-free path to school. nor which playlot might prove lethal. children shouldn’t have to spend their summers behind closed curtains, in the corner of a room farthest from the picture window, where crossfire could soar in. mothers shouldn’t have to lay awake nights imagining the phone call, calculating how long it would take to race to the ICU bedside. mothers shouldn’t have to hear the click of the coffin closing.

this is no easy summer in america.

short of searching the internet for plastic shields and bash-proof helmets, we’ve got work to do here in the land of the brave and the free.

america is crying. are we listening? are we doing what we must?

and those my friends are the questions, the imperative questions: are we listening? are we doing what we must?

6 Comments

July 17, 2020

a short bit in praise of laze

i might have had you there at short, the adjective for brevity, synonym for “this’ll be quick; over in a jiffy.” perhaps you heard a sigh of exultation as your cognitive wheels sputtered and spilled out a soft hallelujah. not much to read today. oh, joy. (too lazy here even for exclamation marks, when a simple dot of ink — the period — will do.)

today, amid the incoming heat waft, the plumes of furnace-fueling Fahrenheits rolling in across the prairie, building steam as they leap the Big Muddy (the mighty mississippi, among the few rivers whose spelling wove its way into my girlhood jump-rope ditties), we turn our collective attentions to the myriad ways the month of hot july invokes slo-mo, stalls us to the lower-grade velocities: we amble to the garden, plonk our toes atop the wicker settee or into the water’s edge, set a spell in the summer porch, toss back fistfuls of inky-bursting berries, dawdle under the stars, lose track of day and time…(and make the most of ellipses while we’re at it, the original non-committal punctuation, the one that trails off into whisper, allowing any sentence to unspool at its own sweet idle…)

in celebration of indolence (lazy‘s grown-up fancy twin), a short list of praises:

sleeping till your eyelids — or the window shades — flutter open. determinedly silencing the bells, whistles, radar tones, and radio blares that dare to launch you into yet another full-on, get-it-done day.

making no plan for the weekend beyond the turning of pages.

cicada song, the rising reverberations of the hollow belly of the male bug the old latins called “the tree cricket,” from the superfamily Cicadoidea; perhaps a noxious noise to you, but to me it’s a lullaby i sink into every summer. a sound not unlike the endless sawing of blocks and blocks of wood, it’s a song that indeed puts me in a mind to saw my own endless strings of zzzzzzz’s.

sauntering the farmers’ market, guided only by whatever bounty stirs your fancy, leaving home any iteration of a grocery list (yet another domestic harness by which we are too often, too tightly bound).

pinching off fistfuls of pungent basil leaves, stuffing them into the maw of the countertop wiz-master, along with cloves of garlic, chunks of parmesan, and rivers of the fine green olive oil, and, presto, calling it a pesto (aka the unction of choice for any summer feast).

speaking of which, here’s a little video that inspired my presto pesto trials most of yesterday afternoon, interludes of herbaceous joy amid yet another afternoon sprawled in my window perch, up amid the serviceberry boughs where my turning of the pages is accompanied by duets of robins getting tipsy on the fattest, purplest berries just beyond the windowpanes.

and here, if you’re too lazy to click on any hyperlinks, the read-along version of summer’s long-awaited green and chunky goo, the one best slathered on anything that dares to cross your platter….

food52’s best basil pesto

Makes about 3/4 cup

Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 3 min

1/4 cup raw pine nuts
10 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
1/4 cup finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (about 1/2 ounce)
1 garlic clove, grated
3/4 teaspoons kosher salt
5 loosely packed cups basil leaves (from a 2-ounce bunch)

Set a small strainer over a small bowl. Combine the pine nuts and 4 tablespoons of oil in a small pan set over medium-low heat. Swirling occasionally, toast the pine nuts until golden, 3 to 5 minutes. Pour the pan’s contents into the strainer. Let nuts cool completely.
Once the nuts are cool, combine them and their oil, the cheese, garlic, salt, and remaining olive oil in a food processor. Pulse until coarsely chopped, scraping down as needed. Add the basil leaves and pulse just until the pesto becomes smooth, again scraping down if needed. Use immediately, store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 weeks (though, the sooner you use it, the better-tasting it will be), or the freezer for up to 3 months.

and, poof! there you have it. a short meander through the delights and surrenders of a day — or even a weekend — spent in unbridled serendipities. a necessary antidote to madness. most emphatically amid pandemic.

how do you define lazy?

p.s. all this laziness comes at the end of yet another wrenching and tumultuous week: putting boy 1 on airplane, bound for a big cross-country move and, alas, a bar exam that — unlike dozens of other states — illinois is insisting on holding in person come the start of september; and boy 2 found out that only freshmen and sophomores are now slotted to return to campus in the fall, a decision that means — among many other things — he has to give up the dorm room he considered one of the best in the leafy little town of gambier, ohio, a room in an old stone manse, a room complete with leaded glass bay windows, peering down a wooded hill, in the great company of his best coterie of college comrades. all in all, given the horrors that abound, these are not by any measure trials, but they wrench the heart nonetheless, and after months of this, our heart walls are somewhat thinned….

14 Comments

July 10, 2020

riding the COVID-coaster*

U.S. Hits Another Record for New Coronavirus Cases: *New York Times* graphic

we are all — all of us, red states, blue states, striped states, star-dappled states — strapped into this unplotted, unprecedented, unpredictable pandemic roller-coaster ride (*aka “COVIDcoaster,” a term introduced to me by my brilliant friend amy). the season of COVID, long past its toleration date, is gearing up for a wallop. or so it seems as summer cranks up the heat, and what’s ahead grows hazier.

we seem to be lurching upward and off-the-charts at breakneck speed, as if some giant-sized foot is pressing the proverbial pedal to the floorboard.

at this old house, the summer feels a bit like a COVID chess game. us v. the invisible virus that takes our smell and taste away. i need to put on speed dial a beloved ER doc friend of mine, the one who answers every inane puzzle and quandary i conjure. (and, believe me, i conjure.)

just this week, boy No. 2 found out his best friend’s sister — and another dear friend’s cousin — had tested positive — fever + sore throat, the sweet girl’s symptoms. of course, boy 2 had been out hitting golf balls the two previous nights in a row with her brother. and, to double the trouble, one of those nights he’d taken a long sidewalk-straddling walk (without masks), with the COVID girl’s cousin, who’d just gotten back from a week of sharing a summer cottage — and a bedroom — with the newly diagnosed one.

from the minute boy 2 got the news — at the end of a hot sauna of a day mowing grass and chopping trees for the park district — he had his KN95 mask strapped on so tight it musta made it hard to breathe. he insisted on eating his dinner on the far side of the kitchen, a good 12 feet from the rest of us. and he holed up in his room as if protecting me from nuclear fallout. just now, as he loped out the door for another day of tree-chopping, he triumphantly announced his test (taken yesterday afternoon at one of those one-day testing sites) just came back negative, as did his best friend’s and the cousin’s. halle-holy-lujah! i’m thinking it was a close-enough call to maybe add an extra 20 seconds of hand washing to the regime from here on in, though the perceived invincibility of teens prompts me to hedge that bet.

then there’s boy 1: the one who is here, asleep under this very roof, spending his days studying for the bar exam and waiting to move to portland, oregon, where a federal clerkship awaits. you might think — with five scheduled cross-country flights and two separate moving crews, a new job, new apartment, and that bar exam — that we set out to plot the most complicated itinerary imaginable in the age of COVID (though we assure you we did not). as it stands now he is due to fly back to new haven on monday, where the first of the two moving crews will crate every last fork, spoon, and tome in his law school apartment, and ship it all oregon way. the plan had been to come back here for the duration, till it was time to meet the movers in portland, but with the COVID charts skyrocketing in the exact wrong direction, we ditched plan B. and have moved on to plan C in which the poor kid will wait it out for 10 days in a stark empty apartment (save for the old lumpy mattress he is not moving), fly new york to portland, meet the movers, and then — drum roll here for the most mind-bending part of the plot — fly four-and-a-half hours back to chicago to take the bar exam, which in itself is a legal petri dish of COVID waiting to engulf the entire law school class of 2020. the geniuses who plot bar exams are currently planning to stuff 2,000 illinois test takers into a ballroom for two long days at the start of september. some of those test takers, like our very own, will be fresh off airplanes, having flown into chicago for the exam. others, waiting to take the exam before they can start drawing a paycheck, might well be inclined to go ahead and take the test even if, say, they can’t smell a thing, feel a wee bit hotter than usual, and might have started sniffling or coughing. how this is allowed to happen is beyond me, but then it’s the COVIDcoaster, and we are all whipping around the course, bracing ourselves through all its undulations.

so i do what i do best: i worry the night away. i pony up for the higher-cost health insurance, haunted by visions of the kid sick as a dog and turned away from the best hospitals in town if he doesn’t flash the right insurance card. we canceled the plane ticket on the airline that no longer keeps the promise to not fill every seat on the plane, and grabbed a new one for an even-longer ride on a plane that promises a few inches more breathing room. and we are leaving the kid to sleep in an empty apartment for 10 days — all because we’re haunted by the very real fears that COVID is a fire-breathing, smell-stealing dragon that’ll come up and nab you from behind.

meanwhile, we watch germany and south korea mostly trot back to work, no longer so encumbered by this awful terrible invisible virus.

by the hour, awful terrible numbers are flashing before our eyes — cases climbing, death rates certain to follow.

and those of us who swear allegiance to masks and 75-percent isopropyl alcohol hand sanitizer, we begin to wonder when, oh when, will it end? and who of the ones we love will be caught in its vice — snuffed out, or left with lingering scarring for who knows how long?

it’s enough to wear you down, and wring you like a soggy rag. we’re weary of all the lysol-wiping of every last milk carton. and navigating the variations of rule-following among those we love is no summer picnic. (i’m among the self-avowed scaredy cats who takes tony fauci at his every last word; if he tells me to mask up and not share even a fruit bowl among friends, i’m wearing two masks and lysol bleaching like nobody’s business.)

it all makes for strange times. surreal times, really. but, thank God, we are — so far — living to tell about it.

and in the meantime, i’m baking.

here’s the latest summer joy from the cookie jar, and they couldn’t be easier. four ingredients, stir, scoop, press flat, await the slightest gilding of the coconut edges. then watch ’em fly.

almond joy cookies

these wicked little coconut cushions, studded with semi-sweet chocolate and bits of sliced almond, are what happens when your favorite grocery store peddles a similar confection at $5.99 for five of ’em. because those pricey little mounds are practically inhaled in this old house, i was determined to make ’em myself. a bit of prowling around the internet, my cookbook without end, led me to these, courtesy of some lovely someone named trish on momontimeout.com

she writes: “These easy Almond Joy Cookies take just four ingredients and don’t even require a mixer! No beating, no chilling, just mix ’em up and throw ’em in the oven EASY! You’re going to love these ooey gooey fabulous cookies!”

Prep Time: 5 mins

Cook Time: 12 mins

Ingredients

1 14-oz bag sweetened coconut flakes
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
2/3 cup chopped lightly salted almonds (trish used Blue Diamond Low Sodium Lightly Salted – light blue bag, but i couldn’t find, so i used sliced almonds and added 1 teaspoon salt)
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk regular or fat-free works

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 325F.
Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
In a large bowl combine coconut, chocolate chips, almonds, and sweetened condensed milk.
Stir until combined.
Scoop out dough with a cookie scoop onto prepared baking sheet.
Moisten the tips of your fingers with water and shape into discs. Pat the tops flat.
Bake cookies for 12 to 14 minutes or until tips of coconut are just starting to turn golden brown.
Let cool on baking sheet.
Store cookies in an airtight container.

Notes

Parchment paper is critical for these cookies to turn out right. Silicone mats, waxed paper, etc. will yield a slightly different result.

chime in and spill your COVID-coaster stories. do tell. misery loves company. and by now we are all worn thin from the red-ringed worries.

(p.s. i am not making light of one drop of this, merely recounting with a journalist’s eye the absurdities of what the summer’s bringing….)

16 Comments

July 3, 2020

summer vacation

even the sound of it, those two easy-does-it words hammocked together: summer + vacation = kick back, fling your shoes across the yard, sink your toes in the sand (or the dew-dazzled grass), take your to-do list and tear it into confetti.

it’s the necessary pause. the shot of pure oxygen to the suffocating soul. the certain truth that, even for a day, we can–and must–call time out. all but scribble the long-forgotten permission slip, giving our weary little selves a break from the unrelenting everyday.

never more than now.

this year, maybe for a day we can shelve the motherlode of worries, revel in the tiniest of wonders: the firefly, the cucumber vine’s improbable curlicue, the invention of the blueberry.

maybe for a day, or a whole string of days, we can make-believe we’ve piled in the station wagon, rolled along the back roads, taken a turn at the windmill or the “raccoon crossing” road sign, listened for the gravel spitting up from our wheels, unpacked at the ramshackle cottage deep in the woods (minus mosquitoes), packed the fridge from the nearest farmer’s market, and unfurled the beach towel or aforementioned hammock (see first sentence above), settling in to the preferred posture of the day.

can you hear your old bones sighing? or whistling along to their happy tune?

sometimes all it takes is the mere whiff of vacation ahead to slow the heart’s staccato, ramp up the oxygen content of the lungs. sometimes the magic is in the imagining. maybe that’s why God gave us doodle pads for brains.

there are a million and one ways to dawdle through a day. to seize emphatically the indolent season. to master the art of doing next to nothing (it’s harder than you’d think). to make the turning of the page, the slicing of the tomato, counting firefly flickers be the most arduous task of your day.

irony of ironies, you might scribble just such a litany onto your to-do list of the day: 1.) plop your bum on the nearest ledge under the sun. 2.) stay put for a good half hour. 3.) tick off three whimsies in which you rarely indulge. 4.) do them. 5.) call it a day.

it is always a fine thing to upholster your indolent day with proper feasting. i find the blueberry–that swollen burst of summer–to be synonymous with a july-fourth fete. think backdrop to stars on betsy ross’s american flag. i’ve used them as inkblots in pancakes, embroidered the top of a summery flag cake, plopped them by handfuls straight into my mouth. but the way i find them most apt for the moment is that wonder of indolence i call blueberry slump*.

and wonder of wonders, here–from the pages of Slowing Time, my first foray into the world of book publishing–is your very own road map to blueberry confection.

From the Summertime Recipe Box…

No-cook summer, the aim. Pluck tomato from the vine. Shake with salt. Consume. Repeat with the sweet pea, the runner bean, the cuke. And who ever met a berry that demanded more than a rinse — if that? Thus, the blueberry slump. A no-frills invention, concocted — lazily, one summer’s afternoon — in the produce aisle. Even its verbs invoke indolence: dump, splash, dash…spoon and lick. With lick, though, comes a sudden surge of gusto.

Blueberry Slump

(As instructed by a friend bumped into by the berry bins; though long forgotten just whom that was, the recipe charms on, vivid as ever…)

Yield: 1 slump

2 pints blueberries dumped in a soufflé dish (fear not, that’s as close as we come to any sort of highfalutin’ cuisine Française around here….)

Splash with 2 to 3 Tbsps. fresh lemon juice

Cinnamon, a dash

In another bowl, mix:

1 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1 stick butter, cut into pea-sized bits

{Baker’s Note: Add a shake of cinnamon, and make it vanilla sugar, if you’re so inspired…(I usually am. All you need do to make your sugar redolent of vanilla bean is to tuck one bean into your sugar canister and forget about it. Whenever you scoop, you’ll be dizzied by high-grade vanilla notes.)}

* Spoon, dump, pour flour-sugar-butter mix atop the berries.

* Bake at 350-degrees Fahrenheit, half an hour.

(Oh, goodness, it bubbles up, the deepest berry midnight blue. Looks like you took a week to think it through and execute. Ha! Summer in a soufflé dish. Sans soufflé….)

* Serve with vanilla ice cream. But of course….

Tiptoe out to where you can watch the stars, I was tempted to add. But then I quickly realized you might choose to gobble this up for breakfast, lunch or a late summer afternoon’s delight. In which case a dappled patch of shade will do….

*my beloved friend paula, who is in fact idling by a lake house this weekend, asked me for this recipe yesterday, so she could carry it along in her beach bag. it reminded me, and both of my boys, that we could not make it through the weekend without a few scoops. so thank you to paula for the tap on the recipe tin.

how will you idle away your indolence?

2 Comments

pull up a chair

Month: July, 2020

July 31, 2020

the hours we lie awake