Maisie Dobbs and O.D.s

Sometimes grace appears in odd places, most recently for me in the Maisie Dobbs series. I never read mysteries but during a conversation with a bookseller she and I discovered that we both turn to Anne Lamott's nonfiction when we're feeling blue. When I asked what else she read to lift the spirits, she said the Maisie Dobbs novels. Ok, worth a shot.

To really love a book, you have to love the heroine, and Maisie is one of those people you want to spend as much time with as possible. These novels take place in London after the Great War, and focus on people who came back from battle changed as well as the pain of growing away from one's childhood, one's parents. There's a spirituality (in a mystery series!) that's both strange and thoughtful. In one passage, Maisie is talking with a doctor, asking why some soldiers who return from war recover quickly while others with the same injuries don't recover at all.

He responds: "In my opinion, acceptance has to come first. Some people don't accept what has happened. They think, 'Oh, if only I hadn't walked up that street when I did...' I would say that it's threefold: One is accepting what has happened. Three is having a picture, an idea of what they will do when they are better. Then in the middle, number two, is having a path to follow.' "

I've been thinking about that all week as I try to jettison the "if only I hadn't" line of thinking. Danny and I went to O.D.s, where the white bean and ham soup is thick, served in heavy white cups that keep it hot no matter how slowly you eat. The waitresses at O.D.s call you "Hon" and get food on the table fast even though they don't seem the least bit harried or rushed. One of the waitresses is named Esmerelda, and she fits her name perfectly. I find the more I pay attention, like Maisie Dobbs, the less unhappiness becomes the center of my focus.

Maisie has a livid scar that runs from her neck up across her scalp. She hasn't cut her hair since the war because she's worried that the scar will show. Finally, she relents, lets all the weight go, stops worrying about her scars showing and moves a step closer to acceptance. I'm trying to do the same; let go of the event that caused the scars, let go of trying to keep the scars covered, and find my path. Take the cup of soup from Esmerelda and watch the train go by with Danny.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Howl and the University Cafe

I know. It's wrong on several levels. Ginsberg and Palo Alto is like pulling together raw meat and espadrilles. It's tough to find the point of connection. In Palo Alto, the point for me is Bell's Books. Faith invited a few of the faithful to a reading of Howl at the book store. I'm nervous (what does one wear these days to hear beatnik poetry?) but also eager to see who comes to listen.

The bookstore is crammed full of people so I stand in the doorway with the should-have-been-earlier others, all of us leaning in to hear. There's a funny confluence between the street noises, the cars and laughing young women outside, horns and sirens, and the steady voice inside the store.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...."

Not my generation, I think. The minds of my generation have been minimized by greed, by a pursuit of technology without grace or poetry.

"... who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedies among the scholars of war...."

Soon, the sentences stop sounding like full thoughts and instead I'm rattled by separate words:

"...joyride neon, blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree...."

"from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge..."

"who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts..."

As I listen, the clock stops ticking and even the outside street noises seem to pause.

"I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel very strange..."

Faith stands in the balcony and her voice joins in: I'm with you in Rockland... I'm with you in Rockland...

Then it's no longer poetry, it's a call, a bloodline connecting us, those of us who love words, who love books, who love Faith, who yearn for connection and meaning and truth.

And afterward, we stand by the cookie plate, awkward, making polite conversation, necessary but somehow too meek, too mild. And we fold the chairs, and Faith and Kippy and Don and I walk to the University Cafe where we talk about decades past: Kippy in Canada, farming; Faith, leaving her hometown and meeting Kippy and staying there with him; Don, teaching in Israel, and every day riding in a sheroodt -- a large shared taxi full of people all viewing him with suspicion. Trying to make a difference.

And the food doesn't matter at all. It's fine: it's good crab cakes, nicely browned, and a decent steak salad, and greens and coffee, yes they're fine, but we remember a time when it wasn't about the food, when it was about the thinking, and the people, and the hopes we had for our shared futures. When did food come to matter as much as the words matter?

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Cottage for Sale and August Tomatoes

The author of "Cottage for Sale," Kate Whouley, at first strikes me as a little...mmmm, fastidious. But I want to keep reading when she admits to compulsively scanning the want ads in the Pennysaver. That's how she finds her cottage, which she has trucked over to her small house on Cape Cod.

"The main thing is we get it over here onto the foundation," her contractor says when she suggests adding the cottage to her house. "Then, we build the connecting passageway, and finally we marry the houses together."

Kate says, "Marry the houses together. I love the language. I love the image. I love the metaphor." Kate writes that the cottage is a first step toward opening up her life:

"First comes the cottage, I remind myself--the place to write, the space to share. I have no doubt that opening up my workspace will also open up my work. And taking the work out of the bedroom? Surely that can only help in the romance department. Create the space, I tell myself. The man will arrive when I have room for him. In the meantime, I have this cottage to move."

I'm shaking my head no as I read this. That's not how it works. You don't meet men by adding on to your house. It turns out I'm wrong. You DO meet men by adding on to your house: contractors and plumbers, architects and cottage movers. True, most of them are older men and married, but they are men and they know other men.

The real pull in this book is Kate's solitude. Even more than Kate, I love her little Cape Cod house, the quiet days at home with her cat, Egypt, her travels, her work, her calm life:

"The darkness in my bedroom is interrupted by the nearly full moon. The moonlight travels through the skylight in the hallway, shadowed by white mullions on the two new windows over my bed. The rectangular patterns of silver light play on the center of the pale blue pillowcase next to me. When Egypt claims that very spot, he draws the moonlight into his fur until it disappears."

As Kate is yearning for someone to share her life, I'm wishing for the Cape Cod cottage, the clean, the quiet, the solitude. I've brought back some heirloom tomatoes from Berkeley Bowl along with Acme baguettes and a few loaves of sweet batard, and I've set everything out so I can read at the table. Then the kids are back, and the calm is replaced by noise:

"Tomatoes!I want some!Did you get the yellow ones too or only the red ones?Man, these tomatoes are fat (phat?)Where did you go?Did you get other breads because I don't like the wide kind?Is this dinner or are you going to cook something real?Did you go to Berkeley?You never said you were going to Berkeley.Why did you go to Berkeley?Rachel got more of the baguette than I did. Mommmmmmmmm." (Imagine various slapping sounds here.)

Why can't we combine our lives, I wonder. Why does family mean giving up quiet thought? And why is it that when we have the calm and the quiet, we want marriage and family or at least the right person to make us feel less lonely?

"These tomatoes are the bomb. Thanks Mom," says Danny, sitting across from me. I look up and he gives me a grin, rare as rain in the summertime here. "You're welcome Dan," I say. "Thanks for staying to eat with me." And suddenly I don't envy Kate's cottage at all.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Moby Dick and Poulet

Yep. Fish and chicken. The thing about reading Moby Dick for fun (when you’re in your forties, don’t try this at fourteen) is you realize the fun that Herman Melville had with his story. Take the moment when Ishmael and the landlord of the Spouter Inn discuss where Ishmael will sleep – there are no beds so he either sleeps with Queequeg or on a wooden bench.

Ishmael launches into the landlord when he hears about Queequeg’s shrunken head:

“And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooner is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you sir, you I mean, landlord YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to criminal prosecution.”

“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then.”

I find myself snickering over my chicken salad. Like Moby Dick, Poulet has been around for a while. (30 years, which in restaurant time makes it a classic.) Like Moby Dick, it stays the same but every time I eat here, I feel this sense of gratitude that I can sit at the exact table – it sure looks like the exact table – where Brad and I came when we were college undergraduates, optimistic (him more than me), looking forward, young.

Most of the people at the other tables are solitary diners, like myself, although there are a few couples. I get what I always get: the chicken salad with homemade mayo, capers and scallions, plus a hunk of bread and a veggie salad (today, it’s fresh corn, mango, and jicama). And a glass of real lemonade which is poured for me from a blue pitcher that has condensation on the outside.

I sip my lemonade and wonder why we ever accept poor imitations. Why isn’t all lemonade made from lemons picked in a backyard, icy cold, not too sweet. Why do we settle for unhealthy, powdered lemonade with a metallic after-taste when the real thing brings solace and comfort to a hot afternoon in mid-July?

I take another bite of Marilyn’s perfect chicken salad and return to Ishmael. He’s come downstairs after sharing the bed with Queequeg and he sees the landlord:

I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow. However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

Ishmael is bountifully laughable, and he sees it, poking fun of his own irate, puffed-up little speeches. I finish my chicken and sit looking out onto Shattuck Avenue, thinking about what we lose from our twenties to our fifties: the fresh outlook and infallible knees are gone but it’s not such a bad thing to have a stronger appreciation for old friends and a good laugh. I resolve to allow myself to spend and be spent in that way.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Haven Kimmel and a BLT

When Gilroy is too hot and too bright and my thoughts turn to how many Lunesta it would take to sleep for a long, long time, I drive over the mountain to Santa Cruz. It's one of those days when I seem to feel every sound against my skin -- not a good sign. I almost pass by Cafe Delmarette because it looks like to-go only but then I spot the 3 tables pushed against the wall. I walk in and see tiny, tiny white-frosted cakes under a glass dome on the counter. Each cake is decorated with a lopsided strawberry slice and for some reason that lifts my spirits. The woman behind the counter greets me and her open, friendly face reminds me of the Mary Tyler Moore show -- why, I have no idea. "A salad," I say. "Please."

"What kind?," she asks, and when I look stumped she says, "Maybe strawberries and goat cheese on greens? That's really good."

"Okay," I say happily, and then I spot the BLT description on the chalkboard. Niman Ranch bacon, local heirloom tomatoes. Okay. The smiling woman sets to work making lunch for me in the tiny, tiny kitchen, which makes me feel rich and pampered and lucky.

I sit down at the smallest table and take out "She Got Up Off the Couch," which has acted like a shield all summer against sadness and loneliness and grief. I read about Zippy while waiting for my food. I read about the hitchhiker that Zippy's dad lets sleep in a tent in their front yard:

I looked up at him. His clothes still looked clean, and his black hair was shining in the early sun the way Rose's did. That big mustache was something to see. He hitched up his pack and fastened a belt around his waist, then messed up my hair with his open palm, as if my hair needed more trouble.

"I thought of something you have that no one else does," he said, walking backward away from me.

"What's that?" I yelled, even though he was still close.

"Your own hitchhiker," George said, then turned around and walked away.

The nice woman brought over my salad and sandwich. BLT heaven: Really good bread, just the right thickness, and toasted perfectly by someone who clearly understands that a good BLT is about comfort: thick pieces of bacon and just-right slices of yellow tomato that had that picked-this-morning tomato leaf smell. I took a few bites of my sandwich, tasted the summer strawberries and goat cheese salad, and then went back to Zippy:

I knew girls who even had those life-sized decapitated Barbie heads....And Barbie's lips would get painted a cheap, crayony pink, with lumps and streaks, and it was not many hours after Christmas morning that my toiletry-leaning friends discovered that no matter what one did with Barbie's hair it turned out creepy and couldn't be undone. Then there she sat, gathering dust on her cheerful, ruined face and chopped-up vinyl hair and I don't know why my friends didn't just get themselves a talking evil clown doll and be done with it.

I laughed out loud, which caused the guy at the next table, seated about six inches away from me, to look up from his lunch and smile.

"Izz your meal goot?," he said, with some kind of Nordic accent.

"Yes. Very, very good," I answered.

"Yes, me as well," he said, nodding.

We smiled at each other and then went back to our solitary companionable books and lunches. If there is a heaven, it will have tiny cafes with miniature cupcakes, a smiling cook who has rainbow-colored socks peeking above her intimidating black hiking boots, and many, many books by Haven Kimmel.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack