Wallace Stegner and "Women, Food, and God" Plus Shortcut Onion Soup

I'm not good at parties. If I could be zapped into the middle of a party -- teleported into a good conversation -- that would be fine. Instead, you have to WALK into a party, carrying a large bowl of fruit, absolutely positive that somewhere between curb and patio you're going to stumble and send fruit flying and probably it will land on Anne Tyler, your favorite writer in the world, who happens to be a friend of the host.

This party was an open house for a sculptor, Richard Starks, (Anne Tyler was not there, having remained in Baltimore since Richard and Jill don't actually know her) but even so we fell into a group of book lovers right away. Suddenly this was no longer a "party" but just a kind group of people chatting while eating grilled chicken, two kinds of quinoa salad, plus Tosh's heartbreakingly beautiful fruit tarts. We talked about left brain/right brain (Jill Bolte Taylor), Life of Pi, Ann Packer, Into the Beautiful North, and Wallace Stegner. Some of us love Stegner and some of us aren't so crazy about him, but either way you need to read Wallace Stegner On Teaching and Writing Fiction. There's a kind of compassion in this book that seems more about being human than about being a writer. Stegner quotes Joseph Conrad:

[Of the writer, I would ask] that he be capable of giving a tender recognition to the obscure virtues. That he not be impatient with [humankind's] small failings nor scornful of their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence but depend on their education, their social status, even their profession. I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power.... Let him mature the strength of his imagination among the things on earth....."

I'm also reading Geneen Roth's Women, Food, and God. Now, you're probably thinking "what can Wallace Stegner and Geneen Roth possibly have in common?" Yeah, I thought that too, but here's the deal: Geneen Roth says that in order to stop eating ANYTHING and everything within reach, start observing. Put down the fork and let yourself see, hear, smell, touch. That when we eat voraciously and without hunger we are trying to drown out the voices -- our mother's voice or maybe Luva, that horrible ballet teacher we had when we were five who said that we landed like an elephant -- yes, we eat an entire chocolate cake and we drown out those voices but we also halt our ability to hear the wind blowing the oak tree behind the house, and to see the hummingbird hovering just above the rose bush with soft, ruffly flowers that are so vibrantly pink that they glow.

Seems like Stegner (or maybe Conrad) is saying the same things as Roth:

[Enlarge your sympathies]

Patient, loving observation

[Enlarge your sympathies]

Put down that leg of lamb and look at the sunset

[Mature the strength of your imagination]

Lots of folks can put together a sentence; only those with enough room in their hearts can connect words in such a way that the words connect human beings

[Mature the strength of your imagination]

Instead of focusing on what you cannot have (or on the voices of those who refuse to see your beauty), look at the beauty within reach

SHORTCUT ONION SOUP

Make this when you have lots of onions and you are working on maturing the strength of your imagination (which may or may not leave a lot of room for cooking).

1 large yellow onion

6 to 8 small white onions (OR any kind of onion at all)

2 to 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 26-ounce container Swanson's low-sodium beef stock

2 cups cold fresh water plus more if needed

2 tablespoons Cognac or Calvados (optional)

Peel the large onion and cut it in half. Dice half the onion and set aside. Cut the other half of the onion soup-style, which means cut thin slices from pole to pole so you have half-rings and then cut those long pieces in half.

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy pot. When the oil is hot, toss in the diced onion (but not the long onion pieces just yet). Stir the diced onion and when well browned, pour in the stock and the 2 cups of water. Heat over medium heat while you cut the small onions.

Peel and cut the small onions soup-style (no dicing for these). Toss them into the pot as you slice them. Then, lower the heat so the soup simmers. Simmer for as long as you like -- 30 minutes works and 2 hours also works. If you simmer for more than 30 minutes, add another cup or two of cold water. Basically, the longer you simmer, the darker and more mellow the soup. Get up and taste it every 30 minutes or so, and take it off the heat when it's perfect for you. Then stir in the Cognac or Calvados if you like. It's also fine without any booze added.

When you're ready for soup, decide whether you want option A or option B:

Option A

Cut up some nice, fresh veggies -- anything from carrots and celery to parsley root and red peppers. Stir in the diced veggies, heat for just a few minutes and then serve a light, healthy supper.

Option B

Heat your oven to 350 degrees F. Cut a baguette into slices and toast them. (Or just cut any old bread into cubes and toast them.) Ladle soup into ovenproof bowls, add baguette slices (or croutons) and top with shredded gruyere cheese and a little Parmesan. Set the bowls (or one bowl if it's just you) on a baking sheet just to be safe. When the cheese is melted and golden brown on top, take it out and while you're waiting for your soup to cool, you can look at the web site of sculptor Richard Starks:

http://www.richardstarks.com/

See the photo of Lou Ferrigno on the wall behind Richard? Before he became a sculptor, Richard made exercise equipment for body builders including The Hulk. Don't you love meeting interesting new people at parties?

Family Album and a Good Turkey Sandwich

I've been thinking about famous artists as compared to some of my favorite authors. If Picasso is Anne Lamott and Hopper is Anne Tyler, then I think that Penelope Lively is Vermeer: small, quiet at first glance, incredible impact -- she creates these complete paintings of people who stay with you after the book is finished and shelved.

The story of a family with six children, each chapter in Family Album is like a snapshot of one family member or one incident, and something mentioned in a chapter leads to the next. It's carefully written but not stuffy. I'm sitting here with the book beside me wondering how she did it, how the author made each person in the book mysterious and whole, interesting and likeable or unlikeable, depending on your point of view.

This is a book about family, home-making (not in the sense of bed-making but in the sense of creating a home life) and how children can determine who a woman is. Does that mean that men won't want to read it? Maybe.

This book makes me consider the cost of being a mother, how for some women there is no hesitation, no question that caring for children is a life's work, a calling, satisfactory on its own. For the rest of us, it's constant push and pull. I know when I make a great meal, everyone in the family feels better. I also know that most of the time I would rather read and write than shop and cook. (Does everybody else think about Meg's mother in A Wrinkle in Time, cooking stew over a bunsen burner while she did her work in her laboratory? Nice idea but somehow it doesn't ring true.)

A turkey sandwich is the opposite of a good meal. It's not warm, it's not cooked. It's a cheat, a lunch, really, not dinner. So I dress it up. Pile up deli-sliced maple-roasted turkey on a plate. Set out fantastic sweet batard from Acme sliced thickly and a nice dark green bowl filled with homemade mayo (see below). I mound up whole romaine leaves on a nice dark blue platter to put on your sandwich or just to eat with your fingers. I add a small plate of sliced tomatoes and a funny old-fashioned divided casserole filled with sweet gherkins on one side and slices of dill pickle on the other. Bring out a few whole avocados with a knife and a small cutting board for anyone who wants to add avocado to their sandwich. That's it. That's dinner.

Danny and Rachel sit down and Danny actually says it out loud: "This is dinner?" My feathers are ruffled. "Yes," I snipe. "Tomorrow do you want to make dinner?" He shoots Rachel a look and then shakes his head. "No," he says. I settle my feathers into place and we each make our own sandwich, and eat quietly.

"It's good Mom," Danny says and Rachel nods, both eating their sandwiches. Not my best dinner but maybe not my worst.

Homemade Mayo

I have it on good authority that Julia Child actually kept a jar of Best Foods mayo in her fridge and when she didn't feel like making mayonnaise, she whipped out the jar. That works for me. If you have beautiful eggs from a farm nearby (as I did) and you want to make your own mayo, this is the method I used. (Make sure all your ingredients are at room temp; don't do this with chilly eggs.)

2 large egg yolks

1/4 teaspoon good Dijon mustard

2 to 3 tablespoons fresh-squeezed lemon juice or vinegar

1 cup oil (I used a nice olive oil)

Slide the egg yolks into a blender and whir for just about 20 seconds. Add the mustard and lemon juice or vinegar and whir until smooth. With the top off the blender add just a few drops of the the oil with the machine running on low. Add the oil, a few drips at a time until it forms an emulsion (it's thick and smooth). In a slow drizzle, add the rest of the oil. You could add a little more oil than 1 cup if you like, but I like it on the lighter side.

Dandelion Wine, Dandelion Greens, Dandelion Tonic

I'm trying to remember how old I was when I first read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. Ten maybe? It was the first time that I read something that I knew wasn't true and yet was more true than true. Now, four decades later, walking through my yard trying to decide if I should weed the dandelions or make a nice liqueur from them, I'm remembering Dandelion Wine in surprising detail.

Do you remember Douglas, looking through the store window at a pair of Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes?

"Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

Douglas tried to get all this in words.

'Yes,' said Father, 'but what's wrong with last year's sneakers? Why can't you dig them out of the closet?' "

I'm now the parent wondering WHY my children can't dig last year's shoes out of the closet, but this brings back memories of how those first minutes of summer sound when school lets out, and the way your body feels when you wake up with absolutely nothing to do while cicadas are chickering in the long grasses, and the sky is impossibly, almost painfully blue.

I decide not to weed the dandelions but to eat and drink them. I walk outside with a glass jar and small scissors and walk through my yard snipping off the bright yellow flower heads and letting them fall into my jar. I bring the jar inside and go back out with a salad bowl, pulling off any tender, bright green leaves from the dandelions. (I don't use any pesticides -- if you do, maybe think twice before eating greens from your overgrown lawn.)

I have the flowers in a large glass measuring cup and I pour on a good amount of vodka. I add just a few teaspoons of sugar and two long strips of lemon peel, with the white pith scraped off. I pour all this into a large clean glass jar, screw on the lid and put it away in the back of my pantry. (I have no idea how this will taste -- stay tuned.)

Then I rinse and dry the dandelion leaves. I pour about 1 tablespoon of EVOO into a pan, add 2 minced garlic cloves, let it cook for about 30 seconds and then add the dandelion leaves -- about 1 1/2 cups of them. I add a little bit of lemon zest and a bunch of chopped fresh parsley leaves, and heat for another 10 or 20 seconds. I chop up a few roasted almonds and throw them on top. I taste it. It's good but there's something missing. I take my bowl of greens outside and carefully balance it on a tree limb while I climb up into the kids' treehouse. (This is harder than it sounds.) I sit down with my bowl so I can kick my legs while looking out over the fields, which are just turning from pale green to gold. The dandelions are about as good as greens can get (which is to say a lime popsicle would be more appropriate) but just for a minute I'm the same person I was when I was ten years old and summer stretched ahead so far forward that you couldn't imagine school starting up again.

Happy summer to you.

The Elephant Whisperer and Alfresco

Alfresco isn't a restaurant but a kiosk in downtown Santa Cruz. Walking by on my way to the Del Mar, I smelled something spicy: cinnamon and cloves, slow-cooked vegetables. I stopped walking. As I stood there, deep breathing, the guy waiting in front of the kiosk smiled at me. "Such a big smell from such a small place," he said. The woman inside the kiosk handed him a bowl (biodegradable, of course) filled with chunks of spicy soft eggplant, raisins, chickpeas, and tomatoes on a mound of couscous. I forgot all about my movie and asked for the same thing, the North African Bowl. Then we sat at Parisian cafe tables on the sidewalk taking bites of this earthy, aromatic, completely satisfying sun-drenched food.

This bowl fits in with the book I'm reading, The Elephant Whisperer. (Yes, bad title. I walked past it in the library and thought, "Cheesy.") Okay, maybe it does bear a little resemblance to Born Free but once Lawrence Anthony, the author and owner of the game reserve Thula Thula, begins telling about the elephants who arrived by a fluke at his property, I can't stop reading.

Elephants have had a tough time of it what with humans taking all the land and deciding that it's much more expedient to shoot elephants than to find them appropriate homes. Anthony, who's lived in South Africa for much of his life, is struck by the fact that elephants -- once plentiful here -- haven't lived on this land for over a century. Many of the native Zulu people surrounding Thula Thula have never even seen an elephant. He fights to save his little band of elephants, fights to build a lodge that will help eco-tourism replace poaching, fights to convince the ranch owners that the land could be more viable and lucrative as a reserve than as grazing grounds for cattle. He falls in love with the elephant herd, with the matriarch Nana, inquisitive and stately, the second-in-command female Frankie, who charges first and asks questions later (I feel a curious affinity for Frankie). He tells of the arrival of Mvula and Ilanga, the first elephant babies born on this land in 100 years and how the elephants will not let him near the babies but later, bring them to his house to show them off. Lawrence will take his first grandchild to the elephants (while his daughter-in-law nervously wrings her hands), and the elephants meet the human baby with the most gentle touches of their trunks.

I've been recommending this to people as a beach read but I think it's more: when a book can take you to African lands and let you stay with elephants, let you meet a particular group of elephants with their endearing and not-so-endearing traits, isn't that the reason we read in the first place?

Here's a link if you want to see the very appealing kiosk that is Alfresco.

http://www.alfrescosantacruz.com/

And you can hear (in lovely Brit accents) how Lawrence Anthony saved many of the animals in the Baghdad zoo:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/audio/2009/feb/20/conservation-wildlife-lawrence-anthony

And you can google Thula Thula too.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Lit (part 2) and Alice's Dark Hot Chocolate

I've underestimated Mary Karr. In Lit, she calls her mother after checking into a mental institution when she's come too close to killing herself. Her mother refuses to come help with Mary's son, Dev, while Mary is hospitalized.

Her mother says, 'I just can't honey. You know I've had this trip to Mexico planned for a while.'

Mary says, "After she hangs up I cry because part of me still wants to drag her behind my car. But the other part still wants to crawl into her lap."

And then there's this conversation, held with Jack, a schizophrenic from Mary's AA group who works in a box factory when his meds keep him stable:

"But what if I don't believe in God?," Mary asks Jack.

"Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here." Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying "Let go. Surrender Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender Dorothy."

Mary says, I want to surrender but have no idea what that means.

Jack goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: "Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope...."

"What if there's no answer?" Mary asks.

"If God hasn't spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don't be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to the AA meeting and make the chairs circle perfect."

I read this page five or six times. Every time I read it, the knot in my chest loosens a little more. If someone battling schizophrenia can keep this kind of contract, then so can I.

I go downstairs to make toast and hot chocolate. Forget toast from a toaster -- it's soulless, hard and unforgiving. I put little marks of butter all over really good bread and then slide it into the oven under the broiler. I stand there watching because otherwise I know I will wander off and forget the toast entirely until it's smoldering and dark smoke is curling out of the oven door.

I make Alice Medrich's hot chocolate:

6 ounces of a really great dark chocolate, like Scharffen Berger
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1 1/2 cups milk

Chop up the chocolate, put it into a saucepan and pour half of the boiling water over it. Stir until smooth. Add the rest of the water and then the milk. I like to froth it up with a whisk. Then I dig around in the cabinets for my stainless steel coffee carafe that I love even though it's dented and old. I pour in the hot chocolate and set the carafe on the table with a good white china cup and my plate of perfect toast. Screw Weight Watchers. I bring Mary Karr to the table so I can finish reading.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Lit and Roasted Cauliflower

Roasting cauliflower is easy. You hack the head into florettes, toss them into a big bowl, pour on a few tablespoons of olive oil, add some salt and pepper and then toss with your hands. Spread the oiled florettes on a baking sheet, and roast for 25 minutes at 375 degrees. It's forgiving, this recipe. Leave it in the oven a little bit longer and it's no big deal. I like them a little more browned anyway.

Made a whole white meal, just trying to use up what was in the fridge. Beige plates of Swedish meatballs, roasted cauliflower, and scallops and then we all sat at the table eating in a kind of bland-induced trance. I am stuck here, in white.

Mary Karr is the opposite of white. She is shiny black, obsidian dark, with a jagged tear of scarlet that stays in your brain after you've turned off the light. I go back and forth between loving Mary Karr and really resenting her.

I wonder why so many of us move forward in white, afraid to leave the path, doing everything we can to cover what shames us, while Mary Karr steps into the dark, writes about the dark, travels through it. "Nice" enters into it. ("Nice" is tangled up with "insidious" and "strangling.") Swedish meatballs on a beige platter -- how did I end up here?

Poetry makes me love Mary Karr. The fact that she is unsure about poetry's validity until she teaches poetry to a group of mentally challenged women. Somehow their ability to hone in on what is moving lifts Mary Karr above her uncertainty and lifts me above the whiteness. This is a poem by one of the mentally challenged women in Mary's class, Katie:

MONKEY FACE
Far away St. Paul
People like robots
Wash their tables
Scrub the floor
Bored things
Washrags on the window
Put it away now
Look at your leg
Tie your shoe. Look
At yourself. A monkey.

I read this and think that maybe poetry is not about intellect. Not about being adept with words or good in school or nice to your mother. I'm thinking about the purpose of poetry. Mary Karr writes about a teacher she had early on, Etheridge Knight. He told Mary to picture a woman climbing five flights of stairs in a Harlem apartment building in the summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. "If you're standing on the corner of 116th Street, poeticizing," Etheridge told Mary, "what could you possibly say to help her climb back up."

So I'm thinking about what I could say to help her climb back up. Those words sure as hell wouldn't be found in a cookbook. They would come from leaving the path, from leaving behind "should," from sitting in the dark and letting the words come to you.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

The Center of Everything and The Slanted Door

Here's what happens if you're lucky enough to go to one of San Francisco's best restaurants with my friend Julia. The place -- THE place -- The Slanted Door -- is jammed with people and the noise reverberating off the walls makes me feel a little off balance. I hesitate in front of the throng waiting for tables but Julia is undeterred. She slips through the mob and finds us two seats at the bar. The chefs come out of the kitchen to say hello to Julia (she and Andy grow vegetables that can make you pass up cake in favor of fava beans). Justine comes out with her daughter, who is three years old and wholeheartedly focused on moving restaurant furniture. She tries to take off her shirt (her mother convinces her to keep it on) but there is something so appealing about this gorgeous tiny blond girl determinedly moving heavy tables and wanting to take off her clothes so she can really get in there and adjust the room to her liking.

This is the theme of dinner. Strong women, strong girls who still manage to be kind-hearted and funny. Julia reminds me of those lasting friendships you keep after college: she is opinionated and quick to laugh, she is fast moving and determined and sympathetic. I'm thinking about Julia while reading The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty. It's about high school, having mothers who -- while less than perfect -- are struggling to be good parents. It's about finding your strength.

We had decided no alcohol with dinner but then a flash of inspiration: virgin cocktails made by the tattooed Aussie bartender who kept us laughing and assured me that yes, I should let Danny get out there and ride dirt bikes. The most lemony drink I've ever had alongside a cup of clear chicken broth with tiny squares of winter melon and one perfect shrimp. Sauteed fava bean shoots and a cabbage salad with glazed nuts and a fish sauce dressing that I could have gone on eating for the rest of the evening. Utter contentment, sitting next to Julia who is my partner in complete and wholehearted appreciation for a great meal cooked for us by someone else. Walking back to our cars and just happy all around. That's what you get when you're lucky enough to go to a restaurant with Julia.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Eye Level Eye and Amber India

Eye Level Eye is a short play by Leah Halper. I'm thinking about it because my constant thought these days is how people overcome injuries. The play has just three characters: a young woman searching a military cemetery for the headstone of the father she never met; her brash and abrasive cousin; and an old vet in a wheelchair who has taken on the job of cemetery caretaker.

"Eye level, EYE level," the vet snaps at the girl when she tries to talk to him. He refuses to listen until she bends down to look at him face to face. I see this same tendency in myself. Unless someone makes the effort to come to my level, I staunchly refuse to listen. I can look absolutely engaged but inside I am as unassailable as a stone.

When I was driving through Morgan Hill last week and saw a group of tea party demonstrators, I wanted to pull over and engage them -- and probably not in the most peaceful manner. Rachey stopped me from getting out of the car. "Please, Mom," she said. "I have to be at work in half an hour."

It's like the three people alone in the cemetery in Leah's play. All of them come there for a good reason and yet the first instinct is to battle -- to throw out little verbal grenades.

Amber India is like a breath of air -- spicy, warm, lamb-scented air. Their butter chicken is the ideal combination of aromatically spicy and buttery smooth. The waiter spoons the chicken and sauce neatly over a small mound of rice, sparked by hits of yellow saffron. I love this: the person who made this rice has combined white rice with just a little saffron-tinted rice so instead of a monochromatic rice, you have rice confetti.

I wonder if just one tea party representative and I sat down over rice and butter chicken -- with a lovely mango mint cooler on the side -- if we could debate calmly and see each other's views eye to eye.

The Story Sisters and the Lunchroom at Neiman-Marcus

The lunchroom I'm envisioning isn't there any more; I'm back in the 1980s when the decor was pink and pale turquoise with shiny, abstract art on every wall. Back then I thought it was the height of sophistication to eat lunch at Neiman-Marcus, and I ate the same thing every time, a chicken salad sandwich and a glass of Neiman's special iced tea (their trick was mixing the tea with ground cloves and Tang).

Neiman's is hardly Paris but there is something about those memories -- the strength of tradition, which lasts when everything else is gone -- that comes back to me while I read The Story Sisters.

The sisters -- Elv, Meg, and Claire -- have one life in Paris with their grandmother Natalia and another life on Long Island with their mother Annie. Their father disappears early on -- we see him only briefly driving around town with his new girlfriend in a Miata -- and it's clear from the start that the girls are on their own when it comes to staying safe. One sister in particular -- Elv -- begins to fall and then spirals downward in a way that feels so true to me that it's painful to read. Although this book is about the worst things that can happen to a family, it's also a soaring flight, a walk along the Seine in the darkest hours of night, long afternoons in a bird-filled garret, the trick of finding solace in memories and the color of the light. Reading this is like being on a small boat in the fog; the mist moves and you see first one object emerge and then disappear again while another point comes into focus.

I'm envious and in awe and at a complete loss as to how Alice Hoffman can write a story with such clear beauty, such pure brushstrokes, such pain and such grace. I immediately ran to the library and checked out 9 Alice Hoffman books but none of them have the same power, clarity, beauty, or sheer transcendence. I think about a writer becoming stronger and clearer with each work until she produces a novel that is as painful and startling and beautiful and human as any painting by Van Gogh, or any piece by Mozart. How can words on a page make one love fictional characters, embrace human frailties, feel the pain in a part of our minds (not left brain but right brain) that puts the beauty before the pain?

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

My Stroke of Insight and Earl Grey Tea

I'm thinking about the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of my brain thanks to Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight. Jill is a neuroanatomist, a researcher at Harvard who made the study of the human brain her career because she grew up with a schizophrenic older brother. At 37 years old, she had a stroke, specifically an arteriovenous malformation, a rare form of hemorrhagic stroke that can strike younger people.

Jill explains with humor and self-deprecation how the portions of her brain affected by the stroke lead to loss of faculties. Blood is fatal to brain cells and when the rupture of a major blood vessel bathes the brain in blood, big swaths of brain cells die. (My first thought: how can blood be fatal to brain cells? What part of evolution was responsible for that little kink?)

More than 75% of hemorrhagic strokes happen in the left portion of the brain. I wonder about this. Do strokes occur in the left side more often because that side is busier or because that side is responsible for our negative ideas about life and ourselves? When you've had a stroke on the left side, you lose things like interest in achievement and success, time, society, fitting in, excelling. What about those who have a stroke on the right side and retain the capacity for despair while losing the big picture, and an innate sense of well-being that has nothing to do with accomplishment. I am fascinated by Jill's post-stroke thoughts about left and right brain. She says,

"Moment by moment, our right mind creates a master collage of what this moment in time looks like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like, and feels like.... In the absence of the rules and regulations that have been defined (by our left mind) as the correct way of doing something, the right mind is free to explore the possibilities that each new moment brings. By its design, our right mind is spontaneous, carefree, imaginative... and it allows our creative juices to flow free without inhibition or judgment."

The left brain on the other hand is not carefree. It organizes each moment of our life into linear and methodical configurations so that we know to put on our socks before our shoes. Our left hemisphere uses words to describe, define, categorize and communicate. Our left hemisphere examines a flower and categorizes it: stem, leaf, petal, stamen. The right brain feels the joy of the whole picture, feels beauty, smells fragrance and is enticed, soothed, excited, or sorrowful. The left brain dissects the image of a rainbow into ROY G. BIV. The left brain thrives on weaving details into story. It excels at academics and manifests a sense of authority over the details it masters.

The voice that moves us forward, task by task, stems from the left brain. When Jill's left brain in incapacitated, the "brain chatter" stops. Jill says,

"One of the jobs of the left hemisphere language centers is to define self by saying, 'I am.' Your brain repeats over and over the details of your life so you remember them.... I personally love the color red and am inclined to collect a bunch of red things -- I drive a red car and wear red clothes. I like red because there's a circuit in my brain that gets very excited and runs automatically whenever anything red comes my way. From a purely neurological perspective, I like red because the cells in my brain tell me that I like red."

But that is all left brain, and when her left brain is wiped clean so are many aspects of Jill's personality: her ability to read -- or even determine what letters and number are -- her ability to walk, to speak, to drive, to make sense of the cracks on a sidewalk.

Here's the flip side. The loss of left brain means a right-brain view of the world. Jill says,

"Although I experienced enormous grief for the death of my left hemisphere consciousness and the woman I had been, I concurrently felt tremendous relief. That Jill Bolte Taylor had grown up with lots of anger and a lifetime of emotional baggage that must have required a lot of energy to sustain.... In my present form, I had not inherited her fundamental hostility. With the obliteration of my memories, I felt both relief and joy."

It took eight years but Jill was able to recover most of her faculties. She explains how brain cells repurpose themselves by comparing the cells in different portions of her brain to kids at a playground. If the merry-go-round is taken away, she says, those kids will run to other parts of the playground and try to find another spot to play. The strongest aftereffect of stroke was holding on to the enormous relief that came with loss of the left-brain chatter. When her left brain begins to heal (i.e. cells that survived the stroke take up some of the work of the cells that did not), Jill writes that "it seemed natural to blame other people or external events for my feelings or circumstances" even while she knew it was unrealistic to blame others for how she felt. She even says she wishes there were a safe way to silence the left brain so that people could experience a right-brain existence, if only for a few minutes.

So I'm thinking of my two hemispheres. I'm picturing my right brain as a sort of pre-hippie Berkeley bohemian, long stringy hair, shapeless purple caftan trimmed in gold. At one time she studied modern dance. Her house is an absolute mess. My left brain is an army sergeant, one who has been kicked out of the service for lack of organizational skills and yet he tries valiantly to maintain some semblance of order. He sees that he doesn't have much sway over caftan woman but still he pokes me constantly, disgusted by my piles of paper, my unpacked boxes, my dining room table filled with things for Any Soldier, the fact that it takes me days to make it to the post office.

Jill describes how her perception of her own body shifted after her stroke:

"I no longer perceived myself as a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me. At the most elementary level, I was liquid. Of course I am a fluid! Everything around us is made of atoms and molecules vibrating in space."

Our left brain makes our skin solid and impermeable to everything but air while the right brain feels us to be a part of everything around us. I drink my Earl Grey tea and try to let both halves of my brain have a taste. My left brain chatter reminds me of Rachey, who adores Earl Grey, and the Sullivans at the Ritz-Carlton every December and of being in London where I sipped Earl Grey by Hyde Park, watching as a huge black coach rolled past pulled by black horses with red plumes. I try to ease Sergeant Left Brain off the controls so I can feel a bigger picture, the cup smooth and warm in my hands, the tea fragrant and I feel myself as liquid, like tea, like water, like ocean, like air.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Here is Jill, talking about how her stroke changed her for the better:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Committed (Part II) and Becca's House

In her book, Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the Marriage Benefit Imbalance. "Married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers above single men, married men are far more likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction and depression than do single men."

"Dishearteningly," Elizabeth writes, "the reverse is not true." Married women don't live as long as single women, don't accumulate as much wealth, don't thrive in their careers as well as single women do, are significantly less healthy than single women, and we're much more likely to die a violent death than single women -- usually at the hands of a husband.

I'm confident that Brad would never hurt me but I'm also sure that marriage has not made me a better person. For every personal sacrifice I've made, I lug behind me about 10 suitcases bulging with bitterness and regret. They take up all the rooms in our house. And our house is big. Yet I am the person who has made the decisions that have carried our lives so off-track. Adopting twins from a family that clearly has some sort of mental disorder -- now there's a recipe for certain unhappiness. Moving us all to Gilroy, effectively cutting us off from every friend we have. WTF?????

So the question becomes -- how to steer together with Brad so life feels hopeful again instead of sitting here in Gilroy waiting to be hit by yet another loss in a long series of failures and bad choices.

I'm thinking about all this when we go to Becca and Allyn's house for a surprise party for Suzie. Becca and Allyn's house is a bungalow, in a neighborhood that is a long way from gentrification. They give us the tour, the huge cellar with a wine press in one corner; a high ceiling that -- when they tore down the low, rough ceiling that hid it -- showed the scorch marks of a long-ago fire. There is something about Becca and Allyn in this house -- their simple happiness at creating a place that is theirs that reminds me it's not so simple to say no to love, to a first house, to companionship, to children. We want those things. We think... we hope our family life will be free of the upheavals, the despair, the violence and fear that marked the low points in our own childhoods. How dim-witted am I to think our family life could possibly be free of upheavals? Life is upheaval.

I think about this as we wait for Suzie and Steven to arrive. Suzie comes through the door, and all of us, 50 people, jump out and yell "surprise" at her. Suzie is shocked. She covers her face with both hands, and stands in the doorway not moving, then she shows her face again and laughs, clearly at a loss. Later, when the color is back in her face, we stand to one side talking.

"Do you like surprises?," I ask her. She grimaces, tilts her head, shrugs, makes an "eh" sound, and laughs. "Your daughter," I say, and what I love about Suzie is we speak without words. That Becca admires her mom and loves her and arranged this party to show how highly she thinks of Suzie, how much Suzie means to her. And Suzie, maybe, in those first seconds when she walked through the door, would have preferred a quieter Valentine's Day with Becca and Allyn, Steven and Rachel, but as the party moves through Becca and Allyn's house, the kids all tooting on their glittery party-favor horns, there is only good will and peace and community and the love between a mother and a daughter.

Steven, who has helped Becca and Allyn lay the wonderful dark red and yellow checkerboard kitchen floor, is in back, manning the barbecue, turning turkey burgers. And the table shows how this group knows Suzie because the turkey burgers are the only meat in sight: there is a carrot salad that practically glows it's so orange, and a salad of pristinely tender Little Gems lettuce leaves, a lentil salad with incredibly ethereal feta, and the most beautiful plate of asparagus, and even a salad of shaved Brussels sprouts and almonds. And an enormous bowl of potato salad that Becca has made. I have three helpings of that potato sald and even take a fourth helping with me for the long drive home.

And I think about weathering the upheavals, using whatever means you have: meditation or religion, yoga or Feldenkrais, travel or singing or reading or whatever gets you through the really bad patches. So you can be there on those radiant days when the love shines clear.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Committed (Part I) and Potato Salad

Brad says to me, "why can't you just commit?" As we've been married for 25 years and lived together for more than 27 years, this strikes me as odd. I'm pondering this -- the fact that I still hesitate to commit after all these years -- while making potato salad and thinking about Elizabeth Gilbert's new book Committed.

Elizabeth has come through a horrible divorce, is determined to never marry again, but then is put in a situation where she has to marry. The thing that hits me hardest while reading this book is her absolute clarity around that fact that she does not want children. She wants to work. I want to work too. Living in a house with two struggling teens (hell, all of us are struggling) means that time to work is hard won.

It's not just that there are no uninterrupted hours. It's that there are no uninterrupted thoughts. Brad says he thinks about sex every 30 seconds. I laugh at that but thoughts about relationships fill most of my waking hours and not just my relationship with Brad. My relationship with my children (that's the worrisome one), my relationship with my parents (definitely better now), my relation to my sisters and my failed relationship with my sister-in-law. At least four times a day I think, "I'm not the right person; another person could manage these relationships better. There must be someplace I can go to be free of these relationships and then become the person I was meant to be. Mexico? Bali? Iceland?"

Elizabeth Gilbert is maybe not the best person to turn to when one is tempted to run away to foreign lands. I'm stuck on the idea that if I live alone, I could be good. When I live with others (especially sixteen-year-old others) I'm angry, mean, even sometimes violent. This is not who I am in my head, but this is who I become when I'm scared and frustrated, angry and tired. I'm envious of families whose children are in step -- soccer-playing, straight A, polite readers -- and I kill a big part of myself with the thought that my children would be those teens too if I'd just been a better mother.

I think about having twin babies in New York City, moving to Manhattan when they were only two months old. I remember the intense loneliness of it but also days when sun poured through the window, and I lay on my back inside the huge corral that I'd constructed in the center of our apartment. Danny and Rachel would crawl over me, each one clutching a Cheerio between thumb and forefinger. And who they were did not depend on me. Their well-being depended on me, and I did a damned good job of making sure they were never hungry, that they were warm and clean and dry and safe always, always. They were happy. But now, somehow who they are depends on me. The fact that they haven't achieved is my fault. And fear is the ruling emotion, fear that Danny will land in jail, fear that Rachel will become pregnant, fear that I'm somehow keeping them from doing their best or not doing enough to help them become the person I think they could be, should be.

How do mothers bear this?

I drag myself out of bed, and make potato salad. My Dad always made the potato salad in our house, and I think about how hard my parents had it with five children and not enough money. I chop vegetables just the way that my Dad does, small mounds of diced celery, red onion, and sweet gherkins. I leave out the hard-boiled eggs and mayo, and cook really beautiful Yukon golds (a pain to peel but such a gorgeous yellow). I make two bowls of it, one just chunks of potato, a good deal of Olio Nuovo, and a sprinkle of sea salt. In the other bowl, I mix the potatoes with the Olio Nuovo and all the veggies. Danny and Rachel fall on the no-veggie potatoes, and pronounce it "bomb-y." I take a spoonful of the vegified potato salad and there's something about commitment right there: that my parents and I struggled and yet I make the potato salad, I try to stay. That's a sort of commitment.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

I Capture the Castle and Bottega

When life is hard, I fall back on children's books. I Capture the Castle isn't quite a children's book and it's not really an adult book; it's sort of a fairy tale for those of us with no patience for "the prince will come and we'll live happily ever after." This book fills up a small leaky place in my heart every time I read it.

Bottega is a fairy tale too. It's one of those restaurants that seems to exist on a separate plane: you step through the doors and the rules change a little from the outside world. We walk in and glasses of sparkling wine are set down before we've even settled into our seats. We're brought lemon-braised artichokes and burrata (a kind of super-creamy soft mozzarella) on floral plates that would be right at home in my grandmother's good china cabinet. We're served small, sweet clams on delicate saffron fettucine and perfect asparagus topping a Meyer lemon risotto and airy puffs of ricotta gnocchi in a sauce the color of dark red velvet. Then we have gingerbread with coastal huckleberries, and an apple turnover with fennel seeds and caramel gelato.

Chiarello comes to sit with us and every one looks over to see who we are. The two women at the next table lean in, eager to hear what he is saying. He is saying that he was in D.C., where he'd gone for his wife's brother's wedding. Many of the guests were stranded by snow, stuck in airports all across the U.S. and then the caterer called to say there's no getting his truck through this snow so he won't be able to make the dinner. Chiarello listens quietly, sipping his coffee, while his wife's family runs around the room, throwing up their hands, squawking, pleading with the caterer to no avail. He's not budging. When they had exhausted all resources, Michael got on the phone. "Listen," he told the caterer, "I don't need you. I just need what's in your truck. You have two options. I can come to you and drive the truck. Or I can bring a few four-wheel vehicles and we can offload your truck, but either way, I'm getting all the stuff in your truck and I'm coming to get it now." Long pause from the caterer, and then he asks, "Who IS this?" Chiarello looks around the table, and we are all laughing, everyone who can hear him tell this story is laughing, and he doesn't need to say another word because of course that's the punch line -- imagining the caterer's face when he hears "This is Michael Chiarello."

And that's the thing about Chiarello. This is a man who is going to find a noble four-wheeled steed and he is going to save the day, record-breaking snowfall be damned. He's a romantic at heart and no true romantic can bear the idea of a bride with no wedding dinner. Chiarello came, he drove, he cooked and the wedding dinner was saved -- no, not just saved. The wedding dinner was fantastic. Poor caterer.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Her Fearful Symmetry and Nothing

I kept turning pages thinking, "this book has to get better" but it didn't. Cold-hearted and clinical, Her Fearful Symmetry was so depressing, I'm actually angry with the author, Audrey Niffenegger. It's a sad thing when a story's most appealing character is the cemetery.

Columbine and Orson

I don't think it's morbid curiosity that has me engrossed in Columbine. It's more the idea of a pathology, psychopathy as not illness but irreversibly twisted wiring that makes a human being incapable of compassion. This concept -- the idea of a person who lacks empathy -- is so puzzling I close the book often and sit staring at the ceiling, pondering it.

The author of Columbine, Dave Cullen, was one of the first journalists on the scene on April 20, 1999. Along with all the other journalists that day, his priority was posting the story minute by minute. Over time, he realized that he had made many errors -- as had every other reporter -- and that the ideas all of us hold about Columbine are wrong.

The misconceptions bothered Cullen so much that he spent ten years on this book, talking to Dylan's parents, talking to the parents of children killed and the students who survived. This book tells a story of two boys, one depressed and one a psychopath, but the bigger story is how we share a story, how the media can imprint us with inaccuracies that we regard as truth ten years later.

Orson is the anti-Columbine. At a benefit for Project Open Hand, we sit upstairs with Deb and Janet and Elizabeth, talking about astral projection and horses, books and wines and mushroom hunting. We eat a soup so glorious that it makes you wonder how you've underestimated winter vegetables all these decades. We eat short ribs and a sous vide chocolate cake with hazelnut mousseline and a perfect little homemade Reese's cup (but way better than a Reese's cup). Jane, the psychoanalyst and dream interpreter at our table, can't finish her dessert so of course she turns to the one person at the table who can. "Ann," she says, handing her plate across the table to me. "Do you want the rest?" She's known me for 90 minutes and already she's got me pegged.

And I think about how this room feels -- peaceful -- and how we don't have as many of these warm, filled, peaceful evenings as we should but that for most of us humans this connection is the best part about being on the planet. And I think about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and how teenagers don't know. They know Bruce Willis, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and that Arnold is governor and all kinds of awful things about destruction and anger and violence and hatred but they don't know the power of peace and good will.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack