Persimmon Bars, Autobiography of a Face, and Truth & Beauty

My mom and dad brought me Persimmon Bars, and then my Dad emailed me the recipe under the subject line "Recipe for a pretty heavy cake." He's not kidding. It's a brick, coated with a sugar-lemon glaze. Still, I can't stop eating it. I long for raspberries and green salad, chilled cucumbers and crisp apples but I can't stop eating the Persimmon Bars even after Danny has picked off the glaze.

The books I've been reading are the same: they make me feel heavy and slow and a little dim-witted. So I'm going back to two books read last year at the recommendation of my friend Barbara Jourdonnais: Autobiography of a Face and Truth & Beauty.

To read these together is like having two mirrors side by side, each showing a different reflection. Ann Patchett carefully chooses her words and they are beautiful, inevitable, and rock solid. She writes, "When I was young and decided to be a writer, my understanding of the job description came straight from La Boheme. There would be a drafty garret, cold nights, little food, a single candle."

Then there's Lucy Grealy, who has undergone repeated surgeries on her face since the age of nine due to a rare form of cancer that causes her jaw to disintegrate. Lucy writes, "Though our whole family shared the burden of my mother's anger, in my heart I suspected that part of it was my fault and my fault alone. Cancer is an obscenely expensive illness; I saw the bills, I heard their fights. There was no doubt that I was personally responsible for a great deal of my family's money problems; ergo, I was responsible for my mother's unhappy life."

Ann and Lucy meet when they share an apartment while attending the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Ann's book is mostly about Lucy and Lucy's book is entirely about Lucy. Ann's version is full, an epic novel of a true story. Lucy's version is one-dimensional, painful, short. To read them one after the other is to see how far we are from each other, how some gulfs cannot be crossed.

Ann's writing is like flying -- you get to lift above and see the whole countryside. Lucy's writing is quick and clever but there's a lack, a hurriedness. That feels uncharitable but to look at the path of Lucy's life is to wonder how she wrote at all. And to wonder what she'd have written if her face and her heart had been left intact.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Tea and Maira Kalman and Cary Tennis

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/e-pluribus-unum/?th&emc=th

Sleepless night. Comforted in the early hours by Maira Kalman and Cary Tennis:

Somewhere people are laughing in a cafe.

But I am looking in a cardboard box for a tax file from 1987.

As I look for the tax file, I find a solitary button in a cellophane wrapper and try to decide whether to keep the button, and if so, whether to leave it in the box of tax files

or whether to find a new place for the button, and if so, where that place would be, and then I examine the button, noting its deep brown color and then I see that it is broken, and I wonder, Well, this button is broken, and yet the package is not opened, what shall I do?

Thusly are the hours of our days flushed down the toilet.

Thusly do we feel the crushing, deathly weight of meaninglessness.

Thusly do we abandon forthwith any such project of getting organized.

We go out into the sunshine and it is still beautiful. We sit in a cafe and laugh.

We come home and there are still boxes on the floor. We sit among them and weep and curse the gods.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

Thus we seek to become aware of the qualities of time, and the qualities of space, and try to live in this world as it is.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

The Art of the Bar and Polenta

This is not good polenta. This is polenta that stiffens immediately in the pot, is bright yellow and crunchy instead of cream-colored and silken. I've made the damn polenta three times today and now, instead of feeling polenta soothed, I want to stomp out back and hurl the pot into the cow pasture.

Instead, I open The Art of the Bar. It's like walking through an art gallery, and every room has a tasteful display of a perfect cocktail glass filled with a perfect cocktail. No people. Just cocktails in jewel tones with perfectly restrained garnishes. Forget the polenta. Look at the light on the glass stem for the Sazerac. Look at the old-fashioned lime juicer in front of what looks like a pressed brass wall. Look at the square platter with the beaded rim and tiny, perfect little cocktail onions. I'm thinking I could go on an all-cocktail diet and be very happy.

And this thought before I go scrub out the polenta pot: one story of how cocktails may have gotten their name describes Betsy Flanagan, a tavern-keeper during the American Revolution who garnished her drinks with a rooster's tail feather. "The soldiers were so enamoured of her drinks that they would toast her with the chant "Vive le coqtail!" Every time I open the book I wonder about Betsy and those feathers, and how I can have such a vivid idea of what she was like without knowing anything else about her.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Charlotte's Web and Soif

While Rachey and Ari stand in line for the Boardwalk rides, Steve, Brad, Danny and I go to Soif, my favorite wine bar. I order a flight of rose, and the guys try a sip from each glass while we eat fingerling potatoes with aioli and plate after plate of padron peppers, perfectly salted and roasted.

Then the guys head off to watch Inglorious Basterds. I don't like Quentin Tarantino in general and am irritated by misspellings in particular, so I skip the movie. (Prissy!) But I'd choose a bookstore over Quentin any day, so I'm happy to cross the street to Logos. I find a battered copy of Charlotte's Web, (a bargain at $3) and soon I'm curled up in the warm, cozy barn with Fern, listening to Charlotte and Wilbur and Templeton. A small thrill, remembering Templeton the rat and his me-first-ness, his slightly ominous presence. I think about E.B. White, making the untrustworthy personality the smallest one on the barn floor (Charlotte's obviously smaller but she's up above). It's the opposite of Stephen King. Shrink down what scares us so we can stand over it, feel more noble and bigger than the selfishness and greed.

And the words that Charlotte wove into her web: Some Pig, Terrific, Radiant, and Humble, which Charlotte says means "not proud and near the ground -- that's Wilbur all over." There's something there for all of us, choosing words carefully because weaving each word takes such effort.

"Why did you do all this for me?" Wilbur asks Charlotte.

"I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

And then, all too soon, this passage, which stops me and causes a pang of grief:

She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people who had visited the Fair, knew that a gray spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

I almost don't want to keep reading. But then there are Charlotte's daughters to rediscover, Joy, Aranea, and (the one that Wilbur names) Nellie. And that last page (go find your copy because it won't be the same if you read it on a blog). And when you turn the last page, you sigh, and you sit there on an old stool, looking up at the ceiling thinking for a little while. And then you go look for your friends.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

A Homemade Life and Cream-Braised Green Cabbage

I love Molly Wizenberg and envy her in equal measure. I envy her petite mother trotting around Paris in high heels. I envy Molly's years spent in a tiny apartment in France as well as her naturally red hair and funny, endearing writing style. "A Homemade Life" is my favorite book right now, and every recipe I've made from it makes me like Molly even more.

She saved me with her Cream-Braised Green Cabbage. Rachey read about cabbage soup (maybe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?) and has been hounding me to make it for weeks. I keep saying, "Cabbage soup is what you eat when you have no money for good food," but Rachey persists with her unreasonable belief that I will make a cabbage soup that she likes.

Suddenly, there's the answer right in front of me. Molly says,

"Cabbages may be homely, hard-headed things, but with a little braising, they're bewitching. Cut into wedges and cooked slowly in a Jacuzzi bath of cream, they wind up completely relaxed, their bitter pungency washed away and replaced with a rich, nutty sweetness."

Okay, worth a shot. I find a lovely delicate petit chou, cut it into wedges, and braise it in cream with salt and a little fresh lemon juice. Oh my God. OH MY GOD. Rachey takes a bite, serves herself a bowlful and curls up with it in her lap, watching Grey's Anatomy, completely happy. Danny comes downstairs, and sniffs at the pot. "What is this?" "Cabbage," I reply, sure that he'll snort in disgust and walk away. "Can I have some?" he asks. Sure. He polishes off the bowl and says, "That's so good. Can you make more? Can you make more now?"

So tomorrow I'm going to buy another green cabbage, braise it in cream, and serve the kids cabbage as an after-school snack. Thank you Molly.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Everything Matters! and Jellybean Tomatoes

Don and Gary's backyard holds miracle after miracle. The praying mantis, stock-still on a plant leaf that's exactly the same shade of green. Don's little chapel of a greenhouse with its pepper plants and lemon tree. And the tomato wall -- a construction of plumbing pipe and wooden poles that holds a prodigious number of tomato plants. "I want this," I say over and over, like a child and Gary laughs. "This just about killed us" he says about the backyard, their weed-free, purple-flowered, blue-sky haven of a backyard. Don carries a large basket and carefully snips the tomatoes free of the wall, filling a bag for me. "Try this," he says, holding out the tiniest tomato I've ever seen. "I call these jellybean tomatoes because they're so sweet."

Somehow this fits in with Ron Currie's novel "Everything Matters!" Junior, who knows from the time he is born that a comet will hit the earth and destroy it, somehow manages to screw up his entire life. Heartache after heartache and I become more and more angry as he loses the love of his life, loses his mother to drinking, his brother to drugs. I read and scowl and keep reading. And then, when I'm about to lose patience and throw the book to the ground, a shift again. A moment of grace, of starting over.

This passage won't reverberate unless you read the book -- or maybe it will matter, because everything matters in the end:

"You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in this last moment than they experienced in their entire lives."

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

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