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

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