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