Food

I recently read (#68) The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan. McMillan is a journalist who worked in farm fields, the produce section of a Supercenter Walmart, and at Applebee's in a quest to figure out how food (produce) makes it from field to table, why so many of us lack access to affordable, fresh produce, and how, regardless of one's race, ethnicity, age, class, socio-economic status, or any other factor, most of us truly want to eat good food.

It is a powerful book and more than once I found myself nodding in recognition and agreement. For the politics and economics of food distribution, and what can be done as a society to make food more accessible and affordable, read the book.

What I was not expecting was how this book triggered food memories in me. McMillan wrote of her own upbringing in a working class Midwest family and what she learned and did not learn about cooking and eating and nutrition growing up. This sentence says it all: "We ate a lot of Helper Meals and Ortega Taco Dinners when I was growing up, and I liked them." She describes salads of chopped iceberg lettuce, some diced carrots, and Wish-Bone Ranch dressing. Oh, Tracie McMillan, I could match you meal for meal with some similar variations of my childhood: frozen fish sticks, cheap hotdogs and chips, and the occasional (and intensely disliked) rice with margarine, milk, and sugar (I was a teenager before I realized that most people I knew did not eat warm rice as a cereal, let alone for supper).

At supper Saturday after I finished the book, we had a somewhat more deliberate meal than we often manage during the workweek. A filet of salmon (from the Aldi bargain salmon last fall), a baked potato for Warren, a baked sweet potato for me, steamed broccoli. We ate slowly, savoring the flavors.

And I talked about food.

At one point in her yearlong quest to source and follow food, McMillan worked in the produce section of a Walmart. She eventually realized that one of her shortcomings in produce was that she was "incredibly ignorant when it comes to buying quality produce." McMillan observed that most of her "food literacy" came from her family, as it does for most of us.

I shared that observation with Warren, adding, "I was fortunate to have Grandma Nelson."

Grandma Nelson was my dad's mom. She was not a warm woman. Hardworking, yes. An excellent cook, absolutely. Most important of all, along with my grandfather, who did the tilling, she grew a large vegetable garden every year out of which we ate fresh and canned (and eventually frozen) food all year long.

Because there was a large garden and because Grandma Nelson did not believe in coddling children, I learned early on not just how to pick vegetables but also how to choose which ones were ready. Green beans, tomatoes, sweet peppers (always called mangoes), sweet corn, cabbage: she taught me how to choose and how to pick. The lessons I learned from her stood me in good stead when I discovered the vast extent of the world of produce.

Grandma Nelson has been dead for 36 years. She was not affectionate; she never once hugged my dad, let alone any of her grandchildren. She could be hard. But she nonetheless left me a legacy. After reading The American Way of Eating, I now realize just what a treasure it was.

End of First Quarter: Book Count

By the end of March, I had finished 69 books. Some books I toss off in a day or less, others take longer. One thing I am noticing is that I reading more fiction, both as a result of the booklists I am working off of and as a result of recommendations. It is probably also a result of not physically being in the library since February 7. When I graze the shelves, I lean heavily towards nonfiction.

Here are the new titles that I have read since the last book post:
60. Personal History by Katharine Graham (Graham's autobiography, which I read on the strength of seeing the movie The Post; so much of her life until her midyears was difficult that I was relieved when she took over leadership of the Washington Post and became a major force in the newspaper publishing world)
61. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (think Shirley Jackson meets a toned-down but still seriously twisted Stephen King; this novel is by the author of the short stories in #51)
62. The Other by David Guterson (by the author of Snow Falling On Cedars, think of Into The Wild written as a bromance from the viewpoint of the the friend who did not succumb to the lure of the wilderness)
63. East of the Mountains by David Guterson (the two Gutersons came from a male friend—this one he was particularly interested in my reading because the older male protagonist (a retired heart surgeon) has terminal colon cancer and sets off to stage his suicide—what did I think? I think the decision to stick with living as a result of delivering a difficult breech birth was a bit hokey, but if Anne Sexton could make that decision based on delivering dalmatian pups, who am I to quibble?)
64. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading By Listening by Roger Nierenberg (remember the book Fish!, in which the fictional heroine changed her poorly performing department into a wildly productive team based on lessons learned from the Seattle Pike Place Fish Market? Everyone was reading it to get ideas on how to improve their workplaces. Substitute a baton and a podium for a twenty pound salmon being tossed across the store, and you get the idea)
65. The Witches by Roald Dahl (this was another stray Dahl hanging on my bookshelves: better than The Twits but nowhere near the spark and the charm and the anarchism of Matilda and Danny The Champion of the World)
66. The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory (a frothy romance featuring a white male doctor and a curvy black female attorney who keeps getting eyed by all the skinny white blonde women wondering why her? I'm not a romance reader, but I made it through this one)
67. Made For You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home by Caitlin Shetterly (this was a reread of Shetterly's memoir of her and her husband getting ground up in the Great Recession in 2008 and their retreat to Maine to rebuild their lives)
68. The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Field and Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan (I discovered McMillan reading her essay "Who Do We Think Of As Poor?" last year in the New York Times; on revisiting that essay recently, I realized she had written a book about food and access and food and poverty and poverty and nutrition and how we view those intertwined topics in this country. I'm so glad I did.)
69. American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander (superb poetry by the same author of the stunning memoir I blogged about earlier)

Many of the books on the list of titles by women of color are fiction (#66, for example), so I have a lot of heavy reading ahead of me. I don't dislike fiction. It's just not what I turn to first. It continues to be a fascinating year and my reading horizons are getting expanded in ways I could not have anticipated when I started in January.

March Finances

March was kind on the two fronts I am tracking for 2018: groceries (including household items) and eating out. Stunningly so.

March groceries (food)? $115.24. Household items? $9.38. Grand total? $124.62. Eating out came in at a whopping $13.94 and would have been even lower if Warren had not had an out of town concert and grabbed a Subway sandwich for dinner.

We've been homebound most of March. We ate out of our freezer and pantry a lot this month. We also had a gift certificate for barbecue for ten, and after our friends came and ate and talked, we ate leftovers for five more days.

What this low spending has allowed me to do is set aside extra money for April, which will have some heavier expenses. We head to Mayo and that means car rental, gas, hotel, and eating out. At the end of the month, the Symphony will wrap up its season and we will host a reception post-concert reception to celebrate the season, our wonderful conductor, and the guest artist. I expect to pull off the reception with excellent food for under $75.00, but it's still an atypical expenditure.

In case some of you are wondering, no, I don't spend money on consumer items as a rule. I don't buy clothes, I get my books from the library rather than buy them, and I am immune to the siren song of sales. When I come out of my walking boot in another week, I will have to invest in some new shoes for work/dress as my old ones are worn out. Shoes are a major expenditure. I cannot wear most shoes because of the neuropathy in my feet. The ones that I can wear are more expensive. I knew this expense was coming up, but the surgery and recovery pushed it off.

Let's see what April brings.

National Poetry Month Is Just Around The Corner

Homestead

March 14, 2018

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By April Nelson

Looking back, we were all so earnest,

gathering for our monthly potlucks

of rice and beans and lumpy breads.

Squatting in the cold March mud

to thumb in the broccoli, our breath

small clouds hanging in the damp, chill air.

And the knitting! My god, the knitting!

We did it endlessly, when we weren’t

spinning the wool, or the honey. Sweaters

and shawls and gloves and hats: small wonder

we didn’t clothe the sheep themselves in wool wraps.

The chickens, the pigs.

The chickweed, the pigweed.

Hauling the slops to the pigs, the pigs

to the butcher, the pork chops to the freezer.

It never stopped.

What was it then, that changed? What was it that made us say

“that’s enough,” and scrub our hands raw at the sink

until every trace of soil was gone from under our nails?

It wasn’t the goodness of the first tomato of summer

or the soft down of the chicks

that did us in. Heaven knows those were gifts,

plain and simple.

It was something more basic.

One mud-tracked rug too many,

another torn fingernail,

too many five grain casseroles and no desserts at the potluck.

Something as little as that.

We sold off

the chickens, the tiller. Gave up the lease and

moved back to the rhythm and hum of the city.

Never looked back, never kept track of the cost,

plus or minus. What good would have come of that?

Nothing but heartache and some tallies on a sheet of paper.

No, better to leave that door closed: the knitting unfinished, the herbs gone wild, 

the heart gone to seed.

****

We are days away from National Poetry Month, which I often celebrate by posting a poem a day on my Facebook page. Earlier this month, SWWIM Every Day (Supporting Women Writers In Miami) published one of my poems. 

I won't feature this poem during April because I already have splayed it all across my Facebook page, but I thought I would share it here. 

This is my second publication in a year, after over forty years of silence. The day I received the email from SWWIM saying they would publish my submission, I stared at the screen, gasping for breath. 

Thank you, SWWIM, for giving me the chance. 

Getting Over Something

Back in mid-March, I came down with something: something respiratory, something congestive. Something like a common cold, but something not like a common cold either.

Something.

A variation of it had been kicking around our court for weeks. One never got really, really sick, but just went around feeling blah and achey and maybe but not necessarily coughing.

And it wasn't the flu, which also made the rounds of schools and court.

My something hit at an inconvenient time, not that any illness is ever timed conveniently. I'd just gotten my walking boot, I'd just been at an eleven hour conference at which I presented twice, and I'd just gone back into school mediations with both feet because my coworker Dodie, who'd just spent four weeks covering for me, was taking a long-planned (and well-deserved) trip out of town and now I was covering for her.

In short, not a time to be messing around with something. And here I am, two weeks later, still messing around with it. I am impatient to be "better." I am impatient with the slow progress. All the same, I know why I not recovering as quickly as my heart desires:

• I'm still recovering from surgery, which took a lot out of me;
• It's been a long, cold winter with the house and cars closed up (no fresh air here); and 
• I'm stretched way thin on the job (adding tired on top of tired).

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also add:

• I'm about to turn 62; and 
• I do have cancer (always, always) and shouldn't be surprised by anything. Ever.

Well, okay, I am not surprised. Ill at ease, but not surprised.

I'm ill at ease because this little episode is triggering strong memories of the months leading up to my diagnosis in November, 2004. That August, I'd had pneumonia. Then the weight started peeling away. In October, I ran into my doctor in the produce section of a now defunct grocery and told her that I just wasn't bouncing back. I still remember Pat holding her vegetables while she eyed me up and down, then saying, with not a trace of levity in her voice, "You need to come in and see me." Three weeks later, I was diagnosed.

I recently wrote about trauma, my own and that of others. A number of psycho-oncologists classify receiving a cancer diagnosis as a significant traumatic episode that may well cause PTSD in the patient. Put me in that group, based on my prior trauma. As I slog my way through this something, I am well aware that I am on alert. I'm constantly checking and rechecking how I feel. I am vigilant of how many acetaminophen tablets I am taking a day, not because of drug overload but as a measuring stick of how I am feeling right now. (No, this right now. I mean, this right now.) I keep muttering to myself, "It's not cancer. It's not cancer." (And this is where my mind goes when I am triggered: it makes no difference to my tension that Warren also has this something, caught from me, and is getting over it as well. That's different.)

The likelihood is that it is not the myeloma flaring. It is just a cold hanging on a bit too long. Just something. Once I know deep inside myself that I'm okay, then I can stand down.

Here's to better days for us all.

The Next Books That Moved From "Unread" to "Read"

My 2018 reading continues unabated. My evening lifestyle lends itself to lots of time for reading. I have been struggling with an upper respiratory something-or-other for several days, just imposing enough and lingering enough that I have had to sit home instead of going with Warren to recent performances, and that has added to the reading time.

So where am I now? Here:
49. Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington (after reading the excerpt from this memoir in Black Ink [#30], I wanted to read the original, which left me with more questions than before as to this man and his legacy)
50. You Are Free by Danzy Senna (superb short stories by a woman author of color exploring the meaning of race in our society; I previously read her memoir [#31])
51. Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (more superb short stories, these by a young American woman author)
52. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, MD (this one shook me; I blogged about it a few days ago)
53. Negotiating With The Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood (Atwood almost lost me in the Introduction, when she explained how this series of essays on writing came to be, but I stuck with her until she hit her stride, and enjoyed every bit of this wonderful writer's look at the art of writing and how she came to it)
54. A Taste of Blackberries by Doris Buchanan Smith (this slight 1973 juvenile novel, which I came across accidentally, was a reminder of how far juvenile literature, especially when dealing with death, has come in 45 years and how grateful I am it has come this far)
55. Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington by Robert J. Norrell (Washington is a troubling and enigmatic figure in history when it comes to civil rights; Norrell, a white historian, tries to put Washington in perspective and explain why what looked like acquiescence on Washington's part was instead the working of a resistance fighter deep within enemy territory)
56. My Year by Roald Dahl (this was Dahl's last work, a gentle one based on notes and observations he made his last year of life and contains these great sentences about golfing: " And in Lagos (Nigeria), monkeys used to pelt you with unripe mangoes just as you were about to putt. It was super.")
57. The Light of The World by Elizabeth Alexander (I just blogged about this most beautiful memoir about love and death ever)
58. Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo (Native (Mvskoke) poet, playwright, and musician, Harjo here pens her memoir and how she discovered the artist within her)
59. Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling (a superb novel by a Native (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) author, set on the Flathead Reservation in the 1940s, about love, loyalty, family, tribe, betrayal, and redemption; I cried at the ending)

I learned of Earling from a list of Native American female authors published by Tracy Rector in response to the recent charges of sexual harassment by Native author Sherman Alexie. While some of the names on her list are familiar to me, too many are not, and I am adding them to the ongoing list of  names while I focus on reading outside the safe parameters of white authors. As I ranted to Warren this morning (my husband is so patient), I have spent 62 years walking around in the security of dominant white America, and I am finally acknowledging the vast extent of my tunnel vision. Especially when it comes to reading.

More to come.

This Book

I came across The Light of the World through something else I recently read. I don't remember what. Not from the women authors of color list, although the author, Elizabeth Alexander, poet and professor of African American Studies at Yale, is an author of color. Not from a magazine article. Not from Black Ink. From someone else's mention of the work?

I don't know.

But I do know this: reading this book was like holding a glowing, translucent orb in my hands.

Alexander's memoir is about the sudden death of her husband, painter Ficre Ghebreyesus, days after his 50th birthday. She writes flowingly, forwards and backwards, painting in words as he surely painted on canvas. Alexander seamlessly captures their marriage, their respective childhoods and lives before meeting, their sons, his death, their love for one another and for their sons, the loss she feels as wife, the loss her sons feel—Alexander write of it all, and of the love and the wonder at that love threaded through every bit of it.

Every now and then. you are blessed as a reader with a book that reaches deep into your heart and lodges there. This book is one of those for me.