Another One for the List

As I often vent to my friend Margo, how did I get to my age (almost 56) and not know about this or that book? How, I ask you?

The latest book to add to that list is The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, a Scottish writer in the nineteenth century. MacDonald was a friend of Charles L. Dodgson, and helped encourage him to publish Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. The Princess and the Goblin came out as a book in 1871, the same year as Through the Looking Glass.

1871. This book was long in print before I read it in 2012. As I raved to Warren over breakfast this morning, "Your mother probably read this book. My grandmother probably read this book. Heck, your grandmother probably read this book!"

Note: Warren is a most tolerant man when it comes to listening to me talk endlessly about whatever book has captured my heart at the moment. Add that to the very long list of his wonderful attributes.

The Princess and the Goblin is noteworthy, historically and literarily, for many reasons. I'll spare you that discussion. But I will share something about it that fascinates me, and that is the number of authors whom it influenced: J.R.R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle among them. It was Madeleine, in fact, who lead me to The Princess and the Goblin, citing it as a very important book in her childhood pantheon.

I have already earmarked a number of books for Baby Sanchez. The Princess and the Goblin just joined that list. I am sure there are more to come. Other grandparents out there may knit blankets or build cribs. Me? I build libraries.

Recently Alise asked me what I wanted to be called when the baby arrived? I laughed at the time, as that question had never crossed my mind. As I peruse my book list, though, I find myself thinking "Granny Books."

Granny Books. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.

Plenty

We don't go in for Valentine's Day at our house. No flowers, no lace dripping cards, no candlelit dinners. Nothing big or showy, or even little and sentimental. So what I was feeling this morning was distinctly unrelated to the day.

But the fact that it is Valentine's Day probably made me feel more put out than I would have been if it were, oh, say, Groundhog's Day.

It is That Time of Year. The Symphony's BIG concert is coming up fast on the first Sunday in March, and Warren's normally rigorous workweek has shifted into a high intensity and demanding workweek (and work weekends). It is a given that this happens. Normally I take February for what it is: all Symphony all the time.

Yet when Warren called me this morning and gave me a rapid-fire-matter-of-fact-yes-my-schedule-has-changed-I'm-just-leaving-for-Columbus-now answer in response to a text I had sent, I forgot what month it was and hung up in tears. Nothing wrong, mind you, nothing that couldn't be tweaked in my schedule to accommodate the Symphony, but...

And that was where my thoughts jumped off from: but... But for once I would like not to have to be responsible. But for once I would like not to have to be the one trudging in the snow to the office. But for once I would like not to feel guilty about my schedule.

I know, I know. I'm whining. Or I was as the tears fell. I know, I like walking. I know, we are close enough in town that most of the time I am able to walk and I don't need to vie for car time. I know, I have the more flexible schedule. I know, it is February. And for crying out loud, it was just a light snow and the temperature was warm, so it wasn't like it was a hardship for me to walk this morning.

But it stung all the same. So much so that when Warren called me back some 20 minutes later, upbeat and chipper and on the road to his appointment, I couldn't quite match the tone of his mood. I told him so.

When I left for the office five minutes later, I admit it, I trudged. And, I am embarrassed to say, my mood trudged as well.

Last night I read The Country Kitchen, by Della T. Lutes. It was a Katrina book from our great book packing adventure and one that I am grateful she told me to take. Written in 1935, it is the author's memoir of growing up in rural Michigan in the late 1870s. Memories are intermixed with recipes and the entire book is a gentle, comforting read from an era long gone. The last chapter centers around a Christmas dinner that carried the potential for going terribly awry, but which managed to come to a satisfactory conclusion. Looking back, Lutes wrote: It had been a good day, after all. Nothing to make history, but good to live, good to remember. 

I thought of that phrase as I walked. Nothing to make history, but good to live, good to remember.  I tucked the thought away and went through my day, trying not to dwell on my bruised mood, but not entirely letting it go either. It was that kind of day.

Tuesdays are usually long days for me. By the time I got to Warren's office and by the time he got done with the Symphony, the hour was late. I was tired, Warren was chilled from the long day. We came home, we ate a non-memorable late supper, we talked quietly of quiet matters. While I finish typing this, Warren is downstairs working on, yes, more Symphony matters. After all, it is February and the BIG concert is just a few weeks away.

Before sitting down to write this post, I picked up The Country Kitchen from my desk and reread the lines that I had carried with me all day long. I then picked up my notebook of quotes and turned the pages until I came across a companion quote from Matchless by Gregory Maguire: they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world, that is called plenty.

It is Valentine's Day, which we don't celebrate, although Warren surprised me with a Valentine's Day card at supper. A thoughtful, sweet, loving card. The BIG concert is almost upon us. And on balance,  it has been a good day. We have the warmth of one another, and that is plenty.

 

Wild With Joy

Everything happens in life. Some of what happens in life is terrible. We know this is true because it has always been true. But there is another truth available, an inexplicable and sometimes crazy truth that is no less compelling. The living of a life, day by day and moment by moment, is also wild with joy. Reeve Lindbergh, Forward From Here.

I have been sitting on this story since Christmas Day at the request of two people very near and dear to me who asked me to keep quiet. But they just lifted the ban, oh, about fifteen minutes ago and it is time to go public.

As I have mentioned before, my dearly loved daughter-in-law Alise is a beautiful writer. So I am going to let her tell the story:

Coming August 2012: Baby Sanchez! That's right, I'm totally incubating as we speak. Saw the little bean on an ultrasound today, and he/she has a super strong heartbeat and is doing water aerobics as we speak. Exciting!

The living of a life, day by day and moment by moment, is indeed wild with joy.

Lost and Found

Scrabbling among the cookbooks this morning, looking for something else, I pulled out a folded newspaper insert of cookie recipes. As I refolded it to place it back on the bookshelf, a stained and well-worn oversize index card slipped out from the folds.

I held it up to Warren. "Ah! Look what I found."

My grandmother's popcorn ball recipe.

The card slipped back into my life at a good juncture. Good as in "I needed that." I am coming off several intense days: intense activities, intense work, intense travels, intense interactions. Most of them good, mind you, but intense all the same. Warren is in his own intense period: an upcoming blockbuster concert, a flurry of grant applications coming due, the general press of the Symphony even when there isn't a blockbuster concert in four weeks. It has been so grueling that I often feel by the end of the day as if we have been thrown up on shore after hours in a heavy surf, exhausted and beaten by the cold water and grateful beyond words just to be alive.  

In the middle of this intensity, we packed in a trip (intense) to New York so Warren could attend the midwinter managers meeting of the League of American Orchestras. (Yes, it was intense.) In past years, I would split my time between friends, all of them dear to me, making trips into the city to see them. This year, I spent all of my free time with my longtime friend Katrina. 

Both Katrina and I have been experiencing intensely tumultuous personal times, and both of us had been looking forward for weeks to seeing one another. As Warren aptly noted, I needed time with Katrina. 

Katrina is preparing for a cross-country move and much of what we did while we were together was sort and pack books. Tens of books, hundreds of books. We set out for inspection a massive doll collection that Katrina inherited from a friend of her mother's. It was a tsunami of dolls, so many that I turned to Katrina and said "these are depressing me," which caused us both to start laughing. We sorted through lifetime accumulations of her children's and even her own school papers and drawings and photos. We left the house a few times, to run some errands, to tour the Cloisters, but mostly we stayed home working.   

And throughout the packing and the sorting and the tossing and the boxing, Katrina and I talked and talked and talked. It was healing talk, it was exploring talk, it was comfort food talk.

I am typing these words on Saturday morning while Warren works nearby marking bowings on music for the upcoming concert. Our evening plans have been rewritten; our dinner guests have been under the weather and called to cancel. I will miss them. All the same, I am looking forward to a quiet evening of just the two of us, away, if only briefly, from the intensity of the recent weeks. I am looking forward to an evening of comfort food talk and time with my beloved Warren.

And then there is the missing recipe that slipped back into my life today as quietly as it had disappeared. The card is sitting in front of me as I type and I am almost (but not quite) tempted to make a batch. I said when I began this that it came back at a good juncture and it did. I am still not "back" to writing, although scribbling even this small piece gives me hope. I am still at times all but driven to my knees with what I can only describe as sorrow, undefined and vague, but sorrow all the same.

But the recipe is back home. And so am I.

A Certain Self Possession

On the topic of writing and not being able to write, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

Or something like that. I can't place my hands on my copy of A Moveable Feast, which to this day remains a favorite of mine. Never mind the tawdry internecine battles over its posthumous publication, it should be read if only for Hemingway's description of hunger and of the sausage he ate in the brasserie after unexpectedly receiving money for selling a story.

One true sentence.

     **The sunrise Thursday morning was gloriously brilliant.

     **At night, I fall asleep with the radiant heat of a corn bag paving the way.

     **Last night, I talked with one of the most charmingly self-possessed young women I have ever met.

That last one I can go with.

We had a (vastly) younger couple over last night. By young, I mean in my son Ben's age range: mid-20s. I have known Doug since high school, as he and Ben were friends and teammates. Danielle is his fiancee; I had heard about her from Doug, but not yet met her.

The stop at our house was supposed to be the briefest of way stations for Doug and Danielle's evening. He was stopping by to meet and talk with Warren about the Symphony; she, an aspiring rare book appraiser, was coming by to look at a book in Warren's library. (It wasn't rare; no Antiques Roadshow moment here, folks.)

In arranging the evening, Doug and I had estimated perhaps a half hour. They were off to dinner and a night of board games with friends afterwards, so I made no plans for drinks, for appetizers, for anything.

Well, it didn't turn out that way. The conversation started quickly and took on a life of its own, as good conversations will. The Civil War, children's literature, the Symphony, downtown Cincinnati, Japan, Frank Lloyd Wright, music, vellum, Christmas trees, the First Folio, Archimedes, and the Gutenberg Bible, to name a few, were all part of the evening. It was as wide ranging a conversation as we have had with any of our closest friends.

It was only with reluctance (and guilt that we had gone on so long and I hadn't set out any food) that I finally felt compelled to say, "We've kept you from your friends and your plans!" Shortly after that, Doug and Danielle drove off in the light snow, while Warren and I turned to making our now very late supper.

This morning I woke with the evening still on my mind. It has been a long time (and not something we often do as a couple) since we had spent an evening talking with such young adults in such a free floating way. I found myself hoping they did not leave last night saying, "Thank God, I thought we were never going to get away from there."

And Danielle made an impression on me. She is bright and witty and down to earth all at the same time, with a good, hearty laugh, a combination I like in anyone, but especially in young women. And she was stylish and put together in a graceful, subtle way that I have never achieved, and certainly could not have even begun to attempt when I was her age.

I commented on that last fact this morning.

"Well, she probably puts a little more time into it than you do, " Warren mused.

Well, yes. Isn't that the whole point of looking put together: putting a little more time into it? And haven't I gotten to the point where I can pick and choose where to put the time I have? My point was more that some women, of any age, possess that innate sense of being put together and I do not.

But that's not what this post is about. It's not about my lack of style, or what I was or wasn't at age 27 or am or am not at age 55. And that's not what last night was about. Last night was about the talk and the topics.  Last night was about shouts of laughter and murmurs of agreement. Last night was about exploring architecture and music and medieval manuscripts. And last night was about one of most charmingly self-possessed young women I have ever met.

One true sentence.

Wonder Bread

It is the simplest of processes.

Stir yeast and water together, add some flour. Stir some more to wake the gluten. Add some salt, add some more flour. Knead vigorously.

Let it rise.

I am at the "let it rise" stage right now. We are - well, we will be when Elizabeth gets back here and kicks it into gear - eating a Pakistani inspired meal tonight. (For the new year, Elizabeth and Warren have started cooking ethnic meals on the Saturdays she is here. Tonight is Pakistani.)

I offered to make naan , a Middle East/subcontinent flatbread. I have never made naan before, but the recipe (courtesy of Dorie Greenspan and Julia Child) is so basic that I am trusting it to turn out.

By any measure, I have had a good day. Other than meeting a friend for coffee this morning, I have been home all day, tending to small things. I have sent or answered a few emails; I've read some of John Cheever's short stories. I've tied up some loose ends too small to be projects but too big to ignore.

And now I am waiting out the rising, experiencing yet again the wonder of bread. It never fails to catch me by surprise.

While I stirred the yeast/water/flour slurry today,  I found myself thinking of how many centuries we - women, humans - have been making bread. How many generations of us have kneaded it, watched it rise, baked it (over a fire, in an oven, in the big city, in the desert) and then broken it?

When I lose myself in baking, the cares of my world drop away. Baking is a tonic for me, and baking bread is the strongest tonic of them all. Bread has its own rhythm, its own schedule, its own ways - you come to bread and enter its universe when you bake.

Out of flour, salt, water, and yeast, this miracle.

Wonder bread.

Postscript: Because of the unpredictability of the American teenager, the day grew later and the dough rose higher without Elizabeth reappearing. Finally, Warren and I looked at each other, scrapped the Pakistani meal, and headed to the grocery for the staples we needed. Once back home, I announced I was making the naan all the same, and I proceeded to shape and bake while Warren prepared a pasta dish. Elizabeth burst through the door as the first of it was going into the oven. Some twenty minutes later, we sat down to a meal of pasta, grilled vegetables, and the naan. The naan was an unqualified success. Not quite what any of us had in mind when the day started, but wonderful all the same.

Of Dragons' Tails and Corn Bags

We saw in the New Year in the best way possible: sitting outside around a fire with our close friends Margo and Gerald. By the time 2011 was down to its last hour, the night sky had cleared and the stars had grown bright. Gerald came back from taking the dog in and announced that the Big Dipper was prominent in the northeast; I joined him in the yard and picked out Orion in the south.

When the New Year came, we all kissed our spouses. There were fireworks on the horizon in several directions. Warren and Gerald poked the fire until we could safely leave it to burn out. We said our goodnights, exchanged hugs and best wishes, and then my dear husband and I drove home in 2012, smelling of wood smoke and friendship.

The next day, I read a line in an old New Yorker that the "happiest civilizations had existed in the age of Homer, when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths." Certainly it seemed that way the night before as we watched the stars wheel by.

I have been reading the Byron Blakely biography of the writer, John Cheever. It is not the first biography of Cheever I have ever read, but it is the best. It presents an intricately detailed and ultimately sympathetic portrait of Cheever, who was a very complex individual on his best days. That alone is an achievement. But what Blakely does particularly well is make the reader see the beauty and structure of Cheever's prose. It is akin to Blakely placing a hummingbird in your hands for the briefest of seconds and then telling you to release it to the garden.

One such hummingbird is this excerpt from Cheever's essay, "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear." Cheever is describing the ascent and descent of an imaginary popular writer and criticizes the final works thusly:

You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

I have read those two sentences over and over for the last few days. I read them and smell the ocean. I read them and recall the smoke of New Year's Eve. I read them and hear the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

I have written very little in the last few months. Chalk it up to any number of reasons: the press of life, family issues, Warren's and my schedules, niggling little medical problems that have put me in medical offices, the needs and demands of others, a lingering and persistent depression threaded through the holiday season. I pick up a pen to write, then set it aside. My inner ear is not damaged, but I am not listening well. I am mistaking the rumble of the weekly garbage truck for the heavy noise of the dragon's tail.

As I often do when in this place, I am scaling back everywhere I can, cutting the daily demands down to the smallest size possible. I am focusing on the small moments: writing letters to close friends, cooking savory meals, paying attention to the intense blue of the daytime sky when I am outside. My smallest moment occurs each evening when I warm a corn bag in the microwave and then read with it on my lap. (Corn bags, for the uninitiated, are large pieces of terry cloth (bigger than a washcloth, smaller than a dishtowel) sewed first to make a sack, partially filled with dried field corn, and then sewn shut.) A warmed corn bag has the weight of a fat puppy and the smell of a corncrib on a hot day. It radiates heat and comfort far beyond the physical. When bedtime draws close, we warm up several such bags and throw them under the bedclothes to take off the chill. I often drift off to sleep with the smell of harvest time lacing the air.

2012 holds great promise, I hope and believe. For now, though, it is just beyond the tip of my pen. For now I can only trust that I am building up a store of ideas and impressions and sentences. Somewhere there is sea water. Somewhere there is the sound of the heavy dragon's tail moving over dead leaves. Somewhere I will return to writing.