Nigella and Me

Imagine.  Lovely cubes of pancetta bronzing in a skillet.  A splosh of vermouth, a drizzle of double cream.  Imagine tumbling the golden pasta strands into the pan, the whisked egg , the salty cheese and if, like me…like her comely British self, you go uncharacteristically mute—rapt with wonder and greed for what you’re about to taste, you find yourself in that pausing pleasure place, suspended agony and delight mingled and, helpless now, you watch Nigella Lawson alone “going in” for a taste of her Spaghetti Carbonara.

True confessions…. I’ve recently become a Cooking Channel junkie.  I’m a nut for watching other people cook and I realized not so long ago, it’s become just one of many quirky ways for me to take in sustenance without literally eating.  It’s a way to get nourished by foodie ideas, then take or leave them.  TV Food shows serve up choice and celebration over tyranny; a vast spectrum of savory and sweet offerings and approaches.  The cumulative result (for me) has been more consciousness about what I choose to eat, and more joy in the process of choosing and making it. Additionally, my food voyeurism ignites an attitude of pleasure I’d lost over the years as I labored to serve sustenance to my family and others with the voices of apologetic and martyred Grandmothers and Mothers in my head.

Nigella, among a few other Cooking Network Goddesses and Gods, offers personality and inadvertent life coaching for free, if you’re in the market for it.  While I’ve never been given to midnight refrigerator raids, I do love a good lick of a cookie mixing bowl and a new voice in my head to say, “Oh, please, just enjoy it!" Given my proclivities, comfort eating has played a role in my journey, with mostly negative results.  The permissive, celebratory voice has a way of making me less hungry.

On the road to healthier eating and attitudes, surprisingly, Nigella has become a great stand-in for my hedonistic, orally fixated persona, since she, curvaceous, flirty, confident, careless and ever-creative, demonstrates how to throw caution to the wind and celebrate greed over vanity with a wink. She looks gorgeous with a chocolaty spoon in her mouth.  She offers up ideas for feeding ourselves and our loved ones simply, richly and well after we’ve turned off the television.  And she convinces us that curves are beautiful and pleasure is…, well, something we need to remember we’re entitled to!  

But Nigella, my queen, wouldn’t be Nigella without her WORDS!  In a recent survey of one show, I noted just a few that seduced me into a swoon.  How about the velvety swirl of potted chocolate, another knob of butter, idiotically vibrant pureed peas, a tumble, a whisk, a dribble, a dollop.  And seriously, when was the last time you experienced the resinous aroma of fresh rosemary? Makes you want to dive in after whatever’s being “done to” doesn’t it?  Those fabulously eggy, cheesy, bacony post-pub, one-skillet snacks.  Ummmmm.   While I won’t indulge in most of these offerings, sometimes I can FEEL like I’ve indulged, just by summoning them up.  Turns out,  just listening and watching and writing this can be quite satisfying.  Thank you Nigella.

BLR for the Poplar Grove Muse

And Then There Was One... Redux

And Then There Was One…Redux

Since April 2011 I have lost my brother, my father and now my mother.

Thea Wentz Riebsomer passed away on February 26, 2012 at 12:35 a.m., just shy of her ninety-second birthday. She died as she lived, chaotically, until the very end. I had not seen her for almost eight years. She had disowned me, having told me I ruined her life for reasons that I won’t go into here, except to say that Mother tried so hard to be loved her whole life, but the love she sought had to be on her terms and it was never quite good enough. I had made my own personal peace with our estrangement long ago.

All I ever wanted was for her to find some peace and I felt in my heart that she would never find it here on this earth. I returned to Connersville just six weeks after my dad’s death because my niece, Aimee, needed me and to help ease my mother in her passing. She had said that she was ready to go, but she was afraid. Mother had what is called terminal restlessness the last two days of her life and only calmed down with the help of morphine and, strangely, my presence. Aimee told her I was on my way and she nodded.  Mother had been staying with my niece for two weeks, since she was diagnosed as terminal, due to congestive heart failure.

I wish that she had had a happier life, that she had made better choices for herself. She was smart, funny and beautiful. I don’t think she believed those things about herself. In the end she was surrounded by people who cared about her. The great fear she had of dying alone did not come to pass. Her youngest granddaughter Beth, who lives in Michigan, was on her shoulder via cell phone until the very end, her nurse, her oldest granddaughter Aimee, her former daughter-in-law, Pam, her estranged daughter, and her pastor and his wife surrounded Mother with love and light. This odd mix of people took such good care of her and in that she was very fortunate.

 I talked to my mother for nine straight hours as I tried to get her to let go. It’s hard work to convince someone who has never been known as cooperative into floating away. She was unable to respond, but I know she heard me. I told her I knew that she loved me and she squeezed my hand. When I started talking to her about her beloved Panama City Beach, Florida, where she wintered for twenty years, and the beautiful sunsets she had taken thousands of pictures of, we could see her relaxing. I told her she would never be alone again, she would never be in pain again, and she would never have to reveal her age again. Her breathing slowed, her jaw relaxed and at long last she let go.

Rebekah for Poplar Grove Muse

Internal Exile

I remember reading in the New York Times, during the last days of the Soviet Union, an article about “internal exile,” where individuals retreated within themselves, largely out of a healthy, self-protective need to conserve personal resources, psychological and otherwise, due to the burdens the crumbling, corrupt state placed on them daily. (This, in a state all too familiar with the more conventional, political definition of the term:“a state of comparative isolation imposed upon certain political dissidents within the former Soviet Union, in which the subject was forced to live in a remote and often unfamiliar place and in which freedom of movement and personal contact with family, friends, and associates were severely restricted.”)

Despite having searched, I cannot locate this piece, much as I would like to refresh my memory of this account of a unique psychological state. I am frustrated anew by my failed searches, largely because lately I have felt that I am in just such a state of internal exile, making major transitions in my work life and attempting to integrate them into the rest of my life.

My comfortable job in the familiar academic world ended as the calendar page turned from September to October. My office had been understaffed for my entire time there, and I couldn’t go full-time, needing to get family members where they have to be in the after-school hours.  I was fortunate to have several job offers before my position even ended, and made the best decision I could, based on the partial information I had.

I am now a proposal writer for a small local construction firm that bids on Department of Defense (DoD) contracts all over the world. The learning curve is as steep as any I have encountered, including (but not limited to): decoding the culture of a toy factory (Cootie or Perfection, anyone?) during a high school summer, where my boss, an alcoholic ex-con, had it in for me because I read novels during my lunch break and wouldn’t be staying on; navigating the social climate as an onboard services employee at Amtrak, one of few whites and fewer women riding the rails out of Chicago for two summers in college, sleeping in common crew cars with men from the South Side and working long days in the close quarters of the last old-time dining car with a wood burning stove; surviving an introductory paleography seminar at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, where the librarians dismissed any ideas of modernizing the system, proudly displaying huge leather-bound tomes that served as indices and card catalogue, into which tiny period-penmanship entries on back-folded slips of vellum were glued, and reglued as necessary, to accommodate new entries; deaning undergraduates at two august Ivy League colleges I had not attended, boning up on both academic and social conventions in order to best represent my students in the college.

I am learning more about the worlds of construction and the military than I ever dreamed I would. I find it to be a wholly foreign universe, but I feel lucky to be accepted as I am by (mostly) men with completely different experiences from my own, who are willing to acknowledge my good intentions and intelligence, and work with me. I am learning quickly to wrest and represent partial understanding from confusion, and to have faith and keep writing, researching, learning, even when it feels like exceedingly slow going.

I am grateful to be employed in a difficult economy, and grateful to be learning new things at a time when I could easily avoid learning anything new. I find I have limited energy for interactions outside family and work at present, in my personal “internal exile,” but I trust I will emerge from my learning curve with greater energy, and confidence.  See you on the other side!

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

My Birth Day

The day I was born was January 22, 1950. I was supposed to have been born sometime in December of 1949 but I was reluctant to leave my cozy accommodations, so delayed my arrival for about four weeks.   

As the story goes, my frustrated and miserable Mom at long last went into labor the morning of the January twenty-second.  Assuming I was indeed planning on being born that day, my parents headed to Doctor Parker’s office.  

Unusual for the time, Doctor Parker was a female doctor and an old curmudgeon.  She often assisted with births and was rumored to be the provider of other pregnancy related issues.

Doctor Parker’s assessment was that I was just testing the waters and I would probably not arrive for a couple of more days.  Reluctantly Mom and Dad started home to continue the wait for my arrival.

My Mother, Juanita, was not a novice when it came to giving birth.  I was her third child and regardless of what Dr. Parker had to say on the matter, Mom knew I was on my way.  About half way back home she insisted Dad turn around and go back to Dr. Parker’s office.

As fate would have it, as they approached a railroad track the bells and lights began to clang and flash.  They watched the gates swing slowly closed as a train of epic proportions began to pass.  I like to think the bells and lights were my cue to start making my way to the exit because that's when Mom went into hard labor.

The train lumbered past and the final dash back to the doctor’s office was just fast enough to get Mom in the stirrups before she give birth to me.  A ten-pound, wrinkled face, bald, screaming baby girl.  I have always wondered how close I came to being born in the car delivered by my Dad.

Mom and I remained at Dr. Parker’s office that afternoon and apparently I was not happy with my new situation. I cried loudly and continually enough for my mother to tell the Doctor “To shut that baby up.” To which Dr. Parker replied, “Let her be, it just means she has good lungs.”

Diana, for the Poplar Grove Muse

Valentine Poem

Duet

You have it

I want it

I work hard

You make work look easy

I am searching for answers

You ask all the questions

I’m looking old

You look young

You make me seem small

I give you great power

I feel like a child

You embrace your fading youth

You want more

I have had enough

I have less to lose

You are fearless and daring

I talk and explain my life away

You listen then smile

Then some days everything is reversed

I am on top

You are depressed

I feel invincible

You are defeated

I give and you take

I need and you want

I go and you follow

You love and I am seduced

I’d give a stranger my blood

You give a passer-by a smile

You want to be open but not harmed

I want to be friendly but not the object of unwanted attention

I fear the unbalanced in mind or body

You fear loss of power and strength

Together we can face anything

For all the valentines' tomorrow

Carole

Something To Hold On To

This morning I saw a raccoon in a tree.  I was unaware how high they’d actually go.  It looked awkward and ambling like at any moment that branch would break and here’d come this fluffy thing out of the sky.  I looked up there because the crows were really pissed off.  I imagine the raccoon was stealing something…probably an egg.  Raccoons are weird.

I loved raccoons as a kid, even as a teenager.  Among the stuffed animal collection I carried far too long into my upper teens were a couple of raccoons.  I was a stuffed animal kind of kid…they were soft, you could hug them…they had eyes and faces and…they had stories.

Their stories were my mirror, as I matured so did their plot.   Smitty, the large stuffed raccoon, eventually felt remorse about his stealing ways and decided to set himself free from the life of crime.   

A ceremony ensued…I snipped the thread that held his hand to his face.  He was free, he’d been saved.  In celebration, three stuffed animal friends took a trip to the West Coast…to Oregon and Washington, and Canada…with a chaperone…me.  A seventeen-year-old person is an intriguing phenomenon…on the one hand…traveling onwards,  broadly leaving home…on the other hand…stuffed animals with stories and names? 

That trip was visionary, although it was difficult to comprehend what I was seeing.  I knew mountains, but I’d never seen the ocean, or a rainforest.  I’d never been on a large boat or been to Canada.  I’d been invited on the excursion by my boyfriend.  He, his father, and younger brother always took several big trips in a year…the three of them were seasoned expeditors and I was available.   Me, three stuffed animals and a duffel bag.  I set the animal crew up every night in our tent along side of me like they might stop a bear from tearing through or make the banana slugs more bearable…and they did.  I thought I was going to die on that trip.  Terror requires so many relics; stuffed creatures were my allies.  If it wasn’t the bear, it was the three day boat ride towards Alaska, or the dirt road up the side of a mountain.  Was I normal to worry so much?   I knew myself well though…I knew that I’d go anywhere, and do anything if I was invited--whether my fear liked it or not, but it wouldn’t stop the terror.   I could deal with the terror, I’d learned how to cope - clutch stuffed animals, hold my breath, disassociate, just keep moving.   No wonder I began to carry the medicine bag…even if it was just full of stuffed animals. 

I see kids today with blankets and t-shirts they won’t take off for the life of them…favorite shoes or boots that they will not remove…stuffed animals that have been invested with so much attention their heads are falling off.  I ponder the meaning of this.  In a way, it seems we are all little shamans at some place in our beginning.   Or, we have a lot of terror to cope with.  Or, maybe innately we are born with the function of adoration…always exploring the power naturally invested in us to breathe life into anything.  

Hi there Smitty, Rainbow, Mustard, Puddles, C-Lee, and Owl Lee.

…I’ve never gotten over the habit, this breathing life into things that seem to have none.  Toy cars are “those guys,” a large tree, “that fine gentleman reaching towards the moon.”  And I still have the stuffed animals, even some new ones… smaller relics who travel around in my car or ones who can be found on shelves in my apartment.  I look at these, and imagine those of us who’ve chose to go off on our own, called by the quest of breathing life into form, turning inanimacy into vitality.   I think of the purpose of play too.  I think of all those little miracles when we invested ourselves in worlds, when toys were still archetypal.  How our minds and hearts naturally developed rich love and deep imagery when we were free to create stories - when an elephant could be an elephant without being “Dumbo.” 

How are our children going to be able to have their own narratives when the commercial story line blares into the imagination waves?  I wonder.  

Maybe it’s not such an eccentricity to keep these creatures around

 I watch myself think this …when I hand Bird-E to Elie, she always wants to see him after school.  Bird-E’s seen better days though. He’s a homemade puffball cardinal with tiny black balls for eyes and pipe-cleaner feet.  I made him with a six year old.  She opens the palm of her hand, Bird-E fits perfectly in, her eyes widen,

“Bird-E, how are you feeling, how was your trip to Canada?”

She brings him up to her ear and listens, then hands him back to me,

“What did he say?”

“He wants to talk to you about something.”

 I place the smashed red puffball up to my ear saying,

“uhuh, uhuh, okay I’ll tell her.”

I put the soft guy down on my dash,

“He feels a little under the weather today due to his long flight with friends last night, but he said that he saw you looking at him from the street on our walk yesterday.”

She beams.

“I saw him too!”

She paused, then added,

“Allison, Bird-E wants you to glue his eye so he can see better, or he’ll have to get glasses.”

I can see this story’s about to grow a moral

Allison D. for The Poplar Grove Muse

Half-Way House

Hello Friends,

I recently saw a photo of a house I lived in long ago that had been greatly gentrified.  I got to thinking about my own personal gentrification.  I hardly recognized the house, just as I hardly recognize the young woman I was who lived there once, but here's to resurrecting places and pieces of a self and trying to get it down.  (Couldn't quite make my 3-line- stanza format correctly on this blog, but you get the jist.)

My Half-Way House

Wasn’t the Graves Avenue place, on the other side of the tracks,

round the corner from Burt’s second-hand store where the guy gave 

discounts then undercut his own bottom line to keep you coming back.

There, on Graves, with 90 bucks after the security deposit and 1^st month's 

rent paid, I was. Landed with a thump and the slow leaky lump

of my heart big enough to stain the walls and hardwood red.

The part of me dying went to live on Graves.

It wasn’t that other house in the country, Tiny, White,

Yankee-Prim  place-holder house I rarely slept nights alone.

But between those two, on State Street, near the old fruit market

We came and went in a shingled green flop house:

The clown I slept with, the blind hippie, his

Flat-bellied, wild-haired Cuban princess and their pet

Ferret, whose name I forget, but not her scent.

The whole house smelled of musk, sex, bong water and sandalwood.

In those younger, in-between-things- days, I sought

A house of forgetting, wood-screened door to slam closed  

what had opened, Big Love, Big City Loss

I sought to cauterize my wounds

With instruments that played lullabies

in the underwater light of dreams.

Not on Graves, or in the country near Amherst ,

but the half-way house on State

was a good spot to die awhile.

Most places like this are for getting it together.

Mine was for falling apart, which I did

Until lack of breath brought me up for air.

State street for the state of me then

Part Emily Dickenson, part Diane Arbus,

The green house healed me in the end.

--BLR  for the Poplar Grove Muse