lindsayliveshere.org

The point is just to make things

By the time I got to the house, I was so hungry that it seemed completely normal to make scrambled eggs.

Last month I visited D.C. for a weekend and through a stroke of luck learned that my old roommate in Phnom Penh, Rachel, was in the area, too.

RACHEL!

Rachel lived with me in the apartment with the rusty staircase and the wormy cats that lived on the porch; above the family that sold heaps of pungent fruit downstairs; the friend who dolled me up in the clothes from her boutique so we could make posters proclaiming: SALE! The one I accidentally padlocked in our apartment one morning. The one who accidentally padlocked me in, too. The one who rolled fresh sushi in the back of a van WHILE WE WERE DRIVING DOWN A BUMPY MOUNTAIN PATH because we needed a snack.

American, blonde pixie haircut, been living in Phnom Penh since college. Anyway, Rachel.

She was visiting an aunt in Maryland, and I happened to be in DC. I borrowed an old minivan and drove all the way across town — rattling the whole way, straining to hear the weak prim GPS voice above the din. Not so unlike the van we drove down that mountain.

Finally I arrived — Rachel (RACHEL!) was in her aunt’s kitchen making breakfast (and would I like some?) So I set about making eggs right away. Pulled a few from the carton; grabbed a pan from a hook, dropped in shredded cheddar. Makin’ eggs in a stranger’s kitchen.

Seeing Rachel felt like home, too, because she knows what it’s like to go from Here to There and back again.

Next, a long sunny walk to the park, where we passed a carnival just beginning to set up. A washed-out, rusty carnival — the colors reminded me of Phnom Penh’s pastel amusement parks, where you think — if I get on that ride I’ll plummet to my demise, no matter how cute the smile on that bug-faced rollercoaster. I wondered where that carnival had been; and what it’s like to piece everything together, over and over. Do you get sick of tightening the same bolts?

Then we laid in the cool grass under a cherry tree and blew petals off our palms, catching up on all the stupid stuff. Our favorite Hungarian fashion photographer and his dirty mouth. The new cool restaurants; who’s leaving, who’s staying; The Cambodian girls and our wishes for their precarious or bright futures.

We bought bottles of water from a food stand and started to walk home. That’s when we saw the house. Covered in intricate metal scrollwork, a gingerbread house out of metal and more; everything metallic recycled and affixed in ways that suggested grandeur but up close looked like old eggbeaters and fan blades and muffin tins. In a row of normal-looking suburban homes, suddenly this.

Back at Rachel’s, her aunt unearthed framed drawings by Rachel’s great-grandfather for Vogue magazine, then unrolled an intricate beige silk shawl woven and embroidered in the Phillipines. And, oh, Rachel said, yawning, sipping tea — later she had to make a friend’s wedding dress. Because that’s a weekend project. Her entire family and its lineage burst at the seams with creativity and art.

Days later I Googled the crazy metallic house, and found this video of the owner talking about why he does what he does — tricking out his suburban house in elaborate metal sculpture. The point, he says, is just to make things.

It is the point. It is the point.

One of my favorite days in Phnom Penh: the afternoon I learned how to screenprint. It’d been a hot, horrible weekend. One of those days when you’d rather stay in bed, but it’s too hot in bed, so you walk around like a total zombie and hope your knees don’t melt into your shoes.

But then Rachel called and said she needed a hand screenprinting some fabric in her workshop. I parked my clunky aluminum pedal bike downstairs, walked through a tiny concrete tunnel and then up a dark staircase, certain this had to be the wrong place. But then, the workshop: Light-filled, top floor, a balcony overlooking the outskirts of a bustling market. A smiling Khmer woman was already at work, pushing bright ink through a wood-framed screen onto hand-cut fabric pieces that would become skirts.

That day I helped hose off the silk mesh screens; develop new ones over a light box and, eventually, ink them myself. The work was methodical, and just what I needed.

At sunset on the balcony I saw cross-legged amongst screens propped everywhere and drying in the warm breeze. The orange-sherbert light washed through them and over us. The fabric hung over clothes lines, pink and green flags covered in new inked patterns and scrolls.

—

Every now and then, like once a year, I have a thought that causes me to stop what I’m doing and sit on the floor. Most recently it was this: My parents have always encouraged me to be a writer, which I think — looking back — seems strange, because no one in our family had ever been a writer. We’ve worked in steel plants and hospitals and car factories and on trains and boxing rings and bars. But there are no writers. I used to think they saw my constant scribbling and thought, well kid, get yourself a bestseller so you don’t have to work. Maybe they just didn’t know the economics of the industry and had miscalculated.

But now I wonder if it was something more; consciously or unconsciously. I wonder if they didn’t see that their little oddball would need some help. Some shielding for the journey, armor against the world’s harshness, and that writing would serve that purpose. Art does this for us. When things are very hard or heartbreaking or weird. When you finally realize that you just do not fit and never will. Again and again, I remember the same lesson. Whatever your art is, hold tight to it. The point is just to make things. Especially when you’re hungry. To reach for an egg in a strange kitchen, and without hesitation, crack it.

Memory: the most unreliable durable refrigerator

My friend Sam sent this story to me today, about how experiences are worthwhile investments because they can be considered “durable consumer goods”.  Like refrigerators and stoves. Things that last more than three years.

It got me thinking about the nature of memory.

Earlier this month I visited D.C., stayed with my old friends Doran and Tina and their adorable kids, and helped out at my old nonprofit job. These were such lovely things, and if I were better at being a blogger of everyday fun, I’d list out the whole itinerary and post photos from Instagram or something. Onward.

Point being. I left my job and life there in something of a rush; packed it all into a borrowed sedan and headed west. I was reeling from a college-boyfriend-heartbreak (everybody now: “awwww….”) and just had to get the hell out of dodge. I’d never take that decision back. Chicago has been everything.

But searching through old writings today (a couple of weeks after my visit)  I found this passage. It’s so strange. I recall that entire city laced with woe-is-me and the alienation of being too young for one’s own high heels, but I must’ve been having something of a good time:

…a beautiful dinner with doran, him hobbling around on his broken leg, where we conspiratorially made fun of the restaurant’s pretensions and drank the best wine, then stopped afterward for ice cream. it seemed like he really understood. or wandering around the sun-soaked botanic gardens with josh, like children fascinated by mysterious misters and textured foliage. or making spaghetti with sarah, meatballs falling as casualties to the kitchen floor. or the feeling of having a going-away dinner that felt crowded, hot, burbling like the spaghetti sauce with love, love, love. or crying at the supply cabinet in my office as i put back the paperclips i never used, and the staples, and feeling a co-worker put his hand in the small of my back as an it-will-be-ok. or lunch with a friend from a museum we often worked with, where she gave me mementos from her colleagues of the museum’s art. or the presents i got from the teachers — pencil holder, sweatshirt, good-luck card, wild flowers that stuck out in all directions and reminded me of the teacher herself, the one from south africa who told the most articulate narratives of growing up. cramming things in — dinner parties, improv shows, nights out out out and hard-working days, each one feeling like a marathon, only to see another marathon right around the corner. and then it was done.

– Sept. 2004

How not to make a pie, and then make a pie, the hard way

I love pie. Wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth — more like, a wooden spoonful of pie filling. When I lived with my family for a couple of months this fall, I’d drive to the grocery store, pick up six Granny Smith apples, and then drive to my grandmother’s house. She’d make me a pie.

So, I’ve never learned to make one myself. And when my sister Christina came to visit last weekend, we realized that none of us Muscato girls had baked a successful pie from scratch.

There are many ways to make a pie. Butter crust vs. shortening. Lattice top? Brush with milk? Sure. But we hear less about how NOT to make a pie. And that is what we did.

How Not to Make a Pie and then Make a Pie, in 27 Easy Steps

1) Decide to open a pie shop. (No one can accuse you of thinking small!!)

2) Realize that first you should probably make a pie. Any pie. Choose apple.

3) Determine in quick succession that you are missing a) a rolling pin; b) wax paper for rolling the dough and c) the knob to the oven. Disregard obstacles.

4) Use a recipe transcribed from your grandmother’s memory.

5) Wonder what’s going on when the dough is way too sticky.

6) Make the recipe a second time. The dough is way too sticky.

7) Forge ahead; roll the dough using a bottle of “Menage a Trois” red wine, on a piece of aluminum foil.

8) Pause and stare quizzically when the dough is stuck to the bottle in a bajillion places.

9) Forge ahead. Flour it up. Finally get the dough flat. Transfer to pie pan.

10) Pause and stare quizzically when the dough splits like a map of the world going through a very terrible earthquake.

11) Start eating the dough.

12) Drink the red wine. …Drink more.

13) Pay no attention when one of your team members, perhaps the eldest sister, dashes to the store for a rolling pin and wax paper. In fact, don’t notice that she’s left.

14) While she’s gone, start jamming the dough into cupcake tins. These will be “tarts” you tell yourselves. Dream of your tart shop.

15) When your eldest sibling returns, try to explain the DisasterTarts. Then, just stop talking as your arguments peter out. As a trio, briefly consider deep-frying the dough. Realize you have no deep-fryer.

16) Make a new batch of dough using a recipe from the internet and an off-brand of butter named “Challenge Butter”. Feel that this is appropriate.

17) Snack on sugary sliced apples. Drink more wine.

18) Roll the new Challenge Butter dough using a rolling pin and wax paper. It’s so easy! Transfer to pie plate without incident. Marvel and congratulate selves.

19) Try to set the oven to the appropriate temperature using a pliers. See also: missing oven knob. Set your timer for forty minutes.

20) Note that the pie is not cooking fast enough. And not cooking. Now it is midnight. It is not cooking.

21) Call your grandmother, even though it is midnight and two of your team members are fast asleep in the living room, one curled up in an armchair. Your grandmother answers, because she is always awake at all hours. Her main comment is: No, a pie should not take an hour and a half to cook.

22) The top is not browning. Glaze it in honey. Glaze it in leftover cinnamon butter from yesterday’s biscuits!! STAY AWAKE! STAY AWAKE!

23) Finally remove pie from oven. Go to sleep at 2am.

24) Wake up after four hours of sleep.

25) Bleary-eyed, watch your sisters wake up, parade into the kitchen  and peek under the foil approvingly. It looks delicious, they say.

26) Pie for breakfast. Send celebratory text messages all day remarking on the fabulousness of your pie.

27) Decide to never, ever open a pie shop.

Why my fiction-writing efforts have gone nowhere

I have a special wariness of people who write opening sentences with nothing in mind, and then try to create a story around them. These sentences, usually easy to detect, go like this: “Mrs. Ponsonby had never put the dog in the oven before,” “‘I have a wine tree, if you would care to see it,’ said Mr. Dillingworth,” and “Jackson decided suddenly, for no reason, really, to buy his wife a tricycle.” I have never traced the fortunes of such characters in the stories I receive beyond the opening sentence, but, like you, I have a fair notion of what happens, or doesn’t happen, in “The Barking Oven,” “The Burgundy Tree,” and “A Tricycle for Mama.”

– James Thurber

Drink me through this hatch in the orange

Right now I live in a big, old house behind one of my favorite cafes on a quiet block in Chicago. My roommates and I cook for each other most nights of the week. Sam makes me mojitos and plays Chopin on the piano. Julia is unafraid to do an open-mouthed, point-and-laugh at me when my Sunday pancakes turn into a hash of semi-raw batter. Last night we played shuffleboard for about a million hours and noshed on truffle fries at the bar. Usually light-hearted days and nights.

On Friday, though, a few of us saw a play that obliterated us. We left the theater in silence; a reverent, stunned and full-headed hush. High school kids from Albany Park Theatre Project had interviewed dozens of community members about their stories and assembled them into a performance called Home/Land. True stories, told in words but also motion and rhythmn, color and light. About inustice and intolerance and irrational hate and unspeakable resilience. Transforming a tiny black box space in a utilitarian park district building with some of the most powerful performances I’ve ever seen on a stage, let alone from a group of kids.

I’ve been thinking a lot about telling stories; how we transmit our personal experience and knowledge to others. I’ve always revered English. Though I break its rules for kicks and for joy, I can easily default to its formalities, the way my fingers still know what to do with a rosary. But last year I learned of English’s slippery places. How other languages tick and translate, from speakers with other native tongues. In candlelit cafes we’d compare idioms for hours, passing a notebook back and forth. Swapping words and turns of phrase like kids sharing sticky sections of peeled orange — valencia, clementine, blood.

In French there’s l’esprit d’escalier — “the spirit of the staircase” — to describe that feeling of leaving the room only to suddenly realize all you wished you’d said. There’s also coup de coeur — one of my very favorites. It means something like “I heart that”. Your passion of the moment.

The play brought immigration issues to life; discrimination, neon orange jumpsuits for fathers who tried to get work, elderly nuns who fought to legalize prayer in deportation centers, traffic stops that turned to panic and kids who couldn’t say their parents’ real names in public.

Even on the bus ride home, we still didn’t really talk.

Non-fiction theater about social justice has been in the news. You know, the Mike Daisey/This American Life thing. His play, and that original radio episode, hit people hard, too. What’s the word for how we felt as audience members, listening for the first time to stories of hardship and injustice? It’s not guilt or sympathy or even empathy.

When we got home from the play, I paced the house. Grilled my roommates. Googled. Tip of my tongue. Like schadenfreude, but in reverse? Maybe that hippie word, “grok”, one of them said. The difference between knowing something in your heart instead of just your head.

Today I came across the word somehow, not even looking for it, clicked on through
and there it was. Oh, the Germans. I should have guessed it’d be you guys. A squiggly, innocent-looking word that sums up entire sentences of English thought.

Weltschmerz. World pain. Wikipedia tells us, the modern meaning of Weltschmerz in the German language is the psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone’s own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances.

In a physical sense, the only thing I can compare it to is the pain of breaking a bone. It’s not that the pain itself is worse than a sprain, it’s the slight grinding of bone on bone that’s sickening, because that’s how you know something’s really fucked up and will take forever to mend.

Our best shot is through stories. We need human bridges to these big issues, of
course. This is not a revelation to any journalist. But my new vocab word might help explain the tenor of the backlash against Daisey. People felt so betrayed over a selection of facts in a play and a radio program. Things that usually merit little attention at all. Why did this sting so badly?

I propose it’s because he’d made us feel that particular, rare flavor of world-pain — and for what? For nothing? There is plenty of truth to his words. But it is so much easier to push it far away, fast and hard and angry. We can forget it. It wasn’t real. Thank god. It was just a sprain. We got hurt for nothing and now it’s over.

Theater is particularly effective at spreading this feeling because of its inherent intimacy and immediacy.

On the bus after the play we didn’t talk but then on the walk from the bus stop to the
house we did. The night opened up with rattling el trains and light spilling from dive
bar doors and on all the trees, new green leaves shuddered under a near-frost but
held steady.

I still don’t have words for everything.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “Each one (of us) has the incomparable taste in his
mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect
within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth’s.”

I just know that in Phnom Penh, a little French girl taught me a new
way to eat an orange. We were at the rum bar late at night and she came over to our table. Maybe four years old. Long brown curls, a white pinafore and a bow-tie mouth. She reached up to me and offered the fruit, so of course I took it. And she showed me how you can make a little hatch in the top — take off just a circlet of peel. Then squeeze it a bit until the golden juice starts flowing free, and put it to your lips and drink. I think it’s an analogy for something, and someday I’ll find out which one.

The shape of luck

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double, how
we can feed as upon nectar
upon need.

– Kay Ryan, “Why We Must Struggle” in The Best of It

Lately I’ve been learning the shapes of things, of gains and losses. By feel. By chance. Stumbling through an unlit room, pressing a palm to the walls and bumping into the stairs. Then waking in a vineyard. A lucky one, when I’m lucky.

Lock the door and run

I didn’t tell many people how sick I was in October. I didn’t want to worry anyone, and I didn’t know what to say. But Oriana was with me in the airport on the way to the hospital in Bangkok. She wanted me to get in a wheelchair so that we could pass more quickly through customs. But I refused. I told her, straight-faced, that I didn’t want to get in the wheelchair because “these might be the last steps I ever take.”

Wrong again, Muscato. I am now totally fine. And I’m thankful that Oriana talked me into sitting in the wheelchair. We breezed through customs and got to the hospital that much faster. But I’ve appreciated my legs a lot more ever since. Now I lace up my sneakers and run sometimes.

I just got these fancy running shorts with a tiny zipper pocket in the waistband, perfect for a house key and an ID. I began to slip the house key from the ring and slide it into that itty bitty pocket. But then I stared at the salad of metallic shapes in my palm.

I am terrible at locks. I am clumsy at keys. It’d all seem too conveniently metaphorical if it weren’t so true.

Silver keys and gold keys, with curved tops and square tops, and one of those fancy ones that can’t be copied — suddenly I realized: I didn’t need any of them. In fact, I didn’t even know what any of them were for. So I slid off each bright key until just one remained. Simple. Weird. Easy. Good. Then I locked the door behind me and started to run.

Mike Daisey & the morning of the muffins

I’m both a journalist and a performer in theater. Very few people work inside the overlap of this particular Venn diagram of minimum-wage professions. So I have to comment on the news.

In the event that this post is found in a digital time capsule in 2097, an explanation: A writer and performer named Mike Daisey traveled to China, visited a factory where some very popular computer products were being made, returned home and wrote about it. The resulting play was performed live for many people, excerpted for an extraordinarily popular journalistic radio program, and then found to be factually untrue. There was an uproar.

Denizens of the future: Hopefully someone has recorded the meanings of China, factory, journalistic, computer and radio so that you can decipher the above.

I became an early fan of Daisey after seeing him give a thrilling and mostly improvised talk at a conference of arts administrators. He pegged us from the start. He knew we were artists too and wanted, more than anything, to be valued for our work. Our art, yes, but also for our labor to connect art with its viewer. He said it was our mission “to make art visible in our time”. He nailed our fears and insecurities so deftly that I found myself scribbling into a notebook dotted with tear stains.

Muffins had been served in the lobby but we were not allowed to bring them into the lecture room. He wove this tiny injustice into his speech on the spot, our desire for the muffins that were separated from us by red tape, a detail mirroring all the administrivia that so often sunk our spirits. I scribbled down quotes. “Sometimes you just think, ‘Fuck art.’ And it may not always make you happy. But the point is not to be happy, the point is to do the shit you’re called to do.” He said art is often a hard sell because this country was founded by Puritans — but we must keep at it; deep down, everyone still wants to make art. He said in his signature, dramatic throatiness, “It calls to them in the night.”

The man can reach an audience. And his story about Apple was perhaps his best work. But people don’t like their bitter pills mislabeled.

Writer Tim O’Brien posits in his famous and much-beloved essay, How to Tell a True War Story [pdf], that there are different kinds of truth. Factual truth — and story truth.

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

Daisey made our stomachs believe. Bitter pills, mislabeled — for reasons I can only guess. But something strange happened during Daisey’s talk to us arts administrators. He’d been speaking about the muffins being denied us; saying the words with such passion you could taste them. And then, suddenly, we could taste them. One of the experimental theatre performers in the room had stood up, walked out the door and returned with these illicit muffins on a silver platter.

The artist passed them throughout the audience in a jolly manner. I was happy for the second chance at breakfast — but something in the air turned, a slight scratching of the needle on the record. Daisey didn’t chuckle with us or celebrate this turn of events. In fact he looked annoyed; so fond of the poetics metaphor surrounding our lack of muffins that he didn’t actually want us to have them at all. And I was so entranced by his performance that I almost didn’t want to eat.

It’s World Poetry Day

… or so says UNESCO, so I’m chipping in. You should, too.

In Our Time of Great Speed

in our time of great speed
everything’s fast
even spring
the sticky green leaves
opened in march
as the sun ticked us
closer to 90 degrees
though we dug out cars
in marches past
and under the ground
thirteen-year cicadas
murmur in half-sleep;
“twelve, twelve”

On the eternity of a copier

“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.” — Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

If you can imagine becoming sentimental about a Canon copier.

I once wrote about being in charge of purchasing a new copy machine at my first-ever real job; and this past weekend I witnessed the copier’s last day. It was being replaced by a newer model, on the very afternoon that I visited my old co-workers.

I remember so clearly being the person who inhabited the skin that purchased the copier. More afraid, more alone, with tuning-fork bones and an ear infection. It was a bad season.

They took the copier away and replaced it with a new one, where you can fax from your desk and send cheese to the moon; and maybe even drink warm merlot from a spigot on the side. The guys who came to pick up the old machine said it was the longest they’d seen one in service.

If you can imagine becoming sentimental about a Canon copier.

But standing there; I remembered so clearly being that person with those tuning-fork bones. The precision and dread with which I spent $5,280 of my company’s money, at age 22. I could not have imagined my life in a decade, but here is all I have to say about it: I am so calm. I am so calm.

Steal me a line from the mouths of champions

The other night; I got a call from an old friend. I was driving, and lost in an unfamiliar city, and nearly about to lose my mind because a cop car was tailing me. I was not driving my own car. Not stolen. But I hadn’t asked where the registration was, and I’d have little stamina to explain myself after wrestling with the prim voice of the frustrated GPS computer-lady. I pictured catastrophe. The flip side of creativity: a constant ability to picture catastrophe. So I pulled over into the parking lot of an apartment complex, and I answered my phone from there. The cop drove on.

My friend on the line was asking for advice — and lord knows I’ve asked for enough of it over recent years, collecting glints of wisdom from my army of smart and hilarious friends. (Recently I’ve even teamed up with a fellow writer for bi-weekly what-the-hell-do-we-do sessions.)

But I’ve also found wisdom somewhere else, lately. I saw an incredible play the other night, at the theater company where I now work, fml: how Carson McCullers saved my life by Chicago writer Sarah Gubbins.  It’s about a young woman whose only lifeline in a small-town high school is writer Carson McCullers, long dead, but whose book eases her heart. Afterwards, writer Dan Savage talked about growing up gay in a small town, and how the It Gets Better project was intended to reach across the divide between young people and the adults who’ve successfully made their way.

The project, though it has its detractors, seems to me one of the most beautiful manifestations of why art matters to me. And technology has made it possible. (I am such a nerd for spreading goodness through digital media in new ways.) In both the play and Savage’s project, links from artist to viewer change lives. The messages are simple; the effect profound and real.

Find heroes. Listen.

Sometimes new, simple platitudes rise to the front of my consciousness, the way waves suck back the shoreline to reveal crabs and shells. Last year the phrase was, “Seize your heart around the kind and beautiful world.” Lately it’s been, “Hold hard to your heroes.” If you don’t see any recognizable help in your geographic area. If you are lost; if the GPS is guiding you astray. Find someone who can speak to you through a book, through a play, through a poem. It’s so simple. But as David Foster Wallace says below, “the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance”.

Of course, as we closed the conversation, I also said, “Maybe don’t ask for too much advice. It’s possible to over-think things.” It’s always, always possible to forget why you got in the car, how you ended up here, by the side of the road. There was the cop car. There was the GPS. The phone rang.

Despite the warning. Here are a few words for the road that I’ve collected lately. (I just used this first snippet to kick off a talk I gave this week.)

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

… The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

– David Foster Wallace; commencement speech

Intention doesn’t sweeten./ It should be picked young/ and eaten. Sometimes only hours/ separate the cotyledon/ from the wooden plant./ Then if you want to eat it/ you can’t.

– Kay Ryan, “Intention”

A theatre is the most important sort of house in the world, because that’s where people are shown what they could be if they wanted, and what they’d like to be if they dared to and what they really are.

– Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

…if Bruce Springsteen’s story has a central issue, it’s whether dawning maturity is compatible with the rock-and-roll spirit.

– Dave Marsh, Born To Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

– Cheryl Strayed, “Tiny Beautiful Things”

Birthdays

This week, the blog turned 11. Eleven years old! A blog! How strange; how lovely to know that this site has sustained my writing, sculpted my voice and kept me sane (as sane as any human can be) for more than a decade. I’m grateful that I was born in the time of the internet.

So, here is why this blog was born. I really, really wanted to make a zine because all the kids who were older and cooler than me made zines. They were pressed in Xerox shops and distributed via the underground — somehow.

But I lived in the suburbs and didn’t have a car. There was no way on earth to get to the one Kinko’s in town on a regular basis, and even if I could have, where would I have distributed this mystical zine? The local Starbucks was really kicking up the coffee house scene, but beyond that, I was lost.

So I started this page, which later became a blog. And this week that blog turned 11.

I never thought I would make it past thirty years old. I really, really couldn’t picture it. And then I almost didn’t. On the eve of my birthday, I was in a hospital in Bangkok, and then suddenly the birth date on my hospital bracelet matched the day on the calendar. Cheating one’s own demise is pretty rad way to kick off the year. But more than anything, it taught me what matters. The people you think of in the worst moments, the ones who call and write and forgive and give, are the ones to keep for always. And when those people are busy, well, you also have the world. Which you are part of.

I’m a fan of poems; people send them to me and I appreciate that deeply. I’m not sure when I got this one or where, but it seems fitting for a birthday.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

–Mary Oliver

It’s also my mother’s birthday today. The absolute best part of this fall in Buffalo was estate sale shopping, brunching, giggling and lounging with my mother. As a teenager, I left home shortly after my zine fetish, to go to college and study journalism and find my place in the family of things. But this year I found my place in the family of my family. Which, if you think about it, is the best outcome I could have asked for.

When faced with a room full of smashed pianos, first get the pieces downstairs

One winter morning I walked into work, all mittens and hot coffee and rosy cheeks, to find our lobby destroyed — full of smashed pianos.

We’d seen them, days earlier, as whole pianos. Dusty, vintage uprights — but whole pianos, still. Now they were in pieces — and judging by the tools laying around, they’d been hacked with saws and hammers, pounded with mallets, strings gutted, keys made kindling. Sawdust hung in the air.

This was, of course, one of the basic hazards of managing an experimental theater company. One of our shows had encouraged audience members to take some choice thwacks at a few old wooden pianos in the lobby — John Cage-style — and after closing night, they’d been finished off in celebration, hacked to pieces. But the company had a big event in 24 hours. The room needed to be full of 200 people laughing and having a good time, holding wine glasses.

—
I came across a quote from author Ben Marcus recently, about his writing process:

…”if I wanted to sound a note on a piano (in prose), I didn’t just have to purchase and install the piano, I had to build it. But before I built it I had to grow the trees whose wood would yield the piano, and probably I had to create the soil and landscape through which those trees would burst. Then there was the problem of the fucking seeds. Where did they come from? I had to source them. With such mania I was either onto something or I completely misunderstood what a fiction writer was supposed to do.”

What strikes me most about this statement is how I imagine that thought process unfurling. It starts with the breezy pragmatism of a weekend carpenter facing an empty Saturday and plotting a lazy trip to Home Depot; then builds to frantic despair, unfinished and unfinished still; persistence fueled by a mad scientist’s longing for the result.

—

I know a little something about seeds, as it happens.

For some extra pocket money in Phnom Penh, I talked my way into an occasional substitute teaching position at the fancy private school in town.

These kids, the children of wealthy expats, had EVERYTHING. Their library alone stocked magazines and books from all over the world that you couldn’t find anywhere else in town. Their science teacher had gotten bitten by some terrible insect in Northern Thailand and was in the hospital unexpectedly and indefinitely.

The school secretary handed me this one-sentence lesson plan right before the bell rang: “Have students check seed experiment.”

I walked in expecting a well-disciplined bunch. But as they darted around the room stealing each others’ pencils and whining at the top of their lungs, I realized my mistake. They were the children of bankers, NGO workers, investors and — to hear them talk — kings and queens. Luckily they were totally adorable — diminutive features and prim tea-time accents.

No sooner had I written my name on the white board than one loudmouth mop-headed adorable-face announced, “MISS! WE NEED TO GO CHECK OUR SEEDS!”

By the time I turned around the entire class had left the room.

I wondered if this would affect my job.

——–

Seeds gathered in tall grass and stashed in apron pockets. Trees knelt over and watered. Then YOU. You chopped down a tree and made your OWN fucking piano! You planed the wrest plank. Strung the backframe. Sawed 88 keys. It took so long.

—

Sometimes, you wake up and all your work and your life appears to be just pieces and sawdust. A few notes sound, a few strings still ring. But still.

When I first docked in the U.S. this fall, things seemed really rubble-filled. Like I’ve said before, I’m bad at transitions. Really, really remedial. For a few weeks when I passed a lake or river or even a pond, I automatically noted the water level. How close were we to a flood? To repeat: This was not rainy season in Phnom Penh. It was winter in Western New York.

—

That afternoon at the fancy private school, my cherubic Euro divas bounded out of the science classroom with their clipboards. They were learning the life cycle of a plant by growing mung beans in various environments. Some chose the freezer. Some, the roof. Some, a well-trodden dirt foot path. Some, underneath the bushes of the lush tropical landscaping.

Half an hour later most returned, tormented. Their seeds had not grown. One girl came back and, wordlessly held her frozen petri dish up to me. (Her lab partner, overcome by the glorious train-wreck nature of things, shouted in ecstasy: NOTHING GREW!!!) The microwaved seeds fared no better. The ones on the roof had been seared. The footpath seeds had been trampled.

A dozen students busied themselves creating line graphs that were completely flat. I tried to assure them they were not failures.

Then I heard my name from the doorway. “MS. MUSCATO?!?!”

I poked my head out to find Anton and Xavier, two bouncy, chubby bookish types with saucer-sized eyes. “OURS GREW!” Xavier produced the plant from behind his back and there it was, a springy green stalk with one leaf at the top, shooting defiantly from the petri dish.

There is no greater embodiment of innocent hope than a happy child holding a springy green mung bean shoot.

I shouted, “OH MY GOSH!” and turned, about to shout to the class, when Anton shouted, “NO! STOP!”

And this is when I learned the difference between being in middle school and being a grown-up.

“Stop what?” I asked.

“PLEASE DON’T TELL THE OTHERS,” he whispered. His saucer eyes now telegraphed all-consuming panic.

“But why?”

“NONE OF THEIRS GREW.”

I quickly shut up. Duh: You can’t be publicly good at anything in middle school. In adult life, of course, it’s the reverse. That mung bean would be all over Facebook.

—

When I got back from Cambodia, I felt like all of those kids plucking their petri dishes from the freezer and the microwave. Plotting flat line graphs on standard-issue graph paper. I watched water levels in a reservoir in Rochester and wrote nothing that I didn’t redact. Everyone else’s mung beans looked so much more awesome. I wondered if I should go back to Asia, on the double. But one night I chatted with my friend Brechjte online. I first met her at a moonlit concert on a Cambodian beach. She’s in Amsterdam now, being a kickass human rights lawyer. And she said something that helped: There’s always the dilemma, of whether to stay a temporary expat or go back to “real life”. Specifically, a life with more roots, more consequences and more complex relationships. Her answer: Make real life everything you’ve always wanted. Whatever that means to you.

—

I remember so crisply the feelings of facing these two surprises. One brought the sinking weariness of destruction. The other brought the simple joy of a child holding a new plant. But certainly, through Marcus’s quote about painfully building one’s process to fit one’s own peculiar needs and vision, they interlace — and apply to how we write and how we live.

John Cage called his instruments “prepared pianos”. Usually they were prepared by the dings and knocks and beatings they’d endured. At a very basic level, his art is a knock at those who stay too precious, too perfect. Those who won’t butcher their darlings. And so, yes, I was bewildered and overwhelmed that morning at the theater. But something of the ecstatic recklessness of Cage’s original experiment was there too, even in the sawdust. As I stood there open-mouthed in snowboots, coffee in hand,  the thrill of the butcher lingered. It’d be an improvised feat of wonderment to get everything down the stairs.

—

The challenge of course, when faced with a huge pile of piano pieces, is always to get everything down the stairs. And then return to the beginning to make a new piano. Find some new seeds. Sprout them in a place they might like to grow. One bright spring morning when your trees are ready, return to your saw and hammer. Maybe even the same saw and hammer that destroyed your last piano. Just like before, you’ll need 88 keys.

Cold day, warm brownies: another happy island

I’ve been writing about days filled with islands and sun. They’d have seemed like a vacation if they hadn’t been so fraught with uncertainty. When living someplace familiar (and possibly chilly), it’s easy to forget that your anchors are your buoys. Friends, family, the indelible bond between you and that sidewalk. I’ve been visiting Chicago, on and off, over the past few months since returning to the U. S. of A., and my favorite days have been the simple ones.

Like with Eliina and baby Alice.

Eliina is a friend I’ve known since we were 17, both brand-new transplants to the venerable Northwestern University. Gathered for an all-dorm meeting, 100 of us kids squeezed into the cinderblock basement lounge, crowded on blue polyester couches or seated knees-to-chin on the cold linoleum floor. The session leader instructed us to find a partner and interview each other. I’m sure there was some sort of awkward shuffle of who-will-pick-me, but all I remember is that Eliina and I somehow paired up. She looked like such a cool chick, punky short blonde hair and an eyebrow ring.

One mandatory question was: Weirdest fact about you. Eep – I felt simultaneously completely alien and totally non-descript, a kid from a farm town outside Buffalo, New York. Eliina had a cool fact. Of course she did. She’d played the sousaphone in the marching band. Me? All I could think of was the twenty pounds of candy that my parents had sent me away to college with, now the only thing stuffed in the drawers of my particle-board desk. “I’m addicted to chocolate…?” I said.

Then we had to introduce our partners to the entire group — It’s a testament to the extreme nerdiness of our dorm that no one laughed at either of our weird facts. And Eliina and I became fast friends. We lived together all through college in the dorm and then afterwards in an apartment with friends. Later, when I was thinking of moving to Chicago after two disorienting years in D.C., she sent postcards. Highly persuasive postcards. Maybe twenty of them, one after the other, so that shuffled in with student loan invoices and credit card offers, I started getting photos of the Chicago skyline and her notes on the back that all amounted to: “Get over here. Be with us.”

So I went. And this city has been the best place I could ever hope to spend so much of my short life. Now she’s married to an artist and has a sweet, tiny Alice baby. But we are still total nerds. On one lazy weekday, with the rest of the world working silly JOBS and making batches of DOLLARS we decided to bake a batch of brownies and watch the movie Adventures in Babysitting.

It’s a Chicago movie, which is partially why we picked it. But also Elisabeth Shue is a total badass. There are gang fights, a tow truck driver with a hook for a hand, sewer rats and singing the blues. (“Ain’t nobody leave this place without sangin’ the blues…”) We knew all the best lines already, so it was the perfect backdrop by which to catch up and watch Alice gurgle and scootch on her back across the shiny wood floor. (She’s already rubbed a bald patch on the back of her tiny milk-scented head. I can only imagine how awesome she’s going to feel when she can transport herself facing forward. )

So, brownies. From scratch, which Eliina whipped up such with mechanical speed that before I could take my eyes from wiggly giggly Alice, the batter bowl was ready for licking.

–

The only thing better than half-watching Adventures in Babysitting with a dear friend  is adding slightly undercooked brownies, right from the oven. (Really key for a still-recovering chocolate addict.) And the only thing better than that is washing them down with fizzy cocktails of wheat ale and a splash of blood-orange juice. And the only thing better than that? Narrating a fake advice column starring the characters in the movie.

Dear Ms. Manners,
What is the proper etiquette for escaping from murderous car thieves? If you accidentally scrape rust into one of their coffee cups whilst traversing an overhead steel beam, must you stop and apologize?

And the only thing better than that is doing the whole thing again, getting to the end of the movie, pressing “Play” and reaching for another brownie. Because the first time we missed a bunch of stuff. There was, as always, more.