numb & number, how not to be...

+++ resolutions/schmesolutions, a book, a writing prompt, and a good luck recipe

Dear Ones,

I’m home from a month in Santa Cruz, my hometown, where I set myself the goal of seeing as many sunrises/sunsets as possible. Out of 28 days, I missed just two. A value add to the beauty in the sky was standing beside strangers who came to take-the-sunset as well. Everyone sort of shushed and smiled and turned their faces to the forgiving light. I’ve observed this ritual in Nosara, Costa Rica, and Nice, France as well. People arranging their days to view the sun and sky? That’s how I want to live.

And yet, when I lived in Santa Cruz I didn’t make taking-the-sunset a regular practice. I’m slightly embarrassed to write this, but I let life get in the way. Whatever that means. My kids were young, there was homework to do, dinner to make, taekwondo and ballet, but what if I’d taught my kids that putting themselves in the path of beauty should be priority?  

In line at CVS I fell into conversation with a kind man who seemed on hard times, a rough sleeper. Stanley and the man’s dog, Ned, exchanged business cards (i.e. sniffed each other’s butts). Ned, an adorable sienna colored dachshund, was very peppy and Stanley wriggled too. Ned’s man and I exchanged pleasantries about the dogs and the bright day. In his basket he had batteries, dog food, ginger ale, two apples and other random groceries. When Ned and his person left, Stanley and I chatted with the checker as well (as you know I am dead set against self-serve check-out). Round the corner from the store, we saw Ned and his man crouched in the dirt. Ned happily wagging his tail while the man dipped his fingers in a half gallon of vanilla ice cream and lovingly held them out for Ned to lap up.

Yes, there may be legit concerns about limited resources and sugar and fat and health for good old Ned and his person. But/And, what an act! To buy a half-gallon of ice cream when you have no freezer! To let your dog enjoy a bit of the treat. They were totally in the moment, beaming adoration at each other, having a party. I felt happy and lucky to have met them. I tell you this because there are plenty of times I’ve walked past a body wrapped in blankets, slouched on the sidewalk. It’s not that I don’t see. It’s the overwhelm of a problem that seems to have no answer.

I want to push back on numb and number. I want offer help and hello to a human struggling in a failing system. I want to prioritize looking at the sky.

We die only once, and for such a long time. ~ Molière

If you’re seeking a place to give money at year end. Might I suggest these two spots, one to help bring comfort to rough sleepers, and one to feed people in devastated parts of the world.

I’m not a fan of new year’s resolutions as they seem a recipe for failure and a bit like proclamations from a police state. Save! Quit! Diet! I am a fan of intentions and so here are mine:

• Don’t numb-out to beauty in the world.

• Don’t numb-out to positive energy around me (overcome the negativity bias!).

• Spend loads of time with friends and tell them I love them.

• Finish my book this spring.

• Hopefully double my subscribers. (You can help with this one. Please share and recommend widely and wildly!)

What about you? What are you thinking about leaning into in the new year?

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read:

LOVED AND MISSED, by Susie Boyt, is a hard subject, and yet the moments of happiness, the bits of bliss and charm are so bright and necessary they nearly cut. Man-0-man, can Boyt write. I normal run for the hills when I read a plot description like this, taken from an article in The Atlantic:

Ruth, a genteel literature teacher living on a dodgy street in London, sells her only family heirloom—and brings the £4,000 it nets to the christening of her granddaughter, Lily. “I don’t know if I’m good and I don’t know if I’m evil,” she narrates, “But I knew what I wanted.” She hands the envelope full of cash to her daughter, Eleanor, a drug addict who shows up to the church with beer cans tucked into the baby’s pram, and assures her that she’ll take Lily off her hands for a while so she can rest. Eleanor understands what Ruth is offering—a permanent, or at least long-term, pseudo-adoption—and tacitly approves. 

Because the reviewer described the book as a love story about being a parent, I jumped in. There are no sitcomish eye rolls or flustered/exasperated/underappreciated moms who get a robe for Christmas. (Not that I don’t enjoy that stuff as well, ahem, I might even write it at times…) Boyt writes the hard parts with such a light touch. The situation with Eleanor, Ruth’s daughter, is abysmal, any parent’s nightmare, but Boyt allows us to worry over and love Eleanor, she allows us commiserate, and fret, and relish (because it is all those things) with Ruth, and of course, we fall in love with baby Lily. I’m not yet finished with the book, but I give you this delightful bathtub scene to entice:

I ran a bath, elbow-tested it, climbed in holding Lily to me firmly, her legs on my legs, pink dappled sausage colored skin and folds of flesh. I patted the slippery creases on the back of her neck. We splashed about in the warm and I washed her hair from behind, the thatch of soft strands so fair it was pale pink, dabbing white foam from her scalp onto my nose. I swiveled her around to see and she roared with mirth, started waving her hands exuberantly. I sang her sea shanties, my features piratical with grimaces and grins. I turned on the hot tap again, worked up a bank of bubbles in the water. ‘Ahoy there, landlubbers,’ I called out to the line of shampoo bottles on the lip of the bath. Lily kicked up her legs and began to cackle wildly. She’d have slipped on an eyepatch if she had one on hand. Installed a parrot on her shoulder. She was such an easy customer. I kissed her chin. I was almost delirious, as though someone had ladled a gallon of double cream down me.  

I can taste that double cream as well. Babies in the bathtub! Such a fleeting joy. Honestly loving this book.

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Check my read.write.eat. Bookshop Store, where you will find many of the books I've recommended in the newsletter. Buying books from my shop is a way you can be a friend to the newsletter. 

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write:

I want to share three samples with you. The first is from John Cheever’s story, “The Season of Divorce.” When I read this paragraph in my twenties, I was moved and felt absolutely, YES!! This is my lived experience. I’ve had big emotions wash over me in which the past the present and the future all overtake in a way I have not understood.

Why do I cry? Why do I cry?” she asked impatiently. “I cry because I saw an old woman cuffing a little boy on Third Avenue. She was drunk. I can’t get it out of my mind.” She pulled the quilt off the foot of our bed and wandered with it toward the door. “I cry because my father died when I was twelve and because my mother married a man I detested or thought I detested. I cry because I had to wear an ugly dress—a hand-me- down dress—to a party twenty years ago, and I didn’t have a good time. I cry because of some unkindness I can’t remember. I cry because I’m tired—because I’m tired and I can’t sleep.” I heard her arrange herself on the sofa and then everything was quiet.

The second is also about big emotions, but these are joyful and fretful from Nathan Hill’s, WELLNESS.

Why back rubs? Why not? They are all in the arts for god’s sake. They are making an insanely poor decision in this trickle-down economy. And what you do when you are making big mistakes is find other people to make them with you. If you are going to be destitute for the rest of your life, well, it might as well be pleasurable. You might as well have a good time along the way. You might as well say yes to what feels good. And back rubs feel good. And pot brownies also, they feel good. And belting out Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos songs while standing and sometimes jumping or even dancing on the couch that feels really good. And drinking absinthe and reading poetry aloud feels good, and doing shots of pulverized hallucinogenic mushrooms mixed with lemon juice tastes bad but feels good. And doing whippets feels mostly good except for that moment right after you inhale when it feels like your head very quickly shrinks and just as quickly explodes.  

Here’s a final paragraph from “The Old Man at Burning Man,” by Wells Tower, full of existential anguish buried in the humor of the petty.

I do not do volunteer work. I am a poor carpenter. I give very little money to charity. My hair is thinning. I am a miserly Captain Bligh of an RV skipper, having forbidden the men from deucing, or even showering, in the RV out of fear of depleting the battery and water reserves. I am bad about returning e-mails. I love my father. My father is dying and will leave no worthy successor. My life is at least half over. Out of cowardice masquerading as prudence, I have sired no children and nourished no lifelong commitment to a member of the opposite sex. My dog's halitosis is noxious and incurable. The ivory-billed woodpecker is almost certainly extinct. Super-PACs are destroying American democracy. The Milky Way is whorling into a huge black hole. They eat dolphins in Japan. I'm getting muffin tops.

What do each of these paragraphs have in common?

• They are or include rants

• They’re lists

• They all include concrete images and examples that when amassed reveal the depth and context of ponderous emotions.

• They’re not melodramatic.

In the Cheever section, the character is overcome with sorrow and rage in the present, which unleashes sorrow and rage from the past, and even amorphous sorrow and rage (I cry because of some unkindness I can’t remember) making everything hot and tumultuous and unbearable.

In the Hill paragraph, the freedom and fear of youth and art come together in a bacchanalia that seems wild and delicious and frightening and kicks-the-can of adulting down the road. It’s all about escape. Yet we readers know the day will come when you can no longer escape, and so there is urgency, narrative tension, and dare I say desperation, in the rant.

Tower’s paragraph makes a little sandwich of petty character flaws and bad behavior at the top and the bottom, while in the middle, he speaks of loving his father, his father’s impending death, his own aging body and fear of commitment, then he retreats to the petty with his dog’s halitosis, etc... Big thoughts are buried because he can barely look at himself, and yet he does.  

I love this kind of writing. I love the very specific details as a way of revealing what seemingly can’t be said.

I just keep trying to make something out of words that you’d think couldn’t be made out of words. ~Deborah Eisenberg

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Here’s a PROMPT:

Challenge yourself to give a character an emotional rant. Challenge yourself to make it both specific and universal. Challenge yourself to steer clear of melodrama. Let the power of the list, the amassing of details build so the reader knows the emotion and is able to experience it in their own body. Don’t tell the reader how to feel. Make them ‘get it’ in their body.

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eat:

You must invite good luck for 2024 by making Hoppin’ John on New Year’s day!

We were going to have a party and now we aren’t. Does that ever happen to you? You have this big idea, and then you kind of want to curl up on the couch with your partner and dog and a bowl of something delicious and something good on the tv. (I could use your help with this part! What should we watch?)

Hoppin’ John
4–6 servings

• 2T vegetable oil

• 1 smoked ham hock

• 1 small onion, fine chop

• 1 red bell pepper, fine chop

• 1 celery stalk, fine chop

• 2 garlic cloves, fine chop

• 1 large carrot, peeled and fine chop

• 1¼ c dried black-eyed peas, soaked overnight, drained

• 1 T cajun seasoning (if you don’t have cajun seasoning, no big deal, mix equal parts dried oregano, paprika, and black pepper in a small bowl)

• 2 t dried thyme

• 1 bay leaf

• 4 c water

• ½ t freshly ground black pepper

• Kosher salt to taste

• Cooked long-grain rice

• Thinly sliced scallions

• Diced jalapeños. Chopped parsley. A squeeze of lemon. Only if you feel like it!

1. Heat vegetable oil in a medium Dutch oven or other heavy pot over medium-high.

2. Add onion, red bell pepper, celery, carrot to pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until beginning to soften and brown, about 5 minutes.

3. Add garlic cloves, and cook, stirring often, until fragrant, about 1 minute more.

4. Add dried black-eyed peas, Cajun seasoning, dried thyme, bay leaf, and smoked ham hock then pour in 4 cups water.

5. Bring to a rolling boil, then reduce to low heat and cover pot. Simmer until peas are tender but not mushy, 1–1½ hours.

6. Remove ham hock from pot and let cool slightly. Pull meat from bone and add back to the pot.

7. Discard bay leaf.

8. Taste and season with kosher salt and pepper.

9. Divide cooked long-grain rice among bowls and using a SLOTTED ladle, scoop the peas on the rice. DON’T MAKE IT TOO SOUPY. LEAVE MOST OF THE BROTH IN THE POT.  

Scatter scallions over the top and additional suggestions for some verve!

Happy New Year! 🥳🤞🏻🍀

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Stanley, walking into 2024 like he’s paying the rent!

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Remember to tell your people you love them, and take good care of your skin. 

xN