a million tiny things

Never back down. But maybe retreat?

2012-01-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

The FSC-certified hand-built bathhouse out in the woods isalmost complete, which means that my eco-studio can almost (always few tinydetails undone) be rented out as a writing retreat. No phone, no internet, nothing but peace and quiet and aradiant-heat floor under the redwoods.

I’ve thought about offering it as an activist retreat aswell, maybe for cheap or free to earth activists who need some time torejuvenate. But seriously, haveyou ever heard of an activist going offline for a few days? Could Bill McKibben survive without hisinternet line to the rest of us footsoldiers of the environment, waiting tohear our next marching orders? (Bill, you are welcome any time.)

Hm, I wonder. So if anyone knows a full-time environmental activist who could use abreak, send them my way. Occupythe woods.

Stopping. Okay, not stopping, but...

2012-01-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

...can we at least sit down for a moment to enjoy a cup of tea? Please?

This was a big week. After all the arrests and teach-ins and protests, Obama said a big, fat, loud "NO" to the climate-killing Keystone XL pipeline. Wahoo! Hurrah! And all that.

I mean, I'm as thrilled as anyone. Or perhaps, "relieved" is better than "thrilled." Relieved for just one moment that there is an ounce of sanity in the government, even if you have to dig hard to find it. But I'm not relieved like, oh, great, that's over so I can move on to other stuff. I mean, I'm perfectly aware that Big Oil will keep trying to strip-mine our political process in pursuit of profit.

Still, the "We won, but..." emails are making me a little crazy. So I'm going to drink in the "we won" for now, and save the "but" for next week, after I've celebrated a bit. After all, my kids have been going through this protest movement with me, and I think I want them to believe for just a few days that the good guys can win, at least for a while.

So, an hour at the teahouse for me, popcorn for them. Wahoo, hurrah, and all that. For real. (For now.)

a million tiny “no”s

2011-12-26T12:17:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve, my malaise took me for a walk around town,searching for a way to fill the empty space left by the fact, incontrovertible,that my children are not at home with me baking cookies for Santa. They were with my X and her newpartner, doing whatever they do which I’d rather not think about since itdoesn’t include me. Being a middleclass American, my hard-wired instinct was to fill this hole in my heart bybuying more gifts for those same missing, missed kids.

Lucky for me, I had two bits of perspective. One: there wasn’t much money in my bankaccount, a common occurrence since the divorce. Two: Facebook. My daily checking thereof NOT usually something I like to admit to, butwhen it’s Christmas Eve and your little kids are making their Santa snacks at ahome in which you are not welcome, Facebook really doesn’t feel like so much ofa time-waster. More like alife-saving time-filler. You neverknow how long one day can be until you are missing your kids at Christmas time.

A friend had posted on Facebook that morning: “sufferingpre-Christmas oscillation between anxiety about overconsumption and the desireto delight and thrill my kids. I haven't gotten my kids enough gifts! I'vegotten my kids too many gifts! Aaagh!”

And remembering that post saved me. I let my feet wander through the toystore, linger by the games shelf, and move on. (Oh, they would love this! But they have enough, more than enough, too muchreally.) When your kids have twohouses, you have to be very conscious not to compete for best Christmas, and byproxy, best parent. Out here inthe shopping frenzy of Christmas Eve, everyone was jolly, laughing, hurrying. I had all the time in the world, notexpecting my kids back until noon on the 25th, but I pretended to smileback. My hands, seeminglydisconnected from my shut-down self, browsed the bookstore shelves, allowing afew small items to pile up on a bench, but only if they seem likely to advancethe progress of our slowish readers: Mad Libs for the one learning parts ofspeech, Hangman for the one working on simple spelling. The honey store extracted a few moredollars as they are a local business devoted to the continued health of thehoneybee population, and a few pieces of their honey taffy would fill the kids’expectation that Santa always puts candy in stockings without adding to thecorn syrup and chocolate intake that surely would have begun near dawn at theirother house.

To walk through town on December 24 with a hole in your souland emerge without an enormous sack full of crap requires an inexhaustiblesource of internal “no”s. Noplastic. No made-in-far-awaynon-durable goods. Nonon-FSC-certified paper. No FarmBill-subsidized corn syrup. Noclamshell cases. No, no, no. No pretending that “retail therapy” isanything other than just digging yourself in further, into debt, intodepression, into denial that you are part of the problem. Unless. Unless, your profligate spending of “no”s adds up to youheading home to discover that the stockings are, in fact, just the right amountfull, and the honey is sweet in a cup of tea, and your attempts to be part ofthe solution, however small, have made the waiting tolerable. Because the only thing that can fillthe hole, the big “yes,” will arrive. And they will not miss for even one second any of the things you said “no”to.

Open house

2011-12-21T17:01:00.000-08:00

“The door’s always open,” I like to say. I like to have that kind of life,people coming and going, feeling welcome, dropping by. Staying for a while.

But I never meant for my open door policy to be literal.

“DOOR!” I yell,over and over, a howling refrain. “DOOR!” as my sons run down the driveway. “DOOR!” as my daughter heads into the bathroom.

“I’d very much like to hear what you are saying,” I intonecalmly, “but I can’t pay attentionbecause the door is open and all ourheat is pouring out into the driveway.” I am proud of the control in my voice since I just read a book detailinghow horrific the practice of natural gas extraction by fracking is, and ourfurnace is fired by, you guessed it, natural gas.

“Sorry, Mom.”

And when I’m really tired of the constant, repetitive “DOOR”call, I lose it a bit: “You guysare going to lose your privilege to go outside ever again!” As if.

After weeks of trying, failing, and failing again to get mykids to close the door without a reminder each and every time, the kids’ annualcookie party this week came as a relief. A million kids running in and out requires full-on surrender to awide-open door, and the continuous baking means the house is plenty warmwithout having the heat on. Openhouse, indeed.

Best of all, the whole house is full of laughter and sugarand mouths stuffed with pilfered M&Ms. And I notice that on each of the gingerbread housesthe kids make, the door is propped wide open, letting in the love, even if theheat is escaping.

Whoa, Nellie!

2011-12-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

The holidays are rushing forward on a constantlyaccelerating intake of sugar. Myfeeble attempt to counter the trend by baking cheese straws from ahealthy-food-for-kids cookbook was derailed by the fact that the cheese straws,though whole grain and healthy, aren’t in the least cheesy, despite my havingadded more cheese than the recipe called for. So the kids continue to chip away at the shingles of theirorganic gingerbread houses decked with non-organic, artificially dyedM&Ms. And start each day witha dose of chocolate from the chocolate advent calendars (surreptitiousgrandparental attempt to convey the idea of advent to my non-churchgoingbrood).

Yikes. Justdays away from our annual cookie party, I’m trying to figure out how to preventa complete crash-and-burn scenario. Spurred on my the success of my “No”vember campaign, I look to the monthfor inspiration, but all I’m seeing in the “Dec” of December is “decathalon.” I gotta slow down. Take a breath.

And when I do that, I see it. The “duh” of the D month. December. Decelerate.

So today, maybe the kids will keep sneaking sugar, but I candrive slower. Literally. Just get everywhere a littlelater. And while I’m at it, savegas. Do a little thing for the earth and for our family at the same time. Feel more relaxed. Happy, slower, holidays.

(And if you live around here, see youat the cookie party!)

Winter spirals: a million tiny lights

2011-12-06T13:14:00.001-08:00

After the excitement of a house-full-of-life Thanksgiving,my winter spiraling starts. Thereality of the long, cold nights, even longer when you work them, and themounting dread of a prolonged, not-by-choice, no-kid period before Christmas(oh, the vagaries of the family court judges) conspire to send me sliding down,around, and down further. Theempty house during my non-custody days, as I sit holed up in the only bedroomthat I heat when we are not all home, echoes with nothing. And in that dark, shivering spot, itbegins again: the easy tears, the sense of defeat, the ache in the chest, thefeeling that I just can’t do this divorced lifestyle, really can’t, the harshjudgment of myself for not being grateful enough for what I have.

The feeling of relief when, driving, I see a warning signfor high winds on the bridge ahead, and I realize that my car is small andlight and might just get blown off, twisting down into unending darkness ofwater below. The tears again, whenI’m not expecting them. The lossof hope that we can do anything to save this planet for our kids. The sense of warm comfort that comeswith contemplating not being alive, letting the world just spin and heat upwithout me on it. This is mywinter spiral, and I so don’t want to have to get back on those white pillsthat I spent six months getting off of this year. Damn it.

I cross the bridge without incident, and get homesafely. For now. And I go through the motions ofadulthood: work, the hardware store, the post office, the grocery store, thebank, trudging through the to-do list. Next up: evening holiday school event, and the start of my kid-custodyhalf of the week. I make suresupper is ready and warm for when we get home, and head over to theschool.

The room is dark and quiet as I take my seat, alone. My ex has delivered my daughter to herteacher and the boys will arrive later with the sitter for their own turns(hard for boys to stay quiet for too long). More parents filter in through the opaque doorway, babiessquawk to lighten the somber mood, siblings whisper in their seats as we waitin darkness for the kindergarteners. My ex ducks in, takes a seat a few rows back. I relax in my chair and breathe gratitude that her newpartner isn’t here too.

The teacher leads them in, singing. Such sweet voices, timid in thedarkness. They take their placeson a bench facing the center of the room, where a team of parents has created aspiral pathway out of greenery and logs cut so they stand on end at variousheights within easy reach of a kindergartener. The teacher tells a story of children and friendship and thepower of love, and then the pianist starts to play, and my healing begins.

One by one, the children are given an apple with a beeswaxtaper in it, and each walks the spiral to the center where she lights hercandle from the large pillar in the center. As she walks back outward, she chooses a stump on which toplace her apple with its light. Over and over we sing a child to the center and then back out. The pathway emerges from shadow intosoft light.

In the candleglow, I have lost sight of the self who couldnot find her heart, her will to live. I feel only gratitude that despite the logistical complications ofchildren and sitter and maintaining a reverent mood, I will now sit through twomore consecutive spirals to watch my sons’ classes, as I have for the past fiveyears. In order to reach thelight, you have to walk through the darkness. How fortunate are my children that year after year, as theygrow taller and taller, they enact this ritual. How I hope they remember this somewhere deep inside, so whenthey face their own black winter spiral, they recall that there is a lightsomewhere.

Preparing for the second spiral, I am sitting in the darkwith my arm across the shoulders of my little boy, suddenly a pre-teengranddaddy longlegs, skinny limbs bending every which way out of his foldingchair. We watch his brother’sclass walk the spiral one by one, and when they are done, the room full ofsmall lights, he whispers to me: “It’s hardly dark anymore.”

I send the two younger ones home with the sitter and returnto the dark room alone to watch my spidery son and his long-legged classmateslight their own candles. And he isright. My shadow-lurking heart iswatching, and letting the light in, and it is hardly dark anymore.

Farewell, lovely NOvember. Come again soon.

2011-12-01T13:21:00.001-08:00

Don’t ask me how I was so lucky as to be the one to receivethis divine revelation, but there I was, racing down the road of myoverly-scheduled, hectic life, when I suddenly saw this mental billboard:November starts with N.O. Likemost great discoveries (electricity comes to mind), it’s been there all along. No. Nooooo-vember. A whole month of “no,” just waiting for someone to come along and grabit. And guess what? That same month comes around everyyear. Just when you need it most.

This year we needed it more than ever, as this is the yearthat I finally embraced my inner environmental activist and started runningaround getting arrested at the White House and hanging up big signs atcommunity events, doing teach-ins, and generally spending too much time postingupdates on the Keystone XL pipeline for all my Facebook friends. Not to mention my usual school gardenvolunteering, which included the rash promise to post recipes every week on aschool garden blog. Oh, and alsonot to mention my full-time job as a night nurse. And did I say I’m a single mom? Each week this fall, I would lie down on my chiropractor’stable, finally exhale, and say the same thing: “I never stop.”

So in late October, I declared that November would be awhole month of N.O. Longexhale. A whole month offreedom. No activist events, nocraft fairs, no social events that we don’t all absolutely positively want togo to. No going to the farmer’smarket where I always spend too much money, no going out to eat. No throwing parties. No calling the White House or mysenator, no keeping petitions to sign in my inbox, no responding in any way tomass emails. And no guilt. I’ve been busy, and I’m taking a monthoff, and all these no’s mean I have some big yeses for my kids. Not very visible ones, but we all feelthem: yes, I can help you with those moccasins you started back in August, yes,we can make chow-chow and can it, yes, we can sit on the couch and read, yes,we can build a door for the hole you cut in the wall. Yes, we can stay in our pajamas all day.

No looking through catalogs for good deals or gift ideas—straightto recycling, along with every single one of the direct-mail pleas forend-of-year donations. I usuallykeep those, stack and sort them according to priority, and try to send whatmoney I can. But if I think aboutit, I know which charities I want to donate to, and I know how to donateonline, and I don’t need the clutter or the attendant guilt that I haven’t sentthe donation in yet.

The most radical “no” has been this: no groceryshopping. This was not part of myoriginal plan, but honestly, all the running around in the past few months hadmy bank account in scary territory. How to recover in time to buy an organic turkey for the holidays: stopshopping! We get a veggie box fromour CSA farm each week, and honestly, often I end up letting a few items get old and rot. The CSA box comes with milk, half &half, and butter, and I can pick up a loaf of bread at the farm when I pick upmy box. Funny thing I noticed:when I’m not supplementing with other groceries, nothing gets old androts. Hmmmm.

During all the other months, when any given foodstuff runsout, I replace it. This means thatbehind the front layer of dry and canned goods in my pantry there is acollection of dusty, seldom-seen items. These got taken out and dusted off right after Halloween this year,thanks to a food drive at the kids’ school. Unnoticed by me, most of our canned goods had collectedsmall rust spots, past-due expiration dates, or some sticky coating resultingfrom a leaking, improperly preserved jar of marinated figs. Which obviously rendered them unfit fordonation to the food drive. Andonce I’d noticed, I couldn’t really put them back into the pantry. Stacking a bunch of aging cans ofkidney beans, hearts of palm, and coconut milk on my counter turned out to be apowerful motivator to get out of my cooking rut, get creative, and get rid of the cans. So fora month, we have survived on fresh vegetables and random canned food. Surprisingly, the kids have enjoyed themore creative meals, even if there have been occasional complaints about thedearth of quesadilla ingredients in the fridge. Plus, as a total surprising bonus, none of us got botulism(whew!).

As for the “no activities,” it’s not that we didn’t doanything all month, it’s just that any offers that came along had to becompelling enough to override the automatic “no.” So, although we skipped many, many cool and interestinglocal events this month, I did go to see my friend’s lamps at a pre-holidaycraft fair, and even bought one. But I didn’t have to go. The lamp is funky and captivating,hanging in a previously too-dark corner of my living room, its light shiningout through multiple layered images of an apple with one bite taken out of it. For the artist, the apples refer to ourlocal apple producers and the “eat local” imperative (which is also emblazonedacross the lamp), but to me, it’s more a symbol of how often we succumb to thetemptation to take one more, and one more, and one more bite, until we havemore than we can chew. Furthermore, the lamp has a switch, as a reminder that anytime I want, Ican turn it all off.

Now that NO-vember is over, I am looking forward toadopting the same practice every year. Without any further effort than the implementation of “no,” we are all rested,our house has less dust bunnies than it has since my youngest was born, we havemultiple craft projects racing toward completion, my pantry is clean and sparein readiness for the holidays. Andto me, the space created by saying “no” echos with a resounding “yes.” Yes to NO-vember. Now that seems like a tradition worthkeeping.

November starts with N.O.

2011-11-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

That includes blog posts (except for those pesky garden recipes, and only because I promised the kids).

Suburban moms loose in the big city

2011-10-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

Gratification: Two babes who didn't know what the Tar Sands protest was all about until my teach-in not only show up at the protest outside Obama's SF fundraiser, they also get on TV!!! Because we were being good mamas and left the protest a little early to go pick our kids up from school, we stumbled across the speeding motorcade routing the Predident away from the mass of protesters and got to wave our signs as the long Presidential hand waved at us. (And yes, that sign on the right does read "Another Motha' against the pipeline.")

Out of my comfort zone

2011-10-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

Nice how really believing in something will make you stretch outside your usual orbit. As if the handcuffs weren't painful enough, I have delved fully into google docs presentations to give a teach-in for people in my community tomorrow. So, from a former and future Luddite, here's my slideshow if you want to see it. It's got some cool videos. (Yes, I really did imbed videos. They might even let me into the 21st century soon.)

Empty Jars

2011-10-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

Cascades of over-ripe, late-season blackberries scold mewith their fermented sugars, leaving sticky liquor all over my hands: “What,did you think we would wait for you?” The chickens trail along behind me, getting drunk off my discards.

“When summer’s over, it’s gone,” the berries whine, like mychildren bemoaning the spate of babysitters who bide the time reading bookafter book, but who don’t get the harvest in. While I’m off protesting, sending out press releases, doinginterviews, the kids and ripe fruit miss me. On the counter sits a new box full of empty jelly jars,pristine in their unmet potential.

Every choice has its converse: if I’m doing the activiststuff, which feels like the big work of mothering, there’s a lot of othermothering work that I miss out on. Like cooking dinner, tucking people in, and canning the jam. This year, I missed the first day ofschool, and I missed the blackberries. Hopefully those are the biggest things, and I didn’t miss anyunrecoverable moments of ripeness in my children.

My son, declaring some mix of independent thought andresentment, insists he doesn’t care if they build the planet-killingpipeline. Sigh. Mom’s on the front page in herhandcuffs. I’m so not gonna careabout that stuff. I just want herhome. I just want jam.

For now, I’ll let him have the final word on this thornyissue.

Moving planet!

2011-09-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

350.org's worldwide day of moving beyond fossil fuels in action at the Laguna Farm Hoedown!

A van full of optimists

2011-09-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

There is something deeply disturbing about the decision totake part in civil disobedience, even when the action itself is well-organizedand decidedly non-violent. Tointentionally break the law in protest is to declare openly the opinion thegovernment has broken its contract with its citizens. And once you have admitted to yourself that as huge andunwieldy a system as our federal government is broken, it is hard to have faiththat it can be fixed.

I had imagined that once I got to Washington, thenon-violence training session would be energizing. Instead, I felt teary the whole time. I had thought that sitting with ahundred other people in front of the White House would make me feel proud;instead, I felt sad. Once I was handcuffed,though, and placed in a police van with 11 other women, once the van wasbouncing us around so that we had to grab onto the seat belts that layunfastened behind us on the benches, once our wrists were all hurting from theplastic cuffs, once we all got uncomfortably hot and sweaty and discovered thatif you sweat enough, your handcuffs can slide around and you get a littlerelief from the pressure.

Once we had all started talking about our doubts aboutwhether what we were doing could really make any difference at all, and once wewere laughing about how the sweet young policeman guarding us while the van wasparked at the police station, seeing how sweaty we were, said sheepishly, “Iwould have left the van running so you could get a little air conditioning fromthe front, but I didn’t think you people would want that.” Once all those things had happened, Irealized that despite my undercurrent of grief, I was right where I should be. Squeezed into a whole van full ofpeople so optimistic that we, in one unanimous chorus, answered that youngpoliceman: “And you were right!”

Back-to-school Time

2011-09-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

(This is the original essay which I butchered down for the Bohemian--that was the link in my previous post)

It isn’t until I sit down on the subway platformthat the tears begin to fall. Mywrists still show the marks from the zip-tie handcuffs, my shoulders are stiff,and I am exhausted, but I am really crying because I am missing mydaughter. Her first day ofkindergarten. Her first step intothat wider world, where she will discover her own voice. And I am not there holding her hand,kissing her goodbye. I am on theopposite coast, rubbing my wrists, waiting for a train to take me away fromthis Washington, DC, police station. This is not the type of mothering I want to do. Unfortunately, heartbreakingly, it isthe type of mothering that is required.

I’m a hands-on mother. A co-sleeping, attachment-parenting,school-volunteering, constant presence in my children’s lives. I’m one of those moms, the ones who seem to have found their truecalling in making organic, homemade ice cream and planning elaborate,eco-friendly birthday parties. Whoseem to practically live at the school (amazing how many school garden hoursyou can fit in when you work nights), and don’t resent it. The kind of mom my own mom was. The kind of mom who wouldn’t be caughtdead NOT being there on the first day of kindergarten. Until now.

As my youngest child enterskindergarten for the first time, I am sitting in front of the White House,waiting patiently for my turn to be cuffed, photographed, and escorted into thepolice van. Because as much as Iwish it were different, I can’t feel good about being the kind of mom I alwaysthought I would be, there holding my kids’ hands their first days ofschool. Now that my three kids areall old enough to be in school, I’m able (forced, really) to step back justenough to gain a new perspective. What I see compels me to change my mothering plan. The problems facing my children on amacro level are so huge that it’s ever so tempting just to lower my eyes andput my shoulder back to the grindstone of day-to-day parenting: laundry, meals,bedtime, packing lunches, more laundry. I’m living in this world that I don’t know how to fix, and I want tojust have the same work my mother had in raising her three kids: give themlove, and healthy food, and some basic values.

But my work is different. Instead, I have to look, and lookclearly, at how climate change is happening now, faster than anyone thought itwould. I have to be willing to seethe damage we are doing to our planet, to their planet, through our failure toaddress not only climate change, but issues of clean water, clean air,environmental justice, and corporate-money political influence. And I don’t want to see it, I reallydon’t. Thinking about those thingsis just plain depressing, and my kids need a mother who is not depressed.

So I must choose one of twopathways: denial, or hope. Ichoose hope, and with it, love. But against such odds, hope only makes sense in the context of action:there is no love without proofs thereof. My proof, this week, is the bruise on my wrist. I love my children enough to use mybody, my willingness to give up my personal freedom, in order to tell PresidentObama that he has the power to protect the planet that my children have to liveon. This fall, President Obama hasthe sole decision-making discretion to approve or deny the necessary permitsfor the Keystone XL pipeline to be built: he can stop an environmental disasterright now.

If built, the Keystone XL pipelinewill carry tar sands from Canada to Texas oil refineries, escalating the rateat which the currently sequestered carbon in the tar sands is released into ouralready over-carboned atmosphere. The world’s leading climate scientists say that if we burn the oil fromthe tar sands, it will be “game over” for the climate. Which means, basically, that my kidswill be trying to live on a dying planet. I cannot even imagine the scale of the human suffering that will occurif we do not radically adjust our global response to climate change. President Obama can, and must, startthis shift. So for my children’ssake, I must tell him myself; I cannot depend on anyone else to mother mychildren for me. Mothering, inthis century, means carrying the grief of dire possibilities around withyou. And doing everything you canto fix a broken system.

The morning before I left for DC, Ilooked into my daughter’s bright eyes and felt my own eyes fill. “I’m gonna miss you, sweet bug,” I toldher. “I hope you have a reallygreat first day of kindergarten.”

She gazed back at me seriously fora moment, then smiled. “I hope youhave a really great first day of going to jail, Mama.”

And so we are both starting tolearn, both stepping out into a larger world. May we find our voices, and may they rise and carry.

Standing up for the planet

2011-09-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

Looking at the larger picture these days. And getting the book ready for Mother's Day 2012. Whew. Click here to read a very short piece about getting arrested.

Hand Work

2011-02-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

A new hand-thrown mug,
a gift from the potter,
necessitates a clean counter.

As you scrub, you notice that even the plastic thingy under the dish drain needs washing. Actually, you notice this frequently, but today, eyeing the mug, you decide to scrub it. Why is this? Why wouldn't the mug just call for sipping tea on the couch?

You think, perhaps, that you feel the work of the mug under the potter's hands, the slide of the clay, the smooth of the slip. You need to honor this work with work of your own.

Being, as you are, an apocalyptic thinker, you of course also appreciate that potters are still around, making things by hand, preserving skills that will be needed when climate-related disaster strikes and the world returns to one of things made by hand. You are grateful that some people are dedicating their lives to those skills that you yourself have left behind in previous generations. You really meant to attend the "re-skilling fair," to learn how to pickle and can things, and how to warp a loom, but someone had stomach flu, or a baseball game, or something, and you missed it.

Once the counter is clean enough to deserve a hand-thrown mug, you are free to sit on the couch and knit. This is one of those skills, last seen in your grandmother's hands, but glory be, your kids, your little, charter-school-attending kids, have learned to knit in school and are taking great pride in teaching you.

You try to forget that someday you might really, really need to know how to do this, and just enjoy using your hands in this moment, making something useful, sipping tea.

Wandering off...

2011-01-29T14:42:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update--I've been spending too much time in the school garden to get around to any blogging. You can check out my school garden blog, which I plan to catch up on any month now.

Whole Hog

2010-10-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Since there’s often a waiting list for such commodities as pasture-raised pork, I went ahead and contacted Liz, our meat farmer, about a whole hog. And what do you know? October is a great time to get a pig. Despite my deep abiding affection for the Little House on the Prairie books, I know next to nothing about what time of year hogs are ready to harvest. Ma and Pa did their hog butchering after the snow was deep, so I guess I was figuring that here in the temperate zones, we at least were supposed to wait for the rains. But no, my pig is just standing around in the yellow-dusty pasture waiting for his fate to meet him.

Along with the “good news” that I’ll need to send a big chunk of change sooner than I thought, Liz asked me two important questions: skinned or scalded? And even more daunting: do I want the offal? Well, heck, I don’t know. Scalding sounds somehow cleaner, until you find out that scalding is what you do when you want to take home the head, skin and lard, none of which seems like something I need in my freezer. So, skinned then. But do I want the offal: the heart, liver, kidneys & who knows what else? Well, honestly, no, I do not. But it seems like a waste to have it thrown away when the nations top chefs are all finding novel ways to serve organ meats. So, okay, we’ll take it and do our best. Worst case the dogs get it, right?

Connecting: 10/10/10

2010-10-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

How do you combine a kid who wants to put on a show and a mom who wants to constantly harp on saving the earth? Put on a show as a 10/10 Global Work Day event! It's so hard to help the kids feel empowered to make a real difference, but seeing their picture in the slideshow on 350.org was a big thrill. I think it's one of the few times I've felt as if all this internet "connectivity" made us feel really connected to something real and important. Plus, it was a bonafide success, in that my neighbor came, and said that he didn't know what the significance of the 350 movement was, but now he could tell his friends. Each one teach one, even if it means you give a party and have to endure the torture of freaking out that too many people will come and you won't have enough food, and then the last minute panic that no one at all will come and you will be forever marked in the eyes of your children as a failure and a social outcast...

Learning Curve

2010-10-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

“Our cow,” as we affectionately call the butcher-paper wrapped parcels in the deep freeze, is nearing the end of its useful life. Its breathing-eating-shitting life ended a while back, when a man called The Harvester arrived in the bucolic rolling hills where this beast reputedly lived a fully realized bovine life. The Harvester proceeded to “harvest” the animal, and deliver it in large chunks to our local butcher, who carved it into smaller chunks and gave it to me to cook for my growing, insatiably hungry kids.

Having spent a crucial period of my young adult life as a vegetarian, I’m a little behind the curve when it comes to the heating to essential temperatures and serving of meats, preferring to rely on precooked sausages for a great deal of our animal protein intake. But the hip eco-eaters are all getting their own deep freezes filled with happily harvested meats, and I’ve got to keep up with the Van Joneses if I want to ever claim the elusive title of eco-mom. So I picked up the little flyers on cooking grass-fed meat and sent a big check to the farmer. (The self-same farmer from whom I bought my fabled twenty-dollar chicken. See June, 2009.)

After I picked up the cow in the minivan and packed it into my freezer, I went on a culinary stampede of the simpler beef dishes: burgers, meatloaf, pot roast. These were universally popular, especially the meatloaf which I made from an old Joy of Cooking recipe which might more aptly be titled Fatloaf, seeing as it contains both ground up bacon and a significant dose of heavy cream. But once the roasts and ground beef were gone, I was out of my league. Somehow, despite having grown up with a constant supply of beef from our own cows, my youthful foray into vegetarianism has left me not having the slightest notion how to cook a steak. My kitchen shelf is packed with vegetarian cookbooks, and when you browse the internet looking for instructions, all the recipes involve a grill, which I don’t have. So I did my best, and the innately carnivorous Mr. Mixed Media ate it no matter what, but The (more discerning) Percussionist quickly began saying, “Steak? Yuck. I don’t like cow.”

This all came to a head last week, when I pulled out two parcels labeled “short ribs.” Well, I thought, people barbeque ribs, so as they thawed I bought a bottle of barbeque sauce and told the excited kiddos we’d have barbequed ribs that night. (I thought I could pull it off on my cast iron stovetop faux-grill.) When I unwrapped the packages, the contents didn’t look like what I was expecting, but I gamely chopped apart the chunks of bone and slathered the pieces in the sauce. I had a huge pile of these cooking just in time to feed my son’s friend before we took him over to his soccer game, but when I placed a couple of the better-looking ones on his plate, he politely began dissecting them without ever touching his mouth with the meat. Then I served up Mr. Mixed Media, who gnawed away with delight, and then The Percussionist, who, more intimate with the cook, picked one up and declared it “disgusting,” to my great disapproval. Bright Eyes hadn’t yet flitted toward the table, so I served a plate for myself and sat down. As I picked past the huge chunk of fat attached to my bone, I bit into a frankly repulsive piece of meat. I immediately apologized to The Percussionist and snatched away the plate from his friend, throwing the scraps to the eager dogs.

We had quesadillas. And Mr. Mixed Media asked for some of the ribs in his lunch the next day, the dear. The dogs have been in heaven all week. Sometimes the learning curve is steep. But I have learned this: (almost) everyone prefers pork. So I’ll look into getting a pig. After all, I’m a single mom now, so I have to bring home the bacon. I just have to work through the remaining mysterious parcels of the cow first. Oh, and maybe buy a carnivore’s cookbook. I’m sure the pig will have some mysterious parcels of its own.

Duh...

2010-09-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

As September approached, I was dreading the start of school. Seriously, even more than Mr. Mixed Media, whose entire vocabulary during the month of August was reduced to seven (and a half) words: “I do not want to go to school, duh.” The Percussionist, on the other hand, was counting down the days in avid anticipation—“I just want to find out what third grade is like.” His enthusiasm for the structure of school quashed my fantasies of just skipping the whole thing, continuing the summer schedule of relaxed long mornings and fluid bedtimes. If one of them is in school, then we have to get up anyway, so I might as well get some kid-free grocery shopping time. But I wasn’t looking forward to the rushed mornings, the last-minute packing of lunches, the picking up and shuttling to after-school activities, just the whole school year routine, which tends to leave me exhausted and cranky, escalating the ceaseless “PLEASE put on your shoes NOW,” like a CD on repeat with the volume slowly turning up.

Early in the summer, my mother presented me with what she thought would be a question requiring some contemplation to answer. She had been reading “green living” exhortations to simplify as a means toward living more sustainably, and she wanted to know what that really would mean. So she asked what would be the biggest thing that would both simplify my life and have ecological benefits. My mouth answered before my brain even registered the question: “Stop all after-school activities.”

“Because of the driving, right?”

“Well, that, but really because when we are running around all afternoon, we are not only driving, we are also away from home.” As the boys would say: Duh, mom. I tried to recover from my self-evident & idiotic previous statement by adding, “So, I don’t get time to work in the garden, or to prepare non-processed suppers, or hang out the laundry. And we end up grabbing non-organic burritos or pizza way too much. And the kids don’t get time to work in their gardens, either, and it defeats the whole purpose of them having gardens if I do their harvesting while they are at school. ”

So, two months later, there I was, dreading the school year, and the “duh, mom” lightbulb went off: extracurricular activities are actually optional! We can just skip them, and afterschool can be a time to hang out and garden and cook and play. Whoa, Nellie! Who knew? It totally rocks. And the kids still haven’t harvested their gardens very well, which means their main crops will be seeds for next year, but we are all so much more relaxed and fun, not to mention well-fed on cooperatively cooked suppers.

So to my own mom, for giving me that “Duh, mom” moment, I owe you a “thanks, Mom.” (Well, duh.)

In praise of legwarmers: final(ly) installment

2010-07-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

In an “Eco-Literacy in Action” workshop last Saturday (sadly, mostly nice folks preaching to the choir, when I could have been out weeding my garden, you know, like “in action”), we talked a lot about the necessity of including tenets of social justice within environmental education. You know, like making sure local organic foods aren’t inaccessible to people without trust funds. Which brought us to the importance of building local communities, which brought me (well, yes, my mind was wandering a bit) right back around to legwarmers. And the schoolyard, my most immediate regularly encountered community, and Chris sitting there on a stump, knitting.

Knitting is a de rigeur activity at my kids’ school. All the kids knit. I, however, do not. But Chris does, and she rocks at it, using large numbers of needles at once, giving the impression that she is fondling a pet porcupine. So of course, when I wanted a new pair of legwarmers, she was the obvious person to ask. She immediately supplied the idea of a much-nicer-than-I-had-in-mind wool, and emailed me several websites with patterns to chose from. And then she sat in the schoolyard working on my legwarmers. Which meant everyone was a part of it, not just me and Chris. Community legwarmers. So when I wore them for crossing guard duty, multiple parents would stick their heads out of their cars to cat-whistle (or, well, at least say “those turned out so great!”). Despite her underestimation of the skinniness of my legs, which meant there was some initial stretching required, the legwarmers from Chris are even cooler and more fun than my other favorite (recycled cotton, stripey, excellent) pair.

So, can legwarmers save the world? Apparently, they can—they meet the strict criteria of being good for individuals, community, and the planet. So, forget Irene Cara, and say it with me: What a feeling!

Better short than never

2010-02-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

(I'm trying very hard to figure out how to write something that's actually an appropriate length for a blog post. There's a reason they don't call them "blog rambles," right?)

Anyway, legwarmers. A great word, almost as comforting as "comforter" and "fireside throw." What could be better then warm legs? When I had my temporary medical-writing job last year, my co-writer and I initially discovered our compatibility by comparing our extremity-warming accessories: I had been given this awesome pair of wrist-warmers and he responded by pulling up his pantsleg to show me the socks he had cut the feet off of so he could pull them up his calves and wear them above his other socks. When I told him that legwarmers are having a comeback and you can actually purchase a pair without yarn falling out of one end, he countered, "Not for men," and I realized he was probably right. Not that I'm in Men's Hosiery that often, but I imagine there aren't the racks of legwarmers that the women's section currently has. We worked in a small room with an inadequate electric heater, but That Didn't Matter because we were warm. Simple, knitted conservation of body heat canceling out our need for electricity (except for, um, our laptops). Since then I've taken to wearing them to bed and haven't even minded turning the heater way down at night (plus, I recently had a revelatory experience when I happened to have them on for an x-ray appointment, and I discovered that they are the absolute must-have accessory if you are forced to don a hospital gown and lie on a cold table). Next time you're in Women's Hosiery, check out how you too can give legwarmers a chance to change your life for the better. I mean, how often is saving the earth this fun?

In praise of legwarmers, part 1 of 3

2009-09-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, ladies, just forget Flashdance. Pretend you never cut the neck out of a sweatshirt so it would casually slip off your shoulder, exposing the straps of your jog bra. Delete from your memory the humiliating scrapbooked candids of you and your friends draped over benches, your legwarmers meticulously “slouched” down your calves. I’m being serious here. Legwarmers are back, hopefully to stay. So don’t avert your eyes…

It’s the first week of September, and finally, my father’s doubts that my Ivy League education was a colossal waste of money can be put to rest. I have become a crossing guard. Every Friday for thirty minutes before the school bell quaintly rings, I now heft my octagonal sign to protect dozens of distracted children from vehicular injury.

As I learn the ins and outs of my new job (big rush at 8:25, be prepared!), one of the things I’m realizing is that wardrobe is an issue. Our school is too small and the traffic too slow to necessitate the provision of a reflective orange vest, so my fashion choices are unimpeded by a uniform. The clothing issue centers more on temperature. Once the rain starts, it will be easy: dress warm. But this time of year, the last gasp of summer, it’s more complex. The days are hot (too hot, hotter than a few years ago? I always ask, I can’t help it), but the mornings are blanketed in a damp woolen marine layer. Were I simply dropping off the kids, a quick kiss and hug before jumping back into the car, I could get away with the thin cotton skirt, t-shirt, and flip-flops that will be de rigeur by pick-up time. But I have to stand unprotected in the crosswalk, covered by the long morning shadow of a scrub oak which prevents the sunrays beginning to break through the fog from reaching my goosepimpled legs.

If I were headed home after crosswalk duty, I’d just wear jeans and a sweatshirt, but I’ve got places to go (car needs maintenance), people to see (helping a friend edit a paper for school), and things to do (set up laptop at teahouse to write latest blog post), so I’m loathe to return to the house for a costume change. Plus, I’m recently single, so I’ve got a compulsive desire to look cute as I run my various errands. The answer to my problem lurks demurely in my sock drawer: legwarmers. Now, those of you who do not live in towns as hippified as mine will probably dispute my “cute” claims, but I SWEAR it worked: the skirt/tee/sandals, with an overlay of zip cardigan and, yes, what you were dreading, legwarmers. I was cozy as a kitten, hanging out in the crosswalk, and then somewhere between the oil change and the teahouse, the legwarmers slipped right off to reveal my appropriate-to-the-heat original outfit.

Now, I’m not usually one to offer up fashion advice to others, but in this one instance, I’m emboldened by the fact that my whole romance with legwarmers was started by Selena, my way way way hipper-than-me friend who gave me the purse I currently carry, which seriously, without fail, elicits a daily “what a cute purse! Where did you get it?” comment from a random stranger. A couple of years ago for Christmas, I talked Selena into bringing her kids over for our annual Christmas Eve dinner party. It was a basic cultural exchange: my kids came to her seder, hers came to our Noche Buena celebration. Despite my “no gifts” insistence, she showed up with a small package, which I opened after we were all stuffed with traditional Cuban holiday fare.

“Wow, thanks!” I politely said, holding up the navy blue ribbed legwarmers. Legwarmers??? Okay, whatever, I thought.

“Wait!” Selena interjected. “Are those legwarmers?”

“Looks like it.”

“Oh, shit, I thought they were tights. I’m SO SORRY,” she moaned.

“No, no, it’s cool. Legwarmers are great, really. I mean, um, I haven’t had a pair in a really long time.”

“Of course you haven’t. They went out of style about 20 years ago. I’m so sorry—I’ll take them back.”

I insisted on keeping them. I mean, what’s the point in having grown up in the south if you can’t insist on keeping a gift you don’t want. “Really, I love them. Thank you.”

And then they went into my sock drawer to languish for a while…

Coming soon: how legwarmers will SAVE THE PLANET, plus, how to build community through legwarmers. (I’m actually dead serious.) So stay tuned…

I really don't spank my kids, I swear

2009-09-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

But if you want to read my theoretical reconsideration of that decision, pick up the current issue of Brain, Child (Fall, 2009).

Summer Vacation: Beech Creek

2009-07-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

After the long baking walk across the drought-crisp field, the air of the creek greets us like, well, like a breath of fresh air. A deep inhalation of the water-cooled air on the shady creek bank suddenly makes those ubiquitous yoga t-shirts make sense: breathe. Ah, yes. The heat in the field has worked everyone into not just bodily sweat, but into anxious and cranky mindset, which instantly lifts under the cool sated trees. We savor one more gulp of calm, then plunge in, ankle-deep in clear cold ripples, mud clouds billowing up under our heels, minnows and crawdads shooting away from our footfalls.

My sons explore the creek with reckless little-boy abandon, not yet having internalized my stuffed-down maternal fears of snapping turtles and copperheads. They earnestly construct piles of stones and rotting leaves to dam off channels between platforms of rock, watching with fascination their own power to affect the water’s route. Sunlight, bright through summer’s lace of leaves, dances madly on the pebbles beneath the surface. A fish appears, slides into shadow. A pencil-thin snake shimmers red-brown against the long grass leaning down into the water. The boys splash after him, scaring him off in their attempts to get a closer look.

I grew up here, the creek my source of private sanctuary for the difficulties of childhood, a place to hide within deep banks, its calm coolness a balm to troubled mind or heart. I come back to this Tennessee valley now each year; each year I unexpectedly receive this healing again. The creek is still here. It has not run dry even with the overdevelopment of the surrounding former farmland, even with the hot dry summer after hot dry summer accumulating. The heron who astounded with his wide span floating between the close banks has gone, but look, the hawks are still perched on the dead trees in the fencerows above the banks. Deer tracks and raccoon prints draw a festive calligraphy along the water’s edge. My children will know this place the way I know it, from before memory begins. Their as yet unblemished faces expose a pure joy in connecting their bodies with this creek.

The creek does not cure my deep anxieties about the changed world my children will live in, but it does give me a moment to feel that it perhaps all is not lost. The small power that they discover today in seeing themselves change the water’s flow will grow with them, and I pray that power will be guided by the love of this place, of clean water and animal tracks and cool green shade. May the creek still be here for them to watch their children disappear around the next curve, curious and safe. May they seek sanctuary here, and breathe.

Overmodified

2009-06-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, a chicken was a chicken, and an egg was an egg, and the answer to which came first simply depended on whether you believed in evolution. Ah, the good old days. Nowadays, the chicken-and-egg business is awash in adjectives and hyphens; something as basic as an egg carton teems with descriptions pointing the unwitting consumer in all sorts of labyrinthine directions. When did everything get so complicated?

I suspect that at some point in the not-too-distant past, the word “natural” actually had a meaning shared by most of the population. In the new millennium, “natural” is a throwaway—you have to add “all-“ to wring any value at all from it, and it’s still pretty parched. As our choices have expanded, and sustainability in agriculture has begun to enter the popular consciousness, we are barraged by the marketing of “natural” foods, nowhere more apparent than in the egg aisle. But as more and more people want foods produced by humane and earth-friendly methods, the supply doesn’t seem to meet the demand. Those truly all-natural hens can’t lay fast enough. Enter the funhouse of the modifier.

There was always large, extra-large, and jumbo, the egg-producers having beat Starbucks in the race to label everything as superlative by several generations. And white or brown. That used to be the extent of it, two simple decisions, size and aesthetic preference. Now there are moral decisions to be hashed out as you choose between free-range, cage-free, Omega three, family-farmed, no-gmo, veggie-fed, hormone-free, organic, locally-owned, antibiotic-free, artisan-made, sweatshop-free…(oops, I think I got out of the egg cooler just there at the end). What with the large and fine print cluttering the egg cartons, it’s no wonder there’s usually a bottleneck right at the egg section of my local grocer, as my fellow bewildered customers try to figure out if Susie’s Family Farm or Paradise Organics is the right choice. Does Susie treat her workers well, we wonder? Has Paradise been bought out by some major evil corporation? Are ANY chickens ever given hormones, or are the egg folks just borrowing a bit of anxiety-calming rhetoric from the red-meat folks? And does any of it really make a difference to the chickens?

From an aesthetic and ethical standpoint, I want to buy eggs and meat from chickens that were raised the way I picture chickens in my mind, strolling about the farmyard magically unmolested by attentive herding dogs. These chickens populate my toddler’s cardboard books in plenty, pecking at the green tufts of grass with their chicks trailing behind. These chickens look happy, expressing their inner “chicken-ness” by partaking of the activities dictated by their natures: scratching, catching bugs, and whatever else a self-realized chicken does. In a real world, these enlightened chickens would even lay eggs with naturally high amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids and would be resistant to disease because they are healthy and unconfined, living out the picture that “free-range” produces in my mind.

I found some of these storybook chickens last summer at the farmer’s market set up in the parking lot of our town plaza. The fairytale farmer was youthfully handsome and idealistic, flaunting a notebook filled with photos of the hens wandering his acreage, basking in the sunshine and freedom of sustainable farming methods. I gushed with excitement: finally, food I could feel unreservedly good about feeding my children! I happily handed over an exorbitant $5 for a dozen guilt-free eggs and started to walk away, but was lured back by the perfect poultry in the pictures. “Do you happen to have any broilers?” I ventured. “Just one left,” he grinned. He hoisted the sole remaining chicken out of his freezer and looked at the label on it: “Four pounds, okay with you?” I returned his wide-open smile as I handed him a twenty, taking the chicken and dropping it into an old plastic bag as I joked, “Can’t you find a bigger one in there?” pointing to the now-empty freezer. There is an awkward pause after he pocketed the bill I had just given him and said, “Thanks. Hope to see you again.” I was still smiling politely, waiting for the change he did not seem to be getting for me. In my unsureness about how to handle the situation, my eyes scanned the booth, and only then did I actually read the little chalkboard which gave the prices of his various vegetables, listing at the end: chicken, $5/lb. Four pounds at five bucks a pound, shit, that’s TWENTY DOLLARS! I had just bought a twenty dollar chicken, and I was way too embarrassed to hand it back after I had been falling all over myself telling him about how great it was that he’s doing all the right things, how I wished more people were doing it like him. I grinned one last time to cover my confusion and regret, and turned away, swinging the bag with the $20 chicken from one hand.

Now bereft of cash, I wandered away from the produce stalls over toward the lawn where several families were picnicking. My own kids were clamoring around in the general mélange of children, and I stopped by to check on them and say hi to the other parents. At each blanket I held up the paltry-seeming bag and flatly announced, “I just bought a $20 chicken,” my shock temporarily trumping the embarrassment I would start to feel shortly.

The sheer indulgence of having spent twenty dollars on one scrawny chicken weighed on my stereotypically middle-class scale of guilt, but it was balanced by the fact that I realized it probably represents the true amount of money a chicken is worth in the world that I, with my liberal ideals, would wish into existence if I had the requisite power to do so. In a world where all workers are paid fair wages to ensure a decent standard of living, in a world where the chickens are outside of their efficient “cage-free” warehouses actually eating wild insects and acres of grass instead of processed chicken feed with its list of suspect ingredients, in a world where the farmer values sustaining the earth over profits, a chicken would cost at least $20. My $20 chicken would probably be in the bargain basement of such a world.

I had to admit, to my untrained palate, fed for years on plump “free-range” roasters that probably never saw sunlight, my $20 chicken tasted pretty bargain basement: rangy and a little tough. Probably, just as with grass-fed beef, truly free-range chicken requires we adjust our cooking methods as well as our taste buds. I’d be happy to make the adjustments, I’m just not sure I can afford it. The “right” solution here would probably be to do some math: figure out how much I spend on chicken and use the same amount to buy only this truly sustainable version. Which would mean less chicken, but less guilt. Or I could raise my own free-ranging fowl in my back yard, an option I considered only until I mentioned it to my city-bred partner, who laid down a clear line in the chicken scratch: if we got chickens, we could eat their eggs but not them. No neck-wringing chez nous. I made a half-hearted attempt to woo my partner into the possibility of setting up our own slaughter house. “Coq au vin,” I murmured seductively. “Poulet provencal.” No go. She usually swoons when I speak French to her, but somehow my murderous plot wasn’t having the same effect as romantic renderings of lines from Jules et Jim.

I loved that she gave me this out, since although chicken is my kids’ favorite meal, and I do want us to eat in the most sustainable way possible, I was already developing a sense of dread about the moment of killing itself. Wring or chop? Of course, my pint-sized barbarians would probably love the literal sight of the proverbial headless chicken. In one of my most vivid memories of my semi-agrarian childhood, the seeming impossibility of that flapping, running bird-sans-head provoked my older brother to a hurricane of laughter. I recall inching backwards, fascinated but afraid, even though the bird’s main weapon was lying still attached to the tiny head near our chopping block. So I’m not in denial that the meat we eat comes from creatures that once lived and breathed, it’s just that I’d rather outsource the slaughter function. Back to the butcher counter for me, where I’ll have to grapple with my conscience and my wallet both.

While I’ve been trying to figure out the chicken conundrum, we’re eating a lot of eggs, without reading a lot of fine print. I’ve recently discovered that I can buy eggs from a neighbor, cheaper than the market eggs, packaged in battered recycled cartons festooned with adjectives no longer tied to the particular eggs within. These eggs, with their irregular sizes, muted palette of blues, greens and tans, and bits of straw still stuck underneath, feel somehow more real than the grocery store version, those homogeneous soldiers lined up ready to march through USDA inspections. With the homegrown version, I don’t need a barrage of modifiers to soothe my maternal health concerns, my environmental anxiety, and my animal welfare fears--the chicken herself was underfoot as I climbed up the neighbor’s porch steps to see how many extras they had today, and she looked plenty happy and healthy to me.

I guess the only thing that could be better would be that family-run, collaboratively-built, no-slaughter, egg-only, recycled-materials, beyond-organic, fully guilt-free henhouse I haven’t given up planning. I’ve got some old boards behind the garage. But until I find the time for a construction project, you’ll find me and the kids walking down the road to the neighbor’s, bringing our empty egg cartons for a refill. And as we walk past fennel and blackberry, Queen Anne’s lace and wild mustard flowers, for a while, life seems simple again.

Prop 8 tidbit

2009-06-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

You can read my response to the prop 8 brouha in this week's Northern California Bohemian.

Fishing for answers

2009-05-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

Um, it's been over a month since I posted the fish stories, and it only just now occurred to me that I had never posted the link to the list itself, which was kind of the whole point. Oooops. To be a totally righteous consumer of marine life, go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium website where you can customize your list by what region you live in or hook into online versions accessible from one of those handheld devices everyone seems to have now... Oh, I guess I could have just added the link into the previous posts, but that really would have been pushing the limits of my techno-savvy, since I'm really a Luddite by inclination.

Check out the Dilemmas Project

2009-04-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

And, of course, my contribution: http://thedilemmasproject.com/?page_id=5. And yes, I realize I need a different photo.

Fish Story, part 2

2009-04-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

BACK when I was a vegetarian full-time, eating out was all about pasta primavera. Usually offensively bland despite the fact that its preeminence on restaurant menus was entirely determined by its wimpy inability to offend, the ubiquitous “pasta of spring” made eating out a rather dull prospect in any season.

BOY, have times changed. My town is chock-full of recovering vegetarians gorging themselves on the local livestock. Here in northern California, folks are now as likely to request gluten-free choices as they are to require meatlessness. Trying to cover both bases, the Seafood House lists the new, improved pasta primavera: butternut squash risotto. Perhaps not manageable for vegans, but what self-respecting vegan would go eat at the Seafood House anyhow? Clearly, I’ll get the risotto.

NEVERTHELESS, I pull out The List, the one I carry around to help me make intelligent, informed choices if the boys ask for fish. (And they do! You have never seen children with such a yen for slabs of raw fish. They actually get offended when I order the kind lying atop a compact glob of sticky rice. “More fish! Less grains!” they beg, unaware of just how many hours I would have to work to pay for the meal they envision, in which they eat until sated “just the fish” with no belly-filling rice at all. Clearly, nature, in the form of a genetic predisposition to crave sushi, has come out once again the victor over nurture, since these little heathens are being raised by someone who has completely internalized the Aquarium’s anti-fish-consumption propaganda.) The List tells me which kinds of fish are being overfished, which contain the highest levels of PCBs and mercury, and which are farmed using ecodestructive methods. I’m fooling myself, but I’m thinking today may be the day I plunge back into the consumption of marine life. I’ve had a LOT of butternut squash risotto and ravioli in the past few years.

SUE, with her clear love for seafood, is not one to be intimidated by a piece of paper. Nor to be embarrassed by eating at the Seafood House with a clearly over-zealous dissector of menu options. Sue is all for The List, as long as she can still eat whatever she wants. “Tell me what it says about clams,” she proposes, with the added warning, “but don’t tell me that I can’t eat the crab.” We talk through the pros and cons of a few of the appetizers listed, before the server appears, pad and pen poised for our order.

“UM, hey, before we order, can I ask a few questions?” I sheepishly blurt. Our server lets the pen droop limp in her hand, raising one eyebrow as she glumly acquiesces to the inquisition. I’m comparing the menu and The List, looking at the Fish-n-Chips with nostalgia for a long-ago trip to England. The List says that I can have the Fish-n-Chips as long as the cod is from the Pacific, which happens the be the ocean conveniently located only 20 minutes from here, so I’m thinking this one will be easy. “So, um, can you tell me where your cod comes from? Please?”

THE server thins her lips into an approximation of a smile, thrusts her chin forward, and answers crisply, “The ocean. Ha ha ha.” The laugh forced out in a transparent attempt to pretend she is not just plain fed up with my kind. When I persist, matching her own forced laughter with a faked chortle of my own, her face twitches with what appears to be a willful effort not to roll her eyes. She exhales slowly before reciting the flat words: “The cod is Atlantic cod. Next question?”

WHAT’S a girl to do? Keep pressing on in the face of clear indifference, or even resistance? I don’t think I’m educating the server, or pressing the restaurant to offer more sustainable options at this point, I’m just proving to her that all this fuss about fish is annoying. I venture out once more, asking if the clams are farmed or wild-caught, and the server claims her moment of superiority with apparent glee: “ALL shellfish in restaurants are farmed, it’s the law,” she gloats, the subtext of “oh you think you’re such a smarty-pants with your List, don’t you, and you don’t even know something like that” shining through her now-genuine smirk. The List drops from my once-righteous hand into my purse, defeated for now. Sue orders her seafood pasta, satisfied that it’s at least partially List-approved.

THE risotto is delicious and almost (but not quite) too filling to allow me to order the beignets for dessert. Sue listens to my confessions of human weakness, slaps me back onto the straight and narrow path, and pays up as we look around and realize we’re the only people left besides the regulars gathered at the bar, a familial group entwining the server and the bartender into their midst. They barely nod our direction as we press the glass door open onto the grey-lit sidewalk. The Seafood House doesn’t really want us back again.

BUT knowing my boys, we’ll end up there sooner or later, and then The List, wielded by eco-mom in defense of her minnows, will prevail. “We’ll be back,” I murmur, as the door slams shut behind me.

Fish Story, part 1

2009-04-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

SO Sue invites me out for dinner, or in the common parlance of the land where I come from, “supper.” This is a good thing, as I’m struggling with various ethical dilemmas and Sue somehow usually manages to be both nonjudgmental and hard-assed. I helped her with some editing she needed, so she’s both buying and listening. Not one to be particular (ha!), I suggest that she choose the restaurant. I figure this will allow her some control over how much she’s shelling out for my supper, especially since I always want dessert. She zings me an email: “Okay, see you at the Seafood House then, 8 o’clock.”

OF course it has to be the Seafood House. I don’t eat seafood.

I used to eat seafood, having gone so far as to opt out of true and legal vegetarianism for months after I (falsely) claimed the title, because I just couldn’t bear the thought of giving up sushi. Then one day, magically (or possibly having to do with my soy-fueled psyche), the fish-lust was gone. Kaput. Over. It’s not like I suddenly saw my own consciousness reflected in their little slimy faces and couldn’t bring myself to eat another sentient being, I just lost the taste for it. I became one of those people who likes to go “out for sushi” and orders a bunch of seaweed-wrapped vegetables having little to no resemblance to actual raw fish.

I remained a vegetarian for a decade, but since the turn of the millennium, my formerly righteous plant-based diet has been slowly replaced by a drop-in freezer full of local, organic, free-to-roam, grass-finished (and every other justifying adjective you can think of), but only tangentially plant-based food. Plant-based insofar as the cow and the pig in there ate the plants.

GIVEN the apparent completeness of my dietary backsliding, what kind of beef could I possibly have with seafood? Shouldn’t I be back at the sushi bar full-force? Well, I might be, were it not for an ill-timed stop into the movie room at the Aquarium when I thought it might be nice to sit and watch a movie for a while instead of standing and watching the fish. The movie room was a trap. And as a nonseafood eater, I was primed to take in the horrors of the documentary about bi-catch, over-fishing, and toxic metals without the defense mechanisms I assume would be standard equipment in someone who felt any need to justify the fish-n-chips they ate last night.

SO I bought it all, hook, line and sinker, if you will. And although I occasionally let the kids eat carefully selected seafood items (wild Alaskan salmon, farmed catfish, sardines), I’ve never reclaimed my long lost love for dining on marine life. It all just tastes a bit too, well, fishy to me.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2: Will Sue toss Kenna out on her ass for ranting too much about sustainable fisheries? Or will they make it through the evening without anyone going overboard? (couldn’t resist that last pun, sorry)

A million tiny things

2009-03-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

If you're curious about the title of the blog, check out the genesis of my "milllion tiny things" mantra here (one installment from my "home eco-nomics" column in the now-defunct mamazine): http://www.mamazine.com/Pages/column188_aid28.html.

Eternal questions

2009-03-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe my imagination is held captive by an entire childhood of Sunday mornings spent in linoleum-floored fluorescent-lit rooms, construction paper cutout arks plastering eggshell-painted drywall, well-meaning matrons reading from an illustrated book of Bible stories. But I like to think that it probably has more to do with the recurring template of editorial page cartoons: loopy black lines across the bottom of the frame, a cloudbank floor upon which perches a podium. Behind the podium, the parabolic downcurve of a barred gate swoops from misty towers of yet more clouds. Just two characters comprise the scene--a bushily white-bearded, berobed gentleman consults a ledger, while a supplicant beseeches him with tensely raised shoulders and desperate eyes. The punchline changes from politician to politician, but the basic set-up remains stable: judgment day.

Technically, I don’t believe in judgment day. I certainly don’t believe that some man standing in the sky will tally me up into black and red columns and come up with a final number that determines my eternity. I don’t even really believe in ‘karma’ the way it is generally understood by the people I hear using the word, that what-goes-around-comes-around. The way I see it, if bad people were always punished for bad acts, we wouldn’t need a criminal justice system. If good people were always rewarded for good acts, we’d all be out there dumping our wallets into the outstretched palms of the homeless man on the shoulder of the offramp, instead of averting our eyes and pulling our cars forward, craning our necks into oncoming traffic to move quickly past the question he asks us: are you kind, or stingy, or pretending to yourself that you gave at the office? His question lingers, despite my agnostic approach to the justice of fate, as if underneath what I think I believe there lurks Saint Peter, or perhaps just Santa, ticking off the columns, and asking each time: good or bad, which are you?

I know I’m asking myself this question a lot these days. Am I good because I don’t hit my kids when I’m at the end of my rope or bad because I growl viciously at them from between clenched teeth? Good for buying produce from a local farm or bad for succumbing to the temptation of shipped-from-Mexico bananas? Good for carpooling or bad for driving a 19-mpg minivan in the first place? Good for being aware of the environmental impacts of my decisions, or bad for continuing to live within the template of an unsustainable culture?

In the ledger of my self-esteem, the ‘bad’ column gets the most ink. I try to give myself credit for what I’m doing right, but the value of my stumbling stepwise efforts breaks down when I look at my daughter, just crossing the border between babyhood and girlhood. I think about her adulthood, and then I think about her children and the world they will inherit from me. I can see their questioning eyes settling onto myself, by then white-haired and obstinate, distilled into my purest form by time. They are wondering why we didn’t do more. In this scenario, the difficulty I have now in avoiding plastics, overly processed foods, and made-in-China non-essentials seems an indulgence, pure luxury, almost a bad joke--the irrationality of human behavior seen through the telescopic lens of hindsight, 40 years of climate change from now.

So I guess I do believe in judgment day, that day in the unseen future when I will have to look at my grandchildren and justify the choices I’m making today. I can already hear my excuses, my rationalizations, my attempts to explain to them how it all seemed kind of unreal, how we all thought that someone else was responsible, that some government scientist would fix it, that recycling and biofuels would be enough. They will not understand, they will point to the history books which tell them that all the information was available to us for so long, and so widely broadcast. They will tilt their curious heads and with heartbreaking innocence hang the word heavily on my guilty conscience: why? Why couldn’t you see? Why didn’t you act?

There are many answers to their questions. Denial, laziness, denial, inertia, and denial being a few. But there’s also the fact that in the now, without the clarity of hindsight, the proper course of action doesn’t always seem clear. Within a changing world, how do we know what is good and what is bad? Case in point: what should I do with my tax refund, put it aside in the solar panels fund or add it to the kids’ college savings? Will my kids need more education to prosper in a rapidly mutating culture (college fund), or does book-learning matter less on a frying planet (solar panels)? And shouldn’t I place the needs of everyone (solar panels) ahead of the needs of a few (college fund)? But won’t everyone need well-educated leaders to help through the transition (college fund)? Do we triage the immediate crisis of carbon emissions (solar panels) as more urgent than the potentially drug/alcohol/sex-wasted four years of the undergraduate experience? Where is the compass pointing toward “right?”

I have a great desire to be able to look into my grandchild’s face and say: we tried. We did what we could. We did our best. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to. This very morning I took a hot shower, quickly washed my hair and body, and then stood under the steaming stream of water--water pumped out of the ground by electricity and heated by burning natural gas. I stood there, the hot cascade pouring into my stiff shoulders, waiting for the ratio of pleasure to guilt to reach a tipping point which would make me crank the valves closed. I turned them off sooner than I wanted to, later than I should have.

My friends say to me, “You do a lot. Cut yourself some slack,” but I’m not so sure that I really do “a lot.” More than many, less than some; either way, probably not enough from my grandchildren’s perspective. How much is enough, and how do we know? I am haunted by one of the closing scenes in Schindler’s List, where Oscar Schindler looks at his car, his ring, all the things he kept, and regrets aloud how many more lives he could have saved had he given those things up. I ask myself: in what ways could I do more, sacrifice more; in what ways could I probably do more without even really sacrificing anything of importance to me? How much more would I have to do to get on the “good” list?

If I had a conclusion, I wouldn’t be writing this. I am living in this swamp of questions, searching for solid ground where my feet can rest, exhausted from kicking to keep my mouth above the murky surface. But when I reach my toes down, they simply encounter more slimy mud, sucking me down, down to where I’m afraid I won’t be able to breathe. I stay up by wriggling a constant compromise: put half the money into a socially and environmentally screened mutual fund for the future, half into savings for the solar upgrade. And in this way I keep swimming, my head just out of the muck, as I search for dry land, or at least water clear enough for me to know whether I am good, or bad, or pretending that what I’m doing is enough. I keep treading water in hopes that a bright sun will come out and shine on a newly posted sign, marking “this way” toward righteousness.