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2012: A Sink Odyssey

If you have come to see that the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth while others do not, the End of the World has come for you. For the world as it was for you has indeed ended.”

From Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell

We had a sink problem recently. I had some work done in our garage that was supposed to fix one problem, but led to the sink problem.

Our old utility sink, into which our washing machine drained its cycles, had to be disconnected to complete the work that was supposed to fix the original problem. When it came time to reconnect it, the fittings were so old, they crumbled and needed to be replaced. The original thingies (technical term) to which you connect the sink are over sixty years old. Let’s just say that the interface with new materials was not compatible. Kind of like trying to hook up a manual typewriter to a wireless printer.

Well, not quite as bad as that, but close.

Our options were to find a way to connect the sink, or sink (so to speak) more money into drilling and cutting our way into the pipes to let the washing machine cycle drain.

Tom was eventually able to reconnect the sink. He is one of those men who combines a highly developed artistic sensibility (he’s an amazing composer) with a roll-up-his-sleeves ability to master common, and not so common, home repairs.

I am, in some ways, responsible for the odyssey. The person I hired to fix the original problem had found me wandering bewildered through Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) looking for a thingie (again, technical term) that would make the thing you use to turn the water on and off for the hose outside fit the thing it was supposed to screw into.

He presented himself as a fixer of problems, down on his luck, who would fix things cheaply. He seemed nice enough and knowledgeable enough that I convinced myself he could do the job in our garage, which involved laying cement.

To make a long story sort of short, he scheduled then rescheduled the work because of doctors’ appointments, upped his estimate the day he showed up to start the job, kind of did the job, it kind of led to the other problem, and he was indeed down on his luck—so far that a dark cloud hung over him.

He told me that the fittings didn’t match, instructed me on what I needed to get from OSH (the place in which he found me floundering, let’s not forget) so he could reconnect the sink, then went to his car to go to another job.

He couldn’t get his car into gear. It was frozen in park.

He was clearly freaked out. He needed the car for work so he could pay for his medical bills which had mounted up since he lost his job and so his medical insurance.

I called AAA, used my card to get his car started, watched him drive off, and decided that perhaps keeping him away from our garage might be a wise decision.

Let me be clear. Tom did not blame me for any of the fallout from my attempt to “fix” the problem.

And, while I don’t exactly feel I am at fault for the cascading events of fix-it folly I do see something that has lurked in my psyche—a bit of a demon really—that leads me down a questionable road.

I sort of felt sorry for our fix-it guy. I told myself that, well, these times call for us to cover each other’s backs. He needed work. I needed it done economically. He gave me an estimate. I believed him.

A warning bell went off when he had to reschedule, and then rang again when he raised his estimate just as he started the job. But the demon whispered to me that this was as good as it was going to get. And I listened to the demon. My bad.

Now, here is where I see progress in my life—stay with me, I think this will make sense.

For much of my early life, my relationships were based on decisions much like the one I made about Mr. Fix-it. I made excuses for behavior impelled by mortal emotional wounds, believed we had mutually invested in working towards a healthy, loving relationship, then thought this was as good as I could get when it became clear that our ideas of investment were not—shall we say—equitable. I was the one who tended to have the AAA card in case of emergency, for example.

This was my MO for romantic as well as friendship relationships.

I woke up when I was 40 and thought, “Hmmmm. I seem to be doing something wrong here.”

That’s when Tom came into my life, and I discovered what it was like to be with someone who cherished me. We’ve definitely had our rough spots—we are, after all strong personalities. But underneath it all, we cherish each other. And because I am cherished, I have learned to extend that requirement to other relationships.

I am learning that I don’t have to give my heart away to have the open heart I need to live my life fully.

I think that demon got towed away by AAA to the land of junker demons.

Which brings me back to Joseph Campbell’s quote. This might be too much of a leap, but what the hell.

That demon had the influence he did because I wanted someone or something else (God) to rescue me from my own life. The voice of that demon was a compilation of “truths” that were bequeathed to me by well-meaning family members, and reinforced by a social zeitgeist that enforced the rule that one must mold oneself into an image of God that existed out there—somewhere—and existed without any connotation of what it meant to be human.

Trying to find the divine out there is a fruitless search. It happens here, inside us and in the beauty of the world around us.

2012. That’s the year the world is supposed to end according to the Aztec calendar. Or so people believe that’s what the Aztec calendar predicts.

I think, perhaps for me, the world as I knew it has come to an end. It was a world of shame for being human—for not knowing.

This new world is about stumbling through life to discover what life is to me.

The end of the world ain’t so bad.

Our sink odyssey led us to purchase a new sink. I love our new sink. It brightens up the garage.

People ask, ‘When will the Kingdom come?’ The Kingdom will not come by expectation. The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men don’t see it.”

Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas

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Beans and Meatballs and the Pink Stuff

My mother was not known for her cooking. She wasn’t a bad cook, she just approached it as she did her housekeeping—a duty for which she had no calling. One of her signature dishes was beans and meatballs.

My mother’s recipe for Beans and Meatballs
Soak a package of dried pinto beans for however long
Add the right amount of water, then turn up the heat ‘til the water boils
(Make sure you use a pot big enough for this)
You might want to turn the heat down to medium highish or so at this point
(Make sure you cover the pot)
Add salt and pepper to a pound of hamburger meat
Turn it into meatballs (whatever size you want)
Add the meatballs to the pot of beans
(Before the beans are done cooking)
Slather margarine on a piece of white bread
(Use Wonder bread if you can afford it)
Place the margarined bread on a plate and cover it with the beans and meatballs when the meat is cooked through.
Note: do not use butter. Butter tastes too rich.
(To emphasize what you mean by this, stick out your tongue as if to
show the coating of butter that lingers there, and say, “Bleah.”)

I can’t begin to tell you how satisfying this dish was on a cold, rainy night as we sat in front of the TV watching Captain Satellite.

My father was actually a better cook than was my mother. He would take over the duties when a strike or work drought left him at home while my mother worked. We would have hamburgers with walnuts mixed into the meat because—well because the walnuts were there and he thought it was an interesting idea. It was.

My mother’s mother had recipes galore. When she was in her nineties, living in a senior apartment (living by herself for the first time in her life), she boasted, “The manager says I keep my house better than most.”

But my mother—not so much. She had a wooden trivet emblazoned with the statement:

My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”

It hung on our kitchen wall. I don’t think it ever got used as a trivet.

My mother didn’t have a career so much as she had jobs outside the home—pink collar jobs that she hoped would catapult her into the world of power she imagined men had because they got to spend their days outside the home.

Those pink-collar jobs did not land her there because the power she imagined the men had—well, they didn’t really have it either.

I think what she was looking for was an expression of self. The workplace was not set up for that for either men or women.  But men did have a patriarchal power—women couldn’t get credit in their own name, for example, no matter whether they brought home a paycheck.

My grandmother never worked outside the home. Everyone thought that was just fine with her. The oldest of nine, she was matriarch to her siblings and their children. Family was everything to her I always heard.

When she turned 90, I recorded her life story. “I really wanted to be a telegrapher,” she told me. “But there were nine of us at home so I thought it was time I got out to the farm and set up house with John.” She was 18.

And so, with a vengeance, setting up house became her life’s work.

I think that was a recipe my grandmother gave to my mother—a recipe of sacrificing one’s selfhood for marriage, as if the choice were one or the other.

Because the recipe had been handed down to her, my mother advised me in my late teens that I should not know myself too well, or I would never be able to mold myself enough to marry someone.

Anyone who knew my mother is surprised when I tell this part of her story. She seemed so much her own person. And, she was. But somewhere, buried inside her, encoded on her DNA, was the belief that women had to sacrifice themselves if they wanted home and family—they had to disappear their heart’s and soul’s desires.

That was the heart of my conflict with my mother. She wanted more for her self, she admired me for striving for more for my self, but it scared her when I began to respond to my heart’s and soul’s desires.

I began to feel entitled to my self.

It was a not a recipe the family had ever tried before.

It was a conflict that reared its head just before she died; we did not resolve it. After seven years, there are moments I mourn that she did not, could not, give me her blessing before she left.

I think that might be the way it is between mother and daughter: we need her to bless the recipe we choose to follow.

The other dish my mother made that I loved was her Thanksgiving special—a dish I came to associate with Thanksgiving. I called it the Pink Stuff because it was pink and tasted pink—not airhead pink like cotton candy—but luscious pink-rose pink. It included cherry Jell-O, cream cheese, pecans, and cranberries. I think that’s all the ingredients. But I don’t know for sure and I don’t know the portions and I don’t have a clue how to put it together.

I don’t know where the recipe for the Pink Stuff is. It got lost somewhere when we cleaned out her house.

So the Pink Stuff will have to remain her unique dish, one I cannot duplicate. I miss it. It is the empty place at the table that once was hers.

I did create my own recipe for beans and meatballs. My mother tried it and liked it. She said I had a way of taking a recipe and making it my own.

My recipe for beans and meatballs
Sauté one small onion (chopped finely) with a handful of pine nuts
Combine ½ pound of ground beef with ½ pound of ground pork
Add a cup of ricotta cheese to the meat
Mix in the sautéed onion and pine nuts
Add some finely chopped fresh rosemary
Let sit if you want for an hour or overnight, but you don’t have to
Form the meatballs (keep them on the small side)
Brown the meatballs on all sides until golden brown
Remove meatballs from the pan
Put an 8-ounce can of chopped tomatoes into the pan (open the can and empty the contents)
Add a cup of red wine
Raise to a boil then turn to medium high
Add the meatballs and cook until they are well done
Heat a can of white beans (any kind you like–again, open the can and empty the contents)
To the beans add garlic
Toast some dried thyme
When the beans are done, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with the toasted thyme
Place the meatballs and beans in separate serving dishes on the table
(I place the meatballs on the trivet that says, “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”)
and let your guests do with them as they may

Note: I think I gave you all the ingredients and methods. If not, improvise!

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Unconventional Wisdom

The trees are bare outside my Writing Shed. Four small birds share a thin branch. Persimmons hang like ornaments from another tree. It is my California home’s version of winter.

Winter is actually the beginning of things – the time when light returns. I heard once that as the sun goes into Capricorn, the moon goes into Cancer, calling to the seeds planted deep in the earth that it is time for them to wake up and start their journey of growth.

That is how it feels to me, this time of year – like something is calling me to wake up and start a new journey.

I was thinking as I sat staring at the blank screen – we need rain. And then I thought well, yes, that is what I need. To end my dry spell.

I have a fantasy that I have this audience out there that has been waiting with bated breath for my return – who wonder why I stopped writing right after I posted a blog about getting women writers out of the corner — over six months ago.

I wish I knew why I did. I certainly started many posts. But none of them seemed to find their way. The blogs I started included: about a bowl filled with plastic fetuses at my local Farmer’s Market on “Family” night; the reaction to the movie The Help; that what America means to me was formed by the civil rights movement – and all its successors; about the death of a high school friend who gave up his law practice and became a teacher at our former high school; about the two “young” people who had a booth at the local Farmer’s Market that displayed the poster of Obama with a Hitler moustache; about the death of Steve Jobs.

Each time, after starting to write, I felt the need to remain silent — that more would be revealed in time.

I think it was a decision. I continued to write in my journal and started writing a story. None of it was for publication. At least not yet.

And, then, this morning it became clear to me that what had been rattling around in my writer’s soul was an increasing awareness of my mortality. Not so much a fear of death. More, the unmistakable reality that life will leave me some day.

My family lives long lives. My uncle died last year at 100. My grandmother lived to 99. Her father lived to 106.

I could have close to another 40 years of life.

On the other hand, my mother died at 83 and my father at 77.

I could have somewhere between 15 and 20 years of life.

My high school friend returned from a hunting trip feeling ill, went to sleep and died of a heart attack.

He was my age.

I’ve already had six more years than Steve Jobs had.

The point is, I don’t know — we don’t know — when Death will come knocking.

So that leaves me with: how do I spend my days? In fear, or making them count?

Not surprisingly, I want to make them count.

Yet Fear hangs in the air these days, nourished by political forces that seek power as an antidote for their own fear: “Push the unworthy in front of the speeding train to prove your own worthiness—in the eyes of God.”

It can make you want to stay curled up in a seed underneath the earth. I already started unfurling myself from the seedpod, so too late for staying curled up.

During my months of silence, I read a book about cave paintings in the south of France. The oldest are 32,000 years old – those discovered in the late 90s in Chauvet. The Lascaux paintings – discovered during World War II – date back to 14,000 years ago. The author noted that the culture of cave painters lasted for some 18,000 years. He also noted that like everyone else who visited the cave paintings, he came away altered, changed in some profound way – almost unnerved.

It gave me a perspective on time, including my time. Conventional wisdom says that in the days of Google, staying silent for so much as a month can lead to death by Google contempt. I’m hoping that I was following unconventional wisdom, that there is time and room for silence even in the day of the Internet.

I started this blog in May of 2009 to change my story.  I think that taking myself out of the corner was the end of my old story — that in the silence I found my way to the beginning of my new story.

I received an email from WordPress that linked me to my 2011 statistics. I was surprised to see how few blog entries I had posted (7) and surprised to discover that nevertheless, my audience had included folks from pretty much around the world.

I think that My Writing Shed is my cave – the place where I allow my story to unfold. And, hopefully, it is a place where others discover my story and find a connection to their own.

Here’s to more story in 2012.

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No One Puts Baby in the Corner

It’s true. In loss there is gain. Closing down 4th Street Studio freed up a bookcase for my writing shed, where the floor had started to serve double duty as a place to stack books.

I put the bookcase in the southeast corner of the shed, and then pondered which books would find a home there. I had thought about putting books by women writers in one place. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to fully execute that plan.

So, I culled through my books, selected those written by women, and placed them in the new bookcase. They filled three shelves.

I stood by the door and gazed over my rediscovered floor. I looked at the bookcase that covers the back wall, the one that faces me as I enter my writing shed. I looked to the southeast corner, pleased that I had executed my plan to have women writers in one place.

I turned, opened the door, stepped into my garden, and closed the door behind me. With the click of the latch, I realized I had put women writers in the corner.

Thanksgiving, 1960. I was eleven, so was my cousin Patty. We had dinner at her house, the only child of my Aunt Lucille, my mother’s older sister. Our two families lived in the same town.

Patty and I had been gleeful before dinner because it was my brothers’ week to do the dishes. There were two of them, one to wash and one to dry. That’s how we did it at my house. One of us always had the week off. These were the days before we had dishwashers.

It was as we were finishing the last bites of whipping-cream-laden pumpkin pie that the sword fell on us. My aunt told my brothers to go out and play, brought Patty and me into the kitchen and ordered us to do the dishes.

“This is what a woman’s lot in life is,” she said as the piles of dishes, glasses, greasy pans, serving platters, bowls, silverware, and cooking utensils loomed over us. “Get used to it.”

My brothers went out to play, my parents and aunt and uncle moved to the living room where they sipped cocktails, and Patty and I sat at the kitchen table, arms folded, furious with a ferocity that our eleven-year old bodies could barely contain.

I don’t remember doing the dishes. But I have a visceral memory of those moments Patty and I sat with the ferocity of our folded arms — it was my first experience with impotent rage.

The message had been dutifully delivered to me by my aunt: domestic life was a drudgery to which women were chained by divine decree. To step outside it was to betray the sacrifice generations of women in my family had made: the nourishment of their spirits.

My aunt’s resentment for her sacrifice came across loud and clear. If giving up the nourishment of her spirit was good enough for her, then by god, it was good enough for my cousin and me. Impotent rage was what defined us as women – it was the tie that bound us together.

I think I was in my thirties before I discovered the joy of creating a home, cooking a dinner, sharing it with guests. I even have come to learn there is pleasure in cleaning up after a meal – learned that it can be the period at the end of a well-written sentence.

What has been more of a learning curve to me is feeling entitled to nourishing my spirit.  Writing, for me, comes from my spirit – that animating energy that allows me to experience my life in this unique human body called Karen Hogan. It is that spirit, that animating energy, that leaves when we die, so to not nourish it is to – well, I think it’s a sin to not nourish it.

When I first saw Dirty Dancing, I was a little embarrassed when Patrick Swayze confronts Jennifer Grey’s father (the wonderful Jerry Orbach), tells him, “No one puts Baby in the corner,” then leads her to the stage where they dance a dance that revels in the joy of bodies moving to music.

I wasn’t embarrassed the last time I watched it, just a few months ago. This time, I saw that when Swayze approached her, she really was sitting in a corner as music swelled around her. The corner left her no room to move to the music, and moving to the music had awakened her spirit. It had been her coming of age as a woman.

After leaving my writing shed that afternoon, I argued with myself about whether it really mattered that I had put my women writers in the corner. It was just a place in my writing shed I tried to convince myself.

It was not a night of restful sleep. I would say that it pretty much fit the description of fitful sleep. It was near dawn when I realized, it really did matter when women writers are put in the corner.

The next morning I returned to the shed and rearranged my books. The books by women writers now face me as I enter. The energy in the room feels clean and light.

The article in which The New York Times announced that Jennifer Eagan had won the Pulitzer Prize also noted that Jonathan Frazen had not won it. The photo accompanying the article was of Jonathan Frazen, not Jennifer Eagan.

It’s time to stop putting women writers in the corner.

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The Train Passing Through

I think it is in the film Black Stallion that a character in a voiceover says that Picasso didn’t paint the horse — he painted the memory of the horse. He says that as the underwater camera captures the image of the black stallion being lifted out of the water — the image of the horse becoming increasingly distorted as the camera stays still with the horse rising above the surface until it resembles a horse Picasso would paint.

That’s what the sound of the train passing in the distance is to me — the memory of the sound. It seems elegiac to me, a mournful horn surrounded by air being purposefully pushed aside because the thing pushing it has a destination in mind.

I didn’t realize I had forgotten the sound until I returned to Livermore, the town in which I spent my pre-teen and teen years, where I hear it late on summer nights when the windows are open. Or, unexpectedly as I walk through the Arroyo. Or, sometimes in the early morning before anyone else rises. Each time, the sound jogs my memory of it, as if I had forgotten it.

I had also lived in Southern California, Oklahoma City, Saudi Arabia, and Chico. But, Livermore is the closest thing I have to a hometown. Each move to Livermore was a traumatic uprooting from the place I lived before. The best and worst things in my life have happened in Livermore. Perhaps that is why I think of it as my hometown. I think that might be why I had to return to it — so I could understand something about the mix of best and worst.

I had been gone for 34 years, since I graduated from high school. Over that time I had wrestled with, worked on, and dealt with memories that haunted me. I thought I had exorcised all the ghosts.

I was not prepared for what it was like to return to the place where memories took root. I read through a journal recently where I wrote that the memories had stirred a raging out-of-control forest fire in me. But on reflection, I think it was more of a burn that nature makes — a lightning-struck fire that burns away the underbrush to clear the way for new growth.

We moved back here barely two months after that Tuesday in September 2001 — 9/11. My parents are both gone now, as are Tom’s. That coupled with 9/11 has made the world seem very different to me now. The loss of innocence has not made me cynical so much as it has taught me how to take the bitter with the sweet.

I think that the innocence I lost was really the last vestiges of a child-like trust that I had held onto because it was too painful to let go of. I wanted someone to save me from my life experience, and holding on to the trust was holding onto hope that the past could have been different.

What I found by losing that innocence was my life. My story.

My high school English teacher, Ed Brush (he is one of those I lost shortly after I moved back here), used to talk about the macrocosm and microcosm in Shakespeare’s history plays — about how one reflected the other. I’m wondering if my microcosm of growing up so I could embrace experience is happening in the macrocosm as well.

At least in the debate in this country, it seems to me the forces pulling in opposite directions are one that insists we are innocent and need to retreat, while the other is experience — an even more insistent force that says we need to expand our understanding of the universe so we can embrace how small our world has become.

I have tried pulling back from what passes for news and journalism. These media are no longer trying to find the story that connects us as humans, but the element of a story and presenting it as the story.

I’m a news and political junkie, so this isn’t easy. I want our system to work. I believe that the idea of America, recognition that our right to our lives is our birthright, can let collective stories unfold into one that contains them all.

But, I don’t hear that now. I don’t hear anyone leading us out of this wilderness of change. Perhaps we need to do it as individuals working together right now. Nikos Kazantszkis wrote in his memoir Report to Greco that when he returned from Mt. Athos, he understood that Jesus was wandering alone and hungry in the wilderness and it was mankind’s turn to save him.

Time for us to embrace compassion for being human and extend that compassion to ourselves as well as the world at large.

I think embracing my experience let compassion through for me. I think it allowed me to forgive myself for being a victim, and to see that I had also been a victimizer, and forgive myself for that.

I have come to feel at home here in my hometown. The sound of the train reminds me that life is happening here, while moving onto somewhere else at the same time.

The sound of the elegiac horn surrounded by air being pushed aside by a moving force reminds me that the train passing through carries away baggage lost and found.