the joy luck club

I forgot to resolve. I'm sure I was supposed to join most of the rest of America and engage in the annual ritualistic declaration, but I have been tiptoeing around the baby new year, afraid I'll wake him; 2010 was just that good—at least in comparison to the last batch of years. On Monday, I hope to stop eating like I have two assholes. That's about it.

Twenty ten began with an attitude adjustment, a concerted effort not to tell myself I suck with every passing minute. I focused less on whining my ailments to the world and more on putting them to music (C, G, D, usually, but occasionally D, A, G and sometimes Em). I have liked living this way. The benefit to feeling pain but not sharing it all the time is that you get to create some pretty twisted poetry and still have a bunch of friends with whom to share it.

Twenty eleven is much harder to say, but I hope it will be no less easy to do. The morning began like last year's, with an incredible sunrise and the serenade of crows, followed by a brisk walk in the park. It will end with Harry Potter at our favorite theater. In between, I stood around in the street gabbing with friendly neighbors and eating a roasted pig sandwich and chocolate truffles, drinking ale, telling jokes, and taking pictures. Perpetually-pink-haired Paula Willey, Your Neighborhood Librarian, was the pig tender—and boy was the pig tender! (Sorry.) I tasted brains for the first time (creamy and rich, with a little metallic aftertaste; almost delicious, except for the part about them being brains), though I'm pretty sure black-eyed peas are slightly luckier.

I've put in a request for lots of joy this year, a heaping helping of good times with friends and family, smooth skin, good hair, deep relaxing breaths, a pinch of luck, and just a tiny dash of strife to keep the art interesting. Happy New Year!

alchemy

It’s Christmas, but you wouldn’t know it by my house, which has no tree, no wrapped presents, no fauxflake or stocking or stray spray of tinsel. It’s not because I’m a curmudgeon. I just started thinking: What do we need that we don’t have? What do we want that we don’t get nearly as quickly as the thought pops into our heads? While this condition is much the same for us every year, it’s the first time I have been stricken by the absurdity—of frantic shopping, of wrapping surprises on the same pre-scheduled day as most of this country and some of the world, as if we’d deprive our child, now too old (not to mention too Jewish) to believe in Santa, of her reasonable heart’s desires for an entire year, as if we should have waited on Hendrix the Creature, her pet bearded dragon. As if guitar picks should be stocking stuffers rather than tools of her trade.

As I sit here, my daughter is pounding insanely on the drums while her friend makes repetitive keyboard sounds, my husband is watching some dull war documentary, the kitchen countertop is covered with crumbs, my back is sore, and my dogs are where they always are—beneath my feet, a perpetual tripping hazard—one of them, Cleo, snoring so loudly that I can hear her over the drums.

But I am practicing a new craft. I am waving away the fog of depression, turning the ugly floaters into the swirling glitter of a snow globe. My daughter taught herself how to play the drums, and she’s good; she has a friend with her, and they are making music, not noise. My husband is watching the movie on our brand new shiny iMac. My counter is crumby because I’ve just made warm, delicious brownies filled with the free bag of chocolate chips Safeway gave us for spending twenty bucks on the ingredients for brownies and chicken stew. My back is sore because I’ve been standing up playing guitar, something I couldn’t do a few months ago. And my dogs are beautiful; at fourteen, Cleopatra’s cacophony is a comfort because it means she is still alive.

If I have a resolution for the coming year, it’s to practice more of this kind of witchcraft, to discover a way to transmute anxiety and sadness into something bright and gleaming, something the crow dragged in.

I have spent far too much of 2009 listing the things that have gone wrong. It’s not that I didn’t earn the right, but pacing back and forth along this path has put a rut in it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s as awful as it is habitual. Now the rut is a damned trench, which makes the climb out a little tougher. All I really need to do is start filling it with each good thing until that, the filling, becomes my groove.

Habits, old or new, are hard to break; however, I’m wise enough to know that my blessings are many. My family, friends, and social networks have literally kept me alive when I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay that way. We had foster families at the beginning of this year, people who fed us and drove us around and made sure we were safe.

Before I sat down to review the year, I’d already panned 2009, in my mind worse than at least forty other years. But some pretty remarkable things happened this year.

• I knitted and sold enough scarves to help pay for an expensive chair, which was instrumental in my recovery.

• I ran almost two miles six months after back surgery.

• I felt the force of several thousand crows lifting off from a field where I stood.

• Bob Schneider sat next to me in my car, and, a week later, I got to hang out for half an hour with the very cool Chuck Prophet.

• I have written at least five really good songs this year and will record them in the studio soon.

• I was in two movies, I Will Smash You and 60 Writers, 60 Places, both of them released recently. In two different glowing reviews, my parts were singled out for positive acknowlegment.

• My daughter, Serena, got straight A pluses (except for the A in religion), improved her saxophone, guitar, and drum playing and her singing. She landed the acoustic intro to one of my favorite songs ever, “ Crazy on You,” by Heart, for the Seattle Sounds show in January, and she’s nailing it.

• The Book was published! Let Me Eat Cake was not the best book ever written, and I got down on myself a lot after negative reviews, but you know what? Simon & Schuster liked it enough to pay me for my words and to publish them with a beautiful cover and pictures inside. I don’t know too many people who can say that. So there!

I’m not completely skipping gifts and holiday cheer, but I am finally questioning them in light of our dwindling bank account and increasing debt and dismal prospects for employment. And all we have already and all we discard every day. For instance, this week, I’ve received ten Christmas cards in the mail. Half were store bought; the other half were personalized with family photos. Not a single one of the senders wrote more than a generic, nameless greeting and a signature. I appreciate that you thought of me among the mountain of friends who give your hand a writer’s cramp each year, that you’d truly like me to have a blessed holiday, that you’d share your beautiful family with mine. But tell me something—that I’m a good neighbor, a good friend. Tell me you love me and my family, that we’ll make an effort to get together more this year, that you hope my back heals, that I write another book, that I stay with my husband for the 28th year. Make me laugh or think or cry over your sentiment. Those are the cards I save and reread when I need a quick reminder that I’m worthwhile. Unfortunately, my recycling bin fills up first.

So many of you have touched my soul this year. Telling you each might take me the majority of 2010. Until I do, please enjoy the card I made from photographs of the beautiful snow, an icy windshield, and the birds I love. Print it out if you’d like to keep it. When I see you next, I’ll write on the back of it what I love most about you.

Peace.

happy, challah daze

Before spirituality became contagious, like a yuppie sickness, I considered myself spiritual; that is, I worshipped nature and “frolicked in the autumn mist” and babbled about the sunsets and the sounds birds make. But maybe that’s not because of spirit.

I am religious in my habits: the way I make morning coffee, the way I postpone playtime until my work is finished, how I worship the four-o’clock beer. I adore tradition. Just before Easter break, I pick my Jewish daughter up from her Catholic school early enough that she misses mass, and we have a girls’ lunch—at the same place every year.

It’s Rosh Hashanah, and since I first learned in 2006 how to make homemade challah from my friend, Maya Sprague, I have made it my new holiday—challahday—tradition. I spend the day of our celebration—which is nothing more than a loud dinner with my loud family—baking. I listen to music (today, The Records** and Jim Carroll, which go together perfectly because I have loved them long and well). I take pictures of the dough and marvel at the yeast’s magic and curse the sticky strands that never braid the way I want them the first time.

I love the Jewish New Year because it’s exactly when a new year should be: the kids have settled back to school, I have settled back to writing, and the air has settled—both cool enough to be renewing and warm enough to coax a little red into the last tomatoes. I love that this holiday makes no pretenses, that it’s about sweetness and life. I love the tired joke about blowing the chauffer. I even love the whole phrase, l’shana tova tikatevu: may you be inscribed for a good year. That’s the loose translation. The longer version is, “May God write you down in his book for a good year.” Even though I don’t believe in a supreme being (unless you count Bob Schneider), I do believe in the righteousness of the Golden Rule, which, more than God, is the foundation of every religion on earth. The earliest version is the most beautiful and the most simple: “Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do.”*

I don’t make resolutions on the Jewish New Year. This is about sloughing off the old skin and returning to the things that make me glow. And it all starts with the baking of the bread.



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Maya Sprague’s Challa, I Love You


ingredients

2 t sugar
2 pkg. yeast
2 C warm water (105-115°)


6 eggs, lightly beaten
2/3 C oil
4 t salt
4T sugar

8+ C flour

1 egg yolk mixed with a little water
2 T sesame or poppy seeds (opt.)

Note: I divide this recipe in half and make it in two separate bowls for two loaves. To one of the bowls of wet ingredients, I add ½ C raisins, 1/8 C cinnamon, and ¼ C honey. Braid the rolls separately.

instructions

1. Add sugar to warm water; sprinkle yeast on top; mix with fork. When mixture foams (about five minutes), it’s good to go.

2. Mix the eggs, oil, salt, and sugar. Add foaming yeast.

3. Add flour to wet mixture, one cup at a time, then turn out on a kneading surface dusted with flour.

4. Knead until dough can be handled without sticking, adding flour as needed. (I have never been patient enough to get to that point, so if you find yourself adding more and more flour, just stop and continue with step 5.)

5. Cover dough ball with a dish towel and set in a warm, draft-free place for two hours.

6. Punch dough. Braid. (See Maya's cool video, or braid in three strands.)

7. Put braids on an oiled stone or baking pan; cover, and leave to rise one hour.

8. Brush bread with egg yolk/water mixture. Moisten finger with egg, and press seeds into the challah for decoration (opt.).

8. Bake at 350° until a rap on the bread sounds hollow (about ½ hour to 45 minutes).


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*from "The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, 109 - 110 Translated by R.B. Parkinson. The original dates to 1970 to 1640 BCE and may be the earliest version ever written."

**Singer John Wicks has been doing fabulous things since he's been away from the Records. Check out Rotate; it's superb.