Revising: Lessons of Piecrust , Part 2

here's part 2. trying to show self-involved kids and the fading joy while eating the crust. then the wrap up ... my reflections. hopefully not too much telling. glad for feedback, 'cause then it's going to Brevity. J

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The rich aroma filled the house, but Mom never finished it. No cherries, no apples. No can of pumpkin in sight.
“When will it be ready?” we whined after the golden brown pie shell sat on the white corner cabinet for two days. It begged to be eaten, and we begged back.
“Please, girls,” Mom said. She ceased sorting laundry to push a loose hairpin into her dark French twist.

“It’s Eileen’s fault,” my sister, Theresa, whispered after Mom left the room. Eileen was the second oldest. A month prior, she had totaled Dad’s company car. I didn’t know it then but she had gotten tangled up with friends getting high; she used stimulants in the mornings and sedatives at night. “It cost so much Dad lost his bonus; that’s what’s wrong.”
“Well, Mom can still cook, can’t she?” I snapped back under my breath.

Later that day, Theresa and I were doing our homework at the kitchen table. As I was trying to erase stray pencil marks that had somehow made their way onto the white metallic surface, Mom glanced over at us from her sink full of dishes. Before I could explain myself she asked, “You two want to eat that crust?” as she rubbed her forehead with the back of her wrist.
Our eyes lit up. “Yeh!” we said in unison.
“Oh, go on and eat it,” she said. I can almost see her smile as she returned to her work.

Oo la la! We were thrilled! We began to gobble it up quickly. After all, things in our family were never given unevenly or without methodical division, and we knew someone could walk in any minute wanting to share a piece. The first bites were scrumptious and melted in our mouths. But as it disappeared we became uncharacteristically generous.
“You finish it,” Theresa said.
“No, you can have the rest.” I said, and wandered away from the table.


Thinking back, I suspect that that was the first I’d seen just how small of a jump it was from not quite enough, to far too much. But that’s not all I learned that afternoon. It was a special moment, yes, but special presumes limited opportunity. While eating the whole thing was special, and memorable, the crust itself ceased to be. In fact, its deliciousness faded with every bite. Without the filling, there was no balance; it was all yin and no yang.

I am fortunate that at eighty-six, my mother is still baking pies. I’ve often wondered why, exactly, she didn’t fill that crust. I’ve asked, but she doesn’t remember. I suspect it was just the everyday heaviness of life. Recognizing this in my own life I find myself ever more grateful that there were so many days with fewer burdens. Days, when, after a meal with meatloaf or mashed potatoes, Mom could present us with a deliciously fragrant, fully baked pie to fight over.

Revising Lessons of Piecrust , 1st section

Here is the first part of my revision, i tried to expand my mother and the sensual environment and kitchen ...

Everyone loves a fresh baked pie, especially the buttery crunch of the crust. In our family, we would fight over an orphan piece of crust, the six of us, and Dad, who taught us this appreciation.

When I was ten, and sweetly unaware of the life pressures that prevented Mom from baking the rest of the pie, she let me, well, my sister, Theresa, and me, eat a whole crust! We had watched her create it two days before in the kitchen of our Baltimore row house. Small and plain, the kitchen had a table, three chairs, and a large window with a swag curtain that gave Mom easy access to holler us home from the alley, or yell, “Janice, tie your brother’s shoe,” or, “Let Donna have a turn!”

Mom flipped and gently pressed the dough as she sprinkled the white flour like fairy dust. She rolled her pin this way and that, ball bearings jiggling with each new run. Once it was thin and nearly round, she flopped it into the glass pie dish, ends spilling over. Then, with concentrated effort, she tucked and fluted the unruly edges into a perfect zigzag, a skill she eventually taught to all of us. Then there was a quick rinse of her hands and swipe on the apron before she’d tap, tap, tap fork holes, just so, all along the bottom. “So it can breathe,” she said as she popped it into the oven for the pastry gods to bless.

Before the Words

An attempt to describe the indescribable

As a teenager I experienced a sensation, a visceral awareness that occurred only prior to sleep. It was enveloping, comforting, a touch that was not a touch. It allowed me to, momentarily, but just long enough, forget my worries, let go of my fretting, and fall into a restful sleep. It seemed familiar, like I knew it from before, and yet I had no idea what it reminded me of. This has continued, but only sporadically, throughout my life.

Once, many years later, I was sitting in the rocking chair next to my son's crib. Both of us were sleepy after his middle of the night feeding. I placed him over my left shoulder to pat and rub his back. Rub his back. Ahh … That’s the feeling, I realized.

A sensation between my own hand and my chest. Concretely it is like I’m rubbing my chest but the skin in numb. It is the sweet sense of a warm loving somebody between my hand and me. A touch that is not a touch.

I see now that what I was sensing as a teenager was a preverbal, somatic memory: My hand on my mother’s back, as she held me over her shoulder, perhaps, and rocked me to sleep.

Response to Miss New York Has Everything by Lori Jakiela

With wit and keen observational skills, Lori Jakiela’s “Miss New York Has Everything” shows us the life of a girl growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, always wishing, as her father did, that things could be different. The chapters are loaded with personal reflection. The voice is strong and steady, and seems genuine even given the exaggeration that is suspected in some scenes. The primary energy seems to be lyrical, though, by the end, an arc of a story - her life interwoven with her father’s - emerges.

Lori Jakiela uses humor in much the same way as Sheryl St Germain uses raw truths and metaphor, each page is dripping with it. Other things come to light underneath it. And one turns the page because of it.

As I read this book I appreciated some stylistic choices Lori made. She frequently used one sentence paragraphs such as: “My father in death was suddenly popular”, “I blame Marlo Thomas” or “And then there was fitting day.” And she sprinkled in quick one-liners as well: “What did I know?” “What could I say?” or, my favorite, “Well then.” In addition she used dialog in interested ways, sometimes three simple lines carried so much information or tone or scene. Other times one line of dialog was followed by back-story, or even new story, for a whole paragraph before the response. In fact, on page 242, she carried on for over 2 pages (until p244) before giving us the follow-up part of the dialog.

The opening, while not exactly a road sign, set us up to understand what followed. I loved the closing - finding her way home from the air by looking through the airplane window at the line of traffic below, taillights specifically, on Grand Central. That was perfect.

The characterization of her father was very well done. The cursing and gestures helped as well as the consistency throughout the book. She felt no need to make him perfect just because he died, or just because it turned out she loved him … a lot. And I don’t much like repetition in a book but I smiled each time I read “those bastards” or “cockroaches, all of ‘em.” In the end I felt her compassion for this sometimes-unlovable man.

While I enjoyed the writing for the most part, I did wish for more plot or pull forward. I confess if it weren’t homework I may have put it down for good by about the chapter “My Life in Translation”. Early in the chapter she finally gave words to what I thought was obvious, (and perhaps the theme of the book): she and her father were looking for happiness somewhere in the future (“off the next exit ramp”). But by the middle of that chapter I was tiring of delving into riff after riff. I was yearning for more depth or action, I think.

Ultimately though, I was glad I kept at it, because the honesty and tenderness used to describe her father’s last year made it worth it. I would welcome more detail on her transition from lonesome-future-planner to wife and mother. Did she continue to skip like a stone? Or did she settle within herself enough to simply be in the moments life offers? I think she insinuated the latter, but I wondered: why not show us some of that?

This book didn’t really “crack my frozen sea” as Kafka might say, but I know a man very similar to her father, and I know I will pass this book along to his daughter, who is, ironically, also an ex-flight attendant. I will do this not only because of the hilarious flight attendant stories, but also because of the insight Lori Jakiela showed us as she internalized the meaning of her father’s life, (and her own, perhaps) including his inability to realize his dreams, even as he was living them.

Revising: Brain Pain

You know, in general I like the process of revising my work. I like to read it again and again, admiring it, amazed that something close to coherent has come out of my hand. I like changing a word here, a sentence there, dawdling in the meaningful parts. .
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I even like fixing those pesky errors I’m prone to: grammatical errors, spelling errors, telling more then showing, using clichés. But I’m OK with that, god knows I’m not an English Major. I’m a doctor. I nearly flunked out of high school, and then worked my way up from Community College focused on science. And I don't come from a highly educated family. In fact, even after I had everyone I loved or admired proofread my ‘personal statement’ - the essay section of my medical school application, a spelling error remained for all to read, and comment on, as I sat across from them in my stiff interview clothes. (I had suggested it was helpful to stay away from pier pressure, which is good, I guess … if you’re, I don’t know, a dolphin.)
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So, yes, I'm impressed when I write something that clearly shows a moment of life, has a message, or holds a thread of an idea long enough to land it in the end. And I know I’ll have to fix it up.
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But revising to the degree suggested in class last week doesn’t feel possible.
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Go with the mother angle or my own revelations, not both. But (she whines) the whole point was to be that it is both. If I drop the mother angle the last line, which I love, won’t work. And I can’t bear to drop the lessons of pie being a balance of crust and filling (yin/yang) or learning how quickly one can move from not quite enough to far too much.
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And, more importantly, I have no concrete idea how to do the whole thing metaphorically.
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Help! My revising brain hurts. Anyone else in this same boat?
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Janice

My mother’s hands

Prompt 266: Tell me about your mother’s hands: Go for ten.

My mother’s hands. Old. Delicate. Strong. Pained. Knuckled. Smooth. Dark spots and thick veins on thin white skin. Welcome. Wanted. Yearned for.
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She reaches deep into ground meat to mix breadcrumbs, eggs, ketchup and mustard. Teaches my son to flute a piecrust. Butters a turkey. Gives a stinging spanking. My mother’s hands. I watch as she dries them on her apron before reaching for something: a knife, a spice, a runny nose. She gestures as she speaks. Places hundreds of pills, one at a time, into a month’s worth of four-times-a-day containers.
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My mother holds a baby with her hands, with her arms, with her body. Lifts a cigarette to her lips, long nails polished. Struggles to write, or spell, a short note on the bottom of a birthday card, after having underlined the important words from Hallmark. I see her hands cleaning. Wringing out rags. Using a thumbnail for the stubborn spots. Shaking a damp tea towel with a ferlop, and then spreading it out on the counter at end of an evening when all the dishes have been washed, dried and put away, counters wiped down and coffee set for morning.
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I feel my mother’s hands lay softly on my cheeks as she looks into my eyes as if to embed some hope or wish for me, until she sees me next.
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sticking my neck out

I've been thinking about potential themes for my memoir, for my life. One might be ‘sticking my neck out.’ You know, jumping into something before I know the consequences, either because I have no inkling of those consequences or because I think I can tolerate the ‘hard parts’ before I know what the hard parts are.

The first time I remember this, literally, happening was a warm, fall day, I was sitting in the aisle seat near the back of a yellow school bus, thrilled to be venturing into to my 3^rd week of kindergarten. I wore a plaid dress with a limp cotton belt and I had a pixie haircut, which I hated because, of course, I wanted to have long luxurious hair like the women on the Prell commercials. My bare legs stuck to the seat, but no matter. I was happy, engaged, giggling with my new friends. In fact everyone on the bus was excited and energized. This energy was familiar to me because it resembled my own family of eight when moods were just right. Joy shared evokes more joy. In our family one voice overtakes the other, then another, as if whoever gets the biggest laugh, wins. So I was comfortable being just another in the clamor of kid-voices on the bus that day.

Suddenly I found myself thinking: Wait a second, is that someone speaking to us?

I tried to gather my attention, and when I finally tuned in to the driver’s deep voice I heard, “…and so if you want to come up here and sit…” as he pointed to the floor next to him.

Front and Center! That would be fun.

He continued, “…Well then, just say so now.”

“Oh I do! I do!” I shouted out as I leaned into the aisle and waved my hand, an enthusiastic volunteer.

“Then get up here!” he bellowed.

Uh oh… he’s not happy; he’s mad. He’s mad at us. I tentatively got out of my seat.

“Come on, get up here!” he yelled, exasperated.

Now I’m in trouble …

My joy dissolved. Slowly, one ankleted oxford in front of the other, I walked up the up the suddenly long, eerily quiet aisle. All eyes were on me.

Oh, this is not at all what I thought.

Struggling to figure out what went wrong, I began to whimper. An older girl reached out and took my hand.

“You didn’t mean that did you?” she asked. I shook my head. She called out to the scary bus driver, “She didn’t know what you meant. Can I keep her here with me?”

“OK. Everyone just keep a lid on it, will ya?”

She pulled me onto her lap. I was saved, safe, and only a hair less confidant as I made my way in the world.

finding my spine

Good News!

A structure for my memoir, a spine, as Natalie Goldberg put it, has presented itself to me! Finally. We talked a lot about structure during Marc Neison’s Craft of Creative Nonfiction class at Chatham last term, but I could not, for the life of me, come up with a good one for my memoir. This morning, after reading Prompt 286 in Goldberg’s “Old Friend from Far Away” it came to me:

Waves. The ocean. The beach. The shore. Tides. Bird migrations. Dolphins. Jellyfish. Seaweed. Hurricanes. It’s all there. Primarily, though, it’s the waves – rollers, breakers, cappers. Waves can bring me in or take me back. Gently lift me off my feet or chew me up, spit me out, and leave me gasping for breath.

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The beach has been part of my life since the beginning:

My first disappointment? When I was 4 years old and Bobby, a family friend, carried me past the breakers to the rollers… a thrill with no fear; a strong adult held me sure. She tired though, and went back to the blanket to rest, promising to take me out again later. She fell asleep and woke with sunburn … no more rollers ‘till years later.

Best family memories? Yearly trips to Wildwood, NJ. Sisters. Aunts. Long hot walks from our rental to the beach lugging beach chairs and coolers with baloney sandwiches and soda. Mom happy and jumping waves with us. Dad laughing.

Lost virginity? At the beach. ‘Nuf said.

First time living away from home? Long Beach Island. May. Alone. So lonely that I held foil on the TV antenna to get reception, actually said “goodnight” to the newscasters.

Closest I ever came to death? Jumping the biggest waves ever! I was caught in one, took in water, and couldn’t get my breath, and then, weakened, couldn’t fight the current to get back to the beach. Just made it, thanks to the help of a friend. Later we realized it was a ‘rip tide’ day. So that’s what the red flags meant …

The sexual assault that threw me for a loop? The Outer Banks. Avon, NC. While on vacation. While getting a massage. While trying to relax, for cripes sake…

Follow-up legal wrangling? All at the beach, Manteo NC. Three court dates. Interesting weather each time, once in a hurricane. This will come up in the memoir.

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So, that’s a structure… at least a beginning of one. Right?

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Maybe I’ve had too much coffee this morning, but I thought I’d share this too: here are some photos of, I guess you'd call it art. Believe me, I am not an artist, but I had taken some time off after the sexual assault and while I was trying to sort through the waves of feelings ; ) that kept coming over me I took to journaling, then I tried poetry, then gluing words and yarn together on canvas. I kept trying to depict the circle of thoughts - “the maddening nimbus with twists and turns spinning me dizzy on a center of truth” - (a line from one of my attempts at poetry). Here's the center:

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Center of Truth – early

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Center of Truth – later layers

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The reason I am uploading this now? As I worked on the piece the ocean showed up as my internal strength. Anything good I found within me flowed up from there in the piece of art. The ocean levels everything and helps me find my self again.

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So, I think I should use waves, the beach, as my structure. How, exactly, I’m not sure. Maybe that’ll be my next blog.


...Janice

Exposure

I am impressed, and humbled, by the memoir “Swamp Songs,” by Sheryl St. Germain. Incredible. There is so much to comment on: the dance of the tenses, the deliciously poetic style and the way she layers stories upon stories. Not to mention the rich metaphors and symbols - food and place and body. The structure is true to the content, a life size bowl of gumbo. But the thing that impresses me the most is the bone deep honesty.

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I have to wonder … will I ever have the skill to weave my, and my family’s, flaws and gifts into my memoir? Will I have the nerve? The level of honesty found in this memoir brings up a few concerns for me. One is that I have a strong drive toward being good (never really good enough, but that’s another matter) and then, of course, to describe the people I love in a good light. A midwestern good. I could no more notice, or write about, my mother’s “bedroom eyes,” or my own sweating and bleeding, then fly in the air. Let alone how one might use a tongue. And, in truth, I doubt I’d ever attend the whip laden Mardi Gras described in the book. I find that edge, that place where someone might get hurt, even if that hurt is embarrassment, too scary. But that’s me.

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Another related concern is for my family - the privacy issue, the exposure. As Sheryl mentioned the other day in a blog about her son, there’s a need to express something deep and real yet honor the privacy of those we love. I am not sure where I will land on this issue. I can see the importance of honoring privacy but if doing so creates too much distance from the raw truth then the writing will be bland, useless. “Swamp Songs” has certainly set the bar high.

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Let me give it a try here, a small step for a new blogger, and see how it goes.

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I am experiencing what has been called a “developmentally premature loss” – my seventeen-year-old son is now living away from home. It’s sad but it is the right thing for him to do. He is living at his girlfriend’s house. She is sixteen and eight months pregnant. I am proud of him and I am resisting it. I am handling it well, I am messing it up.

Last night S and his girlfriend, M, were here for dinner. As P and I were preparing dinner and setting the table, I got a wave of anger: here we are hosting … hosting my own, still young, son. Shouldn’t we be arguing about doing dishes and homework, or whether he can have the car tonight? And yet, I know on some level that it is the right thing to do, it is one of the only ways we can stay connected. M doesn’t feel all that comfortable here, won’t spend the night. (I remember well the discomfort I felt at my boyfriend’s house when I was her age - I get it…) So, I know by doing this, by hosting, by treating them like guests, I am handling it well. But then, during dinner, my son starts picking at his face. Acne, after all, does not recognize or honor the adult world he has jumped into. I could not resist asking him not to pick at his face at the table. Suddenly, I am messing it up … just like that. It is such a tenuous balance.

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There, I’ve tried it. I’ve probably said too much. I will just have to see if I can live with this over the next few days. If you return to my blog and it’s gone, you’ll know why.

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Memoir.
My goal over the next few months is to write a memoir. I already have thirty pages in rough draft. This morning, after reading "Writing True" by S. Perl and M. Schwartz, I decided to do this prompt: "Finish the line "I want to tell you that ..."" Here is my response:

I want to tell you that something bad happened to me. To which I hear, “So?”

I want to tell you that I reacted to it in a way that would have been unfathomable to me prior to the fact of my reacting in that way. And that it is unfathomable to most people when they hear how I reacted, especially people whose job it is to sit in judgment of others.

The reaction felt as if it had an infinite number of layers, like mirroring a mirror, like stop sign ahead signs (stop sign ahead sign ahead…). There was, of course, the initial reaction, or lack of reaction, in the moment of the incident, then the reaction to that lack of reaction, then the reaction to the reaction to the lack of reaction, and so on.

I want to tell you that it is not at all uncommon for humans (especially, I suspect, women) to react in the same way. And this is what needs the light of day shown upon it.

And, for me, this ‘something bad’ was major enough to completely knock me off course… but minor enough for me to remain mindful of, and, in fact, record through daily writings, the mental decline and subsequent (complete?) recovery.

So, I believe that if the emotional/spiritual/physical reactions to this type of life-changing event are played well, are allowed to exist in full, with reasonable support, then human growth - incredible, unforeseen, deliciously rich, I-wouldn’t-trade-this-part-for-the-world, growth can happen as a result.

And that’s the story I’d like to tell.


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first blog

hello wide world...
what better way to start this new fangled 'blogging' then with a poem about my father. I've been thinking about him recently, perhaps because my son is about to become a father himself. So for my first blog, here's a poem about the day my father died.



Father’s Last Day

There is barely room around the bed
of this cherished man
transitioning.

We stand, hold hands
remember…
Say Our Father
hushed and reverent.

Young ones tuck their heads
on the chests of their mothers.

Aware of each breath,
They glance at their feet, up to us.

Awed
by this life and then death.

Outside, a June rain falls
soft, straight and sure.

The blossoms stand grateful.


Janice Anderson