We are what we don’t discard

Cleaned out the shed that doubles as storage and workshop, the workshop half mostly theoretical the past few years as the storage expanded and my time contracted, and was unable to explain the choices I made about what to keep and what to throw away. When I was in graduate school and had less stuff, less money, more time, and a need to compensate for my endemic uselessness, I saved everything — odds and ends of hardware, bits of rope, scraps of wood, the wheels off an old lawn mower. And I used most of it, the lawn mower wheels finding their way onto a moveable grazing pen for the ducks. But no shed is infinite. Four lawn ‘n’ leaf bags await next week’s garbage pickup.

Discarded:

  • a step stool that I built in 1998; I designed it badly so that it tips over whenever you step on it, and haven’t used it since the turn of the century
  • staining rags, work gloves, and knee pads chewed by mice
  • two broken lamps that I don’t like but have been meaning since 1994 to fix
  • the balls from my childhood croquet set (the mallets are long gone)
  • sixty or so egg cartons purchased when the ducks were still laying regularly (actually I composted these)

Kept:

  • countless pieces of wood too small to be of any use
  • five dozen mason jars, in addition to the dozens actually in use in the house
  • four gallon bottles of antifreeze, each more than half full

I can admit my failure to build a decent stepstool and that the ducks are getting old and won’t be replaced, but I can’t shake the vision of endless shelves of pickles and applesauce and sauerkraut I know perfectly well I don’t have time to make. But I like the idea that I could, just as I like the idea that I could build a desk or some bookshelves in my newly accessible workshop.

I could write the shed as metaphor, that when you are young a shed is twelve by sixteen feet of possibility, that the junk in it is not junk but the physical manifestation of your experience stored as raw materials for the future, and that at some later age you reach a point where your accumulated past chokes the life out of the future. But that would be silly. It’s just a shed.

Cake. Pinups. Cherry.

In Plymouth, a little town off the Albemarle Sound, I stopped for coffee. This is how old Plymouth is: It is so old that the streets leading from the highway downtown to Water Street are named for presidents. Washington Street was blocked off for roadwork, so I took Adams downtown and Jefferson back out. On Water Street I found the Plymouth Bakery, where one table was occupied by two men and a woman, probably in their seventies. One of the men was hitting on the waitress, who was maybe sixty. Her name was Cherry. She asked if they had saved room for a piece of cake.

Pretend men tell no tales

The Monkey hands me a beanbag.

“Um, thanks.”

“It’s a flyer,” she said, and bounces off to the living room, where she has arranged a dozen of her stuffed animals on chairs and the couch. She places a beanbag in front of each animal.

“I’m passing out flyers to all my animal friends,” she explains, in case I hadn’t figured this out on my own.

“That’s great, honey,” I say, wondering where my daughter got the idea to pass out flyers, hoping that she is playing political activist and not Jehovah’s Witness or guerilla marketer. “What do the flyers say?”

She stops and looks at me with as much disdain as a three year-old can muster. “Pretend things don’t say anything, Dad.”

Fair enough.

Maybe it is magic after all

When I was learning to cook I liked to watch Jacques Pépin. In the early 1990s he recorded a series of short videos on basic cooking techniques that the local PBS station aired every year during its pledge drive. Poaching an egg, for example, or making mayonnaise, or trimming an artichoke, or making tomato flowers. When demonstrating a technique that required learned skill he slowed it down and patiently explained it so that the viewer could see and understand what he was doing. Then — and this was the part I especially liked — he would speed it back up so that you could see what the technique looked like in the hands of a professional. “In cooking school you would do it three, four hundred times,” he would say with a shrug, “and then it will look like this.” This looked like magic, but because I’d seen it step by step, his expectation that I would emulate him at home seemed perfectly reasonable.

The words we leave behind

1. Ordered descent

On the wall by the stairs of my grandmother’s house she hung trivets of the kind you might find at a tourist trap. Rough cast iron, self-consciously old-timey, painted with whimsically tacky messages. Four of them in a line, so you could read as you descended:

Come in, sit down, relax, converse. Our house doesn’t always look like this. Sometimes it’s even worse.

and

I’m not a fast cook, I’m not a slow cook. I’m a half-fast cook!

When my grandparents packed up the house and moved into a retirement community I asked for the trivets, but it was only after she died that I noticed the penciled notes she had made on their backs: LT. END, LT. MID, RT. MID., and RT. END. Removing the trivets from the wall to paint, she had labeled them so they could be returned promptly to their proper position. Whimsical, but ordered. They are scattered now, one in my office, one in the kitchen, two boxed in a closet. But I like to think they will be reunited someday, and I will know how to arrange them when they are.

We like to dance real slow

The Monkey likes to watch basketball with me, or rather she likes to be in the same room while I’m watching basketball. Or football. She is only vaguely aware of who is playing, unless it’s the Philadelphia Eagles or Carolina basketball—though during the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament I can’t claim much better for myself; I frequently have to Google a set of initials before remembering which university it stands for. On Friday I asked her whether we should root for Memphis or North Texas; she considered the matter briefly before saying, as if pronouncing judgment on a fine wine, “North Texas, I think.” Then she returned her full attention to her Leapster, which binged its approval and cheerfully inquired whether a sea turtle might be larger than an orca.

The point isn’t the particular sport, or which teams are playing or who happens to be winning; it’s the experience of watching together. It would be male bonding if she were male, but hey, it’s the twenty-first century, and we could just as easily be watching women’s sports.

We Dare Defend Our Rights

Read enough history and you find yourself crowded by the dead. They mill about as palpable as the living, and more numerous. Stoop to retrieve a slobbery tennis ball and assailed by the recollection that your yard was once a great plantation you may rise to find yourself surrounded by toiling slaves whose worksongs are insufficiently energetic for their driver. Hiking past a grave you may see a dead woman seated on her grave, her face like a hologram appearing old or young depending on the angle, and her legs accordingly decrepit or dangling childishly. Mention this to others and you will be regarded as the boy in the movie who claims to see ghosts or hear poltergeists, and to be fair, there may be only the finest line between historical awareness and otherworldly madness: either way, you see things that aren’t there.

cherry tomatoes

American dream in an envelope

cherry tomatoesWith the end of the holidays the seed catalogs arrive. There may be nothing more American than a seed catalog: it is both the song of nature and the promise of perfectability, conveniently packaged for a low low price. It lures us with photographs of plump vegetables in green gardens and plump children in green grass, the fruit of the earth and of our loins, the promise of spring and of a new generation. Beneath swelling tomatoes and glistening heads of broccoli captions proclaim Hybrid! They are bigger, stronger, more durable, better tasting, more nutritious, longer growing, the wonder of technology. We can make the world better; just add water and warm sun and hard work and clean living. It may not be uniquely American, this promise of technology and commerce to grant us natural wonder and old-fashioned virtue, but it is American. An American dream in an envelope. In the pit of winter it is irresistable.

New Year’s wishes

So I wrote this and published this, and then, defying the traditional New Year’s resolution to be more organized, forgot to publish it. But now it’s relevant again, so with a little updating, here it is with best wishes for 2007.

Darrin McMahon writes in today’s the 12.29.2005 New York Times that you can’t just decide to be happy. He notes that happiness as a commendable and morally acceptable end in itself is a concept invented only in the past few centuries and cites the 19th-century philosophers Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill on the subject — now there’s research to back them up, but really, Mill’s common sense could be more common without the blessing of social science:

Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

In the spirit of Mill and the ever-cranky Carlyle (and with an eye toward looking back fondly on the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin, whose memory moves me to one-liner homilies), I will not tell you to have a happy 2006 2007 but instead offer the following wishes.

No such thing as a free lunch (literal edition)

It never ceases to amaze me that people are surprised by things like this: Kids in England don’t like the healthy lunches the schools are serving them. Why are they surprised that kids will happily accept a change in their routine that is shoved down their throats. (Of course, the same people who pushed for these changes are equally happy to shove things down the throats of adults they disagree with, so I don’t know why I’m surprised by any of it.)

As I see it, there are four major variables that contribute to the quality and desirability of food:

  • taste
  • healthfulness
  • ease of preparation
  • cost

The contribution of each variable to a food’s desirability is dependent on the individual in question, obviously, but as a first approximation, desirability is directly proportional to taste, healthfulness, and ease of preparation, and it is inversely proportional to cost. In other words, people tend to want food that tastes good, is good for them, is easy to prepare, and is cheap.

The problem is that these are not independent variables. Ease of preparation requires preprocessing that degrades healthfulness (unless you want to eat all raw foods). Cheap ingredients don’t taste as good and aren’t as good for you as expensive ones; as a rule, you get what you pay for. The cheapest and easiest way to take cheap ingredients of poor quality and make them taste good is to add fat and sugar — both of which our biology attracts us to, because humans evolved in times of scarcity not abundance — and salt, which enhances whatever flavor is present. All three in too great a quantity are bad for you.

To make everyone happy in the school lunch wars, we’d have to serve lunches that meet all four criteria. Activists and most parents want food that’s healthy; kids want it to taste good; schools need to keep the preparation as simple as possible; and schools and most parents want to keep costs down. But there simply isn’t much food that is tasty, healthy, cheap, and easy. I agree that schools ought not be serving junk and calling it dinner, but anyone who wants to improve the overall quality of school lunches needs to start from a realistic assessment of what’s possible and be prepared to work within those constraints.