Simple Is Good

Rachel Henry6 Comments

The great thing about French is that it makes even the most ordinary things sound fancy. I cooked ratatouille for the first time tonight and discovered that it is not at all fancy.

I think ratatouille must once have meant, “I’m tired from screaming at the kids and milking the goat and cleaning the house all day. I don’t know what to make for dinner, so I’m going to roast whatever vegetables are ready to pick with some olive oil, garlic, and, hm, the rosemary bush needs trimming so I’ll throw in a couple branches.”

To make this dish, you cut vegetables in big pieces, toss them in some olive oil and salt, throw the pan in the oven, and end up with a rather delicious dinner (at least if you follow the recipe in the wonderful cookbook Cook This Now by Melissa Clark). Not delicious in the “my mouth is turning somersaults trying to figure out what this unique flavor combination is” but delicious in its simplicity.

Simple things bring us back to ourselves, snatch us off our hamster wheel of thoughts about past mistakes and future pressures and say to us, “Here, try putting your feet on the ground. It is a little easier that way.” Some people may feel most relaxed wearing an evening gown and dining on duck a l’orange, but I suspect for most of us it’s macaroni and cheese and our favorite sweats.

Our daily lives demand a lot of being on—on top of things, on the ball, on target. Stews, soups, and sweatpants, on the other hand, offer comfort without demanding a lot of skill or attention. You don’t have to impress the chicken and dumplings; they love you already. And your chicken and dumplings don’t have to impress whoever’s eating them; those people already love chicken and dumplings.

After dinner, the cat curled up in my lap, and we lounged until a moth appeared who needed to be chased. I think the Quakers had it right: ‘tis a gift to be simple.

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The blog is delayed this week due to illness. Please check back Thursday. To mollify impatient readers, here is a picture of my dad and me in front of the Parthenon. I am thinking, “Don’t get get too close you’re sweaty.” He is thinking, apparently, “Look at that UFO.”

Rachel and her dad in front of the Parthenon

Skimming the Surface

Rachel Henry8 Comments

A friend of mine once pointed out that humans, as a species, are weird. Her evidence: our interest in observing other species that we don’t intend to eat.

During my recent trip to Greece it occurred to me that tourism is kind of odd in this same way. I used to think that visiting other countries ought to profoundly affect me, but recently I’ve decided that in Europe, at least, you mostly look at old, beautiful stuff and eat good food (and hear people say “mama mia”).

I’m not talking about living abroad for an extended period of time, getting to know a people and a culture, letting their values influence your own. I’m talking about the kind of travel most of us do most of the time—there and back, a week or two, a variety of locations.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful I got to see the Parthenon, which definitely fits into the old and beautiful category, and eat genuine moussaka and baklava, which fit into the seriously yummy category.

Perhaps it is the lack of connection that seemed odd to me. Tourism is largely an experience of surfaces.

I learned a guidebook page’s worth of information about the sights we saw. Just at the point I’d start to find a point of reference in a town, we’d move on to the next. The Greek people were kind, welcoming, and friendly, but I’ll probably never see any of them again.

Of course there is always the possibility that one of these things will hit some deeper chord and lead to a new interest, a new direction in life.

Or maybe I’m over thinking this. After all, who doesn’t want to look at beautiful stuff and eat good food? One day we followed the GPS to a tiny seaside town we picked more or less at random off the map. It turned out to be one of the most picturesque places we visited, and the sole taverna in town served platters of small, perfectly deep-fried fish whose English name I never learned.

Perhaps, as with so many things, both are true: it does feel like taking the shortcut through someone else’s backyard in order to have these experiences, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Homecoming

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First, thank you to Anne for her wise guest blogs. Those hard-to-begin apples came to mind as I sorted through my accumulated emails. Second, this is your blog on some serious jetlag, so I’m going to keep it short. If it doesn’t also come out sweet, I beg your indulgence until my brain and I are reconnected in the same time zone next week.

I was in transit for a few days, which gave me the odd feeling of being location-less. Place began to slip away at the fancy airport hotel that lacked any hint of Greece except the stuffed grape leaves at the buffet. It disappeared altogether during a surreal sprint through the Vienna airport—picture any dream you’ve had about trying to get somewhere and failing, give it to Kafka for rendering, and you’ve got a good idea of being between terminals in Vienna. And finally, I spent a night in New York City but a New York City without subways and almost without sidewalks as my cousin picked me up from the airport and a car delivered me back to it at 4 a.m. the next day.

All of which made me grateful that I belong to a certain spot of Earth. The oak trees on the hills began to place me during the drive from LA. While I was eating lunch on my first full day back, a hummingbird came by to check out the Mexican sage by my bench. Greece and California look a lot alike, but I didn’t see any hummers while I was there.

So to all the people, creatures, and plants, the smell of the air and the feel of the soil, the ocean and the hills, and even the In ‘N Out hamburger joints, thank you for making this place home.

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(The second of two guest blog posts from Rachel’s friend Anne.)

Buon giorno! This blog post is coming to you direttamente from Rome, where my husband is attending a conference, and where I am seeing the sights. Sights seen so far: the Vatican Museum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Largo di Torre Argentina (a square filled with various Roman ruins and various Roman cats), the Colosseum, the Forum, and Palatine Hill (one of the famous seven hills of Rome).

Whenever I visit someplace I’ve never been before, I’m always struck by how many things I thought were outdated stereotypes turn out to be true.

The Parisians really do carry baguettes down the street. There really are red telephone boxes on the streets of London.

In Zambia and Botswana, I really did see African people carrying objects on their heads.

In the Netherlands, I spotted a pair of wooden shoes on the doorstep of the rural family I was staying with. When I asked the father what they were for (I was assuming they were planters for flowers or something), he replied, “Um, those are my shoes.”

And yesterday, as I rode a public bus on my way to the Vatican, I really did hear a young Roman man exclaim, “Mamma mia!”

It’s all kind of comforting.

Now, I’m not trying to be a condescending Yankee who thinks that other cultures are adorably quaint, or that people in other countries run around acting like cartoons of themselves all the time. When I visit France, I don’t expect to see Pepe le Pew sauntering down the street (“Le skunk! Le stink!”).

I mean only that in an age when American culture seems to have spread over the globe, it makes me happy that there’s still a purpose to travel, that other places really are different. It reminds me that there is more in this world that I can imagine. That—as difficult as it is to remember sometimes—the world does not begin and end with my tiny little mind.

Mamma mia!

 

 

Rachel Henry3 Comments

(Hi, everybody! I’m Anne. *waves* Thanks to my friend Rachel for inviting me to guest-blog while she’s away.)

My youngest stepdaughter doesn’t like to eat breakfast. I get that some people aren’t big breakfast-eaters, but I feel pretty strongly that she needs to eat something before school, even if it’s only a few bites. This morning she took an apple with her to eat in the car on the way to school, and a few minutes after we pulled out of the driveway I noticed that I didn’t hear any chomping from the backseat.

“Eat your apple, Kit,” I said. (Note: Her name is not Kit.)

“I’m GOING TO,” she said, aggrieved. “I just don’t like taking the first bite. It HURTS.”

It was pointed out to her that someday when she is rich and famous, she can hire someone to take the first bite of all her apples for her. It was subsequently pointed out (by Kit) that that would be gross. And then we were at school, and she and her sister got out of the car and plunged into the netherland that is high school, and I was left to drive home and think about my own apples and all the first bites I’m waiting to take.

I don’t like taking that first bite into a whole apple either. I usually cut my apples up into nice, thin, manageable slices, which don’t sound all loud and crunchy and impolite when you chomp into them, and which don’t make your front teeth ache in their sockets. But sometimes there’s no way around it. You’re hungry, with no knife, and there’s an apple in front of you.

This week I am working on an article I’m scared to write. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of my computer thinking about how I Better Not Mess This Up, and how probably They’re Going to Ask Me What in God’s Name I Was Thinking, and Why I Call Myself A Writer Anyway When I Clearly Should Have Gone Into Accounting.

And then I shake myself and start making the phone calls I need to make and asking the questions I need to ask, and before I know it, I’m curious instead of anxious, and I remember that I know how to do this after all. Yes, it hurt, but just for a minute. And now I am fed.

What Grit Will Get You

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I learned from a friend this morning that new Marines take three tests: intelligence, fitness, and grit. The greatest indicator of success is a recruit’s score on the grit test. (Caveat: I didn’t check this fact for the Marines, but I did find this article in The New York Times that says something similar about West Point cadets and college students.)

A few days earlier I had re-watched Little Miss Sunshine, one of my favorite movies, whose moral could be summed up as: things may not work out as you hoped even if you score 5 out of 5 on the grit test. (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t watched the movie and don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now.)

A thousand pushups won’t help colorblind Dwayne become a pilot in the Air Force. Frank has forever lost the pinnacle of Proust scholarship, and Olive will certainly never wear the Little Miss Sunshine crown.

But the movie is very much about how grit matters despite all that. From the eternal pushing of the clutch-less VW bus to stealing grandpa’s body from the hospital, this family epitomizes the refusal to give up.

Not the refusal to fail. They do nothing but fail, as measured by society’s standards and their own goals, in the entire movie. But they never give up.

Olive doesn’t win the pageant; Richard doesn’t get the book deal; and Frank doesn’t get the boy. I think life is like that sometimes: grit doesn’t necessarily get you what you’re aiming for, but it might get you something better.

What’s better than winning life’s many beauty pageants? Dancing to “Superfreak” on stage surrounded by those who love you.

Note: My friend Anne Ford will be guest blogging while I’m on vacation for the next two weeks. Anne is the author of Peaceful Places Chicago and is wonderful and funny and by the end of two weeks you will wish she had her own blog.

Come in! Come in!

Rachel Henry2 Comments

My own bad behavior recently reminded me how important it is to support each other in whatever we dream to do.

A friend on the van knows someone who is thinking about writing a book and so asked me for publishing advice. My internal reaction was, “Write the blankety-blank book and then worry about it.”

My external reaction might have been slightly more gracious, but it wasn’t exactly welcoming. I didn’t say, “Wow, that’s great. What a fabulous project to undertake. What does she want to write about?” I didn’t pour out a list of helpful resources.

Trying to get published is often discouraging. I recently read an article in Poets and Writers Magazine that said, without connections, a writer has a one in 11,111 chance of getting an offer of representation from a typical literary agent.

That means you can be in the top .0001% of writers and still not get signed by a particular agent. My math is not good enough to figure out the odds if you considered all agents, but certainly not good enough to make me dance a jig.

Which is all the more reason to be encouraging to others entering the game. Nobody enjoys being one in 11,111. It is better to be two and even better to be five or ten, exponentially better, in ways that defy mathematics.

I don’t know why we need the support of others who share similar experiences, but anyone who’s ever felt really lousy and then talked to a friend or family member and felt better knows it’s true. We are social beings, and I think it’s hard wired into us to thrive more completely in community.

So, henceforward, I will take as my motto Shel Silverstein’s poem “Invitation,” which begins, “If you are a dreamer, come in.”

Not to Clean

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Labor Day is not usually life-changing for me, but this year, I learned something extremely important: cleaning takes time. Others may have grasped this concept much earlier in life, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Let me unfold the revelation for you. I played soccer all day Saturday. On Sunday, a friend and I went to an art show and then some other friends had me over for dinner. Monday morning I looked disconsolately around my house and wondered how another weekend had gone by without any scrubbing, vacuuming, or mopping taking place. No hope beckoned as most of the coming day was slotted for eating pancakes, giving my dad a birthday call, buying groceries, and hanging out with my mom.

Then, while describing my weekend to my dad, divine inspiration descended: I realized I could have cleaned only if I had done it instead of all those fun things. True, this is a bit like mastering a kindergarten-level mathematical concept while doing your Ph.D., but I had never accepted the either-or idea in this context before.

I always felt as if it should be possible to do it all—the fun stuff and the cleaning—as if everybody else knew some secret technique. But no, they were actually spending time with sponge in hand. That’s the problem with this whole finite thing, every moment can contain only one action, no matter what we like to think about multitasking.

I have a quote from Mastercard above my desk at work. It says, “Not having to choose—priceless.” It’s there to remind me that the people who say I can have it all are selling me something and that the freedom to choose is a great gift.

So if I have to decide between a soccer tournament and a clean bathroom, the bathroom will lose every time. And I’m OK with that now. Mostly.

Awed and Amazed

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It’s been a cup runneth over kind of summer on the Central Coast.

A couple of weeks ago a friend and I met by the beach to talk about writing and ended up bird watching. A swarm—yes, a swarm, as in way beyond a flock—of sooty shearwaters had turned a large patch of ocean brown. They couldn’t have been more than 100 yards off shore.
thousands of sooty shearwaters on the water
At some point, we figured we’d had our evening’s worth of magnificence and turned away, only to be lured back by the number of birds, their closeness, the constant splashes of pelicans fishing. I felt both the desire to and the impossibility of taking it all in.

At the same time, a few whales took up residence in Avila Bay and were kind enough to let the human world know about it by sticking their heads out of the water to feed, breaching, and jumping. I didn’t see the whales, but I did see some phenomenal pictures. A friend who did see them spoke of trying to leave several times and being pulled back to watch some more, much as we had been with the birds.

There’s a lot in life that’s just too big or too wonderful to absorb. Part of my brain wanted to hold onto and process all of those birds, to sort them or comprehend them. But what kept us watching wasn’t the possibility of comprehension.

Knowing exactly how many birds there were or understanding why the fish they were after had come so close to shore wouldn’t have improved the experience. If you measured every detail and understood every interaction at every moment, all that knowledge would not add up to the sense of sheer magnitude and wonder those birds inspired.

I’m blown away by nature on a fairly regular basis, but occasionally she pulls out the stops and reminds me that, when it comes to awe, she has an almost infinite repertoire.