Times, they are a changin'...

The summer is burning herself out here - a few days ago, as I came down my bike on our street, I looked up to see the leaves on the trees lining the brownstones turning shades of burned red and brown, the first glorious harbingers of fall. The heat wavered for a minute, giving us two days, before returning to show that summer wasn't quite spent, not quite yet.



Without intending to be a seasonal reader, I finished Jeffrey Lent's In the Fall, a novel about three generations of a Vermont family grappling with its own history. The first thing I noticed about Lent's writing is his use of fragments. All the time. On purpose. I think. I'm not sure if this is his writing style generally, as this is his first novel and the first (if there are more) of his that I have read, but it is a style well-suited to a novel with this subject material. The story of Leah, a runaway slave whose sad history included being gang-raped and mistreated by her white slave-owning father, is tragic but unfortunately believable; less believable is her marriage to Norman Pelham, a northbound Yankee soldier. Norman and Leah return to Vermont to start a family; their children and grandchildren's lives are recounted to the steady metronome of the passing seasons. The novel ends with Foster Pelham's discovery of his grandmother Leah's origins in Sweetboro, his own ancestry, and the despicable cause of Leah's catastrophic suicide. Lent makes one thing clear: that through the years, many things come to pass and many things change but the sourest parts of human nature - its predatory instinct and the young child's cruel tendency to exclude, construct hierarchies, and inflict pain for the simple fact that he can - remain. These insights are timeless in their relevance; the focus on family, ancestry, marriage and children struck me particularly as I am learning to articulate these things for myself and from the new position of fiancee. I have already learned that weddings are stupidly complicated and arrive with a set of nuanced politics all their own. Families and lineages blending creates quite a stir, and everyone has at least one opinion on the way "things should be" that renders it impossible to please anyone, accomplish anything, or celebrate one's own life choices in a way one sees fitting. I am calmed only by the knowledge that this fluster, too, shall pass.

It seems ironic to read a book called In the Fall right as fall begins, but perhaps it can offer a gentle harbinger of the delights to come, and a lesson for the churning negotiations of the moment. Living in New York has been a lesson in patience and the acceptance of the natural world's insistence and cyclical nature, but having weathered a few seasons I feel now excited for the particular joys of the next: scarves, windy streets with fallen leaves dancing down them, pumpkin lattes, cider with cinnamon sticks, squash, the last crisp fall apples, and those glorious sharp icy blue days before the chill sets in for the winter. And then, there are months of dormant grey-white, snowballs, stews, boots, hats, and empty streets, beaches, yards...perhaps the wisdom being to appreciate where I am, fully enjoy the blessings and treasures of the moment while quietly laughing at the elements of the ridiculous that manifest themselves, and to absorb it all for what it is, not trying to change it...but just, to ride the seasons of life with a good sense of humor, a voracious appetite for life, and an eye for the beauty in it all, loving it, just for what it is.

I Dream (Read) of Africa...

My inborn wanderlust has struck again. I realized recently that for the first time in 20 years, I have been on the same continent for 12 consecutive months. This fact makes me itchy. With no relief in sight, and no trips planned (other than the honeymoon that will happen after the impossible-to-time wedding), I have resorted to the NYPL and Nancy Pearl. I have dusted off my little-used library card, a vestige of a former, no-longer-up-to-date Manhattan address, and invested 30 minutes on the NYPL website requesting Nancy Pearl's Book Lust recommendations be sent to the Harlem branch for my rapid consumption. I read a lot. I always have; this is a leftover habit of a youth spent traveling the world in my mind before I started traveling it in my body. E is still amazed at how fast I can read.

I devoured Francesca Marciano's Rules of the Wild in three days of train rides. Her Italian narrator's quirks were eerily reminiscent of my own, and her search for a home and place to belong in the wild, unknowable, ever-changing Kenya parallel my own hunt for a room of my own (so to speak). Pearl describes this book as a love story set in 90s Africa, among wealthy and self-indulgent white society. I would add, it is a bleak, if honest, portrayal of white Nairobi society. But it really is a love story, set in an insider's world, and detailed with the set of a semi-nostalgic African lifestyle, but at its heart, is a story about love and the search for belonging. As someone who belongs nowhere, I found it dizzyingly real, and as I grew further engrossed with the story, it became difficult to separate fact from fiction. As with any good story, I was sad to let Esme go.

Continuing in the same geographic if not thematic vein, my next Pearl recommendation is The Ukimwi Road by Dervla Murphy. At sixty years old, Murphy decided to bike solo through Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Her account is brutally honest, sharing the flies and smells and sour meals - and her daily counts of Tusker beers (now familiar because of Marciano); she does not romanticize Africa, or what it is to be a white woman traveling alone there. While she is critical of the white intervention in Africa, she does not question of the fraught side effects of Western medical superiority or probe assumptions of Western feminism as the ultimate liberation (so far). The work quickly becomes about AIDs, as Murphy cycles through AIDs-ravaged villages in the 90s as the epidemic was on the rise, and before drugs were widely available that mitigated the effects (even for white patients) of what her acquaintances call "the slim disease." It is depressing that even in recent years, with the time that has elapsed since the book's publishing, a cure has not been found and the disease continues to devour. Murphy recounts the continual pleas for help of people she comes across in her travels: they assume she is rich because she is not African and traveling there, because she has a bike, because she is white. They assume she can help, they offer her their children to take with her, ask for money, request drugs. Her contribution is publishing a book to an audience who knows little of living with this disease, a trifling offering to those she meets but an important one for those who have not seen this disease at work.

I am enjoying living vicariously through the irreverent, spicy Murphy, and plotting how to make some voyages of my own very soon. My next Pearl recommendation, waiting for me at the Harlem library, is an account of the founding of Australia...I seem to have a white postcolonial guilt thing going for places that are depicted as rugged, lawless, unconquerable...

On Marriage

Perhaps because the universe knows I got engaged to be married, I have randomly read and come across so many things on the topic of marriage recently. In a mad plan to read all of Nancy Pearl's recommendations, I ordered a copy of The Nowhere City by Alison Lurie from the NYPL (I have one hour and fifteen minutes commute EACH WAY to work at the moment, so I find that between this length of time per day allotted to delicious reading plus my cultivated nerd speed-reading tendency, growing up in a house without tv, means I have trouble staying "in books" like some women have trouble staying "in shoes"). Pearl guaranteed me a novel about California, so I picked up Lurie with interest, encouraged further by the sticker on the cover notifying me that she won the Pulitzer Prize (for another book, of course, but still...it's a Pulitzer!).


The Nowhere City is in fact the story of a marriage that goes sideways when the East Coast couple, Harvard intellectuals, unable to find work in the small, closed circle of East Coast academia, turn to California and work at a research firm in order to get a paycheck. The Harvard man is immediately lured away from his shy, depressed brunette wife - who is, in the first half of the book, always described in bed suffering from headaches - by a beatnik blonde artist/waitress. He becomes obsessed with her laidback attitude, her California slang, her daring, sensual lifestyle and her voracious West Coast sexuality, so opposite of his wife's closed, muted life and personality. The Harvard man eventually returns to the East Coast (for him, and Lurie, clearly, California is after all so unnatural in its lack of seasons, desert colors, blunt sexuality, its blondeness). His wife, who first hated Los Angeles and suffered from psychosomatic headaches that prevented her from exploring the city for what it truly is, eventually turns into a California girl, abandoning her husband when he returns to the green summers and white winters of Boston. Unrecognizable to him now, she is blonde, she wears colorful clothing, she has an affair with a Hollywood starlet's husband. The book is a chronicle of a failed marriage, and an East Coaster's likewise failed attempt to make sense of California.



I'm sorry to relate I was disappointed with my first stab at conquering Nancy Pearl's recommendations (I will give her a few more chances!) but I think part of it is that its bleak portrait of marriage and failure to fully give the West Coast a chance influenced my negative opinion. After all, as a West Coast person, I feel Lurie did not weigh heavily enough the freedom and opportunity of the West Coast (see pictures of this very freedom above), of California - the freedom to redefine oneself, the freedom of the sky that goes for miles and miles uninterrupted, unconstrained...there is no pressure, no social constraint, there is space for exploration, which just does not exist on the East Coast. All one's effort on the East Coast is concentrated on trying to break into a circle of power long consolidated and designed to exclude others.

Reading a story about a failed marriage, too, is not the best thing for a newly engaged person. It is easy to recognize the small miscommunications inherent in any relationship, and see how they conflated and escalated to become unavoidable, unmistakable, capable of breaking the relationship. Then I read a delightful piece of infectious inventice on McSweeney's, here. Guest columnist Susan Schorn writes about women - the women who become mistresses of married men, and the women who are wives, left behind, forgotten, scorned. Schorn writes against these women who betray their fellow women, advocating the bitchslap despite various nuanced understandings of what it means to be a woman, a wife, a person in today's society. I found I agreed with her violent anger towards the women who so callously disregard their fellow women and don't stand beside them to end men's infidelity (we could, as women, after all, make it impossible if we chose.

Still a bit disillusioned and sad, divine intervention then sent me to Elizabeth Gilbert's website, where I found her Q & A discussing her new book, Committed. Here she discusses the negatives of marriage (it benefits men financially, socially and healthwise more than women; marriage actually makes women unhappier, increases their workload, and punishes them socially and financially, according to averaged statistics). She talks about how marriage is practical, and not romantic; it is, in her opinion, not a game for young people, either. These things I agree with, I can see. But then she went on to discuss how marriage was a revolution, instituted by families who wanted their connections to mean something, and found against the governments and powers that be to keep marriage around. I appreciate and support her call to honesty, to small "acts of household tolerance," to being individuals responsible for their own state of being at the end of every day. She writes about how gay marriage can rejuvenate the institution of marriage, and it reminded me of why I believe so fervently in the legalization of gay marriage. It's because I am, at the end of everything and despite experiences to the contrary, a hopeless romantic and believe fully in the restorative, beautiful, peace-giving power of love. I believe we should be free to bind ourselves to the person of our choosing. I believe that we can become better people in a monogamous domestic partnership - I know this because I have been shaped and honed by my relationship with E. I believe that with real love, it is the opposite of an anchor, the weight of this love pulls me up, pulls me toward my better self. And that journey is the only one worth making.




You can read Gilbert's extended Q & A here.

On the Road Again: Forgotten Manzanar

There are some places that carry their secrets ponderously, where you can sense the past and their heavy weight of history is palpable. Manzanar is one of these places, on the freeway in southeastern California between Yosemite and Death Valley. It is easily one of the most beautiful places I've been to, with Mount Whitney towering over the area and craggy mountains lining a desert valley. The sky goes on for miles, and there is little human habitation. At night you can see stars you never even dreamed of.

But this place has a history attached, inescapably, dragging on its heel. During World War II, the American government issued an executive order that condemned Japanese Americans to internment in camps for "national security." The government felt that these citizens and residents, given their heritage, posed a danger, and so they isolated them. Rounded them up, in places like Puyallup, Washington (the site is now the Puyallup Fair), put them on trains and loaded them into several camp sites across the US. Once in the camps, these unfortunate citizens and legal residents of America worked making camo garments for American troops overseas, drawing vegetables and sustenance from the desert's soil, going to church and playing baseball. The government, wanting to justify their internment of US citizens, sent Ansel Adams to photograph the camp residents and show how happily they sacrificed their freedom, their land, their homes, their families, how they understood this was necessary, how they weren't angry about it. This was Adams' most controversial job. His photographs portray a sunny, industrious group of Japanese; these photos contrast with those of Dorothea Lange, famous for her capturing of the Great Depression, and Toyo Miyatake, a resident and photographer. Lange and Miyatake caught fragments of the camp's toll on its residents, their confinement, and their difficulty living in one of the most extreme sites on earth, with its withering summers a testament to nearby Death Valley and frigid icy winters, their wafer-thin holding blocks affording the camp residents poor protection from the elements.

Much of the camp was destroyed, dismantled by the government after WWII, an embarrassing show of America's paranoia and inflicting un-Constitutional action on her own citizens. Today, the site is run by the National Park Service, with a self-drive auto tour and an Interpretive Center. We arrived at 8am, and enjoyed the site to ourselves until around 9a. It was so beautiful, so peaceful, so sad. The zen garden created by the camp's residents has been recreated, but other than that and the cemetery, solitary markers (Block 25, Church, Baseball Field) are the only pieces left standing. At the cemetery, a white stupa with black Japanese script on it stands alone in a square, fenced in with wooden slats decorated with strings of origami paper cranes, startlingly colorful against the backdrop of the desert and her muted colors. Visitors have left coins, necklaces, mementos, small Buddhas on the steps of the stupa, spontaneous pieces of their hearts left behind as a sign of their presence, their witness. Only six graves remain at the site (families have petitioned for the return of all other remains originally there), and seeing these mementos brought tears to my eyes. I want to believe that this place is not forgotten, that these six lives still are heard and that their lives, dishonored by ending captivity, are redeemed as rehonored by every person who comes here and walks away touched, vowing that America cannot take these liberties from her citizens again, that this compromises our principles and our founding and who we claim to be in the world. The Interpretive Center provides much of the backdrop and documentation of the stories of these Americans: their lives, their names, the stores and farms they owned before they came to Manzanar. It is my fervent (there is no other word) wish that this place continue to exist as an admission of America's mistakes and a call to who we can be: a place of liberty and justice for all.

Experiments in Cooking: Making Pickles

Between my organically grown cucumbers from upstate, courtesy of my boss donating her CSA to me while she's in France for the summer, and the Mediterranean cucumbers I usually gorge on from 3 Guys, I found myself with lots of extra beloved cucumbers. My ability to consume them couldn't keep up, and their once-crispy skins were starting to wrinkle, their crunch diminishing.

Rather than toss them, I thought I'd take the opportunity to experiment and make pickles of them. I've never converted cucumbers into pickles myself, but I've been wanting to try. So I found a recipe on Old Faithful (Real Simple): dill pickles! I used regular instead of sweet onions, and dill rather than dill seed. Following the recipe didn't yield enough liquid to cover the cucumbers in the Ball jar, so I added some water to bring the liquid over the cucumbers.

It took about 4 days for them to marinate fully. Delicious!

On the Road Again: Yosemite to Manzanar

We woke up Wednesday morning, and drove into Yosemite again. Even the crowds and RVs couldn't make the place less beautiful, but there was a lot more traffic and congestion than there had been the night before. We swam in the brisk, chilly Merced River, joined by a mama duck with her four chicks. Continuing across the northern road, through the meadows, we caught a glimpse of a brown bear grabbing some breakfast in a field. We came out of the park, and hit even more mountains, just as beautiful as those in the park. We then turned south, to Lone Pine, and Manzanar.