Six years ago this week, the world lost a treasure, and I sat at my desk at GSLIS mourning someone I never had the opportunity to really know. In previous years I’ve resolved to be more like Leslie – this year I put that resolution on my body. In her honor, do something unexpectedly awesome for someone in your life today.
About Leslie:
I’ve been meaning to make this list for a long time, but Gemma’s recent photos have pushed me to actually writing it up. My feelings for Champaign are all wrapped up in my grad school experience, my first really fulfilling (and challenging) professional job, and a prolonged period of personal growth and experimentation between the end of my marriage and the beginning of my relationship with Shane – so lots of complicated, complicating things factor into my relationship with that little city in the corn.
Ultimately, though, what I miss is being able to walk everywhere – and the fact that wherever I went, I would run into someone I knew. Hell, it’s been four years and that is still often the case. And it goes without saying that the people and relationships made Champaign my home, but there are far too many of them to list here.
I loved LCD Soundsystem before Sound of Silver, but I don’t know that I have words for the weight of this song hitting me as I drove through the mountains into Virginia in September of 2007.
So many aspects of a life I loved left behind. So many goodbyes. And no better way to do it than with New Order, Tim in the booth, DocD and the symposium crew on the dance floor. I stopped at a hotel two hours out, too tired and blurry-eyed to drive safely, and checked in via chat with a party that I was missing, with friends I’d seen that morning but already missed.
As the sun came up and I merged onto the Beltway, I turned the stereo in our new car way, way up and just let it all wash over me. All the sadness. All the longing. All the uncertainty. All the love.
We’re leaving in the very wee hours of the morning to drive to Iowa to spend Thanksgiving with my family and also with the Wadsgreens – so tonight was very much about clearing the fridge, packing the bags, and doing a bit of meal prep since we’re likely to roll into Davenport just in time for dinner.
I would say that my grandparents are getting up there in years, but that would be an understatement. They’re old. My grandma was born in 1918, so her first Thanksgiving would’ve been just after Armistice Day. My grandpa was born two years later – his childhood on a farm in very rural Iowa might’ve looked like this:
Photo by drivebybiscuits1
This year we’ll have eleven at dinner: the two of us, my grandparents, my parents and my aunt Nancy, Eric, Jenn, Bill, and little Max. Mark will be celebrating with friends in California, but will be home for Christmas. Uncle Tom, Aunt Ann, and the little cousins will be with Ann’s family. Uncle Rich will be in Iowa City. There will be turkey and stuffing and Grandma’s mashed potatoes and butterhorn rolls. We will drink wine out of tiny glasses, and Grandma will fuss over the dishes if we don’t get the dishwasher started before she can get up from the table. It will be very warm in the house. These things never change, though this year I’ll be introducing two new dishes: sweet potatoes with pecans and goat cheese and carrot cake, both from Smitten Kitchen.
Part of the reason I love friend Thanksgivings so much is the lack of codified traditions. We each bring our own things to the table – literally and figuratively – and discard the things that don’t work. I love this. But I also love the traditions. I love the fact that our family recipes – boring and predictable as they can be – are ties to the past, to the years of shrimp cocktail before dinner, of being sandwiched at the dinner table between my aunt and my mom, of sneaking sips of wine after the meal. I argued against having a turkey this year, but I know I’d miss it if it wasn’t on the sideboard along with Mom’s cranberry sauce and the small cut glass salad bowls.
Going home for the holidays is expensive and time consuming – hours in the car, money for pet sitters and expensive tanks of gas and food on the road. Moods run thin, we eat too much, and sleep is compromised by unfamiliar beds. I dread the drive and the stress, and part of me will be relieved when we don’t have to make as long of a trip. At the same time, I treasure the years and years of memories, and look forward to the brief amount of time we’ll have with my family around the table. I feel tremendously blessed.
The notes in my cookbook indicate that I made this recipe for dinner with Carl in September of 2005. While I recall little about the meal itself, I do remember that evening quite clearly. I was in a weird place emotionally, coming off a dizzying summer of shows and dancing and heartbreak. I was starting to feel the ground under my feet professionally and intellectually. Things were about to shift, and I was feeling at loose ends. After dinner, we laid on the paint-stained hardwood floors and talked and smoked cigarettes, and when he kissed me goodbye, I felt like a tremendous weight was lifted off my shoulders.
That’s one of the reasons I love cooking – and one of the reasons I’ve liked this project so far: that a note written in a cookbook can bring back so vividly the memories of a meal shared with a friend. I don’t know that this note will have the same kind of effect several years from now, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a good dinner. Shane was a bit put off by the texture and flavor of the rhubarb – when it isn’t used in desserts, rhubarb is tangy and sour – but the pork was flavorful, and I’m kind of blown away by the fact that we roasted pork chops in our toaster oven. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
Recipe:
Super Pork Fillet Roasted on Rhubarb from Happy Days with the Naked Chef
Five and a half years ago, I had a week of really terrible luck. While driving to Milwaukee to see Lords of Acid, I got a speeding ticket for ~ $165. My options were to pay on the spot or go to jail – so, of course, I paid. My then-husband was furious, and I remember him barely speaking to me the rest of the way to the show. Upon arriving, I tucked my ID and debit card in my pack of cigarettes, which I tucked into the top of my stocking – something I did fairly regularly, since I’ve never been one to carry a purse. Within five minutes of getting into the venue, the pack had fallen out of my stocking, leaving me with no ID, no debit card, and no cash. My ex continued to be furious with me – and mainly with good reason – though my friends helped me to make the best of the evening.
Less than a week later, driving to Milwaukee for another show, I got another speeding ticket. That’s over $300 in tickets in less than a week – at a time when we were both basically making ends meet, but not much more. I didn’t have any way of paying on the spot, so I was lucky that the cop was called away, and I was able to send in a cashier’s check.
About a week after the second ticket, a small white envelope arrived in the mail containing my ID, debit card, and a note. Someone had found my stuff while cleaning up the venue, smoked the rest of the cigarettes, and mailed my cards back to me with a note explaining as much.
It’s been 5 1/2 years, but I still have that note and envelope somewhere, as I always meant to write the guy and thank him. Instead, I’m hoping that I’m repaying the good karma dealt to me by mailing back the wallet I found this morning on my walk to school.
I’ve had kind of a rough day at work today, and sometimes the littlest gestures of kindness make everything better.
I have a number of delicious memories associated with this album, not the least of which is the end of the Subversion Halloween party in 2005. Jim used to always end his sets with a Portishead track, and that night it was “Glory Box”. I was alone on the stage at the Highdive, wrapped in plastic, glowing under the blue-white lights. It was a perfect ending to a very, very fun night.
Lying in savasana, my hands weighed down by bags of sand, my eyes covered by a lavender pillow, I remembered vividly an afternoon in Poitiers with O. After kebab sandwiches, we walked to a little park on the grounds of what used to be a manor or a castle. We stood at an overlook point, the wind whipping about us, watching trains leave the station and snake through the valley below. We talked about S, and I remember a deep longing for N at a time when things were the definition of uncertain as he pursued his Camino a few hundred miles across the mountains.
Tonight as we stirred from savasana, Mary told us to breathe in pure oxygen, exhaling anything that didn’t come from love or grace. I don’t know where that memory came from – love or grace or longing or deep sadness – but when the weight was removed from my wrists, I felt that memory lift from my body as well, leaving me at peace.
I’m not ashamed to admit it. I love Third Eye Blind‘s self titled first album. It reminds me vividly of the summer between high school and college, which I can’t believe was 10 years ago (class of ’97, woo!). That was the summer I went to DC with church and hated every minute of it except for the parts where I was hanging out with Adam and James and being disgruntled. That was the summer I went to Vancouver with my family and counted microbuses. That was the summer I really rebelled against my parents for the first time, had my first real kiss, and met my ex.
I have no desire to be 17 again, but it’s sometimes pretty awesome to be able to flash back to an exciting and turbulent time of my life so effortlessly. Thanks, Third Eye Blind.
This weekend was awash in deja vu.
Thursday night I drove to Chicago to see Metric at the Metro. I drove home alone through a wicked storm, my ears and heart full of a conversation late at night, driving home from the Nine Inch Nails show a year ago, tired from the end of the semester, from wandering around on Fullerton in clunky boots, from months of wondering what this particular phone call and the conversations to follow would bring. My ears and heart were full of the Camino that night, and of things that I so desperately wanted, and things that would never come to pass. On this night I drove home white-knuckled and quiet.
Because I see and know so many people, I am constantly doing double-takes, making sure the person I see is who I actually think they are. On Saturday I was working at the cafe when my breath caught in my throat at the mis-sight of a customer. She had her back to the counter and was wearing a long skirt, a lace-y, macrame-y sweater, and had her hair clipped up in a messy ponytail. When she turned around, I knew she couldn’t possibly be who I thought she was – she was at least 20 years too old, with graying hair and a darker complexion – but when I waited on her and smelled the familiar sweet and warm vanilla perfume, I found stinging tears in my eyes. “You remind me so much of someone I used to know that it’s freaking me out a little,” I said, lowering my milk pitcher to make the foam for her cappuccino. She just laughed.
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