Watch This Space...

... enough will come again. Soon. In three weeks, definitely, but maybe sooner.

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is about gratitude for all the wonderful things in our lives -- family, friends, food. It is so wonderful to have enough of these things to be able to celebrate, to hold a feast, a potlatch, a ceremony of eating and drinking, and enjoy this abundance. At this time of year many of us also donate food to others whose feast tables may not be quite as full. I know I never give enough, but what enough would be, I never know. I can only hope that everyone will have a full belly at the end of a day spent with people they love. If you don't, email me, and we will try to find you a space at our table.
 
This year, we will have my mother and three friends over for the big meal. I am so excited to be able to host it in my own home. That doesn't happen very often, and there is something so satisfying about cooking for hours and having people over to enjoy it, especially on Thanksgiving. This is a day when I, at least, am overwhelmed with gratitude for the abundance in my life (so much so, that I usually end up eating about three times more than my stomach can hold, and then lying around groaning for the next few hours, until enough space opens up to start picking at the leftovers.)
 
As always, enough is too much, or at least too much for my little brain to handle. Stop eating when you're full. Duh. Nope, not smart enough to do that. At least, as a non-sugar-eater I get some break from dessert -- but no, wait, there's my wonderful no-sugar apple pie*. I think I will still be lying on the couch for a while.
 
Just before Thanksgiving this year, I turned 46. This occurred after having been 45 for what felt like 10 years. That was one long year. I am grateful, though, to have had these years, and all the ones before, with all of my parts still working. Even if my hair no longer produces color without liberal application of L'Oreal Preference and even if my joints are all silted up, I am here. The world from my window is white with snow. I went sledding with two wonderful children today. We screamed as we flew down the hill, faces being slammed with frozen powder as we went. It was awesome. I am thankful for snow and for sledding and for 10-year-olds who carry their own sleds back up the hill. I am grateful for the fuzzy grey cat stretched out in a half-moon on the floor in front of me. I am grateful that my drive to Burlington in the soggy snow last night did not end up with our car on its side in the ditch, and I offer my best wishes to those whose did.
 
I am grateful for my "precious human birth", as Pema Chodron calls it, and for the preciousness of the humans around me this year -- Cedar, Bruce, my mom, my good friends. I am so blessed; the turkey should be just an afterthought... but it won't be! I wait all year for this meal! It will be good, and with any luck, it will be enough.
 
 
*Whenever I've written anything about one of my recipes, people always want it, so here is the very scientific one for no-sugar apple pie. Make a double crust, with butter, not that scary Crisco stuff. Fill a large bowl with peeled, cored and sliced Cortland apples (they make the best pies). Throw in some cinnamon, a hint of nutmeg, some lemon juice, some butter, and some flour. Mix it all up and pack it into the shell, making sure it mounds up high. Put on the top crust, pinch it on well, cut a few slits to let the steam out and bake it around 400 for as long as it takes to start bubbling out the slits. Pretty easy, and especially yummy with plain whipped cream (just put in a dash of vanilla).

Steamroller Blues

 

I have drunk many cups of tea whose teabag tags bear the wise words "When God made time, he made enough of it." That may be true, but I think he only gives it to people who go to church (or synagogue, or mosque...), which is why you are not gettting a full blog post this week. The post exists and awaits only the application of large jolts of electricity, mental and otherwise, to make it rise from the table and walk. However, it is hard to reach the jumper cables from under the steamroller. Fear not, though; before long there will once again be enough Enough to satisfy all. Hope to see you next week!

A Clover and a Bee

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson is the poet of enough. Dwelling in “possibility”, “a fairer house than prose”, she knows we don’t need the whole prairie to be happy. Consider this:

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
 
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —
 
I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

How many friends does a person need? If you have a good one, or two, can you close the valves of your attention? What else can the soul select and then stop, satisfied? If I could do that with everything – with food, work, stuff – then to be alive truly would be “Power… Omnipotence --Enough.”

 
It’s not just Dickinson. All poetry is about enough, really, because the poem stops when the writer feels he or she has said enough. Still, a small aspect of enough in poetry comes from small poems about small things.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

We get the taste and feel of the cold, juicy plums. We get the questions in our own mind – should I really do this to my friend? Should I really take these plums? And we get that feeling of guilty pleasure. That this is enough to make a poem and that these plums were enough for the speaker is somehow both incomprehensible and satisfying at the same time. It is the same with William Carlos Williams’ other famous small poem about the wheelbarrow. Is a wheelbarrow really enough for so much to depend on? Its mere existence in the world, its redness, next to the white of the chickens, is somehow integral, is enough to contemplate, to make a poem.

Sure, there are more complicated poems. But even they end, and thus at some point the writer said, “Enough. It’s done.”

But why should we single out poetry as being sole representative of enough? Other works of art – short stories, novels, paintings, essays (blog posts?) – also eventually end, their creators saying, “Enough.” And what about us humans? Our lives begin and end, and I don’t know if we have a creator per se, but eventually God or our DNA or the Higgs Boson steps in and says, “Enough.” And then we die, but was it enough, after all?

…would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

Maybe the fact that so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow is a reminder that our lives, too, are enough, that somewhere, somehow, something depends upon us, even if we are completely isolated, even if our only companions are chickens.

 

The following picture comes from http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/so-much-depends-upon-a-red-wheel-barrow, a collection of many permutations of this poem.

 

Me and Fibber McGee

The other day Bruce said he was tired of living in a warehouse. I replied that I would love to live in a warehouse; warehouses are huge. Right now we are living in a closet.
                                               
It’s true that our house is small, but that is not the problem. The problem is all the stuff in it. After all, there are plenty of families larger than ours living in single trailers. And then there’s the “tiny house” movement, where people live in places that are only 100 square feet total. Actually, when I first met Bruce, he was living in just such a tiny house, aka a vacation cabin that had been converted to year-round rental use, long before tiny houses became fashionable. I don’t think the place was much more than 100 square feet, certainly no more than 150. And yet it was homey and neat, and he had somehow managed to shelve and hang everything he owned so that the place felt plenty big enough (until I tried to take a shower and kept banging my elbows on the walls). Ironically, now we live in a place about 10 times the size of that cabin, and it feels tiny and crowded.

Why? Well, from where I sit, I see an expensive doll that’s been played with about five times in two years, a bottle of Rit dye with a little left in it that “might come in handy”, two shelves of cookbooks of which we generally use three or four and never crack the others, and a manila envelope decorated by my sister, which used to house some photographs she sent. There are antiques and quasi-antiques thrown up on walls and mantles (most not really arranged, just put). In a corner is a brown pottery crock containing a rarely used metal detector, an old-fashioned rolling mouse stick toy, a yard stick, a couple of wooden “swords”, a “bow” made of a bent stick and string, with a pipe insulation “arrow”, a stick horse, a baton, a feather duster, a watercolored fabric flag on a stick, a long cat toy that’s like a feather duster, a small broom, two walking sticks, a dowel, and a random piece of one-by-one wood. This is just one crock in one corner of the house. Almost every corner looks like this, and not just the corners. The cabinet under the TV is stuffed with blankets and quilts, as is the hall closet. We wouldn’t even need this many blankets if our house became a Red Cross shelter in the next ice storm! (We should get rid of some, yet how do we pick which ones? They are all cozy, and many were gifts; two were Cedar’s bed comforters as she’s grown up, and how can we throw that part of her childhood away?)

Looking into the kitchen, I can see a teddy bear in a pirate kerchief next to my daughter’s placemat on the table. This table gets cleared off periodically, but within 24 hours is always re-covered with newspapers, mail, papers brought home from school, wallets, keys, pocket change, to-do lists, and, obviously, stuffed animals and other toys. Two of the five chairs are generally un-sat-upon in our family of three. They are layered with sweaters, coats, hats, snow pants (yes, already!), and bags. The stairs going up to our bedroom are no better. They hold the newspaper box; brushes, combs, and potions for Cedar’s wild hair; tissues; books to be returned to the library; the pumpkins we painted for Halloween; anything needing to go upstairs; and all the papers we’ve taken off the table to make room for eating.

I have just described maybe 10 percent of the stuff I can see from where I’m sitting in the living room. Just think of the bedrooms; the bathrooms overflowing with magazines (the New Yorker comes every week!), towels, gifts of soap and bath salts (not to mention the litter box and all its accoutrements); and the back office in which we can barely turn around, let alone stand up, because above us is a loft full of, guess what, more STUFF!

We have gotten rid of many things, but still we are drowning in them. Over the past couple of years we have given boxes and boxes of books to the library sale, and recently we threw away crates of old music cassettes and video tapes. These were emotional partings. Those tapes had held the music of our teens and twenties, as well as mixes lovingly made for us by friends. And it’s not that we don’t still own a cassette player, because we do, but we never play tapes anymore, so it was logical to toss them. Unfortunately, logic and emotion don’t mix well. It’s been months since the tapes went to the dump and just last night Bruce was still lamenting their loss.

It’s amazing that we did let go of the tapes. Normally around here, emotion wins. I have never been able to bring myself to throw away my sister’s envelope because she spent so much time decorating it with magic marker shapes. And then there is all my daughter’s art. I have trouble even tossing coloring book pages that took no creativity whatsoever, let alone her actual artwork. And then there are the toys. Even she (a serious pack rat) is finally starting to feel weighed down by the amount of stuff she has, so she proposed getting rid of a children’s Sudoku game. She never plays it, but it has these beautiful little jewel-like animals to place in the squares. She was willing to let it go, amazingly, but I wasn’t. I love those little animals!

Basically, our house is one loooooong paragraph in the story of our life, full of words and sentences that have just enough meaning to resist being tossed aside, but still overwhelming to both reader and writer alike. Natalie Goldberg, in her wonderful book Writing Down the Bones, says that writers should be samurai, cutting away all the fat from our work. I can generally do that with my writing. After all, words come easily; I can always replace them. But how do I replace the Guess Who game, made for three-year-olds, that Cedar and her friend Reuben used to play for hours every day? It has not come off the shelf in ages, except to afford access to something underneath, and yet if it were gone, I think I would feel the hole in my life forever.

I have a feeling we’ll be in this closet for a long time.

I Want a Smartphone, but I Need a Yacht

I want a smartphone… but I don’t. It’s more like I feel like I need one to continue living in this world. It’s already a communication device; a computer; storage for music, movies, photos, and podcasts; a checkbook; a credit card machine; a locator for self, others, restaurants and constellations – but luckily there are still other ways to perform these functions, so for the moment a smartphone is just a want. Eventually, though, it will be the only way to check out a library book (book!) or to travel; it will be our social security card; passport; driver’s license; certificate of birth, marriage, divorce, and/or death. Then, of course, it will be a need.

Wants vs. needs is at the heart of the question of what is enough. I never took a psychology class (though growing up with two psychologists should entitle me to at least a bachelor’s degree in the field!), but I do know about Maslow’s hierarchy. At the bottom are the physiological needs – food, water, air, excretion, etc., which, when unfulfilled, supposedly make it impossible to do anything more in life than just try to survive. A smartphone isn’t necessary for any of those, but the right app could help locate a food or water source or a public bathroom. Still, when the future comes, and it is impossible to buy anything without a smartphone, I will still easily (well, maybe with some difficulty) be able to stay right on our land and live off our garden in the summer and off deer and pine needles in the winter without any electronic devices. And I will be able to use my own bathroom facilities, or the woods, as needed.

The second level of needs Maslow lists is safety. Here a smartphone could be an asset or a liability. It is good to be able to call for help when in trouble (to actually place a call, unlike the two girls trapped in an Australian sewer who simply updated their Facebook status), but I can use my dumbphone for that just as easily. On the other hand, my dumbphone doesn’t have GPS, so it should not lead the NSA to me, which may, in the end, keep me safer. Not that I have anything to hide, of course, but given the amount of “collateral damage” our military operations always generate, I’d rather err on the side of caution.

So score one point for the smartphone on physiological needs and zero on safety. The higher levels of need Maslow describes are social connection, esteem, and self-actualization. We need to feel useful, to feel like we belong, to be valued by ourselves and others, and to feel like we are working to our potential. The traditional way to feel like we belong is to be part of a tribe. We wear tattoos, dress a certain way, or root for a certain team in order to show our affiliation. (My husband’s San Francisco Giants hat is an icon of his tribe. Often someone will recognize the sign and speak to him as one of the group. Here in the East, his tribe is not large, but apparently it is sufficient.)

This tribal iconography must be why my community college students, many of whom fail classes because they “can’t afford” the textbook, almost all have smartphones. I’m not sure how they prioritize a $200 phone and $100/month service over their degree, but I guess it’s that important to be part of their peer group, the student tribe. And speaking of peer groups, in an article I’ve previously mentioned from the Atlantic, the multimillionaires interviewed almost all felt like they needed more money to have enough. Why? Because absolute wealth doesn’t matter, only relative wealth within one’s group. If you don’t have as nice a yacht as the guy next door, then you clearly need to trade up. Otherwise you’ll lose your spot in the good yacht tribe. And then where will you be?

Personally, I tend to think of needs as only those things at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy: food, water, air, shelter, love (maybe). There are people in refugee camps living in tents. There are homeless in cardboard boxes on sidewalks, poor kids in tin hovels between buildings in Brazil. They live. They make it from day to day somehow. They definitely do not have what most Americans would consider to be enough to meet their needs, but do they? Researchers have found that in many people the needs for belonging, esteem and self-actualization are prime motivators even when physiological and safety needs are not completely met. Sometimes it’s more important to belong than to eat.

So is more than enough to simply ensure physical survival a want or a need? If it is a want, then my desire for a smartphone is as exorbitantly ridiculous as the rich guy’s desire for a better yacht. But if cultural affiliation and belonging are truly needs, that sometimes even trump the basics, then the smartphone is becoming more and more necessary as more and more people get them and my tribe of holdouts grows ever smaller.

The Icing on the Cake

One night, after a dinner that left me almost stuffed, after a quarter of a mango, a frozen banana, and a few grapes, I casually went to the kitchen for one pretzel rod. It was crunchy and salty and had that perfect burnt-ish smooth pretzel skin under the salt. I ate it and continued reading my email.

 

Then I went back to the kitchen and got another pretzel. It was just as good as the first. I ate it slowly, biting a piece off gently and chewing it carefully, softening the inside with saliva, then crunching the outside. I went back for another one. By this time there was not even the slightest thought of hunger, but still I was pulled back to the bucket to take another. Finally I just stood at the counter in the kitchen and ate two more, not even bothering to pretend I was going anywhere.

 

There’s a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, “One drink is too much, and a thousand is not enough.” After five pretzel rods, on top of everything I had eaten earlier, I could feel chewed-up starch piled right up to my breastbone. My esophagus was literally full. If I had eaten another pretzel, it would not have had anywhere to go; it would have just sat in my throat. But I still would have eaten another. And another, and another – if something hadn’t called me to my senses and sent me off to bed.

 

The next morning I still felt that stuffedness, all the way up my chest to the back of my throat. I felt a distaste for pretzels, yet I knew that later, if I allowed myself to have one, I would do the exact same thing and maybe not stop at five.

 

When I was around 14, every day after school I would bike half a mile down the hill to the Grand Union and buy a can of vanilla frosting. As I pedaled hard up the hill on the way home, I would imagine I was actually burning off the calories of what I was about to do, earning the right to eat that can of frosting. Which I would do, either in front of the TV or reading a book, completely encasing myself in numb pleasure, my brain sated with entertainment and my mouth sated with creamy sweetness. I was alone in a delicious cocoon…

 

…until I started feeling sick, which was usually when there were only a few spoonfuls left in the can. At that point I would throw the can away, vowing never to buy another one. And then I’d eat a pickle or something “real” to counteract the greasy sweetness of what was in my stomach (which was essentially sweetened Crisco). The next morning, however, I would pick the can out of the trash and finish it. For the rest of the day I’d want more and couldn’t wait until I could bike back down the hill for more frosting.

 

With certain foods, and to some extent with all food, for me “enough” has no inherent meaning. For years I’ve struggled to give it a meaning, but then there are nights like the one with the pretzels when all meaning is gone. The only enough I know then is that there are not enough pretzels in the world.

 

For me, that is a figurative dearth, but for so many people there is literally not enough food to keep them alive and healthy. People are starving, and I have so much food I have to practically tie myself down to keep myself from eating too much of it. A thousand calories is the bare minimum for a woman to survive on per day, but that 2000-calorie can of frosting was extra for me, on top of all the healthy food I ate. How can it be that people not having enough to eat can exist in the same world where I could buy 2000 calories for a dollar-fifty or whatever it was back then? How is it that the thought of these people is not enough to keep me from going back for one more pretzel?

 

 

Riding the Giraffe

I wish I were more like John Muir. This guy used to grab a blanket and some hardtack and take off across the desert or up a mountain or down into a canyon. He never feared not having enough. “’Oftentimes,’ he writes in some unpublished biographical notes, ‘I had to sleep out without blankets and also without supper or breakfast. But usually I had no great difficulty in finding a loaf of bread in the widely scattered clearings of the farmers. With one of these big backwoods loaves I was able to wander many a long, wild mile, free as the winds in the glorious forests and bogs, gathering plants and feeding on God’s abounding, inexhaustible spiritual beauty bread.’

“On these expeditions he had disciplined himself to endure hardship, for his notebooks disclose the fact that he often went hungry and slept in the woods, or on the open prairies, with no cover except the clothes he wore,” writes William Frederic Badé in the introduction to Muir’s A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf.

In one of his most famous essays, “Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta”, Muir describes the night he and a fellow naturalist spent in blasting snow, huddled over volcanic vents that spewed intense heat and foul gases from the side of the mountain. It was such a cold night that they had to continually turn their bodies so that one side could be boiled by the steam from the fumaroles, the other side freezing. While his companion was wishing he had a minister to pray with and dwelling on their certain imminent death, Muir was optimistic: “With a view to cheering myself as well as him, I pictured the morning breaking all cloudless and sunful, assuring him that no storm ever lasted continuously from day to day at this season of the year.”

Muir was fearless; during a strong windstorm, instead of taking refuge indoors, he climbed to the top of a hundred-foot Douglas spruce and whooshed back and forth wildly, perfectly happy. The last thing he was thinking of was food or where he would sleep that night. Meanwhile, I go into a panic attack if I’m not sure when my next meal is coming.

When I camp, I have a huge pack, a tent, a sleeping bag and pad, food, cooking gear, bug spray, sunscreen, a towel, a bathing suit, water… I can imagine setting off with just a blanket and some biscuits, but I also imagine myself shivering, hungry, and miserable. I have never even fasted for an entire day. I often can barely make it from breakfast to lunch without a snack.

The closest I’ve ever been to Muir’s self-sufficiency was when I was three years old. In the big house where we lived was a room that I think was supposed to be a dining room, but it didn’t have a table in it, or at least for a while it didn’t. All it had was a large circular braided rug. At the time, one of my favorite toys was a Playskool riding giraffe. It was a little scooter, with handles on each side of the giraffe’s head. I remember packing a lunch and a blanket and riding my giraffe from the outside edge of the rug around and around the spiral to the center. I had my supplies, and when I got to the center I would eat my lunch and lie down on the blanket. Eventually I’d pack up and ride back out to the edge.

When I think about those “trips”, I remember how satisfied I felt that I could pack what I needed and take it with me. I didn’t need much, and I had my giraffe to take me where I wanted to go. Many years later, when I started to read John Muir’s writings, I was brought back to that feeling. To this day I would love to be so free, so unneeding of anything beyond the very simplest provisions.

 

 

When Enough is Not Enough

In the Adirondacks this week, we are having the gorgeous September weather that magically appears each year (though sometimes it doesn’t come until October). Clear blue skies for days on end are the set for the spectacular show of colored leaves. Twelve years and three weeks ago, in 2001, the weather was just like this when planes were crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. For days the blue sky defied my attempts to grasp what had happened, to come to terms with a world in which people didn’t value their own lives as long as by killing themselves they could also kill others.

The mall attack in Nairobi, sectarian fighting in Iraq, the Syria gas attacks, the Sandy Hook shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing – all the killings that keep arriving on my radio each morning – clearly show that there is something wrong with the world. All humanity seems to be suffering from a sickness that we ourselves have created, with our tribalism, consumerism, greed, and isolation. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. And everywhere else.

Every time these things happen, I wonder, what am I supposed to do in the face of this unbearable wrongness? After every one of these terrifying and idiotic demonstrations of what’s wrong with humanity, I think that I should just give up on this messed-up world, find my own “enough” here in the woods, and live a relatively safe, fulfilling life. It would be fulfilling. I don’t need all the misery of my interactions with the world. I can just retreat – not to hide from the awfulness but simply to stop participating, to sit by the edge of my pond and write, to tend my garden and go on long walks, to fully inhabit this world, this beautiful piece of the world that I have found and am lucky enough to live in. But that feels selfish even though it also feels necessary. I, personally, would have enough, but though I would be living in the moment, content with what I have, not fueling the greed cycle, would that be the right thing to do? Is having my own enough enough?

 

I have studied Buddhism informally for many years, meditating off and on, reading dharma teachings, at times participating in a sangha with likeminded friends. My understanding of Buddhism is that we should consider whatever we have at the moment to be enough. In the July 2005 issue of Shambhala Sun, Zenkei Blanche Hartman quotes Suzuki Roshi: “Just to be alive is enough.” But, sneakily, there is more to it. My favorite Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, reminds us often that we have received an enormous gift of “this precious human birth”, and gratitude is one of the six paramitas or important practices. Zenkei Hartman writes, “Not only is life a gift, and practice a gift, everything we have, without exception, has come to us from the kindness of others.” So can we rest with our enough, or do we have to find ways to give back, to help others in return?

This past spring, as the world was greening up, my mom’s friend Jo -- the same age as her – unexpectedly dropped dead. That same week the Boston Marathon was bombed, a fertilizer factory in Texas blew up, and one morning my cat, Jigs, killed a gray jay that had been hanging around. It was the last event that hit me hardest, opening my heart to feel the pain of the others. This sweet bird, almost tame, had been sitting in a tree above our not-yet-planted garden, occasionally swooping over the fence to grab some bread my husband had thrown out there. Then suddenly it was a lifeless body in my cat’s mouth. I felt angry and guilty and sad. I am harboring, feeding, and yes, loving, a killer of innocent creatures.

I am not a “terrorist”, but there is still death in the world because of me, if not because of my cat then because my taxes go to fuel a giant greed and war machine. I can’t just sit serenely on the edge of my pond. I don’t know what to do to fix the world, but I can’t retreat from it either. While it would be enough for me, I do realize that it would not be enough.

 

 

 

Shellac and Dental Floss

Years ago, soon after I graduated from college, I was driving across the country with a friend, Matt. Along the way we listened to some of his Frank Zappa tapes. So it was that when we pulled into a gas station in Albuquerque, and the attendant told me he was “moving to Montana soon”, I had to ask, “To be a dental floss tycoon?”
 

You will not be surprised that all I got was a blank look.
 

And frankly, I would have given myself a blank look, too, if I hadn’t just been listening to the song. Despite having seen Zappa in concert when I was in high school, and having heard some of his songs at other times, I really don’t know much about him or his music. Basically I know just enough to say something that provokes a blank look in an Albuquerque gas station attendant.
 

This is true about so many things. I have a smattering of knowledge on many different subjects, but I’m sad to say there are very few concentrations. I know enough about writing to be able to teach it, and I know enough about teaching to be able to do it, but that about covers the areas where my knowledge has any depth.
 

I studied geology for four years in college and even worked in the field after graduation, but most of the time I’m reluctant to admit it because people then expect me to know something about it. I can identify some different types of rock, and I know just enough to understand why the Adirondacks are growing and how they can be such young mountains when their rock is incredibly old, but that’s about it.
 

One thing I do have is good grammar, but I don’t know the names of all the constructions, so when students ask me why something is wrong or right, I often struggle to explain it. In fact, what I generally do is act out the sentences to show why a particular piece of punctuation is so critical (because it just is!) Many years ago I got a job as the editor of a newspaper on the strength of my good grammar. For a year and a half I faked being a journalist, blundering through interviews and missing “scoops” left and right. But darn it, that paper was well edited! Amazingly, I did not get fired.

I feel like I squeak through life, knowing just barely enough to make it, though sometimes the knowledge I do (or did) have gets me in trouble. For example, when you’ve had four semesters of calculus, that may actually be a hindrance to figuring out how much plywood to order to cover a shed roof. It would have been a much simpler and I’m sure more accurate calculation if, instead of doing algebra, I had just drawn a picture and figured out how many 4 by 8 sheets were needed to fill the dimensions of the roof. Unfortunately, the confidence with which I put forth my calculation convinced my husband, so he was understandably mad when we had to go back to the lumber yard to get another sheet.
 

Luckily for me, I have a terrible memory. Very little of importance stays in it. That’s good because I easily forget the bad things that happen (like how mad Bruce was about the plywood). The bad news is that my daughter is constantly frustrated that I don’t remember what I told her five minutes earlier, let alone a day or a week ago. Trivia seems to last, though, and certain triumphs. For example, I will never forget being proven right when my husband doubted that the word “shellac” indicated that the substance was made from the shells of lac beetles. I don’t really know anything else about shellac, other than that people use it to protect wood. Or at least they used to. (Has it been replaced by polyurethane? Is shellac the same as lacquer? I’m assuming the “lac” part is the same…)
 

How much is it necessary to know in life, anyway? In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Albus Dumbledore has a “pensive”, a weird magical device in which he can deposit thoughts and memories so they don’t clutter up his brain. Nowadays people have smartphones to do that. I don’t have either, but truthfully, I don’t know if either would help me because the important thoughts would probably be gone before I could download them to the device. And just as before, all I’d be left with would be shellac and dental floss.

The "S" Word

How can we, as a society, make it possible for everyone to have enough? According to some, including Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as President Obama, the answer is college. I teach college, so I should be very excited about this. After all, it’s job security. But given how expensive college has become, is it really the right path for all students?

Many think that the only purpose of college is to help students get jobs. New York’s Governor Cuomo has proposed performance-based funding for colleges, in which the school only gets state money if students are able to find employment within a short time after graduation. Peter Thiel andCharles Murray have gone further and argued that students should be able to gettheir money back if they do go to college but don’t get jobs in their fields. (That sounds good, but frankly it might not be the college’s fault if the student is unemployable or if the economy is so bad that there are no jobs, etc. And I say this as someone who graduated with a ton of debt and not only did not get a job in my field but ended up working at a discount bookstore for $4.25 an hour. I’d love to blame it on my college and get my money back, but it’s not their fault I majored in the wrong subject.)

Are there other purposes to college than simply getting a job? Is it the right path for all? My English Comp. students and I have written about this many times in class, and I had three sections of Comp in the same semester, so I ended up thinking fairly deeply about the topic. Then I had an “aha” moment (which will probably seem pretty obvious to everyone else).

None of this would matter if college were free.

If college were free, or very, very cheap, it wouldn’t matter if graduates got a job in their field or not. College would be a low- or no-stakes way to try out different things, learn about the world and about yourself, and grow up a bit before striking out on your own. It would allow students to try the college path, and if it were not the right one, they could then do something else without having lost anything or gone into debt. It would allow poor students the same opportunities as rich ones. Our society might (gasp!) become more equal. (Or it might not. After all, high school is free, and rich parents still pay huge sums to send their kids to private schools where they make the contacts the will help them stay rich forever…)

So I decided that college should be free. There might be a clause that if you screw up badly you then have to pay or get kicked out, but the starting gate would be open to all. Why not? After all, the social costs of an uneducated population are huge, ranging from welfare to crime and incarceration to higher disease and death rates. It would be much cheaper to just pay for everyone to go to college. It’s pretty obvious what we should do. So why aren’t we doing it?

I racked my brain for a while before realizing what the problem is. Socialism. The “S” word. For some reason anything that smacks of everyone getting equal shares of anything is anathema to the general public, despite the fact that they themselves would benefit in any number of ways. We don’t want everyone to have free health care and we don’t want everyone to have free education. It seems like people would rather not get something good if they know someone else is going to get it also, which feels kind of twisted to me. (I think they should take a lesson from my 10-year-old daughter. When she gets a cool new toy, she actually wants all her friends to have the same thing so they can play together. But she’s just a kid. What does she know?)

Is it because, “I had to work hard for what I got, and walk 10 miles in the snow uphill both ways, and I never got any handouts, dammit, so no one else should get them either”? Or is it that people are afraid of what more people with a “liberal” education might do? Then again, maybe they’re just cheap.

For it is true that nothing is really free. Taxes would certainly go up if health care and college were paid for. But we would have a more prosperous, productive society, and we would be able to afford to pay more. If everyone were healthy and educated, there would be less crime and more money for all. Everyone would have enough.

I still cannot fathom why people don’t think this is a good thing, so I guess I should call up my old school and ask for my money back. Clearly they did not do a good job educating me, or I would be able to understand.

A Creditable Cautionary Tale

I got my first credit card when I was 18. It was a “Coop” card, for the “bookstore” Harvard and MIT each had branches of. This was a bookstore in the same sense that Wal-Mart is. Books were a minor offering. There were clothes, toiletries, games, bedding, jewelry… I took advantage of all of it. As a result, there has not been one debt-free moment in my entire adult life. I am 45 now, almost 46.

It’s not that I didn’t know the value of money. Even in high school I knew enough to steal the change from the jar in my parents’ closet so I could buy cigarettes and vanilla frosting. I even knew how to work for money. From age 11, my parents paid me for cooking meals and doing laundry. If I cooked, I got 50 cents. Cleaning up afterward would double that. I seem to recall laundry netting a dollar, but that may have been for more than one load. I even got money for “babysitting” myself. When I began babysitting for other kids, I started accumulating real riches. Or I would have, except that I always found something to spend those riches on – usually something ephemeral like candy.

Addiction can certainly eat away at a budget, and even though candy, frosting, and cigarettes are cheaper than cocaine (and back then cigarettes were much cheaper), when your appetite for them is bottomless, you can still spend all you have and then find yourself stealing to get more.

Of course, spending money, too, is an addiction, even more so when it’s done on a plastic card that just goes back in your pocket after the transaction, as if nothing has happened. I discovered this early on in life. Sure, the bill would come each month, but for each $100 I had spent, I would only have to pay $5-10 in minimum payment. What a deal!

I graduated college at age 20 with both credit card and student loan debt of more than $25,000. I am not sure if I have yet paid that off, even though the banks and loan agencies say I did. I did so many convoluted transactions with that money that credit default swaps actually seem tame in comparison. I consolidated loans. I put them on forbearance so I could travel or work for minimum wage. I took out new credit cards with “Zero Percent Interest When You Transfer a Balance!” I went to graduate school and added $18,000 more in student loans. At this point I don’t know how much more there was from credit cards, but I had to have my sushi dinners and nights out with friends, right? After all, I was living in New York City!

Later I got married and we bought a house (with a mortgage, of course). After a few years we refinanced and used the new equity to consolidate our old debts. Hey – no more student loans! No more credit cards! No more car loans! This would have been great except that I kept using the credit cards and we bought another new car with a loan. Luckily a home equity credit line came along just in time.

All of this sounds awful to me now. My chest is constricting as I write about how I* suffocated myself under these bricks of debt, but at the time I thought nothing of it. Here and there I’d have a few moments of panic or clarity where I’d realize how little freedom I had in my life because I had to pay these debts, but those moments would pass and the next time I wanted something, out would come the card.

Gradually over the last several years I have woken up from the free money dream. We cut up our cards so that even if we weren’t moving forward we could at least stop moving backward. But the biggest wake-up came a few years ago when we inherited some money. Suddenly here was a finite sum – not quite enough to pay everything off, but close. I wanted to pay off as much as possible, but it was scary because then that money would be gone and there would be no getting it back. I was afraid that then we wouldn’t have enough.

I know, the irony is obvious. When I had no money, I felt rich, but when we finally got some, I felt poor. I guess when something doesn’t seem real to you, the concept of having “enough” of it doesn’t even make sense. Do I have enough fairy dust in my life? Enough clouds made of marshmallow?

Now money isn’t fairy dust to me anymore, and I’ve cut up and thrown away my magic wands. Suddenly the world is like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back to reveal that there was no magic, only fakery. In the movie, the characters discovered that they didn’t need the wizard’s magic because they had had what they needed all along. Is that true for me as well? Can I go back to Kansas under my own power and turn my castle in the air into a solid home on the ground, on a real foundation? I’ll keep you posted.

*Even though I am married, I can’t implicate my husband in any of this. He had gone merrily throughout his life without ever having a credit card when he met me. I was the vile temptress who led him down the road to perdition.

 

Red Ant Soup

I remember watching a documentary about Cambodia. People were being paid a few cents an hour to dig a trench by hand, with picks and shovels. Men and women dug side by side, covered with sweat and dirt. The trench was for a fiber optic cable. The woman the camera was following left the trench that night to cook dinner for her children on a campfire in the nearby woods where they were going to sleep. But first they had to find the food – red ant nests, which they boiled to make soup for dinner. And somehow that was enough, enough at least to sleep and get up and go back to the trench to make a little more money.

Making Red Ant Soup

Many years ago I visited a friend who was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. The village where he lived was a tiny one. At night the stars were stupendous because there were no electric lights for a hundred miles around. Matt kept a bucket under the open tap in the tub because the water only flowed sometimes and you never knew when it would be. The underground water pipe leading to the building was broken, making a perpetual puddle in front of the building entrance. This is where people came, with buckets, to get their water, from the puddle on the ground. It had to be filtered and boiled before it could be used. Clearly this was enough for them, though, or wouldn’t someone have fixed the pipe?

There were little restaurants around the area, small buildings, with a few small tables. They all had hand-painted menus that covered whole walls – dishes made from chicken, goat, and beef with rice, bread and many other things. The first time we went to a restaurant, I made the mistake of reading the menu to see what to order. But when I asked for what I wanted, the man behind the counter laughed and shook his head. “Today we have chicken and rice.”  That was all. So I had chicken, cooked in tomato and garlic, with bits of tomato skin curled in the sauce, over rice. It was delicious. It was enough. I went there other times. Chicken and rice was all they ever had. I wondered if the menu on the wall was from a more prosperous time or if it was wishful thinking. Or maybe it was there just to tell customers how good the cook was because he could cook all those different dishes – could, if the ingredients happened to be available, which they never were. Other than in the capital, Dar es Salaam, in a hotel, every restaurant I went to in the country was like this -- long menus but only one dish on offer.

There were actually many remnants of a more prosperous time around Tanzania. We would be riding down long roads with fields of grass or sunflowers on both sides, and come upon an eighteen-wheeler or a large combine rusting in the field. They were from colonial times perhaps; when they had broken down, and no one from the west was there to fix them, they just sat and rusted. In Dar there were tall buildings, ten, twelve stories, with no glass left in the windows, and no functioning elevators. But people still lived there. The paved roads were worse than they would have been if they had been left as dirt because giant potholes had opened up, big enough to swallow a VW beetle, and no one had repaved. Yet now the Tanzanians were “free” from colonial rule, and the ones I met seemed happy enough. Perhaps it’s like Aesop’s fable about the dog and the wolf.

 

In the little village where Matt lived, in addition to the rundown apartments, were tiny huts that housed families. I often saw little boys outside the huts, thin wiry boys with very short hair. To a one they all wore pants, usually cut off somewhere around the knee, but with no seat. Where the back pockets should be, there was nothing but round, brown flesh. No one seemed to notice or care. The boys played or worked, wearing seatless pants. They seemed happy enough. They had enough to eat, though much of it was ugali, this thick corn paste that eliminated hunger because it clogged up the entire digestive tract for hours. I don’t think it had much nutritional value but it was good for holding a little bit of stewed vegetables, grown in a subsistence plot outside the hut. Perhaps some meat occasionally made it into the stew pot. I sometimes saw a skinny cow or goat in someone’s yard.

Livestrong.com says “The minimum survivable calories varies between individuals, with 600 to 1000 given as a standard range, according to the U.S. Army Survival Handbook. The less active an individual is, the fewer calories he can eat and still survive.”

I wonder if red ant soup meets these caloric guidelines. Certainly the glue Kenyan street children sniff instead of eating food does not. Meanwhile, back in Northern New York, my angst is over how much food we gather from our small garden every day and whether we will be able to eat it all. A refrigerator, full of leftovers, stresses me out because I don’t want to waste anything. Eating 1800 calories a day is being on a diet.

Remember when your parents would tell you to eat all your dinner because there were kids starving in India (Africa, or wherever)? I, and many other children, would say, “Send it to them.” Now that I have seen more of the world, I wonder how it is possible that I and this Cambodian woman and these Tanzanian children all live on the same planet. Now I truly wish I could send them the food. It's no longer just a smart aleck response to my parents.

(Making Red Ant Soup)

 

 

 

"Enough Ees Too Much!"

In the Warner Bros. cartoon "I Love to Singa", little "Owl Jolson" wants nothing more than to be a jazz singer. His father, a classical musician, cannot bear the thought, and for him enough is not just enough, but it "ees too much"! Until it isn't. Because eventually, of course, Dad comes around, and much jazz music is made by all.

"What Kind of Fool Am I?"

From Devo to Jackson Browne, the theme of blissful ignorance winds on. But there’s a difference. Devo’s “Mongoloid” is happy with his hat and his job. There’s no thought of what it’s all for. Jackson Browne’s “Pretender” is more like me. He has to decide to be dumb, and the dumbness he’s looking for is what Winston Smith had to find in 1984, an ability to let the cheap substitutes provided by society make up for the lack of freedom and love.

Dumb Enough

I wish I were dumb – just smart enough to survive and enjoy life. Not so smart that I’m always thinking, thinking, thinking. Enough thinking! My mind can’t stay in one place. It is constantly making connections. For example, when I had this thought, suddenly Devo’s song “Mongoloid” started playing in my head:

            Mongoloid he was a mongoloid

            Happier than you and me
            Mongoloid he was a mongoloid
            And it determined what he could see

Working Up To My Potential

The ottoman is covered in cat hair. So is the rug. So is the couch underneath the sleeping (snoring) culprit. She sleeps in various places around the house to spread the hair around. I can never brush her enough; there is always more loose fur and dandruff (yuck!) I can never vacuum enough.

Sleeping Out

Yesterday I decided I needed to sleep outside. I’ve had a tent set up in the woods by the pond for the last two weeks, since Cedar and I camped out one night. It’s survived a couple of wind and rain storms, and it seemed silly not to use it after it had been out through all that.

"Wake Up, Time to Die."

How will I know when I have lived enough? I have heard that some people say that they have lived enough and are ready to die. I cannot imagine ever being ready to die. Some nights before I fall asleep, I remember that it is going to happen sometime, and my body goes completely cold. Thank God for sleeping pills.

Commerce and Trade

One night in bed Bruce and I were talking about World War II and why the U. S. had entered (romantic, eh?) He said it had occurred to him that we really did it to preserve our trade routes and trading partnerships more than for any military reason. So I asked him the question that’s been on my mind so much lately – is trade and commerce all there is? Is this what life is about? It seems so in America, where everywhere you look is an advertisement. But even in Tanzania, everywhere I went, people were selling food – holding it up to the windows of buses slowed down in traffic –oranges, symmetrically peeled with knives, roasted field corn, sweets. And then there was the market where people sold baskets and dyed cloth and vegetables. There was a woodcarvers market where I bought carvings to bring back for people and I bought myself a lovely Zanzibar chest. But then I gave it away the following Christmas. Every now and then, like right now, I have a moment of mild longing for it – the beautifully carved top, the secret drawer inside – but then it is gone.

WWED (What Would Emily Do?)

Is there such a thing as enough of a life?

Growing up, it seemed that all we did was move from one place to another. First it was just my parents trying to find their place -- from Israel to various locales in the NY metro area. Then they split up and I hopped on the microbus with my father for the ride to Tennessee, Wisconsin, and back to Israel. Then my mother pulled me back on her bus, with stops in Manhattan, Scarsdale, and Spring Valley, NY. By the time I was 10, I had lived in 10 places in three states and two countries.

Some of these moves were prompted by circumstances, or messages from God, but the last few were distinctly upwardly mobile. I was more or less equally unhappy in each place, but each dwelling was bigger, with more yard and nicer things. After moving back with my mother, when I was eight, every home we lived in had a television. Always the sad sack new kid, I spent most afternoons in front of it, stuffing my face. Saturday nights I watched Love Boat and Fantasy Island, alone, imagining all the other kids at parties, movies, hanging out...

Giving It All Away

Peter Singer thinks that if you make more than enough money to satisfy your basic needs, you should give at least some portion of the rest away to keep children all over the world from starving to death or dying of preventable diseases. Preferably, he says in some of his writings, you should give everything you have above what you need to live. His argument for this claim is compelling, and if you are interested in seeing why, and making yourself squirm a bit in the process, try this exercise called "The Drowning Child". (The site this exercise is on -- philosophyexperiments.com -- has a lot of eye-opening exercises on it. I highly recommend it.)

Jobs

It drives me crazy to hear so much talk about jobs and how people need jobs. Just give us jobs. As the “Great Recession” drags on, and politicians continue to bloviate, I am completely up to my ears in bricks made up of “J”s, “O”s, “B”s, and “S”s. But what are jobs? They are opportunities, situations in which you trade your time, strength, and/or expertise for money. And what do you do with the money? You spend it, of course, so that other people, the ones who make the stuff you buy, can also have jobs. If you don’t spend, people won’t have jobs. So get a job so you can get money to spend so that other people can have jobs too. Oh, but don’t forget to put money aside for retirement because it’s your right, your entitlement, to someday not have to have a job, but you’ll still need money to spend so that other people can still have jobs even while you’re taking it easy. (And of course if they have jobs, they can continue paying your Social Security.)

Too Rich or Too Thin -- Part II

So we have established that yes, one can be too thin. The more difficult question is whether it is possible to be too rich. In the third person, the answer is clearly yes. The 99 percent, as most of us were characterized in the Occupy Wall Street protests, can easily see that those in the top 1 percent are too rich (as this video shows). Their wealth has grown; ours has shrunk, and it is easy to blame their growing wealth for our growing poverty and social problems. But when you are too thin, it does not just mean you’re an eyesore for others. It means your own health is compromised and you could die. Is there comparable danger to the person who is too rich? What are the perils of plenty?

Well, there’s the whole “money doesn’t buy happiness” theme, with Richard Cory going home and putting a bullet in his head. And there are the addictions – “sex addiction” not least among them. (Are there happy marriages among the very rich, or is the charismatic power of wealth to attract nubile young women just too much for any man to resist?)

Too Rich or Too Thin -- Part I

“You can never be too rich or too thin.” True or false? Well, we know you can be too thin, actually. As an American, my mind’s eye flashes to those grotesque pictures of anorexic actresses gleefully displayed on the cover of Us magazine. But anorexia is only a symptom of other problems – and lack of food is not usually one of them. In real life there are stick-thin Sudanese refugees, street junkies, cancer patients whose bodies waste away, inmates of Nazi death camps. Yes, you can be too thin.

You can also, obviously, be too fat. Bariatric surgery is becoming more popular as more and more bodies grow to the point where their own flesh becomes a disease. And there are diets and exercise plans all meant to thin us down. But not too much. There is a balance point. There is, despite the cliché, such a thing as “thin enough”.

"Where Hides Sleep"

Enough is not only about material things. The above is the title of a song by Alison Moyet. For the first 100 or so times I heard it, I actually thought it was about something called "hides" and where they slept. It took me a while to realize she was actually singing about me and my misery. My mind must have been muddled from lack of sleep.

I blame my insomnia on Ronald Reagan. I was 12 when he was elected. I lived 10 miles from the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It was the Cold War. I thought that any day, or night, the bomb would fall that would obliterate me and the rest of the planet. At night the thought became especially vivid. Just on the edge of sleep, I would imagine the flash and be suddenly awake. This happened over and over throughout the night.

On the Couch with Mildred Pierce

I am sitting on my very comfortable but inexpensive (aka cheap) couch, in the living room of my not-very-large house, having just completed watching the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. It aired in 2011, and we happened to be visiting my parents at the right time to watch the first two episodes (luckily, since we don’t have TV reception, cable or otherwise – a post for another day). The story was dark and intriguing, but unfortunately we had to come home before the other episodes were shown, and I was left wondering and haunted by the seeds of tragedy that had been planted.

Recently, though, I had the brilliant idea to order the discs from Netflix, and this cold, dark, rainy day was the perfect time to watch. The series opens with Mildred losing both her husband and his money in the Great Depression (his housing development has gone broke and he has taken up with another woman). She bounces back, starting her own business and making lots of money, buying a mansion, wearing furs, being chauffeured everywhere. But with regard to one daughter, she makes spectacularly stupid decisions, and between that and what happens to her other daughter, she spends

What Might "Enough" Look Like?

From up close, enough is getting home and opening the refrigerator. I see eggs, meat, yogurt, milk, cold cuts, fruit, vegetables, leftovers in various unwieldy containers. It is a beef stew that’s at least as much beef as stew. It is the warm floor under my feet when I walk around in my socks in the winter. It is each of us on our own computer, working or playing. It is listening to the rain beat on the roof but not feeling it on my head. It is driving to work, knowing my husband too has a car and I don’t have to worry about leaving him stranded. It is being able to donate money to others so that they, too, can have enough.

 

From far away, enough looks like a window glowing with light, many windows, as I rise above the ground and can see more and more of the landscape. It is a neat little town or a bustling city where everyone has an indoor space to shelter in, and the people out on the streets are there because they want to be and not because they’re begging. Outside of the cities and towns are big dark spaces,

Thermoeconomics, or the Birth of the Blog

When I took thermodynamics as a geology student at MIT, I knew I had found the key to the universe. It explained everything! I loved the fact that there was a word, an actual scientific term, derived from Greek, to describe why everything always goes to hell. Entropy explained much of what I saw around me -- including death. It explained why every one of my relationships ended and why albite crystals have so many planes of symmetry. What could it not explain?

I resolved that if I ever got rich, I would go back to MIT and just study thermodynamics, so that eventually I could understand everything. However, given that I majored in geology, and then went on to get a master’s degree in creative writing, getting rich was not a real possibility. So my thermodynamic education ended after one class, of which I remember almost nothing -- only the conviction that if I kept at it, I would eventually know all.