M.E. Breen

In order to understand about my new bed, you have to understand about my old bed. Imagine a 4×6 foot bag of peas. Now imagine an elephant setting its foot down in the middle of that bag. Now imagine yourself falling asleep clinging with all ten fingers to the edge of the pea-bag and waking, every wee hour on the hour, to find yourself in the valley of the footprint. Imagine the dire effects on the no longer 20-year-old back and neck. Imagine the cat’s disgust, imagine the dog’s wounded looks, as they, too, sink into the hollow. It was a blind-date of a bed, bought over the phone in a cold Eastern city some eleven years ago. It was a bed for a student, provided the student preferred to sleep standing up. It was a bed off the end of which skinny ankles hung bare and pale and exposed to cruel breezes, like the ankles of Ichabod Crane. It was a bed of limited imagination, thinking itself primarily designed for sleeping, and except that I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a decade, I can hardly blame it. It did not understand that the bed is the Raft of Life: table, dresser, desk, yoga mat, grooming station, hankie, periodicals rack, phone booth, polling place. The raft sank. The bed was a born failure, and so it failed for all of its 4,015 days until the large men carted it away, sides billowing, edges sagging, springs sprung.

And now? A Baroque cloud. A mollusk. A strawberry shortcake, in which I am the strawberry and the bed is the biscuit smothered in cream. The palm of a French aristocrat. The cotton in the top of the asprin bottle. A petal. An earlobe. The belly fur of a polar bear. The breast feathers of an owl. A tower of silk. A bowl of pudding. A bed fit for a queen.

This review warmed my green, wolfy heart.

See more by Lupa at http://www.thegreenwolf.com/

Not mood. Food. Here is what’s waiting for me in the office fridge:

Wizened butt of cucumber (1)
Middle-aged baby carrots (approx. 20)
Exploding with whole grains bread (excessive)
Tofurky beer brat, “made with Full Sail Ale!” (1)
Mustard (unequal to the task)

There it sits, too discouraging to eat, until my hunger pangs catch up to discouraging and jog on past to dismaying. (In 1995, my hunger pangs dug in at despairing for a whole month. I was backpacking through China and ate only bao, white rabbit candy, and McVitties tea biscuits.) Anyway, I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately, and beauty products and procedures, and yoga and massages, and jogging vs. dog walking, and all the things you can do for yourself that straddle the line between self-care and self-indulgence, and ok, triple line, self-punishment. That cucumber falls into only the latter category, I know, but I’ve been eating very well the last several months, home-cooked, fresh, tasty food, food it never would have occured to me to prepare for myself. Now, by contrast, my own cooking habits seem pitiful and confined and mostly about arranging: oh, here’s a breadish thing and a meatish thing and a vegetable-looking thing that can go on a plate together. Bon appetit!

I didn’t know what it meant to know how to cook. Being good at cooking was like faith to me, something other people had that I occasionally felt a longing for and mostly wasn’t all that interested in except for the art it produced over the centuries and that, if I really thought about it, seemed to involve equal parts terror and magic. But now I’m seeing that cooking is about imagination, and alchemy (cauliflower becomes palatable through the addition of garlic and anchovies,  bad mood becomes good through rituals of chopping, wine, steam), and risk-taking, and telling the squash pasta recipe, that’s whack! No way am I matchsticking the squash! See, if it was just me, I’d matchstick the squash, and I’d hate it, and that would be my cooking experiment for the decade.

I want to learn how to cook for the same reason I want it to be ok to walk instead of jog, or jog instead of walk, to wrinkle without smoothing, to get a massage without thinking I don’t deserve a massage because I don’t manipulate a war horse puppet for two hours every night on stage at the National Theatre (people do). I think cooking is a way to be free, and I think slathering mustard on soy dogs is a way to sidestep the hard work of deciding what you really want. And sometimes, of course, what you really want is for someone to take all that off the table and put a bowl full of gold in its place.

One of the things that happens when you write a children’s book is you start spending more time with children. Until now, my strongest impression of children has been that they belong to other people. Some of my friends have kids, but they are all little kids, and they all come firmly attached to a parent. Even when the parents are gone, when I’m babysitting, for instance — and let me pause to say this is something I’ve done maybe four times, and at least one of those times the kid in question conked out before I even got there and I just hung around and drank wine and watched Buffy on DVD, which is exactly what I would have been doing at home — anyway, even when the parents are gone the parents are there, their shoes are lying around the house and the kid talks about them and the kid smells like the parents and the parents smell like the kid and it’s all pretty umbilical.

The children I’ve been meeting lately are older and they travel in packs. They still have soft skin and big eyes, sometimes outlined with eyeliner, which I could object to more if I hadn’t been and didn’t continue to be so totally into eyeliner, and they still chatter and worry, but they worry about different things. Little kids seem to bounce between, Let me do this by myself! And, Watch me! Applause they take for granted.  Eleven and twelve year-olds are starting to figure out you can do something better or worse, and that applause is sort of contingent. They start checking around the room to see if what they’re saying is right, except sometimes they forget to check and just blurt, and then comes this agony-face of, Was that stupid? I wish I could tell them how much I envy the blurt, how great the blurt is, greater even in its way than the four year-old’s bandy-legged, absurdly confident pirouette, because it’s happening in spite of self-consciousness. It’s the flower on the weed.

The teenagers, on the other hand, occupy a post-blurt landscape, where what they want to say comes bundled with an idea of how they sound saying it, the kind of person it makes them, the shape their face takes when they speak, the moues, the hair-tosses, the leg with its flip-flopped foot dangling over the side of the chair. They’re more confident now of what right is, and, sure, they’re as mistaken in their confidence as the rest of us, but there’s an earnestness to it that seems, well, childlike.  I think they still believe in a map — that with the map and a sidekick and a couple of cheese sandwiches they can follow the dashes to the X and dig up the treasure and hand it around to the people who were good to them and then, after a tense moment, hand it around to those who weren’t.

The treasure? I don’t know what that is for them. I don’t know what it was for me, except that I knew it was going to be spectacular. I have this image of myself as a tiny figure on a giant map, jumping from one dash to the next, each dash a solid resting place, a stone, and ahead of me lies the big X, very dark against the parchment. There it is, the treasure, the end, but the X is not another stone, it’s an opening in the earth, and so I start the long, slow fall and discovery of life underground.