M.E. Breen

Are you ready for me to be, like, totally California? I’m going to talk about vegetables. Every Wednesday is Vegetable Christmas around here. It starts on Tuesday, Vegetable Eve, when the newsletter from Two Small Farms arrives. Andy, the farmer, usually writes a little history of beets or peas or chard, and there is always a bunch of new recipes. Most of these turn out delicious, some turn out green mush. But the best part is the list:

In the Box This Week:

I love broccoli. I love fennel. I love artichokes. I love all green and spiky and bitterish things. But more than these I love the word “or,” and most of all I love the word “mystery.” I was just reading the review of a book called The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar. She is the scientist who conducted the jam experiment in a fancy supermarket in Menlo Park. Here I paraphrase the reviewer, who is paraphrasing Iyengar, so consider yourself warned:

More people stopped to sample jam when there were 24 different kinds on offer than when there were six, but 10 times as many people actually bought jam when there were only six kinds to choose from. Dr. Iyengar says that the obvious conclusion, that too many options make it hard to choose, is not the whole story. “The optimal amount of choice lies somewhere in between infinity and very little, and this optimum depends on context and culture.”

San Francisco is going through a stretch of weird and marvelous weather: heavy rain followed by hot still days followed by windy sunny days followed by more rain. Today we are in a windy stretch of the cycle, our third, I think, since early March.  The garden is going wild, and the giant garden of Golden Gate Park where I walk nearly every day is going wilder. Everything is in bloom. Everything is in doublebloom. Outside is magic, but inside, specifically inside my nose, is hell.

I’ve tried about seven different allergy medicines and still I’m walking around with spitball-sized wads of tissue shoved up each nostril. I mean I am actually walking around like that. I look like I’m healing from a nose job except I so obviously haven’t had a nose job, unless it was the sort of nose job designed to mask your true identity like on Parker: The Hunter and your previous nose was really small and dainty and you told the Mob doctor to give you the opposite of that.

Where was I? Oh yeah: how I’m suffering. Aside from the leaking eyes and that pang behind the brow chakra that means I’m about to launch into hysterical sneezing and the sandpapered nostrils and the head full of hardening cement, what I really hate about allergies is how they compel you to announce to other people how bad they are.

Allergies fall into the category of illnesses I call Worse for Me than You Can Easily Perceive illnesses. Here are some others:

back pain
menstrual cramps
asthma
stomach aches
the blues
pulled hamstring or torn something or other or inflamed whatsit giving me the pang in my leg

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted the kind of health problems that made other people immediately solicitous and forgiving. Broken arm: make that a compound! Black eye. Emaciation. Anything requiring crutches.

Instead I’ve always had the ones you have to remind people you have. Oh, yeah, sorry, even though I’m, like, six feet tall and really robust looking and wearing a baseball cap, I can’t help you pick up that chair because I have a bad back.

The closest I ever came to a broken bone was when I broke my nose, except I didn’t really break it. I just banged it on a water slide and spent the next ten years telling people I’d broken it so I’d have some explanation for its appearance. Actually I did break my pinkie finger rescuing ducklings. The nurse said I could just wrap it in gauze, and wasn’t I glad I wouldn’t have to wear a splint? No. Not glad.

Even when I got mugged and kicked in the head, the next day my mom was like, you look fine! But I was not fine. I was not fine at all, and I wanted to shave my head so the bruise would show, because then there would be proof that something bad had happened to me that I did not deserve.

Unhatch you April butterflies
For Maud is in a drawer.
Filling the air
With piles of overnourished fur.

Come crown the wonder of such startling size,
And tiny fish bones, spaced with violets, twine
To wreath the tips of those twin ears,
While down the graceful tabby-speckled spine
Lay bows in rows
And round white paws
That out-vie Venus or the Himalayan snows.

Those strange and ornamental eyes
Stare with shifting sights,
Cavernous
Readily ravenous,
Lugubrious with subtle feline sighs.

And irresistible, the monster skittish pat
Of prima donna paw
Stretched from silky depths of flowing fur and fat,
Most exquisite!

And so I sing
To matchless Maud
Squatting in a drawer in Spring.

–Annabel Farjeon

This week I spent two days talking about Darkwood at a book fair on the Peninsula. The book fair was terrific: great parents, great school, great bookstore, and, most of all, great kids. I’m routinely surprised by how much I like kids, and routinely surprised by my surprise. I mean, of course I like kids — why would I write a book for people I didn’t admire?

I think what strikes me anew each time I hang out with a group of children is how intense they are, and how charming that intensity is. I remember the intensity I felt as a kid, and the risk, always, that you had committed your feelings to the wrong thing, that you had mixed things up, that awful moment when all the adults at a gathering laugh at something you’ve said, and whatever it was falls so far outside every category you have for funny that you feel not just misunderstood but totally defeated.

I don’t remember having a sense of a public self versus a private self as a ten year old. Certainly I had a sense of public and private. I knew there were impulses one shouldn’t indulge in front of other people. But I experienced myself as a single entity who might or might not act in certain ways but who was always fundamentally the same. However people responded to me, they were responding to me, to Molly, not to Office Molly or Dog-person Molly or Jock Molly or Writer Molly or Night on the Town Molly.

I just read that last line over and realize it sounds like the worst-selling line of knock-off Barbie dolls ever.  Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest that as an adult I have some sort of radically split personality, but I’m usually aware of myself as a public actor. Night on the Town Molly has reached a different set of agreements with the world than Office Molly. She wears different shoes; she speaks at a different volume; and, oh, please, let her converse on different topics than Dog-owner Molly. Writer Molly, who spends all her time inside alone, goes through her day with a different set of expectations than Jock Molly, who lives outside and, even when she is alone, likes to pretend a coach is studying her form. Neighbor Molly knows that her popularity has to do with the volume at which she plays her music and the regularity with which she rolls out the trash cans, not how she wears her hair or her feelings about Robert Frost.

As a kid, though, I invested my entire self in everything I did, so everything felt to some degree life or death. Whether or not someone had time for me had only to do with my worthiness as an object of attention, and nothing to do with how busy or distracted or sad or tired they were. This is why kids amaze me. They get their little hearts broken over and over because the people whose attention they require are always going to be unequal to the task, but they soldier on. Their desire to connect outweighs their terror of rejection, and remember the rejection they anticipate is total. And they are so ardent, and so sincere, and fearless, and full of fear.

Here is the point where I confess I have become a fan of Green Lantern comics. I realize that some (most? all?) of the people who read comics these days are adults,  but the part of me that likes Green Lantern is not far evolved from my ten year old self. In the Green Lantern universe, green is the color of will power and yellow is the color of fear.* Green power rings don’t always work against yellow rings, go figure. I wasn’t what most people would describe as a fearful child. I liked rats and spiders and swimming and the concocting of potions. But I was afraid, a lot, and nine times out of ten, when you are afraid as a kid, you have to do the thing that scares you anyway, because you are not the boss of yourself. Like poor Hal Jordan, you are always being conscripted by a higher power into perilous battles with freak aliens who threaten to overwhelm you. But, like Hal, you do your duty. Because even rookies know a Green Lantern isn’t without fear. A Green Lantern overcomes fear.

*If you’re interested, the full emotional color spectrum is green (will power), yellow (fear), violet (love), red (hate), indigo (compassion), orange (avarice), and blue (hope). Green Lantern Sinestro Corps War! Check it out!

Writing outside is always ten times less successful than I want it to be. Because of the sun and my sunglasses I can’t really see the computer screen, and the breeze is blowing my hair in my eyes and etc etc. Nevertheless! Here I am on my front steps, drinking a neon orange mimosa, celebrating. It’s 3:39 pm, not really the mimosa hour, and I shocked myself by opening a bottle of champagne with no one else around, though it is very cheap champagne, a champagne-ish sparkling beverage, wedged in the fridge door behind the bad olives and the good hot sauce for months, maybe years.  But there are lots of things to celebrate today, and if you can’t celebrate on your own with your computer, what’s to be done with you?

First, I made a hard decision and put it in writing. It felt a little like putting one of my cats in a cat-sized boat and letting it drift out to sea. Ok, not that bad, but anyway, it’s done. Second, the beach crows are in love. I checked the Sibley’s Guide and their chest and tail feathers suggest they are ravens, not crows, but I can never remember to call them ravens. Sometimes they are freaky in their brashness and intelligence, but they aren’t dour or sinister. They act more like professional snowboarders than anything, calling to each other in crow slang and plummeting off cliff tops and, now, flirting like mad. I saw two of them sitting side by side on a branch this morning, each with one end of the same stick in his? her? beak. It was like the crow version of the spaghetti scene in The Lady and the Tramp.

I think I just want to sit out here in the bad-for-writing sun and babble because I’m tired of feeling there must be a better use of my time than whatever it is I’m doing. I’m between 98 and 100 percent certain there is no Guide to Surviving the Recession that advocates drinking mimosas alone on a Thursday afternoon, which I guess is exactly why I’m doing it. It’s not as though I’ve been doing all the things those guides do advocate. I haven’t been perfecting three different versions of my resume or networking or buying 9 Lives cat food instead of Wysong. (The cats don’t even like Wysong, for the record. They love byproducts most of all.)

The great lesson I have drawn from being out of work is that the free time I have in such abundance rarely feels free, and guilt infects everything. Except my mimosa!

A friend of my mom’s sent her some old photos of our family, including the perilously-possessed house I grew up in in Berkeley. It was so beautiful — I’m sure it still is — and looking at the picture I had an old-fashioned thought, or I suppose an enduring thought that expressed itself in old-fashioned language: How we have come down in the world.  In many ways this thought isn’t even true. Living above, or even totally outside, one’s means and then having to live according to one’s means isn’t coming down so much as correcting. I was a child when all that happened, so for me the change was really a move from insouciance to, er, souciance, a move I’m repeating now. As I’ve probably said before, a predictable paycheck lends an aura of predictability to everything else, and its absence casts everything in doubt. Never have I felt more vulnerable to crime, disease, gross accidents of fate. Never have I worried more about the people I love.

On the way to the front steps where I’m sitting now I passed the mailbox, and inside the mailbox I found a letter of solicitation from my university. The particular solicitor is a woman I knew and liked in college, and seeing her name, which is her married name, and receiving this proof of her . . . how do I put it? Her free time? Her disposable interests? Her fundamental security? makes me feel weird.  I can’t shake the image of my life as a giant map, an old-timey pirate-looking map, with bold ink islands and dashes leading to a big X. The hazards are marked: triangles for impassable mountains, wavelets for impassable seas, crosshatching to show the impassable thicket. The path to the buried treasure is clear, but my map is covered with smudges where I stopped and looked around and didn’t know what to do.

I got down on my belly and crawled through the thicket. I’m in there now, in a clearing, with my fizzing orange drink.