M.E. Breen

So awhile ago I started this new job at a food co-op.  A long while ago. I also started taking a class and volunteering at a women’s health clinic and writing another novel and, so, no blog. But I missed my blog and thought of it often. So let’s try!

I don’t think the problem of writing a blog while doing a bunch of other things is a problem of time. I think it’s a problem of mode, or maybe a problem of access. Some life modes are contemplative and others are active. The past six months I’ve been building a beaver dam. I gnawed on my life and collected all my schedule-sticks and arranged them this way and that and slapped the mud with my tail, and whoa! there was a dam. It’s a great and sturdy dam, but it’s an action dam. Where do the thought waterways go? They form a pool behind the dam. It’s much easier to follow flowing thoughts than to fish around in that murky pool for things that have sunk to the bottom. It’s not that I haven’t had any thoughts during this time. I just didn’t get to them quick enough and they turned to silt.

But there is one trickling thought that has made its way through a gap in the dam. It’s not a thought so much as an article of clothing: the apron I wear at work. There are any number of aprons, hung up behind the door to the meeting room along with the hernia belts. There are red, green, blue and black aprons, and I do try to color coordinate with my sweatshirt and jeans ensemble of the day, by which I mean I try to make sure I don’t look too matchy or deliberate. I’ve been this way about clothes since pre-teenhood, as though the worst thing would be to get caught making an effort. I blame it on prep school. Ridiculous.

Anyway! Before this job, I’d never had a manual labor job. I’d also never had a cash-handling job, a retail job, a food service job, or a customer service job. This makes me sound like a dipstick for sure, but the reason I mention it is so you can picture how weird I felt those first few weeks, lurking in the aisles of our tiny store like some Yuppie ghost haunting the poor shoppers looking for mustard.  If someone actually asked me where the mustard was I wanted to run away. (I do in fact know where the mustard is, and only yesterday I had a triumph re the exact location of Xanthan Gum — gluten-free baking section! — but just as often a customer will ask if we carry say, beeswax, or Women’s Nordic Vitality Omega Plus, or Irish Moss, and I breathe and stare like a pug.)

But being available so customers can ask your help finding stuff is an important part of this job, and when I started I worked three floor shifts a week. I couldn’t hang around the kitchen sanitizing tongs forever. It was then I discovered the power of the broom and the apron. This part of the story makes me feel like Don Quixote, except I’ve never read Don Quixote so that may be bunk. But I think all you need in this world to feel legit, to feel heroic and purposeful, are a) a costume and b) a signature weapon. Daredevil has his red suit and his white-cane-convertible-to-billy-club. Green Lantern has his face mask and his ring. Batman has his bat ears and zip-line bat darts. I have my apron and my broom.

Well, I don’t disable criminals with the broom. But I could! For me it essentially functions like a cigarette: it turns hovering/lurking/waiting/idle hoping into a respectable if occasionally gross and prematurely aging activity. Being new at anything involves a lot of  hovering. You know there is work to be done, but the precise nature of the work eludes you, and you lack the skills to do the work anyway, and being useful involves asking someone else who is busy to show you how to be useful, which isn’t that useful. So I love to sweep. I like the floor to be clean, but I also love busy-ness above idleness. I love certainty above uncertainty. My lowest moments in life, great and small, are those when I Do Not Know What I Am Doing. With sweeping, I always know. And because the gremlins who live in the bulk section like to throw oats and spaghetti on the floor,  there is a lot of sweeping to do.

But even better than I love the broom, I love the apron. Like a superhero’s costume, it makes the wearer distinctive but shields her innermost self from view; it has functions essential to the job at hand (pockets for sharpies and rogue guavas that have rolled into the soaps and sponges section); it announces to others “my role here is different from yours. I am not a bystander.” It confers on the wearer a dignity of purpose, an identity at once public and secret. I think that’s the best thing about it.  A person wearing an apron and pushing a broom is in some ways the most invisible person in the world. But in other ways, the apron gives you authority and identity.  You can be present but occupied. You can watch for signs of mustard location confusion and offer advice. People don’t have to wonder, Who is that person over there by the sauces in the carefully uncoordinated cotton coordinates? Does she work here? Can she help us?

The Caperon says, I do! I can! I work! I am!

Win a signed copy of Darkwood by submitting your short-short-story to the contest on the Writing For All blog. The subject? Why, dead parents and cruel circumstances, of course. Now get writing!

Major life developments! I have a new job and I’m going back to college.

The new job is for a cooperative organic grocery store. It’s pretty great. I already felt like an insider at the store because I’d been shopping there for a long time, but it turns out the shopper is just an ice-skater swooshing along, all la dee dee, vegan Indonesian wrap and Pellegrino, la dee dum, California Complete Protein bread and nut butters. Well, hold on. I’m going to switch water metaphors, because a frozen lake full of sleeping frogs is nothing like the co-op. Let’s say the shopper is a surfer and the store is Atlantis.

There are no fish in the store because it’s a vegetarian co-op and this is a metaphor. When I picture Atlantis I think of graceful people in Roman Empire-type clothes riding around in chariots towed by dolphins. Instead of jewels the women wear starfish in their hair. The poor dress in seaweed rags and weave togas out of algae for the rich. A pair of jowly bottom-feeders guards the coral gates to the city. A handsome, green-haired youth can be glimpsed through an open window, reading by the light of a lantern fish. From time to time he scratches a note on his clam-shell paper with his shark-tooth pen. Senators walk along glittering paths of crushed abalone. Sea fans grow in geometric plots. Little Aquina, who will grow up to murder the leader of the opposition with a well-placed urchin spike and marry her brother, chases her pet otter through the kelp.

Ok, the co-op is nothing like that, either. The co-op might actually be the opposite of that. Metaphor fail! Too weird.

I’ll let Arcimboldo and Marvell do the work:

What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples fall about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

The workers at the co-op handle the fruit and vegetables with tenderness and awe, like jewels, or kittens. (Ah, now I know what I was trying for with Atlantis. It was all about the starfish, the living jewel.) The produce really is as beautiful as jewels, but it inspires a sort of calm reverence instead of avidity. There’s anticipation (of eating) but no anxiety. There is so much food, and such an array of food, and such irrefutable dirt-evidence that the food has in fact come from the earth, that it’s impossible to feel any sense of want at all. There you are at 7:30 in the morning, wearing fingerless gloves and listening to Sonic Youth, surrounded by the eternal abundance of the Earth. And, because you are setting out food for other people to eat, and only offering food that is ripe at that particular time of year, there’s a kind of patience to the whole undertaking. You are at a remove from your own desire. If I liked to cook instead of hating to cook, I think that is what I would like about it. But my kitchen is not an easy place for me to be at a remove from my own desire. Also, in my kitchen I’m responsible for taste outcomes, and with the produce that’s all on Demeter, and Demeter don’t care.

I haven’t been at the co-op long enough yet to know, but maybe this sense of patience is what makes it work.  Maybe the sense of connection to nature that the turnips impart extends to coworkers. I was in nutrition class this morning and I wanted to raise my hand. I had something cool to say about Weight Watchers and car advertisements. I felt so anxious to say it. My blood pressure was up. I was like that hyperventilating kid in the front row in grade school, except I was in the back row where there happens to be this one desk-chair contraption left over from a previous generation of lecture hall furniture that has a padded seat = very vital to middle-aged butt.

Anyway, I was in a froth to contribute to the discussion. An avidity. It wasn’t even a discussion. It was a lecture, and the teacher hadn’t yet invited our comments and questions. And when she did, and this kid who I happen to know just returned from Afghanistan and now works the overnight shift as a baggage handler at SFO and barely makes it alive to 8:00am class raised his hand with a shy darting motion like a mouse emerging from its hole in a field patrolled by hawks, my first thought was, No! It’s my turn!

Because I am so old and wise, I was observing my avidity and sort of laughing at it and holding it in, and also wondering whether I would feel the same way at co-op board meetings. Would I feel like I might die if I didn’t assert myself and establish my importance, my relevance to the proceedings, my unique offerings, or would all those things feel assured because I was among equals, and already a living creature of the earth?

It would be quite something if my urgency to learn could be separated from the urgency to show off my learning. My nutrition teacher says we should eat plants because each plant has developed its own tricks of survival, and those adaptations, the plant’s defenses against bugs, drought and monsoon, provide us unique and necessary combinations of nutrients. That makes me feel like I’m eating Superman, except he is always lifting buses, reversing the rotation of the Earth, etc, while the carrot quietly turns orange. Carrot, can I eat your patience?

Not about crazy fog, I promise:

1) A young writer named Bree has posted an interview with me on the very cool blog she writes with her friend Shelby. It’s called Writing for All and I encourage you to check it out. Thanks, Bree!

2) I’m teaching an online fiction writing class through Stanford this fall, October 7- December 12. You can check out the class here. Syllabus will be up soon. I’ll keep you posted.

But ok, one more thing about the fog: spontaneous generation of ravens! I swear! The unkindness on the neighbor’s roof has grown from five to thirty in the past week. But I also have to say this sweet old world is alright by me, because it came up with all this.

Current toe temperature suggests we are living in Michigan, mid-winter. You might say, Put some socks on, woman! But I’m already double socked, and the hot water bottle has become my fourth pet. (The hot water bottle seems like the sort of genetically altered pet favored by citizens of an amoral and luxurious future society: mute, lumpen, hairless, heat-giving, obedient friend.)  But let’s get back to the weather for a minute. I mean, the sky outside is white. The ocean is invisible. The dog is wearing her pink blanket, and the pink blanket is definitely wearing the dog. It’s been like this for weeks. Every July I tell myself, This year, I’m prepared, my heart is hard, my hopes are low, why, I’ll even find the beauty in it,  and every year it turns into the Fogocalypse.  The fog makes me suspect we can never adequately prepare for anything, even the seasons. How can this fog not be a harbinger of something else? How can it not be a metaphor? What does it conceal, apart from my car parked across the street? And because we are on the coast, and the rest of the city is so often in sun, I feel the message is meant especially for us, beach people. Is it a message from the sharks? Is it a message from the future? Is it a blessing or a subjugation?

I’ve been reading a lot of good kids’ books lately. You might think this is something I do all the time anyway, but I don’t. Reading any good book fills me with a sense of loss as well as delight. I assume some of the feeling of loss has to do with envy because I didn’t write the awesome thing myself, but that’s not the whole picture. When a book is really good, really wise, or funny, or weird, or full of broad and nuanced understanding of man and beast, or the projection of a great imagination, then I find the world of the book and the world beyond the book painfully discordant. The real world isn’t worse, exactly, but it’s different, and I’m different in it. When I read I am all action, never numb, never lazy, basically a wolf girl tearing across the landscape on all fours.  I guess reading is like dreaming in this way, but a dream you don’t undertake voluntarily. You don’t surrender energetically to a dream. You just live through it.

Good novels for adults make me more alive to the ways of the world, but it’s usually this sweet old world. Kids’ books make me alive to other worlds. Sometimes I go puttering along for months at a time, happy in loving who I love, determinedly doing the things I need to do, and then, bit by bit, I’ll start wondering, What is beyond? What is out there? It’s very sci fi. It’s not about death, exactly, or anyway, not immediately. It’s about a space of greater imagination, different animals, surprising physics, magic powers! I don’t think I’m explaining very well, but sometimes I just think, Is this all there is? Making our way and making sense of the same old mysteries? I want to know what the sharks discuss at their yearly meeting in the valley of the ocean. I want to meet a dog with eyes on his forelegs, who sings and sees the future. I want to have a child with wings and a beak. You know what I mean? You see what the fog brings?