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This year’s card

1.
Twenty-one years ago, a fifteen-year old girl answered the phone. She was about to turn sixteen, and she had sent out invitations to her birthday party. On the other end of the line was a boy. He was calling back to tell her that he could come to the party. They’d never really had a conversation longer than quick greetings in the hall.

They talked for two hours.

The girl had never talked that long to a boy on the phone. She heard some music in the background. “What are you listening to?” she asked. “Oh, that’s me. I’m just playing around on the guitar,” he answered. Our girl, a sucker for a well-strummed chord, was impressed.

They talked for two hours, about the latest Van Halen album and movies, about English classes and waking up for their shared zero period band class. They talked about his girlfriend, and they talked about her boyfriend.

Over the next few months they talked through isolation, through loneliness. They called each other when her boyfriend and his girlfriend weren’t home. They didn’t see each other as potential more-than-friends. They just talked because the other was there to listen.

2.
Six months later, on the way home from a band trip, they talked through the aftermath of her breakup with her boyfriend. She cried; he stroked her hair. His girlfriend wanted to ride another bus, so our girl and the boy were sitting together.

As the school bus rumbled north on Highway 280 they sat in silence, her head on his lap. After a while, to distract her, he told her about the moonlit hills they were passing. He grew up near those hills. She listened as he told her about the amber  streetlights that were lighting up, city after city, down the highway. She listened and watched as the Northern California darkness crept over the bus, soft as the fog creeping over those hills.

Months later, they talked through his breakup with his girlfriend. After all those conversations in isolation and seeming loneliness, the boy had realized that he had fallen for our girl.

And then the girl and the boy started dating. For a year, they were the couple who made out in hallway corners between classes, the couple who heard “Get a room!” during those embraces at Round Table and didn’t care.

Then the girl went to college. They talked around and then into one breakup.

And then they didn’t talk for nine months. Those nine months of heartbreak carved new reservoirs of empathy for the girl; to this day, she can remember how it felt to wake up and face the prospect of high-tide buy ventolin inhaler online pain washing onto the shore of her days.

At the end of the school year, the girl came back home. They talked their way cautiously back into dating again.

They moved in together. They got engaged. For the next three years they talked through the terror of the mid-twenties: what to do with my life? When does my life become our life? How? Why, and why not? The engagement ring came off her finger, and two days later, he placed it back on. She stormed out of their apartment, and he came after her. She hasn’t forgotten that.

They talked through her first round of rejections from graduate schools. When she heard about those, he picked her up from work. He told her he’d packed a bag, and told her to pick a direction (north or south) along one of the most beautiful highways in the United States.

She picked north. They got lost. But across the Golden Gate Bridge they found a sweet little town, nestled in the county north of the City they both loved, across the bay from their beloved university. They talked all the way up the curves of Highway One and back.

Eleven years ago this month, they got married in a corner of that town, enclosed in a green garden. There was something to be said for speaking love out loud, in front of their families and the friends from the circles of their lives.

3.
How to explain, twenty-one years after those two hours, that the girl and the boy stayed together?

The girl likes to think that it’s hard work that’s kept them together. And it has been work. They learned how to work together by studying together, sitting across countless café tables together. Now they work together to teach their daughters to read avidly and to dance playfully, to eat joyfully and to twirl aimlessly. And hard work is part of the story.

But the elemental truth of their alchemy is conversation: all those years of talking, all those years of listening. They still analyze everything together, from music to moments to meals to Mad Men. At the end of that first phone call, the girl couldn’t believe that two hours had passed. Twenty-one years later, the girl still can’t believe this much time has passed.

All she knows is this: On her worst days, what comforts her is the sound of his voice. On her best days, what makes her even happier is his voice in his body next to hers. She still wants that voice, forever and always.

Happy anniversary, Josh.

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An unexpected stretch

“How does it feel to be writing your own MFA?” my newly-refound childhood friend asked me, while we were chatting on Facebook this week. A concert pianist, and thus an artist herself, she wondered if I faced issues with writer’s block, or struggled with a blank page, or a blank screen. “Sometimes the longest trip is between me and the piano,” she wrote.

“Well, I’ve been away from writing for a while—for now, I still hunger to write,” I replied. “And I know that an artist’s life is not a linear one.” (“Amen, sister!” she wrote back.) “But right now, I think it’s more fulfilling.”

And it’s true, so far. While writing my dissertation had its own rewards, a life lived in bookstore cafes and libraries, this version of my writing life is, well, fun. And it’s a foreign work ethic for me, when my work ethic is usually much more Puritan.

These days I just don’t want writing to be work that I hate. I don’t mind it being hard. I don’t mind working hard. But I don’t want to hate it. I don’t want to write out of guilt for having not written. I don’t want to write in order to please a hostile or cynical audience. I want writing to always have some element of pleasure as the goal. (I’m telling you, Stephen King’s On Writing has some great stuff in it.)

So when I write these days, I am seeking pleasure. Every time I decide to write creatively, it is a gift that I am giving myself.

You might hear the faintest hint of yoga-speak creeping into that last sentence, and I don’t blame you if you are skeptical. Too granola, too Berkeley, too earth-mothery, too woo-woo. I know, I know, I know. Surprising that despite growing up in California, despite going to UC Berkeley, I didn’t take up yoga until I moved to Washington. Like many people, maybe even some of you reading right now, I rolled my eyes at yoga. But really, now that I think about it, the idea of writing as a gift to myself must have something to do with my yoga practice.

A few years ago my sister convinced me to try yoga. For a little while, I took yoga classes at the recreational sports center here. And when the karate students were thumping upstairs over our overheated yoga room, I couldn’t see any “horizon” past my Warrior II fingertips, pointing at the heap of dirty blue gymnastics mats. And then I bought some DVD’s like the ones here. And it was fine, but not great, much less life-changing.

But then I started taking classes, and found a studio that I love, about a mile from my house. The teachers often incorporate meditation techniques. (Some of my favorite techniques: focus on an image, a word, a quotation, and use these as themes for the hour and a half. It’s actually quite literary.) The teachers gently correct postures. And the studio itself tries to create community within its community, from the self-introductions at the beginning of classes to the sponsorship of farmers markets to the weekend retreats, events and workshops.

And for someone like me, who lives so deeply in the mind, yoga has been a priceless gift, because it emphasizes the mind-body connection. Academics live at computers, at desks, at tables; it can be physically and mentally damaging if there are no times to take a break. It’s absorbing, and rewarding, but it can take its toll.

While academia often involves judgment, yoga doesn’t judge me. I rarely look around to see what other students are doing, and I don’t feel the need to compete with them. (“Ooh! She’s holding her ‘tree pose’ longer than I did!”) I’m never sorry that I went to yoga, and that’s an entirely new approach to work, and even exercise, for me. Even after several years, I feel like I’m still pretty new, but I’ve gone to a few advanced yoga classes. There I’m nowhere near as flexible or practiced as other students, but it’s actually fun to shrug my shoulders (mindfully) and just give the pose a try. Or rest.

There was a series of poses that used to be very difficult for me; I had to start out in the easiest, most modified version. Then I had to modify a little less, but for months my arms would shake when I’d lower myself to the ground. But one day I realized that I could do these poses without any modification or protest, mental or physical. And I wasn’t doing it to please my teacher, or to get a good grade, or to receive validation from anyone but myself. For an academic overachiever like me, it’s a revolutionary approach to learning.

Yoga taught me that holding up your own weight can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, but holding up your own weight can also be exactly what makes you strongest.

So now, six years after I started yoga, I can list almost identical reasons for my yoga practice and my writing: I go because there I can practice, and screw up, and fall; because there I can rearrange my mental furniture, or even redecorate my mental living room. And because there I am constantly surprised that I can discover new ways to be happy.

(And yes, now the title of this post comes into play. Sorry for the pun. But honestly, I didn’t expect to end up writing about yoga. I was going to write more about the latest developments with the book. Next time, for sure.)

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Findings in fractions

Music Scores at the Seattle Central Public Library

Here’s a paradox to consider. I’ve got a lot to think about, so you’ll have to look past the academic scaffolding.

First premise: There are very few traces of my dad on the Internet.

You can Google “Taku Nimura,” or “Taku Frank Nimura,” and there isn’t very much connected to him, or who he was. I have active e-mail accounts, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a SheWrites.com page… and as a new daughter of this digital age, it makes me sad that you can’t Google my dad*, for lack of a better term. You can’t find his obituary, the most stripped-down version of a life outline (except for the tombstone inscription), in online newspaper archives.

(Maybe I will create a Wikipedia page about him, but there’s still so much that I need to know. And one wonders: if what makes someone “historic” is debatable, what makes someone Wikipedia-page-worthy?)

And so I wonder about the countless individuals who do not have an online presence, even now; I wonder about the connection between the Internet and identity. I’m not saying that Google should be the only way to find out information, but it’s the first stop for so many, for so much. I wonder about the impact technology will have on my daughters, and the impact it’s had so far. I wonder about them finding out more about their grandfather, in an age where they can’t find him, through search engines that mark their findings in fractions of a second.

Second premise: And yet, Internet technology gave me these things:

1. Pictures I’d never seen before of my dad, from a long-lost friend of his on Facebook. “Are those his granddaughters I’m looking at in your profile picture?” she asks. And that’s a relationship I had not yet connected with my father: he would be a grandfather, my daughters would be his granddaughters.

2. A blog comment here, from someone who knew my dad—during a time when I know so little about his life. I’m not sure we would have found each other without the Internet. I’m so excited to find out more.

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realize this next thought, and my ten-year-old self would have resisted this, I’m sure. But here goes: my dad never belonged just to me, or just to my family. He also ventolin usa belonged to his friends, and other communities I’d never known or seen. The memoir that my sister and I are writing, then, may not be just a “dual” or “triple” memoir; it may also be something like a community memoir. I want to ask more people what they remember about him.

3. His Masters thesis in Public Administration and a bibliography that he wrote about Japanese in the United States. (Coming soon from Interlibrary loan, more Internet: cross your fingers!)

4. And this page from the California State Sacramento Library catalog, which makes me so happy. Taking my cue from my wonderful university reference librarians, I know that Google does not see everything. There is, however, a great deal of less-Google-able information, available from libraries.

5. A bookstore in Sacramento selling a poetry anthology; one of the poets is my dad.

Last part of the paradox: what does it mean?

Perhaps more obviously, search engines can erase (or obscure) an identity, but it can also restore an identity, in completely unexpected ways.

In the project I want to think more about what that means about humanity’s urges to record, document, remember. Google might not get me a quick answer about my dad, and I’m not sure I want it to do that, anyway. But I can still find him—or fractions of him—through these vast oceans of time and memory.

Despite our rapid technological changes, I think he would have loved our here and now. He wrote so many letters to friends and family. (My first copyediting job, by the way: proofreading those typewritten letters.) I think he’d have an active Facebook account, to share pictures of his granddaughters. And I can almost see him writing witty status updates. Like me, I think he’d share anecdotes about his family, menus of evening dinners, pictures from his travels.

Librarians, writers, readers: our human urge is to connect.

In the book I’ll be writing more about each of these artifacts. For now, I’m remembering that writing the book is one way to put my father’s presence back in the world.

The paradox rephrased: I’m writing both through, and despite, a technology and history that might otherwise erase my father.

*The dystopic novel I’m reading right now–set in the “not so distant future” describes such a person as “ITP” (Impossible To Preserve).

This picture says a lot about where, how, and why I’m traveling, taken at the Seattle Central Public Library:

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To daydream, to promise, to liberate

It’s 10:24PM, and I just finished sending a cover letter and book proposal to this contest. It’s the first writing contest that I’ve entered in…now that I’m counting…hey, twelve fourteen years. I was lucky last time, so maybe some of that luck will carry over to this time.

I’m excited (it’s out there!) and relieved (it’s out there!) and terrified (it’s out there!).

This is the second book proposal I’ve written. The first one was for my academic book. I may return to my academic book eventually. But by comparison, this proposal was so much fun, and so rewarding. I hadn’t realized that I really could write something before I’d written it. I have similar problems writing academic abstracts for conference papers: how do I know what I’m going to argue before I’ve argued it? So I usually need to write the entire paper first, then write the abstract. And, given that proposal deadlines are usually months and months before the conference, the timing of these two acts never works out very well.

With the academic book, I’d already written a full version of the project. So it was easier to write the proposal, knowing the chapter outlines, knowing most of the “through line,” having an academic monograph format to follow (introduction, 3-4 body chapters, conclusion).

But with this project, I have not written the book yet. I know its focus, and I have an idea of how it will be structured. At least for now. You can ask my students: I am a huge believer in (and preacher of) process, allowing the writing process to carry you where it will. That’s where the real insights and discoveries lie.

As I wrote this proposal, however, I was surprised at the book proposal genre’s ability to daydream, to promise, and to liberate, all at the same time. It opened watershed expanses of possibility. Could I do this? ventolin inhaler 100 mcg no prescription Sure. And if I could do that, why not this? It’s a creative work! The writing process actually can carry me where it will. To write the proposal is just that: it’s writing into possibility.

And, I realized, the proposal is a proposal: it’s not a contract. Maybe there are acres (if not oceans) of latitude between the proposal and the finished product.

I have had a hard time with uncertainty, but, as my sister pointed out to me, this is one of the first times in my life that I’m uncertain about my next steps, my next stage. I knew I wanted to major in English before I set foot on the Berkeley campus. I knew I wanted to teach before I finished college. I knew I wanted to be a professor before I finished graduate school. I landed my first teaching job right out of graduate school. To top it off, I’ve had the same lovely and amazing partner for almost 20 years, over half my life. A lot of my life has been stable, and well, I’m a Capricorn: driven, ambitious and goal-setting. Most of the time, I like it that way. And I know that I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have so much stability, especially with love.

On my best days, in my best moments, I know that this new uncertainty—like the creative process—could actually be good for me. Yet I know myself. There’s a strong possibility that what’s good for me, as with most people, is not always going to be what’s easy. That’s all right, though. Capricorns are used to hard work, and that’s usually where and when and how we thrive.

I just want to be strong enough, and graceful enough, and grateful enough to see this uncertainty as a privilege: to see uncertainty as freedom.

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Uncollected

It’s been quite a month, and while I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with my daughters, it’s also been exhausting. I’ve had to choose sanity and take a few expectations off of my plate: mostly self-imposed expectations, often the heaviest ones. Not all laundry must be clean and put away at all times; not every snack my girls eat at home must be homemade and organic and local (you can take the girl out of the Bay Area, but…); dinner does not need to be simmering on the stove when anyone walks in the door. Or, maybe one might be feasible, but not all three in the same day.

And yes: not every blog post must be perfect, beautiful, articulate, collected. For now, the point is to keep writing, whether it’s for the joy of it (Stephen King’s On Writing) or if it’s only for 15 minutes a day (Summer Pierre’s The Artist in the Office).  It’s the writing as habit that’s been an important transition for me this summer. And because of writing, I think I newly understand the phrase “collecting your thoughts.”

So there are a few thoughts I’ve collected, picked up, from the cluttered floors in my mind:

1. I’m not entering a writing contest just to win, really. Although winning would be fabulous, it’s more about the commitment to set a larger goal and put my writing out there. A lot of my thirtysomething peers seem to be running 5Ks or triathlons (or marathons) to commit themselves in similar ways. The contest deadline‘s this week, so I’m going to be working on that application. I’ve got a cover letter mostly finished, and am going to be revising these pieces.  And after that, I’m going to try to submit things elsewhere, maybe here and here. But I just want to keep my head down: write, revise, occasionally send (or hit “publish”).

2. Ever since I wrote about libraries a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about ways to help public libraries, beyond donating my books and beyond using the facilities. I was shocked to see that Seattle’s Central Library will be closed for a week next month, due to budget cuts. That library seems to serve so many, in so many ways. I’ve been heartened by NPR’s prediction that libraries will be the next cupcakes. I’ve seen several articles about libraries that have continued this thread in my mind. But I want to know what else I can do, or where to begin. I’ve been committed to American ethnic studies for almost a decade now, and I wonder if there’s a place for me to combine my commitments to that field with my renewed commitment to public libraries. Both of these institutions are firmly committed to radical inclusion and social diversity and educational justice; it shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, that both of these things are also currently under attack.

3. I’m going to look a bit more into metaphors for history. Ever since I read my first piece of historiography in grad school, I’ve wanted to know more about it. I’m fascinated with Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” with Suzan-Lori Parks’s “great hole of history.” I’ve been thinking more about it ever since I came up with my own metaphor for history and title for the book.  Any cheap ventolin inhalers sale suggestions are more than welcome.

As a subset of that, I’m also curious about what makes something or someone historical. I’ll have to ask my historian friends and colleagues about that.  What strikes me about internment and Japanese Americans is that in some ways, internment is a big part of what makes Japanese Americans “historic”—and there’s so little about what happened to them after they left camp.  Are they no longer “historic” once the historical event has passed, in other words? What’s left once the boat and the wake have disappeared?

I’ve been mulling over the main character’s struggles in Louise Erdrich’s novel Shadow Tag:

How many times have I told you how difficult it is to resist the lure of the historical moment? The one action, the instantaneous truth that changes everything? How many times have I described my own struggles in telling stories, relating historical occurrences, searching for the sequence of events that results in a pattern we can recognize as history? There are always many moments, there is never just one. There are many points of clarity and many causes to one effect. However, after many, many of these points, these moments, have occurred, there is, I should tell you, a final moment. A final scene.” (48)

But I wonder about the desire to resist the lure of the historical moment. We find that the character’s narration is somewhat unreliable. I wonder if her desire to resist transcendence and knowledge (that is, the epiphany) is in itself revealing, and if so, how.

4. An MFA usually requires a large project. I’ve got my project. It’s already larger than I’d anticipated; at first, I thought it would be a reworking of a response to my dad’s manuscript about our family’s internment. And it is, but among other things, it’s also about:

  • technology and memory: how do different forms of documenting (from typewritten manuscripts to Facebook photos) inflect how and what we remember?
  • family and endurance: how has my family maintained its ability to laugh?
  • creativity and multimedia: the textual, the visual, meshed with the archival; the creative lives of me, my dad, and my sister

After I enter the contest, I’ll need to figure out how to plot my next steps. In the meantime, I’ve been happy to spend so much time with printed pages and much less time with online pages (not that I don’t appreciate you reading this!). More printed pages have meant that I’ve been reading books, not just replenishing the well but also stirring up the pot, and seasoning the stew, to mix a few metaphors.

Four things: that’s the collection which is in the laundry basket for now: a few wrinkled items, a few fluffy items, a few that need to be hung up and put away. I’ll add some links to this post tomorrow evening or Wednesday, and I’ll post more about my entry in the contest towards the end of the week.

(For those of who you who asked for a post about farmers markets, I did write one, but it became something else entirely: a meditation about home and a marching song. I’ll keep trying. And I’ll post that one, too, once I revise it.)

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Summer reading lists, 2010

Recently completed reading

  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King
  • Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby
  • The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp
  • Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Reading right now (In media re[ad]s)

  • War Dances, by Sherman Alexie
  • The Calligrapher’s Daughter, by Eugenia Kim
  • The Guardians, by Ana Castillo

Reading returned to the library, without reading in its entirety

  • South of Broad, by Pat Conroy (I like his books, but tire of his one protagonist with the same mother issues.)
  • Sparkle Life, by Kara Lindstrom (Beware the book that needs “sex” on its book jacket description, twice.)

Reading on the bedside table: on deck

  • The Surrendered, by Chang-Rae Lee
  • Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, by David Mura
  • Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich

Reading that may require more quiet and commitment than I’ve got right now (and that I hope to get to eventually)

  • Baltasar and Blimunda, by José Saramago
  • The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

Reading I haven’t bought yet

  • The Stieg generic ventolin albuterol Larsson novels (anyone want to loan me these?)
  • I-Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita
  • Medium Raw, by Anthony Bourdain

On my hold list at the library

  • The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

A few favorite rereadings in bits and pieces:

  • Three Junes, by Julia Glass
  • The Sum of Our Days, by Isabel Allende
  • Comfort Me With Apples, by Ruth Reichl

Books to reread soon for the book project

  • To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
  • Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Books to buy soon

  • Honoring Juanita, by Hans Ostrom
  • The Atlas of Love, by Laurie Frankel

A bit of recommended online reading

I’m happy to answer questions or comment more on any of these, by request. And you? (as Shauna likes to ask) What do your summer reading lists look like?

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Opening the envelope

I could tell you that it smelled yellow. Not in a diseased, Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman way. Not in an inscrutable, exotic, “Oriental” way.  It smelled like Northern California summer sunlight coming through shoji screen paper.

I could tell you that it smelled, predictably, like aging paper. But that might only tell you so much. If you haunt used bookstores like I do, you’d probably recognize the smell. You’d also know it if you’ve done a lot of research in the archives, or shelving in the library stacks. This week we took a family walk down the spiral stacks at the Seattle Central Public Library, and as we rounded a corner, something like that smell greeted me.

The envelope smelled, as my husband Josh pointed out to me, like my childhood house. When I was growing up, we had touches of Japanese décor around the house: a few kokeshi dolls, a noren that fluttered in the main entrance to the hallway, even a tokonoma with a bright red painting. But for me it’s the shoji screens over our windows and glass doors that quietly say home. That’s the smell: the yellow, the paper, the light.

Since I love paper with a cocooning fervor that would make a silkworm blush (another post, another time), you’d think that the feel of the paper would be my first sensory hit. I’ve had this envelope for years now, and it’s been at my mom’s house for a couple of decades before that, probably unopened.

But at first, I was too tentative to rub the paper between my fingers. I even did some writing before I opened the envelope; I wrote down the questions that I wanted to ask. During internment, how did you and our family deal with loss? How did you deal with the loss of your possessions, of your house, of your family papers and baby pictures? And the difficult, near-impossible questions: How have I dealt, or not dealt, with your loss? How do we endure?

It took me a week to think about those questions. I haven’t read the manuscript since I was eight or nine years buy ventolin without prescription old: almost twenty-five years ago. Then a week later, I wrote down why I was so afraid of opening the envelope. I’m scared that it’s going to make me cry and realize his loss all over again. I hate crying. I hate having lost him.

On my computer desktop, I opened up and looked at an old photo of my father. I wanted to say something like a prayer, but I didn’t know what to ask for. I don’t really pray, if we’re being very honest here.

I couldn’t think, didn’t say, probably felt: please.

Then I opened the envelope. Lately I’ve been worried that the manuscript inside the envelope has been deteriorating. But I noticed that though the first and last pages are a bit tattered, the bond paper’s doing its very best to stand up to the manual typewriter. In an age of slick laser printouts, there’s something engraved, almost letterpressed, about these typewritten pages.

And at the bottom of the very first page, he left me an unexpected gift.

Taku Frank Nimura

December, 1973

Out of the two-hundred plus manuscript pages, it’s this one that I just might cherish the most. He wrote this book—or at least this page—during the month and year that I was born. He died eleven years later.

In the wake of a recent loss, private for now, I am beginning to write my own book. It’s a book that speaks to my father, that will interweave his voice with the voice and artwork of my sister. I don’t know where this project will take us, but I know it’s about memory, family, technology, loss, and home. And it’s about the precariously shifting aftermath of history, or what I’ve come to think of as the wake.

The wake? Stand near the back of a ferry boat, and watch the waters below. As the boat engine starts, the waters will seem to hum. All that unseen energy will churn itself into a thick, gorgeous procession of rippling upheaval. We know the procession will eventually disappear. And so we treasure the wake because we are always leaving it behind.

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Fried rice (“Cooking became more fun when…”)

I wanted to find a nice image for you here, but fried rice isn’t the most photogenic dish. Restaurants can garnish fried rice with basil or cucumbers or even flower-cut carrots, but really, garnishes aren’t the point with fried rice. Which is part of my point here.

When Shauna asked us to fill in the title sentence on Twitter, I first thought of this: “Cooking became more fun when I realized that recipes (for cooking, not baking) were suggestions.” I think that’s still true of my cooking now. I’ll substitute carrots for red peppers, delete the fennel, revise the asparagus roasting time, add mirin or olive oil or brown sugar where necessary. But I didn’t have a specific moment, or month, or even year to attach to that philosophy.

My next response, which I didn’t post, was “when I learned to trust my nose and my palate.” And the moment came, complete with a dish: fried rice.

As a college student, my friend C came to visit me in my second post-dorm apartment: a two-bedroom apartment on Arch Street in Berkeley. The apartment, come to think of it, reminds me a lot of UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, and, probably not so coincidentally, of my house now. All of these spaces have white walls with wood-rimmed windows, and hardwood floors. My apartment was a 1940s converted townhouse. A huge plus: it was half a block from campus, on the quieter north side. A huge minus: it had a radiator that clanked in the morning like a drunken prisoner. But it had a lot of natural light, and a galley kitchen.

In that kitchen, my dear friend M and I made dozens of cookies and batches of mochi, usually after midnight Safeway runs. Late night beer runs? Not so much. Brown sugar and chocolate chip emergencies? You bet. And I made a lot of fried rice.

The fried rice I remember making when my friend C came to visit is no version of “authentic” fried rice that I can think of. (Then again, I’m not sure that fried rice has an authentic history or one specific ethnicity. Chinese? Thai? Filipino? Malaysian? I’ve found fried rice at all of these restaurants. Surely, someone’s done a culinary history of fried rice. If not, I call dibs on writing one.) Anyway, I remember buy albuterol adding the following ingredients to the skillet:

  • Half a roughly chopped onion
  • A fresh garlic clove, minced
  • Canola oil
  • Leftover cooked white rice
  • Half a package of frozen mixed vegetables
  • Leftover chicken sausage, chopped up
  • Italian seasoning
  • Paprika
  • Salt
  • Finely grated cheese, maybe Asiago or Parmesan

I was a bit nervous talking to this friend, I remember, so I kept looking in the fridge and pantry, adding more things. The paprika I remember adding towards the end, a random note of inspiration to sweeten the rice a bit and enhance the browning.

As I kept adding things to the skillet, the conversation loosened up, or maybe I loosened up. I wasn’t sure how the rice, or the conversation, or even the friendship, was going to turn out. But I remember turning away from the stove, wooden spoon in hand, for minutes at a time, so I could talk to my friend.

When I came back from these minutes, I’d stir. Each time, a bit more of the rice had developed that crunchy crust which makes the best fried rice. The Spanish call it socarrat; the Japanese call it okoge. The rice, and the vegetables, and even the onions and sausage, had caramelized a bit. I’d stir the rice, turn around and talk, come back and stir. It took a long time for fried rice, maybe even half an hour. But the rice, and the conversation, and the visit, were eventually pretty good. Both the friend and the rice were forgiving.

Most importantly, I became more comfortable in the kitchen that day. I began with one of the most familiar acts of cooking I knew and revered. I used vibrant ingredients that I already had in my pantry. I played with one of the ingredients central to my cooking soul. I wasn’t worried about how the rice would look when I dished it up. I wasn’t following anyone’s recipe. I was just tasting the dish in my head: trusting my palate and offering the results to someone else.

Not a bad way to cook, or write, or even live.

P.S. This is another community blog post; you can check Shauna’s roundup post for other online responses in the next day or two. If you’re on Twitter, you can search for #cookingbecamefun.

P.P.S. This week on the blog: more about the book project, and, by request (!), farmer’s markets.

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Revision of Assignment #1 (Tell a story in lists)

On Becoming a Writer (Again): A Progress Report of Habits

Clean desk.
Hours to complete: about 4.

Renew library card. Check out library books.

First checkout from the library: 2 books. Second checkout from the library: 1 book. Latest checkout from the library: about 14 books.

Read more fiction for pleasure.

  • Read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a few stories from Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You. Laughed over one, puzzled over the other (perhaps am not hip enough? a high probability).
  • Tried to read Sonya Chung’s Long for this World, but had to return it to the library. Want other people to read this book—it looks like it will be important, transnational, historically relevant. But early in the book, had this terrible feeling that a feverish child was going to die. Couldn’t go on.

Read nonfiction writing.
Just finished Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. An inspiration.

Resurrect the quote journal for inspiration.
Taste these from My Life in France:
• “the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite” (302)
• “how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly” (66)
• “I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.” (67)

Carry several notebooks and pens around with you.

  • Saw my writer friend R’s clothbound journal a few weeks ago: the cover soft, lovely, well-worn like an heirloom quilt. Want my notebook to be like that: used, not reserved for special occasions, like fancy china behind glass cabinet doors.
  • Using one of those hardbound blank journals that had been a Christmas gift. Having that notebook is like having a camera: not only are moments and thoughts that much easier to document, but having the journal is itself a lens and a mandate.

Read books on writing.

  • Started Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. It’s been recommended reading for writers, but all can think about, at least in this early part of the memoir, is “No wonder he writes horror novels.”
  • Started worrying about some of the different neuroses associated with writers: the sullen solitary, the competitive wit, the narcissistic venom, the icicle-forming insecurity. (Note to self: do not confuse writers with anonymous YouTube or newspaper commenters.) Thought about the writer who reads other writers and always loses in self-judged beauty writing contests. Always the bikini round, not the interview, that wins the day.
  • Wondered if this worrying about worrying is a writer’s characteristic.

Write.

  • Blog posts: 19
  • Status updates on Facebook and Twitter: probably too many.
  • Typed letter to a friend: 1

Revise.

  • Posted first drafts on the blog, then second and third and fourth drafts.
  • Reflected more on earlier entries, such as the one about the act of loaning out and returning library books. Although still struggling to love abundantly, wonder if my love of owning books may be actually less about generosity and more about the idea of hoarding something. You hoard something that you love because you worry that it will be taken away from you.
  • Tried to remove as many “I”’s from this post as possible.

Grades:
1. Collaged the lists, wrote, revised the first assignment into a linear story.

2. Oldest daughter commandeered one notebook from my purse, while we were waiting at the airport. She’s started to write and illustrate her first narrative book.

3. Opened my dad’s manuscript; had been scared to reread it; haven’t read it in over 25 years.

4. Woke up with a filmic ending of a story. Had never met the boy and girl characters, though had seen that particular off-ramp to downtown Seattle many times over. Two balloon releases. Not sure why. Wanted to know how the characters got to that image. Started to dream in fiction.

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And the envelope, please

From the About page:

“And sometime this year I am going to reopen the manila envelope with my dad’s book manuscript, which I haven’t read since I was in fifth grade, some twenty-odd years ago. “

So: this week, I did it. I opened the envelope. I can’t ventolin tabs wait to tell you all about it. I’m only 40 pages into reading the manuscript. However, I think the very act exhausted me. And–I promised you no more death this week. Please, stay tuned. I’ve already found one unexpected gift on the very first page.