Welcome February!
Here’s a mantra I come back to from time to time:

“Let Good Things Happen To You”

(try it out if you’d like, I don’t mind sharing)

‘Cause why shoot for excellence when competency will do?

Interestingly, I seem to be worried about a lot of things aqueous right now.  Not just these fish, but the plumbing we need to get done in the bathroom because our tub faucet has gone from dripping to trickling to an almost pouring. Not so bad if you pretend it’s a fancy water feature we’ve added to the house. But it’s also begun to smell mildew-y reminding me of the city pool locker rooms when I was a kid and that can’t be good. Plus there’s that whole “you’re wasting water in the desert” rant going on in the back of my head.

Oh, and there’s the worry I’m carrying around about my kid’s recent lack of dentistry and what a lax and terrible parent I am. And there’s these damn fish that I’m beginning to feel attached to. I’m checking in on them every time I come and go.

I tell Liam about the aqueous stress and he says, “Well, it is the year of the water dragon.” Hmm, well that’s something to think about.  I read that water allows the dragon to “re-direct its enthusiasm”. Ok. Ok, I think, I can work with that. It’s time to think about the flow. It’s time to just get in the current and swim.

“I know how the road in both directions both threatens and beckons.”

- Wallace Stegner

“Oh that Aunt Jan, she shouldn’t be getting me anything,” I say while tearing the wrapping off of a white shirt box on Christmas morning. I lift the lid and find a worn Ziploc baggie. “What’s this?” Inside is a writing tablet with my grandma’s name stamped on it twice and two brittle handmade cookbooks.

When I unseal the top of the Ziploc bag, it smells! It’s chemically sweet like dryer sheets and Aqua Net.  It’s the smell of visiting my grandma at the Beauty Shop behind her house; of shop towels in the laundry; of pretending to “sit under the dryer” while watching her roll hair into rows of rollers. I want to hoard this smell.

I delicately thumb through one of the cookbooks, “Relief Society Recipe Book”. There is a handwritten page tucked inside for Coconut Marshmallow Layer Cake. I smell you and I hoard you.

The second of the recipe books is two-hole punched; red plastic rings holding the loose typed double-sided pages.  The recipes are from Winslow women, I recognize some of these names. I like the name Goldie Cooke, I think she was a friend of grandma’s. It has no cover and no date, could it be the 50’s, 60’s – not sure who collected these and put them together. Some women’s club I imagine, but which one?

Hot Milk Sponge Cake

Food For The Gods

Sopapillas

Grandma’s contribution: Spoon Bread Tamale Pie, also South of the Border Casserole, and a Cranberry Salad with celery and marshmallows.  I’ve eaten you.

Many of the women’s recipes use the word “scant”. Scant cup sugar, scant cup oil.  Why scant?

Which brings me to this thought: I’m beginning a New Year thinking about Transactive memory – a system of explaining how we rely on our family, friends, and community to store information for us.  Each person doesn’t need to remember everything the group needs to know, it’s the capacity to know who knows what. How people in close relationships “coordinate” memory and tasks. These recipe books unlock transactive memories about food and community, and a shared culinary heritage.

Like a family story that is laughter plus smells plus food. The whole is greater than the sum.  I think this might mean that my iPhone is part of my transactive memory? And this blog?

I’m going to try to remember that what I know includes what those around me know. I’m thinking about this while smelling old crumbly recipe books, trying to conjure my grandma’s expertise and areas of specialization, part of the memory of my childhood, and wondering what there is to learn from making that Coconut Marshmallow Layer Cake?  And smelling Aqua net?

no real cleavers were used in this photo

I just came home from a week in New York visiting my friend Lilah. She has a new baby, a 6-week old infant son, Aro. We spent a lot of time in the car driving from Yonkers up north, down the West Side Highway, making our way across Manhattan and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. It was grey and rainy, which was a welcome change from Phoenix, but also made me feel like I needed to re white-balance my eyes; my self? I’ve been so worried lately; so serious. Watching the watery Hudson River out the passenger side window — droplets of rainwater obscuring the view slightly — I let my mind drift.

I’ve been stressed out about money, and my own creative progress, and how the two are sometimes at odds. About what’s next? What’s next? Lilah has been known to say, “Just keep doing what you’re doing… more will be revealed.”

One time, Lilah and I won tickets from a radio station while driving cross-country. It was about 95 degrees and we were standing in the sun at a pay phone in Nashville, Tennessee. Lilah was dialing, trying to connect us with the Grand Ole Opry so we could purchase tickets for a performance â any performance. But somehow she misdialed and got connected instead with the radio station WSM. She started telling our story — we’re driving cross-country; we’re only in Nashville for a couple of days, we started our road trip in Upstate New York, we’re on our way to Arizona. Next thing you know, Lilah is put on the airwaves and the disc-jockey is yelling, “Guess what, you girls are going to the GRAND OLE OPRY!!” and we end up winning tickets to that night’s line-up of shows. We are jumping up and down at the pay phone with sweat dripping down our faces. What an incredible stroke of luck! We’re not even sure how it happened. That night we saw a great string of performances at the Opry: Porter Wagoner, Charlie Pride, Ricky Skaggs, Riders in the Sky.

We lived together for a bit in the East Village (on 2^nd Street and Ave A) when it was still pretty sketch. Our one bedroom apartment had a bathtub IN THE KITCHEN, and at the other end of the kitchen a French door missing the glass in most of its panels opened into a closet-sized bathroom where there was a toiletâ just a toilet. You’ve heard the expression, “Don’t shit where you eat”. You know, said as a warning against having romantic relations with a co-worker or band mate. A warning against causing trouble in a situation in which one might regularly finds oneself. Well, in this domestic arrangement, we literally shat where we ate! We embraced it — bring it! — in this place was there an alternative?

Here we are, years later. I’m waking up to hold Lilah’s infant son in the mornings and talk with her over tea and the morning news. Smelling his head, staring into his deep eyes and delicious baby-ness. Marveling at the chirps and throaty suckling sounds he makes. Lilah is the friend that always reminds me about the malleability of perception; that people create their own meaning to life.

On the last day of my visit, one of Lilah’s classes for her graduate MFA program is having a Performance Art event at a Polish church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The class is broken into four groups and each has taken over a section of the large church basement to set up their interactive tableau. There was a group with masks inviting folks to join in, and a group serving tea, and a group compiling complaints. But the best part is that during a diaper change it’s discovered that the waistband of baby Aro’s pants are wet. Lilah hasn’t brought a spare pair so she sets his baby pants in a pot and turns the stove burner on and tries to dry them. But of course the wool-blend fabric begins almost immediately to smolder — filling the whole room with an awful smell. The little pants had burn marks all over them. In fact, they looked like a toasted marshmallow. The funniest part is Lilah holds them up and says, “Huh, they’re not so bad.” But they would have been, believe me, they would have been considered a minor disaster to many new mothers. I said, “He’s going to look like a s’more.”

SO my point is, Nevermind the well-read, Brooklyn MFA-bound artists, watching my friend sauté her sons pee-soaked pants was really the most inventive, best artistic “performance” of the whole afternoon. The thing that I wish I had been recording.