The Music Sounds Fine From Here

Dear Old Self:

I miss you sometimes. I think about the nights out, the concerts and shows and bands and bars. I miss the sticky familiarity of a dive bar, his exploratory hand on your backside, guiding you through a crowd to a spot near the band or a dark corner somewhere. I miss sneaking down to the floor section of the Sting concert with your girlfriend when you were 13, sitting outside a ticketbox all night for good Dave Matthews seats, pushing forward through smoke and crowds to get to that lit-up place right in front of all the action. I miss how you finally kissed him on a bench just outside a swanky lounge after that L.A. band played the first set and you downed a couple of memorable martinis. I miss not being worried about jostling and groping. I miss relying on that fake I.D. I miss the first time you heard the folksy twang of Barenaked Ladies and the live roar of Pearl Jam. I miss that icy winter night on my first trip to his hometown, stumbling into that college bar, eating corn-on-the-cob, trying to salsa. I miss that night at Kinky when you jumped and danced and let that music echo pink and red inside your chest and didn’t even know a little seed was planted somewhere deep within, shaking like a baby rattle in a bean hopper, taking root to change it all.

Dear New Self:

I’m proud of you. I’m proud that you guys decided to take the kids to the music festival after so many years safe at home among playpens and nap times. I’m proud that even when the open, grassy green where you arrived two hours early for the show began to fill up with excitable youth, you held your ground on the spread-out blanket, feeding your children curly fries and smiling nostalgically at him. I’m so glad that when the excitable youth started to feel boisterous and pushy, you glanced at him questioningly and hovered over the children but stayed to claim your spot. And I’m proud that when the concertgoers kept coming and coming, overcrowding the grassy green until there was no more than an inch of cool air around anyone and the whole crowd swayed and lurched with threatening abandon, you stayed, a pressed-in blanket-bound family just waiting for the music. I’m proud you told the mouthy youth who mocked your blanket set-up behind your back to shut up and go back to middle school. I’m proud that a teen-age boy next to you gave your man “props” for holding ground and the twentysomethings  nearby said they’d buffer your little family with their determined bodies. And I’m proud that when Alex Ebert called into his microphone asking if any little ones were there that night, you held up your little girl high into the sky, and their dad held up your other girl, and those little girls pumped their fists and swayed their heads in the night and took in the music along with you. So what if they maybe got a little contact high? So what if it got kind of sketchy in the jostling heart of the crowd for a while? You made it. They saw their first concert. You’re back in the mix. Sort of. The music’s different now, from over here. But it’s still good.

It’s The Simple Things

This weekend we received a gift we’ve been waiting for ever since we left the landlocked desert and moved to Seattle.

I’ve been feeling murky lately, not depressed exactly but weighted down by various thoughts and responsibilities. I complained to Mr. Punkernoodle that we haven’t been doing enough “fun” stuff, that lately it seems all our spare time is spent planting, laundering, shuffling bank accounts and hunting down kindergarten options. So Saturday we set out for Richmond Beach, bahn mi in hand, kids squealing, the dog slobbering excitement all over the back of the rig.

It was a gorgeous afternoon thanks to the early dose of spring we’ve been getting around here. The sun was sparkling off the Sound, the air was a bit foggy and the Olympics jutted out above the water looking very majestic before melting into the mist. The girls occupied themselves by climbing the driftwood obstacle course and exploring a fort , and the dog delighted herself by trying to hump other dogs (always the guru of embarrassment, her).

And we just sat, leaning into each other and gazing out at the blue expanse. I joked that it was a lovely day but not exactly the freedom I had been fantasizing about (think kid-free, warm-weather beach with cocktail in hand). And then, I gazed up and saw it: An umbrella spray off the surface of the water, a few hundred yards from shore. Followed by a silky breach of black, gliding left to right, gracefully emerging and submerging. “I just just just sssssaw a whale!” I managed to sputter. Mr. Punkernoodle was nodding, jaw dropped, pointing, along with half the people on beach. We frantically called the girls over and watched, amazed, as more umbrella sprays appeared. Over the next hour, we saw it many times, spouting and, several times, breaching. The Mr. thought they were gray whales, scouring the shallow depths for some type of crustacean they apparently like to feed on.

As the afternoon moved toward dinnertime, the whale(s) moved farther out, the spouts becoming tiny cotton balls on the horizon. But we were transfixed. Even as we trudged up the hill and across the railroad bridge to the parking lot, we craned our necks back toward the Sound for one last chance to see the massive creature. In the car on the way home, Punkernoodle 1 kept exclaiming over and over again, “I can’t believe we saw real whales — real ones! Not pretend, but real!”

I understand her awe. Eight years after moving to the Pacific Northwest, and without paying for a “sightseeing tour” (been there, done that, and let me say that getting a glimpse of a whale through a choppy, freezing veil of seasickness is not really my cup of tea), we finally were graced with one of the most graceful creatures on earth. It was an unexpected gift and a simple, priceless pick-me-up.

The Sound of Monday Nights

This post was written for {Write} of Passage Challenge #6: Anne Lamott tells us, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” She’s referring to that inner voice that we hardly ever hear anymore. Today, take a few minutes to be still and quiet. Listen to your inner voice and write what she/he says. That’s it. Whatever it is that’s in there, let it out.

Tomorrow is garbage day. So tonight is garbage eve, which makes me think about death. Which makes me think about marriage. Which makes me think about life.

When we bought our house four years ago, we inherited The Old Lady Next Door. Dorothy, as I’ll call her, lives in a house about three inches from our own. Her tiny, one-story house is set all the way back on her property, taking up about 1/5 of her lot. The other 4/5 of her property amounts to a gigantic lawn stretching from said house down to the sidewalk. The first image I have of Dorothy is what I saw when I spied on her and the rest of the street from my kid’s upstairs bedroom window the summer we moved in.

Every morning that summer, Dorothy ambled out to the enormous lawn, which was deep, violent green and perfectly manicured. She spent hours crouched on her knees at the edge of the grass, pruning rose bushes, rearranging wood chips, polishing garden fairies and pulling out any errant weeds that dared to break the uniformity of her smooth grass carpet.

When she wasn’t lawn-grooming or looking after her husband, Dorothy walked her newly acquired companion, an edgy little Maltese I’ll call McDoodles, around the neighborhood. McDoodles was adopted and apparently had been mistreated at some point, Dorothy confided in us, because he seemed “a little” mistrusting of people. He also didn’t like other dogs, and we learned quickly that a hopeful sniff or excited slurp from our 40-pound Golden mutt resulted in an upswell of high-pitched barking and a sharp jump in Maltese blood pressure.

We tried to keep our dog away from McDoodles, we really did. But though she’s friendly and sweet, our dog has no street sense and suffered from a sad drop in obedience since our Punkernoodles came along and dethroned her from No. 1 Baby. So yeah, a few times she bust out the backyard and rushed over to McDoodles’ to see if maybe this time he had taken his meds and wanted to play. No harm was done, but McDoodles and Dorothy were both left in quite a state after these encounters. So much so that Dorothy decided to sic the Seattle dog-catcher on us.

I won’t go into the boring details of my interactions with the weird little man holding a yellow clipboard or how those interactions left me with some ungodly fines, nor will I makes excuses for letting my dog leave our property — bad neighborly behavior, I admit. Suffice it to say that, for a while, me and Dorothy weren’t the best of friends. No canning parties or gossip over the tea cozy.

Eventually, over the years, my bitterness thawed and we began saying hello over the laurel hedge. Dorothy brought our girls airport souvenirs from a trip she took and cooed at them on Halloween. We left Christmas cookies on her doorstep and shoveled her walkway in a snowstorm. Beyond her green thumb and her love of mentally challenged small fluffy dogs, I didn’t know much about her, nor did I think to find out.

Then, one dark dawn last spring, the spinning red lights of two fire trucks and an ambulance shone through my bathroom window. I peeked down onto the thick green lawn and watched as medical technicians filed through the screen door and, more than an hour later, carried Dorothy’s husband out on a stretcher. Word spread quickly down the street later that day: After years of ongoing health problems, he had died.

We all got information about the funeral, and I thought maybe I would try to go. I had learned Dorothy didn’t have any children and that much of her family was gone. But the kids got sick that week, and because I had nowhere to leave two snuffling whiny booger factories, I didn’t go. I remember, though, that the funeral was a Monday.

I remember because that night, after my kids were tucked into bed, the bills paid, and hubby and I had eaten ice cream and watched a few minutes of crap TV, I was washing my face in the bathroom. That’s when I heard the rolling.

We have a lot of garbage bins here in Seattle — one small square bin for actual trash, plus a large rolling green bin for yard waste and compost, and another large green rolling bin for recycling. The two big bins have to be rolled all the way from the back of the house down the driveway to the curb Mondays nights, in time for Tuesday morning pickup.

As I peeked out the rectangular bathroom window that night, I saw her, wearing sweats and slip-ons and slowly pushing her yard waste bin down the long driveway where her husband used to park their navy Lincoln after taking her on shopping trips or to dinner.

In that moment, as Dorothy rolled the trash to the curb on the day she buried her husband, a helplessness washed over me. I felt the fragility of life. The impermanence of our existence. One day you’re pruning your rose bushes or stubbornly ignoring your busybody neighbor, and the next day someone’s true love is gone forever.

And I think about that now, every week, when I hear the bins begin to roll along the driveways up and down our street, their black plastic wheels bumping and scratching over the pavement before coming to rest near the curb. Any Monday could be different than the Monday before.

Reality Check

So for a year now I’ve been stressing about a Situation.

Three times a week, we drive the same route to preschool. The Punkernoodles’ school is great, but it’s a little far – a 20-minute drive. The route takes us through several neighborhoods and requires us to cross Aurora Avenue. Also known as Highway 99, this mini highway through Seattle is, well, pretty much a shit hole. For miles it basically consists of flea-ridden motels offering hourly rates, strip clubs, gun clubs, fast food “restaurants,” even drive-through coffee huts where your barista will dress up in cheap lingerie. The underbelly of our town, if you will.

Anyway. Before crossing this treasure of a byway, we have to stop at a long red light. At the corner stands a homeless man. A very bedraggled homeless man. He’s an older guy, no doubt looking even more aged than he actually is, with a nest of wildish hair, a gnarled grimace, pale watery eyes, and a sign. The sign has changed a few times since we first started passing him, but generally it is fashioned from a wrinkled piece of box cardboard and is scrawled with a request for food, money etc. For much of the past year (though not in the past couple months), he wore a snowsuit, a kind of torn-up puffy sleeping-bag-looking thing. In this suit, or whatever outfit of the day he can muster, he shuffles along the sidewalk, grumbling and peering into car windows with his sign.

It is sad – I know that. I have a lot of compassion for people like this man. I have interviewed many of them as a journalist, written stories about programs that support homelessness. I have done the midnight homeless count and spent the night in a homeless shelter to interview the men who called it home. It’s not simple – lots of factors contribute to a life like this: Bad luck, sure, and also addiction, mental illness, poor social suport systems. Bottom line, people like him suffer on levels I personally cannot really even imagine.

But that’s not what I’ve been thinking about this past year. This whole time, I have been worried about the minutes we spend every commute sitting, in the right-hand-lane, right at his corner as we wait for the light to turn green. For the first six months or so, when the kiddos were a bit younger, I was just concerned they would notice this scruffy specter and have nightmares. Then, as Punkernoodle 1 inched closer to her fourth birthday, I began to panic about the day she would inevitably ask, “Mommy, what is that man doing?”

I know, it’s weak. I admit it. But I was afraid of having to explain homelessness, in stark terms, with such a compelling visual standing right before us. In the 2 minutes of a red-green light cycle.

Finally, a few months ago, the question came. I played the classic (and weak, I know, I know) brush off. “Oh, I don’t know, honey – sometimes people just stand outside with signs.”

Yes, I am a pathetic chicken-shit of a parent.

Another time, as 2 1/2-year-old Sister listened in, Punkernoodle 1 tried to come in from another angle. “What does that sign say, Mommy?” In that probing, demanding, painfully innocent 4-year-old way.

“Not sure, babe,” I chirped out as the light changed and I slammed the gas pedal. “I missed it.”

Other times I just distracted them at the corner so they wouldn’t notice. “Let’s sing a song,” I’d say. “What’s your favorite dessert?”

It’s not that I am afraid of tough topics. I take them on all the time. I’m like a parrot about the whole “your body is private” thing. We’ve done food drives and toy drives and  have talked about how some children don’t have money for good food or nice toys and it’s good to help them. Heck, my daughters have a cousin being raised by two dads – and they already know all about that.

There’s just something about the harsh reality of a person so run-down, so obviously alone and desperate and unloved, so without-a-home, that I can’t bear to break to them. Maybe that’s because I don’t really understand it, or believe it, myself at some base level: How can someone in our country, our community, have no home? Nowhere to sleep? Or shower, or eat? It’s shameful – not on the people without a bed, but, maybe, on all of us with one. On me.

I know this speaks to a larger issue, the question of how to talk to our children about the difficult topics. I am searching for the best road, the way to give them the information they are going to need to become “citizens of the world,” as the catch phrase goes, without shattering that which makes them regard that world as miraculous to begin with.

Well. Finally, this week, the fateful moment arrived. The day I’ve been avoiding like a coward for a year. We pull up to Aurora. It’s an uncharacteristically sunny fall Seattle day. The girls are very busy looking out their windows. There he is. Here it comes. “Mommy? What is that man doing?”

I can’t avoid it this time. Too direct. Too obvious. She’s gotten too smart, too perceptive. This is going to shatter her innocence forever, steal her open-hearted wonder at the world and give her the first spoonful of human bitterness, but there’s nothing more I can do about it. Fuck. Ok – here it goes: “Well, sweetie. Sometimes people don’t have any food or money. So they might make a sign asking other people for money, or food, so maybe if they hold the sign up people will help them.”

I wait for it. The request to roll down the window and pass this man some money. And some food. And maybe invite him home to sleep in our guest room, at least until Nana comes to visit.

“Mommy,” she barks in her recent, loud, newly assertive and slightly demanding way. I cringe.

“He should just get a job.”

Oh my god. All this time, all this fear – of the wrong thing. She’s not losing her rosy outlook on the world. She’s training for public office. Ha.

Ok. Sigh of relief. Laughs all around. Note to Self: Make a few extra donations to the food bank, kids in tow. Volunteer at a shelter. Find children’s book explaining mental illness?

Find a new route to school.

Just kidding…

The Food Project – Getting Started

It’s been a while since we’ve posted, mostly because it feels as though we’ve been eaten alive by our garden (isn’t it supposed to be the other way around???). But really, things here at the Punkernoodle Palace have revolved around the seemingly endless task list associated with getting stuff ready for summer.

We’ve grown an edible garden every year for the past 6 or 7 years, with varying degrees of success. It’s actually a lot of fun, and we never know exactly how it’s going to go – which vegetables and herbs will take root and succeed to harvest, and which (depending on weather, our skills and maybe a little luck, or lack thereof) will flop. One year, when we lived in a small house on Capitol Hill, we were surprised to receive a wildly bountiful potato crop that lasted us well into fall/winter after we threw in a couple dozen sprouting potatoes into a strip of little-used earth along our backyard fence. We usually have a great pea harvest and good luck with zucchinis (who doesn’t?). Tomatoes have been trickier – we lost more than a hundred unripened ones to an early rainy season one year (this year we’ll try covering them if the threat should arise again) but have also enjoyed hundreds of juicy, sweet cherry tomatoes from our potted plants.

There is nothing better than the taste of food from your own earth, freshly picked. Even our two little Punkernoodles love eating tomatoes, spinach – even onions! – straight from the plant, even though they often turn their nose at less-fresh, store-bought versions on their dinner plates.

This year, our garden has spread from its modest backyard plot into some nicely landscaped plots, bordered by antique brick, in the front. We’ve added chickens and are enjoying watching them grow from the tiny pullets and chicks they were a couple months ago into big girls who might start gracing us with urban eggs before winter if we’re lucky.

After recently (and obsessively) reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I now have even bigger hopes for our little home food crops. If you’ve read the book, you know what I mean when I say it can change your outlook on the cutural and environmental implications of our food choices. If you haven’t read the book, you should. Anyway, a few chapters in it dawned on me – there’s no reason we can’t do this. Ok, maybe not to the extent Kingsolver and her family does (we don’t have acres of rural land to grow a year’s worth of our own vegetables and meat, for one thing). But we have some space, which we fill with as many cabbages, carrots, pea vines and spinach seeds as we can, plus a handful of chickens who will hopefully give us fresh organic eggs soon. And, most importantly, we have what I hope will be the key to the success of this new Punkernoodle family plan: the Ballard Farmers Market.

Seattle in general has amazing farmers markets. We are lucky to live in a neighborhood that hosts a year-round Sunday market. Farmers from our county and beyond truck in whatever is fresh and in season every week. Most of it is organic, and these farms use free-range, grass-finished and sustainable methods to grow hormone- and chemical-free vegetables and meat, practically in our own backyard. Ok, not that close, but thousands of miles from the South American bananas we’ve become programmed to think we need to eat every week of the year.

I go to the market often, but I always use it to supplement our weekly grocery visits – I spend maybe $30 on a handful of market produce. If I really looked at every stand with a fresh eye, treating the market as my grocery, how much of our weekly food could I get there? Could I, complementing with whatever we grow in our yard, fill nearly all our nutritional needs from these local farmers and food artisans?

Like Kingsolver, my husband and I discussed some necessary exceptions to a potential buying-local rule: coffee, tea and spices, chocolate (though we’d aim, as we do anyway, to buy those through fair-trade sources). What about staples like bread and pasta, beans and grains, we wondered? I did some research. I was surprised to find a couple of Washington sources for some of those, including a Methow Valley enterprise called Bluebird that grows and processes emmer/farro, rye and oat flour. And I was excited to learn on Sunday (more about the first project trip to the market later) that I can get beans of many varieties grown in the Yakima Valley only 150 miles from us, not bad on the local-eating chart.

For now, we decided we will buy bread from local bakers using organic ingredients and conscious practices, as well as acknowledged that we’ll need to occasionally buy some things of the truly non-local/commercialized variety (hey – we have a 2- and 4-year-old who might not be so down with this plan of ours, at least right away). Even then, I was excited to see that our local natural-foods co-op has great orange tags in every food section denoting which products are produced locally – so we can try to navigate to the mac and cheese that is still from down the road, or highway, vs. across the country, cutting down on our global footprint and supporting our local community. The overarching goal is simple: to change our habits so that we can begin eating and appreciating local food that is in season. What to do when there is (practically) no food in season?? We asked ourselves that, too, as Kingsolver does in the book. What I learned, or was reminded of, by reading it is that there are always foods in season, even during the soggy, nearly freezing Pacific Northwest winters. I am newly interested in the other methods of relying on local foods that I learned about in the book – canning, drying, freezing foods when they’re in season. I’ll report the (probably hilarious) attempts at those when the time comes.

Obviously, we decided to go for it. I would take my $200+ normally spent at the store to the market this weekend with a fresh eye and a new task: feed us all for a week. I spent that money, and I’ll report what it bought us (and what I’m doing with it) in the next blog installment.