Perseverance furthers

I used to toss coins to get guidance from the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. I had the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation, which was heavy on Taoist philosophy and light on practical advice. I kept tossing the coins anyway, hoping that one day the wisdom of the ages would make my path perfectly clear. After a while, I noticed that the I Ching was telling me the same thing over and over: Perseverance furthers. 

 Since I was trying, and quitting, a lot of things back then—pottery, Karate, macrobiotics—I figured the book was suggesting that I cultivate stick-to-it-ness. It was, and I did. Perseverance was what kept me, a lonely Peace Corps volunteer, in my village when all I wanted was to go home. Perseverence has kept me with my husband even when he drives me crazy. Perseverence keeps me writing and sending my work out to literary agents and magazines. Perseverance is what gets me past obstacles, disappointment, and rejection.

Halfway through the pandemic, I started sending out an excerpt from my memoir to literary magazines. I figured that getting some publishing credentials would help my chances of finding an agent to represent the memoir to publishers. After eight rejections, which isn’t many in this business, Parhelion, a magazine out of Virginia, emailed that they wanted to publish “A Girl from Pakau.” For the first time, someone liked my work who wasn’t a) my sister, b) a friend, c) my writing coach, or d) a member of my writing group. This acceptance not only affirmed my work, but also encouraged me to send out more. 

I would like to thank S.L. Brown, my editor at Parhelion, whose insight helped me make the piece stronger. If you would like to visit a little-known corner of the world—The Gambia, West Africa—you can read “A Girl from Pakau” athttps://parhelionliterary.com/linda-gambill-pakau/

Getting Back on the Horse

If you fall off your horse, you’re supposed to get back on as soon as you can. The longer you wait, the more firmly fear or plain old inertia sets in. The pandemic stopped my writing in its tracks. I launched this blog to reflect on the themes I explored in my memoir, The Mango Garden: leaving home, taking risks, embracing the unknown and being changed by it. Now, as if worrying about jet blasts, monster waves, and hard falls weren’t enough—(I love documenting warning signs when traveling)—we have to think about Covid-19 every time we walk out the door.

When I get stuck in my writing, unable to find the right word or unsure about what I’m trying to say, I get up and do something with my hands, usually cooking. My mind relaxes and nine times out of ten, the answer presents itself. But this time, all my ideas seemed irrelevant in light of the anxiety and suffering engendered not only by the pandemic, but by the killing of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks.

Still, I had to get back on the horse. As much as I enjoyed making yogurt from scratch and growing basil from seed, I was getting cranky. I hadn’t written anything in weeks, then months. Finally a workable idea started circling in my head—right around the time my husband went to the hospital for an angiogram. We thought he might get a stent or two, but the doctors said he needed surgery—immediately. His arteries were so blocked, they were afraid to send him home. Five bypasses and six days later, he left the hospital. 

Now that Tom is getting his energy back and walking up to an hour a day, I can focus. 

Everybody is spending a lot more time at home, so I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the Bowen approach to understanding how families work. The cool thing is that it teaches you how to observe interactions between family members, (including yourself), which helps to temper knee-jerk reactions with a more thoughtful response. It’s a very down-to-earth approach that has helped Tom and me a lot. 

Over decades of observation, Murray Bowen, M.D., identified seven ways that family members relate to each other when anxiety runs high: 

1. they bring in another person—a friend, rabbi, counselor, cop (triangling)

2. they fuse with each other, blurring their personal boundaries (fusion) 

3. they fight a lot (conflict)

4. they separate, either psychologically or geographically or both (distance)

5. they cease all communication (cut-off)

6. one spouse overfunctions, the other underfunctions (over-/underfunctioning reciprocity)

7. they focus their anxiety on a child (dysfunctional child)

Everybody’s been in a triangle. A simple example is when you’re mad at a friend. Instead of talking to the friend, you unload on someone else. Triangles arise between friends, between parents and children, and between spouses and a third party. 

When I left for Africa in 1979, I was caught in a triangle between my divorced parents, which is part of the reason I went away. When entrenched, a relationship triangle can put you in lockdown even more than a pandemic. More about this next time—until then, maybe you’d like to look at some of the relationship triangles in your own life. 

Bringing Order to Disorder

If you’re not already famous and you decide to write a book, you have to work with absolutely no guarantee of success. Years pass, and you may still have nothing to show for your creative effort, nothing tangible, anyway—like an actual book. I used to be a photographer with a darkroom. I printed my own photographs and hand-colored some of them. By the end of the day, I had something to show for my effort, either a piece for a gallery or a commissioned portrait like the one below.

As the pandemic grinds on, I’m spending a lot of time on my laptop dreaming up characters for my next project, but I’m beset by a physical restlessness—not just to exercise, but to make something tangible like the photographs I used to spend so much time on. Something that’s not squirreled away in a digital file or that vanishes in a matter of minutes, like food. So many people are baking now. What are you doing? Making? If you feel restless like me, what quells it for you?

With people dying and the virus lurking in public places, I find myself wanting to bring new life to things. So I’m putting in plants around my tiny pond, replacing the ones the deer ate with ones I’m almost positive they won’t like. I’m sprucing up some outdoor furniture with paint and stenciling. Doing these things satisfies me deeply because I can see results even though nothing is finished yet. It’s about making patterns and creating order during a time of disorder. After working in the physical world this way, I can return to the blank page.

I’ve actually completed one hands-on project. After watching a bunch of tutorials on YouTube, I gave myself a haircut. This was the second time I’ve done this; the first was when I was six. All excited about my class picture the next day, I cut my bangs. My mother left them that way—they did, after all, match my front teeth. 

My bangs matched my teeth

Decades later, a new look

Coping with Enforced Togetherness

I once got so mad at my husband, I jumped out of the car when traffic was backed up on I-24. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but whatever it was, the inside of the car was too small to contain it. I ran down a hill, crossed a parking lot, and ducked into a furniture shop, where I wandered around until my heart-rate slowed down. Then I called a cab to take me home. 

Fortunately, being cooped up with my husband at home during the pandemic is going much better. We each have our private space, and we come together to walk and eat and occasionally watch a movie. But we’re both flawed human beings, and now there’s a higher probability that we’ll grate on each other simply because we’re spending more time together. 

A lot is being written about how to get along with your spouse during this protracted time of enforced togetherness. A lot of it is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times, like respecting each other, listening to the other’s point of view, and apologizing when we mess up. I’d like to add three lesser-known strategies that have helped my husband and me. 

“We start noticing the good things about each other again, and the list grows, getting us back on track. ”

For no apparent reason, we I occasionally fall into a downward spiral of negativity. All we notice about each other are the intrusive or annoying or hurtful things: the clothes on the floor, the late dinner, the constant interruptions, the poor listening. The negativity usually goes away on its own, but the few times it hasn’t, we did this thing called positive tracking. We each have a piece of paper on the fridge. When he does something I like, however small, I write it down. He does the same with me. We start noticing the good things about each other again, and the list grows, getting us back on track. 

As much as we love each other, our relationship has been stormy at times. I’m American and he’s Polish. We have cultural differences and misunderstandings in language on top of the usual female-male thing. We once saw a family therapist who said something that sounds weird, but that I’ve found to be true. One of the greatest gifts you can give your spouse, she said, is to let them blow up. She didn’t mean that we should put up with emotional or physical abuse. She was talking about run-of-the-mill anxiety and anger. The idea is to stand back and let your partner vent, rant, blow their stack, decompensate, whatever. It’s amazing how quickly the storm blows over if you just stand there and watch it. If you don’t get sucked into it, you won’t escalate it. The situation calms down faster, and you can talk.

My husband and I haven’t actually used the last strategy because I only found out about it last month. Neil Jacobsen, a psychologist based in Seattle in the 1990s, discovered that the couples who did the best after marital therapy had an evening ritual that he called the stress-reducing conversation. The couples shared what had gone well during the day and what hadn’t. They asked for more detail about situations and feelings. They talked about their worries, but only about those unrelated to the marriage. And they didn’t try to solve each other’s problems. (Italics mine.) They just listened, and they did it every evening.

My husband and I have adopted this ritual. Although our days aren’t as varied as they were before the novel coronavirus burst upon the world, we’re sharing them every evening, not just every now and then. We refrain from trying to fix each other’s problems. We just listen, like friends.

My husband and I fighting. Okay, so he's in drag as the Princess Carina Capella, and I'm all gussied up as the Lady Bianca Barbarella. And we're forty years younger. And we're fighting over a man. So what if it's a staged fight in a British club in West Africa? Nobody posts pictures of themselves when they're actually fighting.

The Corner of His Eye

By the time I left for Africa, my life had stagnated—a scary thing when you’re only twenty-four. My friends were all moving away, settling into committed relationships while pursuing careers as therapists, lawyers, and stained-glass artists. In the meantime, I was stuck in a rundown bungalow in Knoxville, Tennessee, teaching psychiatric patients to make tile trivets and then going home to smoke pot with my cat.

I felt invisible to my family and friends, and increasingly, to myself. So I joined the Peace Corps—something I’d been dreaming about since I was a teenager—and went to The Gambia, a small country in West Africa. I was no longer the ear into which my parents and friends poured their personal problems. I was getting to know people from all over the world, and I was as exotic to them as they were to me. 

I also met the man I would marry, now my husband of almost four decades. Tom left Poland in the mid-70s, when the Communist party made it hard to get out. I saw him as a romantic hero, a man without a country who’d fled a broken marriage and a repressive regime. In his eyes, I shone with the glamour of the West, the land of free speech, pop culture, and fast cars. I admired his work as a pediatrician in the Gambian capital, and he admired mine as a community organizer in a small village. We couldn’t take our eyes off each other. 

We got married in The Gambia, and three years after coming to the States, he became an American citizen.

Years passed, then decades. Without meaning to, we took our intimate knowledge of each other and set it in stone. This immutable shorthand saved a lot of time and energy, but it also created a problem: Once something is set in stone, it’s hard to change. Once we think know another person, we stop looking and asking questions. I’ve sometimes felt so unseen by my husband, the man who once couldn’t take his eyes off of me, that I’ve wanted to run away from home and start all over again, like I did in my mid-twenties. 

Instead, I’ve done what I can (sometimes clumsily) to make myself seen and heard. This has led to conflict that took a long time to resolve; but since the conflict was already there, I figured I might as well put it out in the open where it could be dealt with. Whenever we did this, our marriage would reach a new homeostasis—then we would revert to our familiar shorthand, setting our knowledge of each other in stone. 

This wasn’t necessarily bad, as long as we remembered to look at each other more closely every now and then. As we settled our most stubborn differences, (at least as much as they’ll ever be settled), our life got calmer. Ironically, this lulled us into thinking we didn’t need to pay close attention anymore. After all, life was great. Great, but lacking surprise. So when Valentine’s Day rolled around this year, I suggested we give each other a present with a $20 spending limit. We usually do dinner and flowers, but I wanted us to come up with something less formulaic, something that would make us pay attention.

Tom agreed to the plan, though he sweats gifts. He uses his powers of concentration for diagnosing sick kids and predicting the trajectory of tennis balls, not for making a mental note every time I mention some small object that has caught my fancy.

I knew exactly what I would get him—which isn’t to imply that I always see him with 20/20 vision. It’s just that a few weeks earlier, he announced that the terrycloth headbands he’s always worn to play tennis are dorky. At seventy-five, he wants to switch to bandanas folded into headbands, like super-star Rafael Nadal wears. Tom would never go to the trouble of buying bandanas for himself—that would be paying too much attention to fashion, which, to the generation of hero-obsessed Polish men born around WWII, is as uncool as driving at dusk with the headlights on. 

I bought him three: black, grey, and hot pink. I knew he would protest the pink, a color never worn by members of the Polish Resistance, either male or female; and he did protest. I also knew that when I pointed out that all the top seeds, Nadal included, are now wearing pink, he would succumb to the color’s charm; and he succumbed. As of this writing, Tom has worn the pink bandana three times, and he won every game.

We went to our favorite restaurant on Valentine’s Day. We ordered wine and Tom placed my gift, (wrapped in pink tissue), on the table. It looked and felt like a pen. I already have a million pens. I thought of the time he gave me a pair of gold chandelier earrings—then gave me the same pair a few years later. 

I opened the gift. It was a pencil.

I picked it up. It was sleek, yet comfortable to hold. My husband of almost forty years somehow noticed that ever since I inherited a pack of plastic pencils from my mother, I quit marking up my books and writing in my calendar with ink. He eagerly showed me its features: press the button on the top, and the lead pops out. Press down on the clip, and the lead retracts back into the barrel. Best of all, the lead is encased in a tiny metal shaft so it won’t easily break off. Tom knows I love good design.

He surprised me. He noticed a tiny change in my habit, and gave me something to make it more enjoyable. I can’t imagine how he noticed. He must have been looking out of the corner of his eye. 

Persian Rice

Fari Farzad was a class act without even trying. She was tall and self-possessed, her dark eyes observant and warm. She did things calmly, with a minimum of fuss. She dressed in simple clothes, well-cut and of good cloth. She was beautiful; her son, who took after her, modeled for Armani for a while.

We became friends after I got to know her husband, Bahman, who was one of my photography teachers in the early ‘90s. By then, our native countries, America and Iran, had been at odds with each other for almost half a century; but Fari and Bahman and I talked more about photography and culture and family than politics. 

Their daughter babysat our daughter. I edited Bahman’s book about light measurement. I loved going to their house. The family was close-knit, the hospitality gracious. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Fari set a platter of Persian rice on the table: it looked like a round, single-layer cake, the “icing” a crispy golden crust, the rice within fluffy, the grains separate instead of stuck together in a gluey mass. The crust, called tahdig, is considered a delicacy, and Fari always made sure I got plenty of it. She loved that I loved her cooking.

After my family moved to a city a few hours away, we kept in touch with phone calls and visits, but as the years went by we drifted apart. Bahman unexpectedly passed away in 2016. Fari followed the next year. As my husband and I drove to Birmingham for her service, I was devastated, having learned only a few days before that she had been suffering from ALS.

~ ~ ~

My husband and I are in a supper club with five other couples. We take turns hosting, and the host, who prepares the main dish, picks the cuisine. It’s almost always international, the idea being to try new food and learn new cooking skills. When the hosts decide to ring in 2020 with Iranian food, I volunteer to make Persian rice. 

I want to remember Fari by making something she made for her family and friends. I regret that I never asked her to show me how. I regret that we drifted apart. She was on my mind for weeks before she died, and I kept thinking of calling her, and I regret that I didn’t.

I watch video after video on YouTube, surprised to find so many Iranian men making rice. But I’m looking for a recipe—though Persian rice is more of a technique than a recipe—that I imagine to be like Fari’s was. It has to be simple, elegant, unfussy. I end up cobbling instructions from two videos together.

My husband helps me make the rice. I weep as I grind the saffron in the small marble mortar Fari gave me after her first trip back to Iran. The cooking technique is so different from what I’m used to, I worry that I won’t be able to get that delicious golden crust. As I go through the steps, I remember that Fari always covered the pot with a cloth before putting on the lid. I feel like I’m getting to know her, and her culture, in a way I haven’t before. Persian rice is slow food. I tell myself to be patient. If I can bring forth a bit of Fari’s calm, I’ll get some kind of crust.

It’s getting late, so I put the pot in a box and set it on the stove as soon as my husband and I arrive at the host’s house. A young Iranian woman is among the guests that evening; she suggests I turn up the flame a bit. About ten minutes later, I can tell by the aroma that the rice is done. Holding our breath, the young woman and I turn the pot onto a platter. The crust is a crispy golden brown. She tells me that my tahdig came out better than hers ever has. I tell her it’s not mine. It’s Fari’s.

Fari’s Persian Rice

Ingredients

½ c. boiling water

¼ tsp. saffron (2 pinches)

2 ½ c. basmati rice

Enough water to cover the rice 

1 T. salt

Directions

Grind saffron with a mortar in a small pestle if you have one. (If not, don’t worry about it.)

Add saffron to the ½ cup of boiling water.

Set aside for about 10 minutes.

Combine rice, salt, and enough water to cover the rice by about an inch in a large non-stick pot. 

Bring to a boil, cover, and keep boiling for 6 minutes. (This is called parboiling!)

Drain rice in a sieve, and rinse well with cold water.

Melt 2 T. butter with 4 T. olive or grapeseed oil.

Add it to the saffron water and mix well.

Pour ¼ of saffron mixture into the bottom of the pot. (This makes the tahdig.)

Then add a layer of rice and pour some saffron mixture over it. (It won’t cover the whole layer.)

Repeat until rice and saffron mixture are finished.

Make several holes in the rice with the handle of a wooden spoon. (This allows steam to escape.)

Cover with 2 or 3 paper towels, then put the lid on. (The towels absorb the steam.)

Cook for 15 minutes on Med-Low if your burner runs hot, Med if it doesn’t.

Then reduce to Low and cook for an hour. 

Turn the rice onto a platter.

This is delicious with roasted chicken and vegetables. 

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper.”

— Jonathan L.

The Unlived Life

Most of us have an unlived life, maybe several: the path not followed, the risk not taken, the love who got away.

Bell Rock and Cathedral Butte, Sedona, Arizona

It’s been said that if you go to red rock country in Arizona three times, you’ll end up moving there. And indeed, as my husband and I hiked mountains and mesas that seemed to emit (rather than simply be) various shades of copper, we started imagining ourselves in the Sedona area for the rest of our lives. The air in northern Arizona sits lightly on the skin; it isn’t weighed down by humidity. Without trees, the vistas are endless. From Mescal Mountain, you can see Cathedral Rock miles away. 

We met a couple on the trail who moved to Sedona from Indianapolis two years earlier. The guy said he’d lost thirty pounds just by hiking. My husband and I looked at each other. We too could hike our way back to our former svelte selves!

“New places and people change us in ways we can’t anticipate.”

He would finally take up carpentry (though there’s a glaring lack of wood in Arizona). I’d release myself from the grueling search for a publisher. I’d learn to read Tarot cards, and my spot-on readings would help people get clarity about their lives. My business would boom! As my husband and I wound around the precipitous side of Mescal Mountain, I mentally decorated my office: it would be a Zenlike space without the typical beaded curtains, scented candles, and paisley bedspreads adorning the walls. I would never drape myself in bracelets and scarves. Instead, I would—
 
The popular HGTV show “House Hunters” popped into my mind. Whenever people tour houses that appeal to them, they always say, “I can see myself here.” They’re trying on different houses for size; in Sedona, my husband and I were trying on a different geography for size, a geography we fantasized would mold us into our ideal selves.
 
I do this every time I travel. When I joined the Peace Corps and left for Africa, I imagined I would become a health-care super-hero . (I didn't.) At various times in my life, I’ve imagined myself as a scholar in an ivory tower in Boston, as a devoted yogi at an ashram in Pennsylvania, as a successful woman of letters living in a cozy flat in London. In each scenario, I appear as a better version of myself. 
 
Two truths hold: 1) Wherever we go, there we are, and 2) where we go changes us. 
 
Geography, climate, culture, and relationships matter. If I hadn’t lived in Africa, what would my life look like now? Would I be a wife? A mother? Photographer? Writer? The equation is muddy. New places and people change us in ways we can’t anticipate. They bring forth different aspects of the self, but they can’t bring forth something that isn’t already there. Dormant perhaps, but there.

Within hours of arriving home, my husband and I knew we wouldn't be moving to Arizona, as compelling as it was. We’ve already moved several times, so we realize we’re no more likely to make drastic changes in our habits in Arizona than we are in Tennessee. And here, we have a beautiful if not perfect geography, enough culture to feed us, and friends we love and who love us. But the next time we travel, we’ll once again imagine living an alternate life far from home.
 
If you could move anywhere, where would it be? What aspects of yourself would that place bring out? What keeps you where you are? 

Hiking with friends at Big Soddy Creek outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee

Books you can't put down–Part 2

Like three women, which I recently wrote about, The Silver Star is a book I got absorbed in from the get-go. If you feel like curling up in a comfortable chair with a compelling story, or if you’re looking for a gift for someone who loves novels that read like memoirs, you might want to take a look at this title.

It’s by Jeanette Walls, the author of the bestselling memoir The Glass Castle. Herself a child of loving parents who nevertheless refused to don the mantle of adulthood, Walls and her siblings had to fend for themselves from an early age. So when Walls turns her hand to fiction in The Silver Star, her writing rings true to life. Narrated by twelve-year-old Bean, the story begins when Bean and her fifteen-year-old sister, Liz, find themselves on their own, their astonishingly immature mother having taken off for a few months to chase her latest dream. 

As soon as the sisters suspect that child protective services is taking an interest in them, they gather the cash their mother left them and board a bus to Virginia, where their only other known relative, Uncle Tinsley, lives. His house isn’t just a house—it’s the family mansion, even though it’s falling down around his ears. Eccentric and used to his own company, he takes grudgingly takes his nieces in.

Bean thrives in Virginia. The trouble starts when the sisters go to work part time for Jerry Maddox, local bully and the foreman of the mill. Liz, whom Bean adores, gradually grows moody and withdrawn. After Bean learns the truth about her sister’s troubles, the two decide fight the abuse of power that has infected not only Liz, but the entire community—with convoluted and surprising results. 

The Southern eccentricity in The Silver Star isn’t overdone because families everywhere, however fragmented, often come together to protect their own. Bean’s voice is as engaging and authentic as any precocious, observant twelve-year-old voice can be. The ways in which she and Liz band together, making plans—sometimes naïve, sometimes savvy—to survive and thrive, drive the narrative forward. By the time I finished the book, even though it deals with the abuse of power, I felt better about the human race.

Books you can't put down

When was the last time you read a book you couldn’t put down?

As the year draws to a close and the “Best-of-2019” lists roll out, I thought I’d share three of my recent favorites: three women, The Silver Star, and If the Oceans Were Ink. Today I’ll begin with three women, which kept me up way past bedtime for several nights in a row.

My cat, Polly, and three books I couldn’t put down

Lisa Taddeo spent eight years interviewing subjects in different parts of the country about their sex lives, but the resulting narrative is as much about gender politics as it is about sex. The first woman, Maggie, is only seventeen. She lives in Fargo, North Dakota, with her loving but troubled parents. Her cool, handsome English teacher encourages her to confide in him about her problems at home, and the relationship allegedly progresses from after-school chats to nightly phone conversations to bedroom trysts at his house when his wife is away. When he dumps her, Maggie—being the person with less power in the relationship—falls into a major depression. Several years later, she has no degree, no career, no boyfriend, no direction—and her seducer is named North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year. Anger kindled, she decides to call him out in court.

Lina, who lives in a suburb somewhere in Indiana, has been married twenty years to a man who won’t even kiss her on the mouth. Lonely, bored, and subject to panic attacks, she strikes up an affair with her high-school boyfriend, who misused her then but now makes her feel “like a girl and not part of the house.” Lina can’t get enough of the guy, who keeps her on tenterhooks because he’s also married, but feeling guilty about cheating on his wife. 

The third woman has advantages that Lisa and Maggie lack: a slender body, striking good looks, and professional success as a restauranteur in the super-swank enclave of Newport, Rhode Island. Sloane is married to her business partner, a chef who likes to watch her have sex with other people, all of whom he picks. Sometimes it’s a man, sometimes a woman. He often joins in. After several years of this arrangement, Sloane—who acquiesced to something that made her uncomfortable at first—begins to wonder where her husband’s desire ends and hers begins. 

Taddeo doesn’t shy away from rough language or explicit descriptions of sexual acts (which, because they’re repeated so often, get rather boring). If that kind of thing upsets you, you’ll want to pass on this book. I have to say, though, that Taddeo is a wonderful writer. Her style is edgy and immediate, occasionally verging on the poetic; but she tells the women’s stories in a neutral manner, allowing us to come to our own conclusions and to reflect on our own sexual histories.

The stories are woven together, which drives the narrative forward. To one degree or another, the women all struggle to assert themselves as equal partners in skewed relationships; but it is Maggie, the least powerful, who tries the hardest. Her downward spiral reminded me of myself after a relationship I had with an older professor. We had a one-night stand that I saw as the beginning of our life together and he saw as a revenge fuck after a fight with his girlfriend. Like Maggie, I got depressed; but I eventually joined the Peace Corps, went to work in Africa, and re-centered myself—perhaps easier to do (though it took me years) when you’re in your twenties instead of your teens. Maggie’s story sheds a powerful light on the vulnerability of people who’ve become erotically entangled with someone who’s older, more experienced, and more powerful than they are.

I couldn’t put three women down because I wanted each woman to shake off the hold her man had over her—Maggie’s alleged abuser, Lina’s married lover, Sloane’s voyeuristic husband. I was rooting for all three to put their pieces together and move forward with their lives—but most of all I was rooting for Maggie.  

Next, read Books You Can’t Put Down, Part 2.

Striking a bargain

Forty years ago yesterday, I started a garden in Africa.

I’d been living in a Gambian village for about seven months. The Peace Corps asks you to stay the course for at least six, no matter how miserable you are, because that’s how long it takes to even begin to adjust. I hadn’t gotten very far. Anxiety had me by the throat. I was always on the edge of tears. I had to constantly fight the urge to flee to the city and take the next flight home.

I felt like I should have adjusted months earlier

But I couldn’t go home. If I did, I would have failed. I would end up right back where I started, a place I didn’t like. I couldn’t leave my village, but neither could I stay. 

Something had to give, so I made a bargain with myself. I’d already figured out why the women didn’t listen to my health lessons: I’d been telling them to improve their diet with vegetables, the very thing they didn’t have. Although I’d never grown so much as a carrot, I decided that I would organize a garden. If the women participated, I would stay. If not, I’d admit failure and go home. 

The women said they liked the idea, but I couldn’t tell if they meant it—they often said “yes” to be polite. We formed a club and they paid dues to buy seeds, but when the appointed day came, only my counterpart—an older woman named Ya Mari—joined me. We dug one vegetable bed and began another, embarrassed for having started a club that only we wanted to join.

We’d almost finished our third bed when I heard a little boy calling my name. I looked up. He’d run ahead of his mother, who was striding toward us with a cluster of women trailing behind. Smiling and waving and swinging their buckets, they looked like they were on their way to a festival. 

If they hadn’t shown up, I would have understood; they already had way too much work. But with my emotional well-being at stake, but I would have honored my bargain with myself and started packing for the sad trip home. Instead I returned to my hut, tired but happy. I glanced at the calendar, surprised to see that the date was inked in red. I looked closer and laughed. It was Thanksgiving. I’d been too busy to be homesick, and the holiday had passed me by.

A little boy helps his mother water her vegetable beds

The elephant at the table

My mother wanted to buy me a new faucet when my old one broke, but she wanted it to be just like hers—the kind with the built-in sprayer. I preferred a rustic Italian design with a separate sprayer. She kept pointing out all the advantages of her model, not because she was trying to boss me around, but because in that moment, she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that even though fifty percent of our genes were identical, our taste in small kitchen appliances was not.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I’ve been thinking about why there’s so much pressure for sameness in families—a pressure that ratchets up during the holidays. This is what I’ve come up with so far. If you have more thoughts, I’d love to hear them. 

Family members share genes, memories, and experiences, which feed into a shared identity. Our families are extensions of ourselves. We’re like little tribes; if there’s a disaster, we’ll band together. The more alike we are, or so the thinking goes, the better we’ll cooperate, increasing our chances of survival. In peaceful times, our unity gives us a sense of belonging and ease. 

Thanksgiving morning at my aunt’s house in Memphis, Tennessee, 1962. I’m the one wearing glasses.

So what happens when the family sits down for a holiday feast, and there’s not one black sheep at the table, but several? When the liberals and conservatives are more or less equally divided? Maybe the two sides have promised not to talk about politics, and maybe they’ll succeed. If so, politics often becomes the elephant in the room, precisely because it’s so important. It determines whether you have health care, what kind of schools your kids go to, where the next nuclear bomb will drop. Each side of the family is anxious to correct the other’s idiotic and perilous worldview. When discussion does break out, it turns into a shouting match. 

Shouting matches estrange us. We may still see each other socially, but we probably won’t be very close. I became estranged from a cousin—and by extension from his family—after a hostile email exchange about Hillary Clinton’s rumored child pornography ring. It’s sad; one of my sweetest memories from childhood is of Thanksgiving in Memphis at my aunt’s house.

If politics comes up in the family, I say let it come up at Thanksgiving instead of by email. We can read each other’s faces across the table. There are other people around to moderate. We’re more likely to apologize if we’ve upset someone. We could even get to know each other by listening to those we disagree with until we understand their point of view. We usually don’t do this, I think, because we’re afraid they’ll mistake our understanding for agreement.  

What if they do? It’s still a win. Most of us think the same old thoughts day in and day out, especially when it comes to politics. Thanksgiving is a time when people gather around the table. Who among them can teach you something new about the way of the world? 

Starting a supper club

I’ve been thinking about the fast-forward lives we lead, driven by the need to do, do, do. Sometimes friends get lost in the shuffle of our responsibilities—family, work, health, and the general maintenance of life. 

My husband and I’ve belonged to a supper club for a few years. There are twelve of us, and we get together once a month, taking turns hosting. Sometimes only eight of us show up, sometimes all twelve. The point is, we schedule a time to bond over food. 

A small but lively party

Since two of us are vegetarian and one is allergic to seafood, we make vegetarian meals without fish. To challenge ourselves, we cook international. The host picks the cuisine. Among others, we’ve done Colombian and Russian, Syrian and Thai, French and Native American. The host prepares the main dish, and everyone else brings appetizers, soup, salad, a side, and dessert. 

About to dig in

 Our most recent meal together was German. (It turns out that Berlin, which makes me think of bratwurst, has been named not only the vegetarian, but the vegan capital of the world.) The hosts really got into the Oktoberfest theme, decorating with beer steins, trumpets, and dried leaves. For entertainment, the musician in the group coaxed us into singing a German tune in rounds of three. We didn’t get very far but we had fun.

Still life with trumpet

Eating in a restaurant from another culture gets your toe in the door to that culture, but making the food yourself gets your whole foot in. A meringue or souffle—that tricky combination of sweet or savory ingredients with just the right amount of egg white and air—is uniquely French. A Thai spring roll, so innocent in a restaurant, requires a feat of manual dexterity. Knafeh, a Syrian dessert that looks like a bird nest with pistachio eggs, is the most difficult dish I’ve ever assembled—also one of the most delicious. As I struggled with it alone in my kitchen, I thought of the long line of women who have passed the skill to their daughters, making the delicacy together until the girls can do it in one hour instead of four. 

Carol and me

If starting a supper club seems like a good idea, who would you like to be in it? How often would you meet? What kind of food would you make? Trying new food is a lot of fun—even more so when doing it with friends.

Finding your tribe

Whatever you make, whether it’s as ephemeral as music or as physical as furniture, it’s a lot more fun when you belong to a group that encourages you, helps you solve problems, and critiques your projects. You become friends and your work improves.

My writing group is called the Radish Farm, a name that comes from a New Yorker’s interpretation of a Southerner’s pronunciation of the Writers’ Forum. There are four of us, and we adopted the name because it conjures up an image of a root vegetable unusual for its spiciness, and because we can call ourselves the Rads. 

At a recent conference outside of Nashville

If you’re thinking of getting a group together, it helps to know what others do. But you have to make the process your own, depending on the craft you practice, the personalities involved, and the culture you live in. This is what we do: several days before our monthly meeting, we email our fellow Rads the pages we’ve been working on. This gives us time to read each other’s work (sometimes more than once) and write down our thoughts. We also think about how to frame our feedback so the person receiving it can best take it in.

Writing is a solitary business, so we meet in each other’s homes. We hang out, have a glass of wine and a few appetizers, then sit down to dinner. The host makes the main course, and the others bring sides. All this goes on between 6 and 7 p.m. Then we move to the living room. 

We each get thirty minutes of feedback—ten minutes from each of the other Rads. It helps to time this, but we don’t spaz out about it. One person might comment for four minutes, another for fourteen. What’s key is this: the person receiving the feedback doesn’t defend or explain her pages, which would slow down the process and interfere with her own listening. 

After all the feedback has been given, then the writer whose work is being critiqued gets to talk, usually to clarify her intentions and ask questions about the feedback. The “critics” can also to respond to each other’s comments—as in “I agree with what you said about this, but not about that, and here’s why.”

This process takes a lot of trust. We know and care about each other’s projects. We get invested. We talk about what works as well as what doesn’t. We get specific. We want our feedback to be actionable, but we don’t insist that it be acted on. It’s the other person’s book, after all.

Sometimes we go out for dinner and just hang out. We’ve traveled to writing conferences, and we’ve created our own retreats. We have tiffs every now and then, but we talk them out and move on. We email each other between meetings. We help each other make our writing stronger. 

What do you love making? Who helps you make it better and have more fun doing it? If you don’t have a group, what can you do to find your tribe or create one?

The Silver Brooch

We all own things that have stories behind them. The teddy bear my husband gave me for Valentine’s Day five years ago has a simple story. The silver brooch that passed from his mother’s hands to his, and from his to mine, tells a complicated one.

The brooch, now a necklace, and a portrait of my monster-in-law taken in the 1940s

It’s small—not even an inch in diameter—but it’s heavy, each piece of silver meticulously soldered onto a dome and fanning out from a carnelian mounted in the center. It looks like a miniature shield, a protective amulet. The woman who made it lived in the subdivided flat where my husband grew up in Poland. Her name was Joanna Szydlowska. 

In the early 1940s, she ran afoul of the Nazis for her work with the Underground Resistance. She was sent to Ravensbruck, the camp where medical experiments were performed on seventy-two Polish Catholic women. Many died. Others were killed when their bodies became too broken to be useful. Szydlowska survived.

After the camp was liberated, she returned to her hometown. She’d always wanted to make jewelry, so after she got strong enough, she set out to learn how. My husband’s family says it took her a long, long time. But she didn’t let the Nazis win. She grew skillful and went on to create objects of beauty. 

My mother-in-law wore the silver brooch for many years. Then in the mid-1970s, Tom, her youngest son (and my future husband) decided to leave Poland. It wasn’t easy because the Communists were still in charge. People who got out lost their professions if they couldn’t master a new language. But Tom’s marriage had ended, and he was determined to start over in the West. Everybody thought he would be back after a few months—everybody except his mother.

 When they said good-bye, she gave him the brooch. She told him it was for his future wife. 

 Four years later, Tom and I are sitting on his couch, talking and cuddling. (It’s 1980 and we’re in West Africa, so we don’t have a laptop or a TV to disappear into.) He suddenly jumps up and goes into his study. When he comes back, he sits down and says, “This is for you,” placing the brooch in my hand. 

 I look at it. I look at him. Last year he told me all about the pin—what his mother said, who made it. How can I say what I’m thinking? Coming into town from my village to be together on the weekend is one thing; marriage is another. 

I must look panicked. He rushes to reassure me that there are no strings attached—the brooch is for what we’ve had, not for what we might have. Relieved, I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. The pin shimmers in my palm. I think of the woman who made it, of the hardship she endured and of her persistence in overcoming it. I think of Tom’s mother in Poland, of the gracious way she let her youngest go. I feel so honored, I want to weep.

 I’d love to hear about the objects you cherish for the stories they tell. Which one is the most meaningful to you?

Me, wearing the brooch as a necklace

How would I get help?

Most of us have a few days—not just hours, but days—etched in memory. They don’t follow the usual routine. They start out one way and end up another.

When I was living in a small village in West Africa, I often got lonely. One day I got really lonely, so I rode my motorbike through the bush to visit a friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer. Her nickname was Anna Banana, and like me, she lived in a village where nothing much was happening. We decided to ride our motorbikes to a bigger village that had a market. If we didn’t find any excitement there, at least we could buy some fish for dinner.

Off we went. The empty dirt road was corrugated from the rains and dusty from the heat. I had to clench the handlebars to keep the front wheel of my bike straight. We were riding side by side, but when a bush-taxi came barreling toward us, she pulled ahead to give it wide berth. I squeezed my eyes shut to keep out the dust as the taxi thundered past, and when I opened them, my friend was sprawled out in the road, her motorbike several feet away.
 
I stopped and ran over to her. How would I get help if her neck was broken? The road was empty, the closest village miles away. I couldn’t leave her alone, and it would be dangerous to move her. We would have to wait for another vehicle. It might take minutes, it might take hours. 

She sat up. I sank down beside her, limp with relief. She’d broken her finger, not her neck. 
 
I hid her motorbike in the bush. Gingerly, we rode mine back to her village, cleaned up her scrapes, and waited by the side of the road for a bush-taxi to deliver us to the Peace Corps nurse in the capital. The nurse decided the finger should be x-rayed, so she dispatched us to the hospital, where we ran into one of Anna Banana’s friends, a Polish doctor who not only expedited the x-ray, but invited us to dinner at his place that evening.
 
Once the x-ray confirmed that the finger in question was indeed broken, the Peace Corps nurse medevacked my friend to a neighboring country to have it properly set. I was going to return to my village, but Anna Banana urged me to stay in town. “Go to dinner. Adam’s a good cook, and his friend—the other Polish doctor I told you about—will be there. It’s been a rough day. Have some fun.”
 
So I stayed over with friends. I got a shower, borrowed a dress, and went to the Polish doctor’s house in my least flattering colors: olive and chartreuse. I met the other Polish doctor. They wined me and dined me and made me laugh. I not only had fun, I met the man I eventually married. That was forty years ago this week.

A few months after we met, hanging out on the beach. This was toward the end of 1979.

Who knew? How do you ever know? You wake up one morning feeling lonely, go visit a friend, and by evening you've met the love of your life. There’s such a long chain of events leading up to it. Maybe you decide to join the Peace Corps; maybe he decides to slip through the Iron Curtain. Maybe you can’t get the job you want here, and he can’t get the job he wants there, so you each end up somewhere else, perhaps somewhere far from home. You’re lonely, he’s lonely. You meet, and soon you’re inseparable.

Sometimes it seems impossible that out of the billions of people in the world, this is the one you met and married and are spending your life with. What chain of events brought you together? Was it as chance or was it fate?

Roadblocks to Our Dreams

I’ve been thinking a lot about what stops us from leaving home and striking out on our own, maybe even following our dreams to another country. Over the years, when I’ve told people I was in the Peace Corps, this is what I’ve often heard: “I always wanted to do that.” I almost asked why they didn’t, but I kept silent. I kind of knew.

I almost didn’t do it myself. No one encouraged me, neither family nor friends. I was in my early twenties, and my life was narrowing down instead of opening up, but I was afraid to leave it for the  unknown. My fears kind of looked like this:

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to adapt to a new culture.

I was afraid that people on the other side of the world wouldn’t like me.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to help anyone, myself included.

I was afraid people would laugh at me if I came home early.

I was afraid I’d fall into a pit of sadness if I failed to do this thing I’d been dreaming of.

Besides, I couldn’t leave my cat. She’d been with me since I was five. After my parents divorced in my last year of high school, she went to college with me. She was my anchor, the only sense of home I had. She was getting old, and I wouldn’t abandon her.

I was gawky at 12. Puff was elegant at 7.

After Puff passed away, it took me another year to call the Peace Corps and ask for an application. Everybody has obstacles when it comes to taking risks. What are yours? 

Books that spark joy

I love Marie Kondo, the cute Japanese lady who coaches people to take stock of their possessions, keeping only those that “spark joy.” Her method has a twist: she asks us to consider not what we want to throw out, but what we want to hold on to. She tells us to go through our stuff in this order: clothes, books, papers, knick-knacks and gadgets and tools, then sentimental objects. The idea is that clothes are the easiest category to sort out, mementos the hardest.

But what’s simple for one person may be complicated for another. Would Kondo’s sequence work for you? It didn’t for me. I couldn’t do my books second. I’m too attached to them. They teach me things, tell me who I am, add warmth to my living room. But did I really need to hang onto Plato’s Dialogues and The History of the English Language? Maybe I’d been keeping them on my bookshelf to impress guests in case they noticed. I’d read these books decades ago. They hadn’t sparked joy then and they didn’t spark it now. 

Kondo believes that your possessions should reflect who you are, not who you were. I happen to have an edition of The Wizard of Oz. It doesn’t reflect who I am now, but the story gave me so much pleasure for so many years, I can’t imagine parting with it. When I was a child, I devoured every Oz book Frank Baum wrote, all fourteen of them. They do everything a good story is supposed to—and what I’ve aimed to do in my memoir about Africa. They whisk the reader to another world. 

When I'm really absorbed in a story, I get annoyed when someone interrupts me like my dad did one long-ago day. I don't remember what I was reading, but I didn't like being wrenched out of whatever world I was in.

Books like this, Kondo says, are the ones that belong in your Book Hall of Fame. I liked this idea. It helped me clarify what I wanted to keep, so I drove to the liquor store and filled up my car with boxes.

My Hall of Fame ended up holding titles I’ve read more than once and might read again—a few kids’ books, some international thrillers, and a lot of historical fiction. Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Hemingway had to make the trip to Goodwill. Those guys definitely don’t spark my joy. But they taught me something, so as Marie Kondo advises, I thanked them as I let them go. 

Altogether, I loaded eighteen boxes of books into the trunk of my car. My house feels lighter, airier, more cheerful. I feel lighter, airier, more cheerful. We all have books we love. Which are books you couldn’t put down? Which ones belong in your Hall of Fame?

What I learned from my father cut two ways

I once asked my mother what the biggest challenge of her life had been. Without hesitation, she said, “Your daddy.” 

Which explains why my relationship with my father was fraught with anger, hurt, and confusion as well as gratitude and love.

On the good side, Dad loved to play. He stoked my imagination with fanciful figures, monster chases, and Ferris wheel rides. He helped my sister and me with our homework, taught us to question received wisdom, and instilled a love of adventure. He was an unusual father of daughters in the mid-twentieth century, and he gave us the best of himself.

Many a Saturday morning, we made up stories about our special characters. I was Gertrude, Dad was Herman, and my sister was Eloise.

He wasn’t so generous with our mother. While fostering our self-esteem, he shredded hers. He had her waiting on him hand and foot. He flirted with other women, came on to his sister-in-law, and eventually left my mother for a long-haired manic-depressive whom he married and divorced within the space of six months. 

Decades after he broke our little family up, he admitted that although he was a good father, he’d been a terrible husband. I wanted to tell him that to be a really good father, a man has to be good to his wife.

After all, how did he expect me to grow into a confident woman when he destroyed the confidence of my closest role-model? How did he think could I love him wholeheartedly when he kept humiliating my mother, whom I also loved? How could I not be angry, when, once I became a teenager, he wouldn’t stop complaining to me about his girlfriends, no matter how many times I asked him to stop? 

A few years after I became a wife and mother myself, I began to resent his visits because he expected me to fetch and carry like Mom had. I fumed at his every request. They were for things he could do for himself, and they sparked memories of my mother waiting on him like a maid.

Like me, a lot of my friends have had complicated relationships with their dads. What was yours like? How do you understand it now?

Looking back, I’m glad my father was my father, flawed as he was. When I was little and couldn’t sleep, he would pick me up and sing “Old Man River” off-key. He taught me to love the mountains. He encouraged me to be who I am instead of trying to fit in where I don’t belong. And through it all, he made sure that I would never let a man treat me the way he treated my mother.

A phone call from Africa

When I returned home from West Africa, I was glad to be back but I also felt sad, thinking that I would never again get to talk to the friends I’d made in the village where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer. There were no phones there, much less an internet. To receive mail, you had to have an address in the capital, and even then letters could take anywhere from two weeks to three months to arrive. Now that I was home, I was cut off from the people I’d been living among for the past two years.

Today, almost forty years later, my cell phone lit up as I sat down to write. It was Neneh Jallow calling from The Gambia, courtesy of Facebook Messenger. I picked up, and the line was unusually clear and free of delays. I was speaking to the little girl, now a woman, who used to come over to my house to do her homework and play with my cat. Neneh and her parents had a battered old tom who earned his keep as a mouser, not as a beloved household pet. She took after her quiet, observant father and didn’t get easily excited, but the first time she saw my kitten wiggle and leap to catch the piece of string I was dangling, she burst into peals of laughter. Whenever she came to my house after that, she cuddled and played with my pet.

Neneh is in her mid-forties now. A community-health nurse, she began her education in the village, in a one-room, mud-brick schoolhouse. A wife and the mother of four, she works as a community health nurse in the capital. She cared for her mother, Chimban, one of the best friends I’ve ever had, in the last difficult years of her life. Chimban kept telling Neneh she would never get to hear my voice again, so last year Neneh called me up on Facebook Messenger for the first time. Chimban didn’t speak English, and my Wolof had grown rusty, but we were able to say everything that mattered—that we missed each other, that we’d always remember each other. She called me by my African name. “Ehhh, Sainabou,” she kept saying, words that took me back to who I was decades before. 

Facebook and other social media platforms have gotten a lot of flak lately. They’re monopolies that need to be broken up. Cannibals harvesting our data. So driven by advertising that they won’t get serious about monitoring hate speech, misinformation, and Russian interference in our elections. This may all be true, but stop and think about the people you’ve loved and lost—not because anything was wrong but because life moved on. You’ve probably reconnected with some of them on social media. If not for this amazing invention (and the ones it’s built on) the friends you found might have been lost completely. 

Who have you searched out from your past? Who was the hardest to find? What was the most surprising outcome? If there’s someone you’d like to reconnect with but haven’t, I recommend doing it. Maybe like me, you’ll not only affirm a bond, but also reconnect with a part of yourself.

Instead of grounding yourself for life, book a window-seat.

The first time I realized that my plane—just possibly—could crash, I was twelve years old. My parents and my sister and I were flying to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where we would be living for the next six months. The Andes were 20,000 feet below, their arid heights dotted with lakes an impossible shade of green. As I marveled at the vivid color, it dawned on me that the safety of my parents’ protection had nothing to do with the safety of the aircraft. If the plane went down, my family would be wiped out.

We arrived in Buenos Aires in March 1966, my sister and I in white go-go boots.

I was an optimistic girl, so my realization floated away before it had a chance to harden into fear. Then, for reasons I still can’t fathom, I became afraid of flying when I hit my late forties. Strapped into my seat, I would pray that TSA had kept a sharp eye out, that the pilot wasn’t having suicidal thoughts, that the plane was shipshape even though it rattled like it was about to fly apart at the seams.

“I’d experienced the life-changing power of traveling and living overseas, and I wanted to do more of it. ”

This newfound dread distressed me. I’d experienced the life-changing power of traveling and living overseas, and I wanted to do more of it. I had to find a way to stop torturing myself with catastrophic fantasies. Several months later, I heard someone say that people become what they pay attention to. What I was paying attention to was my fear, not to all the places I wanted to see. I changed my focus, and my anxiety gradually melted away.

Since the recent crashes of two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets, I’ve been thinking about people who are curious about the world but are so afraid of flying, they won’t get on a plane. The Max 8 disasters, I imagine, have only reinforced their decision. Boeing’s squirrelly corporate behavior has done little to inspire confidence. The F.A.A.’s reluctance to ground the planes hasn’t helped, either.

Even so, the trend toward increasing automation (such as in the Max 8) has reduced the number of crashes over the past decade. Everybody knows it’s safer to travel by plane than car, but once anxiety grabs hold, the mind doesn’t care about statistics—it cares about maintaining the illusion of safety. Cars are routine, and routines are safe. Therefore, cars are safe.

When I get in my Subaru, I perceive myself as an irreplaceable human being in control of my destiny. Countless times I’ve swerved out of harm’s way before I was aware of a car veering into my lane. In traffic there are so many variables, I know I could become a grease spot on the asphalt in an instant, but to function behind the wheel, I have to stash that unpleasant thought away. In the air, I’m not behind the wheel, so my imagination will gladly take over if I let it, filling my head with visions of disaster when the air gets rough or lighting flashes across the sky.

Some people feel so overwhelmed by their dire fantasies, they never fly again, which is sad, at least for those who would otherwise love to see the world. If you’re like that, maybe all you have to do is change your focus. Dream about the places you’ve always wanted to see, no matter how far away they are. Galapagos? Dublin? Botswana? Rome? Instead of grounding yourself for life, book a window-seat and enjoy the ride. Feel the thrill as the aircraft gathers speed, as the wheels leave the earth, as this amazing human invention takes to the sky and bears you across the turbulent ocean in a matter of hours instead of weeks. Then look out the window as if you’re twelve years old again. Look at the towering cumulus clouds, at the patchwork fields six miles below, at the toy cars and red-roofed dollhouses, at the mountain tops dotted with lakes an impossible shade of green.

Fly!

After all, the world beckons.