Category: Uncategorized

Reparations

As I said in this post, I’m not a person of color, and in no way do I wish to appropriate my experience to that of black folks. Nor do I wish to co-opt it and use it as mine.  I am speaking as a white person, (woman, if you must), and I therefore will never know what the world is like as a person of color.  As a black activist said recently, “White skin is armor.” That is true, and in that way, I am safe in privilege.

That said, I’d like to take this post to talk about reparations.  This is the idea that people of color, who have endured slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc, deserve compensation from white people because of the hell they’ve faced in our society.  I’m on board with this, by the way.  There’s something to be said for equity rather than equality, and we’ve thus far left a lot to be desired in terms of equitableness. Here’s a great article on reparations, much better researched then this little blog.

I’d like to suggest the concept of reparations with disabled people as well. For the daily harassment, the job discrimination, the indignity, the burden of having to educate and find solutions to problems that we did not ourselves create.  Reparations seem to be in order.

As a younger person, I would have never gone for this. I wore my pride like a shield, and wielded it like a whip.  No one was going to give me “special favors” for being blind.  I did not apply for scholarships for visually impaired folks; I scoffed at the suggestion that I do anything differently or take an “easy” way to compensate for my blindness.  At amusement parks, people would offer me special passes to go ahead in line.  To my (still) great shame, I’m certain my high school geometry teacher gave me a “pity grade”, because he was too busy teaching to the few “smart kids” who grasped concepts quicker than the rest of us.

Now I see things differently. I still don’t think I should have gotten that grade, but rather than thinking I should have gotten a worse one, I think my teacher should have worked tirelessly to help me understand in a nonvisual way.  Today, I’d go to those same amusement parks and take the front of the line.  If someone’s uplifting the voices and presence of disabled folks by offering scholarships for school or skill learning, send me an application.  If someone offers me a “short cut”, I’ll cut.  The rest of the world is hard enough for someone who isn’t kept in mind when “innovation” strikes; I’ll take the compensation.  Call it a favor if you must, but I call it justice.

Recently, I started a group on Meetup. It turned out that the calendar for organizing meetups was completely inaccessible, and I could not set up an event without sighted assistance.  I did that for a few months, but it just wasn’t practical.  In the meantime, I was emailing with Meetup support, who were minimally responsive at best.  They gave me some suggestions without actually testing them first to see if they would work; they also sent me a link to Apple’s accessibility page, because, obviously, I never would have thought of that.  I told them I’d tested the calendar with three different screenreaders and also with the mobile app, using that very same Apple accessibility.

I should also mention that Meetup is a paid service. I was paying 20 dollars a month for a service I couldn’t even use.  At a certain point, I’d had enough of the incompetent replies, the seeming lack of interest in doing anything regarding accessibility, and I canceled my membership.  I also asked for a complete refund of the months I’d paid and had not been able to use the service.  Five years ago, two years ago, even, I never would have dared.  I would have felt too embarrassed, too prideful.  I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to have to “go through the trouble.” Now, I felt it was absolute least they could do.

Luckily, they did refund me, and I told them that if they ever wanted to make accessibility a priority, I would be happy to help. I doubt anything will come of that, but I hope, at the very least, I may have planted a tiny seed.

I have felt so angry with the world this past year, and I finally think I may have found a productive way to channel my anger, through reparations. Through asking for, insisting upon, even gently demanding, compensation for my trouble and for a world not made for me.  Through an insistence on reparations, I can stand my ground without giving into my anger.  I can attempt to shift the feeling of being a victim to a feeling of being empowered.  I’ll save the anger for when I really, really need it.

I’m currently doing a manuscript review for my friend Stephany, whom I met at a conference last fall. She’s a sheep shearer, and in describing her first forays into shearing, she says: “I start to laugh a little, a deranged, half-crying laugh, in pain, out of relief that I am done and the sheep is not dead, and at the full force of knowing, so immediately, that nothing I have ever done has been hard.”

When I read that, I stopped and sat still, like I’d been given a profound revelation. What if I were to challenge myself with this thought? What if nothing in my life, thus far, has ever been hard?

When I am faced with something difficult, with a shock to my system, with a hard slog, I tell myself a little story about how I am resilient. How I have grit. How I’ve faced this challenge before, or something similar, and I’ve gotten through, and I will get through again. What if all of that is just the story I tell myself, because I have no resiliency, no grit, because nothing I have ever done, up to now, has been hard?

What I considered “hard” things: my school closing down, a cross-country move with no guarantees, breakups with people I adored, constant dealing with people’s ignorance, bias, and thoughtlessness every time I leave my house alone, bleak years of unemployment, crippling student loan and credit card debt, directionlessness, inability to do what I want for lack of funds, loneliness. Not hard. None of it hard.

What could I do with my life if I suspended all belief that what I’ve been given has been hard, and what I face will always be hard? What free, unincumbered space would open up in my mind if I could let go of all that hard?

That space could be for new creation, for love, for more hand-holding and laughing and ice cream and intense conversations where we all figure it out, and more acceptance for each of us, particular and beautiful and human.

Kitchen Year: Dinner Traditions

Tonight, I was making a batch of pfeffernuesse after putting in a few hours of schoolwork, which has come so very slowly these past few weeks, but that’s an entirely different story. While baking, I remembered that I also had some of Mollie’s double chocolate mint cookie dough in the freezer to take to my family’s holiday celebration this weekend.  I’ve made those mint cookies for the holidays ever since the cookbook featuring them came out in 2009.  I love the texture of the dough, and the generous spoonfuls of peppermint extract and the equally generous handfuls of chocolate chips.

My mind began to rabbit hole, as it often does when I’m thinking and cooking or baking, and I started to think about traditions. I’ve felt, as I’ve crossed the threshold solidly into my 30’s, that there is generally a lot of societal pressure to have traditions.  Most notably, traditions surrounding family, raising kids, attending the same events year after year, (usually with said kids, if you please),  patronizing the same businesses your grandparents did, etc etc.  While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with traditions, and they can be lovely in their own right, they feel abstract to me, as a person who hasn’t sought or cultivated typical ones.

Even with food, I tend to cook more experimentally rather than remaking what I’ve made before. This is typically because my cookbook fiendishness means I’m always wanting to try new recipes and techniques.

I thought for my first kitchen year post, I’d make a list of things that seem to be in my lunch and dinner rotation, traditionally, year after year; and, I invite you to share your rotating lunch-dinner traditions in the comments. Who knows, maybe we’ll be inspired to create new traditions for ourselves and those we cook for.

My Yearly Dinner Traditions

Crustless Quiche: usually with potatoes or zucchini, greens, herbs, and cheese; sometimes with raisins and nuts, surprising but good

Scrambled Tofu: usually with mushrooms, kale, spices like cumin, a squeeze of lemon, and a sprinkle of nutritional yeast for that final hippie essence

Potato and Chickpea Curry: with chutney, over rice

Red Lentil Soup

Pasta with No-Cook Sauce: usually I make this in the summer with ripe and tiny cherry tomatoes, touches of basil and garlic, and a splash of olive oil

Roasted Vegetables, Moroccan-Style: with harissa, preserved lemon, and pumpkin seeds

Tabbouleh: also usually in the summer, with cucumbers and feta

These tofu, asparagus, and mushroom noodles, especially when I see the first asparagus in early spring

Risotto, with peas and mint in early summer, squash and kale in the fall, mushrooms anytime

Kasha Varnishkes: the melty, chewy, buttery wild card, so deeply comforting. I usually have it with sauteed mushrooms and homemade cranberry sauce on the side.

What do you love to cook over and over? What sustains you and your people year after year?

I wonder what your life was like when you were young.
I picture quiet streets, everyone knew your family.
Everyone knew you.
In grocery stores they’d ask what you were learning.
They’d tell you you were smart.
Leaves under your feet
school trips and brothers and God
or something like it
How did you picture your life would be?
Did you know I’d turn up
like I had some right to be there?
(That’s how I usually turn up, and I usually don’t.)
But I come in anyway
I dismantle what people think is true
I break teacups and leave traces
blood and glitter, glass and gold
Sometimes I forget to clean up the mess.
Sometimes I remember and leave it.
Did you see it coming?
Did you know me in your mother’s arms
in the sun flooding your eyes
in the way you think you hear me laugh when I’m somewhere else crying?
I spent years looking for you
not even knowing I was
and I’ll spend the rest of my life
trying to leave you
with nothing to gather or sweep or scrub or throw away
It’s the very least I can do.

For anyone who is alone and does not want to be, my home is open to you. Please get in touch.

For anyone who wants someone to talk to, I am listening.

For anyone who wants to sit quietly with someone, I can be happily quiet.

For anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by things like deciding what to eat or what to do next, I have lots of food and I will feed you and we will figure it out.

For anyone who is grieving, I am grieving with you.

For anyone who is afraid, I am afraid too, and maybe we can be braver together.

It’s natural for me to want to turn inward on days like today, and I could do so easily. But I am here in the world for you, yes you, if you need me.

And if not, know that you are loved, especially by me.

Last night I dreamed about Seattle and woke up near tears. If I read this in another context, one where I hadn’t written it, I might have scoffed. I don’t generally hold any sentimentality about dreams, nor do I find mine, (or anyone else’s), particularly entertaining. And yet, I’ve been awake for several hours and still can’t shake the way I felt in that dream. I dreamed of a winter, though wet and gray with low-hanging skies, where I could still go outside every day. I could wait at a bus stop for 15 minutes without freezing the tips of my fingers. I could see life growing in January, a different kind than in summer, but life all the same. I could curl up for hours in my favorite tea shop, the pot warmed underneath by a tiny lit candle, the daylight waning outside.

I know I loved these things about Seattle when I was in Seattle, but I don’t know if I love them more now in the act of missing than I did when they were my reality. I wonder if the fact that I am still thinking of Seattle two and a half months later and missing it as fiercely as when I left is important, or if it’s just something I need to let go of.

When I first moved to Seattle, I met and talked with a disproportionate number of transplants from other parts of the country. I heard an overwhelming number of people say they were drawn to the West and wouldn’t ever leave. I assumed that this was largely due to the scenery and the mountains, and without a visual reminder of the climate, I would not be similarly drawn back if I left. But I have left, and it wasn’t the mountains at all. I don’t know what it is. I suppose it doesn’t much matter, all that matters is that I feel it and understand it deeply.

I wonder if there are places we all dream of returning to, and what percentage is just plain nostalgia and what percentage, if any, is actually worth paying attention to. Do you dream of places you’ve loved and lost, and wake with fierce yearning to return? And if you, too, are inexplicably but insistently called West, maybe I will meet you there someday.

Exactly

I was just in Seattle for a week, gathering my strength.  It was as restorative as I had hoped. It was exactly, exactly what I needed.

 

I flew in early Friday morning, under a generous sun,, and spent a story book autumn day drinking chai, eating smoky kale and sweet potatoes, taking a nap which I never ever do, and going to a writers’ salon on Capital Hill.  I got to see many people from NILA.  I got to talk about writing without any qualifiers or worrying that I was boring my audience.  I basked in the support and love of my weird and wonderful writing community.

 

Practically perfect days followed the first practically perfect one.  We wandered around Pike Place Market.  I stocked up on tea and Rachel’s Ginger Beer.  We tried to go to three restaurants for a snack, and were run out of all three by the sheer gobs of tourists.  This, in itself, was so indicative of Pike Place on a sunny September Saturday that it too was practically perfect.

 

That night, I visited my old “Cookbook Club” meet up.  The theme was “Tom Douglas Recipes.” Tom Douglas is a chef in Seattle who owns a bunch of restaurants, though I’d never eaten at any of them.  I think I made a tomato soup of his once, which was delicious with the bite of celery seed, buttery croutons, and a few lashes of cream.  On the whole, though, a far more decadent tomato soup than I’d normally make.  I expected similarly decadent fare from the Tom Douglas potluck.

 

There was plenty of that, and also, there were peanut butter cookies.  Peanut butter sandwich cookies, rather, with a smooth Skippy peanut butter filling squashed in the middle.  It was like eating a peanut butter oatmeal cream pie.  It was like eating the idyllic childhood most of us didn’t have in reality, but may remember in nostalgia.

 

I needed to eat way more of these cookies than I dared politely justify at the potluck, and I had a copy of the cookbook the recipe came from, Douglas’s Dahlia Bakery Cookbook.  Incidentally, apparently, the recipe was so beloved by Nora Ephron that the cookies are called “The Nora Ephron” in the book.  Also, of course, they were ridiculous: using two kinds of peanut butter, Skippy and a crunchy natural type, requiring a long dough-chilling time, and calling for a “double-pan” baking method.  The recipe called for baking only eight cookies per sheet.  For a batch making two dozen cookie sandwiches, I’d technically need 12 cookie sheets unless I wanted to be constantly cooling and washing and reusing them.  As if.

 

Next best option, and clearly the only option in this scenario: go to the real live sugar-and-nostalgia-filled Dahlia Bakery before I left Seattle.  Which is why the last evening before I boarded my plane back to Minneapolis found Arlie and me speeding downtown in Seattle traffic to try to get to the bakery before it closed at 7 PM.  We hadn’t realized it was closing at 7 until approximately 6:13.

 

It was a nail biting car ride.  Downtown traffic in Seattle is terrible most times, parking even worse, but we were being downright cocky thinking we could make it in time during rush hour.  And yet, somehow, we only encountered a few snarls, managed to park (somewhat illegally) close to the bakery, ducked in and snagged a dozen Nora Ephron-approved peanut buttery goodness and get back to the car by something like 6:47.  Someone must have really understood my feelings about those cookies.

 

Honestly, there were some non-practically perfect points in Seattle, and during the writing conference I attended in the California high desert during the same trip.  Most of these moments involved the usual financial anxiety, unemployment panic, school decision angst.  Things haven’t been picnicky for me lately.  And yet, I have to think that as long as I have people in my life who are willing to have those ridiculous adventures with me, to screech through traffic just before closing time simply for a cookie, to react to silly spontaneity with open-minded enthusiasm, then I’ll always have incentive to push through the hard shit.  If there’s a cookie on the other side, count me all in. It’s exactly, exactly what I need.

 

I’m sitting on the porch of my childhood home, or at least the home that we moved into when I was thirteen, just a few blocks from my then middle school, which now, as far as I can remember, no longer exists. The house sits a block off a main avenue, and moving in at 13, it was the first time I’d lived somewhere where I could walk to restaurants with my friends: McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, a snowcone truck, a coffee bar where I drank a few hot ciders in the fall. I remember feeling grown-up, even though I never walked anywhere by myself. But the fact that my friends and I had the freedom to get cookie dough blizzards without our parents, was novel and exciting and, in a way, addicting. Today, I still feel that same thrill when I go somewhere new, and especially when it involves ice cream.

Last September, I wrote about what summer felt like in 2015. 2016 summer has been a tapestry of new and old places: Lopez Island over Memorial Day, where we read books and watched movies and dared to be as lazy as we possibly could; a cold, rainy June day on Whidbey Island with my parents, where I felt the strange realization that I would never get my degree there all over again; fourth of July in Seattle, revisiting Slate Coffee Bar and flying high and crashing on caffeine. This summer, I rode a tandem bike up and down the main drag of my neighborhood in the Fremont Solstice Parade, wearing nothing but a jingly bellydance belt and sandals. It amazed me how quickly our varied, beautiful bodies became normal, and how no one hurried to dress at the end. This summer, I sat on a blanket under a generous sun, eating blueberries and listening to Neko Case sing one of my favorite songs from the past few years, radiating awe and happiness to my core. This summer, I worked from home on long afternoons and canned cherry butter and pickled garlic scapes and wondered what I’d be at this time next year. This summer I spent two nights in an author-themed hotel on the Oregon Coast, reading in a top-floor library with spiced wine in my belly and a fire at my feet. This summer felt like adventure, felt like I could do things, had permission and desire and just barely enough money to do a little living. This summer, I ate way too many thin-crisp fries at Brouwer’s, and drank way too much beer, and fell in love with blackberries, again.

This summer I left Seattle. I cried and questioned and dragged my feet, and yet, in the end, I ultimately left. This summer, I made another life-changing decision, and will spend the time until next summer seeing how it plays out.

What did this summer feel like for you?

We are all scattered in the plains and the hills.
Visits, all tiny postcards of life
I fold us together a sunset picnic
so you can watch the night birds on the Sound
You buy me coffee while I write our lives entwined.
We climb what there is to climb.
You bring me lavender in escaping bundles.
I sleep some of my best nights under your watch.
Whenever I leave I am welcomed back
and I need to remember, re remember, re re remember
how I’ve been given the precious gift of so many homes.
We kicked around tourist towns
you talked about architecture, I pulled you to the ferry deck
and breathed until the salt air shocked my lungs alive.
You showed me your city
I fell in love and hauled everything across the country
only to haul it back.
Who knows what is right forever
I can only guess what is right right now.
You hold my hand when we’re walking
You make jam with me in a cramped kitchen
You painted my toenails, once, and I wore flip flops for a week.
You showed me the softness of your life
I reveled in it all.
I’m always looking back while walking forward
and you tell me you’ll love me whereever I decide to go.

She said, “I hope this is ok to tell you. The reason I decided to sit on the board of the Lighthouse for the Blind is because I needed to be hit over the head, again and again, with the knowledge that blind people can and do have better skills than I do. That, as an individual, I am not a sighted person talking to a blind person. I am a professional talking to a professional.”

I sat quietly in my straight-backed desk chair, listening to her speak, though what I really wanted to do was shout, “yes!” and “thank you!” and “You win!”

No person, no “professional”, had ever talked to me like this before, with such candid admission of prejudice, of having thought that we, blind and sighted, were not equals, that we couldn’t be equals based purely on what one of us had and what one of us did not have.

People don’t want to tell me this. I see it all the time. I see prejudice around me, from people who are basically kind, from people who would unequivocally deny their prejudice to my face and then, in the same conversation, remind me what an inspiration I am. They don’t see that in that basically “nice” sentiment lies the assumption that I should not be as independent as I am, that I should not be capable, and that the act of doing something as mundane as get out of bed and get to work makes me inspiring to someone who believes, no matter how innocently, that they are more capable than I will ever be. That it’s an inspiration that I’m even trying to measure up to them.

People are always telling me they don’t “see” my blindness. They don’t think about it. They don’t make assumptions based on it. But based on their actions, I know they do and that’s ok; what’s irksome is to be told that they’re not.

Finally, finally, in that closed office, where we could be real, someone was telling me this, what I’d always known and what no one had quite had the nerve to tell me before. That sighted people do, in fact, dismiss blind people’s skills and talents because they are blind. That sighted people do have lower expectations for blind people, because they’re just amazed that we can dress ourselves and make an omelet. Finally, somebody had enough respect for me to tell me, and also to tell me she was wrong.

The Lighthouse for the Blind is an organization in Seattle (with chapters elsewhere, too) which employs blind people who have skills working with hardware, tools, and machinery. All things that I know nothing about. All things that awe me slightly when I see someone who knows a lot about them. I say, “I could never do that”, but not because I’m blind. Because I’m closed-minded about my own skills and ability to learn. I am in awe of anyone who hammers a straight nail, regardless of whether they are blind or sighted. I try, as hard as I can, with regular checking of my thoughts, to be impressed by skill and not by my assumptions about how hard I perceive that skill to be for any particular person. I’m not perfect, I don’t always succeed. But I know what it’s like to be an “inspiration” just because I crossed a street. I don’t want to put that heavy weight on anyone else.

I’m so glad Lighthouse exists for blind people who have skills and who are overlooked because of their circumstances. I’m glad it exists for sighted people who “get it” enough to actively change their thinking by purposefully interacting with blind people, and being willing to take that hit again and again until our worth is ingrained. And, I’m glad that someone had the guts and the humility to say all this to my face. Thank you, Becky.