I can remember being a senior in high school and having arguments with my parents about applying for “blind scholarships.” By that I mean, scholarships awarded to blind students pursuing college degrees, or students with physical disabilities in general. My parents were pro, I said no. I was determined not to get money just because I was blind. I was seventeen and silly and really stubborn and I was having none of it. I didn’t want my claim to fame to be that I was the best, smartest blind person. And, I suspect that I also feared NOT being the best, smartest blind person. I feared losing. I feared rejection.

What a difference 13 years, many of them unemployed, and a sizable cache of student loan debt can make. Forget buying a house, I now have a student loan mortgage. Maybe I should have tried harder to be the specialest snowflake blind person and gone for all those scholarships. “Maybe I should have”, I suppose, is a staple of getting older. In any case, there are far fewer scholarship opportunities for blind MFA grad students than there were for undergrads. “I should have” known better.

When I started using public transit after moving to the Twin Cities, I was determined to pay the full fare. It was $1.50 then, and the disability fare was 50 cents. There was no reason, I thought, that I couldn’t pay as much as everyone else.

“It’s only 50 cents,” bus drivers would tell me after I plunked in all my change. “You get reduced fare.”

I remember feeling annoyed and insulted by their comments. They didn’t know anything about me. How could they be so presumptuous and try to tell me what I “should” be paying?

Now, I pay the disability fare. If I made a ton of money, I tell myself, I would pay the full price. I would support public transportation. But, for now, I’m glad I have the option to spend less on the bus. It’s helpful.

I have EBT, aka “food stamps.” Every time I have to go reapply or update things in person, I cry. It’s embarrassing, and I try not to do it, because I know better logically. I know I’m not “just sitting around taking from everyone else.” I know I’m not lazy, or at least, that I’m not lazy about the big things. (I do put off doing laundry longer than I should is all I’m saying.) My economic situation is not because I haven’t just “pulled myself up by my bootstraps”, “buckled down”, or “worked hard enough.” It’s a systemic problem. But I still feel ashamed because of what society says about people like me.

I remember the first time I applied for EBT, my dad mentioned there was a sign in the DHS office that said something like, “No angry or violent outbursts.” I thought, at the time, that that sign was strange and kind of funny.

To be honest, I understand it now. I’ve seen people on the bus, on the streets, at the Department of Services for the Blind, just lose it because scarcity, disempowerment, poverty … all of it is freaking hard. I’m not supposed to lose it, so I don’t, but sometimes I envy them. I’ve seen older people, completely beaten down by our systems, who are bitter and unable to see what’s beautiful any more. I don’t want to get that disillusioned.

Pride is something I have less of now. But I don’t want to lose my compassion. I want to be kind to people, especially the people who understand the brokenness of our systems and think about what it would take to change them. I’m putting this here, so I don’t forget about compassion and kindness.

Labor Day is over, which probably means summer is, too. The last week and a half have been cloudy and cool here. I’ve been closing the windows at night. Things are changing.

I don’t want to say that. I always have a slight temper tantrum at the end of summer, kicking and screaming my way into fall just until I breathe the first lungful of burnt leaf crockpot cooking incense fresh breeze. Then the fight goes out of me.

This summer was my first in Washington and it felt sun-dappled and too short. This summer was walks by the canal and Green Lake, huge hashbrowned omelets at Beth’s afterwards. This summer held weeks of cherries, all sweet, and one generous quart of sour pie cherries, which I should have horded more carefully. Maybe, as the name implies, you’re supposed to put them in a pie, but mine never made it that far. I ate them by the handful. Ditto peaches, which, until the last month, never made it further than the kitchen sink where I stood slurping, with juice running down my chin. Then, two weeks ago, I made peach buttermilk ice cream. With cinnamon. And pecans. And bourbon.

This summer, I figured out how to deal with fava beans, because they grow here. Ditto nettles, morel mushrooms, fiddleheads, huckleberries, and dragon’s tongue beans. It’s likely that many of these things grow in Minnesota too, but less prominently. Everyone in the Pacific Northwest seems to be an artisan of some food creation, so the more quirky the produce, the better.

This summer was drinking wine on Vashon Island, kicking around Port Townsend with no agenda whatsoever. It was writing on Whidbey and starting my second semester of school. I enjoyed feeling like I knew what I was doing this second time around, maybe, possibly, like a real grad student.

This summer was showing my friends and family around Seattle, walking the hills of my neighborhood, trying to get a job. Not getting one, and having multiple opportunities flounder. (I may write these up in future posts, if I can muster the energy.)

Now that it is almost over, what did this summer feel like to you?

Someone on the bus the other day asked me if I had been “born that way.” I assumed she meant blind. I assumed this because she’d just spent the better part of the previous 5 minutes telling Kiva what a good dog she is and how good she is for “seeing for your mommy.” I ignored all this, because I haven’t figured out a good way to end this line of monologue yet. So, I just pretend it doesn’t exist, like a good Midwesterner.

After she said, “Were you born that way?” I figured attention had shifted from dog to human. Benefit of the doubt, I somehow figured she wasn’t actually expecting the dog to answer.

I very politely told her, “I’d prefer not to answer that question.” This is a new thing I’ve just started doing. I used to feel compelled to answer all the questions lobbed at me on a daily basis by semi-bored bus people: “How much can you see?”, “How did you go blind?”, “How do you pick out your clothes?” I thought it was my “job” to “educate.” Whether it is or isn’t, everyone with a job has the right to time off. So sometimes, especially when I’m on a thickly crowded bus, sweating, trying to keep myself contained and compact, I take my vacation.

She didn’t get that memo, because she spent the next several minutes until I reached my stop, complaining to whomever would listen, about how if “people” expect respect, and expect opportunity, then they should have enough decency to answer a perfectly innocent question. After all, how is she supposed to know? She doesn’t know any blind people. She’s just trying to show interest, to be educated. How can she try to understand when people “refuse” to answer her perfectly logical questions?

Yup. I’ve heard this before too. I’ve probably been guilty of at least having some of the same thoughts, about people whose experiences I don’t understand and am ignorant of. Of course, I too want to learn and to hear perspectives different from mine.

I also totally get that, for instance, “my trans friend” is not under any obligation to answer all “my trans questions.” “My Latino friend” is not obligated to answer everything I want to know about being Latino. “My hard of hearing friend” owes me no explanation, ever, about what it’s like to be him, if he doesn’t want to offer one. Sure, I hope he will, but I’m not his victim if he declines. I don’t get to feel cozy with my ignorance, to sit back and say, “Oh well, I tried, guess I get a free pass now.”

There are other ways to learn. There are countless things to read, free, on the Internet. There are other people to talk to, if someone isn’t up for it when you’re bored and it’s convenient.

I’ve often thought that in recent years, I’ve noticed increasing awareness and embracing of differences. Things are, obviously, far from ideal, but I’d like to think, however tentatively, that they’re improving. No doubt social media has a lot to do with this. It’s now easier than ever to have a voice online, to speak of diverse experiences for those who want to listen. And, we’d like to think we’re good listeners, enlightened citizens. But our ears should also be attuned and accepting of a “No”, a “I’m not comfortable discussing that with you”, a “let’s talk later when I have better focus.” Just because you ask once and perceive you’ve been denied, you don’t get off the hook for not asking again.

I’m a passable cook, some of the time. What’s “exciting” about my particular combination of following a recipe up until the need for rebellion overtakes me and I fling following orders into the figurative fire is that, just like Forrest’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes I turn out a gorgeous coffeecake studded with puddles of fresh sour cherries, or a perfectly spiced curry in silky coconut broth, and then I make the exact same dishes, (sort of), the next week or month or year and they’re disastrous. Cherries oozing all over the oven and a cake that’s rubbery and deflated. A curry so scorchingly spicy and otherwise devoid of flavor that everyone’s sinuses explode within 50 miles of my kitchen.

Up until recently, it was in this same vain that I’d always made ice cream. Sometime in college, I think after returning from an Ecuador winter to a sticky Midwest heat in late July, I bought an ice cream maker. It was obnoxious. There was a giant bucket, which you placed the canister in, then filled with alternate layers of ice and salt. It was loud. I would put it on to churn and then go take a bath, shutting the bathroom door between myself and the horrible grinding of machinery.

I tried a bunch of ice cream recipes, with varying results. I scrambled custards at the last minute, because I got distracted singing along to Joss Stone (she was so rad in 2008!). Or, I just let them cook too long, because though I told myself I could “afford” an ice cream maker, I sure as hell wasn’t buying an instant-read thermometer. Even though all the recipes told me to. But that was just one of the parts I ignored.

Two years ago, I had a summer flingy type courtship with someone who was bound and determined to teach me to make ice cream, consistently and without rebellion. He was one of those church of Alton Brown types, who go around making finicky food preparation demands all in the name of science and chemistry and testing and blahblahblah. You can see how his methodicalness and my need to stray could potentially crash and burn just out of reach of the ice water bath. (I’m already freezing a thousand ice cubes for the actual ice cream churning, must I really cool the custard in an ice water bath beforehand? That’s just more ice and another bowl to wash.)

I must admit, though, that despite his Alton Browniness, Summer Fling did coax me and my kitchen into churning out some fine ice cream. Once I saw how the instant-read thermometer really DID reduce custard scrambling, and how actually paying attention to ice and salt ratios instead of just throwing things willy-nilly into the bucket helped freeze the base more evenly, I was willing to concede to a little methodicalness. I still held, though, that even a “premium” vanilla ice cream is boring, and I insisted that it was perfectly acceptable to add cookie dough, brownie chunks, AND chocolate shavings to my freshly churned batch, instead of just settling on one of those. We made phenomenal mint-chip, and even as I complained about how mint-chip shouldn’t be eaten outside of December holidays, I was shoveling half a pint down my shivering throat the whole time. We made sour cherry, which was disastrous, because as it turns out, even the Alton Brown Wannabe didn’t realize that if you mix in the cherries while the custard is still hot, the cream curdles from the fruit’s acidity and freezes into little grainy pebbles. More important than success and failure, though, is that we made compromises. And though you could say, “it’s just ice cream”, it’s not just ice cream. It’s life.

This year, my ice cream maker began showing signs of old age. Even though the reviews on Amazon overwhelmingly insisted that theirs had lasted for years, the motor in mine sounded more pained and geriatric with each new slurry of ice and salt and cream. I offhandedly, grumblingly, mentioned this to Pat and forgot about it. Until my birthday and the first day of summer coincided on the calendar and, like some frozen treat fairy godmother, he sent me a shiny new freezer-canister ice cream maker. No ice and salt. No giant bucket. No shrieking machinery while I hide in the bathtub. Also included: a spare canister, for when one quart of ice cream simply isn’t enough. Which has been the case, every time, during this above-average-temperature Seattle summer.

Now, you still might be saying, “It’s just ice cream.” But it’s not just ice cream. It’s love.

She squeezes in next to me at lunch
this woman, almost graduated, MFA nearly done
manuscript ready, pitch pitched,
book unfurling on its own winged pages
“Your thesis,” she says, “what is it? What are your ideas?”
And she hunts me like a bulldog
ramming its head against my hand, but instead of “pet me” it’s
“Thesis thesis thesis. What are you doing? What are you thinking? It’s coming, next semester, on the other side of solstice, in the cold wet of January
what’ll it be, chickadee?”
She’s eating and haranguing, badgering, slurping up my noncommittal “I don’t knows” but not swallowing
And I DON’T know except to say that I want to tell the stories that aren’t getting told
I want to take what’s outside of me and bring it in
give the solstice birds room to roost and talk and tell
the stories they never dared
the things I have never said
together, maybe we can shoulder our grief
and figure out how to reframe the things we’ve lost
or reconcile that they were never ours to begin with.
I want to stretch the edges of my curiosity
though I hope they go on forever.
I want to tell the stories
that set my teeth on edge
and pull my tears from drought
I always want there to be something that I don’t know.
“Thesis” beats in my brain like the heart of a hungry hawk
I’m listening
She laughs, satisfied.