Strong Like Bull

If there's anything I like better than thick, white coffee mugs the waitress refills twice, it's thick, white coffee mugs the waitress refills three times. This morning I may have snuck in a fourth refill, whilst breakfasting with H in a cafe older than I am.

(I will miss, profligately, breakfasts in my hometown, rolling around in my own history like a potbellied pig with a nostalgia complex. Sigh.)

H and I started in on one topic, but the conversation turned, as conversations do (they're wily little buggers, spryer than pigs) and we got around to strengths and weaknesses. Apparently the Presbyterian church calls weaknesses "growing edges" but everyone knows this is church-speak for faults. After all, most of us are experts on weakness. We're prodigies. We're rocket scientists! Heck, I can recite by heart a taxonomy of my soft spots, my blindnesses, my flaws.

(I'm anxious. I'm cowardly. I am persnickity. I don't trust easily. I'm reactive. I'm mildly lazy. I'm selfish, especially when hungry. I'm restive. I have a hundred more where this came from.)

What we don't continually catalog -unless we are Liberace or Sarah Palin- are our strengths. We take them for granted. Our strengths are like the maiden aunt who takes care of you for eighteen years after your mother and father die in an elephant-riding accident. You see her around the house every day cleaning up your dishes, ironing your shirts, but you don't bother to say thank you because that's just what she does.

So I'm coming up with some strengths. Not the standard answers I trot out for job interviews, but some honest-to-God, real-life, bona fide maiden aunts. Here goes:

I'm empathetic.
Words are easy.
I'm a cheap laugh.
I'm a good walker.

That was actually kind of tricky. What are your strengths?

#4: Love

OMG u r so damn CONGRUENT. I mean, a book called Love for a reading project on books you love? It's so thematic it kills me, so thematic my facility with language has run screaming for the hills and I am left with the vocabulary of a 14-year-old Justin Bieber fanatic. I E> u!

That's a heart. Sorry. I'm not exactly a ninja with the emoticons.

Love is by Toni Morrison, an author I confess I've always hated. She's not a bad writer, but she is, in my judgment, an overwriter, prone to lavender-tinged prose and the kind of woman-power magical realism that has turned me away from a phalanx (no, a coven! No, a sharing circle!) of authors, including Alice Hoffman, Sarah Addison Allen, Laura Esquivel, and Joanne Harris.

(An orange has four quarters, damn it! And water and chocolate cannot be substituted for one another, unless possibly you have lost your tongue to a glossectomy and can no longer taste. Also you'd have to be blind. And have no nose.)

I guess what I'm saying is that Toni Morrison and I have different points of view. In her books, emotion bends reality: anger conjures storms, love heals, the past poisons you. In my book, reality bends emotion. The world happens to you; you deal with it. End of story.

But taking another person's perspective, while often irritating, is seldom wasteful. At the most it expands you; at the least, you sojourn outside of your head. And so I read Love over a series of midsummer afternoons, sipping sweet tea the whole way.

Love is the story of Bill Cosey, a fast-talking hotel magnate who birthed, then ran into the ground, a resort for wealthy African Americans in the first part of this century.

Except that's the first lie Love tells us: it's not about Cosey at all, but rather the women who alternately plagued, cosseted, accommodated, loved, hated, and were abused by him. Decades after Cosey's death, Heed, his final wife, and Christine, his grandaughter, live locked together in silent battle in the house he left behind. They loathe one another, each consumed by her plans to thwart and hurt the other. Into this cold war stumbles Junior, an opportunistic eighteen-year-old just out of Corrections who wants only, so she claims, to survive.

That's another lie, of course, and over the brief length of her novel Morrison skillfully presents, then unwraps, one prevarication after another. It's an arresting striptease: Morrison's prose may be overwrought, but her plotting is lithe, and her characters reveal themselves to themselves, and themselves to you, with the awkward grace of pole dancers.

Love is the wife you didn't know you married but uncover decades later, one hand on the spoon, the other on her hip. It's the fish you didn't understand you caught, the letter you didn't know you had written until you saw the one you got in return. Love is tricky little novel, and not an uninteresting one. Love and hate, Morrison shows us, are head and tails of the same coin.

Which, if true, reframes my hatred of Morrison. Do I hate Love? Do I love Love?

I'm not sure, and, thanks to Morrison, I'm not sure it matters.

Somewhen, Somewhere

My hard drive crashed, and I lost everything.

Everything is an exaggeration. Everything always is.

I lost some of what I had. Not most, not even a moiety, but a portion. To start, a fourth of a novel and all my notes on its development. I miss the novel about as much as I miss the '80s PBS show Mathnet. Which is less than I ought, and which probably means I should give up forcing myself to squeeze out novels 500 words at a time and go back to doing what I do without prompting, like sleep.

And poetry. I miss, acutely, some of the poems I lost. It could have been worse: I recovered more poems than I really had a right to recover, unearthing them from self-addressed envelopes fat with rejection, from files flung into the ether of the Internet, from the printed pages of obscure periodicals, from odd corners of my email.

Thank God for email, which allowed me to reconstruct most of my tax records and almost all of my long-range professional planning, though not the document containing a record of which poems I'd sent to where, and why, and how long ago, so now I run the risk -in addition to the risks of dying, of choking, of having my heart prised open- of saying the same thing twice.

My pictures, on the other hand, are gone. There were three or five left on my camera. I uploaded them, let them huddle together in a vast empty hangar of file space. They are strangers to me. I thought, when I lost what I lost, that I was losing memories. It falls out, though, that memory is even more fallible than hardware. I have already expunged the provenance of this picture. I do not know when it was taken, or why, or where. It happened; that's all.

Five Books I am Actively Avoiding

You Remind Me of Me (Dan Chaon): This is on the floor of my bedroom. It looks nice and appropriate there, as the cover is an airbrushed photograph of shoes. I liked Await Your Reply, so I'm not sure why I'm ignoring the blandishments of this one, except that I have a feeling it's going to be literary and depressing, and I am, on my own, literary and depressing enough that I don't need written reinforcement.

Dust: A Richard Jury Mystery (Martha Grimes): I abandoned this one mid-read a while back and have been ducking its calls ever since. You know you're in trouble when you're more interested in the description of the half-eaten hamburger that constituted the deceased's last meal than in the identity of the killer who interrupted said meal. Yet, it's tough to admit defeat. I will charge through this book like Charlemagne through France! I will prevail against the massed forces of boredom and mediocre writing! Later!

Julie and Julia (Julie Powell): Another half-way through-er. Julie annoys me. And so, at least as penned by Julie, does Julia. For God's sake, just stick a tortilla in the microwave already! This one is holed up underneath the nightstand plotting culinary malfeasance.

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): Love AND disease in one lengthy and very serious mash-up? I need a few more months of fortification and possibly a case of gin.

Ulysses (James Joyce): I have been fleeing this one for as long as I can remember. It hasn't caught me yet!

What are you avoiding?

Money Can't Buy You Love

Or mulberries!

(Except it can sometimes buy you love, or at least a semblance of love, because people are awfully good at fooling themselves about what they feel, and a well-heeled mate is, to many folks, an attractive mate. And actually I could probably buy mulberries as well: even though they don't travel well enough to make it to grocery stores, I could pay some enterprising ten-year-old to stand there and pick them for me. Or I could buy a mulberry bush and wait a decade or so. DAMN YOU, BRAIN! Be less ornery!)

#3: Tam Lin

Here's my thesis: Books that people love -truly, heedlessly, painfully love- contain love. Even if the books aren't love stories -and many of them are- love will be there, intermingling with the plot, intermixing with the language, pushing one or the other of them forward or back. Love begets love, and you don't love -or rather, you don't love more than fleetingly- if you don't receive love back.

(All those Medieval songs of unrequited love might say differently, but I'm sticking to my guns!)

And lucky for me I'm reading books you love this year, which gives me the opportunity, if not to prove my supposition, then at least to amass supporting evidence. And so far, I have to say, my theory's been borne out. The Thirteen Clocks , a love letter to the English language, admonished, in addition, against covetous love, and An Equal Music was one long love affair.

Tam Lin, Pamela Dean's retelling of the old ballad, goes one step further, pitting love against death.

At least that's love's ostensible role in Dean's young adult novel, a meandering traipse through the college experience of one Janet Carter, a red-headed faculty brat who fences, quotes profligately from Shakespeare, and is a mostly satisfying mix of nerdy and plucky. Janet attends Blackstock College, an institution of higher learning that appears to be differentiable from Minnesota's Carleton College only insofar as it is lousy with fairies.

(Full disclosure: I almost went to Carleton. It was my favorite of the four colleges I chose between, and had I not gone haring off after music -love, again, damnable love- I might well have matriculated.)

You know the story of Tam Lin. I've even blogged about it before. A young woman saves her lover from becoming the Fairy Queen's human sacrifice by pulling him from his horse and holding on to him as he is transformed into a lion, a snake, a burning brand. She wins him in the end, returning him to life and, more tellingly, to humanity -a victory for love in the face of change.

That scene is in Dean's book. It is almost unaltered from the original, and it takes up two paragraphs toward the very end of the novel. That's two paragraphs out of over 400 pages, which should perhaps clue you in to the real love affair in Dean's Tam Lin, which doesn't involve strapping young men or loyal swains or even fairies. Rather, Dean's Tam Lin is one long, lingering affair with the (selective liberal arts) college experience.

Janet is consumed by her passion for learning. She lusts after her classes, pines for her books and the experience of wrapping her mind around them. She has lively debates with her equally erudite friends, dithers over declaring her major, attends theater events, delves into poetry. She challenges her professors and finds them challenging; and even her mischief, lovingly undertaken with the help of her various brilliant cronies, is recondite. Her love affair with the title character, stuffed hurriedly into the final eighth of the book, seems by-the-by.

The trappings of the ballad, accordingly, feel close to incidental, and the book's loose ends, of which there are many, can grate. Yet, I don't begrudge either Janet or Dean her love. College is, indeed, a wondrous time, a time when we are allowed to be -expected to be- most ourselves. And Janet's sojourn there, so lovingly depicted, is something I don't mind holding on to.

Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America

The number of houses in between my house -or not properly my house, but the house from which I bent curfew, left for college, married, etc.- and the house of Alfred Charles Kinsey, noted sex researcher, is six.

To get there, amble up a damp and creviced slant of sidewalk. Duck under the maples and the prideful oaks, past the white house, past the red house that recently sold, past the day lilies and the lawn care sign and the lilac branch that guillotines, sweetly, your throat.

It's not the nearness that cuts. It's the distance.

By which I mean: I wish time moved more slowly and with less precision; I wish it were off its game.

Double back, because I've missed the house of the girl who captained my state champion high school spell bowl team, spell bowl ranking not as important as sports in the eyes of my fellow prisoners of taxpayer-funded education, not one fifth as important, not one twentieth -but nevertheless possessed of a certain satisfying rhythm, an in/out thrust by which words entered your brain and then exited, whole, impressing themselves only insofar as their letters were pleasurably ordered or, occasionally, chafed-

but there's a suicide in there. We've forgotten, but here he is, stitching his consonants to his vowels like a sweatshop granny, riding beside us on the bus. We stop at KFC for too-late lunch; he gets biscuits, no chicken. He's only a freshman. He's someone's little brother. We ask him what flowers we remind him of. He says peony, cat tail-

Kinsey, it is rumored, loved flowers. Loved to look at them but also to lure them, to tease them out of the muck and sweat and the bang-bang-bang of the hoe against the earth. The earth doing what it was supposed to be doing, all of us doing what we are supposed to be doing-

Except we do more. After the state championship -cheap medals, no glory- we drive home. It's seventy miles south and east, the hills opening up, the sky folding shut. We are quiet on the bus. We disembark. We graduate. We fuck. We blink. None of us gardens. One of us dies. Our captain builds canoes, counsels students at Kinsey's alma mater, administrates arts programs, collides with an SUV.

Her parents fly her back, put her in a nursing home south of town. They return to their house, the blue one that's the last house before you reach mine, the one I'd stop in front of if it weren't almost dark, almost home.