This one time, when I was in high school, my mom went to a Halloween dance with me.
It wasn’t strictly a high school dance or anything – anybody could have dressed up and gone to the dance in our local community hall and danced to a deejay who played actual cassette tapes.
My mom loved to dance. And maybe the opportunity was just too good to pass up so she cobbled together a costume from our tickle trunk. It was kinda weird – a zebra head and an elephant suit. But it was the perfect disguise: she was unrecognizable.
I don’t think we went together to the dance. I’m pretty sure she walked the two-and-a-half blocks to the hall by herself. I found my own way with my friends. I don’t think I particularly wanted to go with my mom and I think part of her strategy of anonymity was not to tag along with me either.
My mom wasn’t discriminatory when it came to dancing – the rock-n-roll music of the ’80s suited her just fine when she wanted to bust a move. And seriously, she got on the dance floor that night and barely left. (She left the slow dances to twitterpated teenage couples.)
My mom wasn’t a particularly playful person. She wasn’t uber-serious but she wasn’t one to act goofy, either. And I really don’t remember her dressing up before that or ever again.
For one night (and one night only!) she let her inner zebra/elephant take over.
If you happened to watch her, you could tell she was having a ball. She never spoke to anyone. I danced with her a couple times and people asked me who she was but I never let on. I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I regularly boogied down with hybrid animals.
At the end of the evening, when the lights turned up, she took off her mask and just laughed when people recognized her. And then like Cinderella, she slipped away home.
If there was one thing my mother knew, it was that she knew what she liked. She loved her family, her garden, her home. She loved being a farmer. She loved the good old days that she grew up in.
As October 31 gets near, I find myself getting nostalgic, as I do every year. Halloween, in the “good old days” was just a heck of a lot more fun.
Maybe part of it was that my mother loved to make costumes. I don’t really remember choosing what I was going to be for Halloween. Mom just got an idea from something she unearthed from the rag bag or the cedar chest or some hand-me-downs. She was an talented seamstress, having taught herself how to sew when she was very young. A yellow towel inspired my Dole banana costume, an excess of fake fur produced the owl you see above. At any rate, the costumes were never “off-the-rack” in any way.
Maybe part of it was that regular school was cancelled after lunch. We would get dressed in our costumes and move our desks into a circle so we could play games. This was after we paraded through every other classroom showing off what we were wearing. And then a teacher would decide who had the best costume. Someone probably cried when they didn’t win. (Maybe it was me.) But it was okay because then we would then eat all the cupcakes our mothers sent with us that day and remember that the best part of Halloween was yet to come.
Maybe part of it was growing up in a very small town. (At the time, it was a village so yes, it actually was a village that raised us.) We would go home on the bus first so that we could adjust our costumes to wear them over our parkas, because: Alberta. It was gonna be cold because we were gonna stay out and trick-or-treat until we got the job done.
Maybe part of it was always meeting at our town cousins’ house. Halloween was never about friends: this was a relative-only event. The five or six of us would start there, pillowcases in hand (because cloth shopping bags weren’t invented yet and handles are for pansies) and meticulously visit every house in town. Even the ones that turned their lights off.
Maybe part of it was because we sang at every house. What’s that? you say. You SANG? Yup, we had a repertoire. And it was our belief that our singing is what opened even the darkened door.
Halloween! Halloween! Oh what funny things are seen! Witches’ hats! Coal black cats! Broomstick riders, mice and rats!
Maybe part of it was that we knew that halfway through the night we could land in at our Baba’s house and get fortified with Sprite and extra candy (because obviously, we were lacking the necessary sugar to soldier on) before she sent us on our way with full-size chocolate bars in our pillowcases.
Maybe part of it was that by the time we had canvassed the last house and dragged our full pillowcases back to the town cousins’ house, it was deliciously dark and we knew we weren’t done yet. At their house, we’d eat the popcorn balls that Auntie always made and inspect our loot and maybe make a trade or two. Then someone from the farm would drive in to pick us country cousins up.
Maybe part of it was that at home, Mom gave us each a cake pan to “organize” our treats (or was that just me?) and then let us store it under the bed and didn’t police us. But somehow, the candy always lasted. And the candy? There were things you never saw any other time of the year. Half-size chocolate bars or bags of chips or licorice that only appeared in the days before Halloween (and not the day after Canada Day.)
Maybe (maybe?) we ate way too much sugar in one day. Maybe it affected my memory. Or maybe, just maybe, it was Halloween that was that much sweeter in the good old days.
As a (capital R) Reader, I have naturally thought that reading the same books and discussing them with other people would be edifying, illuminating and fun. Ergo, my process led me to believe that joining a book club would also be fun. Instead, my experience has been well, kinda not.
I have several friends with whom I love to informally talk about the books we read and there have been occasions when I have actually discussed some books in detail via email with a group of friends. But the book club I was seeking was the kind you see on movies (well, maybe without the Fifty Shades theme of the movie Book Club). You know, the ones with glamorous living rooms, appetizers that didn’t come from Costco, brutally honest life-long friends and oh, of course, wine.
A couple of years ago, my local library switched to a self-serve system to pick up borrower holds. It was then I noticed the alluring collections of all the same books held there for book clubs in my small town. Could it be possible to infiltrate one of these already existing groups, I asked? No, I was told. The memberships were closed.
Closed? I was crushed. I just knew I could be a valuable member. I wouldn’t talk too much. I wouldn’t stay too long. I wouldn’t bring any appies from Costco. Or wine with a flip-top. I would probably actually read the books. I could do this thing.
Unfortunately, our library’s only power lay in ordering the books for the clubs, not coercing them to take new members. After all, my library card cost the same as the next guy’s. I had no special library mafia privileges.
Last year, I noticed an ad for an open book club in a neighboring town that met at the museum. The selections listed for the next few months were great – they were all already on my TBR list. The club was meeting soon, so I actually bought the book and read it quickly and on the day of , arrived early to meet my new life-long friends.
Oh, I’m sorry, I was told. Book Club has moved its meeting place to a restaurant where they’re holding an open-house wine-tasting tonight.
Wait, what? Obviously, I had miscalculated just how important the wine factor was in order to facilitate literary discussion. But as much as I really had liked the book I had read and wanted to discuss it, the introverted-me that was okay with meeting strangers (that could become life-long friends) at a museum was definitely not okay at venturing into an unknown crowd of wine-testers. So I went home.
A few months ago, my local library responded to the pleas (not just from me) to facilitate a new book club, aptly called The Book Club at the Library. I went to the inaugural meeting and was cheered to see other women around the table. Oh, and one teenage boy.
We met again the next week, with instructions to bring some suggestions for books to read together in the next few months. Our librarian would help us by checking availability on the system. I was pumped. The book suggestions made by the other women were great. I felt like I was among kindred book spirits.
Except. Our lone male, unlike Greg from The Jane Austen Book Club, was not interested in reading about 18th century English courtship. Or even about suburban-housewives-on-the-prairie-going-through-menopause-or-divorce-or-other-stuff-like-that. He wanted to read about dragons.
Now I’m all for expanding my reading horizons and broadening my literary landscapes. But I wasn’t prepared for dragons. Yes, I’ve read (and loved) Harry Potter and The Hobbit and The Paper Bag Princess, but I wasn’t sure if I was up for a 500-page tome about morphing dragons disguised as humans living among us and the people who are trained to hunt and destroy them. With guns and grenades and stuff. (No broomsticks or eagles in sight.) And wouldn’t you know it: plenty of copies were available and this would be our first month’s assignment.
Sigh.
I read the damn book. I dragged myself through it. I kept waiting for it to captivate me and turn into a page turner. Or at least surprise me with a plot twist I didn’t see coming. (And I am highly unimaginative when it comes to guessing what happens next in 99.9% of the books I read.)
I didn’t want to be a book snob. So I used Post-it flags to note “interesting” parts of the story so I could at least contribute to the “lively” discussion I was hoping would ensue. But then, on that first day of The Book Club at the Library, only three of us showed up: me, the teenage boy and another woman who could only stay for 30 of the 120 minutes allotted for discussion of the book.
I think the problem was that the library didn’t serve wine.
Now, I’m not saying that there was something wrong with The Book That Shall Remain Unnamed. The young man obviously loved it because he was already on the third book of the series it was a part of. It just wasn’t what I want to read (and talk about) right now. Or ever.
The next month, I dutifully read and showed up for the meeting but this time, it was only me and the teenage boy who made it. Okay, I thought. This is NOT what I signed up for. And while I really wanted to talk about A Man Called Ove, my teenage companion had nothing to say.
The next month’s selection was…hard. And it was summer. The excuses abounded. So I didn’t go back. Which led me to ask the question, what exactly am I looking for?
Well, like-mindedness, for sure. And good books, which to me are the kind that I like to read. There’s only so many reading minutes, hours, days I have left. Perhaps I shouldn’t let someone else tell me what to read (if I’m not paying them tuition and expecting a certificate afterwards.)
And maybe I’ve figured out why there’s always wine at book clubs. Because book clubs should be about sharing what you’re eating and what you’re reading with friends around the table. I already have friends that I do that with. Maybe it doesn’t look the way it does in the movies, but maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Or maybe if I could handle more than one glass of wine, I could also handle dragons.
My husband and I looked at a lot of condos last spring in search of the perfect one to invest in. One of the fun parts of this is getting to peek in on other people’s homes, on their lives really. When house shopping, you’re allowed to open closets and vanity drawers, notice where they have shoved the messes and if, perhaps, they don’t have any at all. Inevitably, I’m always drawn to the bookshelves.
What do other people read? I make assessments as I go. This
one only has coffee table books. Verdict: not a reader at all, just likes the
pictures. This one has shelves full of DVDs and (gasp!) VHS tapes! But even
more befuddling, not a TV, or a VCR for that matter, in sight. Ummm, what?
Another office held binders upon binders full of papers destined for the
recycle bin, hearkening to a professional life and a time before documents were
saved in the Cloud.
And then there are the ones with the copious collections of every
book they ever purchased and hopefully read, just sitting there, pregnant again
on the shelf. The wide array is just a trophy case to me, a testament yes, of
great swathes of literature (or not) combed through over many years. But
it doesn’t tell me much except how important you feel it is to keep so many books.
Most intriguing to me are the homes with neatened piles of
books on the nightstand, all with bookmarks halfway in all of them, some
fiction, some not, a testimony to a voracious and varied reading and learning
life. All around the house there are small dog-eared collections tucked
carefully away in closets and piled on the toilet tank or in baskets in the
living room. A hasty retreat has left a Robert Galbraith face down on the top
shelf of the coat closet and now they can’t read the next excellent chapter at
the coffeeshop they’ve gone to because dammit, they forgot their book.
It makes me sad when I enter a home and see…no books. I know
some people just aren’t readers, I get it and…maybe. Whatever. And I
know that some have forsaken the physical bookshelf for their Kindles full of
fascinating titles, that they keep private and easy to transport. Or they
frugally and responsibly read all their books from the library. But I like the
personality that a curated, actual bookshelf displays. Sure, it’s nice to make
another notch in the reading belt and wedge the latest conquest in between
others of the same height and width. I prefer to add to my ‘Books Read’ list in
my current journal and if I decide I will most definitely never read it again
(because really, who has time to re-read mediocre or unsatisfying books?), I
will add it to my give away box or return it to the library.
My own bookshelves hold only my favorites, the ones I hope to get back to someday or that I’ve marked up and dog-eared so that I can easily return to a favorite place. This has surprised some people who know how much I read and how I prefer physical books to their digital and audio counterparts. Because while I have quite a few books, I have given away probably hundreds more, most purchased for only a dollar or two at the local thrift store. Either they or the library book sale will get my cast-offs so it’s not wasteful on my part, it’s a donation. But I would hope that looking at my shelves you would get a sense of this girl who loves YA and historical novels, art and writing books, memoirs and spiritual guides, all grouped together meaningfully, hoping to impart some creativity in their arrangement in addition to the art in their pages.
From Austin Kleon’s brilliant book Steal Like an Artist
The great myth about prolific artists and entrepreneurs and people who, in general, just get a lot of sh*t done, is that they are more talented, have better connections or are just luckier than the rest of us. It’s the legend of the overnight success that has us green with envy and groaning that we couldn’t possibly ever get “there”, wherever “there” is.
Sure there are the crazy stories of someone who wrote one song about a pen, a pineapple and an apple and made a million dollars. (Disclaimer: this is all unsubstantiated hyperbole). You hear about these people because it’s so crazy and extreme. And that kind of stuff goes bonkers on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram.
The more likely story for someone who is trying to write a book, start a business or promote their fabulous line of cat backpacks looks like clocking a lotta hours on your passion project. And to the outside eye, it actually looks kinda boring.
“Be Boring” is one of the creativity secrets that Austin Kleon, “a writer who draws”, advocates in his book Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.What Kleon is saying is not “sit on the couch and watch TV and never go anywhere or do anything.” Instead, he says that creativity requires a lot of energy so you need to set parameters on the rest of your life: keep your day job, stay out of debt, buy an calendar and use it, and make good marriages – both romantic and in business.
Austin Kleon is one of my favorite authors, but even more impressive to me is his practice of blogging every day. In my short experience as a twice-a-week blogger, this is just plain old impressive. I am finding it an uphill battle to be consistent, to find those pockets of time to write, to Keep Going – it even seems a little well, boring sometimes, compared to a night on the couch watching TV.
But that’s the lie. Don’t get me wrong – I like taking a break just as much as the next gal. The lie comes in when I tell myself, Oh, I can write or do the dishes or work out later. Instead, later finds me still on the couch and I’ve done nothing to move my life forward in a positive direction.
Growing up is a lot about being boring. Except boring might not look the same to everyone. It can look like sitting at my desk, going for a walk, or nurturing those habits that will shape my life like the tide slowly carves out a rock.
This advice from Kleon rings true to me. I know in my heart that the only way I will get those important big things done is by being consistent with those gentle boring everyday habits.
This morning I looked into the bread bag and out of
the three slices remaining, I selected the single crust that was left, shunning
the two symmetrically sliced middle pieces. (Or maybe just saving them for a
proper grilled-cheese sandwich for later.) I toasted the crust, buttered
and jammed it, then enjoyed every warm, delicious bite. And then I toasted
myself with my coffee and said, “Here’s to growing up.”
When I was younger, much (much) younger than now, I was a cut-the-crusts-off-my-sandwich-or-I’m-not-gonna-eat-it kind of kid. It was an indulgence, I suppose, but my thrifty mother would have saved those cut-offs for the pan in the oven that held all the dried-out bread that would become breadcrumbs for some future delicious use like in hamburgers or fried chicken, which I would happily eat. (So, the joke was on me.) My defense at being a crust-shunner? That I don’t remember the first crust-less slice of toast placed before me – it was all I knew and then it became all I demanded.
[Philosophical side note: Why did I like buns,
which are essentially all crust?]
As I got older, my toast and my sandwiches matured along with me. My mother, who still made my lunch for me all the way through high school, eventually stopped cutting off the crusts. And I dutifully ate them, but always first, saving the soft middle yumminess to savor last. Crusts didn’t kill me, but they weren’t my favorite. And then when I had kids, I started cutting off their crusts. I knew they were capable of eating them, I knew it was silly, but like the proverbial story of the cook cutting off the ends of the ham like her mother did, I repeated for my kids what my mother did.
I don’t think my kids have any crust baggage. Of course, being homeschooled and eating hot homemade lunches every day, they didn’t have years and years of school-sandwich torture either. (Reason #512 Why I Homeschooled My Kids)
Sandwiches don’t bother me anymore. (Unless they
taste like they’ve been stored in a plastic lunch kit in a locker for 4 hours.)
But then there’s a lot of things that don’t bother me anymore that I used to
find distasteful. Or hard to do.
I keep my room clean. I wash my face every night. I
eat fruits and/or vegetables at almost every meal. I wash the dishes. I turn
off the TV and go outside. I work out. I
use sunscreen. I check the weather before I go anywhere. I wear a toque and don’t
even care if it’s not cool because: Hey? I’m warm.
Sometimes I wish I’d done these things earlier in order to save myself some pain – like, I dunno, adult acne? (So much for the promise of outgrowing zits, the only thing that made the acne years bearable. “This too shall pass.” NOT.) Or I wonder if I would have been a more diligent worker-outer (well, it’s a word NOW) when I was younger, if I would find it easier and maybe would be, oh, I don’t know, slimmer?
The truth is, many lessons aren’t learned until
life has smacked you upside the head a little bit or until you use up all those
get-out-of-jail-free cards that come with youth, like a high metabolism or the
ability to stay up all night to finish a project. Or the wherewithal to ignore
the long-term consequences of wearing stiletto heels to hockey games or the
detrimental effect on a bank account of buying so many beers at that same
hockey game.
Growing up (or adulting, that chic new verb that used to only be a noun and sometimes an adjective) has a lot to do with making those connections between Now Me and Future Me. They’re the same person, it’s just that Now Me wants to have fun and doesn’t really give a crap about Future Me. Until it either starts to click or starts to hurt, which sometimes happens at the same time. Sometimes it’s a little click like: Eating the crusts on a sandwich will not kill me. Or a big hurt, like: If I don’t exercise everyday, depression might kill me.
I can’t do anything about Past Me, except to forgive her and love her, uneaten crusts and all. But I’ve got nearly fifty years to go in this journey of a century. I need to remind myself everyday that Future Me IS Now Me. It’s like retroactive love and forgiveness from the future. It might be a little boring, like walking on a treadmill to nowhere, but it works.
When I went looking this week for books about thankfulness, one of the ones that isn’t aimed at children is already on my bookshelf: Ann Voscamp’s One Thousand Gifts. An inaugural attempt by the author, it spent some 65 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
Not bad for a “farmer’s wife” (which is basically saying that she’s a farmer, too) from rural Ontario.
Despite the fact that it was wildly popular (apparently), it’s not a real favorite of mine: the author’s breathy, metaphorical style is not one that resonates with me – I do better with a little ironic humor thrown in now and then. Instead, I find myself squinting at the page, trying to decipher the meaning behind “all things wooden-hard giving way to the sky” or “the clay eyes shot red for the sacred seeing.”
What I did find inspiring was the author’s attempt to crawl out from a pit of despair and gloom by engaging in a dare: to make the mother of all gratitude lists. Voscamp kept a gratitude journal, just a simple coil-bound scribbler, open on the counter and moment-by-moment recorded the lovely and memorable “gifts” she witnessed in her everyday life.
243. Clean sheets smelling like wind.
513. Boys jiggling blue Jell-O.
904. First frost’s crunch.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say under the entry ‘Gratitude Journal’: One of the early research studies on gratitude journals…found that “counting one’s blessings” in a journal led to improved psychological and physical functioning. Participants who recorded weekly journals, each consisting of five things they were grateful for, were more optimistic towards the upcoming week and life as a whole, spent more time exercising, and had fewer symptoms of physical illness. Participants who kept daily gratitude journals reported increased overall gratitude, positive affect, enthusiasm, determination, and alertness. They were also more likely to help others and make progress towards their personal goals, compared to those who did not keep gratitude journals.
Wow! If writing down five things can do that, just think what one thousand could do! Granted, Voscamp’s list wasn’t made all at once, but the practice of gratitude did its trick. Which was to turn her eyes away from the despair in the heart and toward the world around her with the simple physical exercise of writing good things down.
The secret of gratitude is learning this: it’s not about us. Those many things that we can write down in our fancy gratitude journals or old scribblers are not things we are owed or that we deserve. A stream of geese in the air, a child’s sticky kiss, a Thanksgiving plate piled high – these are at the same time both magical and ordinary. Our only duty is to recognize them as the gifts that they are.
Thanksgiving happens this weekend. Well, at least in Canada it does. Which lends itself nicely to thinking about turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy and all manner of butter-laden vegetables. Oh, and pie! Don’t forget the pumpkin pie. With real whipped cream. Duh.
Okay, for many of us, some version of this meal encapsulates Thanksgiving. But is it really the point? Isn’t the meal supposed to be a visible (not to mention tasty) expression of the the things we are thankful for?
Ah, of course: thanks-giving.
When I Googled “Books about Thanksgiving”, the usual south-of-the border offerings appeared, pretty much all children’s books, many featuring black-and-white turkeys and Pilgrims in their matching black and white outfits. Or sometimes Pilgrims with a turkey slightly after it lost its outfit. A Canadian Thanksgiving motif doesn’t even register.
When I Googled “Books about Thankfulness”, again it was children’s books that primarily populated the results – indeed a full 9 out of every 10 books on thankfulness is aimed at children. Which makes me think that thankfulness is probably a very simple concept to grasp: even a child can understand it.
When our boys were small lads, we taught them to recite the things they were thankful for during bedtime prayers or around the table. Much like Steve Carell’s character in Anchorman shouting, “I love lamp!”, the boys would swivel their eyes around the room and say, “Thank you for my bed. Thank you for my toys. Thank you for my daddy. “ They were tangible, the things they were thankful for.
It’s a good place to start, with the concrete and the visible. As adults, we can be grateful for the things and people immediately around us. But it’s easy to get caught up with what we don’t have or aren’t satisfied with. Our house has been for sale for nearly four months as we make plans for our next step. It’s a wonderful house to bide our time in but it’s a bit of a bother to keep super tidy for impromptu showings. Plus we really thought we’d be packing up boxes by now.
Years ago I read a poem about being thankful for the opposite of the usual things: heating bills = a warm house, complaining about the government = free speech, clothes that are snug = more than enough to eat. You get the idea.
This weekend I will welcome home my kids and their friends for the weekend. They will sleep in their old rooms and leave empty potato chip bowls on the coffee table. We will spend more on groceries and more time feeding the crowd. We will wonder if we will be living somewhere else next Thanksgiving or if we will find ourselves still here with a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front lawn. It will be noisy and fun and messy and happy and crazy and good – because you can’t really separate those things out with family.
I have never had a truly chosen career. First and foremost, there was motherhood and then homeschooling all three of them. And then came a business partnership with my husband which was much like how we “planned” our children: one day I woke up and found out I was “with business”. No one was more surprised than me how wonderful, endless, gratifying, stressful and fun either children or business could be.
We have been lucky/blessed/rewarded: the kids come
back to visit and not just for the free food and beer. And business has grown
on me and it actually pays me, so there’s that.
But writing, willing my butt into the chair every day, this comes at me comically, it is so ridiculously hard, with no promise ever of reward. Every day, I ask myself to what end am I doing this? I scan lists of Pulitzer Prize winners and New York Times Best Sellers and I think I must be crazy. I have only really written for myself, and there was that $10 per column run I had with the local paper fifteen years ago, the weekly discipline of which sent me over the edge, or at least running back to the safe parameters of balancing Quicken, baking muffins and breaking up fights among my ruffians.
Those things were immediate and right before me. I knew what to do. In fact, it was downright easy in how I knew how to do them. But writing? Half the time I don’t know where I’m going with something or what I’m writing it for. Much of writing is just practice, practice, practice: following that prompt, free-writing, morning pages, stream-of-consciousness – all things to prime the pump. Like a panhandler who sifts the sand for days, weeks, years, I write to find the nugget of gold. Sometimes you are sitting on a gold mine, but more often it’s the return every day to comb through the muck to find that one small nugget. It’s consistency that will unveil both the nugget and the vein.
The stuff I crank out every day is crap. Pretty much. Anne Lamott has coined an apt phrase for this: the “shitty first draft”. The point being that you have to write something and then, from something you can write something better. But something better will not come from nothing. Writing is part discipline, part endless slogging through the muck and part divination as you peer into the sludge you’ve contrived of your own accord and glimpse that something that has potential. And that has to be what gets me back to the chair the next day.
For the last few months, much of my brain space has been dedicated to the launch of this blog. Much, much brain space. Byte space on my computer – not so much.
Oh sure, I’ve been writing. But I haven’t been writing enough and I haven’t organized myself enough for this writing life. You know, the one I actually want to live. Not the one in my head. And so, three weeks into it, I find myself behind and I don’t like it.
It was with glee that I figured out how to schedule posts for the future. But not just schedule them – I could backdate them, too. So, in a sense, my quiet resolution (now, written – oy!) to start by posting twice a week can be fudged. That post for September 26? Just posted today – on October 1.
But really, that’s not the way I want to roll. A better plan would be to have posts WRITTEN and READY to go – not WISHY-WASHY and UNFINISHED. Because you know what? Life (and another four-letter word) happens.
Last weekend I fulfilled a commitment to cook for 50+ teenagers and the adults that were supervising them for a weekend youth retreat. It was something I had done before, so it wasn’t anything new on the learning curve. But even though I basically kept the menu the same as last year and made really good notes, the last week was all about shopping, prepping, and packing – not to mention an unexpected 6-hour round trip to Costco.
I packed my laptop for the weekend. I had a room to myself. But I was starting to feel a tickle in my throat and knew that in order to get through the weekend, more than writing, I would need to sleep when I could.
And then that’s when life (or insert other four-letter word here) started to happen. We arrived to a cold, beeping lodge. The beeping was actual, not a euphemism for an expletive. No one had arrived 24 hours earlier to turn on the boiler for heat – so we were cold – for the next 24 hours. And no one knew how to replace the battery for a dying smoke detector, the source of the intermittent beeping. Luckily (really?) I couldn’t hear the beeping downstairs in my room, cold as it was. Instead, I was graced with the constant rushing sound of a dripping toilet directly above me, which was supernaturally amplified by the myriad of pipes in my room. So let’s just say, sleep did not come easy that night, sore throat, stuffy head and all.
But I get ahead of myself. While I did not worry about the furnace, it did concern me that repeated checks on the industrial oven I needed to use to heat up some chicken fingers for late night snack was also not producing any heat. Further investigations yielded this information: the gas was out of commission and for the rest of the weekend, I would have no oven and no stove. To cook. For 70 people.
Cue the hotdogs and the bonfire. Except that I didn’t have hotdogs and the budget was already blown on ingredients for soup and biscuits and Bagel Bites. Which needed stove-tops and very large ovens.
Now given that it was a church camp, I know that besides mine, there were plenty of prayers (and other words) being raised up for me but mostly for their hungry tummies. And God, who is the Original MacGyver, came through. He reminded me that plans could change (taco-in-a-bag could happen for Saturday lunch not as-it-had-always-been-and-don’t-mess-with-it on Sunday), people were mostly just happy to be fed (no one even missed the biscuits – well, except Chris who did go into town and buy buns instead) and a lot of things could happen with electricity and a couple turkey roasters. And with excellent helpers, of which I had two. (Thank you Sheri and Sarah, even though I probably chose the wrong spellings of your names.)
Suffice to say, my weekend was encompassed with the cooking, which pretty much happened non-stop from 6:00 in the morning when I plugged in the crock pots (thank God I brought the crock pots) till midnight on Saturday when the mayhem of the teenage girls washing dishes finally subsided. And I usually have trouble staying up past 9:30. That second night, I was blissfully unaware of dripping and beeping for at least a few hours of solid sleep. But by the time I got through Sunday (yes, you can make chicken noodle soup in a turkey roaster), I knew that when I got home, I was gonna be sick. Like final-exams-are-over sick.
And so my laptop and my blog got ignored for at least another day as I took Monday to recover from the worst of it. But it got me thinking: what do I need to do to post to this blog twice a week like I would like to do?
And then it hit me. I gotta feed my blog. No matter what it takes, no matter what cooking/writing challenges come up, I have to figure out how to keep the crowd – and the blog – happy and fed.
When my boys were still at home, I always made sure they were fed or, at the very least, that there were some mini-pizzas in the freezer and ramen noodles in the cupboard. Somehow, at least the five people in this family always ate, usually three meals, sometimes continuous snacks. And that involved shopping and prepping and a helluvalot of cooking. And time.
My blog needs to become my hungry child. Sometimes it’s gonna get the Kraft Dinner treatment, sometimes it will be a Thanksgiving dinner extravaganza. The proper care and feeding of this blog is the only thing that will make it grow. It’s October 1 and I’m posting this today.
