Month: January 2011

Make It Count, People

I give to charity:

  • the Red Cross
  • Heifer International
  • Habitat for Humanity
  • United Way

I support other non-profits too:

  • Planned Parenthood
  • my local NPR affiliate WUNC
  • Wikimedia
  • This American Life
  • Manbites Dog Theater

And you know, I give what I can, but it’s not a ton. I just feel like they’re using up the little money I do give them on postage to send me letters asking for more money.

Close, But No Cigar

My sister and I look a lot alike. Of course, she’s got darker hair and bluer eyes (which make for a ridiculously beautiful contrast). She’s slighter of build. And three inches taller. But if you see us together, you’re not going to go, “Hmm, I wonder how those two ladies know each other.”

Today, my sister had a meeting to go to. The “big kids” (ages six and eight) were at day camp so I got to babysit my 14-month-old niece, E, all by herself for a few hours.

When I arrived, she was napping, but she started stirring about 20 minutes after my sister left. I went in, and she had smooshed herself up against a corner of the crib, one sock on, one nowhere to be found, her little knees tucked under her belly, butt stuck up in the air. (I nearly died from the cuteness, of course.)

I said, “Hi there!” and she looked up and gave me the wrinkly-nosed smile she gets from her daddy. She still looked a little groggy, so I picked her up, and we went outside to say hi to my dogs.

“Ff ff!” she said.

“That’s right, woof woof,” I said.

My sister had said she’d be hungry, so I put E in her high chair, set a chopped-up piece of string cheese on the tray, and plopped down on the stool in front of her to supervise. She picked up a couple pieces of cheese and chewed them in a contemplative fashion, all the while staring at my face.

After a minute, her little eyebrows lowered, eyes squinted just a bit, in a universal “I’m confused” look. Then a tear welled up in her eye; the corners of her mouth turned into a tiny frown. She brought her elbows to her sides, palms turned toward the heavens.

I mean, it couldn’t have been clearer if she had spoken it in the Queen’s English:

I JUST REALIZED YOU’RE NOT MY MOM. WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOM?

I felt like a con artist.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Big-Wheel Here

In my little neck of the woods growing up, a lot of the houses looked like this:

That's a brick ranch.

Or this:

That's a single-wide.

At best this:

Before you get excited, I did not draw this.

That is, they were made of brick, wood, or aluminum, and squatted, the opposite of ostentation, in the crevices, set back from the roads.

But there was one that looked like this:

Except there was blood oozing out from under the gate.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. It was definitely big, definitely made of stone, definitely had a pointy roof line, and definitely sat close to the road.

It belonged to Mr. Nelson. Mr. Nelson was a mean man, a bad man. He would come out and yell at us if we made too much noise.

My siblings and I were so scared of Mr. Nelson that, when we wanted to cross the bridge and ride our Big Wheels on the road in front of his house (the road in front of ours had a blind curve, and people drove really fast), we had a method. We would skid to a halt at the edge of his property, pick up the trikes between our legs, and tiptoe the forty yards past his house before setting them back down and tearing off again.

Mr. Nelson had a gun. And he drank a lot. At some point, his wife divorced him and moved away.

Mr. Nelson didn’t like people on his property, especially fisherman despite the fact that he had a perfect little peninsula that jutted out into the deep part of the creek. He posted No Trespassing signs and came out hollering at people who disobeyed. He even tacked up a sign on our side of the creek on a tree right above a rock so perfect for fishing we called it the fishing rock. Risking execution, we took it down.

One morning we arose to find a perfectly-arranged pile of dog shit outside our front door. Turns out, the day before, our dog had crapped next to the road across from his house. He had shoveled it up and deposited it on our deck.

(Note: I have a moral code about dog poop now. I’m all Atticus Finch about it. It can be dark, and raining, with no witnesses around, and I’ll still pick up my dogs’ doo-doos. But this was in the days before people carried bags, and we lived way out in the country anyway. This was where folks’ pets could live their whole lives and never see a vet, much less have their poop scooped.)

Safe to say Mr. Nelson was an angry curmudgeon. I don’t know if I ever verbalized it, or if the thought just banged around in my little brain for decades, but I always wondered how somebody got that surly.

When I was up for Christmas a week ago, I saw Nelson come out to walk his Yorkshire terrier—one of the rare times he comes out of his stone manse now. (I don’t know if he picks up its tiny poops or not.) I said to my dad, “There’s old Nelson.”

Dad looked up and said, “You know he’s got a boyfriend who comes in from Mountain City a couple times a week to spend the night. Parks his truck in the back where people can’t see it.”

(record needle screeching across vinyl)

All of a sudden, I had such a different—compassionate, even—view of the old sorcerer. He was gay in rural Western North Carolina in the 1980s.

Man, there must be nail and teeth marks on the inside of his closet. No wonder he was such an asshole.

Bottom Chef

My friend, Melinda, is awesome for many, many reasons. One of which is that she introduced me to CrossFit. Another is that she’s hilarious. And a third (this list is not exclusive) is that she will often take a picture of the dinner she has made and post it on Facebook. It’s always something like braised lamb shank with balsamic marinade and poached leeks.

Or something, I don’t know. I just made that up. I don’t know what you marinate lamb in, and I’m not sure what a leek is. Or if you poach them.

The point is, it always looks and sounds yummy. It makes me hungry and jealous.

Jealous because, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t really know how to cook. I tried with my CSA produce, and you know, I was going to the farmers’ market regularly there for a while. But I’m sort of willful; I don’t like to follow recipes. I just want to be able to throw things together, deliciously.

That keeps not working out for me.

I bought a ham at the farmers’ market. It was like a frickin’ salt-lick. So I mixed it with some frozen lima beans. That tasted like crap, so I chopped up some fresh Chapel Hill mozzarella.

Gross.

At my school, before Thanksgiving, we had a Stone Soup assembly. A day before, each grade level brought an ingredient (carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, celery, broth, and seasonings), and students and parents chopped and prepared and threw everything into crock pots. It was delightful! I thought, I can do that, so I went to the grocery store and bought all the stuff and

it tasted like smooshy, wet nothing.

On the rare day that I do manage to make something remotely edible, like my London broil with roasted vegetables, it’s never visually appealing.

Nobody likes pink food, unless it's frosting.

I can saute a shrimp in butter. So I do that occasionally, but when I shred some zucchini and toss it in, it comes out all mushy.

Shrimp with a side of mush.

One time, I made delicious home fries with onions and red peppers!

Yay! Victory is mine!

And then I thought, “I can’t eat that many potatoes by myself. I’ll make a tortilla de patata!”

So I tossed in four or five scrambled eggs and cooked it until it was leather. Completely inedible. I didn’t even feed it to the dogs. That’s how bad it was.

Alas, I’m not sure I’m meant for this “cooking” thing.