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Sunday, March 25, 2012

 

Why Isn't Everyone Talking About Kevin?


I can't stop thinking about the film We Need to Talk About Kevin. I had seen the trailer long before the Oscar picks came out, and had mourned its lack of recognition, even before seeing the movie (which was only just released in Bellingham this weekend). The film was a work of art, to say the least, with perfectly paced parallel story lines, rich metaphor, and stunning use of shape, color, and texture to create maximum visual impact (I don't want to say too much here, but you'll see what I mean when you see it for yourself), including a scene I can't forget where Tilda Swinton's character is forced to hide in a grocery store, and the camera captures her standing for several seconds against a wall of perfectly lined rows of tomato soup cans. And that's just the start of it. Swinton is a complete knockout. There are stories about parents with deeply troubled children that fall into the trap of cliche, focusing too much on the question of nature vs. nurture, but Swinton's character, a mother wrestling (sometimes literally) with a badmouthed, all around dark and disturbed child, surprised me up until the very last scene. John C. Reilly is always a favorite, especially in his serious roles (which seem to be rare these days)—think his unforgettable performance in Magnolia—and the trio of young actors who depict Kevin throughout various seasons of life are all mesmerizing and downright creepy (in a good way). Most of all, the final scene had me challenging myself with questions of grace and redemption, questions I thought I had answers to, and I'm still thinking about it, and I'm still bothered, and that's got to be a mighty good sign.
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Saturday, March 24, 2012



 

Charles In Charge

It's a long story, but about two years ago, my husband met a guy named Charles who had started his own organic catering business, just in time to cater our wedding reception. Charles was a one man show for our wedding that September, putting everything together and taking it all down, in an old venue that didn't even have a kitchen. He cut our wedding cake and served it to our guests, mastered as bartender for the beer, wine and champagne fountain, and provided an Italian spread for lunch (including appetizer plates) to feed over fifty at a price so cheap I won't even reveal it because there's no way you're even going to believe me.

After our wedding, we never heard another word about his organic catering company, and we didn't run into Charles and his wife at art walks on Friday nights like we used to, and it almost felt like he had descended from heaven to feed our wedding guests and had vanished afterward in a poof. And then, one blessed Saturday a few months ago, we found ourselves in Village Books, desperately wanting coffee and heading to the fiction section anyway, and suddenly, the coffee shop on the top level that we hadn't gone to in years, had been transformed into a hot-spot for Fairhaven-dwellers, tourists, college students, and the Bellingham elite, with a hip new food menu and a bearded man whose impeccable taste didn't take long to recognize, casting his charm from behind the counter, running the entire show. We had finally found him, and he was absolutely thriving. Ever since, we have made a practice of visiting Charles, the owner at the Book Fare Cafe (http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/88/816105/restaurant/Book-Fare-Cafe-Bellingham), for coffee on Saturday afternoons, because it's so damn good, and so is Charles.



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Monday, March 19, 2012




March 19, 2012 - The Third Anniversary of My Grandmother’s Departure

My maternal grandmother bought me a manicure kit when I was ten years old to try and get me to stop biting my fingernails. Her nails were perfect and long and she had pale skin and freckled hands, hands she would always say looked old, but they never looked old to me. I would watch her file her nails, then paint them, as we sat together on her bright orange floral davenport (as she would call it) in her duplex in Alameda.
            She had three children and five grandchildren, two sisters, Gertrude and Helen, and a brother, Al, who died tragically in an accident when they were both teenagers. Al had gone on a motorcycle ride with a friend, and he had invited my grandmother to go with them, and she had said no, and when the two young men arrived on the scene (a field or wherever it was), there was an accident with a gun (they were to go shooting), and when the gun went off, Al got shot. She kept his dark flannel shirt in her dresser drawer (the dresser that now holds my clothes and my husband’s clothes), and she would take it out and show me the bullet hole in the shirt, the hole that had killed him, and I would place my finger over it, and I would miss him, although I had never met him.
Aunt Gert and Aunt Helen came to visit for my grandmother’s 80th birthday some years ago (my grandmother was the middle daughter, the other two sisters are still alive), and one afternoon during their stay, we had gathered at my parents’ house and I sat on the bed in the guest room off the garage, where they kept the piano (that has since been sold), listening as my grandmother and her sisters played songs from the hymnal my mother kept there, so sure of themselves and the harmonies they belted that it seemed nothing in our lives could ever change.
Back in California, when I was young, I would sit alone in the front row of First Baptist Church and listen to her sing in the choir. She would hand me a sandwich baggie filled with marshmallows and chocolate chips and tell me to sit quietly while she sang, and that she would come for me soon. There were so many people in the choir, so many faces, wearing robes that rippled with every movement of the arm, like the current of a wave when they turned the pages of their hymnals, my grandmother casting a look of love out to me, a young girl dangling her legs from a long wooden pew, waiting to see what was next.


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Wednesday, March 14, 2012


Pedestrianism

                    I have never had a driver’s license. When I was in high school, I passed driver’s education, and I’m pretty sure my parents would have gotten me a car (it's what all the kids wait for, right?), but I had no desire to drive. I took the class because everyone was taking the class and I thought it was what I was supposed to do, what I needed to do in order to become a proper adult. I held my breath and tried not to think while driving the freeway, I studied the book from cover to cover (like a good student should) and took the written tests, but I told my parents soon after taking driver's education that I thought driving was crazy, and I couldn’t believe everyone wanted to do it. It seemed like such an insane thing to want, to be given that much power, you could run over a curb and into a tree, or over an animal in the road, or you could even kill a human being, and the fact that kids were signing up for this, the fact that they were jumping up and down in anticipation of this, was nuts.
                    I have since driven on a couple of occasions. The first being sometime in college when I was in my brother’s truck and he pulled over because he thought he had popped his knee out of joint. I drove us home because he was in pain, and the entire time he was yelling because I was all over the road. The other happened several summers ago in Idaho when my husband tried to teach me how to drive. I drove quite a bit that summer and even got close to taking the driving test, but talked myself out of it not long after getting pulled over by a cop for turning the wrong way down a one-way street (without a driver’s license). The cop told me I was worse than a drunk driver on the road.
                    There is something to be said for being a pedestrian. I don’t do it for noble reasons (although wouldn’t it be nice if I did?), but out of my unshakable fear of doing this normal thing that every other adult in society does without thinking, and although I’m not the slightest bit proud of my fear (I'm embarrassed), it’s worth noting that this state of pedestrianism has taken me to a place I never would have found if I had gone and driven a car like everyone else. I like walking down the street to the drugstore to get what I need, slow enough to see what’s for sale at the sporting goods store on the corner, to wonder, like I always do, why the bakery across the street uses florescent lighting and how the people inside can stand it, slow enough to stop at the burger joint no one ever goes to and get a soft serve ice cream for a dollar, to see who happens to be working at the 7-11 (the old guy or the young guy), and to notice what’s growing in the vegetable garden three houses down on my way back home. Maybe I’m a grandmother and should be living in a different time, but the bus is just fine with me, the train is a nice ride, and there is something perfectly sturdy about my own two feet.



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Monday, March 12, 2012



     

304 S. Van Buren

     There was this little studio apartment in the upstairs portion of a two story house, and from the reading chair in the corner, you could look out the window every morning and see squirrels running on the roof. You lived across the street from an old brick Presbyterian Church that had rummage sales on occasion, and since you loved rummage sales, you would watch from the window to see when the Oldsmobiles pulled up so you could beat the old ladies for the steals. The church had weddings too, weddings on sunny days, and you could watch bridal parties gather on the lawn.
            
     You think about this studio, like you think about the people you love. It had a small bathroom upon entering, and when you first moved there, you and your best friend (who helped you move, but left shortly thereafter for France) dumped your combined makeup in the sink and spread all of your clothes on the bed and took Polaroids of yourselves in matching outfits, smoking your shared pack of Camels, when you went out to explore the town. This studio, your studio, had a seemingly enormous kitchen with tall ceilings and an olive green stove and you couldn’t even count the number of dance parties you had there. The kitchen opened to a small room where you kept your bed, the daybed from your childhood (that you sold to a used furniture store for twenty bucks when you left ), your grandfather’s typewriter, and a small closet for your clothes. In this studio, you had everything you needed. You drank red wine from your grandmother’s Lenox china cups because you couldn’t keep them packed in boxes any longer, and you sat on the stool at the kitchen table and tried to write something, and you made friends with the fat neighbor cat, the only cat you ever liked, and took tequila shots one night, the last time you ever drank that much, and awoke the next morning in your bathrobe with your head in a garbage basket. This place knew the things you kept quietly to yourself, the things you believed to be true, the things you most wanted, and for three years of your life, this place held you.

Photo: sitting on the porch, October 2008.

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Sunday, March 11, 2012



30’s

            My husband turned 33 on Friday. We celebrated by going for pizza and having my parents and brother and sister-in-law over to our house for an ice cream party. I bought crazy yellow paper napkins that said “Happy Birthday” on them. We made our own sundaes with hot fudge and caramel and whipped cream and cherries, and made a mess of the kitchen. We sat around the living room and ate while he ripped open his gifts and the wrapping paper piled on the floor. We presented him with funny cards. We listened to Tears for Fears on the record player. It doesn’t really feel like we’re getting any older.
            I turned 30 last July, and before approaching the monumental date, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. I didn’t really know what to think. Everyone tiptoes around the big 30th birthday, like it’s this evil thing that comes for each and every one of us, whether we like it or not, to rob us of our youth. I hear so many people say things like, “By the time I’m 30, I want to…” or “When I’m 30 I want to be established…” or “30’s too old for…” I just sort of jumped into the fire and hoped for the best. What else can you do? You can’t stop it. It’s going to come for you. So it came. And this is what I’ve found to be true:
            I feel really good. I’m a lot more sure of my purpose as a human being on this earth than I was five years ago. I was stumbling around in my 20’s, and I did a lot of embarrassing things. I said a lot of stupid stuff to the boys I liked, and I wore a lot of wild outfits, I let my friend pierce my nose with a gun meant for piercing ears, and I got a tramp-stamp. I am permanently marked by my 20’s. I went to graduate school because I wanted to become a writer and I accumulated a lot of debt. I was trying to figure out who I wanted to read, and how I wanted to write.
It’s a lot of work figuring out how you’d like to present yourself to the world and what you’d like to invest in, so you’ve got to try some things out and do a little investigating around. I think I’ve finally come to a place in my life where I’m happy with the person I am and proud of the things I’ve done, and I know a thing or two about what I’d like to do next. Also, I don’t think there’s an appropriate time, an appropriate age, for getting married or for having a baby, or the next baby, or for going to graduate school. I like to rest in this knowledge. The bottom line is, I don’t want to be 21 again, and as time continues its perpetual march, I’m going to take it as it comes, one day at a time, exactly where I am.

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Tuesday, March 6, 2012






Le Chat Noir

Le Chat Noir, otherwise known as The Black Cat, is the coziest spot for a happy hour date in all of Bellingham. It’s in Fairhaven, in the Marketplace building, red brick and up flights and flights of stairs, and if you sit by the window you can see a great view of Fairhaven, and if you’re lucky, like tonight, you might even see a sunset. The happy hour special I like best is a bottle of wine and cheese fondue for two for twenty bucks. Twenty bucks! So you can sit there for a couple of hours and eat and drink (where else can you get fondue in town?) and talk, and if you happen to be with a good friend, like I was tonight, there is pretty much nothing better in the world.
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