Mulberry Jam

A week ago, a friend gave me a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Eat, Pray, Love.” I was aware of the book when it came out last year. A book with a focus on food and yogic philosophy? You’d think it would be right up my alley. But I waited to read it and was eventually discouraged by some negative reviews. People seem to either love it or hate it, with few people lukewarm about either Gilbert or her story. The book begins with Gilbert at a very low point, facing a bitter divorce in her early thirties, accompanied by severe depression. After settling the divorce she finds it difficult to re-engage in life, and seems unable to leave the pain of the broken marriage, compounded by an unhappy rebound love affair, behind. To escape from herself and the situation, she uses a book advance to take a full year off, spending four months successively in Italy, India and Indonesia. These are the three sections from which the book takes its title. She describes her travels as a search for God. God is definitely a part of this quest, but it’s also about trying to find a way to become sustainably comfortable in her own skin.

The outset of the book is heavy going, as Gilbert describes crying oceans of tears and spending night after night in misery on a series of bathroom floors. But she won me over completely once she and the book arrived in Italy. She gives herself over to food and the pleasures of daily life, including the beautiful Italian language. Her description of being charmed by the florid profanity and histrionics at a Roman soccer game conveys her affection for Italy, and is itself completely charming. It is an abrupt change to follow her to a yoga ashram in India, living a life of austerity and prayer. Her new regimen includes five hours daily of scrubbing floors, a vegetarian diet, and daily wake-up calls at 3:30AM for prayer. But her search for an experience of God over four months of prayer and meditation is rewarded with a true glimpse of the transcendent. The final stage of her journey, in Bali, is embodied by a voice that’s clearly older and wiser than the desperate woman who began the story.

As with most memoir, the question for the reader is can you sympathize with (or in some cases, stomach) the complaints of the writer. In re-reading the negative reviews, it seems many critics couldn’t relate to her troubles or her goals. Before diving into the book, I had my own concerns about whether it would be my cup of tea. In the past I haven’t been a big fan of the hits of modern memoir. Excerpts I’ve read from books like “Prozac Nation” or “Running with Scissors” have left me cold. I feel little besides impatience with what seems to me to be endless navel gazing, wallowing in sad childhoods and victim psychology. This book, however, sucked me in immediately. Gilbert has an entertaining voice, able to cover her early mid-life crisis with a touch that’s doesn’t minimize her pain, but is light enough that she avoids taking herself altogether seriously. And she’s genuinely working to try to improve herself, to find happiness and to make her life better. Again and again, her wit and irreverence kept the book from being sappy or tiresome. I was happy for the hard-won equanimity she found, and enjoyed sharing the voyage with her.

Thanks, Kim, for giving this one to me!

Back from Labor Day weekend and back to work this week. We had an unseasonably pleasant holiday, with temps in the low eighties and incredible, upstate-New-York-like low humidity. I did everything I could to spend the entire weekend outdoors, which makes it a little easier to be tied to my desk this week.

The first week of September always reminds me of going back to school, even though I’ve been out of school for almost twenty years now. In the tradition, I thought I’d give you a little book report on what I was reading during the past couple of months.

Earlier in August I finished reading Real Food: What to Eat and Why, by Nina Planck. I really enjoyed this book, probably because it confirmed a lot of my own prejudices about food. Ms. Planck is the daughter of Virginia vegetable farmers and has her own consulting practice building farmers markets both here and in the U.K. Greatly simplified, her message is that if people weren’t eating it two hundred years ago, you don’t need to eat it either. That excludes all kinds of industrially processed foods, from trans fats to high fructose corn syrup. Planck’s book is much more readable than the better known book by Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan’s book is written in a muckracking style reminiscent of Upton Sinclair. I never had the sense that Pollan even likes food, whereas Planck is more of a kindred spirit, a true food lover. I’ve always refused to give up my butter, eggs and whole milk, so it was great to get her thoroughly researched explanations for why all that is better for you than margarine and skim milk anyway.

I dipped back into some old favorites on the bookshelf last month. One was The Cat Who Went to Heaven, by Elizabeth Coatsworth. This Newberry Award-winning book was first published in 1930 as a children’s book, but its timeless story is the best short primer on Buddhist compassion I’ve ever read.

Another book I revisited after a long break is Eight Skilled Gentlemen, by Barry Hughart. The novel is an unusual cross between fantasy and mystery, and takes place in an ancient China where mandarins co-exist with demons and monsters. Hughart has a playful way with language, riffing off of Chinese poetic style while also including a lot of dry humor. First published in 1991, sadly this is one of the only Hughart books still in print. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it, so it was great to rediscover this one.

A friend very kindly loaned me her copy of Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen. I thought books like this couldn’t get published anymore. Great plot, great characters, and the best part is the setting within a second-rank traveling circus during the Depression.

And I have to thank my sister for catching me up on the current crop of young adult best sellers. You may have noticed two books by Stephenie Meyer camped out atop the best seller list this summer: Twilight, and Eclipse. The gothic novels about a teenager in love with a vampire are exactly what I would have adored when I was fifteen. Reading them at the age of 42 I felt too old for them, but I can certainly see what the fuss is all about. I enjoyed another young adult novel more: A Great and Terrible Beauty. This one is set in a Victorian boarding school for upper class girls. It involves magic and visions, but what I really enjoyed was the spot-on portrayal of the inner workings of a girls clique. Girls of any era have always had the ability to be creatively vicious, and the writer, Libba Bray, clearly remembers the social game well.

What are you reading? Please drop me a line and give me some more books to add to my list!

The heat of August has finally broken here in Washington. About time too! Finally we’ve returned to open window season. Aaah, this is the best time of year here. Today is clear and sunny with very low humidity. All my windows are thrown open to the air. I’ve always avoided air conditioning as much as I could, mostly because I hate being closed up indoors without any contact with outdoor air. Growing up in upstate New York we didn’t have central air, and didn’t really need it except for a few hot weeks in mid-July. No-one I knew had air conditioning, and we went through the summers running in and out of screen doors and setting up fans in open windows. I tried to carry that lifestyle with me after I moved to Washington, and actually lived my first three years in this town in an apartment without A/C. Still, I eventually broke down under the weight of steady temps over 90 and dewpoints near 80 degrees, and my house is kept closed up tight through most of the summer. I’m not sure I could make it If I had to work at home every day without relief from the sticky heat. But that’s all the more reason why I’m overjoyed when we can go back to living an indoor-outdoor existence. Now Mark and I can exchange offhand comments about “good sleeping weather” and clearly hear the birdsong chatter at my feeders. Last night was cool enough to make my down duvet feel delicious with the windows open, and the morning was just nippy enough to make my cup of hot tea feel extra good running down my throat. Opening the windows at my house has a special thrill for me, beyond just letting in the fresh air. The windows on my house are secretly one of my favorite things about it. They’re steel casement windows, with metal frames painted black. They’re original to the house, which was built in 1948, and make no mistake, they’re rickety, leaky and very inefficient, energy-wise. But they swing out to open on hinges that take them all the way out and flat against the house. There’s nothing so fancy as a crank, you just unlatch the window and push. Whenever I stretch to sweep one out into open space I feel like Snow White. Each and every spring we get a parade of window salesmen stopping to ask if we plan to replace them (because they’re rickety, leaky, etc.). I send them quickly on their way. No! You shall not touch my windows! I think we all miss something, being closed up indoors so much of our lives. We lose touch with the place where we are when we can get away with wearing sweaters indoors in August and have no idea when it last rained. I’m not saying we should do away with air conditioning and climate control altogether, especially in a climate as unforgiving as Washington’s. But I wish more folks would be more conscious of taking opportunities to open up their houses in that yummy season that lies between unbearably hot and uncomfortably cold. Are your windows open today?

My postings have been spotty this month, but my excuse is that I’ve been enjoying the build-up to the Christmas holiday. Last weekend my husband and I hosted a dinner party for seven, this week has been last-minute mailing, shopping and Christmas cards. Busy time, but tremendous fun.

Next week I’ll be taking a break from posting. I’ll be back the first week of January with new material and new essays. In the meantime, I’d like to pass on one of my favorite Christmas books. A Pussycat’s Christmas has a simple text written by Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. The story is as sweet as you’d expect from Brown, but the illustrations by Anne Mortimer are what make me go to my shelf to bring this out to the coffeetable every year. Mortimer is a naturalist who often paints cats, and she captures the facial expressions and body language of an inquisitive cat so well I can’t help but be charmed. Here’s a typical illustration. How long do you think it will take before this cat jumps into the midst of this table?

Merry Christmas to all, and happy new year too! See you in 2006.

During waking hours I read a very wide variety of things. I normally have at least two or three books going at once. Right now I’m reading an anthology of Buddhist writings, a manual on HTML (for the blog, you know) and a novel. Plus there are always piles of magazines around the house, and the three daily newspapers we receive.

I enjoy all of them very much, but none of those fit the bill for pure bedtime reading. Luckily for me, I inherited my mother’s ability to drop off very quickly and sleep soundly. Even if I’m engrossed in a ripping yarn, I never make it for more than a few pages once I get into a cozy bed with the lights turned down. For me, the perfect bedtime reading is something I can read in short bites, something untroubling, so I can drop off with a peaceful frame of mind.

Something like Emily Post’s Etiquette. I am the delighted owner of a hardback copy of the 1937 edition that I picked up years ago in a used book store. I love this book, and have read some sections over and over. Contrary to what you may expect, it’s written in an informal, somewhat breezy style, and although Mrs. Post was a true stickler for proper form, her voice as a writer never seems stiff or prudish. I admit the large format of the book is a bit of a drawback for bedtime—the book is 877 pages with its index—but otherwise it’s perfect. Short chapters, undemanding syntax, and a restful sense of order and decorum send me right to sleep with a smile on my lips every time.

I enjoy this nearly seventy-year-old edition far more than I would a contemporary book on manners. You’ll understand why when I list a few chapter headings:

• The Country House
• At the Opera, the Theater, and Other Public Gatherings
• Cards, Names and Visits
• Teas and Other Afternoon Parties

The book describes the society of a privileged world with balls and dances, weekend house parties, formal dinners and servants. While she also discusses the well-appointed house of a young and less-wealthy couple, even the smallest household incorporates at least one full-time maid. Two of my favorite chapters are “Modern Man and Girl,” about dating etiquette, and “Popularity, Fraternity House Party, and Commencement,” which is all about how a proper young lady visits the college of her beau. There is no consideration that the young lady might herself be attending college. The collegiate world that Post outlines, of house mothers and curfews, is so unrecognizable to me that it might as well be a document of the Victorian era.

And yet there is so much wisdom here that still applies. Post’s bottom line is always kindness and consideration, and that’s what makes me love her. The rules for tipping servants in a large country house are exotic and quaint to me, but her advice on writing a letter that will entertain, or how to speak gently to the bereaved, or how to behave as a guest will never be out of date.

And then there are continual flashes of humor. On the subject of mourning: “The young widow should wear all black for a year, and then second mourning for six months. She should, however, never remain in mourning for her first husband after she has decided she can be consoled by a second.”

Nothing stuffy about that!

I’m back posting again after more than a week off. To those of you who told me you missed my posts, thank you! I was refilling the well of inspiration by visiting my hometown in upstate New York and touring the Finger Lakes region. I plan to write more about my travels soon.

I’m writing today on my back patio, which is quite a novelty to me. Only yesterday a good friend was kind enough to set up a wireless network for my new notebook computer, and now I’m feeling so modern, tapping away out here in the dappled sunlight under my shady pergola. Behind me a small fountain is splashing. There are crickets in the flowerbeds and birds in the trees. With all these organic sounds, I hardly notice the background city noises that are part of living inside the Washington Beltway. Planes and helicopters go overhead regularly, traffic passes by in the street in front of my house, but the closer sounds are all natural.

I say I feel modern, but I also feel quite old-fashioned. The photograph at the top of today’s entry is of the porch where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did her writing in the nineteen-thirties and -forties. She’s best known for her novel The Yearling, which was made into film at least twice (once with Gregory Peck). My favorite book is her memoir of her life in central Florida, Cross Creek. I have a treasured first edition I picked up for $1.00 in a used bookstore. It’s too well-loved to be valuable, and I’m glad—I wouldn’t want to feel inhibited from re-reading it as often as I do.

I went looking for the book after seeing a film based on her life. I saw it at an impressionable age, and it set my ideas of what writing life should be. I was seventeen in 1983, the year the movie came out. It starred Mary Steenburgen as Miss Rawlings, and I was so fascinated with the tale of a woman who’d left everything to take up a dilapidated orange grove she’d inherited in the middle of nowhere and concentrate on writing. The middle of nowhere was much more isolated in 1930 than it is in 2005. No wireless internet connections, no phone, few neighbors. Despite coming from what was at the time the wealthy industrial city of Rochester, New York, she settled into that retiring life with tremendous affection for its details. I’ve read her memoir over and over, and it’s been a major influence upon my own character. She showed that you can cultivate the life of the mind and still take pride in your cooking. She lived the life of an independent artist, while remaining a very feminine woman who enjoyed the company of men. She was a kindred spirit for me, someone else who appreciated the magic of the everyday, the mundane.

Mulberry Jam, the blog, is a direct response to her inspiration. In a way I’m still trying to absorb the principle that creation can happen wherever you are. Art can be made on a porch, or in a kitchen, or in an orange grove. Although I never got stuck with that image of the urban garret as the ideal locus for the creative life, I do sometimes need to remind myself that even here, on a suburban patio, I can build my own Cross Creek of the soul.