I am sorry that I said I was sick when really I just wanted to lounge around on the couch, knitting and perling myself into a quiet place.
I’m sorry that there was something I could have said that would have allowed you to stay, and that I couldn’t figure out what it was, so you had to go.
I’m the one who broke the window in your mother’s garage when we were seven. I was throwing rocks at it, angry at you because you said Jewish girls couldn’t be cheerleaders. I’m sorry I didn’t fess up when your brother Kevin was getting yelled at, your mother shaking her cigarette in his face and calling him a liar.
I’m sorry for telling you I was a virgin just so you’d feel special. That being said, I was not.
My dog hasn’t been feeling well and it simply wasn’t scoopable. You have my apology.
I am sorry that I fell in love with him before I told you that I had fallen out of love with you, and even more sorry I wasn’t gracious enough to make sure you never knew that.
I’m sorry for picking the chicken out of the soup and then telling you it was vegeterian. I was broke and there wasn’t anything else in the house to offer you. Besides, the last time I saw you, you were eating a cheeseburger and smoking a Marlboro. How was I to know?
When we met, I loved to go out dancing until the wee hours of the morning. I’m sorry for getting old, and for loving the comfort of our big old bed so much I can’t force myself to go honky-tonking these days, oh my love.
I’m sorry that I took your white shirt from Mexico when we were dividing up our things, but I am not sorry that it looked better on me.
I am sorry but you can not have another treat. The vet said only three a day. Don’t give me that look. It’s not going to work. I’m not paying any attention to you.
Alright, fine, damnit… but don’t come back in fifteen minutes and ask for another one.
I’m sorry that I let my love for you turn into a needy, grasping thing.
I’m sorry. It’s too cold and early. You walk the dogs. I’ll do it tomorrow. I know I said that yesterday, but this time I really mean it. Really. Now turn off the damned light and let me go back to sleep.
I was once married to a man who had grown up in Birmingham right next door to Bull Connor. Though by no means supporters of Connor’s reactionary politics or his famously brutal methods, my husband and his family had still done all the neighborly things people do: brought in the mail when the Connors traveled, baked them fruitcakes at Christmas, invited them to neighborhood cook-outs. While the nation watched Bull Connor turn fire hoses and attack dogs on unarmed demonstrators, my future in-laws smiled and waved a neighborly “Hello” to him when passing on the street. Anything else would have been rude, my former mother-in-law once told me.
My ex-husband and I fought about this through out our marriage; he staunchly insisted that there is never anything wrong with being polite, and I never stopped believing he had shirked his moral obligation to throw bricks through the Connors’ windows every morning on his way to school.
So I do not know how I am supposed to act now that I find West Virginia has somehow become the last bastion of racism that speaks out loud and doesn’t even know it’s supposed to be ashamed. There isn’t a single villain here, a person at whom to throw bricks… literal or rhetorical. There is only a sadly gullible citizenry. An unchanging understanding of a world that is made of nothing but change.
I am at a loss. I hope you are not. I hope you have ideas and hope and a list of things for me to get working on right this very second to make this better. I am willing to spend my time, my money–or maybe some other thing, some thing it hasn’t occurred to me to offer up but that you know will do some good– to make this better. Because I didn’t know it was this bad. I would have told you “West Virginia isn’t a traditional strong-hold of racism, the Union made sure of that, because as long as there were men who would cross a picket line, no strike would hold.” I would have told you “Where everyone is this poor, skin color doesn’t mean so much.” And I would still tell you, “I was one of the few Jews growing up here, and I can’t remember ever experiencing anti-Semitism.” So I don’t understand what has happened here.
But I am grateful to Robert Byrd, who leads us even when we do not want to be lead.
I wish there was something I could say to refute this, but there isn’t. I am, however, going write the Governor and suggest that we take The Daily Show’s suggestion and, in fact, make our state motto “No Interviews Please.”
Can someone call the Southern Poverty Law Center and beg them to come help us out? We need you, Morris Dees!
I finally got a chance to see Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man. I’m not a big fan of biopics, and I am also not a big fan of U2, so I was prepared to love this less than I should.
I didn’t.
This is a really brilliant and lovely movie. It has the haunting, sweet, funny qualities of one of his songs and it isn’t hurt–as I was afraid it would be–by the folk who come after him paying tribute. (Still, why anyone would have Bono cover a Leonard Cohen song is beyond me.)
Scotti spent his afternoon calling people to ask them to vote for Hillary Clinton on the 13th. The pundits say it was unnecessary; last time I looked at the polls, she was favored to take the state by twenty points.
I, on the other hand, have been a die-hard Obama fan since he first emerged on the national scene. He talks to me like I’m an adult, and I rise to the occassion. He says difficult things to me, and I am grateful.
You’d think there would be arguments in the yellow farmhouse, but we are oddly able to each believe the other is completely misguided without feeling the need to bring it up.
Of course, if one or the other of us were out rallying voters for McCain, it would be a different story. Here is my favorite story about politics:
My parents had just eloped. My mother was at Queen’s College in North Carolina, and engaged to someone else, when my father appeared out of the blue. “You said to come back when I was ready to get married,” my father said from the payphone in the lobby of her dorm, “and so here I am. Get packed and let’s go get married.” Or something to that effect. One hopes there was a little more romance to it, and that just gets left out of the telling for the sake of us kids.
In any event, my mother called my grandfather from the road to tell him the news, a little afraid of how he would react.
“Daddy, guess what? I just married John Einstein!” she said.
“Well, that’s great, honey,” my grandfather replied. “I always did like John. He’s a good boy.”
“Now, Daddy, you know this is a mixed marriage, right?” my mother said, a little sheepishly.
My grandfather’s exact words are never reported when the story gets told, no doubt because he said some very ungrandfatherly things. But there was some yelling, and some over-my-dead-bodying. Finally, my mother was able to interupt with, “But, Daddy, you knew John wasn’t Jewish the whole time we were dating!”
“Jewish?” my grandfather said–and I believe this, because my mother won’t brook any lies about her father–”Who said antying about Jewish? I thought you meant he was a goddamned Republican!”
So the little yellow house on Ridgeway Avenue can sleep peacefully behind warring Democrats, safe in the knowledge that once we finally have a nominee, we’ll both be standing behind the same person. Everything will be fine, as long as neither one of us becomes a goddamned Republican.
Sidneys like presents. (So, in the interest of full disclosure, do Sarahs.) But both Sidneys are notoriously hard to buy for because each pretty much gets what she wants. Sidney-who-is-my-mother has the resources to be sure that both she and Sidney-who-is-my-niece pretty much never have to pine away for something they really, really want. At least, nothing that they really, really want and that fits into my rather restricted budget.
But this year May has both Mother’s Day and the weekend we celebrate Sidney-the-smaller’s second birthday at this strange place filled with bouncy castles and such. (It also has Haven’s birthday in it, but she is easier to buy for, because in the rush to buy presents for her daughter Sidney, everyone pretty much just tosses her a gift certficiate and an e-card.)
For Sidney’s first Christmas, I gave her a stuffed animal of some sort that made noises and played music and lit up… the exact same stuffed animal with batteries that her next-door-neighbor gave her. But that will never happen again, because I have (belatedly) discovered Etsy.
Etsy is a kind of Ebay for all things handmade. But that’s not exactly right, because there is no auction. The prices are set. It’s also a little like a museum… I log on far more often than I buy, just to look at the clever things people make. This Purple Big-Eyed Plush Monster (which is for Sidney-my-niece, because Sidney-my-mother might get scared if this were in her bedroom when it was time to turn off the lights) was made by CurlyQCuties, whose monsters will no doubt be appearing in birthday packages, under Christmas trees, and beside Menorahs for many seasons of present giving to come. These are so creative and fun… and they don’t come from Wal-Mart.
Sidney-my-mother is also getting a gift from Etsy, but you won’t see it here. She knows how to Google.
I tried my hand at selling things on Etsy… you can find my one, sad hat (made special for someone who never came to pick it up) by searching “hilltrash” on their site. The rest of last year’s hats were given to folk at the homeless shelter for warmth. I loved the hats I made out of recycled sari silk… but apparently every other person on the planet realized they were, perhaps, a little ugly. Recently, my husband saw a picture of me wearing one of them. “Oh, look, it’s you in that hat.”
Sometimes I think I’m the last living hippy in America. Then I go to Etsy. It’s not Burning Man, but it’s a small shot of the same kind of mojo.
Sometimes when I think of my younger self, it is as if I am thinking of a person I knew long ago and have lost touch with. An old friend, but not the kind one keeps. The kind who fades into memory, whose path isn’t reported in emails or chatty phone calls. The sort who sporadically sends a Christmas letter full of news about people you don’t know. A husband you never met, children you did not know had been born to her.
This self is nineteen, still wearing her grandfather’s old shirts, although he has been dead for seven years by the time this picture is taken. His initials, ASP, are embroidered on the pocket. This earned her the nickname Cleopatra in High School history class, but it is not a nickname that she could ever carry off, and so did not bring it with her.
She is standing near the piano in the drawing room at Mallet–the men’s honor’s assembly–at the University of Alabama. In the end, it will prove tragic for her to have made the choice to come to school here… a choice she made first because she had family there, and then later made again for boy, and still later than that, for a man.
I can barely remember her, and when I do, I blush for her brazenness and her selfishness. I imagine that the others who remember her–at least, those who aren’t Jimmy, who has always been kind before all else, and Putt, who is the one enduring friend–think of her as a destructive force that blew through their lives for a moment or two and then went on, leaving only wreckage of one sort or another in her wake.
I do not like her, though I envy her the slim shoulders, the way her collar bones peak through her collar. I can not envy her youth, which was difficult. More for others, even, than for herself.
I have no urge to look her up, to see how she is doing. I do not think of her often. When I am nostalgic for that time, she is not one of the people who comes to mind.
Forty-two is not a glamorous age. But I would not be nineteen again for all the world.
Ramp season is drawing to a close. The few I picked this week had yellowing leaves and huge bulbs; by this weekend, the season will be over for another year. But the basement pantry is well-stocked with jars of pickled ramps and ramp kimchi so that we can savor the stench of spring in the winter, when the taste reminds us that February is always followed by March, and never by another February.
Both recipes this year are new ones. Here they are:
Ramp Kimchi
Ingredients:
1 long white napa (Chinese) cabbage, about 1 lb 3 oz
1 cup coarse or pickling salt
5 cups (1 liter) water
1 small long white radish, about 5 oz (160 g), cut in 1 1/2 in (4-cm) julienne strips
1 cup ramp bulbs
1 teaspoon finely grated ginger
1 1/2 cup chili powder (Korean, not the stuff for making chili you buy at Kroger)– Or 3/4 cup chili powder and 3/4 papriki for a kimchi that won’t burn your face off
1 teaspoon sugar
2-3oz pickled shrimp
3oz salted anchovies
1 large bowl to hold cabbage while soaking in water
Remove root end of cabbage without separating the leaves. Put all the salt in a large bowl and add 4 cups (1 liter) water. Stir to dissolve all the salt in bowl and wter. Fit the cabbage into bowl adding water if necessary so it is covered. Place several heavy plates as weights on top of the cabbage and let sit at room temperature for 8-12 hours. Drain the cabbage and rinse under running water, and squeeze dry.
In a seperate bowl, combine all other ingredients and mix well. The red chili paste should look like the bottom left photo so your ingredient amount can vary slightly regarding the red chili powder. Slightly separate the cabbage leaves and pack them well with the radish mixture. Pack well into glass jar and press firmly to remove air bubbles. Cover jar tightly. If you decided to cut the cabbage into bite sized pieces before adding chili paste that is fine. You can cut the cabbage into bite sized pieces before soaking in brine water as well. Just a matter of personal taste.
Once thoroughly mixed, fill the jars with the Kimchi and seal with lids. Allow the jar to sit in a dark room temperature area for 2-3 days. Follwoing this early fermentation process place jar in the refrigerator and return to the fridge after each serving.
Important: Never use a reactive metal container to store kimchi; use porcelain or stainless steel. Plastic will be permanently stained by chili. Store kimchi in a cool, dark place – a fridge is best.
Cloved Ramp Pickles
Ramps
1 cup water
10 cloves
1 cup vinegar
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon alum
1. Clean ramps, keeping bulbs only. Pack tightly in jars.
2. Add 1/4 teaspoon alum to each pint.
3. Bring liquid mixture to boil, pour over ramps.
4. Continue making liquid, enough to cover all ramps to be pickled.
5. Process sealed jars in boiling water bath for 5 minutes to seal lids.
Vanity Fair is getting on my nerves. First, they write a long apologia for the literary dickhead of the decade, James Frey. At the same time, they are oddly silent about the photos of Miley Cyrus taken by Annie Leibowitz and, while the whole world clucks their collective tongue at the teenager and her father, they can’t seem to find anything worth adding to the conversation.
I am tired of bruhaha.
First, let’s all just go ahead and admit that Frey doesn’t matter, and never has. The reason he’s gotten so much play has nothing to do with his book or it’s lack of veracity. Show me one person who is genuinely shocked that a junkie lied for money. Seriously. We aren’t shocked or appalled, and we certainly aren’t more shocked or appalled than we are at Misha Defonseca, Margaret Seltzer, and Ishmael Beah. I mean, they lied about important lives–Frey just lied about the extent to which he was a bad ass. Which, it turns out, is easy to do because he’s not one. So let’s all fess up folks. We’re still talking about James Frey because it gives folk who like to think of themselves as above-all-that a chance to pick on Oprah.
Vanity Fair wrote a shameful piece about Frey in this month’s issue. The author attempts to turn him into an everyman, a victim of the New York publishing world and, even more bizarrely, of Oprah. They seem to credit his account that he was tricked into his second appearance on the show, and that afterwards that he was told by Oprah, “I know it was rough, but it’s just business.” Are you kidding? When did Frey become a credible witness? So let’s call the fray over Frey what it really is–the chance to engage in a little back-biting gossip about Oprah because, well, she isn’t Vanity Fair’s kind of person.
And then there is the fresher, and even more ridiculous, bruhaha over Miley Cyrus’ pictures in this month’s edition. Really, give me a break. Everyone keeps asking this teenager and her father–who happens to be the same sort of hill trash as me, from the same part of Appalachia–what they were thinking. I can tell you what they were thinking. “Annie Leibovitz is one hell of a photographer.” They were thinking, “When you get an offer to do a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz, you rely on her judgement, because she’s a frigging genius.” Isn’t that what you’d be thinking? Would you have the balls to edit Annie Leibovitz mid-shoot, to question her choices?
I didn’t think so.
Vanity Fair has gotten old. These silly contraversies have gotten old. I’ve bought my last copy. I can no longer pretend that this is anything but “The National Enquirer” for people who like their gossip to have glossy photos and big words.
Posted by sarahemc2 
Posted by sarahemc2 
Posted by sarahemc2 
Etsy is a kind of Ebay for all things handmade. But that’s not exactly right, because there is no auction. The prices are set. It’s also a little like a museum… I log on far more often than I buy, just to look at the clever things people make. This Purple Big-Eyed Plush Monster (which is for Sidney-my-niece, because Sidney-my-mother might get scared if this were in her bedroom when it was time to turn off the lights) was made by 
