Map Your Life in Books

TCPL, our local library, invited me to kick off their fall fundraising week. I came up with the idea that the books you choose illustrate your identity over time, character formation if you were fictional.

The audience was a bit shy about their offerings, and I realized that our identity as readers is an intimate subject. But privately, before and after I spoke, people told me the most wonderful stories about themselves as readers. One man who later became a doctor said his family owned no books, didn't understand reading as a pleasure and he discovered it on his own, found science through reading.

One woman told me of a book that saved her life.

Many spoke about a teacher or a librarian who gave them a particular book that made them a reader for life.

What book made you a reader?

Agent and Writer?!

I always read Betsy Lerner's blog. She is consistently pithy and funny and acerbic, my favorite mix. She is also the only agent/writer I know. Besides me. She does it gracefully, and has the most self-deprecating voice since Anne Lamott. The things she says about publishing are hilarious, heartfelt, and true. When I read how much she loves her colleagues, I miss the watercooler conversations, and the high energy sit-com feeling of being in an office in Manhattan. I don't wear the agent hat much anymore, just to tend to projects that were underway when my own novel landed. But I still admire and feel kinship with that group of people, the ones who care so much about books and writing and will do anything and everything to make writers find their readers, and readers find writers they love.

June Wedding

It's June and in NY State, gay people can finally marry each other. It's almost enough to make me want to go to weddings. I have a compunction to go to weddings that I believe in; my feeling is one of duty. I will stand there with the assembled friends and family members in their mis-matched clothes, wishing for an art director to pare down on some of the frou-frou (do we really need swags and lilies on every row?), wishing for a costumer to build a uniformity in palette (didn't her friends from the city ever talk to each other; crimson plus pink dress, plus teal green suit?). But then I will stop with my noisy mind, clanking like a box of bolts, and send my thoughts up and out. I will hope for them commitment: to working together, to witnessing each other's lives. I will hope that they have joy, hope that they find humor, release. I will hope that the big passion doesn't dim or go out, but reinvents itself in tenderness and in other guises.

I hope that I am standing there, or sitting on the pew or the garden chair, not admiring someone else's shoes, nor my own, not wondering if my dress is too tight or gappy to do the slide or whatever goofball dj dancing will be done later, not wishing I lived in a culture where dancing was expected on all occasions, solemn or joyous, so that all people danced, even the men. I may be making goo goo eyes at the baby on the seat in front of me, drooling down the back of his mother's dress, but then I hope I come back to my duty to the couple and to their community, assembled in the room. I hope that I can give over the static of my thoughts because I am a serious witness to love. I am.

Missing a Poet

I spent the last few days collaborating on a notice for the Washington Post with a few of the people to whom Ann Brewer Knox was especially dear. She had a long and fascinating life, and is missed acutely. She gave herself very fully to writing, and also to the natural world, exploring and making her home in beautiful places. I awoke in the morning to a blue sky with a white moon and the bowl of hills with the lake at its bottom was filled with a soft layer of white clouds. It was the kind of thing a poet who valued natural beauty might collect, wondering through the day if the image was "a blue breakfast bowl, half filled with milk," or if milk captured the soft pillowyness of the clouds.

We are up against the translation from perception to language, all the time looking for accuracy, for economy, for elegance. Sometimes a writer has the feeling that she "got it right," and more often there is the instability of having found words to mark the place where the perfect image is recalled, but not captured. It's not a bowl, not milk, not pillows, not cotton, not an upside down moment where it is clear above and cloudy below. It is the morning after I finished assembling some words about a friend, a fellow writer, someone who reveled in the process of making poems, maybe with less frustration than I have with language. Words fall short of life.

I am glad that Ann's words stay behind, though my friend is gone. I will continue to meet her on the page, and I will wonder if in her words she got it just right or if what is there is an approximation of what she wanted, what she hoped for.

The Story in the Story

The Mixer, by Leslie Daniels New Ohio Review Fall 2009[Listen to Leslie reading The Mixer: here]

The Mixer 

Love, like a skill, gets better with use

When I was a child of two and my mother was mixing my birthday cake, she let me pull my pants down and sit in a plate of cake flour. I remember the paper plate on the floor, and her pretty ankles going between countertop and stove. She was a child psychologist and she understood that you need to feel things to know them. The bottom test was my own invention. I remember the exquisite sensation, and the hum of the mixer.

Many years later I was the mother making the birthday cake, the oven preheating, mixing with an electric mixer. It was the morning of the party and I was making All-Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake from The Cake Bible. It's the only cookbook I own for which I have too much respect to mess around with the recipes. I don't care much about cakes, though they are a good meeting place of butter and sugar, but to other people in my life ¾ my daughter who was turning three ¾ cake is important.

As I used the hand mixer to mix the heavy batter, I was thinking about the real Bible. Raised by atheists, I had missed the Bible entirely except for a stray psalm or hymn from my grandmother. I was thinking that I should be reading the Bible to my children at the end of the day along with the Torah, the Koran, and something Zen, instead of  whatever fiction caught our fancy. I was thinking that they need some sacred scriptures beside The Cake Bible for wisdom and as an inoculation against developing religious fanaticism in their later years.

The mixer is not the Kitchenaid azure or red enamel kind I gaze at in stores, so large it requires the installation of a modern architectural atrocity: the appliance garage. The mixer is light in weight and poorly designed by General Electric, easy to entangle and sever the fingers of a day-dreaming cook. It dates back to the time before law suits shaped the design of American household goods.

I bought the mixer at a garage sale during my starter marriage. It outlasted the starter marriage and accompanied me during the next one (the "finisher" marriage?), through many birthday cakes, a few meringues, and one stupendous Mont Blanc aux marrons.

I never think about my starter husband at all, off in the Bay Area selling something large and industrial to restaurants, cooling systems perhaps. I have zero curiosity about him, and when his face comes up on the inner billboard, my mind makes a swift and happy U-turn.

My finisher husband is often on my mind, no longer with yearning or fascination, but with warmth and a checklist of regrets.

I traveled lightly through these marriages, I tell myself, without gathering many things or bitterness, only friends and tools, and the skills of how to please with cooking. My friend Ellen doesn't cook at all. She said there are other ways to love people that aren't so time consuming. I haven't learned them.

I may have simply been a bad wife. As a cook I have goals that I never had as a wife. When I cook I want those gathered at the table to ask themselves how can I keep this woman in my life forever?

But the cook and the poisoner walk hand in hand. There is a delicate line between They'll love this and Who will notice if the meat is  a day older than it should be under a burgundy sauce? Once in my finisher husband's red wine I squirted dish soap (regret number 64). It was almost an accident. He drank it, belying his palate for good California reds.

Maybe eating other people's food is a risk like taking your clothes off outside, done easily by children and schizophrenics, and by Germans on specially designated beaches.

The doubled recipe calls for eight egg yolks. (Thea is the only person I know whose chickens express attachment to her, but only when she wears her pink rain boots, her sandals will cause them to attack.) The batter from the doubled recipe is massive. Standing at the ready is my largest pan, the brown Teflon sheet pan I inherited from the house purchased during my finisher marriage.  The previous owner of the house, Mrs. Flugelspiele, died at 96 leaving an empty house except for the brown pan, forgotten in a drawer under the oven. My finisher husband didn't care that I took the pan. He is indifferent to cake, a rare overlap in our tastes.

I turned the bowl with one hand and ploughed the batter with the mixer, pushing it through as I poured in the yolks in three separate additions, mixing thirty second for each one. The yolks were a rich yellow, near orange, from the full life led by the chickens. Under my breath I counted out the seconds. The Cake Bible instructs that mixing is more than simple combining, mixing builds the structure of the cake.

I scraped the batter from the sides with a neat palette-shaped scraper complete with thumbhole that came from Thea's third stepmother, who passed away recently. She was a tremendous cook, Mrs. Townsend the third (or fourth?). She taught her stepdaughter to cook and to raise productive and individuated hens. As well as the scraper, I inherited Mrs. Townsend's blue and white table cloth that begs to be flung on the grass under a tree for a picnic. This afternoon I will spread it on the birthday table, where it will contrast oddly ¾ beautifully, to the eye of my daughter ¾ with the blue whipped cream frosting she requested.           

As I built the structure of the cake, mixing in the second batch of yolks, I was thinking about the persistence of things, small plastic scrapers even, in the face of the transitory nature of people, how knowledge is either passed on, taught by a mentor, a cook perhaps, or it isn't, but tablecloths, plastic bowl scrapers and Teflon sheet pans remain.

On the countertop beside me the brown pan stood, thinly buttered and the surface covered evenly by fine soft flour spread by tilting and tapping, as I had watched my mother do. My parents were together forever almost. Now one eats cake in heaven with Mrs. Flugelspiele and the three or four Mrs. Townsends. The other parent is on earth and is lonesome in a way that cake cannot touch.

As I was thinking of the wisdom of the elders, both the cooks and the non-cooks, passed down in bibles or taught beside a stove, and the wonderful hunger of children for meaning and for cake, the mixer began to smoke.

The morning sun was pouring through the window and the smoke was roiling out the rear of the appliance, making my nose twitch. I beat faster to get the last batch of sunset colored egg yolks from the vicious boot-loving chickens incorporated and the cake in the oven before the mixer could catch fire. I am usually careful with things. I learned from my atheist parents that tools are to be respected. But I accelerated through the dense batter, driving the badly designed mixer, almost older than I.

At present I don't have a cooking mentor or a husband. My skills in both areas are in stasis. The children are with me for ten or so more birthday cakes apiece, as I become either a better or a worse cook. Used sparingly, the tools may endure. Love isn't like that I suppose. Love, like skill, gets better with use.

As I revved the mixer, smoking and reeking, I felt a surge of happiness that I was outliving this object. Not that I wanted to kill off my appliances, but for once the person was outlasting the thing. Score: One for the cook, zero for the mixer.

I had doubled the recipe to provide for ten three-year-old girls, some older brothers, and whichever moms would want a piece. My notations in the margin of the well-worn page of The Cake Bible read "8  egg yolks + one egg to fit brown pan." The recipe is a simple one with few ingredients and good eggs are essential for the transparent flavor of the cake. From my friend Thea's chickens, I had a dozen beautiful eggs, no two alike.

The Mixer is also published on Psychology Today and in the New Ohio Review (NOR) (Fall 2009)