the swoon and how to get it

I’m writing this early and breaking a personal rule by talking about something before it’s happened. But there’s a lot to be said for writing a post early and letting it go up automatically, and I don’t believe in jinxes, so here we go: Tomorrow I intend to visit two used bookstores in a town just outside of Ottawa. Finding a new UBS is a giddy experience for me, because my personal addiction is not easily quenched. Here you see two books from my collection of eighties teen romances. These two are from my particular favorite line, First Love from Silhouette. It’s easier to find Sweet Dreams up here, which is a bit of a downer, but they’ll also do just fine. My eye is open for my very favorite First Love, which actually has a love interest named Myron. (If I’d only known!) I could buy these things on eBay or Amazon, but it would ruin the chase.

My mom started buying these for me when I was very little. She would go to KMart during the day, and I’d come home from school to find a book or two on my bed with a new shirt or pair of shoes. She liked to surprise me. (Today I’m overcome with emotion because of that gesture, which is so much of her in one behavior.) I ate them up. They’re incredibly short and have large typefaces, but—and this is a humbling thing to admit—the real reason I ate them up is because they were about boys, which are absolutely mystifying to a girl of ten, eleven, or twelve years. I read my fair share of grown-up romances even at that time, but there is something about these that is more enchanting than I can probably articulate here in one three-paragraph entry. And it’s not just the sweaters and the eighties hair on the covers. See that chick on the right-hand book? Some days, my hair looks like that in 2010. My hair has never gotten over the eighties.

So many of them are bad; it’s one reason that there are blogs out there that mock them. And honestly, a lot of them deserve the mockery. (Wait till I tell you about the one with the circus monkey someday.) The thing I can tell today, from the vantage point of many years, is that they were incredibly didactic: They taught you how to be a good girlfriend, what to look for in a boy, what parts of yourself never to sacrifice, what kind of friend to be. Today’s books for young people are so much more sophisticated that it’s hard to believe that my naive favorites were written twenty-five years ago instead of fifty. (Although I must admit that Beverly Cleary’s teen romances were also among my favorites, and those were written in the 1950s.) No one’s relationship is perfect in real life, but I do believe that some people are made for you and that the swoon is not only real, but necessary. These books taught me, way before I was really ready, how to pick ‘em. I didn’t even know what I was learning, but it paid off in the end. So off I go, bearing cash and tote bags, and my fingers are crossed in hopes for a motherlode. Wish me luck?

an earned retirement

These are the dishes I bought at Target when I graduated from college and moved to Georgia. I have fed a lot of people on them in the past thirteen years; they’ve crossed North America twice. Nothing looks as good on them as sliced red, black, and yellow tomatoes with shavings of bright basil and a drizzle of olive oil. I had eight of everything at one point, but now I’m down to four dinner plates, four bowls, and seven side plates, and the ones I have left are chipped, cracked, and oh, heavy as a guilty conscience. I’m ready to move them out of daily rotation and into the cabinet where my grandmother’s dishes stay safe.

They’ll be slowly retired as I bring home more of these new dishes, a few at a time. Yesterday I picked up four of the pasta bowls first, and they’re just perfect. The tiniest hint of cream in the glaze, lighter than my blue beasties but heavier than Corelle, and they let the food speak for itself. And it does that, don’t you think? The dishes went straight into service when I found this beautiful salmon. A quick search for “salmon pasta” gave me pages of Alfredo recipes, and that’s just too heavy for this weather. But buried in the results was this quick Giada De Laurentiis entree that was perfect—so perfect that I know I’ll make it again.

Pasta with Lemon, Basil, and Salmon

adapted from Food Network: Giada De Laurentiis

makes 2 very hearty servings, or save some for lunch

• 1/3 pound whole wheat pasta (these are penne rigate)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced (this will wind up being 99.9% raw; use less if you’re not used to it)
• 1.5 tablespoons of your best olive oil, plus some for sauteeing the fish
• salt and black pepper to taste; lemon pepper if you’ve got it
• 3 salmon filets (these are all around 5 ounces; Myron eats two)
• 1/4 cup tiny basil leaves (or chopped larger ones)
• 2 tablespoons capers, rinsed if packed in salt
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• a pinch or two of red pepper flakes, optional
• 1.5 cups of cooked vegetables of your choice, optional (see step 3)
• 2 cups baby spinach leaves

1. Cook the pasta in salted water until done to your preference. Toss cooked pasta with chopped garlic, a little salt and pepper (not too much!) and 1.5 tablespoons of olive oil.
2. Meanwhile, season salmon filets with lemon pepper and a bit of salt. Preheat a pan or grill and add a small amount of olive oil. Pan-sear or grill the fish until done and remove from heat.
3. Toss pasta with lemon zest, capers, basil, red pepper flakes if using, and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. Taste a little and adjust juice to taste (I used 2 tablespoons and made this very zingy). This would also be a great place to add another cooked veggie, like roasted red pepper strips, steamed broccoli florets, or grilled summer squash.
4. Place half the spinach leaves in each bowl, top with hot pasta, and rest a salmon filet on top. The heat from the pasta wilts the greens.

Yum, I tell you. We had it with broccoli on the side, and I wish I would have tossed it in with the olive oil. If I would have been able to control myself yesterday, a handful of the pasta and some flaked salmon would have made a great cold lunch today. Instead, I’m just telling you about it and wondering if it’d be overkill to serve this next week, too.

the tilt of the earth

Here you are, September. Back home, we always started school the last Wednesday in August, so by this point I’d have gauged everyone else’s clothes and found mine wanting, headed back out to KMart for the notebooks the teachers wanted us to have, and lost whichever pen was my favorite in my back-to-school trousseau. It would still be too hot for corduroy and cable knits, and the butterflies and hope for a true fresh start would already be gone. 

These days we’re back to eating dinner with the light on in the dining room instead of cringing while soccer-coach whistles interrupt our conversation. Only the sugar maples have started to change, and they have business to attend that I wouldn’t dare interrupt. Next week, school will start around here and Myron will have to go back to evading buses on his route to work along with the year-round dodging of suburban psycho-mommies who drink coffee, text, and discipline their children while driving. Most people feel a new zest when the temperatures come down and Starbucks brings back their pumpkin syrup and that crisp autumn smell hits the air. Not me. I headed south to get away from winter as soon as I was able.

Molly Lambert’s piece on This Recording today gets into the dread of it all:

I also knew nothing about the secret undertow of autumn’s nostalgia, which is DREAD. The trade-off for the beautiful natural spectacle of New England autumn is that it becomes New England winter. In California the fall crispness is just a prelude to more of the same during winter, but in most other places it acts as foreshadowing that within a couple of months it’ll be too cold to keep your eyes open outside. Fall nostalgia has a morbid undercurrent. The leaves are beautiful but they are dying. Back to school’s second self is Halloween. […] The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both. And so the flip side of anticipation is dread. You can anticipate good things happening with the seasonal change, but because you absolutely cannot predict in advance them there is also endless dread of worst case scenarios, even though the chance of every situation playing out nightmarishly is low. 

Pennsylvania winters are not as bad as New England ones, but I’d venture that Ottawa’s are at least as severe and last longer. This past summer was an anomaly here; there’s a chance this winter might be, too. The lack of light and the bone-deep cold still make me unhappy—I can’t lie about that—but I’m better able to deal with that unhappiness after years of practice. You control what you can. You get proactive: I have a light box. I have a stack of books at the ready. I have a manuscript to keep me busy when it’s too ugly to go outside. I have a bus stop three minutes from my front door. When the light starts diminishing and morning wants to fold me back into its arms for three more hours of sleep, I can fight it. April is coming. Like a good friend I can’t see often enough, I miss it as soon as it goes away.

ideas made tangible

Last week I came across a baking dish that holds one stack of lasagna noodles instead of the three you’d normally use in a 13x9 pan. I’ve always wanted one of these. I remember being in one of my first apartments, sometime in 1993 or 1994, missing my grandmother’s lasagna and lacking the enthusiasm for a week’s worth of leftovers in one pan. A few years ago, I saw a woman on television talking about her invention—a metal pan just right for a one-row lasagna. Awesome to have your brainstorm validated in that way, really.  Some manufacturer picked it up, and it became a porcelain reality on the shelf in a suburban Canadian grocery store. This weekend, I packed it full of mushrooms and the best mozzarella I could get my hands on, and the results were dinner on Saturday and Sunday nights.

I love experiencing the kind of creativity that makes me wish I’d made it myself. I wish I’d been responsible for the opening sequence of True Blood, which holds me rapt every time. Every little detail, from the cellulite on one woman’s thigh to the tension in the praying women, praying so hard, gets me right in the mood for the story. I make that wish most often when I’m reading a book that ends up being one of my favorites: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Drood by Dan Simmons come to mind because they elicit complete immersion into the world of the story. They’re novels, though, and until they’re made into films (they’d both make amazing films, Hollywood; get on that), they remain products of imagination alone. It’s a different experience to hold that creativity in your hands with a perfectly sized oblong baker.

If you could live in it, though? Because this site says that I could. It’s not an old house, but there’s room for character. So much of this appeals to me—its small size, its logic, its flexible spaces like the lower-floor apartment and the upstairs storage area. In Canada, they’d build them with the upper floors in the basement and wind up with a bungalow, according to Builder Online. It means that oversized monstrosity houses (I hate the McTerm that people use for them) are going to become as out-of-style as avocado refrigerators and macramé. Finally. Finally. If you take the tour (note: audio!), you’ll see how the closet in the adaptable suite can become a kitchenette. You’ll see that the master bedroom is a place for sleeping, not for home theaters and spa retreats. You’ll see that it’s humble, without vaulted ceilings and windows that defy curtaining. It’s not for showing off what you can afford. It’s for living in. Yes, it’s every single thought I’ve had about a house, made real in this century, with only a few hundred square feet more than my townhouse. It’s the kind of place I could stay in for decades, and I love it.

It’s one thing to have a great idea, a brainstorm that feels innovative enough that you wonder if it’s even possible, let alone whether anyone else would get it. When I come back to read a day’s work, I usually have a gut sense of whether it worked or not, whether there’s merit to it, and even that sense is fallible. But it’s another thing altogether to see that it works for other people, that it makes sense in the real world. Even if I’m not responsible for my lasagna baker or the New Economy Home, it’s a charge to see them. It means other people were thinking the way I thought. It makes me feel good about my other thoughts, the words on the screen that are still just mine.

let's go, then

Would you look at this?

I even put it in Fahrenheit, just for you. For a long time, Celsius temperatures meant absolutely nothing to me.

It won’t be lovely like this for very much longer, so I intend to be outside in it as much as I can. This means a walk today to the store to pick up a few things, absentmindedly watering the lawn while I untwist plot points in my head, and any excuse at all to be downtown amid the late summer crowds tomorrow. I’ll be eavesdropping, so hopefully I’m around boisterous, confessional people. They’re the most interesting to spy on.

And oh, holy holy have I loaded my eReader with some fabulous books for reading in the sunlight:

• The World in Half, by Cristina Henriquez
• Trouble, by Kate Christensen (she wrote The Epicure’s Lament, one of my favorite books ever)
• This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper (again, I’m a longtime fan)
• The Whiskey Rebels, by David Liss (so excited; my hometown played host to some important scenes during the Whiskey Rebellion)
• PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009

It won’t be all fun and games—I still have my words to write daily. And did I mention I still have to take the notes I’ve made for my critique group and email them along to one of my partners? Really those are all just fun, too. You probably won’t be surprised to know that some plucky, sexy guitar will be running through my head as long as the sun keeps streaming down.

It’s going to be an amazing weekend. I hope yours is packed with the good stuff.