Three Things

Here are three small things that never, ever fail to bring me joy.

1) FRESH VEGGIES: My farmer's market basket that arrives at school every Wednesday filled with fresh, local produce of the season. "Benji, Theo and vegetables," the principle says into her walkie-talkie in the car-pool lane. I dig in, inhale the dirt and green and fruit, and then I put my hand into the produce grab bag like a pirate to see what surprises, what treasures lie within.

2) HARUKI MURAKAMI: Every time I pick up one of his books, and disappear into his strange, bizaare Japanese detective novel/psychological thriller/journey into the unconscious novels I am thrilled and all my love of life, of mystery, of Japan, is restored. He never, ever lets me down. For me, he is the perfect novelist.

3) MY BOYS: Watching them go down the steps in the morning, their backpacks on their backs--Theo gripping his wand and the Harry Potter tome du jour, Benji just skipping, checking his strawberry plants, and looking at the sky. Then all of them piling into the little red mini with Jonathan like clowns, and zooming off down the road listening to the Beatles and doing math challenges in the car.

Time

Sometimes it feels like the world is on fire and everything is happening at once in every direction so fast you can't even keep up but you are scrambling and trying and it is good, so good, and you just keep running and praying you don't fall down.

That was last week.

Sometimes everything slows so completely to a stop that it feels like the world has died, everyone you know is asleep, and you are on hold, alone, forever, outside of time, outside of place, in a place where nothing ever happens at all.

That is this week.

Too Dry!

After a winter and spring of wet it is dry, unbearably dry, in Los Angeles.

Everything is still green and lush--for maybe a week more-but the air is so devoid of moisture I wake up every hour at night with my throat parched and sore, reaching for water.

The weather is beautiful, with cloudless blue days and gorgeous golden light, but my lips are chapped and my nose keeps bleeding.

I long for Maple trees and blue lakes and green places, where I think my body might be happier.

I am not meant for the desert.

Checking in with My Gardening Muse

It's year two of my garden and I feel less fear. I have also given less attention.

But I do feel different; I have faith the plants will grow, some will die, and most of it will not be my fault as long as I turn up and water. That is just the cycle of things.

I tried not to overcrowd my plants, because last year I crammed so many plants in each box that the plants had to grow OUT of the boxes seeking sun, and some died beneath the leaves of others.

I had compost this year to use for planting. A year of vegetarian trash has been converted into deep, loamy soil filled with earth worms. I was amazed. Jonathan really could not believe it.

Also, after two years at LCW and gardening classes, Theo really is confident in the garden. He knows what he is doing, and he does it without fear. He shakes out the roots and plants them tenderly. He grows potatoes and plants seedlings. He could work in a nursery. He just inspires confidence.

I put in peas and tomatoes (a big variety, no neurotic heirlooms) and squash and cucumbers and eggplant and zucchini and three sweet caroline watermelons (a weakness: sometimes I pick my plants just for the poetry of their names)

I went up to visit my fledgling garden on Sunday and nothing seemed to have grown. Animals had dug holes, and a few plants had lost their lives. It was neither exciting, nor depressing. But I was nervous to show Jill Tanner, my gardening muse.

But today I invited her up for a look. She climbed up the terraces in her stylish black top, designer sunglasses and black flats, and praised me and encouraged me.

Oh, I lapped it up like child.

"Your garden looks great!" She said. "Great job with the compost! Oh, your plants look so healthy. Your peas won't survive, you need some new watermelons, plant them in the other corner for more sun, and I would err on the side of overcrowding. Yes, I will give you a sungold seedling (our most favorite tomato--so sweet it tastes like candy). Oh, you are doing so well!"

I felt like an initiate. Still a beginner, but more confident. I can do it.

This weekend, watermelons, pole beans, and some wacky strains of cucumber (last year I fell in love with an Armenian cucumber, all prickly and lemon-flavored).

I feel proud. Very proud.

Pictures to come. I promise.

A Thought...

If I pushed myself as hard as I pushed my boys, if I planned for myself as much as I plan for them, if I practiced something myself as much as I work to make them practice, if I did as much homework on something every day as I make them do, what would happen?

It is only fair that I should try. Don't you think?

Recession Gourmet

I love to cook.

This does not mean I am a great cook, but I do love to cook. I love to be in the kitchen, surrounded by people I love (a restless husband, children drawing or doing homework, or girlfriends sitting at the table and telling me great and funny stories.) I like to sip a little wine, crank up some really great music to annoy my neighbors, throw open the windows and doors so the late afternoon spring sunshine streams in, and offer tastes along the way to all the hungry people waiting around. (boys, friends, husband). That really does make me happy. Like I am feeding the world.

At least my little world.

When I first had people to cook for (first a husband, then some boys) I was so happy I probably went a little crazy. I could no longer live on yogurt and aglio and olio. I had people to cook for! To nourish!

Back then, when cooking for people still felt new, I loved to pick exotic recipes and then hunt down the crazy--and obscure--ingredients--from all over L.A.. It was a great way to tour this town of ethnic districts. Indian spices in Atwater. Fish in Glendale. Weird Asian vegetables in Thai town. Expensive European ingredients, Whole Foods and the Mayfair. Armenian specialties, my corner market.

It was my own personal city-wide scavenger hunt.

But I am more tired now, and poorer. I can no longer approach each meal as an excuse to travel from one side of this sprawling city to the other and spend extravagantly on hard to find ingredients from high end cookbooks.

I have to be creative, and make do.

A note on this: my mother was creative, and made do. In some ways this was cool. She grew vegetables, made yogurt from cultures, made jam (that never really hardened, but tasted soooooo good), and could open a refrigerator of nothing and create something delicious. Sometimes I was filled with wonder. Sometimes fear.

She was so frugal that often her eighteenth century approach to saving everything to make something else could go wrong. Like the time she made two giant containers worth of homemade chicken broth and froze them in our basement refrigerator. One turned over, and leaked out onto the floor, and began to putrify. We could not identify the source of the horrible stink in our house. I think our dog found it.

By the time we did find it, the smell was so awful that my father and I had to put handkerchiefs over our mouths like we were running through tear gas, run and get the plastic pitchers, run them outside, dig a hole, and bury them under two feet of dirt. I could not eat chicken broth, or chicken, for twenty years. (Is this what made it so easy to be a vegetarian???)

So you can see there was some trauma in the creative use of food.

But now, with a family of my own, and less money, I have to do some of the same things (minus the rotten chicken broth). When I make a chicken, two days later I make chicken soup. When I cook vegetables, a few days later I dump the leftovers into spaghetti sauce, or risotto, or soup. Often the first round was wonderfully spiced so the flavors travel onto the next dish like a secret hidden spice capsule--hard to detect, but there.

This is a work through the leftovers week, so I am thinking of all this, and how I have changed.

I still love my scavenger hunt for the perfect ingredient. But I also love pulling something leftover from the refrigerator and making it the base of something totally new. I mean I get turned on! I want to dance around the kitchen and cackle! I feel gleeful -- like I pulled one over on somebody.

Today I took our perfectly spiced easter lamb leftovers and threw them into a pot to make harira, the ramadan staple, made of lentils, chickpeas, lamb and other spices. The only ingredient I had to buy was saffron.

I feel so delighted with myself. So resourceful and creative and frugal--but also gourmet.

And I think, this is probably how those women in Morocco felt when they made their harira. They were not running from store to store across a city a million miles wide to get each ingredient. These were ingredients in their house they could pull down in a pinch and slow-cook to deliciousness while they went about their work.

It is a private pleasure--no one can really appreciate but me. I don't want to brag about my frugal creations. But it is a wonder--to create something magnificent out of something that was nearly ready to be thrown away.

And I wonder what my boys will think of me, and my cooking. I mean I know they love it--they cannot help it--it is home. That is a perk of the (mother) job.

But will they remember the scavenger hunts (those can be so fun) or the frugal recreations?

I'll get back to you in 20 years and let you know...

What is YOUR Heroic Symphony?

Last weekend we went to one of the fabulous children's concerts at Disney Hall, put on by the LA Phil. These concerts are so wonderful that last year Jonathan and I were practically in tears over the beauty of the music.

So last Saturday we went again (with the boys still dressed in their new baseball uniforms).

The day's theme was "Heroic Composers."

It began with Beethoven's Heroic symphonies, but then highlighted four "heroic" pieces composed by students who had been studying composing on a special two year program. The students seemed to be college age or just past. Or just before. Young.

Each piece had a well-thought out theme, which the conductor explained before it played so we could listen for it. Then the conductor told us what to listen for. For example, the first piece was based on a Nordic creation myth, about the Gods bringing two pieces of driftwood to life. The piece began with "woodwinds," the Gods were represented by magical metallic sounding rhythms and melodies, and "life" was represented by drums--which slowly grew into a hearbeat.

The second piece, written by a video game aficionado, was about an oppressive ruler, an oppressed people, a strain of a folk-song that kept their souls alive, and finally a rebellion. You could hear those things happen!

The third song was about a hero trying to hear his own melody, his own soul, among all the distractions of life, and the modern world. So the beautiful melody was often drowned out by the cacophony, frenzy, allure of the loud, full symphony. But the hero's melody kept coming back, gradually finding itself, and growing. Nice. It reminded me of Jonathan and Theo.

The final hero's journy was about a regular person/hero. This piece was about a hero who had a series of adventures, all separate, barely linked--at least in no obvious way. They were simply movements, separate, beautiful, only vaguely connected. At the end, the "hero" is dying, and at last finds peace, as he looks back at his adventures.

That felt like me!

I know that storyline is in all the myths, but it was so good to hear it as a symphony. That is how I feel about my life. It is composed of a series of adventures. I know they are supposed to build off each other, feed into each other, reflect some larger, well-laid plan. But for me, that has not happen. I have had many "chapters" or "adventures," and the only thing that seems to link them all is me. But I love them all--all my chapters, my adventures--I would not trade one of them in.

I exhaust myself sometimes, looking for some pattern that I hope is there, that I believe is eluding me, and will only emerge later. But for me, I think the only common thread is a sense of adventure, of my own desperate attempt to experience all the world has to offer--in whatever way I can.

And that is enough.

I do not need to find a thread of meaning.

I hope that I, too, when I lie on my deathbed, will feel peace about my adventures.

I also hope I never stop having them.

I say that, because I feel like I am transitioning to a new adventure right now. Funny. This adventure is not grand. There is no leaping from a cliff, climbing on an airplane, growing a baby and birthing it, involved.

But I feel I am on the cusp of new things, new challenges, new ways of being. A new chapter.

And I feel like I need go out and find my Heroic symphony. I will not hold myself to actually writing it--but at least some piece of music that I love, and that seems to speak to some part of my soul.

Perhaps Chopin. Perhaps Mozart. Perhaps Stravinsky.

I will let you know when I find out.

What about you?

What is your journey? What piece of music tells your story? What is the soundtrack of your life (as they say at KCRW)?

Tell me, please!