Recently Jenny sent me an editorial from the New York Times about reflection. The author seemed to think that end-of-year pondering was less than helpful. Apparently studies have shown that people who thought incessantly about their depression or analysed the relationships they were in were either no more likely to fix things, or in fact less so. However, one thing I noticed was that it never mentioned whether any action was taken towards improvement, or whether they were simply.....wallowing. I'd have to read the article again to confirm my train of thought, as its been several days since reading, and I got distracted in the midst of my own original response, but I wondered. Because there is a time when self-reflection is necessary, not for one's survival, but in order to thrive--not to act upon, not to judge, simply to acknowledge. To see things for the way they are. Whoever said the unexamined life is not worth living was on to something. Not only is it not worth living, it may in fact be unlivable. A spiritual inventory is one of the most important processes we have, a sacred ritual that empowers us and grounds us.
For me, the end of December is such a time. While for some the cycle of newness begins in the fall, when the harvest is at its peak, the traditional end of the year, when everything seems frozen and here in the north often actually is, gives me the necessary pause for reflection. Or, more aptly, for scrying on this thing that is my life. The lake in my front yard is frozen nearly solid, with only a narrow black channel of warmer current. But from our cove to nearly halfway across to Canopus Hill , the ice is a product of slow freezing: of daily fluctuations, thawing and re-freezing, that white ice crazed with crystals yet entirely motionless. As I wrote this by hand in my journal, it was also covered with a morning's fine dusting of snow. Instead of being simultaneously a reflection of the sky and a glimpse of the abundant, though wet, life beneath, the lake was blank: a perfect white sheet of paper: a movie screen.
(It was then that Robin came in from out of the snow of his short walk, and I drove him to the station in Garrison, that perfect little town carved into the cliff bank of the Hudson River, stopping at the general store for coffee and doughnuts, looking out over the falling snow above the river, the birds darting among the red thorns, talking about the normal life, the simple life, before I put him on the train with a quick kiss on the cheek and drove back over the mountain in the blinding wet snow and the magical snowy New Year's Eve twilight was gone)
This kind of reflection is more than self-analysis, while also being less than it--or perhaps by being less than it. There is second-guessing one's action, and there is meditation upon one's soul. One's actions, in a sense, are finite. One's soul is not. It is true, in both physics and human relationships, that to an extent a single action is infinite, in the sense that it reverberates and affects each thing in turn, causing re-action and new action. Soul manages to escape that, encompasses the whole at the outset, outside of time. There comes a point, one hopes, where one stops observing what one has done and begins to observe, quite simply, who one is. It's a subtle shift, one that often takes years or even a lifetime, but one that must be made to go beyond mere omphaloskeptic self-absorption into something spiritual. I hate to use the word "useful" because reflection is not a tool, which seems to be the general opinion. It is not a machine into which you put two quarters to come out with a hypothesis that can then be applied to the situation at hand. Meditation is not a transaction. In our consumer society, we often fail utterly to understand that. It's not something of which we can ask, "What's in it for me?" without being disappointed. The answer is too enigmatic to satisfy our craving for solid proof. We want results. And the answer, of course, is simply to be in it, ourselves, both feet planted firmly in this impossible existence where we set the ones we love free downriver on the current, where the road home is slippery and often treacherous, where the silent solitary beauty of snow falling on the evergreens undoes us even as we search for the meaning of small towns nestled in valleys.
Even while we search, the answer is inside us, and if we do not stop to ask for it, we will pass it unnoticed, thinking it merely another snowfield rather than the silent wonder it is.
09 January 2006
14 December 2005
Africa Journal
about keeping a journal... I keep cameras... but here goes...
the air here is thick with the red dust that makes up most of the roads and smells of dried wood fires, diesel and brick. the sun sets early, not because it has crossed the horizon but because the atmosphere is so thick with exhaust and dirt that it creates a higher softer horizon.... burnishing everything the light falls on an hour before the real sun sets below the real horizon .... the markets teem at this hour... small wooden shacks with corrugated tin roofs... goods dangling like so many unfulfilled wishes... one sign in particular caught my eye 'librarie du savoir' ... it was closed ... and in so many ways so is Mali... there is no god here or devil... just little gods and little devils ... who like the shops open and close themselves to us at whim... I walked the 4 miles to the 'guare' (the bus stop where most of the trafficking takes place) ... the same walk the kids take... I was looking for the 'locateurs' (trafficking agents) ... who kidnap these kids... in the middle of this squalor of limping buses and touts and mud and piss and tilted everythings I finally saw one and he saw me... and it was like we knew each other... and the knowledge that those who prey upon others may one day be preyed upon...
That is part of today... save this for me... as I normally don't write that much... and share it and my love with [your husband]
RR
25 November 2005
Pie Dreaming: A Deconstruction of My Coming of Age as My Father's Oldest Son
Apple, pumpkin, blueberry, and--in a minute or two--coconut custard. For most people, Thanksgiving is about turkey and stuffing, though some people refer to it mysteriously as "dressing" as if it went on the outside of the bird, cranberry sauce, football, and of course mashed potatoes and gravy.
For my family, it's all about the pie.
When we were little, my dad discovered that he didn't like most coconut custard pies. The ones from the bakery, in addition to having crusts that weighed about as much as the Hindenburg, had the wrong texture. They weren't....well, custardy. In order for a coconut custard pie to meet my father's strict epicurean standard, it needed to have a distinctly custard-like texture, smoother than pudding, almost as creamy as the filling in a Boston cream doughnut (and those were another story). Which meant two things. The first one was the obvious detail of cooking it in a water bath, which most large-scale bakeries no longer bothered to do. But the second is where my father's quirkiness started to show through. You see, my father liked his coconut custard pie with the coconut floating on the top. This meant that the baker had to pay close attention during baking, regardless of the fact that he or she might be slicing apples or rolling out another pie crust or even mashing potatoes while the custard simmered away in its water bath. Halfway through the baking time, the oven opened, out came the pie, and on went the coconut, thus giving the custard time to set, enough to hold the weight of the flakes of coconut.
But that wasn't the half of it. My father also knew the deep truth about pie-making: there is nothing more criminal than a soggy crust. Lusciously soaked in apple and cinnamon and nutmeg, yes. Soggy from drowning under three cups of egg and milk and sugar, not so much. No, my father insisted on baking the pie shell for his beloved coconut custard separately. Surely he's not the only cook in the world to do this, because there exist such exotic things as clay-moulded pie weights (though why anyone would need anything other than a one-pound bag of pinto beans and a length of aluminum foil is beyond me to this day. They're just as reusable, too; my father has had the same bag of "pie beans" for more than thirty years.) This isn't the weirdness. The weirdness is what comes next.
One would think that an empty pie shell and a fully-cooked coconut custard filling would not be too hard to merge. One would be, in this case, gravely mistaken. The obvious problem is the aesthetic one: an upside down custard is a vulnerable thing at best. At its worst it's pockmarked, pale, watery, and prone to weeping. Failing that, it also doesn't fit snugly into its crust, like a child's fist does into a mitten. Even if it did, the coconut would all be on the bottom, which defeats the obsessive-compulsive routine of pulling the pie out half-baked to add the eponymous ingredient. No, this does not do at all. In order for a coconut custard pie to be a proper coconut custard pie, at least if you were born a Monahan, the pie must undergo a transformation that defies all logic (and occasionally gravity.) The pie must be slud.
That was not a typo. Perhaps it was my father's own coming of age in the fifties, in Brooklyn. Or maybe it was the fact that my mother's a die-hard Mets fan. Her theory is that it comes from "they woulda had him at second, but he slud." Regardless of the etymology, it is the only word that adequately describes the precariousness and absurdity of the entire pie undertaking. The baked custard must be slud, with a flourish, like an omelette from a pan, but it must be slud not onto a plate, but into a waiting pie crust. Furthermore, this bit of acrobatics must be performed at the holiday table during coffee, in front of the entire family, including friends, orphaned neighbours going through divorces, and inevitably a priest or two. This heightens the drama, raising the stakes from simple culinary manouevre to a sort of dessert as theatre.
It takes equal parts caution and frivolity, care and sang-froid, control and a damn the torpedoes kind of attitude. What's the worst that can happen? The entire custard could land in Aunt Doris's lap? Not likely, unless the tablecloth is greased. No, the realistic worst-case scenario is ugly enough, and it's happened more than once. I'm not describing a dessert that looks more like a quiche, or even scrambled eggs. What I'm talking about here is swearing in front of your mother.
Pie-sludding was always my father's honour. It was always the high point of Thanksgiving dinner, even more exciting for us girls than getting to finally listen to Christmas carols on the drive home. It was sometimes the only time the whole extended clan was actually around the table together, instead of snoozing or watching the game or off in Patrick's room playing whatever video game was cool that year. Just when we were getting bored, someone would call down the hallway that Jackie was getting ready to do the pie. And off we would go, joystick dangling and the enemy shooting at us undefended, obliterating us in a fireball of epic proportion.
Then one year it happened. No, not a custard-wearing catastrophe. Grad school. More specifically, grad school in Spokane, three thousand miles away from the family table in Staten Island. One night in May, shortly before I packed up my Volvo wagon and drove across I-90, I came downstairs to find my father in the kitchen, stirring something and peering intently into the double-boiler. I sniffed. This could mean only one thing. Coconut custard pie--but completely out of season. It was the one thing he gave me when I left for Washington, except for his father's Estwing hammer that was older than I was. When I went away to NYU at 18, it was advice about drugs and birth control and not getting mugged. When I left for Spokane, he didn't say a word. He just taught me how to slud the pie.
Ever since then, the pie has been my duty and my honour to bring to the family table. We don't go to Staten Island anymore; only two of us live there. The cousins have all married or gone off to reform school (or both), divorce has taken some people to Florida or Easton, and our grandparents are long dead. For a long time I continued the pie ritual at my own parents' house, in the enormous plaid kitchen where my mother spends two-thirds of her day, not because of the stove but because of the massive oak table where she reads or does her crossword in the southern exposure. I got married nine weeks ago to a chef, a beloved, funny man with long blond hair and a goatee who loves to sing Doors songs while he shuffles back and forth from oven to counter to sink, lining his favourite knives up like toy soldiers next to the cutting board. We didn't have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving; apparently that's something I'm going to have to get used to. On a holiday that's traditionally all about food, if you're a chef, you're at work. If you're a chef's wife, you're curled at home under an afghan, reading a novel and trying not to think about what you're missing while every family around you in this nation is sitting down to their tables and feasting. You're waiting, for the restaurant to close, for the truck to pull into the driveway, for your husband to slump in through the kitchen door, his whites rumpled and mottled with stains from the night's specials.
Tomorrow our family is coming up. The whole family. Mine, and his. Because my husband is who he is, there will be turkey, a ham, stuffing with and without mushrooms, sweet and mashed potatoes, two kinds of corn, string beans, cranberry relish, cream of carrot soup, homemade rolls, and whatever else he thinks up between now and then.
But dessert is my department.
For my family, it's all about the pie.
When we were little, my dad discovered that he didn't like most coconut custard pies. The ones from the bakery, in addition to having crusts that weighed about as much as the Hindenburg, had the wrong texture. They weren't....well, custardy. In order for a coconut custard pie to meet my father's strict epicurean standard, it needed to have a distinctly custard-like texture, smoother than pudding, almost as creamy as the filling in a Boston cream doughnut (and those were another story). Which meant two things. The first one was the obvious detail of cooking it in a water bath, which most large-scale bakeries no longer bothered to do. But the second is where my father's quirkiness started to show through. You see, my father liked his coconut custard pie with the coconut floating on the top. This meant that the baker had to pay close attention during baking, regardless of the fact that he or she might be slicing apples or rolling out another pie crust or even mashing potatoes while the custard simmered away in its water bath. Halfway through the baking time, the oven opened, out came the pie, and on went the coconut, thus giving the custard time to set, enough to hold the weight of the flakes of coconut.
But that wasn't the half of it. My father also knew the deep truth about pie-making: there is nothing more criminal than a soggy crust. Lusciously soaked in apple and cinnamon and nutmeg, yes. Soggy from drowning under three cups of egg and milk and sugar, not so much. No, my father insisted on baking the pie shell for his beloved coconut custard separately. Surely he's not the only cook in the world to do this, because there exist such exotic things as clay-moulded pie weights (though why anyone would need anything other than a one-pound bag of pinto beans and a length of aluminum foil is beyond me to this day. They're just as reusable, too; my father has had the same bag of "pie beans" for more than thirty years.) This isn't the weirdness. The weirdness is what comes next.
One would think that an empty pie shell and a fully-cooked coconut custard filling would not be too hard to merge. One would be, in this case, gravely mistaken. The obvious problem is the aesthetic one: an upside down custard is a vulnerable thing at best. At its worst it's pockmarked, pale, watery, and prone to weeping. Failing that, it also doesn't fit snugly into its crust, like a child's fist does into a mitten. Even if it did, the coconut would all be on the bottom, which defeats the obsessive-compulsive routine of pulling the pie out half-baked to add the eponymous ingredient. No, this does not do at all. In order for a coconut custard pie to be a proper coconut custard pie, at least if you were born a Monahan, the pie must undergo a transformation that defies all logic (and occasionally gravity.) The pie must be slud.
That was not a typo. Perhaps it was my father's own coming of age in the fifties, in Brooklyn. Or maybe it was the fact that my mother's a die-hard Mets fan. Her theory is that it comes from "they woulda had him at second, but he slud." Regardless of the etymology, it is the only word that adequately describes the precariousness and absurdity of the entire pie undertaking. The baked custard must be slud, with a flourish, like an omelette from a pan, but it must be slud not onto a plate, but into a waiting pie crust. Furthermore, this bit of acrobatics must be performed at the holiday table during coffee, in front of the entire family, including friends, orphaned neighbours going through divorces, and inevitably a priest or two. This heightens the drama, raising the stakes from simple culinary manouevre to a sort of dessert as theatre.
It takes equal parts caution and frivolity, care and sang-froid, control and a damn the torpedoes kind of attitude. What's the worst that can happen? The entire custard could land in Aunt Doris's lap? Not likely, unless the tablecloth is greased. No, the realistic worst-case scenario is ugly enough, and it's happened more than once. I'm not describing a dessert that looks more like a quiche, or even scrambled eggs. What I'm talking about here is swearing in front of your mother.
Pie-sludding was always my father's honour. It was always the high point of Thanksgiving dinner, even more exciting for us girls than getting to finally listen to Christmas carols on the drive home. It was sometimes the only time the whole extended clan was actually around the table together, instead of snoozing or watching the game or off in Patrick's room playing whatever video game was cool that year. Just when we were getting bored, someone would call down the hallway that Jackie was getting ready to do the pie. And off we would go, joystick dangling and the enemy shooting at us undefended, obliterating us in a fireball of epic proportion.
Then one year it happened. No, not a custard-wearing catastrophe. Grad school. More specifically, grad school in Spokane, three thousand miles away from the family table in Staten Island. One night in May, shortly before I packed up my Volvo wagon and drove across I-90, I came downstairs to find my father in the kitchen, stirring something and peering intently into the double-boiler. I sniffed. This could mean only one thing. Coconut custard pie--but completely out of season. It was the one thing he gave me when I left for Washington, except for his father's Estwing hammer that was older than I was. When I went away to NYU at 18, it was advice about drugs and birth control and not getting mugged. When I left for Spokane, he didn't say a word. He just taught me how to slud the pie.
Ever since then, the pie has been my duty and my honour to bring to the family table. We don't go to Staten Island anymore; only two of us live there. The cousins have all married or gone off to reform school (or both), divorce has taken some people to Florida or Easton, and our grandparents are long dead. For a long time I continued the pie ritual at my own parents' house, in the enormous plaid kitchen where my mother spends two-thirds of her day, not because of the stove but because of the massive oak table where she reads or does her crossword in the southern exposure. I got married nine weeks ago to a chef, a beloved, funny man with long blond hair and a goatee who loves to sing Doors songs while he shuffles back and forth from oven to counter to sink, lining his favourite knives up like toy soldiers next to the cutting board. We didn't have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving; apparently that's something I'm going to have to get used to. On a holiday that's traditionally all about food, if you're a chef, you're at work. If you're a chef's wife, you're curled at home under an afghan, reading a novel and trying not to think about what you're missing while every family around you in this nation is sitting down to their tables and feasting. You're waiting, for the restaurant to close, for the truck to pull into the driveway, for your husband to slump in through the kitchen door, his whites rumpled and mottled with stains from the night's specials.
Tomorrow our family is coming up. The whole family. Mine, and his. Because my husband is who he is, there will be turkey, a ham, stuffing with and without mushrooms, sweet and mashed potatoes, two kinds of corn, string beans, cranberry relish, cream of carrot soup, homemade rolls, and whatever else he thinks up between now and then.
But dessert is my department.
14 October 2005
My Best Friend Just Hijacked My Blender
So, Robin was scheduled to come over for dinner last night, and because of all the skook he's been through recently (and also because we're dirt-poor and the herb garden is out of control) I decided to make him pasta-pesto. Which, being the brilliant friend that I am, I happen to know is his favourite meal.
Robin comes over just after 7, and beholds me in the kitchen with a vat of water on the boil, the blender out, and a huge-ass pile of basil on a dishtowel. A couple of humps of garlic, some parm, some walnuts. (neither of us likes pine nuts. Ptui!) Says to me, "So, what's for din-din?" Um, guess.
He opens the (first) bottle of white wine (Fat Bastard sauv blanc, pretty yummy) and pours us each a glass, so we can "Get obliviated." Sounds good so far. I'm picking bugs and stuff off the basil and hucking it into the blender. It's at this point that Robin, who has been telling me all about his breakup with Teri and how she thought he was a control freak, goes, "Honey......let me do that," and gets up off where he's been leaning on the kitchen table. It makes sense, right? The man's Italian. Native speaker, and all that. For chrissakes, the name on his passport is Umberto. Also, he's a complete boss in the kitchen, much like a certain husband I have. I'm used to this. I've been relegated to salad duty and baked treats for the remainder of my existence.
Anyway, after a couple of swigs of olive oil into the blender (I cannot believe we actually ran out of olive oil in my house. That's like running out of air.) and some of the garlic, he looks at me and goes, "You know you can't really make pesto in a blender. Where's your food processor?"
What, you mean the one my husband wouldn't let me get because it's just as quick for him to chop the veg himself? Yeah. That one. It's working a double in the kitchen tonight. Besides which, I've always made pesto in the blender. (possibly for just this reason, actually)
Robin, of course, has a food processor 100 yards away through the Noah's Ark style downpour. It's now 7:20, dark as a donkey's arse, and we're two thirds of the way through the Fat Bastard. So we put on our rain slickers, grab our wine glasses, cork the wine, wrap the basil up in its dishtowel, untwist the blender from its base, and pack the whole mess into a string bag. And tromp up the steps over the hill.
There we are, in one of those cataclysmically blinding downpours (sans lightning, which would have made it so....I don't know....Forrest Gump), hunkered over our wine glasses, in the dark, on these slippery slate steps over the hill, Robin's got my blender under his arm, and he stops dead in his tracks, looks at me from under the brim of his ancient Columbia danger-yellow parka hood, and goes, "Is Teri right? Am I too controlling?"
I'm very proud of myself for not actually laughing out loud.
Robin comes over just after 7, and beholds me in the kitchen with a vat of water on the boil, the blender out, and a huge-ass pile of basil on a dishtowel. A couple of humps of garlic, some parm, some walnuts. (neither of us likes pine nuts. Ptui!) Says to me, "So, what's for din-din?" Um, guess.
He opens the (first) bottle of white wine (Fat Bastard sauv blanc, pretty yummy) and pours us each a glass, so we can "Get obliviated." Sounds good so far. I'm picking bugs and stuff off the basil and hucking it into the blender. It's at this point that Robin, who has been telling me all about his breakup with Teri and how she thought he was a control freak, goes, "Honey......let me do that," and gets up off where he's been leaning on the kitchen table. It makes sense, right? The man's Italian. Native speaker, and all that. For chrissakes, the name on his passport is Umberto. Also, he's a complete boss in the kitchen, much like a certain husband I have. I'm used to this. I've been relegated to salad duty and baked treats for the remainder of my existence.
Anyway, after a couple of swigs of olive oil into the blender (I cannot believe we actually ran out of olive oil in my house. That's like running out of air.) and some of the garlic, he looks at me and goes, "You know you can't really make pesto in a blender. Where's your food processor?"
What, you mean the one my husband wouldn't let me get because it's just as quick for him to chop the veg himself? Yeah. That one. It's working a double in the kitchen tonight. Besides which, I've always made pesto in the blender. (possibly for just this reason, actually)
Robin, of course, has a food processor 100 yards away through the Noah's Ark style downpour. It's now 7:20, dark as a donkey's arse, and we're two thirds of the way through the Fat Bastard. So we put on our rain slickers, grab our wine glasses, cork the wine, wrap the basil up in its dishtowel, untwist the blender from its base, and pack the whole mess into a string bag. And tromp up the steps over the hill.
There we are, in one of those cataclysmically blinding downpours (sans lightning, which would have made it so....I don't know....Forrest Gump), hunkered over our wine glasses, in the dark, on these slippery slate steps over the hill, Robin's got my blender under his arm, and he stops dead in his tracks, looks at me from under the brim of his ancient Columbia danger-yellow parka hood, and goes, "Is Teri right? Am I too controlling?"
I'm very proud of myself for not actually laughing out loud.
11 September 2005
Learning to Swim
Recently I've had two or three separate sources suggest that I set aside time for grief each day. There's an inherent misstep in that suggestion.
The misstep is the supposition that grief behaves.
Grief is a crock. It won't come out when you invite it, not even when you coax it out with pillows and your best journal and time alone and silent in the mountains. Instead it sneaks out, impervious to convenience, and smothers your attempts to do the laundry, to get a day's work done at the office, to have a logical conversation with an unrelated party.
Grief is a petty thief, stealing away what little resolve you have to soldier on, to persevere gracefully in the face of things, to remain intact once and for all.
Now I know why Daniel is afraid of water. It's not because he can't swim, or because he thinks the boat will turn him over and trap him like it did George. It's because he is so consumed by grief over I don't know what that he's already drowning. The waves have already closed over his head, and in his flailings he took hold of my arm and tried to drag me down to the bottom with him.
Like him, I hate and resent my grief, because it stifles me. It surrounds me, and keeps me from drawing a full breath lest it pour into my lungs like lake water. My ears pound with it, and my eyes swim with its blood. But I will not let this take me under.
The misstep is the supposition that grief behaves.
Grief is a crock. It won't come out when you invite it, not even when you coax it out with pillows and your best journal and time alone and silent in the mountains. Instead it sneaks out, impervious to convenience, and smothers your attempts to do the laundry, to get a day's work done at the office, to have a logical conversation with an unrelated party.
Grief is a petty thief, stealing away what little resolve you have to soldier on, to persevere gracefully in the face of things, to remain intact once and for all.
Now I know why Daniel is afraid of water. It's not because he can't swim, or because he thinks the boat will turn him over and trap him like it did George. It's because he is so consumed by grief over I don't know what that he's already drowning. The waves have already closed over his head, and in his flailings he took hold of my arm and tried to drag me down to the bottom with him.
Like him, I hate and resent my grief, because it stifles me. It surrounds me, and keeps me from drawing a full breath lest it pour into my lungs like lake water. My ears pound with it, and my eyes swim with its blood. But I will not let this take me under.
28 August 2005
Madge! I Soaked in It!
Someday I'll look back on today and laugh, but right now we are not amused.
What a colossal waste of a day. For some unknown reason I decided that I would colour my hair to get the highlights back in it for the wedding.
Also for some unknown reason, all hell broke loose on the top of my head. Sisters, I'm talking Baskin Robbins. I looked like a slushee for a couple of hours there. Thank god for Lisa, who called from Peoria to tell me that the household product most likely to tone down an accident of crimson proportion is....good old Palmolive.
Nevertheless, it did a number on me and I've now got an appointment at something inexplicably called Atelier Premiere Salon de Frou Frou or some fool thing, where tomorrow for more money than I undoubtedly have Heather will do something called "single process colour." I hope she also does something that I call "fix."
This is what happens when you let wedding planning go to your (admittedly now very squeaky clean) head.
What a colossal waste of a day. For some unknown reason I decided that I would colour my hair to get the highlights back in it for the wedding.
Also for some unknown reason, all hell broke loose on the top of my head. Sisters, I'm talking Baskin Robbins. I looked like a slushee for a couple of hours there. Thank god for Lisa, who called from Peoria to tell me that the household product most likely to tone down an accident of crimson proportion is....good old Palmolive.
Nevertheless, it did a number on me and I've now got an appointment at something inexplicably called Atelier Premiere Salon de Frou Frou or some fool thing, where tomorrow for more money than I undoubtedly have Heather will do something called "single process colour." I hope she also does something that I call "fix."
This is what happens when you let wedding planning go to your (admittedly now very squeaky clean) head.
11 August 2005
I Was a Rebo
I was a Rebo. (ree-boe)
I cannot explain a Rebo to you, really. Alas, Rebos are now defunct. Rebos all had their lockers in (of all places) Rebo Hall. No one really knows the origin of the word "rebo," nor why some people insist it is spelled "rhebo," so don't ask. Anyone left on the planet who still knows no longer has enough teeth left in their head to tell us.
Rebo Hall was a short, side hall that dead-ended at the stage doors to the auditorium. There were all of two classrooms in Rebo, one of which was the English classroom of the theatre director.
Art and theatre geeks had lockers in Rebo, as did the occasional punk radio geek, band geek, darkroom geek, journalism geek, or geek-geek. Lockers in Rebo were not "assigned" by the office (well, they were, but if you found an assignee in "your" locker on the first day of school, they usually gladly left for a locker somewhere in the main hall where all the cool kids were). Lockers in Rebo were bequeathed by their previous tenants. There was a caste system (no pun intended) in the locker assignments as much as there was in the acting and tech sub-groups of Rebo.
My senior year, my crowning glory. I had locker 679. All a tech girl could ask for. Well, that and getting assigned as light board operator for the spring musical. Locker 679, in addition to having the 7 scratched out, was the locker closest to the stage door, in a row of exactly three lockers. Locker 679 had been handed down through the eighties and into the early nineties, from Shelly Kierman, before her from David Palmer, before David from Andy Walsh (not even my older sister, former tech geek, had reached 679), and Andy had inherited it from......insert angelic chorus......Susie Crowell. (production note: the supporting cast sighs dreamily, men in angelic lust, women in plain envy of her beauty and sweetness: "Susieee Crowelllllll......") The high point of my senior acting class--much of which, oddly, involved chopping vegetables--was when the theatre director was giving notes on a scene and he growled at me, "and get your damn hair out of your face, you look like Susie Crowell." I walked on air all day. I had been compared to Susie Crowell!
I still have dreams about high school, and in these dreams the locker combination has not changed, which is funny, because we each had our own locks--but in each dream, the success of the dream as dream vs. nightmare depends on whether or not I can get into this locker.
But regardless of how the dream turns out, in real life, I was a Rebo. The last of the Rebos, in fact. They tore the lockers out several years ago, as part of renovation. This summer they renovated the auditorium, and moved stage storage. Harry retired. Susie is married and living in Baton Rouge, but soccer players get nose-jobs and act in Oscar-winning films. Rebo Hall is dead.
Long live Rebo.
I cannot explain a Rebo to you, really. Alas, Rebos are now defunct. Rebos all had their lockers in (of all places) Rebo Hall. No one really knows the origin of the word "rebo," nor why some people insist it is spelled "rhebo," so don't ask. Anyone left on the planet who still knows no longer has enough teeth left in their head to tell us.
Rebo Hall was a short, side hall that dead-ended at the stage doors to the auditorium. There were all of two classrooms in Rebo, one of which was the English classroom of the theatre director.
Art and theatre geeks had lockers in Rebo, as did the occasional punk radio geek, band geek, darkroom geek, journalism geek, or geek-geek. Lockers in Rebo were not "assigned" by the office (well, they were, but if you found an assignee in "your" locker on the first day of school, they usually gladly left for a locker somewhere in the main hall where all the cool kids were). Lockers in Rebo were bequeathed by their previous tenants. There was a caste system (no pun intended) in the locker assignments as much as there was in the acting and tech sub-groups of Rebo.
My senior year, my crowning glory. I had locker 679. All a tech girl could ask for. Well, that and getting assigned as light board operator for the spring musical. Locker 679, in addition to having the 7 scratched out, was the locker closest to the stage door, in a row of exactly three lockers. Locker 679 had been handed down through the eighties and into the early nineties, from Shelly Kierman, before her from David Palmer, before David from Andy Walsh (not even my older sister, former tech geek, had reached 679), and Andy had inherited it from......insert angelic chorus......Susie Crowell. (production note: the supporting cast sighs dreamily, men in angelic lust, women in plain envy of her beauty and sweetness: "Susieee Crowelllllll......") The high point of my senior acting class--much of which, oddly, involved chopping vegetables--was when the theatre director was giving notes on a scene and he growled at me, "and get your damn hair out of your face, you look like Susie Crowell." I walked on air all day. I had been compared to Susie Crowell!
I still have dreams about high school, and in these dreams the locker combination has not changed, which is funny, because we each had our own locks--but in each dream, the success of the dream as dream vs. nightmare depends on whether or not I can get into this locker.
But regardless of how the dream turns out, in real life, I was a Rebo. The last of the Rebos, in fact. They tore the lockers out several years ago, as part of renovation. This summer they renovated the auditorium, and moved stage storage. Harry retired. Susie is married and living in Baton Rouge, but soccer players get nose-jobs and act in Oscar-winning films. Rebo Hall is dead.
Long live Rebo.
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