Puzzling

You might just know that I love puzzles. I always have. My favorite one during childhood was Verticalville II. Elia, my sister, and I must have completed it two dozen times.

A few years back, after the pneumonia-induced staycation that ushered in my renewed mania for puzzles, I managed to find on eBay, an unopened, original Verticalville II. I bought it immediately, ostensibly for the boys.

Oliver doesn't much care for puzzles, but Jack is a big fan, and though he and I prefer 1,000-piecers, we've done Verticalville II -a mere 500- twice or three times since I bought it. He loves it like I do, because it's challenging but not too much so and delightfully illustrated.

Nanny enjoyed puzzles before her hands and eyes failed her. She loved landscapes: fall foliage, say, or a Christmas scene. Those aren't my bag, but since she died, the kids, Mom and I have put a few of her old ones together during visits to Lake Charles, and I always feel so happy to do so. I miss her.

I used to puzzle in my basement, but after Nutmeg employed two box tops full of inside pieces as his litter box, I've moved upstairs, by a window in my front room. My one nice room, as the kids know. There sits a decent-enough card table and a much nicer folding chair that doubles as an extra dining seat when we have more than six for dinner. 

Last night, Jack and I wrapped up this one: Fancy Buttons or some such name, a 1,000-piece by Ravensburger. It was really a near-perfect puzzle. Tough but not like the one of the snowy owl that made you want to tear your hair out and pitch the endless white pieces into the nearest fireplace. Colorful and interesting enough to keep you engaged, even during the periods of slow progress.

That's one thing I like about puzzles. They don't mind waiting if I need to take a break from them. Nothing is urgent except, perhaps, for my desire to get back to the one at hand. 

Puzzles can take full concentration or allow me to feel mindfully absent. Sorting edge pieces, for example, takes little effort, but figuring out which of four identical green circles this or that piece fits into requires a great deal more focus.

While puzzles are both random and orderly, it is always true that many pieces comprise the whole, and absent the box-top photo, you're never completely sure about what the jig is going to look like until you slot the last piece in.

Isn't that rather like life? And parenting?

Clues litter the paths we can take. Colors, shapes, parts of words and phrases, experiences, mistakes. All guide us forward, clearly or not remotely so. Some days feel successful, some feel like trapdoors that push us back to the starting point. Sometimes puzzles, life, are frustrating. We throw up our hands and stalk off. But sometimes, we hit our strides, and our shoulders life with the sense of accomplishment.

We move forward, with blind faith, determination, youthful joy and even some trepidation about what might appear when we slot the next piece correctly. When we reach the next milestone, successfully teach or learn the next skill. 

While some puzzles are whimsical flights of fancy, not unlike a choose-your-next-step adventure book, others are lithographs of life, snapshots of time and place taking shape before your eyes.  

The obvious difference of course is that a puzzle, once done, can be broken apart and tucked away for later, left to gather dust on a shelf. A goal accomplished.

Life isn't so neat. Parenting isn't ever really done. But in both, the beautiful parts are essential to the whole, and I find that lovely indeed.

Evenings with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ruth Reichl

I love living in a city that teems with cultural opportunities. This past week felt especially rich, and although I cannot wait, literally, to go to bed tonight, the fatigue is worth it.

On Wednesday, not two hours after traffic mayhem, swimming lessons, gobbling pizza, hopping the Metro and arriving in Chinatown, I made it to the historic Sixth & I synagogue where an energetic line stood waiting for the doors to open, 

I took my seat, the closest to the dais I've ever had at Sixth & I, and took in the effervescent buzz of anticipation around me. Ta-Nehisi Coates was soon to take the stage.

Have you read any of Coates' work? He writes for The Atlantic (The Case For Reparations was an incredibly journalistic accomplishment; The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration is in the Oct 2015 issue), has been published in the New York Times and has written two books. Between the World and Me is on the short list for the 2015 National Book Award, and Coates was just awarded a MacArthur Fellows grant.

Wednesday's talk was part of his book tour for Between the World and Me, his recently published letter to his son about the history and present of being black in America. Of blacks never having had full access to what Coates calls The Dream.

It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.

The letter is, as he said in an interview, a literary construct, but Coates told us that he tried to be as unsparing in this book as he is when speaking with his son. Which is to say, brutally candid about his perspectives and confusion and fears, for blacks, America and his boy. 

He feels that in doing so, real trust is built, and I agree. He has a presence and authority that comes from mincing no words and buttressing his arguments with research and facts. 

Coates grew up in Baltimore. Looking back, after college at Howard University -which he credits as the watershed experience of his life- he believes it wasn't rage or violence that really explains all he saw and witnessed on his childhood streets. It was fear. 

Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out. I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice. 

Coates' writing is so powerful. In print he often seems a hyper-intellectual firebrand. I love reading his work and admire him tremendously, but I wasn't sure what his in-real-life presence would be like. Would he seem prickly?

Not in the least. He is totally charming, affable, funny, warm, at ease and so very bright. I laughed, was brought to tears, and found myself repeatedly nodding my head in agreement or disbelief. It was an important night for me, and I enjoyed myself tremendously.

*******

Last night, T and I joined friends at Buck's Fishing and Camping (same place the Gabrielle Hamilton dinner was held; remember? I asked a three-part question!) for a dinner celebrating the release of Ruth Reichl's new cookbook/memoir, My Kitchen Year.

Long, long ago, I read two of Reichl's memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples. I can hardly remember the details, but I remember feeling enveloped by her stories, her writing, the way she wrote about childhood, adulthood, food.

I thought she was a marvelous editor at Gourmet and loved her emphasis on publishing long-form food writing. Real, substantive, literary work. When Conde Nast suddenly and unceremoniously shuttered the magazine's doors in 2009, I was both surprised and deeply disappointed. At that time, Reichl was 62, and couldn't recall the last time she hadn't had a job. What was her identity without one?

She did what she'd always done when stressed or sad. She went to her kitchen and cooked. My Kitchen Year is the result. It's a simply presented book, 136 recipes dancing with stretches of Reichl's effortless prose. You feel you can make these recipes and do so successfully, and I believe that's Reichl's aim.

She wants people back in the kitchen because she knows what transpires when one cooks to nourish oneself and others. It's something along the lines of healing. At least it was for her. 

Of course I asked a question, which was along the lines of the place and future of food memoir in a time that often prefers soundbites, and later got to sit by Ruth for a while. She was gracious and lovely and signed not only my copy of My Kitchen Year but also the old paperback copies of Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples I'd pulled from my 'favorites' shelf as I ran out the door.

Under the gloss

For the past several months, the color of our basement bathroom's walls has made me feel peevish. I get a burr in my butt every time I go in there.

The lovely shade of green I once found peaceful and whose name, Sweet Caroline, I continue to adore, lately smacks of institutional hallways in need of scrubbing and better lighting. 

On Tuesday, Jack stayed home with an upset stomach, and during our hours together, I began outlining the dingy green room with thick strips of bright blue painter's tape. Pull, rip, align and press. Pull, rip, align and press. And on and on, in fits and starts, long strips and short ones, around the corners and up and down.

Yesterday, I finished the first coat of Smoke Embers plus 25%, a soothing dove gray. Already I feel the burrs slinking away.

I love to paint walls, or any flat expanse really. There before me lies the proverbial empty canvas, ready to be given new life with little more than a clean brush and a freshly shaken gallon.

Up and down I roll the brush, pausing only to dip it in more paint or check for spots I’ve missed. It’s meditation in action. Not only is a room transformed, colored anew with promise, but so too is my mind, blissfully unfettered now from having focused on just one repetitive task for the unknown number of minutes that have swept by.

This sort of focus, on a basic job that requires concentration but little other effort, allows me to both lose myself and remain present. My subconscious mind can flit and flutter, processing all manner of idea and query on which I may have been noodling.

During the brief, intimate time I spend with the walls, I see cracks and imperfections that I didn’t before. I run my fingers over slightly protruding nails, the drips and scuffs, the unknown gunk that landed on the surface one day and decided to stick.

It's not a perfect plane underneath an aging coat of shine but rather an imperfect thing that's been added to and taken from over the years. It has supported and weathered, been asked to hide and also to bare itself completely. I like being reminded of this. I like knowing these walls better.

The walls are much like people really, even those who seem glossy and impervious to bump or fault but who, of course, aren’t. It’s worth taking time to get to know people, and it’s worth letting people really get to know us.

In all the ways society today makes us feel more connected, I think it often does so only superficially. It’s so easy to show and share only what we want others to see; impressions more than selves. A coat of paint rather than the supporting structure.

But what’s lost is depth. History. Knowing. Being known. Being proudly unique and proudly fallible, for each of us is both original and imperfect. That’s what makes us human.

Three girlfriends came for breakfast this morning. One brought fruit, unwashed and still in the plastic clamshells, and apologized for that. Another teared up as we talked about our kids and our pride in and worries for them, and she apologized for that.

But I couldn’t have been happier because plastic clamshells and random tears are just real life slowing down long enough on a busy Friday morning to wash fruit and share a Kleenex or two with unvarnished friends. That’s what’s under gloss. No apologies needed.