ask questions. people will tell you their stories if you promise
to listen
roll “history” around in your mouth
and see how it sounds when you say it out loud

test it out for righteousness
and the metallic taste of propaganda
coated in sugar

understand that the difference between those hours and these is not a flat timeline

the past inhabits the present
and the present inhabits the future

and you feel your familiar ghosts crowding in;
unknown ancestors
dreams of your former self
storied poets
anonymous nannies
and private photographers
college dreams
and immigrant fantasies,

Americana writ thickly across the land

and you in the midst of it
becoming a part of the past

newyorkminute

It wasn’t until the last day that I sat on a corner bench and raised my collar against the cold and cracked my journal: for four days I followed his tall and purposeful stride through the subways and the sidewalks and the elegant lobbies, beneath the sky-filling spans of bridges and down the hallowed and corrupted aisles of urban cathedrals, through the temporary winter foyers of artful restaurants and past the legions of doormen, (some of whom i am convinced we have interrupted in the midst of composing poems), along the curving sidewalks of frozen Central Park and over the very ground where John Lennon breathed his last on the day my mother heard my heartbeat for the first time, in and out of taxi cabs and up the stairs of the Jane hotel for a cocktail but not a 99$ room, into the darkened bustle of gay bars without women’s restrooms which makes me laugh, buzzed on gin and freedom while musicals are projected onto the walls and the scarcely clad bartenders ply their trade, past graves marked and over graves unseen and through gusts of paper confetti drifting onto sidestreets after a Lunar New Year parade, taking refuge from the biting wind over yet another cocktail and elegant scallion pancakes, seitan marsala with figs unrolling on my tongue and fennel soup eddying across my notion of what is possible, exorbitant shop windows and resilient beggars, and meanwhile there are ghosts, millions of them, Ginsberg ogling muscled Puerto Rican delivery boys in the East Village and Dorothy Parker tapping her pen on the tabletop next to her drink at the Algonquin, the woman who shares my name who was murdered in Central Park a few years back and whose face I know from the pictures, precious babies who died from adulterated milk in the tenements by the thousands because their malnourished immigrant mothers couldn’t produce breastmilk what with all the stress and work outside the home, each of us here chasing our own particular version of the American dream in this island city built on ancient bedrock and washed over by the storms of the Atlantic and I’ll just stop there for now because the laundry won’t do itself.

KP and RR… crazylove and wildgratitude.

for Jack Heil.

it would seem that there are not too many threads
between you and I

your exit came nineteen years before my arrival
and I have only a few snapshots
in the stark black and white
of the postwar years
when you married my grandmother
and held my mother on your lap
in a white tank top
with a St. Christopher medal around your neck
and a bottle of Imperial in her tiny hands

and I have only a few stories
of how you traveled for work
and how the six kids would pile in the car
to drive old highway 99 to the airport
and see you off
back in the day when you walked across the tarmac
and up the stairs
if you needed to take a plane

of how you were at a convention in Florida for work
with my Grandmother
and there was a sitter for the kids back home
and the last night you sat with her on the beach
and watched the waves
and the next day, she took one flight
and you took another
and you did not come home

of how your death tore a hole in your family
and how your widow stitched it together as best as she knew how
and your children healed in their own ways
and they grew with the scars.

Some scars never heal,
some are open even now,
fifty years later.
Your grandchildren have seen them.
We grew up bathed in the echoes
of what seemed to us a distant tragedy
and so you are part of our lives
and now we are trying to fathom
which part
that is.

so I have a few photos
and a few stories
and tonight, it occurs to me that I have something else
I am your granddaughter
I am one-fourth you.
I do not know which parts of me come from you
but it cannot be denied
that we are connected in ways
that are timeless and unknowable

and I have your headstone
and I visit it sometimes
with cedar boughs or incense
sometimes I bring you coffee
and your great-grandson,
and I wonder what you would tell me
if you could
speak
now

“maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us–”

― Mary Oliver

In memory of all those lost on Northwest Orient Flight 705

saturday night

saturday to everyone else is tuesday on my calendar. I worked a long lunch shift, and took tiny comfort from the fact that at least a couple of the waitresses wanted to be somewhere else as badly as I did. We are experts on each other’s fake smiles.

After my shift I buy toothpaste, because we are out. Walk home in a light rain, tired of being on my feet but grateful I’m walking for myself now, and not for someone’s side of ranch or glass of ice or fresh silverware. The Sound is blue-grey, the sky is blue-grey, and I’ve had the same headache for two days. Another random unexpected side effect of pregnancy. My body is producing whole pints of new blood, and all of it is taking a slow detour around my womb, made slower by my already low blood pressure. Which means, if I manage to trigger a headache, it’s aggravated every time I stand, sit, lean, or bend over. I record this as sort of an anthropological observation, but its true, I’m whining. The not-so-unpleasant side effect of the headache: I’ve begun to walk very deliberately. Gently, slowly, with intention, so as not to jar my skull or rush blood away from my head and to another part of my body. I notice more this way. More raindrops, more faces, more birdsongs.

Somewhere in Seattle, as I walk home, a family of elderly siblings is considering an offer Ryan and I made to buy their deceased mother’s house. Her name was Annie. She raised 6 children in the house and lived out her days there. It sits on a third of an acre in south Seattle, and is ringed with evergreens she planted in the 1930s. I promised her son Roger if we got the house I’d keep her birdfeeders full, something he’s been doing in her memory since the day she died. There’s a damn good chance we’ll get the house, and it won’t break us to pay the mortgage. All of this is surreal.

Walking down the alley to our house, I hold my breath to pass through the smell of the bag of cat litter one of our neighbors poured into the potholes. Our winter garden is still in the evening light, beaded with droplets of clear rainwater. The dog is giddy and overwrought when I unlock the door, and she runs in circles for a while, which seems to help.

When she’s calmed down, I profer her harness, and she walks willingly into it. We set out walking in the fading light. I leave her off leash for a while, and she bounds back and forth between smells, waiting at driveways and sidestreets on command. When we reach the busier street, she instinctively narrows the distance between us, walking in unleashed heel the rest of the way to the petstore. Inside, she greets the employees, all of whom she knows well. They lavish treats upon her in exchange for shakes and sloppy kisses. I buy her cheese hearts and peanut butter bones, and stock up on treats for a care package for my brother’s new dog, a German Shepherd rescue named Kodi.

Walking past the pizza joint on the corner, I find myself wanting pizza. We cross the street to the grocery store, where I pick out baby spinach leaves, two hothouse tomatoes, and a brick of vegan mozzarella. Also a peach and a plum, which arrived at my local grocery store courtesy of a long, fossil-fuel powered journey from Chile. I agonize over buying them for a while, then decide to get them anyway. I’m pregnant, for God’s sake. I’m allowed to do some things I wouldn’t ordinarily. This is what I tell myself in the produce aisle.

We walk home in the dark and the quickening rain. Assata takes her peanut butter bone into the livingroom, and I pour a packet of yeast into a silver mixing bowl. Feed it a cup of warm water and a tablespoon of good sugar, and sit down to wait while it “eats.” Five minutes later, add flour, then salt, then olive oil, then more flour. Easy peasy pizza crust. Knead it for a while, and let it “rest,” then roll it out on a cookie sheet. Listen to an Au Revoir Simone album, which Ryan procured for us last night. Its lovely, whimsical and sad and rambling and poignant all at once… perfect for making dough on a rainy January Saturday night.

Whisk olive oil together with dried thyme and good salt, and paint the crust with a pastry brush. scatter the fresh spinach leaves across, an inch and a half thick, then slice the tomatoes over the top. Grate on the entire brick of “follow your heart” brand mozarella, then slide the entire thing into the oven, listening for the muted clang of the cookie sheet on the hot baking rack, one of my favorite sounds.

Finish the plum, which is disappointing. A shallow imitation of what I’d really been craving, which is, to say, a plum-in-season that wasn’t picked three weeks and 8 thousand miles ago. The kitchen begins to fill with the smell of melting cheese and pizza crust and roasting tomatoes, and I start to think about baking cupcakes.

I’ve baked a lot this past week. Vegan dark chocolate oatmeal shortbread. A vegan poppyseed apple coffeecake. Then a batch of vegan peanut butter cookies. Dark chocolate vegan cupcakes seem like a logical progression. When Ryan gets home, I’m sifting cocoa powder and flour with a fork. We eat pizza and sit on the couch, looking out into the dark neighborhood and discussing the counteroffer the family made on the house. Its not bad, and we’re not sure if its good either, since we’ve never done this before. I am mostly caught up in being mad they want to take the washer and dryer, even though the cost of a new energy and water efficient set would be the tiniest fraction of what we’re talking about spending overall.

Chocolate cake smells fill the house. We rent a movie from the video store on the corner, and curl into each other to eat cupcakes and go gently braindead. Crawl into bed to fall asleep spooning each other spooning the dog, who is using a pillow. The smell of lavender suffuses the sheets. Years ago, when Ryan lived in Bellingham and I lived in Utah, I sewed him a lavender pillow to put over his eyes to help him sleep at night… now he uses a few drops of essential oil before he turns out the light, and his breathing settles out before I’ve even finished tossing and turning. His hand is tucked gently, but firmly, over my pregnant belly, and the newest Au Revoir Simone album is playing softly on the speakers. The dog falls asleep too, and I lay in the middle, hands tangled in both of their limbs, watching shadows from outside flicker on the closet doors. Thinking:

I will remember this moment when I am old.

RECIPES for those who want them:

lovely easy vegan pizza crust (from the Vegan Family Cookbook)

1 packet active dry yeast (one 1/4 oz package)
1 cup warm water
1 Tbs. sugar
whisk together and let sit for five minutes.

Add 1 cup flour
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup light olive oil
and another 1 1/2 cups flour.
knead for five minutes
let rest five minutes.

roll out on oiled baking surface, let rise for as long as you like (i usually get impatient after 5 minutes, but 30 is good).
sauce and top, bake at 450 for 12-15 minutes.

Dark chocolate vegan cupcakes

sift together dry ingredients:
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/3 cup flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 cup sugar

blend in:
3 Tbs. butter
2 egg substitutes (i use 2 tablespoons ground flaxseed whisked together with 6 tablespoons water)
dash vanilla
1 cup soymilk (or other milk substitute)

chop up a few squares of good dark chocolate and sprinkle the pieces over the cupcakes before putting them in the oven.

bake 15-17 minutes at 350.

Frances

My nan passed away 9 years ago, on 29 October 2000. I was nineteen then, and I’d missed seeing her on her last visit to the northwest, because I’d spent the summer working and living in southern Oregon.

I don’t think I knew then what it meant to lose her. I naievely assumed I’d miss her less as time went on. I’ve been surprised to discover that I feel her absence more acutely with every passing year.

She was born in Philadelphia on 23 January, 1918, to Edward and Minnie Saller. Her parents immigrated to the United States as children, from Russia and Lithuania, respectively. They married in 1911, and raised their family over their tobacco, ice cream and candy shop on the corner of 12th and Mifflin Street. They kept the store open from 6 am to 2 am every day but Sunday, when they had shorter hours. Frances played in the neighborhood, and savored her rare trips out of the city to visit Atlantic City, or her aunt’s Lena’s farm northeast of Philadelphia. She graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1935, and worked in a department store, then as a secretary at the Naval Yard.

(I know this because my mother thought to ask. There is a reason I am hungry for stories. I grew up that way.)

She met Morris Fox in 1948, through Ruth Kaplan, a mutual friend. Frances and Morris enjoyed each other’s company a great deal, and one day, as they stood waiting for a late streetcar, my grandfather proposed. He’s told me many times that if the streetcar had been on time, they might have dated forever. They married on 16 January, 1949, and moved into a tiny apartment over Edward and Minnie’s store. My Aunt Ellen came along the following year, and my dad Howard was born in 1953.

They moved into a newly constructed rowhome neighborhood on Baldwin Street, where Frances developed close friendships with other young mothers and her children roved the sidewalks with a gang of neighborhood children.

Once her kids were a little more independent, she returned to work at the Naval Yard. She survived breast cancer while my Dad was in high school, something I never knew while she was alive. My sweet Nan, a fighter.

Once I was born, followed by my brother and sister, Nana and Grandpop traveled regularly to visit. She always packed her recipes, and kept the kitchen warm with baking. She knitted on the couch, while Grandpop read the newspaper. We took day trips around the northwest. She called me kid, even when I got older, in a way that was filled with warmth and love and utterly devoid of condescension. She and Grandpop taught me bits of Yiddish, and I fantasized about what their childhoods must have looked like in 1920s Philadelphia.

A few years ago, after she’d passed away, I had a dream that she came to visit me in Logan, Utah, where I was working on my master’s degree in history. It was one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. She met me at my office, and I showed her my desk, and introduced her to my colleagues in the department. We walked down the hall, and went to a cafe for lunch, where we ate steaming tomato soup in robins’ egg-blue bowls, and shared a piece of pie for dessert. After lunch, we walked to a park and found a place to sit. We both worked on our knitting, and I noticed that we held our loose yarn in the same fashion, keeping the tension with a bent knuckle. We talked about being in our twenties, and she told me about her womanhood in Philadelphia in the Great Depression, about meeting my grandfather and having my dad. Finally, as if we both knew the dream was ending, she gave me a hard candy from the tiny wallet in her purse, as she always used to do, and then she walked away, leaning into her cane, in the graceful uneven way she developed after her hip surgeries.

I had that dream four or five years ago, and I remember it like I dreamt it last night. It still makes me cry.

I thought missing her would be a matter of calling up memories from a finite set, like paging through an album of photographs that fade with the passage of years. I thought missing her would be a matter of fixating on the way I missed her in those photos, and on static little memory clips of the way her voice sounded when I was five, or the way she bent over the warm cave of the open oven, checking on almond cookies when I came home from school at twelve. Or the way she’d hold up pieces of the sweaters she knit for me, to see how the fit was coming along.

As I age, I am coming to realize that missing her is less about clinging to that finite set of dear memories, and more about wanting to share my life as it is now with her. To have her sweet laugh in this house, this living room. To drink tea with her in this kitchen. To bake her the recipes I’ve learned lately, and to show her my garden, to introduce her to my husband. To show her my book, when it finally gets published. To hear her say “I’m proud of you kid” the way she always used to, except about the things that I have done lately. She always told me that, and I can hear it clearly. But its been so many years. I’ve done so many things since she last said it.

I want her to be my friend as I cross the threshold into my thirties.
I want her to tell me stories I never even thought to ask for.

And this kind of missing is so much harder than the other.
But its sweeter too.

It makes loving her fresh. I don’t have to leave her in those memories, in those static photograph images and frozen nostalgic sound files.

I get to keep her close for the rest of my life. I get to keep dreaming about her, and imagining the visits we would have. The things I would show her. The stories I would tell her, and the ones she’d tell me. About my dad’s childhood, and life with my grandpop, and her solitary dreams. The way she would smile and the way she would walk. The way we would knit together.

We would cook together too. She used to worry about the desserts she baked, as my grandfather has had a series of heart problems over the years. Many of her staples—kugle, knish—were loaded with eggs and butter (and lordy, were they delicious). I’ve been on a mission for several years to create a vegan version of her knish bread, my favorite among all of her exquisite desserts. Its hard to replace four eggs, and every attempt has ended up in the compost up till now. Last night, I finally succeeded. In honor of my Nana, I am sharing the recipe. Its by no means identical to her knish, but its a pretty delicious, much healthier alternative. And Grandpop gave me the thumbs up. So that’s all I figure I really need. You’ll need a couple of old-fashioned ice cube trays… easy to find at thrift stores… just discard the metal innards that separate the ice cubes, and use the tray! If you can’t dig up any, use small bread pans.

Vegan Knish Bread

1 c. sugar
1 c. oil
4 “eggs”:
[Whisk together 4 Tbsp. ground flaxseed with 12 tbsp. water. Be patient… eventually it will acquire the
precise consistency of eggs!]
dash vanilla
2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
dash salt
several squares of dark chocolate chopped fine
handful of nuts, chopped fine (almonds, pecans, or walnuts are good)

pour batter into foil-lined ice cube trays or bread pans. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
Lift baked knish loaves out using the foil. Slice into 1/4 or 1/2 thick slices (the thinnest slice you can get without them breaking apart). Lay out on a baking sheet. Bake ten minutes at 350, then flip and bake for another 10 minutes.

Vegan Knish

I love you so, Nan. We all miss you. And we are all so, so, so grateful for the time you spent with us, for your warmth and sweetness and and your humor and your generous heart. I see you in my Dad, and I see you in myself.
You are still with us.