JUST AN ORANGE

Rituals are the backbone of life; they are what make it stand up, give it some structure; new summer tennis shoes, hanging the porch swing, pressing the dandelions for their sweet nectar.

Then there are the discoveries, the revelations, intuitions and illuminations. All those things that make life sparkle and shine. The new information that we gather to us, some of which becomes a part of our life, circling into the ritual again, strengthening us, giving us more reason and enjoyment to be alive.

And so a young boy walks into the shoe emporium and charms Mr. Sanderson, the old shop keeper; shows him, really, of the joy of living. Antelopes. Gazelles. Douglas is specializing in a quiet exuberance for life.

With the passing of Tim Russert this past Friday, I’ve been thinking a lot about exuberance for life. What I know of him is largely from hearing him on the radio or occassionally seeing him on television. But from what I can tell, Mr. Russert was a man who loved life. He loved his profession, his family, his country; his concern was for people. There was a happy enthusiasm that spilled out of him and I admire that. I regret that we will miss his contribution to the public discourse on some of the most pressing subjects of our time, particularly in this election year.

Chalk it up to my own discoveries and revelations. I want to live a life as fully as I perceive Mr. Russert lived his. Not that his ambitions and values are necessarily my own, but I admire his feeling. I know instinctively I don’t have that kind of energy, it’s just not in my nature. I am more like Douglas, quiet but aware, exploring the idea of what kind of life I want to live. I want to fill my life with rites and ceremonies that are meaningful and fulfilling, not simply patterns I fall into haphazardly. I want to be illuminated by discoveries and revelations that enrich my existence.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury; published by William Morrow, 2001 hardcover edition, pages 17-34.

photo by roberto pagini

Dandelion Wine, William Morrow 2001 hardcover edition, pages 1-16.

Do you remember summer as a child? The never-ending days, the ever-expansive weeks, the eternity of the season; summer seemed as long as the rest of the year put together. And that trip to the dentist was so incredibly disruptive.

I remember the year I started piano lessons. And that was the first measurable summer. Suddenly weeks meant something; there was this mark on the time line, like some giant cement monolith casting unnecessary darkness into my days of endless sunshine. I remember being called in from playing. I remember reluctantly pulling myself up into the front seat of our blue VW Vanagon unhappy at being interrupted. It was the first year that I noticed summer passing before my eyes.

So, for this Summer 1928, Douglas, at age 12, has realized he’s alive, really alive! Not that his senses haven’t worked before, but now he is aware of them; an inward realization of what is going on outside of him. It’s a lovely moment as he takes everything in, aware that life itself is stalking him, waiting to pounce. And then it does; and Doug is growing up.

Douglas, aware that this summer will be special and extraordinary, becomes vaguely aware, then, of the passage of time. As the first “golden tide” rushes off the wine press and into the bottle, Douglas has already measured out his summer, knowing that each day must be caught and stoppered and the memories kept for later days.

{I’ll be posting about Dandelion Wine each week. The sections are short and undemanding and they go through to the end of summer, just like the book. This is the first week, and while it’s already Thursday, you can catch up quickly. I’d absolutely love to have you join me with your own thoughts and ideas.}

{For a Summer Reading Schedule of Dandelion Wine, please click on Literary.}

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Of all the books about summer, I think that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine must be the best. I read it for my sophomore English class in high school and promptly fell in love. Bradbury is at his best chronicling Douglas Spalding’s summer while weaving through little vignettes about the towns people that inhabit Doug’s life on the periphery, in the same space that all adults inhabit in every child’s life they are a part of. I love every bit of it. With faithful brother Tom at his side, Doug is the boy on the brink of growing up, which is a wonderful and terrifying place to be for anyone.

In some tribal cultures those adolescents are ignored for a time. They don’t exist, according to the tribe and are left to fend for themselves until they can prove they have managed to become adults. If we followed the same tradition in our culture I wonder how many people would still be hanging out in that no-man’s land? Too many, I suspect. Adolescence is a liminal space, a space that is really a nothing space, like a doorway; one is not in or out; one is not a child, nor are they yet an adult. It’s a tricky spot to navigate. I sometimes look back at my own adolescence completely amazed I made it through in tact.

The sequel to Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer, deals more with this idea. I must say I was rather disappointed by it, as Douglas seems to lose all qualities that made him Doug in the first place. Despite what Bradbury says, that this second novel was written at the same time as the first, I don’t believe him. It lacks the magic. And while the transition from being a kid to a teenager is rough and awkward and full of pimples, I wasn’t impressed with Bradbury’s re-visit of Green Town.

But all that aside, here, now, in Green Town, Illinois, we have Doug and Tom, the Green Machine, the Happiness Machine, Col. Freeleigh, Bill Forrester and of course, one must not forget The Lonely One. And Douglas, though he is heading towards the door, is still the child whose mind is starting to navigate the world we all must inhabit for the long-run.

There are days when I long to bring it all back. To live in tights and bare feet, to move and work my body in odd ways until my muscles ache. To feel the euphoric sense of open space waiting to be molded and designed by shapes that consist of arms and torsos and legs. To be in a room with people I hardly know, and yet to feel that we have been in that room together our entire lives. The whole of our existence is the wooden floor pressing against our toes, the reflection of bodies in the large mirrors on the wall, as we pull and stretch out our fingertips beyond their natural extension.

Energy grows and builds with each exercise as our bodies push outward what comes from inside. Even simple plie-releves are laced with tension and release. It is the whole body that breathes and not just the lungs. Motion and momentum gather as we cross from one end of the room, to the other. I take a deep breath. The music pulses and sways, and my body follows suit.

Dance is my passion. Some of my earliest memories involve dance. I had my first lesson when I was three years-old. It was held in a large gymnasium. I was frustrated because we were learning to skip and I could not do it. I could only gallop. My young legs could not grasp the concept of pulling up only one knee at a time as I hopped, before landing and lifting up the other. I went home and practiced in our living room, one moment being elated because I thought I had achieved the skip only to realize I had fallen back into the up-up of the gallop.

I continued to take gymnastic and ballet lesson up until high school where I tried out for and made the modern dance company. I fell in love with modern dance. I loved the freedom of movement that we were allowed and the emotion that could be portrayed. I loved the camaraderie that took place at rehearsals that went from 2:30 pm to midnight the week before a concert. I loved the rush of feeling completely alive as I moved through the space having an experience that, at the same time, felt totally surreal.

I don’t dance now. I did study it; I was a dance major. Was. Do I still have the right to claim dance as my passion when obviously it didn’t win out amongst a myriad of options I had to choose from? The closest I get to dance now is the occasional concert. For awhile, living close to where I went to school, I would sneak into a dance studio at my university instead of taking my evening jog around the track. And then I didn’t even do that anymore. It has been twelve years since I was a dancer. Twelve years! I stop to look back–I can’t believe I’ve actually gone that long without a regular technique class, without rehearsals and performances. How could I have filled up that time so easily? There were entire days, weeks even, when I lived in a leotard.

I left school after my sophomore year for a time. I was not in a place where I had the opportunity to dance. As the days went by I remember watching my dancer’s body slowly seeping through the cracks. My alignment and posture, the complete flexibility, my technical feats were becoming things of the past. By the time I returned to school I knew that what I wanted to accomplish as a dancer would never work with what I wanted to accomplish as a person. My flaw was there. Maybe it was wrong to differentiate between the dancer and myself. If I never could have seen myself without dance, I probably wouldn’t have ever been without it. It can be disturbing to look back and see your passion left on the cutting board, or in my case on the black marley floor. But I guess there are times when we have to give up a dream for other dreams that need to become our own.

A few years after returning to school while walking across campus I heard a beat, music. It was familiar. I looked to where the sound was drifting from to see human forms moving simultaneous–rows of bodies pushing across the space. They were dancers in street clothes and a middle-aged black man with no hair was leading and clapping them across the grass through the shards of late morning sunlight that was passing through the leaves of the surrounding trees.

I fell enchanted by the motion and the rhythm. They penetrated into my body, piercing and reminding me that I should be out there, that I could be. I felt a longing and a homesickness as I watched, as I wanted to join in, to move with them, more that anything. But as I stood there, lost in their movements I realized that a part of me was out there with them. It was an odd sensation of participation in an event that required a body, even though my body wasn’t there. I knew then that although I may never take another technique class, I may never again feel that thrill of standing on stage before an audience of hundreds, that I will always be one who moves to music, whose heart is syncopated by the drum beat, whose senses get lost in a whirl of muscle twisting and stretching and pulling grace our from the pockets of the air. I will always be a dancer.

do you think an old heart can’t sing
do you think an old heart can’t dance
with a love that belongs to spring –
nor i – till i took this glance

in a mirror long put-by – denied
the least touch of light (there being
no cause but to let it hide)
yet now there’s this sudden seeing

this astonishing flow of longing
that gives the dulled glass a shine
and so many lost wants thronging
(must i fear the eyes aren’t mine)

dream has shaken its sheets out
a freshness (discarded) restored
muted rhythms let loud beats out
(scared hopes being reassured)

unfathomable scores its chances
(love’s fingers plucking the strings)
can’t you see – this lame heart dances
can’t you hear – this dried heart sings

You, my daughter
Youngest of the pre-school ballerinas
Transported by the quick, quick movements
Of your tiny legs,
Arms floating blithely
Like the wings of angels
Your entire body in a grin of rhythmic joy
Moving in that nonchalance of joints
Sauntering in innocent defiance
Of the studied discipline demanded
By your instructor’s level tones.

How can he know
You will dance purely on a stage of starlight
With every action winged and fired by grace?

I was excited to ask Linsdey of Cafe Johnsonia to write about her experiences in the kitchen, because she really is a culinary wonder. And even better, Lindsey shares her talent with those around her and they get to benefit from it (especially their taste buds). Art is a good thing to share. And I do believe that cooking and baking are an art. One, that I have yet to really attempt, but that I appreciate. Thanks for sharing, Lindsey!

Sometimes when I read a beautiful poem or look at a spectacular painting, or hear an orchestra playing exquisite music, I get emotional. Cooking and baking conjure those same emotions.

Even as a young child I was interested in food. What I didn’t know was that my environment was limiting my inner creativity. The artist within was being prevented from escaping and flourishing.

Then I moved to New York—the most pivotal, wonderful thing to have ever happened to a girl from a small town in the Mountain West.

Moving to New York was like adding water and sunshine to a seed that lay dormant under a forgotten piece of earth. I was just waiting for the small ray of light and a few molecules of water to feed me so I could grow.

In one fail swoop, I was introduced to ingredients and cuisine from foreign lands. Suddenly there was more to dessert than chocolate chip cookies or cake and ice cream. And dinner was more than meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

When I moved to New York almost seven years ago, I was twenty years old. I was naïve, yet I thought I had the world all figured out. I had traveled abroad. I’d been to a few years of college. I knew it all.

Working as a nanny during my first year in NY taught me more than just how to take care of four small children simultaneously. I was living with a family who truly appreciated fine cooking and the art of cuisine. To a girl who grew up on canned veggies and Hamburger Helper, this was uncharted, but exciting, territory.

During that year, I shopped at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Citarella, Dean and Deluca, and other gourmet markets. I ate at fun places in Manhattan. I was given my Professional series KitchenAid mixer by the people who employed me. They could see that there was something in me bursting to get out. Sure I could whip up a batch of cookies and cook spaghetti. But there was so much more awaiting me.

When I married my husband during my second year in NY, the union of my new found creativity and his unique sense of taste and smell collided in a wonderful way. I cooked and experimented; he tasted and critiqued. There were failures. There were successes.

All the while, I thought I was just having fun.

One day I was having a pity party—why wasn’t I born creative? Why couldn’t I sing or dance, or paint? Where was all my talent?

My husband told me something I will never forget. It was engraved upon my very soul. He told me that he’d never seen someone who was so creative. And what did I think I was doing in the kitchen all this time? Was that not pure, unadulterated creativity? Was I not an artist?

From that point on, cooking and baking took on new meaning. As did life–I saw myself for who I really was. That part of me that had been hidden and locked away was finally let out all the way.

I had finally found my true self.

Now maybe that seems like a stretch—“finding myself.” Isn’t that what people do when they go on long road trips with their friends or backpack through Europe? Or go through a horrible, debilitating illness?

I never thought of myself as being creative—not in the littlest, tiniest bit. Creativity was something reserved for poets, painters, musicians, vocalists, and photographers. (To name a few…) The thought of being an artist in the kitchen never occurred to me.

I enjoy the process of cooking. It has never become mundane to me.

I pour over recipes and cookbooks as someone might a book of poetry. I can tell by looking at a recipe how it will turn out and how it will taste. I appreciate what lies behind the scenes even more than the actual finished product.

Surely it must be the same with any artist—my medium is just different.

I adore the feel of bread dough between my hands. The smell of searing meat, melted butter, and toasting spices awakens me. I get excited watching butter and sugar whip in my stand mixer. I love to frost and decorate cakes. The joys and possibilities in the kitchen are endless. I’m always finding new ingredients to try. I’m always thinking of a better way to execute a recipe. Sometimes I don’t even need a recipe.

For the first twenty years of life, I was unknowingly stifled. The last seven have been a rebirth of sorts. And I hope the next five, ten, or fifty years bring as much wonder, excitement, and pure exhilaration.