Life uncorked

Perfect days don't usually involve work. Unless you love your job. Which I do. Most of the time.

After breakfast in bed this morning, I headed to the local Hindu Mandir for its first pre-Thanksgiving vegan meal. So for the first part of my day, I chatted with New Agers about religion and energy, Indian women about the roti my grandmother made on her tawah, and mendicants about life on the streets.

The women insisted on sending me away with a container of biryani rice, peas stew, spinach salad, and bundi.

Once the story was done and filed, I popped into photo, grabbed a digital camera and went down to the Halifax Uncorked food, wine, and jazz festival to snag some interviews. So I spent the afternoon roaming around foodies, chatting with travelers and retirees, and taking headshots. Even ran into our food editor and a musician or two.

Once the interviews and pictures were in, I left for home in the rain. And now here I am, snuggled and warm, Lizz Wright on the stereo, about to edit a script, critique a short story, and write a bit about humor in advertising.

At the end of days, long and short, I look back at the places I've been and the people I've had the chance to meet, those colourful encounters that make life full and interesting and worth living. And I think about how much I love that what I do allows me to do that. And to write.


Photo from Corbis of a celebration at the Sri Manicka Vinayakar Alayam Hindu Temple, Paris, France, by Phillipe Lissac

Comfort food

You're home, finally home, at the end of a 12-hour day. Midway up the walkway, you've pulled off the black patent heels and adjusted the laptop case's weight so it won't hang so heavy.

Behind you: a sleepless night; an interview; 120 miles; two deadlines met; a 4-hour meeting.

Ahead: short story critique; studying; headache already there. Dinner?

But it's too late to get real food anywhere and you've resigned yourself to two hot dogs and a beer. So you open the fridge and that's when you see The Black Pot.

Inside The Black Pot: your last memory of a perfect meal. Sunday. Tilapia marinated in mummy's secret green seasoning; macaroni and provisions and love, boiled, simmered and stirred to a perfect broth.

You scoop the last of it into a blue bowl. Three minutes in the microwave. It's almost as good as the first time, sans one ingredient. But it's enough to light your insides on fire and make you smile.

At the end of a 12-hour day, it's enough.


Photo from whatocook.com

Waiting in vain

I can't get this song. Out of my head.

In life I know there's lots of grief,but your love is my relief.Tears in my eyes burn; tears in my eyes burnwhile I'm waiting, while I'm waiting for my turn.

Possible passion

"The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go... the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility."
- Susan Orleans in The Orchid Thief

Photo of cave painting at the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya, by Richard T. Nowitz from Corbis

Heart plus heart

"So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells

of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells

and heavens till the spirits squeak

surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's

bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks

away our rationed days and weeks.

"Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,

and god or void appall us till we drown

in our own tears: today we start

to pay the piper with each breath, yet love

knows not of death nor calculus above

the simple sum of heart plus heart."

- Sylvia Plath in Love is a Parallax

Caught

In a maelstrom, that is. Ten more days until comprehensive exams. Forty-one more days til a Master's degree. Thirty-eight more days until my mother arrives for two weeks. She'll probably bring me fluffy socks and try to iron everything in my closet. But that's a whole other story.

I fell asleep on my books today. Didn't get home last night until midnight, after a 30-inch story on deadline. This kind of exhaustion like nothing I've ever known. It's been my life for a year and a half.

I remember when I started this journey. Now I'm about to end it. And the once taken-for-granted gifts of sleep and time will be mine again.

Waiting

"Look," he says, "how the night follows us home."

In the mirror, I see it: fierce fading light in the moving distance. Our fingers thread like Christmas lights and so the day ends. And another will begin. Some tomorrows you cannot escape.

Good hair

Posting a little late--we ran this Oct. 20--but here's my Accent advance on Chris Rock's documentary, Good Hair, which launched nationwide Oct. 23.

What Is 'Good' Hair?
Black community debates controversial, expensive topic

I first heard about "good hair" in college. And apparently I had it.

Frizzy curls that I paid little attention to. I'd wake up, fluff and run. Or roll a bun and be done. But the "good" hair thing? That was new.

I grew up in Trinidad, where cultural and ethnic blending is a fine, taken-for-granted art. My curls came from an East Indian mother and a black father, mostly.

My concept of hair was that it was beautiful regardless of shade, texture or style.

But being at a historically black college in the heart of a thriving black community taught me that not everyone felt the same way.

In his man-on-the-street documentary "Good Hair" -- which snagged a special jury prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival -- comedian Chris Rock takes on what many in the black community see as a taboo topic.

He visits beauty salons, hair shows and even science labs in an irreverent yet socially conscious exploration of how hair affects the community's self-esteem, finances and relationships.

His impromptu interview subjects talk about everything from touching a black woman's hair to "creamy crack," as often-pricey hair relaxers are called in jest.

Rock's motivation for the Jeff Stilson-directed flick? An off-handed question from his daughter on why she didn't have "good" hair.

Read the rest.

Photo of yours truly from The News-Journal by Sean McNeil

Only a thing

"You could compare a certain kind of love affair to a car wreck. You don't expect it, and yet when it does happen it seems somehow inevitable—even overdue. There is the status quo, and then its interruption; a pattern, then variation."
- Antonya Nelson in Only a Thing


If you read nothing else this weekend, read Nelson's Only a Thing.



Photo by Monalyn Garcia from Corbis

All the words

To be read on a bench.

I can never not stumble upon and wander into used bookstores. On street corners. Under buildings. Off snow-slicked sidewalks.

Here: wooden spice bottles for sale amid the cookbooks; a $3 decorative, glittering pear; stained bottles one would expect to find with messages in the salt spray; tiny tea sets; old children's desks; amber-handled, greening copper tea pots with the architecture books.

Books, books, books. Books everywhere. Books and mermaids. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké.

Ella. Ella and the Duke. A bookstore with a soundtrack. The Very Thought of You: How I know all the words.

Pastiche

In the past three months, I've read more than I've read in a year. Not the feet-high stacks of research articles: communication theories and qualitative studies and advertising (those don't count). And not because I don't love to read--I do--simply that time for things that once brought me pleasure (other than CSI) is almost non-existent.

And so, between the meetings and deadlines and few-hundred-miles-on-the-roads days, I've been reading novels and writing guides. I lug them around in the car in case the day grants me a spare moment. In carry-on luggage to pass the time in airports and in planes not spent sleeping. Half a novel a week--sometimes a whole book (it depends on the length)--and a few essays. Not the two or three chapters of research articles (those don't count).

Baxter and Root and McCullers and Krauss and Calvino and Auster and Covington and Kincaid.

Funny that I've learned more about writing from reading their prose and Baxter and Root's essays--thrown on the side like fries--than in a workshop. Like I learned to write like a journalist as an undergraduate PR student by reading the newspapers and pretending I knew what I was doing. (The first story I ever did: it was about a roving Vietnam Wall exhibit (I think I was 20) ran in the Orlando Sentinel. You cannot imagine the pressure; I cannot imagine the editor's grief, working through my words, crafting a too-long piece into something suitable for print. She later said the writing base was there; the craft I'd come to learn on my own reading newspapers and finally knowing what I was doing.)

And so I read half a novel a week--sometimes a whole book (it depends on the length)--and I wonder if I'm teaching myself to write in other ways again. I read with a yellow highlighter and a blue pen, mark the passages and turns-of-phrase that make me pause (White: "And in the east beyond the lilac and beyond the barn and beyond the bay and behind the deepening hills, in slow and splendid surprise, rise the bomber's moon.") Also, highlight mentions of books that probably should be read.

And sometimes I'll read something that, when the passage is past, I'll exhale and realize I'd stopped breathing.

Anne Dillard in Holy the Firm. The narrator is camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading the poet Rimbaud's biography, when she sees the death of a moth in the candle by which she's reading.

"She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning--only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet."

Exhale.


Photo by Doug Landreth from Corbis

Solitude

"If there is a voice of truth--assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak--it comes from the mouth of a woman."- Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude

In the long tunnel of endless night

I cannot be without you,
and will always be beside you,
in body, in mind, in spirit, in love.
Undeniable love.
Even in the middle of the night.

Late at night, only two lamps burn. Sometimes the TV, for sleep's sake.

My space has become a Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment. A living cumulative essay.

The kitchen in boxes in the living room; disorder defining management's futile attempt to rid us of tiny roaches. (No time yet to unpack.) Research articles: assigned and printed for the coming week's Advertising class; found and printed for the final paper. Book stacks. Water bill. A food-stained syllabus. Sample graduation invitations. Police reports.

A traffic citation. A copy of a story that ran last week reminds me that a critical e-mail or two still haven't been answered. Maybe the 12-page essay due in prose can be about another story that ran a few months ago, can juxtapose the chase, the development, my involvement, the source's ultimate insult and betrayal?

Nothing is linear anymore. Everything flows into the next.

I move the heavy lion from the shelf against the red wall to the book shelf on the opposite end of the couch. And smell it along the way. It smells like nothing. And then the phone rings.


Photo of the lioness on a hummock from Corbis

Indelible tics

"When I first started, I thought it would come spontaneously, in a trance-like outpouring. So great was my need to write that I thought the story would be written by itself. But the words have come very slowly so far. Even on the best days I have not been able to write more than a page or two. I seem to be afflicted, cursed by some failure of mind to concentrate on what I am doing. Again and again I have watched my thoughts trail off from the thing in front of me. No sooner have I thought one thing than it evokes another thing, until there is an accumulation of detail so dense that I feel I am going to suffocate. Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. For the past few days, in fact, I have begun to feel like the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how close I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the one truly important thing (assuming it exists), I will not be able to say it."
- Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude

Photo by Robert Essel NYC from Corbis

Speak easy

He appears from behind the bar, grey waistcoat and scruffy beard. Like a jazz musician whose real work isn't here.

"I heard you're trying to go Upstairs," he says. We nod.

"There are two seats waiting for you at the bar if you go now," he says. "Just call first."

We saunter over to the vault-like door, schoolgirls with a secret. She picks up the phone. Where it rings we cannot hear. In five seconds, the door unclicks and we're in.

The wooden stairs and walls are rustic, the hallways lined with nude black and whites. Upstairs, static tunes tumble from an invisible phonograph.

Another waistcoated bartender says our wish is his command. Anything my lady has a thirst for? Yes. He mixes a frothy Armaretto concoction and watches as I sip, walks away only when I nod in appreciation.

She and I spend the evening curled on bar stools, staring at antique liquor bottles. People come and go, talking of Michaelangelo. Friends stay.

We move to big, straight-backed chairs in the corner, sip each other's drinks and talk about journalism and sexuality.

When we leave, the patrons downstairs watch with curiosity as we emerge from the metal door. Outside, Seattle is cold, but the ginger keeps me warm.