What We Do to Stay Wahm

She’s usually a frigid wintah up here in Maine, yessir. Cold dahk nights and wind wippin’ so hahd you gots to wear oneofthose face masks that makes you look like a retahded G.I. Joe or storm troopah or somethin. You gots to be bundled up real tight in ordah to stay wahm and make sure you wear your lawngunderwears undah your jacket or else you’ll be freezin’ your butt off, ayuh.

So whadda we Mainahs do to have fun outside but stay wahm in the wintah? Well, besides the obvious snow-mo-beelin,  ice fishin’ and skiing (but that gets a bit pricey if ya goes a lot), we go smelting, ayuh. And there ain’t no bettah place to catch me some smelt than down at Jim’s Smelt Shacks in Bowdoinham.

  

Go there on a Friday or Satraday night and woo-wee! all us good ol’ boys and gals’ll be there just-a smelting and drinkin’ and havin a regulah good time. Now, you ain’t no Mainah if you don’t go smeltin’ on your Friday night, nosiree. Screw dat Mixahs bar where all dem kids go, no, we real Mainahs, we smeltin’ godddammit.

Jim’s is just a bitty little place in Bowdoinham off route twen-tee-fah on da Kinnebec Rivah. Theys gots ‘bout twen-tee shacks and they’ll let ya rent em for few hours and get ya smelt on real gud. Dem shaks have big ol’ stoves to keep ya wahm or cook some food on and little holes fer the lines to dangle intah.

Them boys at Jim’s’ ll give ya those bloodwohms (that look like little centipeeds and freakin’ gross me right out! One time I stuck one down the flannel pants of my friend and woo-wee did he dance! Those little buggers gots pinchahs on ‘em, they do. So watch out, k?)

Anyways, you gets yer bloodwohms, go to ya shack and stick the buggahs on the hooks, lower ‘em in the water and start drinkin! If it’s a real gud night, you can just yell acrossed to yer buddies and have a hootin’ ol time waiting to see who catches the first one. You do know what happens when ya catch the first one, don’t cha? Ah, really? Sheet. Well, if’nya catch the first smelt, well, you gots to bite the head off. No whinin or pissin and moanin’ just grabbit real quick like and bite the head right off. The little guys have just bite-sized heads and one chomp and she’s off. Fecking gross though.

Now, with all that head bitin’ and wind wippin’ like I’se said, you gots to have you a little something to keep yous wahm inside and build up yer courage sorta speak. Now, that’s when the ol’ Roopah’s store comes inta play. You’s gots to stack up on the beverage necessities before you get ta Jim’s so make sure ya stop and gets you some fine drinks or that head bitin’ won’t be so easy, ayuh?

Now, you may think that we Mainahs are just up here all wintah long, freezin’ and a chatterin’ away, but let me tell you, we are just fine bitin’ heads off smelt, thank ya very much. Hope ta see you there this Friday or Satraday; I heard she’s gonna be a cold one, yesiree.

Dancing in the Dark with Björk

Once in a blue moon there’s a film that really grips you. I mean, strangle-hold, pin-you-down-on-the-mat, no-crying-uncle kind of film where at times you struggle to catch your breath, you choke back tears, you wrestle with emotion and are overcome with awe. A connection is formed. And when it’s all over, when the screen goes black and the block letters scroll up from the bottom of your screen, you feel as though a little part of you may have changed slightly. I felt that shift after watching Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark starring Icelandic singer Björk.

You may scoff at first, rolling your eyes at the realization that this is—yes—a musical. You may assume it’ll have a bit of Newsies pluckiness or Grease’s teenage soap opera angst. Perhaps it will have epic political undertones like The Sound of Music or gaudy and outlandish characters like Rocky Horror Picture Show. Instead, you’ll find a tactful film, complete with original story line and a soundtrack you wouldn’t be ashamed to play in your car.

 

The movie, tailor-made for Björk with the score being composed by her, is a story about a Czech woman who faces imminent medical problems and struggles to make sure that the same doesn’t happen for her son. She escapes life’s woes by daydreaming that her life is a musical because “somebody’s always there to catch you when you fall,” in a musical.

I do have to admit, I’m a Björk fan. Always have been. So to see her, to listen to her amazing voice and be able to connect the emotion with the story behind the lyrics, brings her to a whole new level for me. She committed to her character in a way that was so believable, so utterly moving, that I couldn’t help but share this film with all of you. It’s no wonder she was nominated for a Golden Globe and won best actress when the film debuted at Cannes in 2000.

I never watch movies twice, but I’d watch this a thousand times over.

Can a Soul Reside in a Cookie?

One holiday my mother forgot to make her famed “whirligig” cookies, and all hell broke loose.

“Where’s the whirligigs?” a cousin asked as they searched the dessert counter for the chocolate swirled cookies.

“They have to be there somewhere! Obviously Kathy brought them,” said my aunt, her back to the others as she washed the never-ending pile of dishes.

“What?! No whirligigs?” another cousin echoed, panic in her eyes as she approached the typical holiday spread of pumpkin and apple pies. She muttered in disapproval as she lifted, poked and prodded for the goods.

The news quickly spread around the kitchen and others joined in, elbowing and searching for the desired treats. Like San Fermin they rushed the orange counter, hunting high and low for the obviously misplaced rubber Tupperware container they had become so familiar with year after year.

Standing between the kitchen and far room, I could see my mother sinking in her chair, pretending to be preoccupied in conversation with a relative who had not yet heard the disastrous news of the missing cookies. I watched her as she took off her glasses, pulled a half-used tissue from the pocket of her leaf-embellished vest and gingerly cleaned the gold-rimmed spectacles as a riot ensued in the kitchen.

Had she not heard? Does she not sense the tension? Peeking back through the saloon-style doors that lead from the living room to the kitchen where the food was laid out, I watched in horror as cousins, aunts, uncles and family friends began to get up in-arms over the absent cookies. Arms gesticulated, the wooden cupboards were opened and slammed shut, people looked atop appliances and in closets, all in a vain attempt to find the missing treats.

“They have to be here somewhere!” said a cousin as she went into the coat room. “Maybe Kathy left them in here.”

“Did you look on top of the fridge?” another snapped.

“Of course I looked on top of the fridge! What do you think I am?”

“Hey, you don’t suppose she didn’t make them, do you?” The room gasped at the idea of my mother, The Whirligig Queen, forgetting or, worse yet, just plain not making the traditional peanut butter and chocolate swirl treasures.

I tugged at my sagging tights and brushed back my hair with small hands. Looking from my mother and back through the cracked wooden doors, I knew confrontation was just a matter of minutes because she hadn’t made them. I knew she hadn’t. She had decided not to bother this year for some adult reason I couldn’t comprehend. And now, well, now, all hell was breaking loose.

Swallowing hard, I looked with wide-eyes back to my mother. She was calm; her brown hair curled and mounded around her head, she sat with one leg curled under her and laughed a hearty, toothy laugh. Her cheeks blushed rose which made me think that yes, of course she can hear them. She knows the mutiny that is brewing in the other room. But what is she going to do?

“Hey, Molly!” called an elder cousin in my direction. I stumbled backward, realizing that the saloon doors in all their swinging coolness had left the entire bottom half of my body exposed and was, perhaps, not an ideal hiding place to stay uninvolved in the whole ordeal. I was called into the kitchen and was soon interrogated as a material witness to either the making, or lack thereof, of the cookies.

“I dunno,” I answered coyly as they asked me where the whirligigs were. I looked from one face to the other as they towered over me in a cookie-induced delirium like addicts needing a fix. I shuffled from one foot to the other, avoiding eye contact.

“Maybe you should ask my mom?” I suggested, sweat pouring under my flannel dress. I searched for my brother in the crowd. Where’s Angus? Angus will help me! I don’t want to be the one to break the news, to oust my mom. But he was nowhere to be found. Apparently he was much smarter than I, and had made himself scarce.

In all the confusion I managed to slink away back through the doors and retreated to my mother who still sat safely in the far room.

“Mom, they want to know where the whirligigs are,” I whined.

“Do they?” she asked half amused. “I didn’t make any whirligigs this year.”

“I know that, but… But…” I tried to find the right words.

“Just tell them that they can wait ‘til Christmas. I didn’t feel like making them,” she said coolly, stroking my hair with her hand as she held a cup of Pepsi in the other.

But it was too late; the forces had spilled into the room in search of answers, demanding reason for this potential ruination of their holiday feast. They surrounded us like accusatory vultures and I buried my head into my mother’s shoulder. She smelt of Anis Anis perfume and fabric sheets.

“Kathy, where’s the whirligigs?” a cousin pleaded.

With one dismissive wave of her hand, my mother frankly explained that she had not made the cookies and that everyone would have to wait for Christmas to have them. A silence fell over the room and the cousins looked at each other in shock, disbelieving.

“But, but, you have to make them,” they begged. “It’s Thanksgiving. They’re tradition.”

“You’ll have them at Christmas. Eat some pie,” my mother said lightheartedly. I took a deep breath and watched as the family, although disappointed, smiled, accepting the grave fact that the cookies were not to be enjoyed this Thanksgiving, and perhaps appeased by the promise of enjoying them in just a few short weeks at Christmas time.

For years to come, relatives would regale at the year my mother failed to make whirligigs and teased that she couldn’t come to holidays without them. Now, that jocular threat has been passed down to me.

Before my mother passed, she taught me how to make whirligigs. Too sick to stand by my side while I made the cookies, she directed me from the couch, calling out ingredients and tricks she had learned by trial and error over the many years of preparing the cookies for the holidays. Amused with herself, she revealed the secret ingredient, something she had not shared with anyone else. And although her appetite was diminishing, she still enjoyed licking a beater with me and even indulged in a slice of the raw dough.

It’s true, I had learned to make them before. Each holiday season I’d help my mother sift the flour and melt the chocolate, but there was something more serious when recently she suggested we make them together. Maybe she felt that this was an important legacy I needed to carry on. Maybe she just didn’t want another mutiny in her memory.

That last cookie-making moment was sacred to me, is sacred to me. And as the holidays approach, my first holidays without my mother here, I find myself hesitant to make them. But I know with each bite, each savory morsel of swirled goodness, she’ll be with us.

I like that.

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Do you think there will be hesitation for those voters who have to enter schools as the polling place?

I mean, the media has made schools out to be breeding grounds of the swine flu. News flash! Schools are breeding grounds for all sickness- they're kids. Tell me the last time you saw a child sneeze all over themselves. Pick their nose? Cough on a friend? Puke without warning? And all this without washing their hands afterward.

Swine flu or no swine flu, bring hand sanitizer.

In Search of a Green Thumb

I’ve decided to “go green” for the winter. No, I’m not buying a hybrid car or recycling my grey water. I’m simply bringing as many plants inside as I can. I'm greening up the pad, if you will. The only problem is my track record as an indoor gardener is a bit rough.

It’s a love hate relationship, really: I love the plants, they hate me. A bit of a bummer to someone who enjoys indoor plants a whole lot, but this time I’m going to get it right. I can feel it.

Perhaps it’s the hour-long conversation with the gardening experts at Algren Appliance that boosted my confidence; their no nonsense advice in potting soil and fertilizer feeding really revved me up. But whatever the catalyst, I’m happy to have started this journey into purification of air and just plain lushness to contrast with the barren, disgusting bleakness of winter.

It all started with an inherited spider plant that has been around since I can remember. It sits in the corner of my kitchen, long overgrown tentacles drooping to the floor and mixed in with the growth are little spores just waiting to be plucked and potted. So I did just that and plunking them into pots, I eagerly waited for them to grow.

They died. No matter how much I cooed and coaxed the little buggers to fight, they just kept losing their green and started sagging in the leaf department. It was quite disappointing, really. But I did walk away with a lesson learned: Too much water and not enough sun is a bad combination. Duh.

So when I went to the local farm stand the other day and saw that herbs were 3 for a dollar, I just couldn’t resist. I mean, who can pass up fresh herbs in the kitchen, right? Maybe herbs would be the revival (or creation of) my green thumb!

After potting and planting, fertilizing and watering, transplanting and arranging, I’ve created a little green oasis in my home. I have herbs aplenty, spider plant spores galore, relocated outdoor plants and even some clippings of a Hydrangea tree from my mother-in-law I’m attempting to root and plant as my own. Now I just hope this thumb turns green, otherwise I’ll have quite the mess on my hands.

Sockin’ It To The Dempsey Challenge

 

It’s still raw, the fact that I lost my mother. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I think I hear her calling to me, the way she used to when I took care of her. Other times I lay in bed, haunted by things I should have done better, could have done better, and I cry. It’s this overwhelming feeling of guilt, not because I’ve done something wrong, but because there was nothing more I could do.

She passed away. Moved on. Whatever you want to label it, the truth of the matter is that she is, in fact, gone. I can’t touch her. I can’t smell her. I can’t complain to her, laugh with her, cry, cook, clean, dance, bitch, yell or share with her tangibly. All I have is her memory, and I’m scared of it fading.

My heart hurts—literally hurts—with a longing to see her again, to have a spare second, another moment… anything. I wrestle with my emotions, try to put them in check to my current reality, but grief always seems to seep in unannounced and pungent.

When I was living and taking care of Mum this past year, I ran in the mornings. I ran to relieve the pressure; to take a breather from being a caregiver. The mornings I’d slack, not wanting to put on my sneakers and hoof it outside, she’d nudge me out, reminding me to go because she knew I needed it. And truthfully, she probably needed it as well, to know I was doing something for myself and coming back to her refreshed. It was an important part of our new relationship, those morning runs.

This past Sunday I ran. I ran for my mother as part of Team Black Socks, fourteen friends and family members banded together in honor and memory of her, participating in The Dempsey Challenge. A walking, running and bicycling event, it’s in support of those fighting cancer, those who have survived it and the families of those affected by the disease.

The air crisp and the sky overcast with a blanket of grey, it was ideal weather for a 5k run. I started out with the hundreds of other participants, my pace steady and my breathing only slightly labored, and as another hill rose on the horizon, I dug in, determined to finish the entire course. At times tears swelled up and that hurt, that hurt in my heart, made it difficult to go on. Memories flooded back to me, grief bubbled up, but I continued for her: For every smile she gave in the face of grave diagnosis, for every joke she made to deal with her pain, for every bit of fight she tackled the illness with bravely and courageously and for everything she was and always will be.

The quiet rhythm of feet on pavement was broken by a woman behind me as she shouted encouragement to herself: "You can do this! Only one more mile to go! My father went through three years of pain, I can go through 3 miles. Dig! Dig in!” It struck deep inside me and through her words, we came together as mourning daughters, fighting the road under our feet just as our parent had their battle with cancer.

Crossing the finish line, tears streamed my face. I was both relieved and saddened that the race was over. I had been dedicated to this event for the past five months, a way for me to keep my mother alive in my everyday thoughts, to keep her memory from fading. No what?

As I found a spot near the finish line, I watched as my brother and his girlfriend, my friends, mother-in-law, my mother’s college friends, my husband and father-in-law crossed the finish line, each proud to have completed the course, each touched by the reason we were united today.

 

 

Our team raised over 5,900 dollars for the Dempsey Center, a lifeline for me during my mum’s illness, and in total the event raised more than 1 million. Generous donations from friends and family to our team over the past five months inspired us on a daily basis.  But more than money, the donations remind us of how loved our mother was, how she touched peoples’ lives. We will never forget that. We will never forget her. Ever.

I’ll keep running.

Art in the Afternoon

Andrew Mc kenzie and Jason Squamata. Rad new art conglomerate.

As I wandered the streets of Rockland, Maine, my mind yawned at all the moose-themed pajamas in storefront windows and redundant coffee spots. Perhaps it was the rain, the dulling grey sky, but killing time really felt exactly like that: killing time, only I was murdering it with coastal Maine monotony.

That was, until I found myself wedged in a precarious hallway called the "in between gallery" with some of the coolest art/narrative collaboration from Maine boy Andrew Mc Kenzie and Oregonian Jason Squamata(whose name, by the way, was incredibly hard to spell on a Blackberry with auto-text).

Just wanting to find an alternative exit to the jammed front door of Rock City Coffee Roasters where I got myself a pick-me-up coffee, I stumbled into said hallway and was blown away. The art movement is called HYPNO. What exactly it is, I'm not sure, but I like it.

Here's an explanation you can have a stab at from HYPNO artist Sir Richard Wentworth's blog and HYPNO-Wiki(http://rwentworth.blogspot.com/):

HYPNO is the current default designation for a style, aesthetic and worldview that has its roots in Entropian and Hypgnostic salons, hatched in front rooms, secret gardens and humid discotheques across Boston, Brighton, Allston and Everett Massachusetts in the late 90s. The vision of the original movement informed the group's musical, artistic and narrative output, and generated recording projects, comic books, graphic design, short stories and even dance nights.

The original group's activities culminated in the summer of 2002 with a live presentation of Orji Walflauer's radical response to H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond. This mass hyposis "happening" was staged and performed by members of the World Hypgnostik Order and featured spontaneous sound design by the ritual improvisation group Clue Display. The intensity of the evening's entertainment splintered the movement and placed an emphatic ellipsis on the future of HYPNO.

Lined with poster-sized artwork the "in between" hallway was a confusion of black and white swirls, dizzying and captivating. Each image seemed to tell a story.

Andrew's Art is like a myriad of smashed spider-veined windows and rippling water obscuring the succession of layered pictures overlapping in one's inner mind. It's rapid-fire thoughts interrupted with paused questions and an over-stimulated 1990's era MTV-head, of Pop Culture imagery and contorted everyday subjects.

Jason Squamata is Head Writer and Creative Director of HYNOKOMIX, the art movement these works belong to, and the author of the narratives that accompanied each artwork. Dark and sinister, like a good Chuck Palahniuk novel, it pulls you in with its tense and intelligent writing, its interesting story line and character traits that are a reflection of everything about oneself you don't want anyone to know.

Standing in that pale yellow hallway, totally immersed in the story and artwork of these two was the best hour of my day. For a little while, on a drizzly afternoon, I went somewhere else -- and that's exactly what art is supposed to do.

To find out more check out the artist's webpage:
http://web.me.com/squamata/HYPNOCRACY/HYPNO_is....html
http://web.me.com/squamata/HYPNOCRACY/HYPNOZINE.html