About six years ago around this time of year, Josh came home with a book and told me nervously that he thought I should get a hobby to distract me from treatments. A friend at work had told him how therapeutic bread-making could be and so he purchased what essentially amounted to a bread textbook.

I believe my exact words as I chucked it across the bed were, “I don’t need a hobby, you motherfucker.”

Yesterday, I took an hour of the morning for myself. I tried out a new bread recipe, the texture of sandwich bread with the taste of a rye.

It can be therapeutic; when the dough forms together and you’ve forced the yeast a bit with warm water and it is rolling into a small, tight ball beneath your hands.

When it is resting afterward, steam rising from the finished bread.

Thank you, Josh, for the hobby. Apologies that it took me so long to give you a proper thank you for the useful distraction. Apologies, also, for calling you a motherfucker.

I love you.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin. Children are seen in this post in case you want to skip down to Mr. Linky and add your own without reading mine.

The ChickieNob set up this shot while we were at a party last week. Someone gave her a flower and she came over to me and asked me to take her picture. Afterwards, she looked at it on my camera and said, “put that up on your blog.” I follow directions, so the colours in her dress and the flower are my Show and Tell today. The only word I could think of when I saw this shot was “vibrant.” And perhaps, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

Tweetroll link updated at the bottom

I have fallen in love with Twitter all over again. I first fell in love with Twitter when I finally understood Twitter. I communed with Twitter. We became one. And then we were on a break from one another. It was a little awkward when I’d swing through to read updates. There really wasn’t a good reason for the break. I think Twitter was a little bored with me and I had changed and suddenly, we weren’t a great fit–me being too wordy, Twitter being too controlling.

And then I just had this craving for Twitter recently and Twitter welcomed me back with open arms and all is forgiven and now we’re just grooving with one another. Twitter says something and I laugh hysterically. And then I say something and Twitter pees a little in his pants (it’s okay, he can’t control it and he takes precautions knowing that it’s going to happen). And then we throw our arms around each other and declare ourselves best friends forever.

Are you on Twitter? Can we be friends? Do you have your blog listed in your Twitter profile if your sign-in name differs from your blogging name? Does Twitter do that thing with you where he sort of is giving you a massage and you start wondering if he has feelings for you, but then he says something that makes it completely clear that he doesn’t have feelings for you?

Or is that just me?

Here is where you can find me on Twitter. Let me know where you are if you’re over there. In fact, let all of us know below in the comment section and also find new people there to follow.

In fact…

You knew this was coming…

I have created a form. If you click over and fill it out, I will add a Twitter section of the blogroll listing Twitter accounts in the ALI community.

Is anyone else having a love affair with Twitter? A hateful silence? Complete, cold indifference?

On a Twitter side note, I noticed a cool Tweet Me button at the bottom of posts on Lori’s blog. I clicked on it and it took me to my Twitter status bar and it had filled in all the retweeting information for the post including a title and a link. All I had to do was hit “publish” on Twitter and it tweeted her post.

I decided I needed this on my blog too (and hells yeah, if I write something you think people should read/know about, hit that button and Twitter it). So I tried to add the code and obviously, I’m not as bright as Lori because I messed it up 3000 times. Finally, I wrote the Tweetmeme people and by fuck, they wrote back a few hours later with an answer. Then I emailed a second question and the same helpful person gave me an answer.

I don’t know about you, but good customer service buys my loyalty and admiration. I love Tweetmeme. There, I’ve said it. I’m having another affair–a three-way with Twitter and Tweetmeme. In a week filled with tea-bagging, this should not raise any eyebrows, n’est-ce pas?

So add it to your own blog to make it easier for people to Twitter your stuff and click on my buttons (always at the bottom of the post) when the spirit moves you.

The Third Part of the Trip (you can read the first part here and the second part here):

The final part of the story is about something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

Before the kiss at the end of a Jewish wedding, the couple stamps on a glass, breaking it. There are a lot of reasons given for the breaking of perfectly usable stemware (stemware that could be used to imbibe large amounts of champagne if not for now being in three hundred and forty little pieces–though trying to keep people from imbibing large amounts of champagne is not given as one of the possible scenarios for the act). The most common reason given ties in the destruction of the Temple.

But I think it has to do with something else. You know, because I’m a big religious scholar and have the authority to dismiss the ideas of 30,000 Jewish wedding books.

Still.

Judaism is too symmetrical a religion to bring in some tangential piece of history without it having a counterpart in the ceremony. Which is why I think the breaking of the glass serves as a bookend for the breaking of the tenaim. Tenaim means “conditions” and when some Jews get engaged, they write out their vows to each other–all the conditions of the marriage. Josh and I did this, writing out all the unique things we wanted for our marriage and I painted it on a piece of pottery (a cut-paper version remains in our house).

We had our mothers smash the ceramic version of the tenaim and then put a piece of the broken pottery in a glass box and sealed it with a knotted ribbon. The symbolism was obvious–just like the broken pottery, our lives and possibly the lives of our families would be broken–unfixable–if we were to go back on these vows and not fulfill them. We gave each person in our family a piece of the tenaim so that we wouldn’t have all the parts. It was the enormity of the commitment, but it was also a mindfulness as to what we were entering into by getting married. That once you start wrapping your lives around one another like that, it is heart breaking to rend the two lives apart. Do-able, of course, and sometimes necessary for the emotional health (or even safety) of the people in the couple. But it’s a fool who thinks that divorce is ever easy or entered into without thought.

Shattered things are, by their very nature, painful.

The glass we broke at our wedding was blue.

Something Old

We drove up to Vermont in the rain. I wanted to go to the King Arthur Flour store. It is somewhat a baker’s Jerusalem, a holy space with more meaning for me infused it in than a little store can handle. I have wanted to go there for many years–we are a King Arthur Flour house except for a few forays into Hodgson Mill (oh their vital wheat gluten; their vital vital wheat gluten). The ChickieNob and I love to go through the catalog together, moaning over the bread storage systems and specialty pans.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I had this buzzing in my spine that can only come from finally reaching a destination. It’s probably more pronounced, let’s say, for people who climb Mount Everest. But Vermont is a fair distance from D.C. and Norwich is a tiny town in Vermont–hardly a destination where you end up accidentally like New York or Chicago. You need to make a choice to go to Norwich, Vermont.

I ended up buying cautiously, keeping in mind the bags clogging the trunk from various stores we love in Massachusetts. I bought a bag of pumpernickel, a special rye blend, a rye flavouring, and a few bags of cake flour. Modest purchases with specific loaves of bread in mind. I just felt humbled to be in a space that I have loved from afar for so long.

Something New

Julie and her family met us at the King Arthur Flour store.

So why are the pictures from a Panera in New Hampshire? Because it also seemed like a good idea to play musical locations through two states.

This is what it was like finally meeting someone that I have read for so long. Actually, first let me explain my first date with Josh. Not that I’m planning on calling my mother at 11:30 p.m. again and waking her up for the second time to crow into the phone: “Mum! I just met the second person I’m going to marry!”

The best way I can describe my first date with Josh is that the conversation felt like standing in front of the flour display at the King Arthur store. I wanted everything there, by which I wanted to know everything about him. I had my first date with Josh several years after meeting him for the first time, therefore, I knew enough about him to know that it was worth investing the time in listening to his thoughts on everything from Ireland to sushi. With some first dates, you’re simply trying to decide whether or not the person is worth engaging in detailed conversation; whether it’s worth collecting and retaining all the small details that make up a person’s life. I knew from the moment I entered his car that it was worth my time to remember everything he said because what he said was important. Fine, fine, all words are important, but the people you honour and respect deserve to have their opinions and desires and stories remembered.

And that is sort of how I felt about meeting Julie face-to-face for the first time. I knew enough about her from her writing to know that she was someone I was going to like and it was well-worth my effort to take in all of those small details because there was a lot to learn. Josh and Paul took the four kids to the Norwich library (after we gave them an impromptu snack of baked goods at their own kid table which included scintillating overheard conversation such as “do you like cars, Charlie? Do you like computers? Does your mommy let you type on her computer? I like to do Garage Band.”) and we walked around the store, discussing everything from baking ingredients and cake disasters to other bloggers and writing in general.

It was an amazing convergence for me where the old–flour I’ve used for dozens of years–met the new, and both switched in a Freaky Friday-sort of a way. The store made me reex
amine what I knew about baking as well as the shortcuts I’m prone to take. And being with Julie, someone relatively new in my life, felt so old and familiar. I was entirely comfortable with her from point one, which is a huge statement since I am generally quite shy and awkward and prone to vomiting when nervous. I only wish we had more time to talk–I had one thousand questions and only so much time to ask them.

Julie is exactly what you’d expect from her blog: intelligent, funny, circumspect, thoughtful, kind, and warm. She knows how to walk that fine line of teasing without drawing blood; the sort of teasing that sets the other person at ease and makes them feel as if someone small aspect of their life has been noted, made important enough to tease.

Maybe a better explanation of Julie, again in a story:

One time I wanted to get this writer’s signature. He wasn’t signing books, in fact, he infamously almost never signs books. But he was on our campus and I knew that he was at a reception in this particular room, socializing with some of the professors before he spoke to a small group of writing students. I walked into the room and entered this circle that the professors had made around him, hanging back towards the edge, just listening to him tell this story. But suddenly, everyone noticed me and was staring at me. The story stopped and my professors were glowering and one asked what I was doing in the room. I remember standing there, trying to think of how I could back out of the room, and the writer leaned forward and took my book out of my hands as well as a pen out of his pocket. He gave a laugh and a wave to the professors as if to say that it wasn’t a big deal at all and they shouldn’t make it a big deal. “She just wanted her book signed. No problem.” He scrawled an inscription and handed back the book graciously. And then my professors made it clear that I was to leave immediately.

And that was what it was like to be with her. She held the graciousness of that author, the ability to make another person feel welcome. The ability to put others at ease is a gift.

And she is twice the writer of the unnamed author. I have a lot to learn by reading her work.

Something Borrowed

We borrowed a room in my aunt’s house. The last time I was up in Vermont was more than ten years earlier. My cousin–her daughter–and I had driven up to her parent’s house to get away from Western Massachusetts. We went swimming in the quarry. We made tomato sauce. We all ate out on the porch.

My cousin is my human harbour, more like a sister. She lived in Western Massachusetts at the same time. It is continued symmetry: our mothers were each other’s bridesmaids and she was one of mine. I had tried to talk her into meeting us at her parent’s house during the trip, but she had to work. Maybe I was trying to recreate the missing piece of taking back the area. How could I take back Western Massachusetts without incorporating the harbour that protected me emotionally those years? My cousin is my heart–then and now.

I told Josh that I wanted to go to Vermont for the flour store, but as we drove back towards Massachusetts, he asked if it subconsciously had to do with running away to the area I always ran away to towards the end of my time in Western Massachusetts. When I could no longer go out to study in Amherst or Northampton and risk running into people, I would drive up to Brattleboro and take over a cafe table up there.

When we drove up towards Norwich, stopping in Putney at the Sugar House, I felt a lightness. It was just like the lightness I felt when I drove up I-91, trying to escape even knowing I was going to return. Driving back down the highway after leaving Julie, the pit in my stomach returned once we exited onto Route 116 and we drove through my old town, the stretch of empty road to the school, the college buildings.

That is the problem with borrowed things–you always need to give them back.

Something Blue

I have always been a blue person. When I think of myself as a colour, I think of myself in hues of blue, even though orange is my favourite colour. My blueness has always been something that felt like it needed fixing, much like Western Massachusetts. Who wants to be blue? Who wants to be sad? It is something we strive to fix in this country.

When we drove back into Amherst, the sky was finally blue again after a long period of greyness. Not just figurative greyness, but the literal greyness of rain and clouds. I put on my sunglasses for the first time in 48 hours.

We went to the Eric Carle Museum and learned that we had the closing time wrong; there were fifteen minutes left in the day. The woman at the desk possibly could sense how much it meant for us to check our final item off the list. It might have been my voice cracking as I explained that we couldn’t come back, we were returning to D.C. And that this final piece had to happen.

We ran through the exhibit as best as one can do with fifteen minutes to see multiple rooms of amazing illustrations. At first I tried to teach the twins Eric Carle’s form of cut-paper art, but finally gave up and just let them enjoy the images.

My favourite pictures in the museum aren’t actually in the exhibit. They’re in the hall before you enter.

The canvases are enormous, demand attention. And they create a mood for the space. It is lighthearted, it is visual, it is joyful. The museum is just as much a showcase for the images as it is a celebration of illustration in general, the act of creating a picture.

Blue doesn’t always have to be a sad colour. It doesn’t always have to be a negative, something to fix. Blueness also brings with it other positive traits that other colours lack–a calmness, a slowness. Blueness, the waters, gave life to everything on earth. Blue is not necessarily a terrible colour to be if one needs to be a colour.

Because the problem with a synecdoche is that it dismisses so much of the heart, the fact that there is a convergence in most aspects of life, a symmetry. The yin and the yang. Hues of blue are not just a colour of sadness, but also great joy. Things that are old can become new with a visit and things new can feel quite old, as if you have known them for twenty years. The breaking of the glass bookends the spectrum of the betrothal–from engagemen
t to the chuppah. A symmetry.

I learned from this trip that things that have shattered probably can’t be repaired. But sometimes, things that you think need fixing are fine on their own. You can’t take back a space and you can’t repair a broken glass, but you can return, again and again, putting yourself into those terrible feelings because something beautiful can grow out of them as well.

And now, the story is complete.

Forgive the frizzy hair–it was a long day with many side trips into the rain. Also forgive the early-90s look of a t-shirt layered over long underwear. It was just that sort of a day. And forgive the glazed expression. It was probably close to midnight when we took that picture.

My first copy of the book arrived in the mail yesterday. So I guess this is really really real.

Also note that the publication date has moved up on Amazon. It’s now May 1st. You know, just in case you were waiting to get your copy of the most scintillating read about infertility, adoption, and loss ever written. And I will be posting a tour/reading schedule once I know it because I want to meet all of you and this seems like the best chance.

A proper thank you to everyone who helped me with this by providing their story coming soon. But a pre-thank you before the formal thank you. I could not have done this without all of you.