Hoops and hoppers

Because I recently shared my memories of gold earrings and small frogs, I thought I'd include their references in Luis Alberto Urrea's "The Hummingbird's Daughter." The first involves Huila, the medicine woman, and Teresita, the Hummingbird's daughter.

"Huila told Teresita to peirce her hears. Teresita was thrilled that Huila was interested in making her pretty. But Huila didn't care if she was pretty or not. Huila told her: 'You must pierce your ears to show God you are no longer deaf. You have not only been blind, but deaf. Punch holes in your ears to show God they are open, and you are ready to listen. God doesn't care if you think you're pretty!' But she gave her two beautiful gold hoops to wear once she had done the ritual."

Here is the reference to toads:

"In the summer, the rains came, and the magical event of toads bursting from the ground followed: toads started to shoot up from the soil, blinking their happy yellow eyes, excited by the first drumming of rain. Wildflowers were sure to follow. First toads, then flowers."

Still life

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Woman Before an Aquarium, 1921–1923.

I think I'm pretty good at painting a vignette with words. I can set a mood, sketch a character, but try and make that portrait come to life and my brain bogs down, its wheels sink into sand and spin, spin, spin in place. I'm stuck, and I'm stuck good. All that journalistic training to act as the impartial observer has me creating still lifes instead of stories.

Right now I'm thinking about the passionate woman I created a few months ago, and her terrible streak of bad luck. What's she going to do about this curse? I ask myself in the shower as I shampoo my hair. I ask as I pour my first steaming mug of coffee and sweeten it with cream. What's she going to do? Do. Do. Do. Do. The word thuds in my head as I walk home from the kids' school. It slaps against my skull as my sneakers hit the sidewalk, beats out a rhythm, a tribal calling to circle the fire and listen to a tale.

But what is my story?

Muscle memory

Photo from Duke University Archives, courtesy of Duke Yearlook.

Twyla Tharp, one of America's greatest choreographers, offers real justification for copying another's words, brush strokes or dance movements. "Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill," she writes in "The Creative Habit: Learn it and use it for life."

She calls it "muscle memory," a skill learned through practice and repetition, which becomes embedded in our physical bodies and can be called upon decades later. It's what allows the dancer and the musician to perform pieces that they haven't thought about in years. It's what allows any of us to hop on a bike and pedal away, even if we haven't ridden one since childhood.

But how can muscle memory -- the calling upon of an automatic, unconscious skill -- be of use to the writer? Tharp argues that typing someone else's words forces the writer to pause and study the craft, and points to Raymond Chandler as an example. Chandler considered Hemingway the greatest American novelist of his time, and so wrote imitations of Hemingway's style to absorb what he loved about it.

"In this case, the exercise is less about muscle and more about perceiving structures and harmonies anew -- from the vantage point of the author rather than the reader," Tharp writes. "If there's a lesson here it's: get busy copying."

Writer's envy

Sometimes a writer leaves me coveting their words, wishing to see the world through their eyes so I may own their descriptions and phrases. Fruitless thoughts, I know, but sometimes I'm so overcome with a yearning for ownership that I copy them into my notebook, hoping that by forcing my hand to write another's words it will fire different synapses in my own brain.

Lately, I've been filling pages of my Moleskin with passages from Luis Alberto Urrea, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. He's the latest author I admire for his magical realism, the fusion between physical and psychological reality that also defines the gritty, lyrical prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and whimsical storytelling of Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate." The fact isn't lost on me that these three writers are Latino, and that their countries and cultures infused my own childhood. It was in Oxaca, Mexico that I tasted my first Twinkie (yum!) and had my first taste of exhibitionism (at school, curious brown-faced girls stood in the door of the bathroom stall to watch me peel of my black leotard and bare my tiny white ass to pee). I was 5, and reality was magical: Rain-soaked roads bounced and bubbled to life with small frogs, and loops of red thread dangling from my earlobes (recently pierced with a sewing needle) promised to one day turn to gold.

Here is some magic from "The Hummingbird's Daughter." Enjoy!

Tomas rode his wicked black stallion through the frosting of starlight that turned his ranch blue and pale gray, as if powdered sugar had blown off the sky and sifted over the mangoes and mesquites.

But I like this, too:

"What are you eating?" she asked.

"Cherries."

"Cherries? What are cherries?"

He held one up. In the faint fire glow, it looked like a small heart full of blood.

And this:

As the light poured out of the eastern sea and splashed into windows from coast to coast, Mexicans rose and went into their million kitchens and cooking fires to pour their first rations of coffee. A tidal wave of coffee rushed west from the land, rising and falling from kitchen to fire ring to cave to ramada. Some drank coffee from thick glasses. Some sipped it from colorful gourds, rough clay pots that dissolved as they drank, cones of banana leaf. Cafe negro. Cafe with canela. Cafe with goat's milk. Cafe with a golden-brown cone of piloncillo melting in it like a pyramid engulfed by a black flood. Tropical cafe with a dollop of sugarcane rum coiling in it like a hot snake. Bitter mountaintop cafe that thickened the blood. In Sinloa, cafe with boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on top in a pale membrane that looked like the flesh of a peeled blister. The heavy-eyed stared into the round mirrors of their cups and regarded their own dark reflections.

Share your beautiful sentences, whether you own them or not.

An oatmeal cookie that rocks

Photo courtesy of greg.turner.

The oatmeal cookie is a blank canvas for creative cooks, with its dough stiff enough to hold a whole mess of goodness. I've tossed in dried cranberries, toasted nuts, shredded coconut, sunflower seeds and fistfuls of M&Ms. And while I don't follow a recipe and can't recreate my cookies (which is a point of regret when the combination is particularly tasty), I cling to one cardinal rule and it must not be broken: never add raisins for then you've sinned, creating a morally corrupt cookie that promises chocolate, yet delivers shriveled fruit.

Given my slipshod approach to this kitchen sink cookie, I've held it in rather low esteem -- at least I did until a recent visit to Sup (pronounced soup), a tiny restaurant in downtown Reno that serves an oatmeal cookie with every meal. I was nibbling my cookie, trying to unlock its secret when a waitress leaned over my empty soup bowl and whispered that it was really quite simple: Follow Quaker's vanishing oatmeal raisin cookie and replace the raisins with 1 bag of bittersweet chocolate chips, 1 bag of peanut butter chips and 1 bag of toffee chips.

"That's it?" I asked, incredulously. Within a week, a special trip was made to the grocery store and these delightful cookies were duplicated.

Plants and politics

Poster by Scott Hansen, a participant in the Artists for Obama series.

There was a time not too long ago when my life was lived in stop motion, seasons slowly slipping away as I sat on the couch and breastfed my twin sons. From my living room window I witnessed my neighbor's yard burst in bloom, daises and tickseed unfurling petal by petal. Months later I was still on the couch nursing and watching as flowers faded and trees dropped their curled, yellow leaves into the cool grass.

On those days that nursing sessions melted into hours, and I feared my brain was being sucked out through my breasts because I couldn't remember what day it was, my neighbor's Thursday habit saved me. She'd emerge from her cottage to care for her yard, and when I saw her I'd breathe, remembering the week was almost over and soon my husband would be home to help. Then I'd settle back down into the couch, nurse some more, and sing my daughter the nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary," because by then I'd learned it was also my neighbor's name.

When my babies began to toddle, I pulled myself out of the permanent dimple I'd made in the couch and went outside to dig in my own garden. With one baby on my back, the other fenced in the grass, and my 3-year-old daughter equipped with her own small shovel, I moved rosebushes and toppled fences, wreaking havoc in the yard and sowing sanity in my mind. The crash and splinter of rotten wood, the ripping of root from its earth made me smile, and I'd wave at Mary from across the street and ask her opinion on where to plant my catmint and whether grapes would fare as well in my yard as they did hers. Life was no longer tick ... tick ... ticking in slow animation. I could leave the house with three small children and not panic, as long as I confined my errands to stores with shopping carts (to contain the kids) or to garden shops (where they could run freely without attracting attention or disapproval).

Today there's no time to sit on the couch and watch Mary's yard grow, although it's still as quaint as the nursery rhyme's. No, it's not her marigolds that catch my eye now, but her political signs. Her irritation with the Bush administration has grown to weed-choking proportions she told me the other day after I put a Barack Obama sign in my yard. So I penned this one for her because we share a love of plants and politics:

Mistress Mary, quite contrary,

How do the Democrats grow?

With precinct swell and cash in the till

And Obama signs all in a row.

Flashback

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Discovering this video dredged up memories from college, and among the most vivid are my inky nights spent at the student newspaper. The Sagebrush offices were tucked into a dingy corner of the student union and served as the unofficial home to a rag-tag crew of students who agonized over AP style, memorized headline font sizes, and challenged authority for amusement.

It was just my cup of tea. (Er, though back then it was probably a wine cooler.)

I spent hours there pasting up pages, learning how to use a PMT machine and falling in love. Marcel wooed me from behind a Mac SE/30. He was a ceramics major at the time, skinny with big hair, rode a bike all around campus, and wore funky button-down shirts. While the skills I worked so hard to learn are now antiquated, and Marcel has lost the hair and funky shirts, he's still my No. 1 super-guy.

My neighborhood

"little neighborhood"
courtesy of everything.in.blue

"What's boyhood?" my son asked.

"The time you are a child. A boy's childhood is called boyhood."

"Oh," he said.

"When you grow up and become a man, it's called manhood."

"And after that you're a neighborhood?"

"Nah," I laughed. "A neighborhood is a place, not a state of existence."

But later, I got to thinking about my neighborhood, my street and my place on it, and decided that my son had hit on something. A neighborhood is more than a series of streets and houses and businesses. It can be its own living entity. Just like a corporation can assume human qualities imbued by the people who run it and work there, or a nation take on characteristics of its citizens, we become the neighborhood we live in. Our individual personalities shape the collective character of our street.

This became apparent over the summer when the rental across the street housed a family that was painfully out of sync with the block. Why did the neighborhood reject this family? Firstly, money -- the family had noticeably less than the rest of the street based on the number of broken cars in their driveway, and the number of times they knocked on doors asking for the phone, food, tools or rides. Secondly, (and this is harder to admit) I think they didn't fit in because of race, despite a diversity of ages and ethnicities existing on the street. In "Taking Care: Understanding and Encouraging Self-protective Behavior" Neil D. Weinstein cites a number of studies that have found that neighborhoods need a certain amount of homogeny to function. We need to share something other than just fence lines, and finding that link is getting harder in a neighborhood like mine with its shrinking percentage of elderly and expanding populations of immigrants and rentals units.

So I'm challenging myself to find the common denominator that defines my street. I want to develop a map of my neighborhood that not only employs physical boundaries and statistical spreadsheets, but uses the medium I feel most comfortable in: stories.

My summer vacation

Courtesy of OneGreatClick.

My recent trip to Seattle was a delightful detour from life, an escape from the hustle and bustle of a big family to the hustle and bustle of a big city.

In my suitcase I packed baby carriers so I could hop buses, a chocolate chip cookie recipe from the New York Times, and a list of Seattle chocolatiers and Japanese dollar stores. And for just shy of a week, two sisters and their two sons crisscrossed downtown, sampling chocolates recommended by the blog Chocolate Speak, dropping by Daiso to check out its bento collection, and then returning home to work on a cookie recipe.

Theo Chocolate won the taste test hands-down. A tour of the small company, which in one location transforms cocoa bean to bar, impressed me. Theo's commitment to organic and fair trade cocoa is well and good, but it was knowing that its Fig, Fennel and Almond bar involved soaking figs in a local merlot and stirring all that goodness into rich chocolate that made it divine. This is one craving I can continue to satisfy because I've discovered that Reno's Whole Food's carries Theo's chocolate bars.

My desire for the perfect bento box took me to the Japanese dollar store Daiso where I picked up some tiny squeeze bottles for soy sauce, and some equally small and cute forks and spoons. But I hit the jack pot at Uwajimaya, a larger Asian market that carries Lock & Lock, the Korean Tupperware by Hanacobi Co. These utilitarian boxes have taken the madness out of the morning lunch assembly. Woohoo!

In between the shopping we took a ferry to an island, watched the salmon run, and then returned home to work on the cookie recipe, which promised perfection after three days and a sprinkling of salt. Did it deliver? All I can say is: nirvana.