with strong voices, passions, pageants

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once but leave before it makes you soft. --Baz Luhrman.

Over the last three years, I have acquired many big-city homes—London, Beijing, Qingdao, and DC—with DC being the smallest at half a million and Beijing the largest at 14 million. Even the streets of Manhattan felt a bit like home when I visited in August and was comforted by the sight of a bagel shop, a sushi restaurant, a BBQ joint, and a Korean grocery store all on the same block across from my grandma’s apartment—a kind of homecoming after 6 months in more-homogenous China. New York is my dad’s rejected homeland, after all; “I’m Midwestern by choice,” he says. It is a place I come back to, again and again, and I feel wrong if I don’t visit once a year, maybe to remind myself that it’s still there. But my dearest home--not a city, at all--remains little Ann Arbor, with her wide streets and green trees arching overhead, with bookstores and bars and a world of restaurants... Home is the place you go away from and come back to.

Last March when I was living in Qingdao, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, an intensely beautiful, epic story, full of weighty words that paint a vibrant picture of life in Latin America. While sitting in my 14th floor apartment overlooking Fuzhou Beilu and barges on the distant horizon, I found something comic and strangely wonderful about reading Marquez—surrounded not by parrots and palm fronds and Spanish, but by gingko trees and cherry blossoms, emerging infrastructure and mounds of rubble, the weight of sharp Chinese tones and of filmy pollution being blown away by the hazy mist off the sea.

Now, on the other side of the world, I find myself amongst a mildly similar contrast—reading Charlie Baxter’s Saul & Patsy and Fuchsia Dunlop’s chili-soaked memoir, Shark Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet & Sour Memoir of Eating in China. These two books, as profoundly different as they are, bring out a sense of “home” for me like neither could on its own.

Dr. Baxter was my mom’s professor at Wayne State before he began his career at U of M and is the Garrison Keillor of Michigan, arguably our poet-laureate (even though he recently retreated to Minneapolis). He writes about Michigan’s landscape, people, and nuances with dexterity, thoughtfulness, understanding, and a sincere reverence for the beautiful peculiarities that make this place inimitable.

At the same time, I’ve been reliving the three lazy, haze-filled days I spent in Chengdu last July, while I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan food memoir. My former professor, Kevin Miller, lived in China for several years and recommended Dunlop’s books to me last fall. I think he understood, in his quiet, awkward way, that I was urgently, frantically, trying to hold onto something—onto anything I could from my time in China, even if I’m not planning on enrolling in cooking school in Chengdu like Dunlop did (in 1994, when there were even fewer laowai (foreigners) in China and there were certainly no laowai women at a Sichuan culinary academy.)

Reading Dunlop’s book in my carpeted bedroom here in Michigan, in Meiguo, makes my head rush with memories of faces and sounds and tastes of Chinese chaos. I can only read a few pages at a time before I am overwhelmed with a strange homesickness.

A similar power of contrast holds true for this poem by Walt Whitman. It is the differences between the language, the imagery, and the pacing of the first half and the second that brings out the beauty of each. And it is a beauty I have been toying with a great deal lately. Part of me is forever fascinated by the intensity of cities like Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York—with their passions and pageants—while the other, quieter part of me daydreams about owning a vineyard in Napa, about running off to Spain or New Zealand, where I will ride a motorbike and stare at fluffy sheep-clouds and harvest grapes all day long in the splendid, silent sun.

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

--Walt Whitman

1

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape,

Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching

content,

Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the

Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can

walk undisturb'd,

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire,

Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the

world a rural domestic life,

Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears

only,

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal

sanities!

These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and

rack'd by the war-strife,)

These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,

While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,

Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,

Where you hold me enchain'd a certain time refusing to give me up,

Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich'd of soul, you give me forever

faces;

(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,

see my own soul trampling down what it ask'd for.)

2
Keep your splendid silent sun,
Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets--give me these phantoms incessant and
endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes--give me women--give me comrades and
lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day--let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching--give me the sound of
the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments--some starting away, flush'd
and reckless,
Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very
old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
torchlight procession!
The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

and each will smile at the other's welcome

The last in a series of love-themed poems, here is Derek Walcott’s Love After Love. The poems this month progressed in an order unlike the phases of a relationship—first the nurturing, satisfying (or dissatisfying?) love of Billy Collins’ Osso Bucco; then the classic, overwhelming I carry your heart by e. e. cummings; followed by the flirty sentiments and deep-felt loss of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why. Finally, and perhaps my favorite of them all, is this poem about the loss of one love and the rediscovery of another—the love we come back to again and again: the love for ourselves.

Right now, I interpret this poem indirectly. (Isn’t that the beauty of poetry? A single poem can speak to us in so many different ways, at many different times in our lives.) I haven’t gone through a tumultuous breakup—though maybe a few losses—but here I am, greeting myself at my own door, in my own mirror, and I am beginning to smile at the welcome.

I am once again surrounded by things that feed me, things I had forgotten about thanks to time and distance—walls covered with familiar paintings; shelves of well-loved books; ceramic vases and pitchers and lopsided animals that I shaped with my own hands; the seashells mom and I painstakingly gathered on dozens of walks down Juno beach; and photographs of me at every age, carefully selected to fill the house when my scampering footsteps are far away.

Yesterday, Mom and I spent the entire evening and well into the night on our quiet pursuits. The snow was coming down silently on our woodsy, white backyard, while the back room was filled with churning creativity and my constantly streaming Ann Arbor radio. I sat at the long table, with art and books and photographs and the chess set I bought in China for company, and sketched for hours—jars, vases, tea sets, bowls, bottles, and sake sets that I will hopefully be able to make soon. My hands are itching to get back in some clay… Mom set up a batik silk-painting lab of sorts all around the room—with sponge brushes, containers of wax, huge sheets of paper, a wood painting frame, finished scarves draped over chairs—and I watched her, all night, exhibit the kind of quiet delight she once directed towards gardening and which I haven’t seen in a long time.

I could say a few things about our talk at lunch—about Bill Joy and the Michigan computing center, about law school, about that internet democracy firm in DC—or I could say how strange it is to be so quiet all the time. I could talk about the haphazard objects around the house and how I’m trying to do my part by getting rid of some of them, or how hearing Tchaikovsky on the radio made my legs crave dancing again. But I’m trying out this quiet thing. I’m doing something that’s hard for me, like everyone keeps telling me to, and it’s slowly becoming easier when I can pass the still, snowy evenings watching Star Wars with Alex or absorbed in art with mom.

There’s a reason this poem is quietly and simply one of the best mantras on love. And it’s the last line, my favorite in all of poetry. I assembled an anthology for a poetry class in college and I titled the entire thing after that one line—one thread to quietly pull everything together, one phrase that I am still trying to heed.

Love After Love

--Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained

One week into The Post and I’m already behind. Insert comment on Miriam-lateness here.

Ok, here’s a real-life conversation from last week…

Me: I was supposed to be born in mid-October, so I was a few days early.

Allison: You? Early?! I guess it happened that one time aaaand it’s never happened since! (buh dum chh)

I didn’t post on Monday, as promised, because I was sick and still went to work. Bad move. I’m paying for it now. I dragged myself to a clinic this afternoon to find out what's wrong (I've been sick three times in four weeks; turns out I have a sinus infection and an ear infection) and then I went on a quest for the ultimate medicine: Matzah ball soup.

Whenever I'm sick, all I want is chicken soup. My dad sent me a bunch of Hanukkah presents last month, including a gift card for a delicatessen in Tenleytown, so I managed to get carry-out today. I cashed in big-time--two containers of matzah ball soup, a turkey melt, an everything bagel, blintzes, rugelach, and a Dr. Brown’s cream soda. Now I have enough food to last me through the weekend--and hopefully through this illness.

So my question for you is: What are your favorite comfort foods??! And why? (This seems like the kind of question my roommate would like. She's moving out tomorrow and it’s going to get lonely around here!!)

My comfort foods are:

*Mom’s chicken soup with acini di pepe

*Mom’s polenta with spicy Italian sausage

*Mom’s roast beef and mashed potatoes

*Mom’s cornbread and Irish soda bread

*Mom’s oatmeal (notice a trend here?)

*Chinese food--onion pancakes, rou chuan, guan guan mien from Tai Dong, etc.

*And of course, kreplach or matzah ball soup

Comfort foods remind us of where we're from... So what are your favorites?

This poem has been one of my favorites since Mrs. Greenbaum’s Advanced Writing class senior year. It was a great class--probably my favorite at Groves. We wrote a lot. We read a lot--both poetry and prose--and I knew I loved Mrs. Greenbaum when we read a short story by Charlie Baxter, who was my mom’s professor in college. Emily, Caitlyn, Kate, and I were in the class together, which gives me the warm fuzzies because Caitlyn and I had brunch in Woodley last week, and almost exactly a year ago, Emily and I were in Southeast Asia.

I like the simplicity of this poem and how everyday it is--like a snapshot out of Alan Dugan’s life. It makes me think of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and of being in New York--one of the places I'm from, in a way.

And most of all, as a perpetually-late Libra, I like the imperfect metaphor of perfect balance.

Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli
--Alan Dugan
This is the time of night at the delicatessen
when the manager is balancing
a nearly empty ketchup bottle
upside-down on a nearly full ketchup bottle
and spreading his hands slowly away
from the perfect balance like shall I say
a priest blessing the balance, the achievement
of perfect emptiness, of perfect fullness? No,
this is a kosher delicatessen. The manager
is not like. He is not like a priest,
he is not even like a rabbi, he
is not like anyone else except the manager
as he turns to watch the waitress
discussing the lamb stew with my wife,
how most people eat the whole thing,
they don’t take it home in a container,
as she mops up the tables, as the
cashier shall I say balances out? No. The computer does all that. This
is not the time for metaphors. This is the time
to turn out the lights, and yes,
imagine it, those two ketchup bottles
will stand there all night long
as acrobatic metaphors of balance,
of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained,
of any metaphor you wish unless
the manager snaps his fingers at the door,
goes back, and separates them for the night
from that unnatural balance, and the store goes dark
as my wife says we should take a cab
or walk, the stew is starting to drip already.
Shall I say that the container can not
contain the thing contained anymore? No.
Just that the lamb stew is leaking all across town
in one place: it is leaking on the floor of the taxi-cab,
and that somebody is going to pay for this ride.