her able hands

Thank you all for your encouraging words and for pointing out bits and pieces that I just might be glossing over. I spent quite a lot of time yesterday talking with several people, including Cheril, and writing down a list of my requirements and of what I’m looking for the next big adventure in my life to entail. When I got home I sat down with my neighbor for a bit and told him this:

We’re interested, but don’t like the space. We also feel that in order to open strong and memorably, we would want to have the menu focus on a few things and do them really well, and then leave room to add in other experimental items over time. We want as much organic as possible and to find a way into that niche. We recognize that it will be very challenging to develop a franchise using locally produced food, but still want to make that at least a tiny corner of the plan, where a monthly special uses a local, seasonal food item.

If he wants to do the sub shop in conjunction with the organic foods, we feel that’s just a marketing nightmare (healthy, whole foods and uh…submarine sandwiches!) and we’re not philosophically down with that. We’re two women in our forties who have worked hard to make other people wealthy over the years. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re ready to dive into work that is meaningful for us, and will be much more willing to put extra time into a project that aligns with our values.

I also said I’d done quite a lot of asking around (thanks Becca!) and using my own restaurant experience and my own fuzzy logic, I knew for a fact that his goal of opening his doors in three weeks (or his revised four) is absolutely unrealistic and way optimistic and is a recipe for disaster. And that his idea to have us hand over a menu and he take care of getting it all set up and just have us start when the store opens is crazy because we are the ones who know the food and would need to set up the line process, figure out the timing on everything and then train the staff to do what we do and to do it even better.

So if that’s his plan, he’ll need to find somebody else to help him with that, but we will joyfully provide him with cupcakes and cookies via our SugarBuzz home catering gig (our business cards arrived yesterday).

So it turns out he had a difficult afternoon with the man who owns the building, trying to iron out a lease that has quite a lot wrong with it. He’s having second thoughts and took in all I had to say and more. He said he loves our ideas but doesn’t know enough about the market and wants to do more research to see what the numbers are for health food restaurants. He also said that several other people have mentioned that it’s a bad location (a strip plaza with zero personality and a lease that states you can’t do anything to the outside of the building to make your store stand out from the others). He said “If I look for a place in downtown on Main St., would you be interested? If I found that space and turned you two loose in it to run with your ideas?”

Uh…yes. Yes, we would be very interested in a project like that.

So he went off to thinkthinkthink, and I went home to stop thinking and worrying about it for the night. And that felt so bloody good. It only took two days to go from white hot excitement to really seeing what is true for me. Phew.

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I don’t think I’ve ever been a very good listener, particularly with new people. My brain always has one ear turned to how it can latch on to some detail and then noodle it in a thousand ways, waiting for that inevitable pause into which I can thrust my own related (hopefully) thoughts. I doubt anybody I’ve met at a social gathering has walked away thinking, now that Kelly, she’s a really good listener. But I’m pretty sure more people than I (and they) care to recall have walked away knowing useless bits of my history like the time I waited on Judd Nelson, or the time the entire wait staff stampeded one another in the mad rush to get outside to pick Kate Hepburn up off of the sidewalk. Or that Fire Stix Jolly Ranchers and Mountain Dew were my favorite foods when I was 12. And that I was in labor with child the first for a month week.

I think I’m sick of myself. I wonder how people reinvent themselves? Do they start with something on the outside? Because I’m thinking that could be kind of fun. Would my thus far unsatisfied fascination with knit skirts and Frye boots be a step in the right direction?

Maybe if I feel absolutely confident in my body and convinced of myself I can learn how to be with people in a more genuine and present way. People like you. And you. And yes, definitely you. To learn how to not rush into connections in a bluster of me, to not just puncture a vein and spurt the story all over you in a river of images and feelings with no reference, no history. Hi, I’m Kelly and I’m a talkaholic. Maybe I can worry less that while you’re talking to me, my facial expressions are running away with themselves and revealing my inner insecure me. Is it weird that I want to discover the earnest listener inside of me? The one who hears all of the little details and instead of constructing her own story out of those pieces, stores them away as the pixels that redraw you in blooming color in her mind’s eye when you’re no longer there. I want to be the one who sits easy in her chair with soft arms and hands, eyebrows low and relaxed, mouth soft, not waiting or wanting for anything. Just being with you. Being easy with you.

But here…this is her counterpart, with arms crossed tensely across her belly. She’s not angry or holding or trying to block you out, she’s just trying to hide that protuberant tummy so her eyes don’t stray to it every five seconds. She hasn’t felt comfortable in her own skin for a bunch of years and she knows that fact creates a wall that not much passes through, not all the way. Maybe she worries there’s not enough room in there for you both. Even still, yes, she is listening—and no, not only so she can tell you what your storytelling has triggered inside of her own speeding mind. Though, as I think we’ve established…there is that.

When I first started blogging at Baggage Carousel back in 1998, it was for the love of stories—to be part of this burgeoning world of words and pictures, slices of past, present and future that people were sharing. I can’t believe it’s even true, but I feel like I’ve run out of stories, or have come up against the wall that has that sign on it that says: Do Not Enter. Or maybe it says: Enter At Your Own Risk. But there’s no disclaimer to indicate just what the risk might be and I don’t do well with that kind of uncertainty. All I know for certain is that I feel frustrated because I’m not expressing myself the way I want to anymore.

I love garden blogging and writing about food and my misadventures in the kitchen and in the soil. I don’t want to write much about the kids anymore because it just doesn’t feel like my story to tell and there are only so many ways I can be self-referential while recounting their escapades. And these things are only a part of me, not the whole of me and dammit all, it was a very long winter with no gardening whatsoever. I got in a serious rut with my cooking (pizza, pasta, beef stew, pizza, chicken soup, stir-fry, curry, grilled cheese, pizza, pasta, chicken soup, pizza). Hell, we even had frozen fish sticks one night. Yuck. I’m also in a rut with my writing—not just on the blog, but all across the spectrum. I guess I’m just burned out and so I’m looking at ways I can shake things up without walking away because I don’t want to not blog. I just want to find my way back to the stories.

I’m thinking about the reason I titled my blog Her Able Hands in the first place — because I was buried in my novel (no, I haven’t touched it in the last year) that I had given a working title Able Hands and because I was doing a lot of cooking and handwork and raising kids and noticing that my hands were always working on something and how good that felt. I was looking for a new outlet online because I was so tired of the baggage that went along with the first blog. Now here I am again with old stories looking for a new framework, knowing that I don’t want to go changing the whole damblam thing again. So stay tuned, I’m cooking up a little project that I’ll announce in another day or two, as soon as I can get a decent photo to go with it, and I sincerely hope you’ll all participate. That’s right…you. And you. And yes, you too.

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Saw The Avett Brothers at the Kent Stage last night, and after the encore, we all piled out in a daze…it was such an energetic show and we wanted it to go on forever. But the house lights came up. Tyler and I got separated from Chris, and we waited in the lobby for a while wondering if he got hung up with someone he knew, or in the bathroom. Then the stage manager came running through yelling that we all needed to get our asses back inside, because the boys had taken the stage again.

Here’s what the played for the 2nd encore.

and here’s the energy they maintained for 2 straight hours.

Standing room only, sold out show. Everyone on their feet dancing and singing along.

My face still hurts from smiling.

ETA: Kate, these guys are based in North Carolina, and sister, I swear to you, it is so worth a drive to see them play live. Phe-no-menal.

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Can I get an amen and a hell yeah?!

I didn’t sleep in too long, up by 7:15 to pay some bills and get thinking on the week’s menu/shopping list. A small pot of oats is simmering on the stove with chopped almonds. I’ll add blueberries from the freezer and a spot of the last container of maple syrup from the farmers’ market. Listening to the Into the Wild soundtrack on itunes and letting some ideas percolate. They’re loosely connected bits and I’m going to toss them up here so I won’t lose them in one of my twenty three notebooks.

I’m working my way through Derrick Jensen’s books and enjoying the hell out of the conversational tone and the balls-out pronouncements about how unsustainable our society and culture are by their very nature. At the same time, he weaves a thread of light and love for relationships, for the shrinking populations of creatures on the planet and for the land on which we all play out our lives, throughout the work. I’ve read a lot of gurus works on kindness, empathy, compassion, being here now and they all had this backdrop of hope that I just don’t feel. The world has felt hopeless to me for as long as I can remember. I’m not calling Derrick a guru, I’m just noticing the level of consciousness he has in his writing and one can presume in his living. He doesn’t talk about hope for the future. I’m reading and questions arise. Some asked directly, as in: “How do you want to live?” Well, free, of course. Then he shows me how much of a pipe dream and illusion my ideas of freedom are—how we’re all caught in the mouse trap of our culture.

Yet, there are all of these stories of human connection that are used as examples of teaching and learning. He never comes out and says “Hey! Loving each other is the way.” But the spark in his writing lights up these examples of him experiencing or facilitating or witnessing his or another person’s moments of awakening. It makes me want to be more awake. It makes me realize just how far off the path of critical thinking I have wandered in my pursuit of a comfortable lifestyle. Would you believe me if I told you that in recent weeks I have felt areas of my brain tingling? Spots on top and in the back of my head that I wouldn’t have any awareness of unless I cracked my skull on an open cabinet door or on the door frame of the truck while lifting out sacks of groceries. But it’s not the surface, it’s way inside, this tingling. Interesting that I’m reading these books while detoxing and cutting out sugar. It feels as if a layer of sludge has peeled away and I can see myself and my surroundings more in focus. No idea what it all means other than recognizing that I’ve been hibernating for a long time and that waking up feels terrifyingly fantastic.

Dang, this oatmeal is delicious.

So my cast-iron Lodge wok finally arrived. Jeeze-oh-man, it took three weeks. See? I’m such an American. I almost left negative feedback on Amazon, but really, I got free shipping and when I contacted the company two days after the projected delivery date to ask for an ETA, they wrote back to say that they were waiting for a shipment and would send it out as soon as they had it on hand. And I thought to myself, well, I should have bought it direct from the manufacturer or sourced it in a local store instead of trying to save seven bucks. And providing the machine with more information about my habits.

My credit card statement arrived the other day and while I did quite a lot of Etsy purchasing for the holidays, I still managed to rack up some serious amazon mailings. While looking the statement over for inaccuracies, I noticed a credit at the top of the month from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now, I had never noticed a charge from them and haven’t subscribed since we lived in the old house. Looking at that $5.75 credit, I saw this vast web of connected threads of digital information about me running all over the country criss-crossing with the same kinds of threads belonging to (no, not belonging to, but about) most of the other people in this country. The information belongs to corporations and the government. And I give it away every day.

But hey, I’ve only had one cup of coffee and I’m not ready for quite that much awareness this morning. Baby steps and all that bullshit.

So! A wok—seasoned cast iron with loop handles and deep enough to fry if I’m feeling like saturated fat is the way to go! My big Teflon coated Calphalon sauté pan is going out to the garage for Chris to use sorting parts while he rebuilds that motor for the Datsun. Dinner tonight? Stir fry!

Oh, and Cheril gave me a great faux snake skin covered journal that has lined pages on one side and blank on the other. I’m going to use it for a garden journal. The only real notes I kept last year were on this blog, and while it’s nice to know it’s recorded somewhere, it wasn’t very well organized and is beyond impractical to try to extract the facts from the narrative. I’ll use the blank pages for sketches and charts and the lined pages for notes.

Our stocking-exchange dinner at the local bistro was yum, but the rich food gave me a bit of a belly ache. We finished off the meal of shared appetizers and salads with a vanilla crème brûlée. The custard was a little more pudding-like than I prefer, but the burnt sugar was spiced with cardamom and topped with a few fresh blueberries. The combination? Sublime. I need to do some sort of dessert with cardamom and blueberries. After I’ve lost this baked goods belly and have strengthened my self-control muscles enough to have just a taste instead of emotionally stuffing my face with half a cake, one sliver at a time on the sly, over the course of a Sunday afternoon.

And now on to the question. Tell me…who or what is informing your thinking today?

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Watching this tonight, right after I watched a few video clips of Led Zeppelin’s concert in London last night, well…I’m just sitting here all goosebumped out and feeling like mush. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any live music. Well over a year ago when we went to see the Cowboy Junkies at the Kent Stage.

This song is so layered. It makes me feel like I’m traveling down a long tunnel of someone else’s thoughts. But they’re mine, too.

Wilco is playing Feb. 22 at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium and tickets go on sale tomorrow. I’m so splurging.

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