Naked Ladies Trash & Treasure

Twelve years ago I went with some trepidation to my first Naked Lady Night. I knew only the friend who invited me, had just a few paltry clothing items to contribute, and I was unsure how I fit in with the all female, childless crowd swooning over piles of their discarded clothes. I was also instantly hooked. That night for the price of a few tired shirts I came home with two remarkable vintage overcoats, including one heavy black coat made in England with lovely grosgrain trim that still hangs in my closet and comes out every winter for dress-up occasions.

In the years since, Naked Lady Parties have become the easiest and go-to reason to get anywhere from 4 to 15 gals together to eat, drink and be merry, not to mention shed weary or wrong clothing items in exchange for new-found ones. It's the primary intake source for all the clothes that get into my wardrobe; with multiple social circles concurrently hosting, it's like an ongoing walk-in closet with a harem of personal shoppers at intermittent disposal. And it's a godsend for my kind who cringes at the sensory overload of choices and price tags in a store.

Naked Lady Parties happen in many ways. For kicks I googled it once and found that in some circles they are even big-time fundraisers: attendees pay an entry fee and contribute a specified number of clothing items in exchange for another specified number. There are sometimes rules. My Naked Ladies tend to be clothing stews piled in the middle of a room with a perimeter of eager gals all around it picking at things until there is a keeper in hand. My rules are the same ones I learned on that first night - no insults, no elbows, no greed. The way I see it, even leaving with one awesome and coveted item is a successful score. But I have also attended a Naked Lady that tarried over cocktails for a long while before getting down to business in the living room where clothes were methodically sorted into type: tops, skirts, pants, dresses, intimate, coats, accessories. To proceed, each item was held aloft and anyone with interest tried it on; the general consensus of appreciation awarded the item to its new owner. There is something to be said for the instantaneous honesty of strangers sizing up a garment for size, style and general attractiveness on you. But it's also a bummer of a way to lose something you really wanted.

The jury is still out on whether I would pay to go to a Naked Lady. It's hard to pay for things that you already have access to. As a social event I love the way it circulates and encourages friends to be vigilant and intentional about what comes in and out of our homes. The unclaimed clothes pile is always high, and there is great satisfaction in unloading extraneous things; I favor donating the surplus to a clothes closet in my neighborhood where migrant and farm workers can choose clothes vs. sending to a thrift store for resale.

The folks who are swooning over a $25 admission ticket to raise money for something noble and leave with a few nice new things.....your swoons are valid.
But I'm a purist: one naked lady's trash is another naked lady's treasure.

A Person's a Person No Matter How Small (the paycheck)

When do you jump the rungs and tell the Big People what all the Little People need them to know?

I know that when you're a Big and Powerful working person, you rely on Medium People to tell you what is what: what you can skimp on when the funds run low, what it will take to bring in more revenue, how to avoid a storm of angry Little People, how to keep up appearances, whether the job can still get done. And then, I reckon, Medium People decide to either work with the Big People to protect themselves and believing it also protects the Little People, or they decide to work against  the Big People.

I have a feeling I'm still a Little Person because I would work against the Big People, if not rub very loudly and abrasively all around them.

Which is funny, because the Medium Person who tells me what to do likes to tell me I should be a Big Person.

Very recently I got to stand up in front of a lot of Big People to honor someone who had spent an entire career as a Medium Person making a real difference in people's lives. At the heart of her work was the indisputable fact that she was in the business of making memories for people who were often marginalized in the majority of society. Of course, I didn't think to say it quite that simply, so I don't know if the Big People heard it. So now I am fairly sure it needs to be said again.

Only this time, not only do I wish all the Big People to take a break from their dizzying schedules and social reviews to remember what got them to be big in the public sector in the first place, I want them to think about making sure Little People get to become Big People. And how Little People do a lot of work that make Big People happy when they no longer have to work. And how Little People do a lot more work when they can't find the money to pay the Medium People to do it anymore. And how the Little People won't really get to have Big People kind of happy and health care and retire one day.

But mostly, isn't it just a bit off that the Little People can't afford not to do it?

Accidentally Awesome Bread Pudding

I'm a fan of those delightful children's picture books that reference or create a recipe within their stories. One of my very favorites is Mary Ann Hoberman's Seven Silly Eaters, in which a mom's seven picky-eater kids accidentally bake her the perfect birthday cake when their personal quirky favorite foods miraculously combine after a clandestine baking session in the night kitchen. The book offers the hint of  a recipe by telling us these kids are dedicated eaters to a single named food each - with nary a hint of how much might go into the amazing birthday cake. I ambitiously set out to make this cake with my preschool class this spring. I looked at the ingredient list: warm milk, pink lemonade, fresh-baked bread, applesauce, eggs (fried and poached), and lumpy oatmeal....
....and I pretty immediately took the easy way out and looked for a recipe online that someone surely would have developed for the book. The author herself published one on her website......so I used that one. Disappointingly, it was reminiscent of the book but to literal preschoolers not quite the same as we had to sleuth out the ingredients it takes to make bread rather than use actual bread. Although they were good sports (and we even adapted it to be be vegan and gluten-free), I wasn't convinced the primary source wouldn't make a similarly idealistic cake. My 10 year-old felt the same.

The great thing about being ten years old is the perpetual willingness to suspend disbelief even when you know it's going to make things harder. She was insistent that we use the book's "recipe." So yes, we warmed some milk on the stove, made simple syrup and real lemonade with a dash of grenadine, opened a jar of homemade apple butter, cooked some oats with a conservative amount of water and let it set to lump up. I probably should not have, but I suggested we could use the eggs raw rather than cook first and re-cook them with the other ingredients. I also pointed out that to bake fresh bread for our recipe we wouldn't get to bake the actual cake for several more hours. So we compromised on pulverizing three slices of gluten-free bread.

And it worked! We made up measurements for our six pure ingredients, recorded them meticulously, and put a round and soupy-looking cake in the oven for an hour at 375 degrees. After an hour, we gave it fifteen more minutes to get golden. Our dish emerged from the oven smelling divine. It cooked up fairly solid, though I began to see its potential as the rival to many signature bread puddings I've dined on around town. Our cake, superbly well-served by its heavy ratio of homemade apple butter made from fresh-pressed cider, provided the sensation of eating oatmeal and tasting like apple pie. It was delicious. It was delicious enough to make again and consider whether reducing the amount of liquids to produce a more cake-like treat would outweigh the goodness of an accidental bread pudding. Mrs. Peters and her seven silly eaters were content to eat their pink cake for every meal ever after.....I was happy with being patient enough to create a recipe as we went that was edible! And it was downright delicious when served with fresh-whipped cream.

Why I Drove 65 Miles to Walk Up a Hill

and not just any hill, but straight up a hill, on 1.5 miles of relentless switchbacks.
(first published May 2011)
Because the sometime-regular ritual of Saturday morning family hikes gave way to seasons of Saturday morning soccer games a few years back.
Because the ritual complaining about those hikes always amounted to happy kids and satisfied parents.
Because it's Mother's Day, and that's pretty much the only reason daughters acquiesce to hikes anymore.
Because the balsamroot and lupine and Indian paintbrush and sun were in full bloom.

Destination: 1.5 miles up to the high point in the distance.

Balsamroot & Lupine

Because a daughter grousing her way to the top giggled herself most of the way back down.

Because the special adolescent cocktail of sneer and absent dear are manageably carried off by the wind at great heights.
Because Oregon wildflowers are so lovely.

Looking eastward over the Columbia River.

Rowena Plateau

Because of the view.

Because mamas must share their ideas of beauty with their daughters.
Because it is often less lonely on top of a mountain.

Because I can be silly and I can be serious.

Closer to that tip of Tom McCall Point

Balsamroot

Because carbon footprints are overpowered by moms making memories with their daughters.

Looking west to Portland

Because of the clouds.
Because I'm me.

Letterpressing Riot

The lay of the case. Since capital letters were used less frequently in typesetting, they were kept in the case above the 'low letters,' hence the terms "upper and lower case letters" came to be.

It's no surprise that a typesetting trade art "lost" by the 1930s got a welcome reprise in the late 90s, particularly here in fair Portlandia.  I'd been aching to take an introductory class for a couple of years in hot pursuit of the wishful thinking I could spend some kind of long hours amid old machines and heavy letter type

Building form on a job stick, or as the printers say, "I like it backwards and upside down."

waiting to be locked up in poetic form and printed. In a fit of good timing and found luck over a year ago, I salivated over buying an old print shop out of Christmas Valley before even trying my hand at the Press. I seem to think the fastest means to making time for a new hobby is to let it invade my pocketbook and beg for its audience!Then time passes and classes come and go and finally one day there's a class on the Right day at the Right time with the Right partner in printing crime.

coppers and brasses, quads and kerning

  The language alone in letterpress print world is seductive enough to interest me:

Locked the form, planed the type, tightened the quoins.

coppers and brass, furniture and ringlets, chase, kern and quoin. There's even a Hell Box - the place for type no longer fit for the case! It's remarkably methodical yet puzzle-like all at the same time.

...this good idea came all the way from Florida...

There's a lot of decision-making on type size and style up front; start with a good idea,
flirt with precision to set the chase,  build and screw and ink it all up for the finishing. It's a lot of prep work for swift and smooth print production. It's worth the trouble and the tremble....and the long wait to get into the shop.

Registered, inked and printing!

We made it.

Thank you Chandler and Price.

first published May 2012

The Tight Squeeze of Wonder and Diversity

I've stolen a Sunday morning to sort through a 6-inch pile of mail. At the bottom was the winter's quarterly newsletter from my college. I tend to skim or read them on a delayed response, much like any of my third class post. The newsletter featured last year's commencement address, and it's message was to arrange for wonder and diversity in one's life. Bingo.

I did not attend my university or department graduations. I interpreted the advantage of a 5-year scholarship to maximize my credit hours and stayed in school through the summers (I loved those summer terms) and finished non-traditionally one year right before the Christmas holiday. And then I left the country. At the time, graduating among people in the larger University context seemed gratuitous. I've never really thought twice about that until this morning, wondering what my graduating class' commencement speech intoned, further wondering if I gleaned that innate message of Wonder and Diversity on my own, which to the best of a single mom's ability has been my MO. It makes me feel like I must be doing okay.

There was a second, less simple didactic message in the speech too: "What will support your building of a personal intellectual framework for regarding the world and those who share it with you?" Now that is a question that remains prescient in adult life, and challenges me regularly on my behalf and for my children. I'm not sure I've succeeded in building my own framework, and I tend to overlook that in pursuit of helping of the kids. Yet that children part, the nurturing of building a framework, that is tough stuff. Every summer camp, beach vacation, overnight, midweek getaway drive, after-school activity and even lazy afternoon informs this framework. This year like none prior I feel that I am facing a summer of last hurrahs. For the first time I am looking at the role of summer camps in my older-aged kids' lives as a real investment in those frameworks. It's not that I haven't been enamored of what wonder and diversity summer programs have had to offer in the past - I even spent five years offering enriching art and craft camps for kids out of my home to pay the bills - it's that I haven't easily accommodated their financial impact on my purse-strings. Navigating this stuff is overwhelming, expensive, and when contextually labeled as 'intellectual framework,' downright daunting.

So this year, having decided the expense of some quality camps in their areas of interest is non-negotiable, the question becomes what defines wonder and diversity. My firstborn goes to high school in the fall, a place where I know she will be surrounded by girls who have been afforded many more of these bought-and-paid advantages. At the age of ten she went off to her first extended overnight camp after earning half the fee herself. So it's my own doing that I taught her to work for the things she wants the most. This year, I know the thing she probably desires most is to start her new school year talking about a repeat trip out of the country with her best friend.....but at the expense of every other scaffolded summer option? At the expense of a family trip? Mama knows wonder and diversity. Mama doesn't know how to get a hug out of this one......

Contrast and Compartmentalization

The airline ad tells me to embrace my spontaneity; the holiday chocolate foil says to open my eyes to all the love around me, and another one says to exercise my heart today. I have never regretted acting on impulse, and I wistfully recall several youthful months in Europe guiding myself with a mantra of "No Regrets," yet I have regretted ignoring impulse. But the older I get the more I am sure these messages are for people with more means, less time lapse on the margins of error and planning.
In the past week or so I have made valentines, sung songs to plants, stayed in bed half a day, made friends with a sea witch, danced with strangers, drank rum with someone who brings out the best in me, walked at twilight, harassed a friend or two by text and wrote a letter back to a former student who wrote to tell me he had so much fun he's 7 now. And these things, all, were part and parcel to fun or the pursuit of it. But not a bit of it happened on impulse. It all required some planning or sacrifice or intention, and it all was pleasant but not earth-shattering.
By contrast, in the past week I have, of course, worked. I helped kids pulverize paper scraps to make paper, taught them to seal an envelope with a kiss, traipsed to a post office for stamps, took tea with seniors and spotted a peregrine falcon on a winter perch. I left a trail of hearts, wrote notes for lunchboxes, ordered books for school, paid bills, donated clothes and got recruited to help with a school auction. Work. Less sacrifice and planning, more requirement, yet oddly more fun. More obviously productive and emotionally gratifying. So this contrast, this fuzzy compartmentalization of work and life balance, it confuses me. I exercise my heart every day at work, but I have only more work to look forward to. My work life offers no resource for grand respite or repose.
I suppose I have exchanged the rewards of flexibility and honest pleasure from my work for more standard benefits of a big paycheck. I have chosen a kind of respite and repose without grandiosity. I wonder, can I rent a metaphorical room to the luxury of impulse often enough to keep up the dance?

The Hard Stuff

Today I happened to leave the office at the same time as my supervisor. This doesn't happen very often, as we rarely have concurrent arrival and departure hours. I have known this woman for more than 14 years, and as she is my senior by more than a decade as well as a mom of two grown children that she raised working full time through a divorce, I found her conversational comment surprising: I don't know how you do it, you're done working but you still have to go home and be a mom. So true. I often wonder that too.

But it's really the onset of adolescence that brings the sneaker attack, the Hard Stuff. I wish I meant the sudden appearance of adult beverages to soothe the heartaches at every turn. Being a mom of older kids has the obvious hallmarks akin to a paid job, shuttling hither and yon to lessons and practices and playdates (like work errands & procurements), managing schedules and homework deadlines (like work requirements and project deadlines), and keeping the sibling peace (like working with various EI types as coworkers and clients). It also comes with the monumental task of all the little things that happen in between, the emotional quandaries and especially the split-second media moments that launch, alleviate or darken the idiosyncracies of friendships.

My rule of thumb for my kids about living on-line in any form is that if you wouldn't say it out loud, don't say it or post it at all. A kind of media version of If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say, Don't Say It. It seems like an easy One Rule. The toneless texting & online chatting trap is attractive and welcoming, gratifying and immediate. I get it. I'm just as enamored of these qualities. What I don't get is how our kids are going to know who is really there to support them when they are suddenly misunderstood, taken at too much more or less than face value. What I don't get is how choosing these less personal methods of communication crept right in and replaced good planning-ahead skills, long giggly phone calls with innate instantaneous awkwardnesses, and all the while cultivated the documentation of secrets.

So like any mom, I go to work, and then I go home to work some more. I grieve these changes and think on how to effectively lobby for their demise. I ask the parents of my kids' friends, who are also my friends, to think about adopting a similar reverence for face to face communication. There's nothing easy about eye-rolling and cold shoulders, but they're astronomically more complicated in the virtual world.