What Color Is Your Parachute?

We're going on that loveliest of ideas but most horrid of words, a staycation, in eight days, and we have all sorts of projects lined up: painting, sleeping, dining with friends, sleeping, grocery shopping, sleeping, movie watching, sleeping. So far, 2011 has cooked up to be a scintillating year.

One goal is to put these on something, I don't know what. But something.

On Giving.

I've been seeing the phrase "casting about" a lot recently. We are casting about for someone to blame, a shelf to place our growing anger on, a reason for why we feel everything is so wrong right now. Political candidates are casting about for a reason for being. The unemployed are casting about for jobs that don't exist. You'd think this was a nation of terrible fishermen.

The problem, though, is that there seems to be nothing to cast about for. There is just not enough for us right now -- money, healthy food, affordable houses, jobs, hospital beds, teachers, intelligent conversation.

But what would happen if we all said, I will give something? I will give $5 to you. I will give a meal to that man. I will give books to a library. I will give you 30 minutes of my time, or an hour. I will give you the quiet space you need to figure things out. I will forgive you. What would happen then? Would we find that somehow, again, we have more than enough, if only for a little while?

I'm not thinking about this because of Christmas. I am chewing this over because, in the search to save ourselves, we seem to have lost our human generosity of spirit. We have forgotten that in order to fix our own lives, we must take care with those around us, including -- especially -- they who we'll never encounter ourselves.

In that spirit, what I can give you? I have English Toffee. Will that work? It is the simplest of things, and the rewards are deeply satisfying. Let's start with that.

English Toffee
(my mom's recipe)

1 stick of butter
1 cup of sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup water
3/4 cup of sliced almonds
8 oz. chocolate of your choice (Despite its waxy taste, Hershey's works well for this, but use whatever piques your fancy)

Spread almonds evenly on a buttered cookie sheet. In a medium saucepan, combine the butter, sugar, salt and water, and cook on medium-high heat (don't stir it) until the mixture reaches the hard-crack stage (that's about 300 degrees on a candy thermometer). Pour the mixture evenly over the almonds. Break up your chocolate into 1-inch squares, and place them on the sugar mixture. As they melt, use a wooden spoon or spatula to spread the chocolate evenly over the candy. Let the entire mixture cool (I usually throw the pan into the freezer), and break it up into pieces when the chocolate is set.

I dare you to not eat the whole pan yourself.

15 Minutes

Kathryn over at Snippet and Ink featured our wedding and was so kind to boot. Hop over there to see. Thanks, Kathryn!

A Very, Very, Very Fine House

I have a house. Did you know that? I do. It is four bedrooms, two porches, and lots of trees. It is creaky in summer and in winter. In February, when the nights are at their deepest pitch, you can see your breath when you get up to go to the bathroom. In July, it rings out with my birthday song and roman candles in the backyard. It hums always.

This house keeps lots of secrets. It knows where Christmas presents hide, where dirt that I can't be bothered with collects, where the other sock is. It knows the pores next to my nose -- not the pores on my nose, but the ones in that northern corner by my nose, the part that swoops under the inherited dark circles, the ones that welcomed 30 by opening up like they were 16. It knows why Michael rips the pillowcases off in his sleep, because I sure as hell do not. It knows where the pacifier skittered off to; it sees the stains on the couch cushions we just flipped over for the second time.

Upstairs, my house is a riot of color, pinks and pale yellow and a verdigris in the bathroom, where the sink drips. The ceiling needs to be repainted, and the light streaming through the hallway window showcases the years of socked feet on floorboards.

The basement is dank; the boiler growls in the corner, and the garage could use some shelves. But the fire crackles in late fall, and the front door bangs with an everybody's-here ka-clank, and it is ours.

We just have to find it.

Yes, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

Lisa over at Privilege wrote a lovely bit about taking care of your silver, and it got me thinking about my own and why, in this strange age of recession and austerity, it is still so important to me.

I have a walnut chest of silver flatware. Much of it is my own sterling wedding pattern, Kirk Repousse. Repousse is a very old pattern, and quite ornate; some would say it is a pattern for frilly girls, which I am not. But my great-aunt took me to Bromberg's when I was 16 or so and told me to pick out a pattern, and that is what I chose. (We can talk about how strange an activity that is for a teenager some other time.) When we were creating a wedding registry, I almost felt a fool for asking for such a seemingly frivolous thing. But I am glad I did.

Much of the silver chest is filled with the silver plate that my mom gave me for my first post-college Christmas. It's very 1930s, with a smooth cluster of fruit on the handles, and it is what we use to stir our coffee and spread peanut butter on toast. On the rare nights that we can sit down to dinner together, I like its gleam on our table.

The rest of our silver is made up of bits and bobs from my family -- a serving spoon from a great-grandmother, some delicate demitasse spoons from another, a meat fork that came from Scotland a hundred years ago. There's a teeny deep-bowled baby spoon, and bunch of pearl-handled pickle forks whose origin is unknown, and they grace our table for every party.

I grew up polishing my mother's silver and laying it out for special dinners. Even though we always ate with a motley assemblage of old family sterling, it was the special service -- her wedding pattern, Gorham Greenbriar -- that got trotted out for holidays and anniversaries and whenever she wanted to put on the dog. For Christmas Eve dinner, I pulled out the tub of Wright's and a bunch of old dishcloths, and got to work. She may have had to bribe me once or twice; I seem to remember brokering a "nickel per piece" deal. I hope she didn't pay me.

As the holidays approach, I am thinking about our silver more. This is our first married Christmas, although it certainly isn't our first Christmas together. But it is our first as a family, with a paper from the Commonwealth of Virginia to show for it. My husband did not grow up with silver, and to him, I think it is a bit of an extravagance, not to say a pain when it comes to washing the dishes. But to me, it is so much more. It is every Christmas and graduation dinner, and bowls of ice cream eaten with old engraved grapefruit spoons, and a sparkly signal that something big is happening. And this year, to me it means the beginning of something wholly our own: our new family, with a new, very old pattern to show for it.

Speaking of Lists

(via the extraordinary Margaret Gould Stewart)

Does anyone want to gather in Prospect Park this weekend and saber open a few bottles of bubbly? I'll buy.

This One Is for Me

Hey. Over here. Remember this, your blog? The one that you promised yourself you'd write, you know, one post a week. Or maybe two a month. Or there was that one time when you said every Monday or Tuesday, or whatever it was. We all know how that went.

But enough, or too much, with the beating up. Blogs, like anything else, wither without tending. What I want to talk about today is that big old life list you detailed, and then seemingly forgot.

I know you didn't forget. Big things have happened: new jobs, new lives, new shoes. You did the biggest thing on the list, and getting married takes almost as much out of a person as it puts in. Balancing that out is hard.

But here's the thing: there hasn't been a whole lot of doing what you love around here lately, so let's fix that. Let's start with the list, shall we?

A lot of these take long-term figuring out, like that whole adopting a child thing. But so many of them start with one step, one hour-long session at the keyboard. One phone call.

1. Marry Michael
2. Write a book about the couples who got married at the Little Church Around the Corner (sort of in progress.)
3. Learn to sew
4. Adopt a child
5. Publish short stories
6. Earn a culinary degree
7. Finish my master's thesis
8. Hike through Patagonia
9. Move west
10. Stock a liquor cabinet full of good bourbons
11. Take my daughter to Paris with Amy
12. Institute monthly potluck suppers with friends
13. Be able, again, to do that yoga pose where you balance completely forward on your palms
14. Learn to sing, or at least carry a tune
15. Meet Emmylou Harris
16. Learn how to make really excellent jambalaya
17. Let my hair go totally gray
18. Own a farmhouse that has a giant porch
19. Make peach ice cream
20. Take Michael to Zanzibar
21. Visit Australia
22. Have a dog
23. Learn to play the banjo
24. Do a job that helps to free people from something that is hurting them
25. Hike the Appalachian Trail like my dad
26. Go camping with my family again
27. Read all of Steinbeck
28. See Moscow
29. Spend a lot of time in India
30. Tea at Claridge's
31. Finish "War and Peace"
32. Flesh out my idea of the horrible superhero family
33. Read a play or story that Michael wrote
34. Remember people's birthdays
35. Montreal with my brother
36. Visit Banff
37. Take a holiday on the Royal Scotsman
38. Get my health in order: teeth, eyes, exercise
39. Drive across the United States
40. See a concert at the Ryman
41. Get all my old college friends together at the beach
42. Make Christmas stockings for people who don't have them
43. Waterfalls in Costa Rica
44. Tea in Morocco
45. Get my scuba diving license
46. Learn to speak Spanish and Arabic
47. Learn to play the piano
48. Take my family to Antarctica
49. Learn enough about baseball to explain it to a kid
50. Write a novel
51. Organize my photos
52. Visit the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia
53. Spend one day a week learning how to cook new things
54. Dinner at Antoine's
55. Nap in a hammock in the Bay Islands
56. Drive from San Francisco to Seattle
57. Visit Rwanda
58. Dinner at Chez Panisse
59. Write food articles for The New York Times and Gourmet magazine another incredible publication
60. Find one person and write a book about them
61. Relearn the tenets of algebra
62. fall fires in our backyard, friends in lawn chairs, dogs roaming
63. Go one week without using a computer
64. Do micro-lending
65. Drive down the Seward Highway
66. Buy a house in the North Carolina mountains
67. Donate a percentage of our income each month
68. Go back to Turkey
69. Paint and make curtains for our guest room
70. Make the bed every morning
71. Sew my own clothes
72. Run, and after that, meditate.
73. Figure out other ways of money coming to me than from a corporation.
74. Own a Karmann Ghia. Drive said Karmann Ghia to the Keys.

Let's begin with number 73.