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About a little elbow room

Kimberly Mayer received a B.A. from Emerson College, Boston, and an M.F.A from Goddard College. Her memoir, "The Making of a Master Gardener" was awarded first place in the Pacific Northwest Writing Association Literary Contest. She recently completed her first novel, "Black Angels," and is currently at work on a sequel to it. Kimberly lives, writes, and revises in Seattle, Washington. Currently, Kimberly is a Contributing Blogger at "Pyragraph," the online magazine for the arts. http://www.pyragraph.com/?s=Kimberly+Mayer
October 31, 2012 · 8:37 pm

Hair of the Dog

Seattle is, as they say, a city of neighborhoods, and when we first moved to Queen Anne, the local 5 Spot restaurant was particularly welcoming. We liked to sit and eat at the bar, watch a UW game or the Mariners, and befriend the bartender. Hank may have been the first person in town to remember our names every time, and so the 5 Spot became for us, the local Cheers bar.

Every now and then we feel in need of that again. Earlier this week, at a time of high election angst, we returned. (It is important to note here that this was before Hurricane Sandy made landfall). The intensity of the election was, at that time, Category 4, all consuming and draining. As Anne Lamott put it, “This is no way to live–rooting around the internet and twitter sites like a truffle hound, looking for better polls.” We had to get out of the house.

Once again, the 5 Spot was just the ticket. For those who are unfamiliar, the 5 Spot continually celebrates an “American Food Festival” by changing its theme every three months.  Sometimes it’s Texas, New Orleans or New York. Currently the theme was Washington D.C. Of course it would be.

Customers entered via a red or blue door to a restaurant decorated with every red, white and blue cliché: stars & stripes, beads, hats and streamers. It felt like one enormous rally. It felt like election night. And it occurred to us that maybe this was one way to deflect from the election, by just stepping right into it. Soon it would all be over, in other words.

“Vote with Your Liver” screamed the cocktails menu. Although I knew we would be ordering our usual iced teas, it was a good read:

Let Me Be Clear Martini, “no details, perfectly clear”

Bain Baubles & Bubbles, “silly, what recession?”

Joe’s Scranton Manhattan

Private Sector Sunrise, “we build, you drink, no interference”

Hair of the Dog, “for those mornings when you feel like you were tied to the roof of your car”

One of my goals this campaign season was to change my mother’s mind, to get her “to vote like a woman.” I wrote a blog post on the subject, “Don’t Call Me During the Debates,” and told mom that I had written it for her. And in every conversation I tried in some way to convince her. Then one day she informed me that it was too late.

“Your father and I have already voted,” she said.

“So there’s no sense talking to you anymore?” I quipped.

Mom laughed, I laughed.

Well, maybe I will try a Hair of the Dog cocktail afterall.

The specialty menu at 5 Spot offered Congressional House Hash, Marion Barry Cakes, White House Standoff, Koch Bros. Memorial Super Pac Porkity Pork Wich, and Initiative 502 “Herb” Salad (in reference to Washington state’s marijuana legalization initiative). I went with my usual, Cobb Salad.

There was no room for dessert. We had so much on our plates. Slurping to the bottom of my Hair of the Dog I was thinking, we can’t go back and protest for women’s rights again, not twice in one lifetime! I want to pray, please let Obama win so I can get on with my work!

Meanwhile, over on the Eastern seaboard, global warming was at our door. And she didn’t knock, and she didn’t just huff and puff, but blew our house down. How many times do we have to be reminded? Nature rules.

Vote, and vote intelligently.

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October 24, 2012 · 3:52 pm

All Aboard!

As a child traveling Pullman cars with my family through the south and on trips out west, I had a romance with the railroads.  Smiling porters, seemingly as happy as I. Gleaming brass and wood, the freshest of linens, service whenever we wanted it, and always with that smile. I had no idea at the time what a moment in history we were caught in.

The first Pullman porters were recruited from the first generation of black men to be freed. It had to be considered a desirable occupation at the time. Porters were trained in schools and wore their uniform proudly, but their working conditions were horrendous. Meager wages, hurried meals, 400 hours of work per month, catering to rich white passengers, some of whom felt free to buzz all night and call any porter “George,” after George Pullman.

And yet the Pullman porters’ contribution to the Civil Rights Movement was immense. Forming the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1937, it was the first organized black labor union and wages finally  improved. Porters were couriers for “The Chicago Defender,” an African American newspaper that advertised job and living opportunities in the urban north, helping to encourage the migration of African Americans from the rural south.

I learned all this while enjoying the “Pullman Porter Blues” theatrical production at Seattle Repertory Theatre. The year is 1937, on the eve of the first black heavyweight championship, and hopes are high for Joe Lewis among porters aboard the Panama Limited, bound from Chicago to New Orleans. Three generations of men serve as porters. Musicians and singer Sister Juba are along for the ride, wailing blues, spirituals and slave era work songs. The set is designed like a fast moving train and moves seamlessly between luxury Pullman cars to coach, cargo, and caboose, and I’m in heaven….

And this ride isn’t over. Next stop is Arena Stage in Washington D.C. (opening November 23). We are casting our ballots out here and sending local playwright Cheryl L. West’s “Pullman Porter Blues” to “the other Washington,” as we call it. Consider them both, our vote and this production, from Seattle with love.

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October 17, 2012 · 5:09 pm

View from the Rafters

I haven’t been this nervous since seventh grade, when as captain of my debating team, I had to go before the school. I’m sure I feigned a sore throat that morning in an effort to stay home, and I’m sure my mother made me go. It was too important, something like “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” and I know I felt the weight of the world riding on my performance.

Now here I am, hours before the second presidential debate, beside myself again. And I have every confidence in my candidate. It’s not that. It’s that with so much at stake, the content of this debate is going to be shaped by people who cannot make up their minds.

Really? As a nation with one of the most critically important decisions to make, we fill the hall with undecideds? When was the last time you had an important decision to make? Did you call upon undecided people for help?

That’s what it’s like out there right now. All the emphasis is on the undecided or mixed-up states. What if you are not in a mixed up state? What if you are not a mixed up voter? We hardly matter anymore. Many of us have a pretty good idea of what we envision for our country, and suddenly, this election is no longer in our hands.

I have to get going…. the stage is all set at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. I can feel my old familiar bellyache, or was it a sore throat? The candidates tonight will be playing to a selected group of eighty-two uncommitted voters seated on stage, while the “general audience” sits up on rafters, in the cheap seats, in the dark. The candidates have been coached not to make eye contact with the general audience. It’s much like a microcosm of society right now. So many of us with little to do for the next three weeks but hang here in the dark, and check the daily tracking polls morning, noon and night.

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October 10, 2012 · 4:11 pm

Sounds of Silence

After seeing the film, “Descendents,” my sister remarked that it made her aware of all the superfluous chatter in life, that much of what we mean can be expressed without words. No doubt it was George Clooney’s eyes that spoke to her, nevertheless we are all capable of so much more in nonverbal communication.

And while this blazingly beautiful Indian Summer of ours just won’t quit, my husband and I slipped off in the boat again for “one more weekend.” Pulling up at Rosario on Orcas Island, we came ashore as tens of people were pouring out of a seminar. They were out on a break and while most sat on the shore facing the sun, some lay down on the grass, or strolled singularly on paths. The notable thing about it was the quietude. None of the participants spoke. Not to each other, not to anyone. And we did not want to disturb it.

Describing quietude is like trying to describe the dark. There is little light on land at night in the San Juan Islands. Soft lights from boats reflect, and diffuse, in the water. It is darker there at night. The sky, however, can be lit up like the Hayden Planetarium on the Upper West Side in NYC. Stargazing did for me a child, and this was again, such a night.

We were taken with it, both the quietude and darkness. While on a walk at midnight, my husband encountered a deer. It was close yet he couldn’t see it. When he came back to the boat his description was of “a low hum, the sound of air moving fast.” We talked like this that weekend.

We learned that we had arrived on the second day of an intensive, three-day, Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Retreat. Tom Kenyon was creating catalytic sounds by channeling a celestial musician, the participants found it transformational, and although we were not in the program, it affected us nonetheless. For the entire weekend we did not play the music we are usually fond of hearing out on the water, and I don’t know that either of us noticed.

I wish I could write this from inside the retreat too, but no, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend all that time indoors. One of the benefits of boating is we can absorb all that good Vitamin D and raise our serotonin and endorphin levels through the roof. And if we go a bit overboard in the summer, it is because we are stocking up for all the gray months ahead.

On the final day of the program–day three for them, day two for us– one by one, participants out on break began to say “hello.” It was as if they were resurfacing, and us as well.

Time had stood still, it seemed, and now it was time to return from whence we all came. Soundlessly, people wandered off with their backpacks, and boats left their slips or moorage, more sailboats than motor. We hoped to bring some of it back with us, the sounds of silence and the lights of darkness.

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October 3, 2012 · 3:47 pm

Don’t Call Me During the Debates

“We will decide this election, really it’s a question of whether we vote or not. It’s that simple.” Gloria Steinem

For weeks now I’ve been lining up chairs and turning my house into a theatre. Whenever I find more chairs, I start another row. This will be a full house and it should be a handful.

Out front, horse drawn carriages and buggies are drawing up to the curb on my street. Antique cars are coming around the bend in every direction. Sacagawea walks up from the banks of the Columbia River in Chinook on The Lewis and Clark Trail.

Eleanor Roosevelt gets things started in her sing song voice, “We don’t know our strength until we are in hot water!”

A few ladies sit in rockers, skirts and petticoats making a wide girth. Others prefer a hard bench, and still others insist on standing, but most are in chairs. I never could have anticipated such a turn out.

Margaret Mead interrupted important research she was doing in Samoa for the occasion, and hangs her pith helmet at my door.

Freshly bailed out of jail, Margaret Sanger proclaims “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether or not she will be a mother.”

Abigail Adams agrees, “Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”

“Here, here!” comes up from the crowd.

Elizabeth Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Clare Barton, Betty Friedan. Scanning around the room, I am impressed by the number of writers: Margaret Fuller, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston to name a few.

“America’s future will be determined by the home and the school….” declares Jane Addams, feminist, social worker, and friend to the poor.

“And voting!” they all chime.

In the remaining minutes before the debate begins, I try to explain to them who our moderators are, Jim Lehrer, Martha Raddatz, Candy Crowley, and Bob Schieffer.

“I think,” states Elizabeth Stanton, “that the young women of today do not and can not know at what price their right to speak and to speak at all in public has been earned.” There is great agreement among all, settling down to a palpable quietude as the debate begins.

I am watching for Betty Friedan. I am watching for Margaret Sanger. I am watching for Margaret Mead. I am watching for Elizabeth Blackwell, first American female physician.  I am watching for them all.

I am watching for the women who died at the hands of back-alley abortionists. I am watching for women whose education was derailed by unwanted pregnancy. I am watching for all the young women who were sent off to Homes for Unwed Mothers. I am watching the debates in the company of all these extraordinary women and we will not blink.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” muses Zora Neale Hurston as she slips into her wool coat.

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September 26, 2012 · 5:00 pm

Over Our Heads

Sometimes you just have to do something that is outside your comfort zone. “Do one thing a day that scares you” is written all over the Lululemon bags. I don’t know about you, but I always listen to my tote.

When my friend, Lynn, and I found that each of our submissions had been accepted for publication in “Minerva Rising,” a new literary journal for women, we thought, this is great. We’d show it to our families, mention it in our bio’s, and then it would retire to our shelves…. Or, we could throw a party! A perfect excuse in this case, as it’s the debut edition. And so, The Seattle Launch of Minerva Rising was born.

I’ve lost track of time, that was a few weeks back. Shortly after releasing electronic invitations to all the local literary illuminati we could think of, we lost control of it. With four or five files where there should have been one, we could never be certain of the count. (I knew I preferred paper invitations).

A few years ago on an island off Seattle, an ancient Japanese woman named Sally lived next door to me. Sally and I saw a lot of each other because both of us were always out, weather permitting, to garden, weed, clean up, and in the course of it, exchange conversation and plants. Sally owned a block-long warehouse in downtown Seattle, worth millions in real estate alone.  She and her husband had built up a wholesale floral business, after what I can only imagine may have been a period in internment. (She never mentioned that). Her husband passed away, and well into her nineties or hundreds Sally was retired and their daughter ran the business, but every now and then Sally insisted on going to the office “to be sure the money was flowing in the right direction.” I loved that line.

Well, Lynn and I may have lost count with our event, but acceptances have trickled in daily, assuring us everything was flowing in the right direction. The day before the event we will round up fresh flowers from Pikes Market (most likely from Sally’s warehouse), and arrange them. Lynn’s son will man the door, my husband will play bartender, and the Northwest Girlchoir will make an appearance at the event and sing a few songs. We will dim the lights, light candles, and pump in soft music when the girls aren’t singing. It will be a reunion of sorts among Goddard MFA alum and friends. We will treat our guests to readings, always our choice for entertainment at MFA residencies. And from our coast and our fair city, we will help, I hope, launch this new literary journal for women.

The editors are flying in from Atlanta, Georgia and Portland, Maine. They will stay at our house and we will drive them around town like dignitaries. The beds are made, steps are swept, and yesterday I added purple pansies to my window box. (Purple being the color of “Minerva Rising Literary Journal”). Afterall, it isn’t everyday one’s friends start a new publication. And it isn’t every day you get published in one. Soon we will pass the mark where we’ve done all that we can anticipate, and there will be nothing more to do but celebrate.

 

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September 19, 2012 · 5:37 pm

Everything Matters

This week the world has been shocked to witness what in chaos theory is called The Butterfly Effect, whereby “when a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world.” Or in other words, when an amateur filmmaker in Los Angeles makes a hateful anti-Muslim film, it can cause riots, death, and destruction throughout The Middle East. We witnessed this too with the Qur’an-burning pastor in Florida.

Personally I’d like to see the film maker behind bars as well as the pastor, but the problem is bigger than that. Free speech, for one thing. Democracy demands it. Civility, however, has its own demands. To put it simply, we must respect others.

Civilization is eroding and evolving at once, and perhaps this has always been the case. We know how fast things can erode, as a mere snowball turned into an avalanche while we sat frozen in our seats.  But let’s remind ourselves that The Butterfly Effect works both ways, toward healing, understanding, and enlightenment as well.

Robert F. Kennedy expressed it elegantly, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

What we say and do matters. What we write matters. It all matters.

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September 12, 2012 · 4:16 pm

The Memory of Food

I remember my grandmothers in food. The grandmother I called Gram often had a cook in the kitchen. Holidays were huge affairs at her house, all the best silver, glassware, and china, all the best dishes, all their sons and their wives, and a cotillion of dressed-up grandchildren of all ages, making every effort to be mindful of manners.

These dinners began with cocktails and fresh pink shrimp in the living room. Children took note of candy filled bowls on high buffets and soda bottles for the taking in a walk-in ice box. The candy was not so easy to reach, but hang around long enough beneath the buffet and an uncle would go by and pass them down to you. Hard candies, they were always hard candies. We would have preferred them soft, or say, chocolate, but I suppose if you are going to leave it out like that…. which, of course, struck us as wondrous.

Cocktail hour was followed by the procession into a dining room that seemed to seat thirty, paneled in a deep dark mahogany that had once graced the boardroom of a bank. Between the crystal chandelier and enormous window of leaded glass, prism reflections bounced around the high ceilinged room when the sun was at that ‘certain slant of light.’

Young ones started at the children’s table situated near the window, and over the years, graduated to the long table—which meant that maybe an uncle would pour you a taste of champagne. Food never stopped coming. Grandpa had a buzzer by his feet at his end of the table to summon Susan, the cook, but we all knew that Gram had worked her tail off too. This was how she showed her love. ‘Never enough food for the family’ must have been her motto.

Dessert was multiple choice, as at a restaurant. I don’t know where the Southern influence came from, but there was always a pecan pie at Gram’s table—the richest thing imaginable—served with vanilla ice cream on top. And plates of her homemade cookies passed around with coffee and tea, to top off dessert.

My other grandmother, Nana, was as thin as a rail. One dinner at Gram’s would have lasted her all year. Nana had a funny relationship with food, starting every morning when she would mix assorted cereals to make the perfect combination. “A little bit of Kix, a little bit of corn flakes,” (the emphasis always on “little”), followed by the proclamation, “mmm, this is so good!” It didn’t take much to make Nana happy.

One grandmother couldn’t feed you enough. The other grandmother was watching your weight before you were, but both are remembered through food. While Gram’s silver candy dishes were perpetually polished and filled and on display, Nana, I discovered, kept small tins of confectionary sugar-coated hard candies squirreled away in her little pantry. (What was it about grandmothers and hard candies?). And she never said a word about it over the years as I would sneak in, open the tins, lick off all the sugar, and stick the hard candies back in there again. It didn’t take much to make me happy either.

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August 29, 2012 · 7:49 pm

Pass Me My Blog

“Blogs make it hard for me to read full articles. Now tweets make blogs hard to read. Soon, I’ll only be able to consume shapes.” Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box

This is good news I suppose for cave painters. But as writers we have to tremble. Many of us have every intention to write books. In the meantime, we are blogging….

My daughter advises me to keep blog posts short and brisk, “perhaps no more than one or two sentences per paragraph.” (I have to listen to her. She’s the one who helped set up my blog in the first place).

OK, so I am trying. (How am I doing, honey?)

I have to be concerned about my manuscripts, however. Will there even be an audience for book-length works? Then I remember that I read, every day and every night. There’s little blue tin and tint of television light ever emitting from this house. That’s my tribe, and as endangered as it may be, I write for that.

So I see blogging as a literary linking of arms. A pat on the back that we are still here.

I’ll confess, I rather like the regularity of a weekly blog. I also like to imagine that I am E.B. White writing in my boathouse on the saltwater farm in Maine, sending my pieces off to The New Yorker. And although there is nothing particularly hurried to each day up here in Maine, it is amazing how rapidly that weekly deadline comes around. That’s a good thing for an old man like me.

I like the feedback in this too. Look at how one blog can start others writing, and how readily their comments are published. Does anyone remember the odds and the wait with “Letters to the Editor”?

Blogs are accessible. So much so, it’s become the new noun in my weekly writing workshop for seniors. In our workshop we write in longhand, read aloud what we have written at the end of each session, and many of the seniors  refer to it as their “blog.”

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August 23, 2012 · 4:11 pm

The Gods Amongst Us

When I was in my late twenties and living in San Diego I was fortunate to land a position in an interior design firm that had a highly acclaimed name in Southern California. The name was the owner’s, Gerald Jerome. He was considered a master, and no one knew it more or believed it more than himself and his staff. Looking back, we were almost like a cult.

Working for meager salaries we thought nothing of staying until midnight if that’s what it took to meet deadlines. And that frequently happened because Gerry, quite the salesman, made promises he wouldn’t have kept otherwise. None of us could have possibly had a child or a marriage and survived that employment. Still, we were for the most part young and told ourselves that we were the fortunate ones, that there were hundreds of designers out there with portfolios under their arms who would love to have our jobs.

So we worked for the association with Jerome, the hope that some of his genius would spill over, and that one day too we might be on our own. Such is the nature of the field, it is almost medieval like the apprentice system. Gerry Jerome relished that. He had a larger-than-life persona, and oftentimes while we were under the gun he made himself at home in our office, sitting back with a vodka & tonic, telling tales. Meanwhile we were at our drafting tables working, flying down the hall to make blueprints, organizing all the materials he would need for his meeting with the client in the morning, and driving home half dead.

His genius, the look we became so good at, was over-scaled and custom-designed for the most part. His interiors favored textures such as wood, stone, wool, leather, hide, over pattern, unless it was tribal, an ikat or a primitive rug. He combined contemporary with primitive, with little to nothing in between. His color palette favored the naturals, and we tended to steer clear of color with the exception of “Jerome red,” a brick/rust red. Everything Had to Make a Statement. It was design with a man’s hand. And his signature at the end of a job was often a custom designed door that stood twice as tall, twice as wide, made of copper or carved. One had to marvel at how easily it swung.

I knew I was over the edge when one day my brother-in-law, a Boston based writer and filmmaker on assignment in LA, came to visit, and I tried to explain to him that Jerome was “like a god.” All my brother-in-law had to do was give me that look and I knew. Not that I was going to do anything about it. You have to remember, I was in heaven.

Looking back, much was not right. All those hours without overtime pay, the chauvinism we endured, the salaries that might have been better but for the fact that Jerome was fond of making deals with his clients, and often took payment in the form of a rare Pre-Columbian sculpture, a Tamayo or Francisco Zuniga painting, or a large piece of quartz, all of which were showcased in his home in Mission Hills.

And then one day, after he had turned all other clients away so that our small firm could oversee an enormous convention hotel project in Mexico with Westin, we woke to find that the Mexican economy had collapsed overnight and the government had imposed a freeze on the American dollar. I didn’t understand the economics then and I don’t understand it now, but Westin pulled out and Gerry Jerome laid us all off. Just like that.

For years afterwards in whatever I did in the arts, I felt Jerome over my shoulder, bellowing if he didn’t like what I was doing, or laughing that I “designed like a woman” (the ultimate insult).We put up with such behavior in a person that extraordinarily talented or bright, and here he wasn’t even around. I was married and at home with my first newborn when I received a call from an old associate in our firm, informing me that Gerry Jerome had died. He had come home, slipped out of his Italian shoes, and suffered a heart attack while sitting up in bed reading “Architectural Digest.” There always had been a matter with his heart; I seem to recall it ran a little fast. His memorial service had come and gone—while I was in labor and in the hospital giving birth–and I never had a chance to say goodbye to this man who had meant the sun, moon and stars to me. How many people can be that significant in a lifetime?

Later when my life took a decidedly literary turn, I assured myself that I would always have a hand in interior design so long as I had a shelter to live in. I think it was only in writing that I didn’t feel Gerry Jerome lording over me. It is in writing that I would find my own voice, and what looks like my own design style while I’m at it.

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