Calmly butchering produce on a Sunday evening

It’s finally happened.

I’ve turned into my dad.

This evening, during NPR’s new age music programming, I found myself washing, drying and chopping up every bit of the produce we bought at the store today, and then packing it away in neat little plastic containers. I even parceled out the Greek yogurt into containers and taped a Lactaid tablet to the top of each one.
I had to check myself in the mirror to make sure I hadn’t sprouted a beard. This is exactly the sort of anal-retentive behavior my dad used to display. He’d crank up the space-age music (“Bladerunner” theme anyone? John Williams?”) and hack up a cantaloupe.

You’d kind of worry that he was dealing with some “Alien Nation”-related aggression issues.

Dad used to call the Alien Nation aliens "cantaloupe heads." But then again, he also called asparagus "Fraggle tails."

Seriously though, he may have had a point. Not about the aliens. About the produce.

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Lunch

This morning, I packed a lunch for my husband and myself. I wrapped up sandwiches, and diced fruit and folded napkins and nestled them all together in the picnic basket my mom gave us for a wedding present.

I was amazed by how happy the act of making lunch made me.

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Ann Beattie, and a word on a decade I don’t remember.

Ann Beattie’s writing evokes an idea of the ’70s for me.

Ann Beattie in 1980, recovering from the '70s.

I say that because I don’t remember much of the decade itself, but there’s an idea I get about the ’70s; a sort of feeling that makes me think of straight hair parted in the center, fondue pots, and kitchen appliances painted pea-green, orange and chocolate brown.

I don’t know why, but when I think of the ’70s, I also think of depression. Maybe  it’s the color schemes I’ve seen in pictures, or the disillusionment

following Watergate, or maybe I somehow think that ’70s represent a post-Summer of Love hangover. But I get a sense of depression from the ’70s in the same way I think of cheesy euphoria when I think of the ’80s. When I look at photos from the ’70s its always hard for me to believe that only 10 years earlier many of these same folks were wearing flannel suits and day dresses. It’s almost like everybody stopped trying.

Now, I know this is not fair or true,

but Beattie’s writing reinforces these ideas for me. I’ve read two of her books this semester, Distortions and Chilly Scenes of Winter. Her writing is bleak and spare. She doesn’t give us more than we need, and, in fact she doesn’t even tell us what people look like. Which is what my essay, below, is about.

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The return

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted to this blog.

Actually, I don’t know why I bother to write that last sentence, because I’m not really sure that anyone reads this blog. But in the name of continuity, I think it’s important to note that I’ve been blog-delinquent in the last several months.

In that time a lot has happened. I got married, for one thing. And I went away on my second residency for the Fairfield University Masters of Fine Arts Program. And I was made a full adjunct professor at Norwalk Community College, where I teach. I got to interview some celebrities for my job as entertainment reporter at The Hour. I wrote some short stories. I did some yoga. I fell right off my pre-wedding Weight Watchers diet into a vat of chocolate.

And all of this has been fantastic – particularly the whole “being married” thing – but there’s been a big, blog-shaped hole in my life. So to rectify that, here I am again, trying to make a go of this.

But my triumphant return to WordPress brings me back to the fundamental question I had when I stated this blog: What, exactly, am I trying to do here?
I’m a writer; am I going to write about writing? Isn’t that an awful lot like writing a song about rock and roll? Because while there are many good, valid and popular songs about life as a rock star, I just don’t want this to be the writer’s blog equivalent of Boston’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Band.” Nobody needs that.

So this is my plan. As part of the MFA program, the students have to respond to fiction every month with craft essays. That is, we have to write two to four page essays about a specific element of craft in a work of fiction (i.e. use of punctuation in Dick and Jane books). I plan to post some of mine here, interspersed with other posts, of course.

I don’t know if anyone’s going to want to read my homework, but that’s another matter. At the very least, maybe my mother can print some of them out, ink an “A” on them, and stick them to the fridge.

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