Battle Scars Tell Their Own Kind of Story

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One that’s usually messy … but all too real

For the past few weeks, every morning I find this tiny bird perched at the feeder my neighbor, across the way, installed just outside his window. The thing is I’m thoroughly dense in the bird department. In other words, I wouldn’t know a whippoorwill from a chipping sparrow — let alone its gender. But everything tells me it’s female. The way she moves, the way she’s so completely in tune with her body as she sits patiently waiting her turn at the feeder unfettered by the human lounging around in sweats watching her.

Part of me loves this air about her, this radiating sense of inner zen with those God-given parts. While another part, the one not naturally hardwired in this fashion sulks slightly with envy. As women, the majority of us struggle with body image our whole lives. What we see in the mirror, what we imagine, what really is, the denial, the twisting ourselves into clusterfuck knots trying to fit someone’s else mold. It’s a long road. A painstaking stretch of self-loathing and self-doubt from that young girl to that older and hopefully wiser woman who has to figure shit out, break the spell of deception and reclaim what society snatched away.

Beyond those graceful nuances, something else draws me to this particular furry creature. She has only one leg. Yes, (for those screaming in my ear right now) I’m fully aware that many birds do stand on one leg to minimize heat loss. However—despite my prior disclaimer I wasn’t part of the Audubon Society—after countless hours and cups of coffee sitting there watching her in action, there’s little doubt in my mind the only thing that plume is sheltering is heart and bone.

I have to admit, my first reaction to this abnormality tugs at my emotional strings with an outpour of pity. My time invested makes me think of us as friends of the imaginary kind like Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin. But then I stop myself. Stop with the sinking realization pity is the last thing she deserves, that and as living, breathing creatures we all share in this commonality of existence which will undoubtedly, from time to time, leave us with those lost legs, broken wings and I suspect warrior badges far worse to help remind us where we’ve been, how far we’ve traveled, the battles we’ve suffered, and what we’ve lost.

I don’t imagine for one second anyone or anything passes through this life unscathed. We all come away with those lessons that don’t come cheap. As a person with my own share of deficits and tragic losses weighing me down, I often find myself side-tracked from the most universal of truths: real pain isn’t necessarily in the experience of those losses, rather in the aftermath of them when we find ourselves digging deep into a place we didn’t even know existed then somehow, just somehow manage to push one foot in front of another. I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned … this is what I call grit. The stuff we’re really made of. The true breakfast of champions.

Out of our greatest suffering and our deepest anguish miracles arise.

Anyway, that’s my take on my little friend. Whether she agrees with me or not … it seems pretty safe to say: I’ll never know. But as I sit here smiling wistfully to myself watching her fly away, what I do know is that if this courageous ladybird can endure a few ruffled feathers along the way, so can I.

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I hope you enjoyed my somewhat whimsical and lighter perspective on life. Perhaps you’d like to complement the read with If You Don’t Show Up For Your Life Who Will?

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2018. The Year That Wasn’t.

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To say the least, it’s been a strange year. Looking at my blog (and when I say blog I mean essays) I can see that my posts are far and few between. Part of me feels a little sad, perhaps even a little guilty about not writing as much as I’d like to; while the other part reminds me that a quarter of the year was in fact spent picking up the pieces after Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael, that and my creative well wasn’t exactly what you’d say overflowing. And yet, despite these blocks in the road, I still somehow managed to drum up my two cents’ worth over our country’s lack of gun control, over the true importance of women, alongside my conviction that regardless of what some might think, anti-Semitism is very much alive and well where we live and where we pray.

Ego aside, I like to imagine my time spent laboring over a few paragraphs was spent wisely. I like to imagine that I was creating something that would be remembered long after I’m gone. I like to imagine my days spent under a hot sweltering sun mucking through the mud in search of survivors was equally of value to others as they were to me filling my life with purpose. I wish to believe these things because the latter has taken me away from home at a time when I was needed there the most.

From September to December with my FEMA hat on, I found myself stressed to the core as I raced from one state to another, one disaster to another while juggling all my roles: caregiver, advocate, daughter, mother, grandmother, writer, disaster responder. Looking back, I was a goddamn mess. My emotional fibers were unraveling at warp speed and I soon found myself in the ER hooked up with fluids pumping in. Naturally, I didn’t think I could last another day in the Panhandle. But after a few hours rest, lots of liquid nutrients and a $500 bill to show for it, I was back in the trenches.

As I said, this past year was strange. But more than that … it’s been devastating as I’ve watched my ninety-one-year-old mother deteriorate like a runaway train careening down the track. Alzheimer’s is the type of monster once it gets its hooks in, there’s no coming back. Bedridden, frail, withering away to skin and bones, she sleeps 24/7. She doesn’t talk. She barely opens her eyes and when she does, she doesn’t know me. Each day has been this incredible struggle trying to wrap my head around the hard fact her end is near, and with that end will go the most important person in my life.

And so the wait began.

When I wasn’t binge-watching Outlander and Game of Thrones, I funneled whatever energy was left over into writing. For as long as I can remember this thing I do has been my single most precious place of worship. My retreat. My joy. And my greatest frustration. Most days I find myself staring at a blank page or a page I’ve edited five times and still reads like shit. The thing is 2018 was supposed to be a banner year in regards to the completion of my second book (well, it’s not actually just one book, rather a series of three fat ones). That was the plan. The goal after thirteen long fucking years. But if you know anything at all about life, you know things don’t always turn out as planned. Shit happens. Not for one moment do I honestly believe that what I’ve been toiling over for forever is going to be the next War and Peace. But oddly—if nothing else—it sure is nice to know I’m not the only snail in the bucket. Tolkien took eighteen years to write Lord of the Rings. Salinger took ten to write Catcher in the Rye. Mitchell ten as well for Gone With the Wind. And Hugo scribbled through twelve arduous years with Les Miserables.

It’s not always easy trying to explain the trials and tribulations of living a creative life. Sometimes it feels so small in comparison to the reality of it. However after taking eight years to complete her first book: A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, I do think Maria Popova nailed it. “One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution,” she wrote. “When we dream up a project, we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Rather than a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the creative mind if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any creative endeavor, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached.”

So yeah … 2018 pretty much sucked. And I suspect 2019 will be marked by more of the same. But I’ve been down this particular road before—as have 99% of you as well—and as horrible and as shitty as some things feel in the moment, what is true is the knowledge that you do go on. You can endure those tests you’re forced to face. Because after the dark does come the dawn.

And so determined to finish off the year with some tiny nugget of hope in my heart, like every New Year’s Eve before, I spent this one with my daughter and granddaughter. After a meal of salmon drenched in duck sauce and Nutella popovers, topped by a glass or two of Pinot, Meghan and I colored. We all danced. We took loads of silly Snapchat photos, strutted our tiaras, shook those noisemakers and whatever else Party City had to offer. And for a few short hours, just a few, I was once again laughing.

So as we hail in this new year, like a gentle kiss on the cheek, I give you my wishes. My hopes. My thoughts on whatever.

Please try not to be so hard on yourself in the year ahead. Forgiveness is easier than you think. Make everyone and every moment matter. Work toward change. Be the change. Remember kindness is more than a word. Remember that those battles worth fighting aren’t won in a day or an hour. Meet new people. Kiss new people. Find new things that interest you, that inspire you, that can open up doors to those relationships which just might pan out to be the best ones of your life. And lastly, never stop reaching for the stars … no matter how long it takes you to get there.

Thank you all for allowing me into your lives. I wish for you and your families a most miraculous year ahead.

Lauren

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Long May Her Soufflés Rise

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“People who love to eat are always the best people.” — Julia Child

Over 6’2″ tall with a voice described as, “careening effortlessly over an octave and could make an aspic shimmy,” Julia Child (August 15, 1912-August 12, 2004) was an unlikely hero and loved by millions.

Whether it was resuscitating a soufflé, coddling a thinned bechamel sauce or flipping an omelet and having it splatter all over the stove, Julia had no fear in making mistakes—even in front of an audience. “Well, that didn’t go over well,” she smiled into the TV camera. “Remember if you’re alone in the kitchen, who’s going to see?”

The great thing about Julia was for someone who wasn’t trying to be funny, she was sheer delight.

And who can forget this Saturday Night Live classic?

Born and raised in Pasadena, California into a family of middle-class privilege, Julia had no great aspirations or focus growing up. “I am sadly an ordinary person with talents I do not see,” she wrote in her diary.

But all that changed with the onset of WWII. She went to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), met and married Paul Child then the two moved to France where he was next posted. Interestingly enough it was fate at first bite. While en route to their new home, Paul brought Julia to La Couronne in Rouen where they dined on oysters portugaises on the half-shell, sole meunière browned in Normandy butter and a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fumé. “The whole experience was an opening for me,” she later wrote. “I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out.”

Suddenly eager to learn everything there was to know about cooking for a person who considered herself a walking disaster in the kitchen, Julia promptly enrolled at the Le Cordon Bleu where she began to hone her craft within an all-male environment. A craft that soon went to a new level during a chance meeting in Paris with two French women, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholie; who were in the process of writing a French cookbook geared for an American audience. Only they were lacking an American collaborator. And believing she was the perfect person for the job, Julia leaped at the opportunity.

Little did she realize that this would turn out to be a massive undertaking. One that would consume her life, and consistently challenge Julia’s notions about integrity and creative freedoms that still somehow remain virtually unchanged in the fifty-some odd years since.

In a 1958 letter to Avis DeVoto, one of Julia’s greatest champions and confidants, she wrote:

Hell and damnation, is all I can say. Why did we ever decide to do this anyway? But I can’t think of doing anything else, can you?”

Ten years. Ten relentless years. That’s how long it took Julia to finally complete the now famous, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In between moving from Paris to Marseilles to Bonn to Oslo and finally to Washington, DC. Followed by six more years just trying to get it published. After shifting away from Ives Washburn, a small publisher, then being rejected by Houghton Mifflin, the book was finally picked up by Alfred Knopf. And as they say, “The rest is history.”

It’s been fifty-eight years since Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first published. And with Julie Powell’s 2009 book, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, followed by the move version Julie and Julia, written by the masterful Nora Ephron, Julia is as popular as ever. Someone we can all relate to. If not aspire to.

As far back as I can remember, cooking had always been my first love. Well, baking actually. When The French Chef aired on PBS in 1963, I was ten and utterly mesmerized by this unusual-looking woman wearing pearls, smacking things around in this makeshift kitchen, while laughing at herself saying things like, yum and hooray and oh goodie. This was at a time when television was still in its infancy, so to speak. We didn’t have shows like this. And we certainly weren’t used to the informality surrounding her show, let alone the premise. Regardless it obviously struck a chord with other viewers because the show ran for ten years and won numerous awards. For me, it was all about what might come next.

After graduating high school, after a short stint at a Boston college and being out in the world working as a secretary (do they use that word anymore?), I was miserable. I wanted to be doing something I loved. And making someone’s coffee every day wasn’t my idea of a dream job come true. So with the help of two generous parents, armed with my bibles (Joy of Cooking, Art of Fine Baking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking), I went to culinary school and turned a corner. Would I have ever imagined such a career had it not been for my Easy Bake Oven and Julia? Like all those deep-pondering questions where the answer remains elusive, so does this one. Her mark on me is as indelible as time.

When most people think of Julia Child, chef and a best-selling author are the labels at the top of the list. But she was so much more than that. She was an inspiration to generations of future cooks and bakers, a pioneer, a cancer survivor, the first woman inducted into the Culinary Institute of America’s Hall of Fame, and she was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She left behind a legacy that far surpassed what French culinary marvels she brought to the American masses. She taught us how important it is to hold onto what we love and to persevere—no matter how many times you fall.

So happy birthday Julia. And Bon Appetit!

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