Renewal

For most people, renewing a driver's license is merely a bureaucratic annoyance that must be endured every five years. For me, it’s a report card.

A woman’s driver’s license unflinchingly documents how she is managing the shift from girl to woman, from student to professional, from girlfriend to life partner, from no-strings-attached to mother.

The pictures on my first two Washington State driver's licenses, both taken in August at the Greenwood branch of the Department of Licensing, had turned out beautifully – nothing like the stereotypical mug shots people joke about. They were better, in fact, than most photos of me, taken in more natural moments and with better lighting. Unlike people who shamefully produce their driver's license, I’ve always been proud to display mine. Often, far too often, the me it portrayed looked much better than the fatigued, haphazard me that offered it up.

The first time I sat in the waiting room of the Greenwood facility, I had just quit an exciting international career to move to Seattle and live with a man I'd never spent more than two weeks with. I should have looked worried. But in that driver's license picture I look carefree and adventurous, dressed in a shirt of Cambodian silk, excited to begin a new chapter of my life.

Five years later, I sat in that same waiting room, fondling that portrait of the glowing, unafraid me, wondering what clues my new picture would give about how I had weathered the changes in my life.

I was older now, with shorter hair, married and at home with a baby. My traveling days were over. I was afraid that my new driver's license picture would make me look matronly and dull. And nothing about the dingy Greenwood waiting room, with its rudimentary camera equipment, suggested otherwise. But the laminated me that the clerk handed back did not disappoint.

Five years after that, I’d spent months worrying about my next renewal picture, unwilling to believe that I could be lucky a third time. I was now a stay-at-home mother of two, who’d been out of the workforce for some time.

Would the new photograph capture the old adventurous me, who I hoped still existed underneath the minivan mom I’d become?

All year I’d been aware of this looming assessment of how well I was doing at finding balance in my life. I’d embarked on a diet and exercise regimen so that when renewal time rolled around, I’d be within the 10- pound acceptable range for lying about my weight. I studied my five-year old picture, convinced that wearing brightly colored clothes and make-up was key. I timed my hair appointment so that the cut and color would be fresh, but not too fresh, come picture day. Though I was offered the chance to renew my driver's license for an additional year by mail, I declined. I was ready now. Who was to say I would be ready a year from now.

On D-day I donned a fuchsia shirt and added my trademark lavender eye-shadow and pink lipstick and headed to the Greenwood licensing center, where I sat for an hour- and-a-half in the cold, beige waiting room, reflecting on why this photo mattered so much. If looks are the outward manifestation of state of mind, I decided, then I wanted to be satisfied with what I and others saw.

When my number came up, I walked confidently up to the counter and flashed a bright smile. And when the clerk handed me my new license, I saw a strong, healthy woman, the first lines of wisdom forming around her eyes.

Five months later, on a bleak January morning, my wallet was stolen and along with it, my driver's license. This time there was no opportunity for vanity. I needed a new driver's license now.

I expected the worst. The theft had unnerved me. It was winter. Instead of tanned and healthy, my skin looked sallow and green, my face careworn.
Though it seemed futile, I donned a pink sweater and the same bright make-up that I had worn the summer before.

The Greenwood facility was crowded. As I stood in line to get a number, a poster caught my eye. "If you've been issued a driver's license within the past two years, you can apply for a replacement on line." I want to say that it was simply the prospect of a long wait that made my decision. That vanity had nothing to do with it. And it's true that five minutes after I logged onto the Department of Licensing website, my application for a replacement license was processed. But the truth is, I wasn't ready to let go of that picture. I didn't want to believe that my confidence and strength were impermanent.

The Greenwood branch of the Department of Licensing closed on April 24. My driver’s license, which I was able to renew on line last year using the previous picture, expires in 2013. By then I will be the menopausal mother of two daughters going through puberty. I’d like to think that the wisdom I will have accumulated will shine through in the picture, or at least that I will have the self-confidence not to care how it turns out. But I’m not hedging my bets.

If anyone knows where the talented clerk/photographers of the Greenwood branch of the Department of Licensing have been reassigned, please let me know.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

Past is merely prologue, I tell my pre-adolescent daughters.

On days when they are suffering the inevitable emotional bruises of childhood, they are comforted by stories of my perceived childhood suffering. I was a chubby New Jersey girl with a dysfunctional family and an off-the-radar social persona in a small town where, as I saw it, no one appreciated my interest in foreign languages and spicy foods and people were in-your-face and proud of it. “And you know,” my stories often end, “I grew up and never saw any of those people again.”

Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Just the usual childhood middle class, small town angst, often portrayed in books and movies. And yes, I did grow up and, as many of us do, I’ve lived a life of many chapters: California student, exchange student in France, world traveler, foreign service officer and later, wife, mother and writer, settling into a peaceful existence in the verdant northwestern corner of the country, where the natives are polite and healthy and nobody ever gets run over by a garbage truck.

Here I’ve found my inner swan, taking the best part of my origins and subsequent reinventions and molding these qualities into the grown-up version of me. Over the years I’ve had happy reunions with several people from the more interesting chapters of my life. Yet, hovering on the periphery of 50, I’m still a little ashamed of my roots. So I keep my Jersey self hidden inside me (like the fat person that lurks within the body of the newly thin) only allowing it to emerge on special occasions, like when Bruce Springsteen plays the Superbowl or when I am loudly (and some say inappropriately) rooting for my daughter’s basketball team.

Then, they found me.

The first blast from the past came from my mother, a 75 year-old web surfing enthusiast, who, for most of her life, has been the living embodiment of a social networking site. Though, predictably, she lives in Florida now, she keeps up with the doings in our New Jersey hometown, remembers her high school years fondly and even lunches with her former classmates once a month. She found and later directed me to the website for my upcoming 30th high school reunion. Like a cyber peeping Tom, I looked but didn’t act.
A few weeks later I received a call from one of my best friends from high school, whom I hadn’t communicated with in 25 years. She still lived in Jersey, was going to be traveling in my neck of the woods, and wanted to get together.

Sitting in a neighborhood sports bar that I hadn’t known existed, I cringed as her husband, a die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fan, scream epithets at his team as the game went into unexpected overtime. Near another big screen TV, polite Seattle fans quietly cheered every small triumph of the beleagured Seahawks, making polite allowances for their flaws. It was like being with an embarrassing, yet lovable relative.

Later, we showed my kids our high school yearbooks and my friend filled me in on the lives of people I had forgotten existed – the stoner had become a Port-a-Potty millionaire, the jock was a doctor and several people seemed to have done quite well selling cars.

All of this made my past real to my kids and I decided it was good for them to meet people who had meant something to me and with whom I could still enjoy an easy rapport, despite distance, different politics and years gone by.

Then came Facebook.

Egged on to join by some foreign service friends who had posted some amusing old pictures, including one of me circa 1986 wielding a (fake) gun, terrorist-style, I succumbed to Facebook after months of resisting. I lost my innocence in the traditional way of Facebook newbies, wasting several hours the first afternoon reading the profiles of my many (thanks for finding them, Facebook) friends, prompting me to announce in my first “What Are You Doing?” posting, “Alison is regretting that she joined Facebook because she finds it as addictive as crack cocaine.”

Friends complained about the pressure to join Facebook, and relaxed in a sheepish, conspiratorial way when I admitted that I had joined too. Some justified it as a way to monitor their kids’ on-line activities, which we all know is the equivalent of saying you read Playboy for the articles.

It was only a matter of time before high school caught up with me via Facebook. The affable senior class president (now a media professor in Milwaukee) contacted me, I responded and we became “friends.” You know what happened next. Friend requests came in from one of the reunion organizers (still a die-hard Yankees fan), the audio-visual nerd (now with a struggling indie-music record label) and a woman last seen sneaking off to make out with my cousin (she appears to have settled down).

Requests also came in from people who weren’t my friends then, making me wonder why they wanted to be my friends now. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want to open myself up to superficial and time-consuming encounters.

“Just ignore them,” my seasoned Facebook friends advised. “Everyone does it.”
So I did and I settled into a comfortable routine with Facebook, checking my “wall” (an ironic name for something meant to break-down barriers) once in a while, learning how to set my filters, ignoring martini requests and never getting around to writing 25 Random Things About Me.

Then he found me.

Actually, I found him first. I admit it, that first addict-like day, I didn’t just react to the friends Facebook sent me, I went trolling for people I knew and in the process learned that a lot of other people that I had once pigeon-holed had happily reinvented themselves too and that some (the senior vice president at Warner Brothers) would be well within their rights to have the last laugh.

While searching for my niece, I found 80 or so Krupnicks, none of whom was familiar to me… except one.

The postage stamp-sized photo revealed the unmistakable hair and brow of my father, who had been deceased for more than 20 years. The name, hometown and birthdate were familiar to me too.

Here was my half-brother, whose birth, when I was 13, coincided with my permanent estrangement from my father.

I clicked the page closed and enjoyed telling the story for a few days. Facebook had the power to literally raise the dead.

But then, after a few months, he found me.

The nuances of Facebook are perhaps more, well, nuanced then email. His approach was tentative, “Are you related to the Krupnicks in New Jersey?” My response, less so, “Yes, and I’m also related to you.”

Both his parents were now dead. I felt a surprising tenderness for this man/child I’d never met. I’d heard from my older brother that he had not had an easy life, though he had the standard carefree Facebook photo.

“I’m your half-brother,” he said, adding “I hope it’s okay that I contacted you.”

I am the veteran of a three-year, pre-internet, long distance relationship, which happily led to marriage. My attempts to choose the right words and the right tone and to interpret what my new Facebook correspondent was feeling, reminded me of the emotionally charged “voice-reading” I used to engage in during telephone conversations with my taciturn boyfriend-turned husband. At least then I had something to go on. These exchanges were much harder to decipher.

“Strange way to find a half-sibling,” I responded, trying not to betray the emotional turmoil I was feeling, “but nice to meet you. I hope you have had and are having a good life.”
Talk about an etiquette dilemma, this exchange was clearly on a different par from those Facebook stabs at friendship whose expectations had worried me. I wondered how far this would go. I wondered how far I wanted it to go.

Because Facebook had opened up the possibility that I could gain answers to the questions I’d never been able to ask my father. Doubtful, since my half-brother had been 12 when our father died. Maybe my father, whose bitterness at my mother tainted his relationship with me, wasn’t the same father he had known and I’d get to hear about his positive qualities. Maybe we would share a sense of regret and unfulfilled possibility, since we’d both “lost” our fathers at roughly the same age.

Was he feeling the same jumbled mix of emotions and, if so, what did he want from me? After all, we were strangers, with nothing in common but some genes and a last name that means Cold Barley Soup.

I guess I’ll never find out, at least not via Facebook.

Because despite my carefully thought-out response, I never heard from my half-brother again.

Was I too casual, inadvertently putting up a wall between us with my breezy “have a nice-life” sensibility? Maybe I wasn’t casual enough and should have added him to my “friends” list, though to me that smacked of insincerity. Or maybe, as many do, he had widely cast his friendship net to see what he could catch and had moved on.

It makes a good story and it’s one I’ve told often, most recently during a face-to-face encounter with a friend I hadn’t seen for thirty years. The internet brought us together but I realize that only a human connection will keep us that way.

Marvin Gaye had it right.

Funny how the music from one’s youth still says it all.

Maddy Walking

I live in a neighborhood that used to be made fun of on a local late night comedy show.


We were known for driving with the blinker on, eating smelly lard-preserved fish and responding to everything with a deadpan repetitious catch-phrase.


Now we are impossibly hip and are regularly spotlighted whenever national publications feature Seattle.


But before all that, before we were cool, there was Maddy.


I first noticed him shortly after quitting my job to stay home with my first child, around ten years ago. The neighborhood renaissance was just beginning and as I walked the 'hood with my stroller, wondering how I would keep myself occupied during the long days, I noticed I wasn't the only one walking.



Our first independent coffee shop had opened, with fabulous European-style pastries. I used it as my reward, trying to get through as many hours as I could before allowing myself to visit. I even tried to structure naptime around it.



The shop closed at 3:00. Sometimes I would skate in just prior to closing and there would be Maddy, bantering with the barista. I have to admit, sometimes that frustrated me. I wanted my coffee and I didn't want to wait for the banter. Sometimes it frustrated the barista, who would often be trying to close. But Maddy would stay and talk while she mopped the floors and wiped down the tables and she always had a smile for him and gave him all the time in the world.



I started spotting him other places, always walking. My house is between a commercial street and a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. Maddy would walk from the coffee shop, along my street, and over to the bluff, day after day.



I began to wonder if the walks were his reward too, his attempt to fill up the long days, that like mine, used to be filled by a job and meetings and other important-sounding events. He was old, but not that old. But as the years went on, I added another child to my stroller, and found new ways to fill up my days, I would still see Maddy walking, eventually leaning on two titanium canes. Sometimes I would encounter him in other shops and it was the same. Everyone made time for him. He was a local personality.



The street with the European coffee shop now sports an artisan beer shop, a sushi bar and a bakery. The street closest to the bluff is home to a Green Grocer, a video store, and a new Italian trattoria. I don't walk as much as I used to and the other day I got to thinking that I hadn't seen Maddy recently.



But on Sunday, while selling Girl Scout cookies outside the video store with my now ten-year old daughter, I ducked into a nearby coffee shop, decidely un-hip and a favorite with the neighborhood stalwarts, who are fewer and farther between, and I saw a sign on the window. "Closing at 6:00 for a memorial service." I wasn't surprised to walk in and see Maddy's obituary propped up on the counter.



In our busy world, none of us walks or banters as much as we might. I feel privileged to live in a neighborhood and to have a life where that is still possible. My husband and I talk about whether we should move to a town closer to where he works and with a more solvent school district and I say no. "I wouldn't be able to walk," is my reasoning.



From the window of the room where I write this I can see the street where Maddy used to walk and where other old and young people walk each day. I recognize them and I am out walking they recognize me, though we've never been introduced. We nod a quiet acknowledgment knowing that we are participating in a vital, yet dying pursuit.

If a Blog Falls in the Woods...

I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?"



I can't remember who wrote that poem but I feel a little like the nowhere woman, writing my little blog for nobody to see because I'm haven't put it Out There yet and am not sure how far I'll go.



This was a day with weather like mood swings -- snowy and st0rmy one minute, sunny and calm the next. A great day for writing and cooking - my favorite simultaneous pursuits, though too much reflection can sometimes lead to disasters in the kitchen, I've learned the hard way.



I'm starting to see the appeal of the renograde elements of blogging, publishing what you want, when you want -- a big difference from the long time-lag between sending out a query letter, struggling over edits and actually getting published and paid.



I've had an interesting time trying to come up with a unique title for this blog (Ruminations from the Minivan seemed too long). Haven't found one yet.



Turns out there are a lot of creative people out there. If the traditional world of publishing is a tough nut to crack, at least you send your work out in a vacuum. The blogosphere enables you to see it all - there is no slush pile. So out comes the yardstick and one wonders if one measures up. Yet it also makes you glad for all the voices that can be heard.



Yesterday I saw the film Phoebe in Wonderland, in which Felicity Huffman gives a performance that hit very close to home as a mother and writer conflicted over which would leave her with the more important legacy.


I'm contemplating whether blogs, like meals, can sometimes be small masterpieces that are short-lived but satisfying.

And just like that, as I was writing this, my first comment came in and a very empowering one at that. Lighten up and have fun, she said, in so many words.

So thank you very much, I will. And I'll reflect (but not too much) upon that while making broccoli soup and sweet potato bread (thanks for the recipes, Orangette) to sustain my busy family.

I'm out there. So far, so good.

Testing, 1, 2 3

This is an experiment relating to a book I tried to write: Ruminations from the Minivan: Musings from a World Grown Large, then Small.

Part chronicle of new motherhood, part travelogue and part food memoir (what isn't these days) the manuscript showed early promise -- excerpts were published in literary journals, it won an award at a writer's conference and even attracted the attention of a couple of agents.

But for some reason I couldn't finish it.

The same things that make me uncomfortable about blogging or participating in Facebook made me reluctant to finish the book, even though it was originally written as a series of messages to my daughters and wasn't intended for publication at all.

We live in an era that is saturated with personal revelations, some true, some embellished. In memoir writing classes they teach you that they key to a successful memoir is finding the big, universal truth that makes your story relevant to others.

So even though I have enjoyed the memoirs of others, I've avoided finishing my own memoir because I wasn't convinced that my take on things is so special that I need to share it with the world. This despite the fact that a few of the pieces I've published, most notably an account of the death of a young mother, have touched people and I've been proud to have told those stories.

Instead I turned toward impersonal (and more lucrative) article writing.

But last night at my daughter's basketball game (the new baby I started writing for is now 10), several women were raving about a food memoir written by a woman in our neighborhood. It's called "A Homemade Life" and it started as the blog Orangette. I immediately ordered the book from Amazon (because our neighborhood book store is already sold out of copies) and checked out Orangette's blog entry tonight -- a lovely ditty about tomato sauce.

I was inspired to write in part because of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who, one reviewer said "is able to see the entire world through a single grain of sand."

One small blog entry about tomato sauce affected me the way the first taste of a pungent tomato sauce does -- it was a wake-up call. Orangette advises you add butter to the sauce to take the flavors to a whole new level.

So this blog is the butter in my sauce, as it were. Maybe writing it will be the kick in the pants I need to finish the book. Maybe it will be just be the daily writing practice I've been avoiding. Or maybe it will enrich my life by providing creative outlet I've been avoiding.

And maybe, just maybe, because blogs can be the equivalent of the Schwab's drug store soda fountain in Hollywood (where Lana Turner and a bunch of other "starlets" were discovered), some hotshot literary agent will pluck me from obscurity, sell my finished manuscript, send me on a book tour, then option the screenplay and sign Meryl Streep to be in the movie (hmmm, I'll have to write a role for her).

On verra.