Discipline

(If you have not read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, get on that asap.)

In sixth grade, I learned the word “discipline” for the first time when a somewhat friend of mine used it and I asked her what it meant, and she said, somewhat shocked, You’ve never heard that word before? Perhaps this was because until sixth grade I went to a groovy private school where we called our teachers by their first names. It’s not that I was unaware of the concept, really, but I did not fully get it until I was unceremoniously moved to a fairly strict public school and skipped a grade in the process. My sixth grade teacher traumatized most of the class with her so-called “discipline” while pretending to be an openhearted soul when our parents were around. But that is a story for another time.

As for the other meaning of the word (“activity or experience that provides mental or physical training”), I didn’t really get it until quite recently when I watched a very young woman on YouTube (whose yoga classes I do sometimes) describe in a video the difference between motivation and discipline. Unfortunately, she took the video down not long after posting it, which I discovered when I wanted to watch it again, as the significance of what she had said was slowly dawning on me.  

I learned discipline through doing yoga every single day for nearly seven-and-a-half years. And when I say every single day, I mean every single day. Even when I was struck down by the flu last fall I managed to do some gentle classes each day. That’s the thing about yoga, I keep telling myself and anyone who will listen. You can choose classes based on your mood, energy level, general achiness, etc. So that at this point, and for a long time, I never wonder if I will do yoga each day but only when (and these days, it’s almost always first thing in the morning). So, after that video (the young have so much to teach us!), I realized that yoga had become a discipline for me. I was not waiting to be motivated to do it; I was simply doing it every day.

And so I thought, at various times over these years, what is something else that I could treat the same way? What can I do not because I’m motivated to do it, but just because I have decided to do it every day. I think you can guess what I came up with. I had done this daily writing and blog posting back in 2016, during the month of February (obviously I chose the shortest month; I’m no fool) and decided that it was time to try it again, having only a vague memory of how hard it had been (which is similar to what happens when you have a second child; you go through an entire pregnancy and only remember what labor is like the second it kicks in and then you think, Oh no, wait, what have I done?).

But this time it was going to be different: I had been practicing discipline for seven-and-a-half years, instead of just half a year, so why not try again? I had written practically nothing last year, which felt like a glorious break (never disregard fallow times), and I was suddenly in the mood to start again. But the every day-ness of it all was not as easy as it seemed at first. Obviously, unlike yoga, it began to feel like work. I mean, it is a lot like some of the work I do, which is doing a ton of research and condensing it all down into something readable. But I knew that if I left it up to motivation, I’d be motivated to write maybe once or twice a week (or less?). So this month, writing became a discipline for me, and I began to understand how people write books, something I have never been interested in: you just do it, ideally at the same time every day (which was never possible for me because of my work), for some predetermined amount of time or amount of pages per day.  

But I soon realized that this is not the way I like to write, if I’m writing for myself. Most of the writing I do is for work, meaning I get paid for it. When the writing is just for me, when I am motivated to write, it is thrilling to be so interested in something that I feel compelled to write about it. Turning writing into unpaid work didn’t feel great a lot of the time. There are some blog posts that I really enjoyed writing, that I think worked well. There are others that I might have spent more time on if I had not just wanted to get them done. There were a couple days that I was too exhausted to write much of anything and found some old writings to repurpose, for which I am grateful to past me.

And one thing I learned from this month is just how long a month can feel when you are aware of each day passing. And that I think if it’s quality writing you want (in short form anyway), motivation might actually be the way to go. Or maybe yoga has perfectly taught me about discipline and I don’t need to add anything. If I figure out anything else, I’ll let you know. But in the meantime, I’ll see you on the mat.

Snow day

(From a snow day long ago. Note: those are tiny plastic cats my children placed along the bathroom windowsill.)

Here on a Monday afternoon, the capital region prepares for a winter storm starting later tonight and lasting all day tomorrow. Mostly you will become aware of an impending storm here if you happen to be out food shopping and things seem especially frenetic at the supermarket. I was at Price Chopper a little earlier and it was a bit busier than usual, but not the craziness I remember (and sort of love) from times past. Once, at my old Price Chopper, some hours before an impending snowstorm, I stood in line behind a guy buying six huge packages of chicken. “I’m barbecuing!” he announced to everyone. Those were the days. Perhaps the pandemic has taught us about running out of essential items. Maybe we have a better idea of what we actually need.

I have no real memories of snow days from my childhood. We may have had them, but I can’t be sure. New York City is actually famous for never having snow days, or at least very few. It’s not that it didn’t snow, because it certainly did, but we somehow never seemed to get the day off. Which might explain why my brother (an adult) was outraged some years ago when New York City schools were actually closed due to a blizzard. I have exactly one memory of a huge snowstorm during the seventh grade that happened, of course, on a Saturday, so that even though my friend Hilary and I spent the day leaping into snow banks, we did not miss any school.  

My children’s snow days were the kind I never had, in which school would actually be closed, and they could spend the day outside in the snow or inside playing, and the entire day felt perfect and cozy.  I was usually home for their snow days, but often working, which did not mean I could not stop and make cookies and/or hot chocolate when necessary.

Snow days feel very different now, the same way the year feels different. When your kids are in school, your sense of the season, the week, time in general, is heightened. It has a precise rhythm. The year begins in September; it ends in June (at least here in New York, where I have lived most of my life). Summers feel incredibly long and then over almost immediately.

When my younger daughter left for college two years ago, I still sometimes looked at the old school calendar on days when I was feeling particularly lost. And sometimes, if there was snow, I checked to see if the school was having a snow day. It was hard to get used to the days being not entirely attached to a school calendar, to winter concerts and spring break, things like that. One year there were so many snow days that the school had to steal a day from spring break, meaning that the break was a day shorter and school technically started the Friday of the break instead of the following Monday. I don’t think many kids went in that day though; mine certainly didn’t.

Today I made spaghetti and meatballs, which seemed right for the day before a storm, since it will last until tomorrow. And tomorrow, in addition to this, I will make buckwheat chocolate chip cookies, which are from an Alison Roman recipe and are perfect. We will need them, I think, as the snow falls and falls, and the pages fly off the calendar, as they do. And I will try to pay attention, as I always do, and let everything simply float down all around me.

The chieftain of leafy greens

There is much to recommend about spinach, if you like it, which I do. Spinach as we know it today originated in Persia around 2000 years ago. It was called aspanakh, which became “spinach” in English sometime in the late 1300s.  

The first written mention of spinach appears in China, and it was apparently brought there in the seventh century from Nepal, where it had come from Persia sometime before that. Spinach made its way into Europe by the eleventh century as Moors brought it with them to Spain. Ibn al-ʻawwām, an Arabic agriculturalist living in Spain in the late 1100s, called spinach “the chieftain of leafy greens” in his agricultural handbook. Which, yes. Yes!

Spinach was Catherine de Medici’s favorite vegetable. When, in 1533, she married French King Henry II, she brought her own cooks from Florence who could make her favorite spinach dishes. In fact, this is where we get the term “Florentine” to refer to certain dishes made with spinach. People were really wild about spinach at this time.

And it continued to be loved for quite a long time, as it made its way to the United States sometime in the 1800s. But once spinach became inextricably tied to a certain cartoon sailor, which we’ll get to in a moment, well, there was no stopping its power, in more ways than one.

Except. On the one hand, my research shows that spinach became the third most popular children’s food in the 1930s, yet, on the other hand, I distinctly recall the song “You Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby” in the 1936 Shirley Temple movie Poor Little Rich Girl (which thrillingly, to me, as a little girl, also starred Jack Haley, aka the Tinman from The Wizard of Oz). The whole point of the song was getting Shirley Temple to eat her spinach, baby, which she hated. Perhaps she was not yet aware of Popeye.

Which leads me to: Popeye. So what made cartoonists Max and Dave Fleischer feature a character whose entire personality was pretty much based on spinach and its apparent super powers? I know that Popeye started out as a comic book character, but it really wasn’t until he became animated in the 1930s that spinach took such a starring role. The idea for this was based on the common belief that spinach was very rich in iron and that iron gave you strength (perhaps not superhuman strength, but it’s fine to suspend disbelief for a cartoon). Except that that wasn’t really true either.   

Spinach does contain iron, but not the crazy amount that people thought. In 1870, German scientist Erich Von Wolf wrote up a study on the iron content of green vegetables. Due to a transcription error (either on his part or in the translation from German to English, in which the comma in the European decimal system was placed incorrectly), what had really been 3.5 milligrams of iron in a 100-gram serving of spinach became 35 milligrams. Once it was printed, it was accepted as truth, and spinach was considered a kind of superfood, which was perfect in terms of Popeye. The error wasn’t corrected until 1937, when scientists rechecked the numbers and realized what had happened. But by then it was too late: spinach was the entire source of Popeye’s strength, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. (I would love to use the word “ironic” here, for obvious reasons, but I’m pretty sure, like rain on your wedding day, it isn’t quite right.)

But, in truth, besides being a pretty versatile vegetable, spinach does have one super power, which you most certainly notice when cooking it fresh: it shrinks down to almost nothing. Every single time I start to cook spinach, I think, This can’t possibly be the right amount. But an entire bushel (60 pounds; I just checked) of fresh spinach cooks down to like two tablespoons (I exaggerate only slightly). What else can you say about a vegetable that is around 93 percent water? (Spinach was the first frozen vegetable sold commercially. There are 40,000 seeds in one pound of spinach.) I will continue to love spinach, despite learning that it is less miraculous than once believed (but the myth is still very much alive). There’s more iron (and irony) elsewhere. Spinach is just fine.

The farm

Upstate New York, how did I get here? Well, it started a long time ago.

Really, I’d say, it started even before I was born, when my grandparents bought a non-working farm in the town of Berkshire, New York, about 25 miles north of Binghamton, i.e., the middle of nowhere. This place, known to everyone (family and non-family members alike) as “The Farm,” was a character in my life as much as any of my relatives were. The Farm, which I believe was purchased for its hundreds of acres mostly, included an old farmhouse along the road and an old barn (whose second floor my aunt famously jumped out of in college into a big pile of snow that did not quite break her fall).

When I was about four, my father built another house further up on the property, basically on stilts, since it was on a hill, and the old farmhouse (of which I have a couple vivid memories) was burned to the ground. The building of the new house was an enormous undertaking by my twenty-something dad (and any friends he could rope into it), but eventually it was completed. And it was here that I spent many weekends and summers of my early life, providing such a stark contrast to the city life I experienced the rest of the time that it felt like my life was split in two at times. Here, at the Farm, I was a country girl. I picked berries that my grandmother and I made into jam, I took walks and sleigh rides through the woods, I sometimes played with the kids who lived on a working dairy farm a mile away.

I had mixed feelings about the pond, which was just a short walk up from the house. I always loved to swim, but if you were not careful walking through the muck to get in or out, you would end up stepping on leeches. My grandmother had the classic “what’s the big deal?” attitude about literally everything, so I had to remain brave while she burned the leeches off my feet. I won’t say this happened regularly, but certainly more than once, which still amazes me when I think about it. I know that I once came to the pond in my socks, which seemed totally reasonable to me (still does), but my entire family laughed at me. I think I was more of a city kid.

My feelings for the Farm in general are complicated. On the one hand, I spent hours playing outside with brooms I pretended were horses, but on the other hand, I had to do this since there was usually no one to play with me. The sound of car wheels scraping onto a gravel road will always remind me of the excitement of waking up in the back seat and realizing we were finally there, but the car ride was so endlessly long that sleep was the only way to get through it.

But how I loved the smell of hay, which still reminds me of summer (just as much as the smell of fire hydrant water hitting hot concrete does), and the sight of my grandparents’ dog Max, with a cattail in his mouth, swimming along the pond and making a sort of happy galumphing sound. I can’t deny that the Farm imprinted on me things that stayed with me my entire life, so that when I realized that it was time to leave the city for good, I knew that it had to be to a hay-in-the- summertime kind of place. And for a long time, this was exactly right. My children had a country childhood full of jam-making, walks through the woods, and mucky ponds (minus leeches, lucky for them). And I thought that I would live some kind of country life forever, even though there were times that the lure of a city (though not that city) beckoned to me.

We ended up here, in an actual city (though one of only around 90,000 people), not intentionally, and yet it somehow feels like the exact right place at this time of my life. My kids are pretty much grown-ups (what?), having experienced the country childhood that I wanted for them, and the fact of getting good Mexican food delivery these days has been quite life-affirming. I can no longer just step out the door and take a long walk down a country road, say, but it’s not too hard to find one.

My ex-husband and I moved up here mostly because we drove about two-and-a-half hours north of New York City and noticed that things got especially beautiful right then. To test this theory, we drove up again during January, when upstate New York is at its worst, and it was still beautiful. It is still is. I think I learned to appreciate not just the country but upstate New York from my earliest days at the Farm, now with more people and fewer leeches.

Notes from the past

October 15, 2007

Hamilton Beach Proctor-Silex
261 Yadkin Road
Southern Pines, NC 28387

Dear Sir or Madam:

On August 14, 2007, I purchased a Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro Juice Extractor through amazon.com. It arrived a few days later.

Within one month, the rotating piece became bent and made the juicer unusable. I would like an identical replacement juicer sent to the address above.

Thank you very much.

Yours sincerely,

Reyna Eisenstark

Morning person

If being a morning person means being most alert and productive in the morning and near unconsciousness by like 9:30 p.m., then I am a morning person. I am pretty sure I started out this way, but as I get older, I feel sometimes that I can only function in the morning. So that if I’m on the couch in the evening watching a movie and I simply see people dancing or otherwise doing  anything at night, I feel exhausted for them. I wonder, how can people be awake at that hour and also be doing that? Or during the rare times when I’m actually out somewhere in the evening, I find myself thinking essentially the same thing about myself.

It definitely makes sense to be a morning person (to me, anyway) because of the light. I like to be awake when there is light. This tends to be a natural human inclination, or rather it’s that human bodies tend to follow the natural cycle, but I know it’s not that way for everyone.

Probably as a teenager, I slept late, but I genuinely have no memory of doing so after my thirties. Now to me, late is 8 a.m., and I actually love sleeping this late (!), though it only happens if I’m not at home, as we have a cat alarm clock that angrily meows at the bedroom door starting around 6 a.m. (if I’m lucky). Everyone else in the house can sleep through this, but not me. Even with a very loud air purifier on in the bedroom, nothing can drown out the sound of a cat who has been waiting seemingly his entire life for a tiny bowl of wet food that will take him approximately two minutes to wolf down (note: he has dry food available to him at all hours; this makes no difference).  

After I feed our starving cat, I make coffee and then go into the living room to do yoga. This is really one of the best parts of the day, so that even though I do not always wake up when I want to, I am always up for it. After yoga, I grab a cup of coffee and read on the couch until it’s time to start work (which involves going back into my bedroom – I have a pretty short commute). The couch is up against the living room windows, which look out onto our street, and I love to watch the day beginning this way. In the earlier part of the winter, it was still dark when I finished yoga, but now it is sometimes light (or getting light) right when I begin. Soon it will get lighter still, lighter before I even wake up. Soon I will not even recall what it was like getting up in the dark, until eventually, it gets darker.

Do we become more aware of everything as we get older? Not just the seasons changing, or the passage of time, but really just everything. Maybe the first half of your life you spend entirely falling forward. Then in the middle, you start looking back a bit, noticing things more, the same things, in fact, that were so obvious to you in your youth that you barely acknowledged them. The days are getting longer! I would announce to my kids practically every year as spring approached. Or maybe I’d say, Did I already point out that it’s so much lighter now than it was just a few weeks ago at this time? and my kids would say yes, and I’d feel satisfied.

I am a morning person, yes, here, in the middle of my life, though I don’t know that I would have ever wanted to call myself that before. I probably thought the cool things happened at night, the way my kids do now. But I would not trade my mornings for anything. They truly are the best part.

 

Every American’s right not to be bummed out

Like most people who were alive in the 1970s, I was aware (but in my case, only vaguely) of a drink called a Harvey Wallbanger. Someone was always ordering it on TV shows, and it was presented as a kind of trendy or even racy drink where there would be raised eyebrows or suggested inuendo. It was never clear to me what exactly was going on with it. But my instinct was correct: it was definitely the drink of the 1970s, somehow intertwined with the days of disco, and just as famously, faded away after a time.

So what was this drink? It turns out to be ridiculously easy to put together: vodka and orange juice (so, a screwdriver) with a bit of Galliano liqueur added last, plus an orange slice and cherry garnish. Galliano is a sweet Italian liqueur made from vanilla and herbs and spices, and only half an ounce goes into the drink, but it is entirely what made the Harvey Wallbanger, in a number of ways.

The first Harvey Wallbanger can probably be traced to the early 1950s and bartender Donato “Duke” Antone, but again, like most cocktail stories, it is not entirely clear if he invented it. Antone owned Duke’s Blackwatch Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood (did he?) and supposedly created the cocktail there, possibly calling it Duke’s Screwdriver. Antone may have also created a few other simple cocktails of the time, including the White Russian, but maybe not. (As you can see, there is no way to talk about this without using words like “possibly,” “supposedly,” and “maybe not.”)

The part that is much more clear occurred in the mid-1960s, when George Bednar became marketing director of McKesson Imports, importers of Galliano liqueur. Bednar had heard about (and/or tried) the drink and created an ad campaign for Galliano entirely based around the Harvey Wallbanger. So did he come up with the name himself? Quite possibly, but again, there are a number of stories swirling around about this. What Bednar did was make it famous.

In 1969, Bill Young, a commercial artist, designed a cartoon mascot named Harvey Wallbanger as part of the ad campaign. Harvey was a cartoon surfer whose tagline was “Harvey Wallbanger is the name, and I can be made!” And so he was.

Now we come to the 1970s, where the Harvey Wallbanger became the best drink in town: “The favored cocktail was consumed everywhere from parties to train cars; it was sold in bottles, people named their pets after the drink, and soon enough, even Harvey Wallbanger cakes were sold.” Harvey Wallbanger, the sort of exhausted-looking surfer, was everywhere too, “from posters and T-shirts and bumper stickers to buttons and coffee mugs and beach towels.” Thousands of people even wrote in “Harvey Wallbanger” in the 1972 presidential campaign. Of course they did.

It’s wild to realize that the cocktail itself called for just a tiny splash of Galliano (according to those who have tried the drink, it really is quite different from a screwdriver), but thanks to the insane marketing campaign, Galliano was the most imported liqueur of the 1970s.

And the Harvey Wallbanger craze did go on for years (as I witnessed in grown-up TV shows I didn’t entirely understand), but of course, all cocktail trends do come to an end (when was the last time you had a Cosmopolitan?). Don’t worry, though, because Harvey Wallbanger has not entirely disappeared from our culture (maybe there was even a resurgence in the 90s? maybe there’s one still to come?). There is even a day devoted to it (November 8)! And if you wanted to, you could easily make this basic cocktail at home. Or maybe ask for one at a local bar. You will either seem incredibly retro and cool or you will receive a blank look. Either way, I will be proud.

We can hitch a ride

In her book Just Kids, Patti Smith talks about how she loved riding the F train to Coney Island: “Just the idea that you could go to the ocean via subway was so magical.” I have thought about that on and off in the years since I read the book because I had never considered it that way before. But of course: it is magical. And yet, I never went to Coney Island as a kid. People always talked about how crowded and dirty it was, but when I did end up going (in my late teens) I realized how wrong they were. What were they talking about? Coney Island is perfect.

Part of the problem is that I had grown up hearing how dirty and crowded all New York City beaches were. And if you were from the Bronx, well, all of this energy was directed toward one place in particular, the Bronx’s only public beach, once crowned the “Riviera of New York”: the much-maligned Orchard Beach.

It’s true that pretty much everything in New York City was much-maligned in the 1970s and 80s, but as a child I wasn’t really aware of this. I mean, I had never known anything different (the second season of Russian Doll is set in the New York City of 1982, and the first time Natasha Lyonne entered a graffitied subway car I actually teared up from recognition and a kind of longing).

But as for Orchard Beach, I have a few fond memories of going there as a child, which is why when a friend in high school referred to it as “Horseshit Beach,” I was truly surprised. At some point, we had stopped going there, and this is when things got worse.

Going further into the past for a moment, my father, who also grew up in the Bronx, has fond memories of Orchard Beach. He remembered that his mother used to take them later in the day, around four, when it was less crowded, and his dad would pick them up some hours later, but he could not remember how they got there, since his mother did not drive. If you live in the Bronx, there is never an easy way to get anywhere; it always involves a complicated route of buses and sometimes trains, plus walking to and from them. So maybe they traveled this way or maybe they went with their neighbor who did drive. In any case, it had once been a lovely place, and then at some point it wasn’t.

Orchard Beach is crescent-shaped, one mile long, and was developed in the 1930s on the Long Island Sound. Or rather it was expanded. First, landfill was shipped in to connect several islands in Pelham Bay Park, and then it was all covered with fine white sand hauled in from the Rockaways (bus ride is too slow, etc.). For all of this, we have New York City Parks Commissioner and Racist Neighborhood Destroyer Robert Moses to thank. (For more info about Moses and his complicated legacy, you probably know what book to read.)     

“On July 25, 1936, more than 18,000 people attended the opening-day festivities, at which Robert Moses and Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882–1947) spoke and which featured fireworks, music from the Police Department Band, and a diving exhibition.” (I have to say, having researched extensively the 1939 World’s Fair, those guys really knew how to put together opening-day festivities.) Apparently the bathhouses could fit up to 7,000 people and the beach could hold up to 100,000 people. This was a big beach. There was also a pavilion with concession stands, a cafeteria, tennis courts, sports fields, a playground, you get the idea. The water, as I recall, was clean and calm.

But you must know that New York City had a serious budget crisis in the 1970s (“Ford to New York: Go to Hell”), which was bad news for many things back then (though, I must note, not for renters), one of which being a lack of funds to maintain and patrol Orchard Beach. And thus began its decline. By 1980, it had apparently “become so rundown that there was garbage covering much of the sand, and there were prostitutes and gamblers along the promenade.” Not great.      

But there have been renovations since then. In 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of Orchard Beach, the pavilions were restored for $1 million. In 1995, more sand was brought in to replace sand that had been lost in the thirty years since the last time sand had been brought in. A water park at the beach was proposed but then canceled.

But then! Orchard Beach was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2006. More plans for renovation are underway and could be finished this year or next. The beach that I, and my father before me, once knew could return to its former glory.

You could say that Orchard Beach is a classic New York story, in which a place or a neighborhood rose and fell and then rose again. This happens constantly throughout the city; it is happening right now. I have no idea if I will ever return to Orchard Beach or even how to get there (it still involves a train and bus, or multiple buses) (“How do you get to Orchard Beach?” “Practice!”) (you’re welcome), but I was so glad to be reminded of it, so glad it’s still there.

Why are we racing to be so old?

Says my friend Greg, How about putting on an old favorite album that you haven’t heard in 20 or 30 years and still knowing every song? Yes, how about that? Stranger still is hearing a song out of context that you once put on a mixed tape and then, as it is ending, hearing in your head the song that followed on the tape. There is one serious instance of this that I think came from a mixed tape my friend Rachel’s then-boyfriend made for her back when we were living together in like 1991 where Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” (the fast version) is followed by Dinosaur Jr.’s “Freak Scene,” and this somehow paired these two songs in my mind forever, so that I always hear one followed by the other and always put them together on any subsequent mixed tape or CD that I made.

But, of course, we listened to music so differently back then. Songs had an order that made some kind of sense to the artist (or perhaps the producer) or at least were set down specifically so that you had to listen to an album the same way every time. I mean, you didn’t really (who did not put on the same side over and over again or even the same song?), but if you did let yourself hear the whole album, that was the correct order of songs forever.

I used to think really carefully about this when making mixed tapes or CDs, like I’d hear in my head what seemed like the next song that would go well there, but really I think it was just what I was thinking about then, and if my mood had been different there would have been an entirely different order of songs. I have to think that at least some artists put together albums the same way.  

Which leads me to something else and I think this is maybe a controversial stance: I don’t mind having the order of songs moved around. In fact, I think it makes things more interesting. If there is one thing I am guilty of it’s ruining songs or albums for myself by playing them way too many times in a row. These days, I really am a fan of the shuffled and/or random mix made by someone else. It’s the only way to keep me from ruining songs for myself or getting too used to an order of songs.

Honestly, and maybe it’s because I ruined music for myself, I often can’t believe that people still listen to music they listened to when they were young. Don’t get me wrong: like everyone, I do crave the old stuff that comforts me and I will never tire of, say, the earliest David Bowie records, but if I’m on a walk, I will always put on a Spotify mix created by some rando and will delight in at least a few new songs (by new, I mean new to me). The best mix, I find, is one that mixes stuff you know (comfort) with stuff you don’t (possibilities). Or even entirely new stuff, as the trip hop mix my older daughter made for me is one of my favorite mixes ever, which I always listen to on shuffle (but I now have to restrict myself for fear of getting sick of it).

I’m also not one of those people who insist that their kids must know (and like) all of their favorite music. This seems crazy to me. My ex and I exposed our kids to tons of music just by having it on a lot (and sometimes dancing to it), but I was never insistent on their liking anything I liked (my younger daughter famously fell asleep at an outdoor Elvis Costello concert that we all went to together, which she apparently hated, but this only amused me). Then my kids just got into music on their own, and it always delights me to look at some of their playlists and see that they have found some of my favorite stuff on their own (such as, in the case of my younger daughter, the Mountain Goats).

All I wanted to share was a love of music, which I think got through to them. This was actually the way I was raised too. Just as there are songs that will always remind me of my mother, I am pretty sure there are songs (or artists) that will always remind them of me. And the way they listen to music is obviously so different than the way I listened to it such that an “album” probably makes no sense at all to them or even listening to the same songs in the exact same order. I don’t think this matters all that much. Honestly, I’m really just glad they’re listening.

Not knowing

Even though I lived like half of my life before the internet, it is hard for me to remember what I did without it. I look things up all day long, partly for my job, but partly because of my interest in just about everything. Yesterday, for example, I googled “how many carrots in a half pound” because I was halving a carrot cake recipe (answer: three).

I looked up Deney Terrio because Tony and I have been watching old Dance Fever episodes and I wanted to know when Deney stopped being the host (1985) because there is no point in watching the ones hosted by Adrian Zmed. (This actually led to a delightful extended search on disco movies, which led us to watching Staying Alive last night. If you like disco montages set almost exclusively to Frank Stallone songs, this is your movie. We loved it.)

I looked up paintings from Picasso’s blue period because I was reminded of a time when I had this kind of out-of-body experience walking through a Picasso exhibit at the Met. I looked up candles and perfume because I am always wanting more candles and perfume, despite already having plenty of each. I looked up a picture of the school I went to in sixth grade to use for my blog post yesterday (that is the actual picture of the schoolyard). Such an incredible wealth of information with almost no effort at all on my part. But what did we do before this?

As a child, I was fond of randomly looking up things in the dictionary and once did an entire report on birds this way (a report that no one had asked me to do) (listen, my younger daughter once wrote and illustrated a report on lions that no one had asked her to do, so maybe she comes by it naturally). There were out-of-date library books and encyclopedias that you could always rely on for actual school reports. I’m pretty sure if you wanted to know the hours a store was open you had to actually call the store. For recipes, you had to have cookbooks, which frankly I still have a lot of, but I also sometimes google, say, “spinach, tomatoes, pasta” and find a good recipe that way.

Of course, we used maps to get anywhere, but I totally forgot how we used them, until in a 1989 Margaret Drabble short story I read yesterday I came across this: “She . . . wrote down road numbers in an orderly way. A10, A30, A354. There didn’t seem to be any very obvious way of getting to Dorset from Cambridge, but that made the exercise of plotting a route all the more entertaining.” Plotting a route! I’d almost forgotten. I remember being in London around that time and using the glorious “London A to Z” guidebook, which allowed you to look up a street name in the index and then find it mapped out on a page. Drivers of black cabs in London had to memorize this book, which astonishes me still.

We had phone books to look up all kinds of things, which reminds me that I used to sometimes sit on a Manhattan phone book on my chair as a child if the table was too high to reach (I remember telling that to my ex-husband and him looking at me completely baffled. He grew up in a farm town that had a phone book about as thick as a pamphlet). Actually I used an old Manhattan phone book in the 1990s to look up David Sedaris’s address so I could send him a letter. He sent me back a typewritten letter from France.

Of course, if you wanted to know what years Suzanne Sommers was on Three’s Company, for example, well, you just had to think about it (1977-1981). Sometimes I try to capture that not-knowingness by asking a question and then just not bothering to look up the answer. Life goes on.     

I do sometimes miss my old analog life, though I can’t always recall what I did without the internet. I still read a lot and sometimes I write things. I still see movies and television shows, but I do not spend one second watching anything I didn’t specifically set out to watch. I still take walks while listening to music, though more often these days it’s podcasts. And if I want to know the answer to something, usually I look it up.

But I am also remembering a time when my ex-husband and I were driving down the Oregon coast and we saw a sign on the road that said “Sea Lion Caves,” and we thought, This sounds good, and we took an elevator (!) down inside the caves and saw just a whole bunch of sea lions sunning themselves on rocks right in front of us (but as I recall, we were behind a sheet of plexiglass), and I remember this as being so special partly because we had not known about it beforehand. This is the gift of not knowing. I always want to know everything, I think, but then I am shown what it’s like not to know something, or rather to not know something beforehand, and I wonder what we have lost.