Are You Not OK?

Plus: How To Take Care Of Your Nice Things

A Note For You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

Once again, everything is not OK. (As an aside: my sister asked several months ago, “What do you mean when you say ‘OK’?” And I felt like it was one of those things where you know when you know, but also a valid question. Nevertheless, my impulse when someone asks for a definition is to Google it, and I went down a rabbit hole about the origins of the word “OK.” What’s annoying is that there’s not really a clear consensus; the Smithsonian likes the idea that “OK” was a satirical newspaper joke that went viral in 1839, which, fine. If that was true, it would have originated because someone was making fun of someone else for abbreviating other things — sort like BRB — but they wouldn’t have been doing BRB back then. The only period-appropriate abbreviation listed in the Smithsonian article is “OW” for “Oll Wright,” as in, “All Right.” So, basically, maybe, “OK” is a viral joke from old New England. I wanted the answer to lead me somewhere that would help me understand myself, and all of us, but all it helps me understand is that it’s so hard to know what makes language catch on. I’m getting better at saying “it’s giving,” by the way.)

For now, I guess I mean: more bodies than usual seem unbalanced. For instance, when you check in with yourself, when you put your hand on your chest, do you feel your heart sort of pounding, or your muscles tightening? The world is going through it, and you are part of the world, so you are going through it too.

But hey: I don’t want to put any of this on you without your consent. Maybe you are in New Zealand, where it’s building to summer, and you’re harvesting sweet spring peas, and that’s pretty much all you’ve got going on these days. If this is you, I’m so glad you’re here — and you can skip ahead. This part of the newsletter is for those of us who are staring down darkness.

This bird is from New Zealand. Just in case this… feels like it is coming out of left field.

First of all, I always need to be reminded explicitly in October that the darkness is literal for people in the Northern Hemisphere. Your animal body needs more rest, and you are almost certainly not getting it. The shift has been rather sudden. The other animals have gorged themselves on berries or whatever, and they’ve gone to Florida, where other members of their species, as far as we know, don’t vote. As a teacher, I‘ve spent the past 15 Octobers to Decembers going to classes filled with students who are visibly experiencing unmet need, day after day after day. I feel like I could be a person who loved winter, if the world I lived in would only let me. Let everything shut down, slowly; allow projects to taper off; see obligations hibernate; allow global citizens to be compensated to shelter in place near people they love, cooking nourishing food made of hearty roots and hot broths and the tough kale greens that can go even in frost. BUT THIS IS JUST NOT OUR WORLD. You can’t blame yourself for this. This is not your fault.

And as for what’s going on in the rest of the world, which you can’t wrap your mind around. Or — I’m putting that on you again, to distance myself from it. I can’t wrap my mind around it. But I’m pretty sure that big things are not for individuals to wrap their minds around, and in fact, individuals trying to wrap their minds around things, and needing to figure out who is right and who is wrong, is maybe the greatest problem that leads to the greatest tragedies that are so unique to humans. (I do see the paradox in making a statement like that, which would require me to be right in order for it to have any impactful meaning. But it needn’t be impactful; have whatever feeling you have about it! It’s the statement that I keep in my pocket for me; it doesn’t need to be a statement for anyone else.)

A lot of things can be true all at the same time: You can be grateful for the life you have, and sad about something that might seem petty. You can be devastated about what’s happening in a place you’ve never visited, and confused about where to direct it. You can be angry at someone for writing something you disagree with on social media (or elsewhere), and still love them unconditionally, because you are both people who love other people, and who just want the people you love to be safe. You can be concerned about global politics and have the need to take time away from it — and it’s OK to take what you need, even if not everyone alive has the privilege of taking what they need. And you can read any of the sentences I’ve written here and disagree with them, and you can feel angry with me, and I can agree with you that your anger makes sense — and I can still stand firmly by what I’ve written. All of this at once. I know: It’s giving dialectical.

If it doesn’t feel OK now, you should know that your feelings will change. Actually, change is the only thing that has ever been consistent about feelings, or about anything.

OK. (OK!) I love you. Good luck out there, bravely facing all the things that break your heart.

Love,

Sophie

How To… Take Care Of Your Nice Things (Cast Iron Pans, Etc.)

There is a reader of this newsletter who recently told me that she could not have a cast iron pan, because she already had a number of ferments — a kombucha mother (she may not have called it this, but I call it this, and I’ll never call it anything else), a sourdough start, — and other things she has to take care of, and a cast iron pan was just too much work. All that seasoning! All the care! She couldn’t do it. This shocked me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I woke up in the middle of the night one night thinking about some other thing, but I stayed awake thinking about how Erin thought cast iron pans were a lot of work!

And I guess that’s because there is a loud camp of people who think you have to take care of these pans in a particular way. The camp must be VERY loud. You can’t use soap on them, or sponges; you can’t let them dry in a dish rack; you have to put special spices all over them (I’m making that up, but that’s what “seasoning” sounds like to me); they are heavy. Maybe these people are really happy treating their cast iron pans like this, and maybe they’ve had really horrible experiences wherein they did some other thing with their cast iron pans and some kind of goo-mouthed Kitchen Monster came out and saw what they were doing and screamed, “I’M GONNA PUNISH YOU!!!!!” And ATE THEIR PANS. But I doubt it.

In my home, there are only cast iron heat-up-things. We have nothing else to cook anything in. Last year I tried to buy Luke a large non-cast-iron pasta pot and we instantly melted it. I will say this about cast iron: it IS heavy. This makes me feel strong and mighty, like a lumberjack. You mostly shouldn’t use soap on it, although I have broken that rule no fewer than 300 times on each of our cast irons. I used to use a special plastic thing to wash the cast iron with, and now I use a regular sponge, and sometimes a scratchier scrubby thing to get the harder-to-get-to crust off of it. Not using soap is actually easier? Because… you don’t have to use soap? You just muscle off the gunk and then you put the cast iron back on the stove and you either towel dry it or you turn the stove on to heat-evaporate the water off the pan. THE END. THAT’S ALL I DO. Sure, you can sometimes, if you want (I mean, I guess you should), rub some olive oil on the pan, if you feel like it, in the middle of the day. But the not-using-soap is enough to season the pan. I WOULDN’T TELL YOU THIS WORKED IF I HADN’T BEEN DOING THIS FOR THE PAST TWELVE YEARS OF MY LIFE WITH MULTIPLE PANS AT MULTIPLE PRICE POINTS. I’ve never had to replace a pan, a goo monster has never come into my home. I’m sure there are reasons to treat the pans better. My pretty ceramic-on-the-outside ones are ugly now.

Here’s a belief I have, and I think you can disagree with me and we can still get along. The way to take care of your nice things is to use them and to really enjoy using them! Don’t waste your life worrying that you’re going to break a dish — you definitely are! Your sweaters will get holes, your shoes will get worn down, and your cast iron pans will get worse for wear. If your things are nice, you can get them repaired. Go get your sweater darned, your shoes re-soled, your sewing machine engine replaced, and buy another single piece of china to replace the piece that broke — if you can’t sand it down or kintsugi it back together. The art of repair is dying, but it isn’t dead. My friend Jill took me to Wilmette to meet a man who re-canes wicker chairs last winter. All I could think was, “Imagine how much fun was had in that chair, for it to sustain such a hole.”

And I’m pretty sure I’m right, because my daughter smashes her stuffed sheep BaaBaa up against every wall, every edge, and even into whole buckets of water. BaaBaa has been the star of multiple avant grade plays where no English was spoken, but the sheep-actors were thrown high into the air repeatedly. BaaBaa has been under the tire of a bicycle and in between the cushions of all our couches. I have to sneak him into the washing machine when T is at daycare so she doesn’t know that he also goes on jostling journeys in a place she doesn’t consent to have him go. But you know, nothing is taken care of quite so well as a child’s favorite stuffed animal, is it?

Housekeeping

• This is the last time I’ll bother you about this, because it starts on Tuesday! I’m teaching a four-part bird drawing / painting class over Zoom. It shall be on Tuesdays at lunch, and the live version of the class (which I am keeping very small) costs $120. But I’m recording the classes, and I’m releasing them all to anyone who is in the paid tier of the newsletter. So! Details about the class, including how to sign up, are linked here. If you want to sign up for the paid tier and get access to all four videos, so you can take the class on your own time, click here. Yes, I will host this class again on a different day and at a different time! So if your heart is set on taking it in person, don’t fret.

• It’s time to pick a “Good Enough Job” image to print! Which one do you like?

Loose Thoughts

• I find it hard to locate my feelings lately, but I have started crying at moments that surprise me, and that feel outside of my control. Earlier today, on the deck, when a new friend told me they went birdwatching and on a ghost walk in the same weekend, and I wished I was invited to do things like that; when I saw what Raffi posted on social media this week; when I breezed past a clip on a sitcom of a stay-at-home mom at a career day ad-libbing about how it is hard to be a stay-at-home mom; on the subway, because a baby was missing one shoe. What are these feelings? “Crying” is not a feeling but an action, and besides, it doesn’t really mean that I’m sad, or that anything is wrong. It’s just my body telling me something is happening. I can’t decode it easily lately.

• My grandma turned 97 this week!

• The best part of my week was saving a bird who’d flown into a building and was stunned. The best part of saving the bird was the brief time he was in my hand and I could feel against my palm his warm heart beating and for a while, I felt deeply that he felt deeply that we were both safe.

• T has started mimicking the things that I say to her when I pick her up from daycare back to me, preemptively. Yesterday when I picked her up, she put her hand on my breast (this is an every day thing — hand down my shirt, on my breast, which I think is a lot like the feeling the bird’s heartbeat, see above), and then kissed me on the lips and then said, “I MISS you!” She also says, “Hi! How are you! How WAS yerrday!” She also sings the big notes in many Broadway songs, but that’s later.

• Speaking of crying: every time I leave T lately, I’ve been crying. More than when she was an infant. We are entering a new phase. I try hard not to let her register that this is happening. It’s because I’m working too much, and too often on weekends.

• College students do not understand parenting, and that’s good, but also, it’s hard for me, a college-teaching parent.

• Practically one mile of vines in our front yard that have been growing all summer have produced exactly ONE gourd. I want an explanation.