three bowls

I have spent a lot of my career around salespeople. In many ways I admire them; they daily have to face one of life's most fearsome things: rejection by the other humans.

That said, I do sometimes bristle (surprise!) at some of the philosophical underpinnings of the self-bolstering language some of them use. For example, the idea that "you make your own luck."  

I've mentioned before that I volunteer at East African Community Services. I help folks there learn computer stuff.  If you would like to see some people making their own luck, check out these refugee women.  They often barely speak English. They have never used a mouse much less a keyboard.  

And not only are they learning English, they are also learning the alphabet.  Their minds are still learning how to keep straight what are, really, rather small visual differences on the keys themselves. 

Add to all that they have to struggle through an hour and a half of listening to ME trying to teach them, when native English speakers who've known me for more than two decades sometimes have trouble following the output of my addled brains.  All to maybe get a better job down the road or just get along a little easier here in the States.

There you go, there are some folks who are picking themselves up by their bootstraps, right?  But I guess I just get irritated by the "make your own luck" mentality as it often neglects to take into account that the mileage of one's luck may vary greatly depending on what kind of ride you're in in the first place.

That is all to say...lately I just feel really lucky, both about what ride I started out in and the fact that it's still motoring along. This is not some kind of floofy-poofy, soft focus, kittens-and-toddlers feeling of gratitude. It's a shocked kind of breathless feeling, like someone just yanked me by my hoodie back onto the sidewalk and out of the path of a bus.  Lately I think about this poem a lot.

It's by Wislawa Szymborska, fellow Polish lady.

Could Have

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. On the left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck - there was a forest.
You were in luck - there were no trees.
You were in luck - a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant...

So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.

I hate saying what poems are "about" but since she lived in Poland during WWII, it's pretty clear what events this one is referring to.  Like any good poem, though, it moves out past that to something universal.

I don't know what, exactly, I expected for adult life. I do remember my adolescent fantasies of success and fulfillment.  Underneath that, though, I guess some part of me has been bunched up, anxious, anticipating catastrophe & calamity.

Not always consciously, not always in some kind of Eeyore pessimist way. But I realize now I was operating under the assumption that the odds of someone like me getting to any kind of tidy, pleasant, contented adult life were quite...long.

So lately, every day that my life seems to veer away from the edge of calamity (I worry I'm about to lose my job, but it turns out they just cut my hours; a loved one gets follow-up cancer test results back and things look okay, etc.), every day that I manage to make my bed and eat a successful series of meals and go for a walk and look at trees, every time I watch Mad Men and realize I don't know how I survive - or, at least, how I would have found happiness - if I lived in a time when or a place where women couldn't/can't make unorthodox life choices with relative ease, I am stunned from unexpected luck.

I do feel dizzy from another dodge, like I squeezed through a hole in this net I've apparently been waiting to descend over my life.  Or from the realization that I could have been born into a choking net that I would have had to spend much more of my life fighting.

I've always liked Thanksgiving but I might just finally be enough of a grown-up to actually understand why people started out wanting to give thanks in the first place.

I am off to friend-of-blog Sarah's for vegetarian Thanksgiving and I'm also grateful that she's been indulgent enough to let me contribute to the menu.  And I'm grateful that despite the lack of attention I've given this blog lately, it's helped me learn how to cook, something I've always wanted to know how to do, but before I combined the learning process with writing, I didn't know how to make it happen.

So here's what I'm making, and the process has been so much less grueling than previous cookathons. I really think I'm starting to get the hang of all this. I'll report back with recipes tweaks later.

• Vegetarian stuffing (made with vegetarian sausage a la Cafe Flora & Mark Bittman's roasted vegetable stock)
• Buttermilk scallion black pepper biscuits
• Spinach salad w/candied pecans, gorgonzola & balsamic vinaigrette
• Pear cranberry cake
• Bourbon vanilla bean ice cream with chocolate chunks
• Mulled appled cider sorbet

Hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving too!