Keeping Things Loose

I thought it would be a simple project.

After weeks of price comparisons and shopping around, I finally decided on a new patio table from Target. The display set was simple and quaint and exactly what I wanted. Not to mention fully assembled. When I found the giant box that contained all the pieces of my future table and chairs, I was only slightly deterred.

How hard could it be to assemble two chairs and a table?

Community Writing Project: Summer Vacations

Every year about this time, I start asking the same question of coworkers and friends, acquaintances and strangers: Do you have a vacation planned for this summer? Most people say “yes” if they are taking a trip to Europe, or even to Cleveland for a family reunion. Camping treks with family, college tours with their high school children, even casino trips with old friends all elicit a “yes.” Sometimes, people even say “yes” if they are taking the week off to work on a home project.

American vacations usually mean taking our busy lives on the road for a week.

Those are the vacations I usually take, too. One year, I took off several days to paint the entire inside of my home. And since I have friends and family scattered around the country, I usually book flights, pack suitcases, and go live their lives with them for the week. It’s true that I am away from work, and sometimes I even have a chance to sleep in or get a pedicure. But am I resting? Am I pulling back from the pace and connectedness of normal life?

Those questions had me wondering about my idea of “vacation” last summer.

Shepherding a Family of One

I was standing in a circle of friends recently talking and laughing about any number of things. At some point in the conversation, someone mentioned watching sports on television, and one friend replied, "I wouldn't know; we don't have a television." 

The conversation went on from there without even a pause, except in my own mind. She and her husband have several children, and whether or not the decision about television is for the young ones, I'm not sure. But the comment called to mind a commitment I made years ago that if I ever had children, I would sell my television.

Since I don't have children, my own television still sits prominently in the living room.

One Woman: The Helpless Widow

I was in a hurry, if you must know. I was driving an hour and a half for my baby sister's graduation, and a couple of unplanned errands put me behind schedule. One of the stops was a quick gas-up, and I was going about it rather briskly. Swipe the card. Open the cap. Jab in the nozzle. 

I was willing the gas to flow faster when a woman approached me from the other side of the gas pump. She was well-dressed in a peach pant suit and white blouse; her white hair was set in a soft curl; her frame slight. The woman looked at me hesitantly.

"So, what kind do you usually use," she asked me, looking at the pump.

"I just use Regular," I said, pointing at the button.

"Oh," she said. "I wasn't sure." She looked around nervously.

Living Alone as a Cultural Act

“Most people wouldn’t understand why we do this,” I said to two friends one day as we were shopping.

“Spend four hours buying food?” Jamie asked. We laughed. We already had been to the farmers market, a coffee shop, and two grocery stores.

“No, run errands together,” I said. “Most married people, especially if they have kids, wouldn’t get together with friends and go to the grocery store. And I don’t think they would understand why we do it.”

I wondered about it myself. Why is it that many Saturdays I find myself in the car driving around town with these or other single friends who live alone like I do, picking up a gift at a department store,  doing the week’s shopping, or depositing a check at the credit union?

Recent census figures indicate that 28 percent of all American households, and as many as 50 percent in large metropolitan areas, now are made up of just one member. That’s 31 million of us using our dryers as a dresser, eating peanut butter out of the jar with our fingers, or leaving the door open when we are in the bathroom.

:: CONTINUE READING ::

Today, I am writing at theHighCalling.org as part of the Everything Matters series, considering "Living Alone as a Cultural Act." Follow the link to join me over there.

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BONUS STORY

Here is the story behind the story that prompted me to want to write about living alone when I first heard about the growing number of "singletons" in America.

Living alone certainly does foster some quirkiness in my home life. 

On a recent weeknight, I came home after a difficult day on the job and a vigorous workout at the gym. Though the sun hadn’t set and I wouldn’t be going to bed for hours, I put on my pajamas and my “house” sweater that I wear only at home. Grabbing a handful of cashews and a rice cake, I sat down at the dining room table to do some editing on my laptop. 

When my younger sister arrived at the house a few minutes after me, I was embarrassed. I usually do a pretty good job of hiding my antisocial behavior – at least I think I do. But my sister had been staying with me for a few weeks while she finished an internship, and I had let my guard down. After living alone for so long, I have developed a few, er, eccentric habits. 

In a recent New York Times article, Steven Kurutz chronicles some of oddities that develop from a life lived alone. From indulgent work styles to intriguing dietary choices, Kurutz reveals the secret lives of the singletons he interviewed for “One Is the Quirkiest Number: The Freedom, and Perils, of Living Alone.” 

But it’s not just the relaxed sense of self that many of us have at home. According to Kurutz, living alone accentuates the duplicity. “What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different — in ways big and small — from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them,” Kurutz said. 

Photo by Yuliya Libkina, via Flickr, used with permission under the Creative Commons License.

One Woman: The Unknown Soldier

How a conversation starts with a stranger never seems straightforward.

My friend Kelly and I, and her two boys, had gone downtown for a festival, and as we were leaving, we decided to stop at the Subway sandwich shop to buy bottles of water. While we were there, Kelly asked the boys to wash their hands and faces. They were going in and out of the men’s room looking for paper towels, being asked to rewash, when I caught her eye, the young woman in a wheel chair eating at a table alone.

“How are you this evening?” I asked, when she looked my direction.

She smiled, putting down her sandwich, that one long piece of hair in the front falling over her eyes. “Good,” she said. She looked strong, not like I imagined someone in a wheelchair, and defiant. The blunt haircut and the various ear piercings screamed look at me.

The Peace of Wild Things

“I have a poem to read before we eat,” I told my sister, Sierra, as we were searching for bright plastic Easter eggs filled with candy. The little children had finished their egg hunt in the front yard already. Now, we grown “kids” were running around the back yard looking for treasure.

“Did you write it?” Sierra asked, knowing that I do that occasionally.

“No, it’s a poem by Wendell Berry,” I said.

“Dingleberry?” my sister-in-law, Stacy, asked, joining us for the end of the conversation.  “What’s this about a dingleberry?”

“Not dingleberry,” I said. “Wendell Berry.”

:: CONTINUE READING ::

Today I am writing over at TweetSpeak Poetry. Follow the link above and join me there.

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I couldn't write about wild things today without remembering Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and many other books loved by people everywhere, who died yesterday at 83. We will never look at wild things the same because of you.

 

Photo by Michael Sissons, via Flickr, used with permission under the Creative Commons License.

A Way with Words

I would like to say that an NPR program called to interview me because I had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but that would be only half true. An NPR program did call to interview me, but actually, that's only half true, too. 

An NPR program called, but only because I called them first.

Here's what happened. When a coworker and I talked about the phrase "back like a bad penny" in the break room one day, I knew I had to call Martha and Grant from "A Way with Words" to discover the source of this interesting phrase. "A Way with Words" is a public radio show about the English language. Co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett take calls about grammar, idioms, etymologies, and, of course, old sayings that we don't quite understand.

I called on a Saturday thinking that I might get to be on National Public Radio live, right then as the show was airing. Wrong. Apparently, when you call most "live" radio shows, you never talk live. Instead, I left a message describing my question, and a few days later, the producer, Stefanie Levine, called me to arrange the taping.

So they called me, but really I called them. But hey, either way, I was on National Public Radio! The show aired on Saturday, May 5, and you can listen to the light-hearted exchange among Grant, Martha, and me below. (Just fast forward to 2:30 if you want to get straight to my part.) 

And as it happened, the call took place in Ann Kroeker's living room just minutes before she and I left for Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing. So, she snapped my picture while I was talking.

Really, it's a word nerd's dream come true!

Photo by Ann Kroeker, used with permission.

Making Sense of Things

“Books invite us to share in a sustained, subtle, complex system of making sense of things,” Scott Russell Sanders said Tuesday evening during an event hosted by the Plainfield Public Library. He was reading from his essay “Hunger for Books” in the compilation The Country of Language. 

The essay was about reading, and how as a boy, he was surrounded by books though his parents owned very few of them. It could happen that way, he said, because of the public library. While he sat among those stacks of books, he came to love the “miraculous power of language, whether written or spoken.” “I could follow any question wherever it lead, and all for free,” he said. 

Sanders read from several other of his books to the crowd of about 30 of us. Ann Kroeker and I attended the event together in a sort of “reprise” of our recent road trip to Calvin College for the Festival of Faith and Writing. (If you must know, I called it “getting the band back together” in my best 80s rocker voice as I got in the car that evening.)