Search Results for: essay

Sharing Food to Feed A Family’s Soul

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After WWII, Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s grandmother foraged and grew whatever food she could to feed her young daughter, Kazuko. Kazuko lived and learned to forage to survive, too. After she moved to the US, food forged a similar bond with her daughter, Marie Mutsuki. As Marie Mutsuki Mockett suggests in an essay for Elle, preparing food for other people nourishes bonds as well as the body, and these connections endure for generations. “Unlike so much in our lives that’s now transactional,” Mockett writes, “the making of food is elemental. It makes the cells that constitute the body and keep us clinging to life. I wonder how many problems in the world can be attributed to this lack of understanding: To make food for others from start to finish is to follow through in our commitment to each other.” Now the pandemic has shut Mockett’s mother’s facility off to visitors, and cut off her deliveries of food, she assesses how to live without shared meals and the role they have played in their lives.

When I was 19, I had pneumonia and was hospitalized for a week. While my fever raged and the antibiotics fought to clear my lungs, I refused to eat. The spaghetti and lasagna cooked up by the hospital kitchen turned my stomach. All I wanted was rice and seaweed: Japanese soul food.

After the final fever broke, my mother arrived with three plastic containers. One had rice. Another held pickled sour plums she had made with fruit grown in her garden. A third held ground beef carefully seasoned. “You’ll get better now,” she grinned as she fed me by hand. And I did. My body reconstituted itself out of her nourishment. Even now, when I am sick, I yearn for those flavors.

Back at the nursing home, before the world shut down to combat a pandemic, the social worker talked to us about how we might plan for my mother’s return home: “You’ll need to either use an assisted living facility, or hire care,” she said to my mother, “That way, you can keep your relationship with your daughter as mother and daughter.” This is what people in the medical field tell the elderly and the dying. It’s a way of suggesting that our bonds with our loved ones should remain purely emotional, as though two people can distill the most important aspects of how they interact, the way cream is spooned out from milk, and leave the rest of the work for others to do. But while it’s one thing to accept help with incontinence, bathing, and medication, I stumble over the idea of letting someone else decide what my mother will eat.

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Phone Call in The Age of Coronavirus

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Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | May 2020 | 6 minutes (1,765 words)

When I imagine the call, it comes on a landline. Not a cell phone. A land line like the one propped on the little table in the hall outside my parents’ bedroom on 22nd Street, on the second floor landing. Beige with a rotary dial. Not installed on the wall but sitting fat and secure on the table where a chair joined it, perfect for those long conversations my older sisters had with their friends, the phone that rang in the middle of the night with the news my father’s only uncle had died. My father stumbled out of bed to answer its loud and insistent rings. My mother and my sisters and I followed the ringing, unheard of at that hour, assembling by our father as he heaved himself into the chair after hearing the news. I was 5 years old and it was the first important phone call of my life. The image of my whole family hovering around the phone was engraved forever as the way one receives the surprising news of death.

Recently, after years of not thinking about the phone call I imagined I might receive some day, I thought about it again. I used to torture myself by pretending it was his voice I heard on the line, saying the name he alone knew, the name he had given me because he thought it suited me better than the one I wore so heavily. And now I wanted to hear him say that name again, one last time. The global spread of the Coronavirus, our shutdown in Washington where I live, the way fear hangs in the air has perhaps triggered its return. Doctors are making their wills, never a good sign, and we’re being told it’s time to talk about death. For some of us may have run out of time to do those last things we thought we might do. In my imagination, the call still comes in on the beige phone of my childhood even though I haven’t owned a landline for 10 years. Those models are museum pieces, shoved away in attics as relics along with bone china tea sets. My husband never did sign on for the transition to cell phones. He missed the physical presence of the landline in our lives, claiming he couldn’t hear the voice on the other end as clearly on a cell phone. About three years ago he finally broke down and got one installed in our condo unit only to discover no one ever called him on it. This new version of the landline didn’t look at all like the phones of old and it didn’t operate like one either. It was much more machine-like with buttons to hit and complicated functions. Though it sat on his desk where he could readily answer, it never rang. The world had moved on. Eventually he got rid of it, the expense of the landline wasn’t justified, he said.


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Cell phones, so thin and light and little, don’t seem fitting for momentous calls, for life and death communications, for last words, or even if the calls aren’t literally life and death, they’re emotionally weighty, too weighty to receive or conduct on an iPhone or flip phone. For calls of that sort, a landline is required, or so my psyche thinks. I never picture receiving the call walking idly about my neighborhood and hitting accept on my cell phone. Or perusing lettuce at the grocery store. Or even on a picturesque trail looking out at the ferry gliding on its way to Seattle. It would be awful to get such a call as I’m imagining in public, standing in line to board that ferry or waiting for an order of coffee. Imagine being at the drugstore, a place as soulless as Walgreens, and getting the call. Because we carry our cell phones everywhere, we now can receive calls anywhere and at any time. This is a tragedy. Cell phones have destroyed the sense of the occasion of a call, the magnitude of picking up and hearing a familiar voice on the other end who has something significant to say. Truth be told, I don’t receive many calls anymore from anyone. Mostly reminders that my prescription is ready or my dental appointment has to be rescheduled. The exceptions are rare and they don’t compare favorably with important calls I’ve received in my life on a landline, like the call telling me my father had died. Now that is a call I will remember until I die.

Because we carry our cell phones everywhere, we now can receive calls anywhere and at any time. This is a tragedy.

The call came in the middle of the night just like that call about my father’s uncle when I was 5. It was early March, cold and wintery, the river that ran by our house was churning with chunks of ice, and the heat had been turned off. I know this because my husband and I had buried ourselves under a down comforter and two large dogs. Richard got up to answer the call — he was surprisingly quick about it having been woken from sleep. I immediately knew the news was bad and it was for me. No one calls in the middle of the night unless they have to. Oddly our phone was beige just like my childhood phone and sat on the dresser in our bedroom. Did I deliberately pick that model, the instrument carrying the news of death, or was it an accident of fate?

I had to get up out of bed to speak into the phone. Not easy and convenient like a cell phone that I could reach while staying under the covers. In the dark I could barely make out Richard’s shape. I heard his voice — It’s your sister Carol. That’s all he had to say and I knew. He didn’t have to say It’s about your father. I threw off the blankets, dislodged myself from the pile of dogs, and found him to take the phone. Nearly naked and shivering I heard her voice. There was no chair to fall into. I stood to hear her say Marcia, Daddy’s gone. It should require some effort to take such a call. You should have to get from one place to another and it shouldn’t be easy. You should have to run down the stairs to answer the call or stumble across the room in the dark hitting your hips on the edge of the dresser. It should leave a mark, a bruise that will take weeks to fade and remain sensitive to the touch.

There are many momentous phone calls I imagine I might receive, frightening calls I dread receiving, terrible test results, something happening to those I love, calls I don’t want to get on my cell phone or pick up as voicemail. These are inevitable and they await me. I doubt that I will escape them. But the call I imagine, the call I’ve thought about receiving is from the man who first stirred me, a troubled man I knew a long time ago before there were cell phones, a time when talking on the phone for us was rare and memorable because I was keeping our relationship secret from my parents. I feared that once our relationship became known, it wouldn’t withstand their disapproval. I was 17. Some might say 17 is too young to have a significant relationship but I would say they are wrong. With him I felt vulnerable and real. At 17 I let everything happen to me. I let him happen to me. And that wasn’t the case as I grew older. For a short space it didn’t matter how we spent our time as long as we were together. But the days between the sweet and the bitter were brief, between the hours of early fall and the dark end of the season. All that was pure affection between us was driven underground in the cold that came. We were doomed from the start, though I didn’t know it — that was something it took time for me to see. We didn’t last, or I should say our relationship didn’t overcome the obstacles put before it. But we did last in my heartbrainbody. He vanished into his life and I vanished into my life without a word passing between us ever again. I know nothing about what became of him. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.

At 17 I let everything happen to me. I let him happen to me.

I used to periodically let myself descend into a kind of sad daze, a timeless daze, imagining that someday he would call me. Something would make him call me. Perhaps he’d have something specific to say to me. That he sometimes was overcome with remembering me, someone would remind him of me. I don’t know what he would say although sometimes I imagined him asking if it was too late. And of course it was. It had been too late for a very long time, but I still wanted him to ask. I wanted to hear him say those words. I wanted to be curled into a chair with the telephone cord wrapped around my fingers and hear his voice one more time. I used to rehearse what I wanted to say to him if I ever got the chance. I suppose I wanted to put something right before it was too late. Though I know it’s impossible for one last phone call to put anything right, to untangle what has tangled, to repair what has broken, to forgive. Mainly there’s just an ache of the unfinished. I know it is likely there will be no call. But because I am still alive, I imagine the call.

I know it is likely there will be no call. But because I am still alive, I imagine the call.

It comes in on the beige phone that sits on a table like the one in my childhood but it isn’t inside. That’s the thing about creating your own dream — you can take a landline sitting on a table and move it to where it could never be. I want the phone and table to be sitting in the middle of a deserted beach. I hear the ring though it comes from far away. I run through the country fields of my youth and along the back roads he and I used to take on his motorcycle. I hear the pit-pat of my boots slapping the ground like panted breath. I run and run until eventually I can see the green sea spread before me and then the table with the phone. I run down steps onto the hard packed sand of the beach. I hear the ring ring ring ! I am close now.

* * *

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu

Editor: Krista Stevens

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Shawn Yuan, Marty Munson, Anna Merlan, Lauren Collins, and Drew Magary.

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1. Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup

Shawn Yuan | Wired | May 1, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,696 words)

“The dawn of a pandemic — as seen through the news and social media posts that vanished from China’s internet.”

2. What It Feels Like to Compete at the Biggest Ice Swimming Race in North America

Marty Munson | Men’s Health | April 30, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,255 words)

“The first five minutes — especially when it’s below 60 — can be so painful and you think, I don’t want to do this. But when you’re swimming in training, within ten minutes, your body goes numb and there’s this adrenaline and a thrill. I don’t understand it, but it’s incredible.”

3. I Tried Hypnosis to Deal with My Pandemic Anxiety, and Got Something Much Weirder

Anna Merlan | Vice Magazine | May 5, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,565 words)

“When I stepped through the door, I told him, I found myself in a room entirely lined with aquariums, in which large, spotted, neon-colored fish were floating. It felt peaceful, I told Brown. ‘There’s some purpose here. I’m not worried about the fish, they’re being taken care of.'”

4. Missed Calls

Lauren Collins | The New Yorker | May 4, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,423 words)

Lauren Collins’ father died in March of leukemia as the pandemic began to unfold, forcing her to learn to grieve in a time of enforced isolation. This essay is a remembrance of her father and an exploration of grieving from a distance.

5. I’m On a Pancake-only Breakfast Diet and I Wish I Started This Sooner

Drew Magary | SF Gate | May 4, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,979 words)

“MY NAME IS DREW AND I LOVE PANCAKES.”

Missed Calls

Longreads Pick

Lauren Collins’ father died in March of leukemia as the pandemic began to unfold, forcing her to learn to grieve in a time of enforced isolation. This essay is a remembrance of her father and an exploration of grieving from a distance.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 4, 2020
Length: 13 minutes (3,423 words)

And Then We Grew Up

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Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2020 | 11 minutes (3,116 words)

“I envy you,” my cousin told me once, as we were sitting on the front porch of a log cabin in the Ohio woods, eating peach pie. “You have a word.” That word was WRITER. My cousin, who’d bounced around jobs in her twenties and thirties, envied the way my word so neatly answered the questions of career and identity, the way it brought me into focus. I may not have had any money. I may not have had any idea if the project I was working on would ever actually be seen by someone other than myself, but I had a word.

Every once in a while, I go through a spell of applying for jobs. Teaching jobs. Tech jobs. Utterly random jobs. I google “how to write a cover letter.” I fantasize with both fascination and horror about showing up at an office and chatting about The Handmaid’s Tale over tepid coffee in a communal space. Then inevitably I imagine that moment when a stranger asks me what I do and I can no longer supply my word as an answer. It is incredibly disarming, even just in my interior dreamscape, not to have that word. It has been an anchor for my personal sense of validation, my identity, my way of relating to the world for so long. What would it mean to give it up? To hand over all my art monster ambitions and renounce the often cruel bargain of personal stability for creative nobility?

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The Function and Language of Ancient Sexual Texts

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought about a medieval classroom’s curriculum or what it might have been like to attend. Apparently they could be a lot more racy than you’d think. Chaucer’s story Reeve’s Tale, is about rape, for example. Poems about deflowered nuns and lascivious men whose sexual appetites earned comparisons to animals were read to children and adults. In a fascinating and fresh review-essay for the London Review of Books, Irina Dumitrescu looks at ancient depications of sexuality, and the idea of obscenity, through Carissa Harris’ book Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. “In her meticulously argued new book,” Dumitrescu writes, “Carissa Harris shows that obscenity was used to convey vastly different lessons about sex and ethics in medieval literature. Focusing on sexual language in Middle English and Middle Scots, her study explores the way texts deployed for (heterosexual) erotic education often combined ‘the irresistible pull of arousal and titillation and the revulsive push of shame and disgust’.”

For much of the 20th century, academics argued that the concept of obscenity was born along with the printing press and state censorship of erotic material. One can understand where this idea came from: even a fleeting encounter with medieval art is likely to turn up lurid depictions of sex organs and bodily orifices. Take the naked man crouching at the bottom of the Bayeux Tapestry, his genitalia on full display. (In 2018, George Garnett achieved brief internet fame by counting the 93 phalluses, human and equine, shown on the tapestry, and documenting their states of tumescence.) Medieval manuscript pages often have a stately central text surrounded by rollicking activity. Nuns harvest penises from trees in the lower margins of a manuscript of the Roman de la rose, and a naked man presents his behind to be pierced by a monkey’s lance beneath the prayers of the Rutland Psalter. Pilgrim badges, popular medieval souvenirs made of cheap metal alloys, depict vulvas dressed as pilgrims, winged penises and female smiths forging phalluses. Erotic imagery is carved into stone corbels and on the undersides of wooden choir seats in medieval churches.

But none of this should be taken as proof that there was no concept of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The notion that some things are lewd or filthy is distinct from the desire to regulate them by political means. The influential seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville used the adjective ‘obscenus’ to describe the love of prostitutes and those parts of the body that excite people to shameful acts. In the 12th century, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux railed against heretics doing ‘heinous and obscene’ things in private, comparing them to the stinking behinds of foxes. In the Roman de la rose, the Lover upbraids the allegorical figure of Reason for using the word coilles (‘balls’). He argues that this isn’t dignified in the mouth of a courteous girl (an unwitting double entendre), but Reason defends her usage. God made the generative organs and women enjoy the pleasures these afford, whatever word is used to describe them. Not all medieval copyists of the Roman de la rose agreed with this argument: a number of versions leave out this passage. People in the Middle Ages certainly understood certain things to be filthy or shameful, but such topics could also inspire prayerful reflection or be used to explain the error of a poor line of verse.

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Japan: A Longform Reading List of Longform Writing

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Before I traveled to Japan for the first time in 2014, I read as much about the country as time allowed. Japanese culture and ecology had interested me since I discovered anime in the fifth grade; I read books by Pico Iyer and Donald Richie, novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and collected countless online stories about everything from Japanese architecture to history to customs. I wanted to understand more about this island chain that has been inhabited since at least 30,000 BCE. I wanted to know more about this aggressively innovative culture simultaneously committed to tradition, a country that is famously easy to navigate by train but difficult to integrate into as an outsider. I wanted to understand Tokyo, the world’s largest city, whose allure comes partly from its incomprehensibility.

My library was filled with anthologies on my other passions California, the American South, jazz. But while I had stellar fiction anthologies on Japan, like The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction and Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll, the nonfiction book I wanted didn’t exist.  I couldn’t find a single, English-language anthology collecting longform nonfiction about Japan. So I made it.

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O! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall

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Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words)

The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to school pickup, the next minute I’m disoriented and sobbing. The at-fault is a 19-year-old dude in a Jeep full of friends. He is nonplussed. He asks, without affect, whether I am okay.

“No!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

My car is badly damaged. I can’t stop sobbing. No airbags deployed. I am worried the dude will get back into his car and flee, so I photograph his license plate in haste, and call the cops. I cannot for the life of me stop crying. My rage and fear and shock and sadness are a tangle. The Jeep doesn’t have a scratch on it. It’s raining. The dude and his friends huddle under a shop awning, laughing.

The cop tells me to calm down: “It’s not that big a deal, ma’am.”

Later, when I call the cop oversight office to suggest that this particular cop go fuck himself, the oversight officer will watch the body cam footage and promise to speak to the cop in question about sensitivity in traumatic situations.

For some reason, I refuse an ambulance. (“Some reason”, ha: I am more terrified of institutional health care than I am of getting back into a smashed up car and driving away with whiplash and a concussion.)

I spend days in bed, in the dark, alternating heat and ice. A haze of phone calls from insurance agents, a hailstorm of Advil, rivers of CBD hot freeze.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany. Fucking Albany! This was God’s way of telling me I’ve done my time in this hopeless shithole of a city, right? Or maybe this was God’s way of punishing me for never utilizing public buses. Or maybe this was God’s way of shaming me for having my kid in private school. The thinks you think when you’re stuck in bed, in the dark, without distraction, for days on end! Meditation is a billion times harder than crossfit, and constructions about “God” are tough epigenetic habits to break.
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The Shopper’s Dream of an Optimized Life

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Shopping online can seem like the ultimate way to save time and trouble. This is especially true now that we have to stay indoors to reduce exposure to the Coronavirus. From Netflix to candle subscriptions to Rent the Runway, subscription-based businesses and direct to consumer services like Warby Parker take that promise further, allowing you to both avoid a brick and mortar store and even the thought of shopping at all. Subscriptions buy you time. Think of all the things you can do with your time once you have to shop less! At Esquire, editor Kelly Stout reveals the tragic flaw in that thinking. Although, theoretically, subscriptions free up customers’ time to do other things, no one can get us to spend that newly available time more efficiently. There is no optimizing for that.

The dream of the subscription is that without having to use our brains for something as mundane as remembering to buy razor cartridges, we might do something better with our time. We might even become more optimized human beings—an economic fever dream that dates back to, I don’t know, the invention of the cotton gin. Probably earlier. In a memorable essay for The Guardian, Jia Tolentino summarized the economist William Stanley Jevons’s definition of optimization: “We all want to get the most out of what we have.” Saving not just time but effort is key to forward momentum in the industrial phantasmagoria that is, at this moment, blasting circus music into my ears. It’s a flattering proposition that implies I’m capable of something grand. Once we’ve saved all that money, all that time, all that hassle, out pops a gameshow host—his smile wider than a Smile-DirectClub member’s—to ask us, What will you do with all this time?

One answer is work. With fewer hours, minutes, or even seconds spent chopping onions and herbs for tonight’s dinner, I could be turning that extra time into money. But I had a different idea: What if, instead, I enjoyed myself? In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a compelling case for leisure time—not leisure time as “side hustle” or “monetizable” or even something that will improve the self, but as recreation for no reason. This is a novel idea in 2020, even though it’s been around for more than a century. “As far back as 1886 . . . workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will,’ ” Odell writes. The movement inspired a poster of people in canoes and a song about feeling the sunshine and smelling the flowers. When I read that, I thought: Dang, I never canoe! Maybe shaving off a sliver of my time at CVS could add to those eight what-I-will hours. And yet I spent those extra seconds sitting on my couch. I wasn’t doing anything except scrolling through my feeds, thinking about my subscriptions, contemplating how I could optimize my life further. I wasn’t even going to the store.

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Secret Museums

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B. Pietras Creative Nonfiction | Summer 2019 | 16 minutes (4,291 words)

 

I was a freshman in high school when my religion teacher faced the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you have seen pornography?”

There were about twenty boys in the classroom that day, and until then, we probably weren’t paying full attention—some of us were thinking about lunch, others about the quiz next period. But when the question came, everything in the dusty room seemed to go still; the air itself seemed to thicken, to prickle against our skin. Tense, wary of a trap, we watched one another out of the corners of our eyes. Did he really expect us to answer honestly? And what would happen if we did?

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