So I decided to move the focus of the month a little further north on my body – to my navel.  No, I am not piercing it.  I’m gazing at it.

I decided to spend the month meditating, which I’ve never done.  It is my hope that, through meditation, I can become more aware of the world around me, a beautiful, enchanting, unique world that I too often ignore in favor of stupid crap happening only in my head.  This month, I’m aiming to slow down the compulsive list-making and encounter rehashing and prewriting and disaster planning that occupies entirely too much of my energy and my consciousness.

Although I intended to meditate every day, it was February 3 by the time I realized the month had started without me.

And then I had no idea how to go about meditating.  I’d never meditated, I owned no books on meditation, and I didn’t know anyone who meditated regularly (believe me, I’d asked around).  My gym doesn’t offer meditation classes, and the only meditation centers I knew of were far from Westchester.

I logged onto the computer, intending to Google “How to Meditate,” when I remembered YogaGlo.  My friend Laura had turned me on to this great online resource for yoga practitioners.  I’d joined, and over several months had taken a number of yoga classes. I remembered that I’d seen meditation classes offered as well, so I logged on to my YogaGlo account.

For someone like me, who is both easily overwhelmed and a complete beginner, the choices were overwhelming.  I could do one of the series of five Kosha meditations, or a Gurubhava Meditation or Chitinri Nadri.  I could choose Visualize Your Intention or Embrace Abundance or Firm Resolution.  I ruled out Prenatal Meditation and Connecting With Baby, and I didn’t feel the need for Releasing Sadness or Releasing Anger, but how could I possibly select from all of the many other options?

I finally settled on The Universal Self, led by Tara Judelle, which is described as “A meditation about feeling yourself in your whole body, and the bigness of the universe.”  I chose it based on a combination of its length – it was fifteen minutes, which seemed doable – and the description, which sounded like what I was trying to accomplish – to feel more present in and connected to the world around me.

I spread my yoga mat out on the floor in front of my desktop computer, folded an afghan to sit on, pressed play, and got ready to meditate.

Sitting in a beautiful lotus position, Tara instructs me to find a comfortable position.  I cross my legs, not trying to get them into lotus, but even in a basic crossed-leg, I notice that my left knee isn’t touching the floor.  In fact it’s several inches off the floor.  I try pushing on it but it doesn’t budge.  I try adjusting the position of both legs; no dice.  What the hell is going on?

All the time I’m wrestling with my left knee, Tara has been giving quiet, gentle instructions.  Which I have not heard.  A minute into my first meditation experience and I’m already screwing it up.  I stand, restarted the video, and sit back down, determined to ignore my recalcitrant knee.

Tara instructs me to move the flesh of my thighs back and apart; this is familiar language for me from years of intermittent yoga practice, and I feel reassured.  Then Tara says I should take a moment to center myself, and find where my vertical axis centers in the bowl of my pelvis.

What?  What does that mean?

Determined not to let a little confusion interrupt my meditation, I rock slightly back and forth and try to imagine my upper body centering in the bowl of my pelvis.

“Finding stillness in that spot,” Tara continues, speaking slowly and softly, “allow your eyes to soften behind your eyelids…and the space behind your eyes to soften—“

The space behind my eyes?  What the hell is that?  My brain?  Or does she mean the bony sockets of my skull?  Cathleen, I say to myself, you’re being too literal.  You don’t have to freak out over every little thing.  Just go with the flow.  Which is when I suddenly remember that I need to make an Orthodontist’s appointment for Maggie.  Oh, and also, tomorrow is my father’s birthday; I need to remember to call him.  I pull up my mental “To Do” list and add two items—

and then remember that I’m supposed to be meditating—

I tune back in to Tara, who is instructing me to focus awareness in my feet.

I hate focusing on my feet.  Patty, my yoga (and singing) teacher, often begins class with students in a standing position, and gives us feet-related instructions – pull up the inner arch and activate the foot, pull up the outer arch, ground the ball of the foot – which I always struggle with.  The only feet-related activity I can really embrace is a nice pedicure.  Which reminds me, how long had it been since I’d had a pedicure?

I tune back into Tara who is instructing me to place my whole self in my feet.

What?

I try.  I really try.  But they’re my feet.  The part of my body farthest from my head, which is where I feel that my self is actually located.  Sometimes my feet feel cold, and sometimes they get sweaty, and if I wear high heels, they can hurt.  But I just don’t have such an intimate relationship with them that I can feel my whole body in them.

“Allow your awareness to climb up your body from your ankles to your knees—“

Oy.  I’ve been trying to ignore my knees, especially the left one that is still three @#%ing inches off the floor.  Now I’m supposed to put my whole self in that knee?  Maybe my whole self will weight it down enough that it will TOUCH the @#%ing FLOOR.

After we spend some time feeling (or failing to feel, if you’re me) our whole selves in our legs, we move on to feel our selves in other parts of our body – the place where the leg bones insert into the hip sockets, the pelvis, the navel, the organs of digestion, lungs.  It goes on, and up.

I am hugely relieved when we finally get to feeling our selves in the top of the skull because there’s nowhere else to go.  When Tara says, “Feel yourself in your whole body,” I think, “Yes!”  because this I can do.  I revel in feeling myself in my whole body.

We stay there for what seems like a long time, Tara quiet, feeling our selves in our body, and I’m beginning to think maybe I can do this meditation thing when Tara says, “Feel your self expand past your body into the entire room.”

Really?

I try to see my self expanding out of my body and filling the bedroom.  I imagine stretching up and out so that my self touches all of the walls and the ceiling.  I’m just beginning to feel bigger and more expansive when Tara says, “Make yourself as big as your whole city.”

What if I don’t live in a city?  What if I live in a tiny village?  A little hamlet in the hills?  And even if I do live in a city (which I do) What if I don’t want to be as big as my whole city?  What if I really hate the blue light at the top of the Ritz-Carlton in my city and I don’t want that to be part of my self?

I try focusing on the parts of my city that I love – my street, the neighborhood park, my synagogue, Target (honestly.  I love Target) – but I can’t seem to expand my mind to encompass the whole city.  And Tara’s already moving on, telling me to envision my self as the whole country.

Should I envision the country as a map?  Or should I try to see the real places? I picture that famous New Yorker cover, where New York is larger and more detailed than everything between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean.  But that’s a cartoon, not the real country.  I try picturing Maine, and then holding on to that image while also picturing the Pacific Ocean as I’ve seen it from a plane, and San Juan Island, which is the farthest west I’ve been in the U.S., but I don’t know what Kansas or North Dakota or Kentucky looks like, and even if I could imagine them, I can’t keep all of the images in my mind’s eye at once.

While I’m still stuck on trying to imagine my country, Tara moves on to the world and then to universe.  I retreat to my city, and focus on encompassing the whole of it, on being the city.

And that’s where I am when the meditation ends.

I don’t feel energized or changed.  I don’t feel connected to the universe.  I don’t even feel particularly connected to my city, upon which I focused so much of my mental energy.

But I am surprised at how quickly the fifteen minutes passed.  And I do feel…quieter.

Next time, I’ll pick an easier meditation.  There is one called Beginner Meditation.  Maybe that’s for me.

It’s not the New Year’s resolutions that I find so stressful; it’s my inevitable, predestined inability to keep them.  Year after year, New Year’s Day dawns, full of bright hope and good intentions, and by February, it has all gone to shit.   Making New Year’s resolutions, I’ve always thought, is the best way to ensure feeling like a complete failure.

So when January rolled around,  I thought I would try just skipping over the whole month.  Pretending it wasn’t happening.  The days are already only about six hours long.  I would stay in my pajamas through the meager hours of sunlight, wearing my eye mask on my head like a talismanic hair band and sneaking in a few middle-of-the-day naps, and maybe January would be over before I even had a chance to come to full consciousness.

Somewhere around the middle of the month, I knew I had to face reality.  It was January, and I that had an obligation to myself and to “Forward From Fifty.”  Just because it was January, thereby dooming whatever resolution I embraced, didn’t mean I could skip out on my resolution-making.  And, really, I’m already well acquainted with, if not complete failure, something less than glowing success.  I have not, this far, withered away from self-pity or been laughed at in public places or spontaneously combusted.   So what would be so hard about another month of trying to be a better me?

I got out of my pajamas, tossed the eye mask onto my nightstand, and decided I’d use what was left of the month to try volunteering.  I would not put pressure on myself by committing to volunteer a certain number of hours each week, or to volunteer with a predetermined number of organizations, or to commit myself to volunteer forever.  This would just be a January experiment, where I’d give some new volunteer activities a try.  See how it felt.  I couldn’t possibly fail at that, right?

Which is how I found myself, two Sundays ago, at the other end of a leash from Waylon, a young and rather excitable pit bull terrier who is currently living at the New Rochelle Humane Society.

I did not, mind you, just stroll in to the shelter and grab a dog leash.  Volunteering at the shelter – and everywhere else that I’ve contacted – requires at least one, and often more, volunteer orientation sessions.

So before I let myself into Waylon’s cage and clipped a leash to his collar, I had attended both a general orientation and a special Green Dot Dog Walker session.

The general orientation was a talk about the shelter and basic shelter rules, and the Green Dot Dog Walker session was a talk followed by a short, trainer-supervised hands-on.  At the end, we got a volunteer badge with a green dot on it.  No one did not get their badge.

The basic idea of the Green Dot Dog training is to learn how to be able to:

• get into a Green Dot Dog’s cage without the dog slipping out, leashless;
• get the dog out of the shelter, past the other caged dogs, without incident;
• walk the dog;
• prevent the dog from ‘staring’ at another dog, which is considered rude dog behavior and can lead to fights; and,
• get the dog safely back into the cage, and yourself out of it, at the end of the walk.

This all sounds relatively simple and straightforward.  Except that what the dog wants to do is…

• escape from the cage,
• sniff, bark at, and otherwise taunt the caged dogs,
• stare intently at all other dogs he encounters on the walk, possibly provoking a fight,
• walk faster than you,
• or slower,
• or not in the direction that you’ve chosen.

(If you’re wondering what a Green Dot Dog is, it is a dog who has been judged by the professionals at the shelter to be fairly easy to handle and walk.)

At the Green Dot Dog training session, the trainer explained that the shelter uses positive reinforcement to train their dogs.  They never hit or chastise a dog or use physical force.  Physical force includes pulling a dog by the leash.  I never thought of pulling a dog’s leash as using force, and I do it all the time with Goldie because she hates to be walked.

There are two basic weapons in the Green Dot Dog Walker’s arsenal.  The first is not giving the dog what she wants.  If, for example, a dog is pulling on her leash, you simply stop walking, turn around and look in another direction until the dog realizes that she isn’t going anywhere.  This same technique is used when dogs jump on you – you ignore them because what they want is your attention.

The second weapon in the Green Dot Dog Walker’s arsenal is food.  How much food?  A steady stream.  But delivered in pea-sized bits of food, because, the trainer explained, dogs don’t savor their food.  They swallow it whole, whether it is a pea-sized piece of dog kibble or a giant juicy meatball.  Their dog brains get the same nanosecond of pleasure from either.

I was not entirely convinced after the Green Dot Dog training session that I could pull off a Green Dot dog walk, but the shelter people seemed to have confidence in me – they let me put a green dot on my volunteer badge – so I decided I would just have to suck it up and act like I was really capable of Green Dot Dog walking.

Waylon, however, did not realize that he was a Green Dot Dog.  He really, truly thought he was a Yellow Dot Dog – one who required a walker with special dog-whispering skills. Which I did not have.  I had only a clear sense of what NOT to do, a shaky belief in my authority, and a pouch full of pea-sized treats.

Waylon loved the food, and he would bound right to me and sit prettily to get nibble.  Then, as soon as I took a single step, he would leap ahead, pulling at the leash with all his might.  He wanted to RUN.  To soar over giant puddles and roll in the snow.  To stare intently at any other dog who crossed our path at any person who passed us.  And to run some more.

The walk went like this: I would take three steps, and Waylon would charge ahead, full tilt, pulling the leash and me with all his impressive might. I would stop, and turn in the other direction.  Waylon would tug hard for a few seconds, then give up and sit sweetly next to me.  Pea-sized treat and praise.  Three steps.  Full-tilt Waylon. Repeat.

It was extremely frustrating for both of us.  Waylon wanted to GO GO GO and I kept making him STOP.  Each time we stopped, Waylon’s desire to go intensified. He was perfectly happy to take as many pea-sized treats from me as I’d give him, but all of the treats and all of the stopping weren’t going to convince Waylon not to pull on his leash. And I wasn’t supposed to let him pull on the leash.

After about a block and a half, I decided we needed to turn around.  The walk wasn’t working for either of us.  My first Green Dot dog walk was a total failure.

Outside of the shelter are two fenced-in play areas, which can be used by the dogs and their volunteers – one dog at a time.  Both had been occupied when Waylon and I headed out, but the volunteer in one, perhaps picking up on the dispirited slump of my shoulders, told me she was taking her dog back in and I could use the play space.

When we stepped through the gate, Waylon’s whole body thrummed with excitement.  He pulled so hard at the leash that I knew I’d never be able to unhook it from his collar.  I dropped my end, and he took off, racing around the yard at what seemed like fifty miles an hour.   He raced through the red play tunnel, then back through it again, then around the whole yard in a circle, then through the tunnel, and up over a sort of wooden bridge, then around the whole yard.  He grabbed one of the stuffed toys, dropped it off at my feet, and raced off again, radiating pure joy.

Waylon didn’t need me.  He was making his own fun, and although he brought me several toys, he didn’t really care whether I threw them for him or not.

While he raced around the play yard, entertaining himself, and exuding doggy ecstasy, I watched other volunteers take dogs out of the shelter for a walk, and bring them back in.  And I noticed something: sometimes they pulled a reluctant dog by the leash.  And sometimes they let dogs stared at each other, or even allowed them to come over to the fence around the play area to watch Waylon.  And sometimes the dogs tugged at their leashes, wanting to walk faster than the volunteer.  No one seemed the worse for wear because of these dog-walking imperfections.  In other words, none of the other volunteers were perfect dog-whispering masters.  They were just as incompetent as I was.  But they didn’t seem to care.

Waylon played in the yard for ten minutes.  He would have happily stayed longer, but I thought we should let some other dog have a chance in the space.

I took him back into the shelter, got him successfully into his crate, and got myself out of it.

Then I took a deep breath, refilled my dog-treat pouch, looked around, and chose another dog to walk.  This time, I picked a little one.

In dog walking, as in most everything, perfection is nice if you can achieve it, but “good enough” can be good enough.  I wasn’t a perfect dog walker, but I was good enough.

Waylon

The consensus among my blog readers, yard guys and community of friends is that 50-year-old women should not go climbing ladders to clean out their gutters.  But, Gentle Reader, I did it anyway.  Luckily for me, the one person whose opinion about my ladder climbing actually matters – my husband, Peter – seemed to think it was a fine idea.  He was even willing to schlep the ladder from the garage to the front of the house, and even hold on while I climbed up it.

The ladder, like the house, is quite old, and made of wood.  It has no safety features like tread on the rungs or hooks at the top.  It came with the house, and had been leaning against a wall in the garage for the entire time that we have lived here.  I had previously seen it as a sort decoration, along with all of the rusting garden implements – items that exist to make the garage, and by extension the house, seem authentically old.

Nevertheless, the ladder was solid, and Peter set it down near the left front of the house, and I climbed up it.  I wanted Peter to hold the ladder with both hands the whole time I was on it; he didn’t feel this was necessary, although he was willing to stand at the base, with his hands in his pockets and shout encouragements at me.

We have Yankee gutters on our house, a fairly common feature of older homes.  Yankee gutters are made of wood, then lined with metal and coated with a rubber sealant.  They are less visible than more modern, metal gutters.  They are also harder and more expensive to repair.

When I got to the top of the ladder I could see that the left end of the gutter had several inches of standing water in it, along with a lot of leaves.  At the right end of the house, I could see some leaves but no water.

Using that most important of home repair tools – my hand – I scooped the freezing wet and soggy handfuls of leaves out of the gutter and threw them down into the driveway.  The standing water didn’t budge, and it became clear that the real blockage was located in the downspout.  Luckily for me, I was able to lean a bit to the left to reach into the downspout.

“Don’t lean too far over,” Peter shouted encouragingly.  “The ladder could tip.”

We couldn’t move the ladder to the left any further, as we have two stone steps that lead from the walk in front of our house down into our drive, so leaning was really my only option.  I had brief visions of the ladder sliding out from under me, leaving me, dangling helplessly from the Yankee gutters, while Peter shouted encouraging words (“Don’t let go!”) but I had come this far.  I was determined to clear the stoppage.

I reached in and pulled out a handful of rotted muck, which I threw down onto the driveway.  Then another, and another, until my hand was numb from the cold and, finally, the water in the gutter began to gurgle and flow.

“I think I cleared it,” I shouted to Peter.

“I think we have a bigger problem,” Peter shouted encouragingly from the base of the ladder.  “Look under the gutter.”

I looked – and saw that the water gurgling into the downspout was dripping out along a three-foot section of the bottom of the gutter, rather than continuing in the downspout to the ground.

So the gutters – or at least the downspout – need repair that is way beyond me.  But I did have the satisfaction of climbing the ladder and seeing the gutters for myself, and even cleaning them out, which I consider a small victory.

Act II – The Power Drill

For as long as we’ve lived in this house, we’ve had the same toaster oven – a Black and Decker SpaceMaker mounted-under-the cabinet model.  When the “On’ switch started giving us problems, a few years ago, I tried to buy a replacement – and discovered that no one carried under-the counter models.  I was told at the time that these models were a bit of a fire hazard, so had become unpopular and then discontinued.  I felt like Elaine, on Seinfeld, when she discovered that the contraceptive sponge was being eliminated – except I didn’t have a chance to stockpile a case of toasters.

Because I wasn’t willing to give up any more of my already limited counter space, we hung in there with the persnickety one we had.

Then the upper heating element blew.

After weeks of heating pizza slices in the regular oven and making toast in a two-stage process – toast one side, then flip and toast the other – my sister Amanda gently suggested that I needed to move past my attachment to the dying toaster.  Besides, she said, she’d heard that there was a SpaceMaker model available.  I checked at Target, but no luck.  Amanda suggested that I check online. Which I did.

When the picture and description of the new SpaceMaker flashed on my computer screen, it was as though I’d reconnected with a long-lost friend on Facebook.  Except I don’t have any long-lost friends who mean nearly as much to me as my SpaceMaker.  I ordered it, and it arrived three days later.

In the division of labor in our house, Peter handles all jobs involving hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers and power tools.  Of which he has two, and they’re both drills – one that plugs in and one that has a rechargeable battery pack.  If a job involves something more advanced than these, we call someone.  Or, as I’ve described previously, we don’t.

Installing the new SpaceMaker required drilling four holes in the bottom of one of our kitchen cabinets: a job a power drill.  A job for Peter.  But, in this month of learning to take care of my house, I felt that I should do the power drill work.

Peter wasn’t immediately convinced.  I could tell he had doubts about my power drilling skills.  But I begged.  And maybe whined just a little.  He finally relented.

Basically, with a power drill, you mark where you want to make the hole, put the drill bit at the spot you marked, press firmly so that the bit doesn’t slip, and turn the thing on.  A few seconds later, you have a hole.

I made four of them.  It felt really good.

ACT III – A Really Big Mess

After cleaning the gutter and drilling four holes, there was a new swagger to my step, the kind of swagger you see on those tool-belt wearing This Old House guys.

Then, one dark and stormy night, we had edamame for dinner.  And, in a moment of sheer stupidity, I put the shells down the garbage disposal.  A lot of them.  Okay, I basically stuffed the disposal with edamame shells.  When I turned it on, the disposal whirred and hummed…and then it burped.  I turned it off and pulled the plug out, and it upchucked some ground edamame shells into the sink.

“That can’t be good,” I said to myself.  However, not knowing what else to do, I took the path taken by all idiots – more of the same.  I put the plug back in and turned the thing on again.

I have a triple-bowl kitchen sink that looks something like this, with the disposal connected to the drain on the left:

After a few seconds, ground-up edamame began burbling up through the other two drains like some kind of radioactive green sci-fi slime.

I turned the disposal off, and ran some water into the sink, but, sadly, it did not go down: I had clogged the drain.

If this weren’t the month of learning to take care of my house, I would have run immediately to the phone and called Stuart the Plumber.  But I felt I needed to at least try to solve this problem myself.

I turned to YouTube, where I found a video on how to fix a garbage disposal.  Following the video’s instructions, I turned the power to the disposal off, and, again using that most important home repair tool – my hand – cleared all of the green gunk out of the disposal, even manipulating the blades inside the machine to clean out the gunk below them.  When I was done, the water and considerably thinner green muck did not burble happily down the drain.  The video recommended resetting the disposal using the reset button on the bottom.  I located the reset button, but knew that my disposal didn’t need to be reset – it had never stopped working; it had just gotten clogged.   So clearing the gunk out of the disposal didn’t solve the clogging problem.

I went looking on YouTube for a “How to Unclog Your Drain” video. I found two.  One recommended using a mix of baking soda and white vinegar, which sounded lovely and gentle and not at all likely to work on whatever thick, green plug was somewhere way down in my pipes, with lots of water on top of it.  The second video explained how to use a snake to unclog a drain.  We actually have a small plumber’s snake, about a foot long, but I couldn’t figure out how to thread it through the garbage disposal and into the pipe.

So I called Stuart the Plumber.  The next morning, his assistant Oliver appeared at my door.  I showed him the kitchen sink and explained, sheepishly, what had happened.

“I love garbage disposals,” he said happily.  “The thing they’re best for is keeping plumbers employed.”

After carefully studying the bilious green water in my sink, Oliver asked to go to the basement.  I led him down, determined that, if I couldn’t actually take care of this aspect of my home myself, I could at least understand what it was that the professional was doing.

Because I kept shnozing him with questions, Oliver explained that he was going to snake the pipe out from below the clog.  He showed me the pipe that led from the kitchen, and pointed to a metal plug in the side of it.

“I’m going to take that off and snake it from here.  Do you have a bucket I can use?”

At that moment, I had a vision of what might happen when the pipe came unclogged from below, and I offered up a brief prayer of thanks and appreciation that I wasn’t going to be the one standing below it.

Oliver went to his truck and returned with a light and an electric cable augur, which is basically a really long plumber’s snake that is wound around a drum and can be fed automatically into the pipe.  Between the image of slimy green water gushing out of the pipe and the knowledge that this job required specialized plumber’s equipment, I began to feel much better about the whole calling the plumber thing.

Oliver hung his light, undid the plug, and fed his cable into the pipe.  After a minute, he stopped the cable, wiggled it a bit, and began withdrawing it from the pipe.  I watched from a safe distance through squinted eyes, but when the cable came completely out of the pipe…nothing.  No gush of green muck and water.

“What happened?” I asked.

Oliver shrugged.  “Didn’t work.”

He sealed the plug back up using special plumber’s tape and a joint sealant compound, and I again felt better really good about calling the professional, with his professional supplies.

Then we both went back upstairs to the kitchen.  Oliver studied the sink.  I studied Oliver.

“Be right back,” he said, and disappeared out to his truck, returning a moment later with…a plunger.  A plain old plunger, just like the one we have next to the toilet – wooden handle and red rubber plungery-thing.

He fitted the red rubber part over the middle sink drain.  And he began plunging.

He plunged the sink so hard I could see the entire counter area moving up and down.  After fifteen or twenty good plunges, he pulled the plunger off the drain, and the water began gurgling down.  Unclogging my drain, it turned out, required no special plumber’s equipment.  No actual skill even – just a little brute strength.

Why hadn’t I tried that?

It is all the fault of YouTube, I say.  If anyone had suggested plunging the clog, I would have tried it.

I am trying to move past my feelings of failure and the attendant bitterness and despair.  I found a really great YouTube video about how to replace a broken pane of glass.  I’ve watched the whole thing, and I really think I can do it.

The Grande Dame, Looking Regal in the Snow

My house is a beautiful old center hall colonial.  It was built in 1906, and it has the bones of a century-old home.  It also has all of the problems of any grande dame of its age: creaking and sloped floors, cracked plaster walls, screws that wiggle themselves free from God-knows-where to pop up suddenly under my bare feet, knob-and-tube wiring that prevents us from plugging in two blow dryers when a lamp is on anywhere in the house.

Many homeowners approach the care of an aging and temperamental home with gusto.  Not us.  After 13 years, we still live in our house as though there is a landlord, but he’s not answering his phone, dammit.  Something needs to be fixed?  Panic!  Wring your hands!  Don’t just do something; stand there!

Added to this chronic inability to fix anything is my level of extreme disorganization – which, I’m sorry to say, seems to have been inherited by all three of my children – Peter’s pathological horror of spending money, and my own genetic predisposition to a chronic and severe packrattedness.  The end result is that our beautiful home looks like it is occupied by the Joads.

For example…

We have French doors…with one panel of glass that’s been broken for two years.  I don’t mean cracked; I mean it was shattered by the large, hard head of a big dog chasing my cat.  (The cat was fine, and so, thankfully, was the dog.)  The pieces of glass that fell out were swept up, but a row of jagged glass teeth remain in the window frame.  For a while had a piece of cardboard – actually, part of the carrying case from a six-pack of beer – taped over the jagged glass with some attractive masking tape, but the tape eventually dried and curled and fell off, no longer holding the Molson artwork in place.  (There is a second cracked pane, but the glass is still intact in that frame, so, from Peter’s point of view, why would one even consider replacing that?)

The knob to our front hall closet broke some time ago.  It’s a funky, old knob that isn’t any kind of standard size, so isn’t easily replaceable.  And besides. there is still a small metal base of the knob, which, if  grasped firmly and carefully, can be turned to open the closet door.  Of course, we don’t actually use the closet for our coats because it is stuffed full of old coats that don’t fit anyone, along with a half-a-dozen bike helmets from when the kids were little, various pairs of boots that also don’t fit anyone, a bag of baby clothes and two pop-up tents.  I don’t know where the pop-up tents are from or why they are in the coat closet, so don’t ask.  We hang our actual coats on a free-standing coat rack in the front hall.  However, we do need to get into the coat closet every day because our porch lights, which are on an automatic timer located in said coat closet, don’t go on automatically.  No one knows why; we lost the directions for how to program the thing, so we have to go into the coat closet to override the non-working automatic function.

Actually, we didn’t lose the directions; we’ve just misplaced them.  They are definitely in the house somewhere.

Speaking of doors, every single screw on every single doorknob backplate has come out, so the backplates spin around like roulette wheels.  It would seem like a simple thing to screw the screws back in.  Unfortunately, all the screw holes are stripped.

A couple of the doorknobs come apart completely periodically, with knobs and various internal pieces clanging loudly and unexpectedly to the floor.  Usually this happens late at night.  Also, the door to the linen closet has to be hoisted up and jiggered into place in order to be closed fully.

The knob on the dining room light switch popped off and disappeared.  It’s not an up-and-down switch, but one of those knobs that you push in to turn on and off and rotate to brighten or dim the lights.  No one seems to make this kind of dimmer switch anymore. I’ve gotten quite adept at pushing and turning the little plastic stick that should have a knob on it.

And the gutters.  I pay my yard guy hundreds of dollars every year to clean them, but they seem to become clogged again by the first rainstorm after a cleaning.  Then I spend months standing in the rain, shaking my fist in frustration as water pours over the side of the gutter while nothing – not one drop – trickles out of the downspout.

So I have a vision for December.  This last month of 2011, I am going to learn to take care of my house.  I am going to climb up on a ladder and take a gander at my gutters myself, thank you very much.  I’m going to learn how to use wood filler and an electric drill.  And I’m going to replace that damn broken piece of window glass all on my own (okay, maybe with someone coaching me through it).

I am not so naïve as to think I’ll be pouring a foundation or framing new walls by January. But I do have a brain that, mostly, works, and this year is about trying new things.  Here we go…

I said no.  But that’s not a bad thing.  For most of us, change doesn’t happen like in the movies.  True change is slow, and hard, and anxiety provoking.  It takes time and energy.  But every day there are moments of mini-enlightenment – more like hot flashes than lightning bolts.  The earth hasn’t shifted, but I often feel it beneath my feet in a way I never used to.

So I slog on, attending weekly singing lessons, and googling – but not making – “canning recipes.”  And trying – really trying – to find new friends.

Because the gym thing has not flowered into new friendships, and because my new friend, Susan, has only so much free time for me, I decided awhile back to revisit Gretchen Rubin’s Friend-Making Strategies, and retool my approach.

I’ve been rigorously trying to Show Up, Set a Target, Make an Effort to Smile, and Say Nice Things.  All good and worthy actions that have thus far yielded bupkes.  I did have my one shining moment of success with the Friends of Friends Strategy (i.e. Susan), but my old friends haven’t sent any other new friends-of-friends my way.  That left Join a Group or Start a Group.  I am simply not the type of person who would start a group.  Ever.

So I opened my heart and my mind to joining a(nother) group.  This is not easy for me.  I love the groups I belong to, and my soul is nourished by being part of each of them.  But when someone asks me to volunteer for something – even something I really believe in – I find the word “No” coming out of my mouth even before I’ve consciously thought it.   I’m just not a joiner. I don’t have time; I’m not outgoing; whatever skills are necessary, I probably don’t have them.  My reasons for no, if anyone every pushed me on it, are all valid.  But they are all also excuses.

So when my friend Annette asked me if I would be interested in becoming more involved in Play Group Theater, I managed not to say no.  PGT, a wonderful non-profit children’s theater program in White Plains, has been a central part of my daughter’s life for several years.  One of the reasons I love PGT, beyond the warm, safe, and nurturing environment they provide for their students, is their perennially optimistic, whole-hearted commitment to being a true community, and to pulling parents into that community.  Parents at PGT are expected to volunteer to help with their child’s show – manning the box office, selling snacks at intermission, working as ushers in the theater.  That may sound like a burden, but the way PGT approaches it, it doesn’t feel like one.  Plus there’s a lot of hugging.  And everyone smiles.  All the time.

Annette was asking me for a bigger commitment than my couple-of-times-a-year box office stint.  She wanted me to join a newly formed “Marketing Outreach Committee.”   We marketing-outreach parents, she explained, would be working to spread PGT’s name and mission.  I could get behind that.

At our first meeting, the head of the committee, Ellen, outlined all of the different tasks that needed to be assigned.  She described what each involved, and what she saw as the necessary talents or skills needed for each.  After she had described all of them, she went back through the list, asking for interested volunteers.

“Newsletter,” she said.  “Who wants to take on creating a PGT newsletter?”

Silence in the room.

“I had someone in mind for this…” Annette said.

Continued silence.

Gradually, it occurred to me that the person Annette had in mind was me.

As I said, I’m not a joiner, so jumping in with an enthusiastic “I’ll do it!” doesn’t come naturally.  But a newsletter seemed like a reasonable fit.  I am, after all, a writer, and I do even have some newspaper experience in my distant and foggy past.  So I managed, to choke out, “I could take that on.”

A month later, as I was sitting alone at my desk, writing up the interview I’d conducted – over the phone – with one of PGT’s directors, I had one of those hot-flash moments of insight.  Yes, I can be in charge of a newsletter.  But putting together a newsletter, when one is a work-from-home writer, is just more of the same: me, the computer, the gently snoring dog and cat, and near total silence.  Not a great way to meet people and make new friends.

Sigh.

“Do not despair,” I told myself.  “Buck up.  Join something else.”

Almost immediately an opportunity presented itself.

I have been a member of the Hazon CSA of White Plains for several years.  This CSA was started by congregants from the five White Plains synagogues, but is open, basically, to anyone.  Vegetables grown on a farm in New York are harvested and a share of the harvest is brought each week during the growing season to Temple Israel Center.  Each year, I pay for a share, and promise to give a whopping 4 hours of volunteer time to the CSA over the course of the season.

I was bagging greens one week, to fulfill my volunteering hours, when I struck up a conversation with one of the CSA’s Core Members, Janet.  Janet is one of those cheerful, chatty people I aspire to be.  She makes everyone feel noticed and appreciated.  And she is easy to talk to.

Core Members form the backbone of the CSA.  They communicate with the farmers, supervise the vegetable deliveries, keep everyone informed about the produce, manage the volunteering system, and make all the important decisions.  They make a pretty significant time commitment to the CSA, but they are the cool kids.

I asked Janet a lot of questions about her Core Membership experience.  Somewhere along in our conversation, Janet said, “We’re always looking for new Core Members.  Are you interested?”

I surprised myself by responding, “yes.”

A few weeks later, I got an email.  There was a Core Member meeting that evening; could I come?  Visions of a potluck supper made with local veggies danced in my head.  I imagined sitting around with the other cool kid Core Members, snacking on crispy kale and roasted beets, and planning for next year.  Determining the future of the CSA.  My CSA.

But I couldn’t go that night – I had a writer’s group meeting.

“I’m still interested in being a Core Member,” I emailed back.  “Please keep me on the list.”

A week later, I got a call.

“Listen,” said Daryl, another CSA Core Member.  “There’s something we really need help with, and your name came up.  We think you’d be perfect.  We need someone to take over the CSA newsletter.”

Sigh.

Maybe I should try the Mahjong group.  They can’t possibly have a newsletter, can they?

Aren’t they gorgeous?  I brought them into the world all by myself – all six of them, and I am quite proud of their luscious, pink hue and their general photogenic beauty.  It wasn’t easy, giving birth to six beautiful jars of applesauce.  Like the other births I’ve experienced, this one took hours, and was messy, and required a lot of hard work, with some moaning and grunting even.   However, this time around, I had no one to rub my back and cheer me on; I was all alone, in the overheated solitude of my kitchen.  Of course, this time around, there was considerably less pain.  And I didn’t have to plan a bris immediately afterwards, or start worrying about college tuition.  So, go ahead – tell me they’re gorgeous.

“But, Cathleen,” you say, tapping your foot, “it’s November 21^st already.  Canning was so-o-o last month.”

Yes, Dear Reader, we are most of the way through November, and I am still working on October’s goal of achieving domestic goddessness through canning (and baking, but let’s not go there).  However, I have decided to embrace my behindness.  This is, after all, a self-created, and self-directed 12-month project of becoming the me I always wanted to be, and if I created it and I’m running the show… well, then – I can modify too.  So I’m still on canning.

Here, then, is what I learned about myself and about canning during the applesauce birthing experience:

• I learned that I don’t know how big a bushel of apples is.  The recipe I used called for a bushel of apples, which is not how Whole Paycheck, where I shop, sells apples.  I had a moment of panic because Bob McClure’s number one piece of advice to avoid accidentally breeding botulism in your canned food was to follow the directions exactly, especially around quantities of each ingredient.  Was I going to be cooking up a noxious batch of poison if I didn’t use a bushel of apples?  I ultimately decided that, since the list of ingredients for the recipe I was using was 2 items long – apples and water – I could safely play around with apple quantities without killing anyone.  I bought what I believe is technically termed a buttload of apples; how that compares to a bushel, I still do not know.
• I learned that a buttload of apples cooks down to only 6 cute pint-sized jars.
• I learned that my stove is not ideal for canning.  Nor is my kitchen, actually.  I have a stove with a double oven – one oven below the cooktop and one above it.  The rim of the beautiful water bath canning pot I bought came to about 3 inches below the bottom of my top oven.  Which meant that I couldn’t put the top of the pot on properly; I had to put it on upside down.  And when it came time to put the cans in the boiling water, I only had access to about a third of the pot because two thirds of the pot was underneath my top oven.  Also, my kitchen does not have nearly enough prep space and entirely too much floor space.  The walk from my sink to the stove felt like the Green Mile, especially when I was shuffling across it carrying a water bath canner that contained several gallons of water.
• I learned that even though sterilizing jars in the dishwasher by running it on sanitize sounds like a great time-saving trick, it is not.  I basically watched the water in the water bath canner boil while I ran my dishwasher for 96 minutes in order to sterilize 12 jars.  And then I only had enough applesauce to fill 6 of them.  I could have just put the empty jars in the boiling water of the water bath canner for, like, 5 minutes, and they would have been sterilized.
• I learned that my children do not appreciate the effort a mother puts into home-canning applesauce.  They will, thankfully, eat it, but from their point of view, it’s just applesauce.
• I learned that canning, like writing and learning to sing, is something one does largely alone, and, therefore, is perhaps not the best new hobby for someone who would like to spend less, rather than more, time alone.

I do still have 6 empty pint jars, and an interesting-sounding recipe for cranberry-orange chutney, so there still may be canning in my future.  But I’m ready to move on to a bright and shining new month.  No more canning blog posts.  I promise.

Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot.  About how and why I set my sights on canning.  It’s rather ironic, I think, that I’ve ended up obsessing about domestic goddessness.

My mother avoided the kitchen.  I have no fond memories of baking cookies with her – or doing anything domestic together, for that matter.  My mother hated to cook.  She also hated to clean, sew, knit, or participate in any activity that was scented with the sweet perfume of domesticity.  She worked full-time, which goes a long way towards explaining why she saw all domestic tasks as drudgery, but she was also the daughter of good New England Yankees, and that history alone could destroy any domestic inspiration one might have.  My grandparents saved string and canned the produce from their large garden, and made their own furniture and hooked rugs – and did it all with a sense of duty and patriotism.  It was one’s moral obligation to be frugal and clever and handy.  Domesticity wasn’t supposed to be fun; it was supposed to be work.

All of my mother’s stories about her childhood carry a whiff of the Dickensian: how she was whipped with a belt on her bare legs if she was five minutes late for dinner; how she had to eat everything on her plate, even when what was on her plate was liver and lima beans; how she had to wear garters and woolen stockings that itched and gave her rashes.

But the story of hers that I remember most fondly is the story of the special dress my grandmother sewed for my mother’s ninth grade graduation.  My grandmother sewed all of my mother’s clothes, and my mother didn’t have much of a say in any of it.  For this particular dress, my grandmother chose an unusually stiff fabric.  Probably because it was a good bargain.  My mother doesn’t actually remember what color the dress was, but I like to think it was brown.

My mom had skipped a year of school, as many kids did in those days, so she was only thirteen, and not yet, ahem, “mature” by the time of the graduation.  She was, however, tall.  The patterns available for a 5’7” girl assumed the physical maturity that my mother did not have.  So my grandmother selected and sewed a lovely woman’s dress – complete with darts to accommodate a womanly bosom– out of the stiff fabric.  The stiffness of the fabric intensified the pointiness of the darts.  My mother recalls trying on the dress and staring down at her chest, which pointed sharply out, two cones of brown fabric with nothing beneath them.

1940s Butterick Dress Pattern

With these kinds of warm and fuzzy experiences, it is not surprising that my mother had little interest in bonding with me in the domestic arena.  We read books together, and played cards, and ate hot peppers on crackers while watching M*A*S*H.

That meant it was left to my public school to teach me whatever I might need to know regarding homemaking.  In those days – the very, very dark ages of the 1970’s – girls actually took a class called “Home Economics,” and boys took Shop.  As the name implies, Home Ec had nothing to do with celebrating domestic artistry or encouraging crafty creativity.  Running a home was seen, and taught, as a science.  Be precise, our teacher admonished; follow directions, don’t take shortcuts.

What I learned, mostly, in my three years of Home Ec, was that reality rarely matched one’s imagination when it came to making stuff.  We knit scarves that looked adorable on the pattern sheet, but the yarn we had to work with was acrylic and ugly, and no one wanted to wear their finished product.  We sewed stuffed animals, which sounded kicky and fun; the stuffed animals turned out hard and ugly and unhuggable.  We followed recipes to cook things like broccoli surprise, which no one wanted to eat.   Project after project sounded so good and so exciting at the outset, but fizzled into disappointment.  Still, I held out hope: the next project would be The One, the satisfying foray into domestic creativity.

In eighth grade, as our final sewing project, and culminating Home Ec experience, we had to sew an item of clothing for ourselves.  The preppy girls selected patterns for wool jumpers; the bohemians settled on maxi skirts; a few very brave and talented girls (mostly those whose mothers sewed) went for hip-hugger bell-bottoms, to be sewn from a stretchy material.  I pored through the pattern catalogues, thrilled at the idea of creating something beautiful that I could actually wear, and finally settled on a blouse.  I chose a lightweight, cream-colored cotton fabric.

There were many, many pieces to the pattern, and I slowly fell behind the other girls. When everyone else had all their pieces cut out , and I was still pinning mine onto the fabric, I decided to try a shortcut.  I doubled the material over, and pinned all of the pieces for the right sleeve onto this doubled fabric, figuring I would use the second set for the left sleeve.  Only when I began sewing did I realize that there was an actual difference between a right sleeve and a left sleeve.  But it was too late.  I didn’t have enough fabric to cut a true left sleeve.

I made my blouse with two right sleeves, and wore it for the Home Ec fashion show.  What should have been the left sleeve hung at an odd angle, and the buttons at the wrist fastened on the wrong side.  It was a subtle defect, but one that made me feel like I was slightly deformed.

After so many years and so many less than shining homemaker memories why is it that I have such an urge to master a new domestic skill?  I don’t quite know.  But tomorrow, dear reader: a dozen jars of applesauce.  No shortcuts.  Here’s hoping it goes better than the blouse.

Hallelujah!  Finally.  Seven days before the end of my intended month of canning and baking (don’t ask about the baking) I took a real step towards domestic goddessness.

After I had already committed October to learning to can (and bake, but let’s not go there), I discovered that October is really late in the season to can, and even later to learn to can.  Most canning is done – and therefore most canning classes are offered – in the summer, when gardens are bursting with produce and gardeners are faced with more than they can eat.  Canning provides a way to preserve the surplus of those summer gardens.  By October, many gardens (including mine) have fizzled out, and those that are still going offer forth mostly beets, carrots and other root vegetables (some of which are mighty fine for canning, but, again, it was the canning class I needed).

In the end, I had to go all the way to Brooklyn, to a place called the Brooklyn Kitchen to learn to make a pickle.  I do feel little tingles of domestic divinity for having done it.  Plus, I discovered that pickling and canning are really the same thing (more on that further down), so, even though it won’t be October anymore, I’m going to try to apply my newfound skills to a big batch of applesauce sometime soon.  But back to the pickles.

I knew from the website that the Brooklyn Kitchen was going to be a very trendy, very hip kind of place.  It is located in Williamsburg, a neighborhood long known for its large community of Hassidic Jews, but currently the epicenter of New York hipness.

I am not hip.  I wasn’t hip even when I lived in Brooklyn, several decades ago.  Back in my Brooklyn days – the late 1980’s – I was that most boring of creatures, a yuppie.  I worked on Wall Street and wore suits with enormous shoulder pads.  I had an extensive collection of silly little scarves that were supposed to be the female version of the necktie and faithfully watched thirtysomething with my roommate Tina. I not only didn’t can, I didn’t even cook.  Breakfast was a cup of coffee, bought at the Korean grocer, and a cigarette.  I ate lunch at the employee cafeteria of the large, boring, commercial bank where I worked, and alternated between Smiling Pizza and the Donuts Luncheonette for dinner.

I like to think that my life has become more interesting since then, but I have not gained one ounce of hipness.  So faced with having to learn the secrets of canning amongst the hip and trendy, I began by panicking.  I thought I could claim a hipness I didn’t have by at least looking hip, until I remembered that I had no idea what constituted hip clothing.  I considered asking my daughter for a hip-clothing tutorial, but then I realized it would do no good.  Even if I could identify what a hip person wore, I wouldn’t actually own any of the uniform.  My wardrobe consists of three pairs of jeans, all from Gap, a drawer-full of t-shirts, both short- and long-sleeved, and various fleece tops to be layered on for warmth.  Easy and comfortable, but not hip.

So, unable to call on a former hipness or even fake the appearance of present hipness, I took a deep breath and headed off to the land of Williamsburg, armed with my GPS and my mom jeans.

The Brooklyn Kitchen, which I found without incident, arriving unspeakably early, is housed in what looks to be an old commercial garage, facing an elevated highway.  It is a kind of combination kitchen goods store, specialty grocer, event space and community center.  If you are single (or just curious), you can peruse the extensive Personals listings that paper one wall of the entryway.  Once inside, you can purchase all manner of prepared foods, such as herb-infused olive oils and gourmet catsup; meats (technically sold by the Meat Hook, which isn’t so much of a separate store as a counter and prep area inside the Brooklyn Kitchen); retro, hip cooking utensils like Chemex coffee urns and Bluebird Stoneware crocks; cook books; and refrigerated glass bottles of expensive sparkling fruit juices and gourmet sodas.  You can also sign up for the one of the “food events” held in their event space – a large, unnaturally picturesque exposed-brick-walled room that houses a well-stocked kitchen and several long tables.  Or you can take a class. As I did.

My class was held upstairs, where there is another well-stocked kitchen with a 30-foot long stainless steel counter.  Two stainless steel tables run perpendicular to the counter.  We students were instructed to sit at these tables.  When I arrived, there were two other wanna-be pickle makers already in attendance. Our teacher, Bob McClure, of McClure’s Pickles, was puttering around in the kitchen area, setting out little bowls of spices and larger bowls of red pepper strips and cauliflower florets, organizing an impressive array of kitchen utensils, and checking up on two giant pots that were bubbling on the stove.

By 6:30, when the class was scheduled to begin, most of the sixteen of us who were signed up had arrived, filling the two tables, and I learned my first lesson of the evening: what hip people wear.  Hip men wear skinny jeans, fitted button-up shirts left untucked, and knit caps.  Hip women wear very short knit skirts or dresses, opaque tights or leggings in any color other than black, and desert boots.

By 6:45, the stragglers had arrived, and Bob began the class with an overview of his company and of the art and science of pickling.  He was an entertaining speaker, no surprise really, as he is an actor and stand-up comic in addition to a pickle-making master.

Bob explained that pickling began as a way to preserve vegetables before people had ready access to refrigerators.  Vegetables need to be pickled (preserved in a brine solution) because they are not naturally acidic, and an acidic pH – of 4.6 or less  - is necessary to ensure that bacteria, such as botulism, can’t grow in preserved food.  The brine, usually made from vinegar, salt and water, provides necessary acidity.

The steps and tools to pickle vegetables are essentially the same as those involved in canning fruit.  However, fruit, which is naturally acidic, does not need a brine solution.  Some fruit canning recipes call for adding a little lemon juice to ensure a proper pH.  Bob encouraged us, in our home canning of both fruits and vegetables, to use reliable recipes, and to follow the recipe quantities and instructions exactly.  This is the best way, he said, to ensure safe and tasty canned produce.

After his entertaining and informative overview, Bob moved to the real purpose of the evening: making pickled cauliflower.  He explained that he had chosen cauliflower, rather than cucumbers, because cauliflower is in season in October, and cucumbers are not.

We each took a half-pint glass canning jar, added the spices of our choosing – I skipped the hot pepper and used ginger and curry – packed the jar within a half-inch of the top with cauliflower and a few bits of red pepper, for color, and then poured hot brine into the jar, covering all of the vegetables but leaving about an eighth of an inch of space, called headspace, at the top.  Then we placed a flat metal lid over the top of the jar and screwed a metal band on over that.  The flat lid has a rubber ring on the underside, and it is this flat lid with the rubber ring that actually provides the seal for the jar.  The metal ring holds the flat lid on during the canning process, but can actually be removed once canning is complete.

After we all had our jars filled and closed, we tipped them upside down, to help complete the seal.  Then Bob put them into a large pot of boiling water and processed them for 10 minutes.  This final step of processing raises the temperature of the stuff inside the jars high enough to kill any remaining bacteria.

While the jars boiled, we were encouraged to check out the rest of the place and, maybe, buy a little.  Since I didn’t really need any artisanal pork sausages or bottles of sparkling juice, I spent my time peeking in on the raucous party happening in the event space.  It was a casserole cook-off.  Really.  Surprising numbers of people had signed up to bring casseroles, which were being dished out and placed before a panel of judges.  The music was loud and thumping, everyone seemed to be having a rocking time, and there were many, many pairs of desert boots in evidence.

A short while later, I left the Brooklyn Kitchen, and headed home, proudly clutching my very own jar of pickled cauliflower.

Cover via Amazon

According to Ms. Lawson, being a Domestic Goddess means learning to bake what she calls Comfort Food and I call The Kiss of Death for Weight Control: desserts.  In her table of contents, Ms. Lawson has a chapter titled “Desserts,” which implies that other chapters will cover other types of foods but that is misleading because the whole book is about how to bake yummy sweet things.  For example, there is another chapter titled “Children,” but it is NOT about how to bake children; it is about to bake yummy sweet things with the HELP of your children.

I do not bake yummy sweet things.  I try very hard not to have any yummy sweet things in my house, except on Friday nights when we have Shabbat dinner, and then I buy whatever bakery-made sweet treat I think I will best be able to resist eating.  And then I eat it anyway.

I would bake yummy sweet things, except for two main problems.  The first, as I hinted at above, is that when yummy sweet things are available, I eat them.  Baking them makes them available.  The second problem is that baking something yummy and sweet takes a lot more time and effort than tossing a bakery-made chocolate babka into my grocery cart.

But as I gazed upon Nigella Lawson’s beautiful book, I thought how nice it would be to be a yummy-sweet-treat-baking domestic goddess.  I imagined greeting my children in the morning with warm muffins, fresh from the oven.  Wouldn’t their day be better if it started with a made-from-scratch scone or slice of banana bread, rather than a 67-ingredient foil-wrapped power bar?

So I did what any Wanna Be Domestic Goddess would do: I took a shortcut.  I bought frozen chocolate croissants that could be baked up fresh.  They had to be good – they were made in France! Then I got up five minutes earlier than usual in the morning to preheat the oven and “bake” two croissants.  The croissants filled the kitchen with a warm, freshly-baked aroma, I felt like a domestic goddess, and I even got a “thanks” from my son.

I haven’t worked out a good answer to that question.  I generally say that it is going, and there are positive moments – brief, flickering glimmers of light in the dark.

What follows is a more nuanced and informative answer.  I hope.

Mount Everest - Image via Wikipedia

Learning to sing, for me, is like climbing Mount Everest: I can’t see the top, or even imagine it, but I am definitely on the mountain, and I’m trudging very, very, very slowly uphill with my trusty Sherpa Patty beside me.  Sherpa Patty has climbed the mountain before, and she has a lot more confidence than I do that we’ll get, if not to the top, at least to the first camp.

Although Mount Everest reaches 29,029 feet above sea level, it is actually about 15,250 from the base of the mountain to the summit.  I figure that I’m a good 500 feet up from the base of the Mount Everest of singing.  Last week, I felt very optimistic and decided I was a thousand feet up, but then it was my daughter’s birthday on Saturday and I joined in on a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” and felt myself sliding back down several hundred feet.

Here’s some of what I have learned or learned to do, singing-wise, so far:

•   I have a “head voice” and a “chest voice.”  I had no idea there were such things, and certainly had not an inkling that I possessed them.
• My “chest voice” sounds like my speaking voice, and is the voice that I have always sung in.
• My “head voice” is higher and is brand new to me.  I feel like Renee Fleming when I sing with (in?) my head voice.  I don’t sound like Rene Fleming, but I do feel like her.
• Patty thinks that ultimately I will be a soprano.  Who knew?  Certainly not me.  When I was in fourth grade, the music teacher told me I was an alto; I believed her.
• I’ve gotten pretty darn good at singing an eight-note scale as Patty plays it on the piano.
• I can often sing an eight-note scale (called an octave, I think) if Patty plays only the first note
• If Patty plays just the bottom note of an octave, I can sing that note and then sometimes sing the top note and the scale (without the piano).  I have no idea how or why I can do this.
• I can sing along with Patty, matching her pitch nicely.
• I find it easier to match pitch with Patty than with the piano.
• I can mostly sing “Simple Gifts.”
• I can sing the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluyah” mostly on-key, I think.
• Sometimes I get parts of  “The Circle Game,” but other times I botch it all up.

Patty has decided I should begin ear training.  This involves her playing a note on the piano and having me sing that note and then sing some other note related to that note.  We’ve begun with descending minor thirds, which is apparently a nearly universal interval in music.  It is the interval of the notes when kids tease each other, a la “nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.”

So that is how the singing is going.  Only 14,750 feet left to climb.