Where the Air is Rarified

We’re at 6200 feet and James Darren is singing in my head. My old college buddy Carl and I are climbing basalt rocks at 8:00 in the morning. It’s already 90 degrees here in New Mexico, and we are on the hunt for petroglyphs, pre-Columbian symbols etched into the rock, presumably by a tool harder than basalt.

To get to the petroglyphs, you drive ten minutes east of the subdivision, park just below a mesa and walk up a dusty unmarked trail, past the “decorated tree.” This is a dead tree with rusty cans hung from its branches. Nobody knows why the random decorating, except for the people who do it.

Up up up, and the trail becomes less trail and more rock. We’re frankly climbing now, three points of contact, careful not to step into tumbleweed bogs – where the spaces between rocks are filled with stickery dried tumbleweeds that obscure the depth and angle of the potentially ankle-twisting space. Carl has reported hearing rattlesnakes up here, too. My eyes are on the next rock and my hands and feet. Every now and then I glance up to see how far I am from the top of the mesa. We’re at a point where if I really stretch and hoist myself energetically for twenty feet or so, I will scramble onto the top of the flatland. Then Carl says, “Brenda, look up.”

I look up. Just above my head, on the flat wall of the basalt that is the edge of the mesa, are alien-looking symbols. Heads with antennae. Spirals. Corn. Eagles. Lizards. Not a “Tiffany loves Ryan” in sight. They’ve been here for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the artists long dead. Pagan graffiti? Good luck for hunting? Pre-historic art gallery? Nobody knows. But there I am, out of cell and wi-fi range, hanging onto a rock in the hot early morning sun, eyes trying to make sense of what they’re seeing.

Sometimes it’s not about getting to the top.

History Is the Next Tweet

I am living so beyond the future.

That’s me -- To the future and beyond!

If you are about my age or older, you know what I mean – the future was supposed to be 1984. No, 2001. No, the sequel – that really cool one with Helen Mirren and Roy Scheider – 2010.

Now it’s 2011 and wait, what?

(That’s something we say here in the future. “Wait, what?” I think that’s kind of funny.)

First the phone booths started disappearing and the few that were left didn’t have phones in them. They got filled with spit wads and graffiti instead.

Then my phone stopped ringing a year ago. Did anybody else notice that? People don’t make phone calls. They e-mail or tweet or Facebook you. And if you weren’t paying attention to your computer or smartphone – or if you don’t have a smartphone – too bad, because they assume you saw that they were moving that meeting to the other Starbucks.

We had a toxic chemical cloud release from a factory that’s sited near my home, just last month. If you were watching TV or were on a social media site at the time, you got the word to “shelter in place,” in other words, don’t go outside and breathe the air because it would make you really, really sick. If you weren’t, that was too bad, because nobody ever thought to activate the automated “reverse 9-1-1” system where they call everybody in the area and tell them there’s a disaster going on right now. Why bother? It’s on Facebook!

They re-named Depressions, “Recessions” and said that this one ended, but they’re worried that we might slip back into it because the unemployment rate has gone up four more points and the housing market is still dropping and the economy will never recover anyway.

All the stuff I was worried about in the ‘70s is coming true, and some new stuff too! Good thing I didn’t know about global warming in 1969, my head would have exploded. Has anybody noticed that the reporting on climate change has shifted from It’s a Big Ol’ Hoax to Whoa, It’s Happening Now and We’d Better Make Plans to Do Something About the Effects? Look at Chicago – they’re re-doing the whole city, because they’re pretty sure they’re going to have two or three different weather incarnations before they finally settle into a tropical climate only about 90 years from now.

From denial to resignation in about twelve months. That was fast. That’s how you get beyond the future in a hurry!

A friend of mine just got back from a several-year-long adventure. She and her husband unplugged from their jobs in the East Bay and moved to Japan, then walked around the Himalayas for a couple of years, then went to live in China for six months. She’s lived out of a backpack for the last three years. We were eating dinner, catching up, when she palmed an imaginary smartphone and bent her face to it and wiggled her thumb around. “I see people doing this all the time. What are they doing?”

“They’re texting, or tweeting.”

“Yes, but what are they doing? They do it all the time, while I’m sitting there with them!”

“They think they’re communicating.”

You should have seen her face.

“In China, people still eat meals together. They sing together. They get together to talk.”

Yes, well, those poor folks. Guess they can’t afford the latest technology. Ironic that China is where the rare earths come from that make our nifty toys go.

Also ironic that apparently, China and India, the new economic powerhouses, won't be able to offer all the same toys and foods and cars to their populace that Americans can get…because the planet simply doesn’t have the resources to provide that much stuff to that many people. I'm not making this up. I read this in the International Herald Tribune last week.

I remember teaching a unit on Utopian literature to a fifth grade class and asking my students how they envisioned the perfect society, and one boy said, “A place where everything is always in stock!”

Hum, Ryan, what do you mean by that?

“Everybody in the world would have a clothes washer!”

Yes, but there literally isn’t enough metal in the world to make all of those clothes washers , to say nothing of enough electricity, water or clothes to put in them. I don’t think he believed me.

But I ramble. That happens more and more. It doesn’t have anything to do with my age, although I did turn fifty-five this week. What I really wanted to say is, I have figured out the real reason why there’s a push to cut Medicare.

Now, Medicare was about to be the only way anybody could count on having health benefits. I was looking forward to it. Because if you lose your job, you lose your insurance. Even if you don’t get laid off, if you get too sick to work, you lose all that lovely insurance that you were counting on to make you better enough to go back to work. If you don’t have a whole bunch of money, it can be pretty hard to pay those premiums. Or if you are like a healthy young woman I know who has had hemorrhoids, you will be denied health insurance even if you have the money. Or if you are fifty and have ever been to a doctor or ever plan going to a doctor, you will never qualify for self-paid insurance.

But if you could manage to live to 62, at least then you could have some benefits, although more and more doctors don’t take Medicare patients anyway, because they lose money every time they do.

So this is my theory. I think that cutting Medicare, or turning it into a private system where you either can’t afford to see a doctor or the private plan won’t take you no matter how much money you have, is a plan to get rid of everybody with a long-term memory.

You may not believe this looking at me, but when I look out of my eyes, I still feel like I’m twenty-two, twenty-three years old, just with a really long memory and a bunch of critical thinking skills that I didn’t have thirty years ago. I remember lots of stuff, not just phone booths and home cooking.

I remember what happened when Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers and had too much fun with deregulation.

I remember when the richest people in the U.S. made just twelve percent of all the income in the country instead of having one quarter of all the money. According to Isaac Shapiro, reporting for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “New figures from the Internal Revenue Service show that income disparities grew substantially from 2002 to 2003. After adjusting for inflation, the after-tax income of the one percent of households with the highest incomes shot up in 2003 by an average of nearly $49,000 per household while the after-tax incomes of the bottom 75 percent of households fell on average.” I remember that.

I remember when the trees outside my house were full of birds singing loudly at dawn. They made a racket. They woke me up.

I wish they still did. They aren’t there anymore.

I remember when the public schools had stable funding sources and teachers had 23, 24 kids in a classroom. Schools offered shop, Home Ec, and typing. Choir and band were in the curriculum, and the school library not only was unlocked and in use but it actually had a librarian in it. The asbestos wasn’t leaking out of the walls and when you flushed the toilet, it didn’t splash all over your shoes as another acoustical tile fell on your head from the soggy ceiling. Remember that?

It’s inconvenient to have people like me running around with all these dangerous memories in their heads. The continuity and memory and wisdom accumulated over a lot of years has always been something to fear – didn’t you read George Orwell’s 1984? “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past…Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date... All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary."

It’s better if those people with the inconveniently long memories don’t have Medicare. Maybe they won’t be around as long.

But I’m being silly, of course, because we don’t pose a danger. Who reads mainstream op-ed pieces anymore anyway? They’re all tuned into where all the real meaning is – in a little glowing pad held in the palm.

What’s beyond the future? If you follow a circle, you end up in the same place…and as Santayana pointed out, if you don’t remember the past, you are condemned to repeat it. The new history is being re-inscribed in the next tweet.

Watch the birdie!

Earthquake II

Just about a year ago, I wrote an essay using earthquakes as a metaphor for “danger that you can’t avoid, can’t really change and can’t even influence.” At the time it was just a metaphor, but now, of course, it’s real. Japan, our first world neighbor and buddy – practically a family member, since it’s hard to even buy a reliable car if Japan isn’t able to manufacture them – is on the verge of melting down in multiple ways, except, of course, for how the traumatized but stalwart, creative and heroic Japanese people are caring for each other under conditions that would make most of us just curl up in a ball under the bed, if we still had a bed.

I belong to a working support group of people who are bent on making the world a better place. Among them are writers, a photographer, a manager and business wizard, a web designer, a graphic designer, a conservationist, a master gardener, a publisher, an information technology guru, a psychologist, an opera singer and several Trekkies. And there are only five of us, so this tells you something about how high-powered this group is. The problem with us high-powered people who want to change the world is that we tend to take on problems that are beyond us. Those of you who have been with my blog for awhile know that I at least won’t be truly happy until the planet is saved, with its species, oceans, atmosphere, peoples, cultures, and oh yes, the attributes of human empathy and love, still intact and healthy.

Maybe a bit too much for me to take on. But at least I’m being consistent. At the last meeting, the facilitator asked me what my goals were for the next ten weeks. I replied that I wanted to finish a book revision, get a new website up and operating, get my book published in hard copy and e-book form and launched. There was a long silence, I remember. The publisher in the room remarked gently that even if I had a contract, with a marketing department, editor, and layout people, that the turnaround was a bit tight. And that January might be a more reasonable target.

Really?

One of our members is spending most of her waking hours attempting to save the elephants of Chad. Elephants are highly intelligent, have complex and empathetic social orders, and are being slaughtered for their tusks. (It makes me think of killing Grandma for her teeth, although if there were a profit in it and the kids were poor and desperate enough, Grandma might wish she didn’t have any teeth.) The ivory is sold to China. This situation is dire and urgent. If the poaching isn’t stopped, there will be no more elephants in Chad. My friend is doing her best to garner 50,000 signatures for a petition to present to the Chinese government, asking them to outlaw the purchase of ivory. Unfortunately, Chad is now being visited by the fury of genocide and the threat of a complete collapse of its government and infrastructure, and no one really has time to worry about the elephants. (Well, and it is hard to concentrate, what with that flap with Charlie Sheen and all. Besides, we have Japan and Libya to worry about – and what about the housing market and the cuts to state budgets and our leaders who would rather try to take each other down than govern, and checking our Facebook, tweets, texts and e-mail every five minutes? For those of us with a bit more of a long-term memory, there are the headlines receding into the past, like the Haiti earthquake, the Indonesian tsunami, New Orleans – the headlines recede, but the tragedies don’t).

So my colleague is out there with her shoulder to the wheel, writing, networking, strategizing, educating – tired, frustrated, and soul-sick about this heart-breaking problem. And there really isn’t much of a chance that she will be able to shut down the Chinese market for ivory.

Should she stop trying?

My husband and I have one car, an older model Toyota that gets 50 miles per gallon, and we try not to drive it much. We and our grown children live in a 1500 square foot house with one bathroom, a great garden, photovoltaics on the roof, good neighbors, and which is within walking distance of good transit and about every amenity you could need. We live this way by choice, because if living this way ever became really popular, it would make a difference in how many greenhouse gasses were emitted into the atmosphere, how much petroleum we as a nation needed to extract from Alaska, the Gulf and politically unsavory but oil-rich countries, and how many sweatshops we have to patronize.

Do we really think we’re making a big difference in the world?

No. Well, some. Some of our friends notice what we’ve been up to. Some think we’re crazy, most think we’re harmless, a few have been inspired to try a few changes themselves. Our kids have been raised to always think about the difference between wanting and needing, and about how to leave some for the other guy.

But I can do the math. I know that really, I am not making any measurable impact on the world at all. My lonely shoulder can’t bend the arc of history by itself. I have to face that fact daily, or not.

Wise people have been writing for thousands of years about how to deal with problems bigger than one person, and here is some of their wisdom, paraphrased for my refrigerator:

Let your own hands be clean.

The fact that a problem can’t be resolved by you alone does not relieve you of the responsibility of working at its resolution.

All great problems that are worthy of attention are bigger than one person. Do your part as long as you can, and know that there are others. And that more work will happen after you’re gone.

And here’s one of my favorites. I like to think I made it up, but I think that really I got it from JRR Tolkien’s wonderful creation, Sam Gamgee –

Keep your spirits up.

And stick together.


If you would like to learn more about the movement to save the elephants of Chad, click here. To sign the petition, click here.

Pet Peeves

I’m not a grouch, really. It’s just that I’m noticing things that bug me. And I’ve decided that the way to make them stop bugging me is to share them with all of you. So here goes – my Top Three Pet Peeves for the season:

Treating Teenagers Like They’re Nuts, Predatory, or Inherently Dishonest

Really, where did this one COME from? I’m the proud mother of a seventeen year old son. He is loving, funny, has personal integrity to burn and works hard. At first it just made me weary to have people say things like, “And you believed him?” or “I’m sorry, I can’t trust a boy to babysit my children.” Now it makes me angry. According to the class in Adolescent Psychology, which was a requirement for my master’s degree, people his age are inherently idealistic, not dishonest. Yes, they are a bit self-centered, and wouldn’t you be if you were doing all the grown-up things for the first time and hoping that you were doing them right? Most teens I know are trying as hard and as anxiously as they can to please the adults in their lives.

The Idea That Instant Success is Normal

My grandfather used to read Oliver Optic. You know, the guy who first popularized the “rags to riches” notion, who wrote books like “Now or Never” or “Poor But Proud.” I’m on the periphery of the entertainment industry here in Portland (that’s a funny sentence, actually), and have been an aspiring singer/actress myself for most of my life. I’m here to tell you, the YouTube-inflated-concept that it just takes One Big Break to suddenly be a superstar does us all a huge disservice. It takes hard work and a lot of time and gumption to be a success at just about anything. Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to master it. Divide that out by a 40-hour workweek and it’s…well, I don’t have my calculator with me right now. But it’s a lot.

So if you know anybody who’s working to make a living as an entertainer, don’t expect that they’re going to be the next big hit on “Leverage." They’re taking classes, getting to know people, working as an extra, working for free in student films, and oh yes, being a waitress whenever they’re not doing the rest of their 120-hour work week. Be supportive.

Last But Not Least: People Lie Down, Chickens Lay Eggs

I’ve been waiting for somebody, Noam Chomsky or the President, SOMEBODY, to make an announcement, but apparently they’re not going to. You LIE down, people. You don’t LAY down. Chickens LAY eggs. People LIE down. If you lay down yesterday, that’s OK, because it’s past tense. If you lay something down, that’s OK, because you are the subject and the something is the object.

There. Now I feel better. Thanks for listening.

Second Thoughts About the Closet

A few more thoughts about this closet idea.

Last week I wrote about getting organized enough to actually accomplish something. The key seems to be “Don’t store things until it’s time to throw them away.”

I collect wrinkled clothes in a hamper, then they’re in the way so I put them in a box, then the box is sitting in the corner of the bedroom for too long so it goes in the closet, and eight years later I unpack it and there’s Ed’s dress shirt.

I collect bills in a pile, then put them in a shoebox, then stuff it in the closet (usually because people are coming over and I want things to look neat), and years later I find the box and throw it away. (I do SO pay bills, it’s just that sometimes I wait for the yellow envelope to come.)

And then there’s the aging-food-in-the-refrigerator-until-it’s-time-to-throw-it-away-system.

So there is a little pattern here. Collect the most important resources in your life – food, clothing, electricity-phone-water-insurance – and put them in the closet until they’re out-of-date and unusable and it’s time to throw them away.

That’s a complicated idea, or maybe it’s just that it’s always hard for me to think about the truth. I like self-delusion as much as the next person, so it’s taken me a long time to start to think about this. Until “halfway through my first century,” is how I believe I put it last week, and you want to talk about self-delusion?

I’m starting to think that this goes deeper than storing food, clothing and shelter until it’s time to throw it out.

When my laryngologist told me that my vocal structure was broken, perhaps permanently, and that I might never sing again, I really did laugh and say to him, “At one point that would have been devastating news, but not at this point in my life. I don’t use my voice anymore anyway.”

I loved teaching fifth grade. I loved conducting choirs. When I lost my job in the public schools, I dove into being a housewife as if picking up other people’s messes and doing their thinking for them was a noble profession and made up for losing the joy of helping people find their true selves and expressing them fully.

After years of writing in hardbound journals and filing them in a bookcase in my attic, I stopped. I couldn’t find the time.

(Maybe it was in a box in the closet?)

No. Not time, exactly, but I have been storing something away in the closet, in a box, until it had aged enough to be thrown away.

Me.

My voice. My singing, writing, conducting and teaching. How many times have I said to myself, “I’m getting older now. I need to get ready to retire – although I’m not sure from what. It’s time to become contented with a smaller life.”

Have a small day tomorrow, and a smaller day the next day.

I read yesterday that the ancient Celts and Teutons believed in a great wheel of time, which they called Houl – a wheel that alternately threw its light toward the world and then away from it. For twelve days at winter Solstice, this Houl – now we call it Yule -- stood still before casting light onto the earth again.

Maybe it’s time for me to climb out of the box. As Woody Guthrie sang, “When you find me in the mailbox, cut the string and let me out!”

It’s time to let myself out of the back closet. Time to catch a ride on that Ferris wheel and ride back into the light. Publish the stories, conduct the choir, take this show on the road.

Welcome Yule!

On Getting Oh-Oh-Organized

Sometimes your heart’s desire is hiding in plain sight, especially when your heart’s desire is Time, or The Ability to Think Clearly.

I didn’t know this. I thought it was hiding in The Perfect List. Or the perfect calendar app or tickler file or the perfect PDA. I just needed to slice up my day a little more precisely. Maybe get Bluetooth for driving or…not my favorite but seems to be the default…don’t sleep as much.

But halfway through my first century, I think I have finally figured something out. Sometimes it’s not finding more time. Sometimes it’s going with the flow, or more accurately, going with what really works for you. Don’t argue with yourself. You’ll lose. Find out what you want and then give it to yourself. It’s OK. You’ll be a lot happier and, by extension, so will all the people around you.

When I couldn’t get any writing time, I blamed housework. Then my husband started doing the laundry and vacuuming. OK, that wasn’t it. Then I blamed my inability to schedule in writing time. Fine. Put it on the calendar. OK, months of dithering, Solitaire-playing and e-mailing later, that wasn’t it.

Then I noticed that the only days that I actually wrote, happily, for hours, were days when I didn’t have to get up and feed everybody and make sure they had their lunches and homework and then cleaned up the kitchen. When I just reached over, BEFORE I PUT A TOE OUT OF BED, and picked up first my journal and then my netbook, I wrote for four or five hours before I knew what hit me.

So I don’t get up in the mornings anymore. I just write. And it’s surprising how much more gusto I have for the laundry and errands when I have already given myself my work time. Ed and the kids get themselves ready for school and work.

(What a great sentence! “I don’t get up in the mornings anymore.” Chortle!)

This plays out in all kinds of ways. Take ironing.

I’m not a big ironer. When we unpacked the last box, three years after we moved into this house, guess what was in it?

Ironing.

It had been in that box for three different moves. Boy, was Ed happy to find his dress shirt! (“Well, I’ve been making do…”)

We iron when we find something wrinkled in the closet that we want to wear right now. (Or not!) So no more ironing box. This doesn’t save time, exactly, but now there’s room where the box was sitting in my closet for other things, like the clothes that have been piled on the chair.

Paying bills.

My way of paying bills is to put them in a pile, hopefully one pile in one place. Although if they start to look messy, I might sweep them into a shoebox and put them in the closet and then, of course, you have to start another pile when more bills come. They always do. After awhile the envelopes change color and then you know that you really do have to pay them this time. But it’s stressful, you know, and sometimes the ol' adrenal glands need a break.

So this month I took all my old bills and set up auto bill pay with my bank and then threw the bills away. Case closed.

And I’m of the food-aging school. That’s where you have a big refrigerator and you keep food until it’s aged, fermented or ripened until it’s time to throw it out. So when my last refrigerator died, I bought a really small refrigerator. I mean, about 10 cubic feet, the kind that uses a nickel-ninety-eight to run for a year and that makes your friends laugh at you.

Now I don’t have room to age the food, and I can skip the bi-monthly go-through-the-refrigerator-and-toss-half-of-what’s-in-there job. That saves time, and our grocery bills have gone down by a surprising amount.

So now:

I feel satisfied with what I’ve been able to create each day;
My bills are paid on time and I don’t even think about it;
I have room in my closet and my refrigerator and more money in my account;
I don't get stressed out much any more.

Without a new calendar app, or talking on the phone in the car all the time, or by getting More Efficient.

Just by going with my flow.

Maybe now I’ll play a game of Solitaire.

A Solid Mouthful of Christmas

That’s what our friend Hugo calls it, but really it’s just my chocolate fruitcake. I invented it in Baltimore in 1981. All my friends had warned me about fruitcake, but like the rebellious brat I was, I ignored them because during my senior year at Peabody, I found a recipe for chocolate fruitcake and how could that not be good? It waaaaas. That first fruitcake was heart-meltingly delicious, full of home-candied dried fruit and toasted nuts and rum and so chocolatey, complicated, soft and sweet. Yuuuuuuuuuummm.

Like many voice students at Peabody, I paid my rent by singing in a church choir. So for me, Christmas meant performing in what seemed like dozens of church and church-related programs. The Advent concert. The annual rendition of Schubert’s Ave Maria for the Men’s Club at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Roland Park. (The pay was a bottle of sherry in a gold box. I drank the sherry and made Christmas ornaments out of the gold box.) Christmas at St. David’s itself was a huge production – as paid choristers, my friends and I sang the Christmas Eve services, including the midnight Mass, gathered in my apartment afterwards about 2:00 a.m., ate potluck around my three-foot-tall, listing-to-one-side tree that I’d decorated in sherry bottle cardboard and popcorn, sang some more, and got back to the church by 7:00 a.m. to rehearse before the 8:00 and 11:00 morning services. Hey, who needs sleep when you’re twenty-two, eh?

So the year after I graduated, I decided I would make my new fruitcake for the all-night party. I’d prove to the world (at least to my friends) that fruitcake can be good. It’d start a whole new tradition.

After two hours of looking through every cooking magazine and scrap of paper I had in my recipe box (I have recipe boxes like other people have tax files), I had to admit that I had lost the recipe. Oh no! Now what’ll I do?

I’ll just re-create it. How hard could it be?

That was twenty-nine years ago. Thank goodness for the 1959 version of the Betty Crocker cookbook, because that’s where the basic recipe came from. Cooking is chemistry and you can’t just guess at ratios for leavening to liquid and flour. Then I started tinkering with the add-ins. The first few versions established that I like dried papaya and pineapple, more for the stained-glass window look than anything else, and that little dried green bits of citron were right out. By 1985 I was in a groove, the proportions and types of fruit and macerating liquid and nuts fairly well set, although the recipe was still scribbled (in pen!) in the margins of Betty’s fruitcake page. (I didn’t claim the recipe for my own and move it out of the cookbook until well into the computer age when I typed it out on my Mac Mini sometime in the late 1990s.)

But as I only made the cake once a year, tweaking just one or two ingredients each time, changes were slow to come. Each year I went through the same laborious process. Re-read the fruitcake story in Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. Make the pilgrimage to Sheridan Fruit to buy dried fruit and nuts in bulk. (Although when I was in grad school, I cheated and bought bags of pre-chopped fruit from Trader Joe’s. I still feel bad about that.) Dice and snip until my hands seize up and then warm the fruit gently in orange juice or rum and let it all sit for a day or three. Chop the nuts. Prepare the pans (this can take a couple of hours, but luckily I married a man a third of the way into my Fruitcake Life who took on this part of the job). Finally, finally make the cake itself, and this is where I kept trying to achieve the Perfect Chocolate Fruitcake Flavor. Some years I would come tantalizingly close to the intense chocolatey-ness I remembered, but then the cake wouldn’t quite stay together. Then I’d back off the chocolate the following year and get a more traditionally solid fruitcake, still okay but just…not…quite…right…

I made fruitcake through three divorces, two children, a Master’s degree, careers in singing and teaching, years as a private school administrator and grant writer and housewife-and-mother. I made fruitcake during the last years of the Cold War and in the days following 9/11 and through melting arctic and Antarctic poles and the disappearing ozone layer. Maybe the world didn’t get better each year, but the fruitcake did.

Last month, I read Truman Capote aloud to my children, my high-school-Junior son and my 27-year-old daughter. The three of us decided upon the ingredients for this year’s cake, dried apricots, cherries, and papaya. (They wanted hazelnuts, not almonds, but I forgot and in the actual baking, put in almonds instead. They are good children and forgave me.) Rum, instant espresso powder, and LOTS of chocolate. Maybe if we use chocolate extract to bump up the chocolate index, it won’t make the cake fall apart like the chocolate chips did that time. No pineapple this year and definitely no dried blueberries. The dried blueberries had been a little strange.

The next day, son Robin and I rode our bikes four miles each way to Sheridan Fruit to buy the fruit and nuts. We got a little lost because of the construction along 99 East, but we got there after overshooting and backtracking twice. And it cost more than I expected because of the bulk Jelly Belly display. You must suffer for your fruitcake. We stopped at the liquor store on the way home and bought a pint of rum, too.

The ingredients went into the dried fruit cupboard, stored inside a springform pan, which means don’t touch, this means you, this is the fruitcake stuff. Everybody in my family respects the fruitcake stuff.

Three weeks later, anxious weeks for my husband Ed who really, really believes that fruitcake should be made in August so it will age and doesn’t want to face the fact that I ALWAYS make fruitcake during the last week of November, I got started. Two days before Thanksgiving, I started chopping, macerating, sniffing and gloating. I love the fruit preparation part. Then the fruit sat in a covered dish out in “Fred,” our name for the uninsulated enclosed porch just off the kitchen that doubles as a second refrigerator, while we got through Thanksgiving Day and the aftermath. Two pumpkin pies, three types of cranberry sauce, two versions of stuffing, one for those who want to court E.coli and a non-fat casserole version, and two kinds of gravy. Fruitcake had to wait.

But finally, finally, the night after Thanksgiving, Ed prepared the pans with Crisco and parchment paper while I melted chocolate in the double boiler. It took awhile, because we had to decide how many fruitcakes and what size to make. You can’t give fruitcake to just anybody. Some people will not appreciate it and it will be wasted. We do have a few friends and family members who ask plaintively each year if they’re going to get one. Hugo, of course, gets one because of the time at the pub sing when I gave him a piece and he sighed blissfully, with that accent from his native England, “Now THAT’S a solid mouthful of Christmas!” And we have to make sure that we have enough. There’s the tree decorating evening, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to get through, and what if we run out?

Then I had to find the recipe. There’s tension about this, too, because I printed out my recipe a few years ago and now there are multiple copies floating around. Sometimes you can’t find the one with last year’s notes on it and you have to proceed without knowing what worked and didn’t work last year. To my chagrin, this turned out to be one of those years. Oh well. I’m sure the 2007 fruitcake was good enough, although I remember last year’s as being pretty good. Have faith in the process and forge ahead. This year, I added another tablespoon of cocoa and some chocolate extract, a new addition. I beat the batter until it fluffed up and changed color, a new procedure. Now we’re getting risky. (I can hear Han Solo shouting at Luke Skywalker, “Great, kid! Don’t get cocky!”) Hey, I’ve been making this thing for three-fifths of my life, I can take chances if I want to. Poured the batter over the precious fruit and nuts and called the family for the traditional stir. You must stir the fruitcake batter and make a wish for the coming year. While we were stirring, I stared at an eight-ounce package of Valrhona mini chocolate chips that I’d bought at DeLaurenti’s, a specialty food store in Seattle. THAT would make it chocolatey enough, you bet. Should I put it in? Robin, who works off-and-on as a prep chef in a high-end Italian restaurant, said decisively, NO. His sister Elizabeth, who has ten years on him and who as a prospective actress has more reason to live it up when she can, said yes yes YES. I decided that you can over-think things and dumped the whole container in.

Then I filled one good-sized loaf pan, two middle-sized pans, two small-ish pans and three really cute baby pans that I found at the dump last summer. (Don’t ask.) I put them all in a slow oven along with a big pan of hot water, and settled down with a timer and a bunch of West Wing episodes.

Ed tuned his melodeon. The cats duked it out for each other’s food. The kids went out for garlic fries and peanut-butter-marshmallow milkshakes and then came back to watch some Buffy. It takes a long time to bake fruitcake, and you have to keep checking them because there’s no going back. I usually use up half a box of toothpicks.

At eleven o’clock at night, when I was so tired that I couldn’t remember why I was still conscious, kind of like childbirth, the last fruitcake came out of the oven. The smallest cake had been out for two hours at that point, and was ready for the taste test.

It slid right out of the pan, a good start. The parchment paper peeled off easily, no damage there. No burned edges. The cake looked almost like it had been steamed, softer than in previous years but my finger didn’t leave an indentation when I poked it. Good and solid. It smelled like Christmas. Carefully, I sawed off a slice. I’m alone in the kitchen and it’s MY fruitcake. I put the piece in my mouth.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmm.

That’s it.

After twenty-nine years, that’s IT.

I took Ed a piece. Yuuum. Robin and Elizabeth. Yeeeeesss.

This is the best ever, Mom.

So I will not hug this recipe close to me anymore. It is time to send my Fruitcake Child out into the world. My friends, here is my Christmas gift to you. May it bring you as much joy as it has brought me.

A Solid Mouthful of Christmas Fruitcake

You can change up the kinds of fruit and nuts and liquid, heaven knows I did. But this is the latest version and as far as I’m concerned, the best.

The reading of Truman Capote and the pilgrimage to a bulk store for dried fruit can be dispensed with, I suppose, but it just won’t be the same.

Plan on doing the work over several days, and allow four hours for the baking itself.

Step One

Prepare six cups of chopped dried fruit by cooking it over extreme low heat, preferably in a cast iron Dutch oven in two cups of liquid. Although I have included dried pineapple and golden raisins in the past, I recommend this combination:

2 cups dried apricots, diced
2 cups dried Bing cherries, snipped in half
½ cup candied orange peel
2 cups dried papaya, diced
A pint of rum. I like Bacardi’s Gold. Glug glug glug!
A cinnamon stick. This is to be removed after the simmering.

Stir it when you think of it, or when you want to inhale the Christmas smell. After it’s simmered for awhile (one to four hours, say), turn off the heat and let it sit. A day or two is fine. It sat three days this year, but it was out in “Fred,” so that was all right.

Chop a cup, cup-and-a-half of toasted nuts: hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, whatever you like. Put them aside. Once the fruit is done macerating, stir the nuts into the fruit mixture.

Step Two

Prepare the pans. This can be one big tube pan or several smaller loaf pans. If you have batter left over, you can even make cupcakes. Grease the pans with Crisco (I know, I know. Just do it…) and line them with parchment paper. When I line loaf pans, I just use one strip to cover the long axis of the pan and leave bunny ears hanging out on both sides. Then grease the paper. When Ed lines the tube pan, he uses Scotch tape to affix the paper to the inner tube part. Somehow, he does it so the tape is not in contact with the batter. I don’t want to know how.

Step Three

Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees.

Cream together:

1 cup shortening
2 cups packed brown sugar
4 ounces of melted semi-sweet chocolate (I like Ghirardelli’s 60%, but really any baking chocolate will work)
4 tablespoons cocoa

Beat in:

6 large eggs

Add and beat in:

1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cardamom, if you have any.

Add and beat in:

3 cups WHITE flour. Don’t get all crunchy and sincere and use whole wheat flour. It will not work. Trust me, I know.

Add and beat in until the batter gets fluffy and changes color from dark to light brown, scraping the sides of the bowl from time to time:

2/3 cup apricot preserves
1 tablespoon rum extract
1 tablespoon chocolate extract
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder

Stir the batter into the fruit and nut mixture, and then stir in:

8 ounces of bittersweet, mini chocolate chips.

Really. Elizabeth says to do it and it worked out for us this year.

Make sure everyone in the family stirs it for luck in the coming year. Wishes made at this time have a better chance of coming true than wishes made at other times, except for birthday candle wishes.

Step Four

Boil water in a kettle. Then pour this hot water into a large lasagna-type pan. While you are waiting for the water to boil, pour the batter into prepared pans. Put the hot water pan on the bottom rack of the oven and the cakes on a rack above it.

Get out your timer and a box of toothpicks. The length of time that fruitcakes bake is much more art than science and you will have to rely upon your Curious Nose as much as upon the timer. I’ve found that fruitcakes bake for these approximate durations, but don’t blame the results on me if you get all precise and just use a timer for these treasures instead of paying attention.

Tube pan: four hours
Nine inch loaf pans: 2 ½ - 3 hours
Seven inch loaf pans: 1 ½ - 2 hours
Little pans: About 1 – ½ hours
Really cute tiny pans and cupcakes: I once had an oven that baked them in 45 minutes flat. My oven this year takes more like an hour, maybe even an hour and a quarter.

Check them with toothpicks before you take them out. The toothpick should come out clean when the cake is done, but it might not because of the sticky fruit or if you hit a pocket of chocolate chips. Check it twice.

The cakes will look dry around the edges and should have pulled away from the ends of the pan a tiny bit. Don’t let them brown though.

They should smell like heaven. You can carry one around the house and give everybody a sniff. This always makes me feel like a pre-Christian priestess with a votive offering. Or maybe I’m just being a bit braggy.

As you take out each installment, put the pans on cooling racks. Don’t take the cakes out of the pans, no matter how Curious you are, until they’ve sat for 15 minutes or so. The first tiny one can be a tester, that’s okay. And besides, you need to know if the parchment paper will peel off cleanly, right? Use a serrated knife to slice those first warm, fragile pieces. Be patient and slow in your slicing.

I like to loosen the parchment paper on all the cakes before I go to bed for the night, just to make sure it will not cement itself permanently to the cake, although I’m sure it wouldn’t. Pretty sure, anyway.

Once the cakes have cooled thoroughly (the tube pan will need to sit all night, and I sometimes get all 1950s and invert it on an old-fashioned glass Coke bottle or even a wine bottle), you can peel off the paper and wrap them in aluminum foil. Some years I wrap them in cheese cloth first and douse them in brandy or rum before wrapping them up – this is on the rare occasion that I actually do make them in August or September.

Put them somewhere cool for a month or so to age and meld. Mine used to sit in the cellar until we insulated it. Now we put them in “Fred.” Somewhere that stays above freezing but below fifty degrees would be ideal. Keep an eye on them. Sometimes one of the smaller ones will disappear.

Merry Christmas!