DECEMBER GEMS

3. Snow fell all evening and shortly after midnight, I took Emmett out for a long romp in it. It was thick and deep and the flakes falling were big as pearls. I take these long cold super-late walks almost every night now. I love them. They clean my mind.

2. This afternoon I spotted what I first thought was a pack of greyhounds right across the creek. Then I realized they were deer: a doe and three adolescent fawns (post-spots.) They bounded in big exuberant circles, kicking up snow, cavorting. Deer, playing!

1. Tonight my mom called me back from the message I left her; it's her birthday and she may have been tipsy. This, if you know my mom, is pretty funny. "I have been partying all weekend!" she said. Birthday brunch at a friend's house with nine of nearest and dearest; more friends dropping by to return loaned dishes, and more bottles of wine being uncorked; an inner-circle celebration of Brita Sailer's reelection to the Minnesota house, for which my mom was campaign manager this year. Whenever people ask, "What do you do in a small town?", imagining endless boredom I suppose, I think of my parents and their whirlwind social calendar and am thankful to mostly live in a place where I can get away with not having as action-packed a life.

Today, Pearl Harbor day, she turns fifty-six. When I got Emmett two years ago I attempted to make today his birthday as well, as revenge for mom assigning her beagle my birthday. (Yes she did.)

But then I realized I had counted a month wrong and he is actually probably a January dog. With a rescue mutt, it's all guesswork.

So today is just for my mom, who can't imagine ever being bored; who has nicknamed her pets Stinkweed (the beagle) and Sticky Note (the cat); who will bake a cake on any occasion or none at all, and claim it is for dad, and then eat it herself; who buys Cool-Whip by the tub; who grew up in a town of 800 people and many moose; who, at age 16, wearing a brown vinyl jumper and white go-go boots, was asked out by Frankie Valli's saxophone player (she declined); who reads literary novels faster than I can keep up, yet also gets a kick out of "The Girls Next Door"; who never hesitates to exaggerate for dramatic effect; who decided at age 49 to open a bookstore, an independent bookstore in a small town no less, and made it a smashing success; who teaches tiny kids with messed-up bodies how to move in this world; who unconsciously hums along in harmony with anything she hears; who is probably owed a grandchild or two (sorry, Mom, one of us is bound to get you one eventually); and who totally leaves me panting in her wake on the cross-country skate-ski trail.

When I was younger, "You're just like your mother" provoked me to protest vigorously. Now when I think about it, I'm more like, I sure hope so.

CHARD, SINGING

Thunderant introduces "Feminist Bookstore," Episode Two. Slays me! Click to watch.

If you haven't yet seen the first one, do immediately.

(And check out that incredible flute playing in the theme song. Ha.)

VOICE MAILBOX

At what point do you suppose voicemail will stop instructing us on what it is and how to use it?

You know, You have reached the voice mailbox of number FIVE. OH. THREE. THREE. THREE. THREE. TWO. OH. MY. GOD. The cellular customer you are trying to reach is not available. To leave a message, press one, or just wait for the tone; to send a numeric page, press two; to leave a callback number, press three; to listen to your message, press four; to twist the tips of your nerves into tiny raw knots, press five; to accelerate your own inevitable decline, press six; to squander the last of your anytime minutes, when you are finished recording, hang up, or press pound for more options.
Pause.
Beep.

Thanks, but after ten years or whatever, I THINK WE'VE GOT IT.

ELMER FUDD STARING BACK

In a cafe in Louisville a couple days ago, I was privy to the mad genius of a man with a wild beard, a pot belly, and a fishing T-shirt, holding forth solo at a table by the door. I paid no attention at first. But after a while, I started to listen, drawn in by the repeated evocation of Elmer Fudd. I strained my ears and this is what I picked up. I started transcribing.

I look in the mirror and I see the Elmer Fudd staring back.
You don’t see the Elmer Fudd staring back.
He doesn’t see the Elmer Fudd staring back.
Nobody sees the Elmer Fudd staring back.
The world around us, it’s all…

[pause to listen to unspoken question]

I don’t have anybody who can truly see.

[pause]

There may be, but I’m not aware of them.

After working through it for a while longer, along with some digressions about Will Smith and villainy, the guy genuinely nailed it. If I had to distill his brilliance down to one line, here it is. Think of all the people this exactly encapsulates:

The guy is a cartoon. But he doesn’t see the cartoon. He doesn’t see the Fudd.

SYLLABUS=THE FICTION MIXTAPE

The time has come again to submit my book orders for next semester, and as I pore through anthologies and photocopies, trying to figure out which stories to teach and in what order, it occurs to me that the whole process is a lot like making a mix tape.

Time is the cassette tape and the stories are the songs.

Necessary considerations:

• striking the right balance of tone and content, old greats and brand-new brilliance, multiple cultures and voices, realism and fabulism and minimalism and lushness
• the staples, the surefire winners, the surprises
• side-by-side order of stories, the timing and mixing thereof (which perfect triad of stories will illuminate a technique in disparate yet compatible ways--in 75 minutes?)
• sequencing the whole thing to move seamlessly from one week to the next for maximum cumulative power.

And like mixtape-making, the endless rearrangement and math of it eventually ties my brain in knots. Elbow-deep in anthologies, books and photocopies spread all over the table, I'm glassy-eyed and fast-forwarding impatiently through each story, hardly able to pay attention beyond the first and last pages.

Truthfully, I couldn't be happier that this is my job.

THE PARK RAPIDS HOCKEY PLAYERS' COOKBOOK

I mentioned the Park Rapids hockey players' cookbook in my previous post. It was printed sometime in the early 1980s, thinks my mom ("I'm pretty sure Nate was still a Mighty Mite.") The recipes are all submitted under the hockey players' names, and are presumably their favorites, or at least what their mothers figured would be the most appreciated by the other hockey moms.

From this paean to ketchup, hamburger, cream-of-something soups, and Cool Whip, I pulled out some choice recipes. Most look pretty revolting or perplexing to me, but I'll admit I'm tempted to go for the French Fry Bake.

All right, let's start with some of the main dishes--namely, hotdishes.

FRENCH-FRY BAKE

CHEESEBURGER PIE

CHEESEBURGER

MEAT ON A BUN

MISTER HOTDISH
I'm having a hard time believing this can be cut into squares.

And two of the many macaroni-based recipes, starting of course with...
MACCRONIE AND CHEESE
(Whoever typed the cookbook spells it this way in every recipe.)

WESTERN MAC HOTDISH
"What makes it Western?" my mom and I wondered. Then she figured it out: green peppers.
(Also note the second ingredient.)

---

On to SALADS,
a term that in Minnesota applies to any dish that is served below room temperature.

ORANGE SALAD
I ate variations on this at every church potluck. I preferred the kind that had cottage cheese in it too.

"MANACOTTI SALAD"
Try to envision this.

PISTACHIO SALAD

---

Finally, DESSERT.
(That's right, Cool-Whip-based dishes belong in the Salad section.)
For the most part, this is the part of the cookbook that actually sounds delicious. Cupcakes, bars, brownies, cookies, many involving melted bags of chocolate chips...and finally, my classmate Courtney Rutherford's recipe for
POPCORN CAKE.

If anyone will venture to actually make one of these dishes and send me a photo of it, I will personally mail you a photocopy of the whole book.

SWEDISH PANCAKES

I am home in northern Minnesota for the weekend. The snow is still light, the air is nippy, the sauna fired up. And this morning, I awoke to Swedish pancakes.

This was the favorite breakfast of my childhood. Growing up, I didn't eat standard fluffy buttermilk pancakes very often. Instead, my parents made these delicious floppy, crepe-like, Scandinavian pannekaker.

Essential to their deliciousness is that you slather them in maple syrup (Minnesota style) or in lingonberries and lightly sweetened sour cream (Scandinavian style) and then roll them up.

Let me tell you, a roll-up of tender buttery pancake and real maple or creamy tart lingonberries sure beats the typical sodden wedge of your standard flapjack.

Here's the recipe, as printed in my brother's hockey player cookbook from nineteen-eighty-something. (My grandmother found it the other day, yellowed and grease-spotted but staples still intact. I think I'm going to have to post some select excerpts from it after this.)

I usually put in only a tablespoon or two of sugar--it doesn't really need four (a full quarter-cup!) But whatever, I can eat these with my fingers straight off the griddle. And, as I have witnessed firsthand, kids can easily eat ten and even twenty of them in one sitting.

SNOW-PHORIA

Few things in the world make me happier.
I wrote all day.

SOURTOOTH SHOUT-OUT

One of my best friends in the world (since 1980!) just confessed to me that she has been secretly keeping a blog. (I did that too, when I started. I wanted to make sure it would take.) And what a great blog it is! Today, a delightful picture of deer-hunting cupcakes from the Menahga bakery.

Amy is a great writer (degree in English from Macalester) and an equally brilliant cook (she's cooked, and written cookbooks, for the big guns in New York--Bouley, Vongerichten, Gallante, et al). Most importantly, she is very funny, and genuine and knowledgeable and pragmatic. She's just all-around good, that's all there is to it.

About half the year she and her husband live back home in northern MN in the amazing house they've built up over the years. (The other half, in Brooklyn.) Aaron makes art and Amy cooks and writes. They harvest wild rice from the lake in the fall. They snowshoe in the woods in the winter. They have an enormous garden in the summer. And Amy makes incredibly delicious food, year-round. Every time I'm home, I can't wait to bump down their mile-long dirt rollercoaster of a driveway to their oasis in the woods.

So now she's writing about it--life in the woods, eating good food, or as she puts it, exploring rural cuisine in the city and the country. And there are recipes. Go on, feast. I'm going to be counting down to our Christmas break slumber party. (Dibs on the sleep loft.)

HARBINGER FROM THE AIRPORT NEWSSTAND

This is one of those things like cellphones on airplanes or digital books where I feel like the future is going to be a big headache. Imagine a whole wall of this.

Forget our attention spans for a second--honestly, is the human eyeball built to handle so much flashing and light and movement as the modern world keeps stepping it up? Like physiologically, what does it do to us? Are our brains going to look different when they lift them out of our skulls in ten, twenty years, new wrinkle patterns in the occipital lobes?

Or will we just become increasingly skilled at not seeing? Selective attention, honed pinpoint-sharp.

I was going to speculate it's going to be weird for writers and anyone else who relies on nonspecific observation. But personally I am already zoned out much of the time, too preoccupied with whatever's in my head to notice, say, the chair I'm about to walk into.