a moment in the day: egg

I'm just up from bed on a Saturday morning, oversized t-shirt and pillow hair. We're in the dining room talking about the grocery store, how he's going to go. As he takes a step toward me, I'm taking a step or two away and saying, "I'll think if I need anything."

"Hey, I was just coming to hug you," he says.

I turn back, "You were?" And he comes over and folds me in warm.

I can't think of anything I said that was particularly wonderful. I say, "To what do I owe this?"

"Nothing," he says. "I like you. You're a good egg."

Tiny everyday moments like these are everything.

I rub my hand down his back. "You're an egg too."

"Just an egg?"

"A good one."

Book Cover: This Never Happened

When I was contracted by University of Hell Press to design the book cover for Liz Scott's memoir This Never Happened, I was equal parts thrilled and freaked out. As a member of Liz' writing group, I knew every essay intimately, and let me just admit: I'd been having a love affair with this book for years.

It is so good. It is so good.

I remember one evening in group when Liz got to the end of reading a piece and we were about to launch into the critique, and I tried to say, "Wait, can you read [such and such a passage] again," but mostly just burst into tears.

This Never Happened is heartbreaking but also darkly hilarious, a memoir in gorgeous little fragments—which is such a perfect structure as so much of the story of her (totally bananas) family/background is shrouded in mystery. When I went to her house to talk about the book cover, she brought out a very small hoard of old photographs and papers to look through. Peeking through these remnants was like reading through the fragments of her life in the book.

So I started by tinkering with a scatter of these fragments, seeing where I might lay out, in the middle of the chaos, the elements of title, author, "a memoir." Finding placement for the Hell Press logo that the publisher generally places on its book covers.

There were photos but also old papers: job applications, notes, strange letters-to-the-editor that gave so much insight into her father's fascinating character. A lot of which are reproduced in the book.

She had this sweet, little mini photo album that intrigued me so I altered it with her name and book title for a sample or two. I was kind of proud of that.

But as I worked, I started to zero in on one particular picture. The photo is of a baby Liz with her (complicated, narcissistic) mother and her (complicated, mostly-absent) father. In the middle, Liz looks... a little shell-shocked to be there. Maybe a little... what's the word I'm looking for? What's that expression that's a combo of wisdom and wtf?

To me, she looks like she's saying to you: honey, you don't even know.

That picture seemed so apropos of the tone and content of the book. So I started to focus on how I could use the portrait front and center. First, I photoshopped it so that it would look like one of those old colorized photos.

And in the end, when I sent a bunch of my tinkerings to Liz and the folks at U Hell, they chose the below. Baby Liz peeking up from the lower right corner and most of the faces of both parents hidden, speaking to the many unknowns in Liz' history and, to me, the personal distance and the longing that Liz endured through her very particular story.

What else comes from all that Liz endured? Well, in her case: a woman full of wit, intelligence, wisdom, integrity, and personal strength. And one hell of a book. I hope I've done it justice.

Here's a taste:

My mother says, “Now’s the time to ask. If you have any questions, now’s the time.” She waits till her deathbed to say this and it’s hard to find the right adjective to describe this feeling, how it might be possible finally, after all this time, to get some answers to the mysteries of my family. Thrilling, shocking, flabbergasting, mind-bending, Jesus-fucking-christ. It’s been years—decades really—worrying this puzzle, this frustrating, vexing, bring-me-to-my-knees puzzle. What I know: I have a mother and a father. I have a sister. But that’s hardly enough to construct even the outside border, let alone begin to fill in the picture.

Once when I was young I asked my mother if she had any brothers or sisters. “I don't remember.” That was her answer and somehow, in our family, that passes for an acceptable, reasonable answer. What must be going on in a family where you just leave it at that? And then to boot, when my sister and I are already well into our adulthood—surprise! You’re a Jew!

Now’s the time to ask questions? Okay, Who am I? Where did I come from? How did you both—mother and father—get to be such fucking whack jobs, bless your hearts, but really.

I’ve come to believe that all of this—the facts about your ancestors, the truth about your family story, the reliable connections—are what create ballast in a life. With little to anchor me to earth, I’ve been in one long free float trying to forge some mooring in various, ill-conceived ways with only modest success. Because really, before you clearly know what you’re after, it’s all mostly flailing. I’m fast approaching my eighth decade now and I imagine this is what happens when time starts to run out. The need to make sense gets stronger and more urgent. If there are answers out there, I want them. If there is sense to be made, let me make it. And while we are at it, do let me forgive.

*

You can buy This Never Happened in many places, but my favorite is here.

Liz' book launch will be this coming Tuesday, April 23rd at Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland, Oregon. More info on that is here.

a moment in the day: après l'école

Finished with his first French class of the quarter, Stephen quietly sings a song in French under his breath. He tells me about one of the other students, a guy who's married to a French woman.

"They're making plans to move to France."

"Ooh!" I say. But I don't say, la la.

"They're going to get there and just wander the countryside looking for the perfect place to settle down," he says.

"Must be nice," I say.

"I know," he tweaks his eyebrows at how unfair it all is. "Why couldn't you be French?" he asks.

"Technically I'm French," I say.

"Yeah," he says, "but not in a way that's useful."

a moment in the day: twenty-one

I'm driving home after work, start and stop traffic down Burnside street. On the news, they talk about some place in Alaska where, usually this time of year, they can drive across this road made of ice, but the globe is warming and the ice is melting earlier and people fall through the ice and die.

The whole day seemed to have gone by in two or three hours. That's what time does, now. It was just New Year's and already it's April. At work that means it's time to start planning for the holidays, and I spent a large portion of the day emailing people and setting up meetings about things like Christmas decorations.

A red light turns to green and my car moves forward. On the news they talk about rain and the river and where, in and around Portland, are the biggest chances for flooding. I try to remember little moments in the day. Email, email, email. I remember when a coworker said to another: ever since I moved to Portland, every time I bought an umbrella—every time!—I would leave it on the bus. I like to try to write down moments from the day. Sometimes I even turn them into little posts for my blog. Like if I could focus on every small moment, it could make life stop speeding away so fast.

When I was a kid, life was eternity. Waiting for Christmas lasted forever. In my thirties, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing the game that I could actually slow time if I paid better attention to it. I paid attention and paid attention, but then I was forty and then I was almost fifty.

I ease the car onto Burnside Bridge. Doing what I always do when I drive out onto this slab of concrete suspended over space: pretend not to think about earthquakes. Traffic stops, starts, stops again. Stops completely. I wait. Pay attention. Look down over the Willamette River, take my eyes across the shoreline, the tiny people walking along the edge, try to look for someone walking a dog.

The water is so high. On the news they talk about North Korea and say words like "missile."

When they do that, all I want to do is eat all the pizzas in the world. Eat pizza and cheese and noodles, eat it all before it's too late.

Traffic starts up again. Everything moves forward.

It's twenty-one years, today, since my grandfather left this world. Twenty-one years.

It's April, and it's already almost Christmas.

a moment in the day: tiny mystery

As I step through the living room, something catches my eye through the big front window. It’s a young woman in cat eye sunglasses, with little mini Princess Leia buns in her dark hair, standing on my lawn. She’s grinning. She seems really intent on something, staring down. At her feet? At the grass? I can't see from my angle. Then she crouches, fast, disappearing from the window.

OK, this is kind of weird. What’s she doing out there? I don’t want to stare but, well, I want to stare.

I sidestep into the bedroom and peek through the curtains. I make the tiniest opening between the two curtains, just enough to fit my eye through.

There’s a big golden-haired dog lying on his back on the grass, paws up in the air, and the woman is petting him.

Oh. Well. That’s not as interesting as I thought it might be.

But now she straightens to standing again, and instead of moving off with her dog, she stays there facing my window, pulls a small sheath of papers from under her arm, holds it up, and starts reading.

The dog rolls around, happy, in the grass. The woman’s lips move.

A mystery in daylight, this woman with her eyes glued to her stack of pages, her pink sneakers on my lawn. Reading to the dog? Reciting an incantation? Singing to the dog?

Reading to herself the instructions she printed off the internet for teaching your dog to sit, stay, play dead?

But she doesn’t look like she’s just mouthing the words as she reads silently to herself. She looks posed, proper, her back straight, shoulders straight, head up, like she’s standing behind a podium.

A mystery is how she doesn’t seem at all concerned what anyone might think, standing on the lawn of someone she doesn’t know at two in the afternoon on a Sunday, orating to a dog.

A guy goes by on a bicycle, his eyes on the woman the whole time. I wonder if he can hear what she's saying.

She does seem to be directing it toward the dog, whatever she’s doing. Although I suppose she may be casting a spell on my rose bushes and the dog’s just along for the ride.

A mystery is how different twelve little inches mean to this scenario. How much less weird this would all feel if the woman were standing just a foot back, on the sidewalk. These invisible barriers we have, these unspoken rules. That is the sidewalk. This is my grass.

And she’s not hurting anything (unless she’s putting a hex on my rose bushes), but I do feel better when she’s stepped her shoes off my lawn and back onto the sidewalk.

Still, I’m a little sad to watch her head off and away, leaving just the mystery of it behind.

Off and away but then, just a few feet down the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s house, she stops. The dog makes a happy hop and flops into the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street. The woman sits herself down on the half wall that encloses my neighbor’s lawn, pulls out her pages, leans in toward the dog, and starts to read again.

a moment in the day: leftovers

The leftover French fries didn't fare well. I thought they'd be okay if I put them in the toaster oven but that just made them tough and chewy. In the kitchen after the movie, I put the leftovers of my leftovers back in their container and back in the fridge.

"You're keeping them?" Stephen asks.

I bump my shoulders up and down at him, "I guess. Tomorrow I'll try just microwaving them. That usually makes them kind of floppy, so maybe floppy and tough will cancel each other out."

"You're right," he says. "The microwave will revivify them."

Revivify. That's the word he uses. Who uses the word revivify about French fries? Come to think about it, I don't know whether I've ever heard that word said out loud.

I throw my arms around him. He looks confused.

I explain, "I appreciate you."

Tiny Beautiful Things at Portland Center Stage

Tiny Beautiful Things may be my favorite of Cheryl Strayed’s books: the way she transforms the vehicle of the advice column into a forum for deeply complex personal essays that not only fully address the questions posed by the advice-seekers but also tell her own story and, taken all together, get to the heart of what it is to be human.

When I heard this column that became a book was becoming a play I was equal parts excited and perplexed. How does someone turn a book like this into a play? How do you fashion a set around it? How do you take the question-and-answer structure of an advice column or the start-and-stop structure of a collection of essays and bend it into something with a single plot and a beginning-to-end story arc? Or do you?

Then I saw photographs of the production showing people sitting around a couch in a set that looked like someone's house—and that confused me, too. I didn't get how those pictures related to the Tiny Beautiful Things in my head.

The play opens with one of those four, a woman, alone in the house. She comes in with a laundry basket in her arms, passes through, goes into a laundry room, closes the door. Nothing for one beat, two. Then she re-emerges.

And I finally got it. This was Sugar. Or rather this was Cheryl Strayed, in her own home. Which is where all those pieces of advice, all those lovely essays came to life.

And that's what the play does. It brings those essays to life, as the advice-seekers, in the form of three actors, appear in her home, inhabiting different characters, beautifully anonymous (now he's a man, now he's a woman) hovering around her couch, her kitchen table, asking her their questions and letting her spin out her answers as the tiny beautiful essays they are.

I loved this approach. What an intimate thing, bringing these people into her personal space just as her intimate and generous responses to their questions must have brought her right to them in a personal way. Which is what the book does for the reader as well.

You might think this back-and-forth structure would get old, but it doesn't, because each issue brought up, each monologue performed, is so different and so heartfelt—at times funny, at times wrenching. An unexpected arc forms as the monologues start to piece together the story of Cheryl's life. And toward the end, something happens that takes the play to a place the book never could have gone, and it's surprising and wonderful.

Each of the players (Dana Green who plays Cheryl/Sugar, and Leif Norby, Lisa Renee Pitts, and Brian Michael Smith, who get to exercise their versatility chops playing all the advice-seekers) is fabulous. But the star is Cheryl's words and the masterful way they're shaped and arranged and brought to life on stage. Kudos for this have to go to adapter Nia Vardalos, co-creators Marshall Heyman and Thomas Kail, and of course Cheryl Strayed herself, as well as director Rose Riordan.

A good example of this mastery is a moment during the sequence advanced by an advice-seeker who calls himself "Living Dead Dad." I remembered it from the book. It's shattering. In fact on impulse—just this second—I got out my book and read that piece again and it shattered me again. The issue brought up by "Living Dead Dad" is so difficult for him to express that he presents it in a list rather than the paragraphs of a letter. And Cheryl/Sugar responds in kind. In the middle of their interaction, Cheryl walks over to where "Living Dead Dad," played by Leif Norby, is sitting, and struggling, at her table, breaks a fourth wall we didn't know existed, and hands him a box of tissues. It's such a tiny thing, but this exchange, this intimacy, is exactly what the play is all about.

I knew this performance was going to touch me, but I was somehow not ready for how much. I was holding my breath to try to cry less, because we were in a public place, and the only thing that made me feel better was that I could hear Stephen, my date for the evening, crying just as much.

Artist Jeana Edelman, also in the audience, later said, "I’d never experienced an entire house crying at once before."

Stephen expressed it in a slightly different way. He said, "In the part where she hands him the box of tissues, all I kept thinking was, maybe they should pass them around."

*

The other thing Stephen said? He coveted the kitchen. The set is a lovely craftsman home, the perfect setting because of its openness and its beauty but also its hominess, with a dog bed at one corner, books and shoes under the couch, evidence of life lived. If you saw our kitchen, the one un-fixed-up room in our house, with its cracked, rust orange counter tops and old, chipped cabinets and dead appliances, you'd understand why Stephen loved the layout created by Scenic Designer Megan Wilkerson, all blue and white and tiled and fresh.

"Yeah," Stephen said as we were driving home after the show. "I want that kitchen."

*

Tiny Beautiful Things is playing now through March 31st on the main stage at Portland Center Stage. More information is here.

The book is available here.

Photos by Patrick Weishampel/blankeye.tv/Courtesy of Portland Center Stage at The Armory

Poster art by Mikey Mann.