For the last couple of years, I’ve been wanting to write a book about potlucks. I think that most people in this country can be divided into two groups, potluck people and dinner party people. I am most definitely a potluck person (I also believe that the potluck people further sub-divide; hippie, church, all the different regional styles of potlucking, funerals, weddings [although my parents might be the only ones who did this one], college, park… you get the idea).

The idea for this book first came to me three years ago, at the first annual summer book club potluck. The members of this book club were the first real friends I made when I moved to Philly and that evening in August in 2002 was the first time I knew I was going to make it in this city. We read Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed for that night, drank tequila shots in honor of the main character, Cannie, and ate and giggled ourselves silly.

Tonight is the fourth annual book club summer potluck, except that’s there no book club anymore and no book to discuss. The only thing that remains is a collection of women (the collection has grown and shifted a bit over the years) who get together once a year on a hot night in late August to eat dinner around my grandmother’s table, discuss their lives, their loves, their passions and their futures. Since that first dinner, some of us have gotten married, had babies, found love and lost it, changed jobs, moved cities and states, altered hair color and discovered new paths. In the face of all these changes, one thing has remained constant, and that is the joy we find in coming together to share food, thoughts and laughter.

Tonight will be one of the good nights in life.

Tonight I ironed. It started simply, a skirt I bought during the thriftstore bonanza on Saturday had gotten washed and needed to be ironed before it could be worn. I set up the ancient but sturdy ironing board in the living room, and plugged in the slightly less aged Black and Decker iron. I watched the hot, steamy surface slide across the black linen. Like magic, fabric that had seconds before been puckered and creased, revealed itself to be smooth and rumple-free. I found this simple action to be so soothing that I went to the closet to search out other items that would be equally satisfying to run under the iron and transform. As I slowly and methodically pressed another skirt–turn, straighten, smooth, turn–I felt like I was being turned, straightened and smoothed by psychic iron, one that could seek out the crinkles and puckers in my heart and mind, leading me back to a neutral state.

I see more ironing in my future.

When I was six years old, my dad gave me bronze business card holder with my initials on it. He didn’t give it to me to propel me towards a career in business, but simply because it came free with an order he had placed, he already had one for himself, and thought I’d think it was fun. Of course, being someone who (at least at that age, I’ve gotten much better) ALWAYS looked a gift horse in the mouth, I found a reason to complain about this completely unexpected gift. He put the initials MKM on it. Which are, in fact, my initials. But at that time I was boycotting my given name, and I was hurt and upset that my father didn’t know this and take it into account when ordering the card holder (yes, I expected my parents to be able to read my mind in those days).

When I was a kid, I didn’t like my middle name, which is Klein (my mom’s maiden name). It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t like that name until my sister was born, and was given the middle name Rose. I wanted a pretty middle name too. I started saying that my middle name was Rose too, but my mom told me I couldn’t have it, that it was my sister’s. So I decided that my middle name was going to be May, in honor of my birth month. All this led to the temper tantrum when my dad gave me the card holder, because Klein had no place in my name in my warped little mind in those days.

About the time I was wrapping up my high school days, I started to come back around to the middle name Klein. I realized how much more character it had than May, and I liked the fact that it identified me as someone who had at least a little Jewish lineage (being blonde, blue eyed and raised in a Unitarian church, I didn’t have much else identifying me as a Jew). These days it is my middle name, and one I am proud to carry.

Last Wednesday, I was going through a box, in an attempt to get my apartment in order, and I found the business card holder I had so crazily rejected 20 years ago. Only these days, the initials are right. Yesterday, I received a box in the mail at work, which contained 250 business cards, the first I’ve ever received with my own name on them. Last night, I joined the cards and the case, and said a little silent prayer of thanks and appreciation for my dad, who all those years ago had tried to do something nice* for me.

*He continues to do nice things for me, there was a little package in my mailbox yesterday with three cds from the daddy-o.

Tonight I made dinner for two friends before we ran down to the Ritz Five for a free Philly Film Society screening (“The Thing About My Folks,” Peter Falk and Paul Reiser playing father and son, it’s sweet and funny and sad and endearing and you don’t have to be Jewish or from the east coast to see your own family in it). As payment for the meal, I forced my friends to listen to me, yet again, bemoan the fact that I feel directionless and without purpose. Coming from me, this is not a new story for them.

We walked down to the movies and once in our seats, I started to whine to Ingrid how pointless I’ve been feeling. That I want to be extraordinary and mostly I feel unimportant and like excess in the world. As I was ranting on, I glanced over to her and noticed her that her eyes had started to tear up. Seeing her close to tears, I shut my mouth. She took my speechlessness as an opportunity to tell me that I was not pointless, and that in her life and in the lives of our other friends, I was extraordinary. That I mattered to her. Hearing this stopped me in my tracks, because I realized that the current tear I’ve been on, trashing myself to anyone who will listen is not only damaging to myself, but it’s damaging to my friends, who don’t see me as pointless, but instead see me as valuable and important in their lives. I was stunned. It isn’t often that someone is willing to show you how they see you. Ingrid gave me a brief opportunity tonight to see myself from her perspective, as opposed to my own, slightly warped one (sometimes I feel like I see my personality and the space I take up in the world with the same level of distortion that anorexics see their bodies). I have to admit, I kind of liked what I saw. I’ve been spending so much time punishing myself for the things that I’m not recently, I haven’t spent any time enjoying all the things I am. This doesn’t mean that I won’t slip back down into a little self-judgement and dissatisfaction in the future, but when I start down that path, I’ll try to remember how I looked through Ingrid’s eyes.

I got home this afternoon, after church and brunch with friends. I wandered around the apartment for a bit, leaned back into my bed and was sucked down into sleep. In my experience, there are two kinds of afternoon naps. The first are delightful, you sleep gently in the airy light, and wake refreshed and happy to be alive. In the other kind of nap, the sleep sneaks up on you and pulls you in. It has no respect for your plans and intentions, and when you wake, you feel groggy, grumpy and a little blue. It was that second kind of nap I had to today. When I finally managed to rouse myself 45 minutes after I had initially succumbed to my bed’s siren song, I had to fight the sticky fingers of sleep that wanted to pull me back down into unconsciousness. I got up and walked into my living room, and my whole apartment looked slightly altered, as if elves had come in while I drooled and breathed heavily and moved everything a fraction of an inch. Even now, after an evening at an outdoor concert with friends and turkey hoagies, I feel slightly off. I think the only thing to do is go to bed and see if I can’t realign whatever was displaced while I napped.

When I was 17 (March 1997), my mom and I drove out to visit Whitman College. I had been accepted the previous November and had accepted my acceptance sight unseen. Thankfully, I fell in love with Whitman and Walla Walla (the mini-city in which Whitman exists). I remember driving around in my mom’s minivan, feeling thrilled that I would get to spend four years of my life in such a classic American small town. We drove down one street, lined with beautiful old houses which were becoming decrepit. I was filled with anguish that these houses (which in my mind were works of art) could be left to crumble. When I expressed this pain to my mom, she told me something that has stayed with me for years, that I often repeat to myself. She said, “everything has a lifespan.”

That little bit of wisdom came back to me last night, as I was driving through the neighborhood that, up until three weeks ago, I worked in. At least once a week after work for two years, I would drive along Queen Lane, from Wissahickon to Germantown Ave., to go to my favorite thriftstore. Queen Lane only runs one way, so to head back into East Falls, I would take Coulter St., past Germantown Friends, to get back to Henry Ave. and then Kelly Drive. I happened to be in the area last evening, and took this path to and from Bargain Thrift. Nothing appeared to have changed along Queen Lane, but as I drove up Coulter, there was a glaring void.

There had been a ramshackle old garage on Coulter, near Greene St. It was brick exterior building. The ceiling had crashed in, and it looked like it had been that way for years. There was an old, rusty Buick, half crushed under a roof support beam. It had been there for as long as I had known the neighborhood, and I assumed that it would continue to stand in that location. Every time I drove by, I would glance into the gaping mouth of that garage. I would watch the way the weather influenced the way the light passed through the ruined roof and into the disarray. The snow looked particularly amazing covering the old car, bricks and beams. I always meant to stop and take a picture, and I never did. I expected it to last forever, a modern ruin in a undeveloped neighborhood.

But now, it’s gone, it’s lifespan completed. I recognize it, I understand it and yet I still mourn it.

Evidently,this is me.

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“Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful on Morning Edition today. Thanks to my dad, I’ve been a Spoonful fan since age 6. He would play a rockin’ version of “Jug Band Music” on his guitar and I would dance around and sing. I’m pretty sure I was the only first grader who was familiar with the collected works of Jon Sebastian.

Hearing that song on the radio caused me to relive a memory that really isn’t mine. It’s my dad’s experience, of the moment in when he first heard that song, on the radio, at the kitchen table of a house he and some friends were living in, someplace outside of Boston, the summer after he graduated from high school, in 1966. He was standing at the sink, doing dishes when the deejay announced that after the commercial break, they would be playing the newest, hottest song from the Lovin’ Spoonful. He turned off the faucet, dried his hands and sat down at the table, to be ready to give his full attention to the song. As it started to play, the teasing preamble of organ and drums pulled him in, then the guitars and vocals blew him away.

I’ve always imagined that room he was sitting in was white, with an old white enameled gas stove and lots of windows. I can see my 17 year old father, his thick blonde hair starting to get long, one tanned arm resting on the table, the other flung over the back of the wooden chair. He is listening to this song for the first time, lost to the rest of the world for a few minutes. It’s an experience that will never be repeated.

I left work this afternoon around 5:30, and walked home through coolish air and into a completely uncommitted evening. I dropped into Salvation Army on the way and by 6:05, was home to fall into the open arms of my favorite brown couch. I puttered for a bit, pulled on my new favorite jeans and ate guacamole and baby carrots for dinner in front of the second half of a rerun of “Stargate SG-1.”
I knew that it would be a crime to spend the rest of this beautiful evening in my apartment, but calls to a friend went unanswered, and as I was staring at my phone, trying to determine who to call next, it rang. It was my mother, who mentioned that she was planning on attending a candlelight vigil tonight to support Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who is camping outside of President Bush’s Crawford ranch in protest to the war and to lament her son’s lost life, a life wasted by hubris. I had played with the idea of going to a vigil tonight, but hadn’t signed up or done a research as to where they were taking place. A quick googling found an abundance of vigils in the Center City area. I picked one, grabbed a candle and headed out.
I went to the vigil in Fairmount, because it felt appropriate to protest the war and stand in solidarity with a woman in righteous pain in the shadow of the country’s first Penitentiary.
I arrived at the vigil and found a eclectic collection of people, standing silently in a circle with candles and signs. There weren’t more than 80 people there, although a few more trickled in over the next ten minutes. There was a cluster of deeply tanned, much-tattooed men and women who showed up on motorcycles. Hippies, young and old. Several families, four or five young couples and individuals who arrived alone. The signs were handmade and a little crude, but they conveyed the message with more eloquence than a professional printing job would have. Two plates of liberty bell shaped ginger snaps traveled in opposite directions around the circle. I was reminded of the power of people standing silently with intention and emotion.
I had my camera with me, and considered taking pictures, but it felt inappropriate for me to take on the role of documenter or observer, when I was there to participate. When I arrived, I spotted Karin, a woman I know from the Unitarian church, who is the mother of one of my buddies, but also a friend of mine in her own right. I stood next to her and lit my candle from her’s. We stood in silence for many minutes, until she leaned towards me and said, “We need a gong or something, to indicate the end!” I muffled a giggle and said, “I’ll give it a couple more minutes, and then we go.” Then one person said goodnight and another took that as a sign to start singing, “God Bless America.” One verse of that and we all blew out our candles and headed out into the night.

More tomorrow on what I did when I headed out into the night.

The cd has really landed and is available for purchase at CD Baby. So, go, buy it. It makes the perfect Labor Day gift (okay, so what if we don’t normally exchange gifts on Labor Day). If Raina can sell 30 in the month of August, CD Baby will put a track from this cd onto a compilation disc that they send free to all customers. So shop early and shop often.