Sunday, June 30, 2013

Mother Plucker


Mother Plucker

This is the name of one of the many absurdly and equally inventive, caloric and delicious donut offerings at “Gourdough’s - Big. Fat. Donuts.” here in Austin, Texas.

I personally opted for their Miss Shortcake this morning, a golden-orb-fried-miracle dolloped in perfectly balanced cream cheese frosting and Texas-red strawberries.

It is important to note that this came after a morning of free paddle boarding in Lady Bird Lake, a misnomer, since it’s really a river.

And what a river!

Standing in the middle of this green river, surrounded by trees the lushest I have seen since I lived in Wales, in the middle of the fastest growing city in America. 158 people move here each day. 

Skyscrapers rising in a rush behind me.


Other early Sunday morning revelers surround me, rowing and paddling and kayaking and running with their dogs, making the most of this rare wet grey summer morning, although they’d probably have come out anyway, as Austinites seem to take pride in ignoring excruciating weather.

Freeways loop and cross over our heads and the river and her trees. Never have I seen concrete and bark and water look so natural and peaceful side by side.

My friend Emily, a biologist and devotee of rivers far and wide, found turtles sunbathing on the banks. I encountered a father and his toddler toe-head daughter perched on the front of his yellow kayak, paddling slowly down the river.

The park also has trails along the river and through the entirety of the city for miles, green and deep and meandering.

We found a bench in a bend in the river amid the forest path. And then we got the fluffiest, softest donuts in a parking lot across the river.

I think these bits and pieces are reasons why the saying “Don’t mess with Texas” is true afterall.



Not because of the guns or vigilantes or heat or holy rollers. But because of the equally extreme magic that can be found in parking lots and holes in the wall and free, quiet paths along the water. It’s hard to argue with free rivers and donuts in parking lots on a Sunday morning.

I feel this fried goodness seeping into my staunchly Californian veins, the body that always remembers the direction of the Pacific. And it scares me. I could get used to big clouds and big heaping portions and big blue skies and even a sun that feels larger than before.

Did I mention that from my bed you can see the Capitol building, the Don’t-mess-with-Texas one that is the only state Capitol building to say f@#$ you to the national Capitol by being taller? I was doing lesson plans on my bed looking at the dome while Wendy Davis redefined what “Don’t Mess With Texas” means earlier this week in the coolest filibuster ever. When have filibustering and pink running shoes ever gone together before?

I wish I had been there, but my kids! Grading and lesson plans on you-name-it . . .



And on Friday night, after I gorged on forementioned tortilla chips and nutella, I got in my friend’s Jeep and drove with her and a bunch of our friends to San Antonio.



We saw the Alamo and the river walk, but the true reason for our 3-hour roundtrip driving adventure in an air conditioning-less car was to go to Helotes outside the city proper to listen to Green River Ordinance at the John T. Floore Country Store.



I agreed to go along, because why not? Little did I know that this was the honky tonk bar immortalized in Willie Nelson’s song “Shotgun Willie,” considered his ‘birth place’ and frequented by Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, and Lyle Lovett among many others. I trusted my wonderful new friend Emily’s music taste and her enthusiasm for this band I had never heard of.

And anyway, who doesn’t want to drive on a highway in Texas with new friends one summer Friday night after a long week, bulleting into the impossibly green countryside to hear beautiful music for the first time?



Speaking of the lush countryside, it brought me back to driving in Uganda three summers ago. Except for the sprawling, excessive car dealerships every few miles or so, they look so similar, green and shrubby and flat and extending far, far, far.

What I found in Helotes was so real it was unreal. I landed in Footloose, which I had always assumed was a Hollywood exaggeration. But the metal bull sculpture outside the liquor store and the sign proclaiming the “World’s Best Homemade Tamales Bread Sausage Country Butter Eggs Everything Nearly” and the girls walking in the middle of the street under the live oaks in short jean shorts and cowgirl boots were inarguably real.



Inside, the ceiling of the John T. Floor Country Store is decorated in sixty years of anti-taxation signs, hanging cowboy boots and twinkly lights.




For twenty bucks, five of us devoured platters of brisket, pulled pork, bread, pickles, sausage and pork tamales outside on picnic tables near live oak trees and a stage painted with the Texas flag.




The wonderful-wonderful band started (look them up!) and we sipped margaritas in plastic cups as they dedicated songs to the Marines and talked of singing to them at a BBQ for 1500 on a naval ship near Bahrain. A marine in the audience introduced himself and everyone cheered, hollering America-proud slogans I had never heard before. And perhaps I won’t ever hear again, which says a lot since I’m pretty fond of this country as liberal Californians go.

After the magical-magical music stopped, we went outside and watched taut, tan men in tight, white t-shirts, Wrangler jeans, and cowboy boots approach girls in boots and dresses with the sleeves pulled down over their shoulders. They talked and mingled as they sat on picnic tables in gendered clusters. Some spat chewing tobacco into empty plastic margarita cups.



The next band started with a song about women going down on men in fields all night long: “We got a spot beneath a cottonwood tree/And she knows what she's gonna do to me.”

The crowd cheered. We left.

We drove back to Austin and talked about our gods. The entire time it was over 100 degrees. And I came home and went to bed in my 70 degree room.

These are just bits and pieces of my weekend. Just bits and pieces of Texas. My descriptions feel acutely incompetent, but they are all I have to offer you to get a taste of this place.



Moral of the story: Don’t mess with Texas, Mother Plucker!

ps- I forgot to mention what the Mother Plucker involves! Spicy fried chicken smothered in honey butter. . . on top of a freshly fried donut.


Friday, June 28, 2013

Salty Revelations


Salty Revelations

Oh boy.

I think I might have jinxed my students with yesterday’s blissful posting.

It turns out that every 12-year-old soul-puppy-dog-angel has an inner hyena that tends to be brought out by 106 degree weather.

I’m not kidding: 12 year olds capable of imagining social welfare vending machines for high-density homeless areas stocked full of water, medication, blankets and non-perishable food on the first day of class are also capable of stealing purple markers from each other, calling teachers monstrous expletives, and doing some hard core public footsy in the front row of your lesson on the respiratory system.

All of this probably sounds to you like not a big deal, the typical junior high fare. I know. I saw much worse in my own middle school days. I should not have been so naïve, bracing myself for these moments from the beginning.

But I did. And then they showed up, smart and eager and gentle and strong all at the same time, little grown-ups already jaded and yet hopeful still.

And all of my preparatory anticipation of the certain lows vanished in their giggles about the word ‘bowels’ and in their awe that a Mexican man, someone who looks like them, invented the color television.

In such wonder, it is hard to remember the pettiness that exists side by side with revelation. Most of the time, I think our comprehension of them depends on the other, in this co-dependent, two-sided-coin miracle of human resilience.

I hope I feel that way again tomorrow.

 p.s. - This revelation led me in a moment of post-work exasperation to discover the joy of nutella on salty tortilla chips. Forget the pretzels. This will change your life.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

What Wise Old Women Know


What Wise Old Women Know

Become a teacher of 12 year olds, and you will finally understand what it feels like to be Taylor Swift.

They will braid your hair by the fountain at pick-up, early in the morning, coming from every corner of the city to learn, yawning but braiding intricately and laughing anyway, while you wait for the other learners who travel even further to get to you.

You will think your outfit is normal, not fit for the Celebrity theme of the day, satisfied with your spirited contribution of the leopard print toga and your dark eye shadow-whiskers, the ones that wouldn’t come off and smeared all over your pillow case, the day before on Animal Day.

But that’s not enough for them. They will look at you early in the morning light of Texas you are so unaccustomed to, already close to 90 degrees, and they will find the Taylor Swift within you.

They’ll braid your hair more intricately and gently and impossibly than anyone ever has, their small hands like prehistoric creatures in rapturous flight. They’ll touch your thick, curly hair and you’ll explain your Jewish heritage.

They don’t care that you aren’t wearing red lipstick. Or that you can’t sing. Or that you are 5’2” tall and far from glamorous, instead groggy and thinking about how to best explain the structure of bone the next day with cups, garbage bags and Twizzlers.

They do not notice the pizza grease stain on your long, grey Gap skirt, the one you wear to Orthodox sites and teaching because it is that modest. And you forget about it too, lost in their joy of finding Taylor Swift and asking for her autograph.

Later at lunch, when it is time for all the more obviously dressed-up teachers to take a picture, you do not join them. You have forgotten after a lesson on bowels and bronchi that you are, in fact, after all, although you didn’t know it, the one and only Taylor Swift.

They notice. You do not realize this at the time, but they do.

Right before dismissal, the officially dressed-up teachers go up to the stage at the front of the auditorium to introduce their celebrity selves. At first you do not join them, but then again, you cannot argue with twenty 12 year olds.

Life-lesson learned: Don’t even bother. They are more often right than wrong anyway.

So you go up to join the mass of impressively costumed colleagues. You wait ‘til the end to announce your Taylor-ness. Finally, when you do, you ramble on about how you did not intend to be Taylor Swift, but that your kids showed you that, in fact, you were Taylor all along.

At this, two of your favorite kids smack their foreheads and shake their heads side to side with the vigor of Michael Jackson back-up dancers, horrified that you let the world know you were not always the one and only Taylor Swift.

They do not look like 12 year old Bieber fans; They look like perfectly wise old women, the kind you saw when you yourself were also 12, when you lived in Italy and visited Sicily, the ones who sold fish out by the church, their ancient faces poised against marble and newspaper, gold crosses and black dresses and stockings, talking, talking, talking, shaking and nodding, coming closer to eternity than you have ever known. They shake their heads as they discuss their grandson’s inability to marry, and they keep the whole world pinned up and clean like fresh laundry.

Your beautiful girls shake and smack, shake and smack. You know they are thinking, How could she be so stupid!


They do not yet know that even more than being their Taylor Swift, you love being their Ms. Hannah.

In fact, you have never loved your name so much as now, carried by their soft voices in a caramel chorus.

You have revealed to the world you are Ms. Hannah, not Taylor, but they cheer anyway. And as you descend the stage and move back to join them, their Ms. Hannah! How could you! is perhaps the most beautiful thing you have ever heard.



Sunday, June 23, 2013

Sunflower Sunday: Yeah, well, there’s also this


Sunflower Sunday: Yeah, well, there’s also this

So remember what I said about the unflappably stubborn dependability of being alone in this being human circus?

Yeah, well, there’s also this equally true, pressing fact:

You are never, never, never alone if you don’t want to be.
And not just in that we’re together in all our alonenesses way.
I mean in the big way.

Even when you think you are.
Even when you are certain of it and you would bet your house on it.
Or your dog.



If you want to be, that’s a different story.

But if you position yourself like a sunflower facing the sky, awaiting the almost-eternal promise of the sun, well, soon, you will not be alone.

I’m fairly certain of this now, so I’m going to take a risk, and promise you this, on the full faith and credit of Hannah Rose Friedland, whatever that means to you.

Remember those newly-former-strangers? The ones you felt you couldn’t tell your loneliness to when you went out dancing only a week before?

Well, before you know it, you’ll be sharing your life stories with each other as you drive around the New City, the one that is starting to get under your skin and tip toe into your heart.


You’ll all take turns that summer hunching yourself into a ball to fit into the trunk so all of you can go to the 25 cent thrift store sale on the other side of town. You’ll make plans to meet each other in the middle of the bookstore to talk again after getting lost in books, which they love just as much as you. You’ll eat pizza in silence on the sidewalk. Get free water together in a fancy Japanese restaurant, forgetting your thirst and the heat as you wander this new city.



They don’t mind if you talk to your best friend on the phone for an hour in the middle of the day; they are also partial to wandering off by themselves, as much as they are to wandering off to get lost together.

They’ll even wait in the crazy line of the burger joint while you run down the street to find your dream birthday dress, and wait for the other friends to arrive to join you for this much-anticipated feast.

You’ll gorge on meaty burgers and shakes and feverishly make 4th of July plans involving “the Shire with cacti,” dessert lakes and art villages, New Orleans, camping, BBQ stakeouts and marathons, and paddle boarding down the river of the New City.

They’ll wait for you, sitting on the curb as you run down the street again to feast with your eyes on another dress in another window.



You’ll feel your appetite for life waking up after its quiet winter, which you weren’t even aware of until now, as the new city’s and the new friends’ hungers for life is contagious and you will do everything you can to catch it again. This you want.

You’ll then drive off to jump into the natural spring downtown, with its free swimming after 9. You’ll all cannonball and leap in, in your shorts and panties. You’ll howl at the super moon in a chorus with dozens of other strangers as you float.

You’ll float on your backs, amazed at your buoyancy despite your bellies being full of a day of brunch and New York style pizza for snack and burgers and shakes. And joy.

Joy.

How is it possible that you are floating when you are full to the brim with so much?!

But you do.
You float on.
Thank G-d for this gift of floating and astounding buoyancy!



You jump out of the spring together and run to the miraculously close parking spot your best friend’s mom’s parking fairy must have lent you for your birthday.

You drive back to your new co-op, where you quickly throw on your dream birthday polka-dotted jumper-suit-thing and walk to your communal birthday party with a pack of newly-former-strangers-now-friends.

You do shots in each other’s honor and eat cake made for you by these beautiful people.

You fall out of the hammock by the pool. It’s broken, and that’s annoying, but that’s OK.

Because of all of this.

One of your newly-former-strangers-now-friends brings everyone outside to you on the deck, surrounded by all the twinkling lights and the pool’s hushing lapping sounds, and they sing to you.

You call your twin-sister.
She is happy too.
You are happy together.



You slip off with some of these newly-former-strangers-now-friends to the hole in the wall, literally and figuratively, where a burly bartender makes you your first legal drink, the perfect mix of whisky, soda water, agave syrup and fresh lemon juice, a surprise gift from your new friend.

You go off together to listen to the live music, seriously good sound despite the silliest costumes ever worn by a band in history.

You make your way outside and toast and chat until sleepiness catches you all, a catcher in the rye.



You hug and leave.
You don’t mind leaving.
It’s OK to leave.

You know you’ll be back again.
Soon.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Wherever you go, there you are


Wherever you go, there you are.

It’s a bitch.

And it’s a blessing.


You fly to Texas. You so desperately do not want to say goodbye to your friend, the one you must leave at the other terminal. So you don’t go to your gate. Instead you wander in your loss to the exit, and in doing so, almost miss your flight, the one that takes you away from your friend, even though --  regardless  -- she is leaving you anyway. And you can’t help but leave her too.

She must.

You must.

It goes like this.


When you run through security the second time around, you forget your vaccine in the carefully-iced-packed-belabored love of your parents, the one that is supposed to prevent you from frothing at the mouth and dying in such an embarrassing display of animal saliva in a few months time when you again must go.


And so it goes.

You barely make it.

But you do.


You arrive in the new city, the one you held out for, the other place that might fill the particularly awkward hole gaping in the dough of you. The shape for which no cookie cutter exists.

You travel around in taxis, lost on buses, whisp about on your feet in your bright new sneakers with their promises, with your new, easy companions. You mentally categorize the heat as exotic. Same goes for the urban grit and unthought-of sprawl (as if any part of it was planned).



You watch the bats flit across the light-to-dark sky with a hundred strangers on a bridge. You pet dogs whose names you do not know. You listen to free music in a new park with strangers, and your newly former-strangers.



You notice big clouds like popcorn, and popcorn shrimp, and batter-fried-anything.



You bless the green oaks and the river that curves like a scoliosis spine. You open your mouth. A lot. Food. Words. Recognition. Gasps. Air. Saliva frothing at the mouth in sleep, the undeathly kind.




You forgive everything. Anything.


You go to a party of strangers, transformed from grungy-druggy hipster-hippie by the light of the precariously placed twinkly lights hovering over the pool. You drink cups of beer and dangle your ankles in the water, your body perched just as precariously as the lights above that pardon such alchemy.



You strip off your dress and kick off your platform shoes. You cannonball into the pool and supposedly everyone cheers, although you are underwater for half of it and absorbed in your lunar nakedness for the rest of it.

A short, thin, hairy man follows you, inspired. 
No one cheers.




You go to a 24 hour diner with these new people for whom you forgive everything, even before you know what there is to forgive. Eat lemon poppy-seed pancakes bathed in icing. You think you have never tasted pancakes this good.

The waitress gives you dish towels to wipe your arms still wet from the pool, made worse by the relentless ice of the AC that undoes any benefits of a warm climate. You give her a tip that is 100% of your bill.


She is your guardian angel. You hope you are hers tonight.


The next day you sleep ‘til brunch and get lost in conversation while on the bus to the river, thus getting lost on the bus, so you don’t paddle board but settle on blackberry shaved ice, oily fried veggies for dinner, and two-stepping on the edge of town.

At first the dapper cowboys with their chivalry and their Christ and their lights and flags and footwork, extinct in the feminist land you come from, dazzle you with their grace and confidence.

They even pull you across the slick floor, boots clacking. You twirl, and the pancake alchemy persists.



But at some point between the circles your feet make gliding, and watching the couples, and turning around you to look at your newly former-strangers who are not your best friends, the gracemagic lemon poppy-seed pancakes and rivers like spines and blackberry syrup on your fingers provide weakens its spell.


And you are again just a girl.

In a place.

Alive and alone.


What is more anathema to the pancake two-stepping magic is not that you have no one you want to dance with, but that you have no one you want to tell there that there is no one you want to dance with.


And you are again just a girl.

In a place.

Alive and alone.



The silver lining is this: You can depend on that.