Keeping Company
& unexpected small practices, plus first novel events
My first Heading North event is set: a launch at Midtown Scholar Bookstore (voted Publisher’s Weekly’s Bookstore of the Year!) on Wednesday, November 8, at 7 p.m. I’ll be in conversation with Curtis Smith, whose new novel The Lost and the Blind is out next week from Running Wild Press. You can order a signed copy of Heading North through Midtown Scholar here. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!
Sometime last winter, my two-year-old cat Roo developed a behavior in which he does not want to eat alone. We don’t know why. As long as he’s eating, the vet’s not concerned. Our pandemic brother cats have always been social about mealtimes; they make it a point to eat a little bit when we sit down to any meal. But while Gil will also eat whenever else he wants, Roo insists on company.
For a couple of months, that meant I was getting out of bed at 2 a.m. to stand beside Roo’s bowl in the kitchen and pet him while he ate six pieces of food. Then doing it again at 3 a.m. and 4. Then I became slightly more smart and put a bowl on my side of the bed, so I could just flop my arm over the edge of the bed and pet him without getting up1. Sometimes this also involves scooting to the edge of the bed so he can touch his nose to my nose before eating, which is very cute.
During the day, if we’re home, he’ll come get one of us for an escort to his bowl. If I’m away for the day, often I’ll be met at the door and he leads me to the bowl. I’ll sit on the floor while he crunches away, and I’ve taken to picking up a book to accompany those minutes, so he will eat his fill.
The book I am reading in those moments is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. So much has already been written and said about this marvelous collection of essays that weaves together indigenous ways of knowing and interacting with plants and landscapes, contemporary scientific knowledge, and elements of personal narrative, but one concept that sits at the center of these essays is patience in the act of care. Kimmerer illustrates this in many ways, but one that recurs is her process of cleaning out and maintaining a pond at her home. She rakes out raft after raft of choking algae, tending to the plants and shoreline not only at her first desire for a place for her and her daughters to swim but year after year. And when her daughters are excited about the possibility of making maple syrup from the trees that grow at their home, Kimmerer is the one to sit up with the simmering sap because the girls are young and she wants to foster their joy.
The book is laden with these kinds of care. I am grateful to be reading it while sitting beside my inexplicably particular cat. Would he, when hungry enough, probably eat by himself? I expect so. He manages all right when we’re away and he has only our wonderful cat-sitting friends for a few hours a day. But there’s no reason I can’t sit with him when I’m home. It’s no hardship for me to wait and read a while, so why begrudge it?
Some treasures:
A rare podcast recommendation from me: Finding Favorites with Leah Jones
Let me begin by prefacing this with a declaration of love for the very concept of the show: a way to get recommendations for things without an algorithm. To achieve this, host Leah Jones brings guests onto her show to talk about their favorite things. As a dedicated liker-of-many-things, this is catnip for me. I’ll point you specifically to this recent episode with poet and playwright Dan O’Brien, wherein the conversation constellates around British comedies—and we get a little information about the three books he has coming out this fall!—and this older edition with fiction writer Jen Michalski, whose favorite is S. E. Hinton. As a young writer who lived and died for The Outsiders, I found this to be especially important.
“Resistance Song” by Jill Sobule:
“Resistance Song” is from her 1995 album Listen, which was something I listened to over and over again in college (where it was recommended to me by my excellent roommate). It happened to turn up on shuffle as I drove home one day last week2 and was reminded of how much I love it. Delightful whimsy factor and heart.
“The Pub with No Beer” by Kevin Barry
The interplay of past and present in this story is handled in a fascinating way that is the story; to say the voices of the story’s narrative past intrude upon the text is too strong for the tone and effect, but they do arrive with a certain abruptness, sometimes wholly unannounced, in such a way that masks their pastness. It’s also a very subtly done pandemic story, a story of silences and solitudes—save those voices that fill the room and the mind, surely as bodies. No one is doing short stories like Kevin Barry.
Some making:
In praise of summertime fancy toast: while the season holds, toast (or grill) your favorite bread or bread-adjacent item and top it with fresh, meltingly soft sliced peaches, crumbled goat cheese, some slivers of prosciutto or speck, a generous confetti of torn basil, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar reduction or pomegranate molasses.
Join me and a bunch of supportive, interesting writers at Barrelhouse Magazine’s wonderful and affordable Conversations & Connections conference in Philadelphia on Sept. 23.
Maybe someone with more fortitude than I have could wait him out, but he’ll cry for two or three hours if he has to, or escalate: there are no movable objects on any flat surface in the bedroom anymore. I made my bargain: I’ll take my slightly interrupted sleep over no sleep at all.
Most often in my car, I am listening to my 18-year-old iPod Nano, which contains most of the music I’ve collected since 1999, and those thousands of songs are most often on shuffle. So sometimes I’m treated to a real blast from the past or a song I haven’t heard in quite a long time.