The Little Chowder that Could

I will admit fully and freely that, as a child, I very much took for granted that my mother is quite a brilliant chef. Not only were her recipes delicious and diverse (I don’t remember ever having the same thing twice in one week—a feat in itself), but everything always came out at exactly the same time. I didn’t realize the vast skill and planning this took until, when I was a teenager, she went out of town briefly and I tried to make my dad dinner. The chicken was burned on the outside, frozen in the middle, the peas were soggy, and I don’t even want to think about the rice. The only thing I could think to do was tearfully yell at my dad (who, good man that he is, took the unwarranted abuse with great grace) and then make tuna melts.

My continued culinary learning curve generally depended upon having a very patient dining companion—patient not only with the more or less edible product of my endeavors, but also with my hysterics throughout the cooking process. My roommate in Italy was one such companion. She would look on calmly as I perched on a footstool (the counters were remarkably high in our tiny kitchen), frantically trying to whisk a sauce into submission and yelling at the stubborn lumps. There was much rejoicing when I finally hit upon a successful recipe: Dijon and Balsamic vinegar marinated chicken. I also found out that one cannot go wrong with basil, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella. Like I said, it was a learning curve.

Once I had mastered a few simple meals, I realized the next major step in my cooking career would be the mastery of our most sacred family recipes, the ones that invariably meant home. I knew that at some point, somewhere between my basic sustenance and my mother’s mastery, food became more than what you chew and swallow for nourishment. It became a ritual, a two-way comfort mechanism. There were things I could not take with me, like the way my house smells or the feel of the back-porch floorboards on my feet, but I could take the recipes with me and try to make a new home with them.

A week after starting my first job, I told my sister over the phone that I was completely lost. Having vast experience with being far from home for work, she told me that whenever she is settling into a new place, the first thing she does is make her steel-cut oatmeal. The food and the ritual of preparation are comforting in their familiarity, their predictability. She asked me what thing meant home to me.

“Meatloaf,” I sniffled into the phone.

“Then make meatloaf.”

So I did. The act of pouring, squishing, and patting was the same as it always had been, and the homesickness got a little better.

Months later, I made my first batch of pilaf in my new apartment. I had inherited my grandmother’s pots and pans, and making her recipe, the staple carbohydrate of my childhood, was a little unnerving. The recipe involves the very strict admonition NOT TO PEEK, and I waited with no small amount of anxiety without touching the lid. When the required time had passed and I uncovered the pan, I think I actually wept a little bit because it looked exactly right. It tasted even better.

Recently I undertook an even bigger task: my mom’s clam chowder. My sweetheart had told me he absolutely loved chowder, so in preparation for his visit, I gathered the requisite ingredients (did you know they sell bottled clam juice? Like, the juice of clams?) and got down to business. My mother was on-call that night, and was not surprised that when the phone rang (several times) it was me on the other end, screaming things like, “OH GOD, IS THE BACON SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT?” (Incidentally, it is the bacon that makes the chowder.) Mom knew the recipe, and the unwritten modifications, by heart, and coached me through valiantly. Unfortunately for my nerves, the recipe doesn’t look like much until you add the final ingredient: the half and half.

But when I did, I swear it was like transubstantiation in a Dutch oven pot.

Where but a moment ago there had been a dubious-looking pile of glop, some miracle had occurred and I was staring into a pot of my mom’s clam chowder. When I tasted it, I actually whooped with joy and began dancing around my kitchen like an idiot. Next stop: Italian wedding soup.

Some of the more scientifically-minded people out there may point out that a recipe is a recipe for a reason: you follow the same instructions and you will get the same results. Not being scientifically-minded myself, I find that to be a precise load of hooey, because in the kitchens of my mother and my grandmothers, there was a lot more going on than just the combination of ingredients. Our lives happened in those kitchens. There were inevitably children of varying ages and dispositions tromping in and out, dogs underfoot, and probably three or more conversations happening simultaneously. “Well-tamed chaos” may seem like an oxymoron, but to me that’s the perfect description of home. And in the midst of that chaos, there was always incredible food.

So maybe that’s why I have a desperate need for my recipes to come out. If I can make something good from the chaos, then the chaos will have been worth it. My long-distance friends have become used to sudden screams and crashes of pots and pans over the phone—they know that just means I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to be a mess, but from the mess, so help me God there had better emerge something meaningful. Extrapolate that outwards, and you get the idea.

I have learned the hard way that there is no point at which the universe presents you with a certificate of adulthood, ala the Wizard of Oz handing out hearts and diplomas and medals of valor. I make meaning in my life where I found meaning in my childhood: in cooking, in comforting, and in being a chaotic and social creature.

Fortunately, ‘tis the season for all of those things:

I am immensely proud of the fact that yesterday I picked up my first ever solo Christmas tree: a marvelously plump, six foot tall Balsam, which I have named Noël. And I mean I literally picked it up. And carried three city blocks in high-heeled boots to the T. When I got home, I immediately put on the two definitive (if odd-couple) Christmas albums of my childhood: Nat King Cole and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s respective carols. Shortly, my DVD of “White Christmas” will arrive via UPS.

And next week, I will make the traditional family Christmas cookies, because the whole shebang just wouldn’t be the same without them.

The Facebook Debate

I had thought about how to approach a particular topic for a while and had spent many email hours polling my friends on their opinions. But really, it would just be me doing the asking when I finally wound up my courage, which I managed to do this weekend.

I was sitting with my sweetheart on his bed in his parents’ house, where we were taking a break from cleaning out the shop that holds, among other things, his dad’s car restoration projects and a keg of beer. I faced him with some trepidation and told him I had a really stupid question to ask him. He looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t even look him in the face as I asked:

Will you be my boyfriend on facebook?

Oy vey. My mortification knew no bounds.

I had been chasing my metaphorical tail on this for a long time, well before my boyfriend became my boyfriend (both on and off facebook—and for the record, I know these two phenomena are very different). On the one hand, I fully recognize that making it (cringe) “facebook official” has very little to do with the actual emotional life and reality of a relationship. If the electronic status of your partnership is the glue, there are significantly larger problems afoot. Mark Zuckerburg does not make your relationship real; you and your partner do.

So why, why if I knew all of these things did I still want it so badly?

It isn’t as though I’m insecure about my sweetheart’s affections. I am not, and have not been, lacking in reassurance from him. He challenges me when I need challenging, and he supports me when I need supporting. His Monday morning texts cause me to start my week with a really dopey smile on my face. But it’s also nice that he refers to me as his girlfriend, and that his friends and family know about me. I love that I am in the public record of his life as he is in mine. While I believe that wanting his friends and family to know I exist as his girlfriend is reasonable, the facebook debate takes a few steps beyond and treads suspiciously outside reason.

Facebook played an odd role in my college socialization. Early on freshman year, a friend of mine asked me if I had signed up, and the blank look I gave her indicated that I hadn’t. She immediately helped me set up my profile. I am one of those unfortunate people who have to make a conscious effort not to talk about myself all the time (and I often fail at that—blog much?). But here was this website that was inviting me to do so. I wondered at the time if people actually cared that I love Cheez-its and biking, and the answer was “no, probably not.” That question, however, has become obsolete in the brave new world of facebook and twitter. In the early days of facebook, during which time I joined, the website was restricted to college students only, and we stalked one other with alarming energy—indeed, we adopted “stalk” as our verb of choice, as if that weren’t indicative of some very weird cultural changes. Sometime before graduation, the site opened to non-college email addresses, and the deluge of high schoolers (disturbing) and then parents (even more disturbing) began. I think I entered into a new realm of weird when my grandmother friended me.

Something tells me that my desire to have people know that I am in a relationship finds its origins much, much earlier than facebook, but the current culture of (over)sharing has certainly encouraged my preexisting leanings and insecurities. I’ve had two boyfriends in the past who withheld (as it were) on facebook to varying degrees. The first was so loathe to even hold my hand in public that an expectation to declare couple-hood online must have been appalling to him. When I step back and look at the bigger picture of that particular relationship, I realize that the facebook relationship wasn’t what I was looking for necessarily; I was looking for any kind of validation, any freely given gesture of affection that might indicate that—for whatever reason—he was the other half of a couple, that I wasn’t just making this up.

In a way, the facebook relationship status is just that: a culturally idiosyncratic gesture of affection, rather than a public declaration of exclusivity. My sweetheart is seldom on facebook, so it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to update his profile, but when I asked him, burying my head in a pillow so that my words came out a bit muffled, he smiled and said, “Of course.”

What he did in that moment was not decide he wanted to announce to the social networking world that we were a couple. He decided that this thing that was not a big deal to him was, for whatever reason, important to this crazy girl of whom he is very fond. And so he gave it freely, probably a small thing to him but a big deal to me—whether that is reasonable or not was sort of a moot point.

In the ever expanding, networked universe in which we find ourselves, my own insecurities have been given a whole new stage on which to play out their varying dramas. I am reminded of a good line from an unfortunate movie in which Drew Barrymore laments, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting.” The weirdest part of hearing that line was that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I am often ambivalent about technology, but I have zero ambivalence towards a miraculous phenomenon that I’m sure has been played out for centuries before Mark Zuckerburg was ever born:

The insecure half of a couple seeks an odd form of validation from the other half of the couple, who, being very kind and almost shockingly insightful, gives this validation freely. And suddenly there is a significant change in status—internal, facebook, or otherwise:

Insecure half is… very happy, very grateful, and—by the way—in a relationship.

Cake-Stand Stories (or, The Chronicles of Naperville)

In the town where I grew up, there was a place called “Tasty Bakery.” It had a huge electric sign in the shape of a cartoon baker—imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe a few pounds lighter, with rosy cheeks. It’s nice to remember my town as it was: quiet, and full of family businesses. I guess when the Starbucks moved in, and the Eddie Bauer followed, the decline was really only a matter of time.

With my twenty-fifth birthday looming—and no, it doesn’t just approach, it decidedly looms—I had a sudden onset of nostalgia for Tasty Bakery, home of the best black and white cookies in the world, other cookies shaped as Chicago Bears helmets, and above all the raspberry chocolate birthday cake. Some of my first memories of home are from my older sisters’ birthdays: my mother would get the cake from the bakery and set it on a beautiful glass cake-stand. I think my love of single-use utensils originates with that stand; melon-ballers, garlic presses, and apple-corers have a special place in my heart because they are items that know their purpose. The cake itself was a two layer contraption of dense chocolate and raspberry filling. On top, around the circumference of the upper layer, were small nests of chocolate frosting and preserves. These, too, served a single purpose: they were where to place the candles.

I went looking for that bakery on the internet, hoping against hope that it hadn’t closed but simply moved. I was out of luck: the number, with my hometown area code, had been disconnected.

When we first moved there, my town was small: two lane roads and empty plots in our development. Storms would come over the prairie preserve across the street, turning the sky a bizarre and thrilling green, and then a thick, dark black. My friends and I would dig holes in the vacant lots and cover them with plywood as forts—afternoon kingdoms fed on goldfish crackers. There was one farmstand where we always bought our corn: a dozen-dozen ears. My dad and the daughters would gather on the back porch and shuck one hundred and forty-four ears of corn, which my father would then scrape, so my mother could freeze the corn-guts for sweet corn soufflé all winter long. My dad and his brother built me the biggest swing-set in the neighborhood with precut lumber; Chuck told my dad it was nuts to have it precut, and when it came together perfectly, my dad was nothing short of smug. I watched my sisters get ready for prom in the brightly lit mirrors in my parents’ bathroom—last minute hysterics over deodorant stains on black taffeta, followed by a deeply enviable entrance down our wrap-around flight of stairs into the foyer.

Sometimes I wonder how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt, writing out her childhood. I acknowledge that there is a very large difference between looking back at your childhood through the lens of industrialization as opposed to yuppification, but I still feel as though I’ve lost something. I view my childhood as something that is over, and therefore in some ways separate from my continuing relationships. I isolate people and places in memory, and in a way, put them in storage: the role they played in my childhood, and who they were then, remains static in the place where I keep my memories. In that space, my oldest sister, who now keeps her hair buzz-cut short, will always have blonde hair down to the middle of her back and wear her letterman’s jacket. My middle sister will always wear dark lipstick and oversized sweaters. My parents are perpetually forty, a time anomaly with which my mother takes no issue.

If one can extrapolate such a verb, I have in essence snow-globed my past—I’ve wrapped glass around the time between my first memories and roughly my twelfth birthday, and every now and then I look into the strange little world and see things that I miss, things that I wonder about. My relationship to my own history is a strange and complex beast, often taking on different incarnations. We necessarily live in our own timelines and tell ourselves stories to make sense of our own history—a post-modern, personalized myth-making, if you will. My favorite history professor in college said once that every generation invents its own past, and I think she’s right, though it’s not a one way street, as her syntax might indicate. As we invent our own pasts, we simultaneously draw on them to inform who we are. This is just one of many odd, tautological cycles I can’t quite seem to shake as I think about getting older. And all of this started because I wondered about a bakery I used to know.

I tell myself a story about my childhood: a snow-globe, a Laura-Ingalls-Wilderization of my history. Taken as simply a story, not as a living part of my own timeline—though it is both—maybe that story is one of those single-purpose objects I love; an emotional cake-stand: mostly useless, but lovely to have when you need it.

When my birthday loomed, then arrived, then passed with remarkable timeliness, I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the universe were looking at me and saying, “Well? You’re twenty-five now. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I would say that I have some pretty good stories to tell, and that I’m sure it will be a riot to look back at the snow-globe I will inevitably create sometime in the future, and marvel at my sweet and ridiculous twenties.

The Greatest Sum

Whenever I’m dealing with a particular problem, for better or worse my mind begins to catalogue experiences and memories that might help my sorting out the issue. It’s as though my brain has an automatic search function, and whether I like it or not, I get the search results with remarkable speed. Often in our lives, we base our decisions on our judgment of the situation at hand and our experience in the past. While it can be helpful to have that background—a bibliography for a decision—sometimes I wish I could solve the arithmetic of a problem without factoring in the sum of my complete experience:

It is August, and I am sitting in the passenger seat of the car belonging to the person I think of as my boyfriend. I am sixteen and have spent the entire summer with this charming boy, thinking that the high school experience I’ve been craving has finally started to happen. When I came back from my college tour, I knew instantly something was wrong, and today I ask him what will happen when we go back to our respective schools, and more specifically, will he call me his girlfriend. He gives me a look that will make me cringe even long after this painful hour is gone: the look that indicates that not only are all of my impressions mistaken, but it’s a little embarrassing that I could be that wrong at all. He says, “Well, I’ve been hanging out with an old flame lately… I never thought of you as my girlfriend.”

I am walking with my two sisters and our dogs in the park near our grandparents’ house. It is the dead of Indiana winter, and my eldest sister is livid. Earlier that year, she began referring to the man she was with as her partner, and it eventually became clear to the rest of the family that while they had committed to one another for the rest of their lives, that commitment would not come in the form of marriage. Our parents can be liberal-minded about many things, but this didn’t turn out to be one of them. JR, as I’ve called my sister since I was a child, is speaking more to the cold air and our other sister than to me, but she is relating how our mother told her that if her partner would not marry her, that might mean that he did not love her enough. Far out of my depth, I nevertheless venture the hesitant opinion that maybe it was less likely that they would break up if they were married. JR, who most resembles a bird of prey when she’s angry, turns to me and says, “Calling someone a wife doesn’t make leaving her any less of a possibility.”

I am wearing a surprisingly acceptable coral pink color and sitting in a sweltering church in Connecticut. As I listen to my middle sister read her vows, I am trying (and failing) to hold back tears that seem to come from two wells. The first is totally virtuous and kosher: happiness for my sister and her love. The second is completely shameful: somewhere between self-pity and envy, I am crying because I am not in love, and I feel an alarmingly dense hole in myself; the perfect opposite of the whole my sister is becoming with the man standing next to her.

I am sitting in my favorite margarita joint in Boston with someone about whom I am certifiably crazy; he is in a chair, and I’m across the table from him on the wall bench. He seems discontent with something, and eventually says, “Hold on. I want to move.” For a minute I’m confused, because the only thing my brain can piece together is that he wants to trade seats with me, which I find odd. But he gets up and comes over to sit down next to me, draping his arm behind my shoulders. “That’s better,” he says with satisfaction, and I am completely dumbfounded, both with joy and my brain’s inability to reconcile this guy with anything I thought I had figured out so far.

A Sesame Street tune from two decades ago sings in my head: one of these things is not like the other… one of these things just doesn’t belong. When the larger portion of your romantic experience takes the shape of disappointment, it can be difficult to fit a new, obscenely happy shape in with the rest of the puzzle. Part of me expects this round peg to eventually whittle itself down to fit itself into the square hole of my expectation, but I also have a strangely optimistic impulse to which I am entirely unaccustomed. And that makes me think about what exists in between the various shapes of my experience.

I wonder at what point our knowledge becomes more than the total of our experiences; when we become more than the sum of our parts; and when a belief in something we haven’t found yet fills the spaces in between. Out of what, exactly, do we make that mortar? I imagine it as a combination of hope and gravity, maybe even a biological imperative tucked somewhere near the nesting instinct and pack mentality I find within myself. My brain may not quite believe this thing is real, but the rest of me does and has been waiting for the chance to believe it for a long time.

I think somewhere along the way, my search engine memory also took it upon itself to deduce patterns. I have come to expect a certain trend, and this recent outlier has my brain stumped and suspicious. It would be easy, cowardly, to believe in the trend rather than in this new love, but I’ve come to understand that is the point at which I let the past beat the future before it’s even had a chance. So here are the things that are true:

I am more than the sum of my disappointments. I have never been good at math, so there is no reason to apply any of that reasoning to my emotional life now: trends, outliers, or whathaveyou. And more than this, perhaps most surprisingly of all, I am madly in love.

The One Year Mark

And so it was on the twenty-seventh of August that I squeaked in under my own deadline and published my twenty-fourth original work, just a week shy of my one year mark.

My therapist, whom I adore in all of the healthy ways, says often, when I’m questioning why it is that I form the things in my brain the way that I do, “Well, you’re a writer.” I think she frames “writer” as less of an occupation and more of a personal attribute—like being stubborn, or putting my right forefinger on my nose when I’m thinking hard. I suppose it doesn’t matter overmuch whether it’s inherent or learned; the important part is that it simply is, and it is a very large part of me.

One of the things I didn’t anticipate in this undertaking was how through the process of writing, I would be able to articulate things I didn’t know were there. It was as though my writing was two steps ahead of my brain, and when something illuminating would come out, I would stop and only be able to say in shocked tones, “Oh.” Also surprising was how this blog snuck into my everyday speech: talking with a friend, I will now occasionally pause and note, “Hmm… there’s a blog in there.” My friends have taken the addition of this particular idiosyncrasy with great grace and generosity—namely, none of them have rolled their eyes or told me to stop being self-referential. I thank you for this.

It never ceases to amaze me how much can change in a year; true to form, I want to frame this phenomenon as plotlines surfacing, disappearing, and making grand entrances. I am not entirely sure where I’ll go with this effort—whether the year of writing has worn me out or revved me up, I can’t quite tell. But I’m glad I did it: wringing confessions and enlightenment out of myself a couple of times a month made me think in different ways about how I form my world and how it forms me.

I’ll tell you this much: Carrie Bradshaw I ain’t. But I’m grateful to my alter ego, Dylan Fitzgerald, for allowing me some camouflage, without which I might not have had the courage to do this.

My name is not Dylan Fitzgerald, but this is still my Middleground.

With love, and thanks,
Cait

The Faith of a Freshman

Though I’ve worked for a large university for almost two years, it was not until recently that I went to work on the main campus. I should have known the fall was truly upon us when small family groups—generally two parents and an anxious-looking upper-adolescent—started boarding my daily bus with enormous bags of bedding and shower accessories. It only really hit me yesterday as I walked through the main quad on my lunch break. Large tents are not uncommon on campus, but the one that now covered a large swath of grass had an enormous sign: FIRST YEAR KEY PICK UP.

My own beloved alma mater did not have such a tent—instead, there was a small office in the basement of one of the central dorms, accessible through a backdoor in a parking lot. My parents and I went there first when we arrived on campus. It must have been pretty familiar to them by then; not only the freshman key pick up, but that very office: both of my sisters had picked up their keys there before me. What we didn’t know (though I wonder if they suspected) was that of the three of us who attended, I would be the one who would love it the most.

The clearest memory I have of the day my parents dropped me off at school came towards the end of the afternoon. It had started to rain a little, and I was wearing my brand new college hoodie, which I had purposefully gotten about three sizes too big. Just before they left, my dad turned and called out to me the exact phrase his father had said to him thirty-five years earlier as he was departing for the same college. After they drove away, I took a deep, shaky breath and walked up the steps of a then-unfamiliar building. I knew that, good or bad, something very big was starting.

But more importantly, here are the things I didn’t know:

I didn’t know that my mother was desperately trying to suppress panic for most of the day: she was convinced that between the bad weather and my asthma, I would probably need to be evacuated by helicopter at some point during the canoe trip I was about to embark upon. I also didn’t know that after they left me, my parents were both crying so hard that they missed their exit and had to drive about fifty miles out of their way to the next one.

I didn’t know that the unfamiliar building I was entering would become my second home on campus (I do know for a fact that I spent more waking hours in that building than I did in any dorm I lived in). That I would eat innumerable lunches on those steps and meet people there who now form my insides. That I would lie in the grass, walk through the mud, stomp through the leaves, and roll in the snow outside that building for four very, very good years.

That a year after graduation, I would visit campus, sit on the same steps, and try very hard not to cry because something else was beginning—my adult life—and I felt like I didn’t know anything.

My parents took a picture of me as I was walking away that I didn’t see until a few years later. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans that I would later wear out while studying in Italy and the giant green hoodie that now has stains all up one arm from a radio-active hot chocolate spill at Homecoming. Having grown into my place at college (if not the sweatshirt), I was always surprised at how small I look in that photo.

Colleges go out of their way to welcome their incoming freshmen—I know that mine did, most obviously in the form of upperclassmen, who chopped off varying degrees of hair, dyed the remainder psychedelic colors, and danced around in resplendent flair. But the real world? Not so much. My college life began with an acceptance letter, and my adulthood began with nine months of rejection. Adulthood orientation has not been nearly as much fun as college, but I think that’s just part of the deal.

My current landscape continues to become more familiar, but eventually I will need to leave it to do something else. And I’m sure it will be scary in all sorts of unique and debilitating ways, so something I should learn is the ability to turn my faith forward. When you’re starting something new and suitably terrifying, it’s almost impossible to be confident in anything, save your own nausea, and the definition of faith necessarily includes confidence: “Faith is the confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing.” Maybe when starting something new, I need to borrow confidence from where I was before: I earned it, I saved it, and now I literally owe it to myself. The confidence I learned as a freshman before might be able to fuel the faith I need in the future.

There still lots of things I don’t know, but maybe that can be something that I believe.

Just One of Those Things

In high school, after a trying day, it was not uncommon for me to come home, dump my backpack beside the couch, and announce to my mother that I needed my gravy boat. She would nod sympathetically as I sat down on the carpet next to the lower shelves in our kitchen’s island. The gravy boat in question was a beautiful piece of fine china from Limoges in the Autumn Leaf pattern. It was permanently fastened to its dish and had painted gold details on the lip and handles. If the day had been particularly rough, I might even go so far as to pull out a flat soup dish or two. I very seldom needed to go as far as hauling out the teacups, but I knew they were there if I needed them.

Call it object therapy.

I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.

Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.

When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.

A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.

I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.

A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”

Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.

We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.

I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.

And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.