Hounded by Kate Bush: A Tribute...

I first learned about Kate Bush as a freshman in college. I learned about her in a way that is embarrassing to admit to but was characteristic of the time: a quiet boy in my dorm with pale blue eyes and an all-black wardrobe (also, in retrospect, a mullet) told me I looked like her.  It was narcissism and a budding crush that inspired me to rush to the record store that same afternoon and pick up a cassette of hers, but I've been fully entranced by her mysterious, beguiling, smoky-eyed, utterly idiosyncratic charms for my own reasons ever since. That year, I even dressed up like Kate Bush and lip-synched to Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) for a celebrity look-alike charity fundraiser, unconcerned that no one in Kansas but the boy with the blue eyes and I seemed to know who she was. Everyone else was dressed up as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper or Simon LeBon, there was a veritable Claire's Boutique warehouse worth of leggings, rubber bracelets, eyeliner and mesh gloves in the room, and because no one knew who I was, I felt beyond cool, channeling Kate’s inimitably hot-and-chilly English persona as best I could.

The Kate Bush album I bought that afternoon was Hounds of Love. The image of her lying on a purple bed with a diaphanous mauve sheet across her chest, her dark hair splayed out around her, pouty lips and two sleek Weimeraners snuggling against her, one gazing up at her lovingly, was jarringly intimate and sensual.  I stared at the woman lying there with her arms around the dogs in the photo - okay, yes, it seemed like she had a post-sex afterglow - and I thought, I could look like her to someone? I was eighteen, fresh from the suburbs, naive, prone to blurting out whatever I was thinking at inappropriate moments (still am), and apparently I also ran off to record stores the moment that I got attention from cute boys: I could look like this confident, sexy, fully-formed woman who stared back at the camera lens, daring the viewer to disapprove of her? As someone who had always sought approval, just the photo itself unraveled me a little.  That I even reminded one person of the woman in the picture was enough to give me the boost I needed to think I was cut from a different cloth that those boring, cookie-cutter people who went to football games in at my dorm. As soon as I was exposed to Kate Bush, I stopped trying to fit in and I found my crowd: the artsy, weird, wonderful misfits came out of the woodwork to meet me and they have ever since.

I really believe that there were two identifiable, seismic inner-shifts I had as a young person that have determined my direction in life ever since: becoming a vegetarian at fifteen and discovering Kate Bush three years later.  Vegetarianism gave me the tools to become the sort of person who was in harmony with her values: Kate Bush with her inspired, bold, thoroughly-engrossed-in-chasing-her-muse example was a different sort of catalyst, teaching me that women could be as seized by an artistic, aesthetic drive as any brilliant male artist.

And the music. The incredible, unearthly sounds that she made. That voice, screeching one moment and guttural the next, changing from a sweet little chirp to a grandiose, swooping vocal in one brief line, Kate's voice expressed a quality I’d not come into yet, which was a person who was fully at home with herself.  In one moment, she could sound like she'd gulped helium, in the next, her voice was indescribably lush and gorgeous. Despite this, it didn't take long to integrate the two, these opposing voices that could exist in one person and be transformative together. Hearing her voice was a little like the first time I had kombucha. At the first sip, I recoiled at the weirdness of it, the distinctly vinegar flavor with the carbonation that made me feel lightheaded, and then I somehow couldn't resist taking another sip. By the third sip of kombucha, it was not only like it was always imprinted as part of my DNA code but I also was hooked. Kate Bush was kombucha to me.

The moment my Walkman's wheels spun the thin black tape and that translated into sound in my headphones, the dorm room around me dissolved and I was in her world. She has been quoted as saying that she wants her music to intrude, and this is an understatement. She was running up a hill, she was haunted by hounds, an angry man threatened her, made us sympathetic to her as a witch, she described with chillingly simple detail something - a person? - moving under ice, alive but desperate to get out, a ghost in her home, murderers. There was the complex instrumentation, too, the creepy rise and fall of the synthesizer in Mother Stands for Comfort (not to mention the disturbing lyrics belying the gentle, almost sleepy singing), the amazing fretless bass throughout that gave me goose bumps to the point where I needed to put on a sweater to listen.  The first time I saw music as being sculptural, as something I could almost reach out, feel, and let wash over me was through Kate Bush's Hounds of Love album that freshman year in college, sitting on my industrial cot in my messy room. I’d loved albums and songs before but this was different. I was spellbound and I wore that cassette down within a few months. I hungrily reached for the rest of her albums, each one leaving me more punch drunk than the previous. Hounds of Love will always be my Kate Bush album, though, because it was my first.

I was a painting major with English major leanings. I had no idea as to how this would translate into the real world of paying bills and supporting myself, but her music assured me that anything was possible. Kate Bush had her first recording contract at sixteen and Hounds of Love, her fifth album, came out when she was 27. This was the first album she self-produced, making it in the studio she built so she could record it at the pace she wanted, exactly as she wanted. Kate Bush’s music resonated so powerfully with me also because of her story: that she was a fierce believer in her right to be heard, to intrude, and to not always sound pretty or ever be packaged as a plaything. Her childlike curiosity, the way that she played with sound like a four-year-old smashing around finger-paints, the way trusted a bold muse with enough confidence that she was willing to fall on her face, helped me to realize that the pursuit of a creative vision should also be damn fun sometimes (when it’s not infuriating), or your results will suffer. It will be anemic and stale: maybe you will have technical proficiency but you won’t inspire. Our culture can hold to firmly to the archetype of the artist as a dour, long-suffering, joyless scold, and Kate, with her feral, playful but also deeply disciplined aesthetic, gave lie to that outdated notion.

Kate Bush was passionate and sensitive, feminine and ferocious in one, petite, totally unshackled form. More than any of the visual artists I studied, she was my inspiration because she was the one who challenged me, as a woman, to intrude. By the time I graduated and left Kansas, I was optimistic and hungry for the future. I had an amazing group of friends who supported and challenged me, I believed in myself for the first time since early childhood. This might have happened without Kate but I don’t like to contemplate a life without her. Years later, at 26, I met my husband. The first night we went out, we bonded on our mutual love of Kate Bush and I knew I’d never have to explain myself to this man. I knew I’d found home. 

Kate is not perfect, of course, because she’s real, flesh-and-blood, not a marketing creation. After the creative burst of her young adulthood, her output has tapered off considerably. She is a reclusive person, living with her husband and son, rarely giving interviews. (This is a sweet one, though, from 1980: yes, Kate is, or at least was, a vegetarian.)  Some of her songs are overwrought and her music videos – oh, her music videos! - are cringe-worthy at best and stand as very good examples of bad performance art from the 1980s. You can’t say that she didn’t put it all out there, though. Ambition and gumption are to be admired in this fearful, self-conscious world. Who knows what kind of astounding music she’s creating, epic songs she’s writing, off alone with her family and her imagination?

The quiet boy in black with the pale blue eyes faded into the background and I don’t think I saw him past my freshman year. I probably fell in love fifty more times that year alone. He left a lasting legacy to inspire me, though: the knowledge of a daring, brilliant, beautiful woman living as an artist, one who refused to do anything but intrude.

The Case for Why Vegan Feminists Should Just Rule the World Already

Do I really need to count the reasons why? Yes. Yes, I do.

A real live vegan feminist is the best kind of person to know. This is not opinion: this is scientifically provable fact. She has the most interesting array of friends, knows the best restaurants, books, films and music, and she will make you laugh and laugh with her impressions of stupid, annoying people. The vegan feminist will bring more cultural savvy and belly laughs into your life. Trust this.

While the rest of the world is tittering over the latest antics of a celebrity who is having a public nervous breakdown or psychotic episode, vegan feminists are too busy actively cultivating a whole different reality to notice or care. That's how cool and above it all we are.

We organize vegan bake sales that raise thousands of dollars to make the world a better place in our spare time, and, no, there's not a lot of time to spare what with these misogynist wing-nuts running around everywhere ruining everything. Still, we manage.

We are equally nimble at discussing the intersectionalities of oppression or this really great recipe we found for dairy-free Eggplant Parmesan. Some of us have also been known to talk about the really awesome shoes we found online.

Now that peak oil has come and gone, vegan feminists on bikes will be the incandescent symbol of the new world order. It’s inevitable: we will be the next icons. What? It’s not going to be a violently apoplectic tea partier with a stupid haircut, I guarantee it. Best to befriend a vegan feminist now rather than seem like a johnny-come-lately.

Despite our reputation of being a bunch of sanctimonious scolds, we have a great sense of humor, because, really, how could you live in this world and not have one? We can even laugh at ourselves. For example, how many vegan feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: THAT'S NOT FUNNY.

With possible food shortages looming, vegan feminists are powerful allies. We cannot only make a great dinner out of just basmati rice, kalamata olives, vegetable scraps and a can of coconut milk, and we can organize a kick-ass potluck in our sleep.

We don't sleep, by the way. Too much to do. Like brainstorm meals and organize potlucks.

When life gives us lemons, we make organic, Fair Trade lemonade and we grate the rind for later use so as to not be wasteful, then we sell the lemonade to help support an awesome cause. Why? What do you do with lemons?

Some of us have children, some of us would rather adopt a pack of asocial, peri-menopausal jackals. Some of us wear make up, some consider lip balm an obvious doorway to selling out the sisterhood. Vegan feminists of today like to keep you guessing. In other words, we’re not all wearing hemp power suits and swaying to the dulcet harmonies of the Indigo Girls on our iPods. In other other words, watch what you say.

Looking for a book recommendation? Fiction [Science fiction? Dystopian? Fantasy? Young Adult? Post-modern?] ? Non-fiction? Biography? Memoir? We’ll send you our lists. Is it okay if they’re not alphabetized?

Who’s going to help you move? Who’s going to pick you up from the airport? Who’s willing to sniff the questionable Vegenaise? Well, it might not always be a vegan feminist, but if we say that we will do it, we’ll do it.  Why? Because we are dedicated friends who keep our word and because we are fearless.

Vegan feminists will listen to you complain about your life with sensitivity and understanding but hold you to a high standard of changing the things you can. Because we believe in you, that’s why, and because we don’t coddle.

When a local newscaster smugly narrates forage of a woman stripping to save the polar bears or minks or whatever, do not blame the vegan feminists for the bad press. Nobody consulted us on this.

Who’s starting wars? Who’s undermining unions? Who’s hunting deer and whales? Who’s letting their dogs poop everywhere and not cleaning up after them? Who’s generally screwing things up miserably? Not vegan feminists.

At the end of the day, or even the beginning, we rock because we’re funny, critically engaged, whip-smart, fierce, compassionate and consistent. Vegan feminists are hard at work trying to make the world suck a little less: what other subculture could say the same thing and be able to actually, you know, point to proof of it? 

If vegan feminists ruled the world, there would be beautiful gardens everywhere, Rush, Glenn, and Sarah would be the names of our poodle mixes, and chocolate would be a birthright (it’s all organic, Fair Trade and dark because we rule so we can just call it chocolate now). We’d have to dedicate no time to cleaning up messes caused by stupid, sexist, right-wing windbags and selfish corporate opportunists. What does this mean? More time for creative self-expression, bike rides and potlucks. This is why vegan feminists should just rule the day already.

Who’s with me?

Let's hear it for the weird kids!

After innumerable teacher's conferences, field studies and unsolicited comments lo these past eight years, I’m not leaping to any conclusions here to deduce that my son is perceived as a little strange by society at large. An odd duck. Maybe even weird. Not alarmingly weird, like the kind of boy a mother instinctively shields her own child from weird. On the contrary, he's the sort of boy that mothers tend to want their children to play with, at least that’s what I hear. He's well-behaved, he's witty, he shares well, he's articulate. But he's just...weird.

My son creates elaborate stories involving him and his friends having adventures catching ghosts and aliens and he draws plans for cat hotels with deep, winding underground tunnels. He could name four-syllable dinosaurs from the Cretacious period when he was five but he couldn’t tell you any characters from SpongeBob SquarePants. (Still can’t.) At his preschool, an idyllic place run by a painter almost as an artist’s retreat for young children, my son decided that in the year-end production of The Adventures of Frog and Toad he wanted to depict a Vegan Velociraptor rather than any characters already created. He settled for this as his second choice because his teacher didn't know how to begin to spell the Triassic era’s coelophysis.

Even at this artsy preschool with the bold paintings everywhere and interesting projects always being undertaken, my son was considered odd, not in a negative way, more like he was a rare museum acquisition, a gem to behold. He was adored, he was encouraged, but he was a little…strange. The message that I’ve consistently gotten is that every child is unique, of course, but that my child is a little more unique. “He has a rich inner world,” is how educators typically characterize him.

When he was two, my son burst out crying that whole autumn with the leaves falling from the trees, the life-and-death of it all bringing him to tears. I would tell him that the leaves would come back in the spring and he would point to a pretty red maple one on the ground and sniff, “Not that one.” I had no answer for that. He was far too tender for the local Waldorf school: all their plaintive songs about the cycles of life sent him wailing and scrambling past the pastel scarves to the door. That sensitivity, combined with his singular way of interpreting the world, has worked together to create an unusual child.

When he was three, my son was so spellbound by the Pompeii exhibit at the Field Museum that he insisted that we go straight home and start painting volcanoes immediately. For a year, I drained our library system of every possible volcano-themed book and movie. Every story he told, every drawing he made, my son found a way to bring it back to volcanoes. They reigned supreme until he learned about tsunamis, underwater volcanoes, which led him to deep-sea creatures, dinosaurs and evolution. His first band, created at five with a few of his friends, was called Bronto-Scorpions Don’t Wear Socks, the name of their signature song, with the lyrics being that phrase repeated over and over again.

Now eight, left to his own devices, my son would still have every article of clothing on not only inside-out but backwards. He can describe the movement of the tectonic plates but he has trouble bouncing a ball. He could explain the phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis to you reasonably well but he can’t figure out the mechanics of tying a shoelace for the life of him. He doesn’t care, though, because who has time to tie a shoelace when there are alternate universes to create? Shoelaces are a waste of time. Thank goodness for Velcro.

There is a long literary and cinematic tradition of weird kids – also identified variously as nerds, underdogs, freaks, spazzes – being celebrated as under-appreciated, often long-suffering, ultimately victorious heroes. From Charlie Bucket to the Harry Potter trio, the theme of triumphing over bullies, bad circumstances and danger is something that resonates with the human spirit. We feel emboldened by their courage, buoyed by their independence and uncommon grace. The underdogs’ willingness to forge ahead despite their obvious liabilities is deeply uplifting and we are inspired by the courage with which they take a less-traveled path. We like to imagine that we would do the same in their Velcroed shoes. Well-liked, accomplished and athletic characters aren’t juicy, rich or compelling. Our hearts are with the scrappy, weird ones. We like their spirits, we identify with their struggles and we root for them because if a weird child triumphs, it means that there is some equity and goodness in the world.

Weird kids out in the field, though, face a different reality because their enjoyment of life is contingent on how they are perceived and treated by other children. While almost all children side with Harry Potter over his mean-spirited cousin Dudley, they aren’t always kind to actual flesh-and-blood classmates who don’t fit in. Weird kids often eat alone. They can struggle to make friends without active parental involvement. They are among the last picked as partners or for teams. While the other children are scheduling play dates and squeezing in birthday parties, odd kids often live in a much different social landscape. They don’t necessarily mind this – many are not joiners – but at a certain age, they become aware that their peers have very different social experiences.

The message from adults should be that what makes the so-called weird children of the world tick is also what makes them wonderfully unique individuals and gives them the qualities that will get them far in life. Instead the message is that while it’s great to be different, for their own good, they don’t want to be too different. It is a protective instinct, I think, but I don’t believe it’s what’s best for their evolving spirits. As long as the children are kind and respectful to others, I honestly think that they should be left alone to develop their weird selves.

I would bet that Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein were total weirdoes growing up. So were Thomas Edison, Emily Dickenson and Galileo, I’m sure. That sort of obsessive, singular vision, the total immersion not in simply perfecting their craft but becoming pioneers does not happen for those who prioritize fitting in at all costs. Weird kids are often “weird” because they have a different calling altogether. Like the very high-pitched whistles that are imperceptible to most human ears, I think these children hear (and see and think and feel) stuff missed by many others but it is so plainly obvious to them, they can’t help but respond to it.

Many wonderfully strange children of today will grow up to be great innovators, inventors, artists, peacemakers, novelists and problem-solvers. They are often the ones who are driving the world toward progress and new, creative, compassionate ways of thinking and living.

To us, it is perfectly normal that our son has a school for his cat with a daily schedule (kitty nap time, cat math, kitty climbing) on the chalkboard. He plies Clover with catnip and she occasionally indulges him when she’s not hiding behind the radiator. Today my son has Kitty School but in fifteen years, he could be developing curricula for a whole new educational approach. Maybe it will be one that honors and encourages the exquisite weirdness of all pupils.

The future of the world depends on these odd children blazing their new, wonderful, weird paths. Thank goodness for them.

The Emotional Pipeline of Food

Going down this very well traveled road of exploring food and emotions, I may as well start by saying that I was not a very happy child growing up. Or I could amend that to say that I was happy as a young child but went through a very dark time that lasted for years due to circumstances I couldn’t control. Tempers were unpredictable, confusing undercurrents influenced everything and most people couldn’t be trusted, so food became a source of consistency and reliability. When others failed, food was there for me. Coffee tables could easily be upturned in a fit of rage and my mother might have been pacing the house crying, but food was always a trusted companion. While life was uncertain, the top of a Hostess Cupcake would still always lift off in one piece, Wheat Thins would always taste exactly the same, one after the next. Food also helps to smooth over the edges, distract and numb us; it is an opportunity to feel better, or at least less bad, if only briefly.

Beyond the palliative effect food seems to have on most of us, the familiar tastes and scents of our childhood foods contain vivid memories and give us easy access to our emotional wiring. Jay’s potato chips will always make me think of my mother. Her favored snacks have always come from the salty-crunchy food group: sweets, she can take them or leave them, but popcorn, tortilla chips, corn chips and, most of all, potato chips make her feel instantly better. Potato chips bring to mind greasy paper plates and summertime, comfort and frustration fused together.

Catching a whiff of Hershey’s chocolate syrup instantly reminds me of my father, of drunkenly constructed sundaes at the kitchen table, of richness and bitterness swirled together. I remember the cans of Hershey’s syrup with triangles punctured into the lid, chocolate globs dried on top, always in our fridge. My father sought out sweet flavors like it was a genetic imperative: he had no interest in my mother’s bags of crunchy things, but if there was cake or brownies or ice cream in the house, he couldn’t help but devour the whole thing like a tornado. Whereas my mother has that enviable ability to eat ten potato chips and call it a day, my father was voracious in all matters and had no inner-mechanism for quitting once he started doing whatever it was that made him feel better. So when I smell Hershey’s syrup, I also think of desperation.

The influence of a Jewish grandmother who showered her family with love and home cooked meals probably cemented this merging of food and emotions together for me. Nothing will ever compare in quality to even her simplest grilled cheese sandwiches. I cannot think of my grandmother and not associate her with the smell of sizzling potatoes in vegetable oil, the intoxicating steam of matzo ball soup, perfectly crispy-and-chewy ruggelah, It is hard to think of her and not remember the comforting smells of her kitchen, of sitting at the kitchen table with my feet wrapped behind the chair legs, grating potatoes and onions, cracking eggs into flour and sugar. Her kitchen was a place to escape, a place where I was not simply accepted but adored. Even though her hands prepared it, her food was imbued somehow with my feelings toward her and my sweet grandfather: uncomplicated love and devotion, bites of gratitude and contentment that warmed me from a hollow place in my belly like a hot potato wrapped in foil. It’s no surprise that I have her photo up on my kitchen wall, along with her grater, rolling pin with the chipping red handles and ceramic set of containers. I’m not much of a collector of mementos, but one room in my house is different. Food is full of memories and emotions at times: my kitchen reflects that.

Not unexpectedly, when I became a vegetarian and later a vegan, I felt that schism from my past pretty profoundly. It was one thing to distance myself from unhappy times associated with food – I am glad to never eat a lamb chop again for many noble reasons, but self-centeredly, I’m glad because they remind me of Sundays, which remind me of when my father was home from work, which reminds me of tension, fights and tires peeling out of our driveway - but going vegetarian meant separating from comforting, warm memories as well. It meant saying goodbye to my grandmother’s Jell-O, always reliably ready for my brother and me. It was just Jell-O, a powder bought in a box, totally artificial but it was perfect because it was from my grandmother. The first thing we would do when we went to her condo was open her fridge and grab our cups of Jell-O: consistency, care and blessed predictability could be found in that wobbly gelatin. Giving up meat meant no more corned beef and meltingly tender potatoes that only my grandmother could make. Chicken noodle soup, kishke, raspberry jam dot cookies: gone, gone, gone.

I recognize missing my grandmother and the emotional connection with her is more significant than missing the specific foods she made us, though I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t miss that for a time, too. What she cooked for us felt sublime because it seemed to be infused with her spirit and the awareness that when I was eating it, I was happy: I was safe, away from my worries and I was with her.

I think we do a disservice to people struggling in their transition to veganism when we downplay or overlook how emotional food memories imprint themselves upon us and our psyches. I consider becoming a vegetarian at fifteen the best decision I ever made because it paved the way for so many other blessings in my life, but I have to acknowledge that there was a loss there, too. Just as giving birth to my son, the light of my life, was an incredible gift that I cannot overstate, there was a loss with it, too, of independence, of the freedoms I enjoyed before he come into my life. This is not to say that I ever for a moment regret having him but that things are not always so relentlessly upbeat.

Someone’s memory of fried chicken might be deeply intertwined with childhood and carefree summers at her grandparent’s farm. Another person might associate hamburgers and milkshakes with a particular restaurant, just him and his dad once a week, or, to someone else, chicken noodle soup with Ginger Ale was something her mother always gave her when she was home from school with a fever. Chicken salad sandwiches aren’t just chicken salad sandwiches: they are picnics with your cousins, a chance to see your parents smiling and turn your world upside-down by rolling down the hill. Corned beef sandwiches with mustard on rye are you and your papa sitting side by side at the lunch counter, him taking your cole slaw and giving you his potato chips, the way his breath always sounded, steady like an engine. Little Debbie snack cakes were you and your best friend, hiding out in your tree house every day that July: not as decadent as Hostess, but perfect for what they were because they were the food that transformed you into superheroes. When we eat these foods, we not only revisit familiar tastes that comfort us because we recognize them, we revisit familiar feelings that comfort us because of our memories.

A way out of the mental trap that our past is our destiny is to recreate the tastes and flavors you grew up loving. We are so fortunate to be living at a time that this is possible. There is a cookbook for every taste, from raw salads to comfort foods, as well as all manner of ethnic cookbooks within the vegan sphere. A trip to a well-stocked library is a great starting point. Asking an herbivore if he has any particular recipes will probably result in you getting a dozen variations – we vegans love to be helpful! – and I think that with an open mind, patience and a willingness to experiment, you could find a good staple of recipes that fulfill what you’ve been missing. Plus, there’s everything from egg-free mayonnaise to dairy-free melty cheese now to help you on your way, products not necessarily created for the vegan market but for people who have to cut down on animal products for health reasons. These are designed to taste as close as possible to what you grew up eating.

The first time I had matzo ball soup again after a twenty-year embargo, it was a revelation, like all those years melted away and I was with my grandmother again, sitting in her little yellow kitchen. The broth didn’t come from chickens and the matzo balls didn’t have eggs but that didn’t create any barrier to my grandmother. That place in my belly, no longer hollow but missing her sweet spirit, filled again, not with food so much as with her particular smile, voice, vibrant energy. I feel the same way when I use her rolling pin, creating things that nurture and nourish my family, make them smile. I hope that my son will grow up to continue the tradition, also feeding the people he loves delicious, nourishing, peaceful food.

Perhaps what is most important is that if we are craving the feeling of nurturance of long ago foods, we look inside and ask how we can create that sense in a more lasting, rooted way in ourselves beyond food. Veganism shouldn't be a barrier. When we think that we’re hungry for a specific thing – an omelet, a French dip sandwich, whatever - often we’re hungry for feelings and a time in our past. Can we cultivate an inner-source of nurturance, love and joyfulness that meets our deeper needs? If we can’t access that, nothing will fill ever us up.

Tough Love in the Confessional Booth

(I understand that nuns do not run confessional booths but I'm a feminist so I'm going to run with it, okay?)

Let's be honest here. I know what's expected of me, I am just not going to cooperate.

I know that I'm supposed to pat your hand, sigh deeply and nod.  The unspoken covenant between us is that in a sincere, supportive tone, I am supposed to tell you that I understand, it is far too difficult for you to do what I do. I am infused with something elusive to others, I have a preternatural self-discipline, despite all evidence to the contrary. I am monk-like, apparently, birds fearlessly alight on my robes as I gather roots and nuts in the garden for my Spartan meals. As a real-live vegan, I am often perceived as an eco-priest of some sort and since I'm friendly enough, I am supposed to relieve others of the burden of their guilt.

Let's get on with it, then, shall we?

You grew up in a meat-eating home.
Interesting. So did I. So did pretty much everyone I know.

You ate meat every day growing up.
Yes, that sounds familiar. Go on.

No, really, you ate lots of meat. Like, if you had the eight arms of Vishnu or the four-to-ten arms of Kali, each hand would be holding a plate piled high with meat. Your meat came stuffed with meat, with a side of meat and served on a bed of meat.
Whoa, that's a lot of meat but I get what you're saying.

And you really like the taste of meat.
You may find this hard to believe but I completely understand. For the first fifteen years of my life, my Grandmother's brisket was pretty much my favorite thing in the world to eat. I would race to her kitchen and grab a piece before dinner officially started, that's how much I loved my Grandmother's brisket.

But you don't like vegetables.
I grew up on the same sad iceberg lettuce salads as most people did in my generation with very little else but button mushrooms, Idaho potatoes and the occasional carrot thrown into the mix. I did not experience kale, parsnips, winter squashes, Japanese eggplant, and so on until I got The Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook at a New Age bookstore - it still smells like incense all these years later - and the uncharted territory of the produce aisle suddenly appeared in front of me like the magical kingdom of Oz. I learned to like most vegetables by working with them and experimenting, not through osmosis.

Your blood sugar plummets if you don't eat protein! You feel weak. You become a raving lunatic.
I would too, I'm pretty sure. That's why I eat protein.

You don't like to cook.
I will admit that I do like to cook. I had to learn how to cook like anyone else, though, this knowledge wasn't bestowed upon me by my personal vegan faerie who appeared to me in the steam over my stove-top the first time I attempted to boil pasta. I do not and have never had access to any supernatural abilities to the best of my knowledge, though I'm pretty good at finding a parking spot and a seat next to the craziest person on the train. That's about it, though. Pretty much everything else comes from effort and learning.


The culinary traditions of your heritage and family make it very hard to imagine a life without animal products.
No kidding! The culinary traditions of my heritage include the aforementioned brisket, chicken noodle soup, kreplach, chicken Kiev, corned beef sandwiches and of course there was all the regular stuff of my generation: Oscar Mayer hot dogs and bologna sandwiches, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, cans of Chef Boyardee with mushy meatballs and so on. I was not raised on a back-to-the-land kimchi production commune in the mountains of Santa Cruz. I grew up on the North Shore of Chicago.

It’s too hard to find vegan food.
Okay. Back in the olden days when screeching Jurassic-era winged reptiles terrorized the land-dwellers and you could buy a comic book for a quarter, we herbivores used to eat soy protein weenies in a can. Jarringly beige, roughly approximating a cylindrical shape and perhaps constructed of pulverized flip-flops, we didn’t complain about them, either, because we were altogether too sincere and just too grateful to have an opportunity to eat yellow mustard again. I know that all circumstances vary and some are much more advantageous than others, but nothing can compare today, because, seriously, those hideous weenies were revolutionary to us then. This is why I occasionally glaze over when people tell me that it’s too hard to be a vegan. I'm just flashing back to those canned weenies and remembering how happy I felt just to be able to eat something similar to a hot dog again at a Fourth of July barbecue even if my stomach hurt for the rest of the night. Unless you live in Antarctica or a Biosphere-like setting, you should have decent access to some lovely and natural options as a vegan.

Your family does not support you.
I do understand that this is not easy. When I became a vegetarian at fifteen, I was told that I was on my own in the kitchen: I could be a vegetarian but I'd have to cook for myself. Not exactly an enthusiastic show of support but it was what it was. For years after making the decision to be a vegetarian, I was treated as though my diet were indisputable proof of an eating disorder, my predisposition toward naivety, or blatantly mutinous behavior. I did not meet one other "out" vegetarian until I was a junior in college other than the Hari Krishna devotee with the shaved head who used to hand out copies of "A Higher Taste" while twirling around Grant Park. He seriously had little whirligigs spinning around in his pupils. Yep, that guy in the saffron robe WAS my community. This was before the Internet and meet-ups and message boards and a million other fantastic resources at most fingertips today. 

See? I would be a failure as a priest in a confessional booth. Failure! It's a good thing I'm a non-religious female of Semitic descent or that might really disappoint me.

I do understand obstacles, though. We all face them and it is part of life. What is a worthwhile, passionate life without the occasional challenge? If everything were laid out in front of us in an effortless, predictable, pre-masticated sort of way, wouldn’t that get boring after a while? To be driven by something outside of our customs and comfort zone, we are forced to stretch and grow. This is not to say that being vegan is difficult because I don’t believe that it is, but that swimming against the current requires some determination when the waters become choppier than we'd like. Constructing our lives to minimize harm to other animals - beings humans were almost universally raised to believe exist solely for our purposes - is a dramatically different way to live and perceive our place in the world. It would make sense that living with this perception and commitment would require some adjustments, given how deeply entrenched this attitude of human entitlement is and how our society conforms to it. The obstacles we face and overcome are essential to our continuing evolution, part of the process of honing in on and articulating what is valuable to us.

Given what so-called food animals endure and succumb to, given their horror-filled, unfathomably sad existences just to become a quickly forgotten turkey sandwich in a plastic bag or part of a gallon of ice cream, is what we go through on our path to compassionate, integrated living really all that big of a hardship? Is it really too big of a sacrifice that we occasionally miss out on a croissant at a café when most others don't think twice? It is a privilege. Even considering occasional challenges, living as a vegan is not a cloistered, monastic existence or a sacrifice: it is a joyful, engaging, passionate and deeply delicious life if we decide that is how we want to live. We are so profoundly fortunate to be able to live in a way that is consistent with our values. I am often blown away by what a privilege this is.

There are a lot of things one faces in life that are incredibly grueling. Having the opportunity to live our lives as best we can is just not one of them. So, no, I won’t absolve anyone of any guilt because I believe that being vegan is easy. I am understanding of individual differences in circumstances and I sincerely want to help but I will hold people to the level of honesty I’d want to be held to as well. I will not be complicit in propagating the idea that it's just too hard.

Playing games and lying to ourselves is difficult. Being vegan? Easy.

The Zombievore's Dilemma

Zombievore: An omnivore as the walking dead; an automaton. 

From the outset, let me just say that I don’t think that all omnivores are pernicious zombies without measurable brain waves. Clearly, that would be unfair, the sort of absurd overstatement people love to point to as further evidence of mean-spirited, wrong-headed vegan, feminist sedition. Of course I am not claiming that all omnivores are zombies, just a sizable percentage that has not been calculated yet. By Zombievores, I am referring to individuals who are not using the complex reasoning skills they were presumably born with and are instead idling, aided by their built-in societal privileges and tendency to allow others to do their thinking for them. An omnivore who has abandoned his or her critical thinking faculties in favor of meaningless word repetition and habituated practices, who lurches through life without regard for those who do not share the same privileges, is maintaining a Zombievorous lifestyle. If this description doesn’t fit you, then please, no need to be offended.

There are various categories of Zombievores. There are the Fast Food Zombievores, of course. There are the Custom-Fixated Zombievores, too. These first two types are easy to identify and avoid, unless one should happen to live within your own home. There is a classification of Zombievore that is usually more subtle and cunning than the others, though. They are best known for their ability to penetrate and assimilate into otherwise progressive spheres of society with a message that captivates and seems to be imbued with the spirit of positive change but, upon closer inspection, simply reinforces the established order. These Zombievores are generally affluent, urban, well educated and Caucasian though there are certainly exceptions, and their undisputed leader is Michael Pollan. To understand him and the particular sway he has over his order of Zombievores, one must first get a recap of his recent visit to one of Oprah Winfrey’s famous chairs.

Have you ever gone to a party that you're a little apprehensive about but your friends have been building it up in your head all week so you think that you should stop being such a sour crab apple all the time and just go with the flow? It might be decent, it might even be worthwhile, you think to yourself, psyching yourself up like the pompom girl you never were. You arrive at the party, though, and you can see from the start that it's pretty much what you already expected and feared: vacuous chitchat that you fail at both initiating and maintaining. Joyless tittering back and forth.

"It will be okay," you tell yourself. You remind yourself to smile, to unclench your shoulders, to get a drink. It's still early. The party hasn't hit its stride yet. Then you notice an energy shift in the room and you see him.

He's surrounded by disciples who chuckle as if on cue at his bon mots. When he is speaking of something poignant, the devotees mirror his sincerity, leaning in, nodding, creasing their foreheads with concern. When he is articulating his opinion, it is with the mien of an authority, and if the others surrounding him could, they would start taking notes. Despite the adoration, he considers himself to be humble, earthy even, and despite the salary he draws and his impressive résumé, he is one of the little people, at least in his own mind.

At this point, any shadow of the doubt is instantly erased. You're almost relieved because you now have proof positive that, indeed, nothing good can come of this assembly. This is because Michael Pollan is in the room and he is a Very Special Guest. This was the experience of watching Oprah’s “Let’s try on a new lifestyle this week like a new pair of awesome, pretty shoes!” – I mean - her thoughtful exploration of the vegan lifestyle with that avowed consumer of serenely, lovingly butchered animals, Michael Pollan, curiously stuck to her side for the entire hour like a human barnacle in an expensive suit. 

He is the Golden Prince of his particular classification of Zombievores, giving them sustenance and the drive to continue with his patently void nuggets of personal validation. Somehow his followers are able to extract enough from these little nuggets to sustain themselves but it is clear that they are not running on quality fuel. Too smart and ambitious to be a zombie himself, Michael Pollan has become wealthy writing books and telling affluent, greenish omnivores to keep doing what they're doing and telling aspiring affluent, greenish omnivores to do a better job (in other words, spend more money for ever-more exclusive animal products) at what they are doing. The stricken become Pollanated Zombievores. They repeat the catchphrases of their guru, dull-eyed and flat in tone, not an original thought firing their synapses: freeeee-raaaaaange, they lurch. Sus-taaaaaain-able, they growl. Graaaaaass-fed, they drone. Hu-maaaaaane, they bellow as they corner you in the room, humid, meaty breath in your face.

The Golden Prince of the Zombievores was planted by Oprah’s side the entire episode, her wingman, a designer security blanket, the yuppie habit apologist anointed to sanction meat-eating by waving his glittery green magic wand and making everyone feel better, even righteous, with his platitudes that do not stand up to reason.

Zombievores have been rendered insensible by the willful suspension of disbelief that the Pollanization process requires. The Pollanated have decided to stop thinking because it protects their privileges and they have elected to spout empty banalities instead that defy common sense.

“I want to help the small farmers,” they will assert. As though one can’t help small farmers who don’t kill or exploit animals.

“It’s my personal choice,” the Zombievores will rail. Their supposed right to take another’s life simply because they have the means and the privileges is the antithesis of a sound ethical argument. Next.

“It’s sustainable,” they will allege. For real? Given the amount of space these animals would naturally, normally claim in nature, it is a mathematical impossibility to provide the landmass these billions of beings would need thus we have concentrated feeding operations. Given human consumption habits and the lack of adequate landmass to support that, any allegedly sustainable animal product is a luxury item produced for a relatively elite, affluent few. The Pollanated plan is clearly an untenable model for meeting demand, thus it is willful ignorance. Given the sheer amount of animal products people consume, the only model for meeting demand is an industrial one, and that doesn’t sit right with Mr. Pollan and his adherents who vastly prefer an aesthetic of exclusivity. It doesn’t matter if his model is steeped in an illogical, idealized reality: the fairy tale is all that matters here. A drastic reduction in consumption is the only way that this model could realistically function.


“The animals do not suffer,” they will claim. Because getting a bolt in the skull, a knife slashed across the throat or a bullet in the brain always feels fabulous, especially when it is unnecessary. Being forcibly impregnated, getting their milk stolen from them, their babies taken from them and often killed, having their ears notched for identification purposes because we enjoy exercising our personal choice to enjoy their “product” is unkind. Pollanated Zombievores are loath to admit this and even more loath to admit that these are standard practices on many of the beloved, pastoral small farms they believe in with the blind trust of a child putting a tooth under her pillow in anticipation of a winged Tooth Fairy.

So Zombievores. They walk among us. You will find them at the farmers market, at the bookstore, at fundraisers and at the beach. They are everywhere.

To put it plainly, if you value your time, your best defense is to simply walk away. Engaging the afflicted tends to yield scant rewards though even the most seasoned of us occasionally will forget this cardinal rule and attempt to break through. Pollanated Zombievores have everything to lose with honestly evaluating their deliberately cultivated naïveté – their ethics, their creature comforts, their privileges, their integrity and character – and so they must maintain their position at all costs, even if it makes no sense.

If you feel that you have the time to spare, by all means, it is your prerogative to engage such a Zombievore. Remember that they are thwarted by logic and reason. Don’t be scared. The thing about the Pollanated variety of zombie is that they don’t want to eat your brains: they only want to eat heirloom quality, rare, specialty, sloooooow-fooooood-approved brains. You should be fine.

Concerned that you might actually be among the stricken? Ask yourself some questions: Have you referenced the “snout-to-tail” movement without irony or wanting to vomit? Do you fetishize the ovum of your backyard hens? Is your quest for obscure, artisan quality paté leaving you exhausted, stressed out and broke? Do you become anxious when you are fresh out of bone marrow for spreading on your morning baguette? Do you feel an ever-escalating pressure within the ranks of your friends to consume possibly life-threatening viscera in order to fit in?  If so, you may very well be a Pollanated Zombievore.

I don't claim to be an expert in the field of Pollanated Zombievore recovery, but my recommendation is to stop immediately because, seriously, you are tedious. You must simply put yourself on a strict diet of avoiding the works and wisdom of Michael Pollan. Those first few weeks are the most critical and they will undoubtedly be the most rough. The old friends will try to lure you back with promises of nouveau butcher shops, charcuterie and out of the way barbecue joints. If you feel the old bloodlust rise up inside you again, grab a beet, drink some cranberry juice. Fill your home and body with fresh produce. Spend some time outdoors, breathe in the fresh air. Take notice of the birds, the dogs, the squirrels, how they live simply for their own reasons, not for our purposes. Think of how much free time you have to actually bring good into the world now that your brain waves have started to fire up again and original thoughts have begun trickling in. Imagine how liberated you will feel when you're no longer lurching from meat counter to meat counter, shoveling internal organs into your mouth.

You know that you are free when believing self-serving fairy tales has lost its appeal, when empty platitudes ring hollow and critical thinking has been restored. You are free when you recognize that your fleeting desires and tastes do not have primacy over another being's right to live. At this time, the process of Pollanization will have been reversed.

You're welcome.

The Sand Dollar...

Last March, my mother moved in with us. It was a long, circuitous path from her living independently to moving into our brick bungalow but the trajectory to our home has also been obvious for years. My mother giving up her place was not something any of us wanted but, given the circumstances, it was working with the cards we were dealt in the best way that we could.

My mother was losing her wallet, her keys, forgetting to pick up her mail. This is a woman who had always prided herself on being so reliable and well organized (it skips a generation, apparently) that she has never paid a late fee in her life. Not for a late payment of a bill, not for an overdue library book because even if it was a ten-cent fine, that fine would be a black mark of judgment against her, a poor reflection upon her as a member of society. 

When she started to decline more sharply, what was most telling to me was that she became blasé about the things most characteristic of her – orderliness, organization, being dependable – to the point where I was the one darting around her place, looking through drawers filled with dozens of unused spiral notebooks and under the bed for library books that were due. Also, as the easiest of easy targets, I had feverish visions of someone horrible following her home from her daily walk to her usual haunts – the pharmacy, the sandwich shop - and slipping into the building behind her. There were so many other concerns, too: She couldn’t be trusted to take her medication right, she couldn’t figure out how to use the phone, I was worried about her remembering to turn off her stove. When it came time to make the decision to move her in with us, it was an easy one. The decision was easy: the living together, that is the hard part.

People inevitably ask me why we didn’t try assisted-living. Simple: she is not able to care for herself enough to be accepted into one. Why not a nursing home, then? They have activities for residents, she would at least be around people closer to her age. My mother is fuzzy about a lot of things these days, but one thing she is very clear on is that she desperately does not want to go into a nursing home and I think her instincts are right on this one. I have seen her in those environments and she becomes very anxious, scared and uncomfortable. She is still lucid enough to know what a nursing home would mean for her. Although that is likely on the future horizon, we’d like to delay that as long as possible as it will be the end for her.

We’ve had to learn all about medications this year and how they interact, that all chairs need to be pulled out and pushed in, that when my mother gets even a simple cold everything falls apart, that becoming distracted in the grocery store could result in her filling her cart with bags of frozen shrimp that I will never cook in a million years, that “the red thing” means her purse and “the white paper” is usually a piece of mail (we still don’t know what “the yellow thing” is), that if we don’t take out her hearing aids for her, she will put them wherever (check the mantel first), that she cannot simply go to bed without a whole, elaborate ritual.

My husband is a thick-skinned, patient type of person, a typically stoic Minnesotan who manages to also be kind and nurturing. In other words, he’s a much better person than I. When it’s one’s own parent, though, our buttons are much more easily pushed. One effect of my mother’s condition means that even though I work very hard to care for her, I still get treated like a shady sixteen-year-old who is asking for the car keys again whenever I try to carve out time for myself. It’s like the old dynamic between us remains intact, frozen in time. Even when my husband is home with my mother, she expects me to keep to a curfew and despite how this activates every last rebellious synapse I have, I’ve learned to roll my eyes and abide by it or I will be pestered to the breaking point.

This year, I have learned all about pyrrhic victories, how to identify them and, when I have the self-discipline, how to walk away from them. Sometimes, though, it takes every last bit of resolve. In those moments, when my own nerves seem to have been lit on fire like the wick on dynamite, I try to imagine myself as Wonder Woman or Supergirl in a bright red cape and leotard, able to deflect anything life tosses my way with my handy wristlets. This helps somehow, even while I know that I’m still the one standing there, wristlet-free, squeezing my hands into tight, clenched balls.

It is not always bad. Most weekdays consist of her napping and watching games shows or judges squinting at defendants in TV courtrooms. I sit in the sunroom and I write, edit, read, research and generally try to lose myself in words. Mornings and evenings are our rough times, trying to get my son ready for school when my mother wants her medication, trying to get him calmed down for bed when my mother’s television blares in the other room. Our clash of lifestyles and the very different temperaments we were born with has not brought out the best in me in such close quarters. All it takes is for one seemingly minor, mundane irritant (my mother eating potato chips – gah! Another irritation! - out of the bag instead of a bowl, for example, leaving crumbs everywhere and why-oh-why of all those lifelong traits she abandoned did neatness have to among them?) to send me spiraling. It’s not the crumbs, of course, or the potato chips: it’s everything. It’s never having taken care of herself so she’d have a stronger foundation, it’s losing my personal space, it’s rearranging everything in our lives, it’s the lack of privacy, it’s the helplessness, it’s still being treated like a juvenile delinquent in my forties even when I was never one to begin with, which brings me back to all the old baggage. It’s funny how potato chips can do that to a person.

Caring for a chronically unwell parent whose best hope is to not get worse can bring out parts of yourself that you’d rather prefer remain dormant or at least hidden.

Over holiday break, when my mother was in Texas visiting my aunt for three weeks, we had the a chance to go away, to run for the hills or the valley or wherever the hell we could go that was far away from here, and we sprinted toward it with the panting enthusiasm of a pack of golden retrievers chasing after a ball at the beach. And to the beach we headed: Florida, land of orange groves and amusement parks and palm trees and miniature golf and fundamentalists and Jews and pelicans and the Atlantic Ocean. No medication that needed to be dispensed, at least not by our hands. No litter box that needed to be scooped and no sidewalks that needed to be shoveled by us either. The only chairs we needed to push out or in would be our own. We were going to Florida. Three trilling syllables rolling off the tongue, a happy song, a stone skipping on the water before it sinks to the ocean floor to hang out with the starfish: Flor-i-da.

The snow on the ground in southern Georgia was the first sign that it wasn’t exactly blisteringly hot in the Sunshine State but it was a lot warmer than Chicago. It did not matter. We were away. My husband and I immediately fell into our natural rhythm of traveling together – basically, research where the vegetarian restaurants are and then let the interesting points in between them become the little dash marks – and our son was more than amendable to it. We became that unit of three again that functions so well together.

On our second day in Florida, we were on the beach in St. Augustine, a place with a name that sounds as far away from Chicago as possible, the first time my son had seen the ocean since he was four. There were shells everywhere we looked and it was finally warm enough to cuff our parts and walk into where the tide had just pulled away. We started instinctively putting shells in our pockets for my son’s classmates, squatting down to examine the radius around us, the foamy water fizzing over rocks. Strange brown birds unknown to me ran on skinny legs along the tide, a kite bobbed nearby, children climbed on the rocks like billy goats. It was during one of those moments when I was crouching in the sand on the balls of my feet, reaching for shells with my son and husband in the near distance when I thought, This is peace. I hadn’t felt that way in years, the feeling of not having any responsibilities or expectations, just of pure enjoyment and being. It was amazing to me with what ease I could transition into beachcomber mode, to being someone who only cared about where the next interesting shell might be found. The only thing that occupied me was plucking my fingers through the sand like nimble tentacles.

After an hour or two, we needed to leave to find a hotel. Walking back, something brought me farther out to where the tide had just rolled out and I crouched again over the popping foam, unable to resist the lure of more discoveries. As I was about to take a step, I crouched again, noticing a small circle in the sand that looked like a drawing of a flower with a stick. Pushing the sand away, I kept digging until my fingers were around a big, perfect sand dollar. Five notches exactly under the flower’s petals, a small star in the middle, a loopy etching of a flower shape on the back, elegant symmetry. Even when I was holding it, turning it around in my hands, I was in disbelief, my jaw open as if I’d just seen a mermaid splashing in the waves. It was bleached white, no longer alive. 

I am a city girl by choice and temperament. I marvel at architecture daily, at the diversity of accents and faces around me when I’m on the train, at the crackling, robust energy all around me. It’s not so often that I’m given the opportunity to be blown away by the simple, magnificent design of a sand dollar discovered by my own eyes. I’m the sort of person who always looks up a second too late to see a falling star, who catches the merest glimpse of yellow feathers before a gold finch darts away. Nature’s magic show is going on out there, I know it, but it’s always been elusive to my own eyes. Here was something perfect in my hand, something labored over, a home designed out of necessity but artfully crafted without any shortcuts.

What I held in my hand was the sun-bleached skeleton of a sea urchin, the protective bone a spiny animal once covered before the evolutionary drive compelled him to become burrowing creature. The scratchy flower shape is created by the sand dollar’s tube-shaped feet, which are used for breathing. There are scientific explanations for the design and symmetry of a sand dollar, having to do with respiration, gas exchange and evolution. The thought that a spiny sea urchin would work so hard to find food, survive and fight the current - young ones are even thought to ingest sand to better plant themselves to the ocean floor – and still leave behind a work of beauty without expecting a word of praise from its aquatic community kind of impresses me. Just by living, they create a beautiful home in the process, a natural by-product of life itself. 

I finally held up the sand dollar, unable to stop grinning, and my son and husband came running toward me, whooping. I could barely speak. Whenever I looked at my son sitting in the back seat of the car for the rest of our vacation, most likely he was turning that perfect disk around in his hands, staring at it in that wide-eyed way he has about him.

Sometimes life can be really, really challenging. We’re just trying to get through our day, get from Point A to Point B, and we’re sent spinning. We’re without an anchor, we can’t see where we’re going, we’re drowning in it all. Burrowing in, though, we can create a beautiful life as something to leave behind. Maybe no one else will ever notice or appreciate it. Maybe our lives will just look messy and confusing and unnecessarily challenging to other people. Maybe it’ll look that way to us, too. At our best, though, we know what we’re doing. We’re digging in and building beautiful lives as if there were an evolutionary drive toward it. A beautiful life is not one without dark, petty, horrible moments and breakdowns. It is seeing our shortcomings, looking at them without fear, and trying to do better, trying to etch pretty little flowers on ourselves just because.

I’m working at it. Sand dollars don’t happen overnight, either.