The Love Song of R. Anica Dewdrop

too long; almost didn’t write it

Wash Your Hands, Handle Some Food

I’m feeling great, no lie. I’m feeling more centered and focused because I’ve been steadily straining my reach for these frames of mind, the way you would strain to grasp the best pieces of fruit high on a tree. But the holidays are approaching and I’ve always found that time unwinds dangerously for me at the end of the year. The specificity required of the right word for this phenomenon is a task too much for a word to bear alone, so the word evades me, leads me to believe that the maneuver of describing could even be Sisyphean. I could, in very trite and brief terms, offer personal anecdotes to give a sense of what happens when a person has a very evident tightness of the chest during the months of October through December, but I can’t fully convey, truly, why it’s always (always) around this time that my life falls apart.

Help me out here. Is there a word for the desire to wipe clean away certain memories because the agony of their guileless splendor, consigned to the past, means you’ll be miserable if you try to recreate them, and the only way you’ll be ok with having these memories is if you have children, so that you can relieve unto them the legacy of what you know to be wholly and absolutely beautiful and moral, thereby reconciling the psychic impressions and idealism from youth, but you won’t, actually, be having children, the way things are going, so, can you toss me the word for that feeling? If you have a word for that, then maybe you can give me the word for feeling like your hands are dirty with weariness—constantly informing yourself about the politics of human interaction, the failings of noble visions for order, and the pains these cause, makes you so weary—and so these days, for you, are cycles of soil and soap, a continuous, humbled washing of the hands, because it’s hard to reach for the best fruit on the highest limb when your hands are dirty(!), but it’s the holidays now, and you’re supposed to handle everything articulated above without saying “bah, humbug”, which you, unfailingly, always end up doing.

It was time to take a year off from the holidays.

*

When I told my sister, Norm, I wouldn’t be spending Thanksgiving or Christmas with the family, subsequent silences on the phone, I could tell, were calculations of how to best disguise her disapproval. “I live hundreds of miles away,” she said, “So even though family-gatherings can be crazy, I can see why people do it, year after year.”

I didn’t know how to put it to her—that I’ve been wrestling with questions of morality, ethical responsibility, questions of legacy, wrestling with what was once agnosticism and has now become atheism, what I want my literature to look like, how best to uphold my values with graciousness, while shedding my arrogance and generally learning how to step down from the self-appointed task of managing the universe which I find so bewildering. Though I didn’t tell her this, I needed to see this through, without adding more stress of pretending like I understand or feel what any of the lyrics in any given Christmas song are about.

“I have never said ‘no’ before,” I said. “But it’s finally time for me to make my own rituals. I want something so that, whether I’m single or married with children or whatever our family relations are like, I can know again what it feels like to truly, truly, look forward to something.” No shitty holiday copy on a promotional poster from a soulless corporation was going to give me the answer.

She may or may not have relented when she said, “You never really seemed to be there during the holidays.”

I chose not to reiterate, again, that it probably had to do with the fact that for the past seven holiday seasons, my life imploded in on itself, and what rang to me as abounding mawkishness, which I call McChristmas, only made it worse.

My first step was to decide Thanksgiving plans. I thought about my favorite Thanksgivings. Of the most dear to me, one was spent going to church followed by a soup kitchen before ending the day eating Doritos with my siblings later in our dark house as we watched a rented VHS of a Disney movie. I was 7. The other was spent in NYC, while my dearest friend, Anna, and I waited in line to watch a renowned jazz musician play at a famous basement club. In the nipping chill of late fall she held our place in line while I went to the corner deli to grab coffee and two turkey sandwiches. We were 20, two girls from southern California, and our existence at that very moment was a spire in the history of beauty and spirit and anything else celebratory.

I decided that this year, maybe I would go to a soup kitchen. But I decided not to volunteer on Thanksgiving. In my readings long ago, I read that soup kitchens need volunteers year-round, and are overwhelmed with them only on holidays. I researched nearby soup kitchens that are open 7 days a week and found one called Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, in a city in Orange County next to the one where I grew up.

I decided that my first day would the day before Thanksgiving; thereafter, throughout the month of December. As for Thanksgiving itself, a road trip to Vegas and the Grand Canyon sounded like a good start to a roadtrip ritual. I would tackle Christmas later.

*

When I was 19, I discovered feminism by accident. I had found a stack of books at Goodwill, one of which was a pop psychology/anecdotal book about and for young girls. My roommate had moved out for the summer, so I was living by myself at that time and subsequently didn’t move from the couch in my living room once I started reading. I knew that my mom is a strong woman with instincts that alienate her from her culture, instincts which she bequeathed me, but I hadn’t known that there was a word to describe her paradigm. More importantly, I didn’t know that word was one I already was familiar with, one that I knew to be hurled, derogatory. That summer, I educated myself on Simone De Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, and the Gender Studies textbooks that sold for pennies at the nearest thrift stores by USC. I basically didn’t move very much from that couch. I didn’t see many friends, preferring instead to go on long bike rides to digest everything I had read. It felt like someone had handed me a prescription to ease the emotional congestion deep in my chest. I had been a wild child, constantly lashing out because of inner conflict, and now I knew why.

The following time I felt like this, I accidentally discovered vegetarianism. I was working at the oldest and biggest of the USC libraries, speedily completing my work so I could steal away to corners and read whatever book had crossed my path to capture my interest. This behavior wasn’t new. In elementary school, I was often punished for reading books, held under the table away from the teacher’s view, during class. What was new was the luxury of reading to my heart’s content for such a sustained period of time that everything in the world feels intimately connected. The world is a tight wove. And because I wasn’t discriminatory in my readings, I would find myself hastily jumping between books from the psychology section, nonverbal communication section, the paranormal section, evolutionary biology section, and some of these would lead me to other random sections; the literary criticism section, prison reform section, religion. Eventually, without having read a single book about animal rights, it became clear to me that all animals were intelligent enough to feel pain and fear and that we are wrong for delineating between which ones could suffer and which ones could not. After I made that connection, I looked for more books to help keep my epiphany in focus. Discovering something like that for myself, once again, made the noise in my head quiet down to a hum I could work with. I kept my distance from my friends and family as I redefined the word ‘tragedy’ for myself, resolving to not contribute to abbatoirs and their apologists. The world was ticking away without my effort, but at least I knew now where I stood in its progression.

I say all this because trying to keep a balanced life, feeling great and focused, means I have to be living an examined life and finding myself satisfying the minimum criteria, ON TOP of worrying about bullshit personal crap, like if my hair makes me look like a homeless lady or not.

My recent epiphany has to do with political activism. It’s been a long time coming, this political stuff. I won’t go into it, because I’m still trying to make sense of things—how to best make the shift from a frustrated, informed radical, who is forced to vote Democrat so that the world doesn’t fall apart a smooth transition into a contributing political activist-citizen who doesn’t lose her cool when confronted by a conservative about the things which matter most. I have no idea how to do the latter, which is why I’ve stayed informed and indignant, rather than resilient and optimistic. I will say that my mind and heart are working overtime these days, and for the first time I have hope. I’m charged with roseate electricity.

What’s at stake, then, this holiday, is seeing this through to the end, while also dealing with the parergon of finding meaning for myself, so that I can continue feeling this sense of balance and self-esteem which I’ve worked so hard to grasp. I have an amazing man in my life who I like to make out with a lot, I’m young in good health, and I finally think I have something to say and give to the world.

No matter what, there can be no ghosts of holidays past this year.

*

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I drove down to Costa Mesa and arrived at exactly 1pm, the hour of the second shift. There was a long line extending around the front of the building, so I walked through the back door to find a person in charge. It was easy to find the back door, because there were piles upon piles of food in crates and bags in the parking lot area around it. A woman in a red apron with the words ‘Someone Cares’ and an image of a pot below it told me to make my way to the office through the kitchen and dining area.

The kitchen smelled of garlic bread and roasting chicken; people of different ages stood around in red aprons, mixing, rolling, mashing, or chopping. I passed an older man with salt and pepper hair singing a Christmas carol, who paused once to chirp, “Everyone’s always in everybody’s way!” Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a large pantry with a bookshelf that had a piece of paper marked “Someone Cares Library” over cookbooks and a few jars of spoons and spices.

In the dining room, all of the seats at the tables were already taken, and there was a line of people against the nearest wall waiting their turn. Plastic pitchers full of either milk or a vague juice with ice were the only centerpieces.

I walked into the office where two women were discussing something frantically, before of them turned to me. “Are you volunteering or eating?”

“Oh, this is my first time volunteering.”

“Did the court send you or is it for school credit?”

I told her neither. She said ‘oh’ twice before beckoning me around the desk and handing me one of three clipboards, where I was to put my name, date, and time of entry.

“You don’t really have to sign out, I guess. Follow me, I’ll show you where the aprons are.” We went back in the same direction I came from, where she told me to wash my hands and take one of the many aprons hanging on a rack. “So, ok. Just see what needs to be done,” she said before leaving.

I stood in the middle of the busy kitchen. I stepped toward a young boy who smiled as he shrugged at me before turning to the girl next to him. I looked around again, approaching a man slightly older than myself. “Do you need help?” Without looking up from hacking a chicken into pieces, which he placed in an enormous plastic bin with pinkish liquid and rosemary flotsam, he pointed at a short, round woman in a long brown skirt and headband. “She’s the boss.”

It took about two seconds of being around her to realize that years of thankless drudgery can manifest itself physically; it was taut in her shoulders, it slowed her gait, and her eyes were lasers of judgment. I asked her how I could help, and it took her so long to reply that I wondered if I had spoken aloud; she finally mumbled something of which I could only make out the word ‘potatoes’.

After a series of painfully awkward exchanges, I was mashing two metal tubs of potatoes from scratch. Smashing the round steamy starch into mush, I thought about when I was 7 years old visiting the soup kitchen. When I was in high school, I had looked upon that Thanksgiving fondly, and I believe I told my high school sweetheart that volunteering on Thanksgiving had been so much fun. It was only much later in college that I really sat down to think things through, and eventually found myself asking my mother, “When we went to the soup kitchen on Thanksgivings when we were little, we went to eat, didn’t we?”

Stirring the melted butter into the potatoes, I thought about how I had researched Someone Cares soup kitchen. It was important to me that I find the kind of kitchen open to anyone regardless of age or income, and when I came across the website, I was impressed by the story of the founder, Merle Hatleberg. I gleaned that her kitchen began when she realized that people were going hungry in her community, many of whom were children. With her own money she served her first pot of soup in 1986; 11 years later, she had fundraised enough to buy a standalone site, a former restaurant, the kitchen of which I was standing at that very moment. I couldn’t remember the soup kitchen I had visited as a young child, but when my mom confirmed that we had been there to eat and not to volunteer, I immediately flashed back to myself as a child: wholly blind to socioeconomics and sociopolitical implications, completely seduced by decorations and the promise of a good time. It made me happy, knowing that I once had that which is so invaluable and so easy.

45 minutes later my hands were red from mashing enough potatoes for hundreds of people. Everyone was busy with tasks, so I found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen once again. The man who had been happily mopping before was now rinsing dishes and trays in a corner by himself, and having overheard that he needed help, I walked over.

“Dan, right?”

Turning the faucet off, the lanky man showed me the quickest way two people wash hundreds of dishes using industrial equipment. He power-rinsed, I was to soap and sanitize. The majority of the dirty dishes were cafeteria trays on which each meal was served, which were piling up, so we started off quickly, steady. Something about the way he had been humming and brightly pointing out mundane things—the way I’m apt to do—made me initiate conversation with him right away. I asked him how long he’d been at Someone Cares.

“Oh, gosh,” he said, pausing to look up at the fluorescent lights, gloved knuckles on his hip as he searched his memory. “Well, too long, hahah! I guess it’s been about, hmmm, twelve years, I guess now. I mean, at first I volunteered for two years, then I was hired. I used to come here every day, seven days a week, but I was getting burn out. Now I’m here five days a week, all day.” He interrupted himself to remind me that if I wanted soup, I should grab some before the pot was dragged off to the front where volunteers were serving disposable plates on the trays we were washing. I declined because of my vegetarianism.

“Really? Well, how about that!” He threw his head back, his slender body leaning forward, his long gray hair shuddering with his excited movement. “I am, too! Excellent! May I ask why?”

I told him I really like animals and threw the question back at him.

“Well, I’ve always been very nutritious-minded, wasn’t a big meat-eater to begin with. Then, I got really interested in philosophy, and when I got really interested in philosophy, I couldn’t not, you know—And did you know a lot of great philosophers were vegetarians? My favorite, Nietzsche, was very much one, and Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, George Bernard Shaw, and even Albert Einstein! And did you know that Leonardo Da Vinci, the smartest man to ever have walked this earth, was, too? He once said he didn’t want his stomach to be a graveyard, hahah! That man was the smartest man to ever live. You know who wasn’t a vegetarian. Jesus. Because he ate fish.”

I offered that Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin were vegetarians, too.

“Well, Benjamin Franklin was for a while, until one day, he saw—”

“A fish eat another fish!”

Somehow, this cracked us both up so hard that the beleaguered kitchen director looked up from her work.

“That’s right, you know your stuff! Benjamin Franklin was making excuses.”

“Jesus and Ben Franklin were pescatarians, really.”

Dan asked me if I was vegan or vegetarian. I told him that I try to consume vegan as much as possible, but that I mostly fail at the whole thing. “I’ll be at it for the rest of my life.”

“I tried to eat vegan, too, but, I did it for some years, but. Well, I always say, do the best you can. But it’s not for some people, I understand that. Vegetarianism isn’t for some people, I think, you know. And that’s ok.”

We fell into a silence, and I tried to focus on developing a system for getting the trays out as fast as possible even though I had X-large sized gloves for my tiny hands. After a while, I realized that the stress on my fingers, from getting faster at soaking each tray in one sink full of soap while pulling another up from the water with the other hand and then pulling another up from the sink next to it where it had rested to sanitize, all left my fingernails raw, thumbs aching in a way I never before knew. I decided to keep conversation going. “Did you know Merle?”

“Merle? Oh, yeah. She was the most magnificent lady, tough as nails.” Dan went on to describe her uncanny memory, straightforward demeanor. Confined to a wheelchair in her later years, she would demand to be taken through the kitchen and always knew when something had been taken or moved from the position she’d assigned it. She would scream about it. “Oh, when Merle found this place, nobody wanted us here. Even the police wanted us to settle somewhere else. Everyone thought it would attract all the, well, unsavory folks, that it would damage the value of the businesses. And, to be honest, well, the church we were at before had kicked us out because too many of the visitors were drunk all the time.”

By this time, another volunteer had joined story time. “And then what happened?”

“Well, it’s too bad, you know, they had showers there, but they did it to themselves! The church had enough, they said, you’ve gotta get out of here. You just can’t stay here anymore. So Merle looked, and she found this place, and Merle fought tooth-and-nail, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. And when the dining hall was finally open, she had put—we used to have these rules up on the wall, that were very clear. She was very forthright. She used to say—” Here, Dan stopped the faucet to lean forward as if offering a secret, “ —if you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat here. And they listened. But, still, sometimes we’d have the police chasing someone through the hall and kitchen. One time, they ran right by me here!”

The other volunteer was helping dry the trays, and I was making a giant mess on the floor. The oversized gloves kept filling up with water, and when I would reach for an unwashed tray, the water would spill onto my hip and onto the floor. A better person would have taken off the gloves already, but I was afraid that the gloves were brunting some of the trauma from my aching thumbs.

Finally, Dan suggested I eat and I relented; I hadn’t realized that two and a half hours already passed. He guided me past the line of people, showed me where to take my tray, and reminded me that I could always eat in the back kitchen by the Someone Cares Library. But I wanted to sit in the dining hall, and when an old man said it was ok to sit across him, I took my seat and ate all of my mashed potatoes. The old man asked me what I had done to serve time at the kitchen.

I considered telling him the truth. He was in an old khaki vest with pockets and an old fisherman’s hat and slippers. “What’s your name?”

“Herman.”

I gave him mine and asked him if he liked the mashed potatoes. He shrugged.

“I came here because I wanted to volunteer. I don’t know how I feel about, um, I mean, I’m not going to be here tomorrow, so I thought maybe I could help today.” All of a sudden, I felt silly. Like, utterly and completely stupid-silly, for not knowing what Christmas and Thanksgiving are all about. I didn’t grow up believing in Santa, and I know its not about consumerism, so what is there for me to reconcile? Maybe I was like a stubborn, perverse puppy, unwilling to just walk on the leash for no other reason than the puppy wants to do things her own way.

“Herman, how are you going to spend your Thanksgiving?” Herman told me that he wasn’t sure. “Usually, I wait for my sons and daughters to call, if they remember. You know, they’re busy going to Vegas or Florida or Mexico, so, you know. In this country, everyone forgets about the old people.” Herman asked me to guess which country he was from, and that if I would guess, he would guess my age and my ethnicity. After several minutes of hesitant back-and-forth exchanges, we determined that he was from Thailand and I was most certainly not sixteen. We skipped the part about me being Mexican.

“Herman, you’re a good man. You’re a really good man for that. But I’m getting really old.”

“They forget about you when you’re older. I bet no one has ever forgotten you.”

“Maybe they did and just never told me about it. Say, Herman, do you know the meaning of Christmas? Because I’m trying to find it, you know. I think I’m a little bit—” I imagined that if you were to lift me up at that very moment and shake me like some brick-a-brac, you would hear something rolling around, unpleasantly dissonant, and toss me in the trash.
Herman said it was about counting your blessings and not taking it all for granted. Soon thereafter, he called me an angel for driving from LA, then rose to throw his plate and cup away before standing in another line where one can take bags of donated food home. I remembered standing in lines similar to it, with my mother or my dad’s mother when I was between the ages of 3 and 8. I imagined they stood in lines like it before I could form memories.

Something Herman said about Vegas and the holidays had caught me. The road trip I would take the following day was to Vegas; somewhere between my longing and Herman’s experience, there was a connection that I was struggling to make. I finished my meal as quickly as possible, then went back to the operose dishwashing.

For the remainder of the day, I washed those dishes like it was the one thing I was put on this earth for. When Dan realized that I was there because I wanted to and not because I had committed a misdemeanor, he thanked me profusely, adding that he didn’t know what he would’ve done without an extra dishwasher. “I don’t bother coming in on Thanksgiving because we’re flooded with volunteers, but today, I mean it’s so busy, we’re understaffed!”

I decided to keep conversation going now that I was dishwashing queen and it made the time fly by. Dan told me about Venice Beach in the sixties (“everything was fine in 1967 until a bunch of hippies showed up in 1969, bunch of weirdos”) and I told him about how I had attended some Occupy LA protests and assemblies. Dan told me he didn’t envy my generation, and I told him my generation was a bunch of weirdos. Eventually, when the soup line died away, the front volunteers came to the back to help with the last of the dishes and to mop up the mess I had made. Dan and I drifted into a comfortable silence.

When it was time for me to go home, I returned to the office to gather my stuff and introduce myself to Merle’s granddaughter. “It’s really great what you’re doing here,” I told her, and I offered to help in wrapping toys for their toy drive, and gathering warm clothes for their clothes drive. This last one was important to me because of a story my dad once told me about his first impression of America. “It was colder than I thought, than it gets in Mexico,” my dad relayed. “My jacket was too thin.”

On my way out of the door, I introduced myself to a gorgeous woman, assuming that she was a benefactor of some sort. “Oh, no, I’m just a volunteer!” She went on to tell me that she used to work as a corporate executive until one day, after a massive robbery, she found herself having nothing, with nowhere to go. “You just never know, you know?” she mused, rhetorically.

On my way home, I thought about how, language, in spite of its beauty, is inadequate as a complete almanac of human emotion.

*

Several weeks later, I was video-chatting with my sister, a ritual we engage in on Mondays and Fridays. We were discussing how, if I have kids, I will never participate in the massive lie that is Santa Claus. As a strict pragmatist and student of existential philosophy, she completely agreed.

“You know that all the moms are going to judge you, though,” she said. “Moms are always judging other moms. I know from reading all those mom blogs.” I told my sister that it was ok. That all of that was ok. It had taken me a while, but I had finally got it; I remembered that the whole point of Christmas was that a really nice man had been born once. I told her that it had hit me coming back from the road-trip to Vegas and the Grand Canyon when my boyfriend and his friend pulled over at a rest stop for a cigarette break and to look up at the stars. I was sleeping, deeply, in the backseat, so my boyfriend was gentle in shaking me awake. In a soft whisper, he told me to come take a look at the Milky Way. “Why?” I murmured, still in my dream, where I was reconciling the fact that the Grand Canyon had taken 6 million years to form and I wasn’t even a flash in the pan. “There is no God, did you know,” I whispered, eyes closed. And in that sympathetic but no-nonsense manner that made me fall in love with him, he pulled out of the car, saying, “Because you’ll be happy you saw it.” On the road again, he sat with me in the back, holding me and listening as I told him how I felt about the holidays and my frustration with politics and how peace on earth is impossible.

“People aren’t perfect,” he said.

And I thought about how I’m not the perfect feminist, or the perfect vegetarian, and as I struggle with my political consciousness, I’m not the perfect American, either, especially when I feel like echoing the contempt I hear all around me more than I feel like washing my hands of it and elevating myself above it all. But to celebrate our good humanity in the face of our darker nature, if only for a brief moment because that’s how long we, perfectly flawed humans, can take—that’s good enough. More specifically, my siblings and friends and ex-lovers and ex-friends aren’t perfect, and my parents, who are so, so different than I am but who are also more amazing than most people I know, aren’t perfect either. But we participate in these rituals together because, as my boyfriend said, we’re happy later that we did.

My sister was making a funny face at me as I spoke. “It took you this long to realize that Christmas is about Jesus?”

I resisted the urge to close the browser window. “Yes, ok? I’m an atheist, but he was a nice guy once, and I’m down with that. What would a nice pescatarian do? I’m down. But what I’ve been talking about are holiday rituals in general, that it’s not really about consumption or erecting trees or lighting candles. It’s hard for me to—”

She wrinkled her nose. “I make it a point to say X-mas instead of Christmas.” With her finger she drew an invisible X.

My perfectly wonderful sister didn’t understand a word I was saying. And that was imperfectly alright, too. “Oh! And, Norm?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be home for Christmas after all.” She could count on me.