sunshinedreary

Once, in middle school, I saw my father make a peanut butter sandwich and I’ve never forgotten it.

Peanut butter is a critical food in my life, and always has been. I’m fond of saying that if I ever develop a peanut allergy I will be fucked beyond all comprehension because there’s a lot of peanut butter consumption happening here. Whenever I admit this fear, I shine it up with a layer of humor, but I am actually afraid of its potential to materialize. A woman I know and love ate peanut butter often for many years of her life and then stopped eating it for a spell, no reason in particular. When she started eating it again, she realized she had developed a peanut allergy and hasn’t eaten it since but told me with sorrowful eyes and a disappointed mouth that she misses it every day. This tale radiates Edgar Allan Poe levels of foreshadowing and horror for me, despite the fact that it is delivered by a tall slip of a garden-goddess whose short gray hair sparkles and whose eyes shine with love and positivity on the grayest day. I cannot break up with peanut butter; ours is a relationship that has existed for a very long time.

Peanut butter is an Everything Staple for those of us who don’t [YET] have a [MAYBE? JESUS CHRIST, MAYBE?] peanut allergy. Part of why I eat it so much probably stems from the fact that I grew up with a single mother who lived in a constant state of obsession over what she ate, and by extension, what I ate. Before you get mad at her, let me assure you that there was no shaming going on, no judgement. While it was impossible not to personally imprint the world’s view of people who don’t have tiny figures, my mother approached food almost empirically, like she was a food scientist pulling apart the complex chemistry of nourishment to decipher the reasons why things that tasted so good could attach to her thighs and belly and then turn from flesh into an emotional burden of guilt and self-scrutiny. I like to say I am making up for lost time with long-lost food loves from my childhood and the picky first quarter of my life, peanut butter lives in that forbidden pantry for me along with garlic, sour cream, and sugar cereals. Look, I don’t write sonnets and poetic love couplets about garlic as a result of being given a stepfather who loathes its very existence, YOU DO.

Anyway, my mother never made me feel bad about myself and how I looked, she always encouraged and loved me. But her intense focus on the food she ate sort of rubbed off on me and stigmatized certain foods that I ate. Sometimes it was a direct attack: peanut butter was in the cross-hairs, probably because I always wanted it. I’d happily eaten regular Jif during all of my early years and then somewhere around the time I turned eight, she became convinced that peanut butter was going to make us both sick and give us cancer. She’d already had breast cancer, but was understandably concerned about staying in remission, so the conventional wisdom at that time was to worship at the shitty altar of low-fat foods. From that moment on, my life was a guessing game of When Is Peanut Butter Evil And When Is It A Friend? My mother wavered between ostracizing the delicious, sugary, and fatty foods we liked and determinedly choosing the reduced fat EVERYTHING. There was no constant, but certain food items were more demonized than others. To whit, I still feel guilty as a 38-year-old adult looking at sugar cereals in the grocery store. I feel like she knows. And she doesn’t like it.

Reduced fat Jif, by the way, is like a thick, congealed, freakish science experiment that’s gone wrong: the sugar and the peanuts stopped emulsifying at the exact moment when they were destined to be at their most disgusting states, and just before it all hardened up, someone stirred in a healthy dollop of earwax. Sorry for that.

I just want to be clear that regular Jif is excellent (and the only peanut butter to use in baking). I like the Crunchy Jif too, but if we are going with the maximum awesome for crunchy peanut butters, I err on the side of Skippy Extra Crunchy, because: yes. If you want to know about natural peanut butters, I will always pick crunchy natural peanut butter, and it’s got to be Crazy Richard’s or Teddy for me. When they add salt to natural peanut butter, it’s a food crime. Come at me.

You begin to see that my relationship with peanut butter is not unlike a great romance (or a Shakespearean comedy where I am Falstaff, but with peanut butter instead of spirits), fraught with ups and downs. Allow me to complicate it a little more:

Every time I pull out a butter knife and use it to slowly and carefully spread whatever type of peanut butter I happen to want at that moment on whatever type of bread I happen to have at that moment, carefully…out to the edges…I think of my father, not my mother. Why? You want to know why. I just wasted a shitload of your time on a peanut butter soliloquy that orbited my mother’s decades-long audit of a nut butter, not discussing the fact that my dad is an actual asshole who ruined peanut butter sandwiches for me over the course of perhaps 27 years of my life.

Here is the plain truth: for all of my mother’s food obsessions, reduced fat Snackwell cookies one day and Saralee pound cake, Mrs. Richardson’s fudge sauce, and vanilla ice cream the next, the confusion she created only manifested with food items, not with WHO I WAS or WHAT I LOOKED LIKE. My father used food as a weapon to shame me into whatever it was he thought I should be (I still don’t know what that is, by the way). My confusion is compounded because I couldn’t deny my paternal genes if I wanted to: we are all short, thick, and would have made excellent peasants back in the dark ages. What I’m saying none too bluntly is that not a one of us are pulling any awards for shapely figures or gorgeous looks. Middle of the road in all ways physical.

My parents divorced when I was three and my father had custody every other weekend (I was not a fan of this). He eventually remarried, conveniently, the weekend before my mother got remarried, in the same month of the same year. Every other weekend, my father and stepmother would deride and scold me for what I ordered if we went out to dinner; they would stare at every bite I took, and control the food in the house so I never ate without them knowing what and how much. My stepsister was tall and thin, whereas I am rather shaped like a frostycone, so I suspect that she did not have the same rules imposed on her when I was not around. I would ask for snacks and they would say no. They did everything but lock the pantry. We were allowed dinner on Friday night and then one lunch item on Saturday before dinner. I was restricted. My stepsister ate what she wanted, when she wanted, and would quietly slip away from time to time. We know why.

My mother bought me a super heinously ugly sweater at The Gap once when I was in eighth grade. It was thick and bulky, sprinkled with white and green pine trees and white horizontal stripes over a light gray background. If I’m honest, it was not real on-brand for The Gap, I am still shocked to this day that they sold such a shitbird design in their stores, so naturally I hated the shapeless wonder and refused to wear it until my mother guilted me into it (precisely twice). The second time I wore the sweater was the last time. It was a Sunday afternoon and almost time for my father to bring me home, which put me in a good mood. He and I ran into one another in the living room when I came downstairs for a drink of water. He hadn’t seen me yet that day, and I will qualify the WTF-ness of not having seen him all day by telling you that before he got remarried, the public library in town spent more time with me than he did. He and my stepmother did whatever they did downstairs (their bedroom and office were on the first floor) while my stepsister and I watched TV upstairs in her bedroom. My father’s face immediately flashed in anger and he grabbed the sleeve of my sweater, “What is this shit you’re wearing? Why do you always look so bad? Why can’t you ever wear clothes that LOOK GOOD?”

I just stared at him, gobsmacked, feeling much like a tennis ball that just got walloped by a Williams sister. Strangely, the first thing I wanted to say to defend myself was, “She bought it at The Gap, isn’t that good enough for you?”

Yeah kid, the class issues are the real heart of the issue here.

I never ate peanut butter sandwiches at my father’s house, even though they always had Old Pride wheat bread and Jif Creamy peanut butter. I remember because I saw my father make a peanut butter sandwich once. It was Saturday, between lunch and dinner. I was standing in the kitchen and my father pulled out the yellow plastic bag of Old Pride- the nutty wheat smell breezed out, little flecks of grain sewn into a soft pillow ready for its fate as a sandwich. The lid unscrewed from the Jif quietly and that immediate, powerful smell of peanut butter hit my hungry stomach. My father swirled the peanut butter across the bread, an inch thick. It seemed unthinkable to me and my eyes grew wide. An inch thick. Even when peanut butter was not on the bad list at my mother’s house, it was meant to be used sparingly; I never had full autonomy free from guilt when I made my peanut butter sandwiches. An inch thick. I think my father noticed my face because he hastily layered the top piece of bread on his completed sandwich and gave me a look that was half angry, half embarrassed before removing all traces of food and walking down the hall to his office. An inch thick. I will never forget it. I can still see the countertop, the bread, all that peanut butter- not for me. Made by someone who did nothing but diminish me in ways I still can’t reconcile.

I wish I could make a peanut butter sandwich without thinking of him, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying them. Luckily, he is only linked to the creation of the sandwich and not the relishing of its taste, texture, and smell. It’s these weird, nuanced moments that show me where he broke me. But there are strange, funny things I associate with my father as well. He calls long toenails “lunch hooks” and I will never know why, but it makes me laugh. He taught me the ideal way (in my opinion) to eat a muffin: slice it in half horizontally and butter the inside of each half. I still say, “Don’t let it get away from you” about staying on top of tasks and that is purely my father. I’m militant about notifying people when I receive things from them in the mail, because he told me it’s the right thing to do, AND IT IS. When he laughs, it’s rare, but it’s a deep belly laugh, and it’s nice because he only does that when it’s true. My father is not a sympathy laugher, he’s not here to make you feel good about anything. He’s worked hard to educate himself and gain upward mobility in his jobs, but he’s also been an asshole to a lot of people in his personal life. I just know he is not allowed to be an asshole about my motherfucking peanut butter sandwiches anymore.

Update 4/15/20: I haven’t thought about my father while making a peanut butter sandwich since I first wrote this. I’ll take the win.

Everything’s so easy for Pauline.

That’s the first sentence I ever heard Neko Case purr and I’ll be damned if you can convince me that buying Fox Confessor Brings the Flood wasn’t one of the most important purchases of my musical life. I already know you can’t. It was (and remains) one of the most perfect albums ever written, composed, produced, performed, distributed, and stocked on shelves when Borders Books & Music was still a Thing.

There are a crush of thoughts and feelings that sweep through me when I listen to Fox Confessor, and to a secondary degree, Blacklisted, which I rushed to buy immediately after hearing Fox Confessor for the first time. Summer of 2006 I moved into my own first apartment, still a deeply lost and sunken person following the death of my mother in October of 2004 after I graduated college. She was number one on my list of People Whose Death Will Cause Me to Lose My Shit, which then put a lot of pressure on the number two person on that list, my very dearest and best friend in the whole world. To his credit, Josh instinctively knew how to love me even when I couldn’t remember what love was, let alone feel it. Music has always been a bedrock of our friendship; we did and still do discuss, argue, fangirl, swap artists, and make recommendations to one another (even if the response is “WHAT THE HECK MADE YOU THINK I’D LIKE THAT, WEIRDO?”). I still consider him my most foundational musical mentor, because he did what all great mentors do: he challenged my assumptions about taste, style, composition, vocals, lyrics, production, sequencing, packaging, emotions, and he made my musical world bigger and better.

So, when a person like that says they think you should check out Neko Case because that Fox Confessor album sounds exactly like an album that you’ve been waiting for your entire life (he was more casual than that, but who is writing this, ME OR HIM? EXACTLY), you buy the fucking record. You just do. And somehow it changes your life. You pore over the packaging, read the words, see the little notes and drawings that Neko created; love letters to the music. You know that shiver you get sometimes when you eat food with a perfect balance of sharpness and sweetness? That shiver starts in your neck, runs up your jaw and down again over your arms and back. You start salivating. Nibbling a piece of extra sharp cheddar, tasting a savory sauce with tangy-sweet notes of garlic or a snap of vinegar that hits your taste buds just the right way. Fox Confessor still gives me that shiver and its shine has never dimmed for me.

Now this is where I confess that I am not really a concert person. My music producer/drummer/percussionist/all-around-knowledgeable-badass-studio-owner boyfriend is a concert person. He’s seen hundreds of Everyones and No Ones and all the people in-between. He’s played to rooms where the wall graffiti is the best audience and he’s played to rooms so crammed with people that you could probably wiggle out of the experience with an over-the-clothes STD. In contrast, I have been to about 10 concerts that are incredibly valuable to me, out of maybe 25 overall. Crowds, drunk people, sticky floors, and standing for hours on end are not really my jam unless at least two things on that list are non-issues, and I really mean more like three if I’m being honest. But some artists are worth every square on the Bingo card, especially when you find out they are playing five minutes from your house. When we found out Neko Case was coming to town, the real concern was HOW FAST CAN WE BUY THE TICKETS?  

I don’t need to tell you the proper preparation for concerts, right? You listen to the records again, all week, on repeat, many times. Especially your favorites. Then, if you’re me, you think way too hard about it, write a blog post that is probably too long, send it out into the universe and pray that maybe Neko Case will read it and feel good that her music is so enveloping.

Music, records, voices, sounds- they have the innate ability to surface memories you haven’t unearthed in decades, draw out feelings you haven’t nurtured in ages, and return gasps of living breath to the dimensions of time, space, and emotion that you felt were dormant, dead, or lost forever. When I hear Fox Confessor, I remember playing the album in my empty apartment, motherless and untethered from so many good things. I played it loud, really loud. Neko’s strong, sure voice echoing around the oddly sloping attic ceilings, keeping all the juicy secrets to herself but sharing enough of the story to captivate. The deftly nimble and slightly jangly piano of Margaret vs. Pauline burbling off the tile floors where no carpet was laid, the deeply resonant low-end of Star Witness, which feels like a life story regaled in a twist of stale cigarette smoke by someone who lives in a cloak of sadness. The urgency of Hold On, Hold On dissolves into the softer, spare, and slightly fragile A Widow’s Toast. John Saw That Number rumbles and soars like an old gospel tune before diving deep underground into the gritty Dirty Knife and arcing upwards once again with the lilt and sage vocals of Lion’s Jaws. Every song is like unwrapping a present, piling up until you reach the delicate but hopeful At Last, a heartfelt eulogy to vulnerability, and the concise Needle Has Landed. REPEAT.

When I think about Fox Confessor I can feel the oppressive humidity during that summer of 2006, when I spent countless nights driving tiny, winding backroads in northwestern Connecticut. I feel the bare space in my life where my mother would have lived, had she lived. I feel gratitude that my best friend knows me well enough to suggest music that fits intangibles like space, time, love, emptiness, grief, and beauty. I feel a depth of luckiness that I still get the chance to see an artist who created an album that is so big it can encompass entire years of my life. An artist who shows us all every day that she is human and fallible and lovely and thinks about the world in her own gloriously curlicued way; a way that we can hear on every album.

I placed a mayday phone call yesterday.

Me: “I just had a terrible epiphany about myself: I am that person who takes their job way too seriously. Worries about it, while everyone else is looking at me in disbelief thinking ‘What the hell is wrong with her?’ I get smacked down every week for…caring too much?!?…and I’m the asshole. I have the unhealthy relationship with the job: the ridiculous, pedestrian, low-level job that barely pays the bills. Why? WHY? I AM THE LISA.”

Him: “I was just about to leave for work. If I get there on time I can have Starbucks before my shift starts.”

Me: “I’m sorry, I was expecting to unload on your voicemail.”

Him: “Why are you the Lisa?” (Clearly not grasping my desperation here.)

Me: “Because I’M the one with the unhealthy relationship. I’M the one with the impossibly high expectations that will only ever cause ME grief and pain.”

Him: “Wait, what does that have to do with your job?”

Me: “I have those same havoc-wreaking issues…with my job.”

Him: “But that’s totally different from a personal relationship, your job is your job.”

Me: “Why aren’t you getting this? I’m telling you that I’m the ONE weirdo in the room who can’t disconnect from the job and just let it be what it is. Everyone else can look at me being overly concerned and roll their eyes wondering why I’m giving double my hourly wage in expected effort and then getting swatted for it.”

Him: “Oh I see what you mean. Yeah, that’s confusing- it happens at Target, too. I never know if I’m doing a good job because when I walk around I see people who SEEM like they’ve given their heart and soul to corporate to do the best job, but then I’m the heel when I take it home with me and become concerned by their expectations.”

Me: “Yes. YES. They expect you to give them $20 an hour in effort, pay you $10, and then treat you like the freak when you’re confused about what is expected of you.”

Him: “I think people must be lying when they say they don’t care about their jobs. If you walk up to someone and ask them if they can leave it there, they’d probably say yes and pretend they’re not bothered because it’s easy to lie, and maybe they don’t want to admit how much they think about it. We can’t be the only two people who worry about our jobs, right?”

Me: “Probably not but I’m really starting to wonder. Why am I the freak? Is it so weird to care what happens at the place where you spend your prime 40 hours every week? How do you disconnect from that? Survival? I’m still angry about it, almost every day, this weird servitude we’ve brought on ourselves. And yet, I want a cozy place to live that just mine. And air-conditioning. And a car that drives me places. I can’t have that without money. It’s a shitty circle.”

Him: “Yeah. And they love to tell you 'If you don’t like it, go get another job,’ like that’s possible…”

I am mediocre in every way. In fact, even my mediocrity isn’t anything extraordinary. I am an elbow. An ankle. A wrist. Oh who am I kidding? I’m too mediocre for helper parts, even. I’m in-between space. The stuff that makes up the rest of the important things. The drivel, the scraps, the leftovers, the area where you get cuts scrapes dents bruises that just annoy you. There’s nothing special about that. That area only exists. It doesn’t add or subtract. It just IS until it ISN’T.

When you’re so unhappy and a lot of it is because of other people and situations, but another part of it is that you had the chance to change it (or at least try to change it) AND THEN YOU BLINKED.
And then it didn’t change.

You find yourself stuck in those same toxic situations you want to escape from. Angry at yourself. Regret, regret, regretting the slimy fear that kept you from doing everything you could to change it.

I suppose that’s the place where you should know how to fight for yourself.