Sockpile

This is a recipe that I borrowed from my imagination, who had quite a clear-eyed idea of how The Idyllic Writer’s Retreat should be — or maybe I should say, after reading numerous reports about Tin House, a rather green-eyed idea.

The most important thing, of course, is ingredients:

• a Saturday afternoon
• a friend or two
• coffee
• a purple bell pepper
• at least one perfectly ripe avocado
• Manchego
• a large trampoline
• one hot tub
• an embarrassment of conversation
• a long list of distractions
• good lighting
• Macbooks
• some very comfortable couches

Prep: Mix together the Saturday afternoon, friend or two, and coffee.

Certain things - like suits, efficiency and agendas - are banned and if discovered should be sealed off in a half-sized plastic baggie, and relegated to the back of a forgotten kitchen cabinet.

Sprinkle in some fresh produce from a nearby farmer’s market. If you can’t find a purple bell pepper, perfectly ripe avocado, and Manchego - then an eggplant an imperfectly ripe avocado and some Havarti might do. But really, let’s be honest: There is no substitute for a perfectly ripe avocado; there is an entire subset of Heaven reserved entirely and specifically for a perfectly ripe avocado, so it’s best to get that part right.

Eat all comestibles at once, with good lighting, and an embarrassment of conversation. Melt in a long list of distractions and stir.

Then retire to the couches, with your Macbooks and sit there…

Several hours may go by…

And that’s fine. Really.

It’s expected.

At the end of everything you’ll have little to show for your efforts. That’s because you forgot an ingredient. The most important one perhaps: something to write about.

Also, somewhere in there there’s a hot tub.

That’s a wonderful account and it sounds just like her. I wish I could have been there! And I want to try that recipe. You have to promise not to move before we get the chance.

I am back in Paris after a week in Tunisia. Paris is now like my Monday, my second chance to get it right. My sleep schedule is fully-tuned, so I should be able to make it to the places that you have to get to in the morning if you have any hope of avoiding a killing line.

I entered Arin’s Bad Weather Writing Contest with this attempt:

It was a hard rain. The kind of rain that pelted a man, that drove him down. Each drop was like a hammer. But a very small hammer. The kind of hammer a jeweler might use, if a jeweler had any use for a hammer. Did jewelers use hammers? Simms didn’t know. But as the drops pelted him he thought, if a jeweler used a hammer, and that hammer was to hit a man repeatedly, over every inch of his soaked and salty skin, that hammer would be like this rain.

But not the hammer in general. That was too vague. The head of the hammer. The flat part that hit the nail, or whatever it was that jewelers hit with hammers. That was the part the rain resembled. The whole question really had Simms stumped. It clouded his thinking, shrouding him in fog as jet and inky as the night. Suppose a jeweler did use a hammer? What would he hit the hammer with? A tiny nail? But what use would a jeweler have for a nail? His confusion was like … like what? Like a driving rain? No. It was not like that. The rain was like a hammer. He was getting ahead of himself.

To clarify: Each drop of that hard rain struck with a certain force, but that force was limited, necessarily, by the tiny size of each raindrop. Each drop might have been the tears of an angel, splashing against the lost and unwanted souls of the world, but Simms wasn’t thinking about angels. He was thinking about jewelers with tiny hammers, hitting on tiny nails, in some imaginary world awash with rain.

It had been like this every since Simms and Julie stood on that cliff, the hurricane in the distance, lifting the water from the ocean and swirling it around in the sky like … like what? Like a jeweler with a hammer, thought Simms, that’s what. And then the hurricane had come closer, and Julie had said, “Shouldn’t we perhaps seek shelter? There’s a Marriott nearby, with a fake Parisian boucherie. They serve a mean prime rib.”

But no, Simms said, it would be better to stay on that cliff. It had been selfish, he knew. And also irrational. Simms knew, from his extensive professional training, that the absolute worst place to be in a hurricane was on top of a tall cliff. And yet he insisted. Even when Julie pointed out that they served the prime rib with a baked potato, and you could have extra sour cream just for asking.

And so the hurricane came, and he clung like a jackel, or a beaver (did beavers cling? More questions!), to the vines on the hillside, just above the cliff, and when the storm passed Julie was gone. He called out. He searched everywhere. But she was gone.

And since that day, the rain had always bothered him. It had rattled at the cage of his soul, like his soul was a cage, maybe a cage worked on by a jeweler, a jeweler with a hammer, who knew? Anything was possible. But why would a jeweler be working on a cage? A cage for what? The questions. They had haunted Simms, along with the rain, since that day on the cliff, and they always would.

Bon journe!

We stayed up late, consuming two full baskets of salty fried wonder, many beers, and a sprinkling of cigarettes — and just generally telling life what’s what. She taught me, for instance, that it is possible to love a Monday. You just have to think of it not as the beginning of your work week, but as your chance to get it right, to lay the groundwork for all your evil machinations. If you manage to love your Monday, and love it well, the rest of the week will just fall into place, like magic.

I told her a little bit about your time at Tin House and she told me about her experiences at the Hedgebrook writer’s retreat on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington. And she also told me about how she came to adopt her dog.

She was on her way back from the Appalachian trail, having finished her solo journey, which may or may not very closely resemble the story of Mary Williams who wrote for McSweeneys about “the wisdom of a woman in her late thirties walking away from her marriage and well-paying job to hike the Appalachian Trail alone.”

She told me the wildthing in her four-legged companion reminds her daily of why she left for the trail, and what she brought back with her from that journey to keep. She even gave me the recipe for a summer dish that we’ll have to eat before it’s fall. Peaches, thyme, ricotta and brown sugar…

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