The usual

In the time since we last spoke, I’ve revised the manuscript for my next book! I’ve traveled alone with my five-month-old baby to a family wedding on the other side of the country! I’ve felt like an Olympic gold medalist for having survived traveling alone with my five-month-old baby to a family wedding on the other side of the country! I’ve consumed biscuits and dark chocolate milkshakes and fingers and cheeks, listened to Fugazi and almost remembered what it felt like to be 15 and have a crush on Guy Picciotto, tried two recipes for healthy cookies, decided that I’m not into healthy cookies, made my daughter wear a pair of sunglasses that were intended for a doll, and rekindled my love for farro. The usual.

I don’t know what made me think of farro again, but I’m glad I did. A few years ago, I went through a period of cooking it regularly, but then I forgot about it. I’m good at that. Farro went the way of this apple cake, these oatmeal popovers, this egg salad, this broccoli soup, and this boiled kale, foods that I love but almost never think to eat. But: yesterday I bought farro for the third time in less than a month. The third time! LOOK OUT.

A billion (or five and a half) years ago, when Brandon and I got married, one of the dishes that our caterer made for the reception was farro with caramelized onions, carrots, celery, and feta, with a red wine vinaigrette. I didn’t have much experience with farro, but I liked the sound of it when they suggested it, and it was, in fact, terrific: chewy, nutty, and complex. In its uncooked state, it looks a little like barley, and once cooked, it looks a lot like brown rice, but its flavor is more interesting and lighter somehow than either.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been cooking big batches of farro and stashing it in the fridge, scooping out a few spoonfuls at lunch or dinner as the base for a hearty salad. I’ll bet a lot of you do this, too, with some grain or other? At first, I threw in whatever I found in the crisper drawer and any leftovers that were lying around, but slowly, over a number of days, I settled on a few ingredients that got along especially well. The flavors in my salad are not unlike the farro salad from our wedding, but mine is quicker to make, more of a bang-it-together thing. I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, wondering if this recipe - if you can even call it a recipe - was too simple to write about, but then I decided that if I like it enough to eat it a few times a week, well, you know, what the hell, why not.

Let’s call it a warm farro salad with chickpeas, feta, and spicy dressing.  You’ll need a good-sized bowl - maybe the kind they call a pasta bowl?  I use a medium-sized mixing bowl, because I’m a classy lady. Whatever you’re using, put a nice amount of warm farro in the bottom of it, and then pile on a spoonful of chickpeas, maybe half of a sliced carrot, a handful each of chopped escarole and radicchio, and a generous hunk of feta, crumbled. You could also add some small pieces of cooked chicken, if you want, or leftover steak or braised pork, and other raw or roasted vegetables. Everything is negotiable, except the feta. DO NOT SKIP THE FETA. Then you douse your salad with a dressing that’s essentially nuoc cham: fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water, garlic, and a chile. You are now ready to sit down with your mixing bowl and eat.  There’s something very special, I think, about the union of farro and feta, and then the chickpeas, the bitter chicories, the sweet carrots, and the salty-hot dressing: it’s crunchy and juicy, now warm, now cold. It was my dinner yesterday and my lunch the day before, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be my dinner tonight.

P.S. My friend and Spilled Milk co-host Matthew Amster-Burton has written a new book, and he’s just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. It’s called Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo, and like everything Matthew writes, it’s funny, insightful, and very smart. (...Annnnnnd now he is blushing.)


Warm Farro Salad with Chickpeas, Feta, and Spicy Dressing

I’ve found farro in Seattle at Whole Foods, PCC, and some grocery stores, or you can get it from ChefShop. I like the farro grown by Bluebird Grain Farms of Winthrop, Washington. Farro should be soaked briefly before cooking, although Matthew often uses Trader Joe’s quick-cooking farro – done in 10 minutes! – and says that it’s great. In any case, I give instructions below for cooking standard farro, and hey, feel free to scale up and cook an even bigger batch, if you’d like. From one cup of uncooked farro, I wind up with enough cooked farro for three or four servings of this salad.

Also: among types of feta, I like French feta best.

For the farro:
1 cup farro
½ tsp. salt

For the dressing:
3 Tbsp. fish sauce
3 Tbsp. lime juice
2 to 3 Tbsp. (25 to 35 g) brown sugar
6 to 8 Tbsp. water, to taste
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
1 Thai chile, very thinly sliced

For the salad:
Chickpeas, either canned (drained and rinsed) or cooked from dried
Escarole, coarsely chopped or sliced
Radicchio, coarsely sliced
Carrots, sliced into rounds
Feta, coarsely crumbled

Put the farro in a medium (2 ½- to 3-quart) saucepan, add cold water to cover, and set it aside to soak for 30 minutes. Then drain the farro, put it back into the saucepan, and add 3 cups of cold water and ½ teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil; then reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until tender but still a little chewy, about 45 minutes. It’s up to you, really, how “done” you want your farro. At 30 minutes, mine is usually too tough, but a few minutes later, it’s just right: al dente, but not exhausting to chew. When it’s ready, drain it, and either use it while it’s warm or transfer it to a storage container for later use. (Covered and chilled, cooked farro will keep for a few days, easy.)

To make the dressing, combine the fish sauce, lime juice, 2 tablespoons of the brown sugar, 6 tablespoons of the water, the garlic, and chile in a small bowl. Whisk well. Taste: if it’s too pungent, add more water 1 tablespoon at a time. If you’d like a little more sweetness, add more brown sugar ½ tablespoon at a time. (Covered and chilled, the dressing will keep for three days to a week.)

To assemble a portion of salad, scoop out a couple of large spoonfuls of farro – maybe 1/3 to ½ cup – and put it in a wide bowl. If the farro is cold, you might want to microwave it for 45 seconds or so, to warm it. That’s what I do. Or you could put it in a small ovenproof dish, covered, and bake it for a few minutes to warm it. Or you can just leave it cold. Add a large spoonful of chickpeas, a good handful each of escarole and radicchio, and maybe half of a carrot, sliced. Top with a generous amount of feta, and then drizzle some dressing – maybe a tablespoon? Or to taste – over the whole thing. Toss, and eat.

A small revolution

You good, good people. Before I say another word, I want to thank you for your many comments, your e-mails, and the incredibly kind card - a real, three-dimensional paper card - that one of you sent to me at Delancey. Your kindness blew me away. I thought for a long time before deciding to write that last post, and I want to thank you for making me feel not only safe in deciding to do it, but very, very glad. I remember my doctor saying to me, one day in mid-December, that I would not only recover, but that someday soon, I might even have a hard time remembering exactly what postpartum depression felt like. Though he’s been my doctor for years, and though he knows us very well - he’s Brandon’s doctor, too, and June’s doctor, and he delivered June - in the privacy of my mind, I thought, Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Suuuuuuuure. Well! Turns out, being wrong is my new favorite thing.

In other news, June is a champion. She’s my new favorite person. She sleeps with her arms straight up by her ears, like she’s cheering very, very quietly about something, or like a gymnast who’s just stuck her landing. She thrashes around like a rodeo bronc when in the nude, and if you sing "Katy Too," by Johnny Cash, with the words "Baby June" subbed in for "Katy too," she will grin and stick her tongue out. This is because she has just discovered that she has a tongue. Every day is a small revolution.

I’ve been cooking more regularly, which is a great development, except that I haven’t been cooking particularly well. I have long had a special talent for making bland soups, and I guess it should be some kind of consolation that, with so much change in my life in the past year, this, at least, has remained consistent? On the upside, I’ve been roasting a lot of rutabagas, and I highly recommend that. And the other day, I made braised endive with prosciutto for the millionth time, and for the millionth time, it was excellent. And last night, after dinner, I fell down a rabbit hole of Bon Jovi videos, which has nothing to do with food but was also excellent. When I was eight years old, I had a Bop magazine poster of Jon Bon Jovi, shirtless and wearing a fringed scarf, on my bedroom wall. I think that explains everything.

I have a recipe for you today. Not the best photographs, but a recipe.

For years now, I’ve followed the site 3191 Miles Apart and the work of its co-creators Maria and Stephanie. Two years ago, they began publishing a quarterly, which is filled with photographs, recipes, projects, travel guides, and anything else they feel excited about, and it’s always beautiful and beautifully produced, printed on matte paper that feels nice in your hand. One night last weekend, while June was sleeping and Brandon was working, I climbed into bed with 3191 Quarterly No. 9 and promptly fell onto Stephanie’s recipe for oatcakes.

I should say that oatcakes are not actually cakes.  As Stephanie explains, they’re sort of a cross between a cookie, a cracker, and maybe a biscuit - a small, crunchy, nubbly thing that you could eat at pretty much any time of day.  The concept is Scottish, although I’m going to be totally blasphemous and uncouth and American and admit that I like Stephanie’s version better than the oatcakes I tried in Edinburgh. In my defense, my friends who live in Scotland - and one of them is Scottish by birth - didn’t love the oatcakes we ate that day either. No idea what the brand was, although I can tell you that we bought them at Mellis. Anyway.

I like to eat oatcakes with sharp cheddar, though you could also treat them more like a cookie and dunk them in a cup of tea.  This week I’ve been eating them with peanut butter and slices of apple, as a second breakfast. (I eat my first breakfast around 6:30 am, while sitting next to June on a blanket on the kitchen floor, singing "Baby June / Katy Too," and it’s gone long before lunchtime comes around.) They’re a little sweet and a little salty, and they somehow manage to come across as both wholesome and tempting.  Do any of you remember Carr’s Wheatolos?  Oatcakes don’t really taste like Wheatolos - maybe a cousin of the Wheatolo - but for me, they push the same buttons. God, I miss Wheatolos.


Oatcakes
Adapted slightly from Stephanie Congdon Barnes and 3191 Quarterly No. 9

1 ½ cups (150 grams) rolled oats
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1/3 cup (60 grams) packed brown sugar
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. fine salt
1 stick (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, diced
¼ cup (60 ml) full-fat plain yogurt
Whole milk, if needed

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.

In a large bowl, combine the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt, whisking to blend. Add the butter, and use your fingers, pressing and squeezing, to work it into the oat mixture until it resembles a coarse meal. Stir in the yogurt until a soft dough forms. (If your yogurt is on the thick side, you may need to add a tablespoon or so of milk, just enough to bring the dough together.) The dough should be a little crumbly. Lightly flour a work surface, and turn the dough out onto it, rolling or patting it to a ¼-inch thickness. (I found that the dough was a little too sticky to roll cleanly, but it worked out alright.) Using a 2-inch round cookie cutter, stamp out oatcakes, and transfer them to the prepared sheet pans. (A bench scraper comes in handy for transferring the oatcakes to the sheet pans and cleaning the counter afterward. I found that I could comfortably fit about 15 oatcakes on one pan and the remainder on the second.) (I am really into parentheses today.) It’s okay to gather and re-roll any scraps of dough.

Bake the oatcakes for about 15 minutes, or until they are golden brown around the edges. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, and then store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Yield: about 25 oatcakes

P.S. Thank you, Stephanie, for allowing me to reprint your recipe. It’s a keeper.
P.P.S. This essay by Zadie Smith is wonderful (via Brian Ferry).

Ah ha

My father wasn’t a writer, or not in the vocational sense, but he liked to play with words, and I grew up thinking of him as someone who wrote. He never made a big deal of it; writing was just something he did sometimes, a few quick lines on one of the index cards that he always kept in his shirt pocket. I haven’t seen a lot of his work - only a goofy poem he once jotted for me on a notepad from a medical conference he went to, and some haikus that we found in his bathroom drawer after he died. Many years ago, in a context that I now don’t remember, my mother told me that Burg tended to write most when he was feeling down, and not so much when he was happy. I don’t know if he would explain it that way, and I can’t ask him, but it resonated with me at the time. Probably because I was a teenager then, and I was doing my own share of mopey writing - mostly about the tall, long-haired kid who was a senior in my high school when I was a freshman, who played in a moody band with a clever name and reportedly smoked a truly staggering amount of weed but, I was certain, could be reformed into a fine, upstanding boyfriend if only, if only, IF ONLY I could manage to open my mouth and try speaking to him. There was a lot of woe going on, a lot of longing. I had a lot of feelings. In any case, I remember that conversation with my mother, and I remember thinking, Ah ha! That’s it! I too write the most, and the best, when I’m unhappy. That’s the trick...

Of course, that was sort of an unhelpful realization, and after some years passed and I stopped being a teenager (FINALLY), I began to see that it was not only unhelpful, but also untrue.  I discovered other ways to approach writing and other things to write about. I think we can all be grateful for that. Though I do wonder what happened to the tall, long-haired kid.  He’s totally unGoogleable, and you know I’ve tried. He’s also now almost forty.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say, and I swear that I really am going somewhere here, is: I don’t like being unhappy, and I don’t like writing about being unhappy. It’s boring, and it makes me tired. But about three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and I don’t see a way to not write about it. It began in the form of insomnia, and it took me a while to recognize it, because it was more complicated than I thought depression would be: I wasn’t sad so much as I was overwhelmed. Statistically, something like one in ten mothers get postpartum depression, but few seem to talk about it - or at least, few that I’ve found. When I was diagnosed, and when I was first trying to make sense of it, what I wanted most was to talk with another woman who had been through it and come out the other side, someone who could reassure me with full confidence that it wouldn’t be a permanent condition. I knew that logically, intellectually, but THE HORMONES, they pull the wool over your eyes, and the wool, whoa, it is heavy. You spend nine months growing a real live human baby in your abdomen, and then you push that baby out, and then you feed that baby milk that your body somehow makes, and though we mammals have been doing it for as long as we mammals have existed, it is big, weird, screwy stuff. It makes you have more feelings than you did when you were fifteen, and they feel very real. And in my case, the case of postpartum depression, they don’t go away when they should, and instead, they build.

I am grateful to have been able to ask for help, and I’m relieved that the help is actually helping. I am grateful for Brandon, and I am grateful for June. And though I would certainly rather just la la la pretend that it never happened, I want to write this down, on the off chance that you or someone you know needs to hear it. I am grateful that I can now reassure myself that this isn’t a permanent condition, that I now believe it.

Whew.

As loud as I wanted

Ah. Okay. Where were we?

Everything is happening at lightning speed. I have to get back to writing it down, or I’ll forget.  One morning, you wake up and you’re 33 years old, with two dogs and a spouse and a refrigerator full of esoteric vermouths and amari, and the next morning, you wake up and you’re 34 years old, with two dogs, a spouse, and a 12-week-old child in a bouncy chair on the floor in front of the refrigerator.  The other day at a doctor’s checkup, I actually told the nurse that I was 33, because I forgot that I’d had a birthday. 33, 34, same thing. In any case, I’m still a baby when I get a shot.

We are beginning to find moments of normalcy. On Monday, we put June in the car and drove to Vancouver to see Bruce Springsteen in concert.  He played "Cover Me," and it was sufficiently deafening that I could sing along as loud as I wanted without worrying that anyone would hear. I also ate a hot dog with yellow mustard.  It was outstanding. June stayed back at the hotel with our friends Katie and Kyle and slept through the entire show.  Someday, when she’s moaning about how ancient and uncool and deaf we are, I’ll tell her about the days when we were seeing Springsteen and sacrificing our hearing and she was drooling shamelessly all over a borrowed hotel playpen.

Twice now, Brandon and I have gone on dates. Real dates, without a small person around.  Of course, these dates are on Sundays, at lunchtime, and Brandon goes to work afterward.  The first time, we went out to lunch at The Whale Wins. (The sardine toast with curried tomato mayonnaise and shaved fennel! The whole roasted trout with brown butter and walnut sauce!  The brownie!  Eric Bordelet’s pear cider!) Then we went to see the new James Bond movie, which was exciting, except that we failed to note that the movie would end after the babysitter was expecting us home, and that meant that we were those people, the ones who trip on your purse while climbing over you and tiptoe sheepishly out of the theater with twenty minutes left. The second time, we went out to lunch again, and after having three-quarters of a glass of Champagne, I fell asleep in the car on the way back to our neighborhood. When I woke up, we were parked in the lot outside the grocery store, where we were supposed to be doing our Thanksgiving shopping, and over in the driver’s seat, Brandon was now sleeping.  We are pros at sleeping in parked cars.  Who knew? This past Tuesday, I had a fabulous nap in a parking lot on Granville Island, with cars roaring across the bridge over my head, while Brandon and June explored the market.

June looks exactly like Brandon when she smiles, and the rest of the time, or most of it, she looks like me. Early the other morning, in our hotel room in Vancouver, I heard her start to fuss in her playpen-slash-crib, and when I bent down to pick her up, she let out a tiny gleeful scream and I could see, even in the dark, that she was grinning at me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the fact that she exists - except when she’s having a flamboyant meltdown like she did yesterday afternoon while we attempted to take a walk, and then I am pretty sure that I will definitely, without a doubt, never ever get over it.

When we were first thinking about having a baby, I read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions - there’s an Anne Lamott book for every phase of my life!  Such a consolation! - and a couple of days ago, I decided to reread it.  There’s so much that she gets right. "Before I got pregnant with Sam," she writes on page 60, "I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. . . .  Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I didn’t used to care all that much."

Sometimes when I’m driving, because I do all of my thinking (and now, sleeping) in the car, I think about Tina and my dad, all the people June will never meet. You’d think I’d be used to it, now that Burg has been gone for ten years next week, but grief always catches me off guard.  I can’t believe that June will never know my dad; that she’ll never get one of his scratchy, bracing, beard-forward kisses; that he will never have the opportunity to forget her birthday, something he was always so good at.  And then I think about the fact that June will never really think of my mother as a twin.  I just can’t believe she’ll never know The Twins.  Brandon tells me almost every day that he sees them in her, and that makes it a little better.

It feels good to come back to this space.  It never fails me.  Thank you, always, always, for reading.

P.S.  This song. (With thanks to my friend Brian for pointing it out.)  Stevie wins again.

I stand by my assessment

I know. The universe does not need another recipe for a banana baked something. And yet.

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and I have a couple of hours(!) home alone(!) to do whatever(!) I want(!), which is mostly to eat Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and stare at the wall. Brandon and June are out on the town, having a lunch date at a friend’s new restaurant. I hope June is polite and doesn’t spit up at the table or get totally milk-drunk and harass the server - or that, if she does, she at least tips well. Baby jokes! It’s come to this! God, I am so, so sorry.

I’ve been wanting to tell you about this recipe for several weeks now. I first made it on September 7, a Friday.  I remember the date because I was in very early labor that day, though I wasn’t entirely sure of it yet. My mother was in town, and we were trying to keep ourselves occupied. There were three overripe bananas on the countertop, and I felt like baking. But I had already made two banana breads and stashed them the freezer, so for the first time in recorded history, banana bread seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I got out Kim Boyce’s excellent book and thumbed through it until I came to a recipe for Banana Cereal Muffins.

I don’t have a picture of said muffins for you. But I’ll go ahead and let you in on a secret: they’re not especially beautiful. They look like muffins, muffins that might even be good for you. They’re brown and lumpy on top. But they are very, very delicious: tender and with a hearty crumb, faintly buttery, intensely perfumed with banana. They were the first thing I ate after June was born, and though I’m sure the astonishment of that moment has biased my opinion somewhat, I stand by my assessment of the muffin. I can’t remember why, but Brandon had to feed it to me - maybe I was holding the baby? - and rather than putting the whole thing up to my face, he broke off bites and put them in my mouth. It was a very sweet gesture, except that the bites he gave me were tiny, as though he were feeding an injured bird, and he kept getting distracted by something - it must have been the baby, who, yes, I must have been holding - and soon I was barking, "MORE MUFFIN. THE MUFFIN. GIVE ME THE MUFFIN." Which, of course, is nothing new.


Banana Cereal Muffins
Adapted from Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce

I think of this as a garbage disposal-style recipe, and I hope you won’t take that the wrong way. What I mean is, you can throw your nearly dead bananas at it, and your leftover hot cereal from this morning, and that bag of dark rye flour you’ve had lying around in the refrigerator since last March. Or, if you’re short a banana but happen to have some applesauce, put a little of that in instead. I might even try using leftover oatmeal next time, instead of the cracked grain cereal.

Another note: Boyce calls for creaming butter when it’s cold, rather than room temperature. I can’t say for sure, but I think she does it as a convenience: that way, you don’t have to plan ahead. I was nervous, but when beaten on high speed, it really does cream just fine.

½ cup cracked-multigrain hot cereal, such as Bob’s Red Mill or Bluebird Grain Farms Old World Cereal Blend
Pinch of salt
1 cup (140 grams) dark rye flour
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
6 Tbsp. (85 grams) cold unsalted butter
¼ cup (50 grams) dark brown sugar
3 very ripe bananas, about 1 ¼ pounds or 565 grams
2 Tbsp. unsulphured (not blackstrap) molasses
1 large egg

Bring 1 ½ cups water to a boil. Add the cereal and salt, and whisk to prevent clumping. Reduce the heat to low and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the cereal is tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool; then set aside ½ cup of the cooked cereal, saving the rest for another use. (You can freeze it in ½-cup portions to use for more muffins later, if you want.)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease 8 cups of a standard-size muffin tins.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the dark rye flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter and the brown sugar. Beat on high speed until the mixture is light and creamy, about 2 minutes. Using a spatula, scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Add the bananas, molasses, egg, and the ½ cup cooled cereal, and beat on medium speed until thoroughly combined, a minute or so. It may look curdled. Don’t worry about that. Add the dry ingredients, and mix on low speed to just combine. Using the spatula, mix a bit more to ensure that the flour is entirely absorbed.

Scoop the batter into the 8 prepared muffin cups. (I use an ice cream scoop to do this, but you could also use a spoon.) Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan midway through, until the bottoms of the muffins are dark golden in color. (Twist one out of the pan to check.) Remove the tins from the oven, transfer the hot muffins to a wire rack, and cool slightly. The muffins are best eaten warm from the oven or later that same day. Or, on later occasions, consider warming them in the oven or toasting them lightly before serving. They also freeze beautifully.

Yield: 8 muffins

All right

Well, well, well! I’m typing this with a baby strapped to my chest! Still trying to figure out how that happened.

I hope you’re well. Things are all right here, I’m relieved to report, especially given the fact that I had exactly zero experience with babies prior to birthing one three short weeks ago. I have never felt so simultaneously capable and incompetent. It depends on the day. Sometimes the hour. But we’re figuring it out, with help and handholding and deliveries of soup and Szechuan pork and plum cake from our parents and friends and our adoptive family at Delancey and Essex. It helps that June has the world’s best cowlick, and that she makes pirate faces when she’s hungry. It helps that I really, really, really like her.

Last week, someone asked me how it feels to be a mother. I have to say, I don’t feel like a mother yet. I don’t even know what it means to feel like a mother. Right now, more than anything, I feel best if I don’t think too hard.

I’ve never been a journal- or diary-keeper. This site, though I don’t like to think of it as anything remotely like a journal, is my closest thing to it. But if I were keeping a journal of this period of time, I would want to make note of Music Hour. Every morning, after June has had breakfast, I sneak out to make coffee or pay bills or shower, and she and Brandon lie in bed and hiccup, listening to music and looking out the window.

June is a great fan of Elvis, Johnny Cash, old country-western as a general category, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (with gratitude to Unofficial Auntie Elissa for the suggestion). She also likes Arthur Russell. She does not like the silence between songs. She is deeply insulted by the silence between songs. Like me, she is made alternately ecstatic and weepy by Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” She appreciates my singing voice, which is something that no one on Earth has ever appreciated, ever. She can stay.

Be back soon.

We did it

I am very happy to announce that June is here.

I had my first contraction while sitting at the bar at Delancey last Friday evening, eating dinner with my mother, and went into early labor in the middle of the night. Twenty-nine hours later - after deafening my companions on the drive to the hospital; discovering that I wasn’t far enough along to be admitted; a few hours spent laboring on a bench on the nearby campus of Seattle University, scaring incoming freshmen into a lifetime of abstinence; and much care and encouragement from my saintly longtime doctor, the world’s finest doula, and a nurse named Wendy - our daughter June Elizabeth Alexander Pettit was born at 6:29 am on Sunday, September 9. She weighed 9 pounds and was 20.5 inches long, with a full head of wavy dark brown hair. I still can’t believe we did it.

Brandon and I came up with June’s first name over a year ago, when we were still only thinking about becoming parents. Neither of us really remembers where the idea came from, though I think we borrowed it from June Carter Cash. June’s middle names come from two of my mother's siblings. Elizabeth was my aunt Tina’s formal first name, and Alexander was the middle name of my uncle Jerry, who died of AIDS when I was nine. I like knowing that Tina and Jerry will always be with her now. Especially Tina, who wanted so much to meet her. I hope they got to wave to one another as they passed, Tina leaving and June arriving.

Thank you so much for the support and care you’ve shown me and Brandon in these past months and years. I know June has already felt it, too. We’re so glad to know her, and to introduce her to you.

Be back soon.

[Second photograph by my friend Lecia Phinney. I highly recommend clicking it to make it larger. Blogger is making it oddly blurry here.]