North Carolina, pt. 3

There are genetic tests through hair samples to map out every single place you've ever been.  There are new studies that show that starvation and trauma-induced depression and psychosis can be hereditary through small changes in RNA that is outside of the genome--the essence of you.  Every roadmap we trace our little fingers on, every winter your mother stayed under the covers and  forgot your birthday, everything the genome forgot to tell you, it's all built on experience. I thought about this when we finally found my brother's house.  Blinking back the sunlight, seeing the church my brother would be married in four days' time.  I thought about what moments changed me so greatly the RNA inhibited growth in certain genes:  The hatred I felt when I came out.  The deafening silence I felt when I banged my head on the church altar the night my mother told me my uncle died in Afghanistan.  The detached realization that I wouldn't make the funeral because I was in Italy studying art.  The summers I spent as a child, screaming into a locked closet door while my brother was on the other side with the key.  Those experiences changed me molecularly, cellularly.  I dreaded reliving those moments in the silence, how each pause or lull in conversation could be interpreted as resentment.

Really, truly, the only thing I resented was not learning how to forgive when i needed to most.

And I did.  I forgave in a way that was unlike my grudge-harboring self.   I forgave my aunts and uncles for the unspoken words as they greeted me with beer at Nag's Head.  I forgave my sister for all the foolish adolescent arguments we still held onto and we opened up to each other on the three hour ride to the beach.  I forgave my grandfather for calling me the wrong name on the phone after not talking to me for five years.  I forgave, I forgave, and I forgave.  And I smiled and lost sunglasses (and found them at the bottom of the tides).   Sometimes it was overwhelming, sometimes it was organic.  And each time we made promises to keep in touch, we knew it was never going to happen.  But, it was the clarity of knowing where our weaknesses lie that made it all the more real to make those promises.  It was a gossamer veil of a relationship that was just a little too transparent for all of us.  In the periphery of our embraces, we could all sense the charade.

I still have not received the phone calls I was promised.  I am still the stubborn boy I was before I left and need proof of their love before I give in and make the first call.  But, at least now I know my family.  And I understand my mother and know her as an adult now.  We drank four nights straight and laughed for five.  We hugged tight at the airport and I knew it was different each time I said goodbye, how the promise of seeing her again all depended on schedules and airline prices and her progressive arthritis.  But she opened up to me, found comfort in my understanding her ways, and held her hand in the silence on the way to the airport.  The windows stayed down and my grandfather's pipe formed tails of smoke motes that floated between our heads.

I wear a Piggly Wiggly shirt that we bought together almost every night to bed.

But it was not just my mother I got to know better, not just my relatives whom I'll drift away from casually and expectantly again.  I got to relive all the moments of high school with Carissa, experienced new ones and solidified our friendship with a tattoo.  We dedicated it permanently, and it's a perfect emblem of our relationship.  A small outline of a hummingbird sit on my right shoulder, hers on her back.  The edges on mine have blurred a little, but it's permanent nonetheless.  There's a metaphor in there somewhere, a poem about us I can't write just yet.

But, I never had a moment alone with my brother.  A moment to be the best man I was elected to be.  He helped me with my corsage and that was it.  In silence, he handed me a card that thanked me for coming out and I hugged him in an awkward, obligatory way.  I do not know his wife, Jennie, and I kept my distance.  They have their house in North Carolina and their jobs as teachers, their dog and toy collection, their bedroom in their attic.  They are building a life together, they went diving in the Florida Keys together.  I don't need to disrupt a harmony I had no part of.  I kept my distance.  I'll always keep my distance with him, and it's understood and not forced anymore between us.  It's comfortable, and that's relieving.

But in all those moments as the trip wore down, each second I took to remember where I was and whom I was talking to, I never forgot that I have a life in California.  A life no one can relate to, but old women in the church basement will ask if you know so-and-so, who may have visited there in 1973.  You know they mean well, but they know nothing about you and expect you to know everything about them. Now I am a scatterplot of triumphs and failures that have somehow formed this version of myself that's at once cynical and optimistic, serious and the performer.  I'm transitioning between two worlds and constantly having to remind myself that I physically am not in Pennsylvania anymore, that I cannot hold my mother's hand again for another six months.  That those laughs were not promised like they used to be.  To look each person in the eyes and mean it when you say you love them.  I have learned these things through mistakes and I could write a million vignettes about my week in North Carolina, but none of them were as important as that lesson.

North Carolina, pt. 2

I can be pensive when I need to be, to appear intelligent and aloof.  I can do this as protection or for show, a drag I perform to keep myself entertained on the long flights and the short layovers.  I play this game and wonder who think I'm interesting.  In the liminal spaces of airport terminals, everyone wants to be an image of God, someone you'll clutch and pray to when the seatbelt sign flashes, when turbulence hits, when the seat has to remain in an upright position. I feel the same way about friends.  Who will crash with me? Who will share their mask and let me breathe with them?  So few people have met those standards, so few have tried.  My circle of friends used to be loose and crocheted, a yarn of commonality from being bored in the same area code.  Now, the scatterplot characters I call friends are in timezone drifts and desert plains, in metropolitan cities with crime rates and county fairs.  As you get older, you begin to lessen the load, streamline the birthday cards to remember, the gifts to buy.  The secrets you once told the room now remain between you, God, your teddy bear, and a friend.  Whoever will listen rather than opine, whoever will not judge.

I have this in my friend, Carissa.  I have this on a level unsurpassed by any other person I've met.  We hugged tight in her car as she pulled up to greet me at the airport.  She handed me fried chicken, we went to Taco Bell.  A relationship built on unashamed enjoyment of dollar menus and drive-throughs, stopping at a fast food restaurant is intrinsic to our friendship.  It's in the DNA of who we both have become together because there is no pretense, no need for customs and waiters.  We are happy to substitute a napkin for a shirt sleeve, we are happy to laugh at ourselves and who we have become.

After, we drove to her apartment, in a suburb of Philadelphia.  In a two-bed-two-bath, with high ceilings and broken bar stools.  I slept on the couch, the air conditioning turned on to combat the insidious humidity that unapologetically clings to your body like static.  There was no getting rid of the heat, and I was introduced to it in Philadelphia.

And the next morning, when I dropped Carissa off at work to have her car for the day, I stripped my sweaty shirt off and sat for a while in the parking lot of her complex, marveling at the greenery and the way birds sang higher notes.  Beads formed, breath shortened, and I followed the familiar zigzag of hallways that led to her doorstep.  I drank the rest of my gas station coffee and found every movement of mine echoing in her airy apartment.  I had time to think, to relax, to hear myself and my opinions.  I had time, for the first time in a long time.

So I cleaned her apartment.  I did the dishes and folded blankets.  I put laundry away and wiped my spit from the sink.  I did it because I wanted to show I loved her in a way she wouldn't expect.  I like to be kept busy, and I'm good at distracting myself from myself.  The echoes were almost too loud, they drowned out the birdcalls I loved so much.

When it was time to pick up Carissa, we headed towards Richmond, Virginia, the overnight stop on our way to Pinetops, North Carolina.  We shot down lanes, followed banks and rivers.  We covered more mileage in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed than I had in years.  We stocked up on snacks, and stopped once to buy lottery tickets outside of Baltimore.  Carissa drove the whole way and I watched her lips move in the cold blue hues of her dashboard as we sang along to the radio.  It was a night when the water made the air cold and we fogged up the windows from laughing at ourselves.

We checked into a Microtel that had bulletproof glass and slept in a queen-sized bed, waking up five hours later to pull into my brother's driveway by nine the next morning.

North Carolina, pt. 1

I don't know the meaning of life and at 22, I don't think I am supposed to.  People forget my age, and sometimes people forget a lot of things.  I forget my own story sometimes, fabricating new ones as I go alone.  Hell, I forget my own age every once in a while; but from bouncers to ex-boyfriends, you're always trying to impress someone the farther you can detach the essential "you" from yourself. Maybe that was my apprehension about going home for my brother's wedding.  And by "going home", I meant to a place I've never been before.  Born in Indiana, raised in a handful of states, settled in Pennsylvania, home for me is anything cast-iron, anything coal-mined and steel-forged. In California, the mecca of starry-eyed wanderlusters call anything that's remotely in the direction of their birthplace home.  For me, anything pointing due East is homespun for me.  Where I know they have iceberg lettuce for salads, ranch as a side for fries, and an unapologetic sense of beliefs when it comes to God and football.  I bought the roundtrip tickets through Southwest, into Philly and out of Raleigh. It's nearly impossible to pack for summers, because you have to factor in degrees.  Those in Fahrenheit and those in conveyance to your family.  North Carolina in the peak of June was swampy and suffocating, my mother going as far as to say the wedding was held in a mausoleum.  But, I wanted to dress in degrees of formality.  It was a wedding, after all.  And even though I knew I would regret it, I packed one pair of shorts and tried to convince my relatives I was beyond being comfortable, that the two degrees I received at 20 from a private school constituted a level of Victorian modesty that I did not want to disobey.  I packed a beat-up, broken-stitched Louis Vuitton carryall and kissed the family I hand-picked myself in California, got on a plane to meet people who never really made me feel welcomed. Family is an odd concept to me, foreign and awkward on the tongue, those that have it won't understand my impossible anxiety for bloodline connections.  Every family has mythology, stories retold as fable or warning, passed down to give a composite of the generation before them.  For me, it has always been a reproachful loathing for any contact with her side of the family, the Bishops.  Without any wealth or success in the family, each Bishop has become a Freudian archetype of some sort or the other--the Town Drunk was my grandfather, the Pill Addict my aunt, the First Witch Burned in Salem is a distant relative, looming her cursed fate on us all, giving us reason to believe the innate defects of the blood ties we hold.  And being content in them, also. There has always been distance between my mother and her family, the extent of it going back nearly thirty years.  She has been estranged from one sibling or another throughout all of my siblings lives and it would not be fair to her to give the whole account of their tension.   But, in any rate, it is no secret I say, "I come from a small family, only five of us left," to strangers.  It doesn't invoke questions, doesn't stir the mind to what kind of reasons we aren't nuclear.   The relatives that would be there I hadn't seen in ten years, not since my uncle returned from Afghanistan for the first and last time.  Not since I was small and pudgy, not out and uncomfortable in my own body.  And never have I received a kiss from them, a card on my birthday, a well wishing phone call when I went to Italy or California.  In short, they were all strangers to me.  I did the math and I shared perhaps 8 chromosomal pairs with them and that was enough to decide we hardly would have anything in common when I met up with them in North Carolina. But first, I went to Philadelphia, via Houston.  Time is tricky when it's transcontinental, and you never know if you're ready for bed or just in time for dinner.  In Houston, I sat on the floor and charged my phone, sat on my luggage and rested my head in my hands.  Nothing worthwhile, I waited with some coffee, trying to maintain a positive mindset.  Trying to not be too excited to see my closest friend, who was my date for the wedding.

Hello, Again.

I think sometimes it's hard to keep promises. I think it's always hard to be honest, when there are so many excuses I could use as to why I got lazy with responsibilities this summer. I tell myself it's work, I tell myself it's exhaustion, I tell myself it's having people over every week since May. But I'm only telling myself these things. In reality, I just got silent. Bursts of creativity came late for me this summer and I chose my time more wisely (finishing TV series and taking three hour naps). Instead of living through my work, the work that I create through whisks and butter, I died through the work I do for a living. Five-thirty comes very fast when you've been running in your head all night, trying to remember if you prayed that day (trying to even remember if you still prayed and what for). Commitment has never been a scary word, I'm co-dependent by nature. I've dated the same person for the majority of my adult years, but it's the commitment to myself that makes me find something else to do, anything else to not have to sit in front of the blinking space bar and the words don't come like they used to, when I was naive about failure and everything smelled like pollen in the Springtime.

But just because I didn't write about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I had a good month away from writing, away from commitments that I've married myself to. But, today, I come back to you all in the hopes of welcome arms. And in the name of marriage and commitments, I want to share with you the present sent all the way to St. Louis, a package of sweets and savories, a package I did to celebrate complementaries. A package for my friend, Anne, on her wedding day.  I had originally planned to do a candy week, but I want to make it up to everyone and give them all at once, like Christmas morning instead of Hanukkah evenings.

Usually, if I mess up a cake, I throw it out and start again (after some swearing and desperate attempts to fix it) ((read: the carrot meringue fiasco of March 2014)). With these, I wanted to make sure they were perfect, combinations that would amaze the newlyweds and let them know I cared.  I went with the four basic flavor profiles:  sweet, sour, salty, and umami, as I thought that any relationship should have these aspects.  I didn't have time to test and retest. I could only mail out and hope for the best. So, enjoy these treats and make someone's day special, even if it's your own.

Anne's Wedding Treats

1. Honey-Peanut Butter (makes about a cup and a half)

Ingredients

• 15 oz. bag of peanuts (I used honey roasted)
• 1 TB clover honey
• 1 TB canola/peanut oil

Directions

1. Put bag of roasted peanuts in food processor and start to blend (please make sure the motor on your food processor can handle the mixing capabilities of this recipe;  otherwise, it will start to smell like a furby that was on too long)
2. As the peanuts start to break down and oils are being released, you will notice the consistency will start to change.  At this point, I began to add the honey and oils (both of these are to taste, as the oil will change the texture to less crunchy and the honey is used as the sweetener)
3. Continue to blend until the texture and taste are desired.  If it is not "peanutty" enough for you, add more peanuts to blend.  Also could add chocolate while mixture is still hot, more honey, or anything else you may like.
4. Put in airtight jar and store in fridge to firm up.

2. Candied Bacon

Ingredients

• One pound of thick-cut bacon
• 3/4 cup good quality maple syrup
• 2 TB artificial maple syrup (it's sweeter and works here...sue me)
• 2 ts Dijon Mustard (Grey Poupon)
• A pinch of black or cayenne pepper

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit
2. As the oven preheats, line a baking sheet with foil or parchment paper (I preferred foil here because the mixture was so sticky).  In a medium bowl, whisk the syrups and the mustard together.
3. Once the baking sheet is lined and the syrup mixture is whisked, dip the bacon in the mixture and place on the prepared sheet.  Give them some room as you space them so they can cook evenly.
4. Bake 12-14 minutes, turn over, and bake an additional 3-5 minutes (to desired crispiness)*

* A note on this one:  the bacon is very hard to get to a good crispiness if you continue to open up and watch it.  I suggest going with the lowest time setting and to trust that it will crisp.  If that doesn't work, then continue to do a minute at a time

3.  Butter Toffee

This one is actually my mom's recipe that she suggested a couple times for various events I was giving gifts for.  I never really paid attention, but it stuck out as a perfect option for Anne's gifts.  This one is completely hers, so when I share it, I'm sharing my mother's words.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 ts vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup chopped almonds

Directions:

1. Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper (buttered on each side to stick on the pan and also for easy peeling for the toffee).  Set this aside along with the almonds
2. In medium saucepan, put butter and sugar together and heat on medium
3. Stir slowly and steadily.  As you stir, you will notice that the solids start to break down in the pan, slowly coming back together.  Make sure to stir constantly, for nearly a half hour.  It seems like a lot of work at first, but it is therapeutic.  As the sugars start to caramelize and the butter starts to brown, you will see the signature toffee color slowly form.  When a deep, chestnut color becomes heterogenous in the mixture, you are done.
4. Take the pot off the heat and pour onto the prepared sheet pan.  It will cool quickly, so add the almonds to the top and try to shake the pan to distribute the mixture evenly (my mother also suggests using a greased rubber spatula to spread the mixture).
5. Place pan in fridge to cool completely, break into chunks and enjoy!

4.  Preserved Lemon Peels

Ingredients

• Peels of four lemons (make sure to not get the white pith), cut into strips
• One cup sugar

Directions

1. In saucepan, cover peel strips with water and bring to a boil.  Drain.
2. Repeat twice more. (this ensures all the bitterness of the pith is taken out)
3. Bring peel (should now be pretty limp), 1/2 cup water, and sugar to a boil
4. Reduce heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until translucent
5. Drain and let dry, 2-4 hours (I did mine overnight)
6. Toss with additional sugar

I hope you guys enjoy the recipes and if you need any proof that these recipes are great for gifts, here's the bride herself, posted on my instagram about her present:

Besos,

Brett