Amy Frykholm

This morning, I set out early on some errands. I stopped by the co-op because I knew that had just gotten some apples, onions and potatoes in at a good price. I filled my bag, wrote my check and walked out of the co-op. I was fifty paces out the door toward home when it occurred to me that I had just bought the potatoes in plastic. The thought had not even entered my mind. I was thinking about what a good price they were and how the co-op needs to sell them before they rot. I was thinking that it was good to get my shopping out of the way. For all the time that I have been obsessing about my use of plastic, I did not even hesitate.

I was surprised by the wave of shame that came over me, the defensiveness, the self-justification, the frustration with myself. Mostly, I was shocked that the thought hadn’t entered my brain until the potatoes were purchased and I was out the door. There must be a Freudian expression for this willful repression of intention.

I knew the plastic fast would be difficult. I don’t know that I thought it would be difficult in exactly this way. I had hoped that I might at least get to feel a little self-righteous, but I guess self-righteousness has to go in the trash with my potato bag. 

Meanwhile, I visited this blog and found it very useful: a woman who has been trying to live "no new plastic" for three years. I probably couldn't live three years without a new toothbrush, however.

This Lent, my little community of St. George has embarked on a plastic fast. We are trying to avoid plastic for the next 40 days. We kicked off our fast last Wednesday on Ash Wednesday. When the ashes went on our foreheads, we were reminded that, unlike plastic, we will return to dust. 

Then Thursday, Ali, my priest, called me from the grocery store. "I'm already ready to give up," she said. "I can't buy anything." She left the store with a few potatoes, a carton of eggs and a few aluminum cans (that we later learned are coated with plastic on the interior). 

On Sunday we gathered to watch the movie "Addicted to Plastic" and to ponder the reality that every piece of plastic we have ever put in the garbage still exists. Much of it is in landfills, some of it is in the ocean and some in the stomachs of fish and birds. 

Meanwhile, we are gathering resources. We've learned that we can buy bread at our local bakery and have it boxed instead of bagged. We can buy cheese wrapped in butcher paper at the local deli. And just like the collect for the first Sunday in Lent suggests, our "hidden gifts" are drawn forward. Gary knows how to make paneer; Jessie can make yogurt; Blanca can make tortillas, Lynnette can crochet old Safeway bags into reusable shopping bags. Pete is going to explore whether together we can generate the right conditions to compost bio-plastics. 

Lent has always been an introverted and personal experience for me. I've taken on fasts that I've largely managed on my own. This collective experience is very different. Trying something as difficult as foregoing plastic turns us toward each other, toward what we can do instead of what we cannot. 

On the other hand, yesterday, I tried to bake bread that stubbornly refused to rise. I guess I'll try again today. 

I’ve been reading Angel Mendez Montoya’s book The Theology of Food, a meditation on molé and Eucharist. In it, he talks about the relationship in the Spanish language between sabor and saber—tasting and knowing. Both come from the same root, and while that seems momentarily counter-intuitive, it also makes sense. Every parent knows that a child first receives knowledge of the world by putting everything in her mouth. In the Middle Ages, people thought that babies, literally, received wisdom from their mother’s or a wet nurse’s milk.

Somehow, this led me to think about a little restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, whose name I never knew. It was a hamburger joint turned Ethiopian restaurant. When I was a child, this place was a classic diner called Dillinger’s. They served big hamburgers and french fries. Posters of Jimmy Dean and Marilyn Monroe were on the walls. Then when South Dakota legalized gambling in eateries, the quality of the food dramatically declined, but people plunked quarters into the machines in the back room. But in the late ‘90s Dillinger’s became the first Ethiopian restaurant in Sioux Falls, run by a family of recent immigrants. The striped bar stools and plastic booths remained. The posters had been taken down, but not replaced. And instead of plastic baskets of fries appearing in the window between the kitchen and the dining room, servers picked up plates of injeira and spicy lentil wat.

These immigrants first offered the people of Sioux Falls their wisdom through our mouths. They reversed the role of host and guest, and asked us to take into our bodies something that was a part of them. Both communities changed when that happened, and as Mendez explains, that change was both literal and metaphorical. Maybe we had a long way to go to “know our neighbors,” but this first knowing was “intimate and sensory,” and transformative. 

In last week’s New Yorker, Lillian Ross writes a remembrance of J.D. Salinger, the infamously grumpy author of the classic The Catcher in the Rye. In the early 1960’s, Salinger holed up in Cornish, New Hampshire and started refusing both interviews and publishing. I’d always been struck by Salinger’s choice to walk away from the public door held wide open for him, his rejection of the authority granted to him by his success in writing the “great American novel” at a relatively young age. To be honest, the choice to refuse to be a public figure always seemed at least a little selfish to me.

Ross quotes Salinger twice in a way that offers a kind of explanation. “There are no writers anymore. Only book selling louts and big mouths,” she quotes him as saying. I admit this hits a little too close to home, as I have been thinking about how to “promote” my recently-finished biography of Julian of Norwich, but it gets at Salinger’s understanding of the nature of writing. Writing is essentially a private activity, one done by an internal impulse to express oneself, not as an act of self-promotion.

The other quotation is about reading. Salinger once encountered a Maytag salesman who quoted Ruskin to him. “God, how I love private readers,” Salinger reportedly wrote. “It’s what we all used to be.”

Salinger was nostalgic for reading and writing as primarily moments of private exchange. He imagined them emerging out of a solitude or an intimate community that he knew was essentially out of keeping with the contemporary world. Instead of writing for “himself and strangers” as Gertrude Stein famously put it, Salinger wrote for himself and friends. While Salinger no doubt found blogging appalling, is it, in an odd way, closer to his vision than traditional publishing?

I had, shall I say, the privilege of spending time with some doctoral students last week. It had been awhile since I had imbibed that heady mix of insecurity, arrogance and intellectual dynamism that seems to accompany dissertation writing. Some dissertation writers seemed terrified that if they sauntered anywhere near the non-academic world, engaging in such basic humanness as asking thoughtful questions or making a personal statement, they would be dragged kicking and screaming from the academy exposed as a fraud. It was painful to envision myself with such people as future colleagues. It made me think that I escaped the academy just in time to save my mortal soul. 

But another of the graduate students emailed me later asking if I had any advice on how to get the dissertation writing job done. Dissertation writing is a long, grueling, often desperate process. I knew one man in graduate school who, in his first year of dissertation writing, composed one sentence. At the end of the year, he erased it. Here's what I told the graduate student asking my advice. It applies for any writing project in which a person feels that the task is both miserable and impossible. It is especially good if you are feeling watched and judged by a thousand angry eyes. 

1) Write 15 minutes a day and/or 500 words no matter what. Even if your basement floods. Even if your kids get the flu. Even if your dissertation advisor just told you that you didn't have a chance in hell of getting a job. Just write something, even if it is garbage. No, especially if it is garbage. This is basic plumbing and must be done.

2) In my experience, writing demons--the kind that attack you with their mean-spirited critiques and regularly ask, "Who are you kidding?"--tend to sleep in a bit late. If you can get up and get your 500 words written early in the morning, you may get a couple of good solid weeks in before they wise up.