Alizah Salario

Didion with her daughter. From the LA Time's Jacket Copy

In order to do the heavy lifting of reading a Joan Didion book, the brain – and the heart – must be prepared to carry the weight. This is especially true with Blue Nights, Didion’s extended eulogy to her daughter Quintana, who died in 2005.  For this reason I hesitated picking it up immediately; one has to be in the right place to read about death, especially when it’s a mother writing about the death of her only child. I wanted to save Blue Nights, but the Bookforum cover, the NPR interview, the review after interview after review all finally got to me. I had to read it to know what all the fuss was about. I had recently finished the book and started jotting notes for a blog post when I found out about the death of my father’s girlfriend (for lack of a better word), who had lived with us for many years and played a major role in my upbringing. I returned to Chicago before I had the time – no, before I could create the mental space – to flesh these out.

• It is impossible to read Blue Nights without thinking about all the things one has loved and lost.
• Didion lets us see the small cracks in the veneer
• We are constantly shaping and reshaping the stories of our lives to align with the changing visions of ourselves.

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I wrote a draft of this post nearly three years ago while living in Istanbul, when I felt unexpectedly nostalgic for an American holiday that had always meant little to me beyond the stuffing and pie. I like to tell myself it’s because I’m constantly reminding myself what I have to be grateful for, rather than confining it to a particular day, but I’m not sure that’s totally true. Anyway, missing Thanksgiving made me eager to latch onto ritual of any sort, even if it wasn’t my own.

I don’t know how to slaughter a turkey. I have no clue how to kill a sheep. I’ve never heard the choked bleats of a dying lamb, and I can’t even imagine the process of turning a furry or feathered animal into the various shanks, chops, thighs and breasts of the butcher’s sinewy world. I figure it begins with a quick slit of the throat, but I really don’t like to figure such things at all.

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Do you consider yourself an Ikea Swedish meatballs or Ikea cinnamon buns kind of person? This is the question I pondered during a much-anticipated pilgrimage to the home furnishings behemoth in Red Hook for the second installment of a weekend game I sometimes like to play called Decorating My Apartment Makes Me Feel Like A Real Adult.  After 3 months of living in our new place and an initial splurge on key household items like knives and chairs, my roommate and I decided it was time to get non-essentials like cookie sheets and mason jars to keep legumes, spices and other organic substances fresh. (I’m neither into Swedish meatballs or cinnamon buns, but I am the kind of person who wants to partake in the gingerbread house building contest in the kid’s play area).

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When I lost my iPhone in the back of a taxi a few weeks ago, I decided I wouldn’t replace it. My incessant checking of Gmail, Facebook and Twitter had bred a certain gadget co-dependency that I felt rather ashamed of. I had become that girl walking down the street while texting without looking where she was going. I’m also the girl who has to check her phone in the middle of meals, meetings, and otherwise important events. Rude? Maybe. But you’re probably that girl or guy, too. Still. Perhaps the iPhone mishap was a blessing in disguise. I replaced it with a $20 go-phone, which is the modern-day tin-can-on-a-string equivalent: it makes calls and texts. That’s it. No photos, no email, no Internet – and worst of all, no Tweets. I’d survive. Maybe.

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“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

Adrian is (was?) a member.

I recognize that most of my existential questions will go unresolved, but I had to find an answer to my latest (ridiculous and first world) crisis: Should I join the The Park Slope Food Coop?

The concept of the co-op is simple: it’s run and owned by members, so there’s no big boss man disconnected from the workers, and no disgruntled peons on the bottom of the totem pole. Everyone is equal, in theory, which makes for an heirloom tomatoes and flaxseed oil sort of utopia. Again, in theory. Members work one short shift a month (lifting boxes, cutting cheese, weighing dried mango slices, whatever ) and in return have privileged access to luscious organic produce and  natural products at discounted prices.

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Zuccotti Park, ground zero of Occupy Wall Street, is near my work. You can easily extrapolate that sentence to mean exactly what it does mean: that I work on Wall Street, not the street per se but the environs – in finance, in the financial district, in the World Financial Center to be exact, the idea of big business and corruption being more important here than the street itself.

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Rhetorical question.

I passed through Union Square shortly before this occurred. I weaved through a crowd chanting “the people, united, will never be divided” and headed into the nearby movie theater to see Drive. I’m not sure which type of violence I prefer: the gratuitous, almost cartoonish gore of the blockbuster, or the candid, made-for-YouTube street conflict below.

These days, I’m working near Wall Street, not protesting against it. I wonder: are there sides in all this, and if so, which one am I on?

The view from my window

Like many Americans, my consumption of 9/11 coverage has dramatically increased over the past week.  And also like many Americans, I still stare in disbelief at photos taken in the wake of the destruction. But these days I’ve been doing something I haven’t always been able to do. I look at the photos online, then I looked out the window of my office at Ground Zero. I looked back at the photos, and then again out the window, where an unconventional triptych emerges fifteen floors and ten years below me: one part pool of water, one part transformer-like metal structure, and one part gaping hole.

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When I moved to Brooklyn, I felt slightly disgusted with myself. Does this borough really need another writer with liberal politics, too many advanced degrees, and a penchant for organic kale? I didn’t think so. But alas, after the purgatory that is apartment hunting in New York, I’ve landed in Park Slope. Oh yes. I’m lapping up the sweet yuppie nectar that oozes from the pores of Slopers and can be used as an alternative to agave sweetner in tea and/or fair trade coffee. That’s right. I’m living at ground zero of what makes Brooklyn Brooklyn, or at least, the Brooklyn I’ve come to know and love (and sometimes find obnoxious).

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