Savoring Slow Food

I woke this morning to an overcast sky and gentle rain. As I took the dogs out to do their business, I moved my strawberry plant from under the eaves where it normally resides to a spot in my yard where it would receive a drink. Yesterday at the farmer’s market I got a basil plant for a dollar, so I placed it right next to the strawberry for company. Later today I will give it a new home in a larger pot.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at the Marietta Square Farmer’s Market. The tomatoes in my garden are still ripening and ones in the grocery stores still taste like cardboard. I decided the next best thing was to buy something fresh from a local grower and get out in the sunshine.

Well okay, it was hot out there. It's July in Georgia. But it was worth the trip. I ran across raw, unpasteurized honey, all kinds of decorative and culinary herbs, beautiful artisan breads, and even cups of worms (for your compost pile). But stand back for the tomatoes.

Heirloom tomatoes are a joy to behold if you’ve never tried them. There’s just one thing you need to understand about them. They are ugly. I was talking to one of the vendors, asking her questions about hybrids versus heirloom varieties, and an elderly woman paused next to me, surveying the Cherokee purples, the green zebras and the Brandywines. She paused though at one of the tomatoes the woman called an “Aunt Anna.”

“Is it a tomato?” she asked cautiously. I nodded. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “It just looks like a mango.” She nodded, listened a few more seconds to the conversation I was having with the vendor, then moved on.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder it seems. I got a few pounds of tomatoes from each vendor who had some. And with that, I made conversation with people who felt strongly about heirloom tomatoes, who were scientific in their approach to growing them, were communal in their approach to sharing them, and who made the commitment to come out to the heat of the farmer’s market every Saturday to make their living from their own efforts.

Those tomatoes were so good.

In two weeks I’ll lay my money down again, to get enough tomatoes to put up for the fall. I still don’t know how my tomato patch will produce this year, so I want to get a batch of them now, so I don’t miss them so much in January. This will be my first experience putting up vegetables in season, and hopefully not my last.

For now though, I’m enjoying the season’s harvest – fresh, local and ugly. It was a wonderful weekend.

For more information on Georgia Organics, I encourage you to visit this website: http://www.georgiaorganics.org/

And for more information on locally grown produce in your area, click on the Local Chapters link at this website: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/

Be Decent

I got a compliment at work today. One of my favorite people in the company was on the phone with my manager when he said, “Do me a favor and say hello to Laura for me. She’s one of my favorite people in the company.”

Stuff like that is great to hear, isn’t it? I was particularly touched because it came from someone who is, in my opinion, one of the most decent people I know.

I know plenty of smart people. I also know some good managers. But this guy is simply decent, and that quality makes him stand out above everyone else.

You may wonder what I mean by decent. Well, in his professional capacity, he’s a project manager. I worked with him on one of the more rewarding and challenging projects of my career, so I got to watch him in action.

There are smarter men in the company, I’m sure. People with more technical knowledge. He's smart, don't get me wrong, but he doesn't know everything and knows he doesn't need to know. What makes him a brilliant project manager is how he treats people. I've watched him throughout the course of a day, and from the person picking up the trash at the end of the day to the Call Center worker bee on the other end of the phone, he knew everyone by first name. And he treated them all like they were people. Not cogs in a wheel or as obstacles to getting where he wanted to go. He didn’t even treat them as “human resources” at his disposal. He spoke to each and every person on the team as if they were fully engaged in solving the problem at hand. He wasn’t demanding of excellence, he was just so committed to the project himself, so interested in the outcome, and so engaged in seeing it work in the real world that he rolled up his sleeves and got in on the ground floor of each problem that needed to be tackled. He got involved until he understood the problem, understood the severity of the problem, and discussed potential solutions. He drew people into his world. Pretty soon everyone else on the team was fully engaged in solving the problem as well. No one wanted to disappoint him. He created one of the most pleasant working environments I’ve ever experienced.

You don’t forget being around a person who values you, and does it genuinely, and all the time. It’s inspiring.

Normally, I’m paid to be a cog in the wheel. I struggle each day to stay smart and engaged and focused at work. It’s disheartening to say that because work takes up a third of my day. And by the time I sleep, another third is gone. Half of the rest I have to spend time being my own personal cog, doing laundry, washing dishes, putting groceries away, any mundane chore you wish to name. So there’s a 1/6 of my day where I really get to shine. And I’m going to admit this – sometimes I don’t feel like it, sometimes I don’t have any leftovers to spare to for my own ambitions.

So listen, if you’re a manager of people, I’m going to reveal a big secret to you. In the dozen or so years I’ve spent with one company, I’ve run across two managers who inspired me to be good at what I do. I wish I still worked for them. So if you think you’re doing great because as a manager you’re smart or funny or fair, please spare me, okay?

Work on being decent. People won’t forget it.

--Laura

You've Been Extremely Helpful!

I will never forget parallel parking on Folly Beach.

Saturday night was the last night of my Charleston vacation. Stacy and I decided to drive to Folly Beach for dinner. If you’ve never been, it’s the last island in a cluster of islands surrounding Charleston, and locals call it the “Edge of America”. We located the restaurant on the corner of a prominent intersection.

Right next to the flashing lights of the Ambulance and the Fire Truck.

Stacy’s expression implied she thought that was a bad sign. “They don’t appear to be coming FROM our restaurant,” I observed.

The center of town was a cross between a carnival and a bike rally. The breezes blowing from the beach were fierce and the last street vendors of the day were taking advantage of them to display all manner of flashing and blinking, whizzing and whirling wind toys. Stacy found a parking spot near the restaurant and started to parallel park, but got stuck because she was used to parking her mustang and not my RAV4. I got out of the car and stood on the curb to direct her in.

While I stood there, I was mildly distracted by the conversation going on behind me. Two residents, male and female, were walking on the sidewalk behind me. Suddenly the man stopped and said, “I can’t wear these, they are too big!” His female companion stopped next to him and said, “Here, try mine.”

His slurring told me he was drunk, but I had to turn around to determine that he was referring to his flip flops. I was relieved. There were so many other things he could be taking off. The two twirled in a boozy dance as they held onto each other, coordinating the exchange of flip flops while maintaining their compromised sense of balance. They perfectly balanced the whizzing and whirling wind toys across the street.

Stacy commanded my attention from the car. “Am I close enough to the curb now?” she wondered.

“I don’t think this is the place where we need to worry about perfection. Looks good to me.”

We reached the restaurant and had our names on the waiting list before Frick and Frack arrived. Their conversation soon included us as a matter of course.

“It’s all your fault,” the man told Stacy. She apologized. “That’s how it all starts,” I said. He immediately agreed. The woman then spoke up to tell us she wasn’t speaking to him. He didn’t seem to mind.

“You know what I’m talking about,” I told him with just a little gangster bravado. I had no idea what I was talking about, but he laughed knowingly. Stacy says he only had one tooth, but I didn’t see that one, so I think it was just wishful thinking on her part. He looked like a pirate who’d lost his crew and his way.

“Ladies, you’ve been extremely helpful!” he shouted abruptly.

We watched him walk off with his female companion. They both swayed like island palms in a stiff breeze. “I hope they stop when they hit water, or they’re both going to drown,” Stacy said.

The restaurant was a hole in the wall. The food was served in plastic bowls. We ate with plastic forks. Our drinks were in plastic cups. The food was great however and we giggled most of the night. It was just one of those “you had to be there” moments.

And I’m really glad I was.

--Laura

Confession: Part II

After the Great American Novel Tragedy (GANT), you may wonder why I didn’t start over, just re-write the story. I’ve joked in the past that the reason was because it was so bad that I was doing the world a favor. For example, the story was set in Ireland, a country I’ve never visited. Most of the main characters were Irish, and at that point in my life I’d not met a single Irishman. If the cardinal law of writing is to start with what you know, I’d broken it.

But my joke about its quality isn’t completely true. Parts of me know the book wasn’t bad, just naive. I followed the formula for that genre precisely. And I still remember Maeve, my Nancy-Drew like American. I remember the mystery man, Ian. I even remember Angus, the groundskeeper (because all Irish estates need groundskeepers). I still have the blueprint of Ian’s estate in my head, from the house (manor?) to the grounds. Ian even powered his estate using hydroelectricity. He was an engineer. He’d come up with the plans himself. He was mysterious and awesome.

I set the story in County Waterford because I have family roots there. As I was describing the landscape, I wrote about the estate being near ruins of an ancient round tower. I thought that was unrealistic, so I did research on the area. Well it turned out that near Ardmore, in County Waterford, situated minutes off the main Waterford - Cork road, is just such a round tower, ruins from the 12th Century.

The significance of this event should be underscored, because it was the impetus later (on a campus noted for foo foo hippy-ness) for my college pagan phase. I was convinced that I was psychic and if I developed my natural talents, I could be a conduit, tuning into the cosmos like an elegant old radio adjusting her buttons from static to station – from confusion to understanding. Oh, and of course, my ancestors had something to do with that old round tower. One day I’d be sensitive enough to hear what they wanted to tell me about it.

I’m serious. Well, I was.

So what about re-writing the story? Well, the decision to discard it was unconscious at first. I was in college by then, with distractions like work, school, trying to become an adult. Briefly after graduation I did try to take it up again. But I got a job and put it aside once more, that time for good. Today I couldn’t tell you where the remnants of my manuscript are, or if they even exist. It belongs to the shadows of nostalgia.

It’s funny, because for years I regarded this as a failure. I’d never be that earnest dedicated girl again. I couldn’t even re-write a story that was tucked away in the corner of my mind. People say, you can’t go back. Well they were right, I thought, and I clung to that regret. That’s how I viewed everything I did in my life, whenever I experienced failure. I was just a hopeless list of good ideas I could never quite carry off.

But in the meantime, I wrote. Not the great American novel, but about ordinary events from my life that gave me insight on the Big Picture. Maybe there’s still a part of me who wants to be psychic – be that elegant old radio tuning from static to station – only I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m not calling on the ancestors or copying from an expert. Now I know how to speak for myself.

And so here’s the truth. The book I wrote then was for a particular time and place. When I attempted to recreate it, I couldn’t write the same story because I wasn’t the same person. I could no longer write for her, the girl who was trying to become someone else. Time will tell if I’ve lived up to that girl’s expectations. Sometimes it’s hard to escape the worry that I’m letting her down. She was a cool kid, quirky and interesting and worth getting to know.

But making my adult self proud seems more productive than living in the past. I’m not that kid anymore, so it’s unrealistic to try and please her. I’m still writing. I still try to move from static to station, which makes me cool. I don’t have it all figured out yet, which keeps me quirky. I’m still learning, and I think that makes me worth getting to know. So in all the ways that count, I think I still am that kid.

But I’ve learned things she didn’t know, like how to speak with my own voice instead of copying others. I’ve learned how to mend fences and heal from hurt. I’ve learned what’s important to me and what I can live without. And the thought that I still have so much left to learn doesn’t make me tired, I find hope in it, because it means I can meet someone new each day without even leaving home.

And everyone who takes the time to acquaint themselves with me will share in the discoveries, just as I will learn from them. Is that the definition of success? I don’t know. I think maybe it’s my definition of life. Time will tell.

--Laura