Despite evidence to the contrary, I’m still here, dear friends. I’m still stuck in the LuthorCorp morass, I’m still neck-deep in LSAT revision, I’m still slogging my way, awkwardly, through ballet and morning laps in the pool, but I’m here, and I so look forward to writing and thinking properly again.
If this were any other year, dear friends, I’d have a veritable book in me tonight. I like to celebrate my heroes in a manner that befits them, and if ever there were a hero who deserved celebration, it would be Lionel Poilâne, the two-fisted champion of the great, grand, long-fermented, darkly-baked French sourdough loaf. If I had my own way, I would drop about 5,000 words about those loaves, and about the bakery at 8 rue de Cherche-Midi from which they emerge; about the global business he built, sending fresh miches to bread lovers around the world via FedEx, about the bread-dough-based working chandelier he made for his good friend Salvador Dali, and about the anonymous New York customer who paid him $100,000 in 1997 to deliver a loaf of bread a week to his children and grandchildren for the rest of their lives. It is a grand story of a grand life, but, time-pressed as I am, I cannot tell it tonight.
What I can do is share a few links with you, and ask you to take a moment on this festive night to remember M. Poilâne and his wife, Iréna, who died five years ago today, when the helicopter M. Poilâne was piloting crashed off the coast of Brittany. Their daughters are carrying on the family business. Even if you are not a breadhead, or if you are not a fan of big dark rustic loaves, even if a trip to Paris is not in your immediate future or if you have no plans to mail-order a loaf of pain Poilâne, please do consider following the links; if you do, you will find captivating and inspiring thoughts from a baker I still miss, and still mourn.
Discover Paris’s obituary for Lionel Poilâne
A 2001 interview with Lionel Poilâne in Fast Company
A remarkable interview with M. Poilâne in the Stars and Perfumes column in Osmoz
A truly lovely essay by Lynelle Scott-Aitken in the Sydney Morning Herald
Dear friends,
I have spent the past 90 minutes trying to find some clever and writerly way to say that all has not been well at the box factory since my return from Mystic. That I have only been able to muster the previous sentence is a sign of just how dire things have become. As ever, I am loath to part with details, partly because even in my worst moments I’d rather not be dooced out of a job, but mostly because the sordid details are only sordid—and interesting—to those of us who actually work there. They do not make for interesting reading; nor do they make for cathartic writing. All they do is steal my time and creative energy, and they do a spectacular job of it.
I do have stories to tell, dear friends, and I would like to promise that you’ll find them in this space soon, but between LSAT revision and the sheer amount of energy I need just to get through a day without grinding my teeth into dust, I have no idea just when I’ll be able to produce them. If you’ve read this from me one too many times and have decided that you’ve had enough, I certainly wouldn’t blame you. But I do hope that you haven’t. To quote another pair of sages of the ages, I do appreciate your being ‘round.
It’s not as kinky as it sounds, dear friends. Showing the superb taste and judgment that has made him The Boy for Me since 1992, Lloyd took me to Mystic for four days to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I knew we’d have a good time, mostly based on the happy sighs of our friends and relatives who have been to Mystic, but even knowing that I was in for a good time, I had no idea just how much I would love it up there, or how difficult it would be to return to our cramped, noisy, quotidian corner of the world.
There is much I want to say about this splendid week, more than I have in me to say now, focused as I am on the prospect of returning to the box factory tomorrow, and surviving the next three weeks, which I already know are going to be painful and difficult, even by the normal box factory standard. I promise, dear friends, that I will share properly, but in the meantime, I can say that there was more to our visit than picturesque landscapes and drawbridge geekery. There was also print geekery, in the form of the nifty linotype machine Lloyd and I found in a used bookstore:
There were also swell and imaginative Halloween lawn fixtures:
There was retail therapy, including two bookstore runs, two trips to a large and sublime health food supermarket, and a trip to this shop, where I bought these:
There might have even been a nice meal or two. Or ten. 
Dear friends, I am on a week’s vacation from the box factory. Tomorrow morning, Lloyd and I are headed to beautiful uptown Mystic, Connecticut for four days. On Tuesday we will celebrate our anniversary—no, let me rephrase that. Tuesday is our anniversary, but we’ll be celebrating all week, and the week after that, and the weeks/months/years that follow, as long as we possibly can. If I were any kind of wife, I’d write him the valentine that he deserves, but I don’t know if I can improve upon the first one, which I originally posted on December 3, 2003, two days after this silly little blog was born.
Although I have not given him the URL, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before my husband finds this little blog of mine, as he is a smart cookie. This should inspire me to be on my best behavior; after all, if I say to him, Gary Hart-like, “Go ahead! Read it! I have nothing to hide!,” I should not be surprised if he takes me up on the offer. Furthermore, I should consider this possibility before writing a page full of sound and fury about what a shitheel he is, how he persists in doing things that make one’s blood gout out of one’s head in anger and despair for the future.
This should inspire me to be good...and yet I am compelled to be mean instead, for not only is my husband so good to me as to be positively sick-making, but he is also self-effacing to boot. He has the good manners to accept an “I love you” graciously, but once you add anything onto that, he becomes sheepish and blushy, clearly uncomfortable in the presence of so much silly love, unless he is in a piss-up mood, in which case he rolls his eyes into the back of his head, sticks his tongue out, lolls his head from side to side and makes ridiculous noises. If he visits this page and reads my bragging on him, he will become downright obnoxious, devising sneaky little psychological torture games and asking, mockingly, “are you going to put this in your blog? How about this? Huh? Huh? Nnnnnnngeeee! Am I making you crazy? Am I Dial M for Murdering you?” Not only is he obnoxious, but he also knows he’s screwing up the movie reference: it’s Gaslight, not Dial M for Murder, that he’s thinking of. He knows this, and he knows it drives me up a wall, and he insists on saying it, as he has daily for almost 12 years.
Note to Lloyd, in the event he is reading this: Dude, you are so annoying.
Lloyd is not his real name, of course. I am enjoined from ever using his real name. So it’s his own damn fault if he doesn’t like his pseud, which I created in honor of a conversation I had with two friends. We were at Telephone Bar and Grill on Second Avenue. They were drinking girl drinks. I was drinking cider, fancying myself all hard and English because I was drinking cider, but considering that it was Woodpecker, I should have been called out as the poseur (poseuse?) that I was and tossed into the gutter like Dylan Thomas.
But I digress. We drank, we drank some more, and as we started getting pleasantly-but-not-yet-obnoxiously sloppy, Meredith began to wax rapturous over Lloyd Dobbler, the hero of Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, played by John Cusack. We oohed and ahhed and reminisced about being just-out-of-teenhood in 1988, falling deeply in thrall with Lloyd, who is smart but directionless, whose best friends are girls, who focuses his considerable intelligence, charm and kindness on the girl he loves, the beautiful-smart-insecure-driven Diane Court. We recited Lloyd’s dinner party reply to Diane’s father’s question “what do plan to do with your life? ("I don’t want to buy anything, sell anything or process anything. I don’t want to buy anything sold or processed, sell anything bought or processed or process anything bought or sold...")
“Remember when all you wanted in a guy was that he be Lloyd Dobbler?” said Meredith.
“Oh, absolutely,” I said.
“Oh, fuck off,” said Bronwyn. Normally in New York this phrase is shorthand for “let’s have an alcohol-fueled obscenity-laden fistfight,” but since Bronwyn was from London, I knew that oh, fuck off is London-speak for oh, puh-leeze. “You married Lloyd Dobbler, didn’t you?”
Note to Lloyd: Oh, fuck off.
Well, let us count the ways: While he works like a dog, always brings home the bacon and has ambitions, plans and dreams, career-wise he is not what the social-climbing striver girls in New York would consider a good earner. His skills are not manifested in his resume, but once he enters a certain work environment he proves himself both flexible and indispensible to the team. He listens to swell music, although he has never serenaded me with a boom box. He used to wear a very Lloyd-ish trenchcoat, giving it up only after being followed by store security when he went to a nice liquor store to buy me a bottle of Armagnac for my 30th birthday. He can talk all night long without talking too much, if that makes sense. He can defend himself if he is physically attacked. These are all good things, but does this make him Lloyd Dobbler, who won Diane Court’s heart by steering her around the broken glass she almost walked over in the parking lot?
Normally, I abhor abrupt transitions, but I promise that there is a point to this. When I was 12, my family got a kitten. Kitten grew up into a cat, then an old cat, then an older-than-the-hills cat. He died when I was 27, long after I had grown up and moved out, and about a year after I got married. This should all be in the natural order of things, except that our poor Smokey died a particularly cruel death, cruel to him, cruel to us, the kind of cruelty that makes you believe Depeche Mode was onto something when they sang “Blasphemous Rumours.” Smokey had grown up, as I did, in the wild hinterlands of northeastern Pennsylvania, the northern end of the Poconos, the southern end of the Catskills. Then my folks up and moved back to Philadelphia, having finally been driven mad by 20+ years in Wayne County, itching to move back to a place where you didn’t need to apologize if your family hadn’t lived in Wayne County for the past 150 years. Smokey came with them, and spent close to two years refusing to go outside, fixing my parents with a look of contempt for moving him somewhere where there were many fewer mice and garter snakes to kill. Then one day he decided he would be fine outside as long as he stayed close to the perimeter of the house. He was good with this for a year, perambulating around the house, pretending to be stalking prey but really doing his little geriatric mall-walker kitty laps.
We still don’t know why he decided to break form one chilly night in February, and head down the driveway. All we know is that he did, and that he slipped on a piece of ice and fell under the back wheel of the car that my mom was reversing out of the driveway. I will not dwell on what followed, on how he survived, and was alive when Mom rushed him to the vet, but the vet couldn’t say for sure if he could be saved, so maybe we should just end his pain, which we did. I will pass briefly over the vale of tears, of how distraught my mom was, of how my brother, 17 at the time, not only missed the cat he’d known since he was 2, but was also thrown off by how much pain our mom was in ("I just want my mom back,” he said to me on the phone, his voice filled with confusion). I will not even begin to describe how I cried twofold: tears for Smokey, who, by virtue of his age, had earned the right to die in his sleep but instead had to die in pain and fear; tears for my mom, who adored that cat, and was filled with guilt that nobody could assuage, nobody could fix. Despite my vow to go to work and be a pro, I cried, silently, all week at the office, hoping that no one would ask me what was wrong, because when I told them, you could see the look in their eyes: sure it’s a shame, but is one dead cat worth all this?
I came home from work one night, feeling sad but ready to feel better, ready for the finest mindless entertainment broadcast television could provide. On came an ad for some expensive pet-store cat food. “When you love your cat,” said the sorghum-y female voiceover, “you want to take the best care of her.” Instant, gushing, body-convulsing sobs from me, the same litany running through my head, oh my cat, oh my mom, oh my cat, oh my mom.
Lloyd sprang for the remote and changed the channel.
“What are you doing?,” I asked. “Aren’t you watching that?”
“We’ll put it back when the commercial is over,” said Lloyd.
“No, don’t be silly. I’m sorry. Put it back.”
“No, I can put it back on in a few seconds.”
“Lloyd, really,” I said. “I just have to get over it. We can’t change the channel every time a cat food ad comes on.”
“Tonight, we can,” he said. And he did, that night and every night until several weeks later, when my mom called to announce shyly that she had saved a cat from the pound, a cat that was due to be put down, a cat that had never been separated from its brother, so of course she had to get both of them, and no, they weren’t Smokey, but they’re pretty great cats nonetheless…
Does he steer me around broken glass? Damn right, he does.
Note to Lloyd: Are you still here? Aren’t you supposed to be writing something now? Don’t you have anything better to do than to sit around and read blogs all night? Get to work, Internet Boy!