Growing things

About ten days ago, I took a workshop on how to make challah.  Ever since, I have been trying to make one successfully.

When I was in kindergarten, my little sister went to a Jewish nursery school, and every Friday they made challah.  She would come home with a hard twist of carbs, and, even though my parents laughed at it as not real challah, I thought it tasted good.

I have been living my sister's legacy this past week.

I get everything about the form right.  I braid a gorgeous round challah.  I roll the raisins inside so they don't burn.  I use a glaze of egg, cinnamon, and sugar. If it could be a sculpture, it would be perfect.

My realization yesterday (I am on my fifth and sixth loaves) is that I need to not think that I am making bread but that I am raising yeast.  Like my plants, which I examine carefully, making sure they are getting the right combination of light and, well, no water, I have to think of this as an exercise in growing something.

To grow, yeast apparently requires:

• Proofing.  I wince as I say that.  What a weird use of that word, but apparently it is something people say.  My recipe didn't have instructions about it, but yesterday I combined yeast, sugar, and water warmed with meat-thermometer accuracy and watched the slurry bubble.
• No drafts.  There is also something about covering it with plastic wrap.  My immediate thought is that there was no plastic wrap in the shtetl, followed by a thought that if you cover it tightly the yeast will ferment anaerobically, and that can't be good.  Apparently in the shtetl they used a damp cloth ... its purpose, as I'm trying to respect this time around, is to reduce drafts.  Drafts?
• Patience.  My recipe says to let it rise for an hour or so.  So I set the chicken(-shaped) timer for an hour and take a break.  It's supposed to double in size ... I look at it and think, well, maybe I forgot how small it was beforehand.
• Warmth.  Everyone I've talked to about my challenges tells me that their grandmothers put the dough in the oven with the oven light on, that that is the perfect temperature for rising.  

Last night: I proofed the yeast, put the dough in a cooling oven, put the light on, was patient, and left it there all night (which apparently also happened in the shtetl, although somehow I think perhaps they didn't have oven lights).

I woke up this morning and finally understood what rising means!  This is an entirely different dough than what I've experienced so far.  I've now grown some great yeast.

However, and perhaps this is the deeper source of my problem and my impatience, the part I really care about is not the growing, not even the eating, but the kneading.

The only time I ever saw a family member knead was when I was very, very little, and I watched my grandmother make kreplach.  When I had my first wonton, it sent me right back to my grandmother's kreplach.  Interestingly, my family laughed at my grandmother's kreplach, too, so that's probably why I only had it that once.

I love kneading.  Delightfully, challah involves two risings and therefore two kneadings.  When I started this process of learning how to make challah, kneading for just a few minutes was hard.  Now I can easily go 10 minutes (and I'm not supposed to go longer, sadly), standing on solid shoes; sometimes literally pounding the dough with my fists after the second rise, breathing rhythmically, kneading with my palms and my fingers.  Turn, fold, breathe, punch.  It's meditative.

The two that rose

The best way to skate

This morning I skipped the first few hours back at work after a two week break ... to skate with disabled kids.

This is a grant-funded program in the San Mateo schools. Every Thursday in January, several classes of disabled kids come to the San Mateo ice rink and are escorted around by women hockey players. It's a coincidence that we are all women hockey players ... the call for volunteers goes out to the NCWHL, and we respond.

These kids have a variety of challenges. Some have mental/emotional issues, some have sensory issues, some have physical issues. Most have more than one. The therapy of being in the cold and moving so smoothly on the ice does wonders for them.

It takes the strong and nimble skating skills of hockey players to do this. With chairs, wheelchairs, and kids skating on their own, it's amazing we don't have collisions.

We help kids who hang onto the wall: my first kid, Angel (no real names here), went all the way around the rink with one hand on the wall and one arm supported by me. I closed the doors along the boards so he could cross the gaps. He whimpered in fear when I moved away from him by inches to pull the doors shut, although after the third he understood the drill. My feet were enormously cramped after that!

We push a lot of kids on chairs. This is my favorite part. I later took Angel around on a chair. With his limited communication skills, he laughed and expressed that he wanted to go faster, racing the other kids. We spin the chairs in circles, either by pulling the chair in a circle (variously with ourselves or the chair as an axis) or by tossing the chair forward with a spin and then catching it. Angel loved that one. After our first turn around the rink, as I checked in with him, he waved his hands with his fingers spread. I couldn't hear him, so I scooted to the front of him. "Five times!" he shouted gleefully. He'd counted: I'd spun him five times.

As I was resting, one of the teachers turned to me and said, "You'll take Charlie around, right?" I looked at Charlie: a 200-pound kid who was just staring forward, with no response to our words or the world around him. I said, "Sure." We maneuvered him into a chair, and I began pushing. It's actually not hard to push someone that big on the ice. I knew right away that he was smiling, and the teachers along the side told me so. His only reaction to his surroundings was that smile.

We push kids in wheelchairs: my first one was Debbie. She smiled her crooked smile and laughed the whole time. On a couple of occasions a teacher stepped onto the ice to take a picture, and we lined up the wheelchair kids. Debbie was the only one who responded with a huge smile. (I asked for a copy of the photo, but there are legal issues with releasing them.) Pushing Debbie, I practiced spinning a wheelchair on the ice. A skill I am still working on.

My last kid was Susie. During the wheelchair pictures, Susie appeared as a pile of purple jacket. She was curled in a fetal position in her chair covered by a hood, completely rolled up. A teacher tried to prop her up for the photo, but over she went.

I took over pushing her little chair. After a loop around, I stopped to chat with the teachers, and suddenly she turned around and gave me a brilliant smile. It turns out that she loves to be surrounded by conversation. I'd take her around again, and she'd flop forward; I'd talk to someone, and that smile would reemerge. Everyone celebrated that she'd come out of her frightened shell.

Then I discovered that she wasn't completely covering herself when she flopped forward: Susie was watching the ice go by beneath her chair. I knew just the snow and the grooves in the ice were enough for her, but I also took her around the painted center of the ice. I traced the circles, the blue lines, the red line, the dots, the crease. I followed the concrete lines showing through the paint. The brilliant smile, right at me, appeared several times. I don't know what she was experiencing, but I loved providing it for her.

Dream of the Blue Jersey

It's summer, and I dream of being athletic.

Specifically, I dream of playing hockey.

I dream I'm skating. The other night I dreamed I spoke to a woman who said she played in a league in San Francisco. I was thrilled when she said her league was fun and that it was at Yerba Buena. It all came back to me: where to park, carrying my bag in, the visual of being on the ice. I think maybe I've been back once since I broke my collarbone there.

It's summer, and I can't believe how long it's been since I was athletic. Before I started my current job, I was unemployed, working with a trainer, doing yoga, going to hockey camp. Since then, I keep setting a goal of being active, but it just hasn't happened. I took a break from hockey almost two years ago to recover from an unrelated injury, and I keep telling myself I'm going back. I am going back.

Summer is a great time to return because of the longer days, not having to leave in the dark for a late afternoon game. But I dread the idea of playing in Belmont, the rink where my league has so many games. A rink that is super-small and so poorly insulated that the ice doesn't freeze on warm days. So the puck comes to a dead, stuck stop when it hits a puddle. Where you have to lace your skates loosely because your feet swell as soon as you put them on, where you wish you didn't have to wear shoulder pads or a helmet because it's just too hot.

I miss the smell of the ice. I miss my regular pre- and post-game routines, including hydrating and handwashing before and then afterwards drinking Gatorade, eating a recovery hot dog, and laying out my sweaty gear to dry. I miss carrying my sticks, and I miss the sound and use of hockey tape. (There aren't really a lot of uses for it outside of hockey, unfortunately.) I step over low fences and other objects as often as possible to relive those many exciting times I stepped over the boards to get on the ice. (I do not haul myself over fences and other objects to relive the paralysis of utter exhaustion that accompanies getting off the ice.)

I'm a good hockey player. Not a great player; not even a very good player. Maroon #15 does not have a lot of presence in the record books, or even on the crumpled, damp scoresheets that live in the bottoms of captains' bags. I probably have had one or two penalties, and I can't even remember them. I've had very few goals but a few more assists. I'm most proud of my assists -- I love setting up plays and passing the puck to someone who can do something great with it. I miss freaking out the other team's defense (and surprising myself) with a threading-the-needle pass from behind the net through several players' legs and sticks to the blade of my waiting teammate (who usually has several people hanging off of her and can't get the shot off, but, hey, the pass was pretty). Mostly, I have been a smart teammate who can read a play and know where to be.

If I could, I'd be a full-time coach. People sometimes come up to me and thank me for coaching them, which sends me to the moon, even if I don't remember who they are. I love seeing my former players run a play that I taught them, which more often than not they're doing against my own team (while I'm sitting, helpless, on the bench, knowing they're going to do it).

But I can't just be a coach -- because it's too agonizing. Because no matter how slowly or poorly my body reacts to my brain's quick commands, I need to be physically in the game, not just thinking about it. It's also why I like to play forward positions: playing defense gives me way too much time in my head.

I do love having a two day weekend, not dealing with hydrating and carbo loading and traffic, having Sundays to nap or paint or do whatever else comes up, not being worthless on Monday morning. But I so dream of being on the ice again. I need to find a decent pick-up game. I need to get my skates sharpened. My hockey bag sits in my large powder room near the front door, waiting to be taken out again, falsely announcing to visitors that I am an athlete. I am not ready to retire. I need to be active again.

Turning over a new leaf

Today, in Seattle, I pity people who grew up in California. At least, my part of California and south. And other places that don’t have autumn.

Like with snow, you can visit it, but being surrounded by it on a daily, routine basis is an entirely different experience.

I looked out of the cab window and saw the beautiful density and variety of trees – you can’t see individual trees – it’s just mounds of trees. With spashes of color. You get an almost tactile feeling of a paintbrush having swatted at them.

Do people who grow up without mounds of deciduous trees even know the expression “The leaves are starting to turn”? I said it to the cab driver, and it was like an ancient, familiar phrase in my mouth. Like the name of a best friend you haven’t talked about in many years.

Someone from California, someone who hasn’t lived through fall afer fall, might think these splashes of gold and red and orange among the rich green is what fall colors are. Even as a midwesterner I used to celebrate the arrival of the colors, thinking fall is here. Forgetting it’s just the beginning. It’s not when leaves are splashed with color: it’s when leaves are doused in color, bright golds and flaming reds completely replacing most of the green, that fall is at its most awesome.

Snow

I haven’t smelled the snow in years. You don't even know that snow has a smell until you've lived with it and been apart from it (geographically, seasonally). We know the smell of rain, the acoustics of a wet day -- snow has them, too, in a quiet, lovely way.

Arriving to 25 degree Fahrenheit weather in Colorado, the connection between the smell of snow and memory, both sentimentally and practically, returned.

All my snow habits came back. You have to walk differently in cold weather. Starting from the bottom: rather than heel-toe, or whatever the normal walking pattern is, you walk with a sort of a shuffle, placing your foot flat on the ice and taking that fraction of a second to know you aren’t going to fall before putting your whole weight on it. Experienced snow walkers don’t even notice that hesitation. And then, as you walk on the ice (looking to make sure you tread where it’s been pre-churned by others and not onto perfectly smooth ice) you listen and feel for that satisfying crack. When you crack the ice under your feet, you know you’ve mastered it, that it is giving way and providing you traction, rather than pushing back and making you slip.

Because you are shuffling, you’re working from your knees rather than your hips. In fact, your hips and upper body stay as still as they can be in order to reduce the number of variables in the physics experiment that is walking on slippery ground. Your arms move a little – because they have to in order to give you a little more speed and balance – and the only sound you hear in this muffled world, aside from the crunching of ice under your feet, is the swish-swish of your jacket sleeves as they rub against your sides.

The upper body is unmoving for reasons other than physics. We keep our heads perfectly still when we walk because our scarves are wrapped around our lower faces. If you move your head in a normal way (who even notices what’s normal until you’re cold?), you shake off the protection of the scarf.

(Having had problems with lack of flexibility in my neck and with my hip flexors, having been told that I walk too stiffly, I wonder if it is a legacy of all this snow walking.)

When you walk out into the cold, your glasses start to get cold and feel stiff, almost frozen to your skin. Or maybe as the moisture is sucked out of your skin (a sensation of instant aging, as if created by computer graphics) it freezes to your glasses. Because you’ve got a scarf wrapped around your lower face, the steam of your breath shoots upwards, fogging your glasses.

Sometimes your eyes water. Certainly, your nose runs. Another unforgettable aspect of snow walking: even as you keep your head still so as not to lose the carefully-arranged coverage of the scarf, your nose is running, creating a cold, wet spot on the scarf sitting right in the middle of your face and chin.

There is nothing that beats that moment when you’ve been inside, having put on your coat and hat and scarf and gloves and only then running around trying to find your keys or something you forgot to take … and then, overheated, you step outside. The freshness of the air gives you a rush of exhilaration. The smell of snow fills your head, clears it, presents your mind with images of white and clean and fresh and cold.