Tall Poppy

The Coin Of The Realm

"Are you going to write a review of this place?" V asks me, his chin resting on the back of his hand in that way that only urbane Southerners and elderly gay men can manage without looking foolish

"Yeah, why not?" A review is already forming in my mind as V asks this question.

"I just think it would make a better story."

V shrugs absently and pulls off another piece of flaky, buttery perfection as if it's nothing to him whether write a review or not. Still, we both know better, and what's done is done. A story it is.

----

In your life, there will be a limited number of people to whom you can say, let's get up at 5:30 in the morning on a Saturday and brave finding parking in the Mission just so we can sit around and eat the best croissants in a hundred mile radius. If you're smart, when you find those people, you'll tie a rope around them so they can't ever get away.

I've had a few friends like that, over the years, though curiously never more than one at a time. It is as if the universe has a finite supply of real friendships, and you can't have more than your share or some celestial bookkeeper will have a nervous breakdown. Of course, a lover will do things like this for you, but they'll be doing it out of love (or worse, obligation), and getting up this early in the morning is not something you want someone to do with you because they want to make you happy. Getting up this early in the morning is something you want someone to do because it will make you both happy. Because it will be an adventure. Because you are both out of your minds together.

If I can say one thing about my friendship with V, it is that we are both out of our minds. And so, the first time he told me about Tartine Bakery, complaining bitterly that he could no longer mock the quality of baked goods in San Francisco, I knew that it was only a matter of time before we'd be going.

The idea languished idly long enough for V to go a second time -- this time with his wife and eldest daughter -- and to report back to me that indeed, his puffed pastry epiphany had not been illusory. Having now been taunted with perfection twice, the issue moved from idle consideration to moral imperative. The calendar was considered, a date was selected, V's half-hearted protestations were silenced.

It was he who insisted on going at the absolute crack of dawn, however. To avoid the line, he said, but I think the real reason was drama. Croissants this good shouldn't just be a jaunt up to San Francisco. They should be an event.

I set my alarm for 5:30, and with the uncanny trajectory of someone who has Something To Do, I woke at 5:27 without a trace of grogginess (only an acute sense that I was probably very seriously out of my mind). V, on the other hand, overslept and was late to pick me up. Ironic, since he's the early riser between the two of us. After some requisite cranky grumbling from V, we fetched some coffee and hit the road. Despite the forecast for a grim gray morning, the city dressed up in its Sunday best, uncharacteristically sunny and pleasant.

At a quarter after 7 on a Saturday, parking is shockingly plentiful in the Mission, possibly because most of it is closed. Including, as we discovered, Tartine Bakery, which doesn't open until 8. How we planned this whole endeavor without ever checking Tartine's hours is beyond me, but fortunately we're both fairly adept at frittering away time.

Half an hour successfully frittered on conversations about nothing, we delivered ourselves to Tartine's front door to wait in line (behind the one person more croissant obsessed, or perhaps simply more bored, than we). Hunger had set in, and even if it hadn't, watching the huge trays of croissants, scones and pastries being loaded onto the counter would remain an agonizing tease.

The beauty of food is that it does not simply stop at a single sense or even two. Yes, they smelled wonderful, and no doubt they would taste wonderful, but I would be remiss not to mention that Tartine's croissants are the prettiest I've ever seen; huge and golden brown, puffed within an inch of their lives. You can tell just by looking, this is not ordinary food. You have entered fairyland, and a bite might be worth your eternal soul.

Just as I'm musing on the dangerous delights of fairyland, a hobgoblin went wheeling by. Or at least, a homeless man with a vat full of piping hot coffee perched precariously on a little wheeled cart. As he walked past the ever-growing line, he wondered aloud if this was a line for unemployment, or a homeless shelter. No one answered him, all of us, perhaps, too embarrassed to explain that privilege allowed us to wait in line for gourmet pastries we couldn't possibly need.

I couldn't tell if he was selling his coffee, or distributing it to the other homeless who blanket the Mission. I almost regret not asking, and not buying a cup. It's probably a good thing that my sense of self-preservation is ever so slightly stronger than my love of mystery. If I ever find myself in fairyland I know that I will drink, and drink deeply. Escape seems unlikely.

He trundled on, and soon enough one of the little pixies inside opened the door and let the eager petitioners inside. I suddenly wished we were farther back in the line as I realized that I had absolutely no time to decide what I wanted. V and I ordered two pastries a piece, a croissant and a cinnamon roll for him, a croissant and a black currant scone for me. The counter-pixie looked on us with some dismay, but our gluttony was allowed, and I was even permitted a big, francophile-pleasing bowl of Cafe Au Lait.

In Olympic swimming matches, the distance between gold and silver is often a tenth of a tenth of a second, so keep that in mind when I say that the cinnamon roll was the best. It was light but toothy, exactly as sweet as you want and no more and had the faintest hint of orange, like the baker had spent the night sleeping under a blanket of orange blossoms, before he rolled out the dough.

The croissants were beautifully, artfully crafted, but ever so slightly too hot. If we were more patient people, we would have waited for them to cool. Alas, we are imperfect creatures, and ate them too soon, wincing as we acknowledged this slight black mark on the beauty of our breakfast. We are critics by nature, and though our breakfast was transcendent, we could not help but comment on those tiny details that were not just so.

Some people will say that V and I create our own disappointment with our critical nature, but what these people do not understand is that same discerning, discriminating determination allows us to be aware of how unbelievably close that illusive perfection sometimes is. I was giddy over these almost entirely perfect pastries because I have a keen sense of how far most things are from that level of success. When we love things, we love them honestly. We can give a standing ovation, tears in our eyes, but don't ask us not to tell you what was wrong with it later.

We ate, we talked. About food and life and, of course, these amazing pastries. We agreed that this was not a place one could visit often. To render it ordinary and habitual would be a crime. When I eat something like that, I want it to be a trip down the rabbit hole, a blissful losing of myself. How could one maintain that kind of passion for the everyday? You would be forced to render it pedestrian so as not to dull yourself to other, more elusive passions.

I can remember little else of the substance of our talk, only the warmth of my coffee and the lightness of my soul. Like the croissants it was ephemeral and ethereal, the critically important kind of unimportant talk that passes between good friends on a good day. Fairyland gives you what you wish for, though it does not operate without menace. A time to pay for your trespasses will come soon enough, the pixies whisper. You cannot visit this place without losing some of yourself.

When the time comes, I'll pay my debts in the coin of the realm, and pray that I can find my way home.

Passions: Storytelling

I cannot remember a time when I did not love storytelling, both as a creator and a consumer. I read passionately and constantly in my youth - books are the best friend of an only child - and I continue to consume media of all kinds enthusiastically. There are many different ways to tell a story of course, but writing has always been the place where I am most at home. I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with fiction, but mostly it's off-again. In writing, the place where I am most at home is the essay. If I can show an audience what I saw, or convince them of what I believe, if I can express my view with an elegant turn of phrase, that's what turns me on.

Biographical essays, like The Soap Maker's Passion, are among my favorite to write. There's something to be said for the old cliché about writing what you know. My work - I'm a fundraiser for a very non-traditional non-profit - also demands a great deal of writing from me, which is one of my favorite things about it. In fundraising, crafting a good story is the difference between another enthusiastic donor and another person who walks away thinking you're a crank.

Storytelling is the second passion I share with my father. My father was a frustrated writer. I don't mean that he was unsuccessful in writing - though he was often unsuccessful in publishing - but rather that he seemed to write by dragging the words from underneath his skin by main force. Of all the things I'm glad I didn't inherit from my father, this ranks highly. Working creatively is emotional draining at times, but it's never the constant ache of dissatisfaction that it was for my father. I can find imperfections in anything I write, but there's enough of it that I can look at with real pride to make the failures seem worth it in the end. I'm not sure my father was ever even halfway happy with anything he wrote, and I can't imagine living with a passion that was so endlessly cruel.

It would be unbalanced though, to credit this passion to my father entirely. My mother is a storyteller of another kind. It was from her that I learned how to craft a convincing argument, how to talk about people and ideas in a way that will matter to your audience. Storytelling is about connecting; it's about learning how to speak to someone in a language that they will hear, and that ability to connect is something I learned - and learned to love - from my mother.

I've told my own stories, I've told other people's stories. Some of them mattered to me deeply, some of them were just ephemeral. In the end, it hardly matters what you're talking about. What matters is only that your audience leaned in; eyes fixed on your face, pulse beating in time to the cadence of your speech. What matters is that you spoke to them. That feeling - even far removed as it is in this context - is one of the best things I've ever experienced.

Storytelling is more about delivery than ideas. Isaac Asimov came up with remarkably compelling ideas, but he wasn't much of a storyteller when it comes down to it. Conversely, Shakespeare is often criticized by those who find it fashionable to do so, for having cheap, borrowed plots. It's a fair criticism, but it also doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that "star-crossed lovers" is the oldest story in the book, what matters is this:

ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take,
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

Romeo and Juliet isn't even - in my opinion, at least - one of his better plays, but this interaction is everything teenage infatuation should be; it's charming and sweet, a bit naughty and oh so very dramatic. This is storytelling at its core, it doesn't matter that this is the oldest of all old stories told, we only care that through his words we can feel it as though it was we ourselves who never saw true beauty before this night.

This is the essence of what makes me passionate about storytelling; that commonplace human experiences like a young crush can become iconic and enduring because they were told in a beautiful way. Examined closely, no moment, no experience, no life is ordinary. Tell the story the right way and you can change the way we see it, you can make us love a person we've never met or understand a person we hate. By telling a story, we can make the world a more beautiful and wondrous place to inhabit, and that's the best thing that we could ever hope to do.

The Soap Merchant's Passion

A recent edition to the roster of weird at my local Farmer's Market is The Soap Merchant. He set up shop with his modest little stand, placing thick slabs of homemade soap on saucers and piling a stack of shimmering gift-wrapped soaps into a large basket off to the side. There are no signs bearing health claims to be found, not even a price list; he comes to the farmer's market armed only with his soap and a cheery smile.

Now as it turns out, I'm nuts about good soap. My skin is fairly sensitive but even if it wasn't, smell is such an important sense to me that I'm very selective about what goes on my body. So as soon as I saw those simple, lush looking bars, I knew I was going to have to try them. As is often the case, I had a slightly embarrassing stock of soap at the time he first showed up at the market, so I had to wait until last weekend to finally sample some of his wares.

When MCB and I approached his stand, he engaged us immediately, asking if we had ever tried his soaps before. When we acknowledged that we hadn't he immediately began to rhapsodize about his ingredients. This is the first good sign, he does not talk about his methods, he talks about his ingredients. I won't bore you with his technical details, but I know enough about soap making to know that he chooses high-quality ingredients that probably mean nothing to 99% of the people who buy soap from him, and eat significantly into his bottom line.

MCB and I eventually decided on 3 soaps for the (on the high-end soap scale) very low price of $15. He threw in one of those little packages of heart-shaped soaps wrapped in plastic and tied with a ribbon. As we were about to walk away he stopped me and said earnestly, "the first time you use this soap, really, just take a moment to -notice- your skin."

You might be inclined to think that he's just a good salesman, but I assure you, he's not. He didn't have a patter down, he didn't flatter me or joke with MCB the way a salesman would. All he did was speak with passion and excitement about the thing he makes and loves. Soap is his livelihood, yes, but only after it is his passion.

Is it weird to be passionate about soap? Sure, it's a little weird to be passionate about anything. You have to be a little strange to dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to the perfecting of something, but it is these chasers of perfection, these passionate specialists, that we should seek out for anything and everything that touches us.

If I told you that you should buy art to hang on your wall that was made by someone with passion, you would roll your eyes and nod, "of course, of course." When it comes to art, we consider a need for passion so obvious that it's ridiculous to state, but when it comes to simple, everyday objects, when it comes to food or clothing or anything that fulfills a need, it doesn't even occur to us. Passion seems like a strange bedfellow for necessity, but I think that's because we overlook how much we need passion in our lives.

When I showered with this soap for the first time, the smells burst forth and filled the room. It had a tart tang of sour cherries and the rich sweetness of almonds. It went onto my skin like cream and came off like velvet. Because there are no preservatives, it's melting with alarming alacrity in my shower, in no time I'll be on to the Rosemary-Mint or the Honey, Milk, and Oatmeal. I could buy cheaper soap that lasted longer that wouldn't do my skin any harm and smelled fine enough, but I wouldn't enjoy it in the same way.

Using his soap, it is hard to imagine why one should settle for less than this. In the mornings I am provided with a moment of focus, a moment of pleasure, and it is due to this passion. We should seek this passion in the things that touch our lives, we should demand it of ourselves. Passion is hard, it's exhausting and frightening and it turns ordinary failure to crushing defeat. Still it is undeniable that anything else is unavoidably lesser, and how can we abide that?

I'll admit that I have in my heart a deep envy for passionate specialists like the soap merchant. I've often wished that my heart had a true calling that rose up above the rest. While I pride myself as a roving curious mind, I must admit it would be easier to love one thing above and beyond all reason and anything else in the world. Passion is a harder beast to manage if it will happily wander off into the fields, leaving you to chase it and lash it to whatever cart you're driving to market today. I lose focus easily, it's the reason that this blog is about anything and everything, rather than being focused on any one particular subject. All I can give you is the passion that moves me today.

We do need passion in our lives. Unquestionably we can exist, we can sustain ourselves, without it, but why? We - in the first world, at least - live an existence more freed from the effort of sustaining ourselves than anyone previously in history. We are so far up Maslow's Heirarchy that most of us will barely have to consider the bottom rungs in any real way. Do we not then have an obligation to use the energy we no longer have to dedicate to watching for lions for doing something grander? I'm not talking about a societal obligation; I'm talking about an obligation to the self, and the extended self of those we love.

I endevor to give you passion, my best beloveds, because it is the best of me. The way a passion for soap and scent is the best of the soap merchant. If ever I should fall short in my duties, forgive me; passion is neither easy nor clean. Like the soap merchant who knows he sounds a little nuts when he talks about cold-pressed essential oils I am sensitive to the idea that passion can be uncomfortable when viewed too closely, and like anyone I fear what you will think of me if I lay my heart bear. Even in this public setting, intimacy exists, and I would like to be intimate here; because it is the best of me.