5 Connected Things

Baltimore, breast pumps, Hitchcock, and more

Last time: Pretty Good Year

UTZ Girl image from Pop Icon

“Either way, collected ideas bounce off one another like some percussive instrument and the sound of one thought striking another thought is a beautiful sound.” —Samantha Hunt, The Unwritten Book

I can’t blame it on the new year, the way my brain keeps trying to find connections, knotting and unknotting my thoughts so much that I miss my turn, lock myself out of my office, and otherwise, forget why I walked to the kitchen in the first place.

I’ve always been this way. Not so much easily distracted as prone to daydreams. The list of five things below is my way to open the lid on my current state of mind and my writing process. Also: I’m a writer so I work out my issues in writing. There’s no way around it.

I’m going to blame it on all the nonfiction I’ve been reading, especially John Green’s outstanding The Anthropocene Reviewed.

Here are 5 connected things on my mind lately. Stick with me to the end and I’m going to bring all of this mess together. I hope.

1. The street where Marnie was filmed

Image of Sanders Street in Baltimore, MD, the ending of Marnie: http://ffactory.blogspot.com/2005/09/baltimore-cinema-marnie.html

The picture above, a movie still from Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, does something funny to my insides. It’s the street I grew up on (at least until grade school) and the street where my husband proposed, where we lived after we got married.

It makes me homesick to see that image. Yeah, I think that’s what I’ll call this feeling in my stomach.

Marnie is not one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous films, but true Hitchcock fans (I’m not one of them) tend to have strong feelings about it. I’m told our house—I still call it our house—was the one used at the end of the film and I was also told by one of the long-standing neighbors that neighborhood kids back then were paid money to bounce balls and play in the road as extras.

What I think about lately is how the street is so narrow with cars parallel parked along one side that it is a bit terrifying to drive down. I think about how that view of the harbor isn’t there anymore, has never been there in my lifetime. There’s no boat, but there is a high school in rock-throwing distance that now fills the immediate skyline.

In The Unwritten Book, Samantha Hunt writes about the people who have moved into her family home: “How can they live there when my family will forever be living in that house?”

It’s been on my mind, what pieces of me still live there, maybe trapped under the floorboards or some loose strand of my hair that has never been swept away.

2. The Bar

Google Maps

When I have recurring dreams, they are set in two places: the restaurant where I used to wait tables and the Baltimore bar my family used to own. See image above. My grandparents lived in the apartment upstairs. I spent most weekends (at least Sundays) there, and now I am really good at claw machines. I bet I could still do some damage on a video poker machine.

As long as I’m thinking of Baltimore as a map of my rarely-sentimental heart, this bar is one of the landmarks. That alley where I played. The smell of smoke trapped in the walls. The jukebox, which I know is no longer there. I like to pretend it somehow survived all the decades since we left.

I haven’t been back to that street in so long, and I’d like to say it looks different now than it did in the 80s, but everything, including that faded green awning looks exactly as I let myself remember.

There’s no online proof that my family’s bar ever existed. Whatever it was after and whatever it is now, isn’t part of the internet. I just have to rely on memory.

3. The Unwritten Book by Samantha Hunt

   

   Image via Bookshop.org

   Samantha Hunt writes, “I looked for my dad everywhere right after he died. I even looked for him on the internet, a place that often troubles me…When I looked for my dad there, I found little to no evidence of his full life. He hadn’t survived long enough to make a dent in the digital realm.”

   Same for my dad. Same for the bar. No digital proof. Not much anyway.

   I saved Hunt’s The Unwritten Book as my final book of 2022 and I still can’t get it out of my head. It’s part of why I keep connecting all my thoughts.

   I also am not ashamed to admit that after reading one of Hunt’s chapters about the delirium of motherhood, I tracked down her email address and sent her a message with the subject line: “My breast pump spoke to me, too.”

   My first gushing email of the year to a writer I admire. I hope to do more of that in 2023.

4. Being a girl

   

   Image from “There is Only One Direction”

   I now can’t think of Samantha Hunt without thinking of her article, “There is Only One Direction.” It is about her joy and love of the boy band, One Direction, but also about being a girl, having a body.

   She writes, “My stomach’s a contour map of twin skin and cesarean scars, a different sort of tattoo.”

   And since this is a new year of health commitments, where I’m deciding how I feel about my own body, I’m also thinking about another of my favorite writers, Laura Lippman. Known more for her crime novels, Lippman’s essay “Whole 60” should be mandatory reading for everyone—not just “girls.”

   Lippman: “What would happen to the global economy if all the women on the planet suddenly decided: I don’t care if you think I’m fuckable.”

   These two essays by Hunt and Lippman make an excellent pair. They are the energy I want this year and every year after.

5. The UTZ Girl

Baltimore City Paper (R.I.P)

Look, I said I’d bring it all together. Laura Lippman, who I gently stalk on Twitter, is a Baltimore writer. She posts daily photos of the Domino Sugars sign from her morning walk and it’s a view I know well. A similar photo of that view hung up in our house until recently. It needs to be reframed.

Baltimore—here we are again. I have an old cover of the Baltimore City Paper on my cork board. It’s the UTZ potato chip girl sliding a gun into or out of a bag. There couldn’t be a more Baltimore picture in my mind. At the time, it was a reference to guns being sold at the UTZ stand in the Lexington Market.

I, personally, never bought a gun at the Lexington Market, but there used to be a food stand that sold the most amazing Thanksgiving sandwich (sold year-round). And if you don’t know what a Thanksgiving sandwich is, I’m going to let you use your imagination on that.

Now I’m thinking about food, which is where it always comes back to.

I’m writing about Baltimore a lot in my early morning sessions this year. I can’t escape it. At least now, if I say I’m writing about my favorite city, you can picture the places where my imagination and memory collide.

My favorite view (image from Chesapeake Bay Magazine)

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The prompt:

Write 5 things that are connected. If they aren’t obviously connected, that’s part of the fun.

Summer Brennan’s “The Five Things Essay” was surely on my mind here.

I also sometimes assign a braided essay for the creative nonfiction section of my creative writing class. It works in similar ways, separate topics (3 in this case) that get braided together via natural connections and artistic choices.

Add a couple strands to that braid and you have 5 connected things.

Other current reads:

• Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

• Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

• The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

Note: I am a Bookshop.org affiliate and if you purchase through my links above, I may earn a small commission. Shop local!

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