Cheese and Peas

In late fall or early winter of 2004—in Wisconsin, that line between late fall and early winter is exceedingly blurry as golden cold light turns into thick heavy snow very fast—Gretchen and I were in the teeth of the new two kids phenomenon. Evelyn was two, and Silas was two months, or close to it. I could see the end of my dissertation on a watery and British horizon, and with that end, the outrageous fortune, chock with its slings and arrows, of the academic job market. Like leaves on tree. But that chasm of doubt and fear was easily boarded up and wallpapered over with the sleepy delirium of Silas and his beatific id and his very squirmy sleep and his awesome mahogany eyes. When Karen came—herself saintly, entering into that scene and willing to help—to Madison, we could promise nothing more than a lot of take-out, DVDs, restless nights, and if we were lucky, a few pints in the evening—make that in the late afternoon.

Heroically, we delivered on our promises. Karen was—as always—game. But there were a few moments when I got zapped with an unmooring dissonance. A time or two, she and I escaped the house, and walked around campus: she wanted to see Memorial Union and the Rathskeller, the library with the odd display of David Lynch paintings in Circulation, the brightly colored iron chairs and the falling leaves on the Terrace. The old parts of campus drew her in and we talked about whether the UW left its traces in some people she was very close to, what those might mean. It was then that I felt this vertiginous swing of the pendulum. Karen was so fucking awesome: she lived in big cool cities, she had brilliant artist friends, she made films about tiny robots, electric chair repairmen, Robert McNamara scored by Phillip Glass. I lived in a small midwestern city and rarely saw past mashing up bananas and making up lullabies as I purportedly studied thousand-year-old books. For a bit there, it was colder out, State Street was quieter, the walk back longer. That night we got Laotian food from the place on Willy Street and Karen and I went to the video store for a DVD. There was—shockingly—nothing she hadn’t seen, though she was giddy with one new straight to DVD release, ‘Lord of the G-Strings’ and its epic tale of the Throbbits. I had to pry the box out of her hands. She talked me into renting the British series ‘The Office’ which we hadn’t seen (we hadn’t seen anything). At home, all the usual chaos, but Karen rifled our substantial and varied liquor cabinet and made some freaky concoction involving citrus and some unspeakable blend of things. In the micro-living room, we had on the stereo this kids record, ‘The Bottle Let Me Down’. This is a collection of a bunch of Bloodshot Records artists doing songs for kids and I abashedly liked it. When the hipsters are making kids records, you know a new demographic is reluctantly getting old. With the liberally applied cocktails (beer for me), the kids settling down, and snow outside flaking, we just might have danced to ‘Godfrey the sickly unemployed amateur children’s musician’ and felt the sting of melancholy with ‘I hit the big 1-0, and candy just doesn’t taste as sweet anymore’. Schmeer was into it, but became ecstatically entranced with Gretchen’s favorite, ‘Cheese, Peas, Pickles & Bananas’. It was on repeat until Karen perfectly nailed over and over the quiet sweetness of ‘Get me a banana from a chimpanzee’ with this sideways head move that made her cropped hair sway and swing just so. Later that night, we watched ‘The Office’ and Gretch laughed so hard she almost peed, and we stayed up late, and we ate cake, and we folded out the couch bed contraption, and I guess the pendulum swung back. For a second, Karen’s fantastically best friend Kim Caviness sang the song at the memorial. It was beautiful and felt like someone hit me with a shovel.

Steve Frisbie - Cheese, Peas, Pickles & Bananas