post-tonsillectomy children’s memorial, january 2000
dispatch from 20037. . .
two dozen years ago, a little guy I loved, a little guy of six, was wheeled down a long hallway to have his tonsils plucked. i walked the whole long way beside his gurney, straight into the OR, where they let me hold his hand till they were ready to send him off to dreamless land. and then, back I walked to wait, eyes awash with tears.
just now, that same kid was wheeled away again. and I, the nurse who flew in from chicago because I couldn’t imagine being even a mile away, was by his side. This time, though, I skipped the long walk, and no tears.
I seem to have been born hardwired to not stay far away, not when someone I love is being wheeled down long hallways, and the day begins at 4:45 a.m.
It’s an urge as irrepressible as anything I know. So much of mothering comes to me instinctively, without the synaptic pause that populates most thought. I leap before I think—leap into the fire, into the deep end, into wherever is the urgency. I don’t know how not to. And, yes, maybe sometimes I’m too much. And maybe I’m unnecessary. Or redundant. But where is there room for redundancy or un-necessity in the chambers of the heart?
Among the breaths of my life that I relish most, being by the side of the ones I birthed will always, always, be my most precious, most savored.
And so, in living my days with all I’ve got, this blessed day, being plopped in this hard chair, in this cacophonous waiting room in downtown DC, is one I will always hold so close to my heart. Truth is, I pray for as many of these sorts of days as time will give me. And as long as I can be there to plant one last kiss on the forehead I have loved since the hour of his birth, I am going to board all the planes, trains, and automobiles to get me here.
And now I’m signing off to keep my holy vigil.
xox
No need for any worries; all will be well here in the nation’s capital. Trust me on that.
PSS my uppers and lowers are a jumble today because I’m typing in my wee phone and can’t stop the gremlins from insisting on at least some proper capitalization.
it might have been the last time i’ll ever hear it, those words rising out of the murky middle-of-the-night darkness, curling out from under the door of the bedroom at the bend in the stairs. “mo-o-om, i feel sick,” came the plaintive declaration, my one-syllable moniker being drawn into multiples, emphasizing the dire straits the sick one was in.
and, with that, the boy about to move out of this old house, about to move into the big city where his freedom will be all his own, we played out one last time the choreography of mother caring for feverish, achy, gland-swollened child.
this time around, he took his own temperature and called into work in the wee dark hours. but still i was the one who deep in the night tugged on the medicine drawer at the top of the stairs, and filled the cup with fat chunks of ice and glugs of gingerale. and, soon as the light came, i set out for the store to fetch the fixtures of sick days with this particular boy: salty oyster crackers and noodly chicken soup.
it’s a role i know well. it’s a role i have loved, all told, for thirty years now, even though it first came upon me with my own arms trembling, so worried was i by the baby i cradled (this one’s big brother, my firstborn) on a long-ago night when the cry came shrilly and skin felt hot to the touch.
i can’t count the number of nights i’ve lay on the bathroom floor, a bath towel for both pillow and blanket, as we staked out the nearest position to the toilet bowl or the bath — depending which virus was doing the attacking. i can’t count the number of trips up and down the stairs in the dark, fetching ice, fetching honey, fetching gingery ale.
on day two of this latest siege, when morning came, and the boy on the verge of moving out let on that he was hungry, i dove in to a task i couldn’t have relished more: i made one last sick tray, and, right down to the spoonful of brown sugar i plopped in a dish, i felt my whole soul being ladled into each unnecessary flourish.
somehow the ticking down of days in which i can take care of him, in which he’ll let me take care of him, made me all the more emphatic about each and every drop. i ladened that sick tray with every indelible talisman from our homegrown, family-specific, sick-day manual: the buttery toast sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, the ice chips drizzled with honey, the clementine and plump red strawberries for extra vitamin C. and of course the spoon and the glass wrapped with a rubber band, tagging it sick-kid’s-only, just as my mama had done for me, her unscientific attempt at keeping the lid on infectious disease amid her troupelet of five.
it was as if i was packing him off for a lifetime of taking care, as if an eternity of loving him was what i was ladling onto that sick tray, and into his soul. as if i was shortshrifting the snuffing out of time, making my own tight-end run around some clock that is ticking. i was sealing a deal with forever and ever. and it came, in this moment, in the form of being his nursemaid.
there is something in me that takes like a bird to the wind when it comes to taking care of the ones i love, especially the ones i birthed and the one to whom i was birthed. maybe that’s why i found myself in nursing school. i’ve always been drawn to the sick-bed bedside.
it’s a place of certain tenderness, of amplified permeabilities (we are more wide-open when we are ailing, and our needing each other is heightened). it’s a place where exercising empathies is so often met with eager and unspoken reception. it’s one of the best places i know to love as i would be loved. and more than once or twice, i’ve found myself on the receiving end, tended to by the very boy i am tending to now. (a story i’ll never forget.)
maybe because this is the last or almost last go-round in the sick-kid-under-my-care department, and maybe because i am feeling this latest pulling-away (the kid getting ready to move, once and for all) deep in my marrow, the reel started wheeling of sick hours when he and i have stitched our hearts together: the ERs where i was right there, and the one when i was far away, connected only by long-distance telephone line and left only to imagine him strapped inside the ambulance that carried him across farmland and rolling hills to the heartland hospital where they checked him in. i remember a yom kippur he and i spent in the ER, and another when he had a bulge in his neck so golfball-sized they considered slitting it open. i remember the awful time i’d squished his tiny toddler fingers in the car door window. i remember and remember, and truth be told i feel every tug of the letting go.
when the surest thing you have done in your life, the one thing you’ve most tried to imbue with the holy, is about to shift into another more distant gear, it’s an act you surrender with all the grace you can muster. and a spoonful of dark brown sugar besides.
what are your most natural ways to dollop your love? and what are the ways of the sick bed you’ve picked up along the way?
a calendar turned the other day, a yearly one. and it turned for the seventeenth time. thus begins the eighteenth year of this little old chair.
that first day of that first year –– december 12, 2006 –– i faced a blank white screen and a motherlode of trepidation. that screen plus the trembling inside equaled a scarier form of publishing than i’d ever really done before –– and that was 25 years into my stint at the late great Chicago Tribune.
to write what at the time was a newfangled thing — a blog, an ugly gutteral word if ever there was — was, to my mind, to take away the filter that might have allowed me to occasionally put my heart to my sleeve in the stories i told and how i told them, but it shielded me from going deeper than that, from willingly baring my soul, where my truest self stirs.
i was compelled to write the chair because i was convinced that the deepest truths of our lives are played out in the quotidian. on the humdrum stage of our day-after-day domesticities, and the confines of hardly exotic daily rounds. i’d come to believe that the common, plain-wrapped stories of our lives are in fact imbued with the sacred, the lasting, the shared. and more than worth holding up to the light.
i still think so.
chances are, you and i are not going to find our names chiseled in the roll call of global heroes. we are going to live on in the scant traces we leave behind, the simple kindnesses, the one or two times we mustered just the right words, the softening we brought to someone’s unbearable hour.
and so, i thought then and think now, if this one bracket of time is ours, then perhaps we’d do well to plumb the depths of it. or at least plumb a little more pointedly. root around a bit. not shy from asking the tough question, the true question. search for the sacramental. name the holiness where we find it. shine the light on it. make known the magnificence that runs through the river of each of our lives.
because i firmly believe that, in the end, we are all animated by a few certain yearnings: to love and be loved; to be seen or be heard; to reach out in the darkness and be met with a soft and warm hand to hold onto. some of us live to be stirred, to feel our hearts beating hard against the wall of our chest. to delight in the whimsies of each and any hour. and to know more when we fall asleep than we knew upon waking that day.
so i offered up the stories of my own life’s spool. i scanned the day to day, and plucked the shards that shimmered the most, the ones that seemed to hold the most questions. maybe even a quiet holiness. the ones i’ve described as exuding the most wattage. the ones i thought might resonate a bit more than all the rest. ones worth examining.
and so for 17 years i’ve turned here, plopped my bum on this rickety chair that’s missing a spindle, tapped at the alphabet letters as if i was at once alone and in the company of the dearest of soulmates. i’ve pushed toward the truth, even when i worried you might wriggle a bit. even if i pictured you rolling your eyes. to write the truth is to blot out the worries of just how your words might land. especially if your mother-in-law or your mother is one of the ones reading your words. (i learned not to hyperventilate on the days when only a weighted silence followed a post, when my usually exuberant mother-in-law chose silence as the way of letting me know she was, um, not such a fan of whatever i’d mused that morning.)
over the years, dear chairs, you’ve chimed in, and made me laugh aloud, and more times than you might imagine you’ve moved me to tears with the words and the wisdoms you’ve brought here.
and this year, this darn nasty year, you all but kept me from keeling right over.
the fourth wall, the one they talk about in the theater, the invisible screen that separates actors and audience, it’s non-existent in the realm of writing, or at least in the writing i write here.
ever since that long ago first morning, i’ve meant for this to be a back and forth, a call and response. yet i never imagined the friendships that would leap off the page, break through the cybersphere and become so very real, some of the dearest in my life.
whether we’ve sat in the same room never or once, or dozens of times, your very big hearts, your high-soaring souls, your whimsies, your tender ways, have worked their numinous magic in a world that’s sometimes so, so dark: you’ve become true, true friends. the sort you tell truths to, the sort whose hands you reach for when your own are trembling like leaves in an autumn wind.
so all of this is a long-winded way of simply saying thank you. from the bottom of my very big heart, the one i’ve long worn on my sleeve. where it now shares a space with my soul.
and thank you to willie, who long long ago, got me started. and to teddy, who long let me tell his collection of growing-up stories. and, of course, to each and every one of you, whether you ever leave a trace, or tiptoe in and out quiet as a mullipuff bobbing on the breeze….
i decided to give you a pretty picture of this season erupting, but doing it in slo-mo. this is korean spice viburnum waiting to open wide its little throats and let out its intoxicating perfumes. this is waiting, the spring edition.
waiting is the word of the week. word of the year, in fact––so far, anyway. i’m on the other side of surgery––and have the tic-tac-toe board crisscrossing my side to prove it. they got out what they needed to get out (i hope), though it was more than we’d been betting on. so now i’m waiting.
waiting is a quilt of many textures. sometimes it washes over me, with a calm that takes the sting away. sometimes i feel my heart kick into higher, faster gear. i try hard to turn off the nozzle that lets the worries out. but even my secondborn tells me i do too much of that. and he’s only been keeping watch for twenty-one of my years (and he is 300 miles away right now, so he’s out of range for any current worries; job one for me is to project calm to the one with the very, very giant heart). it’ll take two weeks for the blessed souls in the pathology lab to do what all they do to lay out the specifics of this little dervish that somehow found its way to the bottom of my lung. and that gives me time to sink slowly into the bath of this new reality.
waiting gives the human species time to settle in, to realize you’ve taken more steps into the unknown than you’d ever imagined you would. and you’re calmer––and maybe braver––than you’d ever ever imagined you could be (most of the time anyway). of all the worries i’ve worried over the years, i never added lungs to the list.
just the other week, i read a lovely line from a 96-year-old, a woman who knew she was on the last pages of her life, and so she scribbled out her truths for her children, her grandchildren, and her many greats. when asked what might be the most important thing she’d realized as she rounded the final bend, she simply said: “i wish i hadn’t spent so many hours worrying, cuz most of those worries never came to be.”
mostly, what waiting does is make me savor every minute. stepping out into the balmy springtime air. tucking my nose into the soon-to-be blossoms. listening to the owls hoot at 5:15 a.m. marveling at the miracles of modern medicine that can do so very very much, and for the most part do it so very lovingly. (i fell in love with my nurses, emily who stayed all night with me, and clare who worked by day. the care with which they changed dressings, filled syringes, listened to my questions, they made me so so proud that i was once one of them. and they made me realize how very much even their most basic medical tasks translate into a language that feels like love. i was a stranger to them when i was rolled into my cubicle of a room, but by shift’s end i was sad to see them leave. if you’re a nurse, believe me when i tell you you’re a living saint. to make the scared and fragile and confused feel safe and tended to is a sacred act, is sacramental, in that it lifts even the most perfunctory of duties into the closest thing i know to benediction.)
a few of things i marveled at this week, while idling in my wait station: my friend the nurse practitioner who, when she found out how much it hurt to try to lie down in bed, ordered up a giant wedge pillow that made last night a whole lot less bumpy. having two of my three boys right by my bedside all week long. one of ’em had me laughing (sidesplittingly is not such an apt description here, though it might have stretched some stitches) within hours of getting to my little room. (i was on the heart transplant floor, and, believe you me, i did not miss for a minute how blessed i was to be there only for a chunk taken out of my little lung.)
yet another surround-sound marvel in this week one of the two-week wait: the promise of springtime, that life bursts forth year after year after year. we live in an eternal spiral, and i am on for the holy blessed sumptuous ride. stepping into the still soft air, watching the goldfinch nibble at the thistle seed, rejoicing as the daffodils tossed off their snowy caps to rise and shine again, golden periscopes of spring. it felt to me like the arms of God were wrapping round me in the form of this gentle greening world.
in book world, one fine thing happened: there is a lovely lovely journal, the EcoTheo Review––a quarterly put out by a collective of poets (mostly), writers, and artists who plumb the depths of wonder and beauty in this world, and who claim as their mission, to “celebrate wonder, enliven conversations, and inspire commitments to ecology, spirituality, and art.” and they published a conversation we’d had a few weeks back about The Book of Nature, which you can read here. the editor who spent hours in our exchange of thoughts, Esteban Rodriguez is his name, is himself a poet, and one of the kindest, gentlest souls i’ve been blessed to come to know. it more than more than made up for the half dozen book events that got wiped off the calendar.
while i wait in these days ahead (and try so hard not to worry!), i’m going to be on watch, to soak up and see every blessed wonder and beauty in this holy world. i don’t want to miss a drop. i am following the instruction of richard rohr, the modern-day mystic, who asked:
Where is this God being revealed? Not in the safe world, but at the edge, at the bottom, among those where we don’t want to find God, where we don’t look for God, where we don’t expect God.
i’m going to look for God in every nook and cranny along this waiting way. because i’m fairly certain God comes in a thousand thousand forms: in the gentle touch of the nurse who poked my arm, in the bouquet dropped on my front stoop, in the tub of soup that now takes up a shelf in the fridge, in the box that’s on its way from zingerman’s deli in ann arbor, and in every last note and gentle text that simply says, “you got this, and i am here beside you.”
God comes most certainly in the hours when our waiting gives God more than plenty time to tap us on the heart, the soul, the noggin. i’m on watch while i wait…
where did you find God this week, or whatever is the name you give to the all-embracing goodness that i call the holy Author of it all?
i’ve thought long and hard about what i was going to write here today, and i’ve decided to lower my voice to a whisper and let you all in on what’s stirring in my heart. after all, even if this table is more cyber than maple, and even if the chairs we pull up are virtual, it’s all very real, and utterly fulsome to me: the love and the kindness and the tenderness, and all the shared wisdoms and laughters and tears, as deep and human––and often divine––as they could possibly be.
and what sort of hearts would we be if we didn’t share some especially tender threads every once in a while? so here’s what i want to tell you, though i really truly don’t want anyone worrying: i’m having a little surgery next week. a little something is stirring in one of my lungs and they need to take it out. there, now you know. i’ve been in something of a medical mystery tour these past many weeks, some of them bumpier than others, and all of them pointing toward the date i now have with a wonderful surgeon who has a habit of making me laugh out loud.
the timing, of course, is something of a bummer. not in any marketing plan in publishing land is there a clause that suggests the author duck out for a while to have scalpels taken to her chest. so i’ve had to cancel a swath of bookish adventures for the next few weeks. or, “postpone” them, as sweet blair keeps correcting me. and since brand new books have only so wide a window for birthings, i feel a bit as if i’ve slammed the sash on my very own thumb.
but maybe you can help keep the flutter in my butterfly wings. maybe for the next few weeks, while i get the wobble out of my knees, i can imagine you afluttering for me. any simple thing: maybe a few words on that ol’ amazon reader review (my publisher keeps reminding me); maybe ask your local librarian if they’ve a copy on their shelves; maybe you simply send me a picture of a page you’ve found yourself reading. (i melt every time anyone does that.) or, maybe, whatever stirs you.
i promise you i need not one other anything. i am abundantly wrapped in the tenderest care by my beloved, blessed dear hearts and souls. my blair has been nothing short of a saint. and one of my boys will be here all week. and the other has sworn not to give it a worry. (an emphatic answer to this mama’s prayer; more than anything i did not want that kid to give it one shred of a worry.)
because i’m a quirky iteration of shy, and because i’m mostly allergic to SocialMediaLand, i am not saying a word about this out in the public sphere (i don’t think of the chair as anything close to public; it all feels very sacred and safe here to me), as i don’t want it to prompt any worries or wild-eyed questions. (trust me, the things people ask!!!) i’ve kept it all exceedingly quiet because i can’t bear the thought of worrying the ones i love (or anyone else) and, until i had more than an inkling of what was going on, i didn’t want to utter a word.
so know only this: that little fluttering, however you flutter, is more than aplenty; it will keep me afloat and awaft, and soon as i can, i’ll pick up the winging all on my own. xoxox, and thank you.
love, bam
p.s. i think by now you’ve figured out that i love to respond to your comments whenever you leave one at the table, but i might not be able to check the chair too much in the week ahead. and i want to apologize in advance.
and speaking of the public square, how’s this for the perfect antidote?
Remedy for Social Overexposure
by Sandra Cisneros
Seek a pirul tree and sit beneath immediately. Remove from ears and tongue, words. Fast from same.
Soak in a tub of seclusion. Rinse face with wind. In extreme cases, douse oneself with sky. Then, swab gently with clouds.
Dress in clean, pressed pajamas. Preferably white.
Hold close to the heart, chihuahuas. Kiss and be kissed by same.
Consume a cool glass of night. Read poetry that inspires poetry. Write until temperament returns to calm.
Place moonlight in a bowl. Sleep beside and dream of white flowers.
or this one stanza from celtic mystic christine valters paintner’s poem, “origins,” especially the first stanza, about peering into a robin’s throat, an image i envision again and again every time i see the robins plucking for a worm in my newly-verdant grasses…
Origins
If I could peer far enough down a robin’s pulsing throat, would I see notes piled there waiting to be flung into freshness of morning?
If I close my eyes and burrow my face into peony’s petals, would I discover the source of its scent, a sacred offering?
Can I plunge inside and find a lifetime of words spooled tightly inside my heart ready for a tug?
If I dig beneath the bedrock will I find love there, solid like iron or does it flow like magma filling in all of the empty spaces?
–christine valters paintner
and i’ll sashay off into the sunset with this psalm from dorianne laux…
Psalm
by Dorianne Laux
Lord, there are creatures in the understory, snails with whorled backs and silver boots, trails beetles weave in grass, black rivers of ants, unbound ladybugs opening their wings,
spotted veils and flame, untamed choirs
of banjo-colored crickets and stained-glass cicadas. Lord, how shall we count the snakes and frogs and moths? How shall we love the hidden and small? Mushrooms beneath leaves
constructing their death domes in silence,
their silken gills and mycelial threads, cap scales and patches, their warts and pores. And the buried bulbs that will bloom in spring, pregnant with flower and leaf, sing Prepare for My Radiance, Prepare
for the Pageantry of My Inevitable Surprise.
These are the queendoms, the spines and horns, the clustered hearts beating beneath our feet. Lord though the earth is locked in irons of ice and snow there are angels in the undergrowth, praise them.
“how shall we love the hidden and small?” that’s a question to ponder in the blessed, blessed unfurling days ahead….
p.s.s happy blessed birthday to my beloved ella bella beautiful, who is turning 14 today, her goldenest birthday. xoxox
at one point yesterday afternoon, five of six burners were occupied on the carrier ship of a cookstove that occupies this kitchen: one boiled a vat of water for soon-to-be-roiling pastas; one simmered the beginnings of roux; one held a pot of tomatoes and basil and a chunk of parmesan cheese; one simmered chunks of apple and pear and cranberry into a compote; and one awaited the tea kettle’s whistlings.
even the cutting boards had taken assigned seats: one for the stinky onions and garlic; another for apples and pears.
we were packin’ it in.
stuffing as many favorites onto the stove, into one afternoon, into one ultra-condensed week of days jam-packed together. four of us––aka, all of us––are home this week. bedsheets are tossed in two of the rooms, the floors seem to be serving as closets and drawers. why unpack when you’ll soon be packing again, heading back out the door, into the air, and home to those faraway places?
packing it in seems as apt a way to live a life as any i can imagine. squeeze in as much as you can. (as long as those super-thick times are bracketed with spells of the monastic quiet that seems my most natural habitat.)
when it comes to loving, i’ll attach lavish every time. i don’t think an hour’s gone by this week––or maybe in my whole motherly lifetime––when i didn’t deep-down marvel at the miracle that two human beings were born to me. born from me, as a matter of fact. a feat i somehow never ever thought my wobbly old body would be able to do. i’d never put quite enough faith in my physical capacities. finish lines felt far beyond my reach; i wasn’t one to get where i needed to go by sinew and bone. and, besides, i’d mucked it up plenty along the way.
and so, the sound of their newborn cries in two dimly-lit delivery rooms is a sound that lifted me out of my body. it’s never faded.
in birthing both of them, volumes and volumes were birthed in me. i began to redefine love. and loving. i was filling in blanks, inserting my own particulars, and reaching toward the surest truth i’d ever been told: love as you would be loved. it was sacred instruction made flesh.
and all these years now––decades now––i’ve been stumbling, and bumping into walls, and trying and trying to do just that. my boys have become my paradigm for loving. my living-breathing exercise in empathy. i might try too hard sometimes. but i’d rather err in that direction than in not quite enough. not enough can feel achingly empty.
and so, here at the brink of a newborn year, another chance at trying again, it’s not a bad time to consider the ways we choose to live our days: will we pack it in? lavish a little bit of love? or as much as we can muster? will we put up with the jumble, and the noise, because it means we might squeeze in a few bits of truth, the truth that rises up from the deepest residue of the heart and the soul? will we pay close attention? will we savor our one more chance to live the love we all pray for? to be the love we imagine, we believe in?
my prayer for the new year is ancient and infinite: dear Holy Breath, that i may love as i would be loved. again and again and again. in ways never noticed, and in ways certain and strong. amen.
how will you live your days?
(the sweet boy above had promised he’d send along a photo of the jam-packed cookstove, with all its burblings and gurglings, since i was far too busy stirring to snap one, but as of friday morning press time, said photo hadn’t yet appeared, so we’re running with the one frame i managed to snap, in all its blurry glories. tis the famed mac ‘n’ cheese i’ve been making for 28 years.
p.s. long as i’m here, might as well pass along the mac ‘n’ cheese that has my boys crowding the cookstove….
mama mac ‘n’ cheese
Provenance: Gourmet magazine, May 1995, pages 200 -201; the issue that just happened to be lying on my kitchen table the day I sat down to plot the festivities for my firstborn’s second birthday.
* Preheat oven to 375-degrees Fahrenheit and butter a 2-quart shallow baking dish (the broader the crust, the better).
* In a 6-quart kettle bring 5 quarts salted water to a boil for cooking pasta.
* In a heavy saucepan melt butter over moderately low heat and stir in flour and paprika. Cook roux, whisking, 3 minutes and whisk in milk and salt. Bring sauce to a boil, whisking, and simmer, whisking occasionally, 3 minutes. Remove pan from heat.
* Stir pasta into kettle of boiling water and boil, stirring occasionally, until al dente. Drain pasta in a colander and in a large bowl stir together pasta, sauce and 2 cups Cheddar cheese. Transfer mixture to prepared dish. Macaroni and cheese may be prepared up to this point 1 day ahead and chilled, covered tightly (an indispensable trick, when confronting a serious to-do list for a day of birthday jollity).
* In a small bowl, toss remaining ¾ cup Cheddar with bread crumbs and sprinkle over pasta mixture {Note: My boys insist you go heavy on the extra cheese here, it makes it better, and my boys are ones who like their cheese to supersede their bread crumbs}.
* Bake macaroni and cheese in middle of oven 25 to 30 minutes, or until golden and bubbling. Let stand 10 minutes before serving. At last: Dig in.
a hundred thousand years ago, at a bend in my life when i was mostly a dreamer, and under a rather dark cloud, i hoped i might grow up to be the sort of someone with friends who come for saturday lunch. i’d also hoped i’d live in a house where the walls were stacked in books, rows upon rows of them. and, for reasons that escape me, i dreamed of a bespectacled mate, one with his nose often in books; something of the professorial sort. check, check, and check, lo and behold.
not a day goes by that i don’t all but bend my creaky knees, and press them against the floorboards, whispering not only thank you’s, but practically screeching, holy mackerel how did my dimly-lit hopes come tumbling true?
but about that saturday lunch: there is something in particular about company lunch on a saturday that seems so, well, civilized. cultured, even. people with big ideas come for lunch. to get a jump on the thinking perhaps. to cogitate and prognosticate by the light of the sun. (people who want to plop on a couch inhaling hotdogs and football, they come for lunch too, but they’re not the ones of my attention today.)
dinner by candlelight is a whole nother thing, a thing that might entail the tucked-away china and silver. lunchtime, though, is cozier, maybe with a soupçon of euro-sophistication (it’s long been a way of life in paris, barcelona, or rome to insert a midday pause in the chaos, and relish a slow, sumptuous feast, unfurled in the afternoon’s heat.) and, besides, anything more haute than PB&J suggests true commitment to kitchen wizardry.
those who come for lunch, maybe can’t wait.
lunchtime company kicks off their shoes. settles in for old-fashioned simple foods. bounties built on the basics: soup, cheese, bread, fruit, unfettered sweets. (i suppose my tastes––even in menus––tend toward the monastic.)
but it’s not something i’ve ever done much of. not the sitting-down sort of a lunch. the lunch that’s not pulled from a grease-splattered paper sack, or laid out on the rickety old door of a table i refuse to retire out on our porch (the protests rise higher and higher, summer after summer, as the rickety door grows more and more rickety, but i like it too much to admit its demise).
at six-point-five decades and counting, i am still very much stumbling along. trying to make good on a few more of my dreams before my time is expired.
so it’s no small deal that company’s coming for lunch on the morrow. this particular company is coming with a wee baby, the most scrumptious sort of company i can imagine (especially since i’m not seeing any babes anywhere on the horizon here at this old house). this company is someone i dearly love though i’ve only just known him for the last several months (it was pretty much love at first zoom). he’s a new papa who is achingly in love with his new baby boy. and because he wrote me a bracingly beautiful, deeply vulnerable, letter the other day, i know this lunch will commence in the deep end, where feelings hew close to the heart, and eloquent words are put to the truths. i imagine there might be a tear or two, adding a droplet of salt to the menu.
in dreaming up the sort of lunch that might set the mood for the day, i settled on high comfort: grilled cheese and tomatoey soup, though i’m taking both up a whole notch.
grilled cheese is truly straightforward: bread + butter + cheese. sizzle low and slow for high-level melt. my aim is to dream up a scheme to make these ahead, and slice them into fingers, thus giving me the chance to stack them into a geometry of puzzling dimension (think: jenga of oozy-cheese strips).
and the soup prompted a deep dive into the cookery books, where i’ve settled on a non-negotiable trinity: san marzano tomatoes (tinned, as the lovely brits would put it), basil in leaves and stems, and rind of parmesan. a dribble of red-pepper flakes, an ooze of olive-y oil, a few cloves of garlic, and an overnight slumber in the fridge should provide a bowlful of summer in the darkening days of early december.
because i’m an inveterate futzer, and usually can’t manage to leave well enough alone, i almost never take one recipe’s word for the matter. i like to peruse and muse, and mix things up, culling my plot till it’s just the right calibration. in my mind, i’m cooking before i ever step near the cookstove, before i’ve laced up my apron strings.
because we’re at the cusp of the darkening season, with a few more weeks till the longest, darkest night of them all, it seems a fine moment to haul out the soup pot, and commence the stirring.
here, should you have reason for a saturday lunch, and find yourself in the mood for a summery bowl, is my game plan for provencal tomato, basil, parmesan soup, brought to you by a cooking collective.
Tomato, Basil, Parmesan Soup, a collective effort…
call me a futzer, or call me a fiddler (or maybe even a muddler), i cannot keep from plucking a little this, a little that, to reach for the stars. And so it goes at the cookstove, when more often that not i stand with an array of roadmaps and mull over the smart way to go. a parmesan rind from Column A, stems of basil from B. 1 + 1 = 3 in my arithmetic book.
here’s my final equation, when the assignment was a splendid tomato basil soup with undernote of parmesan for saturday lunch with a friend….
Provençal Tomato, Basil, Parmesan Soup
By Martha Rose Shulman and Ali Slagle and Babs
Time: 1 hour Yield: Serves four
Martha learned to make this soup years ago when she lived in France. She tells us that if there are no fresh tomatoes at hand, use canned. And she thickens with rice or tapioca, which we’re forgoing, at least on the first go-round. Ali chimes in: “What if you could have a tomato soup that was as plush as a cream of tomato but tasted like pure tomato? Enter Parmesan. Simmering tomatoes with a Parmesan rind is like seasoning a bowl of soup with a shaving of cheese 100 times over. It gives the soup an undercurrent of savory fat and salt that only bring out tomato’s best sides. Many specialty groceries sell containers of rinds, but if you can’t find any, stir 1⁄2 cup grated Parmesan into the final soup (or cut off the rind of a wedge you’re working through). Rinds will keep in the freezer for forever, so start saving.” Babs echoes and amplifies both, having plucked the very best bits from each of the kitchen geniuses.
INGREDIENTS 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil 1 medium onion, chopped 4 to 6 garlic cloves (to taste), minced 1/2 tsp. red-pepper flakes Salt to taste 2 (28-ounce) cans whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes with juice, or 4 pounds tomatoes, cored and diced Pinch of sugar (optional)2 large sprigs basil, or about 16 leaves, plus 2 tablespoons slivered basil for garnish [i’m skipping Ali’s call for 1 quart water (or 1/2 wine, 1/2 water), because i’m doubling up on San Marzano tomatoes] 6 ounces Parmesan rind Freshly ground pepper to taste 1⁄4 cup rice or tapioca (optional; i’m trying without it. if necessary, we’ll float our grilled cheese bits in the tomatoey pond.)
For the Garnishes Garlic croutons (thin slices of baguette, lightly toasted and rubbed with a cut garlic Grated or shaved Parmesan
PREPARATION —Heat oil over medium heat in a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven. Add onion. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about five minutes. Stir in half the garlic and a generous pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds to a minute. Add the tomatoes, sugar (if adding), basil sprigs or leaves and remaining garlic. Cook, stirring often, until tomatoes have cooked down and smell fragrant, 15 to 20 minutes.
––Add Parmesan rind and salt to taste. Bring to a simmer, cover and reduce the heat to low. Simmer 30 minutes. (If adding the tapioca or rice, add it at the 15-minute mark, then simmer for the remaining 15 minutes until tapioca is tender and the soup fragrant.) Remove basil sprigs and Parmesan rind. Puree in a blender in small batches, taking care to place a towel over the top of the blender and hold it down tightly. (Martha adds: If you used fresh unpeeled tomatoes and want a silkier soup, put through a strainer, using a spatula or the back of a ladle to push the soup through.) Return to the pot, add pepper to taste and adjust salt. Serve garnished with garlic croutons and/or Parmesan, if desired, and slivered basil leaves. If serving cold, refrigerate until chilled.
Tip: Advance preparation: The soup will keep for two or three days in the refrigerator and can be frozen.
what wintry recipe will you be bringing to your lunchtime table?
i am, as i so often am, late to the game. it’s a game i’ve not played since the long-ago years when a fat-fingered toddler might be plopped on my lap, as he and i searched for the fat wooden pieces, maybe seven in all, and slid them into their hollowed-out shapes on the puzzle board. little boy blue, i remember. and thomas the train.
but this week, stirred by winter snows and stitches in my paw that kept me from typing too much, i found myself pulling from the cobwebby corner a 500-piece jigsaw sent my way a whole year ago by my very best friend, my friend who spent all of wednesday in surgery.
i was pulled at first by a faint curiosity, a wondering why she and so many i love seem entranced––almost in meditative spell––bent over card tables of cardboard squiggles and bits, allowing images to emerge out of what starts as some iteration of chaos, albeit colorful.
sometimes mesmerizing, quite often maddening, it’s a picking-up-pieces sort of a game, a game particularly apt for these times that make so little sense, these times that feel in such tatters and broken-up bits. the whole point of this puzzling pursuit is to make of its maddening and disjointed parts a seamless whole that slowly, serenely comes into view, soul-satisfyingly so.
it didn’t take too many days before i found it all but impossible to stay away from the spillage on the dining room table. in very large measure, i felt pulled deeper and deeper by a wanting to be connected––all these thousands of miles away––to the one who’d shipped me the box. by the time it was wednesday, the day framed squarely in the lens of her surgery, the pieces of puzzle had become some sort of pressed-cardboard prayer bead, an amulet of wiggly edges and bright splashes of color. i was puzzling for something akin to protection, in that way that two very best friends sometimes imagine, wielding shield and sword for each other, willing to leap tall buildings if that’s what it takes.
if piecing together the puzzle she’d sent—a charming illustration of a braided-hair girl reading a book to the birds (its title, en français, charmingly: la fille qui lisait aux oiseaux; in english, quite plainly, “the girl who reads to birds”) from the french illustrator nathalie lété––somehow drew me into the inner sanctum of my puzzling friend, allowed me to slip in like some sort of guardian angel, then the hours of her surgery could pass with certain focus, and most determined purpose.
as the faraway surgeon deftly excised the cancerous nob, i focused more and more sharply on the pieces before me, magically thinking that my high-voltage zeroing in might somehow guide the hand and the blade of the surgeon. i aimed for nothing short of textbook precision. i wanted my dear and gentle friend, my friend who sends puzzles by long-distance post, a children’s librarian fully fluent in the charmingest of pages, a wonder of a human who knows by heart the storybook hits of all of the ages––i wanted her clean and unbound from all cancer.
as the long afternoon drew longer, and the minutes ticked numbingly by in my head, i discovered that puzzling is as much as anything an exercise in fine-tuning attention. but that isn’t all. there slowly emerged an even more pressing call to attention. it’s not merely visual, the narrowing field of super-fine focus. there seems, along with the eyes, to be a training of the mind, a sharpening of cognitive mettle, a nifty little syllabus for teaching your brain not to leap to conclusions, not based on scant bits of shape, size, or color: sometimes what you see is not what it is. a squiggle you’re sure is the claw of a bird, just might turn out to be the twig of a tree. and the point, over and over, seems to be some sort of lesson in keeping an open mind. not shoving the piece where you think it belongs. only to find that you’re wrong. that seems a wisdom that reaches far beyond the puzzle corner.
at the start, as the 500 pieces tumbled onto the table, all i saw was a dizzying morass of undulating edges. the first few passes were sieved simply by broad swaths of color: pinks over here, blue-and-white stripes shoved to one side, and whole other piles neatly haystacked all round the table: stippled bits of yellow and brown, the reds of a bird, followed by blacks and browns and golds and blues, and all the greens of the various leaves.
but the longer i kept at it, i found my focus shifting from broader swaths to barely visible daubs and dots. i noticed the shifts in the flow of the paint brush’s bristles. and soon enough i realized i was teaching myself how to see, how truly to see. and how to patiently wait for puzzling clarity. in time, the puzzles give way to emergent precision. an indecipherable brushstroke of brown suddenly manifests as the branch that it is. what appears an odd variegation of white dashes on black suddenly makes sense as the wing of a towhee.
it’s all in keeping the focus, honing in on the subtlest of clues. working hard to keep open your mind. allowing the truth to slowly emerge.
it took hours and hours. no short cuts in puzzling. no short cuts in seeing the whole.
it finally came, though. where my eyes had been spinning, my pupils near bursting, there suddenly was the deep satisfaction of the whole greater than any or some of its parts. those dashes and dots had turned into fine-feathered birds. the brushstrokes of the yellow and brown, the braids that spilled to the little fille‘s frock.
and now, the last piece inserted, my beloved best friend home in her bed, i’m ready to puzzle again. it’s an insatiable pull, the puzzling clarity that comes in a box, 500 bits at a time.
shall i go for 1,000?
fini!
do you puzzle? and have you a pastime that teaches the secrets of seeing? and keeping open your mind?
a one-woman whimsy factory, madame lété. it’s been written that she sought refuge from a troubled family life in the make-believe world of european fables and chinese legends; she was an only child––“sad and solitary”––shunted between a german-czech mother and a chinese father “who did not get on,” as she’s told it. though she now lives and works in paris, the walls of her tucked-away cottage in fontainebleau forest are alive with playful folk-life motifs. it’s a bit alice-in-wonderland sprung to life: a giant papier-mâché toadstool serves as a console table. a door is fringed with ceramic “moss.” a pink bedhead, adorned with hearts and birds, and tree trunks hemming the edge of the doors. it’s all inspired, she’s said, by the bloomsbury group, who painted across walls and floors, over and under furniture, including lampshades, and carpets, and the bindings of books—a palette without end. hers is a hand-painted world filled with “an air of fairy-tale wonderment,” according to the slick world of interiors (she’s also been profiled in harper’s bazar UK, and chinese edition of vogue and cosmo, and of course france’s le monde).
prayer corner:prayers for the puzzler in sunny la, and prayers for sweet P, a dear and beloved friend of the chair, getting herself a brand new ball and socket this morning. xoxox. and giant giant happy birthday prayers for my beloved “baby brother,” the one who was and is my dream come true, born 2/4/68, the perfect pair to my odd numbered 1/3/57.
p.s.quite a morning here, with back-to-back phone calls starting at 7 a.m., including one from my favorite law clerk who called to report that he’d bumped into none other than the real sarah palin (sounding “more tina fey than tinafey,” he reported) as he ambled into the courthouse this morning. thus, the delay. so, so sorry.
it wasn’t the winter break it was supposed to be. or the christmas. or the new years. two of us were behind closed doors for days on end. one of us is still shuffling from armchair to armchair, plopping down for little puffs of air. another one has blotchy red spots on the back of his hands, covid rash they call it. the other two of us strained to keep two steps ahead and out of the path of the red-spiked intruder.
but we barreled on, the four of us. christmas-morning bread pudding finally billowed in the oven on january 2. and ever since we’ve been trying to shove the train back onto the rails, to make the most of these 10 days before flights and calendars dissipate us once again.
it dawned on me in the middle of the night, as i shuffled through the dark to trace my way to the bathroom down the hall, that we were––at that very moment––all four of us safe under one single roof, as is my most settled equation, as is the variable i’ve prayed for, waited for, for two long years. and it hit me just as quickly how the four of us, over the years, have grown to be our own impenetrable force, a circle of loving each other fully and thoroughly through thick and thin and whatever the whims of life hurl our way.
we’ve worked hard at that. it doesn’t come without determination and practice. it’s a living, breathing exercise in turning the other cheek, in forgiving, in listening, in quietly knocking on a bedroom door and asking, “can i come talk?” it’s long long hours on the long-distance line. it’s jumping in the car and driving hours, if necessary. it’s showing up, again and again. it’s being willing to admit, i blew it. i worry too much. i got scared. (or whatever is the foible of the hour.)
it’s believing in the best of each other. and giving yourself the time to see it. it’s figuring out that if someone else sees the best in me, maybe the best is deep down under there, after all.
it’s a lifelong practice in practicing. in knowing there will be days when you don’t quite do your best. when your voice comes out in sharper tones than you’d intended. when you wish you lived alone. when tears sting your eyes, and eventually you hold each other tight.
it’s a testament to loving played out in episodes that take your breath away: the time the stranger called to say she’d found your kid unconscious, strewn on the bike path; the time your kid called to say he got into the law school of his dreams; the time the brand-new driver slunked in the house and handed over the speeding ticket he’d just gotten on his first friday night out; the time your mom turned to you and said they’d found a tumor, and weeks later your then-little one proposed a hat party to make a little bit of joy out of grammy losing all her hair.
those are the strands that make a family, that stand a chance of weaving something whole in a world of rampant brokenness. it’s the little asides at the dinner table, or while stirring onions on the cookstove, the gospel spelled out––again and again––in certain truths you dare impart. it’s the notes you slide under the bedroom door. the stories they hear you share at the kitchen counter, or listening in on one of your phone calls. that’s the slow-unfurling whole of who you are, and what you believe, what you stand for, that gets spelled out, inscribed, passed on without a slip of parchment.
families are made by choice or by birth. both stand strong against the cold winds of history. families take endless work, and infinite joy. at our house, it’s the laughter that is the certain glue. the antics that punctuate the pure delight. sometimes, too, it’s tears, the willingness to cry. always, it’s the listening, and the curiosities that drive the questions. hours and hours of questions. of true and telling replies.
it’s the most important work i’ve ever done. making a family, day after day after blessed loving day. it’s the hardest work, and the work that lifts my soul more than any other aim i’ve reached for.
my definition of family is nothing like it was when i was little. i used to look to the scrubbed and polished clans who filled the church pew, all in matching hats and coats, lined up like stepping stones in graduated sizes. a lifetime of paying attention clobbered that flimsy facade. now the ones who teach me how it works are the ones who weather heartache, who do not give up, who tell the truth, don’t hide the hard parts.
i remember in the hours before my firstborn was born, i was sitting all alone at the kitchen table, and i whispered words to God, promised to envelope that sweet child in all the love i could muster, to harbor him from every hurt. i’ve found out over the years that you can’t keep the ones you love from hurt, from heartache. but you can build a mighty shield, you can build an unbreakable ring of love and light, and you can be there to catch ’em when they falter, you can wrap them in your arms, rest their heads against your heartbeat, and you can promise them your love is one inextinguishable force, and your light will always always burn for them. and you can always make ’em laugh. and listen to their secrets, their hopes, their dreams, their prayers.
and when the days don’t unfold the way you’d wished, the ways you’d dreamed of, well, you can wait till the darkness ends, and you can tuck a new bread pudding in the oven, and you can shuffle to the kitchen table, join hands, squeeze tight, and whisper, thank you God for bringing us this holy, holy moment, and letting us weather all of life––its best, its worst––with each other at our backs, our sides, our wholes.
every family is its own story, is a vessel for a hundred thousand stories, some passed down from generations, and it’s hard work to make a tiny community of similar-but-unique human beings coalesce into something whole. how do you get through the hard parts? what’s your one essential ingredient? (questions need only be for your own personal reflection, as is always always the case.)
tis january, a month of new beginnings, and a happy birthday blessing to the one and only MJH, loyal reader, dear friend of this ol’ chair, and to my longtime beloved comrade MBW, whose birthdays are today!
used to be i could fix things. when the lunch box was left at home, i could drive it to the schoolhouse door. the ladies in the office always obliged, and, knowingly nodding, got it delivered. when the mercury on the thermometer soared, or someone’s rosy red cheeks broke out in bumps, i slid open the medicine drawer, pulled out just the right fix-it concoction. when a red crayon snuck into a pocket that went into the dryer, i spent a whole afternoon plucking streaks of red wax from the tumbler. by sundown, you’d never have known.
there was nary a thing i couldn’t patch back together, couldn’t replace, couldn’t make right by the end of the day.
but then the kids on whom i fixated my fix-it powers, they grew up. and while my doctor just the other morning announced that i’d shrunk by nearly an inch, i think she might have overlooked the fact that my magical powers are no longer. they’ve expired. passed the date on the side of the label. must have let out a gasp like air escaping from tires.
now, when a kid with a heavy heart calls late in the night, all i can do is listen. and mutter a swear word or two. (lest you tsk-tsk, the truth of the matter is that i’ve somehow managed to teach my nonagenarian mother the sheer satisfaction, the gleeful release, of a short swift four-letter word. we swear in unison now, my mother and i. one of our few shared pursuits.)
most of the time — thank the holy heavens — the things that bang up the heart of someone you love aren’t necessarily life or death. sometimes it’s a stupid clerical error that mucks up the works. and triggers hard-to-swallow outcomes. leaves a kid on the sidelines. figuratively or otherwise.
more often than not — knock on wood — the things that shove us into the ditch are things from which we recover. another chance comes along. time passes. someone reminds us to laugh. the sky, one night as the sun sets, paints itself a shade of papaya.
it’s the immediate wake that’s tripping me up. it’s what comes after you hang up the phone. when you remember the old days, the days when it was your job to be the cleaner-upper, the fixer, the homegrown sorceress who kept all the goblins at bay.
you realize your heydays are over. you can’t really fly in on your broom anymore, can’t kiss the hurt, and make the sting go away.
you know — because you’ve read it in books, heard it whispered on benches at playgrounds — that it’s your job now to let your kid figure it out. employ their own fix-it powers. exercise resiliency. suffer the blow.
so you do as instructed. you stand back. feeling the lump in your throat grow bigger and bigger. wondering why your chest hurts so much.
you wish you could pick up the phone. call the college. or the boss. explain the injustice. beg for mercy, like any self-respecting grownup would do.
but then, once again, you remember there’s another self-respecting grownup these days; it’s the kid you raised to not topple, not go weak in the knees every time life throws a hook. you tried your darnedest not to over-coddle (though coddling, i’d argue, is just another name for fiercely protecting, and i’d made a vow, a heavenly vow — silly as it might seem — to protect to the death the children i bore. i once actually — naively — believed that if i loved them fiercely enough i could keep them from every last hurt. turns out, the joke was on me).
i miss the days when i could all but fling on my cape, swoop in for the rescue. slice an apple in crescents, grab a fistful of pretzels, stir chocolate in milk. snuggle close on the couch. tuck someone in bed, plant a fat wet kiss to the cheeks. make it all better again.
i wish i’d realized back then that those were the days, the sweet days, when what ailed, and what brewed was within my magical powers. and i could turn out the lights knowing that all was, indeed and in fact, better again. the monsters were chased from the room.
it’s what happens when mothers grow up. though not quite as fast nor as sturdily as their beautiful, beautiful now grown and resilient long-ago children.
our magical powers give out, quite before we’re honestly ready.
*of course i am simplifying here to make a general point, to muse on the achy part of feeling ourselves shoved from one stage to another. certainly there are times when the heavy hearts of my boys demand all i’ve got: not only my listening, but my leaping on planes, tracking down every last possible lead, and whatever else the worry or quandary or setback requires. it’s just that more often than it used to be, i’m merely the backdrop, the listening board, the human sponge for the sadness, dread, disappointment, you name it.
once upon a time, did you too expect that magical powers must be a clause in the motherly job description? did those powers fizzle over time, and what do you do with the ache when you realize your magic wand has given up the ghost?
pull up a chair 