Hard Times

If you ever need to cheer me up, just put on the DVD or CD of The Band's The Last Waltz. It's on now, LOUD, at the end of a terrible week. The week actually started ten days ago when the husband of a dear friend of mine was suddenly hospitalized. Today was his funeral. Her heart is broken and her nine-year-old twins lost their father. There is and was so much love in that family, something I never stopped to think about before all this happened. It's not just our own lives that we often take for granted. I can only imagine the sadness. There is no platitude anyone can say to make things better. There is nothing good about this. It's the kind of grief you don't get over. You figure out how to live with it in a kind of stutter-stop-start again. No one can help her with that, but she's got a lot of us who'll pitch in on all the practical things. We'll aim for the grace in casseroles and clean laundry, parts of the daily management of sorrow.

Cheesecake

I've got graham cracker crust on the brain. Maybe it's because it was my birthday a couple of days ago and I know that I shouldn't eat cake, so of course I obsess about it, or it's the cooking show on my TV this morning that was all about cheesecake and a chicken salad made with grapes and walnuts, both of which made me think of an old friend and things that happened a long time ago.

When my sister was dying, I found that all I could bear to watch were home improvement shows and cooking programs. I'm not sure why, but they were comforting and played like excerpts from someone's perfect life where things got done and people ate together and not only enjoyed the food but each other's company. Food connects me to a constant stream of memory. For instance, I'm eating a tuna salad sandwich as I write this and that same cheesecake friend and I split a tuna sandwich on the morning after we found out her boyfriend had been killed in a motorcycle crash. That's my memory anyway; I also remember her grabbing my hand and telling me that no matter what, we weren't using this as an excuse to go off our diets. She's also the first person who ever served me a chicken salad that contained grapes, and it was a revelation. That's when I began to understand that there was a world beyond limply boiled vegetables and special meals weren't just a grilled T-bone steak with frozen fries from the oven. My family never stayed in a place longer than two years and adapted to living in a number of exotic locations, but it seemed to me that making that salad expressed a real sense of adventure. Hard to believe I got that all from the contrast of sliced grapes, mayonnaise and chunked chicken, but there you are.

I'm not a cook, though I can cook some things well enough to be grateful when someone goes to the time and trouble of making something for me. That brings me back to the famous cheesecake with the graham cracker crust that my friend only made on special occasions. Good friends got one on their birthdays and she even made one once for a famous director's birthday shortly after she started working for him. He didn't appreciate it; he thought it was too personal a gesture. We're all a lot older and maybe wiser now, and I hope that director understands just how dumb he was. She showed a generosity of spirit that he lacked.

Baptist Sno Cones

A friend of mine is starting a blog and her search for a title brought back memories of the summer that I became a Southern Baptist. I was ten; my family was living in Corpus Christi, Texas, where my father ran a satellite tracking station for NASA. It was incredibly hot and there was nothing to do. Every other kid on our block went to vacation Bible school at the local Baptist church and would come home every afternoon licking sweet, icy sno cones that came in every color of the rainbow. My parents believed in the Chinese restaurant menu theory of religious studies, i.e., try a little bit of everything, and I wanted a daily sno cone, so my sister and I joined up.

I did really well too, winning a prize for memorizing the most Bible verses: a highly varnished slice of tree trunk with a decoupage picture of Jesus praying at Gethsemane. On Sundays, we had Communion (Grape Hi-C drink and saltine crackers) and wore red robes and sang in the choir. By the end of the summer I was ready to be immersed in the big tiled baptism pool by the choir loft. My sister was baptized that same Sunday. The very next morning, two adult members of the church showed up at my house to tell my parents that since their daughters had joined the congregation, my father was required to tithe 10% of his salary. That's when I stopped being a Baptist. I knew instantly that they never wanted us. All they wanted was the money. It was the biggest betrayal I'd ever experienced from anyone outside of my family.

I'm not like that

I just did a search for "Stay-at-Home" since that's part of my title for this blog, and found lots and lots of listings for stay-at-home moms. That phrase never occurred to me: my kind of stay-at-home is Emily Dickinson. She had her house and her garden and out of that she built an entire world. I'm watching the bamboo sway in the breeze from my kitchen window. If I had to put myself in a box, a window is the kind of box I'd want. I need to see.

Some Loves Lost and Found

The daughter of a good friend had to put her dog to sleep a couple of weeks ago. I just found out. I'm told that Lewis had a head the size of a bowling ball and other than that, was all elbows.I only met him a couple of times, but I remember those elbows. He could clear a kitchen countertop in thirty seconds. Sunday dinner as antipasto. When she first rescued him, he chewed everything to the point that she just gave up and gave in - that's what love will do to you. I say this with some authority because my Gus, also a rescue, had the most melancholy howl. He was very sick when I had to put him to sleep. I whispered "I love you" into his ear as the injection went in. Gus was my heart, and his death put a crack in it. That wasn't enough to stop me from getting another dog -- in fact, the same friend who told me about Lewis gave me my Henry, who was very proud of his bloodlines (or so a pet psychic told me). His heart embraced the world and belonged to me, but failed young. Another crack, which brought me to Ollie, who has one brown eye and one blue. He worries when I cry -- or when any friend cries, for that matter -- and climbs into the sad person's lap to offer his comfort. I'd send Ollie to sit in for Lewis, just for a moment, if I could.