When I was a kid, I was pretty much a geek. At nine I started to
stutter so badly that the school put me into a class for “special”
students and my parents sent me to a psychologist. The approach
favored by the psychologist was to withhold talking until I said
something. Since I didn’t want to stutter and didn’t want to talk to
him anyway, we mostly spent 50 minutes in silence.
My father was a pragmatist which meant he figured that whatever was
was, so if I was socially awkward and stuttered, that’s who I was and
he left it at that. My mother however was an optimist. She had
proudly attended Hunter Model School in New York and felt that she was
part of the liberal intelligentsia that wouldn’t rest until the world
was cleansed of poverty, racism, sexism, and war. Reading about the
latest armed conflict in the newspaper, she would proclaim with
frustration, “Why can’t people just get along?”
Breakfast
Breakfast
The Waffle Iron
Who knew that making waffles could be so fraught with symbolism and stress? As a single woman, I never gave a thought about waffles, irons or, come to think about it, marriage. One day my mother called to say she couldn't, just couldn't send me a waffle iron. Why? She had read a "Cathy" comic strip where Cathy's mother went on her usual neurotic rant about how she couldn't buy Cathy a waffle iron because waffle irons meant children, which meant marriage, which meant husbands, none of which Cathy had.
French Toast at 4
It’s 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and like any well-adjusted
twentysomething, I’m eating breakfast. More specifically, I’m having
brioche french toast and cappuccino at the Little Next Door on 3rd with
my friend Gloria. After living in LA for six months, I have determined
that breakfast in the afternoon is exactly the sort of reckless
behavior Sundays demand.
Typically in New York, Sundays amounted to consumption of greasy brunch
complemented by mimosas and black coffee. Following brunch was an
inevitable headache, followed by more consumption in the form of
excessive window-shopping, followed by an indulgent nap upon what
appeared to be a laundry pile, but was in fact my bed.
Benediction
They say you always remember your first. And were we talking about a
kiss, I remember sitting on a recessed bench filled with orange life
jackets on the second level of the Boblo Island ferry leaning towards
my sixth grade “girlfriend” Monica. I remember the stench of rotting
sea life from the Detroit River and the paprika scent of Better Made
BBQ potato chips mingling with the floral waft of Giorgio perfume from
her neck (though I suspect it was the Parfums de Coeur Designer
Imposters knock-off—after all what 12-year-old can afford the real
thing?) as we hesitantly merged our lips. Were we talking about sex, I
remember that too, but kissing and telling is one thing, getting laid
and doing so is quite another.
What I’m really talking about here is my first Eggs Benedict, the legendary English muffin raft conveying tasty castaways of salty pork and jiggly poached eggs awash in waves of silky hollandaise. And of that, I do not remember my first.
Though, I suspect it was at an all-you-can-eat buffet, one of those restaurant-larder-clearing affairs featuring an orgy of tangled snow-crab legs, a miserable checked-pant-wearing short-order cook manning a butane-fired omelet station and mountains of chartreuse-rinded unripe cantaloupe. That means my first Benedict was likely a steam-table-parched muffin topped with Canadian bacon parchment and a sulfurous over-fried egg mottled with a gloppy, broken mock-hollandaise. Thankfully I subscribe to the idea that you try everything twice, because you never know if the first example was cooked right.
Losing a Partner
It happened suddenly. One minute we were together, touching, my hands on his body, as close as always, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, signs of dire distress. It sounded like a heave or a deep sigh. But I heard a click in there somewhere as well. Something more than the whirl of a distant fan. I heard danger. I heard Mac’s finally gasp.
And then, after four years together, nine to ten hours a day, seven days a week, for all 52 weeks of the year – half of those trying to work, the other half simply searching together for answers – it was over.
Lately, he was the first thing I reached for in the morning after my husband, who gets up early, was gone. I pulled him off the table and woke him up from his sleep. I demanded that he bring me the New York Times. That was always the start.
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