Food, Family and Memory

I got sick last week. Sick like “Oh my god, I’m never going to walk again.” Sick like, “Should I go to hospital now?” Sick like stomach virus. out sick Liquid Alison. It was the worst, though luckily it moved through me quickly, so to speak. After hours of sleeping cocoon-style on the couch, I realized I would have to put something into my body. I stood in my kitchen, staring at my shelves, wrapped in a blanket, moaning slightly as my dogs rolled their eyes. It had to be simple to make and easy to eat. My eyes scanned the shelves: quinoa, polenta, whole wheat penne, vermicelli, and then focused on a box of small shells, half of which I had cooked for a child’s mac and cheese a long time ago. That I could do. Pasta is easy.

As a personal chef, I’ve spent years trying to get kids to expand their culinary comfort zones to include something beyond buttered noodles. But then I sat there on my couch last week and ate buttered shells with a bit of parmesan and I had a true aha moment. It was insane it was so delicious. Maybe I’ve been fighting a losing battle. Sure, sure; appreciation for broccoli is an important skill to acquire, but I had been thinking that the kids had limited palates because they didn’t know much. Actually, they have limited palates because they found no reason to look further. Buttered noodles are at the apex of simple esculent pleasures. It is my testimony that buttered pasta saved my life last week.

Yesterday morning, I stood at the entranceway to our living room and surveyed the damage.  There were stacks of books and magazines on the coffee table, tumbles of blankets on the couch, a smattering of empty mugs with used tea bag strings dangling over their rims.  My abandoned crutches were leaning on the door, my physical therapy CPM machine on the floor. 

Two weeks after my hip surgery I can finally walk without assistance.

This, unfortunately, means I can clean as well.

It’s fine.  I like it actually.  It’s very cathartic after two weeks of being absolutely still.

Shannon, my insane boyfriend and exceptional caretaker, has taken the weekend off to run a marathon in Niagara.  He’s an ultra runner.

This marathon is 100 miles. ONE HUNDRED MILES. I know. I think the same thing.

“…I remember, as the chief result, a very pleasant little supper after the theatre, at Miss Tempest’s house near Regent’s Park, for the purpose of talking the matter over.”

-Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

I had always rather imagined myself living the sort of life in which after theatre dinners would figure quite prominently. There would also be suppers after the opera, the symphony and the series of Beethoven string quartets. I would nibble on some grapes, and maybe have some tea and biscuits to tide me over as I got dressed and did my hair and makeup, and after the performance I would come in from the cold (it’s always cold in this particular fantasy), my head still full of this character or that movement, to the smell of something delicious to eat.

While I readily acknowledge that this dream of mine is largely the result of reading far too many 19th and early 20th century novels involving the British aristocracy and their American descendants (Henry James! Edith Wharton!!). I have stubbornly clung to the hope that at least once before I died, someone would have dinner ready for me when I got home from a performance. I can now say that it happened, and that it was less elegant, but just as wonderful as I had hoped.

My grandfather Mervin was an inventor. He invented hairclips. To make money as a lad, he got a job sweeping up hair in a beauty parlor. Soon he noticed a need for clips. Clips that held the hair in place while the barber cut, clips that put waves in the hair, and doohickeys that crimped and flattened. He had patents on all these. Some were profitable, like the Jiffy, the Teeny, and others weren’t. But I guess the successful ones more than made up for the duds because he did pretty well for himself.

In the 1940s, his factory was at 173-177 Lafayette Street in Manhattan. Later he moved it to Orlando, Florida, though, when the workers tried to organize. In my family, we never liked unions much.