Naively, I asked for larks. The grocery clerk seemed perplexed.
      “You know,” I added …  “song birds? And, laurel branches, please.”  

Armed with my shopping list from my 1954 edition of the Alice B Toklas cookbook  (the Hashish Fudge recipe was expunged from that edition) I was beginning life as a newly wed.  I didn’t realize that Alice B Toklas was not Betty Crocker; that our local grocery store in Fort Worth, Texas was not a wildfowl and gourmet food purveyor circa Paris 1920’s; and that I wasn’t cooking for Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse or Braque. I was a recently graduated art student and lookin’ to live La Vie Bohème.  Anything that associated delicious food and painting was what I most wanted in life.  Since I was a woman and not a man-with-a-wife, if I wanted it, I was going to have to do it all myself! And, so … arm in arm with Alice, I started my career as a would-be painter/chef.  Never made Alice’s Larks. However, the super impressed clerks at my market thought I was an authentic epicurean, and I never dared tell them otherwise.

I’m changing – slowly, but surely, morphing into some life form I no longer recognize as myself. With this neurotic thought stampeding through my mind, I rise this morning and put up a pot of Rose’s favorite coffee—Peets Major Dickason. Despite her penchant to skip breakfast, I prepare a healthful little dish, hoping my angel will think twice: a dollop of non-fat yogurt sprinkled with Urth Café granola and topped with a red glistening strawberry. Into the kitchen she comes, looking every bit the marketing director of an International law firm that she is and the woman whose bras I’m continually picking up off our bedroom floor. I proudly present her the breakfast plate. “Would you mind getting my dry cleaning today, honey?” she asks, walking by me to the coffee pot, where she fills her cup to the brim. I tell her I’ll think about it. A perfunctory peck to my cheek and she’s gone, off to work.

A few seconds later and a forty-pound school bag strapped to his back, Julian comes clomping down the stairs and into my face, “You’re nuts if you think I’m gonna eat that!” he warns, motioning derisively to the plate I find I’m still holding. In one large spoonful I consume the yogurt and take him to school, stopping along the way at Starbucks for his customary ham and egg sandwich; after numerous attempts at getting Julian to eat real eggs I have given up; begrudgingly conceded that the disgusting pale yellow layer in the sandwich he crams into his mouth each morning, while not the Real McCoy, is, at the very least, some distant relative.

Food and death are a marvelous combination, except for when one suddenly causes the other.  In my family, news of someone’s passing usually initiates a steady stream of food delivered to the ground zero of loss.  Sandwich platters, rice puddings, and pink cardboard pastry boxes tied up with string.  These are a few of my favorite things.  The food, not the death part.

The different foods that are bestowed upon the bereaved are a reminder of the living.  Who else but the living would care enough to drop by with a Bundt cake?  Keep the pan.  I have extras for times like these.  You can look at this delivered feast as a measure of the love for the deceased.  Home made fried chicken is a great compliment; day old grocery store pie, not so much.

As my daughters will attest, I am not a cook. 

Indeed, the only thing I have ever cooked is brown rice and boiled eggs (you notice I said boiled and not scrambled or poached or anything remotely requiring any cooking skills) so it was a testament to my attempts to be fearless, that the first time I cooked anything more complicated than brown rice or a boiled egg, was on national television on Martha Stewart’s show...