Monthly Archive

My writing has been affected by the middle school schedule. I have found it difficult not to nod off sometime after 11pm, since I have to get up shortly after the brutal hour of 6:15am. It stinks, particularly because I feel my creative urges draining from my fingertips on a daily basis. I hope to correct this soon.

In the meantime, I contribute this, a song from my girls about a large, stuffed polar bear named Beary. If you knew my six-year-old daughter, you would understand why Beary is such a funny bear. Beary is cantankerous, but has many adventures. If you knew my eight-year-old daughter, you would know that Beary has been hearing nightly recitations of Winnie-the-Pooh, with some intriguing consequences. Beary has become quite distressed at learning of Pooh’s emprisonment chez Rabbit. Also, balloons, umbrellas, and the words, “Tut, tut, it looks like rain,” have affected Beary in a profound way.

Beary Blues

I looked in the kitchen for my honey pot.
I thought I had some honey, but I guess not.
I’ve got the Beary Beary blues
I’ve got the Beary Beary blues
I’ve got the Beary blues, and I need some honey, you see.

I looked for some honey… in a tree.
I looked for some honey, but damn that bee!
I’ve got the Beary Beary blues
I’ve got the Beary Beary blues
I’ve got the Beary blues, and a stinger in my knee.

I went to find honey, and guess what I saw.
I saw my honey on another bear’s paw.
I’ve got the Beary Beary blues.
I’ve got the Beary Beary blues.
I’ve got the Beary blues, and no honey, poor ole me!

I finally found some honey in a honeycomb.
I turned around then and brought it right on home.
I’m not Beary Beary blue (anymore)
I’m not Beary Beary blue (anymore)
I’m not Beary blue now, eating blueberries with honey!

“I’d jump the Mississippi deep and wide…
If you was a waitin’ on the other side…”

I had the George Jones and Melba Montgomery CD playing in the car stereo today as I contemplated the nature of online dating.

First off, I don’t know if the melodrama of country music is the best thing to listen to in moments of loneliness and despair. Second, I was not actually in a moment of loneliness or despair before I pulled out the George Jones. There are real tragedies in the world that beat out momentary melancholy and self-indulgent pity.

I really have nothing to say right now, which for me is itself a statement. I saw a couple of friends, thought, spread out some artwork I am doing on the dining room table, went to a teaching workshop… The weekend was in all ways ordinary, and that in itself was enough to make me a little regretful this weekend. What more could I have done? Was there not one thing I did to make someone else’s life a little lighter? It really bothers me when there is not.

Maybe it was the cool nights and the long shadows that made me feel that way.

Of course, my fleeting sadness could have been much worse. I could have continued on to Hank Williams, maybe a little Leonard Cohen, and the keys to a new John Deere.

Then again, no. My yard hardly needs a weed eater, much less a riding mower. And I have better means of transportation. It’s got to be pretty hard to get a six-pack home on a bicycle, and after the endorphins of a hard ride kick in, there is really no use for it anyway.

Making a brown stock is something of a meditation, and works best, in my experience, in large kitchens with subzero barns attached.

Sometimes, in fits of boredom over the years, my obsessions have ranged from listening to the same song over and over, to yoga postures, to stirring risotto, to calligraphy. These are not entirely wasted pursuits. After all, any talents I could claim are the result of various fixations. Remember Buffon, “Le genie n’est qu’une longue patience.” I like to think there is some truth in that, considering the rarity of my first-time brilliance in most areas. Practice, repetition, persistence, soon enough it seems good enough; a bit past that, it seems just about right. Making brown stock requires that kind of obsession.

Stocks are winter-time creations. It has taken me a lifetime to admit this, but winter bores me. I lived in many cold, snowy places in my life, so this is quite a shame. Sure, it would have been great to spend the days cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, outside, running inside to make hot chocolate and warm up by the fire. Oh so Vermont. A bit tricky with young kids, especially a lot of them. So, it was at such a time, nursing a baby, entertaining a toddler, watching the snow swirl around the backyard, no phones ringing, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, that I baked bread and made stocks. Again, very Vermont. Around that time, the household lore maintained that grocery shopping was a hobby I enjoyed. Not true! Well, maybe in farmers’ markets, in France. Come to think of it, though, I kind of liked the coop in Montpelier, and I admit to enjoying trips to the Market Basket. Still not a hobby, but a great excuse to get out, after all.

But I digress. I did have a bit of shopping to do for my stock. It turns out that you need not so much meaty bones as meat. There used to be a butcher at the Grand Union in Morrisville who seemed to appreciate the notion of a stockpot simmering, and packed up nice bits for me. After doing this more than once, you know when you’ve got a great bone, great meat, with lots of connective tissue, for gelatinous stock… Oh my. I hope no one is disgusted by this.

That’s another thing. I have seen a lot of farm animals in my life, mostly treated kindly, but not always. My family hunted (never caught a damned thing, but it was hardly forbidden). I have pictures of my brother at age seven walking around the woods with a shotgun and an orange hat. I looked out my window for seven years, and saw dairy cows all day, everyday. (Hard to believe they are no longer there, like nearly all the dairy cows I knew when I lived there).

It just seems dishonest to eat a thing unless you can know what it really looks like when it is alive, and when it dies, and think about that. I really have nothing against eating meat, but I want to do it with as much respect to the animal as possible. For some reason, in my book this means thinking about things like feathers (well, not on a cow, obviously) and connective tissue, and shins, and not just picking out those prepared pieces, pre-wrapped in cellophane.

So, my obsession for stock was aided quite a bit by Madeleine Kamman, in her exhaustive “New Making of a Cook”. What a tome! With the commentary, it is pretty hard not to want to please Madame Madeleine. I pity the well-intentioned babysitter who recognized herself as the one who had washed Madeleine’s seasoned omelet pan. Again, I digress. The stock.

Stock is wonderful, because it allows all sorts of digressions, and yet forgives you for them as long as you eventually get back to the matter at hand. In my Vermont kitchen, the excitement built from the first step: roasting the bones, meat, various vegetables, a bouquet garni to add flavor. Into the oven they went, and stayed for some time. Wonderful aromas. I am probably going to forget something here, though, because I do not have the recipe here in front of me as I write this.

I do have things to admit here. I moved into the house I live in now about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more. The last several years have been.. shall we say? yes, busy. I have not thought about obsessive cooking since the oven in my last house broke. I really hated that oven, seemed to have a sort of wind tunnel inside, but that house was not in Vermont, and I do not live there now. And, by the way, I did not break the oven. It was just fate.

Now I have a new house, with a newer oven. So, the potential for obsessive cooking is there, if only I could find my cookbooks. So far, I have uncovered “The Cook’s Bible,” collected recipes from Cook’s Magazine. Now Christopher Kimball is one obsessive cooking man, if I ever saw one. I just cannot maintain that level of perfection in the kitchen. Obsession is one thing; the testing they do in Cook’s Magazine is just nuts. I found my ex-husband’s copy of “365 Ways To Cook Pasta,” which I have to give back to him one of these days. The Julia Child and the vegetarian cookbooks and the Silver Palate, and all those others that I used over the years, including the Helen Corbitt books that my mom handed down, must be in a box in my overstuffed garage. But it is raining today, and I am not inclined to go out and dig around.

Madeleine will simply have to understand if I am depending on my faded memories of meats roasting, stock simmering for hours, pots all over the kitchen, then shallow pans lined up on the frozen tables in the barn. It was such a process, executed over several days. The key was making the stock shimmering, as I interpreted it. How simply amazing!: pouring the filtered water and a little white wine over the roasted meat, celery, onions, carrots, and letting the low heat work its magic. Time passed, time to take all the solid parts out, pouring the stock through cheesecloth, reducing it a little more, then straining it again, skimming the top for fat, or any other evil particles… this indeed made the layers of flavor, simply marvelous.

This repetition went on for some time. By the time I finished, the huge quantities of broth had become a much smaller amount of glorious brown stock, the base of most things magnificent in my kitchen. For the health-conscious, it was nearly fat free. For most others, it was simply heaven. Nothing is more splendid than the meal that braises in the sublime.

Busy lives, crowded minds, fallen tears… so much seems to take from life at times. And yet, the good things always remain, waiting, until we look for them again.

I used to leave my house in northern Vermont with some combination of trepidation (would my family survive without me?) and anticipation (hot damn! I’m headed to the big city!) as I headed out across the countryside toward Montreal. The first time I went, I took a bus, enjoying the tales and tribulations of the rave organizer who sat next to me. I decided the next year that it was much more satisfying to have the option to stop along the way, and pile the car full of treasures that at the time were usually no problem to drag across the border duty free. I managed to fill my farmhouse with mod furnishings from Caban, electronic music, exotic vegetables and enough elaborate pastries to extend the stay at least a few extra days in feeling, if not in fact.

It was a getaway for me, to be sure, and I craved the city with the passion of Lisa on Green Acres (sans Hungarian accent), like a smoker trying to quit. “Bloom where you’re planted,” my neighbor from the dairy farm across the street told me. Oh, I tried. I tried. And I did sometimes, managed a few nice flowers from time to time. I looked across the street at the Holsteins and her business sign, “The Beauty Hut,” and the grey hills and the sky, and I tried.

And then, an hour into the trip, I could feel my heart race—literally race—as I drove through the fields and saw the skyscrapers in the distance. I loved the way that the city just sprang up like that, somehow adding to the excitement of it all, like Oz. The traffic picked up there, adding car after car, a few crotch rockets zooming their riders off to an inevitable early grave. And I would finally reach it, le Pont Champlain, there at last, over, then off the bridge, driving fast. Yee haw! (or something a bit more sophisticated than that).

I loved racing down the hill on University, downtown, to Rene-Levesque, the thrill of being back where it was busy. It’s hard to imagine the contrast from where I lived, where the first traffic light was ten miles away.

For all the luxury of time, bookstores, hair coloring (it was red then), and room service, the trips also gave me perspective. Vermont was beautiful, glorious. I was involved in the community, advocated for my kids constantly, knew everyone. I loved that, but I also always knew that at heart, I was a flatlander. Not my fault, really—I just didn’t grow up there. And I had this kid who needed so much. Once, in a grocery store, a man saw me pushing him and his sister through the store, and thought to share his thoughts with me.

“I hope you don’t plan to have more of them,” he said. I was taken aback. The man didn’t even know that my older boy was in school then. For all the time that I had faced the realities of my son’s disabilities, I had honestly never heard anyone actually voice such an opinion to me directly.

“These kids cost everyone else a lot of money,” he informed me. I found myself dumbstruck, then hostile, thinking of the man’s own cost to society. He was older, certainly had health concerns that were undoubtedly some cost to Medicare. But in spite of that, the man did deserve those benefits. I could not think of a thing to say, so I just told him that I loved all my kids, and walked on.

I checked out, pushed my groceries out to the car, helped my little girl and my three-year-old son out of the carriage. My daughter tried to climb out herself, but my son did not. He did not try to walk. In fact, at that point, he was unable to do that, but was getting closer to that developmental milestone with the help of over two years of physical and occupational therapy. My boy smiled, and let me load him into his car seat, placid, trusting. The man from the store was standing behind me, and I stiffened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. It’s really none of my business.” And he walked away.

I am sure that he felt better for apologizing to me, but I felt numb for a while, then mad at myself for not having the appropriate, politically active, stereotype-shattering response. Then, I just felt sad. I always assumed that everyone just absorbed the love that my little boy exhibited with his belly laugh and hugs. It never occurred to me that he was viewed as “too expensive.” I felt sorry for the man, probably counting every penny, and thinking about Town Meeting and property taxes. After all, he was right. My son’s education, which was still nowhere near appropriate, did carry a hefty price tag that was all too evident in the school budget.

Days after the man shared his thoughts about my right to have more children, I found out I was pregnant with my fourth child. And yes, I continued to take my disabled son out in public with the others, and let the glarers glare. Sometimes, someone smiled.

So, that brings me back to the perspective I gained from Montreal. What was I searching for? What could this Oz grant me? There, I was not the mom with a cause, except as I wished to be. I escaped, spoke French, saw plays, and thought about the life I had been called upon to lead. Sometimes it struck me, after days of seeing not one person like my son, that life felt superficial. Then, I’d come upon the man who sat, speechless, with a cup on Ste. Catherine Street, just a man and his dog. I knew he probably had autism, probably some other mental health issues, but enough skills to sit out there all day and collect his money. What more might he have been doing? Was this the life he chose, or was it all that was left for him to do?

I went because I loved the luxury, the freedom of letting go of a reality chained to limits imposed by disability. I could let go, once in a while. But why chains? why such limits? If I left feeling exhausted and questioning about why this life had been handed to me, Montreal did take me home. I returned to have it in all its fullness, with new energy and hope, a new fire blazing to make a difference.

So, now, fully recharged from the laziness of summer, I return.

When you have gone without rest for a long, long time, mere pleasure can seem decadent. So I discovered, as I rested over a two-week break. Back in the swing of life, kids in and out, the routine starts again, but for today, I rest. Just one more weekend to relax with friends, to sleep, to dream.

I think this now, as I lie around with my balcony door open just a little, a breeze blowing in. I have managed to darken the room enough to induce sleep. A bath helps, too. Which aromatherapeutic wonder is by the tub today? Ah… jasmine and myrrh. Sure, that’ll work. I love my huge bed, soft sheets. This is just about perfect in my book. Lou Rawls is telling me that I’ll never find another love like his, and I don’t care, although you’ve got to give the man credit for persuasive arguments. It’s not anywhere near the midnight hour.

In fact, it is just past 1:00 pm. That means afternoon. And here I am, about to fall asleep for a while in the early afternoon of a beautiful, near-fall day. I love this time of year.

Yes, decadent.

—————-
Now playing: Lou Rawls - You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine
via FoxyTunes