Home Alone

I have the house to myself for the weekend.  Scotti’s gone to Boulder for a conference and I’ve sent Michael off to stay with friends… he is quiet, mostly stays downstairs until we’ve gone to bed, someone I know mainly as the small mess he leaves in the kitchen every night.  A subtext to our lives, or a warning:  we give things away too easily, Scotti and I, only coming to know how much we’ve needed them after they are gone.  Michael doesn’t take much from us any longer; he’s stopped stealing food, at least.  But the difference between being alone, and being alone except for the guy in the basement you rarely see, is greater than you’d think it would be.

It’s not his fault, but he has cured me of need to open my house to the homeless.  We never imagined he’d be here two years.  But once you’ve taken responsibility for someone, abandoning it is very different than never having taken up the burden, so he’s here until his disability claim is settled.

I could feel the difference within minutes of Scotti pulling away; he’s going with a female colleague, and she came to pick him up in a rented car.  She must travel quite a bit; if he had been going alone, he would have taken his car or had me drive him.  The idea of renting a car just to travel to and from the airport wouldn’t have occurred to either of us. 

I lived alone for many years before I married Scotti.  Even when I did not, I almost always lived with someone in a place that was mine; if one of us had to go, it would almost always have been the other person.  But this house is his.  We chose it together, but before we were married his lawyer drew up papers making certain I know it would be his if there were ever a divorce.  So I am cautious in my love for this house. 

Still, the first thing I do once he’s out the door is start to clean it in that intimate way that’s only possible when no one else is around.  I have finished the bathroom; scrubbed the difficult place where the back of the toilet connects to the floor, bleached the grout between the tiles in the shower, emptied out the medicine cabinet and dusted the shelves.  I am using one of the good glasses, one of the ones from Blenko that my sister gave me as a wedding gift, to drink water.  Later, I will cook a dinner for myself of things that no one else likes:  curried cauliflower and peas, maybe, or tofu with soy sauce and green onions.

I can’t say why it is different that Scotti is out of town instead of just at work, but it is.  And while I’m not glad he’s gone, I’m also not sorry to be alone in the house for a few days. 

Two Years…

Today is my second wedding anniversary. I have said it to people I don’t know well several times in the past few days, “Wednesday is my second anniversary,” for the usual reasons: …and I would like a reservation at your restaurant, or …so I won’t be at the committee meeting. They always assume they have misheard me, and repeat some other number. “Your twenty-second anniversary, did you say?” Or, “Seven years, be careful of that old seven year itch!” I am, it’s clear, not someone others imagine to be a newlywed.

It’s been a good two years. We get along easily, though we both have a passle of exes who would be surprised to hear it. But we are mellower versions of the people they knew; we are slower to anger, quicker to tire, and more willing to compromise. And while there are still days when I feel tethered, and also days where he feels like the only responsible adult in the house, for the most part we are very happy. Marriage didn’t set well with me in my twenties or thirties, but it seems a perfect way to live in my forties. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the decade, maybe it’s the man I chose this time around. I don’t know.

But it’s working, so I should probably not use the anniversary as a reason to poke it with a sharp stick.

Five Things I Learned Today…

My friend Alan P. Scott taught me the word “bildungsroman.”  I have spent the whole day looking for a chance to use it in conversation. Try as I might, though, it will not be lessened to fit the things I have to talk about: what I am–or rather am not–going to cook for dinner, whether or not the dogs needed yet another walk on this muggy summer afternoon, or which font would look best on my husband’s business cards.  If it’s going to be of any use to me at all, it will probably have to be over coffee at the Blue Moose with someone else from the English Department.  That’s how it is with all the best new words I’m learning these days.

Jam can be remade if it doesn’t jell correctly.  For every quart, just add ¾ cup sugar, 2 tablespoons bottled lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons liquid pectin and bring everything back to a hard boil for 45-60 seconds.   Voila.  And to think I was going to dump it all down the sink.

I have learned the details of the procedure known as an “icepick lobotomy,” and the particulars of the procedure as it was peformed on Howard Dully, author of My Lobotomy.  I have also learned that there is a reason people read trash during the summers and not deep, ponderous tomes.  It is a beautiful day and all I can do is sit inside and grumble about injustices.  If only I weren’t allergic to trashy novels, I might be at the pool today, growing bronze and fit.  See what books can do to you?

Nasturtiums are better in theory than in salad.

George Carlin is dead.  Apparently, there really are some things that you can’t be clever enough to talk your way out of, and death is one of them.  This means I can stop worrying about saving up enough money to retire forever, which is good, because as it stands I can afford to retire until exactly lunch the following day.   That is, as long as I don’t put any gas in my car.  Which, of course, I will have to do sooner or later.  See?  Some things are inevitable.

Petty Larceny Cobbler

I’m a thief.  There is a mulberry tree in a yard at the end of our block, and for the second time this week, I have helped myself to a good-sized basket full of the sweet purple berries.  The house is rented to college students who I haven’t been able to catch at home, and I only pick berries from the branches that hang over the sidewalk and street… so it’s a very petty larceny, but stealing is stealing.

If they come after me, I’m done for.  The purple has refused to completely come out from under my fingernails for four days, and three of my rice sack dishtowels bear permanent witness.  Over the weekend, there were muffins.  Tonight it is a cobbler for Scotti to take to his “Dinner and Skinner” psychology reading group.

This recipe works well with other berries, even ones that have been legally obtained.

Berry Cobbler

Berries:

1. 3 cups of mulberries
2. 1 tbsp ww pastry flour
3. 1 tbsp sugar

Cobbler Topping

1. 1 cup ww pastry flour
2. 1 cup sugar
3. 1/3 cup butter or shortening
4. 1 tsp baking powder
5. 1 egg, lightly beaten

For the Filling: Gently rinse mullberries in cold water. Combine ww pastry flour and sugar in medium bowl.  Toss.

For Topping: Combine flour, sugar and baking powder in bowl. Cut in butter with pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add egg; mix slightly, stirring just to moisten.

Grease 8-inch square baking dish. Fill with berry mixture. Crumble topping over berries. Bake at 350 degrees until just golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes.

 

Sour Cherry and Kumquat Jam

There was a farmer selling a healthy crop of sour cherries at the farmer’s market this morning.  We don’t see them often–the birds and squirrels like them too well. 

When I was a child, my grandfather and his brothers all had gentlemen’s farms (that phrase tickles me) in the part of the state near the Greenbrier Hotel.  I can remember going to the Asbury farm when I was very, very small.  Too small to have many specific memories of those trips at all.  I remember the peacocks, and the caretaker’s son, who told me it was bad luck to bring the feathers inside.  “It brings in the evil eye,” he’d said, and then for years I wouldn’t touch peacock feathers because I thought they caused pink-eye.  I remember pitting cherries in a scratchy, red wool sweater with my mother and my cousin Lynnie.  Those two memories are all I have of those summers. 

So, home from the market, I’ve made two batches of jam this morning.  One, the traditional sour cherry that tastes like pie filling.  The other, an experiment, is made of sour cherries and kumquats.  Sort of half-jam, half-marmalade.

It tastes wonderful coming out of the pot, and so far (an hour into the jars), seems to have set up well.  Here is the recipe for anyone feeling adventurous and lucky enough to have a good supply of sour cherries.

Sour Cherry and Kumquat Jam
Makes 7 half pints

 

• 4 cups sour cherries, pitted, stemmed, and coursely chopped
• 1 cup kumquts, very thinly sliced
• 4 3/4 cups sugar
• 1 tsp butter (to prevent foaming–optional)
• 1 packet Sure-Jell liquid pectin

Process the jelly jars for preserving.

Put fruit, pectin and butter into a non-reactive pot.  Bring mixture to a rolling boil, stirring constantly.

Stir pectin into fruit and add butter, then bring the mixture to a rolling boil. Stir in sugar and return to rolling boil for one minute. Using a canning funnels, ladel into prepared jars.

Tim Russert

I’ve just heard, and most likely you’ve just heard–or are just hearing–that Tim Russert died this afternoon at the age of 58. 

That doesn’t sound right.  For years, I’ve been breathing easier, having been told by a doctor friend, “If men make it past 50 then they are likely to make it to at least 70.”  Of course, “likely” is one of those words that doesn’t mean anything.  Still.  Scotti will be getting a particularly healthy dinner tonight and I plan on being a little less cavalier about his health from now on. 

I have a friend whose children are growing up in Alabama, where what are you? always means what church do you go to?  He has taught them to answer, “I am Meet The Press.”  Tim Russert was, he said, as close to hearing the truth on Sunday morning as his kids were going to get.

Where will my truth come from now? 

I can’t imagine who will step into his place, not only on the show, but in the culture at large.  I was stuck in a garage getting my tires changed a few weeks ago, and CNN was on the television. Normally, I avoid the 24-hour news circus like the plague, but it was either that or old issues of Field and Stream, so I watched.  When did our newscasters become ditzy?  When did cleavage become appropriate on an anchorperson?  And when did the news stop being about, well, the news?

Is Jon Stewart the closest thing we have to real journalist, now that Russert is gone?  If not, who is?  Tell me, please, because I’m starting to get frightened.

We have a huge election coming up, and the Fourth Estate is suddenly without it’s leader.  Where will we get our truth now?

Three Things I Will Never Write About

I will not write about the time you and I sat in the woods at the end of your road, fourteen years old and brave in that stupid teenage way, learning to smoke and flicking lit matches into a wet pile of leaves.  I won’t tell how, fifteen minutes later, we were back in your room and pretending to only then be getting up for the day and heard sirens wailing closer and closer until they dopplered past your house.  Your street was a dead end; they could only be going to the woods. 

We yawned in our little-girl pajamas and asked your mother what was going on.  “Oh, some vagrants caught the woods on fire,” she said.  We asked for pancakes and plopped down in front of the television, laughing in that stoned teenage way as we watched Scooby-Doo, worried about getting caught but not about whether or not we had done something wrong. 

*     *     *

I won’t ever write about the night you knocked on my door, a toothless woman–a skeleton, really, with hungry red eyes–on your arm and promising to go clean as long as I could get you both through the night.  I will keep secret the way you sat on the couch, twitching and muttering to yourself, while she took my two hundred dollars down to Harlem.  That was the longest hour the world has ever known. 

*     *     *

I will write, “…the over-ripe sweetness of paw-paws in summer, the juice running down our chins.”  I will write, “…the taste of my own flowers in the honey…” and “…he held the knife deftly, his brow furrowed in concentration like a painter before an easel.”  I will say that it tasted like a far-off country and still also like something from childhood.  But I will never write that your secret ingredient was nutmeg, pilfered from the shelf of your Croation landlady and carried across an ocean to flavor my summer.  Your secret is safe with me.

 

 

Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley died today.  You probably already knew that, but it bears saying again and thinking about.

My last job in New York was at Agency.com.  They laid almost all of us off on the day of the Christmas party.  It was a ridiculously lavish, dot-com era sort of party in a grand hotel near Wall Street.  There was a huge buffet table and an open bar.  We’d all been told to expect a special musical guest.  We were a little surprised it wasn’t cancelled, but it had all been paid for in advance, so there you have it.

The President of Agency.com was known to consider himself something of a musician.  We, newly out of work, drank too much and wondered if we could be gracious if his band turned out to be that special surprise.  I was sitting at a table of my much-younger coworkers (all of my coworkers in those days, it seems, were much younger…) when an old black man with a square quitar walked to the microphone at the front of the room.

“Oh my god!” I squealed, jumping out of my seat.  Everyone else just looked at me.  “Don’t you know who that is?” I asked, incredulous. 

“Uhm, no.  Who is it?”

“Just wait,” I said, “you’ll know as soon as he starts singing.”

He sang.  As was his wont, he started out with the song bearing his own name.  “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring…”  I waited for some sign of recognition.  There was none.

“Oh, c’mon!” I said.  “That’s Bo Diddley!”  I probably squealed a little again.

They looked at me, every face blank.  “Who?” they asked, genuinely perplexed.

I left.  I hailed a cab and went to visit a friend who lived uptown, someone old enough to know Bo Diddley.  We shook our heads.  We clucked our tongues. 

“Can you imagine,” one of us must have said, “not knowing Bo Diddley?” 

We could not, we agreed, imagine it.

Hafez

I am not, in general, a great lover of poetry. Or, rather, I only love the work of a very few poets; H.D., Eliot, and oddly ee cummings. I am working to be broader, more accepting. It’s slow work, though, having come to demand perfection and bite from a poem before I’ll commit to it.

That said, my favorite poet is Hafez, the Islamic poet whose work is more in the Sufi style. Of all his works, this is my favorite:

God
and I have become
like two giant fat people living
in a tiny
boat.

We
keep bumping into
each other
and laughing.

Peace and all good things,

Sarah