Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
I Think This is What Grief Looks Like
What are the ten thousand things you’ve done wrong?
Is there a list? Did you keep a list? It’s not too late to compile.
You could leave room for more, the list can be open-ended, just set another place at the table.
Runners wear weighted vests.
They do it to make a hard thing harder, punish themselves like monks whipping their own bare backs with branches
in order to call back their sins, free themselves from regret, show they are sorry. Runners love the heaviness, how the weight makes them sweat, how passers-by nod in admiration.
It is a bad idea to write when one is in a black mood.
People will think they need to call you and inquire. They won’t understand inquiry is unwelcome, obtrusive, that it is burdensome to explain that dark times will pass, they always do, that you are too busy to talk because you are working on your list. It is very long and people are calling your name from the other room.
Julia and Fennel Nights
What I love most about watching episodes of Julia Child’s The French Chef is how she scrapes the inside of a fish after scaling it and having the scales flying all over the place. I love how she pulls all the guts out, rinses the fish in the sink, puts it in a pan, and pats it like a favorite pet.
I love her 1970’s instructions, that we should store the fish with ice on the bottom and ice on the top and then when we’re ready to cook the fish, swab it with oil inside and out and, of course, give it a good sprinkle of salt and ground pepper (in the cavity) and how she talks about flaming the fish with fennel but that seems beyond me, for some reason.
I love also how she quickly gathers up and throws on the floor anything that smacks of failure, like a poorly cut piece of chicken or a radish that refuses to flower. Mistakes are just so much trash to her. That is my attitude as well so we are simpatico, me and Julia.
There is also Julia’s extraordinary reliance on butter, which, I believe, is the key to all successful cooking, and her resistance to using actual measuring spoons or cups. Just guessing is my favorite thing. I overdo it sometimes, just guessing and then guessing again and again because I thought the first guess was too modest, but never mind.
Right now, Julia is putting the fish head on a pillow of aluminum foil. And stuffing its insides with fennel seeds.
Now it’s in the oven and she has begun the sauce. Much lemon zest. And a stick of butter. Of course. And cream.
Now she is moving her cooked fish to a special fish plate and garnishing it with parsley. She is putting a sprig over its eye. I would do that. For sure.
Back to the sauce goes the juice from the fish and more parsley. Now she is picking up the fish plate like it is a just-diapered baby, that’s how gentle she is about her fish. At the table, she is scattering fennel seeds in a hot pan, adding cognac, and then, of course, striking a match!
The flame is invisible and I sense Julia’s disappointment. She presses on, though, peeling the roasted fish skin back to reveal the perfectly cooked flesh and telling us what wine to drink, as if nothing is amiss.
Julia is my role model, for cooking and much else.
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Originally published in 2021 but it popped up this morning and made me nostalgic for the old days when we watched endless episodes of Julia and quietly celebrated surviving Covid.
Tiny Steps in Some Direction
My petunias are getting leggy. This is always the time of the year when they get leggy and I turn again them, resent their not keeping themselves thick and lush. I would have to sit out there on the front porch for three hours to deadhead those damn petunias and, really, is it worth it?
I think about it but then I realize everything is leggy and disappointing. I think about this while carrying in a new pack of doggy training pads which I’ve been using to prevent Tempest from peeing in the same spot on the landing’s carpet. Except the pads don’t prevent her from peeing in the same spot (as countless dogs before her have despite the carpet cleaning guys with their loud machines and giant tubes snaking their way out our front door to their truck), the pads have reinforced her peeing in that spot.
Yes, I am training a dog (who is otherwise housebroken and really well-trained and obedient) to pee on pads I put down on the carpet because I don’t want her to pee on the actual carpet. It’s crazy. And there’s no clear path forward.
On the front porch (where the leggy petunias are sitting), there is a table that is set up with art supplies and paper and coloring books and bubbles, and the porch serves as sort of an outdoor playroom for our granddaughter who lives with us. Also, on the porch, waiting its turn to be put away, is a storage bin of her mother’s costume jewelry and several Christmas ornaments. I want to put this box somewhere because it is beginning to feel like the leggy petunias, but I am loathe to move it because every so often my granddaughter opens the box and takes something from it and that thing or things show up in a place that is precious to her, like these tiny shoes sitting on a table that she has fashioned into her ‘desk.’
So, I think I will just let that be. Not worry about the box of jewelry or the training pads but maybe deadhead the petunias, just to have some forward movement here.
My New Learning Curve
Well, today I learned that if you buy a $39, nuclear weapons protection grade, red birdfeeder that requires each bird to create a unique registration number not shared with any other bird in order to partake of any seeds, then the squirrels will suddenly refrain from hanging on the current birdfeeder and will eschew even entering the yard.
I also learned that the adrenalin that fuels the aftermath of a death in the family evaporates around week five. In that space between the death and week five there is the work of death – the ‘arrangements,’ the calls, phone companies and credit unions and retirement funds and clothes and jewelry and cosmetics, and death certificates, so many death certificates. And affidavits, forms, so many fillable forms.
It’s been days since we made a list and divvied up the tasks. We seem at loose ends. What’s our job today, I ask. And the answer is we don’t have a job today. We can just sit down. Study the birds. Read a book. Watch a documentary consisting entirely of aerial shots of various states’ topography. This might be called resting. Or maybe it’s settling in. Or being numb in a different way.
I’m new at this death business so there is a learning curve. I have learned, though, to be patient with myself and not think I ought to be one way or the other. I know there are places I’m not well enough to be yet – big stores, big crowds – and places that feel womblike – like our back porch. And so, I just sit out here, hanging with the birds, watching the bunny that just slowly hopped across the strip of sunlight showing between our overgrown trees, listening to the neighbors call their dogs, thinking about watering the plants.
If I wonder what’s next, I guess this is next. I’ve learned to wait and see.
It’s a Hard Knock Life, So I’ve Heard
Remember toys that came in cereal boxes? Decoder rings and such?
Well, our ever-hungry backyard squirrel, the one who has been raiding the bird seed bin for days came up on the porch and chewed the heck out of the beloved super-duper green plastic Toy Story cereal spoon that was left out here after one of our morning sits.
We are crying. Well, one of us is crying.
Hearing us (or her), Neighbor Tina (that’s what we call our neighbors – Neighbor Pete, Neighbor Nora, Neighbor Mark, and Neighbor Tina) came over with a handful of wrapped sticks of clay. Now we are making snakes and tiny snowmen.
The Toy Story spoon owner just went inside to put on her shoes so she could chase the squirrels who have moved on from chewing on the Toy Story spoon to hang on our bird feeders. She is now using a rubber band as a pretend slingshot and laughing loud enough to be heard downtown. The squirrels run but come back. It’s how everything is.
We work the clay with our hands to soften it up. It’s not like Play-Doh I explain. It takes more work. More commitment. We are distracted by the need to constantly chase the squirrels. Action being more fun that art at the moment.
My daughter died a month ago and her daughter is in my backyard chasing squirrels. “You want to fight?” she yells when she charges across the yard with a sand pail on her head and a shovel in her hand. I think of her mom in this moment.
She would be laughing. So are we in her honor.
Blessed are the Well-Wishers, I Guess
What you write about and what you want to write about are two different things a lot of the time.
I want to write about how some condolences feel like diagnostic quests. How are you doing? No, how are you really doing? Is that when I tell them I scrolled through all the texts from my daughter while she was hospitalized in the month before she died to see if our back and forth was strained or relaxed? Was I remembering things the way they were? Were the hours we sat in her hospital room easy or hard? Had her old resentments been stowed away or were they lying on the thin sheet at the foot of her bed but I just didn’t see them. Do I tell them that I think all the time about when I washed her hair in the tiny hospital room sink, how reconciling and fleeting that was?
I don’t say any of these things.
Yesterday, I walked into a shop of a nonprofit group that helps trafficked women begin new lives. They sell soap and candles and notecards and hats, and the shop smells like the lightest cleanest place on earth. The program’s director met me at the door. She smiled, glad to see me, and I could tell from her eyes that she knew what had happened to our family. But she didn’t ask. And I was grateful for that. For having her silent acknowledgement of our daughter’s death and our family’s challenges but being spared the piercing look, the How are you doing? No, how are you really doing?
It’s ill-mannered to criticize well wishers of any ilk. They mean well, my mother would say. So I don’t criticize, I just buckle up when I’m around them, drive faster to get out of traffic, roll the windows down so I hear nothing but the wind and sirens in the distance.
That’s what I write about today. It’s neither here nor there.
Want What You Have or Not
Here.
It’s not perfect but I gave up envy for Lent. My mother who seemed to me to be more long suffering than content with her lot in life often said, “Want what you have.” This is useful advice since it can be applied to a person, place, or thing. It’s a profound kind of settling, a deep resignation that could manifest depression or serenity. Oddly, my mother had both. She was serene in her depression, almost mystical.
Anyway, about places to live. For a long time, I wanted to live on Lake Superior and I did, parttime at least. And then I fell out of love with living there because the difficulty of it overrode the beauty of it. So, I no longer wanted what I had, but I didn’t want anything else. In other words, I didn’t aspire to a better place, a more beautiful place, more exotic and lovely.
I settled for here. An old house a few blocks from Lake Michigan where lots of people walk by every day and we can have a fulfilling porch life on front and back porches depending on the time of day. I like turning the corner on our street and seeing our lovely sea green lady sitting just so in the middle of the block, arguably the prettiest house in the neighborhood. I love that our back porch has become a place for morning reflection and gentle conversation and that our front porch serves as our cocktail lounge and art studio for a budding artist. That there are smudges of purple and blue and red on the porch floor bothers me not at all – it is washable paint after all, if we ever get around to mopping the porch which seems possible but unlikely.
Here is a very strange photo of here taken by an artist friend who happened by the night we put a broken kitchen chair out at the curb.
Here.
Apparel has two P’s and one R
I cancelled my trip to Paris to do a crossword puzzle.
That’s not true. I cancelled my trip to Paris to pull weeds in my side garden and then to sit for an hour on the front porch while a four-year-old told me fantastic stories about monsters that involved painting popsicle sticks red and yellow and being extremely quiet when so instructed.
Okay. I didn’t really cancel my trip to Paris. I’ve never planned a trip to Paris. What I know about Paris is Hemingway’s Moveable Feast and all the chatty, catty descriptions of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds hanging out with Gertrude Stein, all of them drunk and talking smart until dawn. I can do that here.
It occurs to me, being of a certain age, that I ought to be more worldly, well-traveled, sophisticated. I screwed this retirement thing up, for sure.
And now. Well, now, God only knows where I’m headed. There are, after all, monsters everywhere.
Floating is Fine as a Strategy
“You don’t have to decide everything right now.”
It was the funeral director who said this first but since that meeting a month ago, I’ve said it to myself a hundred times.
I don’t have to have a plan. I don’t have to weigh and re-weigh alternatives. I don’t have to think of the worst-case scenario (mostly because it’s already happened). And I don’t have to be in control. That last one is the revelation. I don’t have to be in control.
Last week, I stood in the kitchen with my older son, both of us shaking our heads at what brought us to this point with a little girl racing around my kitchen as if she owns the place (she does after just two months of living here).
I asked him how he’s doing. “Just goin’ with the flow,” he answered. “Yeah, me, too,” I said. “Me, too.” He seemed surprised, knowing me as someone who always has a plan. That I was winging it, just trying to keep my arms and legs from getting sliced up by branches while I float down what? this river of life seemed to surprise him.
Me, too. But it’s working. I don’t have to decide everything right now. That’s the lesson from these past two, very hard months. I can just float for a while, maybe a good while.
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Back Porch Barbie: Entry #2
She knows how to pick ‘em, don’t you think? Never mind that his gnome vibe doesn’t quite pair up with her beehive and giant earrings, not to mention the stilettos with wraparound straps. His red gnome nose might also be cause for concern, you know, all the slinging back in the woods breaks a lot of capillaries.
Never mind. What happens on the back porch stays on the back porch.
We can’t have reality messing up our little back porch lives now, can we?
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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